That’s right, I’m talking about Hawaiian Shirt Night. It wouldn’t be summer in New England if a lodge didn’t have a Hawaiian Shirt Night. That is, except for those lodges that have Hawaiian Shirt Nights during the winter.

We didn’t have a luau for dinner, but we did have hot dogs, burgers, and barbecued chicken.

Maybe the purpose of the  shirts is to hide the barbecue sauce and ketchup?

Mostly, that is.

Over the last ten years I’ve moved from novice initiate to the Master of the lodge – for which I had to undergo another secret ceremony during which I was imbued with the secrets of the Oriental Chair. Along the way I was appointed to several committees on our Grand Lodge – the governing body at the state level in the US – and was even appointed to a term as a minor Grand Lodge officer. During this time, I made a point to dismiss the twisted ideas of the conspiracists, who we often denigrated as the “Antis.” I’m now embarrassed to admit that I actually taunted them for their beliefs at times. However, I’m also willing to admit that the scales (or should I say, the hoodwink) has fallen from my eyes. In a perverse twist on the state toward which Masons avowedly strive, I can now say that I have been enlightened. I have discovered proof that there actually is a Masonic/Illuminati conspiracy, whose purpose is to pass messages from faction to faction via the mass media. However, unlike the hundreds, nay, thousands of conspiracy theorists who continue to post ridiculous theories on their websites and forums, I actually am a Freemason, and therefore, I actually have information to which they do not — nor ever will — understand.

For years I have read claims that there are branches of the Freemasons that are in league with the Zionists and the reformed (or more likely, never disbanded) Illuminati. I, myself, used to find such claims too outlandish, too ridiculous to believe, but I now see that this is how the Freemasons managed to keep their efforts concealed: they were hiding in plain sight the entire time. The methods that they use to pass messages is encoded in the icons of pop culture, and the messages themselves are passed along symbolically. This keeps the uninitiated from suspecting, let alone interpreting the signals being passed from group to group.

Are all Masons in on this? Of course not, and this is what makes most of the Antis seem so ridiculous. Not even the CIA can keep secrets; certainly the bunch of semi-retired engineers, office clerks, and web designers who make up most Freemason lodges could not do any better. No, only a small handful of illuminated ones are in on the secrets being passed on, and it is now my understanding that they are in government, finance, and more importantly, the mass media. Why the media? Because it is through pop music that these illuminated Freemasons are using symbols and allegory to pass secret messages along to the far-flung reaches of their empire.

I’m sure it goes without saying that it was in the early days of rock and roll that these Illuminated Freemasons realized the power of the media. Early experiments with the British “invasion” bands, such as the Beatles, were rife with hidden messages, and even the occasional researcher can easily turn up dozens of such references. Unfortunately, many of the messages became muddied during the late 1970s with the advent of disco. That was when the Freemasons decided to broadcast those messages through a very small number of channels, and in the late 1980s, it became obvious that they had hand-picked an unknown pop singer named Madonna Louise Ciccone.

Urged to keep her first name as an ironic jibe to their enemies in the Church, Madonna’s career skyrocketed as other media moguls were given their marching orders. Indeed, the most blatant message broadcast was her 1989 video “Express Yourself.” Revisiting that video, it’s now difficult to believe that we completely missed the message, deflected, as it were, by the outrageous costumes and stage antics of the ironically nick-named Material Girl. But hindsight is always 20/20, and it’s important to note that the real message was that Madonna, herself, was to be the messenger, and that those people “in the know” should take note. Indeed, her stage antics were interspersed with a riff on German filmaker Fritz Lang’s silent film “Metropolis,” which is a very obvious sign that the Illuminated Freemasons were in the planning stages of their New World Order.

Pop icons, however, exist at the whim of the public, and eventually Madonna would have to be retired. This was effected in 2003 when she symbolically passed the torch to upcoming singer Britney Spears. Now, I know that some conspiracy researchers take issue with this, but it’s quite obvious when one examines the facts. As you can see by the picture of them on stage at the MTV Music Video Awards, Madonna was dressed in black, symbolizing her death (i.e., retirement), while Britney is dressed in (“Like a Virgin”) virginal white. Even her name gives away the plan: Britney refers, of course, to Britain, the home of modern Freemasonry. Spears are, of course, are shafts tipped with metal or stone barbs. It’s interesting to note that in Masonic lodges, there are several minor officers that carry items called “staffs” or “wands”, but those staffs are always topped by emblems of pointed metal, making those tools essentially identical to spears. Furthermore, the officers carrying those staffs have an express purpose within the secret lodge rituals: to carry messages from one higher-ranking officer to another.  Clearly, Britney Spears was hand-picked in order to make it clear that she was the new messenger from the higher ranking Illuminated Freemasons in Britain..

However, the case of Britney Spears points up how the conspiracy theorists often get things wrong. Generally, they seem to think that the Freemasons have unlimited, almost God-like control over all circumstances; however, it’s obvious that those who picked Ms. Spears made a mistake. A former Disney child actor (And don’t forget that Walt Disney, himself, was a high-ranking Illuminated Freemason) one would have thought that Britney Spears should have been able to handle the sudden leap into the public eye, but it seems that her private life suddenly went into a downward spiral. There’s no need to recount the reports of drug and alcohol abuse; they were simply the human failings of a very human person who was unable to handle the huge responsibility thrust upon her. Because the inability to handle celebrity is almost legend in the film and music industries, it’s impossible to know how many other messengers there may have been — or have been lost — over the decades.

Before the messages themselves could be reliably transmitted, it would be imperative to find another messenger — one that would be believable for those on the receiving end. Fortunately, the Illuminated Freemasonic cabal anticipated the need for this and had already begun grooming the next messenger: Stefani Germanotta.

While it almost goes without saying that Lady Gaga became the next messenger, it’s worth noting that she was aware of the fact that she was being groomed for the position. I haven’t figured out if the constant barrage of Illuminati symbolism in her music and videos is a “hidden in plain sight” ruse, or if she is deliberately throwing the messages in our collective faces as a display of power. Either way, there is no question that Gaga has been carefully groomed to deliver the symbolic messages for the foreseeable future. For example, her early videos were rife with Gaga making odd hand signals, easily recognizable to any initiated Freemason. However, what could not possibly be a coincidence is her making liberal use of “All Seeing Eye” symbology, ranging from wearing of dark glasses, to covering one eye, to (most importantly) the “V” sign framing one eye in various scenes. Signs regarding “The eye of Horus” or “The All Seeing Eye” are recognizable to even non-Masons; such posing goes beyond the obvious and well into the blatant. Gaga is not doing this by accident, and it is my opinion that she is intentionally signalling that not only is she the new messenger, but that she’s aware of being the messenger, and intends to carry out that office in any manner possible. Whether this is to put some level of confidence back into those on the receiving end (who had presumably been left hanging since the dark days of Britney Spears), or to signal that plans have been moved into a higher gear, or possibly, a more public arena remains to be seen.

However, this is yet another case of how the initiated conspiracy theorists get things wrong. For instance, one popular conspiracy theorist writes often on his interpretations of pop music, and frequently expresses the opinion that the artists are conveying the message that they are caught in a prison and forced to do the bidding of their Illuminated Freemason overlords. Nothing could be further from the reality, which is that most of the pop cultural icons are, indeed, pleased to have been enriched financially, and have taken full advantage of the perks offered to them. This probably offers up a clue as to why Gaga herself throws so much symbolism into her videos: she’s flaunting her wealth and power.

The question arises that if Gaga is so blatant, how could there be any certainty that she is the messenger of a secret cabal? However, the chain that links Gaga to previous messengers is simply undeniable.

