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CHAPTER 2

Daily Lives as Measured in Masonic Time

Getting at the daily rhythms or thoughts of people in the past presents a challenge. Today our lives would appear in outline in our daily diaries, written or electronic. Trips to the doctor mix with important events in personal and family life, also with information deemed necessary for daily living: phone numbers, holidays, days when the government closes and so on. Framed in day-to-day time we jot our lives down, almost in passing, perhaps never imagining that hundreds of years from now our pocket diaries might prove to be very interesting. Such daily jottings from the eighteenth century are rare, almost nonexistent. But we do possess multiple copies of the small, printed books, generally called almanacs, that people used to get at the information they needed, like the times of coaches, or about how to get around in a city, find the right merchant or court, or to look up the day of the week on which Christmas would fall. Seeing a specific market, publishers made such almanacs for freemasons. The way they record time, and provide readings to assist in its passage, especially concerns us.

We would give the world to know how such an eighteenth-century diary was used, how personal events mixed with the printed outline of the year around which it would be lived. We would love to know whether women used their daily diaries differently from men; perhaps they took fewer coaches but needed to know the days of holidays more exactly. The information about actual use is probably lost forever. Neither in masonic nor in general pocket diaries—both often described as almanacs—do handwritten jottings appear with any frequency. Most times we have no idea who owned the diary, or even if particular copies preserved in libraries throughout Europe or America were anything more than part of a print overrun, just one copy that never got sold.

FIGURE 4. Frontispiece to De Almanach der Vrye Metzelaaren … 1780 (Amsterdam: Willem Coertze, Jr.), showing a woman holding a square and compasses. The use of women as allegorical figures was commonplace in masonic symbolism of the age. With permission of the masonic library, Prins Frederik Cultural Masonic Center, The Hague; copyright Grand East of the Netherlands.

We can extrapolate from the printed contents of pocket almanacs as to what their publishers—especially when many of them were freemasons—thought would best sell the diaries or almanacs to a consumer. Masonic almanacs interest us most compellingly in this chapter, but they are best seen in light shone by general almanacs intended for any literate reader. One remarkable feature stands out that separates most masonic diaries from those aimed at a general audience. Most general diaries contained pious sentiments that invoked religious pieties and Godly thoughts. Not the masonic ones. In large measure their publishers cast the contents of diaries aimed at the fraternity in decidedly secular terms. It seems reasonable to suggest that publishers probably knew their audiences.

Before we dwell upon the striking differences between masonic almanacs and ones aimed at the general public, some similarities are worth noting. At first, masonic and other diaries were hardly pocket-size, but by mid-century they began to resemble what we routinely carry with us today. They were light-weight, small, and hence fragile. Generally, eighteenth-century owners put their names in a diary’s margin, just as they occasionally recorded in cramped spaces important birth and death dates. Sometimes a personal note slipped through. Take an American entry that vividly reminds us of a lost world. An almanac jotting in a margin from one month in 1729 tells us that “Black Nanny died the 20th day.”¹ But she is as unknowable as are most of the owners of pocket almanacs, masonic or non, slave-owning or not. In the paucity of available blank pages and in the absence of detailed jottings, eighteenth-century almanacs, generic or masonic, differ from our diaries, which first and foremost provide real space for a listing of our personal affairs. People in the eighteenth century must have kept such diurnal agendas in their heads, or put them in the traditional personal, sometimes confessional or spiritual diaries.² Those, however, generally recorded events after they happened.

