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VERY FAR BACK IN TIME our remote forefathers used in
one form or another the short word mu. It meant "keep
your
lips closed," "say nothing about it"; and
either in the
beginning of its use, or not long afterwards, it also
meant
"keep your eyes closed," "don't be
inquisitive about the
affairs of others," etc. We ourselves in our own
language
continue to employ that same ancient word in our
"mum,"
"mumble," "mutter," "mummer"
(it is not the root of "mummy,"
which derived from a Persian word mum, meaning wax, and
was applied to bodies preserved in wax and oil).
From this same root the ancient Greeks formed their
word-
phrase ta musteria, which denoted secret rites, secret
teachings, secret initiations; when confronted by such
rites
an outsider (a "profane") was expected to keep
his eyes
shut, and an insider, an initiate, was expected to keep
his
lips closed. From that phrase (it was plural in form) the
same
Greeks formed their word musterion. From that use in turn,
as was true of so many other Greek terms, the word passed
over into the Latin language, where it was mysterium, and
it
there continued to have the general meaning of something
not pried into, or spied upon, or talked about. From the
Latin,
Old French derived its mistere, and modern French has its
mystere. From such sources it passed into Middle English
as
mistere, or mystereye, and from that it came into modern
English as "mystery." The .word's own long,
unbroken
history defines it: a mystery is something private,
something
secret kept by certain persons for good reasons of their
own
which an outsider must not be inquisitive about and which
insiders must not talk about - they must keep the lips
closed.
In the meantime, and also long ago, another word began its
history, starting with the ancient Latin word ministerium,
formed from minister, which denoted a servant.
As civilization slowly developed in both Greece and Rome
the callings, or forms of work, which required skilled
hands
and trained minds were more and more placed in the care of
organized crafts which the Greeks called hetarai, and the
Romans called collegia. Later on they were called gilds.
The
purpose of such gilds was to serve the people by producing
things necessary to everybody.
The Dark Ages were so called because during a long and
ghastly period of nearly four centuries barbarians invaded
Rome and Greece from all directions (except from the
south),and in so doing destroyed almost every vestige of
the
knowledge and skill which had been employed in the old
organized crafts.
After Charlemagne, who lived in the ninth century, Europe
began very slowly to recover the old arts, and when this
occurred the skilled workmen once again became organized,
and their organizations had a gild-form. But these new
gilds
were called "mysteries," and it is easy to see
why; the skilled
craftsmen in them made things needed for use, and since
the few literate men in Europe in the period used the
Latin
language in speaking and writing, these men adopted the
Latin word ministerium. In Old French it became mestier,
in
Modern French, metier, and when introduced into English,
during the period of Middle English it became, first,
mistere,
and later, mistery.
Since the Operative Freemasons were skilled craftsmen,
organized in the form of a gild-fraternity, their craft,
like every
other skilled craft, was called a "mystery," and
in almost all of
the oldest charters, fabric rolls, and borough records
that
word is used of it. That usage denoted nothing secret or
occult, but denoted nothing more than the fact that
Freemasons were trained workmen, and it is in that sense
that the word is used in the old phrase, "arts,
parts, and
mysteries of Freemasonry." Freemasonry is an art, and
any
young man with normal intelligence can learn it, if he is
willing to put himself through an apprenticeship, in which
case he is not called upon to become an adept in some
secret science, or be made privy to some occult secret.
Why is it that for a century or so the general public has
made
the word "Freemasonry'' almost synonymous with the
word
"mysterious"? Why have so many Masonic writers
themselves argued that since Freemasonry is a mystery
there must be something very mysterious within it? And why
did the Anti-Masons of America, in the quarter of a
century in
which they endeavored to destroy it, attack it for being
the
custodian of some strange, occult, and possibly dangerous
secret? They all confused two words, each of which is
wholly
different from the other, though both are spelled and
pronounced alike: they jumped to the conclusion that
because in modern times a mystery is a puzzle, a thing
hidden, something occult, it had always been used in that
sense; they were too ignorant of history to know that
through
the many centuries of the Middle Ages a
"mystery" was a
skilled craft, and that Freemasonry was always a mystery
in
that sense of the word.
Among the ancient Greeks and Romans there were two
kinds of religions. On the one side were those which may
be
called public religions, because they were maintained and
directed by the state, carried on their observances as
publicly as possible, and used temples which had so little
secrecy in them that the buildings consisted of little
more
than a roof supported by columns, with no walls. On the
other side were those which may be described as private,
not in the sense that they were private to an individual
or to
an individual's family, but in the sense that they were
private
to their own members. These latter are called either The
Ancient Mysteries, or The Mystery Cults.
A Mystery Cult admitted members by initiation, divided its
members into grades, employed ceremonies, sometimes of
an astoundingly costly and elaborate kind, used emblems
and symbols, and had grips, passwords, tokens, etc. The
probability is that they developed, at least the larger
number
of them, out of those organized skilled crafts which were
described above, and which always carried on within
themselves a number of ceremonious and symbolic
practices.
Many of the earlier Masonic historians believed that
Freemasonry must have originated in some one or more of
The Ancient Mysteries, such historians as Hutchinson,
Oliver, Greenleaf, Franklin Fort, and Albert G. Mackey
among them - it is probable that Mackey, who wrote a
history
of the Fraternity in seven volumes, believed in that
theory as
long as he lived. And in so doing they furnished yet
another
reason for attaching the word "mystery" to
Freemasonry -
their doing so was not altogether an act of good fortune,
because there is no so reason for believing that our Craft
ever had a connection with any one of the Mysteries.
In the present day and age the word "mystery" is
entering
yet another chapter of its long history. There is
developing in
plain view that new use of it which is represented by the
phrase "the mysteries of science," and the
development of
such recondite subjects as the quantum theory, the
publicity
given to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and the
invention of
the atomic bomb, have been among the more prominent
forces and events which have crowded that new meaning
into an already over-crowded word.
What is a scientific mystery? It is a subject, or a set of
facts,
discoveries, and inventions so difficult to know and
understand that to do so a man must go through a long and
laborious preparation in higher mathematics and difficult
technologies before he is even prepared to undertake his
investigations. In a somewhat different sense, though
cognate with it, a "scientific mystery" means
that many of the
oldest and most familiar things have turned out, under
scientific analysis, to be extraordinarily complex and
hard to
understand; light is such a mystery, so is time, so is
space,
so is gravitation, and so are many other things which all
men
have known about from the beginning.
There are scientific mysteries in Freemasonry.
Architecture
is one of them. If a reader believes it to be an
exaggeration
to describe architecture as a scientific mystery, he must
ask
himself why it is that among the thousands of engineers
who
are erecting the boxlike office buildings in American
cities
there are so few architects, and why it is that there are
probably less than a dozen men in the whole world who,
without outside aid, could design and construct a
genuinely
Gothic cathedral, for architects, the garden or common
variety of them, find Gothic as difficult to comprehend as
the
Theory of Relativity. Another scientific mystery in the
Craft is
mathematics, which there passes by the name of geometry.
Nothing is more certain than the statement that since the
discovery of the first system of Non-Euclidean geometry
until
now mathematics has been more and more becoming a
scientific mystery. There also are others in the Ritual.
There are these uses of "mystery" as applied to
Freemasonry. There remains yet another one, and it may
ultimately prove to be the most important of any.
Freemasonry is itself a mystery. Why? Because nobody has
ever satisfactorily explained it. Why did it alone, out of
all the
mysteries of the Middle Ages, survive? Why did it, after
some seven or eight centuries had passed, so suddenly wax
into a world fraternity, more powerful than ever before?
What
is there in it which holds so many otherwise busy men to
its
services, and more especially when it does not pay them
for
those services, and oftentimes does not even reward them?
What is the secret of its endless, its inexhaustible,
fascination for men of many races and tongues across the
earth?
POTS
Freemasonry is an establishment founded on the benevolent
intention of extending and conferring mutual happiness
upon the
best and truest principles of moral life and social
virtue. - CALCOTT.
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