The Simularities of Druidism and the FreeMason
I find it very important to state my opinion on this subject as one who has studied many texts only to find that no one has come to, or is willing to state, a conclusion that I find only obvious. I continually find scholars who say that druidism and it's rituals are very much like that of the masonic lodge. Why does no one place the druid before the mason? It is only understood by all who research this history that a grove of druids could not have existed publicly in the early centuries of Europe or this country without feeling the wrath of the Christian church. The masonic lodge came into existance in the early 18th century. A time of change and industrial revolution for both Europe and America. It is my finding that these men who founded the masonic lodge were more than likely descendants of the old world Celtic oral traditions that found a way to come together in the public eye as a brotherhood of craftsmen, yet still practice, teach, and continue the old ways. This can be seen also by the fact that the men who founded the latter 18th century druid organizations were also earlier members of the masonic lodge. You have to ask yourself, why would these two neolithic organizations have founding members in common? Speculation is all we have, but it's my opinion that the two brotherhoods are very similar in teaching, if not almost exact.
The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man are foundational teachings of Freemasonry.Those phrases are often carved in the stonework of Masonic temples. A glimpse of the Masonic concept of God is provided by examining those phrases.
Monotheism is the sole dogma of Freemasonry. Belief in one God is required of every initiate, but his conception of the Supreme Being is left to his own interpretation. Freemasonry is not concerned with theological distinctions. This is the basis of our universality.
The true Mason is not creed-bound. He realizes with the divine illumination of his lodge that as a Mason his religion must be universal: Christ, Buddha or Mohammed, the name means little, for he recognizes only the light and not the bearer. He worships at every shrine, bows before every altar, whether in temple, mosque or cathedral, realizing with his truer understanding the oneness of all spiritual truth.
To the altar of Freemasonry all men bring their most votive offerings. Around it all men, whether they have received their teachings from Confucius, Zoroaster, Moses, Mohammed or the founder of the Christian religion--just so long as they believe in the universality of the fatherhood of God and universality of the brotherhood of man--meet upon a common level. The Jew returns to his synagogue, the Mohammedan to his mosque and the Christian to his temple--each better prepared for the solemn duties of life by the associations in this universal brotherhood.
The brotherhood of man can be established upon the Fatherhood of God, which could and should be a universal unifying synthesis of sufficient power to draw all men together. Masonry proclaims the universal sovereignty of the All-Father, for it is He who has sent every divine messenger into the world of humanity to teach men the way, the Truth, and the Light. The ancient teachings were projected on the earth plane by the great teachers--Avatars, divine messengers, messiahs, way-showers, exemplars, elder Brothers, who at the behest of the Great Architect came into flesh from the Celestial Lodge at different times and to different races of men. Jesus of Nazareth was sent to be a light to the world to some branches of the human race, but other branches have had, and do now have, their Buddha, their Krishna, their Zoroaster, their Confucius, their Mohammed. Masonry declares that all these peoples, of whatever religion or creed, are children of God born into a particular race, religion, or creed to derive whatever benefits and self development they need, or are capable of, on their long journey back to the Celestial Lodge. As all men live and move and have their being in the Creator, all men are potential Brothers. Hence Masonry emphasizes no one Avatar in its Ritual more than another; and Masons all over the world express their first allegiance to God, as the Universal Father. . .
Masonic/Fraternal Druidism is a religious and philosophical system that has lasted for at least two centuries, helping thousands of people to gain a better understanding of themselves and their times. Its attitude of reverent skepticism is fully in keeping with the ideals of the founders of the Reformed and Neopagan Druid movements. These Mesopagans have a great deal of wisdom and experience that we would do well to avail ourselves of, and many of the current Fraternal Druids are right on the borderline between Meso- and Neopaganism. It is to be hoped that more lines of communication will be opened between us in the years to come.
In London, throughout the century, Druid groups appeared along with Rosicrucian and Freemason organizations. As the Druid Order/B.C.U.B., put it in their introductory booklet, The Ancient Druid Order:
"The 17th century saw the emergence of the Order into its more modern shape. In the 17th and 18th centuries there was a complex of mystical societies, Hermetes, Rosicrucians, Freemasons and Druids, who often had members in common."
In 1781 c.e., Henry Hurle set up The Ancient Order of Druids (sometimes just called "The Druid Order," as were a few others, leading to no end of historical confusion), as a secret society based on Masonic patterns (not surprising, since Hurle was a carpenter and house builder). This group, like most of the similar mystical societies formed at the time, was heavily influenced by Jacob Boehme.
