William Wynn Westcott and the Esoteric School of Masonic Research

Discussion

Bro. J. Webb, W.M., said:

It is with pleasure that I rise to offer a hearty vote of thanks to our Brother for the thought-provoking paper which he has presented today. The paper represents the first of what I hope will be a continued series of papers that I trust he will either present or contribute to the Transactions which this Lodge publishes. 

The paper is, I am sure, the direct result of the studies which Bro. Gilbert has made in connection with the publication of a series of books connected with an Order or Society formed by W.Bro. Wynn Westcott in 1887 known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, that is described in a publication by our distinguished past Master W.Bro. Ellic Howe as ‘Intended to be a secret and highly exclusive alternative to the Theosophical Society, in fact a school of occultism based on the Western-Hermetic Qabalistic tradition, and hence without any Hindu or Buddhist elements’. 

The biographical details of the paper are handled well and are simply stated and it would appear that Westcott took a wide interest in each and every side of Masonry that he could. I particularly like the quotation attributed to A. E. Waite when describing F. G. Irwin, whom Westcott had met as ‘a zealous and amiable Mason with a passion for rites and an ambition to add to their number’. The rite of Swedenborg mentioned in the masonic life of Westcott was indeed introduced into this country in 1876, being declared and proclaimed at Freemasons Hall, Manchester, on 13 January 1877 when John Yarker was installed as Grand Master. It had a short existence and the rites of the Society, possibly better described as the rituals, were described by one masonic writer T. B. Whytehead as ‘The veriest twaddle and the guinea was the worst money I ever disbursed.’ 

The contributions that Westcott made to the Quatuor Coronati Lodge published in theproceedings rather exemplify his great interest in the mystical side of research. Listed in the combined index they are as follows: 

WESTCOTT, W. W.

Freemasonry and its relation to the Essenes. 28 (1915) 67 – 79.

The Magic Roll. 16 (1903) 254-6.

Masons’ Marks and their relation to the secret magical alphabets and numerals of Cornelius Agrippa. 3 (1890) 77-8.

Notes on a curious Certificate and Seal. 19 (1906) 241 – 2.

On The Symbolism of the Tabernacle. 6 (1893) 12 – 16.

Tbe Religion of Freemasonry illustrated by the Kabbalah. 1 (1886 – 8) 55-9.

The Resemblances of Freemasonry to the cult of Mithra. 29 (1916) 336 – 47.

Rosicrucians, their history and aims. 7 (1894) 36 – 47, 83. 

Of Westcott’s sincerity there can be no doubt and his masonic career, marked as it was by great effort and enthusiasm in the Craft and also in Soc. Ros. in Anglia, reflects his ability.  The paper draws attention to this but towards the end I note that our lecturer has posed the question as to whether masonic research has always been on the right track when it kept only to the ‘Authentic’ school or should it have encouraged somewhat more research along the guidelines laid down and expounded by Wynn Westcott in his Inaugural Address. 

In reply to that question I can only say that I am of the opinion that the word ‘research’ intends a searching into the highways and byways to expose and present the truth which can be defined by example. This, it is obvious, the Lodge had never been afraid to do and for that reason papers have been presented for comment and criticism by any of those attending our meetings. I can give no better example of this than to quote our distinguished Brother, Colin Dyer when commenting on a paper given by Bro. Theodore Beck, on the subject of Anthony Sayer, Gentleman. The Prestonian Lecture for 1975’. Bro. Dyer said, ‘Study of the occult and even of the influence of such students was not limited to this time in History, and evidence can be adduced to show that at the end of the 18th century, with the age of reason in in full swing, attempts were being made to incorporate occult subjects. I find Bro. Beck's theories that such practices are responsible for certain aspects of our third degree, and that Sayer was concerned to reduce occult influence, interesting. I would have found his points more convincing if supported by rather more real evidence.’ 

That this question has also been dealt with by the I.P.M. of the Lodge and summarized by Bro. Gilbert is of material interest in particular to those who feel that they, like our distinguished lecturer, would not only like to do the research, but also indicate to our Secretary that they would in time like to present a paper. Any member of the Lodge will be pleased to render assistance when they can. 

Finally, once again my congratulations to Bro. R. A. Gilbert on this his first delivery of a paper to the Lodge.

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Sir Lionel Brett, S.W., said: 

I gladly support the motion and I regret that I have nothing of any value to add. My knowledge of Westcott is restricted to what appears in A.Q.C. 1, and as I have been abroad I have had little time to study the paper we have just heard. 

Among the accusations against English Freemasonry which we hear from Christian critics is that it usurps the place of religion and practises or at least condones what the critics call sincretism, a word which Chambers’s Dictionary defines as ‘reconciliation of, or attempt to reconcile, different systems of belief, esp. of different forms of Christianity by George Calixtus; fusion or blending of different forms of religion, as by identification of gods, taking over of observances, or selection of what seems best in each; illogical compromise in religion’. 

