1613 Nation Reaching Across The Globe

It has only been a year since the official formation of Post-Modern Freemasonry. With the release of the 1613 Manifesto we have seen the current resonate with seekers of Masonic Light all over the globe. Now with 22 lodges in 11 countries we can see the powerful effect that our paradigm is having on people. The message of Masonic self empowerment is taking hold.

Tomorrow is a whole new day and with it comes a whole new challenge of teaching, learning and growing. Read the manifesto, get it out there. Never forget our grass roots street ethic. Knowledge is power so build my Brethren.

IN LVX,
Frater Raum Sariel 3°
Secretary Lodge Napoleon Bonaparte-1613 Nation

Reflections on 2009

Wow, what a crazy and exciting year. All in all I would say that it went pretty good. One for the history books, should everything (well, most things) play out the way that they should.

2009, for all of it's financial ups and downs for almost everybody proved to be a year of new creation as well as rebirth. From that original idea of Masonic freedom, fluidity and personal empowerment came what we would later label Post-Modern Freemasonry. From a concept ,to a cause who would have thought that those original four who founded the very first Post-Modern Masonic lodge in Lodge Bonaparte would strike a chord deep within the core of so many spread out across so wide of a distance?We have seen our idea grow into what is now a worldwide Masonic family. Now found on four continents and growing. We also gained the support fellowship and cooperation of several long established Masonic orders as well. Quite and accomplishment.

Of course this past year had it's down spots as well. We lost more than one dear friend and a few inspirations to the Celestial Lodge. And while we may have heavy hearts we must always remember that their energy flows through us and helps us to build the future.

We also actively took part in the creation of a whole new Masonic Rite, the Hellenic Rite. The first created from the ground up Post-Modern Masonic Rite. This allowed us of course to create this very special Lodge Hera. Dedicated to the sacred feminine, a very important role lost to most within Freemasonry now reawakened.

In these early morning hours I am thankful for all of my Brethren and friends who have decided to walk the rugged road with me. Without you I could not continue. We as a community strengthen each other with the pure love and support that is Masonic Brotherhood. For that I owe you all my deepest gratitude.

So here is to a great sendoff to a very important 2009, and a welcome to 2010. I have a feeling that 2010 will be our best year to date.

S&F,
Frater Raum Sariel
Secretary Lodge Napoleon Bonaparte
Post-Modern Freemasons

Update

Brethren and Friends,
I know activity on this blog has not only been slow, it's been zero. This does not reflect the activity level of Lodge Napoleon Bonaparte, even more importantly, the movement within the Post-Modern Freemasonic world.

Tons of activity. Where to begin. We have started an initiative to establish new Post-Modern lodges on a local level. The original idea was to have Lodge Napoleon Bonaparte to serve all sincere seekers around the globe. While this is still a reality it is not the only reality. We realize the demand for local groups to be able to come together as a lodge and we would be foolish not to service the demand at that level.

So, what we have is the It Takes Three Initiative. This allows a lodge to be fully functional and independent with only three officers, instead of the traditional seven. As a result we have several Rites and rituals that are fully operation at that level with more on the way.
The good news is also more and more Masons are showing reception to the Post-Modern Masonic movement. We now have a cooperative of lodges around the world with more coming every day.

These include:

Lodge Ptah (Atlanta, GA)
Lodge Herra (Bay Area, CA)
Lodge of Nine Tears (Miami, FL)
Lodge Via Hermeticae (Mexico City, Mexico)
Lodge Corazon (Mexico City, Mexico)
Lodge Human Stones (Tel Aviv, Israel)
Lodge Helios (Johannesburg, South Africa)
Lodge Morganrote (Dortmund, Germany)
Lodge Ojo De Horus (Ecuador)

Also lodges are in the process of forming in France, Belgium, Italy, Sacramento, Charlotte North Carolina, Washington, DC and Rogers Arkansas.

We are also establishing a special Lodge of research. Lodge John Yarker. This will allow all Post-Modern Freemasons and members of academia to work together in Masonic, esoteric and occult research.

As you all now know we have been extremely busy. We have also established official relationships with the Order of Masonry Memphis Misriam Mixed of Ecuador and Portugal.
In LVX,

Raum

"Re-Creating" Freemasonry in Our Own Image

I read on an institutionalized Masonic forum this morning an accusation that I have had against me before but never really thought seriously about until now. This accusation of course was levied against all non "mainstream" Masons, not just Post-Moderns.

I stood back, looked at this and realized to myself that this time our critic is 100% correct.

Speaking from the Post-Modern Masonic perspective we are absolutely creating the flavor of Freemasonry we want to ingest. Gender-Equal, Adogmatic yet Occult, deeply magickal and operational in base yet philosophic. The encouragement of the creation of new Rites as well preservation and re-establishment of the old. Sure, you could say that we are "recreating" Freemasonry.

At the same time isn't this a "traditional" practice?

When we look at history what do we find? The York Masons diverged the Stonemasons. The Moderns diverged from the Yorks. The Antients diverged from the Moderns. The Post-Modern now diverge from the Moderns, Antients and Yorks.

I will write a paper more in depth on this subject sometime but isn't "recreating" Freemasonry in our own image the whole point? Aren't the needs of seekers and of society vastly different today than they where in 1717? Aren't both adaptation and evolution required for species survival?

I would love to read the thoughts of our forum on this subject.

Love and Light,
Raum

Women and Freemasonry

This our dear readers is the rarest of rare occasions. We are featuring a cross post on our blogs. This topic we feel is so important that it must get as much publicity as humanly possible. The issue of the continuing inhuman practice of gender segregation has no place in 21st century Freemasonry. It is for the very sake of the Crafts future health and well being that we post this. We urge all Freemasons, regardless of Rite, affiliation or obedience to please do the right thing and contribute to this cause. We owe this as citizens of humanity.

Your Host,
Raum Sariel


Women and Freemasonry, From the Enlightenment to Today
http://www.fabula.org/actualites/article31531.php
Call for Contributions
Information Published on Thursday, May 21, 2009 by Fabula (source: Cécile Révauger)
Deadline: September 15, 2009
University of Bordeaux and Museum of Aquitaine
June 17-19, 2010, Bordeaux
Women are still absent today from the majority of Masonic lodges. Few rational arguments can be made to justify such an exclusion. That of tradition, the most widespread, only applies to the Constitutions of Anderson, and do not appear explicitly in the Old Charges of the Masons. The lodges of adoption were sometimes considered as a substitute Masonry. It would be erroneous, however, to minimize their importance and the significance which they had in their time, as Margaret Jacob and Janet Burke have recently showed. These lodges of adoption, which were born in Holland, and then in France, at the time of the enlightenment, are certainly characteristic of the limits of participation of women at that time, because of their very elitist and aristocratic character. However, they conveyed a certain number of values, if only by their ritual, and accorded women an unprecedented place in the public sphere, comparable with the salons.
Were these lodges satisfied to reflect the society of their time, or did they anticipate certain evolutions and contribute to the emancipation of women? To what point are they representative of enlightenment society? To a significant degree, these lodges of adoption disappeared at the same time as the enlightenment, to reappear in a quite different form in the following century in the United States (the Eastern Star). The Masonic world of the nineteenth century was almost exclusively male. It would be interesting to seek the reasons for such an absence of women. It is necessary to await the end of the nineteenth century, with women such as Annie Besant, Madame Blavatsky, Marie Deraismes, Clémence Royer or Louise Michel to find a feminine presence in the lodges, sometimes, as in the case of Annie Besant, in close connection with the Theosophist Society.
We will endeavor to identify the evolution of feminine participation, on the one hand through mixed Masonry, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, and also through specifically feminine obediences, which date only from the twentieth. All these women fought for equality, but some hoped to reach it within mixed structures, and others by autonomous paths. We will be interested in the choices of manner of organization and of ritual, as well as the social composition, of the mixed and feminine lodges.
We will inquire about their openness to society, or on the contrary about their wish for discretion, on the nature of their work. These obediences developed only in certain countries, we will try to see for what reasons. At the same time we will explain the Masonic organizations and their individual characteristics.
We will try to determine the weight of the various factors in these areas: - The cultural, social and political factor: is there a direct link between the development of mixed and feminine obediences, social progress as regards emancipation of women, and the force of the feminist currents in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? - The religious factor: can one observe different behaviors according to the religions? Is the question of feminine initiation posed in a specific way in the Catholic, Protestant, Islamic or Orthodox countries? - The Masonic factor: the line of fracture between Latin Freemasonry and Anglo-Saxon Freemasonry, dating from 1877 and the decision of the Grand Orient of France to grant a full freedom of conscience to its members and no longer to require belief in God. But curiously, it also translated into terms of exclusion or recognition of women, even if it is immediately advisable to qualify the matter with regard to obediences known as "Latin."
There exist several degrees of exclusion today: women can be regarded as noninitiables, as is still formally the case in the United Kingdom, the USA, and in all obediences which give allegiance to the United Grand Lodge of England. In other cases, the presence of women is accepted and even encouraged, but in structures that are not recognized as Masonic, although they are regarded as serving with the male lodges thanks to their charitable actions (the Eastern Star). Finally, obediences known as Latin are divided on the question of the admission of women. Some are mixed, others are discussing the question of co-Masonry, others still refuse it on principle.
Can one speak about Masonic universalism, or is Freemasonry determined by gender? It will be advisable to inquire at the same time about the reasons for the exclusion of women, in all these forms, with all these nuances, and about the specific types of feminine freemasonry in time and space, from the first lodges to those of today in Europe, Asia and the Americas. We will also be able to inquire about the view which the feminists had about Freemasonry, and also about the lodges of adoption and contemporary Freemasonry. We will thus encourage a diversity of approaches and desire that the historical and geographical scope be the broadest possible, in order to understand the differences as well as the similarities, and to understand the evolution.
Summaries of papers should be accompanied by a curriculum vitae (2000 characters in all) and must be received by Cécile Révauger before September 15, 2009. mail to: Cecile.revau...@wanadoo.fr
Cécile Révauger Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux3 Domaine Universitaire , 33607 Pessac Cedex France