(Jacob Boehme, 1675-1724 c.e., was a Protestant mystic, greatly involved with alchemy, hermeticism and Christian Cabala, as well as being a student of the famous Meister Eckhart. His mystical writings attempted to reconcile all these influences and had a tremendous impact upon later generations of mystical Christians, Rosicrucians, Freemasons and Theosophists.)
Overseas, the link between Deism, Masonry and Druidism was once again established, in the small town of Newburgh, New York. G. Adolf Koch has an entire chapter on "The Society of Druids" in his book Religionof the American Enlightenment. Deism and downright atheism were popular during the 1780's and 90's among the American intelligensia, especially those who had supported the American and French revolutions. In fact, a rather large number of the key political figures involved in both revolutions were Deistic Masons and Rosicrucians (see Neal Wilgus, The Illuminoids). Koch tells the story of the Newburgh Druids thusly:
Some influential citizens of Newburgh had organized themselves into an interesting radical religious body called "The Druid Society." Like its sister organization, the Deistic Society in New York, it was a radical offshoot of an earlier and more conservative society. A Masonic lodge had been established in Newburgh in 1788, and it seems, as one attempts to piece together the fragmentary facts, that as the brothers, or at least a number of them, became more and more radical in the feverish days of the French Revolution, the metamorphosis from Mason to Druid resulted. The Druids held their meetings in the room formerly occupied by the Masons and continued to use a ceremony similar to the Masonic. It is interesting to note, too, that as the Druid Society died out contemporaneously with the end of [famous Deist of the time] Palmer's activities in New York City, a new Masonic lodge was instituted in Newburgh in 1806.
The question naturally arises as to why those apostate Masons chose the name of Druids. It seems that when they abandoned Christianity, with which Masonry in America had not been incompatible, they went back to the religion [as they conceived of it] of the ancient Druids who were sun worshippers. It was commonly believed at that time, by the radicals of course, that both Christianity and Masonry were derived from the worship of the sun... The Druids thus went back to the pure worship of the great luminary, the visible agent of a great invisible first cause, and regarded Christianity as a later accretion and subversion of the true faith, a superstition, in short, developed by a designing and unscrupulous priesthood, to put it mildly in the language of the day.
It appears that Thomas Paine, among other radicals of the time, was convinced that Masonry was descended from Druidism. Koch refers us to an essay by Paine, The Origin of Freemasonry, written in New York City in 1805. In this essay he mentions a society of Masons in Dublin who called themselves Druids. The spectacular fantasies and conjectures that have been offered over the centuries to explain the origins of Masonry and Rosicrucianism will have to await another article to be properly discussed. Suffice it to say for now that the sorts of Druidism with which the noble Paine and his friends might have been familiar were far more likely to have been offshoots of Masonry than vice versa.
As for the group of Druid Masons in Dublin, I know nothing else about them. I will speculate that they may very well have been intimately linked with Irish Revolutionary politics, which might or might not have strained their relations with Druid Masons in England. There doesn't seem to be much data about Irish Masonic Druidism available in this country, but we do know a bit about developments in Wales.
Following the tremendously successful Eisteddfod (bardic gathering) organized by Thomas Jones in Corwen in 1789, a huge variety of Welsh cultural and literary societies mushroomed and flourished. In 1792, a member of several of these groups in London named Edward Williams, using the pen name of Iolo Morganwg (Iolo of Glamorgan), held an Autumn Equinox ceremony on top of Primrose Hill (in London). Along with some other Welsh Bards, he set up a small circle of pebbles and an altar, which he called the Mean Gorsedd. There was a naked sword on this altar and a part of the ritual involved the sheathing of this sword. At the time, no one paid very much attention to the ceremony or its obvious sexual symbolism (which, if noticed, might legitimately have been called "Pagan"), at least not outside of the London Bardic community.
Iolo, however, was not daunted. He declared that the Glamorganshire Bards had an unbroken line of Bardic-Druidic tradition going back to the Ancient Druids, and that his ceremony was part of it. He then proceeded (almost all scholars agree) to translate, mistranslate and occasionally forge various documents and "ancient" manuscripts, in order to "prove" this and his subsequent claims. Many people feel that he muddled genuine Welsh scholarship for over a hundred years.
In 1819, Iolo managed to get his stone circle and its ceremony (now called, as a whole, the Gorsedd) inserted into the genuine Eisteddfod in Carmarthen, Wales. It was a tremendous success with the Bards and the tourists and has been a part of the Eisteddfod tradition ever since, with greater and greater elaborations.
The effects of Iolo's work did not stop there however, for later writers such as Lewis Spence, Robert Graves and Gerald Gardner apparently took Iolo's "scholarship" at face value and proceeded to put forward theories that have launched dozens of occult and mystical organizations (most of them having little if anything to do with authentic Paleopagan Druidism).
