So tonight we’re going to talk about the historical role of Freemasonry the subject was suggested to me by a Tipper whose name I believe is M Fab’s goat isn’t it Leo yes that’s right who asked a question about it and so I was pretty
Sure it was going to come up on the next live since when you ask questions on type they come up on the first live that comes along and so I knew I was going to have to answer this question anyway but since it’s a subject I’ve dealt with in
The story of the coming Century I knew I’d have to answer it anyway but as it’s a subject I’ve dealt within the history of The Next Century I knew I’d have a lot to answer and so I thought it would be a long answer to a question that
Might unbalance the live show live on it since for logically the Tipper in question must be here so welcome M Fabric’s goat to this live chat if he’s live in the chat room in which case he shouldn’t hesitate to stand up and be recognized it’s an interesting subject because people regularly ask me
Questions about it because Freemasonry is a divisive subject which has a certain importance for a certain number of people because it’s an organization with which still exists which still has a certain influence perhaps as much or even more so in private than in public affairs since it can explain
Relationships between people it can explain problems in legal proceedings it can happen so today’s Affair is Freemasonry has this problem it still appears to be an alternative network but one always suspects that its rules take precedence for those who belong to it over the rules of society I for example
People will pass on I don’t know their loyalty to Freemasonry before their professional ethics that sort of thing so that’s why there’s a lot of fantasies or less fantasized things that can also take place with it and so it fascinates a little and then it fascinates too why
Quite simply because it’s a secret society and it’s a very good thing it’s a very good thing to look at the effect of these secret societies of these secret societies can they have one uh so that’s the question we’re going to try and answer this evening Jonathan already
Said on Twitter I don’t remember what he said to me this evening no Freemasonry doesn’t have a decisive role to play since he’s only interested in well all that so that and that makes a good introduction that’s the short answer I can give often when people come to talk
To me about the influence of the about the influence of masonry on the revolution or things like that or in the evolution of the modern world it’s true that I can come up with a rather fasile answer and say for example in revolutions is not essential is not
Decisive but the reality is a little more subtle because in fact the problem is knowing what you’re talking about when you talk about Freemasonry and there are many myths about Freemasonry and its historical role that need to be denounced not as a structure the structure we call Freemasonry didn’t
Play a decisive role but in so far as Freemasonry as it exists with its identity its codes and the ideas it defends must be distinguished from the histor anomic object Freemasonry necessary history and contingent history and so you have necessary Freemasonry I’d like to say and that’s what we’re
We’re going to talk about which is the necessary product of a society that has reached a certain level of evolution Etc and which is going to secrete these new forms and which will secrete these secret societies in the same way as the body secretes certain hormones when
Puberty comes let’s say you can’t point the finger and say it’s the hormone’s fault that I’ve become a man when I’m not I became a man when I was a little boy uh if you’ve got Peter Pan syndrome but then you’ll think all I had to do was suppress those hormones and I
Wouldn’t have grown up and so on it’s true that there are puberty blockers now that we’re doing this but let’s try to keep it abstract and not stretch the metaphor too far the idea is above all to see that it’s not a foreign body that’s suddenly grafted onto a society
And is going to influence it in a certain way it’s not some kind of parasite it’s a secretion of society itself at a certain stage of evolution which in turn has effects as is often the case with historical mechanisms secondly the fact that afro masonry has certain certain orientations and for
Example I know that there are a lot of people Catholics for example who detest afrom masonry and and think that it’s in some kind of war against the church so there’s the whole thing about the idea that it’s a kind of war against the church the whole idea that it’s Satanist
Etc it’s luciferian and which therefore attributes to this kind of struggle uh a whole host of social Evolutions whereas in reality the two go hand in hand and eventually we can consider that afrom masonry acts as a kind of dorone or enzyme if you like which is secreted by
Society to make it evolve in a certain direction to make it evolve in a certain direction but it’s not something that appears out of nowhere and it’s in this sense that it’s necessary and decisive that’s what I’m going to try and explain to you to help you understand that
There’s a subtlety to the historical role of women in masonry it’s not a question of denying what year is one on the other hand it’s about discussing the fact of knowing that she herself is the product of her time is the product of a society society and that if you like