Under the name of Ecumenism reconciliation among Christians is widely sought today, and while no one in a position of responsibility has suggested a fusion or blending of the major monotheistic religions of the world, their leaders have not thought they were compromising their own faiths by meeting and acknowledging what ideals they have in common. 

However, this is by the way. My point about Westcott is that he does give certain ammunition to our critics when he presents a paper entitled ‘The Religion of Freemasonry illuminated by the Kabbalah’ in which he repudiates the definition of freemasonry as ‘a peculiar system of morality veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols’, describes it as one special development of a long series of monotheistic secret associations and asserts that ‘our present doctrine is a unitarianism, clothed with the Christian virtues’.

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Bro. Desmond Caywood wrote: 

A.Q.C., Vol. 1, pp. 27 – 8, records that Westcott was ‘...the author of... A Commentary on the Ten Sephiroth... and The Kabbalistic Book of Creation, Sepher Yetzirah, translated etc., and Bro. Gilbert has shown that Westcott had presented a paper to the Hermetic Society on the Sepher Yetzirah sometime during 1886 – 7 – not on the wonderworking Yetzirah that is mentioned in the Talmud but a later treatise of the same name dating from Gaonic times (ninth century A.D. Babylon). 

The sum and substance of the work is summarized in the first Mishna of the first chapter, ‘By thirty-two paths of secret wisdom the Eternal The Lord of Hosts... hath created the world by means of numbers, phonetic language and writing’. The thirty-two paths to wisdom, whereby God created the universe, is decidedly different to the way in which the Kabbalistic Sephiroth are depicted in the doctrine of Emanations or Sephiroth which were known to Westcott – hence his Commentary. 

In the Westcott-translated Yetzirah, the Spirit of the Living God, who, as the Head of all things, is represented by the number One – three entities, Spirit-Air, Water and Fire – follow in numerical order. The remaining six numbers of this primordial decade represents the six dimensions of space, i.e. the cardinal points of the compass, North, South, East and West together with Height and Depth. The whole is supported by the Holy Temple. It is here, with the last six spatial digits that most of us can see an obvious similarity with Freemasonry – especially the explanation of the First Degree Tracing Board. One does not have to have ‘... the Mason Word and second sight...’ to see this similarity, but one certainly seems to need it to detect the feminine elements that Westcott and Mathers saw in the Second Degree ceremony. 

C. D. Ginsburg has shown in his study and analysis of the Yetzirah that it has ‘no affinity with the real tenets of the Kabbalah’. Rabbi Dr Isidore Epstein (Judaism, London, 1959) says that when ‘stripped of all its symbolism and mystical formulations, the underlying philosophy of the Sepher Yetzirah is the celebrated Theory of Ideas... which entered into the history of philosophy through Plato, but it by no means originated with him’. 

The reference to the ‘ancient Egyptian’ affinity and ‘the system of Pythagoras’ in the Explanation of the First Degree Tracing Board – and my mention of Plato – calls to mind the second book of John Reuchlin’s De Verbo Mirifico (Basle, 1494) in which he attempts to show, ‘that all wisdom and true philosophy are derived from the Hebrews, that Pythagoras and Zoroaster borrowed their ideas from the Bible’. And of course, much later, the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Rome, 1652) held the opinion that, ‘the Kabbalah was introduced into Egypt by no less a person than the patriarch Abraham; and that from Egypt it gradually issued all over the East and intermixed with all religions and systems of philosophy’. 

To investigate the ancient mysteries, which were, surprisingly enough, primarily concerned with monotheism, the unity of nature and man’s place in it – and perhaps encouraged by the writings of the Christian Kabbalists, Reuchlin and Kircher – Westcott decided to devote two years of his life to study, which was to include the Kabbalah. Clearly Westcott thought that a knowledge of this ancient theosophy was a necessary requirement, a starting point, as it were, for his excursions into areas into which few care, or dare, to venture; how perilous those excursions were are reflected in the dismissive view of Westcott that prevails today. But it was an avenue that required investigation, and if nothing else was gained from his probings – which I doubt – at least he satisfied himself that freemasonry had no connection with the ancient mystery religions. 

It is a sad fact that so often a man is remembered only for the negative, or seemingly unimportant, aspects of his life, rather than for the positive contributions that he has made during his lifetime. The author’s reference to Swedenborg is a typical case in pbint. We are told by Sir W. F. Barrett, F.R.S., that ‘Swedenborg the Seer has largely obscured the fame of Swedenborg the Savant’. Swedenborg actually devoted two-thirds of his life to science and natural knowledge – but it is the visionary who is remembered today, not the scientist! I fear Westcott the masonic historian has been obscured by Westcott the occultist, paradoxically by Westcott himself. Fortunately for Westcott’s memory, and I might add, for the benefit of our Transactions, Bro. Gilbert has presented a wide spectrum of Westcott’s multivarious activities and has highlighted the acceptable, or ‘authentic’, aspects of his work– in fact Bro. Gilbert has succeeded in doing what the subject of the paper was unable to do, namely to differentiate between his masonic and his occult activities. Bro. Gilbert has thrown a more charitable light upon an early member of our Lodge and I thank him for it.

