KANSAS LODGE, U. D.
Any Grand Lodge in Annual Communication assembled, and though it were composed of Masonic jurisconsults of the first water, would agree unanimously that no such Lodge as Kansas Lodge U. D. was possible ever had been or ever could be. Nevertheless the impossible Lodge existed; and the storv of it ought to be known wherever Masons meet because it proves that there is some secret in Freemasonry which transcends analysis. In 1854 there was a Lodge or two in the remote wildernesses of Washington "where rolls the Oregon"; two or three in Sew Mexico, a land as remote as the moon; two or three in Indian Territory; otherwise, and excepting for a few settlements around a few forts, and some thousands of Indians, there stretched an empty empire larger than Europe from the Missouri River west.
In 1854 three Wyandot Indians and five white men who lived in their midst, having made themselves Known as Master Masons and duly accredited, petitioned the Grand Lodge of Missouri, mother of Freemasonry in the West, for a Dispensation to establish a Lodge in a Wyandot Indian village in Kansas Territory. On August 4, 1854, the Dispensation was granted; on August 11 the Kansas Lodge U. D. opened for Work, and elected a missionary, the Rev. John M. Chivington, its Master. On the heels of this new Masonic birth two other Lodges followed; in 1856 whe three formed the Grand Lodge of Kansas. The second oldest Lodge was given the glory of No. 1; Ransas Lodge, though the oldest, was assigned No. 3, because "it was an Indian Lodge."
The Indians had come originally from Ohio, but somewhere in their enforced migrations had the institution of slavery forced upon them (a novelty to them) therefore they were slave-holders when their Lodge was formed; three of the white men were abolitionists; of the other two nothing is known. The White Man, the Wyandots used to say, is like a stick; he has two ends and they point in opposite directions; a footnote to that same effect is given by one of Kansas Masonry's historians, Bro. F. P. Strickland, Jr. in his brilliant treatise on page 485, Transactions, The American Lodge of Research; Vol. III; Number 3:
" In the bloody 1850's and the years of the Civil War, Kansas was continually torn by bitter strife, [over slavery] members of the two factions relentlessly hunting down and slaying each other. Yet, whenever enough Brethren, regardless of faction could be found they eagerly stood their guns against the nearest tree and began the erection of a Masonie altar. Enemies by day they met as Brothers at night."
KNIGGE, BARON VON.
A history of Adam Weishaupt and his Order of the Illuminati is given. The work and principles of the Lodges in which each man had been initiated would not be recognizable as Freemasonry by us in America, or by regular Masons anywhere, because while the first German Lodges were founded on the Landmarks they were later taken over by the German aristocracy and transformed, most of them, into an aristocratic cult which contradicted the ancient principles of the Craft at every point.
After Weishaupt, a brilliant and well-intentioned man, had won a position for himself among German Lodges he was seized with a desire to set up a grandiose new society of his own, with vague but vast aims, an(l officers with resounding titles, called the Order of the Illuminati. The Baron von Knigge joined the enterprise and became Weishaupt's St. Paul, then turned against it, and in his last years became a savage AntiMason. The Order of Illuminati was the greatest single misfortune ever to befall European Freemasonry because it became at once the pattern and the point of departure for a succession of secret, underground, political conspiracies which (though it was not a Masonic society) divided Masonry and brought disgrace upon its name; even the Jesuits founded an Order of Illuminati of their own, and the scheme of it was the blue-print for the Italian Carbonari.
Prof. John Robison of the University of Edinburgh wrote a book about it in 1797 (see page 862). This Professor had a bland, credulous, innocent-appearing mind strikingly like that of Marshal Petain; he believed everything he read about the Illuminati, became possessed of a great fear of it, and expected any moment to see the civilization of Europe come crashing down, undermined by the secret, under-ground Weishauptian conspiracies; he took the Illuminati to be identical with Freemasonry, and his ProcJs of a Conspiracy became an Anti-Masonic book. Ever since, it has been in Europe the Anti-Masonic Bible (supported by the writings of the Abbe Barruel; see page 125), and it has been re-published, rewritten, imitated, quoted from; and its weird and simple-minded charges against Masons have been repeated ever since. It even became the inspiration of an Anti-Masonic movement in Massachusetts and Connecticut at the end of the Revolutionary War. As for Knigge it was supposed that he had quarrelled with Weishaupt. Near the end of his days he published a book entitled Uber den Umgang mit Menschen, which may be freely translated as on Dealing moth People.
At the end of World War II there came to the surface, and with a sort of apocalyptic luridness and grandiosity, what Weishaupt and Knigge had both been meaning to certain powerful groups of the German ruling class. It transpires that Weishaupt had inadvertently discovered what had never been dreamed of before: a technique for a secret movement which could be operated in public, an underground on top of the ground, a nation-wide conspiracy completely invisible, and which a class or a people could carry on under the very eyes of their enemies. It also transpires that it was this which Knigge had taken the Illuminati to be; and it was this which was the subject matter of his Uber. The latter book was re-printed, revised, enlarged, modified, and went on generation after generation.
