0A The Two Rhetorics of Freemasonry, Or, On Function and Necessity of Masonic Secrecy

The Two Rhetorics of
Freemasonry, or,
On the Function & Necessity of
Masonic Secrecy
Joshua Gunn, 32º
“These two pillars are the most duplicated architectural structures in his-
tory. Replicas exist all over the world.… [They] are exact replicas of the
two pillars that stood at the head of Solomon’s Temple.” Langdon pointed
to the pillar on the left. “That’s called Boaz—or the Mason’s Pillar. The
other is called Jachin—or the Apprentice Pillar.” He paused. “In fact, vir-
tually every Masonic temple in the world has two pillars like these.”
—Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code¹
A
t the conclusion of Dan Brown’s wildly successful novel,
The
Da Vinci Code (2003), Professor Robert Langdon and his
younger companion Sophie Neveu arrive at the famous Rosslyn
Chapel in Edinbrugh, Scotland on their quest for the Holy Grail.
Brown’s use of Masonic symbolism in the novel is frequently inaccurate, such
as in Langdon and Sophie’s discussion of Boaz and Jachin while standing in the
sanctuary. Although it remains the oldest and most well known fraternal orga-
Volume 15, 2007

Joshua Gunn
nization in the world, contemplative or speculative Freemasonry most likely

originated in the early eighteenth century in England.² The allegorical and
symbolic teachings of the fraternity orbit the stories surrounding the building
of King Solomon’s temple and are drawn from what some have thought to be
the practice of masonic guilds in the Middle Ages. However, the suggestion
that the markings and architecture of Rosslyn Chapel are directly related to
contemporary Freemasonry is misleading. Speculative Freemasonry has retro-
actively claimed the symbolism of Rosslyn,³ but, just like the All-Seeing Eye on
the back of the U.S. dollar bill, Rosslyn’s architectural symbolism existed long
before the Order in its present form was established.⁴
Owing to the focus of its strange symbolism and secrecy, Freemasonry has
often been the topic of many misleading associations and cultural fantasies that
have made the fraternity and its teachings an interesting topic for conspiracy the-
orists, mystery novel writers, and Hollywood filmmakers.⁵ Historically, most of
the fantasies about Masonry have been negative and hostile, frequently involving
the fraternity’s allegiance to Satan or various projects to establish a ‘New World
Order’. In distinction from these fantasies, the few references to Freemasonry in
The Da Vinci Code are largely positive. The book has been widely read (at the
time of this writing, there are over 65 million copies in print) and it has helped
to generate a less hostile, worldwide interest in the fraternity, spawning a flood
of knock-off novels, films, and television documentaries related to the Masons.⁶
In connection with the 2006 release of the film version of The Da Vinci Code—
which curiously only has one, very brief mention of Masonry—the ABC show
Good Morning America broadcast live from the House of the Temple in Washing-
ton, D.C.⁷ Perhaps because Masonry piques the interest of so many, Brown has
announced that his sequel to The Da Vinci Code, titled The Solomon Key, concerns
early U.S. Freemasons, many of whom were among the Founding Fathers of the
United States of America, including Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.
The recent media attention of the past few years has been a mixed bless-
ing for our fraternity. On the one hand, although the renewed exposure in the
mass media is mostly positive, this publicity has nevertheless resurfaced many
of the myths and conspiratorial fantasies that have plagued the fraternity since
its inception.⁸ On the other hand, however, media exposure may increase our
membership, which has declined more than fifty percent in the latter half of
the twentieth century.⁹ Seizing this opportunity, a number of Masonic leaders
have been appearing on television and publishing essays and books to ensure
that the popular media spin remains positive. In distinction from the rhetorical
10 Heredom
The Two Rhetorics of Freemasonry
response of Masons to anti-Masonic movements for hundreds of years, however,

these newer efforts to popularize Freemasonry downplay the occult traditions
central to the philosophical teachings of our past (it is important to stress that
my use of the term occult, which means ‘hidden’ and connotes secrecy, refers to
the vast inventory of symbols borrowed by Freemasonry from earlier mystical
and symbolic traditions, such as Alchemy, Kabbalah, and Hermeticism).¹⁰ In
light of the function of secrecy outlined in the following pages, downplaying
the secrecy of Masonic practice and ritual may be more detrimental to our
fraternity than many realize.
The recent rhetorical response of some Masonic leaders to the renewed pub-
lic scrutiny catalyzed by The Da Vinci Code can be read as a symptom of a sig-
nificant transformation in civic engagement. In response to the technological
and cultural changes documented as causes for the decline of participation in
social and civic groups (e.g., the arrival and dominance of television, interac-
tive video gaming, and the Internet as stationary, in-home mediums of stranger
socialibility),¹¹ the Masons have adopted a promotional strategy of transpar-
ency that entails divesting the Order of its secrets, which are, paradoxically,
both the cause of renewed public interest and the social capital that provide
Masons a sense of community or fellowship. Ironically, the decline of Masonry
is a consequence of the realization of the cherished, republican ideals that our
fraternity once protected in the ritualistic cloak of secrecy.¹²
The category of Masonic rhetoric or discourse is designed to persuade or
influence, and includes speeches, written texts, symbols, and imagery. As a
rhetorician or scholar of what many would describe as persuasion, I have been
trained to pay attention to the way in which people use language to do things—
not simply to communicate, but also to influence, to impart knowledge, to
inspire, and even to manipulate others.¹³ From a rhetorical perspective, a com-
parative analysis of Masonry’s internal and external rhetorical practices reveals
a widening disjunction between the previously secret rituals of the Craft and
its contemporary promotional rhetoric. In other words, the rhetoric internal to
Masonry (what we say and do behind the lodge doors) and external to Masonry
(how some Masons promote the Order outside of the lodge to journalists, the
entertainment industry, and so on) have become increasingly contradictory.
Not only does such a disjunction bespeak the way in which publics are defined
and maintained in respect to that which people presumably do not know, but
it also suggests that a decline in civic engagement is intimately related to the
contemporary lust for publicity.¹⁴
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Joshua Gunn
This essay unfolds in three parts. With reference to Masonic history, in the
first part Jürgen Habermas and Jodi Dean are cited to situate publics in relation
to secrecy and an emergent ideology of publicity. Masonic rhetorical practices,
specifically the occult (hidden) function of ritual and symbolism, work to cre-
ate a sense of community by fostering promises about what I term the “inex-
haustible secret.” Finally, the third part of the essay describes how the recent
self-promotional rhetoric of transparency adopted by the Freemasons works
to erode this inexhaustible secret upon which the fraternity is based. The ten-
sion—if not contradiction—between these two Masonic rhetorics not only sug-
gests the necessity of secrecy for a sense of public belonging in general, but also
diagnoses the decline of the fraternity in particular.
The Private Public of Freemasonry

Freemasonry is a beautiful and profound system of morality, veiled in
allegory and illustrated by symbols. The design of the Masonic Institu-
tion is to make its members wiser, better, and consequently happier. This
is accomplished by means of a series of moral instructions taught accord-
ing to ancient usage, by types, symbols, allegorical figures, and lectures.
The forms and ceremonies of this institution have come down through a
succession of ages and are all designed to impress upon the mind signifi-
cant and solemn truths.
—”Lecture in Preparation Room” to an Entering Apprentice candidate¹⁵
Recently Freemasonry has received scholarly attention for its status as a
civic group not unlike the PTA or a bowling league, and our declining mem-
bership has been referenced as evidence of a decline in civic engagement in
the United States.¹⁶ Of course, in the popular imagination the aura of secrecy
and mystery surrounding the fraternity is relegated to the realm of infotain-
ment, such as The Da Vinci Code or History Channel exposés, while the civic
function tends to be studied in scholarly literature.¹⁷ Recently, Masonic spokes-
persons have downplayed the mystery of the fraternity by also emphasizing its
civic mission and lamenting its decline as part of a larger trend toward social
fragmentation and disengagement. For example, during their interview in con-
nection with The Da Vinci Code on Good Morning America, television person-
ality Charles Gibson and Masonic scholar S. Brent Morris linked Masonry to a
general decline in civic clubs:
Gibson: … one of the things that struck me, you’ve all talked about
the fact you do good works, very supportive of one another, but member-
ship is diminishing in the Freemasons.
12 Heredom
Morris: Indeed it is. Membership has diminished in the Freemasons

since 1960. But it’s also diminished in virtually every voluntary organiza-
tion in the United States. It’s a mystery for sociologists.
Gibson: Why? Private societies, secret societies, whichever word you
want to use, raise suspicions. Are some of those suspicions the reason you
think that membership declines?¹⁸
Morris responds that “you can’t point to just the Masons’ traditions,” implying
that the mystery and secrecy of the fraternity is not related to Masonry’s civic
mission. Presumably, the secret rhetorical practices internal to Freemasonry are
not related to the decline in voluntary or civic organizations in the United States.
As the widely read scholarship of Robert D. Putnam has shown, Morris is
correct in diagnosing a general decline in the participation in civic groups. At
least some of the reasons behind this decline, however, are not a mystery to
sociologists: Putnam locates the decline in the complexities of major social
changes including urbanization, the erosion of the nuclear family, divorce rates,
the move of women into the workplace, and most especially the arrival of mass
media entertainment technologies:
[N]ews and entertainment have become increasingly individualized. No
longer must we coordinate our tastes and timing with others in order to
enjoy the rarest culture or most esoteric information … with my hi-fi
Walkman CD [player] … I can listen to precisely what I want to when I
want and where I want.… Second, electronic technology allows us to con-
sume this hand-tailored entertainment in private, even utterly alone.¹⁹
Television killed the secret handshake, or rather, television is a synecdoche for a

