DRUIDICAL MYSTERIES.
The Druids were a sacred order of priests who existed in Britain and Gaul, but whose mystical rites were practised in most perfection in the former country, where the isle of Anglesea was considered as their principal seat. Godfrey Higgins thinks that they were also found in Germany, but against this opinion we have the positive statement of Caesar.
The meanings given to the word have been very numerous, and most of them wholly untenable. The Romans, seeing that they worshiped in groves of oak, because that tree was peculiarly sacred among them, derived their name from the Greek word, apes, drus thus absurdly seeking the etymology of a word of an older language in one comparatively modern. Their derivation would have been more reasonable had they known that in Sanskrit druma is an oak, from dru, meaning wood. It has also been traced to the Hebrew with equal incorrectness, for the Druids were not of the Semitic race. Its derivation is rather to be sought in the Celtic language. The Gaelic word Druiah signifies a holy or wise man; in a bad sense a magician; and this we may readily trace to the Aryan druh, applied to the spirit of night or darkness, whence we have the Zend dru, a magician. Druidism was a mystical profession, and in the olden time mystery and magic were always confounded. Charles Vallencey (Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicus, iii 503) says: "Walsh, Drud, a Druid, that is the absolver or remitter of sins; so the Irish Drui, a Druid, most certainly is from the Persic duru, meaning a good and holy man"; and Ousely (Collectanea Oriental iv, 302) adds to this the Arabic dari, which means a wise man. Bosworth (Anglo-Saxon Dictionary) gives dry, pronounced dru, as the Anglo-Saxon for a magician, sorcerer, druid. Probably with the old Celts the Druids occupied the same place as the Magi did with the old Persians.
Druidism was divided into three orders or Degrees, which were, beginning with the lowest the Bards, the Prophets, and the Druids. Godfrey Higgins thinks that the prophets were the lowest order, but he admits that it is not generally allowed. The constitution of the Order was in many respects like that of the Freemasons. In every country there was an Arch-Druid in whom all authority was placed. In Britain it is said that there were under him three arch-flamens or priests, and twenty-five flamens. There was an annual assembly for the administration of justice and the making of laws, and, besides, four quarterly meetings, which took place on the days when the sun reached his equinoctial and solstitial points. The latter two would very nearly correspond at this time with the festivals of Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist. It was not lawful to commit their ceremonies or doctrines to writing, and Caesar says (Commentarii de bello Gallico vi, 14) that they used the Greek letters, which was, of course, as a cipher; but Godfrey Higgins (page 90) says that one of the Irish Ogum alphabets, which Toland calls secret writing, "was the original, sacred, and secret character of the Druids."
The places of worship, which were also places of initiation, were of various forms: circular, because a circle was an emblem of the universe; or oval, in allusion to the mundane egg, from which, according to the Egyptians, our first parents issued; or serpentine, because a serpent was a symbol of Hu, the druidical Noah; or winged, to represent the motion of the Divine Spirit; or cruciform, because a cross was the emblem of regeneration.
Their only covering was the clouded canopy, because they deemed it absurd to confine the Omnipotent beneath a roof; and they were constructed of embankments of earth, and of unhewn stones, unpolluted with a metal tool. Nor was anyone permitted to enter their sacred retreats, unless he bore a chain.
The ceremony of initiation into the Druidical Mysteries required much preliminary mental preparation and physical purification. The aspirant was clothed with the three sacred colors, white, blue, and green; white as the symbol of Light, blue of Truth, and green of Hope. When the rites of initiation were passed, the tri-colored robe was changed for one of green; in the Second Degree, the candidate was clothed in blue; and having surmounted all the dangers of the Third, and arrived at the summit of perfection, he received the red tiara and flowing mantle of purest white. The ceremonies were numerous, the physical proofs painful, and the mental trials appalling. They commenced in the First Degree, with placing the aspirant in the pastes, bed or coffin, where his symbolical death was represented, and they terminated in the Third, by his regeneration or restoration to life from the womb of the giantess Ceridwin, and the committal of the body of the newly born to the waves in a small boat, symbolical of the ark. The result was, generally, that he succeeded in reaching the safe landing-place, but if his arm was weak, or his heart failed, death was the almost inevitable consequence. If he refused the trial through timidity, he was contemptuously rejected, and declared forever ineligible to participate in the sacred rites. But if he undertook it and succeeded, he was joyously invested with all the privileges of Druidism.
