INTRODUCTION When Trying to Decipher the Often Bizarre Symbols

INTRODUCTION When trying to decipher the often bizarre symbols and codes in the writings of Swedenborg and Blake, I often found keys in the myths, images, and language of "irregular," Franco-Scottish Freemasonry. The important work carried out by French scholars of eighteenth- century Ecossais rites—scholarship which drew on the great Masonic collections in the Bibliothèque Nationale—revealed an imaginative world of Cabalistic, Hermetic, Rosicrucian, Sabbatian, and Sweden- borgian symbolism that was transmitted to the artistic circle of Blake in London.1 The standard histories of "regular" Freemasonry in English provided few credible clues to the origins, provenance, and modes of transmission of this complex "occultist" tradition.2 Moreover, the French historians were hampered in their investigations of seven teenth-century Freemasonry by the misleading histories published by Anglo-centric scholars. The great stumbling block to research on pre-1717 British Free masonry was James Anderson's Constitutions of the Free-Masons (London, 1723; rev. ed. 1738), the first "official" history of the fraternity, which is a hodge-podge of credulous legends and verifiable facts. A native 1 For information on the symbolic rites of Ecossais Freemasonry and their inter national transmission in the eighteenth century, see Auguste Viatte, L·s Sources occultes du Romantisme (Paris, 1928); Tatiana Bakounine, L· Répertoire biographique des Francs- Maçons Russes (XVIIP et XIXe siècles) (Bruxelles, 1940); Jacob Katz, Jews and Freemasons in Europe, 1723-1939 (Cambridge, 1970); René Le Forestier, La Franc-Maçonnerie tem- plière et occultiste aux XVIIIe et XIX siècles, ed. Antoine Faivre (Paris, 1970); Antoine Faivre, UEsoterisme au XVIIF siècle en France et en Allemagne (Paris: Seghers, 1973); Karl Frick, Die Erleuchteten (Graz, 1973); Pierre Chevallier, Histoire de la Franc-Maçonnerie Française (Paris, 1974); Carlo Francovich, Storia délia Massoneria in Italia (Firenze, 1974); José Ferrer Benimeli, Masoneria, Iglesia e Illustracion (Madrid, 1976-77); Gershom Scholem, Du Frankisme au Jacobinisme (Paris, 1981); Claude Nordmann, Gustave III: un Démocrate Couronné (Lille, 1986); Charles Porset, L·s Philalèthes et les Convents de Paris (Paris, 1996); Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, UAutre et le Frère (Paris, 1998); André Kervella, La Franc-maçonnerie Ecossaise dans lAncien Régime (Paris, 1999). 2 For histories of "modem" or "regular" Masonry, see Robert F. Gould, History and Antiquities of Freemasonry, 3rd rev. ed. (1882-87; London, 1951); John Hamill, The Craft: a History of English Freemasonry (London: Aquarian, 1986). Margaret Jacob's Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York, 1991) provides valuable information on rationalist, Whig, Newtonian Masonry and its spread from England into Europe. 2 INTRODUCTION of Aberdeen, Anderson was a Presbyterian propagandist for the Anglo-Scottish union and the Hanoverian succession. Though he had access to Scottish and English Masonic documents and oral tradi tions, he shaped and distorted them to suit his anti-Jacobite politi cal purposes. Despite the difficulty of ascertaining the accuracy of many of his assertions, his statements cannot be ingored by the his torian, for many early readers knew the historical figures (or their descendants) whom Anderson claimed were Masons. While he min imized Scottish (Jacobite) Masonic history in order to exaggerate English (Hanoverian) contributions, his claims should be mentioned and evaluated within their historical context. It is still unclear whether his use of terms such as "Grand Master" for early Masons was ret rospective anachronism or a derivation from oral traditions. Though Anderson repeated uncritically the medieval and Renaissance traditions of Scottish and English Masons, his version of more recent (1685-1722) Masonic developments was skewed by his anti-Jacobite political agenda. Thus, the formation of the "modern" Grand Lodge of London in 1717 was portrayed as the beginning of real Freemasonry, with the surviving evidence of earlier Scottish and Stuart develop ments given such short shrift that it virtually disappeared from the emerging "conventional wisdom" of Masonic history. Thus, in 1972 the English historian J.M. Roberts could confidently assert that "the only definite thing which can be said about Scottish masonry is that it did not come from Scotland."3 Rejecting the Ecossais traditions preserved by Jacobite exiles in Europe, he argued that "the idea of masons who strove sword in hand to rebuild the Temple was the taproot of the tradition to become known as 'Scottish' masonry, a name which owes much to another of [Chevalier] Ramsay's flights of fancy," for Freemasonry was "peculiarly English." Despite Professor Roberts's commendable effort to place English Masonry in a wider European context, his dismissal of Scottish his tory led to his frequent rejections of Cabalistic and Hermetic themes as rubbish and nonsense. Thus, he remained puzzled by the persist ent Jewish elements within the higher degrees developed in European lodges and by the political charges made against the Ecossais lodges. For the next sixteen years, the prevailing academic assumption that the Scottish and Stuart claims (made by European Masons through- 3 See J.M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (1972; Frogmore, 1974), 45, 53, 110. .

Load more