Conversations on the Craft, the symbol,
and the long work within.
" Remembering the Past, Present, and Future" with Bro. Doug Russell
with Bro. Doug Russell
"The Esoteric Art of Memory" with Doug Russell The night he took his first degree, Doug Russell watched officers deliver the entire ritual from memory, including a lengthy lecture, and asked a question that would take him the next fourteen years to answer. Why do Masons memorize? Doug Russell returns to the show to reveal his forthcoming book, Remembering the Past, Present, and Future: Esoteric Memory Arts and Spiritual Freemasonry. It is a book about memory, about how memory connects to spirituality and to the esoteric side of our nature, and it is going to the publisher now, timed to launch at the Esotericism in Freemasonry Conference.
Selected dispatches
"The Secret Freemasonry of a Priest in the Temple of Nature" w Bro. Josef Wages
with Bro. Josef Wages
Bro. Josef Wages returns to the show to discuss The Secret Freemasonry of a Priest in the Temple of Nature, an eighteenth century Rosicrucian Masonic system recorded by Johann Samuel Mund. The manuscript predates the Golden Rosy Cross by three years, and until Bro. Wages and his research partners transcribed, translated, and published it, no one had ever studied the system at all. The book appeared in a limited run of only 500 copies, and the last of them are disappearing fast. The conversation ranges across the wild landscape of continental high degree Masonry: the Chevalier de Beauchêne peddling degrees from a wagon behind the French army at Frankfurt, the patents of Bouchère de Lennoncourt, and how the trail leads directly to Étienne Morin and the Kadosh degree. Along the way, Bro. Wages makes his case for why primary sources matter, why the era was far more organized than the old assumption of institutional chaos suggests, and why researchers who rely on Gould and Mackey are recycling secondary sources.
"The Genesis of American Freemasonry" with Dr. Ric Berman
with Dr. Ric Berman
There was no England and no America. There was a greater Britain, and a few thousand people in London held most of the levers. Dr. Ric Berman joins us to talk about his new book, The Genesis of American Freemasonry, published this June and timed for the semi quincentennial. It traces the craft in America from its earliest colonial footholds, through independence, to the creation of the state Grand Lodges, and it asks a question most American brethren have never had answered plainly: how did our ritual, our structure, and our lodges actually get here?
Essays & notes
How Freemasonry Came to America
A companion to Episode 45 of The Mystic Tye, "The Genesis of American Freemasonry," with Dr. Ric Berman Most American Masons know the outline. Washington was a Mason. So were Franklin, Revere, and a good number of the men who signed the Declaration. The lodge was there at the founding, and every Grand Lodge in the country will tell you so. What almost nobody gets told is how the craft actually arrived. Who sent it. Who appointed whom, and why. How a fraternity chartered in a London tavern in 1717 ended up with a lodge in nearly every frontier settlement west of the Blue Ridge inside a century. This is that story, and the short version is that it did not travel as an idea. It travelled as a network.
By Troy Spreeuw