The Gnostic World

routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315561608-41

Freemasonry: gnostic images

Authored by: Garry W. Trompf

Print publication date:  October  2018

Online publication date:  October  2018
Print ISBN: 9781138673939
eBook ISBN: 9781315561608
Adobe ISBN:

10.4324/9781315561608-41

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Abstract

Speculations about the origins of Freemasonry will doubtless go on unabated. They have
often connected Masonic teaching and practice to Gnostic filaments in Mediaeval and
Renaissance sources – back to Sufi orders via the Crusader Templers on to operative masons’
“guild-assemblies” (e.g., Shah 1964: xix, 50, 178–88, 226), for instance, or to the later
Rosicrucian manifestos (1607–1616), in which masonry and temple architecture are invoked
to create a new covertly founded Christian order (Joann Andreae, Confessio Fraternitatis
[1615], chs. 4, 6), and to the “initiatory ordeal” described in the (anonymous) Chymische
Hochzeit (or “Chemical Wedding”) of 1616, which is set in 1459, the year the Constitutions of
the Strasburg Masons were signed [1459] (Edighoffer 2001: 377–80; cf. Yates 1972: 209–19).
The point of this article, however, is to recognize that a “Gnostic-associated” movement,
namely Freemasonry, with its many branches but common enough features, became a
worldwide movement in modern times. We are not to forget the ancient program of Mani to
make his Gnosticizing religion “surpass” other churches that only worked in “particular
places and cities,” and to spread the “message” (including that of the rescuing divine, Great
Architect) “to reach every land” (Keph. 151.9–10) – even though Manichaeism faded into
apparent extinction by the fourteenth century (Tardieu 2008: 91–102). But Freemasonry has
usually been presented by its (traditionally all-male) members as a Craft or Art, and a
philosophical, moral, and philanthropic fraternity that does not substitute for religion, albeit
a society veiled by symbol and allegory, holding secrets so occult as to die for.

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