We have few such poignant entries in European almanacs, masonic or otherwise, as the one about the death of an American slave nanny. Samples from the print runs of these small, fragile books nonetheless survive—to be found in multiple editions—because so many businessmen and travelers needed them. They were deeply utilitarian in purpose, yet interspersed with a wide variety of thoughts, aphorisms and pieties. Thus both general and masonic diaries give us glimpses, however nearly opaque, into the daily thoughts available to their users. The almanacs provided information about everything from coach times to the meeting hours of local courts and, in the case of diaries made for freemasons, the location of lodges in multiple cities. Eighteenth-century almanacs, whether masonic or generic, were meant to be predictive and reliable guides to the world at a glance. As a genre the almanac stretched well back into the early seventeenth century, but it came into its own, and into a mass circulation, largely in the eighteenth.³

We focus on the diaries bought by freemasons and published especially for their use. The diaries allow us to inch our way closer to the lives of their masonic users, without letting us assume that the buyer subscribed to all the sentiments found in a diary. Perhaps inevitably, by the 1730s enterprising publishers saw the masonic market for such diaries and began to produce them with a style and content that they thought would sell. The repetition of themes and ideas suggest that by the mid-eighteenth century masonic formulas had emerged that were commercially successful enough to warrant repetition. Indeed, aside from farmers, freemasons were among the few groups whom publishers sought specifically to woo, and decade by decade masonic almanacs—as far as we can tell from what survives in libraries—became more numerous. The genre began in 1735 when William Smith, a London publisher, produced the first masonic “pocket companion,” as he called it.⁴

Alas, not as many masonic pocket companions from Britain and America have survived as we would like. The best examples of such almanacs come from the Dutch Republic: there are boxes of them housed with meticulous care at the Library of the Grand East in The Hague. They could be in Dutch or French, since the latter language was used by many in the republic. Also with a French text the publisher had a larger, international audience. We can imagine such a diary selling in Belgium, Switzerland, France, or even Germany where the educated often used French.

Mostly the masonic diaries found today in The Hague will provide our examples, bearing in mind that the ones in Dutch, like their British counterparts, were aimed at a largely Protestant audience. We would expect Catholics to be more wrapped in the daily liturgy of the saints in part because Protestants had frowned upon their cults, relics, and statues. Predictably the French diaries offered a diurnal religiosity and gave every day its proper saint. Neither religion had the edge, however, when it came to piety or a sense of the afterlife, the religious time-out-of-mind that promised salvation and that was plainly visible in the almanacs aimed at the larger public.

Being involved in this secular world, hence the need for such a practical diary, could be seen by both Catholics and Protestants as a distraction from Godliness. This fear of worldliness may account for the overall pious tone adopted by generic diary after diary. After a user managed to catch the coach listed in an almanac, the time could be passed by the reading of pious texts. Thus the appearance of secular themes, and the general absence of a specified religion in masonic diaries—as seen in every European language—becomes distinctive. Such worldliness strikes the historian as particularly interesting. So too in the masonic diaries a remarkable cosmopolitanism surfaces and complements their generally secular stance. Seldom did a masonic diary fail to mention the locations of lodges in other countries, or events of importance wherever freemasons had an interest. A German masonic diary sang the praises of the local rulers and the protection they gave the lodges. Nary a religious theme appears; only the unity of the freemasons mattered.⁵

Most nonmasonic diaries never cast their geographical gaze so far and wide. Some generic American ones, even in the years of the French Revolution, made no reference to events in Europe.⁶ Others did at least give an estimate of the population of the various European countries.⁷ But the English language diaries from both Britain and the American colonies did lay emphasis upon the chronology of the monarchy and who sat on the British throne at the moment. Whether general or masonic, diaries inculcated the broad outlines of royal government and dynastic succession. They achieved a timelessness, or regularity, as sure as the phases of the moon or the setting of the winter sun.

One of the earliest American masonic diaries appears aimed at both a generic and a masonic audience; perhaps we have in it evidence of a publisher who hedged his bets. This early American diary also possessed distinctively American qualities. In contrast to the European diaries for freemasons, the American one gave an eccentric history of the origins of the order, one that laid emphasis upon the working men in the earliest lodges. In English, French, and Dutch language diaries the story of the origins of the fraternity stuck pretty close to the account given in Anderson’s Constitutions of 1723. It laid emphasis upon royal patronage and architects as the key to masonic evolution. We know, however, from the work of Steven Bullock that in the American colonies by the 1760s the lodges had become “ancient” and had broken with the orthodoxy of the Grand Lodge and its official history. The early American diary of 1764 bowed briefly in the direct of royal patronage for the order. Then, with a feisty tone, it said that the stonemasons, patronized by Edward III, “agreed upon Tokens etc. to know one another by, and to assist one another against being impressed and not to work unless free, and on their own terms”; hence they were called freemasons. It even said that the fraternity in those olden days enjoyed equality with the royal Order of the Garter.⁸ It was artisans and not architects who inspired the American masonic imagination, both white and black.⁹

