Freemasonry: A Very Short Introduction - Andreas Önnerfors 2017
Freemasonry—a short overview
Two approaches to freemasonry
Modern freemasonry (which throughout this book will also be referred to as the ’brotherhood’ or ’craft’) became a global movement in the 18th century and its ideas have since created a considerable social, cultural, and political impact. Since its official inception in 1717, without any formal governing body, it spread throughout the world as a prominent feature of associational life. It became one of the largest non-governmental secular organizations. At the beginning of the 21st century, freemasonry has approximately two to three million members worldwide. Following a dispute over ideological matters in the 1870s, the masonic world is divided into two main spheres of influence: lodges adhering to the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE, 1717/1813) and those adhering to the Grand Orient de France (GODF, 1738/72). Besides these two major masonic bodies there exists a large number of independent, self-authorized masonic lodges and masonic-like fraternal orders. Female membership is today a prevalent yet still disputed feature of freemasonry. And a wide range of other fraternal organizations such as the International Order of Good Templars were established, based on principles of freemasonry.
The historical origins of freemasonry are to be found in medieval professional craft-guilds for stonemasons, active in the construction of cathedrals, churches, and secular buildings around Europe. Modern freemasonry was modelled on the imaginative world of these guilds, with their architecture and geometry, mythology, symbols, feasts, and rituals, and it represents both in real and in imagined terms a continuation of this heritage. In this sense, freemasonry preserves cultural practices otherwise only to be found in guild traditions surviving into the modern era (such as the London Livery Companies, the French ’Compagnonnage’, and the German ’Wanderschaft’).
The medieval heritage was merged with the scientific and associational culture of the early Enlightenment, creating an eclectic mixture of intellectual and religious traditions. This undogmatic openness contributed to cultural dynamics in the development of various masonic rites and ritual systems (for the purpose of knowledge transfer) during the subsequent centuries and across the globe. Strikingly, blended into this heterogeneous mix was the powerful idea of descent from Chivalric orders in general and the Knights Templar in particular, as well as from Greek and Roman mystery cults. Thus, a historical legacy was constructed which reflected an antiquarian impulse and a revived interest in the classical era. Openness and diversity make it impossible to identify freemasonry as a unified or even unifying phenomenon. For instance, a universal coherent masonic organization was never established; rather, freemasonry promoted the development of independent local nodes (lodges) in a loose global network with instances of regional and national organization.
The common and central feature of various masonic rites is the performance of rituals for the purpose of initiation of new members or members’ promotion to higher levels (’degrees’, ranging from three to thirty-three, depending on the masonic system in question), where further knowledge is transferred. The pedagogical aim of masonic rituals in a progress towards higher understanding is to enhance the moral autonomy of the modern individual, which follows an enlightened programme of ’disenchantment’ and in one sense sets it apart from the Christian tradition. However, it would be misguided to interpret these practices as a mere rationalization of the Christian religious impulse in content and form, since the rituals of freemasonry are saturated with influences from other religious and spiritual sources too. Most masonic rituals have appeared in various press exposures and are available in print and digital media. Thus ’secrecy’ as a practice and organizational attribute of freemasonry must rather be understood as representing an elaborate societal play of trust in the interface between opacity and transparency. Freemasonry embraces a particular politics of knowledge along these limits. There will always remain a gap between insiders and outside observers and their agreement upon any ’proper’ understanding of freemasonry. This tension between practitioners’ and observers’ perception is not necessarily an intentional aspect of freemasonry, but it is nevertheless reinforced by the culture of secrecy surrounding it.
Masonic ceremonies are enacted according to a set script (the ritual) in a private space, the lodge, and mostly followed by a formalized dinner, sometimes also called the ’table lodge’ or ’agape’. The lodge is a physical location as well as being the place for ritual work, and it is the name of the smallest organizational unit within freemasonry. Several single lodges in the same region, as a rule, form a provincial lodge; and several provincial lodges form a national masonic organization or grand lodge, sometimes extending its authority to other countries, mostly occasioned by colonialism and other international relations. Autonomous grand lodges interact with each other in a self-organized system of standardization and self-regulation.
Modern freemasonry traces its organizational origin back to an alleged constitutive meeting of four lodges in London in 1717 (which most likely never took place). By 1721, a Grand Lodge of London and Westminster was fully operational. As organizational heir to this first body, the UGLE claims the right of assessing and granting the so-called regularity of other national masonic bodies in the world. Already in its first published normative text, The Constitutions of 1723, the tolerant and inclusive values of freemasonry are stressed, values that were compatible with the establishment of lodges in a large variety of cultural, social, and religious settings. Fifteen years later, a famous masonic oration stated that there were no significant differences between men based on language, fashion, borders, or rank. The world was here described as one vast republic, every nation as a family within it, and every individual as a child. The author claimed it was the goal of freemasonry to bring about the unity of mankind.
This idea of a universal, all-embracing brotherhood has clear elements of cosmopolitan thought that recur throughout the history of freemasonry. A universal consciousness is also represented by the frequent use of globes in seals and symbolically important furniture of the lodges, as well as in the expression to be found in a number of rites that freemasons are ’dispersed over the face of earth and water’. Moreover, freemasonry has also been involved in a number of national liberalization and independence movements across the globe. There is an inbuilt tension between a universal ideology of brotherhood and a particular ideology of individual self-determination. And despite its cosmopolitan ethos, issues of race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation illustrate the fault-lines and limits of masonic tolerance. Even today, some grand lodges in the USA have adopted the view that membership requires heterosexual orientation. Homosexual couples have been expelled and extra-marital cohabitation between heterosexual couples has been questioned. By the same token, African-American freemasonry has not been fully accepted and a racial bias is observable in recruitment to lodges and particularly to masonic leadership.
Since the early 18th century there has been a friction between established Christian churches and freemasonry. Starting with the first papal ban in 1738 (followed by many more), the Catholic Church was most prominent in its condemnation of freemasonry, culminating in the decades before World War I. In Catholic journals and pamphlets across the world, freemasonry was identified as the enemy of the Church, contributing to secularization and dissolution of traditional values. It has to be stressed, however, that these condemnations have not prevented practising Catholics from joining masonic lodges, and in countries like Ireland freemasonry was and is particularly evident (in 2017, the Grand Lodge of Ireland counted 27,000 members).
At least since the French Revolution, freemasonry has even been accused of orchestrating radical political change. Reinforced by anti-masonic and anti-Semitic writings at the turn of the 19th and into the 20th century, European right-wing groups mainly after World War I absorbed this anti-masonic ethos into their ideological and political agendas. In Italy, Spain, Portugal, and, later, Nazi Germany as well as occupied states such as France, lodges were closed down, their property seized, and individual members persecuted (see Figure 1). Also in the Soviet Union and China and in the communist regimes of central, eastern, and south-eastern Europe, freemasonry was prohibited. Cuba was and is a remarkable exception to this rule. Freemasonry and similar fraternal organizations feature today in a large variety of globally spread conspiracy theories, popularized by a vast number of Internet sites and references in popular culture. The narrative of conspiracy purports to explain everything about historical developments and current events; it is this global scope that provides the best evidence for its mania. After a negative trend in membership recruitment following the 1960s, there have been signs of recuperation not least occasioned by the collapse of Soviet communism after 1990, and many new national grand lodges have been established in central and eastern Europe.