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"JESUIT RELATIONS."
J H W H.
JOHNSON, SAMUEL.
JONES, JOHN PAUL.
JOURNEYMEN MASONS.
JURISDICTION, EARLY CUSTOMS OF.
JURISPRUDENCE, MASONIC.
"JESUIT RELATIONS."
King Louis XV undertook to carry out a grandiose scheme by which he could capture in one or two decades the richest parts of North America, and then could overwhelm the English Colonies hemmed in between the Alleghenies and the Atlantic. He already had possession of Atlantic Canada, centered in Quebec; also the mouth of the Mississippi River, the Colonies of which he could support from his Colonies in the West Indies. To connect these two, and at the same time to entrap the English Colonies, he had only to capture the Mississippi Valley from where Detroit now stands down to New Orleans. He sent troops from France; recruited forces of French and French-Canadians in Quebec; enlisted thousands of trappers and traders; b and formed alliances with Indian tribes up and down b the Mississippi. Had Louis not lost interest his Napoleonic scheme might have succeeded; as it was, it fell apart in the French and Indian War the war in which young George Washington learned soldiering. Pittsburgh was born, Quebec fell, and the inept performances of the scarlet-clad General Braddock and his automaton troops eased the native Colonials out of any fear or awe they may have had of a British army, and thus was a psychological preparation for the Revolution twenty-five years later.
Many Jesuits worked their way with French troops down through mid-America. Among the troops were a number of Masons; there may even have been a few among the Jesuits themselves. In any event the whole period of that war is in need of research by Masonic students because in it were many of the roots of Freemasonry in America. The Jesuits, though with no thought of Masonic students ever in mind, kept up a continuous and detailed reportage of what they daily saw and encountered, and it , is in these that research can expect to find small data where and there which can be utilized by Masonic history. The whole narrative is in a large set of volurnes: Travels and E:ploratiorLs of the Jesuit Missions arias in New France; 161S1791; Burrows Bros.; Cleveland; 1896. They are usually called The Jesuit Relations.
J H W H.
It may also be written J H V H because in the Ancient Hebrew the letter in question had a value intermediate between our W and our V. It is the consensus of opinion that the oldest writing in the Old Testament is a portion of the Book of Judges written some 800 years before the beginning of the Christian era, or about 200 years after Solomon built the first Temple. The Hebrew people originally consisted of a number of tribes of Semites who had been pastoral nomads on the deserts; they were welded into a nation only after many years; and a single language took even longer to form an analogous case is our own language which is a compound of Anglo-Saxon, Danish, French, Latin, etc.
When the b Hebrews first learned to write their language is not w known but they had a difficulty with "the problem of the alphabet. " It continues to be one of the most difficult of problems, because after nearly 200 years of international investigation and thought by thousands of specialists (in the first half of the Nineteenth Century in France " philology " and " science " were almost synonymous terms), not many of them agree at each point on what exactly an alphabet is, or how one is formed; and any layman can test this difficulty for himself by uttering some word and then trying to discover what separate actions of utterance compose it in the word "laymen" itself, for example, is the utterance between "l" and "y" one act of utterance or two? is it "lay" or "leay"? The Hebrews must have decided that a letter represents some conscious, single act of the lips, or the jaw, or the tongue; a vowel appears to be a quality of the breath and to issue from the lungs without action by the mouth, and therefore they did not deem any separate vowel sound to be a letter. In any event, they had no letters for the vowels (we ourselves have an insufficient number). Also, they failed to separate words when writing; used neither capitals nor paragraph divisions; and wrote from right to left. Thus, in Hebrew, the words "from right to left" would be written tfltthgrmrf. The time and place of writing and the author's name were not written on a document.
