Masonry has always been a mens society. Think about its formation about 300 years ago (modern), were there any female acedemics and the such? Nope. Male only is a tradition.
To my knowledge (told to me by Daemonpainter) some lodges do accept women but are not officially recognised.
Masonary is a male only thing because:
the spiritual rituals are geared specifically FOR men,....
sexist or not, it is what it is....
Here is an interesting view that some may find of interest....
and is an actual conversational piece, as opposed to posting about meetings in ale houses and special pieces of paper...
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In more customary and conservative fields of materialist psychology, we find the typical Victorian concern for labeling. If something can be labeled, it need not be understood. A label also distances us from the subject matter; we need not be involved in it too deeply, we can stand aside and consider it coldly, dispassionately; when we find something that we do not understand, something that instills fear or doubt or uncertainty, we try to fit it to our set of labels. Thus archetypes, gods and goddesses, mythic patterns, and the flow of energy in the human psyche and body, are all reduced to a set of labels within a conceptual framework. We have a comfortable feeling, thereafter, of knowing what we are talking about, writing about, experiencing, or, perhaps, avoiding experiencing. Victorian psychology and occultism share this entrenched attitude.
Now it has to be said that the same concern with naming names is true of genuine ancient and contemporary magical and spiritual traditions; the Mysteries (in any form worldwide) are replete with systems, labels, connective structures and so forth. They do not, however, regard the system, the label, as being of any value in itself; there is no reductionism in the Mysteries unless the individual chooses, in a typical modern sense, to reach no further than the labels themselves.
This apparent similarity between mythic re-tellings and obsessive listings is brought into proper focus when we realize that the original mythic epics and magical correspondences were not written down, but were vehicles of a living oral tradition. The use of images and verses from memory rather than from the printed page is an essential aid to transformation of consciousness: this is why magical traditions insist on learning by heart what seems, to the modern intellect, to be a mass of superficially indigestible lore.
Much of our response to ancient mythic patterns and magical or religious systems is heavily conditioned by that same Victorian obsessive labeling as materialist psychology; it is most unlikely that the lists of correspondences used in the esoteric traditions were ever regarded as scientific or authoritative in the nineteenth century sense that still dominates much of modern thought and practice. They were more in the nature of incantations, dream flows, protean collections that were used to attune the consciousness to holisms, rather than to reduce perception to series of items.
The Male Mysteries, like any branch of esoteric tradition, are essentially practical. The male-dominated elitist secret societies and occult orders of, for example, the nineteenth century, tended towards the intellectual, the hierarchical, and of course towards extreme obscurity. But there are older traditions, sometimes hidden within intellectual occultism and sometimes quite separate from it. It is the hidden traditions that we should restore for the present day, and it is in those traditions that we find the direct teachings, myths and legends of the Five Branches, and their empowering gods and goddess forms.
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The Theosophical Society, despite its many admirable achievements in the causes of women's rights, racial equality, antivivisection, and ,of course, the liberation of India from British rule, had a surprisingly wide range of negative undertones. Many of these undertones were prevalent in other esoteric teachings and magical orders of the period, and have persisted unbroken to the present day, often re-manifesting in the New Age movement. We shall touch upon such difficult and potentially suppressive streams of consciousness throughout this book, but for the moment need to state the primary ones briefly.
The Theosophical Society, and related but far less politically influential magical Orders such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, placed a strong emphasis upon 'hidden Masters'. These were an elite of supposedly superhuman males, living in secret isolation and dictating the progress of the human race. To a certain extent this concept derives from a perennial teaching concerning Innerworld or spiritual masters, who are said to exist in, and act or communicate from, other dimensions, and to relate to humanity in many varying but generally beneficial ways.
The suggestion that such teachers are almost exclusively male, and that they are, in fact, super-physical beings moving secretly among humanity and steering our 'evolution' is a subtle but powerful twist to an age-old original teaching, and has many negative ramifications.
Such concepts are anathema to spiritual development, to equality and harmony of the sexes, and to individual emotional and mental maturity. At the most juvenile level they can lead weak misguided men to assume that they are, or soon will be, such 'Masters' but this is only the most obvious and trivial result. More subtly they presuppose that humanity is little more than a series of manipulated races or, at best, a collective entity being steered by higher forces and specific (male) intelligences. The worst extremes of this type of esoteric teaching merge imperceptibly with racism and fascism, in which superior male immortals cultivate a racial elite at the expense of other 'non-Aryan' or supposedly lesser races.
Much of this negative dross has permeated through into certain modern or New Age cults and societies, also claiming tuition from 'channeled' sources, hidden Masters, and the advent of an elect or elite within the present or next century.
This range of suppressive conceptual structures derives in turn from the political programming of historical or exoteric Christianity, carefully devised to generate belief in an 'elect' abandoning or even hostile to 'the damned', and firmly based upon male superiority.
Nor should we assume that movements based upon eastern (or more usually, pseudo-eastern) religions operating in the West are free of this long-term pernicious suppressive program; very often the veneer of eastern spirituality and the glamorous use of exotic words and half-understood practices, masks what is at root an essentially Judaeo-Christian outlook. The much abused and misunderstand concept of karma is a typical example of this, while the pseudo-scientific use of 'evolution' within esoteric, spiritual, and New Age teachings, be they eastern or western based, is another. We shall return to these subjects in our later pages, for both karma and evolution are central to the Male Mysteries, though not in the popularized and often perverted manner in which they are regularly presented today.
Clearly none of this suppressive monosexual elitism is adequate or desirable for the twenty-first century, and any man or woman seeking inner growth should be very cautious indeed of working with any movement or set of teachings that derives from such sources or suggests such ideas. The most dangerous concepts are often subtly hidden or cunningly disguised with several layers of camouflage, and are often only fully perceived through meditation and contemplation, rather than in a gross outer form, though such outer forms abound in the current expansive warm wet climate of consciousness.
In our present context of the Male Mysteries, men need to be particularly aware that many lines or streams of concepts, of imagery, involving hidden Masters and so-called spiritual evolution, are in fact linked to the negative suppressive shadow of enlightenment, a word widely used to loosely mean spiritual liberation. For many centuries this shadow has resonated and manifested through male-elitism, which damages men as much as it does women. We shall return to this subject in many places in the following pages, as it is one of the major problems that men must address if they are to recover a proper Mystery or process of true enlightenment for the coming century.
http://www.amazon.com/Celebrating-Male-Mysteries-R-Stewart/dp/1873596014/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225807517&sr=1-2
