One word alone, omni-potent, omni-comprehensive, all-healing thaumaturgic [*] and resolute, which arising from the depths of a hearth of immense darkness, would impose itself beyond constraints and beyond doubts.
One word alone, invulnerable and definitive, merciless and wreathed with a halo of blasts, inhabited by the inhuman lucidity of the lightening, such that it would lacerate the skies of uncertainties and of prejudices and would warrant itself with unvanquishable evidence:

«The land of Zabulon, and the land of Nephthalim, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles;
The people which sat in darkness saw great light; and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light is sprung up.»
[Matthew 4,15]

One word alone I would need, which would erupt from the night of our confessions and such that leaping forth it would flutter glowing and pure towards the perennial day of our awareness and of our critics, and there it would enthrone itself so that whoever stares at it would clearly perceive its glare and its charisma, and would bear witness and acknowledge that it hasn't reached but the seal that becomes and befits it: like the crowning of a shakespearian king, dark and simmering beneath the thundering of a smouldering fate finally unveiled.
Is such a word among the wherewithal of mortal beings? No, it is not.
 
None the less, this is exactly what I was in search of before being initiated.
How would I have managed to accredit myself, and with insane ambition dare hope to gain heed for a word which is still profane and is unable to qualify itself as immediately trustworthy before the threshold of diffidence which welcomes it?
A ferocious Cerberus, a warden of the hinge, an inner and outer tyler perpetually preside and vigilantly watch over the corridor surrounded by immemorial pillars, and whatever stalks by it, is liable to be loathed as profane, absolutely and hopelessly profane.
Notwithstanding if profane voices cannot demand to claim within the Temple, yet they can snake with insolence around; and with the witchcraft of a charm they can attempt to delude surveillance, spying for the propitious occasion to sneak in with a whisper.
And such whisper too isn't to be but profane, doomed to implacable suspicion, because no one could foretell whether it is the ambassador and the carrier of a poisoning.
 
Therefore there is no longer a doubt about it: that whatever might ever involve Freemasonry with Evil, is a game bound to be played upon this interstice and whose bet has to be cast on this limen: upon the thin line that separates the initiated from the non initiated world, among the loopholes of mutual contamination between these two tiers, amidst all that interminable theorem either of reciprocal misunderstandings or of possible unconfessed complicities that riddle this passage and afflict this transit.

Upon the night of my confusions and of my confessions, like a melody or a reverie that sweet comes back to itself, one thing alone I knew about whom I was.
Like the Hermit in the tarots I felt, and still to-day I feel, that I belonged to an archetype of twilight, to the myth of a nobility all sheathed and enfolded within, in an intimacy where it was no longer recognizable and no longer suitable to be spotted.
My overall, my pre-initiatory apron were those of a wandering scavenger who ceaselessly harangues and petitions, beating with indefatigable hands, with unyielding insistence at kafkian gates which resound void, and which unfurl themselves along the lonely road endlessly and perpetually closed.
And every hour spurred by the brightness of my intentions, and every minute bouncing against the power of the things that reject me, I'm flung back into the obscurities of my native condition, and there I concoct senseless plans and I transformed, and still to-day I do transform, my projects into the grandiloquence of a solipsism, and all my words plummet in vain.
And there forth, uncertain whether to blame myself or solace myself blaming the strings and the arrows of an outrageous adverse fortune, I attained, and still to-day I attain, the threshold of the malices and of the incoherent claims of shakespearian purposes:

«Now is the winter of our discontent
made glorious summer (...)
But I, that am not shap'd for sportive tricks,
nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
to strut before a wanton ambling nymph:
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time
into this breathing world scarce half made up
and that so lamely and unfashionable
that dogs bark at me, as I halt by them -
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
have no delight to pass away the time
unless to spy my shadow in the sun,
and descant on my own deformity.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
to entertain these fair well spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain,
and hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots I have laid, inductions dangerous,
by drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,
To set my Brother Clarence and the King
in deadly hate, the one against the other:
and if King Edward be as true and just
as I am subtle, false, and treacherous,
this day should Clarence closely be mew'd up
about a prophecy, which says that 'G'
of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be -
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul! Here Clarence comes.»
[Shakespeare, Richard III]

Do you know of anybody, before or beyond the threshold, who is an alien to this experience, and who never felt himself as enough of an outcast to partake of this monologue? Because it is exactly this universal experience of rejection what is ultimately conducive to the Grand Evil.
In this sense, in a negative sense, there is no space, there is no interstice, there is no distance: but both the profane and the initiated still go on parting the sea swells of the same titanic ocean.

In the 60s there were those who believed that God was a bolshevik. But no, we retorted: He is american!
But it is evident that neither a God nor a Great Architect Of The Universe trouble themselves to make a universe, or an Order, ad ususm Delphini, for in such a case they would administer no longer a universe, or an Order, but a set of favorites: and a god who owns sects, favorites and courtiers is not the true god, but an idol:

«Let those who are in favour with their stars,
of public honour and proud title boast,
whilst I whom fortune of such triumph bars
Unlook'd for joy in that I honour most;
Great Princes' favourites their fair leaves spread,
but as the marigold at the sun's eye
and in themselves their pride lies buried,
for at a frown they in their glory die.
 
