\
\\\THE TEMPLE AND THE LODGE
MICHAEL BAIGENT AND RICHARD LEIGH
TWO
Scotland and a Hidden Tradition
The Architect as Magus
The Hiram legend represents a strand of Judaic tradition in Freemasonry. In certain of its versions, however , including Gérard de Nerval’ s, it also incorporates Islamic elements and influences; and, as we have seen, Nerval claimed to have obtained his version from Islamic sources. How, then, did it find its way into the heart of medieval Christian Europe? And why should it have been so impor tant to the builders of Christian religious edifices? Let us begin by considering the second of these questions.
Judaism forbade the making of graven images. Islam inher ited and perpetuated that taboo. Under both Judaism and Islam, a cultural heritage evolved which was inimical to representational art - to any depiction of natural f orms, including, of cour se, that of man himself . The kind of decoration one associates with Christian cathedrals is not to be found in the synagogue or the mosque.
In part, this interdict derives from the fact that any attempt to depict the natural world, including the human form, was deemed to be blasphemous — an attempt by man to compete with God as creator , even to usurp and displace God as creator . God alone was held to. possess the prerogative of creating forms out of nothingness, creating life out of clay. For man to create a replica of such forms, and a replica of life, out of wood, stone, pigment or any other substance, was a trespass on the divine prerogative — and, of necessity, a parody or travesty of it.
But there was also a deeper theological justification behind this apparently over - literal dogma — a justification which over lapped, and may even have been influenced by, ancient Pythagorean thought. God, in both Judaism and Islam, was One. God was a unity. God was everything. The forms of the phenomenal world, on the other hand, were numerous, manif old, multifarious and diverse. Such forms bore witness not to the divine unity, but to the fragmentation of the temporal world. If God was to be discerned in the creation at all, it was not in the multiplicity of forms, but in the unifying principles running through those forms and underlying them. In other words, God was to be discerned in the principles of shape — determined ultimately by the degrees in an angle — and by number . It was through shape and number , not by representation of diverse forms, that God’ s glory was held to be manifest. And it was in edifices based on shape and number , rather than on representational embellishment, that the divine presence was to be housed.
The synthesis of shape and number is, of course, geometry. Through geometry, and the regular recurrence of geometric patterns, the synthesis of shape and number is actualised. Through the study of geometry, therefore, certain absolute laws appeared to become legible — laws which attested to an underlying order , an underlying design, an underlying coherence. This master plan was apparently infallible, immutable, omnipresent; and by virtue of those very qualities, it could be construed, easily enough, as something of divine origin — a visible manifestation of the divine power , the divine will, the divine craftsmanship. And thus geometry, in both Judaism and Islam, came to assume sacred proportions, becoming invested with a character of transcendent and immanent mystery.
Towards the end of the first century BC, the Roman architect Vitruvius had enunciated what were to become some of the most basic premises for later builders. He had recommended, for example, that builders be organised into mutually beneficial societies or ‘ collegia’ . He had insisted, ‘ Let the altar s look to the east’ , 7 as, of course, they do in Christian churches. More important still, he had established the architect as something more than a mere technician. The architect, he said, ‘ should be . . . a skilful draughtsman, a mathematician, familiar with histor ical studies, a diligent student of philosophy, acquainted with music . . . f amiliar with astrology . . .’ . 8 For Vitruvius, in effect, the architect was a species of magus, conversant with the sum of human knowledge and pr ivy to the creation’ s underlying laws. Paramount among these laws was geometry, on which the architect was obliged to draw in order to construct temples ‘ by the help of proportion and symmetry . . .’ . 9
In this respect, too, then, Judaism and Islam were to converge with classical thought. For was not architecture the supreme application and actualisation of geometry — an application and actualisation that went further even than painting and rendered geometry three- dimensional? Was it not in architecture that geometry in effect became incarnate? It was thus in structures based on geometry, with no embellishment to distract or def lect the mind, that God’ s presence was to be accommodated and worshipped. The synagogue and the mosque, therefore, were both based not on decoration, but on geometric principles, on abstract mathematical relationships. And the only ornamentation allowed in them was of an abstract geometrical kind – the maze, f or example, the arabesque, the chessboard, the arch, the pillar or column and other such ‘ pure’ embodiments of symmetry, regularity, balance and proportion.
