THE MASTERS

Every year that I watch the solemn piety associated with The Masters golf championship, I am reconfirmed in my belief that its rituals and procedures are modeled off Freemasonry. Indeed, The Masters may be a masonic lodge. 

As with masonic membership, golfers aren't allowed in except by invitation. The setting is idyllic - a Garden of Eden for modern man.

The Garden of Eden is particularly relevant as interpreted by the Kabbala adept, which status is characteristic of the Masons of the highest degrees, according to evidence manifest in their own books. In this interpretation Adam was both male and female. Woman was drawn out of man. However, at its most elevated and pristine level, there was no woman.

Thus, Augusta National Golf Club which hosts The Masters assumed the status of "perfect garden." The Masters became a special event within the "garden." The event was the "creation of man" - a new man - in the Masters Lodge. Winners of the golf tournament, The Masters, were the invited ones. They had passed through the Entered Apprentice and Fellow Craft stages during their golfing journey. Now, they were welcomed into the second floor level where serious masonic work occurs. They were then presented their masonic apron in the form of a green coat. It is the Green Coat ritual that seals the process as masonic in nature. They were then the equivalent of a Master Mason at The Masters lodge at Augusta National.

Parenthetically, the initiation of young communists in the old U.S.S.R. involved similar masonic rituals, including the bestoyal of the Red Hankerchief. Both the Green Coat and the Red Hankerchief are correlatives of the traditional masonic apron, which is bestowed on all Master Masons of the Third Degree of the Blue Lodge Masonry. There is a kind of spiritual fellowship in all such ritually similar associations. This does not mean they are the same.

The fact that women are excluded from membership in The Masters is not surprising, since that is a characteristic of masonic lodges. However, "open masonry" - associations that include many freemasons and are invitational - do include women. The Council on Foreign Affairs is an example of this. From the point of view of masonic adepts of the Kabbala, women are included in the lodges; however, they exist within the men.