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’s unique ‘lodge structure’ originated amongst stonemasons and the elite in Scotland. In England it was it was further formed by philosopher Francis Bacon into 3-degree “Blue Lodge” Freemasonry. If you want some background on Freemasonry Wikipedia is pretty good. Londoner Francis Bacon and his spy-brother Anthony had extensive contacts with King James VI of Scotland during this origin period in Scotland circa 1595. King James VI became King James I of England when Eliza Regina- the Virgin Queen, the not-so-good Queen Bess, left this world in 1603.
Short Argument For The Scottish Origin Of Freemasonry
Freemasonry did not begin in ancient Egypt, Israel or in roving bands of Medieval stonemasons that built the cathedrals of Europe, all of which are common origin stories coming from Freemasons themselves and independent scholars. As for the Scottish origin, to wit: the two oldest lodges of Freemasonry are both in Scotland.(1) One is in Edinburgh, home of the old Scottish royalty, and the other oldest lodge is in the Orkney Island Highlands, where not much large scale stonemasonry was practiced dare I say, but where the Earl of Orkney clan lived. The Orkney Earl’s are the Sinclair or St. Clair family, with ancient connections to king Robert the Bruce and to the Knights Templar, and who later built the famous and mysterious Rosslyn Chapel. The Sinclair family gave us the first Grandmasters of Scottish Freemasonry to boot. 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 (a real Scottish lodge record backs this up). This is the same James who later became King James I of England when Queen Elizabeth died. King James looms large over this history. The next recorded initiate (1640) is the Scots renaissance man 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 Sir Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam. Moray had lodgings in James’ Westminster palace on the Thames.
Now, if that’s not convincing enough you’ll have to read the next 25 pages of fascinating history. Surely THAT will convince you Freemasonry got it’s occulted origin in Scotland, near-about the great stone bridges of the Water of Leith river in Auld Reekie, the “Athens of The North”, Edinburgh. This is a long essay since much went into the making of the world’s most successful secret society, now a society with secrets. Jump about to the different headings as you see fit. Don’t miss the King James’ North Berwick Witch Trials section near the conclusion. James was a very nasty fellow and as such, the Masons got off to quite a dark start. No women allowed is one thing, but…I wouldn’t let that guy in my club, even if he was the king.
Edinburgh Bridges
This Scottish origin story shown by recent research,(2) is still mildly 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 on “science”, this a curious falsehood. Because the origin of Freemasonry has been de-mystified.
In step by step fashion I propose to show that Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Baron Verulam, Viscount St Alban, the philosopher, lawyer, historian, Lord Chancellor and William Shakespeare, 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, already married to the beginnings of modern Science, oddly enough.
A bit of background on the many facets and accomplishment of Francis Bacon: (to get right to the Freemasonry scroll down to ‘The Origin Of Freemasonry” below) Sir Francis is well known today as the philosopher and “father of modern science” (4) and even as the “patron saint of the Enlightenment”, all the while being subject to persistent rumors, for decades and decades now, that he is the true author of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare.(5) Evidence for his involvement in writing the Shakespeare plays and creating the Shakespeare hoax has produced hundreds of books. (6) (Mark Twain, Freemason, wrote one in 1906) and probably best compiled by the Francis Bacon Society, founded in 1856 and still extant. For those new to this topic, follow the links for more, after hundreds of years of searching, there is still no credible physical evidence AT ALL that directly links actor, man about the theater and grain dealer William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon to the writing of the world famous plays and poems. None!(7) No letters from him or to him, no manuscripts, no payment records, no one in Stratford even knew he was a poet. It’s not even known if he ever went to school. To my satisfaction, after years of research, Bacon’s involvement in the writing of the plays is now an established fact.
Another remarkable truth newly understood is that there would be no British Empire without Shakespeare, that’s how important the plays are.(8) Empire is one of the primary reasons that Shakespeare exists. Bacon was all about Empire.
The Shakespeare “history plays”, especially “The Tragedy Of Richard III” are now understood by mainstream Shakespeare scholars to have been written as Tudor propaganda, and as such provide evidence for the point of view that the plays serve an ulterior motive.(9) Top-notch feature film '‘The Lost King” is must see on this issue.
