Christian Heresy
Cathars, Medieval Builders, and the Freemasons
Abstract
Sifting the Cinders of the Cathars
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 23 July 2008
Origins
The origins of Freemasonry, Masons say, are in the masons who built Solomon’s temple. As there never was a Solomon, this is a myth, but it is possible that the temple at Jerusalem which was thought to have been the replacement for Solomon’s, and therefore still carried the name “Solomon’s Temple”, could have been meant. The Masons have other traditions too, equally unlikely ones being that they began with the Tower of Babel or the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Druids, as Winwood Reade thought, and more feasibly in the Roman collegia, the Collegium Artificum or the Collegium Fabrorum and the crusades via the medieval trades guilds. The motto of the Freemasons is “Order out of Chaos”, hinting at the role of the Great Architect of the Universe according to Genesis.
The Freemasons as we know them today began only at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but they claimed to be extensions of the medieval masonic guilds. In the Gothic age a stonemason’s work was unlikely to be in his home town or village. Masons were partly itinerant. They had to go where the work was, moving from one building site to another, but possibly remaining on a major site for years. Great cathedrals took many decades to build. Churches were smaller but still took several years to finish. They had to lodge near the site, and it is argued their local bases were therefore called lodges.
The original Roman Catholic guild of masons, started early in the period of Gothic architecture, was taken over first by the heretics in the thirteenth century. The secret handshakes and passwords they used were most likely connected with their heretical religious beliefs, rather than their craft association, for the craft guilds were made up largely of heretics. Masons call their practices “The Craft” just like witches.
Then, by the end of the sixteenth century, with gothic architesture dying, they were taken over again by gentlemen having a lark. King’s College Chapel at Cambridge, the last English Gothic building, had been completed about 1512, and the craft, the guild of construction workers—now called operative masons—was taken over in the seventeenth century by aristocrats and professional men.
Speculative Freemasonry, the modern name for masons who are not operative masons, might have started in Scotland. John Boswell, Laird of Auchinlech, became a member of the Lodge in Edinburgh in 1600, the earliest occasion known of a gentleman, joining a masons’ lodge. The first English gentleman to join seems to have been Elias Ashmole, an antiquarian, interested in Rosicrucianism and founder of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, in 1646.
Masonry became a fad among the gents, and, as the seventeenth century progressed, these guests in the lodges (the “acceptance”) became the majority. In 1670, the Aberdeen Lodge had thirty-nine “accepted” members and only ten operative masons. Then at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the gents were enjoying their new clubs so much, they started to open their own, and Freemasonry separated in pratice from its connexion with building. Only the basic symbolism was retained to go with the name.
Masonic Documents
A document preserved in the British Museum and published in 1840 was believed to date from 1390, and another document published in 1861 was dated to 1490. The older document is the Halliwell document (or Regius MS), and the later one is the Cooke document, each named after their publishing authors. Another document dated around 1600 was published before both of these in 1815 by a man called Dowland, but it has vanished. A whole tranche of other documents all apparently derived from the Cooke document, or a similar document with which they all have a common root, are dated throughout the seventeenth century.
Albert Mackey (The History of Freemasonry), a Mason himself, admits that most of the supposed history in these documents is “replete with historical inaccuracies, anachronisms and even with absurdities”. There are records of Gerrman masonic guilds of Strasburg in the fifteenth century and French guilds as early as the twelfth century but they contain none of the traditional masonic history, suggesting it is spurious and late—in a word invented!
The Halliwell document, though, is unique in being poetry not prose, giving a Masonic constitution, and some history, including the story of the Four Crowned Martyrs common to the books of the German Steinmetzen. The story goes back to the late Roman empire, offering a link with the collegia but even so, it is more likely to be mythical than proper history. As Voltaire wrote in Charles XII:
Incredulity is the foundation of history.
One does not accept tales just because they are there, however exalted or sacred some people might regard them. They need to be independently confirmed. None of the alleged legendary Masonic history has been.
