DALLAWAY, JAMES.
James Dallaway's Discourses on Architecture (at page 265 of this Encyclopedia) contains a chapter on that important but almost completely neglected branch of Operative Masonry which usually is described as military architecture, and included castles, forts, fortifications, piers, redoubts, etc.— the great Crusaders castels in Palestine are the most famous examples, though ruins of them in Scotland have been more often viewed by tourists. The castles often were unimaginably extensive, filled with stories, rooms, towers, halls, and they could have been built only by the most expert Masons. If the Fabric Rolls, or building records, and detailed histories of the masterpieces of this branch of the building art were published, and if in addition they included Priories and Houses of the Knights of the Temple and of Malta, they might (almost certainly would) throw a new light on Medieval Freemasonry. Dallaway, at least, believed so; but Masonic writers have not followed his lead. He states that Doomsday Book lists 49 castles, and that castle architecture originated in Normandy, in the very center of what was to become the first beachhead area established by Allied Armies in the invasion of the Continent in 1944. At page 421 he gives a list, surprisingly long, of Master Builders from about 1100 until about 1530 A.D.. Dallaway quotes Adam Smith (in Wealth of Nations, probably) as saying "that wages are 15 times increased since the eleventh century."
The Rev. James Dallaway was born at Bristol, Eng., February 20, 1763. He was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries; had his degrees from Oxford; served as chaplain at Constantinople; and from 1792 to 1834 was Secretary to Charles, Duke of Norfolk. (The eighth Duke of Norfolk had been Grand Master, the Grand Lodge of England, in 1730-1731.) Both Charles, Duke of Norfolk and Dallaway very probably were Masons, but there are no available records to prove it; and the assumption is based on the fact that Dallaway wrote a number of works on architecture, heraldry, and the arts. A Series of Discourses on Architecture in England (London; John Williams; 1833) would have an unchallenged place in a set of Masonic classics if ever a publisher were inspired to erect such a monument in the midst of Masonic literature, which is 90 large, and yet has done so little either to recognize or to honor its own masterpieces. It is a wise, learned, quiet book, and is written in that English which was possible only to writers who had married to the Anglo-Saxon speech the Latin and the Greek they had learned to read as boys.
DARKNESS.
Ignorance is not lack of knowledge. If it were there could be no learned men because the most learned men lack knowledge about innumerable things. A man may know twenty or thirty languages, as did Pico delta Mirandola, but as against the 2,750 languages used in the world that number is insignificant. Aristotle was 'the prince of them that know" but he had never heard of North and South America.
Such scholars as Roscoe Pound, Kirsopp Lake, and George P. Baker have an amazing erudition, but the arts, and occurrences, and subjects about which they lack knowledge are beyond counting. blot to have knowledge is not a failure, or a limitation, or a fault; and nothing can be wider of the truth than the definition of ignorance as lack of knowledge.
Ignorance is the lack of that particular knowledge which a man needs, which he requires in order to carry on his work, which he is under a moral obligation to have. If a physician does not know Sanskrit he is not therefore ignorant; but if he does not know anatomy, physiology, pathology, diagnosis, and prescription he is an ignoramus, and is obtaining money under false pretenses. It is not required of a farmer that he know Shakespeare by heart or be able to name the stars but if he does not know how to care for livestock or to raise crops he will go bankrupt. No man thought the less of the immense erudition of Edward Gibbon because he knew nothing of the history of the American Indian and had never read the traditions of the Polynesians, but if he had lacked knowledge of the history of the Romans he would have been ostracized by his colleagues and held in contempt by the public. A man is a man and not an angel or a god, is born an infant unable to walk or to talk, must learn by labor, and as he grows must know how to speak, eat, clothe himself, and make his way; he must know enough to take care of himself and his family, to do his duties as a citizen, to do his work, to be an associate of others, to have friends and neighbors; if he lacks sufficient knowledge to be a man he is an ignoramus and there is no hope for him, either in himself or elsewhere. When it is thus correctly defined it is easy to see that the early theologians were right when they numbered ignorance among the sins, because there is no need for any man to be ignorant; if he is in ignorance it is because he decided to be so, and did so deliberately, so that he has no excuse and is entitled to the contempt under which he stands. Whoever is able to walk and to talk, to look and listen, to go and come, to eat, and sleep, and dress himself, to act, to move, and to be in motion is able to learn what is required to be a man and to work. If a man refuses to learn it he is in guilt.
