Masonic Ritual Research Articles

Masonic Secrets in and Brown’s The Lost Symbol

This research delves into the Masonic secrets embedded within Dan Brown's novel "The Lost Symbol," particularly as they relate to Washington D.C.'s enigmatic history. The study centers on Freemasonry symbols depicted in the novel and seeks to uncover their deeper meanings by analyzing real-life counterparts. The primary aim is to disclose the second-order meanings of these symbols, thereby unraveling the myths associated with Freemasonry, especially the so-called "lost symbol." Employing Roland Barthes' semiology perspective, this research reveals how Masonic symbols, as described by Brown, are interwoven with Washington's iconic monuments. The analysis focuses on symbols such as the House of the Temple, the Apotheosis of Washington, the Pyramid, the Circumpunct, and various Masonic working tools. By interpreting these symbols through both their first-order (denotative) and second-order (connotative) meanings, the study aims to reveal the myth behind the lost symbol. The findings indicate that the Masonic secrets are indeed hidden within the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building, specifically in the House of the Temple, where Masonic rituals are conducted, and the Capitol Rotunda, which is rich with concealed Masonic lore. The ultimate Masonic secret, as portrayed in the novel, is the "Lost Word," symbolized by the phrase "Laus Deo" (Praise God), inscribed atop the Capitol. According to Masonic beliefs, this symbol holds the power to unlock profound secrets, guiding them towards their ultimate objective: the establishment of a New World Order. Through the lens of second-order meaning, the myth of the lost word is interpreted as a celestial symbol, representing the promise of new beginnings and the transition from night to morning, as envisioned by the Masonic forefathers who designed the U.S. Capitol.

ON A STRANGE QUOTATION IN ALEXANDER BLOK’S ARTICLE “APOLLON GRIGORIEV’S LIFE”

Until now, a German quote from Grigoriev’s article “Th e Last Phase of Love” (1846) in A. Blok’s “The Fate of Apollo Grigoriev”, has remained not only uncommented, but also untranslated. A dictionary analysis showed that a major misprint was made in the magazine “Repertuar i Pantheon” (Erwürdigster instead of Ehrwürdigster). In Blok’s article, another inaccuracy was added to this typo, as a result of which the quote turned into an “obscure passage in the text”. Correction of typos showed that Grigoriev quotes a remark from a Masonic ritual, which corresponds to his passion for Freemasonry and mysticism during the translation of the “Hymns”, with which Block correlated the quoted fragment.

Мистические видения и их оценка в русском масонстве конца XVIII – начала XIX века

In the richest manuscript heritage of Russian freemasons, who lived two centuries ago, there are numerous descriptions of various mystical experiences. These are visions and mystical dreams in which beings from the other world appeared, as well as deliberately evoked mystical states by which an adept attempts to penetrate into the other world. For censorship reasons, this aspect of the activities of Russian brothers practically did not go beyond the narrow circle of initiates. The article will attempt to present the main types of mystical experience reflected in the manuscripts of Russian freemasons – mostly diaries and correspondence. The most valuable information of this kind is contained in so-called “Masonic dreams”. These stories constitute a special genre of Masonic literature and preserved in a significant number of manuscripts. They were based on the idea of a special inner, spiritual vision, which has an adept and which allows him to achieve clairvoyance. Masonic dreams contain a significant amount of details related both to the Masonic ritual and symbolic decoration of the premises of Masonic lodges, and to those practices of moral self-improvement that are important for the Masonic path. Russian freemasons paid considerable attention to the problem of evaluating such experience – is it a gift from the divine essences or a temptation sent by demonic forces? The question of the significance of such an experience was also important: is it an accidental consequence of Masonic work, a hindrance on the way, or, on the contrary, a kind of confirmation of progress in following the Masonic path? The Orthodox Church, to which the Russian freemasons belonged, is extremely negative about such forms of mysticism. Therefore, they were forced to seek explanations for such phenomena in Catholic and Protestant mysticism, as well as in the European esoteric tradition. The article attempts to answer these questions, based on the analysis of a wide range of Masonic manuscripts of the 18th - early 19th centuries, preserved in the families of Russian Masons and today located in the Moscow archives.

