Note: The following material is a scanned-in research resource; it is NOT intended as an exact reproduction of the original volume. Due to computer display variances, page numbers are approximate. Scanned at Phoenixmasonry by Ralph Omholt, PM - June 2007.
The History Of Freemasonry
By
Albert G. Mackey 33°
VOLUME TWO
PART I. - PREHISTORIC MASONRY
CHAPTER PAGE
[Original Volumes / This Copy]
30. - Freemasonry and the House of Stuart.......................................... 267 / 6
31. - The Jesuits in Freemasonry ...................................................... 286 / 25
32. - Oliver Cromwell and Freemasonry ............................................. 293 / 34
33. - The Royal Society and Freemasonry ........................................ 301 / 42
34. - The Astrologers and the Freemasons ....................................... 315 / 56
35. - The Rosicrucians and the Freemasons .................................... 329 / 72
36. - The Rosicrucianism of the High Degrees ................................. 352 / 95
37. - The Pythagoreans and Freemasonry ...................................... 360 / 102
38. - Freemasonry and the Gnostics ............................................... 371 / 115
39. - The Socinians and Freemasonry ............................................. 382 / 126
40. - Freemasonry and the Essenes ................................................ 387 / 128
41. - The Legend of Enoch ............................................................... 396 / 140
42. - Noah and the Noachites ........................................................... 406 / 152
43. - The Legend of Hiram Abif ......................................................... 412 / 158
44. - The Leland Manuscript ............................................................. 433 / 179
PART 2. - HISTORY OF FREEMASONRY
1. - Preliminary Outlook .................................................................... 455 / 200
2. - The Roman Colleges of Artificers ............................................. 471 / 218
3. - Growth of the Roman Colleges................................................... 488 / 235
4. - The First Link; Settlement of Roman Colleges of Artificers in
the Provinces of the Empire................................................... 502 / 251
5. - Early Masonry in France.............................................................. 516 / 266
6. - Early Masonry in Britain............................................................ 530 / 281
7. - Masonry Among the Anglo-Saxons ......................................... 540 / 293
8. - The Anglo-Saxon Guilds ........................................................... 559 / 315
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME TWO
PAGE
Henry Price .................................................................................. 300 / 45
Plate of Symbols ......................................................................... 332 / 70
The Discovery ............................................................................. 364 / 112
George Washington .................................................................... 400 / 146
Procession of the Scald Miserables in 1741 ............................ 432 / 178
Moses and the Burning Bush .................................................... 464 / 211
John Theophilus Desaguliers ................................................... 492 / 245
Youth, Manhood, and Old Age .................................................. 524 / 279
The Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle .......................... 556 / 317
CHAPTER XXX
FREEMASONRY AND THE HOUSE OF STUART
THE theory that connects the royal house of the, Stuarts with Freemasonry, as an Institution to be cultivated, not on account of its own intrinsic merit, but that it might serve as a political engine to be wielded for the restoration of an exiled family to a throne which the follies and even the crimes of its members had forfeited, is so repugnant to all that has been supposed to be congruous with the true spirit and character of Freemasonry, that one would hardly believe that such a theory was ever seriously entertained, were it not for many too conclusive proofs of the fact.
The history of the family of Stuart, from the accession of James I. to the throne of England to the death of the last of his descendants, the young Pretender, is a narrative of follies and sometimes of crimes.
The reign of James was distinguished only by arts which could gain for him no higher title with posterity than that of a royal pedant.
His son and successor Charles I. was beheaded by an indignant people whose constitutional rights and ideals he had sought to betray.
His son Charles II., after a long exile was finally restored to the throne, only to pass a life of indolence and licentiousness.
On his death he was succeeded by his brother James II., a prince distinguished only for his bigotry.
Zealously attached to the Roman Catholic religion, he sought to restore its power and influence among his subjects, who were for the most part Protestants.
To save the Established Church and the religion of the nation, his estranged subjects called to the throne the Protestant Prince of Orange, and James, abdicating the crown, fled to France, where he was hospitably received with his followers by Louis XIV., who could, however, say nothing better of him than that he had given three crowns for a mass.
From 1688, the date of his abdication and flight, until the year 1745 the exiled family were e ngaged in repeated but unavailing attempts to recover the throne.
It is not unreasonable to suppose that in these attempts the partisans of the house of Stuart were not unwilling to accept the influence of the Masonic Institution, as one of the most powerful instruments whereby to effect their purpose.
It is true that in this, the Institution would have been diverted from its true design, but the object of the Jacobites, as they were called, or the adherents of King James was not to elevate the character of Freemasonry but only to advance the cause of the Pretender
It must however be understood that this theory which connects the Stuarts with Masonry does not suppose that the third or Master's degree was invented by them or their adherents, but only that there were certain modifications in the application of its Legend.
Thus, the Temple was interpreted as alluding to the monarchy, the death of its Builder to the execution of Charles I., or to the destruction of the succession by the compulsory abdication of James II., and the dogma of the resurrection to the restoration of the Stuart family to the throne of England.
Thus, one of the earliest instances of this political interpretation of the Master's legend was that made after the expulsion of James II. from the throne and his retirement to France.
The mother of James was Henrietta Maria, queen of Charles I. The Jacobites called her "the Widow," and the exiled James became "the Widow's son," receiving thus the title applied in the Masonic Legend to Hiram Abif, whose death they said symbolized the loss of the throne and the expulsion of the Stuarts from England?
They carried this idea to such an extent as to invent a name, substitute word for the Master's degree, in the place of the old one, which was known to the English Masons at the time of the Revival in 1717.
This new word was not, as the significant words of Masonry usually are, of Hebrew origin, but was derived from the Gaelic. And this seems to have been done in compliment to the Highlanders, most of whom were loyal adherents of the Stuart cause.
The word Macbenac is derived from the Gaelic Mac, a son, and benach, blessed, and literally means the "blessed son; " and this word was applied by the Jacobites to James, who was thus not only a "widow's son" but "blessed" one, too.
Masonry was here made subservient to loyalty.
They also, to mark their political antipathy to the enemies of the Stuart family, gave to the most prominent leaders of the republican cause, the names in which old Masonry had been appropriated to the assassins of the third degree. In the Stuart Masonry we find these assassins designated by names, generally unintelligible, but, when they can be explained, evidently referring to some well‑known opponent of the Stuart dynasty.
Thus, Romvel is manifestly an imperfect anagram of Cromwell, and Jubelum Guibbs doubtless was intended as an infamous embalmment of the name of the Rev. Adam Gib, an antiburgher clergyman, who, when the Pretender was in Edinburgh in 1745, hurled anathemas, for five successive Sundays against him.
But it was in the fabrication of the high degrees that the partisans of the Stuarts made the most use of Freemasonry as a political instrument.
The invention of these high degrees is to be attributed in the first place to the Chevalier Ramsay.
He was connected in the most intimate relation with the exiled family, having been selected by the titular James III., or, as he was commonly known in England, the Old Pretender, as the tutor of his two sons, Charles Edward and Henry, the former of whom afterward became the Young Pretender, and the latter Cardinal York.
Ardently attached, to this relationship, by his nationality as a Scotsman, and by his religion as a Roman Catholic, to the Stuarts and their cause, he met with ready acquiescence the advances of those who had already begun to give a political aspect to the Masonic System, and also were seeking to enlist it in the Pretender's cause.
Ramsay therefore aided in the modification of the old degrees or the fabrication of new ones, so that these views might be incorporated in a peculiar system; and hence in many of the high degrees invented either by Ramsay or by others of the same school, we will find these traces of a political application to the family of Stuart, which were better understood at that time than they are now.
Thus, one of the high degrees ‑received the name of " Grand Scottish Mason of James VI." Of this degree Tessier says that it is the principal degree of the ancient Master's system, and was revived and esteemed by James VI., King of Scotland and of Great Britain, and that it is still preserved in Scotland more than in any other kingdom. {1}
All of this is of course a mere fiction, but it shows that there has been a sort of official acknowledgment of the interference with Masonry by the Stuarts, who did not hesitate to give the name of the first founder of their house on the English throne to one of the degrees.
Another proof is found in the word Jekson, which is a significant word in one of the high Scottish or Ramsay degrees.
It is thus spelled in the Calhiers or manuscript French rituals.
There can be no doubt that it is a corruption of Jacquesson, a mongrel word compounded of the French Jacques and the English son, and denotes the son of James, that is, of James II.
This son was the Old Pretender, or the Chevalier St. George, who after the death of his father assumed the empty title of James Ill., and whose son, the Young Pretender, was one of the pupils of the Chevalier Ramsay.
These, with many other similar instances, are very palpable proofs that the adherents of the Stuarts sought to infuse a political element into the spirit of Masonry, so as to make it a facile instrument for the elevation of the exiled family and the restoration of their head to the throne of England.
Of the truth of this fact, it is supposed that much support is to be found in the narrative of the various efforts for restoration made by the Stuarts.
When James II. made his flight from England he repaired to France, where he was hospitably received by Louis XIV.
He took up his residence while in Paris at the Jesuitical College of Clermont.
There, it is said, he first sought, with the assistance of the Jesuits, to establish a system of Masonry which should be employed by his partisans in their schemes for his restoration to the throne, After an unsuccessful invasion of Ireland he returned to France and repaired to St. Germain‑en‑Laye, a city about ten miles northwest of Paris, where he lived until the time of his death in 1701. It is one of the Stuart myths that at the Chateau of St. Germain some of the high degrees were fabricated by the adherents of James II., assisted by the Jesuits.
The story is told by Robison, a professed enemy of Freemasonry, but who gives with correctness the general form of the Stuart Legend as it was taught in the last century.
{1} "Manuel Generale de Maconnerie," p. 148
Robison says: "The revolution had taken place, and King James, with many of his most zealous adherents, had taken refuge in France.
But they took Freemasonry with them to the Continent, where it was immediately received by the French, and cultivated with great zeal in a manner suited to the taste and habits of that highly polished people.
The Lodges in France naturally became the rendezvous of the adherents of the exiled king, and the means of carrying on a correspondence with their friends in England."{1}
Robison says that at this time the Jesuits took an active part in Freemasonry, and united with the English Lodges, with the view of creating an influence in favor of the re‑establishment of the Roman Catholic religion in England.
But the supposed connection of the Jesuits with Freemasonry pertains to an independent proposition. to be hereafter considered.
Robison further says that "it was in the Lodge held at St. Germain that the degree of Chevalier Macon Ecossais was added to the three symbolical degrees of English Masonry.
The Constitution, as imported, appeared too coarse for the refined taste of the French, and they must make Masonry more like the occupation of a gentleman.
Therefore the English degrees of Apprentice, Fellowcraft, and Master were called symbolical, and the whole contrivance was considered either as typical of something more elegant or as a preparation for it.
The degrees afterward superadded to this leave us in doubt which of these views the French entertained of our Masonry.
But, at all events, this rank of Scotch Knight was called the first degree of the Macon Parfait.
There is a device belonging to this Lodge which deserves notice.
A lion wounded by an arrow, and escaped from the stake to which he had been bound, with the broken rope still about his neck, is represented lying at the mouth of a cave, and occupied with mathematical instruments, which are lying near him.
A broken crown lies at the foot of the stake.
There can be little doubt but that this emblem alludes to the dethronement, the captivity, the escape, and the asylum of James II, and his hopes of re‑establishment by the help of the
{1} "Proofs of a Conspiracy," p. 27
loyal Brethren. This emblem is worn as the gorget of the Scotch Knight. It is not very certain, however, when this degree was added, whether immediately after King James's abdication or about the time of the attempt to set his son on the British throne. {1}
This extract from Robison presents a very fair specimen of the way in which Masonic history was universally written in the last century and is still written by a few in the present.
Although it cannot be denied that at a subsequent period the primitive degrees were modified and changed ill their application of the death of Hiram Abif to that of Charles I., or the dethronement of James II, and that higher degrees were created with still more definite allusion to the destinies of the family of Stuart, yet it is very evident that no such measures could have been taken during the lifetime of James II.
The two periods referred to by Robison, the time of the abdication of James II, which was in 1688, and the attempt of James III, as he was called, to regain the throne, which was in 1715, as being, one or the other, the date of the fabrication of the degree of Scottish Knight or Master, are both irreconcilable with the facts of history.
The symbolical degrees of Fellow Craft and Master had not been invented before 1717, or rather a few years later, and it is absurd to speak of higher degrees cumulated upon lower ones which did not at that time exist. James II. died in 1701.
At that day we have no record of any sort of Speculative Masonry except that of the one degree which was common to Masons of all ranks.
The titular King James Ill., his son, succeeded to the claims and pretensions of his father, of course, in that year, but made no attempt to enforce them until 1715, at which time he invaded England with a fleet and army supplied by Louis XIV.
But in 17I5, Masonry was in the same condition that it had been in 1701.
There was no Master's degree to supply a Legend capable of alteration for a political purpose, and the high degrees were altogether unknown.
The Grand Lodge of England, the mother of all Continental as well as English Masonry, was not established, or as Anderson improperly calls it, " revived," until 1717.
The Institution was not introduced into France until 1725, and there could, therefore, have been no political Masonry practiced in a
{1} "Proofs of a Conspiracy," p. 28
country where the pure Masonry of which it must have been a corruption did not exist.
Scottish or Stuart Masonry was a superstructure built upon the foundation of the symbolic Masonry of the three degrees.
If in 1715 there was, as we know, no such foundation, it follows, of course, that there could have been no superstructure.
The theory, therefore, that Stuart Masonry, or the fabrication of degrees and the change of the primitive rituals to establish a system to be engaged in the support and the advancement of the falling cause of the Stuarts, was commenced during the lifetime of James II., and that the royal chateau of St. Germain‑en‑Laye was the manufactory in which, between the years 1689 and 1701, these degrees and rituals were fabricated, is a mere fable not only improbable but absolutely impossible in all its details.
Rebold, however, gives another form to the Legend and traces the rise of Stuart Masonry to a much earlier period.
In his History of the Three Grand Lodges he says that during the troubles which distracted Great Britain about the middle of the 17th century and after the decapitation of Charles I in 1649, the Masons of England, and especially those of Scotland, labored secretly for the re‑ establishment of the monarchy which had been overthrown by Cromwell.
For the accomplishment of this purpose they invented two higher degrees and gave to Freemasonry an entirely political character.
The dissensions to which the country was a prey had already produced a separation of the Operative and the Accepted Masons‑that is to say, of the builders by profession and those honorary members who were not Masons.
These latter were men of power and high position, and it was through their influence that Charles II., having been received as a Mason during his exile, was enabled to recover the throne in 1660.
This prince gratefully gave to Masonry the title of the " Royal Art," because it was Freemasonry that had principally contributed to the restoration of royalty.{1} Ragon, in his Masonic Orthodoxy,{2} is still more explicit and presents some new details.
He says that Ashmole and other Brethren of the Rose Croix, seeing that the Speculative Masons were surpassing in numbers the Operative, had renounced the simple initiation of the latter and established new degrees founded on the
{1} "Histoire de Trois Grandes Loges," p. 32 {2} Ragon, "Orthodoxie Maconnique," p. 29
Mysteries of Egypt and Greece.
The Fellow Craft degree was fabricated in 1648, and that of Master a short time afterward.
But the decapitation of King Charles I, and the part taken by Ashmole in favor of the Stuarts produced great modifications in this third and last degree, which had become of a Biblical character.
The same epoch gave birth to the degrees of Secret Master, Perfect Master, and Irish Master, of which Charles I was the hero, under the name of Hiram.
These degrees, he says, were, however, not then openly practiced, although they afterward became the ornament of Ecossaism.
But the non‑operative or "Accepted " members of the organization secretly gave to the Institution, especially in Scotland, a political tendency.
The chiefs or protectors of the Craft in Scotland worked, in the dark, for the re‑establishment of the throne.
They made use of the seclusion of the Masonic Lodges as places where they might hold their meetings and concert their plans in safety.
As the execution of Charles I. was to be avenged, his partisans fabricated a Templar degree, in which the violent death of James de Molay called for vengeance.
Ashmole, who partook of that political sentiment, then modified the degree of Master and the Egyptian doctrine of which it was composed, and made it conform to the two preceding degrees framing a Biblical allegory, incomplete and in‑ consistent, so that the initials of the sacred words of these three degrees should compose those of the name and title of the Grand Master of the Templars.
Northouck, {1} who should have known better, gives countenance to these supercheries of history by asserting that Charles II. was made a Mason during his exile, although he carefully omits to tell us when, where, how, or by whom the initiation was effected; but seeks, with a flippancy that ought to provoke a smile, to prove that Charles II. took a great interest in Masonry and architecture, by citing the preamble to the charter of the Royal Society, an association whose object was solely the cultivation of the philosophical and mathematical sciences, especially astronomy and chemistry, and whose members took no interest in the art of building.
Dr. Oliver, whose unfortunate failing was to accept without careful examination all the statements of preceding writers, however
{1} "Constitutions," p. 141
absurd they might be, repeats substantially these apochryphal tales about early Stuart Masonry.
He says that, about the close of the 17th century, the followers of James II. who accompanied the unfortunate monarch in his exile carried Freemasonry to France and laid the foundation of that system of innovation which subsequently threw the Order into confusion, by the establishment of a new degree, which they called the Chevalier Naron Ecossais, and worked the details in the Lodge at St. Germain.
Hence, he adds, other degrees were invented in the Continental Lodges which became the rendezvous of the partisans of James, and by these means they held communication with their friends in England. {1}
But as the high degrees were not fabricated until more than a third of the 18th century had passed, and as James died in 1701, we are struck with the confusion that prevails in this statement as to dates and persons.
It is very painful and embarrassing to the scholar who is really in search of truth to meet with such caricatures of history, in which the boldest and broadest assumptions are offered in the place of facts, the most absurd fables are presented as narratives of actual occurrences, chronology is put at defiance, anachronisms are coolly perpetrated, the events of the 18th century are transferred to the 17th, the third degree is said to have been modified in its ritual during the Commonwealth, when we know that no third degree was in existence until after 1717; and we are told that high degrees were invented at the same time, although history records the fact that the first of them was not fabricated until about the year 1728.
Such writers, if they really believed what they had written, must have adopted the axiom of the credulous Tertullian, who said, Credo quia impossible est ‑ "I believe because it is impossible." Better would it be to remember the saying of Polybius, that if we eliminate truth from history nothing will remain but an idea too.
We must, then, reject as altogether untenable the theory that there was any connection between the Stuart family and Freemasonry during the time of James II., for the simple reason that at that period there was no system of Speculative Masonry existing
{1} "Historical Landmarks, " II., p. 28
which could have been perverted by the partisans of that family into a political instrument for its advancement.
If there was any connection at all, it must be looked for as developed at a subsequent period.
The views of Findel on this subject, as given in his History of Freemasonry, are worthy of attention, because they are divested of that mystical element so conspicuous and so embarrassing in all the statements which have been heretofore cited. His language is as follows:
"Ever since the banishment of the Stuarts from England in 1688, secret alliances had been kept up between Rome and Scotland; for to the former place the Pretender James Stuart had retired in 1719 and his son Charles Edward born there in 1720; and these communications became the more intimate the higher the hopes of the Pretender rose.
The Jesuits played a very important part in these conferences.
Regarding the reinstatement of the Stuarts and the extension of the power of the Roman Church as identical, they sought at that time to make the Society of Free‑ masons subservient to their ends.
But to make use of the Fraternity, to restore the exiled family to the throne, could not have been contemplated, as Freemasonry could hardly be said to exist in Scotland then.
Perhaps in 1724, when Ramsay was a year in Rome, or in 1728, when the Pretender in Parma kept up an intercourse with the restless Duke of Wharton, a Past Grand Master, this idea was first entertained, and then when it was apparent how difficult it would be to corrupt the loyalty and fealty of Freemasonry in the Grand Lodge of Scotland, founded in 1736, this scheme was set on foot of assembling the faithful adherents of the banished royal family in the High Degrees! The soil that was best adapted for this innovation was France, where the low ebb to which Masonry had sunk had paved the way for all kinds of new‑fangled notions, and where the Lodges were composed of Scotch conspirators and accomplices of the Jesuits.
When the path had thus been smoothed by the agency of these secret propagandists, Ramsay, at that time Grand Orator (an office unknown in England), by his speech completed the preliminaries necessary for the introduction of the High Degrees; their further development was left to the instrumentality of others, whose influence produced a result somewhat different from that originally intended." {1}
{1} "Geschichte der Freimaurerei" ‑ Translation of Lyon, p. 209
After the death of James II. his son, commonly called the Chevalier St. George, does not appear to have actively prosecuted his claims to the throne beyond the attempted invasion of England in 1715.
He afterward retired to Rome, where the remainder of his life was passed in the quiet observation of religious duties.
Nor is there any satisfactory evidence that he was in any way connected with Freemasonry.
In the meantime, his sons, who had been born at Rome, were intrusted to the instructions of the Chevalier Michael Andrew Ramsay, who was appointed their tutor.
Ramsay was a man of learning and genius‑a Scotsman, a Jacobite, and a Roman Catholic‑ but he was also an ardent Freemason.
As a Jacobite he was prepared to bend all his powers to accomplish the restoration of the Stuarts to what he believed to be their lawful rights.
As a Freemason he saw in that Institution a means, if properly directed, of affecting that purpose.
Intimately acquainted with the old Legends of Masonry, he resolved so to modify them as to transfer their Biblical to political allusions.
With this design he commenced the fabrication of a series of High Degrees, under whose symbolism he concealed a wholly political object.
These High Degrees had also a Scottish character, which is to be attributed partly to the nationality of Ramsay and partly to a desire to effect a political influence among the Masons of Scotland, in which country the first attempts for the restoration of the Stuarts were to be made.
Hence we have to this day in Masonry such terms as "Ecossaim," " Scottish Knights of St.
Andrew," " Scottish Master," "Scottish Architect," and the " Scottish Rite," the use of which words is calculated to produce upon readers not thoroughly versed in Masonic history the impression that the High Degrees of Freemasonry originated in Scotland‑an impression which it was the object of Ramsay to make.
There is another word for which the language of Masonry has been indebted to Ramsay.
This is Heredom, indifferently spelled in the old rituals, Herodem, Heroden and Heredon.
Now the etymology of this word is very obscure and various attempts have been made to trace it to some sensible signification.
One writer {1} thinks that the word is derived from the Greek
{1} London Freemasons' Magazine
hieros, ‑ "holy," ‑ and domos, "house," and that it means the holy house, that is the Temple, is ingenious and it has been adopted by some recent authorities.
Ragon, {1} however, offers a different etymology.
He thinks that it is a corrupted form of the mediaeval Latin haredum, which signifies a heritage, and that it refers to the Chateau of St. Germain, the residence for a long time of the exiled Stuarts and the only heritage which was left to them.
If we accept this etymology I should rather be inclined to think that the heritage referred to the throne of Great Britain, which they claimed as their lawful possession, and of which, in the opinion of their partisans, they had been unrighteously despoiled.
This derivation is equally as ingenious and just as plausible as the former one, and if adopted will add another link to the chain of evidence which tends to prove that the high degrees were originally fabricated by Ramsay to advance the cause of the Stuart dynasty.
Whatever may be the derivation of the word the rituals leave us in no doubt as to what was its pretended meaning.
In one of these rituals, that of the Grand Architect, we meet with the following questions and answers:
Q. Where was your first Lodge held?
A. Between three mountains, inaccessible to the profane, where cock never crew, lion roared, nor woman chattered; in a profound valley.
Q. What are these three mountains named?
A. Mount Moriah, in the bosom of the land of Gabaon, Mount Sinai, and the Mountain of Heredon.
Q. What is this Mountain of Heredon?
A. A mountain situated between the West and the North of Scotland, at the end of the sun's course, where the first Lodge of Masonry was held; in that terrestrial part which has given name to Scottish Masonry.
Q. What do you mean by a profound valley?
A. I mean the tranquillity of our Lodges.
From this catechism we learn that in inventing the word Heredon to designate a fabulous mountain, situated in some unknown part of Scotland, Ramsay meant to select that kingdom as the
{1} "Orthodoxie Maconnique," p. 91
birthplace of those Masonic degrees by whose instrumentality he expected to raise a powerful support in the accomplishment of the designs of the Jacobite party.
The selection of this country was a tribute to his own national prejudices and to those of his countrymen.
Again: by the "profound valley," which denoted " the tranquillity of the Lodges," Ramsay meant to inculcate the doctrine that in the seclusion of these Masonic reunions, where none were to be permitted to enter except "the well‑tried, true, and trusty," the plans of the conspirators to overthrow the Hanoverian usurpation and to effect the restoration of the Stuarts could be best conducted.
Fortunately for the purity of the non‑political character of the Masonic Institution, this doctrine was not generally accepted by the Masons of Scotland.
But there is something else concerning this word Heredon, in its connection with Stuart Freemasonry, that is worth attention.
There is an Order of Freemasonry, at this day existing, almost exclusively in Scotland.
It is caged the Royal Order of Scotland, and consists of two degrees, entitled "Heredon of Kilwinning," and "Rosy Cross." The first is said, in the traditions of the Order, to have originated in the reign of David I., in the 12th century, and the second to have been instituted by Robert Bruce, who revived the former and incorporated the two into one Order, of which the King of Scotland was forever to be the head.
This tradition is, however, attacked by Bro. Lyon, in his History of the Lodge of Edinburgh.
He denies that the Lodge at Kilwinning ever at any period practiced or acknowledged any other than the Craft degrees, or that there exists any tradition, local or national, worthy of the name, or any authentic document yet discovered that can in the remotest degree be held to identify Robert Bruce with the holding of Masonic courts or the institution of a secret society at Kilwinning
"The paternity of the Royal Order," he says, " is now pretty generally attributed to a Jacobite Knight named Andrew Ramsay, a devoted follower of the Pretender, and famous as the fabricator of certain rites, inaugurated in France about 1735‑40, and through the propagator of which it must hoped the fallen fortunes of the Stuarts would be retrieved."' {1}
On September 24, 1745, soon after the commencement of his
{1} "History of the Lodge of Edinburgh," p. 307
invasion of Britain, Charles Edward, the son of the Old Pretender, or Chevalier St. George, styled by his adherents James III., is said to have been admitted into the Order of Knights Templars, and to have been elected its Grand Master, a position which he held until his death.
Such is the tradition, but here again we are met by the authentic statements of Bro. Lyon that Templarism was not introduced into Scotland until the year 1798. {1}
It was then impossible that Charles Edward could have been made a Templar at Edinburgh in 1745.
It is, however, probable that he was invested with official supremacy over the high degrees which had been fabricated by Ramsay in the interest of his family, and it is not unlikely, as has been affirmed, that, resting his claim on the ritual provision that the Kings of Scotland were the hereditary Grand Masters of the Royal Order, he had assumed that title.
Of this we have something like an authentic proof, something which it is refreshing to get hold of as art oasis of history in this arid desert of doubts and conjectures and assumptions.
In the year 1747, more than twelve months after his return from his disastrous invasion of Scotland and England Charles Edward issued a charter for the formation at the town of Arras in France of what is called in the instrument "a Sovereign Primordial Chapter of Rose Croix under the distinctive title of Scottish Jacobite."
In 1853, the Count de Hamel, Prefect of the Department in which Arrasis situated, discovered an authentic copy of the charter in the Departmental archives..
In this document, the Young Pretender gives his Masonic titles in the following words:
"We, Charles Edward, King of England, France, Scotland, and Ireland, and as such Substitute Grand Master of the Chapter of H., known by the title of Knight of the Eagle and Pelican, and since our sorrows and misfortunes by that of Rose Croix," etc.
The initial letter "H." undoubtedly designates the Scottish Chapter of Heredon.
Of this body, by its ritual regulation, his father as King of Scotland, would have been the hereditary Grand Master, and he, therefore, only assumes the subordinate one of Substitute.
{1} "History of the Lodge of Edinburgh," p. 287
This charter, of the authenticity of which, as well as the transaction which it records, there appears to be no doubt, settles the question that it was of the Royal Order of Scotland and not of the Knights Templars that Charles Edward was made Grand Master, or himself assumed the Grand Mastership, during his visit in 1745 to Edinburgh.
As that Order and the other High Degrees were fabricated by the Chevalier Ramsay to promote the interests of his cause, his acceptance or assumption of the rank and functions of a presiding officer was a recognition of the plan to use Masonry as a political instrument, and is, in fact, the first and fundamental point in the history of the hypothesis of Stuart Masonry.
We here for the first time get tangible evidence that there was an attempt to connect the institution of Freemasonry with the fortunes and political enterprises of the Stuarts.
The title given to this primordial charter at Arras is further evidence that its design was really political; for the words Ecosse Jacobite, or Scottish Jacobite, were at that period universally accepted as a party name to designate a partisan of the Stuart pretensions to the throne of England.
The charter also shows that the organization of this chapter was intended only as the beginning of a plan to enlist other Masons in the same political design, for the members of the chapter were authorized " not only to make knights, but even to create a chapter in whatever town they mightthink proper," which they actually did in a few instances, among them one at Paris in 1780, which in 1801 ,was united to the Grand Orient of France.
A year after the establishment of the Chapter at Arras, the Rite of the Veille Bru, or the Faithful Scottish Masons, was created at Toulouse in grateful remembrance of the reception given by the Masons of that place to Sir Samuel Lockhart, the aide‑de‑camp of the Pretender.
Ragon says thatthe favorites who accompanied the prince to France were accustomed to sell to certain speculators charters for mother Lodges, patents for Chapters,etc.
These titles were their property and they did not fail to use them as a means of livelihood.
It has been long held as a recognized fact in Masonic history, that the first Lodge established in France by a warrant from the Grand Lodge of England was held in the year 1725.
There is no doubt that a Lodge of Freemasons met in that year at the house of one Hure, and that it was presided over by the titular Earl of Derwentwater.
But the researches of Bro. Hughan have incontestably proved that this was what we would now call a clandestine body, and that the first French Lodge legally established by the Grand Lodge of England was in 1732.
Besides the fact that there is no record in that Grand Lodge of England of any Lodge in France at the early date of 1725, it is most improbable that a warrant would have been granted to so conspicuous a Jacobite as Derwentwater.
Political reasons of the utmost gravity at that time would have forbidden any such action.
Charles Radcliffe, with his brother the Earl of Derwentwater, had been avenged in England for the part taken by them in the rebellion of 1715 to place James III. on the throne.
They were both condemned to death and the earl was executed, but Radcliffe made his escape to France, where he assumed the title which, as he claimed, had devolved upon him by the death of his brother's son.
In the subsequent rebellion of 1745, having attempted to join the Young Pretender, the vessel in which he sailed was captured by an English cruiser, and being carried to London, he was decapitated in December, 1746.
The titular Earl of Derwentwater was therefore a zealous Jacobite, an attainted rebel who had been sentenced to death for his treason, a fugitive from the law, and a pensioner of the Old Pretend. er or Chevalier St. George, who, by the order of Louis XIV., had been proclaimed King of England under the title of James III.
It is absurd, therefore, to suppose that the Grand Lodge of England would have granted to him and to his Jacobite associates a warrant for the establishment of a Lodge.
Its statutes had declared in very unmistakable words that a rebel against the State was not to be countenanced in his rebellion.
But no greater countenance could have been given than to make him the Master of a new Lodge.
Such, however, has until very recently been universally accepted as apart of the authentic history of Masonry in France.
In the words of a modern feuilletonist, "the story was too ridiculous to be believed, and so everybody believed it."
But it is an undeniable fact that in 1725 an English Lodge was really opened and held in the house of an English confectionier named Hure.
It was however without regular or legal authority and was probably organized, although we have no recorded evidence to that effect, through the advice and instructions of Ramsay ‑ and was a Jacobite Lodge consisting solely of the adherents and partisans of the Old Pretender.
This is the most explicit instance that we have of the connection of the Stuarts with Freemasonry.
It was an effort made by the adherents of that house to enlist the Order as an instrument to restore its fallen fortunes.
The principal members of the Lodge were Derwentwater, Maskelyne, and Heguertly or Heguety.
Of Derwentwater I have already spoken; the second was evidently a Scotsman, but the name of the third has been so corrupted in its French orthography that we are unable to trace it to its source.
It has been supposed that the real name was Haggerty; if so, he was probably an Irishman.
But they were all Jacobites.
The Rite of Strict Observance, which at one time in the last century took so strong a hold upon the Masons of Germany, and whose fundamental doctrine was that of Ramsay‑that Freemasonry was only a continuation of the Templar system‑is said to have been originally erected in the interests of the Stuarts, and the Brotherhood was expected to contribute liberally to the enterprises in favor of the Pretender.
Upon a review of all that has been written on this very intricate subject‑the theories oftentimes altogether hypothetical, assumptions in plane of facts, conjectures altogether problematical, and the grain of history in this vast amount of traditional and mythical trash so small‑we may, I think, be considered safe in drawing a few conclusions.
In the first place it is not to be doubted that at one time the political efforts of the adherents of the dethroned and exiled family of the Stuarts did exercise a very considerable effect on the outward form and the internal spirit of Masonry, as it prevailed on the continent of Europe.
In the symbolic degrees of ancient Craft Masonry, the influence was but slightly felt.
It extended only to a political interpretation of the Legend of the
Master's degree, in which sometimes the decapitation of Charles I., and sometimes the forced abdication and exile of James II., was substituted for the fate of Hiram, and to a change in the substitute word so as to give an application of the phrase the " Widow's son " to the child of Henrietta Maria, the consort of Charles I. The effect of these change, except that of the word which still continues in some Rites, has long since disappeared, but their memory still remains as a relict of the incidents of Stuart Masonry.
But the principal influence of this policy was shown in the fabrication of what are called the "High Degrees," the "Hautes Grades" of the French. Until the year 1728 these accumulations to the body of Masonry were unknown.
The Chevalier Ramsay, the tutor of the Pretender in his childhood, and subsequently his most earnest friend and ardent supporter, was the first to fabricate these degrees, although other inventors were not tardy in following in his footsteps.
These degrees, at first created solely to institute a form of Masonry which should be worked for the purpose of restoring the Pretender to the throne of his ancestors, have most of them become obsolete, and their names alone are preserved in the catalogues of collectors; but their effect is to this day seen in such of them as still remain and are practiced in existing Rites, which have been derived indirectly from the system invented in the Chapter of Clermont or the Chateau of St. Germain.
The particular design has paned away but the general features still remain, by which we are enabled to recognize the relicts of Stuart Masonry.
As to the time when this system first began to be developed there can be but little doubt.
We must reject the notion that James II had any connection with it.
However unfitted he may have been by his peculiar temperament from entering into any such bold conspiracy, the question is set at rest by the simple fact that up to the time of his death there was no Masonic organization upon which he or his partisans could have used
His son the Chevalier St. George was almost in the same category.
He is described in history as a prince‑pious, pacific and without talents, incapable of being made the prominent actor in such a drama, and besides, Speculative Masonry had not assumed the proportions necessary to make it available as a part of a conspiracy until long after he had retired from active life to the practice of religious and recluse habits in Rome.
But his son Charles Edward, the Young Pretender as he was called, was of an ardent temperament; an active genius, a fair amount of talent, and a spirit of enterprise which well fitted him to accept the place assigned him by Ramsay.
Freemasonry had then begun to excite public attention, and was already an institution that was rapidly gaining popularity.
Ramsay saw in it what he deemed a fitting lever to be used in theelevation of his patron to the throne, and Prince Charles Edward with eagerness met his propositions and united with him in the futile effort.
To the Chevalier Ramsay we must attribute the invention of Stuart Masonry, the foundations of which he began to lay early in the 18th century, perhaps with the tacit approval of the Old Pretender.
About 1725, when the first Lodge was organized in Paris, under some illegitimate authority, he made the first public exposition of his system in the Scottish High Degrees which he at that time brought to light.
And finally the workings of the system were fully developed when the Young Pretender began his unsuccessful career in search of a throne, which once lost was never to be recovered.
This conspiracy of Ramsay to connect Freemasonry with the fortunes of the Stuarts was the first attempt to introduce politics into the institution. To the credit of its character as a school of speculative philosophy, the attempt proved a signal failure.
P. 285
CHAPTER XXXI
THE JESUITS IN FREEMASONRY
The opinion has been entertained by several writers of eminence that the Company of Jesus, more briefly styled the Jesuits, sought, about the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, to mingle with the Freemasons and to bend the objects of that Institution to the ambitious designs of their own Order.
This view has been denied by other writers of equal eminence, though it is admitted that Roman Catholic, if not Jesuitical, features are to be found in some of the high degrees.
It is contended by one German writer that the object of the Jesuits in seeking a control of the Masonic Institution was that they might be thus assisted in their design of establishing an aristocracy within themselves, and that they sought to accomplish this object by securing not only the direction of the Masonic Lodges, but also by obtaining a monopoly of the schools and churches, and all the pursuits of science, and even of business.
But the more generally accepted reason for this attempted interference with the Lodges is that they thus sought by their influence and secret working to aid the Stuarts to regain the throne, and then, as an expected result, to re‑establish the Roman Catholic religion in England.
The first of these explanations is certainly more satisfactory than the second.
While there is a great want of historical testimony to prove that the jesuits ever mingled with Freemasonry‑‑a question to be hereafter decided‑there is no doubt of the egotistical and ambitious designs (Of the disciples of Loyola to secure a control of the public and private affairs of every government where they could obtain a foothold.
It was a knowledge of these designs that led to the unpopularity of the Order among even Catholic sovereigns and caused its total suppression, in 1773, by Pope Clement XIV., from which it was not relieved until 1814, when their privileges were renewed by Pope Pius VII.
But I think that we must concur with Gadeike in the conclusion to which he had arrived, that it is proved by history to be a falsehood that Freemasonry was ever concealed under the mask of Jesuitism, or that it derived its existence from that source. {1} It is, however, but fair that we should collate and compare the arguments on both sides.
Robison, who, where Masonry was concerned, could find a specter in every bush, is, of course, of very little authority as to facts; but he may supply us with a record of the opinions which were prevalent at the time of his writing.
He says that when James II fled from England to France, which was in 1688, his adherents took Freemasonry with them to the continent, where it was received and cultivated by the French in a manner suited to the tastes and habits of that people.
But he adds that " at this time, also, the Jesuits took a more active hand in Freemasonry than ever.
They insinuated themselves into the English Lodges, where they were caressed by the Catholics, who panted after the re‑establishment of their faith, and tolerated by the Protestant royalists, who thought no concession too great a compensation for their services.
At this time changes were made in some of the Masonic symbols, particularly in the tracing of the Lodge, which bear evident marks of Jesuitical interference. {2}
Speaking of the High Degrees, the fabrication of which, however, he greatly antedates, he says that " in all this progressive mummery we see much of the hand of the Jesuits, and it would seem that it was encouraged by the church." {3} But he thinks that the Masons, protected by their secrecy, ventured further than the clergy approved in their philosophical interpretations of the symbols, opposing at last some of " the ridiculous and oppressive superstitions of the church," {4} and thus he accounts for the persecution of Freemasonry at a later period by the priests, and their attempts to suppress the Lodges.
The story, as thus narrated by Robison, is substantially that which has been accepted by all writers who trace the origin of Freemasonry
{1} "Freimaurer Lexicon," art. "Jesuiten."
{2} "Proofs of a Conspiracy," p. 27
{3} Ibid., p. 30 {4} Ibid
to the Jesuits.
They affirm, as we have seen, that it was instituted about the time of the expulsion of James II. from England, or that if it was not then fabricated as a secret society, it was at Ieast modified in all its features from that form which it originally had in England, and was adapted as a political engine to aid in the restoration of the exiled monarch and in the establishment in his recovered kingdom of the Roman Catholic religion.
These theorists have evidently confounded primitive Speculative Masonry, consisting only of three degrees, with the supplementary grades invented subsequently by Ramsay and the ritualists who succeeded him.
But even if we relieve the theory of the connsbn and view it as affirming that the Jesuits at the College of Clermont modified the third degree and invented others, such as the Scottish Knight of St. Andrew, for the purpose of restoring James II. to the throne, we shall find no scintilla of evidence in history to support this view, but, on the contrary, obstacles in the way of anachronisms which it will be impossible to overcome.
James II abdicated the throne in 1688, and, after an abortive attempt to recover it by an unsuccessful invasion of Ireland, took up his residence at the Chateau of St. Germain‑en‑Laye, in France, where he died in 1701.
Between the two periods of 1688, when James abdicated, and 1701, when he died, no one has been enabled to find either in England or elsewhere any trace of a third degree.
Indeed, I am very sure it can be proved that this degree was not invented until 1721 or 1722.
It is, therefore, absolutely impossible that any modification could have been made in the latter part of the 17th century of that which did not exist until the beginning of the 18th.
And if there was no Speculative Masonry, as distinguished from the Operative Art practiced by the mediaeval guilds, during the lifetime of James, it is equally absurd to contend that supplementary grades were invented to illustrate and complete a superstructure whose foundations had not yet been laid.
The theory that the Jesuits in the 17th century had invented Freemasonry for the purpose of effecting one of their ambitious projects, or that they had taken it as it then existed, changed it, and added to it for the same purpose, is absolutely untenable.
Another theory has been advanced which accounts for the establishment of what has been called " Jesuitic Masonry," at about the middle of the 18th century.
This theory is certainly free from the absurd anachronisms which we encounter in the former, although the proofs that there ever was such a Masonry are still very unsatisfactory.
It has been maintained that this notion of the intrusion, as it may well be called, of the Jesuits into the Masonic Order has been attributed to the Illuminati, that secret society which was established by Adam Weishaupt in Bavaria about the year 1776.
The original object of this society was, as its founder declared, to enable its members to attain the greatest possible amount of virtue, and by the association of good men to oppose the progress of moral evil. To give it influence it was connected with Freemasonry, whose symbolic degrees formed the substratum of its esoteric instructions.
This has led it incorrectly to be deemed a Masonic Rite; it could really lay no claim to that character, except inasmuch as it required a previous initiation into the symbolic degrees to entitle its disciples to further advancement.
The charges made against it, that it was a political organization, and that one of its deigns was to undermine the Christian religion, although strenuously maintained by Barruel, Robison, and a host of other adversaries, have no foundation in truth. The principles of the order were liberal and philosophical, but neither revolutionary nor anti‑Christian.
As the defender of free thought, it came of course into conflict with the Roman Catholic Church and the Company of Jesus, whose tendencies were altogether the other way.
The priests, therefore, became its most active enemies, and their opposition was so successful that it was suppressed in 1784.
There was also between Illuminism and the many Masonic Rites, which about the period of its popularity were constantly arising in Germany and in France, a species of rivalry.
With the natural egotism of reformers, the Illuminati sought to prove the superiority of their own system to that of their rivals.
With this view they proclaimed that all the Lodges of Free. masons were secretly controlled by the Jesuits; that their laws and their mysteries were the inventions of the same Order, of whom every Freemason was unconsciously the slave and the instrument.
Hence they concluded that he who desired to possess the genuine mysteries of Masonry must seek them not among the degrees of Rose Croix or the Scottish Knights, or still less among the English Masons and the disciples of the Rite of Strict Observance in Germany, but only in the Eclectic Lodges that had been instituted by the Illuminati.
Such, says Barruel, was the doctrine of the Illuminati, advanced for the purpose of elevating the character and aims of their own institution.
The French abbe is not generally trustworthy on any subject connected, with Freemasonry, of which he was the avowed and implacable foe, but we must acknowledge that he was not far from wrong in calling this story of Jesuitic Masonry " a ridiculous and contemptible fable." For once we are disposed to agree with him, when he says in his fervent declamation, "If prejudice did not sometimes destroy the faculty of reasoning, we should be astonished that the Freemasons could permit themselves to be ensnared in so clumsy a trap.
What is it, in fact, but to say to the Mother Lodge of Edinburgh, to the Grand Lodges of London and York, to their rulers, and to all their Grand Masters: You thought that you held the reins of the Masonic world, and you looked upon yourselves as the great
depository of its secrets, the distributors of its diplomas; but you are not so, and, without even knowing it, are merely puppets of which the Jesuits hold the leading‑strings, and which they move at their pleasure.'" {1}
I think that with a little trouble we may be able to solve this apparently difficult problem of the Jesuitical interference with Freemasonry.
The Jesuits appear to have taken the priests of Egypt for their model.
Like them, they sought to be the conservators and the interpreters of religion.
The vows which they took attached them to their Order with bonds as indissoluble as those that united the Egyptian priests in the sacred college of Memphis.
Those who sought admission into their company were compelled to pass through trials of their fortitude and
fidelity.
Their ambition was as indomitable as their cunning was astute. They strove to be the confessors and the counsellors of kings, and to control the education of youth, that by these means they might become of importance in the state, and direct the policy of every government where they
{1} "Memoires pour servir a l'Histoire du Jacobanisme," T.N., p. 291
were admitted.
And this policy was on all occasions to be made subservient to the interests of the church.
At one time they had not less than an hundred schools or colleges in France, the most important being that of Clermont, which, though at one time suppressed, had received renewed letters patent from Louis XIV.
It was this College of Clermont, where James II. was a frequent guest, led there by his religious feelings, that is said to have been the seat of that conspiracy of the Stuart faction which was to terminate either in the invention or the adoption of Freemasonry as a means of restoring the monarch to his throne, and of resuscitating the Roman Catholic religion in heretical England.
Now we may readily admit that the Jesuits were exceedingly anxious to accomplish both these objects, and that for that purpose they would enter into any intrigue which would probably lead to success.
With this design there can be but little doubt that they united with the adherents of the Stuarts.
But this conspiracy could not have had any reference to a Masonic organization, because Freemasonry was during the life of James II. wholly unknown in France, and known in England only as a guild of Operative Masons, into which a few non‑Masons had been admitted through courtesy.
It certainly had not yet assumed the form in which we are called upon to recognize it as the political engine used by the Jesuits.
The Grand Lodge of England, the mother of all modern Speculative Masonry, had no existence until 1717, or sixteen years after the death of the king.
We are bound, therefore, if on the ground of an anachronism alone, to repudiate any theory that connects the Jesuits with Freemasonry during the life of James II., although we may be ready to admit their political conspiracy in the interests of that dethroned monarch.
During the life of his son and putative successor, the titular James III., Speculative Masonry was established in England and passed over into France.
The Lodge established in Paris in 1725 was, I have no doubt, an organization of the adherents of the Stuart family, as has already been shown.
It is probable that most of the members were Catholics and under the influence of the Jesuits.
But it is not likely that those priests took an active part in the internal organization of the Lodge. They could do their work better outside of it than within it. In the Rose Croix and some other of the High Degrees we find the influences of a Roman Catholic spirit in the original rituals, but this might naturally arise from the religious tendencies of their founders, and did not require the special aid of Jesuitism.
After the year 1738 the bull of excommunication of Pope Clement XII. must have precluded the Jesuits from all connection with Freemasonry except as its denouncers and persecutors, parts which up to the present day they have uninterruptedly played.
In conclusion we must, I think, refuse to accept the theory which makes a friendly connection between Freemasonry and Jesuitism as one of those mythical stories which, born in the imagination of its inventors, has been fostered only by the credulity of its believers.
At this day I doubt if there is a Masonic scholar who would accept it as more it as a fable not even " cunningly devised," though there was a time when it was received as a part of the authentic history of Freemasonry.
P. 292
CHAPTER XXXII
OLIVER CROMWELL AND FREEMASONRY
Three fables have been invented to establish a connection between Freemasonry and the dynasty of the Stuarts one which made it the purpose of the adherents of James II. to use the Institution as a means of restoring that monarch to the throne; a second in which the Jesuits were to employ it for the same purpose, as well as for the re‑establishment of the Roman Catholic religion in England; the third and most preposterous of these fables is that which attributes the invention of Freemasonry as a secret society to Oliver Cromwell, who is supposed to have employed it as a political engine to aid him in the dethronement of Charles I., in the abolition of the monarchy, and in the foundation of a republic on its ruins, with himself for its head.
The first and second of these fables have already been discussed.
The consideration of the third will be the subject of the present chapter.
The theory that Freemasonry was instituted by Oliver Cromwell was not at first received like the other two by any large portion of the fraternity.
It was the invention of a single mind and was first made public in the year 1746, by the Abbe Larudan, who presented his views in a work entitled Les Franc‑Macons ecrasses, a book which Klass, the bibliographer, says is the armory from which all the enemies of Masonry have since delved their weapons of abuse.
The propositions of Larudan are distinguished for their absolute independence of all historical authority and for the bold assumptions which are presented to the reader in the place of facts.
His strongest argument for the truth of his theory is that the purposes of the Masonic Institution and of the political course of Cromwell are identical, namely, to sustain the doctrines of liberty and equality among mankind.
Rejecting all the claims to antiquity that have been urged in behalf of the Institution, he thinks that it was in England where the Order of Freemasonry first saw the light of day, and that it is to Cromwell that it owes its origin.
And this theory he claims (with what truth we know not) to have received from a certain Grand Master with whose astuteness and sincerity he was well acquainted.
But even this authority, he says, would not have been sufficient to secure his belief, had it not afterward been confirmed by his reading of the history of the English Protector and his mature reflections on the morals and the laws of the Order, where he detected at every step the presence of Cromwell.
The object of Cromwell, as it has been already said, was by the organization of a secret society, whose members would be bound by the most solemn ties of fraternity, to reconcile the various religions and political sects which prevailed in England in the reign of Charles I to the prosecution of his views, which were equally opposed to the supremacy of the king and to the power of the Parliament, and as a consequence of the destruction of both, to the elevation of himself to the headship of affairs.
In the execution of this plan Cromwell proceeded with his usual caution and address.
He first submitted the outline to several of his most intimate friends such as Algernon Sidney, Harrington, Monk, and Fairfax, and he held with them several private meetings.
"But it was not until the year 1648 that he began to take the necessary steps for bringing it to maturity.
In that year, at a dinner which he gave to a large number of his friends, he opened his designs to the company.
When his guests, among whom were many members of Parliament, both Presbyterians and Independents the two rival religious sects of the day, had been well feasted, the host dexterously led the conversation to the subject of the unhappy condition of England.
He showed in a pathetic manner how the unfortunate nation had suffered distracting conflicts of politics and religion, and he declared that it was a disgrace that men so intelligent as those who then heard him did not make an exertion to put an end to these distracting contests of party.
Scarcely had Cromwell ceased to speak when Ireton, his son‑in‑law, who had been prepared for the occasion, rose, and, seconding the sentiments of his leader, proceeded to show the absolute necessity for the public good of a conciliation and union of the many discordant parties which were then dividing the country.
He exclaimed with fervor that he would not, himself, hesitate to sacrifice his fortune and his life to remedy such calamities, and to show to the people the road they ought to take, to relieve themselves from the yoke which was oppressing them and to break the iron scepter under which they were groaning.
But to do this it was first necessary, he insisted, to destroy every power and influence which had betrayed the nation.
Then, turning to Cromwell, he conjured him to explain his views on this important matter, and to suggest the cure for these evils.
Cromwell did not hesitate to accept the task which had, apparently without his previous concurrence, been assigned to him.
Addressing his guests in that metaphorical style which he was accustomed to use, and the object of which was to confuse their intellects and make them more
ready to receive his boldest propositions, he explained the obligation of a worship of God, the necessity to repel force by force, and to deliver mankind from oppression and tyranny.
He then concluded his speech, exciting the curiosity of his auditors by telling them that he knew a method by which they could succeed in this great enterprise, restore peace to England, and rescue it from the depth of misery into which it was plunged.
This method, he added, if communicated to the world, would win the gratitude of mankind and secure a glorious memory for its authors to the latest posterity.
The discourse was well managed and well received.
All of his guests earnestly besought him to make this admirable expedient known to them. But Cromwell would not yield at once to their importunities, but modestly replying that so important an enterprise was beyond the strength of any one man to accomplish, and that he would rather continue to endure the evils of a bad government than, in seeking to remove them by the efforts of his friends, to subject them to dangers which they might be unwilling to encounter.
Cromwell well understood the character of every man who sat at the table with him, and he knew that by this artful address he should still further excite their curiosity and awaken their enthusiasm.
And so it was that, after a repetition of importunities, he finally consented to develop his scheme, on the condition that all the guests should take a solemn oath to reveal the plan to no one and to consider it after it had been proposed with absolutely unprejudiced mind.
This was unanimously assented to, and, the oath of secrecy having been taken, Cromwell threw himself on his knees and, extending his hands toward heaven, called on God and all the celestial powers to witness the innocence of his heart and the purity of his intentions.
All this the Abbe Larudan relates with a minuteness of detail which we could expect only from an eye‑ witness of the scene.
Having thus made a deep impression on his guests, Cromwell said that the precise moment for disclosing the plan had not arrived, and that an inspiration from heaven, which he had just received, instructed him not to divulge it until four days had elapsed.
The companion though impatient to receive a knowledge of the important secret, were compelled to restrain their desires and to agree to meet again at the appointed time and at a place which was designated.
On the fourth day all the guests repaired to a house in King Street, where the meeting took place, and Cromwell proceeded to develop his plan. (And here the Abbe Larudan becomes fervid and diffuse in the minuteness with which he describes what must have been a wholly imaginary scene.)
He commenced by conducting the guests into a dark room, where he prepared their minds for what was going to occur by a long prayer, in the course of which he gave them to understand that he was in communion with the spirits of the blessed.
After this he told them that his design was to found a society whose only objects would be to render due worship to God and to restore to England the peace for which it so ardently longed. But this project, he added, requited consummate prudence and infinite address to secure its success.
Then taking a censer in his bands, be filled the apartment with the most subtle fumes, so as to produce a favorable dies position in the company to hear what he had further to say.
He informed them that at the reception of a new adherent it was necessary that be should undergo a certain ceremony, to which all of them, without exception, would have to submit.
He asked them whether they were willing to pass through this ceremony, to which proposition unanimous consent was given.
He then chose from the company five assistants to occupy appropriate places and to perform prescribed functions.
These assistants were a Master, two Wardens, a Secretary, and an Orator.
Having made these preparations, the visitors were removed to another apartment, which had been prepared for the purpose, and in which was a picture representing the ruins of King Solomon's Temple.
From this apartment they were transferred to another, and, being blindfolded, were
finally invested with the secrets of initiation.
Cromwell delivered a discourse on religion and politics, the purport of which was to show to the contending sects of Presbyterians and Independents, representatives of both being present, the necessity, for the public good, of abandoning all their frivolous disputes, of becoming reconciled, and of changing the bitter hatred which then inspired them for a tender love and charity toward each other.
The eloquence of their artful leader had the desired effect, and both sects united with the army, in the establishment of a secret association founded on the professed principles of love of God and the maintenance of liberty and equality among men, but whose real design was to advance the projects of Cromwell, by the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a commonwealth of which he should be the head.
It is unfortunate for the completed symmetry of this rather interesting fable that the Abbe has refrained from indulging his imagination by giving us the full details of the form of initiation.
He has, however, in various parts of his book alluded to so much of it as to enable us to learn that the instructions were of a symbolic character, and that the Temple of Solomon constituted the most prominent symbol.
This Temple had been built by divine command to be the sanctuary of religion and as a place peculiarly consecrated to the performance of its august ceremonies.
After several years of glory and magnificence it had been destroyed by a formidable army, and the people who had been there accustomed to worship were loaded with chains and carried in captivity to Babylon.
After years of servitude, an idolatrous prince, chosen as the instrument of Divine clemency, had permitted the captives to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the Temple in its primitive splendor.
It was in this allegory, says the Abbe, that the Freemasons of Cromwell found the exact analogy of their society.
The Temple in its first splendor is figurative of the primitive state of man.
The religion and the ceremonies which were there practiced are nothing else than that universal law engraved on every heart whose principles are found in the ideas of equity and charity to which all men are obliged. The destruction of this Temple, and the captivity and slavery of its worshippers, symbolized the pride and ambition which have produced political subjection among men.
The unpitying hosts of Assyrians who destroyed the Temple and led the people into captivity are the kings, princes, and magistrates whose power has overwhelmed oppressed nations with innumerable evils.
And finally, the chosen people charged with the duty of rebuilding the Temple are the Freemasons, who are to restore men to their original dignity.
Cromwell had divided the Order which he founded into three classes or degrees.
The third or Master's degree was of course not without its Hiramic legend, but the interpretation of its symbolism was very different from that which is given at the present day.
The Abbe thus explains it.
The disorder of the workmen and the confusion at the Temple were intended to make a profound impression upon the mind of the candidate and to show him that the loss of liberty and equality, represented by the death of Hiram, is the cause of all the evils which affect mankind.
While men lived in tranquillity in the asylum of the Temple of Liberty they enjoyed perpetual happiness.
But they have been surprised and attacked by tyrants who have reduced them to a state of slavery.
This is symbolized by the destruction of the Temple, which it is the duty of the Master Masons to rebuild; that is to say, to restore that liberty and equality which had been lost.
Cromwell appointed missionaries or emissaries, says Larudan, who propagated the Order, not only over all England, but even into Scotland and Ireland, where many Lodges were established.
The members of the Order or Society were first called Freemasons; afterward the name was repeatedly changed to suit the political circumstances of the times, and they were called Levelers, then Independents, afterward Fifth Monarchy Men, and finally resumed their original title, which they have retained to the present day.
Such is the fable of the Cromwellian origin of Freemasonry, which we owe entirely to the inventive genius of the Abbe Larudan.
And yet it is not wholly a story of the imagination, but is really founded on an extraordinary distortion of the facts of history.
Edmund Ludlow was an honest and honorable man who took at first a prominent part in the civil war which ended in the decapitation of Charles I., the dissolution of the monarchy, and the establishment of the Commonwealth.
He was throughout his whole life a consistent and unswerving republican, and was as much opposed to the political schemes of Cromwell for his own advancement to power as he was to the usurpation of unconstitutional power by the King.
In the language of the editor of his memoirs, " He was an enemy to all arbitrary government, though gilded over with the most specious pretences; and not only disapproved the usurpation of Cromwell, but would have opposed him with as much vigor as he had done the King, if all occasions of that nature had not been cut off by the extraordinary jealousy or vigilance of the usurpers." {1}
Having unsuccessfully labored to counteract the influence of Cromwell with the army, he abandoned public affairs and retired to his home in Essex, where he remained in seclusion until the restoration of Charles II., when he fled to Switzerland, where he resided until his death.
During his exile, Ludlow occupied his leisure hours in the composition of his Memoirs, a work of great value as a faithful record of the troublous period in which he lived and of which he was himself a great part.
In these memoirs he has given a copious narrative of the intrigues by which Cromwell secured the alliance of the army and destroyed the influence of the Parliament.
The work was published at Vevay, in Switzerland, under the title of Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, Esq.‑ Lieutenant‑General of the Tories in Ireland, One of the Council of State, and a Member of the Parliament which began on November 3, 1640. It is in two volumes, with a supplementary one containing copies of important papers.
The edition from which I cite bears the date of 1698.
There may have been an earlier one.
With these memoirs the Abbe Larudan appears to have been well acquainted.
He had undoubtedly read them carefully, for be has made many quotations and has repeatedly referred to Ludlow as his authority.
But unfortunately for the Abbe's intelligence, or far more probably for his honesty, he has always applied that Ludlow said of the intrigues of Cromwell for the organization of a new party as if it were meant to describe the formation of a new and secret society.
Neither Ludlow nor any other writer refers to the existence of Freemasonry as we now have it and as it is described by the Abbe
{1} Ludlow's "Memoirs," Preface, p. iv.
Larudan in the time of the civil wars.
Even the Operative Masons were not at that period greatly encouraged, for, says Northouck," no regard to science and elegance was to be expected from the sour minds of the puritanical masters of the nation between the fall of Charles I and the restoration of his son." {1}
The Guild of Freemasons, the only form in which the Order was known until the 18th century, was during the Commonwealth discouraged and architecture was neglected.
In the tumult of war the arts of peace are silent.
Cromwell was, it is true, engaged in many political intrigues, but he had other and more effective means to accomplish his ends than those cd Freemasonry of whose existence at that time, except as a guild of workmen, we have no historical evidence, but a great many historical facts to contradict its probability.
The theory, therefore, that Freemasonry owes its origin to Oliver Cromwell, who invented it as a means of forwarding his designs toward obtaining the supreme power of the state, is simply a fable, the invention of a clerical adversary of the Institution, and devised by him plainly to give to it a political character, by which, like his successors Barruel and Robison, he sought to injure it.
{1} Northouck's Constitutions," p. 141
P. 300
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE ROYAL SOCIETY AND FREEMASONRY
The hypothesis that Freemasonry was instituted in the 17th century and in the reign of Charles II., by a set of philosophers and scientists who organized it under the title of the " Royal Society," is the last of those theories which attempts to connect the Masonic Order with the House of Stuart that we will have to investigate.
The theory was first advanced by an anonymous writer in the German Mercury, a Masonic journal published about the close of the last century at Weimar, and edited by the celebrated Christopher Martin Wieland.
In this article the writer says that Dr. John Wilkins one of the most learned men of his time, and the brother‑in‑law of Oliver Cromwell, becoming discontented with the administration of Richard Cromwell, his son and successor, began to devise the means of re‑ establishing the royal authority.
With this view he suggested the idea of organizing a society or club, in which, under the pretence of cultivating the sciences the partisans of the king might meet together with entire freedom.
General Monk and several other military men, who had scarcely more learning than would enable them to write their names, were members of this academy.
Their meetings were always begun with a learned lecture, for the sake of form,
but the conversation afterward turned upon politics and the interests of the king.
And this politico‑philosophical club, which subsequently assumed, after the Restoration, the title of the "Royal Society of Sciences," he asserts to have been the origin of the fraternity of Freemasons.
We have already had abundant reason to see, in the formation of Masonic theories, what little respect has been paid by their fram ers to the contradictory facts of history nor does the present hypothesis afford any exception to the general rule of dogmatic assumption and unfounded assertion.
Christopher Frederick Nicolai, a learned bookseller of Berlin, wrote and published, in 1783, an Essay on the Accusations made against the Order of Knights Templar and their Mystery with an appendix on the Origin of the Fraternity of Freemasons. {1}
In this work he vigorously attacks the theory of the anonymous writer in Wieland's Mercury, and the reasons on which he grounds his dissent are well chosen but they do not cover the whole ground.
Unfortunately, Nicolai had a theory of his own to foster, which also in a certain way connects Freemasonry with the real founders of the Royal Society, and the impugnment of the hypothesis of Wieland's contribution in its whole extent impugns also his own.
Two negatives in most languages are equivalent to an affirmative, but nowhere are two fictions resolvable into a truth.
The arguments of Nicolai against the Wieland theory are, however, worth citation, before we examine his own.
He says that Wilkins could scarcely have been discontented with the government of Richard Cromwell, since it was equally as advantageous to him as that of his father.
He was (and he quotes Wood in the Athena Oxonienses as his authority) much opposed to the court, and was a zealous Puritan before the rebellion.
In 1648 he was made the Master of Wadham College, in the place of a royalist who had been removed.
In 1649, after the decapitation of Charles I, he joined the republican party and took the oath of allegiance to the Commonwealth.
In 1656 he married the sister of Cromwell, and under Richard received the valuable appointment of Master of Trinity College, which, however, he lost upon the restoration of the monarchy in the following year.
"Is it credible," says Nicolai, "that this man could have instituted a society for the purpose of advancing the restoration of the king; a society all of whose members were of the opposite party? The celebrated Dr. Goddard, who was one of the most distinguished members, was the physician and favorite of Cromwell, whom, after the death of the King, he attended in his campaigns in Ireland and Scotland.
It is an extraordinary assertion that a
{1} "Versuch uber die Besschuldigungen, welche dem Tempelherrn orden gemacht worden und uber dessen Geheimniss; nebst einem Anhange uber das Enstehen der Freimaurergesellschaft," Berlin and Stettin, 1783.
discontent with the administration of Richard Cromwell should have given rise in 1658 to a society which was instituted in 1646.
It is not less extraordinary that this society should have held its meetings in a tavern.
It is very certain that in those days of somber Puritanism the few taverns to be found in London could not have been used as places of meeting for associations consisting of men of all conditions, as is now the custom.
There would have been much imprudence in thus exposing secret deliberations on an affair equally dangerous and important to the inspection of all the spies who might be congregated in a tavern."
He asserts that the first meetings of the society were held at the house of Dr. Goddard and of another member, and afterward at Cheapside and at Gresham College.
And these facts are proved by the records of the society, as published by its annalists.
As to the statement that Monk was one of the members of the society‑a fact that would be important in strengthening the theory that it was organized by the friends of the monarchy and with a design of advancing its restoration ‑ he shows the impossibility that it could be correct, because Monk was a prisoner in the Tower from 1643 until 1647, and after his release in that year spent only a month in London, not again visiting that city till 1659, when he returned at the head of an army and was engaged in the arrangement of such delicate affairs and was so narrowly watched that it is not possible to be behaved that with his well‑known caution he would have taken part in any sort of political society whatever, while the society would have acted very inconsiderately in admitting into its ranks military men who could scarcely write, and that too at a time when distrust had risen to its height.
But a better proof than any advanced by Nicolai, that Monk had nothing to do with the establishment of the Royal Society, whatever may have been its object, is that his name does not appear upon the list of original or early members, taken from the official records and published by Dr. Thompson in his history of the society.
Finally Nicolai asserts very truthfully that its subsequent history has shown that this society was really engaged in scientific pursuits, and that politics were altogether banished from its conferences.
But he also contends, but with less accuracy, that the political principles of its members were opposed to the restoration of the monarchy, for which statement there is no positive authority.
Hence Nicolai concludes that " there is no truth in the statements of the anonymous writer in Wieland's Mercury, except that the restoration was opposed in secret by a certain society."
And now he advances his own theory, no less untenable than the one he is opposing, that this society "was the Freemasons, who had nothing in common with the other, except the date of foundation, and whose views in literature as well as in politics were of an entirely opposite character." This was the theory of Nicolai‑not that Freemasonry originated in the Royal Society, but that it was established by certain learned men who sought to advance the experimental philosophy which had just been introduced by Bacon.
But the same idea was sought by the originators of the Royal Society, and as many of the founders of this school were also among the founders of the Royal Society, it seems difficult to separate the two theories so as to make of each a distinct and independent existence.
But it will be better to let the Berlin bookseller explain his doctrine in his own language, before an attempt is made to apply to it the canons of criticism.
He commences by asserting that one of the effects of the labors of Andrea and the other Rosicrucians was the application of a wholesome criticism to the examination of philosophical and scientific subjects.
He thinks even that the Fama Fraternitatis, the great work of Andrea, had first suggested to Bacon the notion of his immortal work on The Advancement of Learning.
At the same time in which Bacon flourished and taught his inductive philosophy, the Rosicrucians had introduced a system of philosophy which was established on the phenomena of nature.
Lord Bacon had cultivated these views in his book De Augmentis Scientiarum, except that he rejected the Rosicrucian method of esoteric instruction.
Everything that he taught was to be open and exoteric. Therefore, as he had written his great work in the Latin language, for the use of the learned, he now composed his New Atlantis in English, that all classes might be able to read it.
In this work is contained his celebrated romance of the House of Solomon, which Nicolai thinks may have had its influence in originating the society of Freemasons.
In this fictitious tale Bacon supposes that a vessel lands on an unknown island, called Bensalem, over which in days of yore a certain King Solomon reigned. This King had a large establisliment, which was called the House of Solomon or the College of the Six Days' Work, in allusion to the six days of the Mosaic account of the creation.
He afterward describes the immense apparatus which was there employed in physical researches.
There were deep grottoes and tall bowers for the observation o f the phenomena of nature; artificial mineral‑waters; huge buildings in which meteors, the wind, rain and thunder and lightning were imitated; extensive botanic gardens, and large fields in which all kinds of animals were collected for the study of their instinct and habits, and houses filled with all the wonders of nature and art.
There were also a great number of learned men, to whom the direction of these things was intrusted.
They made journeys into foreign countries, and observations on what they saw.
They wrote, they collected, they determined results, and deliberated together as to what was proper to be published.
This romance, says Nicolai, which was in accord with the prevailing taste of the age, contributed far more to spread the views of Bacon on the observation of nature than his more learned and profound work had been able to do.
The House of Solomon attracted the attention of everybody. King Charles I was anxious to establish something like it, but was prevented by the civil wars.
Nevertheless this great idea, associated with that of the Rosicrucians, continued to powerfully agitate the minds of the learned men of that period, who now began to be persuaded of the necessity of experimental knowledge.
Accordingly, in 1646, a society of learned men was established, all of whom were of Bacon's opinion, that philosophy and the physical sciences should be placed within the reach of all thinking minds.
They held meetings at which‑‑believing that instruction in physics was to be sought by a mutual communication of ideas‑they made many scientific experiments in common.
Among these men were John Wallis, John Wilkins, Jonathan Goddard, Samuel Foster, Francis Glisson, and many others, all of whom were, fourteen years afterward, the founders of the Royal Society.
But proceedings like these were not congenial with the intellectual condition of England at that period.
A melancholy and somber spirit had overshadowed religion, and a mystical theology, almost Gnostic in its character had infected the best minds. Devotion had passed into enthusiasm and that into fanaticism, and sanguinary wars and revolutions were the result. It was then that such skillful hypocrites as Cromwell and Breton took advantage of this weakness for the purpose of concealing and advancing their own designs.
The taint of this dark and sad character is met with in all the science, the philosophy, and even in the oratory and poetry of the period.
Astrology and Theurgy were then in all their glory.
Chemistry, which took the place of experimental science, was as obscure as every other species of learning, and its facts were enveloped in the allegories of the Alchemists and the Rosicrucians.
A few learned men, disheartened by this obscuration of intellectual light, had organized a society in 1646; but as they were still imbued with a remnant of the popular prejudice, they were the partisans of the esoteric method of instruction, and did not believe that human knowledge should be exoterically taught so as to become accessible to all. Hence their society became a secret one.
The first members of this society were, says Nicolai, Elias Ashmole, the celebrated antiquary; William Lilly, a famous astrologer; Thomas Wharton, a physician; George Wharton; William Oughtred, a mathematician; Dr. John Hewitt, and Dr. John Pearson, both clergymen, and several others.
The annual festival of the Astrologers gave rise to this association.
It had previously held one meeting at Warrington, in Lancashire, but it was first firmly established at London.
Its object was to build the House of Solomon in a literal sense but the establishment was to remain as secret as the island of Bensalem in Bacon's New Atlantis,‑ that is, they were to be engaged in the study of nature, but the instructions were to remain within the society in an esoteric form; in other words, it was to be a secret society. Allegories were used by these philosophers to express their ideas.
First were the ancient columns of Hermes, by which Jamblichus pretended that he had enlightened all the doubts of Porphyry.
You then mounted, by several steps, to a checkered floor divided into four regions, to denote the four superior sciences, after which came the types of the six days, which expressed the object of the society.
All of which was intended to teach the doctrines that God created the world and preserves it by fixed principles, and that he who seeks to know these principles, by an investigation of the interior of nature, approximates to God and obtains from His grace the power of commanding nature.
This, says Nicolai, was the essence of the
mystical and alchemical doctrine of the age, so that we may conclude that the society which he has been describingwas in reality an association of alchemists, or rather of astrologers.
In these allegories, for which Nicolai may have been indebted to the alchemical writings of that period, to which he refers, or for which he may have drawn on his own imagination‑we are uncertain which, as he sees no authorities‑we may plainly detect Masonic symbols, such as the pillars of the porch of the Temple, the mystical ladder of steps, and the mosaic pavement, and thus it is that he seems to find an analogy between Freemasonry and the secret society that he has been describing.
He still further pursues the hypothesis of their identity in the following remarks:
"It is known," he say, " that all who have the right of citizenship in London, whatever may be their rank or condition, must be recognized as members of some company or corporation.
But it is always easy for a man of quality or of letters to gain admission into one of these companies.
Now, several members of the society that has just been described were also members of the Company of Masons.
This was the reason of their holding their meetings at Masons' Hall, in Masons' Alley, Basinghall Street.
They all entered the company and assumed the name of Free and Accepted Masons, adopting, besides, all its external marks of distinction.
Free is the title which every member of this body assumes in England; the right or franchise is called Freedom,‑ the brethren call themselves Freemen, Accepted means, in this place, that this private society had been accepted or incorporated into that of the Masons, and thus it was that chance gave birth to that denomination of Freemasons which afterward became so famous, although it is possible that some allusion may also have been intended to the building of the House of Solomon, an allegory with which they were also familiar."
Hence, according to the theory of Nicolai, two famous associations, each of a character peculiar to itself, were at the same period indebted to the same cause for their existence.
These were the Royal Society and the Freemasony " Both," he says, " had the same object and the difference in their proceedings arose only from a difference in some of the opinions of their members.
The one society had adopted as its maxim that the knowledge of nature and of natural science should be indiscriminately communicated to all classes of men, while the other contended that the secrets of nature should be restricted to a small number of chosen recipients.
The former body, which was the Royal Society, therefore held open meetings; the latter, which was the Society of Freemasons, enveloped its transactions in mystery."
"In those days," says Nicolai, "the Freemasons were altogether devoted to the King and opposed to the Parliament, and they soon occupied themselves at their meetings in devising the means of sustaining the royal cause.
After the death of Charles I., in 1649, the Royalists becoming still more closely united, and, fearing to be known as such, they joined the assemblies of the Freemasons for the purpose of concealing their own identity, and the good intentions of that society being well known many persons of rank were admitted into it.
But as the objects which occupied their attention were no other than to diminish the number of the partisans of Parliament, and to prepare the way for the restoration of Charles II. to the throne, it would have been very imprudent to communicate to all Freemasonry without exception, the measures which they deemed it expedient to take, and which required an inviolable secrecy.
Accordingly they adopted the method of selecting a certain number of their members, who met in secret, and this committee, which had nothing at all to do with the House of Solomon, selected allegories, which had no relation to the former ones, but which were very appropriate to their design.
These new Masons took Death for their symbol.
They lamented the death of their master, Charles I; they nursed the hope of vengeance on his murderers; they sought to re‑establish the Word, or his son, Charles II., for they applied to him the word Logos, which, in its theological sense, means both the Word and the Son; and the queen, Henrietta Maria, the relict of Charles I., being thenceforth the head of the party, they designated themselves the Widow's Sons.
"They agreed also upon private signs and modes of recognition, by which the friends of the royal cause might be able to distinguish each other from their enemies.
This precaution was of great utility to those who traveled, and especially to those of them who retired with the court to Holland, where, being surrounded by the spies of the Commonwealth, it was necessary to be exceedingly diligent in guarding their secret."
Nicolai then proceeds to show how, after the death of Oliver Cromwell and the abdication of his son Richard, the administration of affairs fell into the hands of the chiefs of various parties, whence resulted confusion and dissensions, which tended to render the cause of the monarchy still more popular.
The generals of the army were, however, still opposed to any notion of a restoration and the hopes of the royalis ts centered upon General Monk, who commanded the army in Scotland, and who, it was known, had begun to look favorably on propositions which he had received in 1659 from the exiled King.
It then became necessary to bind their secret committee still more closely, that they might treat of Scottish affairs in reference to the interests of the King.
They selected new allegories, which symbolized the critical state to which they were reduced, and the virtues, such as prudence, pliancy, and courage, which were necessary to success.
They selected a new device and a new sign, and in their meetings spoke allegorically of taking care, in that wavering and uncertain condition of falling, lest the arms should be broken."
It is probable that, in this last and otherwise incomprehensible sentence, Nicolai refers to some of the changes made in the High Degrees, fabricated about the middle of the 18th century, but whose invention he incorrectly, but like most Masonic historians of his day, attributes to an earlier date.
As some elucidation of what he says respecting the fact of failing and the broken arm, we find Nicolai afterward quoting a small dictionary which he says appeared about the beginning of the 18th century, and in which we meet with the following definition:
"Mason's Wound, An imaginary wound above the elbow, to represent a fracture of the arm occasioned by a fall from an elevated place."
"This," says Nicolai, "is the authentic history of the origin of the Society of Freemasons, and of the first changes that it underwent, changes which transformed it from an esoteric society of natural philosophers into an association of good patriots and loyal subjects; and hence it was that it subsequently took the name of the Royal Art as applied to Masonry."
He concludes by affirming that the Society of Freemasons continued to assemble after the Restoration, in 1660, and even made, in 1663, several regulations for its preservation, but the zeal of its members was diminished by the changes which science and manners underwent during the reign of Charles II.
Its political character ceased by the advent of the king, and its esoteric method of teaching the natural sciencess must have been greatly interrupted.
The Royal Society, whose method had been exoteric and open, and from whose conferences politics were excluded, although its members were, in principle, opposed to the Restoration, had a more successful progress, and was joined by many of the Freemasons, the most prominent of whom was Elias Ashmole, who, Nicolai says, changed his opinions and became a member of the Royal Society.
But, to prevent its dissolution, the Society of Freemasons made several changes in its constitution, so as to give it a specific design.
This was undertaken and the symbols of the Society were altered so as to substitute the Temple of Solomon in the place of Bacon's House of Solomon, as a more appropriate allegory to express the character of the new institution. Nicolai thinks that the building of St. Paul's Church and the persecutions endured by Sir Christopher Wren may have contributed to the selection of these new symbols.
But on this point he does not insist.
Such is the theory of Nicolai.
Rejecting the idea that the origin of the Order of Freemasonry is to be traced to the founders of the Royal Society, he claims to have found it in a society of contemporaneous philosophers who met at Masons' Hall, in Basinghall Street, and assumed the name of Free and Accepted Masons, and who, claiming, in opposition to the views of the members of the Royal Society, that all s6ences should be communicated esoterically, therefore held their meetings in secret, their real object therefor being to nourish a political conspiracy for the advancement of the cause of the monarchy and the restoration of the exiled King.
Nicolai does not expressly mention the Astrologers, but it is very evident that he alludes to them as the so‑called philosophers who originated this secret society, and to them, therefore, he attributes the invention of the Masonic system, as it now exists, after the necessary changes which policy and the vicissitudes of the times had induced.
Nicholas de Bonneville, the author of the essay entitled The Jesuits chased out of Freemasonry, entertained a similar opinion.
He says that in 1646 a society of Rosicrucians was formed at London, modeled on the ideas of the New Atlantis of Bacon.
It assembled in Masons' Hall, where Ashmole and other Rosicrucians modified the formula of reception of the Operative Masons, which had consisted only of a few ceremonies used by craftsmen, and substituted a mode of initiation founded in part on the mysteries of Ancient Egypt and Greece.
They then fabricated the first degree of Masonry as ive non, have it, and, to distinguish themselves from common Masons, called themselves Freemasons.
Thory cites this without comment in his Acta Latomorum, and gives it as a part of the authentic annals of the Order.
But ingenious and plausible as are these views, both of Nicolai and Bonneville, they unfortunately can not withstand the touchstone of all truth, the proofs of authentic history.
It will be seen that we have two hypotheses to investigate‑first that advanced by the contributor to Wieland's Mercury, that the Society of Freemasons was originated by the founders of the Royal Society, and that maintained by Nicolai and Bonneville, that it owes its invention to the Astrologers who were contemporary with these founders.
Both hypotheses place the date of the invention in the same year, 1646, and give London as the place of the invention.
We must first direct our attention to the theory which maintains that the Royal Society was the origin of Freemasonry, and that the founders of that academy were the establishers of the Society of Freemasons.
This theory, first advanced, apparently, by the anonymous contributor to Wieland's Mercury, was exploded by Nicolai, in the arguments heretofore quoted, but something may be added to increase the strength of what he has said.
We have the explicit testimony of all the historians of that institution that it was not at all connected with the political contests of the day, and that it was founded only as a means of pursuing philosophical and scientific inquiries.
Dr. Thompson, who derives his information from the early records of the society, says that " it was established for the express purpose of advancing experimental philosophy, and that its foundation was laid during the time of the civil wars and was owing to the accidental association of several learned men who took no part in the disturbances which agitated Great Britain." {1}
He adds that "about the year 1645 several ingenious men who
{1} "History of the Royal Society," by Thomas Thompson, M.D., F.R.S., LL.D. London, 1812, p. 1
resided in London and were interested in the progress of mathematics and natural philosophy agreed to meet once a week to discourse upon subjects connected with these sciences.
These meetings were suspended after the resignation of Richard Cromwell, but revived in 1660, upon the Restoration."' {1}
They met at first in private rooms, but afterward in Gresham College and then in Arundel House.
Their earliest code of laws shows that their conferences were not in secret, but open to properly introduced visitors, as they still continue to be.
Weld, the librarian of the society, says that to it "attaches the renown of having from its foundation applied itself with untiring zeal and energy to the great objects of its institution." {2} He states that, although the society was not chartered until 1660, " there is no doubt that a society of learned men were in the habit of assembling together to discuss scientific subjects for many years previous to that time." {3}
Spratt, in his history of the society, says that in the gloomy season of the civil wars they had selected natural philosophy as their private diversion, and that at their rneetings " they chiefly attended to some particular trials in Chemistry or Mechanics."
The testimony of Robert Boyle, Wallis, and Evelyn, contemporaries of the founders, is to the same effect, that the society was simply philosophical in its character and without any political design Dr.
Wallis, who was one of the original founders, makes this statement concerning the origin and objects of the society in his Account of some Passages in my own Life. {4}
"About the year 1645, while I lived in London (at a time when, by our civil wars, academic studies were much interrupted in both our Universities), besides the conversation of divers eminent divines, as to matters theological, I had the opportunity of being acquainted with divers worthy persons inquisitive into natural philosophy and other paths of human learning, and particularly what has
{1} "History of the Royal Society," by Thomas Thompson, M.D., F.R.S., LL.D., London, 1812, p.1
{2} "A History of the Royal Society," with Memoirs of its Presidents, by Charles Richard Weld, Esq., 2 vols., London, 1848, I. 27
{3} Ibid
{4} In Hearne's edition of Langsteff's chronicle.
been called the New Philosophy or Experimental Philosophy.
We did, by agreements, divers of us meet weekly in London on a certain day to treat and discourse of such affairs." Wallis says that the subjects pursued by them related to physics, astronomy, and natural philosophy, such as the circulation of the blood, the Copernican system, the Torricellian experiment, etc.
In all these authentic accounts of the object of the society there is not the slightest allusion to it as a secret organization, nor any mention of a form of initiation, but only a reception by the unanimous vote of the members, which reception, as laid down in the bylaws consisted merely in the president taking the newly elected candidate by the found and saluting him as a member or fellow of the society.
The fact is that at that period many similar societies had been instituted in different countries of Europe, such as the Academia del Corriento at Florence and the Academy of Sciences at Paris, whose members, like those of the Royal Society of London, devoted themselves to the development of science.
This encouragement of scientific pursuits may be principally attributed to many circumstances that followed the revival of learning; the advent of Greeks into Western Europe, imbued with (Grecian literature; Bacon's new system of philosophy, which alone was enough to awaken the intellects of all thinking men; and the labors of Galileo and his disciples.
All these had prepared many minds for the pursuit of philosophy by experimental and inductive methods, which took the place of the superstitious dogmas of preceding ages.
It was through such influences as these, wholly unconnected with any religious or political aspirations, that the founders of the Royal Society were induced to hold their meetings and to cultivate without the restraints of secrecy their philosophical labors, which culminated in 1660 in the incorporation of an institution of learned men which at this day holds the most honored and prominent place among the learned societies of the world.
But it is in vain to look in this society, either in the mode of its organization, in the character of its members, or in the nature of their pursuits, for any connection with Freemasonry, an institution
entirely different in its construction and its objects.
The theory, therefore, that Freemasonry is indebted for is origin to the Royal Society of London must be rejected as wholly without authenticity or even plausibility. But the theory of Nicolai, which attributes its origin to another contemporaneous society, whose members were evidently Astrologers, is somewhat more plausible, although equally incorrect.
Its consideration must, however, be reserved as the subject of another chapter.
P. 314
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE ASTROLOGERS AND THE FREEMASONS
We have seen, in the preceding chapter, that Nicolai had sought to trace the origin of Freemasonry to a society organized in 1646 by a sect of philosophers who were contemporary with, but entirely distinct from, those who founded the Royal Society.
Though he does not explicitly state the fact, yet, from the names of the persons to whom he refers, there can be no doubt that he alluded to the Astrologers, who at that time were very popular in England.
Judicial astrology, or the divination of the future by the stars, was, of all the delusions to which the superstition of the Middle Ages gave birth, the most popular.
It prevailed over all Europe, so that it was practiced by the most learned, and the predictions of its professors were sought with avidity and believed with confidence by the most wealthy and most powerful. Astrologers often formed a part of the household of princes, who followed their counsels in the most important matters relating to the future, while men and women of every rank sought these charlatans that they might have their nativities cast and secure the aid of their occult art in the recovery of stolen goods or the prognostications of happy marriages or of successful journeys.
Astrology was called the Daughter of Astronomy, and the scholars who devoted themselves to the study of the heavenly bodies for the purposes of pure science were often called upon to use their knowledge of the stars for the degrading purpose of astrological predictions.
Kepler, the greatest astronomer of that age, was compelled against his will to pander to the popular superstition, that he might thus gain a livelihood and be enabled to pursue his nobler studies.
In one of his works he complains that the scanty reward of an astronomer would not provide him with bread, if men did not entertain hopes of reading the future in the heavens. And so he tampered with the science that he loved and adorned, and made predictions for inquisitive consulters, although, at the same time, he declared to his friends that "they were nothing but worthless conjecture."
Cornelius Agrippa, though he cultivated alchemy, a delusion but little more respectable than that of astrology, when commanded by his patroness, the Queen mother of France, to practice the latter, expressed his annoyance at the task.
Of the Astrologers he said, in his great work on the Vanity of the Arts and Sciences, "these fortune tellers do find entertainment among princes and magistrates, from whom they receive large salaries; but, indeed, there is no class of men who are more pernicious to a commonwealth.
For, as their skill lies in the adaptation of ambiguous predictions to events after they have happened, so it happens that a man who lives by falsehood shall by one accidental truth obtain more credit than he will lose by a hundred manifest errors."
The 16th and 17th centuries were the golden age of astrology in England. We know all that is needed of this charlatanism and of the character of its professors from the autobiography of William Lilly, himself an English astrologer of no mean note; perhaps, indeed, the best‑educated and the most honest of those who practiced this delusion in England in the 17th century, and who is one of those to whom Nicolai ascribes the formation of that secret society, in 1646, which invented Freemasonry.
It will be remembered that Nicolai says that of the society of learned men who established Freemasonry, the first members were Elias Ashmole, the skillful antiquary, who was also a student of astrology, William Lilly, a famous astrologer, George Wharton, likewise an astrologer, William Oughtred, a mathematician, and some others.
He also says that the annual festival of the Astrologers gave rise to this association. "It had previously held ," says Nicolai, "one meeting at Warrington, in Lancashire, but it was first firmly established at London."
Their meetings, the same writer asserts, were held at Masons' Hall, in Masons' Alley, Basinghall Street.
Many of them were members of the Masons' Company, and they all entered it and assumed the title of Free and Accepted Masons, adopting, besides, all its external marks of distinction.
Such is the theory which makes the Astrologers, incorporating themselves with the Operative Masons, who met at their Hall in Basinghall
Street, the founders of the Speculative Order of Free and Accepted Masons as they exist at the present day.
It is surprising that in a question of history a man of letters of the reputation of Nicolai should have indulged in such bold assumptions and in statements so wholly bare of authority.
But unfortunately it is thus that Masonic history has always been written.
I shall strive to eliminate the truth from the fiction in this narrative.
The task will be a laborious one, for, as Goethe has well said in one of his maxims "It is much easier to perceive error than to find truth. The former lies on the surface, so that it is easily reached; the latter lies in the depth, which it is not every man's business to search for."
The Astrologers, to whose meeting in the Masons' Hall is ascribed the origin of the Freemasons, were not a class of persons who would have been likely to have united in such an attempt, which showed at least a desire for some intellectual progress.
Lilly, perhaps the best‑educated and the most honest of these charlatans, has in the narrative of his life, written by himself, given us some notion of the character of many of them who lived in London when he practiced the art in that city. {1}
Of Evans, who was his first teacher, he tells us that he was a clergyman ‑ of Staffordshire, whence he "had been in a manner enforced to fly for some offences very scandalous committed by him "; of another astrologer, Alexander Hart, he says " he was but a cheat." Jeffry Neve he calls, a smatterer; William Poole was a frequenter of taverns with lewd people and fled on one occasion from London under the suspicion of complicity in theft; John Booker, though honest was ignorant of his profession; William Hodges dealt with angels, but " his life answered not in holiness and sanctity to what it should," for he was addicted to profanity; and John A Windsor was given to debauchery.
Men of such habits of life were not likely to interest themselves in the advancement of science or in the establishment of a society of speculative philosophers.
It is true that these charlatans lived at an earlier period than that ascribed by Nicolai to the organization
{1} "The Life of William Lilly, Student in Astology, wrote by himself in the 66th year of his Age, at Hersham, in the Parish of Walton upon Thames, in the County of Surrey, Propria Manu."
of the society in Masons' Hall, but in the few years that elapsed it is not probable that the disciples of astrology had much improved in their moral or intellectual condition.
Of certain of the men named by Nicolai as having organized the Society of Freemasons in 1646, we have some knowledge.
Elias Ashmole, the celebrated antiquary, and founder of the Ashmolean Museum in the University of Oxford, is an historical character.
He wrote his own life, in the form of a most minute diary, extending from July 2, 1633, to October 9, 1687. In this diary, in which he registers the most trivial as well as the most important events of his life‑recording even the cutting of his wisdom teeth, or the taking of a sudorific‑he does not make the slightest allusion to the transaction referred to by Nicolai.
The silence of so babbling a chronicler as to such an important event is itself sufficient proof that it did not occur. What Ashmole has said about Freemasonry will be presently seen.
Lilly, another supposed actor in this scene, also wrote his life with great minuteness.
His complete silence on the subject is equally suggestive. Nicolai says that the persons he cites were either already members of the Company of Masons or at once became so.
Now, Lilly was a member of the Salter's Company, one of the twelve great livery companies, and would not have left it to join a minor company, which the Masons was.
Oughtred could not have been united with Ashmole in organizing a society in 1646, for the latter, in a note to Lilly's life, traces his acquaintance with him to the residence of both as neighbors in Surrey.
Now, Ashmole did not remove to Surrey until the year 1675, twenty nine years after his supposed meeting with Oughtred at the Masons Hall.
Between Wharton and Lilly, who were rival almanac‑makers, there was, in 1646, a bitter feud, which was not reconciled until years afterward.
In an almanac which Wharton published in 1645 he had called Lilly " an impudent, senseless fellow, and by name William Lilly." It is not likely that they would have been engaged in the fraternal task of organizing a great society at that very time.
Dr. Pearson, another one of the supposed founders, is celebrated in literary and theological history as the author of an Exposition of the Creed.
Of a man so prominent as to have been the Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, and afterward Bishop of Chester, Ashmole makes no mention in his diary.
If he had ever met him or been engaged with him in so important an affair, this silence in so minute a journal of the transactions of his every‑day life would be inexplicable.
But enough has been said to show the improbability of any such meeting as Nicolai records. Even Ashmole and Lilly, the two leaders, were unknown to each other until the close of the year 1646.
Ashmole says in his diary of that year: Mr. Jonas Moore brought and acquainted me with Mr. William Lilly: it was on a Friday night, and I think on the 20th Nov. (1646)."
That there was an association, or a club or society, of Astrologers about that time in London is very probable.
Pepys, in his memoirs, says that in October, 166o, he went to Mr. Lilly's, "there being a club that night among his friends." There he met Esquire Ashmole and went home accompanied by Mr. Booker, who, he says, " did tell me a great many fooleries, which may be done by nativities, and blaming Mr. Lilly for writing to please his friends, and not according to the rules of art, by which he could not well eue as he had done" The club, we may well suppose, was that of the Astrologers, held at the house of the chief member of the profession.
That it was not a secret society we conclude from the fact that Pepys, who was no astrologer, was permitted to be present.
We know also from Ashmole's diary that the Astrologers held an annual feast, generally in August, sometimes in March, July, or November, but never on a Masonic festival.
Ashmole regularly attended it from 1649 to 1658, when it was suspended, but afterward revived, in 1682.
In 1650 he was elected a steward for the following year he mentions the place of meeting only three times, twice at Painters' Hall, which was probably the usual place, and once at the Three Cranes, in Chancery Lane. Had the Astrologers and the Masons been connected, Masons' Hall, in Basinghall Street, would certainly have been the place for holding their feast.
Again, it is said by Nicolai that the object of this secret society which organized the Freemasons was to advance the restoration of the King.
But Lilly had made, in 1645, the year before the meeting, this declaration: "Before that time, I was more Cavalier than Roundbead, but after that I engaged body and soul the cause of Parliament." He still expressed, it is true, his attachment to monarchy; but his life during the Commonwealth showed his devotion to Cromwell, of whom he was a particular favorite.
After the Restoration he had to sue out a pardon, which was obtained by the influence of his friends, but which would hardly have been necessary if he had been engaged in a secret society the object of which was to restore Charles II to the throne.
But Charles I was not beheaded until 1649, so that a society could not have been organized in 1646 for the restoration of his son.
But it may be said that the Restoration alluded to was of the monarchy, which at that time was virtually at an end.
So this objection may pass without further comment.
But the fact is that the whole of this fiction of the organization, 1646, of a secret society by a set of philosophers or astrologers, or both, which resulted in the establishment of Freemasonry, arose out of a misconception or a misrepresentation ‑ whether willful or not, I will not say‑of two passages in the diary of Elias Ashmole.
Of these two passages, and they are the only ones in his minute diary of fifty‑four years in which there is any mention of Freemasonry, the first is as follows:
"1646, Octob. 16‑ 4 Hor. 30 minutes post merid.
I was made a Free‑ Mason at Warrington in Lancashire, with Colonel Henry Mainwarring of Karticham in Cheshire; the names of those that were then at the lodge, Mr. Richard Penket Warden, Mr. James Collier, Mr. Richard Sankey, Henry Littler, John Ellam, and Hugh Brewer."
And then, after an interval of thirty‑five years, during which there is no further allusion to Masonry, we find the following memoranda: " 1682, Mar. 10. About 5 Hor. Post merid. I received a summons to appear at a lodge to be held the next day at Masons Hall, London.
II. Accordingly I went, and about noon was admitted into the fellowship of Freemasons, by Sir William Wilson Knight, Captain Richard Borthwick, Mr. William Wodman, Mr. William Grey, Mr. Samuel Taylour, and Mr. William Wise.
"I was the senior fellow among them (it being thirty‑five years since I was admitted) there was present besides myself, the fellows after mentioned. Mr. Thomas Wise, Master of the Masons Company, this present year; Mr. Thomas Shorthose, Mr. Thomas Shadbolt, Wardsford, Esq; Mr. Nicholas Young, Mr. John Shorthose, Mr. William Hamon, Mr. John Thompson, and Mr. William Stanton. We all dined at the Half‑Moon‑Tavern, in Cheapside, at a noble dinner prepared at the charge of the new accepted Masons."
Without the slightest show of reason or semblance of authority, Nicolai transmutes the Lodge at Warrington, in which Ashmole was made a Freemason, into an annual feast of the Astrologers.
The Society of Astrologers, he says, "had previously held one meeting at Warrington, in Lancashire, but it was first firmly established at London." And he cites as His authority for this statement the very passage from Ashinole's diary in which that antiquary records his reception in a Masonic Lodge.
These events in the life of Ashmole, which connect him with the Masonic fraternity, have given considerable embarrassment to Masonic scholars who have been unable to comprehend the two apparently conflicting statements that he was made a Freemason at Warrington in 1646 and afterward received into the fellowship of the Freemasons, in 1682, at London.
The embarrassment and misapprehension arose from the fact that we have unfortunately no records of the meetings of the Operative Lodges of England in the 17th century, and nothing but traditional and generally mythical accounts of their usages during that period.
The sister kingdom of Scotland has been more fortunate in this respect, and the valuable work of Brother Lyon, on the History of the Lodge of Edinborough, has supplied us with authentic records of the Scottish Lodges at a much earlier date.
These records will furnish us with some information in respect to the contemporaneous English Lodges which was have every reason to suppose were governed by usages not very different from those of the Lodges in the adjacent kingdom. Mr. Lyon has on this subject the following remarks, which may be opportunely quoted on the present occasion.
"The earliest date at which non‑professionals are known to have been received into an English Lodge is 1646.
The evidence of this is derived from the diary of one of the persons so admitted; but the preceding minutes {1} afford authentic instances of Speculative Masons having been admitted to the fellowship of the Lodge of
{1} Minutes of the Lodge of Cannongate, Kilwinning, for 1635, quoted by him in a precedding page.
Edinburgh twelve years prior to the reception of Colonel Main warring and Elias Ashmole in the Lodge of Warrington and thirty‑ eight years before the date at which the presence of Gentleman Masons is first discernible in the Lodge of Kilwinning by the election of Lord Cassillis to the deaconship.
It is worthy of remark that, with singularly few exceptions, the non‑operatives who were admitted to Masonic fellowship in the Lodges of Edinburgh and Kilwinning, during the 17th century, were persons of quality, the most distinguished of whom, as the natural result of its metropolitan position, being made in the former Lodge.
Their admission to fellowship in an institution composed of Operative Masons associated together for purposes of their Craft would in all probability originate in a desire to elevate its position and increase its influence, and once adopted, the system would further recommend itself to the Fraternity by the opportunities which it presented for cultivating the friendship and enjoying the society of gentlemen to whom in ordinary circumstances there was little chance of their ever being personally known.
On the other hand, non‑professionals connecting themselves with the Lodge by the ties of membership would, we believe, be actuated partly by a disposition to reciprocate the feelings that had prompted the bestowal of the fellowship partly by curiosity to penetrate the arcana of the Craft, and partly by the novelty of the situation as members of a secret society and participants in its ceremonies and festivities.
But whatever may have been the rnotives which animated the parties on either side, the tie which united them was a purely honorary one." {1}
What is here said by Lyon of the Scottish Lodges may, I think, be with equal propriety applied to those of England at the same period.
There was in 1646 a Lodge of Operative Masons at Warrington, just as there was a similar one at Edinburgh.
Into this Lodge Colonel Mainwarring and Elias Ashmole, both non‑ professional gentlemen, were admitted as honorary members, or, to use the language of the latter, were " made Freemasons," a technical term that has been preserved to the present day.
But thirty‑five years afterward, being then a resident of London, he was summoned to attend a meeting of the Company of Masons, to be held at their hall in Masons' Alley, Basinghall Street,
{1} Lyon, "History of the Lodge of Edinburgh," p. 81
and there, according to His own account, he was "admitted into the fellowship of Freemasons." How are we to explain this apparent double or renewed admission? But mark the difference of language.
In 1646 he was "made a Freemason." In 1682 he was admitted into the fellowship of Freemasons." The distinction is an important one.
The Masons' Company in 1682 constituted in London one of those many city companies which embraced the various trades and handicrafts of the metropolis.
Stowe, in his Survey of London, says that " the Masons, otherwise termed Freemasons, were a society of ancient standing and good reckoning, by means of affable and kind meetings divers time, and as a loving brotherhood should use to do, did frequent their mutual assemblies in the time of King Henry IV, in the 12th year of whose most gracious reign they were incorporated."
In Cheswell's New View of London, printed in 1708, it is said that the Masons' Company "were incorporated about the year 1410, having been called the Free Masons, a Fraternity of great account, who have been honored by several Kings, and very many of the Nobility and Gentry being of their Society.
They are governed by a Master, 2 Wardens, 25 Assistants, and there are 65 on the Livery."
Maitland, in his London and its Environs, says, speaking of the Masons: "This company had their arms granted by Clarencieux, King‑ at‑Arms, in the year 1477, though the members were not incorporated by letters patent till they obtained them from King Charles II. in 1677.
They have a small convenient hall in Masons' Alley, Basinghall Street."
There were then, in the time of Ashmole, two distinct bodies of men practicing the Craft of Operative Masonry, namely, the Lodges which were to be found in various parts of the country, and the Company of Masons, whose seat was at London.
Into one of the Lodges, which was situated at Warrington, in Lancashire, Ashmole had in 1646 received honorary membership, which, in compliance with the technical language of that and of the present day, he called being "made a Freemason." But this did not constitute him a member of the Masons' Company of London, for this was a distinct incorporated society, with its exclusive rules and regulations, and admission into which could only be obtained by the consent of the members.
There were many Masons who were not members of the Company.
Ashmole, who had for thirty‑five years been a Freemason, by virtue of his making at Warrington, was in 1682 elected a member of this Masons' Company, and this he styles being "admitted into the fellowship of Freemasons "‑that is, he was admitted to the fellowship or membership of the Company and made " free " of it.
From all of which we may draw the following conclusions: First, that in 1646, at the very date assigned by Nicolai for the organization of the Freemasons as a secret political society, under the leadership of Ashmole and Lilly, the former, being as yet unacquainted with the latter, was at Warrington, in Lancashire, where he found a Lodge of Masons already organized and with its proper officers and its members, by whom he was admitted as an honorary non‑professional member of the Craft.
And secondly, that while in London be was admitted, being already a Freemason, to the fellowship of the Masons' Company.
And thirdly, that he was also a member of the fraternity of Astrologers, having been admitted probably in 1649, and regularly attended their annual feast from that year to 1658, when the festival, and perhaps the fraternity, was suspended until 1682, when it was again revived.
But during all this time it is evident from the memoranda of Ashmole that the Freemasons and the Astrologers were two entirely distinct bodies.
Lilly, who was the head of the Astrologers, was, we may say almost with certainty, not a Freemason, else the spirit of minuteness with which he has written his autobiography would not have permitted him to omit what to his peculiar frame of maid would have been so important a circumstance as connecting him still more closely with his admired friend, Elias Ashmole, nor would the latter have neglected to record it in his diary, written with even still greater minuteness than Lilly's memoirs.
Notwithstanding the clear historical testimony which shows that Lodges of Freemasons had been organized long before the time of Ashmok, and that he had actually been made a Freemason in one of them, many writers, both Masonic and profane, have maintained the erroneous doctrine that Ashmole was the founder of the Masonic Society.
'Thus Chambers, in their Encyclopedia say that " Masonry was founded by Ashmole some of his literary friends," and De Quincey expressed the same opinion.
Mr. John Yarker, in his very readable Notes on the Scientific and Religious Mysteries of Antiquity, offers a modified view and a compromise of the subject.
He refers to the meeting of the chemical adepts at Masons' Hall (a fact of which we have no evidence), and then to the "Feast of the Astrologers " which Ashmole attended.
He follows Nicolai in asserting that their allegories were founded on Bacon's House of Solomon, and says that they used as emblems the sun, moon, square, triangle, etc.
And he concludes, "it is possible that Ashmole may have consolidated the customs of the two associations, but there is no evidence that any Lodge of this, his speculative rite, came under the Masonic Constitution."' {1}
We may also say that it is possible that Ashmole may have invented a speculative rite of some kind, but there is no evidence that he did so.
Many things are possible that are not probable, and many probable that are not actual.
History is made up of facts, and not of possibilities or probabilities.
Ashmole himself entertained a very different and much more correct notion of the origin of Masonry than any of those who have striven to claim him as its founder.
Dr. Knipe, of Christ Church, Oxford, in a letter to the publisher of Ashmole's Life, says: " What from Mr. E. Ashmole's collections I could gather was, that the report of our society's taking rise from a bull granted by the Pope in the reign of Henry III, to some Italian architects to travel over all Europe, to erect chapels, was illfounded.
Such a bull there was, and these architects were Masons; but this bull, in the opinion of the learned Mr. Ashmole, was confirmative only, and did not, by any means, create our Fraternity, or even establish them in this kingdom."
This settles the question.
Ashmole could not have been the founder of Freemasonry in London in 1646, since he himself expressed the belief that the Institution had existed in England before the 13th century.
There is no doubt, as I have already said, that he was very intimately connected with the Astrologers.
Dr. Krause, in his Three Oldest Documents of the Masonic Brotherhood, quotes the following passage from Lilly's History of my Life and Titles. (I can not
{1} "Notes on the Scientific and Religious Mysteries of Antiquity," p. 106 {2} "Die drei altesten Kunsturkunden der Freimaurerbruderschaft," IV., 286
find it in my own copy of that work, but the statements are corroborated by Ashmole's diary.) "
"The King's affairs being now grown desperate, Mr. Ashmole withdrew himself, after the surrender of the Garrison of Worcester, into Cheshire, where he continued till the end of October, and then came up to London, where he became acquainted with Master, afterwords Sir Jonas Moore, Mr. William Lilly, and Mr. John Booker, esteemed the greatest astrologers iii the world, by whom he was caressed, instructed and received into their fraternity, which then made a very considerable figure, as appeared by the great resort of persons of distinction to their annual feast, of which Mr. Ashmole was afterwards elected Steward."
Ashmole left Worcester for Cheshire July 24, 1646, and moved from Cheshire to London October 25, of the same year.
In that interval of three months he was made a Freemason, at Warrington.
At that time he was not acquainted with Lilly, Moore, or Booker, and knew nothing of astrology or of the great astrologers.
This destroys the accuracy of Nicolai's assertion that the meeting held at Masons' Hall, in 1682, by Ashmole, Lilly, and other astrologers, when they founded the Society of Freemasons, was preceded by a similar and initiatory one, in 1646, at Warrington.
A few words must now be said upon the subject of Bacon's House of Solomon, which Nicolai and others supposed to have first given rise to the Masonic allegory which was afterward changed to that of the Temple of Solomon.
Bacon, in his fragmentary and unfinished romance of the New Atlantis, had devised the fable of an island of Bensalem, in which was an institution or college called the House of Solomon, the fellows of which were to be students of philosophy and investigators of science.
He thus described their occupations:
"We have twelve that sail into foreign countries, who bring in the books and patterns of experiments of all other parts; these we call merchants of light.
We have three that collect the experiments that are in all books; these are called depredators.
We have three that collect experiments of all mechanical arts, and also of liberal sciences, and also of practices which are not brought into the arts; these we call mystery men.
We have three that try new experiments such as themselves think good; these we call pioneers or miners. We have three that draw the experiments of the former four into titles and tablets to give the better light for the drawing of observations and axioms out of them; these we call compilers.
We have three that bind themselves looking into the experiments of their fellows and cast about how to draw out of them things of use and practice for man's life and knowledge as well for iworks as for plain demonstrations and the easy and clear discovering of the virtues and parts of bodies; these we call doing men and benefactors. Then after divers meetings and consults of our whole number to consider of the former labors and collections, we have three to take care out of them to direct new experiments of higher light, more penetrating into nature than the former; these we call lamps.
We have three others that do execute the experiments so directed and report them; these we call inoculators.
Lastly we have three that raise the former discoveries by experiments into greater observations, axioms and aphorisms; these we call interpreters of nature." {1}
It is evident from this schedule of the occupations of the inmates of the House of Solomon that it could not in the remotest degree have been made the foundatiort of a Masonic allegory.
In fact, the suggestion of a Masonic connection could have been derived only from a confused idea of the relation of the House to the Temple of Solomon, a misapprehension which a reading of the New Atlantis would readily remove.
As Plato had written his Republic and Sir Thomas More his Utopia to give their ideas of a model commonwealth, so Lord Bacon commenced his New Atlantis to furnish his idea of a model college to be instituted for the study and interpretation of nature by experimental methods. These views were first introduced in his Advancement of Human Learning, and would have been perfected in his New Atlantis had he ever completed it.
The new philosophy of Bacon had produced a great revolution in the minds of thinking men, and that group of philosophers who in the 17th century, as Dr. Whewell says, "began to knock at the door where truth was to be found " would very wisely seek the key in the inductive and experimental method taught by Bacon.
To the learned men, therefore, who first met at the house of Dr. Goddard and the other members, and whose meetings finally ended in the formation of the Royal Society, the allegory of the House of
{1} "New Atlantis," Works, vol. ii., p. 376
Solomon very probably furnished valuable hints for the pursuit of their experimental studies.
To Freemasons in any age the allegory would have been useless and unprofitable, and could by no ingenious method have been twisted into a foundation for their symbolic science The hypothesis that it was adopted in 1646 by the founders of Freemasonry as a fitting allegory for their esoteric system of instruction is evidently too absurd to need further refutation.
In conclusion, we may unhesitatingly concur with Bro. W. J. Hughan in his opinion that the theory which assigns the foundation of Freemasonry to Elias Ashmole and his friends the Astrologers " is opposed to existing documents dating before and since his initiation." It is equally opposed to the whole current of authentic history, and is unsupported by the character of the Institution and true nature of its symbolism.
P. 328
CHAPTER XXXV
THE ROSICRUCIANS AND THE FREEMASONS
Of all the theories which have been advanced in relation to the origin of Freemasonry from some one of the secret sects, either of antiquity or of the Middle Ages, there is none more interesting than that which seeks to connect it with the Hermetic philosophy, because there is none which presents more plausible claims to our consideration.
There can be no doubt that in some of what are called the High Degrees there is a very palpable infusion of a Hermetic element.
This can not be denied, because the evidence will be most apparent to any one who examines their rituals, and some by their very titles, in which the Hermetic language and a reference to Hermetic principles are adopted, plainly admit the connection and the influence.
There is, therefore, necessity to investigate the question whether or not some of those High or Philosophic Degrees which were fabricated about the middle of the last century are or are not of a Hermetic character, because the time of their invention, when Craft Masonry was already in a fixed condition, removes them entirely out of the problem which relates to the origin of the Masonic Institution.
No matter when Freemasonry was established, the High Degrees were an afterthought, and might very well be tinctured with the principles of any philosophy which prevailed at the period of their invention.
But it is a question of some interest to the Masonic scholar whether at the time of the so‑called Revival of Freemasonry, in the early part of the 18th century, certain Hermetic degrees did not exist which sought to connect themselves with the system of Masonry.
And it is a question of still greater interest whether this attempt was successful so far, at least, as to impress upon the features of that early Freemasonry a portion of the characteristic tints of the Hermetic philosophy, some of the marks of which may still remain in our modern system.
But as the Hermetic philosophy was that which was invented and taught by the Rosicrucians, before we can attempt to resolve these important and interesting questions, it will be necessary to take a brief glance at the history and the character of Rosicrucianism.
On the 17th of August, 1586, Johann Valentin Andred was born at Herrenberg, a small market‑town of what was afterward the kingdom of Wurtemburg. After a studious youth, during which he became possessed of a more than moderate share of learning, he departed in 1610 on a pilgrimage through Germany, Austria, Italy, and France, supplied with but little money, but with an indomitable desire for the acquisition of knowledge. Returning home, in 1614, he embraced the clerical profession and was appointed a deacon in the town of Vaihingen, and by subsequent promotions reached, in 1634, the positions of Protestant prelate of the Abbey of Bebenhausen and spiritual counsellor of the Duchy of Brunswick.
He died on the 27th of June, 1654, at the ripe age of sixty‑eight years.
On the moral character of Andred his biographers have lavished their encomiums.
A philanthropist from his earliest life, he carried, or sought to carry, his plans of benevolence into active operation.
Wherever, says Vaughan, the church, the school, the institute of charity have fallen into ruin or distress, there the indefatigable Andred sought to restore them.
He was, says another writer, the guardian genius and the comforter of the suffering; he was a practical helper as well as a theoretical adviser; in the times of dearth and famine, many thousand poor were fed and clothed by his exertions, and the town of Kalw, of which, in 1720, he was appointed the superintendent, long enjoyed the benefit of many charitable institutions which owed their origin to his solicitations and zeal.
It is not surprising that a man indued with such benevolent feelings and actuated by such a spirit of philanthropy should have viewed with deep regret the corruptions of the times in which he lived, and should have sought to devise some plan by which the condition of his fellow‑men might be ameliorated and the dry, effete
{1} Biographical Sketch by Wm. Bell, in Freemasons' Quarterly Magazine, London, vol. ii., N.S., 1854, p. 27
theology of the church be converted into some more living, active, humanizing system.
For the accomplishment of this purpose he could see no better method than the establishment of a practical philanthropical fraternity, one that did not at that time exist, but the formation of which he resolved to suggest to such noble minds as might be stimulated to the enterprise.
With this view he invoked the assistance of fiction, and hence there appeared, in 1615, a work which he entitled the Report of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, or, in its original Latin, Fama Fraternitatis Rose Crucis.
An edition had been published the year before with the title of Universal Reformation of the Whole World, with a Report of the Worshipful Order of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, addressed to all the Learned Men and Nobility of Europe. {1} There was another work, published in 1616, with the title of Chemische Hochzeit, or Chemical Nuptials, by Christian Rosencreutz.
All of these books were published anonymously, but they were universally attributed to the pen of Andred, and were all intended for one purpose, that of discovering by the character of their reception who were the true lovers of wisdom and philanthropy, and of inducing them to come forward to the perfection of the enterprise, by transforming this fabulous society into a real and active organization.
The romantic story of Christian Rosencreutz, the supposed founder of the Order, is thus told by Andrea.
I have borrowed for the most part the language of Mr. Sloane, {2} who, although his views and deductions on the subject are for the most part erroneous, has yet given us the best English epitome of the myth of Andred.
According to Andrea's tale, a certain Christian Rosencreutz, though of good birth, found himself compelled from poverty to enter the cloister at a very early period of life.
He was only sixteen years old when one of the monks purposed a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulcher, and Rosencreutz, as a special favor, was permitted to accompany him.
At Cyprus the monk is taken ill, but Rosencreutz proceeds onward to Damascus with the intention of going on to
{1} " Allgemeine und General Reformation der ganzen, weiten Welt. Beneben der Fama Fraternitatis des Loblichen Ordens des Rosencreutzes, an alle Gelehrte und Haupter Europae geschreiben," Cassel, 1614.
{2} "New Curiosities of Literature," vol. ii., p. 44
Jerusalem.
While detained in the former city by the fatigues of his journey, he hears of the wonders performed by the sages of Damascus, and, his curiosity being excited, he places himself under their direction.
Three years having been spent in the acquisition of their most hidden mysteries, he sets sail from the Gulf of Arabia for Egypt.
There he studies the nature of plants and animals and then repairs, in obedience to the instructions of his Arabian masters, to Fez, in Africa.
In this city it was the custom of the Arab and African sages to meet annually for the purpose of communicating to each other the results of their experience and inquiries, and here he passed two years in study. He then crossed over to Spain, but not meeting there with a favorable reception, he returned to his native country.
But as Germany was then filled with mystics of all kinds, his proposals for a reformation in morals and science meets with so little sympathy from the public that he resolves to establish a society of his own.
With this view he selects three of his favorite companions from his old convent.
To them, under a solemn vow of secrecy, he communicates the ‑knowledge which he had acquired during his travels.
He imposes on them the duty of committing it to writing and of forming a magical vocabulary for the benefit of future students.
But in addition to this task they also undertook to prescribe gratuitously for all the sick who should ask their assistance, and as in a short time the concourse of patients became so great as materially to interfere with their other duties, and as a building which Rosencreutz had been erecting, called the Temple of the Holy Ghost, was now completed, he determines to increase the number of the brotherhood, and accordingly initiates four new members.
When all is completed, and the eight brethren are instructed in the mysteries of the Order, they separate, according to agreement, two only staying with Father Christian.
The other six, after traveling for a year, are to return and communicate the results of their experience.
The two who had stayed at home are then to be relieved by two of the travelers, so that the founder may never be alone, and the six again divide and travel for a year.
The laws of the Order as they had been prescribed by Rosencreutz were as follows:
1. That they should devote themselves to no other Occupation than that of the gratuitous practice of physic.
2. That they were not to wear a particular habit, but were to conform in this respect to the customs of the country in which they might happen to be.
3. That each one was to present himself on a certain day in the year at the Temple of the Holy Ghost, or send an excuse for his absence.
4. That each one was to look out for a brother to succeed him in the event of his death.
5. That the letters R. C. were to be their seal, watchword, and title.
6. That the brotherhood was to be kept a secret for one hundred years.
When one hundred years old, Christian Rosencreutz died, but the place of his burial was unknown to any one but the two brothers who were with him at the time of his death, and they carried the secret with them to the grave.
The society, however, continued to exist unknown to the world, always consisting of eight members only, until another hundred and twenty years had elapsed, when, according to a tradition of the Order, the grave of Father Rosencreutz was to be discovered, and the brotherhood to be no longer a mystery to the world.
It was about this time that the brethren began to make some alterations in their building, and thought of removing to another and more fitting situation the memorial tablet, on which were inscribed the names of their associates.
The plate, which was of brass, was affixed to the wall by means of a nail in its center, and so firmly was it fastened that in tearing it away a portion of the plaster of the wall became detached and exposed a concealed door.
Upon this door being still further cleansed from the incrustation, there appeared above it in large letters the following words: POST CXX ANNOS PATEBO ‑ after one hundred and twenty years I will be opened.
Although the brethren were greatly delighted at the discovery, they so far restrained their curiosity as not to open the door until the next morning, when they found themselves in a vault of seven sides each side five feet wide and eight feet high.
It was lighted by an artificial sun in the center of the arched roof, while in the middle of the floor, instead of a tomb, stood a round altar covered with a small brass plate, on which was this inscription:
A. C. R. C. Hoc, universi compendium, vivus mihi sepulchrum feci‑ while living, I made this epitome of the universe my sepulcher.
About the outer edge was:
Jesus mihi omnia ‑, Jesus is all things to me.
In the center were four figures, each enclosed in a circle, with these words inscribed around them:
1.Nequaquam vacuus.
2.Legis Jugum.
3.Liberias Evangelii 4.Dei gloria intacia.
That is ‑ 1. By no means void. 2. The yoke of the Law. 3. The liberty of the Gospel. 4. The unsullied Glory of God.
On seeing all this, the brethren knelt down and returned thanks to God for having made them so much wiser than the rest of the world.
Then they divided the vault into three parts, the roof, the wall, and the pavement.
The first and the last were divided into seven triangles, corresponding to the seven sides of the wall, each of which formed the base of a triangle, while the apices met in the center of the roof and of the pavement.
Each side was divided into ten squares, containing figures and sentences which were to be explained to the new initiates.
In each side there was also a door opening upon a closet, wherein were stored up many rare articles, such as the secret books of the Order, the vocabulary of Paracelsus, and other things of. a similar nature.
In one of the closets they discovered the life of their founder; in others they found curious mirrors, burning lamps, and a variety of objects intended to aid in rebuilding the Order, which, after the lapse of many centuries, was to fall into decay.
Pushing aside the altar, they came upon a strong brass plate, which being removed, they beheld the corpse of Rosencreutz as freshly preserved as on the day when it had been deposited, and under his arm a volume of vellum with letters of gold, containing, among other things, the names of the eight brethren who had founded the Order.
Such is an outline of the story of Christian Rosencreutz and his Rosicrucian Order as it is told in the Fama Fraternitatis.
It is very evident that Andrea composed this romance ‑ for it is nothing else not to record the existence of any actual society, but only that it might serve as a suggestion to the learned and the philanthropic to engage in the establishment of some such benevolent association.
"He hoped;" says Vaughan, " that the few nobler minds whom he desired to organize would see through the veil of fiction in which he had invested his proposal; that he might communicate personally with some such, if they should appear, or that his book might lead them to form among themselves a practical philanthropic confederacy answering to the serious purpose he had embodied in his fiction." {1}
But his design was misunderstood then, as it has been since, and everywhere his fable was accepted as a fact.
Diligent search was made by the credulous for the discovery of the Temple of the Holy Ghost.
Printed letters appeared continually, addressed to the unknown brotherhood, seeking admission into the fraternity‑a fraternity that existed only in the pages of the Fama.
But the irresponsive silence to so many applications awoke the suspicions of some, while the continued mystery strengthened the credulity of others.
The brotherhood, whose actual house "lay beneath the Doctor's hat of Valentin Andred," was violently attacked and as vigorously defended in numerous books and pamphlets which during that period flooded the German press.
The learned men among the Germans did not give a favoring ear to the philanthropic suggestions of Andred, but the mystical notions contained in his fabulous history were seized with avidity by the charlatans, who added to them the dreams of the alchemists and the reveries of the astrologers, so that the post‑Andrean Rosicrucianism became a very different thing from that which had been devised by its original author.
It does not, however, appear that the Rosicrucians, as an organized society, made any stand in Germany.
Descartes says that after strict search he could not find a single lodge in that country.
But it extended, as we will presently see, into England, and there became identified as a mystical association.
It is strange what misapprehension, either willful or mistaken, has existed in respect to the relations of Andrea to Rosicrucianism.
We have no more right or reason to attribute the detection of such
{1} "Hours with the Mystics," vol. ii., p. 103
a sect to the German theologian than we have to ascribe the discovery of the republic of Utopia to Sir Thomas More, or of the island of Bensalem to Lord Bacon.
In each of these instances a fiction was invented on which the author might impose his philosophical or political thoughts, with no dream that readers would take that for fact which was merely intended for fiction.
And yet Rhigellini, in his Masonry Considered as the Result of the Egyptian, Jewish, and Christian Religions, while declining to express an opinion on the allegorical question, as if there might be a doubt on the subject, respects the legend as it had been given in the Fama, and asserting that on the return of Rosencreutz to Germany " he instituted secret societies with an initiation that resembled that of the early Christians." {1}
He antedates the Chemical Nuptials ials of Andred a century and a half, ascribes the authorship of that work to Christian Rosencreutz, as if he were a real personage, and thinks that he established, in 1459, the Rite of the Theosophists, the earliest branch of the Rose Croix, or the Rosicrucians; for the French make no distinction in the two words, though in history they are entirely different.
History written in this way is worse than fable‑it is an ignis fatuus which can only lead astray.
And yet this is the method in which Masonic history has too often been treated.
Nicolai, although the deductions by which he connects Freemasonry with Rosicrucianism are wholly untenable, is yet, in his treatment of the latter, more honest or less ignorant. He adopts the correct view when he says that the Fama Fraternitatis only announced a general reformation and exhorted all wise men to unite in a proposed society for the purpose of removing corruption and restoring wisdom.
He commends it as a charming vision, full of poesy and imagination, but of a singular extravagance very common in the writings of that age.