The painful warrior famoused for worth,
After a thousand victories once foil'd
is from the book of honour razed quite,
and all the rest forgot for which he toil'd:
then happy I that love and am beloved
where I may not remove, nor be removed. »
[Shakespeare, sonnet 25]

Would anybody among us be so naive to confer a totem with venerability? No, we would not.
Therefore it was clear to me, or at least so I was reasoning before being initiated whilst I was dangling in the true middle reign, that though I know not the shape, the countenance, and the tools of the Great Architect of the Universe, yet he had to know me already, and if to-day I am officiating to the god unknown, yet is it possible its name is Great Architect?
But it couldn't be, for

«Vocatus Atque Non Vocatus Deus Aderit»
[Oracle in Delphi]

That is, called or uncalled, and with a name or without a name, God shall show His Strength.
And with a name or without a name I too, before being initiated, thought I was a tool of some Great Architect: a tool still resting in a case, unused and pried in no Officina, utilised in no workroom, but not because of this son of a lesser god.

An idea of masonry: this is what a profane may entertain, what is required by a petitioner (though "what does he know about Freemasonry? - Nothing."), and what an Entered Apprentice must develop (though "He doesn't know how to write and how to read"), and this is what a Master Mason must have, if in him Hiram has to resurrect.
[note: I have been objected that Hiram did not resurrect. That's not the point. Hiram is a symbol, and not only he did not rersurrect in reality, but how can we know if he really even and ever existed in the first place? Do cherubims exist? I don't know, for I have never seen one. But the Bible mentions them too. Hiram is within ourselves as the Psalms say that "David is among us in disguise": David is within you, within me, within everyone in disguise. This does not mean we have an homunculus in our head whose name is "David", and that he wears a mask...; it only means that a great deal of depths are in ourselves if we would only use more than the 3% of our brain that we actually use].
 
In these cases we might wonder: what is mine, what is yours, what is our idea of Freemasonry?
But it is to need some patience. Yes, for well before mine, yours, our idea of Freemasonry, there comes the first idea that normally one entertains about Freemasonry: which is a different thing.
In fact, it is right around this primeval idea of Freemasonry, so much unmistakable as unadmitted, that all the Evil Freemasonry is accused of not being able to cope with gravitates.
So what this first idea of Freemasonry is, this idea that an Entered Apprentice would be allegedly entertaining, or that he gets suspected of being secretively entertaining? What this dazzling ideal would be? Absolutely no one, otherwise there would not be so much reticence to confess it upon oneself. In fact the first idea that comes to the mind when thinking of masonry is (shall I unveil this unto thou?): opportunism.
This parable is well engraved and ingrained within profane minds, though it cannot be denied that the discredit that Freemasonry enjoys in some mindsets can be ascribed not to diffidence for an interest suspected of being corporative, but to a resentment for an interest, reputed powerful, which cajoles us not:

«And why rail I on this commodity?
But for because he hath not woo'd me yet.»
[Shakespeare, King John]

Now, this may seem with Dante's words "Un parlar che mi parea nemico" - a wording that spelt enmity. It is possible, namely, that it doesn't suit a gentleman to wrongfoot courtesy formulas in such abrupt a way by malevolent references to a disrepute that a few, in the profane world, attach to masonry, and to a motive that many, in the profane and initiated both, may be susceptible of harbouring but that all want to keep concealed.
None the less, it is true that

«But if you be afeard to hear the worst,
then let the worst unheard fall on your head.»
[Shakespeare, King John]

and:

«See what a ready tongue suspicion hath.
He that but fears the thing he would not know
hath by instinct knowledge from other's eyes
that what he feared is chanced»
[Shakespeare, Henry IV, part II]

Consequently, acknowledging the truth of opportunistic expectations doesn't constitute a threatening preliminary, but a fertile one: because it situates a potential problem and a common misunderstanding upon the floor where its true root resides. And since

«Benevolence is incompatible with Truth, and fecund is only our mute dialogue with our enemies.»
[E.M. Cioran]

we are then furnished with one more reason to lift this curtain.

Now, how can we get rid of this vocation to opportunism, of this agreeable nightmare?
It is apparent that opportunism is miserable: it feeds itself upon crumbles, upon "grand trifles" [E.M. Cioran] and it relishes in small abuses.
It is thus apparent that opportunism means delivering oneself to coasting trade.
No opportunist makes the strike of the century, and he who makes the strike of the century is not an opportunist but a magician.
And therefore the moral sizes of these two characters although seemingly in the same kinship because they share in avidity, none the less are uncommensurable.
 
Nothing would impede, of course, that an organization whose vertex would pursue the strike of the century might tolerate at its basis the teeming of the opportunists, "the petty intrigues between courtiers and the infightings between satraps, in a climate where the resolutive decisions are not taken after serious reasons, but after college rancors" [Max Weber].
But is is unavoidable that, in such an organization, the opportunists might end up prevailing and tainting, with their insignificance, the meaning of the whole structure, pervading and overtaking it and eventually turning it into a real nest of venoms and of vipers.
 
I believe I'm speaking the language of responsibility if I therefore say that even on this ground (because if I can attack it on this ground, I'm safe on all grounds) wherever opportunism dare show its leer, it must be dislodged without mercy and must be routed without quarters in nothing short of an all out fight.
Because it doesn't just constitute a puerile egotism that whoever got stuck to a pre-oral narcissism lulls himself with, interpreting reality after an infantile spite uncapable of aiming at and building grand objectives.
Opportunism is so evil that it can even eclipse evils greater than it: it may make even grandiose evil, the Miltonian Evil, collapse and crumble; because even watching at the opportunists with the indulgence that a luciferin sovereign beyond good and evil in his machinations might bestow upon them considering them but his nestlings, this monarch of horror would just end up realizing they were not nestlings but full fledged scorpions, and that they, as all scorpions do, would sting him when wading on his shoulders and right in the middle of the ford; and this simply because, they would answer accordingly to the well know fable, "well, you see: it is just in my nature to do this type of things."