Hartley , Janet M. Shaw , Denis J. B. Magic, Texts and Travel: Homage to a Scholar, Will Ryan (review)

SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 760 Hartley, Janet M. and Shaw, Denis J. B. (eds). Magic, Texts and Travel: Homage to a Scholar, Will Ryan. Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, London, 2021. x + 388 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Publications of Will Ryan. Index. £25.00 (paperback). According to all its outward signs, this book should make the reviewer wary. The idiosyncratic combination of topics listed in its main title hardly suggests coherence. The subtitle, baldly advertising the book as a Festschrift, gives not even the mildest nod towards modern disguises of the genre (under cover of, for example, a themed issue of a journal). The fact that the volume is published by a study group seems to remind us of publishers’ wariness with regard to collections of essays in general and Festschriften in particular. A glance at the contents list shows contributions ranging from A. V. Chernetsov’s study of early Rus amulets to Paul Dukes’s account of Scottish missionaries and Manchurian railways at the turn of the twentieth century, via detours into diverse side-avenues such as fifteenth-century Slavonic translations of Hebrew philosophical terminology (Moshe Taube), or eighteenth-century masonic rituals (Yuri Stoyanov). Everything seems to indicate the pious obscurity of a semi-private act of — as the title says — scholarly homage. And yet, despite all of that, this turns out to work rather well as a book. As Will Ryan might have said, never underestimate the ostensibly esoteric. The twenty-one chapters are roughly evenly distributed across three sections whose headings are slightly expanded versions of the three words in the main title of the book. To summarize them all is impossible, to select is invidious, but a few highlights will indicate both the diversity and the unexpected coherence. The coherence derives from the predominant focus, across all three sections, on aspects of what might conventionally have been reckoned liminality, on phenomena on or around the cultural, social or geographical margins. But this is not a mere kunstkamera of curiosities. Will Ryan has contributed hugely to the process by which conventionally liminal preoccupations have shifted into the historiographical mainstream. The chapters are also of a consistently high quality. The first section is on ‘Magic and Beliefs’. The line between the two is pleasingly blurred. Valerie Kivelson vividly illustrates the ‘lyrical logic’ of Muscovite spells that involved or invoked animals, while Eve Levin explores the practice of therapeutic blood-letting that seems to have been adopted from Western Europe from the late fifteenth century, despite the fact that Muscovites did not relate disease to ‘humours’ and hence did not share the theory that underpinned the practice. Gary Marker investigates the curiously disproportionate posthumous notoriety of the heretic and dissenter Grigorii Talitskii, who was convicted and immolated in 1701 and on whom a dossier was REVIEWS 761 assembled on the orders of the Empress Elizabeth in the 1740s and published in the 1860s. The second section is headed ‘Texts and Translations’, though in some respects the chapters here also touch on magic and, in particular, belief. Sergei Bogatyrev meticulously deconstructs the sources on the ‘legend of the golden belt’, an apparently scandalous episode at the wedding of Vasilii II. It may have originated as just a drunken row, but it was subsequently interpreted and elaborated into a political polemic. Adelina Angusheva-Tihanov considers how the story of the toll-booths that the soul has to negotiate on its attempted ascent to heaven, derived from a vision in the tenth-century Byzantine Life of Basil the Younger, was adapted in the eighteenth century and later, with particular focus on the treatment of the toll-booth that assessed ‘magic’. Boris Uspenskij makes an intriguing case for the notion that some polite diplomatic rhetoric by the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1658 was interpreted (and reported) by a Muscovite envoy as an actual pledge of subservience to the tsar. Thethirdsectionismorewordilyheaded‘Travel,TechnologyandExploration’. Here liminality knows almost no limits, as we are reminded of how much of the globe we can traverse while remaining safely within the realm of Russian Studies. Anthony Cross surveys the British in Crimea between 1774 and 1856. Elena Smilianskaia and Julia Leikin investigate a tour...

Masonic Ritual and the Display of Empire in 19th-Century India and Beyond

This article aims at exploring the role played by Freemasonry in displaying, promoting and celebrating the British Empire. It argues that Masonic lodges held centre stage in the Indian colonial public sphere. They organized processions, cornerstone laying ceremonies, and banquets on an unequalled scale, which all became an integral part of imperial display. Masonic ritual, therefore, held centre stage in the dramaturgy of colonial power in India, and also played a leading role in fostering the cult of Empire, which emerged in the last decades of the 19th century. In that respect, Freemasonry offers a stimulating venue for articulating the local and the global, the material and the cultural, formal and informal Empire. It also offers an interesting insight into imperial circulations.

