Experiential communication

One of the hardest elements of Freemasonry to communicate to others is what it communicates. There are parts of the communication that are easy to understand. You can read exposes of the degrees online. You can chase the historical, philosophical, religious, educational, literary and technical allusions that they have to offer, and spend a lifetime in doing so. You can listen to lectures on their deeper meanings on YouTube and read the dissection of them by notable Masons, scholars, enthusiasts and raving conspiracy theorists alike.

All of this will have varying amounts of return on the investment of your time, and to some extent I think it would be worth doing for the person who is not and feels they never will be a Mason.

But after all of that study, you still won't understand what Freemasonry communicates!

That's a kind of bold statement, and it really does need to be defended, so let me first explain some technical details before I circle around to defending my claim.

In the 1960s, a man by the name of Noam Chomsky developed a startling linguistic theory. His theory, backed up by the first successful mathematical approach to all languages, demonstrated that all human languages together only covered a small subset of possible languages that might be developed.

From this arose the popular idea that even the set of all possible languages has its own limitation on expressing all possible ideas.

If we take that as given, then my statement about Freemasonry becomes a bit clearer. What I'm really asserting is that, while language cannot communicate certain ideas, the combination of language and an experiential setting that goes with it gives us the ability to communicate ideas that we cannot then divulge to others without the same combination of language and experience.

I call this "experiential communication," and it has been the secret hidden in plain sight of Freemasonry for hundreds of years. In fact, it is one of the hidden secrets of all initiatory organizations, religions, orders, societies and so on. Not all of them are communicating the same ideas, though. Obviously a Christian baptism is seeking to communicate something different from a Masonic initiation, but both are ideas for which language is (in my opinion) insufficient and always will be.

But, I hear the careful reader saying, "you said that this was true only if we took as given that there are ideas which cannot be expressed through language." This is true. And it should never be taken as an absolute given that what we Freemasons claim to communicate is truly impossible to communicate any other way. But what I will say is that, thus far, I have never even come close to finding a way to do so. I could write for ages on this blog about how I feel "connected" to the Brethren of my Lodge or how the degrees evoke a gestalt that I can't quite put my finger on and has lead me to a deeper and more intuitive understanding of the philosophies and other ideas that the degrees connect to.

But ultimately we come to the fact that I can never tell you what it is that I can't tell you.

What is initiation, why is it secret and how does society benefit from it?

The Initiation Chamber
Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii

I've made the outrageous claim before that society makes great strides when the initiatic tradition is intact and widely adopted and that civilization suffers when this is not the case. In order to even begin investigating the validity of that claim, we need to understand what it is we mean by "initiation" and how it works. This is the goal of the present article.

So, what is initiation? In its simplest form, it is the recognition of entry into a new role or subculture in a larger society, using a system of ritual, performed exclusively by those who have previously been initiated.

Let's look at some examples to clarify what that means: When a man is going to be married, most Western cultures have some sort of ceremonial celebration at which the man is prepared for his new role in society as a husband. In the US we usually call these "bachelor parties." Similarly, when one joins the military, there are many distinct rituals of bonding and acceptance performed as a part of "basic training."

Within the societies which perform stand-alone initiations such as Freemasonry, Rotary and so on, the role of the initiation is not merely a demarcation which one experiences and then moves on. It is an entry into a fellowship, but the process is still very much the same.

We now have a sense (if only by example) of what initiation is, so why is it almost always secret?

Certainly, there are elements of many initiations that are considered private matters (bachelor parties might involve watching a "stag film" or, more commonly in the modern day, hiring an exotic dancer; military initiations might be considered violent by outsiders; etc.) but this is not the primary reason for secrecy.

Rather, secrecy is a part of the reason for initiation. Forming a hidden "token" of belonging between the initiate and the existing members of the group makes the act of initiation meaningful. We see this in every trivial act of initiation from the proverbial "keys to the executive washroom" to the programming communities where contributors who have been accepted into project are given permission to submit new source code.

This gives us a reference point from which to begin to talk about how initiation benefits the individual, the group and society at large.

For the individual, initiation is a signpost. Before and after initiation one leads different lives: the exoteric and the esoteric. By creating and valuing an esoteric context, we promote the notion that there is meaning and value in belonging and contributing to something which is more than just the sum of its individual members. This idea, in turn, is the hallmark of functioning societies.

To quote Yeats' poem, The Second Coming, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." It is this lack of conviction on the part of those who have the most to contribute which initiation is meant to address and resolve; not simply by bonding the initiate to the existing members, but by bonding them to the initiatic body itself and teaching them that they can add value to their cultural context by seeking the acceptance of their peers.

In a future update, I will address specific historical examples of societies with and without strong initiatic traditions....