THE ARCANE SCHOOLS - Fort Myers Beach Masonic Lodge No. 362

Sir Walter Scott uses it as such in Rob Roy, "she doesna' value a
Cawmil mair as a cowan" (chap. xxix). Masons used the word to describe
a "dry-diker, one who built without cement," or a Mason without the
word. Unfortunately, we still have cowans in this sense--men who try to
be Masons without using the cement of brotherly love. If only they
_could_ be kept out! Blackstone describes an eavesdropper as "a common
nuisance punishable by fine." Legend says that the old-time Masons
punished such prying persons, who sought to learn their signs and
secrets, by holding them under the eaves until the water ran in at the
neck and out at the heels. What penalty was inflicted in dry weather,
we are not informed. At any rate, they had contempt for a man who tried
to make use of the signs of the craft without knowing its art and
ethics.
[90] This subject is most fascinating. Even in primitive ages there
seems to have been a kind of universal sign-language employed, at
times, by all peoples. Among widely separated tribes the signs were
very similar, owing, perhaps, to the fact that they were natural
gestures of greeting, of warning, or of distress. There is intimation
of this in the Bible, when the life of Ben-Hadad was saved by a sign
given (I Kings, 20:30-35). Even among the North American Indians a
sign-code of like sort was known (_Indian Masonry_, R.C. Wright, chap.
iii). "Mr. Ellis, by means of his knowledge as a Master Mason, actually
passed himself into the sacred part or adytum of one of the temples of
India" (_Anacalypsis_, G. Higgins, vol. i, 767). See also the
experience of Haskett Smith among the Druses, already referred to (_A.
Q. C._, iv, 11). Kipling has a rollicking story with the Masonic
sign-code for a theme, entitled _The Man Who Would be King_, and his
imagination is positively uncanny. If not a little of the old
sign-language of the race lives to this day in Masonic Lodges, it is
due not only to the exigencies of the craft, but also to the instinct
of the order for the old, the universal, the _human_; its genius for
making use of all the ways and means whereby men may be brought to know
and love and help one another.
[91] Once more it is a pleasure to refer to the transactions of the
Quatuor Coronati Lodge of Research, whose essays and discussions of
this issue, as of so many others, are the best survey of the whole
question from all sides. The paper by J.W. Hughan arguing in behalf of
only one degree in the old time lodges, and a like paper by G.W. Speth
in behalf of two degrees, with the materials for the third, cover the
field quite thoroughly and in full light of all the facts (_A. Q. C._,
vol. x, 127; vol. xi, 47). As for the Third Degree, that will be
considered further along.
[92] _Storia di Como_, vol. i, 440.
[93] _Natural History of Wiltshire_, by John Aubrey, written, but not
published, in 1686.
[94] _A. Q. C._, vol. x, 82.
[95] Roughly speaking, the year 1600 may be taken as a date dividing
the two periods. Addison, writing in the _Spectator_, March 1, 1711,
draws the following distinction between a speculative and an operative
member of a trade or profession: "I live in the world rather as a
spectator of mankind, than as one of the species, by which means I have