Furnishing a Lodge Room on the Canadian Frontier

A small artefact collection and a substantial archival fonds from Rideau Lodge No. 25 offer an unusual glimpse into the material practices of freemasons in early 19th century rural Canada. Organized in 1815, Rideau Lodge operated for about 30 years in and around the hamlet of Burritts Rapids, in presentday eastern Ontario. Their surviving artefacts and accounts reveal how the brethren procured the material necessities of masonic ritual in the context of emerging frontier capitalism. The Rideau Lodge masons developed a hybrid material strategy, purchasing some items from distant suppliers, including those in the United States, while making or repurposing other items locally. A case study in the relationship between local production and the market economy on the Canadian frontier, this article adds to the general literature on early Canadian capitalism by illustrating how cultural considerations - in this case the practices and values of freemasonry - influenced rural Canadians' consumption strategies.

Swift, Ramsay, and “the Cabala, as Masonry Was Call’d in Those Days”

Abstract When Jonathan Swift anonymously published A Letter from the Grand Mistress of the Female Freemasons (Dublin, 1724), he entered a political minefield, for it was a mocking response to James Anderson’s Constitutions of the Freemasons (London, 1723). Swift countered Anderson’s “modern,” Anglocentric, pro-Hanoverian history with his account of more “ancient” Scots-Irish traditions. He drew on his Masonic experiences in Dublin in 1688 and Ulster in 1695, where he learned of the Solomonic, Cabalistic, and Lullist themes of early Stuart Masonry. From his readings in Rosicrucian and Cabalistic works, he developed a “drolling” technique of linguistic and allegorical satire that protected him from government prosecution. Though he was not a practitioner of the esoteric Masonic rituals, his great admirer, Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay, determined to implement them in Écossais lodges maintained by exiled Jacobites.

Opera y Masonería: El Cántico Fúnebre de José María Velásquez

El Cántico Fúnebre es una obra para tenor y orquesta escrita por el compositor venezolano del siglo XIX José María Velásquez con texto del político y escritor Francisco Conde. El Cántico fue escrito para los funerales de Juan José Conde, prócer de la Independencia y uno de los fundadores de la masonería local. Los rasgos más particulares de esta obra son la marcada influencia operística que posee la música y las referencias simbólicas masónicas del poema. Este artículo ofrece, en primer lugar, una visión de la ópera en Latinoamérica y su utilización como instrumento emulador de la cultura europea. Luego se estudia el proceso mediante el cual la ópera fue penetrando el ritual masónico hasta manifestarse plenamente en la ceremonia fúnebre y, finalmente, como las élites gobernantes, integradas en su mayoría por miembros de la orden y las clases medias, adoptaron a la ópera como uno de sus principales valores culturales.

Women in Eighteenth-Century English Freemasonry

Drawing on several so-far neglected documents available in the Burney Collection of the British Library as well as in the Library and Museum of Freemasons' Hall in London, this paper investigates the gender structures and roles represented in English masonic constitutions, pamphlets, letters, rituals as well as newspapers of the long eighteenth century. First, it examines the origin and the public perception of the exclusion of women from the fraternity in England and discuses how freemasons defended this 'landmark.' Secondly, it analyses how and why English freemasons invited ladies to participate in various masonic activities including balls, feasts and public masonic ceremonies. Thirdly, it highlights how some English women, following the advice of some liberal-minded 'brethren', managed to subvert this gender-exclusive principle by establishing all-female and / or adoption lodges in the second half of the century. So far scholarship has dated the emergence of such lodges to the twentieth century in England. Finally, the paper will compare the gender constructions of traditional male masonic rituals with the first English ceremonies of adoption lodges admitting both sexes.

