The task of describing Freemasonry is formidable. It is the largest fraternal organization in the world, with almost three million members in the United States, over seven hundred thousand members in Britain, and a million more around the world. It has been the subject of over fifty thousand books, pamphlets, and articles since it revealed itself to the world in 1717.
Although based on the primary membership requirement of firm belief in a Supreme Being, admitting men of all religions, and having a central theme of moral behavior, constant self-improvement, and a dedication to acts of charity, Freemasonry probably has aroused more enmity than any secular organization in the history of the world. It has been consistently attacked by the Roman Catholic church, its membership forbidden to men of the Mormon faith, and even the Salvation Army and the Methodist church in England have advised their members against Masonic membership. It has been, and is today, outlawed in a number of countries, although Masons certainly do not mind their order having been declared illegal by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Francisco Franco. They do mind having been branded an alternate religion, the Antichrist, and the force behind subversive plots to overthrow governments. Most recently, they have had to contend with the involvement of a clandestine, disavowed Masonic lodge in the Vatican banking scandals and allegations of unwarranted preferment and coverups in the British police and civil service.
Many anti-Masonic allegations are difficult to address because of the traditional policy of Freemasonry to decline to respond to attacks. Critics of Freemasonry benefit from the concept of “confession by silence,” their accusations usually standing unanswered by a quasi-secret society that apparently feels, even in our media-burdened society, that deeds will outweigh press releases. Because of that policy, the Freemasons may be destined to remain controversial, although their legions of critics are easily matched by the legions of notables who have chosen to embrace Masonic membership.
Freemasonry was there in the American Revolution, with members such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Monroe, Alexander Hamilton, Paul Revere, John Paul Jones, and even the Marquis de Lafayette and Benedict Arnold. Other revolutions, against both church and state, were led by Freemasons Benito Juárez, Simón Bolívar, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Sam Houston (aided in some cases by the products of their fellow Mason, Samuel Colt).
Kings and emperors who took the Masonic oaths include Edward VII, Edward VIII, and George VI in England, Frederick the Great of Prussia, George I of Greece, Haakon VII of Norway, Stanislaus II of Poland, and even King Kamehameha V of Hawaii. In addition to Washington and Monroe, the Masonic roll of presidents of the United States includes Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, James A. Garfield, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, and honorary brother Ronald Reagan.
World War II was fought by British Masonic leaders Sir Winston S. Churchill, Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis, Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinlech, Marshal Lord Newhall (Royal Air Force), and General Sir Francis Wingate. American Masonry was well represented by Generals Mark Clark, Omar Bradley, George Marshall, Joseph Stillwell, and Douglas MacArthur.
Nor were Freemasons always on the same side. Napoleon threw his Masonic marshals Messena, Murat, Soult, MacDonald, and Ney against Freemasons Kutuzov of Russia, Blucher of Prussia, and their ultimate nemesis, the duke of Wellington.
One hardly knows where to stop in recounting Masonic influence on all aspects of western life in the past 270 years, whether that influence be political, military, or cultural. In music Freemasons ascend the entire scale from William C. Handy, composer of “The St. Louis Blues,” to John Philip Sousa, and from both Gilbert and Sullivan through Sibelius and Haydn to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whom some say was murdered for revealing Masonic secrets in his opera The Magic Flute.
Masonic members of the literary world include Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Rudyard Kipling, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Oliver Goldsmith, Mark Twain, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who would never have permitted Stephen Knight’s anti-Masonic book, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, to be rewritten, as it was, into a fictionalized motion picture version pitting Sir Arthur’s creation, Sherlock Holmes, against Sir Arthur’s own Masonic brothers in London).
As impressive, even legendary, as some of these actual Freemasons may be, they pale against the revelations of early Masonic historians, who claimed the Masonic membership for Adam, Abraham, Noah, Moses, Solomon, Ptolemy, Julius Caesar, and Pythagoras (remembered in Masonic verbal tradition by the delightfully anglicized name of “Peter Gower”). One Masonic writer was incensed that some of his contemporaries expressed doubt about the claim of Masonic membership for Achilles. Nor did the fantasy stop there. Claims were made to establish the origins of Masonry in ancient Egypt, and some traced Masonic sources to the Essenes, Zoroastrians, Chaldeans, and especially the Phoenicians, since they had been kind enough to sail to Britain to share their Mysteries with the Druids, also claimed as predecessors of Freemasonry.
Gradually the competition among Masonic historians to outdo each other in such fantasies died down, and more sober voices were given a chance to be heard. The first great retreat was to the establishment of Freemasonry at the building of the Temple of Solomon, based upon a literal interpretation of an allegory which, as we shall see, is central to the initiation ritual of a Master Mason. This theory was embellished to establish three original Grand Masters: King Solomon; Hiram, king of Tyre; and a mythiical Hiram called “Hiram Abiff.” Masonic writers have tried to identify Hiram Abiff as the biblical Hiram, “son of a widow of Naphtali,” who was a master worker in bronze, a skill he used to cast the great pillars, Jachin and Boaz, that flanked the entrance on the outer porch of the temple. Their problem is that in Masonic ritual the master builder, Hiram Abiff, is murdered and the Temple of Solomon is never finished, while the biblical account says that the temple was indeed finished and, as far as we can tell, Hiram the metalworker went home, alive and well. The biblical account in fact provides no clue to the real origins of Freemasonry. If there was to be any valid revelation of Masonic origins in the building of King Solomon’s temple, it would have to be drawn from the allegorical drama locked within the Masonic ritual.
The next generation of Masonic historians, now striving for truth rather than romance, finally admitted that there was absolutely no evidence of Masonic beginnings in the building of the Temple of Solomon, but they thought that they had found those origins in the medieval British guilds of stonemasons. This theory has led to the trotting out of all the working tools of the stonemason, making them the symbols of moral lessons which the Mason is to follow as he constantly strives for self-improvement. There is absolutely nothing wrong with lessons of morality and charity, in whatever form they are taught, just as there can be no objection to an incessant striving for self-improvement. The problem is one of credible history, a believable basis for thinking that an organization of dusty stonecutters with scraped hands and knees, backs aching from struggling with heavy blocks of stone in all weather conditions, somehow turned into a noble company led by kings and princes, dukes and earls—not to mention that the entire process was accomplished in total secrecy.
The basic problem, of course, is that prior to the year 1717 the Masonic order was a true secret society; not just an organization with secret signs and secret handgrips, but a widespread society whose very existence was a secret. No Masonic historian claims to fully understand why that secrecy existed, or even why the group existed. When Masonry finally revealed itself, it gradually became known that this secret society had cells, or “lodges” as they called them, all over England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, but nowhere else. What was it that had held them together, sworn to preserving this tradition of total secrecy for generation after generation with oaths so sacred that the breaking of them could earn extraordinarily brutal punishments? Whatever the mortar of motivation was that had held the stones of the Masonic lodges together, giving purpose to the members’ lives and demanding total secrecy, it had disappeared by the time that the first Hanoverian king, George I, ascended the throne of England, a throne by then legally forbidden to any Roman Catholic or spouse of a Roman Catholic.
It was an event of little importance at the time: Four lodges of Freemasons met at the Apple-Tree Tavern in Covent Garden in London in 1717 and declared that they were banding together to form an official association to be called a “Grand Lodge.” There is no evidence that they had in mind at the time any confederation extending beyond London and Westminster. The news itself was not earthshaking to the people of London, whose first impression, if any, would have been that four eating and drinking clubs were combining to eat and drink together once a year. That impression would have been justified by the fact that these “Masons” held their “lodge” meetings with food and drink and tobacco at the Apple-Tree Tavern, the Crown Ale-House near Drury Lane, the Goose and Gridiron in St. Paul’s Churchyard, and the Rummer and Grapes Tavern in Westminster. It turned out that the group claimed John the Baptist as one of its patron saints, and on St. John Baptist’s day, June 24, 1717, the Grand Lodge was officially instituted with the election of a Grand Master and other officers.
