The Universal Language of Freemasonry - ArchiMeD - Johannes ...

Chapter 8 - Categorization of Rituals 693
the larger American democracy." 1680 In other countries, there also exist students'
societies, but they are not as dominantly prevalent each and everywhere as in the
U.S.A. Every visitor to the United States will have noticed the many Greek letter
societies on the campus. Do those fraternities have some connection with the
Masons or are entirely independent of them? They also have initiation
ceremonies, "secret" sessions, pins, "rituals," and constitutions. We learn from
CME that some of these college fraternities were indeed founded by Masons or
Knights Templar, that some united with or were absorbed by ordinary college
fraternities, and that some are even limited to Masonic members. 1681
The idea was born when a club of Master Masons started the Square and
Compass college societies at Washington and Lee University at Lexington,
Virginia, in 1897. 1682 In 1917, this first college society, the "Square and Compass
Fraternity," received a charter. In the following years, it began to form many
collegiate chapters called "Squares," which included college presidents, Grand
Lodge officers, professionals, and public officials. A parallel organization was
the "Sigma Mu Sigma", formed in 1921 by three Knights Templar at Tri-State
College, Angola, Indiana. It amalgamated with the "Square and Compass
Fraternity" in 1952 and became the "Square and Compass - Sigma Mu Sigma."
Another example is the "Order of the Golden Key" formed in 1925 at Norman,
Oklahoma, which apparently grew from an organization of Master Masons at the
University of Oklahoma. It is limited to Freemasons and is composed of two
degrees: "Chief Craftsman, or Pledge Degree," and "Knight of the Golden Key,
or Initiatory Degree." It has two other classes, the "Order of Pentalpha," which is
honorary, and the "Order of the Golden Circle" for the officers. In Illinois, there
is the "Tau Kappa Epsilon" (TKE) which started at Illinois Wesleyan University
in 1899 under the name of "The Knights of Classic Lore," and which in 1934
absorbed some of the Sigma Mu Sigma chapters.
It is a fact that there is little to the activities of college fraternities today
which suggests their ties with Freemasonry. Nor are they particularly social
organizations. Their honorary fraternities are devoted to scholarship and attempt
to foster intellectual activity on campuses. However, we still can observe several
similarities of these "college frats" with Freemasonry. For example, college
fraternities also promote the idea of self-perfection, which we find so
emblematically expressed by the "working on the rough stone" in Craft Masonry:
"It is said that no one can be educated; he can only educate himself. The great
glory of the American college fraternity is that throughout a chaotic era of
1680
Robson (ed.), p. 1.
1681
Paul Rich (University of the Americas-Puebla and Hoover Institution, Stanford University) in his
paper "Researching Grandfather's Secrets: Rummaging in the Odd Fellow and Masonic Attics"
goes even further when discussing the Greeks' honor or recognition societies for educators, i.e. Pi
Lamda Theta, Delta Phi Epsilon, Phi Beta Delta, etc.: "All of them, and there are now hundreds,
can trace their origins to Phi Beta Kappa and hence to eighteenth-century Freemasonry, - as of
course do the Greeks [sic] social fraternities that are so characterisitc of another portion of
academia. Phi Beta Kappa originally was a ritualistic society par excellence [...]."
Quoted from http://mailweb.udlap.mx/~rich/papers/grandfathers_secrets.html Bold print added.
1682
For a more detailed description of the different college fraternities mentioned in this chapter, see
CME, p. 137.