• While the backstory varies somewhat, the publicly given acknowledgement of Stefani Germanotta’s stage name is that a music producer friend of hers remarked that she reminded him of the old Queen song “Radio Gaga,” and a typo or a bad autocorrect changed that title to Lady Gaga. She liked the name, and took it as a stage moniker.
• Gaga (as she is now called) has posed with Masonic backdrops.
• Gaga’s latest music single is entitled “Born This Way,” the title being a nod to her having been groomed for several years for this office. The backbeat to this song is somewhat reminiscent of a major single from a previous messenger, Madonna. If you listen closely, you can hear echoes of the 1989 tune “Express Yourself.”
• The video to “Express Yourself” had a number of references to German Filmmaker Fritz Lang’s 1927 film “Metropolis.”
• Gaga’s actual last name is Germanotta
• Madonna, herself, retired from the office and moved to Britain (!) where she became known for studying the Kaballah, which itself is closely linked with the other esoteric studies associated with the Freemasons and the Illuminati, and shows signs of a Zionist tie-in.
• Part of the lyrics in “Born This Way” are “Don’t be a drag, just be a queen,” a reference to the band which gave Gaga her stage name.
• The band Queen (a reference to Britain, the home of Illuminated Freemasonry) wrote the song “Radio Gaga” in 1985, at least a year before Stefani/Gaga was born. “Radio Gaga” contains not just references, but actual clips of the original movie “Metropolis.”
• The front man for Queen had the stage name of Freddie Mercury.

And in Roman mythology, who was Mercury? None other than the messenger of the gods.

Could anyone possibly need more proof than this?

Edit: After this was published, TechSource (a computer & technical news blog) wrote that Gaga’s computer operating system of choice is a laptop running Ubuntu Linux. What’s the message behind this announcement?

Some jurisdictions in the US have a “mouth to ear” tradition, in which the ritual is taught by a proven instructor to one person, or a small group. Other states have printed copies of the rituals and ceremonies that are passed out to (or sometimes, purchased by)  a member. Some states have such monitors written in plain English, while others might use a shorthand or some other kind of code in order to disguise the words – as if you couldn’t already get them from some website, or purchased in book form.

Connecticut is one of those states that has a ritual monitor in plain English; that is, if you can call the sometimes tortured grammatical constructions and archaic words and phrases “plain.” They have had this plain English version for at least ten years before I became a Masons, which was almost another ten years ago. The English version grew out of an older version that used two books: one being encoded (really, just using abbreviations), and the other a key; that version had been used for quite some time.

Recently, some people have been suggesting that we might want to go back to using the abbreviated word code. I have found that the people suggesting this are either old-timers who learned that way in the first place, or young, new guys who are geeky about Masonry. The old-timers claim that people will learn ritual better, since they will have to work harder, and the young-timers are usually the kind of geeks who would, given the opportunity, have been taking a Klingon class.

I used to pooh-pooh the idea because I learned ritual using the plain English books, and I think I have done rather well, at least, if you don’t count the fact that I often find myself substituting some of the archaic words with synonyms that roll more readily off the tongue. But the way that I learn these passages isn’t necessarily the best way for everybody, so I concede that the coded books might have some merit.

That’s why I found it interesting to see an article on Lifehacker this past week, which revisited a study in which  schoolchildren were given copies of material to learn; some were given good copies, while others were given copies in hard-to-read fonts. Researchers discovered that the children who had to work harder to read the material had the best retention.

From the BBC News Article:

Researchers found that, on average, those given the harder-to-read fonts actually recalled 14% more.

They believe that presenting information in a way that is hard to digest means a person has to concentrate more, and this leads to “deeper processing” and then “better retrieval” afterwards.

It is an example of the positive effects of what scientists call “disfluency”.

“Disfluency is just a subjective feeling of difficulty associated with any mental task,” explained psychology Prof Daniel Oppenheimer, one of the co-authors of the study.

“So if something is hard to see or hear, it feels disfluent… We’d found that disfluency led people to think harder about things.

[...]

Students given the harder-to-read materials scored higher in their classroom assessments than those in the control group. This was the case across a range of subjects – from English, to Physics to History.

The lead author of the study Connor Diemand-Yauman told the BBC that psychology is revealing all sorts of “counter-intuitive” results in the field of education.

“Everyday psychologists are showing that seemingly insignificant factors can have big effects on how we process and retain information.”

[...]

