The TRUE History of Freemasonry (NEW CONCEPTS)

[AJMorton]

Snip!

[AJMorton]

Edited the first post. The thread can now be explored in more general terms, without reference to any personal quest.

[AJMorton]

The Grand lodge of England claims that Masonic history doesn't precede the year 1717 (the year Grand Lodge was founded). Members are forbidden to study Masonic history before this time.

If there was truly no masonic history before 1717, why would you prevent the study of it?

[Mick Harper]

To what extent was the Ulster Rising of 1798 a Masonic plot?

[AJMorton]

The years before and after 1798 were characterised by a huge boost in the creation of pseudo-masonic orders. Many borrowed the masonic system. Others simply adopted it outright.

The Society of United Irishmen was directly responsible for the plot. Freemasonry therefore may have had indirect influence over it.

[Mick Harper]

The contemporary French and American Revolts were...mmm... Masonically implicated. Wolf Tone was a Mason. Something must have been going on.

We know that Masons were very prominent in the French and Amercian Revolutions (and numerous less successful plots in Germany, Italy and Ireland). This may be coincidence, this may be fashion or it may be that for a brief time Masonism was highly effective for political conspiracy-making. Just as Marxism was in the twentieth century. Just as Christianity was in the fourth century.

[Ray]

I've no idea how correct my sources may have been when I read up on the subject of pre-revolutionary France but, as I understood it, the bourgeoisie were increasingly drawn to Masonry and other secret societies because of the lack of opportunity for non-aristocrats under the Ancien Regime.

Masonry in particular offered the promise of an egalitarian international brotherhood that must inevitably grow in strength till it finally rendered the old feudal systems irrelevant and unworkable. Something like that. Casting aside the conspiracy theorists, most accounts explain (if I remember rightly) the export of Masonry to America as a mainly altruistic gesture.

But it doesn't quite stack up. The peasants, who made up far and away the largest section of the population, were not included in the movement, whereas aristocrats could be - and were - initiated. The same was to be true in the US. Clearly something else was going on.

[Mick Harper]

Just for the record, AJ, I do not hold nor have I ever held the belief that the Masons were responsible for either the American or French Revolution. Nor have I ever ruled it out. All I know is what we know: that there were a lot of masons heavily involved.

[Ray]

There's also the subject of early medieval cathedral building, which Graham Hancock certainly linked convincingly to the Templars (does he count as an academic?), if not the Masonic movement.

As far as the experts are concerned, Cluny is reckoned to be the very first of the great medieval erections. How does it fit into your paradigm?

Somewhere, AJ, you wrote