In part one we saw how Hitler toned down his initial anti-masonic rhetoric in order to focus primarily on his Jewish conspiracy theory whereby in Catholic Spain Fascists were less restrained. In this third part, now we come to the present time period where we follow in the footsteps of a recent documentary titled Terra Masonica, Around The World In 80 Lodges including Stephen Knight claims about a Masonic conspiracy, activities like those of the Ndrangheta, when only four weeks ago $193m in assets were seized, Dan Brown's masonic musings in The Lost Symbol, including the  role of Freemasonry in British India including the little, researched influence on Indian Nationalism.

Having presented what happened in Spain, we should ad that Catholicism was not the only home for religious anti-Masonry. In the early 1990s, some evangelical Protestant groups in the United States expressed an anti-Masonic phobia not seen since the Taxil hoax of the 1890s. Their propaganda alleged that Masons in the highest Degrees all worshipped Baphomet, the goat-headed avatar of the devil supposedly revered by the Templars in the fourteenth century, as by Taxil’s fictional Palladian rite in the nineteenth. Albert Pike, Confederate general and guru of the Scottish Rite in the Civil War era was portrayed as the anti-Pope of the Masonic anti-Church.

Although the Southern Baptist Convention ruled in 1993 that Masonic membership was a question for each individual Christian’s own conscience, the spread of the Internet in subsequent years ensured that there would always be a home for such ravings. For example, Albert Pike’s strange afterlife as the star of conspiracy theories looks set to continue. Pike hit the news recently because in 1871 he supposedly made a prophecy about a Third World War between the Christian West and Islam. British tabloid newspapers the Sun and the Star first reported the story in 2016. In their wake, a long list of websites now tells us that the secret goal of the Illuminati is to make Pike’s prophecy come true. Which is indeed ‘chilling’, as the Sun called it. As long as you are extremely naïve and entirely without historical memory.

There are many parts of the world where anti-Masonry is a much darker force. Since the 1960s, Freemasonry has disappeared from almost all of the Muslim world. When the Raj ended in 1947, the Craft survived the partition of India. However, in Pakistan, the number of members and Lodges fell dramatically with the migration of most of the white British population. There were about one thousand Freemasons left, many of them Muslims, when an ominous series of press attacks began in 1968: the Craft was accused of being a Zionist front group financed by the CIA. It was outlawed by President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1972. The Masonic Temple in Lahore, where Rudyard Kipling was initiated, is now a general-purpose government building.

In Iran, to cite just one more example, Freemasonry reappeared as an aristocratic club in 1951 under the new Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who used it to build loyalty to his regime among the elites and middle classes. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 swept the Lodges away, and many Brothers, particularly those close to the deposed Shah, were executed.

As of 2019, Freemasonry is banned everywhere in the Muslim world except Lebanon and Morocco. The Charter of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas, describes Freemasonry, the Lions and the Rotary Club as ‘networks of spies’ created by the Jews to ‘destroy societies and promote the Zionist cause’.

In western democracies, Freemasonry’s reputation for secrecy continues to provide an awkward test for tolerance. Masons have some justification in regarding themselves as the pit canaries of freedom of association and the rule of law. Even Britain, the very cradle of the Craft, provides a demonstration.

 

The alleged secrets of British Masonry

In 1976, a young provincial journalist called Stephen Knight claimed that a Masonic conspiracy was responsible for Jack the Ripper’s series of unsolved murders in 1888. Knight’s book, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, was dismissed as laughable. Nonetheless, it captured the imagination enough to go through twenty editions. Its echoes endured: the gloriously spooky graphic novel From Hell (1989), and a slasher movie of the same title starring Johnny Depp (2001), were both inspired by Knight.

At the time of Jack, the Ripper: The Final Solution, the United Grand Lodge of England had a longstanding policy of maintaining silence in the face of conspiracist accusations. Stephen Knight’s subsequent book, The Brotherhood (1983), would expose the limits of that policy.