Dur ing the Ref ormation, the taboo against representational art was to be adopted by some of the more austere forms of Protestantism. This was particularly so in Scotland. But medieval Christianity, under the hegemony of the Catholic Church, had no such inhibitions or prohibitions. Never theless, Christendom was quick to seize upon the principles of sacred geometry, and utilised them to augment its own attempts to embody and do homage to the divine. From the period of the Gothic cathedrals on, sacred geometry in architecture and in architectural adornment went hand in hand with representational art as an integral component of Christian churches.
In the Gothic cathedral, indeed, geometry was the single most important factor . As we have noted in the building of Rosslyn Chapel, the construction of any such edifice was conducted under the direction of the so- called ‘ Master of the Work’ . Each such master would devise his own unique geometry, with which everything that followed had to harmonise. A study of Char tres has revealed, dur ing the course of its construction, the imprint of nine separate masters. 10
Most master s were essentially proficient craftsmen and draughtsmen, whose skills were wholly technological. Some of them, however — two, it is believed, out of the nine at Chartres — were obviously versed in something more. 11 Their work reflects a metaphysical, spiritual or , in the language of Freemasonry, ‘ speculative’ character which attests to a high degree of education and sophistication — attests to men who were thinker s and philosophers as well as builders. As we have noted, one manuscript, dating from 1410, speaks of a ‘ science’ whose secrets were revived after the Flood by Pythagoras and Hermes. From references of this kind, it is clear that certain masters, at least, had access to Hermetic and Neo- Platonic thought well before such thought, dur ing the Renaissance, came into vogue in Western Europe. But prior to the Renaissance, such thought — heterodox as it was, and drawing on nonChr istian sources — would have been extremely dangerous to its adherents, who were therefore compelled to secrecy. In consequence, an ‘ esoteric’ tradition of ‘ initiated’ masters would have ar isen within the guilds of ‘ operative’ stonemasons. Here, then, were the seeds of what was later to be called ‘ speculative’ Freemasonry.
Within this ‘ esoteric’ tradition of ‘ initiated’ master s, sacred geometry was of paramount importance — a manifestation, as we have seen, of the divine. For such master s, a cathedral was more than a ‘ house of God’ . It was something akin to a musical instrument, an instrument tuned to a particular and exalted spiritual pitch, like a harp. If the instrument were tuned correctly, God Himself would resonate through it, and His immanence would be f elt by all who entered. But how did one tune it correctly? How and where did God specify His design requirements? Sacred geometry provided the general principles, the underlying laws. But there was one Old Testament context in which, it was believed, God had very precisely and specifically instructed His wor shipper s, had drawn up His own blueprints. This context was the building of Solomon’ s Temple. And thus the building of the Temple came to assume supreme importance for the stonemasons of the Middle Ages. Here, God had actually taught the practical application of sacred geometry through architecture. And His chief pupil, Hiram of Tyre, was theref ore adopted as the model to which every true master builder must aspire.
The Hidden Knowledge
This is why the Hiram story came to assume the importance that it did. There remains the question of how it and its various embellishments find their way into the heart of Christian Europe. How, for that matter , did sacred geometry as a whole — compounded of Pythagorean, Vitruvian, Hermetic, Neo- Platonic, Judaic and Islamic thought — find its way to the West? In order to answer these questions, one must look at the periods in history when such bodies of teaching might have been most influentially transmitted and assimilated — periods when Christianity was most exposed to ‘ alien’ influences and, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by a form of osmosis, absorbed them.