‘Aux Mânes d’un F[rère] qui fut Roi’

When King Leopold I of the Belgians died on 10 December 1865, freemasons in Brussels were quick to organize an elaborate lodge of sorrow for their mason king (le Roi maçon). This lodge of sorrow included a masonic cantata, written for orchestra, choir and soloists by Karel Lodewijk Hanssens (1825–71), one of the city’s leading composers. This cantata, long thought to have been lost, was recently recovered from a collection of manuscripts of the Royal Music Conservatory in Brussels. This essay aims to explain why the freemasons thought such a cantata was in order and why Hanssens was willing to accept the commission. It also seeks to elaborate on the relationship between the masonic ritual and its music and will conclude by explaining the failure of this ritual, which resulted in the cantata being shelved and forgotten.

Lodge of Sorrow for King Leopold I of Belgium (1866)

Belgian King Leopold’s connection to freemasonry was tenuous at best. He had been accepted ‘by proxy’ under the auspices of a Swiss lodge but most likely he never set a foot inside a lodge room. He was hailed nevertheless as a brother by Belgian freemasons. Leopold accepted the role of protector of the order when the young country had its own Grand Orient organized in 1832–33. But Leopold quickly developed hostility towards the Belgian lodges’ liberal positions and kept that negative opinion until his death in December 1865. In February 1866 the Grand Orient organized a widely attended lodge of sorrow for the departed monarch. The ritual explicitly echoed the then still largely proclaimed masonic spirituality and its conception of the immortality of the soul. The dead mason-king was symbolically integrated into the pantheon of national heroes, was reinvented with mythical qualities and was ‘instrumentalized’ as an icon to prove that freemasons were good patriots. The explicit expression of a deist worldview was meant to show that masons were no vile atheists either. Catholic opinion reacted vehemently against this recuperation of the monarch, but the 1866 ritual also led to a first but ever so meaningful protest by more radical freemasons who opposed this imposed deist doctrine. These polemics anticipated the progressive secularization of Belgian masonic rituals in the 1870s.

Report from Doctoral Students Study Day UCL, London

This report provides details of seven promising PhD projects presented by doctoral students working in the domain of freemasonry and fraternalism, with commentaries by Professor Cécile Révauger from Université de Bordeaux III, who is perhaps the leading European scholar of eighteenth-century freemasonry, and by Miguel Hernandez, doctoral student from University of Exeter. The students’ research covered colonial freemasonry in India, Belgian reactions to fascist prohibition of freemasonry in Italy, masonic pottery, the Ku Klux Klan and freemasonry in the US, the creation of a Belgian national identity, female masonic rituals, and an introduction to the life of nineteenth-century Egyptologist and social climber Thomas Pettigrew. This impressive range demonstrates the excellent health of research into freemasonry in our universities.

Die Zauberflöte: Oper und Mysterium (review)

Jan Assmann, Die Zauberflote: Oper und Mysterium. Munich: Hanser, 2005. 384 pp., with 38 illustrations and numerous musicological examples. First-time viewers of Mozart's Zauberflote most likely experience the same consternation as Prince Tamino when their initial expectations of a conventional knight in shining armor rescue of Pamina, the daughter of the Queen of the Night, from the clutches of the (purportedly) evil sorcerer Sarastro are confounded. Thanks to the efforts of scholars such as Jacques Chailley (The Magic Flute, Masonic Opera [Paris, 1968; English translation by Herbert Weinstock, New York: Knopf, 1971]), a critical consensus has emerged that sees in the plot of Die Zauberflote not only the triumph of light over darkness, reason over superstition that is a main goal of the European Enlightenment, but also specific elements of Masonic ritual. In this regard.Tamino becomes a candidate for initiation in a secret Society who needs to be disabused of his pre-conceptions of Sarastro and his fellow priests in the Temple of Wisdom. What, then, does the most recent book of the Egyptologist Jan Assmann add to the already immense literature on Die Zauberflote? The answer is contained within its short, but appropriately cryptic subtitle, which refers to the Hellenistic Mystery Religions that Freemasons like Ignaz von Born-the prototype for Sarastro-believed were derived from Egyptian religious rites performed in the interiors of the pyramids. Assmann reminds his readers that, as of 1791, the Rosetta Stone had not yet been found and deciphered and that the meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyphs was still wholly a matter of speculation.Egypt in The Magic Flute is hence not a historical land, but rather a realm in which the hopes and dreams of the Viennese late Enlightenment are given aesthetic form, a realm still accessible to attentive viewers and listeners today. In his exploration of this realm of the aesthetic imaginary, Assmann devotes four chapters to Geertsian thick descriptions of the musical numbers, spoken dialogue, and contemporary stage decorations for the opera, each of which is followed by investigations of their cultural context. Chapter 1 ends with Bei Mannern, welche liebe fuhlen, the duet sung by Pamina and Papageno, whose theme and 14 lines of text correspond to the aria on the transforming power of love sung byTamino earlier in the act. Assmann then turns to the Utopian dimension of time and space in the opera, where bald is the dominating word and where subterranean chambers and passageways evoke the grottos and landscape gardens that wealthy Freemasons constructed as scenery for the mysteries of Isis as dea panthea. …

