On Laptops and Cats

As I wait for my daughter to come home from school on the penultimate day of fifth grade, my cat Minerva has sprawled herself on my lap and is trying to subtly push my laptop off.  Her tail keeps straying onto the trackpad to make the cursor go bananas.  This seems to me to be a metaphor for life.  Are you going to devote yourself to knowledge and the pursuit of self-expression on the newest medium, the Internet?  Or are you going to shut up with your fingers and pet your cat?

I need novelist’s career counseling or some nice group of other writers in Minneapolis who can sit around with a cup of tea and talk shop.  The very unpleasant thing about being a practicing novelist (that is practicing as apposed to actually published) is that you haven’t anyone with whom you can talk shop.  You can read helpful books about how to become a successful writer, which is nice, but not the same as real human beings encouraging you.

On the other hand I cringe at the idea of “sharing” my first drafts with anyone.  As Hemingway (or somebody of that ilk) said, “First drafts are always crap.”  Maybe it was F.Scott Fitzgerald.  Maybe I should make my pen name F.Scott Fitzmarten.  I am dragging myself around today with the effects of bad living again.  I think I have to give up whiskey and smoking as well as everything else.  Must adopt a proper ape lifestyle, eating fruits and vegetables and nuts and so forth.  I still eat meat and fish and they don’t bother me, but really, I don’t think it is good for one.  Still, I am sure I haven’t the virtue to give up meat.

Anyway, in this melancholy state, under cloudy skies, I really only want to lie down.  However, I have managed to think about my plot.  I have half a first draft and all sorts of threads.  But now I am getting anxious that the threads are not going to pull themselves together for the resolution.  I’m still really in the Middle — the complication stage, where the protagonist encounters problems in her movement towards he goal.

One problem is that I need to define her goal.  Is she going to pursue hidden knowledge and try to understand her world?  Or is she going to pet the cat?  That is such a great metaphor that I have no idea what it means.

Choices.  Moral choices, and choices of action that lead to reaction and new knowledge.  Ladedahdodah.

You know the thing is that it is more fun to work out the neat plot of a novel with a nice resolution, or even a clif-hanger ending that leads to the next book in the series is so much more pleasant than dealing with the absolutely unpredictable business of one’s mundane life.  What is my life?  Non-fiction?  Why are we stuck having to have a non-fiction life?  Where is the fun of that.  I object!

Rollo May wrote a book about finding your own Myth in life and living it.  I rather like that idea.  I’m not sure that I like the myth I am in, however.  The dragon of dispepsia and the hydra of sleep apnea do not seem like very good monsters to have to slay.  And I am not having much luck slaying them.  It is more like, “Well, you have to learn to live with them and just bear up.”  How heroic is that?

No, really, I’m in the dish-washing, laundry, vacuuming, and making bag lunches myth.  Thankfully that does include petting the cat and napping as well, but it is really really super unheroic with knobs on.  What I would like is to be in a Romance.  You know the sort with a happy ending.  But I feel quite too old for that now.  Sweeping damsels off there feet is frowned upon by society once you are yourself a father of a young damsel.  You are just considered a villain then.

On the other hand, being the villain in the myth might be preferable to just being the helpful peasant dish-washer.  Yes, indeed.  But I don’t think I am really villain material.

Why must I live my life in prose?  Why not poetry?  Or better still: song!

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, says Hamlet.  He is so obscure.  But if we are talking about my dreams, I would rather be made of something else.  Aluminium perhaps.  No, silver.  No, cake.  Wait –

Oh, never mind.

On Witchcraft in Africa

There was a brief article in the magazine “The Week” which prompted this entry in the Weekly Owl.  We in the U.S. and the rest of the English-speaking post-colonial world have arrived at an odd cultural point.  I hazard the guess that most Americans today have at least heard of Wicca.  Many know that it is a “witchcraft” religion.  Fundamentalists undoubtedly reject it as the work of their Devil using the simple logic that reality is divided into two warring camps: The true faithful, and those whose souls are under the influence of the Great Adversary.

We are rather used to that situation and Western pagans have learned to deal with it.  There are still many states in the U.S. where pagans live a closeted existence, but Wicca can adapt to that quite easily since part of its structure emulates the medieval folklore of witches meeting secretly in covens.  They are not very often functioning as cunning folk or healers in their village, much less doing juju for their neighbors.

In Africa, on the other hand, in countries such as Liberia, Ghana, and Congo the cultural situation regarding witchcraft is just as bad as it was in medieval Europe.  Even heads of state have believed in the efficacy of “juju” and have both employed it to try to increase their personal power or launched witch hunts to apprehend and kill witches.  Many people practice witchcraft (or as some anthopologists would prefer to say, “sorcery.”).  Many others hire witches or sorcerers to help them get rich, find love, get revenge, and all the usual things witches have been employed to do.

This stuff is, at least in part, what the thousands of Harry Potter fans would call “the Dark Arts.”  One practice mentioned in the article in “The Week” is using the body parts of albinos for magic.  This practice has resulted in the murder of albino people and has left the entire substantial albino population living in fear.  This sort of magic is the real old magic.  It is not  self-improvement through candle magic or creative visualization.  it is not even raising “demons” using formulas from medieval ceremonial magic.  Those practices seem merely stupid, but not violent and socially pernicious.

I wonder how many modern Western pagans or witches know about how witchcraft has been practiced in the past and is being practiced in the present.  The belief in magic can be nothing more than a type of stupidity, that bane of the human condition.  It is a mistake, a lapse in reason, that can make even highly educated people do things that others would consider bizarre if not criminal, and certainly nothing more than idiocy.

I have been  reading  Paul Tabori’s 1959 book The Natural Science of Stupidity (re-issued by Barnes and Noble as The Natural History of Stupidity in 1993).  The book is, in part, a study of the ability (or even tendency) of humans to believe things that seem utterly absurd and have no basis in actual facts.  There are certain fears and desires instinctive in human beings that can override the capacity to reason, suspend the critical faculty of judgment, and lead all of us into acting stupidly.

Curiously, in American society (at least where I live in Minnesota) calling someone “stupid” is considered a grave insult.  Certainly it may be that.  But what we are rather stupidly ignoring is that we are all stupid at some time or other.  Some people become chronically stupid as some irrational belief takes over their mind to such an extent that they constantly make errors in handling facts.

What we also lose in trying to remove the word “stupid” from polite conversation is the ability to understand the horrifically destructive capacity of human stupidity.  When humans believe that witches are cursing people, or that children who have serious illnesses are “witches” who must be killed, or when they believe such groundless ideas as that another country is hiding weapons of mass destruction, or that our country has the moral right to invade anyone, or that war is an effective way to resolve differences of opinion — these sort of acts of stupidity result in enormous death and suffering.

Tabori notes that among the many kinds of stupidity is prejudice.  A belief founded regardless of fact, and often built upon wild stories passed on from parent to child.  Conspiracy theories are the more serious pathological version of prejudice.  But as Tabori points out, prejudice by itself is more or less passive.  It is intolerance that is the active form, acts of hatred against individuals or groups of people who have been labeled “the Other” and who are imagined to be dangerous.

Antisemitism has been a long-standing historically pervasive form of prejudice and souce of intolerance.  Hitler elevated it to the point of being a touchstone against which every other act of intolerance is measured.  You cannot carry intolerance much farther than genocide.  But what we may fail to stop and consider is that the root of all this horror is stupidity, belief in things that are clearly idiocy to any dispassionate observer who is not caught up in the mass delusion.

Pause to consider the followering proposals:

“Let’s kill all the Jews and that will restore peace and order to our society.”

or,

“Let’s kill all the witches… or, …all the heretics… or all the Westerners…  or all the homosexuals…”

“Kill them!  Bomb them!”

This basic idea that killing off some group of people is going to make things better for us, make us safer, restore our culture to its past righteousness or glory.  This idea has been the thing motivated not only every war and street fight, but also such huge endeavors as imperialism, slavery, the subjection of wives and daughters to male authority, and the subjection of sons to adult male authority.

The latter enterprises have consumed an enormous amount of human energy and resources over the past several thousand years.  Men do not kill women or boys, unless they are incorrigible in their rebellion.  The killing is most often simply killing their independent thought.  It is the use of beatings and the threat of death to subjugate, but more than that to indoctrinate this particular sort of stupidity.  Namely the belief that adult males are smarter, wiser, and more dependable than women, girls, or boys.

Feminist critics have identified this particular naked emperor as Patriarchy, the belief that old men know best and shouild enforce their rule by violence.  So, boys in school are caned, wives beaten, daughters forced to marry who their father chooses, and other women subjected to rape, all on the grounds that men are superior and priviledged — usually bolstered with some religious story.

The willingness of humans to swallow religious stories in place of facts and empirical knowledge is such a vast field of stupidity that one can hardly begin to describe it.  Nearly everyone who believes the stories of their own religion as true also adds the stupid mistake of thinkning that everyone else’s religious stories are false and pernicious.

