Masonic Secrets: What Freemasons Actually Keep Private

The word “secret” has followed Freemasonry since the organization’s modern founding on June 24, 1717, when four London lodges convened at the Goose and Gridiron Alehouse to establish the Premier Grand Lodge of England. In the three centuries since, that single word has generated more speculation, fiction, and outright misinformation than almost any other aspect of the fraternity. The reality is considerably less dramatic, and in its own way considerably more interesting. Freemasons do keep certain things private: specific modes of recognition, passwords associated with the three degrees of the Craft, and the internal proceedings of lodge meetings. What they do not keep secret is their membership, their charitable work, their organizational structure, or their core philosophical commitments. The distinction matters. This article examines exactly what falls inside the circle of Masonic confidentiality, why that circle was drawn in the first place, how secrecy functions differently across jurisdictions and rites, and why the gap between ceremonial privacy and the conspiratorial “hidden agenda” narrative is wide enough to drive a freight train through.

What Are Masonic Secrets? Defining the Term Precisely

Masonic secrets refer to a narrow set of ceremonial items: specific handgrips, passwords, and ritual gestures used to verify membership between Freemasons. They do not encompass political conspiracies, hidden governance structures, or suppressed knowledge. The United Grand Lodge of England, the world’s oldest grand lodge, publishes its constitutions and membership handbooks openly, and has done so for centuries.

Most public confusion starts with treating three very different categories as one. The first covers modes of recognition, the handshakes, passwords, and signs that vary by degree and allow one Mason to identify another. The second covers lodge proceedings, meaning the internal experience of ritual, which members are asked not to describe in detail outside the lodge room. The third is the claim, repeated endlessly in conspiracy literature, that Freemasonry conceals a hidden political agenda. That third category is not a Masonic secret; it is a fiction. Government inquiries in Britain, France, and the United States across the 19th and 20th centuries found no evidence of coordinated political control by Masonic bodies. Treating all three categories as equivalent produces the misunderstanding that drives most of the mythology surrounding the fraternity.

Membership secrecy, in particular, has been overstated almost from the beginning. Masonic directories listing lodge officers by name were printed and sold to the public as early as the 1730s in London. Samuel Cole’s Freemasons’ Library and General Ahiman Rezon (1817) included membership rolls. By the 19th century, lodge anniversaries were routinely reported in local newspapers, and many Masons wore their affiliation openly on lapel pins and regalia. The idea that Freemasonry has historically hidden its membership is, to put it plainly, not supported by the archive.

What Is Not Secret: Membership, Charity, and Doctrine

Grand lodges across the United States and the United Kingdom actively publish their locations, officers, and charitable initiatives. The Masonic Service Association of North America maintains public records of lodge activity and relief work. The United Grand Lodge of England’s website lists its governance structure, its official statements on religion and politics, and its affiliated charities, including the Masonic Charitable Foundation, which publishes annual reports in full compliance with UK charity law. Core Masonic principles, belief in a Supreme Being, the brotherhood of man, and the use of working tools as moral allegory, appear in published monitors and ritual books that have been commercially available since the 18th century. Albert Mackey’s Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (1874) alone runs to nearly a thousand pages of openly published doctrine. There is no organizational theology being concealed.

What Is Kept Private: The Narrow Circle of Confidentiality

What Freemasons are genuinely obligated to protect is considerably more modest. The obligation taken at initiation asks members not to reveal the specific modes of recognition associated with each degree, and not to describe the internal experience of ritual ceremony to non-members. The rationale is partly practical (recognition signs lose their function if universally known) and partly experiential (the ritual is designed to be encountered rather than read about in advance). This confidentiality is not unique to Freemasonry; fraternal organizations, university honor societies, and some professional guilds maintain analogous internal protocols. The Masonic first degree secrets, for instance, are specific enough to be functionally useless to anyone outside the lodge room, and general enough that partial descriptions have appeared in print since William Morgan’s 1826 Illustrations of Masonry without meaningfully undermining the institution. The secrecy is real but narrow, ceremonial rather than conspiratorial.