In the case of the Halliwell poem, it is written in antiquated language typical of the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries, and it ends with the characteristically masonic, “Amen! So mote it be”. The whole poem seems to be a hybrid of two separate poems, or rather, it is virtually the whole of one poem but with two block insertions from another or others. Perhaps it is a document resulting from the merging of two guilds with different legendary origins.
Moreover, the content of this document suggest a Catholic tradition, rather than a heretical or Protestant one. A hundred lines of the poem refer to the observance of the Catholic mass, but tantalisingly includes a line saying, “when the gospel one shall read…”, suggesting the hearer of the line could be expected to read the gospel, an unlikely event among Catholics unless they were clergy… or they were heretics like Waldensians.
In 1300, only clergy could read the gospels other than heretics who by reading the gospels themselves were defying the authority of the church, and only clergy or heretics were literate enough to have written the poem at all, and especially to expound for a hundred lines on the mass. Ordinary people were illiterate, and the bible was written in Latin, so the poem could hardly have been intended for Catholic workmen however exalted their labour was—unless they were friars. The author of one of the original constituents of the Halliwell masonic poem was possibly a clergyman, probably a monk, and the masons he wrote for were specially trained friars. Thus the word “Freemason” might have been originally “Frères Maçons”, the ordained supervisors of the masons building churches and cathedrals—a special group of clergy, just as the Essenes were used by Herod to build the Holy Place of his temple because they were builder priests.
A Protestant tradition at this early date would, of course, have been impossible, but an heretical one was not only possible but more likely at this time, and the heretics seem to have mocked the Catholic mass, and so might have found it useful to have it written out for their mock masses, called black masses by Catholics. Yet, it could have been suicide to have had heretical practices written down in the rules of a guild just when the Catholic Holy Inquisition was searching out heretics everywhere and burning them. So, the rules might deliberately have reflected orthodox Catholicism as a cover.
It is speculation, of course, and the members might have been simply loyal Catholic masons. The evidence of heresy in trades guilds comes from elsewhere, and the evidence of heresy among masons comes from the occasional heretical carving found in churches and cathedrals, often in places not easily visible.
By the seventeenth century, the masons in England, were Protestants, the later manuscripts suggesting a Protestant membership, and so were not monks, itself suggesting that the masons were readily converted from Catholicism, and therefore belonged to a different, perhaps heretical, tradition anyway. The speculative masons of the eighteenth century claimed to be advocating a universal Christianity that was not Catholic, and in the twenty first century, men of any faith are able to join, the Great Architect of the Universe that they vowed allegiance to representing any God they willed it to be! None of this pleased the popes, so Catholicism repudiated the Freemasons, and its dislike of them, and its allegations of Satanism, might reflect the heretical roots of the Masons, something remembered by the Church, though forgotten by everyone else—except perhaps some Masons of high degree.
The masons of the middle ages were said to have had their skill and organization from the Architects of Lombardy, who allegedly first called themselves “Freemasons”. These architects kept each other, though often widely dispersed even in different countries, informed of technical and theoretical developments, in for example the use of geometry in building and the significance of symbols. The Dowland MS identifies Masonry with geometry. It all served to distinguish the operatives masons from the row masons, or rough masons, the hewers of stone.
Masonic Myths
Mackey summarises the legends of the Freemasons. The “science as it is always called” went from…
Lamech to Nimrod, who found or invented the craft of masonry at the building of the Tower of Babel, and then to Euclid who established it in Egypt, whence it was brought by the Israelites into Judea, and there again established by David and Solomon at the building of the temple. Thence by a wonderful anachronism, it was brought into France by one Namus Grecus, who had been a workman at the temple, and who organized the science in France under the auspices of Charles Martel. From France, it was cerried into England in the time of S Alban. After a long interval in consequence of the Danish and Saxon wars, it finally took permanent root at York, where prince Edwin called an assembly, and gave the Masons their charges under the authority of a charter granted by king Athelstan.
The story attributes English Masonry to a French original, not a German one, and it has no reference to the “Four Crowned Martyrs”, who were the patrons of German Masonry. Only the Halliwell MS has this allusion, but it does not mention anything about Solomon’s Temple, so important in all the other texts, or Charles Martel and the French connexion or even S Alban. Nor does the Halliwell make any mention of prince Edwin and York. Mackey concludes that the Halliwell MS is an aberation, and prefers the others, though Halliwell is earlier than any of them.
The masonic legend of Lamech and the pillars of brick and stone is not biblical but a similar story was related by Josephus in Antiquities of the Jews, and he even claimed the two pillars still existed when he wrote around 100 AD. The story in Josephus differed from that of the masonic author in that the sons of Seth built the pillars not the sons of Lamech. In each case the purpose of the pillars was to have inscribed on them masonic science because they knew God was intent on destroying sin in the world by fire or water. The pillars would preserve the science for the righteous survivors.
In fact, there is a source for the Lamech version in The Polychronicon, a Latin universal history written by Ranulph Higden, a Benedictine Monk of S Wesbury’s Abbey in Chester. Higden died about the time the Regius MS was set down, but it does not appear until the Cooke MS. It happens that The Polychronicon was translated from Latin into English by Sir John Trevisa, and published by Caxton in 1482. The author of the Cooke MS knew the translation, and he cites it as authority for what he was relating. The Polychronicon uses the Josephus story, but the author of the Cooke MS overlooked a passage in which the descendents of Seth were introduced and so related the story as if the pillars were the work of the sons of Lamech who had been already introduced. Curiously, Higden had used The Chronicon of S Isidore, Bishop of Seville, who died in 636, and Isidore had made the same error, though Higden had not! It suggests that whatever Cooke had said about using The Polychronicon as a source, he had some other source too, derived directly from The Chronicon.
The Masonic legend that Enoch had made the pillars has no obvious source, and its late arrival on the scene suggests a modern invention, though Enoch is a type of Zoroaster or perhaps Zurvan, and The Polychronicon says Zoroaster had inscribed the seven sciences on seven pillars of brass and seven of brick. Jewish myths were originally Persian, but they were rewritten and translated into Greek and Hebrew by the Ptolemaic scholars in the third century BC. They seem to have taken Seth as typical of the pharaohs of Egypt whom they knew for erecting inscribed monuments.
The Solomon Connexion
The absence of any reference to Solomon in the Halliwell MS, the earliest, strongly suggests it is a later invention. How could such a fact be omitted had it been known. That Solomon and his building of a temple are myths also means that any link of Masonic origins with Solomon are also mythical. Mackey does not deny it, though not because he thought Solomon was a myth himself, but because it is all symbolic. Mackey had just been writing his History of Freemasonry when he died in 1881. The only evidence of Solomon and his temple, then, as it is still, was the bible, yet Mackey wrote in his last work:
The simple naked fact that king Solomon built a temple remains uncontradicted and is as historically true and undoubted as that of the construction of any other public edifice in antiquity.
Er… no, Brother Albert! In the very act of writing this, Mackey has to admit that one of his fellow Masons, Richard Carlile, had denied it in saying that even the Israelites themselves as well as Solomon’s temple were allegories. And also:
That Solomon, king of Israel, built a temple in Jerusalem is an historical fact that cannot be doubted or denied.
Many a Christian will endorse him still as well, though the evidence is still utterly absent except in a story. The point for these people, Masons or Christians, is that the bible is true by definition, and not by the evidence of history.
