The Queen's Necklace (7 page)

Freemasons are pleased to trace the history of the ‘Royal Art’ back to the earliest biblical times. James Anderson, the first historian of the movement, claimed in a work published in 1723 that, “During their wanderings in the wilderness, Moses, in his capacity of Grand Master, would often assemble the Israelites in a regular lodge which they all attended.” King Solomon was also a Grand Master, since he built the temple, and so too, for reasons which are rather less clear, was Nebuchadnezzar.

Other writers trace the origins of the movement back to the Knights Templar, and others again to the mysterious and, properly speaking, non-existent Rosicrucian fraternity of the seventeenth century. Less fanciful observers settle for English precursors of the lodges in the medieval stonemason corporations, or guilds. That suggestion has the ring of probability, but even it cannot be proved. The theory is that at some point in the seventeenth century the stonemasons, by now rather isolated and very much in decline, admitted (in full accordance with their basic constitution) members of the gentry and upper middle class who wished to exchange views and opinions of the world in a secure atmosphere under the protection of the guild. These would be people who were disenchanted with religious wars, thus
entrenching the principles of tolerance and open-ended inquiry into ideas that were ahead of their time. The records of some of these lodges go back a very long way. Those of Edinburgh Mary’s Number One, for example, claim to date from 1599.

The movement finally emerges from this twilight of myth and conjecture in 1717, when, on St John’s day (St John being their patron saint), the first English Grand Lodge was founded, absorbing most of the other English lodges that were still active. Its French counterparts had come into being a few years earlier.

It is difficult to be very sure what these first lodges actually did, and on what sort of ideological basis they existed. What is sure is that dinners had a prominent place on their agendas, often with the Grand Master as presiding host. By this time he probably considered the lodge as his own property, effectively a component of his business or factory, and no doubt this further softened the general ethos towards one of ‘enlightened’ Epicureanism.

The history of the French lodges in the eighteenth century is rather more troubled. In 1737 the authorities began persecuting them, and in the following year Clement XII issued a Papal Bull excommunicating their members. But neither the religious or secular authorities took this very seriously.

In 1737 a Scottish nobleman called Ramsay reformed the French lodges and founded the so-called Scottish Order, creating a great many more ranks than the original three, the better to reward members’ loyalty. In this celebrated refoundation the ethical principles of Freemasonry are more clearly manifest. Ramsay wrote to his brethren about four ideals: first, philanthropy, the love of one’s fellow man, regardless of nationality or religious denomination, thus giving an element of universal brotherhood to the organisation; second, moral purity (a homosexual, for example, could not be admitted until he changed his ways and affirmed that he would pay appropriate respect to the ‘fair sex’); third, absolute secrecy; and finally, love
of the fine arts. Among these he included academic scholarship, and held out certain universal disciplines as the most ideal: his hope was that the Order would undertake something like the project which, a few years later, became the
Grande encyclopédie
.

In 1738 the French Freemasons elected a member of the royal family, Louis de Bourbon-Condé, Duc de Clermont, as their Grand Master. Clermont fulfilled his duties with the usual Bourbon insouciance, deputing a dancing master, Lacorne, in his place. Lacorne’s rather dubious character alienated the more serious elements in the membership, and this led to rifts and divisions that lasted for decades. To counterbalance this they instituted the Grand Orient. Its Grand Master, the Duc de Chartres, finally reunited the warring lodges after Clermont’s death in 1771. This Duc de Chartres was none other than Philippe-Égalité, the future revolutionary Duc d’Orléans, who, though a Grand Master and supporter of the Revolution, did not himself escape the guillotine, but whose descendants became the ruling (junior Bourbon) House of Orléans.

What were the Freemasons doing when not at war with one another, and what did their work consist of? They organised meetings, initiated new members, progressed up the ranks via elaborate ceremonies, dined, performed charitable deeds, and practised philanthropy. It was an intensely theatrical age—as early as 1754 the appearance of the actor Manelli in a new
opera buffa
had led to such heated conflict between the devotees of French and Italian music that the Parisian Jansenists and ultramontanes set aside their mutual hostility that had been threatening a religious civil war. In such a climate, when everything was played out in the full glare of publicity, and the arrival of a new theatre company could put a temporary stop to revolutionary activity, the Freemasons no doubt took a charitable view of all varieties of theatrical genre.

