Some of the men behind the founding of the modern Grand Lodge, in 1717, reflected their time of cultural change, when the Enlightenment emphasis on order, rationality, and science existed within an older longing for the deeper truths of ancient knowledge. William Stukeley, an early lodge master, was a fellow of the Royal Society, a member of its council, and a censor of the College of Physicians. He was also an Anglican priest, a cofounder of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and so deeply drawn to the stone circles of Stonehenge that he created his own “temple of the Druids.” This occult yearning drew Stukeley to the “Mysterys of masonry, suspecting it to be the remains of the mysterys of the antients.”39 Similarly drawn to both Enlightenment reason and primeval truth was the scientist Sir Isaac Newton, whom Stukeley claimed as a “countryman” and a friend.40 Newton’s Principia, while establishing the foundations for later mechanistic science, also asserted that all of its discoveries could be found among the mysteries of occult knowledge and biblical wisdom.41 This mixing of traditions was characteristic not only of the London circles surrounding Newton and his Masonic friends but of the larger Enlightenment project too.
The seeming anomaly of Enlightenment thinkers embracing ancient wisdom can be explained by keeping in mind that Enlightenment thought emerged within older cosmic and theological understandings of the world. The Enlightenment effort to identify a finite field of inquiry accessible to the human mind took for granted that a larger field of knowledge lay outside human investigation. John Locke’s pivotal Essay Concerning Human Understanding sought to carve out from this larger metaphysical and divine external world an area limited to only that which the human mind can know. What some have identified as the darker side of the “modern,” “rational” Enlightenment and worked to explain away as the residue of earlier, magical thinking was in fact the larger epistemological world that it inhabited. Galileo’s battle against the church is one obvious example of the new way of thinking existing within an older paradigm. Rather than a progressive movement of order, reason, and science that gradually replaced ancient forms of knowledge, the evolution of modern thought is better characterized as shifting between the two opposing impulses of modern reason and ancient wisdom. The persistence of “ancient,” “primitive,” and “antimodernist” thought within and beyond the American Masonic fraternity, as we shall see, is not an anomaly to be explained away but rather a reflection of the Enlightenment’s failure to completely eclipse earlier metaphysical and divine ways of understanding the place of human beings in the world.42
Despite the mixing of new and old knowledge among Newton and the Masons of his generation, the men who created modern Freemasonry came from the next generation, of Newton’s followers, and emphasized modern science over ancient mysteries. These included such men as Jean-Théophile Desaguliers, a Huguenot refugee trained in Newtonian science at Oxford who took holy orders in the Church of England and served as the grand master of the Grand Lodge in 1719.43 Unlike Newton, Desaguliers and his brothers lived in an increasingly cosmopolitan London society, where enlightened thinking and polite social practices led to the creation of a new form of Masonic brotherhood.
The social reasons for the popularity of modern Freemasonry are rooted in large transformations that began in London and reshaped social relations. In the eighteenth century, the city experienced growing social diversity and a threefold increase in population. In this milieu, nobles, gentry, craftsmen, and strangers moved about without the communal or kinship bonds of earlier village life. In response to this anomie, clubs rapidly appeared, providing a means of re-creating the intimacy of local bonds by bringing gentlemen and aristocrats together in private tavern rooms for feasting, discussion, and singing. Lodge meetings, like those of these clubs, often took place amid the food and drink of a private tavern, where members “clubbed” together to cover the expenses.44
The new perception of a natural harmony among the members of this redefined social world aided this easy mixing of nobles, gentry, merchants, professionals, and master tradesmen. By the early eighteenth century, Thomas Hobbes’s despairing vision of a selfish humanity that only coercion could control was losing its power. He produced his description of the Great Chain of Being, in which all of society was ranked and each level was in charge of those below and obeyed those above, amid the conflicts of the mid-seventeenth-century Civil War, but the concept no longer worked in a society driven by commercialization and torn by political and religious dissent.45 The development of urban centers, a widening market, and population growth and movement made it increasingly difficult for the monarchy to assert control over the merchants, noblemen, and professionals of the new protocapitalist order. As early as the 1640s, the development of printing allowed for the circulation of previously secret political petitions and the beginnings of public debate.46 Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, the establishment of the first cabinet government marked a new stage in the development of the state’s parliamentary authority. At the same time, the growing Deist movement and its rejection of the power of revelation increasingly countered High Church Anglican demands for religious obedience and the suppression of dissent. Where Hobbes had asserted that only complete submission to authority would avert conflict, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury and other progressive social theorists saw in human nature a “benevolence” that knit society together through sympathy and a natural desire for community.47 Like the new world of Newtonian science, the new society could rely on simple and natural processes to work.
In 1709, Shaftesbury traced the emergence of this sentiment of benevolence to what he termed “private society.” He composed his treatise in “defence” of the “liberty of the Club” as a letter to a friend of “court breeding.” As recently as 1668, Charles II had sought unsuccessfully to outlaw English coffeehouses, for their association with free thought and political debate. Against the state-controlled ritualistic behavior of the royal court, which sought to fix an authoritarian and court-centered hierarchy of power, Shaftesbury argued for the “polite” behavior of the new private clubs, which were founded on the new freedom of expression.48 “All politeness,” as he put it, “is owing to liberty.” Against the “temper of the pedagogue,” which “suits not with the Age,” the English nobleman endorsed the sociability of the club, where prevailed “a freedom of raillery, a liberty in decent language to question everything, and an allowance of unravelling or refuting any argument, without offence to the arguer.” Through this new polite behavior, club members were able to “polish one another, and rub off our corners and rough sides by a force of amicable collision,” resulting in a greater virtue. Moreover, by titling his treatise “An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour,” Shaftesbury made clear that these attributes, as well as theatricality and satire, had the serious purpose of enabling the expression of ideas under the imposition of the authority of church or state: “If men are forbid to speak their minds seriously on certain subjects, they will do it ironically. If they are forbid to speak at all upon such subjects, or if they find it really dangerous to do so; they will then redouble their disguise, involve themselves in mysteriousness, and talk so as hardly to be understood, or at least not plainly interpreted, by those who are dispos’d to do ’em a mischief.” These “speculative conversations,” Shaftesbury further warned, could take place only with the “mutual esteem” of “gentlemen and friends.”49 More coercive forms of social control would be necessary to tame the common people.
By the early eighteenth century, professionals and noblemen were employing the polite behavior and free conversation of private societies to forge a common culture, differentiating themselves from the lower orders. Modern Masonry was an expression of this new elite social vision. The fraternity drew its members from the growing middling ranks of men who had separated themselves from the rest of society through their professional training, education, or greater wealth yet were not among the landed gentry or nobility.50 Its 1723 constitution offered a new way of imagining social relationships, by seeking to inspire “true friendship among persons that must else have remain’d at perpetual Distance.” Unlike the members of a Hobbesian hierarchical society, Masons were to treat one another as equals. Holding their society together was not the coercive power of a patriarch but rather the natural benevolence of brothers. “All preferment among Masons,” the new constitution said, “is grounded upon real worth and personal