The first Freemasons must have had a peculiarly passionate hatred of ignorance because they filled the Ritual with warnings against it. Darkness is the symbol of ignorance in general.
The North is the home of darkness because the sun does not rise in it in any of the seasons, therefore none of the Work of the Lodge is ever done in the North—no Officer is stationed in it nor is a Candidate ever taken there. The Petitioner comes from the Outer Darkness and therefore, like a shapeless stone from the quarries, he comes in the shapelessness of ignorance.
An ignorant man is poor, blind, destitute; he must be conducted about with a cable-tow; he is like a man with a hoodwink over his eyes; he has no Working Tools, and would not know hove to use them if he did. To escape from this darkness the first Degree makes an apprentice of him; and the second Degree teaches him that he must have an education which can be found only when he toils up the three, five, and seven steps of the Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Third Degree shows what it means to a man and to his fellows and to the world if he is not enlightened enough to work according to the laws and be in harmony with his associates. He can be neither a master of his work nor of himself until he has been raised from darkness unto light; otherwise Low Twelve will toll for him and he will be cast to the rubbish because the end of ignorance is confusion, crime, squalor, and poverty. And so the Ritual proceeds, precept upon precept line upon line, employing every device of art and of teaching to show a Candidate how ill and how accursed it is for men to dwell in ignorance.
For eight centuries Masons have been champions of schooling and of education. In the Operative Period thay trained their own Apprentices, supported gild schools, raised funds for scholarships, and preached everywhere the Liberal Arts and Sciences.
For many years in America before citizens were able or willing to support public schools by taxation they organized and supported school societies, paid tuition for students, and fostered or founded colleges; and in each home for the orphans of Masons it is their first concern to provide the means of education. If a Mason, one who has taken the OB. . and accepted the privileges of membership, lacks knowledge about Masonry itself, he is an ignorant man; to guard against that fateful lack of knowledge the Fraternity carries on the everincreasing activities of Masonic education. The motto of Freemasonry is, "Let there be Light!" If a land be in the darkness of ignorance, how great is that darkness!
DARWIN, CHARLES, AND MASONRY.
Dr. Erasmus Darwin was almost as famous in England in the Eighteenth Century as his grandson, Charles Darwin, was to become in the Nineteenth, because in addition to being an eminent physician, poet, and scientist (author of Zoönomia, The Botanic Garden, etc ) he was the first man in England to suggest those ideas which later were to be embodied in the Darwinian Theory by his grandson, and to be brought into the stream of popular discussion by Tennyson and Herbert Spencer before the publication of-Darwin's Orgin of Species in 1859; the fountainhead of these ideas was the Philosophical (an old name for scientific) Society which Dr. Erasmus Darwin founded in his home city of Derby in 1788. Before coming to Derby the Doctor had been made a Mason in the famous Time Immemorial Lodge of Cannongate Kilwinning, No. 2, of Scotland.
Sir Francis Darwin, one of the Doctor's sons, was made a Mason in Tyrian Lodge, No. 253, at Derby, in 1807 or 1808. His son Reginald was made a Mason in Tyrian Lodge in 1840. The name of Charles Darwin does not appear on the rolls of the Lodge but it is very possible that he, like Francis, was a Mason. At the time he left Derby to attend the university he was studying for the ministry.
