Controversies about Freemasonry often ignore the context and circumstances of its origins. At a time of deep social transformation, the legend of the Rosy Cross was born.
by Massimo Introvigne
Article 1 of 8
Conspiracy theories, which today even play a role in elections, and calls to restrict its activities in several countries generated a new attention on an old institution, Freemasonry. This series tries to answer some basic questions about Freemasonry, from the point of view of a scholar who is an outsider, in the sense of not being a Freemason, but has devoted several books and articles to the institution.
Freemasonry can only be understood within the framework of a more general inquiry into the problem of modernity. The most essential characteristic of modernity is pluralism, not only social, but doctrinal: the presence of socially significant groups bearing different and irreconcilable ideas about the origin and destiny of the world and humans, that is, proposing different worldviews, philosophies, religions. The Middle Ages, from this point of view, was not a pluralist society in the modern sense of the term. The Jewish and Muslim communities, although present, were not considered an integral part of society. The various “heretical” groups were regarded as extraneous bodies, socially significant only in circumscribed local contexts. The unity and integrity of the Catholic faith were considered a good to be pursued and the presence of contradictory worldviews within Christianity an evil to be fought.
The modern pluralist society was born after the Reformation and the wars of religion. The outcome was the presence in different European nations, and in Europe as a whole, of different religious groups carrying mutually irreconcilable ideas. This situation of pluralism only increased from the sixteenth century onward. If at first Catholics and Protestants coexisted, soon the Protestants fragmented into dozens, then hundreds of rival denominations. Geographical discoveries also made evident to the European educated public the existence in the world of many different religions. Later, with the Enlightenment, rationalism and unbelief also became socially significant. From the nineteenth century onward, the presence in the West of non-Christian religions and new religious movements also gained increasing space.
With doctrinal pluralism came a widespread social unease, which manifested itself in two different ways. On the one hand, there were those who attempted to escape from pluralism, which appeared to them intellectually incomprehensible, by taking refuge in their own micro-societies. There, pluralism was denied, and the plurality of contradictory messages was reduced to selective listening to a single message. This was the case of the “sects” that, physically or at least psychologically, separated themselves from the pluralistic society to build micro-societies that were no longer pluralistic. Only one “truth” was heard and the contact (at least intellectual) with the outside world was reduced.
On the other hand, there were also those who instead of fleeing from pluralism sought a way to adapt to it. At the opposite extreme of the “sects” for whom there was only one truth, different groups organized themselves around a different and pluralistic notion of truth. There, all the contradictory messages circulating in a pluralistic society were declared simultaneously (if only relatively) true. It was argued that it was possible to live between the folds of their contradictions if a “key” was found that allowed the different worldviews to be arranged and ordered in a somewhat logical construction. This “key” was often esoteric. It was asserted that at the superficial level (exoteric) the different religions, worldviews, and philosophies were indeed contradictory. However, each also entailed a deeper and more secret (esoteric) part. The esoteric cores of the different (legitimate) religions and philosophies not only did not contradict each other but on the contrary ultimately coincided.
This sociological itinerary paradoxically demonstrates a need for truth and the discomfort of living in a world of contradictions. When contradictions arise in modern pluralistic societies, we feel the need to resolve them, either by fleeing to our own protected micro-world or by finding tools to adapt to the new world.
Freemasonry is a main example of the second reaction. Italian historian Carlo Francovich (1910–1990) called it “the first-born daughter of eighteenth-century intellectualism , [which] was born in England under the conflicting auspices of rationalism, professed by [John] Locke [1632–1704] and [Isaac] Newton [1643–1727], and of that pre-Romantic yearning for mystery, rooted in the occult tradition and medieval spiritualism” (Storia della Massoneria in Italia dalle origini alla Rivoluzione francese, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974, XI).
The origins of Freemasonry, according to English historian Frances Amelia Yates (1899–1981), are one of the most debated and debatable problems in the whole field of historical research (The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972, 247). However, if one wants to understand exactly what Freemasonry is, the question of origins cannot be left unaddressed.
The esoteric response (although the world “esotericism” did not exist at that time) to the need to resolve the contradictions of the nascent pluralistic society was most characteristically revealed in the emergence of the Rosicrucian legend. The legend argued that the unifying “secret core” behind the different religions was known since the Middle Ages to a brotherhood of initiates founded by a certain Christian Rosenkreutz.
The legend described him as a knight of the German nobility who lived between 1378 and 1484 and who, at the age of sixteen, embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. During the journey, certain circumstances, including the death in Cyprus of the adviser accompanying him, led the knight to alter his itinerary. He travelled to Yemen, Egypt, and Fez, where he was initiated into the mysteries of Islamic mysticism and Jewish Kabbalah. Returning to Europe via Spain, he devoted himself to work and meditation for a few years. He finally called to himself three friars he had met in the monastery where he grew up during his early youth. With them, he established the first nucleus of the “Fraternity of Rosicrucians” at a “Convent of the Holy Spirit.”
Together, these first “Rosicrucians” decided to keep the existence of the fraternity secret for a century, each choosing only one successor. Upon the founder’s death, the location of his burial place was not communicated to the new brethren, and remained unknown until the third generation of disciples. Hidden in a German forest, the grave was found some one hundred and twenty years after Christian’s demise. In his tomb, the Rosicrucian brethren discovered, in addition to a number of wondrous objects of the strangest virtues, the incorrupt body of the master, holding a small parchment book decorated with gold letters in which was contained the key to attaining the secret of the brotherhood.
The legend of the Rosicrucians may have been put into circulation as early as the 16th century, but it did not gain wide circulation until the 17th century thanks to the publication of three texts: the “Fama fraternitatis” (1614), the “Confessio” (1615), and “Christian Rosenkreutz’s Chemical Wedding” (1616). Many took these texts seriously. Even a philosopher like René Descartes (1596–1650) devoted more than a year of his life to searching for the mysterious Rosicrucians in Germany. He did not find them for one good reason: they did not exist. No Rosicrucian brotherhood had existed in the Middle Ages. The legend was precisely a legend, created (with others) by the German Lutheran pastor Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1654). He included in the story both the theme of unity among the secret cores of religions and a political program of coalition among all Protestant and “enlightened” forces of Europe against the Catholic Church, the Papacy, and the Habsburg Dinasty.
Today there are numerous orders named after the Rosicrucians whose origins, despite the “mythical stories” they propose to their followers, are no older than the 19th century. The largest is the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), founded by American businessman Harvey Spencer Lewis (1883–1939) in 1915. Lewis then endowed AMORC with a “mythical history” allegedly going back, through Rosenkreutz, to the ancient Egyptians.
Many esoteric organizations , including Freemasonry, have both an “authentic history” and a “mythical history.” Authentic history, which can be reconstructed through documents, reports their founding as emerges from documents. Mythical history starts with the Druids, Noah, Solomon, the Pharaohs or at least the Templars and finds members of the esoteric orders among the most famous poets, scientists, and rulers of history. Mythical history is not a vulgar forgery. Many of those who propose it know that it is not empirically true. It is a legend, a word coming from the Latin “legenda,” “something to be read,” which can inspire meditation. Most members of esoteric orders know that the mythical history they tell is not the narrative of events that actually occurred in history. They would say that it is worth telling because it stimulates reflection. But they would not confuse it with the authentic history of their orders, which they know is more prosaic.
