That Religion in Which All Men Agree - David G. Hackett

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of geometry was Jabel, Lamech’s son who, fearing God’s punishment, inscribed his discovery on stone pillars that could survive fire or flood. After the Great Flood, Hemarynes (Hermes), a great-grandson of Noah, discovered the pillars and from them retaught the sciences to humanity. Next, Abraham and his wife Sarah went to Egypt and taught the seven sciences to the Egyptians, including Euclid. Euclid then instructed King David during the latter’s sojourn in Egypt. On his return to the Holy Land, David gave these charges to the masons who began building the Jerusalem Temple, whose construction continued under his son Solomon. Solomon sent for workers from other countries, whom he charged to spread the craft to France and England (later rites of initiation took place in an allegorical Solomon’s Temple). Eventually, it was said, the English king Edwin compiled both this prehistory and the guild’s codes of conduct, and his books became the constitutions themselves.24

      In the seventeenth century, Scottish masons working from these constitutions created catechisms for their rituals of identification and initiation, which collectively became known as the Mason Word. Although it was customary for craft guilds to maintain constitutions detailing their rules and legendary histories, masons not only had extensive codes of conduct and an elaborate legendary history but also, unlike other guilds, evolved an extensive ritual life. Again, this may have been due to the prominence of the craft and the need to guard trade secrets among a regional labor force. The early Scottish catechisms dealt with the admission of candidates to the two grades of mason known as Entered Apprentice and Fellow Craft. These rites probably existed prior to that time and may have been created out of earlier practices of the craft.25 Though fragmentary and diverse in their contents, the surviving catechisms usually include questions and answers to ascertain the identity of another craftsman, culminating in the recognition of a secret or words, and rites of initiation that instructed the two grades of masons in the secrets of the Word.26

      Both rites of initiation were said to involve a “great many ceremonies,” which the surviving catechisms keep largely hidden from outsiders’ view. Emphasizing secrecy, the Entered Apprentice investiture involved the recitation of the craft’s legendary history, while the Fellow Craft rite explained the significance of the letter G—for both geometry and God—and its place in the Temple of Solomon. The ceremonies took place within the Mason’s lodge, which could be their guild, their workplace, or the setting for their ritual return to ancient Egypt.27 Though the scattered evidence of the catechisms does not give a clear picture of the early rites, the “work” to which the master put the masons in the lodge presumably symbolized the building of the temple. Among religious people of that time, “building the Temple” meant creating the kingdom of God.28 Post-Reformation influences also appear to be present, in the use of the singular form of word. Scotland’s new Calvinist churches emphasized the truth of the “Word of God” as revealed in scripture. Scripture itself was often referred to as “the Word.” Such phrases as “in the beginning was the Word” invoked powerful sentiments of mystery and ultimate truth. In the Wisdom of Solomon, a favorite among Masons, “God made all things by his Word, and his Word killed all unbelievers.”29

      References to building the temple and the Mason Word, David Stevenson has suggested, also intimate that the rituals of seventeenth-century Scottish Freemasonry may have emerged partly as a reaction to some of the changes that the coming of Protestantism brought to Scotland. As is well known, the Reformation fundamentally changed Christian religious beliefs and practices. Catholicism sanctifies life’s passage with seven sacramental rituals that give social significance to the stages of life’s journey. Protestantism shifts the emphasis from the ritualization of life’s journey to particular beliefs and individual faith. Compared to the richness of Catholic ritual life, the practices of the new Protestant churches were barren. This was particularly true in Scotland, where there was a decisive break with the pageantry of the old church. By suddenly eliminating so much of the ritual and spectacle of the Catholic Church, the Scottish Reformation of 1560 may have created a profound sense of loss in many people.30

      It is noteworthy, then, that the appearance of the Mason Word in Scotland coincided with the Calvinist Church’s destruction of the religious aspect of trade guilds. For members of trade guilds, the pageantry and processions that marked the feast days of their organizations’ patron saints were the high points of the year. The Protestant leader John Knox sneered at the “priests, friars, canons, and rotten Papists, with tabors and trumpets, banners and bagpipes,” who processed through Edinburgh in 1558 on Saint Giles’s Day. Reformation, in one respect, meant the suppression of the guilds’ religious practices. Though their members continued to attend church in groups and begin meetings with short prayers, the guilds no longer participated in the religious festivals of the Christian year nor maintained altars dedicated to their saints. This reaction against ceremony may have contributed to the counterreaction of the majority of Edinburgh’s leading craftsmen, who steadfastly remained Catholic following the 1560 Reformation. It is probably more than a coincidence, moreover, that within two generations an elaborate pageantry and ritual life emerged within Scottish Masonry.31

      Aside from the innovations of the Mason Word, by the seventeenth century, secrecy was increasingly associated with the Scottish lodge. This was partly a legacy of the craft’s medieval past, when it kept the mysteries of its operative trade to itself, but also reinforced by the late Renaissance passion for ancient, esoteric truth.32 Though belief in the power of occult knowledge was declining by the eighteenth century, many educated Britons still believed that ancient mysteries might be retrieved and so reveal God’s deeper truth.

      It was from within the broader environment of hermeticism and Rosicrucianism that nontradesmen started to seek out the Masonic guilds. Hermeticism began with the interweaving of metallurgical traditions and ideas gleaned from Gnosticism, Platonism, and Egyptian theology in Greco-Roman Egypt. Its magical practices were believed to have the power to turn base metals into gold and mere humans into immortals. The Renaissance recovery of ancient texts led to a new exploration of the supposed revelations of the divine being Hermes. Combining hermeticism with tales of an occult brotherhood, Rosicrucianism sparked the search for secret tablets, originally discovered in the tomb of the mystic Christian Rosencreutz, whose inscriptions revealed ancient mysteries.33 Early seventeenth-century Scottish Masons, in particular one William Schaw, the master of the king’s works, were imbued with the reforming and mystical hermeticism of the late Renaissance. Schaw was an intimate of the Stuart court of the 1590s, to which the Renaissance hermeticist Giordano Bruno carried the ancient wisdom. Schaw, in turn, brought hermeticism to the lodges of the 1590s.34 The years around 1600 saw the peak of hermetic striving for spiritual rebirth based on secret knowledge and mystical societies. This was also the time when the legendary history and hidden ritual practices of Freemasonry began attracting large numbers of nonmasons.

      What first drew them were statements contained in the old manuscript constitutions.35 The legendary histories traced Masonic origins to both the author of Biblical wisdom, Solomon, and the source of occult knowledge, Hermes. Furthermore, like the ancients, the craft guild transmitted its knowledge not through books but through symbolic language and secret ceremonies. For late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Britons seeking primeval wisdom and occult knowledge, Masonic statements and ceremonies suggested a means of entry into the esoteric truths of the ancients. Elias Ashmole and Sir Robert Moray were among the first nonmasons initiated into the English and Scottish lodges. Ashmole, who was interested in hermeticism and the Rosicrucian brotherhood, joined and eventually became the master of his Edinburgh lodge. A few years later, in 1646, Moray, who had a great interest in alchemy and number mysticism, was admitted to a lodge at Warrington, Lancashire. Both men were founding members of the new scientific organization, the Royal Society.36

      The late Renaissance glorification of mathematics and architecture similarly attracted men interested in planning and design. Renaissance thought associated architecture with the articulation of moral values, in the sense that buildings give concrete expression to society’s ideas about how to construct social life.37 For the fraternity, economic reasons played a role in the admission of nonmasons. As early as the 1670s, lodges in Scotland and England were offering “honorary” membership in their “ancient” society to prosperous gentlemen willing to offer infusions of capital for renovations and

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