CLAUDIU IONESCU
talking to
JOHN BELTON
Masonic Scholar, Author
Our guest today is my brother and friend John Belton, a respected Masonic scholar and author. We met for the very first time in Edinburgh, in 2007, at the first edition of the International Conference on History of Freemasonry. Many thanks, John, for granting me this interview. I am honoured, thank you!
My pleasure!
John was initiated in 1980 and currently is also a member of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge 2076 UGLE. By education he was a microbiologist, by profession a marketer and exporter working for a major multinational pharmaceutical company. John has recently moved to Scotland to be near his family. Early research interests focused on the post-1947 decline of Freemasonic membership across the English speaking world, leading to many papers, and the book, The English Masonic Union of 1813: A Tale Ancient & Modern. His latest book is Exploring the Vault: Masonic Higher Degrees 1730–1800, written together with another Masonic scholar, a French professor, Roger Dachez. Roger has been President of the Institut Maçonnique de France since its founding in 2002. He is also a member of the Scientific Committee of the Museum of Freemasonry in Paris and a Contributing Member of the Scottish Rite Research Society (Washington DC). Since 1992 he has directed the Masonic research journal, Renaissance Traditionnelle. He is the author of nearly thirty books, including De Salomon à James Anderson – L’Invention de la franc-maçonnerie and La véritable histoire du grade de Maître – Hiram et ses Freres. But let’s come back to the Vault.
My dear John, why is the book called Exploring the Vault?
It was the Third Degree and the publication of Masonry Dissected – and suddenly in 1730 it was very popular with edition after edition and in it, for the first time, everyone could see that Hiram was slain and the Word was lost. What better invitation is there to a Freemason than to try and find the Word that was lost? And in that we start to get stories about rebuilding the Temple and about people digging around with spades and picks in the rubble and finding stones they can lift and vaults they that they can go into. Things were found in the vaults, under the pillars, so whichever way you turn the story revolves around the Temple of Solomon, its destruction, its rebuilding and what is found underneath it. And that, in many ways, is symbolic of the exploration that the minds of those early Masons took. I think that’s the reason really.
You know, it was interesting to see that the book was co-authored with a French Brother, Roger Dachez. What was it that made the two of you decide to get together?
It was actually my ignorance about France! I’m English so when I grew up what my mother taught me was the history of England – she didn’t teach me the history of France. When I became a Mason, equally well, it was forbidden really to consider even thinking about the Grand Orient of France, so my knowledge was not particularly good. I had a bit, yes, but not much! I think what became clear to me was that in the last century the research on the early development of the Higher Degrees was poor, repetitive and didn’t answer any of the questions. And it’s quite clear that some of those answers would be in France. This is why I needed someone like Roger Dachez. We could communicate in English or French and he had a very good grasp of what his mother taught him about France and what his proposer into Freemasonry, presumably, taught him about French Freemasonry. We thought that there had to be something more to be found, but we didn’t know where we could find it, we didn’t know what it would be that we could find. But if we were going to find it and make a good story, it needed the two of us. We spent we spent four years of our life doing this. Four years! That’s 5% of our total lives so far! That makes it a big project by anyone’s standards. And so that that’s what we embarked upon. We didn’t know it was going to be that big. Here we have a TV programme called „Grand Designs”, where people want to build themselves very big houses and they start with a little idea and it gets very big, very expensive, and consumes all their time. This project was like that! But it was exciting.
Your research for the book needed to be both holistic and forensic. Please, can you explain why and what you hope to achieve doing this?
Well we didn’t know what we were going to find and that’s why we thought that past researchers over the previous century had failed to find any really good answers. So we needed to look more broadly, we didn’t look just at England, we didn’t just look at the British Isles, we looked – quite frankly, at England, Ireland, Scotland, France, and we also looked quite a lot at Germany and the Netherlands, just to see what there was to find. And we found a lot. The other thing is we realized that the story is not going to be handed to you on a plate, you’ll have to look for it. So you imagine these scenes, like a murder scene and the police are looking through a woodland for clues. There’s a line of policemen and they’re going through the wood with sticks, poking away to see what they can find – that’s exactly what we did with the printed evidence we found! So that’s the forensic bit of it. We looked wide and we looked in depth. We must have been insane to even think we could do it, but there we are, that’s what we set out to do – holistic and forensic.
