powers and degrees” and were to wear it every year when attending Mass on the Feast of the Four Crowned Martyrs, after which they were to have dinner or “honest” recreation. This feast day honored the martyrdom of four Roman stoneworkers killed by Diocletian for refusing to abandon Christianity.20 Other masonic guilds were known to celebrate the feast day of Saint John the Evangelist or Saint John the Baptist.21 All versions of the company’s constitutions, moreover, contained a provision demanding secrecy, such as the following: “You shall keep secret the obscure and intricate parts of the science, not disclosing them to any but such as study and use the same.”22 These were trade or technical secrets intended to enforce membership requirements against the growing number of competitors in a time of building expansion.
Although nearly all early modern trades asserted high standing and great antiquity, the fact that masons created the vast stone cathedrals, arguably the most awe-inspiring human works in the Middle Ages, distinguished their claims from those of other medieval craftsmen. Unlike workers whose tools and products tied them to a local market, the masons involved in such large-scale projects were drawn from a relatively wide region. Assembling this regional labor force on a local work site necessitated the drawing up of detailed rules that would help to create shared values and standards of behavior both on and off the job. Among other things, these codes of conduct stipulated how masons should treat one another. For example, their requirements included not taking work from others or underpaying fellow masons, choosing only suitable persons to be apprentices, and respecting confidences and trade secrets.23
In the available manuscript constitutions, these charges follow an elaborate legendary history of the guild that traces the origin of masonry to geometry—the source of all knowledge. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this mythical prehistory was intended to be read out or recited at meetings, especially when entrants were admitted to the craft. The manuscripts open with brief invocations or prayers addressed to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The narrator then characteristically launches into the subject by presenting the “worthy Craft of Masonry” as rooted in “Geometrye,” which is the foundation of “the seven Liberall Sciences.” The origins of geometry are then traced to the children of Lamech, mentioned in Genesis. The founder of geometry was Jabel, Lamech’s son who, fearing God’s punishment, inscribed his discovery on stone pillars that could survive fire or flood. After the Great Flood, Hemarynes (Hermes), a great-grandson of Noah, discovered the pillars and from them retaught the sciences to humanity. Next, Abraham and his wife Sarah went to Egypt and taught the seven sciences to the Egyptians, including Euclid. Euclid then instructed King David during the latter’s sojourn in Egypt. On his return to the Holy Land, David gave these charges to the masons who began building the Jerusalem Temple, whose construction continued under his son Solomon. Solomon sent for workers from other countries, whom he charged to spread the craft to France and England (later rites of initiation took place in an allegorical Solomon’s Temple). Eventually, it was said, the English king Edwin compiled both this prehistory and the guild’s codes of conduct, and his books became the constitutions themselves.24
In the seventeenth century, Scottish masons working from these constitutions created catechisms for their rituals of identification and initiation, which collectively became known as the Mason Word. Although it was customary for craft guilds to maintain constitutions detailing their rules and legendary histories, masons not only had extensive codes of conduct and an elaborate legendary history but also, unlike other guilds, evolved an extensive ritual life. Again, this may have been due to the prominence of the craft and the need to guard trade secrets among a regional labor force. The early Scottish catechisms dealt with the admission of candidates to the two grades of mason known as Entered Apprentice and Fellow Craft. These rites probably existed prior to that time and may have been created out of earlier practices of the craft.25 Though fragmentary and diverse in their contents, the surviving catechisms usually include questions and answers to ascertain the identity of another craftsman, culminating in the recognition of a secret or words, and rites of initiation that instructed the two grades of masons in the secrets of the Word.26
Both rites of initiation were said to involve a “great many ceremonies,” which the surviving catechisms keep largely hidden from outsiders’ view. Emphasizing secrecy, the Entered Apprentice investiture involved the recitation of the craft’s legendary history, while the Fellow Craft rite explained the significance of the letter G—for both geometry and God—and its place in the Temple of Solomon. The ceremonies took place within the Mason’s lodge, which could be their guild, their workplace, or the setting for their ritual return to ancient Egypt.27 Though the scattered evidence of the catechisms does not give a clear picture of the early rites, the “work” to which the master put the masons in the lodge presumably symbolized the building of the temple. Among religious people of that time, “building the Temple” meant creating the kingdom of God.28 Post-Reformation influences also appear to be present, in the use of the singular form of word. Scotland’s new Calvinist churches emphasized the truth of the “Word of God” as revealed in scripture. Scripture itself was often referred to as “the Word.” Such phrases as “in the beginning was the Word” invoked powerful sentiments of mystery and ultimate truth. In the Wisdom of Solomon, a favorite among Masons, “God made all things by his Word, and his Word killed all unbelievers.”29
References to building the temple and the Mason Word, David Stevenson has suggested, also intimate that the rituals of seventeenth-century Scottish Freemasonry may have emerged partly as a reaction to some of the changes that the coming of Protestantism brought to Scotland. As is well known, the Reformation fundamentally changed Christian religious beliefs and practices. Catholicism sanctifies life’s passage with seven sacramental rituals that give social significance to the stages of life’s journey. Protestantism shifts the emphasis from the ritualization of life’s journey to particular beliefs and individual faith. Compared to the richness of Catholic ritual life, the practices of the new Protestant churches were barren. This was particularly true in Scotland, where there was a decisive break with the pageantry of the old church. By suddenly eliminating so much of the ritual and spectacle of the Catholic Church, the Scottish Reformation of 1560 may have created a profound sense of loss in many people.30
It is noteworthy, then, that the appearance of the Mason Word in Scotland coincided with the Calvinist Church’s destruction of the religious aspect of trade guilds. For members of trade guilds, the pageantry and processions that marked the feast days of their organizations’ patron saints were the high points of the year. The Protestant leader John Knox sneered at the “priests, friars, canons, and rotten Papists, with tabors and trumpets, banners and bagpipes,” who processed through Edinburgh in 1558 on Saint Giles’s Day. Reformation, in one respect, meant the suppression of the guilds’ religious practices. Though their members continued to attend church in groups and begin meetings with short prayers, the guilds no longer participated in the religious festivals of the Christian year nor maintained altars dedicated to their saints. This reaction against ceremony may have contributed to the counterreaction of the majority of Edinburgh’s leading craftsmen, who steadfastly remained Catholic following the 1560 Reformation. It is probably more than a coincidence, moreover, that within two generations an elaborate pageantry and ritual life emerged within Scottish Masonry.31
Aside from the innovations of the Mason Word, by the seventeenth century, secrecy was increasingly associated with the Scottish lodge. This was partly a legacy of the craft’s medieval past, when it kept the mysteries of its operative trade to itself, but also reinforced by the late Renaissance passion for ancient, esoteric truth.32 Though belief in the power of occult knowledge was declining by the eighteenth century, many educated Britons still believed that ancient mysteries might be retrieved and so reveal God’s deeper truth.
It was from within the broader environment of hermeticism and Rosicrucianism that nontradesmen started to seek out the Masonic guilds. Hermeticism began with the interweaving of metallurgical traditions and ideas gleaned from Gnosticism, Platonism, and Egyptian theology in Greco-Roman Egypt. Its magical practices were believed to have the power to turn base metals