When Jerome, Luther, Wyclif, the King James translators, etc., encountered in the Old Testament MSS. the consonants H W H J (for in Hebrew they were reversed) they had no means of discovering the vowels. Hebrew scholars themselves could give no assistance because according to their own traditions the vowel pronunciations had been lost at the time of the Babylonian captivity. The King James translators (1611) of the Authorized Version ("authorized," that is, by King James of England) arbitrarily selected the vowels belonging to the Greek word for Lord they had to use something and "Jehovah" was the result. The majority of Hebraists have since come to believe that the original form was " Jahweh. " Another Hebrew form for the name was some form of the root "al" or "el" (as in Elohim, Allah); what the connection between them was is undecided. (We ourselves use " God, " " Deity, " " Creator, " the "Absolute," etc.)
This loss of the vowels was doubtless one of the sources of the old legends about The Lost Word, "That Which Was Lost," of which there are many versions; but in reality, as a non-Hebraist will immediately see for himself, the word itself was never lost; only the pronunciation was lost. In the Middle Ages Jewish Talmudists speculated through millions of v. ords on the mystery of that lost pronunciation, connecting it with the doctrine of a Messiah, and preparing materials for hundreds of legends, allegories, poems, myths, tales, many of them of great beauty and wisdom; and a number of these became known to Gentiles during the Middle Ages, especially in Spain where for a long period the Jews had the great center of their culture. Because of this, many Masonic writers have reasonably assumed that the Allegory of the Search For that Which Was Lost in the Third Degree was a version of the lost pronunciation of J H W H: hut while any Mason is free to accept that Interpretation he is confronted by difficulties:
a) nowhere in the Degree is the fact clearly shown;
b) the "Lost" could have been originally the "Lost Grail, " a more likely theory;
d) what was lost when the Grand Master was lost manifestly was not a single word but the plans and designs of the building (many times in the building of cathedrals this actually occurred; through stoppage of the enterprise by failure of funds, or war, or the death of an architect, the work ceased; some cathedrals show as many as four changes or substitutes in plan);
e) the "substitute word" did not mean substitute in the sense of a make-shift, or something that "would have to do" but in the sense of "another" a new plan; and the new one might be even better than the old;
f) moreover, it was not a word that was substituted for another, but a man; one Grand Master going, a new Grand Master (in the person of the Candidate) taking his place.
In the article Dr. Mackey has given the interpretation of the "Mason's Word" generally accepted in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Since then Masonic archeology has discovered documents which have given the subject a wholly new change in direction. The Mason Word was used by Seventeenth Century Lodges (Operative-Speculative) as the name of a ceremony. In that ceremony were doubtless a number of "secret words, " some of them passwords or other modes of recognition, and these words were not always the same among the Lodges, and sometimes they were alteredfrom one period to another. Also, some of the City Companies gave "the Mason Word" to each new member, and for a fee; since in such a company the Freemasons were only one of a related group of crafts it is not reasonable to suppose that a single secret word sacred to them would be given also to carpenters, quarrymen, tinners, etc.
The "Word" as used in the Royal Arch has a history of a different kind, and one impossible to piece together because as yet only a few of the data are known. There must have been a ceremony involving an arch in early Speculative Masonry because though the Rite is not mentioned by name until 1744 that reference implies that it had already been in use before that date; also, much evidence indicates that the Arch ceremony belonged originally to the Master Degree. How did it come to be separated? Some years before the separation a wave of enthusiasm for Hebrew had swept over Dublin and other Irish Masonic centers; Laurence Dermott was so carried away by it that he studied the Hebrew language. It is reasonable to make the tentative hypothesis that in his Hebrew readings Dermott became inx,ensely interested in Rabbinic legends about the Lost Name, and around such a legend helped to crystallize the then meager portions of the Masters' Degree centering in the Arch. Dermott was leader of the Antient Grand Lodge; he was one of the architects of lts Work; the Antients set the Royal Arch apart from the Master Degree and made a separate ceremony of it long before the Moderns did; it may be that under Antient influence an older legend about a lost Grand Master became fused with a Rabbinic legend about a Lost Word, and this became the basis of a new separate Degree at about 1750-1760. On the other hand, and the fact must be re-emphasized, too little is known of Royal Arch origins to support anything of more weight than a tentative hypoth esis; the discovery of one now unknown document could alter the whole subject at the present stage of knowledge.
