Freemasonry Explained: Origins, Structure and Modern Practice

Freemasonry is the world’s largest and oldest fraternal organization, with several million members spread across roughly 100 recognized Grand Lodges and a continuous institutional history going back to the early eighteenth century. Its symbolism is borrowed from the medieval stonemason’s craft, but its membership has, for most of its history, consisted of gentlemen, professionals, and public figures rather than working builders. To understand Freemasonry is to understand the long arc of Western fraternal life: the rise of the urban guild, the transformation of trade brotherhoods into philosophical and political associations, the development of a graded ritual curriculum, and the gradual decline of the lodge system in the modern era.

This page covers the historical origins, the organizational structure, the principal rites and degrees, and the modern state of the fraternity. For the broader history of fraternal orders, see the fraternal orders and lodges pillar. For the symbolic vocabulary, see the Freemasonry symbols glossary, and for the most discussed members, see the most famous Freemasons.

From Operative to Speculative Masonry

The earliest verifiable form of the Masonic tradition is the operative masonry of the medieval building trades. Stonemasons in England, Scotland, and France formed local lodges that regulated apprenticeship, wages, and the secret signs by which a master mason could be recognized on a foreign building site. These lodges compiled their customs in a set of manuscripts known as the “Old Charges,” the oldest of which, the Regius Manuscript, dates to about 1390.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a new kind of lodge began to appear. Gentlemen who were not stonemasons by trade — usually intellectuals, scholars, and aristocrats interested in the Hermetic and Rosicrucian philosophy of the day — were “accepted” as honorary members. The records of such lodges, particularly Elias Ashmole’s diary entry of 1646, document the gradual shift from a craft guild to a philosophical society. By the 1680s and 1690s, lodges in London, Edinburgh, and York were meeting as clubs of “speculative” Masons who used the mason’s tools as moral allegory.

The Grand Lodge of England

The institutional founding event of organized Freemasonry is the formation of the Premier Grand Lodge of England on St. John the Baptist’s Day, June 24, 1717, at the Goose and Gridiron Ale House in London. Four existing London lodges formed a Grand Lodge to regulate the craft, and they elected Anthony Sayer as the first Grand Master.

Within a decade, the Grand Lodge had grown rapidly and begun to issue “warrants” to provincial and overseas lodges. The early years were marked by bitter controversy with an older, “Ancient” tradition, but the two branches were reconciled into a single “United Grand Lodge of England” in 1813. Irish Freemasonry, formally organized in 1725, and Scottish Freemasonry, organized in 1736, have their own independent Grand Lodges, each of which is in amity with the others.

The Craft Degrees

The basic unit of Masonic life is the Craft lodge, which works the three degrees known as Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft, and Master Mason. The three-degree system is the common inheritance of all regular Freemasonry and is governed by a book of ritual called, in the English-speaking world, “the Volume of the Sacred Law” (specifically, the Bible, opened at the Gospel of St. John), and the working tools of the various officers.

Entered Apprentice

The first degree is the initiation, in which the candidate is “prepared” by being divested of metal, blindfolded, and led into the lodge. The ceremony dramatizes the candidate’s symbolic death and rebirth as an apprentice, the obligation to keep the brotherhood’s secrets, and the presentation of the apron — the single most distinctive piece of Masonic regalia. The reason the apron is so central is examined in the apron reference page.

Fellowcraft

The second degree is presented as a stage of learning. The candidate is instructed in the seven liberal arts and sciences (grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), traced through the symbolic pillars Boaz and Jachin that stood at the porch of King Solomon’s Temple, and given the working tools of a Fellowcraft. The detailed content of the degree is covered in the Freemason degree rituals reference.

Master Mason

The third and most solemn degree dramatizes the legend of Hiram Abiff, the master builder of Solomon’s Temple who, according to Masonic tradition, was murdered by three apprentices who sought to learn the “Master’s Word.” The candidate enacts a symbolic re-enactment of the murder and is raised to the degree of Master Mason. The lesson is the moral: that fidelity to obligation takes precedence over life itself. The Hiram legend is also the most common source of allegations of Masonic blood oaths and has been a frequent target of anti-Masonic polemic since the eighteenth century.

