Having been a Freemason for over twenty years, I have seen many people come and go in the Fraternity. There are people who were well-established when I first entered into the Order and are still by my side today. There are many members who have joined over the years and added to the sweetness and depth of this large family unit. Some people have come in for as little as one meeting, and others have stayed on and off over the years. The path of Freemasonry is an open road that may see many people branch off.
As a member of fifteen different Lodges of varying degrees, each one of them is, to me, a sacred family where I am safe, secure, and can be myself. I can breathe easily and feel the fraternity that comes with a real love and dedication to a common goal: the perfecting of humanity of which each of us is a part.
When we join, we join for different reasons. We join to find like-minded people, to find some sense of peace with the Architect of the Universe, to have that “A-ha!” moment, to have a group of people to converse with, to break bread and share hard work, or perhaps to share in aging and passing with authentic humans. The road of Freemasonry isn’t easy and many people fall off the track – some earlier, some later – but the journey towards the higher degrees becomes less crowded and in many ways, more intimate and sweeter for having shared the labors of self-improvement.
The act of accepting the different paths of different people is extremely difficult. These are people with whom you have shared life’s journey and striking moments. From marriage to the birth of children, the death of parents and friends, to their own old age and passing, it is in these moments of strife and hardship, joy and bearing that Freemasons are there with each other, supporting, sharing, and providing true fortitude.
These are not easy moments and they are intensified by the quickening that focused self-improvement provides. They are sticky and painful at times. I have had nights of tearful crying, angst over love and loss, and laughter until I got in trouble. Discipline does that. It breeds purer moments of real life.
It also creates the moments when we stop and think: what is a family?
The birth family has always been, to me, that group of people who take care of you from that early age and teach you how to move in the world. They teach you how to survive. They do the best they can, with the tools and experiences of their own lives, to provide that guidance to help the child thrive in a very unsure and chaotic world. We carry those lessons, for better or ill, with us into our own realms, creating new families from these seedlings of experience.
Like the leaf that drops into the still pond, the ripples of one family flow and collide with those of others, creating an intricate pattern of artful energies of creation. We create families, when we’re older, to find a sense of stability and continuance. We may have children, adopt children, foster children, foster animals, care for the aged, or create intimate ties with friends, neighbors, and community. We may pastor to a church where the family is quite large, or we may shepherd the town council, where our influence might be low. We all form a family of woven relationships in the creation of… something.
Masonic families, like all families, can be quite intense. My childhood father was not a Freemason but his father and mother were extremely active in not only Freemasonry but Eastern Star, The Shriners, the White Shrine, and other auxiliary bodies. For nearly forty years, they were caretakers of the temple building behind their house; their days were filled with card games, socials, dinners, and Lodge meetings, fancy affairs and day-to-day work of Freemasonry. They cleaned the Lodge room and scrubbed the bathrooms, repaired the kitchen equipment and planted flower beds. They only stopped when cancer and Parkinson’s slowed their activities.
When they passed, I took up the mantle of Freemasonry. While they lived, I had no idea a woman could be a Freemason and neither did they. Freemasonry was a hobby my grandparents did but never, ever discussed it with the larger family.
My father harbored a deep resentment toward Freemasonry; he felt that it took my grandfather from his side. It hardened my grandfather’s ideals in a way that he imposed on my father. Resentment and dislike were the crops my father harvested from that sowing. Even so, my father grew up a good man, hard working and shaped by the ideals my grandfather provided. He struggled though, with the idea of what it means to be a father and to provide that example for his children. It’s a shame because I think my father would have really found solace and inspiration and fraternity of brotherhood something to sustain him latter in life. Maybe even earlier in life.
It’s funny that my desire for like-minded people in my life, people striving to educate and improve themselves, was driven by the lack of that in my own blood family. I wanted more than blood connections; I wanted that connection that propels us to be better than we think we can be. I do not think it took me from my family; in truth, close friends and family members have joined because of the work they’ve seen me do, the joy I’ve found in being with intelligent, hard-working individuals. They have joined because of my self-improvement.
The cycle, I think, repeats. The Masonic family taught me how to live, how to be in the world, how to succeed, challenged me to think, to be better than I am, and to constantly work on being a better person. They took what blood started and propelled that into new realms.
There are some people who do not think it’s right that families should join Freemasonry together. This does not make sense to me. If you want good people in your life, people who you respect, want to spend time with, learn from and also teach, why would you not want to be on a similar journey?
