WESTERN Australia’s top Freemason has confirmed human bones found during renovation works at the former Albany masonic hall in May were once used in the secretive organisation’s private ceremonies.
Dr William Babe, who is Grand Master of WA Freemasons, said they used the bones as teaching aids while performing a ritual known as the Third Degree.
“They are called the Emblems of Mortality and they are used very briefly as a lesson in our own mortality,” he said.
“It’s not done in any improper way and they are of an enormous historical significance.”
“For 600 years it’s been a part of our culture that’s never really come to light; it is something we keep to ourselves.”
Dr Babe said the ritual used to be performed using either a real skull and two thighbones, or replicas made of plaster cast or wood.
“All of them were from antiquity,” he said. “The ones that were found would likely go back to the 1860s.”
While enacting the dramatic moral lesson, freemasons arranged them to make the well-known “skull and crossbones” emblem, which Dr Babe said appeared in many old cathedrals throughout Europe.
Dr Babe said the 125 lodges under his jurisdiction no longer used human bones in the ceremony since a former grand master ordered them to be handed in to police in 1999.
When it was put on the market in 2008, the Albany masonic hall belonged to Plantagenet Lodge, which is the oldest lodge in the region and is not affiliated with Dr Babe’s Grand Lodge of Western Australia.
Sven Tobiassen, who is master of that English-affiliated lodge, said it stopped using human bones in its rituals some time in the last century and they may have been long-forgotten lodge property.
Alternatively, he said the bones may have belonged to one of the Western Australian masonic lodges that rented rooms in the building for their meetings.
Dr Babe, who is also a General Practitioner in Kalamunda, said there was no law governing human remains until 1972, and as a medical student he was required to own a real skeleton.
A police spokesperson said an initial investigation showed there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding the bones found in the old Albany lodge rooms.
“The remains were collected by the State Mortuary, and this is no longer a police matter,” she said.
Albany Senior Constable Jill Cartmell said police determined the bones were not of recent origin but still had to be identified.
“Once we rule out that it’s not a recent crime or it’s not a criminal matter it is looked at by university scientists,” she said.
Snr Const Cartmell said this was being done at the University of Western Australia in Perth.