(Note. See treatises by Bros. Snoop and Jones, who have specialized on the Mason Word; see also Ars Quatuor Coronatorum since 1930).
In earlier times there was much sincere belief in magic and miracle working. The miracler or the magician, as in any one instance the case may have been, had to have a means to perform his miracle or to work his magic, and this could be any one of a number of devices; a secret ceremony, an amulet, a sacred drug, an incantation, a sign, etc.; in thousands of instances the means used was a secret or magical word, like abracadabra, the mere pronun. ciation of which under the required circumstances would effect a miracle or a wonder. Inasmuch as there were many miraclers and magicians (Merlin was a popular hero in England) in each people and tribe, therefore the number of these magical words tended to multiply; in some tribes writing itself, and as a whole, had supernatural powers attributed to it (as is true even today of some Chinese peoples). Thus developed what the anthropologists call "the doctrine of word magic." (See chapter in The Meaning of Meaning, by Ogden and Richards; and Calabria, by Norman Douglas.)
A deal of solemn and pseudo-learned nonsense has been written by Masonic occultists to argue that the "Word," or "secret words," etc., as employed in Freemasonry are survivals or relics of this word magic. Masons have had "words," "a Word," but they have never used them for working magic; they have never at any time in their history, Operative or Speculative, been in the business of working magic or attempting to perform miracles; the whole notion (it belongs to the intellectual underworld) has been repugnant to them always. The early Operatives may have believed that God had performed miracles, or that the Saints had; they never believed themselves able to perform them. Their secrets were of another kind. The importance of their words, passwords, secret locutions can be explained on the ordinary grounds of everyday common sense; before the days of printing, the post-office, the telephone, etc., when a Freemason moved from one town to another he had to prove himself to the Freemasons there, and the most convenient means to do it was by words, and word formulas it is still done in armies. There is nowhere a trace of evidence to show that the Word, the Name, the Tetragrammaton (four-lettered name: J H W H), or any other word or password was ever used as a magical word in the Craft.
JOHNSON, SAMUEL.
Samuel Johnson, maker of the first complete dictionary of the language, hero of Boswell's Life, was he a Mason? The probabilities in favor of his having been one are much weightier than the probability against. Old Dundee Lodge Minutes show that a Sam Johnson was made a Mason in 1767, after which his name appears in the i records twenty-one times. Was this the Sam Johnson? It is known that Johnson loved the water-front sections of Wapping, and often wandered there at night. Garrick, Burke, Pope, Arbuthnot, Swift, Richard Savage, Sir William Forbes, his closest friends were in the Craft. Boswell himself was a Past Master.
Johnson went out of his way, at a large expense of time and pride, to defend the unfortunate Rev. Dodd who was hanged for debt, and who, though he had been for sortie time expelled from both his Lodge and Grand Lodge, had been the first Grand Chaplain, and a private Chaplain to the King. The firm of Strahan, England's leading publishers, were Johnson's publisher and during many years he was often in their offices; when he was, he must have met William Preston (originator of WebbPreston Work), who was superintendent for years and finally a partner; and John Northouck, also on StrahanJs staff, an editor of an edition of the Grand Lodge Book of Constitutions. Critics have many times called attention to the "Johnsonian style" of the language of the Monitorial Lectures; if Johnson was a Mason himself he may well have assisted Preston to compose them. (See a series of four articles by Arthur Heiron, in The Builder; 1923.) There is one suggestive sentence in Boswell's Life dated in 1773, about an occurrence in the Turk's Head tavern: "IJpon my entrance Johnson placed himself behind a chair, on which he leaned and gave me a 'Charge' pointing out the conduct expected from me as a good member of the club. "
JONES, JOHN PAUL.