The details of the story were from The Polychronicon when stories previously known only orally by people unable to read Latin bibles were made available in English. The Cooke MS acknowledges it, but this MS never mentions the name of Solomon’s Master Mason, Hiram Abif, merely saying he was “the king’s son of Tyre”. In the bible, Hiram was the king of Tyre, and Abif means “his son”, so the king’s son of Tyre equates with Hiram Abif without being the same explicitly. The bible does mention also a foreman responsible for 30,000 labourers in Lebanon called Adoniram who seems to be the source of the Masonic myth, especially as the continental Masons call Hiram Abif “Master” or “Lord” Hiram, the meaning of Adoniram.
The name Solomon has long been popular in the East, in its various forms, and many of those people with the name Solomon, assume it derives from king Solomon. It is not so! Solomon has his name from an ANE sun god in its aspect of the evening sun, Shalim. In modern Arabic, ash shams (a lazy form of al shams) is still the sun. From at least the time of the Persian Achaemenid monarchs, though, the trend has been towards imperial or universal gods, and older gods were expunged often as evil, or brought down to earth as heroes. King Solomon is the ancient god, Shalim, brought down to earth. It removed him as a rival to the new universal god while allowing him to be revered by his worshippers while they still lived. As they died off, the former god became the heroic king instead.
So the old sun god, has become a preternaturally wise, rich and magical king, a king with pseudo god like features. To Moslem Arabs and Persians, Solomon was a magician with power over spirits, employing jinns to build his temple, which was, in fact, the temple of the new universal god. The power depended on a ring, which became a signet ring bearing the name of the true God (Yehouah, Yahu, Iao, Iah, Ea), but for long ANE monarchs had been depicted as receiving a ring from God, signifying the power and authority the God had given him—and therefore a signet ring in fact. After seven hundred years of darkness, contact between West and East in the crusades, and in the subsequent influence of the promitive Christianity of the Bogomil religion brought eastern myths of Solomon to the West, and troubadours were found serenading him as the ideal philosopher king.
Though the Regius MS does not mention Solomon in the fourteenth century, he appears in the following century. Perhaps he was already known as a suitable forerunner of the masonic guild but the author of the Regius MS had reasons not to include him at that stage. With the revival of scholarship around the time of the crusades, Solomon became the symbol of wise and magical skills, and was familiar to the travelling artisans who spread heresy throughout Europe. Among them were the masons.
Medieval Masons
Work on ecclesiastical buildings initially will have been supervised by clergymen, and the operative masons, the foremen architects, were originally clergymen, monks and friars, but barons and princes also built fine buildings with no need to employ clergymen masons, so freelance masons seem to have split from the church organizations early on, and became the organizers of subsequent guilds. Feudalism was virtual slavery. These peripatetic builders were among the first “free spirits”, the first people no longer tied to the land by feudalism. Once they had proved their competence, the Friar Masons had become the Freemasons.
There are few points in the middle ages more pleasing to look back upon than the existence of the associated masons. They are the bright spot in the general darkness of the period, the patch of verdure when all around is barren.G Godwin, cited by Mackey
Among the organizations of workers that formed in medieval times—about the telfth century—was the “Compagnons de la Tour”. Mackey says they had a similar myth to the current masonic Solomon myth. Indeed the Compagnons had split into three hostile factions each of which had a slightly different myth relating to the Namus Grecus of the modern version. Their relevance is simply to show that peripatetic workmen in twelfth century France already had the myth that appeared a few centuries later in the Cooke MS.
These guilds had split from ones that had already existed because, like many trades unions, their leadership had become corrupt, and had colluded with the employers against their members. Eventually some went on strike and seceded from the guild to reform the association. The traditions and rituals they took with them will have been those of the original corrupt asociations, suitably revised. Such a division would be hardly surprising if the original guilds had been ecclesiastical, given that the medieval Church was corrupt anyway, and both the leadership of the guild and the employers of the masons were clergy.