The names of Charles Darwin's two predecessors among the great thinkers of England are in a like case. Some of the early editions of the Book of Constitutions contain a Letter on Masonry attributed to John Locke, but from internal evidence the genuineness of the Letter is doubted. The name of Sir Isaac Newton is not found on any Lodge roster, but there is a likelihood that he was a Mason. Dr. Desaguliers, architect of the first Grand Lodge, was Secretary of the Royal Society and for many years was so close a friend to Newton that the latter was godfather of Dr. Desaguliers' daughter. Next to his own work the Royal Society was Newton's constant care and preoccupation; almost every member in it in its first period was a Mason—ten were members in one Lodge; a London Lodge and the Royal Society Club met in the same room. There is a Sir Isaac Newton Lodge at Cambridge. The introduction of the Terrestrial and Celestial Globes into the Second Degree may have originated in the close connection between the first Grand Lodge and scientists and scientific bodies, of w hich there were many.
For the Darwin family Masonic record see The Centenary Celebration of the Texan Lodge, No. 2B; Derby; Second Edition; published in Derby by W. Bacon.
DAYS, ST. JOHNS' AND OTHER HOLY,
When a Lodge of Operative Freemasons, acting through their Head or Superintendent or Master of Masons, made a contract with some bishop, prior, abbott, lord or king for erecting a building, there was always the question of holy days to be covered in the terms. On how many of these were the Freemasons to stop work? If they did not work were they to be paid? In a number of Fabric Rolls it is evident that a certain number of holidays were agreed on, that the Freemasons were to be paid on half if they did not work and not paid on the other half of them; and that a number of holidays were to be ignored.
Why it was that Symbolical Lodges selected the two St. John's days nobody has discovered. One of them came at the end of the year; the other at its middle; this was convenient when new Lodge officers were elected every six months, and Grand Lodge held Communications every quarter. Two or three of the Masons Companies, which were organized in the cities and are not to be confused with the Fraternity at large, appear to have considered St. Thomas ŕ Becket their Patron Saint—and as stated on another page it has been suggested that the overthrow of that Bishop had been commemorated in the Tragedy of HA.°.
In his Rest Days: A Study in Early Law and MoraZity (Macmillan Co.; New York; 1916), and in his Primitive Secret Societies (one of the golden books for a Masonic student), Professor Hutton Webster shows in data collected from around the world that the farther back a historian goes in time the more holy days there seem to have been. In the most ancient time, as among uncivilized men now, there were many tabooed days. There was almost everywhere a belief in mars, a potent and active and invisible somewhat, like a soul, in each object, plant, and animal, and this mana was dangerous. The idea of it was transposed into the idea of a day; when so, such a day became tabooed; it possessed mana.
In the Middle Ages each day had an individuality. It had its own name; often it had something to do with the sun, or moon, or zodiac; for some undertakings a dav was propitious, for others it was baleful. Market days, rare and longed-for events in small towns, took on a sabbatical color; the butcher carried his meats to his stall and the merchant carried his cloth to his booth in a religious procession.
The Babylonians had had a planetary week of seven days, one for each of the planets then known. They made much of the moon, and of lunar symbols in naming their days. "In the old Roman calendar," writes Webster, "out of 355 days, nearly one-third (one hundred and nine) were marked as nefasti, that is, as unlawful for judicial and political business." (Rest Days; page 304.) Augustus reduced this to 66, against a clamorous opposition from the priests. In the time of Tiberius this had again increased to 87. Marcus Aurelius made it 135. In the Fourth Century, and after Italy had become Christian, the people had 175 holidays per year. In Russia, in the period after the Orthodox Church was established, the Russians loafed away one-third of their year. By sweeping away the holy days except for Sunday, the Reformation almost doubled Europe's working time, and consequently its wealth.