Not everyone is cut out to be a Freemason, however, Not every family member has the capacity or wherewithal to step onto such an intense path. We need to assess each person independently and give credit where credit is due. The people who have joined Freemasonry with me, in my life, are all fantastic people and yes, some are family members. I get the double blessing of being able to speak about all sorts of subjects and delve into deep thought with people that I truly love and who have a head start on knowing me. It’s like perfect icing on a perfect cake. We’re trying to perfect humanity; that doesn’t mean everyone except the people you grew up with. Far from it.
Not everyone who comes to Freemasonry is looking for a family. We call each other Brother for a reason though. It’s not arbitrary. Whatever you goals in joining the Craft are, you will end up with a family – one that you’ve chosen with forethought and daring. Make it your own.
“Neither man nor woman is perfect or complete without the other. Thus, no marriage or family, no ward or stake is likely to reach its full potential until husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, men and women work together in unity of purpose, respecting and relying upon each other’s strengths.” – Sheri L. Dew
In my younger days, I too went down this path of how-history-gets-corrupted-by-pop-culture and fell down a deep rabbit hole researching the Knights Templar. Inevitably, this lead me to the Cathars and Merovingians, Lomas and Knight, and yes, I was a swirling mess of mythology masquerading as fiction masquerading as fact. Of course it could have happened. Of course. It’s right here on the Internet.
Many people believe that the beginning of the country of France began with Clovis uniting all of the different Frankish tribes under his rule, and he set the tone for how the future of France would evolve. Hence, the Merovingian dynasty has a place in the heart of the modern French psyche. It’s no wonder that a strong, late 20th century mythology built on a hoax would stir the French as well as the rest of the world.
Freemasons search for truth and in their own origins, I would think they would search hardest. There are elements of the Knights Templar, the Cathars, and even the Merovingians in the foundation stones of Freemasonry. How could there not be? These were groups whose ideas and ideals were radical for their time; groups of people who formed new ways of being and thinking in their time periods, from the early 5th Century all the way through the late Middle Ages. Rebels. Mold breakers. Liberators. For people who are themselves trying to change the world for better, I can’t really think of better icons.
At the time of their arrest, the Templars were one of the richest organizations in Christendom. They were money changers and deposit bankers, one of the largest religiously sanctioned banking functions in the Middle Ages. Being beholden to the Pope, and only the Pope, did not hurt their lofty status; they were answerable to no King or Duke, ostensibly working for all of the Christian faith. That is, they had little temporal control over their comings and goings. This apparent secrecy hurt them, in the end, as false charges were difficult to disprove. Yet, their status as protectors of pilgrims never wavered, even when the Crusades were beginning to fail. As Christians lost control of the Holy Land to other religions, the Templars pulled back their protection efforts yet still retained their status as bankers and pious warrior monks.
In the end, we have to rely on contemporary reviews of medieval writings, from everyone but the Templars, on their motivations and defense. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of contemporary writings about the Knights Templar, with nearly as many theories of “why” and “what.” Grand schemes involving treasures and magic have surfaced with little substantiation behind them. The truth can be found, we hope, in the primary resources and period writings. At least in part.
As to the reason for the arrests and trial, two theories reign. The first is that the Templars were arrested on the charge of Heresy as that is the only charge that could force the organization to deliver all its material wealth to the regional authorities: in this case, Philip IV in France. Philip was broke, after having seized monies from all his available sources and this source, the Knights Templar, were the last richest group he could possibly tap. Having some control over the Pope afforded Philip the ability to take the step of arrest without the Pope’s approval. The Pope attempted to control the situation by issuing the arrest warrants for all Templars throughout Christendom, and force the trials to be run by the Papacy rather than the regional monarchs. This did little to help the Order survive as the defaming, true or not, caused a general apathy towards the original goal of the Knights Templar.
For people who are really interested in how the Templars began, a copy of the work of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, The Rule of the Knights Templar, can be had from your bookseller. St. Bernard was a leading theologian of his time, attending popes and royalty alike. His rule came out of the work he did in the Council of Troyes, and became the ideal of the chivalric orders. The
Templars if it could be found available to the public. One can hope that the Vatican, someday, releases it to a far wider audience. Some scholars on academia.edu’s reference site have placed papers about the Templars, some of them referencing this Vatican book, including one treatise on the Chinon Parchment, the written conclusion of absolution of the charges of heresy against the Order written by the then-pope, Clement V and the college of cardinals. “The document contains the absolution Pope Clement V gave to the Grand Master of the Temple, friar Jacques de Molay and to the other heads of the Order, after they had shown to be repented and asked to be forgiven by the Church; after the formal abjuration, which is compelling for all those who were even only suspected of heretical crimes, the leading members of the Templar Order are reinstated in the Catholic Communion and readmitted to receive the sacraments.”