larger trend toward individual, social isolation catalyzed by media technology.
According to Putnam’s logic, instead of going to a lodge, would-be Masons are
sitting in front of screens or drowning out the world with their iPods. Because
public talk and deliberation are regarded as important to any healthy democ-
racy,²⁰ Putman implies that mass media technologies have played a significant
role in an increasingly unhealthy republic.
Although it is clear that the mass media is implicated as a major causal fac-
tor, what both Morris and Putnam fail to discuss is the motivational impetus
for social isolation and civic disengagement: why are people no longer moti-
vated to join civic groups? A closer look at one of the assumptions of delibera-
tive democratic theory suggests an answer, and it has more to do with mystery
and secrecy than Morris or Putnam might suspect. The unspoken warrant that
links public talk and deliberation—that is, civic engagement—with a healthy
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Joshua Gunn
democracy is that by talking about matters important to a community, one

discovers information that enables him or her to form opinions about impor-
tant issues and decisions that affect his or her community.²¹ In other words,
one engages a given public—one joins a civic club or participates in a sewing
circle—because he lacks knowledge, because there is something that he wor-
ries he may not know, because he fears that he may be out of the loop. What if
civic engagement requires a sense of mystery? What if civic mindedness entails
some degree of suspicion or self-doubt? What if the new modes of publicity
catalyzed by mass media technologies are contributing to a perceived decline
in civic deliberation because they evaporate mystery? Because Freemasonry
is a civic group with a centuries-long history of secrecy, its study suggests an
answer to these and related questions.
The problem that publicity poses to a community is well known among
Masons: if knowing a Masonic secret generates communal bonds, then it is
publicity—not so much the isolating effects of screens and headphones—that
threatens community. For example, although the presumed secrets of Freema-
sonry concern certain parts of the ceremonies and a number of secret passwords
and handshakes, these secrets are not difficult to find with a simple Google
search of the Internet.²² Today, there is one primary reason why Masons do
not talk about these not-so-secret secrets: as S. Brent Morris explains, the value
of secrets to Masons is “as symbols of fidelity and advancement within the fra-
ternity. Masons make a solemn promise not to reveal the secrets to anyone. It
doesn’t matter to him that you can find the secrets in print; what matters … is
that he keeps his promise.” ²³ In other words, Masons keep secrets in respect to
an ethic of reputation, an ethic that is established with the formal contracting
of promise keeping. The promise is the rhetoric of the communal bond, hence,
the actual content of the secret is something of a ruse.²⁴ Insofar as reputation
is premised on suspicion, or rather, insofar as one dispels the suspicion of one’s
character by keeping secrets, the interplay of secrecy and publicity are impli-
cated in a promise about something presumably unknown.
Whenever one speaks of publicity, a public is evoked. Historically speak-
ing, this is because the demand for the revelation of a state’s secrets marks the
beginning of a (re)public. Following the research of Reinhart Koselleck, Jürgen
Habermas traces the emergence of the ideal of a democratic public sphere to
the interplay of publicity and secrecy that actually began in private. Haber-
mas describes eighteenth century coffee house meetings, reading groups, and
Masonic lodges as nascent, or proto-, publics:
14 Heredom
The decisive element [of lodges] was not so much the political equality of the
members but their exclusiveness in relation to the political realm of absolut-
ism as such: social equality was possible at first only as an equality outside
the state. The coming together of people into a public was therefore antici-
pated in secret, as a public sphere existing largely behind closed doors.²⁵
And it was behind the lodge doors, guarded with passwords and handshakes,
that the rational faculty was protected from the counter-secret machinations
and “chanceries of the prince.” ²⁶ For both the people and the lodge, Habermas
argues, publicity had to “rely on secrecy” until methods of rational deliberation
and judgment in private helped to topple the secrecy of the state in increasing
demands for transparency. “Masonic brothers,” explains Jodi Dean, “as they
transmitted … their rational measures for moral discipline and self cultiva-
tion, were … vehicles for the reconstitution of political society in terms of the
public sphere.”²⁷ In short, the idea of ‘the public’ began in secret over secrets.
Although the claim sounds counterintuitive, the public as an idea was a direct
product of secret societies like Freemasonry.
In the formative centuries of Freemasonry, secrecy harbored a complex sys-
tem of moral uplift based on mystery, reputation, and mutual trust, putting
into practice the Enlightenment inspired idea of participatory government and
the rule of law.²⁸ Margaret C. Jacob argues that “within the confines of private
sociability the abstractions found in some of the favorite texts of the Enlighten-
ment, from Locke through Montesquieu, and not least Voltaire” were “lived as
well as read.” ²⁹ According to Koselleck, one of the abstractions that Masons
concretized was John Locke’s “law of reputation and censure” through the pro-
cess of elections. Masons maintained Locke’s belief that the “private” judgments
about others have a “universal obligatory character” by electing their leaders
and voting on who could join the fraternity.³⁰ Masons claim that only men of
sound mind, good health, moral conviction, and excellent reputation are eli-
gible for membership, and these qualities are assessed by an investigation com-
mittee that discusses an individual’s character with his colleagues, friends, and
family. Once the investigation committee is satisfied that they have discerned
the moral character and spiritual faith of a petitioner, they offer a recommenda-
tion to the lodge members to accept or reject the petition. Then, the members
of a lodge vote by secret ballot to allow a man to receive the degrees and join
their lodge. This is done by having each member place either a single white
(yes) or black (no) marble or die into a covered wooden box. This is the origin
of the term blackballed, to reject someone from membership. One of the origi-
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Joshua Gunn
nal rationales for Masonic secrecy was to protect the (then) radical practice of
electoral discrimination.
Secrecy was also important to ensure that a lodge was a forum where one
could speak freely about matters of philosophy, science, politics, and religion
without fear of persecution from the church or the state.³¹ Indeed, because the
fraternity was and remains a strong proponent of republicanism and democ-
racy, it consequently retains a principled commitment to the separation of
church and state. In the eighteenth century—and to some degree today—this
stance drew fire from the Roman Catholic Church,
1738 the Papacy condemned [F]reemasonry, partly in response to the
popularity of the lodge in Rome, and Catholic apologists who promul-
gated the Papal Bull explicated its logic in detail. At the top of their list
of [M]asonic offenses was republicanism. The ingenuity of the English
nation, they explained, has revived the purity of [F]reemasonry, and this
“society … imitates an aspect of the government of Republics. Its leaders
are chosen, or dismissed, at its will.” … Catholic opponents of the frater-
nity fixated on its custom of holding elections.³²
It is probable that from this two hundred seventy year-old antipathy in Europe
comes the oft-told observation that Catholics hate Masons and vice-versa.³³
Nevertheless, Koselleck and Habermas argue that secrecy was necessary to pro-
tect Masonic political beliefs until relatively recent times.³⁴ In fact, some histo-
rians have even argued that Masons were directly responsible for the institution
of the United States as a republic. The close, trusting bonds created between
men through the sharing of secrets “played an important role in building the
camaraderie necessary for the survival of the [early American] army—and
thus the American Republic,” argues Steven C. Bullock.³⁵ Some Masonic fra-
ternities have been linked to American revolutionary activities.³⁶ Lodges were
places where the merits and virtues of constitutional societies were discussed
and debated. Unlike the protections on free speech that we have today, some
historians argue that the clandestine character of Masonry helped to protect
and promote the political and religious ideas of revolutionaries in Europe and
in the United States that had yet to find widespread support.³⁷
As republicanism was eventually—and violently—instituted in the United
States, the stress on the clandestine nature of the fraternity’s governance and
teachings gradually weakened. Habermas would suggest that this is because
the unforeseen consequence of Masonry’s promotion of democracy and social
equality is that the fraternity “fell pray to its own ideology” of publicity.³⁸ The
16 Heredom
logics of suspicion and distrust that led to the formation of Masonry and our
internal ethic of repute are the very same logics that have contributed to the
decline in our membership. The ‘public’s right to know’ has inspired the pub-
lication of the presumed secrets of Masonry, and yet it is the sharing of a set of
secrets that originally constituted Masonry’s private public. It would seem that
the decline of Freemasonry is paradoxically symptomatic of the realization of
the republican ideals we have promoted for centuries.
Given the concrete, historical role Masonry and other constitutional soci-
eties have played in advancing the notion of ‘a public’, the decline of Freema-
sonry illustrates the centrality of secrecy in the formation of publics. Jodi Dean
argues that publics depend on a prior demand to reveal; the “fantasy of unity”
implied by the concept of a public is premised on something that is not known,
on suspicion, or on being an outsider. The “secret marks the constitutive limit
of the public,” Dean suggests,
a limit that the public sphere cannot acknowledge. That this limit can-
not be acknowledged, that it in fact stimulates not simply the continued
imposition of the public but the explosion of networked media, points to
the ideological function of publicity in the information age. How do we
know when we have enough information, when the ultimate secret has
been revealed? We don’t.³⁹
The reputational function of Masonic secrecy—that is, the notion that one is a
good man because he keeps his word—is thus more significant than the actual
content of Masonry’s secrets. To create social capital the secret must be under-
stood as a formal relationship among people about something that is forever
deferred. A public is sustained around this continuous and never-ending defer-
ral. Consequently, the public never tires of the promise of news or the revelation
of secrets—about the private lives of celebrities, about the real reasons for the
war in Iraq, or about the secret truth of The Da Vinci Code—because it is only
brought into being through the drama of revelation. It is to that drama, first
practiced inside Masonry and now decidedly external to it, that I now turn.
“Veiled in Allegory and Illustrated by Symbols”:

Masonic Rhetoric Explained
Rhetorical forms are elements in that system of assent that defines a pub-
lic consciousness. The rhetorical forms of secrecy and disclosure are espe-
cially definitive: they reflect the ways in which people assimilate them-
selves to those two sovereign antonymies, the public and private.
—Edwin Black⁴⁰
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Joshua Gunn
A number of rhetorical scholars have taken to theorizing publics and the

idea of the public in terms of “texts and their circulation,” which implicates
the domain of rhetoric as concerning both an object (television shows, iconic
images, books, and so on) and the process of its traveling (address).⁴¹ According
to Michael Warner, although publics are created “by virtue of being addressed,”
the object of public address must continue to circulate in a network for that pub-
lic to persist. In other words, a public continues to exist as a public only inso-
far as its many members shares some object in common. What distinguishes a
mere audience from a public is the duration of the group and the persistence of
its common object. I have suggested that Masonry is such a public, and I have
implied that Masonry is homologous to other publics in general. The question
then arises: how do objects of public formation continue to circulate and there-
fore maintain the existence of a public? What keeps the objects in circulation
around which publics form? Why are people motivated to continue as a public?
Using the example of Masonic symbolism and ritual, I suggest that the motor
of circulation is the curiosity inspired by the generalized promise of disclosure
betokened by peculiar texts. Any text can address—and therefore create—a
public, but only peculiar texts can maintain one: occult texts, texts that prom-
ise more secrets, mystical texts that suggest an inexhaustible mystery. In other
words, I want to suggest that mystery begets the desire to know that under-
writes a public.⁴² If one agrees with Dean that the secret is the constitutive limit
of a public, then a fundamental role of rhetoric in civic matters is that of revela-
tion and disclosure, which also entails mystification and obfuscation. This is a
process that ties together the object or text and its circulation in a continuously
dynamic way.⁴³ Dean and Warner’s theories imply that a public ceases to exist
when the common object of their address disappears. For a public to continue,
the object of its formation cannot be exhausted of meaning or enjoyment. Also
some aspect of that object must remain mysterious and beyond comprehension.
For shorthand, I term this object of public formation the inexhaustible secret.
The inexhaustible secret is not any one object, but rather refers to the formal
and relational dimension of that which brings a public into being. As the social
capital of Masonry demonstrates, “the secret is a matter of form, not content, so it
can never fully or finally be revealed.” ⁴⁴ The life of a public consequently depends
on a never-ending parade of content to sustain itself. In this way, the inexhaust-
ible secret is the essence of civic being, for Masonry and other civic groups alike.
Understood as a proto-public, we should expect the rhetoric internal to
Masonic practice to feature the continuous deferral of secret content and the
18 Heredom
constant promotion of mystery and suspicion. As a civic group presumably

on the decline, however, we should also expect Masonic rhetoric to reflect the
exhaustion of the secrecy and the evaporation of its mystery, for if the secret is
the constitutive limit of a public, then publicity heralds the demise of that pub-
lic. By analyzing and comparing the rhetorical practices internal and external
to Masonry, one can observe how the ideology of publicity may have more to
do with the decline of civic engagement in the United States than the isolating
and individualizing effects of news and entertainment; in other words, public-
ity is prior to and reason for the social isolation and fragmentation decried by
sociologists and political scientists. The decline in social capital, understood as
“connections among individuals-social networks and the norms of reciprocity
and trustworthiness that arise from them,” is at least partially explained by the
demise of the secret, by the ways in which the “public’s right to know” thwarts
its continued formation as a public.⁴⁵ Absent some form of secret knowledge,
the perception of a networked or unified community simply ceases to exist.
The Promise: Masonry’s Obligatory Drama

As many readers know, upon entering a Masonic lodge for the first time, every
candidate that petitions the fraternity represents someone trapped in the dark-
ness of ignorance. Once the lodge door is ceremonially opened to him, each
candidate will enter in pursuit of “more light,” participating in a lengthy, com-
plicated, highly symbolic (and initially confusing) ritual that is at least 250 years
old. The rituals draw heavily from passages and stories of the Old Testament of
the King James Bible, which culminate in an extended allegory, ‘the Hiramic
Legend’, based on two short passages (Kings 7: 13–14; 2 Chronicles 2:13–14).
As Masons we stress the allegorical and symbolic significance of the legend,
as few of us believe the story is true, which is revealed and elaborated in three
basic rituals: the Entered Apprentice Degree, 1°, the Fellowcraft Degree, 2°, and
the Master Mason Degree, 3°. In the climax of each ritual, the candidate kneels
before ‘The Volume of the Sacred Law’ of their faith and is asked to take an oath
not to reveal the secrets of Freemasonry. This obligation is the most important
speech act of the rhetorical practices internal to our Order: by promising to
keep secrets, an outsider is made a ‘Brother’.
Owing to the locus of secrecy’s suasive power in form, which establishes the
bond between people that knowing or sharing the content creates, Masonic
ritual consistently stresses the significance of one’s word or obligation to the
fraternity. The act of making a promise over some secret (irrespective of what
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Joshua Gunn
that secret is supposed to be) establishes Masonic community within a logic of

reputation. For example, although the actual wording of one’s Masonic obliga-
tion varies widely from one jurisdiction to the next, Ralph P. Lester’s nineteenth
century exposé of Masonic ritual helpfully imparts the character of Masonic
obligations.⁴⁶ Lester reports that, while he is blindfolded and kneeling at an
alter with his hands on a Bible, the obligation of the First Degree taken by an
Entered Apprentice begins something like this:
I, A.B. [name of candidate], of my own free will and accord, in the pres-
ence of Almighty God, and this Worshipful Lodge erected to Him and
dedicated to the Holy Saints John, do hereby and hereon (Master presses
his gavel on the candidate’s knuckles) most solemnly and sincerely prom-
ises [sic] and swear that I will always hail [sic; hele], forever conceal, never
reveal any of the secret arts, parts or points of the hidden mysteries of
Masonry which have been heretofore, or shall be, at this time, or at any
future period, communicated to me as such, to any person or persons,
whomsoever, except it be a true and lawful brother Mason, or within the
body of a just and lawfully constituted Lodge of Masons.…⁴⁷
The obligation continues at some length and gets longer with each degree. The
preponderance of clauses and labored prose is not designed to protect some
profound secret truth, but rather, to impart the gravity and significance of the
act of swearing. In this respect the Masonic oath is a classic social contract, how-
ever, it is peculiar in its literal and figurative blindness. Before any passwords or
handshakes are revealed to a Masonic candidate—before any secret content is
revealed—he is asked to make the obligation first. In this blind allegiance one
can locate the ideology of the rule of law and how republicanism tends toward
a public of promised equals.⁴⁸
Joan Copjec argues that such is the peculiar logic of democracy particular to
the United States. In fact, “if all our citizens can be said to be Americans, this
is not because we share any positive characteristics but rather because we have
been given the right to shed these characteristics, to present ourselves disem-
bodied before the law.” ⁴⁹ The blindness of the candidate in taking his Masonic
obligation enacts a certain kind of freedom—a temporary escape from family
and professional duty at the very least—from one’s personal and private life
in exchange for membership in a new public. The obligation implies, “I divest
myself of positive identity, therefore I am a citizen.” ⁵⁰ Furthermore, as the ety-
mology of swear attests, the divestiture of the promissory act is thus simultane-
ously the establishment of answerability, that one is now liable to the community
20 Heredom
of Masons by virtue of his promise. The moral uplift taught by the fraternity is a
consequence of mutual policing—keeping each other on the level and in line.⁵¹
Finally, the statement made that “I most solemnly and sincerely swear and
promise,” establishes a bond among strangers—people that one does not yet know
as Masons. Michael Warner terms this act of blind bonding the “stranger socia-
bility” that sustains any contemporary public.⁵² One’s blind obligation to others
as a Master Mason allows him to enter any regular Masonic lodge in the world.
In this respect the performative secrecy of Masonic rhetoric is a speech act not
unlike a vow of marriage: in making a pact one is beholden to others and ceases
to be a private individual resigned to the dark solitude of ignorance. The speech
pact is an announcement of one’s public being as a policed being, which is what
distinguishes a public from a mere audience.⁵³
The Secret: Masonry’s Hermeneutic Circle

The counterpart to the Masonic obligation is the secret over which it is made;
one requires the other. If the private public of Masonry fundamentally con-
cerns the ritual drama of secrecy and disclosure in ritual promise making, then
something must be disclosed, even if that something or content is trivial. As
Albert Pike once argued, it is mystery and curiosity that inspires.⁵⁴ As a corol-
lary, on can argue that without the sustained allure of mystery, the motive to
belong to a given community weakens over time. In other words, for a public
to persist, secret content can never be exhausted; there must always be further
secrets to contract over. For Masons, that inexhaustible something is symbol-
ism, a secret of Masonry that has always been in plain sight.
Of course, if anyone starts looking for the principal symbol of Freemasonry
in one’s community, which is the square and compasses encircling a capital
G, one will start to notice it is everywhere—on buildings, on car bumpers, in
books and frequently in films, on the rings and jewelry of passers-by, and so
on.⁵⁵ The inexhaustible secret of Masonry lies in the effects of this symbol on
the viewer, not necessarily on the meaning it signifies. The function of interpre-
tation in Masonry concerns this symbol’s seemingly recalcitrant strangeness, a
mystery only partly explained, and in this respect Masonry participates in the
difficult symbolism and esoteric prose of the Western occult tradition.
For centuries occult rhetoric deliberately obscured spiritual teachings in
strange and ironic prose and symbols.⁵⁶ Speaking an occult language can invite
persecution, but it can also ironically help to protect a group of like-minded
people from attack, as was the case with Masons and alchemists alike. Under-
Volume 15, 2007 21

