Enciclopédia Mackey – W

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FREEMASONRY AND ITS KINDRED SCIENCES
by enciclopédia ALBERT C. MACKEY M. D.

W

The twenty-third letter of the English enciclopédia alphabet, which originated in the Middle Ages, is a double V, and is peculiar to the English, German, and Dutch alphabets.

W

An abbreviation of Worshipful, of Wrest, of Warden, and of Wisdom .

WAECHTER, EBERHARD, BARON VON

Lord of the Chamber to the King of Denmark, and Danish Ambassador at Ratisbon; was born in 1747. He was at one time a very active member of the Rite of Strict Observance, where he bore the characteristic Knighthood name of Eques a ceraso, and had been appointed as Chancellor of the German Priories of the 7th Province.

When the spiritual schism of the Order made its vast pretensions to a secret unaccountably derived from unknown superiors, whose names they refused to divulge, Von Waechter was sent to Italy by the old Scottish Lodge of which Duke Ferdinand was Grand Master, that he might obtain some information from the Pretender, and from other sources, as to the true character of the Rite. Von Waechter was unsuccessful, and the intelligence which he brought back to Germany was unfavorable to Von Hund, and increased the embarrassments of the Strict Observance Lodges. But he himself lost reputation.

A host of enemies attacked him. Some declared that while in Italy he had made a traffic of Freemasonry to enrich himself; others that he had learned and was practicing magic; and others again that he had secretly attached himself to the Jesuits. Von Waechter stoutly denied these charges; but it is certain that, from being in very moderate circumstances, he had, after his return from Italy, become suddenly and unaccountably rich. yet Mossdorf says that he discharged his mission with great delicacy and judgment.

Thory, quoting the Beytrag zur neuesten Geschicte, or the Bearer of New History (page 150) says that in 1782 he proposed to give a new organization to the old Templar system of Freemasonry, on the ruins, perhaps, of both branches of the strict Observance, and declared that he possessed the true secrets of the Order. His proposition for a reform was not accepted by the German Freemasons because they suspected that he was an agent of the Jesuits (ActaLatomorum i, page 152).

Kloss (Bibliographie, No. 622b) gives the title of a work published by him in 1822 as Worte der Wahrheit an die Menschen, meine Brüder, Word of Truth on Humanity, my Brethren. He died May 25, 1825, one, perhaps, of the last actors in the great Masonic drama of the Strict Observance.

WAGES

The whole period of the Middle Ages in England was in one aspect of it a struggle of barbarism against civilization, but on the question of wages it would be paying them a tribute to describe them as barbaric; wages were savage, savagely low and savagely cruel, and next only after war were the ruling class’s most brutal weapon of subjugation, and that remains true after every possible allowance is made between the purchasing power of a shilling then and a shilling now. A bookkeeper in the reign of Edward I records “that one Master Mason was paid 6d per day, and five Masons were paid 4d per day.”

Bro. Edward Conder, from whose Hole Craft these figures are being taken, notes that in 1336 a Mason received one shilling a day. In 1342-1400 typical wages for Freemasons working on Westminster Abbey ran 4d; 10/6 for two Masons for 21 days; two Masons at 2 shillings per week; two for two weeks 6 shillings; for “Master Yevele Chief Mason, ” one of the greatest of architects, “100 shillings per annum”; etc.

In 1402 Henry IV forbade Masons to work by the week, or to receive pay on feast days, and ordained that on a day before a holiday when they stopped at 3 P.M. they were to receive only one-half day’s pay—”in ye name of Godde.” One Royal Act forbade Freemasons to be paid more than 5′ shillings per day. In 1495 a statute fixed visages for Freemasons at 4d with meals furnished, 6d without meals during the long-day half of the year, 3d and 5d respectively during the other half; the fad a day began at 5 A.M. In Henry VIII’s time a Master received 12d a day; a Warden 5d a week; setters 3 8d per week; clerk of the works, 8d per day; under-clerks, 6d per day. At page 93 of his Gleanings Frown Westminster (Oxford London; 1861) George Gilbert Scott prints a number of specimens of the Westminster Fabric Rolls, the oldest being for 1253 A.D. In that year the average wage for Masons was 1 10d per week. In 1271 an expert Master Mason received 2′ 6d per week.

WAGES OF A MARK MASTER

See Mark Master’s Wages

WAGES OF A MASTER MASON, SYMBOLIC

See Foreign Country

WAGES OF OPERATIVE MASONS

In all the Old Constitutions praise is given to Saint Alban because he raised the wages of the Freemasons. Thus the Edinburgh-Kilwinning Manuscript says: “Saint Albans loved Masons well and cherished them much, and made their pay right good, standing by as the realm, did, for he gave them iis. a week, and 3d. to their cheer; for before that time, through all the land, a Mason had but a penny a day and his meat, until Saint Alban amended it.”

We may compare this rate of wages in the third century with that of the fifteenth, and we will be surprised at the little advance that was made.

In Grosse and Astle’s Antiquarian Repertory (iii, page 58), will be found an extract from the Rolls of Parliament, which contains a Petition, in the year 1443, to Parliament to regulate the price of labor. In it are the following items:

And from the Fest of Mighelmasse unto Ester, a free Mason and a maister carpenter by the day iiiid. with mete and drynk, withoute mete and drink iiid., ob.

Tyler or Sclatter, rough mason and meen carpenter, and other artificers concernyng beldyng, by the day iiid., with mete and drynk, and withoute mete and drynke, iiid., ob. And from the Fest of Mighelmasse unto Sister, a free Mason and a maister carpenter by the day iiid with mete and drynk, without mete and drink, iiid., ob.

Tyler, meen carpenter, rough mason, and other artificers aforesaid, by the day iid., ob, with mete and drynk, withoute mete and drynk iiid.., and every other werkeman and laborer by the day id., ob, with mete and drynk and withoute mete and drink iiid., and who that lasse deserveth, to take lasse.

WAGES OF THE WORKMEN AT THE TEMPLE

Neither the Seriptures, nor Josephus, give us any definite statement of the amount of wages paid, nor the manner in which they were paid, to the workmen who were engaged in the erection of King Solomon’s Temple. The cost of its construction, however, must have been immense, since it has been estimated that the edifice alone consumed more gold and silver than at present exists upon the whole earth; so that Josephus very justly says that “Solomon made all these things for the honor of God, with great variety and magnificence, sparing no cost, but using all possible liberality in adorning the Temple.”