The Three Degrees and Their Associated Secrets

Entered Apprentice: The First Degree

The Entered Apprentice degree is the first formal step in Blue Lodge Masonry, and it is here that a candidate receives his initial set of recognition devices: a word, a grip, and a sign specific to this grade. The precise content of these has been publicly documented since at least 1730, when Samuel Prichard published Masonry Dissected in London. That pamphlet, which went through multiple editions within its first year, reproduced the catechetical exchanges of all three degrees in considerable detail. Prichard was not the last. William Morgan’s Illustrations of Masonry (1826) caused a political firestorm in upstate New York precisely because it did the same thing again, nearly a century later, to an audience that apparently needed reminding. The practical secrecy of first-degree recognition signs had been compromised long before most lodges active today were chartered. What the Entered Apprentice degree actually confers, then, is less a body of hidden information than an introduction to a symbolic vocabulary, one that the candidate is expected to internalize rather than merely memorize.

Fellow Craft: The Second Degree

The Fellow Craft degree shifts the symbolic register from initiation to intellectual development. Where the first degree draws on imagery of rough stone and basic tools, the second introduces the candidate to the liberal arts and sciences, with particular emphasis on geometry, and to the architectural symbolism of the two pillars, Jachin and Boaz, described in the biblical account of Solomon’s Temple in 1 Kings 7. The private knowledge associated with this degree follows the same structural pattern as the first: a password, a grip, and a sign that function as recognition devices between members. Academic treatments of Masonic ritual, including those by historians David Stevenson and Margaret Jacob, describe the Fellow Craft degree as the lodge’s attempt to position speculative Masonry within the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment, connecting the working tools of operative stonemasons to a broader framework of moral and philosophical self-improvement. The secrecy attached to this degree is, again, largely a matter of form. The substance has been in print for nearly three centuries.

Master Mason: The Third Degree and the Legend of Hiram Abiff

The third degree is the emotional and philosophical core of what Freemasons call the Blue Lodge, and its central narrative is the legend of Hiram Abiff, the master architect of Solomon’s Temple. According to the ritual drama, Hiram is murdered by three ruffians who attempt to extort from him the Master Mason’s word. He refuses, is killed, and is subsequently discovered and given a new form of recognition by King Solomon. The legend is not presented as history, even within the lodge. It functions as allegory, specifically as a meditation on mortality, integrity under duress, and the idea that certain things are worth protecting at personal cost. The philosophical message is explicit and has been documented extensively in academic literature, including in S. Brent Morris’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Freemasonry (2006) and in the scholarly work of John Hamill, former librarian of the United Grand Lodge of England. The drama of the third degree is what makes Masonic secrets feel genuinely significant to those who experience them, not because the recognition signs are operationally sensitive, but because the ritual context in which they are conferred carries real weight. That distinction, between information and meaning, is the one that most outside accounts of Masonic secrets consistently fail to make.

Modes of Recognition: Grips, Passwords, and Signs

Every fraternal and trade organization operating before the age of centralized record-keeping faced the same practical problem: how do you confirm that a stranger claiming membership actually belongs? For early Freemasonry, the answer was a system of physical signs, spoken words, and handgrips, each specific to a degree, that allowed a lodge to authenticate a visitor without paperwork, photographs, or any institutional infrastructure beyond the lodge room itself. These modes of recognition were not invented to mystify outsiders. They were a functional solution to a real administrative gap, one that any guild, merchant network, or military fraternity of the same era would have recognized immediately.

The Historical Function of Secret Recognition

When the Premier Grand Lodge of England was constituted on June 24, 1717, there was no membership registry in any modern sense. A traveling Mason arriving at a lodge in a city he had never visited needed a way to demonstrate his degree without relying on letters of introduction that could be forged or misread. Grips (specific handshake configurations), passwords (words or syllables exchanged at particular moments in a ritual sequence), and signs (physical gestures performed in a set order) served that function precisely. The system was borrowed, at least in spirit, from the operative stonemason guilds whose “mason word” traditions in Scotland are documented as early as the 1690s in sources such as the Edinburgh Register House Manuscript of 1696. The word was a credential, not a cipher.

That credential has been publicly documented for nearly as long as it has existed in speculative Freemasonry. Samuel Prichard’s Masonry Dissected, published in London in 1730, printed a detailed account of the grips and passwords of the first three degrees and became an immediate bestseller. Dozens of similar exposures followed across the 18th and 19th centuries, from France’s Le Maçon Démasqué to the American anti-Masonic publications that proliferated after the Morgan Affair of 1826. Academic scholarship, including Jasper Ridley’s The Freemasons and the exhaustive work of historian John Hamill, has since placed these materials in full historical context. The practical secrecy of any specific grip or password has been, for most of the past three centuries, largely ceremonial rather than operational.

