So yesterday we mixed things up a little by throwing in a quick revision of the Installation Ceremony, Resuming in the lower Degrees and finally Closing the Lodge. Hopefully you found that you still retained quite a bit of knowledge of the Ritual even though it had been almost two weeks since we were last learning it. Don’t worry if you got stuck in areas, we are still in the revision stage of the Installation and will have plenty more opportunity for revising and rehearsing it so you’ll be on top form for your Installation – in 69 days time!
After a day away from the First Degree let’s get back to it:
Revising Masonic Ritual, Day 32 of 100: Opening and First Degree (up to the Obligation)
So let’s kick things off by going right back to the beginning of the First Degree by opening the Lodge (pages 42-46 in my book of Emulation Ritual), then going through the First Degree ceremony up to the Obligation (pages 69-80). When we first started learning this it was broken up over four days:
Day 18 – Opening the Lodge in the First Degree and Candidate Enters
Day 19 – Perambulations
Day 20 – Declarations
Day 21 – Pre-Obligation
We are still in the learning stage of this so don’t worry too much about testing yourself and trying to get yourself word perfect. Feel free to have the book open, but instead of just reading and repeating, try and see if you can pre-empt – you’ll be surprised at just how much you’ve learnt and retained.
I found that I couldn’t have done this with-out the book open, but once I had taken a prompt from the book I could usually complete the part with a good degree of accuracy. Inevitably there are areas that need more work that others, and some (such as the Declaration Questions) that even with a prompt to kick-start still didn’t help. That’s fine, we are still in the learning stage. I therefore spent some additional time on these parts repeating them out loud until I was more confident at them. This is really only putting it into my short-term memory, but as long as I know these are areas of weakness and come back to and repeat the process it will eventually build in the long-term memory.
If you are getting stuck on parts try that technique yourself. Remember, you don’t have to be word-perfect in this for your Installation, the point of this is to plant a solid foundation so that when you do need to do the First Degree the heavy work has been done and you can spend the weeks leading up to the ceremony rehearsing and perfecting, not stressing and sweating.