IMPRESSMENT OF MASONS.
A record of the 1590's shows that at that period there were Lodges in existence in Great Britain which had both Operatives and non-Operatives in their membership; and the records of that period indicate that such Lodges had been in existence long before 1590. The first written version of the Old Charges was made it is believed, in the middle of the Fourteenth Century, or during the latter half of it. These Lodges were small in membership, therefore only a few of the men in the building trades were in them. These two facts together suggest that there must have been some special occasions, some particular event, or unusual set of circumstances, at some time and place, to account for these special Masonic organizations. There are two known historical occasions, either one of which would satisfy this theory.
One of these has been carefully studied by Bros. Knoop and Jones in a paper published in Economic History, February, 1937, entitled "The Impressment of Masons for Windsor Castle"; and to a more limited extent by Knoop, Jones, and Hamer w in The Two Earliest Masonic MSS., pp. 12, 13, 23. On page 12 of the latter they write:
' For the supply of these wage workers the Crown relied to a considerable extent upon impressments. The practice of ' pressing ' masons, as well as other craftsmen and labourers, was very eommon at this period. (1300 to 1400.) fin some eases orders were issued to sheriffs to take masons and to send them to certain royal works by specified dates; in other cases the master mason or clerk of the works at some particular building operation was authorized to ' press ' such labour as was required. Oeeasionally the Crown would authorize the Chureh or other employers to 'impress masons'."
After referring to the cases of impressment in Wales, they write on page 23: "The influence exerted, however, was probably slight compared with that exercised by the greatly increased use of impressment from 1344 onwards and in particular by its wholesale adoption in 136S3, when Masons from almost every county in England were assembled in such large numbers at Windsor Castle, that the continuator of the Polychronicon could write that William Wykeham had gathered at Windsor almost all the masons and carpenters in England. Though the chronicler's statement was doubtless an exaggeration, the vast gathering of Masons at Windsor in 136S3 must have marked an epoch in Masonic history and probably contributed more than any other single event to the unification and consolidation of the Masons' customs, and very possibly led to their first being set down in writing."
(Note. It does not follow that violence was used in the impressment of masons and carpenters; it Mras the only available means by which large numbers of craftsmen could be brought together at one time and place.)
In his The Masonic Poem of 1390, Circa, (page 28) Bro. Roderick H. Baxter notes a similar concentration of craftsmen, a ad, as will transpire from the paragraph, it has one advantage over the above suggestion. He is referring to the Regius MS.:
"So far as the location of the writing is concerned, Dr. Begemann, after a careful and minute philological enquiry into the dialects of the country, succeeded in placing it at the South of Worcestershire or Herefordshire or even the North of Gloucestershire. [Dialects in the period hardly stopped short of being separate languages.] Assuming this conclusion to be correct— and no one, so far as I am aware, has ever tried to controvert it—we have only to examine the architectural remains in this district, to find that great activity of building was proceeding at the time of writing. The cathedrals of Worcester, Hereford and Gloucester—to say nothing of the various abbeys and minor buildings in the neighborhood—all exhibit remarkable traces of the architecture of the period, and although a similarity of activity could of course be traced to other parts of the country, I think this evidence may fairly be accepted as confirmatory of our learned Brother's view [Begemann]. so far as I am personally concerned, I would like to assume that the poem [Regtus MS.] was written for the benefit of the craftsmen engaged in the erection of the beautiful (and unusually placed) cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral, for Mr. Wyatt Papworth tells us, that the work was completed under Abbot Froucester between 1381 and 1412, dates which very nearly coincide with the range of time during which experts have placed the writing. "
There is yet a third possibility, although it has no connection with the subject of impressment, and it has the advantage of conforming to an old tradition. This is the possibility that the required set of special circumstances may have occurred at York. According to old records the first church was built there in 627 A.D. (This is according to Bede.) This was destroyed by fire in 741 A.D. In 767 A.D. a second, and much larger church was built, but this also was destroyed by fire in 1069 when Northumbrians attacked the city. In 1070 a Norman, Archbishop Thomas, rebuilt the church; in 1171 a new Choir was built; a new Nave was begun in 1291 and completed in 1340. This latter date brings us into the period presupposed for the original version of the Old Charges, and when, according'to this writer's own hypothesis, the first independent, permanent Lodges began to appear. The Presbytery was begun in 1361, completed in 1373. The Choir (presupposing the old one had been lost by fire) was begun in 1380, completed in 1400. In 1405 the central tower was begun, and other equally important operations continued until 1472. (A set of Fabric Rolls is authority for much of this data.) Thus, as Albert G. Mackey says, "For the long period of eight hundred and fortyfive years, with some halting, the great work of building a cathedral in the city of York was pursued by Freemasons . . . " (And other buildings also; see Clegg's Mackey's Revised History of Freemasonry, page 1135 ff.) Dr. Begemann placed the writing of the Refries MS. in Herefordshire—Worcestershire—Gloucestershire but the Regius was a copy of an original; the latter may well have been written in York.)`
INDIA.
