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Among the many fascinating angles of the Ancient Craft are the
numerous facts yet to be discovered.Masonic history discloses
greater and greater gaps as we go back into the far past. The
Ancient mine of Masonic symbolism stills yields the gold of truth to
him who knows how to delve, but many and various are the Masonic
customs, words, rituals and ideas for which we have as yet no
complete explanation. Among these is the dedication of the Lodges to
the Holy Sts. John. No satisfactory explanation has yet been
advanced to explain why operative masons adopted these two Christian
saints, when St. Thomas, the very Patron of architecture and
building, was available as patron of our Order. Most Freemasons who
give the matter thought are well agreed that the choice of our
Ancient Brethren was wise. No two great teachers, preachers, wise
men, saints, could have been found who better shadow forth from
their lives and works the doctrine and teachings of Freemasonry. But
to be happy that the Holy Sts. John, in character and attainments,
are typical of all that is best in Freemasonry, is not to know how
and why the Fraternity came to select them. Where the great students
and researchers of the Masonic world have failed, he must be fool
indeed who would rush in to explain. Yet there is an explanation
somewhere, if we can but find it. St. John the Evangelist apparently
came into our Fraternal system somewhere towards the close of the
sixteenth century, at least, we find the earliest authentic Lodge
Minute reference to St. John the Evangelist in Edinborough in 1599,
although earlier mentions are made in connection with what may be
called relatives, if not ancestors, of our Craft. For instance, “The
Fraternity of St. John” existed in Cologne in 1430.“St. John’s
Masonry” is a distinctive term for Scotch Lodges, many of the older
of which took the name of the Saint. Thus in its early records the
Lodge of Scoon and Perth is often called the Lodge of St. John, and
the Lodge possesses to this day a beautiful mural painting of the
Saint on the east wall of the Lodge Room. Other Lodges denominated
“St. John’s Lodges” were some of those unaffiliated with either the
“Moderns” or the “Ancients” in the period between the schism of the
Mother Grand Lodge (1751) and the reconciliation (1813).In many old
histories of the Craft is a quaint legend that St. John the
evangelist became a “Grand Master” at the age of ninety. It seems to
have its origin in a book printed in 1789, in which one Richard
Linnecar of Wakefield write certain “strictures on Freemasonry,”
although his paper is really a Eulogy. Whether this Ancient
Freemason really continued a tradition, or invented the tale that
was seized upon by Oliver and kept alive as a legend, impossible
though it is, no man may say as yet. One Grand Lodge has ruled that
Sts. John’ Days are Landmarks! Of course any Grand Lodge may make
its own laws, but it is beyond the power of any Grand Lodge either
to make a Landmark by pronouncement, or to make a Landmark by
denying it. Inasmuch as Landmarks, whatever else they may be, are
universally admitted to be handed down to us from “time immemorial,”
and Sts. Johns’ Days as Masonic festivals are neither extremely old
nor universal among the Craft (England using Wednesday after St.
George’s Day, Scotland St. Andrew’s Day and Ireland St. Patrick’s
Day), we must consider only this Grand Lodge’s intent to honor our
patron saints, and the validity of her results.Historians believe
that only after 1717 when the Mother Grand Lodge was formed, did
Freemasonry generally hold festival meetings on either or both, June
24th and December 27th. Perhaps the real explanation of
Freemasonry’s connection with the Sts. John is not to be found in
the history of the Craft but in the history of religions. For the
festival days of the two Sts. John are far older than Christianity;
as old as the ancient systems of worship of fire and sun. It is here
too, that we find the beauty and the glory of the reverent practice
of dedicating Lodges, erected to God, to the Holy Sts. John. Travel
backwards in imagination to an unknown date when the world of men
was young; when knowledge did not exist and the primal urges of all
humanity were divided between the satisfaction of bodily needs -
hunger, thirst, warmth, light - and the instincts of
self-preservation, mating, and the love of children. The men of that
far off age found everything in nature a wonder. They understood not
why the wind blew, what made the rain, from whence came lightning,
thunder, cold and warmth; why the sun climbed the heavens in the
morning and disappeared at night, or what the stars might be. As is
natural for all primitive people, they tried to explain all
