Scottish Rite Journal

REVISITING THE NEW AGE

In Summer 2020, Supreme Council, SJ, Librarian, Larissa Watkins, and Chris Ruli, 32º, District of Columbia Grand Lodge and Washington, D.C., Valley Historian, digitized the entire run of The New Age Magazine (as the Scottish Rite Journal was known until 1989).

When founded in 1904, the magazine contained not only Masonic articles but general-interest features more similar in style to The Saturday Evening Post than to a specifically Masonic publication, including short stories (“White Rose”), poetry (“The Magical Kiss”), a regular Music and Drama column, and even advertisements for Shredded Wheat and the Studebaker Electric (an early battery-powered automobile). This broad-spectrum approach is evident on the covers of the early years, featuring artwork in Art Nouveau style and employing figures from the zodiac which corresponded to the month of each issue.

Despite these early differences to the present-day Journal, the New Age of the early years prefigured later events. One poem, “The Sphinx” by Clarence H. Urner (Nov. 1904 issue) foreshadowed eleven years later that the House of the Temple in Washington, D.C., would install two monumental sphinxes to guard the entry of the building.“What is Morn,/ Hot Noon, black night, or any lengthening hour,” the poet asks, “When Egypt lives within that steadfast frown?”

In a 1905 feature anticipating the Journal’s current Masonic Traveler series, Warren Harper journeys to the Jungfrau Mountain summit of the Swiss Alps: “where sturdy mountaineers in the past have perished in this Arctic wilderness of snow, you and I will take our ease and make merry over little Swiss cakes and beer.” Harper praised the “modern Aladdins, the engineers, [who] have again rubbed their lamps” to make possible “the wonderful electric road ascending the grizzly veteran of the Oberland Alps […]”

This focus on developments in technology is reflected in another feature which appeared in the New Age’s early years, to wit: popular articles on science. John Bozeman, a scholar of early technology, appraises a March 1912, ten-page article on astronomical research called “The Great ‘Eyes’ of Science.” Dr. Bozeman writes: “While the article speaks of the immense scientific value of [large telescopes] and similar instruments, another motivation is given as well: the quest to see Martians and their works [and the potential] ways that humans might someday communicate with the beings who could live on Mars […]”

Cover of the August/September 1904 New Age Magazine in Art Nouveau style

Within a few years of its 1904 premiere, The New Age Magazine gradually moved away from the general-interest format, and it instead concentrated increasingly on articles analyzing Masonic symbolism, history, and organizational structure.

In the New Age’s next wave, according to Br. Ruli, “the publication adopted a ‘Masonic activist’ tone. Masonic activism became organizational policy in 1920, when the Supreme Council, S.J., publicly supported developing a federal Department of Education (something which did not occur until decades later) […]”

Then in the 1920’s, the magazine’s articles began alternating between a metaphysical Masonic focus and pieces dealing with patriotic as well as more on-the-ground topics, a pattern the Scottish Rite Journal continues today. Thanks to the recent digitization efforts by the House of the Temple Library, a greater appreciation of the unique development of the New Age, the Southern Jurisdiction Supreme Council’s “first literary magazine,” is now possible. - Mark Dreisonstok, 32º, KCCH,