THE PYTHAGOREANS AND FREEMASONRY
by Albert G. mackey
The theory which ascribes, if not the actual origin of Freemasonry to
Pythagoras, at least its introduction into Europe by him, through the school
which he established at Crotona, in Italy, which ,was a favorite(oke one among
our early writers, may very properly be placed among the legends of the Order,
since it wants all the requisites of historical authority for its support.
The notion was most probably derived from what has been called the Leland
Manuscript, because it is said to have been found in the Bodleian Library, in
the handwriting of that celebrated antiquary. The author of the Life of Leland
gives this account of the manuscript :
"The original is said to be the handwriting of King Henry VI. and copied by
Leland by order of his highness, King Henry VIII. If the authenticity of this
ancient monument of literature remains unquestioned, it demands particular
notice in the present publication, on account of the singularity of the subject,
and no less from a due regard to the royal writer and our author, his
transcriber, indefatigable in every part of literature. It will also be
admitted, acknowledgment is due to the learned Mr. Locke, who, amidst the
closest studies and the most strict attention to human understanding, could
unbend his mind in search of this ancient treatise, which he first brought from
obscurity in the year 1796."'
This production was first brought to the attention of scholars by being
published in the Gentlemen's Magazine for September, 1753, where it is stated to
have been previously printed at Frankfort, in Germany, in 1748, from a copy
found in " the writing-desk of a deceased brother."
The title of it, as given in the magazine, is in the following words:
Certeyne Questyons wyth Answeres to the same, concerynge the Mystery of
Maconrye ; wrytenne by the hande of Kynge Henrye the Sixthe of the Name, and
faythefullye copyed by me Johan Leylande, Antiquarius, by the commaunde of His
Highnesse."
The opinion of Masonic critics of the present day is that the document is a
forgery. It was most probably written about the time and in the spirit in which
Chatterton composed his imitations of the Monk Rowley, and of Ireland with his
impositions of Shakespeare, and was fabricated as an unsuccessful attempt to
imitate the archaic language of the 15th century, and as a pious fraud intended
to elevate the character and sustain the pretensions of the Masonic Fraternity
by furnishing the evidence of its very ancient origin.
Such were not, however, the views of the Masonic writers of the last and
beginning of the present century.
They accepted the manuscript, or rather the printed copy of it -for the
original codex has never been seen--with unhesitating, faith as an authentic
document. Hutchinson gave it as an appendix to his Spirit of Masonry, Preston
published in the second and enlarged edition of his Illustrations, Calcott in
his Candid Disquisition , Dermott in his Ahiman Rezon, and Krause in his Drei
Altesten Kunslurkunden. In none of these is there the faintest hint of its being
anything but an authentic document. Oliver said: " I entertain no doubt of the
genuineness and authenticity of this valuable Manuscript." The same view has
been entertained by Reghellini among the French, and by Krause, Fessler, and
Lenning among the Germans.
Mr. Halliwell was perhaps the first of English scholars to express a doubt of
its genuineness. After a long and unsuccessful search in the Bodleian Library
for the original, he came, very naturally, to the conclusion that it is a
forgery. Hughan and Woodford, both excellent judges, have arrived at the same
conclusion, and it is now a settled question that the Leland or Locke Manuscript
(for it is known by both titles) is a document of no historic character. It is
not, however, without its value. To its appearance about the middle of the last
century, and the unhesitating acceptance of its truth by the Craft at the time,
we can, in all probability, assign the establishment of the doctrine that
Freemasonry was of a Pythagorean origin, though it had been long before adverted
to by Dr. Anderson.
Before proceeding to an examination of the rise and progress of this opinion,
it will be proper to cite so much of the manuscript as connects Pythagoras with
Masonry. I do not quote the whole document, though it is short, because it has
so repeatedly been printed, in even elementary Masonic works, as to be readily
accessible to the reader. In making my quotations I shall so far defer to the
artifice of the fabricator as to preserve unchanged his poor attempt to imitate
the orthography and style of the 15th century, and interpolate in brackets, when
necessary, an explanation of the most unintelligible words.
The document purports to be answers by some Mason to questions proposed by
King Henry VI., who, it would seem, must have taken some interest in the "
Mystery of Masonry," and had sought to obtain from competent authority a
knowledge of its true character. The following are among the questions and
answers:
Q.Where dyd ytt [Masonry] begynne? A.Ytt dyd begynne with the fyrst menne, yn
the Este, which were before the fyrste Manne of the Weste, and comyngc westlye,
ytt hathe broughte herwyth alle comfortes to the wylde and comfortlesse.
Q. Who dyd brynge ytt Westye ? A. The Venetians [Phoenicians] who beynge
grate Merchandes comed ffyrst ffrome the Este yn Venctia [Phoenicia] for the
commodyte of Merchaundysinge beithe [both] Este and Weste bey the redde and
Myddlelonde [Mediterranean] Sees.
Q. Howe comede ytt yn Englonde? A. Peter Gower [Pythagoras] a Grecian
journeyedde tor kunnynge yn Egypt and in Syria and in everyche Londe whereat the
Venetians [Phoenicians] hadde plauntedde Maconrye and wynnynge Entraunce yn all
Lodges of Maconnes, he lerned muche, and retournedde and woned [dwelt] yn
Cirecia Magna wachsynge [growing] and becommynge a myghtye wyseacre
[philosopher] and gratelyche renouned and here he framed a grate Lodge at Groton
[Crotona] and maked many Maconnes, some whereoffe dyd journeye yn Fraunce, and
maked manye Maconnes wherefromme, yn processe of Tyme, the Arte passed yn
Engelonde."
I am convinced that there was a French original of this document, from which
language the fabricator translated it into archaic English. The internal proofs
of this are to be found in the numerous preservations of French idioms. Thus we
meet with Peter Gower, evidently derived from Pythagore, pronounced Petagore,
the French for Pythagoras ; Maconrye and Maconnes, for Masonry and Masons, the
French c in the word being used instead of the English s,- the phrase wynnynge
the Facultye of Abrac, which is a pure Gallic idiom, instead of acquiring the
faculty, the word gayner being indifferently used in French as signifying to win
or to acquire,- the word Freres for Brethren,- and the statement, in the spirit
of French nationality, that Masonry was brought into England out of France.
None of these idiomatic phrases or national peculiarities would have been
likely to occur if the manuscript had been originally written by an Englishman
and in the English language. But be this as it may, the document bad no sooner
appeared than it seemed to inspire contemporary Masonic writers with the idea
that Masonry and the school of Pythagoras, which he established at Crotona, in
Italy, about five centuries before Christ, were closely connected-an idea which
was very generally adopted by their successors, so that it came at last to be a
point of the orthodox Masonic creed.
Thus Preston, in his Illustrations of Masonry, when commenting on the
dialogue contained in this document, says that , the records of the fraternity
inform us that Pythagoras was regularly initiated into Masonry; and being
properly instructed in the mysteries of the Art, he was much improved, and
propagated the principles of the Order in other countries into which he
afterwards travelled."
Calcott, in his Candid Disquisition, speaks of the Leland Manuscript as " an
antique relation, from whence may be gathered many of the original principles of
the ancient society, on which the institution of Freemasonry was ingrafted "-by
the " ancient society meaning the school of Pythagoras.
Hutchinson, in his Spirit of Masonry, quotes this " ancient Masonic record,"
as he calls it, and says that " it brings us positive evidence of the
Pythagorean doctrine and Basilidian principles making the foundation of our
religious and moral duties." Two of the lectures in his work are appropriated to
a (discussion of the doctrines of Pythagoras in connection with the Masonic
system. But this theory of the Pythagorean origin of Freemasonry does not owe
its existence to the writers of the middle of the 18th century.
It had been advanced at an early period, and soon after the Revival in 1717
by Dr. Anderson. In the first edition of the Constitutions, published in 1723,
he alludes to Pythagoras as having borrowed great knowledge from the Chaldean
Magi and the Babylonish Jews, but he is more explicit in his Defense of Masonry,
published in 1730, wherein he says: " I am fully convinced that Freemasonry is
very nearly allied to the old Pythagorean Discipline, from whence, I am
persuaded, it may in some circumstances very justly claim a descent."
Now, how are we to explain the way in which this tradition of the connection
of the Philosopher of Samos first acquired a place among the legends of the
Craft? The solution of the problem does not appear to be very difficult.