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Bro. Ellic Howe wrote: 

I must congratulate Bro. Gilbert for his carefully researched paper. About twenty years ago when I first became familiar with Westcott’s name I was investigating the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which was essentially Westcott’s creation. It is possible that Bro. Gilbert’s paper would not at that time have been considered suitable for presentation to this lodge because so many of Westcott’s activities had very little connection with Craft masonry.  It just shows that times and intellectual climates change. 

On the subject of Westcott’s enthusiasms, Bro. Gilbert is rather more charitable than I would be prepared to be. However, many years ago the late Professor George Boas, a distinguished American historian of ideas, suggested that [I quote]: ‘One should be willing to treat ideas that seem silly, or superstitious, and that are perhaps obsolete, with the same care as one would give to established truths’. 

Thus I believe that Westcott is worth studying in relation to the history of ideas even if, as I have suggested, he was never a typical member of the Craft. In fact he used masonic models, at least of a kind, for his own purposes. His purposes contained a large measure of self-indulgence and he was unable to distinguish between fact and fiction – hence the necessity for forgeries and other deceptions. 

Bro. Gilbert gives Westcott the credit for the transmission of esoteric ideas and traditions.  In that context it is necessary to ask if they were esoteric in the real sense of the word.  However, to be charitable he provided new horizons and interests for people who would otherwise have remained ignorant of what can be found in a sort of neo-Platonic attic. To that extent he was an educator.

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Bro. F. W. Seal-Coon wrote: 

Brother Gilbert’s paper on William Wynn Westcott and the Esoteric School is a well written and interesting piece of research – but of more value, perhaps, as a salutary lesson than as an addition to the body of masonic lore. 

I hope I am not misreading the author in deducing that whilst he may not himself be an adherent of the Esoteric School, he has at least a sneaking sympathy with it and is a little enmeshed in the aura of mystery and magic that hangs about its fringes. 

There is no law which says that Quatuor Coronati Lodge and its members and supporters must stick to the requirement of documentary proof, and indeed what are we ‘speculative’ masons for if not to speculate? But there are very strong reasons of commonsense and useful productivity for limiting our research to provable facts and our speculation to ideas that promise to add to them. 

To enter the esoteric field is like removing the bones and skin from a body, which then loses its proper form and spills into strange, changing and possibly repellent shapes with little meaning and less purpose. He who enters that field finds himself lying with queer bedfellows – not only mysticism, symbolism and romanticism, but spiritualism, magic and even (as the mention of Aleister Crowley, whom I once met, conjures up) demonology and black magic! Such pursuits are best left alone, if only for sanity’s sake, and while Westcott appears not to have ventured beyond less harmful frontiers, he was at least enticed into invention and deceit. 

Symbolism certainly figures in our masonic rituals, but while the theory of Masonry’s evolution from the age-old operative mason craft allowed the mind to wander back into farthest antiquity with its mysterious cults, the more recent speculation that Freemasonry originated in a clandestine movement in Elizabethan or post-Elizabethan times that only borrowed the trappings of operative masonry for concealment, divorces the symbolism from true masonic history and leaves it only as a moral tool for reinforcing the spirituality of masons. 

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Bro. W. McLeod wrote: 

In connection with the Order of Eri, Bro. Gilbert quotes Westcott’s manuscript note listing the eight brethren who were admitted in 1872. Two of them, curiously enough, were gentlemen of leisure who lived in Canada and were well-known collectors of masonic degrees. 

Lieut.-Col William James Bury M(a)cLeod Moore (1810 – 90), a native of County Kildare, inherited the Scottish portion of his name from his great-grandmother Emilia, daughter of Norman, 22nd of MacLeod (1705 – 72; his well-known portrait by Allan Ramsay hangs in Dunvegan Castle), and wife of Captain Augustus Moore of Salston, Ireland. After serving in H.M.’s 69th Regiment MacLeod Moore came out to Canada in 1852. He was the founding master of Corinthian Lodge, No. 50, P.R.C.W, No. 953, E.R. Ottawa, in 1855 (it surren-dered its warrant in 1876). He headed the Knights Templar in Canada from 1854 until his death, and established them on a firm basis here. In 1868 he received a dispensation authorizing him to establish chapters and consistories of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, thereby in fact introducing this observance to Canada; Moore Sovereign Consistory, in Hamilton, one of his foundations, is named after him. Reginald V. Harris wrote a biographical notice in the Papers of the Canadian Masonic Research Association, No. 7 (1951) =collected edition (edited by C. E. B. LeGresley, Toronto, 1986), Vol. 1, pp. 96 – 113. 

George Canning Longley (1827 – 85) lived nearly all his life in the tiny village of Maitland, on the upper St Lawrence River; his father was a successful businessman and landowner, of whom Col. Charles Grey, Durham’s brother-in-law, wrote in 1839, ‘the greatest part of the village belongs to him, where he has built a very neat Presbyterian Church at his own expense’ (Stephen A. Otto and Richard M. Dumbrille, Maitland, Erin, Ontario, 1985, p. 53). In 1857 the son was the founding master of St James Lodge, No. 40, G.R.C., Maitland (still working as No. 74, South Augusta). From 1870 until his death he was active in organizing local groups in virtually all the off-shoots of masonry, many of them under the authority of MacLeod Moore. In 1882 Longley issued a leaflet ‘listing thirty bodies conferring two hundred and eighty-two degrees’, all in the village of Maitland. ‘You could have them all for less than $190.00 and total annual dues of $6.50... Convocations were held which extended over two or three days, when all known degrees, rites, orders and honours were conferred.’ The whole system collapsed at his death. There is a brief biography by R. V. Harris in P.C.M.R.A., No. 54 (1960)=collected edition, Vol. 2, pp. 984-92. A. J. B. Milborne alludes briefly to these men and these matters in his comment on Bro. Howe’s paper on Fringe Masonry, A.Q.C., Vol. 85 (1972), p. 286.

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Bro. Christopher Haffner wrote: 

Bro. Gilbert’s paper follows a line of research for which he is already well known, and I welcome his detailed study of the life of Bro. Westcott, and his relationship to this lodge. 

I was interested to note that Bro. Westcott felt that his Grand Lodge honours were not a recognition of his work as an occultist. The outsider to the Craft certainly sees such an award as a recognition of a mason’s life and teaching as a whole. Back in 1926, Bro. Wilmshurst could write in response to a suggestion that Grand Lodge disapproved of his ‘Esoteric School’ writings: 

I have had the warmest appreciation of my work & books from the very highest Grand Lodge Officers & only last month was promoted to the rank of Provincial Senior Grand Warden of West Yorks by our new Prov. Grand Master, Lord Lascelles, in the presence of the Pro Grand Master Lord Ampthill, both of whom know my work well & were extremely complimentary.

This formed the basis for the use by ‘An Anglo-Catholic’ of Wilmshurst’s work against the Craft in his Reflections on Freemasonry (Freedom Press, Derby, 1930). 

I therefore suggest that the view put forward by Bro. Gilbert in the last section of his paper – that the ‘Esoteric School’ should not have been denied access to masonic research publications – should be treated with extreme caution. At least we can say with a clear conscience that genuine masonic scholars regard the work of the ‘Esoteric School’ as the rubbish that it really is! 

I do not object to the study of legend, but the moment that it is suggested that there should be some place in masonic research for someone whose ‘approach was rather the treatment of legend, in the absence of historical fact, as being an adequate substitute for such fact’, then I must object. The ‘Esoteric School’ ignores the real evidence that masonic ritual evolved during the eighteenth century from a few scraps that had seen the light but a few years before, and substitutes legend, anywhere that it can be found. It is with concern that I note that Manly P. Hall’s An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian symbolic Philosophy: the Secret Teachings of All Ages is now available from masonic suppliers as a paperback, and no doubt selling well. What has happened to dear old common sense? 

I welcome the biographical study of any prominent mason, and enjoyed Bro. Gilbert’s paper, but let us not try to make out a case for following members of the ‘Esoteric School’ in their credulity.

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Bro. Alain Bernheim said: 

It was a great pleasure to hear Bro. Gilbert deliver his most able paper on Bro. Westcott.  As Bro. Hamill recently said in his Inaugural Address (1985): 

...both the popular world and the historian’s attitudes to what constitutes history have differed from generation to generation.

Wouldn’t it be fair, then, to keep in mind that Bro. Westcott joined this Lodge a century ago and to ask the question if his attitude toward history did not change during the time of his membership here? 

Bro Westcott had been proposed ‘from the chair’ as a joining member of this Lodge, 8 Sovember 1886 (A.Q.C., 1, 1886 – 8, p. 25). As he attended the Lodge for the second time, 8 March 1887, a paper was delivered by the founding master, Sir Charles Warren. This paper, said Bro. Gould as he was installed W.M., 8 November 1887, was ‘one of the most brilliant papers that adorn our Transactions’ (A.Q.C., 1, p. 72). And as an acknowledgment for the grcat services rendered by Sir Charles, Gould presented his predecessor with ‘a number of books which have been written by members of the lodge, or brethren belonging to the Corresponding Circle’ (ibid). This brought a witty answer from Sir Charles: 

There is a certain flavour of irony in giving me these books, in order that I may learn something, and I acknowledge my insufficiency. I think, however, I do know something about the Temple of Jerusalem, but I know very little of modern Masonry, and shall be pleased to study the subject (A.Q.C. 1, 1886 – 8, p. 73).

Let us try to put ourselves in Bro. Westcott’s place listening to Sir Charles delivering his paper, 8 March 1887, and hearing him say among other things: 

Masonry is after all neither more nor less than the ancient religion of the world – with the Hebrews there was the true Masonry – with the heathen the degenerate Masonry – carried on side by side... I put forward as a solution that modern masonry is a combination of the mysteries of the Hebrews, the Phoenicians (including the Greeks) and the Egyptians, that it thus forms the chief of the triads running so remarkably through all Masonic lore... In a word I think there is not a doubt that in our order we are the direct descendants from the Phoenicians, who first moulded Masonry into its present form, and who were unable to openly worship the true God for fear of the people. If it were not so, I would not be here tonight to speak, for if we cannot trace our descent from the Phcenician craftsmen who worked on the Temple of Solomon, and if it be only an allegory, then our position descends from the sublime to the ridiculous (A.Q.C., 1, 1886 – 8, p. 42 – 3).

Now can’t we imagine Bro Westcott listening to these words and dreaming he might have written them himself? 

Doubtless papers were read during these first years which were up to the present standards of this Lodge: Begemann’s, Gould’s, Lane’s and Speth’s, to name a few. But a communication entitled ‘The Rosicrucian Society of England’ could also be printed in the first volume of the Transactions (A.Q.C., 1, 1886 – 8, p. 54) defining that the first-listed purpose of the said Society was 

...the scientific and literary, historical and archeological [sic] investigation of the occult wisdom of the ancients....

in a communication signed by Bro. Westcott, ‘Sec. General, IXº Honoris Causa’. 

His first paper delivered in this Lodge, ‘The Religion of Freemasonry illuminated by the Kabbalah’, sounds to me mainly enthusiastic though sometimes a little disorderly. Such a sentence as: 

The absence of distinct and definite histories of secret Monotheistic societies is really an evidence of their reality... (A.Q.C., 1, 1866 – 8, p. 56)

has probably little equivalent in papers read here during the last century. But I have a strong feeling that his two last papers, delivered some thirty years later, originated from a much wiser man. In February 1915, a visitor noticed ‘the temperate tone of his paper’ in which he stated that the relations between Freemasonry and the Essenes, sometimes asserted by well-known masonic authors such as Mackey, Waite, Yarker or even Gould, were not proven and wrote: ‘It is folly to perpetuate errors’ (A.Q.C., 28, 1915, p. 74). And his last paper here, October 1916, stated from the beginning: ‘there does not appear to me to be any basis for the suggestion that the origin of Freemasonry had any relation to it (the cult of Mithra)’ (A.Q.C. 29, 1916, p. 336) 

Had anything happened to make him change his approach to Masonry, both as an historian and as a propagator of para-masonic organizations? 

I could not find anything to substantiate this hypothesis in Bro Gilbert’s paper in which very little information is supplied about the life and writings of Bro. Westcott between 1903 and 1915 with the exception of the mention of the death of his two sons, 1906 and 1907, and of an excerpt of his preface to Gardner’s Catalogue, 1912. 

Bro. Gilbert mentions of course facts which have been studied in detail in previous papers by Bro. Howe in A.Q.C. 85 and 91, relating to ‘fringe’ masonic creations in Germany, based on warrants or authorizations granted directly by Bro. Westcott or issued by his friend, Bro. Yarker, to Reuss in 1902. I would like to suggest now that a fact which does not seem to have been hitherto noticed should be taken into consideration which might have influenced Bro. Westcott, and that is that the masonic and financial scandals connected with Reuss, as well as the charges of immorality preferred in Germany against him, must have been known in England generally, and by Bro. Westcott personally with a high degree of probability, since 1906. 

A young mason, born 1865 in Budapest, but who lived from 1899 in Nuremberg and in Vienna, had been a member of the Reuss organizations between 1902 and December 1905. His name was Emile Adrianyi (though he often signed his name as Adrianyi-Pontet after marrying Miss Pontet in 1893). He died aged eighty-seven, 10 November 1952, in Germany after quite a remarkable masonic career. On the one hand he was from about 1908 a member of the Grosse Landesloge of Germany (one of the main German Christian Grand Lodges) which he left because of its anti-semitic attitude shortly after Hitler came to power. But he also introduced the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite in Germany from 1921 with the intention of founding a Supreme Council. For reasons which would be too long to give here, he could not carry out his plans but was named a member of the German Supreme Council in 1947. 

On two different occasions Bro. Adrianyi delivered a personal testimony against the misdeeds of Reuss in Germany. The first occasion immediately followed his demit from all Reuss’s organizations, December 1905. He had been profoundly shocked by what he had very recently learned and he considered it his duty to let the masonic world know the truth about Reuss. He then launched an information campaign in foreign masonic magazines such as L’Acacia in Paris. He went even further and wrote directly to the Southern Jurisdiction of the Supreme Council of the United States on account of the Cerneau system of Reuss in Berlin. As a token of gratitude the Southern Jurisdiction conferred on him the degrees of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite from the 4º to the 32º ‘honorary’ on 26 October 1907 (Carter, History of the Supreme Council, 1971, Vol. 3, p. 254; his name is there misspelt ‘Adrinyi’). This was how he became a member of that Rite. Shortly afterwards the Italian Grand Commander Saverio Fera gave him the 33º. 

The second occasion took place much too late of course to have had any influence on Westcott who had died a few years before. It consisted of a very long article written by Adrianyi under the pseudonym ‘Akim Haemeth’ which was published in nine instalments in the Wiener Freimaurer-Zeitung (W.F.Z.) in 1928 and 1929. This paper was entitled ‘Irregular and fraudulent rites’. It was mainly historical and was not exclusively dedicated to Reuss’s creations. When Reuss’s name appeared it exposed the bitterness of the brethren who felt they had been cheated by him. This paper is therefore quite interesting from a human point of view and certainly bears testimony to the feelings of Adrianyi towards Reuss after 1905. 

The first revelations of Adrianyi to the masonic foreign press concerning Reuss began in1906. But Reuss’s activities seem also to have been known outside masonic circles at the same time through a paper which had appeared in an anti-masonic magazine, La France Chretienne. 

In a letter dated 18 April 1907, published in L’Acacia (1907, p. 294) Adrianyi wrote: 

La France Chretienne has published an absolutely accurate narration of Reuss’s various undertakings.

Nowhere did Adrianyi mention Westcott’s name in the letters he sent to the press. In his

1928 – 9 paper he even takes up the defence of the S.R.I.A. as well as of Westcott and strongly emphasizes the Christian character of the S.R.I.A’s rituals (W.F.Z. 1929, No. 9/10, pp.9/10). But he also wrote there that Westcott had ‘very soon’ withdrawn the warrant which he given to Reuss for the Swedenborg rite and that Reuss had been excluded from the S.R.I.A in 1906 (W.F.Z. 1929, No. 9/10, p. 28). 

Adrianyi’s relations with England seem to have existed on various levels. According to his obituary, written in 1953 by his intimate friend, Bro. August Pauls, the then Grand

Commander of the German Supreme Council, Adrianyi had been named, 1903, Honorary

Member and 1906, Honorary Magister of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (Eleusis, 1953, no. 1). He was also local Secretary of Q.C. Lodge for Bavaria. Thanks to the courtesy of Bro. H. P. Farrer, P.M. and Secretary of Gordon Lodge No. 1726 in Bognor, who looked through the Minutes of his Lodge for me, I could verify that Bro. Adrianyi, together with two full members of Quatuor Coronati Lodge, Bro. Count Goblet d’Alviella (then Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of Belgium) and Bro. Ladislas de Malczovich (P.G.W. of the G.L. of Ireland), had been elected Honorary Members of the Gordon Lodge, 1 June 1909 (letter from Bro. Farrer, 21 May 1983). The W.M. of Gordon Lodge was then Bro. Crowe who was elected that same year W.M. of Q.C. Lodge. 

Taken altogether these facts seem to build a case of circumstantial evidence that Westcott must have known the consequences of his relations with Reuss and I would expect that Adrianyi wrote to Westcott to inform him and might have informed English masonic circles in which he was introduced. 

Should we consider it only as a coincidence that in 1906 (A.Q.C., 19, p. 241).

Westcott wrote: 

Degree-makers have very often been unreasonable and have put together incongruous materials, and have shown how dangerous a possession is a little learning.’

Could this be the consequence of that? And didn’t Bro. Gilbert find any letters from Adrianyi to Westcott or documents showing Westcott’s reactions to the scandals provoked by Reuss? 

Two more questions remain in my mind: Bro. Gilbert seems to agree with Bro. Howe that the Swedenborg Rite was founded in the United States in 1859. Except for the indication given (for the first time?) in the Lexicon of Lennhoff and Posner (1932) is there any documentary proof supporting this affirmation? In the W.F.Z. (1928, No. 11/12, p. 24) Adrianyi wrote that this rite had originated in Canada but does not substantiate his statement. 

The other question is this: the last words written by Bro. Westcott in the Transactions wund like an enigma. 