The doctrines of the Druids were the same as those entertained by Pythagoras. They taught the existence of one Supreme Being; a future state of rewards and punishment; the immortality of the soul, and a metempsychosis; and the object of their mystic rites was to communicate these doctrines in symbolic language, an object and a method common alike to Druidism, to the Ancient Mysteries and to Modern Freemasonry (see also Druidism, Dudley Wright, London, 1924, containing a bibliography of the subject).
DRUMMOND, JOSIAH HAYDEN.
Born 1827, Brother Drummond was made a Freemason in 1849, and died on October 25, 1902, aged seventy-five. He served at the head of all the Masonic Bodies of his State, Maine, and had also been Grand High Priest of the General Grand Chapter, Grand Master of the General Grand Council, and Grand Commander of the Supreme Council, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite. A Freemason for fifty-four years, this Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Maine, 1860 to 1862, was for thirty-eight y ears a vigorous writer of the Foreign Correspondence Reports and of other valuable works on Freemasonry. Christopher Diehl of the Grand Lodge of Utah wrote of him in the Proceedings of 1903, "His whole life was devoted to Freemasonry and for it he did his best work and because of that work he will live in the hearts of his Brethren for all time to come. The world is better off because he lived. His fame is secure. May his last sleep be sweet." At the anniversary of the one hundred years since the death of Washington, conducted by the Grand Lodge of Virginia at Mount Vernon on December 14, 1899, when no less than seventeen Grand Masters were present together with the President of the United States, Brother Drummond was introduced by the Grand Master as follows:
"First of all I wish to call upon one whom Freemasonry delights to honor. The most erudite and accomplished Masonic scholar our century has known, the charm of whose personality and the strength of whose character, coupled with a conservative, calm and judicial mind, has made him not only beloved but a power of usefulness throughout the whole Masonic Fraternity" (see` Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, 1900).
DRUSES.
A sect of mystic religionists who inhabit Mounts Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, in Syrian
294. They settled there about the tenth century, and are said to be a mixture of Cuthites or Kurds, Mardi Arabs, and possibly of Crusaders; all of whom were added, by subsequent immigrations, to the original stock to constitute the present or modern race of Druses.
Their religion is a heretical compound of Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedism; the last of which, greatly modified, predominates in their faith. They have a regular order of priesthood, the office being filled by persons consecrated for the purpose, comprising principally the emirs and sheiks, who form a secret organization divided into several Degrees, keep the sacred books, and hold secret religious assemblies. Their sacred books are written in antiquated Arabic. The Druses are divided into three classes or Degrees, according to religious distinctions. To enable one Druse to recognize another, a system of passwords is adopted, without an interchange of which no communication is made that may give an idea of their religious tenets (see Tien's Druse Religion Unveiled).
Doctor Clarke tells us in his Travels that "one class of the Druses are to the rest what the initiated are to the profane, and are called Okkals, which means spiritualists; and they consider themselves superior to their countrymen. They have various degrees of initiation."
Colonel Churchill in his Ten Years' Residence on Mount Lebanon, tells us that among this singular people there is an order having many similar customs to the Freemasons. It requires a twelve months' probation previous to the admission of a member. Both sexes are admissible.
In the second year the novice assumes the distinguishing mark of the white turban, and afterward, by Degrees, is allowed to participate ;,n the whole of the mysteries. Simplicity of attire, self-denial, temperance, and irreproachable moral conduct are essential to admission to the order.
All of these facts have led to the theory that the Druses are an offshoot from the early Freemasons, and that their connection with the latter is derived from the Crusaders, who, according to the same theory, are supposed to have acquired their Freemasonry during their residence in Palestine. Some writers go so far as to say that the Degree of Prince of Libanus, the Twenty-second in the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, refers to the ancestors of these mystical mountaineers in Syria.
