Everything changes and usually for the better, but one change that worries me is the falling membership in service clubs. If society loses the great contributions made by these voluntary organizations, will it be able to absorb the damage?

That's why on 9 January we were watching men in Arab robes, clown suits and familiar red fezes gather for ceremonies kicking off another year of operation for Tunis Shiners. We're at the Ottawa Masonic Centre, 2140

Walkley Road, and for those who've never been in the place, it's a surprise. The centre is huge and divided into many rooms. Three of them are big enough to serve as churches.

Two of the rooms look a bit like courtrooms, and the installation service with the mystical air is being performed in a room set up almost like a church. To the uninitiated, of which this reporter is one, it at first seems spooky, but then it becomes clear. This is a boys club for men who still want to have fun.

Peter Rippstein, a researcher at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, is being formally installed as Tunis's "potentate." The Middle East flavour of everything stems from the organization's name at its 1870 founding in New York City -- The Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine.

They were Freemasons who decided, maybe just for the hell of it, to establish a club that would encourage a little nonsense, as long as it was fun. It would be fraternal and philanthropic, like the organization it sprang from. The fun spread and today there are 350,000 members in North America, raising $735 million annually to run 22 children's hospitals in the US, Canada and Mexico.

In Ottawa, here are 735 members contributing to a national budget of $15 million. The women's arm of the operation is called Daughters of the Nile and it commits itself to $2 million annually.

The service begins with a farewell to 18 "nobles" who died last year. In Shriner talk, they don't die, but are "visited by the black camel" that helps them pass through "the invisible forest."

Like everything else, Shriners have changed. They used to be a rowdy bunch. In full party mode they were known to ride motorcycles into hotel lobbies and party hearty.

Now the emphasis is on things like "freedom with responsibility" and its main philanthropic thrust is still aimed at children. Like all service clubs, the main aim is giving back -- supporting the community that supports them. To be a Shriner, one has to first be a Mason. The Shriners are starting a major membership drive, and don't appear to be worried about topping up their ranks.

Things are different for other major service clubs, and in Ottawa there's talk of merger. At this point nobody seems to want to go on record.

Kiwanis Club of Ottawa, founded in 1917, has always been one of the biggest and busiest. In 1995, it had 248 members. Last year, it was down to 161. There are exceptions. Manotick Kiwanis last year saw a leap in membership to 50 from 16.

Ottawa Rotary at its peak had about 150 members, and is now down to less than 70. But it wouldn't be fair to rely on a headcount, says president Brian Barr. As the city grew, the Ottawa club established other clubs in suburban communities. Like executive level members in other clubs, he agrees there's pressure from shrinkage. He also sees irony. "It's happening at a time when the need (for volunteerism) was never greater." Is it a sign of a citizenry becoming more self-centered and falling away from the idea of giving back? Norm Morrison doesn't think so. He's director of public relations for Tunis.

"Society is changing and there are new pressures and responsibilities." But he's confident there are still many willing to keep payback on their list of things-that-must-be-done.

This is not intended to be an-depth look at the future of service clubs. There are other Shrine "temples" in Ottawa, and many service clubs. Some are doing better than others, but most are being squeezed in the membership department. When I started writing a newspaper column in the capital in 1966, I tried to make sure service clubs got more attention than they had before. That they worked hard and performed wondrous service for their communities became taken as a given, so it wasn't news anymore. Members can't be blamed for feeling they've been working in the dark.

In another bit of irony, they'll make headlines if we lose them.

The history of the name for a Mason carries one back through strange and unfamiliar territory.

Six and one half centuries before speculative Masonry began in the reign of George I, the word mason was brought to England by those great builders, the Normans. The English term is derived from the Old French masons (Modern French Maçons) and this goes back to the medieval Latin machiones, of which Isodore of Seville (who died in A.D. 640) explained that the masons were so called from the machinae (scaffolding) on which they had to stand because of the height of their walls.

With classical Latin we encounter an entirely new set of words: structor ("a builder" later lengthened to constructor); caementarius ("Maker of a rough ashlar," or caementum, from caedo, I cut); and latomus ("stone-cutter", a word borrowed from the Greek). Classical Greek had at least four words for 'mason,' based on two words for stone, las and lithos. They were latomos and lithomos (both meaning "stone-cutter"); latypos ("stone-striker") and Lithourgos ("Stone-worker").

Remembering that in II Samuel, Ch.5, v. 11, King Hiram "sends masons" to King David (This is earlier than his more familiar help to King Solomon), I looked up the Hebrew text to find what the original term was. It turned out to be a triple compound, haraash-ebhen-qir ("Cutter of stone for a wall"). Unlike the scaffolding of the mediaeval machiones, the term in Latin, Greek and Hebrew are aptly related to Speculative Freemasonry.

But stone-masonry did not originate in either Tyre or Jerusalem, not as late as 1000 B.C. Its beginnings were rather in Egypt, around 3,000 BC, when it was created by the genius Imhotep. I therefore turned to Dr. Wallis Budge's Egyptian Language (London, 1922) to find the hieroglyphic sign for a stone-mason. It is pronounced "hus", and shows a worker with bared arms and lower legs, standing beside a three-foot wall and testing it with a plumb-line! He even seems to be wearing an apron. He is a striking anticipation of Amos, 7:7, in a hieroglyphic that goes back to 3,000 BC., or 2,000 years before that prophet. In the Jerusalem Bible, more accurately translated than the King James Version, verse 7 of Chapter 7 reads: "This is what the Lord Yahweh showed me: a man standing by a wall, plumb-line in hand." In other words, what the Lord showed to the prophet Amos of Tekoa in this third vision was a fellowcraft mason at work, as carved by the Egyptians on obelisks and pyramids almost 5,000 years before our time.

The Junior Warden may well take pride in his symbolic jewel!

The author reaches some striking conclusions about the involvement of Freemasonry, the Templars, and the European governments in underwriting/encouraging various forms of piracy up to the early 1700s.

Evidently, piracy started out as a form of anti-Papism, with the merchant vessels of the Papal States being the target. (Frers thinks the Templars, with their jolie rouge flag = the Jolly Roger, were behind this game plan. He believes that the fleet that sailed from LaRochelle in October 1307 into thin air actually resurfaced as pirate vessels.) Then as Spain and Portugal began to colonize all over the globe, attention shifted from robbing the Pope to hitting their ships, especially the ones returning from the New World loaded down with gold and gems.

Anyhoo, a pseudo-masonic group of pirates formed the Brotherhood of the Coast on all the Masonic principles except belief in God. It provided cooperation and safe havens for marauding members throughout the Caribbean.

This book was originally published in Spanish, and I’m willing to bet the occasional misconstructions about the __th century (actually referring to the wrong 100-year period) and other inconsistencies are the result of either bad or no editing to the Spanish text or a sloppy translation. But it’s still worth a look.

There’s more about piracy than the other elements. And the author speaks of the Priory of Sion as a simple fact, which I know many Masons don’t credit. New Yorkers will bridle at the author’s discussion of Robert Livingston’s involvement in bankrolling Captain Kidd and involving a known Mason, Richard Coote (earl of Bellomont), in their master plan “to capture pirate ships in the name of the Crown, but keep the booty instead of returning it to its owner.” Oddly enough, Frers does not remark that Livingston was a Mason - rather a surprising gap in a book that drops lots of other names from the early days.