All these sentiments suggest that by the 1760s in the colonies a high degree of independence from the imperial or royal narrative of freemasonry had come to prevail. As Steven Bullock shows, such independence of spirit had become symptomatic of a larger movement stirring among the general American population. The rest of this early American diary, aimed only in part at a masonic audience, is relatively unremarkable except, just as we shall see with its European counterparts that it gave an entirely secular chronology of important dates from Roman times onward. It also added some astrology, an essay on health by the famous English doctor George Cheyne, a list of all the English kings, and a curious essays on love and marriage, supposedly by the seventeenth-century English scientist Robert Boyle. In it we learn of his sentiment “I have seldom seen a happy marriage.” One might contemplate that grim thought while on a stage wagon, picked up conveniently because the times and prices were given in the diary.

An American masonic diary from just into the new century, 1801, suggests that the secularism of the eighteenth century was distinctive to the colonial age that spawned Franklin and Jefferson. In the first year of the nineteenth century the pocket almanac gives saints’ days as well as all the secular dates, the Fourth of July for example, and provides an extensive list of lodges all over the new republic and even in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. All the officers of the Philadelphia lodges are listed. But a closing poem points to a renewal of religious sentiment, “Let us also inwardly digest the holy bible; let its doctrines & precepts even accompany our conditions in life that we may, like true Masons, dwell even here in the house of the Lord our God, and admire the beauties of his holy temple.” Uncharacteristically for an earlier age, brothers are then admonished to have faith in Christ.¹⁰ Yet a slightly later masonic almanac, for 1814, has songs and gives heads of government in Pennsylvania and is devoid of religious overtones.¹¹ We know nothing about the religiosity of the owners of these almanacs intended for a pocket. They might have been pious or not; we are just lucky to have them at all.

Except for their preservation, these small, commonplace American or European items, pocket diaries or almanacs, would be unremarkable save for the noticeable difference between eighteenth-century masonic ones and those meant for a general audience. In the age of Enlightenment, freemasons on both sides of the Atlantic seemed more comfortable in this world’s time, without seeing the need of being reminded about eternal time. Some masonic diaries gave the saints’ days, even the date of the creation of the world, for example, 5742, and the year of the flood, 4686—all earnestly offered. Christian dating was also commonplace in diaries aimed at a general audience.¹² Of course, the year for the building of the Temple of Solomon (2810), said in masonic mythology to have been the work of the fraternity, would be a natural piece of masonic chronology, and one date not found in generic diaries.¹³ But by and large, other important pieties were missing from pocket diaries aimed at a masonic audience. Whether in English, French, or Dutch, talk about how “the great God of nature forewarns a sinful world of approaching calamities,” or about the laws of nature revealing the majesty of God, is strangely absent from the masonic repertoire.¹⁴ Some diaries for the general public on occasion broke with the generally naturalist reading of comets and insisted upon seeing them “as God’s Hand, and take Notice of the divine Pleasure and Design in them.”¹⁵ By contrast, masonic diaries waxed eloquent with vagaries, more secular than religious, “to adore a supreme Being is always the first principle of our Ancestors … a mason consecrates the premises of his work to the Eternal … he is equally remote from ridiculous incredulity and superstitious fanaticism.”¹⁶ A masonic poem found in one French diary put its religious sensibility nicely: “In Religion and in Politics [la Politique] / We never neglect la Pratique.”¹⁷

