Best of EFC: Seven Conversations on the Esoteric Core of Freemasonry

This is the companion post for Episode 54, our Best of EFC collection. Listen to the full episode at mystictye.com/episodes, and hear the complete original conversations in Episodes 47, 48, 50, 51, and 52.

Episode 54 pulls together the strongest material we have connected to the Esotericism in Freemasonry Conference: longer explanations from five past guests, plus two archival interviews Troy originally recorded for Scholomance at EFC 2024. Below are the seven conversations in running order, lightly cleaned of stutters and false starts but otherwise word for word.

A Space for Esoteric Freemasonry

Troy Spreeuw: The impetus is really to create a space where we could talk about the various aspects of esotericism in Freemasonry. And for me, from an academic standpoint, all of Freemasonry is wholly esoteric. Now, that doesn't mean that everything Freemasons do is esotericism, but the nature of our specialized knowledge, that's exclusive for a certain group that you have to be initiated to join. When you look at the definition of esotericism, Western esotericism, Freemasonry does check all the boxes.

The Classical Art of Memory

Doug Russell: The classical art of memory is worth a brief explanation because it's the core of all the memory arts that followed. It was first written about in a book in eighty BCE in Rome. The ancient Romans, in a book on rhetoric, have a very important section on the art of memory. And it basically says, first of all, artificial memory is that memory which is trained, which we train. In the same way that artificial intelligence is a human invention, the classical art of memory is how do you memorize stuff so you can give a speech, especially in an oral culture back in the day in Rome, where most people couldn't read and write. You didn't have an iPad to look at your notes while you were speaking.

So classical art of memory is simply that you have an imaginary building in which there are rooms, and you put images in the room. Images in places that remind you of what you're going to say.

Doug walked through a live example: a grandfather clock, described once, remembered not word for word but as an image. "You're probably going to have an image in your mind of this wooden clock, the white face with the gold on it, and the four Roman numerals. That's a natural thing, that you form images to remember things." He traced the idea back to Aristotle, who said you can't think without an image. "So that's the essence of the classical art of memory. And they're still doing the same thing today. That's how people who memorize a whole deck of cards in a very brief time, whatever, it's still being done."

Fight Club and Freemasonry

Dago Rodriguez: Fight Club and Freemasonry is a talk that I will be presenting, and that talk was inspired at another event called MasonicCon in South Pasadena, where we were putting together a pop culture panel. Fight Club was celebrating its twentieth anniversary release of the film that year, so we talked about how it connects or has some similarities to Freemasonry. We sat there and had a round table discussion for forty five minutes, and that left a seed planted in my head. I was like, well, there could be an issue, a magazine we could put together for the Fraternal Review, comparing this.

The talk grew into something more specific than a film comparison. "This was really a study on masculinity and the need for role models. What is Masonry doing to answer the call when men of any age walk into our lodges looking for something to emulate? Especially nowadays when a lot of men are being influenced by caricatures and social media, they have no guidance. I've seen this happen in my lodge. They walk in because of something they read online, they're curious, and they come knocking on our doors basically asking, tell me who I am. But if we take good men and make them better, how are we as seasoned Masons answering that call?"

The conversation widened into lodge culture and generational change. "If a lodge does not evolve, it dies, and that's been proven to me over and over. In the fifties, the golden era after World War Two, it was an influx, you were opening a lodge in every city. From the culture that changed after that, the hippies, why am I gonna have this bell bottom, long haired, pot smoking hippie join our lodge, we have enough members. And there's the missed opportunity for the next two generations, and now those same people are sitting in their lodges in the eighties thinking, where did everybody go. To make a lodge a monoculture is going to make it suck."

Wilmshurst and the Language of Ritual

Ike Baker: Walter Leslie Wilmshurst, for anybody who isn't familiar, was an esoteric Mason who wrote The Meaning of Masonry, Masonic Initiation, and The Rite of Passing. He founded Lodge of the Living Stones in Leeds in the UK. He was a Christian mystic, the quintessential esotericist of the early twentieth century, fin de siecle era. He left a tracing board that Brother Robert Lomas found in one of Wilmshurst's personal notebooks. It's posted online, but the resolution is so poor you can't even read it. It's illegible. I restored what could be restored. There's maybe one or two parts that are just entirely illegible. It's not pretty, not like a lot of Masonic tracing boards with beautiful images. It's almost rudimentary because it's communicating in geometry.

