The novel Grand Lodge began to assume control of Free Masons’ Lodges after 1717, establishing new lodges of its own regulated brand. The Grand Lodge had its own far-reaching, and largely unspoken, agenda. Part of that agenda appears to have been to establish a regulated fellowship where Christian denomination, with all its divisive political consequences, would not influence a lodge’s ideal amity and harmony. You must be a brother to a brother regardless of your, or his, religious upbringing, be it Catholic, Protestant, or anything else. While it may be assumed that such mutual tolerance was already a characteristic of some British lodges, the new Grand Lodge went further, asserting that there existed, and had always existed, a “religion on which all men could agree” and “all men” included Jews and Muslims and Hindus and all believers in God. Before Abraham, the Supreme Being or “Great Architect” had made a covenant with all humankind, symbolized in the story of Noah and the rainbow; Man had gone astray, God had stayed the same. This idea answered a specific political, as well as spiritual, need of the time—and perhaps our time as well.
Given this perspective, traditional Christian feast days and saints were perceived by the framers of new regulations as sticking out like sore thumbs, binding British Masonry to its Catholic, prescientific, pre“enlightened” traditions: a world unreformed, a world conveniently to be cast off as “Gothick,” that is, dark, irrational, unenlightened. Overtly Christian references familiar to pre–Grand Lodge Free Masons would be gradually removed from authorized Masonic ritual and commentary.
We can thus understand why those resisting the new order might have made a point of emphasising the “St. John’s Men” tradition. They probably felt that their Master—or at the least, sacred patron—was being relegated, even expunged. This phenomenon becomes strikingly visible when we look at some of the critical changes to Masonic regulations that took place in 1723 and fifteen years later, in 1738. One can, I think, see behind the apparently innocuous words to glimpse a distinct anxiety over the stubborn figure of St. John the Baptist.
Ironically, it was on St. John the Baptist’s Day, 1721, that the Grand Lodge approved outgoing Grand Master George Payne’s General Regulations. Article 22 of these regulations ruled that
the Brethren of all the Lodges in and about London and Westminster, shall meet at an ANNUAL COMMUNICATION and Feast, in some convenient Place, on St. JOHN Baptist’s Day, or else on St. JOHN Evangelist’s Day, as the Grand-Lodge shall think fit by a new Regulation, having of late Years met on St. John Baptist’s Day.
We see that a “new Regulation” puts St. John the Evangelist’s Day (December 27) on a par with St. John the Baptist’s Day. For sure, December 27 is very close to the winter solstice and therefore suggests a convenient “harmony” with the summer solstice celebration, if a rather cool one, coming so close to Christmas midwinter feasting and the coldest time of the year. The regulation seems to involve not only a reduction in the traditional significance of the Baptist, but also the downgrading of a specifically traditional Masons’ feast. The Regulations proceed to make the case that “St. John’s Day,” without now specifying which “St. John” is intended, shall be for the appointment of the new Grand Master, his Deputy, and Wardens, whether it is agreed to have a feast, either for the “top brass” or all Brethren, or not.
This regulation has led to long-standing and persistent confusion among Freemasons for whom a “St. John” is important. A famous Masonic glyph, for example, shows two parallel lines on either side of a circle with a point at its center. While the circle with a point at its center remains the classic astro-alchemical “sun” symbol, it is worth bearing in mind that Hermetic writings echoed in Copernicus’s famous pro-heliocentric treatise On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs describe the sun as the second or visible God. That is to say, the circle with a point at the center may denote the manifest presence of God. Masons are taught that at the center of the circle, they “cannot err.”