Joshua Gunn
stood as both the proto-scientific quest to turn baser metals into gold, as well
as a spiritual quest to improve one’s soul, alchemy was protected and practiced
since antiquity well into the eighteenth century.⁵⁷ As with the Masons centuries
later, alchemists recorded their studies and teachings in the ‘language of the
birds’ or the ‘green language’, a difficult cipher of symbolism, character, and
code, because they feared persecution by religious and state authorities. For
example, Charles Walker reports,
The thirteenth-century occultist Michael Scot once insisted that honey
falls from the air into flowers, whence it is collected by the bees. To us, the
idea is fanciful, yet Scot was versed in the secret arts, and he knew that
the bee is an ancient symbol for the human soul, while honey is the thing
which [sic] feeds the soul.⁵⁸
There is also a certain poetic element to Scot’s writing of bees, flowers, and
honey that is not merely cipher; there is a sense in which the symbolism of
bees is mysterious because, when one first confronts it, one is not quite certain
what it means. Hence, strange symbolism is about more than protecting one’s
thought from persecution or discriminating between insiders and outsiders; it
is about the poetic, mystery-effects of occult symbols. The odd symbol or mys-
terious figure is employed by Masons in keeping with the alchemical logic of
secrecy: using deliberately obscure prose and symbols is discriminatory, both
marking off insiders and outsiders, but with the risky benefit of inspiring curi-
osity among both.⁵⁹ In this respect the discriminatory function of occult rheto-
ric parallels the function of irony in discourse generally, which many rhetorical
theorists since antiquity have noted can bond an audience as well as alienate one,
often at the same time.⁶⁰ Dan Brown’s use of Masonry as a historical object of
intrigue in The Da Vinci Code represents the centuries-long success of Masonic
poetics and the consequent irony at the heart of its symbolism. The fraternity’s
aura has helped to create a popular audience for Brown’s yarn as well as culti-
vate a membership for Freemasonry for almost three hundred years.
Among occultists and especially Masons, however, it is important to under-
score that the mystery of strange symbolism and difficult prose is not merely
strategic. From a sympathetic standpoint internal to Masonic philosophy, the
very strangeness of Masonic ritual and symbol is thought to encourage spiri-
tual contemplation. Within the modern occult tradition, evocative, exotic, or
otherwise bizarre representations functioned to encourage the aspirant or
reader into higher states of spiritual consciousness and intuition.⁶¹ Masons
have encouraged this practice because of our professed faith in the ability of an
22 Heredom
individual’s reason to intuit spiritual knowledge beyond the realm of significa-

tion. In her study of contemporary ceremonial magic, T. M. Luhrman explains
that the function of occult language and symbol is premised consciously on an
understanding of the contingency and limits of language:
Magicians are explicitly told [by mentors] of the ambiguity of language,
and different magicians use different words and images in different
ways to characterize the same event. In discussion of magical ideas, and
descriptions of magical practice, the specific words seem almost irrel-
evant: it is as if the word-value dwindles to its phatic importance, so that
magicians use their descriptions of the ritual to signal a sense of involve-
ment and commitment instead of as a means to convey information.⁶²
Although most of us do not claim supernatural forces are at work during our
rituals—or at least forces other than that of Deity—Masons nevertheless use
Masonic language and symbols similarly. What distinguishes us from other
occult organizations is the way in which our fraternity has sustained its prac-
tices for hundreds of years through the continuous and seemingly never-end-
ing creation and revelation of secrets. Since the inception of the current form
of Freemasonry in the eighteenth century, we have developed an arsenal of
degrees, titles, and associated symbols that have occupied scholars for lifetimes.
Numerous appendant bodies have emerged since the original, three-degree
Symbolic Lodge was established: the Scottish Rite extends the drama of secrecy
through an additional thirty degrees, while the York Rite, the Shrine, the Order
of Amaranth, the Eastern Star, the Grotto, the Tall Cedars, and many others
promise secrets, degrees, and titles of their own. In addition to being one of
the largest and last remaining occult fraternities of our kind, then, Masonry’s
unique purchase is the labyrinthine complexity of the symbols revealed to can-
didates in seemingly countless rituals and degrees. Many encyclopedias and
dictionaries are devoted to explaining the etymologies and complex meanings
of the scores of occult symbols and strange words; only a handful of extremely
learned Masons could ever specify the multiple meanings of all the words and
Masonic symbols used or referred to in a given degree. One reason why Mason-
ry’s private public persisted for centuries is because its various groups, degrees,
and symbolism grew over time in accord with classically occult hermeneutics
that stressed the inexhaustibility of meaning.
Looking into one of the most celebrated Masonic encyclopedias, Coil’s
Masonic Encyclopedia, provides a good example of the inexhaustible secret
of our fraternity’s symbolism. Owing to its occult roots and borrowings from
Volume 15, 2007 23

Joshua Gunn
alchemical practice, it is not surprising that we find that bees and the beehive
are important symbols to Masons:
On old jewels … lodge furniture, banners, summonses, certificates, etc.,

the beehive with its flying bees is often a prominent symbol, and in at
least one case is to be found in a lodge seal. Carved models of beehives, a
few inches high, have a place in one or two old lodges. As far back as 1724–
27, a Masonic pamphlet, often attributed to Jonathan Swift,… speaks at
length of the bee and the beehive as a symbol, and apparently our sev-
enteenth century brethren were taught that the beehive is “an emblem of
industry recommending the practice of that virtue to all created things,
from the highest seraph in heaven to the lowest reptile in the dust.”⁶³
For the Masonic candidate, the beehive’s significations—the human soul as well
as the industry and the product of its labor (honey)—are not revealed until
the Master Mason’s degree, if at all. Coil reports that mention of the beehive
is omitted in the lectures of the degree today, although the symbol is ubiqui-
tous in Masonic literature and in the decorations, furniture, and architecture
of lodges across the United States. What is important about the beehive, how-
ever, is not its basic interpretation as “industry.” What is important is what the
candidate himself makes of it, or how the image causes him to reflect on the
mysteries of Masonry, or the complexities of human industry and social orga-
nization, or the role of the feminine in structuring society, or the division of
labor in contemporary basic arrangements of the world, or the mysteries of
an ordered universe and its relation to his own spirituality, and so on. In short,
the interpretation of the beehive as a symbol is a kind of veil, delaying the final,
definite secret meaning. The endless interpretation of symbols represents how
Masonry has deployed and maintained the inexhaustible secret.
Termed symbolism or symbology in Masonic philosophy, the study of the
symbolic relationships and meanings of Masonry’s accrual of all things occult
and religious in the past 250 years is often touted as the central, scholarly com-
ponent of our philosophy. Such study is the counterpart to ritual obligation
in Masonry and, arguably, the most important practice that sustains the inex-
haustibility of secrecy. For example, in many Masonic lodges, and especially
those that are designated as research lodges, it is common to have a member
or guest speaker lecture on his interpretation of a Masonic symbol, such as the
beehive, or on a particular aspect of Masonic history. Sometimes these lectures
are collected into books, which are then repackaged as scholarly examinations
or reflections on the Craft. Many of the most cherished books of Masonic phi-
24 Heredom
losophy—most especially those of Albert Pike—were originally orations and

speeches given at lodge meetings.⁶⁴ Such study combines with the discrimina-
tory and protective functions of difficult rhetoric to encourage the pursuit of
further spiritual insight, or “more light,” by the Masonic student. As Rex R.
Hutchens explains, Masonic symbols are thought to be instructive. They
may clothe instruction for several reasons: first, the ideas taught cannot
be expressed readily in ordinary language, such as descriptions of Deity;
second, symbols can provide a metaphorical garment by which ideas are
presented on several levels … third, symbols provide ready mnemon-
ics by which instruction may be remembered.… To study a symbol is to
reflect on and explore it in the context of its history, allowing our minds
to be led beyond the grasp of reason.⁶⁵
Attention to the way we speak and have spoken about symbolism indicates that
our order is an occult organization formed on the promise of an inexhaustible
secrecy. This is the reason why Dan Brown and others reference the Masons
in their books and films: Masonry’s deployment of the inexhaustible secret
generates the curiosity that leads to our continued existence. Because Masonry
is constituted by the mystery and protection of a secret that can never be fully
exhausted of meaning, any threat to dispel the mystery central to the fraternity
is a threat to our continued survival. The third part of this essay shows how the
abandonment of the inexhaustible secret by a number of our leaders is both
symptomatic of, and responsible for, Masonry’s decline.
The Perils of Publicity, or, Dumbing Down the Mystery

The conflict between secrecy and democracy would appear to be a recur-
rent phenomenon in our national history. Indeed, since the flowering of
the modern secret society in the eighteenth century, antisecretism as a state
of mind has been an enduring fiber in the pattern of Western culture.
—Leland M. Griffin⁶⁶
Reading the theories of Jodi Dean and others, one discerns a direct relation-
ship between secrecy, publicity, and the formation of publics. Historically, this
relationship can be seen in the concrete practices of our fraternity, whose
republican ideology was originally practiced in secret and maintained over
the promise of some inexhaustible, ineffable truth. Conceptually, I argued that
we can observe how secrecy creates a sense of community by examining the
rhetoric internal to Masonic practice: occult ritual invents its public and com-
munal bonds through a drama of blind obligation to the fraternity’s secrets.
Volume 15, 2007 25

