Modern Freemasonry was born in the early eighteenth century as an association devoted to sociability, tolerance and moral improvement. Within a few decades, however, it developed an extraordinary variety of degrees, rites and legends, many of them rich in esoteric content: Templar chivalry, alchemy, Kabbalah, theurgy. Understanding this evolution is essential to understanding how Western esotericism reached the modern age.
Origins: the Grand Lodge of London
Stonemasons' lodges had existed for centuries in Scotland and England, and in the seventeenth century they had begun to admit members from outside the trade. The traditional date for modern Freemasonry is 1717, when four London lodges are said to have united into a Grand Lodge; historians now debate some details of this account, which rests on later sources.
In 1723 the Constitutions drawn up by the Presbyterian minister James Anderson were published, with a legendary history of the craft and the rules of the lodges. English Freemasonry originally had two degrees, Entered Apprentice and Fellow Craft, soon joined by that of Master Mason, tied to the legend of Hiram, the architect of Solomon's Temple.
Ramsay's oration and the chivalric legend
In France Freemasonry quickly became popular among the aristocracy. In 1737 the Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay, a Scot serving the Jacobite cause, prepared a famous oration linking the origin of Freemasonry not to stonemasons but to the crusading knights who in the Holy Land had supposedly united the art of building with religion.
This idea opened the way to a proliferation of high degrees, often called "Scottish", added to the three symbolic degrees. Each degree offered a new legend, a new secret, a new stage on an initiatory path.
In 1738 Pope Clement XII condemned Freemasonry with the bull In eminenti, the first of a long series of ecclesiastical condemnations.
The Templar Strict Observance
In Germany one of the most influential systems took shape, the Strict Observance, promoted by Baron Karl Gotthelf von Hund. It rested on the idea that the Templars, suppressed in the fourteenth century, had survived in secret and handed down their order through Freemasonry. Members received Latin knightly names and owed obedience to "unknown superiors".
The Strict Observance spread across much of central Europe, but the impossibility of proving the Templar descent or of identifying these superiors led to a growing crisis.
Martinez de Pasqually and the Elus Coëns
In France an enigmatic figure, Martinez de Pasqually, founded around the middle of the century the order of Knight Masons Elect Priests of the Universe, the Elus Coëns. His teaching, set out in the Treatise on the Reintegration of Beings, described the fall of primordial man and the possibility of a "reintegration" into the original condition.
The Elus Coëns practised a genuine theurgy: complex ritual operations linked to the cycles of the year, intended to obtain signs of the presence of beneficent spirits. The name Coën, from the Hebrew for "priest", expressed this priestly dimension.
Martinez's disciples included Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, who later abandoned theurgy for an inner, contemplative path known as the "way of the heart" and signed his works as "the Unknown Philosopher", and Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, a silk merchant from Lyon.
Willermoz and the Rectified Scottish Rite
Willermoz worked to preserve Martinez's teaching by placing it within a stable Masonic structure. He took part in the Convent of Lyon in 1778 and then in the great Convent of Wilhelmsbad in 1782, which gathered delegates from all over Europe to decide the future of the Strict Observance.
At Wilhelmsbad the claim of historical descent from the Templars was abandoned. The system devised by Willermoz was adopted, the Rectified Scottish Rite, which included the order of Beneficent Knights of the Holy City. The content of Martinez's doctrine was passed on discreetly in secret classes, while the chivalric form remained as a symbolic language.
Other esoteric systems
The century saw the birth of many other rites and groups:
- the Gold- and Rosicrucians in Germany, combining alchemy, Christian piety and a hierarchical structure;
- the Philalethes of Paris, who organised congresses to investigate esoteric knowledge;
- the various degree systems from which the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite emerged in the nineteenth century;
- Cagliostro's Egyptian rite, which also admitted women.
For Studio Esoterico Cornelio this period matters because it shows that modern Western initiation was formed through the search for a ritual language able to convey an inner path, rather than through the historical continuity of a single organisation.
In short
- Modern Freemasonry organised itself in London in the early eighteenth century; Anderson's Constitutions appeared in 1723.
- Ramsay's 1737 oration encouraged the rise of chivalric high degrees.
- Von Hund's Templar Strict Observance spread across Europe but fell into crisis.
- Martinez de Pasqually founded the Elus Coëns; Willermoz passed on his teaching in the Rectified Scottish Rite, adopted at Wilhelmsbad in 1782.