II the grand master of the Knights Templars superintended the Masons, and employed them in building their Temple in Fleet Street, A.D. 1155.”26 Dan Brown could have gotten part of the fanciful chronology of his novel confirmed by that diary.
Some of this mythical history, of uncertain origin, had also been incorporated into the Constitutions of 1723, and that canonical text in turn went through a multitude of editions in just about every Western language. The 1723 book, so basic to freemasonry, went hand in hand with the masonic diaries of European origin. The Constitutions also had very little to say about religious belief, except to note that the freemason should be of what ever religion to which all men agree. It also gave a potted history of England with reference to which king or queen had done what to the freemasons.
The Constitutions said that freemasonry had not fared well in the reign of Elizabeth. The almanacs elaborated with the tale that the queen sent “an armed force to York, with intent to break up their annual communication.” She thought that the freemasons were withholding secrets. The Grand Master disabused her of the notion and proclaimed the brothers to be “skillful architects, who cultivated arts and science another, and never meddled in affairs of church or state.”27 By the time the histories got to the late seventeenth century, they settled into more believable stories, or at least ones that historians can check against other sources. Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Clayton appeared as early founders of gentlemen’s freemasonry.28 Other documents from the period, or from private letters slightly later, suggest their involvement. Helpfully the diaries also listed all the national officers right up to the year in question.
In their fashion the diaries, whether masonic or aimed at a general audience, may also be seen as teaching devices. For example, sometimes they gave the order of the planets (and their signs), the eclipses of the sun; “following Copernicus, the earth and not the moon is a planet.”29 All taught the simplest astronomy, but occasionally even the masonic ones could allude to astrological themes.30 Science and magic mixed freely with the dates for the beginning of Lent, Easter, the Ascension of Christ, and the start of Advent. The pattern of mixing the credulous with the scientific began earlier in the century and can be seen in almanacs now preserved in Anglo-American libraries.31 In diaries that might have been aimed at both a Catholic and Protestant audience, the saints’ days were also catalogued.
In the masonic diaries more was to be taught than the rhythm of the originally Christian calendar. Always they aimed to inculcate virtuous behavior. In order to distinguish a true brother from a false one the reader should observe that the first eschews “ambition, vain glory and interest,” and he seeks truth par excellence, as well as the practice of charity. Always the true brothers are “children of the light”; and at the same time “the man who is morally free is truly free.” Sometimes a vague religiosity is also invoked: “The heart is the foundation upon which the freemason builds, for the glorification of the supreme being, the Sovereign Architect of the Universe … it is necessary to police our mores, finally so that our actions will be able to be, like a cubed gem, an appropriate part of a mystical temple.”32 This fairly minimalist creed could be practiced by any earnest brother or sister. Funeral orations, often printed in the almanacs, brought home the this-worldly quality of masonic virtue. Heaven went unmentioned and the deceased brother won praise for having a “sensibility that united at its base humanity, sweetness, charity, that had given him a love of the poor for which all men would have been jealous.”33 At the masonic funeral for Voltaire, music and song celebrated “the great man” who had become “the founder of a New World.” The brothers, V. F. de la Lande, the painter, Greuze, the visiting American, Benjamin Franklin, and sister Madame de Villete, laid wreaths at the foot of his statue.34
The universalism of the masonic message can be deduced from the extent of the territory an almanac imagined for its sales. More than a sense of local time and place appeared in masonic diaries aimed conceivably at the entire European market. Many diaries gave a list of lodges in every city and, remarkably, in the colonies of the Dutch Republic, or of France. Sometimes the date and place of meetings were offered.35 Wherever the language used in the almanac was spoken lay a potential market, both at home and abroad. Perhaps membership in lodges overseas served as another way for the beneficiaries of the empire to feel “at home.” Lodges, like churches and chapels, gave Europeans a sense of identity whether in Suriname or St. Dominque. They helped to unify the empire.
The sense of recognition and identity that lodges offered was only reenforced by the many attempts to apply uniformity to their proceedings. Rituals repeated, and similar from lodge to lodge, meant that brothers and sisters away from home could participate in the proceedings. Supposedly all these were secret, but the almanacs often reveal that masonic secrecy was honored more in the breech than in the execution. Some diaries had engravings that depicted masonic ceremonies, perhaps intended to make sure that they conformed to a pattern wherever they might be performed. We can imagine a brother in his coach en route to a lodge meeting frantically going over the details of an elaborate ceremony, memorizing where the master should stand or the new “secret” password to be given out that day and conveniently printed in the pocket almanac for that year. Some of the rituals described in the almanacs were elaborate and almost religious in their emotional tone, for example, rituals that imitated death and rebirth. They must have made a strong impression on the person being initiated, and perhaps these descriptions can help us better understand why the lodges for women asked that the initiate not be pregnant at the time.
Into the pocket of any brother also came knowledge of foreign dignitaries admitted to the masonic order. In London in 1777, brothers were told, the oldest son of the Nabab of Carnatica, Madras, became a freemason.36 But the admission of indigenous peoples was on the whole rare. The lodges were for the imperialists. The entire globe, as surveyed and dominated by Westerners, became a part of daily consciousness. Lists provided the names of all Grand Lodges in North America, the Bahamas, Armenia, and Belgium, and they complemented extensive lists of European lodges. Triumphantly, alphabetical lists were given of “the principal lodges established in the four corners of the world.”37 So too lists appeared of all the kings in Europe who were members of the order, or just as important, its protectors.38 We can imagine that the diaries were therefore also intended to serve travelers far from home and looking for fraternal company. Not surprisingly, coach times and prices were also printed.
Perhaps such lists suggest a certain dryness in the subject matter of masonic diaries, that the lists look like the string of 800 free phone numbers provided in many of our own diaries. But lodges in the eighteenth century, like the diaries intended for their members, also sought to instill orderliness, as well as to edify and sometimes to be polemical.
FIGURES 5–9. IN De Almanach der Vrye Metzelaaren … 1780 (Amsterdam) we find these elaborate ceremonies engraved for readers. The numbers correspond to the titles given in the text: 1 is the Grand Master, 2 is the speaker (for that meeting), and so on. The images show the candidate being received into the lodge (Figure 5) and being positioned to be received (Figures 6, 7); the ceremony complete with the laying on of swords (Figure 8); and the candidate, still blindfolded, being raised up by his new “brothers” (Figure 9). In effect he is being laid on the masonic carpet as if he were dead, to be “marked” by his brothers, given the secret password “Tubalkain,” and finally “resurrected” into his new masonic life.
FIGURE 6.
FIGURE 7.
FIGURE 8.
