Grand lodge mandates use of tracing boards for Masonic education and ritual

On Friday, the Grand Lodge of Texas's Masonic Services & Education Committee announced that, commencing immediately, all Lodges in the jurisdiction are to use tracing boards as visual aids for Masonic education and ritual. 

Very Worshipful Brother Joe Snow, a spokesperson for the Masonic Services & Education Committee, explained,  "We've been taking a hard look at the state of Freemasonry and Masonic education today. It's apparent from the lack of proper Masonic discourse, as evidenced across social media to include groups like The Whining Stairs or our very own Fexas Treemasons, that most brethren today lack the intellectual acuity to internalize our Masonic teachings as conveyed through the ritual alone. It has become clear to the committee that we need to bring Masonry back to a simpler time, when we conveyed teachings through pictures drawn on some dusty tavern floor. We're hoping that the introduction of visual aids might help our less astute brethren better understand their responsibilities and obligations as Masons."

At this time it is unclear if the Grand Lodge will provide direction or standards guides for the symbols to be drawn in the degrees, and brethren at local Lodge levels have already taken to social media to express their differences of opinion over which symbols should and should not be included. In the Whining Stairs facebook group, Brother Bubba Sawyer took a break from shitposting Confederate flag and All Lives Matter memes to express his confusion about the Grand Lodge's direction: "I dunno about them pictures they're drawing in the Lodge room. Why do we even need em? The only ones I need to recognize as a proud American Mason are the flag of this great nation and the AR-15, the badge of our free and accepted 2nd amendment rights. #MyRitualMyRights" 

The Past Bastard reached out to Bro. Joe Snow to ask if, perhaps, the issue isn't with the ritual, but instead the character of the men within the organization. "No," he said unequivocally, "we're great at guarding the west gate. Besides, we can't just kick people out once they're in. That would wreak havoc on our membership numbers."

For now, this reporter for The Past Bastard is left wondering: "Am I out of touch?" No, it's the ritual that is wrong.

Above: A Texas Lodge room being prepared for an upcoming Master Mason degree.

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GL Kentucky undertakes emergency ritual training when lodge discovered to be passing down incorrect word

Madisonville, KY -- The Custodians of the Work of Grand Lodge of Kentucky have announced emergency measures for retraining the last several generations of Freemasons in some of the lodges in the western end of the state, after it was discovered that virtually all of the members have been passing down the wrong "Master's Word." 

Friend corn bread, sometimes called
Indian Bread or Corn Pone is a popular side
dish in the southern and midwestern states.

"I realize that it's a big state, and our own Grand Lodge has to take some of the responsibility here," said Very Worshipful Buck Hatfield, District Director of Ceremonies.  "We don't get out to the rural lodges as often as we should, so nobody ever really noticed this. Fortunately, Bob McCoy happened to figure it out, so we can at least work to correct the problem."

Hatfield was talking about Right Worshipful Robert McCoy, DDGM in one of the western districts. The Past Bastard reached out to RW McCoy. "I was just making one of those routine lodge visits in... well, I suppose I shouldn't mention the lodge. But anyway, they served up a nice fry-up before the meeting, and I was up at one end of the table, and I said to the fellers at the other end, 'Hey, would you pass me the corn pone?' All of a sudden, everything got real quiet. A couple of old timers dropped their forks, and everybody just swiveled their heads to look at me. "

Over the course of the dinner and subsequent meeting, RW McCoy determined that for at least the previous thirty three years, and possibly longer, lodge members had been passing down a regional name for corn bread, instead of the correct version of the "Master's Word."

The Past Bastard asked how this could have happened. 

"That's the problem with the lodges out in the sticks," VW Hatfield explained. "Not only don't we get out there as often, but frankly, some of them are so small that we forget about them. Hell, the lodge we're talking about is only fifty miles as the crow flies from Madisonville, but it's literally a four hour drive to get there -- which nobody even wants to attempt in the spring or fall rainy season, so probably nobody checked on this lodge since Reagan was president."

The Past Bastard asked what the resolution for this situation was going to be. 

"Well, the secretary, he's calling all the old lodge members, which ain't easy because most of them are in Florida now," VW Hatfield told us. "The Grand Master gave them a dispensation to ask them for the word over the phone, and to correct them if they heard it wrong. From what I understand, that's not going well, either. But in the meantime, we're sending more guys out to the smaller lodges in the surrounding area to check, and hopefully retrain them."

