The Freemasons trace their foundation to London in The Craft, as members call it, was based on a fraternal bond created by ritual and symbol. Its rules prescribed a formal equality between all members, whatever their race, creed or class. The aim was moral education: building better men, just as the stonemasons of old had built cathedrals and castles.
Crucially, however, all of this was to be conducted in seclusion from the outside world, and it involved learning secrets and swearing to keep them. Whatever secrets the Masons were guarding, they made for a bewitching recruitment tool. Within a couple of decades, the mystique of Freemasonry made it a worldwide phenomenon: there were Lodges everywhere from Amsterdam to Aleppo, from Charleston to Calcutta.
The Craft spread on the currents of an earlier era of globalization: empire and commerce, warfare and intellectual exchange. Its founders quickly discovered that they could not control their creation. Within the group, Masons disagreed passionately about arcane rites and procedures, splitting into rival branches based on their beliefs. They also fissured on issues of race and gender. Were women worthy to be admitted to the great mysteries? Were Jewish or Black people?
Externally, the Masonic brand was borrowed and bastardized. If you had a secret, then organizing yourself like the Freemasons seemed a good way to keep it. Groups as varied as the Ku Klux Klan to conceal the identity of white supremacist terrorists , the Sicilian mafia crime , and the Mormon Church bigamy all incorporated the furtive strands of the Masonic DNA.
The Pope excommunicated them very early on, seeing them as covert heretics; any Catholic who joins the Masons is still putting his soul in peril, according to the Vatican. Conspiracy thinking drove Mussolini, Hitler and Franco to crush the Craft. But within a few years, the continent had become unrecognizable. Europe was pulled into the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars with no end in sight.
Societal structures that had persisted for centuries split apart in an instant. Even now, more than years later, historians are divided over the causes of the fateful events of that period.
Many of those who lived through those times also sought answers, but they wanted simple ones. Confronted by the spectacle of kings falling and empires breaking apart, they believed that a hidden hand was pulling the strings. This was an early version of the conspiracy theory. Robison and Barruel each maintained that a worldwide plot existed to depose the monarchy and the state religion, and that the planning of those events had actually begun decades before the revolution. The conspirators included philosophers and Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire and Diderot, but no less, the Freemasons and the secret order of the Illuminati, which in reality was a small, insignificant society that operated for a few years in Bavaria.
According to the conspiracy-theory advocates, these orders worked behind the scenes to mislead the masses through lies and manipulation, and they had instigated people to rise up against their beloved monarch and to rebel against the very foundations of society. The conspiracy theories had no basis in fact, of course.
The Masonic lodges were not revolutionary — indeed, many of their members were aristocrats. In any event, the theory was disseminated quickly in numberless pamphlets and essays. Within a few years, it had become one of the most widespread and most popular explanations for the French Revolution.
Albans Peter Moore and Dr. Robert Hart, a pathologist. The other members were a woman theologian and three clergymen. In Italy, Freemasonry came under a cloud in when police unearthed a list of 1, members of a secret Masonic lodge called P2. Also listed were two government ministers, civil servants, military officers, judges and police.
Resulting charges of corruption caused the government of Arnaldo Forlani to fall. Sections U.
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