Nostalgically, Bill Feingold intones the excruciating litany. “Having your tongue torn out, and your throat cut across,” he rumbles, recalling words memorized on a New York City rooftop 38 years ago. “And buried in the sands of the sea, where the tide ebbs and flows twice in every 24 hours–if you should reveal the secrets belonging to the degree of first-degree Mason. The second degree is to have your breast torn open and left prey to the vultures of the air. The third degree…” If he wonders whether anyone really cares what happens when you reveal the secrets of a third-degree Mason, Feingold doesn’t let on.

First degree, third degree. Ceremonial apron and secret handshake; the Square and the Compass; the letter G for the Grand Architect himself. There was a time when America was dying to know and no one was telling. Freemasonry, which claims to be the world’s oldest fraternal society, has been called the civil religion of the American Revolution. As recently as 1959, its U.S. branch constituted an earnest and convivial army of 4.1 million. Yet today those ranks are decimated. True, the group is still a philanthropic presence, donating some $750 million a year to charities. But its 2.1 million national membership, notes Richard Fletcher of the Masonic Information Center in Silver Spring, Md., is “the lowest it’s been in some time.” By which he means since around 1888. And it will plummet further, since the average brother is pushing 70. To baby boomers the Masons are a fusty memory. To the boomers’ children, well, it’s a philosophical conundrum: if a million-member secret society dies quietly, does anybody notice–or care?

Feingold does. It has come so far: he is the secret society’s flak. His opening gambit is to invite a reporter to a gathering of worldwide Masonic grand masters at the New York Grand Lodge. And the event is grandly international: 75 delegations in Masonic aprons of every color and design, Lebanese hobnobbing with Cote d’Ivoirans and multitudinous Brazilians, engaged for the first time (although the cabal-obsessed may dispute this) in establishing an international Masonic coordination. Still Feingold can’t forgo bragging about the domestic organization. “Fourteen Presidents have been Masons,” he says; “nine signers of the Declaration of Independence…”

And on and on, through such current luminaries as John Glenn, William Bratton and Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas. Freemasonry probably began formally in the 1600s as an English gentleman’s club, but by 1717 had evolved into an engine of the European Enlightenment. Its members were committed to egalitarianism, civic participation and other ideals expressed through tropes of the stoneworkers trade: the square for straightforward virtue; the compass to circumscribe one’s passions; the plumb line to stay upright. There was little religion but much ritual, which enraged churchmen and engaged conspiracy theorists, who still flood the Web with Masonic villainies, but it posed no problem for the Deists, who frequented the Continental Congress. Benjamin Franklin joined in Philadelphia and later guided Voltaire through the order’s mysteries. Colonial lodges, says Masonic historian William Moore, offered “a civil space in which to play with self-rule in a world where democracy was not yet a fact.” The brotherhood helped unite the squabbling colonies and primed them for that quintessential Enlightenment political enterprise, the Revolution. Grand master George Washington eventually set the Capitol cornerstone attired in his ceremonial apron.

The group has had its ups and downs since. By 1830 its members’ near monopoly on government positions–and a scandal over the mysterious disappearance of a brother who broke secrecy–provoked the birth of American single-issue politics: the Anti-Masonic Party nearly wiped the group out. The Masons eventually bounced back as the preferred club of the country’s merchant class–the Strauss family reportedly built Masonic columns into New York City’s Macy’s–and again as political incubator. The two Roosevelts, Tom Dewey and Harry Truman all belonged. After World War II, G.I.s who had enjoyed its patriotic but egalitarian flavor abroad returned to swell the lodges.

The 1960s and ’70s were a different matter. John Wayne was a Mason, which meant the protest generation wasn’t. Nor did ’80s antiestablishmentarians-turned-entrepreneurs feel much affinity toward a group of admitted joiners who perceived squareness as a virtue. That left the war veterans and youngsters like Feingold, now 62, who was taken under the wing of a brother in his Queens neighborhood in 1960. The man was a stickler for ritual and dragged Feingold up onto a Forest Hills roof at night so that he could recite in secret. But the then-apprentice has no regrets. He remains awed that “a man could walk up to another man and say, ‘I need a thousand dollars to pay my rent,’ and the brother would give him a check and say, ‘Give it back when you have it.'” He still believes in the group’s pledge to “take good men and make them better.” He eventually joined the Shriners, the fez-headed Masonic subgroup with a philanthropic specialty and more recently undertook the hyping of a dying colossus. “We’re in a very strong rebuilding program,” he insists. “Young people are starting to show a dramatic interest.”

Actually there is a glimmer of hope there. The uptick among young initiates has not offset the deaths of the old soldiers, but it is visible. New York’s venerable Independent Royal Arch Lodge No. 2 boasts an average member age of about 50 and an unusual concentration of college-educated men. There are brokers, lawyers and journalists with interests running from martial arts to organ music to the Masonic references of James Joyce, explored in black tie over wine and cigars. Says John Chang, 39, a lawyer active in local Democratic politics: “Maybe now that my generation is getting a little bit more established with families, they’re getting interested in organizations that are beholden to certain moral values.” Lodge 2, he says proudly, is simply “a good body of men.” Adds his lodge brother John Hilliard, 52: “This elusive male bonding that people try to recover sitting in sweat lodges and drumming, the Masons have had it for generations. They never lost it.”

Lodge 2 may be too good to be true; New York is anomalous in so many ways. But it’s a thought worth playing with. Are you attracted to club chairs and Montecristos but find the swingers’ scene a bit weak on moral discourse? Are you tempted by the camaraderie of Promise Keepers but put off by the catharsis? If one must dabble in male-only culture, why not try something with a pedigree and an established philanthropic track record? Think of it as an experiment: Can the secret handshake ever be made hip again?

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