The Brotherhood was an odd mixture. There were painstaking and tedious protestations of good faith (‘we should not judge Freemasonry by the actions of a few individuals’), together with ambiguous evidence of workaday misdeeds by Masons within the police force. But there were also absolutely false claims that Knight had unmasked upper tiers of Masonry so secretive that even the vast majority of Brethren had no idea they existed. Based on an error-strewn summary of the P2 story, Knight went on to propose that Soviet intelligence had masterminded Gelli’s plot so as to discredit an enemy government. He concluded that, in the UK, the ‘KGB’s use of Freemasonry for placing operatives in positions of authority’ was ‘almost certain’.

Knight became a follower of the Indian cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in the year The Brotherhood came out. He died two years later after refusing conventional medical treatment for a tumor. Despite his lack of authority and his book’s glaring shortcomings, The Brotherhood had a huge impact. As conspiracy theories began to circulate about Knight’s death, another journalist took up his work on Masonic scheming within the police. The same old refrain began: if the Freemasons are as innocent as they say, why all the secrecy? In June 1988, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party leader between 2015 and 2020 but then a backbench MP, declared in parliament:

Many of us are gravely suspicious about the influence of Freemasonry. I am utterly opposed to it and to the influence of other secret organizations because I believe them to be a deeply corrupting influence on society … Masonic influence is serious … Freemasonry is incompatible with being a police officer … I am suggesting that the power of a Masonic Lodge on any organization is sinister and insidious. The British public was ready to stretch its credulity a long way when it came to a police force that had a shabby reputation, especially for framing Irish people for IRA bomb attacks. These were the years of the notorious Guildford Four, Maguire Seven, and Birmingham Six cases, as well as of Operation Countryman (an investigation into collusion between the City of London Police and professional criminals). This distrust of the police made a potent cocktail when combined with the centuries of suspicion surrounding Masonic secrecy. Henceforth, newspaper editors were all on the lookout for a Masonic angle to stories of wrongdoing.

The strongest evidence of Masonic foul play that Knight had to offer was the United Grand Lodge’s refusal to dignify his allegations with a reply. So in response, the English Masonic leadership looked hard at its own culture of secrecy. It turned out that even rank-and-file Masons thought that they were supposed to keep silent about their membership, despite there being no such rule in place; some had not even told their families. Henceforth, they were encouraged to speak openly. A post of Director of Communications was created. Freemasons Hall in Covent Garden opened its doors to visitors for the first time in 1985. English Freemasonry’s lax disciplinary procedures were also tightened, and the number of expulsions rocketed from 12, between 1934 and 1986, to 277, between 1987 and 1996. In the early 1990s, non-Mason historians would begin to delve into the archives of the Grand Lodge.

However, this Masonic glasnost failed to stop the suspicion, which took parliamentary form in 1992 with an all-party Home Affairs Select Committee set up to investigate any influence the Craft might have within the criminal justice system. Every imaginable insinuation against Masons and Masonry was aired – with anticlimactic results set out in the Select Committee’s report. Yes, individual Freemasons had committed crimes, and some of those Freemasons were policemen. But no, these individuals were not representative of Masonry as such, nor was Masonry a factor in what they had done. The overwhelming majority of witnesses who alleged that there was illicit networking by Masons had no proof. The number of Brothers in the police and judiciary was far smaller than suspected and was falling. A certain kind of secrecy was part of Freemasons’ rituals, but the organization itself was no more secret than a sports club or professional body.

In the end, everything boiled down to an image problem. Widespread mistrust of British Freemasonry, groundless as it was, nevertheless damaged public confidence in the institutions. So the solution was for all Masons in the judiciary to make a declaration of interest, the Select Committee advised in 1997.

This final recommendation sounded sensible enough, and the Labour Party, which came to power in 1997, set about trying to implement it. Wielding the Sword of transparency against a stuffy institution like the Craft would help justify the ‘new’ in New Labour, as leader Tony Blair had rebranded the party. From 1998, judicial appointees were obliged to declare if they were Freemasons.

However, the policy never escaped a tangle of practical issues and legal objections. If there was no evidence that the Craft was a source of trouble, why target it? Would the declaration-of-interest policy not lead to prejudice against Masons, a presumption of guilt? If it applied to Masons, what reason could there be for not applying it to other forms of belonging that might conceivably lead to bias, like religions, or Oxford colleges? In the early 2000s, the European Court of Human Rights ruled on two cases in Italy where local government had tried to apply a similar policy to Freemasons: the Court decided that the measure was discriminatory and contrary to the right of free association. In 2009, on the verge of losing power, the Labour government very quietly gave up on the scheme, acknowledging that it had achieved nothing. Meanwhile, an assumption had long since bedded down in the public mind: Freemasonry was ‘the mafia of the mediocre’, a coterie of paunchy men pursuing preferment in their careers and protection from scrutiny.

