April 30, 2008
King Solomon and His Followers — A Valuable Aid to the Memory
A few years ago, a then-girlfriend gifted me this genuine Masonic handbook, printed in 1920, as a Christmas present. (I wish everyone had such a good understanding of my tastes.) The entirety of the manual is written in nigh-impenetrable code and shorthand, save passages like that in the middle of the left-hand page, quoting from Genesis.
From what I’ve read, Freemasons technically are disallowed from using printed guides like these, for the exact reason of dissemination by persons like myself. Seeing as it was published prior to 1923, it’s all public domain under U.S. copyright law anyhow. But even so, leafing through something so painstakingly shrouded in secrecy is still mildly creepy.
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11 Responses to “King Solomon and His Followers — A Valuable Aid to the Memory”
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A friend’s father owned a one-volume encyclopedia of Freemasonry, a compendium not of secret lore but simply of Masonic history written by Masons for Masons. Still, there was an aura of taboo about that book, and when we were eight or so years old, my friend and I liked to page through it surreptitiously and frighten ourselves out of all proportion in response to perfectly benign illustrations of people and places.
This Walken is one of mine — I treasure this little curio so much because I suppose someone probably put it to practical use, which fuels the imagination. And I wish that somewhere it bore the mark of its former owner, but I’d guess even Masons who stoop to picking up the Cliff’s Notes have the good sense not to put a “This Book Belongs To:” plate inside the front cover.
Maybe the former owner wrote marginalia in disappearing ink.
I own a similar book — old Masonic books were often written in “pseudocode” to sustain the aura of mysticism. Your book above looks like a lot of the ‘keys’ — there’s not a direct one-to-one for characters; one or more may translate to a word (often it’s the first letter of the word or ‘looks’ like the word) , but the word is often only gained through context and different codes for the same words in different sentences — meaning you already need to have a good idea of what the phrase is before you can read it. OMG LOL those wacky freemasons
! I’m impressed with your book’s use of non-characters; the typesetter must have been a master.
Wonderful little volume. I am a mason and my father gave me his “code books” for all three degrees and I love them. The idea is that the “code” are actually prompts for material that is meant to be memorized “mouth to ear”. It’s not so much that its super secret stuff, its helping to enforce the oral tradition in masonry as well as the old fashioned art of memorization and oratory. Anyway even the “real” secret stuff isn’t written in code it is represented by blanks “______”.
You’re right — “code” is a definite misnomer here; it’s shorthand through and through. Exceptionally complicated, befuddling (to the uninitiated) shorthand, but that label still fits better than “code”.
I have the 21st century equivalent from the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts sitting here on my desk. Once you start actually looking into what the Masons are all about, all the secret decoder ring stuff ceases to be sinister/creepy, (but no less time-honored/vaguely mystical. :))
It looks a lot like the “Ecce Orienti” cipher books published by Redding in the late 19th-early 20th century. Some grand lodges allowed them, others did not. (Although GL of Pennsylvania forbade these books, they sold like hotcakes, anyway.)
The last time I saw one of those, it had regular text at the front about some nonsense ritual to make it look non-masonic.
Nice gift!
What a great thread this has turned out to be.
Tell me about it, Sheila.
What are Free Mason’s all about?
Well, I could tell you but its a secret!