Secret Societies And Subversive Movements Part 12

Now, the infamous character of the Duc d'Orleans is a matter of common knowledge; moreover, during the Regency--that period of impiety and moral dissolution hitherto unparalleled in the history of France--the chief of council was the Duc de Bourbon, who later placed his mistress the Marquise de Prie and the financier Paris Duverney at the head of affairs, thus creating a scandal of such magnitude that he was exiled in 1726 through the influence of Cardinal Fleury. This Duc de Bourbon in 1737 is said to have become Grand Master of the Temple. "It was thus,"

observes de Canteleu, "that these two Grand Masters of the Temple degraded the royal authority and ceaselessly increased hatred against the government."

It would therefore seem strange that a man so upright as Ramsay appears to have been, who had moreover but recently been converted to the Catholic Church, should have formed a friendship with the dissolute Regent of France, unless there had been some bond between them. But here we have a possible explanation--Templarism. Doubtless during Ramsay's youth at Kilwinning many Templar traditions had come to his knowledge, and if in France he found himself befriended by the Grand Master himself, what wonder that he should have entered into an alliance which resulted in his admission to an Order he had been accustomed to revere and which, moreover, was represented to him as the _fons et origo_ of the masonic brotherhood to which he also belonged? It is thus that we find Ramsay in the very year that the Duc de Bourbon is said to have been made Grand Master of the Temple artlessly writing to Cardinal Fleury asking him to extend his protection to the society of Freemasons in Paris and enclosing a copy of the speech which he was to deliver on the following day, March 21, 1737. It is in this famous oration that for the first time we find Freemasonry traced to the Crusades:

At the time of the Crusades in Palestine many princes, lords, and citizens a.s.sociated themselves, and vowed to restore the Temple of the Christians in the Holy Land, and to employ themselves in bringing back their architecture to its first inst.i.tution. They agreed upon several ancient signs and symbolic words drawn from the well of religion in order to recognize themselves amongst the heathens and Saracens. These signs and words were only communicated to those who promised solemnly, and even sometimes at the foot of the altar, never to reveal them. This sacred promise was therefore not an execrable oath, as it has been called, but a respectable bond to unite Christians of all nationalities into one confraternity. Some time afterwards our Order formed an intimate union with the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. From that time our Lodges took the name of Lodges of St. John.[366]

This speech of Ramsay's has raised a storm of controversy amongst Freemasons because it contains a very decided hint of a connexion between Templarism and Freemasonry. Mr. Tuckett, in the paper referred to above, points out that only the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem are here mentioned,[367] but Ramsay distinctly speaks of "our Order" forming a union with the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, and we know that the Templars did eventually form such a union. The fact that Ramsay does not mention the Templars by name admits of a very plausible explanation. It must be remembered that, as Mr. Gould has shown, a copy of the oration was enclosed by Ramsay in his letter to Cardinal Fleury appealing for royal protection to be extended to Freemasonry; it is therefore hardly likely that he would have proclaimed a connexion between the Order he was anxious to present in the most favourable light and one which had formerly been suppressed by King and Pope. Moreover, if the Charter of Larmenius is to be believed, the newly elected Grand Master of the Temple was the Duc de Bourbon, who had already incurred the Cardinal's displeasure. Obviously, therefore, Templar influence was kept in the background. This is not to imply bad faith on the part of Ramsay, who doubtless held the Order of Templars to be wholly praiseworthy; but he could not expect the King or Cardinal to share his view, and therefore held it more prudent to refer to the progenitors of Freemasonry under the vague description of a crusading body. Ramsay's well-meant effort met, however, with no success. Whether on account of this unlucky reference by which the Cardinal may have detected Templar influence or for some other reason, the appeal for royal protection was not only refused, but the new Order, which hitherto Catholics had been allowed to enter, was now prohibited by Royal edict. In the following year, 1738, the Pope, Clement XII, issued a bull, _In Eminenti_, banning Freemasonry and excommunicating Catholics who took part in it.

But this prohibition appears to have been without effect, for Freemasonry not only prospered but soon began to manufacture new degrees. And in the masonic literature of the following thirty years the Templar tradition becomes still more clearly apparent. Thus the Chevalier de Berage in a well-known pamphlet, of which the first edition is said to have appeared in 1747,[368] gives the following account of the origins of Freemasonry:

This Order was inst.i.tuted by G.o.defroi de Bouillon in Palestine in 1330,[369] after the decadence of the Christian armies, and was only communicated to the French Masons some time after and to a very small number, as a reward for the obliging services they rendered to several of our English and Scottish Knights, from whom true Masonry is taken. Their Metropolitan Lodge is situated on the Mountain of Heredom where the first Lodge was held in Europe and which exists in all its splendour. The General Council is still held there and it is the seal of the Sovereign Grand Master in office. This mountain is situated between the West and North of Scotland at sixty miles from Edinburgh.