Headlines in the press have alleged that Freemasons were responsible for a whitewash at the inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, and for concealing the dreadful police misconduct at the Hillsborough stadium disaster, which led to the death of ninety-six Liverpool football fans in 1989. Such ‘revelations’ typically cite little or no supporting evidence and die with the first headline. In both of these cases, the conspiracy interpretation looks feeble on even a cursory second glance. The British marine establishment of 1912, and the South Yorkshire police of 1989, both had compelling motives for covering up their own mess and scapegoating – respectively – the captain of the Titanic and a mass of innocent soccer fans. There are no loose ends for the Masonic conspiracy theory to explain. Yet such stories regularly make it past the bullshit detectors of reputable newspapers.

 

The Lost Symbol

In 2009, Grand Lodges across the United States were in a state of fibrillation. Six years earlier, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, a cloak-and-dagger thriller about earth-shattering truths supposedly concealed by the Catholic Church, had sold in Harry Potter quantities and been adapted into a hit movie. Now Brown’s sequel, The Lost Symbol, was imminent: set in Washington DC, its theme would be the secrets of Freemasonry, and the initial print run a record-breaking 6.5 million copies. The fear was that, just as the Vatican had been besieged by cranks in the wake of The Da Vinci Code, so the Masonic establishment would be made answerable for whatever portentous baloney Dan Brown had made up this time around. Even before The Lost Symbol, the Scottish Rite headquarters in Washington DC regularly had to report threatening letters to the police.

The Lost Symbol sold a million copies on its first day alone. But it proved to be a false alarm. Within a few short weeks, the tide of interest in Freemasonry had subsided to normal levels. Part of the explanation for the anticlimax lies within the novel itself. Whatever its flaws, which were gleefully nailed by reviewers at the time, The Lost Symbol has a clever way of feeding our enduring obsession with Masonic secrecy, without making too many concessions to the silliest myths. In the end, it is only the novel’s deluded, psychopathic villain who believes that the Masons are guarding momentous mysteries. By contrast, the hero, ‘symbologist’ Professor Robert Langdon, gives the Brothers a glowing press: ‘For the record, ma’am, the entire Masonic philosophy is built on honesty and integrity. Masons are among the most trustworthy men you could ever hope to meet.’ The real star of The Lost Symbol is Washington DC, which is reimagined as a Masonic maze of unknown tunnels, high-security laboratories, underground sanctuaries, and coded inscriptions. In the real world, Masonic Washington certainly has plenty of history. However, far from being hidden, it could scarcely be less ostentatious. Most of it consists of huge monuments from the golden age when Masonry was central to male life across the nation. More than any other Freemasons across the western world, Craftsmen in the United States have a huge architectural patrimony to administer.

The most magnificent Masonic edifice in the capital is the House of the Temple (1915), the headquarters of the Scottish Rite (Southern Jurisdiction). With a Mesopotamian ziggurat roof and a columned façade guarded by sphinxes, it is modeled on the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus – one of the seven wonders of the ancient world – which was intended to bestow god-like status on a Persian imperial satrap. The man immortalized in the House of the Temple is Confederate general Albert Pike: his ashes are walled in next to a shrine dedicated to big donors. The heart of the building is the Temple Chamber, the holy of holies of Scottish Rite Masonry: a lavish square hall of black marble, purple velvet, Russian walnut, and bronze – all dramatically lit by high windows and a skylight. It is open to visitors.

Atop a hill across the Potomac, a Metro ride away in Alexandria, Virginia, stands the George Washington Masonic National Memorial (1932), which rises where the great man was a member of the local Lodge. It too is a copy of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world: the Lighthouse of Alexandria in Egypt. In its atrium stands a titanic 5.2-metre bronze statue of the first President, Brother George Washington, in his apron; it was unveiled in 1950 by the thirty-third President, Brother Harry S. Truman.

