24.7: The Intense Masonic Initiation of George Cole
Supplement to Endnotes
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The Raising of George Washington Cole
Albert Bruno, a gunsmith at the arsenal, and Lieutenant John Eckles, stripped George naked.[1] They dressed him in pantaloons, rolled the cuffs up past his knees, slid his half-unbuttoned shirt below his warped ribcage down to his waist, and wrapped his body three times with a heavy rope. They fastened a blindfold over his eyes. As their hands grazed his face and shoulders, fumbling over buttons, securing knots, the General might have detected the acrid smells of metal and gunpowder mingled with sweat.[2]
When he entered the ritual, he was met by a Mason who, with the sharp ends of an architect’s compass, poked both sides of George’s bare breast. A voice in the room exhorted him to let the discomfort help him remember what was about to unfold. A Deacon then guided him about the lodge by the crook of his arm, conducting him through one imaginary setting to the next, taking on new instructions, stepping further into the dense ritual.
George had participated in similar rituals in the past months. But in this culminating ceremony, he was given a trowel as a symbol of his newly ordered life built on loyalty and moral rectitude. As with the first two degrees, he received a white lambskin apron, but this time was taught how to fasten it to his body correctly in the order of a Master Mason.
When he finished the ritual work, he was instructed to retire to the preparatory room where he changed back into his dusty clothes.
When George emerged in street garb, his eyes adjusting, he found a room of men who were fraternizing and exchanging stories. One or two of them asked George how he liked the ritual; another offered him a secret handshake. The whole of it suggested that George had passed the test, and that soon the band of brothers would separate and slope homeward across the moonlit valley.
But just when George was likely thinking he had, at last, worked his way into this circle -- one of the brothers gave a quick rap with a mallet. The men darted from the group and assumed their previous posts, a scripted surprise that was meant to leave the candidate standing alone -- confused, if not humiliated. George had spent the evening pretending he was a master builder from the Old Testament, named Hiram. And though he had shed the hoodwink and rope, the drama wasn’t over. Only the intermission had ended. He was still Hiram, standing in George Cole’s clothes.
Standing off to the east, the Worshipful Master beckoned George towards him. He “undeceived" George by informing him that he was not yet worthy of the Master Mason's privileges -- and that he might never be. Nothing was certain, the Master continued, until George proved he could withstand the “amazing trials and dangers” that awaited him. “You must now undergo one of the most trying scenes that human nature ever witnessed,“ he cautioned.
George was warned that he might meet his death. The Worshipful Master pulled out a blindfold and fastened it over George's eyes again, warning him that his previous achievements had always been aided by Masons doing his bidding and praying on his behalf. This time George's personal resolve -- the strength of his character, without the help of brothers -- would have to be tested. Before he would be permitted into a lifelong circle of brothers he would have to demonstrate self-reliance, and reliance on God while in the clutches of peril. This was a band of men who had been promised that they would always have somebody to lean on, but only after each man proved he was not the leaning kind.
The Master ordered George to the altar to send up a desperate prayer to God. George was supposed to be praying as if he was in the Holy of Holies, the most sacred space in the ancient Jewish temple. In this climaxing ritual, likely with some combination of contrivance and real fervor, George pled to his maker.[3] After his prayer, the oil lamps were dimmed again and he was conducted to stand before Jeremiah Heeps, a common soldier from the fort .
Playing the role of a jealous, plotting worker at the temple, Heeps lunged toward George, gripping him by the collar and throat, threatening to kill him if he did not reveal the secret “word" taught only to Master Masons. Like any candidate, George had certainly known this was all symbolic. But exactly when he was Hiram and when he had slipped back into his ordinary self was less clear.[4] After his guide refused to reveal secrets of the Master Mason, Heeps lashed George on the throat with a twenty-four inch measuring gage.[5]
Led by his guide, George broke loose from the grip on his neck and fled to the west gate of the imaginary temple where he was then attacked by a second plotter. When George then scrambled with his guide to the “east gate,” and again refused to cough up the secrets, the third ruffian raised a maul and with a stage actor's restraint struck George on the forehead while another Mason whacked him with a leather bag stuffed with hair. In the confusion he was pushed backward and tripped onto a large canvas stretcher tautly held by the participants. They pronounced “Hiram” dead on the canvass and then lugged him in circles around the dimly-lit room as flitting shadows swelled and undulated across the adobe walls. They then laid him on the floor under a pile of lodge furniture, with his feet pointing eastward.