Apart from the historical confusion of the first sentence, this pa.s.sage is of interest as evidence that the theory of a connexion between certain crusading Knights and the Lodge of Heredom of Kilwinning was current as early as 1747. The Baron Tschoudy in his _etoile Flamboyante_, which appeared in 1766, says that the crusading origin of Freemasonry is the one officially taught in the lodges, where candidates for initiation are told that several Knights who had set forth to rescue the holy places of Palestine from the Saracens "formed an a.s.sociation under the name of Free Masons, thus indicating that their princ.i.p.al desire was the reconstruction of the Temple of Solomon," that, further, they adopted certain signs, grips, and pa.s.swords as a defence against the Saracens, and finally that "our Society ... fraternized on the footing of an Order with the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, from which it is apparent that the Freemasons borrowed the custom of regarding St. John as the patron of the whole Order in general."[370]

After the crusades "the Masons kept their rites and methods and in this way perpetuated the royal art by establishing lodges, first in England, then in Scotland," etc.[371]

In this account, therefore, Freemasonry is represented as having been inst.i.tuted for the defence of Christian doctrines. De Berage expresses the same view and explains that the object of these Crusaders in thus binding themselves together was to protect their lives against the Saracens by enveloping their sacred doctrines in a veil of mystery. For this purpose they made use of Jewish symbolism, which they invested with a Christian meaning. Thus the Temple of Solomon was used to denote the Church of Christ, the bough of acacia signified the Cross, the square and the compa.s.s the union between the Old and New Testaments, etc. So "the mysteries of Masonry were in their principle, and are still, nothing else than those of the Christian religion."[372]

Baron Tschoudy, however, declares that all this stops short of the truth, that Freemasonry originated long before the Crusades in Palestine, and that the real "ancestors, fathers, authors of the Masons, those ill.u.s.trious men of whom I will not say the date nor betray the secret," were a "disciplined body" whom Tschoudy describes by the name of "the Knights of the Aurora and Palestine." After "the almost total destruction of the Jewish people" these "Knights" had always hoped to regain possession of the domains of their fathers and to rebuild the Temple, and they carefully preserved their "regulations and particular liturgy," together with a "sublime treatise" which was the object of their continual study and of their philosophical speculations. Tschoudy further relates that they were students of the "occult sciences," of which alchemy formed a part, and that they had "abjured the principles of the Jewish religion in order to follow the lights of the Christian faith." At the time of the Crusades the Knights of Palestine came out from the desert of the Thebad, where they had remained hidden, and joined to themselves some of the crusaders who had remained in Jerusalem. Declaring that they were the descendants of the masons who had worked on the Temple of Solomon, they professed to concern themselves with "speculative architecure," which served to disguise a more glorious point of view. From this time they took the name of Free Masons, presented themselves under this t.i.tle to the crusading armies and a.s.sembled under their banners.[373]

It would of course be absurd to regard any of the foregoing accounts as historical facts; the important point is that they tend to prove the fallacy of supposing that the Johannite-Templar theory originated with the revived _Ordre du Temple_, since one corresponding to it so closely was current in the middle of the preceding century. It is true that in these earlier accounts the actual words "Johannite" and "Templar" do not occur, but the resemblance between the sect of Jews professing the Christian faith but possessing a "particular liturgy" and a "sublime treatise"--apparently some early form of the Cabala--dealing with occult science, and the Mandaeans or Johannites with their Cabalistic "Book of Adam," their Book of John, and their ritual, is at once apparent.

Further, the allusions to the connexion between the Knights who had been indoctrinated in the Holy Land and the Scottish lodges coincides exactly with the Templar tradition, published not only by the _Ordre du Temple_ but handed down in the Royal Order of Scotland.

From all this the following facts stand out: (1) that whilst British Craft Masonry traced its origin to the operative guilds of masons, the Freemasons of France from 1737 onwards placed the origin of the Order in crusading chivalry; (2) that it was amongst these Freemasons that the upper degrees known as the Scottish Rite arose; and (3) that, as we shall now see, these degrees clearly suggest Templar inspiration.

The earliest form of the upper degrees appears to have been the one given by de Berage, as follows:

1. Parfait Macon elu.

2. elu de Perignan.

3. elu des Quinze.

4. Pet.i.t Architecte.

5. Grand Architecte.

6. Chevalier de l'epee et de Rose-Croix.

7. Noachite ou Chevalier Prussien.

The first of these to make its appearance is believed to have been the one here a.s.signed to the sixth place. This degree known in modern Masonry as "Prince of the Rose-Croix of Heredom or Knight of the Pelican and Eagle" became the eighteenth and the most important degree in what was later called the Scottish Rite, or at the present time in England the Ancient and Accepted Rite.