Several chapters deal with the Dresses in the Secret Sects of Syria and the Lebanon, by Brother Bernard H. Springett, London.
DUAD.
The number two in the Pythagorean system of numbers.
DUALISM.
The state of being two-fold, as good and evil, for example. In the old mythologies, there was a doctrine which supposed the world to have been always governed by two antagonistic principles, distinguished as the good and the evil principle. This doctrine pervaded all the Oriental religions. Thus in the system of Zoroaster, one of the great religious teachers of the East! we have Ahriman and Ormuzd, and in the Hebrew cosmogony, their explanation of the system of the universe, we find the Creator and the Serpent. There has been a remarkable development of this system in the three degrees of Symbolic Freemasonry, which everywhere exhibit in their organization, their symbolism, and their design, the pervading influences of this principle of dualism. Thus, in the First Degree, there is Darkness overcome by might; in the Second, Ignorance dispersed by Snout e, and in the Third, Death conquered by Eternal Life
DUB.
In the ancient ceremonies of chivalry, a knight was made by giving him three strokes on the neck with the flat end of the sword, and he was then said to be dubbed a knight. Dubbing is from the Saxon, dubban, meaning to strike with a blow. sir Thomas Smith (English Commonwealth), who wrote in the sixteenth century, says:
And when any man is made a knight, he, kneeling down, is strooken of the prince, with his sword naked, upon the back or shoulder the prince saying, Sus or sois chevalier au nom de Dieu, the two expressions in French meaning Be of good cheer, Knight, in God's name, and in times past they added St. George, and at his arising the prince sayeth, Avancey. This is the manner of dubbing of knights at this present; and that terme dubbing was the old terme in this point, and not creation.
DUE EAST AND WEST.
A Lodge is said to be situated due east and west for reasons which have varied at different periods in the ritual and lectures (see Orientation).
DUE EXAMINATION.
That sort of examination which is correct and prescribed by law. It is one of the three modes of proving a strange Brother; the other two being strict trial and lawful information (see Vouching).
DUE FORM.
When the Grand Lodge is opened, or any other Masonic ceremony performed, by the Deputy Grand Master in the absence of the Grand Master, it is said to be done in due form. Subordinate Lodges are always said to be opened and closed in due form. It is derived from the French word du, and that from devoir, meaning to owe, that which is owing or ought to be done. Due form is the form in which an act ought to be done to be done rightly. The French expression is En due form (see Ample Form).
DUE GUARD.
A mode of recognition which derives its name from its object, which is to duly guard the person using it in reference to his obligations, and the penalty for their violation. The Due Guard is an Americanism, and of comparatively recent origin, being unknown to the English and Continental systems. In some of the old books of the date of 1757, the expression is used, but only as referring to what is now called the Sign. Dieu garde is similar in pronunciation to Due Guard and means God preserve. This similarity is worth consideration.
DUELING.
This has always been considered a Masonic crime, and some of the Grand Lodges have enacted statutes by which Freemasons who engage in duels with each other are subject to expulsion. The Monde Maçonnique, the Masonic World, a French publication, May, 1858, gives the following correct view on this subject:
A Freemason who allows himself to be involved in :3 duel and who possesses not sufficient discretion to be able to make reparation without cowardice and without having recourse to this barbarous extremity destroys by that impious act the contract which binds him to his brethren. His sword or his pistol, though it may seem to spare his adversary, still commits a murder for it destroys his brothers from that time fraternity no longer exists for him.
DUES.
The payment of annual dues by a member to his Lodge is a comparatively modern custom, and one that certainly did not exist before the revival of 1717. As previous to that period, according to Preston, Lodges received no Warrants, but a sufficient number of Brethren meeting together were competent to practice the Rites of Freemasonry, and as soon as the special business which called them together had been accomplished, they separated; there could have been no permanent organization of Speculative Freemasons, and no necessity for contributions to constitute a Lodge fund.
Dues must therefore have been unknown except in the Lodges of Operative Freemasons, which, as we find, especially in Scotland, had a permanent existence.