Noticing that “his” body had begun to stink, panicking for their crime, the "plotters" lifted the canvas high and tilted it as if they were hauling George up a hillside to bury him. They then lowered his wrapped body into the imaginary dirt, planted an imaginary acacia tree at his head, leaving him to listen to the unfolding drama from his makeshift grave. From subsequent lines, he learned that he had been buried on the “brow” of hill near Mount Moriah -- the legendary place where the ancient prophet Abraham nearly sacrificed his son, Isaac.
The rituals were thick with rich and strange detail. Mallets knocking, festooned columns topped with orbs, sprigs of acacia, pomegranates, esoteric hand grips, chains of phrases that had to be perfectly spoken, nearly a dozen symbolic steps on a winding staircase, references to obscure passages in the Old Testament, and passwords borrowed from biblical names.
This was clearly not the kind of conversion in Christian churches that took place under the loving guidance of wives and mothers. Unlike the comforting sermons that echoed in evangelical churches of the day, about a friendly God in Jesus, the masonic ritual was dark, primitive, sober, and sometimes threatening. The ritual redemption came through harrowing scenes of violence, all played out by men. Man had wrecked the world. He was crooked and needed straightening. He only had so much time to figure that out. Death and bodily corruption lurked just around the corner for him.[6]
Besides being murdered, poked and fooled, George had to get on his bare knees, make the masonic sign of desperation and distress, and kiss the top of an ornamented Bible. He learned from the scripted dialog that a true Mason was not supposed to measure a man by money or worldly honors, and that he should limit his appetites and curb his ambitions. He listened and repeated oaths and mandates of how to live rightly. A real Mason would fly to the relief of any fellow Mason in distress; he would go barefoot to save a brother; he should promote a fellow Mason’s welfare, and place harmony and love before political and religious differences. George repeated the vow that Masons made to one another to never “violate the chastity” of a fellow Mason’s wife, daughter, mother, or sister.[7] It cut close to his heart.
These were bosom friends, finally. Bound by oaths and ritualized vulnerability. At least their scripted lines suggested so.
After he was slayed with the mallet and buried on the brow of the hill, and his killers were brutally executed, a search party happened upon his grave; two men tried but failed to lift the cadaver from the hole because, the ritual revealed, the decomposing flesh slipped from bone. George had become a rotten corpse. The Master Mason knelt at his head and began to pray -- that is, warn George once more.
Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth as a flower and is cut down….
The Master took his hand by a secret grip -- the lion’s paw -- and lifted him up from the grave, pulling him into his bosom. George’s face was only inches from the creases and whiskers of the Master; they joined with their bodies in what the Masons called the “Five points of Fellowship.” In this embrace, limbs and feet pressed into each other, arms draped over the others’ back, and mouths placed near the other’s right ear. It symbolized unity of brotherhood.
The Master then uttered the much-awaited Masonic phrase into George’s right ear. It was three primal syllables that somehow when spoken together, sealed men into a brotherhood based on the eternal truths of the universe.
They needed to say it together.
They breathed the word in unison, into the other’s right ear. And with this, George had been lifted from the grave and into the company of equal men.