mysteries in terms of their daily lives. When angry, their emotions
resulted in loud shouts and a desire to kill. What more natural than
to think that thunder and lightning the anger of the Unknown who
held their lives and well being in His hands? Stronger than his
enemy, ancient man bundled him out of his cave into the open, where
he froze or starved or was eaten by the beasts. What more natural
than to think the wind, the rain, the cold, a manifestation of an
Unseen Presence which was angered at them? The greatest
manifestation of nature known to these ancient ancestors of ours was
the sun. It never failed. It was always present during the day, and
it near kin, fire, warmed and comforted them at night. Under its
gentle rays crops grew and rivers rose. The sun kept away the wild
beasts by his light. The sun made their lives possible. Sun worship
and fire worship were as natural for men just struggling into
understanding as the breath they drew to live. Earliest among the
facts recognized about the sun must have been its slow travel from
north to south and back again as the seasons waxed and waned. And so
Midsummer s day, the longest day, became a festival; it was the
harbinger of harvest, the very birthday of new life. Its opposite
was equally inevitable; the winter solstice was significant of the
end of the slow decline of the sun, the beginning of a new time of
warmth and crop and happiness. Through the countless years, in a
thousand religions, cults, mysteries, in a hundred climes and lands,
priests and people celebrated the solstices. We know it not only
from history and the records of ancient peoples, often cut upon
stone but from myths and legends; the story of Ceres and her search
for her daughter Propsperpine, and the allegory of Isis, Osiris and
Horus. Ancient custom is taken from a people with difficulty. In the
height of our civilization today we retain thousands of customs the
origin of which is lost to most of us. We speak glibly of Yuletide
at Christmas, without thinking of an ancient Scandinavian God, Juul.
The small boy avers truth “By Golly!” Not knowing that he offers his
hand (gol) if he speaks not the truth. Those who think it “bad luck”
to break a mirror but continue a savage belief that a stone thrown
in water which mirrors the face of an enemy will break his heart
even as the reflection is broken. If such ideas persist to this day,
imagine how strenuously a people would resist giving up a holiday
celebration which their fathers’ and their fathers’ before them had
kept for untold ages. So it was when Christianity came to the world.
Feasts and festival days of a hoary antiquity were not lightly to be
given up, even by those who put their faith upon a cross. It was of
no use for the early Church to ban a pagan festival. Old habit was
too strong, old ideas too powerful. Hence clever and thoughtful men
in the early days of Christianity turned the pagan festivals to
Christian usage, and the olden celebrations of summer and winter
solstices became the Sts. John’ Days of the Middle Ages. As the slow
years past, those who celebrated thought less and less of what the
days really commemorated, and became more and more convinced of
their new character. Today, hardly a Freemason gives a thought to
the origin of St. John’s Day in Winter, or knows his celebration of
St. John’s Day in Midsummer preserves a touch with cave men
ancestors. Fairbank’s “Greek Religion” indicates that this transfer
of meaning of festival days from a pagan implication to a Christian
significance was not confined to the Sts. John. He writes: “That in
Greece itself ancient rites should persist under the cover of the
new religion, and that the ancient deities or heroes should reappear
as Christian Saints, is hardly surprising to one who considers the
summary method by which Christianity became the established
religion. It was not so difficult to make the Parthenon a Christian
Church when the virgin goddess of wisdom was supplanted by a St.
Sophia (Wisdom), then by the Virgin Mary. Similarly, Apollo was more
than once supplanted by St. George, Poseidon by St.Nicholas, the
patron saint of sailors, Asculapius by St. Michael and St. Damian,
and in Grottos where Nymphs had been worshipped, female saints
received similar worship from the same people.” It was a common
custom in the Middle Ages for craftsmen of all kinds top place
themselves under the protection of some saint of the church. Our
greatest historian, Gould, puts this in a paragraph, thus: “None of
the London trades appear to have formed fraternities without ranging
themselves under the banner of some saint, and if possible they
chose one who bore a fancied relation to their trade. Thus the
fishmongers adopted St. Peter; the drapers chose the Virgin Mary,
mother of the ‘Holy Lamb’ or ‘Fleece’ as an emblem of that trade.