Civility, Male Friendship, and Masonic Sociability in Nineteenth‐Century Germany

Largely neglected by historians who assume that its heyday passed in Europe with the demise of the Old Regime, Freemasonry in fact became a mass phenomenon among German (and French as well as American) middle‐class men in the nineteenth century. Masonic secrecy made possible a form of sociability which allowed men to experience intimate relations with each other. Within the lodge, men could experience the emotional drama of the rituals while, both in public and in the family, men increasingly sought to comply with the ideal of a man ruled by reason. Masonic rituals entailed the implicit message that the most important presupposition for civility, moral improvement and a ‘brotherhood of all men’ was male friendship.

Alexander Pushkin: A Celebration of Russia's Best-Loved Writer by A. D. P. s> Briggs Pushkin's Hiostrical Imagination by Svetlana s> Evdokimova Pushkin on Literature by Tatiana s> Wolff (review)

REVIEWS 311 the travestyfrom Scarron(pp. IO8-27), and second, in his use not so much of native Russianmaterialbut a complex systemof recurrentRussianfolkmotifs (PP. 13I-50). The specific nature of Maikov'sburlesque should be sought in these two developments. In general the lexis of Eliseiwith its popular speech and vulgarismsbelongs to the traditionof the travesty,whereas its rhetoricin the sense of its stylistic resourcesand formal structurescomes from the mock heroic (p. 12 i). Hence as well as the burlesquecontrastbetween the elevated and the debased caused by an incongruity between subject and style, Eliseiexhibits an intra-stylistic burlesquecontrast,arisingfroma non-correspondencebetween itslexical and rhetoricallevels (p. I56). Dr Schrubaoffersnew solutionsto severalproblemsof fact and interpretation . The date of Maikov's introduction to masonry is advanced from the beginning of the i770s to the early I76os on the groundsthat symbolismfrom masonic ritual can be recognized in Igrok(pp. 21-28). The composition of JNaloi, which L. N. Maikov and G. A. Gukovskiipresumed to have followed the publication of Elisei in I77I, is assigned instead to four months of the preceding year,January to April I770, firstbecause it refersto V. P. Petrov's tranislationof the Aeneid,which came out in January I770, and second, because, as ProfessorMaria Di Salvo has pointed out, it contains an allusion to Emin's novels inappropriateafterEmin's death in April 1770 (PP. 30-3I). The anonymous verse epistle Poslanie kg. izdateliuTrutnia should be attributed to Maikov rather than to Emin or D. I. Fonvizin on the basis of numerous verbal parallels with Maikov's own poetry (pp. 40-41). A skilfully argued discussion of the date of composition of Eliseirefutes A. V. Zapadov's view that it was alreadycirculatingin manuscriptin I769 (pp. 44-58), and a whole clhapterexplores Mlaikov'sindebtedness to the manuscriptcollection associated with the name of I. S. Barkov(pp. 83-107). W'iththis fresh, penetrating and comprehensive study, Dr Schruba has made a valuable contribution to a too rarelyinvestigatedfield of eighteenthcenituryRussianliterature . Iniiperial College C. L. DRAGE London Briggs,A. D. P. (ed.),Alexander Pushkin: A Celebration ofRussia's Best-Loved Writer. Hazar Publishing,London, 1999. 208 pp. ? I6.99. Evdokimova, Svetlana. Pushkin's Hiostrical Imagination. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999. xviii 300pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $35.00. W'Volff, Tatiana. Pushkinon Literature(revised edition). Athlone Press, London, 1999. xxxViii + 554 pp. Footnotes. Bibliographies. Index. k4 .95. THE bicentenary is over and these books, like a score of others, are the spent cartridges left from the battle to get the English-speaking world to recognize Pushkin as a luminary of the same magnitude as Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe. They have been backed up by the heavy artillery of translators (some 312 SEER, 79, 2, 200I of whom give an account of their fight in Briggs'celebratoryvolume) and if, afterAntony Wood'sLittleTragedies and BorisGodunov (not to mention the lyrics shortlyto appear)or the FalenEvgenii Onegin, victory is stillnot achieved, and Flaubert'slament 'yournationalpoet is so flat'stillsumsup the reactionof the English- and French-speakingpublic, we shall have to wait for the campaign of 2037 and maintain our faith that the untranslated is not forever demonstrablyuntranslatable. The Briggsvolume may seem a light-weighttome better suited for a radio programme or a series of weekly magazine articles: certainly none of the twenty-threecontributorsevergetsnearthe depthorpersuasivenessof Marina Tsvetaeva's Moi Pushkin(Paris, I937). The preface by Mikhail Gorbachev is sadly preposterous: if he had read more attentively the ten-volume set he claims to have had on his bookshelf,then he might not have connived at the killingsin Vilnius and Tbilisi and could have come back from Forosnotjust unbloody but unbowed. The afterword, compiled from Isaiah Berlin's utterances (Berlin died before a contribution could be commissioned from him) is the complete opposite:nothing the other contributorssay makesquite the impact of his declaration of love for Pushkin, the cross between Racine and a fox. In between these great men one's fellow academics and dilettantes (the contributors are mostly Anglo-American, with one Hungarian and a couple of Russian emigres)are best at providing an opening into themselves, especially interesting, even endearing for the readers of SEER: how they driftedinto Russian studies by accident, throughparentage, in flightfrom pack-drill,mathematics...