The real shock would have occurred underground and been felt by all of the other Masons in Britain. The four London lodges, simply by revealing themselves and the existence of their order, had violated their sacred oaths of secrecy. They had unilaterally decided that total secrecy was no longer necessary, or even desirable. Every other Mason in Britain would have been in a quandary, and one can only imagine the concerned and heated discussions that took place in the secret lodge meetings throughout Britain during the months following the London disclosure.
Slowly other Masonic lodges, most of them in the areas around London, revealed themselves and asked to join with the new Grand Lodge. Others, however, were angry with the “oath-breakers” and would have nothing to do with them. Their ire may have been occasioned by the fact that the members of the newly formed Grand Lodge made no attempt to justify their actions, or even to explain why they had decided that the time had come to shrug off what they apparently felt was needless and even inconvenient secrecy. That there was resistance on the part of lodges still clinging to their original charges is shown by their reaction to a formal request made by the Master of the Grand Lodge at the second Grand Festival in 1718. All of the Masonic lodges in England were asked to turn over to the Grand Lodge any ancient records or other documents relating to Freemasonry so that they might be considered in drafting a constitution for the Grand Lodge. The reaction of many lodges was to burn all written references to their regulations or history, to prevent their being used to break the oath of secrecy. Historians may lament this destruction of valuable documents, but in a way their destruction does credit to those who were not quick to throw away their traditions or their vows.
The first formal objection to the concept of the Grand Lodge came eight years later, in 1725, from the Masonic lodge at York. York Masons based their complaint not upon the violations of the ancient secrecy of the order but upon the assumed superiority and antiquity of the Londoners. York Masonry, they asserted, was as old as the setting of the foundation of York Cathedral in the seventh century; Edwin, king of Northumbria, had been their first Grand Master. In the spirit of brotherhood, they said, they would not argue with the London group calling itself the Grand Lodge of England, but the whole world should know that York Masonry had an “undoubted right” to style itself as the “Grand Lodge of All England” (italics mine).
During that same year of 1725, Irish Freemasonry came out of its misty bog of secrecy and declared a Grand Lodge of Ireland, based in Dublin. The first Irish Grand Master was the twenty-nine-year-old earl of Rosse, probably a wise choice to get things moving, since he had inherited a vast fortune of a million pounds from his loving grandmother, the duchess of Tyrconnel.
Scotland was the longest holdout in bringing its Masonry into public view. (It has been said that if Freemasonry was to be classified like Judaism, America would be styled as Reformed, England as Conservative, and Scotland as Orthodox.) Finally, however, nineteen years after the launching of the Grand Lodge of England, the Scottish lodges began to meet to discuss their own situation. The year 1737 saw the first formal meeting of the new Grand Lodge of Scotland.
That same year also saw the beginning of an explosion of Freemasonry in France. It set off the proliferation of hundreds upon hundreds of new Masonic orders and degrees and sparked the creation of new legends and new fantasies that confuse any serious attempt to comprehend modern Masonry, even in the United States. It was all triggered by one man, a well-placed Scot whose motivations are as mysterious now as they were then.
Andrew Michael Ramsay was born at Ayr in Scotland in about 1681 and was educated at the University of Edinburgh. In 1709 Ramsay was appointed tutor to the children of the earl of Wemyss, but he soon became embroiled in the religious turmoil rending Scotland at that time and went to France. There, under the patronage of Archbishop Fénelon, Ramsay converted to Roman Catholicism. Some time later he was appointed preceptor to the Duc de Château-Thierry, and subsequently to the Prince de Turrenne. For his services he was rewarded with a French knighthood, being made a chevalier (knight) of the Order of St. Lazarus, for which he is remembered in Masonic history as the Chevalier Ramsay.