Thinking and taking politics, accordingly to Ralf Dahrendorf.
Thinking and taking: masonry.
But in politics thinking is a prerequisite, as much oblivious as indispensable, strictly functional to acting.
Therefore such thinking is unfit to keep brooding on the riverbed of the thought until it ignites the luminosity of an archetypical lamp, of a flowing light that, rising to the rank of a guardian numen, insensible and indifferent to the finalisms of the purposes, would implode within the mind and come to reap and tap all the energies from all the latitudes of the Spirit and summon all the contingents of the Thought in a sudden and dramatic Exodus.
 
Like that, exactly like that for Freemasonry.
For Freemasonry appears to be first of all, and perhaps uniquely, the palpitation of a vast and unceasing thinking that once kindled self feeds itself and never seems to abate or to get placated.
It is every day experience of any Mason, I believe, rearing within oneself not only a thinking and a rehearsal of what Freemasonry is and what being a Freemason may mean and may entail, but most of all partaking in that much more acute and symptomatic experience of catching within oneself an impression till then ciphered and unnamed that, evaporating at the heat of the attention finally focused upon it, dispels the fogs that enveloped it and reveals the presence of a whole host of back-thoughts, arrayed subtle and tight in the field, perennially busy elaborating and cooking Masonry.
 
Undoubtedly such phenomenology, looking like the exacerbation of our imbalances, seems to belong to the psychology of the possessed and to partake in the fatal obsessions of the fanatic.
None the less we ought to admit that there is a feature in it that doesn't make easily viable the liquidation imported with this interpretation.
 
In fact it is evident that the innermost and tepid meaning attained by rocking oneself with such abstraction, consists in this, that being or wanting to be a Freemason is something that trascends the mere membership with a professional category, deontologically and indefectibly turned towards exoteric [*] finalities; rather, it is something that pertains to the esoteric [*], and which through this pertinence qualifies itself and differentiates itself from the professional profile only inasmuch, and only as far as, as a masonic identity pervades and involves the feeling of a personal identity both ontological and occult: namely which imbues us along all our latitudes and all our longitudes. A medical doctor, once home, dismisses his medical concerns. A freemason does not and can not: ghosts keep haunting him.
 
In this case being or wanting to be a freemason means tracking back and every hour revisit, as a Sisyphus grateful to his fate, the meaning of the membership in a real ethnos [*] lived as irreducible and coherent.
It is on this note, on this tonality that the reciprocal and syllogistic possibility of growing together and not despite or against the Institution grafts itself. Because the sense of belonging to an ethnos that contributes to the definition of an esoteric identity (and all identities are such) implies the impossibility that it goes beyond you or that you go beyond it, likewise it is impossible that what becomes a personal evolution, induced by the belonging to the Order, may fail to produce beneficial retroactions to the Order itself.

It is here that the differentiation from the Catholic Church arises as an unavoidable metaphysical necessity.
In fact, being a freemason doesn't require at all the abdication of one's own individual particularities to sacrifice them to the impersonality of an inexorable and protocanonical [*] god, but on the contrary it postulates the exaltation of these particularities until the determination of a firmament of spiritual and scintillant monads [*], accomplished and fully realized in their Uniquenesses, consistent and participant in that state to the gravitation upon the same plane - or sliding upon the same stellar dome.
 
This conclusion is supplied with such a force by the truth upon which translucent it transparently rests, that although the clash with the Catholic Church (freemasons were excommunicated by Pope Innocenzo XI, if I'm not mistaken, and confirmed by Pio IX, codified in the Codice di Diritto Canonico canone 2335) leaves exposed this unbridgeable vulnus [*] still perceived as scandalous and unhealable, none the less from this wound emanates and spreads no panic destructuring one's own identity or the Grand Orient's one, but on the contrary it consolidates the feeling of an authority grown adult, perfectly self aware and fearless and as such entitled to deal upon equal basis with whatever else esoteric magnitude.
 
This is why a freemason, while keeping his/her own personal religious creed whatever it may be, is required, once in the Temple, to acknowledge the existence not of a god but of a Great Architect Of The Universe, a name general enough to be capable of subsuming in itself any specific faith. A god cannot be but a god and as such He is jealous; as E.M. Cioran wrote

«It has been alleged that Christ was not a sage. His words at the last supper testify this: this do in remembrance of me. Now, a sage never speaks on his own account. A sage is impersonal. Let's admit this. Only, Christ didn't mean to be a sage. He was a god, which demanded a less modest wording, a personal wording indeed.»

On the contrary a Great Architect Of The Universe is no god, it is an architect!
Its bursting into the foreground is not studded and glorified by a procession of apotheoses, by militant saints, by cherubims enveloped in clouds, by full armoured crusaders, and by believers; rather it is a soft spreading of aseptic and impersonal hints beckoning the perfection of the asymptotes, ushering into hyperbolic purities, waving the hyperuranian neutrality of algebraical digits, the tensities of leonardian parallaxes drawn with indian ink, welcoming the risings and the slopes not of men and cathedrals but of parables, the turning of sines into cosines, and quiet dissertations of geometrical analyses subtended upon a graph papyrus.
 
