The Masonic Lodge in my hometown stood on a corner, at the end of a street that let out onto one of the main thoroughfares. It was “downtown” (back before downtown got re-branded) across and up the street from the post office and not too far from the public library. Right next to a shoe repair shop that has since disappeared, the Masonic meeting place was an old square building like a lot of other old, square buildings in middle America. Fairly easy to miss if one didn’t know it was where the Mason’s hung out. It was no Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, that’s for sure.
All throughout my childhood, I never saw anybody go in or out of that building. I knew it had some funny symbols in the windows, windows that always had the blinds drawn, which just added to its mysterious character. The few times I’d tried to go in, the front door was always locked. It was just a mysterious building that I thought about now and again, but mostly not at all. After all, there was the candy store housed inside an old train station that sold dozens of penny and nickel candies, plus chocolate covered bananas and salty, sweet caramel corn (long since gone). There was also the independent record store down the block where I gave my sister the whole of my allowance so she could buy me those two tapes with the parental warning stickers on them, thus beginning my initiation into the mysteries of hip hop: Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet and Ice Cube’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. (This place, also, has ceased to exist.) And of course, there was the big dormitory tower on the nearby college campus and all those pretty girls with funny letters on their t-shirts.
When I became a high school senior my interest in that old, lonely, seemingly never open Masonic building became reawakened by two events. The first event was the discovery of an ornately designed book with what looked like Renaissance-era artwork on its cover on one of the shelves way in that back of the school library. I’d wandered back there on my free period out of boredom and the desire to find something, anything, that might cure that most typical of teenage ailments. From the moment I saw the artwork, the book had me captivated; reading the title only made me more so: The Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy. I looked at the stamps on the inside cover and noticed that it hadn’t been checked out of the library in nearly twenty years. I didn’t check it out either, but I did walk out of the school library with it and took it home, where I read and re-read it and poured over all its esoteric artwork over and over again. The book, of course, had quite a lot to say about the lofty teachings of Masonry, its connection to the legendary Rosicrucians and hints of a lofty, secret purpose behind the founding of the United States, among many other things.
Just what went on at that Masonic building downtown?
When I’d finished reading The Secret Teachings for the third time, the second event happened, the discovery of another book. This time I was downtown, just a three minute walk away from the Masonic Lodge, in a locally-owned comic book store. On a rack in the center of the store, between a book on Chaos Theory and a copy of William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse, sat the Big Book of Conspiracies, a comic book treatment of the most profound, paranoid and plain deranged conspiracy theories that had been established up to that point. Fittingly enough, it was published by Paradox Press. And yes, there was plenty of stuff about the Masons in there.
Just what really went on at the Masonic building downtown?
I set out to find out.
I started with the phone book. While in my friend’s basement, I looked up the number and, just in case something magical, mysterious or frightening happened, while I dialed the number, my friend listened in on another phone.
One ring. Oh man.
Two rings. Ho, baby.
Three rings. What the? Do you think they know that we’re calling and who we are?
After a few more rings, we got the answering machine of the Lodge, informing us of the days and times of meetings and the kind of folks eligible for membership in the Lodge.
Spooky! My friend and I hung up.
But I got a bit of luck. At the time, I was also making the rounds of different religious houses of worship in town (shades of other activities to come in my life), out of curiosity, a sincere hope of something genuine and real, and oh, yes, also out of boredom and the desire to find something, anything, that might cure that most typical of teenage ailments. In this endeavor, I once again received assistance from the local telephone book. From calling the local representative of the Greek Orthodox congregation, I learned that, due to the tiny size of their community (we were, after all, in a very non-Greek Midwestern town), they were holding services in the basement of…the Masonic Lodge.
Spooky! But also convenient and cool, two missions rolled up into one.
I asked my friend with the basement if he wanted to come along with me that Sunday to the Greek Orthodox service and to, you know, also see if we could sneak around the super secret Masonic other floors. He dutifully agreed to embark on the journey with me.
Sunday came and I got dressed. My friend picked me up and drove us downtown. We parked in a spot right in front of the shoe repair shop and walked on up to the corner. This time, when I pulled on the front door, it opened.
Spooky!
There were folks already ahead of us heading downstairs and so we followed them.
What followed was a very beautiful service, officiating by a young Greek-American priest with nearly black hair. Some of it felt familiar because I had been raised Roman Catholic, but it struck me as much more meaningful and spiritual, partially because of the sheer quantity of smoking incense used during the service (a detail virtually absent from the local Catholic churches), the greater frequency of kneeling, standing and sitting, and the fact that it was conducted entirely in Greek and I didn’t understand a word of it.
Right then I had an insight about the importance of ritual and mystery in human life and the need to seek out and experience those things, even if one had to create them for oneself. I suddenly understood why certain elderly Catholics bemoaned Vatican II so much and how it had gotten rid of the traditional, Latin mass. I also understood one reason why the blinds were always closed and the front door was frequently locked at the Masonic Lodge whose basement I was sitting in.
When the mass ended, my friend and I spoke with the Father for a few minutes. I complimented the mass, let him know how beautiful it had felt, how spiritual. And we asked him about the use of incense in the service and received a two-fold answer.
“Well, it’s meant to symbolize the prayers of the people going up to heaven, as well as reminding us of the Holy Spirit.”
He then smiled.
“It’s also used because, well, in the Middle Ages they didn’t have deodorant or air conditioning and people smelled really bad, especially in the summer.”
Now we smiled.
After a few more minutes of pleasant conversation, we thanked him for the experience and said goodbye. There were still plenty of people mingling in the basement as we ascended the steps up to the entry way and kept on climbing to the very next floor. We hadn’t forgotten our other reason for being here. To seek out some clues as to what the heck those Masons did when the Greeks weren’t using their basement.
We walked through a bare room with a portrait of George Washington on the wall and came upon a locked door. No dice there, so we continued on to the next room. Here, we found a framed diagram outlining various degrees of Freemasonry. The one that stuck out for me was “The Order of the Knights Templar.” I remembered them mentioned both in the Big Book of Conspiracies and in The Secret Teachings, each making a connection to the Masons, but painted in very different lights. The first book conjured something wild, sinister and disturbing; the latter, painted something wild, wise and profound. Standing there I knew I was in no position to know whether either view was entirely, partially or not at all correct.
“Interesting,” I said.
“Yup,” my friend agreed. “Looks like that’s gonna be it for today.”
“Yup,” I said.
So ended my first trip inside one of Hiram’s Houses. Not a single spooky thing came of it either. I did, however, enjoy smelling like incense for the rest of the day.
