99 Fun Facts About Freemasons

What did 'lodge' first mean to medieval stonemasons?

A workshop: the lodge was the masons' hut put up beside a big building job, and the word later passed to the group of men who worked there.

What is Craft Freemasonry's third and highest degree called?

Master Mason: there is no higher degree in Freemasonry, so the many numbered degrees of bodies like the Scottish Rite count as further teaching, not promotion.

What is the first degree a candidate receives in Freemasonry?

Entered Apprentice is the first of three steps, and each step has its own secret grip and password so that Masons can tell how far another member has gone.

A Mason is 'initiated' into the first degree, 'passed' to the second, and what to the third?

Raised comes from the third degree's drama, in which the body of a murdered master builder is lifted from a makeshift grave; the ceremony acts the story out.

What is the officer called who stands guard outside the door of a working lodge?

The Tyler stands outside with a drawn sword to keep off 'cowans and eavesdroppers', and a lodge whose door is secured is still said to be tyled.

What is the formal dinner sometimes held after a lodge meeting called?

The festive board runs to a set round of toasts and sometimes song; early lodges met in taverns and alehouses, so dining together was part of Masonry from the start.

What is the most widely recognised emblem of Freemasonry?

The square and compasses are builders' tools given moral jobs: an 1866 ritual says the square is 'to square our actions' and the compasses to keep Masons 'within bounds with all mankind'.

In English-speaking countries the Masonic emblem often carries which letter at its centre?

G is most often said to stand for God, while the second-degree ritual calls it the initial of Geometry, the science on which Masonry claims to be built.

Freemasonry describes itself as a 'beautiful system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by' what?

Symbols: a lodge's rough ashlar, a stone straight from the quarry, stands for the untaught man, and its smooth ashlar for the same man improved by education.

The Craft degree ceremonies revolve around the building of which structure?

The Temple of Solomon: most lodge rooms still set up two pillars named Boaz and Jachin, after the bronze columns the Bible puts at the Temple's porch.

Which legendary chief architect's death is the subject of the Masonic third-degree ritual?

Hiram Abiff is ambushed in the legend by three workmen who demand the master's secrets; he refuses each in turn and is killed, a lesson in loyalty.

In most lodges, on what is the Masonic oath taken?

A Volume of Sacred Law means whichever scripture the candidate holds sacred, so a lodge whose members follow several faiths may have more than one book open.

What are the painted depictions used in some lodges to illustrate the themes of each degree called?

Tracing boards replaced designs once chalked on the lodge-room floor and mopped away after each meeting; painted cloths, then boards, saved the redrawing.

Which Saint John's feast day saw the first Grand Lodge founded?

John the Baptist's feast, 24 June, is still St John's Day to Masons; fittingly, the rival English Grand Lodges later merged on 27 December, the feast of John the Evangelist.

The rival 1751 Grand Lodge, the 'Antients', coined which insulting label for the original body?

The Moderns were in fact the older body: the 'Antients', formed in 1751, claimed to keep the old customs and pinned the taunt on the Grand Lodge of 1717.

England's rival Grand Lodges merged in 1813 under sons of which king?

George III: two of his sons headed the rival bodies, and one of them, the Duke of Sussex, went on to lead the merged Grand Lodge for thirty years.

Which Scottish city's Mary's Chapel lodge holds minutes from 1599, the oldest of any Masonic lodge still meeting?

Edinburgh's lodge began as a body of working stonemasons and slowly took in gentlemen who never cut stone, the shift that turned a trade into the Freemasonry of today.

The Regius Poem, the oldest Masonic manuscript, says which Greek mathematician founded the craft in Egypt?

Euclid, in the poem's telling, devised masonry as honest work for the sons of Egyptian nobles; the rhyming text then carries the craft to England under King Athelstan.

After England's in 1717, which two countries founded Grand Lodges in 1725 and 1736?

Ireland and Scotland: with England's, theirs are the three Grand Lodges from which regular lodges around the world descend, though many Scottish lodges held aloof for years.

As of 2025, which body is the world's largest single Masonic jurisdiction by membership?

The United Grand Lodge of England counts about 170,000 members; no American body comes close, because the United States has no national Grand Lodge, only one for each state.

The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite is a system of how many degrees?

33 degrees, counting the three Craft ones every Mason takes first; the last is an honour that cannot be applied for, only bestowed by a Supreme Council.

In America, the York Rite administers the Royal Arch, Cryptic Masonry and which knightly order?

Knights Templar: America's York Rite strings the three orders into one ladder, while in Britain each answers to its own governing body, the Templars to a Great Priory.