Which is exactly what it is needed when what is meant is not the pursuit of the mortification or of the deletion and of the flattening of personal identities and creeds, but conversely their development and their perfection, within a context of parameters suitable to warrant, by their own anonymous neutrality, against any coercion and suitable to grant the free unfurling of whatever value you may be pleased to ascribe to the anonymous variables of the equation.
For:

Glory for the Great Architect Of The Universe
Greatness for the Worshipful Master
and Geometry for all the Brothers

This is why a Great Architect Of the Universe is an idea that makes no noise. And I say 'this is why' because believing that it makes no noise or -worst- that it should make no noise for other reasons, would only mean to have mistaken invisibility with darkness:

«GADSHILL (...) We steal in a castle, cock-sure. We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible.
CHAMBERLAIN Nay, by my faith, I think you are more beholding to the night than to fern-seed for your walking invisible.»
[Shakespeare, Henry IV, part I]

Indeed, the fact that a Great Architect of the Universe is so quiet stirs this misinterpretation: that it is hushing because it has something to hide, that it is invisible in order to cheat, and that it is so impalpable to abuse even better.
And such is indeed the most trivial misapprehension of what a Great Architect can be, and of being, and wanting to be, a freemason.
Once again, we ascribe the radix of Evil to Freemasonry when we indulge in this misrepresentation, when we keep treading on the dividing line between the profane and the initiated.
None the less, since it is also a misinterpretation that hovers about the Great Architect Of The Universe, it would be blind arguing that it has nothing to do at all with the Great Architect of The Universe itself, and that he who deludes himself into this postulation is also, by that, telling a blatant lie: in fact, even he who wrongly thinks so believes in a Great Architect as well, and speaks the truth about it; and he believes it and speaks the truth about it exactly inasmuch as st. James wrote:

«What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?
(...) if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works.
Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.»

Therefore no need to argue or to wonder who this freemason is, and who is right and who is wrong about him: you don't have to tell a man by your wildest imaginations: you can tell him by a safer avenue. By his works.

Risking being pedant, let's repeat it once again. Being a freemason, electing to be a freemason, instantly and invariably means being potentially exposed upon a plane where you're vulnerable by the loathsome reductivism of one innuendo alone, always the same, monotonously: that you're being a freemason for a mundane 'interest'.
But since it cannot exist a structure whose unique purpose consists in lavishing systemic favours to its own acolytes or which would consent to their extortion (for such a structure wouldn't be able of bequeathing its legacy across the centuries as Freemasonry does, but would conversely get exhausted, and would get exhausted very quickly indeed), likewise it is apparent that the intra-psychical path that leads to the maturity of this vocation, is a path that never crosses the roads of reductivism.
Whoever would have approached Freemasonry harbouring an opportunistic set of expectations, would have proved by this very same fact that he/she had a very naive and narrow conception and outlook on life. Such expectation would imply that you've yielded to an existence that bases itself upon survival, not upon life: a life riddled with accidents, every hour engrossed in the mendicancy for a facilitation, vowed to drag itself along by expedients, striding in the kingdom of the episodic and of the occasional, sieged by the incertitudes of a frown, plagued by the perpetual mirage of a lucky strike that looks like waiting for the message of the Emperor in Kafka.
The Brothers can certainly try lend a helpful hand if a real and overwhelming chance occurs: but summoning Freemasonry upon this level signifies losing Freemasonry.
 
Being a freemason testifies a will to provide one's energies with an additional capacity that may help funnelling one's personality and self towards a superior integration: and such a task is so pivotal that no means should be spared by a man who is really concerned with his soul and the spiritual longing that he feels quivering in it.
You don't have a faith in freemasonry: you can at most have affection; the same affection which isn't but the transposition, on the emotional level, of the pulsional drive of commotion and gratitude you experience when it looms and dashes in your mind the idea that you may have found at least one of the things you were in search for: vox clamans in deserto, plea crying in the wilderness.
 
We're before some called the vocation, the calling, the metanoia (latin term).
It is obvious then that the preliminary inquest of a petitioner knocking at the Temple's door is, possibly, even more critical and crucial than the initiation itself. In fact, the initiation under this perspective comes to be nothing else but the certification and formal corroboration of a substantial immanence that preexisted the initiation itself, and lacking which the initiation itself would have no longer any meaning but that of sporting a ceremony as much sophisticated and suggestive as it would be frigid.

Albrecht Altdorfer, The Birth Of The Virgin, 1525, Munich - Alte Pinakothek

Arguably, it wouldn't be "orthodox" alleging that the petitioning phase, insisting upon such delicate and decisive a threshold, also partakes of an ambiguous land, populated with amphibious chimaeras, whereas if on the one hand you're still out of the Temple and "profane", on the other hand you're already in the Temple and initiated.
Notwithstanding, to the probing of the petitioner belongs the commitment to inquiry into the presence of a requisite that antecedes the initiation, and whose nature is essential insomuch as it is designated to be preserved for the whole of the post-initiatory course: the sincerity of your vocation, your availability to the experience of an intimate, profound rebirth, and consequently by the agency of all of the fore mentioned the implicit acknowledgement that the initiated belonged to Freemasonry (better, to the Myth represented and enacted through Freemasonry) since ever, since a mysterious, astral and unheard of time, that forewent the current one and upon which, perhaps, the initiated fully shared the membership and the spirituality of a Freemasonry before Freemasonry, of a Freemasonry ante-litteram.
 
Irresistible this conclusion appears to be. But its main arch consists in this, that since its reasoning is convincing, it is logical, it is persuasive, it annihilates the idea of an unbridgeable gap between the "profane" and the "initiated" too, and it extinguishes the hiatus no longer on a negative ground, the ground upon which if the profane and the initiated meet they pollute each other, but on a positive ground. Upon this plane, in fact, the comparison with the profane relinquishes no idea of Evil any longer.
And this is a stunning conclusion.

Before switching to the symbolism of the pillars, to the parallelism they imply, to the meaning that may be entangled when speaking of their shadows, I want now to speak of an additional factor which has been an endless spring of misunderstandings and which so frequently has been wielded as an evidence of some Evil in the Kingdom of Denmark.
I want to speak of the masonic oath, of the masonic bond which is alleged as unbreakable.
 
Have you ever read a novel titled Teresa Raquin, by Emile Zola?
The mother was paralytic, and her son and his wife kill themselves, sort of a double suicide Kleist style; and they kill themselves before her eyes after a long string of vicissitudes she had to witness in her utter impotence:

«The corpses rested on the floor of the room for the whole night, wrangled and curled, lightened only by the xanthous glimmers that the lamps casted upon them. And for nearly twelve hours, until the next day at noon, the mother, silent and rigid, contemplated them at her feet, being unable to fill herself with their sight, crushing them with the inexorability of her gaze.»

I believe it is about this. I mean that the alleged unbreakable nature of the masonic bond's feature, shades into the features of a sweet condemnation, that doesn't stop being a condemnation because it is sweet: a condemnation wanted, sought for, whatever you may prefer: but still sort of a damnation. To what?
To be forceful constrained to keep one's eyes open before the evil we more gladly would recoil from.
In fact it is seemingly that ideating an unbreakable bond is conceived to be operative in the unfortunate circumstances, for who would ever need a bond in order to keep together persons upon merry fates that already entice them enough?
So an unbreakable bond would apparently insinuate that you're not bound only for the good, but that you're bound also for the bad, that you're bound in good and bad times as well, and therefore it seems to import the innuendo that you would have been especially bound in the evil.
What evil then, and whose?
 
Let's be clear: evil is a cosmogonic creature that preexists whatever Freemasonry, operative or speculative, regular or irregular (if an irregular freemasonry should be called freemasonry at all). Therefore no hue of perverse relishing emblazons us, no idea of being invested upon satanic seats: Freemasonry is not a satanic sect, it is not even a sect. And since not even the Holy Inquisition went thus far with such rubbish and charge Freemasonry with such accusation not even when the Pope put on the dock Tommaso Crudeli, it is then evident that the Evil we suspect the masonic bond being importing is not the cosmogonic evil, but a more specific, lesser one.
If "the good is that towards which everything aspires to" [Aristotle, Ethics], evil should be deduced like that from which everything cringes and flees from.
Flees where? flees from what?
For if you flee from it, then evil is.
It is not the nothing, the privatio boni (absence of the good), for then by escaping from it you wouldn't but widen the compass of its realm, leaving no man's land being there where something earlier was: the good.
None the less, regardless of how much you escape from it, we'd guess that evil exists and pursues us, because it goes on target and nothing is really spared by it.
It is just like in that wondrous excerpt by Carlos Castaneda:

« -Don Juan, there is a car following us, it is a long time I see its lamps.-
-That is not a car- Don Juan said.
-Oh well. If it is not a car what would it be then?-
-Those are the lights upon the hat of Death. Death keeps these lights upon her hat, and then, when she starts her pursuit, she dons her hat.-
I thought he was insane and I dropped the subject. After a while, emboldened, I said to him that the care was no longer after us: -see Don Juan, the car is no longer behind us, I can't see its light any longer.-
-Oh- Don Juan replied: -but death never quits pursuing you. At times it just switches the bulbs off.-»

Compelling, isn't it? And how true.
Whether Death as a metaphor of evil, or evil as a metaphor for death, or whether evil as absolute evil, evil is something: something that pursues the good to break it asunder. And you deduct no relativism from this, for the good has no vested interest in tearing evil apart but only in developing itself unfettered by it: the ambition to subvert doesn't belong to the good, but to the evil alone; and, of course, only what is incomplete entertains ambitions:

«When workmen strive to do better than well
they do confound their skill in covetousness.»
[Shakespeare, King John]

Of course, all these appear otiose and pointless rantings, for you cannot reduce evil to reason by force of explanations, and it sounds as if somebody would be speaking in the name of good and evil because one would have been a good acquaintance of them.
But one element at least which you cannot challenge is in them: namely that none the less, evil exists: "an opinion this, that like stating that two plus two yields four, can be contended by no one except those very few who had a very long philosophical preparation" [a characteristically caustic Bertrand Russell].
And since evil is not just something that dwells in men but that lives of its own outside men, the correct question is not whether evil exists or what it is: but where is it?
Where is the Kingdom of Evil?
Is it a star embedded in the fulcrum of a collapsed gravity, or is it a quasar riding the galactic oceans? Or is evil a woodworm that roams unfindable among time's burrows?
 
It may seem incredible, but Freemasonry has an incredible answer to this.
Let me swing.
 
It is alleged that in the objective reality is not present just a patent order, but even a latent sub-order: likewise evil stalks good facing it with the expectation of a counter-order, an anti-order, completely different and structured, and by the agency of which evil is insidious to good, leaping forth with a subordinate order meant to insubordinate the superior one.
At any rate, little matter whether this sub-order exists indeed, because as we are to see Freemasonry aspires to provide an incarnation for this face off.
Anyway a subordinate order seems really to be in place, and it seems to exert its powers unfailingly and unyielding: we experience and sense it particularly on those times when the whole appears hostile to us, and obstinately incomprehensible, informed and trespassed by the pulsing of an alien will, situated elsewhere in a mysterious and inaccessible stronghold:

«A malefic genius presides the destiny of History, a peculiar providence, isn't it, extremely suspect, and whose schemes are a bit less impenetrable than those of the original one (alleged beneficial) only insofar as it acts in such a manner that the civilizations whose progression is led by it invariably depart from their original route, in order to attain the opposite of their primitive intentions, in order to fall in the pit with a stubborn regularity that well betrays the plots of a gloomy and ironical Power.»
[E.M. Cioran - my translation]

A power that mocks at our failures and upon our tombs, and that so quickly gratifies itself with the latest trap it was pleased to lay before our stroll, only because it is already intent to array the next ones. And

«Here I and sorrows sit. (...)
Law cannot give my child his kingdom here,
for he that holds his kingdom holds the law.
Therefore since law itself is perfect wrong,
How can the law forbid my tongue to curse? (...)
All form is formless, order orderless (...)
I will not keep this form upon my head,
When there is such disorder in my wit. »
[Shakespeare, King John]

And also:

«For thy great bounty, that not only giv'st
me cause to wail, but teachest me the way
how to lament the cause.»
[Shakespeare, Richard II]

I therefore define suborder a disposition of elements, also generically meant, organized and teleologically [*] oriented according to perspectives of their own whose overall characteristic is to array themselves parallel to reality, namely capable of exhibiting a specular and symmetrical correspondence with all its pivotal hinges although proceeding upon a different and autonomous track and after differentiated directives, so that by these correspondences the parallel order can manipulate and circumvent the super-order handling them as knobs and keys, in order to turn it towards a finality that didn't belong to the intentions of the super order.
 
In this fashion it is clear that if a sub-order exists, it may well exists but we inhabit it not: this is what confers things with their meanings and their misunderstandings, lacking which none of them could have ever existed.
 
In fact if I say: pentagon! There can be no equivocation: a pentagon is a shape with five sides.
But if I say: good, then the air teems with enchantments.
'Good' can be meant as an hedonistic denomination, behind which a whole apparatus of meanings can rise.
'Good' can be an ethic qualification, which implies a doctrine of judgement.
'Good' may be a metaphysical innuendo that signifies what is desirable and thereby discloses the gates to an immense kingdom of libido that not even the most sophisticated multi-disciplinal approaches have tamed yet.
'Good' can import an utilitarian intension, which introduces the problems of pragmatism.
So in all cases if when I say 'pentagon' I realize what is transmitted is a merely cybernetic datagram (insofar as there exist not two conflicting definitions of pentagon) and therefore I can receive it without hesitancies, as soon as I say 'good' "we immediately sense that they're telling us something which has a philosophical range, and that is completely beyond the mere informative reach of a dictionary" [Bertrand Russell].
I therefore understand that behind the word 'good' I'm being served with a semantic [*] universe all but settled down and undisputed, in sort of a logrolling whereas, beneath a semiological [*] surface apparently neutral and shared, a whole vast and promiscuous smuggling of meanings is being entertained in disguise.
"All the times that a definition leads us to wonder whether it is true and whether it corresponds to its verbal usage, there is ground to suspect that we're not dealing with a definition" [Bertrand Russell], but exactly with this notorious sub-order, parallel to reality and which contradicts it although continuously cohabiting with it.
 
That's the very elusive woodworm which cranks within time's burrows! It is like a SNAFU (Situation Normal All Fouled Up) of the videogames, where interminable and voracious anellids trail with temerarious speed along the meanders of a fatal maze, perpetually threatening to stumble against pacman and to phagocytize it with one mouthful.
It is like a man who, leaning from the loophole of a murky and obscure wall, doesn't discern the sad platonic shadows any longer, but the vertigo of a ravening, outlandish panorama made up of waterfalls, pluvial forests, meadows of grazing chimaeras, atolls burdened with the luxurious magnificence of nature and scattered as far as the eye can see upon an ocean that breaks over cordilleras of snow capped mountains whose peaks wound the purest twilight making gush out of it the purples and the golds of the sun turned into blood:

«There will come that day when the young god will be turned into a man,
without grief, with the dead smile of a man
who understood. Also the sun runs remote
reddening the beach. One day will raise
that the god won't know any longer where his shores are.
You wake up one morning and the summer is over,
in your eyes its splendors still rumble
as yesterday, and in your ears still are the clangs of the sun
turned into blood. The colour of the world has undergone a change.
The mountain touches no longer the sky; the clouds
do not gather any longer as grapes; in the waters
you see pebbles no longer. The body of a man
bends thoughtful, there were a god was breathing.
The grand sun is over, and the smell of sand,
and the free road, coloured with people
that knew nothing of death. You don't die on summers.
If anybody disappeared, there was the young god
who lived for all and who ignored death.
Upon him sadness was but the shade of a cloud.
His gait made the earth wonder.
Now it weights,
this strain upon all the limbs of the man,
without grief: the quiet calm of a dawn
which heralds a day of rain. The obscured shores
know not the young man, who upon a time hadn't but
to gaze at them. Neither the sea nor the air lives back
at his heaving. The lips of the man tilt
resigned to a grimace before the earth.»
[Cesare Pavese, from Lavorare stanca - my translation]

