The Symbolism of Memorising Ritual (and how do it quickly & easily)

Have you ever struggled to memorise your exam as an Apprentice or Fellowcraft, learn your work as a Progressive Officer or take on a new Charge as an Installed Master?

While we can agree that memorising our ceremonies is not the be-all and end-all of Freemasonry, it’s the first and most critical step in revealing the mysteries, discovering the secrets and learning the lessons that our peculiar system of morality teaches.

My name is RW Bro Darren Allatt and over the last 17 years, I have been studying & practising Freemasonry and have tried all kinds of tips and tricks to help me learn the rites & ceremonies so that I can not only perform them in Lodge but take the lessons from Freemasonry and apply them to my own life.

I have set myself a challenge to not only learn but to perfect the Address to the Brethren over the next 30 days and I am going to share with you my strategy that makes memorising rituals very easy as well as the key lesson that learning our ceremonies is symbolical of.

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First, you may not agree with me about memorising the ritual. Did you know by objecting to the practice of memorising the ritual you are destroying the foundation and the base value proposition of Freemasonry?

Let me explain!

Freemasonry is a system of education that teaches us how to live a life of purpose, meaning and fulfilment and one of the ways it does this is by making us shed all of those external and material things of our day-to-day life. It humbles us by instilling in us that we are always an Entered Apprentice, a student to learn.

Our society has existed for the last 700 years on account that the ceremonies have always been performed from memory and they were traditionally passed down from generation to generation verbally. This is because parchment or papyrus was unobtainable to most people, even those excellent stone masons. Only when paper did become widespread, cheap and the printing press made mass volume obtainable did we start writing things down.

There is also a recent emergence in the spoken word, many people today prefer podcasts or audiobooks to read. Imagine if you could have been present to hear the dialogue between Socrates and Plato, instead of reading it in a text. That’s the power of the spoken word!

It’s also one of the key liberal arts and science, Rhetoric. In Ancient Greece and throughout time, those who had mastered the art of speech found themselves with far more success in life.

However, the foundation of Freemasonry is built on the very nature that it isn’t easy.

Just remember, the reason why our Ancient Roman ancestors survived the purge of the Collegia, was because of their expertise and skill in doing something extremely difficult that took a lot of time, effort and practice to learn and perfect. Our Operative forefathers of the Middle Ages, to which we owe much of what we know as Freemasonry today, protected their trade through their secrets, arts and hidden mysteries because of the dedication and skill required to progress from being entered as an Apprentice to a Fellow of the Craft, let alone to become a Master of Masons.

This nature of difficulty is also represented in the symbolism of being stone workers, taking the rough stone and perfecting it. It only was shaped to perfection through time, effort, perseverance and thousands of hits with gavel and chisel. That’s the lesson of the First Working Tools!

I want you to think about our modern world now. Cheap dopamine through doom-scrolling TikTok or even Gambling that has your brain firing off dopamine like the New Year fireworks. Instead of it being once a year, it’s constant throughout the day.

Instant gratification that all the information in the world is at your fingertips, transportation to the other side of the world with a few taps on the screen and food that you can summon through an app delivered by someone on a push-bike.

Life is easy. Too easy. Nothing is difficult, and when everything is easy, nothing has any value. When nothing has value, we human beings lose all hope, we lose our purpose, we lose meaning and we are left unfulfilled in life.

We resort to more dopamine, materialism and conditional happiness we place on ourselves like having a supermodel wife, Lamborghini, and Millions in the bank, but despite all this, we have this unquenchable thirst that no matter what we still feel empty.

See this is the whole point of Freemasonry — it’s supposed to be difficult. It’s supposed to be hard. It’s supposed to stretch us and take us outside of our comfort zone. But it does it in a sacred space where we are among our Brothers.

I want to emphasise Brothers here. Not friends. Not acquaintances. Not colleagues.

Brothers.

Your Brother is the person who will always be there for you, no matter what. Yes, brothers fight. They disagree. They can’t stand each other at times. But, at the end of the day, Brothers always want what is best for each other and are always willing to pick you up when you are down, build you up and support you to achieve the best you can be.

