Page 17 - WM Manual Guide and Monitor 2024 - 2025

THE HOODWINK

I
"Where were you prepared?" The answer made to that question opens for our
vision a way into one of the secrets of Freemasonry. We must prepare ourselves in
order to receive any teaching whatsoever, for we see only, as Goethe has expressed
it, "that which we carry in our hearts." For this reason many of the Ancient
Mysteries insisted on a long period of preparation, as do many churches to-day.
For the same reason the Masonic lodge should see to it that the candidate is as fully

prepared in mind as he is in body before he is given admittance to the door. In
some parts of Europe, I have been told, an experienced Master Mason is appointed
sponsor, or godfather, to a candidate; and lodges of instruction are held in which
the petitioner is taught something of the history and principles of the Order.
Surely this is a wise custom! Many a man—you yourself, perhaps, were one, as
was I—has stepped into the First Degree without the slightest inkling of what "it
was all about," with the consequence that he has been too bewildered to know
whether to laugh or to cry. And how often it happens that a candidate passes from
one degree to another as rapidly as he can learn the lectures, moving all the while
in too great haste to comprehend the simplest rudiments of the great ideas and
teachings that are dramatically presented to him moment after moment! To be
"prepared in the heart" means that within one's own mind and feelings he is
experiencing the meaning of that which he does and sees; if a candidate is hustled
along too rapidly to be able to have any such understanding of the degrees, how
can it be said that he is duly and truly prepared to be a Master Mason?
The Ritual itself is wise in these connections because it recognizes the fact that a
man must be prepared in the heart as well as in the preparation room. Except a
man's mood be right, except his will be in the appropriate attitude, except he act
from true motives, and in a reverent prayerful frame of mind, the "work" will be to
him as meaningless as an old wives’ tale. It is necessary that every lodge arrange to
prepare the candidate's mind by previous instruction; and it is equally necessary
that it build about the preparation room a wall of secrecy and sanctity in order to
ward off the jest or careless word that may lead a candidate to approach the door in
light or flippant mood.
II
Being in Masonic ignorance, a seeker after light, and a representative of the natural
untaught man, it is fitting that the candidate be made to walk in darkness by
wearing the hoodwink which Mackey has well described as "a symbol of secrecy,
silence, darkness, in which the mysteries of our art should be preserved from the
unhallowed gaze of the profane." The use of the blindfold goes far back among
secret societies, even to the Ancient Mysteries, in which the candidate was usually
made to enter the sanctuary with eyes covered. The Cathari, whom Innocent III
tried so hard to annihilate, and who were at bottom Christian mystics, were
accustomed to call those seeking initiation into their mysteries "hoodwinked