Poe and the American Affiliation with Freemasonry

Edgar Allan Poe's Cask of Amontillado (1846), over 150 years old and much commented on, still has some fresh insights to offer about American culture. I am thinking particularly of this story's treatment of American Freemasonry not just overt references to Freemasonry that readers often focus on, but the larger cultural picture involving American culture's affiliation with an old, secret society. In effect, it has taken us a long time to understand that this tale not only draws heavily on issues prominent in 1846 concerning American Freemasonry, but the tale itself actually enacts a Masonic ritual in a way that would not be evident to anyone except Masons and Masonic scholars. Without this historical context, this tale is simply another example of Poe's skillful manipulation of gothic effects the praise usually given in commentary on the tale.1 Read in its proper historical context, this tale is participating in Freemasonry's discussion of an emergent national character and the

Comment

Comment Loren Kruger We all know where South Africa is, but we do not yet know what it is. —Albie Sachs This statement by Albie Sachs—former anti-apartheid activist, Constitutional Court judge, and most recently chair of the commission setting up a National Arts Council in South Africa—was first uttered at a meeting of the African National Congress in exile in 1989, but it is still apt today. The unifying energy of the anti-apartheid struggle has dissipated under the pressure of daily life and mundane politics. Without the binding force of a common enemy, discrepancies in economic and social conditions, as well as cultural conflict, are too powerful to permit easy appeals to a united national culture. In particular, the moral conviction that sustained several generations of theatre activists and cultural workers since the 1930s and that culminated in such memorable political theatre events as Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972), Woza Albert (1981), and Born in the RSA (1985) has given way to a variety of not-quite-compatible political persuasions and cultural practices. “Blessed with a perfect confusion,” in the words of one character in Sophiatown (1986), the play that dramatized that township’s urban and intercultural legacy, theatre in South Africa is now more diverse but also more conflicted. The provocative image on our cover, for instance, would have been unthinkable in the days of struggle. Satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys’s appearance as Winnie Madikizela Mandela draped in a Nelson Mandela T-shirt does not simply present the spectacle of an “Afrikaner-Jewish drag queen” impersonating the woman known as “mother of the nation” (at least until she was dismissed from the Cabinet). Its hybridity also challenges South African audiences and performers to think skeptically about national icons and founding fictions when competing appeals for national, regional, and ethnic affiliation continue to echo across the country. The articles in this special issue on “Performing (in) South Africa,” take readers beyond (and before) the vivid and familiar images of anti-apartheid theatre to critical investigations of other performances with national aspirations, past and present. Most of the authors are practitioners as well as critics; all are based in South Africa. Researchers on the ground are in a unique position to map uncharted terrain and to open up new perspectives on well-trodden areas. In “Masques, Monuments, and Masons,” Peter Merrington draws on the theoretical work of Benedict Anderson and Jean-François Lyotard to analyze the South African Pageant of Union in 1910, and the local drama of the enmity and reconciliation of the “white races,” Boer and Briton, against the international backdrop of Masonic ritual and British imperial iconography from Canada to the Antipodes. Complementing Merrington’s historical investigation of the invention and performance of national tradition in a partially postcolonial South Africa is Jacqueline Maingard’s essay, “Imag(in)ing the