My Snazzy Red Hat!

A bit of symbolism with the bonnet rouge

It could, I suppose, be said that I am indeed nuts, but I went out and bought a cool new red hat today.¹

Check this baby out! (The Granddaughter is once again horrified by my choice of hats.)

The Red Effanem Hat

I plan on wearing this beauty to our upcoming Annual Communication, so I should be easy to spot while I’m wandering around. If you want one of these beauties, scroll down, I’ve got a link into an old post that tells you where to buy one.

This is the genuine red Effanem hat that was so popular among hunters when I was a kid, and I’ve been feeling that nostalgia for awhile now, so no, it’s not the red hat of a current political candidate, and no, I haven’t decided to become a middle aged woman and join the Red Hat Society.²

So what did it?

Ah, a bit of the Catcher In The Rye and of course Holden’s Red Hunting Hat:

“Up home we wear a hat like that to shoot deer in, for Chrissake,” he said. “That’s a deer shooting hat.”

“Like hell it is.” I took it off and looked at it. I sort of closed one eye, like I was taking aim at it. “This is a people shooting hat,” I said. “I shoot people in this hat.”³

The imagery conjured in our minds by those words may be dark, perhaps more so today than when they were published in 1951. But Holden isn’t actually hunting and shooting people in his Red Hunting Hat. It’s a metaphor, a symbol. And we Freemasons love our symbolism!

But more about Holden later.

My good friend, World Famous VW Larry Foley will be at this year’s Annual Communication. For many years at this event, he would open up his hotel room to all who would come for a drink, declaring it “The Room Of Commoners.” One could go to the Grand Lodge’s official Hospitality Suite, or one could declare himself a Commoner and go join Larry.

(It may be difficult to declare oneself the host of The Room Of Commoners while wearing a Purple and Gold Apron, but, details.)

The Room Of Commoners. There is a lesson in Larry’s idea there. If we see it. A lesson I think related to Holden’s ‘people shooting hat.’

The symbolism of these two things flow together.

Let’s consider what the academics have to say about it:

“On one level, critics interpret the hat as a display of Holden’s attempt to be unique and divergent from those around him.”

Yep. A red hat when not actually hunting will certainly signal one’s uniqueness.

But, what about ‘people shooting?’

“As a protector of innocence, Holden often verbally attacks, or “shoots,” phony people who accept the artificiality and conventionality of growing up. Thus, the red hunting hat manifests Holden’s clinging to his childhood and his struggle to come of age.”⁴

Enough of that.

Let’s get out of academia and back to Freemasonry.

I think that we can all agree that in a lot of our Lodges, the Masonic experience could be better. Things aren’t as good as we would like them to be, and that if we made the improvements that we know should be made, Lodges would be more successful.

It may have been different in the past, but I do think that today, there are very few Masons who are actually opposed to improving Lodges and the Lodge experience.

What is it that probably holds us back more than anything else?

Inertia I think. Inertia more than anything else.

We’ve never done that, so we won’t do that.

We don’t know how to do that, so we won’t try to do that.

We can’t know that it will work, so we will avoid doing it.

We’ve always done it this way, and it’s just too hard to change.

Inertia.

I think that’s what VW Larry used to fight with his Room Of Commoners, inertia.

He recognized that something had to be different. That things couldn’t remain the same in 2020 as they were in 1950. That the world had changed, people had changed, what Masons wanted and needed had changed. That to thrive, Freemasonry has to change.

The Room Of Commoners might have seemed like a joke, even have been presented as such, but it was also a message. That message sank in, and it influenced people.

And isn’t that what Holden means when he declares that he shoots people?

That he’s working against, working to destroy, those attitudes and ideas that ruin that which is best in people.

If he were in a Masonic context, Holden would be shooting down those ideas that hold our Craft back, working to destroy the inertia that so often keeps us from moving forward into a brighter future.

So The Room Of Commoners, and the Red Hunting Hat can, I think, be seen to symbolize the same idea. The same need for progress.

That’s why I snagged a snazzy red hat today.

Warning: Unless you want to go really deep into crazy rabbit hole land, you should stop reading here.

OK, you asked for it.

The red hat goes very deep into human history. Consider:

“The lion-headed Wadjet wore a red cap with a long back that represented the sun. This cap, a sign of lower Egypt, was also worn by pharaohs, who saw themselves as the sons of the sun.”

And

“The red cap, which carries the colors of the esoteric sun or fire that illuminates the soul, became the symbol of the Hermetics.”