"The members of this lodge were playing a thirty-odd year long game of Telephone," added RW McCoy. "Fortunately, it's only that one word they got wrong. At least they didn't pass down the other words 'Bows Ass' and "Sherbet Test' wrong, too."

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GL of Ohio to honor 300th anniversary of Freemasonry by streamlining ODC degree ceremonies (repost)

(Note: The Past Bastard writers are currently carb-loading and rehydrating in preparation for running the "couch" part of a "couch to 5k"  event. We are republishing some of their favorite articles until they return. -- the unpaid interns)


Dayton, OH -- In a bold and controversial move to honor of the 300th anniversary of the formation of the first known Grand Lodge in 1717, the Grand Lodge of Ohio is not only planning their biggest ever "Grand Master's One Day Class;" but the degrees themselves will be "streamlined" in order to accommodate the incoming members.

"We've done a lot of one day degrees, probably more than any other state, and we found that a lot of the guys coming in were losing attention with all the stuff we were throwing at them," explained RW Steve Garvey, the Grand Lodge Publicity Spokesperson. "By the end of the day, they hardly retained anything. Half, maybe three quarters of them always have that 'deer in the headlamps' look, so we figured that the best thing to do would be to cut out the unimportant parts and just have one big degree."

The Past Bastard questioned RW Garvey on shortened degrees.

Grand Lodge of Ohio at the Dayton Masonic Center

"We all know that there's a lot of repetitious stuff in the degrees, and that there's some stuff that doesn't really add anything," he told us. "What we did was remove some of the longer lectures, like that staircase thing. Nobody really listens to the whole thing anyhow. Then we realized that there was no sense in having three different obligations, so we're just giving them the Master Mason one. And we're combining all the working tools into one big set that we call 'The Working Toolbox.' And if we're only giving them one obligation, there's no sense in having them walk around three different times, so we're going to settle on circumnavigating just three times."

The Grand Lodge figures that by consolidating the rituals and ceremonies into one big degree, they can save between two and three hours on the One Day Class.

"If this works out, then we're going to look at possibly having a morning session and an afternoon session for our next Grand Master's One Day Class," said RW Garvey. "Our goal is to make things easy enough so that a lodge never has to put on their own set of degrees again."

-- Conte Calvino Gliostro

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GRAND LODGE OF FLORIDA REMOVES SYMBOLS OF MORTALITY TO APPEASE AGING BOOMERS (repost)

(Note: The Past Bastard writers are spending an undetermined time in a coma for tax reasons.
We are republishing some of their favorite articles until they return. -- the unpaid interns)

The Villages, FL -- Faced with membership rolls full of post-war "boomers," most of whom are not happy to be finding themselves nearing the end of their natural life spans, the Grand Lodge of Florida is rolling out a re-tooled ritual that avoids references to death and dying, in an effort to make their aging members less uncomfortable during degree work.

"We came up with the idea a couple of years ago when we noticed that a lot of the sixty five to seventy year olds stopped coming to lodge," said RW Dick Johnson, Chairman for the Grand Lodge Committee on Aging and Retention. "Oh, sure, guys stop coming to lodge all the time, but generally, in the past, the older Masons tended to show up more often.  We started talking to them, and discovered that the degree work, especially the Master Mason degrees, were starting to scare the old timers from showing up."

Many aging baby boomers are uncomfortable with
symbols of mortality, so one Grand Lodge is removing
those images from the work.

RW Johnson explained to The Past Bastard that his interviews led him to believe that the boomer generation never felt like they had any obstacles, and had generally been happy to do what they wanted without repercussions, generating debt that they figured would just get paid off later, and enjoy their retirement years in the warm Florida sun. However, as their health began to fail, and as some watched their friends die off, they had little idea of how to handle the changes.

"As Boomers have been hitting retirement, images of death have become triggering for them," he told us. "It's gotten so bad for many of these guys that we've spent some time re-writing the rituals to remove such imagery, so they don't have to think about it."

The Past Bastard interviewed several anonymous Master Masons around Florida for some perspective.

"I never really thought about it before, you know?" said a 68 year old past master, originally from Tacoma, Washington. "I mean, yeah, you got all these death symbols, but I never took them seriously. I mean, 'Father Time' with a scythe? An hourglass? That's, like, so cliche, you know?"