The Germans created a secret army after Napoleon had conquered them, and conquered him at Leipsig. After Metternich had set up the absolutist Holy Alliance regime secret societies on the Knigge pattern came into existence everywhere; the Carbonari in Italy (Louis Napoleon was trained in it), the Decembrist revolutionists in Russia in 1825, etc., etc. It also has transpired that while the Nazis were still an underground movement they followed Knigge's formula, and that the fiber was the favorite text-book of Heinrich Himmler.
In the eight centuries or so of its history Freemasonry has had its own adventures but never before or since has anything happened to it quite so extraordinary, quite as impossible as this, that a simple-minded and typically mystical Bavarian Mason, ambitious to be a Founder of something great for himself, should have become the Architect of gestapos and a fountainhead of AntiMasonryl If there be Masons who believe that the Craft should look with tolerant indifference upon quasi- and semi-Masonic "societies," and that AntiMasonry should be ignored, Weishaupt and Knigge should "give them furiously to think."
NOTE. There could be no greater fallacy than the theory that underground conspiracies ale carried on only by the poor, the downtrodden, and revolutionaries. The Freneh Royal war against the Huguenots began as an underground movement. For a history of it see Cathertne de Medicz and the I>ost Revolution, by Ralph Roeder; Viking Press; New York; 1937.
KNIGHTS AND ORDERS OF CHIVALRY.
A knight originally was a boy in attendance on a prince, and was called an aldor or altherro; from this was a gradual transition first to a knight as a soldier, next as a professional soldier, and lastly as one class of professional soldiers those who had taken up arms under vow to make it a life-long vocation, like the vow of priesthood. The word itself first was cnight among the Saxons, Kneght among IDanes, cniocllt in Ireland. A modern professional soldier takes oath to the government, fights or is ready to fight for his country, and lives under military regulations; the knight took a vow to his vocation, a personal oath to his king, or his lord, or his chieftain, and behaved according to the rules of chivalry. These latter, and allowing for a great difference in the circumstances, were in essence the same as military regulations now.
Just as there was a transition from Operative Masonry to Speculative Masonry, so was there a similar transition, and following in general the same lines from the "operative" soldiery of the Saxon and Norman periods to chivalry as a set of ideals and rules for gentlemen and ladies, which may be metaphorically described as its "speculative" or "symbolical" form. This latter consisted of legends and traditions art, poetry, ballads, music, ideas and ideals, a philoso. phy of daily conduct, an ideal of honor and gentlemanliness, and grew into such a mass that a great cycle of legends such as that which accumulated around the Search for the Grail. Modern Knight Templarism has no historical continuity as either a calling (Masonic knights, for one thing, are not soldiers), or as an organization, with the Orders of Knights in the early Middle Ages, but it is the heir of that large wealth of tradition, literature, art, philosophy; and few modern fraternal societies have so rich a heritage.
The philosophy underlying chivalry, considered solely as a system of thought, has been overlooked by professors and historians of philosophy; it also has been very largely overlooked by Knights Templar themselves, else they would by this time have a larger and more learned literature of their own. A student of that philosophy of chivalry has ready to hand, as text book or authoritative work, a masterpiece of learning and thought: The Broad Stone of Honour; or, The True Sense and Practice of Chivalry, by Kenelm Henry Digby; in five books, the last of which is in two volumes, making six volumes in all; London; Bernard Quaritch; 1877.
KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS.
In the official history entitled The Knights of Columbus in Peace and War, by Maurice Francis Egan and John B. Kennedy (New Haven; Conn; 1920) it is stated that Michael Joseph McGivney, an assistant in St. Mary's Church, New Haven, "sometimes had the painful experience of seeing young Catholics enter fraternal societies either frowned upon or actually forbidden by the Church. " There had been since the Civil War a loose fraternity called Red Knights composed of Roman Catholics; a small number of these met with McGivney to discuss with him the formation of a fraternity. The first thought was to set up a branch of the Catholic Order of Foresters, with death benefits a principal feature. Instead it was finally decided to launch a new fraternity. This was in January, 1882.
At a third conference Knights of Columbus was adopted as the name. McGivney himself wrote three degrees of Ritual. The new secret society was incorporated by the State, March 29, 1882. The first lodge was formed April 6, 1882, at New Haven. The Supreme Council wss formed May 16, 1882, with C. T. Driscoll as Grand Knight. A Constitution was adopted on the 15th of the following month; and the revised and completed ritual, approved by Bishop McMahon, was adopted July 7, 1883.
Note. In its Annual meeting in St. Pnul, August, 1914, the Supreme Council of the K. of C. appointed a Commission on Religious Prejudices, a laudable undertaking which attracted the attention of the Masonic press because in a number of centers Masonic leaders co-operated with the Commission in the hopes of lessening the amount of senseless religious fanaticism. [See Final Report of Co1nstsston on Relioious Prejudices, Supreme Couneil, Knights of Columbus, Chicago, 1917.1 The Commission ultimately failed; perhaps it was not sufficiently broad, because it did not include among the many " bigotries " it was opposed to its own Church's Anti-Masonic Crusade. It failed also because it did not learn that to be continually and openly truthful is the one hope for success of any propaganda or educational campaign.