We learn, as one instance of this liberality, from the Second Book of Chronicles, that Solomon paid annually to the Tyrian Freemasons, the servants of Hiram, “twenty thousand measures of beaten wheat, and twenty thousand measures of barley, and twenty thousand baths of wine, and twenty thousand baths of oil.” The bath was a measure equal to seven and a half gallons wine measure; and the cor or chomer, which we translate by the indefinite word measures contained ten baths; so that the corn, wine, and oil furnished by King Solomon, as wages to the servants of Hiram of Tyre, amounted to one hundred and ninety thousand bushels of the first and one hundred and fifty thousand gallons each of the second and third. The sacred records do not inform us what further wages they received, but we elsewhere learn that King Solomon gave them as a free gift a sum equal to more than thirty-two millions of dollars. The whole amount of wages paid to the Craft is stated to have been about six hundred and seventy-two millions of dollars; but we have no means of knowing how that amount was distributed; though it is natural to suppose that those of the most skill and experience received the highest wages.

The Harodim, or chiefs of the workmen, must have been better paid than the Ish Cabal, or mere laborers. The legend-makers of Freemasonry have not been idle in their invention of facts and circumstances in relation to this Subject, the whole of which have little more for a foundation than the imaginations of the inventors. They form, however, a part of the legendary history of Freemasonry, and are interesting for their ingenuity, and sometimes even for their absurdity (see Penny).

WAHABITES

A Mohammedan sect, established about 1740, dominant through the greater part of Arabia. Their doctrine was reformatory, to bring back the observances of Islam to the literal precepts of the Koran. Mecca and Medina were conquered by them. The founder of Ibn-abd-ul-Wahab, son of an Arab Sheila, born in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and died 1787. Their teachings were received by the Mussulrnan population of India, and much uneasiness has been feared therefrom.

WAITE, ARTHUR EDWARD

Arthur Edward Waite: A Check list of his Writings, by Harold V. B. Voorhis, privately printed; Red Bank, New Jersey; 1932, is an exhaustive but not wholly complete list of works possessed by Voorhis of which Waite was “either the author, the compiler, the translator, the editor, or the writer of the preface or foreword. ” Bro. Waite himself assisted Bro. Voorhis to make the collection as complete as possible; after Bro. Waite’s death Bro. Voorhis installed his collection in the Iowa Masonic Library, Cedar Rapids, Ia., where it is housed in a special case and named the Waite Collection; the magnanimity of that act is genuinely appreciated by Bro. Voorhis many American friends and colleagues.

In the Check List the titles are: Alchemical Writings of Edward Kelly. Azoth, or the Star in the East. Belle and the Dragon. Book of Black Magic and of Pacts. Book of the Holy Grail. Braid on IIypnotism—Neurhynology. Brotherhood of the Rosv Cross. Cloud Upon the Sanctuary. Collectanea Chemica. Collected Poems Compendium of Alchemical Processes. Deeper Aspects of Masonic Symbolism. Devil Worship in France Doctrine and Literature of the Rat balah. Elfin Music: An Antholog-v of English Fairy Poetry. Emblematic Freemasonry General Bool; of the Tarot. Gift of the Spirit. Gift of Understandings Golden and Biessed Casket of Nature’s Marvels. Golden Stairs. Harmonical Philosophy. Hermetic and Alchemical M ritP ings of Paracelsus. Hermetic Museum.

Hidden Church of the Holy Graal. History of Magic. Holy Kabbalah. Horlich’s Magazine. Israfel, Letters Visions and Poems. Key to the Tarot. Lamps of Western Mvstieism. Lexicon of Alchemy. Life of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin. Lives of Alchemvstical Philosophers. Lucasta, Parables and Poems. Lumen de Lumine. Lyric of the Fairyland. Magical Writings of Thomas Vaughan. Mysteries of hIagie. New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry. View Pearl of Great Price. Obermann. Occult Sciences. Ode to Astronomy and Other Poems. Pictorial Key to the Tarot. Prentice Mulford’s Story. Prince Starbeam Psyche.

Quest of the Golden Stairs. Raymond Lully. Real History of the Rosicrucians. Saint-Martin. Secret Doctrine in Israel. Secret Tradition in Alchemy. Secret Tradition in Freemasonry. Some Characteristics of the Inner Church. Songs and Poems of the Inner Church. Songs and Poems of Fairyland. Soul’s Comedy. Steps to the Crown. Strange Houses of Sleep. Studies in Mysticism. Tarot of the Bohemians. Transcendental Magic. Triumphal Chariot of Antimony.

Turba Philosophorum. Unknown World. Way of Divine Union. Works of Thomas Vaughan. World’s Great Religious Poetry. Zodiac of Life. Magazine articles in Horliek’s Magazine; Psyche; The Master Mason; The Builder (five); Light; Occult Review; Transactions of the Society Rosicruciana in Anglia.

Waite was not interested in Masonic History properly so called, and as represented by Mackey, Gould and Hughan; in fact, as his private correspondence and his published works prove, he was wholly mis taken about the point and purpose of it, as when he insisted that Gould had tried to prove that a few illiterate stone-masons had fathered Speculative Freemasonry. Moreover when his specifically Masonic writing is sifted out of the mass of his writings it is of surprisingly slender volume even his New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry is less about Masonry than about occultism; and the amount of history in his Emblematic Masonry is scarcely more than a trifle. His theory was that a few occultists like Ashmole and Fludd were bearers of the “Secret Tradition,” brought it into Masonry, and by means of doing so were the instruments by which the Operative Craft was made over into the Speculative Fraternity. He gives very little data and no proof for this theory, which has not been accepted; and it has made so little impression that in Ars Quauor Coronatorum and the Transactions of other Lodges of Research his name is seldom referred to, and his theory is not discussed.

It is in the fields of occultism and of mysticism and in the borders between the two that his massive and permanent fame will always rest; his works on the Rose Cross and on the Grail are his own masterpieces, and at the same time are masterpieces of the whole literature which they dominate. (American Masons Will find a surprise in this paragraph from Bro. Voorhis’s brochure, page 1: “Born in Brooklyn, New York~ U. S. A., in the year 1857, of Connecticut paternal ancestry, his English mother took him to England at the age of two, following the death of his father, and he has never returned to America. “)

WALES

The earliest Lodges in Wales were two at Chester and one at Congelton, all three established in 1724, and Doctor Anderson records that Grand Master Inchiquin granted a Deputation, May 10, 1727, to Hugh Warburton, to be Provincial Grand Master of North Wales, and another, June 24th in the same year, to Sir Edward Mansel, to be Provincial Grand Master of South Wales (Constitutions, 1738, page 191). Wales forms a part of the Masonic obedience of the Grand Lodge of England, and the Fraternity there has been directly governed by four Provincial Grand Lodges, namely, North Wales, South Wales, Eastern Division, and Western Division.