In 1782 a market vegetable stall-holder called Mme Menthe was disinherited by her wealthy sister. Despite this she then gave a home to this wicked sibling’s illegitimate son, even though she
already had ten children of her own. Shortly afterwards she gave birth to her nineteenth child (eight having died young), and to mark the occasion the Sincerity Lodge arranged a grand surprise for her. “The meeting,” wrote a contemporary, “took place with more than one hundred and forty illustrious members, of both sexes, present. After the usual ceremonies, the curtain rose and there on the stage, seated on a throne, was the worthy Mme Menthe, surrounded by her ten children, and, at her feet, the child she had so magnanimously taken in. The entire family (so deserving of compassion!) had been fitted out with new clothes at the Lodge’s expense. The presiding Marquis, in a speech that was as harrowing as it was eloquent, explained the meaning of the striking tableau before our eyes. At the most moving point in his address, the Comtesse X placed a citizen’s crown on the lady’s head, the Marquise Y held out a purse to her containing a considerable sum of money, and the Comtesse Z profferred a trousseau for the infant so newly brought into the world. The child that Mme Menthe had taken in was then adopted by the Lodge, who undertook to raise it and take every care of it.”

The brothers Goncourt mention a letter written to the Princesse de Lamballe by Marie-Antoinette, in which she states: “I read with great interest what was happening in the Freemasonry lodges you took charge of at the start of the year. I see that all they do apart from their charitable works is sing pretty songs. But by working for the release of prisoners and finding homes for young women your lodges are following in our own footsteps—which will certainly not stop us doing the same for the girls in our care or finding homes for the children on our list.”

But the real attraction of Freemasonry in this period lay in its secrecy. Members were bound to that absolutely. Most of the time those secrets, involving special symbols, practices and so forth, would have had no significance whatsoever: mystique was practised for its own sake. Of course, people have always loved secrets—they still do. But in eighteenth-century France,
when life was lived in permanent public view, when non-stop gossip ensured that everyone knew everyone else’s business and the whole country was one great, malicious family, privacy held an especially powerful attraction. The favoured Court style, rococo, with its exquisite, tiny interiors, was an art of intimacy; and the rest of the nation also lived in confined spaces. The idea of a shut door was unknown. In such an age, the concept of a closed and secret meeting fulfilled an important spiritual need.

Everyone—especially the very young and the adolescent—adores a secret. Youth is a time of secret writing, secret languages, secret symbols daubed on walls. Some secrets are to be shared only between boys, never with women, not even mothers (especially, Freudians would say, not with mothers). Within young male groups, by some atavistic process, some ancient primitive impulse rises out of the deep layer that Jung calls the collective unconscious, a race-memory of the male-bonding and male-only societies of primitive peoples. In ancient times, and even today in rural parts of Africa and New Guinea, pubescent youths are initiated into manhood in harsh tests involving cruel rites. Thereafter they become independent of their families and live with other youths in all-male compounds, where women are admitted only on very special occasions. The juveniles form a separate little social group in defiant opposition to the adults, and leave these closed communities only to establish families of their own. It is from these all-male societies that the great negro outlaw gangs are formed, such as the Leopard People of Liberia, who hold entire countries in terror.

The higher civilisations were founded on the family unit, thus abolishing these exclusive pre-adult and adult male-only societies. But they could not root out the innate tendency which still sometimes surfaces, the eternal impulse of the man to turn his back on women and the family, return to his boyhood-self and join some all-male group in a great, daring, heroic and pointless adventure. The same primal impulse gave rise to the
knightly orders, whose initiation ceremonies are a vestige of the old puberty rites. And initiation was the central feature of the Freemasons’ ceremonies too, because the movement was, at base, another such all-male society, much tamed, of course, and gentrified. This, after the element of secrecy, must have been its second most important attraction.

