By Emily Hollingsworth
When I first watched the movie National Treasure over Christmas, sometime in the mid-2000s, I remember vaguely hearing about a group called the Freemasons who had something to do with the symbols on the back of the one dollar bill. At the time, I was too overwhelmed with holiday food and enamored with the hectic chase scenes and Indiana Jones-esque secret passageways to pay attention to the historical details.
This organization, shrouded in secrecy, didn’t capture my interest again until years later. I came across an online trend. . The Illumanati is believed to be a network of people who influences and controls the world’s events, spanning back hundreds of years. The group became part of the popular culture because of the book and movie The Da Vinci Code YouTube and Internet memes tried to claim that major companies and celebrity figures had connections to the Illuminati. These memes show ways that the most innocuous pictures hide the Illumnati’s signature sign: a triangle, meant to represent the all-seeing eye atop a pyramid found on dollar bills. The Illuminati is a network believed to control the events of the world and have symbols and signals people can learn to catch.
Many Internet sources said the Freemasons are connected to this powerful group. The Masons, I learned, are a secret brotherhood believed to have begun in London but quickly taking root in the United States beginning in the 1700s. The masons, collectively known as a fraternal organization, are guided by secrets.
The group was believed to have originated during the stonemasons guild in the Middle Ages with the earliest documented lodges taking place in London in 1717, Their initiations and levels of membership are largely kept mum by its members.
Famous figures have also claimed to be masons. From influential political figures Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson and Winston Churchill to author Mark Twain, Reverend Jesse Jackson, Duke Ellington and John Wayne, it’s easy to see why people believe masons have so much control over current events when its members have had considerable amounts of power and influence themselves.
My real, sustained interest in this group really began a few months ago, I was at my brother’s friend’s party and he told me about his new job digitizing archives of the Masonic Lodge, home of the freemasons. “Hey guys, Mike is working for the Illuminati now,” my brother said.
Shocked, I listened as my brother’s friend told me about the room itself and some of the gossip, that there was an altar in the room where ritual sacrifices were made.
Soon my shock turned into curiosity. The fourth oldest Masonic Lodge was minutes away from my house. I must have passed it so many times, never guessing what secrets may lie inside. I became determined, wanting to know what was really going on within that brick building on Princess Anne Street. Freemasons are a secret hidden in plain sight. Multiple masonic lodges, their meeting places, exist in each state, a historic lodge is even in Fredericksburg. Most would not consider the square, brick house on Princess Anne Street to be home of one of the most scrutinized and feared organizations in the world, yet the organization sponsors blood drives in the area and offers monthly dinners and meetings (though not their secret meetings) to the public.
For a group with approximately 6 million members around the world, I was surprised that it was able to hold on to so many secrets. In this age of information, when anything you ever wanted to know can be reached through a Google search, organizations that operate through closed doors and keep their secrets with lock and key are the subjects of particular interest, scrutiny and distrust.
And if I tried, could I crack their security? What better way to try to understand this phenomenon than to leave the laptop behind and take a tour of the lodge itself, parsing fact and fiction in order to decide once and for all if the legends and power this organization contains is myth, or something to be feared.
***
It was a surprisingly hot day for October. Heat crept into the square house on 803 Princess Anne St., home to the Fredericksburg Masonic Lodge. This had been the open hiding place of the masons for more than 200 years, but its first recorded meeting took place in September 1752. The organization’s original meeting room was holed on the house’s second floor, a smaller room with warped floors. The meeting room later relocated to the first floor.
Its cemetery, where dead members are buried, is across the street.
Dan Thompson, the lodge’s secretary and the five or six people who had wandered into the house for an impromptu tour were smart enough to wear button-down or polo shirts with short sleeves. I was in a long-sleeved button-down and sweating.
They were standing in the main meeting room, a square room with a high ceiling and long, interconnected blue benches lining the right and left walls. In the bench’s centers were brown chairs, one against the wall with two chairs on either side in front of it. The two chairs were where the stewards, or the group’s lowest members, apprentices, were supposed to sit, according to Thompson.
On either end of the room sat thrones. The chair at the right end of the room was the seat of the Worshipful Master, the highest honor of an individual Masonic Lodge. Below the chair on the left side, a smooth block of concrete sat with a rougher block on its right side.
In the room’s center, however, where Thompson stood by and the few tourists looked on was the large, weathered book encased in glass: the very King James Bible George Washington himself became sworn into when inducted as a member of the Masons. Thompson allowed photos, the men and women casually surveying the case from different angles. George Washington, when inducted into the presidency, was without a Bible to be sworn in, according to Thompson. In a panic, a Congress member ran across the street to a Masonic Lodge, picking up a Bible and using it for Washington’s inauguration.
This says something about the role of religion in the country, Thompson had said later, you have to be a man of faith to be a Mason, but what makes your deity is between you and your heart, not something the lodge determines for you.
Eventually, the group left. But I was curious to know more, so I let Thompson continue to show me around.
Thompson walked through the room, his voice echoing over the expansive walls, sounding impressive and hushed, like liturgy spoken in a cathedral. Everything in the room has a double meaning, ones known only to the members of the Masonic Lodge, according to Thompson. The black and white floors, checkered in small squares, resembles the light and dark of life. The philosophies of the room, the intricate purposes behind every detail, is following the example of King Solomon building the temple in the bible’s 1 Kings chapter 6, according to Thompson.
Thompson then gestured with his hand toward the ceiling, voice echoing pride: “And this,” he said, displaying a house still standing, its members still meeting the second Friday of every month, continuing to move as the building and world outside of it has moved for hundreds of years. “is King Solomon’s palace.”
Worshipful Master, according to Thompson, is based on the Old English language for a leader, not as a blasphemous term for a man who isn’t a god, or a title sounding a degree away from the name given to a leader in a cult. Thompson should know; he has spent the past 20 years fulfilling every single role in the Masonic Lodge’s order, aside from a spare few. He had even been a Worshipful Master, but now works as the lodge’s secretary.
* * *
While taking a tour of the meeting room, I asked Thomson to tell me about the group’s history.
The history of the Masons, according to Thompson, were made up of a series of almost parabolic tales where crafty but illiterate stone masons taught doctors and lawyers about masonry in exchange for their services. Using these teachings, the doctors and lawyers philosophized on the meaning of various types of buildings and tools.
For example, the “square,” or a tool that looks like a ruler, was said to be used by masons to mark true right angles when crafting stone. It’s now symbolic of morality, making sure that members measure up in terms of honesty and integrity. Another tool, the “compass,” isn’t a compass you use to tell direction. It’s a tool with two prongs. You use one prong to put on the center and another to draw a circle. The end result, according to the masons, isn’t a perfect circle but the importance of discipline and setting boundaries, but also recognizing one’s own potential. They took tools that were purely mechanical and crafted them into having moral significance. Essentially, this was a self-help program based on stone buildings. The lessons focused on ethics and good character. They were co-opting the language of this group with lower education and turning it into a philosophy for existence. The square and compass now appear as the insignia for the masons.
Eventually, this educated elite formed a brotherhood, with the doctors, lawyers and other professionals becoming more common than the less educated stone masons.
Current Freemasons are open about some of these lessons. But others, they keep to themselves. Thompson said that group members don’t allow out, for example, their secret handshake, secret passwords they use to find other members and aspects of their initiation process, as members begin as stewards and possibly end at the top tier, the worshipful master.
The mason’s views on women as a fraternal group was also interesting. Thompson mentioned a few female-led mason groups that exist in some parts of the U.S. However, he said that if a woman approached this group and asked to be members, that they would have to “take them out.” Choosing to dismiss the wording as more benign than it sounded, I wondered if their decision to only allow men was only to upkeep yet another mason tradition, or a pointed means of sexism within the organization.
* * *
After the meeting with Thompson, I decided to look for answers elsewhere. Surely, I thought, the group must have disgruntled members who’ve shared their secrets online. What I found were forums and start-up sites that were asking the same questions as I was: what exactly do masons do? Is the Masonic Lodge safe? What are their secret words, signals, etc.? The forums relating to the masons, particularly the ones on reddit.com, contain users who boast of having family members in the masons or are members themselves.
“We can barely get a pancake breakfast organized; let alone world domination,” user PhonedZero, who claims to be a mason, said about the organization. Questions about what the organization was and what they did were common, and some forums revealed helpful answers.
One forum user claimed to know the secret handshake. According to the user, it is the same as a regular handshake, except the person will use their index finger to lightly press the other person’s inner wrist. If the other person is also a mason, he will do the same motion.
