Word: mystical
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...Gordon G. Johnson hung up his dentist's drill, got a bite to eat and headed for Medinah Temple, Chicago headquarters of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. Doc made a beeline for the third floor where the Temple's Oriental band was gathering...
Week after week, in thousands of halls, in darkened rooms over Main Street drugstores, men meet, exchange mystic signs and complicated handgrips. New members are sent upon symbolic journeys through wildernesses of sawhorses and overturned chairs. Old members toll bells and simulate the groans of lost souls, solemnly chant and portentously listen as the initiate promises to keep the secrets of the order or have his throat cut and his tongue pulled out by the roots...
Floating Cloud. The Order of the Mystic Shrine, sometimes called Masonry's "playground,"† is a kind of detached and whimsical cloud floating somewhere above Masonry's topmost branches. Its members must all be 32nd degree Masons or Knights Templar. It was started about 1870 by William Florence who was fascinated by some Oriental rites he saw in Marseille. Florence was a well-known American comedian of his day. Harold Lloyd, the new Imperial Potentate, therefore follows in a noble tradition...
...about everything he has ever taken up, he went up through Scottish Rite with his father beside him, became a 32nd degree Mason, then went up the other route to Knight Templar. In 1926 he "crossed the hot sands," i.e., took the initiation into the Order of the Mystic Shrine...
...weekend. With them they brought 20,000 Harold Lloydish hornrimmed spectacles for their brethren to wear. Chicago citizens blinked. In hotels and bars, along the streets, everywhere, middle-aged men in red fezzes all began to present the same face. The Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine began to assume a familiar native character-"quiet, normal, boyish, clean, sympathetic, not impossible to romance...