A Word to the Reader

A book does well to say from the outset whom it is addressed to, and this one will say so without evasion. This book was written, in the first place, for Masons: for anyone who labors in a regular lodge, whatever his Rite and his jurisdiction, and who no longer needs to be told what a square is for. But it is written as well for everyone who seeks the light: for the man who, without having crossed the door of any temple, suspects that there is a door and wants to find it. To both I owe the same candor: the matters treated here have an initiatic purpose, not a literary one.

Nothing here is lowered so that it will reach everyone, because to lower it would be to falsify it. The Latin adage said as much: omne promiscuum sordescit, whatever is made common is debased. Neither will anything be disclosed of what the Order keeps to itself, and not out of deference to a prohibition: there are things that, once said, instantly cease to be what they were.

What follows is a conversation among Bros∴ (that is how the Craft abbreviates Brothers in the usages this book inhabits), carried on in the knowledge that someone else is listening.

Whoever reads these pages will do well to bring some prior instruction with him, however elementary, in what the Order teaches beneath its symbols. It is worth saying why these matters resist writing, since it is no whim of the man who treats them: what produces them occurs on a plane that is not the plane of discourse, so that in bringing them down to the page they are forced to speak a language that is not their own. Hence a man who has not passed through the rite may find them obscure, and it will be no fault of his.

Of the seeker who has not received ritual and symbolic initiation I ask the one thing that can be asked of him: that he read with the eye of the heart. For to approach these teachings one needs, besides the desire to understand them, the faculty of recognizing at a stroke what a word or a figure carries within it without saying so; and that faculty is conferred by no diploma, and denied by no door.

I must also say what this book is not. It is not a history of Freemasonry, which others have written better and with more rigor. It is not a manual of ritual, nor could it be. It is not a defense of any one jurisdiction nor an attack on any other. And it is not a collection of symbolic curiosities to enliven the after-dinner hour: whoever wants that will find plenty to choose from, but not here.

The words used here—tradition, initiation, esoterism, symbol—are used in their strict sense, and not in the sense that current usage gives them today. This is no mania for precision: a good part of the confusion suffered in these matters comes from having allowed those words to mean anything at all. Whoever reads them in the devalued sense will be reading another book, not this one.

These pages speak of what is common to the Order, not of the particular usages of each jurisdiction. Where the reader finds that his own practice differs from what is described here, let him hold to his own: the letter varies legitimately from one jurisdiction to another, and it is not the letter that is under discussion here. The reason for holding to one's own is not diplomatic but technical, and the book will demonstrate it: rites are vessels, and the contents do not travel intact between any two of them. For the same reason, let no one take it into his head to use these pages to "improve" any ritual: the man who corrects the letter with a reading he does not possess commits, with this book in his hand, the very sin this book condemns.

Each of the two readers already named will pass through pages that were not written for him. Of the profane reader I ask that he cross the vocabulary of the house—tiled meetings, degrees, aprons—as a man visits a trade not his own: the argument will not escape him, because the crisis this book treats is a crisis of language, and that one belongs to everybody. To the Brother Mason I give the opposite warning: he is going to find questioned precisely what he believes he knows, and the pages that seem addressed to others—those on Hebrew, on art, on the psyche—are his. Each half will do well to read the other's part with patience: that is where this book does its work.

This book initiates no one. Initiation is received from a living chain, by a rite, in person, never from a reading; and the reader who on closing these pages feels himself "initiated" will have found, in himself, the first of the many falsifications described here. The Tradition knows that dead end well, the bookish initiation contracted in libraries, and this book would like to be the opposite: not a substitute for the door, but the reason to look for it.

It must also be said what these pages say and what they keep silent. There is not a word in them that has not been in print for years, within anyone's reach; and there is not, and will not be, a single word of the one thing the Masonic obligation truly protects: the modes by which Brothers recognize one another, the living touch between links. The reader will notice that the author stops short several times: "of this I will say nothing." It is not coquetry: some things are kept silent not because they are forbidden, but because said aloud they are nothing; the difference will be explained in its place.

Almost all of this book speaks without a person, because what it transmits is not the author's: where it says I, which it does rarely and always on purpose, it is testimony, and should be weighed as testimony: it is worth what the witness is worth, no more and no less. The same holds for the masters who speak in these pages without a name or by living voice: they enter as the oral is received in an oral tradition, not as an authority that settles the matter, but as hands through which something passed. And the book opens and closes the way a man speaks, not the way he writes: that too is deliberate, and it will become clear why the voice matters so much on this way.

One last warning, and it is the one that matters most. This book is not made to be read straight through, nor to be accumulated. There is no information in it to retain, but things to recognize, and recognition does not depend on the speed of the reading but on what the reader brings with him. Some pages will say nothing the first time and will say everything years later, when the work has made them legible. That will be no defect in the text: it is the nature of the matter.