It’s an interesting idea, and while I’ll concede that there may be some benefit to the idea that learning ritual in code is inherently better, I think that there are too many variables for this to be definitive.  Again, from the article:

“What really matters most when reading is mindfulness… it’s not printing things badly that’s needed, but more thoughtful reading”.

[...]

“Obviously, if you can’t read it at all, you can’t learn it. At some point you may get so annoyed that you give up without trying! Different people probably have different thresholds.

And in my opinion, that is what holds so many members back; they simply get annoyed at trying to read something that they just don’t understand. Will presenting it in code make the archaic usages any more attractive?

I like Charles; he’s young and progressive minded, and he’s the kind of person I have in mind whenever I hear the (sadly clichéed) expression “The future of Masonry.”  Charles has consistently pushed for our Grand Lodge to adopt new technologies in order to reach — and be relevant to — the newer members of our fraternity. He’s bright, and well-spoken, and modest about his achievements.

And he prefers Apple computer products.

Apparently, I have so little going on in my own life right now that I have taken to ribbing friends about their choice of technology, much in the way many people poke fun at one’s favorite sports team, choice of automobile, or taste in literature. This ribbing is further driven by the fact that for the last year, my office and home networks have been plagued by more computer problems than I’ve ever seen; obviously I’m envious of anyone who is actually happy with their computer, and confess to some distrust at anyone who doesn’t have some anger, annoyance, or irritation with their gadgets.

To his credit, Charles has refused to take the troll bait; although for that matter, I don’t particularly think about Apple products except when I hear from him or a few other similarly inclined friends.

Until yesterday, that is.

Some of you may remember that last year I wrote a post that made light of the similarities between Freemasonry and the GNU/Linux community. I should have remembered that satire is based in reality.

Yesterday, while reading Lifehacker, I ran across a couple of articles about how Apple is introducing a new way to get software, entitled respectively, Why the Mac App Store Sucks, and Why You Might Really Like the Mac App Store In The Long Run. And suddenly, the pictures jumped out at me. Why?

Here’s the logo for the Mac App Store:

Umm… does this look familiar to you?

For reference, here’s a couple of random images from a Google image search.

A Past Master's symbol from some areas of the world.

An older, lesser known version

I mean, of all the possible combinations that the graphic artists could come up with, they riff on the Square and Compasses?

Coincidence? I think not.

Although I’ve long explored the twisted logic of the conspiracy theorists, I don’t have any background with regard to the twisted logic of Apple users. I believe, however, that this bears looking into.

Conspiracy theorists have a lot to worry about, what with Lady Gaga using the pop media to send Illuminati signals, and with 33 miners being brought from darkness to light, and all that. Now they have to worry about the link between Freemasons and GNU/Linux.

==========

Toon Credit: http://xkcd.com
A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

Yes, Friendship Lodge is back for another two weekends at the Southington Apple Harvest Festival. Once again we are featuring our fried apple wedges, and despite the damp weather, the crowds are lining up for a taste.

Bello is the Italian adjective for “good” or “nice,” as in having done a good job in making a sandwich form steak marinated in tomato sauce, smothered in roasted peppers and covered with provelone cheese on a fresh grinder roll. Yes, that’s a long definition, but it’s relevant because this weekend is the Southington Italian Festival, and Friendship Lodge once again has a bracciola sandwich booth set up.

I know that we generally don’t equate Freemasonry with any ethnic celebrations, with the possible exception of Scotch-tasting nights, but consider that the members of a lodge are representative of the members of the local community. Southington has a fairly large Italian-American population; once a very rural town, Southington is located between the cities of New Britain and Waterbury, and over the last several decades, many of the Italian-American families moved from those cities and settled in town. Consequently, where the old town records typically featured names like Adams, Smith, or Flanders, it’s now not uncommon to open the local paper and see names like DePaolo, Secondo, or Della Vecchia.

The Italian Festival is only a few years old, and now takes up most of the main street in the downtown area. Last year some of the members of Friendship Lodge decided to enter in order to have the opportunity for some community exposure, and to hopefully make a few dollars for the Trowel Club. Since we were already known for selling the steak and cheese sandwiches at the Apple Harvest Festival, it was very little work to set up a booth for a more Italian-themed treat.

