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Posted: Mon Jun 9th, 2008 04:52 PM

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MASONIC CIVILIZATION

by Richard Smoley

Masonry. To some the word connotes sinister conspiracies, an underground
cabal that, through means unknown and scarcely imaginable to ordinary
mortals, manipulates currencies and topples governments.

To others, more adept at observation than imagination, it evokes images of
small town America, of solid citizens in cheap suits congregating at a lodge
on the second story of a shabby Main Street commercial building.

In either case, today's seekers may wonder why Masonry should interest them.
While some grain of esoteric knowledge may be buried in those peculiar
rituals, how powerful could it be? The Masons we know-a father or an uncle,
perhaps-so far from being mystic masters, usually blend unobtrusively into
the background of middle-class life.

Personally I am not a Mason. I know no more of this tradition than can be
found in books. Yet from the small amount of reading I've done, I'm
convinced that every spiritual seeker today owes an incalculable debt to
Freemasonry. You could even say that ours is fundamentally a Masonic
civilization. (Freemasonry and Masonry, by the way, are more or less
inter-changeable terms; "the Craft" is a common nickname.)

To understand why Masonry is so important, it's helpful to look at its
origins-at least as far as we can glimpse them. The oldest known Masonic text,
the "Old Charges," which dates at least as far back as 1400 A.D., sets out a
legendary heritage that begins with the antediluvian patriarch Jabal, who discovered
geometry ("the which Science is called Massonrie") and wrote down his findings on pillars
of stone. After Noah's Flood destroyed all human civilization, the Egyptian
sage Hermes Trismegistus rediscovered this knowledge and passed it on in a
lineage that includes Nimrod, Abraham, Euclid, and the 80,000 masons who
were said to have worked on Solomon's Temple.

Like many branches of the Western inner traditions, Masonry thus claims to
go back to ancient Egypt and Israel. But most scholars today including many
Masons would say there is no evidence of any such link. Hence most opt for
one of two other theories of Masonic origins. You will encounter both of
them in this issue.

The first one holds that Masonry evolved from the medieval stonemasons'
guilds. The medieval guild, a combination of trade union and regulated
monopoly, had the responsibility of inducting trainees and preserving trade
se-crets; this was the origin of the famous Masonic passwords and secret
handgrips. And because medieval civilization was steeped in religion,
spiritual and ethical instruction was included in the apprentices' training,
giving rise to the lessons imparted in the Masonic degrees.

In the early modern period, the guild system began to break down; as it did,
the associations of practicing stoneworkers-what is known as "operative
Masonry" began to evolve into the "speculative Masonry" of today's lodges.
Here the old symbolism of plumb and square, compass and gauge, for moral
and ethical virtues was retained, but now purely symbolically. Eventually
the "operative" side was lost altogether and Masons were drawn chiefly from
the nobility and bourgeoisie.

Such is the first theory. It is semiofficially promulgated by many Masonic
organizations and books, and is the more or less standard account. It does
have some major problems, however. As Christopher Knight (interviewed in
this issue) notes, it doesn't explain why Freemasonry seems to have
originated in Scotland, where there were few if any stonemason's guilds,
rather than on the Continent, where there were many. It also fails to
explain why, in an age where nothing was more of a blot on one's social
stand-ing than any kind of connection with work that soiled one's hands, the
gentry and intelligentsia suddenly became interested in the knowledge
embodied in a craft guild. It is as if a socialite today went to the union
local in search of esoteric knowledge. Finally, the religious sentiments in
the surviving guild texts are strongly Christian.Yet explicitly Christian
motifs are almost completely absent from Masonry.

The second theory is far more romantic (which can be a disadvantage if it is
being judged by historians who pride themselves on caution and sobriety). It
says that Freemasonry is a reformulation of the knowledge possessed by that
mysterious medieval order known as the Knights Templars. Some scholars,
notably the amateur historian John J. Robinson, argue convincingly for this
view. I tend to agree with them. Here's why.