My conclusion has become, after years of research, that Bacon surreptitiously created three interrelated ‘religions’ if you will, providing the engine of early Empire: Freemasonry is a literal secret religion still undercover as a ‘fraternal organization’, claiming to not be a religion. Science became a religion, that of Scientism: ‘Trust The Science’ has replaced ‘Trust In God. This was purposeful. And, tongue in cheek, (slightly) Shakespeare has also become a religion. Ask someone in academia. No CAP. Bacon was a part of the original English Intelligence that became MI5/6, and as a master of espionage, and he hid the magnitude of his massive influence so as to better facilitate the flowering of Empire. His plan worked becasue it was based on his inordinate and precocious understanding of individual and group psychology. Rumor has it that he read “every book in print in England” as a very young man. (10) Among those books, of course, were those by Machiavelli. (11) The technocratic occult feudalism envisioned as the end game of his Empire is clearly taking shape. To stop the plan we need to know it’s origin story.
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, herbal medicine and gardening (well, his servants did the actual gardening). He also designed gardens and 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 the 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, see this prophecy of the ‘priests of science as government’ in 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 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!
The Origins Of Freemasonry
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
The very earliest line of descent for Freemasonry lies in what are called the “old charges” or “old constitutions”, which contain a mythical history of the craft and trade of building with stone. These “old charges” date to the medieval era.(18) Medieval trades were administered by a guild specific to a trade such as weaving, leather working, carpentry, wheel wrights etc. These were associations that offered aid, protection, order and regulation and gave political power to craftsmen and tradesmen. To practice a trade professionally one had to join the guild.
“Guilds in medieval and early modern Europe offered an effective institutional mechanism whereby two powerful groups, guild members and political elites, could collaborate in capturing a larger slice of the economic pie and redistributing it to themselves at the expense of the rest of the economy. Guilds provided an organizational mechanism for groups of businessmen to negotiate with political elites for exclusive legal privileges…” 19
Each guild had a written “mythical history” that stressed the antiquity of their craft, closely linking them with religion and moral concepts”.(20) Ah, the good old days. The stonemasons happened to have a particularly elaborate mythical trade history. Their “old charges” not only emphasized morality, but as well tied masonry to geometry, and gave importance to both Solomon’s Temple and ancient Egypt in the development of the craft. One legend even has the guild dating back to the building of Solomon’s Temple. However, “Nothing…made the mason guild unusual, there was no indication to single out the mason craft from the rest for a remarkable and unique future.”(21)
This medieval contribution clearly provides ingredients for modern Freemasonry. The tools and materials of building in stone being a prominent part of Freemasonry’s esoteric symbolism.
The Renaissance Occult and Medieval Scotland: The Schaw Statutes
Guilds of laboring men began morphing into esoteric Freemasonry when aspects of Renaissance “spiritual” thought were added onto the medieval legends of the “old charges”. This splicing of the Renaissance occult onto the guilds is first documented in 1598, when, in Scotland, the new “Schaw Statutes” were pronounced as official government decrees. These new statutes included Hermetic notions of the quest for knowledge, a greater glorification of mathematics and the architect. It is in Scotland specifically where the Hermetic and the Occult were combined with building trade symbolism so fulsomely found in Freemasonry. Right there is really where Freemasonry can trace its origin, largely due to heroic work by historian Douglas Stevenson’s The Origins Of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century 1590-1710. (22)
Oddly enough, there are no statutes for any medieval mason’s guilds in England. They are well documented in Scotland and Europe. This is because the guilds had been banned in England after the famous Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 (a revolt which has been linked to the Knights Templars in the great Born In Blood)
“After the Peasants Revolt in 1381 Richard II - one of England’s worst kings in the face of stiff competition - passed an ordinance that all Guild warrants were to be laid before him. In 1425 all annual assemblies of guilds were banned by Henry VI. The “persecution” of the guilds continued intermittently for almost the remainder of the mediaeval period. It is against this background that many of the churches mentioned on this website were being built or, much more frequently, being extended and updated. Knoop and Jones were unable to discover a single example of guild regulations preserved in England.” (23)
The all important Shaw Statutes in Scotland changed the notion of what a masons lodge is, going from a temporary building set up on a work site to store tools and have lunch - to more conceptual “lodges” that were given regulatory control over all the masons working in an area, typically extending to an entire Shire. The lodge, distinct from a guild, described lodge roles in terms that are still found in today in Freemasonry such as ‘warden' and ‘entered apprentice’.
