The Works of Walter Leslie Wilmshurst
Brief Masonic Biography
The Meaning of Masonry
The Masonic Initiation
The Ceremony of Initiation
The Ceremony of Passing
Notes on Cosmic Consciousness
The Fundamental Philosophic Secrets Within Masonry
The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal
The Mystical Basis of Freemasonry
Reason and Vision
The Working Tools of an Old York Master
Spurious Ecstasy and Ceremonial Magic
Wilmshurst's Tracing Board of the Centre
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Published in the Occult Review Oct 1911
THE MYSTICAL BASIS OF MASONRY
by W. L. WILMSHURST
When, in 1646, the founder of the Ashmolean Library recorded that
he had been made a Freemason at Warrington, or when, some five
decades later, the architects, contractors and superintendents of
works engaged upon the reconstruction of the metropolitan cathedral
foregathered after their day's work in masonic assemblies of another
character at the Goose and Gridiron Tavern in St. Paul's Churchyard,
no one was likely to have foreseen that during the ensuing two
centuries, and out of the then exiguous community of Freemasons, the
enormous Masonic organization that now flourishes in our midst would
have sprung into being. At the present moment, holding warrants from
the central authority - the Grand Lodge of England- alone, there
exist roughly some three thousand Masonic Lodges with an estimated
aggregate membership of 150,000. The Scottish and Irish divisions of
Great Britain work under separate constitutions of their own but upon
similar lines to the English, whilst the British dependencies, the
United States and every other civilized country in the world, with
the exception of Japan, contain Masonic organizations, the total
membership of which constitutes a great multitude which there is no
opportunity of numbering, and which is annually increasing. It is
thus obvious that the Masonic idea has caught and continues to hold a
firm grip upon the imaginations of a very considerable body of
humanity and that distinction of race and language has proved no bar
to a universal appreciation of it. The inwardness of the phenomenon
passes unobserved even within the Masonic community itself, although
the external fact of the diffusion of the Masonic system throughout
the world is, of course, not merely notorious, but is one of which
large and agreeable advantage is taken by members of the Fraternity,
and it may be profitable to accord a brief consideration to it here
and to inquire what is the secret of the wide appeal Freemasonry has
made during the last couple of centuries and still continues to make.
The problem is doubtless very complex, and to the question
proposed a variety of offhand answers might be tendered, the value of
which would depend largely upon the perspicuity of the respondent and
his friendliness, or the reverse, towards the Masonic system, That
that system provides occasion for social, fraternal - and, to meet
the claims of the, cynic, I will add - convivial, intercourse amongst
a number of individuals who choose to segregate themselves into a
distinctive fraternity with no deeper purpose than this is, one may
reasonably submit, an incredible motive to justify an organization so
firmly entrenched, so robust and associated with such personalities
of eminence and character as have been formerly or still are actively
connected with it. That it is an instrument for furthering practical
benevolence and philanthropy, which it certainly does and does
handsomely, is a similarly inadequate pretext; Masonry was not
intended to be, and is not, a high-grade Friendly Society and its
charitable energies are merely an incident of, and not the motive
for, its existence. That it is a school of morality, tending to
promote peace and goodwill amongst men, which is also wholly true,
again fails to suffice, for men need not join a secret society, or
enter into the obligations of silence required therefrom, merely to
learn rudimentary ethics which it is the common duty of the whole
world to know and practise. That it is, as is not infrequently
alleged, an engine for promoting the mutual temporal aggranisment of
its members to the prejudice of non-members; a cover for political
intrigue, or a screen for propagating anti-religious ideas, are again
idle suspicions. That political or other intrigues have in the past
been conducted — as in connection with the pretensions of the
Jacobites and Legitimists in both England and France in times of
revolution — under the aegis of societies claiming to be
Masonic, is doubtless a fact; but this, when established, proves
merely that a fraud has been committed upon a system devoted to
entirely different purposes. Speaking for British Masonry to-day it
is as innocent of such purposes as a mothers' meeting and, indeed, is
wholly untinctured with even the political partisanship manifested,
whether passively or actively, by the official churches of the land;
whilst the notorious ban of the Roman Church upon the Masonic
brotherhood as being a trespass against the exclusive spiritual and
temporal rights of the former is, upon a moment's reflection,
stultified by that Church's own insidious political record.
