Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2007 00:25:35 +0000 From: "David Gerard" dgerard@gmail.com Indeed. "As a Freemason, I am honour-bound to remove these secrets from your pages!" "What a coincidence - as an admin, I am honour-bound to block you, and your eternal sockpuppets returning to make the precise same edit. Idiot."
The mention of Freemasonry brought to mind three of my favorite books, William Poundstone's "Big Secrets," "Bigger Secrets," and "Biggest Secrets," which attempt to expose things like the ingredients of Coca-Cola, the truth about subliminal messages, and, incidentally, a number of stage illusions by prominent magicians.
What makes these books so wonderful is that he, himself, keeps no secrets. He explains precisely how he got his information, and is quite honest and judicious in explaining their limits and reliability.
In "Big Secrets," he has a chapter about the Freemasons, including the secret handshake, secret password, secret word, secret cipher, and initiation rites. However did he learn them?
He "ran across a Chicago firm that works by mail order. The Geo. Lauterer Corporation publishes an illustrated catalog of lodge gear.... We obtained a sampling of titles."
It's reminiscent of the Sherlock Holmes story, "The Red-headed League," in which Holmes astonishes a visitor by saying to Watson that "Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason. that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else."
When Wilson asks how he knew about the freemasonry, Holmes says "I won't insult your intelligence by telling you how I read that, especially as, rather against the strict rules of your order, you use an arc-and-compass breastpin."
As for the magicians, Poundstone learned a number of their "secrets" by ordering plans from mail-order magic-supply houses.