George Pomfret was in 1728 appointed by the Grand Lodge of England to be Provinciall Grand Master of East India (not to be confused with the East Indies) but nothing farther is known of him.
The following year Captain Ralph Farwinter succeeded him, and in 1730 constituted Lodge No 72 in Bengal. (In 1731 he sent a gift of money and liquor to the Grand Lodge at London; he did not receive a reply until two years afterwards. India suffered as much as did the Provincial Grand Lodges in America from the silences, always long and often absolute, of the Grand Secretary in London; the Grand Secretary- ship appears for many years to have been a paralytic arm of the Mother Grand Lodge except in the immediate circles of London.) The first Lodge on the Coast
of Coromandel was established at Madras in 1752. In the Presidency of Bombay, Lodge No. 234 was constituted at Bombay in 1758, and Lodge No. 569 at Surat in 1798; a Provincial Grand Master was appointed in 1763. Ceylon received no Lodge until 1761, when a military Lodge was brought there by a regiment with a Charter from the Antient Grand Lodge.
It will thus be seen that the planting of the Craft in India coincided with the period of its establishment in America, and by English merchants, soldiers, and sailors first, followed by Irish and Scottish. The Lodges were of the same pattern, used the same Constitutions and Rituals, were composed of men of the same type; and as with Indians here so with Hindus there, it was not until long afterwards and then in small numbers only that they began to be admitted into membership. Of Freemasonry itself, there was in India no trace before the white man arrived. Some Theosophists, Rosicrucians, and other occultists have argued that Freemasonry originated in India, but they produce no facts and their reasoning is weak—as when one of them argues that the thread worn by a Brahmin around his neck is the origin of the Cable Tow! In no other land in the world were the social, political, and religious customs less likely to produce Freemasonry, or anything similar to it in principles and teachings.
The whole people were cut asunder by a caste system which made impossible any universality or meeting on the level or fraternalism; the 500 or so native states were (and still are) under personal despotisms which have always forbidden free associations; the religious cleavages are as abysmic as the caste cleavages; and nothing is farther from the truth than the notion that because the religion called Hinduism finds room in it for a million gods it would therefore find room in it for
a million religions; its gods are Hindu gods, and it has never yet found room in itself for Mohammedanism, Judaism, Buddhism (it drove Buddhism out of India), Lamaism, Parsceism, or Christianity though it has been surrounded by these and many other religions for centuries. Indians are much given to the use of symbols, rites, ceremonies, and once had a large gild system; but the same has been true of every other paople. Nothing in Indian philosophies, which are neither so numerous nor so profound as Americans have been led to believe (most of them are unbelievably crude) coincides at any point with the philosophy of Freemasonry- None of the many origins of Freemasonry had their first roots in India.
INDIANS AMERICAN.
American Indians, including those in Canada, Mexico, Central, and South America (perhaps 25,000,000 in all), are divided into peoples, and these peoples are divided into either tribes or clans, or both; and they are remarkable for their large number of independent languages—among the Pueblo villages in New Mexico, no one of which has a population over 3,000, four separate languages are used. But it is equally extraordinary that in spite of these multiplying units of peoples and languages, and the lack of central or general states and governments, Indians are everywhere singularly at one in a continual use of ceremonies, for innumerable purposes, and on innumerable occasions—some of them improvise ceremonies on the spot for some special
purpose.