This word, egregore, came up recently in a conversation with a fellow Mason, and I wondered at its true meaning. It isn’t a word in my everyday vocabulary and not one I had heard or used more than maybe once. It was time to brush up. I found an astounding number of occult meanings and, to be frank, made up ones as well. The word was first used by Victor Hugo, and the root is noted above. But, the idea of egregore is, I think, difficult to put into exact words. It’s kind of like other concepts of “good” and “bad” – you may not have the adequate words but you know it when you see it. Egregore is similar: We might “know” what it means and we have seen it, and felt it, in action. Yet, saying the meaning of the word, as a feeling, feels, frankly, a little “woo-woo.” A little fluffy, new-agey, and weird. Yet, all of us knows that it does exist.
This is really what I mean about being able to identify a Masonic egregore. I once wrote, in a personal essay, “I don’t know exactly how Freemasonry works, but it does work. I am a far better person today than I was before, by applying Masonic principles and being open to learning. Had those two things not come together, Freemasonry would not have worked.” So, for me, egregore is the “work” achieved by a group mind, coupled with the willingness to receive that work. Sounds remotely like discipline, doesn’t it?
The second item suggesting egregore, creating the group mind, is far more difficult to qualify. In contemporary articles on leadership, there is a concept called emotional intelligence. “Emotional intelligence (EI) or emotional quotient (EQ) is the capability of individuals to recognize their own, and other people’s 
With Freemasonry, it feels as if one needs to be “all in” in order to even start to build a true Masonic Lodge: a curated collection of people coming together in a thriving and growing group that finds, eventually, its own brilliant egregore. Perhaps that is what we are searching for and why Freemasonry appeals to us human beings. The mystical experience that some members hope to find is really this egregore that, in some ways, we are all hoping to find. We all want to make a place in the world – leave our mark or our legacy. As Freemasons, that is a better humanity. Masons seem to be searching for that community that brings us hope, trust, and peace. Finding it takes a lot of work, it seems. Touching the egregore for a moment provides perhaps a brief insight into what the Divine really is like.
Then there was an explosion at which time the singularity inflated and then cooled. The Universe changed over millions of years from something tiny and very hot to the Universe’s current size and temperature. And the Universe has continued to expand and cool throughout history. Thus, the Big Bang Theory provided a scientifically-based explanation of what happened at the very beginning of our universe continuing until our current time. 
lished “Cosmology from Quantum Potential.” Their work proposes a “corrected” version of Einstein’s Theory of 
These books talk about first the fall of the angels who were alleged to have fathered the Nephilim, as described in Genesis. The rest of the books are writings about Enoch’s revelations about and travels to heaven, either via visions or dreams. Some of the concepts discussed in these books are interesting and could have been controversial to the first Christian church leaders. The books contain histories of the fallen angels and their interaction with human kind, Enoch’s travels through what might be considered the underworld and heaven, a discussion about the Tree of Life, who the seven archangels were, parables on living, descriptions of heavenly bodies and their movements, and much more. 
Enter John Dee and Edward Kelley (a.k.a. Talbot). Much has been written about John Dee, and much of it dismissive. However, he was an extremely learned man with a fervent desire to heal the rifts between the Catholic Church, The Church of England, and the Protestant sects in mainland Europe. He was a devout man, and while we might understand how this can all work together, he was a scientist, alchemist, and occultist. In his desire to mend the religious wounds of the time, he sought to discover the original language, the language of God and Angels. In doing so, he felt that he could bring about the unification of humanity. Not being a medium or scryer himself, he turned to both his son, Arthur Dee, and eventually to Edward Kelley, a younger alchemist and spirit-medium. For eight tumultuous and energetic years, they worked together with Edward relating the Angelic language to John Dee through a series of seances and spirit conferences. Dee’s writings have been republished and in the web archives and by some publishing houses. Copies also exist in the British Library.
I think we may safely say that John Dee and Edward Kelley put the “Enoch” in Enochian, which begs deeper insight into who Enoch was, and why he “went with God.” Another excellent book is “The Book of Enoch,” by Weiser Books, and author R.H. Charles. The most recent publication is 2003. We’ll close with this small excerpt from that book: