Masonic symbols

Tools of the Grand Geometer, square and compass. This is zinc (Birmingham Cemetery, Erie Co., O.).

In pre-capitalist Europe, trades of workers formed guilds (unions). These mediæval guilds were also social units, often with festivals, group benefits and ceremonies. Stone masons build stone walls.

'Free and Accepted Masons' became a fraternity, and a secret society that used mason guilds/lodges as a model. Their evidence of their existence before 1717 is scanty. Many masons are often touchy about their 'craft' membership. They believe in their metaphors. And how are these metaphors created? By members with fanciful imaginations who write poems, scripts, rituals and such. They are then taught in lectures. Over time members accept them as history.

These creations include the role of masons in the building of King Solomon's Temple (c. 1000 BC). Masons work in stone. Solomon's Temple, had some stone, but was largely built in wood. The Crusades in the Holy Land were c. aD 1096-1292. Certain christian military orders were created. The Knights Templar were, perhaps, the most famous. They were extinguished by the french King Philip IV, and a french pope Clement V, from 1307-1314.

Records begin to start from 1717 from a coming together of four pre-existing lodges. I would start looking from that point backwards, not from four hundred, or twenty-seven hundred, or for some the pyramid builders of seven thousand years ago.

A starting point to go forward in time would be when did stone cutting, and building slow down in Britain? or pick up? There was civil and religious war and military dictatorship from 1639 to 1660. A Restoration of monarchy then came. In 1666 London burned, its cathedral and eighty-eight parish churches went.

If one wants to find a real origin of 'freemasonry', one needs to find when did laboring organisations transform (or was borrowed) into an organisation that did not labor, but used metaphors. Clearly real masons, and those we call speculative 'freemasons' are different. In 1717 the latter emerged in London, in Scotland in 1736 (but the Scots have records from real masons to just before 1600).

From fanciful and occupational sources symbols were borrowed. The tools of the trade are few. The borrowings from religious iconography are many. What a symbol means in religion, and what it means in masonry are often different. So is a particular symbol religious or masonic? In isolation one doesn't know. Also, so many organisations that came after the success of masonry took masonic signs for their own, e.g. the Orange Order, and Mormonism. Some are easily defined as masonic:

32nd degree scottish rite mason

he was crowned a 33° mason