Da Vinci Code Matrix Seminar: Hiram Abiff and Mormon traditions Appearing in Dan Brown's new novel (the sequel to The Da Vinci Code). the "Temple of Salomon" and "Hiram Abiff," were not a topic of Freemasonry in 1717 when the first documented four lodges came together. This is evidenced by the Anderson book written on the request of the first Masonic Grand Lodge The Hiram Abiff legend in contrast is a much later development that came with the invention of the so called high degrees; or red degrees of Masonry and later the occult influence of the Eastern Temple in Germany and France.



But also profane history is conspicuously silent on the matter of Hiram Abiff. There is no mention of Hiram Abiff per se and a scuffle involving a chief architect and an impatient pack of vengeful apprentice masons in the Bible. Nothing about a search party of loyal followers apprehending the murderers (tearing out their tongues, slitting their throats, and spilling their guts as punishment) and finding the body of their mentor so badly decomposed that they had to lift it from its shallow grave using an intimate male embrace known in Masonic rituals as the five points of fellowship. Nor is it anywhere said that afterward Solomon, king of Israel, revealed to this faithful few a grand omnific word, instructing them in the niceties of a ritual in honor of their fallen general.



Extracanonical sources (the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls) prove no help, either. In fact, the paucity of documentary and archaeological evidence suggests that the story of Hiram Abiff is simply a figment of some fertile imagination. But, then again, so were Moses and possibly even Muhammad. Gautama the Buddha is more than likely an invention. The list is endless. And while the founder of Christianity is uniquely historical, there is the unfortunate and inescapable fact that the New Testament offers the only proof of his resurrection. Of course, there is still plenty of optimism in both the Christian and Masonic camps that someday a pristine document will appear on the scene-locked away in some subterranean vault-testifying to the truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the exhumation of Hiram Abiff, respectively.



The search for such a text is the mythica stock-in-trade of high degree Masonry-and of Mormonism. In both cases, the hoped-for proof takes the form of the golden plates (of Enoch), one or several, and/or a lost gospel that is said to have made the rounds, discovered and rediscovered by Masons and would-be Masons. First a bit of serendipitous excavating at the construction of the Second Temple and then digging through the rubble in the aftermath of its destruction by the Romans set the stage for a kind of quest for the holy grail: the discovery of the father of all patriarchal scriptures, Enoch's lost engravings, to which Jesus will be privy in time. The Lord and Savior, it turns out, was a member of the brotherhood.



The list of distinguished Old Testament and New Testament Masons grew as the movement pushed forward into the Middle Ages, adopting the heroic French Knights of Templar in the corps of manly men, although they were but honorary members at first. Betrayed by King Philip IV of France and Pope Clement V at the beginning of the fourteenth century, according to French occultists, the Templars were not all murdered,' a faithful remnant sailing to America long before Columbus, navigating using a "lodestone compass and astrological maps" as recent (all completely fictional) accounts claim. According to in 2002 written in The Book of Hiram;, they also carried with them a secret gospel of Jesus-a pristine copy of the scriptures, in short-that they hid lest it fall into the hands of mendacious and willful Copyists.



Depending on what Masonic source you read, the order traces its origins to Adam in the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel (Anderson, blue Masonic lore). In all cases the construction of the Temple of Solomon comes later. And how jesus got on the ticket, is a good question.



Then again, in the opinion of some, the Knights Templar (another later invention of red Masonry, are no less ceremonial than Jesus (their mentor), representing the pomp of Masonry and no more than that. Their critics within the movement are inclined to characterize them in the most unfavorable light as a bunch of saber rattlers who only knew how to toot their (own) horns in military formation as loudly and as inharmoniously as possible, to the cheers of an undisceming crowd. The idea that such men and women (among their apparent failings is a fledgling belief in women's rights), the idea that women could ever be accorded any real power (or the priesthood) stretched the limits of Masonic credulity.



