The Two Rhetorics of Freemasonry

The Two Rhetorics of Freemasonry, or, On the Function & Necessity of Masonic Secrecy
Joshua Gunn, 32
These two pillars are the most duplicated architectural structures in history. Replicas exist all over the world. [They] are exact replicas of the two pillars that stood at the head of Solomons Temple. Langdon pointed to the pillar on the left. Thats called Boazor the Masons Pillar. The other is called Jachinor the Apprentice Pillar. He paused. In fact, virtually every Masonic temple in the world has two pillars like these.
Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code
t the conclusion of Dan Browns wildly successful novel, The Da Vinci Code (2003), Professor Robert Langdon and his younger companion Sophie Neveu arrive at the famous Rosslyn Chapel in Edinbrugh, Scotland on their quest for the Holy Grail. Browns use of Masonic symbolism in the novel is frequently inaccurate, such as in Langdon and Sophies discussion of Boaz and Jachin while standing in the sanctuary. Although it remains the oldest and most well known fraternal orga-
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nization in the world, contemplative or speculative Freemasonry most likely originated in the early eighteenth century in England. The allegorical and symbolic teachings of the fraternity orbit the stories surrounding the building of King Solomons temple and are drawn from what some have thought to be the practice of masonic guilds in the Middle Ages. However, the suggestion that the markings and architecture of Rosslyn Chapel are directly related to contemporary Freemasonry is misleading. Speculative Freemasonry has retroactively claimed the symbolism of Rosslyn, but, just like the All-Seeing Eye on the back of the U.S. dollar bill, Rosslyns architectural symbolism existed long before the Order in its present form was established. Owing to the focus of its strange symbolism and secrecy, Freemasonry has often been the topic of many misleading associations and cultural fantasies that have made the fraternity and its teachings an interesting topic for conspiracy theorists, mystery novel writers, and Hollywood filmmakers. Historically, most of the fantasies about Masonry have been negative and hostile, frequently involving the fraternitys allegiance to Satan or various projects to establish a New World Order. In distinction from these fantasies, the few references to Freemasonry in The Da Vinci Code are largely positive. The book has been widely read (at the time of this writing, there are over 65 million copies in print) and it has helped to generate a less hostile, worldwide interest in the fraternity, spawning a flood of knock-off novels, films, and television documentaries related to the Masons. In connection with the 2006 release of the film version of The Da Vinci Code which curiously only has one, very brief mention of Masonrythe ABC show Good Morning America broadcast live from the House of the Temple in Washington, D.C. Perhaps because Masonry piques the interest of so many, Brown has announced that his sequel to The Da Vinci Code, titled The Solomon Key, concerns early U.S. Freemasons, many of whom were among the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, including Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. The recent media attention of the past few years has been a mixed blessing for our fraternity. On the one hand, although the renewed exposure in the mass media is mostly positive, this publicity has nevertheless resurfaced many of the myths and conspiratorial fantasies that have plagued the fraternity since its inception. On the other hand, however, media exposure may increase our membership, which has declined more than fifty percent in the latter half of the twentieth century. Seizing this opportunity, a number of Masonic leaders have been appearing on television and publishing essays and books to ensure that the popular media spin remains positive. In distinction from the rhetorical
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The Two Rhetorics of Freemasonry
response of Masons to anti-Masonic movements for hundreds of years, however, these newer efforts to popularize Freemasonry downplay the occult traditions central to the philosophical teachings of our past (it is important to stress that my use of the term occult, which means hidden and connotes secrecy, refers to the vast inventory of symbols borrowed by Freemasonry from earlier mystical and symbolic traditions, such as Alchemy, Kabbalah, and Hermeticism). In light of the function of secrecy outlined in the following pages, downplaying the secrecy of Masonic practice and ritual may be more detrimental to our fraternity than many realize. The recent rhetorical response of some Masonic leaders to the renewed public scrutiny catalyzed by The Da Vinci Code can be read as a symptom of a significant transformation in civic engagement. In response to the technological and cultural changes documented as causes for the decline of participation in social and civic groups (e.g., the arrival and dominance of television, interactive video gaming, and the Internet as stationary, in-home mediums of stranger socialibility), the Masons have adopted a promotional strategy of transparency that entails divesting the Order of its secrets, which are, paradoxically, both the cause of renewed public interest and the social capital that provide Masons a sense of community or fellowship. Ironically, the decline of Masonry is a consequence of the realization of the cherished, republican ideals that our fraternity once protected in the ritualistic cloak of secrecy. The category of Masonic rhetoric or discourse is designed to persuade or influence, and includes speeches, written texts, symbols, and imagery. As a rhetorician or scholar of what many would describe as persuasion, I have been trained to pay attention to the way in which people use language to do things not simply to communicate, but also to influence, to impart knowledge, to inspire, and even to manipulate others. From a rhetorical perspective, a comparative analysis of Masonrys internal and external rhetorical practices reveals a widening disjunction between the previously secret rituals of the Craft and its contemporary promotional rhetoric. In other words, the rhetoric internal to Masonry (what we say and do behind the lodge doors) and external to Masonry (how some Masons promote the Order outside of the lodge to journalists, the entertainment industry, and so on) have become increasingly contradictory. Not only does such a disjunction bespeak the way in which publics are defined and maintained in respect to that which people presumably do not know, but it also suggests that a decline in civic engagement is intimately related to the contemporary lust for publicity.
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This essay unfolds in three parts. With reference to Masonic history, in the first part Jrgen Habermas and Jodi Dean are cited to situate publics in relation to secrecy and an emergent ideology of publicity. Masonic rhetorical practices, specifically the occult (hidden) function of ritual and symbolism, work to create a sense of community by fostering promises about what I term the inexhaustible secret. Finally, the third part of the essay describes how the recent self-promotional rhetoric of transparency adopted by the Freemasons works to erode this inexhaustible secret upon which the fraternity is based. The tensionif not contradictionbetween these two Masonic rhetorics not only suggests the necessity of secrecy for a sense of public belonging in general, but also diagnoses the decline of the fraternity in particular. The Private Public of Freemasonry
Freemasonry is a beautiful and profound system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols. The design of the Masonic Institution is to make its members wiser, better, and consequently happier. This is accomplished by means of a series of moral instructions taught according to ancient usage, by types, symbols, allegorical figures, and lectures. The forms and ceremonies of this institution have come down through a succession of ages and are all designed to impress upon the mind significant and solemn truths. Lecture in Preparation Room to an Entering Apprentice candidate
Recently Freemasonry has received scholarly attention for its status as a civic group not unlike the PTA or a bowling league, and our declining membership has been referenced as evidence of a decline in civic engagement in the United States. Of course, in the popular imagination the aura of secrecy and mystery surrounding the fraternity is relegated to the realm of infotainment, such as The Da Vinci Code or History Channel exposs, while the civic function tends to be studied in scholarly literature. Recently, Masonic spokespersons have downplayed the mystery of the fraternity by also emphasizing its civic mission and lamenting its decline as part of a larger trend toward social fragmentation and disengagement. For example, during their interview in connection with The Da Vinci Code on Good Morning America, television personality Charles Gibson and Masonic scholar S. Brent Morris linked Masonry to a general decline in civic clubs:
Gibson: one of the things that struck me, youve all talked about the fact you do good works, very supportive of one another, but membership is diminishing in the Freemasons.
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Morris: Indeed it is. Membership has diminished in the Freemasons since 1960. But its also diminished in virtually every voluntary organization in the United States. Its a mystery for sociologists. Gibson: Why? Private societies, secret societies, whichever word you want to use, raise suspicions. Are some of those suspicions the reason you think that membership declines?
Morris responds that you cant point to just the Masons traditions, implying that the mystery and secrecy of the fraternity is not related to Masonrys civic mission. Presumably, the secret rhetorical practices internal to Freemasonry are not related to the decline in voluntary or civic organizations in the United States. As the widely read scholarship of Robert D. Putnam has shown, Morris is correct in diagnosing a general decline in the participation in civic groups. At least some of the reasons behind this decline, however, are not a mystery to sociologists: Putnam locates the decline in the complexities of major social changes including urbanization, the erosion of the nuclear family, divorce rates, the move of women into the workplace, and most especially the arrival of mass media entertainment technologies:
[N]ews and entertainment have become increasingly individualized. No longer must we coordinate our tastes and timing with others in order to enjoy the rarest culture or most esoteric information with my hi-fi Walkman CD [player] I can listen to precisely what I want to when I want and where I want. Second, electronic technology allows us to consume this hand-tailored entertainment in private, even utterly alone.