Overwhelmingly all diaries betrayed their origins in the new scientific culture. Invariably their authors or compilers described themselves as astronomers, natural philosophers, or mathematicians. One British almanac writer said he was “Philomath.”¹⁸ Occasionally a diary might be done by “a student in physick and astrology.”¹⁹ Such a diary might assert “the government of the Moon over the body of man, as she passeth the 12 zodiacal constellations.”²⁰ Yet even when tilting toward astrology, every diary taught basic astronomy and gave naturalistic explanations for comets or eclipses. But when aimed at the general market, as distinct from a masonic one, the almanacs largely kept to a pious theme. The age called that particular mix physico-theology, and generic almanacs loved to invoke it. Boston almanacs told users of 1762 that, as they ventured in the British empire, “Ye Christians as their plenteous Wealth you share, / With your best faith enrich the Natives there.”²¹ American diaries, like British ones, invoked the pious poetry and prose of Pope, Dryden, Addison, and the ubiquitous Dr. Cheyne, who preached sound body and mind as the natural state to which Christians should strive. Some American diaries gave the meeting times of churches or Quaker groups. British diaries frequently gave the names of all the bishops, archbishops, and deans, and of course, listed the Anglican holy days. By mid-century, however, the pious genre was less common even in generic diaries. They might offer medical advice as well as giving high tides and the times for a full moon.²² Sometimes mathematical exercises were offered, for both men and women.²³

Without exception all diaries taught history and gave chronologies. Even if the masonic dates were a bit fanciful, the impulse found in many diaries, to order history and put the year in question in its chronological place, made a serious contribution to giving people a sense of historical development and change. The time being presented was often religious time, but just as important, and more frequently than in nonmasonic diaries of the period, masonic time could be measured in public events, battles, wars, the death of kings.²⁴ It might even be possible to pass the time using one’s diary, masonic or not, to assist with memorizing a list of all the kings of France or England.

This secular quality to be found especially in masonic almanacs and diaries foreshadows much of our own sense of time as being historical. A sense of history as something unfolding in the here and now belongs distinctively to Western modernity. Historical time was invented in European consciousness in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the diaries and almanacs such time became commonplace, available to any literate reader, masonic or not.

While the masonic diaries gave a sense of history, theirs could also often be a fanciful sense. One reason it has been so hard for us to sort out masonic facts from fictions has been masonry’s eighteenth-century ancestors, who took up every imaginable story to make the lodges seem as old as Western civilization itself. Take this one from a masonic diary: “Upon the introduction of the Romans into Britain, arts and sciences began to flourish apace. In the progress of civilization, Masonry came into esteem, and was much encouraged by Caesar, and several of the Roman generals, who succeeded him in the government of this island.”²⁵ Julius Caesar had protected the lodges! The problem with the story is that there is not a shred of historical evidence to support it. The tales continued: in 600 the archbishop of Canterbury “appeared at the head of the fraternity.” Of course William the Conqueror also protected “the fraternity” and it in turn built the Tower of London, not to mention London Bridge and a host of other important buildings. As guild evolved into voluntary society the society of freemasons appropriated the guild history (indeed stonemasons built all those buildings; who else would have?). And then they added flourishes that still turn up in the twenty-first century. “During the reign of Henry II the grand master of the Knights Templars superintended the Masons, and employed them in building their Temple in Fleet Street, A.D. 1155.”²⁶ Dan Brown could have gotten part of the fanciful chronology of his novel confirmed by that diary.

Some of this mythical history, of uncertain origin, had also been incorporated into the Constitutions of 1723, and that canonical text in turn went through a multitude of editions in just about every Western language. The 1723 book, so basic to freemasonry, went hand in hand with the masonic diaries of European origin. The Constitutions also had very little to say about religious belief, except to note that the freemason should be of what ever religion to which all men agree. It also gave a potted history of England with reference to which king or queen had done what to the freemasons.