By an eliminative process, then, we arrive at the sole remaining
raison d'etre for the spread and attractiveness of the Masonic
system, namely, the significance and implications involved within its
ceremonial rites. Now if these, or some subtly-speaking voice in
these, be not, when all irrelevant and accretionary considerations
have been removed, the fundamental essence and the secret of the
vitality and the development of Masonry, there remains no
justification for its existence worthy of account. It matters not,
that in the case of a large majority of the Fraternity that voice is
not a loud one or that the significance, of its purport is but dimly
recognized; and it may be admitted that among Masons themselves there
are but few who have entered into a full intellectual realization of
their own heritage. The fact remains that something veiled, latent
and deep down in those rites speaks to something that is latent and
responsive, however faintly, in those who participate in them; some
remote causa causans, apart from the mere impressiveness and
solemnity of the rites themselves, which for most remains unrealized
and unformulated in the consciousness, but which, nevertheless,
induces those who partake in them to feel that they are in the
presence of a mystery that goes to the root of their being and that
it is good for them to be there.
To what element in the Masonic rites, then, is to be traced the
effectiveness and subtlety of the appeal alluded to? Among the
Fraternity, as' well as among the outside public, there are many who,
in the absence of better information, suppose Masonry to be a system
of immemorial antiquity, one which for some undefined reason or
another, became instituted for no very definite object among
primitive inhabitants of the East, and which for some equally
indefinite purpose it is still desirable to perpetuate in the West.
It is supposed also that the predecessors of the present Craft were
concerned in operative building and erected, among other edifices of
both earlier and later date, the national Temple of Israel at
Jerusalem traditionally associated with the name of King Solomon. To
dissipate the misconceptions inherent in these suppositions to
dematerialise the outward veils and exhibit the inward and real
significance of the matter, would take me far beyond the limits
permitted to the present paper. It is a fact of commonest knowledge
that systems of initiation into certain spiritual secrets and
mysteries have obtained immemorially; it is doubtless true that
guilds and trade-unions of operative builders possessing also
elementary rites, secret signs, tokens, and privileges of membership,
flourished from very remote epochs and subsisted until comparatively
recent times; it is the fact also that at least the superiors and
chief architects connected with such communities were profoundly
instructed, as the fanes and monuments of the past and the great
cathedrals of Christendom attest, in the principles of deep-reaching
symbolism, and that with consecrated minds and reverent hands they
introduced those principles into the construction of religious
edifices byway of emblematizing in stone the perfect temple man
should build in his mind and body if ultimately he is to participate
in another temple that is eternal and not built with hands. But this
is far from saying that modern Masonry is the perpetuation, or the
faithful, lineal image, either of ancient mystery-systems or of the
operative masonic communities, though doubtless points of connection
with both survive. Every Mason knows that his Craft purports to
initiate into certain secrets and mysteries; every Mason knows that
in that system the tools, tackle and terminology of operative masons
are employed; but a moment's reflection will tell him that the
secrets and mysteries referred to are not those of any industrial
trade (which, of course, can have none of other than commercial
value) ; that the incidents of the operative trade have been merely
used as the outward apparel within which to clothe truths of a moral,
and spiritual order; and lastly that the chief of the Craft degrees —
that which embodies its great and central legend or traditional
history,, and as a preparation for instruction in which the
antecedent degrees are, in theory, processes of purification —
is devoted, from the first word of its opening to the last of its
closing, to the veiled presentation of something which, upon the one
hand, is as unassociated with mundane architecture as the east is
distant from the west, but which, upon the other, is an integral
factor and root element of every system of religious initiation of
antiquity.
In modem speculative Masonry, then, is to be traced a confluence
of two distinct systems. Some time in the seventeenth century the
elementary rites of membership used till then among the then
virtually obsolete operative guilds became taken over, under
circumstances now very obscure and by individuals almost equally so,
and adapted to serve as the vehicle for the expression of a highly
mystical and religio-philosophic doctrine disconnected altogether
from mundane architecture and unrelated to any form of masonry other
than that which, by employing metaphor, we may call the building —
or perhaps the rebuilding and reintegration — of that
incompleted temple, the human soul. It may be stated at this point
that the credit of reaching the conclusion just mentioned is
attributable wholly to Mr. A. E. Waite, who first gave voice to it in
some illuminative papers in his Studies in Mysticism and added some
confirmatory words in his subsequent book. The Hidden Church of the
Holy Grail. The facts involved in the conclusion had previously
escaped the observations of historians of Masonry, who speaking
perhaps without any, and certainly without Mr Waite's extensive,
knowledge of the movements in occultism and mysticism that were
occurring behind the scenes of public history in Europe and England
during the past few centuries, have been without adequate equipment
for tracing the real genesis of modern Masonry. It is notorious that
at, and for long prior to, that genesis this country and the
continent were alive with occultists and initiates — of
pretensions both meritorious and the reverse — connected with
schools of alchemy, magic, Rosicrucianism and what not. The worthy
name and written remains of Thomas Vaughan alone, apart from the wide
testimony of contemporaneous literature to the prevalence of occult
inquiry, testify that earnest students and genuine adepts were in the
field at the date of the inception of the Masonic movement, and it is
reasonable to deduce a connection between these and the movement
itself. In the old operative system they, or some of them, found, as
it were, a body prepared; they imported into that body a new spirit
and gave it a transfigured life, a life which, in its maturer growth,
is with us in such magnitude to-day. To use an expression of Mr.
Waite;'s, "they made an experiment upon the mind of the age,"
and, be it remembered, it was an experiment made, and perhaps made
with shrewd insight and foresight, at the commencement of an epoch
when the tide of spiritual life and understanding in the official
churches was about to run extremely low and the tide of rationalistic
thought and scientific materialism to rise extremely high, and when,
maybe, it was found desirable, for the benefit of a few in the dark
days that were to follow, to kindle a new beacon-light testifying to
a truth and a doctrine that have never been absent from the world.
It being my purpose in this article to bespeak the attention alike
of those who are technically Masons and of those who are not to a
further and extremely valuable work upon the esoteric development and
mystical aspect of Masonry and its numerous ramifications and allied
rites, the foregoing considerations may perhaps not be misplaced,
since their intention is to clear the somewhat befogged atmosphere in
which the true history and vital purpose of the Masonic system have
become involved in both the Masonic and the public mind. In the
volumes referred to — and they deal not with the external and
virtually negligible history of Masonry, but with its interior
content, its mystical purport and its place in the long chain of
occult tradition — Mr. Waite demonstrates after what manner
Masonry, in both its Craft and High Grades and its cognate rites, is
an expression, perhaps far from a full, but still an indubitable,
one, of that Secret Tradition which throughout all time has been
perpetuated with the object of instructing those that were keenly
enough concerned with solving the riddle of existence to consent to
adopt the methods which that Tradition accredits and. guarantees. The
quest after that solution is for ever proceeding, amongst however
few. We may call it the quest of the Graal; we may call it the search
for the Lost Word, or the guarding of am empty Sepulchre; we may term
it the achievement of the Great Work, or the discovery of the
Philosopher's Stone; or we may refer to it in the terms of the
Platonist as the task of re-integrating the divine element in man
with the Divine Basis of the Universe. The systems have been many,
but the quest, and the goal of the quest, are but one. Many of these
systems, expressed sometimes in terms of baffling ingenuity lest the
pearls they contain should fall into unworthy hands, have long since
passed away, to be replaced by others. Like the ever-renewed branches
of the Tree of Life — uno avulso non deficit alter aureus; when
one has served its day another has manifested without fail, as if
(but is it not part of the Tradition that it is so ?) there was
watching over Israel — the small, but continuous body of
dedicated, undaunted aspirants — that which slumbers not nor
sleeps; a watch, of unseen wardens whose concern is to keep ever open
and illumined the pathway to that Centre whereto all experience leads
and wherein all quests end.
Mr. Waite defines the Secret Tradition as (i) the memorials of a
cosmic loss which has befallen humanity, and (2) the records of a
restitution in respect of that which is lost. It is innermost
knowledge concerning man's way of return whence he came, by a method
of inward life. But, by a paradox, that method of inward life is also
one of inward death. There has been no accredited system of
mystery-teaching but has proclaimed, whether in legend, symbol, or
dramatic representation, the fact that death, interpreted in a
mystical sense, is the gate of that life which is not merely
post-mortem existence, but conscious, irrefragable union with the
Eternal Basis of the Universe. It may be urged, and with truth, that
this doctrine is, or was intended to be, that of official public
religion. I am not concerned here to discuss to what extent the
churches have conveyed or failed to convey this truth in its
plenitude to the consciousness of their adherents, and I am far from
asserting that the collateral Masonic system can claim an advantage
in this respect, But there is none among the millions who have
received the degree of Master-Mason but may reflect that not only has
he symbolically undergone an experience which has been the crux and
centre of all the great Mystery-schools of the past, but that in so
doing he has in his own person testified to a truth which is inherent
in the moral fabric of the Cosmos itself.
And herein lies the peculiar purpose and value of ceremonial
initiation as against systems that are but didactic or mainly so. The
doctrine imparted is given an immediately personal application. The
imagination of the disciple is intended to be impressed through his
being identified with, and made to enact ceremonially, that which it
is essential for him to learn, to the intent that thereafter he may
in his own life and consciousness become that which he has
sacramentally portrayed.
Such being the nature and purpose of arcane rites, Mr. Waite, who
appears to be in the probably exceptional position of being
personally familiar with the entire range of those now extant, as
well as with the records of many now in desuetude, has been enabled
in this book to apply his well known qualifications as a mystic to
collating them and assessing their respective values; a laborious
task conducted with unfailing skill and tact, for in dealing with
matters to which covenants of privacy attach he has been confronted
upon one side with the difficulty of avoiding saying things to which
those obligations would apply, and, upon the other, with that of
saying too little to render an important subject intelligible to the
non-Masonic inquirer. This twofold problem he has effectually
surmounted. Faithful in respect of those matters which are the
private prescriptions of secret communities, he has been abundantly
generous in his exposition of those which exceed the range of all the
instituted systems and can never become the monopoly of any since
they are open to humanity at large. For this reason, although those
who are officially Masons will in virtue of their inside knowledge
stand at an advantage, the book need in no sense be deemed as
restricted to their consideration, but is, meant for a far wider
public. The Mason of whatever rank will receive from it an
illumination perhaps little suspected as possible in regard to his
own science, which is now, and for the first time, subjected to an
exegesis never hitherto undertaken; whilst the non-Mason who may be
interested no less than his initiated brother in the development of
mystical knowledge and philosophy, and the forms in which these have
found expression from time to time, will find ample scope for
profitable instruction and reflection.
Space does not avail here for detailed reference to the contents
of Mr Waite's book, or to the interesting collection of illustrations
of cryptic symbols and of portraits of some of those who have been
conspicuously associated with the expression and transmission of
mystical doctrine and rites, and of which a few are here reproduced.
The two volumes themselves constitute an extremely handsome setting
to an unique work which, as a Mason myself, I most gratefully welcome
and commend to my brethren and all others whom it may concern as the
most important contribution to Masonic literature that has hitherto
appeared. I have preferred in this notice of it to limit myself to
emphasizing a conviction of its value and to indicating the fact that
it must needs mark an epoch in the history of a system which has
developed as it were from a mustard-seed until it has overgrown the
whole earth. Masonry in some at least of its grades may be, as Mr
Waite shows, an imperfect expression of the Secret Tradition, and the
average Mason may, and doubtless does, enter into but an incomplete
understanding of the full content of his system even as imperfectly
expressed, although reasonable excuses for his so doing might perhaps
be advanced. But the present work should make such excuses henceforth
impermissible, and for this reason it may be destined in time to
assist in transforming and elevating the whole conscience and motive
of the Masonic body. In a system which hitherto, with so intangible
and obscure a reason, has developed as Masonry already has done there
lie, now that that reason is unveiled and a new motive is displayed,
enormous possibilities; and in this regard I am thinking less of its
future numerical strength than of the augmented spiritual stature of
its adherents.
Masonry may yet become an undreamed of power for good, especially
when regard is had to the increasing decadence of the churches and
the vapidity of their teaching. Connected with its future is the
problem, already becoming urgent, of the admission of women, against
which there is, of course, no a priori or other substantial
objection. The natural conservatism inherent in vested interests and
arising from long usage may eventually dissolve when a fuller
realization of what is involved is attained. Upon the continent a few
lodges are opening their doors to women, whilst the Co-Masonic
movement working in connection with the Theosophical Society already
numbers some dozen lodges admitting both sexes. Of this latter
movement Mr. Waite speaks somewhat impatiently, but rather because of
its reputed supervision by an elusive entity described as the Comte
de Saint Germain than from prejudice against feminine rights to
participate in mystical rites and philosophy. In the words of the
apostle-initiate, the man is not without the woman, nor the woman
without the man, in the Divine Idea, and, besides abundant precedents
from antiquity, there are good warrants for associating them together
in any system whose ultimate goal is the conscious realization of
that Idea. There was once, it may be remembered, a building-which,
through the mouth of a great prophet, was rejected and condemned by
the Great Architect because it had been "daubed with untempered
mortar."
My references to Masonry in this article are, like Mr. Waite's
book, not meant to be restricted merely to the Craft grades and their
extension, the Royal Arch; they extend to Masonic grades and cognate
rites lying beyond these, and some of them are entirely beyond the
range of the average Mason's present vision. Those whose existence is
a matter of public knowledge are, as Mr. Waite observes, analogous to
what in former days were known as the Lesser Mysteries. But as beyond
these there subsisted the more withdrawn and Greater Mysteries for
those who wer proficient and well equipped, so also, we are assured
in these volumes, the corresponding form of the latter is amidst us
to-day. It is of the Masonic method and the initiatory system as a
whole that I have written, and if in what is here said I have done
less than justice to the important volumes under notice, the
deficiency is due to a desire to exhibit in the space at my disposal
the standpoint from which they should be read. They form the greatest
contribution in the way of expository literature that Masonry has
received. It remains now with the Masonic Fraternity — and with
doubtless many eager inquirers outside of it — to take
advantage of them and to enlarge their borders of understanding in
regard to a momentous and underestimated subject.
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