DavidGoode

At the festive board after our Rose Croix meeting last Friday, the starter was a two halves of a boiled egg on a bed of salad, topped with a curried mayonnaise dressing, and the caterers had arranged three slices of cucumber, each with half a baby tomato on top, in a triangular pattern round the eggs. I have to say, it bore a remarkable similarity to your "Triune System of the Peace". Have you cleverly recruited Masonic caterers around the world to infiltrate your ideas subliminally using curried eggs and various components of a salad?

My illusion is shattered!

As a member of an Ely lodge as well as my mother lodge in Cambridge, you can now tell precisely how many times I’ve attended an LoI!

Ah, right. Thanks.

What's a Junior Master, a Junior ceremony, and a Junior team? I've never heard of any of those.

I'm not sure I can even remember the difference. I'll have to ask him to show me again. I was at your Craft lodge last Friday, but you weren't there!

A Scottish friend of mine joined our Mark lodge a couple of years ago. He'd received his Mark in his Scottish Craft lodge, but we accepted it anyway. For some reason it fell to me to prove him beforehand, and I noticed that they give one of the signs very slightly differently.

Yes, different colour entirely.

I think so. Mark after Passing and before Raising, and PoV after Raising and before HRA. Were you at the demonstration of POV a couple of years ago at Bateman St? Very interesting.

I think MrSifter has got it about right. I’d like to see the Mark in its proper place, between Passing and Raising, followed by HRA, all in the the Craft lodge. I’m rather pleased that the other orders are not in the vice-like and stifling grip of UGLE.

Or go ahead and recognise their contribution anyway. I can think of several brothers in our Province with dark blue rosettes on their aprons.

My thinking is quite simple: the exoteric honours system has (I believe) become so prominent to make up for a lack of any meaningful esoteric content. How different might English Freemasonry feel if everyone wore the same plain white apron in Craft lodges, an ordinary companion's apron in the RA, with a clear pathway from Craft to Royal Arch to the 18th Degree of the Ancient & Accepted Rite, the Rose Croix, for example.

@Trouillogan, I know what it would take, but I also know it will never happen, for the reasons you outline in your opening three paragraphs. What it would take is this, for UGLE to abandon the exoteric and divisive "honours" system and embrace some of the orders beyond Craft and RA. Mark, RAM, and A&AR would be a start. It's a pipe dream, I know, but that would be a radical move which would bear fruit.

Or even worse, why some lodges would neither close nor amalgamate, but just die slowly.

Yes, welcome, Eric. Visit. Get yourself out there and enjoy. And we are all mostly a nice bunch. Even Trouillogan, Sontaran, and Jon, all of whom I know!