Masonic symbol-expounders continue to eat their masters’ crumbs and suggest, bizarrely, that the parallel lines on either side of the sun symbol represent the “two St. Johns.” To this curiosity, the idea is added that the parallel lines somehow represent the bounds of the sun’s respective closeness and distance from the Earth (the solstices). In demonstrating such an order, or “harmony”—a concept as central to Grand Lodge ideology as it was to Hanoverian political polemic and Newtonian science—the glyph is said to link the ordered universe and its creator’s necessary bounds with the constraints that should morally govern a Mason’s conduct. In my book Freemasonry—The Reality you may find an internally consistent argument suggesting that the glyph probably represents the Ark of the Covenant with its revelatory staves, once secreted in the holy of holies in the Temple, the centering of God’s presence in Zion. Whatever the glyph’s original meaning, readers should take the “two Johns” kind of tortured explanation with a pinch of salt. It derives from the confusion that stems from trying to match St. John the Baptist to St. John the Evangelist.
There was considerable political and ideological impetus behind the control-freakery of the new Grand Lodge with its creaking, dryly moralistic, and oh-so-rationally “enlightened” encroachments on old freemasons’ lore. The founders of the new Grand Lodge were practically all staunch Whigs, pro-Hanoverian mercantilists and great landowners. Contemptuous of prochurch Jacobite-sympathizing Tories, they were not romantics. Leading Whigs wanted a new, rational order; their descendants still do. Grand Lodge regulatory activities have long muddied the inherited symbolic waters, bringing many fascinating old masons’ traditions and symbols into disrepute, or unnecessary obscurity, among intelligent and spiritually minded people.
The choice of St. John the Evangelist as one of a “pair” of Johns was an astute red herring. We are all familiar with chapter one, verse one of the Gospel generally attributed to John (the evangelist): “In the beginning was the word . . .” First, the use of the evangelist may have been a sop to biblicist Protestants for whom the written “word” of the Bible was religion’s sole authority, thus linking the Protestant deity to the mathematically orderly deity of Newtonian science. Second, John’s Gospel has much to say about a contrast between “Light” and “Darkness,” a symbolism familiar to the language of Masonic initiation as we now know it. Third, the “Mason’s word,” a secret to die for, is still significant in Masonic mythology. In this case, however, implied reference to the “word” serves primarily to neutralize traditional attachments to St. John the Baptist. The Baptist is generally recognized as a very different figure from St. John the Evangelist. Even in orthodox presentation, the Baptist, unlike the Evangelist, was not a follower of Jesus (a “Christian”) but a “forerunner.”
And John the Baptist was popular: his birthday was once a public holiday or holy day.
Should it be thought I exaggerate the force of apparently minor regulatory changes, it does well to look at Anderson’s Book of Constitutions of 1738. The book’s “New Regulations” supersede even the established “New Regulation” of 1723. From these even newer regulations we can see that the first “new” regulation of 1723 was but a minor pop against tradition. A veritable broadside was on its way. The new Article 22 stated:
The annual Feast has been held on both the St. JOHN’s Days, as the G[rand] Master thought fit.
And
On 25 Nov[ember] 1723. it was ordain’d that one of the Quarterly Communications shall be held on St. JOHN Evangelist’s Day, and another on St. JOHN Baptist’s Day every Year, whether there be a Feast or not, unless the G. Master find it inconvenient for the Good of the Craft, which is more to be regarded than Days.
But of late Years, most of the Eminent Brethren [sic] being out of Town on both the St. JOHN’s Days, the G. Master has appointed the Feast on such a Day as appeared most convenient to the Fraternity.
It is hard for us today to grasp fully just what was being both implied and stated plainly here. It is clear that the Grand Lodge, after some fifteen years of act
ivity, had acquired a certain confidence, not to say arrogance, in its dealings with established custom. We need not be surprised. The Grand Lodge was now “well in” with Whig nobility and the Royal House of Hanover, if indeed it had ever been “well out” of it. What matters now, the Regulations state, is what the Grand Master “sees fit.” And in 1738 the Grand Master was Henry Brydges, Marquis of Caernarvon (from 1744 Second Duke of Chandos), former Master of the Horse to Frederick, Prince of Wales (himself a Freemason), and a Knight, Order of the Bath. The Marquis of Caernarvon was also Whig MP for Steyning, Sussex.
Caernarvon’s father, the first Duke of Chandos, had established a great house at Cannons Park, for which Royal Society member Rev. John Desaguliers (1683–1744) was made responsible by the Duke for the engineering of the water gardens. The Duke also supplied Desaguliers with his clerical living; he was the Duke’s chaplain and rector of St. Lawrence’s, on the edge of the estate.