Some of its components are important and others are not that what’s important and what’s decisive is what can be history I that we find in other experiences in other times in other periods in other places and that anything that appears to be a little contingent is not so
Decisive so what parallel can we draw here I was talking about the history of the century to come and that’s very interesting because it’s really a parallel we’ve got to work out a parallel we have with a phenomenon such as women’s masonry which has affected the whole of Western history since it
First developed in England then arrived in France throughout Europe and in the United States so it’s a widespread phenomenon phenomenon in western civilization and the fact is that we find a and particularly in European civilization the fact is that we find an equivalent in the history of Greek
Antiquity to these secret societies the pythagoreans the pythagoreans were likewise a kind of mystical scientific sect and in both cases we’re dealing with the same thing so a few brief historical reminders the Pythagorean school school was founded in the 6th Century BC by Pythagoras of Samos the author of the famous pythagore
Theorem we know how it worked the Egyptians used it but let’s just say that in its formalization it also seems to have in any case we don’t know its origin if it’s pous but it wouldn’t be totally surprising if it were the same man who founded this school and the
Doctrine of this school was naturally the search for knowledge in all Fields but with an extremely elitist idea and so the idea is that at some point you have a society which is sufficiently evolved to to produce a critical mass of people interested in intellectual things
In other words you need to be a little advanced in the process of civilization urbanization and so on and so you’re going to have people who care about knowledge but at the same time are still evolving in societies where knowledge has not the most admired thing in the
World there are still reports of very religious traditional societies and so these are still societies that are stricken by many prohibitions so logically enough these individuals who are numerous enough to form a community will find mechanisms to get together and discuss the subjects subjects that are important to them without the risk of
Being of being prevented from speaking by the stupidity of the crowd and so on that’s the idea behind these kinds of societies and so in order to preserve themselves from the threat of the outside world they are necessarily in other words people learn little by little and as they come to be trusted
They move up the hierarchy in fact the aim of this organization is not to have some sort of conspiratorial role but above all to ensure the security of its members to make sure that the space for discussion and transmission is a bit of a circle of trust if you like at the
Same time in ancient Greece logically when you have a structure like that it doesn’t invent everything from scratch it doesn’t invent everything from scratch it will pick up uh its operating Rules by imitation from societies that already function like that the Hermetic societies and in the case of
Pythagoreanism it’s orphism which was an initiatory religion in ancient Greece which came from the hero orus and was very much focused on the individual and personal choice and here we also find a sign a preoccupation which uh is emerging in societies on the road to civilization IE that the individual
Increasingly the importance of the individual in the midst of the collective so when uh a number of individuals like this grant themselves this importance they want to get together in a society in a safe space in fact which they organize through this system and naturally when you model your
Club on an existing structure it’s not uncommon that the structure you draw inspiration from also has a cultural influence on you in its ways of thinking its cultures and so on by imitation when you find out about them you can tend to pick up inputs from them so that’s what
It did so right from the start you can see that the Pythagorean sect is a system that’s a little mystical scientific I.E there’s both the aspect where we meet to advance knowledge freely in these freeth thinking societies but at the same time we’re in a kind of philosophical philosophical
And spiritual Superior we’d say with the emphasis on being more intelligent than others and therefore having access to higher truths truths the pythagoreans took this as their starting point and I remind you that this was in the 6th Century BC the pythagoreans sought to apply the same thing to the products of
Freemasonry or at least to those things linked to the development of Freemasonry namely thought and thought light the idea was to apply reason to all subjects whether spiritual or scientific so if you already know a little about the origins of Freemasonry you should see some important parallels how Freemasonry
Came into being is still a matter of debate but we know with some certainty that while it is not necessarily the heir to the medieval from the Guilds of medieval Masons that the Freemasons and in particular the Builders of cathedrals I.E people who had professional secrets and kept them thanks to their secrets
