These Master Builders were the forerunners of the Freemasons and celebrated the new apprentices and members of the guild in ritual ceremonies such as the ones described in the Halliwell Manuscript, where references to Sacred Geometry, Euclid and Ancient Egypt are made in relation to the building trade.
Eventually, with the advent of the Renaissance, these operative lodges opened up and started to accept non operative masons such as Elias Ashmole for example, who was initiated in 1646 attracted by the discreet atmosphere and freedom afforded in these lodges of Master Builders. Ashmole, a solicitor interested in Rosicrucianism, Alchemy and the Kabbala who was a Royalist during the English Civil War and would end up being acquainted to the founders of the Royal Society, was initiated alongside Colonel Henry Mainwaring (a Roundhead friend related to his father-in-law). Freemasonry, speculative Freemasonry, from it's inception has always promoted equality and fraternity independent of status, religious beliefs and political inclination. In France, Freemasonry become initially a fashionable and exclusive club first among the nobility and then amongst the new emerging bourgeoisie. In December 1736, the chevalier de Ramsay pronounced a discourse in which he propounded the idea of a chivalric origin for Freemasonry whilst simultaneously promoting Republican and egalitarian values very much atuned with the Enlightenment. In 1738, the Pope Clement XII issues the first papal bull against Freemasonry which by necessity must have positioned it in a course against the ancient regime.
Among active Freemasons in the Revolutionary period were Mirabeau, Choderlos de Laclos and Rouget de l'Isle, writer of the national anthem "La Marseillaise" as well as Lafayette, Danton and Marat, each one of them espousing different factions within the Revolutionary movement. Freemasonry was used and misused during the French Revolution but there were Revolutionaries as well as counter Revolutionaries who were members of the brotherhood.
The XVIII was the century that gave birth to the modern world. Revolution, reform and change constituted the zeitgeist of the period. There was a very important Masonic lodge in this century that enjoyed international membership and which embodied the spirit of the age: La Loge des Neufs Soeurs, the Lodge of the Nine Sisters. As the wonderful website of the Grand Lodge of British Columbia and the Yukon explains:
"NINE SISTERS, LODGE OF THE. A famous Masonic Body at Paris, France, La Loge des Neufs Soeurs, whose request for formal organization came before the Grand Orient on March 11, 1776. The name, Nine Sisters, refers to the Muses, the classic nine goddesses presiding over the arts and sciences; their names, their departments, and their characteristic attributes being as follows: Calliope, epic poetry, bearing wax tablet and pencil; Clio, history, with a scroll; Erato, erotic poetry, with a small lyre; Euterpe, lyric poetry, bearing a double flute; Melpomene, tragedy, with tragic mask and ivy wreath; Polyhymnia, or Polymnia, sacred hymns, veiled and in an attitude of thought; Terpsichore, choral song and the dance, with a lyre; Thalia, comedy, with comic mask and ivy wreath, and Urania, astronomy, carrying the celestial globe.
This truly remarkable Lodge had many noted members and it exhibited some curious features. For instance, the tendency that has cropped up here and there to some small extent to demur at any taking of an oath in the conferring of a Degree was long ago considered by this Lodge and it decided adversely to the practise. Among the leading Brethren of the Lodge was Benjamin Franklin, the second Worshipful Master, who during his term of office, two years, had undoubtedly a part of consequence in the organization mainly by the members of his Lodge of the Apollonian Society, called after the fabled originator and protector of civil order, the founder of cities and legislatures. The President of this organization was Antoine Court de Gebelin, who was Secretary of the Lodge in 1779. He was a member of several learned societies and the author of a comprehensive work planned to extend over thirty volumes, of which he published nine, entitled the Primitive World Analyzed and Compared with the Modern World. This enterprise gave him such a reputation that he became the Royal Censor, although a Protestant. In 1780, some months before the formation of the Apollonian Society, the French Academy having the disposal for the first time of the prize founded by Count de Valbelle awarded it to Court de Gebelin as having produced the most meritorious and most useful work. This writer having an encyclopedic knowledge was an extremely zealous Freemason. Before the foundation of the Lodge of Nine Sisters he was a member of another Lodge at Paris, that of the Amis Reunis, Reunited Friends. He had been one of the principal founders of the Rite of the Philalethes or Seekers of Truth which played an important part in the Freemasonry of the period and which extended its influence even beyond French territory. In 1777 he gave in a series of seven lectures a course on the Allegories most resembling the Masonic Grades where he had for hearers the most distinguished Freemasons of Paris."
https://freemasonry.bcy.ca/texts/nine.html
Freemasonry adapted to the successive French empires that followed the French Revolution. Jose Bonaparte was made Grand Master of the Grand Orient de France in circa 1804 but his brother Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France wasn't a Freemason contrary to popular belief and though Freemasons a "bunch of imbeciles that sometimes did good things."
In the 1870 Paris Commune, large numbers of Freemasons were heavily involved and took an active role. Many of these Freemasons such as Thirifocq, Jules Vallès and Élisée Reclus were socialists. Le Droit Humain, an off shoot of the Grand Orient de France become a large international Masonic organisation in the XIX century and had also very notable socialist activists among its ranks such as founders George Martin, Marie Deraismes and in England, feminist, socialist and activist Annie Besant. The British Empire played an important part in the dissemination of Anglo Saxon styled so called regular Freemasonry throughout its territories but in Latino America, Bolivar the heroe of the independence was a Freemason ( who later turned on Freemasonry, sadly).
The Enlightenment is still an ongoing process and not a done deal relegated to history books. And Freemasonry, the condensed essence of Renaissance and Enlightenment values, to paraphrase Masonic author Kirk McNulty, is therefore not the domain of boring old middle class men in black suits. Freemasonry doesn't belong to the middle and upper classes nor the aspiring working classes. All this is snobbery and a misguided understanding of what Freemasonry is and was. Freemasonry trascends class, religious, racial and social barriers. It is the brotherhood of mankind under the All Seeing Eye of the Great Architect of the Universe.
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