Dictionary:

freemasonry

  (frē'mā'sən-rē)

1. Freemasonry The institutions, precepts, and rites of the Freemasons.
2. Spontaneous fellowship and sympathy among a number of people.

Music used in connection with the ritual and social functions of freemasons. Hymn singing, while never an integral part of masonic rites, was frequently included at meetings, and masonic hymnals and cantatas were published in considerable members from the 1730s onwards. Haydn, Mozart, Loewe, Spohr, Liszt and Puccini are among composers who became freemasons; Wagner planned to join.

Mozart's masonic music is of particular importance. He became a mason in 1784, but as early as 1773 wrote music for Baron von Gebler's masonic play Thamos, König in Ägypten. He took part in musical performances at his lodge, and composed for various Viennese lodges, notably cantatas, wind works and a piece of funeral music. Musical reflections of masonic imagery are present in Die Zauberflöte.

For more information on Freemasonry, visit Britannica.com.

Compared with its British counterpart, the French masonic movement has always been reforming and anticlerical, though it was also linked in the 18th and 19th c. with various mystical or Illuminist currents. It was supposed by many to have been one of the influences preparing the way for the Revolution, and in the 19th c. it became strongly associated with republicanism. As a result, reactionaries have often denounced freemasons, along with Jews, Protestants, and other supposedly alien elements, as enemies of true French nationhood. Under the Occupation of 1940-4 masons were subjected to severe harassment.

There are three masonic organizations in France, the Grand Orient, the Grande Loge de France, and the Grande Loge Nationale Française; the last of these, founded in 1913, is recognized by masons of Britain and other countries.

[Peter France]

Freemasonry came to Russia as part of the eighteenth - century expansion that made the craft a global phenomenon. Although at first it was one of several social institutions, including salons, societies, and clubs, that made their way to Russia in the course of Westernization, Freemasonry soon acquired considerable importance, evolving into a widespread, variegated, and much vilified social movement.

Despite the legends that attributed the origins of Russian Freemasonry to Peter the Great (who purportedly received his degree from Christopher Wren), the first reliable evidence places the beginnings of the craft in Russia in the 1730s and early 1740s. The movement expanded in the latter half of the eighteenth century, especially between 1770 and 1790, when more than a hundred lodges were created in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and the provinces.

Freemasonry was an important element of the Russian Enlightenment and played a central role in the evolution of Russia's public sphere and civil society. The lodges were self-governed and open to free men (but not women) of almost every nationality, rank, and walk of life, with the notable exception of serfs. While many lodges were nothing but glorified social clubs, there were numerous brethren who saw themselves as on a mission to reform humankind and battle Russia's perceived "barbarity" by means of charity and self-improvement. They regarded the lodges as havens of righteousness and nurseries of virtue in a depraved world.

The history of Russian Freemasonry followed a tortuous path. Most of the lodges, especially in the provinces, were short - lived, and Russian Freemasonry was very fragmented. Some lodges were subordinated to the Grand Lodge of England; others belonged to the Swedish Rite, the Strict Observance, or some other jurisdiction. Contemporaries made a distinction between Freemasonry proper and Martinism, a mystical strand in the movement that claimed the famous mystic Claude Saint - Martin as its founder. A group of Moscow Rosicrucians headed by Johann - Georg Schwarz and Nikolai Ivanovich Novikov were the most important Martinists. Often referred to as "Novikov's circle," they enjoyed close ties with the university, the government, and even the local diocese and initiated numerous educational and charitable initiatives, such as the Friendly Learned Society, the Typographical Company, and the Philological Seminary. Novikov's circle was an important episode in the history of the Russian Enlightenment. Its activities, however, came to an end in 1792, when Novikov was arrested, interrogated, and sentenced to life in prison.

Many aspects of the so-called Novikov affair are still unclear. The government of Catherine II may have had political motives for arresting Novikov, given the Rosicrucians' ties to foreign powers as well as to the future Emperor Paul I and his entourage. The affair may also, in large part, have been caused by the fear of occult secret societies and anti - Masonic sentiment that was spreading through Europe. Anti - Masonry later became an important political factor in imperial and post-Soviet Russia.

Russian Freemasonry enjoyed a brief period of relatively unhampered existence in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The craft counted among its members practically every politician, military leader, and intellectual of note, including Mikhail Kutuzov and Alexander Pushkin; many of the Decembrists belonged to the Astrea lodge in St. Petersburg. After 1822, when Alexander I imposed a ban on all secret societies, the situation changed. The ban, confirmed by Nicholas I in 1826, signified the official end of Freemasonry, although some clandestine lodges continued to operate, particularly during a brief revival on the eve of World War I. Freemasonry was again outlawed in Soviet Russia in the early 1920s. The ban ended in the 1990s, when the French National Grand Lodge established lodges in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Voronezh, and chapters of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite were also organized.

Bibliography

Smith, Douglas. (1999). Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.

—OLGA TSAPINA

Organized locally in secret societies known as lodges, freemasonry attracted adherents in every major European state over the course of the eighteenth century. Freemasonry, with its humanitarian emphasis on moral improvement, religious toleration, and universal brotherhood, showed clear traces of Enlightenment influence. Although freemasons were avowedly nonpolitical in their aims, some scholars have linked them in France and elsewhere with proto-democratic movements of the later eighteenth century.

Origins

The origins of freemasonry are shrouded in colorful myths passed down by generations of masons. Some masons traced their beginnings back to the building of Solomon's temple in biblical times. Others dated their order back to the Templars, the knightly crusading order of the twelfth century. But most historians now see eighteenth-century freemasonry as evolving out of English and Scottish stonemason guilds of the seventeenth century. Master stonemasons were highly skilled craftsmen whose trade demanded considerable technical knowledge in engineering and architecture. Taking pride in their craft, they had developed over the centuries a rich repository of legends and rituals highlighting their history as the builders of palaces and churches. In the seventeenth century their myths and ceremonies began to attract the attention of individuals outside the guild, including those with philosophical and scientific interests who saw masonry as a fount of ancient wisdom. By the early eighteenth century masonic organizations had begun to lose their identity as occupational associations and had evolved into fraternal lodges devoted to charitable activity and the provision of fellowship and mutual aid to their members. As such, the rise of freemasonry was symptomatic of the more general proliferation of clubs, reading societies, salons, and other institutions of sociability that occurred throughout Europe in the age of Enlightenment. Those from the middling ranks of society, especially merchants, comprised a large segment of British freemasons, although members also included aristocrats and even royalty (at the end of the eighteenth century almost all male members of the royal family were members). By 1725 London lodges, which in 1717 had confederated themselves into the Grand Lodge of London, numbered thirty-seven, and by 1780 England as a whole boasted almost four hundred.

Expansion

With a social base that was urban, mercantile, and hence geographically mobile, freemasonry spread quickly to the Continent. A Parisian lodge was in existence by 1725, and on the eve of the French Revolution there were an estimated 600 lodges in the monarchy as a whole. In 1770 Paris alone had some 10,000 freemasons, and in 1789 France's masonic population ranged between 50,000 and 100,000. In the Dutch Republic lodges were established in The Hague and in Amsterdam in the 1730s, and in Germany some 450 lodges were founded between 1737 and 1789. Freemasonry took root somewhat later in Austria, where the devoutly Catholic Maria Theresa (ruled 1740–1780) was hostile to the order after the papacy formally condemned it (1738) on the grounds of its alleged deism. But her son and successor, Joseph II (ruled 1780–1790), himself joined a lodge and encouraged the movement during the early, liberal years of his reign. By 1784 there were sixty-six lodges in the monarchy, although Joseph's successor, the archconservative Francis II, outlawed freemasonry in 1794 as a subversive Jacobin import. The spread of freemasonry was also belated elsewhere on the European periphery. Madrid's first lodge was founded relatively early (1728) by an exiled English Jacobite, but opposition by the church curbed the growth of Spanish freemasonry until the enlightened reign of Charles III (ruled 1759–1788). Russia's first lodges were founded by and for foreigners, but under Catherine the Great (ruled 1762–1796) freemasonry for a brief time became fashionable among enlightened circles at the University of Moscow. But by the 1790s Catherine, like her Austrian counterpart, had begun to suppress freemasonry as politically subversive.

Significance

Such official persecution has led some to see freemasonry as a proto-democratic, egalitarian, and even revolutionary movement. In her 1991 study of British, Dutch, and French freemasonry, Margaret Jacob argued that masonic lodges served to spread British constitutionalist ideas and practices throughout the Continent. Masons called the rules of their lodges "constitutions" and practiced principles of majority rule in elections of officers and members. Masonic sociability and ceremony also had a distinctly egalitarian flavor. Masonic meetings, where titles were dropped and members referred to each other as "brother," momentarily suspended differences in social rank. Inspired in part by the work of the Catholic royalist historian Augustin Cochin, who found organizational and ideological parallels between pre-Revolutionary French lodges and post-1789 Jacobin clubs, other scholars have viewed freemasonry in a more ominous light. Reinhart Koselleck and François Furet have seen the abstract moralism and egalitarianism of freemasonry as foreshadowing a modern totalitarian quest for ideological purity and unity.

These interpretations vary in details, but all tend to see freemasonry as inherently antagonistic to the social and political structures of the Old Regime. Yet freemasonry looked to the past as well as to the future, and its political manifestations were varied. Like the Old Regime itself, lodges were hierarchical in structure, with members advancing from a lower to a higher rank through service to the order and mastery of its secrets. Admission to and advancement within the order were ostensibly based on merit, but initiation fees, membership dues, and literacy requirements in practice made membership a preserve of the propertied. Freemasonry was also overwhelmingly male in composition, although there is evidence that some French lodges admitted women as well as men. The more traditional features of eighteenth-century freemasonry are also evident in the order's quasi-religious character. In some ways lodges hearkened back to lay confraternities and religious orders in providing members with fellowship, mutual aid, and outlets for charitable work. As with a church, freemasonry's elaborate ceremonies and esoteric symbolism fostered a sense of spiritual mystery as well as a belief that members had access to a higher wisdom closed to those outside the order. Finally, lodges could be found across the political spectrum. In the 1760s many British masons became associated with the cause of popular radicalism through their support of John Wilkes and his demands for parliamentary reform, but by the 1790s British lodges had become solidly loyalist and conservative in character. In France, not all lodges were sympathetic to the Revolution: in Toulouse about one-third of the 250 individuals who can be identified as freemasons were royalist in their sympathies, and some Parisian lodges were hostile to the Revolution from its very inception.

Eighteenth-century freemasonry was innovative not so much for its politics, but rather as a prototype for the voluntary associations and clubs that democratic political theorists have viewed as defining features of modern civil society. Freemasonry was the first secular, voluntary, and pan-European association in modern times, and as such became a model for civic organizations and clubs throughout the West.

Bibliography

Dülmen, Richard van. The Society of the Enlightenment: The Rise of the Middle Class and Enlightenment Culture in Germany. Translated by Anthony Williams. New York, 1992.

Furet, François. Interpreting the French Revolution. Translated by Elborg Forster. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1981.

Halévi, Ran. Les loges maçonniques dans la France d'ancien régime: Aux origines de la sociabilitédémocratique. Paris, 1984.

Jacob, Margaret C. Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry in Eighteenth-Century Europe. New York, 1991.

Koselleck, Reinhart. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge, Mass., 1988.

—JAMES VAN HORN MELTON

An occult movement of the seventeenth century. Freemasonry emerged as the British form of revived gnosticism analogous to the Rosicrucian movement in Germany. While having its roots in the architectural and construction guilds of the Middle Ages, modern masonry is rooted in the post-Reformation revival of Gnostic thought and occult practice. The mythical history of masonry served to protect it in the religiously intolerant atmosphere operative in Great Britain at the time of its founding.

History and Mythic Origin

Although it would not be exactly correct to say that the history of Freemasonry was lost in the mists of antiquity, it is possible to say that although to a certain degree traceable, its records are of a scanty nature, and so crossed by the trails of other mystical brotherhoods that disentanglement is an extremely difficult process.

The ancient legend of its foundation at the time of the building of the Temple at Jerusalem is manifestly mythical. If one might hazard an opinion, it would seem that at a very early epoch in the history of civilization, a caste arose of builders in stone, who jealously guarded the secret of their craft. Where such a caste of operative masons might have arisen is altogether a separate question, but it must obviously have been in a country where working in stone was one of the principal arts. It is also almost certain that this early brotherhood must have been hierophantic with a leadership adept in the ancient mysteries. Its principal work to begin with would undoubtedly consist in the raising of temples and similar structures, and as such it would come into very close contact with the priesthood, if indeed it was not wholly directed by it.

In early civilization only two classes of dwelling received the attention of the architect—the temple and the palace. For example, among the ruins of Egypt and Babylon, remains of private houses are rare, but the temple and the royal residence are conspicuous everywhere, and we know that among the ruins of Central America temples and palaces alone remain, the huts of the surrounding dwellers having long ago disappeared. The temple was the nucleus of the early city. Commerce, agriculture, and all the affairs of life revolved around the worship of the gods.

A medieval cathedral took more than one generation to erect, and in that time many masons came and went. The lodge was invariably founded near the rising cathedral or abbey, and apprentices and others started work as opportunity offered. Indeed, a man might serve his apprenticeship and labor all through his life on one building, without ever seeing any work elsewhere.

The evidence as to whether the master-masons were also architects is very conflicting, and it has been held that the priests were the architects of the British cathedrals, the master-masons and operatives merely carrying out their designs. There is good evidence, however, that this is not wholly true. Of all arts, architecture is by far the most intricate. It is undoubtedly one that requires a long and specific training. Questions arise of stress and strain of the most difficult description, and it is obvious that ecclesiastics, who had not undergone any special training, would not be qualified to compose plans of the cathedrals.

Professional architects existed at a very early period, though instances are on record where the priests of a certain locality have taken upon themselves the credit of planning the cathedral of the diocese. Be this as it may, the "mystery" of building was sufficiently deep to require extensive knowledge and experience and to a great extent this justifies the jealousy with which the early masons regarded its secrets. Again, the jealousy with which it was kept from the vulgar gaze may have been racial in its origin, and may have arisen from such considerations as the following: "Let no stranger understand this craft of ours. Why should we make it free to the heathen and the foreigner?"

Masonry in Great Britain

In Great Britain, prior to the founding of the Grand Lodge, York and the north of England in general were regarded as the most ancient seat of the fraternity. Indeed, without stretching probabilities too far, the line of evolution so far as York is concerned is quite remarkable. In the early days of that city a temple of Serapis existed there, which was afterward a monastery of the Begging Friars, and the mysteries of this god existed beside the Roman Collegia or Craftsmen's Society.

Some have argued that the crypt of York Minster affords evidence of the progress of masonry from Roman to Saxon times. It is stated that it has a mosaic pavement of blue and white tiles laid in the form employed in the first degree of masonry. Undoubted is the fact that the craft occasionally met in this crypt during the eighteenth century.

Masonic tradition goes to show that even in the beginning of the fourteenth century, masonry in Britain was regarded as a thing of great antiquity. Lodge records for the most part only date back to the sixteenth century in the oldest instances, but ancient manuscripts are extant which undoubtedly relate to masonry.

Thus the old charges embodied in the Regius manuscript, which was unearthed in 1839 by Halliwell Phillips, are dated at 1390 and contain a curious legend of the craft that tells how the necessity of finding work of some description drove men to consult Euclid, who recommended masonry as a craft to them.It goes on to tell how masonry was founded in Egypt, and how it entered England in the time of King Athelstan (d. 940). The necessity for keeping close counsel as regards the secrets of the craft is insisted upon in rude verse.

The Cooke manuscript from the early fifteenth century likewise contains versions of the old charges. Egypt was regarded here as the motherland of masonry, and King Athelstan the medium for the introduction of the craft into the island of Britain. But that this manuscript was used among masons at a later date was proved by the 1890 discovery of a more modern version dated about 1687 and known as the William Watson manuscript. In all, about 70 of these old charges and pseudo-histories have been discovered since 1860. They all have much in common and are of English origin.

The Birth of Speculative Masonry

Whatever the ancient and medieval roots of masonry, in the seventeenth century it was given a new direction by the widespread acceptance into the lodges of non-masons who used the lodges as a home for their pursuit of spiritual wisdom apart from the theology of the established church, often while keeping a nominal membership in the Church of England. (By 1723, for example, all specific references to Christianity were removed from the movement's constitution; members had only to acknowledge God, the Great Architect of the Universe.) The first prominent speculative Freemason was astrologer Elias Ashmole (1617-1692), an officer in the court of Charles II. Ash-mole, and his contemporaries such as Robert Fludd (1574-1637), helped spread the revived gnosticism represented on the continent by Rosicrucianism. Through the century, speculative lodges consisting primarily if not exclusively of accepted masons spread throughout England and Scotland where they existed as a condoned (and somewhat unrecognized) form of religious dissent.

The coming of age of speculative masonry was signaled by the formation of the Grand Lodge of England, inaugurated on St. John the Baptist's Day 1717 by four of the old London lodges. Rev. John Theophilus Desguliers, who became Grand Master in 1719, was the chaplain to the Prince of Wales, and used his considerable influence to spread the movement both in England and France. The Grand Lodge provided the fraternity with its first central governing body, as prior to this time each lodge was self-governing. Many lodges speedily came under its aegis, and Ireland formed a Grand Lodge of her own in 1725, but Scotland did not follow until 1736, and even then many lodges held aloof from the central body, only 33 out of 100 falling into line.

From one or other of these three governing bodies all the regular lodges and variant rites throughout the world have arisen, so that modern masonry may truthfully be said to be of British origin. To say that Continental masonry is the offspring of the British lodges is not to say that no masonic lodges existed in France and Germany before the formation of the English Grand Lodge, but underscores the break between the masonry of the builders of the medieval architectual wonders and the speculative masonry of the seventeenth century. All of the modern speculative lodges in Europe date from the inception of the English central body. However, the Continental masonry possesses many rites that differ entirely from those found in the British craft.

In Germany, which existed at this time as a number of independent states, it was said that the Steinmetzin approximated very strongly in medieval times to the British masons, if they were not originally one and the same, but again, the modern lodges in Germany all dated from the speculative lodge founded in 1733.

We find the beginnings of modern French masonry in the labors of Martine de Pasqually, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, and perhaps to a some extent Cagliostro who toiled greatly to found his Egyptian rite in France. It is noticeable, however, that Cagliostro had become a member of a London lodge before attempting work on the Continent. In France, masonry had a more political complexion, being a source of the democratic thought underlying the French (and later the Italian) Revolution. Because of the political alignment of continental Freemasonry, an extreme enmity developed between Free-masonry and the Roman Catholic Church, which had aligned itself to the royal families of Europe. Masonry in England, a country that broke with Rome during the Reformation of the sixteenth century, had a much more apolitical stance.

Official opposition to Freemasonry by the Roman Catholic Church dates back to Papal bulls of 1738 and 1751 and is a tangled story of suspicion and intrigue relating to masonic secrecy and to complex political developments of the time. Much antagonism has been deliberately fostered by mischief makers. For example, during the nineteenth century, the French journalist Gabriel Jogand-Pagés, writing under the name Leo Taxil, perpetrated an extraordinary and prolonged hoax in which he claimed to have exposed a Satanist activity within Freemasonry. The motive appears to have been to embarrass the Roman Catholic Church, but it also added to traditional Church prejudices against Freemasonry and caused much trouble for masons.

The plot involved the claim that a certain Diana Vaughan, claimed to have been a High Priestess of Satanic Freemasonry and dedicated to overthrowing Christianity and winning the world for Satanism, had been converted to the Roman Catholic faith. The memoirs of "Diana Vaughan," written by Jogand, were read by Pope Leo XIII, and Jogand himself was received in private audience by the pope, and an anti-masonic congress was summoned in 1887 at Trent.

On Easter Monday 1897, at a press conference to present Diana Vaughan, Jogand confessed to his conspiracy and the details of his complex hoax are now generally known. But, great damage had already been done to relations between Roman Catholics and Freemasons. In 1917 the church declared that anyone who joined a masonic lodge was automatically excommunicated.

The Masonic Worldview

The Freemasons instituted an initiatory degree system by which members were step-by-step brought into the inner working of the lodge. Initially there were three degrees, but these could never satisfy the true gnostics. Various elaborate systems of degrees were developed to picture the levels leading from this world to God and to symbolize the journey of the knowing soul back home. The most famous, due to its success and longevity, was the 30° system placed upon the original three degrees that emerged as the 33° system of the Ancient and Accepted Rite, the system operative in the United Grand Lodge. This system became integral to the dominant American masonic body, the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, and its teachings as illustrated in the writings of Albert Pike, its dominant intellectual leader.

As speculative masonry emerged, it espoused the idea that masonry was a restatement of the ancient religion of human-kind. At one time, the masons suggested, there were two religions, one for the educated and enlightened and one for the masses. The one religion of the enlightened became the base upon which the various historic faiths emerged. Through the centuries, however, adepts (masters) kept the original teachings intact, and they were eventually passed in their purity to the masonic leadership. In the modern age, due to the evolution of the race, more people are now capable of receiving and safely handling that secret wisdom that is now being disseminated by the masonic lodges. That secret wisdom came from the ancient East and Middle East, and both Eastern religions (especially Hinduism) and Western mystical systems such as Kabalism assist the process of describing it.

The ancient wisdom myth of Freemasonry found an origin in the Bible, a significantly more acceptable source to a Christian establishment than Arabia and the Muslim countries of Rosicrucianism. In 1 Kings 7:13-45, the masons found the story of Hiram. Hiram was employed by King Solomon to work on the temple in Jerusalem. After his work, he disappeared from both the pages of the Bible and from history. Freemasons, however, developed his biography that included a murder by his artisan colleagues. Hiram, in working on the temple, became aware of the "Word of God" inscribed in the secret parts of the temple. He would not reveal what he had learned and his non-collegial reticence cost him his life. His death then became integral to the ritual initiation of members who symbolically die and are reborn into the craft.

The masonic worldview begins with three fundamental realities. First, there is a omnipresent, eternal, boundless, and immutable principle that is ineffable, beyond any limiting descriptors of human language, the end-point of all metaphysical speculation, the rootless root and the uncaused cause. Natural law is a representation of the permanency of the absolute. Second, there exists what we term space in the abstract. Space is a symbol of divinity as it is basic to all experience; it is fathomless but at the same time integral to all human concepts. Third, there exists motion, another abstract notion, representing unconditioned consciousness that manifests as spirit and matter. Spirit and matter are two facets of the absolute.

The universe is seen as a boundless plane, a playground upon which numerous universes come and go. There is an eternal flex in which new universes begin to develop and are absorbed back into the boundless space out of which they were formed. Creation of a universe begins as space becomes turgid and produces a first or potential matter called the akasa. Operating on this matter is absolute abstract motion, latent potential energy, consciousness, and cosmic ideation.

Thus at the beginning is the universal energy (fofat) and the universal substance (akasa) behind which stands consciousness and ultimately the absolute. As creation proceeds, it will occur in steps of seven. Seven plans of creation will be formed from the purely spiritual to physical substance. These seven planes of existence are reflected throughout the universe. Each human also possesses these seven levels. The seven levels are: atma, buddhi, manas, kama, astral, life principle, and physical. The operation of these seven planes in the universe and in the individual provide much room for speculative elaboration and would later provide material upon which Theosophy would build.

Masonry in America

Through the eighteenth century, Freemasonry had aligned itself with the Enlightenment and with the anti-monarchial ideals of the late-century revolutionaries. Masonic and Rosicrucian ideals flowed through the salons of France and supplied vital ideological components of the new revolutionary ethos that allowed the complete overthrow of an obsolete government system and the institution of a new democratic system. The Marquis de Lafayette, who joined in the American Revolution, was a mason. In the United States James Madison; James Monroe; Benjamin Franklin, who financed much of the revolution; and George Washington, who led its armies, were Free-masons. The input of Freemasonry in the founding of the republic can now be found on the dollar bill, which hails the coming of the "ordo nuevo seculorum," the "new order of the ages" and the pyramid topped with the all-seeing eye.

But masonry had established itself in America long before the revolution. The Grand Lodge of Massachusetts dates from 1733 and that of South Carolina was founded just four years later. The General Grand Chapter of the Royal Arch Masons of the U.S.A. was founded in Boston in 1797 by representatives from Massachusetts and New York. The Supreme Council 33 of Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry for the Southern Jurisdiction of the United States of America was formed in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1801. Albert Pike, the most noteworthy of nineteenth century masons, was the leader of this latter organization for many years (1859-1891). The Order of the Eastern Star, an auxiliary for female relatives of masons, was founded in 1876. The masonic movement now encompasses millions of members primarily in lodges affiliated to its larger organizations, but also in a variety of smaller masonic groups that follow various patterns of different speculative rites.

Understanding the origins of speculative masonry as an occult movement, and the essentially gnostic nature of its thought, does much to explain why many prominent occultists such as Manly Palmer Hall trumpeted their masonic connections. It also shows how masonic thought served as a basis for Theosophy, and the manner in which masonic organizations provided the substructure upon which modern Rosicrucianism emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. Masonry supplied the organizational model not only for Rosicrucianism, but for ceremonial magic groups such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Ordo Templi Orientis.

Sources:

Coil, Henry. Coil's Masonic Encyclopedia. Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing, 1961.

——. Freemasonry Through Six Centuries. 2 vols. Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing, 1961.

Hall, Manly P. Lost Keys of Freemasonry. Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing, 1923.

Haywood, H. I. The Newly Made Mason. Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing, 1948.

Knight, G. Norman, and F. Smyth. The Pocket History of Free-masonry. London: Fred K. Muller, 1977.

Knight, Stephen. The Brotherhood: The Secret World of the Free-masons. New York: Stein & Day, 1984.

Mackey, Albert G. Mackey's Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry. Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing, 1909.

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Waite, A. E. A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry. 2 vols. London: William Rider; New York: David McKay, 1921. Reprint, New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1970. Reprint, New York: Weatherwane, 1971.