Monday, April 25, 2005
THE ROSY CROSS AND FREEMASONRY
A history of the origins of Freemasonry is presented at the website of the Grand Lodge Alpina of Switzerland - The origins. It includes the members of the Rosy Cross. Because the passage is presented in a single paragraph which is difficult to read, I've taken the liberty of breaking it out into several paragraphs:
With this "Renaissance", which marked the era of the "great discoveries", there appeared scientific break-throughs, and, with this, a new and more rational approach to the world knowledge. The birth of this modern scientific thought, between the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 18th century, was represented by the Rosy Cross movement.
Generated by leading thinkers who were, amongst others, Michael Maier (1568-1622), Robert Fludd (1574-1637), Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), Jean-Valentin Andreae (1586-1654), this movement went off in search of lost wisdom which, once found again, would permit a new understanding of the Divine, of the universe and of human nature. For that, these thinkers depended on the study and development of the sciences, in which mathematics and especially geometry, mother of architecture, were considered to be of the foremost.
Several societies of the Rosy Cross were therefore created all about in Europe, but notably in London, where Alchemy was at its peak and where the followers of the Rosy Cross played an essential role in the founding of the Academy of Sciences, which is now called the Royal Society. A number of the Rosy Cross members were also Freemasons, such as Christopher Wren, Superintendent of the Royal buildings; Robert Moray, chemist and mathematician, first President of the Royal Society; and the historian, Elias Ashmole, who created a society having for purpose the symbolic edification of Salomon's Temple, which being interpreted according to the Rosy Cross's ideal, the Temple unifier of sciences.
The famous Royal Society, in which the Rosy Cross, Isaac Newton and the physicist and cofounder of the Grand Lodge of London, Théophile Désaguliers, took part, was then one of the melting pots in the synthesis of the Rosy Cross and Freemasons.
The members of the Rosy Cross were considered from the beginning by the founders of modern Freemasonry as "Brothers belonging to the same Fraternity or Order". It is this revival of ideas, brewing up notably in the Lodges, from which was born "modern" Freemasonry, described as "speculative" at the beginning of the 18th century.
The Canonbury Masonic Research Center website also mentions Elias Ashmole in connection with John Dee. You will find the mention in the public lecture scheduled for May 18, 2005 by David Rankine, an "author, researcher, and practising magician". The title of the lecture is "The Angelic Legacy of Dr. John Dee". From the website:
The importance of Dr John Dee's skrying work with Edward Kelley, and the subsequent Angelic material received, is now well known. In the late 19th century the Enochian system was revived within the Golden Dawn by its founders Westcott and Mathers who were also prominent members of the Societas Rosicruciania In Anglia. Subsequently this system of working with Angels is now acknowledged to be one of the most interesting areas of modern esoteric practice. Current research reveals the level of practice of Dee's Angelic material by magicians throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Dr John Dee's work, was preserved by such men as Sir Hans Sloane and Elias Ashmole, and expanded further by Dr Thomas Rudd. The role of the Enochian system within the Grimoire tradition of the Renaissance will be considered in detail, as will its continuing influence on the subsequent esoteric traditions that have come into being in more recent times.
Robert Macoy (1815-1895), in his book General history, cyclopedia and dictionary of freemasonry, currently reprinted by Outlet Book Company, Inc. as A Dictionary of Freemasonry, offers a timeline of the founding of the Craft. The entry for 1646 reads as follows:
The Masonic corporations in England, in which for a long time the majority had been composed of learned men, artists, men eminent for knowledge and position, who were received as honorary members, and termed accepted Masons, no longer busied themselves with the material and primary object of the association. It was at this time that the celebrated antiquary Elias Ashmole, who founded the museum at Oxford, having been initiated, rectified and composed the formula for the society of Rose-Croix, consisting of ceremonies based on historical allusions, and the communication of signs of recognition after the manner of the Freemasons. This labor inspired him with the idea of composing new rituals for the Masons, and accordingly he composed and substituted for the rituals in use a new mode of initiation, based, in part, on old Anglo-Saxon and Syriac manuscripts, partly on the Egyptian mysteries, and on what he supposed to have been the form of initiation among the Roman architects. These rituals were adopted by the London lodges, and soon after throughout England. (p. 25-26)
Dr. John Dee, then, is an historical figure with a strong input into Freemasonry through his admirer Elias Ashmole.
I recently blogged some of the material from the ninth chapter of the Calder Thesis MS online at the John Dee Society website. The tenth chapter mentions Elias Ashmole in the following comments:
Moreover, Dee himself had never wholly abandoned the practice of scrying, though he never found an assistant so fluent and satisfactory as Kelly had proved (49) and it is doubtful whether such an occupation could be kept entirely secret. Renewed rumours had led him in 1595, just before he was presented with his wardenship to print a public letter, to the archbiship of Canterbury, which had perhaps only served to give further currency to the slanders. It is one of those works which Ashmole spoke of later with italicised eloquences: "His great ability in astrologie and the more secret parts of learning (to which he had a strong propensity and unwearied Fancy) drew from the Envious and Vulgar many rash, lewd and lying Scandalls upon his most honest and justifiable Philosophicall Studies; and many times forced him out of the bitternesse in his Soule (which was even Crucified with the malice of impudent Tongues) most seriously and fervently to Apologise." ...