There is, accordingly, no regulation in any of the old Constitutions for the payment of dues. Brother Mackey held that it is not a general Masonic duty, in which the Freemason is affected to the whole of the Craft, but an arrangement between himself and his Lodge, with which the Grand Lodge ought not to interfere. As the payment of dues is not a duty owing to the Craft in general, so, in his opinion, the non-payment of them is not an offense against the Craft, but simply against his Lodge, the only punishment for which should be striking from the roll or discharge from membership.
Brother Mackey reports that in his day it was the almost universal opinion of Masonic jurists that suspension or expulsion from the Order is a punishment that should never be inflicted for non-payment of dues. However, the reader must be referred to the Masonic Code of his own Jurisdiction for the practice prevailing there.
DUMBNESS.
Inability to speak. Although the faculty of speech is not one of the five human senses, it is important as the medium of communicating instruction, admonition, or reproof, and the person who does not possess it is unfitted to perform the most important duties of life. Hence dumbness disqualifies a candidate for Masonic initiation.
DUMMY.
A word that has been used in the Grand Chapter of Minnesota to signify what is more usually called a substitute in the Royal Arch Degree.
DUNCKERLEY, THOMAS.
No one, among the Freemasons of England, occupied a more distinguished position or played a more important part in the labors of the Craft during the latter part of the eighteenth century than Thomas Dunckerley, whose private life was as romantic as his Masonic career was honorable.
Thomas Dunckerley was born in the city of London on the 23d of October, 1724. He was the reputed son of a Mr. and Mrs. (Mary) Dunekerley, but really owed his birth to a personage of a much higher rank in life, being the natural son of the Prince of Wales, afterward George II, to whom he bore, as his portrait shows, a striking resemblance. It was not until after his mother's death that he became acquainted with the true history of his birth; so that for more than half of his life this son of a king occupied a very humble position on the stage of the world, and was sometimes even embarrassed with the pressure of poverty and distress.
At the age of ten he entered the navy, and continued in the service for twenty-six years, acquiring, by his intelligence and uniformly good conduct, the esteem and commendation of all his commanders. But having no personal or family interest, he never attained to any higher rank than that of a gunner. During all this time, except at brief intervals, he was absent from England on foreign service.
He returned to his native country in January, 1760, to find that his mother had died a few days before, and that on her death-bed she had made 3 solemn declaration, accompanied by such details as left no possible doubt of its truth, that Thomas was the illegitimate son of King George II, born while he was Prince of Wales. The fact of the birth had, however, never been communicated by the mother to the prince, and George II died without knowing that he had such a son living.
Dunckerley, in the account of the affair which he left among his posthumous papers, says: "This information gave me great surprise and much uneasiness; and as I was obliged to return immediately to my duty on board the Vanguard, I made it Icnown to no person at that time but Captain Swanton. He said that those who did not know me would look on it to be nothing more than a gossip's story. We were then bound a second time to Quebec, and Captain Swanton did promise me that on our return to England he would endeavour to get me introduced to the king, and that he would give me a character; but when we came back to England the king was dead."
Dunckerley had hoped that his case would have been laid before his royal father, and that the result would have been an appointment equal to his birth. But the frustration of these hopes by the death of the king seems to have discouraged him, and no efforts appear for some time to have been made by him or his friends to communicate the facts to George III, who had succeeded to the throne.
In 1761 he again left England as a gunner in Lord Anson's fleet, and did not return until 1764, at which time, finding hiinself embarrassed with 3 heavy debt, incurred in the expenses of his family, for he had married in early life, in the year 1744, knowing no person who could authenticate the story of his birth, and seeing no probability of gaining access -to the ear of the king, he sailed in a merchant vessel for the Mediterranean. He had previously been granted superannuation in the navy in consequence of his long services, and received a small pension, the principal part of which he left for the support of his family during his absence.
But the romantic story of his birth began to be publicly known and talked about, and in 1766 attracted the attention of several persons of distinction, who endeavored, but without success, to excite the interest of the Prineess Dovvager of Wales in his behalf.