On page 509 are two sentences which may be amplified and possibly revised: "Son of John Paul, a gardener, the name Jones assumed by the son later in life. John Paul Jones was raised, November 27, 1770, in the Lodge of St. Bernard, No. 122, at Kirkcudbright, Scotland.... "
The brochure entitled The Stoty of the RwAt Wotshipful Joseph Montfort, by Harry W. Gowen (Halifax, N. C.; 1907) is an enthusiastic oration about the famous old Royal White Hart Lodge, of Halifax, N. C., of which the first recorded meeting was held on April 20, 1764. There are a few obvious errors in it, Wthe tone of it is uncritical, its principal thesis that Joseph Montfort was the first and only Provincial Grand Master of America cannot be sustained; nevertheless the brochure is an open invitation to further and more exact research, and its contents can nowhere be disregarded. This last applies especially to what Bro. Gowen writes about John Paul Jones.
R.-. W. . Joseph Montfort was the father of Mrs. Willie Jones, whose husband was one of the outstanding, colorful figures of the Revolution, the rich and celebrated Willie Jones, Revolutionary statesman, an alumnus of European universities, and owner of one of the richest and largest plantations of the Carolinas. Upon returning from a vacation in Virginia, in 1772, Mr. and Mrs. Jones brought back with them the young Scotchman named John Paul who was then tsventy-five years old, and destined, of all things in the vorld to become the official lather of the American Navy, and to be buried in the crypt at Annapolis. He came as a welcome guest but remained most of the time for three years as an almost son, and in the end adopted the name of Jones as his own, after the latter had (through Joseph Hewes) secured him a commission as Lieutenant in the to-be American Navy. (For this fighting against England Robert F. Gould described him as "the notorious John Paul Jones"; Gould forgot that Jones had been an An erican for a number of years, and was not a renegade Englishman but an immigrant Scotchman.)
"He was a frequent visitor at Fredericksburg Lodge, No. 4," Washington's Mother Lodge; "and while at Portsmouth, N . H., fitting out the hi anger' he visited St. Johns Lodge No. 1". "John Paul Jones took only the first degree in Masonry in Scotland . . . ," writes Gowen; "the fellow craft and master mason degrees he took somewhere in America.... If the lost records of Roya: White Hart Lodge are ever found, I believe it will be discovered that he took them here." The Jones family presented him with "a beautiful sword" before he left; the tradition is "that the presentation . . . was made by Joseph Montfort."
JOURNEYMEN MASONS.
Masonic historians have spoken with two voices about the subject of journeymen Masons of the Medieval and Pre-1717 Periods of Masonry. One school, the older, has held that by "journeymen" was meant "traveling Masons," and that (as was the case of the hero in Goethe's Wilhelm Me?ster) an apprentice fresh out of his indentures spent a period, about two years, traveling from one town or country to another, to work and to observe the Craft in its practices in different places, thereby receiving a post-graduate course in his art. One old writer, compacted more of fancy than of fact, drew a picture of Freemasons traveling in bands from city to city, singing as they went. The other school takes it that "journeymen" did not mean "a man on a journey" but that the term derived from the French word (as in "jour") for day, and was used of Masons who worked by the day, and therefore need not have belonged to any of the Lodges which were stationed at large building constructions, and worked on a different scale of wages.
Records nowhere decide in favor of either theory but indicate that both may be true in part; and also indicate that there were Freemasons not included in either. The customs of the whole Craft were not identical in each and every country, OI from one cen tury to another. It is certain that many Freemasons went from one place or country to another to work because written records prove as much and because a number of them have been traced by the Mason Marks they left behind. It is certain that some Masons (like Inigo Jones) traveled in order to study, and made notes and sketches. Also it is certain that some Freemasons worked by the day, had no apprentices, made no contracts, were not Masters, and belonged to a category, in known instances, apart from Lodge Masons. (The Medieval highway was a world in itself; see under WANDERING SCHOLARS in this Supplement which has bibliography.) Scotland has a Journeyman Lodge, once an Operative body.