WALES, PRINCES OF

From 1737 no less than nineteen princes of Great Britain and Ireland have been admitted as Freemasons, four being Princes of Wales:

Frederick Lewis, 20th Prince of Wales, was initiated at the Palace of Kew, November 5, 1737 by Doctor Desaguliers, and the Book of Constitutions of 1737 was dedicated to him. February 6, 1787, George Augustus Frederick, 22nd Prince of Wales, was made a Freemason in London by the Most Worshipful Grand Masters the Duke of Cumberland. The Prince of Wales was elected Grand Master in 1790. There is in the museum at Washington, District of Columbia, of the Supreme Council, Ancient and Accepted ,Scottish Rite, a copper medal or token bearing the date November 24, 1790, and the inscription “Prince of Wales was elected G. M.” with the motto “Amor, Honor et Justicia” (Love, Honor and .Justice) commemorating the election of the Prince of Wales as Grand Master. He was installed in 1792; but on assuming the Regency, 1812, the office was vacated, and he became Patron. As George IV, he accepted the title of Grand Patron from 1820; and whilst Prince of Wales, 1787-1820, was Worshipful Master of the Prince of Wales Lodge, London, Sir Samuel Hulse being the Deputy Master for that period.

Albert Edward, 23rd Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, was initiated at Stockholm by the King of Sweden, in 1868. The rank of Past Grand Master of England was conferred upon him in 1870, but on the resignation of the Marquis of Ripon, he accepted the chair, and was installed as Most Worshipful Grand Master at the Albert Hall, London, by the Earl of Carnalaron, April 28, 1875 idle served as Worshipful Master in the Apollo University Lodge, Oxford, the Royal Alpha Lodge, London, and from 1874 was Worshipful Master of the famous Prince of Wales Lodge, No. 259. In the Grand Lodges of Scotland and Ireland he was a Patron and all honorary member of the Lodge of Edinburgh, No. 1, and also a member and Patron of the Supreme Council of the 33rd Degree for England, as well as Grand Master of the Convent Central of Knights Templar.

On Clay 2, 1919, H. R . Edwald A. C. G. 24th Prince of Wales, was initiated at an Emergency Meeting of the Household Brigade Lodge No, 2614, London, and raised a Master Mason on June 24, 1919, installed as Senior Grand Warden of the United Grand Lodge of England, October 25, 1922, and as Provincial Grand Master of Surrey, July, 1924.

WALLACE, GENERAL LEWIS

American writer and soldier in the Mexican and Civil Wars. Corn April 10, 1827; died February 15, 1905. Member of Montgomery Lodge No. 50, Crawfordsville, Indiana (see New Age Magazine, February,1924) . Author of the famous novel, Ben Hur, a Tale of the Christ. Governor of New Mexico, 1880; Minister to Turkey, 1881-5.

WALLACE KEATON MANUSCRIPT

Brother Wallace Keaton of London in 1926 discovered this manuscript, of the period from 1695 to 1715, which bears his name and is now possessed by the Grand Lodge of England. A description of it by brother H. Poole was published in the Masonic Record, beginning July, 1927 (page 192). There are six strips of parchment sewn into a roll about fourteen feet long and some seven inches wide. The text is in the main of normal style but Brother Poole notes a most interesting feature in that this version contains the peculiar variations of the Dowland Manuscript

WALLACHIA, GRAND SCOTTISH DEGREE OF

Found in Fustier’s lists

WALLERS AS MASONS

Operative Freemasonry had in the large a uniform system of organization, grades, customs, but this is a generalization against which must be charged a long list of exceptions or provisoes, and it is never safe to generalize about the whole of Masonry from any one record, set of rules, or lodge. This proviso holds of the subject of wailers. According to a set of still-existing records wallers were Masons who hewed and laid stone in walls; in contrast to them, the Masons who could work in finer stone, or free-stone, could shape and carve it, were called free-stone Masons—one of the origins, probably, of the name Freemason. A set of rules were set up for Masons in London in 1356; they were compiled by a commission of six free-stone Masons and a commission of six wailers in a joint conference. This indicates a recognized distinction between the two types of Masons, and suggests that they may have had separate organizations. Such a distinction would be in consonance with the records of the incorporated City Companies; in them Masons often were put into the same Company with trades having no connection with building, although each trade would usually maintain its own organization as a fraternity, association, or society apart from the Company.

WANAMAKER, JOHN

Famous American merchant, giving employment in two stores to more than 12,000 people. Born July 11, 1838; died December 12, 1922. U. S. Postmaster-General, 1889-93. He was made a Freemason “at sight” on March 30, 1898, by the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, and later received the Thirty-third Degree (see New Age, March 1925).

WANDERING SCHOLARS, MINSTRELS, ETC.

Even as early as the Twelfth Century there were a few universities in Europe, and by the Thirteenth these had grown to such a number, including Oxford and Cambridge in England, and also in size (one or two might have as many as 35,000 students enrolled), that their faculties ranked in power and intrust in the general intellectual life second only to the Church. With few roads and fewer ships to travel by, students had to walk for weeks or months through the country to reach a desired school; and since many students, young men or grown men, would go to one school to sit under one or two famous masters and then to another, and usually distant, school to sit under others, any given student might pass one-third or one-half his time on the roads, begging or working his way along, or earning a week’s lodging in some manor or castle by tales, recitations, and songs.

These wandering scholars, as they came to be called, developed in time an esprit de corps, had their unwritten rules, and by the end of the Middle Ages had become almost an organized fraternity. Like the Fellowship of Freemasons they had their legend, the core of which was a set of tales about a certain Golias, or Goliath, who was a sort of Paul Bunyan of scholarship, and very possibly was the germ out of which Rabelais’s abounding fancy developed the first idea for his tales of Gargantua and Pantagruel. For this reason the wandering scholars called themselves “Disciples of Golias,” or Goliards, or Gollerds, or Gollyers (the name is spelled in many forms); and they were often called vagans, though, as paragraphs below will show, that cognomen properly belonged to another fraternity

The Goliardi reached their apogee about 112S1130 A few scholars among them became famous not only as scholars in their own right but as heroes among the Disciples of Golias; Hugh, whom they called their Primate (they tended to be derisive of the Church hierarchy), was a canon of Orleans about l 14U; their “Archpoet was in the court of Frederiek Barbarossa (that Medici before the Medicis), was a knight, and was author of a literary masterpiece entitled Confession of Goluls (circa 1161-65). The great name of Walter Map, an Arehdeacon at Oxford under Henry II, occurs in many Goliardi MSS.

Men who have pictured the Middle Ages as a block of orthodox belief, solid with saints and a somewhat self-abasing piety, and without any Lucian or Voltaire anywhere in sight, will take a second thought after reading a history of the Goliardi, they and their writings together. They were free minds, witty, ironic, scornful of saints miracles, disgusted by relic worship, and arrogant to priests, monks, and other illiterates. They carried Latin over Europe and Britain; composed masterpieces in verse and prose: kindled a love for the other fine arts; were among the first to spread the good news of the new style of Gothic art and architecture at Paris; lit in remote places a lamp of learning; and helped to knit together the disrupted communities of Europe.