Now, you may be asking how a self-professed wizard and modern druid can call magic “stupid.”  This is something that, for me, is at the very center of the Bardic system of life.  The bard understands what is story and what is fact.  The druids of old guarded the facts and the bards made sure that the people understood how stories worked.  Now, I have no evidence that this was true in days of yore.  Probably not.  Most likely Celts in the Iron Age and the Middle Ages were just as prone to stupidity as anyone else.  Anthropologists call the belief that religious stories (myths) are actually true “superstition.”  Similarly, belief in the efficacy of magical charms and spells based on “tradition” rather than experience, is another sort of superstition.  But both of these types of superstition are at base human stupidity.

Some historians have viewed religion and magic both as ways to keep the ignorant common folk under control.  Ignorance certainly doesn’t help one to avoid stupidity, but it is not at all the same thing.  The supposed ruling classes of priests were being just as stupid as anyone else.  Once a belief has been embraced, however improbable, fantastical, or idiotic, education only makes the mistake worse.  Occasionally, nowadays, education does prompt young people to recognize beliefs that they have taken as true by nothing more than blind obedience to some authority, be it priest, pastor, mullah, high priestess, or parent.

Modern paganism is founded on the idea that Christian myths are a bunch of baloney, but I wonder how many pagans shine the same critical light of reason on the stories that have become traditional among modern pagans.  The idea, for example, that magical acts (even if disguised as New Age techniques) can cause one to find one’s soul mate, grow rich, and so forth.  The fact that the book “The Secret” was such a best-seller testifies to the fact that we as humans have not overcome this sort of stupidity.

For me, being a wizard means seeking wisdom and loving it.  Wisdom is the opposite of stupidity.  It involves learning from your experiences.  Inner experiences or outer experiences, but not other people’s experiences.  That is, other people’s claims cannot be taken as fact until they have been thoroughly investigated and tested.  The use of sorcery to kill other people is clearly evil, but using it to convince others that what you believe is true instead of teaching them to think clearly for themselves, is practically as bad.  It can destroy a life too, only more slowly.

That is one reason I do not like to “teach magic” — Passing off one’s own beliefs to other people who willingly accept them as authoritative, is never wise and never courteous to the pupil. The human desire to love authorities comes from human stupidity, a kind of laziness that longs to abdicate the work of truth to other people, usually people in the past, or who claim to be passing on amazing magical traditions that have been preserved for thousands of years.

The true wizard must never encourage stupidity in his or her pupils.  Having “followers” is itself an act of stupidity, a mistake of reasonable thinking.  Believing in one’s own super-powers to the point of wishing to gather up students and admirers crosses the divide between wisdom and stupidity.  Why?  Because your experience, and your interpretation of your experience are not the same as “facts.”  Until someone else experiences the same or similar phenomena themselves, and does the work of collecting facts and interpreting them for themselves, they cannot be a wizard.

This criticism could be applied to all education, of course, but in the realm of magic and spirituality, the offenses are far more egregious than in other fields.  There are certainly examples, of course in which teachers taught things that were completely untrue based on authorities.  This was a big problem in the medieval universities and the system that evolved out of it up until well into the 20th century.  A few examples must suffice.  The age of the Earth and humankind was not taught correctly until well into the 19th century.  In physics, Newtonian laws of motion and thermodynamics were taught as if they could explain all natural phenomena until Einstein developed new ideas.  Historians taught that the Roman historians were reliable sources of factual information, and also acepted the idea that the Bible was a historical account of true facts.  Some still want to teach that.  Biologists promulgated the notion that humanity was divided into distinct races with particular characteristics and that white Europeans were just naturally smarter than others.  This teaching ironically proved just the opposite.

In the arts also one can find stupidity.  Until quite recently, professors of literature beleived devoutly that there was a sacred “canon” of English literature that everyone should learn and that teaching students to read books outside of that canon was wrong-headed.  Literature professors still sometimes embrace the idea that interpreting books or poems in the light of sexism or racism is completely illegitimate.  Up until the 19th century many art critics believed that there were established natural laws of painting or drawing, natural laws of what could be called “beauty.”

Today, in a world that has become dominated by advertising as the pervasive form of thinking, people are encouraged to believe that the health and welfare of our culture depends on our buying more things, accumulating stuff.  Advertising and motion pictures also promote the idea that physically beautiful people are the only ones worth consideration.  They promote the idea that infatuation will lead to lasting “true love” even if a girl has fallen head-over-heals for a handsome vampire.

I feel sorry about the situation of witchcraft in Africa, and I know that similar problems exist all around the world.  Our naive belief that magic is benign and harmless is dangerous not because the sorcerer’s apprentice is likely to release powers he cannot control.  It is dangerous because it encourages human stupidity.  And human stupidity kills.  Let us teach wisdom instead, for the stupidity of humans is the number one problem threatening us and our planet.  How?  By questioning any popular beliefs rigorously, especially if we are inclined to accept them on authority.  We should question the belief that the global climate is changing because of greenhouse gasses with exactly the same rigor that we wish our ancestors had questioned the belief that building cars and internal combustion engines was nothing but good for us and harmless to the planet.  Or as we wish our ancestors had questioned the belief that forcing the American Indians off their land was not only good for us white folks but good for them.

The Wizard asks questions. Any wizard who offers you answers should be met with rigorous critical suspicion, not superstitious awe.

OWL

Natural Religion and Druidry

It is fair to speculate that modern Druidry was influenced by the ideas of Deism current in the 17th and 18th centuries when the seeds of the modern druid orders were planted.  I have suggested elsewhere in these pages that Druidry and Freemasonry are related, probably cousins although each might lay a certain claim to being the “father” of the other.  I say this because some Freemasons in that early period and in the nineteenth century as well, have suggested that Freemasonry the revival of the ancient wisdom of the Druids.

The claim may sound curious without the logic upon which it is built.  The first premise is that Masonry is a mystery tradition, not just a fraternity, and that it is the vehicle by means of which the old spiritual wisdom and initiatic current was transmitted to the modern age in Europe.  The second premise is that there was a unified and universal religion practiced by our prehistoric ancestors and from this religion descended all modern religions.  Corrollary to the second premise is the idea that the descent of religion involved it moving away from its pure roots and becoming corrupted by priesthoods that desired to use it a a tool for politics and power.  The initiatice tradition of individual enlightenment was replaced with various social forms of mediation, placing priesthoods between God and ordinary people.

W. L. Wilmshurst in his classic book The Meaning of Masonry suggests this kind of devolution of spiritual insight into priestly mediation.  Now, of course, such a thing is highly conjectural and as a generalization will probably not stand to scrutiny, but it is one of the beliefs upon which much Enlightenment religious thinking was based.  Another key idea related to the idea of devolution of spirituality from its pure source is that of Natural Religion.  This idea, developed by Deists among others, maintained that morality could be reduced to logical and rational principles without reference to any particular religious sect.  This Natural Religion, was in fact the essence of the pure religion before it was added to with needless accretions of pomp and ritual apparatus and hierarchies.

At the same time, we find that these thinkers looked back to ancient India and Egypt as sources for the great mystery schools of initiation that passed on the Secret Doctrine (as Blavatsky called it).  The belief was that this Secret Doctrine had been passed down though secret organizations from master to pupil since the dawn of time.  This was a central tenet of Theosophy.  But Natural Religion is simpler even that that and it will, I believe, do modern Druids good to think about its six moral precepts.  I paraphrase loosely from an article by Chris Impens called “The First Charge Revisited.” in Ars Quatuor Coronatorum (Vol. 120 for 2007), a paper to which I do not have immediate access but which has been quoted by one of my correspondents. Impens himself is, I believe, quoting another author named Clarke, though I lack the full reference.  I will offer the paraphrase of each precept and then my own commentary.

ONE
All created rational Beings, depend continually upon God.  Therefore, they are rationally  bound to adore, worship and obey God; to praise him for all things they enjoy, and to pray him for every thing they want.  This, of course, begs the question What is God? But we may easily turn around the statement to discover the answer.  God is a word we use to denote that spiritual invisible power within every rational being that is the source of its reason, its being, and all the good fortune of life.  God is a power for Good and for Reason and each human being derives its ability to do good things and to reason from that source.  For this reason it is metaphorically called The Father, or even The Allfather.  We “depend” on God in the sense that our Being comes from that source, the word “depend” in its Latin root (dependare) meaning “to hang down from.”

TWO
All are bound to promote, in their proportion, and according to the extent of their several powers and abilities, the general good and welfare of those parts of the world, wherein they are placed, especially to make it their business by an universal Benevolence, to promote the happiness of all others.  The logic of this is that by the first moral law, all humans are brothers and sisters, ultimately emanating or proceeding from the same single source denoted by the word God.

THREE
In order to do this, every human being is bound always to behave himself towards others, as in reason he would desire they should in like circumstances deal with him.  This law is, of course, the Golden Rule.  It proceeds logically from the first law in that this is the way we may rationally judge how to behave from a mental attitude of empathy and compassion.

FOUR
Therefore, we are obliged triply:
A.  To obey and submit to our superiors in all just things, for the preservation of Society, and the Peace and benefit of the Public

B.  To be just and honest, equitable and sincere, in all our dealings with our equals, for the keeping inviolable the everlasting Rule of Righteousness, and maintaining an universal confidence, friendship, and affection amongst Men

C.  To our Inferiors to be gentle and kind, easy and affable, charitable and willing to assist as many as may be in need our help, for the preservation of universal Love and Benevolence in Mankind.

In these three parts of the Fourth Law we find imbedded social and economic distinctions, not because these are Divinely ordained, but because they are facts of life in human society.  This law is about how we are to act within that social order and boils down to treating everyone equitably and respecting social authorities who have power over us, so long as they are just in their actions.

FIVE
In respect of ourselves we are bound to preserve our own Being and the right use of all our faculties, so long as it shall please God, who appointed him his Station in this World, to continue therein.  Which is to say that we are obliged by this interdependency and descent from God to take care of ourselves and developed ourselves in all our mental faculties, spiritual faculties, and physical faculties until such time as we pass away into another existence.

SIX
We are bound to have an exact Government of our Passions, and to abstain from all Debaucheries and Abuses of ourselves, which tend either to Destruction of our own Being, or to the disordering our Faculties, and disabling us from performing our Duty, of hurrying ourselves into the practice of unreasonable and unjust things.  This law is also a corollary following  on the other premises; namely, that bound together and emanating from the same source, if we destroy ourselves or hurt others through ungoverned passions such as lust, violence, anger, greed, or jealousy, we harm the whole body of Humanity and God.

These laws or obligations may be summarized by ‘the three great and principal Branches, from which al! other and smaller instances of duty do naturally flow, or may without difficulty  be derived’,  these ‘principal Moral Obligations’ being the following three:
Piety or our duty towards God (Rule One); Righteousness or our duty towards each another (Rules Two, Three, and Four); and Sobriety or Our Duty towards Ourselves (Rules Five and Six).

This last formulation could almost be a Druid triad.

So, modern druids, believing that that ancient druids practiced something much closer to Natural Religion than the elaborate priestly religions of Egypt, India, Jerusalem, and Rome, may do well to embrace these six precepts as a guide to Natural Morality.  For the root of all of these is the realization that all beings emanate into this world of forms from a single source.  This is not “monotheism” but simply the idea of the Divine Monad, that all things form a Whole and that there is a source of Being.  Few modern scientists would be likely to disagree with the hypothesis, even though it cannot practically be proven.  Modern scientific thinking has endeavored to keep itself separate from religious thinking, but even so, it accepts as a working hypothesis that all living creatures on Earth descended from the same primordial source of life.  Life, that peculiar and mysterious organization of organisms, must have some Source.  It may be thought that lightning playing upon the primordial soup created life.  But to take that as an hypothesis is almost to step off into the language of myth and it may come as no surprise that the Sky Father or God of Lightning is often the mythic figure identified with this One God who created all beings.

There are, of course, many other creation myths that do not represent the process as the act of an anthropomorphized Source, and many that do not represent creation as something that happened sometime in the past, but rather as something which is always happening.  Still, even modern science seems to think that there is some sort of origin of organic organization on Earth and that this organization advanced in complexity up to the emergence of the human species.  Likewise, many mystical traditions carry this logic further to suggest that the human species is continuing its evolution, not on a material plane so much as on the invisible, spiritual plane.

Modern scientific schools, as a matter of course, identify and describe the actions of many invisible forces and complex systems.  It is not, therefore, too much to ask the modern druid to think of the Spiritual plane of existence as that conglomeration of invisible forces, including the invisible organization and power of the human mind.  If the First Law is accepted as a working hypothesis, then it follows that this universal Source of All is in fact inclusive of All Things, and that it also must include a universal Source of Mind which is manifest in our species, and to a less complicated degree in other species as well.

We observe this concept of Mind in the beehive, the dolphins, the penguins, dogs, cats, and by some extention of the concept even in plant life.  It is an invisible source of action and Will.  In humans it is also a self-aware source.  In a sense, we might say that to believe in God, the One Source of All Things, is to believe that there is a universal unifying ecology which connects All Things.

Those who argue against “monotheism” and in favor of “polytheism” consider the two ideas mutually exclusive.  Why not have many “sources”?  One answer to this question is simply that if we follow that hypothesis, then the whole edifice of this morality collapses.  There is no reason for the Golden Rule, if in fact we are not all connected in some sense, if we are not all brothers and sisters.  It seems safe to say that historically polytheism without the addition of an Allfather of the gods and goddesses logically breeds division and tribalism and pits one group of humans against another.  Nor does it offer any logical reason for respecting other forms of life.  I will not claim it is the “only way” but it is certainly one way to achieve an end to this division and selfishness to adopt the belief in the One as the Source of All.

In the Irish druidic pantheon I believe this One God is the Daghda, whose name is usually translated as simply “The Good God.”  He is noted for his invincible cudgel and his cauldron of infinite food.  Some have identified Daghda’s pot with the Holy Grail because of its limitless powers of fecundity, prosperity, and healing.  In other words, what comes from that cauldron is Goodness.

It will be noticed that the One is the First Law.  As in the Jewish Ten Commandments, the first is “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” which does not say, you shall have no other gods. It in fact implies that there are plenty of other gods.  It just says that the speaker is the Allfather, from whom all other gods and all other beings emanates in the act of creation.  In the druid Awen symbol – three rays descending from three points of light and encircled, the three fundamental moral principles may be seen – as stated by Clarke and Impens above:  Piety, Rightousness, and Sobriety.  In other words:  Right Action towards the Source of All; Right Action to All beings; Right action to our own Being.

This concept of Right Action is not only Rational it is also the foundation of the Doctrine of Love.  The Christian “Love thy neighbor as thyself” or the Buddhist’s compassion and right living are only two doctrines in major religions which express this fundamental idea, which is the recognition of the absolute Good of brotherly love.

Masonry, Radicalism, and the Vatican

I’ve been reading Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Humanum Genus which condemns Freemasonry.  Although it dates from 1884, I suspect that the opinions expressed in it have lingered on.  Once a Pope proclaims something it is pretty hard for Catholics to ignore it later and admit that it was founded on mistaken assumptions or bad information.  If I may be permitted to summarize, Pope Leo essentially claims that Freemasons are in league with socialists and communists and have virtually take over all the governments of Europe (or at any rate in several predominantly Catholic countries).  He asserts that Freemasons are also “naturalists” who believe that morality and truth can be based on the observation of Nature without regard for a deity of any sort, or divine revelation.

There are two lines of objection to these claims.  One is that the radical, anti-clerical element among Freemasons has always been a limited group and very often condemned by regular Masons.  The other is that the rejection of Naturalism as a philosophic stance depends on logical premises that the modern world has largely rejected.

A glance at the history of European Masonry in the nineteenth century (as I have taken) reveals that Masons were involved with the infamous Carbonari and with various other political groups of the period whose aim was indeed the destruction of the Ancien Regime, as the French called it.  In the early part of the century (when Pope Leo XIII was growing up and working his way upward through the church hierarchy in Italy) such groups were working for the secular unification of Italy and the aboliton of the temporal power of the Popes as rulers over the Papal States in central Italy.  Popes were essentially theocrats with lands of their own, operating as a government.

It is not surprising therefore that cardinals and popes of the period would be aghast at the notion, then emerging, of the separation of Church and State.  In countries that had long been dominated by Catholicism, the state and the church worked hand in hand, the aristocrats often becoming the priests, bishops and potentates of the church.  Indeed, Pope Leo himself was the son of an Italian nobleman, Count Pecci.  It is hard for Americans today to quite imagine how thoroughly interwoven church and state were in Catholic countries and how ancient this system was.  In brief, the alliance between noble families and the Catholic Church had been instrumental in preserving what civilization there was after the collapse of the Roman Empire around the year 500.

So, the 1800’s were, in fact, the very tail end of a long process of untangling the power of the popes and the Catholic institution from government in Europe.  Americans have not experienced this process because the British had extricated themselves from Catholicism in the time of Henry VIII (that is the 16th century).  Those religious protestors (the Protestants) who wanted to go even further and break from the state Church of England, were taking this same movement to its next logical step.  The English kings and queens had localized church-state power within their own domain, separating from what they considered to be foreign influence when they created their own state church.  The Church of England was modeled on the Catholic church but turned to the use of English and the elimination of many Catholic doctrines.  Most important among these was the idea of papal infallibility.

English culture, before America was even formed, had turned away from supernaturalism to naturalism, and Pope Leo XIII is correct to some extent in noting that Freemasonry emerged in the full flower of the 18th century, this Age of Reason, in which the philosophy of naturalism was fully in the accendent among intellectuals.  It is important to realize that such ideas were planted in America at its beginning and have been taken for granted, written into our Constitution, making the United States almost unique among nations for adopting the idea of the separation of church and state.  At the beginning of the 21st century, people have forgotten what a big deal this was and why.  But we need only look to the theocracies that still thrive in other parts of the world to imagine what Catholic Europe was like.

I do not mean by such remarks to condemn any of the religions involved but I do personally believe that the union of church and state is an evil.  Pope Leo XIII thought quite the reverse.  To unite the Catholic Church with state governments was the only way to ensure the morality of those governments.  Only the teaching and pressure provided by the Papacy could prevent the return of the sort of monstrous evil that Europe saw in its rulers in earlier ages.  It was taken as obvious that pagan princes and emperors of the Greco-Roman world were the worst kind of perverse tyrants and that society was awash in sinful behavior.  Leo complains about the return of licentiousness and luxury in the Europe of his time and blames it on the radicals, naturalists, and Freemason who have eroded respect for clerical rule.  We can see exactly the same complaints being made today in Afghanistan and Iran and other theocratic states.

