Freemasons

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FREEMASONS

masonic rituals and organizations
some prominent freemasons
masonic terminology and abbreviations
political and historical engagements
bibliography

A selective fraternal organization based on private initiation rituals, whose symbols and customs are allegedly derived from medieval stonemasons, Freemasonry was first established in England by 1717. Masonic lodges soon appeared elsewhere in France, the Netherlands, the German and Italian states, and Russia. By 1789 perhaps as many as fifty thousand European Masons, most often from the royal courts, landed nobility, and professional middle classes, professed in their lodges the Enlightenment principles of social equality, religious toleration, and moral virtue. For the next 125 years, however, largely in response to the dramatic historical consequences of political and industrial revolution, Freemasons on the Continent especially developed substantially new versions of their initiation rituals and the organizations that regulated their authenticity; they grew in political influence and controversy even as their social status became more diffuse and less prominent. In short, they participated actively in the troubled, uneven evolution of modern civic culture in nineteenth-century Europe.

masonic rituals and organizations

Fundamental to Freemasonry were its secret rituals. The initiations of new Masons took them symbolically in three discrete stages from the "profane" world to the values of brotherhood, charity, and truth. The first degree or grade, the Entered Apprentice, learned what distinguished the Mason from the non-Mason; the second degree, the Fellowcraft or Journeyman, acknowledged the transition to a new life in Masonry; and the third degree, the Master Mason, welcomed the initiate to full rights and responsibilities to vote on admission of new members and take a leadership role in their initiation. Additional degrees, such as those worked by the Knights Templar or the Scottish Rite, built on these foundational grades. In the nineteenth century, the tendency was to add many more degrees; by 1900 the rites of the Memphis-Misraïm worked up to ninety-nine of them.

Dramatizing the symbolic changes in a Mason's status, the specifics of these rituals varied considerably over time and are the main reason for Masonic secrecy: every Mason was sworn not to reveal the ritual mysteries of the craft to noninitiates. Nevertheless, the indiscretions of individual Masons, such as Leo Tolstoy's father, or the efforts of hostile profanes, such as Roman Catholic officials, led to revelationsor exposés not officially sanctioned by Freemasonry. Forms and customs once tied to the medieval stonemasons increasingly gave way to mystical and esoteric rituals, even though the obediences disapproved and tried to limit these novelties in Masonic symbolism.

some prominent freemasons

Philippe-Égalité, duc d'Orléans (initiated 1771), regicide cousin of Louis XVI

Marquis de Lafayette (1775), French general and statesman, "Hero of Two Worlds"

Nikolai Novikov (1775), Russian statesman, confidant of Catherine the Great

Alexander Radishchev (c. 1780), Russian political reformer

George, Prince of Wales (1790), George IV of England

Duke of Wellington (1791), English general and statesman, victor of Waterloo

François Guizot (1804), French historian and statesman in the July Monarchy

Filippo Buonarroti (c. 1806), Italian-born French revolutionary and leader of the Carbonari

James Rothschild (1810), English banker

Alexander Pushkin (1821), Russian poet

William I (1840), king of Prussia and emperor of Germany

Franz Liszt (1841), Hungarian musician and composer of Romantic music

Giuseppe Garibaldi (1844), Italian revolutionary nationalist

Albert Edward (1869), Prince of Wales, Edward VII of England

Léon Gambetta (1875), French patriot and republican political leader

Jules Ferry (1875), French politician, architect of French public education

Rudyard Kipling (1886), English author and champion of British Empire

Annie Besant (1902), English political activist and theosophist

Louise Michel (1904), French revolutionary and Communard

Alexander Kerensky (c. 1910), prime minister, Provisional Government of Russia Philippe-E

A product of liberal Enlightenment ideals, Masonic lodges valued their independence from centralizing authority. Yet coordination of membership among the different lodges, especially those practicing the same ritual, was desirable to foster organizational order. Accordingly, the English were the first to create a Grand Lodge in London, often called the "Moderns" (1717), but they soon encountered resistance from lodges working different rituals in York (1725) and elsewhere in London, better known as the "Antients" (1751). In December 1813 this rivalry ended in the formation of the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE), which elected a new Grand Master (the Duke of Sussex), crafted a common constitution, and created a uniform philosophic framework for the first three degrees. From then onward, all subsequent Masonic activity, including the recognition of new lodges in England and Wales, was subject to the authority of the UGLE.

masonic terminology and abbreviations

Adoption:

The practice of initiating women under a special system of rituals. Adoption appeared first and most pervasively in polite society in France before 1789. After a brief vogue during the Napoleonic Empire, adoption was not revived again until 1901.

Apprentice or Entered Apprentice:

The first degree in Free-masonry. Symbolically, the initiation suggests the end of the new Mason's previous life and the beginning of a new one.

Constitutions:

The 1723 document by the Reverend James Anderson laying out the rules of Masonic activity, which is foundational to Freemasonry as an institution. The 1738 revision of the Constitutions provided a historical explanation of "speculative" or symbolic Masonry, much of it an elaborate mythology underlying the organization's rituals.

Grand Architect of the Universe:

The Supreme Being—as Creator of Heaven and Earth—recognized by all Freemasons initiated into the rituals overseen by the United Grand Lodge of England, but not the Grand Orient of Belgium (since 1871) and the Grand Orient of France (since 1877).

GLF:

Grand Lodge of France, the rival obedience to the Grand Orient of France, founded in 1895.

GOF:

Grand Orient of France, the most important obedience in France.

GSLF:

Grand Symbolic Lodge of France, the first obedience to consider initiating women in annual convents in the 1890s.

Journeyman or Fellowcraft:

The second degree in Freemasonry. This intermediary grade between the Entered Apprentice and the Master Mason was often granted at the same time as the first.

Le Droit Humain:

The International Mixed Masonic Order, established in France in 1894 by Maria Desraismes and Georges Martin, and the first and most prominent obedience for both men and women.

Lodge:

The local gathering of Masons for the working of the craft or degrees.

Master Mason:

The third degree in Freemasonry. The culmination of the Apprentice and Journeymen degrees, Master Masons were entitled to full participation in their lodges, including the right to vote on new members and the leading of initiation rituals.

Obedience:

The organizational authority of Masonic lodges observing the same rituals, generally referred to as the "Grand Lodge" or the "Grand Orient," which grants permission to individual lodges to initiate and to work degrees or grades. The most widely recognized Masonic obediences are the United Grand Lodge of England and the Grand Orient of France.

Royal Art or the Craft:

Freemasonry's universal symbolism.

Scottish Rite, Ancient and Accepted:

The system of higher, or side, degrees beyond that of Master Mason. The Scottish Rite has developed thirty-three degrees, which are often associated with certain elitist, knightly, and Christian tendencies in Freemasonry outside the English context.

UGLE:

United Grand Lodge of England, the largest and most widely recognized authority in European Freemasonry, founded in 1813.

These efforts at centralization in England, however, were unwelcome on the Continent. The French were particularly creative in establishing another Grand Lodge (1738) and then a rival Grand Orient (1773), until 1799 when these two merged into the Grand Orient of France

(GOF). Other obediences were obliged briefly to coordinate their activities. In 1804 the Scottish Rite entered into an agreement with the GOF, only to regain its independence a year later. Also in 1804 the Supreme Council assumed responsibility for regulating the first three degrees, including the creation of new lodges (after 1820), and in 1805 the Grand Directory of Rites, later the Grand College of Rites (1826), took charge of regulating all other degrees.

The largest proliferation of French obediences occurred after 1850. The Grand Symbolic Lodge of France (GSLF), an emanation of the Supreme Council, started under another name in 1880; the Grand Lodge of France (GLF), following the Scottish Rite, was founded in 1895 and fused with the GSLF in 1896. The Grand Lodge of the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis-Misraïm appeared in 1899. Finally, after years of interest expressed by women in participating, the International Mixed Masonic Order: Le Droit Humain was organized in 1894, and the adoptive lodges under the auspices of the GLF began in 1901. In Masonic history, France was an innovator in ritual and organization.

Freemasonry had even less central authority in the other European countries. Freemasons were regulated for less than ten years during France's First Empire (1804–1814), when the GOF was authorized to oversee Masonic activity everywhere French hegemony prevailed, in the Netherlands, many of the German and Italian states, and Spain. Immediately after the empire, European lodges worked the craft most often in secret because the reactionary Restoration regimes outlawed them as revolutionary cells. The establishment of nation-states, especially in the wake of Italian and German unification in 1870 and 1871, respectively, reinforced the decentralization of Masonic authority. In Russia Freemasonry was forbidden until 1918.

political and historical engagements

Under the long, stable reign of Queen Victoria (r. 1837–1901), English Freemasons enjoyed an uninterrupted detachment from politics. Princes of the realm and their relatives regularly served as Grand Masters and Provincial Grand Masters of the UGLE without controversy primarily because of a studious political disengagement in the lodges. The Masonic enthusiasm of Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales (1841–1910), enabled the UGLE to prosper before his accession to the throne (as Edward VII) in 1901. Finances from dues-paying Masons increased more than threefold during the nineteenth century. The principal concerns remained the rapid expansion of lodges in the British Empire.

Elsewhere Freemasons were often embroiled in political conflict. In 1789 Masons appeared in the tumultuous Estates-General; 103 out of 578 deputies in the revolutionary National Assembly were Freemasons. Consequently, archconservatives such as the Abbé Augustin de Barruel created the myth of a Masonic conspiracy, even though sixteen of Napoleon I's twenty-six marshals became members and lent Masonry an official legitimacy. With the Restoration in 1815, however, a comparable movement, the Carbonari, actually used its secrecy for revolutionary purposes in France and the Italian states. Individual Masons were active in much revolutionary activity in Russia (1825), in France and the Italian and German states (1830 and 1848), and again in France (1870–1871), despite the explicit policy of the main obediences not to challenge political authority, especially after unification in Italy and Germany.

Under the pontificate of Pius IX (r. 1846–1878), the Roman Catholic Church actively combated the rival religion it saw in Freemasonry. Repeated papal bulls threatened all Catholic Masons with excommunication. Church officials condemned the Masonic principles of religious tolerance, which had led many assimilated Jews to join. The GOF in 1877 dropped from its texts and rituals all references to the Grand Architect of the Universe, that is, to a Supreme Being, despite the opposition of the more traditional UGLE and its Continental affiliates. The rupture between the GOF and the UGLE continued into the twenty-first century. The basis for the sweeping Catholic condemnation of Masonry, due in part to the Vatican's struggle with recently unified Italy, seemed justified by the anticlerical politics of many GOF Masons in the French Third Republic, culminating in Émile Combes's forced separation of church and state in 1905.

Because of its selective secrecy, Freemasonry soon acquired a distinctive historical mythology. Masons borrowed the suggestions of James Anderson's 1738 imaginative history to elaborate their own lore, derived from the Bible and cultures with impressive stone monuments, to legitimize their organization and to enrich the symbolism of their rituals. Scottish Rite Masons, for example, adopted the myth of the Knights Templar, which formed the basis for their many medieval degrees. These efforts were given force by creative works such as Charles Gounod's opera The Queen of Sheba (1862) and Tolstoy's novel War and Peace (1865–1869). But they did so in the face of powerful countermyths promoted by the church and a popular culture eager to seize on Freemasonry's deliberate mystifications. In 1892, the unscrupulous French publicist Léo Taxil took advantage of widespread fascination with the occult and of fierce anticlericalism to write a best-selling revelation of a self-professed female Mason, Miss Diana Vaughan, which turned out to be an elaborate hoax.

The controversies over Freemasonry eased with the rapid proliferation of civic culture in liberal societies on the eve of World War I. Masons probably represented more than 10 percent of the adult male population in Britain and France by 1914, and had begun to attract a growing number of women in Le Droit Humain and the new

lodges of adoption, which had been reconstituted in France, Spain, and Italy. Since the eighteenth century, Freemasons had included many more members of the newer, middling social groups created by a century of industrialization. Teachers, office managers, salesmen, and government functionaries joined social and political elites in the lodges, often for mixed motives such as employment networks and charitable activities, mostly in small towns. By the end of the long nineteenth century, Freemasonry had become a widely recognized if not exemplary civic organization in modern Europe.

See alsoAnticlericalism; Carbonari; Pius IX.