What are the main discoveries you made?
Very often we didn’t necessarily discover something, but we saw the relevance and the importance of smaller facts. But I think if you look just inside the cover of the book – there you are, Exploring the Vault – the image on the cover is from around 1490. It’s a wood carving of the Temple of Solomon. So we thought we should follow various people of the Union French lodge No. 98 as it came to be called. People like John Coustos and Philip de la Tiercethey were all members of this Lodge and one by one they went out. There was a celebrity chef went to the Netherlands, a jeweler who went to France and Portugal and a diplomat – well, two diplomats – went to Frankfurt, and a man who was an artist who did stage scenery went to Berlin. They were all professionals, and they all took Freemasonry out into Europe. Mostly it was the Craft Degrees, but not only the Craft Degrees. The Ecossais Degree went out from London to Berlin. We don’t know quite exactly what went, we have to guess at that a little bit, but this one Lodge seemed to be united in a purpose, a purpose to spread Freemasonry through Europe. Other people had spotted and researched individual people, but we put them all together and then suddenly a picture appeared that no one had seen and we discovered many other things.
If you look at Freemasonry, Masonry Dissected is only really about the questions and answers. The candidate gets the degree and he’s brought back in and the explanation is given to him in a catechism, in a „question and answer”. But there was more than this. We discovered a 1735 start at explaining what the ethics and morality of Freemasonry were, and the charge after initiation. It deals with the duties you owe to God, your neighbour, and yourself. That is still in the English and Scottish Ritual today and I believe it’s in the Ritual of other places as well. People had noticed, it but no one had realized that this was the first bit of ritual that aimed to teach the candidate upon his initiation what the morals and ethics of Freemasonry were. It’s something that was carried on by Ramsay in his Discours, carried on by de la Tierce in his expansion on Anderson’s Constitution in Frankfort sur Main. People were exploring this, but they were exploring other things as well and if you read through the book they crop up one after the other.
You told me that one of the purposes of your latest book is to open the mind of the reader to new possibilities for research, one not just to requote that the book is on their desk. Please comment
We started on a very big project and as anyone goes through such a project you pick up on a fact here and a fact there, and then you put two facts together, and the process develops rather in that sort of way. What we could do is we found one or two. We for example we can tell you now that the Discours de Ramsay of 1736-1737 was in print in 1738 in a much altered form. We can tell you it wasn’t Ramsay who altered it, it was someone else, a guy called Philip Uriot. We’ve looked at the passing of the Chair Degree and we can explain a lot more about that.
In terms of a single degree, that of the Chevaliers de Saint André that went with the Berlin Ecossais Degrees, we can tell you who wrote the words, and the very day he announced them to the Union Lodge in Berlin, then give you the date when they did a practice and the date when they did it for real at the next St Andrews day installation. And having found that suddenly I realized that someone else had looked at a later document and found the amendment in which the form is not three taps of the sword on the back, but five, and there are clear indications from the other words that they’d been influenced by Ramsay. So you can see how the ideas were flowing through Europe. It blows your mind, but sometimes we could do it to the day, of an event almost 300 years ago. You wouldn’t think there would be that information available, but you have to look and you have to read and it’s tough on the eyes and hard on the printing.
We discovered that you needed to look at different editions of the same work. There was a series in France in 1744 called the Catechisme des Francs-Maçons and then the later version Les Nouvelles Catechisme of 1749. Both by Leonard Gabanon and when it came to the Third Degree it had a picture of a coffin, and across the coffin was the word „Jehova”. And then he did a third edition and we’ve got that – it’s got the same picture of the coffin of the Third Degree, only this time it’s not „Jehovah”, it uses (MB MacBenah). And there is a statement that the word „Jehovah” is not the word anymore of the Third Degree, it is simply the name of God and that’s all. That’s the point at which we can tell you that „Jehovah” became the Ecossais password and that’s why it partly vanishes from the Third Degree. But you keep on you keep on going, you keep on exploring, and you will keep on finding. What we couldn’t do, we didn’t find all the clues to connect all the things. We connected maybe three or four things and the rest is left to other people, because there are plenty more documents to go at. So we’re trying to teach people to think in a different way. The old habit of merely printing big volumes full of rituals doesn’t work, because you just get a shelf of big thick books full of rituals. It’s only when you start to look at version one, version two, version three, look at how it changes over time that you start to see differences. And, again, this is the sort of the forensic approach looking at the detail. If we found things we’re sure that there are more things that other people can find as well.
One of the chapters of your book is about the letter G and the Widow’s son. Please explain to our audience and readers about this topic.
Yes. In England they wanted to get rid of that – they don’t like women, or they didn’t; so Ruth has vanished from English Masonic ritual, the Queen of Sheba has vanished from Masonic Ritual, and so has the wife or (it depends where you look) the mother of Hiram, the one who was slain, vanished. But it still remains in the United States and in Europe, people speak „Oh, Lord, my God, oh, Lord, my God” – and they bring their hands down – „is there no help for the Widow’s son?” And we managed to dig out a bit about that and it makes a fascinating story. With this whole chapter we follow it right the way through to what they did after Hiram was killed. England in 1760 went for retribution, it went for the killing of the guilty. But in other places it wasn’t like that it. And there was one called the Ecossais Maître Angloise which is supposed to have come from England, through French prisoners of war, into France and it tells the story about how after Hiram was killed Solomon gave a village called Gaboan to Hiram’s wife to live in and she decided she was going to care for the Masons. So “is there no help for the Widow’s son?” – it was the Widow who gave help to Masons and you’ll start to see where that story comes from. So there are different tales after the Third Degree, of retribution, or of healing, and it’s absolutely fascinating.
If you go to Rosslyn Chapel – I did recently and was given a lecture, because we filled the church with everyone who was there – and at the end the speaker got his flashlight and he pointed it up at one of the top corners of the back of the chapel and he said “There is the face of the Master who went abroad and left The Apprentice to carve the pillar that you can see at the other end of the chapel.” And then he pointed his torch across to the other side and he said “And that is The Apprentice, the one who got killed afterwards when the Master came back and next to him is his mother.” And – interesting! – almost the same story is appearing at the time of the carving and the building of Rosslyn Chapel as comes up in Freemasonry several centuries later. It might be pure chance, I don’t know, but there are exciting things to be found, and that, for example, is one of them. Claudiu, you know, because we’ve been together, we went to the Torphichen Preceptory (built in 1140), it’s near Edinburgh, which was the home of the Knights of St John. (https://www.masonicforum.ro/no-63/landmark-in-scotland-torphichen-preceptory-built-in-1140/)
The Knights, in reality, were there a long time before, so in the 1100s-1200s, when they got thrown out of the Middle East and they clung on. But around the time of the Masonic Templars there was a lot of interest in the Knights Templars in society. So you look at newspapers, and newspapers were publishing articles about the Knights Templar. So, Rosslyn Chapel – I don’t know! A lot of these stories, myths, legends I think we can see are very old. If you look at the old charge you can see that they’re old. How they’re connected together, I don’t know, but going to a place like Rosslyn Chapel makes you ask a lot of questions. It’s interesting when you look at all the different Degrees and how they all came together. I ended up rewriting Irish Masonic history because they never quite came to terms with the fact that there was an early Grand Encampment that was going late 1760s-early 1770s and then there was a split in 1779, when another group got a warrant from Mother Kilwinning in Scotland and it was to be the High Knights Templar of Ireland Kilwinning Lodge, and to work this in Ireland. If you look at one particular, the 1790 Ahiman Rezon (Book of Constitutions), it lists all the officers of the Grand Lodge, then it lists the officers of both of the Knights Templar Encampments. Now, it’s never been openly acknowledged as that and it happened that the Kilwinning Grand Encampment had the Knight Red Cross and that their Grand Master was also the Grand Master Mason of the Grand Lodge of Ireland at the same time. There were various other Degrees, and I’ve discovered that the two Encampments competed with each other and I think there were behind the various other Degrees, like the Knight of the Sword, Knight of the East – now it’s added in Knight of the East and West. They were also included as part of that and they were different. So I think there’s a lot more to be discovered and I think we’ve made the clear discovery that the form of Knight Red Cross that mainly went to England was taken by an Irish Lodge and is the particular version of the Kilwinning Grand Encampment. Joseph Wages