Television killed the secret handshake, or rather, television is a synecdoche for a larger trend toward individual, social isolation catalyzed by media technology. According to Putnams logic, instead of going to a lodge, would-be Masons are sitting in front of screens or drowning out the world with their iPods. Because public talk and deliberation are regarded as important to any healthy democracy, Putman implies that mass media technologies have played a significant role in an increasingly unhealthy republic. Although it is clear that the mass media is implicated as a major causal factor, what both Morris and Putnam fail to discuss is the motivational impetus for social isolation and civic disengagement: why are people no longer motivated to join civic groups? A closer look at one of the assumptions of deliberative democratic theory suggests an answer, and it has more to do with mystery and secrecy than Morris or Putnam might suspect. The unspoken warrant that links public talk and deliberationthat is, civic engagementwith a healthy
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democracy is that by talking about matters important to a community, one discovers information that enables him or her to form opinions about important issues and decisions that affect his or her community. In other words, one engages a given publicone joins a civic club or participates in a sewing circlebecause he lacks knowledge, because there is something that he worries he may not know, because he fears that he may be out of the loop. What if civic engagement requires a sense of mystery? What if civic mindedness entails some degree of suspicion or self-doubt? What if the new modes of publicity catalyzed by mass media technologies are contributing to a perceived decline in civic deliberation because they evaporate mystery? Because Freemasonry is a civic group with a centuries-long history of secrecy, its study suggests an answer to these and related questions. The problem that publicity poses to a community is well known among Masons: if knowing a Masonic secret generates communal bonds, then it is publicitynot so much the isolating effects of screens and headphonesthat threatens community. For example, although the presumed secrets of Freemasonry concern certain parts of the ceremonies and a number of secret passwords and handshakes, these secrets are not difficult to find with a simple Google search of the Internet. Today, there is one primary reason why Masons do not talk about these not-so-secret secrets: as S. Brent Morris explains, the value of secrets to Masons is as symbols of fidelity and advancement within the fraternity. Masons make a solemn promise not to reveal the secrets to anyone. It doesnt matter to him that you can find the secrets in print; what matters is that he keeps his promise. In other words, Masons keep secrets in respect to an ethic of reputation, an ethic that is established with the formal contracting of promise keeping. The promise is the rhetoric of the communal bond, hence, the actual content of the secret is something of a ruse. Insofar as reputation is premised on suspicion, or rather, insofar as one dispels the suspicion of ones character by keeping secrets, the interplay of secrecy and publicity are implicated in a promise about something presumably unknown. Whenever one speaks of publicity, a public is evoked. Historically speaking, this is because the demand for the revelation of a states secrets marks the beginning of a (re)public. Following the research of Reinhart Koselleck, Jrgen Habermas traces the emergence of the ideal of a democratic public sphere to the interplay of publicity and secrecy that actually began in private. Habermas describes eighteenth century coffee house meetings, reading groups, and Masonic lodges as nascent, or proto-, publics:
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The decisive element [of lodges] was not so much the political equality of the members but their exclusiveness in relation to the political realm of absolutism as such: social equality was possible at first only as an equality outside the state. The coming together of people into a public was therefore anticipated in secret, as a public sphere existing largely behind closed doors.
And it was behind the lodge doors, guarded with passwords and handshakes, that the rational faculty was protected from the counter-secret machinations and chanceries of the prince. For both the people and the lodge, Habermas argues, publicity had to rely on secrecy until methods of rational deliberation and judgment in private helped to topple the secrecy of the state in increasing demands for transparency. Masonic brothers, explains Jodi Dean, as they transmitted their rational measures for moral discipline and self cultivation, were vehicles for the reconstitution of political society in terms of the public sphere. In short, the idea of the public began in secret over secrets. Although the claim sounds counterintuitive, the public as an idea was a direct product of secret societies like Freemasonry. In the formative centuries of Freemasonry, secrecy harbored a complex system of moral uplift based on mystery, reputation, and mutual trust, putting into practice the Enlightenment inspired idea of participatory government and the rule of law. Margaret C. Jacob argues that within the confines of private sociability the abstractions found in some of the favorite texts of the Enlightenment, from Locke through Montesquieu, and not least Voltaire were lived as well as read. According to Koselleck, one of the abstractions that Masons concretized was John Lockes law of reputation and censure through the process of elections. Masons maintained Lockes belief that the private judgments about others have a universal obligatory character by electing their leaders and voting on who could join the fraternity. Masons claim that only men of sound mind, good health, moral conviction, and excellent reputation are eligible for membership, and these qualities are assessed by an investigation committee that discusses an individuals character with his colleagues, friends, and family. Once the investigation committee is satisfied that they have discerned the moral character and spiritual faith of a petitioner, they offer a recommendation to the lodge members to accept or reject the petition. Then, the members of a lodge vote by secret ballot to allow a man to receive the degrees and join their lodge. This is done by having each member place either a single white (yes) or black (no) marble or die into a covered wooden box. This is the origin of the term blackballed, to reject someone from membership. One of the origi-
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nal rationales for Masonic secrecy was to protect the (then) radical practice of electoral discrimination. Secrecy was also important to ensure that a lodge was a forum where one could speak freely about matters of philosophy, science, politics, and religion without fear of persecution from the church or the state. Indeed, because the fraternity was and remains a strong proponent of republicanism and democracy, it consequently retains a principled commitment to the separation of church and state. In the eighteenth centuryand to some degree todaythis stance drew fire from the Roman Catholic Church,
1738 the Papacy condemned [F]reemasonry, partly in response to the popularity of the lodge in Rome, and Catholic apologists who promulgated the Papal Bull explicated its logic in detail. At the top of their list of [M]asonic offenses was republicanism. The ingenuity of the English nation, they explained, has revived the purity of [F]reemasonry, and this society imitates an aspect of the government of Republics. Its leaders are chosen, or dismissed, at its will. Catholic opponents of the fraternity fixated on its custom of holding elections.
It is probable that from this two hundred seventy year-old antipathy in Europe comes the oft-told observation that Catholics hate Masons and vice-versa. Nevertheless, Koselleck and Habermas argue that secrecy was necessary to protect Masonic political beliefs until relatively recent times. In fact, some historians have even argued that Masons were directly responsible for the institution of the United States as a republic. The close, trusting bonds created between men through the sharing of secrets played an important role in building the camaraderie necessary for the survival of the [early American] armyand thus the American Republic, argues Steven C. Bullock. Some Masonic fraternities have been linked to American revolutionary activities. Lodges were places where the merits and virtues of constitutional societies were discussed and debated. Unlike the protections on free speech that we have today, some historians argue that the clandestine character of Masonry helped to protect and promote the political and religious ideas of revolutionaries in Europe and in the United States that had yet to find widespread support. As republicanism was eventuallyand violentlyinstituted in the United States, the stress on the clandestine nature of the fraternitys governance and teachings gradually weakened. Habermas would suggest that this is because the unforeseen consequence of Masonrys promotion of democracy and social equality is that the fraternity fell pray to its own ideology of publicity. The
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logics of suspicion and distrust that led to the formation of Masonry and our internal ethic of repute are the very same logics that have contributed to the decline in our membership. The publics right to know has inspired the publication of the presumed secrets of Masonry, and yet it is the sharing of a set of secrets that originally constituted Masonrys private public. It would seem that the decline of Freemasonry is paradoxically symptomatic of the realization of the republican ideals we have promoted for centuries. Given the concrete, historical role Masonry and other constitutional societies have played in advancing the notion of a public, the decline of Freemasonry illustrates the centrality of secrecy in the formation of publics. Jodi Dean argues that publics depend on a prior demand to reveal; the fantasy of unity implied by the concept of a public is premised on something that is not known, on suspicion, or on being an outsider. The secret marks the constitutive limit of the public, Dean suggests,
a limit that the public sphere cannot acknowledge. That this limit cannot be acknowledged, that it in fact stimulates not simply the continued imposition of the public but the explosion of networked media, points to the ideological function of publicity in the information age. How do we know when we have enough information, when the ultimate secret has been revealed? We dont.
