Freemasonry is a post-collegiate mostly-all male fraternity dedicated to the social development of the member to form a broader sense of the self and their community.
Observations on the esoteric from author Greg Stewart (Masonic Traveler) about the fraternity of Freemasonry, its impact on civil society and contributions to the material culture.
I just happened to open CNN this morning and the story of the Shrine Hospitals is front page news. For any Mason following the media, it isn’t the story on the Jesters, or in membership, its the very real and distressing story of the potential closure of 6 of its 22 hospitals, following the loss of $3.3 million dollars in the stock market crash.
Obviously, this will affect a large number of people in a very negative way, and no one wants to see it come to pass.
The challenge that they face, however is such that potential options include letting Shriner’s hospitals themselves accept insurance or Medicaid from those families who have it covering the co-pays and deductibles or having Shrine doctors perform major surgery at partnered hospitals, and allowing insurance to bill what it can, then cover the rest.
The challenge is losing oversight in the work performed and having to follow Federal oversight curtailing the ability to treat as they see best.
Since its earliest inception, the Shrine is still a significant contributor to the hospitals which also accepts outside contributions and donations. Today, the Shrine arranges and pays for the transportation of children and parents to the hospitals and donate time driving families to the hospitals and entertaining the patients.
Additionally, Shriner’s helps support the hospitals financially by paying an annual $5 hospital assessment assessed in their dues. Various temples and clubs also hold fundraisers to contribute to the hospitals.
Originally founded in 1922, it has, in the past 20 years, had more than 8,000 physicians who have received residency education or postgraduate fellowship in their facilities. The Shrine is a adjunct unit of Freemasonry, pulling its membership from the roles of the Craft Lodges.
Given the present situation, and the continued decline in membership, It leaves me wondering if this will be the straw to break the camels back in the separation between the two fully developed organizations and allow the Shrine to further its aims.
The easiest way to approach this point is to perhaps list some of the more dominant activities that tend to be the biggest draw away from the lodge.
Church – Church membership offers much of what a Masonic lodge promulgates by way of affinity and fellowship. It also involves family intimately in its practice, allowing for more fellowship and familial bonding.
Charity/Volunteer – Opportunities abound in today’s society to give back. From the American Cancer Society to the YMCA. At any point, the interested party can man a booth, wash a car, help sell cookies, deliver food, answer phones, rebuild trails, or ring a doorbell; they can give of themselves financially or in person fulfilling the desire to give back.
Hobby Clubs – These interest groups span the gamut from sports, politics, cooking, crafts, hobbies, etc… If you have a particular interest a variety of clubs exists to meet that need. Even within other organizations, multiple levels of clubs exist that offer an assortment of opportunities. Often these, the interaction can be as frequent as desired or as sporadic, and dues are usually minimal if existent at all besides covering costs.
School groups – From the elementary PTA to social fraternities on college campus, there is a diverse range of opportunities to spend time and money on from baking cupcakes to manning a float in a parade. Usually these endeavors are encouraged as they raise and bolster the spirit of the group to build connectivity to the institution.
Work – While not a club, the obligation of work is not to be ignored. With a diverse society today, many work in fields that resemble the ethos of a club, in that ones profession is most likely closely allied to their passion, and their work obligation stretches beyond the 9-5 time clock.
I have no doubt that this list could go no, but I think you can see all of the distractions that we all have before us. When we have so little time to dedicate for in our interest areas, we are forced to be selective. And in this age there are a lot of interest areas to go around. In fact, websites exist to link a volunteer with an interest, Hobbyists to local hobby clubs, School Booster resources. Many websites exist for both churches and employment, or even social interactions including Facebook and LinkedIn.
So why choose the Masonic meeting? Many have said that the detraction is that the meetings don’t accomplish much, that they are focused on past meetings minutes, paying bills or reading communications. That very little work is passed down, let alone education. There maybe a special interest in the history of the process of the meeting, with a special ceremony and in a special room, to get things done, but with so much competition, are new attendees very keen on the SAME activity EVERY month, year after year? Are you satisfied with the same format of meeting month to month?