Freemasons today have a less heroic outlook than the monuments bequeathed to them by earlier generations. With the Craft in decline, they now seem almost embarrassed by the grandeur that surrounds them. The House of the Temple is a massive financial burden for the Scottish Rite: $45 million has been raised in a decade to fund a renovation, renovation, but much more is needed to endow ongoing repairs. The George Washington Masonic National Memorial is forlorn, struggling for a purpose. While it holds one or two genuine artifacts from the life of the great man, most of the rest is the detritus of Washington’s posthumous Masonic personality cult. The Director told me when I visited that ‘90 percent of the stuff that is on display in this building is contrived, it’s fake’.

Ironically, cinema is important to the survival of these buildings and NBC is adapting “The Lost Symbol, into a television series, Deadline reports. The planned series, titled “Langdon,” will be produced by CBS Television Studios, Universal Television, Imagine Television Studios, and Daniel Cerone.

For example, The Prince Hall Grand Lodge tells us about a very distinctive conception of what Freemasonry is about. It stands at the center of U Street and was at the heart of the black community with which U Street was synonymous. Beginning life as an encampment of freed slaves after the Civil War, the U-Street area was a town-within-a-town in the era of segregation. At a time when white capital was denied to African-American businesses, they were funded by the Industrial Bank: created in 1934 by Most Worshipful Past Grand Master Jessie H. Mitchell, it was and is located just across from the Grand Lodge. U Street was once known as the ‘Black Broadway’, where the likes of Brother Cab Calloway came to play. Brother Duke Ellington was at home here: he was a member of Social Lodge no. 1, which met (and still meets) in the Grand Lodge building. A few blocks away, Howard University-trained a black intellectual élite: Brother Thurgood Marshall graduated from the Law School in 1933. Indeed, civil rights were built into the very fabric of the U-Street Grand Lodge. The plan for the building was suggested by Brother Booker T. Washington when he came to speak in 1912. The lower floors were to contain a big dining hall and shop spaces that could be rented out to provide sustainable funding for the Masonic activities on the upper floors: hence the pharmacy. Still today, at the end of a corridor within the Grand Lodge building you can find a door guarded by fluted columns and encased in mirrored plastic: it is marked ‘Washington DC Branch NAACP’.

Yet U Street is no longer the force it once was. The heart was ripped out of the community in 1968 by the desperate revolt following the assassination of Martin Luther King. Much has changed in the lives of African Americans. U Street has made a slow recovery, which has been driven by yuppification in recent years; the place now lives on its heritage. The Prince Hall Craft has seen better days too: in United States Masonry, white, and black areas one in having a greying membership.

Chequered No force more than the British Empire was responsible for creating the ‘Masonic Earth’ celebrated in Bourlard’s documentary. So perhaps the most appropriate theme to finish with is the legacy of the Empire in Masonry and how it influenced also Hindu Nationalism.

 

Freemasonry and Indian Nationalism

The Masons of Bengal in the 1860s knew what opening up Freemasonry to Indians would mean, and they were dead set against it. It was Lord Zetland (the English Grand Master) and his deputy, Lord Ripon, who in the 1860s had to insist upon the principle of universal brotherhood and, in doing so, promoted, albeit from the top down, a new vision of empire among Masons.

Indian Masons assimilated only too well to the British imperial community-to the point of becoming "brothers" to the English, Scottish, and Welsh-and they strove to obtain the rights and privileges which attended this fraternal assimilation. This was the genesis of the nationalist impulse among the western-educated Indians.

They envisioned and expected to live in an empire of nationalities, in which Indians played an equal role with whites in governing the Indian Empire. Unfortunately for them, the British were simultaneously forging a national identity based on their superior position in the Empire. In the contest between these two nationalisms, British and Indian, the middle path of an imperial brotherhood based on parity would necessarily lose out. Indian Masons, then. who had gone a long way in reaching parity with the British in the lodge, sought the same thing in the Raj as nationalists, but were to find that parity there was "blocked," or at least too slow in coming.

