The Substitute Word: Why I Have Not Sought the Lost One

As a Master Mason under the Grand Lodge of Nebraska, I have spent a good deal of time sitting with the allegorical machinery of the Craft, and one piece of it has held me longer than the rest: the lost secrets of a Master Mason, and the substitute word given in their place. These are not, to my mind, mere narrative furniture. They are the load-bearing wall of the degree.

My conviction is that the true secrets are not the sort of thing that can be handed over. This is the main reason I have not petitioned the appendant bodies — the Royal Arch or the Scottish Rite. The premise that the lost word is recoverable in a later degree seems to me to misread what the Master Mason degree is doing. I want to explain why, and I want to do it without overstating my case, because the argument I am about to make has been made badly by a lot of people, including by me in an earlier version of this post.

What Is Actually Old

Let me begin by conceding something I used to get wrong.

I once believed that the emphasis on the lost word was a late-nineteenth-century development, an import from the Victorian occult revival. That is not true, and it is worth saying plainly. The Hiramic legend and the substituted word are already present in Samuel Prichard’s Masonry Dissected in 1730 — an exposure, and a hostile one, but for that very reason good evidence of what was actually being worked in lodges at the time. The Royal Arch and its recovery of the Name follow within a decade or so; Fifield Dassigny’s pamphlet of 1744 refers to it as an existing thing.

So the structure I am declining is Georgian, not Victorian. It is nearly as old as the Grand Lodge system itself. Anyone who tells you the Royal Arch is a nineteenth-century esoteric accretion is wrong, and I do not want to be that person.

What Is Actually New

The innovation is not the story. The innovation is the metaphysics laid over the story.

Somewhere in the nineteenth century, the lost word stops being a narrative loss and becomes the Ineffable Name — and the Name becomes a thing that does something. Knowledge of it confers metaphysical standing. Recovery of it is attainment. This is the vocabulary of the occult revival, and it enters American Masonic thought largely through Albert Pike.

Pike repays careful reading here, because Pike the Enlightenment historian is constantly at war with Pike the Romantic syncretist.

In his historical mode he is a skeptic of the older school. He recounts the prohibition on pronouncing the Tetragrammaton and the substitution of Adonai, and then dismisses outright the belief that possessing the true pronunciation conferred supernatural power — he calls it a vain superstition, and says it is unworthy of a Mason.

But elsewhere, Pike the reader of Éliphas Lévi shows up. Writing on the letter Yod, he tells us:

YOD is, in the Kabalah, the symbol of Unity, of the Supreme Deity, the first letter of the Holy Name; and also a symbol of the Great Kabalistic Triads.

And then he sends the reader to the Zohar and the Siphra de Zeniutha to work out its mystic meanings. That is the turn. The Craft’s own letter is being routed through a body of medieval Jewish mystical literature that no operative lodge had ever heard of, and the reader is instructed to go study it.

Two things are worth keeping straight. Hebrew scripture is not Kabbalah. The Temple, the pillars, the Name itself — these are in the ritual because the ritual is built on the Books of Kings and Chronicles, reflecting the biblical literacy of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Protestant Europe, not because anyone in the early London lodges was reading Moses de León. Confusing biblical allegory with medieval Kabbalah is the most common error in Masonic esotericism, and it manufactures a Kabbalistic Craft out of what was simply a biblical one.

And Pike had an institutional interest in the word being recoverable. Morals and Dogma is a set of lectures for the Scottish Rite. A system that promises to complete what the third degree left unfinished is, among other things, a case for taking twenty-nine more degrees. I do not say that cynically. Pike was a genuine scholar and an omnivorous one. But Pike the Grand Commander needed a curriculum that stayed compelling for thirty degrees, and an argument’s provenance is worth knowing.

An Honest Word About My Own Reading

Here is where I have to be fair, because the critique I have just made cuts at me too.

Part of the reading I am about to offer — that the lost word figures something like what Jung called individuation — is a modern overlay. Jung published nothing on Masonry, and the eighteenth-century brethren who framed the third degree were not depth psychologists. If I claimed to be scraping off Pike’s accretions to reveal the authentic Craft underneath, I would be doing the same thing he did, and I would deserve the same scrutiny.

So I will not claim that. What I will claim is narrower and, I think, more defensible: that this reading is truer to the shape of the degree than the recovery narrative is. The argument does not need antiquity. It needs only the observation that a mystery whose answer can be conferred at a later meeting was never a mystery to begin with. It was a delay.

The Argument From Structure

The Master Mason degree is built around an absence. That is its architecture. The word is lost, a substitute is given, and the candidate is raised anyway. Nothing in the degree suggests the substitute is a placeholder awaiting resolution. The degree ends. The lodge closes. You go home a Master Mason, holding a word you have been told is not the word.

If that absence is a defect, the degree is broken and needs repair. If the absence is the teaching, then repairing it is vandalism.