A learned Indian in the Pueblo of Isleta said:
we are a race who always have believed in the power of ceremonies." In the tens of thousands of ceremonies in North, Central, and South America together, there are countless emblems, symbols, rites, signs, passwords, etc. It was inevitable that one of those should occasionally coincide with some symbol or rite of Freemasonry (the Navajos have an outdoor ceremony strikingly like the Third Degree); it was from this inevitable coincidence that the belief arose a century ago that the Indians (the Mayan were an Indian people) had possessed Freemasonry before Columbus came, whereas in fact they had none of it, and at the present have none except among the comparatively few Indian members of regular Lodges. (See The Builder; consult index under Arthur C. Parker, and Alanson Skinner. See also page 480 of this Encydopedia.)
(It is among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and of Arizona [the Hopis are a Pueblo people] that the Indian prepossession with and great talent for ceremonies can be studied best, because they have carried ceremonies to their perfection, and to an extreme.
See in especial The Delight Makers, by Adolph Bandelier. It is the "classic on the American Indian"; the characters are fictitious, but otherwise, as Pueblo Indians themselves admit, nothing else in it is fictional. Next in rank to it is Zuni Folk Tales, by Frank Hamilton Cushing; G. P. Putnam's Sons; New York; 1901. Since Cushing [who lived at Zuni Pueblo] wrote his path-finding study, Hodge, Hewitt, Webster, and a long succession of specialists have produced a large literature.)
The principal feature of the Pueblo cosmology is shipapu, or Underworld, from which Indian peoples came to the Upper World and to which they return, the entrance being at the "Four Corners," a spot roughly in the region where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado meet. In shipapu are the katcinas, which are not gods, or demons, or nature forces, but a "Something" impossible for a white man to envisage; each of them is in control of one of the many large cycles or things or regular occurrences, such as winds, rains, growing crops, seasons, death, etc. The Pueblo Indian believes that his ceremonies can set into action, or stop, or otherwise affect these katcinas. They are therefore, in his eyes, not dances, or prayers, or religious rites, or symbols, but a means of getting something done; a ceremony may set a katcina into action just as a horse may set a wagon in motion. Such ceremonies obviously have nothing in common with Masonic ceremonies; so also with ceremonies used by other Indian peoples, which, though they are unlike Pueblo ceremonies, are the same in principle.
INNS AND TAVERNS.
The sketches and floor plans of the Goose and Gridiron on pages 412 and 413 are reminders of the fact that the inns and taverns in which the Speculative Lodges met in Great Britain and America during the Eighteenth Century were not like the modern hotel or bar-room, but were a center of hospitality of a type no longer met with; nor were they like the present-day English "pub." The inn was often one of the most distinguished buildings in a town; beautifully constructed and furnished; and managed by an inn-keeper and a staff who made of hospitality a trained profession. Except in the smallest villages the majority of inns were built with at least one large room designed for Lodges and clubs, and these usually had a private service stairway from the rear, so that even after a Lodge's doors were closed it could still make use of the facilities of the kitchen, the wine cellar, and the staff of servants. Each inn had a sign in front which consisted of a picture and which gave it its name—The King's Head, The Boar's Head, The White Horse, etc. A Masonic Lodge took its name from the inn in which it met, and it was not until the end of the Century that Lodges began to be numbered. Even as late as the end of the Nineteenth Century American Lodges here and there continued to meet in hotels; there are some of these old buildings still standing, especially in the Middle West, and on the old coach runs; in more than one of them the oldfashioned judas window is still in an upstairs door, though it has been a half century since Lodges made use of them.
Lodge meetings in inns and taverns were never completely satisfactory; some Lodges must never have found them satisfactory to any degree, because their Minutes show that they kept moving about every one or two years. A lack of privacy, the inconvenience of having to pack furniture and paraphernalia away after each meeting, difficulties with landlords, and the over-nearness of the bar, these were disadvantages; but it is probable that the many small early Lodges could not have managed under any other system. A joke has been made of the fact that the first Grand Lodge of Speculative Freemasonry held its first Grand Communion in a tavern but no Eighteenth Century Englishman or American would have seen any point to the joke; learned societies, clubs, religious groups, literary circles, scientific bodies (like the Royal Society), artists' groups, public officers, army and navy clubs, clubs of philosophers, an endless number of such societies met in the same rooms. A good tavern was highly respected in any community; its "mine host" often was the first citizen of his town.
See The English Inn; Past and Present, by H. D. Eberlein; J. B. Lippincott Co.; Philadelphia; 1926.