"Our lodge never did those etching board things," said a 73 year old brother from Hackensack, New Jersey. "So I never got the old guy imagery thing. But looking back on it, that thing where the guy gets killed, and he doesn't come back to life? That's just like what happens in real life. That's scary when you think about it." He added, "Which I try not to."

"The part that really gets to me, is that you can't leverage your way out of it," said a 67 year old Past District Deputy Grand master from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. "I've always been able to get enough funds together to shore up some stock, or to tide me over until the next mutual fund flip. But no matter how much you pay the damn doctors, all the seem to do is give you some pills to make you feel better. They aren't actually slowing down the aging process, are they?"

RW Dick Johnson told The Past Bastard that these responses were pretty typical. "It's sad, when you step back and look at it. Those guys had no obstacles in their way, and now they don't know how to deal with this gracefully. That's why we're going to replace the hourglass with a digital watch, and the scythe with a Ginsu knife, and we're going to reword things to make the idea of mortality less threatening."

The Past Bastard asked about the Master Mason degree.

"Oh, yeah, that one was surprisingly easy to work out," he said. "In our version, Hiram is knocked unconscious, and has visions about the ruffians while he's out. In the raising ceremony we just wrote it so that he wakes up and realizes that it was all a dream, and that he's still a king. It's much less frightening or depressing that way."

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Grand Lodge of Florida removes symbols of mortality to appease aging boomers

The Villages, FL -- Faced with membership rolls full of post-war "boomers," most of whom are not happy to be finding themselves nearing the end of their natural life spans, the Grand Lodge of Florida is rolling out a re-tooled ritual that avoids references to death and dying, in an effort to make their aging members less uncomfortable during degree work.

"We came up with the idea a couple of years ago when we noticed that a lot of the sixty five to seventy year olds stopped coming to lodge," said RW Dick Johnson, Chairman for the Grand Lodge Committee on Aging and Retention. "Oh, sure, guys stop coming to lodge all the time, but generally, in the past, the older Masons tended to show up more often.  We started talking to them, and discovered that the degree work, especially the Master Mason degrees, were starting to scare the old timers from showing up."

Many aging baby boomers are uncomfortable with
symbols of mortality, so one Grand Lodge is removing
those images from the work.

RW Johnson explained to The Past Bastard that his interviews led him to believe that the boomer generation never felt like they had any obstacles, and had generally been happy to do what they wanted without repercussions, generating debt that they figured would just get paid off later, and enjoy their retirement years in the warm Florida sun. However, as their health began to fail, and as some watched their friends die off, they had little idea of how to handle the changes.

"As Boomers have been hitting retirement, images of death have become triggering for them," he told us. "It's gotten so bad for many of these guys that we've spent some time re-writing the rituals to remove such imagery, so they don't have to think about it."

The Past Bastard interviewed several anonymous Master Masons around Florida for some perspective.

"I never really thought about it before, you know?" said a 68 year old past master, originally from Tacoma, Washington. "I mean, yeah, you got all these death symbols, but I never took them seriously. I mean, 'Father Time' with a scythe? An hourglass? That's, like, so cliche, you know?"

"Our lodge never did those etching board things," said a 73 year old brother from Hackensack, New Jersey. "So I never got the old guy imagery thing. But looking back on it, that thing where the guy gets killed, and he doesn't come back to life? That's just like what happens in real life. That's scary when you think about it." He added, "Which I try not to."

"The part that really gets to me, is that you can't leverage your way out of it," said a 67 year old Past District Deputy Grand master from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. "I've always been able to get enough funds together to shore up some stock, or to tide me over until the next mutual fund flip. But no matter how much you pay the damn doctors, all the seem to do is give you some pills to make you feel better. They aren't actually slowing down the aging process, are they?"

RW Dick Johnson told The Past Bastard that these responses were pretty typical. "It's sad, when you step back and look at it. Those guys had no obstacles in their way, and now they don't know how to deal with this gracefully. That's why we're going to replace the hourglass with a digital watch, and the scythe with a Ginsu knife, and we're going to reword things to make the idea of mortality less threatening."

The Past Bastard asked about the Master Mason degree.

