Day 88 out of 100 to Learn Masonic Ritual and we continue our revision of the Third Degree. Yesterday we looked at the Third Degree Obligation for the third time, the first two times we called the Learning Stage, our third run through is now Revision. We continue with…
Revising Masonic Ritual, Day 88 of 100: Third Degree Exhortation
We start with the bit of ceremony that immediately follows the Obligation that we first covered on Day 69 (pages 178-179 in my book of Emulation Ritual) before going onto the Third Degree Exhortation (pages 180-182). We start with the position of the Square and Compasses, you should be relatively familiar with this part as it follows a similar format as in the Second Degree.
One handy reminder for the “circle of your Masonic duties” is the compasses are used to draw a circle. Moving onto the Exhortation, as I’ve said previously the only way around this is to learn it! It doesn’t follow an formats that we’ve encountered elsewhere. Ideally you’d be able to go through this with the book to hand, and check your progress as you work your way through.
However, we are long way off from having to be word perfect so don’t put unnecessary pressure on yourself. Hopefully you can at least give a good outline of each sentence, preferably using many of the correct words. It has been a week since we went through the Exhortation so if you are having problems instead of getting frustrated have a quick read through it first, then try again. I’m sure you’ll be surprised how with just a quick refresher how it starts coming back to you.
Any bits that you do get stuck on ensure you spend a little extra time, and if you can find any memory hooks or systems to aid your recall make sure you make a small note of them in the margin so you don’t forget them in the future!