History. Masonry. Fate
Elena Ionescu, Ph.D
Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest
El Siglo de las Luces (The Century of Enlightenment), Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s novel, treats a singular moment in history, a known reality: the French Revolution of 1789 – has an added exotic quality due to the grafting on to a space evolving under the sign of mixtures of all kinds: the Antiles, Cuba, Guyana. A real character, part of history, Victor Hugues, the son of a baker from Marseille, merchant in Port-au-Prince, discovers his fertile revolutionary talents in Guadaloupe, then in Guyana. The grandeur and disillusionment that accompany any revolution are emphasized in his case by pathos and those techniques for the implementation of freedom that he thinks of especially. Freedom and the guillotine are brought by Victor Hugues to the islands on the same ship. The orphans Sofia and Carlos, together with their cousin Esteban, are living to their own rhythm the first year of grief after the death of their father. Isolated by their own will in the building laden with furniture and objects, they build through the limitless power of imagination the routes of journeys in the Old World and the New. In the beginning of the second year of grief, a "man without age"1 appears in the midst of their special universe, who "spoke a funny jargon, more French than Spanish, littered with various English phrases"2 – Victor Hugues. He is the unwanted guest, rousing "at once sympathy and aversion"3, who seduces through his stories about himself. Victor Hugues traps his victims in his stories, he devours hem to regurgitate them tame and curious. He will then use theater, "changing roles between themselves, now actors and now spectators, forced to guess, starting in groups to interpret various characters"4. The roles to which Victor Hugues gravitates, before the "disciples" he has chosen are "ancient legislator or tribunes"5, foreshadowing the future status he will have, in his capacity as disciple of Robespierre, through his involvement in the French Revolution. After embarking for Paris, a new stage begins in the lives of Hugues and Esteban, which, for years to follow, will be tied by history, in a universe without memory and incompatible with normalcy. Revolutionary France is, for Esteban, an innocent youth susceptible to spectacle, "an enormous bazaar"6. The youth receives the radical events as if he found himself "not in the midst of a revolution, but rather in a gigantic of revolution"7. Esteban receives sequences of a tumultuous reality as exotic collages, observing both the vulgar details, such as "the licorice revolutionary emblems"8 and "the torrential waste of words"9. Seduced by everything that means revolution, he speaks, whenever he has the chance, about taking the Revolution to Spain and, further, into America. By dint of circumstance, the young Esteban comes into contact with masons, thus materializing one of the most fascinating stories, in its mystery, of Victor Hugues. He opens the prohibited space of masonry to him and initiates him, as much as possible, to be initiated. Esteban will be received in the Lodge of Reunited Foreigners. The pages referring to the initiation to the degree of apprentice are memorable, not only due to fidelity to the ritual of the first degree, but also due to its significance in extenso which, from the first step between Jachin and Boaz, it confers to the ceremony and his new status. For Esteban, the one who foreswore the profane world, his future brethren in their degrees, identified by their emblems, are first and foremost stages in his journey to the light, they are degrees in which he will be initiated once his ascent will have begun. Penetrating toward the "mysteries of the transformation of the raw stone into cubic stone, of the resurrection of the sun in the acacia leaf, in the midst of a maintained tradition, won back, which, sinking deeply into time reached for its origins in the initiatic ceremonies of Egypt, through the intercession of Iacob Boehme, through the chemical Weddings of Christian Rosencreutz and through the secret of the Templar knights"10, the hero feels "at one with everything and everything with one, clear, enlightened, in front of the arc that the must now build within his being, in the likeness of the Temple built by the master Hiram"11. After he comes out of the Room of carefulness, without a coat, with his shirt unbutton around his chest, as a sign of sincerity and loyalty12, with his right knee bared "to make true the feelings of humility which must guide him in the search for the truth"13, with his left leg bare, "imitating and remembering the ancient hero limping in the dark"14, with his eyes covered, because he is an ignorant neophyte, lacking for now in light, he understand, like a new Parsifal searching for himself15, the meaning of his journey, not in space, but to the beginning of a new century. Masonry - Revolution, both conjugate with the purpose of building a city of the future, which is very close. Free, for now, from his charismatic and noxious master, Esteban starts building his destiny, which he wishes to be a cathedral, as a mason, imagining himself "undoubtedly, like Brunelleschi, Bramante, Juan Herrera or Erwin Steinbach, the builder of the Strasbourg cathedral"16. Beyond the fiction, it must be said that masonry was associated in that context with the French Revolution of 1789; "around the Revolution, masonry had won considerable influence and positions in France. It had successively invaded various classes and social categories: the nobility, the army, the parliament, the clergy, the men of letters, the bourgeoisie... But it would not resist the terrible convulsions that quickly scattered the masons..."17 Moreover, "the first victims of the new revolutionary disorder at the siege of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 were te freemasons in the military… The Marquess of Launay, the Governor of the Bastille, Fonlon, state councilor… the Intendent of Paris, Berthier de Sauvigny"18 (represented, in a period sketch, with both his head and his heart through spikes; moreover, to confirm the inextricable product that history is, the inventor of the guillotine, the doctor Joseph Ignace Guillotin, preoccupied with discovering better methods for execution, was a mason in the Lodge of the Nine Sisters19 - Loge Les Neuf Sœurs –m.n.), although "they are not masons who take their fellowmen out of this life… Some masons enrolled on both sides, strictly for personal reasons"20. Others, slaves to their interest, later fouled the name of masonry, like Victor Hugues. After the masons in the Lodge of the Reunited Strangers asked for light for the profane, now free from his last remnants of profane thinking by the fire that burned the testament where it was enclosed, assigned to initiation, Esteban naturally – and in the Masonic spirit – wants to perfect himself. Like a theatrical twist of the plot, which was a "specialty" with his master, the one who had first spoken to him about the brotherhood, Victor Hugues, suddenly arrived and dressed in revolutionary garb, "newfangled and flawlessly cut", with boots that seemed "just taken out of the box", declared to him in ritual intonations: "If you want to be with us, never set a foot inside a lodge again. We lost too much time on this foolery as it is… Masonry is counter-revolutionary, there is no discussion about this. There is no other morality except Jacobin morality."21 And, in a parallel that touches on tragic irony confirmed by history, he theatrically thrown into the fire an "Apprentice’s Catechism", attempting the forced liberation from Masonic thinking, from the advance that requires time, reflection, humility, respect. Basically, through the tempestuous assumption he imposes, Victor Hugues does not act in the spirit of the meaning of Jachin, which he must know who is a master, in order "to consolidate (to stabilize)". This verb receives a complex meaning through association with the Sacred Word from the degree of apprentice – "consolidated (stabilized) in force"22, and so it could be said the Victor Hugues will interpret literally the phrase, when he becomes the protagonist of rather dark episodes in the French Revolution in the Antiles. From this point on, each of the two will have to built only for himself. Hugues, detached from masonry, because the prosecutor in Rochefort; he will use all the tricks (staging the installation of the guillotine, guillotining as a spectacle, songs, colors, conditioned by the licentious wishes of the multitude in the revolutionary carnival) in order to manipulate a human mass corrupted by its attained socio-political status. More and more convinced by his own importance in the mechanism implementing the revolution, Victor Hugues forgets about his disciple and becomes himself an apprentice voluptuously in relation to a great representative of the revolution, whom he calls the Incorruptible, whose portrait he hangs in his cabin on the ship. The narrator underlines this: "he had imposed on himself the discipline required by his situation as a leader of men: that to have no friends."23 Around him, men started growing quiet quite suddenly, a sign of fear. And he likes to know that he is feared. He builds himself day in day out on the model of the Incorruptible, whom he starts to resemble, relinquishing his usual skin. Thus, the fact that Esteban is the only one who knew him before becomes his vulnerable point. The moment of arrival in Guadaloupe is memorable: the posters announcing the abolition of slavery, the guillotine shining in the sun on the deck of the ship, and he, with his right hand supported by the Machine. Thus, Victor Hugues, "had transformed… into an allegory".24 Glorious deed, like the political control of a territory through a colored militia he forms, the efficient use of the guillotine, which he still