Unlike most Freemasonry, the Swedish Rite of the Nordic countries requires what of every member?

Christian faith: men of other faiths, welcome in lodges elsewhere, cannot join. King Charles XIII, who shaped the rite as Grand Master, founded a royal order of chivalry reserved for its senior members.

Which royal was installed as Grand Master of English Craft Masonry in 1967?

Prince Edward, Duke of Kent was installed at the Royal Albert Hall during Grand Lodge's 250th-anniversary celebrations, and fifty years later he presided there again over its 300th.

Which French philosopher was initiated into the Paris lodge of the Nine Sisters in 1778, weeks before he died?

Voltaire was 83 when he joined Les Neuf Soeurs that April, and he died in May; Benjamin Franklin, then America's envoy in Paris, went on to head the lodge.

Which composer joined a Vienna lodge in 1784 and wrote music for Masonic ceremonies?

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart joined the lodge 'Beneficence' that December, and his opera The Magic Flute, written with a fellow Mason, plays out a quest for enlightenment in Masonic imagery.

As Emperor of the French, whom did Napoleon select as Grand Master of France?

His own brother Joseph, later King of Naples and then of Spain, took the title in 1804, while the lawyer Cambacérès did the real work of running the Grand Orient.

The Duke of Orléans, Grand Master when the Grand Orient de France was formed in 1773, later voted for whose execution?

King Louis XVI was the duke's own cousin; renamed Philippe Égalité, the Grand Master backed the Revolution, cast his vote for death in January 1793 and was guillotined himself that November.

In 1877 the Grand Orient de France dropped which requirement, losing English Grand Lodge recognition?

Belief in the existence of God went in 1877 at the urging of a Protestant pastor, Frédéric Desmons; the new constitution promised 'absolute liberty of conscience' instead.

Which US Grand Lodge withdrew recognition after the Grand Orient de France opened Masonry to all races in 1869?

The dispute began when a Scottish Rite Supreme Council in that state admitted Black members.

Where were the earliest known American lodges, attended by port collector John Moore as early as 1715?

Pennsylvania: Benjamin Franklin joined a Philadelphia lodge in 1731, was Grand Master of the province three years later and printed the first Masonic book in America.

The first US president took his 1789 oath on a Bible borrowed from a Masonic lodge in which city?

New York: no Bible had been laid on at Federal Hall, so one was fetched from nearby St. John's Lodge; Harding, Eisenhower, Carter and the elder Bush later swore on the same book.

Which founding father was proposed as first Grand Master of a never-formed 'Grand Lodge of the United States'?

George Washington was put forward by one state's Grand Lodge in 1780 as 'General Grand Master', but nothing came of it: American Masonry is still run state by state.

In 1775 Prince Hall and 14 other African Americans joined a lodge attached to what body?

The British Army: a military lodge travelling with an infantry regiment, under an Irish warrant, initiated them in March 1775 after the town's white lodges had turned them away.

Prince Hall's African Lodge, the first lodge of Black Freemasons in America, was founded in which city?

Boston: chartered from London in 1784 as African Lodge No. 459, it was later dropped from the English rolls, declared itself independent and became the root of Prince Hall Freemasonry.

Canada's first Masonic lodge was founded in 1738 at Annapolis Royal, in which present-day province?

Nova Scotia: Erasmus James Philipps was made a Mason in 1737 while away on a boundary commission in New England, then came home and founded the lodge at Annapolis Royal the next June.

Kingston Freemasons Wellwood and Maxwell Hyslop bankrolled which Latin American liberator?

He was a Mason himself, but banned all secret societies, including the Freemasons, in 1828.

The pro-US faction of Mexican Freemasons backed by ambassador Joel Poinsett were known by what name?

The Yorkinos met in York Rite lodges and became Mexico's reforming camp, while their conservative rivals kept to the Scottish Rite, so the young republic's first parties were Masonic factions.

The first Masonic lodge in China, Amity Lodge, was constituted in 1767 in which city?

Canton: from 1757 it was the one Chinese port where Europeans were allowed to trade, so the first lodge on Chinese soil met there, in a private room, ten years later.

The first papal ban on Freemasonry, in 1738, set which penalty for joining?

Excommunication, automatic and for the pope alone to lift except at the hour of death; Clement XII objected to lodges that bound men of every creed together under an oath of silence.

Whose disappearance in 1826, on the eve of publishing Masonic rituals, sparked America's anti-Masonic movement?

William Morgan, a bricklayer from Batavia, was never seen again; rumours that Masons had murdered him swept the Northeast and hardened into a political movement.

The Anti-Masonic Party pioneered which practice in 1831, later adopted by all major parties?

