The Origin of the Freemason’s Handshake

The Masonic handshake is the most famous private gesture in the Western fraternal tradition. Two men press the inside of the right wrist, hook the thumb in a particular way, or lay the right hand on the left shoulder in a stylised pantomime of helping a fallen brother. The gesture is widely recognised in popular culture as the “secret” handshake of the Masonic order, and it is one of the elements that has been borrowed, parodied, and contested for more than two centuries. Its origin is older than Freemasonry itself.

The short version is that the handshake came from the medieval operative stonemasons, who used a system of grips and passwords to identify a qualified journeyman and to exclude impostors. The system was practical rather than ritual: a traveling craftsman in a strange city needed to be able to prove his qualifications quickly, and the local lodge needed to be able to test him. By the early eighteenth century, when the English lodges began to admit non-operative “speculative” members, the system had been carried across almost unchanged into the new, ritualized form of Masonry. The full account is given in secret handshakes and signs; the broader ritual context is in Freemason degree rituals explained; the wider symbolic system is mapped in the symbols pillar.

A Practical Problem in the Medieval Building Trade

The medieval European building industry was extraordinarily mobile. The great cathedrals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were built by itinerant teams of masons, carpenters, smiths, and laborers who moved from site to site as work demanded. A journeyman in this trade faced a chronic problem: how to prove his qualifications to a new employer. He carried no certificate. He had no trade union card. He could not easily carry a portfolio of finished work. If he showed up at a new site and claimed to be a Master, the local lodge had no immediate way to test the claim. The result was a steady stream of impostors, and a need for a test the genuine journeyman could pass and the impostor could not.

The medieval masonic lodge solved the problem with a private test. A traveling craftsman was led blindfolded into a closed room and asked to give the word, the grip, and the sign. The word rotated on a quarterly or annual basis, was changed by the incoming Master, and was never committed to writing. The grip was a particular way of pressing the hand or the wrist, taught only to a member. The sign was a silent gesture of the body, used when words were impossible. A candidate who knew the current set of all three was, by definition, a member of some genuine lodge. A candidate who did not was rejected.

The Survival of the System in the Operative Lodges

By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the English operative lodges were beginning to be dominated by men who were not, in fact, working masons. The “accepted” Masons were gentlemen of leisure, scholars, and patrons of the craft who were admitted to the lodge for the social prestige of membership. The admission of accepted Masons did not displace the practical testing system; the system was simply extended to include the new class of members.

The Elizabethean statutes of the operative lodges, several of which survive in manuscript, give a clear picture. The Master of the lodge was elected annually, chose a new set of words and grips at installation, kept them in his own head, did not commit them to writing, and taught them to each new member individually. The system was elaborate enough to be a genuine test but simple enough to be transmitted in a single meeting. The most important feature was that the same test was used at every lodge in the network: a Mason of proven skill could be tested, in a single interview, at any other lodge in the same region.

The Adoption by Speculative Masonry

The transformation of the operative lodges into speculative Masonry is conventionally dated to 1717, the year in which four London lodges met to form the first Grand Lodge of England. The new order was, in the strictest sense, an invention: the speculative Masons borrowed the operative lodges’ vocabulary of grips, signs, and passwords without the practical need for them. The grip, the sign, and the word were now, for the first time, purely ritual.

The speculative Masons preserved the system almost intact, but they rationalized it in a way the medieval operative masons would not have recognised. The three Craft Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason were each given their own grip, sign, and word, and the grips of the higher degrees of the Scottish and York Rites were added as the order expanded. The Master Mason’s grip — a pressure of the right hand on the back of the brother’s right hand, traditionally taught as a stylized pantomime of the assistance given to Hiram Abiff at his raising — is the gesture that has become the popular stereotype of the Masonic handshake at the center of the chest.