Desaguliers was in the Duke’s pocket. And he was a Freemason.
A French-born Protestant émigré from Louis XIV’s vicious anti-Protestant policy, John Desaguliers had trained at Oxford and subsequently become scientific assistant to Sir Isaac Newton. Credited with inventing the planetarium, Desaguliers followed Newton’s view that the original religion was the original science. This principle was demonstrated in Newton’s mind in the grand design of Solomon’s Temple. Newton and Desaguliers believed that religion and science had since been corrupted. Roman Catholicism was held up as prime culprit, whose myriad misdemeanors included, allegedly, the cult of saints and saints’ days.
We are not surprised, then, to learn that John Desaguliers was the Grand Lodge’s third Grand Master and Deputy Grand Master to the Whig peer, the Duke of Montagu, when, in 1723, Desaguliers oversaw James Anderson’s composition and publication of the new Constitutions of “Free and Accepted Masons.”
The Grand Lodge was a tight ship, with Whigs in the rigging.
High-handedly and with haughty aristocratic disdain for the concerns of older Brethren, the Regulations stated unequivocally that what suited the Grand Master was necessarily for the good of the Craft. His will was more important than “Days”; the words Saints or holy hanging unspoken. The framer of the Regulations could see no rational cause for clinging to mere tradition. Furthermore, the Regulations insisted that since eminent (noble) Brethren found it inconvenient to be “in Town” either for midsummer (heat, stench, and disease) or the winter solstice (too cold, too busy on the estates hunting, and so on), ordinary Brethren should no longer expect a St. John the Baptist (or Evangelist) feast. Such, Brethren were informed, was good for the “Fraternity.” What kind of “Fraternity” had emerged was evident to a number of rebel Freemasons. By 1751 they had had enough of the novel, earnest, Whiggish encroachments of the Grand Lodge.
Enter the “Antients.”
In 1751, a group of predominantly Irish-born Freemasons met together at the Turk’s Head in Greek Street, Soho, London, to form a rival “Antient Grand Lodge of England,” claiming to be in accord with the “Old Constitutions” perverted by the Grand Lodge of England. Laurence Dermott wrote the Antients’ new Constitutions, called Ahiman Rezon. In them, he strongly advocated the Royal Arch degree for Masons. The Royal Arch ritual, probably of Irish provenance, underscored and illuminated the spiritual Christian content of Accepted Freemasonry. Contrary to the “Premier” Grand Lodge, the Antients declared the Royal Arch authentic Masonry, denied to members of the novel, even if apparently older, Grand Lodge. The Royal Arch caught on fast—Dermott called it the “root and marrow” of Masonry—and the Antients became popular, especially among members of the armed services. Indeed, it was chiefly by that agency that the Masonry of the Antients came to be vigorously transplanted into the American colonies, where it flourished, albeit in tension with Lodges chartered by the older, if not ancient, Order. The Antients’ existence fostered a spirit of independence, if not rebelliousness, from Hanoverian government control in the colonies.
It may be inferred that St. John the Baptist had something to do with some American colonists’ desire for independence.
Published in 1756, Ahiman Rezon gave voice to the significance for Masons of the figure of St. John the Baptist. Page 150 of the book asked Masons to consider how “the stern integrity of Saint John the Baptist, which induced him to forego every minor consideration in discharging the obligations he owed to God; the unshaken firmness with which he met martyrdom rather than betray his duty to his Master; his steady reproval of vice, and continued preaching of repentance and virtue, make him a fit patron of the Masonic institution.”
But for the martyrdom, he sounds somewhat like the deified image of George Washington.
The Antients’ continued niggling presense eventually forced the Premier Grand Lodge of England to enter into negotiations for amalgamation, although by 1813, when the main negotiations took place, London’s Premier Grand Lodge was unlikely to regain loyalty from Masons dwelling in the now independent American colonies. Nevertheless, London continued to charter Lodges in the United States, notably to black-skinned Masons whose aspirations were rejected by indigenous Lodges, whose enlightenment program was racially selective.