All these meanings that we drill from a simple stone, we hand them over each other every day and with the highest possible nonchalance. What does it imply, that we master them?
But if it were so, the world wouldn't be what it is namely an abyss of incomprehensions:

«Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
and then is heard no more: it is a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.»
[Shakespeare, Macbeth]

Devote and coherent conclusion, this, worth of being devotedly pursued; which rather leads us to admit how much our nonchalance is symptomatic of our complete lack of awareness about all the implied meanings we host and which, we mastering them not for control wouldn't match but with full awareness, delude us into the hosts of all our misunderstandings that daily lay siege upon us and often ruin us: we undertake unhappy choices, we deliver harm to the others just to be sure we're delivering it to ourselves too, and without purpose we sink, we sink within authentic, veritable tragedies which we can appoint with a name but not with -precisely- a meaning.
it is the sub-order that mocks at us with its smirk, it is the sub-order that reverts itself to be once again the "gloomy and ironic power" it is.

Awareness is nearly all.
Nearly. For if awareness is not accompanied by some strength it may fail.
The sub-order insinuates itself from every crevice and we risk, patched a leak in the hull, to find new ones continuously spreading, after a pattern that quickly carries us towards exasperation's rocks, just in order to fling us back once and again in the embrace of the gloomy and ironical power that sneers at us. From thence only one chance, either suicide or surrender, and lead then the life of the crooks who, as all the crooks are, are as much unhappy as the sages, and therefore are cube crooks.
Indeed, men are cheap prostitutes, and nothing is quicker in their hands than turning into a swindler for no other reason but it:

«Treason and murder ever kept together,
as two yoke-devils sworn to either's purpose,
working so grossly in a natural cause
that admiration did not whoop at them:
but thou, 'gainst all proportion, didst bring in
wonder to wait on treason and on murder:
and whatsoever cunning fiend it was
that wrought upon thee so preposterously
hath got the voice in hell for excellence:
all other devils suggest by treason
do botch and bungle up damnation
with patches, colours, and with forms, being fetch'd
from glistering semblances of piety;
but he that temper'd thee bade thee stand up,
gave thee no instance why thou should'st do treason,
unless to dub thee with the name of traitor.
If that same demon that hat gull'd thee thus
should with his lion gait walk the whole world,
he might return to vasty Tartar back,
and tell the legions: "I can never win
a soul so easy as that Englishman's".
O, how hast thou with jealousy infected
the sweetness of affiance. Show men dutiful?
Why, so didst thou. Seem they grave and learned?
Why, so didst thou. Come they of noble family?
Why, so didst thou. Seem they religious?
Why, so didst thou. Or are they spare in diet,
free from gross passion or of mirth or anger,
constant in spirit, not swerving with the blood,
garnish'd and deck'd in modest complement,
nor working with the eye without the ear,
and but in purged judgement trusting neither?
Such and so finely bolted didst thou seem:
and thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot,
to mark the full-fraught man and best indued
with some suspicion. I will weep for thee;
for this revolt of thine, methinks, is like
another fall of man. Their fault are open:
arrest them to the answer of the law;
and God acquit them of their practices!»
[Shakespeare, Henry V]

Fine outcome, that you have to choose between a honest suicide and an exponential crook, just in order to be, in both cases, but an idiot who tells a story filled with screams and fury, which wastes all, spares nothing, and that eventually signified a round cipher.
 
As Woody Allen wrote with irony (I translate, though): "Never like nowadays we found ourselves before such dramatic a fork: one way leads us to the most absolute wreck, the other leads us into the most definitive catastrophe: a choice is badly wanted!"
There would be little to smile about anyway, if the fruit of our deeds is the one picked for us by our defeat that foreruns our actual ones: it seems that we made the choice in the cradle, when no motive spurred us. An italian writer, Ennio Flaiano, wrote: "We are interested in prostitution because it is our condition, and in murder because it is our ambition"; "prostitutes in a world without sidewalks" [E.M. Cioran] we daily beggar for our occasion to crime in order to express ourselves more fittingly, yielding a result about which, honestly, I can locate no reason to be proud of:

"Honestly, do you like shit?
Well, once in a while just for a change.
Mistake: you have to swallow it every day; once in a while, it bothers."
[Ennio Flaiano]

You alway find persons fooled enough to believe that, imagining they got disentangled of human trammels, they assume they can prove it aping the sneer that the sub-order makes at them; for they believe that making of themselves its disciples, the Sneer will spare them.
Or possibly because they believe that although the Sneer won't spare them, this does not constitute one more reason to keep the distance from it but conversely an even better one to identify themselves with it with higher pitch and accelerated fervor. And you often bring along as an explanation that over years you have to attain this conclusions, that over year you have without doubt to reach kind of a disenchanted adulthood which would loiter upon such flawed grounds:

«But the deal is as follows: over time and over years a man, in a spiritual sense, arrives without doubt to a round nothing. Conversely it is easy indeed that you lose something over years; perhaps you lose over years that little passion, that little sentiment, that little fantasy, that little humility you had, and without doubt you arrive (for here you arrive without doubt) to understand the world after the determinations of triviality. This 'enhanced' status, which really ensued over years, men desperately consider as good!»
[Kierkegaard - my translation]

As I told you: desperately and devotedly. Namely he is persuaded of it. We're in the presence of a converted, and as you may guess this cannot be the conversion that needs a whole Freemasonry to be attended: you can gain it at any crossroad, without bothering with a ritual. In fact for this type of conversions I do can assure you no Freemasonry is required.
 