At the first Congress in 1885, Dadabliai Naoroji explained what drew the western-educated Indians politically to the British: 'What attaches us to this foreign rule with deeper loyalty than even our own past Native rule, is the fact that Britain is the parent of free and representative Government and that we, as her subjects and children, are entitled to inherit the great blessing of freedom and representation.' (Briton Martin, New India, 1885, p. 298)

In the front ranks of Indian leaders in the early Congress Party (and even before) were a number of Masons: Dadabliai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta, Badruddin Tyabji, Narayan Chandavarkar, among those in Bombay. In Bengal, there was W.C. Bonnedee, Man Mohan Ghosh, and Rash Behari Ghosh, and probably others who research in lodges there would no doubt turn up.

What these men wanted was respect, to be treated as equals, to be "brothers" with the British in running India, just as they were "brothers" with them in the lodges.

An examination of the Masonic Presidents of the Indian National Congress from its inception in 1885 to the Surat "split" between Moderates and Extremists in 1907, is impressive. Of the Congress Presidents from the Bombay Presidency, a staggering seventy-eight percent-were Freemason. In addition, one President-Lal Mohan Ghosh was the brother of the Mason, Man Mohan Ghosh, and thus may have been a Mason himself (which would have made forty-eight percent of the I.N.C. Presidents Masons):

1885     W.C. Bonnedee Mason (Bengal)

1886  Dadabhai Naoroji Mason (Bombay)

1887  Badruddin Tyabji Mason (Bombay)

1888  George Yule Unknown

1889  William Wedderburn Unknown

1890  Pherozeshah Mehta Mason (Bombay)

1891  P. Ananda Charlu Unknown

1892  W.C. Bonnedee Mason (Bengal)

1893  Dadabhai Naoroji Mason (Bombay)

1894  Alfred Webb, M.P. Unknown

1895  Surendranath Banedea Unknown

1896  Rahirntulla Muhammad Saymni Mason (Bombay)

1897  Sir C. Sankaran Nair Unknown

1898  Ananda Mohan Bose Unknown

1899  Ramesh Chandra Dutt Unknown

1900  Narayen Ganesh Chandavarkar Mason (Bombay)

1901  Dinshaw EduIji Wacha Doubtful (Bombay)

1902  Surendranath Banedea Unknown

1903  Lal Mohan Ghosh Unknown (brother of M.M. Ghosh)

1904  Sir Henry Cotton Unknown

1905  Gopal Krishna Gokhale Doubtful (Bombay)

1906  Dadabhai Naoroji Mason (Bombay)

1907  Rash Behari Ghosh Mason (Bengal)

 

Compared to the early days of the Grand Lodge of India, the Lodges no longer attract the ‘very highest echelons’ of society. Partly as a result, money is a problem too. Indian Lodge buildings often betray their origins in the infrastructure of the Empire: they are on land leased long term from the railways or the military. Many such plots have rocketed in value as India has prospered. With the leases coming up for renewal, the Brothers face a tough challenge to stay in their collective homes.

There are also looming recruitment problems. Many educated young men simply do not have time for Lodge business: those employed in the burgeoning IT industry work extremely long hours, often on American or European time, in facilities situated far from the historical city centers where the Temples are.

One thing that is decidedly not a problem for Indian Freemasonry is intolerance. The very first Grand Master elected at the foundation of the Grand Lodge of India in 1961 was a Muslim; recent Grand Masters have included a Sikh and a Parsi, and the current head of the Southern Region is a Syrian Christian. Indian Lodges all recognize no fewer than five different Volumes of Sacred Law: the Bhagavad Gita, the Qur’an, the Bible, Guru Granth Sahib (for Sikhs), and the Zend-Avesta (for Zoroastrians). Bharat even has words of understanding for Rudyard Kipling, author of ‘The Mother Lodge’, whose racism he says was no more than ‘a reflection of the time’. Indeed, Kipling’s portrait adorns the home page of the Grand Lodge of India website, side by side with that of his Brother from Allahabad days, Motilal Nehru.

