Path: ultra.sonic.net!not-for-mail
From: catherine yronwode <cat@luckymojo.com>
Newsgroups: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.magick,alt.magick.order,alt.thelema,alt.pagan.magick,talk.religion.misc,talk.religion.newage
Subject: Re: The Law (of Thelema) is Offensive!
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 12:04:58 -0800
Organization: Lucky Mojo Curio Co.
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333 wrote:

> nigris (333) wrote: 
> 
> #> Masonry lost the Keys.  they were incapable of tapping the
> #> Current of universalism which the religious establishments
> #> have also sullied and destroyed.  OTO grows because it is
> #> a New Aeon organization,
> 
> note that I provide the transmasonic rigamorole here.  I have
> been informed by my kin that Masonry has not, as some would
> prefer to think, become as disconnected from the esoteric aspects
> of their rites as I have been led to believe. I leave the matter
> for later speculation and discussion.

I salute the author for correcting his own erroneous impression of
Freemasonry. 

Masonry's essentially neo-Platonic esotericism is alive and well in
lodges throughout the world, much to the surprise of human sheep who
have been led by right-wing Christians to believe that "Freemasonry is a
Satanist cult" or, contrariwsie, have been told by an assortment of
self-promoting leaders of neo-religious-mystical-magical orders that
"Freemasonry is a mere social club that has 'lost the keys' of esoteric
wisdom."

(This oft-encountered phrase -- "Freemasonry has lost the keys" -- by
the way, derives from the title of a 1925 book by Manley P. Hall called
"The Lost Keys of Freemasonry."  Hall, who wrote it at the age of 23,
was not a Mason himself (although he became one 30 years later) and he
had never set foot in a Masonic lodge at that time. Under the influence
of Theosophical babblings about secret brotherhoods in ancient Egypt, he
concocted a bizarre but very readable tale about a mystical cult of
Egyptian Freemasonry that only the most naive would have swallowed
whole. {In fact, Masonry's myths and legends are not Egyptian but center
around the Book of Kings and the Book of Chronicles in the Old Testament
of the Bible; their esoteric interpretation is based on Pythagorean
concepts, with the expected admixture of so-called Christian cabalism;
these myths and legends.} In his later years, after becomming a
Freemason, Manley Hall wrote a new foreword to the book in which he
frankly admitted that he had fabricated the whole of "The Lost Keys of
Freemasonry." Oddly enough, some Masons enjoy Hall's juvenile
fabrication, possibly because it shares common threads with other 19th
and 20th century hermetic legends and myths -- and thus the work stays
in print, marketed to Masons by Masonic publishing houses. Within
Masonry, it is, however, considered a fantasy of Masonic import rather
than a true account of the Craft.)

catherine yronwode

Freemasonry for Women: http://www.luckymojo.com/comasonry.html