Freemasonry has long been
associated with secrecy and intrigue, according to 18th-century historian
Margaret Jacob. Don Brown's popular bestseller, The Da Vinci Code (Doubleday,
2003), exploits this perception, locating a fictitious archival call number
of a secret dossier on masonic lodges at the heart of the story's suspense.
While Brown's book may not shed the light of truth and historical accuracy
on the subject of the Masons, Jacob does acknowledge that mystery has been
an integral part of masonic lodge culture since its inception.
From medieval times, guilds and stonemasons used passwords
and codes to exclude itinerants and non-guild members. Guild rituals further
protected the inner
circle of members in their progression from apprentice to master mason. Against
the liturgical backdrop of the times in which much knowledge was itself still
mysterious, these guild members were a "cut above," literate and
steeped in the rudiments of Euclidean geometry, essentially fulfilling the
role of architects.
By the mid-18th century, guilds were initiating members
who had never cut stone. This constituted a crucial shift from "operative" guild
stonemasons to a "speculative" society of educated members. Freemasonry
became a force of religious tolerance and social mobility, in which men
and, in
some cases, women were honored on the basis of merit rather than birth.
These increasingly
genteel societies constituted a new movement away from traditional, sectarian
life. Lodges fostered a literate culture with particular interest in military
skills and engineering. Freemasons even developed their own mythology of
intellectual filiation with the figure of Hermes Trismegistus as the ancient
Egyptian source
of their learned knowledge.
Masonic societies were, on the one hand, secretive,
ritualistic, and devoted to internal hierarchy. On the other hand, they
upheld the ideals of merit,
equality, and enlightenment, believing that all brothers should be philosophers.
A masonic manuscript of 1659 draws an organic link between masonic wisdom
and natural governance. This concept, along with the increasing popularity
of the
notion of the body as the sum of constituent parts, ushered the concept
of a "constitution" as we know it into legal and political parlance.
The 1723 publication of the Book of Constitutions, an amalgam of the constitutions
used by individual lodges, bears early witness to the centrality of their importance
within masonic culture.
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In the 18th century,
masonic lodges became venues for the articulation of liberal political
ideals, including the opposition to French absolutism and the affirmation
of religious tolerance, from theism and pantheism to atheism. Some
French lodges also extended membership to women. Freemasonry, condemned
as a "new form of religion" by the Church, denoted enthusiasm
for new Enlightenment ideas and attracted progressive, secular
thinkers.
By the late 18th century, lodges began to form
bona fide political ties. Masonic lodges served as the sites for
revolutionary discussion of self-governance in
British colonies, just as they did in pre-revolutionary France. On the opposite
side of the political spectrum, Sweden's court in its entirety joined lodges;
Parisian lodges boasted ambassadorial connections; in Berlin and Vienna, lodges
enjoyed royal support and membership. Caught between the concepts of modern
contract and feudal birthright, late 18th-century society found
leadership in freemasonry
in its movement toward disciplined decorum, interiority, public discussion,
sociability, and uncensored private reading. In some cases, lodge
memberships constituted
national representative constituencies; nation and lodge grew so intertwined
as to become difficult to parse.
Masonic culture made the abstract ideals of
reason, equality, and self-governance concrete, if still difficult
to attain. This liberalism was not without its
contradictions, as is evidenced in the exclusion of peasants, workers, slaves,
and, in most places,
women, from lodge membership. In spite of this, Jacob contends that freemasonry
looked more to the future of human rights and egalitarian ideals than to
its medieval past.
From the time of Nazi Germany, the myth of
a Jewish masonic conspiracy has persisted. The March 9, 2004, suicide
bombing of a masonic temple in Istanbul
attributed
to Islamic militant groups may indicate that this myth is alive and well,
notes Jacob. Both examples demonstrate the extent to which freemasonry,
for its liberalism,
would
be hated by enemies of democracy.
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