In the Commission's own Final Report occurs on page 41 this paragraph of mendacities. written by Mr. J. J. Farrel, Augusta, Ga. Manager of the Central Bureau: " Mi hen you say ' This is a Protestant country, ' as you do say with all a printer's emphasis, you have no thought of it being a fact, I am eure. as you know that fewer than 20 per cent of all our ' people profess any Protestant belief, while in none of the 48 States is Protestantism in any form prescribed as a mode of belief or worship. But in forming opinion you ought to know the facts.
You ought to know that the founder of the American Navy was a Catholic- [John Paul Jones was a Scotchman and a Freemason member of two Lodgesl that the first General of the Cavalry was a Catholic, that the only Indians who fought with Washington were Catholics that the money which saved him and his army at Valley Forge was from Catholics, that when Cornwallis surrendered, which all agree made the success of the Revolution secure, more than half the army that opposed him was Catholic- that Catholic Poland, Catholic France, Catholic Spain furnished men, money, munitions and other help to our country and the Catholic States of Germany were the only German States where England couldn't hire troops, like the Hessians, to fight us.
"You ought to remember, sir, and I hope you can remember without misgivings, that the beginning of the breach between Washington and Arnold which finally led to the First Treason [there had been no ''breach''l, was because Arnold objected to Washington's surrounding himself with Catholic generals and aides."
In the Revolutionary War there were but a handful of Roman Catholics in the Colonies; even in Maryland they Reformed a minority. The great majority of men in the Colonies belonged to no church one historian calculates that 91 % did not but many attended who did not register as members. For concise biographies of the generals see Masonry in our Government: 1761-1799, by Philip A. Roth- Milwaukee, Wisc.- 1927. Arnold's "breach" was not with Washington but with Gates; his court martial at Philadelphia he brought upon himself by dissipation gambling, ete. in the "Philadelphis set"; religion had no part in it.
KNOOP, JONES, HAMER.
Except where otherwise indicated these books were written by Douglas D. Knoop and G. P. Jones in collaboration:
The Medieval Mason: An Economic Histony of English Stone Building in the Later Middle Ages and Early Modern Times; Manchester University Press; 1933. Begemann's History of Freemasonry; 1941; 15 pages. Bolsover Castle Building Account, 1936; 56 pp. Decline of the Master Architect; 1937; 8 pp. The Early Masonic Catechisms (Knoop, Jones, Douglas Hamer) 1943 M. U. Press, 200 pp. Freemasonry and the Idea of Natural Religion London; 1942; 16 pp. The Genesis of Speculative Masonry (by Knoop)- London, 1941; 31 pp. A Handlist of Masonic Documents; M. U. Press; 1942; S5 pp. Impressment of Masone for Windsor Castle; Maemillan, London; 1937. An Introduction to Freemasonry; M. U. Press; 1937- 136 pp.
The London Mason in the Seventeenth Centurv, M. U. Press; 1935- 92 pp. The Mason Word (Knoop)- The Prestonian Leeture; 1938. Masonic Historv Old and Zeus; 1942; 16 pp. Nomenclature of Alasonic MSS. and Handlist of MSS; London; 59 pp; 1941. On the Connection Between Operative and Speculative Mason7~v (Enoop)Sheffield, 1935. Pure Antient Masonry (Knoop)- 62 pp. 1939. Rzse of the Mason Contractor; London; 1936- 24 pp. The Scottish Mason and the Mason U ord, M. U. Press1939; 113 pp. A Short Histo7~v of Freemasonry to 17SO M. U. Press; 1940; 148 pp. The Sixteenth Centurv Mason- 1937, 20 pp. The Two Earliest Masontc MSS (Knoop, Jones, and Douglas Hamer); M. U. Press1938; 215 pp.
Bro. Douglas D. Knoop was born in Manchester, September 16, 1883. He was educated in Germany, Switzerland, and at Manchester University. During 1906-7 he was in the United States. In 19l0 he was placed in charge of the Economic Section of the University of Sheffield; was made a Professor in 1920. He is an established authority on the theory of economics.
Bro. Knoop was made a Mason in University Lodge, No. 3911, Sheffeld, December 1921; was Exalted in Loyalty Chapter, No. 296; and founder of University Chapter, Sheffeld. Took Mark Degree in Cleeves No. 618; is Knight Tenoplar, member of Rose Croix, Red Cross of Constantine, Societas Rosicrucianae in Anglia, etc. He w as elected to active membership in Quatuor Coronati Lodge of Research No. 2076, in 1931, and has occupied its East. A number of the brochures listed above are reprints from A. Q. C. Because of interests in his own profession his studies in Freemasonry have inevitably been centered on the economics of Operative Masonry working conditions, rules, wages, etc. The data have been a valuable contribution to Masonic historical research. (Note The bibliography given above is not complete, and includes no titles later than 1942.)
|
