INTRODUCTION

The Night of Origins

THE NIGHT OF ORIGINS!

The night of origins? No Freemason,¹ in my view, has any legitimate right to exempt himself from considering this question. Why is that?

This question contains in seed form the very significance we attach to our specific way of doing things, because the Masonic Rite—especially the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite—is deeply rooted, in essence and by design since its very beginnings, in the highly initiatory value of the speculative use of the symbols and symbolism of building.

But this speculative use that was the consequence of employing the symbolic method obviously did not witness the birth of all its constituent elements at the same time, or in some sense, as one might say, all in one piece. All these elements appeared in gradual succession during a historical period that all (or almost all) agree took place in the British Isles between two pivotal dates: 1599 and 1730. And we will not even mention the debate between the (very old and problematic) theory of a direct line of descent from the professional guild masonry of the Middle Ages and the equally elusive notion that operative elements were collected for the purpose of grafting them to an initiatory practice that was primarily speculative.² However, it should be acknowledged that quite a large number of these elements exist. And although they were historically selected and displayed because of their innovative and primordial qualities, as well as for their specifically speculative dimension, the date of the appearance alone is not enough to explain the prolific corpus that today is called Masonic symbolism and modern Freemasonry.

In my opinion, they only serve as markers. They do not innately contain the way they were crafted or the "cultural" secret of their origins. In any case, they cannot give us authority to claim that our Freemasonry was born on this exact date and not on some other date. We only know that its formation began to take place around 1599 through a series of phenomena akin to sedimentation. It is also fundamentally accepted that we recognize Freemasonry in its practically definitive and finalized form of 1730. It was at this time that all these elements had become assembled into a codified corpus that made it possible to no longer detect in the whole of the body thus constructed the survival of any operative practice of craft³ as such.

Thus under this term, which is certainly all-encompassing, but also practical and in continual use since "the night of origins," we should really not seek shelter behind the relative impotence of the historian, but rather draw a distinction between two different realities: on the one hand, the events, and on the other hand, how those events were perceived. And to be perfectly clear concerning our origins, it is therefore suitable to distinguish the proven historical facts themselves⁴ from their interpretation and contextualization.

There is a great risk, it is true, of lumping together the historical facts inventoried in this way with the myths and legends that accompany and mark the successive and often obscure birth of these facts. So we cannot be overly critical of the poet Paul Valéry for cruelly emphasizing the unreliability surrounding the "invention" of both social and spiritual human phenomena, modern Freemasonry being in this respect, and in connection with the known facts that have made their way down to us, poor in both real history and authentic memory, while at the same time rich with tales that preach an origin from time immemorial.⁵

Their [the Freemasons] real secret is no other but their origin.

THOMAS PAINE, ON THE ORIGIN OF FREE-MASONRY

This is precisely why I now want to revisit the text titled, "Les sources antiques de la transmission initiatique en franc-maçonnerie: L'art classique de la mémoire" (The Ancient Sources of the Initiatory Transmission of Freemasonry: The Classical Art of Memory), which I first published in 1995 and which is included in this current work as appendix B. This is a text that has not always been fully understood and remains a document that some commentators on Masonic historiography have therefore believed was not worthy of citing, despite its precedence.

So just what was it about, in fact?

Because the question of historical origins cannot be totally—and scientifically—dated, I examined the question of sources in this study. Here, of course, hypotheses are permitted and only authorize their authors to tease out the spiritual influences (in the sense used by René Guénon) of a nature likely to support the alleged origins that were claimed, a posteriori, by the Masonic method itself.

But because my opening statement included an essential reminder of these sources whose existence had long been known—to wit, for the art of memory, through the books of Frances Yates; for its presence in the Scottish Lodges in 1599 as confirmed by the Second William Schaw Statutes, as shown in the more recent books by David Stevenson—I was at pains to avoid mixing the two conceptual fields, consisting of the likely sources on the one hand and the plausible hypothesis I had deduced from them on the other. I merely suggested that things could very well have been this way and that the quest for the truth does not travel through the deliberate intention to force the facts to fit the theories, but rather by the legitimate necessity of verifying the theories by putting them in contact with the facts.

My present wish therefore is to contextualize my hypothesis from 1995 by first of all reminding my readers of the acknowledged historical certainties on which that hypothesis was based. Next, I will simply seek to show how it potentially fits into the successive contributions of a protracted and fragmented birth process in a noncontradictory way.