Free Masonry is a secret brotherhood, whose origins go back to the builder’s guild of the Middle Ages. Mason in French means “Brookline.” It was born under the need to aggressively protect their skills, and by doing so maintaining their status and livelihoods. In addition, their secrecy helped save their brethren from palpate persecution.
Many of the Masonic ideals clashed head on with those of the Church in Rome. By the end of the middle ages, Masonry had evolved into Free Masonry, of free and accepted Masons, free to permit slaves or “surfs” into their brotherhood, for anyone who swore allegiance to their rules.
Free Masonry became an anti-monarchial secret society that kept many of the symbols of the original builder’s guilds. Though it became a civilian social organization, it de-vowed its original humanistic objectives, and on many occasions its operations were kept secret, and unmistakably political. For centuries Free Masonry was officially persecuted by the Church and the establishment, however many nobles and clergy did in fact belong to Free Masonry. Its ability to attract even those who are supposed to be against it, made Free Masonry all the more intriguing and disturbing.
The origins of Free Masonry in the United States go back to 1682, when Scotsman John Ski, an active member in the Aberdeen Lodge took an active interest in the American Colonies of New England. Three years later he was named deputy governor of West Jersey.
Johnathan Belcher was Royal Governor of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, became a Free Mason in 1704, and boasted that he was the first Free Mason to be born in the United States. By 1776, for what we now call the United States, there were 13 small colonies crowded upon the east coast. They had been founded by English Protestant Puritans, the famous Pilgrims, who had been expelled from England, by the powerful Anglican Church. The rest of the country was a rich and vast unexplained terrain that was mostly inhabited and more often than not conquered by at gun-point.
This was an era where men worked, fought, and dreamed of what God wanted for them. At first it was a social structure dominated by the Puritans, but then the Free Masons began to create revolutionary ideas both in Europe and in America, by the use of religious freedom, independence, science, rationalism, and humanism.
The emerging American Free Masons were strongly influenced by the Rosicrucian’s, another secret society that was created in Germany in the early 15th century for the study of the hidden arts. The American Free Masons adopted many of the Rosicrucian’s mystical ways, as well as the Greek and Egyptian symbols. Symbols that can be seen in many American national emblems today.
The Rosicrucian’s claimed to have founded their first American lodge in 1694 in Philadelphia. When William Penn, the Quaker who founded the first American community to advocate for religious liberty in Pennsylvania, invited Johann Zimmerman’s “Chapter of Perfection” to leave Germany and join them in America. Zimmerman, a Rosicrucian believed that Christ would return in the year 1700, so in 1694, he built an observatory on American soil to watch for the return of the Lord.
To Zimmerman’s regret Christ did not return, and the Rosicrucian order dispersed around Pennsylvania. Some of them stayed and became emulated healers and gave ceremonies to grow good crops, and drive away bad luck.
In 1717, the “Great Lodge of England” was founded, and it claimed authority over all other lodges of the English Colonies, but the American Colonies rose up against it, and did not recognize its authority. The Great Lodge of England recounted this, by encouraging the creation of several other faithful lodges in the Colonies.
It is important to point out that the uprising of the American Masonic Lodges against the English lodges, pre-dates the American Revolution by many years, therefore whether this was planned or not, became the very first instance of revolutionary thought, and while growing higher and higher in numbers, the thought of independence spread throughout the whole course of the country. In 1776, the United States declared their independence, and shortly thereafter the U.S. Constitution was adopted. The contributions of Free Masonry were fundamental in many events, (for the independence of the American Colonies from England) since many brethren were involved in these events.
In 1732, Benjamin Franklin was initiated into the “Turntable Lodge” Lodge in Philadelphia, and that same year James Ugelthaw, the founder of the Savanna Colony, (later to become the state of Georgia) created the Solomon Lodge, and it was here that these two men were destined to become the first Jewish-American Free Masons.
Regardless of their origins, these English and native Lodges spread like wildfire throughout the country, fueled by the prestige of becoming a member of a Masonic Lodge, gave them. To 1740, most respectable men in the English Colonies were or wanted to become Free Masons.
In 1773 a group of outraged workers staged a protest, to what they considered unfair English custom duties, by dumping overboard the tea cargo for three ships. It was the famous “Boston Tea Party.”
Today it is suspected that many of those workers were disguised Free Masons, who belonged to the “Standers Lodge” in Boston, a lodge that curiously did not convene that night.
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