It is highly significant that during the discussions that led to the eventual establishment of the United Grand Lodge of England (under the Grand Mastership of the younger son of George III), one of the notable sticking points was the Antients’ objection that the so-called Moderns were ignoring Saints Days, in particular the feast day of St. John the Baptist, the day established for the election of Grand Masters. To a limited degree, the Antients appeared to get their way at the amalgamation. From the time of the union of the two Grand Lodges on December 27, 1813 (St. John the Evangelist’s Day!), the date of June 24 would be honored for that particular administrative function. Overt consideration of St. John the Baptist himself, however, has vanished from British Craft Freemasonry—just one of many “holes” in the contemporary Order, an Order that has wilfully reduced its ideological and intellectual significance to that of a mere “fraternal society” whose members are distinguished by a powerful—if to outsiders curious—urge to improve themselves morally. To modern observers it must appear that any reference to St. John the Baptist’s Day is merely coincidental to the date of Midsummer and the proximity of June 24 to the cosmic solstice, while even that latter relic of science might sound a little “pagan” to contemporary British Masonic authority, keen to scrub itself into a spotlessness verging on the vacuous.
How then can we account for, first, the connection between the Baptist and old Free Masons’ customs and, second, the link between John the Baptist and the traditional Midsummer feasting—bearing in mind, as we shall see, that these questions really overlap one another?
ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST AS LORD OF THE FEAST
We have established that St. John the Baptist was important to Free Masons both before and after the establishment of the first Grand Lodge (1716–1723). The Baptist was not important to Free Masons alone. Can we locate what it was about the Baptist that people—and Masons in particular—found so appealing?
This is no simple matter. There were no vox-pop TV or radio interviews in days gone by, asking ordinary people why they liked or did certain things. We can only assemble a rough jigsaw and see if an authentic pattern is discernible within the fragments.
One thing is clear. It did not take Copernicus and the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century scientific revolution to convince ordinary people of the central significance of the sun to their lives. Whether the sun went around the Earth or the Earth went around the sun, the sun was still obviously the source of light, and people could see that without the sun, nothing could grow.
Midsummer, when the sun was closest to the Earth and the days were longest was a very special time to our ancestors. Their lives and consciousness were intimately bound up with the cycles of nature. If religion was to have any meaning for this life, its inseparability from nature had to be perceived and act
ed on. Indeed, most people saw no clear distinction between spiritual and natural activity, except to say that people normally imagined spiritual forces could do for nature what nature could not do alone. Nature could bow to the miraculous. For many people, certain phases of natural processes looked fairly miraculous anyhow; the forces of death and decay had to be overcome. If one failed to thank God and his saints and angels for springtime, sunshine, rain, and harvest, they might not come again, or at least, they might fail, with starvation, death, and disease the result.
So we can perhaps see that the old church’s placing of St. John the Baptist’s birthday at Midsummer was a masterstroke. Apart from the idea that Luke’s Gospel implied that John was born some six months before Jesus (whose “official” birthday of December 25 more or less marked the winter solstice, that is, the beginning of the sun’s “return”), the placing of John the Baptist at the crux of the Midsummer festivities gathered all the residual “pagan” ideas of the season and gave them an ecclesiastically solemnized coating and direction. Furthermore, it did not, presumably, pass some smart people’s notice that this association of the Baptist with Midsummer was no mere arbitrary placing of an acceptable saint over a pagan (that is, “country”) festival; there were certain unmistakable internal resonances between the known figure of John the Baptist and the beliefs of countless ordinary people in relation to Midsummer that magically activated that link.
The first and most obvious resonance between date and saint is the tradition that John was a man who lived “under the sun.” The sun at its most witheringly merciless produces the desert; John made the straight path visible in the desert, a place of extraordinary, sometimes blinding, light. It is a place associated with vision, visionaries, and illumination: a place also of purity, of voluntary hardship, and suffering or preparation to receive light.
The Mysteries of John the Baptist Page 3