What remains genuinely variable is that recognition modes are not uniform across the Masonic world. The Scottish Rite, the York Rite, and the various grand lodge jurisdictions in the United States, the United Kingdom, and continental Europe each maintain their own ritual traditions, so the grips and words of one jurisdiction may differ from those of another. A Mason raised under the United Grand Lodge of England and one raised under the Grand Lodge of New York share the same broad framework but not necessarily identical details. There is no single universal Masonic secret handshake, a fact that makes most popular descriptions of “the Masonic grip” immediately incomplete. The system was always local, practical, and tied to specific ritual lineages rather than to any centralized authority.

The Philosophical Reasoning Behind Masonic Secrecy

Freemasonry has never been shy about explaining, in its own published literature, why it values privacy. The reasoning is philosophical before it is practical, and it predates the modern conspiracy imagination by several centuries. At its core, the fraternity frames discretion not as a tool for hiding wrongdoing but as a cultivated virtue, one that separates a person of genuine integrity from a person who merely performs trustworthiness when observed.

The Latin motto Audi, Vide, Tace, meaning “Hear, See, Be Silent,” appears throughout Masonic iconography and ritual instruction. It is not a command to suppress damaging information. Read in context, it is closer to the classical Stoic discipline of restraint: the idea that a person of good character observes carefully, listens fully, and does not speak carelessly. Albert Mackey, whose Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (1874) remains one of the most cited reference works in the field, frames the obligation of silence as a moral exercise in self-governance. The candidate who can keep a confidence, Mackey argues, has demonstrated something meaningful about his character, regardless of whether the secret itself is consequential. The point is the keeping, not the content. Masonic scholarship published since Mackey, including research compiled by the Masonic Service Association of North America, consistently reinforces this framing: the ritual obligation of secrecy is understood internally as a test of character, not a mechanism of concealment.

This kind of institutionalized discretion is hardly unique to Freemasonry. Bar associations impose confidentiality obligations on attorneys that protect client communications even when no crime is involved. Medical ethics boards enforce privacy standards rooted in the Hippocratic tradition, predating HIPAA by centuries. Medieval trade guilds, the direct historical ancestors of speculative Masonic lodges, protected their technical knowledge as a matter of professional survival, not malice. When Freemasonry asks its members to keep certain things private, it is participating in a tradition of structured discretion that runs through virtually every serious professional and fraternal body in Western history. The fraternity is, in this respect, less unusual than its critics suggest.

Secrecy as Moral Discipline, Not Concealment

The internal Masonic framing of secrecy as a virtue rather than a shield is clearest in the language of the obligation itself. Candidates in the first degree are not told that the fraternity has dangerous knowledge to protect. They are told, in various formulations across different rites, that the ability to keep a solemn promise is a foundational test of character. Mackey writes in the Encyclopedia that “the secrets of Freemasonry are not valuable because they are secrets, but because of the moral discipline which the keeping of them imposes.” That is a significant distinction. The obligation creates a practice of trustworthiness, which is then expected to carry over into the Mason’s conduct outside the lodge room.

This framing also explains why published exposures of Masonic ritual, which have existed since Samuel Prichard’s Masonry Dissected in 1730, have never been treated by the fraternity as catastrophic breaches. If the secrecy were purely informational, a single published exposure would collapse the entire system. Instead, the fraternity has consistently maintained that reading a ritual in print is categorically different from experiencing it, because the moral and philosophical value lies in the lived practice of discretion, not in the content of any particular word or gesture. That argument is coherent on its own terms, and it is the argument Freemasonry has made, in its own voice, for nearly three centuries.