By 1796 c.e., all megalithic monuments in Northwestern Europe were firmly defined as "Druidic," especially if they were in the form of circles or lines of standing stones. In that year, yet another element was added, in La Tour-D'Auvergne's book, Origines Gauloises. He thought he had discovered a word in the Breton language for megalithic tombs, dolmin, and by both this spelling and that of dolmen the term became part of archeological jargon and of the growing Druid folklore.
At this point the folklore, also called "Celtomania," went roughly like this: "The Celts are the oldest people in the world; their language is preserved practically intact in Bas-Breton; they were profound philosophers whose inspired doctrines have been handed down by the Welsh Bardic Schools;. dolmens are their altars where their priests the Druids offered human sacrifice; stone alignments were their astronomical observatories..." (Salomon Reinach, quoted by Stuart Piggott).
Art, music, drama and poetry were using these fanciful Druids as characters and sources of inspiration. Various eccentrics, many of them devout (if unorthodox) Christians, claimed to be Druids and made colorful headlines. Wealthy people built miniature Stonehenges in their gardens and hired fake Druids to scare their guests. Mystically oriented individuals drifted from Masonic groups to Rosicrucian lodges to Druid groves, and hardly anyone, then or now, could tell the difference. Ecumenicalism was the order of the day and in 1878, at the Pontypridd Eisteddfod, the Archdruid presiding over the Gorsedd ceremony inserted a prayer to Mother Kali of India! This might have been magically quite sensible, and was certainly in keeping with traditional Pagan attitudes of religious eclecticism, except for the fact that the British attitude towards Indian culture and religion was not exactly the most cordial at the time. Of course, maybe they were anticipating A.D.F.'s Pan-Indo-European approach to Druidism!
But before this, in 1833, the secret society founded by Hurle split up over the question of whether it should be mainly a benefit (charitable) society or a mystical one. The majority voted for being a charitable society and changed its name to The United Ancient Order of Druids. This group, with branches all over the world, still exists as a charitable and fraternal organization rather like the Elks or Shriners. Meanwhile, the minority group, still apparently calling itself by the old names (A.O.D. and D.O.), also continued to exist, as a mystical Masonic sort of organization.
Information collected from winmason.com and Isaac Bonewitz
I find it very important to state my opinion on this subject as one who has studied many texts only to find that no one has come to, or is willing to state, a conclusion that I find only obvious. I continually find scholars who say that druidism and it's rituals are very much like that of the masonic lodge. Why does no one place the druid before the mason? It is only understood by all who research this history that a grove of druids could not have existed publicly in the early centuries of Europe or this country without feeling the wrath of the Christian church. The masonic lodge came into existance in the early 18th century. A time of change and industrial revolution for both Europe and America. It is my finding that these men who founded the masonic lodge were more than likely descendants of the old world Celtic oral traditions that found a way to come together in the public eye as a brotherhood of craftsmen, yet still practice, teach, and continue the old ways. This can be seen also by the fact that the men who founded the latter 18th century druid organizations were also earlier members of the masonic lodge. You have to ask yourself, why would these two neolithic organizations have founding members in common? Speculation is all we have, but it's my opinion that the two brotherhoods are very similar in teaching, if not almost exact.
The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man are foundational teachings of Freemasonry.Those phrases are often carved in the stonework of Masonic temples. A glimpse of the Masonic concept of God is provided by examining those phrases.
Monotheism is the sole dogma of Freemasonry. Belief in one God is required of every initiate, but his conception of the Supreme Being is left to his own interpretation. Freemasonry is not concerned with theological distinctions. This is the basis of our universality.
The true Mason is not creed-bound. He realizes with the divine illumination of his lodge that as a Mason his religion must be universal: Christ, Buddha or Mohammed, the name means little, for he recognizes only the light and not the bearer. He worships at every shrine, bows before every altar, whether in temple, mosque or cathedral, realizing with his truer understanding the oneness of all spiritual truth.
To the altar of Freemasonry all men bring their most votive offerings. Around it all men, whether they have received their teachings from Confucius, Zoroaster, Moses, Mohammed or the founder of the Christian religion--just so long as they believe in the universality of the fatherhood of God and universality of the brotherhood of man--meet upon a common level. The Jew returns to his synagogue, the Mohammedan to his mosque and the Christian to his temple--each better prepared for the solemn duties of life by the associations in this universal brotherhood.