King James I With A Sceptre and A Globe With A Templar Cross. Gee I wonder What That Signifies?
King James I and VI
King James VI of Scotland had named William Shaw “master of work” for every building project in all of Scotland. Schaw then issued the occult-themed “Schaw Statutes”. King James VI of Scotland was soon to become King James I of England.
Enter Stage Left: Giordano Bruno
The Schaw statutes state that the Kilwinning Lodge (of the Orkney Islands mentioned above) was ordered to test every entered apprentice on “the art of memory”. Dating to ancient Greece the art of memory originally trained orators in more effective rhetorical skills by increasing the ability to remember long speeches using techniques of imagination, usually involving buildings. In the Renaissance the ‘art of memory’ had taken on occult overtones, linked with the imaginative meditation exercises of Kaballah via Bruno, John Dee, Cornelius Agrippa and others.
The ancient Art Of Memory had now became “spiritual”. Giordano Bruno is one of the most interesting, influential and learned people of the entire Renaissance and he was heavily involved, as many were, in the occult practice of Kabbalah (or Cabala for Christians) as well as promulgating the ‘art of memory’. Kaballah and the ‘art of memory’ seem to have fused with Bruno. Bruno was a huge influence on Bacon as we will see in Part 4. Kaballah used similar imaginative exercises as did ‘art of memory’ yet the purpose of the meditations of Kabbalah was to reach supposed higher realms of awareness, not memory training.
Christian Cabala was quite openly all the rage at this very time throughout Europe, including Scotland. Necromancer, mathematician and spy John Dee’s influence was at it’s peak in England and the occult Rosicrucian “invisible college” furor was just a few years away. Kabbalah was to become a core part of Freemasonry.
Bruno, an Italian Dominican priest, spent two and a half years in England, publishing eight books that were influential on men of letters and science. He was very friendly with people known to be in Bacon’s inner circle: influential aristocrat, soldier and poet Philip Sydney and the statesman and poet Fulke Greville. Poetry was of supreme importance in this era. It is impossible that he did not meet many times with Francis Bacon. However no records remain of such meetings. (24)
Bruno also worked as a spy. He worked directly under Francis (no relation) Walsingham. (25) Walsingham was England’s original and renowned spymaster, revered today as an acknowledged genius of espionage. Walsingham had earlier employed a fifteen year-old Bacon as a spy and diplomatic attaché to France in 1576. With Bruno we get the complete documented confluence of the ingredients later to be seen in the 18th - 20th century self-described “charitable and fraternal organization” of Freemasonry: Espionage, military, religion, the occult, science and government fused with the symbolism of the stone building trade, joined together with an intense blood oath of absolute secrecy. Got Empire?
Enter Stage Right: The Sinclair Clan
William Sinclair of Roslin (26) became the next (but only partial) overseer of all of Scottish masonry, issuing the St Clair Charter of 1601, this authority given to him by King James VI. There seems to have been a wee power struggle at this point as the Sinclair’s of Roslin were given some jurisdiction of the mason’s trade even before Schaw’s death in 1602. The St Clair Charter was decreed in 1601. Here the waters get a bit murky and we get two distinct aspects of Scottish Masonry. One still connected to the Schaw statutes and one to the St Clair Charter. Brother King James VI decamped to London to become King James I, and purposefully left the situation in a bit of a perfect muddle back in the homeland.
Roslynn Chapel
With the St Clair Charter we get a connection to the Crusades and the Knights Templars. Sinclair was a direct descendant of the builder of the now famous Rosslyn Chapel, as well as a direct descendant of William “the Crusader” Sinclair of Roslin, Lord of Roslin. Here we have linked the Scottish government, the Crusades (possibly Knights Templar) and early Freemasonry.(27) Both clans, St. Clair and Stewart have connections to the Scottish monarchy. The Stewarts, through marriage, descended from Robert the Bruce, while the St Clairs fought alongside him and received lands as a reward. Both clans participated in the Crusades. Possible Sunday brunches after Church together took place as the kiddies had a run about? No documentation of such exists but one does wonder.
