Ritual, Secrecy and Civil Society Vol. 6, No. 2, Fall 2018 / Spring 2019 | Page 40

Anton von Geusau ’ s Conversations with Ramsay

little importance by attracting all kinds of hostile suspicion . Thus we cordially declined Mr . Ramsay ’ s offer to accept us as men whom he thought were well worthy of membership .

While the three of them would meet again at least six times , their conversations quite naturally never returned to the subject of Freemasonry after this . It is evident , however , that Ramsay held no grudge against the Germans because of their refusal to join the craft . In fact , the visitors spent their very last afternoon in Paris making a trip to nearby Passy together with Ramsay and his young wife . Early the next day , in the morning of 19 June 1741 , they left Paris for good and set off for Italy , from where they would only return to Germany the following year .

In his book on Ramsay , published in 1926 , Albert Cherel warned that Geusau ’ s diary , “ abrégé , interprété , complété par Büsching ”, should not be taken too literally . ²⁴ More recently , André Kervella has voiced similar concerns . Alluding to the anonymous Annecdotes de la Vie de Messire André de Ramsay , he writes : “ Le récit de Büsching a finalement la même nébulosité que les Anecdotes . Aux notes de Geusau sont ajoutées des assertions incohérentes , puisées on ne sait où , à la façon d ’ un fragile patchwork .” ²⁵ An inspection of Geusau ’ s original diary proves that Cherel ’ s and Kervella ’ s suspicions that Büsching might have meddled with it and added his own thoughts is unfounded . In using the diary for his various publications , he did of course remove the excerpts from their original contexts . Other than that , however , Büsching quoted Geusau very nearly verbatim . He did sometimes shuffle the words about a little ; he also quite systematically replaced French and Latin expressions with German words , for instance Novice with Neuling or Conventicula with Zusammenkünfte . This was a natural thing for him to do ; Büsching ’ s generation believed it was wrong to use too many foreign words , and he openly criticised Geusau for having done so . ²⁶ In the end , none of Büsching ’ s revisions intentionally changed the meaning of the individual diary entries . If Geusaus ’ s account was “ by no means all accurate ”, as Henderson has put it , ²⁷ this was not Büsching ’ s fault .

Wilhelm Begemann , the renowned German Masonic historian , noted in 1906 that he had unsuccessfully searched for the Geusau diary for more than a year . Retrieving the original text might be important for more than one reason , Begemann believed . ²⁸ Any conscientious historian would surely have agreed . It has to be said though that the original diary , now that it has been recovered from the stacks of