The Historical Origins of Masonic Secrecy

From Operative Guilds to Speculative Lodges

The tradition of secrecy within Freemasonry did not originate in the candlelit lodge rooms of Georgian London. It was inherited, almost wholesale, from the working stonemason guilds of medieval Europe, where protecting trade knowledge was a matter of economic survival. The Regius Poem (c. 1390), the oldest surviving manuscript associated with the craft, sets out obligations for masons that include discretion toward fellow guild members and silence about lodge business. The Cooke Manuscript (c. 1450) elaborates further, describing a body of knowledge, methods, and moral conduct that members were expected to guard from outsiders. Neither document is a ritual text in the modern sense, but both establish a clear precedent: the mason’s craft carried obligations of privacy long before speculative Freemasonry formalized them into ceremony.

When the United Grand Lodge of England was constituted on June 24, 1717, it drew on this inherited vocabulary rather than inventing one from scratch. The men gathering in London’s taverns were no longer building cathedrals. They were merchants, lawyers, and gentlemen adopting the symbolic tools of the operative craft as a framework for moral instruction and fraternal fellowship. The trade secrets of the working mason (the precise methods of cutting stone, the signs used to identify a qualified craftsman at a building site, the wage scales protected from undercutting employers) were translated into a ritual language of allegory and symbol. What had once protected livelihoods now served a different purpose: creating a shared, bounded vocabulary that gave the fraternity its internal coherence.

Secrecy Under Political Pressure: The 18th-Century Context

The transformation from guild privacy to institutional discretion did not happen in a vacuum. Eighteenth-century Europe was a landscape of religious censure, dynastic instability, and political surveillance, and early lodges operated within that landscape with a keen awareness of the risks. Pope Clement XII issued the papal bull In Eminenti on April 28, 1738, formally prohibiting Catholics from joining Masonic lodges and threatening excommunication for those who did. The stated reasons included the mixed religious composition of lodges, the oaths of secrecy members swore, and the fact that private assemblies of men meeting without ecclesiastical oversight were inherently suspicious to the Church. The bull was not a paranoid overreaction to a harmless social club. It was a calculated institutional response to organizations that refused to submit their membership lists or minutes to outside scrutiny.

In Catholic-majority countries such as France, Spain, and the Italian states, this created real and immediate danger. Freemasons caught in those jurisdictions faced not just social censure but potential imprisonment. Privacy, in this context, was not theater. It was a practical shield. Even in Britain, where the legal climate was comparatively tolerant, the memory of the Jacobite risings and the suspicion that lodges might harbor political dissidents gave members good reason to maintain careful control over who knew what about their proceedings. The culture of discretion that modern observers sometimes find theatrical made straightforward institutional sense in 1738, and the fraternity’s subsequent history cannot be read honestly without acknowledging that context.

Secrecy Across Jurisdictions: How Different Rites and Grand Lodges Compare

The phrase “Masonic secrets” implies a unified, globally consistent body of hidden knowledge, guarded identically from Edinburgh to São Paulo. The reality is considerably more fragmented. Freemasonry has no single governing authority, and the roughly two hundred recognized grand lodges worldwide each set their own standards for what is published, what is taught in ritual, and what members are expected to keep private. Comparing even four major bodies reveals just how wide that variation runs.

The UGLE Model: Transparency as Policy

The United Grand Lodge of England, founded on June 24, 1717, has moved deliberately toward institutional openness over the past three decades. Its Book of Constitutions is freely downloadable from its official website. Annual reports disclose membership numbers, charitable giving totals, and governance decisions. What the UGLE does not publish are the ceremonial tokens of recognition, the grips and passwords that function as the fraternity’s internal identification system. That boundary is narrow but firm, and the UGLE has been explicit about drawing it there rather than around its broader activities, history, or finances.

Scottish Rite, York Rite, and the Problem of Layered Degrees

The appendant bodies complicate any simple account of Freemason secret rituals. The Scottish Rite’s 29 additional degrees each carry their own ritual content, philosophical allegory, and, in some jurisdictions, their own modes of recognition. The Supreme Council, 33°, Southern Jurisdiction, has published Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma (1871) in full, a text that expounds the philosophical underpinnings of many degrees at considerable length. The ritual scripts themselves remain unpublished by the official bodies, even if nineteenth-century exposés placed much of the content into print long ago. The York Rite introduces a further wrinkle: the Royal Arch degree, which some jurisdictions treat as the completion of the third degree’s narrative rather than a separate step. Within that tradition, the private knowledge centers on a specific “substituted word” restored to its original form, a concept discussed openly in Masonic scholarship for well over a century without diminishing its ritual function for those who experience it in lodge. The point is not that these layers of private knowledge are impenetrable; it is that each rite defines its own perimeter, and those perimeters do not overlap neatly.

