1646. October 16. 4.30pm.
“I was made a Free Mason at Warrington in Lancashire
with Colonel Henry Mainwaring of Karincham, Cheshire.”

With these words, Captain Elias Ashmole made the first known personal record of initiation into a lodge of Accepted Free Masons, anywhere in the world. Elias Ashmole: “the greatest virtuoso and curioso that was ever read of in England before his time”, declared contemporary Anthony à Wood.
    I have been fascinated by this luminous “saint of the gnostic church” for many years. In ages of greatness he has been seen as great; in an age of straw-men he has been downgraded. We live in an age of spiritual Liliputianism – Britain in the first decade of the third millennium – but we must nonetheless rise to the challenge of Bro Ashmole’s phenomenal life.
    Six years ago, I made a documentary with Ashmole as its dominant subject (Initiation, Dragon Films); a film inspired by my meeting Freemasonry Today contributor Doug Pickford, a specialist in Staffordshire and Cheshire folklore. The initial motive had been to depict the old mysteries of “the hidden county”. Ashmole’s 1646 ride to initiation during a brief lull in the Civil War provided the structure for the film.
    As the project progressed, Ashmole moved centre stage and the result was a provocative mixed marriage of “earth magic”, folklore, antiquarianism and pre-Grand Lodge Free Masonry. Ashmole himself was portrayed by Columba Powell, son of Michael Powell of Powell & Pressburger fame. His last role had been in his father’s notorious and brilliant horror film, Peeping Tom – so old Masonry was not so great a jump for him!

To every thing there is a season...

Three years as editor of this worthy magazine brought much new intellectual meat to my consideration of Ashmole and 17th century Freemasonry. A number of historical problems were solved, sometimes with exciting results. In particular, one must cite the indefatigable creative inquisitiveness of Freemasonry Today contributor, Matthew Scanlan, whose article on Nicholas Stone and the London Masons Company. will, I’m sure, come to be seen as a seminal moment in the serious study and communication of Freemasonry.
    Towards the end of last year, an old seed sprouted in my mind. Would it be possible to film the missing link in my earlier presentation of Ashmole, namely Ashmole’s initiation itself? In 1996, the ground for such a reconstruction seemed muddy at best, fraught with scholarly difficulties. The time had not been right.
    As the winter of 2001/2 melted away, matters began to fall into place with startling speed; the backing was in place – and so was the scholarship. Initially, I thought of a sequel, Initiation 2, focusing on a more strictly academic approach, with a re-construction of Ashmole’s Acception as its centrepiece. That might please a few dozen specialists, but what was better? A relatively short film on the Acception, or, by melting down the old film and uniting the best of the old with the fruits of the new, make a complete dramatic work?
    A MIGHTY GOOD MAN – Elias Ashmole and the Initiation was born. Shorn of earth magic and Staffordshire folklore, totally focused on Ashmole and Freemasonry, the film not only required very extensive re-cutting but three totally new parts (including one on Ashmole’s 1672 rehabilitation of the Knights Templar).
    Shooting began in earnest in April at a medieval barn in Abbots Bromley, Staffordshire, as we re-constituted Ashmole’s first lodge with the sterling help of six hand-picked Staffordshire gentlemen of no fixed prejudice.
    Nor could one tell the whole story simply from a re-creation of the epoch-marking 1646 initiation, one had to consider Ashmole’s 1682 attendance at an Acception ceremony at Masons’ Hall, Basinghall St., London, as well, and set it in its true context. In fact, Ashmole’s second extant account of his masonic activities made sense of the first. For in his 1682 diary entry the now well established Elias Ashmole, Fellow of the Royal Society, world-beating antiquarian, magus and Windsor Herald, spoke of his being “senior Fellow”, describing the initiates at Masons Hall as “new-accepted masons”.