And their Club likee nature and with all that the Journeymen the Masters the whole hierarchy of the guilds what’s certain is that uh Freemasons themselves lay claim to this lineage saying that it came from there what we used to call operative Freemasonry I.E uh people who tinkered with things proposing
Speculative Freemasonry which concern those who discerned higher truths but what’s certain is that there’s a clear Link at least on the side Freemasons and what we also know is that the first currents equivalent currents of pythagoreans I.E scientists who wanted to do the same thing I.E to discuss amongst themselves while avoiding things
That could be prejudicial to them in their relationship with the church and so on while these people got together and naturally tried to model themselves a little on the way guilds existed managing secrecy Etc because they could see how it worked and so you had members of the Royal Society from the 17th
Century like the English Academy of Sciences the English Academy of Sciences who naturally fell into these trade organizations and began to imitate all that by analogy they were trying to build a kind of spiritual and intellectual Cathedral for Society for society so as with the pythagoreanism I just mentioned that the origins of
Pythagoreanism are also mystical spiritual scientific in the course of the 18th century Freemasonry developed developed most of its operating methods and rules notably its rights with initiation hierarchy and fundamental principles notably the idea that reason must be applied to everything as you can see the parallel in the way these societies function and
Emerge is quite striking is quite striking in both cases whether it’s the pythagoreans or the Freemasons just as there is this desire to apply reason to everything there is also the desire to apply reason to politics at a time when cities are being created Nations appear
And so the idea that all this must be ordered politically was spreading these societies naturally have both a head start and a part particular interest in seeing how to work in these sectors what to do and what to develop to develop pythagoreans first pythagoreans esteemed
And that’s clear I’d like to say it’s a reflection of the fact that every society tends to project outwards I’d like to say that it’s a reflection of the fact that every society has a tendency to project outwards what it profoundly is I.E the idea that these operating rules should apply everywhere
The idea is that power is like knowledge and must therefore be entrusted mainly to an elite and not to everyone that not everyone has access to it and so it seems that Pythagoras’s idea was that the right regime was naturally an aristocracy preferably a learned aristocracy uh it’s important to
Remember that at the time Pythagoras of Samos was speaking most Greek cities were ruled by the old landed aristocracy and the fact is that when Freemasonry was born we were also in the last ages of the aristocracy of the western nobility nobility which obviously found in this idea of intellectual aristocracy
A way of renewing its own legitimacy at a time when generally speaking the evolution towards absolute monarchy and the rise of the Bourgeois as a class tended to delegitimize it so basically Pythagorean political thought was in fact modeled on on Pythagorean conceptions of geometry I.E that everything had to be based on Harmony
And perfectly regulated in society what’s interesting about the pythagoreans is that they not only they reflected on this in all the cities to which they belonged but some of their branches have uh took an active part in political life this was particularly the case in Magna Gracia in southern Italy I
Told you about Magna Gracia when I talked about Latin America in uh Magna Gracia which was the main place where they settled the pythagoreans were the most active perhaps more so than in Greece itself and one place in particular where they succeeded in taking power at one point was Crotona in
The 5th Century where they succeeded in taking power and running the city and it didn’t go so well as the people ended up massacring them nevertheless there are places where they acted and places where they managed to have an influence and what’s pretty clear and here we’ll have
To stop for 2 minutes is that uh we think they had an influence on clanes in particular clanes you know was the man who definitively established democracy in Athens in 510 BC after the end of the tyranny of Epic estres I.E the descendants of epic yres who had taken
Power just after Sol’s reforms and kon’s reforms were clearly rationalizing reforms instead of maintaining in place the old tribal and Territorial and territorial divisions of the city of Athens kistin decided to implement the ADM system which would also divide up the trais I.E a rational division that ignored any tradition of population or
Of to standardize everything within the city and all this went hand inand with the establishment of isonomy I.E equal citizenship for all so why is this interesting because as we shall see for Freemasonry the influence of freemasonry’s ideas grew hand inand with the enlightenment which is why many