In none of the old manuscript constitutions which contain what has been
called the Legend of the Guild, or the Legend of the Craft, is there, with a
single exception, any allusion to the name of Pythagoras. That exception is
found in the Cooke MS., where the legendist, after relating the story of the two
pillars inscribed with all the sciences, which had been erected by Jabal before
the Flood, adds, in lines 318-326, this statement:
"And after this flode many yeres as the cronyclc tellcth these ii were founde
and as the polycronicon seyeth that a grete clerke that called putogaras
[Pythagoras] fonde that one and hermes the philisophre fonde that other, and
thei tought forthe the sciens that thei fonde therein ywritten."
Now, although the Cooke MS. is the earliest of the old records, after the
Halliwell poem, none of the subsequent constitutions have followed it in this
allusion to Pythagoras. This was because the writer of the Cooke MS., being in
possession of the Polychronicon of the monk Ranulph Higden, an edition of which
had been printed during his time by William Caxton, he had liberally borrowed
from that historical work and incorporated parts of it into his Legend. Of these
interpolations, the story of the finding of one of the pillars by Pythagoras is
one. The writer acknowledges his indebtedness for the statement to Higden's
Polychronicon. But it formed no part of the Legend of the Craft, and hence no
notice is taken of it in the subsequent manuscript copies of the Legend, In none
of them is Pythagoras even named.
It is evident, then, that in the 14th and following centuries, to the
beginning of the 18th, the theory of the Pythagorean origin of Freemasonry, or
of the connection of the Grecian philosopher with it, was not recognized by the
Craft as any part of the traditional history of the Fraternity. There is no
safer rule than that of the old schoolmen, which teaches us that we must reason
alike concerning that which does not appear and that which does not exist-" de
non apparentibus et de non existentibus, eadem est ratio." The old craftsmen who
fabricated the Legend were workmen and not scholars ; they were neither
acquainted with the scholastic nor the ancient philosophy; they said nothing
about Pythagoras because they knew nothing about him.
But about the beginning of the 18th century a change took place, not only in
the organization of the Masonic institution, but also in the character and
qualifications of the men who were engaged in producing the modification, or we
might more properly call it the revolution.
Although in the 17th, and perhaps in the 16th century, many persons were
admitted into the Lodges of Operative Masons who were not professional builders,
it is, I think, evident that the society did not assume a purely speculative
form until the year 1717. The Revival in that year, by the election of Anthony
Sayer, " Gentleman," as Grand Master; Jacob Lamball, a " Carpenter," and Joseph
Elliott, a " Captain," as Grand Wardens, proves that the control of the society
was to be taken out of the hands of the Operative Masons.
Among those who were at about that time engaged in the reconstruction of the
Institution were James Anderson and Theophilus Desaguliers. Anderson was a
Master of Arts, and afterward a Doctor of Divinity, the minister of a church in
London, and an author; Desaguliers was a Doctor of Laws, a fellow of the Royal
Society, and a teacher of Experimental Philosophy of no little reputation. Both
of these men, as scholars, were thoroughly conversant with the system of
Pythagoras, and they were not unwilling to take advantage of his symbolic method
of inculcating his doctrine, and to introduce some of his symbols into the
symbolism of the Order which they were renovating.
Jamblichus, the biographer of Pythagoras, tells us that while the sage was on
his travels he caused himself to be initiated into all the mysteries of Byblos
and Tyre and those which were practiced in many parts of Syria. But as these
mysteries were originally received by the Phoenicians from Egypt, he passed over
into that country, where he remained twenty-two years, occupying himself in the
study of geometry, astronomy, and all the initiations of the gods, until he was
carried a captive into Babylon by the soldiers of Cambyses. There he freely
associated with the Magi in their religion ;and their studies, and, having
obtained a thorough knowledge of music, the science of numbers, and other arts,
he finally returned to Greece.
The school of philosophy which Pythagoras afterward estalablished at the city
of Crotona, in Italy, differed from those of all the other philosophers of
Greece, in the austerities of initiation to which his disciples were subject in
the degrees of probation into which they were divided, and in the method which
lie adopted of veiling his instructions under symbolic forms. In his various
travels he had imbibed the mystical notions prevalent among the Egyptians and
the Chaldeans, and had borrowed some of their modes of initiation into their
religious mysteries, which he adopted in the method by which he communicated his
own principles. Grote, in his History of Greece, has very justly said that "
Pythagoras represents in part the scientific tendencies of his age, in part
also the spirit of mysticism and of special fraternities for religious and
ascetic observance which became diffused throughout Greece in the 6th century
before the Christian era." Of the character of the philosophy of Pythagoras and
of his method of instruction, which certainly bore a very close resemblance to
that adopted by the founders of the speculative system, such cultivated scholars
as Anderson and Desaguliers certainly were not ignorant. And if, among those who
were engaged with them in the construction of this new and improved school of
speculative Masonry, there were any whose limited scholastic attainments would
not enable them to consult the Greek biographics of Pythagoras by Jamblichus and
by Porphyry, they had at hand and readily accessible an English translation of
M. Dacier's life of the philosopher, containing also an elaborate explication of
his symbols, together with a translation of the Commentaries of Hierodes on the
Golden Verses of Pythagoras, all embraced in one volume and published in London
in the year 1707, by the celebrated bibliopole Jacob Tonson.
There was abundant material and ready opportunity for the partially unlearned
as well as for the more erudite to obtain a familiarity with the philosophy of
Pythagoras, his method of initiation, and his system of symbols.
It is not, therefore, surprising that these " Revivalists," as they have been
called, should have delighted, as Anderson has done in his Defense of Masonry,
to compare the two schools of the Pythagoreans and the Freemasons ; that they
should have dwelt on their great similarity ; and in the development of their
speculative system should have adopted many symbols from the former which do not
appear to have been known to or used by the old Operative Masons whom they
succeeded.
Among the first Pythagorean symbols which were adopted by the Speculative
Masons was the symbolism of the science of numbers, which appears in the
earliest rituals extant, and of which Dr. Oliver has justly said, in his
posthumous work entitled The Pythagorean Triangle, that " the Pythagoreans had
so high an opinion of it that they considered it to be the origin of all things,
and thought a knowledge of it to be equivalent to a knowledge of God."
This symbolism of numbers, which was adopted into Speculative Masonry at a
very early period after the Revival, has been developed and enlarged in
successive revisions of the lectures, until at the present day it constitutes
one of the most important and curious parts of the system of Freemasonry. But we
have no evidence that the same system of numerical symbolism, having the
Pythagorean and modern Masonic interpretation, prevailed among the Craft
anterior to the beginning of the 18th century. It was the work of the
Revivalists, who, as scholars familiar with the mystical philosophy of
Pythagoras, deemed it expedient to introduce it into the equally mystical
philosophy of Speculative Masonry In fact, the Traveling Freemasons, Builders,
or Operative Masons of the Middle Ages, who were the real predecessors of the
Speculative Masons of the 18th century, did not, so far as we can learn from
their remains, practice any of the symbolism of Pythagoras. Their symbol, such
as the vesica piscis, the cross, the rose, or certain mathematical figures, were
derived either from the legends of the church or from the principles of geometry
applied to the art of building. These skillful architects who, in the dark ages,
when few men could read or write, erected edifices surpassing the works of
ancient Greece or Rome, and which have never been equalled by modern builders,
were wonderful in their peculiar skill, but were wholly ignorant of metaphysics
or philosophy, and borrowed nothing from Pythagoras.
Between the period of the Revival and the adoption of the Prestonian system,
in 1772, the lectures of Freemasonry underwent at least seven revisions. In each
of these, the fabricators of which were such cultivated scholars as Dr.
Desaguliers, Martin Clare, a President of the Royal Society, Thomas Dunckerley,
a man of considerable literary attainments, and others of like character, there
was a gradual increment of Pythagorean symbols. Among these, one of the most
noted is the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid, which is said to have been
discovered by Pythagoras, and which the introducer of it into the Masonic
system, in his explanation of the symbol, claims the sage to have been " an
ancient brother."
For some time after the Revival, the symbols of Pythagoras, growing into
gradual use among the Craft, were referred to simply as an evidence of the great
similarity which existed between the two systems-a theory which, so far as it
respects modern Speculative Masonry, may be accepted with but little hesitation.
The most liberal belief on this subject was that the two systems were nearly
allied, but, except in the modified statement of Anderson, already quoted from
his Defense ofmasonry, there was no claim in the years immediately succeeding
the Revival that the one was in direct descent from the other.
In none of the speeches, lectures, or essays of the early part of the last
century, which have been preserved, is there any allusion to this as a received
theory of the Craft.
Drake, in his speech before the Grand Lodge of York, delivered in 1726 does
indeed, speak of Pythagoras, not as the founder of Masonry, but only in
connection with Euclid and Archimedes as great proficients in Geometry, whose
works have been the basis " on which the learned have built at different times
so many noble superstructures." And of Geometry, he calls it "that noble and
useful science which must have begun and goes hand in hand with Masonry," an
assertion which, to use the old chorus of the Masons, nobody will deny."
But to say that Geometry is closely connected with Operative Masonry, and
that Pythagoras was a great geometrician, is very different from saying that he
was a Mason and propagated Masonry in Europe.
Martin Clare, in his lecture on the Advantages Enjoyed by the Fraternity,
whose date is 1735, does not even mention the name of Pythagoras, although, in
one passage at least, when referring to "those great and worthy spirits with
whom we are intimately related," he had a fair opportunity to refer to that
illustrious sage.
In a Discourse Upon Masonry, delivered before a Lodge of England in 1742, now
lying before me, in which the origin of the Order is fully discussed, there is
not one word of reference to Pythagoras. The same silence is preserved in a
Lecture on the Connection Between Freemasonry and Religion, by the Rev. C.
Brockwell, published in 1747.
But after the middle of the century the frequent references in the lectures
to the Pythagorean symbols, and especially to that important one, in its Masonic
as well as its geometrical value, the forty-seventh proposition, began to lead
the members of tile society to give to Pythagoras the credit of a relationship
to the order to which historically he had no claim.
Thus, in A Search After Truth, delivered in the Lodge in 1752, the author
says that " Solon, Plato, and Pythagoras, and from them the Grecian literati in
general in a great measure, were obliged for their learning to Masonry and the
labors of some of our ancient brethren."
And then, when this notion of the Pythagorean origin of Freemasonry began to
take root in the minds of the Craft, it was more firmly established by the
appearance in 1753, in the Gentleman's Magazine, of that spurious document
already quoted, in which, by a " pious fraud," the fabricator of it sought to
give the form of an historical record to the statement that Pythagoras, learning
his Masonry of the Eastern Magi had brought it to Italy and established a Lodge
at Crotona, whence the institution was propagated throughout Europe, and from
France into England.
As to this statement in the Leland MS., it may be sufficient to say that the
sect of Pythagoras did not subsist longer than to the end of the reign of
Alexander the Great. So far from disseminating its Lodges or schools after the
Christian era, we may cite the authority of the learned Dacier, who says that "
in after ages there were here and there some disciples of Pythagoras, but these
were only private persons who never established any society, nor had the
Pythagoreans any longer a public school."
And so the result of this investigation into the theory of the Pythagorean
origin of Freemasonry may be briefly epitomized thus: The mediaeval Freemasons
never entertained any such theory, nor in their architectural labors did they
adopt any of his symbols. The writer of the Cooke MS., in 1490, having at hand
Higden's Polychronicon, in Trevisa's translation, a new edition of which had
just been printed by Caxton, incorporated into the Legend of the Craft some of
the historical statements (such as they were) of the Monk of (Chester, but they
were extraneous to and formed no part of the original Legend. Therefore, in all
the subsequent Old Records these interpolations were rejected and the Legend of
the Craft, as accepted by the writers of the manuscripts which succeeded that of
the Cooke codex, from 1550 to 1701, contained no mention of Pythagoras.
Upon the Revival, in 1717, which was really the beginning of genuine
Speculative Masonry, the scholars who fabricated the scheme, finding the
symbolic teaching of Pythagoras very apposite, adopted some of its symbols,
especially those relating to numbers in the new Speculative system which they
were forming.
By the continued additions of subsequent ritualists these symbols were
greatly increased, so that the name and the philosophy of Pythagoras became
familiar to the Craft, and finally, in 1753, a forged document was published
which claimed him as the founder and propagator of Masonry.
In later days this theory has continued to be maintained by a few writers,
and the received rituals of the Order require it as a part of the orthodox
Masonic creed, that Pythagoras was a Mason and an ancient brother and patron of
the Order.
Neither early Masonic tradition nor any historical records exist which
support such a belief.
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