The Freemasons, the Temple, and the Lost Ark

This paper sets out to explore the interest of Freemasons, mainly English, in King Solomon’s Temple during the first half of the eighteenth century, through engravings of the period. The 1740s engravings shown are from France, where English Freemasonry had arrived about 1725; they cover a period when English Masons, alarmed by the appearance in 1730 of a significant exposure, published very little. Through much of the century before 1717 the Freemasons were growing away from the old craftsmen’s guild of stonemasons, becoming to outward appearance just an early gentlemen’s club. They existed independently in various centres in England, Scotland, and less certainly Ireland. What gave them a common banner (until 1717 when four old London lodges joined to form a Grand Lodge), was not a central organization but a shared tradition. They carried over from their craft some symbols, some legends, and some rituals, these last concerned almost exclusively with initiating members and then advancing them to further grades. They brought also some vocabulary, notably the word “lodge,” which means both the group and its meeting-place. The guild had only two grades, Entered Apprentice and “Master or Fellowcraft”: “Master” was reserved for a Fellowcraft, a fully trained stoneworker who had set up as an employer of his fellows, and also for the elected head of the local assembly or lodge, but by 1730 “Master” had been added as a third grade. While all the ceremonies question the candidate on the lore of Masonry and culminate in his taking an oath of secrecy and receiving a password, the third degree offers more to the imagination. It imparts a colourful legend of the murder of the master-builder of Solomon’s Temple and the discovery of his body. Some creative spirit must have put this together from available traditions, now hard to trace, and shared it with his lodge. If other lodges then took it up and the Grand Lodge quite soon accepted it, this suggests a need to distinguish between the two groups embraced by the old second degree. When a fourth degree, the Royal Arch, then rather shortly emerged, this again perhaps met a need to distinguish between those who had advanced to the Master’s degree and those who in addition had “passed the chair,” or served as masters of their lodges. The Royal Arch degree, created about 1740 probably in London, dramatizes English Masonry’s other major legend: that during the rebuilding of the Temple under Zerubbabel, returned from Babylonian exile, one of the workers found an underground vault, which he entered by lifting the keystone. Here he discovered a gold plate bearing the mystic name of God. This discovery is seen as making good the loss of the Mason Word that disappeared with the murdered Master. The Royal Arch and a lesser pair of degrees called Mark Masonry are the only additions to the original three so-called Craft degrees recognized by the English Grand Lodge. While some fourteen so-called “higher degrees” have long operated in Britain, with intriguing names like Royal Ark Mariner, Secret Monitor, and Knight Templar Priest, the Grand Lodge keeps aloof from all of these. These further degrees, unlike the Royal Arch and Mark Masonry, are not British in origin. They were fashioned in the eighteenth century in France on the basis of Craft Masonry. The French were eager to escape from the working-class origins of that body, and perhaps more particularly inspired by the 1737 oration of Andrew Ramsay that links the early history of Freemasonry with Crusader knights. The new degrees seem to have been largely the work of opportunists, looking for wealth and an …