The first such per iod was in the seventh and eighth centuries, when Islam, impelled by the militant energy characteristic of a new faith, swept through the Middle East, traver sed the coast of North Af r ica, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar , overwhelmed the Iberian peninsula and advanced into France. The subsequent Islamic rule in Spain reached its apotheosis in the tenth century, and thus coincides with Athelstan’ s reign in England. Although there is no documentation on the matter , it is certainly possible that some of the principles of sacred geometry and architecture filtered northwards from Spain and France. The armies of Islam may have been halted by Charles Martel at the Battle of Poitier s in 732, but ideas are always more difficult to repulse than armies.
In 1469, Ferdinand of Aragón married his cousin, Isabelle of Castile. From this union, modern Spain was born. In an access of apostolic zeal, Ferdinand and Isabelle embarked on a programme of ‘ purification’ , whereby their united domains were to be systematically purged of all ‘ alien’ — that is, Judaic and Islamic — elements. What ensued was the era of the Spanish Inquisition and the auto- da- f é. As Car los Fuentes has said, Spain, at this point, banished sensuality with the Moors and intelligence with the Jews and proceeded to go sterile. 12 But during the seven and a half centuries between the Battle of Poitiers and the reign of Ferdinand and Isabelle, Spain was a ver itable repository for ‘ esoter ic’ teachings. Indeed, the first major ‘ esotericist’ in Western tradition was the Majorcan Raymond Lull, or Lully, whose work was to exert an enormous influence on later European developments. But even apart from Lull, it was accepted that individuals seeking ‘ esoteric’ or mystical initiation had to make a statutory pilgrimage to Spain. In Parzival, Wolf ram von Eschenbach claims his story to have der ived ultimately from Spanish sources. Nicolas Flamel, probably the most celebrated of the early Western alchemists, is said to have learned the secrets of transmutation from a book obtained in Spain.
For seven and a half centur ies, then, Spain was to remain a source of ‘ esoteric’ inspiration. From Spain, material continued to filter into the rest of Europe, sometimes in a trickle, sometimes in a flood. But the Spanish influence, impor tant though it might be, was soon to be eclipsed by other , more dramatic contacts between Christendom and its r ival f aiths. The f ir st of these was, of course, the Crusades, dur ing which tens of thousands of Europeans in the Holy Land became steeped in the very creeds they had marched to extirpate. During the Crusades, the Sicilian court of the Hohenstauffen Emperor Friedrich II became a veritable clearing- house for Judaic and Islamic currents of thought. The Templar s were another major conduit — perhaps the major conduit — for such currents. Although nominally ‘ knights of Christ’ , the Templars, in practice, maintained cordial relations with both Islam and Judaism, and are even said to have harboured ambitious plans for reconciling Christianity with its two rival faiths.
The Templar s built extensively. Using their own teams of masons, they constructed their own castles and preceptories. Templar architecture was usually Byzantine in its characteristics, reflecting influences from beyond Rome’ s sphere of control. As we have seen, two graves of Templar master masons were found at Athlit in Israel — probably the oldest known ‘ masonic’ graves in the world.
The Templar s sponsored their own guilds. They also acted as patrons and protectors f or other guilds of craftsmen and stonemasons — and appear , on occasion, to have become member s of such guilds themselves. 13 On occasion, too, skilled artisans would be taken in as ‘ associates’ of the Temple. They would live in self - contained villages attached to preceptories and enjoy many of the Order ’ s pr ivileges, including exemption from tolls and taxes. In Europe, moreover , the Templars were self - appointed guardians of the roads, ensuring safe passage for pilgrims, travellers, merchants – and builders. Given this broad spectrum of activities, it is hardly surprising that principles of sacred geometry and architecture should find their way to Western Europe under Templar auspices.