The reputational function of Masonic secrecythat is, the notion that one is a good man because he keeps his wordis thus more significant than the actual content of Masonrys secrets. To create social capital the secret must be understood as a formal relationship among people about something that is forever deferred. A public is sustained around this continuous and never-ending deferral. Consequently, the public never tires of the promise of news or the revelation of secretsabout the private lives of celebrities, about the real reasons for the war in Iraq, or about the secret truth of The Da Vinci Codebecause it is only brought into being through the drama of revelation. It is to that drama, first practiced inside Masonry and now decidedly external to it, that I now turn. Veiled in Allegory and Illustrated by Symbols: Masonic Rhetoric Explained
Rhetorical forms are elements in that system of assent that defines a public consciousness. The rhetorical forms of secrecy and disclosure are especially definitive: they reflect the ways in which people assimilate themselves to those two sovereign antonymies, the public and private. Edwin Black
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A number of rhetorical scholars have taken to theorizing publics and the idea of the public in terms of texts and their circulation, which implicates the domain of rhetoric as concerning both an object (television shows, iconic images, books, and so on) and the process of its traveling (address). According to Michael Warner, although publics are created by virtue of being addressed, the object of public address must continue to circulate in a network for that public to persist. In other words, a public continues to exist as a public only insofar as its many members shares some object in common. What distinguishes a mere audience from a public is the duration of the group and the persistence of its common object. I have suggested that Masonry is such a public, and I have implied that Masonry is homologous to other publics in general. The question then arises: how do objects of public formation continue to circulate and therefore maintain the existence of a public? What keeps the objects in circulation around which publics form? Why are people motivated to continue as a public? Using the example of Masonic symbolism and ritual, I suggest that the motor of circulation is the curiosity inspired by the generalized promise of disclosure betokened by peculiar texts. Any text can addressand therefore createa public, but only peculiar texts can maintain one: occult texts, texts that promise more secrets, mystical texts that suggest an inexhaustible mystery. In other words, I want to suggest that mystery begets the desire to know that underwrites a public. If one agrees with Dean that the secret is the constitutive limit of a public, then a fundamental role of rhetoric in civic matters is that of revelation and disclosure, which also entails mystification and obfuscation. This is a process that ties together the object or text and its circulation in a continuously dynamic way. Dean and Warners theories imply that a public ceases to exist when the common object of their address disappears. For a public to continue, the object of its formation cannot be exhausted of meaning or enjoyment. Also some aspect of that object must remain mysterious and beyond comprehension. For shorthand, I term this object of public formation the inexhaustible secret. The inexhaustible secret is not any one object, but rather refers to the formal and relational dimension of that which brings a public into being. As the social capital of Masonry demonstrates, the secret is a matter of form, not content, so it can never fully or finally be revealed. The life of a public consequently depends on a never-ending parade of content to sustain itself. In this way, the inexhaustible secret is the essence of civic being, for Masonry and other civic groups alike. Understood as a proto-public, we should expect the rhetoric internal to Masonic practice to feature the continuous deferral of secret content and the
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constant promotion of mystery and suspicion. As a civic group presumably on the decline, however, we should also expect Masonic rhetoric to reflect the exhaustion of the secrecy and the evaporation of its mystery, for if the secret is the constitutive limit of a public, then publicity heralds the demise of that public. By analyzing and comparing the rhetorical practices internal and external to Masonry, one can observe how the ideology of publicity may have more to do with the decline of civic engagement in the United States than the isolating and individualizing effects of news and entertainment; in other words, publicity is prior to and reason for the social isolation and fragmentation decried by sociologists and political scientists. The decline in social capital, understood as connections among individuals-social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them, is at least partially explained by the demise of the secret, by the ways in which the publics right to know thwarts its continued formation as a public. Absent some form of secret knowledge, the perception of a networked or unified community simply ceases to exist. The Promise: Masonrys Obligatory Drama As many readers know, upon entering a Masonic lodge for the first time, every candidate that petitions the fraternity represents someone trapped in the darkness of ignorance. Once the lodge door is ceremonially opened to him, each candidate will enter in pursuit of more light, participating in a lengthy, complicated, highly symbolic (and initially confusing) ritual that is at least 250 years old. The rituals draw heavily from passages and stories of the Old Testament of the King James Bible, which culminate in an extended allegory, the Hiramic Legend, based on two short passages (Kings 7: 1314; 2 Chronicles 2:1314). As Masons we stress the allegorical and symbolic significance of the legend, as few of us believe the story is true, which is revealed and elaborated in three basic rituals: the Entered Apprentice Degree, 1, the Fellowcraft Degree, 2, and the Master Mason Degree, 3. In the climax of each ritual, the candidate kneels before The Volume of the Sacred Law of their faith and is asked to take an oath not to reveal the secrets of Freemasonry. This obligation is the most important speech act of the rhetorical practices internal to our Order: by promising to keep secrets, an outsider is made a Brother. Owing to the locus of secrecys suasive power in form, which establishes the bond between people that knowing or sharing the content creates, Masonic ritual consistently stresses the significance of ones word or obligation to the fraternity. The act of making a promise over some secret (irrespective of what
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that secret is supposed to be) establishes Masonic community within a logic of reputation. For example, although the actual wording of ones Masonic obligation varies widely from one jurisdiction to the next, Ralph P. Lesters nineteenth century expos of Masonic ritual helpfully imparts the character of Masonic obligations. Lester reports that, while he is blindfolded and kneeling at an alter with his hands on a Bible, the obligation of the First Degree taken by an Entered Apprentice begins something like this:
I, A.B. [name of candidate], of my own free will and accord, in the presence of Almighty God, and this Worshipful Lodge erected to Him and dedicated to the Holy Saints John, do hereby and hereon (Master presses his gavel on the candidates knuckles) most solemnly and sincerely promises [sic] and swear that I will always hail [sic; hele], forever conceal, never reveal any of the secret arts, parts or points of the hidden mysteries of Masonry which have been heretofore, or shall be, at this time, or at any future period, communicated to me as such, to any person or persons, whomsoever, except it be a true and lawful brother Mason, or within the body of a just and lawfully constituted Lodge of Masons.
The obligation continues at some length and gets longer with each degree. The preponderance of clauses and labored prose is not designed to protect some profound secret truth, but rather, to impart the gravity and significance of the act of swearing. In this respect the Masonic oath is a classic social contract, however, it is peculiar in its literal and figurative blindness. Before any passwords or handshakes are revealed to a Masonic candidatebefore any secret content is revealedhe is asked to make the obligation first. In this blind allegiance one can locate the ideology of the rule of law and how republicanism tends toward a public of promised equals. Joan Copjec argues that such is the peculiar logic of democracy particular to the United States. In fact, if all our citizens can be said to be Americans, this is not because we share any positive characteristics but rather because we have been given the right to shed these characteristics, to present ourselves disembodied before the law. The blindness of the candidate in taking his Masonic obligation enacts a certain kind of freedoma temporary escape from family and professional duty at the very leastfrom ones personal and private life in exchange for membership in a new public. The obligation implies, I divest myself of positive identity, therefore I am a citizen. Furthermore, as the etymology of swear attests, the divestiture of the promissory act is thus simultaneously the establishment of answerability, that one is now liable to the community
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of Masons by virtue of his promise. The moral uplift taught by the fraternity is a consequence of mutual policingkeeping each other on the level and in line. Finally, the statement made that I most solemnly and sincerely swear and promise, establishes a bond among strangerspeople that one does not yet know as Masons. Michael Warner terms this act of blind bonding the stranger sociability that sustains any contemporary public. Ones blind obligation to others as a Master Mason allows him to enter any regular Masonic lodge in the world. In this respect the performative secrecy of Masonic rhetoric is a speech act not unlike a vow of marriage: in making a pact one is beholden to others and ceases to be a private individual resigned to the dark solitude of ignorance. The speech pact is an announcement of ones public being as a policed being, which is what distinguishes a public from a mere audience. The Secret: Masonrys Hermeneutic Circle The counterpart to the Masonic obligation is the secret over which it is made; one requires the other. If the private public of Masonry fundamentally concerns the ritual drama of secrecy and disclosure in ritual promise making, then something must be disclosed, even if that something or content is trivial. As Albert Pike once argued, it is mystery and curiosity that inspires. As a corollary, on can argue that without the sustained allure of mystery, the motive to belong to a given community weakens over time. In other words, for a public to persist, secret content can never be exhausted; there must always be further secrets to contract over. For Masons, that inexhaustible something is symbolism, a secret of Masonry that has always been in plain sight. Of course, if anyone starts looking for the principal symbol of Freemasonry in ones community, which is the square and compasses encircling a capital G, one will start to notice it is everywhereon buildings, on car bumpers, in books and frequently in films, on the rings and jewelry of passers-by, and so on. The inexhaustible secret of Masonry lies in the effects of this symbol on the viewer, not necessarily on the meaning it signifies. The function of interpretation in Masonry concerns this symbols seemingly recalcitrant strangeness, a mystery only partly explained, and in this respect Masonry participates in the difficult symbolism and esoteric prose of the Western occult tradition. For centuries occult rhetoric deliberately obscured spiritual teachings in strange and ironic prose and symbols. Speaking an occult language can invite persecution, but it can also ironically help to protect a group of like-minded people from attack, as was the case with Masons and alchemists alike. Under-
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stood as both the proto-scientific quest to turn baser metals into gold, as well as a spiritual quest to improve ones soul, alchemy was protected and practiced since antiquity well into the eighteenth century. As with the Masons centuries later, alchemists recorded their studies and teachings in the language of the birds or the green language, a difficult cipher of symbolism, character, and code, because they feared persecution by religious and state authorities. For example, Charles Walker reports,
The thirteenth-century occultist Michael Scot once insisted that honey falls from the air into flowers, whence it is collected by the bees. To us, the idea is fanciful, yet Scot was versed in the secret arts, and he knew that the bee is an ancient symbol for the human soul, while honey is the thing which [sic] feeds the soul.