The brotherhood of man can be established upon the Fatherhood of God, which could and should be a universal unifying synthesis of sufficient power to draw all men together. Masonry proclaims the universal sovereignty of the All-Father, for it is He who has sent every divine messenger into the world of humanity to teach men the way, the Truth, and the Light. The ancient teachings were projected on the earth plane by the great teachers--Avatars, divine messengers, messiahs, way-showers, exemplars, elder Brothers, who at the behest of the Great Architect came into flesh from the Celestial Lodge at different times and to different races of men. Jesus of Nazareth was sent to be a light to the world to some branches of the human race, but other branches have had, and do now have, their Buddha, their Krishna, their Zoroaster, their Confucius, their Mohammed. Masonry declares that all these peoples, of whatever religion or creed, are children of God born into a particular race, religion, or creed to derive whatever benefits and self development they need, or are capable of, on their long journey back to the Celestial Lodge. As all men live and move and have their being in the Creator, all men are potential Brothers. Hence Masonry emphasizes no one Avatar in its Ritual more than another; and Masons all over the world express their first allegiance to God, as the Universal Father. . .
Masonic/Fraternal Druidism is a religious and philosophical system that has lasted for at least two centuries, helping thousands of people to gain a better understanding of themselves and their times. Its attitude of reverent skepticism is fully in keeping with the ideals of the founders of the Reformed and Neopagan Druid movements. These Mesopagans have a great deal of wisdom and experience that we would do well to avail ourselves of, and many of the current Fraternal Druids are right on the borderline between Meso- and Neopaganism. It is to be hoped that more lines of communication will be opened between us in the years to come.
In London, throughout the century, Druid groups appeared along with Rosicrucian and Freemason organizations. As the Druid Order/B.C.U.B., put it in their introductory booklet, The Ancient Druid Order:
"The 17th century saw the emergence of the Order into its more modern shape. In the 17th and 18th centuries there was a complex of mystical societies, Hermetes, Rosicrucians, Freemasons and Druids, who often had members in common."
In 1781 c.e., Henry Hurle set up The Ancient Order of Druids (sometimes just called "The Druid Order," as were a few others, leading to no end of historical confusion), as a secret society based on Masonic patterns (not surprising, since Hurle was a carpenter and house builder). This group, like most of the similar mystical societies formed at the time, was heavily influenced by Jacob Boehme.
(Jacob Boehme, 1675-1724 c.e., was a Protestant mystic, greatly involved with alchemy, hermeticism and Christian Cabala, as well as being a student of the famous Meister Eckhart. His mystical writings attempted to reconcile all these influences and had a tremendous impact upon later generations of mystical Christians, Rosicrucians, Freemasons and Theosophists.)
Overseas, the link between Deism, Masonry and Druidism was once again established, in the small town of Newburgh, New York. G. Adolf Koch has an entire chapter on "The Society of Druids" in his book Religionof the American Enlightenment. Deism and downright atheism were popular during the 1780's and 90's among the American intelligensia, especially those who had supported the American and French revolutions. In fact, a rather large number of the key political figures involved in both revolutions were Deistic Masons and Rosicrucians (see Neal Wilgus, The Illuminoids). Koch tells the story of the Newburgh Druids thusly:
Some influential citizens of Newburgh had organized themselves into an interesting radical religious body called "The Druid Society." Like its sister organization, the Deistic Society in New York, it was a radical offshoot of an earlier and more conservative society. A Masonic lodge had been established in Newburgh in 1788, and it seems, as one attempts to piece together the fragmentary facts, that as the brothers, or at least a number of them, became more and more radical in the feverish days of the French Revolution, the metamorphosis from Mason to Druid resulted. The Druids held their meetings in the room formerly occupied by the Masons and continued to use a ceremony similar to the Masonic. It is interesting to note, too, that as the Druid Society died out contemporaneously with the end of [famous Deist of the time] Palmer's activities in New York City, a new Masonic lodge was instituted in Newburgh in 1806.
The question naturally arises as to why those apostate Masons chose the name of Druids. It seems that when they abandoned Christianity, with which Masonry in America had not been incompatible, they went back to the religion [as they conceived of it] of the ancient Druids who were sun worshippers. It was commonly believed at that time, by the radicals of course, that both Christianity and Masonry were derived from the worship of the sun... The Druids thus went back to the pure worship of the great luminary, the visible agent of a great invisible first cause, and regarded Christianity as a later accretion and subversion of the true faith, a superstition, in short, developed by a designing and unscrupulous priesthood, to put it mildly in the language of the day.
