Confessions of Aleister Crowley

440 9. In Detroit, a member of the 32° was threatened by certain 33°s with expulsion unless he complied with their views as to his domestic life. The matter was one with which they had no right to meddle on any conceivable theory of human relations. 10. In some parts of America, financial and social pressure is put upon {697} people to compel them to take the 32°! It is common to boycott men in trade or business for refusing to give unfair advantages to their fellow masons. 11. A 33° mason, of many years' standing, holding high office in the Supreme Grand Council, who had joined in order to obtain the traditional secret knowledge, told me that he had never learnt anything from any of the degrees. The only peculiarity in this case is that he should have expected anything of the sort --- or wanted it! 12. With hardly an exception, the "secrets" of freemasonry are strictly arbitrary. Let me explain what I mean. If I am given the combination of a safe, I expect to be able to open it by the use of the word. If I can do so, it proves that that is the correct word. The secrets of freemasonry disclose no mysteries; they do not do what they profess to do; they are meaningless conventions. 13. With the rarest exceptions, freemasons make no attempt to keep their obligations so far as the moral principles inculcated are concerned. For instance, the Master Mason is sworn to respect the chastity of the wife, sister and daughter of his Brother. Those who do so probably respect the chastity of any woman irrespective of her male connections. 14. Freemasons, generally, but especially in England and America, resent any attempt to take masonry seriously. I may quote an essay by a Past Grand Master. It appeared in the English Review for August 1922. It sets forth the initiated view. The question is: Why does a man become a mason? We ought to cross off the pettier human motives first, love of vanity, of mystery, of display, of make-believe; but the average man in England becomes a mason for as serious a reason as he become a Church member or a theosophist; and the average man is usually most abominably disillusioned. He may join the Craft with some idea of fellowship, because it is a tradition in his family to do so, or because he hopes to find in the Secret of the Mysteries something which he does not find in any of the exoteric forms of religion. How is it that the same Order satisfies --- more or less --- aspirations so diverse? We are brought at last face to face with the fundamental problem of the masonic historian --- the origin of the whole business. Without any hesitation at all, one may confess that on this critical question nothing is certainly known. It is true, indeed, that the Craft Lodges in England were originally Hanoverian clubs, as the Scottish Lodges were Jacobite clubs, and the Egyptian Lodges of Cagliostro revolutionary clubs. {698} But that no more explains the origin of freemasonry than the fact "many Spaniards are Roman Catholics" explains why the priest says and does certain things rather than others in the Mass. Now here is the tremendous question: we can admit all Mr Yarker's contentions, and more, as to the connection of masonic and quasimasonic rites with the old customs of initiating people into the trade guilds; but why should such a matter be hedged about with so severe a wardenship, and why should the Central Sacrament partake of so awful and so unearthly a character?