found a copy in a set of Dunckerley rituals, believe it or not, in one of the Masonic libraries in Sweden, in an English transcript! So I can put that together with a Knight Red Cross ritual that Professor Jan Snoek found and today’s Irish Knight Masons ritual. There is a common thread that runs through all of them. So you start to see when I write the chapters on Royal Arch and Knights Templar, the first one is the Royal Arch in Ireland and then it was because lots of Masons wanted to become Knights Templar they had to get the Royal Arch Degree first; and they couldn’t. The Royal Arch took a simple decision, they said „We’re having the Royal Arch”, they made it part of their early Grand Encampment in a formal way and they competed in the press for people to go along to their meetings. But both parts, at the same time, and each of them had a big Feast every St John’s day and they wanted to attract people. I found 70 advertisements by them, so it wasn’t just on one occasion. So the Irish are coming to terms with this. Then the following chapter is the arrival of the Knights Templar in Ireland and how they competed, and then I go on also to look at how it transferred to Scotland and finally, and only finally, it got into England. These things, while some of them might have started in England, the control that the Grand Lodge of England tried to exert made it very difficult for them to succeed. In Ireland, Lodges worked whatever they wanted to work. Grand Lodge didn’t like it, but they couldn’t stop it; in England they could stop it and they did, so it made the progress in England harder and more difficult. There’s a lot more to be discovered but we didn’t rely upon rituals; we did use rituals and they are useful on occasion, but they don’t, of themselves solve the problem – you have to put the context around them, the time, the place, and the people and it’s amazing how much information on time and people is still available. We deal quite a lot with what was going on in Frankfurt and a lot of it was in the early 1740s and it was all to do with the coronation of Charles VII, the big monarch of Europe. So we’ve started round the beginnings of a new way of looking at it, of „ferreting around” as we’re told the people did when they were repairing the Temple and looking for things, by scraping away and we think we are able to offer people a new way of looking at the problems and making new discoveries and starting to put together some common sense, and getting stories that are different. That’s what we’ve done and it was four years’ work.
Any final words to add, my dear brother John?
No, except to wish those who follow Roger Dachez and myself happy exploring. And as researchers have to be much more precise; it’s no good just quoting what was quoted before. If you read Fifield Dassigny – he’s writing in Ireland –, he published a book in which he looks at the arrival of the Royal Arch in Dublin and he says that you must be through the Chair, past the Chair, to get this Degree and that Brothers should be patient and it was obvious that there was a lot of pressure even very quickly, in around 1744, for people to get the Royal Arch degree. There’s a hunger amongst human beings to have just one more Degree! When I went and looked at Lawrence Dermott’s first Ahiman Rezon of 1756, he does talk about the Royal Arch because he made it part of his “marketing strategy”, for want of a better word, and he said that it is the “heart, root and marrow of Freemasonry” – I think that’s the right order. That is what people quote – BUT they were too idle to read to the bottom of the paragraph, because in the bottom of the paragraph, even in 1756 – and remember that the Antients only started in London in 1751, so in 5 years he’d reached a position where he had to say at the end of this paragraph that no one else seems to have read to the end of: “I have to remind those reading this that the Royal Arch is a degree for those who have passed the Chair and I can do no better than quote Fifield Dassigny in his statement of 1744” and he goes on to repeat precisely that. So we know that Lawrence Dermott went over to England and the Royal Arch was popular and a lot of people wanted it but the only thing he could revert to in order to justify his claim for this is that Dassigny says it – no one else had read that! Hundreds of people must have picked up the 1756 Constitution, read the words and not appreciated what was in the bottom of that paragraph, because it tells you immediately about the way in which the Royal Arch was accepted and welcomed and wanted back in the 1750s in England. So there we are. But you have to read and I wish people happy reading!
Thank you so much, John!
It’s my pleasure.
