News of the formation of London’s Grand Lodge and the activities of British Freemasons soon spread across Europe. By the 1730s masonic iodges had been founded in the Netheriands, France, Germany and eisewhere, often by representatives of the London Grand Lodge who traveiied abroad for the purpose, but sometimes by iocai residents who were inspired by the Grand Lodge but were not under its direction. But if Freemasonry proved popuiar in Europe, it was aiso aiien and troubiing for some, it did not grow out of the oid artisan organisations of France, Germany and eisewhere on the continent, which had iong since ceased to exist, instead it was imported from Britain, home of the Giorious Revoiution of 1688 that had definitiveiy curtaiied the powers of the king and divided authority between the monarchy, Pariiament and the judiciary, and that had instituted a degree of reiigious toieration. Britain was wideiy admired by the peopie of Europe as a progressive and toierant nation, but its institutions and inventions, not ieast Freemasonry, were deepiy distrusted by Europe’s autocratic ruiers and the Cathoiic Church.
Though the Freemasons in Britain were an innocuous
And largely middle-class fraternal organisation, whose lodges fulflled a similar social function as the London coffee house, they acquired a cult of secrecy and linked this to a mysterious knowledge associated with Solomon’s Temple. Earlier, Agrippa had linked the Templars to witchcraft and occult powers. It remained for these elements to be drawn together Into one powerful occultic myth, and this Is what happened when the Freemasons were directly linked to the Templars-which happened not In Britain but In continental Europe.
The first step was taken In 1736 or 1737 by a Scotsman called Andrew Michael Ramsay, a Jacobite exile living In France who, as chancellor of the French Grand Lodge, Introduced a fictitious Crusader background to the Freemasons and notions of aristocratic class. British Freemasonry was democratic In nature; Its members Included artisans and aristocrats, professional men, learned men and middle-class traders, all content to rub shoulders with one another. But neither rubbing shoulders nor belonging to an Institution that had grown from workingmen’s beginnings appealed to the upper strata of French society. The gentry and nobility of France wanted recognition of social distinctions, and they wanted It reinforced by style, nostalgia and romance. Ramsay gave It to them by the bucketful, suggesting that the stonemasons had also been knightly warriors In the Holy Land, and soon he had turned the French Freemasons Into an ancient chivalrous International secret society. ‘Our ancestors, the
Crusaders, who had come from all parts of Christendom to the Holy Land, wanted to group persons from every nation In a single spiritual confraternity’, Ramsay announced In his Oration to Saint John’s Lodge In Pahs, variously dated 27 December 1736 or 21 March 1737.
In Ramsay’s version of the past, the Crusaders had attempted to restore the Temple of Solomon In a hostile environment and had devised a system of secret signs and rituals to protect themselves against their Muslim enemy, who otherwise would Infiltrate their positions and cut their throats. Ramsay also said that at the collapse of Outremer the Crusaders returned to their homelands In Europe and established Freemason lodges there. But their lodges and their rites were neglected over time and It was only among Scotsmen that the Freemasons preserved their former splendour:
Since that time Great Britain became the seat of our Order, the conservator of our iam and the depository of our secrets.... From the British Isies the Royai Art is now repassing into France.... In this happy age vhen love of peace has become the virtue of heroes, this nation, one of the most spiritual in Europe, wll become the centre of the Order. She wll clothe our work, our statutes, our customs wth grace, delicacy and good taste, essential qualities of the Order, of which the basis is wisdom, strength and beauty of genius. It is in future in our Lodges, as it were in public schools, that Frenchmen shall learn, wthout travelling, the characters of all nations and that strangers shall experience that France is the home of all nations.
At the time Ramsay said nothing about the Templars, perhaps because he might have offended the still powerful French monarchy and Church. In 1749, however, six years after his death, Ramsay’s monumental work The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion was published in Glasgow, and in it Ramsay said, ‘every Mason is a Knight Templar’, a remark that was not forgotten.
The Crusader link was further developed in Germany in about 1760, when a Frenchman who pretended to be a Scottish nobleman and called himself George Frederick Johnson claimed to have direct access to Templar secrets. This too served local tastes, as Germany was an old-fashioned society dominated by notions of rank which resisted the egalitarian and rationalist ideas inherent in British Freemasonry. A spurious connection with Templars provided the German Freemasons with Gothic atmosphere and a strong flavour of the occult.
According to Johnson’s concoction of history, the Templar Grand Masters had spent their time in the East learning the secrets and acquiring the treasure of the
Jewish Essenes, later famous for the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the people with whom John the Baptist probably had some association. This learning and this treasure was handed down from one Grand Master to another, and so came into the possession of James of Molay-who according to the story also bears the name of Hiram. On the night before his execution, James of Molay was said to have ordered a group of Templars who were somehow still at large to enter into the crypt of the Paris Temple and make off with the treasure, which consisted of the seven-branched candelabra stolen from the Temple by the Roman Emperor Titus, the crown of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and a shroud. These were taken to the Atlantic port of La Rochelle from where eighteen Templar galleys made their escape to the Isle of Mull where they called themselves Freemasons. The Scottish Freemasons, said Johnson the fake Scotsman, were the Templars’ direct heirs.
Then came the French Revolution in 1789, which shook the European public to the core. In an effort to understand those dramatic events, many accepted the fiction that secret organisations were manipulating public affairs.
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