ScruffyOwlet's Tree: November 2015

Wednesday, 11 November 2015

Review 7: Freemasonry, A Journey through Ritual and Symbol

Engrossing Symbolism—A Review of Freemasonry,

A Journey through Ritual and Symbol by Kirk MacNulty

After providing a brief if convincing history of the origins of Freemasonry, MacNulty, in what is a sympathetic treatment of this mystery tradition, reveals Freemasonry to be an effective, inspiring, and even addictive symbolic system for developmental psychology, that is to say, the ascent from base to higher consciousness, within a tight framework of self-labour, ritual, and interpretation.

This is a small volume but I felt greatly enriched within the small amount of time it took me to read its thirty or so pages of text and seventy pages of beautiful illustrations.

This is a most unpretentious work, requiring only open mindedness and curiosity, and I felt greatly empowered by this brief overview of what is in effect a psychology of the self, but far more sophisticated and inspiring I found than modern popular psychology.

This book is an excellent resource therefore on a subject which by its nature is esoteric and the knowledge of which is hard to come by.