INQUISITION, THE, AND FREEMASONRY.
Speculative Freemasonry appeared in Madrid in 1726, at Gibraltar in 1727, and at about the same time in Paris. The first Italian Lodges were constituted in Tuscany about 1735, and a Lodge was working in Rome at about the same time. These dates are mere indicia, and in themselves mean little, because almost every page of written records was lost, and it is probable that there were many more Lodges, and Masons not in Lodges, than the few surviving records would indicate. On April 28, 1738, Pope Clement XII issued a Bull of Excommunication; it was a feeble, ill-drawn document, in a Medieval Latin which only experts could read, but it consigned a Mason to hell in the future and ostracized him from the church, his family, and his property here and now; also it was drawn in such a way as to be most useful to the Inquisition, which assisted the Pope to draft it. The modus operandz of arrests, tortures, penalties, etc., was left to local tribunals; but the Cardinal Secretary of State gave assistance by publishing on Jan. 14, 1739, a model for these tribunals to use; it pronounced "irremissible pain of death, not only on all members but on all who should tempt others to join the Order, or should rent a house to it or favor it in any other way." But while local tribunals were adjured to be as harsh as possible, the crusade as a whole was turned over to the Holy Inquisition.
It is difficult for modern men, and especially in England, America, and Canada, to understand the organization of the Inquisition because they have never had it in their midst. For centuries each country had two governments side by side; the state, or civil, or "temporal" government headed by a King, Prince, or Parliament; and an ecclesiastical government headed by the Pope, and under him by Cardinals, Bishops, and special offices appointed for the purpose. Present day churches have their own rules and regulations governing their internal affairs, but these do not at any point encroach upon civil government, nor can they apply civil penalties. The Roman Church government was of a different kind, before the Reformation, and rested on a different principle; it was not a church government, but a general government, of an authority and a jurisdiction equal to that of the civil government; it differed from the latter in that only such categories of laws and cases belonged to it as had to do with religion, and with the properties belonging to the church; there were, therefore, two complete governments standing side by side, of equal sovereignty, and duplicating offices and penalties. The church enacted laws (canonical law); it had courts, lawyers, judicial processes, hearings, verdicts, and penitentiaries and execution yards or chambers. l.t arrested men, tried them, sentenced them, and punished them. Among its punishments were the disfrocking of priests, removal from office, excommunications, interdicts, alienation of property, torture, selling into slavery, hanging, burning at the stake, beheading, sentence to galleys, banishment, fines, etc. If a crime, or an alleged crime, was a mixture of both civil and ecclesiastical offenses, the accused would be tried and sentenced in the civil courts and then tried and sentenced a second time in the church courts. He was in "double jeopardy" each day of his life. (It was one of the first concerns of the framers of our Constitution to make double jeopardy impossible.)
The so-called Holy Inquisition was set up as a special arm of this ecclesiastical government, and yet while only an arm was itself empowered to act as a separate government, and could impose and execute sentence in its own name; it differed from ecclesiastical government in general only in that it was designed to stamp out heresy, and by heresy usually was meant any form of Protestantism. It is this fact which in the long run filled men of normal, sane minds with horror
and led to uprisings and to driving the Holy Inquisition out of the country, as happened even in Spain which once was its home and center, as it also was the home and center of the Jesuits; and where an auto dafé, or the public and ceremonious burning of "here tics," was a holiday, and celebrated like a Fourth of July. The secret police of the czars, and the gestapos of the Fascists, Phalangists, and Nazis were patterned on it. Heinrich Himmler and his staff made a detailed
study over a period of years of the methods used by the Inquisition.
The Inquisition was not directed against criminals but against men accused of heresy—an exceptionally flexible term, because the Inquisition could decide for itself, and on the spot, what it meant by heresy; thousands of the men and women destroyed by it were of irreproachable reputation and character, many of a saintly life, and whom not even the Inquisition could accuse of crime. The theory on which the Inquisition worked was that it should act as a detective to search out the heretic, the heretic should confess, and the penalty would then be sanctioned by his
confession; but where a marked-down man refused to confess or had nothing to confess, torture was used to reduce him to a state where out of agony or when out of his mind he became willing to confess anything— again, precisely according to the methods used by the Gestapo. Such an engine could be employed for many purposes: to terrorize a community, to browbeat a civil ruler, to defy civil laws, to destroy churches and associations, to seize wealth and property, to commit
plain murder, etc.