The medieval Masons were, as an association of builders, most intimately connected with the ecclesiastics of that age. Their principle home at one time was in the monasteries, they worked under the immediate patronage and supervision of bishops and abbots, and were chiedly engaged in the construction of cathedrals and other religious edifices.A G Mackey
From the split onwards, the guilds were likely to have been seen by the church as heretical, even though indispensible, and heretics doubtless were dominant in the ranks of the Freemasons. That is why the Catholic Church as an institution has disliked Masonry till this day, though senior bishops and cardinals have been Masons, and perhaps still are, even in the Vatican.
Mackey denies that the myth was historical. It draws upon the main work of medieval masons as builders of Christian temples, the great Gothic cathedrals and churches, and the dominant religious myths of the day, those in the bible, to type themselves as being like the builders of Solomon’s temple. He explains that the lacuma between the building of the temple, putatively about 1000 BC, and the mention of Masons in Europe under the Romans about the third century AD (eg the British Masonic myth of S Alban, and that of the German myth of the Three Crowned Martyrs) is too wide, there being no Jewish Masonic guilds in history to pass on the legend. The lacuna is indeed a wide one, but maybe not as wide as it seems.
Essenes
The historical fact is that the only temple known to have been built in Jerusalem with any connexion of Solomon to it was Herod’s temple, supposedly the Third Temple of Solomon. Solomon’s original one was allegedly destroyed by the Babylonians, and the replacement, allegedly built by Nehemiah under the Persians, was replaced by Herod as part of his immense building programme in the decades just preceding Christ. It is at least feasible that masons who worked on Solomon’s Third Temple, built by Herod could have joined or even founded a masonic collegium in Rome, just before the year dot. Indeed, the workmanship on Herod’s temple, or what remains of it today is distinctly Roman, so these masons could have been members of a Roman masonic collegium hired by Herod for their skill.
In fact, the supposed Romanized remains of the supposed Herodic Temple are most likely remains of the Roman temple that succeeded Herod’s in the second century when Jerusalem was razed and rebuilt as a gentile city, Aelia Capitolina. Christians, by then no longer considered Jews, could live in the new city, and it is even more feasible that some of the masons who built it claimed to have worked on Solomon’s temple, but meaning the Roman temple built on the same site, and might even have been Christians, and so would have known it. They would certainly have been members of a Roman Masonic collegium, or an affiliate of it.
Reverting to the building of Herod’s temple, it seems most likely that the operative masons working on this project were the sect of Essenes, known as builders or banaim, and apparently courted for awhile by Herod at that time for the very purpose of having a priestly sect able to build the Holy Place without profaning it. Mackey considers the idea that the Essenes were the original source of Masonry, but rejects it:
The Essenes appear in no respects connected with architecture, nor addicted to those sciences and pursuits which are subsidiary to the art of building.
It is, he says an objection “fatal to the theory which makes the Essenes the successors of the builders of Solomon’s Temple”. Practising Masons have an axe to grind, and secrets to keep, so one cannot always take them seriously in respect of their own beliefs, but, if Mackey expected this to be so, he was wrong, though he was writing in 1881, and we now have the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as the classic sources to tell us about the Essenes. It seems most likely that the Essenes were interested in building, and that Jesus was one of them, the biblical word translated “carpenter” being the Greek tekton which properly means a builder, whence our word “architect”, a chief builder!
Among the important allusions to building in the gospels is that of the “precious corner stone”, and the pun on “abanim” and “banaim”, stones and builders (Mt 3:9; Lk 3:8), builders being a pun on sons (children) that takes its context from the stones. The Essenes were both “sons” (banaim) of their Father, God, and builders too!
The connexion is with Solomon’s Temple is even closer than Mackey could have realized too. The biblical Solomon never existed, so he did not build a temple. The temple built by Herod, though, was believed to have been a replacement for the previous temple, the succesor to Solomon’s original. Herod’s temple is unquestionably historical, and Herod needed builder priests to construct the Holy Place. Essenes were a dissident sect of priests, and were evidently builders, either because they already were, or because they were willing to work at hard manual labour—unlike the temple priests who were rich and used only to comfort—and so trained for the task required. Thereafter, perhaps they were known as builders. Herod seemed to favour the Essenes while they were involved in the temple, but seemed to have ditched them once the Holy Place had been built.
The Essenes therefore built “Solomon’s Temple”, but at a much later date than that Solomon is given. It disposes of Mackeys objection of an 800 year gap between the imaginary Solomon, and the appearance of the Essenes in history. A link with any ANE king of 1000 BC with the Freemasons of 1700 AD England is vanishingly small, and with Solomon it vanishes, but a link through the Essenes is much more plausible, especially as the Christian church is itself an offshoot of the Essenes. The truth could have become known when the heretics became active in Europe around the time of the crusades.
The Masonic ending of the Halliwell poem, “Amen! So mote it be” is a tempting link with the Essenes. “So mote it be” is a translation of “Amen”, perhaps for the ignorant, but it means that “Amen” is written effectively twice, matching a curious practice noted in Essenic works and in Christ’s sayings, where “Amen”, in the gospels, is translated as “Verily”, repeated twice, “Amen! Amen!” or “Verily! Verily!”.
Death, Mysteries and Initiation
The oriental gods that came into the Roman empire invited public worship quite like that of any Christian church, but they also had higher levels of initiation into the god’s religious mysteries that conferred on to the initiates certain alleged privileges, such as eternal life. The belief of Moslem suicide bombers that they went forthwith to heaven as martyrs for their religion with no judgement or trials necessary came from the ancient belief that heroes went straight to Elysium, a place of sunlight and cornfields, whereas ordinary people went only to Hades, the underworld kingdom of the dead, dark and forbidding, but not a place of punishment like hell.
The prospect did not seem too distressing to many people in ancient times—many Jews too, in the Hellenistic era, for whom Sheol was just Hades where souls had lost their consciousness of everything including God, thereby knowing nothing about it—and certainly not Greek and Roman intelligentisia. But ordinary people could, by living a worthy and exemplary life, hope to be nominated as an initiate into the mysteries of the divinity of their choice, thereby achieving eternal life. As Christians, the Four Crowned Martyrs expected to go to heaven.
Stoics were among those unconcerned. Seneca wrote:
There is nothing after death, and death is itself nothing.
What conditioned belief among the less intelligent was their sorry condition in society. They were poor and neglected and felt the world was unjust. There had to be a compensation for the injustice they had to suffer, and punishment for their tormentors and the rich in another life. Demand generates its own supply, and so it did. Clever grifters offered what was wanted for a suitable donation, voluntary of course, and false belief thus feeds itself. Then, as Mackey points out:
Whenever any religion, whether true or false, becomes a religion of a people, whoever opposes it, or ridicules it, or seeks to subvert it, is sure to be denounced by popular fanaticism and to be punished by popular intolerance.
Mysteries were a way of having a religion within a religion, and yet avoiding any potential backlash from fanatics. The legends of several Greek gods punished by Zeus in various ways hint at sects that were impious enough to promise eternal life, a privilege enjoyed only by the gods themselves. As only gods had eternal life and only a god, often only their own, could confer it, the fanatics were sure that sects that promised it were blasphemous. The sects therefore went underground as the mysteries, requiring initiation, tuition, practice, acceptance and a solemn oath of secrecy before the hierophant revealed the secrets that brought eternal life. In the wider world, none of this was allowed to be revealed on pain of eternal punishment in Tartarus, the ancient hell, so all reference to it had to be symbolic to keep it hidden.