A dispute over the role of Jesus and his crusading knights has raged since the 19th century, but again , the oldest Masonic Grand Lodge on record dates back to 1777 in London, England, not Jerusalem. It consisted of two and then three degrees: Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason. The lodge practiced the oldest and most orthodox variety of Freemasonry, known as Craft Masonry (Tory blue was its color of choice, hence the appellation Blue Lodge). The Masonic Knights Templar come later, a mid to late-eighteenth-century invention of British/ Scottish design, the brainchild of Andrew Michael Ramsay, a nobleman with a flair for the dramatic. Chevalier Ramsay, the French title notwithstanding, was a Scot and a bit of a rabble-rouser. The new system of degrees he inspired and all the attendant medieval mythology made the order more accessible to moderate propertied men despite the fact that his intention was to make it more aristocratic.



As a result Craft Masonry became a crafty business, indeed, made up exclusively of the aristocracy (French, German, and Russian). And Royal Arch masonry added its spin on the discovery of lost scripture in the Bible, accusing Craft Masonry of being a modem invention. Ironically, devotees of the older Craft degrees would be forced to accept the polemical designation he assigned them, "Modems," despite the fact that the real modems were Ramsay's self-proclaimed Ancients. Proponents of this Royal Arch or Ancient Masonry, not too surprisingly, dress themselves in red.



High atop the Royal Arch came the so-called Chivalrous degrees, where the Masonic Knights Templar and other Christian degrees were entered into the books-white and black the colors of the Knights Templar. There are other degrees, in the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, for example, a fork in the ritual road. After becoming a Master Mason, one has the choice of pursuing the Royal Arch and/or the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite. The Royal Arch gets one to the top of the mountain quicker, consisting of only thirteen degrees all told, whereas the Scottish Rite has more than double that-twenty-nine in all, not counting the initial three of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason. At the summit, a degree entitled "Sovereign Grand inspector General" makes the total thirty-three. In fact, however, should one choose to make the climb to the summit via both the Royal Arch and the Scottish Rite, this is entirely acceptable, for the argument is that nothing truly exceeds the Third Degree of Master Mason.



There is considerable overlapping and even a measure of professional jealousy between Royal Arch and Scottish Rite Masons.' To avoid confusion, I will take Webb's Monitor, which adheres to the York line of progression, as normative. It consists of the following: the Capitular Degrees of Mark Master Mason, Past Master, Most Excellent Master and Royal Arch Mason, followed by the Cryptic Degrees of Royal Master, Select Master, and Super Excellent Master, zhese last make one eligible to apply for membership in a "Commandery" or "Encampment" of Knights Templar and receive the degrees of Red Cross Knight, Knight Templar, and Knight of Malta.



Masonry (red, white /black, and blue) made the perilous journey across the Atlantic in plenty of time to play a role in the War of Independence and the governance of the Great Republic in the years to follow. Whether Masons, mostly patriots, seems to have depended largely on what kind of Masons they were. Royal Arch or York Masons (their penchant for red notwithstanding) wore a blue uniform as a rule, whereas blue-blooded Craft Masons tended to drape themselves in red.



After a bloody civil war with Mother England to rid the colony of the vestiges of monarchy, one might wonder why the idea of draping the entire country in the black robes of French monasticism and medieval chivalry was never more appealing. Also the Masonic presence in American society became significant following the Revolution, up until the murder of Captain William Morgan in the late 1820’s.



In some important respects, Masonry (not unlike America) owes its existence to the tradition of boys' night out, the need -or exclusive male companionship felt most acutely in the eighteenth century by many in the upper classes, who wished to flee the debilitating effects of par-or and pulpit for the freedom of wrestling their chums to the ground under cover of darkness, dancing half naked, beating their chests, and howling at the -noon with impunity. At worst, Masonry was and is the stuff of Peter Pan. From the start, though, such male bonding was attacked as Satanic.



