The Mystic Tye

" Remembering the Past, Present, and Future" with Bro. Doug Russell

• Troy Spreeuw • Episode 47

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"The Esoteric Art of Memory" with Doug Russell

The night he took his first degree, Doug Russell watched officers deliver the entire ritual from memory, including a lengthy lecture, and asked a question that would take him the next fourteen years to answer. Why do Masons memorize?

Doug Russell returns to the show to reveal his forthcoming book, Remembering the Past, Present, and Future: Esoteric Memory Arts and Spiritual Freemasonry. It is a book about memory, about how memory connects to spirituality and to the esoteric side of our nature, and it is going to the publisher now, timed to launch at the Esotericism in Freemasonry Conference.

The conversation is a guided tour through the whole argument. Doug opens with three kinds of memory drawn from Aristotle, Plato, and Gurdjieff: exoteric memory of the world of the senses, esoteric memory of the inner and divine world where all learning is remembering, and self-remembering, the awareness of who you really are and where you are heading. From there he walks the classical art of memory, first written down in a Roman treatise on rhetoric around 80 BCE, the technique of placing vivid images in the rooms of an imagined building so that anything can be recalled in order.

Then the heart of it. Memory palaces. Doug traces the term back to St. Augustine, who described his own memory as a vast realm with spacious palaces, and through Hugh of Saint Victor, whose Mystical Ark of around 1225 turned Noah's Ark into an enormous memory diagram of the whole of sacred history. That thread runs straight into the Craft, where Noah's Ark, the Tabernacle, and Solomon's Temple all function as memory palaces, and where the tracing board, the winding stairs, the two pillars, and the apron are all, read correctly, memory technology.

Along the way the discussion opens onto the wider esoteric tradition: Antoine Faivre and his three great currents of alchemy, astrology, and magic, the perennial philosophy and its golden chain of sages, Giordano Bruno and his fantastic memory work, the influence that reached the court of King James VI and the William Shaw statutes of 1598 and 1599 as modern Masonry began to form, and Ken Wilber's account of the pre-modern, modern, and post-modern eras and the flatland that a purely materialist science leaves behind.

It is a wide, generous, deeply learned conversation, and it is only a preview. Doug is saving the rest for the conference.

About our guest

Doug Russell is a retired psychotherapist and a longtime student of the Western esoteric tradition, with roots in modern theosophy going back some fifty years. Raised in Freemasonry in 2012, he came to the Craft looking for its spiritual dimension and has spent the years since making the case that it is there and can be named. He served seven years as editor-in-chief of the Fraternal Review, the magazine of the Southern California Research Lodge, and has presented on the art of memory at lodges and research bodies across the country, including the Masonic Restoration Foundation. He is among the most consistent presenters at the Esotericism in Freemasonry Conference.

Referenced in this episode

Remembering the Past, Present, and Future: Esoteric Memory Arts and Spiritual Freemasonry by Doug Russell, published by Plumbstone, with copies or pre-orders expected at the conference

Integral Psychology by Ken Wilber

The work of Antoine Faivre on the currents of Western esotericism, and a Masonic ritual by Willermoz from the 1780s

The Mystical Ark by Hugh of Saint Victor

The scholarship of Shawn Eyer, editor of the Philalethes magazine, on the eighteenth century Masonic textual tradition

The monitors of Thomas Smith Webb and the rituals of William Preston

Recurring at the conference: Ken Lane, Brett Wolfe, and Martin Faulks

Upcoming: Doug presents as one of the first speakers at the Esotericism in Freemasonry Conference on Saturday, September 19th, 2026, where the book launches.

You can find us online at mystictye.com. Support us on Patreon at patreon.com/mystictye. Email feedback, guest suggestions, and any other questions to troy@mystictye.com.

Thanks for listening today. You can support the show by liking, sharing, and subscribing on your favourite podcast syndicator. Even more helpful, leave us a review.

We are looking to create a directory of Freemasonic events and publications. If you are aware of something coming up, please let me know by email. In the meantime, check out the Masonic Conferences website at masonicconferences.com.

The Esotericism in Freemasonry Conference will be held on Saturday, September 19th, 2026. Our keynote speaker will be Bro. Lon Milo DuQuette, author of The Tarot Architect. Bros. Ike Baker, Doug Russell, Dago Rodriguez, and Josef Wages are all slated to present. Get your tickets at esotericmasonry.com.

For other events, check out our calendar at mystictye.com, and don't forget to sign up for our newsletter while you are there.

Graphics and web hosting are by Art Szabo Creative. A special thanks to Organist for our theme music.

Happy to meet, sorry to part, happy to meet again.

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Support the show

If this episode resonated with you, the most helpful thing you can do is leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. We are also building a directory of Freemasonic events and publications. If you know of something coming up, send Troy an email at troy@mystictye.com.

Graphics and web hosting by Art Szabo Creative. Theme music by Organist.

Happy to meet, sorry to part, happy to meet again.



SPEAKER_01

Please welcome Brother Doug Russell. Brother Doug Russell, thanks for being with us today on the Mystic Tie podcast. I'm really happy to be doing this. Just adjusting my hardware. Please allow for the mess in the background. I still this is how much I clean the library. It's been dozens of episodes now, and the library's gotten worse. Anyway, you could blame Martin Fox for sending me all these books.

SPEAKER_03

It's his you can see how my background is very similar to yours.

SPEAKER_01

So yes, but no, yours is organized. Mine is uh it only looks organized. Brother, it is such a joy and a pleasure to reconnect with you. We've been talking d on occasion, a couple times a year. We do, you know, we've run into each other at some of the same stuff. Of course, you've been coming to Esotericism and Freemasonry Conference. You're probably our single most consistent um guest at the event, other than myself and Ken Lane, who've been organizing it, Brett Wolf as well. But you're always there. Uh and it's been such a joy and a pleasure to get to know you over the years. And you've been talking, ever since I met you, you've been talking about writing a book. And some of us who would like to see that book have applied subtle pressure to you over the years, but we've just been working away at it. At some point in the last year, you let Ken Lane and I know that you were going to be ready to go for the esotericism and Freemasonry conference. So we slotted you in as one of the first speakers. And I wanted to get you on today to talk about the title, reveal what it is that's going to be coming out, make maybe give people an idea of where they might get it and where they might go to see you talk about it. Why don't you why don't you take it away, brother?

SPEAKER_03

The title of the book is Remembering the Past, Present and Future. And the subtitle is Esoteric Memory Arts and Spiritual Freemasonry. It is a book about memory. It's about how memory is connected to spirituality and to esoter and to the esoteric aspect of our nature. I just to tell a really short a little story. I was blown away when I saw that these officers were doing the entire thing from memory, including a lengthy lecture. It just blew me away. I said, why do Masons memorize? What is this all about? And so the the night I became an EA is the night that I got interested in finding out what is memory, what's the connection with memory and Freemasonry? That was 2012. The next year I already had a little slide presentation I did at my Southern California research lodge on memory because I one of the first books I came across alluded to the connections between memory and the esoteric traditions that came down through the Renaissance and all that. And that was right up my alley because I came in the Masonry looking for the spiritual aspect of it.

SPEAKER_01

I want to talk about your book, but I think we discussed this before. You were going to put some slides together so people can get a more fulsome idea of what the book is going to be like. Do you want to go ahead and share those slides or do you have more commentary you'd like to share before you start the slides?

SPEAKER_03

I think launching right into them because the commentary I think can go along with them. It's one of yeah, the slides is such that I was just throwing them together in the last couple of days. It didn't occur to me to have a slide presentation for this moment with you. And so it's great. It's just off the cuff type of stuff.

SPEAKER_01

You're welcome. You're gonna need it. You're gonna need it for the event in a few weeks. Yeah, but you started early.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, so if we screen share right now, I can we can get that show on the road. And I guess do I I start that like I did before? Yeah, share. So I click share.

SPEAKER_00

Ah. And can you now see my screen?

SPEAKER_03

Yep. Yeah, so there's the title and the subtitle that I just spoke of. Yep. And I I my first three or four slides are the first three or four pages in the book. So of course this is where the book starts. The next slide, and I'm doing it this way because see over here I have this so I can see what all is there. What I have in the book is a lot of text, of course. It's a book, and I know there's a lot of images. So I have images that I wanted to share with you and with folks listening, in which I want to be mindful of describing them for folks who are listening without the video side of it. So the first, the next thing that when you open the book is the frontus piece. This comes from a this is familiar, but this has been around a long time in masonry. It's from a book published in 1791 in Germany, and it's still not translated into English. I and this image has uh a group of Masons from the 1700s all dressed up in their finery, sitting around a table with a tracing board, looking and studying a tracing board, which is Masonic tracing board, and this one you can see J and B, you can see the pillars of Jackin and Boaz in there, and many Masonic symbols that they're studying. And they're sitting in this light that is coming from the all-seeing eye at the upper left, in a which is the all-seeing eye in a triangle. So the eye of God, the eye of deity shining down into a mirror, and the light of the divine is the light in which they are working. So that really says a whole lot about the nature of memory as it developed in the Renaissance and when Freemasonry was forming by the 1600s, 1700s, that that tradition of the art of memory being remembering your connection to the divine, remembering that you are a child of the one Almighty parent, as we would say, is a big part of memory and spiritual and esoteric aspects of it. So that this this gives you a flavor of that, this picture of Mason just sitting in the light. The next page of the book is several quotes. You often see that at the beginning of a book. So I have a quote from Aristotle, Plato, and from the spiritual teacher Gurdjieff from the early twentieth century, because it's it gives you an idea of the overview and the narrative that's the basis of the whole book. That there are three types of memory, which is exoteric, esoteric, and self-remembering. Which we can go into some detail about that. So Aristotle, you could say, talked about exoteric remembering remembering things in the world of the senses, remembering the things around you. And so for Aristotle, and he his view was, and he wrote two treatises on this, which I refer to in the book, memory is a collection of mental pictures from the past. It's based on sense impressions. So that's exoteric that's how I call exoteric memory, you know, the world that um what we see in here. Plato had an esoteric take on memory. He said memory relates our physical world to the spiritual world, which for Plato was his realm of divine ideas. And so divine ideas include Plato's fundamental ones, goodness, truth, and beauty. I numbers, geometry, science are all part of a universal world that all humans everywhere can tune into, and Plato's view of the world. The gods, goddesses, and virtues are also universal and are accessible to any one of us if we know how to open our mind to higher levels of mind and to esoteric levels of reality. So, for example, just take beauty. If you take beauty as one of the archetypes in Plato's divine world, you you think, for example, if you see a sunset, anybody who sees a sunset sees the beauty of the sunset. No one had to teach you that the sunset is beautiful. You know a sunset is beautiful. Why? Because you remember beauty, what absolute beauty is, and this is a reflection of absolute beauty that all people know on some level high up in their mind and their spiritual self, they know what that is. So for Plato, all learning is remembering. Everything you learn is you already know somewhere inside you, you just have to access it. So that's esoteric memory. It's coming from your inside and from your spiritual self versus Aristotle's, which memory of what's going on around you in the physical world. This is memory of the inner world. Gurjiev uh talked about self-remembering, and that's a special kind of awareness, which for Gurdjieff he would say to really develop yourself, to improve yourself, to know thyself, you must observe yourself and remember who you really are, which is something other than maybe what you think you are, what your parents told you you are, what your roles are that you play. There's something deeper that you remember. And also, he also thought self-remembering was remembering your goals and intentions. I re- I remember, if I remember that I want to write a book, I'm remembering myself and my where I'm heading in my life, and that's self-remembering. So there, those are the three major categories of memory that the book keeps going back to again and again: exoteric, esoteric, and self-remembering.

SPEAKER_01

Of course, students of Kabbalah or Tarot or Sympathetic Magic will know Plato and his world of forms, right? And I would think so. And so these things are talked about in different ways in different types of study. But it's like I I present in my memory palaces everywhere that Totaro and Kabbalah, and lots of other uh esoteric practices, but those two in particular are heavily reliant on a traditional practice of an art of memory. And they are a distillation of that science. There are many other things, but they are also that. This is great. But go on, Brother Russell. I have no questions to ask yet.

SPEAKER_03

Okay, that's good. The I guess the next page of the book would be the table of contents. There's I wanted to say it, there are four major sections of the book. There's a an introduction. The introduction is long because I have several different topics I need the readers to understand to really grasp the depth of this stuff. It's really pretty, it's complicated.

SPEAKER_01

Hang on. This book is the closing in on 300 pages.

SPEAKER_03

Uh the the manuscript, see the book is not quite in print yet, right? It's going to the publisher any day now. And it's 470 pages in the manuscript, which the publisher says is around half that in in print. You're looking at maybe 250 pages, somewhere like something like that. So this introduction is long. Now the book is written in a scholarly style. So, except for the preface, which I say I talk about, I say me, I think this, and I think that, and this is what I did. The rest of it is in third person and it's scholarly. But what I've done, and this I have a model for this from the great American philosopher Ken Wilbur, who is plays a big role in this book, that he wrote a book called Integral Psychology, in which he has the first part of the book is just a narrative so that the people can just grasp it. They don't have to know all the ins and outs of everything scholars think about the nitpicky details of everything. It's just laying it out in a general way. And then the end notes have all the heavy-duty scholarly stuff for folks who want to go deeper into it. So I've tried to write it in kind of a plain language style. It's still intellectual. It's really a lot about the history of ideas. Second part of it after the and it will go back to the introduction because I want to show you each of the five parts of the introduction. There's why I think you and I will be wanting to discuss it. Then there's a lengthy section, 90 pages or so, in the printed book on the history of the memory arts, all the way from ancient Greece to Rome to through the Middle Ages and through the Renaissance, in the late Renaissance where Freemasonry in its modern form was starting to form, and all those influences were converging as Freemasonry was forming. So then we have a nice long section on Freemasonry and the memory arts, really focusing on Masonry. And that I really want to get to that because there's a textual tradition in Freemasonry that's been somewhat neglected by scholars over the years, in which the literature through the whole 1700s I give a lot of attention to, inspired by Sean Eyer and his take on that, the editor of the Philadelphia's magazine. And then there's the then so the fourth set and last section of the book is bibliographies and endnotes. So there's 250 books in the bibliography and 1,300 endnotes. Ken Wilbers book, it's about half and half. He has half a book of a text, and the other half is charts and graphs and endnotes and footnotes, and mine is maybe a fourth or a third, yeah, a fourth or a fifth. Just a 20% is going to be that stuff for scholars and people who want to delve in to the ins and outs of all the scholarly parts of it. But the rest of the book is really I wrote it starting off writing it for Masons, and I ended up sh turning it a little bit, so explaining what Masonry is to folks who are not familiar with it, but might like to know more about it. So that's the overview.

SPEAKER_01

And if we could go right to the right ahead, so many end notes, that's exciting. That's very, what would you say, academically accessible when you've cited all your sources? That's your doing the work.

SPEAKER_03

And that's Yeah, that that was very important to me because I just wanted it to be grounded in scholarship and I wanted to give the viewpoints of a lot of scholars more than just this is Doug Russell telling what he thinks about things. Yeah. That was more my interest is what do all these scholars say masonry and esotericism are all about? Where do they converge? Where does esoteric and Freemasonry and memory converge? And I've that's what I aim to get at. So here's where it might be fun to talk about some of these the introduction part of it. The mysteries of memory is the opening chapter. And it's mysterious, I think, because i it's intangible. You can't put your finger on it. Mm scientists who are very materialistic oriented have looked for centuries for traces, brain traces that would completely explain memory. They haven't they can't nail that down because, in my view, it's not physical. The brain so memories often uh must be understood through metaphors. So memory is like a storehouse. Memory is like a for the gr there's a book uh totally on metaphors of memory. And that book, for example, the Greeks said it was like a wax tablet. They said memory is like a wax tablet because they actually had wax tablets that they would use a stylus and write on, and that was memory. You get to the Middle Ages and you get printed books and memory is like a library. Memory is a library. And so it goes. No, we're getting in to know his arc later as a memory palace, because Ark is an an ark is Arca in Latin was a the name of a wooden box in which manuscripts were stored in libraries. So an ark is that, and people would carry a wooden box around with valuables when they traveled, also known as an ark. So then we have the Ark of the Covenant in our Solomon's Temple and the Tabernacle, and we have the Ark of Noah, and they there's they intermix, and you I have some incredible images that illustrate the the that medieval art of memory, which is based in one inst instance on uh it's a memory palace based on Noah's Ark. And you got so we've gotten masonry, you've got Noah's Ark, the Tabernacle, the Temple, all three of which are very big-time memory palaces through the history of the Art of Memory.