Helen Waddell, one of the most brilliant of modern women scholars, wrote a now famous book about them entitled Wandering Scholars in which her translations of Goliardi poems and songs are gem-like. For a shorter history and a fuller bibliography see chapter VI, in The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, by Charles Homer Haskins, one of the ripest works of American scholarship.

Also, it is rewarding to trace down references to the wandering scholars in the many works on the Middle Ages by the present doyen on that subject, Professor G. G. Coulton, whose autobiography, being published as these lines are written, it is a pious duty of every student of Medievalism to read: certainly, every Masonic student, because no Mason can ever quite fully understand the shape and color of the Fraternity when it first emerged in the early Middle Ages without a knowledge of such forces and influences as were at work in and around it as the Goliardi.

There was also in the Middle Ages another and different kind of society of wanderers. The old Latin vagus, wandering, appears in English speech as a root from which a constellation of words have had their rise, vagabond, vagary, vagrant, and Vwhmc among them; and other languages, also of Sanskrit-Latin origins, have the same words in their corresponding forms, and have had them for thousands of years, suggesting that always there is here and there a man who chooses to live on the road, not as a highway but as home and as a means of livelihood. The road was more of a temptation in the Middle Ages than now. Villages were isolated, towns were walled in; to the men in one community, men in another center only five miles away were “foreigners,” and were viewed with suspicion, sometimes with alarm, we with our papers, telephone, radio, and automobiles do not suffer from village claustrophobia, and therefore cannot picture to ourselves how often a Medieval man was seized by a craving, almost a craze, to get away, to take to the road, to see the world. In consequence there arose that strangely romantic Society of Beggars, or Vagrants, who move and appear and reappear in Medieval romances and legends for a thousand years.

It became in time an organized secret society, with officers, assemblies, and (usually three) degrees, along with modes of recognition and a language, or patois, of its own.

This last was called ” cant”; sometimes, “thieves’ Latin.” It had female side orders (what large and permanent society ever has not!), and like the Goliardi belongs to that mileu in which early Freemasonry took its shape. The Vagantes were the heroes, and points of reference, for Gay’s great “Beggars’ Opera.” Cervantes wrote his novel Rinconete y Costidilla about them (Spain was a homeland of the Vagantes as it was of the Gypsies because they went along with the Spanish Church’s worship of poverty and theological virtue of almsgiving). A modern Spaniard, Ibanez, wrote La Barraca about them.

They have a large role in Victor-Hugo’s Notre Dame. A clear and concise account of them is available, for short reference, in Famous Secret Societies, by John Herron Lepper; Sampson, Low, Marston & Co.; London. Almost every one of the many, and often many-volumed, histories of the social life of the Middle Ages has at least one chapter about them.

A lawyer student will find them much in evidence among Medieval statutes, so many of which were so wrathfully butso ineffectually aimed at the liquidation of “sturdy beggars.” (Adolf Hitler was a “house vagante” in Vienna for some three years.)

Men, women, and children of the Middle Ages were so fond of music, dancing, games, and feasts that they took (depending on the district) as many as from 50 to 150 holidays every year for merry-making, for processions, for which they had a passion, and for social occasions which called for musicians. Out of this developed the craft, or mystery, or profession of trained musicians. But since in any one small town or village there was not enough work to support a troupe of them they also, like the Goliardi, were gentlemen and ladies of the road, who went here and there upon invitation.

They must have become organized as early as the Twelfth Century, and had gilds, officers, and rites, traditions, rules and an apprenticeship of their own; they even had oaths, constitutions, and non-operative members, the last named being gentlemen who did not practice the calling for a livelihood but sought to be accepted because of the honor, or because they were patrons or students of the art. The oldest existing written charter is dated 1469.

For a detailed and charming history see The Worshipful Company of Musicians (2nd Edition); private circulation, London; 1905. (Worshipful was in almost as common and as familiar use throughout Medieval times as our own Mr. or Sir; it meant “respectable; accepted; recognized; entitled to respect,” and in its early use by Freemasons had no significance peculiar to the Fraternity.)

Readers who belong to the senior brackets of age will recall the learned, brilliant, and much-loved J. J. Jusserand, France’s Ambassador to Washington during the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, and his work on pilgrims and wanderers of the Middle Ages; it is no longer as fresh as it was, nor is it as sparkling as the books by Waddell and Haskins and Coulton, but for all that is the best all-round story of the people of the Medieval highway. (See also The Medieval Mind, by Henry Osborn Taylor; II Idol Macmillan; 1927. Medieval Europe, by Lynn Thorn dike; George G. Harrap & Co.; London; 1920. Medieval Italy, by H. B. Cotterill; also published by Harrap; 1915.)

WANDS

Doctor Oliver, under this title in his Dictionary, refers to the three scepters which, in the Royal Arch system of England, are placed in a triangular form beneath the canopy in the East, and which, being surmounted respectively by a crown, an All-seeing eye, and a miter, refer to the regal, the prophetical, and the sacerdotal offices.. In his Landmarks he calls them scepters. But rod or wand is the better word, because, while the scepter is restricted to the insignia of Kings, the rod or wand was and still is used as an indiscriminate mark of authority for all offices.

WAR AND FREEMASONRY

In the Middle Ages a “war” was a personal or family quarrel, with small forces officered by a few knights and composed of retainers and peasants. In the period of the Renaissance, armies were a form of private business, like a factory, which would sign a contract to fight for the highest bidder, and according to agreed rules; collusion among private armies, as among modern managers of prize fighters, was common, and oftentimes the decision was agreed on beforehand— Machiavelli’s appeal to Florence to stop this farce, in which not one man would be killed in “battle,” and substitute for it an army of citizens, stirred Europe far more than his mephistophelean theory of government.

When the countries became nationalized, so did armies; they were composed of local levies of men, or cadres, or of impressed or conscripted troops, and a man could buy his way into or out of an officership —the Ironmongers Company in London was twice levied for money by each side in the English Civil War. As in China, common soldiers were looked down on as belonging to the lowest order, and sailors were treated with even more contempt. Back of the system was the idea that an army was a nation’s champion; while the English champion was fighting the French champion, the English and French peoples went about their affairs as usual, willing to abide by the verdict of a remote contest. Our own Civil War was the first “modern war”; in it the army no longer was a champion but was the people itself, and the home front was as much a part of the struggle as the military front; carried to its inevitable outcome this became the present-day total war in which two or more whole peoples are conscripted into a single armed effort with themselves, their property, and their country at stake.