Why was this Rite called Scottish? "It cannot be too strongly insisted on," says Mr. Gould, "that all Scottish Masonry has nothing whatever to do with the Grand Lodge of Scotland, nor, with one possible exception--that of the Royal Order of Scotland--did it ever originate in that country."[374] But in the case of the Rose-Croix degree there is surely some justification for the term in legend, if not in proven fact, for, as we have already seen, according to the tradition of the Royal Order of Scotland this degree had been contained in it since the fourteenth century, when the degrees of H.R.M. (Heredom) and R.S.Y.C.S.

(Rosy Cross) are said to have been inst.i.tuted by Robert Bruce in collaboration with the Templars after the battle of Bannockburn. Dr.

Mackey is one of the few Masons who admit this probable affiliation, and in referring to the tradition of the Royal Order of Scotland observes: "From that Order it seems to us by no means improbable that the present degree of Rose-Croix de Heredom may have taken its origin."[375]

But the Rose-Croix degree, like the Templar tradition from which it appears to have descended, is capable of a dual interpretation, or rather of a multiple interpretation, for no degree in Masonry has been subject to so many variations. That on the Continent it had descended through the Rosicrucians in an alchemical form seems more than probable.

It would certainly be difficult to believe that a degree of R.S.Y.C.S.

was imported from the East and incorporated in the Royal Order of Scotland in 1314; that by a mere coincidence a man named Christian Rosenkreutz was--according to the Rosicrucian legend--born in the same century and transmitted a secret doctrine he had discovered in the East to the seventeenth-century Brethren of the Rosy Cross; and finally, that a degree of the Rose-Croix was founded in circ. 1741 without any connexion existing between these succeeding movements. Even if we deny direct affiliation, we must surely admit a common source of inspiration producing, if not a continuation, at any rate a periodic revival of the same ideas. Dr. Oliver indeed admits affiliation between the seventeenth-century fraternity and the eighteenth-century degree, and after pointing out that the first indication of the Rose-Croix degree appears in the _Fama Fraternitatis_ in 1613, goes on to say:

It was known much sooner, although not probably as a degree in Masonry, for it existed as a cabalistic science from the earliest times in Egypt, Greece, and Rome, as well as amongst the Jews and Moors in times more recent, and in our own country the names of Roger Bacon, Fludd, Ashmole, and many others are found in its list of adepts.[376]

Dr. Mackey, quoting this pa.s.sage, observes that "Oliver confounds the masonic Rose-Croix with the alchemical Rosicrucians," and proceeds to give an account of the Rose-Croix degree as worked in England and America, which he truly describes as "in the strictest sense a Christian degree."[377] But the point Dr. Mackey overlooks is that this is only one version of the degree, which, as we shall see later, has been and still is worked in a very different manner on the Continent.

It is, however, certain that the version of the Rose-Croix degree first adopted by the Freemasons of France in about 1741 was not only so Christian but so Catholic in character as to have given rise to the belief that it was devised by the Jesuits in order to counteract the attacks of which Catholicism was the object.[378] In a paper on the Additional Degrees Mr. J.S. Tuckett writes:

There is undeniable evidence that in their _earliest forms_ the Ecossais or Scots Degrees were Roman Catholic; I have a MS. Ritual in French of what I believe to be the _original_ Chev. de l'Aigle or S?P?D?R?C? (Souverain Prince de Rose-Croix) and in it the New Law is declared to be "la foy Catholique," and the Baron Tschoudy in his _L'etoile Flamboyante_ of 1766 describes the same Degree as "le Catholicisme mis en grade" (Vol. I. p. 114). I suggest that Ecossais or Scots Masonry was intended to be a Roman Catholic as well as a Stuart form of Freemasonry, in which none but those devoted to both Restorations were to be admitted.[379]

But is it necessary to read this political intention into the degree? If the tradition of the Royal Order of Scotland is to be believed, the idea of the Rose-Croix degree was far older than the Stuart cause, and dated back to Bannockburn, when the degree of Heredom with which it was coupled was inst.i.tuted in order "to correct the errors and reform the abuses which had crept in among the three degrees of St. John's Masonry," and to provide a "Christianized form of the Third Degree,"

"purified of the dross of paganism and even of Judaism."[380] Whether the antiquity attributed to these degrees can be proved or not, it certainly appears probable that the legend of the Royal Order of Scotland had some foundation in fact, and therefore that the ideas embodied in the eighteenth-century Rose-Croix degree may have been drawn from the store of that Order and brought by the Jacobites to France. At the same time there is no evidence in support of the statement made by certain Continental writers that Ramsay actually inst.i.tuted this or any of the upper degrees. On the contrary, in his Oration he expressly states that Freemasonry is composed of the Craft degrees only:

We have amongst us three kinds of brothers: Novices or Apprentices, Fellows or Professed Brothers, Masters or Perfected Brethren. To the first are explained the moral virtues; to the second the heroic virtues; to the last the Christian virtues....

