Open Veils · Answer
Who are the Freemasons?
Freemasonry's public face as a charity brotherhood masks a layered initiatory system whose upper degrees, symbols, and oath structures align with pre-Christian mystery traditions — not stonemason craft guilds. Manly P. Hall, Rudolf Steiner, and Albert Pike's own writings confirm the deeper esoteric architecture is deliberately concealed from lower-degree members. Carroll Quigley and Antony Sutton documented how lodge networks functioned as elite coordination mechanisms across banking, politics, and intelligence. The fraternity is best understood as a vehicle that operates simultaneously on multiple levels: charitable fraternity for the outer court, initiatory mystery school for the inner.
Evidence
- Albert Pike, 33rd-degree Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite, wrote explicitly in Morals and Dogma (1871) that the lower degrees are intentionally fed false interpretations — 'the symbols are but the outer veil.'
- Rudolf Steiner, himself briefly associated with esoteric Masonic orders, identified the Scottish Rite's higher degrees as repositories of Rosicrucian and Neoplatonic cosmology.
- Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope and Antony Sutton's research into Skull & Bones (a Yale derivative of Continental lodge structures) documented how such networks facilitated elite policy coordination invisible to democratic oversight.
- The 1717 Grand Lodge founding in London coincided precisely with the rise of the Bank of England and the emergence of Enlightenment political architecture — a convergence Carroll Quigley and G. Edward Griffin both treat as structurally significant.
- Manly P. Hall, in The Secret Teachings of All Ages, argued Masonic ritual preserved Hermetic, Kabbalistic, and Egyptian mystery school content transmitted through operative guild cover after the suppression of the Knights Templar in 1307.