Freemasonry

Freemasonry is a fraternity organized in local lodges. Members pass through three degrees: Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft and Master Mason. It grew out of the lodges of working stonemasons: the oldest known Masonic text, the Regius Poem, dates to about 1425, and the minutes of the Lodge of Edinburgh show a working lodge of 1598 becoming a modern one. On June 24, 1717, four London lodges met at the Goose and Gridiron tavern and declared themselves a Grand Lodge. Their rulebook, The Constitutions of the Free-Masons, followed in 1723.

The fraternity spread quickly. Benjamin Franklin printed the first Masonic book in America in 1734. George Washington was initiated in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1752 and laid the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol in a Masonic ceremony in 1793. Prince Hall and fourteen other Black men were initiated in 1775 and received their own warrant in 1784. There is no world headquarters: each grand lodge governs itself, and they do not all recognize each other. The United Grand Lodge of England counts around 170,000 members, and a Masonic Service Association estimate puts U.S. membership near 875,000.

The suspicion is as old as the Grand Lodge. A pope condemned the lodges in 1738. In 1798 John Robison's Proofs of a Conspiracy accused them of sheltering the Illuminati, and in 1826 the disappearance of William Morgan launched America's first third party. In the 1890s Léo Taxil published tales of Lucifer-worshipping lodges, then admitted in 1897 that he had made them up. In 1981 Italy's P2 lodge was exposed as a hidden network of politicians, military officers and intelligence chiefs. Then there are the symbols, such as the eye on the dollar bill. It was adopted for the Great Seal in 1782 and first appeared in standard Masonic imagery in 1797; the only Mason on the seal's design committees, Franklin, had his ideas turned down.