What is Freemasonry? Lodges, rituals and the myths

Freemasonry is a fraternal society, a members' club with rituals, whose members meet in local groups called lodges to take part in ceremonies, socialize and raise money for charity. It grew out of the guilds of medieval stonemasons and took its modern form in London in 1717, when four lodges formed the first grand lodge. Freemasonry teaches moral lessons through the symbols of building, such as the square and compasses, and has spread to most countries.

In short

• Freemasonry began with working stonemasons and was taken over, in the 1600s and 1700s, by gentlemen who used the masons' tools and legends as symbols for moral teaching.
• Members pass through three degrees, Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft and Master Mason, in staged ceremonies whose details are kept private.
• Its privacy has made it a target of conspiracy theories for more than two centuries, and the big ones, such as secret control of governments, have no evidence behind them.

Where did Freemasonry come from?

The mainstream view among historians, and the one the United Grand Lodge of England itself gives, is that Freemasonry descends from the medieval stonemasons who built castles and cathedrals. Masons who worked in "freestone", fine stone that could be carved, traveled from job to job, and their lodges, the workshops beside a building site, kept trade secrets and recognized trained members by passwords and signs. In Scotland, the Schaw Statutes of 1598 and 1599 set rules for masons' lodges, and some of those lodges are among the oldest on record.

During the 1600s these lodges began admitting men who were not builders at all. In 1646 the antiquarian Elias Ashmole wrote in his diary that he had been made a Freemason at a lodge in Warrington, the earliest recorded initiation of an English "speculative" mason, one who uses the craft as a set of symbols rather than a trade. By the early 1700s, lodges of gentlemen met in London taverns.

On 24 June 1717, according to the traditional account, four London lodges met at the Goose and Gridiron tavern near St Paul's Cathedral, formed a Grand Lodge and elected Anthony Sayer as Grand Master. The rulebook it published in 1723, James Anderson's Constitutions, asked members only to be good men of any faith and to stay out of plots against the government. Ireland formed a grand lodge in 1725 and Scotland in 1736, and the idea spread with British trade and armies to Europe and the American colonies. The grand lodge in London today, the United Grand Lodge of England, dates from a merger of two rival bodies in 1813.

What happens in a lodge?

A lodge is a local group, usually of a few dozen members, that meets in a room laid out for ritual, often called a temple or Masonic hall. Lodges are governed by a regional grand lodge, and each grand lodge is independent: there is no world headquarters.

A new member is initiated in stages called degrees, each a scripted ceremony in which he takes an oath and acts out part of a legend. The three basic degrees, taken from the grades of a medieval guild, are:

Degree	Named after	What it stands for
Entered Apprentice	The new trainee	Beginning, and the duty to learn
Fellowcraft	The qualified worker	Education and self-improvement
Master Mason	The master builder	Mortality and fidelity, through the legend of Hiram Abiff, the builder of Solomon's Temple

After the third degree, members may join further bodies with degrees of their own, such as the Royal Arch or, in North America, the Scottish Rite and York Rite. The rest of a lodge's life is ordinary: business meetings, elections of officers, a dinner afterward, known in Britain as the festive board, and charity. Masonic charities run care homes and fund medical research and local causes.

Mainstream lodges require members to believe in a Supreme Being, without saying which, and ban discussion of religion and politics in the lodge. Most admit men only. There are separate women's grand lodges and mixed orders, and a second branch of Freemasonry, led by the Grand Orient of France, dropped the requirement to believe in God in 1877, which split it from the English-speaking grand lodges.

Is Freemasonry a secret society?

Not in the sense the phrase suggests. Lodges are listed, their buildings carry signs, and many grand lodges publish their rules and history online. The United Grand Lodge of England puts its own membership at about 170,000 to 180,000, in England and Wales and in districts overseas, and estimates that there are around six million Freemasons worldwide. What is kept private are the passwords, handshakes and the details of the rituals, though versions of these have been published by former members since the 1700s. Masons often describe it as "a society with secrets" rather than a secret society.

Its famous members are real. Benjamin Franklin and George Washington were Masons, as were Voltaire, Mozart, whose opera The Magic Flute is full of Masonic imagery, and Goethe. That a well-connected club attracted well-connected men in the age of the Enlightenment is what one would expect, and historians still argue how much the lodges, as meeting places for new ideas, mattered to events such as the American Revolution.

Why are there so many conspiracy theories about Freemasons?

Because a private, oath-bound network with rituals invites suspicion, and because early opponents had reasons to spread it. In 1738 Pope Clement XII banned Catholics from joining, and the Church still forbids it. The most durable theory came after the French Revolution: in 1797 and 1798, the French priest Augustin Barruel and the Scottish scientist John Robison published books blaming the Revolution on a plot by Freemasons and the Bavarian Illuminati. In the 1930s the Nazis fused the idea with antisemitism, called lodges "hostile to the state" and ordered all remaining ones dissolved in 1935, as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records.

The common claims fall apart when set against the record:

The claim	What the evidence shows
Freemasons and the Illuminati are the same, and secretly rule the world	The Illuminati were a different group, founded in Bavaria on 1 May 1776 by the law professor Adam Weishaupt to spread Enlightenment ideas. Some members came from Masonic lodges, but the order was banned by the Bavarian government in 1784 and 1785 and broke up. No evidence shows it survived
Masons planned the French Revolution	Barruel and Robison offered no documents showing a plot; French lodges held members on every side of the Revolution, nobles and royalists among them, and lodges largely stopped meeting during the Terror
The eye above the pyramid on the US dollar is a Masonic symbol	The eye appeared on the Great Seal in 1782 as a common Christian image of God's watchful providence; it became a standard Masonic symbol only in 1797, and it was added to the dollar bill in 1935
Masons worship Satan	The claim was popularized in the 1890s by the French writer Léo Taxil, who announced in 1897 that his exposés had been a hoax
Masons murder people who reveal their secrets	Based mainly on the disappearance of William Morgan in New York in 1826, which was never solved; it fueled a short-lived Anti-Masonic Party in the US

Still argued

Some of the history is genuinely uncertain. The founding meeting of 1717 is known only from Anderson's revised Constitutions of 1738, written two decades later, and historians such as Andrew Prescott and Susan Sommers have argued that the date may be partly a later invention. How the working masons' lodges became the gentlemen's lodges, and how much Freemasonry shaped Enlightenment politics, are also debated. The nearest thing to a real Masonic conspiracy was P2, an Italian lodge whose grand lodge withdrew its charter in 1976 and which then operated as a clandestine network tied to political and banking scandals; it shows a lodge being misused, not Freemasonry as a whole at work. What is not supported is the claim that Freemasonry secretly directs governments.

Telling a real historical question from a conspiracy theory is a skill: critical thinking asks what evidence would show the claim false, and confirmation bias explains why the theories survive when that evidence never comes. Freemasonry is a good case for how history is built from the documents that survive.

Check yourself

• How did a workers' trade organization become a gentlemen's society that uses tools as symbols?
• What actually happens in a lodge, and what parts are kept private?
• Why did the Illuminati and the French Revolution become tied to Freemasonry, and what is wrong with that link?

Sources

• History of Freemasonry — United Grand Lodge of England
• Frequently asked questions — United Grand Lodge of England
• Freemasonry under the Nazi regime — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
• Freemasonry — Wikipedia
• Illuminati — Wikipedia