I’m not at all sure how many of my readers are aware that this year marks an anniversary of some importance in the western world’s cultural history. Three hundred years ago, in 1717, members of four old lodges of stonemasons that had met in London “since time immemorial” climbed the stair to a private room in the Apple Tree Tavern in London’s Covent Garden neighborhood, and voted to create an umbrella organization, the Grand Lodge. That’s one of the first definite dates in the history of Freemasonry.
I think most of my readers by this point know that I’m a Freemason. Yes, I’m aware that this fact is enough to convince a certain number of people that I’m really one of the sinister space lizards from Epsilon Eridani, or wherever it’s supposed to be, that haunt David Icke’s paranoiac fantasies. A somewhat larger number will take this as proof positive that I’m a Satanist, or a male chauvinist pig, or a member of the worldwide Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy, or whatever their bogeyman du jour happens to be. None of these things happens to be true, but there’s a reason, an important one, why lurid fantasies of absolute evil so often get projected onto Freemasonry; we’ll get to that in a bit.
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