So comprehensive a title as the one selected for the present work would be a vain assumption if the author's object was not really to embrace in a series of studies the whole cycle of Masonic history and science. Anything short of this would not entitle the work to be called THE HISTORY OF FREEMASONRY.

Freemasonry as a society of long standing, has of course its history, and the age of the institution has necessarily led to the mixing in this history of authentic facts and of mere traditions or legends.
We are thus led in the very beginning of our labors to divide our historical studies into two classes. The one embraces the Legendary History of Freemasonry, and the other its authentic annals.
The Legendary History of Freemasonry will constitute the subject of the first of the five parts into which this work is divided. It embraces all that narrative of the rise and progress of the institution, which beginning with the connection with it of the antediluvian patriarchs, ends in ascribing its modern condition to the patronage of Prince Edwin and the assembly at York.
This narrative, which in the 15th and up to the end of the 17th century, claimed and received the implicit faith of the Craft, which in the 18th century was repeated and emendated by the leading writers of the institution, and which even in the 19th century has had its advocates among the learned and its credence among the un learned of the Craft, has only recently and by a new school been placed in its true position of an apocryphal story.
And yet though apocryphal, this traditionary story of Freemasonry which has been called the Legend of the Craft, or by some the Legend of the Guild, is not to be rejected as an idle fable. On the contrary, the object of the present work has been to show that these Masonic legends contain the germs of an historical, mingled often with a symbolic, idea, and that divested of certain evanescences in the shape of anachronisms, or of unauthenticated statements, these Masonic legends often, nay almost always, present in their simple form a true philosophic spirit.
To establish this principle in the literature of Freemasonry, to divest the legends of the Craft of the false value given to them as portions of authentic history by blind credulity, and to protect them from the equally false estimate that has been bestowed upon them by the excessive incredulity of un-philosophic sceptics, who view them only as idle fables without more meaning than what they attach to monkish legends—in one word, to place the Legendary History of Freemasonry in the just position which it should occupy but has never yet occupied, is the object of the labors expended in the composition of the first part of this work. The second part of the work will pass out of the field of myth and legend and be devoted to the authentic or recorded history of Freemasonry.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
Tradition And History In Masonry

CHAPTER II
The Legendary History Of Freemasonry

CHAPTER III
The Old Manuscripts

CHAPTER IV
The Legend Of The Craft

CHAPTER V
The Halliwell Poem And The Legend

CHAPTER VI
The Origin Of The Halliwell Poem

CHAPTER VII
The Legend, The Germ Of History

CHAPTER VIII
The Origin Of Geometry

CHAPTER IX
The Legend Of Lamech's Sons And The Pillars

CHAPTER X
The Legend Of Hermes

CHAPTER XI
The Tower Of Babel
CHAPTER XII

The Legend Of Nimrod

CHAPTER XIII
The Legend Of Euclid

CHAPTER XIV
The Legend Of The Temple

CHAPTER XV
The Extension Of The Art Into Other Countries

CHAPTER XVI
The Legend Of Charles Martel And Namus Grecus

CHAPTER XVII
The Legend Of St. Alban

CHAPTER XVIII
The York Legend

CHAPTER XIX
Summary Of The Legend Of The Craft

CHAPTER XX
The Andersonian Theory

CHAPTER XXI
The Prestonian Theory

CHAPTER XXII
The Hutchinsonian Theory

CHAPTER XXIII
The Oliverian Theory

CHAPTER XXIV
The Temple Legend

CHAPTER XXV
Legend Of The Dionysiac Artificers

CHAPTER XXVI
Freemasonry And The Ancient Mysteries

CHAPTER XXVII
Druidism And Freemasonry

CHAPTER XXVIII
Freemasonry And The Crusades

CHAPTER XXIX

The Story Of The Scottish Templars

ISBN	9788418379451
Pages	280
Width	6 in
Height	9 in

The History Of Freemasonry Vol. I

Available Options