The Inquisition was not given exclusive jurisdiction over men accused of Masonry, for the regular church and civil courts continued to have jurisdiction also, but the Inquisition was especially held responsible for what in later years Adolf Hitler, a spiritual descendant of the Inquisition, was to describe as "the liquidation of Freemasons. " There were never many Masons in countries where the Inquisition was free to act in the Eighteenth Century, and only a few records escaped being destroyed, but in proportion to their numbers the Masons probably suffered more excommunications, tortures, and martyrdoms than any other one group. Books were written about the cases of Coustos and Da Costa. Cagliostro was a charlatan and a thief, and was repudiated by Lodges when his character was exposed, but the wide publicity given to his imprisonment brought the methods of the Inquisition into the light, and in the long run helped to drive it back into the unadvertised offices in the Vatican where it continues to carry on such work as it is able. In Spain alone, and as late as 1816, twenty five Masons suffered under the Inquisition; in 1819 there were seven cases; if it were free to act again, without a civil government to check it, it would resume its old practices, because neither it itself nor the Vatican has ever admitted the Inquisition to have
been a crime against Christianity and civilization, nor altered its principles.
Americans are far from Europe and farther still from the period when the Church was the second government in a land; because of this lack of information and first-hand knowledge they often confuse the Inquisition with the Jesuits. The two are and ever have been independent of each other. The Society of Jesuits is in theory an army, a church "militant"; its members are enlisted; they receive a training"; each is under an oath of allegiance to a general"; they go as troops, singly or in companies, wherever they may be sent, to carry out whatever orders are given to them. In some times and places they have been ordered to make war on Freemasonry; in others they have been ordered to join in with it, to weaken or divide it from within by " infiltration, " etc.; the whole story of Jesuit dealings with Freemasonry reads like a page out of a detective novel of a rather trashy sort, and causes adult men still unbereft of their senses to wonder how other grown-up men can have indulged in practices so childish. The Jesuit author of the article on Freemasonry in the Catholic Encyclopedia even charged Masons with "phallic worship" and Pope Leo XIII solemnly assured the whole of France that Masons worship the devil!
The records of the Holy Inquisition are voluminous, in a dozen languages, full of ecclesiastical terminology, tortuous and tortured to the extreme; it is doubtful if any American scholar except Henry Charles Lea has ever examined them detail by detail; but the general organization and purpose of it is public, plain, easily intelligible. When in 1738 the Roman Church decided to abolish Freemasonry the Inquisition was used as one of the engines for that purpose.
See Clement XII's Bull. History of Inquisition in Spain, by Henry Charles Lea. Freemasonry and Roman Catholicism, by H. L. Haywood. Sufferings of John Coustos, by Coustos. Censorship of the Church of Rome, by George Haven Putnam. Article on Freemasonry in Catholic Encyclopedia by Abbe Gruber. Memoirs of the History of Jacobznism and Freemasonry, by Barruel. See also in Catholic Encyclopedia Vol. II, p. 127; Vol. III, p. 330; Vol. XIV, p. 347; Vol. IV, p. 748; Vol. XIII, p. 9; a sort. on "Illuminati"; Vol. VII; Vol. XIV, p. 265; Vol. XV, p. 309; Vol. XIV, p. 72; Vol. X, p. 266; Vol. XII, p. 138; Vol. XII, p. 190; Vol. XIII, p. 193; Vol. XIV, pp. 67, 624. Roman Catholicism and Freemasonry, by Dudley Wright. Severe condemnations of the Inquisition have been written by Roman Catholics themselves. Lord Acton, a Roman Catholic, was a scholar of learning, intelligence, and character far above the type of such propagandists as the Abbe Gruber, and still more the unhappy Abbe Barruel; he declared the Inquisition to have been organized on the principle of crime, and that its executions were murders and nothing more. Men rebelled against the Inquisition because it was criminal, sadistic, unjust, and in violent contradiction of Christianity; American Roman Catholic apologists, of whom the number is now rapidly increasing, seek to becloud that known fact and at the same time to win Protestants over to their side by reiteration of the sophistry that men were killed by the Inquisition "because they were the foes of the Christian religion. "
INVENTORY, THE LODGE.
