Fezzes, Sphinxes and Secret Handshakes

What do Mozart, George Washington, J. Edgar Hoover and Michael Richards of ‘Seinfeld’ have in common? Membership in the mysterious, and dwindling, fraternity of the Freemasons.

By Peter Carlson
Sunday, November 25, 2001; Page W14

Down we go, deeper into the weird wonderland. Past the huge stone sphinxes, past the squatting marble Egyptians, past the two-headed eagles whose chests hold a triangle emblazoned with the mystical Masonic number 33.

We enter the Executive Chamber and gaze on the gold-inlaid ceiling and the purple throne of the Sovereign Grand Commander and my eyes behold the Grand Sword of State, which the Grand Swordbearer carries into each session of the Supreme Council of the 33rd Degree.

And now I’m following S. Brent Morris down the marble staircase, deeper into the bowels of the Washington headquarters of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry -- the building known as the House of the Temple. The place is as hushed as a cathedral, as silent as a sarcophagus. The only sound is the crisp clicking of Morris’s heels on the marble stairs.

Morris is 51, a balding, gray-haired man in a gray suit. He’s a mathematician who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the science of card shuffling. For 25 years, he worked as a cryptographer for the National Security Agency. But he can’t talk about that. It’s classified.

He’s also a Freemason. He is a Royal Arch Mason and a Cryptic Mason and a Knight Templar. He is a Perfect Elu, a Grand Pontiff, a Knight of the Brazen Serpent and a Master of the Royal Secret. He is a 33rd-degree Mason, and there is no 34th degree. He’s also a Masonic historian and the Scottish Rite’s director of membership development.

Morris leads me down the Hall of the Scottish Rite Regalia, where the walls are lined with photo-realistic oil paintings of the garb worn for each of the 33 degrees -- the aprons, the caps, the cordons, the baldrics, the jewels, the rings, the gloves. He heads down another hallway and stops at the threshold of a room.

“This is the Burl Ives Room,” he says. “When he passed away, his family gave his personal collection to us.”

The room is dark but when Morris steps into it, lights automatically pop on, revealing walls covered with the folk singer’s pictures, and an Ives song begins to play.

“It senses our presence,” Morris says.

“Skip, skip, skip to my Lou,” Ives sings. “Skip, skip, skip to my Lou.”

Morris steps out of the room. The lights go out. The music stops. He walks down the Hall of Honor, which is lined with oil paintings of famous Masons -- Harry Truman, Gene Autry, Norman Vincent Peale.

“There’s J. Edgar Hoover’s picture,” Morris says. “Have you heard the rumors about J. Edgar Hoover’s dress?”

“Sure,” I say. I’d read about the Hoover biography that claimed the famous G-man had been seen at a party in New York, wearing a wig, high heels and a fluffy black dress.

“We have a picture of him in his dress,” Morris says.

“You do?” I ask.

Morris steps into a room full of Hoover memorabilia. The director’s desk is there, along with his chair and his phone. Plus a collection of his Shriner’s fezzes. And pictures of Hoover with Jack Dempsey, with Joe DiMaggio, with Shirley Temple, with the Lone Ranger.

“There’s the picture of him in his dress,” Morris says.

I take a look. It is a shot of Hoover as a baby, dressed in a long baptismal gown.

Morris cracks up. “I love to do that to people,” he says.

Goofy Hats and Gruesome Oaths

My long, strange trip through the world of Freemasonry began, like so many odd adventures, with simple curiosity.

I’d driven past the House of the Temple countless times and wondered what it was. It sits on 16th Street NW near Dupont Circle, looking like the Embassy of Atlantis or the Supreme Court of Mars.

It’s built on a mountain of stone steps, and more steps rise in a ziggurat on the rooftop. It’s held up by 33 Ionic columns, each 33 feet high. Two-headed stone eagles perch on each corner of the roof and the gigantic metal doors are guarded by two enormous sphinxes, which stare out toward 16th Street, where passing drivers do double takes and mutter, “What is that?”

At least that’s what I used to mutter.

Then one day, I wandered over to take a closer look. I climbed the steps and inspected the sphinxes. I approached the huge metal doors and spotted words carved in the marble below my feet:

The Temple of the Supreme Council of the Thirty-Third and Last Degree
Of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry
For The Southern Jurisdiction of the United States
Erected to God and Dedicated to the Service of Humanity

Salve Frater

I had no idea what that meant.

I rang the bell. Nobody answered. The place was shut tight.

Curious, I frisked my brain for everything it contained about Freemasonry. All I retrieved were three vague factoids:

1. The weird pyramid with the eye on top that appears on the dollar bill is some kind of Masonic symbol.
2. It’s a secret society that conspiracy theorists believe is plotting world domination.
3. The geezers who wear funny hats and drive goofy go-carts in Memorial Day parades are Masons.

I wondered: Were the guys in the fezzes trying to take over the world? Did they plan to do it in go-carts? And how did the pyramid and the eyeball fit into the plot?

Back at the office, I turned on my computer and typed one word into a search engine: “Freemasons.”

The computer whirred and chugged and revealed what it found: “35,500 matches.”

I pointed and clicked. I found Web sites for Freemasons in Canada, Sweden, Japan, New Jersey. These sites touted the generosity of the Masons -- they donate more than $500 million to charities every year in the United States alone. The sites included endless lists of famous Freemasons: George Washington, FDR, Gerald Ford and Warren G. Harding. Also Ty Cobb, Buzz Aldrin and John Wayne. Mozart was a Mason and he put Masonic imagery in his opera “The Magic Flute.”

I kept pointing and clicking. I found anti-Masonic sites that claimed the Masons were devil worshipers involved in crimes ranging from Jack the Ripper’s murders to the Kennedy assassination to the Oklahoma City bombing. They said the Masons murdered Mozart because he revealed their secrets in “The Magic Flute.”

Those theories were obviously daffy. I went back to the search engine and typed in “Masonic secrets.” The computer whirred and chugged and revealed what it found: “8,700 matches.”

Within minutes, I read descriptions of secret Masonic handshakes and learned a couple of secret Masonic passwords -- “Tubal-cain” and “shibboleth.” I read descriptions of Masonic initiation ceremonies that involved the initiate being blindfolded and having the sharp point of a Masonic compass pressed to his naked breast.

Best of all were the delightfully gory penalties that initiates called down upon themselves if they should ever reveal these secret ceremonies. Like this: “having my left breast torn open, my heart and vitals taken thence and with my body given as prey to the vultures of the air.” And this: “having my body severed in twain, my bowels taken thence and with my body burned to ashes and the ashes thereof scattered to the four winds of heaven.”

Yikes! And yet somehow the secrets got out anyway.

Intrigued, I kept reading. I learned that Freemasonry is dying out, at least in the United States.

Two hundred years ago, it was a powerful movement that included many of our Founding Fathers. One hundred years ago, it was so influential that it inspired hundreds of imitators. Forty years ago, it reached its numerical peak with more than 4 million members in America.

But now, even its leaders admit that Freemasonry is fading away. Every day, old Masons die and are no longer replaced by a younger generation. Today, there are fewer than 2 million Masons in America and their average age is well over 60.

I decided to check out Freemasonry while it was still around. I soon found myself in a kind of parallel universe of pyramids and sphinxes, ceremonial aprons and funny hats, Imperial Potentates and Grand Inspectors General.

And mumbo-jumbo. Lots of mumbo-jumbo.

Strange Hieroglyphics

“We’re not a secret organization,” says Richard Fletcher. “Good lord, we’re in the phone book! If we’re a secret organization, that’s a strange way to do it.”

Fletcher is the head of the Masonic Service Association, which means he’s the official PR man for Freemasonry. He works out of a modest office in Silver Spring. At 67, he’s got a gloriously craggy face. Today he’s wearing a white shirt, black suspenders and a colorful tartan tie topped with a Masonic tie clasp. He became a Mason in 1956, shortly after he got out of the Army.