There is no trace anywhere of any superstitions about holy days among Operative Masons, or among early Speculative Masons; and pace those writers, moonstruck themselves, who in their lectures and their books have argued that Freemasonry originated in ancient sun worship, or Babylonian lunar cults, or in Medieval astrology, for they are little informed about astrology and less about Masonry; furthermore, to uphold their theory anent the early Operative Freemasons they would have to discover evidences of the old superstitions in the design, shape, sculptures, emblems, statuary, ornaments of the Gothic buildings. If any such evidences are there they have been invisible to the eye for many centuries.
In reality there are in Freemasonry two sets of Sts. John, and to confuse the two is to become confused about the history of Masonry and about the Ritual. In one set, the emphasis is on the days; they are a form of calendar; since they mark the longest and the shortest days they stand for the two seasonal extremes of the year; and hence Officers are elected at the end of the year. The other set is ritualistic and symbolic, and they have scarcely more in common with the others than that the names are the same. In the symbolism the emphasis is placed not on the dates but on the men. They represent the two extremes between which fall every type of men, of personality, of talent, of temperament, of vocation, of standing, etc.; as such they are the two parallel lines, or boundaries, of the eirele of Brotherhood; and the Tragedy of HA.°. taking place between them means that it ts truefor you regardless of what manner of man you are. And when early Speculative Masons associated these lines and Saints with the Pillars and the Globes they proved themselves to possess a true insight, for together this system of symbolism exhibits the truth that Freemasonry is universal along each and every dimension (in Masonry the directions are north, east, south, west, the zenith, the nadir); universal in the world, in time, and within manhood.
The gilds and fraternities of England included between 100 and 200 trades, callings, arts, and professions. In the cities and larger towns these were organized in companies. Such a company had a threefold character:
1. to organize and control work, goods, and wages;
2. to be a religious and charitable society;
3. to be a social fellowship with feasts, entertainments, and processions.
With very few exceptions, the Ironworkers being the most conspicuous, each Company was dedicated to a Saint, and was so designated in its charter; and this meant it would have pictures and images of that Saint in its Hall and on its Regalia would celebrate its Saint's Day as a holiday, would go in procession to worship in a church or chapel devoted to the Saint, would support a hospital or School or orphanage in his name, would have prayers made to him, etc. Thus the Drapers were devoted to the Virgin Mary; the Fishmongers to St. Peter; the Merchant Tailors, St. John the Baptist; the Leathersellers, the Virgin Mary; the Grocers, St. Anthony; the Fruiterers, St. Martin; the Salters and the Skinners (furs) were dedicated to Corpus Christi. Its Saint's Day was a Company's fixed point in the calendar year; on it the members elected or installed its officers, or else at a time fixed as so many days before or after it. When the new Grand Lodge of Speculative Masons chose as their Patrons the two Sts. John they were acting according to a time immemorial custom, and it would have been deemed so scandalous if they had not done so that many would have refused to join its Lodges. (See Chapters IX to XIII inclusive in Historical Reminiscences of the City of London and its Livery Companies, by Thomas Arundel, London; 1869.)
DEGREE PROBLEM, THE.
The Degree Problem has been under continuous discussion for almost a century.
How many Degrees were conferred in Lodges at the time of the organization of the first Grand Lodge in 1717?
How many were conferred before 1717?
Were there Side Orders and High Grades prior to 1717?
or were they constructed out of hand in the Eighteenth Century?
For years the most learned Masons believed that only one Degree had been conferred before 1717; then for many years the belief was prevalent that two had been conferred; at the present an increasing number of men (Baxter, Meekren, Lepper, etc.) are beginning to believe that there had been three. This long, unbroken work of research on a single question has been extraordinarily fruitful because while prosecuting it scholars have discovered data of other kinds which they had not been looking for, so many of them that these by-products would fill volumes; but the original question is not yet answered. The limits of space make it impossible to set out in detail a history of the arguments and findings; what follows is a general conspectus, and even then is one in outline only, and also contains questions which as yet remain unexplored:
1. The word "Degree" itself did not come into general use until well after the beginnings of Speculative Freemasonry. It is doubtful if a Mason of the Thirteenth Century or even of the Seventeenth Century could have 3 guessed what would be meant by it. Would it not, therefore, be wise to drop the word from discussions of any period prior to about 1740-1750? Even now the word continues to be ambiguous because it is used interchangeably with the word "Lodge"—to give one instance of many, a Candidate is initiated into and by not a Degree of Entered Apprentices but a Lodoe of them. "Degree" is for that reason a mere label convenient but ambiguous, and for only a portion of the Work done in a Lodge.
