Rethinking Religion

Abstract This chapter explores the history and intellectual development of Freemasonry. It examines the emergence of Freemasonry in relation to the developing science of religion in seventeenth-century Britain and the works of the Cambridge Platonists. Special focus is given to the evolution of masonic identity, from a society arising from operative stone mason guilds into an imagined remnant of the mystery religions of antiquity. This transformation resulted in the emergence of what this book terms the masonic perennial philosophy. As part of this, Freemasonry absorbed elements of the Western esoteric tradition, and upon being imported from Britain to the continent, helped trigger an eighteenth-century “occult revival.” This occult movement provided a counterweight to the Enlightenment until it went mute during the French Revolution. The chapter concludes by examining early nineteenth-century conceptions of Freemasonry as a primordial meta-religion and, potentially, the root from which all major religions derive.