In articles on other pages of this supplement on RELIGION AND FREEMASONRY and on POLITICS AND FREEMASONRY it is shown that Freemasonry is among those arts and sciences which are inalterable by theological and political doctrines, and therefore it stands apart and unaffected by alterations in them. This is equally true as regards war; just as the old arts of farming, or the old sciences of physics and astronomy, or the old disciplines of mathematics, or philosophy, or history, or the plastic arts, cannot commit themselves to war, or be altered or revolutionized by war, so a Masonic Lodge has nothing in its Landmarks or its purposes which can take part in armies as men, its members may tremble with apprehension or flame with patriotism or may seize arms; as Masons they are, like Christianity or medicine or education, non-belligerent; even if in any given war, as in the war between the Government of Spain and the Id Phalangist rebels, the future existence of the Frater city lies in the balance, still it has in itself no means to arm itself; and as it is not so organized as to take any place in an army neither is it organized to take any part in the diplomatic activities which precede a war, or write a peace, or act to prevent wars.

A Mason’s one interest (as a Mason) is at the point where the history of Masonry intersects the history Of Near. In Medieval Freemasonry one large and important branch of Craftsmen specialized in military architectures in building castles, fortresses, and fortified city walls—castle building was so specialized that it almost comprised a separate species of Masonry. During the hundreds of wars in Britain and on the Continent during the long period of Operative Masonry, there is no evidence that the Masonic fraternities gilds, or lodges ever took part in them as such; in the midst of war the gilds went on with their work as best they could, as farmers, sailors, teachers, churches did. In 1732 the Grand Lodge of Ireland hit upon the expedient of granting Warrants for military Lodges (or regimental, or naval, or sea and field) under ambulatory or traveling Charters.

As one Grand Lodge after another adopted the custom these military bodies multiplied into the hundreds, and helped to carry Freemasonry about the world; but this was not a war measure, made to support one side as against another, but was for the sole purpose of according the privileges of the Craft to men away from home; the same Grand Lodge Chartered Lodges in two or three armies, as in America where there were military Lodges in both conflicting armies and under the same Grand Lodge! During that war, as they were to do so again in 1812 and in 1861-5, Masons from both sides oftentimes attended the same Lodge, and did so not out of “the emotions of the battle field” but because they knew that Lodges stand outside the militant struggle.

NOTE. In his article on page 1089 Bro. Robert I. Clegg discusses the action taken by Scottish Lodges in 1777, in offering bounties to men who would enlist for the war in America. The action taken by the Grand Lodge of Scotland the following year to condemn this un-Masonic practice bears out what was said in the above paragraphs. _ The majority of those Scottish Lodges at the time had patrons in tact is not in name; it is probable that they ware urged on by the patrons. The same thing had been attempted years before when patrons made use of a few Lodges as recruiting centers for immigrants willing to move to the Colonies. One act was as un-Masonic as the other.

WAR II, WORLD, AND FREEMASONRY IN EUROPE

After he declared a world-wide war on Freemasonry Pope Leo XIII set up the headquarters of his international anti-Masonic bureaus in France, in 1896, as described on another page of this Supplement in an article on Leo Taxil, and utilized for the purpose the machinery of persecution and accusation which already had long been in operation against the Jews: Masons were accused of being devil-worshiper, atheists, enemies of the family, humanitarians, democrats, Protestants, etc. This anti-Masonry was consolidated with the Church’s attack on the Republic of France, which it had carried on since the Franco-Prussian war in an attempt to restore the monarchy to the country. French Masonry never was large, having from 300 to 400 Lodges, and from 30,000 to 40,000 members under a Grand Lodge and a Grand Orient, but it more than made up in influence and prestige what it lacked in numbers. As against Roman Catholicism it continued a more-or-less passive resistance, but as against the schemes to destroy the French Republic it worked in the open, not as a member or champion of any one of the numerous political parties, but on the ground that freedom in state, society, and religion and the maintenance of a public school system are right and just.

The paramount social purpose of French Masonry mas to help establish a permanent peace in Europe. Long before Woodrow Wilson’s presidency it held conferences for discussing a League of Nations. Early in 1914, the first year of World War I, it sponsored a conference of German and French parliamentarians at Berne, Switzerland. Between the two Wars it worked continuously to establish a friendlier feeling between French and German peoples. It became identified in the public mind with liberty, education, and peace, and so much so that when on December 28, 1935, a clique of Roman Catholic members of the House of Deputies introduced an amendment to abolish Freemasonry they were defeated by a vote of 370 to 91, which in the tangle of the many political parties was tantamount to a unanimous defeat.

When the Nazis set up their Fifth Column in France under Otto Abetz at about that time, they provided for a special division to plan means to undermine and destroy the Fraternity, that work being placed under the direction of Bernard Fa. This brought the Roman Catholics, royalists, and Nazis (or Fascists) into a single front against a Fraternity which had no army, possessed no governmental offices or powers, had no newspapers, no gendarmerie, and no hundreds of millions of francs,—a tribute to the power and vitality of the Masonic ideal! This combined anti-Masonic bloc also was used as under-cover machinery for attacking the United States and explains why upon the fall of France, Americans there were shocked to discover so much hatred of themselves; and why in his last radio address to the nation before he fled from Paris, Premier Renaud laid the blame for “France’s defeat” on President Roosevelt!

Upon their entrance into Paris the Germans confiscated Masonic property, looted Lodge funds, burned Masonic buildings, carried the great Masonic Library off to Berlin, opened up a derisive “Masonic exposition” (which fell flat, and was a pitiable spectacle in which grown men who had graduated from the German universities acted and tallied like morons), shot some hundreds of Masons, imprisoned thousands of others, and sent other thousands to labor camps in the Reich. Almost as soon as he took control of Unoccupied France at Vichy, Pétain announced over the radio in one of his mumbled speeches that no Masonic dignitary (from a Worshipful Master up) could hold office or retain army commissions.

He removed some forty or more generals for having been Masons, and took the Legion of Honor away from many other Masons prominent in the army and in public life, among the latter being Pierre Comert, Alexis Leger, and Col. Charles Felix Pijeard, and denounced a number of members of the House of Deputies. He ordered Masonic property to be auctioned. Freemasonry was introduced into Italy about 1733, began to work under the best of auspices, and was led by men most eminent in the nation.

After the Popes began their crusade against it with the Bull by Clement XII in 1738, it had an honorable though checkered career, and in the Regiment numbered such Masons in its membership as Cavour, Mazzini, and Garibaldi, the last named a Grand Master. But Freemasonry was disturbed by the rise of the Carbonari with its endless branches and off-shoots, and often found itself compromised in the public eye by political secret societies falsely calling themselves Masonic. In self-defense some Lodges engaged in political work, thereby cutting themselves off from English-speaking Freemasonry; others refused to. The confusion became more confounded after World War I, and it was only when Torrigiani gained leadership, aided by the moral support of the Grand Lodge of New York (interested because of its own large Italian membership), that the Italian Craft began to regularize itself and to weed out false and clandestine bodies.

