From Entered Apprentice to Master Mason

From Entered Apprentice to Master Mason - book description

You were initiated a few weeks ago. It was one of the finest evenings of your life.

Then you went back to work, told nobody, and by the following Wednesday the ten feet tall had quietly leaked away. You have a card of questions to learn and not much else. Nobody has rung. The next meeting is three weeks off. And a small, disloyal thought has arrived: is that it?

Read this book. That feeling is the most predictable experience in Freemasonry, it has a cause, and it passes.

This is a guide to your first year, from the morning after your initiation to the day you are raised a Master Mason. It explains what each of the three degrees is for and what it will ask of you. It tells you how to learn your questions without dread. It explains, properly, why you are sometimes asked to leave the room, and why that is a courtesy rather than a slight. It covers the festive board and its customs, the pace of the year and why the waiting is deliberate, and the one thing that decides whether a new Mason stays or drifts: whether he has a real mentor, and what to do if nobody has offered him one.

It is also honest about the gaps. Most men who leave Freemasonry go in the first year or two, and almost none of them leave because something went wrong. They leave because nothing much happened. This book is written from the new member's side of the table, because that is the side the Craft loses people from.

No ritual appears in these pages, and nothing that happens in a Lodge room is described. What is kept private is kept private here.

Written by a serving Freemason under the United Grand Lodge of England.

Volume Two of The Masonic Pathway. Volume One, How to Become a Freemason, is for the man still deciding. The companion volume, Mastering Masonic Ritual, is for the learning itself.

An independent work. Not published, endorsed or authorised by the United Grand Lodge of England or any other Masonic body.