was founded in London in 1788. This established a more positive focus and soon afterwards, in 1798, the Antient Grand Lodge set up a charitable fund for boys. Now, not only was there competition over seniority and authenticity of ritual, but the two key Grand Lodges were competing in the arena of public relations and social recognition. To complicate matters even further, yet another lodge, the Grand Lodge of All England was established at York in 1761. And, in 1778, a breakaway group from the premier Grand Lodge was styled (by way of a warrant from York) as the Grand Lodge South of the River Trent.
The whole scene had become so argumentatively pointless within the course of a century that a necessary truce was called. Articles of Union were then agreed and signed by the respective Grand Masters and officers at Kensington Palace on 25 November 1813. Henceforth, the Antients and Moderns were amalgamated to form the United Grand Lodge of England which prevails today.
Old Masters
The legend of Hiram Abiff and the building of Solomon’s Temple, which dominates the 3rd degree of modern Craft Freemasonry first appeared in print as late as 1730 in a treatise by the London mason Samuel Pritchard, entitled Masonry Dissected.18 Its appearance in that work indicates that it was known earlier as part of the newly designed Grand Lodge ritual, although not mentioned by Anderson in 1723. The English scholar Thomas Paine (1723-1809) stated that Pritchard swore an oath before the Lord Mayor of London that his Masonry Dissected was a ‘true and genuine copy of every particular’—but he did not say a copy of what! (Paine was personally famedfor his works, Common Sense, Age of Reason and The Rights of Man, along with his part in the American Revolution.) We shall examine in detail the main Hiramic legend in chapter 8, but for now we can look at another account of Freemasonry’s origins as it appeared soon after the foundation of United Grand Lodge.
In 1802, a Portuguese journalist named Joseph Hippolyte da Costa was imprisoned by the Catholic Inquisition for the crime of being a Freemason, as was denounced by papal decree. Following his escape after three years, in 1820 he wrote an essay entitled ‘History of the Dionysian Artificers’ which drew parallels between masonic initiation and the Orphic mysteries. (See chapter 5 for more on this Portuguese mason.)
In this account, Hiram Abiff is said to have belonged to an ancient society known as the Dionysian Artificers, who emerged around 1000 BC just before the building of Solomon’s Temple.19 They took their name from the Greek god Dionysus (Bacchus), and were associated with another group called the Ionians, who built the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. Apparently, when in Jerusalem, the Dionysian Artificers called themselves the Sons of Solomon, and used Solomon’s six-pointed seal (two interlaced triangles) as their masons’ mark. They were seemingly masters of sacred geometry and hermetic philosophy.
There is no reason to doubt the existence of the Dionysian Artificers. They were, in fact, cited by the Greek geographer Strabo in the 1st century BC. He wrote that they acquired their name because Dionysus was reckoned to be the inventor of theatres. Whether Solomon’s artificer, Hiram of Tyre, was associated with this group is another matter. He might well have been if they had a presence in Phoenicia, but there is no mention of the Hiram connection that can be discovered prior to the 1820 treatise.
Another addition to the said masonic pedigree comes in the form of a college of architects called the Comacine Masters, who were based at Lake Como in Northern Italy during medieval times. The masonic link to this guild was said to have been referenced by a Lucy Baxter (pen-name Leader Scott) in her book The Cathedral Builders, published in 1899. The theme of a link between the Comacines and Freemasonry was subsequently taken up in a booklet called The Comacines that was serialized in the masonic journal, The Builder, in 1910.
From the architectural records of Lombardy, it can be deduced that the Magistri Comacini were indeed prominent in their day, and they made a good contribution to Italian design between the years 800 and 1000. But there is nothing whatever to associate them in any way with English masonic history. In fact, not even Leader Scott (who is widely misquoted) said there was a connection. Having investigated the possibility, she stated: ‘There is no certain proof that the Comacines were the veritable stock from which the pseudo Freemasonry of the present day sprang.’20
The Key
The net product of all this research into the origins and history of post-1688 English Freemasonry is that it is about as weak and insubstantial as it could possibly be. Taken chronologically, the story begins with the biblical metal-worker Tubalcain of Mesopotamia (c. 3500 BC) and the wisdom of his father Lamech—a story that incorporates the later Hermes Trismegistus (Thoth of Egypt), and eventually the Greek philosopher Pythagoras.
From Tubalcain and his siblings, the history skips to King Nimrod of Babylon, who apparently instituted the masonic Charges (c. 3000 BC), and then leaps 1,000 years to Abraham, who somehow met with Euclid (c. 300 BC) in Egypt. Moving from Egypt to Israel with Moses (c. 1360 BC), we arrive with the Dionysian Artificers and Hiram of Tyre, who built Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem (c. 950 BC). After that we are in England with St Alban (AD c. 260); then with King Charles II of France (c. 850), and back again to England with Prince Edwin of York (c. 926), and King Athelstan of Mercia (c. 930).
At the end of all this, there is the unfortunate Sir Isaac Newton trying to fathom what he can from this chaotic mire. And to cap it all, James Anderson—the man responsible for most of the chaos—admits that there were no legitimate records to speak of, but then lays the blame for the lack of available literature on the recently deceased Sir Christopher Wren!
Whether the stories of Tubalcain, Nimrod, Athelstan and the others are correct or not is of no real consequence. There is, in fact, a measure of historical substance in some aspects—but these are all accounts of operative artificers, craftsmen and builders. Chronologically, the last account in the series of tales is that of King Athelstan and his stonemasons. Then, quite suddenly, around 800 years later there emerges a charitably based group of nobles and businessmen who support boys’ and girls’ educational foundations and meet in taverns. Nothing, it seems, happened in between, except that the latter fraternity was said to have inherited its secret signs and passwords from the former.
Something is drastically wrong here. There would be small likelihood of high-ranking nobility becoming involved in a tavern club with such little substance or pedigree. Nor indeed would Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, and Prince Augustus, Duke of Sussex, (the sons of King George III) have taken positions as Grand Masters of the Antients and Moderns respectively if Freemasonry were just an everyday fraternity of moralists and benefactors.
James Anderson said at the outset that the meaningful records had been lost when the Stuarts were exiled. So that is the key to understanding the real course of events. King George I was the son of Electress Sophia of Hanover. She was the daughter of Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, whose wife was Elizabeth Stuart, a daughter of King James I (VI). John Wilkins, chaplain to the Palatinate in the middle 1600s had been the man who had founded the masonic group that became the Royal Society of King Charles II, for which Isaac Newton later became president in 1703. Another original founder of that Society was its professor of astronomy, Sir Christopher Wren.
Being the grandson of Frederick and Elizabeth, Britain’s King George I was well aware that there were masonic traditions in the maternal branch of his family, but they had not formed part of his Hanoverian education. His successors were also conscious of the heritage, but they were similarly unaware of the detail. Their only hope of discovery rested with Christopher Wren, who did not die until 1723—the year of the first Anderson Constitutions.
What Anderson really meant when he blamed Christopher Wren for the chaotic state of English Freemasonry was not that Wren had been responsible for losing anything—but that Wren’s loyalties were not