Does the monthly business meeting meet our needs today? By changing it, does it forsake those that enjoy that type of activity?
With the degree to which our meetings repeat themselves is it the way we meet that makes us Freemasons? Is it our ancient landmarks that dictate the way in which we meet, or is it more a long period of doing the same thing over and over that has trained us such that the practice has become a perpetual habit? Do we meet and conduct meetings in our particular way because it is how we have done it since “Time Immemorial”?
If the way we meet is the measure of our success or failure then what exactly do we do in the meeting of a Masonic lodge? What “should” a lodge meeting look like? How can we do it better and what should we be doing in them?
Freemasonry and the Qabbalah have a tacit relationship. In many deep philosophical discussions, the two often come up as being interrelated but just as often leave the conversation without a clear connection defined. As a Mason, we can start to study where the Jewish Mysticism has been woven in, but without a deep degree of study and practice, the two still seem as distant as night and day.
On this episode of Masonic Central, our guest Timothy Hogan joins us to talk about this mysticism and help us join some of the loose threads the three degrees with the various paths and points on the Tree of Life.
Hogan is the author of the new book The 32 Secret Paths of Solomon: A New Examination of the Qabbalah in Freemasonry which is a new examination of Kabbalah and its interconnectivity with Freemasonry. In it, he demonstrates how there are different interpretations of Freemasonry that can be found in the Sephirot and Paths, exploring Gematria and Masonic ritual.
It stands to be an interesting exploration and one sure to enlighten as much as it leaves us wanting to know more.
From the last installment, the point I wanted to build on was the item covered by Br. Dafoe’s article in the Masonic Journal and the missing membership. To touch on briefly what his article said, the most significant loss measured was in NPD’s and SNPD’s which made up the lion share of members who join our ranks, and then for a variety of reasons stop attending or paying dues. That in these numbers could be found the reason for the decline.
But, there are certain problems with that measure. When a member joins the organization the process can take several months, but when a member leaves, there is really very little process or paperwork, and consequently, no way to quantify why the member is leaving. This is different from returning an item or requesting a refund from a store where there is a short form or question involved to explain “why” the item is being brought back. In Masonry, that’s not the case, as there is no exit interview, no closure, to find the point of dissatisfaction. Rather it is a phantom hole, members who were there and now who are not.
So, because of that vacuum, there is no way of knowing what happened. Does the new member come in, stay a while, and then lose interest? Do they make the decision to drop out because of other membership obligations (church, work, bowling leagues, etc), or is that there was a lack of an affinity with Masonry itself? Did they just not find it relevant? Once they’ve left, do they pursue other interest groups (civic, spiritual, or academic)? What they do after Masonry is beyond the scope of our ability to know. All we can quantify it as is that they are no longer on the roles. Is it a society issue where there is a lack of resonance with the society, or is it sociological issue in that the ideas from the non masonic society is shaping their perception of what Masonry is supposed to be doing?
So this leads me to another question, are there other avenues to do what the lodge offers without having to meet to pay bills, or plan events? Is the competition today different than what it was before (say 50-100 years ago)?
In the next post, let’s look at some of the competition. What do you do when you’re not doing Masonry?
State population: 2,834,797 as of 2007 (estimated),
About the Grand Lodge:
The Grand Lodge of Arkansas does not have a listing on Wikipedia.
“Organized Masonry came to Arkansas soon after the formation of the Arkansas Territory in 1819. The first lodge was established at Arkansas Post, the seat of the new Territorial Government, under a dispensation by the Grand Lodge of Kentucky. By 1819, Arkansas Post was a village of about one hundred persons. Since Masonry had been active for a long time in the older states east of the Mississippi, it was quite natural that some of those coming to Arkansas Post would be members of the Masonic Fraternity. Many of them were prominent in the affairs of the Territorial Capitol, and as a result of their efforts, a Masonic Lodge was established there. No records remain of that Lodge except the scattered entries in the Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of Kentucky from whom the dispensations, and later a charter, were obtained”.
From the Grand Lodge website on Freemasonry in Arkansas
Some of what I found on my visit:
URL: The Grand Lodge of Arkansas has a very straight forward URL at http://www.argrandlodge.org which easily appears on a quick search at Google. The URL is clever in that it implements the short AR U.S. Post Office abbreviation for the state which is a very utilitarian approach to a field that it otherwise saturated with non state specific names.
Visually, as you arrive at the site, as with the name, it immediately appears as a very straight forward construction that is both purposeful and well formed. A big attention grabber is the Grand Lodge logo and deep red banner at the top and the stately gray background, with the photo of the Grand Master in the middle. It definitely gives the feeling of authority and leadership, which carries through in the structure. Generally speaking, the site at first glance seems to have much to offer by way of content.
Built in one of the most scalable formats with navigation across the top and on the left side, the site can go a long way in adding future content. On the top navigation, there are a number of drop down tabs that a visitor can follow to their destination pages which emulates the side navigation (except when encountering password controlled lodge operations pages).
The site overall all has a good look and feel. Once the visitor gets into the navigation pages, they are treated to a variety of content anchored with images and icons. Unfortunately there was a lack of uniformity to the artwork and the various icon art the quality and tone detracting from the authoritative red/grey/and black color scheme.
On the front of the site, there is a great depth of navigation but not much to connect it visually to the state. Unlike the Grand Lodge of Arizona, with their immediate extensive use of imagery, here we find the opposite, in that there is no real visual connection to the state other than a small silhouette logo on the bottom right corner.
Informational Content:
I did find that the site has a lot of information in it. My favorite bits included the biography of Albert Pike and the well developed history of the Grand Lodge. Both of these elements added a great deal of depth, and give an impression of its connectivity to the fraternity.
Additionally, there is a great wealth of information for new Masons under the education link including break downs of the various Masonic symbols. This is a great asset that any visitor could make use of, particularly brothers from that state. The educational snippets, Awards programs, and the charitable endowment plans are good ways to let the membership know what is going on and how they can interact.
However, as the site has a lot of good Masonic information, it is very light of any conversion mechanism, meaning that for as much as any Masonic visitor would find the information interesting there isn’t much to showcase to a young first time visitor who may have an interest what Arkansas Masonry is about. On one hand, this seems to support the word of mouth development, but in an age increasingly shopping on line first, the site disengages the new or first time visitor with a lot of information.
Let me qualify this by saying that there is a “How to become a Mason” page, that is very thorough. It approaches the situation in a Q & A style FAQ by going through the myriad questions that a petitioner may have. This is not, by itself a bad system, but in an age when a visitor to a website spends about 90 seconds on content, the particulars of “How To” get lost in the volume of content. At the very bottom of that page is a link to “Contact the Membership Team” which leads to a form page for the aspirant to fill in, which is a great way to capture the information. The only thing I would suggest is to move that contact form to the top and with its own abbreviated “How To” and then insert it into the top level navigation so it stands out. As it stands now, it is three clicks deep (with the submission) from the main page, and buried in the site.
At the bottom of the left side navigation is the sites links page, with images to the appendant bodies and various organizations important to the state. It was good to see that the Grand Lodge recognized many of the various groups and listed them so a user could quickly click in and check them out. Some of the interesting links I found were the Ruffian Chapter of the Order of the Widow’s Sons (a Masonic motor cycle club), and the Scimitar Shrine of Little Rock. The links pages use of images in the navigation, I think, is a dynamic way to entice the viewer to look deeper into the content.
One thing I did not see was a page dedicated to contacting the Grand Lodge. The site does include its contact information at the bottom of each page with the address and phone number, but it limits users who want to send an electronic correspondence, unless it is to the webmaster. The quickest remedy to this is to add a page that could include addresses, maps, contact names, numbers, and email, and so on. Ideally this would also be in the mix of the top level navigation.