However, the reason why Freemasonry is difficult is that it teaches you and forces you, by its very nature, by the peculiarity of the system itself, by divesting you of money & materialism, by you shedding your ego and whatever position you have in the day to day world by putting on the white lambskin apron — to become a person who can focus on what is good for you in the long term.

Freemasonry teaches you to build the right habits, to set a goal far off in the future, one that feels like nothing now, but as it gets closer it gets bigger. So that you can become a person who can do difficult things that don’t have an immediate payoff like scrolling on Social Media.

Yes, the one regular meeting a month can feel like you have to move a mountain to go to the lodge, especially with everything stacked against you when you get home.

But Freemasonry does this to shape you into becoming someone who can move that mountain to go to the lodge for what seems like no reward or value at the time. Except what it’s doing is building the same habits and cognitive ability to not eat that chocolate bar, to not summon a rider with your McDonald’s rather to instead to eat a carrot or cook a steak & veggies.

It’s honestly like climbing a ladder, maybe even Jacob’s ladder — or climbing a winding stair— sure 1 step isn’t going to seem like much, but 1 step after 1 step after 1 step, and then over time you’ve reached the summit.

This is why memorisation of the ritual is at its core teaching you the very thing that is what separates the successful from the failures in everything in life. Pick anyone who was been successful in anything. They didn’t win the lottery, they built it by focusing on what was good for the long term, but doing the reps with the hammer and the chisel, by doing the work (going to lodge, practising the charge) when they didn’t want to and it felt like it was moving a mounting.

This is practising Freemasonry and it’s also the starting level of cognitive learning to be able to master anything and apply it in your own life.

Now we know why it’s important but also understand how we need to think about and approach learning the ritual, after all, that’s the lesson the memorising the ritual is symbolic of— how exactly do we do it?

Here is my strategy!

To start learning the memorisation process, it is a great help to be present in Lodge, not on your phone and to attend our ceremonies. My Lodge meets monthly and I’ve only missed a handful of meetings, I have visited at varying levels of frequency over the last 17 years. I have heard it all hundreds of times.

On the other hand, my Scottish Rite Chapter meets quarterly and I don’t visit as frequently so the rituals aren’t as ingrained in my subconscious as the craft. This means for me, learning Scottish Rite rituals is far harder than Craft. So I know what it’s like to feel like nothing sticks when you are trying to memorise something.

I find that the more I have heard something performed the easier it sticks in my memory. So the key here is to make sure you are active in your visiting, especially when what you are learning is being performed.

Now as for my challenge to learn the Address to the Brethren in 30 days, here is the process I am going to use. But, there are three key things you need to know regardless of which strategy you are using to learn the ritual.

Firstly, you need to carve out time and I know it can be difficult, but remember, that’s the lesson. You don’t need to dedicate a whole hour of the day but if you can find 1 minute at least 30 times in the 960 minutes of your waking hours, that will do you more good than trying to dedicate a whole hour to it.

If you don’t think you have these minutes in the day— go and check the screen time on your smartphone and then be honest with yourself.

However now you’ve carved out time in the day, does this mean you are going to need to take your book with you? Well sort of, my strategy I will reveal in a moment doesn’t require you to take the book with you or put the entire book on your phone either.

As for the second thing you need to know, well, you will no doubt be practising the same lines over and over again. Now, there is a saying that holds true in life, and especially in this case — practice makes perfect. No that’s not true and here is why:

When you make a mistake, and you will, don’t just correct yourself and keep going with the ritual you are practising. This embeds the mistake into your memory and will cause you to need a prompt at that same part every time. It’s also even more difficult to re-write your brain to fix the mistake after it’s been embedded.

So when you make a mistake, go back to the start of the line or the paragraph and practice that part specifically around 14 to 20 times without the mistake. This will embed the correct line into your brain. If you keep making a mistake at that part, don’t go back as far maybe just several words before hand and build up the length from there. The thing is, perfect practice makes perfect!

The third and final thing you need to know before you can use my strategy is this.

As I have said before, Masonry is a progressive science. That’s the beauty of it. So you need to approach this progressively. One brick at a time. That means just starting with one line and perfecting that one per day, then gradually building up by adding the second line the next day. Then every day add a new line.