People in the Catholic tradition accused the Freemasons of having been at the origin of the Enlightenment which then destroyed the influence of the church Freemasonry also carried its ideas of rationality and I recall Robespierre the goddess of reason all those ideas During the Revolution which were put forward by
People who moreover put an end ah create French citizenship abolish privileges abolish the social order of an unan regime regime and tried to form this people this Republic one and indivisible to divide it up into departments that is to say into geographical circumscriptions which would have
Nothing to do with history nothing to do with the people to the people but to purely rational considerations rational considerations and by also introducing censal suffrage which came with it and thus replacing faing the traditional distinctions of society I.E the Society of order by measurable measurable criteria notably money so why is this
Interesting well because you see of course that this political fits in perfectly with what the pythagoreans and Freemasons were trying to achieve in their day so it’s easy to think that they were the ones who influenced this idea and that it triumphed but in reality if you make a little
Intellectual effort you’ll see once again that ideas are in things as I often say that is that uh from the moment when the nation state appears which is the framework of the national Revolution Movement by the time we reach that stage and of course the importance of the idea of nation
Triumphs above all with the idea of associating it with the idea that there is only one set of citizens who are all equal before the law and therefore have the same dignity and this means that you have a mass which by definition must be distinguished in a new way and these
Distinctions are sought in reason because reason alone respects equal dignity because if you keep the traditional Heritage the heritage of orders and so on these are precisely the things that appear to be anti-rational since they don’t depend on objective criteria but are simply there if you like being the product of History so
What we’re really seeing is that there’s more of a a convergence or community of thought between the initial preoccupation of these secret societies which from the outset push towards rationalization because in reality they are composed exclusively of people who belong to the most educated part of the population and naturally the most
Educated part of the population is also the most rational the most rational rationality is explicable and therefore admissible unlike things that are inherited from history and which appear to be fundamentally unjust such as the Privileges of the nobility and so on so reality is when Clon has made his
Reforms on the one hand we can probably say that he was influenced by the pythagoreans but on the other hand we can also say that clenis and the pythagoreans are are the product of the same state of society that call for the same solutions to satisfy the greatest
Number so it’s very difficult to speak of an influence of one on the other we can certainly say that the work of the pythagoreans enabled these ideas to spread more rapidly but if you like it’s exactly the same problem as if you were asking yourself the question of the
Influence of protestantism on the birth of capitalism as you know Max Weber’s idea in the ethics of capitalism was that protestantism ultimately favored capitalism and then we learned from people like Ferdinand brodel who explained that yes but it’s strange because capitalism had already appeared a century or two before in the Italian
Italian city states Florence Venice Etc which were catholic and not at all Protestant so what was the problem the reality is that when you look at the way City States became properly capitalist you see that they generated their own protestantism in a way be it the hites
In Prague or savonarola who was also a former Protestant in Florence and so the reality is that for protestantism people who who were already capitalists or enterprising who are people who are less who are less inclined to social submission who are more inclined to lead who are more inclined to research to
Innovate all these people very naturally they are the ones who have finally secreted generated a vision of their own religion that would not put them under the thumb of the clergy because they didn’t want to obey the clergy and so protestantism is in fact the formation of Christianity by and for people who
Didn’t want to stay in Catholicism because it weighed down on them a whole host of social and political constraints they simply didn’t want so it’s not that protestantism helped generate a kind of thing it’s that the countries that were the most advanced on the road to these things tended to um protestantism and
Above all when it was in sufficiently large areas and sufficiently removed from the influence of the church it was able to develop if you take Northern Italy it was surrounded by cathol powers that quickly put things right in northern Europe in Scandinavia in Germania there wasn’t this capacity for
External pressure and so it was able to develop strongly and so uh if you like we’re dealing with the same kind of idea I.E the truth is that you have a substratum which is roughly speaking the state of evolution of society uh with characters within it who have a certain