"Oh, yeah, that one was surprisingly easy to work out," he said. "In our version, Hiram is knocked unconscious, and has visions about the ruffians while he's out. In the raising ceremony we just wrote it so that he wakes up and realizes that it was all a dream, and that he's still a king. It's much less frightening or depressing that way."

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GL of Ohio to honor 300th anniversary of Freemasonry by streamlining ODC degree ceremonies

Dayton, OH -- In a bold and controversial move to honor of the 300th anniversary of the formation of the first known Grand Lodge in 1717, the Grand Lodge of Ohio is not only planning their biggest ever "Grand Master's One Day Class;" but the degrees themselves will be "streamlined" in order to accommodate the incoming members.

"We've done a lot of one day degrees, probably more than any other state, and we found that a lot of the guys coming in were losing attention with all the stuff we were throwing at them," explained RW Steve Garvey, the Grand Lodge Publicity Spokesperson. "By the end of the day, they hardly retained anything. Half, maybe three quarters of them always have that 'deer in the headlamps' look, so we figured that the best thing to do would be to cut out the unimportant parts and just have one big degree."

The Past Bastard questioned RW Garvey on shortened degrees.

Grand Lodge of Ohio at the Dayton Masonic Center

"We all know that there's a lot of repetitious stuff in the degrees, and that there's some stuff that doesn't really add anything," he told us. "What we did was remove some of the longer lectures, like that staircase thing. Nobody really listens to the whole thing anyhow. Then we realized that there was no sense in having three different obligations, so we're just giving them the Master Mason one. And we're combining all the working tools into one big set that we call 'The Working Toolbox.' And if we're only giving them one obligation, there's no sense in having them walk around three different times, so we're going to settle on circumnavigating just three times."

The Grand Lodge figures that by consolidating the rituals and ceremonies into one big degree, they can save between two and three hours on the One Day Class.

"If this works out, then we're going to look at possibly having a morning session and an afternoon session for our next Grand Master's One Day Class," said RW Garvey. "Our goal is to make things easy enough so that a lodge never has to put on their own set of degrees again."

-- Conte Calvino Gliostro

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Grand Lodge Officer Under Fire For Improper Ritual Storage

Richmond, VA - A high-ranking officer in the Grand Line in Virginia is coming under fire after reportedly being caught improperly storing a written copy of the Virginia Masonic ritual on an unsecured server. According to a report released by the Grand Lodge Committee on Jurisprudence, Right Worshipful Brother Joe Snow, Deputy Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Virginia and presumptive nominee for the position of Grand Master for 2017, was investigated for storing one of the only written copies of Virginia's ritual known to exist on a server in his home bathroom.

Bro. Johnathan Doe, Chairman of the Committee on Jurisprudence, spoke to The Past Bastard about the rationale for the investigation: "Virginia is widely known as a 'mouth-to-ear' state where Masonic ciphers and printed copies of the ritual are strictly forbidden. We were tipped off to the existence of Bro. Snow's unsecured server by our friends in the Grand Lodge of Russia, who expressed their concern over the perceived sloppy treatment of Masonic secrets on the part of the Deputy Grand Master. Naturally, we investigated straight away."

Despite the seriousness of the allegations, it would appear unlikely that the Bro. Snow will face any serious consequences: "The committee does not recommend Masonic charges to be filed against the Deputy Grand Master," Bro. Doe continued, "the Committee on Jurisprudence conducted a full investigation and, while we have found that Bro. Snow acted in a way that was extremely careless in the handling of Masonic secrets, we did not find clear evidence that he intended to violate the laws of the Grand Lodge. In fact, we aren't even certain that the Deputy Grand Master knew how to use the personal server he was storing underneath his bath towels. At any rate, the Deputy Grand Master's staff have said that it was a mistake to use a personal server, and have pledged not to do so again. We are glad that this matter is now resolved, and we want to emphasize that the actions of the Deputy Grand Master should not be held against him during the Grand Lodge elections later this year."

When asked about whether or not the leniency extended to the Deputy Grand Master would be a precedent extended to other brethren in the jurisdiction who might be harboring contraband rituals, Bro. Doe explained, "the Committee wants to make it clear that the outcome of this investigation and the recommendation of the Committee should not be taken as a precedent for those who might possess written rituals in the future. In fact, we will also be instituting a new technology policy immediately that governs when and how to discuss Freemasonry in general and matters of Masonic ritual in particular over e-mail and the internet and institutes strict consequences for those who fail to comply." 