That this accusation was quite false, together with the one that Masons drank blood, made no difference: the clergy (Catholic and Protestant) still saw red. It is difficult to say what bothered America's Evangelical establishment more: that Masonry seemed poised to replace them as the core religion of the United States or that it threatened to become the official church of the nation. And the fact that Masons had Jesus on the ticket only made matters worse. Tony Fels explains that Masonry became the basis for a widespread "non-Evangelical alliance."' In short, orthodox Protestants had been right to suspect that Masonry (and Christian Masonry especially, should it ever get up and running) did not bode well for the future of Evangelical Protestantism in America. Masonry in Federalist Connecticut, as Dorothy Ann Lipson explains, "commanded wide participation and allegiance and became the prototype of most other fraternal and service organizations." Elsewhere she goes on to say that the "single most threatening aspect of Masonry was that some members used the association as if it were a religious denomination or, more threatening yet, an alternative to religion".



Colonial Masonry posed less of an immediate threat; it was the domain of too many gentlemen. The lodge was largely a place to build elite solidarity and to emphasize their elevation above common people. Nothing about the degrees, offices, or even the lodge itself was likely to attract adherents from the middling ranks. Evangelicalism was quite safe.



Colonial Masons were notorious for their elegant attire, the Masonic funeral procession an ostentatious affair, underscoring an apparent lack of political, social, and economic decorum in the face of democratic reforms. Their gaudy dress made an even bigger splash at theaters and local clubs, and they upstaged the clergy at swanky religious affairs whenever they could (P. 57). Not the stuff of the local corn boil, Masonic banquets were notorious for being overly posh affairs-second only to the lodge itself, which was pricier and more exclusive by far. Moreover, "the deliberately high degrees of Freemasonry, formed only one of a series of barriers meant to keep out the improper. The secret ballot and black ball guaranteed the exclusion of any coarse and blundering common folk.



However, as the mood of the country changed from exclusion to inclusion, so did Masonry. in fact, it placed supreme faith in a kind of moral trickle-down effect. George Washington's famous dedication of the Capitol in 1793 as a Masonic temple is a case in point. This was no mere cornerstone ceremony using the Masonic symbols of corn, oil, and wine-though it was (and still is) customary for Masons to dedicate most buildings (even churches). Dusting off his Masonic cap and gown, Washington used the event to redefine America's place



Washington was a Mason, but, when pushed, he was just as likely to reprimand the brotherhood in the interest of political expediency. Neither could Jefferson be trusted to defend Masonry, right or wrong, for he was an outsider through and through. Even Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the most dogmatic of the Masonic founding fathers, put his fraternalism in a bottom drawer, and, not unlike the piety of Oliver Wendell Holmes, he opened that drawer years later he discovered to his dismay that it was empty. Franklin, like many Masons of his class at the end of the eighteenth -century (and indeed as they reached ripe old age themselves), seemed to abandon an order that, for him at least, had outlived its usefulness. Franklin's rise was just as likely to reprimand the brotherhood in the interest of political expediency. Neither could Jefferson be trusted to defend Masonry, right or wrong, for he was an outsider through and through. Even Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the most dogmatic of the Masonic founding fathers, put his fraternalism in a bottom drawer, and, not unlike the piety of Oliver Wendell Holmes, when he opened that drawer years later he discovered to his dismay that it was empty. Franklin, like many Masons of his class at the end of the eighteenth century (and indeed as they reached ripe old age themselves), seemed to abandon an order that, for him at least, had outlived its usefulness.



Franklin's rise up the ranks may be attributable to his erstwhile Masonic vows and associations, but he may have turned away from them when he found something infinitely more gratifying than its ritual celebration of science and learning.



Masonry itself changed to suit the times, favoring more mainstream messages and methods. The new message was that a naive belief in science and a plethora of newfangled gadgetry would make of a nation of republican behavers, Masonic believers, and vice versa.