The Templars (as noted in Dale Boudreau's article in this issue) ostensibly
founded to protect Palestine from the Muslims, reached the zenith of their
might in the thirteenth century, when they wielded great power not only in
the Holy Land but in Europe. But when Palestine fell back into Muslim hands
in 1291, the Templars lost their apparent reason for existence, and various
powers, including the pope, made plans to consolidate them with their rival
order, the Knights Hospitallers. The Templars, perhaps overconfident of
their prestige, did not maneuver very capably in this situation. Many were
rounded up, tortured, and executed.

Not all the Templars fell into their enemies' hands. Many of the knights
were never caught, and a large Templar fleet consisting of eighteen ships at
the French harbor of La Rochelle vanished before they could be seized. No
one knows what happened to them.2

After this many Templars seem to have taken refuge in Scotland, whose king,
Robert the Bruce, was at that time under excommunication by Rome and was
also fighting to keep his country free from English rule. The Scottish cause
was not faring well; the English had set up strongholds throughout much of
Scotland, and it seemed only a mat-ter of time before the nation fell under
England's sway.

But in 1314 the tide turned decisively. At the celebrated Battle of
Bannockburn, Robert the Bruce routed English forces two-and-a-half times the
size of his own, guaranteeing Scotland's independence for the next 300
years. Oddly enough, even here the battle seemed to be going against the
Scots when at the last moment a mysterious force came to their aid. Accounts
of this event are garbled; the best known version says the camp followers of
the Scottish army entered the fray, blowing horns and waving homemade fiags.
Mistaking them for real reinforcements, the English panicked and fled.3

You don't have to read many accounts of battles to un-derstand how the tide
can be turned by such flukes. Even so, it's strange to think that the proud
English knights could have been routed by a seedy brigade of whores and
scullery lads.

Another explanation, favored by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, those
tireless champions of alternative his-tory, says that the mysterious force
was a detachment of Templar knights, and that the legend of the camp
followers' attack was a story cooked up to boost Scottish national pride
while disguising the real source of Robert's help.4 At any rate, by the time
the ban of excommunication was lift-ed from Scotland in 1328, the Templars
would have had plenty of occasion to find cover.

There is some evidence for Templar survivals in the British Isles after
their suppression. Robinson argues that the Peasants' Revolt in England in
1381 was not a spontaneous uprising but an event carefully orchestrated by
heirs to the Templar lineage. He notes, for example, that the rioting mobs
often went far out of their way to sack properties belonging to the Knights
Hospitallers, who had taken over the Templar holdings in England. Robinson
also notes that the leader of the revolt was one Wat Tyler-and every good
Mason knows that the "Tyler" is a lodge functionary: he is the one who
stands guard outside the meeting.5

Robinson also points to a curious allusion in the initi-ation rite of the
third degree, that of the Master Mason. Here the candidate is told that the
initiation"will make you brother to pirates and corsairs." Is this a
recollection of the vanished Templar ships that (we may speculate) turned to
piracy to avenge themselves on the perfidious European powers? The
connection becomes more plausible if you remember that one of the symbols
associated with the Master Mason's degree is the skull and crossbones on a
black background the Jolly Roger familiar to every schoolboy.

Finally, there is the matter of the "blood oaths." The Masonic rituals
contain a number of bloodcurdling punishments that the initiate invokes upon
himself if ever he violates the secret. In the second, Fellowcraft degree,
for example, the candidate binds himself to his oath "under no less penalty
than to have my left breast torn open and my heart and vitals taken from
thence and thrown over my left shoulder and carried into the valley of
Jehosaphat." 7

As Robinson points out, such oaths are mystifying if it is a matter of
stonecutters' trade secrets-but quite understandable for Templars on the
run, who, if they were handed over to the Inquisition, would have suffered
tor-ments far more excruciating than these.

The evidence for a Templar connection is more compendious and more
intricate than I can really do justice to here, but if we accept this
hypothesis, we might ask how the Templars turned into the Freemasons. To
have a sense of this, we must look at a small and quirky chapel a few miles
south of Edinburgh, known as Rosslyn. It is on the estate of the St. Clair
or Sinclair family, and was built be-tween 1441 and 1486. Though ostensibly
the private chapel of an aristocratic family, it has never served as such;
the St. Clairs' chapel is in their house.

Moreover Rosslyn seems to possess an enormous number of non-Christian
motifs. "The figure that occurs most frequently," write Baigent and Leigh
"is the 'Green Man' a human head with vines issuing from its mouth and
sometimes its ears, then spreading wildly, in tangled pro-liferation, over
the walls." 8 Is this "Green Man" connected with "Baphomet ' the bearded
head that the Templars' en-emies accused them of worshiping?

Knight and his coauthor Robert Lomas suggest in their book The Hiram Key
that Rosslyn was built as a replica of Herod's Temple, on which the Templars
had conducted excavations during their time in the Holy Land. Rosslyn even
has two pillars, "the apprentice's pillar" and "the Mason's pillar ' which,
according to Knight and Lomas, correspond to the two pillars, Jachin and
Boaz, of the Jerusalem Tem-ple-and of the Masonic lodge.

But one of the most intriguing pieces of evidence from Rosslyn is a carving
reproduced on page 26 of this issue. Knight claims that it portrays the
astonishing scene of a first degree Masonic initiation-conducted by a figure
in Templar garb. Knight and Lomas conclude:

Many modern Freemasons believe that their organization is descended from the
semi-literate working-class ritual practices of the medieval guilds of
stonemasons. It is an origin theory that is riddled with problems, yet it
did seem to explain the well documented references to the early operative
lodges of Scotland.The true reason is more the reverse: it was speculative
masons (Templars) who adopted opera- tive masons (stoneworkers) and
introduced them to lower-level secrets concerning Solomon's Temple. 9

By the early seventeenth century, Masonry begins to enter the public scene,
and we encounter records of lodge meetings in several Scottish towns.
Depending on whom you believe, either Masonry at this point began to be per-
meated by the esoteric currents that Frances Yates has dubbed "the
Rosicrucian enlightenment ' or, alternatively, these esoteric dimensions
simply became better-known. By 1638 a Scottish poet named Henry Adamson
could write:

For what we do presage is not in grosse,

For we be brethren of the Rosie Crosse;

We have the Mason word, and second sight;

Things for to come we can foretell aright . . . 10

It might be over interpreting to say that Adamson was specifically
connecting the Masons with the Rosicrucians (the mysterious order that was
the subject of several celebrated pamphlets written around 1614); he may
simply have been playing with associated ideas, just as a satirist today
might lump Shirley MacLaine together with crystals and Atlantis without
believing they necessarily have anything to do with one another. 11 But
there is other evidence for a Masonic-Rosicrucian link. One of the most
influential of the seventeenth century speculative Masons was an Englishman
named Elias Ashmole, who was initiated in 1646. Ashmole, a noted antiquarian
(his collection forms the nucleus of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum), was also
one of the founders of the Royal Society, the first modern organization for
scientific investigation. Before its formal establishment in 1660, the
group's members, meeting informally, called themselves "the Invisible
College"-a term taken from the Rosicrucian manifestoes. Nearly all of the
Royal Society's first members were Masons. 12

Henceforth Masonic history becomes more a matter of record and less of
conjecture. After the United Grand Lodge of England was formed in 1717,
Masonic history enters into the spotlight. Dale Boudreau's article
discusses its influence on the American Revolution and on the boom in
fraternal orders in nineteenth-century America, while Dana Lloyd Thomas
shows how Freemasonry was at least as important in forming a unified modern
Italy as it was in influencing our own Founding Fathers.

Thus, if the Templar theory holds true, then the betrayal of the Templars by
king and pope was amply repaid, for Freemasonry has been one of the chief
sponsors of re-publican government against monarchism and of rational,
scientific investigation as opposed to ecclesiastical dogma. But is this
all it comes to? Was the rise of modern science and democracy just a long,
drawn-out act of revenge? And does this make the Masons the enemies of
Catholicism, as many Catholics-and not a few Masons-seem to believe? I
think not. It's worth trying to understand why.