Dreck like Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code have made a bit of a mockery of Knight Templar history, which will be broken out in Part 3.
In 1736 just after Freemasonry had come above ground in 1717 in London, it was William St. Clair’s descendant, William St. Clair, (there’s been a LOT of William St Clairs!) who was made first Grand Master of Scottish Freemasonry.
Scotsmen King James VI and Sir Robert Moray: First known Initiates Into Freemasonry
King James, who became known as “Scotland’s Solomon” is listed as having been initiated on 24 December 1601 at Freemason’s Lodge Scoon and Perth No. 3 in Perth, Scotland. Interesting date! Scoon and Perth is a sister lodge to what is considered Scotland’s oldest or second oldest lodge in Kilwinning, Orkney Islands. This initiation record is considered authentic but it is post dated back from 1658. (28)
The first documented evidence of someone being initiated into Freemasonry took place in 1640 when a Scotsman named Robert Moray, a future founding member of the Royal Society, professional spy, scientist and statesman was initiated in England but into a Scottish lodge- the Lodge of Edinburgh.(29) Well, who initiated him? And why was Moray at the first meeting of the Royal Society twenty years later? Sir Robert Moray was a descendant of an ancient and noble Highland family.(30)
1602 is the same time period Francis Bacon was involved int the Shakespeare hoax, a man of great acknowledged intellectual capacity yet still, at age 41 with no official government or legal position. He, the future attorney general of England under James, did not yet practice as a barrister yet kept a suite of rooms at Gray’s Inn. Bacon had multiple residences but no verifiable source of income for his lavish lifestyle. His activity as a member of Parliament occupied a couple weeks a year. Queen Elizabeth was still on the throne, and for unknown reasons she kept him from any official position of influence An enormous amount of (circumstantial) evidence point to the Virgin Queen Eliza as being Bacon’s real mother. I’ll writing that evidence up soon.
At some point before Moray’s initiation, my guess is exactly when King James was initiated, just after the St Clair Charter was issued, a split was made between the officially sanctioned Scottish working-mason’s (operative) Guilds with their Schaw statutes, and the secret Freemason (speculative) lodges, that used the symbolism of a workingman’s tools and materials but with a new feature: the new initiations involved intense esoteric symbolism. This is why there is a confusing the split between the St Clair Charter and the Schaw Statutes. “Charter” is the term still used today for official recognition given by a Grand Lodge to an individual lodge to be “recognized” to practice Freemasonry.
The first type of lodge had real rough-handed working man builders with stone and are today called “operative lodges”. The second type of lodge did/does no building, meets in secrecy and performs elaborate very theatrical and imaginative initiations. They are known as “speculative Masons” composed originally of upper class merchants, landowners, nobles and even Royalty such as King James. Spot the difference? Later Freemasonry did open up to the working classes, to great success. This cross-class aspect of the Craft being one of it’s many remarkable structural aspects.
Scotsman and first known initiate to Freemasonry Robert Moray is a key player in our saga, and provides documented links to intelligence, military, science and government for both Freemasonry and The Royal Society.(31) Claims the Moray family were Knights Templars is backed up by Wikipedia (32, 33). Moray was actually living in King James Whitehall palace much of this time!
Though the Freemason’s were secret, and their presence in this time period is difficult to trace, the government was well aware of them, which I contend is what the St Clair Charter is partially about—official sanction. Just as the English government was made fully aware of the Royal Society, recognized by King Charles II after the civil war and Restoration.
Old London was a small town. Everyone knew everyone’s business and you would not dare start a secret society without approval from the very top, or suffer dire consequences. Francis Bacon’s special relationship to the very top, the very crown itself will be detailed in Part 4.
The suggestion that nobles and aristocrats slowly began to join working ‘operative lodges’ filled with working stonemasons until they overwhelmed the workers to become ‘speculative’ lodges is thoroughly laughable. By 1717 Freemason’s ‘lodges’ were still entirely made of upper class merchants, government officials, clergymen, aristocrats and even nobility. By 1737 the Prince Of Wales, son of King George II was a certified Freemason. There were exactly zero stone carvers in Freemason lodges and these lodges never functioned as guilds, while the operative lodges of builders contained no aristocrats.
