HISTORY OF FREEMASONRY

There are many masonic bodies, of which only The International Order of Co-Freemasonry, Le Droit Humain, admits both men and women. Each masonic body has its own view and legend of the origins of Freemasonry, though there is, broadly-speaking, a common-point of origin for all masonic ceremonies.

The exact origins of Freemasonry are unclear. It seems, however, as though a craft organization of stone workers in the Renaissance attracted the participation of those who were interested in building, both as a practical craft and for its symbolic associations. Over time, the symbolic aspects became more pronounced and the "speculative" members interested in the symbols became more numerous than the "operative" members who were actual stonemasons. This may have happened first in Scotland, but it was in London in 1717 that a number of such "speculative" Lodges banded together to form a Grand Lodge and the beginning of organized Freemasonry, as we know it.

The broader origins of masonic tradition are believed to derive from the earliest ancient mysteries of civilisations such as ancient Greece and Egypt. Their philosophies contain eternal truths which are regarded by most as the fount of modern religious, philosophical and ethical teachings.

The early "speculative" Freemasons seem to have been interested in a variety of yet earlier forms of thought, especially the symbolic interpretation of pictures and of geometry and what is sometimes called the "perennial philosophy."

Such interests connect Freemasonry thematically with a number of movements from ancient civilisations (whether mythical or real) through to the Middle Ages and later; the Greek and Near Eastern Mysteries, the Pythagorean School, Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, the Knights Templar, the Kabbalah, and the Rosicrucians, etc.

Others more prosaically take a view that Masonry itself was derived in the first instance from the operative masonry practiced in the craft guilds of the Middle Ages - indeed there are many common themes.

Masonry has undoubtedly picked up key threads from many religious sources – Western Europe's stone age burial mounds (marking the solstices, rebirth, mock burials, sacrifices), medieval romance and Christianity (the penalties, investiture and legends), Norse and Celtic traditions (the noose and dagger), Catharsis (the emphasis on light and perfection), Greek, Roman (the trips through the underworld, the elementals), Hebrew (kabbalah, the seal of Solomon), Chilean, Essene (gnosis, the pillars)

Much of this mixed symbolism is found in the strange chapel at Rosslyn. A Christian place, containing pagan symbolism, built by a Templar, more than a century after the last templar was supposedly arrested by Philip le Bel in France and two centuries before the first templars are recorded in England, showing a candidate blindfolded and with a noose around his neck. The trail from Rosslyn leads back to Jerusalem and the Holy Land.