Common History – Freemasonry & Hermeticism
By Daniel Rivera, P.M.

Freemasonry and Hermeticism share much in common. Both are popularly referred to as the Royal Art. Practitioners of Hermeticism and Freemasonry refer to their labors as the Great Work. Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary Thrice Great master of alchemy, astrology, and theurgy, is patron to centuries of Hermetic practitioners, and according to the Old Charges, a legendary founder of Freemasonry as well. ¹

While the precise origins of Freemasonry are lost to the mists of time, we are aware of the many centuries’ influences upon its storied history and development. Then as now, the fraternity saw much of its philosophy, symbolism, and mythical narratives shaped by popular interests as well as the deepest knowledge of the age. The earliest extant Masonic documents are concurrent with the beginnings of the Renaissance in the fifteenth century, when many classical documents sparked a renewed appreciation for antiquity’s wisdom, seen in the art, architecture, and philosophy of the age. The Renaissance was deeply shaped by Hermeticism, the recently rediscovered Late Antique philosophies which were then interpreted as a purer theology and spiritual practice. These spiritual practices included such arts as alchemy, astrology, and theurgic invocation. Alchemical, astrological, and theurgic pursuits reached the peak of their popularity in the decades before and after 1600; Hermeticism has been described as the greatest passion of that age in Europe. The abuses that such popularity can bring have informed and persisted in the popular notions of the Hermetic pursuits of alchemy and astrology as crude chemistry or star gazing in the service of greed, ambition, and other materialistic pursuits. In like manner, we see in our own age a popular misconception of the Masonic Order as an instrument of illicit self-gain. This was not, and is not, however, the objective of the Great Work such as it was and is pursued by sincere Hermeticists and virtuous Masons of every age. The search for the Summum Bonum, the greatest good, the philosophers’ stone, was not, in the hands of its sincere laborers, merely a materialistic search for ways of turning base metals into gold, or idle forecasting; rather, it was an attempt to achieve “the moral and spiritual rebirth of mankind.” ²

The objectives of a moral and spiritual transformation, conveyed and concealed in symbols and metaphoric language, as found in Hermetic traditions, caught the imagination of our Masonic forebears:

“When a system of lodges emerges in Scotland with secret rituals and identification signs, just as the great esoteric Hermetic movement was sweeping across Europe, there surely must be a link between them. This is all the more the case as the masons had long possessed a tradition, enshrined in the Old Charges, that Hermes had played a major part in preserving knowledge of the masonic craft and transmitting it to mankind after the flood, and that a key development in craft history, the teaching of masonry by Euclid to the sons of the nobility, had taken place in Egypt. Any educated man of the day would have some knowledge of Hermetic lore, and would pick up the reference to Hermes in the Old Charges and thus be likely to see masonry as a Hermetic art bound up with one of the great intellectual movements of the day [...] "

"Any assessment of the extent of Hermetic influences in Scotland must await further research, but the evidence given above of interest in the Hermetic arts of memory and alchemy at least indicates that such influences were present in the general intellectual climate there, as in the rest of Europe. Suggesting a connection between the Scottish Masonic craft and Hermeticism is not seeking to link Masonry with some disreputable and obscure fringe phenomenon, but rather demonstrating the strong circumstantial evidence for relating it to one of the greatest intellectual movements of the Renaissance.” ³

Hermeticism’s Royal Art, being the philosophy and practice of transformation of the self and cosmos through prayer, study, and experimental labor, was transmitted via symbolism and ritual, shaping of the Craft degrees and subsequent High Degrees; and while the Fraternity was influencing and being influenced by the Enlightenment, the symbols and practice of alchemy endured.

“If the strange (to outsiders) rituals of Freemasonry seem out of place in the Age of Enlightenment, [...] this was because, at heart the movement was not an Enlightenment, but a Renaissance phenomenon. That the Age of Enlightenment was nonetheless the great age of Freemasonry is a seeming paradox, indicating that, for all the eighteenth-century’s appeal to reason, many still hankered after elements of mystery, ritual, secrecy, and the quest for a hidden truth.” ⁴

Woven through the symbolism and philosophy of Freemasonry, Hermeticism was made all the more apparent in the Écossais degrees, and other degree systems which arose shortly after the formation of the premier Grand Lodge in 1717:

“The appearance of purely Hermetic and alchemical rites appears in Freemasonry during the eighteenth century. In 1785, the Grand Orient of France first ordered that small vials of salt and sulfur should be placed in the Chamber of Reflection, clearly suggestive of the alchemical milieu in which the candidates lived, and the interpretation they were to extract from their initiations.” ⁵

To this day, many Chambers of Reflection from around the world, wherein a candidate for initiation reflects on his own mortality, retain alchemical emblems such as salt and sulfur, along with the alchemical motto: V.I.T.R.I.O.L., the Green Lion, in which sulfuric acid dissolves all metals but purest gold. The alchemical motto also abbreviates the Latin phrase:

“Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem,” ⁶ which translates to “Visit the interior of the earth and rectifying (purifying) you will find the hidden stone.”

This motto refers to the process of internal, spiritual purification from which the unready and unworthy will dissolve and scatter, and by which the pure of heart will be transformed and elevated. Whether this Great Work is carried out by means of operations on plants, minerals, and metals, or by discovering “how planets move in their respective orbits,” ⁷ and these movements’ effects on the human condition, or by communing with preterhuman intelligences; or whether this work is conducted solely within the laboratory of the body, mind, and spirit; Hermeticists, as well as speculative Masons, may sincerely labor for the transmutation and elevation of Self and Cosmos.

Works Cited:

1. Anonymous, Matthew Cooke Manuscript, folio 15.320, accessed 06/21/18, http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/texts/cooke.html.
2. R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and his World. A Study in Intellectual History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 199.
3. David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1988) p. 85, 86.
4. Ibid., p. 233.
5. Mark Stavish, Freemasonry: Rituals, Symbols, & History of the Secret Society (Woodbury: Llewelyn Publications, 2007) p. 155.
6. Basil Valentine, Azoth of the Philosophers (Paris: Chex Pierre Moet, 1659), accessed 06/21/18, https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Category:Azoth_(Basil_Valentine)
7. Anonymous, Monitor and Officers Manual (San Francisco: GL of California), 28