Looking toward the future, Bro. Doe is optimistic that Grand Lodge will utilize the lessons learned from both this unpleasant oversight and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign to make positive changes. "The Committee is actively working with the Grand Lodge of Russia to identify and harden vulnerabilities within our Grand Lodge information technology systems. With the new policy and infrastructure hardening in place, the committee is confident that the brethren in this Grand Jurisdiction will be better equipped to safeguard Masonry's valuable secrets in the future, or suffer the severe consequences that will come with not doing so."

The Past Bastard reached out to Bro. Snow's America Online (AOL) e-mail account for comment, but received an automated "mailbox full" notification in response.

- SK Bro. Mason Burhmaster

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Grand Lodge of Connecticut to finally publish ritual monitor

New Milford, CT -- In 2009, the Grand Lodge of Connecticut ran out of new ritual monitors to hand out to new Masons. With no copy in electronic format to send to a printer, the Supervisors of the Work began the long, arduous task of reconstructing the monitor. Prohibited by obligation to write entire paragraphs, the Supervisory Committee kept passing along the Microsoft Works document via email. Unfortunately, when it was reviewed after completion in 2014, the new version had more mistakes than was acceptable, and the project was put on hold. New Masons were directed to borrow copies from older members, or to download a copy of Duncan’s until a newer version could be printed.

Fortunately, a handful of younger Masons around the state, acting over Twitter, Google Buzz, Facebook, and other microblogging platforms, created an unofficial version so that they could help each other learn the parts. Small enough to carry on even the oldest smartphones, the version quickly gained popularity among the under-40 crowd. Last year, a group of younger WMs from lodges around the state, frustrated with the inability to pass out ritual books to new officers, approached the Supervisors of the Work with an idea: Scrap the idea of a written monitor, and pass out the unofficial version.

The catch: The unofficial version is all written in emoji and SMS shorthand.

Surprisingly, the Supervisors of the Work, some of whom were still working with Apple Newtons and Palm Pilots, accepted the idea readily.

WB Tyler Burden, a 3 year Mason and new Master of Phineas Barnum Lodge in Bridgeport, assisted in getting the Emoji Work, as they call it, approved for official use in the state.

“There’s already a hipster mystique to being a Freemason,” said WB Burden. “My grandfather’s old style books had all these weird symbols and mixed up letters and stuff. What we’re doing with the Emoji version is really just the same thing. It’s just more modernized.”

Explaining the popularity, he said “Emojis are ways to put a lot of information into a simple character. Between the graphics and the shortcut text, we get a pretty good approximation of what the ritual would have said. I mean, maybe it’s not 100%, but then, very few guys memorize 100% anyway, so who would even know the difference?” Burden added, “We’ve even been getting requests from brothers in other jurisdictions that don’t allow any printed works. Pretty soon, we’ll have a version for Texas, another one for Virginia, and later this year, Pennsylvania.”  

We contacted the Connecticut Supervisors of the Work Committee about the new version, and asked about the older versions.

“Years ago, Connecticut used to have a cypher version of the ritual, but in the last few decades, the level of education  in this state has declined, and in the 1970s we had to publish a full-word version,” said RW Winston Smith. “Thing is, nobody ever kept track of how many boxes we had of those things. Apparently, we thought we had several more cases, so when the last books were gone, we weren’t prepared to create more of them. We probably could have been done sooner,” he added, “but the new printing shops wanted electronic versions, and by the time we finished typing everything, we had so many mistakes that we didn’t feel comfortable sending them out.” 

RW Dagny Coleman explained, "We were hampered because we can't write, print, or any of that stuff, and in order to circumvent the obligations, we had to be morally creative. So one of us would type a sentence or two, then forward it to the next guy, who would do the same, and then he would forward it to the next guy. The problem is that it took ages because a lot of the older guys don't check their email regularly. And every time someone dropped off the committee, or retired, or died, we'd have to bring the replacement up to speed. And since some districts have ritual variations, we ended up with a mish-mash of workings, and then we'd have to rewrite that section."

RW Smith added, “We had one version that was pretty close, but the guy who typed it used 1993 AppleWriter and nobody else could read the format.”

-- Conte Calvino Gliostro

For our older brethren, here is a Twitter Emoji version of a classic piece of literature: 

Emoji version of Les Miserables:

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