The secretiveness of the Freemasons tempted certain individuals to set up imitation lodges for the sort of people who wanted to be part of a secret society but were deterred by their own frivolous natures from the more serious, or morally daunting, purposes of the real ones. Thus we find the Mopsli Order (in Austria) whose initiation rites required the new member to kiss a dog of that breed, not on the mouth but at the opposite end. However, when the intrepid candidate bent over to approach his task, a pleasant surprise awaited him: the dog was made of silk and velvet. In the Tappo Order in Italy (the name means ‘cork’ or ‘plug’) would-be knights and ladies were required to kiss the Grand Master in a similar place, only to discover that it wasn’t actually the Grand Master, etc etc. Members of the French Ordre de la Félicité would set out on a journey to the Blessed Isles carrying Freemason-style emblems. For these fellowships, as with the Fendeurs Charbonniers and the Nymphes de la Rose, the purposes were purely erotic, involving secret orgies … if indeed these societies did exist, and were not simply an invention of the gossiping tendency of the age.

Goethe, as we have already mentioned, was so fascinated by the case of the Queen’s necklace that he wrote a play about it,
Der Gross-Kophta
. In it he writes: “
Der Menschen lieben die Dämmerung mehr als den hellen Tag, und eben in der Dämmerung erscheinen die Gespenster
”—Men prefer twilight to the full glare of day, and it is in the twilight that the ghosts show themselves. In the mysterious darkness that the lodges exploited to satisfy people’s eternal longing for secrets, the ghosts were not slow to appear. Eighteenth-century Freemasonry became the home
of occultism. For more mystical souls, the secrets that existed merely for their own sake, the noble aspirations and symbols, were not enough. They held meetings separately from the lodges to seek out the real mysteries, those of nature itself, and the supernatural. In other words, to pursue alchemy and spiritualism.

Thus eighteenth-century Freemasonry became associated with Satanism, black magic and even the conjuration of devils. The Grand Master, Philippe-Égalité himself, personally believed in the black arts and, if we can trust the retrospective memoirs of the Marquise de Créquy, even invoked Satan, who appeared in the form of a naked man, very pale, with black eyes and a scar across his left temple (apparently the result of a lightning strike), pronounced the ominous words: “
Victoire et malheur! Victoire et malheur!
”—Victory and disaster!—and vanished into thin air.

The various strands of eighteenth-century occultism all converge in the person of the great seer Emanuel Swedenborg. It was he who gave form and direction to the mystical aspirations of the time, and his considerable influence is with us still. There are sects in America today whose beliefs derive from his teachings.

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a natural scientist and engineer in his younger days, who went on to become an important person in his native Sweden, was ennobled, and was elected to membership of most of the learned societies in Europe. In 1745, he was dining in a private room in his favourite restaurant in London. When he finished, a kind of fog filled the room and hideous creatures appeared, writhing on the floor. The fog dispersed, and in a corner of the room he saw a man bathed in light. The man commanded him, in ringing tones: “Do not eat so much!” and vanished. Swedenborg went home, but the man reappeared the next day, dressed in purple, and informed him that he was God.

From that point onwards, Swedenborg was a prophet. He gave up all his official positions in order to live for and by his
revelations. In his books he writes (at incredible length) about his supernatural experiences as dictated to him by spirits.

What most surprises the modern reader about his visions is the easy, natural, phlegmatic way he moves among scenes of the other world. As he records the location of the heavenly cities, the variety of their citizens and their manner of living, and explains their various theological preoccupations and other related questions, we almost feel as if we are reading a Baedeker. According to his writings, he had travelled much where few mortals had gone before, and on these journeys had made the acquaintance of a great many angels and devils, together with spirits belonging to an intermediate group who “live between heaven and hell”. These and many other things he discussed with Martin Luther. Luther, having arrived in the other world, moved first into much the same sort of house as he had occupied back home in Eisleben, and here he would sit on a throne and declaim his sermons. But in 1757, when his period of transformation in the spirit world had been completed, the house was taken from him, and shortly afterwards, under the influence of Swedenborg and others, he renounced those of his ideas that differed from those of the author. Swedenborg also met the philosopher Melanchton, who spent long periods at his heavenly desk writing, just as he had on earth, that good works did not matter, only faith. But when the new heaven was built, in 1757, he too corrected his original ideas. He now resides in the south-eastern region of heaven, and when he goes for a stroll his footsteps produce the clang of someone treading in iron shoes across a stone pavement.