thinks a flawed invention, because it cannot be used for mass executions, earn him mentions in the Paris press. The freedom guaranteed by Victor means reports and accusations, disinterring a general and throwing his corpse to the dogs, executions, collaboration and informants, slave trading, control over the fleets of corsairs in the service of the French Republic, basically "revolutionary piracy."25 The next phrase, with its concluding quality, has the value of an armor that the master, now a mimetic "disciple", adopts in the face of the one he tried to model: "I don’t know what you will be thinking of me. Maybe I am a monster. There are however epochs not made for meek men."26 Shortly before leaving on his journey – the mission with his master, Esteban is thrilled that the lodge does not discriminate by nationality or color, all being equal (in the profane territory, strangers gradually become persecuted, discrediting masons not being enough anymore – "for a couple of months now, being a stranger is a felony here in France"27, says one of the characters); the young man is charmed by Mozart’s music, "an inspired masonic composer"28, dreams of alchemical and magical operations, is overtly inclined toward esoteric speculations. On the other hand, "eager as he was to play a role however insignificant in a revolution meant to transform the world"29, he accepts leaving the spectacular revolutionary Paris to deal with the translation and printing of revolutionary material in Spanish. After other trips and solitary missions, in Cayenne and Paramaribo, Esteban returns to Havana. Here he looks again at a childhood painting, Explosion in a cathedral, by an anonymous Neapolitan master, a "perfect canvass, autopictural, foreign to all schools"30. Perfect for its destiny and or the age. Home, Esteban recounts to his sister Sofia, married to a mason, his odyssey. Self-construction seems almost completed, and insofar as concerns Victor Hugues, the judgment overcomes the man and tends toward that bent for tragic irony that history has: "He would have wanted to become a tragic hero and remained a simple bit player. Well, he picked bad theaters. Rochefort, Guadaloupe... stage entries!"31 Explosion in a cathedral belongs not to an anonymous Neapolitan painter, but to Monsú Desiderio, the name under which were concealed, as it seems, two painters, François de Nomé and Didier Barra, somewhere in the beginning of the seventeenth century. The complex meanings contained in the novel find in this painting, mentioned in the crucial moments of the action, the departure and arrival points, in the sense of cyclical motion. The painting is the code by which the events can be interpreted and understood again. Looking and understanding, the disciple liberated from his master looks within himself, thinking of the possibilities for construction in a time of agnosticism: «If that cathedral, according to the teaching once spread, was the representation – the ark of the covenant and the tabernacle – of his own being, an explosion had occurred within, undoubtedly, though late and slowly, destroying altars, symbols and sacraments which he venerated. And if it displayed the age in which he lived, an amazing explosion had indeed managed to ruin the main walls, burying under an avalanche of debris those very people who had built the infernal machine. If, however, the cathedral was the Christian church, Esteban observed that a series of strong columns had remained standing in front of another such series, which, wrecked to pieces, was falling in that apocalyptic image, as a symbol of resistance, of continuity and future reconstruction after the times of struggle forewarned by ominous stars.»32 basically, we can say, in the spirit of Carpentier and not only him, that «there are ages made to decimate the flocks, confuse the tongues, and scatter the tribes.» 33 NOTES: 1 Alejo Carpentier, The century of Lights, translated by Ovidiu Constantinescu and Maria Ioanovici, preface by Romul Munteanu, Editura pentru Literaturã Universalã, Bucureºti, p. 56.
2 Idem.
3 Idem.
4 Ibidem, p. 65.
5 Ibidem, p. 90.
6 Ibidem, p. 151.
7 Ibidem, p. 153.
8 Idem.
9 Idem.
10 Ibidem, p. 159.
11 Ibidem, pp. 159-160.
12 The ritual of the first degree I, p. 19.
13 Idem.
14 Idem.
15 Alejo Carpentier, op. cit., p. 160.
16 Ibidem, p. 162.
17 Paul Naudon, La Franc-maçonnerie, PUF, 1982, pp. 50-51.
18 J.M. B., La Porþile Templului, Bucureºti, Libripress, f.a., p. 807.
19 S. Brent Morris, Ph. D., 33º, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Freemasonry, Alpha Books, 2006, p. 316.
20 J.M. B., op. cit., p. 807.
21 Alejo Carpentier, op. cit., p. 163.
22 Ritual, p. 53
23 Alejo Carpentier, op. cit., p. 187.
24 Ibidem, p. 211.
25 Ibidem, vol. II, p. 32.
26 Ibidem, p. 62.
27 Ibidem, vol II, p. 179.
28 Ibidem, p. 166.
29 Ibidem, p. 174.
30 Ibidem, vol. II, p. 128.
31 Ibidem, p. 150.
32 Ibidem, p. 128.
33 Ibidem, p. 147.
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