The goldsmiths’ patron was St. Dunstan, represented to have been a
brother artisan. The merchant tailors, another branch of the draping
business, marked their connection with it by selecting St. John the
Baptist, who was the harbinger of the ‘Holy Lamb’ so adopted by the
drapers . . Eleven or more of the guilds . . . had John the Baptist
as their patron saint, and several of them, while keeping June 24th
as their head day, also met in December 27th, the corresponding
feast of the Evangelist.” To say with certainty why Freemasons
adopted the two Sts. John, and continue to celebrate days as
principal feast which were once of a far different significance than
was given them by the early fathers of the church - Gregory,
Thaumaturgus, St. Augustine, Gregory the Great - is not in the power
of any historian or student as yet. Further light must be had. But
the fitness of these two in our system is obvious if we consider the
spiritual suggestion of their lives. St. John the Baptist was a
stern and just man; intolerant of sham, of pretense, of weakness; a
man of strength and fire, uncompromising with evil or expediency,
and yet withal courageous, humble, sincere, magnanimous. A character
at once heroic and of nobility, of him the Greatest of Teachers
said: “Among them that are born of woman, there hath not arisen a
greater than John the Baptist.” Of St. John the Evangelist, the
disciple whom Jesus loved, a thousand books have been written, and
student has vied with minister, teacher with historian, to find
words fitly to describe the character of the gentle writer of the
Fourth Gospel. No attempt at rivalry will here be made; suffice it
that St. John the Evangelist is recognized the world over as the
apostle of love and light, the bringer of comfort to the
grief-ridden, of courage to the weak, of help to the helpless and of
strength to the falling. It is not for us to evaluate the character
of either saint in terms of the other; it is for us to agree only
that Freemasonry is wise in a gentle wisdom which passeth that in
books when she takes for her own both the saint who fore-told the
coming of the saint who taught the law of the Son of Man who walked
by Galilee. Consider thus, from being an historical and fraternal
puzzle, the Sts. John and their connection with Freemasonry becomes
as plain as the light which was the central fact of the old religion
which the solstitial days commemorated. And it at once makes plain
that part of our ritual which so puzzles the initiate; the question
“From Whence Come You?” and the answer “From the Lodge of the Holy
Sts. John of Jerusalem.” Many have phrased the simple explanation of
the inner meaning of this passage; none with more beauty and clarity
than Brother Joseph Fort Newton, he of the golden pen and the voice
of music: “The allusion has nothing to do with the Order of St. John
of Jerusalem. To our thought - which we give for what it is worth -
its meaning is mystical, in somewhat the following manner: The
legends of the Craft associate the two Saints John with its
fellowship, as Masters , if not Grand Masters; the one a prophet of
righteousness, the other an evangelist of love - the basic
principles and purposes of Masonry. “Of course, there is no
historical evidence that either of the two Saints of the church were
ever members of the Craft. But they were adopted as its patron
Saints, after the manner of former times - a good manner it is, too
- and they have remained so in Christian lands. Lodges are dedicated
to them, instead of to King Solomon, as formerly. “So, naturally,
there came the idea, or ideal, of a sacred Lodge in the Holy City
presided over by the Saints John. No such Lodge ever existed in
fact, and yet it is not a fiction - it is an ideal, and without such
ideals our life would be dim and drab. The thought back of the
question and answer, then, is that we come from an ideal or Dream
Lodge into this actual work-a-day world, where our ideals are to be
tested. “Our journey is ever towards the East, back towards the
ideal, which seems lost in the hard, real world round about us.
Still, we must plod on, following what we have seen, ever trying to
find the ideal in the real, or to bring the ideal to the
interruption of the real; which is the whole secret and quest of
human life. He is wise, and must be accounted brave, who keeps his
memory or vision of the Lodge on the Holy Sts. John at Jerusalem.”
In a few words and short; we do not know just when, or just how,
Freemasonry adopted the Sts. John. Their days are the Christian
adaptation of pagan festivals of a time when man, knowing no better,
worshipped the sun as the supreme God. So when we celebrate out
festival days on June 24th and December 27th, we walk eye to eye and
step by step with our ancient ancestors, worshipping as they
worshipped, giving thanks as they did; they to the only God they
knew for the glory of summer, the beginning of the period when days
lengthened - we to the G.A.O.T.U. that our gentle Craft took for its
own the austere but loving characters of two among the greatest of
the saintly men who have taught of the Father of all mankind. |