There is also a certain poetic element to Scots writing of bees, flowers, and honey that is not merely cipher; there is a sense in which the symbolism of bees is mysterious because, when one first confronts it, one is not quite certain what it means. Hence, strange symbolism is about more than protecting ones thought from persecution or discriminating between insiders and outsiders; it is about the poetic, mystery-effects of occult symbols. The odd symbol or mysterious figure is employed by Masons in keeping with the alchemical logic of secrecy: using deliberately obscure prose and symbols is discriminatory, both marking off insiders and outsiders, but with the risky benefit of inspiring curiosity among both. In this respect the discriminatory function of occult rhetoric parallels the function of irony in discourse generally, which many rhetorical theorists since antiquity have noted can bond an audience as well as alienate one, often at the same time. Dan Browns use of Masonry as a historical object of intrigue in The Da Vinci Code represents the centuries-long success of Masonic poetics and the consequent irony at the heart of its symbolism. The fraternitys aura has helped to create a popular audience for Browns yarn as well as cultivate a membership for Freemasonry for almost three hundred years. Among occultists and especially Masons, however, it is important to underscore that the mystery of strange symbolism and difficult prose is not merely strategic. From a sympathetic standpoint internal to Masonic philosophy, the very strangeness of Masonic ritual and symbol is thought to encourage spiritual contemplation. Within the modern occult tradition, evocative, exotic, or otherwise bizarre representations functioned to encourage the aspirant or reader into higher states of spiritual consciousness and intuition. Masons have encouraged this practice because of our professed faith in the ability of an
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individuals reason to intuit spiritual knowledge beyond the realm of signification. In her study of contemporary ceremonial magic, T. M. Luhrman explains that the function of occult language and symbol is premised consciously on an understanding of the contingency and limits of language:
Magicians are explicitly told [by mentors] of the ambiguity of language, and different magicians use different words and images in different ways to characterize the same event. In discussion of magical ideas, and descriptions of magical practice, the specific words seem almost irrelevant: it is as if the word-value dwindles to its phatic importance, so that magicians use their descriptions of the ritual to signal a sense of involvement and commitment instead of as a means to convey information.
Although most of us do not claim supernatural forces are at work during our ritualsor at least forces other than that of DeityMasons nevertheless use Masonic language and symbols similarly. What distinguishes us from other occult organizations is the way in which our fraternity has sustained its practices for hundreds of years through the continuous and seemingly never-ending creation and revelation of secrets. Since the inception of the current form of Freemasonry in the eighteenth century, we have developed an arsenal of degrees, titles, and associated symbols that have occupied scholars for lifetimes. Numerous appendant bodies have emerged since the original, three-degree Symbolic Lodge was established: the Scottish Rite extends the drama of secrecy through an additional thirty degrees, while the York Rite, the Shrine, the Order of Amaranth, the Eastern Star, the Grotto, the Tall Cedars, and many others promise secrets, degrees, and titles of their own. In addition to being one of the largest and last remaining occult fraternities of our kind, then, Masonrys unique purchase is the labyrinthine complexity of the symbols revealed to candidates in seemingly countless rituals and degrees. Many encyclopedias and dictionaries are devoted to explaining the etymologies and complex meanings of the scores of occult symbols and strange words; only a handful of extremely learned Masons could ever specify the multiple meanings of all the words and Masonic symbols used or referred to in a given degree. One reason why Masonrys private public persisted for centuries is because its various groups, degrees, and symbolism grew over time in accord with classically occult hermeneutics that stressed the inexhaustibility of meaning. Looking into one of the most celebrated Masonic encyclopedias, Coils Masonic Encyclopedia, provides a good example of the inexhaustible secret of our fraternitys symbolism. Owing to its occult roots and borrowings from
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alchemical practice, it is not surprising that we find that bees and the beehive are important symbols to Masons:
On old jewels lodge furniture, banners, summonses, certificates, etc., the beehive with its flying bees is often a prominent symbol, and in at least one case is to be found in a lodge seal. Carved models of beehives, a few inches high, have a place in one or two old lodges. As far back as 1724 27, a Masonic pamphlet, often attributed to Jonathan Swift, speaks at length of the bee and the beehive as a symbol, and apparently our seventeenth century brethren were taught that the beehive is an emblem of industry recommending the practice of that virtue to all created things, from the highest seraph in heaven to the lowest reptile in the dust.
For the Masonic candidate, the beehives significationsthe human soul as well as the industry and the product of its labor (honey)are not revealed until the Master Masons degree, if at all. Coil reports that mention of the beehive is omitted in the lectures of the degree today, although the symbol is ubiquitous in Masonic literature and in the decorations, furniture, and architecture of lodges across the United States. What is important about the beehive, however, is not its basic interpretation as industry. What is important is what the candidate himself makes of it, or how the image causes him to reflect on the mysteries of Masonry, or the complexities of human industry and social organization, or the role of the feminine in structuring society, or the division of labor in contemporary basic arrangements of the world, or the mysteries of an ordered universe and its relation to his own spirituality, and so on. In short, the interpretation of the beehive as a symbol is a kind of veil, delaying the final, definite secret meaning. The endless interpretation of symbols represents how Masonry has deployed and maintained the inexhaustible secret. Termed symbolism or symbology in Masonic philosophy, the study of the symbolic relationships and meanings of Masonrys accrual of all things occult and religious in the past 250 years is often touted as the central, scholarly component of our philosophy. Such study is the counterpart to ritual obligation in Masonry and, arguably, the most important practice that sustains the inexhaustibility of secrecy. For example, in many Masonic lodges, and especially those that are designated as research lodges, it is common to have a member or guest speaker lecture on his interpretation of a Masonic symbol, such as the beehive, or on a particular aspect of Masonic history. Sometimes these lectures are collected into books, which are then repackaged as scholarly examinations or reflections on the Craft. Many of the most cherished books of Masonic phi-
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losophymost especially those of Albert Pikewere originally orations and speeches given at lodge meetings. Such study combines with the discriminatory and protective functions of difficult rhetoric to encourage the pursuit of further spiritual insight, or more light, by the Masonic student. As Rex R. Hutchens explains, Masonic symbols are thought to be instructive. They
may clothe instruction for several reasons: first, the ideas taught cannot be expressed readily in ordinary language, such as descriptions of Deity; second, symbols can provide a metaphorical garment by which ideas are presented on several levels third, symbols provide ready mnemonics by which instruction may be remembered. To study a symbol is to reflect on and explore it in the context of its history, allowing our minds to be led beyond the grasp of reason.
Attention to the way we speak and have spoken about symbolism indicates that our order is an occult organization formed on the promise of an inexhaustible secrecy. This is the reason why Dan Brown and others reference the Masons in their books and films: Masonrys deployment of the inexhaustible secret generates the curiosity that leads to our continued existence. Because Masonry is constituted by the mystery and protection of a secret that can never be fully exhausted of meaning, any threat to dispel the mystery central to the fraternity is a threat to our continued survival. The third part of this essay shows how the abandonment of the inexhaustible secret by a number of our leaders is both symptomatic of, and responsible for, Masonrys decline. The Perils of Publicity, or, Dumbing Down the Mystery
The conflict between secrecy and democracy would appear to be a recurrent phenomenon in our national history. Indeed, since the flowering of the modern secret society in the eighteenth century, antisecretism as a state of mind has been an enduring fiber in the pattern of Western culture. Leland M. Griffin
Reading the theories of Jodi Dean and others, one discerns a direct relationship between secrecy, publicity, and the formation of publics. Historically, this relationship can be seen in the concrete practices of our fraternity, whose republican ideology was originally practiced in secret and maintained over the promise of some inexhaustible, ineffable truth. Conceptually, I argued that we can observe how secrecy creates a sense of community by examining the rhetoric internal to Masonic practice: occult ritual invents its public and communal bonds through a drama of blind obligation to the fraternitys secrets.
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This obligation is not a static, one-time performance (or even a three or thirtysecond time performance), but rather is continually renewed and maintained because the secret it protectsthat is, the meaning of the symbolism of the fraternityis perpetually deferred. Consequently, the rhetorical practice internal to our Craft consists of a dynamic interplay between obligations and the inexhaustible secret. Masonry can be seen as a micro-example of the formation of publics not only because it was a proto-public before the concept of the public existed, but also because our current decline in membership parallels the overall social decline of civic engagement. Whether a public is a fraternity or a bowling league, it persists as such only to the extent our obligation as a public that is, the promise behind our stranger sociabilityis continuously renewed. Although the mechanism of mystery differs from one public to the next, the disavowal of secrecy by some of our brothers demonstrates how publics disappear as a consequence of publicity. The promotional strategies of Masonry, past and present, need to be compared to explain how this happens. In a classic and highly recommended study of the rhetorical structure of the anti-Masonic movement, Leland Griffin carefully traces how the logic of suspicion behind the formation of our fraternity eventually led to its almost complete disappearance in the United States. As the United States republic was established and gradually stabilized, the public that emerged turned against the private public that incubated its ideology. A brief recounting of Griffins analysis explains why Masons were led to abandon the inexhaustible secret in favor of a transparent, promotional rhetoric. His story begins with a recounting of how the murder of an anti-Mason, allegedly committed by Masons and known in the Masonic literature as the Morgan Affair, sparked an anti-Masonic social movement culminating in the development of a political party and the first Antimasonic candidate for the Presidency in 1831. According to Griffin,
in the fall of 1826 rumor was circulated among Freemasons of western New York to the effect that a former member of the lodge at Batavia, a bricklayer named William Morgan, was planning to publish the secret signs, grips, passwords, and ritual of Ancient Craft [Blue Lodge] Masonry. The anger of the Masons was soon translated into those actions that were to initiate the [anti-Masonic] movement. Morgan was imprisoned on a false charge and shortly thereafter, abducted from his cell by a small band of Masons and driven in a closed carriage more than one hundred miles to Rochester; from there he was taken to the abandoned fort above Niagara Falls. Morgan was locked in the castle of the fortwhere, from that moment, all historical trace of him vanishes.
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After Morgans death, his book was published and became an instant bestseller, and an anti-Masonic uproar led to twenty-one indictments and a trial for six, none of whom were charged with murder (the prosecutor and a number of jurors were Freemasons). After the trial, over a hundred anti-Masonic newspapers sprung up and, as Hodapp puts it, helped to generate a hysteria that was so bad that for nearly two decades, a toddler couldnt get sick in the United States without someone claiming the Masons had poisoned the kids porridge. From a rhetorical vantage, what is particularly interesting to Griffin is the way in which the anti-Masons created a fund of public argument. Various channels of media circulation were used: newspapers, tracts, public lectures, sermons, and so on. It was claimed the Masons killed Morgan as a part of their bloodthirsty rituals, that they were conspiring to take over the newly established and united republic, that they were in cahoots with the Devil, and so on. The first strategy our brethren tried was to counter-attack the character and motives of Antimasons. [Masons] charged that [anti-Masons] were merely trying to raise an excitement, reports Griffin, and declared that the blessed spirit [viz., grace claimed by anti-Masons] was rather an inquisitorial spirit, a product of delusion as the Salem witchcraft trials had been. Apparently the counter-attack strategy was a disaster. Griffin argues that it led the anti-Masons to extend their agenda to the complete destruction of Freemasonry itself, and later, the destruction of all secret orders then existing in the country. Griffin explains that the second rhetorical response of Masons was no more effective, at least for the next decade, as Masonic supporters or Mason Jacks stopped defending the fraternity. In 1830, under the tacit leadership of President Jackson (Past Grand Master of Tennessee), the Secretary of State Edward Livingston gave a speech to a number of Masons in which he urged a dignified silence in the face of the oppositions attack. After this talk was circulated among Masons, Griffin notes that the Masons became, in fact, virtually mute. Meanwhile,
States began to pass laws against extrajuridical oaths, legislation which was intended to emasculate the secret order; lodge charters were surrendered, sometimes under legal compulsion but often voluntarily; Phi Beta Kappa abandoned its oaths of secrecy; Masonic and Odd Fellows lodges began to file bankruptcy petitions; and membership rolls in the various orders began to dwindle to the vanishing point.
Toward the middle of the 1840s, the fraternity began to recover and slowly increased in numbers. Membership steadily increased for decade after decade
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until it ballooned to four million members in the modern heyday of contemporary civic engagement in the post World War II United States. Nevertheless, the rhetorical strategy of absolute silence in response to questions regarding U.S. Masonryand especially in response to attackswould persist until relatively recently, and most visibly after the publication of The Da Vinci Code. Owing to our fraternitys commitment to tradition and ritual precedent, as well as the emphasis placed on scholarship and the study of our symbols and history, many Freemasons are aware of the history of anti-Masonry and at least tacitly inculcated with the tight-lipped rhetorical habits of the fraternity; shaking the defensive silent response of the past when confronting popular publicity has been a decades-long process. The recent, positive portrayals of the fraternity in contemporary popular media, however, shows a number of prominent Masonic leaders have adopted a strategy of seemingly complete openness about the fraternity, its histories, its rituals, and its symbolsat least to the limit of their own knowledge. Although the silence adopted after the Morgan Affair seemed to do little to encourage membership, it nevertheless continued to cultivate the inexhaustible secret for decades until rolls began to increase dramatically in the Cold War. Today, as the fraternity faces a similar, though less dramatic, decline in membership, a number of Masons have chosen to embrace recent publicity as an opportunity to stress the non-mysterious aspects of the Order. One reason that some Masons have decided to appear more open to public curiosity is the recognition that publicsand their habits of information gatheringhave changed dramatically in the twentieth century. Echoing the sentiments of Robert Putnam on the role of the mass media, Pierre G. Normand, editor of The Plumbline, the newsletter of the Scottish Rite Research Society, observes
I suppose the big news in the Masonic world of late is the onslaught of mixed blessings attendant to the release of The Da Vinci Code movie. [It] mentions Freemasonry, however briefly and inaccurately, and, as a result, everyones interested in the fraternity again. We live in a world of tabloid journalism and conspiracy theories where the average American learns everything, not in the history section of the local library or bookshop, but at the checkout counter of the local grocery stor[e] or the movie theatre.
Apparently mindful of this attitude, Masonic officials made a number of strategic choices when the ABC television network approached the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite and requested a live broadcast in the spring of 2006. Decisions were made to downplay the mystery-effects of Masonic symbolism
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as well as the spiritual teaching occult practices of Masonry. Secrecy was deliberately coded as private, disarticulating the fraternity from the long history of clandestine clubs in the language of the right to privacy. For example, when Richard E. Fletcher, Executive Secretary of the dominant Masonic public relations association, spoke with the reporter Charles Gibson on national television, he flatly denied the label secret society:
Charles Gibson: Do you accept this idea [that] its [Freemasonry is] a secret society? Richard E. Fletcher: No, sir. Gibson: Not secret? Fletcher: It isnt. Gibson: Then why the secret handshakes and the secret rites, etcetera, that go on? Fletcher: Well, the handshakesif you want to go in that direction the handshakes are a throwback to our early days when Freemasonry was related to the actual builders in stone.
Fletcher then explained the function of handshakes and passwords in medieval masonic guilds, but Gibson was determined:
Gibson: But you know secret societies today raise suspicions. Now, you say its not secret. But there are parts about it that we dont know. Fletcher: There are parts that are private. Now, if youre talking about what goes on behind closed doors and all those secret things. Theyre not secret. Theyre private. What we are doing is taking an individual man, bringing him into the fraternity through a series of degrees, and in those degrees, he is going to be challenged to look at such things as honesty, honor, integrity, how to make oneself a better person.
