England

THE GUNS OF 75

Battle of Lexington engraving (cropped)

The Battle of Lexington was fought on April 19,1775; the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17. What emotions, what echoes, what old historic memories stir in our hearts as we remember those days and dates. When Lafayette held in his hand the musket which fired the first shot of the American Revolution, he exclaimed: This is the alarm gun of liberty! To England the war was an episode; to is it is an epic.

History of the Allied Masonic Degrees

AMD Member

The vast majority of the ‘additional’ degrees worked in England in the early part of the nineteenth century originally came under the patronage of warrants granted by the ‘Antients’, who held that Craft Warrants entitled Lodges to work any Masonic degree to which they had knowledge and members available who could work it. Upon the formation of the United Grand Lodge various groups of degrees were gradually organised into separate Orders each with their own governing body.

Absolutes and Imperialism: Exclusion and Isolation?

Knowledge

Not long ago, and on behalf of the United Grand Lodge of England, a speech was made that stated that the basic principles of Freemasonry were refined over 150 years and codified in 1929 and 1938. This codification, it is claimed, defines regularity; the speech advises that regularity is an “absolute” and that these basic principles are above and beyond change and reinterpretation. The same statement proscribes masons in masonry from being explicitly involved in matters such as the social progress of the new Europe and it stipulates that “Freemasonry has no role outside of Freemasonry”.

Martinist Orders

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Martinist Orders The Martinist Orders L’Ordre Martiniste of Papus (Dr Gérard Encausse), created in 1888. Papus was its sole Grand Master from 1888 till…

FREEMASONRY AND THE CATHEDRAL BUILDERS

Lincoln Cathederal

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.

Origins of Masonic Ritual

Tradition

The origins of masonic ceremonies are fully discussed by Knoop and Jones in Chapter X of The Genesis of Freemasonry. The authors deduce the origins of eighteenth-century Masonic ceremonies from two main sources. Firstly, the Invocation; the legend or “history” of the Craft; and the Masons’ regulations, as commonly contained in the Ms. Constitutions of Masonry, these being the respective prototypes of the Opening Prayer, the Traditional History, and the Charges of later Masonic ritual


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