Fake Masonry

So often when people talk about Freemasonry in a negative way they’ll talk about people like Aleister Crowley, using him as an example of an evil mason, if they’re not just plucking him out of the air they might even include a picture of him in regalia. Quite apart from the fact that using one individual as evidence that all masons are evil is a logical fallacy there’s a major problem, he was never a mason, in fact he was a fake, so much so that on attempting to gain entrance to the United Grand Lodge of England with his qualifications he was laughed out of the building. So today we will be looking at fake masonry, how to spot it and how it affects actual masons. Just to clarify, I’m not going to include formerly regular masonic groups who have through philosophical differences have become irregular.

Mainstream regular masonry is highly varied with different customs present in nearly every single Grand Lodge, but sometimes you’ll come across a group who are so wildly different from the norm that there’s no way they could be truly masons, so why would they claim to be? Well part of the reason would probably be the cachet associated with masonry, an ancient fraternity that seeks to help people in need, has had numerous famous members and has an air of mystery about it, who wouldn’t be intrigued? That intrigue then leads to be people wanting to join, and this is where the fakes come in, after all if joining real masonry costs money, then a fake masonic organisation will also cost money, the main difference being that these shams will take the money and run, or you’ll find yourself in a lodge where there are few other members and no chance of visiting any other lodge.

Another reason would be ego. That is to say that the creator of the fake group seeks firstly personal aggrandisement by tying their name to a senior position within an organisation, and that they believe that they can do better than the original, surely if this were the case they would have joined a regular lodge and be one of its high fliers. In most cases the reality is that these are people who were refused membership or expelled and so have decided to gain either kudos or cash by creating something out of thin air.

Probably the most common form of fake masonry would be the internet Grand Lodge, that is a website is set up claiming to be a Grand Lodge, often with something close to the name of a real one, which solicits donations, or is simply a vehicle for the creator to strut around as a Grand Master. These should be fairly easy to spot, they’ll often be long of rhetoric, short of detail, particularly about where they meet and who the other officers beside the Grand Master are. You’ll also tend to find that the supposed Grand Master, usually accompanied by various sock puppets will be posting on masonic forums trying to drum up some kind of recognition. From the outset this is frankly rather sad, and if money is being solicited fraudulent too and from various accounts of these kinds of scams the creators can become extremely vicious when confronted about their activities.

Beyond the simple internet Grand Lodge you’ll find some have gone a step further and have actually created a real lodge that actually meets (I use real in this case to mean physical rather than a purely internet creation). The first example that comes to mind is the Grand Orient of US, a now defunct group which did indeed have a lodge. But within seven years it had all fallen apart and now all their websites are down and out, guess no one could be bothered to spend $15 to keep the domain name. Their claim to masonic status was mostly based on being given permission by the Grand Orient of France (an irregular body which started out as regular, but hasn’t had recognition since about 1877) to use their rituals. But the GOOUS was a self created body with no historical link to any of masonic group, and even the Grand Orient of France found their behaviour intolerable and removed anything hinting at acceptance from their website.

Then we come to the out and out frauds, this is the heading that Mr. Crowley’s masonry comes under. Just as you find people selling fake degrees, or “life experience degrees” which are worth less than the paper they are printed on, you’ll find masonic degree mills, you pay a fee and you’ll get a fancy certificate saying that you’re x,y or z and that you can wear the regalia of that rank (available from the place that sold you the degree at a reasonable price I’m sure). Thus it was with Aleister Crowley, he bought himself a 33rd degree and the regalia, attempted to gain entrance to the United Grand Lodge of England and was sent packing, interestingly enough the person who sold him the degrees was the first person in the USA to be found guilty of mail fraud. Quite simply to claim you have a masonic degree you will need to have gone through the ceremony, with few exceptions where someone is given a degree at sight (usually this is for more honorary members and not widely practised) and even then they need to have gone to a meeting for it to happen.

So there we are, disgruntled former members, conmen and chancers, these are the make up of fake masonic groups. It’s an unfortunate truth that anyone can stick an apron on and make claims of masonic status, but with the application of some common sense you can avoid being drawn into their schemes. If you’re not sure about a group’s masonic status I recommend checking out the United Grand Lodge of England’s list of regular Grand Lodges at http://www.ugle.org.uk/about/foreign-grand-lodges

 

A history of Freemasonry: Antients, Moderns & modern times.

So far we’ve seen medieval guilds letting in non tradesmen and slowly evolving over time into something that would be recognisable as modern Freemasonry. The first Grand Lodge of England is set up and starts chartering lodges or bringing old ones under its banner. Constitutions have been drafted and have spread as far away as the colonies which were to become America. So that’s it right? Freemasonry was as it is today and that’s the end of the story…..

Well no, it’s not quite that simple (this phrase will likely become my catchphrase on this blog).

You see, not everyone was happy with the way things were being run by these London masons and something of a town and country split developed. London was expanding and needed labourers. The poor began to flock in, and among them were masons of a lower social class than the urban middle class which seemed to dominate the Premier Grand Lodge. Finally in 1751 five lodges consisting of mainly Irish masons, some of whom may have felt unwelcome in pre-existing lodges, and a sixth which appeared to have only formed that night, met and together created a Grand Lodge, which became referred to as the Antients (yes the spelling is correct, it’s an archaic form of ancient), the Premier Grand Lodge by extension became known as the Moderns.

The reason for this naming was that the Antients believed that the Moderns had diverged from “true masonry” and that they represented a purer form. There’s some value in this as the Moderns had changed some of the old passwords as they had become widely known through exposés. Another charge was that the Moderns were courting nobility to give themselves more respectability and finally the fate of the Holy Royal Arch degree was a bone of contension. The Grand Secretary of the Antients proved formidable in his role of strengthening the Grand Lodge and it soon grew in numbers enough to rival the Premier Grand Lodge.

The two Grand Lodges sat at loggerheads for over fifty years, but an act of Parliament which would have rendered Freemasonry illegal forced the Grandmasters of both Grand Lodges to cooperate, they and the Grandmaster of Scotland appealed to William Pitt. This is one of the only cases where Freemasonry has involved itself directly in politics, and only due to politics directly involving itself in Freemasonry. Masonry was excluded from the ban on the condition that a list of membership for each lodge was submitted to a Clerk of the Peace (a clerical office in the British legal system), this condition remained until 1967.

This came as proof that the old enemies could work together and finally after time sorting out the details in 1813 the two Grand Lodges signed the articles of union and became the United Grand Lodge of England. The document was a classic compromise, for example, lodges could only grant the three degrees, Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft and Master Mason. But a separate body called a Chapter which is almost always attached to a lodge may administer the Holy Royal Arch degree, and so the degree celebrates its official bicentenary this year.

Now we move further afield, to the colonies as they were. Lodges tended to spring up unwarranted here, mostly because the nearest Grand Lodge was the other side of the Atlantic. But eventually they got organised under Provincial Grand Lodges under a Grand Lodge, either one of the English ones, Scotland or Ireland, the Irish Grand Lodge in particular had a lot of lodges in the British army (the fees were cheaper, squaddies never change). It was one of these which initiated a black man by the name of Prince Hall along with 14 other black men, two of whom were sailors who travelled to London and obtained a warrant for a lodge for black men which could admit new members. This lodge proved to be a success and soon other similar lodges were warranted and the original lodge became a Provincial Grand Lodge and later a Grand Lodge with Prince Hall as its first Grand Master, and so we get Prince Hall masonry.

Well almost, had American masons remembered that all mason were their brothers we might never have had two distinct forms of masonry, but after the revolution most if not all the newly formed Grand Lodges for each state refused to recognise Prince Hall masons as regular. Thankfully the situation has by and large been rectified and the two kinds of masonry exist together in the proper fraternal spirit and neither has a colour bar to it, white men may join Prince Hall masonry and black men may join Grand Lodge masonry and each is as recognised internationally.

From here on out Freemasonry has by and large remained stable, and in the two hundred years since the act of union no truly earth shaking changes have swept through the craft. Popularity has waxed and waned, the pre World War 1 and inter-war years are sometimes seen as a golden age of fraternalism with man men joining and new side orders appearing. Then in Europe during the Second World War Freemasonry went very quiet, the Nazi regime and Fascist Italy persecuted masons among other groups, some 200,000 men were killed for the membership in Nazi occupied Europe, which unsurprisingly led to European masons being rather quiet about their membership for quite some time afterwards. Likewise the Morgan affair in the USA caused masons to not publicise their membership for some years.

But which some things have changed the heart of Freemasonry still very much remains that of the 16/1700s moral improvement and looking after those in need. The groundwork for that was there in the Gothic constitutions and the stonemason guild rituals and the seventeenth and eighteenth century ritualists embellished upon it, but as always, dig a little and you can still see what it was built upon.

Until next time.

 

Welcome to the blog.

So what is it all about?

A bunch of old guys dressing up in odd clothes behind closed doors scratching each other’s backs? Some secretive organisation bent on world domination perhaps? Maybe it a sinister cult worshipping the devil, or Zeus or the sun?

The answer is none of the above.

Hello, my name’s Tim Hamilton and I’m a mason, I’m also in my mid twenties, work in a supermarket, listen to wide variety of music (in particular rock and metal), study for a degree in my spare time and try to live a normal life. But some people seem to have a fixation on one part of my life and assume that aspect somehow makes everything else I am and do an irrelevancy. This post and the blog which I’m embarking upon is my attempt to correct some misapprehensions, point out the faulty assumptions and combat the outright lies that have been propagated about Freemasonry and its members.

Before we can really begin to get to grips with this subject we need to define it, what will I be including in this blog. First and foremost I will almost exclusively be dealing with regular, recognised Freemasonry, that is to say Freemasonry which follows the Grand Lodge model used by the Grand Lodges descended from the original Grand Lodge of England formed in 1717. Irregular masonry will be mentioned, but only to help differentiate the two so that readers can look at accounts of supposed masonic activity and be able to tell whether it truly is masonic.

History of the fraternity will feature quite heavily early on in the blog, and will aid in understanding some of the more antiquated aspects. Alongside that I’ll discuss some of the philosophy, symbolism and organisation that you come across within masonry. The one thing that most certainly not feature is an exposé of the secrets of masonry, that is the signs, grips and words by which a mason identifies himself within the lodge, I also will not go into detail about ritual as it is my belief that to be forewarned would spoil the experience of someone going through the ceremonies, if you truly wish to know what goes on beyond the basics ritual books are available, although I would advise searching out one that is used rather than something like Duncan’s masonic ritual & monitor.

Finally welcome, and I hope you enjoy the journey.