The mere fact that our top, highly respected leaders allowed a popular morning news program to film inside the House of the Temple in Washington, D.C., of course, betokens a very different approach to and attitude toward publicity than in our almost three-hundred year history. The lack of discussion about the Masonic obligation in these televised interviews, however, is conspicuous, because it is the promise to keep some things a secret that maintains the private public of Freemasonry. The difference between privacy and secrecy is, of course, the promise: private things concern that which can be made public, but is not done so out of respect. Secrets remain private, however, because one is obliged to keep them that way. The semantic distinction is a fine one, but one that is nevertheless symptomatic of a profound change in our fraternitys promo-
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tional rhetoric. Fletchers choice of words not only denotes a deliberate change in attitude among a number of prominent Masons, but is symptomatic of the declineor at the least a profound transformationof the fraternity itself: silence about the secret implies the obsolescence of the Masonic obligation. One might argue that the divestiture of the inexhaustible secret as both a strategy and a spiritual practice is limited to figures like Morris and Fletcher. Any cursory review of literature sympathetic to Masonry, however, reveals that privacy replaces secrecy in a number of books published for the express purpose of popularizing the fraternity in the wake of The Da Vinci Code. Masons like to say that Freemasonry is not a secret society, reports Christopher Hodapp in his Freemasons for Dummies, rather, it is a society with secrets. A better way to put this is that what goes on in a lodge room during its ceremonies is private. Like Fletcher, Hodapp downplays the centrality and function of mystery central to Masonic philosophy: although it is tempting to believe that there are hidden mysteries and even magic contained in Masonic symbols, in fact, theyre used to simply imprint on the mind the lessons of the fraternity. In the same spirit of simplicity, Hodapp not only downplays the drama of Masonic ritual as a throwback, butand surprisingly sohe dismisses the entire body of modern Masonic philosophy crafted around the never-ending interpretation of the inexhaustible secret. In an offset blurb box titled Mysticism, magic, and Masonic mumbo-jumbo, Hodapp writes,
If you read enough about Freemasonry, youll soon come across the writings of Albert Mackey, Manley Hall, Arthur Edward Waite, and Albert Pike. These men and many others have filled reams of paper with scholarly observations of Freemasonry. They eloquently linked the Craft to the ancient Mystery Schools of Egypt and elsewhere. They wrote that Masonry was directly descended from pagan rites and ancient religions. The works of these men were filled with fabulous tales and beliefs and cultures and cryptic theories of the deepest and earliest origins of Freemasonry. In short, they wrote a lot of crap.
Hodapp continues by denying Masonry has any relation to the occult, and that writers like Pike, Mackey, and Hall wrote big, thick books that created all sorts of problems since Freemasons [now] have to explain all over again to their relatives and ministers that, no, they arent making pagan sacrifices to Lucifer. Hodapp concludes, lets just say their [Pike et al.] vision of the history of modern-day Freemasonry is not accurate and leave it at that. Leaving aside the observation that none of the authors mentioned by Hodapp even claim that Masonry promotes pagan sacrifices to Lucifer, either Hodapp
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simply does not understand the internal function of Masonic rhetoric, or he has deliberately chosen to mischaracterize the way the interpretation of symbolism has been taught by the fraternity. By describing the lengthy and complex writings on Masonic symbology as worthless, Hodapp disowns the form and function of the inexhaustible secret. Given the history and function of secrecy to Freemasonry that I have outlined above, describing the work of Albert Pike and others as crap is, at best, ignorant and, at worst, grossly irresponsible. Although decidedly more serious and less anti-intellectual, a number of other Masonic publications also minimize the mystical and occult teachings of the Craft. For example, Arturo de Hoyos and S. Brent Morris Is it True What They Say About Freemasonry? downplays the important and difficult work of Masonic philosophy, Pikes Morals and Dogma, as a product of its time: Just because Albert Pike was a brilliant ritualist, an able administrator, and a wellrespected Mason doesnt mean all his opinions are right in light of todays knowledge. Such an observation is certainly true, however, it is made in the absence of any explanation of Pikes commitment to the Ancient Mysteries and the central function of Masonic symbolism. Despite the fact that each is hundreds of pages long, similar publications like Morris The Complete Idiots Guide to Freemasonry and The Everything Freemasonry Book (the latter by non-Masons) also downplay the occult origins of the fraternity and as well as the dramatic and mysterious aspects. Although the tone of these books is much more respectful of Masonic tradition and philosophy than Hodapps, they join Freemasons for Dummies in presenting the fraternity as the antithesis of the mystery-effect of the strange symbol. Each book attempts to evaporate the aura of mystery that surrounds the Craft in the language of transparency and contemporary argot. Given the anti-Masonic movements of the past, it is understandable why we have abandoned the counterattack and silence in favor of the third strategy of transparency. And yet, when viewed from the perspective of ritual drama and mystery-effect, this rhetorical trend is ironically counterproductive. In the rush to publicize the fraternity to avoid what is presumed to be its immanent demise, some of our more visible and public Masonic leaders have failed to think more carefully about the function of the secret in relation to the most important ritual practice that sustains the Order: the Masonic obligation. Some of us have abandoned what Albert Pike attempted to teach us over a century ago: mystery begets community in the performance of blind promises to strangers. The dynamic drama of secrecy dwindles when there are no more secrets to discover, when there are no more threats to their concealment, then there is no longer a
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common ignorance to share. In our readiness to disavow secrets in the rhetoric of mass address, some of our most respected and learned Masonic leaders seem resigned to Freemasonrys decline. A Broken Pact, or, Is There No Help for the Widows Son?
The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry is a school of instruction [and] its subjects are morality and philosophy. The moral domain is composed of both precept and example knowledge and action. The accomplishment of the second half of the educational mission of the Rite, however, has received little emphasis like a river seeking the smoothest route, the Rite has steadily moved away from instruction on philosophy and continued to place a greater emphasis on its charitable endeavors. Rex R. Hutchens, 33
In print, Masons have written of the impending death of Freemasonry since at least the middle of the nineteenth century. This fear is discerned in Hutchens observation that Scottish Rite Masonry has gradually and lamentably moved away from its philosophy of inexhaustible secrecy and interpretation, which is frequently the beginning premise of much modern Masonic scholarship. Many of Albert Pikes scholarly works, for example, begin in an elitist tone: The highest claim of Freemasonry to consideration is that it is a philosophical truth, concealed from the masses and taught to adepts by symbols. And yet, argues Pike, every intelligent Mason knows that of every hundred of the Brethren not more than two or three regard the symbolism of Freemasonry as of any real value, or care to study it. Pike applied his efforts to enhance and amplify the mystery of Masonry by rewriting and rendering the Scottish Rite degrees more dramatic. He hoped to inspire the intellectual and spiritual curiosity lacking among the Masons of his time. His worry was that the philosophical mission of Freemasonry was increasingly eclipsed by Masonic sociability and charity. In my own terms, Pike was worried that the exhaustible secret was becoming exhausted. Drawing on recent scholarship concerning deliberative democracy, civic engagement, and publics, I have argued that Pikes fears have been realized. Hastened by mass media technologies, the logics of publicity central to the formation of secret societies have led to their decline through the ceaseless publication and disclosure of secrets. This decline is reflected in the contemporary civil disengagement that Robert Putnam and others see as symptomatic of our time, and suggests that mystery is more important to civic participation than many realize. To this end I described how Masonry creates and sustains
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our private public through the dialectical interplay of promises and secrets: in exchange for ones blind obligation to the group about some inexhaustible secret, an individual can become an equal participant. The obligation is a social contract forged in blindness over the promise of a coming knowledge that never fully arrives. What Masonic practices teach us, however, is that publics require a continuous, dynamic obligation and commitment, and that this is achieved by an object whose information, meaning, or symbolism can never be fully revealed: the inexhaustible secret. Consequently, the recent attempt to disown secrecy by a number of Masons is an abandonment of the inexhaustible secret that underwrites our very existence. The argument by analogy stresses the overlooked import of ignorance as a curiosity catalyst, the death of which is represented in the Masonic divestiture of secrecy; in other words, the decline of Masonry is a symptom of a much larger social transformation. It is not that the secrets are known or can be known that keeps folks from joining civic groups. Just because a Mason says that all the secrets are out there does not dispel suspicion. Rather, it is the notion that the secret is exhausted, that there is nothing more to sustain a public, that there is no mystery in the world. The idea of the exhausted secret translates into what political scholars have dubbed political cynicism, or a belief that ones voting or voice has no efficacy in the political process. Why vote when politics is understood as a predetermined game, if there is no mystery to the political process, or if one believes that they know the outcome in advance because the polls tell them so? A public mood of obligation to the political process cannot be sustained absent some modicum of ignorance and a blind belief in contingency. To wit: the ideology of publicitythat all secrets must be found out, disowned, or investigatedhas not only led to the decline of Masonry, but it has also contributed to civic disengagement writ large. According to Jodi Dean, the ideology of publicity, nascent in the advent of our fraternity but particularly full-blown in our time, values suspicion, exposure, and information to continue. The net benefit of this ideology is the creation and maintenance of various publics that contract over that which has yet to be discovered, as well as the more robust notion of the public or public sphere as a utopian space of inclusivity, equality, transparency, and rationality. Few would disown the latter as important values to cultivate by rhetorical means. Consequently, Dean suggests, arguing for breaking out of todays technocultural matrix may well entail shooting ourselves in the foot because it may require a willingness to challenge, perhaps to sacrifice, our deepest
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commitments Although I do not believe, as Dean does, that it is possible to make any radical break from the logics of suspicion upon which the lust for publicity is based, I do agree that a public is a fantasy of unity sustained only by the incomplete yet perpetual disclosure of its foundational mysterythe inexhaustible secret. Suspicion is indispensable to any self-conscious community, otherwise the community transforms, dwindles, or simply reduces to a mere audience. Because the secret is so central to our bond, Masons need to seriously reconsider the guiding assumption of recent publicity: that an increase in membership will lead to a stronger, more robust fraternal order. Because of the way in which the ideology of publicity seems to work, perhaps a smaller, more dedicated membership would be better for the fraternity and its philosophy? Regardless of ones position on the size of the Order, this essay nevertheless urges Masons to think twice about disowning secrecy or insisting that Masonic secrecy is merely privacy. In this age of the drama of publicity and surveillance, our obligation to secrecyand therefore to each otheris all that we have.
