The Origin of the MB Word in Freemasonry

The MB word in Freemasonry is one of the oldest and most enigmatic signs of the Master Mason degree. It appears very early in the manuscripts, in a variety of forms — some of them obscure — whose origin is still debated. Today the MB word in Freemasonry points to the legend of Hiram, but was that association really there from the start? Before Hiram, other stories were in circulation and other symbolic logics prevailed. Tracing the history of the MB word in Freemasonry means going back to the earliest known rituals and asking what, as early as the seventeenth century, gave meaning to a word that has become so central.

The first occurrence of the MB word in Freemasonry: what does the Sloane manuscript reveal?

The earliest known evidence of an MB word appears in the Sloane manuscript No. 3329, dated to around 1700 but sometimes regarded — notably by the Reverend Woodford, who published it in 1872 — as a copy of a much older document, possibly earlier than 1640. The text stands at the crossroads of two worlds: it refers to operative Freemasons, which suggests an English origin, yet it uses typically Scottish terms, such as the titles given to Entered Apprentices and Fellowcrafts (Interprintices and Fellow craftes) or the J and B Words. Everything points to the direct influence of the Scottish Masonry of the Mason Word.

Facsimile of the Sloane manuscript No. 3329 (c. 1700), one of the first documents to mention a Word reserved for Masters. A key witness to the transition between the Scottish Masonry of the Mason Word and early English speculative Masonry.

It is in this hybrid context that we find a word reserved for Masters, passed on during a grip strongly reminiscent of the later Five Points of Fellowship. This word is MAHABYN, for which no explanation is given. While byn means nothing in Early Modern English, it is attested in Scots English with the meaning “bone”. A Scottish origin for the term thus begins to emerge — without, however, explaining the first part of the word, maha. At this stage, everything suggests that we are facing a linguistic and ritual riddle whose keys will only appear later.

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How did the MB word evolve between 1710 and 1730?

Between 1710 and 1730, manuscripts and exposures offer a series of variants of the MB word, which help us better understand the old Mahabyn of the Sloane. The Trinity College manuscript (1711) gives MATCHPIN; A Mason’s Examination (1723) gives MAUGHBIN; The Whole Institutions of Free-masons opened (1725) mentions MAGBOE; and finally Pritchard’s Masonry Dissected (1730) fixes, for the Moderns, the well-known form MACHBENAH, interpreted as “he is stricken, the Architect”, in direct connection with the legend of Hiram.

But it is the Graham manuscript (1726) that provides the essential clue: it does not give the word itself, but explains it through the enigmatic formula “marrow in this bone”. This association between marrow and bone, absent from the Hiramic context, points to an older story and already announces the Noachic roots of the first MB word.

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Does the MB word really refer to a “bone”?

The decisive clue provided by the Graham manuscript — “marrow in this bone” — confirms that the second part of the first MB word, byn, refers to the “bone” of Scots English, where the term is attested in various forms (ban, bane, bin, byn). The later evolution towards Mahabone or Moabon only strengthens this reading.

It remains to understand the first syllable, maha, entirely foreign to Early Modern English.

Does Scots English shed light on the first syllable of the MB word?

Yes. The form Maughbin, attested in A Mason’s Examination (1723), provides an essential key. In Scots English, maugh (or moach, moch) describes something damp, steeped, fermenting or putrefying. It is a term used for decayed organic matter, sometimes foul-smelling. This nuance leads straight back to the scene in the Graham, where the sons of Noah find their father’s body in an advanced state of decomposition.

Noah and his sons building the Ark. Nineteenth-century chromolithograph (Aurea Bibbia classica, Giovanni Ladislao Sykora). Noachic iconography recalls the symbolic setting associated with the earliest forms of the MB word.

Thus maugh does not evoke the marrow itself, but the state of the body in which it is found — a crucial detail of the Noachic story.

Does the MB word contain a Hebrew root meaning marrow?

Very probably. Scots English alone cannot account for the explicit link between the word and the formula in the Graham. Yet one Hebrew word fits perfectly: מֹחַ (moaḥ), meaning marrow.