Let us hope that the Brethren forming our own Grand Lodge have not only Masonic knowledge but business ability, for it seems likely that the near future will bring on proposals for important changes in our Institution of Free and Accepted Masons (A.Q.C., 29, 1916, p. 344).

Does Bro. Gilbert know their meaning?

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Bro. Kevin Tingay wrote: 

Bro. Gilbert’s paper illustrates the dilemma faced by the researcher into almost all aspects of the history of ‘esoteric’ beliefs, that of sorting out legitimate opinions from wishful ¿king, Westcott does seem to have attempted to avoid much of the latter, but, like so many others, he was caught up by the excitement of the quest for hypothetical concealed wisdom. While keeping this under control in much of his published writing his conduct in relation to the Order of the Golden Dawn does seem to have seen his imagination run away with him. Unless and until a further cache of documentation is unearthed we are unlikely to understand more of Westcott’s character and motives than Bro Gilbert has presented to us. 

A more important issue raised by this paper, however, is the question of the relationship between the scholarly standards set by this lodge and the more speculative reflections of the so-called ‘esoteric’ schools of thought, I think that a parallel can be seen between the change in attitude noted by Bro. Gilbert in A.Q.C. and the attitude of wider scholarship to unorthodox thought. Until comparatively recently it was the generally received opinion in academic circles that such matters were unworthy of serious attention, but now, in the fields of the history of ideas, of religion, of psychology, and of social history, serious attention is being given to the place and influence of individuals and esoteric groups and the sources of their beliefs. It is not possible to avoid the association between some freemasons and the so-called ‘occult revival’ of the late nineteenth century. It is surely proper for this lodge to pay attention to their opinions and to see how they developed. We are now able to see how many of these ideas were neither fraud nor vain imaginings but the result of contacts with the philosophies and religions of other ages and cultures. At the time the innate sense of superiority felt by the Western European led him to reject such influences as being beneath contempt or of the devil himself. In our present age a welcome spirit of tolerance is leading to a greater understanding of the value of all human quests. Has not this spirit always been a feature of masonic thought and practice? The serious student would only ask that the quest is disciplined by the rigours of accuracy and truth. 

Bro. Gilbert noted in passing the considerable sales of W.Bro. Waite’s New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry. In my time as an antiquarian bookseller it was noticeable that demand for books by authors of the esoteric school far outstripped those of the authentic school, a fact which may say more about human nature than the nature of Freemasonry.

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Bro. Gilbert replied: 

My intention with this paper was, in part, to rehabilitate Westcott, whose reputation has suffered from a misunderstanding of his approach to masonic research; but to avoid any misunderstanding of my own approach I would like, at the outset, to reassure the Worshipful Master and Bros. Seal-Coon and Haffner that I do not look upon the methodology of the authentic school as in any way at fault, and I hasten to assure Bro. Haffner that I certainly do not wish to encourage masonic scholars to emulate the undoubted credulity of many of the supporters of the ‘Esoteric School’. I believe, however, that masonic scholars should, in general, be less hostile to supporters of the non-authentic schools and to the subjects of their researchers; rather should they encourage them to espouse accepted methods of academic research and to aspire to the high standards of scholarship maintained by the authentic school itself. 

I agree with Bro. Sir Lionel Brett that Westcott does claim too much when he asserts that Freemasonry is one among ‘a long series of Monotheistic secret associations’ and that this does give ammunition to the opponents of the Craft; but in fairness to Westcott it should be noted that he did express the hope that ‘even if the views be erroneous’ his paper ‘may yet call up a refutation which shall be found of great value to the brethren present, and Freemasons in general’. No such refutation was forthcoming, and the critics of this paper merely stated their dissension from Westcott’s conclusions without offering any documentary evidence on their own parts. Had they done so, criticisms of Westcott’s claims would have carried more force. 

The remarks of Professor Boas, quoted by Bro. Howe, are indeed pertinent. We would do well to recognize the right of others to hold views which appear to be eccentric or unsound, and to criticize them by established academic methods rather than by instant dismissal simply because we look upon them as unworthy of rational argument. Westcott did hold his views sincerely and I suspect that he was not as atypical a member of the Craft as Bro. Howe suggests – which suspicion is confirmed by Bro. Tingay’s comment on the far greater demand for the works of writers of the Esoteric School than for those of the authentic school. 

Bro. Caywood has evidently made a careful study of Westcott’s kabbalistic writings, but I cannot agree with him that Westcott accepted the theory that there are two distinct works each entitled Sepher Yetzirah. Westcott states in his Introduction to the first edition of his translation (which was based on his lecture to the Hermetic Society), that ‘This work, then, or a similar predecessor is at least as old as A.D. 200’. In the third edition, of 1911, he merely elaborates on the general uncertainty as to its date of composition. It does not seem to me however, that a detailed discussion of the issue is appropriate to these pages and I would refer the interested reader to two works of Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1946), and On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism (1965). 

Bro. Bernheim asks a series of intriguing questions to which, I fear, I can give no final answers. Westcott may seem to have altered his views on masonic origins between 1886 and 1915, but there is no evidence that he ever varied from his stated conviction that Freemasonry as we know it today descended from the Rosicrucians, of whose historical reality he was firmly convinced. I do not believe that even in 1886 Westcott accepted the implications of Bro Sir Charles Warren’s remarks on what he saw as our Phoenician origins (i.e. that we can claim an unbroken lineal descent of modern Freemasonry from the builders of King Solomon’s Temple – a task that is clearly impossible). 

In his later years Westcott was not an active Craft mason and after leaving the Golden Dawn he directed his energies towards the S.R.I.A. rather than to the Craft or to the additional degrees (with the exceptions noted in the paper); there is thus little to say of his activities beween 1903 and 1915 that is relevant to this paper. The Societas Rosicruciana in Germania was an ephemeral affair with little support that came to an end in 1907. Unfortunatly, neither the High Council Library of the S.R.I.A. nor the library of the United Grand Lodge of England has any correspondence from Adrianyi, but Bro. Bernheim’s Suggestion that it was Adrianyi who warned Westcott against Reuss gains some support from the sudden disappearance of Reuss’s name from the S.R.I.A.’s list of Honorary Magi 9º in1906, the same year in which Adrianyi first appears as an honorary Magister 8º (he remained on the list until 1918). It was in 1906 also that Reuss came to London to work, and the furthering of his quasi-masonic schemes so close at hand would not have endeared him to Westcott. 

I do not believe that Westcott’s reference in 1906 to the eclecticism of ‘degree-makers’ has any bearing on Reuss, but rather illustrates his commonsense over the question of obscure additional degrees; the certificate in question (Bro. Bernheim quotes from Westcott’s Notes on a Curious Certificate and Seal, A.Q.C., 19, 1906, pp. 241 – 2) having been issued by a quasi-masonic body and not by an occultist organization such as Reuss’s Ordo Templi Orientis. As toBro. Bernheim’s remaining questions, the earliest printed reference to the Swedenborgian Rite appears to be in Samuel Beswick’s Swedenborg Rite and the Great Masonic Leaders of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1870, see p. 166). Beswick there claims – but gives no documentary proof – a date of 1859 for the foundation of the Rite in the United States of America. When the Rite spread to Canada two of its most active proponents were Lieut. Col. W. J. B. MacLeod Moore and G. C. Longley – the two ‘well-known collectors of Masonic degrees’ to whom Bro. McLeod refers. On the question of Westcott’s cryptic words on ‘impending changes’, I regret that I can throw no light. 

Bro. Bernheim has clearly been assiduous in reading Westcott’s contributions to A.Q.C. and in following his activities in the Lodge; if others follow his example they will notice that at the meeting of 3 March 1887 (when the paper from which Bro. Bernheim quotes – On the Orientation of Temples, by Bro. Sir Charles Warren – was read) Bro. Speth announced the publication of circular concerning the ‘design and scope’ of the Lodge. Two of the professed ‘main objects’ were ‘to attract intelligent masons to its meetings, in order to imbue them with love for masonic research’ and ‘to submit the discoveries or conclusions of students to the judgement and criticism of their fellows by means of papers read in Lodge’. There is no suggestion that supporters of the non-authentic schools – among whom Sir Charles Warren would certainly have been numbered – should not be encouraged to offer the results of their researches, and these two objects are precisely those which would have benefited supporters of the Esoteric School. 

We would do well to bear in mind the point reiterated by Bro. Tingay, that the investigation of the received opinions of substantial numbers of Freemasons during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however bizarre those opinions may seem to us, is both a justifiable and worthwhile exercise. Esoteric ideas may not have influenced the Craft itself, but they have unquestionably influenced the perception of the Craft by its opponents, and while I can sympathize with Bro. Seal-Coon’s fears of the psychological and academic risks inherent in examining esoteric subjects, I remain convinced that a continuing refusal even to consider the merits and demerits of the claims and theories of supporters of the esoteric school of research can only continue to do us harm (and I hasten to add that my own fascination with the members of the Esoteric School and the consequent immersion in their writings has neither impaired my critical faculties nor threatened my own mental well-being).  

If the works of Westcott’s contemporaries and successors had been subjected – before publication – to the rigorous formal criticism applied to the researches of the authentic school, then many, if not most, of their more outlandish pronouncements could have been excised, and anti-masonic writers such as the anonymous ‘Anglo-Catholic’ (whose use of Bro. Wilmshurst’s speculative excursions is cited by Bro. Haffner) would have been denied much, if not all of their ammunition. In addition, those few theories of the Esoteric School that do merit serious study could have been incorporated into the mainstream of masonic research to the benefit of all.