It might be said then that the Rose-Croix degree was here foreshadowed in the Masters' degree, in that the latter definitely inculcated Christianity. This would be perfectly in accord with Ramsay's point of view as set forth in his account of his conversion by Fenelon. When he first met the Archbishop of Cambrai in 1710, Ramsay relates that he had lost faith in all Christian sects and had resolved to "take refuge in a wise Deism limited to respect for the Divinity and for the immutable ideas of pure virtue," but that his conversation with Fenelon led him to accept the Catholic faith. And he goes on to show that "Monsieur de Cambrai turned Atheists into Deists, Deists into Christians, and Christians into Catholics by a sequence of ideas full of enlightenment and feeling."[381]

Might not this be the process which Ramsay aimed at introducing into Freemasonry--the process which in fact does form part of the masonic system in England to-day, where the Atheist must become, at least by profession, a Deist before he can be admitted to the Craft Degrees, whilst the Rose-Croix degree is reserved solely for those who profess the Christian faith? Such was undoubtedly the idea of the men who introduced the Rose-Croix degree into France; and Ragon, who gives an account of this "Ancien Rose-Croix Francais"--which is almost identical with the degree now worked in England, but long since abandoned in France--objects to it on the very score of its Christian character.[382]

In this respect the Rose-Croix amongst all the upper degrees introduced to France in the middle of the eighteenth century stands alone, and it alone can with any probability be attributed to Scottish Jacobite inspiration. It was not, in fact, until three or four years after Lord Derwent.w.a.ter or his mysterious successor Lord Harnouester[383] had resigned the Grand Mastership in favour of the Duc d'Antin in 1738 that the additional degrees were first heard of, and it was not until eight years after the Stuart cause had received its death-blow at Culloden, that is to say, in 1754, that the Rite of Perfection in which the so-called Scots Degrees were incorporated was drawn up in the following form:

Rite of Perfection

1. Entered Apprentice.

2. Fellow Craft.

3. Master Mason.

4. Secret Master.

5. Perfect Master.

6. Intimate Secretary.

7. Intendant of the Buildings.

8. Provost and Judge.

9. Elect of Nine.

10. Elect of Fifteen.

11. Chief of the Twelve Tribes.

12. Grand Master Architect.

13. Knight of the Ninth Arch.

14. Ancient Grand Elect.

15. Knight of the Sword.

16. Prince of Jerusalem.

17. Knight of the East and West.

18. Rose-Croix Knight.

19. Grand Pontiff.

20. Grand Patriarch.

21. Grand Master of the Key of Masonry.

22. Prince of Liba.n.u.s or Knight of the Royal Axe.

23. Sovereign Prince Adept.

24. Commander of the Black and White Eagle.

25. Commander of the Royal Secret.[384]

We have only to glance at the nomenclature of the last twenty-two of these degrees to see that on the basis of mere operative Masonry there has been built up a system composed of two elements: crusading chivalry and Judaic tradition. What else is this but Templarism? Even Mr. Gould, usually so reticent on Templar influence, admits it at this period:

In France ... some of the Scots lodges would appear to have very early manufactured new degrees, connecting these very distinguished Scots Masons with the Knights Templar, and thus given rise to the subsequent flood of Templarism. The earliest of all are supposed to have been the Masons of Lyons who invented the Kadosch degree, representing the vengeance of the Templars, in 1741. From that time new rites multiplied in France and Germany, but all those of French origin contain Knightly, and almost all, Templar grades. In every case the connecting link was composed of one or more Scots degrees.[385]

The name Kadosch here mentioned is a Hebrew word signifying "holy" or "consecrated," which in the Cabala is found in conjunction with the Tetragrammaton.[386] The degree is said to have developed from that of Grand Elect,[387] one of the three "degrees of vengeance" celebrating with sanguinary realism the avenging of the murder of Hiram. But in its final form of Knight Kadosch--later to become the thirtieth degree of the "Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite"--the Hiramic legend was changed into the history of the Templars with Jacques du Molay as the victim.[388] So the reprobation of attack on authority personified by the master-builder becomes approbation of attack on authority in the person of the King of France.

The introduction of the upper degrees with their political and, later on, anti-Christian tendencies thus marked a complete departure from the fundamental principle of Freemasonry that "nothing concerning the religion or government shall ever be spoken of in the lodge." For this reason they have been a.s.sailed not only by anti-masonic writers but by Freemasons themselves.[389] To represent Barruel and Robison as the enemies of Freemasonry is therefore absolutely false; neither of these men denounced Craft Masonry as practised in England, but only the superstructure erected on the Continent. Barruel indeed incurs the reproaches of Mounier for his championship of English Freemasons: