Diving Deeper Into The Niche

What about all these groups?

Yesterday I wrote about the importance of Freemasonry finding its niche. If you missed it, that post can be found at:

Today, I’d like to discuss that further, with a focus on Freemasonry’s Appendant and Concordant bodies.

Photo by Roman Kopylov on Unsplash

At a Masonic meeting the other night, I listened as an extremely active and committed Mason explained that he would be discontinuing his involvement with one of our Rites.

Not because he doesn’t love the Rite in question, but simply because he has aged, and has less energy now than he did when he was young. He explained that he wants to direct the energy he retains at the Craft Lodge.

Frankly, in a way, that makes a great deal of sense to me. We have our two massive Rites, the Shrine, and smaller appendant bodies too numerous to mention. We have our industrial sized philanthropic endeavors. And that’s before we even mention our concordant bodies.

(Yeah, yeah, I know, the Shrine is a concordant, not appendant body, and yeah, I know that the photo above isn’t a Scottish Rite eagle, I’m taking some poetic license here!)

As I was told by my mentor, shortly after receiving my E.A. Degree, we have so many of these things that if a fellow joined all that he could he would be left with exactly zero time, and exactly zero dollars.

All of the energy (and everything else) that goes into all of these groups is energy that might otherwise be directed at the Craft Lodge. It could go towards strengthening the roots of Masonry, instead of the leaves.

Because of that, on the one hand, I do wonder if Freemasonry wouldn’t be a whole lot better off if most of those groups didn’t exist. If it wouldn’t be better for Freemasonry if we began winding most, perhaps almost all of them down.

But, on the other hand…

Looking back in history, to the early days of Masonry, before we became quite so rigid and standardized, there were loads more of them.

Some were perhaps considered fully regular and proper, others quite likely fringe or even clandestine, but they existed. Much about them has been truly lost to the mists of time.

Pretty obviously though, they stirred imaginations. They brought interest to our Craft at large. Even today we ponder what it must have been like to sit through the Degrees of Cagliostro’s Egyptian Rite. We wonder about the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis Misraim. We read of Noachite Freemasonry. We dig into the history of the Strict Observance.

Did these orders, and countless others like them, bring men to the doors of Craft Masonry? Perhaps, we can’t truly know today. But, we can know that whatever their faults may have been, those faults were not so severe as to keep the Noble heads of Europe, even her Monarchs, from seeking admission to our Lodges.

So maybe it does not make sense that Freemasonry would be stronger without all of its hydra of appendages.

Perhaps those appendages bring an interest and vitality that would not otherwise exist within our Craft.

I don’t know.

My thoughts are divided.

So I think it might be interesting, and beneficial, if we were to discuss just that here today.

What do you think?

Would Freemasonry be stronger if we took the pruning shears to all of the organizations that have sprung from it through the centuries?

Is it strongest as it currently composed today?

Would it be stronger if we went on a bender of creation, as our Brothers of so long ago did, with Degrees and Rites popping up like weeds, with those deemed best at the time ultimately surviving beyond their founding members?

Let’s chat about it. Perhaps together we can discern the best path forward.