Modern Challenges to Masonic Secrecy: The Internet, Exposés, and Transparency

Ritual exposure is not a modern problem for Freemasonry. William Morgan’s Illustrations of Masonry, published in 1826, printed what Morgan claimed were verbatim degree scripts, and it was not the first such publication. Samuel Prichard’s Masonry Dissected had done the same in London as early as 1730, selling well enough to run through multiple editions within a year. Today, a curious reader can locate degree rituals, catechisms, recognition modes, and officer scripts within minutes of opening a search engine. The fraternity has known this for the better part of three centuries. The persistence of Masonic secrecy in this environment is itself a historical fact worth examining, because it suggests the information was never quite the point.

The institutional response has been consistent, and more philosophically coherent than critics usually acknowledge. Grand lodges and Masonic scholars alike draw a firm distinction between reading a ritual and undergoing one. The United Grand Lodge of England, in its published educational materials, has argued that the candidate’s experience of a degree ceremony, with its physical staging, symbolic progression, and communal witness, cannot be replicated by reading a transcript any more than reading a score is equivalent to hearing an orchestra perform it. The “secret,” on this account, is not propositional knowledge but experiential knowledge. What a Mason is asked to keep private is not a password that would lose its function if overheard, but a set of impressions formed under specific and unrepeatable conditions. Whether one finds that argument persuasive or convenient, it is the argument, and it has the advantage of being consistent with how ritual functions in most initiatory traditions across human cultures.

Some grand lodges have responded to the transparency era by leaning into openness on everything except the ritual boundary itself. The Grand Lodge of Scotland publishes its Book of Constitutions, its historical records, and extensive educational content for public access. Many American grand lodges maintain public websites detailing their charitable programs, governance structures, and historical archives. This selective disclosure is a deliberate strategy: by making the organization’s governance and social mission visible, the fraternity reduces the conspiratorial surface area while preserving the one boundary it considers meaningful. The result is an institution that is, paradoxically, more documentable than most private clubs and yet still capable of generating mystery, largely because the internet rewards the word “secret” regardless of what follows it.

Women in Freemasonry and Questions of Institutional Secrecy

The existence of co-Masonic and women-only grand lodges complicates any claim that Masonic privacy is a function of male exclusivity rather than ritual tradition. The Order of Women Freemasons, founded in England in 1908 and currently operating over 350 lodges, works the same degree structure and maintains the same tradition of ritual confidentiality as its male-only counterparts. Le Droit Humain, the principal co-Masonic order, was established in France in 1893 and now operates in dozens of countries, admitting men and women on equal terms while preserving identical boundaries around its degree work. These organizations did not inherit their practices from mainstream grand lodges that excluded them; they developed parallel structures that independently arrived at the same conclusions about what should and should not be public. That convergence is instructive. It suggests that Masonic ritual privacy is a feature of the initiatory form itself, not a byproduct of the fraternal, male-only culture that dominated the craft from 1717 onward. The secrecy, in other words, belongs to the ceremony, not to the gender of the people performing it.

Debunking the Conspiracy Framing: What Masonic Secrets Are Not

The Illuminati Conflation, Corrected

The Bavarian Illuminati was founded on May 1, 1776, by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of canon law at the University of Ingolstadt. It was a rationalist secret society with political ambitions, and the Elector of Bavaria banned it by decree in 1785. By most credible historical accounts, the organization had effectively ceased to function by 1787. It was never a Masonic body. The two organizations were structurally and institutionally separate, operating under entirely different governing frameworks. What complicates the picture is that some Illuminati members also held Masonic membership, which gave later commentators a thin thread to pull. But dual membership no more makes the Illuminati a Masonic organization than belonging to both a chess club and a rotary society makes them the same institution. The historian Vernon Stauffer, writing in 1918 in New England and the Bavarian Illuminati, traced precisely how the conflation took root in American political culture during the 1790s and found it to be a product of pamphlet-era anxieties rather than documented organizational overlap. Two centuries of repetition have not improved the argument’s evidentiary basis.

