Appendix 1: The Development of Modern Freemasonry and its Impact on the World
The English Reformation and the Conditions for Emergence
For reasons of self-preservation the organization remained hidden from general view until the power of the Vatican began to slide rapidly in the sixteenth century.
This was due to the Reformation, which was a widespread movement within Western Christendom to purge the Church of medieval abuses, reduce papal control and to restore the doctrines and practices that the reformers believed conformed with the biblical model of the church.
The Reformation can really be said to have begun in Germany on 31 October 1517, when Martin Luther, an Augustinian university professor at Wittenberg, issued ninety-five theses. Such Jesus-like thinking was not welcomed by the papacy and he was excommunicated in 1521.
The English Reformation occurred as a direct result of King Henry VIII’s personal trouble with his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. The breakaway from papal power was masterminded by Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to the King, who passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals through Parliament in 1533, followed the next year by the Act of Supremacy, which fully defined the royal control of the Church. Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, authorized the translation of the Bible into English, and was largely responsible for the Book of Common Prayer.
The Roman Catholic Church was replaced by the Church of England, though there was a brief reversal during the reign of the daughter of Henry VIII by Catherine of Aragon: Queen Mary I ruled from 1553 to 1558,who had been ditched by Henry because she had not borne him a male heir. Once in power Mary proceeded to restore Catholicism, re-establishing the traditional services and the authority of the Pope, and earning the epithet Bloody Mary for the Executions of Protestants. In 1554 she married King Philip II of Spain, son of Holy roman Emperor Charles V; the event sparked several rebellions, which were harshly put down, and afterwards 300 Protestants were burned at the stake for their beliefs. Under her successor, Queen Elizabeth I, England grew into a strong and Protestant nation.
The King Who Built the Lodge System
Freemasonry today consists of almost a hundred thousand individual cells called Lodges.
Once the building of the Rosslyn shrine was complete, it was not possible simply to dissolve the secret organizations with which these proud stonemasons had been provided.
King James VI of Scotland (also later James I of England) was the only child of Mary Queen of Scots and the first king to rule both England and Scotland. He was also the first king known to be a freemason, being initiated into the Lodge of Scoon and Perth in 1601 at the age of thirty-five. (1) Born on 19 June 1566, James was only fifteen months old when he succeeded his Catholic mother to the Scottish throne, but did not begin his personal rule of Scotland until 1583. He received an excellent education from his principal tutor, George Buchanan.
The young king had a good brain and under the intellectual guidance of Buchanan, James successfully asserted his position as head of Church and State in Scotland, outwitting the nobles who conspired against him. Being eager to succeed the childless Elizabeth I to the English throne, he merely made a mild protest when his mother was executed for treason against Elizabeth in 1587.
At the age of thirty-seven, two years after becoming a Freemason, James became the first Stuart king of England. James was a speculative mason and also wrote books about kingship, theology, witchcraft, and even tobacco; significantly he also commissioned a new ‘Authorized’ version of the Bible which is called after him – the King James Bible (it is the version that omits the two anti-Nasorean Books of Maccabees). The introduction that still appears in the front of this Protestant Bible reveals no Catholic sympathies; once sections reads:
’…So that if, on the one side, we shall be traduced by Popish Persons at home or abroad, who therefore will malign us because we are poor instruments to make God’s holy Truth to be yet more and more known unto the people, whom they desire still to keep in ignorance and darkness…’(2)
This passage betrays a new kind of outlook where ‘knowledge’ and ’the people’ are seen as things that should be allowed to come together, in contrast to the secretive and political selfishness of the Catholic Church at that time.
With the king a speculative mason himself and the power of the Pope blocked for all time in Scotland, the need for utter secrecy was suddenly gone. King James ordered that the existing Masonic structure be given leadership and organization. He made William Schaw his General Warden of the Craft and instructed him to improve the entire structure of Masonry. Schaw started this major project on 28 December 1598 when he issued ‘The statutes and ordinances to be observed by all the master maissouns within this realme,’ signing himself as ‘The General Warden of the said craft’.
By Schaw’s time the St Clairs had lost their influence, because they had sought to gain financially through their control of operative stonemasonry. Towards the end of the year 1600 a new document was drawn up by the masters, deacons and freemen of the masons of Scotland and issued with the consent of William Schaw, who is described in the document as the King’s Master of Works. This became known as the First St Clair Charter:
’From age to age it has been observed amongst us, it is stated that the lairds of Rosslyn have ever been the patrons and protectors of us and our privileges, but within the past few years by negligence and slothfulness the office had passed out of use. This had deprived the lairds of their just rights, and the craft of their patrons, protectors, and overseers, leading to many corruptions, in the craft and to potential employers abandoning many great enterprises.’(3)
The previously secret Lodges of Scotland starting listing the names of their members and keeping minutes of their meetings.