If the Minute Books of fifty of the oldest American Lodges as of the period between 1800 and 1825 are compared with the Minute Books of the same Lodges as of the period 1900 to 1925 it will be discovered that the subject of the Lodge inventory was somewhere lost, abandoned, forgotten in the years between. Ever so often in the early days a Secretary with loving care, and often with an openly expressed pride, wrote out his inventory; and such inventories are for us now one of the best sources for a knowledge of what Lodge life was a century and a half ago, and coincidentally make vivid and clear one thing wrong with Lodge life now— something lost out of Masonry, like the Lost Word, an old Landmark unintentionally violated; a thing lost though not necessarily beyond recall.
The inventory was not of the carpets, walls, windows, or other structural equipment, nor was it for real estate or taxation or fire insurance purposes; it was an inventory of the treasures of the Lodge. In almost every instance each item was described as a gift from some Brother, or as a memento of some occasion long remembered; there were oil portraits, framed prints, photographs; jewels kept in cases, of silver, and engraved, once the property of officers who later had presented them to the Lodge; aprons, collars, ballot boxes, gavels, Bibles and books, music books, an organ, sets of plate, glass and dishes, altar coverings, certificates, cherished letters in frames, punch bowls, and there were gifts which the Lodge had made to itself, such as hand-made and carved chairs for the officer, a visitors' book bound in morocco, etc. The Lodge Room had a feeling of being richly furnished; it was filled with the emblems and symbols of Freemasonry, of the Lodge's own past, of the community's esteem for it, and the members who had gone were not completely gone. Men loved their Lodge, and because they did there was no need to devise schemes for persuading them to attend.
In every Lodge, even the crassest, there are these untapped feelings of affection. Each one should have an inventory. When a Lodge room is empty, its walls bare, it has no atmosphere of its own, does not feel like home; the Ritual loses its soul because it has not the environment it requires; the worst effect of the bare Lodge room is that its Masonry becomes barren because the Lodge has only the sense of being in a room and does not have a sense of being in the midst of a living and moving Fraternity; nor can it have a sense of its own past, or the Fraternity's past, but sinks into a feeling of isolation and flatness—it cannot even have a banquet because it has nothing to have it with. The inventory was one of riches; the riches came not out of the members' dues but out of their affection.
IOWA MASONIC LIBRARY.
Shortly after Theodore Sutton Parvin became Iowa's Grand Secretary in 1844 he began the building of a collection of Masonic books which became the first American Masonic library, in the true sense of having a librarian, a catalog, and a building; and though Bro. Parvin gave the required time and attention to his duties as Grand Secretary, it was into his office as Grand Lodge Librarian that he put his heart. Decades before 1901, the year of his decease, his Iowa Masonic Library at Cedar Rapids had become not an Iowa center of Masonic learning only, nor even an American center, but a vorld-wide center. Its part in the development of Freemasonry from 1865 until now is unhonored because it is unsung; but if any Mason will go behind the published Proceedings of Grand Bodies and the published books and will search through the private correspondence which came to Parvin's desk he will discover that not only was this Library commandeered by leaders and scholars in every land but also that it made possible certain of the most important achievements of Masonic Bodies and of Masonic scholars and leaders. Thus, Gould, Hughan, Crawley (a part of Crawley's correspondence is at hand while this is being written), Lane, and the group in general which collaborated on the work published as Gould's History of Freemasonry, made continual use of it from England and Ireland. Mackey could not have prepared this Encyclopedia nor have written either his HisCory or his Jurisprudence without it. Albert Pike was always drawing upon it. and especially so in his war on Cerneauism, herein some of his most devastating arrows had been barbed by Parvin, etc. Moreover it was a visible proof to otherwise skeptical American Masons that Masonic books, and in large number, do in actuality exist; and it became an inspiration to other Grand Jurisdictions to set up Libraries of their own.
From 1901 to 1925 Bro. Newton R. Parvin, the son of T. S. Parvin, was Grand Librarian as well as Grand Secretary; and if he was not a scholar he was at least a great book-man, and under him the collection grew. It occupies the largest part of one very extensive three-story building and the whole of another.
