Who are the Freemasons and why do they incite murderous hatred, fanatical devotion and occasional ridicule? Why on earth would a bestselling 1886 French tract warn: “French mothers! Lock up your daughters! Here come the Freemasons!”
In “The Craft: How Freemasons Made the Modern World,” John Dickie answers such questions and many more. Did two Freemasons ever oppose each other for U.S. president? (Yes, in 1832.) How did the Masonic All-Seeing Eye end up on the dollar bill? (It’s complicated, but the men responsible for the 1935 currency redesign, President Franklin Roosevelt and Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, were both Masons.)
The letters of this seal stand for ‘Hiram The Widow’s Son Sent To King Solomon,’ referring to a figure important to Masonic lore.
Photo: GRANGERThe Craft
By John Dickie
PublicAffairs, 487 pages, $32
Freemasons saturate post-Enlightenment history as the stars bedeck the sky. Five kings of England, 14 U.S. presidents, Goethe, Casanova, Duke Ellington and the Duke of Wellington all belonged to Masonic lodges. Not only were Andrew Jackson and his opponent Henry Clay both Masons, so were other historical twins, such as Mozart and his Lodge-mate Joseph Haydn; and, more grimly, Medgar Evers and his assassin, the Ku Klux Klansman Byron De La Beckwith. In the early 1960s, one in every 12 American adult males was a member, including astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who would establish a Tranquility Lodge on the moon during the historic 1969 Apollo 11 mission.
Did Freemasons really make the modern world, as Mr. Dickie’s subtitle claims? They have been held responsible for the French Revolution and have been anathematized by the Vatican, Adolf Hitler and the Chinese Communist regime. Are they the unseen watchmakers who set the clock of history or just silly men prancing around in leather aprons reciting not-so-secret code words like “Boaz,” the name of one of the entrance pillars of Solomon’s Temple?
By the end of this convincingly researched and thoroughly entertaining book, the discerning reader will conclude: a little of one, and some of the other. Mr. Dickie, a professor at University College London and the grandson of a Mason, is admirably even-handed in his treatment of the secret society that so many love to hate.
The fraternal organization traces its roots to 16th-century Scotland, as a gathering of masons who cut stones for construction—“freemasons,” as opposed to “setters,” who plied the lesser trade of laying the carved blocks into a wall. The society embraced the masons’ “symbology”: the compass, the planner’s T-square and the capital “G” often displayed in their meeting places. The G stands for Geometry, viewed by early Masons as “the most prestigious of all the fields of human knowledge,” according to Mr. Dickie; it also stands for the Great Architect of the Universe, i.e., a deist God. There is indeed a secret handshake, a blindfolded initiation ritual and severe, threatened penalties for revealing secrets of the Craft (as the Masons often refer to their brotherhood), including “being cut in two and having your bowels burned to ashes.”
Bowel-burning notwithstanding, Masonry has many attractions. According to an 18th-century Masonic constitution, the group accepts “brethren upon the same level,” a play on words that ideally welcomes the nobleman and the nobody as equals. The Craft has been historically non-denominational and “resolv’d against all Politicks,” values that explain its rapid acceptance in post-Enlightenment societies where l’esprit critique was whittling away at religion and monarchy. Emblematically, the free-thinking Frederick the Great and Voltaire were both Masons.
In 18th-century America, Mr. Dickie writes, Freemasonry became “a religion of state.” Its principles of “self-betterment, and the brotherhood of all men,” he notes, “harmonised with the United States of America’s inborn sense that it stood for something bigger than its own particular national identity, that it was the bearer of universal truths like the ones proclaimed to be self-evident in the Declaration of Independence.”
Masonry had other appeals for ambitious men like Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere and Sam Adams. It was “a way of fitting in, of networking far and wide, and of making influential friends,” Mr. Dickie says. The message was clear: “If you want to get ahead, get an apron.”
Brewmaster Adams doubtless appreciated his brothers’ collective thirst. Many early lodges gathered in taverns, because, as Mr. Dickie explains, “Freemasons loved a drink.” Others savored the masculine camaraderie. Arthur Conan Doyle was a fervid Mason who loved belonging “to an inner circle, with secret passwords,” Mr. Dickie writes, quoting a Doyle biographer, “where he could be safe from the women who fascinated and frightened him, where he could meet odd people who would give him useful copy but not prove a social embarrassment outside the Lodge.”
The Masons feature in many ghoulish conspiracy theories in part because they fetishize secrecy and have many influential members but also because of the Craft’s incurable addiction to bushwa and nonsense. When George Washington laid the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol in 1793, he placed a commemorative silver plate on the block, which noted that the building was rising in the year of Masonry 5793. Indeed, Masonry has rewritten its history at least twice, once to trace its lineage back to 4000 B.C. Cain and Noah were among the first Masons, the society’s 1723 constitution declared, and the Israelites “were a whole Kingdom of Masons, well instructed, under the Conduct of their GRAND MASTER MOSES.”
Thirteen years later, the French Brotherhood, in an attempt to reconcile Catholicism and Freemasonry, ludicrously proclaimed that crusading knights had discovered the secrets of Solomon’s Temple and the Craft in the Holy Land. “It was not just any old crusaders . . . ,” Mr. Dickie notes; “it was the Knights Templar.” The military-monastic Templars were all too real and stood accused by the Vatican of “abominable crimes against God and nature,” which included worshiping a goat-headed god named Baphomet. Cue almost four centuries of anti-Masonic conspiracy mongering, including Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” (2003), one of a long list of tomes exploiting Masonry’s bogus history for boffo book sales.
What’s to invent? The real history is fascinating enough—for instance, the enthralling story of the African-American Prince Hall Masons, who joined a British Lodge in Boston in 1775. Prince Hall (1738-1807), who successfully agitated to abolish slavery in Massachusetts, received his charter from London because the segregationist American Craft wouldn’t accept him. The brotherhood of man had its limits. “The truth is, they are ashamed of being on equality with blacks,” one of Hall’s white supporters said.
The works of Prince Hall Masonry shone through the centuries. They led the recruitment drive for the all-black Massachusetts 54th regiment, featured in the 1989 Civil War film “Glory,” and the order raised money for member Thurgood Marshall’s efforts in the Brown v. Board of Education lawsuit. W.E.B. Du Bois, Nat King Cole and Booker T. Washington were all Masons, but none of their pictures appeared at the Craft’s Masonic Brotherhood Center, the fraternity’s ambitious showcase at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. In a coda, Mr. Dickie reports that “the dream that one day they [black and white Masons] might form a single multi-racial Brotherhood, as Masonic values prescribe, has died.”
Today the Craft seems to be sputtering. American membership has declined from four million in the mid-1960s to one million in 2017. Membership in a same-sex club has little appeal for recent generations, Mr. Dickie says, and some of the Masons’ traditional benevolent activities, such as offering insurance or supporting orphanages, have been supplanted by the state or private enterprise. “Lifelong Freemasons are greying, and dying, and not being replaced.”
French daughters! It is probably safe to come out now.
—Mr. Beam’s latest book is “Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece.”
Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
"craft" - Google News
August 21, 2020 at 09:52PM
https://ift.tt/3gjNxCi
‘The Craft’ Review: On the Level and on the Square - Wall Street Journal
"craft" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2YrY2MS
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "‘The Craft’ Review: On the Level and on the Square - Wall Street Journal"
Post a Comment