Dan Snow's History Hit - History of Freemasonry

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

John Dickie joins Dan from the History Hit Archive to discuss the international story of an organisation that now has 6 million members across the globe. Tracing the origins from local fraternities of stonemasons at the turn of the fifteenth century, John takes Dan on the freemasons' journey from Britain to America, Australia, Italy and India. Find out exactly what the freemasons are, how they have been perceived, and why they seem to attract so many conspiracy theories. 

Some things just take too long. A meeting that could have been an email, someone explaining crypto, or switching mobile providers. Except with Fizz. Switching to Fizz is quick and easy. Mobile plans start at $17 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. This podcast is first published on the 24th of June This podcast is first published on the 24th of June 2021, which means it was on this day in 1717 that the premier Grand Lodge of England, the first Masonic Grand Lodge in the world, was founded in London, London, England. It's the birth of the Freemasons, folks, the birth of the Freemasons. To trace the journey of the Freemasons from that

Grand Lodge to a global organisation of six million members, I turn to John Dickey. This is a repeat of a podcast I recorded a year or two ago. It's one of our most successful podcasts. We thought we'd play it again, play it again, Sam. John Dickey is a professor of Italian studies at University College London and he's written a beautiful history of Freemasonry describing how their secrecy their elusivity provokes fascination and fear from the rest of us there's an abyss of misunderstanding folks between Freemasons and the rest of the world and John Dickey is a man to talk us through it. It's great to have him on the podcast. So listen up for all of the questions you might have about Freemasons answered once and for all. If you want more 18th century history, well,

there's one place you can get that. You go to the following website, historyhit.tv. You enter a small amount of money as a subscriber, and then you get the world's best history channel at the moment we've got documentaries on there of history of aboriginal australians the missing ninth legion d-day bismarck and medieval lux all happening over there at the moment so please go and check it out but in the meantime here is the wonderful professor john dickie talking about freemasonry. Enjoy. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Pleasure. Great to be here. Well, who on earth are the Freemasons and where do they come from?

They are a brotherhood, an oathed secret society, shall we say, although they bridle when you describe them as a secret society. They say we're a society with secrets, and we can talk more about that, who devote themselves essentially to a system of self-improvement through rituals that have a moral meaning, they're sort of allegorical plays. Their chief metaphor is that of building. Just as the stonemasons of yesteryear used to build buildings, the Freemasons are using building as a metaphor for building better men. That's the core of what they're about. And they're about 300 years old. Do they originate in Italy or whereabouts?

No, no, they are very much a British invention. They're one of Britain's great cultural exports because they have gone... I've been reading too much Dan Brown in that case. Yes, no, well, we can talk about the Dan Brown as well because that caused massive panic in the American Masonic world when his Masonic novel was due to come out. or something in that this sort of very typically British thing that then got adopted through the roots of commerce and empire and so on got adopted right around the world. In the book I try and tell that global story but the beginnings happen in the 17th and 18th century really the key locations are Edinburgh first of all and then London. Everything happens in the 17th and 18th centuries.

That's just the beginning. That's the crucible of everything. So it's groups of people that come together for social and educational purposes. I mean, there's all sorts of societies. The Lunar Society. Why did the Freemasons endure? Why did they become this kind of gigantic global export? Well, a lot of it is that sense of fellowship, of collective identity that they managed to forge through their rituals. They also made themselves open to men of different religions,

different class backgrounds, different races. And that really was in tune with the kind of zeitgeist of the 18th century, in a time when we were in a sort of world that was slowly secularising and religion was kind of retreating slowly from its role in public life. The Freemasons allowed you to be from any religion, as long as you believed in God, you believed in the great architect of the universe, which is their code for God. And that was a very radical thing. And instead of the specifics of any particular

theology, which of course had created such enormous bloodshed since the Reformation, they substituted secrecy to give a kind of sense of sacredness, of non-denominational sacredness, to their meetings, to their bonds of fellowship. What did they do? I mean, were they tilting at reform? Was it just social? Was it fun? What were they up to? It was fun. They were notorious boozers in the 18th century, particularly. They met in... Who was 18? Well, quite.

But even in the 18th century, they were notorious, it seems. They met in pubs, taverns, classically. They were certainly a self-help network. They had a shared fund. And in times of distress, you might be able to dip into this fund and they united they were a patronage network as well there's no question about that they took off when the Whig nobility of early 18th century London offered them their patronage and And men of all kinds of station, many of the early members, sort of driving members, were Huguenot or children of Huguenot, you know, sort of immigrants on the

make kind of thing. And they would be able to latch themselves onto this patronage network and make contacts and so on and so forth. So there are different ingredients to their success. Yes, it was educational. Yes, it was self-improvement. There was a lot of back-slapping and male bonding going on. There was the patronage aspect. And then also this strange mixture of law, L-O-R-E, and symbolism and quasi-religious mysticism and so on, that really was a kind of winning cocktail. So it's a bit of a glorified drinking society. That's a bit harsh. Okay, so they make a sort of contribution. I mean, unlike many of the other clubs from that time, you identify that they were incredibly important. Yeah, I mean, unlike many of the other clubs from that time, you identify that they were incredibly important. Yeah, I mean, the main asset they had is that they very quickly became global.