The Graham speaks precisely of marrow. And a seventeenth-century Scot, unfamiliar with Semitic gutturals, would have rendered the final ḥ with a sound close to gh, ch or och, which leads naturally to maugh / moach / moch.

Thus Maughbin clearly combines: marrow (moaḥ, in Hebrew), bone (byn, in Scots English) and putrefaction (maugh, in Scots English). The first MB word therefore appears as a bilingual word, formed from biblical Hebrew and Scots English, in a context where Scottish Protestant ministers — often Hebraists — played an active role in the Masonry of the Mason Word.

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Do MATCHPIN and MAGBOE contradict this interpretation?

The variants MATCHPIN (Trinity College manuscript, 1711) and MAGBOE (The Whole Institutions of Free-masons opened, 1725) do not call into question the hypothesis of a first MB word based on Maughbin/Mahabyn. They look rather like corruptions of it, the result of a transmission that was both oral and written, across different linguistic settings.

In the case of MATCHPIN, everything suggests a phonetic corruption of Maughbin. The guttural ch sound, common in Scots English, does not exist in Early Modern English: it therefore tends to become tch when an English speaker tries to reproduce it. This shift naturally alters the structure of the word. 

Moreover, the ending -bin can easily become -pin, because the affricate tch combines more readily with a voiceless stop (p) than with a voiced stop (b). Hearing Maughbin spoken quickly, an English-speaking listener may thus hear — and write down — Matchpin, without the slightest idea of how the word was originally formed.

As for MAGBOE, the shift is even more transparent: Maha becoming Mag is plausible, especially if an intermediate form such as Maughbone was in circulation; boe may be a direct corruption of bone, or the result of poor articulation; a non-Mason printer, copying a badly deciphered manuscript, may well drop a letter, notably the final n of bone.

Thus MATCHPIN and MAGBOE do not point to the existence of a rival MB word: rather, they confirm the spread of a term of Scottish origin, hard for English scribes to pronounce and transcribe, and bound to undergo many alterations.

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What was the first form of the MB word, and how is it linked to the origin of the Master Mason degree?

The first form of the MB word seems to have been Mahabyn/Maughbin, which came from the Scottish milieu of the Mason Word. The Sloane manuscript provides the oldest attestation, while the Graham offers the key to its interpretation (“marrow in this bone”), which sheds light on its original, clearly Noachic meaning. Both documents bear witness to the presence in England of ritual or terminological elements borrowed from the Scottish tradition.

This convergence suggests that an early form of the Master Mason degree — based not on Hiram but on Noah — may have circulated in Scotland before the London system took shape in the early eighteenth century. We know nothing of its exact ritual form, but the existence of a distinct word for Masters, earlier than MACHBENAH, argues for the existence of such a degree, perhaps known only to a limited number of Brethren.

The scarcity of sources is easily explained: seventeenth-century Scottish Masonry left no manuscript before 1696 – the Edinburgh Register House Manuscript, followed around 1700 by the Chetwode Crawley Manuscript, with almost identical content, neither of which mentions a third degree. 

This documentary silence does not disprove the existence of such a degree; it simply indicates that seventeenth-century Masonry was essentially an oral culture in which the oath of secrecy was faithfully kept. A hypothetical third degree conferred on a restricted basis had almost no chance of leaving written traces.

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Why did the Moderns’ MACHBENAH Word prevail in the eighteenth century?

The Moderns’ MACHBENAH first appears in Samuel Pritchard’s exposure, Masonry Dissected (1730). It is interpreted as meaning “He is stricken, the Architect” and belongs to an entirely new narrative: the legend of Hiram, staged around a drama centred on the murder of the Master and the search for his body by nine Masters. Nothing suggests that this legend existed before the 1720s; it appears in no earlier manuscript.

