Strangers Nowhere in the World by Jacob Margaret C.;

Author:Jacob, Margaret C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2016-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

Secrecy and the Eighteenth-Century Lodges

Throughout the eighteenth-century freemasonry was—as it is now—a supposedly secret society. Yet paradoxically the lodges flourished in the eighteenth century among men—and women—who defined themselves as enlightened and hence decidedly open to people of different religions or professions. In any lodge people could be found who had no other reason for being present other than an interest in ceremony and the ideals taught by the masonic creed. In Bordeaux during the 1730s a Captain Patrick Dixon from Dublin fraternized with James Bradshaw, a merchant in the town, and they were joined by a local curate. All would have been familiar with the masonic Constitutions, first published in 1723 in London. It proclaimed religious toleration, brothers “meeting upon the level,” rising in masonic wisdom because of merit, not blood or birth. Dozens of editions appeared in every European language, and strangers sought initiation who had little in common save their attraction to sociability in its masonic form. They sought personal improvement, and eagerly they practiced skills like voting in elections or giving formal orations before their brothers. They learned social behavior that was meant to be disciplined and refined, and they could be fined for breaches in conduct, both inside and away from the lodge.

In England and Scotland by 1700 the lodges evolved out of guilds where once only working stonemasons socialized and protected their craft from the unskilled or the uninitiated. Slowly they mutated into clubs for literate men attracted by the lure of the ceremonies, rituals, and an imagined history associated with the medieval guilds. Masonry, it was said, went back to the Temple of Solomon. Early in the eighteenth century in London the evolution was well underway. When the then aged and great architect Christopher Wren took the title of grand master, he probably met with friends, as well as master masons who worked with him.10 Within a decade lodges began to spread out to the British provinces, and then in the 1720s to Ireland and Continental Europe, to Rotterdam, Paris, and soon Bordeaux, and by the 1730s to America. At the same time brothers, current or former, published “exposures” that explained the rituals to the uninitiated, or “the profane,” as non-masons were called by the initiated. By 1750, when there may have been about 50,000 freemasons in Europe, not much about the lodge practices remained secret. Yet brothers continued to value their “secrets” in the form of constantly changing passwords, new rituals and degree ceremonies, decorations, and dress.

The new public of the eighteenth century frequently met in private. That dichotomy remains central to much of modern social experience. The paradox at the heart of early modernity lay in its creation of a new public sphere that simultaneously championed the private, the interior, and the exclusive. The same public that read novels silently in the comfort of home also found “secret” lodges fashionable, even alluring. They were more typical of the age than might at first be assumed. The open-doored coffeehouses, pubs, or, in

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