Number of interests and who will self-generate for themselves the ideas that suit their way of life and so for this Poli iCal Evolution Freemasonry and the pythagoreans both had the same role I.E to parallel the evolution of society and often acted as a kind of thermometer
Uh since they were always a little ahead of the game uh since they were representative of the most intellectual part of society and therefore of the ideas that this part would naturally develop as soon as it was detached from the constraints of the society around it so a little additional parallel which is
Interesting and reinforces the parallelism is the fact that in most countries of the world Freemasonry didn’t play a role after that in other words T was in fact the in other words Freemasonry evolved into two currents on the one hand there were those who favored the enlightenment but also
Reason reason Above All Else and a militant desire to secularize society this led to the emergence of two currents Freemasonry or regular Freemasonry which is more traditionalist maintains the obligation for its members to believe in God and rejects political debate conversely there’s the liberal obedience which is Progressive and
Rejects the principles of the other saying that you have to be very involved politically and in political and religious debates and so the first the regular is the one that has remained preponderant throughout the world in fact it’s the one that has remained the most important in France on the other
Hand and this is a French specificity it’s the second one that became the most powerful very quickly during the second half of the the 19th century and into the 20th the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century particularly as you know under
The third Republic the grand Oran of France represents Disobedience which in the year of the Lord abandoned the obligation for its members to acknowledge the existence of God and so this was the real dissension with so-called regular Freemasonry which continues to believe that its members must be at least theists and so one
Thing that’s very interesting is that in France we had this type of Freemasonry which was was very active particularly in the political Arena since it said that roughly speaking Freemasonry held the country together during the third Republic and what’s very interesting is that it was at the Forefront of all the
Anti-clerical battles with the separation of church and state and so on so it’s in France that Freemasonry has probably had the most assertive and notorious political role much more so than in any other country and precisely because of this in reaction a virulent anti- Masonic virence and thus at the
Time of the the vichi regime in France you had the anti-masonic hunt which in my opinion corresponds to what happened to the pythagoreans of cretona in other words where the Freemasons played an extremely important political role this led to a political reaction on the part of the population it’s an interesting
Parallel within a parallel and beyond that Freemasonry had another role to play as did the pythagoreans by being Circles of thought of free thought where intellectuals could go and talk freely about their discoveries or their intellectual research and so it also had a role to play in the birth of Science
And it’s in this way that Freemasonry which was very favorable or very interested in alchemy fitted in very well with its narrative and then in the alchemical quest if you like it became a whole element of the Masonic idea you see Alchemy is the Quest for the philosopher stone which is supposed to
Transform lead into gold and so in the Quest for speculative Freemasonry and the idea of initiation the idea was that in the end every human being is made of lead and must work throughout his life to transform himself into gold and so in the end the philosopher stone would be
The secret and the Masonic approach par Excellence but then on a strictly practical level it also encouraged a lot of people like that a lot of these members to take an interest in this kind of work but on a strictly practical level it also encouraged a lot of people
Like that a lot of these members to take an interest in these questions and so as time went by societies also became more secular thanks to the encouragement of the Sciences whether it was Greek society or european Society at the time and this brings me to the final stage in
The evolution of these secret societies as they evolve little by little they end up becoming become obsolete because by D of working like this on societies especially as they were just a little ahead of the evolution of societies that societies were catching up with them well the societies that saw their birth
That secreted them end up by in such a state that everything that made the secret necessary the secrecy the initiation the setting up of these initial conditions as we were saying earlier has disappeared because when you end up in completely secularized societies societies where reason is very important where science has become a
Great value for society the club naturally loses some of its raon Detra since people can talk openly about any subject they like that it’s even more effective than talking about it in a hermetically sealed system as it allows ideas to travel more quickly and yet conversely as these institutions tend to
