Читать книгу The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions - Ruth Edwards Dudley - Страница 21

On the 12th of July in the year ‘89,

I first took the notion this Order to join;

Then up to the Lodge Room and there I did go,

And what I got there you will very soon know.

CHORUS: On the goat, on the goat, To get in the Order you ride on the goat.

And when I arrived there I knocked on the door;

There’s one they call Master who stood on the floor;

Come in and sit down you are welcome sez he,

But a goat in the corner kept lookin’ at me.

CHORUS

Then the goat was brought forward, that I might get on,

After I mounted they bid him begone;

Through the Lodge window the goat he did go, Through bogs and wild mountains and where I don’t know.

CHORUS

Then after a long and wearisome chase,

The goat he arrived in the very same place,

Approaching the Lodge Room I heard them all sing

Success to the member that made the house ring.

‘The Ride on the Goat’

As Orangemen frequently and plaintively point out, the organization is not a secret society but a society with secrets, and very few of them at that. How can an organization be secret, they ask, when its members parade openly in groups with banners declaring where they are from and what they stand for. ‘The only secrets the Orange has are related to its ritual,’ said an Orangeman. ‘There has to be something mysterious to make you want to join and find out. That’s what creates the male bonding. The fact that we know what the ladder stands for on our sash may not be earth-shattering, but it matters to us.’ His father is in the same lodge; his mother refers to what they do in the lodge as ‘playing silly buggers’. They don’t take offence. ‘Sure, it’s childish. That’s why we don’t want to do these things in public. It’s not because they’re bad, but because they’re stupid.’

I know from private and public sources the details of Orange ceremonies and rituals.^* At their worst they are no more stupid than most ceremonials or rituals of guilds or fraternal societies seem to outsiders; they are certainly not sinister. Ritual accounts for less than 1 per cent of what goes on at an Orange Lodge – infinitesimal compared to what goes on among Freemasons. The most exciting event is an initiation, and mischievous brethren enjoy winding-up potential candidates by making mysterious references to ‘riding the goat’ (which is, in fact, a backwards acronym for ‘the ark of God’^†) and hinting darkly at stringent tests of courage. There are physical aspects to the initiation (the travel) which involve a blindfolded candidate having to face certain tests and travails inspired by a biblical story; in tough urban areas, especially in England and Scotland, these might be occasionally on the exuberant side, but in general the experience is rather tame. ‘The initiation is a bit amusing,’ one young man remarked, ‘but when you come home you think it’s a bit silly.’ A less blasé brother describes the ceremony as ‘a heady mixture of folk memory, rural Ulster Protestant tradition and ancient ritual’, which is for many ‘a moving experience, a rite of passage from boy to manhood, the admission to an historic brotherhood bonded by centuries of blood, fire and persecution and a spiritual experience couched in terms of the language of the deliverance and pilgrimage of the children of Israel’.^*

The written-down part of the initiation involves the sponsors leading the candidate into the Lodge Room, where the Worshipful Master reads out in full the qualifications of an Orangeman and establishes that the candidate assents to these and is seeking admission to the Orange institution of his own free will. The lodge members agree to his initiation, the chaplain says a prayer and the Worshipful Master then asks the candidate at considerable length if, inter alia, he promises allegiance to the sovereign, her successors and the constitution; assistance to the civil authorities when called upon; fidelity to brother Orangemen ‘in all just actions’; and a vow of silence about lodge proceedings to any but a brother Orangeman. There are the promises about religion and secret societies.

‘I don’t think there’s anything in there that would be offensive towards your Roman Catholic friends,’ said a senior Orangeman who was telling me about the ceremony. He then went on to read out one request of the Worshipful Master:

Do you promise, before this Lodge, to give no countenance, by your presence or otherwise, to the unscriptural, superstitious, and idolatrous worship of the Church of Rome? And do you also promise never to marry a Roman Catholic, never to stand sponsor for a child when receiving baptism from a priest of Rome, or allow a Roman Catholic to stand sponsor for your child at baptism? And do you further promise to resist, by all lawful means, the ascendancy, extension, and encroachments of that Church; at the same time being careful always to abstain from all unkind words and actions towards its members, yea, even prayerfully and diligently, as opportunity occurs, to use your best efforts to deliver them from error and false doctrine, and lead them to the truth of the Holy Word, which is able to make them wise unto salvation?

All that Orangemen can see or hear when they read such words are the injunctions to behave properly towards Roman Catholics. They are genuinely baffled that outsiders find such rules and language bigoted.^* Perhaps the reason I have never taken offence is that I was brought up in the Republic of Ireland under the authoritarian and intolerant Irish Catholic Church and understand something of their traditional fears. Also, by the time I began to read the rules and regulations I had developed a great admiration and affection for many Orangemen.

‘As far as the Orange Order’s concerned,’ said an aged Worshipful Master to me, ‘it’s not a bigoted order. It’s a religious order, there to protect the religious beliefs of the Protestant people. In the very opening prayer you pray for your Roman Catholic brethren. I don’t dictate to the Roman Catholic man where he should go to church; I’m as happy with him going to his own as he is to mine. I’ll not condemn any man’s religion – except Paisley, for he’s divided everybody.

‘To me the Orange is a family and if a man would live to the qualifications of the Orangeman and to what he’s taught inside the four walls of an Orange hall, he would be fit to live a good life.’