In the original, operative Masonry of Scottish stonemasons’ lodges, a series of signs of recognition by which one Mason could identify another without any obvious communication passing between them. The first known reference to the Mason Word is in a long and amazingly bad poem, The Muses Threnodie, written by one Henry Adamson and published in 1638. The relevant lines, dealing with the rebuilding of a bridge over the River Tay, run as follows:
For what we do presage is not in grosse,
For we be brethren of the Rosie Crosse;
We have the Mason Word and second sight,
Things for to come we can foretell aright.
Other references in Scottish sources through the middle of the seventeenth century make it clear that the Mason Word was a secret passed on among Scottish stonemasons that allowed one mason to identify another at a glance. The Reverend Robert Kirk, peerless researcher of Scottish fairy lore, wrote an appendix to his 1691 book The Secret Common-wealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies discussing five Scottish “Curiosities…not much observ’d to be elsewhere,” one of which was the Mason Word. Kirk wrote:
The Mason-Word, which tho some make a Misterie of it, I will not conceal a little of what I know; it’s like a Rabbinical tradition in a way of comment on Iachin and Boaz the two pillars erected in Solomon’s Temple; with an addition of som secret signe delivered from hand to hand, by which they know, and become familiar one with another. (Cited in Stevenson 1988, p. 133)
See Freemasonry; Temple of Solomon.
One source, the Sloane manuscript, gives an account of the secret signs summed up by the phrase “the Mason Word.” These included placing the feet or a pair of tools at right angles to one another, in the image of a square; turning the eyes toward the east and the mouth toward the west; and knocking on a door with two light knocks followed by one heavy one. A Mason visiting a building site could knock on a wall and say, “This is bose [hollow];” any Freemason present would respond by saying that it was solid.
None of these signs remained in use in Freemasonry after the early eighteenth-century reformation of the Craft, and in most Masonic works comments about “the Mason Word” refer instead to the password of the Master Mason degree. See Freemasonry, origins of.
SOURCE:
The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies : the ultimate a-z of ancient mysteries, lost civilizations and forgotten wisdom written by John Michael Greer – © John Michael Greer 2006