Freemasonry: The Secret That's Mostly a Handshake

Somewhere near you, on a street you have walked down a hundred times, there is probably a building with a square and compasses carved above the door and no obvious purpose. Once or twice a month, men in dark suits let themselves in during the evening and let themselves out a few hours later, and nobody quite knows what they did in between. They will not tell you. They have taken an oath. Over three centuries, that quiet refusal has been read as evidence of nearly everything a frightened imagination can supply: devil worship, a plot to overthrow kings, a plan to abolish religion, a hidden government issuing orders through secret handshakes to judges and policemen and presidents. The eye on the dollar bill, people say, is theirs. So is the layout of Washington’s streets. So, in the darker versions, is the whole modern world.

It is one of the oldest living conspiracy theories, and it has an unusual feature: the organisation at its centre is happy to admit that it keeps secrets. Freemasonry really does have passwords, really does have private rituals, really does swear its members to confidentiality. That candour about secrecy is catnip to the theorist — here, at last, is a group that confesses to hiding something. The whole enterprise of understanding the Masonic legend comes down to a single question the Craft’s own history answers rather clearly: what, exactly, is behind the locked door? The answer turns out to be stranger and smaller than any of the theories, and to explain a great deal about why the theories grew so large.

What Freemasonry is

The Craft descends, in name and imagery, from the medieval guilds of working stonemasons — the men who built the cathedrals, who moved between towns as “free” masons and needed ways to prove their qualifications to a lodge of strangers. A grip, a password, a token: these were, in origin, a practical credentialing system for a mobile skilled trade, before printed certificates existed. Over the seventeenth century the lodges began admitting men who were not masons at all — gentlemen, scholars, the curious — and the Craft turned from “operative” to “speculative,” keeping the tools and the vocabulary of building as a set of moral symbols. The square teaches you to act on the level; the compasses, to keep your desires within due bounds.

The institution as we know it dates itself to 1717, when four London lodges met at the Goose and Gridiron alehouse and formed the first Grand Lodge of England. In 1723 James Anderson published the Constitutions that codified its principles. A candidate progresses through three degrees — Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft, Master Mason — each with its own ritual. The central drama is the legend of Hiram Abiff, the master architect of King Solomon’s Temple, who in the Masonic story is murdered by three workmen for refusing to betray the secrets of a master mason, and whose death and symbolic raising the candidate re-enacts. Freemasonry is emphatically not a religion, but it requires belief in a Supreme Being, whom it calls the Great Architect of the Universe, so that men of different faiths can meet on common ground. What it does, in practice, is charity, mutual aid, moral instruction dressed in ritual, and the ancient business of men gathering to feel they belong to something.

The secret, deflated

Here is the thing the theories cannot easily survive. The actual secrets of Freemasonry — the grips, the passwords, the details of the ritual — have been in print, publicly, for a very long time. Exposés have circulated since the eighteenth century; the rituals of the main degrees can be read in any decent library or found online in an afternoon. The “secret” that a Mason guards is not a hidden truth about the universe or a set of instructions from a shadow council. It is the specific words and gestures of his ritual, which he has promised, on his honour, not to reveal — and the promise, rather than the content, is the point. The confidentiality is a bond of trust among the members, a shared discipline, the way a family keeps its own small rites private. The secret is mostly the keeping of it.

This is deflating, and the deflation is exactly why the myths flourish. A person who suspects that something enormous is being hidden will not be satisfied to learn that the something is a handshake. The gap between the theatrical gravity of the secrecy — the oaths, the blindfold, the symbolic penalties — and the modest reality of what is being kept is a vacuum, and vacuums fill. If a group swears blood-curdling oaths to protect a password, the outsider reasons, the password cannot really be the point; there must be a deeper secret behind the trivial one. That reasoning is wrong, but it is not stupid. It is the mind refusing to accept that solemnity can be its own reward.

Three centuries of panic

The suspicion is nearly as old as the Grand Lodge. In 1738 Pope Clement XII issued the bull In eminenti, forbidding Catholics to join on pain of excommunication — a prohibition the Church maintained for centuries, on the grounds that the Craft’s oaths and its indifference to which God a man worshipped were incompatible with the faith. Secular rulers were suspicious too; a network of men bound by oath, meeting in private across national borders, looked to any anxious authority like a potential conspiracy waiting for a cause.