SPEAKER_01

And here you're illustrating exactly how it works. You pulled up three examples that would be well known to just about everybody, even if they're not familiar with the actual literature in the Bible or what's been written since about those things that you're talking about. People will still know right? You're applying archetype even to your conversation. You're dropping three examples that everybody would know, and it recalls to your mind these these relationships, and now you're building further relationships by drawing a common theme. I just uh wanted to point that out. Great. Yeah super obviously, right? Until you sit and think about it and what you're it's this is not that it's easy to do, Doug. That's not what I mean. It's just it's a very accessible example for very high concept, right? This is you're applying uh simplicity uh to your discussion, and I think that's genius. I sorry. Thank you. Off you go. Okay.

SPEAKER_03

So the second part of the introduction then is the classical is classical art of memory. Now it's interesting that uh I started off these the first these five parts of the introduction. I considered them the first five chapters of the book, but the classical art of memory, I wrote an essay in about in the book it'll be about five pages long. So that happened three or four times during this writing. So I finally went, I had twenty-six chapters, and so I finally changed it all to twenty-six sections, and I think it's now come up to thirty sections. So there the book is in sections, and you get a chapter-length section, you get a section on classical art of memory that's just five pages long, and then when you come to all these different scholars and different parts of history, I give very long chapter length, in some cases fairly long, to the esoteric side of memory arts, and then I also give a more an essay length uh version to about the exoteric memory arts because I think they should they are off they're important, they're a part of the picture. But I I'm writing a book about the esoteric side of it, so that's not my emphasis. You get long sections and short sections in this book. So classical art of memory is worth a a brief explanation because it's the core of all the memory arts that followed. Art of means art of something means a skill, learn a skill, the skill of something. So the classical art of memory, which was first written about in a book in 80 BCE in Rome, the ancient Romans have this, in a book on rhetoric, have a very important section on the art of memory. And it basically says, first of all, art of, you know, you think art of his, and they called it artificial memory because artificers practice things, they build things, they do skills. So artificial memory is that memory which is a train to which we train human, human beings working to enhance memory. In the same way that artificial intelligence is an invention of, it's a human invention. It's a human thing that was made. So the art of the classical art of memory is how do you memorize stuff so you can give a speech, especially in an oral culture back in the day in Rome, where you most people couldn't read and write. You didn't have an iPad to look at your notes while you were speaking. So classical art of memory is simply that you have an imaginary building in which there are rooms in the building and you put images in the room. So it's images in places that remind you of what you're gonna, of your what your speech is. I'll just in a brief example. I imagine this building where there's this hallway, and on the left there's three three rooms, three doors. And I'm gonna, because I want to give a talk on the Knights Templar, so what I do is I imagine, I want to tell you about first the audience. I want to tell the audience where the Templars traveled and when they were doing their thing. Second, the different roles within the Templars, three of the major ones were warrior, financier, and priest. And then third, I would, after doing that, I'd like then like to tell you about how they did battle. So how I how do I remember that? How do I remember that sequence? Well, I walk into my building in my mind's eye, and then the first room, there's a gigantic map. And it's all over the walls, it's all over the place. The weirder you make it, the sillier you make it, or the crazier you make it, it helps it to be memorable. So it has to have some emotional connection to you as well. So first room in the building has this giant map. Second room in the building has these three men in dressed in different ways, the a priest in their robes, and then a finance theer in his fancy clothes, and then a warrior. And then in the third room, there's two warriors finding a battle. So I'm saying to you, I'm gonna give him a talk on the Knights Templar, I'm gonna start telling you where they traveled, what different roles they played, and how they did battle. So as I'm being telling it to tell my story to you, I in my imagination I go to the first room. Ah, the map. Yeah. So I start telling you. Second room, three guys. I start just describing them to you. The third room, those guys can actually be doing the battle, and I can say, here's how they did battle. Look, they're doing this and that and whatever. Because in my imagination, so that's that goes back to Aristotle, who said that you you can't think without an image, is what he essentially said. You can't think without an image. And so, in order to remember things, you must have them images stored in places. So that's the essence of the classical art of memory. And as it evolved, you got it got more and more complex so that you could have an entirely, you could imagine an entire palace of rooms and remember a thousand different things. And some people learned how to do that. So that I hope that has some clarity to it about how the images and places and order are all right in there, and that's how you train your memory as far as the ancients were concerned. And they're still doing the same thing today. That's how people who memorize a whole deck of cards in a very brief time, or whatever. That it's still being done. So that's very fundamental. Imagination is key to memory, it's very closely associated. Right.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

I'm myself quite familiar given those talks that I have been, but I I find your approach fascinating. I could say Do you want to go on?

SPEAKER_03

I could give an ex an example that really helps to clarify this in my way of thinking. And the example is this. I would say to you, would say to you, to our audience, I'd like you to imagine that you're a good friend of mine, and I say to you, hey, I just bought this fantastic grandfather clock. It's incredible. Tell our friends about it. Tell them to come over. I want them to see it. It's right here in my living room. This clock is about six feet high, and it's got this dark red rosewood on it. It's got two angels at the top carved out of wood that their wings are kind of touching, like the angels in the tavern and over the Ark of the Covenant. And it's got a face, a clock face that's white with gold pans, gold letters, gold numbers, and the number the numbers are Roman numerals, and like those really old clocks, the number four, which in Roman news normals usually IV, is I I I I. That's just so this is the clock. It's fantastic. So I want you to go and tell our friends, tell them to come over. I want them to see it now. I just spoke maybe a hundred words or so. How are you going to remember what I just said so you go tell our friends what I described? Probably you're not going to go over what I said word for word and try to remember 100 words. You're probably going to have an image in your mind of this wooden clock, the white face with the gold on it, and that the four Roman numerals and so on. That so it's a natural thing that you form images to remember things. Right. That's my example.

SPEAKER_01

That's a great example.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

So yeah, very much enjoying this. Please uh go on.

