The Man on the Stair

You Were Passed. You Can Probably Not Tell Me Much About the Evening.

That is not a criticism. It is nearly universal.

Most men experience the Second Degree as a turnstile — the thing that happens between the night they were initiated, which they remember vividly, and the night they were raised, which they remember for the rest of their lives. The middle degree gets passed through on the way somewhere else.

Which is a strange thing to have done, because the Fellowcraft is the only degree in the Craft that is explicitly about education. The senses. The orders. The seven liberal arts and sciences. A stairway with fifteen steps and a chamber at the top where a man is paid for climbing it.

We were handed a curriculum and treated it as a corridor.

Who This Book Is For

There is a particular kind of man this is written for, and I know him well, because I have been him.

He is not a beginner. He was raised some years ago. He has done the reading, he can hold his end of a conversation about the Craft, and if you asked him he would tell you honestly that he understands the working tools.

And he has stopped moving.

Not fallen — stopped. His life is stable, his obligations are met, and somewhere in the last five years the growth quietly ended without any decision being made about it. He is competent, and competence is exactly where most men stop.

The Fellowcraft is the degree for that man, because it is the degree of the middle of a life.

The Staircase

Masonic tradition gives the Winding Stairs fifteen steps, in unequal courses of three, five, and seven. The stair does three things worth knowing before you set foot on it.

It has landings. The steps come in courses with places to stop. The candidate pauses at each division to gather instruction. The pausing is not weakness — it is where the learning happens.

It is uneven. Three, then five, then seven. The runs get longer as you go, which is the opposite of what a man expects, and worth remembering around day sixty.

It winds. You cannot see the top from the bottom, and you will not see the bottom from the top. You get no view of your own progress. You get the next step.

How This Book Is Built

Ninety reflections in six modules, following the ascent:

• The Two Pillars — What you stand between. Days 1–10
• The Three Steps — The first landing. Days 11–19
• The Five Senses — The gates you never guard. Days 20–34
• The Five Orders — Proportion, and what carries weight. Days 35–49
• The Seven Liberal Arts — The curriculum you abandoned. Days 50–77
• The Middle Chamber — Corn, wine, and oil. Days 78–90

On the Sources

The passages come mostly from Thomas Smith Webb’s Freemason’s Monitor of 1797, because that is where the Fellowcraft lecture actually lives. The rest are Albert Mackey, W. L. Wilmshurst, and J. S. M. Ward, with Josephus twice by way of Mackey.

Every quotation in this book has been checked word for word against the original text. Nothing has been paraphrased into something more convenient, and where an old word has since changed meaning, I have said so plainly.

Read the First Volume First

This is the second volume. The Working Man covered the working tools — the gauge, the gavel, the square, the level, the plumb, the trowel, the compasses, the trestleboard. Ninety days of them.

This book does not revisit them. If you have not worked that volume, work it first. The tools come before the ascent, in the Craft and in this series both.

Start with The Working Man →

Get the Book

Paperback, $12.99. Kindle, $5.99. Both on Amazon.

Fifteen steps. Uneven courses. No view of the top. Let’s get to work.