Freemasonry and Why it Matters

Part 1: Freemasonry and American Politics – An Overview

In a 1961 speech, President John F. Kennedy warned the American people of the all too real dangers of secret societies. “The very word secrecy,” he said, “is repugnant in a free and open society, and we are as a people, inherently and historically, opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.”

JFK's words have perhaps never been more timely. Even so, they are only half true.

The politics of a truly open society should be free from any and all clandestine influence. Yet, America has never been an open society – particularly in the corridors of political power. It is nigh impossible to study American history (honestly at least) without inquiring into the role of secret societies – particularly Freemasonry, and Masonic offshoots – in our culture and history from the eighteenth century on.

Freemasonry, to condense an obscure and controversial history, is an occult tradition that traces its own origins to the Knights Templar of the First Crusade, and the religious mysteries of the ancient world. As the story goes, these secret doctrines were preserved by secretive guilds of medieval stone masons, and eventually evolved into secret societies called Masonic lodges, which became a fixture of upper-class society in Western Europe during the Renaissance and early modern period. During the colonial period, Freemasonry and adjacent Western European occult traditions such as Rosicrucianism and Illuminatism (the philosophy of the Illuminati) also established themselves in North America. Freemasonry is a hierarchical institution, divided into 33 degrees of occult initiation, which – as notable Masonic authors boast – employ a complex network of religious symbolism in order to obscure true Masonic doctrines from the unworthy and unenlightened.

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Emblematic Structure of Freemasonry by Shroomery.org licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

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