Posted by:
slskipper
(
)
Date: October 12, 2014 12:26AM
Warning: this will be a little long, but as the question keeps coming up, a complete exegesis is warranted.
IMO: Usually this question is to determine if there is a secret cabal of people who secretly control the world, frequently with input from beings beyond our normal ken. There may be, but it is not the Freemasons. Let's get that question out of the way at the start.
For me, the Templar theory makes the most sense; it is spelled out in "Born in Blood", by John J. Robinson. But let's be perfectly clear about another myth, which is that the Templars had secret rituals from their inception. They didn't. In their salad days, they were the Knights of Columbus of their day. Their only rituals were the standard, and 100% public, rites called "Mass". Yes, there are legal records of Templars confessing to all manner of secret ceremonies, usually involving obiesance to their true Lord, Lucifer himself. All such confessions, astonishingly enough, were made after protracted medieval torture sessions. What a surprise.
The real secret practices, acccording to this theory, arose after their betrayal by the Pope in 1307. Their secrets were derived out of desperation, not from the supernatural. They were on the run for their lives, and most of them were illiterate. So it seems that they devised secret handshakes and passwords, for the sole prupose of determining who was a Templar and who wasn't. The secret handshakes had nothing to do with entry into the realms of Heaven. And all those gruesome penalties? They make perfect sense if you see them as warnings of the fates to be imposed by outsiders (the civil authorities) if the Templars' identities ever got found out. It was only centuries later that the whole thing got turned inside out, to penalties to be imposed by insiders. And what about the symbolic rituals? Originally, it seems there was only one, the one with Hiram Abiff and the ruins of Solomon's temple and restoration of the group's former social status. Why Solomon's temple? Because that's where the Templars used to live, that's why. They were exiles keeping alive the memory of their former homeland.
The connection with medieval stonemasons is tenuous. Yes, medieval stonemasons used compasses and squares and perfect ashlars and so on. But other things don't match up. For instance, classic Freemasonry ahs three levels, while medieval guilds had only two levels- apprentice and what today we would call CEO's. That's what the "masters" were. A "journeyman" was basically a loose cannon looking for a way to establish himself and was not a recognized guild member. Secret groups of wanted outlaws, on the other hand, had need of all sorts of levels of initiation into the group's levels of authority. The best guess (remember that none of this was written down explicitly, partly out of secrecy and partly because they simply did not know how to write) is that they assumed the guise of simple stonemasons as a ruse to fool the authorities. It is true that, of all the medieval crafts, stonemasons and the like were the most itinerant, although their building projects could go on for decades or even centuries. It was not hard to tell if a stonemason knew what he was doing.
The Templars' big break seems to have come in the time of Robert the Bruce, who welcomed any and all fugitives and mercenaries he could muster for his struggles against the English. That is why Scotland is so dear to the Freemasons' hearts.
They also got a big break because the Engllish king at the time had little interest in pursuing the Templars and more interest in pursuing his boyfriend. These two factors allowed the Templars some breathing room,and it was during this period that the institution seems to have evolved into something like the form we have today.
From that point, things get a little complicated. Once the model was in place for special ceremonies depicting ancient glories and a brighter future, the floodgates were open. Lodges, which were initially safe houses for the fugitives to hide out and rest, evolved into venues mainly for portrayal of these ceremonial pageants. They incorporated elements from all over- the Greek and Roman mysteries (Mithraism fit in wonderfully), Jewish Kaballah, etc. They even incorporated elements of cultures that were totally fictitious. The intense infatuation among Freemasonry with all things Egyptian happened because of Hermes Trimegistus, a wonderful leader of an amazing civilization that unfortunately did not have the common decency to actually exist. And so on.
So, yes, some Masonic rituals did indeed incorporate elements used in ancient Egyptian and other religious ceremonies. But all these were quite deliberate borrowings adopted in modern times by modern Masons who wanted for their rites to have ancient roots. To claim that ancient Egyptians or Mayans or Gnostics or Solomon were secretly Freemasons is simply not true. One lodge asked Lew Wallace to write a ritual so they could call themselves Knights of Ben-Hur, but he rather rudely pointed out that at the time of Ben-Hur they didn't actually have any knights.
It is true that 1717 London will always be a puzzle for historians of Freemasonry. It well may be that it did indeed involve bored upper-class gentlemen who had no real ties with the Templars or real stonemasons and so on, or it could have been the actual remnants of the original Templar group. We will simply never know.
We do know that America in the 1800's was awash in Freemasonry. There was no such things as one overarching governing body- anybody could start a lodge, and could write a ceremonial pageant, and claim that their creations arose in the farthest reaches of time. Alfred Pike and others made careers out of it. The "degrees" of Freemasonry, which started out as fully practical means of hiding the identities of the Templar organization, devolved into simply a hodge-podge of one ceremony after another with absolutely no logical progression from one to another, and absolutely no correlation from one lodge to the next. To say that someone is a Thirty-Third Degre Mason simply means that he has been through thirty three different unrelated ceremonies. It's not that hard. And there are no secrets divulged. Not real ones, anyway. It is all rather like the TV shows about ghost hunters. Have you noticed that they never quite get around to locating any actual ghosts? The ghosts somehow always seem to be just around the corner. And so it is with the "secrets" of Freemasonry. They never quite get around to telling exactly what they are. Maybe because they don't have any?
And so we come to the LDS temple. Did you ever really feel you were endowed with any sort of super powers or knowledge as a result? If you did, then you should write a book and be a celebrity. The jury is still out on whether the old leaders really believed all the hype or simply wanted to fool more people. Remember, at the time (in America especially) it was widely believed that the Freemasons did indeed posess cosmic secrets.
So back to the original question as to where Freemasonry originated. It did not originate in the time of Solomon. It did not originate in the time of Adam and Eve. It did not originate in ancient Egypt or ancient anywhere else. It certainly did not originate with God. I personally adhere to the Templar theory, but only as a purely practical response to wholly pedestrian events like trying to stay alive. Freemasonry is unique. It is not magical.
Thank you.