A short time before the so-called March on Rome (it had the King’s knowledge and consent; Mussolini traveled in a Pullman sleeper) the Grand Fascist Council on February 13, 1923, resolved, among other things, that since “Freemasons pursue a program and employ methods contrary to those which inspire the whole activity of Fascism, the Council calls upon those Fascists who are Freemasons to choose between membership of the National Fascist Party and Freemasonry.” Only a few days before, the Grand Orient, with Grand Master Torrigiani presiding, had proclaimed “that Freemasonry can never become a political party, and that, in the interests of national thought, it must be above all parties.” Among the Masonic leaders who chose Freemasonry as against Fascism was General Luigi Capello. Among those who deserted Masonry were Rossi, Balbo, and Acerbo.

Late in 1923 young Fascist toughs began to burn, loot, and destroy Lodge rooms and their furniture— even in Milan. On January 10, 1925, the Parliament outlawed the Fraternity. In a debate on the Bill, Mussolini thundered: “The Bill will demonstrate that Freemasonry is out of date and no longer has the right to exist in the present century.” For the sake of national peace Torrigiani declared the cessation of Masonic activity in Italy.

Then, about Nov. 5, 1926, the great bombshell exploded ! on a trumped-up charge manufactured out of the whole cloth, General Capello was arrested and accused of conspiring to assassinate Mussolini. This charge against a national hero who had given fifty years of his life to the Italian army covered the whole nation with gloom, because everybody knew he was innocent and his “trial” therefore showed the people by what means the Fascists would rule. He was brought to “trial” in the Spring of 1927, and sentenced to an imprisonment of thirty years, the first six to be in solitary confinement. Almost immediately secret police arrested Grand Master Torrigiani, “tried” him in secret court, and banished him to starve to death on one of the Lipari islands, to be followed later by some hundreds of other Masons. Torrigiani first went blind, or nearly 80, and then dsessene attempt after another was made from New York City to send food and medicines to those men on the little rock islands in the Mediterranean, but without much success. How many died from hunger and exposure may never be known. By the time Mussolini opened World War II with the rape of Abyssinia, Italian Freemasonry had become completely obliterated—for the time being.

General Ludendorff and his wife began the Nazi crusade against the Fraternity in Germany immediately after the end of World War I, and in the beginning tool; over enbloc the technique of anti-Masonry which had been used in France, which was character assassination coupled with a device for transferring to Masons the century-old Roman Catholic hatred of the Jews. (Ludendorff was a Nazi before Hitler was, and marched in the punch at hiunich )

In Mein Kamp Hitler wrote that the pacification of men and nations, that is, their civilization, which would destroy Germany’s “Germanness,” had been “introduced into the circles of the so-called ‘intelligentsia’ by Freemasonry,” and from them “is transmitted to the great masses but above all to the bourgeoisie, by the activity of the great press, which today is always Jewish.” (Hitler was startlingly ignorant, one of the most ignorant of a line of despots which always has hated “intellectuality”—and with good reason; he borrowed “bourgeoisie” at second hand from Karl Marx and often used it, but never understood its meaning.) Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, the “philosopher” of the Nazi Party (not a German, but a Balt, and psychopathic throughout his life), wrote at greater length in his Masonic Work Polmes, and with equal ignorance, even to the extent, and in defiance of his own claim to great learning, of accepting and promulgating the fable of the Protocol of the Elders of Zion.

In 1933, and in almost one of his first utterances as Prime Minister of Prussia, Hermann Goering declared that “in National Socialist Germany there is no place for Freemasonry.” In 1927 Joseph Goebbels set up an “exposition” in Berlin to display regalia, furniture, books, etc., taken from Masonic Lodge rooms. At the outbreak of the war in 1939 there were (or had been) about 700 Lodges in Germany, with some 100,000 members. (In a Brown Shirt Berlin street parade so an eye-witness reported in a letter to the writer—Masons were hauled through the streets in a cage like animals.) How many Masons were mobbed, beaten to death, murdered, executed, or sent to concentration camps in Germany may never be know.

In Spain the sufferings of Masons were more terrible than in any other country. What was called Fascism in Italy, Naziism in Germany, Vichyism in France, was called The Falange, or Falangism, there. It was headed by the hierarchy of the Roman Church, the landlords, the higher officers in the army, by royalists, by local representatives of international finance, and was armed, accounted, and financed by Italy and Germany. Under Falangist rule membership in a Lodge automatically called for imprisonment for ten years, later changed to twelve years. In one town during the Franco Rebellion 80 men were garroted on six scaffolds for being Masons; in another 50 were made to dig a trench and then were shot and buried in it.

Savages from Morocco were turned loose on Masons’ families; thousands of Masons were hanged shot, stabbed, burned, beaten to death for no other crime than Masonry; not in a Nazi crematory in Poland was there such an amount of savagery, bloodlust, brutality, murder, and unbelievable cruelty. (See an eye-witness account in Pierre van Paasen’s The Days of our Years.) Prior to the Franco Rebellion Spain had two Grand Lodged some 175 Lodges, and a membership of about 10,000.

Freemasonry in Austria had a very old and proud history but by 1938, the year of the annexation of Austria it was reduced to one Grand Lodge, some 20 Lodgers and 1500 members. Hitler immediately abolished it and sent some 9000 of the Masons to the concentration camp at Dachau, or had them shot.

Belgium had one Grand Lodge, 24 Lodges, and 4000 members, but possessed an influence out of proportion to its size. Immediately the Germans entered Belgium in April, 1940, the Lodges were closed, their properties were confiscated, and their members, most of them, were imprisoned.

Before 1938 Czechoslovakia had two Grand Lodges, 60 Lodges, and 2600 members—Masaryk and Benes both were Masons. Hitler closed the Lodges, confiscated the property, imprisoned Masons, and shot many leaders.

Greece had before the War one Grand Lodge, 70 Lodges, 6000 members. King George was a Past Masters The Germans obliterated the Fraternity— perhaps the Greeks suffered more frightfully than any other Masons except in Spain.

Freemasonry was strong in Holland before the War with one Grand Lodge, 151 Lodges, and 10,000 members. In April, 1940, the Germans closed the Lodges, confiscated real estate, used jewels and leather aprons for making military goods, and arrested hundreds of Masons, among whom a number of Grand Officers committed suicide under torture.