The Grand Jurisdiction continued in its good fortune when in 1925 R.-. W. . Bro. Charles Clyde Hunt succeeded to both the Grand Secretaryship and the Grand Librarianship. Born in Cleveland, O., in 1866, Bro. Hunt went west to Iowa, worked his w ay through the famous Grinnell College, taught school for a time, became a county treasurer, and in 1917 became Deputy Grand Secretary, giving his full time to the position, and from the first devoting a major part of his time to the Library. He has for many years edited the Grand Lodge Bulletin. In 1930 he published Some Thoughts on Masonic Symbolism (later revised and enlarged); and collaborated with Eugene Hinman and Ray . Denslow (General Grand High Priest) to write in two volumes The History of the Cryptic Rite. Bro. Hunt was made a Mason in Lafayette Lodge, No. 52, Montezuma, Iowa in 1900. He joined each of the Rites one after anothers and has held a long list of offices.
IRON WORKER AND KING SOLOMON.
Christian Schussele was born in Alsace, in 1824, studied painting in Paris where he specialized in the historical subjects then in vogue, moved to the United States in 1847, was for eleven years director of the Pennsylvania Art Schools, and died in Merchantville, N. Y., August 21, 1879. Four of his canvasses became famous. One of them has been among the most gazed-at pictures ever painted in America, because prints of it hang in half the Lodge quarters in the United States, and it has been reproduced in Masonic books and periodicals without number under the title of "King Solomon and the Blacksmith. " It is a conservative estimate that since it was painted (about 1860) at least twenty-five million men and women either have their own copies or have looked at it.
In 1868 Mr. Joseph Harrison, Jr. wrote and printed a brochure (J. B. Lippincott; Philadelphia) entitled— Tale Iron Worker and King Solomon. In it he says he had Schussele paint the picture for him (he was writing in 1867) "four or five years ago." In the brochure he gives in his own words a version of the legend which is the subject-matter of the picture. Mr. Harrison, Jr. was one of the first American engineers of his day, who had built railways in Russia and iron construction in Britain, where he was held in high honor. In a speech delivered in 1859 he relates how from a folk-lore expert and friend of his, Charles G. Cleland (author of Hans Breitmann's Ballads of 1868), he heard a version of what he took to be an old Rabbinical Legend, and was so inspired by it that he engaged Schussele to reproduce it on canvas.
The picture was engraved by Sartain (a member of the Thirty-third Degree), and was published by the Macoy Company of New York about 1890, accompanied by a pamphlet entitled Tubal Cain. (The pamphlet, and Harrison's brochure, are collectors' items.) This title, and the conspicuous figure of Solomon in the picture, led Masons everywhere to take it for a Masonic picture, and has occasioned the immense popularity referred to above.
For many centuries the blacksmiths in England, a branch of the ironmongers, were a fraternity, and celebrated the Day of St. Clement their Patron, November 23, and in Britain continue to do so in centers where old ways are kept alive. (In ancient Ireland "smith" meant a builder.) As time passed Tubal Cain, Vulcan, and their St. Clement, whom they know as "Clem," became fused into a single character. They carried an image of him in their processions. This fraternity of blacksmiths has many old legends about "Clem," one of them built around King Arthur, and sing jolly songs about his adventures. Another and more popular version uses King Solomon in place of King Arthur; and a written legend (like and yet unlike our "Legend of the Craft") is still, or was until some years ago, read at gatherings of the Sons of Clem in English towns. It is this legend which Mr. Harrison Jr. heard from his friend Cleland, and not "an old Rabbinical legend." In the Talmudic and Rabbinical literature available at this writing no such legend iH found, though there are any number of old stories and fables about Tubal Cain. It is the character of Tubal Cain, even if transmogrified into a blacksmith, whose description reminds one of the legend of HA.-. Freemasons have lost nothing by mistaking the Solomon and Blacksmith legend for one of their own, because in its modern written form it could be incorporated into the Ritual without dislocation, and the idea at the center of the story is as Masonic as the Square and Compasses.
Notes. References to the Solomon and Blacksmith legend itself, to legends about Tubal Cain, and to the history and customs of the old fraternity of smiths are very numerous. Many titles in that bibliography, as well as the text of the legend itself, will be found in "Some Usages and Legends of Crafts Kindred to Masonry," by Gordon P. G. Hills; Are Quatuor Coronatorum; Vol. XXVIII; page 115.
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