Declining Membership and the Shadow-Government Problem

If Freemasonry functions as a secret engine of global control, it is performing remarkably poorly by any measurable standard. The Masonic Service Association of North America estimates that US membership peaked at roughly 4 million in the 1960s and has since declined to under 1 million. That is a contraction of approximately 75 percent across six decades, a trajectory that would concern any ordinary civic organization, let alone an alleged shadow government. Grand lodges in the United Kingdom and Australia report similarly steep declines. The machinery of world domination, apparently, struggles with the same retention problems as community theater groups.

The Catholic Church’s sustained opposition to Freemasonry, beginning with Pope Clement XII’s papal bull In Eminenti in 1738, is frequently cited as proof that the fraternity concealed dangerous power. The actual reasoning in In Eminenti is more instructive than the conspiracy reading suggests: the Church objected to lodges that admitted men of any religious background and operated under oaths of secrecy beyond ecclesiastical oversight. The perceived threat was political neutrality and religious inclusivity, not a hidden power structure. A body that genuinely controlled governments would have had little reason to meet quietly in rented halls and worry about whether the local bishop approved. The historical record, read carefully, consistently points in the opposite direction from the conspiratorial narrative: Masonic secrecy was a product of vulnerability, not dominance.

FAQ

What are the main secrets of Freemasonry?

The core secrets are the modes of recognition: specific grips, passwords, and signs tied to each of the three degrees of the Blue Lodge. These function as internal tokens of membership, not as classified doctrine. Everything else, including organizational structure, charitable activities, lodge locations, and the broad content of ritual, is either publicly recorded or openly discussed.

Much of the ritual has been in print for nearly three centuries. Samuel Prichard’s Masonry Dissected, published in 1730, exposed the degree structure and passwords of the time in considerable detail. Anyone determined to read it can. The experiential dimension of the ritual, what it feels like to participate, is the one thing a printed text cannot fully transmit.

Why do Freemasons keep secrets?

The obligation of secrecy functions as a moral discipline, not a mechanism for concealing wrongdoing. The fraternal motto Audi, Vide, Tace (Hear, See, Be Silent) frames discretion as a virtue and a practical test of trustworthiness. A man who cannot keep a minor confidence is unlikely to be relied upon in weightier matters.

Historically, privacy also carried real stakes. After Pope Clement XII issued the papal bull In Eminenti in 1738, lodge membership exposed Catholics to ecclesiastical censure. In other jurisdictions, political suspicion made anonymity a genuine protection. The culture of discretion that developed in those circumstances outlasted the immediate dangers, becoming part of the fraternity’s identity.

What does 3-5-7 mean in Masonic tradition?

The numbers 3, 5, and 7 carry symbolic weight rooted in Pythagorean and Renaissance numerological tradition, where odd numbers were considered philosophically significant. Within the lodge, they map onto specific content: the three degrees of initiation, the five classical orders of architecture, and the seven liberal arts and sciences, all of which appear in the Fellow Craft degree.

This is inherited symbolism, not encoded intelligence. The same numbers appear in medieval cathedral-building manuals and Renaissance philosophical texts long before any Masonic lodge formalized their use. Their presence reflects the fraternity’s debt to classical learning, nothing more cryptic than that.

What does 47 mean in Freemasonry?

The 47th problem of Euclid, better known outside lodge rooms as the Pythagorean theorem, holds a prominent place in the Master Mason degree and appears on the Past Master’s jewel in several jurisdictions. Its significance is straightforward: geometry was considered the foundation of all rational inquiry, and the theorem is its most elegant demonstration.

Albert Mackey’s Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (1874) describes the 47th problem as emblematic of the arts and sciences that the fraternity allegorically promotes. The number 47 itself carries no separate mystical meaning; it is simply the position of that theorem in Euclid’s Elements, Book I.

What happens if a Freemason reveals the secrets?

Nothing legally, and nothing physically. The dramatic penalty language found in some older ritual texts is understood symbolically, not literally. The United Grand Lodge of England has formally clarified this position, and most grand lodges across North America and Europe hold the same view. No Mason has ever faced a lawful sanction for disclosing ritual content.

The practical consequence is reputational and fraternal. A member who publicizes internal material may find his standing within the lodge community diminished, and in serious cases could face suspension or expulsion by his lodge. The obligation, in short, is a matter of personal integrity rather than enforceable contract.

---

---