Norway had one Grand Lodge, 30 Lodges, 11,500 members; Quisling and the Germans obliterated the Craft, following the usual program. Poland had one Grand Lodge, 12 Lodges, and 1,000 members. Roumania had two Grand Lodges, 40 Lodges, 1700 members. Yugoslavia had one Grand Lodges, 20 Lodges, 800 members. Denmark had one Grand Lodge (the King is Grand Master), 30 Lodges, 8,000 members. In each of these countries the Germans carried out the same program of suppression, confiscation, imprisonment, torture, execution, and the terrorism often was extended to Masons’ families. As with the Germans so with the Japanese: in Japan, China, Philippine Islands, Singapore, Malaya, Burma, Thailand, and Indo China they destroyed Masons and Masonic buildings with the same ferocity as their Teutonic allies.

Within a space of less than five years more than 200,000 men overt martyred for being Masons, their properties confiscated, their families broken, themselves tortured, imprisoned, or shot. The Masonic Fraternity has a long memory, as long a memory as has the Roman Church; but it has nowhere in its memory any martyrdom such as that of those years; and it is hoped it never will have again; but it will carry a long memory into the future also, and a thousand years from now it will not have forgotten Spain, and Greece, and Holland, and France, and Italy of 1940 A.D.

WAR, FREEMASONRY IN

The question how Freemasons should conduct themselves in time of war, when their own country is one of the belligerents, is an important one. Of the political Course of a Freemason in his individual and private Capacity there is no doubt. The Charges declare that he must be “a peaceable subject to the civil powers, and never be concerned in plots and conspiracies against the peace and welfare of the nation” (Constitutions, 1723, page 50). But so anxious is the Order to be unembarrassed by all political influences, that treason, however discountenanced by the Craft, is not held as a crime which is amenable to Masonic punishment.

For the same Charge affirms that “if a Brother should be a rebel against the State, he is not to be countenanced in his rebellion, however he may be pitied as an unhappy man; and if convicted of no other crime, though the loyal brotherhood must and ought to disown his rebellion and give no umbrage or ground of political jealousy to the government for the time being, they cannot expel him from the Lodge, and his relation to it remains indefeasible.”

The Freemason, then, like every other citizen, should be a patriot. He should love his country with all his heart; should serve it faithfully and cheerfully; obey its laws in peace; and in war should be ever ready to support its honor and defend it from the attacks of its enemies. But even then the benign principles of the Institution extend their influence, arid divest the contest of many of its horrors. The Freemason fights, of Course, like every other man, for victory; but when the victory is won, he will remember that the conquered foe is still his Brother.

On the occasion, of a Masonic banquet given immediately after the close of the Mexican War to General Quitman by the Grand Lodge of South Carolina that distinguished soldier and Freemason remarked that, although he had devoted much of his attention to the nature and character of the Masonic Institution, and had repeatedly held the highest offices in the gift of his brethren, he had never really known what Freemasonry was until he had seen its workings on the field of battle.

But as a collective and organized body—in its Lodges and its Grand Lodges—it must have nothing to do with war. It must be silent and neutral. The din of the battle, the cry for vengeance, the shout of victory, must never penetrate its portals. Its dogmas and doctrines all teach love and fraternity; its symbols are symbols of peace; and it has no place in any of its rituals consecrated to the inculcation of human contention.

Brother C. W. Moore, in his Biography of Thomas Smith Webb, the great American ritualist, mentions a Circumstance which occurred during the period in which Webb presided over the Grand Lodge of Rhode Island, and to which Moore, in the opinion of Doctor Mackey, inconsiderately has given his hearty commendation. The United States was engaged at that time in a war with England. The people of Providence having commenced the erection of fortifications the Grand Lodge volunteered its Services; and the members, marching in procession as a Grand Lodge to the southern part of the town, erected a breastwork, to which was given the name of Fort Hiram (see Fort Masonic). Doctor Mackey doubted the propriety of the act. While, to repeat what has been just said, every individual member of the Grand Lodge as a Freemason, was bound by his obligation to be “true to his government ” and to defend it from the attacks of its enemies, it was, says Doctor Mackey, unseemly, and contrary to the peaceful spirit of the Institution, for any organized body of Freemasons, organized as such to engage in a warlike enterprise. But the patriotism, if not the prudence of the Grand Lodge, Cannot be denied.

Since writing this paragraph, Doctor Mackey met in brother Murray Lyon’s History of the Lodge of Edinburgh (page 83) with a record of the Grand Lodge of Scotland, which in his judgment sustained the view that he has taken. In 1777, recruits were being enlisted in Scotland for the British army, which was to fight the Americans in the War of the Revolution, which had just begun. Many of the Scotch Lodges offered, through the newspapers, bounties to all who should enlist But on February 2, 1778, the Grand Lodge passed a resolution which was published on the 12th, through the Grand Secretary, in the following circular:

At a quarterly meeting of the Grand Lodge of Scotland, held here the Second instant, I received a charge to acquaint all the Lodges of Scotland holding of the Grand Lodge that the Grand Lodge has seen with concern advertisements in the public newspapers, from different Lodges in Scotland, not only offering a bounty to recruits who may enlist in the new levies, but with the addition that all such recruits shall be admitted to the freedom of Masonry.

The first of these they consider as an improper alienation of the funds of the Lodge from the support of their poor and distressed Brethren, and the second they regard as a prostitution of our Order, which demands the reprehension of the Grand Lodge What ever share the Brethren may take as individuals in aiding these levies, out of zeal to serve their private friends or to promote the public service, the Grand Lodge considered it to be repugnant to the spirit of our Craft that any Lodge should take a part in such a business as a collective Body.

For Masonry is an Order of Pease ant it looks on all mankind to be Brethren as Masons, whether they be at peace or at war with each other as subjects of contending countries The Grand Lodge therefore strongly enjoins that the practice may be forthwith discontinued. By order of the Grand Lodge of Scotland. W. Mason, Gr Sec.

Of all human institutions, Freemasonry is the greatest and purest Peace Society. And this is because its doctrine of universal peace is founded on the doctrine of a universal brotherhood

WARDENS

In every Symbolic Lodge, there are three principal officers, namely, a Master, a Senior Warden, and a Junior Warden. This rule has existed ever since the revival, and for some time previous to that event, and is so universal that it has been considered as one of the landmarks. It exists in every country and in every Rite The titles of the officers may be different in different languages, but their functions as presiding over the Lodge in a tripartite division of duties, are everywhere the same. The German Masons call the two Wardens erste and zweite Aufseher; the French, premier and second Surveillant; the Spanish, primer and segundo Vigilante; and the Italians, primo and secondo Sorvegliante.

In the various Rites, the positions of these officers vary. In the American Rite, the Senior Warden sits in the West and the Junior in the South. In the French and Scottish Rites, both Wardens are in the West, the Senior in the Northwest and the Junior in the Southwest; but in all, the triangular position of the three officers relatively to each other is preserved; for a triangle being formed within the square of the Lodge, the Master and Wardens will each occupy one of the three points.