But if the Templar s were a conduit for such pr inciples, they could only have been so for a limited period of time — for no more (and probably less) than the two centur ies of their existence. Nor , as we have stressed repeatedly, must the Templar s be inflated into something they were not. Some of the Order ’ s functionar ies may indeed have been as well- educated as, say, their equivalents in the ecclesiastical hierarchy; some may indeed have been versed in the arcana of sacred geometry and architecture; but the majority of Templar s were mere rude soldiers, as untutored and unsophisticated as most other nobles of their age. From their superiors, such men might have learned that the guilds of ‘ operative’ stonemasons possessed technological secrets meriting respect, but they would not have known what those secrets were — still less have been capable of under standing them. With the official dissolution of the Order , moreover , much was undoubtedly lost. In Scotland particular ly, refugee Templar s, cut off from their former superiors, would have been left with only empty forms to observe. They might have regarded the art of building with def erence, but its significance for them would have been more symbolic and ritualistic than practical; they are hardly likely to have under stood much about it. Indeed, any Templars surviving in Scotland would probably have been like certain later kinds of Freemasonry, mechanically perpetuating a corpus of traditions and observances without really appreciating what they signified.
If there was a connection between the Templars and the guilds of ‘ operative’ stonemasons in Scotland, it would, in any case, have exhausted itself by the fifteenth century — would have worn thin and become diluted. But just at that point, there was to be a transfusion offresh inspiration f rom elsewhere, which regenerated the application of sacred geometry to architecture and impar ted a new impetus to both. In 1453, Constantinople and the last surviving remnants of the old Byzantine Empire fell to the Turks. The result was a massive influx into Western Europe of refugees, together with the treasures, accumulated during the previous thousand years, of Byzantine libraries — texts on Hermeticism, Neo- Platonism, Gnosticism, Cabbalism, astrology, alchemy, sacred geometry, all the teachings and traditions which had originated in Alexandria during the first, second and third centuries and been constantly augmented and updated. And then, in 1492, as we have seen, Ferdinand and Isabelle of Spain inaugurated a ruthless extirpation of Islam and Judaism f rom their domains. This, too, produced an exodus of refugees who f ound their way eastwards and northwards, bringing with them the entire corpus of Iberian ‘ esotericism’ , which had been f ilter ing piecemeal into Chr istendom since the seventh and eighth centuries.
The impact of these developments was overwhelming. It transformed Western civilisation. Scholars and historians concur that the influx of ideas from Byzantium and Spain was probably the single most important contributing factor to the cultural phenomenon now known as the Renaissance.
The Byzantine material f ound its way initially to Italy, where men such as Cosimo de ’ Medici immediately pounced upon it. Academies were established to study and propagate it. Translations — the earliest and most f amous by Mar silio Ficino — were commissioned and disseminated. 14 Exegeses — by Pico della Mirandola, for instance — were written and similarly diffused. From Italy, during the next hundred year s, a wave of ‘ esoter icism’ was to spread across the rest of Europe. Sacred geometry, now regarded as a form of ‘ talismanic magic’ , was applied no longer just to architecture, but — in the works of Leonardo and Botticelli, for example — to painting as well. It was soon to suffuse other arts, including poetry, sculpture, music and, particularly, the theatre.
Not that architecture was thereby diminished. On the contrary, it acquired an even more exalted status than before. The dissemination of Neo- Platonism — the syncretic mystical teachings which had coalesced in immediately post- Christian Alexandria — impar ted a renewed significance to the older classical thought of Plato himself . And in Plato, Renaissance scholars, excitedly seeking relevant connections, found a principle crucial to the later crystallisation of Freemasonry. In Plato’ s Timae us, there appear s the earliest known equation of the Creator with the ‘ Architect of the Universe’ . The Creator , in the Timae us, is called ‘ tekton’ , meaning ‘ craftsman’ or ‘ builder ’ . ‘ Arche - tekton’ thus denoted ‘ master craftsman’ or ‘ master builder ’ . For Plato, the ‘ arche - tekton’ crafted the cosmos by means of geometry.15
As we have seen, the corpus of ‘ esoteric’ material from Constantinople found its way initially to Italy. Of the corpus f rom Spain forty years later , much also reached Italy, but much found its way to the Low Countries, the Spanish dominions of Flanders and the Netherlands. Here, it generated a Flemish Renaissance which paralleled the Italian. And by the beginning of the sixteenth century, the strands originating in Italy and the Low Countries had converged under the patronage of the houses of Guise and Lorraine. Thus, for example, the first French edition of the seminal Corpus he rme ticum, published in 1549, was dedicated to Charles de Guise, Cardinal of Lor raine — brother of Marie de Guise, who married James V of Scotland and bore Mary Queen of Scots.