Although some of the sentences in the ritual can be long and complex. So if you are just starting and haven’t heard the charge you are learning 1,000 times before, my recommendation is to break it down to each pause. These pauses are usually a comma or a semicolon. This will also teach you the right cadence, and this is how I memorised the obligations— by breaking them down to each pause.

It’s like learning how to beat a level on a video game that doesn’t have a save function. As you play the game more and beat more levels, you end up speed-running the previous levels before you slow down on the more difficult ones.

OK, are you ready for my strategy?

If you want to use this strategy, you still need to apply it progressively and increase the difficulty as you learn and improve. Here is is!

Stage 1

You know how I didn’t say you sort of won’t need your ritual book. I promise you don’t. What you will need to do for each line that you are learning is write down an abbreviation of each word, here is an example:

If we take the opening sentence of The Address to the Brethren (my local ritual)

”Brethren, such is the nature of our Institution that, as some must of necessity, rule and teach, so others must, of course, submit and learn; humility in both is an essential qualification.”

What we do is remove most of the letters in each word so it only resembles the word enough to, if we think about it, understand it. The key here is that it shouldn’t come too easy at first it should take us a little touch of effort to pick the word. Here’s my abbreviations:

“Brthrn, sch is th ntur of our Instn tht, as sme mst f ncity, rl & tch, so, ohrs mst, of crs, sbmt & ln; hmty in bh is an estl qfctn”

Then each day, as you add new lines doing the same. There will be some words which you may find too difficult and struggle on, that’s ok. For those, just add more letters to it so you can just get it. You’ll notice I kept both letters in the two letter words is is because there are too many variables as to what a “s” could be— as, is, us, so etc.

Once you’ve learned one line like this, use this part of the strategy as the way to learn any new lines you are adding on. Now it’s time for the next stage.

Stage 2

When you do this stage, remember, you still have to learn new lines using the approach in Stage 1, but for lines we’ve previously learned, we now apply this method.

What we do is remove all letters of each word except for the first two, so that first line now becomes:

"Br, su is th na of ou In th, as so mu of ne, ru an te, so ot mu, of co, su an le; hu in bo is an es qu."

Like in Stage 1, if any words are proving just a little too difficult to get with more than half a second of effort, add more letters in, but pick ones that will make it easier for you, such as “es” becomes “esntl” or “qu” becomes “qual”.

Now we should have:

"Br, su is th na of ou In th, as so mu of ne, ru an te, so ot mu, of co, su an le; hu in bo is an es qu." (being our Stage 2 for the first line)

And add on the second sentence, but seeing at its quite long, we will stop a the the first comma

“Th Ofcrs of ths Ldg ar to cnvrst wh th rls of prprty & th lws of Frmry to xcd th bnds of th dty wth wch tey ar ntrstd” (being stage 1)

Then you want to progress through the charge line by line until you can repeat it either with just glancing at the text in its abbreviated form or from memory. Remember to add letters to words you struggle with and once you no longer struggle with them, take them away! Then it’s time for the next stage which is where most people stop. There are two more “bonus” stages you can use if you need some extra steps to really embed the ritual in your mind.

Stage 3

With stage 3, here is where we take it to the next level. We just have the first letter of each word and the punctuation. However, keep in mind, sometimes you may need to add an extra letter to help. So this is how the First two sentences looks:

"B, S i t N o O I T, a S M o N, R & T, s O M, o C, S & L; H n B i a E Q.
T O o t L a t C w t R o P & t L o F t E t B o t D W W T a E, & Y a o T G a D t E T P. I T, t, Y W H B O A, M n t G D o B H & C H."

One thing I have done here, is replaced “and” with “&” and you can also replace “at” with “@ “ if you want; however the main thing I did here was have all the common short words such as: "the", "is", "of", "in", "to" in lower case. I also used a letter that made it obvious as to what the short word was, such as “an” is “n” but that could also be “in” — except, because you already know what the words are, they should be obvious.

And that is my strategy to learn the Address to the Brethren that I will be using in the next 30 days. It’s similar to what I have used previously where I would just focus on the words line by line, but this will speed up the process as its one of the strategies that Actors use to memorise lines for TV shows!