Enter the great bugaboo of postmodernist angst: mass media. In light of the democratization of information, Masonry's days were perhaps numbered, the idea of passing knowledge from father to son bound for the scrap heap. The free press, not the freemason," would become the medium of the new age for the "instruction of all ranks of people in those secrets of the arts and sciences" hitherto the preserve of so many gentlemen. Ironically, the apotheosis of science quickly turned the lodge into the abode of just as many gentlemen as before, snooty afficionados of the cult of pure reason.



Potential lovers of leaming, taste, and philosophy who required a leg up were getting the boot in order to make room for the likes of Tennessee Grand Master Wilkins Tannehill. His 1829 Sketches of the History of Literature, a sophisticated translation and exegesis of ancient Palestinian texts, speaks volumes of a creeping elitism.



Tannehill's characterization of the work as but "the humble pretensions of a backwoodsman" has all the credibility of a political acceptance speech in the antebellum Deep South." The concessions necessary to keep Tannehill happy were almost certain to anger so-called lesser men, the generation of young American males on the frontier eager to stake their claim in accordance with a more democratic order of conduct.



By the beginning of the century, more American lodges met in inland villages than on the urban seaboard. Masonry in America divide Royal Arch Masonry, after all, had been born of schism and class strife ... a group of provincial lodges declared themselves the "Ancient Rite" and decried the London Grand Lodge as a debased "Modem" version. In great part this was a class based schism, with artisans and small shopkeepers resenting the pretensions of the aristocrats who controlled the London Grand Lodge. The Ancient Masons claimed that the London Grand Lodge had changed Masonic history in abandoning some of the material connecting the order to Old Testament times.



As early as Franklin's return to Philadelphia in 1785, the Royal Arch, or Ancient Order of the Priesthood, was a force to be reckoned with. Suddenly, it was the cosmopolitan Franklin who was not likely to feel much like participating; nor was he entirely welcome to do so, not without submitting to a somewhat degrading healing ceremony. His refusal, claiming it would be unbecoming to a gentleman, could only be interpreted as a thinly veiled criticism of the entire nascent Royal Arch or York system of Masonry. When Franklin died five years later, Philadelphia Masons (almost to a man) faded to attend his funeral, let alone give the event their blessing. If blackballed in death by these pretenders to the throne, this slight, however one conceives it, would not have caused him to shift his weight to one side, let alone turn in his coffin. Whether Modems or cosmopolitan Masons like Franklin were guilty of climbing into bed with the state and thus deserved what they got was most assuredly a moot point in the years to follow. The Ancients quickly made it their mission to court the church with the same gusto.



Enter the Knights Templar, an honorary set of Masonic degrees on the books for a little while at this point. These new kids on the (Masonic) block were patterned after the New Testament rather than the Old (a significant departure), representing a small but significant patch of common ground where a historic Masonic-Protestant interfaith dialogue might take place. The case of New York Royal Arch Mason Salem Town instructive.



His System of Speculative Masonry (1818) argues that Masonry and Christianity are "the same truth" and thus both divinely inspired." While the marriage was not quite made in heaven, the fraternity's standing in the eyes of the public made some enormous gains as it attracted growing numbers of the clergy in its ranks," Town was one of several Christianizers of Masonry, hoping to mend the rift that divided Ancients and Moderns by means of a Christian exegesis of the Craft degrees, in particular seeing in the raising of the Master Mason a type of Christ. George Oliver, an English cleric of noble Anglican blood, was another." His Christian spin called for a much older dating system for the order-reaching back to the time of Adam and Eve, no less-claiming that Seth had practiced a form of "Primitive or Pure Freemasonry" that, among other things, had been a rite that anxiously awaited the coming of Christ." The third member of this trinity was another Englishman, William Hutchinson, whose Spirit of Freemasonry (first published in 1775) would be translated into several languages and undergo numerous printings but, owing to its exclusively Christian interpretation of the Master Mason degree, as one Masonic encyclopedia explains, would "not be received as the dogma of the present day.



