The Ancient Order of Free and Accepted Masons
If you spend much time hanging out in the eighteenth century, you are forced to consider the question of Freemasonry. * Everywhere you turn, you find a major historical figure up to his Whig in Masonic craft.
Today Masonic lodges don’t look that different from the various fraternal orders that appeared in America’s Gilded Age like dandelions in the spring: a combination of boyish high spirits, social service, serio-comic ritual, and distinctive regalia.** However, a quick tour on Google or your local library catalog will reveal a fundamental difference: a search on say, the Elks, does not turn up references to symbols, secrets, legends, and mysteries. No one argues that Kiwanis was affiliated with ancient Druids. Freemasonry, unlike Modern Woodmen of America, was born as a more-or-less secret society.
It’s hard to unravel fact from fiction where freemasonry is concerned. Some accounts claim the “craft of masonry” began with Euclid in Egypt*** and came to medieval England via the Children of Israel–a chronological mishmash that makes a historian’s head ache. Others link freemasonry to the building of King Solomon’s Temple or claim the Crusaders discovered lost secrets of the craft in the Holy Lands and brought them back to Europe. Personally, I find it fascinating that these creation myths all place the roots of Freemasonry in the Middle East, which was seen as the home of mysterious knowledge from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment.
More sober minded Masonic historians claim the order has its roots in the guilds of small-m masons in the medieval period. (Hence the symbols of compass, t-square, and apron.) The transition from masons to Masons is murky. It appears that around the sixteenth century, cash-strapped guilds accepted non-masons as dues-paying members–the so-called speculative masons apparently intrigued by the scientific aspect of geometry as well as the mysticism and ritual.
The first clearly documented Masonic lodges appeared in London in 1717.**** By the mid-eighteenth century, Freemasonry had spread to France (home of the Scottish Rite), across Europe, and overseas to the West Indies and the American colonies. Mozart may well have been a Mason (The Magic Flute is stuffed with Masonic allusions); George Washington certainly was. Not to mention Franklin, Voltaire, Lafayette, Goethe, and the other hundred thousand educated men–and a few thousand educated women–that historian Margaret Jacob estimates took the Masonic oath in the eighteenth century.
If we don’t understand Freemasonry, how can we understand the Enlightenment, not to mention the American and French Revolutions?
* Or at least you do if you hang out in eighteenth century Europe. Despite the order’s own mythology and Rudyard Kipling’s creative speculations in “The Man Who Would Be King”, freemasonry was a European phenomenon.
**To be fair, Masons do not wear funny hats. They wear embroidered aprons, based on the leather aprons that was the precursor to safety gear for skilled tradesmen. Picture a blacksmith.
***We think of Euclid as a Greek mathematician. He taught in Alexandria in the fourth century BCE during the rule of Ptolemy I Soter, one of Alexander the Great’s generals who became the king of Egypt when Alexander’s empire fell apart. The Ptolemies ruled Egypt until Cleopatra’s defeat in 30 BCE. Nationalism as we know it is another eighteenth century idea. But I digress.
**** The conspiracy theory view of Freemasonry points out that it was a secret society for centuries so of course it left no paper trail. Until it did.
Bites of Art and History: 82nd & Fifth
I get hundreds of e-mails everyday: business letters, personal notes, notices of FB updates, newsletters, “opportunities”. Some I read immediately. Some go straight to the trash. Many I let slide until a someday that never quite comes. But every Wednesday since the first of the year I’ve jumped on the e-mail titled 82nd and Fifth.
The e-mails bring me two episodes in a charming year-long series produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art: a curator talking about a work of art that changed the way she sees the world while a photographer interprets her vision. Last Wednesday the pieces were things I’m very familiar with: a painting by Eugène Delacroix* and a Persian miniature. Some weeks the episodes cover works I’ve never seen by artists I’ve never heard of. Each lasts only two minutes: a bright pop of pleasure in the day.
If you’re interested in the intersection of art, history and ideas,** it’s four minutes well spent. Here’s the link: http://82nd-and-fifth.metmuseum.org/about/
Enjoy.
* Don’t ask me about Delacroix and Orientalism unless you are very interested and have some time on your hands.
** And I assume you are since you’re reading this blog.
Madeleine Caulier Goes to War
(In case it’s not clear, this is NOT a picture of Madeleine Caulier. It is a generic picture of a dragoon.)
I’ve been fascinated for a long time by real-life stories of women who disguised themselves as men and went to war at times when women didn’t go to war. * About ten years ago, I began to collect examples, thinking I could write a book, or at least an article, about the subject. I quickly gave up the idea. There were too many examples, from the medieval period through World War I.
What’s more, their stories all sounded the same. For one reason or another** our heroine disguises herself as a man*** and enlists. She makes it to the front, where she serves valiantly. She is only discovered to be a woman when she is wounded or dies in battle.**** Presumably more served who were not discovered.
I recently stumbled across an example with a different twist: Madeleine Caulier.
Caulier worked at an inn outside the city of Lille during the War of the Spanish Succession. As in most all-out European wars, the Low Countries were hotly contested territory. In August, 1708, Lille became the site of a long, hungry siege. The French were desperate to get supplies and information in and out of the city.*****
Caulier’s brother served in the French garrison. For reasons that are not clear to me, she was allowed to cross the lines to visit him. (For those of you who are always alert to the passive voice, let me assure you I deliberately chose it in this case because I don’t know who was fool enough to allow her to go in and out of the city. Did she get permission from an officer? Talk her way through a checkpoint? Did someone assume she was harmless? Was bribery involved? This is one of those times when the documents leave the juice out of the story.) When they learned she had access to the city, French officers asked Caulier to smuggle messages to the commander of the garrison. (In some versions of the story, she overheard them talking and volunteered.) She agreed, on the condition that she be allowed to enlist in a dragoon regiment as a man. I would say she had balls–but the whole point of the story is that she didn’t.
The count d’Évreux granted her request–making her the only example I’ve seen of a woman who was officially allowed to disguise herself as a man and enlist. She remained in the army until her death at the battle of Denain in 1712.
Today a street in Lille bears her name. Anyone know of another woman soldier in disguise who’s been honored in some way?
* I’m not the only one fascinated by this historical trope. Terry Pratchett wrote a hysterical novel based on it: Monstrous Regiment. I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the fun. Besides, trying to explain a Terry Pratchett novel is a fool’s game.
** Popular reasons include following/searching for her husband, lover or brother, heartbreak, patriotism, revenge for losses incurred, and just because.
*** How on earth did they pull it off? I realize that a not-particularly curvy woman could bind her breasts and stuff a rolled-up sock in her breeches and pass as a teenage boy for an evening, assuming no one noticed the lack of an Adam’s apple. A recent book on the subject argues that once the Mongols introduced the concept of trousers to the world the total separation of male and female dress helped: the eye saw pants and thought male. But surely the lack of privacy in an army camp would lead to rapid exposure?
****One of my favorite examples from the American Civil War simply suited up again, changed her name and re-enlisted after she was discovered and sent home.
*****At one point, 2000 cavalrymen disguised themselves as Dutch soldiers and tried to carry 50-pound bags of gunpowder through the lines to the besieged city. That’s a story for another day, but the short version is: BOOM!