JURISDICTION, EARLY CUSTOMS OF.
When the first Grand Lodge laid out its rules and regulations (1717-1723) it claimed for itself jurisdiction over its own Lodges only and these were to lie ln London and Westminster a jurisdiction outlined in the old Bills of Mortality. In so doing it followed the custom of the old Masons Company of London, and also of every other organized Craft, especially those which had a Borough Charter or Royal Charter; for since such a company, society, or gild held a monopoly of its own kind of work and could inspect and supervise everything made by its own trade, there had to be a fixed boundary, or jurisdiction, inside which this authority could be exercised else it would conflict with companies and gilds in nearby towns. These various jurisdictions were described in the Charter, or in Borough Regulations, or in the gild's own regulations. Most of the Charters granted prior to Queen Elizabeth gave the London City Companies, including the Masons, jurisdiction over London and its own metropolitan area; later this was enlarged somewhat for some of the Companies.
A table of jurisdictions adopted in 1571 gives a typical list: the Joiners, a two mile circuit beyond the suburbs. The Blacksmiths, a four mile circuit. James I had given the Butchers a one mile circuit, Charles II gave them two miles. The Masons under the same King had a seven mile circuit. The Poulterers had a seven mile, and the Waxchandlers a ten mile.
The principle of geographical jurisdiction thus begun continues in modern American Speculative Masonic practice. There are in general four kinds of jurisdictions:
1. The jurisdictions of Rites. The Scottish Rite has its own jurisdiction over its own Bodies, Ancient Craft Masonry over its Lodges, etc., etc.
2. The jurisdiction of Grand Lodges. In the United States a State is a Grand Jurisdiction; if a Grand Lodge has Lodges abroad it may or may not have exclusive territorial jurisdiction (other Grand Lodges may be present, as in China), nevertheless its own Lodges there have jurisdictions within a delimited territory.
3. Districts. A Distriet Deputy Grand Master or a District Grand Lecturer works within a jurisdiction. In large cities this may be a given list of Lodges, but those Lodges will be confined within the city limits.
4. Lodge. The majority of Lodges have a geographical jurisdiction, the lines being determined by Grand Lodge; if not (as often occurs in cities), it has a concurrent jurisdiction that is, one Lodge shares with others the same fixed territory.
This jurisdictional system is as old as Freemasonry, and in one form or another is practiced in every country, and is so integral a part of the form of Craft organization that to alter or to remove it would change the Fraternity out of recognition, therefore it has the value of a Landmark, and could properly be added to the list of twenty-five given by Mackey.
JURISPRUDENCE, MASONIC.
Jurisprudence consists of the rules and regulations in force among the members of the Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons. They are found, declared, promulgated, and enforced by Grand Lodges (or Grand Bodies, etc., in Rites other than Ancient Craft Masonry), Grand Masters, Lodges, Worshipful Masters, and in certain Instances of a limited kind by other Lodge and Grand Lodge Officers and Committees.
These rules and regulations rest upon, or appeal to, the authority of certain principles, practices, and rules which are so fundamental that they constitute Freemasonry, so that if any one of them were to be destroyed (by "Innovation") Freemasonry itself would be destroyed along with it. These latter are therefore the axioms, assumptions, and postulates of Masonic Jurisprudence. Called The Ancient Landmarks, they exist prior to and are independent of Grand Lodges and Lodges; they are therefore not enacted by Grand Lodges nor can they be altered by Grand Lodges or Lodges. They can be described or defined in print (they are not secrets) by Grand Lodges, Lodges, or Masons, and in part sometimes they are, but neither writing nor publication creates them, or can alter them, or destroy them, or give them their authority, and they are as much in effect when not written as when they are. They could therefore be described as the Unwritten Law of Freemasonry. Jurisconsults often compare them with the similarly unwritten Constitution of the Empire of Great Britain
But while the Ancient Landrnarks themselves are neither written nor published they are carried into effect by means of statutes, edicts, rules and regulars tions which are. The body of these consists in general of the Constitutions of a Grand Lodge, its Statutes, its General and Miscellaneous Regulations, Edicts made by Grand Masters, By-Laws of Lodges, and decisions made according to a prescribed form by Lodges and Worshipful Masters.