The precise time when the presidency of the Lodge was divided between these three officers or when they were first introduced into Freemasonry, is unknown. The Lodges of Scotland, during the Operative regime, or era, were governed by a Deacon and one Warden. The Earl of Cassilis was Master of Kilwinning in 1670, though only an Apprentice. This seems to have been not unusual, as there were cases of Apprentices presiding over Lodges. The Deacon performed the functions of a Master, and the Warden was the second officer, and took charge of and distributed the funds. In other words, he acted as a Treasurer.

This is evident from the Minutes of the Edinburgh Lodge, published by Brother Lyon. But the head of the Craft in Scotland at the same time was called the Warden General. This regulation, however, does not appear to have been universal even in Scotland, for in the Mark Book of the Aberdeen Lodge, under date of December 27, 1670, which was published by Brother W. J. Hughan in the Voice of Masonry, February, 1872, we find there a Master and Warden recognized as the presiding officers of the Lodge in the following Statute: “And likewise we all protest, by the oath we have made at our entry, to own the Warden of our Lodge as the next man in power to the Master, and in the Master’s absence he is full Master.”

Some of the English manuscript Constitutions recognize the offices of Master and Wardens. Thus the Harleian Manuscript, No. 1942, whose date is supposed to be about 1670, contains the “new articles” said to have been agreed on at a General Assembly held in 1663, in which is the following passage: “That for the future the said Society, Company and Fraternity of Free Masons shall be regulated and governed by one Master & Assembly & Wardens, as ye said Company shall think fit to chose, at every yarely General Assembly.”

As the word Warden does not appear in the earlier manuscripts, it might be concluded that the office was not introduced into the English Lodges until the latter part of the seventeenth century. Yet this does not absolutely follow. For the office of Warden might have existed, and no statutory provision on the subject have been embraced in the general charges which are contained in those manuscripts, because they relate not to the government of Lodges, but the duties of Freemasons. This of course, is conjectural; but the conjecture derives weight from the fact that Wardens were officers of the English Gilds as early as the fourteenth century. In the Charters granted by Edward III, in 1354, it is permitted that these companies shall yearly elect for their government “a certain number of Wardens ”

To a list of the Companies of the date of 1377 is affixed what is called the Oath of the Wardens of Crafts, of which this is the commencement: “Ye shall Were that ye shall wele and treuly oversee the Craft of— whereof ye be chosen Wardeyns for the year. It thus appears that the Wardens were at first the presiding officers of the Gilds.

At a later period, in the reign of Elizabeth, we find that the chief officer began to be called Master; and in the time of James I, between 1603 and 1625, the Gilds were generally governed by a Master and Wardens.

An ordinance of the Leather-Sellers Company at that time directed that on a certain occasion “the Master and Wardens shall appear in state.”

It is not, therefore, improbable that the government of Masonic Lodges by a Master and two Wardens was introduced into the regulations of the Order in the Seventeenth century, the “new article” of 1663 being a statutory confirmation of a custom which had just begun to prevail.

Senior Warden. He is the second officer in a Symbolic Lodge, and governs the Craft in the hours of labor. In the absence of the Master he presides over the Lodge, appointing some brothers not the Junior Warden, to occupy his place in the attest. His jewel is a level, a Symbol of the equality which exists among the Craft while at labor in the Lodge. His seat is in the West, and he represents the column of Strength. He has placed before him, and carries in all processions, a column, which is the representative of the right-hand pillar that stood at the porch of King Solomon’s Temple. The Junior Warden has a similar column, which represents the left-hand pillar. During labor the Column of the Senior Warden is erect in the Lodge, while that of the Junior is recumbent. At refreshment, the position of the two columns is reversed.

Junior Warden. The duties of this officer have already been described (see Junior Warden). There is also an officer in a Commandery of Knights Templar, the fifth in rank, who is staled Senior Warden. He takes an important part in the initiation of a candidate. His jewel of office is a triple triangle, the emblem of Deity.

WARDENS’ COLUMNS

See articles on Columns and Columns, The Wardens’

WARDENS, GRAND

See Grand Wardens

WARDER

The literal meaning of Warder is one who keeps watch and ward. In the Middle Ages, the Warder was stationed at the gate or on the battlements of the castle, and with his trumpet sounded alarms and announced the approach of all comers. Hence the Warder in a Commandery of Knights Templar bears a trumpet, and his duties are prescribed to be to announce the approach and departure of the Eminent Commander, to post the sentinels, and see that the Asylum is duly guarded, as well as to announce the approach of visitors. His jewel is a trumpet and crossed swords engraved on a square plate.

WARLIKE INSTRUMENT

In the ancient initiations, the aspirant was never permitted to enter on the threshold of the Temple in which the Ceremonies were conducted until, by the most solemn warning, he had been impressed with the necessity of secrecy and caution Thus the use, for this purpose, of a Warlike Instrument in the First Degree of Freemasonry, is intended to produce the same effect A sword has always been employed for that purpose; and to substitute the point of the compasses, taken from the altar at the time, is an improper sacrifice of Symbolism to the convenience of the Senior Deacon The Compasses are peculiar to the Third Degree In the earliest instructions of the eighteenth century it is Said that the entrance is “upon the point of a sword, or spear, or some warlike instrument”

Krause (Kurlsturkunden ii, page 142), in commenting on this expression, has completely misinterpreted its signification He supposes that the sword was intended as a sign of jurisdiction now assumed by the Lodge. But the real object of the ceremony is to teach the neophyte that as the sword or warlike instrument will wound or prick the flesh, so will the betray al of a trust confided wound or prick the conscience of him who betrays it

WARRANT OF CONSTITUTION

The Document which authorizes or gives a Warrant to certain persons therein named to organize and constitute a Lodge, Chapter, or other Masonic Body, and which ends usually with the formula, “for which this shall be your sufficient Warrant ”

The practice of granting Warrants for the Constitution of Lodges, dates only from the period of the Revival of Freemasonry in 1717 Previous to that period “a sufficient number oƒ brethren,” says Preston (Illustrations, edition of 1792, page 248), “met together within a certain district, had ample power to make Masons, and discharge every duty of Masonry without a Warrant of Constitution ” But in 1717 a regulation was adopted “that the privilege of assembling as Masons, which had been hitherto unlimited, should be vested in certain Lodges or assemblies of Masons convened in certain places; and that every Lodge to be hereafter Convened, except the four old Lodges at this time existing, should be legally authorized to act by a Warrant from the Grand Master, for the time being, granted to certain individuals by petition, with the Consent and approbation of the Grand Lodge in communication; and that without such Warrant no Lodge should be hereafter deemed regular or Constitutional ”

Consequently ever Since the adoption of that regulation, no Lodge has been regular unless it is working under such an authority The Word Warrant is appropriately used, because in its legal acceptation it means a document giving authority to perform some Specified act In England, the Warr