Tobias Churton
FREEMASONRY - THE REALITY
Published by Lewis Masonic, 2007.
Pp. xxvii,470.
Price, £19.99
ISBN 978-0-85318-275-7
Available from the publisher:
Lewis Masonic
About the Author:
Graduating in theology from Brasenose College, Oxford, Tobias Churton came to the fore in 1987 with the award-winning Channel 4 Gnostics TV series and accompanying best-selling book.
His subsequent books The Golden Builders, Gnostic Philosophy, The Magus of Freemasonry and Kiss of Death - The True History of the Gospel of Judas have earned Churton respect from around the world as a man at the forefront in both the academic and popular dissemination of Gnostic, Hermetic, Rosicrucian and masonic knowledge.
Appointed Honorary Fellow of Exeter University in 2005, he is Lecturer in Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism at the UK’s only MA Course in Western Esotericism at Exeter’s Department of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Churton is also a novelist, composer and filmmaker. His films A Mighty Good Man and The True Story of the Rosicrucians have been released on DVD by Lewis Masonic.
Tobias Churton was founder editor of the respected journal Freemasonry Today and has lectured at the Canonbury Masonic Research Centre’s annual international conference. He is currently working on a new book on the origins and development of monotheism, as well as a political thriller set in the Middle East.
Introduction by Tobias Churton
Always read the small print. Things are revealed when the thought behind them is clear and true. Those who promise 'revelations' always seem to be holding something back; usually, it is ignorance.
There appear to be three types of book published on Freemasonry. First, those books that cater for lodge members -ritual books, inspiring stories from masonic history, any number of works on masonic medals, costume and memorabilia. Second, books that use elements of masonic lore to weave speculative stories -stories often couched in sensationalist terms. Fun to read, they tend to obscure more valid stories behind them. The road of excess leads to the palace of confusion.
On the whole, books written for practising Freemasons tend to play down symbolism, spirituality and esoteric content. The stress is usually on cementing community and relationships. In speculative books, however, the typical masonic experience -turning up for monthly meetings and raising funds for charity -seems to get lost altogether, such is the barrage of half-baked, pseudo-mystical titillation and conspiracy theory. The 'revelations' fail to satisfy the curiosity evoked; there is no revelation -only the hint of one.
These two classes of book are flatly opposed by a third class purporting to 'reveal the truth' behind Freemasonry. These books are usually hostile to the craft. Authors of these books tend to be influenced by the climate of conspiracy of the second class, but find in the mythic confusion nothing but dark intentions. It is not unknown for hostile authors -those who suppose Freemasons to be involved in immoral activities of covert influence and control -to be forced to invent a kind of super-class of 'men in black'/I' gnomes of Zurich' or eminences grises to explain the obvious innocence and ordinariness of Freemasons.
The first known 'exposure' of the craft derives from religious fanaticism in the late 17th century. You might think there was nothing left to 'expose'! Hostile exposures have been enormously influential. They have given Freemasonry the reputation of being a 'secret society'. Secrets are taken to be synonymous with conspiracy.
We all have secrets; are we all conspirators?
It is not unknown to hear that the three degrees of Freemasonry are perfectly OK (if you like that sort of thing), but the 'dodgy' stuff can be found among members of 'higher degrees'. These degrees -Knights
Templar, Rose Croix, and so on -attract interest as a result -though not, I observe, huge influxes of new recruits who actually want to experience the real thing!
We like our fictions, but they do tend to colour our perception of everyday life. When a thing is magnified, its true proportion is distorted. Monsters were portrayed like medieval devils or hideously deformed people until the microscope gave us magnified images of spiders, beetles and microorganisms. Cinema completed the process, by magnifying the innocent and natural into the scary and supernatural. The invasion of the GIANT spiders! Magnification is a benefit to science, but when applied to popular culture, it changes our sense of the real.
Freemasonry has been magnified. It is persistently presented outside of its true proportions. To be sure, you will find more secrecy in the workings of elected governments (often with very serious implications for life, limb and pocket) than you will ever find in the running of masonic fraternities.
You get the idea.
Given the extent of so much dis-information and bad information, I thought it worthwhile to attempt an open look at the reality of Freemasonry. It has been a valuable experience to serve as lecturer on Freemasonry at Exeter University's Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. Dealing with the interests of students who naturally want to know everything has helped me to take up the objective position so rarely, if ever, found among writers on the subject. Students, on the whole, want the facts. They demand objectivity, fairness, and a sense of humour.
There have been many defences of Freemasonry, attacks on Freemasonry, investigations of masonic history, analyses of masonic philosophy, and many useful detailed approaches to the evidence, mostly written by masons themselves. What I have been unable to find is an objective, standard account that yet has the courage to go beneath the surface of the 'official version'.
There are many reasons for this lack of a standard work, not the least of which is the fact that masons have themselves long been unable to satisfy questions put to them on any number of aspects of the craft. And if they cannot give you the answers, who can?
In Germany, under Hider, the Nazi High Command decided that Freemasons were all part of a 'Masonic- Jewish conspiracy' to dominate the world -and fascists were not slow in publishing this propaganda wherever they could, especially in the Middle East, which still suffers from its effects. Everyone who wants to take over the world will tell you they're only trying to save you from a fate worse than them!
Nevertheless, in spite of being so absolutely certain of their imagined conspiracy, the Nazi SS still had to commission a serious study of the subject because it lacked hard information. Like so many bad historians, first they had the theory then they looked for the 'evidence' to try and back it up.
Across the English Channel, and in our own time, Chris Mullin MP launched a Commons Select Committee investigation of Freemasonry in Britain roughly co-incident with Tony Blair's ascension to power in 1997. Grand Secretary Michael Higham's videotaped interrogation by members of the committee stimulated some (non-mason) observers to write to the papers comparing the outrageous scenes with the anti-communist excesses of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthyite era.
When asked by journalist Doug Pickford what his chief source of information on Freemasonry was, Chris Mullin MP cited Martin Short's undeniably hostile expose, Inside the Brotherhood. Whatever else its merits, Short's book was not an objective academic study.
It is often said that truth is stranger than fiction. We can try to aim at the truth, but sometimes the evidence is difficult to understand, or to interpret definitively. Facts alone may tell us very little; they do not stand in isolation. Motives are seldom easy to ascertain. We rarely have the facility of forensic evidence, and, to be sure, we do not always need it. After all, we are not attempting to nail a conviction before the evidence 'goes cold'. Most of the evidence for -or against -Freemasonry went cold a very long time ago, and we cannot, with the best will in the world, revivify corpses. Nor can a book of this size hope to include every fact or detail of the subject that some readers might want or expect to find.
My aim is to establish a standard overview of a vast, complex -and fascinating -subject that does not duck the most difficult questions. If I can convey some of that genuine fascination while at the same time giving interested readers a clear picture of the reality of Freemasonry, I shall hope to be acquitted of all crimes against either truth or prejudice.