The houses of Guise and Lorraine were already steeped in ‘ esoterica’ . Indeed, Cosimo de‘ Medici’ s interest in Byzantine ‘ esoterica’ had owed much to the encouragement of his scholar ly colleague, René d’ Anjou, duke of Lorraine in the mid- fifteenth century — who had spent time in Italy and f ostered the transplantation of Italian Renaissance thought in his own domains. Sheer geographical proximity dictated that mater ial from Flanders should find its way into those domains as well. By the early sixteenth century, then, and despite their ostensible Catholicism, the Guise and Lorraine families had become assiduous sponsors for works of European ‘ esotericism’ . From them — via Marie de Guise’ s marriage to James V, via the Scots Guards and via such families as the Stuarts, Setons, Hamiltons, Montgomeries and Sinclair s — it was to be carried back to Scotland. Here — where the old Templar legacy had prepared the ground and guilds of ‘ operative’ stonemasons under Sinclair patronage were evolving their own mysteries — it was to find fertile soil. And here we find Marie de Guise writing of Sir William Sinclair that:
. . . we bind . . . us to the said Sir William, in likwis that we sail be leill and true maistres to him, his counseil and secret shewen to us we sail keip secret. 16
The Hidden Knowledge in France and England
The Guise and Lorraine families were, as we have seen, ruthlesslyambitious. Not only did they come within a hair ’ s- breadth of gaining the French throne. They also had their eyes on the Papacy, and would almost certainly have attained it had not their intrigues, and their blunders, in French politics compromised their credibility and drained their resources. In order to facilitate their designs on the throne of St Peter , they under took to present themselves as a bulwark of Catholic Europe — ‘ defenders of the faith’ against the Reformation and the rising tide of Protestantism in Germany, Switzer land and the Low Countries. In consequence, they adopted and pursued a public policy of fervent Catholicism, often fanatical in intensity. One manif estation of this policy was the notor ious Holy League, an alliance of Catholic princes and potentates dedicated to eradicating Protestantism from the Continent. To outsider s, the Holy League seemed a testimony to Guise and Lor raine piety. To the Guise and Lorraine families themselves, however , the Holy League was simply a matter of political expediency — the blueprint for a structure intended ultimately to supplant or subsume the Holy Roman Empire. And, of course, there was little point in wresting control of the Papacy if the Papacy were powerless. In order to render it worth the taking, the Papacy had to be strengthened and, so far as possible, its old medieval hegemony over Europe restored.
Unfortunately for the Guise and Lorraine families, the policy and public image that furthered their designs on the Continent were counter productive in Britain. Both England and Scotland had, by then, become Protestant. For England in particular , the pr imary threat was soon to be embodied by Catholic Spain, whose ruler , Philip II, married Mary Tudor four years before her death in 1558. Anything even faintly ‘ Papist’ was anathema in England, and the Holy League was perceived as a menace, not just to Protestantism on the Continent, but in the British Isles as well. By vir tue of their zealous support for the Church, François de Guise and his family became, in English eyes, ogres, exceeded in terms of menace only by the Spanish monarch.
‘ Esoteric’ thought was enthusiastically taken up in England. It was embraced by poets such as Sidney and Spenser , for example, and figures in Arcadia and The Faerie Queene ; it was also embraced by Marlowe and by Francis Bacon. But to the extent that it was associated with Catholic houses on the Continent, it could not be dealt with publicly or explicitly. It was often treated obliquely, allegor ically. Its existence was largely subter ranean, conf ined to small scholarly cabals, circumscribed aristocratic circles and what we would now call ‘ secret societies’ . 17 These organisations were often militantly anti- ‘ Papist’ , and actively opposed to the blatant political and dynastic ambitions of the Guise and Lorraine families on the Continent. But they were simultaneously steeped in the corpus of ‘ esoteric’ material which had filtered back to Scotland from the Guise and Lorraine families and there found such fertile soil.