Freemasonry Is A New Religion
What was happening was the birth of a new religion, one meant to be influenced of all religions, a hallmark today of Freemasonry and similar to the old Gnosticism. While the government was well aware of this new religion, commoners and others loyal to Church of England or Church of Rome were certainly not. Unlike today when any yahoo of the soap bubble can become priest of his own tax-free Mystery Of The Faith Of The Slippery Slope, a new religion back in the day got you tossed into the dungeon or much worse, as we shall soon see when we get to early modern phenomenon known as The Family Of Love.
Though UGLE and other Freemasons have always denied that Freemasonry is a religion, Many would beg to differ.(34)
Into The Fruitful Weeds With Marsha Keith Schuchard
An enormous amount of well sourced information on Freemasonry’s Scottish (and Templar) roots has been collected in Marsha Keith Schuchard’s remarkable Restoring the Temple of Vision, Cabalistic Freemasonry and Stuart Culture (2002) 862 pages, Brill Publishing. Schuchard’s specialty, for which she received a Ph.D. in British literature, is the esoteric-erotic underground traditions of 17- 20th century secret societies and their influence on British and Irish poets and artists. In order to fully understand these later eras of Freemasonic activity, Schuchard felt she needed an understanding of Freemasonry’s origins. She seems to have left no stone unturned, beginning her quest as far back as Roger Bacon in the 1290’s where she finds abundant interesting links of the early scientist Roger Bacon to Kaballah and Judaism.
Restoring The Temple takes an entirely neutral stance if not a subtly favorable stance on Freemasonry. Schuchard has written a staggering amount of essays and two books, later spending a lot of effort on William Blake, Swedenborg and Jonathan Swift.
What Schuchard documents is an astonishing array of occult-saturated statesmen, courtiers, poets, scientists and even alt-religious figures connected to Family Of Love, all in King James VI immediate circle, all having links to Cabala and/or some of the various ideals of the future Freemasonry. King James himself was very interested in Cabala and other forms of the esoteric as were so many of the educated classes at that time. Even as a young man James classmates at school, like prodigy James Crichton and George Erskine were “early illuminists”. (35)
James was to become known as “Scotland’s Solomon”.
Stamping Out Witchcraft In Scotland
As a side note, curiously (or not) the ruling class seemed to expend quite a bit of effort stamping out the occult in the uneducated of the day. King James even wrote a book called Demonologie urging a crackdown on witchcraft, resulting in the the North Berwick witch trials which took place in 1590-1591, and marked by extreme brutality that resulted in the execution of around 70 people, mostly women (naturally) who were accused of witchcraft. The accused were subjected to medieval torture methods, including the breast ripper and the Scold’s Bridle, to extract confessions. Many died from their injuries, others were burned at the stake. The North Berwick Witch Trials revealed a dark, cruel side to James’ nature, and yet this was a highly intelligent King, an intellectual.(36)
The Poet: Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas
Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, was a highly influential French poet/coutier who made a lengthy visit to Scotland after an invitation from James. James even translated Du Bartas most famous poem “Semaines” into Scots English. “Almost every theme of Jewish, Hermetic, and neo-platonic mysticism that emerges in seventheenth century Freemasonry was powerfully articulated in the Semaines. Du Bartas repeatedly described God as the “architect Devine” and the “a heavens architect”. (37) DuBartas argues that God created man in his own “architectural image”. Got Freemasonry?
Du Bartas served in the court of Henry of Navarre who later became King Henry IV of France in 1589. Well wouldn’t ya know but Francis Bacon lived in the court of Henry of Navarre when he was sent to France at the age of 15 by Walsingham, as previously mentioned, as a diplomat attaché spy. Du Bartas was in Navarre simultaneous with Bacon. Du Bartas ideas and poetry seem to have had quite an effect, as they did on on many, on young Bacon, and the future new religion of Freemasonry, and the similarities to Du Bartas poetry are beyond coincidence. Just sayin’. More in part 4.
The Family of Love
Another proto-Masonic group with links to James VI was The Family Of Love, an international secret society and religious sect seeking to reconcile extremes of Protestantism and Catholicism.(38)