Joshua Gunn
This obligation is not a static, one-time performance (or even a three or thirty-
second time performance), but rather is continually renewed and maintained
because the secret it protects—that is, the meaning of the symbolism of the
fraternity—is perpetually deferred. Consequently, the rhetorical practice inter-
nal to our Craft consists of a dynamic interplay between obligations and the
inexhaustible secret. Masonry can be seen as a micro-example of the formation
of publics not only because it was a proto-public before the concept of “the pub-
lic” existed, but also because our current decline in membership parallels the
overall social decline of civic engagement. Whether a public is a fraternity or a
bowling league, it persists as such only to the extent our obligation as a public—
that is, the promise behind our stranger sociability—is continuously renewed.
Although the mechanism of mystery differs from one public to the next, the
disavowal of secrecy by some of our brothers demonstrates how publics disap-
pear as a consequence of publicity. The promotional strategies of Masonry, past
and present, need to be compared to explain how this happens.
In a classic and highly recommended study of the rhetorical structure of
the anti-Masonic movement, Leland Griffin carefully traces how the logic of
suspicion behind the formation of our fraternity eventually led to its almost
complete disappearance in the United States. As the United States republic was
established and gradually stabilized, the public that emerged turned against the
private public that incubated its ideology. A brief recounting of Griffin’s analysis
explains why Masons were led to abandon the inexhaustible secret in favor of
a transparent, promotional rhetoric. His story begins with a recounting of how
the murder of an anti-Mason, allegedly committed by Masons and known in
the Masonic literature as the “Morgan Affair,” sparked an anti-Masonic social
movement culminating in the development of a political party and the first
Antimasonic candidate for the Presidency in 1831.⁶⁷ According to Griffin,
in the fall of 1826 rumor was circulated among Freemasons of western

New York to the effect that a former member of the lodge at Batavia, a
bricklayer named William Morgan, was planning to publish the secret
signs, grips, passwords, and ritual of Ancient Craft [Blue Lodge] Masonry.
The anger of the Masons was soon translated into those actions that were
to initiate the [anti-Masonic] movement.… Morgan … was imprisoned
on a false charge and shortly thereafter, abducted from his cell by a small
band of Masons and driven in a closed carriage more than one hundred
miles to Rochester; from there he was taken to the abandoned fort above
Niagara Falls.… Morgan was locked in the castle of the fort—where, from
that moment, all historical trace of him vanishes.⁶⁸
26 Heredom
After Morgan’s death, his book was published and became an instant bestseller,
and an anti-Masonic uproar led to twenty-one indictments and a trial for six,
none of whom were charged with murder (the prosecutor and a number of
jurors were Freemasons). After the trial, over a hundred anti-Masonic newspa-
pers sprung up and, as Hodapp puts it, helped to generate a hysteria that was “so
bad that for nearly two decades, a toddler couldn’t get sick in the United States
without someone claiming the Masons had poisoned the kid’s porridge.” ⁶⁹
From a rhetorical vantage, what is particularly interesting to Griffin is the
way in which the anti-Masons created a “fund” of public argument. Various
channels of media circulation were used: newspapers, tracts, public lectures,
sermons, and so on. It was claimed the Masons killed Morgan as a part of their
bloodthirsty rituals, that they were conspiring to take over the newly estab-
lished and united republic, that they were in cahoots with the Devil, and so on.
The first strategy our brethren tried was to counter-attack “the character and
motives of Antimasons.… [Masons] charged that [anti-Masons] were merely
trying to ‘raise an excitement’, ” reports Griffin, “and declared that the ‘blessed
spirit’ [viz., grace claimed by anti-Masons] was rather an inquisitorial spirit, a
product of delusion as the Salem witchcraft trials had been.” ⁷⁰ Apparently the
counter-attack strategy was a disaster. Griffin argues that it led the anti-Masons
to extend their agenda to the complete destruction of Freemasonry itself, and
later, “the destruction of all secret orders then existing in the country.” ⁷¹
Griffin explains that the second rhetorical response of Masons was no more
effective, at least for the next decade, as Masonic supporters or “Mason Jacks”
stopped defending the fraternity. In 1830, under the “tacit leadership of Presi-
dent Jackson” (Past Grand Master of Tennessee), the Secretary of State Edward
Livingston gave a speech to a number of Masons in which he urged a “digni-
fied silence in the face of the opposition’s attack.” ⁷² After this talk was circu-
lated among Masons, Griffin notes that “the Masons became, in fact, virtually
mute.”⁷³ Meanwhile,
States began to pass laws against extrajuridical oaths, legislation which
was intended to emasculate the secret order; lodge charters were surren-
dered, sometimes under legal compulsion but often voluntarily; Phi Beta
Kappa abandoned its oaths of secrecy; Masonic and Odd Fellows’ lodges
began to file bankruptcy petitions; and membership rolls in the various
orders began to dwindle to the vanishing point.⁷⁴
Toward the middle of the 1840s, the fraternity began to recover and slowly
increased in numbers. Membership steadily increased for decade after decade
Volume 15, 2007 27

Joshua Gunn
until it ballooned to four million members in the modern heyday of contempo-

rary civic engagement in the post World War II United States.⁷⁵ Nevertheless,
the rhetorical strategy of absolute silence in response to questions regarding U.S.
Masonry—and especially in response to attacks—would persist until relatively
recently, and most visibly after the publication of The Da Vinci Code.⁷⁶
Owing to our fraternity’s commitment to tradition and ritual precedent, as
well as the emphasis placed on scholarship and the study of our symbols and
history, many Freemasons are aware of the history of anti-Masonry and at least
tacitly inculcated with the tight-lipped rhetorical habits of the fraternity; shak-
ing the defensive silent response of the past when confronting popular publicity
has been a decades-long process. The recent, positive portrayals of the frater-
nity in contemporary popular media, however, shows a number of prominent
Masonic leaders have adopted a strategy of seemingly complete openness about
the fraternity, its histories, its rituals, and its symbols—at least to the limit of their
own knowledge. Although the silence adopted after the Morgan Affair seemed
to do little to encourage membership, it nevertheless continued to cultivate the
inexhaustible secret for decades until rolls began to increase dramatically in the
Cold War. Today, as the fraternity faces a similar, though less dramatic, decline
in membership, a number of Masons have chosen to embrace recent publicity
as an opportunity to stress the non-mysterious aspects of the Order.
One reason that some Masons have decided to appear more open to public
curiosity is the recognition that publics—and their habits of information gather-
ing—have changed dramatically in the twentieth century.⁷⁷ Echoing the senti-
ments of Robert Putnam on the role of the mass media, Pierre G. Normand, editor
of The Plumbline, the newsletter of the Scottish Rite Research Society, observes
I suppose the big news in the Masonic world of late is the onslaught of
mixed blessings attendant to the release of The Da Vinci Code movie. [It]
… mentions Freemasonry, however briefly and inaccurately, and, as a
result, everyone’s interested in the fraternity again.… We live in a world
of tabloid journalism and conspiracy theories where the average Ameri-
can learns everything, not in the history section of the local library or
bookshop, but at the checkout counter of the local grocery stor[e] or the
movie theatre.⁷⁸
Apparently mindful of this attitude, Masonic officials made a number of strate-

gic choices when the ABC television network approached the Southern Juris-
diction of the Scottish Rite and requested a live broadcast in the spring of 2006.
Decisions were made to downplay the mystery-effects of Masonic symbolism
28 Heredom
as well as the spiritual teaching occult practices of Masonry. Secrecy was delib-
erately coded as private, disarticulating the fraternity from the long history of
clandestine clubs in the language of the right to privacy. For example, when
Richard E. Fletcher, Executive Secretary of the dominant Masonic public rela-
tions association, spoke with the reporter Charles Gibson on national televi-
sion, he flatly denied the label “secret society”:
Charles Gibson: … Do you accept this idea [that] it’s [Freemasonry

is] a secret society?
Richard E. Fletcher: No, sir.
Gibson: Not secret?
Fletcher: It isn’t.
Gibson: Then why the secret handshakes and the secret rites, etcetera,
that go on?
Fletcher: Well, the handshakes—if you want to go in that direction—
the handshakes are a throwback to our early days when Freemasonry was
related to the actual builders in stone.
Fletcher then explained the function of handshakes and passwords in medieval

masonic guilds, but Gibson was determined:
Gibson: But you know secret societies today raise suspicions. Now,
you say it’s not secret. But there are parts about it that we don’t know.
Fletcher: There are parts that are private. Now, if you’re talking about
what goes on behind closed doors and all those secret things. They’re not
secret. They’re private. What we are doing is taking an individual man,
bringing him into the fraternity through a series of degrees, and in those
degrees, he is going to be challenged to look at such things as honesty,
honor, integrity, how to make oneself a better person.…⁷⁹
The mere fact that our top, highly respected leaders allowed a popular morn-
ing news program to film inside the House of the Temple in Washington, D.C.,
of course, betokens a very different approach to and attitude toward publicity
than in our almost three-hundred year history. The lack of discussion about
the Masonic obligation in these televised interviews, however, is conspicuous,
because it is the promise to keep some things a secret that maintains the private
public of Freemasonry. The difference between privacy and secrecy is, of course,
the promise: private things concern that which can be made public, but is not
done so out of respect. Secrets remain private, however, because one is obliged
to keep them that way.⁸⁰ The semantic distinction is a fine one, but one that
is nevertheless symptomatic of a profound change in our fraternity’s promo-
Volume 15, 2007 29