Several elements show that this new word, while remaining an MB word, marks a break with Mahabyn/Maughbin. The explicit reference to a murder now steers the degree towards a moral and symbolic reading: Hiram becomes the one who keeps his secret unto death, and his Assassins stand for the human passions. This dramatic construction contrasts sharply with the Noachic legend, in which death is neither a crime nor a punishment, but a simple human fact, set under the sign of a more universal secret.

Yet the new structure of the degree retains several reminders of the earlier model: the breaking of the joints, the raising by the Five Points of Fellowship, the adoption of an MB word, and the use of the first word spoken when the body is discovered. These parallels show that the Moderns did not create their system ex nihilo; they reorganised older ritual material around a new narrative theme.

Thus MACHBENAH prevails because it matches the new Hiramic narrative, suited to the Moderns’ wish to build a system of three degrees with a moral, dramatic and symbolic progression. The word becomes the signature of this refoundation.

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Where does the legend of Hiram come from, and why did it require a new MB Word?

The legend of Hiram, as we know it today, seems to have been developed by the Moderns in the 1720s–1730s. No earlier manuscript mentions it, and it does not belong to the Scottish tradition of the Mason Word. Yet the idea of the murdered master builder is not entirely new: builders’ traditions already contain stories in which the head of the worksite dies tragically, such as that of Maître Jacques in the French Compagnonnage. This body of legend may have provided a narrative template.

The introduction of this story profoundly transformed the Master Mason degree. The secret handed down is no longer that of a founding patriarch (Noah), but that of a master builder who embodies faithfulness to an inner law. The murder of Hiram gives the degree a strong moral dimension: the passions that strike down the Master become the enemies the Mason must tame within himself, while the quest for the Lost Word takes on a more introspective significance.

Raising to the Master Mason degree. Eighteenth-century engraving illustrating a traditional scene of the third degree in the early Masonic catechisms.

This change of perspective called for a new MB word. The term inherited from the Noachic story — Mahabyn/Maughbin — sat uneasily with the drama of Hiram, where the emphasis lies on violence, rupture and the search for a buried word. MACHBENAH better conveyed this dramatic momentum: a word both dark and forceful, coined to comment on the central event of the story, and whose sound made it possible to keep the traditional structure of the MB Word.

Thus the appearance of the Hiramic narrative is not a mere innovation: it imposes a complete reworking of the symbolism of the third degree, and the change of MB word is its most visible trace.

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How did the Ancients react to the Moderns’ new MB Word?

When the Ancients founded their Grand Lodge in 1753, they accused the Moderns of having altered the original rituals and of having introduced a Master Mason degree that they considered inauthentic. It is unlikely, however, that these criticisms targeted the very idea of a third degree: the presence of a Word reserved for Masters in manuscripts earlier than 1730 shows that such a distinction already existed. What the Ancients objected to was the new dramatic structure introduced by the Moderns, and above all the MB word attached to that narrative.

Rather than take up MACHBENAH, they adopted or kept a much older form: MAHABONE, inherited from the Scottish variants of the Master’s Word. This choice was not merely a matter of terminology; it reflected a determination to stand within a tradition they held to be older and truer to the spirit of the first speculative Masons.

And yet the boundary between the two systems was not entirely watertight. Many rituals show that the Moderns still knew the idea of the “bone” — inherited from Mahabyn/Maughbin — and that this symbolism had not completely disappeared: MACHBENAH is sometimes interpreted as “the flesh leaves the bones”. Likewise, the 1738 edition of Anderson’s Constitutions, more theistic than that of 1723, explicitly places Freemasonry under the figure of Noah, describing Freemasons as “true Noachides”.

These clues show that, even among the Moderns, the memory of the first tradition had not been entirely erased. The quarrel between Ancients and Moderns is therefore not merely a question of words: it is a tension between two founding narratives — Noah or Hiram — and two conceptions of the Masonic secret.

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Conclusion: what remains of the Noachic tradition in the MB word?

When MAHABONE became established in English usage in the nineteenth century, it did not simply replace MACHBENAH: it quietly reintroduced part of the earlier tradition. The Hiramic model remains, but the vocabulary of the first MB word — built around bone, marrow and the decaying body — continues to surface as the lingering trace of an older Noachic reading.

This hidden memory shows itself less in the Craft rituals than in certain higher degrees, where Noah remains associated with a primordial secret, distinct from that of Hiram. Freemasonry thus inherits two symbolic layers: one Hiramic, which became dominant; the other Noachic, more archaic, but never entirely erased.

The history of the MB word bears witness to this layering. It shows how a new tradition can take hold without abolishing the one before it, and how the same ritual structure can, from one era to the next, hold different meanings without losing its inner continuity.

By Ion Rajolescu, editor-in-chief of Nos Colonnes — in the service of a Masonic voice that is accurate, rigorous and alive

To take your study of the Noachic tradition further, discover the Royal Ark Mariner collection.

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Here is the full transcript of the podcast, for those who prefer reading or wish to explore the discussion further.

PODCAST — The origin of the MB Word in Freemasonry

There is, in Freemasonry, a singular word. An ancient word, reserved for the Master Mason degree, known today in several forms: Mahabyn, Maughbin, Mahabone… the MB Word. We instinctively associate it with the legend of Hiram, but when we go back to the earliest manuscripts, we discover quite another story, older, more obscure and, in a certain sense, more fundamental.

It all begins with the Sloane manuscript No. 3329, around seventeen hundred. It mentions a word for Masters: Mahabyn. No explanation. No staging. Just a word, passed on during a grip that recalls the later Five Points of Fellowship. And this word does not yet refer to Hiram, but to an older Scottish tradition, that of the Mason Word. Another manuscript, the Graham, dated seventeen twenty-six, gives us the key. It relates a strange scene: the sons of Noah discovering their father’s decomposing body. They try to raise him. The joints come apart. And one of them exclaims: “Here is yet marrow in this bone.” The phrase seems harmless. Yet it is decisive. For in the word Mahabyn, the second syllable, byn, means “bone” in Scots English. And the first may derive from the Hebrew moaḥ, “marrow”, pronounced with a Scottish guttural: maugh, moach, moch. The first MB Word thus sums up two elements of the Noachic legend: the marrow and the bone.

Between seventeen ten and seventeen thirty, several variants appear: Matchpin, Maughbin, Magboe. They do not reveal another tradition. They simply bear witness to the corruptions that occur when Scottish sounds pass through the mouths of English scribes: a guttural becomes an affricate, a bin becomes a pin, a bone becomes a boe. Nothing points to a rival word. Everything confirms a misheard Scottish word.

If this word existed, was there a Master Mason degree before Hiram? Perhaps. We know nothing of its exact ritual form, but the existence of a specific word for Masters, earlier than the Moderns’ reform, suggests an early degree, perhaps reserved for a small circle. Scottish sources are few. No manuscript of the Mason Word appears before sixteen ninety-six, with the Edinburgh Register House, followed by the Chetwode Crawley. They do not mention a third degree. But this silence proves nothing: seventeenth-century Masonry was an oral culture, strictly faithful to the oath of secrecy. A restricted degree would have left almost no trace.

Then come the Moderns. In Masonry Dissected, in seventeen thirty, a new word appears: MACHBENAH. It fits a new narrative: the legend of Hiram, centred on the murder of the master builder and the quest for the Lost Word. The drama changes. The moral meaning grows stronger. And the word changes. A quarter of a century later, the Ancients would reject this innovation. Not the third degree itself, but the Moderns’ Hiramic ritual. They would keep Mahabone, which they considered older. Two traditions then coexist: one Noachic, the other Hiramic.

When the two currents unite at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Mahabone prevails. But it does not entirely erase the memory of the first word. Its etymology, its sound, its imagery continue to carry, quietly, the trace of a more archaic tradition. It can be found in certain higher degrees, around Noah, and in the symbols linked to bone and marrow. The history of the MB Word is therefore not one of substitution. It is one of layering. Two narratives, two symbolic strata, two ways of expressing the same mystery: what is lost, what is handed down, and what endures — even when the words change.