The initiated were instructed in the doctrine of a state of future rewards and punishments.Thomas Taylor
Now, without making any assumptions about the continuity of such initiations, it seems the Masonic rituals imitate the intiations of the ancient mysteries. The evidence is rather that the establishment of speculative Masonry at the beginning of the eighteenth century was done in imitation of what they knew about the ancient mysteries, and some Masons were well educated men. So they might well have continued or revived the dying system of medieval initiations by adding imaginative ones of their own, taken from mystery religions. Initiation ceremonies, in themselves are almost a part of human development, so the medieval ones also need not have continued anything that went before, and medieval heretical masons too could have spontaneously created their own. The possibility of a continuous link remains, albeit remote, but if there was a continuous tradition of such ceremonies, the likeliest source is the Church, rather than builders.
Pagans and Gnostics
The reverend C W King has found historical evidence in the Gnostics that the mysteries of Mithras survived the establishment of Christianity. The Gnostics had a dualist religion, derived from Persian religion, meaning their theodicy, or theory of evil, was that the good God had to face up to an equally strong wicked God, and the battle between them depended ultimately on the decisions of human beings. Christianity is considered to have defeated Gnosticism before the fall of Rome, and the onset of the dark ages in western Europe. But, if Gnosticism, re-emerged towards the millennium as heresy, it is possible that it had continued throughout the period unobserved in remote places, or underground.
Even though Constantine established Christianity in the fourth century and an attack on paganism quickly began, only in the reign of emperor Theodosius were all the pagan religions proscribed. The proscription stopped the open celebration of pagan gods, but all it did was drive paganism underground. Modern attempts to proscribe Christianity in some countries have done the same. It is a natural reaction of strongly held belief. Believers gain in their determination when they feel they are being persecuted. That is why it is a popular tactic of the clergy to claim that Christianity is being persecuted in the western world that has been almost exclusively Christian for two millennia.
Arguably, paganism was never killed off because aspects of it merged with Christianity, to different degrees visibly in established Christianity, and invisibly in grass roots Christianity. Christianity was established by Constantine as a type of solar monotheism, a forcing together of several such Roman religions. It was possible because it had come west from Persia via Judaism, a Persian invention, and Persian religion was a type of sun worship.
The great rival to Christianity that it absorbed at this time was Mithraism, the same Persian religion but more directly moved west via Anatolia rather than Palestine. The headress of a Christian bishop is a mitre, just one sign of the hybridization. So, the original Christianity derived from Judaism, under Constantine’s direction, self conciously adopted some trappings and ceremonial of the other Roman solar religions, notably Mithraism, and it was self consciously adapted to the needs of the Roman state.
Meanwhile, the original primitive Christianity that had emerged from Judaea, remained evolving in remote eastern regions like Armenia, and in the west probably continued essentially as it was at first but at the ground level of the common people, in Roman society, the slave and hired workman, then later in Europe, the peasant. Away from the necessities of state ceremonial, primitive Christianity at the grass roots had more in common with the popular pagan solar worship that had prevailed since time immemorial than ecclesiastical historians have been willing to recognize. Once the hybrid establishment religion had been forced into shape, becoming the state religion, the popes were not unduly bothered about the grass roots as long as they professed Christianity, and at least occasionally went to church.
The secret societies that were initially religious, gradually fragmented and diversified. The collegia of the Roman tradesmen seemed to be purely commercial trades unions and rackets, like many in the USA, but their initiations seem to have been inspired by the mysteries. Similar secret organizations then formed when the pagan religions were driven underground. Pagan and Gnostic underground societies could have showm the way for heretical Christian societies. The medieval guilds often associated with heresy, perhapos came from a combination of these influences. Lombardy in Italy became a center of heresy, but Como in Lombardy was a center of the masonic organizations. Later, as the masonic guilds became moribund, some of the honorary members they had by then changed them into philosophical and charitable societies with a secret element. Then they became the modern Freemasons in the 1700s.
Knights Templar
It is popular now to trace Freemasonry to the Knights Templar. Of the three crusading military orders, the Templars, the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights, only the Templars had secret procedures, a secret initiation, secret signs and perhaps a secret doctrine. The secrecy of the Templars was among the charges brought against them. They were said to have shut the doors of any church or house in which they met, and put a watchman on the roof so that no one could approach and see or hear what they were up to. Besides this, they had began by calling themselves the “poor fellow soldiers of Christ” using as their emblem two knights who were so poor they had only one horse between them, but became extremely wealthy and proud. Richard Lionheart, told by a clergyman that he ought to rid himself of pride, avarice and voltuptuousness, is said to have replied:
You counsel well. I hereby dispose of the first to the Templars, the second to the Benedictines, and the third to my bishops
The Templars become closely ssociated with the sect of the Assasins, sealing with them agreements to build crusader castles in Assassin country. Now, the Assassins were supposed to have been yet another secret society with rites of initiation and secret signs of recognition. Assassins came from the Persian Sufis who themselves had degrees of initiation and secret signs. So, the Templars seem to have been influenced by them, secret initiation, for example, being adopted at some stage after the foundation of the order, and it receiving its rule from S Bernard of Clairvaux. It seems beyond coincidence that the Templars took up similar arrangements to the Assassins after being in contact with them.
What of the link that has to be supposed between the Templars and the Masons? The soldiers returning from the crusades brought with them eastern ideas alien to western culture, the most surprising to modern westerners obsessed with hygeine being the idea of bathing. But many other cultural advances had their origin in the east at this time. Moslem influences helped set off the Renaissance. Sir Christopher Wren acknowledged the effect of the crusades on European architecture. Within a century of the first crusade, 600 fine buildings had been erected in Europe. In the 700 year Dark Age, nothing had been seen like it. This spurt of building required masons and architects, and they had to be free to travel in a society that, until then, had tied almost everyone to a landowner. It began the break down of feudalism by freeing people to trade, to be merchants and travelling artisans, independent of a feudal lord. Eventually society changed from feudalism to capitalism.
The Masonic myth instituted by Michael Ramsay, the Grand Orator of 1740, was that the crusades inpired the foundation of the Masons. Secret societies were set up by knights and princes in imitation of those they had met in the Orient. Most of them faded away when the fad ended, but the guilds of artisans and traders did not. The military orders could not have been purely soldiers, any more than a modern military division is entirely fighting men. Quite the opposite, most of them are providing necessary support services, the infrastructure. If Templars were building castles, then some of their number must have been spcialists in architecture and building. Most stone buildings in Europe at the time were churches, and their architects had to be clergymen, for only they could read.
The clerics imagined as being in the order of the Templars for their building skills must have known their initiation and recognition secrets. The conjecture then is that they taught them to the members of the lodges building grand buildings in Europe. The trouble is that there is no evidence that the Templars had these building specialists! Either all Templars had the skills, or they simply employed builders as needed.
Even then, anyone with the ability to read were likely to have been friars, for the educational system was almost defunct, even within the Church, many of the priests holding benefices being so functionally illiterate they had to mumble the mass happy that no one could tell they were talking nonsense. Now when the Templars had made friendly treaties with the Assassins, they will probably have hired the Assassins as labourers, and perhaps even as architectural advisers in constructing their fortresses. Perhaps this was the point when European masons had the secrets of the Assassins, and passed them to travelling masons back home.
Conclusion
There is little to confirm any real links between the modern Freemasons and their mythical beginnings, but they do have links, albeit barely continuous with the medieval guild of masons, some lodges of which they effectively took over as masonry fell out of demand. The Christian Church derived from the Essenes who seem to have been involved in the building of Herod's temple, not the mythical Temple of Solomon, and distant links between them and the medieval guilds are not impossible but they are tenuous. The same is true of the Templars. It looks much more as though the early speculative Masons, some of whom were scholarly, invented links and ceremonies based on their knowledge of these ancients. Nevertheless, the myths are themselves interesting and can be educational, as these paragraphs show.
Further Reading
- More on heretical beliefs
- More on dualistic solar belief, and sun gods as atoning saviours
- More on Mithras, and something about Zoroastrianism