The Higher Grades: Scottish and York Rites

The three Craft degrees are the bedrock, but the great majority of Masons also pursue additional degrees through one of two “Rites” — the Scottish Rite and the York Rite — and the corresponding “appendant bodies.”

The Scottish Rite

The Scottish Rite is a system of 32 degrees, of which the first three are the regular Craft degrees. The remaining 29 are conferred by a “Supreme Council” and include degrees with names like Knight of the Rose-Croix (the 18th, of particular Rosicrucian interest), Sovereign Prince of the Royal Secret (the 32nd), and Prince of the Royal Secret. The Scottish Rite is most popular in the United States, France, and Latin America. It was originally developed in France and the French West Indies in the late eighteenth century, and the story that the higher degrees were brought from Scotland is now regarded by historians as inaccurate.

The York Rite

The York Rite is a system of additional degrees governed by three bodies: the Chapter (which confers the Royal Arch and three “Cryptic” degrees), the Council (which confers the Royal and Select Master and Super-Excellent Master degrees), and the Commandery (which confers the Templar degrees, named for the Knights Templar of the medieval crusades). The York Rite is more popular in the United States and is the older of the two systems in the English-speaking world.

The Appendant Bodies

Beyond the two Rites, a large number of “appendant bodies” extend Masonic life into specialty areas. The most important in North America are:

The Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (Shriners) — a social and charitable organization founded in 1870 in New York, now famous for its chain of children’s hospitals.
The Order of the Eastern Star — the principal Masonic-related organization open to women, founded in the United States in 1850. It admits Master Masons and their female relatives.
The Order of DeMolay — a youth order for young men aged 12–21, founded in 1919 in Kansas City, named after Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the medieval Knights Templar. It has produced an unusual number of politicians, including several U.S. presidents.
The Knights of Pythias — a separate, non-Masonic fraternal order founded in 1864.
The Tall Cedars of Lebanon — a humorous appendant body for Shriners.
The Grotto — another social appendant body.

For the broader family of such organizations, see the Odd Fellows and other lodges cluster.

Recognized and Unrecognized Lodges

Not all Masonic bodies are considered “regular” by the major Grand Lodges. The standard of regularity requires the Volume of the Sacred Law to be open in the lodge, the discussion of religion and politics to be banned, men only to be admitted (with the limited exception of the Order of the Eastern Star), and a chain of amity with the other regular Grand Lodges. Bodies that do not meet these standards, such as the Grand Orient of France (which removed the requirement of a belief in a deity in 1877), are called “irregular” and are not in amity with the regular English-speaking Grand Lodges.

This division has been the source of considerable cross-talk in the popular literature, since writers who describe the Grand Orient as a Masonic body in fact describe a body that, on the English-speaking standard, is no longer considered one. For the political consequences, see the conspiracy theories and hidden power reference.

The political significance of Freemasonry has been most fully documented in three contexts: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Latin American independence movements of the early nineteenth century.

In the American case, the Masonic membership of the Founding Fathers has been thoroughly documented. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and a majority of the officers of the Continental Army were Master Masons. The fraternity’s emphasis on civic virtue, religious toleration, and the brotherhood of man mapped comfortably onto the political program of the revolution. The most discussed American Masons are covered in a separate reference.

In the French case, the lodges of the Grand Orient de France were major centers of Enlightenment political thought in the late eighteenth century, and a significant fraction of the officers of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies were Masons. The later persecution of Masonry by the Vatican, which culminated in the 1917 canonical code that forbade Catholics from joining, was in significant part a response to the perceived role of the lodges in the French Revolution.

In Latin America, the political influence of the lodges was even more direct: figures such as Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín, and Bernardo O’Higgins were Masons, and the Logia Lautaro and Logia de los Caballeros Racionales were the effective headquarters of several independence movements.

The Anti-Masonic Movement

The political backlash against Masonry in the United States is itself a major historical event. The Anti-Masonic Party, founded in 1828 in upstate New York, was the first third party in American history and was the first American political party to nominate a presidential candidate by a nominating convention. Its rise was triggered by the 1826 disappearance of William Morgan, a former Mason who had published an exposé of the fraternity’s degrees, and by the suspicion (probably well-founded) that local authorities had been complicit in his presumed murder.

The Anti-Masonic Party briefly held a balance of power in several New England and Mid-Atlantic states, helped to elect non-Masonic politicians, and contributed to the formation of the Whig Party in the 1830s. Its decline was as rapid as its rise, and the party was defunct by the 1840s. The broader anti-Masonic tradition it inaugurated, however, has never disappeared, and a number of evangelical Christian denominations, including some branches of the Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal churches, continue to teach that Freemasonry is incompatible with Christian faith. The most discussed conspiracy theories about the fraternity are addressed in the dedicated reference.

Controversies and Accusations

The recurring accusations against Freemasonry have taken four basic forms:

The political conspiracy theory — that the fraternity secretly controls governments. The most influential version of this theory is the one constructed by the Jesuit priest Augustin Barruel in his 1797 Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme, which blamed the French Revolution on the Bavarian Illuminati, the Masons, and the philosophes. The theory was updated in the late twentieth century by writers like Nesta Webster and, in a different register, by the producers of pop-music Illuminati symbolism.
The religious objection — that the Masonic ritual is incompatible with Christian belief. This is the basis of the long-standing Catholic prohibition, and of the parallel teaching in many evangelical denominations.
The class-and-corruption objection — that the Masonic lodge has been a vehicle for mutual favoritism in business and politics. The most concrete case is the P2 (Propaganda Due) lodge in Italy, which was a state-within-the-state during the Cold War years; P2 was formally Masonic but is not recognized by any regular Grand Lodge.
The criminal-accusation tradition — that the fraternity has historically protected pedophiles and other offenders. This is the most recent and most contested of the four, and the relevant evidence is best examined case by case rather than as a single thesis.

Modern Membership and Geography

Freemasonry reached its numerical peak in the United States in the mid-twentieth century, with perhaps 4 million members at the end of the 1950s. Since then, American membership has declined by roughly 80%, a fall that has been more severe in the United States than in most of the rest of the world. The largest Masonic populations today are in India, Brazil, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France, Turkey, and the Philippines.

The reasons for the decline are debated. They include the general weakening of fraternal life since the 1960s, the increased religious conservatism of American evangelical Christianity, the cultural visibility of anti-Masonic literature, and the long-running controversy over the fraternity’s all-male membership. In the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, membership has also fallen but less dramatically. The most famous Freemasons of the modern era are now mostly historical figures.

Joining a Lodge

For men interested in the practical question of how to join a lodge, the standard route is to approach a local lodge or to be introduced by an existing member. Most Grand Lodges require the candidate to be a man of legal age, of good character, with a belief in a Supreme Being, and able to support himself and his family. The process is described in the how to become a Freemason reference. For the historical context of these requirements, see the fraternal orders and lodges pillar and the history of secret societies pillar.

Sources and Further Reading

The standard scholarly references are David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590–1710 (1988) and Margaret C. Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts and Fictions (2006), the two most-cited modern academic works; for the English-speaking Grand Lodges, John Hamill, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World (2019). For the Scottish Rite, Arturo de Hoyos, ed., The Scottish Rite Ritual Monitor and Guide (multiple editions). For the French Grand Orient, Pierre Chevalier, Histoires de la Franc-Maçonnerie française (1974). For the Anti-Masonic movement, Paul Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England, 1826–1836 (1988). The P2 affair is treated in David Yallop, In God’s Name (1984), and the more measured Italian-government enquiries of the 1980s.

The Freemasonry symbols glossary, most famous Freemasons, how to become a Freemason, and why Masons wear aprons cover the practical and symbolic detail. The Odd Fellows and other lodges and fraternal orders and lodges treat the fraternal context. The history of secret societies treats the larger arc.