NOTES
1. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2003), p. 436. 2. The consensus among Masons and historians seems to be that the present form of Masonry as it is now practiced can be traced back to a 1717 formation in London. See Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 17301840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), esp. pp. 949; Margaret C. Jacob, Living in the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. pp. 2351; and W. Kirk MacNulty, The Way of the Craftsman: A Search for the Spiritual Essence of Craft Freemasonry (London: Central Regalia Ltd., 2002), esp. pp. 312. 3. See Illustrated Guide to Rosslyn Chapel, ed. Robert L. D. Cooper (New York: Masonic Publishing Company, 2003). 4. See W. Kirk MacNulty, Freemasonry: A Journey Through Ritual and Symbol (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991). It should be noted that in this essay, in the tradition of Masonry, I will refer to Freemasonry, Masonry, the Craft, the fraternity, the organization, and the Order interchangeably. 5. In addition to the film version of The Da Vinci Code, see From Hell (2001), National Treasure (2004), and Rosewood (1997). For more examples, see Freemasonry in Culture: Movies, TV, Books & Other Entertainment, Masonic Leadership Center, available: http://www.bessel.org/culture.htm (accessed August 7, 2006).
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6. For example, The History Channels series Historys Mysteries devoted a number of 2006 programs to the Freemasons and associated secret societies, such as, Secret Brotherhood of Freemasons, Secret Societies and Knights Templar. 7. Secrets of the Freemasons: Do They Control the Government? abcnews.com, April 19, 2006; available at http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1859087&page=1 (accessed August 7, 2006). A full transcript is in S. Brent Morris, Good Morning, America Broadcasts Live from the House of the Temple. Scottish Rite Journal (July/August 2006), available at http://www.srmason-sj.org/web/journal-files/Issues/jul-aug06/MorrisGMA.html (accessed August 7, 2006). 8. There are hundreds of anti-Masonic books that locate the fraternity in Satanic conspiracy; for examples, see Cathy Burns, Hidden Secrets of Freemasonry (Mt. Carmel, Pa.: Sharing Press, 1990) and William Schnoebelenn, Masonry: Beyond the Light (Ontario, Calif.: Chick Publications, 1991). For a book length rebuttal of these and similar fantasies, see Arturo de Hoyos and S. Brent Morris, Is It True What They Say About Freemasonry? The Methods of Anti-Masons, rev. ed., (New York: M. Evans and Co., Inc., 2004). 9. W. Kirk MacNulty, Freemasonry for Bobos, Heredom 13 (2005), p. 27. 10. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. occult. 11. See Robert D. Putnam. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2000). 12. See Jodi Dean, Publicitys Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), esp. pp. 2334. 13. Aristotle defined rhetoric as an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion. In the thousands of years of rhetorical study since his time, rhetoric has more or less referred to the study of persuasion. My personal definition of rhetoric is: the study of how signs and symbols influence people to do or believe things that they otherwise ordinarily would not do or believe. Rhetoric can also refer to a thing or a product, such as a persuasive speech, a tract, and so on. In this essay, I refer to rhetoric in both senses, but am careful to underscore when I mean the study of and when I mean an influential discourse. See Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 36. 14. Dean, Publicitys Secret, p. 42. I should note that, following a general distinction in public sphere theory, I do not use the public and publics interchangeably. In this essay, the public refers to idealized view of both a space and certain group of people, usually confined by the notion of a nation statethe public sphere, for example. As such the public is a fantasy of popular unity. In contrast, by publics I mean to refer to materially existing communities and groups of people. For example, the Masons constitute one type of public, as does the movie going public, and so on. The public does not exist; however, specific publics do. 15. The Louisiana Masonic Monitor, ed. G. C. Huckaby (Kenner, La.: River Parishes
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Printing/The Grand Lodge of the State of Louisiana, 1988), p. 20. 16. Putnam, Bowling Alone, p. 55. 17. Of the handful of scholarly treatments of Masonry cited herein, only the work of Leland Griffin engages the rhetorical dimensions of Masonic secrecy and its relation to civic engagement. Most of the academic work done on Masonry by non-Masons is historical or theoretical and does not engage the internal rhetoric of actual Masonic practice. 18. Morris, Good Morning, paras. 3639. 19. Putnam, Bowling Alone, pp. 21617. Putnams claims are not without controversy; see Alan Horowitz, rev. of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Sociological Inquiry 72 (2002), pp. 34548. 20. Michael X. Delli Carpini, Fay Lomax Cook, and Lawrence R. Jacobs, Public Deliberation, Discursive Participation, and Citizen Engagement, Annual Review of Political Science 7 (2004), pp. 31544. 21. Carpini, Cook, and Jacobs, Public Deliberation, pp. 31921. 22. See Christopher Hodapp, Freemasons for Dummies (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley Publishing, 2005), pp. 1718. 23. S. Brent Morris, The Complete Idiots Guide to Freemasonry (New York: Alpha Books/Penguin, 2006), p. 10. 24. Of course, there is a secondary reason for maintaining ones obligation to the fraternity: telling Masonic secrets simply spoils the fun for new Masons receiving their degrees; learning a secret handshake is much less enjoyable, perhaps even boring, when you already know what it is! See Hodapp, Dummies, p. 18. 25. Jrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into the Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), p. 35. 26. Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 35. 27. Dean, Publicitys Secret, p. 30. 28. See Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. pp. 96119. 29. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, p. 96. 30. In Dean, Publicitys Secret p. 25. 31. Freemasonry and related secret societies have received some attention in public sphere scholarship. See especially Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998); Habermas, Structural Transformation, pp. 3138; and Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, esp. pp. 351. Habermas argues, for example, that Masonry was essentially a proto-pub-
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lic, a point to which I will return shortly. 32. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, p. 23. 33. There are ample, extant writings by Masons to demonstrate a decidedly anti-Catholic attitude in the United States up until at least the 1930s; however, the fraternity is only one, small part of a much larger culture war waged against the Pope. See Lynn Dumenil, The Insatiable Maw of Bureaucracy: Antistatism and Education Reform in the 1920s, The Journal of American History 77 (1990), pp. 499524. It is also true that Masonry adheres to a characteristically Protestant understanding of biblical exegesis and the ability of humans to intuit the spiritual and divine without an intercessor, which obviously creates some tension with the Holy See. Nevertheless, contemporary Masonry is not hostile to Catholics, as a number are members of the fraternity in the United States. It is not clear among ecclesiastical scholars, however, whether the Vatican presently forbids membership; see Joel Schorn, What is the Catholic View of Freemasonry? U.S. Catholic (May 2005), p. 43. 34. These thinkers differ substantially, however, on whether publicity serves a mystical or rational purpose. See Dean, Publicitys Secret, pp. 2334. 35. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, p. 110. 36. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, pp. 113. 37. For example, Freemasonry has also been linked to the English and French revolutions; see Jacob, Living the Enlightenment; and Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood. 38. Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 35. 39. Dean, Publicitys Secret, p. 42. 40. Edwin Black, Secrecy and Disclosure as Rhetorical Forms, Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988), p. 149. 41. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (abbreviated version), Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002), p. 413. Also see Robert Asen, Seeking the Counter in Counterpublics, Communication Theory 10 (2000), pp. 42446; Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer, eds., Counterpublics and the State, Albany: State University Press of New York, 2001; Daniel Brouwer, Counterpublicity and Corporeality in HIV/AIDS Zines, Critical Studies in Media Communication 22 (2005), pp. 35157; Ronald Walter Greene, Rhetorical Pedagogy as Postal System: Circulating Subjects through Michael Warners Publics and Counterpublics, Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002), pp. 43443; and Phaedra C. Pezzulo, Resisting National Breast Cancer Month: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and Their Cultural Performances, Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003), pp. 34565. 42. The same is most especially true for that public that most concerns rhetorical scholars: the audience. In terms of the popular media, the use of the cliffhanger structure in the television program Lost is an excellent example of how audiences are cultivated and maintained over a series of seasons.