SPEAKER_03

I'll go on. So the inter that's so that we introduce I introduce the idea of the mysterious nature of memory, the metaphors for memory, classical art of memory, which we just talked about. Then I go into some detail about modern Western esotericism, which scholars have scholars have written about, because I've written about it as well, and I presented it at the conference a few years back. So the next the slide that relates to that is the various esoteric currents as seen by great Professor Antoine Favreau, the the French professor who in the in the through the 20th century, by the 1990s, he was writing about the esoteric currents and streams. And so I have it on the screen now a diagram of his that he described the history of esoteric traditions as have it being consisting as being with a metaphor as being three rivers, like three historical currents. And the three rivers were alchemy, astrology, and magic. So for those of you listening who can't see the screen, I have made a diagram, and this is there are a lot of diagrams in the book. By the way, there are I made about 20 different diagrams in the book with these words to help explain the concepts I'm dealing with. And I also have in the book another 50-some images. There are 77 images in this book, and so it's very unusual in a way, but that's because images go with the art of memory. It's about memory and it's making that connection. So the image we're looking at, for those who can see it, is all these words about what Favre said and kind of an outline of his way of seeing things. So he said way back in ancient times there was alchemy, astrology, magic, which there still are coming all the way down through the ages to the present day. But he says modern Western esotericism, so scholars have a very definite way of talking about this. Modern Western esotericism started forming in the Renaissance. It started in the late 1400s into the 1500s. You get Christian Kabbalah, for example. So what do we think of as Kabbalah? It was in the Christian culture of Europe in the 1400s, there was, you know, those two Roman, great Roman guys who translated the Greek, ancient Greek works into Latin so that scholars could begin to see what was going on in the ancient times. But in effect, they created these streams of thought, these esoteric streams of thought. So modern Western esotericism started around, say from 1500, and the various forms of it that eventually influenced Freemasonry were all some of them influenced by very ancient ideas and so on, but they were not formally known until the Renaissance. So taking perennial philosophy, that goes back all the way as far back as you can imagine to time immemorial, immemorial, which would be time before human memory, time immemorial. And there was a book published in but perennial philosophy was not identified as that until 1540, when a an author in Europe wrote a book called Perennial Philosophy, and he said perennial philosophy is this ancient thing that goes way back, and what it consists of is a number of things, but just to name three, it consists of belief in one God, a belief in immortality, and it consists of a golden chain, which was talked about in ancient Greece, of sages who passed on this tradition of belief in in unity and in immortality and passed that along through the gener down through generations. And those sages, in in his view, and in the Renaissance view, were started way back with Orpheus, then Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, coming down all the way through a chain of tradition. So that's perennial philosophy. So you look at Plato, Plato would not be able to say to you, I'm a perennial philosopher, because that term wasn't even invented until 1540. So these esoteric dreams. He was absolutely in the tradition, but he was in the term. The idea, the way we talk about it today, he had he didn't have that. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. So and then Freemasonry, perennial philosophy, is very prominent in its in the form of the what we call our traditional history, is you have there a chain of folks who were in uh yeah, I don't know, I can't even think of the list of the moment, but certainly you've got Moses and Solomon in that list and so on, coming on down through in the in the art of memory tradition, Giordano Bruno in the Renaissance, who did these fantastic memory palace things, esoteric things, was inspired by Plato. And he passed it on. He spent some time in London where he passed it on in the late 1500s to two or three Scotsmen who were members of the court of King James VI in Scotland, where William Shaw in 1598 and 1599 had those Shaw statutes that became one of the earliest examples of how modern masonry was beginning to form, where he set it up so that masonry was a national thing under the umbrella of the the state or of a central authority, which became known as Grand Lodges eventually. So there's that stream, so that folks scholars, Masonic scholars have written about that, that that our tradition traditional history, which we call myth history, is a version of perennial philosophy. Interesting.

SPEAKER_01

And it's not ground we're not unfamiliar with over here, but I'm interested in in how you tie this all together. Now, uh you discussed a little bit about the Renaissance. I talk about it in my memory palaces everywhere talk about how most of most literate people wouldn't have had access to uh the Ptolemy Greeks in their philosophy, right? Which is is a lot of that is what was rediscovered by the family and translated as you said. Do you want to talk a little bit about how that was you could say it was kept hidden, it just wasn't studied. Before before yeah, before the Renaissance and why the Renaissance occurred. You did this was the church didn't want you studying such things because it would give you competing ideas, the ideas they were promulgating. Right. Um you would do you want to talk a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_03

Or I would I here let me do it by moving to another slide, back to the introduction. We'll get to this esoteric, we'll go back to this one. In the introduction to the book, I have a whole section on history and tradition, then an esoteric perspective on historical eras. And these get to I I now I'm not sure exactly what you were asking me. But these are getting to it, whatever it was.

SPEAKER_01

Just how the look, I'll just say it out loud. The practices that are now considered esoteric were overtly suppressed, and that the people interested in these ideas established a third way to resist monarchies and in particular the overreach of the spiritual authority of the church. And I just I just say that out loud, because if you want an example of what's going on with that, just take a look around in the well, just take a look around in the modern Catholic resurgence and let's hope to God it comes and goes. We don't need that. I don't need a daddy church Catholics if you're listening. You can keep your politics out of my politics. You stay away from that.

SPEAKER_03

Well in the Renaissance, that was the era of Giordano Bruno, who was that didn't work out well for him, did it? It did not work well out well for him because Ken Wilbur has great explanations of that. This is what happens in the esoteric chapter on historical eras in my book. Yeah. It's explaining the American philosopher Ken Wilbur's view that there are he he took this off of Plato's idea of truth, goodness, truth, and beauty being very fundamental aspects of the divine nature, goodness, truth, and beauty. And he relates goodness to morals, truth to science, and uh goodness to and beauty to art. So art, science, and morals. So he says that there that his idea about historical er historical eras is that there are three of them. He says art, morals, and science were are the three sort of major things that relate to art, art to beauty, truth to science, morals to goodness. So art, science. So he was saying that in modern and postmodern, pre-modern, in pre-modern times, all these three were just melded together. So art, science, and morals were all in just one continuous chain. So you had this vertical connection to higher levels of being, as well as doing some things that are scientific because Aristotle was studying all the different kinds of bugs or whatever, and then and you had arts, you had ideas about good, the good and about morality, but they were all mushed together. So the the Catholic the Roman Catholic Church was able to, with its power, to then take more define what is moral and impose that on science and on art. So you couldn't do art that was sacrilegious. You couldn't do science that said that the sun was at the center of the solar system, not the earth. You couldn't do that. Galileo couldn't do that. Right. J Giodano Bruno, who was very outspoken about the we having a s uh so a geo a heliocentric solar solar system rather than a earth-centered system that ever all of everything was going around it, got burnt to the stake because the Catholic Church, all these things were much together, and the Catholic Church took morals and pounded that into every scientific or every artistic endeavor.

SPEAKER_01

They don't want any competition for ideas. Yeah. Regardless of how factual they might be, don't cloud the issue with facts. No, exactly. It gets in the way of our religious business over here. Don't do that.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, exactly. So that's pre-modern. When you get to modern, the modern era, which started really by people like some of these scholars will say all the way back to the fifth the beginning of the 1500s, you get printed books, you get you do get the Galileo, and you do get Copernicus, you do get people talking about Galileo looks through his telescope and those b the the church's power begins to break down some. And by the time you get toward the Enlightenment, you're talking about getting toward the 1600s, age of reason, 1700s, the Enlightenment, you start seeing art, science, and morals differentiated. So instead of them mushed all together, they're differentiated. Now there's something very cool about that because it allows them all to go their own, do their own part of finding knowledge. You can find knowledge through science, through art. But then it then that modern era goes to the extreme where science begins to dominate every other thing. So that materialistic science doesn't care anything about anything vertical. Right. Doesn't care about these higher levels. The old-fashioned psychology, and there's a lot of psychology in my book, in part because I'm a retired psychotherapist and I practice a form of psychology that's a spiritual type of psychology, but that's the see there was no spirit in psych in early psychology, like Sigmund Freud, the the behaviorists. Everything had to be grounded in materialistic science, which meant, oh, you can't they dismiss that thing about spirit and the soul and all that. We just dismiss that because we're scientists. We don't look at that. And Wilbur, Ken Wilbur calls that flatland. He said, What happened in the modern era is that art, science, and morals, the imbo they were when they were differentiated, which it was a good thing, but then they went to the extreme that science began to dominate everything. Then you get to the postmodern era, in Wilbur's view, and in that era the three begin to start to become integrated. And in that process of becoming integrated, that again goes to an extreme where some people say that that oh for oh yes, a great example of a postmodern is the idea that this that culture determines as a big determiner of who we are. We're influenced a lot by our culture. And that was not the the ancient Greeks didn't have that idea at all. Didn't have that. Everything was Just mush together. But when you see art, science, morals separated out, you say, oh, each one of these has their own unique value. They can all work together. They can all contribute to one another. We can embrace all these many different cultural points of view and so on. That then devolved into a kind of deconstruction where there was no longer any absolute truth anymore. There was just, if I want to believe my belief is truth, and yours isn't. That goes back to people who were religions, those religions who say our religion is true, all the others are not. It turned out that in the postmodern era, which uh Wilbur dates to starting around in 1960, right in that that range, the the idea of truth, absolute truth, which Plato held as a reality that we must that we can tune into, does no longer exist. There's no absolute truth. Because everything's relative. What I think is truth for me, and you're wrong. But Wilbur says the thinkers about postmodernism were saying there is no such thing as absolute truth. So for them, the absolute truth is that there's no absolute truth. Right. So they are riddled with contradictions. Right. And that so in what we see today is some combination of modern and postmodern, basically.

SPEAKER_01

But throughout history, what use depending on who wants to relate it. Somebody wants to make a certain argument, they're gonna argue that we live in a postmodern world, somebody else wants to make another type of argument, they're gonna argue against postmodern modernism as part of the postmodern world we live in. People beg, borrow, and steal what they need to make their point, but they don't actually live the philosophy they discuss. They want you to live the way they're telling you to live, but they don't want they don't actually want to relate to any higher truth. They just want what's the most profitable. And this herein lies the role of Freemasonry in the modern world, I believe, is to stand between those cynical forces that are completely materialistic and have everybody else's uh interests outside of their own as the enemy. And uh Freemasonry is uh a philosophical perspective where one could work on the self and leave other people up to working on themselves and not trying to convince anything of anything subjective, but to try and keep us all working together on a common goal, which is not just harmony in the lodge, but with the world as the lodge room and us all trying to live in harmony together, and with enough Freemasons, that's a lot easier. Because you have less of uh I don't know. That's just my perspective on it. I I appreciate where you're going with this. Part of it too, though, Doug, is I want you to save some of this for the conference. I don't want you to give it all away now.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, I'm just getting started.

SPEAKER_01

I'm just getting warmed up here. Let's if there's because we're it's 45 minutes now, so Oh, we're already my goodness, the time flies. There I see what you've done here. Is there something critical you want to share about the book now before we break down the conversation in another direction?

SPEAKER_03

Um I think what I'd like to do is I'd like to show some of the images and to talk about them that have to do with the memory palaces that are related to Noah's Ark, the tabernacle, and Solomon's temple. Sure, go ahead. That's on the right. First of all, the term memory palaces, as far as I can tell, came from Saint Augustine, who wrote extensively about memory, way back in ancient Rome. And he said that his memory was this vast realm of God, really, that it had spacious palaces and so on. And it's the main thing, the interesting thing, Troy, to me, is I have yet to see in the the study uh all my study of the art of memory, an actual palace being a palace itself being a memory building. What we now call a memory palace is er anything. You know, a Masonic Lodge is can be called a memory palace. So sure.

SPEAKER_01

I I argue in my talk that the tracing boards and and even the tarot cards themselves are a form of memory palace.

SPEAKER_03

Absolutely. They are. Yeah, there's no doubt about that. Maybe I should yeah, let me do this this part. There's another part that's that's also very interesting, which is the actual symbols in masonry, one of which is tracing boards that are very specifically memory-based or memory-oriented. Sure. So what I have on the screen now is something from Hugh of St. Victor. He was thought to be the greatest theologian of the Middle Ages. He wrote a book called The Mystical Ark in the mid-1200s, around 1225. And he had this, he described Noah's Ark as this enormous memory palace. And the description, apparently, it was actually made as a mural on a giant wall somewhere in some abbey somewhere in fr in France. And what we're looking at now in this image is what Hugh described. He did he described the image in a little 25-page treatise on memory on Noah's Ark. And what we see in this drawing is God at the top, the head of God, embracing this giant white circle. And on either side of God are these seraphs, these highest levels of angels. He's actually sitting on a throne. You can see his feet at the bottom of this great circle he's embracing. And the great circle has the signs of the zodiac in it, and within the circle there's a kind of oval shape that is represents the earth, and sitting on the earth is this great rectangle which represents Noah's Ark. And you can see that right there. Yep. And this and this actually was this was digitally created by a scholar in, I don't know, 20 years ago or less, that is what that fits Hugh's description of the world. So you have the divine world up here, the super celestial realm of God and angels, you have the super celestial world, the celestial world of the stars and the constellations and so on, then the terrestrial world, the earth, and there's Noah's Ark sitting on the earth. So in this Noah's Ark, there are literally hundreds of images, hundreds of words. It's just astonishing. And it really portrays the whole history of time from God from the creation. There's six little circles coming out of God's mouth, but the six days of creation, and then you when you get to the bow of the ark, you get into the actual history of the world. Somewhere down along the vertical line through the ark, all the way down to the stern, you have all the time in the history of the church, which has, among other things, lists all 150 popes up till that time. And there are dozens of ladders. There's the entire Bible. In the Middle Ages, monks memorized the entire Bible. Yes. Right? And they certainly memorized, at the minimum, they memorized Psalms. I hope I have that psalm picture and I would jump over to it if I have it. Looks like I don't have it. All right. So here's this fantastic image I wish everyone could see.

SPEAKER_01

This is an example of an advanced memory palace.

SPEAKER_03

A very advanced memory palace, yes. So based on Noah's Ark. Then in another image, this goes way back now, the very early Middle Ages, 1600 600 CE. You have an image here that comes from a manuscript, beautiful, fantastic image, which has this huge thing that looks like kind of it's a wooden chest, really, with three layers to it, which represents Noah's Ark, which had three levels to it. And it you there's on the bottom part of it, people who are dead people and dead animals laying around after the flood and what happened in the flood. So you got the ark, but this ark is a wooden chest sitting on a s wooden stand, so it also represents the Ark of the Covenant. Interesting. Which I think is pretty amazing because the Ark of the Covenant contained the memory of the divine law that Moses brought down from Sinai.

SPEAKER_01

So you get that the most valuable thing the Israelites ever got.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

So that's why they carried around in a gold lined box, right?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, exactly. So then in conjunction with the with the Ark of the Covenant, we know that was in the Holy of Holies within the tabernacle and also in Solomon's temple. Yeah. So another slide I'm showing now for those who are listening is two different views of the tabernacle. One of them is like a realistic painting of what it might have looked like if you've had a camera way back up and way higher on a mountain looking down on it, where you can see the whole temple and the fire, the fiery sacrifice and the labor of water, and the sir the surrounding wall from for the tabernacle, and way beyond the tabernacle, you see the tents of all the ancient Israelites and their encampment and the mountains in the background. So we have here that this view of the tabernacle, and on right next to it, we have a drawing. I think this was colorized in an old book, but this thing came from a monastery in 700 CE from somewhere near the border of England and Scotland. It's a monastery. So they saw the tabernacle as an object of contemplation for remembering teachings of the Bible. Right. And you can see that this is very interesting because if you look at the comparison, you the on the top of the right of this drawing we're looking at, you see these kind of pillars which are seen inside the temple, the walls of the surrounding the tabernacle. And on the other side, you see the outside of the walls, on the other, the right side on the bottom of this drawing, showing the outside of the walls, and then in the middle of the drawing, you see the floor plan looking down. So you're looking at the inside of the tabernacle's space, the outside of it, and the tabernacle itself and its floor plan. So it's an object of contemplation.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, this isn't strictly a work of art. This is to teach something. And that's the reason that would be useful, of course, is because all manuscripts and anything would have had to have been hand copied. So they would all have been extremely dear before the advent of the printing press, right? Yeah, exactly. And so promulgating ideas like this would have required uh small artworks, miniatures is what they were called when our tracing were getting made. Yes. Um and people would have small portraits or little items drawn, hand-drawn in miniature, uh keepsakes to take with them because photography hadn't yet been invented, right? So if you wanted to remember something or get an idea of something, you'd have it done in miniature. This is beautiful. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

So that's so this gets into the part of memory, which it involves contemplation and opening your mind to spiritual realities. Um that's great. As well as the the tabernacle is St. Augustine used the tabernacle as a memory palace, walking through the tabernacle to remember different aspects of biblical teachings in this monastery where this drawing was made. Apparently there were images brought or pictures or drawings or paintings brought from other parts of Europe up there and placed on the walls inside the church around the church. So you have that, again, that idea of images in places that the image is telling. For example, I know of one church where there's twelve, there's these twelve images, which are the stations of the cross. So in a Christian church, you have you remember what Jesus was teaching and in his in his journey heading toward the cross by the twelve stations of the cross, and they're put in a certain order to illustrate his teachings and for you to remember those teachings. So it's the art of memory as it appeared in monasteries and often in the form of a tabernacle. And finally, with Solomon's temple, this is just a I'm showing another on the screen now, an image which has Solomon's temple within the whole courts surrounding it, the whole outer surroundings of the temple. And so the temple itself is just a very small part of this drawing. If you could see it, you would see it's just a little rectangle in the middle of it. But around there, you have all these courts and all these things. So you have priests' quarters, there's treasury rooms, courtyards, gates all over the place. There's a there's this is 500,000 square feet of the temple grounds, and it within within which the small temple itself is in this huge space. That is one heck of a memory palace.

SPEAKER_01

Again, that and this would be for contemplative, because there are no existing plans or images of King Solomon's temple. It may never have existed. It's written out, right? And this one, by the way, strictly a contemplative exercise.

SPEAKER_03

Yes, it is. And this one right here happened to be this is the work of Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton. And he did much study of esoteric matters, including the nature of the temple, prophecy, alchemy, art of memory as well.

SPEAKER_01

So limits, yeah.

SPEAKER_03

So so maybe I could I jump right into the other thing about you mentioned tracing boards, and I'll I could list three or four things that are directly tied, Masonic symbolism tied to memory. Sure. First, let's take a look. This is not a very good image because it's a little blurry. I'm showing on the screen a uh floor plan of Solomon's temple, which is the same as the floor plan of the tabernacle, which has three different sections. You see the outer, the outer court, the the out the porch, the porch and the grounds are related to the s the this is related to the three worlds. This is very interesting to me because you have the Ark of the Covenant at the top of this diagram is represents a super celestial world. It's the connection to the divine. Then you have in the middle room the altar of incense, which wafts up toward the divine. You have the seven oil lamps that represent the seventh planets. So now you're talking about the celestial world, and then you have the porch and the grounds, which is the outer court, which is the terrestrial world. So this pattern of the three worlds, which we saw in Noah's Ark, you see again here. And where I got this from is the scholar, the French scholar Antoine Favre, who was the founder in a sense of esoteric studies and ac and universities, he wrote about a Masonic ritual by Wilhelmose from I think it's it's the 1780s. Yep. Which was based on theosophy. Right. And that and Faber himself has a diagram in which he relates the three aspects of Solomon's temple or the tabernacle to the super celestial world, the celestial world, and the terrestrial worlds. This is a like some brain of traveling.

SPEAKER_01

Some Martinism touches on this that I'm very familiar with.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. So there's that thing about the art of memory going so far back in history that it kept the whole vertical dimension and it got symbolized, so to speak, in the form of these of the temple and the tabernacle. And it's also we also see the super celestial realm. We look at a tracing board, I'm now showing a picture of a Masonic tracing board of the first degree of masonry, in which the you have a blazing star up high in the diagram that represents the divine or the super celestial world, and you have a you have the sun, moon, and stars up there, celestial world, and then you have the checkered pavement and the altar and the pillars, which are part of the earthly plane.

SPEAKER_01

Have you have you ever heard anybody talk about that the square and compasses in this way? That that the square represents the terrestrial, and the compasses represent the celestial. Yes. The G in the middle that represent the super celestial. And this this is one sort of philosophical discussion about squaring the circle and about applying the tools to our morals, right? Um not a lot of people talk about that, right? But I've heard it discussed and I discuss it quite often. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. No, that and that's the idea of the that might have been the original idea of the square encompasses. And then you could have entire discourses about the angles and I don't think there's any in fact um standard argument what the degrees mean, the degrees of arc of all of the different ways of expressing the square encompasses. I just think it's an excellent contemplative exercise for somebody to get out uh a square and a set of compasses and a pencil and pen and try some of these things on. You've never played with number that way on a flat plane on a superface, to anyway. There's plenty of contemplative material there, but I just think it's another great way to express it. And I I've seen this before.

SPEAKER_03

I don't like that. I'm super happy. I agree with that. And I have a slide. I wish I could show it to you right now, but uh I will have it at the conference.

SPEAKER_01

Save it for the presentation for when everybody's there ready to be blown away.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, because then they'll then they will see that that square and compass with the G in the middle explode open so that the G goes all the way up, and then you have the triangle, the square at the bottom and the s the compass in the middle and the G above. Yeah. No, it's a good thing. Now just a couple other things, if I may, about so certainly tracing boards, if you look at the tracing boards, we're looking at one of the first degree, it has so many Masonic symbols in it, yeah, about which are associated with the first degree and are about the teachings, reminding you of the teachings of the degree. So they are reminders and they are considered memory aids. And in I've even seen myself in a lodge in England, they have lectures, tracing board lectures, that that use the imagery of the tracing board itself to explain Masonic teachings.

SPEAKER_01

It's not common in in Preston web work as much as the floor cloths are in certain degrees, but in the Canadian work, which is a reflection of English emulation work, we we use two of the tracing boards. We talk about the third-degree tracing board, but there's never there's never a lectur there's never been a lecture, at least not that I'm aware of, that we use specifically for the symbols on the tracing board. There's a brother here, Sean Turner, that gives a talk about the Master Mason tracing board and what that stuff on there is. And it's quite fascinating because there's a lot of thought went into it, and then we don't deliver a degree lecture for it necessarily.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, and in American lodges, you don't see generally you do not see tracing boards. Whereas in a British lodge, one of the things they do is they set out whatever degree they're working, they have that tracing board right out there.

SPEAKER_01

That's correct. And that's one of the things that gets moved is they in emulation work, you open the first degree, and then the second degree is open within the first degree, and then the third degree is like a box within a box. Whereas with Preston Webwork, you tend, which is the American work or the ancient work here, you tend to pick a degree and go straight to that degree and open. In that if you need to open another degree, you can. But in the emulation work, it's traditional that you're opening up to all three if you need Master Mason working for something, and then closing all three. Again, like uh like nested boxes or nested dolls. Anyway, I digress. Even Got here, you've got a floor cloth with looks like fellowcraft stuff.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, this this image is a winding stairs, and it's got these images on it, and the stairs have names on them, names of the five columns or pillars, and then the names of the seven liberal arts and sciences going up here. So there you have images in places. You have this is probably the most obvious memory connection to the classical art of memory in a Masonic symbol, a Masonic symbol that does it very obviously. The others that I would like just to mention, and then we'll maybe get toward wrapping this thing up a little bit, although there's quite a bit more to my book than we've been able to touch upon so far. Well, I would expect Yeah. So besides the winding stairs, which are absolute memory aid by with the places and images, and you can consider these things here, images, they're little shapes, they're letters, and they have names. They form many names like arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy. But there that's a that represents something, that M-U-S-I-Z represents something broad and enormous, that in one little set of characters is on a s one of the stair steps in the diagram. So it's an image in a place pointing to something much vaster. So two other things besides the tracing boards and the steps that I like to point out are the the two pillars which are in front of Solomon's temple are related to memory because we say in some versions of ritual you hear them say that they were made of brass and they were hollow to hold the records, the Masonic records. And so they're repositories of Masonic uh what they are is institutional memory. Yeah.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

That's what they represent, those pillars. And folks have written about that. Uh Kirk McNulty writes about it more about something about that and how the pillars are related to memory. And the one that this is really the one that I like, the apron. I'll and I'll leave it at that as far as this part of it. I hope we can talk a little bit about Masonic literature before we close. But this the apron, many symbols are reminders of Masonic teaching. So reminder. It gets your memory to working, right? So the to put it in terms of ritual language and some monitors, the apron is the badge of a mason. And when you put on your apron, it is a continual reminder of that purity of life and conduct, so essentially necessary to your gaining admission to the celestial lodge above where the supreme architect of the universe presides. Yeah. That's what the apron is.

