An Intriguing Masonic Templar Project

A few months ago I was approached by a representative of the Grand Commandery of Tennessee and the Grand Encampment of the United States, to talk about a potential project. An old, handwritten book had been discovered on the bookshelves of Coeur De Lion Comandery No., 9 in Knoxville. Upon further inspection, it turned out to be dated 1882, and contained the Rituals of the Masonic Templar Orders, being the Red Cross,  Order of the Temple and Order of Malta. It had been prepared by a committee of Past Grand Commanders assembled to produce an authorized version of the rituals to be adopted by the Grand Commandery of Tennessee (in those days it was often quite possible for different Masonic groups to use rituals of their choice, and standardization in the States was a relatively recent affair).

The rituals were assembled following seven years of careful investigation of the American, English and Canadian rituals available at that time, and the result borrowed from all of them “to provide the most effectual Ceremonies.” Apparently the project had initially started in 1876 with the rituals being shown to the Grand Commander in Chattanooga, again in Nashville in 1881, and finally adopted in 1882.

The book itself is a veritable time capsule. Not only is the entire document handwritten in exquisite calligraphy, with the words in black and rubrics in red, but the documents is embellished with a number of hand-drawn and hand-colored pictures demonstrating banners, paraphernalia and layouts. It is also interesting from the point of view of being a unique take on the rituals, for not only did it draw from three existing sources, it also shows that Grand Encampment could not have been requiring its own standard rituals to be adopted at the time (a position since remedied!). And so this precious document becomes a valuable Masonic artifact, giving us a glimpse into the Templar rituals of a bygone age.

The hope is to have it published and issued as a fundraiser for the Templar Eye Foundation, with the proceeds from sales of the book going to that worthy cause. I envisage the layout as being not unlike the Francken Manuscript, recently published by the Northern Masonic Jurisdiciton of the Ancient & Accepted Scottish Rite. The pages of the manuscript would be on one page with a ‘translation’ in easy-to-read Times New Roman typeface on the right. While both would be in English, the example I have provided below shows that the book itself is not an easy read, despite the colors being still vibrant after 140 years due to the book being infrequently used in the intervening years: and fewer people are familiar with antique cursive script in modern times. There would be prefaces from Masonic scholars in Tennessee, possibly setting the context and discussing the characters, and a foreword from the Grand Master.

The first step in this ongoing project has now been completed. The Trustees of the Robert R. Livingston Masonic Library housed in the Grand Lodge building of the Grand Lodge of New York, F. & A.M. kindly gave permission for the pages to be scanned on their state-of-the-art equipment, and I now possess RAW files of every page. The Librarian is going through the pages a second time, since the writing unfortunately extends both to the edges of the pages and right into the central crease, and disassembling the book in not permitted! I will provide updates on progress as we go forward. As you can tell, this is one of the several publishing projects I shall be working on in the coming year!