In His Lexicon of Freemasonry which he published in 1845 A.D., and which was American Freemasonry's first and almost its only encyclopedia, Dr. Albert G. Mackey touched upon the subjects of the Ancient Landmarks in two short paragraphs. In his two volume Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (now revised, and in three volumes) which he published originally in 1874 A.D., he included an extensive discussion of the subject and gave a descriptive list of twenty-five Landmarks. This article was notable because it was the most influential single essay (or article) ever written by a Freemason; because it embodied the best of American Masonic thought between 1815 A.D. and 1874 A.D.; and because it shows how the development of Freemasonry in the United States during some thirty years (embracing the Civil War Period) had brought the subject of Landmarks to the front. Dr. Mackey did not spend months of laborious thought and research on the subject in order to see his own private theory in print; he found the Craft working to clarify its own understanding of Landmarks because they had become crucial to the setting up a system of 49 sovereign Grand Lodges each of which must continue in fraternal relation with each and every other one, and he searched the mind of the Craft and reviewed its practices in order to assist himself to that end.
At the time of writing, one-half of the American Grand Lodges print Mackey's List in their Codes; of those about one-half have officially adopted the list. With two or three exceptions (New York among them) the other Grand Lodges have either officially adopted or officially approved lists of only one, or two, or three, or five up to as many as fifty-six. In their private writings Masonic authors of books or treatises on the subject have disagreed even.
more widely among themselves, a number of them at one extreme denying that any list is possible (Theodore Sutton Parvin was one), others, at the opposite extreme (such as Grant and Oliver), setting up lists of from 75 to loo or more.
As has so often occurred in debates of this sort the debate did not come to an end because the debaters (including Grand Lodges) found a list upon which to agree, but came to an end be cause the whole debate was shifted to another ground, and the question of how many Landmarks belonged to their list became meaningless. This change in the basis of the discussion was brought about by an almost sudden and very great increase in our knowledge and understanding of Masonic history. Instead of asking what Landmarks are, and what is the number of them history asks, What has been the function of Landmarks throughout the history of the Fraternity?
To that question history has given the answer: It has been to maintain and to perpetuate the identity of Freemasonry. The Fraternity consists of men not of a set of doctrines or dogmas. Freemasonry is the name for what those men do. Since they are men of flesh and blood at work in rooms or buildings in actual town, cities, and countries, they work under circumstances which change. How far can they carry these changes? as far as they deem it wise or expedient as long as they do not change Freemasory itself into something else. Any organism or organization may make changes of some sort; but if a change is of a kind to destroy the organism or the organization then it is unlawful and impossible. The Landmarks are those essentials in Freemasonry which cannot be destroyed without destroying Freemasonry itself.
From the beginning of the Middle Ages until the Fifteenth Century Freemasonry did not use the Bible because it had n,, Bible to use. The 39 books of the Old Testament and the 27 books of the New Testament could be had, where they could b had at all, only in the form of manuscripts; since it took a professional scribe more than three years to copy the Bible manuscript by hand, and since a complete text required a thousand or two of expensive "skins" of vellum or parchment, a Bible cost more than a large farm; only the largest churches had even a portion of the Books, the ablest priests had only a few books, the majority of priests could not even read it because they were illiterate. Even if less expensive copies had been purchasable Freemasons could not have owned or used a Bible because the church had a closed monopoly of it, and did not permit laymen to read it for themselves. The center of the Craft's religion was not in the Lodge but in the chapel to which the Lodge went in procession on its own Saints' days.
The first step toward haying a Bible on the altar came in the middle of the Fourteenth Century when the first permanent Lodges began to work under a copy of the Old Charges. This manuscript was kept on a small stand or pedestal in front of the Master's station, illuminated by three candles ("Lesser Lights"). It was their "Volume of the Law." In it a number of paragraphs gave an account of the great antiquity and honorableness of the art of Freemasonry, or architecture; another group of paragraphs set forth an account of how King Athelstan had granted a Royal Charter to the Fraternity in 926 A.D.; and a concluding series of paragraphs contained the Rules and Regulations. This document was read or recited to a Candidate, in whole or in part, and on its sanction lie took his Obligation.
The contents of the Old Charges were so sacred in the eyes of Freemasons that much of them afterwards were embodied in the Ritual, and the earliest tracing boards were a set of designs or formalized pictures representing some of the more salient portions of them. The first edition of the Book of Constitutions, which was published by the Mother Grand Lodge in 1723 A.D., was nothing more than a version of the Old Charges adopted to Grand Lodge needs.
At about the time that Columbus discovered America a number of printers in Germany, the Lowlands, and France improved the printing press sufficiently to make the printing of books commercially feasible. In about a century the building and operation of presses and the manufacture of paper were so much further reduced in price that by the period 1600 A.D. to 1611 A.D. the cost of a Bible was brought within the reach of men of small means, and everywhere, with an enthusiasm now difficult to measure, everybody began to read it; this popularity was many times multiplied even among children, when editions were illustrated and illuminated.
Before the constitution of the Mother Grand Lodge in 1717 A.D. Lodges kept the Old Charges on the "altar," or Master's pedestal; after the Grand Lodge published the Book of Constitutions in 1723 A.D. that Book began to replace the Old Charges. In 1760 A.D. the Grand Lodge officially declared the Holy Bible to be one of the Great Lights and along with the Square and Compasses it was placed on the Altar. Why this shift from one book to the other? For a number of reasons, among them being: 1) the Third Degree with the Rite organized about HA.·., Master of Masons for Solomon's Temple, brought the Bible into the Ritual, and not in the Third Degree only but also in the Cryptic and Royal Arch Degrees; 2) the rise of the Protestant Denominations everywhere quickened and greatly increased a love for the Bible because they were grounded in it instead of in tradition, church, or priesthood, and this made itself felt among Masons; 3) Solomon's Temple was the natural symbol for architecture because it was the most famous building in the world, and was believed to have been architecture's masterpiece; 4) in the Middle Ages the sanction for a man's oath was his sword, his own name, his family's name, God's name, or a charter, and among Masons it was the Old Charges, or (later) the Book of the Constitutions; when at the Royal Court, in the Church, in Courts of law, in the army, in public office, etc., the Bible came universally into use as a sanction for oaths Masons were led by custom to take up the same practice.
But in the Lodge the Holy Bible was not used as a theological book, but as a Great Light, one of three, and each of the other two stands on a parity with it. It is called "the Volume of the Sacred Law" because it is a continuation of the old use of the Old Charges and of the Book of Constitutions, and because it is the sanction of a Mason's oath. In the latter half of the Eighteenth Century British Lodges declared that since the Bible is used as a Volume of the Sacred Law, Masons in other countries with other religions can use their own sacred Books, and regular Grand Lodges everywhere have since taken the same position (including the 49 Grand Lodges in the United States), for which reason the V.S.L. in Lodges over the world may be represented by the Holy Bible, the Old Testament, the Koran, the Zend-Avesta, the Vedas, the Analects, etc.
The gild system, which included the whole economic life of the Middle Ages, had as one of its cornerstones the rule that any given gild had within its own territory a complete monopoly of its own kind of work without that rule there could have been no gild system, and without the gild system in an age without schools there could have been neither training nor education for any trade, art, or profession. A gild could not maintain this monopoly of its own trade without what modern manufacturers would describe as its "know how," and without confining a knowledge of that "know how" to its own members who received it under an oath not to pass it on to outsiders; these inwardly monopolized practices, processes, and technologies were called "trade secrets." The Fraternity of Freemasons had their own trade secrets as did other crafts; such secrets were historically the origin of that Masonic secrecy which after many centuries has become almost a synonym for the word Freemasonry itself.
The Freemasons lived in a Masonic Community, and since this included their families and homes they also had privacies, another early form of secrets. Their transactions of Lodge business was confidential, and had to be so to conform to civil law as well as to their own Masonic rules and regulations; for if the civil law held a Lodge responsible for what it did no Lodge could be responsible for non-members, therefore non-members "were tiled out"; this necessarily confidential nature of Lodge business was another origin of Lodge secrecy. This form of secrecy means "members only." Another of its sources, and one which for some unknown reason has passed almost unnoted, is the nature of a Candidate's Obligation; if that Obligation is minutely analyzed in the terms of Masonic history it will be found that a Candidate takes his Obligation to the members of the Lodge-it is to a "you," and that "you" can include no non-members. Yet another form of the "members only" type of secrecy were the Modes of Identification, which enabled a Freemason to prove himself to be one wherever he might encounter other Freemasons. Any form of technology is a mystery to the uninitiated the non-mathematician can make nothing of the calculus, the non-chemist is lost in a laboratory; the Freemasons had much technology, involving much geometry, chemistry, and engineering, and in an age without schools or books this was a secret of secrets.
Did the early Freemasons practice secret arts or sciences? They did in the sense that they practiced a number of them at a time when they were generally forbidden, but they had no secret form of those arts and sciences peculiarly their own their geometry, which once was their greatest secret, was nothing other than the same geometry which the Greeks and Romans had used, and which after the invention of the printing press was published everywhere. It is said that the Romans represented the small god of love as being blind-folded not because love blinds the eyes of its victims but because it can keep its own secrets even from those who are closest to it and who have their eyes opened the widestit is a mystery of light; there is something at the heart of Freemasonry which every Freemason knows and yet which Freemasons cannot explain, not even to each other; it is a form of secrety which the Ancients described by the word "ineffability."
The secrecy of Freemasonry is thus in it at many places, in many forms, for many purposes, from many origins, and it may even be that that which is most published in it is most secretthe symbols are an example. Nevertheless, and countless assertions or assumptions to the contrary notwithstanding, it is not a secret society. The society of the Carbonari of Italy in its original form concealed its own existence, hid its meeting places, its officers used assumed names, and its members kept their membership to them selves; it might flourish in a town without the town knowing of its presence. Any secret society is a society of that type. Freemasonry does not conceal its existence; it builds its temples on conspicuous corners; the names of its members and officers are published; it prints its Constitutions, laws and purposes; its members walk in public processions; Lodges publish bulletins and Grand Lodges publish Proceedings, and the Fraternity as a whole has declared itself, expounded itself, described itself and expressed itself for the past two centuries in tens of thousands of books in forty or fifty languages. It is a society with secrets; it is not a secret society.
There are historians of small arts, and minute divisions of science, and movements of only a local fame, of cities, of counties, of states, and of peoples and nations; there also are historians who have as it were, an all-seeing eye, who see the world's history and see it as a whole, who have in their minds neither a taint nor a twist of partiality for their own folk nor prejudice against any other; like Kipling's artist, "when earth's last picture is painied," they see things now as the Great Artist's eye will see them after the world has ended. There are a few such historians now, as there have been in any age, but it is always interesting to see one's own people as they see them. What image of the American people is seen in that universal mirror? If we examine that image for ourselves, as we can if we are sufficiently impartial, we shall find that one of the outstanding peculiarities of ourselves is that almost more than any other people on earth we are the least given to feasting-we are not a festal folk, and we have few festivals. For some mysterious reason, perhaps because of an inheritance from the Puritans, we got it fixed in our minds one or two centuries ago that food and drink are somehow "material," that feasting is somehow a form of indulgence, is a little questionable, and a little gross. And since we breakfast hastily on toast and coffee, lunch on sandwiches, and perhaps eat a dinner hastily put together out of cans, bottles and paste board boxes, it may be that we lack the festal arts because we have a national and ingrained ignorance about food. Even our religion, which most everywhere else in the world is the mother of the festal spirit, is non-festival; a church supper is something to sup, it is never anything to feast on. If at any point our American Lodges have fallen away from the Ancient Landmarks, and fallen below our early Lodges, it is at this point; we have Lodge lunches, Lodge smokers, Lodge dinners, but almost never a Lodge feast.