A presidential nominating convention: its delegates met in Baltimore in September 1831, but the party soon faded and most of its politicians joined the new Whig Party.

Which former US attorney general was the Anti-Masonic candidate in 1832, carrying Vermont?

William Wirt was a former Mason who would not speak against the order and barely campaigned, yet he still carried Vermont and its seven electoral votes.

Which dictator outlawed Freemasonry after Masons helped organise his rise to power?

Benito Mussolini banned the lodges in 1925, though they had hailed fascism as Italy's saviour from Bolshevism; he had already made his own party's members choose between the Fascists and the Masons.

Which Russian revolutionary leader of 1917 was a Freemason?

Alexander Kerensky had been secretary general of the Grand Orient of Russia's Peoples, a secretive political lodge network; when the Bolsheviks toppled his government, Russian Masonry collapsed and was outlawed again.

Which Presbyterian minister compiled the 1723 Constitutions, the first printed rulebook of Freemasonry?

James Anderson wrote them on the new Grand Lodge's orders, opening with a legendary history of the craft; Benjamin Franklin reprinted the book in America eleven years later.

Irish tradition says Elizabeth Aldworth was made a Freemason in the early 1700s after doing what?

Spying on a lodge meeting: the story goes that she watched through loose brickwork in the library of her father's house, was caught, and the lodge, her father among them, chose to initiate her.

Which theosophist spread mixed-gender Co-Freemasonry to the English-speaking world?

Annie Besant was initiated in Paris in 1902 into Le Droit Humain, the mixed order Maria Deraismes and Georges Martin had founded nine years before, and opened its first lodge abroad in London that year.

Which astronaut, a Freemason, carried a silk Masonic flag with him to the Moon in 1969?

Buzz Aldrin took it on Apollo 11 with a deputation from the Grand Master of Texas claiming Masonic jurisdiction over the Moon, and later gave the flag to the Scottish Rite's headquarters.

The Freemasons' Hall in London finished in 1933 was built in which architectural style?

Art Deco: English Freemasonry's headquarters is hired out to film and television crews, which is why its grand interiors keep turning up on screen.

London's Freemasons' Hall opened in 1933 as a war memorial, under what name?

The Masonic Peace Memorial honoured more than 3,000 English Freemasons killed in the First World War; only later did it take the plainer name Freemasons' Hall.

At their peak in 1959, about how many Freemasons were there in the United States?

4 million: lodge rolls reached 4,103,161 that year and have shrunk ever since, to under 900,000 by 2023.

A German professor's theory, later taken up by Thomas De Quincey, traced Freemasonry to which esoteric movement?

Rosicrucianism was launched by anonymous German pamphlets from 1614 about a secret brotherhood of the Rosy Cross; the professor, Johann Buhle, argued that English followers such as Robert Fludd turned it into Freemasonry.

Which two subjects are traditionally off-limits for discussion in Anglo-American lodge meetings?

Religion and politics have been kept out since the 1723 Constitutions, which ruled that no 'quarrels about Religion or Nations or State Policy' may be brought within the lodge door.

What is Masonry's usual term for the divine being who created a scientifically ordered universe?

The Grand Architect, in full the Great or Grand Architect of the Universe, is a deliberately open name: each Mason can read it as the Supreme Being of his own faith.

The alehouse where four lodges founded the first Grand Lodge stood beside which London landmark?

St Paul's Cathedral. The Goose and Gridiron stood in its churchyard, where four London lodges met, declared themselves a Grand Lodge and elected one of their own as Grand Master.

Which hero of Italian unification served as Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy?

Giuseppe Garibaldi. He had been initiated in Montevideo in 1844 during his South American exile, and valued Freemasonry less for its rituals than as a network uniting progressive men.

Where did the Grand Lodge of China relocate after Freemasonry was banned on the mainland?

Taipei. When the People's Republic outlawed Masonic activity, mainland lodges had to close or move: the Grand Lodge of China resumed its work on Taiwan, while other lodges carried on in Hong Kong.

Which fez-wearing Masonic fraternity runs a network of children's hospitals across North America?

The Shriners. Every member must first be a Freemason, and since 1922 the fraternity's hospitals have treated children whether or not their families can pay.

Which French sculptor, a member of the Paris lodge Alsace-Lorraine, designed the Statue of Liberty?

Auguste Bartholdi joined the lodge in 1875, and the cornerstone of the statue's pedestal carries a plaque placed by the Freemasons.

Which founding father was the only Freemason on the committees that designed the Great Seal, with its eye and pyramid?