Acception

The central sequence of the film attempts to re-create in its entirety a coherent “Acception” ceremony set in the pressing circumstances of 1646 at a Warrington country house. The scene is constructed from the best attested 17th century material available: the Free Masons’ Word and Signs manuscript in Sir Hans Sloanes’s collection of curiosities , and a catechetical section made from the latter document together with the Edinburgh Register House Manuscript of the 1690’s. It is reasonable to imagine such material, or something very much like it, was in use among accepted brethren in the 1640’s. Naturally, one has to use an informed imagination in the best traditional masonic spirit to transform dead letter into living word.
    One element of the ceremony that was almost certainly a component of Ashmole’s initiatic experience on that late afternoon in October 1646 was the reading of the “Old Charges” to masons. Amazingly, Sloane Manuscript 3848 ends with the following autograph: “ffinis p.me Eduardu: Sankey decimo sexto die Octobris, Anno domini 1646” – the exact date of Ashmole’s initiation!
    Ashmole named the gentleman Richard Sankey as being present, while Warrington church registers record the baptism of “Edward son to Richard Sankeay [sic.], gent., 3 ffebruarie, 1621/2”. We may imagine Edward Sankey writing out the Charges – perhaps from memory – as part of his father’s preparation for the ceremony. To hear these words, read again in their proper context, was an almost overwhelming experience. One had the uncanny sense of having slipped through a hole in time.

Old Charges

The Old Charges are often written about, but seldom contemplated. Dramatising the reading of the Charges illuminated their character and meaning to an extraordinary extent. As I watched David Foster-Ward unravel the little scroll like a reel of silent celluloid and begin reading, the Charges suddenly made vivid and moving sense : a kind of shorthand “cartoon” of the history of civilisation from its first stirrings in Mesopotamia to the world of medieval castles and abbeys. The Charges saw the whole story as one, as a myth whose subject is legend itself: history as inscription. What masons made, lasts, survives, supports, attests. Betwixt the pillars that hold space and time together, the mason’s works testify to his character and the source of his strength. Even buried beneath the sands of time, the masons’ work lies true – the vital testimony and last word.
    Making the initiation ceremony (by which Ashmole became a Fellow – there was no ‘third degree’) was profoundly moving, strange and exhilarating. As the buckled shoe stepped gingerly around the chalk symbols on the ground, it was like eaves-dropping on a long forgotten rainy afternoon. Outside: the world. Inside: a world of wonder, a truly hermetic experience. Lights in the darkness, and a realisation: in the 17th century, “operative” and “speculative” Freemasonry were phases of a single world of experience, one merging seamlessly into the other as mind and matter must. Ex Uno Omnia (from the One, All) was Ashmole’s motto.

Rosicrucian

The film also gives an accurate run-down of Ashmole’s later Rosicrucian, scientific and masonic interests. We see Accepted Free Masonry as a living, alchemical force in Britain, long before, yet leading up to, the establishment of the first Grand Lodge 25 years after Ashmole’s death. Accepted Masonry within the London Masons Company of the 17th century is discussed on location at Masons Yard in the City of London.
    We also see the original building that housed Ashmole’s gift to the University of Oxford and to the nation, the Ashmolean Museum – the first public museum in the world, which persists to this day as an open inspiration to visitors and students from around the globe.
    While the first film was perforce edited in a fortnight, A Mighty Good Man required every spare hour of three solid months to get right. I leave Brethren to judge whether the finished work cuts the masonic mustard.
    It is plain that the spiritual, scientific and practical principles of Freemasonry were central to the transforming, creative power of Elias Ashmole’s magical life. That life ought to inspire masons today to transcend the bonds of apparent reality to make a new link between the earthly and the heavenly. We must progress from the blackened state of blindness to the golden revelation of divine light – to transcend the chequer-board of death’s hollow face and head for the source and Throne.
    How high is your Lodge? asks Warden Penketh at one point in the film.
    It reaches to heaven, comes the reply.
    Ashmole’s life is, for me, as much a blueprint for the future of Freemasonry as he is himself a shining exemplar of its past.

1 Freemasonry Today, Spring, 2000, pages 26-30.
2 Sloane Ms. 3329.
3 Constitutions of Masonry, British Library.