Calendar/Events/Call to Action:
The troubling thing I noticed right off was that the front page news tab was devoid of any news. This seems a natural place to include upcoming calendar items and events. As I ventured through the site, I did not easily find the calendar of activities around the state, or any informational mentioning anything that was going. Once at the calendar (located in the General Grand Lodge Links) I found a wide variety of information, from degrees, conferences, educational programs, banquets and so on. From a visitor stand point, because of its location, it leaves one wondering what to do when visiting or traveling to the state and it is not until after significant searching (clicking) that its activities became obvious. From an organizational stand point, the calendar would be an excellent inclusion for the front page news or to be grouped with the news so that it is easier to find.
Overall:
Generally, the sites informational content is good, and goes a long way to communicate to the membership about the Grand Lodge and its operations. But it does not address clearly the how and why to become a Mason efficiently, in that where it does go into detail it is to much information. It definitely gives a rich textual experience of what the state offers but misses tying it into some visual aspects of the state.
From the first time visitor stand point the site does not immediately engage with any conversion mechanism (look, click, sign-up). That may be overstating the purpose of the site, but it does not seem to take into consideration the non Mason who may visit with a keen interest to find out about Arkansas Masonry. As a quick comparison, the link mentioned above to the Scimitar Shrine is a very advanced and developed site with video and some interactivity which may be a glimpse into the level of importance (value) that the bodies place in their activities.
As a visiting Mason, the site is enjoyable and does entice additional time spent to look at its wealth of resources and goings on to get a feel for what Masonic life is like there. As a visiting non Mason, it definitely leaves me wondering why becoming a Arkansas Mason is valuable.
Not so much the physical age in years, but the age of its being. What I mean by that is the age of a Masonic existence in light of the age in which we live in today. The reason this seemed relevant to me was that as we examine the landscape of society, with its myriad of organization (both non profit and philanthropic) it seems that the age of the local community champion lodge has passed. I’ll admit that this is a generalization, that “what is in one place is not in all places” but in those areas that are diverse and developed, it would seem that the effectualness of the lodge, as it is presently configured, pales in comparison to the broader reach of the community in general. So the question that arises in my mind is if the drop in membership is something more than merely a drop of knowledge in the fraternity?
Stephen Dafoe, in an article written for the Journal of the Masonic Society (issue 2 autumn 2008) indicated that the problem was not a matter of poor showing, that many men were coming to the doors of the lodges, but that the problem was retention. Of those that did come, that the attrition rate was significant of those who returned, that the drop in membership was higher in Non Paid Dues and Suspensions for Not Paying Dues than in the completion of the degrees region wide. The study was on a very narrow slice of North American Masonry, but I think you can extrapolate the data to suggest a wider, more endemic issue, that once new members come, only a very small portion return year after year.
In the past, I’ve talked about the various reasons that some attribute to this: the lack of openness, the disparity in age, the degree of interest of those already in attendance, or the degree of which the aspirant to the west gate is prepared or ready to be made a mason, that those who petition are not of the right caliber or quality for the degrees and naturally leave of their doing.
But as much as those have been the problems, my question turned back to society in general: has something changed in the modern society that has shaped the aspirants’ idea (or perception) of what the Masonic lodge “should be”, and when they get there. Is it not what they expected? If the latter then it is a good lesson on expectations that seldom are they met, but underneath the surface of that expectation, is there something missing that society is pre-engineering into their consciousness that they are just not seeing when they enter into our chambers?
I plan to explore these ideas in upcoming posts to see if we can break down some of the ideas and formulate some new ideas to bring to the public forum. But before we can do that, I’m curious to know what you think. Is the drop of membership representative of something more? Is there a societal or sociological change in modern day that is different than it was 6o years ago?
Imagine if the richest people in the world got together to decide how you and your charitable dollars (given in person or through your hard spent marketed dollars) were parted. Well, on the heels of our conspiracy show this last Sunday, Tom Accousti of the Tao of Masonry pointed us to a Fox story about “secret” meeting of the richest entertainment/marketers who recently met behind closed doors to talk about charity.
The hit parade read like any secret G7 committee meeting: Buffett, Gates, Rockefeller, Turner, Winfrey, Bloomberg, Soros, all to discuss what they should do in light of the financial crisis.