The ecumenism of Oliver and Hutchinson bore fruit nonetheless, the so-called Union of 1813 that, in England at least, brought an end to the bitter rivalries that had divided Ancients and Moderns, who came together under the present United Grand Lodge of England, which nevertheless seems to favor the Moderns.



Ancients and Modems battled it out on American soil, too, with the Ancients winning the battle but not the war. The war would be a very different fight, indeed, rather less amenable to union as such-and between the Royal Arch Knights Templar and the Scottish Rite. The latter, a plethora of knightly designations with a gnostic and hermetic quality, came to the United States by way of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1783, its first Supreme Council headed by John Mitchell and Frederick Dalcho in 1801. The Scottish Rite is the more esoteric of the two, having a neo-Christian agenda, boasting thirty-three degrees for example:







I. SYMBOLIC LODGE



1. Entered Apprentice



2. Fellow Craft



3. Master Mason



11. LODGE OF PERFECTION



4. Secret Master



5. Perfect Master



6. Intimate Secretary



7. Provost and judge



8. Intendant of the Building



9. Elu, or Elected Knight, of the Nine



10. Illustrious Elect, or Elu, of the Fifteen



ii. Sublime Knight Elect, or Elu, of the Twelve



12. Grand Master Architect



13. Knight of the Ninth Arch, or Royal Arch of Solomon



14. Grand Elect, Perfect and Sublime Mason, or Perfect Elu.



III. CHAPTER OF ROSE CROIX



15. Knight of the East



16. Prince ofJerusalem



17. Knight of the East and West



18. Prince Rose Croix



IV. COUNCIL OF KADOSH



19. Grand Pontiff



20. Grand Master of Symbolic Lodges



21. Noachite, or Prussian Knight



22. Knight of the Royal Ax, or Prince of Libanus



23. Chief of the Tabernacle



24. Prince of the Tabernacle



25. Knight of the Brazen Serpent



26. Prince of Mercy



27. Knight of the Commander of the Temple



28. Knight of the Sun, or Prince Adept



29. Grand Scottish Knight of Saint Andrew



30. Knight Kadosh



V. CONSISTORY OR SUBLIME PRINCES OR MASTERS, OF THE ROYAL SECRET



31. Inspector Inquisitor Commander



32. Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret



VI. SUPREME COUNCIL



33. Sovereign Grand Inspector General-Honorary







With so much about the order (both the Royal Arch/Templar and Royal Secret/Scottish chivalric streams) that was friendly to Christianity (and despite its medieval and even Roman Catholic airs) the Protestant clergy in America were inclined to lend their support-so long as they received special treatment, that is. Masons were quick to oblige, too, remitting membership fees for the clergy as a matter of course.



A new office was created in the Royal Arch or American Rite, that of "Grand Chaplain." The Grand Lodge of Connecticut appointed W. Bishop Jarvis of the Episcopal Church to preside over its meetings, public and private. Over a hundred clergy had joined Connecticut lodges by I830, a third of them Episcopalians.



The other two-thirds were Universalists, including Hosea Ballou and EInathan Winchester, cofounders of Universalism in America. At first, the only available [clerical] sponsorship came from countervailing denominations. Before long, however, Congregationalists in Connecticut had buried the hatchet.



In 1825 the Grand Lodge appointed its first Congregational Grand Chaplain, the Reverend Charles A. Boardman of New Preston . Methodism followed suit, the eccentric itinerant minister Lorenzo Dow preaching the message of Christian Masonry throughout the land and with impunity. The editor of the Methodist Zion's Herald likewise saw no contradiction between his Christian faith and Masonic vows. Masons began holding some meetings at local Evangelical meeting houses, another testament to Masonic-Protestant relations. At about this time, religious tests were added to the Masonic ritual in order to reflect better the new, middle-class Evangelical sensibility: belief in God, in the divinity of Jesus Christ, and in his resurrection, as well as the exhumation of Hiram Abiff.