The Constitutions said that freemasonry had not fared well in the reign of Elizabeth. The almanacs elaborated with the tale that the queen sent “an armed force to York, with intent to break up their annual communication.” She thought that the freemasons were withholding secrets. The Grand Master disabused her of the notion and proclaimed the brothers to be “skillful architects, who cultivated arts and science another, and never meddled in affairs of church or state.”²⁷ By the time the histories got to the late seventeenth century, they settled into more believable stories, or at least ones that historians can check against other sources. Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Clayton appeared as early founders of gentlemen’s freemasonry.²⁸ Other documents from the period, or from private letters slightly later, suggest their involvement. Helpfully the diaries also listed all the national officers right up to the year in question.

In their fashion the diaries, whether masonic or aimed at a general audience, may also be seen as teaching devices. For example, sometimes they gave the order of the planets (and their signs), the eclipses of the sun; “following Copernicus, the earth and not the moon is a planet.”²⁹ All taught the simplest astronomy, but occasionally even the masonic ones could allude to astrological themes.³⁰ Science and magic mixed freely with the dates for the beginning of Lent, Easter, the Ascension of Christ, and the start of Advent. The pattern of mixing the credulous with the scientific began earlier in the century and can be seen in almanacs now preserved in Anglo-American libraries.³¹ In diaries that might have been aimed at both a Catholic and Protestant audience, the saints’ days were also catalogued.

In the masonic diaries more was to be taught than the rhythm of the originally Christian calendar. Always they aimed to inculcate virtuous behavior. In order to distinguish a true brother from a false one the reader should observe that the first eschews “ambition, vain glory and interest,” and he seeks truth par excellence, as well as the practice of charity. Always the true brothers are “children of the light”; and at the same time “the man who is morally free is truly free.” Sometimes a vague religiosity is also invoked: “The heart is the foundation upon which the freemason builds, for the glorification of the supreme being, the Sovereign Architect of the Universe … it is necessary to police our mores, finally so that our actions will be able to be, like a cubed gem, an appropriate part of a mystical temple.”³² This fairly minimalist creed could be practiced by any earnest brother or sister. Funeral orations, often printed in the almanacs, brought home the this-worldly quality of masonic virtue. Heaven went unmentioned and the deceased brother won praise for having a “sensibility that united at its base humanity, sweetness, charity, that had given him a love of the poor for which all men would have been jealous.”³³ At the masonic funeral for Voltaire, music and song celebrated “the great man” who had become “the founder of a New World.” The brothers, V. F. de la Lande, the painter, Greuze, the visiting American, Benjamin Franklin, and sister Madame de Villete, laid wreaths at the foot of his statue.³⁴

The universalism of the masonic message can be deduced from the extent of the territory an almanac imagined for its sales. More than a sense of local time and place appeared in masonic diaries aimed conceivably at the entire European market. Many diaries gave a list of lodges in every city and, remarkably, in the colonies of the Dutch Republic, or of France. Sometimes the date and place of meetings were offered.³⁵ Wherever the language used in the almanac was spoken lay a potential market, both at home and abroad. Perhaps membership in lodges overseas served as another way for the beneficiaries of the empire to feel “at home.” Lodges, like churches and chapels, gave Europeans a sense of identity whether in Suriname or St. Dominque. They helped to unify the empire.

The sense of recognition and identity that lodges offered was only reenforced by the many attempts to apply uniformity to their proceedings. Rituals repeated, and similar from lodge to lodge, meant that brothers and sisters away from home could participate in the proceedings. Supposedly all these were secret, but the almanacs often reveal that masonic secrecy was honored more in the breech than in the execution. Some diaries had engravings that depicted masonic ceremonies, perhaps intended to make sure that they conformed to a pattern wherever they might be performed. We can imagine a brother in his coach en route to a lodge meeting frantically going over the details of an elaborate ceremony, memorizing where the master should stand or the new “secret” password to be given out that day and conveniently printed in the pocket almanac for that year. Some of the rituals described in the almanacs were elaborate and almost religious in their emotional tone, for example, rituals that imitated death and rebirth. They must have made a strong impression on the person being initiated, and perhaps these descriptions can help us better understand why the lodges for women asked that the initiate not be pregnant at the time.

Into the pocket of any brother also came knowledge of foreign dignitaries admitted to the masonic order. In London in 1777, brothers were told, the oldest son of the Nabab of Carnatica, Madras, became a freemason.³⁶ But the admission of indigenous peoples was on the whole rare. The lodges were for the imperialists. The entire globe, as surveyed and dominated by Westerners, became a part of daily consciousness. Lists provided the names of all Grand Lodges in North America, the Bahamas, Armenia, and Belgium, and they complemented extensive lists of European lodges. Triumphantly, alphabetical lists were given of “the principal lodges established in the four corners of the world.”³⁷ So too lists appeared of all the kings in Europe who were members of the order, or just as important, its protectors.³⁸ We can imagine that the diaries were therefore also intended to serve travelers far from home and looking for fraternal company. Not surprisingly, coach times and prices were also printed.

Perhaps such lists suggest a certain dryness in the subject matter of masonic diaries, that the lists look like the string of 800 free phone numbers provided in many of our own diaries. But lodges in the eighteenth century, like the diaries intended for their members, also sought to instill orderliness, as well as to edify and sometimes to be polemical.

FIGURES 5–9. IN De Almanach der Vrye Metzelaaren … 1780 (Amsterdam) we find these elaborate ceremonies engraved for readers. The numbers correspond to the titles given in the text: 1 is the Grand Master, 2 is the speaker (for that meeting), and so on. The images show the candidate being received into the lodge (Figure 5) and being positioned to be received (Figures 6, 7); the ceremony complete with the laying on of swords (Figure 8); and the candidate, still blindfolded, being raised up by his new “brothers” (Figure 9). In effect he is being laid on the masonic carpet as if he were dead, to be “marked” by his brothers, given the secret password “Tubalkain,” and finally “resurrected” into his new masonic life.

FIGURE 6.

FIGURE 7.

FIGURE 8.

FIGURE 9.

All those themes appear in the diaries. When a new lodge was opened in The Hague in 1761, the Equality of Brothers, the opening discourse in French appeared in a diary as late as 1793. Elsewhere I have argued that the lodge, and its name, may have been opened in reaction against the lodge for men and women that had flourished in the city at mid-century.³⁹ Reprinting the opening oration, again and again, may have been a way of continuing opposition to women being in the lodges. Perhaps the brothers who wanted to dwell solely on their equality had in their disapproving mind lodges of adoption, women’s lodges in Bordeaux, or one closer to home in The Hague. Other diaries offered more gender-benign poems and songs, “A brother has a heart for the work/He lives more content than a King.”⁴⁰ The tune to which it was to be sung in French was also provided. Still other almanacs, in search of gender equality, gave ceremonies to be used by men and women at a masonic “fête de table.” “We drink brothers, we drink to our amicable sisters,” who in turn answered, “We drink to our tender confrères.”⁴¹

In general, moral uplift, rather than gender polemics, filled the pages of typical diaries. “The lodges must be schools of the Moral and Philosophy … in effect … in the discourses that are spoken in them, always Virtue, Charity, and the Love of our neighbor, lie at the base of our intentions.” So said a French diary published in The Hague in 1781.⁴² It also published an oration given to the national Grand Lodge in The Hague the previous year. The speaker praised the Dutch nation and also asked the Grand Architect of the Universe “to perpetuate generation after generation a race of citizens useful to their country, heroic defenders of Liberty and Religion, and enlightened masters who can revivify our virtues.”⁴³ The appearance of liberty in the language in that year suggests a number of possibilities. The reference may reflect the growing impact of the American Revolution in European consciousness. But the implication that virtue needs reviving may also signal the growing discontent seen in the Dutch Republic by the 1780s. By 1787 revolution would erupt in Amsterdam that was only put to rest by the invasion of Prussian soldiers. We can only wonder what loyal freemasons made of those events because this same diary was warm in its praise of Frederick, king of Prussia, who a mere seven years later ordered the antirevolutionary invasion. We know that some lodges supported the revolution, and that others were Orangist, supporting the stadtholder and the Prussians.