HISTORY OF FREEMASONRY CHAPTER I PRELIMINARY OUTLOOK F the reader has bestowed any attention on the preceding part of this work, he will have been enabled to discover that what I have designated as "Prehistoric Masonry" is nothing more than a collection of legends and traditions derived from various sources and, apparently, invented at different periods during the Middle Ages, when the Fraternity of Freemasons was a thoroughly Operative association, composed of architects and builders, with a few unprofessional men of rank and wealth, who had been accepted by the Craft as patrons or honorary members. It is, however, only in compliance with the usage of historians that I have consented to adopt the use of this term "prehistoric" in reference to the present subject, and not because I have considered it to be an absolutely correct one when applied to the history of Freemasonry. Anthropologists have divided the chronological series of events in every nation or race into two distinct periods—the prehistoric and the historic. The former includes the time when the inhabitants of a country were in a condition of utter barbarism, from which they gradually raised themselves to a higher state of civilization. Of the fact even of the existence of such a primitive people we have no evidence, except certain myths and legends, in which they appear to have embodied their ideas of religious belief, and, at a somewhat later period in their progress toward civilization, some fragmentary records, to be found principally in the hieroglyphic monuments of ancient Egypt and in the cuneiform inscriptions of old Assyria. But when a nation or race began, by the natural process of advancement, to emerge from this lower sphere of intellectual debasement to a higher one, its first labor was to preserve the evidences of its existence and the memorial of its transactions in written records. All before this era of emergence from oral traditions to records has been called by anthropologists the "prehistoric period "—all after it, the "historic." Now, it is very evident that no such division can, in strictness, be applied to the history of Freemasonry. Viewed as an association of builders, when there ceases to be a record of the association, it must be supposed that it did not exist. There are no legends or traditions whose existence can be traced to a period anterior to that which contains historic records of the society. These legends and traditions, all of which have been given in the first part of this work, were not, like the primeval myths of the prehistoric nations, the outgrowth of an uneducated religious sentiment wholly unconnected with and independent of any record of real events which occurred, or were occurring, at the same time. On the contrary, they sprang up in the Middle Ages, at the very time when Freemasonry was making its indelible record in the history of Europe. They were fabricated by Freemasons who had long before been recognized in history as an association of some importance. They were not the spontaneous growth of some primitive body of builders, known to us only by these legends which had been orally transmitted from the earliest prehistoric times. They were the inventions of a later period, most of the facts which they detailed being borrowed from historical records, principally from the Bible or from ecclesiastical historians, and they were indebted for their fabrication partly to a desire to magnify the antiquity of the Institution and partly to the influence of that legendary spirit which prevailed in the Middle Ages, and which we find still more extensively developed in the legends of the Saints which have been accepted by the Roman Catholic Church. These Masonic legends differ also in another respect from the prehistoric myths of antiquity. As soon as a nation began to make its history, its myths were relegated to their proper place in the region of mythology, and the history continued to be written without any admixture with them. They were considered as things of the past. They had their inevitable influence upon the religion of the people, but they were not intruded into its political history. But from the very time of the fabrication of the Masonic legends and traditions, they were accepted as a part of the annals of the association and were incorporated into it as a portion of its true history. As such they have been maintained almost to the present day. In this way we have two histories of Freemasonry which have always been presenting themselves to our consideration with the assumption of an equal claim to our credence. We have, in the first place, the authentic history, gathered from the records of all the building guilds and confraternities from the time of Numa, and which, assuming various forms at different periods, finally has culminated in the Speculative Freemasonry of the present day. And then we have a mass of legends and traditions fabricated in the Middle Ages, and some others of a later day. These have been obtruded into the authentic history, have grown up alongside of it, and have presented and sought to preserve a different and, of course, an apocryphal form of history. Looking at the time and manner of the fabrication of these legends, and the persistent way in which for some centuries they have traveled down the stream of time pari passu with the authentic history, it would perhaps have been better to designate them as "extra-historic," rather than "pre-historic "-something not before history, but something outside of history. Yet, as they have been made to assume the appearance of prehistoric legends, and have claimed, however incorrectly, to be traditions of the origin and progress of the Institution at a time when there were no written records of its existence, I have felt myself excusable, and perhaps even justifiable, in tolerating temporarily this mistaken view, under the protest of this explanation, and of adopting the usage of historians in their treatment of the histories of nations. As a matter, therefore, of convenience I have used the term “prehistoric," although I am well convinced that there is no such thing as a "prehistoric Freemasonry." |