Thus, in India at least, the legacy of Freemasonry’s role in the British Empire is largely a positive one. Elsewhere, Freemasons have a tougher task coming to terms with the shadows in their past. Australia is a case in point. One of the many troubling aspects of the inhuman treatment of Aboriginal peoples over the centuries since the first whites arrived in 1788 is the abuse of indigenous burial sites, which all Aboriginal nations regard as essential to their bond with the landscape. Identifying and reinterring ancestral remains is a cause pursued with passion by Aboriginal groups. In 2002, following an amnesty, Freemasons handed over to the Melbourne Museum a large but uncatalogued collection of indigenous remains, ‘usually crania and arm or leg bones’. For many years, the Lodges of the state of Victoria had been using Emblems of Mortality stolen from Aboriginal graves. A member of the Museum’s Indigenous Advisory Committee was appalled:

This material has turned up without information on the source of these remains or why they were collected. It’s scandalous that so many of our ancestors were held by the Freemasons, but it’s made worse by the fact that the Freemasons cannot tell us where they come from. How are we to rebury our ancestors when we don’t know where they came from? No wonder that the Craft was recently called to account for its role in colonization by one of Australia’s leading artists, in a prize-winning work that now hangs in the National Gallery of Australia. Danie Mellor’s From Rite to Ritual depicts a Masonic Lodge and its associated symbols: columns, chessboard floor, coffin, and the skull-and-crossbones. The scene is painted in the same blue as the Willow pattern crockery decorated with kitsch Chinese scenes that were first produced in Britain in the late eighteenth century – a typical consumer commodity of the imperial economy at the time when the Craft was being transplanted across the globe. Standing out incongruously against this background are color cameos of Australian animals, such as koalas, kangaroos, and red-winged parrots. At the center of the temple floor are ghostly Aboriginal men enacting a ceremonial dance. The picture reminds us of how the Craft provided a solemn and harmonious cover story for the lethal and greedy business of carving out colonies.

Yet Danie Mellor is aware of the Craft’s insistent contradictions: not only is he a former Freemason, but he is also of mixed indigenous and European heritage. From Rite to Ritual also dwells on the fragile common ground between western Freemasonry and indigenous Australian cultures, notably the way knowledge is embedded in ceremonies, and death is seen as central to the experience of being human. Australian Freemasons point to some Aboriginal community leaders who have been on the Square, such as Sir Douglas Nicholls, the élite Aussie rules footballer, campaigner, and Governor of South Australia in the mid-1970s. A glance at the indigenous press suggests that Nicholls is not an entirely isolated case. Historically, Freemasons may have poached symbols from other cultures around the world for use in their ceremonies, but the Lodges have proven again and again that they are also cradles of cultural dialogue.

A sense of history has always been crucial to Freemasonry. But all too often, the Masons have squeezed their history into rosy identity narratives. And they would be truer to their values if they explored ways to write their story that have a bit less Masonic harmony and a bit more social tension. Freemasonry’s past is as chequered as a Lodge floor.

 

Sources:

G. Baldessarro, ‘“Affiliazioni irregolari e inquinamento malavitoso”. E il Grande Oriente d’Italia sospende la loggia’, La Repubblica, 17 November 2013.

 

C. Blank, ‘For Freemasons, Is Banning Gays or Being Gay un-Masonic?’, NPR, 22 March 2016, https://www.npr.org/2016/03/22/471414979/for-freemasons-is-banning-gays-or-being-gay-un-masonic?t=1580893580748.

 

D. Brown, The Lost Symbol, New York, 2010. ‘For the record, ma’am, the entire Masonic philosophy’, p. 99.

 

A. Brown-Peroy, ‘La franc-maçonnerie et la notion de secret dans l’Angleterre du XXe siècle’, PhD thesis, University of Bordeaux Montaigne, 2016; for the whole Knight-Brotherhood affair in the UK. Number of expulsions rocketed from twelve, between 1934 and 1986, to 277, between 1987 and 1996, p. 289.

 

P. Calderwood, Freemasonry and the Press in the Twentieth Century: A National Newspaper Study of England and Wales, London, 2013.

 

M.W. Chapman, ‘Pope Francis: “Masonic Lobbies … This Is the Most Serious Problem for Me”, CNS News, 2 August 2013, https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/pope-francis-masonic-lobbies-most-serious-problem-me.

 

O. Chaumont, D’un corps à l’autre, Paris, 2013.

 

O. Chaumont and A. Pink, ‘A Sister with Fifty Thousand Brothers’, Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism, 4 (1–2; single issue), 2013.

 

J.T. Chick, The Curse of Baphomet, Dubuque, IA, 1990.

