Freemasonry

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Freemasonry is a fraternal initiatic order whose members are bound by oath into lodges and advanced through a series of ceremonial degrees, taught by way of ritual, symbol, and allegory drawn from the imagery of the stonemason’s craft. It calls itself a system of morality veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols — the working tools of the medieval builder turned to the shaping of character rather than of stone.

The order took its recognizable modern form in early eighteenth-century London; its own founding account, set down by James Anderson in the 1738 Constitutions, dates the first Grand Lodge to 1717 and four London lodges meeting to constitute it — though, written two decades after the fact, that tidy origin is one modern historians treat with caution. What had been, in the late medieval and early modern centuries, the guild structure of working (“operative”) stonemasons gradually admitted gentlemen who never cut a block — “accepted” or “speculative” masons — until the speculative element became the whole. The transition is one of the genuinely difficult problems of the history: the records are thin, and the line from operative guild to philosophical society runs through Scotland and England across the seventeenth century in ways scholarship is still working out. From London the institution spread quickly through Europe and the Americas, splitting and reuniting into the patchwork of rival jurisdictions it remains.

At its core stand three degrees — Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, Master Mason — culminating in the legend of Hiram Abiff, the master builder of Solomon’s Temple, whose death and figurative raising the candidate enacts. Above and beside these run further degree systems, the Scottish Rite and the York Rite among them, elaborating the symbolism without superseding the first three. Freemasonry requires of a candidate belief in a Supreme Being but prescribes no theology and admits men of differing faiths; it is not a religion, though its relations with the churches, and with the Roman Catholic Church in particular, have often been hostile.

The link to Western esotericism is real and frequently overstated. The order’s emergence coincided with the early-modern fascination with Hermetic, Rosicrucian, and Kabbalistic learning, and its symbolic furniture — the temple, the sacred geometry, the language of light and initiation — drew on that common stock; the high-degree systems of the eighteenth century absorbed alchemical and Kabbalistic motifs in earnest. Later occultists in turn borrowed the form of the initiatic lodge. Yet the craft as practised is a moral and convivial society far more than a school of magic, and reading it wholly as a vehicle of secret doctrine mistakes a minority current for the institution.

A separate matter is the conspiratorial literature, which from the 1790s onward has cast the order as a hidden hand behind revolutions and world events. That tradition is voluminous, durable, and almost entirely without evidentiary foundation; it tells more about the anxieties of its authors than about anything done in a lodge. The historical society — secretive in its rituals, public in its lodges and charities — is a more ordinary and more interesting thing than its mythology allows.

→ Related: Rosicrucianism · Occultism · Kabbalah