The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions. Ruth Edwards Dudley

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      A mutual Orange friend who has never been attracted by the Black was listening keenly. ‘It’s a bit popish, isn’t it?’ he commented, not very seriously, but with some truth. ‘No, it’s ceremonial.’ ‘Popery. Sheer undiluted popery.’ ‘Listen to Oliver Cromwell,’ laughed the Blackman. And we fell into an absorbing discussion as to whether it was permissible to have a cross in a church and whether they thought Cromwell had been right to try to destroy all religious statuary.

      Chapters of the Royal Arch Purple meet primarily to initiate Orangemen into the Royal Arch Purple degree in a ritual more elaborate than the Orange and the Purple and involving a lot of ‘travel’. Black preceptories offer ten elaborate degrees: Royal Black, Royal Scarlet, Royal Mark, Apron and Blue, Royal White, Royal Green, Royal Gold, Star and Garter, Crimson Arrow, Link and Chain, and Red Cross. Where Orangemen and members of the Royal Arch Purple call each other Brother (and write to each other as Bro.), Blackmen call each other Sir Knight. However outsiders may view all this, there is no doubting its importance to many of their members. ‘I gained great spiritual depth from going through the degrees,’ said one of my friends. ‘The ritual, the tests, the questions and answers, the drama, brought the Bible stories they were based on home to me. And the morals drawn were right.’

      ‘It depends on how you’re able to receive it,’ said a Black lecturer. ‘You only go a wee bit at a time. There’s a lesson in every degree and the greatest lesson that I can find from any of them is where the children of Israel on the other side of Jordan built the altar and then the bigger part of their brethren saw it and thought they were worshipping false gods. And they condemned their brethren.

      ‘And then they found out the truth – that they had built it to God and that their brethren were true Israelites, but that they had condemned them without one particle of evidence being produced. The lesson I learned I teach candidates is if you made up your mind, saying you’ve had a mouthful of this boy and you were just going to give him a hiding the night, just stop and think and don’t make a hasty judgment on him. Wait. And tomorrow when you waken you’ll have a different picture. I explain that to them.’

      ‘The acting out of Bible stories and the signs and emblems and all that are rather like mystery plays,’ points out an historically-minded Blackman. ‘They helped illiterate people like many of our early members to remember scriptural truths. When properly performed by a good lecturer, these stories and truths can leave an imprint. And the tradition remains a good one. Many of our people are not book-minded, but they like and can relate to imagery.’

      The role of the lecturer is crucial. They are part of an oral tradition: they explain the stories, teach degree candidates their responses and play a crucial part in the ceremonies. It is because they believe that the degree system helps people lead a better life, that so many of them give up an enormous amount of their time to pass on the oral tradition to their brethren.

      Read with imagination (and with the information on Arch Purple and Black emblems given in the next chapter), ‘The Black Man’s Dream’, a song written around 1795, gives a good indication of what is involved in the ‘travel’.

      One night I thought a vision brought

      Me to a spacious plain,

      Whereon its centre stood a mount,

      Whose top I wished to gain;

      Orange, blue, and purple, too,

      Were given me to wear,

      And for to see the mystery

      They did me thus prepare.

      

      My guide a pack placed on my back –

      With pillars of an arch –

      A staff and scrip placed in my hand,

      And thus I on did march;

      Through desert lands I travelled o’er,

      And the narrow road I trod,

      Till something did obstruct my path

      In the form of a toad.

      

      So then I saw what did me awe,

      Though wandering in a dream

      A flaming bush, though unconsumed,

      Before me did remain;

      And as I stood out of the wood

      I heard a heavenly sound,

      Which made me cast my shoes away,

      For it was holy ground.

      

      Two men I saw, with weapons keen,

      Which did me sore annoy –

      Unto a pyramid I ran

      That standing was hard by;

      And as I climbed the narrow way,

      A hand I there did see,

      Which layed the lofty mountains In the scale of equity. Blue, gold, and black about my neck,

      This apparition placed –

      Into a chariot I was put,

      Where we drove off in haste:

      Twelve dazzling lights of beauty bright

      Were brought to guide my way,

      And as we drove thro’ cypress shades

      One of them did decay.

      

      Near to a mount I saw a fount

      Of living water flow;

      I being dry, they did reply,

      To drink you there may go;

      The mystic cup I then took up,

      And drank a health to all

      That were born free and kept their knee

      From bowing unto Baal.

      ‘I think we have to deal with the image of secrecy,’ says William Bingham. ‘Too many people see the Black as being almost masonic, which it isn’t. As a group of people who have hidden agendas and secret meetings and people fishing for jobs for the boys. So I think the institution has to become more open. It has to be prepared to come forward and say, you know, this is what our degrees are about without going into great detail. We should explain to people the meanings of the degrees.

      ‘We’ve tried to do this in Markethill District where about four years ago we started public meetings once a month during the months of November through to March where the scriptures related to each of the degrees were read and explained. And when we’d gone through the degrees we brought in the banners – one СКАЧАТЬ