In 1767, however, the declaration of his mother was laid before the king, who was George III, the grandson of his father. It made an impression on him, and inquiry into his previous character and conduct having proved satisfactory, in May 7, 1767, the king ordered Dunckerley to receive a pension of £100, which was subsequently increased to £800, together with a suite of apartments in Hampton Courl; Palace. He also assumed, and was permitted to bear, the royal arms, with the distinguishing badge of the bend sinister, and adopted as his motto the appropriate words Fato non merito, meaning By destiny, not merit. In his familiar correspondence, and in his book-plates, he used the name of Fitzy George.
In 1770 he became a student of law, and in 1774 was called to the bar; but his fondness for an active life prevented him from ever making much progress in the legal profession.
Dunckerley died at Portsmouth in the year 1795, at the ripe age of seventy-one; but his last years were embittered by the misconduct of his son, whose extravagance and dissolute conduct necessarily afflicted the mind while it straitened the means of the unhappy parent. Every effort to reclaim him proved utterly ineffectual; and on the death of his father, no provision being left for his support, he became a vagrant, living for the most part on Masonic charity. At last he became a bricklayer's laborer, and was often seen ascending a ladder with a hod on his shoulders. His misfortunes and his misconduct at length found an end, and the grandson of a king of England died a pauper in a cellar at St. Giles.
Dunckerley was initiated into Freemasonry on January 10, 1754, in a Lodge, No. 31, which then met at the Three Tuns, Portsmouth; in 1760 he obtained a Warrant for a Lodge to be held on board the Vanguard, in which ship he was then serving; in the following year the Vanguard sailed for the West Indies, and Dunckerley was appointed to the Prince, for which ship a Lodge was warranted in 1762; this Warrant Dunckerley appears to have retained when he left the service, and in 1766 the Lodge was meeting at Somerset House, where Dunckerley was then living. In 1768 the Vanguard Lodge was revived in London, with Dunckerley as its first Master, and it exists to the present day under the name of the London Lodge, No. 108.
In 1767 he joined the present Lodge of Friendship; in 1785 he established a Lodge at Hampton Court, now No. 255. In 1767 he was appointed Provincial Grand Master of Hampshire, and in 1776 Provincial Grand Master for Essex, and at various dates he was placed in charge of the provinces of Bristol, Dorsetshire, Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, and Herefordshire. In Royal Arch Masonry Dunckerley displayed equal activity as in Craft Masonry; he was exalted at Portsmouth in 1754 and in 1766 joined the London Chapter, which in the following year became a Grand Chapter.
He was especially active in promoting Arch Masonry all over the country and was in charge of the English counties of Essex, Hants, Kent, Wilts, Dorset, Devon, Somerset, Gloucester, Suffolk, Sussex and Durham.
He was also a most zealous Knight Templar, being in 1791 the first Grand Master of the Order when the Grand Conclave was formed in London.
He was also a Mark Mason. A Charge, or Oration, is still extant, which was delivered by him at Plymouth in April, 1757, entitled The Light and Truth of Masonry Explained. He was also the author of A Song for the Knights Templar, and of an Ode for an Exaltation of Royal Arch Masons. These will be found in Thomas Dunckerley—his Life, Labours and Letters, by H. Sadler, 1891. Brother Hawkins in submitting the foregoing article points out that it is often asserted that Dunckerley revised the Craft Lectures and reconstructed the Royal Arch Degree, but there is no proof forthcoming of these statements. However, we may add to the comment by Brother Hawkins an observation by Brother Sadler (page 224) where he tells us that the publication of the various Charges, etc., by Brother Dunckerley are of such a character that they not unlikely thereby originated the tradition that he had revised or remodeled the Craft Lectures; but to Brother Sadler it seemed more than probable that the compiler of the Lectures made a very free use of Dunckerley's brains in the work of compilation.
DUPATY, LOUIS EMANUEL CHARLES MERCIER.
The author of many Masonic songs and other fugitive pieces inserted in the Annales Maçonniques. He wrote in 1810, with Révéroui de Saint-Cyr a comic opera entitled Cagliostro ou les Illuminés In 1818 he published a Masonic tale entitled l'Harmonie. He was a poet and dramatic writer of some reputation. He was born in the Gironde in 1775, elected to the French Academy in 1835, and died in 1851.
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