I was away last year, but this year I was biking in the area and stopped by to see what I could do. The answer was “nothing” because the weather was 95°, with 95% humidity; not many people were in the mood to eat anything except some gellato or Italian Ices. I came back later that evening, but the temperature and humidity was still pretty high. It seemed that a lot of people were walking around with their drinks, but the tempting aromas just were not enough to induce people to eat.

The Festival ends today. Hopefully it’s going to be a bit less humid, or else we’re going to be eating beef at the next few dinners after lodge reopens in September.

Masons familiar with the internet probably remember Greg from various web forums. More recently, however, he would be found on Freemason Information, a blog aggregate on which he frequently posts essays and commentary, and on Masonic Central, the well known podcast that he runs with co-host Dean Kennedy.

Greg has always had an esoteric bent, and I expect that his book will reflect his own personal journey. I’m sure that it will make an excellent addition to your already overcrowded Masonic library.

Not that anybody will miss me, of course, seeing that after today, I will have been stripped of my position as the District Grand Lecturer.
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No, it wasn’t because of my latest April Fool’s prank. It’s simply that they have decided to eliminate the position entirely.

I’m still so not the drama, remember ?

My travels over the last three years have given me a few things to think about with regard to the ritual and ceremonies of the lodges in and around my district.

After the District Lecturer position was created, there were still issues as to what the officers should do and how they should do it. Initially, it was expected that they would help the lodges to improve in their ritual skills, but there were never any definite plans as to how they were supposed to go about doing so. Not surprisingly, some Lecturers did little, for fear of over-stepping some boundary. Others tried things such as helping at rehearsals, or having Q&A sessions on lodge nights, or sponsoring practice sessions. However, without any authority to compel the officers of under-performing lodges to participate, you can imagine that the people most often seen at the practice sessions were those who needed the least amount of help. And again, not surprisingly, some people complained that ritual wasn’t getting any better.

There’s an old joke about how many psychologists it takes to change a lightbulb. The answer is none; the lightbulb has to want to change.

Back in 2005, Connecticut tried to implement some small steps to improve the ritual work. They required that all incoming Masters for 2006 be certified in the ability to open and close a lodge. I was in that first class of Masters, and it was witnessed by the District Lecturer, two District Deputies, and their Associate Grand Marshals. A few years later, the certification job was given to the District Lecturers. I’ve complained a few times that often Senior Wardens would wait until the very end of the year before calling me, meaning that October and November would see me visiting several lodges a week.

It didn’t really help, though.

One of the the point that everybody missed is that some lodges have a very strong internal culture that values good ritual work. Those lodges pass these expectations on to new members in various ways; perhaps by showcasing certain good ritual performers, or by asking new officers to start memorizing lectures as soon as possible, or by holding not just one, but a number of rehearsals for degree work. What usually happens in those cases is that new officers will take up the challenge — especially if they are praised for their good work, instead of being carped at for missing a word or two. Yes, some old-timers have told me that they developed good ritual skills because the old-timers before them were harsh task-masters, but times have changed. Nobody wants to be humiliated into not doing a bad job, they prefer to be coaxed into doing a god job.

What I have noticed is that the men from these lodges have consistently better degrees because they enjoy doing it. And they enjoy doing it because they know that their brothers have encouraged them along. More interesting is that even those who consider themselves to be “poor” performers (compared to their peers) are often much better than the average performers at other lodges.

Lodges like that do not need District Lecturers, except, perhaps, to address some of the finer points of ritual and floor work.

Another point that was missed is that the lodges that really need the most improvement tend to be full of officers who don’t believe that they need any help. Connecticut is very liberal in ritual; we have a printed monitor, but several lodges follow rituals that pre-date the Grand Lodge itself. A few others have somehow managed to create their own, but have been doing so for so long that nobody bothers trying to correct them. To accommodate such differences, the Grand Lodge has a policy, which is summed up as “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty.” So, in the absence of regulation, some lodges have managed to develop “traditions,” i.e., customs that make their work markedly different from that of other lodges.

