Freemasonry

‘Rooted in Kemet’

As the first masonic Grand Lodge was founded in London in 1717, the Freemasons are celebrating their third centenary, but they claim a legacy dating back to ancient Egypt. ‘The signs and symbols of ancient and modern Freemasonry are rooted in Kemet (Egypt) and the evidence is overwhelmingly obvious that Freemasonry borrowed its allegorical myths and ideological metaphors from more ancient societies that were well advanced in the philosophical mysteries’, according to the esoteric author Manly P. Hall, himself initiated as a mason in 1954. 

 The BPH has a small section of masonic works, including standard historiographies like R.F. Gould’s History of Freemasonry, but focuses on the Gold- und Rosenkreuzer, a mystically inclined movement that produced the Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer, a compendium of text and image that has been called ‘the last Hermetic manifesto in the Age of Enlightenment’ by emeritus BPH librarian Carlos Gilly.