It is written in the first paragraph of the account of the founding of the Mother Grand Lodge in 1717 A.D. as published in the Book of Constitutions that the old Lodges in London had two (and only two) purposes in constituting a Grand Lodge: one was to establish a center of union and harmony, the other was to revive the Quarterly Feasts! Why feasts? because then (as it had been for centuries) the feast stood close to the very heart of the Lodge, was one of the fundamental things in the Lodge. Even in the original version of the Old Charges, in which everything was condensed to the fewest possible words and only essentials were included, feasts were provided for among the rules and regulations as a fixed and necessary part of the Masonic life, and on a par with wages, and Lodges, and apprentices, etc., etc. Feasts "were a third sector" in the work and scope of the Lodge, and one of the Principal Officers, the junior Warden, had as the purpose of his office to be responsible for that sector; and in early Speculative times this Landmark was not weakened but was reinforced by giving the junior Warden the two Stewards to assist him.
A dinner is nothing but a meal; a banquet is an occasion. where a dinner is nothing but the preliminary to a program: a feast is not a dinner or a banquet but is an occasion; there is food and drink in overflowing abundance and of every possible variety. it is eaten for its own sake and for the enjoyment of it, those who sit down to it remain a long time at their places, and there i always much talk, laughter, and singing, but the talking am'' singing go on during the eating, not as a set program after it.
In the Eighteenth Century Lodges the feast bulked so large in the life of the Lodge that in many of them the members Overt seated at the table when the Lodges were opened and remained: at it throughout the Communication, even when the Degrees We! conferred. The result was that Masonic fellowship was good fellowship; in it, as in a warm and fruitful soil, acquaintanceship, friendship, and affection could flourish there was no grim and silent sitting on a bench, staring across at a wall. Out of this festal spirit flowered the love which Masons had for their Lodge. They brought gifts to it, and only by a reading of old Inventories can any present day Mason measure the extent of that love; there were gifts of chairs, tables, altars, pedestals, tapestries, draperies, silver, candle sticks, oil paintings, libraries, Bibles, mementoes, curios, regalias, and portraits. The Lodge was a home, warm, comfortable, luxurious, full of memories, and tokens, and affection, and even if a member died his presence was never wholly absent; to such a Lodge no member went grudgingly, nor had to be coaxed, nor was moved by that ghastly, cold thing called "a sense of duty," but went as if drawn by a magnet, and counted the days until he could go.
It was an old puzzle to historians until a half century ago to explain how Freemasonry was able to grow, first in Britain and America and then around the world. The puzzle was solved when historical research began to discover for the first time how large had been the place of feasts in early Lodges, and what their consequences were. The average early Lodge had only 8, 10, 15, or possibly 25 members not enough to keep a modern American Lodge in existence yet it flourished generation after generation, and it was those small Lodges which made Freemasonry great! It was because they loved their Lodges! And it so happens that Freemasonry is itself such that if in a Lodge of only ten members the ten whole heartedly love it then their's is Masonically a larger and more powerful Lodge than one of a hundred members in which they are nothing but members, and do nothing but attend it now and then. It is hard to love a Lodge if it meets in a half empty room, if its walls are bare, if its furniture is ugly, if its color is drab, and if its Communications consist of nothing more than a routine turning over of Lodge "business." Business indeed! what business has any Lodge to be nothing but a machine for grinding out their work! It was not called into existence in order to have the Minutes read! Even a mystic tie will snap under the strain of cheerlessness, repetition, monotony, dullness. A Lodge needs a fire lighted in it, and the only way to have that warmth is to restore the Lodge feast, because when it is restored good fellowship and brotherly love will follow, and where good fellowship is members will fill up an empty Lodge room not only with themselves but also with their gifts.
Seldom in the large Lodges in our big cities
can this fraternal and festal spirit be found or developed. It
is much more prevalent and more likely to be found in small Lodges
in the little towns and villages and they therefore are the backbone
of Freemasonry and the best guarantee of its continuous existence
and its further expansion.
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