Evolution of Ritual
MASONIC RITUAL
Evolution of Ritual
MASONIC RITUAL EXPLAINED BY THE CHAIRMAN OF THE CUSTODIANS OF THE WORK
The Lodge’s public Installation of Lodge Officers is coming up on June 10 and this is a nice opportunity to talk a bit about the concept of evolution in Masonic Ritual. It’s tempting to think that our Ritual has remained unchanged throughout the centuries, but this is a mistaken belief. The documentary record of Masonic Ritual that is available to us reveals that our ceremonies were quite brief and to the point in the early 18th century and, in fact, there was not yet a third Degree or the grade of Master Mason. By the turn of the 18th century into the 19th, however, Masonic Ritual had grown by leaps and bounds into the fulsome ceremonies full of emblems and lessons that we know today.
There are plenty of differences between Ritual workings and the one practiced in New York and most American jurisdictions descends from the Ritual system developed by Thomas Smith Webb, which is one of the most elegant and elaborate Degree systems. Even then, there can be significant differences in how each jurisdiction renders this Ritual working due to differences in origin between Grand Lodges as well as how the Ritual evolved within each of them over the years.
Photo: The Elected and Installed Officers of St. Patrick’s Lodge No 4, Johnstown, New York. WB Paul Meher, pictured center
The Grand Lodge of New York has maintained the First Section of the Degrees more or less unchanged, but the latter sections saw significant evolution throughout the 19th century and into the first third of the 20th century, again in 1988 and again in 2015 when the Third Section of the Master Mason Degree was significantly reorganized and supplemented (in addition to which the Rituals of Opening for Entered Apprentice and Fellowcraft Lodges were restored).
All of the foregoing is to say that parts of the Ritual are constantly evolving to meet the needs of each successive age and generation. So, why does the public Installation of Officers bring this to mind? It so happens that Lodges in New York have only been permitted to conduct public Installations since 1965, and for many years thereafter a public Installation was more or less a duplicate Installation “for show only” as it was required to hold an Installation behind tiled doors beforehand. It wasn’t until 1983 that the Custodians of the Work thought to compose an introductory text explaining various Masonic customs and practices to attendees at a public Installation to those present who may not be familiar with Masonic ceremony. This introduction was extensively revised in 1989 and 1993, after which it stayed more or less the same until 2025 when the Custodians of the Work reworked it from the ground up.
Why did we do this? Fundamentally, because there were elements of the old introduction that were not so elegantly written, had become inappropriate, or were no longer needed. As an example of the second category, there were turns of phrase in the old introduction that in the intervening years had become associated with white nationalism. The turns of phrase were not bad in and of themselves, so an unfortunate association would be avoided by rewriting them using different words to convey a similar meaning. An example of the last category is that the old introduction made quite a point that “Freemasonry is not a religion or a substitute for religion.” This may have been a somewhat common misapprehension by the public in the 1980s that we wanted to correct, but today it isn’t a particular concern and we felt that bringing it up in the public introduction would only serve to focus attention on a subject that was no longer apropos. So that material went out. Both of these examples, and several more, happened due to changes in society over time. Just as the evolution of plants and animals is influenced by changes in the biological environment, so too is the evolution of Masonic ceremony influenced by changes in the human environment.
Response provided by RW Samuel Lloyd Kinsey
Chairman, Custodians of the Work, Grand Lodge of New York