Joshua Gunn
tional rhetoric. Fletcher’s choice of words not only denotes a deliberate change
in attitude among a number of prominent Masons, but is symptomatic of the
decline—or at the least a profound transformation—of the fraternity itself:
silence about the secret implies the obsolescence of the Masonic obligation.
One might argue that the divestiture of the inexhaustible secret as both a
strategy and a spiritual practice is limited to figures like Morris and Fletcher.
Any cursory review of literature sympathetic to Masonry, however, reveals that
privacy replaces secrecy in a number of books published for the express purpose
of popularizing the fraternity in the wake of The Da Vinci Code. “Masons like
to say that Freemasonry is not a secret society,” reports Christopher Hodapp in
his Freemasons for Dummies, “rather, it is a society with secrets. A better way to
put this is that what goes on in a lodge room during its ceremonies is private.”⁸¹
Like Fletcher, Hodapp downplays the centrality and function of mystery central
to Masonic philosophy: although “it is tempting to believe that there are hid-
den mysteries and even magic contained in” Masonic symbols, “in fact, they’re
used to simply imprint on the mind the lessons of the fraternity.” ⁸² In the same
spirit of simplicity, Hodapp not only downplays the drama of Masonic ritual
as a “throwback,” but—and surprisingly so—he dismisses the entire body of
modern Masonic philosophy crafted around the never-ending interpretation
of the inexhaustible secret. In an offset blurb box titled “Mysticism, magic, and
Masonic mumbo-jumbo,” Hodapp writes,
If you read enough about Freemasonry, you’ll soon come across the writ-
ings of Albert Mackey, Manley Hall, Arthur Edward Waite, and Albert
Pike. These men and many others have filled reams of paper with schol-
arly observations of Freemasonry. They eloquently linked the Craft to
the ancient Mystery Schools of Egypt and elsewhere. They wrote that
Masonry was directly descended from pagan rites and ancient religions.…
The works of these men were filled with fabulous tales and beliefs and
cultures and cryptic theories of the deepest and earliest origins of Free-
masonry. In short, they wrote a lot of crap.⁸³
Hodapp continues by denying Masonry has any relation to the occult, and that
writers like “Pike, Mackey, and Hall” wrote “big, thick books” that created all
sorts of problems since “Freemasons [now] have to explain all over again to
their relatives and ministers that, no, they aren’t … making pagan sacrifices to
Lucifer.” Hodapp concludes, “let’s just say their [Pike et al.] vision of the history
of modern-day Freemasonry is not accurate and leave it at that.” ⁸⁴
Leaving aside the observation that none of the authors mentioned by Hodapp
even claim that Masonry promotes pagan sacrifices to Lucifer, either Hodapp
30 Heredom
simply does not understand the internal function of Masonic rhetoric, or he

has deliberately chosen to mischaracterize the way the interpretation of sym-
bolism has been taught by the fraternity. By describing the lengthy and complex
writings on Masonic symbology as worthless, Hodapp disowns the form and
function of the inexhaustible secret. Given the history and function of secrecy
to Freemasonry that I have outlined above, describing the work of Albert Pike
and others as “crap” is, at best, ignorant and, at worst, grossly irresponsible.⁸⁵
Although decidedly more serious and less anti-intellectual, a number of
other Masonic publications also minimize the mystical and occult teachings of
the Craft. For example, Arturo de Hoyos and S. Brent Morris’ Is it True What
They Say About Freemasonry? downplays the important and difficult work of
Masonic philosophy, Pike’s Morals and Dogma, as a product of its time: “Just
because Albert Pike was a brilliant ritualist, an able administrator, and a well-
respected Mason doesn’t mean all his opinions are right in light of today’s knowl-
edge.” ⁸⁶ Such an observation is certainly true, however, it is made in the absence
of any explanation of Pike’s commitment to the Ancient Mysteries and the cen-
tral function of Masonic symbolism. Despite the fact that each is hundreds of
pages long, similar publications like Morris’ The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Free-
masonry and The Everything Freemasonry Book (the latter by non-Masons) also
downplay the occult origins of the fraternity and as well as the dramatic and
mysterious aspects. Although the tone of these books is much more respectful
of Masonic tradition and philosophy than Hodapp’s, they join Freemasons for
Dummies in presenting the fraternity as the antithesis of the mystery-effect of
the strange symbol. Each book attempts to evaporate the aura of mystery that
surrounds the Craft in the language of transparency and contemporary argot.
Given the anti-Masonic movements of the past, it is understandable why we
have abandoned the counterattack and silence in favor of the third strategy of
transparency. And yet, when viewed from the perspective of ritual drama and
mystery-effect, this rhetorical trend is ironically counterproductive. In the rush
to publicize the fraternity to avoid what is presumed to be its immanent demise,
some of our more visible and public Masonic leaders have failed to think more
carefully about the function of the secret in relation to the most important
ritual practice that sustains the Order: the Masonic obligation. Some of us have
abandoned what Albert Pike attempted to teach us over a century ago: mys-
tery begets community in the performance of blind promises to strangers. The
dynamic drama of secrecy dwindles when there are no more secrets to discover,
when there are no more threats to their concealment, then there is no longer a
Volume 15, 2007 31

Joshua Gunn
common ignorance to share. In our readiness to disavow secrets in the rhetoric

of mass address, some of our most respected and learned Masonic leaders seem
resigned to Freemasonry’s decline.
A Broken Pact, or, Is There No Help for the Widow’s Son?

The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry is a school of instruction [and] its sub-
jects are morality and philosophy. The moral domain is composed of
both precept and example … knowledge and action.… The accomplish-
ment of the second half of the educational mission of the Rite, however,
has received little emphasis … like a river seeking the smoothest route,
the Rite has steadily moved away from instruction on philosophy and
continued to place a greater emphasis on its charitable endeavors.
—Rex R. Hutchens, 33° ⁸⁷
In print, Masons have written of the impending death of Freemasonry since
at least the middle of the nineteenth century. This fear is discerned in Hutchens’
observation that Scottish Rite Masonry has gradually and lamentably moved
away from its philosophy of inexhaustible secrecy and interpretation, which
is frequently the beginning premise of much modern Masonic scholarship.⁸⁸
Many of Albert Pike’s scholarly works, for example, begin in an elitist tone:
“The highest claim of Freemasonry to consideration is that it is a philosophi-
cal truth, concealed from the masses and taught to adepts by symbols.” And
yet, argues Pike, “every intelligent Mason knows that of every hundred of the
Brethren … not more than two or three regard the symbolism of Freemasonry
as of any real value, or care to study it.” ⁸⁹ Pike applied his efforts to enhance and
amplify the mystery of Masonry by rewriting and rendering the Scottish Rite
degrees more dramatic. He hoped to inspire the intellectual and spiritual curi-
osity lacking among the Masons of his time. His worry was that the philosophi-
cal mission of Freemasonry was increasingly eclipsed by Masonic sociability
and charity. In my own terms, Pike was worried that the exhaustible secret was
becoming exhausted.
Drawing on recent scholarship concerning deliberative democracy, civic
engagement, and publics, I have argued that Pike’s fears have been realized.
Hastened by mass media technologies, the logics of publicity central to the
formation of secret societies have led to their decline through the ceaseless
publication and disclosure of secrets. This decline is reflected in the contem-
porary civil disengagement that Robert Putnam and others see as symptomatic
of our time, and suggests that mystery is more important to civic participation
than many realize. To this end I described how Masonry creates and sustains
32 Heredom
our private public through the dialectical interplay of promises and secrets:
in exchange for one’s blind obligation to the group about some inexhaustible
secret, an individual can become an equal participant. The obligation is a social
contract forged in blindness over the promise of a coming knowledge that
never fully arrives. What Masonic practices teach us, however, is that publics
require a continuous, dynamic obligation and commitment, and that this is
achieved by an object whose information, meaning, or symbolism can never
be fully revealed: the inexhaustible secret. Consequently, the recent attempt to
disown secrecy by a number of Masons is an abandonment of the inexhaustible
secret that underwrites our very existence.
The argument by analogy stresses the overlooked import of ignorance as
a curiosity catalyst, the death of which is represented in the Masonic dives-
titure of secrecy; in other words, the decline of Masonry is a symptom of a
much larger social transformation. It is not that the secrets are known or can
be known that keeps folks from joining civic groups. Just because a Mason
says that all the secrets are “out there” does not dispel suspicion. Rather, it is
the notion that the secret is exhausted, that there is nothing more to sustain a
public, that there is no mystery in the world. The idea of the exhausted secret
translates into what political scholars have dubbed political cynicism, or a belief
that one’s voting or voice has no efficacy in the political process.⁹⁰ Why vote
when politics is understood as a predetermined game, if there is no mystery to
the political process, or if one believes that they know the outcome in advance
because the polls tell them so? A public mood of obligation to the political pro-
cess cannot be sustained absent some modicum of ignorance and a blind belief
in contingency. To wit: the ideology of publicity—that all secrets must be found
out, disowned, or investigated—has not only led to the decline of Masonry, but
it has also contributed to civic disengagement writ large.
According to Jodi Dean, the ideology of publicity, nascent in the advent of
our fraternity but particularly full-blown in our time, values “suspicion, expo-
sure, and information” to continue. The net benefit of this ideology is the cre-
ation and maintenance of various publics that contract over that which has
yet to be discovered, as well as the more robust notion of the public or public
sphere as a utopian space of “inclusivity, equality, transparency, and rational-
ity.” Few would disown the latter as important values to cultivate by rhetori-
cal means. Consequently, Dean suggests, arguing for “breaking out of today’s
technocultural matrix may well entail shooting ourselves in the foot” because
it “may require a willingness to challenge, perhaps to sacrifice, our deepest
Volume 15, 2007 33

