by Roger W Davis

Created on: October 09, 2008

Masons of an ambiguous antiquity were a guild. A brotherhood of builders who kept their science hidden in rituals so unskilled pretenders could be recognized before they might manifest their faulted construction. But sometime during the late 1600s Masons opened membership to non-masons who through organizational skill and without fanfare presented some great public service with hidden integrity. These non-masons were called Free Masons, who learned the rituals but not for the significant sciences the rituals contained. Among the Free Masons the rituals were merely degrees of practiced behavior to secretly identify themselves and their level of authority in the guild whenever they entered a place of unknown strangers. If there was a Mason or a Free Mason among the strangers he would also present a posture of his degree. A Mason of a higher degree or a peer would recognize the posture of his peer or lower degree and take up that same posture to accommodate their recognitions. A Mason or Free Mason of a lower degree cannot recognize the posture of a higher degree, so if no strangers respond in a recognizable way then the Mason among them knows there is no other Mason present.

In the middle of last century when county magistrates had the power of judges in misdemeanor cases, my father was called in the middle of the night to help a friend who had accidently assaulted a county sheriff. The sheriff was injured and angry when my father arrived, and was trying to convince a willing judge that it was no accident. According to my father's friend, my father stood in a certain place in the room, and when the three turned to observe my fathers position and saw his posture, the three took their's also and apologized to each other for not having recognized who they were in the heat of the moment.

A Mason a hundred yards away can stand his ground and the observing Mason knows what his own next move iswhether that move is a personal conduct or the placement of a brick. But Free Masons only learn the personal conducts.

During the 1600s as more and more honorary Free Masons joined the guilds worldwide, politics entered the Masonic Lodges as well. The apolitical skills and sciences preserved in ritual instructions passed down through the generations by Masons became conspiracy games under the nose of kings and their authorities. Differing Lodges moved away from the three degrees of Masons and instituted more degrees of Free Masonry having nothing to do with building with stones. My father's friend was in the 32nd degree of the Scottish Rite.

In the early 1700s the Masons recognized what was happening and within a few months across the nations and around the world, Masons and their sacrid texts began to vanish from the Lodges.

The Free Masons were left with an ambiguous history that seems faulted, such as Abraham's building of the pyramids in Pharaoh's Egypt. An historic inaccuracy that conceals a communicable truth.

Free Masons lost a wealth of sciences when the Masons abandoned them, but thanks to the split George Washington led a band of Free Masons with clear thoughts communicated in apparent disorder. Guess what you will.

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