Masonic Influence

The largest Masonic Temple in the World.

The task of describing Freemasonry is formidable. It is the largest fraternal organization in the world, with almost three million members in the United States, over seven hundred thousand members in Britain, and a million more around the world. It has been the subject of over fifty thousand books, pamphlets, and articles since it revealed itself to the world in 1717.

Although based on the primary membership requirement of firm belief in a Supreme Being, admitting men of all religions, and having a central theme of moral behavior, constant selfimprovement, and a dedication to acts of charity, Freemasonry probably has aroused more enmity than any secular organization in the history of the world. It has been consistently attacked by the Roman Catholic church, its membership forbidden to men of the Mormon faith, and even the Salvation Army and the Methodist Church in England have advised their members against Masonic membership. It has been, and is today, outlawed in a number of countries, although Masons certainly do not mind their order having been declared illegal by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Francisco Franco. They do mind having been branded an alternate religion, the Antichrist, and the force behind subversive plots to overthrow governments. Most recently, they have had to contend with the involvement of a clandestine, disavowed Masonic lodge in the Vatican banking scandals and allegations of unwarranted preferment and coverups in the British police and civil service.

Many anti-Masonic allegations are difficult to address because of the traditional policy of Freemasonry to decline to respond to attacks. Critics of Freemasonry benefit from the concept of "confession by silence," their accusations usually standing unanswered by a quasi-secret society that apparently feels, even in our mediaburdened society, that deeds will outweigh press releases. Because of that policy, the Freemasons may he destined to remain controversial, although their legions of critics are easily matched by the legions of notables who have chosen to embrace Masonic membership.

Freemasonry was there in the American Revolution, with members such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Monroe, Alexander Hamilton, Paul Revere, John Paul Jones, and even the Marquis de Lafayette and Benedict Arnold. Other revolutions, against both church and state, were led by Freemasons Benito Juarez, Simon Bolivar, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Sam Houston (aided in some cases by the products of their fellow Mason, Samuel Colt).

Kings and emperors who took the Masonic oaths include Edward VII, Edward VIII, and George VI in England, Frederick the Great of Prussia, George I of Greece, Haakon VII of Norway, Stanislaus II of Poland, and even King Kamchameha V of Hawaii. In addition to Washington and Monroe, the Masonic roll of presidents of the United States includes Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, James A. Garfield, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, and honorary brother Ronald Rcagan.

World War II was fought by British Masonic leaders Sir Winston S. Churchill, Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis, Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinlech, Marshal Lord Newhall (Royal Air Force), and General Sir Francis Wingate. American Masonry was well represented by Generals Mark Clark, Omar Bradley, George Marshall, Joseph Stillwell, and Douglas MacArthur.

Nor were Freemasons always on the same side. Napoleon threw his Masonic marshals Mcessena, Murat, Soult, MacDonald, and Ney against Freemasons Kutuzov of Russia, Blucher of Prussia, and their ultimate nemesis, the duke of Wellington.

One hardly knows where to stop in recounting Masonic influence on all aspects of western life in the past 270 years, whether that influence be political, military, or cultural. In music Freemasons ascend the entire scale from William C. Handy, composer of "The St. Louis Blues," to John Philip Sousa, and from both Gilbert and Sullivan through Sibelius and Haydn to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whom some say was murdered for revealing Masonic secrets in his opera The Magic Flute.

Masonic members of the literary world include Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Rudyard Kipling, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Oliver Goldsmith, Mark Twain, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who would never have permitted Steplnen Knight's anti-Masonic book, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, to be rewritten, as it was, into a fictionalized motion picture version pitting Sir Arthur's creation, Sherlock Holmes, against Sir Arthur's own Masonic brothers in London).

As impressive, even legendary, as some of these actual Freemasous may be, they pale against the revelations of early Masonic historians, who claimed the Masonic membership for Adam, Abraham, Noah, Moses, Solomon, Ptolemy, Julius Caesar, and Pythagoras (remembered in Masonic verbal tradition by the delightfully anglicized name of "Peter Gower"). One Masonic writer was incensed that some of his contemporaries expressed doubt about the claim of Masonic membership for Achilles. Nor did the fantasy stop there. Claims were made to establish the origins of Masonry in ancient Egypt, and some traced Masonic sources to the Essenes, Zoroastrians, Chaldeans, and especially the Phoenicians, since they had been kind enough to sail to Britain to share their Mysteries with the Druids, also claimed as predecessors of Freemasonry.

Gradually the competition among Masonic historians to outdo each other in such fantasies died down, and more sober voices were given a chance to be heard. The first great retreat was to the establishment of Freemasonry at the building of the Temple of Solomon, based upon a literal interpretation of an allegory which, as we shall see, is central to the initiation ritual of a Master Mason. This theory was embellished to establish three original Grand Masters: King Solomon; Hiram, king of Tyre; and a mythical Hiram called "Hiram Abiff." Masonic writers have tried to identify Hiram Abiff as the biblical Hiram, "son of a widow of Naphtali," who was a master worker in bronze, a skill he used to cast the great pillars, Jachin and Boaz, that flanked the entrance on the outer porch of the temple. Their problem is that in Masonic ritual the master builder, Hiram Abiff, is murdered and the Temple of Solomon is never finished, while the biblical account says that the temple was indeed finished and, as far as we can tell, Hiram the metalworker went home, alive and well. The biblical account in fact provides no clue to the real origins of Freemasonry. If there was to be any valid revelation of Masonic origins in the building of King Solomon's temple, it would have to be drawn from the allegorical drama locked within the Masonic ritual.

The next generation of Masonic historians, now striving for truth rather than romance, finally admitted that there was absolutely no evidence of Masonic beginnings in the building of the Temple of Solomon, but they thought that they had found those origins in the medieval British guilds of stonemasons. This theory has led to the trotting out of all the working tools of the stonemason, making them the symbols of moral lessons which the Mason is to follow as he constantly strives for self-improvement. There is absolutely nothing wrong with lessons of morality and charity, in whatever form they are taught, just as there can be no objection to an incessant striving for self-improvement. The problem is one of credible history, a believable basis for thinking that an organization of dusty stonecutters with scraped hands and knees, backs aching from struggling with heavy blocks of stone in all weather conditions, somehow turned into a noble company led by kings and princes, dukes and earls - not to mention that the entire process was accomplished in total secrecy.

The basic problem, of course, is that prior to the year 1717 the Masonic order was a true secret society; not just an organization with secret signs and secret handgrips, but a widespread society whose very existence was a secret. No Masonic historian claims to fully understand why that secrecy existed, or even why the group existed. When Masonry finally revealed itself, it gradually became known that this secret society had cells, or "lodges" as they called them, all over England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, but nowhere else. What was it that had held them together, sworn to preserving this tradition of total secrecy for generation after generation with oaths so sacred that the breaking of them could earn extraordinarily brutal punishments? Whatever the mortar of motivation was that had held the stones of the Masonic lodges together, giving purpose to the members' lives and demanding total secrecy, it had disappeared by the time that the first Hanoverian king, George I, ascended the throne of England, a throne by then legally forbidden to any Roman Catholic or spouse of a Roman Catholic.

It was an event of little importance at the time: Four lodges of Freemasons met at the Apple-Tree Tavern in Covent Garden in London in 1717 and declared that they were banding together to form an official association to be called a "Grand Lodge." There is no evidence that they had in mind at the time any confederation extending beyond London and Westminster. The news itself was not earthshaking to the people of London, whose first impression, if any, would have been that four eating and drinking clubs were combining to eat and drink together once a year. That impression would have been justified by the fact that these "Masons" held their "lodge" meetings with food and drink and tobacco at the Apple-Tree Tavern, the Crown Ale-House near Drury Lane, the Goose and Gridiron in St. Paul's Churchyard, and the Rummer and Grapes Tavern in Westminster. It turned out that the group claimed John the Baptist as one of its patron saints, and on St. John Baptist's day, June 24, 1717, the Grand Lodge was officially instituted with the election of a Grand Master and other officers.

The real shock would have occurred underground and been felt by all of the other Masons in Britain. The four London lodges, simply by revealing themselves and the existence of their order, had violated their sacred oaths of secrecy. They had unilaterally decided that total secrecy was no longer necessary, or even desirable. Every other Mason in Britain would have been in a quandary, and one can only imagine the concerned and heated discussions that took place in the secret lodge meetings throughout Britain during the months following the London disclosure.

Slowly other Masonic lodges, most of them in the areas around London, revealed themselves and asked to join with the new Grand Lodge. Others, however, were angry with the "oathbreakers" and would have nothing to do with them. Their ire may have been occasioned by the fact that the members of the newly, formed Grand Lodge made no attempt to justify their actions, or even to explain why they had decided that the time had come to shrug off what they apparently felt was needless and even inconvenient secrecy. That there was resistance on the part of lodges still clinging to their original charges is shown by their reaction to a fonnal request made by the Master of the Grand Lodge at the second Grand Festival in 1718. All of the Masonic lodges in England were asked to turn over to the Grand Lodge any ancient records or other documents relating to Freemasonry so that they might be considered in drafting a constitution for the Grand Lodge. The reaction of many lodges was to burn all written references to their regulations or history, to prevent their being used to break the oath of secrecy. Historians may lament this destruction of valuable documents, but in a way their destruction does credit to those who were not quick to throw away their traditions or their vows.

The first formal objection to the concept of the Grand Lodge came eight years later, in 1725, from the Masonic lodge at York. York Masons based their complaint not upon the violations of the ancient secrecy of the order but upon the assumed superiority and antiquity of the Londoners. York Masonry, they asserted, was as old as the setting of the foundation of York Cathedral in the seventh century; Edwin, king of Northumbria, had been their first Grand Master. In the spirit of brotherhood, they said, they would not argue with the London group calling itself the Grand Lodge of England, but the whole world should know that York Masonry had an "undoubted right" to style itself as the "Grand Lodge of all England.”

During that same year of 1725, Irish Freemasonry came out of its misty bog of secrecy and declared a Grand Lodge of Ireland, based in Dublin. The first Irish Grand Master was the twenty-nine-year-old earl of Rosse, probably a wise choice to get things moving, since he had Inherited a vast fortune of a million pounds from his loving grandmother, the duchess of Tyrconnel.

Scotland was the longest holdout in bringing its Masonry into public view. (It has been said that if Freemasonry was to be classified like Judaism, America would be styled as Reformed, England as Conservative, and Scotland as Orthodox.) Finally, however, nineteen years after the launching of the Grand Lodge of England, the Scottish lodges began to meet to discuss their own situation. The vear 1737 saw the first formal meeting of the new Grand Lodge of Scotland.

That same year also saw, the beginning of an explosion of Freemasonry in France. It set off the proliferation of hundreds upon hundreds of new Masonic orders and degrees and sparked the creation of new legends and new fantasies that confuse any serious attempt to comprehend modern Masonry, even in the United States. It was all triggered by one man, a well-placed Scot whose motivations are as mysterious now its they were then.

John J. Robinson. The Birth Of Grand Lodge. Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry. M. Evans and Company Inc., New York. 1989.

Is It True What They Say about Freemasonry? This is the Mason's response to the misinformation about their brotherhood that exists today.

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