 

Commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta sul fenomeno delle mafie e sulle altre associazioni criminali, anche straniere, ‘Relazione sulle infiltrazioni di Cosa Nostra e della ’ndrangheta nella Massoneria in Sicilia e Calabria’, relatore R. Bindi, 27 December 2017.

 

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (J.A. Ratzinger), ‘Declaration on Masonic Associations’, 26 November 1983. Can be consulted at http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19831126_declaration-masonic_en.html.

 

C. Cordova, Gotha. Il legame indicibile tra ’ndrangheta, massoneria e servizi deviati, Rome, 2019. An invaluable overview of the charges in the vast Gotha trial.

 

Il Dispaccio, ‘Masso-’ndrangheta, parla l’ex Maestro Di Bernardo: “La situazione in Calabria mi spinse a dimettermi dal GOI”’, http://ildispaccio.it/reggio-calabria/216683-masso-ndrangheta-parla-l-ex-maestro-di-bernardo-la-situazione-in-calabria-mi-spinse-a-dimettermi-dal-goi.

 

F. Forgione, Oltre la cupola, massoneria, mafia e politica, Milan, 1994.

 

A. Heidle and J.A.M. Snoek (eds), Women’s Agency and Rituals in Mixed and Female Masonic Orders, Leiden, 2008. C.

 

S. Knight, The Brotherhood: The Secret World of the Freemasons, with a new foreword by M. Short, London, 2007. Short’s foreword contains biographical information on Knight.

 

G. Leazer, Fundamentalism and Freemasonry: The Southern Baptist Investigation of the Fraternal Order, New York, 1995. L.

 

Mahmud, ‘The Name of Transparency: Gender, Terrorism, and Masonic Conspiracies in Italy’, Anthropological Quarterly, 85 (4), 2012.

 

L. Mahmud, ‘“The world is a forest of symbols”: Italian Freemasonry and the Practice of Discretion’, American Ethnologist, 39 (2), 2012.

 

M. Maqdsi, ‘Charter of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) of Palestine’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 22 (4), 1993. R.

 

Mckeown, ‘Mystery 200-year-old letter revealed World War 3 plans – and final battle against Islam’, Daily Star, 7 March 2016. R.

 

McWilliams, ‘Resting Places: A History of Australian Indigenous Ancestral Remains at Museum Victoria’, downloaded from https://museumsvictoria.com.au/about-us/staff/robert-mcwilliams/

 

A.A. Mola, Storia della massoneria in Italia. Dal 1717 al 2018: tre secoli di un ordine iniziatico, Milano, 2018. For a review of recent Church positions on Masonry, pp. 643–50.

 

L. Musolino, ‘Calabria, Grande Oriente chiude 3 logge massoniche: “Infiltrate dalla ‘ndrangheta”’, Il Fatto Quotidiano, 18 March 2015, https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2015/03/18/musolino-logge-massoniche/1508927/.

 

H. Richardson, ‘Chilling letter written almost 150 years ago predicted both world wars and a THIRD battle against Islamic leaders’, the Sun, 7 March 2016.

 

R.S. Sidhwa, District Grand Lodge of Pakistan (1869–1969), Lahore, 1969

 

M.A. Tabbert, American Freemasons, New York, 2005. On fundamentalist Christianity and Masonry, pp. 213–14.

 

Tribunale Ordinario di Roma, Sezione dei giudici per le indagini preliminari Ufficio 22, Decreto di archiviazione, 3 July 2000. (On the Cordova investigation into Freemasonry.)

 

Tribunale di Reggio Calabria, Sezione G.I.P.–G.U.P., Ordinanza su richiesta di applicazione di misure cautelari, De Stefano, Giorgio + 7, 12 July 2016 (‘Inchiesta Mammasantissima’).

 

Tribunale di Reggio Calabria,Processo Gotha. Rito abbreviato. Motivazioni della sentenza, 1 March 2018.

 

United Grand Lodge of England, ‘Gender reassignment policy’, https://www.ugle.org.uk/gender-reassignment-policy.

 

T. Zarcone, Le Croissant et le Compas. Islam et franc-maçonnerie de la fascination à la detestation, Paris, 2015. On the fate of Masonry, and of Kipling’s Mother Lodge, in Pakistan, p. 113. On Iran, p. 115.

 

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