SPEAKER_01

So every work I've heard has a version of that.

SPEAKER_03

So as far as I'm concerned, it bothers me when people are standing around waiting to go into the lodge room and tying their apron like they would tie their shoes. Because I consider it a sacred act. Yeah, I'm tying my apron. I want to remember that this is going to be as long as I'm wearing this, it is a continual reminder, continual, of that which I am aiming for, which is connection with my higher self and with the divine. Yep. So that's that. Excellent.

SPEAKER_01

Good point. Oh, you skipped a slide there. What did you skip? Go back to that. You made these slides.

SPEAKER_03

Oh, there's thank you. I think you I think that this one, I think you might like this one. This is beautiful. This is beautiful. This is incredible. This is Jacob's Ladder from Webb's monitor way after Thomas Smith Webb, who was a great influencer on American Masonry, late edition of his monitor long after he passed on, has Jacob's ladder with seven steps, and the first four have T F P and J on them.

SPEAKER_01

So you've got Do you know what those allude to or those alluding to you?

SPEAKER_03

I sure do. I do, I know what they allude to. I'm sure I'll start with the top ones because I'm you got the winged heart at the top. So you got faith, hope, and charity at the top. It's the four cardinal virtues temperance, fortitude, prudence, and justice.

SPEAKER_01

So what I want to point out is that those symbols the winged heart and the anchor and the shield with a cross on it, or it's oftentimes just a cross or a cross-crowned cross. Yes. Those this is all mostly American and post-Preston Webb. You might see them in Masonic artwork, in inch emulation work, but you certainly don't see them being used on tracing boards, not very often. And so when you see the honeycomb, like our or uh a beehive, it's another symbol. That would mean an industry, right? Or hard work or working together or hard. But when you see that when you see these symbols, uh these and there's lots of regional differences across the board in masonry. Oh, yeah. Uh but what these are some symbols that you see often in American influence that you do not see in English influence that anchor, the winged heart, and in particular a cross on the Jacob's ladder. I just I I think it's fascinating. And when I see these, I like to point out what they mean because lots of Engl English Freemasons or in in English influence Freemasons, they won't know what those symbols are necessarily, right? And that's again, I didn't recognize this in concept in context. Of course that's Jacob's ladder, and that's from the in in our work, it's the entered apprentice tracing board. We talk about that and we name those virtues and we talk about, but we just give them lip service. In the Preston Webb work, there's a whole separate lecture for the four cardinal virtues. And in some lodges, they have cast statues that relate to those four cardinal virtues, which in the Canadian work, English emulation work, it's like a paragraph or two, not even like seven lines, and that's it.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. Yeah, I've seen some of those images of the goddesses or whatever of representing those figures. Yes. Wrap up with uh just one couple last comments.

SPEAKER_01

Well, and then I want to ask you why you did it. Like how long you've been thinking about this and w why anybody would subject to them themselves to a project like this, because this is the kind of thing where if you say it out loud, you're gonna eventually do it. Yeah. And isn't that like a curse in itself? Because you can never be fully finished, right? At some point you've got to stop and be like, oh, it goes to the publisher.

SPEAKER_03

No, it's uh I I've I've in the last two months of trying to wrap it up, I've been saying repeatedly, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

SPEAKER_01

Good, yeah, of course. All right.

SPEAKER_03

So I've had to do that because I I want it to be perfect. And every time I I've read it through it a bunch of times. Every time I read through it, so I can make more corrections.

SPEAKER_01

Your your contribution to Masonic print culture and academia will be remembered, but only if you put it out there. At some point you got thought.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, I gotta get it published regardless of its imperfections.

SPEAKER_01

It'll sell. That's good. And you could always do a second edition, or you could do an updated or whatever you want.

SPEAKER_03

Uh the five sections of the last major part of the book, which goes into all the relationship of this to masonry and the history of masonry. There's a whole chapter on masonry, the history of masonry from the standpoint of the esoteric and of memory arts. And so that history happens to include, in my view, developments that came along in 2017 and 2012 and 2017, when first in 2012 the Academy of Reflection was formed in the Scottish Rite in Guthrie, Oklahoma. In 2017, the Legacy of the Masonic Legacy Society was formed. And both of those began practic doing meditation practices, contempl contemplative practices, with the idea that contemplation is often mentioned in masonry. It's very much a part of the memory arts where you have to be able to focus the mind, concentrate the mind, open the mind. So in the last section and the whole long last section of the book, I write a history of masonry from the standpoint of esoteric and memory arts, which Masons will find a bit different than their usual take on it, and hopefully it will introduce folks who are not familiar with Masonry to this spiritual side of Masonry. The other thing I want to point out before I go to my last slide is that I did a very extensive literature search in documents from the 1700s in Masonry and found many examples of how memorizing and memory can be traced from the old charges back in the 1400s to the early 1700s, through the old charges to the all those documents that were snippets of ritual, the catechisms that started in 1696 and continued all the way down for a long time, the exposures that happened in the 1700s, and so many Masonic books. I think I had about 60 Masonic books, pamphlets, what have you, that I did searches in which, thanks to AI, I could find examples of esoteric memory and exoteric memory and self-remembering, and those are all in a chapter toward the end of the book. And with that, I will return to the image that is the frontest piece of the book to just say one thing about what I noticed in all this literature, besides that there is ample evidence all the way down through these last couple centuries of memorizing being a key part of masonry all along the way for various reasons. One of which is that it's masonry is a lot about moral development, and you can't become a better person unless you remember that's your goal, for one thing. And you also must remember, for example, you have to remember the rules. If you don't learn it's it's to drive a car, you have to memorize the rules of the road and pass a driving test. To become a better person, you have to have you have to remember what wisdom is, what prudence is, what truth is, and and what and keep learning more and more about these things of which there are greater and greater depths to go into.

SPEAKER_01

So perhaps the nate that's the nature of our initiation, passing, and raising, and then all the instruction of all the concordant bodies is in order to impart the how to know, how to separate wisdom from folly. Perhaps maybe that's the whole purpose of it.

SPEAKER_03

Sure is sounds sounds right on the mark to me. So as we look at this last slide, the title of this German book that uh has this frontest piece, the Enlightened Freemason, turns out that this wonderful image of Masons sitting at a table dressed up, looking at this tracing board with the light of the divine shining down onto their work. That book is an anti-Masonic book. And it but the person who wrote it is kind of has a good feeling about Masons. They feel pretty good about Masons, and the reason they do is because Masons have some kind of the same esoteric interests as the author has, which is alchemy and I think Hermeticism, some of the basic esoteric arts. This author says, oh, Masons and I, I kind of get with Masons because they get, they like these kind of things that I'm interested in, these esoteric things I'm interested in. Their only problem, their big problem is that they don't go along with the Catholic Church. They don't believe in the Trinity. See, they don't believe in the Trinity. So here's my closing statement for now. I, in the literature search, here's what I came across: the Masonry does have a Trinity. And that happens to be in the prayers that William Preston, the great brother William Preston, who wrote versions of the ritual in the late 1700s that became kind of the gold standard. The prayers for the first, second, and third degree, the prayer for the first degree is to the most high. The prayer to the second degree is to the grand geometrician of the universe. The prayer for the third degree is to the great architect of the universe. And I would think I might have those in reverse order, but whatever it is, we have three we have the three as well, with three kind of takes. And by the way, that that I and the that eye of the divine that we're seeing in the front of piece has a triangle around it. So that says something about God man goes God manifests, it comes out through he com it comes through various three basic forms. So with that thank you.