Perhaps Ramsay’s most significant service was to a king, but a king without a country. He was called to Rome by the man who would have been King James III of England had his father, James II, not been deposed. James was dedicated to returning the Scottish and English crowns to his family and to returning the British people to the authority of the Roman church. If he could not get those crowns for himself, he could work to secure them for his son, Charles Edward Stuart, great-grandson of that monarch who had reigned both as James VI of Scotland and as James I of England and was therefore, in the eyes of Catholic Europe, heir to both the English and Scottish thrones. Searching for a tutor to the heir-in-exile, James sent for the Scottish chevalier Andrew Ramsay, who undertook the education of the tragic young man who would live in history as Bonnie Prince Charlie.
After a time in Rome, Ramsay returned to France, where he took an active role in Freemasonry. It was basic three-degree British Craft Masonry, which had been brought across the Channel by British Masons who had taken up residence in Paris and other major cities of France. They established lodges and took in a number of their French friends. The French seemed mildly interested but were not terribly impressed by a semisecret society that had grown out of an association of grubby stonecutters. Ramsay changed all that. Ramsay proclaimed an entirely new origin for Freemasonry; not in medieval stonecutters, but in the kings, princes, barons, and knights of the Crusades. He had not a shred of documentation nor even any reasonable basis to support his claim, but he was believed. After all, he was a tutor to royalty, a member of the Royal Society, a chevalier of the Order of St. Lazarus, and grand chancellor of the Grand Paris Lodge of Freemasonry. Ramsay’s Oration, as it became known, was delivered for the first time at the Masonic Lodge of St. Thomas in Paris on March 21, 1737.
“Our ancestors, the Crusaders, gathered together from all parts of Christendom in the Holy Land, desired thus to reunite into one sole Fraternity the individuals of all nations,” said Ramsay. He explained some of the secret words as protective, “words of war which the Crusaders gave each other in order to guarantee them from the surprises of the Saracens, who often crept in amongst them to kill them.” He claimed that the ancient mysteries of Ceres, Isis, Minerva, and Diana became connected with the order. As to being “masons,” Ramsay explained that the original Crusader-Masons were not themselves workers in stone, but rather men who had taken vows to restore the Temple of Christians in the Holy Land. He claimed that the fraternity had formed an “intimate union with the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem.”
(Reflecting upon the major motivations of the Crusader nobles, one quickly concludes that they did not include a dedication to the Brotherhood of Man. Perhaps Ramsay can be credited with helping to start the wave of chivalric fantasy that swept over Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which held up as the ideal for all gentlemen the good, pious, compassionate knight, generous and honorable with his fellow man and superrespectful to all women, who is almost impossible to find in the pages of history.)
Ramsay further stated that lodges of Freemasons were established by returning Crusaders in Germany, Italy, Spain, France, and especially Scotland, where the lord steward of Scotland was Grand Master of a lodge at Kilwinning in 1286. (Perhaps he presumed that his audience already knew that the hereditary lord stewards of Scotland, with the title “steward” having evolved into the family name “Stewart” or “Stuart,” had become the royal family of Scotland and England, whose scion, Ramsay’s former pupil, was even then in Rome plotting to regain the lost throne.) The lodges, he went on, were neglected in every country except Scotland, and although Prince Edward had brought Freemasonry back to England, Scotland clearly had the earliest Masonry in Britain and was the fountainhead of the Masonic spirit. He appealed urgently to France to take up the cause and “become the centre of the Order.”
France responded. Stonemasons were one thing, but kings, dukes, and barons were quite another. New Masonic degrees and rites exploded in France like the grand finale of a fireworks display. These new rites were exported to other countries, which, in turn, added embellishments of their own, until the day came when one Masonic historian claimed to be able to document fourteen hundred different degrees. Their ceremonies and rituals, even their names, strained the available nomenclature of the Old Testament and of all of the orders of chivalry.
One French system evolving from Ramsay’s Oration—Écossaise, or Scottish Masonry—graduated up to a thirty-third degree and was exported to the United States, where it is still exercised, with modifications, as the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. It includes a relationship with the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (the “Shriners”), for which Ramsay’s claims of origins in the Holy Land provided a base for ritual and costumes in a polyglot Arab/Turkish/Egyptian theme. In fact, of all the so-called “Scottish” Masonry in existence, only the Royal Order of Scotland has any direct connection with that country.