It appears that Thomas Paine, among other radicals of the time, was convinced that Masonry was descended from Druidism. Koch refers us to an essay by Paine, The Origin of Freemasonry, written in New York City in 1805. In this essay he mentions a society of Masons in Dublin who called themselves Druids. The spectacular fantasies and conjectures that have been offered over the centuries to explain the origins of Masonry and Rosicrucianism will have to await another article to be properly discussed. Suffice it to say for now that the sorts of Druidism with which the noble Paine and his friends might have been familiar were far more likely to have been offshoots of Masonry than vice versa.
As for the group of Druid Masons in Dublin, I know nothing else about them. I will speculate that they may very well have been intimately linked with Irish Revolutionary politics, which might or might not have strained their relations with Druid Masons in England. There doesn't seem to be much data about Irish Masonic Druidism available in this country, but we do know a bit about developments in Wales.
Following the tremendously successful Eisteddfod (bardic gathering) organized by Thomas Jones in Corwen in 1789, a huge variety of Welsh cultural and literary societies mushroomed and flourished. In 1792, a member of several of these groups in London named Edward Williams, using the pen name of Iolo Morganwg (Iolo of Glamorgan), held an Autumn Equinox ceremony on top of Primrose Hill (in London). Along with some other Welsh Bards, he set up a small circle of pebbles and an altar, which he called the Mean Gorsedd. There was a naked sword on this altar and a part of the ritual involved the sheathing of this sword. At the time, no one paid very much attention to the ceremony or its obvious sexual symbolism (which, if noticed, might legitimately have been called "Pagan"), at least not outside of the London Bardic community.
Iolo, however, was not daunted. He declared that the Glamorganshire Bards had an unbroken line of Bardic-Druidic tradition going back to the Ancient Druids, and that his ceremony was part of it. He then proceeded (almost all scholars agree) to translate, mistranslate and occasionally forge various documents and "ancient" manuscripts, in order to "prove" this and his subsequent claims. Many people feel that he muddled genuine Welsh scholarship for over a hundred years.
In 1819, Iolo managed to get his stone circle and its ceremony (now called, as a whole, the Gorsedd) inserted into the genuine Eisteddfod in Carmarthen, Wales. It was a tremendous success with the Bards and the tourists and has been a part of the Eisteddfod tradition ever since, with greater and greater elaborations.
The effects of Iolo's work did not stop there however, for later writers such as Lewis Spence, Robert Graves and Gerald Gardner apparently took Iolo's "scholarship" at face value and proceeded to put forward theories that have launched dozens of occult and mystical organizations (most of them having little if anything to do with authentic Paleopagan Druidism).
By 1796 c.e., all megalithic monuments in Northwestern Europe were firmly defined as "Druidic," especially if they were in the form of circles or lines of standing stones. In that year, yet another element was added, in La Tour-D'Auvergne's book, Origines Gauloises. He thought he had discovered a word in the Breton language for megalithic tombs, dolmin, and by both this spelling and that of dolmen the term became part of archeological jargon and of the growing Druid folklore.
At this point the folklore, also called "Celtomania," went roughly like this: "The Celts are the oldest people in the world; their language is preserved practically intact in Bas-Breton; they were profound philosophers whose inspired doctrines have been handed down by the Welsh Bardic Schools;. dolmens are their altars where their priests the Druids offered human sacrifice; stone alignments were their astronomical observatories..." (Salomon Reinach, quoted by Stuart Piggott).
Art, music, drama and poetry were using these fanciful Druids as characters and sources of inspiration. Various eccentrics, many of them devout (if unorthodox) Christians, claimed to be Druids and made colorful headlines. Wealthy people built miniature Stonehenges in their gardens and hired fake Druids to scare their guests. Mystically oriented individuals drifted from Masonic groups to Rosicrucian lodges to Druid groves, and hardly anyone, then or now, could tell the difference. Ecumenicalism was the order of the day and in 1878, at the Pontypridd Eisteddfod, the Archdruid presiding over the Gorsedd ceremony inserted a prayer to Mother Kali of India! This might have been magically quite sensible, and was certainly in keeping with traditional Pagan attitudes of religious eclecticism, except for the fact that the British attitude towards Indian culture and religion was not exactly the most cordial at the time. Of course, maybe they were anticipating A.D.F.'s Pan-Indo-European approach to Druidism!
But before this, in 1833, the secret society founded by Hurle split up over the question of whether it should be mainly a benefit (charitable) society or a mystical one. The majority voted for being a charitable society and changed its name to The United Ancient Order of Druids. This group, with branches all over the world, still exists as a charitable and fraternal organization rather like the Elks or Shriners. Meanwhile, the minority group, still apparently calling itself by the old names (A.O.D. and D.O.), also continued to exist, as a mystical Masonic sort of organization.
Information collected from winmason.com and Isaac Bonewitz
|