The career of the Scottish philosopher Alexander Dickson exemplifies the way in which such material, amidst the complicated political crosscurrents of the period, was transmitted. 18 Born in 1558, Dickson graduated from St Andrews in 1577 and spent the next six years in Par is. On his return, he published a book dedicated to Queen Elizabeth’s favourite, Robert Dudley, Ear l of Leicester . This book drew heavily on the early work of the prominent Italian ‘ esotericist’ , Giordano Bruno — whose defiance of Rome was to lead him to the stake in 1600, and who, before his death, nominated Dickson as his successor . 19 And yet in 1583, despite his close association with Bruno, whom Rome regarded as an arch- heretic, and despite moving in circles very close to the throne of Elizabeth, Dickson was in Paris, vociferously proclaiming his support for Mary Queen of Scots and associating with personages connected with the Holy League. And though his friendship with Sidney appears to have been genuine enough, he was also a spy, supplying the French ambassador with secret English documents, including some which Sidney had drawn up. By 1590, Dickson was in Flanders, conducting clandestine missions for Catholic potentates. By 1596, he was rumoured to be working with James Beaton, Scottish ambassador to France, and with Charles de Guise, Duc de Mayenne, then head of the Holy League. Also connected with this group was Lord George Seton, whose son Robert was created Earl of Winton in 1600, and married Margaret Montgomerie, an alliance which was to lead, along a cadet line of the family, to the earldom of Eglinton. Beaton, formerly Archbishop of Glasgow, had been conspiring with the Guise and Lorraine families since at least 1560. In 1582, while Dickson was still in Paris, Beaton and Henr i, Duc de Guise, were plotting to invade England with an army supplied by Spain and the Papacy. On the night before her execution in 1587, Mary Queen of Scots named Beaton and Henri de Guise among her executors.
Alexander Dickson typif ies the way in which ‘ esoteric’ and political allegiances had become entangled, sometimes working in tandem, sometimes diametr ically opposed. Dickson, however , was a relatively minor figure compared with England’ s real ‘ archmagus’ of the age, Dr John Dee. And yet Dee, too, had to thread a precarious path between warring factions, Catholic and Protestant interests, the aspiration to ‘ esoteric’ knowledge and the more immediately pressing demands of state. Nor did he escape as unscathed as Dickson. Although his Protestant allegiances were never , like Dickson’ s, in doubt, he came repeatedly under suspicion, was once imprisoned and was consistently harassed.
Born in Wales in 1527, physician, philosopher , scientist, astrologer , alchemist, Cabbalist, mathematician, diplomatic emissary and spy, Dee was one of the most dazzlingly br illiant men of his age, the epitome of the so- called ‘ Renaissance man’ . He is widely believed to have provided Shakespeare with the prototype for Prospero in The Tempest, and his influence, both during his lifetime and afterwards, was enormous. It was Dee who gathered the diverse strands of ‘ esoterica’ and synthesised them in a fashion that prepared the way for later developments. It was through Dee and his work that England, dur ing the seventeenth century, was to become a major centre for ‘ esoter ic’ studies. And it was Dee who, in effect, set the stage for the emergence of Freemasonry.
