Ever visited a Masonic Temple?

[Phillip McCleod]

22. exactly.. to 'do good' is the point of the masonic order..

..as an ethical system and now as an institution it was central to the founding of enlightenment era democratic republics like the USA.

that said, there was and in some places there is a very ugly undercurrent. not all lodges are the same. the KKK is another masonic spinoff.. a sobering realization. despite the supposed openmindedness of masons, the center of much of the ritual is a certain book, present in the hall on an altar, and characters and moral lessons from a certain book.. the christian Bible.

meld the masonic obsession with knights and knighthood and monarchy and God as the Great Architect of the Universe with some good ole southern-fried bigotry and the result is a mess of No True Scotsmanship.

in general the masonic obsession with the pseudohistory involving the Knights Templar has somewhat poisoned the order. it wasn't until later masonic historians like Albert Mackey and A.E. Waite paved the way for historian historian Dame Frances Yates, that the origin of Masonry was finally pinned down..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Mackey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Yates

Masonry has roots in the much older hermetic order of Rosicrucians.. the Rose & Cross Order.. and is intimately related in it's founding with other Enlightenment institutions.. like the Royal Society of Science. these guys were Christian Utopianists of the first order, and wanted to completely revolutionize society around a sort of Johannine concept of Jesus as Logos - the Light of Reason and the Word of God.

much of the mythology is all made up to fit and synchretistic.. the story of pseudo-biblical character, Hiram Abiff.. the ancient origins myth involving the Knights Templar.. it's all inherited from the Rosicrucian sense of melodrama and mix and matched legends, documents and oral histories. some have even seen shades of Druidism and Mithraism in their rites and tales.. certainly they would like their ancient origin story to be true.

interestingly enough.. it might be. hermeticism is a half millennium older than christianity, and alchemy is older than that.