Freemasonry

What it is

A fraternal order organised in lodges, using the tools and legends of stonemasonry as a system of moral allegory, and structured around graded initiation.

The core is three Craft degrees: Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, Master Mason. The third enacts the legend of Hiram Abiff, the master architect of Solomon's Temple, murdered by three craftsmen for refusing to divulge the Master's secrets, and raised.

Appendant bodies extend it — the Royal Arch, the Scottish Rite with its thirty-three degrees, the York Rite, and Masonic bodies styled Knights Templar. Regular Masonry requires belief in a Supreme Being, describes itself as not a religion, and prohibits discussion of religion and politics in lodge.

Where it came from

The documented history begins with Scottish stonemasons. The Schaw Statutes of 1598 and 1599, issued by James VI's Master of Works, regulated the operative craft and refer to lodges with existing structures and practices. Through the seventeenth century these lodges began admitting non-operative members — gentlemen with no intention of cutting stone — and the transition from operative to speculative Masonry is traceable in lodge minutes.

In 1717 four London lodges formed a Grand Lodge, and modern organised Freemasonry dates from there. The Constitutions of 1723, written by James Anderson, supplied a mythical history running back through Solomon to Adam, which is exactly the kind of legitimating genealogy this section keeps encountering.

The Templar connection is not historical. No evidence connects the medieval order, suppressed in 1312, to Masonry. The claim enters through the Ramsay Oration of 1736, in which the Chevalier Ramsay proposed a crusader origin, and was elaborated by Baron von Hund's Rite of Strict Observance later in the century. It was invented in the eighteenth century and has been enormously productive of fiction ever since.

How it is practised

Through ritual in lodge: candidates are initiated, passed and raised in ceremonies using the working tools — square, compasses, level, plumb rule — as emblems of conduct. Members address one another as brother, participate in charitable work, and progress through offices.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the origin claims are unfounded and the real history is more interesting than the myth. A trade guild that began admitting gentlemen, developed an elaborate moral allegory from its own tools, and became a vehicle for Enlightenment sociability across religious and class lines is a better story than a Templar remnant.

We can say Masonry was genuinely significant in the eighteenth century as a space where men of different Christian denominations, and in some jurisdictions Jews, met on declared equal terms — which was novel, and is part of why it attracted both enthusiasm and suspicion.

We can say the conspiracy literature has a traceable and largely disreputable origin.

The Abbé Barruel's Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797) blamed the French Revolution on a Masonic-Illuminati conspiracy, and is the ancestor of most subsequent theories.

More striking is Léo Taxil. Between 1885 and 1897 the French writer produced a torrent of lurid material claiming Freemasonry was a Satanic cult, complete with a fictitious high priestess, demonic apparitions and an invented arch-conspirator. It was received enthusiastically in Catholic circles and reached the Vatican. In 1897 Taxil called a press conference and confessed the whole thing was a hoax, mounted to embarrass the Church.

The confession is documented. The material has never stopped circulating, and a considerable amount of contemporary anti-Masonic and Satanic-conspiracy content descends directly from a man who stood up in a hall in Paris and said he had made it up.

We can say Masons have been persecuted and killed, which the conspiracy framing obscures. Papal condemnation dates from 1738 and remains formally in force. The Morgan affair of 1826 — in which a New York man disappeared after threatening to publish the rituals — produced a genuine scandal and the first third party in United States history. And in the twentieth century Freemasons were persecuted by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, with lodges closed, records seized, and members imprisoned and killed in numbers that are documented and substantial.

We cannot say what happens in lodge beyond what has been published, though since Masonic rituals have been printed by exposure and by disaffected members since the eighteenth century, the answer is that most of it is known and it is less dramatic than either side suggests.

Further reading

• David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century, 1590–1710 (1988) — the documentary history.
• Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment (1991) — on Masonry as Enlightenment sociability.
• The Taxil confession, widely reprinted, for what a hoax can outlive.