But a large number of lodges differ simply because they are doing something not just markedly different, but remarkably wrong. When questioned, they simply claim that it’s “lodge tradition,” and expect to be given a pass. Generally, the “tradition’ was an error on the part of one member that was inadvertently passed down to succeeding officers, most of whom learned ritual not from reading the monitor, but from trying to emulate the other officers, and who ended up copying the mistakes as well as the important things.

Connecticut has always had a problem with defining the essentials from the non-essentials, but I think that the overall view of the Grand Lodge itself is to let those lodges alone that are doing good ritual, even if that ritual is not exactly what is in the book. I know that this view drives some of my brothers in other, more rigidly defined states into looking for the smelling salts, but they, themselves forget, that ritual was always fluid and changing, especially in the educational lectures, which often varied from lodge to lodge. It’s a common misconception that the ritual we hear today is the same thing that has been passed down the generations; personally, I believe that this fluidity is one of the most interesting aspects of ritual practice, and should be one of our incentives to travel to other lodges.

Anyway, it’s probably pointless to discuss this any further. As the only official duties of the District Lecturers (certifying that potential Masters can open and close a lodge) were brief, those will now be assigned to the Associate Grand Marshals; the ones in my district are eminently qualified, and they are excellent brothers, as well.

For my part, I’ve been appreciative not only for the support that most of the lodges in my district have shown me, but also for the several lodges that actually asked for my help. It gave me a great opportunity to work with some fine new officers, and hopefully I’ve been able to pass along something useful to them. I w
ish them all the best in the future.

Our theory that early operative Freemasons became familiar with “revenants” (creatures that in folklore later became zombies and vampires), and codified the means of how to destroy them in certain ceremonies has been met with the expected amount of derision and skepticism. I think that many people simply fail to understand that Freemasons, being employed by the Catholic Church to work on their buildings, had a need to keep their activities on the downlow so as not to be accused of trafficking with the demonic by the less educated and more superstitious population.

We expected this when I volunteered to be the one to publish the ideas.

None of us believe that the revenants are supernatural creatures; those ideas didn’t come about until the Gothic period, when — ironically enough  – people began to be frightened by the idea of technology. No, we think that the historic records of the time will show that people were falling to an as-yet unnamed disease that caused the appearance of death, after which the victims became mindless eating machines (insert jokes about teen-aged boys here). Poor knowledge of medicine and other social factors contributed to the occasional outbreaks in the rural and wooded districts. Unfortunately, when people started moving to the cities in the early 1700s,  so did the outbreaks.

Initially, we theorized that high-level Masons were (although in league with the national and state governments) still keeping this quiet, so as not to alarm the general public, who have shown themselves to be more educated, but not really much less superstitious than they were in the Middle Ages. Naturally, this has met with a lot of skepticism from both Masons and non-Masons alike.

We expected this, too.

But what we did not expect was to be presented with an alternate theory: That the high-level Freemasons have been trying to educate the public by allowing them access to these rituals and ceremonies. Indeed, for the last several years, virtually every newspaper article, news show, or cable TV special has begun with “The once secretive Freemasons have begun to open their doors,” or “The secret mysteries of the Freemasons are being unveiled,” or “Freemasons, that once-secret society, have now begun to…”

The alternate theory, which we have found to be very compelling,  is that various Grand Lodges have been pressured by these higher-level Masons to show off a little, and to encourage non-Masons to look at our secret ceremonies, ostensibly to show that they are simply arcane rituals, but actually, so that the viewing public will understand what to do should there be a wide-spread outbreak of this unknown disease. Indeed, just the fact that we have come so far into the public eye in only a few short years suggests that the higher-level Masons may even expect that a wide-spread infection is about to happen.  Our rituals have been discussed in print by hundreds of authors, and in the last few years have been featured on the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and several other cable TV specials. A generation ago — even ten years ago — this would have been unthinkable. Now we’re practically giddy when we think about it.

Ultimately, I expect that we’ll discover that our original conception was closer to the mark. But the idea remains: is it possible that an unknown disease — perhaps a new “superflu” is about to bring us culturally back to the Middle Ages?