(1) King Solomon;
(2) The Temple
of King Solomon;
(3) Euclid;
(4) Pythagoras;
(5) The
Creation of the World;
(6) The Patriarchal Religion;
(7)
Moses;
(8) The Ancient Pagan Mysteries;
(9) The Essenes;
(10)
the Culdees;
(11) The Druids;
(12) The Gypsies;
(13)
The Rosicrucians;
(14) The Crusades;
(15) The Knights
Templar;
(16) Oliver Cromwell;
(17) The Pretender for the
Restoration of the House of Stuart;
(18) Lord Bacon;
(19)
Dr. Desaguliers and his associates in 1717;
(20) The Roman Collegia of Artificers;
(21) The Comacine Masters;
(22) The Steinmetzen;
(23) The French Compagnons;
(24) Sir Christopher
Wren at the building of St. Paul's Cathedral; and
(25) The
English and Scots operative Freemasons of the Middle
Ages.
Evidently, most of these theories must be false.
An hypothesis, in order to ripen into a valid conclusion must
be supported not merely by some fact, but by sufficient fact
to carry moral conviction and remove it from the realm
of conjecture, and, moreover, it must be consistent with
all other known facts. Truth is an entire fabric; anything that
is true will conform to every other thing that is true; what
is false will not match what is true.
The twenty-five
theories listed fall into seven general classes:
The first
group, items (1) to (4), inclusive, are suggested by the Gothic
Legends as explained in a subsequent chapter. But legends are
only legends and, when they are not only unsupported by proof,
but contain within themselves anachronisms and inconsistencies,
they cease to be persuasive or even plausible.
The second
group, items (5) to (7), inclusive, purports to give Freemasonry
Scriptural authority and identify it more or less with the
religion of the ancient Hebrews.
The third group, items (8)
to (13), inclusive, contains the mystical theories based upon the
supposed resemblances between the symbols and ceremonies of
Freemasonry and those of ancient and medieval cults. This kind of
treatment was carried to such extreme that it became
discredited, because it made Freemasonry a type of sun worship,
sex worship, and cabalistic mysticism designed to obscure
rather than to elucidate, to conceal rather than to
reveal.
The fourth group, items (14) and (15), presents the
chivalric or military theories, which are detected to be quite
fanciful when we consider that there was never the
slightest evidence of any such element in Freemasonry until it
was added during the multiplication of degrees in the
eighteenth century.
The fifth group, items (16) and (17)
makes Freemasonry a political tool, first, of Cromwell against
the Stuart Kings, secondly, of the Jacobites to restore the House
of Stuart, and, lastly, of the House of Hanover, which succeeded
the Stuarts. All of these simmer down to the triviality that
some of the French degrees of the eighteenth century
contained references or language indicating that the author or
authors were partisans of the Pretender to the Throne of
England, then a refugee in France.
The sixth group, items
(18) and (19), suggest personal action, influence, or motives.
The claim that Dr. John T. Desaguliers and his associates created
the Society in 1717 is an oversimplification of the revival or
modification which took place in that year, but has the advantage
of casting the burden of proof upon one asserting an earlier
origin. It is based on the scarcity of English lodge records
prior to the Grand Lodge era, but, obviously, must fall if any
records at all of that kind exist, as they do.
The seventh
group, items (20) to (25), inclusive, may be called the operative
theories, and, as these finally developed into the conclusion
generally accepted at the present day, it is appropriate to treat
this group at some length.
The realization that Freemasonry
had its origin in the fraternities of operative stonemasons of
the Middle Ages arose as if by accident. The Abbe Grandidier,
while writing an essay about the Strassburg Cathedral in
1779, discovered old records concerning practices and customs
of the Steinmetzen of medieval Germany which were so
similar to those of the symbolic Freemasonry which had come
from England and had spread over most of Europe that
he expressed the view in a private letter that Freemasonry
had sprung from the Strassburg Steinmetzen. Upon
the publication of that letter, the theory promptly found favor
in Germany, and, in 1785, Paul Vogel issued the first
work appearing anywhere attempting to trace the true origin of
the Society. He concluded that the Steinmetzen were
the progenitors of the modern Order. Between that time
and 1875, this theory was supported by Heldmann, Kloss,
Fallou, and Findel in Germany and by Steinbrenner in America.
The obvious defect of this presentation was that all of the
lodges on the Continent of Europe were of British parentage,
and those lodges, upon their introduction into Germany,
France, and elsewhere in Europe, had encountered nothing
which bore any relation to them.
Meanwhile, the Ancient
Pagan Mystery theory had sprung up in Germany and spread to
France, in both of which, it soon languished, but it was avidly
absorbed in England and America.
At the same time, the
Andersonian fables, popularized by William Preston, William
Hutchinson, and George Oliver were current and widely accepted as
late as 1858 when J.W.S. Mitchell published his History of
Freemasonry in which he vouched for the origin of Freemasonry at
the Building of King Solomon's Temple, but derided the idea
of its development at any earlier time.
Then came a new
school of realism that completely revolutionized the whole course
of Masonic historiography between 1860 and 1885. In 1861, Mathew
Cooke transcribed into modern English the manuscript (MSS)
which bears his name. W. J. Hughan, in quick succession
(1869- 1872) published his Constitutions of the
Freemasons, Masonic Sketches, and Old Charges of the
British Freemasons. In 1870, W. P. Buchan opposed the theory
that the Grand Lodge of 1717 was the revival of an
earlier, similar body. In 1873, D. M. Lyon's History of the Lodge
of Edinburgh appeared. In 1876, an American, George F.
Fort, placed himself in the forefront of Masonic historians by
the publication of his Early History and Antiquities
of Freemasonry. By 1885, additional contributions had
come from Hughan and W.H. Rylands.
Another member of this
school, Robert Freke Gould, had published The Athol Lodges and
The Four Old Lodges, but the culmination of the whole movement
was his History of Freemasonry which appeared in 1885. This was
at once recognized as epochal, and has, since, for over half
a century, remained the standard work upon the subject.
Later investigations have introduced some qualifications of,
and additions to Gould's findings, but the main stem of
his argument and the validity of his principal conclusions
have not been seriously questioned.
Accordingly, it is
generally accepted at the present day that Freemasonry originated
in the Fraternity of operative Masons, the cathedral builders of
medieval England and Scotland. This conclusion is supported by
all known records. Based upon written. records, it carries the
lodges in Scotland back to A.D. 1598 and the English Craft
(without lodge records) back to about A.D. 1400, the approximate
date of the Regius manuscript, the oldest written document of
the Fraternity. It carries the Mason's Company of London,
a guild, not precisely the same as the Fraternity, back
to A.D.1356.
The period of Gothic architecture extended
from about A.D. 1150 to 1550, and, unless we are prepared to
believe that those remarkable Gothic edifices were erected
by stonemasons and architects who sprang to the work
without prior experience or any long period of developing art,
we must presume some organization prior to the twelfth
century.
Obviously, the door is opened to such theories as
that the Freemasons antedated the Gothic era and developed out
of the Roman Collegia of Artificers or a remnant thereof,
called the Comacine Masters, who are said to have settled on
an island in Lake Como in Lombardy and to have
flourished about A.D. 800 - 1000. One or the other of these
theories was accepted credulously and without proof by
numerous writers, but the latter was very ably supported and
widely adopted following its rather scholarly presentation by
Leader Scott (Mrs. Webster) in 1899. Her argument was based
on the assumption that the Comacine Masters
(Magistri Comacini) were Master Masons who conducted a
school (schola) at Lake Como and there founded
Freemasonry, which they transmitted into western Europe. Her
theory was demolished, however, when it was brought to light
that Comacine was not derived from Como but from the Low Latin
co-maciones, meaning guild masons and used in various Italian
cities far removed from Lake Como for about four centuries before
the Lake Como settlement is supposed to have been made. In like
manner, schola meant guild and not school. Furthermore, French,
German, and British Freemasons of the Middle Ages worked almost
exclusively in Gothic, which had little vogue in
Italy.
Those who have sought to trace Freemasonry back of
its own written records have been too easily persuaded. In
a sense, all crafts of the present day are development
of similar arts of older times. The construction of buildings
has been a common occupation of man through several thousand
years. It no more follows, however, that Freemasonry is descended
from ancient sources than it follows that our government was
founded in Greece or Rome because it contains principles or
institutions formerly current in those countries. The possession
of old themes by younger institutions does not justify our
antedating the birth certificate of the modern holder. But that
has often been attempted, and such themes have been the tenuous
threads by which the modern Order has presumptively been bound to
others of distant lands and ages.
We indulge here in no
such gossamer thesis. By the origin of Freemasonry, we mean that
arising in an earlier body or order which as a permanent sodality
having the same general laws, customs, and doctrines has existed
by a continuously replenished membership from the earlier
times to the present. It is not necessary that each or any unit
of the society show a continuous life throughout but only that
the same system and kind of lodges, chapters or other
meetings were held, ceremonies practiced or doctrine inculcated
with continuity of purpose so as to constitute a
recognizable whole without substantial break or disconnection,
indicating an abandonment or destruction of the
movement.
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