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43. One is tempted to term this rhetoric, simply, journalism. As I detail below, however, the difference between a rhetoric of secrecy and journalism is the function of the inexhaustible secret. Journalism presumes an end to the darkness of human ignorance, while an occultic rhetoric embraces darkness as its existential plight. 44. Dean, Publicitys Secret, p. 42. 45. Putnam, Bowling Alone, p. 19. 46. Owing to the esoteric work or speech-only memorization of the actual wording of Masonic ritual, Lesters account is necessarily inaccurate. The rituals wording changes over time as a consequence of its oral transmission; moreover, the wording of each jurisdiction is different as well because of regional influences. 47. Ralph P. Lester, Look to the East! A Ritual of the First Three Degrees of Freemasonry (Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), p. 30. 48. In fact, the fundamental teaching of Masonry is that of many religious faiths: we are all equal in our blindness toward death; on the basis of that commonality (not so much taxes) we are united and implored to be good. 49. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), p. 146. 50. Copjec, Read My Desire, p. 146. 51. For an account of how speech pacts form the basis of State-sponsored surveillance, see Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 5557. 52. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 417. 53. The logic of willful surveillance (by self and by ones brothers) that underlies the formation of a public indicates the horizon of the public is ultimately the nation state, the conceptual embodiment of policing par excellence. The paradox behind the social contract, in this respect, is that the State can thus claim to guarantee and protect the the public and justify violations of the private (that is, start demanding the revelation of secrets) in the protection of the private. 54. Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: L. H. Jenkins, Inc., 1942), p. 383. 55. See Pike, Symbolism, pp. 93106. 56. Joshua Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005). 57. For a lucid account of the spiritual project of alchemy, see C. J. Jung, Jung on Alchemy, ed. Nathan Schwartz-Salant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), esp. introduction.
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58. Charles Walker, The Encyclopedia of the Occult (New York: Crescent Books, 1995), p. 7. 59. Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric, pp. 14371. 60. Irony is the occult core of the rhetorical tradition. See C. Jan Swearingen, Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Or as Kenneth Burke once put it, irony always requires the foola figure of immense significance in the modern occult tradition. See Kenneth Burke, Four Master Tropes, in his A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 50317. Also see Linda Hutcheon, Ironys Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (New York: Routledge, 1995). 61. Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric, 75; also see T. M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witches Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 21420. 62. Luhrmann, Persuasions, p. 215. 63. Benard E. Jones, Freemasons Guide and Compendium (London: Eric Dobby Publishing, 2003), p. 408; also see Coils Masonic Encyclopedia, s.v. Beehive. 64. See for example Thomas D. Worrel, The Symbolism of the Beehive and the Bee, Mill Valley Masonic Lodge Website; available http://mill-valley.freemasonry.biz/worrel/ beehive.htm (accessed August 8, 2006). 65. Rex R. Hutchens, Pillars of Wisdom: The Writings of Albert Pike (Washington, D.C.: The Supreme Council, 33), p. 57. 66. Leland M. Griffin, The Rhetorical Structure of the Antimasonic Movement, in The Rhetorical Idiom: Essays in Rhetoric, Oratory, Language, and Drama, ed. Donald C. Bryant (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), 14559. The essay is also reprinted in Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State College, Pa.: Strata Publishing, 1995), pp. 37181; subsequent references to this article refer to the reprinted edition. 67. Coils Masonic Encyclopedia, s.v. Morgan Affair. 68. Griffin, Antimasonic Movement, p. 373. Of course, many Masons have disputed this account, stressing that no one knows what really happened to Morgan; see Coils Masonic Encyclopedia, s.v. Morgan Affair, as well as Hodapp, Dummies, pp. 4547. 69. Hodapp, Dummies, p. 46. 70. Griffin, Antimasonic Movement, p. 374. 71. Griffin, Antimasonic Movement, p. 374. 72. Griffin, Antimasonic Movement, p. 377. 73. Griffin, Antimasonic Movement, p. 378. 74. Griffin, Antimasonic Movement, p. 37778.
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75. Holly Lebowitz Rossi, Masonic Membership is Declining, Detroit Free Press, July 15, 2006, available http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060715/ FEATURES01/607150329/1026 (accessed August 10, 2006). 76. Hence, the tight-lipped response of an uncle or grandfather when questioned about the teachings of Freemasonry are not only a consequence of misunderstanding (e.g., that there really are no secrets anymore) and past revolutionary politics, but also a defensive impulse rooted in the fraternitys response to the anti-Masonic crisis of the 1830s. 77. See Dean, Publicitys Secret. 78. Pierre G. Pete Normand, SRRS Bulletin Notes, The Plumbline: The Quarterly Bulletin of the Scottish Rite Research Society 14 (2006), p. 2. 79. Cited in Morris, Good Morning, America, paras. p. 715. 80. The OED defines the adjectival form of private as the opposite of public, while it defines secret as kept from knowledge or observation; hidden, concealed. Habermas, Dean, and others have shown how the public/private distinction is difficult to maintain insofar as the public sphere, for example, was exercised privately. I am suggesting that the notion of secrecy entails more than a mere courtesy but an active promise to hide or conceal things from the public. It is precisely that active element of promise making that sustains the suspicion by various publics (and most especially the State) that there is conspiracy afoot. For this and other reasons Dean argues so-called conspiracy theorists take the rule of law and the ideology of publicity at their word. See Dean, Publicitys Secret, pp. 4778. 81. Hodapp, Dummies, p. 17. 82. Hodapp, Dummies, p. 132. 83. Hodapp, Dummies, p. 61. 84. Hodapp, Dummies, p. 61 85. Although I am critical of Hodapps prose, I should be careful to underscore that I respect him as a brother Mason and have appreciated his conversation and goodwill in personal correspondence. I agree that no one speaks for Masonry, however, I also believe, that it is important to speak out about issues that I, as a Mason, feel and think are importanteven if that means vocally disagreeing with our talented and respected brothers. 86. De Hoyos and Morris, Is it True, p. 26. 87. Hutchens, Pillars of Wisdom, p. 1. 88. I would argue, in fact, that such an assumption helped to generate the explosion of speculative work and analysis on Freemasonry that occurred in the mid- and latenineteenth centuries in the first place! 89. Pike, Symbolism, p. 75.
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90. Bruce E. Pinkleton and Erica Weintraub Austin, Individual Motivations, Perceived Media Importance, and Political Disaffection, Political Communication 18 (2001), pp. 32425. Also see Catherine Bromley and John Curtice, Are Non-Voters Cynics Anyway? Journal of Public Affairs 4 (2004), 32637; and Glenn Leshner and Esther Thorson, Overreporting Voting: Campaign Media, Public Mood, and the Vote, Political Communication 17 (2000), pp. 26378. 91. Dean, Publicitys Secret, pp. 15153.
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The Two Rhetorics of Freemasonry

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The Two Rhetorics of Freemasonry, or, On the Function & Necessity of Masonic Secrecy

Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code

Volume 15, 2007