Freemasonry Through the Eyes of Edgar Allan Poe, Part 1

If you and I had been alive in the 1840s and you asked me for some advice on an invitation list for a party you were planning, I would have one very firm suggestion:

“Whatever you do, make sure you invite Poe.”

“Uh, Mark,” you surely would reply, “there’s going to be booze there, and Eddy, well, you know how he gets when—”

“Trust me, you want to invite Poe. It’s for your own good.”

A Cameo for the Freemasons

Now, to be clear, I never spent any time with Poe. (Don’t let the silver hair and nostalgic remarks fool you; I’m old, but I’m not that old.) For all I know, he was the life of the party—or, if he chose to start spinning yarns like “The Masque of the Red Death,” perhaps the death of the party. In any case, my advice about inviting him has nothing to do with what he would do at the party and everything to do with what he would do after the party.

Poe, you see, did not like to be excluded.

This point brings us back to the topic we have been exploring over the past few weeks: the checkered history of Freemasonry in America.

You may be familiar with “The Cask of Amontillado.” It’s one of Poe’s most famous short stories and with good reason. It’s a horrifying story told by a deeply troubled narrator—classic Poe, in other words—but it also has flashes of humor (very dark humor, of course, but still humor), intriguing autobiographical elements, provocative symbolism, and a Freemason.

If you read last week’s column, you may recall that the Masons, because of all their unofficial power in America, started to spook a lot of non-members, even driving some people to form the Anti-Masonic political party. In fact, voters in Pennsylvania elected two Anti-Masonic candidates, John Edwards and Francis James, into the U.S. House of Representatives in 1838, the same year that Poe moved to the state.

Perhaps it’s not all that surprising then that Poe tucked a little Freemasonry into his story, which he published a few years later in 1846. Unlike his contemporaries Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, however, Poe typically did not make explicit references to contemporary events, preferring to set much of his fiction and poetry “Out of SPACE—Out of TIME” (as he put it in his poem “Dream-Land”). Still, he did live in a space and a time, as we all do, and the zeitgeist left its impression on his work, even if that impression is not always explicit.

No one understands this fact better than my favorite literary scholar, David Reynolds, who has written about the ways that antebellum culture shaped high-brow literary works by Poe and his contemporaries. In an article called “Poe’s Art of Transformation,” Reynolds discusses some of the contemporary influences on “The Cask of Amontillado,” among them the phenomenon of Freemasonry.

“At the center of the story,” Reynolds observes, “is a dialogue that shows Poe tapping into his contemporaries’ concerns about the Masons, a private all-male order widely thought to be involved in heinous crime.” He goes on to recount the story of William Morgan, whose abduction, perhaps by his fellow Masons, I described in last week’s column.

Reynolds, in short, helps us to understand why Poe worked a Masonry reference into his story—an odd feature to our modern eyes—but there’s even more to this aspect of the story.

That’s Poe for you: the more you dig, often the more you find. Sometimes it’s a body (as in “Berenice”), sometimes it’s a treasure (as in “The Gold-Bug,”), and sometimes it’s a fascinating insight into the human experience.

“Then you are not of the brotherhood.”

If you have read the story, you probably remember the basic elements: Montresor narrates a story about luring an acquaintance, Fortunato, into the catacombs, where he—well, I won’t give away the ending, but it’s Poe, so you already have guessed that no one lives happily ever after.

What you may not remember is the brief exchange about Freemasonry. It amounts to just a few lines, but what lies between those lines is a lesson that can go a long way toward improving our lives and our world.

The exchange begins not with words, but with a sign. Fortunato makes a mysterious gesture when he throws a bottle into the air. Here’s how Montressor narrates the rest of the exchange, beginning with his reaction to Fortunato’s gesture:

I looked at him in surprise. He repeated the movement — a grotesque one. “You do not comprehend?” he said. “Not I,” I replied. “Then you are not of the brotherhood.” “How?” “You are not of the masons.” “Yes, yes,” I said; “yes, yes.” “You? Impossible! A mason?” “A mason,” I replied. “A sign,” he said, “a sign.” “It is this,” I answered, producing from beneath the folds of my roquelaire a trowel. “You jest,” he exclaimed, recoiling a few paces. “But let us proceed to the Amontillado.”

The exchange brings us back to the history of Freemasonry. As I explained in the first part of this series, the modern organization of Masons originated in the medieval guild of masons—that is, builders working with bricks and stones. Here, Fortunato is referring to the modern iteration of Masons, a fraternal organization of men who may or may not know anything about stonework or brickwork, while Montresor, by producing the trowel, is identifying himself as someone who actually can lay bricks.

It’s more than a joke. Note Fortunato’s words. Because Montresor says he does not understand his gesture, Fortunato puts his exclusion in stark terms: “Then you are not of the brotherhood.” When Montresor claims he is, Fortunato is incredulous, saying “You? Impossible! A mason?” In light of other details in the story, we can assume that Fortunato sees a clear distinction between himself and his acquaintance: perhaps one of class or just social network. In short, he not only says flatly that Montressor does not belong to the “brotherhood,” but also proclaims that such an affiliation for him is “Impossible.”

For a modern equivalent, imagine the member of an exclusive country club seeing a rattily dressed teenager pulling up to the front door of the club in a 1976 AMC Gremlin. “Excuse me, but are you a member?” asks the former, and the Gremlin driver responds, “Yes, yes.” The response from the former just might be something very much like “You? Impossible! A member?” (I chose the vehicle here for a reason. Back in the 1980s, my dad drove an AMC Gremlin, and, when it came time for me to drive, I had the privilege of using it. Neither of us belonged to any country clubs.)

Let’s keep digging.

When Fortunato demands a “sign,” probably meaning some kind of secret handshake or other gesture known only to Masons, Montresor responds with a different kind of proof: a trowel, something that an actual mason would use.  It's a clever turn: Montresor seems to betray his ignorance, but his ignorance is comparatively harmless—so what if he doesn’t know the secret rituals of the Freemasons? On the other hand, Fortunato's ignorance—specifically of the fate Montresor has in store for him—puts him in grave danger (so to speak).

For Fortunato, who lords his membership over Montresor, a Mason is superior to a mason, but in this case the mason is determined to one-up the Mason.

Artists Out There

Artists often occupy a marginal position in their societies. There’s not a lot of money in writing poetry, after all, and the whole idea of writing or painting or acting has sometimes felt, well, “out there.”

In the Romantic era of the late 1700s and early 1800s, when Poe lived, artists sometimes embraced this outsider status. Coleridge, whom Poe admired, nicely captured artistic exceptionalism in these lines from “Kubla Khan”:

Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Poe, like his fellow American poet Emily Dickinson, imagined artists as exceptional. His masterful detective C. Auguste Dupin was definitely out there, as was Roderick Usher, a character in one of his most famous stories.

Still, it’s one thing to create outsiders in your fiction and quite another to live the life of one yourself.

Next time, we will take a close look at Poe’s life on the margins of society, the revenge he took in his work, and the broader lesson about the cost of membership.