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THIS COLLECTION CONCERNS THE MID-19th CENTURY, when Royal Arch Masons were battling over the meanings of their sacred words. This, no doubt, was brought on by the Anti-Masonic excitement which started in the 1820s as a result of the alleged Morgan disappearance, otherwise known as “The Morgan Affair.” When the controversy came around to the Royal Arch, it wasn’t about a missing Brother, who turned coat and published an exposé. This time it was over the central word of the degree, namely, Jah-Bul-On. This led to the writing of a lot of famous essays on the subject. It was helped along, too, by the publication in 1847 c.e., of the seminal work by George Oliver D.D., Two Letters on Royal Arch Masonry. Anyone with a copy of Duncan’s Ritual will know what we mean. The Royal Arch Masons of Massachusetts became suspicious of the word’s meaning, and held that its pagan etymologies were in direct contradiction to Christianity, and therefore should be removed from the Ritual. However, some of the seasoned veterans of the Craft held that although this might be the case, the word should not be removed, because it is unwise to innovate on the traditions of an old ritual. For example, this is what Mackey tells us in his essays, included in this collection. Pike did not approve of Mackey’s opinion on this subject, nor Mackey on Pike’s opinions. There was, even, an attempt to get a declaration of a Personal God written into the text of the Constitutions. Not merely believing in a Supreme Being, mind you, but belief in a personal God, much like each sect of Protestants has their version of Jesus, which is not the same version of Jesus that the Catholics worship. The results of all this squabbling? Over time, a general lack of interest in the Order, and a decline in membership. By the time the Leo Taxil scandal arose in the 1890s of the common era, Masonry had reached its Golden Age. This lasted well into the 20th Century c.e., despite the Taxil scandal. Only World War I was able to cause the foundations of the Order to totter. It really was in the 1930s and 1940s, at the onset of World War II, that this Institution finally began its downward spiral, a trend which it has yet to recover from. Included in this collection are papers taken from a little-known Masonic periodical, entitled Mackey’s National Freemason, edited and published by Albert G. Mackey himself, from 1871 to 1874 c.e. It was issued in three volumes. We possess copies of Volumes Two and Three. All the pieces presented below come from Volume Two. In fact, a lot of the articles which made it into the first editions of Mackey’s Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry and Its Kindred Sciences (which, by the way, was first announced in the pages of MNF), were first offered in this periodical. It might be useful to include papers from other sources on this subject, and on the subject of the Royal Arch in general, but those will see print in another place, another time. While we hold that Masons such as Kenneth Mackenzie
were the more esoterically inclined, and Masons like Mackey were pragmatic
and exoteric, these essays should repay the reader, for they do contain
interesting insights not generally available to the average reader
of Masonic history. |