For some, the growing Evangelical presence at the lodge did not bode well for the order. A degree of sectarian divisiveness was detectable, too, something foreign to Masonry, in principle at least. The so-called Jewish question divided Royal Arch Masons along promission and antimission lines. In 1822 the Hiram Lodge of New Haven formed the New-Haven Palestinian Missionary Society in hopes of diffusing the Holy Scriptures among benighted heathen people, and having a particular desire to promote the happiness of our Jewish brethren, and others in Palestine. in 1823 the Olive Branch Council of Select Masters a Royal Arch lodge-sent the following admonition to the brethren in northeastern Connecticut, stating that in the general spirit of philanthropy to awake from [their] slumbers to demonstrate, by active benevolence, that when we speak of Masonry, we mean something more than the gratification of the Epicure, were are the descendants of those Master Builders, who rendered Mount Moriah the religious center of the world? To the Jewish Nation we are indebted for all that is ancient, judicious and distinct in Masonry. From them under the great I AM, we derive all we know of the history of man and the will of Heaven, anterior to the advent of the long promised Messiah.(cited on p. 183)



In the war of words, Masonry seemed to take on the appearance of its nemesis, Evangelical Protestantism. In 1816 the General Grand Encampment of the United States was formed, with DeWitt Clinton (New York's governor, no less) named General Grand Master and Thomas Smith Webb Deputy General Grand Master. Templars were to be found in New York before this, but as "Sir Knight Robert Macoy," Grand Recorder of the Grand Encampment of New York in 1851, would later go on to lament, the Knights Templar of that state did not receive authorization to grant warrants until 1797-30.



One reason for confusion is that New York state had been home to numerous self-created Templar Encampments "governed by their own private and individual laws, acknowledging no superior authority". DeWitt Clinton may have hoped to effect a union of his own, rallying New York's best and brightest, elites of Masonic-Christian sensibility, to help to reestablish the old pecking order in the interest of social harmony and likely to increase Masonic coffers and his chances for reelection, too.



In the Conventions of New York Knights Templar for the years 1816, 1819, 1826, and 1829 the names of the state's upper crust appear in spades. Notably, the presiding General Grand Prelate at the time of the Morgan affair was the distinguished Rev. Paul Dean (1816-1826); thereafter the title passed to Rev. Gregory T. Bedell (1826-1829) and then to Rev. Ezekiel L. Bascom in 1829. The Grand Encampment of the United States was not so much grand as an elitist and priestly bunch as deeply divided as any Protestant assembly of the time. Then, to make matters infinitely worse, under the not so watchful or moral eye of the same Grand Encampment of Knights Templar, there followed a murder indictment and attempted cover-up. Was the game over? The end of Masonry or just the beginning.



As for the previously mentioned lecture, enter Joseph SmithJr., the soon-to-be Mormon prophet. Had the founder of Mormonism been able to waltz into one of several lodges in the immediate vicinity-at twenty-one, as was the custom and his birthright, being of Royal Arch stock-had he been able to start the long ascent up the mystical ladder of manhood through the normal channels (all things being equal), he no doubt would not have gone on to become the Mormbn prophet but a Masonic luminary of some lesser distinction. The Morgan affair, in short, left young prospective Masons of Smith's generation without a lodge to be in.



In Smith's case, he ran the risk of being rejected on account of a limp, and so, in some respects, massive lodge closures gave him just the excuse he needed to start something Masonic of his own. Morgan's widow later became one of Smith's wives, but he and Morgan had more in common than a liking for the erstwhile Lucinda Pendleton.



But that they shared a strong desire to bring Masonry down a notch or two is no foregone conclusion. First Morgan and then Smith might just as easily be seen as among Masonry's so-called indiscreet champions. Supporting this is the very plausible Masonic retort that Morgan's death was a freak, an accident, the work of rogue Masons who at worst were guilty of negligent homicide, not a cold or calculated act of premeditated murder, and that the Grand Lodge had no hand in it.