“Each attendee was given 15 minutes to deliver a presentation on how they saw the future global economic climate, the future priorities for philanthropy, and what they felt the elite group should do.”
But, following our show Sunday, it makes me wonder, perhaps there is a secret cabal out there, only its not the Freemason’s calling the shots anymore, its the shining faces of capitolism 🙂
Other invitees included Eli and Edythe Broad, whose current fortune is estimated at $5.2B by Forbes Magazine; John Morgridge, former CEO of Cisco and his wife Tashia; Peter Peterson, senior chairman of the Blackstone Group; Julian Robertson, founder of Tiger Management Corp.; and Patty Stonesifer, former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Is it the Illuminati? What about Skull and Bones? I’ve heard about those Bilderbergs, and what’s up with the owl on the dollar bill? Its that Bohemian Grove isn’t it? Its those Freemasons isn’t it?
This Sunday, we are going to get to the bottom of all those conspiracy theories, as only the Freemason’s know how, buy diving in feet first and taking them on one buy one.
With the Illuminati back in the news with the release of Angels and Demons, we wanted to get to the bottom of all of these pervasive conspiracy theories that seem to keep popping up, and what better way to do it than on a Masonic Interweb show!
Were not just going to take Geronimo’s skull out of the closet, we really want to get to the bottom of why these ideas exist, who their greatest proponents are, and if in the information age they can stand the test of common sense.
The Freemasons, the Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Trilateral Commission, The Bilderberg Group, Bohemian Grove…
Well, we all know that the Freemasons are behind it, right?
Are there really any conspiracies out there that are seriously bent on control of the world?
Chris Hodapp at the blog Freemason for Dummies has posted up a pretty revealing (and scathing in its own way) analysis of the story that appeared in the Buffalo News.
The story is the further sentencing of brothers, who were also members of the Shrine’s Royal Order of Jesters (their website is gone, but a version exists in the wayback machine from 2011), who committed felony violation of the Mann Act, which prohibits transporting people across state lines for prostitution.
In this story, it details the expansion of the federal investigation where now other states are becoming involved as more allegations of bizarre actions of members are coming into question. And, consequently, a 2nd group in Big Sandy, Kentucky has been suspended pending investigation.
Truth be told, this has some very dark tones to what it portends, and if true, it will denigrate the fraternity more than one isolated situation.
What is being reported in the story are:
Prostitutes walking around parties, wearing only panties, soliciting Jesters to meet them later in their hotel rooms.
“Sex contests” involving prostitutes and Jesters members, performing in front of large groups of Jesters.
Off-duty cops in uniform, making sure that no non-Jesters entered the rooms where activities were going on.
Brother Gary N. Martin, who is the president of the 22,000-member Royal Order of Jesters, says that he is “disturbed about the allegations”. But that, to his knowledge, such conduct is extremely isolated and never condoned by the organization.
As a brother, the allegations disturb me too, and so to does the possibility of what this will say about the moral and upright fraternity of men.
Proudly, the Royal Order of Jesters say on their home page “The Royal Order of Jesters proudly believe and participate in Masonry“.
Is this really so “extremely isolated”? And does the activity warrant instructive tongues to correct?
Read Br. Hodapp’s piece on the article, then read the articles above.
In my opinion, I think its time for the Masonic Billiken to go, before its mirth making takes the fraternity down the drain.
What makes this so exciting is that the book sare works of Masonic fiction, a vein of Freemasonry little seen in today in Masonic literature.
Missed the Live Show? Listen now!
The stories are without a doubt fiction, but every bit intrigue and “who done it”. And what makes this series so interesting is that it explores the realm of the Masonic “what if” as the possibilities unfold of what brotherhood could be called to task for.
And, as most of these editions are books in Amazon Kindle editions, it gives us a unique chance to talk about publishing for the new millennium in e-editions.
which is a new examination of Kabbalah and its interconnectivity with Freemasonry. In it, he demonstrates how there are different interpretations of Freemasonry that can be found in the Sephirot and Paths, exploring Gematria and Masonic ritual.
, and 
, and the “Masonic tin foil cap wearing Grand Hierophant of Denver Airport” 
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