LWIA 4.3: Freemasonry

The use of “architecture” is, of course, far from accidental. Another of the structuring elements of “A State of Darkness” is Gull’s involvement in Freemasonry. Obviously the vision of Jahbulon draws on this, but Moore also spends time on Gull’s initiation—the source of one of the echoing lines on the first page—along with the ritual to attain the third degree of Freemasonry and become Master Mason, in which he is beaten and has his “organs of generation” cut in a reenactment of the death of Hiram Abiff, said within the masonic tradition to be the architect of the Temple of Solomon. Moore drew on this imagery further in chapter four, “What Doth the Lord Require of Thee,” which sees Gull deliver a lengthy lecture on the mythic structure of London—what he describes as “a literature of stone, of place-names and associations where faint echoes answer back from off the distant ruined walls of bloody history,” and which is heavily influenced by masonic thought.

By and large Moore had no choice in this theme. A central pillar of Knight’s theory is the claim that Gull conducted the Whitechapel murders according to masonic ritual—a point that was in turn central to the BBC series in which Gorman’s claims were first aired. Indeed, Knight’s follow up to Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution was The Brotherhood: The Secret World of the Freemasons, in which he purports to document the history of Freemasonry and expose its control and influence over the British government. And the idea of the Ripper murders as ritual was much of what drew Moore to the project—the hook upon which he could justify his reading of them as an apocalyptic end of the nineteenth century that prefigured the horrors of the twentieth.

The problem he faced was simple: Freemasonry was kind of rubbish. As with most such things the elaborate conspiracy theories around it are, while not complete nonsense, still wildly overblown. Certainly one looking for masonic influence on history can find it—too many notable historical figures were Freemasons to avoid that. But Freemasonry’s historical influence—as opposed to the influence of specific Freemasons—rests largely on its status as an old boy’s club. Undoubtedly there are no shortage of men who found employment because a masonic friend of their father put in a good word, and countless meetings taken by government officials because some mason or another arranged them. But this is simply the mechanisms of the capitalist class system operating normally—not evidence of the world’s secret masters. 

As for the vast quantities of masonic lore of varying salaciousness, much of it is broadly real. The existence of further degrees of Freemasonry beyond the third, for instance, is absolutely a thing. So too is the figure of Jahbulon. But these concepts can only really be understood in the context of how Freemasonry works. Although Grand Lodges exist to provide larger scale governance, and largely oversees the three so-called “blue lodge” degrees, the basic unit of Freemasonry is the individual Lodge. And individual Lodges are given a tremendous amount of leeway in terms of their rituals and use of symbolism. This has led to a profusion of masonic rites—individual systems of Freemasonry with their own set of degrees and rituals. The famed thirty-three degrees of Freemasonry, for instance, are an element of the Scottish Rite—the most widely practiced at this point. Jahbulon, meanwhile, hails from the second most common one, York Rite, which offers only thirteen degrees. And there are dozens more such rites, each with their own peculiarities and, more to the point, network of Lodges that are all putting their own spin on things. The result is a functionally bottomless supply of masonic rituals, symbols, and concepts, but not one that coheres into any sort of singular system or practice.

Moore, for his part, seems to have been left largely unimpressed. He describes masonic history in the appendix as “an impossibly convoluted web” and proclaims that the best commentary is from Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, which notes that Freemasonry, “originating in the reign of Charles II, among working artisans of London, has been joined successively by the dead of past centuries in unbroken retrogression until now it embraces all the generations of man on hither side of Adam and is drumming up distinguished recruits among the pre-Creational inhabitants of Chaos and the Formless Void” and remarks that “its emblems and symbols have been found in the Catacombs of Paris and Rome, on the stones of the Parthenon and the Chinese Great Wall, among the temples of Karnak and Palmyra and in the Egyptian Pyramids—always by a Freemason.” More tellingly, Moore has Gull paraphrase the primordial chaos joke before dismissing the whole ancient history thing with a “Hogwash! The order as it stands goes back no further than the Eighteenth century,” proclaiming that the “true descent of Masonry” is “not mumbled words passed down across the generations but ideas that spark from mind to mind across the centuries.”

This is actually quite close to Freemasonry’s own account of itself as a “beautiful and profound system of morality, veiled in allegories and illustrated by symbols.” And at the end of the day Freemasonry’s ties with the larger esoteric tradition—there’s significant overlap between Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, and the Ordo Templi Orientis was originally a masonic order and literally purchased the rights to a large amount of its ritual from the Swedenborgian Rite. Between this copious amount of overlap and the diffuse nature of masonic doctrine Moore had a wide amount of leeway in how he set about building his symbolism. Ultimately he found inspiration in “the Masonic notion of the universe, of space-time, as a rough and solid block hewn out by the Great Architect,” an idea that resonated closely with Hinton’s “What is the Fourth Dimension,” with its attendant notion of history having an architecture. But while he dutifully draped his occult history of London in the trappings of Freemasonry, his primary inspiration in its structure came from another source entirely.