2. It is known that prior to the Seventeenth Century the word Lodge had a flexible meaning: a temporary assembly on Masons for one day, a band of Masons organized to work together for a period of time under a Master of Masons; the room or building used by them; any one
of these was a Lodge- After 1717 the Speculative Lodges continued to use the word with the same flexibility: there were a Grand Lodged constituent Lodges, Grand Stewards Lodge, a Masters Lodge, a Grand Masters' Lodge, a Lodge of Reconciliation, a Lodge of Promulgation a Lodge of Instruction, a Provincial Grand Lodge, Ambulatory Lodges, a Lodge of Sorrow, ete. and within this framwork were Lodges of Apprentices, of Fellowcrafts, Masters, the Royal Arch, Mark Lodge, etc. Is it not reasonable to think that since in the earlier period of Speculative Masonry the Lodge was the primary unit, that symbols and ceremonies might be shifted back and forth from one Lodge to another without it being considered questionable? and that some symbol or ceremony which one Lodge used in its Apprentice Lodge might be used by another in its Felloweraft Lodge? A Masters' Lodge in the 1730's met separately from other Lodges, was composed of members drawn from a number of Lodges, and admitted to membership Candidates from any of them : it met (usually) on a Sunday, and since its Work took two or three hours it must have been rich in rites and ceremonies; if some of these symbols and ceremonies were turned back to the Felloweraft Lodge, others to a Master Lodge to be henceforth a part of each Lodge, and others to a new Lodge (or Chapter) of the Royal Arch, it is probable that few Masons would have questioned the redistribution. This would not hold true of the Modes of Recognition and certain other equally fixed elements, but it might easily have held true for a number of symbols, ceremonies and explanatory lectures. The oldest Tracing Boards Huggest that this very probably occurred- If so, the question is not how many Degrees a Lodge had in 1717, or prior to 1717; but how many symbols. ceremonies and rites it had.
3 A comparison of the Minute Books and Histories of the sixty or so of the oldest Lodges one with one another shows that in the eyes of the members the divisions of ceremonial material were not fixed and crystallized because they use many different names for such divisions as they had: Lodge, Degree, Grade, Step, Part, Rank, ete.; the nomenclature was so fluid that even in the same Minutes what was called a Step in one entry was called a Part in another. It is a reasonable hypothesis that the Apprentiice and the Fellowcraft were identified by an OB.-. and a set of Modes of Identification rather than by two Grades; that the Past Master was considered to be more or less of a Rank; that the Raising ceremony was called a Lodge, and that there where other ceremonies of a still more fluid character which sometimes were thought of as a Side Degree and sometimes as a High Grade. Here and there are encountered references to a Side Order caned The Book, Scotch Masons (these were in a Lodge, and were occasionally resented for "their high and mighty airs"); Priests Pillar Masons; Hedge Masons- etc. It also is a reasonable hypothesis that the Tracing Boards, or Tracing Cloths (or Lodge Boards, etc.) may have been the catalytic agent which ultimately brought about the crystallization of the ceremonial material into at least four separately organized Lodges (Degrees), each independent of the others, each with its own place, time, nomenclature, Minutes, and sets of officers; for it appears that a given initiation ceremony was performed while the members sat at table, with a Floor Cloth on the floor, and a set of explanatory comments (Lectures) to convey its meanings to the Candidate. The differences of these Floor Cloths from one Lodge to another is another testimony of the fluidity of the Ritual material during the earliest years.
