Unakceptable_views (@Unakceptabke_views)

**Some Ancient Scots-Irish-Swedish Sources for “Antient” Freemasonry** “In his ground-breaking work on early Scottish Freemasonry, **The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590-1710** (1988), >**Stevenson revealed the late Renaissance linkage in Scotland between operative “craft masonry” and the Cabalistic, Hermetic, and Rosicrucian “sciences.”** >**He differed from those historians who portray Freemasonry as a generically Enlightenment institution, noting that the fraternity contained elements “that appear highly incongruous in the Age of Enlightenment”:** In essence freemasonry is a late Renaissance phenomenon. Its astonishing expansion in the eighteenth century saw it adapt itself to some extent, to a new age, **but in many ways it remained a movement which fits better into the world of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries than into the world of the Enlightenment.** Though Stevenson did not analyse the Jacobite developments in eighteenth-century Masonry, **Jacob’s own research revealed the significance of supporters of the Stuart cause in European, Ḗcossais Masonry, which she found disconcerting:** • • • • • Generally historians have not known quite what to do with the stalwart but exiled Jacobites except to see them as romantic patrons of an essentially lost, and backward-looking cause. When their cause merges with a commitment to freemasonry, defined as progressive and modern in its aspirations and outlook, the historian is confounded by an ostensible paradox. I examine this “paradox” in a forthcoming book, Masonic Rivalries and Literary Politics: From Jonathan Swift to Henry Fielding, in which I discuss **the way in which Scots-Irish Masonry maintained the early Stuart-Renaissance interests in jewish mysticism, Hermetic alchemy, and Rose-Croix chivalry, while at the same time advocating religious toleration and egalitarian relations within the lodges (the latter attitudes were indeed “enlightened”).** Though the Grand Lodge of England, **organized in 1717 to support the Hanoverian succession and Whig politics**, has hitherto received the most attention from historians, its decline in prestige and power in the 1740s opened the door to a revival of those earlier “Celtic” traditions, which were implemented in the newly organized Grand Lodge of the “Antients” in 1751. In the following narrative, I will discuss the “ancient” sources of those traditions and briefly trace their development from the 1450s to the 1770s. **But let us begin with the “upstart” Irish in the mid-eighteenth century.** • • • • • Research on Irish Freemasonry has long been hampered by the lack of written documents, for, as Chetwode Crawley explained, >**It was a point of honour with the Irish Freemasons . . . to prevent any written information or authorization, concerned with the Craft from passing out of fraternal keeping.** >**The Irish Freemason held it to be his plain duty to destroy any document, public or private, historical or evidential, sooner than let it pass to the hands of outsiders. Warrants, Certificates, Lodge Registers and Minute Books shared the common fate.** This tradition of secrecy and silence was compounded by the problem of widespread Jacobitism in Ireland, **which placed many disaffected Masons (both Catholic and Protestant) under government surveillance**. With regular government interception of mail and confiscation of private papers, Irish Jacobites and their Masonic sympathizers were extremely cautious about putting anything controversial or seditious in writing. >**Fortunately, the current revival of international Jacobite studies is bringing long-buried sources to the surface and shedding new light on the early historical background and contemporary context of “Antient” Freemasonry.** • • • • • On 17 July 1751, **the Masters of six Irish lodges in London joined together to form a dissident “Antients” Grand Lodge, in opposition to what would be called the “Modern” Grand Lodge of England, composed mainly of loyalist supporters of the Whig-Hanoverian government**. A year later, an Irish immigrant painter, Laurence Dermott, was elected Grand Secretary of the new system, **and he brought with him a knowledge of older Scots-Irish Masonic traditions that emphasized Cabalistic themes that were not included in the English Grand Lodge system and which were not publicized in James Anderson’s official Constitutions of the Free Masons** (London, 1723; rev. ed. 1738). Over the next years, Dermott published his versions of the Antients’ history and regulations in Ahiman Rezon: or, a Help to a Brother; Shewing the Excellence of Secrecy, and the first Cause, or Motive, of the Institution of Free-Masonry (London, 1756; rev. eds. 1764 and 1778). • • • • • In the process, he revived ancient Scots-Irish (“Celtic”) traditions that had earlier been revealed by the great Irish satirist, Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Dermott dedicated the 1756 version to William Stewart, 3rd Viscount Mountjoy and Earl of Blessington, a former Irish Grand Master and supporter of Swift in the Dean’s campaigns against English oppression of Ireland. He included a theatrical prologue by Thomas Griffith, an Irish Mason and friend of Swift, and an oratorio, Solomon’s Temple, by James Eyre Weekes, an “ancient” Irish Mason, who in 1745 published a Masonic poem in praise of the recently-deceased Swift.8 In Dermott’s 1778 edition, **he boasted about the successful spread of the Antients’ system and the wide sales of Ahiman Rezon by featuring on the title-page a quote from Swift**: >As for his Works, in Verse or Prose, I own myself no Judge of those; Nor can I tell what Criticks thought ’em, But this I know, all People bought ’em. — Swift Like the satirical Dean, **Dermott would provoke suspicions of political sedition and crypto-Jacobitism among loyalist Hanoverian Masons, the “Moderns,” whom he would so gleefully mock**. But both men were careful to cover their more risky political tracks, while continuing to serve Irish patriotic interests.“ continues in comments… https://skirret.com/papers/schuchard-antient.html THE ORIGINS OF FREEMASONRY Scotland's century, 1590-1710 https://books.google.com.tr/books?id=6WzkgXaSSeIC&printsec=frontcover&hl=tr#v=onepage&q&f=false The Constitutions of the Free-masons: Containing the History, Charges, etc. (1859; 133 pages) https://archive.org/details/constitutionsfr00freegoog/page/n1/mode/1up Antients’ history and regulations in Ahiman Rezon: or, a Help to a Brother; Shewing the Excellence of Secrecy, and the first Cause, or Motive, of the Institution of Free-Masonry (1782; 223 pages) https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_ahiman-rezon-or-a-help_dermott-laurence_1782 James Eyre Weeks, Literary Figure, Rector Ballinadee https://durrushistory.com/2025/07/29/james-eyre-weeks-literary-figure-rector-ballinadee/