The subsequent fortunes of his name have been related in a previous chapter, but it may be repeated that already in the half century after Dee's death it figured in a multitude of different contexts. His son fostered the legends of his alchemical achievements, scientists occasionally still referred to his work on the new star, technicians, popular writers on mathematics, and educationalists continued to speak with gratitude and respect of his edition of Euclid, and the annotations and preface he had appended to it, the last of which was to be twice reprinted; his manuscript on the calendar was cited with approval when the prospect of reform recurred periodically as a matter of astronomical and public interest in England; some of his proposals in General and Rare Memorials, it seems probable excited the interest and approval of Sir Harry Vane; connoisseurs of the occult such as Ashmole and Digby assiduously collected his manuscripts in this kind (72), and very early the Rosicrucians busied themselves in annexing Dee's memory to embellish their own sect, and in employing the Monas as a shewstone to reflect the contents of their own imaginations.
It would seem, then, that a man who was involved with spiritualism, who employed the services of a channeler who used a gazing glass, was also a major influence on those who ultimately founded the Masonic Lodge.
Dee's channeler, Edward Kelly, according to chapter nine in the MS, never trusted the spirits they contacted:
Not Dee, but Kelly alone, ever entertained doubts as to the nature of the spirits. Dee had frequently to reassure him, and indeed pledged his soul as to their truth. For when the first intimations were received that the spirits desired their "cross matching," Dee wrote "Hereupon we were in great amazement and grief of minde, that so hard, and (as it yet seemed to me) so impure a Doctrine, was pounded and enjoyned unto us, of them whom I always (from the beginning hitherto) did judge and esteem undoubtedly to be good Angels: And had unto E.K. [Kelly] offered my soul as a pawn to discharge E. K. his crediting of them, as the good and faithful ministers of Almighty God." But in general Dee's credulity, if it is so to be called, was only in proportion to the spirits' promises to him; and he seems to have regarded it only as a test of his faith when they proved so niggardly in small material matters, certainly never doubting that they had power to perform what they declared, in spite of the adverse indications that continually occurred.
Elias Ashmole has not lost his Masonic appeal. In the current issue of "Freemasonry Today" - Issue No. 31 - Referring to an article in this issue Michael Baigent tells us:
Ashmole had a life-long interest in alchemy and in 1652 published a compilation of alchemical texts....Despite his scholarship, his interest was not just intellectual, he knew the secret of the Art. He knew that it involved an experience; one that would change a life. In his introduction to his book he revealed that any true lover of wisdom, "...rejoyceth not so much that he can make Gold and Silver, or the Divells to become subject to him, as that he sees the Heavens open, the Angels of God Ascending and Descending, and that his own Name is fairely written in the Book of life."...
So we should spend a moment listening to Elias Ashmole reaching out to us across the centuries. Ashmole is telling us that the physical rewards of effort, the wealth or the power, are nothing compared to the experience of seeing 'the Heavens open'. He knew more than most of his contemporaries that this is true initiation. But he also knew that it comes after a journey, one which is informed by symbolism. The student becomes master of his Craft but the temple he might build is nothing unless the Divine should fill it.
Some of us are fortunate enough to have had the heavens embrace us with its sudden burning light; but most of us on the journey towards the morning star long simply for that brief moment when everything stops, as though reality, in its rush and haste, briefly misses a gear; when the screens which separate this world from the other draw slightly apart.
The same issue of "Freemasonry Today" offers a review by Baigent of Tobias Churton's book Magus: The Invisible Life of Elias Ashmole. The review offers a brief biography indicating Ashmole became a Freemason on October 16, 1646. He is "often dismissed as a dilettante by masons who should know better" and he was a Hermetic philosopher and astrologer. In describing his religion Beigent writes "his religion was cosmic, Gnostic and personal. This was, I believe, his ideal Church for England. Churton writes almost wistfully as if he too believes such would be an ideal Church. As wistfully, I find myself in agreement."
Ashmole, following in the footsteps of John Dee who employed the services of a channeler to contact angels who were thought to be devils by the said channeler, was one of the first recorded non-craft members of the English Lodge. Today Michael Baigent is enthusiastic for a religion focused on contacting these same angels, and believes Lodge members should take Ashmole seriously.
If the Catholic Church forbids the use of gazing devices and seeking to contact disembodied spirits, how likely is it that what Dee, and subsequently Ashmole, and presumably Baigent or other members of the Lodge contact, is not a fallen spirit? Which really comes down to the fact that Masonry, or some branches of Masonry, or irregular lodges, or clandestine Masonry...who on the outside can really know?...is an organization in the business of promoting channeling as a form of "religion."
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