There is probably no direct connection, but in 1738, the year after Ramsay’s Oration, Pope Clement XII issued the bull In Eminenti Apostolatus Specula, the first of a long series of papal bulls and encyclicals against Freemasonry, which provided a new area of interest and zeal for the Holy Roman Inquisition. Where the Inquisition had power to do so, Freemasons in Catholic countries were imprisoned, deported, and even tortured. In Portugal, one man was tortured and then sentenced to four years chained to the bench of a galley for the crime of being a Mason.
Another event in continental Masonic history may well have involved Ramsay. A German nobleman, with the ponderous name of Karl Gotthelf, Baron von Hund und Alten-Grotkau, believed that he had been commissioned to promulgate the true Freemasonry under a system known as “Strict Observance” because the oath of the Apprentice Mason included a vow of absolute obedience to “unknown superiors.” Von Hund’s diary indicates that while in Paris in 1743 he was received into a Masonic Order of the Temple by an unknown official he knew only as the Knight of the Red Feather. In attendance were Lord Kilmarnock (a Jacobite who was beheaded for high treason on August 18, 1746) and Lord Clifford. Later, von Hund claimed to have been presented to Prince Charles Edward Stuart as a distinguished brother. The “true history” of Freemasonry told to von Hund was that at the time of the suppression of the Templars a group of the knights had fled to Scotland, keeping their condemned order alive by joining a guild of working masons. They had chosen a grand master to succeed de Molay, and since then there had been an unbroken succession of Templar masters. For security purposes, the identity of the grand master was kept secret during his lifetime, his role known only to those few who had elected him. This made it necessary to swear to obey an “unknown superior.” Von Hund was to start setting up lodges of Strict Observance in Germany and to await further instructions. He did as he was told, but lived in frustration, because he was never contacted again.
The concept of a chivalric order, strict obedience, and a secret grand master apparently had great appeal to von Hund’s countrymen, because the new order spread like a grass fire in Germany over a twenty-year period and extended from there to almost every country of continental Europe. Then it began to wane and virtually died out within the next decade, because it appeared that the grand master was not only unknown but was also nonexistent. Von Hund went to his grave convinced that the “unknown superior” was Bonnie Prince Charlie himself. Those who feel that the whole concept of promulgating Strict Observance Masonry was to recruit men and money for the Jacobite cause are inclined to agree with him. If indeed von Hund was correct that Prince Charles Edward Stuart was the “unknown superior,” his reasons for not contacting von Hund again would be very clear. The Jacobite cause was crippled forever by the bloody massacre of the Battle of Culloden Moor and the just as bloody aftermath as the English commander, William, duke of Cumberland—“the Butcher”—hunted and slaughtered Catholic Scots up and down the Highland glens. (As the English hero, the duke was honored by having his name given to a fragrant rockery flower, Sweet William, which understandably is known in Scotland as “Stinkin’ Billie.”)
While continental Masonry was occupied with weaving more and more complex patterns of rite and ritual, original three-degree British Craft Masonry was having problems of its own. With all knowledge of any prior purpose gone, Freemasonry was emerging as an eating and drinking society with perhaps a shade too much emphasis on the latter. All English Masons must regret that their moralizing brother, William Hogarth, memorialized the state of eighteenth-century London Masonry in his painting entitled Night, which depicts a stumbling-drunk Master Mason being helped home by his lodge Tyler, both in their Masonic regalia. The early frivolity was probably the result of the fraternity having no purpose other than the fellowship of the tavern, to the point that lodges were commonly named for the taverns that were their usual meeting places. With the original purposes of Masonry having been lost a generation or more before, the leadership realized that new purposes had to be found. The first of these was Masonic charity, beginning with needy brothers, then gradually extending to the widows and children of brother Masons and to the current inclusion of non-Masonic beneficiaries as well.
The other purpose layered onto Masonry to lure it away from its posture as a tavern-oriented eating and drinking society was the concept of constant self-improvement through the practice of moral behavior, as taught in the lodge. The lessons were taught by using the symbolism of the tools of the stonemason’s trade, and Masonic expressions such as “on the square” became part of the common language. These mason’s-tool symbols of morality were no part of Masonry before it came public in 1717, but they quickly took hold. The summation was reached in the symbol of the “ashlar,” the building stone. The newly accepted Mason represented the just-quarried “rough ashlar” and was to use the symbolic tools of morality to cut and shape and polish himself into the “perfect ashlar,” ready to take its place in the building of God’s temple, for the most important tenet in Masonry was and still is the avowed belief in a Supreme Being.
These two new Masonic elements, charity and morality, constantly asserted and monitored, brought British Masonry out of those taverns and into purpose-built rooms and buildings, which, in turn, brought Masonry into a quasi-religious posture. Instead of having their supper, their wine, and their long “church warden” pipes all through the lodge meeting, those pleasures were banned and replaced by Masonic hymns, Masonic prayers, and organ music in the Masonic temple, all to enhance ever more formal ritual and atmosphere.
Based on little more than the fact that they knew they were called “masons” and that the central ritual involved the construction of King Solomon’s temple, everything about the fraternity was bent in the direction of the stonemason’s trade, and not only through the use of the simple tools as moralistic symbols. Anything that could be learned about medieval stonemasons, or about the construction of ancient buildings, was assumed to be significant to the history of Freemasonry. The lofty Gothic cathedrals especially attracted the attention of Masonic romanticists, who were busy creating a past for Freemasonry in medieval guilds. Descriptions of the better-known cathedrals filled Masonic books and were included in lectures in the lodges, complete with details of arches, buttresses, spires, and variations in the design of columns and capitals. It is now being recognized that there is not a shred of evidence to link Freemasonry to a single notable building, and most serious Masonic writers have now abandoned their once-trumpeted claim of Masonic Grand Mastership for Sir Christopher Wren.
Based on the inability to uncover even one piece of hard evidence, the British Masonic preoccupation with the building trades, like the French Masonic preoccupation with the Crusades and the Holy Land, could offer nothing constructive in the search for Masonic beginnings. The principal point was to determine whether one could establish any connection with the suppressed order of the Knights Templar, and nothing could be expected from words and symbols that were simply made up after Freemasonry came public in 1717. Those signs, symbols, words, and rituals most likely to yield clues regarding Masonic origins would be those preserved in purely verbal transmission, passed on by rote but not understood, thus making them less prone to additions and elaborations in the transmitting.
The best course, then, would be to concentrate on those aspects of Masonry known at the point at which the four London lodges revealed themselves in 1717, when all knowledge was from the past. This would be classified as “Secret” Masonry, as opposed to Freemasonry after 1717, which would be thought of as “Public” Masonry. That also meant that one could ignore the interpretations of secret Masonic facts made by early Masonic historians looking back, not to ascertain the truth, but to force every item of Secret Masonry to fit the preconceived dedication to establishing Masonic origins within medieval guilds of craftsmen.
As an example, there is the “clothing” of Masonry, the gloves and sheepskin apron, said by Masonic writers to be the working clothing of the medieval stonemason. Examining hundreds of drawings, paintings, and woodcuts showing medieval stonemasons at work there was no evidence of work gloves or a sheepskin apron. Another example is the guard who stands outside the door of the meeting with a sword in his hand, the Tyler. It was decided by Masonic writers that the guard might have been borrowed from the guild of roof tilers, or perhaps the secret meeting room at one time had a door covered with tile. Masonic writers are full of such strained notions as they cling tenaciously to the medieval guild theory of origin. By now, we felt that there was sufficient evidence to abandon that theory, but its acceptance was so widespread that perhaps something had been missed. To give the theory the benefit of the doubt, it was necessary to take a good, hard look at the medieval guilds of stonemasons in Britain. The conclusion of that inquiry was something of a shock to me and may be even more so to Freemasons.