THE DUPLICITIES OF HISTORY - PART ONE by Dr. Robert James, Ph.D.

THE DUPLICITIES OF HISTORY : THE CENTRAL PROBLEM OF FREEMASONRY

ENJOY THE FIRST 15 MINUTES OF PART ONE

By Dr. Robert James Ph.D. of New South Wales, Australia.

‘Freemasonry’, as a single identifiable entity, doesn’t exist and probably has never existed. The Grand Lodge [GL] of English Freemasonry (EF), an organisation which probably began meeting in the period 1717-23 and claims to have ‘mothered’ all other variants, is a distinct entity which asserted and gained ascendancy by the classical carrot and stich technique. It offered benefits to memberships of otherwise independent lodges in return for oaths of loyalty and thus of a secondary position. Claims that it was made up of men of higher status who were therefore deserving of obedience from men of lower standing were no more than a re-fashioned statement of ‘the Divine Right of Kings’. The mythical history of this GL is full of delicious ironies. At the same time, the real-time history needs the mythology to help explain the Order’s global expansion.

That initial GL had no authority to determine either ‘Masonic’ or political practice of any other ‘Masonic’ entity yet that is the nature of its achievement. Its claims of uniqueness and authority were parts of a marketing strategy it needed because it was neither unique nor in charge. Why its self-defined ‘Grand Lodge Officers’ chose to act in this way is only the first of many questions the answers to which determine how its subsequent 300 years + of endeavour are to be interpreted. Over three centuries, something called ‘Masonic history’ has been cobbled together by partisans from not very-objective accounts of entities self-identifying as ‘Masonic’ for political reasons and, it seems, for no other reason. . . . .