There are in some fifty countries together more than one hundred Grand Lodges, many thousands of Lodges, and in addition are other thousands of Bodies and Grand Bodies of Capitular Masonry, Cryptie Masonry, Knight Templarism, and the Scottish Rite. Each of the sovereign bodies of those five Rites enacts its own rules and regulations; the field of Masonic Jurisprudence is comprised by the whole of them, and therefore is very large, complex, and difficult. The number of scholars who have mastered the subject (they are called jurisconsults, or publicists) has never been large.
The most widely-used book in the United States has long been Jurisprudence of Freemasonry, by Albert G. Mackey, originally issued in 1856 under the title of Principles of Masonic Law. It has the quality uniquely its own of stating the general and abstract principles clearly, and in a form easy to carry into practice. The Institutes of Masonic Jurisprudence, by George Oliver, which he published not long before his death in 1867, divided the field with Mackey but not for long, because a number of its fundamental assumptions were questionable. The most acute, detailed, and analytical discussion of the subject ever made in the United States was carried on by Judge Josiah H. Drummond in the form of Foreign Correspondence reports for the Grand Lodge of Maine over a period of thirty-eight years (he died in 1902); they have never been collated or published in book form but are included in the published Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of Maine. The most philosophic, and in a degree the weightiest and most learned work on the subject, is Jurisprudence of Freemasonry, by Roscoe Pound, who at the time of writing it was Dean of the Law School of Harvard University.
Mackey's Jurisprudence of Freemasonry is a book of some 400 pages, divided into six books, the titles of which are a tableau of the subjects: Foundations of Masonic Law, Law Relating to Candidates, Law Relating to Individual Freemasons, Law Relating to Lodges, Law Relating to Grand Lodges, Masonic Crimes and Punishments.
The literature of Masonic Jurisprudence is incomplete, either because a number of its subjects have not yet been crystallized by official action of the FraternityJ or because they have been overlooked by writers A list of these undiscussed questions and unexplored subjects and subjects about which there are fundamental differences among authorities is necessarily an indeterminate one but it must include the following subjects at least:
Cornity, or the methods by which Grand Lodges cooperate with each other. Recognition: on what grounds does a Grand Lodge officially recognize another? can a Grand Lodge hold commerce with, or be in correspondenee with, or to any extent fraternize with another Grand Lodge (or Grand Chapter, or Grand Council, etc.) before extending official recognition? Universality: a Grand Lodge's duty within the length of its Cable Tow to plant Lodges in countries where they are desired but where no Grand Lodges have been constituted. The District Deputy System: is a District a legal entity? does it have any jurisdiction over itself? Masonic Purposes: what are they? what must be regulated by them? where and by whom are they derided? The Grand Master's Right to Make Masons at Sight: is it a Landmark? a Prerogative? a Usurpation? Masonic Funds and Finances: among the subjects in Jurisprudence this is in the most inchoate condition. Promulgation: how can a Mason be expected to observe a law or a rule of which he does not (and often now, cannot) know the existence? should each Mason receive a Certified copy of each law or rule enacted by his Lodge or Grand Lodge? The Interrelation between Masonic Law and Civil Law. Parliamentary Law: should each Grand Lodge publish for its Lodges an official code of Parliamentary Law? (Non-Masonic Codes, like Robert's Rules of Order, cannot be used by a Lodge.)