Ike's own conference presentation grew out of unrelated academic work. "I sit on an academic advisory board for something being launched this year called the Hermopolis Academy, with Dr. Aaron Cheak, Dr. Shannon Grimes, Dr. Charles Stang, Professor Wouter Hanegraaff, working with Dr. Mervat Nasr's New Hermopolis Foundation. What we've been doing is working through a text called Conversations in the House of Life, a new translation of what is referred to as the ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth. This particular text is an actual primary source material from ancient Egypt. This translation was put forth by Richard Jasnow and Karl-Theodor Zauzich."

"The correlations, the similarities to Freemasonic ritual are absolutely startling in a way that I didn't even anticipate, not even remotely. This text serves as an ancient Egyptian initiation ritual specifically for the priests of Thoth, who were scribes. This is like an entered apprentice degree. The way the structure of the ritual, the way the catechism develops, the symbols it uses, I think are enough to make any Mason a little bit more interested in this primary source material and its connection to Western ritual as a tradition."

Working Tools and the Inner Temple

Lon Milo DuQuette: In Freemasonry, we have our working tools. Literally working tools. What we build with those tools are everything from our character and our strength of character on one level. But they also have great cosmic and spiritual dimensions to them, and we get a little hint at what those might be in our degree lectures. It's just enough to give us a taste to further investigation.

Lon connected the Craft's working tools to a parallel Kabbalistic set. "My talk in Seattle is going to be the three working tools of the Kabbalah. There's three of them, and I'm gonna treat them as working tools to literally build our own great spiritual temple. Those three working tools are the divine name Yod Heh Vav Heh, the Tetragrammaton, a four letter Hebrew word using three letters, a wonderful mystery right there. And then the familiar diagram called the Tree of Life. And the Tree of Life and the Tetragrammaton together even lead us to the third working tool of the Kabbalist, the Cube of Space. I call it Kabbalistic study, a cosmic lube job. We've got all the spiritual equipment to use these tools properly for our own awakening, our own enlightenment, the building of our own temples. But our machinery isn't lubricated enough."

He tied the idea directly back to his signature material. "It just became absolutely obvious that from the very beginning, when we talk about the rough ashlar and the perfect ashlar, and that both of them are stones. One's got a lot of rough edges knocked off, and it's trued, to we could even say mathematical perfection. And that stone is a building block, an essential part of the great temple of our universe. And we could stick our necks out and say, and that universe is our soul."

Taking the Conference Culture Home

Troy Spreeuw, Brett Wolfe, and Ken Lane: If you want this kind of culture and enculturation in your Craft, you could do worse than coming to this event and learning what to do and take it all home. You're gonna meet some amazing people, some traveling speakers, and many of the attendees would be an excellent invite past your lodge education night just to come down and present. Well, the connections are phenomenal, you can't get that anywhere, and just to have unlimited time where you can talk to brothers and speakers and actually have that one on one time with them, you walk away glowing. Last year at this event, we had twelve jurisdictions present. Between all of the attendees and the speakers, we had twelve jurisdictions present. It is an event that people know about outside of the Pacific Northwest.

Finding Brotherhood

Troy Spreeuw: I didn't expect to fall in love with it. I didn't expect that the men I would meet would be my brothers with a capital B. I grew up in a big family in a small town, and now I'm in a big city where I can be anonymous, which is exactly how I want it to be. But then I had this whole group of guys who loved me for me, even though they hardly knew me, and would accept what I was willing to offer.

I'm getting ready for my entered apprentice. I'm getting ready to knock three times on the door. And there's a part there where I had to take my wedding ring off for practical reasons, and I'm looking around to put it somewhere safe. And the brother I was standing there with just says to me, oh, you don't need to worry about that here, just put it down. I get goose bumps still talking about that. I just remember this level of trust kind of coming into my body, and a good thing, because an initiation is a physical event. If you don't trust the guys that are doing it, it might even be dangerous. That's how I got involved in the Craft.

Full conversations: Episode 47 with Doug Russell, Episode 48 with Dago Rodriguez, Episode 50 with Brett Wolfe and Ken Lane, Episode 51 with Ike Baker, and Episode 52 with Lon Milo DuQuette. The two Scholomance interviews with Troy were originally recorded at EFC 2024. Guest episodes are credited here as interviews, not recordings of conference presentations.