FREEMASONRY: Symbols, Secrets, Significance
by W. Kirk MacNulty
Thames & Hudson, £24.95; 320pp

ON EASTER MONDAY, APRIL 19, 1897, an expectant audience gathered at a hall of the Société Géographique in central Paris. Curious and hoping for scandal, they had come to witness the first public appearance of Miss Diana Vaughan, ex-Satanist and Catholic convert, whose sensational Mémoires of her humiliation and escape from a supposedly Devil-worshiping masonic organisation — the Palladian Freemasons — had both scandalised and titillated Paris for almost two years.

The audience was confronted instead with a slippery trickster of a journalist calling himself Léo Taxil. Miss Vaughan would not be appearing, he told the crowd. She did not, in fact, exist. Both she and the Palladium were myths of his own creation, part of a gigantic hoax to discredit both the Catholic Church and the Freemasons. In the outcry that followed his announcement Taxil slipped from the stage. A few days later his rambling confession, in which he owned up to the deceit, was published in the weekly Parisian newspaper Le Frondeur.

Taxil was a man with a grudge. In 1881 he had been expelled from the Grand Orient de France, the masonic grand lodge, for “crimes” of literary theft and publishing pornography. His invention of the fictitious Mémoires, and their imaginary author, were his revenge on the order. That they were a fraud didn’t matter to the anti-masonic lobby, which had been seeking a stick with which to beat the Grand Orient.

At the turn of the century Paris was awash with conspiracy theories, battles between clerics and anti-clerics and home to an insidious and increasingly vocal anti-Semitism. Freemasonry needed a champion to separate fact from fiction. It found one in the form of Arthur Edward Waite, a British historian of the occult and a Tarot specialist. Waite launched a spirited written attack on Taxil and those who had sought to profit from his scandalous hoax and wrote Devil-Worship in France, a satirical account of persecution of occult groups in France at that time.

Things have not changed much since. More than a hundred years after Waite, the arcane symbols, rituals and regalia of Freemasonry still attract criticism and curiosity — sometimes ridicule and even fear.

It is partly a desire to separate fact from fiction that has encouraged W. Kirk MacNulty, a Mason for more than 40 years, to produce this beautifully designed, lusciously illustrated, encyclopaedic overview. Aimed at the general reader as well as fellow Masons, it covers the origins and the history of the order, the philosophy behind rituals, the terms, the practice and the hierarchy of Freemasonry and affiliated organisations.

The history of Freemasonry is complicated. Some Masons claim a kind of apostolic succession, as it were, from the original Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon. The lodges that met on the feast day of John the Baptist at the London ale house the Goose and Gridiron were said to have “worked” at the “Craft” since “time immemorial”. Even so, between the burning of the last Templar Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, in Paris in 1314 and the first documented Freemason lodges in London, there are a fair number of blank pages.

The four lodges that met in London in 1717 constituted the formation of the “premier” (first) Grand Lodge, the name given to the administrative authority in each country or state. It also meant that the organisation went public, leading to a dramatic expansion in membership and profile. Five years later a Scottish Presbyterian minister named Anderson wrote The Constitutions of Freemasonry, formalising masonic practice and prohibiting the discussion of politics and sectarian religious topics.

The Constitutions confirmed that all Freemasons must believe in some form of supreme being. (Atheists were not welcome — except in France after 1877.) This meant that each brother could swear to his masonic obligations — of brotherly love, relief (through charity), the search for philosophical truth — on a sacred text of his own choosing. Women were not welcome, although there is an interesting section on the development of Le Droit Humain — a global masonic order, membership of which is available to men and women on equal terms — and “androgynous” lodges in the late 19th century.

What MacNulty makes clear is that symbolism, the search for greater meaning, lies at the heart of Freemasonry. The lodge is a place of ritual dramas. A “rough ashlar” — a raw quarried stone — and its smooth, dressed cousin — the “perfect ashlar” — describe the Freemason before and after enlightenment. Brothers undertake symbolic journeys the length of the room, across a chequerboard floor suggestive of good and evil forces at play in the world. Throughout these ceremonies, the tools of the stonemason’s craft are displayed — set squares, compasses and plumb lines. They are used as metaphors for ideals of morality and right living.

Whatever the readers’ attitude to Freemasonry, MacNulty is a good guide. Those determined to see conspiracy are unlikely to be persuaded, but the illustrations are magnificent and cannot fail to engage, to intrigue, to appeal. And it is this, coupled with our enduring fascination with the power of symbol and arcane secrets, that will make this a volume welcome on a good many bookcases.

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist