Let us begin where almost no one begins: with the word itself.
Masonry comes from maçon: a mason, the man who raises walls in stone. It does not mean wisdom, or mystery, or light. It means the trade of the builders, and we should not hurry to regret it, because that modesty in the name is the first exact thing that has to be said. The word promises no doctrine: it promises a job of work. Later it will be seen that everything was said right there.
What Freemasonry is, on the other hand, is a tradition. Tradition, in its etymological and proper sense, means handing over: from the Latin tradere, to put a thing into another man's hands. Which supposes, at the other end of the chain, a receipt: someone who receives something. There is even a language in which the word that names tradition says that and nothing else: in Hebrew, qabbalah (the Kabbalah) means literally what has been received. Let us hold on to that.
It is not an old custom repeated out of respect for one's grandparents. It is not a style, or an aesthetic, or a set of venerable usages. It is the effective transmission of something a man did not manufacture and does not own: our only function is to receive it whole and to hand it over whole.
This must be said at the outset, because the word is fashionable today, and fashionable words are usually the first to empty out.
There are, above all in the United Kingdom and in the United States, numerous lodges devoted to the historical study of Freemasonry, and they do serious work that is not in dispute. But there are two things that look much alike from outside, and they should not be confused. An excellent history of a tradition can be written by a man who is not inside it, and the man who writes it does not claim to be: he is doing history, and doing it well. The scholar of a tradition and the man who receives it do not occupy the same place, even when they handle the same texts and sit at the same table.
Something else, very different, is what has to be named here. More than a few figures of show business and of public life have taken up being Masons, so they say. They go to what we might call the Masonic club: a place where a man attends, belongs, converses, dines, poses for the photograph. It is a thing without any foundation whatever. Forgive my bluntness, but it will not pass; and take the word we ourselves use, accepted, in its literal sense: nothing is accepted there, because nothing serious is handed over to be received, at least nothing of what matters to the Tradition. Company, yes, and hospitality, and a good table. But nothing that matters passes from one pair of hands to another, which was the only thing that should have been happening there.
This is not a worldly complaint. It is a doctrinal precision, and one that costs dearly to overlook. Membership is no secret, and saying "I belong to a lodge" gives nobody away. What gives a man away is something else: presenting himself as one who is a Mason, with the emphasis of a man displaying a possession. If someone introduces himself to you that way, thank him with every courtesy and ask yourself, discreetly, what he is selling.
For the man who is one does not introduce himself that way, and not out of comic-opera secrecy, but for a simpler reason: nobody receives himself. A man may declare that he was initiated, that he belongs to a lodge, that he is current in his dues; all of that is verifiable, and none of it is what matters here. The condition the word names is not proclaimed: it is recognized in a man by his Bros∴, from what they see in him, or it is recognized by nobody. That recognition confers nothing, because there is nothing to confer: it only describes what is already there, or records that it is not.
The man who proclaims it is informing us, without meaning to, that he has not yet understood what the thing consists of.
What, then, is Freemasonry?
Freemasonry is an authentic esoteric tradition, rooted in ancient currents of spiritual and metaphysical knowledge, which offers, in the Iron Age, a way of realization of the human state by means of an initiatic method of rites and symbols, intended for men of the third caste with the inclination of artisans.
Every element of that definition calls for a stop of its own. None is exhausted here: each opens a front we shall travel throughout this work, and we shall say from the start where each item is settled, so that the reader knows there is a method here and not a succession of assertions.
An authentic esoteric tradition. And we must make clear from the beginning what esoteric means here. It does not mean hidden in the police sense of the term, as though it were a matter of concealing a secret that someone else might steal. It means inner: what belongs to a deeper dimension of the same reality.
There is an exoterism, which is the outer form, visible and communicable; and there is an esoterism, which is its inner dimension, and which is not communicated in the same manner because it is not of the same order. They are not two degrees of information: they are two dimensions of one and the same reality.
This is the key to the whole book, and in its place it will be seen why esoterism can neither be derived from the outward nor reduced to it, and why, so long as it remains in this world, it needs an outward form to contain it, preserve it, and transmit it. The outward is the body of the Tradition; the inward, its spirit. Separated, both lose their meaning.
Rooted in ancient currents of spiritual and metaphysical knowledge. This is no courtesy of the paragraph: it is a filiation with two answers that will have to be weighed separately. The historical one lies in the builders' guilds; the initiatic one is not documented but attested.
In the Iron Age. It is not a date: it is the diagnosis of the time in which this way is offered, and on it depends our understanding of why this one, and no other, is the one that remains practicable.
For a way is not offered in a vacuum. Every age imposes its conditions, its limits, and its possibilities. What was possible in another time may have ceased to be; and what remains accessible today is accessible because it answers to the conditions of this epoch.
The doctrine of the ages will be left for the end of the book, when it will be possible to look back and understand what it means to build in exile: far from the center, deprived of conditions that another age possessed, and called, even so, to keep alive the direction of the current when everything pushes the other way.
A way of realization of the human state. Not a doctrine that is learned, but a road that is traveled and that produces a real effect on the man who travels it. If at the end of twenty years a man is the same man who came in, with more information and more collars, then he has traveled nothing.
Whether that effect is produced or lies dormant depends not on the rite but on the man who receives it. Here appears a distinction that will accompany us: the one between virtual and effective initiation. It is not enough to have received a form: what the form contains must come to be actualized in the man who receives it.
What it means, spelled out in full, to realize the human state (which is no figure of speech, but the most precise of promises) can only be said once the reader has the map in front of him.
By means of an initiatic method of rites and symbols. The method is not incidental. One does not arrive at the same thing by another way, nor by reading a great deal, nor by being a good person, nor by saying three Our Fathers, nor by punctual attendance. All of that may have its value; it belongs to another order.
Rites and symbols do not illustrate a teaching that could be transmitted some other way: they are the teaching, operating by ways that are not those of discourse, and which for that very reason will not let themselves be replaced by explanations.
What a symbol is made of, and why it contains more than it shows, will be said when we come to art: it was in art that this teaching took refuge when other ways began to close.
What distinguishes a rite that operates from a ceremony that is merely performed will be seen when we treat of regularity. Let it be said here and now: to perform a rite and to realize what it contains are two different things.
For men of the third caste, with the inclination of artisans. This last is the only one that admits of no postponement, because it is the one that most discomfits the modern ear and the easiest to misread if it is left for later.
The word caste calls here for an immediate precision. We are not speaking of social class, or wealth, or prestige, or a hierarchy among men: we are speaking, in the traditional sense, of a disposition, a function, and a nature within the human order. And artisan does not simply name the man who works with his hands, but the man who has the inner disposition of one who builds: he transforms matter and learns by the work.
The distinction matters, because the Freemasonry of concern here is not addressed to abstract man, stripped of every inner qualification, but to a determinate human type and to a concrete disposition toward the work upon oneself.
Here the language of the Tradition begins to part company with modern language: not in order to establish privileges, but in order to describe differences. Those differences, if they are to be understood on their own terms, cannot be replaced by the categories of our time.