4. In the Operative customs prior to about 1600 Apprentice, Felloweraft, and Master were each the name of a status rather than that of a unit of ceremony. The apprentice was an indentured lad who had taken an oath of obedience to his Master and the rules of the Craft- the Fellow was a man who had completed apprenticeship, the Master was the superintendent of the workmen. Competent, well-trained Freemasons were called Masters (Magistri) in the sense of having mastered the art. The reception of an Apprentice at the beginning, and the day of a graduating into Fellowship were both ocasions, and there is every reason to believe that they were accompanied by much ceremony—if they were not the Freemasons were the exceptions to a general rule, because Medieval men were ceremonious to an extreme. Hughan assumed. and Bros. Knoop and Jones followed him in it that what was earliest in the history of the Craft was therefore most meager, bare, simple. Their assumption cannot be disproved by written documents (as how could it be! the Freemasons did not write down their ceremonies), but it is possible to reason from what is known about gild or craft customs in the Middle Ages generally those customs would suggest that the Operative Masons had very much more ritualistic and ceremonial material than we have now. Also, that their ceremonies were not organized into one or two Degrees, but were of many sorts, and were used at different times for different purposes. It is safe to guess that they may have had, for example, a dozen ceremonies of the type of circumambulation and dedication, because cathedrals and large churches were completed in units, such as the nave, the tower a crypt for a tomb, the choir, ete., and there would be a ceremony of dedication or consecration for each unit There were processions; pageants; distinctive clothing badges; feasts; etc.; and a strange Craftsman arriving from another place looking for work was ceremoniously received. If the argument presented in this Supplement on FREEMASONRY, DEFINITION OF (P. 1234), be accepted that which is the core or essence of Speculative Freemasonry acted over the centuries as a principle of selecetion; the system of rites and symbols which we now have are the result of that selection. If so, it does not matter whether a given symbol or ceremony is one hundred years old or eight hundred.
An even more difficult, at least a more complex "Degree problem," is the question as to the origin of the Degrees other than the first three. How old are they? Whence did they come? What connection have they with the Ancient Craft Degrees? Are they also of ancient origin, as their legends suggest, or are they "modern inventions," as Gould alleged? There is not even an agreement on the names appropriate to them; they are called High Grades (the old and most authentic name), Additional Degrees, Concordant Degrees, Ranks, Orders, etc. Under the limitations of space only a few generalizations can be suggested in answer:
1. The Royal Arch Degrees belong properly to Ancient Craft Masonry; dovetail into its Work- and the Royal Arch itself was until well toward the end of the beginning of the Nineteenth Century either a second part of the Third Degree, or a Side Degree attached to a Lodge, ete.
2. Modern Knight Templarism appeared in Seotland and England late in the Eighteenth Century. It has a legend which connects it with the Knights Templarism of the Middle Ages, but unless new data are discovered it will continue to be only a legend.
3. The Scottish Rite Degrees originated in Europe and most of them in France; in the Eighteenth Century and the tableau of Degrees in the Work of the American Scottish Rite is a selection (and at the same time a modifieation) from a large number of Continental Rites.
4. One fact stands out clear and plain: the Ancient Craft Degrees (including the Royal Arch) possess every external and internal evidence of having grown out of a historical development over many centuries of time- this rootedness in the past, this quality of historical custom, this sense of having grown and not of having been invented, is their salient characteristie. The High Grades on the other hand possess every external and internal evidence of having been erected on the basis of the alreadyexisting Craft Ritual; of being elaborations or interpretations of it, or of having been suggested by it, or or taking their point of departure from it, or of being philosophical treatiseson themes furnished by it. Even the Knight Templar ceremonies and the legends in Knight Templarism and the Scottish Rite which appear to be so remote from Medieval architectural practices are not as remote as they appear to be, and their symbolisms can be translated into a calculus common to both them and the Craft Degrees.
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