Occultism and Rationalism in Enlightenment Historiography

Hermetic philosophical currents turn up in seventeenth-century Scottish texts that relate the Mason's Word, the secret password of lodge members, to the practices of the Brothers of the Rosy Cross, or Rosicrucians. Some masonic writings also make reference to the sun in language that is Hermetic and mystical. Not least, early eighteenth-century opponents of the order, among them the Papacy, linked it to the 'Rosy-Crucians and Adepts, Brothers of the same Fraternity, or Order, who derived themselves from Hermes Trismegistus' ... These mystical philosophical traditions, grafted onto a craft of medieval origin, only made it more interesting, undoubtedly providing one explanation of why some gentlemen with philosophical interests sought to join it.
- Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment

Margaret Jacob's monograph on the Freemasons is a careful and well-drawn analysis. Its pages, however, reveal a constant struggle: the author wants, needs, to delve into the very mystical foundations--or, at least, apparatus--of Freemasonry. But she cannot, because she is committed to an academic historiographical tradition that must reject or treat with gloved hands any fanciful stories about transmission of ideas or hidden conspiracies. In the above section, she is attempting to connect the Freemasons to the older mysticism of the Rosy Cross. She stumbles: committed as she is to historical rationalism, she is unable or unwilling to draw the story further back, to the Knights Templar and their hay wain (she can also discuss a man named Moray, of all things, without noting the resemblance to poor old Grand Master Jacques de Molay) . The situation, then, is one where history demands what pure rationalism cannot offer.

Does one need to be Umberto Eco to be a historian of Freemasonry? Leo Strauss never tired of saying that in order to be a true historicist, you must be able to think ahistorically when a particular historical moment demands ahistoricism. (It wasn't any more elegant when he said it. Sorry) In this case, the traditional narratives of conspiratorial mysticism--specifically, the Freemasons' favorite story about their founding by refugee Templars and hence their connection to the Temple of Solomon--is a supremely valuable piece of historical data, even though it is quite alien to historical method. Jacob always mentions that long-destroyed Temple parenthetically, as it were, but it is in fact the anchor-stone of masonry.

A relevant point. Before the mid-19th century, many people were not sure if Jerusalem actually existed. There were skeptics who denied the actual, physical existence of any of Christendom's supposedly fundamental monuments (which do in fact still exist). In a world where historical and geographical knowledge was so inherently tenuous, the freemasons' stories about themselves revealed much about their creation of a link to some determinate history--a Long March from Roman Palestine through medieval Europe, studded with all the trappings of masonic symbolism as reminders of that historical experience.

In part, this self-understanding derived from a need to legitimate themselves as a corporate body. The city-corporations, guilds, and parlements of early modern Europe frequently drew on a quantified history of freedom or privilege. The freemasons could not quite borrow the story of the boring old masons' guild from which they emerged, for obvious reasons, so the Templar heritage provided the rhetorical foundation for their corporativeness. And as such, it was a story not much crazier than any number of other such invented traditions, from the supposed republicanism of the Germanic tribes to the saintly stonemason of San Marino.

Taking the story of the hay wain and de Molay as a provisional form of truth provides some alternate explanations even within the context of Jacob's argument. Where else than the Freemasons, she asks, could other conspiratorial groups get the nomenclature of Knights and Grand Masters? The Knights Templar present themselves immediately, though the monograph only alludes to them, and a more fit attention to their symbolic importance could potentially have changed Jacob's evolutionary tree of conspiracy groups.

But the broader point is this: myths can have more importance than facts. Perhaps even more than the Foucauldian sense, where they are only narratives, can allow: they can be ways of constructing reality, and only looking through that lens can the reality be reconstructed. History demands nothing less.