Offcial Policy on Masonic Regularity

Dear Readers,
There may be no greater source of stress, strife and confusion amongst the Masonic family that the topic and practice of regularity. It has become all to apparent that most Masons do not understand the policy of regularity, but instead they use it as either a description for themselves or as ammunition against others. This post will hopefully clarify some of the confusion as well as outline Lodge Napoleon Bonaparte's official stance on the subject.

Regularity is a term used to define how a Masonic lodge is to operate. These are most often coined under the term Ancient Landmarks. Best Practices if you will. It is also used as weather or not from a distance one Masonic organization can tell if their own Best Practices are compatible with another. That being said, regularity is strictly determined within each organization, not bestowed from without. This is a vital point of individual order (or as in our case Lodge) Masonic practice of absolute sovereignty.

It is well understood and respected that there is no central authority for Freemasonry. No governing central body in which all would reside. This has set up literally hundreds of Orders and independent lodges who are within their rights (under Masonic custom) to determine themselves regularity.

When we take this to a specific point and define what is regular under Lodge Napoleon Bonaparte we get these definite points. Lodge Napoleon Bonaparte is a Sovereign lodge under the Post-Modern Masonic platform. The membership has defined (through unanimous vote) that in order for a Masonic organization or lodge to be considered regular under our Best Practices (Landmarks) that they must:

Have no bias based on gender or race.

Have no bias based on religion or lack of religion.

Have no bias based on sexual orientation.

In our opinion these are base fundamentals. As we have defined this amongst ourselves and seeing how this is our Masonic right as a Sovereign and Self-Determined Independent Masonic Lodge we, Lodge Napoleon Bonaparte are a regular Masonic body. We believe that as Post-Modern Freemasons we are not bound by a static system that does not grow, breathe and change. To be fluid is essential to the Post-Modern platform.

Fraternally,
Frater Raum Sariel 3°
Lodge Secretary
Lodge Napoleon Bonaparte
Sovereign Rite of Misraim
Post-Modern Freemasons
http://www.lodgenapoleon.com/

Napoleon Bonaparte-Freemason

By, WPGH. Frater. Robert Ambelain ,

From his accession into the imperial purple, Napoleon Bonaparte was always proclaimed and considered to be a genuine Freemason in his lifetime, as where his father, his brothers and his
Marshals. In his book The Freemasonry of Bonaparte, Francois Collavery showed the continual role of Lodges in the diffusion of the great ideals of the French Revolution across Europe "I am a man of the Revolution" Emperor Bonaparte had declared. In 1986 the same author had assembled all of the proofs to Napoleon personally belonging to the Masonic Order in a second volume: Napoleon, Emperor, Freemason.

All of the documents with the very important witness of the archieves of the Grand Orient of France affirm that the Initiation of Napoleon Bonaparte took place in Egypt. To those we can add the documentation published by us in Number 1 of the magazine L'Initiation in 1979, an article which included the recall of a letter by Grand Master Constant Chevellion, dated November 10th 1934, confirming to Grand Master Fletcher of the USA that Napoleon Bonaparte had been received as a Mason in Cairo, which brought together Masonic members of the mission to Egypt and that Kleber presided, a Lodge carrying the name Isis. These where the Masons along with their successors who thereafter formally constituted the Rite of Memphis at Montauban in 1815.

From this period, violet became the color of it's rituals, blue being that of the French Rite and blue edged with red being that of the Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite. Violet constituted the color of the Parma violets, the duchy where the little King of Rome resided at four years of age.

The Rite of Memphis-Misraim associated the violet of these origins with the turquoise blue attributed to the great Isis of ancient Egypt, this joining together in double esoteric symbolism.

This is why Napoleon was one of the very first Masons of the Rite of Memphis. And the Emperor had never forgotten that he "received light" on the unique soil of holy initiation. This is why he also adopted the Bee as the symbol of his reign, with the Eagle. The Bee was the image of the Pharoh in ancient Egypt and two wings of an eagle flank the Osiran sun. Finally, a comment by Napoleon to Josephine has been reported by her intimate friends, then celebrated by Mile Lonormand in her Memoirs: "I have consumed in my life continual movement which hasn't allowed me to fulfill my duties as an initiate of the Egyptian sect."