Joshua Gunn
commitments” ⁹¹ Although I do not believe, as Dean does, that it is possible

to make any radical break from the logics of suspicion upon which the lust for
publicity is based, I do agree that a public is a fantasy of unity sustained only by
the incomplete yet perpetual disclosure of its foundational mystery—the inex-
haustible secret. Suspicion is indispensable to any self-conscious community,
otherwise the community transforms, dwindles, or simply reduces to a mere
audience. Because the secret is so central to our bond, Masons need to seri-
ously reconsider the guiding assumption of recent publicity: that an increase in
membership will lead to a stronger, more robust fraternal order. Because of the
way in which the ideology of publicity seems to work, perhaps a smaller, more
dedicated membership would be better for the fraternity and its philosophy?
Regardless of one’s position on the size of the Order, this essay nevertheless
urges Masons to think twice about disowning secrecy or insisting that Masonic
secrecy is merely privacy. In this age of the drama of publicity and surveillance,
our obligation to secrecy—and therefore to each other—is all that we have.
NOTES
1. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2003), p. 436.
2. The consensus among Masons and historians seems to be that the present form of
Masonry as it is now practiced can be traced back to a 1717 formation in London. See
Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of
the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1996), esp. pp. 9–49; Margaret C. Jacob, Living in the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and
Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp.
pp. 23–51; and W. Kirk MacNulty, The Way of the Craftsman: A Search for the Spiritual
Essence of Craft Freemasonry (London: Central Regalia Ltd., 2002), esp. pp. 3–12.
3. See Illustrated Guide to Rosslyn Chapel, ed. Robert L. D. Cooper (New York:
Masonic Publishing Company, 2003).
4. See W. Kirk MacNulty, Freemasonry: A Journey Through Ritual and Symbol (Lon-
don: Thames and Hudson, 1991). It should be noted that in this essay, in the tradition of
Masonry, I will refer to Freemasonry, Masonry, the Craft, the fraternity, the organization,
and the Order interchangeably.
5. In addition to the film version of The Da Vinci Code, see From Hell (2001), National
Treasure (2004), and Rosewood (1997). For more examples, see “Freemasonry in Cul-
ture: Movies, TV, Books & Other Entertainment,” Masonic Leadership Center, available:
http://www.bessel.org/culture.htm (accessed August 7, 2006).
34 Heredom
6. For example, The History Channel’s series History’s Mysteries devoted a number
of 2006 programs to the Freemasons and associated secret societies, such as, “Secret
Brotherhood of Freemasons,” “Secret Societies” and “Knights Templar.”
7. “Secrets of the Freemasons: Do They Control the Government? abcnews.com, April 19,
2006; available at http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1859087&page=1 (accessed
August 7, 2006). A full transcript is in S. Brent Morris, “Good Morning, America Broad-
casts Live from the House of the Temple.” Scottish Rite Journal (July/August 2006), avail-
able at http://www.srmason-sj.org/web/journal-files/Issues/jul-aug06/MorrisGMA.html
(accessed August 7, 2006).
8. There are hundreds of anti-Masonic books that locate the fraternity in Satanic con-
spiracy; for examples, see Cathy Burns, Hidden Secrets of Freemasonry (Mt. Carmel, Pa.:
Sharing Press, 1990) and William Schnoebelenn, Masonry: Beyond the Light (Ontario,
Calif.: Chick Publications, 1991). For a book length rebuttal of these and similar fanta-
sies, see Arturo de Hoyos and S. Brent Morris, Is It True What They Say About Freema-
sonry? The Methods of Anti-Masons, rev. ed., (New York: M. Evans and Co., Inc., 2004).
9. W. Kirk MacNulty, “Freemasonry for Bobos,” Heredom 13 (2005), p. 27.
10. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “occult.”
11. See Robert D. Putnam. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Com-
munity (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2000).
12. See Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), esp. pp. 23–34.
13. Aristotle defined rhetoric as “an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the avail-
able means of persuasion.” In the thousands of years of rhetorical study since his time,
rhetoric has more or less referred to the study of persuasion. My personal definition of
rhetoric is: the study of how signs and symbols influence people to do or believe things that
they otherwise ordinarily would not do or believe. Rhetoric can also refer to a thing or a
product, such as a persuasive speech, a tract, and so on. In this essay, I refer to rhetoric
in both senses, but am careful to underscore when I mean the study of and when I mean
an influential discourse. See Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans.
George A Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 36.
14. Dean, Publicity’s Secret, p. 42. I should note that, following a general distinction
in public sphere theory, I do not use the public and publics interchangeably. In this essay,
the public refers to idealized view of both a space and certain group of people, usually
confined by the notion of a nation state—the public sphere, for example. As such the
public is a fantasy of popular unity. In contrast, by publics I mean to refer to materially
existing communities and groups of people. For example, the Masons constitute one
type of public, as does ‘the movie going public’, and so on. The public does not exist;
however, specific publics do.
15. The Louisiana Masonic Monitor, ed. G. C. Huckaby (Kenner, La.: River Parishes
Volume 15, 2007 35

Joshua Gunn
Printing/The Grand Lodge of the State of Louisiana, 1988), p. 20.

16. Putnam, Bowling Alone, p. 55.
17. Of the handful of scholarly treatments of Masonry cited herein, only the work of
Leland Griffin engages the rhetorical dimensions of Masonic secrecy and its relation to
civic engagement. Most of the academic work done on Masonry by non-Masons is histor-
ical or theoretical and does not engage the internal rhetoric of actual Masonic practice.
18. Morris, “Good Morning,” paras. 36–39.
19. Putnam, Bowling Alone, pp. 216–17. Putnam’s claims are not without controversy;
see Alan Horowitz, rev. of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Com-
munity. Sociological Inquiry 72 (2002), pp. 345–48.
20. Michael X. Delli Carpini, Fay Lomax Cook, and Lawrence R. Jacobs, “Public
Deliberation, Discursive Participation, and Citizen Engagement,” Annual Review of
Political Science 7 (2004), pp. 315–44.
21. Carpini, Cook, and Jacobs, Public Deliberation, pp. 319–21.
22. See Christopher Hodapp, Freemasons for Dummies (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley Pub-
lishing, 2005), pp. 17–18.
23. S. Brent Morris, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Freemasonry (New York: Alpha
Books/Penguin, 2006), p. 10.
24. Of course, there is a secondary reason for maintaining one’s obligation to the
fraternity: telling Masonic secrets simply spoils the fun for new Masons receiving their
degrees; learning a “secret handshake” is much less enjoyable, perhaps even boring,
when you already know what it is! See Hodapp, Dummies, p. 18.
25. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
Into the Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), p. 35.
26. Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 35.
27. Dean, Publicity’s Secret, p. 30.
28. See Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eigh-
teenth-Century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. pp. 96–119.
29. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, p. 96.
30. In Dean, Publicity’s Secret p. 25.
31. Freemasonry and related secret societies have received some attention in public
sphere scholarship. See especially Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlighten-
ment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998); Habermas,
Structural Transformation, pp. 31–38; and Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment,
esp. pp. 3–51. Habermas argues, for example, that Masonry was essentially a proto-pub-
36 Heredom
lic, a point to which I will return shortly.

32. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, p. 23.
33. There are ample, extant writings by Masons to demonstrate a decidedly anti-Cath-
olic attitude in the United States up until at least the 1930s; however, the fraternity is only
one, small part of a much larger culture war waged against the Pope. See Lynn Dumenil,
“ ‘The Insatiable Maw of Bureaucracy’: Antistatism and Education Reform in the 1920s,”
The Journal of American History 77 (1990), pp. 499–524. It is also true that Masonry
adheres to a characteristically Protestant understanding of biblical exegesis and the abil-
ity of humans to intuit the spiritual and divine without an intercessor, which obviously
creates some tension with the Holy See. Nevertheless, contemporary Masonry is not
hostile to Catholics, as a number are members of the fraternity in the United States. It is
not clear among ecclesiastical scholars, however, whether the Vatican presently forbids
membership; see Joel Schorn, “What is the Catholic View of Freemasonry?” U.S. Catho-
lic (May 2005), p. 43.
34. These thinkers differ substantially, however, on whether publicity serves a mysti-
cal or rational purpose. See Dean, Publicity’s Secret, pp. 23–34.
35. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, p. 110.
36. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, pp. 113.
37. For example, Freemasonry has also been linked to the English and French revolu-
tions; see Jacob, Living the Enlightenment; and Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood.
38. Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 35.
40. Edwin Black, “Secrecy and Disclosure as Rhetorical Forms,” Quarterly Journal of
Speech 74 (1988), p. 149.
41. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics (abbreviated version),” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 88 (2002), p. 413. Also see Robert Asen, “Seeking the ‘Counter’ in Coun-
terpublics,” Communication Theory 10 (2000), pp. 424–46; Robert Asen and Daniel C.
Brouwer, eds., Counterpublics and the State, Albany: State University Press of New York,
2001; Daniel Brouwer, “Counterpublicity and Corporeality in HIV/AIDS Zines,” Critical
Studies in Media Communication 22 (2005), pp. 351–57; Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetori-
cal Pedagogy as Postal System: Circulating Subjects through Michael Warner’s ‘Publics
and Counterpublics’,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002), pp. 434–43; and Phaedra C.
Pezzulo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Month’: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and
Their Cultural Performances,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003), pp. 345–65.
42. The same is most especially true for that public that most concerns rhetorical
scholars: the audience. In terms of the popular media, the use of the ‘cliffhanger’ struc-
ture in the television program Lost is an excellent example of how audiences are culti-
vated and maintained over a series of seasons.
Volume 15, 2007 37

