Promoting the Fraternity across the World
by Bro. H.L. HAYWOOD, Editor THE BUILDER The Builder Magazine, June 1924 – Volume X – Number 6 FREEMASONRY AND THE COMACINE MASTERS In a chapter on the Roman Collegia published last June I referred briefly to the Comacine builder guilds as forming a bridge between the ancient classical culture of Rome and the … Read more
There has been a great deal of difference of opinion among the historians of architecture as to where and when Gothic began. English writers, who have a very natural desire to claim for their own land the glory of the discovery of the art, date it at 1100 A.D. or earlier, and find its first manifestations at Durham; whereas French writers almost unanimously hold that Gothic began first of all in the region round about Paris, in what was once called the Ile de France, and say that the Abbey Church of St. Denis, begun in 1140, is to be regarded as the first known Gothic monument. It appears that a majority of the more modern writers incline to agree with the French theory. Porter dates the new style as beginning in Paris about 1163, and says that it reached its culmination in the year 1220, with the nave of Amiens.
Freemasonry continues an initiatic tradition whose beginnings are lost in antiquity. This statement cannot be proven historically.Yet the more you study Masonic rites and its symbols, the more you become convinced that you are dealing with something ancient, maybe even primordial. It becomes clear that this tradition is much older than Masonrys institutional beginnings in 1717, older than the cathedral builders and medieval guilds, older even than King Solomons Temple or the Egyptian Pyramids.
by Bro. H.L. HAYWOOD, Editor THE BUILDER The Builder Magazine, June 1924 – Volume X – Number 6 FREEMASONRY AND THE ROMAN COLLEGIA THE ORIGIN OF MODERN Freemasonry has been traced by means of documents and other historical records to guilds of builders in the Middle Ages. These guilds in turn were derived from … Read more