What, after all, had Morgan done that was so wrong? Was it really that he hoped to bring down the order by publishing a blow-by-blow account of the ritual? Or was it that by doing so he threatened to rally Masons or would-be Masons around a new captain of the guard-men of his social standing who, like him, were being discriminated against on the basis of their class?



Morgan's Masonic credentials are spurious at best. Allegedly, he was a Royal Arch Mason and member of the LeRoy, New York, Lodge (No. 33) in 1825, declaring on his honor to have received the previous six degrees in the proper manner. Moving to Batavia a short time later, he was denied admission to a Royal Arch chapter there. A petition for a new one bearing his name was also rejected, whereas a second containing the names of Batavia's better sort (who were openly hostile to Morgan) proved successful.



And if that were not enough, when Morgan swallowed his pride and tendered an application to join, he was blackballed. This marked the end of his Masonic career for all intents and purposes. Teaming up with another blackballed applicant, editor of the Republican Advocate David C. Miller, he no doubt hoped to get even, living the good Masonic life-with or without the blessing of the Grand Lodge-as the best revenge. That he intended to publish a Masonic manual or 11 monitor" rather than a mere Evangelical polemic in the hopes that large numbers of like-minded men would follow his lead is not an impossibility.



It makes no sense to say that Morgan stepped over the line and out of the Masonic camp when he published his Illustrations of Freemasonry, given the vast number of Masonic monitors in existence, available to the general public and containing long excerpts from the Masonic ritual-some of these as detached as Morgan's. The gentlemen of the Jerusalem Lodge in London, for example, published an account of the Masonic rituals as early as 1762, the famous Jachin and Boaz, defending their publication as a pro-Masonic work designed to strengthen [rather] than hurt the society to please [their] brethren" and most certainly not done with 'a view of gain.



In their view, a candid account by Masons of the rituals to manhood could prove beneficial to the movement, preferable to that "which hitherto has been represented in such frightful shapes" by their enemies . Morgan's Illustrations of Freemasonry contains little in the way of editorial comment, presenting rather an unvarnished recitative that took its cue from William Preston's Illustrations of Freemasonry (first published in London in 1772) and Thomas Smith Webb's famous Freemason's A Monitor; or Illustrations of Freemasonry (first published in the United States in Albany, N.Y., in 1797). Thirteen editions of Jachin and Boaz had been published in -America between 1790 and 1820. It seems that Morgan had every Masonic right to add to the corpus.



By the time Morgan's turn came along, however, it was becoming fashionable to nip such revisionism in the bud. American Royal Arch Masons were closing ranks around Webb's Monitor, elevating it to canonical status. Webb was well positioned, a Masonic leader at the state level. Postbellurn Masonic apologist Rob Morris explains in the preface of his edition of the Monitor: "In all my teachings as a Masonic lecturer, I have urged that whatever merits the fifteen or twenty Handbooks in use among us possessed over this, or one another, it was merely for their pictorial embellishments; the monitorial and really essential parts being but copies of this, with unimportant additions. I have never thought their dissemination, to the exclusion of Webb's Monitor, the true policy of the Craft." Morris continues: "If, as is fondly hoped, the establishment of Masonic Schools of Instruction, teaching nothing but the 'Webb Work,' should be crowned with general success, an important feature in them must be a uniform text-book. The FREEMASON'S MONITOR must of course possess the only claim to that position" (p. x).



One detects a Protestant canonical bias here, a variant of the sola scriptura doctrine, with Webb and only Webb as the standard for belief and practice. Publishing a competing Masonic monitor in America after 18ig (superseding Webb in some way) had become a risky business by the late I820S. Morgan perhaps knew this but was willing to risk it. He paid with his life.