George learned that his (that is Hiram’s) body was returned to the Holy Temple and buried near the Holy of Holies. A monument was erected at the temple, he was told, of a beautiful virgin weeing over the premature death of the temple’s builder. George was instructed at length by the Master that man in his infancy is born more helpless than the most brute creature; God might have made men truly independent, but instead “made them dependent on each other” to promote reciprocal love and friendship. Men only had so much time to live and, like the hourglass, imperceptibly loses particles of their remaining time on earth. Soon the scythe of death would cut the brittle thread of life. He was shown the spade that dug his imaginary grave and was then reminded it might soon be needed to “soon dig ours.” The acacia plant was an emblem that his soul “never! Never -- no, never dies.”
The Master Mason continued on about death, that “fathomless abyss” that awaited all. Only the God of the Bible would rescue mankind from such fate. He walked him through the symbolic meanings of the rituals. Then George signed his name to the constitution and by-laws. He was finally a brother.
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[1] Eckles listed as commanding officer in Leo E. Oliva, Fort Union and the Frontier Army in the Southwest, Southwest Cultural Resources Center Professional Papers No. 41 (Santa Fe: National Park Service, 1993), p. 677
[2] What happened within the room I can describe with more certainty than the events that historians often write about with supposed certainty. It was thoroughly scripted; a stage with props and actors reading lines. Disoriented initiates, tugged and led about the room, needed to say certain phrases. I have taken certain liberties in recounting this, knowing that these events would have happened along these lines.
[3] Richardson's Monitor claims that in some lodges this grave moment of prayer sometimes led to “merriment" as candidates and participants made it clear that the fervor and trembling were all make believe. As a disillusioned Mason, Richardson may have emphasized something that made the rituals seem phony, even a mockery of sober prayer. Yet there is reason to believe that for many participants--including contemporary Masons I have asked--these moments of gravity registered deeply with those in the lodge. Richardson's Monitor, page 32. (See full citations in last note.)
[4] It might have dawned on him, for instance, that the Masons had required him to return to his own clothes for this final test. His identity teetered between that of a puzzled candidate and a prized worker under King Solomon. As in any powerful ritual, this confusion was the point.
[5] These scripted episodes of violence, of course, would have been greatly restrained. They may have been dryly performed. Yet because it required men to act it out -- to touch, to feel the plosives of warm breath that accompanied murderous threats -- it could seem uncomfortably real.
[6] Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), esp. Pp. 56-65, 115-16.
[7] Though the specifics of masonic rituals were and are tightly guarded by the Craft, and thus rarely commented on directly by its members, the ceremonies, because we have various sources about the content and explication of the symbolism, provide one of the few places in history where we can know almost every word spoken, action taken during these elaborate lodge meetings. By the 1870s the rituals of American Masonry had become fairly uniform from lodge to lodge and state to state. Here I draw from various monitors or masonic publications from the nineteenth century which describe the ceremonies with impressive consistency. Many of the emotions I assign to Cole here are what, as far as I can tell, were the visceral and intellectual reactions these rituals were intended to produce in candidates.
See: Jabez Richardson, Richardson's Monitor of Free-Masonry Being a Practical Guide to the Ceremonies in All the Degrees Conferred in Masonic Lodges, Chapters, Encampments, &c. Explaining the Signs, Tokens and Grips, Words, Pass-Words, Sacred Words, Oaths, and Hieroglyphics Used by Masons. The Ineffable and Historical Degrees are also Given in Full (New York: Fitzgerald [1860]); Malcolm C. Duncan, Duncan's Masonic Ritual and Monitor, or, Guide to the Three Symbolic Degrees of the Ancient York Rite and to the Degrees of Mark Master, Past Master, Most Excellent Master, and the Royal Arch (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald [1866]); Webb's Freemason's Monitor: Including the First Three Degrees, with the Funeral Service and Other Public Ceremonies; Together with Many Useful Forms. The Whole Squaring with the National Work of the Baltimore Convention, as Taught by the Late Brother John Barney, Grand Lecturer. Compiled by James Fenton, P. M., and Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge of Michigan (Cincinnati: published by C. Moore, at the Masonic Review Office, 1865).