As a young man still in his twenties, Dee was already lectur ing at continental universities — Louvain, for example, and Paris — on pr inciples of geometry. Dur ing the critical period of Guise and Lorraine plots and counterplots, he was moving unchecked about the Continent, establishing currency for himself in all quarters. In 1585—6, he was in Prague — which, under the liberal, pacif ist and supposedly ‘ eccentric’ Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, had become the new centre for ‘ esoter ic’ studies. He enjoyed the patronage of the emperor and returned with material which would enable England, in that respect, to supplant Prague. Among his most important later disciples were to be Inigo Jones and Robert Fludd — who, as a young man, worked as tutor in mathematics and geometry to the then Duc de Guise and his brother . Dee was instrumental in disseminating Vitruvian principles of architecture and geometry. In 1570, moreover , fifteen years before his journey to Prague, he published a preface to an English translation of Euclid. In this pref ace, he extolled the ‘ supremacy of architecture among the mathematical sciences’ . 20 He spoke of Chr ist as ‘ our Heavenly Archemaster ’ . 21
He echoed Vitruvius’ s por trait of the architect as a species of magus:
I thinke, that none can justly account themselves
Architects, of the suddeyne. But they onely, who f rom
their childes yeares, ascendying by these degrees of
knowledges, beyng fostered up with the atteyning of many
languages and Ar tes, have wonne to the high Tabernacle of
Architecture . . . 22
And, in a passage of crucial relevance to later Freemasonry, he invoked Plato:
And the name of Architecture , is of the pr incipalitie, which
this Science hath, above all other Ar tes. And P lato
af f irmeth, the Architect to be Master over all, that make any
worke . . . 23
During most of Dee’ s lifetime, ‘ esoteric’ thought in England had, as we have seen, remained underground or had been taken up only in cer tain rarefiled circles. In Scotland, it had prospered; but because of Marie de Guise and Mary Queen of Scots, everything Scottish was suspect in English eyes. In consequence, Dee and other English adherents of ‘ esoterica’ could not yet forge the crucial link with developments in Scotland.
By the beginning of the seventeenth century, however , the situation had dramatically changed. In 1588, Philip II’ s Armada had been decisively def eated and Spain was seen as less and less of a threat to English security. The possibility of the Guise and Lorraine families establishing a foothold in Britain had receded with the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. And the assassination, a year later , of the young Duc de Guise and his brother had effectively cut the heart out of the f amily, cr ippling its dynastic and political ambitions. By 1600, it was an all but spent force, and the Holy League, too, was crumbling.
Moreover , ‘ esoteric’ thought was no longer associated so exclusively with the houses of Guise and Lor raine, or even, for that matter , with Catholic interests. One of its most important new patrons was, as we have seen, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who declared himself to be neither Catholic nor Protestant, but Chr istian; 24 he never per secuted Protestants, he became increasingly estranged from the Papacy, and, on his deathbed, he refused the last r ites of the Church. By 1600, in fact, ‘ esoteric’ thought had begun to flourish energetically and publicly in Protestant principalities. In the Netherlands, in the Palatinate of the Rhine, in the kingdoms of Württemburg and Bohemia, it was soon to be used as an instrument of propaganda against Rome. Thus purged of any taint of the Guise and Lorraine families, it could saf ely break surface in England.
In 1603, moreover , when the Guise and Lorraine families were no longer able to exploit the situation, James VI of Scotland — a Stuar t monarch with Guise- Lor raine blood — became James I of England. At this point, from the perspective of posterity, one can virtually hear a ‘ click’ as the requisite histor ical components at last slip into place. With the union of England and Scotland under a single sovereign, noble Scottish f amilies began to play a role in English affairs, and two of them — the Hamiltons and the Montgomeries — crossed the Irish Sea to establish the Ulster Plantation. Through such families, something of the old Templar mystique, and that of the Scots Guard, began to seep into England and Ireland. And the new king, it must be remembered, was a patron and possibly a member of the guilds of ‘ operative’ stonemasons. He brought with him from the north their traditions, as well as the ‘ esoteric’ her itage of his Guise- Lor raine forebears. All of these elements, conjoined to the work of John Dee and his disciples, were to coalesce into philosophical or , as it is called, ‘ speculative’ Freemasonry. All of them had now become not only respectable and legitimate, but associated with the throne as well. The old Templar sword and the trowel of the master - builder were to become, in effect, adjuncts of the Stuart arms.