William Schaw re-established the separate operative masons as junior subsidiaries of the speculative masons, thereby creating 'incorporations’ for the stonemasons, each of which would be attached to a ‘Lodge’ of speculative masons.
Freemasonry had a Lodge structure which would soon spread to England, and eventually the entire Western world.
The Architects of the Second Degree
This new degree was introduced and designated the Fellow Craft, derived from masons who were not workers in stone but workers in the ‘fellow craft’ of speculative masonry. This degree was a development of the Mark Mason degree (and not the other way around, as most Masons believe).
When James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, one of his first acts was to confer a knighthood on Francis Bacon, who was one of his favorite thinkers as well as a fellow Freemason.
Bacon’s works were held in high esteem by diverse seventeenth-century thinkers and scientists including Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Sir Isaac Newton and Thomas Hobbes.
Bacon let his Masonic knowledge mingle with his public aspirations when he published his book The New Atlantis which openly spoke of his plan for a rebuilding of King Solomon’s Temple in spiritual terms. This pure Ezeikel-esque vision, he said, was to be ‘a palace of invention’ and ‘a great temple of science’; it was visualized less as a building than as a new state where the pursuit of knowledge in all its branches was to be organized on principles of the highest efficiency.
In this work the intellectual seed germ of the constitution of the Untied States of America was firmly planted.
The New Heresy
The ‘Galilean Heresy’.
The Roman Catholic Church was persecuting those who investigated science. Most significant of these ‘wicked’ people was Galileo, who used new techniques to confirm the view that the sun and not the Earth was at the center of the universe. Although this concept had been first described by the Egyptian Eratosthenes in the third century BC, it was known as Copernicanism after the more recent proponent of the idea (Nicholaus Copernicus 1473-1543) and despite all protests the Holy Office at Rome issued an edict against Copernicanism early in 1616.
Francis Bacon incorporated this new truth of nature into his recently created Second Degree.
The Fellow Craft Degree has given rise to major contradictions within this ritual: the candidate is told that a secret sign is made by holding the hands in a certain way above the head, as used by Joshua:
’When Joshua fought the battles of the Lord in the Valley of Joshoshaphat it is in this posture that he stood and fervently prayed the Lord to stay the Sun in its course and extend the light of day until he had completed the overthrow of his enemies.’
First the Earth goes around the sun, then that God stopped the sun going around the Earth to help Joshua.
This explanation of the Fellow Craft sign applies to Joshua 10:12,butthis verse actually refers to the valley of Ajalon, not Joshoshaphat. Joshoshaphat is another name for the Kidron Valley which runs to the south and east of Jerusalem. The Old Testament legend of Joshua depicts him as a marauding, murderous Habiru with no obvious relevance to the tents of Freemasonry. The passage to which the quotation is attributed is one of the many appalling catalogues of the mass slaughter of innocent men, women and children for no reason other than the rapacity of such marauders as Joshua, and the apparent insanity of Yahweh. The passage boasts how, on God’s orders, five kings and all of their subjects and animals were slaughtered by the advancing Habiru and how, from one end of the land to the other:
’he left none remaining but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded.’
There was another biblical figure known by the name of Joshua, or Yahoshua, who did fight the greatest ‘battle of the Lord’ in the valley of Joshoshaphat. The Garden of Gethsemane is in the valley of Joshoshaphat. He called upon God to metaphorically stay the sun at its meridian, which was a way of asking that the forces of darkness be held at their weakest and the forces of goodness be at their height for the duration of the coming conflict.
The Old Charges
The written evidence is available today to tell us what Masonry was about prior to the improvements ordered by James VI and carried out by Schaw, Bacon and others.
A reliable document is the ‘Wood Manuscript’, written in 1610 (the same year as Galileo first declared his views on the structure of the solar system). It starts by identifying the sciences with which masonry has always been associated, which are given as: Grammar, Rethorick, Logicke, Arithmetick, Geometrye, Musick and Astronomie. These are the ancient classical subject lost in the Christian world during the Dark Ages. By the beginning of the seventeenth century they were again the natural subjects of all educated people, and were in no way peculiar to Freemasonry.
The Wood manuscript goes on to say that geometry is the greatest of the sciences and has been since the beginning of time.