Age a little they begin to develop their own interests which may be contradictory to that of their precept and in particular as they are forms of Brotherhood this creates what I was saying earlier problems of mutual Aid which can be on much more lowlevel
Issues I need help to do such and such a thing I’d like to get such and such a thing from the state allow me to build something like this and so as you’re part of the club ultimately the club more and more its interest becomes that it becomes more scientific research
Search more all that because quite simply people who are looking for that who are looking for the scientific Spirit are no longer pushed to come and join you and so I think there’s a drop in intellectual quality Freemasonry very important over the last century because of that because people who want to do
Science they don’t go into Freemasonry anymore they go and join the cnrs no my brother it’s this kind of idea it’s no longer necessary to evolve in this kind of thing it’s necessary to evolve if you want to be in a network of influence which is not at all the same thing and
Which is totally removed from the initial function of the thing and so at the same time these institutions have a tendency to try and develop a new ideology which always puts them at the Forefront of the social body and this is indeed what we’ve seen because in fact Freemasonry like the pythagoreans in
Their day in their evolution continues to be ahead of society ahead of society in their ideological Evolution I.E they’re a little ahead of the game so what we found for example is that stoicism which is the Cosmopolitan IDE ology of late Antiquity the city of the
Wise man is the world so you have to be a citizen of the world Etc well stoicism is pythagoreanism we know that a certain number of the great stoics were originally pythagoreans or at least pythagoreans I they were inspired by Pythagorean thought from Pythagorean thought and therefore naturally uh if
You’re both a Pythagorean with all that that implies in terms of political ideas organization according to reason Etc and a stoic I.E you believe that the city of the wise man is the world you’ll think that orderly rational political organization should also be applied on a global scale and so you’ll become
Advocates of the establishment of a world State and that sort of thing quite naturally in the modern West Freemasonry has also followed the same pattern since there was already a slight Resurgence of the stoic idea that all men are citizens of the world and this was expressed a
Great deal in lodges already at the root of the refusal of religious debate there was this idea of fraternity over and above divisions and nationalities since there were also International Lodge exchanges exchanges and today we can say that Freemasonry especially in its liberal aspect has accepted what we call the
Mundialista I.E the idea that we need to go beyond Nations and give mankind a single government to promote all forms of exchange erase differences and thus eliminate sources of conflict and create a rationalized World Government so once again it’s a bit like the birth of Nations and their rationalization but we
Can see that it’s a little ahead of the game but not so much in terms of the general atmosphere so to speak and that in any case it’s less a driving force than a companion at the very least we tend to ensure that some of the most educated members of network societies
Who tend to reflect on these issues naturally come to these conclusions before any other part of society is is of Freemasonry I’m inclined to say that it’s essentially this so we shouldn’t think of it as a kind of conspiracy organization we shouldn’t think of it as an institution that would have changed
The face of the world that would have changed the world that wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for Freemasonry because if it hadn’t been for Freemasonry it wouldn’t have happened if there hadn’t been Freemasonry as we know it there would have been something very similar since
As we’ve seen most of the fundamental characteristics of Freemasonry uh that I’ve described to you were already fundamental charactera istics of the pythagoreans and so if Freemasonry as we know it hadn’t existed there would have been another organization that would have grown out of things themselves and
Out of society as it was because as I said there were a certain number of needs to which these types of structures came to respond and uh well if it hadn’t been as it was there would have been something else but something else that would have been very similar because in
All the fundamental characteristics it would have been the same thing so it’s not an absolute answer in fact the question of what was the historical role of of Freemasonry there you have the elements of an answer it depends on what exactly you mean by the question I think I’ve clearly described the historical
Role of Freemasonry As We Know It And as some may condemn it it’s very limited in relation to the adjustment that it was able to bring about in relation to the adjustment it makes in relation to what had to be anyway because of the much more fundamental evolution of the whole
Of civilization in the end Europe that’s all I could say in this short present ation
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