The Birth of a Religion: Freemasonry’s Scottish Origins

The Family Of Love, The Art Of Memory, The Knights Templar, King James, Poetry and Human Sacrifice

 (With humble gratitude I want thank my patrons for making this work possible)

As promised in in Part 1 of this essay, here in Part 2 evidence is forthcoming to show that Freemasonry originated in Scotland before coming to England, where it was formed by philosopher Francis Bacon into “Blue Lodge” Freemasonry. If you want some background on Freemasonry Wikipedia is pretty good.

Short Argument For Scottish Origins

Short Argument: Freemasonry did not begin in ancient Egypt, Israel or in roving bands of Medieval stonemasons, all common origin stories.  The two oldest lodges of Freemasonry are both in Scotland.1 One is in Edinburgh, home of Scottish royalty, and the other in the Orkney Island Highlands, where not much stone masonry was practiced dare I say, but where the Earl of Orkney clan lived, they being the Sinclair’s or St. Clair Knights Templar family who later built the famous Rosslyn Chapel.  The Sinclair family gave us the first Grandmasters of Scottish Freemasonry. The oldest known Masonic artifact, the Kirkwall Scroll, was found at the Orkney Island Kilwinning Lodge, pictured above. 

The first known initiate to Freemasonry (1601) is King James VI of Scotland, who later became King James I of England.  King James looms large over this history. The next recorded initiate (1640) is Scotsman Robert Moray: soldier, spy, scientist and a founding member of The Royal Society, the worlds first organization devoted to Science, whose formation was inspired by the writings of Baron Verulam, Francis Bacon.  

Now, if that’s not convincing enough you’ll have to read the next 20 pages of fascinating history.  Surely THAT will convince you Freemasonry got it’s occulted start in Scotland, nearabouts the stone bridges over the Water of Leith in the “Athens of The North”, Auld Reekie Edinburgh. This is a LONG essay. Jump about to the various headings as you see fit.

Edinburgh Bridges

This Scottish origin story shown by recent research,2 is still disputed by official statements from the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE), the nerve center of all “regular” and “recognized” Freemasonic Lodges spread across the globe.  UGLE maintains that the origins of Freemasonry are “Still to this day… the subject of intense speculation”.  For an organization proudly based on the “values and principles of integrity”3 as well as  ‘science’, as we shall see, this a curious falsehood.

In step by step fashion I propose to show that Baron Verulam, Viscount St Alban philosopher, lawyer, historian, Lord Chancellor and William Shakespeare Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) to have been the force bringing Freemasonry from Scotland to London, structuring ‘the craft’ into the form it took when it finally disclosed itself to the world a century later in London, strangely married to the birth of modern Science. 

A bit of Bacon: Francis Bacon is fairly well known today as the philosopher and “father of modern science”. 4 while being subject to persistent rumors for hundreds of years that he is the true author of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare.5  Evidence for his involvement in Shakespeare plays has produced uncounted books and journals 6 probably best compiled by the Francis Bacon Society founded in 1856 and still extant.  For those new to this topic, after hundreds of years of searching, there is no credible evidence AT ALL linking William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon to the writing of the plays and poems. None.7 To my personal satisfaction, after years of research, Bacon’s involvement in the writing of the plays is an established fact.

An astonishing truth now understood is that there would be no British Empire without Shakespeare.8  I personally believe Empire is the primary reason Shakespeare exists, though I do think they had a lot of fun creating the plays and they form a part of Bacon’s Great Instauration, the term he used for the sum of all of his work. Sounds kinda like The Great Reset. The Shakespeare “history plays”, such as “The Tragedy Of Richard III” are now understood by mainstream scholars to have been written as Tudor propaganda, provide evidence for this point of view.9 Top-notch feature film '‘The Lost King” is must see on this issue.

I contend that Bacon surreptitiously created three interrelated ‘religions’ if you will, providing  the engine of early Empire: Freemasonry is a literal secret religion still going undercover as a ‘fraternal organization’. Science became a religion, purposely, that of Scientism: ‘Trust The Science’ has replaced ‘Trust In God'. Only slightly tongue in cheek, Shakespeare has also become a religion. No CAP.  If all of that sounds preposterous please stay tuned.  As a master of espionage, Bacon purposefully hid the magnitude of his influence so as to better facilitate the flowering of Empire, based on his inordinate and precocious understanding of individual and group psychology. Rumor has it that he read “every book in print in England” before he left his teens.10 Among those books, of course, were those by Machiavelli.11

Side note: Bacon is also considered to be one of the greatest lawyers in English history. Besides science, secret societies, the law, high/low brow entertainment and espionage, Bacon loved plants, medicine and gardening (well, his servants did the actual gardening- smiley face)  He also designed his thirteen year old wife’s wedding dress.  Further evincing his great fondness for haberdashery he appeared, as described by his friend the famous playwright Ben Johnson, as being dressed head to toe in royal purple at his famous 60th birthday bash, no doubt in a nod to his royal origins. But what Bacon was most fond of was the grand idea of an Elite British Empire. 12

Scientism, out of all his accomplishments, is the key to Bacon’s world-encompassing end game. For confirmation of his prophecy of the ‘priests of science as government’ see his famous book length fable New Atlantis.  

To Hans Schantz PhD, scientist and AetherCzar at ‘Fields And Energy’ we owe the quip "Francis Bacon is not the father of science, he is the father of Scientism”.

For now let’s just say his new religion of Scientism led 5 billion people around the entire globe to roll up their sleeves and receive in their arms a barely tested ineffective experimental gene therapy for a disease they didn’t have, that was rarely deadly, BECAUSE SCIENCE.  Bacon’s Empire is what the great scholar Frances (no relation) Yates called “British Scientific Imperialism”.13  “Knowledge itself, is Power” is the quote for which Bacon’s is most famous.

This Is The Story Of Our Lives

The Royal Society Of London, the first science-based organization in world history, began meeting officially just a few years after Bacon’s death. Oddly many Freemasons were in attendance at those earliest meetings of the Society that was to become hugely influential, eventually to change world history.  The link between the two organizations was so close that some have speculated that The Royal Society created Freemasonry!14 I daresay the opposite is true.  The Society indeed credits Baron Verulam ShakesBacon as being the inspiration for their founding, going even so far as to compare Bacon to Moses in the first written history of the Society published in 1667.15  The frontispiece of that history is shown below, now permanently on display in London’s Museum Of Science. 

“Frontispiece 👆to Thomas Sprat’s 1667 A History of the Royal Society, showing the crowning of King Charles II. Sir Francis Bacon is shown on the right; William Brouncker, 2nd Viscount Brouncker, the first president of the Society, is on the left.” Dig all the Masonic symbolism ya’ll. 

Bacon is actually pointing to the splayed cross of the Knights Templars 👆 here. The famous Freemasonic black and white checkerboard floor you see in this drawing is of Templar origin.

At the center of the twelve men in attendance at the very first meeting of The Royal Society were known Freemason, spy and scientist Robert Moray, as well as Christopher Wren who was to become a world famous architect. At the second meeting of The Royal society was the third earliest known initiate into Freemasonry: Elias Ashmole. Also in attendance was an expert in finance, government officials and even representatives of The Church Of England. Thomas Spratt, the author of that early chronicle of the Society was a canon of Westminster Abbey.

As expertly detailed in Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs 2012 Builders Of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism 1717-1927, Freemasonry is revealed to be synonymous with Globalism in its earliest incarnation. 

The origins of such an intensely powerful globalist force as is Freemasonry should be better known, should it not?  If Francis Bacon did indeed create modern Freemasonry, that would be knowledge of some importance, would it not?

A Scotsman once declared “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.  In light of such, the rest of this essay contains some of that extraordinary evidence for Freemasonry’s Scottish origins.

The Scottish Play