A Masonic Journal

Should we keep one?

Recently the Master of Olympia Lodge reached out to me with a request. He wanted to know if I could give the presentation about Tarot that I gave to Tenino Lodge this past December to his Lodge. He said that people who attended told him that they really enjoyed it.

I agreed of course.

But, I didn’t know if I had the text of the talk I gave that evening.

Photo by Zoran Borojevic on Unsplash

I wasn’t too worried about that. I know the subject well, and was confident that I could come up with a great presentation for the Lodge if I hadn’t kept what I’d given before.

Luckily though, I found it. I’d uploaded it to the cloud.

I say that this was lucky, because when I re-read it, I realized that it was filled with some truly great insights about how the Tarot illustrates esoteric Masonic concepts.

(OK, full disclosure here. I think the presentation is truly insightful. If you were to read it, you might well think I’m nuts. Hence is the nature of Freemasonry and speculation about our Ancient Craft, and that’s a good thing!)

When we read books about Tarot, or other esoteric practices we are often encouraged to keep a journal. To write down what we’ve learned and the insights we make in our own practice.

Through the years I’ve even heard a learned Mason or two suggest that we do the same when it comes to Freemasonry. That we write down what we learn as we travel through the Craft, and our flashes of inspiration about it.

I guess that I’ve always done something similar. I write a heck of a lot here on Emeth, and I wrote about Freemasonry prior to this online space as well.

But, I’ve never kept a journal for Freemasonry. I haven’t kept one for Tarot either, I must admit.

But, reading that talk I gave this past December makes me think that this may have been an error. That maybe I should have been keeping a Freemasonic journal.

I’m thinking this way because in the eight months that have passed since I gave that talk, I managed to completely forget about it. I had absolutely no remembrance of what I said, nor did I remember the profoundly good (again, in my not so humble opinion) insights that I offered that night.

I must admit, that’s rather disturbing.

Here I had these great thoughts, and made these great connections, and then I promptly forgot them. It is just by chance that I uploaded them to the cloud.

So that’s made me wonder these past couple of days. Should we keep a journal of our progress through Freemasonry?