“My dad was a Mason, a 50-year Mason in a lodge in Vermont,” he says. “I saw him talking to men I respected and I realized there was a bond there, a camaraderie. When two Masons meet in the street, it’s like old home week! They’re patting each other on the back and they’re instant friends. I saw something there that I liked.”

Today, Fletcher has agreed to explain Masonry to me. It’s a tough job so he brought along a visual aid.

“I thought this might help you,” he says. “It’s called the Structure of Freemasonry.”

He passes a chart across the table. It’s festooned with strange hieroglyphics -- a scarlet cross inside a golden crown, a sphinx’s face beneath a shining scimitar, a gold trowel in a blue triangle whose base is broken. Arrows point from one symbol to another. It looks like a corporate flowchart of the occult, as designed by Rube Goldberg.

Slowly and methodically, Brother Fletcher explains it all for me.

First the basics: Freemasonry is a fraternity open to all men over 21 -- 18 in some states -- who are deemed to be of good character. A Mason must believe in a Supreme Being, but his religion is irrelevant. There are Christian Masons, Jewish Masons, Muslim Masons, Buddhist Masons.

Freemasons raise huge sums for charities -- almost $2 million a day, he says -- but charity is not their main purpose. Their goal is self-improvement through fraternity.

“In Freemasonry, you always hear the phrase, ‘We try to make good men better,’” Fletcher says. “We exist primarily to raise the level of commitment and involvement with each other.”

To become a Mason, a man must ask to be admitted -- Freemasons don’t recruit, Fletcher says. If accepted, the man must pass through the three degrees of the Blue Lodge -- Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason -- each with its own secret ritual, handshake and password.

That’s as far as most Masons go. But nearly half of American Masons opt to obtain higher degrees. There are two paths to those degrees -- the Scottish Rite and the York Rite.

The Scottish Rite is the group with the otherworldly headquarters on 16th Street. In this rite, a Mason can earn 29 more degrees, from the fourth (“Secret Master”) to the 32nd (“Master of the Royal Secret”). There’s also a 33rd degree, which is an honor bestowed by the rite’s Supreme Council as a reward for service.

In the York Rite, the higher degrees are not numbered but they have equally impressive titles -- “Most Excellent Master” and “Super-Excellent Master” and, at the apex of the York pyramid, “Order of Knights Templar.”

Some Masons rise to the top in both rites. Fletcher is one of them.

“They’re two branches, each teaching aspects of Freemasonry in their own way,” he says. “The degrees are actually morality plays. They’re acted out by people in costumes and makeup.”

The plays are elaborate allegories, sometimes on biblical themes, and they are designed to teach moral lessons that will help make the Masons who act in them, and watch them, better men. I ask him to describe one. He refuses. They are secret. And, like all Masons, he has vowed never to reveal the fraternity’s secrets.

“I don’t like the term secret,” he says. “I prefer to use the term private. What we do is private. There is nothing sinister about it. There is history and ritual and tradition in everything we do in a ceremony.”

“I’ve read some gruesome Masonic oaths,” I say. “If you showed me a secret handshake, would Masons really rip out your heart and feed it to the vultures?”

He laughs. “No,” he says. “Every Mason on earth knows those oaths are symbolic. I might not have many Masonic friends after that, but my safety would not be in jeopardy.”

History I: Enlightenment Party Animals

The Free and Accepted Order of Freemasons is the oldest fraternity in the world. But it’s not nearly as old as some Masons would have you believe.

Over the centuries, exuberant Masons have traced the origins of their brotherhood back to the Crusades, back to Pythagoras and Euclid, back to the builders of King Solomon’s temple and the pyramids of Eqypt, sometimes back to Adam himself.

Less exuberant Masons -- and independent historians -- have concluded that those claims are baloney. Or, to put it more kindly, myths.

Actually, Freemasonry evolved more than 500 years ago from the guilds of stonemasons who were free to travel from city to city in Europe and build cathedrals. The secret handshakes and passwords were originally ways a man could prove he was a member of the guild in the days before ID cards.