And they were very important to military life. You know, the 18th century is the first century of global war. And if you were a soldier liable to be sent anywhere from sort of Canada to India to Europe, you could find a kind of home from home and a sense of familiarity and the promise of a decent burial and contacts if you joined the lodge, if you joined the Freemasons. And ditto if you were in commerce or if you're an imperial bureaucrat, you find your social life ready for you in the lodge when you arrived in your new destination. And again, a support system, the promise that your widow might be looked after

if you succumb to some tropical disease or other. Sounds brilliant. Why did anyone not join the Freemasons? They generated suspicion from very, very early on. Secrecy is a double-edged sword in Freemasonry. The promise when you join is that you will join an elite band who are in possession of secrets. you will join an elite band who are in possession of secrets.

Secrecy creates this enormous esprit de corps within the Freemasons. But at the same time, it generates great suspicion and ridicule from the outside. I mean, the suspicions that they were a gang of sodomites were very common in the 18th century. And very early on also, the Catholic Church took against them. They were excommunicated for the first time, if I remember the date rightly, in 1738. The problem the Catholic Church had is that the secrecy again, they thought this must be a cover for heresy, for Satanism. And the Masons' code of sort of religious tolerance really ran right up against the Catholic Church's idea that it had a monopoly of truth. Also, they were suspected of being spies.

They came from Britain, which had a much more open public and political life. It's newspapers, it's parliament, all of these scandalous things. And that, from the point of view of absolutist Europe, looked really scary. And that triggered a long-running tradition of anti-Masonic phobia that runs right up to the present day. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I'm giving you the secret Freemason handshake, virtually. More coming up after this. Some things just take too long.

A meeting that could have been an email, someone explaining crypto, or switching mobile providers. Except with Fizz. Switching to Fizz is quick and easy. Mobile plans start at $17 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca.

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Was it quite connected with where British settlers and traders and soldiers went? Very quickly established itself in mainland Europe and took off, particularly in France, for example. Because Britain and France spent most of the century at war. French Masonry took its own characteristics on, separated itself off from the sort of Grand Lodge in London, which was, if you like, the kind of Vatican of the Holy Sea of Freemasonry, but soon lost its authority in different parts of the world. I compared Freemasonry as a cultural export to football, say, but the differences that challenge somebody to a game of football, doesn't matter whether it's in Tierra del Fuego or Thailand,

they play by the same rules. That's not the same in Freemasonry. Freemasons historically in different places, different times, have argued the whole time about who controls the rules and what the rules are. Can you admit atheists? Can you admit Catholics? Can you admit Jews? You know, do Hindus count? You have to be a monotheist to be a Freemason. And so there was a great debate about in the 19th century about whether Hindus counted as monotheists. Then, of course, is the issue of women. You know, are you allowed to admit women? And if so, under what conditions and with what status? So what you get is this great sort of fissuring of Freemasonry across the world. They lost control of the brand very quickly.

Well, you know what? A British movement suffering from schism and with breakaway entities is a joke. Hundreds of years in the making, I'm sure Thomas More would have been very happy, had an ironic grin at that. So we've got all sorts of problems with schism. When people think about Freemasonry, perhaps in a phobic way, we think of that network having its impact on politics, on trade. Are there any events around the world, are there any great historical events

that you can see the influence of the Freemasons as an organising body, perhaps as an activist body, sort of putting its finger on the scale, tipping the course of history? Yeah, in two senses. In the sort of dodgy networking sense, there are, you know, there are definitely examples of that. The prime example from Italy in the 1970s and 1980s is the Masonic Lodge P2, which was involved in everything from laundering money for the mafia to political corruption to right-wing terrorism, you name it. And the networks are different in different places, okay? And in some places, the masonry is just, you know, many places is what it just claims to be, which is, you know, a sort of society of men dedicated to self-improvement and charity. But there's no

doubt that it is a very compelling way of organising yourselves as a secret brotherhood with oaths and a mythology that can be adapted to all kinds of different purposes. Political, for a start. Very soon, revolutionaries and subversives, say during the Napoleonic and early Restoration era in Italy, lighted upon masonry as a way of organising revolutionary cells. That's what the charcoal burners were. They had a very close relationship to Freemasonry. And, you know, the brand further span out of control so that a great many different organisations stole the model, adopted and adapted the model. The Sicilian Mafia, for example, for example, the Mormon Church, the Ku Klux Klan, all of these have very clear Masonic DNA, if you like. That's fascinating. So that just a way of building an organisation that they're all descended from the sort of innovations made by these British Freemasons. Absolutely.

What did the great totalitarians, I say great, what did the sort of powerful totalitarians of the authoritarians of the 20th century make of Freemasonry in Italy, Germany, elsewhere? Yes, that's where we really see the apogée of this tradition of anti-Masonic phobia that I referred to. All of those major dictatorships abolished Freemasonry with greater or lesser degrees of violence, despite the fact that, for example, there are a great number of Freemasons in the early fascist movement, for example, in Italy. The idea was that it was kind of liberal or communist cabal. You know, the secrecy of Freemasonry, as I explain in the book, is like a kind of mirror, dark mirror, in which people see reflected kind of what their worst

nightmare is, if you like, their enemy. And for the dictatorships, Hitler believed thoroughly in the idea of a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy. The worst, I think, the most brutal and paranoid of the dictatorships when it came to repressing Freemasonry was General Franco, not coincidentally, I think, because he was the most Catholic of the dictators and the closest to that long standing tradition of Catholicism.