“Naturalism” becomes the boogey man just as Westernization, Americanism, or Capitalism have been used as boogey men by various regimes.  Indeed in the Capitalist West “Communism” was the boogey man which had to be destroyed because it was the radical enemy of Us.  Pope Leo evokes the Us versus Them mentality that has been taught by Christian leaders for so many centuries at the beginning of Humanum Genus.There he follows St. Augustine’s idea of the universe divided into two camps, one founded by God and one by Satan; the former is founded on love of God and that latter on hatred for Him.  This model of the universe lies at the center of Christian thinking and is a real bugbear.  It prevents any middle ground, any subtlety of reasoning, and indeed any doubt.  You are either Us or Them, the Catholic Church (the only true religion) or else you are in league with Satan, whether you know it or not.  You don’t have to believe in Satan or even in supernaturalism.  In fact if you deny the existence of either of these things in reality, that just goes to prove how deluded you are by the wily arts of the great Enemy.

As a writer of Fantasy, I find this bugbear particularly annoying because it seeps into the genre of Fantasy to the point of being hackneyed.  How many books or movies can you count that are predicated on Good versus Evil in which these two vague forces are personified by a Hero and an Antihero. Once could almost say that this structure is the foundation of Western literature.  And that is because it is the foundation of Western Thought since the birth of Christian doctrine.  Indeed, two literary works did more to promote this idea as Truth than any number of papal bulls.  Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost developed the personificaton of absolute Evil into a stock character of Romance.

So, this great imaginary battle between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil militarizes our whole way of thinking and causes many to think of the world in terms of this great cosmic battle.  Every other activity, idea, or freedom is put aside in the name of the War on Evil.  When someone comes along and suggests that we are talking about a myth and that War, in fact, is rather evil in its very nature, that person typically gets shouted down and called a lunatic.  But it is our whole culture that has been in the grips of this lunacy, I am afraid.  Druid of old understood that war was a bad idea, a stupid, destructive, and vain way to try to solve differences between peoples or factions.  Popes on the other hand have made a business out of promoting war.  Even when they embrace the idea of peace in a modern world, as some popes have done, the deep structure of they mythos is based on the War between God and Satan — what we might very easily call “The War on Terror.”

Such a cosmology, especially when a religon insists that it is factually true and not a myth at all, is insidious in shaping the minds of everyone who is exposed to it.  Ironically, the Protestant Reformation, while it broke from the temporal powers of the pope-kings and removed much of the pomp and glamour of Catholicism, only raised the myth of the War between God and the Devil as a central dogma to a fever pitch.  The Devil was everywhere, the reformers said, even in the papacy, so that constant vigillance was required to prevent temptation from entering one’s heart and planting there the seeds of vice.

Freemasonry responded to these irrational and supernatural ways of thinking by questioning their premises.  When whole institutions take as a premise that (a) there is only one true God, and (b) He has revealed all truth and right thinking to Man through the Bible and his chosen Apostles, including the Papacy, and (c) that the whole cosmos is divided into two warring camps whose war will not end until the End Times; then one will arrive at long strings of logic that are utterly untenable to anyone who does not accept those premises.  And those three statements above are exactly that: logical premises, postulates if you will, that are simply taken on authority as a starting point for all rational thought within Catholicism and many other branches of Christian churchdom.

Freemasonry, while trying to maintain the utmost respect for individual conscience in the matter of supernatural beiefs, and while actually requiring that a man profess a belief in some sort of God or Supreme Being, does not accept any of the above postulates.  Instead, under the influence of Naturalism and Rationalism during the 18th century, it takes as a postulate that we learn about God (however we imagine that Being) through the mediation of our five senses and the cultivation of our minds through the seven liberal arts.  I am sometimes unsure whether my Christian brothers in the Fraternity fully grasp how this stance differs from that implicit in most branches of Christianity.  For those latter institutions demand from their adherents obedience to church authorities and a belief in divine Revelation through the Biblical scriptures.  Moreover, even when they actively encourage their adherents to study those scriptures they seldom provide the framework necessary to understand them as historical documents written by men.

Pope Leo XIII in 1884 was surrounded by radicals demanding an end to Vatican power and the separation of religion from politics.  They were not demanding the separation of morality from politics but it is not surprising that Leo thought that was ultimately what would result.  Take the Church out of politics and morality goes with it, because one of the pope’s logical premises is that the Mother Church is the only soure of morality and that left to themselves in their “natural” state, Men are sinful and immoral.  It is a good point.  But Freemasons believed that morality could come from other sources and be taught without reference to supernatural dogmas and authorities.  Some even questioned whether God was a necessary element to inspire men to be moral.  And that, of course, was what got Pope Leo so mad.

But most regular Freemasons do not go that far.  They do not toss out God entirely.  Instead they recognize God as a key idea, a key premise, if you will, upon which morality is founded.  Not because moral behavior is founded on obedience to divine laws and commandments or a personification of some supreme Ruler, King of Kings, etc.  Rather because God is the postulated source of moral goodness, personified not as a King but as a loving Father who teaches his sons to be good men and the methods of self improvement within a view of the world that is fundamentally naturalist rather than supernaturalist.

There is, I believe, nothing in Freemasonry’s rituals and teachings that requires a belief in supernaturalism and indeed most of its lessons are drawn from the metaphorical or allegorical interpretation of men’s lives as workmen, managers, or government officials.  Even King Solomon of myth is shown as a Grandmaster of stonemasons and Geometers, not in the usual autocratic role of “King.”  Even when acting as judge over criminals, Solomon acts as the instrument by which they are punished by their own self-condemnation and guilty consciences.

Radicalism has perhaps not gone out of Freemasonry entirely.  One can only presume there are individual Masons who harbor radical ideas when faced with tyrants in the government of their respective nations, but for the most part Masons are admonished within the craft to be good and peaceful citizens.  This charge is no doubt a response to the hysteria of the nineteenth century in which Freemasonry and the lodge was accused of being a “cover” for illegal and subversive activities — subversive of kings and subversive of clericalism.  The hysteria was to some degree justified in that time and in Europe especially.  It spread to America and was sparked into an explosion in the Morgan affair, but there is no evidence that I have ever seen that such subversive or manipulative or illegal activities were ever a part of American Masonry.

In the Italy and France of Pope Leo XIII, things were quite different.  Social movements were indeed working to topple all the old monarchies and the power of the Papacy and by the end of World War I that had been achieved, mostly through the self-immolation of those power elites.  Of course there will always be those among those aristocratic cirlces who are convinced that Freemasons engineered the whole thing.  What they really mean is that the Devil engineered the whole thing and that Freemasons were his instrument.  The habit of calling all your political adversaries “Devil-worshippers” is a great evil, in my way of thinking.  It dehumanizes them and cuts off any possibility of mutual understanding or negotiaton between different social groups.  To the mentality of aristocrats and popes social groups were ordained by God and everyone should learn to be happy where they are, not strive for such ungodly notions as “freedom” or “equality” or “brotherhood.”

But so it goes.

Owl

On Pancake Breakfasts and Fraternity

I am a relatively new Freemason, only in my second year of service to the Craft.  I am still learning and always will be, but I have learned enough about the Craft to realize that its true purpose is to provide a safe community of men where one can do inner work, to improve oneself morally in the pursuit of virtue and in the profound understanding of our place in Nature.

Regular Masons all profess a belief in a Supreme Being who is referred to as God.  They use Biblical stories and Bible verses in their rituals and they have a Holy Book, most often the Christian Bible, on their altar.  In other parts of the world where the predominant religion is something else, they may have another Volume of Sacred Law.

Nevertheless, Freemasonry is not a religion and is not, in my opinion, a “religious” organization.  The notion that Freemasonry is “religious” to the extent that it supports religion has been promoted by a few members of the fraternity and has caused some changes in lodge custom, but I feel this stance is more defensive than descriptive.  Freemasons have been attacked so often by conservative Christians and accused of everything from drunkenness to Satanism that the members of the fraternity have made an effort to appear more conventionally “religious” than the institution is meant to be.

That slippage of attitude is unfortunate and is detrimental to the Craft, for if a brother feels the need to rationalize his participation in lodge life by trying to convince himself that Freemasonry is basically Christian or God-fearing, or whatever, he has missed a central point of the Craft.  That is, he is forgetting the origins of Freemasonry in a time (the 17th century) when religious persecution and the union of Church and State were so dominant as to be unquestioned.  This error is especially easy for Americans who have never experienced a society in which theocratic tyrants ruled over private matters of conscience.  At the same time that Americans tend to undervalue their constituted separation of Church and State, they continue a legal system founded on the Biblical Ten Commandments — a source of considerable cognitive dissonance in the collective mentality of our culture.