SPEAKER_01

That's beautiful. And I would argue, just on that final point, I would argue that discussing things amongst enlightened brethren or other enlightened philosophers about the differences, the subtle differences is of zero consequence. You could do that as much as you want, but as all of it is completely subjective and there is no evidence that a scientist would accept it, there's no sense arguing about it. Just believe what you want. And and stop trying to make me believe the way you believe. And here lies the main mystery of Freemasonry. If you accept that somebody else is a better authority to tell you how to worship deity, man, you and I are not gonna agree. It just it just is I just fundamentally disagree with that. People who want to set up a priesthood people who want to set up a priesthood to manipulate the spiritual impulse for political ideas have no business in this world. How's that? Is that controversial enough? Maybe I'll edit that out too. Brother Russell, this was fantastic, and thanks for going through the slides. You want to unshare so we can just wind up a few minutes?

SPEAKER_03

That sounds very good.

SPEAKER_01

You got anything, you got anything left to talk about what why you did this. Like this seems like a project. It's yeah, I gotta do that. It seems like the project would grow and expand and grow and expand until you gotta stop at some point. You gotta be like, okay, that this is the thesis I'd like to put forward. That's enough. You want you want to talk about why you did this. All right. I have to take a moment to had you not thought about that yet?

SPEAKER_03

I've thought about it. I'm trying I'm wanting to see how I could put it together in my mind. It's articulated is not simple. I said I started off by saying that when I the night I took the EA degree, I became interested in memory. I subsequently did slides, presentations in about 20 or so Masonic lodges, and at one Grand Lodge, and at one event, a national event, and by the Masonic Restoration Foundation. And during the seven years that I was, during a seven-year period, I was the editor-in-chief of the Paternal Review magazine of the Southern California Research Lodge. So that magazine came out every month. So I would just finish one and before much I had to start the next one. So I would have done some work on my I I set out to write an article on the art of memory and masonry. An article. But then it would sit on the shelf for seven or eight months at a time. I didn't work. It's been I started in 2016. Yeah. It's 10 years. But so I but I guess what I would say is as I it just kept growing and growing. My slideshows got so long that I couldn't do them in an hour anymore. So then I said, oh, this is becoming a book. So I just had to recognize that I was writing a book without the intention of writing one. And I would say that my motivation is that when I came into Masonry, I had been studying esoteric work, doing esoteric work for 50 years. And that was mainly modern theosophy was my focus. And I was looking for the spiritual spirituality in Masonry. And the first year I was there in 2012, there were two places, we talked about this in the last podcast, where grandmasters, one in Florida, one in Australia, were so anti-esoteric that they forbid the use or would a talk of esoteric. So I felt like it was my part of my journey to bring forth to just show and demonstrate that it's there. It's just in masonry. It's obvious to me. So I wanted to make it obvious to other people that the esoteric is there and it's a specific thing. You can identify it, you can talk about it, and it's very, it has very many definitions. It's not simple. So I want people to know that masonry at its heart is a spiritual practice and a spiritual philosophy.

SPEAKER_01

And it's of no threat. The only threat that it is to people who want to use the spiritual impulse for political means. That's the it's a threat to people, right? Esotericism writ large is a threat to pe people thinking for themselves. If you don't think this is good, if you don't think it's right, and if you don't think that's in the image of the divine creator, again, you and I are gonna fundamentally disagree about the purpose of existence and the the purpose of getting out of bed in the morning. When I I people can believe what they want, just don't come over here and tell me what to believe. Because at least where I'm standing, I'm still free to do so. The freedom of conscience is still fundamental here.

SPEAKER_03

Fundamental to masonry everywhere, as far as I can tell.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Brother Doug, my my hat is off to you. We've gone long enough. Anything you anything else you want to impart before we wind up and go away here?

SPEAKER_03

Only that I'm looking very much forward to the conference and being able to refine a presentation. It's very hard to present such a complex and topic and a short presentation, and I'm aiming to do that, and I look forward to having a physical copy of a book that I can put my signature and give it to folks who are interested in purchasing it. So I'm just I'm just delighted. Who's publishing it? Uh it is Plumstone. It is Sean Eyer who publishes under Plumstone, and that was I feel blessed that he has supported my work and has an interest in doing that because he's published some other m many esoterically oriented authors that I respect greatly. So I consider that I'm in good company and that it's something I wanted to do. I w I wanted my book to be some scholar of his caliber to say, yeah, it's worth publishing.

SPEAKER_01

We will either have copies at the conference or be taking pre-orders.

SPEAKER_03

Exactly. Yeah. We're getting close to the time where it's got to get to the press, and I don't still have a hard date as to what that's going to be, but he has Sean has said that it'll be ready for the conference. Yep, good.

SPEAKER_01

Um great. Have you enjoyed your years coming to the conference? Anything you'd like to impart about that? I don't ask for reviews enough.

SPEAKER_03

What it feels to me like is coming home to a a group of like-minded brothers is what it feels like. Because I'm kind of a lone wolf at in a certain sense, where wherever I am in other Masonic lodges, there's just such a small number of guys in the totality of masonry who want to explore it in the kind of depth and that I do. And the spirit, and this I have to say, depth has different meanings. It's just the spiritual side of it. It's the spiritual side of it that I love, that I came into it for to find out more about. And uh I don't meet a lot of guys that are motivated for that. Lately I've been meeting more and more of them. And this is wonderful thing has happened in California which is that five six before COVID, say two years before COVID, I was in two lodges where we started doing meditation. The inspector of and the California inspector in one of them said, You cannot do this during an a ti an open lodge meeting. You have to meditate before the meeting. So we meditated before the meeting. The other said, Oh, you can do it as long as it's before all the business starts. Now two years a few years later they started to get brand lodge said it's fine for you to do the meditation during meetings. You could take I guess you maybe go to refreshment for whatever to do it and then come back. So now meditation is commonly done in two or three lodges that I'm aware of near me, which is wonderful. And then it so happens that the Grandmaster the grand incoming grandmaster of California, which who will likely be elected in October, starts meetings with meditation.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Nice.

SPEAKER_03

So we've we've got something going here that's a direction that I treasure and I'm very pleased that to be a part of it.

SPEAKER_01

The forces in the craft that I wouldn't say are forces of intolerance, but the forces that are perceived as the forces of intolerance seem like they're capitulating to this idea that the only men that are joining are men that are this way inclined. So you can't you gotta let them have their own space, right?

SPEAKER_03

And yeah some of that is in the book too there are there have been about three studies now that show that there's anecdotal evidence of more and more younger people particularly coming into the craft with that interest. That's why they're coming in and that's getting some validation from studies as well. So yeah it's there is that is a one of the things phenomena that's developing within the craft in my at the time of my journey just since twenty twelve.

SPEAKER_01

It's great to see brother it this has been a joy and a pleasure.

SPEAKER_03

For me too thank you so much for having me. I'm just so I'm just delighted. It's been fun.

SPEAKER_01

It took us months to get this together but I'm glad to finally get together and then I'll be seeing you in person about 45 days from this moment. Oh yes and we will all raise a glass at Olaf's to your wonderful publishing effort. I know there's going to be several other published authors there and I'm really a lineup.

SPEAKER_03

Well it's gonna be quite a a lineup of of accomplished authors it's quite something indeed all right brother thanks so much I appreciate it you have a great night we'll talk again soon we will thank you bye thanks for listening today you could support the show by liking sharing and subscribing on your favorite podcast indicator even more helpful leave us a review coming up on the Mystic Tie Brother Dago Rodriguez of the Fraternal Review EFC 2026 co-organizers Brother Ken Lane and Brother Brett Wolf and the creators of a new 78 card Masonic Wisdom Deck.

SPEAKER_01

Stay tuned We are looking to create a directory of Freemasonic events and publications. If you are aware of something coming up please let me know by email. In the meantime, check out the Masonic Conferences website at Masonic Conferences.com Esotericism and Freemasonry Conference will be held on Saturday September 19th. Our keynote speaker will be Brother Lon Milo Duquette, author of The Tarot Architect. Brothers Ike Baker, Doug Russell, Dago Rodriguez, and Joseph Wages are all slated to present. Get your tickets at EsotericMasonry.com For other events check out our calendar at Mystictie.com and don't forget to sign up for our newsletter while you are there graphics and web hosting are by Artsabo creative. A special thanks to organist for our theme music happy to meet Sorry to part and happy to meet again