Western civilization has never entirely succeeded in reconciling the sacred
with the secular. Christianity, per-secuted both by the Jewish and the Roman
authorities hardly had a healthy relationship with the worldly powers in its
formative years.When it almost accidentally became the state religion of the
Roman Empire in the fourth cen-tury A.D., the Christian Church was more or
less unpre-pared for the role. In later centuries Eastern Orthodoxy would
turn into an arm of the Byzantine state, while Catholicism, stepping into
the vacuum created by the col-lapse of the Western Empire, began to intrude
into the realm of secular power.

By the thirteenth century, popes like Innocent IV were not only temporal
lords (ruling most of central Italy) but were even claiming universal
sovereignty; they regarded secular monarchs like the Holy Roman Emperor as
mere henchmen. (The emperors themselves, of course, never quite saw things
this way, leading to some of the greatest political struggles of the Middle
Ages.)

It was in this atmosphere that the Templars were dissolved.The popes and
bishops were alternately manipulat-ing and manipulated by the kings and
emperors of Europe, and corruption flourished on a scale that makes our
furors over Whitewater and Newt Gingrich's finances look puny. Whatever
truth there may have been to the idea of Templar heresies, the chief motive
for their dissolution was probably the authorities' greed for their wealth.

As Dale Boudreau notes, Friday the thirteenth of October, 1307, was the day
the sacred and secular powers chose to descend upon the Templars, and for
Western civilization it was a very unlucky day indeed. For the Templar
dissolution seemed to be final proof that, despite the considerable
spiritual power the Church possessed and continues to possess, it could not
be trusted in matters secular.

Since that time, if you grant the Templar-Masonic link, the heirs to the
Templar lineage in both Europe and America have fought to separate secular
from sacred authority, culminating in achievements like the First Amendment
of our own Constitution. This struggle was not won in a day or even a
century; religious tolerance was a distant dream for many centuries after
the Templars were jailed.

Masonry does not, as far as I can see, dispute the spiritual teachings of
the Church; its requirement of a belief in a Supreme Being and a life after
death are perfectly consistent with Catholicism. But by its insistence on
respect for all religions, Freemasonry does challenge Catholic (and all
other) claims to an exclusive monopoly on spiritual truth; only in the sense
that it undercuts the doctrine extra ecclesiam nulla salus ("No salvation
outside the Church") can it be called anti-Catholic. For similar reasons it
frightens many Protestant fundamentalists.

Given that both modern science and modern democracy have Masonic origins,
it's not entirely specious to con-tend that ours is a Masonic civilization.
This is not to say that it is free from abuses of its own. Like the medieval
Christian civilization that preceded it, the modern Masonic civilization
presents its own problems: representative government is prone to abuses too,
while scientism has turned into a new form of bigotry. These excesses, if
they go unchecked, may call for a response from the "con-scious circle of
humanity" much like the one that turned the Templars into the Masons. Most
likely, though, Masonic civilization is, like its predecessors, only one
stage in an enormous program of constructing a grand Temple of human
experience, whose nature and goal we today can barely guess at.

To address another question, is there a Masonic conspiracy juggling world
events behind the scenes? I, of course, have no way of knowing, but to all
appearances, Masonry is less influential than it was a century ago. I
suspect that there are circles in which Masonic affiliation may help as a
means to advancement-but that's a far cry from saying it's a dark web of
international evil. Connections in the "old boys"' network and what
sociologist C. Wright Mills called the "power elite" are probably far more
influential in personal advancement than Masonic rings or secret
hand-shakes-as they probably are in global political and busi-ness
decisions.

But let's turn away from these grand perspectives and ask what Masonry
offers in a spiritual sense. There are many interpretations of Masonic
rites, symbols, and degrees; some are more plausible and authoritative than
others, but none is taken as an absolute within Masonry itself. This
suggests not only that Masonry has tried to avoid slavery to creeds and
formulations, but that the ultimate meaning of its rituals lies in the rites
themselves. That is to say, their import is not some kind of implicit verbal
message, but rather the effect they have on the being of the candidate.
Carried out properly, the rites should leave their own distinct mark on the
individual on both conscious and unconscious levels. As Thomas Worrel's
article in this issue suggests, the process may resemble C.G. Jung's picture
of individuation.

For me, the most fascinating of the Masonic mysteries has to do with the
Master Mason ritual, which recounts the story of the death of Hiram Abiff
(sometimes Adoniram, "the lord Hiram").

In this legend, Hiram works as the chief architect of Solomon's Temple 13
Three "ruffians" conspire to extract the secret of the Master Mason from
him. One day as Hiram tries to leave the site of the unfinished Temple
through the south entrance, he is stopped by the first ruf-fian. Armed with
a rule, the ruffian demands the secret. Hiram refuses, and the ruffian
strikes him with the rule on his right temple. He sinks down onto his left
knee.

Hiram then rushes to the west gate, where he is accosted by the second
ruffian, who holds a level. Confronted with the same request, Hiram again
refuses and is struck on the left temple with this tool. He falls onto his
right knee.

Now Hiram, faint and bleeding, staggers to the east en-trance, where the
third ruffian is posted. Being refused as well, he hits Hiram on the
forehead with a heavy stone maul, which finally kills him.

The ruffians bury Hiram in "the rubbish of the Temple ' later exhuming him
to give him a more permanent burial under an acacia tree to the west of the
site. King Solomon and another Hiram, king of Tyre, dispatch a search for
the lost master. A group of workmen find him, and Solomon gives Hiram Abiff
his third and final burial near the Holy of Holies of the uncompleted
Temple. Solomon raises a monument to him in the form of a virgin weeping
over a broken column and holding a sprig of acacia; behind her is the figure
of Time with a scythe, in some versions he holds a snake to her head.With
Hiram dead, the Temple will remain unfinished until one who knows the
"Master's Word" can complete it. 14

What could this strange tale possibly mean? I will try to give one
interpretation here. It is not meant to be defini-tive; indeed, as I've
said, a definitive picture is probably im-possible. What I'm about to say
owes a great deal to an account in Harold W. Percival's fascinating and
compendious 1946 work Linking and Destiny, l5 but it is not identical to
Percival's account.

Hiram is consciousness. The Temple that he is building is the true Self, the
complete and integrated human being. The three ruffians are the three
ordinary functions that operate in man, frequently described as thinking,
feeling, and doing. Now these functions, the three ruffians, work together
at least well enough to plot against Hiram. But be-cause they are
unintegrated and unconscious themselves, they cannot attain their goal. In
fact they only end up "killing" the consciousness, that is, making it
descend into the oblivion of ordinary life.

There are also higher functions in man, symbolized by Solomon and Hiram of
Tyre. They do not have the secret of consciousness either. But they can at
least set up a memo-rial-that is, is a reminder that something has been
lost. Until it is found, man is subject to the forces of time and delusion
(symbolized by the serpent).

Interestingly, the three ruffians are named Jubelo, Jubela, and Jubelum. The
first part of the names is obviously akin to Jabal, discoverer of"the
Science called Massonrie," while the suffixes resemble the Latin masculine,
feminine, and neuter endings. But as Percival notes, there is another
dimension to these endings. If you put them together, you have "Aoum," or
the sacred syllable "Om," which Percival equates with the true Mason's word.
That is to say, the three ruffians, the inferior functions of man, possess
part of the secret of consciousness. But they do not have the secret of
integrating them and bringing them to the higher level symbolized by the
Temple.

If Masonry is a true initiatic tradition, it contains with-in its rites and
teachings and symbols the means to restore this lost word and bring the
Temple to perfection. (I am told that this is part of the Royal Arch ritual,
one of the many higher degrees of Masonry.)

I personally can't say whether Masonry, now or ever, has possessed the
secret of restoring the "lost word" of consciousness. But the Masonic
tradition has been a prime inspiration for many of the paths that we explore
in GNOSIS. H.P. Blavatsky was greatly indebted to it; the founders of the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were all high-degree Masons; even
Gardnerian Wicca, with its three degrees of initiation, is believed to have
been inspired by the first three degrees of Freemasonry.

This leads us back, perhaps, to the notion of conspiracy; paranoids may
shriek that here is more evidence of some grand plot to lure humankind
toward the lairs of Satan. For my part I can see no such thing; indeed if
there is a world-wide conspiracy to increase consciousness and promote
tolerance, scientific inquiry, and representative government, I can only
regret that it has not proved stronger.

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