Religious “tolerance” (”acceptance” might be a better word) is only accepted now because it was nurtured in the Freemason’s lodge three centuries ago.  Whatever its origin, one of the central tenets of the Craft is that men can meet on the level and on the square, which means that they can talk together as Men, regardless of their social class and regardless of their religious affiliations, if any.  The Craft rises out of the religious movement called Deism, a religion (if you can call it that) which has been virtually forgotten today because it  never established a priesthood or authoritarian institution to promote it.  By its nature it could not do so.  But it is the ideas of Deism that permeated Freemasonry at its foundations and still do, for those who can understand its symbolism.  For a believer in the Great Architect of the Universe nothing could be more absurd or hypocritical than to suppose that the Volume of Sacred Law on the altar of a lodge must be a Christian Bible or to refer to this particular religion’s holy book as “the Great Light of Masonry.”  Such language has, I am sorry to say, been introduced into the Craft by its too-zealous Christian brothers, who despite their zeal lack the faith in their religion to feel the need to make Freemasonry conform to social pressures.  Accusations of “Satanism” or other sorts of superstitious nonsense cast at the fraternity so frightened these Christian brothers that they thought they needed to introduce rules that made a Bible part of the regular furniture of every lodge — just to avoid accusations of not being good Christians.

Sigh.  Brothers of that sort (today or yesterday) have sadly missed the point of Freemasonry.  To believe that the Bible is at the core of Masonry reflects such a superficial knowledge of both the history and symbolism of the Craft that it staggers the mind and pains the heart of a Mason who cares for his lodge brothers.  Let me turn your attention again to the tenets of Deism, a thread of thought about religion and Divinity, which was never  any sort of organized religion or dogmatic creed.

Wikipedia has a very nice definition of Deism that will make its relationship to Masonry obvious to any brother of the Craft:

Deism is a religious and philosophical belief that a supreme natural God exists and created the physical universe, and that religious truths can be arrived at by the application of reason and observation of the natural world. Deists generally reject the notion of supernatural revelation as a basis of truth or religious dogma. These views contrast with the dependence on divine revelation found in many Christian, Islamic and Judaic teachings.

Deists typically reject most supernatural events (prophecy, miracles) and tend to assert that God (or “The Supreme Architect”) has a plan for the universe which he does not alter either by intervening in the affairs of human life or suspending the natural laws of the universe. What organized religions see as divine revelation and holy books, most deists see as interpretations made by other humans, rather than as authoritative sources.

There is a reason Mason’s call God the Great Architect of the Universe and this is it.  While I do not doubt that some Christians and members of other religions can reconcile their religious beliefs with Deism, I have a feeling that very few Masons today fully grasp the ramifications.  if you do not accept miracles and revelation or Divine intervention, then you have to discard or ignore an awful lot of Christian doctrine (and I suspect the same would be true for most religions.)  A brother recently mentioned to me that he had heard a presentation by another brother which attempted to compare and contrast Buddhism and Masonry.  At first I thought, “What an odd idea.”  But then it occurred to me that at its roots Buddhism does reject the idea of supernaturalism and places emphasis on moral action, right living,  honesty, and brotherly love (compassion).  As Buddhism developed into a complex priesthood and temple culture it fell afoul of the same tendency toward supernaturalism that Christianity did during its history.

Today I suspect many Buddhists, like many Christians, have forgotten or never learned the simple lessons of their great teachers and have gotten lost in the glamour and mystery of lavish rituals, colorful robes, pagentry, incense, and faith in miracles.

Freemasonry is about as far from this sort of religion as can be.  It arose from a cultural moment when intellectuals were turning away from Catholicism and “High Church” pageantry.  The Puritans and other Protestant reformers wanted simple church architecture and austere lack of ritual.  They focused on personal spiritual development but the main method was prayer and Bible reading.  Masonic lodges took the impetus against pageantry and priesthoods in another direction.  They created an alternative set of symbolic rituals that embody the philosophy of Reason, the Enlightenment.  Who decided to couch it all in allegories and double-meanings and layers of symbolism is a fact lost in the gaps of history.  But one need only look at the rituals today and read a little about how those symbols and rituals are interpreted to see that Freemasonry is profoundly Naturalistic and Humanistic.  Its treatment of supernatural incedents (like being raised from the dead) in a deliberately symbolic and unrealistic way so that (one might hope) the initiate will understand that the lesson is not about literally being raised from the dead.  It is about being raised out of the death and decay of ignorance into which we humans have fallen.  It is about being raised out of our lower nature, the animal impulses that all too often lead to violence and murder.  It is about resurrecting the Mind in Wisdom through the application of Strength of character, self-control, and the keen observation of Beauty in Nature — human nature and non-human nature.

Any brother who takes away from his initiation the smug satisfaction that Freemasonry is really teaching about Christ’s resurrection and his act of atonement for our sins is not paying attention.  But the fact that Masonic lodges during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries became increasingly dominated by men of orthodox and commonplace Christian faith, seems to have led to an ironic loss of the origins and purposes of the Craft.  This is perhaps the real “lost Master’s Word” which is to say, the loss of Logos, Reason and its substitution with a guarded sectarianism and lip-service paid to religious “tolerance.”

In the earliest lodges, although no doubt every man was a Christian, the Volume of Sacred Law 0n the altar of Freemasonry was not the Bible.  It was the Book of Constitutions, those rules that governed the good behavior and honesty of men engaged in the craft as operative stonemasons.  To a large degree the Book is symbolic.  It, along with the square and compasses is a source of “light” metaphorically because it stands for knowledge, learning, and language.  For it is within language — one of the unique arts of human beings — that we do govern ourselves.  It is not, then any specific volume of sacred law; it is the archetypal volume of sacred law we each write upon our minds and hearts.  The very idea that the phrase Volume of Sacred Law could have been ever intended to mean the Christian Bible is preposterous.  In the terms of both Judaic and Christian Biblical studies “Law” refers only to a few books of the Tanakh, the Jewish scriptures.  It would be a very misleading way to refer to the whole Bible to call it “Sacred Law.”  So, this central bastion of regular Freemasonry is, it seems to me, a corruption from its origins and meaning.

The central metaphor of Masonry is not Salvation or Covenants with God, or even Writing.  It is Architecture, the supreme expression of Human Reason and Art.  What could cast clearer emphasis on the Human than architecture?  The hero of Masonic ritual is not a Divine Savior, a prophet, or a supernatural being of any kind, but an architect, a master builder.  The Grandmaster Hiram Abiff is an allegorical character in a mystery drama of Rationalism.  The drama teaches every master mason that he must never resort to violence to obtain knowledge or self-advancement in his career, that he must be patient, trust his teachers, and earn a right to the next degree of wisdom to which he aspires.  He is taught that desiring knowledge purely for personal gain or ambition is wrong and leads only to self-destruction and the destruction of the very fabric of our teaching institutions.  Overthrow the teacher and you end up with nothing.

But that is only one level of meaning in the allegory.  These figures are also symbolic for the faculties of the human mind and spirit.  The Grandmaster is our governing will, our ability to control ourselves, to put off immediate gratification of animal urges, lusts, or greed in order to accomplish far greater ends.  Again, architecture symbolizes and exemplifies this wisdom.  We could never have buildings of any sort unless we were able to control ourselves to work together in a coordinated way on projects.  Projects of any kind.

The Deist sees the way to wisdom and understanding through the contemplation of Nature.  Not just in a scientific empirical way, but  through the mind of  a poet too.  The point is that supernaturalism is poetry, and that to advance as human beings beyond the horrors of religious wars and shallow bigotry, we must recognize the difference between empirical facts and poetic images.  Viva la differance! One is not superior to the other, and both are necessary parts of what make us human.

Thus Masonry is implicitly full of poetry.  The facts of Nature and human nature are presented in a series of poems, some of which are enacted as drama an some of which are simply recited in beautiful prose.  But they are full of images and imagination.  This is to tell us that Truth relies upon the way we interpret the world.  But it is also to tell whoever has ears to hear that religions are woven of the same fanciful stuff as all other poetry.  What truth they contain is poetic not historical or empirical truth.

So, you will be asking by this time, what does this have to do with pancake breakfasts and fraternity?  Well, I’ll tell you.  Freemasonry in the past generation has developed a strange fascination with pancake breakfasts.  It is, beyond everything else, the one aspect of Masonry that seems most stuck in the mud.  It reminds me of Church socials. Of course, the pancake breakfasts are ostensibly fund-raisers for charities.  Nothing wrong with that.  But there is also nothing Masonic about it.  If brother Masons come to think that organizing and holding pancake breakfasts is the main thing to do in Freemasonry, then the have really joined the wrong club.  But this is, I fear, exactly what has happened over the years.  Pancake breakfasts are today what feasting in the tavern was in the 18th century.  One would like to imagine that our Masonic forefathers understood the Craft better than we do.  One would like to believe that the true meaning of Masonry has been lost along the way as the fraternity became so popular in the 19th century.  But I suspect that even earlier, there were brothers who joined just because all their friends invited them to join and they discovered that it was a fun group of fellows to get together with and have a few drinks.  Or pancakes. The fun and eating was rationalized on the grounds that it was fund-raising for charity.  This seemed to tie it in to one of the virtues mentioned frequently in lodge ceremonials and lectures.  The problem is that the meaning of the word “charity” has changed significantly since the rituals and lectures were written.

Freemasonry is about the search for knowledge, particularly self-knoweldge.  It is about cultivating in ourselves the self-control, the will to do good, to be virtuous men rather than vicious and violent.  Among other virtues, it teaches the importance of charity.  But that virtue is an inner quality, an attitude of awareness and right action.  Fundraising for organizations that help the poor and needy is one expression of the virtue of charity, but it can hardly be considered to be the principal one.  Charity starts at home, goes the old adage, and so does brotherly love.  If a Mason does not volunteer his time and talents to helping support his lodge, then no amount of fund-raising for the poor is going to disguise his moral failing.  If he bad-mouths brothers behind their backs, or if he simply is resistant to the rational discussion of what will be good for the lodge and the Craft, he has failed as well.  If he joins Masonry and never lifts a finger to learn about the Craft or to apply its methods to self-transformation and thinks that it is just a good excuse for drinking with the boys, well, it is no wonder that all those annoying business meetings of the lodge should seem so utterly pointless.  No amount of pancakes will make up for a lack of self-examination and humility in the face of the Great Work of learning, of plumbing the depths of the soul and Nature and the mysteries of God’s Divine Plan, which is to say the way Nature works.

That questing spirit does not mean one has to give up one’s religious affiliations, but the Pope is actually quite fair in pointing out that Freemasonry allows and encourages too much freedom for a good Catholic to honestly belong to both organizations.  This freedom, however, is freedom to interpret and understand the Divine Plan in one’s own way.  There are no priests in Freemasonry.  Every brother has the opportunity to lead and to speak on all matters of spirit at any time.  In the York and Scottish Rite when brothers assume a ceremonial title of “High Priest” this is not actual priesthood but anti-priesthood.  Is is a dramatic act that says, priesthoods are false and unnecessary and brotherly love and friendship is better than authoritarianism.

There is an element of serious mocking in these high-falutin titles of the “Higher” Masonic degrees.  Princes, Knights, priests, prophets, kings, and even angels come in for dramatic representation, the underlying message of which is that all these “potentates” are creations of the human imagination.  They are all just play-acting and underneath it all is something far more real and more profound, for underneath the priestly or kingly robes is a brother, a fellow human being.  And that simple man is a miraculous wonder greater than any storybook or fairytale miracle.  The Masonic dramas have a serious tone, but are not far from the kind of foolery that medieval townsmen engaged in when they made a beggar or a common workman “King for the Day.”  It turned the social order on its head and exposed its artificial nature, even though the townsmen and peasants could not figure out a way to escape from that social order.  Eventually, of course, they did.

So much for the sacred symbolic pancake.  And what of fraternity? Well there are two aspects of fraternity.  First is the genuine Latin meaning of the word, which simply means brotherhood or indeed “brotherly love.”  Fraternitas is the virtue and quality of being a good brother and it is used to describe not just one’s relationship to one’s flesh and blood brothers but to all fellow men joined in enterprises together.  It says, we need to love each other, look out for each other, and care about each other seriously, not as an “old boy’s network” but a human beings forming functional societies.  Without fraternitas there can be no liberty or equality, indeed no healthy social contract at all.  Without Fraternité, there is only cutthroat competition that ends by elevating a few at the expense of the many.

But the second aspect of the word “fraternity” comes from the Greek system in American colleges.  Not the Greek language, the system of fraternity houses with Greek letters for names.   The system is part of an elite mentality that is exactly the “old boy’s network”.  So, being a “frat boy” is something almost the opposite of the true virtue of Fraternitas.  It picks out a few people and forms a closed society.  It is selective brotherhood as opposed to universal brotherhood.

College fraternities were actually modeled after Freemasonry and so it is sad to see Freemasonry being reduced to that shadow of itself.  While they are good places to make lifelong friends, network, and secure a place in the upper echelons of the social order, college fraternities are nothing like Freemasonry.  At least so I believe from the outside, for I was never a member of a Greek fraternity.

To all apperances, however, the system of Greek fraternities, like so many social clubs, copied the model of Freemasonry without understanding its serious purposes.  It may be understandable that college boys should use fraternities more for socializing than self-enlightenment because of course they exist as a microcosm within the larger organization of higher education.  If you are at a university and studying to improve your mind, then you are in large measure engaged in the work of the Masonic lodge already.  Do Greek fraternities promote self-knoweldge and the cultivation of self-control and virtue?  Perhaps they do, but their reputation would not suggest so.

What then is to be done with Freemasonry?  For the seeker it remains an ancient and beautiful institution, a bastion for independent thinking free from religious superstition and strife.  In a day when scientific organizations saturate our universities and the culture at large, we might well wonder if the lodge is not outmoded.  Perhaps its work is done.  Perhaps we have the secular rational society and the Enlightenment of humankind has been achieved.

Alas, my brother, it is all too clear that it has not been achieved.  Those old fraternal organizations of symbolic Masons and Druids that started in the 18th century have evolved and they have changed society.  But we still have a long way to go before the virtues of brotherly  love, mutual relief (cooperation), truth, and respect for all living beings is accomplished broadly throughout our culture.  The lessons of the American Revolution — Equality, Brotherhood, Liberty — have not been fully realized.  Indeed, it is sometimes hard to see even that much progress has been made when one listens to Americans spouting off hate and rancor and religious bigotry, as ignorant as anyone in any age.

The work of Druids is less well defined than that of Masons, and Druids are only just recovering from a long sleep.  But the work of Freemasons is there for every initiate to see.  All you have to do is listen to the lectures and the charges and do what you are told to do.  And that is to work every day to become more virtuous and more enlightened that you may become an actual part of the Divine Plan and not just a piece of discarded rubble cast aside and recycled as a byproduct of the construction process.  Freemasonry asks us to place our trust in God.  I don’t actually know how old that part of the ritual is.  It may be just as recent as the Christian interventions in Ameican money and the pledge of allegience who felt that we would all go to the dogs if we didn’t have “In God We Trust” on our money and “One Nation Under God” in our pledge or allegience.  It astonishes me how little faith some Christians have that they think God needs their help to further his Plan.

The Deist founders of Freemasonry really meant it when they said they put their trust in God.  That is, they put their trust in an unknown Divine Plan, not in books written by men claiming to speak for God.  Not in priests, bishops, popes, or caliphs claiming to act as intermediaries between God and men.  No, the Mason actually puts his trust in God.  And that doesn’t mean the Christian or Jewish God or any particular religious idea of God.  All such literary or visual representations of God are what they used to call “idols” in the old days — that is mistaking the representation for the real thing.  Gods by definition are beyond representation.  They cannot be limited by theologians or prophets or books or artists.  These various forms of expression that seek to express one’s personal idea of God are not God.  That is why Exodus shows Jehovah being so coy about his name with Moses on Mt. Sinai.  “Who shall I say has sent me?” asks the prophet.  “Tell them I AM sent you,” says the Almighty.  He’s not about to be pinned down to the name of any tribal deity.  But then they managed to do it anyway, turning “the Lord” and “God” into proper names.

I. M. God
500 Madison Avenue
New York, New York

One of the least understood symbols of Masonry is a circle with a dot at its center and two parallel tangets along each side.  Somewhere along the line someone felt the need to stick a Bible on the top of the circle in order to make sense out of it.  But the book is a fairly obvious addition to a simple geometric diagram.  If you take a pancake and put a tiny point of butter in the center and then set down a knife on one side touching the circumference and a fork opposite and parallel to it, also touching the pancake’s circumference, you have a jolly ancient symbol.

They say that the two lines represent St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist.  Why?  Because they form perfect parallels to the life of Christ.  Oh really?  How so?  Er, well, because one came befor and one came after.  One had a vision of his coming and the other wrote the Book of Revelation about his Second Coming.  See?

But I thought Freemasonry wasn’t about Christianity.

Well, the two saints were great patrons of the art of the Mason.

Really?  You mean Geometry?

Er… Sure.

Well, those two saints official days come in the calendar at opposite points on the circle of the year.  They are roughly at the Summer Solstice and the Winter Solstice.  The parallel lines might be taken to symbolize the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and the fundamental Geometry of parallels set upon circles.  The significance and utility of circles and parallels has been largely lost on us, unless we happen to pay attention to our High School Geometry teacher.  But the parallel is not merely geometrical here, it is symbolic.  As soon as the two saints John are identified with the lines they become symbols of the light and dark halves of the year.  And suddenly, the Druids in the audience sit up and realize that there is something in the lodge that is very familiar.

It is also concievably intended to be a symbol of the larger unknown Divine Plan in which we place our trust.  We look at the universe and see Order and are content and humbled by it.  We look upon the terrestrial and celestial globes and can find the occupation of many lifetimes in their close study.  I have heard more than one brother apologize for the second degree in which education is emphasized.  It is as if they can’t quite understand why all that stuff is in their rituals.  Yet it is as plain as day.  If every  brother Mason would devote himself to the study of geography, astronomy, geometry, language, architecture, logic, and all the other liberal arts, he would then be fulfilling his obligation to the Craft.  But how many do so?

Why not just go to the university and study astonomy then?  Well, not everyone can do this.  But since the Enlightenment every man can use his spare time and his own wits to study these things as a generalist.  His goal is not to become a laboratory scientist, a practicing architect, or a college professor.  His goal is simply to expand his mind and learn, and by learning to grown in virtue as well as wisdom.  Masonry teaches what secular university courses do not: It teaches that every art and science can be taken symbolically, metaphorically, poetically and so our “working tools” in life become mental tools for the more noble and glorous purposes of self-enlightenment and right action.

Brother Owl

The Nanny State and the Superego

Driving around the other day, I heard some “conservative” complaining about the “Nanny State” as if that is what the Democrats stand for and want to institute.  Its a bit of political rhetoric for Socialism.  Of course, the Democratic Party is hardly Socialist, so the “conservative” rhetoric is nothing but the erection of a straw-man argument.  But I was taken by the phrase “nanny state” and said to myself, What is wrong with having a nanny?

In the use of the phrase there is an implicit criticism of nannies, of which I cannot approve.  Frankly, I wish I had had a nanny.  I wish I had a nanny now.  The only logical criticism one can make against nannies as a class is that they are not mothers — that is they substitute for the loving care of the parents.  Parents who hire nannies are sort of hiring someone to do their child-care for them because they are too busy with careers.  I have a few in-laws with nannies, and I envy them, but only people with careers that earn them lots of dough can afford to farm out the childcare.  Still, I do not mean to criticise and think that nannies are quite a good thing on the whole.

So, why is the “nanny state” supposed to strike fear into our hearts?  Do so-called conservatives in America resent the fact that they didn’t have a nanny?  Or did they feel their childhood was too constrained by having a nanny to tell them when they were doing something bad or dangerous?  Are nannies all tyrants?  No.  Hardly any of them, I should think.  They aren’t all Mary Poppins, of course, either, but what is the problem with having someone older and wiser to tell us when we are doing the wrong thing?

In fact, as human beings, we require this.

Growing up, we don’t know right from wrong.  We would grow up to be selfish and destructive apes if we did not have parents, or the teachers and nannies that act in loco parentis. Freud postulated that the internalized voice of our parents and nannies (he had one) saying “No!  Bad!” created in our subconscious minds the super-ego.  The superego is, as the name suggests, an ego above the ego.  The word “ego” is simply the Latin word for “I” the first person pronoun.  So, in Freudian psychology the ego is defined as that conscious part of our mind that speaks and identifies itself in speaking as “I.”  Ego-formation is the business of childhood and a very serious business it is for the stability of our ego is what makes us a stable and functional adult.  If our ego is haunted by negative voices and complexes, it can makes us neurotic. When the ego is split into many personalities (many “I’s”), that is psychosis.  Nobody’s ego is perfectly adjusted, and one of the reasons is that nobody’s parents (or nannies) are perfect.  The voice that tells us what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false accumulates in our unconscious super-ego as a sort of watching personality that follows us around for the rest of our days commenting and criticizing our behavior.  A nice super ego will praise us when we are good.  But child-rearing in our culture has for many generations focussed on “correction” — the voice that says “No!” and is often enforced by physical and emotional violence.  The parental voice may threaten to abandon the child, to go away, to reject it as “bad.”

When I was out driving I observed the behavior of the other drivers on the road.  Some of them were playing by the rules.  Some seemed not to even know there were rules.  Some were flagrantly disregarding the rules, and the worst were behaving in such an anti-social way that they were positively endangering their fellow citizens and themselves.  Now, “conservatives” and “libertarians” seem to believe that government agencies should not interfere when citizens are acting wrongly  or foolishly.  No, we shouldn’t require motorcyclists to wear helmets.  No, we shouldn’t make it a violation of law to not wear a seat belt.  In Britain, of course, where the “nanny state” metaphor originated, they have now traffic cameras that constantly monitor people’s driving speed — what we call photo-cops.  One can certainly see the point that making so many rules spoils the fun of life.

But it is we who make the rules.  Those people who fulfil their civic duty and get involved in the legislative process.  Those who just freeoad off the rest do not have any right to complain.  If they don’t like the laws, they should work to change them.  Simply refusing to obey the nanny is nothing more than childish.  Especially when one is endangering oneself.  I can only wonder at the motives of those who think that refusing to wear a seat belt is an expression of their liberty.  Do they really think that such a gesture has any substance?  Do they think that Liberty is only about doing whatever they want?  That is an extremely childish and selfish attitude.

So, in essence, those who complain about the “nanny state” are the adults in our society who (it seems) had so little support and help in growing up that they learned to play games by the rules.  They are disobedient, selfish, and there is something wrong with their superego.  Did they not have parents to admonish them on values and principles of good behavior?  Or were their parents too strict and abusive?  Were they hypocrites?  Who knows?  But from my vantage point it does seem to me that they lack that little voice in one’s head, that “still small voice” of conscience.  They have confused liberty with mere license – with the abuse of freedom at the expense of others.  They are anti-social, not merely anti-Socialist.

Of course, I do understand that “government surveillance” can go to far.  I’m not an extremist.  It is only extremists on either the left or the right who believe that government surveillance and legislating morality is a good idea.  But there is a middle ground that is complex and requires not childish foot-stamping but reasoned discourse among citizens.  Take the smoking bans that have become so fashionable.   As a smoker of pipes and cigars, I do not exactly approve of the bans.  But I am also a person who doesn’t even like to go to a bar because of the stench of cigarette smoke on my clothes and the burning eyes that any American bar used to produce.  I can certainly sympathize with the waiters adn bartenders who do not want to work in such unhealthy air.  The freedom to smoke if we want to clashes with our neighbors unalienable right to fresh air.  I tend to side with those who want fresh air, but it would still be nice to have a few smoking rooms around where one can light up one’s pipe without breaking the law.  In a Minnesota climate, where I live, the Winter is tough on the tobacco addict.

But clearly we as a people must get together and decide where we draw such lines on the basis of balance between individual choice and how our choices affect our neighbors.  Urban society has made people a bit to self-absorbed.  The smoking ban has a logic, but the same logic might be applied to people who talk on their cell phone in public (I have a right to quiet air too), or who refuse to bathe (the right not to breathe your stink.).

The last example may seem like mere reductio ad absurdum, but consider the pig farmer.  The vast pig factories that exist in today’s agri-industry, generate a monstrous stink and indeed, I do believe that the neighbors have an inalienable right not to be forced to smell their neighbors.  You can get petty about it, certainly, but it is a right of private property.  We do not want to be disturbed by our neighbors and ought to be guided by the Golden Rule.

If everyone was in fact guided by a superego that whispered the Golden Rule in our unconscious ear all day, then we would have no need of the nanny state.  Perhaps the ultimate fictional satire of the nanny state is Aldous Huxley’s great novel Brave New World.  In it parents are eliminated, citizens made in vitro and in test tubes, and conditioned as infants and children with a mechanical voice that repeats the rules and beliefs sanctioned by the state in their shell-like ears until they become adults who are perfectly adjusted to fill their social role.

Nobody wants that.  I don’t think even Lenin wanted that.  Okay, maybe Lenin.  But really, the Golden Rule mitigates against such ideas.  It is all well and good to tell other people what to do  and what to believe, but nobody likes being told themselves.  Well, maybe fundamentalists do.  But nobody else.

So, the issue, it seems to me is that we want our nanny to be a good nanny.  We want the Mary Poppins State, or even the Nanny McPhee State, but not the mechanized bureaucratic soullessness of Brave New World.

OWL

Modern Whigs

I recently was researching the Whig Party when I discovered that there is a new Modern Whig Party (MWP) has been founded and that it looks like a really fine party.   I have jokingly said I was a Whig for years and now I can be one.  Besides a moderate, rational, and wise platform that avoids the extremism of the radical ends of the GOP and the Democratic Party, the Whig’s have taken as their emblem and Owl.  Now, how could I resist the obvious?

I tend towards the Liberal in most things — which I attribute to college. But as I have aged, I have come to realize that there is more to a political party than ideology and its platform and that an old party, no matter how much it professes to be “the party of  the people” becomes intrenched and attracts corruption.  I am excited about the new Obama administration, but I also know that it will run into snags and that an alternative party, especially on the local level, would be healthy for our nation.

The fact that Iraq and Afghan war veterans founded the Modern Whig Party attracts me even though I am not a soldier and am by nature a pacifist.  Oddly, I embrace peace as the desired state of things, but am also fascinated by military science and history.  I have the greatest admiration for many military leaders and the common foot-soldier (or specialist as we say these days).  I myself almost pursued a career as a naval officer, but at age 18, it turned out that my emotional state was not very well suited for it.  Nor is it now that I am too old to join up!

It has always been true that it is the soldiers and sailors and airmen who actually fight (especially the soldiers who face their opponents on the ground) are the best advocates for a common sense and rational attitude towards warcraft.  War is a mess.  It is not a good way to solve problems.  And the soldier’s craft is to carry on the task when it comes in the least messy way possible, efficiently, and effectively.

So, I admire the soldiers who return to civilian life and engage in politics in a positive way.  Like George Washington, for example.  Or Dwight Eisenhower.  We don’t want military dictators in America, but the fact is that real military men of good character and common sense, who understand what this country is all about are the least likely to become dictators.  It is the non-soldiers who have led coddled lives and have romantic notions about accomplishing political or economic goals quickly by using warfare — they are the ones we don’t want in government, especially at the Federal level.

