L ’ Enfant and the Freemasons : H . Paul Caemmer ’ s The Life of Pierre Charles L ’ Enfant It was Caemmerer who dispelled the belief that L ’ Enfant was an engineer , and found that he studied in the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture under his own father , an accomplished oil painter . L ’ Enfant ’ s big opportunity was to fill a blank canvas , physically and ideologically , of what became the capital .
Freemasonry in the Holy Land , or , Handmarks of Hiram ’ s Builders by Robert Morris , LLD .
The famous Himalyan Brotherhood lodge owes its origins to a Masonic lodge established in Calcutta in 1773 . Members of descendant lodges organized Himalyan Brotherhood in 1838 in the Indian hill station of Simla , where British rulers spent the hot summers .
Manual of Knights Templar by Edward J . Newman Partly because of novelists and Hollywood , the Masonic Knights Templar have enjoyed an enormous amount of recent attention , and are the subject of extravagant claims about their antiquity . The truth is that the present Templars , while admittedly going back many years , owe much to the eighteenth century , and not to the Middle Ages . They certainly are a highly ritualistic and very curious organization , as this volume of their secrets illustrates .
Manual of the Eastern Star : Containing the Symbols ,
Scriptural Illustrations , Lectures , etc by Robert Macoy The secret cyphers and ritual books of the Eastern Star as well as of other fraternal societies inevitably make their way to the shelves of antiquarian book dealers . So we do have , as in the case of this Eastern Star volume , an insight into what happens in Star temples . It is a good starting place for the curious .
Masonic Poems by Masonic Service Association of the United States Masonic poems can be maudlin or marvelous , but critics must concede that Rudyard Kipling and Robert Burns cannot be accused of being amateurs . In short , the poetry of Freemasonry is a very mixed bag . This practice got its start in the eighteenth century or even earlier , when lodges often met at a coffee house or tavern , and when learning poems for public declamation was part of a gentleman ’ s portfolio of social graces .