Freemasonry: A Very Short Introduction - Andreas Önnerfors 2017

References to the masonic conspiracy myth in pop culture
Perceptions, prejudices, and persecutions

The plot of Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The Lost Symbol (2009) centres on a potential revelation that male representatives of the highest echelons of American legislative, judicial, and executive power have been caught on video, deeply involved in the performance of a masonic ritual. In the story, this potential revelation represents a serious threat to the national security of the United States, and must be prevented at any cost. It is felt that American society—much less the political allies and foes of this, as the story goes, last superpower and model of democracy—would never accept the engagement of these high-level representatives in the activities of a secret brotherhood; that the average citizen would be too ignorant to understand the fraternity and even less able to tolerate it. Hence, the most powerful unit in the American security services is sent to find and eliminate the main character, Mal’akh, who is threatening to release the incriminating video and, in his quest to gain the ultimate symbols of masonry, leaving a seemingly endless path of death and destruction behind him.

Luckily, symbologist Robert Langdon is also racing to prevent Mal’akh from further evil. Langdon deciphers the clues that lead him through the ’secret’ architecture of the US capital, Washington, DC, right to the headquarters of an international masonic organization, the AASR (SJ 33°). On the altar of the organization’s main temple, Mal’akh dies just seconds before the video is uploaded and e-mailed to some of the world’s most prominent news agencies. Thus, the ultimate exposure of freemasonry in the ’fourth power’—the media—and the national disaster potentially emanating from such an exposure are prevented.

Dan Brown’s novel is fiction, but it draws on common perceptions of freemasonry and its relationship to politics without which the plot would never have been exciting enough to create the tension that it did. These common perceptions are frequently exploited in popular culture across the globe and make up an increasing amount of the information on freemasonry that is available on the Internet, especially on sites such as YouTube.

If the Dan Brown novel exploited the still very strongly held conspiracy myth, the opposite perspective, one of ironic transformation, infused an episode of The Simpsons that was aired in 1995 and entitled ’Homer the Great’. Homer Simpson becomes a member of a secret society in Springfield, the ’Stonecutters’, which has obvious similarities with freemasonry. Two of Homer’s co-workers at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant enjoy inexplicable privileges. He discovers that they are members of a secret fraternity that assembles at a vast temple with an all-seeing eye. Since he fulfils the membership criteria, Homer joins the fraternity; he is blindfolded, tested, and swears an oath of allegiance. After becoming a member, he enjoys preferential treatment by a craftsman, bypasses a traffic queue through a secret tunnel, and gets a more comfortable chair at his workplace. Gathered around the festive table of the Stonecutters, the members of the lodge (one of them a space alien) drink beer and sing the programmatic and catchy song of their fraternity. The lyrics elaborate typical motifs of conspiracy narratives that are spread widely on the Internet today—some, funnily enough, simply invented by the scriptwriters of The Simpsons. Thus we learn that the Stonecutters control the British pound/Crown, create movie stars, and rig every Oscar night; that they hold back the metric system and the electric car, rob cavefish of their sight, keep Atlantis off the maps, and conceal the existence of Martians.

For all its irony and humour, the Stonecutters episode draws upon a conspiracy culture that has since become an integral feature of fact-resistant world explanations that are reinforced by fringe radio, talk shows, websites, YouTube channels, and pop culture itself. Search results for the terms ’freemasonry’ or ’Illuminati’ show more than fifteen million hits, hinting at the prominence of these subjects in the thoughts of the general public. A veritable craze has developed for supposedly masonic or Illuminati imagery, which are assembled by conspiracy theorists as proof that the pop culture media is using the symbols to control the mind-sets of millions of people.