A lot of users and Thompson himself recommended reading “Freemasons for Dummies,” a book written by a mason that describes the basic questions of being a freemason without revealing any secrets. I had not confirmed what I found online with Thompson to know if they were true, and some of the websites that had the most graphic descriptions of what appear to be mason secrets definitely have biases or look a little sketchy themselves. After searching online, I feel like I have more questions than answers. How do I know these users are telling the truth? Why do the answers vary so much lodge to lodge? While the online research was confusing but fascinating, I ended up learning a lot more about the Fredericksburg lodge and about the masons from Thompson himself.
* * *
The Fredericksburg Masonic Lodge has approximately 332 members, according to Thompson. The average member has been with the organization an average of 25 years. In addition, there are 35,000 mason members in the state of Virginia. Thompson, now retired from working at the Library of Congress as a facility manager, now volunteers full time at the lodge. He does paperwork and takes care of the Lodge’s renovations, which has included taking up the carpet in the room outside of the meeting area which was laid down in the 1980s. His office, barely in view, is filled to the brim with papers, furniture and other items, a chair and a laptop a small corner next to the window. The AC and heat have had some trouble in the past year, too.
He has enjoyed putting more of his time into the lodge, saying that it gives him something to do. “It puts me off the streets, keeps me out of my wife’s hair.” Thompson said.
I asked him about the portrayal of the lodge in movies such as the Da Vinci Code.
“Dan Brown is an excellent writer,” Thompson started. “He writes some good books that turned into good movies.”
That being said, he countered his praise with a disclaimer. “Here is what you need to know,” he said. “Dan Brown writes fiction.” According to Thompson, Brown has cinematized the masons, exaggerating their secrets and making some inaccuracies in order to garner a few bucks.
Thompson laughs at the idea held by some that the Masonic brotherhood houses secrets and conspiracies, most grandly, that this brotherhood has an inter-global connection that manipulates the events in the world.
“How can a place that has no heat and basically no air conditioning run a thing like that?” Thompson said. He also added that the toilets only work some of the time.
These conspiracies are far removed from the historic Fredericksburg lodge, which was the fourth oldest Masonic Lodge in the United States.
“The Masons, oh, you mean that one organization with all the secrets?” he said, feigning surprise. “The Masons are not a secret organization,” Thompson said. “We are an organization with secrets.”
* * *
The door in the Masonic Lodge’s basement was open, the chilly air only approaching the entrance. It was now November, and the lodge was having their monthly dinner. Dressed in suits, the men in the lodge, who mainly looked to be in their 60s, made conversation. Sitting in one of eight long tables lined with a white plastic sheet and feeling a bit like a secret agent who sneaked into the basement of the CIA, I waited for the dinner with a few other people who might have also felt out of place. A family with a young daughter sat behind me, and in front of me three University of Mary Washington students studying Historic Preservation, and like my brother’s friend Mike, archived information for the Lodge.
When the dinner was about to be served, the current Worshipful Master himself, Jeffrey VanCuren, came out.
VanCuren said the meal he cooked is the meal he typically makes for members of the Thurman Brisben homeless shelter once a month. Priding themselves on volunteer and community service, I found out that the masons also run a blood drive throughout the year. After VanCuren spoke and said a prayer, the servers handed out plates of chicken with whole potatoes, green beans, dinner rolls and cake for dessert. It was like Thanksgiving had come early. Making conversation with the other college students and a Masonic Lodge member who wanted to learn more about us, I was surprised by how casual the environment felt. The air wasn’t thick with tension or unspoken secrets, instead, it felt more like a community potluck.
The vibe changed a bit after dinner was served. Everyone was invited to come to the main floor and sit in the meeting to watch the Rainbow group, a group for elementary-school age kids, give a performance. The mason members, formerly in suits, were now decked out in blue and white uniforms, proudly showing off the various badges they had gotten during their years in the masons. It was so crowded in the meeting room everyone had to squeeze together in order to fit on the blue benches. The Rainbow group performance were four or five children reciting poems while one held the U.S. flag. VanCuren became emotional, clearing his throat as he explained having to recite the same words at their age. I wondered if the poems were a Mason tradition. After the meeting, the UMW students had to get to work archiving, but we took a tour of the house first, including looking through their secret hallway, a narrow hallway adjacent to the meeting room that contained mirrors and portraits, presumably of George Washington, a member of the Fredericksburg Lodge himself.
Peering down the hallway and hearing the muffled sounds of the meeting in progress, I began to rethink my certainty that the group was just a meeting place for elderly men. Turning from the dim hallway to the students standing in the other room, I kept the possibility of there being more secrets in mind, but felt that I was at least partly right.