And he notes the fact that while the Alchemists have sought in that work for the secrets of their mysteries, it really contains the gravest satire on their absurd pretensions.
The Fama Fraternitatis had undoubtedly excited the curiosity of the Mystics, who abounded in Germany at the time of its appear. ance, of whom not the least prominent were the Alchemists.
These, having sought in vain for the invisible society of the Rosicrucians, as it had been described in the romance of Andred, resolved to form
{1} "La Maconnerie consideree comme le resultant des Religions Egyptienne, Juive et Chretienne," L. iii., p. 108
such a society for themselves.
But, to the disappointment and the displeasure of the author of the Fama, they neglected or postponed the moral reformation which he had sought, and substituted the visionary schemes of the Alchemists, a body of quasi‑philosophers who assigned their origin as students of nature and seekers of the philosophers stone and the elixir of immortality to a very remote period.
Thus it is that I trace the origin of the Rosicrucians, not to Valentin Andrea, nor to Christian Rosencreutz, who was only the coinage of his brain, but to the influence exerted by him upon certain Mystics and Alchemists who, whether they accepted the legend of Rosencreutz as a fiction or as a verity, at least made diligent use of it in the establishment of their new society.
I am not, therefore, disposed to doubt the statement of L. C. Orvius, as cited by Nicolai, that in 1622 there was a society of Alchemists at The Hague, who called themselves Rosicrucians and claimed Rosencreutz as their founder.
Michael Maier, the physician of the Emperor Rudolf II., devoted himself in the early part of the 17th century to the pursuits of alchemy, and, having adopted the mystical views of the Rosicrucians, is said to have introduced that society into England.
Maier was the author of many works in Latin in defense and in explanation of the Rosicrucian system.
Among them was an epistle addressed "To all lovers of true chemistry throughout Germany, and especially to that Order which has hitherto lain concealed, but is now probably made known by the Report of the Fraternity (Fama Fraternitatis) and their admirable Confession." {1} In this work he uses the following language:
"What is contained in the Fama and confessio is true.
It is a very childish objection that the brotherhood have promised so much and performed so little.
The Masters of the Order hold out the Rose as a remote reward, but they impose the Cross on all who are entering.
Like the Pythagoreans and the Egyptians, the Rosicrucians extract vows of silence and secrecy.
Ignorant men have treated the whole as a fiction; but this has arisen from the probation of five years to which they subject even well qualified novices,
{1} "Omnibus verae chymiae Amantibus per Germaniam, et precipere illi Ordini adhue delitescenti, at Fama Fraternitatis et confessione sua admiranda et probabile manifestato."
before they are admitted to the higher mysteries, and within that period they are taught how to govern their own tongues!
Although Maier died in 1622, it appears that he had lived long enough to take part in the organization of the Rosicrucian sect, which had been formed out of the suggestions of Andred.
His views on this subject were, however, peculiar and different from those of most of the new disciples.
He denied that the Order had derived either its origin or its name from the person called Rosencreutz.
He says that the founder of the society, having given his disciples the letters R. C. as a sign of their fraternity, they improperly made out of them the words Rose and Cross.
But these heterodox opinions were not accepted by the Rosicrucians in general, who still adhered to Andrea's legend as the source and the signification of their Order.
At one time Maier went to England, where he became intimately acquainted with Dr. Robert Fludd, the most famous as well as the earliest of the English Rosicrucians.
Robert Fludd was a physician of London, who was born in 1574 and died in 1637.
He was a zealous student of alchemy, theosophy, and every other branch of mysticism, and wrote in defense of Rosicrucianism, of which sect he was an active member.
Among his earliest works is one published in 1616 under the title of A Compendious Apology clearing the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross from the stains of suspicion and infamy cast upon them.
There is much doubt whether Maier communicated the system of Rosicrucianism to Fludd or whether Fludd had already received it from Germany before the visit of Maier.
The only authority for the former statement is De Quincey (a most unreliable one), and the date of Fludd's Apology militates against it.
Fludd's explanation of the name of the sect differs from that of both Andrea and Maier.
It is, he says, to be taken in a figurative sense, and alludes to the cross dyed with the blood of Christ.
In this explanation he approaches very nearly to the idea entertained by the members of the modern Rose Croix degree.
No matter who was the missionary that brought it over, it is very certain that Rosicrucianism was introduced from Germany, its birthplace,
{1} "Apologia Compendiaria, Fraternitatem de Rosea Cruce suspicionis et infamiae maculis aspersum abluens."
into England at a very early period of the 17th century, and it is equally certain that after its introduction it flourished, though an exotic, with more vigor than it ever had in its native soil.
That there were in that century, and even in the beginning of the succeeding one, mystical initiations wholly unconnected with Freemasonry, but openly professing a Hermetic or Rosicrucian character and origin, may very readily be supposed from existing documents.
It is a misfortune that such authors as Buhle, Nicolai, and Rhigellini, with many others, to say nothing of such nonmasonic writers as Sloane and De Quincey, who were necessarily mere sciolists in all Masonic studies, should have confounded the two institutions, and, because both were mystical, and one appeared to follow (although it really did not) the other in point of time, should have proclaimed the theory (wholly untenable) that Freemasonry is indebted for its origin to Rosicrucianism.
The writings of Lilly and Ashmole, both learned men for the age in which they lived, prove the existance of a mystical philosophy in England in the 17th century, in which each of them was a participant. The Astrologers,who were deeply imbued with the Hermetic philosophy, held their social meetings for mutual instruction and their annual feasts, and Ashmole gives hints of his initiation into what I suppose to have been alchemical or Rosicrucian wisdom by one whom he reverently calls " Father Backhouse."
But we have the clearest documentary testimony of the existence of a Hermetic degree or system at the beginning of the 18th century, and about the time of what is called the Revival of Masonry in England, by the establishment of the Grand Lodge at London, and which, from other undoubted testimony, we know were not Masonic.
This testimony is found in a rare work, some portions of whose contents, in reference to this subject, are well worthy of a careful review.
In the year 1722 there was published in London a work in small octave bearing the following title: {1} "Long Livers: A curious History of such Persons of both Sexes who have lived several Ages and grown Young again: With the rare Secret of Rejuvenescency of Arnoldus de Villa Nova.
And a
{1} A copy of this work, and, most probably, the only one in this country, is in the valuable library of Bro. Carson, of Cincinnati, and to it I am indebted for the extracts that I have made.
great many approved and invaluable Rules to prolong Life: Also how to prepare the Universal Medicine.
Most humbly dedicated to the Grand Master, Masters, Wardens, and Brethren of the Most Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of the FREE MASONS of Great Britain and Ireland.
By Engenius Philaiethes, F. R. S., Author of the Treatise of the Plague. Viri Fratres audite me.
Act. xv. 13. Diligite Fraternitatem timete Deum honorate Regem.1. Pet. ii. 17. LONDON.
Printed for J. Holland, at the Bible and Ball, in St. Paul's Church Yard, and L. Stokoe, at Charing Cross, 1722." pp. 64‑199.
Engenius Philalethes was the pseudonym of Thomas Vaughn, a celebrated Rosicrucian of the 17th century, who published, in 1659, a translation of the Fama Fraternitatis into English.
But, as he was born in 1612, it is not to be supposed that he wrote the present work.
It is, however, not very important to identify this second Philalethes.
It is sufficient for our purpose to know that it is a Hermetic treatise written by a Rosicrucian, of which the title alone‑the references to the renewal of youth, one of the Rosicrucian secrets, to the recipe of the great Rosicrucian Villa Nova, or Arnold de Villaneuve, and to the Universal Medicine, the Rosicrucian Elixir Vitae‑would be sufficient evidence.
But the only matter of interest in connection. with the present subject is that this Hermetic work, written, or at least printed, in 1722, one year before the publication of the first edition of Anderson's constitutions, refers explicitly to the existence of a higher initiation than that of the Craft degrees, which the author seeks to interweave in the Masonic system.
This is evidently shown in portions of the dedication, which is inscribed to ‑ the Grand Master, Masters, Wardens, and Brethren of the Most Ancient and Most Honorable Fraternity of the Free Masons of Great Britain and Ireland"; and it is dedicated to them by their " Brother Engenius Philalethes."
This fraternal subscription shows that he was a Freemason as well as a Rosicrucian, and therefore must have been acquainted with both systems.
The important fact, in this dedication, is that the writer alludes, in language that can not be mistaken, to a certain higher degree, or to a more exalted initiation, to the attainment of which the primitive degrees of Ancient Craft Masonry were preparatory.
Thus he says, addressing the Freemasons: "I present you with the following sheets, as belonging more properly to you than any else.
But what I here say, those of you who are not far illuminated, who stand in the outward place and are not worthy to look behind the veil, may find no disagreeable or unprofitable entertainment; and those who are so happy as to have greater light, will discover under these shadows, somewhat truly great and noble and worthy the serious attention of a genius the most elevated and sublime‑the spiritual, celestial cube, the only true, solid, and immovable basis and foundation of all knowledge, peace, and happiness." (Page iv.)
Another passage will show that the writer was not only thoroughly acquainted with the religious, philosophical, and symbolic character of the institution, but that he wrote evidently under the impression (rather I should say the knowledge) that at that day others besides himself had sought to connect Freemasonry with Rosicrucianism.
He says:
"Remember that you are the salt of the earth, the light of the world, and the fire of the universe.
Ye are living stones, built up a spiritual house, who believe and rely on the chief Lapis Angularis, which the refractory and disobedient builders disallowed; you are called from darkness to light; you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood."
Here the symbolism is Masonic, but it is also Rosicrucian.
The Masons had derived their symbol of the STONE from the metaphor of the Apostle, and like him had given it a spiritual signification.
The Rosicrucians had also the Stone as their most important symbol.
"Now," says one of them, "in this discourse will I manifest to thee the natural condition of the Stone of the Philosophers, apparelled with a triple garment, even this Stone of Riches and Charity, the Stone of Relief from Languishment ‑ in which is contained every secret; being a Divine Mystery and Gift of God, than which there is nothing more sublime."' {1}
It was natural that a Rosicrucian, iii addressing Freemasons, should refer to a symbol common to both, though each derived its interpretation through a different channel.
In another passage he refers to the seven liberal arts, of which he calls Astronomy "the grandest and most sublime."
{1} Dialogue of Arislaus in the Alchemist's Enchiridion, 1672.
Quoted by Hitchcock in his "Alchemy and the Alchemists," p. 39
This was the Rosicrucian doctrine.
In that of the Freemasons the precedency is given to Geometry.
Here we find a difference between the two institutions which proves their separate and independent existence.
Still more important differences will be found in the following passages, which, while they intimate a higher degree, show that it was a Hermetic one, which, however, the Rosicrucian writer was willing to ingraft on Freemasonry.
He says:
"And now, my Brethren, you of the higher class (note that he does not call it a degree) permit me a few words, since you are but few; and these few words I shall speak to you in riddles, because to you it is given to know those mysteries which are hidden from the unworthy.
"Have you not seen then, my dearest Brethren, that stupendous bath, filled with the most limpid water, than which no pure can be purer, of such admirable mechanism, that makes even the greatest philosopher gaze with wonder and astonishment, and is the subject of the contemplation of the wisest men.
Its form is a quadrate sublimely placed on six others, blazing all with celestial jewels, each angularly supported with four lions.
Here repose our mighty King and Queen, (I speak foolishly, I am not worthy to be of you), the King shining in his glorious apparel of transparent, incorruptible gold, beset with living sapphires; he is fair and ruddy, and feeds among the lilies; his eyes, two carbuncles, the most brilliant, darting prolific never‑dying fires; and his large, flowing hair, blacker than the deepest black or plumage of the long‑lived crow; his royal consort vested in tissue of immortal silver, watered with emeralds, pearl and coral. O mystical union! O admirable commerce!
"Cast now your eyes to the basis of this celestial structure, and you will discover just before it a large basin of porphyrian marble, receiving from the mouth of a large lion's head, to which two bodies displayed on each side of it are conjoined, a greenish fountain of liquid jasper.
Ponder this well and consider.
Haunt no more the woods and forests; (I speak as a fool) haunt no more the fleet; let the flying eagle fly unobserved; busy yourselves no longer with the dancing idiot, swollen toads, and his own tail‑ devouring dragon; leave these as elements to your Tyrones.
" The object of your wishes and desires (some of you may, perhaps have attained it, I speak as a fool), is that admirable thing which has a substance, neither too fiery nor altogether earthy, nor simply watery; neither a quality the most acute or most obtuse, but of a middle nature, and light to the touch, and in some manner soft, at least not hard, not having asperity, but even in some sort sweet to the taste, odorous to the smell, grateful to the sight, agreeable and delectable to the hearing, and pleasant to the thought; in short, that one only thing besides which there is no other, and yet everywhere possible to be found, the blessed and most sacred subject of the square of wise men, that is....... I had almost blabbed it out and been sacrilegiously perjured.
I shall therefore speak of it with a circumlocution yet more dark and obscure, that none but the Sons of Science and those who are illuminated with the sublimest mysteries and profoundest secrets of MASONRY may understand.
. . It is then what brings you, my dearest Brethren, to that pellucid, diaphanous palace of the true disinterested lovers of wisdom, that triumphant pyramid of purple salt, more sparkling and radiant than the finest Orient ruby, in the center of which reposes inaccessible light epitomized, that incorruptible celestial fire, blazing like burning crystal, and brighter than the sun in his full meridian glories, which is that immortal, eternal, never‑dying PYROPUS; the King of genius, whence proceeds everything that is great and wise and happy.
"These things are deeply hidden from common view, and covered with pavilions of thickest darkness, that what is sacred may not be given to dogs or your pearls cast before swine, lest they trample them under foot, and turn again and rend you."
All this is Rosicrucian thought and phraseology.
Its counterpart may be found in the writings of any of the Hermetic philosophers.
But it is not Freemasonry and could be understood by no Freemason relying for his comprehension only on the teaching he had received in his own Order.
It is the language of a Rosicrucian adept addressed to other adepts, who like himself had united with the Fraternity of Freemasons, that they might out of its select coterie choose the most mystical and therefore the most suitable candidates to elevate them to the higher mysteries of their own brotherhood.
That Philalethes and his brother Rosicrucians entertained an opinion of the true character of Speculative Masonry very different from that taught by its founders is evident from other passages of this Dedication.
Unlike Anderson, Desaguliers, and the writers purely Masonic who succeeded them, the author of the Dedication establishes no connection between Architecture and Freemasonry.
Indeed it is somewhat singular that although he names both David and Solomon in the course of his narrative, it is with little respect, especially for the latter, and he does not refer, even by a single word, to the Temple of Jerusalem.
The Freemasonry of this writer is not architectural, but altogether theosophic.
It is evident that as a Hermetic philosopher he sought to identify the Freemasons with the disciples of the Rosicrucian sect rather than with the Operative Masons of the Middle Ages.
This is a point of much interest in the discussion of the question of a connection between the two associa‑ tions, considering that this work was published only five years after the revival.
It tends to show not that Freemasonry was established by the Rosicrucians, but, on the contrary, that at that early period the latter were seeking to ingraft themselves upon the former, and that while they were willing to use the simple degrees of Craft Masonry as a nucleus for the growth of their own fraternity, they looked upon them only as the medium of securing a higher initiation, altogether unmasonic in its character and to which but few Masons ever attained.
Neither Anderson nor Desaguliers, our best because contemporary authority for the state of Masonry in the beginning of the 18th century, give the slightest indication that there was in their day a higher Masonry than that described in the Book of Constitutions of 1723.
The Hermetic clement was evidently not introduced into Speculative Masonry until the middle of the 18th century, when it was infused in a fragmentary form into some of the High Degrees which were at that time fabricated by certain of the Continental manufacturers of Rites.
But if, as Engenius Philalethes plainly indicates, there were in the year 1723 higher degrees, or at least a higher degree, attached to the Masonic system and claimed to be a part of it, which possessed mystical knowledge that was concealed from the great body of the Craft, " who were not far illuminated, who stood in the outward place and were not worthy to look behind the veil "‑by which it is clearly implied that there was another class of initiates who were far illuminated, who stood within the inner place and looked behind the veil‑then the question forces itself upon us, why is it that neither Anderson nor Desaguliers nor any of the writers of that period, nor any of the rituals, make any allusion to this higher and more illuminated system?
The answer is readily at hand.
It is because no such system of initiation, so far as Freemasonry was concerned, existed.
The Master's degree was at that day the consummation and perfection of Speculative Masonry There was nothing above or beyond it.
The Rosicrucians, who, especially in their astrological branch, were then in full force in England, had, as we see from this book, their own initiation into their Hermetic and theosophic system.
Freemasonry then beginning to become popular and being also a mystical society, these mystical brethren of the Rosy Cross were ready to enter within its portals and to take advantage of its organization.
But they soon sought to discriminate between their own perfect wisdom and the imperfect knowledge of their brother Masons, and, Rosicrucian‑like, spoke of an arcana which they only possessed.
There were some Rosicrucians who, like Philalethes, became Freemasons, and some Freemasons, like Elias Ashmole, who became Rosicrucians.
But there was no legitimate derivation of one from the other.
There is no similarity between the two systems‑their origin is different; their symbols, though sometimes identical, have always a different interpretation; and it would be an impossible task to deduce the one historically from the other.
Yet there are not wanting scholars whose judgment on other matters has not been deficient, who have not hesitated to trace Freemasonry to a Rosicrucian source.
Some of these, as Buhle, De Quincey, and Sloane, were not Freemasons, and we can easily ascribe their historical errors to their want of knowledge, but such writers as Nicolai and Reghellini have no such excuse for the fallacy of which they have been guilty.