I take it to be the teaching. Every initiatory tradition worth its salt operates this way. Eleusis did not distribute a fact; the ancient sources agree that initiates underwent something and came out changed, and the secrecy held for a thousand years in part because there was no proposition to leak. Cicero, who was himself initiated, praises the mysteries not for anything they told him but for what they taught him about living and about dying. The mystery was not withheld information. It was a mode of knowing available only on the far side of an experience.

The Word That Cannot Be Spoken

I want to say where this reading comes from, because it does not come from anywhere exotic. It comes from the intellectual water supply of the men who built speculative Masonry in the first place.

The gentlemen who assembled in London coffee-house lodges in the 1710s and 1720s were classically educated. They had Cicero and Plato and Vitruvius. Their ritual carries that formation on its face: the seven liberal arts stand at the center of the Fellowcraft degree, the five orders of architecture are Vitruvian, Euclid appears in the Old Charges, and our own lectures name Pythagoras. And behind them stood two and a half centuries of Renaissance Platonism, beginning with Marsilio Ficino, who translated the Corpus Hermeticum in 1463 and the whole of Plato thereafter, and whose editions stayed in print across the entire period in which the Craft took its modern shape.

That tradition has a great deal to say about words that cannot be handed over.

The sharpest statement is in the Seventh Letter attributed to Plato — disputed in authorship, but ancient and enormously influential either way. Its author says there is no treatise of his on the highest matters and never will be, because the subject does not admit of verbal formulation as other subjects do. It comes only after long communion in the work itself, and then suddenly, like a flame kindled by a leaping spark, and thereafter it feeds itself. That is not secrecy. That is a claim about what kind of thing the knowledge is.

Plotinus makes the same move as metaphysics rather than pedagogy. The One is beyond being, and therefore beyond name; of it we can say what it is not, but what it is we do not say. Every word offered for the first principle is a substitute word, given in the knowledge that it is a substitute, because the alternative is silence and silence teaches nothing to a beginner.

And in the Corpus Hermeticum, in the thirteenth treatise, Tat asks his teacher to hand him the doctrine of rebirth, and Hermes tells him it cannot be handed to him. Not that it is forbidden. That it is not the sort of thing that transmits. It comes when it comes, and it must be undergone. Ficino put that dialogue into Latin and into print, and educated Europe read it for three hundred years.

Set the third degree beside these and it stops looking like a puzzle with a missing piece. The candidate is given a word and told in the same breath that it is not the word — an admitted proxy, offered as a proxy. That is a more sophisticated thing to be handed than a secret, and it is exactly the gesture the Platonic and Hermetic traditions make when they run up against the limits of speech.

I am not claiming the framers of the degree were consciously encoding Plotinus. I have no evidence of that, and inventing it would be the very error I have spent this essay complaining about. What I am claiming is narrower and, I think, sufficient: these are the waters these men swam in, and this reading requires nothing from outside their world. It needs no Zohar, no Tree of Life, no nineteenth-century revival. Everything it needs was already on their shelves.

The Living Stone

The Master Mason is charged to become a living stone in a spiritual house — the phrase from the First Epistle of Peter — and a building not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, from the Second Letter to the Corinthians. Both are in our ritual, and both describe a work done on the man rather than for him.

That, to me, is the whole of it. The point is not that you come to possess the word. The point is that you come to be the sort of person for whom the word is no longer missing.

Incompleteness as a Gift

I want to be careful not to turn this into a criticism of brethren who have gone on to the Arch or the Rite. Many of the men I respect most in this jurisdiction have, and they have found real things there — historical depth, fellowship, a body of allegory as rich as anything in the Craft. The appendant bodies are not a mistake. My abstention is a personal reading, not a verdict.

But it is a reading I hold with conviction. The third degree gives me an unfinished thing and asks me to keep working. I would rather sit with the substitute word for the rest of my life than accept a completion from someone else’s hands. The incompleteness is not a gap in the system. It is the system, still running.

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Sources

• Prichard, Samuel. Masonry Dissected. London, 1730.
• Dassigny, Fifield. A Serious and Impartial Enquiry into the Cause of the Present Decay of Free-Masonry in the Kingdom of Ireland. Dublin, 1744.
• Pike, Albert. Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. Charleston, 1871.
• Knoop, Douglas, and G. P. Jones. The Genesis of Freemasonry. Manchester University Press, 1947.
• Plato (attrib.). Seventh Letter, 341c–d.
• Plotinus. Enneads V.3 and VI.9.
• Corpus Hermeticum XIII. Trans. Brian Copenhaver, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
• Cicero. De Legibus II.14.36, on the Eleusinian mysteries.
• Yates, Frances. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. University of Chicago Press, 1964, on Ficino and the Renaissance transmission.
• Jung, C. G. “Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation,” in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i.
• 1 Peter 2:5; 2 Corinthians 5:1.

• Tags:
• freemasonry
• symbolism
• mysticism

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