Nation.” Her account of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Rugby World Cup, hosted by South Africa in 1995, shows the remarkable continuity of motifs and format between this “postapartheid” celebration of the “rainbow nation” and the pageants celebrating Union (1910) and the Tricentenary of Jan van Riebeeck’s landing at the Cape at the height of the apartheid era (1952). Taken together, these essays illuminate the unacknowledged legacy of South Africa’s conflicting pasts as well as the remarkable achievements of the present and so remind us of the difficulty as well as the necessity of coming to terms with those pasts in the present. Hazel Barnes’s essay, “Theatre for Reconciliation” directly addresses the roles that theatre and ritual may play in working through the past in the present. Her account of her production of Desire, a play by anthropologist David Lan about reconciliation in the wake of the Zimbabwean struggle for independence, draws on Victor Turner’s reflections on social drama as well as the interaction of student actors and spectators from different backgrounds. She shows how the performance and reception of conflict and redress in the theatre might foster the kind of thought and feeling necessary for reconciliation, while acknowledging that the translation of theatrical into social action is a difficult and delicate operation, especially in strife-torn...

The conservation of sixteen Masonic Aprons: Treating multi‐media, ritual artefacts

Abstract The treatment strategy implemented for Masonic Aprons from the Masonic Collection of William Hesketh Lever is described and evaluated. The aprons encompass a wide range of materials and techniques: silk, leather, linen, and metal components; printing, painting and embroidery. The collection is to be displayed at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, now part of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, at Port Sunlight on the Wirral. The collection is important for two main reasons: the early date of many of the aprons (most pre‐date 1815) and the fact that the collection is now in public hands. The history and development of aprons in Masonic ritual are outlined as understanding of their use and context helped inform treatment decisions, and three case studies are described in detail.

La masonería y la independencia de Puerto Rico : análisis de un papel de 1823

El trabajo toma como base un "papel" fechado en 1823 en plena reacción absolutista de Fernando VII conservado en puerto rico en el archivo familiar del propio mariscal Miguel de la Torre y procedente de un archivo particular de Madrid. El documento es un largo memorial que como consecuencia de un final complicado, cifrado y anónima despedida no habitual en la documentación y ritual masónico, hace pensar se puede tratar de un anónimo no masón con el que se pretendía atemorizar al gobernador militar de puerto rico incitándole de paso a una peligrosa aventura política bajo la doble coacción de la amenaza y el chantaje.

GABRIELE ROSSETTI AND CHARLES LYELL: NEW LIGHT ON AN OLD FRIENDSHIP

Abstract It is unlikely that the bicentenary of the birth of Gabriele Rossetti (1783–1854) will arouse many enthusiastic encomia in Great Britain. Even during his lifetime he was outstripped in popular acclaim by at least one of his talented children, and, while his career as the first Professor of Italian at King's College, London (1831–43) was distinguished by what Professor Vincent justly assessed as ‘unbounded enthusiasm for scholarship, united with an abnormal capacity for hard work’, he largely squandered those gifts in pursuing what Vincent, with equal justice, termed a ‘chimera‘ (Gabriele Rossetti in England, Oxford, 1936, p. 158). Indeed the one illusion which dominated nearly all his critical writings after 1825 was that the mysteries of masonic doctrine and cabalistic ritual underlay not only the Divina Commedia, but also much of the greatest literature of the Italian Renaissance. E. R. Vincent, and, before him, R. D. Waller in The Rossetti Family (Manchester, 1932), followed a trend which Anto...