What Happens During the First Degree (Without Revealing Secrets)

I have been asked about my initiation perhaps fifty times, usually by men who want reassurance rather than information. They are not really asking what happens. They are asking whether they will be humiliated, whether it will be frightening, and whether they will be asked to do something they would be ashamed of afterwards.

So let me answer those three first. No, no, and no. Then let me tell you everything I can about the night, and be honest about where the line sits.

§What I can and cannot tell you

A Mason may describe the shape of a degree, the atmosphere, the emotional experience and its meaning. He may not disclose the ritual wording, the modes of recognition, or the specific obligations. That is not evasion for its own sake. The point of a degree is that it happens to you, once, unprepared, and reading a transcript beforehand steals something from you that cannot be given back.

Plenty of the historical outline is public anyway. The Wikipedia entry on Masonic degrees covers the structure, and MasonicFind has written extensively on the experience from a member's point of view.

§Before the night

You will be told a date, a time, and what to wear. Usually a dark suit, white shirt, plain tie. Someone will be assigned to look after you, often a member close to your own age, and if you have any sense you will take his phone number and use it.

You will be asked to arrive early. Do arrive early. My own advice, learned the hard way, is to eat something light beforehand, because the dining comes later than you expect and the evening is longer than you expect.

§The waiting room

You will spend some time in a small room outside the lodge while the meeting opens. This is where the nerves peak. I remember an older brother sitting with me, telling me about his own initiation in 1974, and it was the single kindest thing anyone did for me that year.

There will be some preparation of your dress, done privately, without indignity, and explained to you as it happens. It is symbolic, it is old, and its meaning is unpacked for you afterwards. No photographs are taken. Nobody laughs.

§Inside the lodge

The degree itself is a piece of drama in which you are the only person who does not know his lines, and that is deliberate. You will be led. At every point someone tells you what to do, and if you get something wrong nothing bad happens, because roughly two hundred men before you got the same thing wrong in the same spot.

• You are received into the lodge and questioned briefly about your intentions. The questions are ones you can answer honestly with no preparation.
• You take an obligation. Its wording is private. Its substance is a promise of good conduct, discretion and fidelity, and it contains nothing that conflicts with your duty to your God, your country, your family or the law.
• You are shown, in symbol, the working tools and the moral lesson attached to them.
• You are welcomed, formally and then very informally.

I expected theatre and got sincerity. That was the surprise. Grown men, meaning every word, in a room with the lights low.

§The part nobody warns you about

It is moving. Not in a sentimental way, and not for everybody, but a great many men are quietly floored by it. I was fine right up until the moment the lights came up and I saw the faces of the men who had been standing there in the dark with me. Something about being deliberately received, as an adult, by people who chose to be there for it, lands harder than you expect.

If you want to arrive at that night already knowing the process, the etiquette and what your first year will ask of you, The First Step Roadmap is the guided programme built exactly for that.

§Afterwards, at the table

Then everyone eats. There are toasts, there is very often a response expected from you, and someone will warn you about it beforehand. Two sentences of thanks is plenty. Men will come and shake your hand and tell you about their own initiations, and you will hear the same phrase five times: welcome, Brother.

You will be given a certificate, some paperwork, and a small piece of learning to do before the next degree. Do it early. The men who fall behind in the first month tend to be the men who fall away in the first year.

§What it is not

It is not hazing. It is not an ordeal. Nothing is done to embarrass you, nothing painful occurs, no animal is present, and nothing you are asked to promise would trouble a decent man or a decent priest. If a friend has told you otherwise, hand them Six Myths About Freemasonry and let them read it for themselves.

And if you have not yet been inside a lodge at all, the ordinary social evening comes first. I have written that one up in detail in Your First Visit to a Lodge.