Benjamin Franklin saw his own ideas for the seal rejected, and the eye became a common lodge emblem only well over a decade after the Great Seal was created.

In the film National Treasure, a map to the Freemasons' lost hoard is hidden on the back of which document?

The Declaration of Independence is stolen by the film's own hero, historian Ben Gates, who wants to keep the map out of a rival hunter's hands.

Which small blue flower became a lapel badge for Freemasons after their lodges were shut down in Nazi Germany?

Forget-me-not badges happened to be chosen for a Nazi charity drive in 1938, and German Masons are said to have worn one as a quiet sign of membership.

Shriners International, a fraternity open only to Master Masons, is best known for funding a network of what?

Children's hospitals: the first opened in Shreveport in 1922, and the network treats orthopaedic conditions and spinal injuries regardless of a family's ability to pay.

The first US president laid which building's cornerstone in a full Masonic ceremony in September 1793?

The US Capitol stone was lowered onto a silver plaque, and the president then struck it three times with a gavel while attendants carried corn, wine and oil.

Which stage magician, who spent his last years exposing fraudulent mediums, belonged to St Cecile Lodge in New York?

Harry Houdini was an active Mason in the years he toured a show that unmasked fake mediums, and he was elected president of the Society of American Magicians nine times running.

Which Bavarian secret society, founded by law professor Adam Weishaupt, was outlawed alongside Freemasonry in the 1780s?

The Illuminati began in 1776 as Weishaupt and a handful of students calling themselves the Perfectibilists, and they grew by recruiting inside German Masonic lodges.

In which Leo Tolstoy novel does the heir Pierre Bezukhov become a Freemason after wounding a man in a duel?

War and Peace has Pierre recruited by an old Mason named Osip Bazdeyev, and he later takes his wife back while trying to live by the lodge's teaching on forgiveness.

Which future wartime prime minister joined London's Studholme Lodge in 1901, months after entering Parliament?

Winston Churchill was following his father: Lord Randolph had been initiated thirty years earlier in a lodge that already carried the family name, Churchill Lodge.

Which author, initiated in a Lahore lodge, made Freemasonry central to the plot of The Man Who Would Be King?

Rudyard Kipling was admitted before the usual minimum age of 21 and served as his lodge's secretary, an experience he also turned into the poem The Mother Lodge.

Which doctor turned novelist, initiated at Phoenix Lodge in Southsea in 1887, later crusaded for spiritualism?

Arthur Conan Doyle joined in the year his first Sherlock Holmes novel appeared, then resigned, returned and resigned again, so he was a Mason for two separate spells.

Which Dublin-born playwright joined Apollo University Lodge at Oxford, drawn by its dress, secrecy and ritual?

Oscar Wilde rose to Master Mason as a student but stayed active only while at Oxford, letting his membership lapse when he stopped paying his subscriptions.

Which American humorist and former riverboat pilot became a Master Mason in a Missouri lodge during 1861?

Mark Twain went from initiate to Master Mason in seven weeks, in the same months the Civil War shut down traffic on the Mississippi and ended his piloting days.

Which US president was elected Grand Master of Missouri's Masons during his 1940 Senate re-election campaign?

Harry S. Truman later said the Masonic election assured his Senate victory; he had been initiated at Belton in 1909 and helped found Grandview Lodge two years later.

Which poet, a tenant farmer's son aged 22, was initiated into Lodge St David at Tarbolton in Ayrshire in 1781?

Robert Burns was five years a Mason and packing for a plantation job in Jamaica when the success of his first book of poems kept him at home.

Which faith's founder joined the Masonic lodge at Nauvoo, Illinois, weeks before unveiling its endowment rite?

The Latter Day Saints' founder Joseph Smith was initiated in March 1842 and introduced the endowment about two months later, and he remained a Mason until his death.

Which Boston physician and Masonic Grand Master was killed fighting as a private soldier at Bunker Hill?

Joseph Warren held a general's commission but chose to fight in the ranks, and he died when the redcoats stormed the redoubt on Breed's Hill.

What title is held by the senior officer of a Masonic lodge, who chairs its business from a seat in the East?

Worshipful Master is the highest honour a lodge can give one of its members, and once his limited term ends the holder is known as a Past Master.

Which Masonic appendant body, created by teacher Rob Morris in 1850, bases its lessons on heroines of the Bible?

The Eastern Star is open to both men and women, and its lessons draw on Biblical figures such as Adah, whose emblems are a sword and veil.

Which US city is home to the world's largest Masonic building, a Gothic landmark that opened in 1926?

Detroit nearly lost the building to a tax foreclosure in 2013, until White Stripes singer Jack White paid most of the bill; one of its theatres was renamed for him.