And

“Attis, who was the lover of the Phrygian goddess Great Mother Cybele who sat on a lion throne in Anatolia and was the equivalent of Horus in Egypt, was again dressed in this red cap.”

And

“Mithras was always depicted with a red cap in these temples, including the latest one discovered in Zerzevan Castle in southeastern Turkey's Diyarbakır.”⁵

And

“Frescoes of the Magi bringing their gifts to the newly born Christ are often depicted wearing Phrygian caps — as they are in some of the earliest depictions from the catacombs in Rome. The Persian background of these men is further depicted in a sixth century CE mosaic in the Basilica of St. Apollinaris in Ravenna, Italy, which depicts the magi in traditional, patterned tights, tunics, and red Phrygian hats.”⁶

So if this is to be believed, the red hat is a very old symbol, dating back to ancient times, Horus, Hermeticism, Mithraism. That’s a cool bit of history, likely appreciated by Masons with a more esoteric bent.

Perhaps these ancient religious traditions are why Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church wore the red Galero, from 1245 until 1969.⁷

Moving beyond the sacred and into the profane:

“The use of red hats to distinguish identity was not new in Roman society. The Phrygian cap was similar to the red freedman’s cap that was worn by male slaves being manumitted by their masters. During manumission ceremonies, the change in hat denoted their change in status from a servile piece of property to a freed Roman citizen endowed with libertas.”

And

“Suetonius, who notes that upon the death of the emperor Nero in June of 68 CE: ‘such was the public rejoicing that the people put on liberty-caps and ran about all over the city.’ This was the birth of the red hat in the Mediterranean, at least, as a symbol of both resistance and freedom from oppression.”⁸

But enough of the ancient world, let’s come up to more recent history, and places that we know.

Prior to the start of the American Revolution, a red cap came to symbolize the rights of free men and republican government, without monarchy. It became the headgear of the Goddess like figure Columbia, also known as Liberty that frequently adorned United States coins from 1793 to 1947, and is currently depicted on the US Mint’s American Silver Eagle. It is featured on the Seal of the US Senate and the flags and seals of various US States.⁹

Shortly after the American Revolution that fervor crossed the Atlantic into France, and it took the red headgear right along with it, where the red hat became the bonnet rouge. What we call the Liberty Cap. To this day that red cap of liberty appears on depictions of the Goddess like figure Libertas, where it crowns her spear, and atop the head of Marianne, the symbolic personification of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.¹⁰ Indeed, two red hats will serve as the mascots for the Paris Olympics this year.¹¹

So the red hat symbolizes liberty, emancipation, and freedom. It did so in ancient Rome, today’s France, the United States, and throughout Central and South America where it appears on the coat of arms of Argentina, Bolivia, Columbia, Cuba, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Paraguay.¹²

It is fair to say that it stands as a recognized symbol for the rights of free men, and of Freemasons. (If I might snag just a touch of our ritual.)

If you’ve read this far, I’ve got to say, I’m amazed. I fear that I would have stopped putting up with me after the first couple of paragraphs.

But, to sum up, we’ve got a heck of a lot of symbolism in that red hat.

Individuality.

Opposition to harmful inertia and oppression. Ideas and attitudes that sap greatness.

The Mysteries.

Emancipation.

Liberty.

All good stuff.

So if you see my weird self wandering around in a red hat, now you know why.

And don’t worry, it may well be a ‘people shooting hat’ in classic American literature, but, just as with Holden Caulfield, I see that as a metaphor. Let’s ‘shoot’ all the things holding us back from improving the Lodge experience, including inertia. I’m going to declare my goofy new red hat a symbol for the ongoing creation of Legendary Freemasonry.

1.

2. https://redhatsociety.com/

3. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/48749-this-is-a-people-shooting-hat-i-said-i-shoot

4. https://bildungsromanproject.com/the-catcher-in-the-rye-a-close-reading/

5. https://www.dailysabah.com/arts/ancient-egypt-to-little-red-riding-hood-the-red-cap-of-hermetics/news

6. https://hyperallergic.com/436182/before-maga-mithras-phrygian-caps-and-the-politics-of-headwear/

7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galero

8. https://hyperallergic.com/436182/before-maga-mithras-phrygian-caps-and-the-politics-of-headwear/

9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrygian_cap

10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianne

11. https://www.thelocal.fr/20221114/phrygian-caps-why-france-chose-two-red-hats-as-the-paris-2024-olympics-mascots

12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrygian_cap