America had its own convulsion. In 1826, in upstate New York, a stonemason named William Morgan announced that he would publish an exposé of Masonic ritual. He was arrested on a dubious debt charge, spirited away from the jail, and never seen again — almost certainly abducted and killed by local Masons enraged at his betrayal. The Morgan Affair detonated. Public fury at the apparent murder, and at the way Masonic sheriffs and jurors seemed to shield the culprits, gave birth to the Anti-Masonic Party, the first significant third party in United States history, which ran a presidential candidate in 1832. Here the fear had a real grievance underneath it: a man had, in all likelihood, been murdered to protect the Craft’s secrets, and the fraternity’s grip on local officialdom had helped the killers escape justice. That is a genuine abuse of a fraternal network, and it seeded a suspicion that Masonry protected its own above the law — a suspicion that, in that specific case, was earned.

The hoax that keeps giving

The most lurid charge against Freemasonry — that it is a front for the worship of Lucifer — has an origin so precise, and so absurd, that it ought to be famous. In the 1880s and 1890s a French writer named Léo Taxil, who had made his name with anti-clerical pornography, staged a spectacular public conversion to Catholicism and began producing a torrent of “revelations” about the satanic inner core of Freemasonry. He described a secret supreme rite called Palladism, presided over by a high priestess named Diana Vaughan, in which Masons communed with demons and worshipped the devil. The Catholic press devoured it. Bishops praised him. The material was cited as proof of what the faithful had long suspected.

In April 1897, Taxil called a press conference, ostensibly to introduce the elusive Diana Vaughan in person. Instead he stood up and confessed that the whole thing — Palladism, Diana Vaughan, the demon-worshipping Masons, all of it — was an elaborate hoax he had invented to demonstrate the gullibility of the Church that had condemned him. There was no Luciferian rite. There never had been. He had made it up and watched the authorities swallow it whole. And yet the story he confessed to fabricating did not die. It escaped its author. To this day, the claim that Freemasons worship Lucifer circulates in earnest, its believers unaware that its source stood in a Paris hall in 1897 and laughed at them. A confessed fiction outlived its confession, which is one of the truest things folklore ever does.

When the fear turned lethal

The Masonic legend has a darker chapter that has to be named plainly, because it did not stay in the realm of pamphlets. Across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the fantasy of a Masonic plot was repeatedly fused with the fantasy of a Jewish one, producing the “Judeo-Masonic conspiracy” — the lie that Jews and Freemasons were jointly engineering the destruction of Christian nations. That fusion runs straight through the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion and became a staple of fascist propaganda. Nazi Germany persecuted Freemasons and sent them to the camps; Franco’s Spain treated Masonry as a mortal enemy of the state and executed and imprisoned its members for decades. The theory that the men in the lodge were secretly ruling the world was, in these hands, an instrument of real murder. Any honest account of the Masonic legend has to carry that weight and refuse the whole framework, because the framework has a body count.

Freemasonry’s habitual pairing with the Illuminati has its own kernel: the Bavarian Illuminati really did recruit through Masonic lodges in the 1780s before both were suppressed, which is enough of a real overlap to keep the two forever conflated in the popular mind. From there the Craft was written into the sprawling New World Order mythology as one more instrument of the hidden hand — the eye on the dollar, the pyramid, the founders’ aprons all recruited as evidence. The eye of providence, for the record, was designed by a committee for the Great Seal and is not distinctively Masonic at all; but a symbol that looks occult will always be adopted by the theory that needs it.

What the door is really hiding

Strip the centuries of panic away and consider what actually meets in that building with the square and compasses over the door. It is, overwhelmingly, ageing men doing charity, raising money for hospitals and scholarships, eating dinner together, and performing a ritual play about a murdered biblical architect that teaches them to be honest and to keep their word. The fraternity has, at various times and places, genuinely functioned as an old-boys’ network that advantaged its members in business and law, and where that shaded into protecting wrongdoers — as it plainly did in the Morgan Affair — the suspicion was fair. Privilege trading favours behind a closed door is a real thing, worth watching. That is a criticism a mutual-aid society can deserve.

What it cannot deserve is the cosmic version. The distance between “a men’s charity that guards its handshake” and “the hidden rulers of the Earth” is the distance the folklore had to travel, and it travelled it for a familiar reason: a private, ritualised, oath-bound brotherhood, meeting in a windowless room, is a perfect blank surface for a frightened age to project its worst suspicions onto. The Craft made itself mysterious, and mystery is a debt the imagination insists on paying with monsters. The men inside are keeping a secret. The secret is that there is no secret worth all this — only a grip, a word, and a promise that the keeping of it means something. That is a strange thing to swear an oath over. It is not a strange enough thing to have frightened the world for three hundred years, which tells you the fright was never really about them.