The name Hiram Abif was only one designation for this central figure; he is also referred to as Aymon, Aymen, Amnon, A Man and sometimes Bennaim. Amon or Amen is the name of the ancient creator god of Thebes, the city of Seqenere Tao.
The name ‘A Man’ brought to mind the writers of the Book of Genesis in 49:6:
’O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united: for in their anger they slew a man, and in their self will they digged down a wall.’
Christians call on ‘Amen’ at the end of their prayers in an appeal for their wishes to be made true.
These seventeenth-century Freemasons had a direct line back to almost the beginnings of human history, but all the stages through which the motifs had now passed were obscuring much of the story.
In 1625 the Freemason King James VI died and his second son Charles succeeded to the throne (James’s elder son, Prince Henry, had died in 1612). Charles married Henrietta Mariathe Catholic princess daughter of King Henry IV of France. Charles displayed arrogance, causing conflict with Parliament and leading ultimately to civil war.
Charles remained at permanent loggerheads with his Parliaments, dissolving three of them in just four years because of their refusal to comply with his arbitrary demands. When the third of the Parliaments met in 1628, it presented the ‘Petition of Right’, a statement demanding that the king make certain reforms in exchange for funds. Charles was forced to accept the petition, but after making this concession, he responded by dismissing Parliament once again and had several Parliamentary leaders imprisoned. Charles reigned for eleven years without any Parliament at all. During this time he introduced extraordinary financial measures to meet governmental expenses which compounded his deep unpopularity.
Everyone in the country thought God was the center of all matters, but there was a growing diversity of opinion on the best way to relate to him. Jesus was a man who strove for simplicity, religious rigor and freedom – and was not afraid to fight for it. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Catholic Church was run by comfortable conservatives that had lost sight of Godliness beneath their own inflated egos, and their insistence that only the Pope had the right to interface with God had worn very thin with those that had the wit and the opportunity to think for themselves.
Words attributed to Jesus in QS 34 of the reconstructed gospel ‘Q’:
’Shame on you Pharisees! For you clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are full of greed and incontinence. Foolish Pharisees! Clean the inside and the outside will also be clean.
Shame on you Pharisees! For you love the front seats in the assemblies and greetings in the market place. Shame on you! For you are like graves, outwardly beautiful, but full of pollution inside…
Shame on you lawyers! For you have taken the key of knowledge away from the people. You yourselves do not enter the kingdom of God, and you prevent those who would enter from going in.’
Our second connection between the two periods concerns the ending of papal power in England and the combining of sacerdotal and secular authority in the single figure of the king. For the first time since the establishment of the Church, the ambition of Jesus to unite both priestly and kingly pillars in one was achieved. We came across a seventeenth-century illustration that confirmed a link with the Jerusalem Church. The engraving showed in graphic detail the kingly and priestly pillars of ‘mishpat’ and tsedeq’. It was almost identical.
King Charles I had assumed the role of both pillars by identifying himself as the keystone that locked them together. The left-hand pillar is ’tsedeq’ in the form of ‘THE CHURCH’, surmounted by the figure of ‘truth’; the right-hand pillar is ‘mishpat’ in the form of ‘THE STATE’, surmounted by ‘justice’. Charles’s son King Charles II was to build this design into the entrance to Holyrood House when he rebuilt it after the Civil War in 1677.
Jesus believed that when social order was run in tune with the laws given by Yahweh, there would be no need for an active high-priestly role because God would act directly through his earthly king to maintain a state of ‘shalom’; in contrast, the English king simply saw a joint role for himself, with God only a distant figure.
The Rise of the Republicans
Three years after Charles I came to the throne, a young commoner with republican ideas entered Parliament as member for Huntingdon. His name was Oliver Cromwell and his family was originally from Wales with the name Williams. They had risen from obscurity through the favour of Henry VIII’s minister, Thomas Cromwell, who was the uncle of Oliver’s great-great-grandfather, and they adopted the name of their patron in recognition of his help. The newly named Cromwell family soon became prominent in the Cambridgeshire town of Huntingdon, where Oliver was born on 25 April 1599. The now well-to-do Cromwells had their son educated in the town by a leading Puritan called Thomas Beard; a man who was outspoken concerning his wish to ‘purify’ the Church of England of its remaining Roman Catholic elements. Cromwell later attended the predominantly Puritan Sindey Sussex College and Cambridge University as well as studying law in London. In August 1620 he married Elizabeth Bourchier and returned to Huntingdon to manage his father’s estate and became member of Parliament for Huntingdon some eight years later.
On 22 August 1642, civil war broke out between the Puritan-dominated Parliament and the supporters of the king. At the end of the first year of war the Royalists held most parts of England except London and the eastern side of the country. Cromwell’s ability as a fine commander was recognized and by 1644 the single-minded soldier was a lieutenant general under Edward Montagu, Earl of Manchester. His promotion was well deserved; he led the Parliamentary forces, known as Roundheads, to victory in the crucial Battle of Marston Moor, earning for himself and his regiment the name ‘Ironsides’.
On 24 June 1646, Charles surrendered himself to the Scots, was turned over to Parliament and became a prisoner.
Yorkshire has a Masonic temple of the library which is entered down a spiral stairway leading onto a black and white paved room with two free-standing pillars. Today it is a corporate headquarters for a large firm of electrical contractors.
One of the best sources of information about Freemasonry during this period was the diary of Elias Ashmole. We found references to some very odd meetings which helped throw light onto the events which led to the formation of the Royal Society and the Restoration.
Four months after he saw his side lose the war, Ashmole traveled to Warrington to be initiated into the Craft.
Sir Christopher Wren built many fine churches including St Paul’s Cathedral after the City of London was largely destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. Doctor John Wilkins was Warden of Wadham College Oxford, the husband of Oliver Cromwell’s sister Robina and a past chaplain to Cromwell himself.
Ashmole met Wilkins. The Freemason king finally lost to a Freemason Parliamentarian. On 20 January 1649 Charles I was put on trial in Westminster Hall in London. The king refused to recognize the legality of the court and did not enter a plea in response to the charges of being a tyrant, murderer, and an enemy of the nation, and a week later he was sentenced to death and publicly beheaded on 30 January. With the monarchy gone and England under his control, Cromwell’s first task was the subjection of Ireland and Scotland. The massacres following his capture of Drogheda and Wexford were terrible and excessive, the result of his burning hatred for both the Irish and for Roman Catholics. The name of Oliver Cromwell still evokes fear and anger in Ireland, three hundred and fifty years after the event.
Scotland was a focus of Cromwell’s wrath, where he destroyed Royalist castles and Catholic churches.
Whilst he had no love of Catholics, he allowed Jews, who had been excluded from England since 1290, to return in 1655 – an action born out of his knowledge of Masonic ritual.
With the beheading of Charles the throne of England was abandoned and the country became the world’s first parliamentary republican a period known as the Commonwealth. The following year the dead king’s son Charles landed in Scotland to continue the war; in 1651 he was crowned king of that country and promptly invaded England.
Ashmole became the friend and acquaintance of astrologers, mathematicians, physicians and other individuals who were advancing their knowledge into the hidden mysteries of nature and science. The word was out; there was an ’invisible college’, a society of scientists that could not be identified as a group, but whose presence was very evident.
General George Monk, in May 1660, recalled the Long Parliament and had them restore the monarchy by placing Charles II on the throne. The new king did not take long to seek revenge on the man who had caused him so much pain. He had Cromwell’s body disinterred and his rotting corpse hanged as a traitor before his head was put on a pole mounted above Westminster Hall.
The Royal Society Emerges
The change back to a monarchy from a republic may well have been welcomed by Ashmole on a personal level, but it also brought benefit to the 'invisible college’. In 1662 King Charles II granted a royal warrant to it, thereby creating the Royal Society; the world’s first assembly of scientists and engineers dedicated to understanding the wonders created by the “Great Architect of the Universe’. The freedoms built into the fabric of Freemasonry had first created a fledgling republic and when that failed, they gave birth to the organization that would push the boundaries of human knowledge forward to create an age of enlightenment and lay the foundations for the industrialized society of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The brief spell that England spent as a republic was not wasted; monarchs from then onwards forgot the primitive notion of the divine right to rule and held office through the affection of the people and the authority of the House of Commons, which spoke for the democratic will of the nation. In years to come that democratic right spread to poor people and eventually women – the vision of the man called Jesus took a long time coming.
John Wallis, the eminent seventeenth-century mathematician writing about his recollections of the beginnings of the Royal Society, said:
’I take its first ground and foundation to have been in London, about the year 1645, if not sooner, when Dr Wilkins (then chaplain to the Prince Elector Palatine, in London) and others, met weekly at a certain day and hour, under a certain penalty, and a weekly contribution for the charge of experiments, with certain rules agreed amongst us. When (to avoid diversion to other discourses, and for some other reasons) we barred all discourses of divinity, of state-affairs, and of news, other than what concerned our business of Philosophy.’
This description of the earliest meetings of the new thinkers is unquestionably Masonic. The weekly meeting at a known hour, the known penalty and the utter abstinence from all topics of politics and religion are still the hallmarks of a Freemason’s Lodge.
One of the most influential scientists to be involved with Ashmole was Robert Hooke, who was appointed the royal Society'’ first curator of experiments. Hooke was one of three city surveyors after the Great Fire of London and he was an early proponent of the microscope, for biological investigations, coining the modern biological usage of the word ‘cell’.
The great men of the age all sought to join the Royal Society, and perhaps the greatest of them all was Sir Isaac Newton who achieved many things including a remarkably detailed analysis of the gravitational structure of the universe. In 1672 Newton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and later that same year he published his first scientific paper on his new theory of light and color in the Philosophical Transactions of the Society. A quarter of a century after the Royal Society had been awarded its royal warrant, Newton published the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), or Principia as it is universally known. This remarkable work is, by common consent, the greatest scientific book ever written.
The gatherings of the intelligentsia no longer needed the secrecy and the protection of the Craft to overcome religious and political obstacles.
The Craft in London was suffering from a certain amount of neglect.
Freemasonry Finds Its Feet
Freemasonry was suddenly a victim of its own success; it had overcome the long-standing threat from the Church and it had kick-started democracy and a climate of ongoing scientific enquiry.
The Spread of Freemasonry
The Development of Masonry in America
It is no secret that Masonry was a major moving force behind the American Revolution and the founding of the Republic of the United States of America. The anti-British tax demonstration known as the ‘Boston Tea Party’ was organized in 1773 by the members of the St Andrew’s Lodge, which had amongst its members such famous individuals as Samuel Adams and Paul Revere. The Lodge met at the Green Dragon Tavern in Boston.
The men who created the United States of America were either Freemasons themselves or had close contact with Freemasons. They did not know it, but by their devotion to Masonic principles of justice, truth and equality for their new country, they were undertaking an attempt to build a land that would be driven by a rediscovered Ma’at; a modern state that was the genuine heir to the greatness of ancient Egypt.
Of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1778,the following were Masons: William Hooper, Benjamin Franklin, Matthew Thornton, William Whipple, John Hancock, Phillip Livingston and Thomas Nelson. Leading Freemasons here included such men as Greene, Marion, Sullivan, Rufus, Putnam, Edwards, Jackson, Gist, Baron Steuben, Baronde Kalb, the Marquis de Lafayette and George Washington himself.
When Washington was sworn into office as the first President of the Republic on 30 April 1789 it was by the Grand Master of New York and he took his oath on the Masonic Bible. He had been a Freemason all his adult life, being initiated into the Fredericksburg Masonic Lodge five months before his twenty-first birthday on Friday 4 November 1752.
Searching through old manuscripts we came across a contemporary record of George Washington’s speech after being presented with an inscribed Book of Constitutions by the Freemasons of Boston on 27 December 1792. From the date of the presentation we assume this must have been to celebrate his forty years in the Craft.
It was also in 1792 that Washington laid the foundation stone of the White House – on 13 October, the anniversary of de Maloy’s crucifixion! That year the dollar was adopted as the unit of currency for the United States of America. The symbol for the dollar is an ‘S’ with a double vertical strike-through. This was borrowed from the Nasorean pillars of ‘Mishpat’ and ‘Tsedeq’, better known to the Masonic founders of the United States as ‘Boaz’ and ‘Jachin’, the pillars of the porchway to King Solomon’s Temple.
Today the dollar bill bears the image of a pyramid with an eye set within it, which is the most ancient of all images in daily use because it has come down to us from before the time of Seqenenre Tao, escaping the purge of Egyptian motifs of the king-making ceremony caused by the prophet Ezekiel during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews. On the obverse of the one-dollar bill is Brother George Washington and on the now-defunct two dollar bill there was the image of another famous Freemason – Brother Benjamin Franklin.
On 18 September 1793 George Washington laid the cornerstone of the Capitol building in Washington, and he along with fellows were all dressed in their full Masonic regalia.
The United States of America is still a very young country. To match the longevity of ancient Egypt it will have to maintain its powerful status until at least AD 4500. It is only another stepping stone on a journey set in motion in southern Iraq at least six thousand years ago.
(1) Year Book of the Grand Lodge of Antient Free and Accepted Masons of Scotland, 1995
(2) Introduction to the King James Bible
(3) The First Schaw Statue, Library of Grand Lodge of Scotland