Joshua Gunn
43. One is tempted to term this rhetoric, simply, journalism. As I detail below, how-
ever, the difference between a rhetoric of secrecy and journalism is the function of the
inexhaustible secret. Journalism presumes an end to the darkness of human ignorance,
while an occultic rhetoric embraces darkness as its existential plight.
45. Putnam, Bowling Alone, p. 19.
46. Owing to the esoteric work or speech-only memorization of the actual wording of
Masonic ritual, Lester’s account is necessarily inaccurate. The ritual’s wording changes
over time as a consequence of its oral transmission; moreover, the wording of each juris-
diction is different as well because of regional influences.
47. Ralph P. Lester, Look to the East! A Ritual of the First Three Degrees of Freemasonry
(Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), p. 30.
48. In fact, the fundamental teaching of Masonry is that of many religious faiths: we
are all equal in our blindness toward death; on the basis of that commonality (not so
much taxes) we are united and implored to be good.
49. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1994), p. 146.
50. Copjec, Read My Desire, p. 146.
51. For an account of how speech pacts form the basis of State-sponsored surveil-
lance, see Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida
to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 55–57.
52. Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” p. 417.
53. The logic of willful surveillance (by self and by one’s “brothers”) that underlies the
formation of a public indicates the horizon of “the public” is ultimately the nation state,
the conceptual embodiment of policing par excellence. The paradox behind the social
contract, in this respect, is that the State can thus claim to guarantee and protect the “the
public” and justify violations of the private (that is, start demanding the revelation of
secrets) in the protection of the private.
54. Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Free-
masonry (Richmond, Va.: L. H. Jenkins, Inc., 1942), p. 383.
55. See Pike, Symbolism, pp. 93–106.
56. Joshua Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in
the Twentieth Century (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005).
57. For a lucid account of the spiritual project of alchemy, see C. J. Jung, Jung on
Alchemy, ed. Nathan Schwartz-Salant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), esp.
introduction.
38 Heredom
58. Charles Walker, The Encyclopedia of the Occult (New York: Crescent Books, 1995), p. 7.
59. Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric, pp. 143–71.
60. Irony is the occult core of the rhetorical tradition. See C. Jan Swearingen, Rhetoric
and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Or as Kenneth Burke once put it, irony always requires the fool—a figure of immense
significance in the modern occult tradition. See Kenneth Burke, “Four Master Tropes,”
in his A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 503–17.
Also see Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1995).
61. Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric, 75; also see T. M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the
Witches Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1989), esp. pp. 214–20.
62. Luhrmann, Persuasions, p. 215.
63. Benard E. Jones, Freemason’s Guide and Compendium (London: Eric Dobby Pub-
lishing, 2003), p. 408; also see Coil’s Masonic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Beehive.”
64. See for example Thomas D. Worrel, “The Symbolism of the Beehive and the Bee,”
Mill Valley Masonic Lodge Website; available http://mill-valley.freemasonry.biz/worrel/
beehive.htm (accessed August 8, 2006).
65. Rex R. Hutchens, Pillars of Wisdom: The Writings of Albert Pike (Washington,
D.C.: The Supreme Council, 33°), p. 57.
66. Leland M. Griffin, “The Rhetorical Structure of the Antimasonic Movement,” in
The Rhetorical Idiom: Essays in Rhetoric, Oratory, Language, and Drama, ed. Donald C.
Bryant (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), 145–59. The essay is also reprinted in Read-
ings in Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State College, Pa.: Strata Publishing,
1995), pp. 371–81; subsequent references to this article refer to the reprinted edition.
67. Coil’s Masonic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Morgan Affair.”
68. Griffin, “Antimasonic Movement,” p. 373. Of course, many Masons have disputed
this account, stressing that no one knows what really happened to Morgan; see Coil’s
Masonic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Morgan Affair,” as well as Hodapp, Dummies, pp. 45–47.
69. Hodapp, Dummies, p. 46.
70. Griffin, “Antimasonic Movement,” p. 374.
74. Griffin, “Antimasonic Movement,” p. 377–78.
Volume 15, 2007 39

Joshua Gunn
75. Holly Lebowitz Rossi, “Masonic Membership is Declining,” Detroit Free Press,
July 15, 2006, available http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060715/
FEATURES01/607150329/1026 (accessed August 10, 2006).
76. Hence, the tight-lipped response of an uncle or grandfather when questioned about
the teachings of Freemasonry are not only a consequence of misunderstanding (e.g., that
there really are no secrets anymore) and past revolutionary politics, but also a defensive
impulse rooted in the fraternity’s response to the anti-Masonic crisis of the 1830s.
77. See Dean, Publicity’s Secret.
78. Pierre G. “Pete” Normand, “SRRS Bulletin Notes,” The Plumbline: The Quarterly
Bulletin of the Scottish Rite Research Society 14 (2006), p. 2.
79. Cited in Morris, “Good Morning, America, paras. p. 7–15.
80. The OED defines the adjectival form of “private” as “the opposite of public,” while it
defines “secret” as “kept from knowledge or observation; hidden, concealed.” Habermas,
Dean, and others have shown how the public/private distinction is difficult to maintain
insofar as “the public sphere,” for example, was exercised privately. I am suggesting that
the notion of secrecy entails more than a mere courtesy but an active promise to “hide”
or conceal things from the “public.” It is precisely that active element of promise making
that sustains the suspicion by various publics (and most especially the State) that there is
conspiracy afoot. For this and other reasons Dean argues so-called conspiracy theorists
take the rule of law and the ideology of publicity “at their word.” See Dean, Publicity’s
Secret, pp. 47–78.
84. Hodapp, Dummies, p. 61
85. Although I am critical of Hodapp’s prose, I should be careful to underscore that
I respect him as a brother Mason and have appreciated his conversation and goodwill
in personal correspondence. I agree that “no one speaks for Masonry,” however, I also
believe, that it is important to speak out about issues that I, as a Mason, feel and think
are important—even if that means vocally disagreeing with our talented and respected
brothers.
86. De Hoyos and Morris, Is it True, p. 26.
87. Hutchens, Pillars of Wisdom, p. 1.
88. I would argue, in fact, that such an assumption helped to generate the explosion
of speculative work and analysis on Freemasonry that occurred in the mid- and late-
nineteenth centuries in the first place!
89. Pike, Symbolism, p. 75.
40 Heredom
90. Bruce E. Pinkleton and Erica Weintraub Austin, “Individual Motivations, Per-
ceived Media Importance, and Political Disaffection,” Political Communication 18 (2001),
pp. 324–25. Also see Catherine Bromley and John Curtice, “Are Non-Voters Cynics Any-
way?” Journal of Public Affairs 4 (2004), 326–37; and Glenn Leshner and Esther Thorson,
“Overreporting Voting: Campaign Media, Public Mood, and the Vote,” Political Com-
munication 17 (2000), pp. 263–78.
91. Dean, Publicity’s Secret, pp. 151–53.
Volume 15, 2007 41

42 Heredom

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The Two Rhetorics of

—Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code¹

Volume 15, 2007 

nization in the world, contemplative or speculative Freemasonry most likely

response of Masons to anti-Masonic movements for hundreds of years, however,

Volume 15, 2007 11

The Private Public of Freemasonry

Morris: Indeed it is. Membership has diminished in the Freemasons

Television killed the secret handshake, or rather, television is a synecdoche for a

Volume 15, 2007 13

democracy is that by talking about matters important to a community, one

Volume 15, 2007 15

“Veiled in Allegory and Illustrated by Symbols”:

Volume 15, 2007 17

A number of rhetorical scholars have taken to theorizing publics and the

constant promotion of mystery and suspicion. As a civic group presumably

The Promise: Masonry’s Obligatory Drama

Volume 15, 2007 19

that secret is supposed to be) establishes Masonic community within a logic of

The Secret: Masonry’s Hermeneutic Circle

Volume 15, 2007 21

individual’s reason to intuit spiritual knowledge beyond the realm of significa-

Volume 15, 2007 23

On old jewels … lodge furniture, banners, summonses, certificates, etc.,

losophy—most especially those of Albert Pike—were originally orations and

The Perils of Publicity, or, Dumbing Down the Mystery

Volume 15, 2007 25

in the fall of 1826 rumor was circulated among Freemasons of western

Volume 15, 2007 27

until it ballooned to four million members in the modern heyday of contempo-

Apparently mindful of this attitude, Masonic officials made a number of strate-

Charles Gibson: … Do you accept this idea [that] it’s [Freemasonry

Fletcher then explained the function of handshakes and passwords in medieval

Volume 15, 2007 29

simply does not understand the internal function of Masonic rhetoric, or he

Volume 15, 2007 31

common ignorance to share. In our readiness to disavow secrets in the rhetoric

A Broken Pact, or, Is There No Help for the Widow’s Son?

Volume 15, 2007 33

commitments” ⁹¹ Although I do not believe, as Dean does, that it is possible

Volume 15, 2007 35

Printing/The Grand Lodge of the State of Louisiana, 1988), p. 20.

lic, a point to which I will return shortly.

Volume 15, 2007 37

Volume 15, 2007 39

Volume 15, 2007 41

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Volume 15, 2007