This misunderstanding is what, stretching, led to the negative connotation that some bundle with the term freemason.
For Freemasonry exactly decided to impersonate with its own Myth the Myth of the parallelism: a daring and titanic role, which makes of Freemasonry a metaphysical entity whose proportions are potentially dazzling: a new parallel order capable of shaking the real from a remote fortress, scarcely visible and hardly passable, from where it flings apollinean arrows of light. You ought to understand this if you want to understand why a few persons always suspect Freemasonry of having something to share with evil, which is the subject of my treatise indeed: because Freemasonry emulates this ARCHETYPE of a parallel order, and a parallel order is a Myth that is bound to conjure also those fears. When you believe that Freemasonry would have had something to share with Evil, you're simply another victim of the kindled archetype, that as such cannot but summon the whole of the significances of all the potential and infinitely rich meanings it hosts. You're swapping the shape with the contents, and since you see a parallelism, you're induced to believe it could have been that type parallelism.

No one now would wonder any longer why you can find so many senseless allegations about Freemasonry: freemasons would have been the owners of the CIA, of the NSA, would have been in touch with the aliens, would run Echelon, would rule the world, and a whole string of such sheer nonsense that one has to wonder how's possible that a healthy mindset may really believe such lots of contradictions enormities and clear absurdities.
 
A Mythology that elected to move by upon this terrain, has elected one among the grandest grounds, absolutely.
Freemasonry is not evil and has no intrinsic tendency to evil or any peculiar knack for it: but it is plausible it can be perceived, by a profane look, as possibly inhabited or moved by the dimension I just dealt with. Of course, this misunderstanding did not provide Freemasonry with suspicion alone but also with a great deal of clearly sensed admiration: it is sensed, namely, that such Mythology has a fulgent might, that it has versions that irradiate blasts of light. And you wear there white gloves, exactly because Freemasonry evolving over time included symbols fit ti characterize its specific type of parallelism: on white gloves you'd detect a stain immediately.
 
This is why the symbolisms that Ramsay wanted for the high degrees of the Scottish Rite are rich with double faced figures like the two headed eagles: because you do have to master a parallelism if you want to embody it with nobility and you do not want to be a victim of it.
The "gloomy and ironical power" isn't but one of the mythologies that exploit parallelism: as such you cannot use it as a ruler for all other mythologies that exploit the same Mythgram. For the parallelism of Freemasonry is exactly the parallelism of an avenger against the damages inflicted by the parallelism of the "gloomy and ironical power", it is a challenge to it upon its ground: this is why the masonic Mythology is so incredibly powerful, because its stakes are set so high.
 
If any evil would derive form a masonic parallelism, it would ensue from deviation. Deviation from what? Precisely, from the linearity of this parallelism.
A deviation from a linear path may concern parallelism in its entirety, namely it can be a deviation not as far as the degree of the implied divergence is concerned but as far as it would appear systemic or frequently recurring.
In such a case it would be a deviation no longer, for an endemic and structural deviation would certainly retain within its semantic kit the meaning of "aberration", but would lose that of "exception" that is indispensable to it.
 
Of course, a deviation is such if it can furnish a non moot evidence that the claimed deviation was the deviation of a fraction and not of the system. The one and only occasion when Freemasonry got entangled with a deviation was the so called P2 affair. An italian affair, actually (a knowledge of italian history would readily show any reader that with the so called operation "Mani Pulite" -clean sweep- the judiciary powers -in 1991, soon after the fall of the Berlin wall- unveiled a streaming texture of corruption that was plaguing the whole of Italy: Italy had several premiers under trial or dismissed because they were found having shielded for years a settled practice of grafting and bribing. Great tycoons went under trial and a few committed suicide; a whole festering tissue was brought to light. None of those men was a mason. None the less, I was not surprised when it was discovered that also in a Lodge named P2 a few were found amusing themselves with the same type of bribery and bank embezzlements that were cheerfully going on on vast scale in the whole of the country. If you single out that deviation from the global social turmoil in Italy you may end up concluding wrongly that there was a masonic issue: there was none, there was an italian social & global issue).
If such an evidence of the isolated singularity of the deviation could not be furnished we should deduce that the deviation belonged to the whole system and that therefore it was not a deviation but a mimetic euphemism for the norm, for it would be obvious that if a whole apparatus would have been deviated, we would behold no longer a parallelism but a mystification. And, indeed, we would behold no longer a Freemasonry too.
 
Every mystification is such because it is a tautology: it explains itself by itself. And since every tautology partakes in the indistinct nature of the Uroborous [*] which hinders any evolution, as such it is a pathology.
With such pathology men will find themselves exposed wherever they go, whenever they live, whatever they do: it is a curse and a malediction engrained on the human seed, not on this or that specific man: and perennially we'll have to watch out in order to eradicate it from our lives. But before, not after it has done the damage.
As long as it is done before, we're perfectly within the bosom of physiology. If it happens after, it means you already trespassed inside pathology, it means that evil 's gates swung open, it means it is already too late: the idiot has started crying his story full of sound and fury, and which would fundamentally mean quite nothing but that somebody, in one occasion clothed with initiatory prerogatives, has performed pretty counter-initiatory deeds, which are already out of Freemasonry, which already are no longer Freemasonry, with the only empiric consequence to bequeath his own name "with a never ceasing infamy" [Machiavelli] and Freemasonry with a tarnishing stain that never belonged to It in the least.