Gradually, the stonemasons invited other men to join their brotherhood and it slowly evolved from a labor union into a fraternity. Printed references to Freemasonry date back to 1390, but it wasn’t until 1717, when four London lodges united, that modern Freemasonry was born.

In an age of religious hatreds, Freemasonry was among the world’s first nondenominational organizations. It became known as a hotbed of the emerging democratic ideas of the Enlightenment, which made it anathema to entrenched powers, particularly the Roman Catholic Church.

But Freemasonry was also a fraternity and Masons were renowned for their post-meeting forays into taverns, where they offered numerous elaborate toasts, each washed down with a generous belt of hooch. They designed special “firing glasses” with extra-thick bottoms so they could smash them down on the table after each toast in an attempt to approximate the sound of gunfire. These dudes were party animals!

By the mid-1700s, Freemasonry had spread throughout Europe and the American colonies, where it attracted many of the men who later led the revolt against King George -- Washington, Franklin, Hancock and Revere. (And Benedict Arnold, although Masons don’t mention him quite as often.)

It also attracted a freed slave named Prince Hall, who was initiated into Masonry by a British soldier in Boston. Hall went on to found an African lodge, which later evolved into a parallel Black Masonic organization called the Prince Hall Masons, which still exists today.

After the Revolution, Freemasons became the quasi-official ceremonial arm of the new American government, providing colorful rituals for the laying of cornerstones for public buildings. President George Washington himself donned a Masonic apron and presided over the dedication of the United States Capitol.

Meanwhile, on October 13, 1792, a group of Masons from Georgetown laid the cornerstone for the White House. After the ceremony, they marched back to Georgetown’s Fountain Inn and began toasting and drinking.

After the 16th formal toast -- “May peace, liberty and order extend from pole to pole” -- the Masons stumbled off into the night, having forgotten to record exactly where they’d laid the ceremonial cornerstone.

To this day, nobody is quite sure which corner of the White House it anchors. It’s just another Masonic mystery.

The Accidental Mason

Down in the depths of the House of the Temple on 16th Street, there’s a gallery of oil paintings of famous Freemasons. Bob Dole is there. So are Sam Nunn and Sam Ervin and Douglas MacArthur. And Audie Murphy and Arnold Palmer and John Philip Sousa.

In this august company is a painting of Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, the president of George Washington University. I decided to call him.

“They are a collection of nature’s noblemen,” he says when I reach him, “some of the sweetest people I’ve ever met.”

Trachtenberg is a 33rd-degree Mason. He never set out to become one, he says, It happened almost by accident.

“When I became president 14 years ago,” he says. “I got a courtesy call from some people who introduced themselves as Masons.”

The Freemasons have a long relationship with George Washington University, which is, after all, named after their most famous Masonic brother. For years, they’d endowed a fund to provide scholarships to GW for the children and grandchildren of Masons.

They explained all this to Trachtenberg and then, he says, “they invited me to join.”

Wait a minute. I thought Masons didn’t recruit and never invited anyone to join. I thought the rule was that you had to ask them.

“Well,” he says, “they made it known that they would be happy if I joined.”

He wasn’t interested. He told his visitors that he was too busy with his presidential duties to attend any meetings. They said that was okay. They promised they’d make it easy for him. So he agreed to join.

“And I’m pleased that I did,” he says. “I’ve met some lovely people who do some very good works and I’ve learned some things I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. And it’s been sort of fun.”

How did you like the initiation ceremony and those gruesome oaths? I ask.

“I thought it was a little flamboyant, a little robust at times,” he says. “But whatever gravity people attributed to the language in an earlier era, it’s now largely ritualistic.”

Did you learn any juicy Masonic secrets?

“I was sadly disappointed in that regard,” he says. “It turns out there are fewer secrets than laymen seem to think.”

I hit him with the big question: Is there a secret Masonic conspiracy to take over the world?

“If there is,” he says, “they’re keeping it from me.”

Of course, he couldn’t reveal it anyway or they’d feed his heart to the vultures.