Ritual , Secrecy , and Civil Society
In reading our title today , you may have thought that we were going to prostrate ourselves before the idol of origins and reveal sensational new evidence about where freemasonry came from . We will not be doing that . Instead , we want to discuss how myths of the origin of freemasonry have been manipulated as a means of power play in freemasonry . We will illustrate how master narratives have been invented by different masonic bodies and individuals in an attempt to bolster their own power and influence . We will try to convince you , as researchers into freemasonry , that you should think less about where freemasonry came from and more about the way it has been constantly reinvented and reimagined to suit different social , cultural and political agendas .
Modern freemasonry is the result of a complex process of historical change which began at least in the middle of the fourteenth century . In each century , freemasonry changed profoundly and was used for different social and cultural ends . As freemasonry developed , different stories were invented to justify its appropriation by a variety of elite groups in different countries . Our job is not to use these to try and trace a false pure point of origin for freemasonry but rather to look at the way these master narratives were invented and how they were used . We cannot as historians ever know what actually happened , and that general- ly is not an interesting question . We can however find out what people said about what they thought happened and that is a far more interesting subject .
The most striking illustration of the invention of masonic tradition are the stories around the creation of a Grand Lodge in London in the early eighteenth century . The Grand Lodge in London has consistently over three hundred years manipulated and reinvented historical tradition to bolster its own prestige and power . Its authority depends on historical inventions . But of course the United Grand Lodge of England is not unusual in the way it manipulates history for political ends . A foundation myth is one of the distinguishing features of a fraternal organisation . The website of the Oddfellows traces the origin of the order to 587 BC and states that ‘ the earliest legend of an Oddfellows fraternity is linked to the exile of the Israelites in Babylon , when many banded together into a brotherhood for mutual support ’. 22 Similarly , the Druid friendly societies claim to be directly descended from the Druids of pre-Roman Britain . 23 We should not simply ignore such stories as rubbish . One of the most important roles of the historian is to examine how these stories were invented and the ways in which they are used for political purposes .
The United Grand Lodge of England ( UGLE ) has recently celebrated
22 https :// www . oddfellows . co . uk / about / history / ( Accessed 7 December 2019 ).
23 Hutton , Blood and Mistletoe , pp . 132-45 ; Cunliffe , Druids , pp . 125-7 . The Ancient Order of Druids Introductory Book ( London : Bro . Coningham , 1889 ) states that the Ancient Order of Druids was founded in time immemorial , but revived in 1781 .
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