BELIEVING WHAT WE WANT TO BELIEVE

History can be manipulated. When Professor Margaret MacMillan published her thinking, it gave us an important lesson. The jungle is beautiful and dangerous. When you understand the dangers, you can talk precautions. The apex creature thinking keeps an advantage not by being largest, most powerful or ruthless but by being smarter. It is fanciful for a 21st century FM to translate the world as we like to see it, full of conjecture.  Are we carrying on conversations that happened between Egyptian priests and Pythagoras who shared with him their mysteries?  Unlikely and unproveable. The history doesn't track. So we take what any sensible mind takes from legend. The stimulus of honour, of loyalty and faith. From the time neolethic artists left their pictograms on rock to a time when the brothers Grim began teaching our children cultural values through their fables, we have have ensured the stories that inspire and define would continue into the future. The time has come to elevate ritual to a level of study deserved by enduring literature. The time is right because we need to reassert the vitality and hidden understandings that actors require to translate the work to an audience.  Within the Brotherhood, Ritual is a pivot point of learning. From it spills out profound knowledge, rendered in puzzle. Decipher the puzzle- get the prize. Do this and the etiquettes become more generous and flexible. The impediments that exist in a lodge are contrived by the cowan that lingers in each one of us, projecting a barrier to learning.  Alchemy is more than chemistry and fantastical thinking. Philosophy and mathematics do converge. From curiousity to understanding what the observer has been doing in the background- whether we start point is idleness or wild enthusiasm it is anindividual start point, the idea of individualism drawing us to the universality of philosophy and the beauty of imagination.