The Origins of Freemasonry. Margaret C. Jacob

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.

      FIGURE 9.

      All those themes appear in the diaries. When a new lodge was opened in The Hague in 1761, the Equality of Brothers, the opening discourse in French appeared in a diary as late as 1793. Elsewhere I have argued that the lodge, and its name, may have been opened in reaction against the lodge for men and women that had flourished in the city at mid-century.³⁹ Reprinting the opening oration, again and again, may have been a way of continuing opposition to women being in the lodges. Perhaps the brothers who wanted to dwell solely on their equality had in their disapproving mind lodges of adoption, women’s lodges in Bordeaux, or one closer to home in The Hague. Other diaries offered more gender-benign poems and songs, “A brother has a heart for the work/He lives more content than a King.”⁴⁰ The tune to which it was to be sung in French was also provided. Still other almanacs, in search of gender equality, gave ceremonies to be used by men and women at a masonic “fête de table.” “We drink brothers, we drink to our amicable sisters,” who in turn answered, “We drink to our tender confrères.”⁴¹

      In general, moral uplift, rather than gender polemics, filled the pages of typical diaries. “The lodges must be schools of the Moral and Philosophy … in effect … in the discourses that are spoken in them, always Virtue, Charity, and the Love of our neighbor, lie at the base of our intentions.” So said a French diary published in The Hague in 1781.⁴² It also published an oration given to the national Grand Lodge in The Hague the previous year. The speaker praised the Dutch nation and also asked the Grand Architect of the Universe “to perpetuate generation after generation a race of citizens useful to their country, heroic defenders of Liberty and Religion, and enlightened masters who can revivify our virtues.”⁴³ The appearance of liberty in the language in that year suggests a number of possibilities. The reference may reflect the growing impact of the American Revolution in European consciousness. But the implication that virtue needs reviving may also signal the growing discontent seen in the Dutch Republic by the 1780s. By 1787 revolution would erupt in Amsterdam that was only put to rest by the invasion of Prussian soldiers. We can only wonder what loyal freemasons made of those events because this same diary was warm in its praise of Frederick, king of Prussia, who a mere seven years later ordered the antirevolutionary invasion. We know that some lodges supported the revolution, and that others were Orangist, supporting the stadtholder and the Prussians.