Ancient Mystic Oriental Masonry

Introduction

A book of inward initiation

Ancient Mystic Oriental Masonry asks its reader to look through the visible forms of a fraternity toward a change in the person who takes part in them. A ceremony may confer a degree, communicate a sign, or present a sacred word. For R. Swinburne Clymer, none of these actions is complete unless the candidate becomes capable of understanding and living what the action represents. His original introduction calls initiation and regeneration synonymous. The rest of the book repeatedly returns to that proposition.

The result is a work in which interpretation and self-cultivation are inseparable. A temple can signify the human being; the builder's labor can become the formation of character; darkness can represent ignorance; light can stand for understanding. The point of reading is therefore more demanding than discovering a hidden definition for a familiar emblem. The reader is asked to become the sort of person for whom the emblem expresses an inward reality.

This edition preserves the complete historical reading text, including Clymer's introduction, the degree narrative, the three main numbered divisions, and the final regulations. The new introduction, key words, annotations, outline, glossary, and editorial notes offer ways into that text. They explain its vocabulary and arguments while keeping the author's assertions distinguishable from evidence that might corroborate them.

The 1907 volume

The copy text is the American edition published at Allentown, Pennsylvania, by the Philosophical Publishing Company in 1907. Its original introduction is dated Thanksgiving, 1906; its regulations say that they were adopted in 1906. The word “present” in its subtitle and rules consequently belongs to that period. It is not a certification of the present status or practice of an organization in 2026. The original volume has 193 numbered pages. The digitized scan and its catalogue record are identified in Sources, S1 and S2.

Clymer writes as an advocate. He wants the public, and Masons in particular, to recognize the existence and worth of Mystic Masonry. His voice alternates with long quotations and reports from other writers. Jirah Dewey Buck is especially important to the account of inward initiation; Albert G. Mackey supplies many explanations of symbols and ritual; Isabel Cooper-Oakley is prominent in the proposed history of hidden tradition. Clymer also refers readers to further esoteric books, including The Philosophy of Fire. These references belong to the historical project he is advancing.

The volume is thus best approached as an argumentative compilation. Its writers do not always say the same thing. A quoted passage may distinguish the antiquity of a philosophy from the comparatively recent organization of a rite, while another asserts an unbroken institutional descent. Some passages leave religious opinions to the individual; others identify a unique key to all religion. The differences are part of the book's texture, and this edition leaves them visible.

Symbolic meaning and historical descent

Two questions must be kept in view. What does a symbol mean in this book? What evidence establishes the history claimed for it? A persuasive answer to the first question need not settle the second. An apron may represent innocence, a cord obligation, and a rising sun the arrival of knowledge. Those readings do not by themselves demonstrate that the objects passed unchanged through every institution named in the narrative.

Clymer often argues from resemblance. Ancient Mysteries, priestly orders, medieval religious communities, Templars, Rosicrucians, and modern Masons are arranged as manifestations of a common wisdom. Atlantis supplies a remote point of origin; concealed masters explain how the inward source could survive despite changes in names and outward forms. Within the author's worldview this makes a coherent spiritual history. A documentary account would still need to establish the links through dated records, identifiable people, and evidence of transmission.

The distinction is especially useful in reading the Hiram legend. The book itself sometimes declines to assert its literal truth and values it as a vehicle of moral teaching: see §§245–247. That acknowledgment permits serious attention to the legend's meaning without treating its dramatic events as an independently verified construction history. Likewise, the Egyptian procession in the Degrees section has a literary parallel in Clement of Alexandria, but that parallel does not verify the surrounding story of initiation in the Pyramid.