There was to be one further current of inf luences bef ore Freemasonry crystallised into its modern form. On the Continent, as we have noted, ‘ esoteric’ teaching was now being promoted by Protestant princes, especially in Germany, and was being used as an instrument of propaganda against the twin bastions of Catholicism, the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. It had, by now, begun to call itself ‘ Rosicrucianism’ , and Frances Yates has labelled this phase of its dissemination ‘ the Rosicrucian Enlightenment’ . 25 Anonymous pamphlets began to appear , extolling an ‘ Invisible College’ or clandestine confraternity allegedly derived from a mythical founder , Christian Rosenkreuz. These pamphlets militantly attacked the new Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope; they extolled the spectrum of ‘ esoteric’ teaching; they forecast the imminent advent of a new Golden Age, in which all social and political institutions were to be regenerated and an epoch of Utopian harmony was to begin, free of the tyranny, both secular and spiritual, of the past.
In England, the chief exponent of ‘ Rosicrucian’ thought was John Dee’ s disciple, Robert Fludd — who, along with Francis Bacon, was among the conclave of scholars commissioned by King James to produce an English translation of the Bible. But while Fludd may have endorsed ‘ Rosicrucian’ ideas, they certainly did not originate with him, nor is he believed to have had any hand in the authorship of the anonymous ‘ Rosicrucian Manif estos’ . Those manifestos are now thought to have been composed, in part if not in their entirety, by a German writer from Württemburg, Johann Valentin Andrea. 26 And they are thought to have been associated pre- eminently with the court at Heidelberg of Fr iedr ich, Count Palatine of the Rhine.
In 1613, Fr iedrich married Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I of England. Four years later , the nobles of the Kingdom of Bohemia offered Fr iedrich the crown of their country, and his acceptance of it precipitated the Thir ty Year s War , the most bitter and costly conflict to be f ought on European soil prior to the twentieth century. In the early years of the fighting, most of Germany was over run by Catholic armies and German Protestantism was threatened with extinction. Thousands of refugees — among them the philosopher s, scientists and ‘ esotericists’ who embodied the ‘ Rosicrucian Enlightenment’ — fled to Flander s and the Nether lands, and thence to the safety of England. To facilitate the escape of these fugitives, Johann Valentin Andrea and his colleagues in Germany created the so- called ‘ Christian Unions’ . 27
The Unions, which constituted a species of lodge system, were intended to preserve intact the corpus of ‘ Rosicrucian’ doctrine by organising its proponents into cells and smuggling them to saf e havens abroad. Thus, from the 1620s on, German refugees began to arrive in England, bringing with them both ‘ Rosicrucian’ ideas and the organisational structure of the Christian Unions. By James I’ s time, as we have seen, a lodge system had already been established within the guilds of ‘ operative’ stonemasonry and had begun to prolif erate across Scotland. By the end of the Thirty Years War , a system had filtered down to England. In its general structure, it seems to have coincided most felicitously with that of Andrea’ s Christian Unions; and it proved more than ready to accommodate the influx of ‘ Rosicrucian’ thought. German refugees thus found a spiritual home in English masonry; and their input of ‘ Rosicrucian ideas’ was the final ingredient necessary for the emergence of modern ‘ speculative’ Freemasonry.
In the year s that followed, developments proceeded on two fronts. The lodge system consolidated itself and prolif erated fur ther , so that Freemasonry became an established and recognised institution. At the same time, certain of the individuals most active in it formed themselves into an English version of the ‘ Invisible College’ of the ‘ Rosicrucians’ — a conclave of scientists, philosopher s and ‘ esotericists’ in the vanguard of progressive ideas. 28 During the English Civil War and Cromwell’ s Protectorate, the ‘ Invisible College’ — now including such luminaries as Robert Boyle and John Locke — remained invisible. In 1660, however , with the restoration of the monarchy, the ‘ Invisible College’ became, under Stuart patronage, the Royal Society. For the next twenty- eight years, ‘ Rosicrucianism’ , Freemasonry and the Royal Society were not just to overlap, but virtually to be indistinguishable from one another .
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