Which European dictator outlawed Freemasonry in 1940 and published dozens of anti-Masonic articles under a pseudonym?

Francisco Franco's officials built an index of 80,000 suspected Masons, although Spain had had little more than 5,000 of them.

Which US president, a past Grand Master of Tennessee, was opposed in 1832 by the new Anti-Masonic Party?

Andrew Jackson led Tennessee's Grand Lodge in 1822–23; his main 1832 rival Henry Clay was a Mason as well, so the Anti-Masonic Party backed neither of them.

Which antiquary, whose collection founded Britain's first public museum, recorded being made a Freemason in 1646?

Elias Ashmole was admitted at Warrington in Lancashire in the middle of the Civil War, and his diary shows him summoned to a lodge meeting in London 36 years later.

Which Boston tavern, bought by a Masonic lodge in the 1760s, became known as the Headquarters of the Revolution?

The Green Dragon had Masons meeting on its first floor while the Sons of Liberty gathered in the basement, where the Boston Tea Party was planned.

Which Finnish composer wrote a set of Masonic ritual music after helping to found Suomi Lodge No. 1 in 1922?

Jean Sibelius also became Grand Organist of Finland's Grand Lodge; the country's lodges had only just been revived after being forbidden under Russian rule.

London's first Grand Lodge was formed when several lodges met at which public house in St Paul's Churchyard?

The Goose and Gridiron's own lodge later became the Lodge of Antiquity, reputedly the oldest in the constitution; its fellow founding lodges were named after their pubs too.

When a traditional Masonic lodge votes in secret on a candidate, which token in the ballot box counts against him?

A black ball signals opposition and a white one support, which is where the word blackballing comes from; some lodges use a black cube instead.

Which future pope issued the Vatican's 1983 ruling that Catholics who join Masonic lodges are in grave sin?

Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, ran the Vatican's doctrinal office; he acted because the new 1983 code of canon law, unlike the 1917 one, no longer named Masonry.

Which Masonic youth order for young women held its first initiation in McAlester, Oklahoma, in 1922?

Rainbow for Girls began after a minister who had studied the boys' order DeMolay closely proposed something similar for young women; its first class numbered 171.

Craft lodges date documents by adding 4,000 to the calendar year, a system known by which Latin name?

Anno Lucis means in the Year of Light and counts from a creation placed about 4000 BC, so AD 1793 becomes A.L. 5793.

Which French writer confessed in 1897 that his lurid exposés of devil-worshipping Freemasons were a hoax?

Léo Taxil had promised to produce his chief witness, a supposed ex-priestess named Diana Vaughan, at a press conference; instead he declared he had invented it all.

Which Ayrshire town's lodge is number 0 on its Grand Lodge roll and is styled the Mother Lodge?

Kilwinning's lodge reads its number as 'nothing' rather than zero, and legend says it was founded by the masons who built the town's medieval abbey.

Which London lodge, founded by nine Masons unhappy with fanciful histories, is dedicated to Masonic research?

Quatuor Coronati, warranted in 1884, set out to replace imaginative legends with evidence and began what is called the authentic school of Masonic research.

Which viscount's daughter from County Cork, by tradition caught spying on a lodge, became known as the Lady Freemason?

Elizabeth Aldworth is said to have dozed off in the library next door, woken to voices and watched through loose brickwork; she is the first woman on record as an initiate.

Which experimental assistant to Isaac Newton served as the third Grand Master of London's first Grand Lodge?

John Desaguliers, a French-born clergyman and engineer, was instrumental in the young Grand Lodge's success in the early 1720s while lecturing to the public on Newton's physics.

Which Venetian adventurer and memoirist joined the Freemasons in Lyon, drawn by his interest in secret rites?

Giacomo Casanova prized the useful contacts that lodges gave him, but back home in Venice a state spy was set to draw out what he knew of Freemasonry.

Which French marquis and American Revolution general laid cornerstones as a Mason across the US on his farewell tour?

Lafayette had become a Mason shortly before sailing for America, and his membership opened many doors for him when he reached Philadelphia.

Which Sicilian adventurer, jailed over the Diamond Necklace affair, sought converts to his own Egyptian Freemasonry?

Count Cagliostro, born Giuseppe Balsamo in Palermo, was first admitted to a lodge in Soho in 1777, and he spent nine months in the Bastille before being acquitted.

Which old Scots word for a builder of dry-stone walls do Freemasons use for an uninitiated intruder?

Cowan was a put-down among working masons for a man who built without mortar and had served no apprenticeship, so lodges borrowed it for anyone outside the Craft.