Part 11. The Western Esoteric Tradition and Freemasonry

Kabbalah, the “received” tradition of Jewish mysticism, is the single most important body of doctrine behind the Western esoteric tradition. The Renaissance magus, the Rosicrucian, the nineteenth-century occultist and the Scottish Rite Freemason all claimed to draw on it. Its…

Between 1463 and 1614 a small group of humanists, priests and physicians built a Christian magical philosophy. It rested on three supposedly ancient revelations: the writings of the Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, the Neoplatonic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, and the Hebrew…

Kabbalah and Hermetic theology supplied the Western esoteric tradition with its metaphysics. Alchemy and astrology were its operative arts: alchemy worked on matter, astrology read the heavens. Both rest on the axiom ascribed to Hermes, “What is below is like…

The Order of the Temple existed for less than two centuries, from a handful of knights guarding a pilgrim road to the arrests of 13 October 1307 and the burning of its last Grand Master in 1314. Its afterlife in…

Between 1614 and 1616 three anonymous German publications announced an invisible brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. Its founder had supposedly learned the secrets of nature in Arabia and Morocco, and its members now invited the learned of Europe to join…

Freemasonry tells two stories about its origins. In its own legends it is as old as geometry, reaching back through the medieval cathedral builders to Solomon’s Temple, to Hiram, to Enoch’s pillars or to Egypt. The documentary record is much…

Freemasonry describes itself, in a definition its own writers repeat, as “a science of morality veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols” [Gruber, “Freemasonry: Its Origin and History”, printed in Sickels, The General Ahiman Rezon, #66646, quoting Mackey]. The Craft,…

The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite is the system of thirty-three degrees built on top of the three Craft degrees, and Albert Pike (1809-1891) is the figure who shaped it. His Morals and Dogma (1871) is a lecture-book for the…

A handful of passages in Morals and Dogma are quoted more often than the rest of its 800-odd pages together. They are the Lucifer sentence of the 19th degree, the Satan-as-Force passage of the 3rd, the admission that Masonry “uses…

Between the first grand lodge (London, 1717) and the end of the nineteenth century, Freemasonry split along ritual, religious and political lines. On the Continent, Templar “high degrees” multiplied, and Rome condemned the Craft again and again. A Bavarian society,…

Whether the lodges made revolutions or merely hosted revolutionaries is a question the library’s sources answer in sharply different ways. Masonic insiders such as Keghel and the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania’s editor of Washington’s letters stress a Craft that trained…

The Revolution broke up most eighteenth-century occult societies, but the nineteenth century rebuilt them on a larger scale. Masonic high degrees, French Martinism, Kabbalah and the new interest in Asian religion merged into a few organisations that shaped Western esotericism…