The Modern Whigs are basically for state’s power rather than loading all our money and power into a distant federal government disconnected from the citizens of any of the 50 states.  The old Whig Party of the Revolutionary era and the party in which Abraham Lincoln was a leader, was pro-development, pro-infrastructure, and advocated a diversified economy.  While the old Democrats stood for a agrarian elite and tended to support slavery as an institution, the Whigs did not take a dogmatic stance on that hot potato issue.  That is what brought about the demise of the old Whigs: the party split over the issue of extending slavery into the territories.  We can hardly fault them for that considering that the whole country split apart into Civil War on the same issue.

But when it comes to the right of citizens to see their taxes spent in their own home state, not in pork barrel projects in other states, I tend to agree.  One cannot make simplistic blanket statements.  Some projects that benefit particular states also benefit the whole country.  it is a fine balance.  The Democrats are often criticized for having a kind of blind faith in the power of the federal government to do good.  The Republicans are criticized for wanting to dismantle the federal government, or else turn it into a feeding trough for wealthy capitalists. Clearly, we need to address the health and wellfare of both workers and capitalists in our nation. President Obama seems to be someone who appreciates that fact and wishes to pursue a balanced approach.  But even the Democratic Party has to admit that Mr. Obama is unique.  He is not the typical Democrat and that is a good thing.

Indeed, the Modern Whig Party strikes me as a party the approach of which is similar to that of President Obama — so far as we can tell so far.  Military men understand why torturing prisoners is a bad idea.  They also understand that using military forces to fight terrorists is not practical.  It is like using a hammer when you need a scalpel.

Several of the brothers of my Masonic lodge are members or veterans of the armed services and I consider them the most admirable brothers I have had the pleasure of meeting.  Not that I approve of blind adulation of soldiers.  Every profession has some bad apples or people who are simply flawed.  We are all flawed more or less.  But there is much to be said for the self-discipline military training teaches and the spirit of self-sacrifice.

The Whigs promote freedom of religion and speech, and want the government to keep out ofthe business of siding with one particular religious viewpoint, or legislating private moral matters of conscience.  They view the abortion issue as a matter of public health.  How refreshing!  They view gun control from a pragmatic point of view, not taking one side or the other of the disfunctional polarized debate we have now.  And finally, the Whigs don’t believe that a person should be forced to join a party because of a single divisive issue, such as has been used by the GOP for many years.  Well, that problem goes back to slavery again, doesn’t it?

The old Whig Party had some anti-masonic tendencies, which the Modern Whigs do not address one way or the other.  The way I see it, the anti-masons were opportunists, but the old Freemasons of John Quincy Adams’ time were turning the fraternity into too much of an old boy’s network.  Masons today bend over backwards to discourage favoritism among brothers, or subversive activities.  So, anti-masons looking back on the French Revolution, for example, had a certain point.  But at the same time, I wonder if the American Revolution would have happened were it not for the philosophy of Freemasonry and its influence on the thoughts of George Washington, Tom Paine, and Ben Franklin (to name just three of many).

Take a look.  I’ve been whigging out for years, and now I know why.

OWL

Posts and Pages

New Year, calendrically speaking.  Full moon at present and I have been absorbed in wand making again and unable to tend to my writing.  Ihave two more wands to make and then I can focus on writing and only carve things when I feel like it.  I’m looking forward to that.

I just wrote a very long thingy on the idea of a druid college.  With the demise of Avalon College, I realize that a lot of the thoughts I wrote in forums there have gone to the aether.  So, my homage to the past four years of experiences and thoughts (mine and those of many others who joined me in the quest for a druid college).

“Pages” are listed across the top of the screen here and appear in the right margin column too, but are distinct from “posts” to the web log.  I was a bit chagrinned to find that the “About Alferian” page has only been visited four times, according to the Great Machine. Teach me some humility!

I shall here encourage you, dear reader, to go look at the Druid College page for the latest ruminations (can Owls be ruminants? Hmmm. Well, they do spit up those owl pellets…  Alright, let’s say the latest owl pellet then.)

More anon,

Owl

On Writing

OK, this is another one of those cases when I am procrastinating from the writing project I ought to be working on, so I will make this Owl about writing and its phases.  Over Thanksgiving, I wrote a great deal on my novel, and sorted out a number of setting details working on the floor plans of the school where it takes place. I’ve written 60K words but am feeling the need to pause now and take stock.  Traveling, sleeping badly in strange beds, bad air on the airplanes, and a few mistakes in eating left me weak and sick for a few days.  I still feel off balance but also still feel I am getting some good work done on the book.  Only a few hours today, but that’s better than nothing.    While procrastinating and writing this blog entry, I was interrupted by a friend on the phone.  I don’t mind, but such interruptions seem typical of my day.  That’s life.  In the pre-telephone days friends would have just come to call and one would have either arranged to have tea or lunch by letter or else one would have to drop what one is doing to entertain them.

Every incident of life, every conversation with friends or strangers shapes one’s story — both one’s autobiography and one’s fictional storytelling.  In a very black mood after going to a play Tuesday night, I fought off a deep depression by lying still and breathing and my heroine, Emily Glass, came to me in my mind and pleaded with me not to give up on life for her sake.  Not only my own daughter but this daughter of my mind see me as absolutely necessary for their story to unfold.  A flesh-and-blood daughter would carry on living, however changed by my absence, but a character whose story is unfolding in my own act of writing it, sees me in another light.  Dorothy Sayers made this very nice analogy between God and the author of a book.  She said that we experience our lives moving through time as a character in a book would do, but that God sees us as the author would — able to skip over parts of the timeline, to move back and forth in flashbacks or foreshadowings that the character in their world cannot see.  But the magical consciousness is precisely the ability to enter the mind of the Creator, at least partially, and see our lives from that Eternal standpoint.  To the Author the whole book lies open before the eyes in the present moment.  To the character living the story, its pattern and resolutions are unclear.  We can, living life, only have inklings of how our troubles and the setbacks we encounter may lead to the resolution of a story arc.  Only when our biography has been written will the themes become clear and when we pass beyond the veil of flesh, we too will see our whole life story laid out as the Author intended it.

So, for Emily, I rise up again another day, to write her life story.  No doubt the psychologists would say she is a part of me, perhaps my own Anima, my soul-image.  But to me she is Emily and indeed I identify with her father in the story.

So, on to laying out the threads of story.

Owl

On Chaos

They say that chaos is good for creation.  Worked for God anyway.  The motto of the Scottish Rite is Ordo ab Chao.  However, entering the third week of our remodeling project, I have serious doubts.  In fact, I think I need to get out of the house.  It has been a learning experience.  Bro. Bob gave me a lesson in painting walls today, which I quite appreciated.  I have been doing them myself (with SP’s help) and yet have not been getting even coverage.  The sage greens in my study are very appealing though, and I very much like my sky blue closet door.  The new oak door to the study has yet to be installed.  Thank God I am not trying to do this all myself.  Leave it to the professionals.

I am distinctly tired of having all my book shelves cluttering up the living room and all my books scattered about in boxes where I cannot find half of them.  I want my desk back.  But the rebuilding of the back stairs in the final part of the project, so we cannot move everything back down until that is finished.  Yes, when I used to play Dungeons and Dragons I played a paladin, Lawful and Good.  I just don’t like chaos.  Of course, the D&D character choice can be backed up by Meyers Briggs which makes me out to be an INTJ (that’s Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging type)  Actually, I am about equally balance between Thinking and Feeling, which I suppose might account for why I am incapable of taking any action at all most of the time and just want to lie down.

I’ve started writing my memoirs — actually a biography of myself — called Elf-Owl: A Half-Life.  I figure I am well over half my way through my lifespan and better go back and review before I forget everything I’ve learned.  I hear there is a test.  Actually, this whimsical project was inspired by my re-reading Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of J. R. R. Tolkien (Ronald) which cast me back to when I was 19 and reading it for the first time.  I was greatly influenced by Ronald’s life and wanted to follow his footsteps by becoming an English professor and writing my own mythological fiction.  Of course one problem with being “another Tolkien” is that you are never going to be taken as original the way he was.  Moreover, no one will take you seriously because you are just one of ten million other Tolkien fans who wish they could be just like him.  Your writing becomes nothing but “fan fiction.”  Especially if you never get around to finishing any of it and publishing it.  Which is why I decided to just skip the literary fame and fortune and write my own biography.  Simplifies things.

I also have developed a new medical theory of a new disorder.  It is a psycho-somatic disorder which I have named Volitional Disorder (V.D.).  If you have V.D. that means you cannot make yourself do what you want to do.  You can waste lots of time writing lists and making project management schedules, but then you ignore them.  And if you get up from your desk to go to the bathroom, you end up taking out the trash and doing the dishes instead and then wondering half an hour later why you have to go to the bathroom again.  V.D. used to be called “absentmindedness” but that isn’t very scientific, so I’ve given it a better name.  As I am a doctor of English and not pharmaceuticals, my therapy for V.D. is poetry therapy.  Every time you want to do something and get distracted (assuming you happen to notice that this has happened), immediately sit down and read some poetry.

If you believe you have V.D. try this therapy and let me know how it works — if you remember.

OWL  /|\