The Three Grips in Modern Masonry

The grip system as it is taught in modern Anglo-American Masonry can be summarised as follows:

• The grip of an Entered Apprentice is a handclasp in which the inside of the right wrist is pressed firmly, with the thumb of the right hand on the knuckle of the second metacarpal joint.
• The grip of a Fellow Craft replaces the wrist pressure with a press on the top of the right wrist, with the thumb on the knuckle of the second metacarpal joint.
• The grip of a Master Mason is a pressure of the right hand across the back of the brother’s right hand, the exact contact point varying by jurisdiction but most commonly taught as the second knuckle. The grip is presented to the candidate as a stylized pantomime of the assistance given to Hiram Abiff at his raising.

Each grip is paired with a word and a penal sign, both taught only in the working lodge and not committed to writing in any open publication. The combination of grip, word, and penal sign, taught in the same private interview, is the modern form of the medieval operative test.

The “True Grip” and the Five Points of Fellowship

The phrase “True Grip” or “Real Grip” refers specifically to the grip of an Entered Apprentice, and is taught as part of the first degree. The True Grip is presented as the practical test of a real workman — the one used, in the early operative lodges, to identify a genuine craftsman in a strange city. Theologically, the grip is rooted in the same covenant theology that gives the order its basic vocabulary; practically, it is a holdover from the medieval operative system that the order has preserved and elaborated.

The most elaborate single gesture in the Master Mason degree is the Five Points of Fellowship, a stylised pantomime in which two Masons join: (1) hand to hand — the grip of the right hand, (2) foot to foot — the right foot placed against the right foot of the brother, (3) knee to knee — the right knee pressed against the right knee of the brother, (4) breast to breast — the breast pressed against the breast of the brother, and (5) the whisper of the Master’s word — the secret word of the Master Mason’s degree. The Five Points is the basis of the popular image of the Masonic handshake at the center of the chest.

What the System Is For

The modern Masonic grip system, like the medieval system from which it is descended, has two functions that are not always compatible. The first is practical: it identifies a member to another member, in a setting where the order is more or less private. The second is symbolic: it is a permanent reminder of the bond of brotherhood that the order was formed to express.

As the order has become more open and more public, the practical function of the grip has largely disappeared. The symbolic function has not. The grip is still taught, still guarded, and still felt, by Masons, to be a powerful mark of identity. The fact that the grip is largely irrelevant to the modern social function of the order is a sign of how durable the older symbolic vocabulary has been, and how important it is to the way the order conceives of itself.

The grip is also a way of connecting the modern member to the historical chain. A Mason giving the grip in a modern lodge is, in the symbolic claim of the order, doing the same thing his operative ancestors did in a medieval building yard. The continuity is partly a historical fact and partly a piece of ritual claim, and the modern order is not always careful to distinguish the two. The history of the transition is treated in the history of secret societies.

Beyond Masonry

The grip system of Freemasonry has had a long afterlife in other fraternal orders. The Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, the Knights of Columbus, and a long list of smaller American fraternal organizations all developed their own grip systems modeled on the Masonic one, and used the grip as the central private test of membership. The general principle is the same as in Masonry: a private, in-person test administered in a closed room that the impostor cannot pass. The same principle is at work in the Skull and Bones tap taught to members of the Yale undergraduate society, in the coded hand gestures of the Bohemian Grove opening ceremony, and in the more or less explicit handshakes of organized-crime associations. A focused account of the practice across the fraternal world is given in secret handshakes and signs.

Sources and Further Reading

The standard scholarly references are David Knoop and G.P. Jones, The Genesis of Freemasonry (1949) for the medieval operative-mason practice; David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry (1988) for the speculative transition; and for the modern grips specifically, the relevant chapter in Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment (1991). The most thorough primary-source edition of the Old Charges manuscripts is Knoop and Jones’s earlier The Scottish Mason and the Mason Word (1939), with the recent updating in the Ars Quatuor Coronatorum journal (1980s onward). The Regius Manuscript is best consulted in the modern diplomatic edition by David W. B. Barker, The Masonic Manuscript of the Regius Poem (2010). For the Roman and Christian antecedents, see the standard references in the Cicero corpus and the Didache 9–10.

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