The Origins of Freemasonry. Margaret C. Jacob

lodges are listed. But a closing poem points to a renewal of religious sentiment, “Let us also inwardly digest the holy bible; let its doctrines & precepts even accompany our conditions in life that we may, like true Masons, dwell even here in the house of the Lord our God, and admire the beauties of his holy temple.” Uncharacteristically for an earlier age, brothers are then admonished to have faith in Christ.¹⁰ Yet a slightly later masonic almanac, for 1814, has songs and gives heads of government in Pennsylvania and is devoid of religious overtones.¹¹ We know nothing about the religiosity of the owners of these almanacs intended for a pocket. They might have been pious or not; we are just lucky to have them at all.

      Except for their preservation, these small, commonplace American or European items, pocket diaries or almanacs, would be unremarkable save for the noticeable difference between eighteenth-century masonic ones and those meant for a general audience. In the age of Enlightenment, freemasons on both sides of the Atlantic seemed more comfortable in this world’s time, without seeing the need of being reminded about eternal time. Some masonic diaries gave the saints’ days, even the date of the creation of the world, for example, 5742, and the year of the flood, 4686—all earnestly offered. Christian dating was also commonplace in diaries aimed at a general audience.¹² Of course, the year for the building of the Temple of Solomon (2810), said in masonic mythology to have been the work of the fraternity, would be a natural piece of masonic chronology, and one date not found in generic diaries.¹³ But by and large, other important pieties were missing from pocket diaries aimed at a masonic audience. Whether in English, French, or Dutch, talk about how “the great God of nature forewarns a sinful world of approaching calamities,” or about the laws of nature revealing the majesty of God, is strangely absent from the masonic repertoire.¹⁴ Some diaries for the general public on occasion broke with the generally naturalist reading of comets and insisted upon seeing them “as God’s Hand, and take Notice of the divine Pleasure and Design in them.”¹⁵ By contrast, masonic diaries waxed eloquent with vagaries, more secular than religious, “to adore a supreme Being is always the first principle of our Ancestors … a mason consecrates the premises of his work to the Eternal … he is equally remote from ridiculous incredulity and superstitious fanaticism.”¹⁶ A masonic poem found in one French diary put its religious sensibility nicely: “In Religion and in Politics [la Politique] / We never neglect la Pratique.”¹⁷

      Overwhelmingly all diaries betrayed their origins in the new scientific culture. Invariably their authors or compilers described themselves as astronomers, natural philosophers, or mathematicians. One British almanac writer said he was “Philomath.”¹⁸ Occasionally a diary might be done by “a student in physick and astrology.”¹⁹ Such a diary might assert “the government of the Moon over the body of man, as she passeth the 12 zodiacal constellations.”²⁰ Yet even when tilting toward astrology, every diary taught basic astronomy and gave naturalistic explanations for comets or eclipses. But when aimed at the general market, as distinct from a masonic one, the almanacs largely kept to a pious theme. The age called that particular mix physico-theology, and generic almanacs loved to invoke it. Boston almanacs told users of 1762 that, as they ventured in the British empire, “Ye Christians as their plenteous Wealth you share, / With your best faith enrich the Natives there.”²¹ American diaries, like British ones, invoked the pious poetry and prose of Pope, Dryden, Addison, and the ubiquitous Dr. Cheyne, who preached sound body and mind as the natural state to which Christians should strive. Some American diaries gave the meeting times of churches or Quaker groups. British diaries frequently gave the names of all the bishops, archbishops, and deans, and of course, listed the Anglican holy days. By mid-century, however, the pious genre was less common even in generic diaries. They might offer medical advice as well as giving high tides and the times for a full moon.²² Sometimes mathematical exercises were offered, for both men and women.²³

      Without exception all diaries taught history and gave chronologies. Even if the masonic dates were a bit fanciful, the impulse found in many diaries, to order history and put the year in question in its chronological place, made a serious contribution to giving people a sense of historical development and change. The time being presented was often religious time, but just as important, and more frequently than in nonmasonic diaries of the period, masonic time could be measured in public events, battles, wars, the death of kings.²⁴ It might even be possible to pass the time using one’s diary, masonic or not, to assist with memorizing a list of all the kings of France or England.

      This secular quality to be found especially in masonic almanacs and diaries foreshadows much of our own sense of time as being historical. A sense of history as something unfolding in the here and now belongs distinctively to Western modernity. Historical time was invented in European consciousness in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the diaries and almanacs such time became commonplace, available to any literate reader, masonic or not.

      While the masonic diaries gave a sense of history, theirs could also often be a fanciful sense. One reason it has been so hard for us to sort out masonic facts from fictions has been masonry’s eighteenth-century ancestors, who took up every imaginable story to make the lodges seem as old as Western civilization itself. Take this one from a masonic diary: “Upon the introduction of the Romans into Britain, arts and sciences began to flourish apace. In the progress of civilization, Masonry came into esteem, and was much encouraged by Caesar, and several of the Roman generals, who succeeded him in the government of this island.”²⁵ Julius Caesar had protected the lodges! The problem with the story is that there is not a shred of historical evidence to support it. The tales continued: in 600 the archbishop of Canterbury “appeared at the head of the fraternity.” Of course William the Conqueror also protected “the fraternity” and it in turn built the Tower of London, not to mention London Bridge and a host of other important buildings. As guild evolved into voluntary society the society of freemasons appropriated the guild history (indeed stonemasons built all those buildings; who else would have?). And then they added flourishes that still turn up in the twenty-first century. “During the reign of Henry 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