The masons are far from secret, actually. Aside from a few passwords and handshakes, nearly everything is freely available. You can easily obtain membership rolls from any lodge. There are detailed, scholarly, boring books about the history of masonry and the symbolism of its rituals. You don’t have to rely on silly conspiracy tales, when the real thing is out there.
As I understand it, the schism between the Roman Catholic Church is one-sided. Catholic men are welcome to become masons, and some do.
While that may be true (I have met some bigoted masons,) the actual vote is a truly secret ballot. Each member present reaches into a box and selects, by feel, a white cube or a black ball. It only takes one black ball vote to reject an application. A reject vote may be appealed, and anyone may make a plea for or against the candidate. The tenets of the lodge say we accept men of any race or creed, but there are no sure things. If one guy simply doesn’t like the candidate, he’s out.
I suspect I’m taking this discussion too seriously. I’m not really a tub-thumper for masonry. As long as you folks have questions, I’ll try to tell you what I know, warts and all. We’re not a perfect fraternity.
But what about the “Templar treasure”? From this earlier GQ thread (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=105048), I got this link (http://www.creighton.edu/~hughesd/Templars.html), which asserts, “The charge of heresy was sought by Philip because it was the only charge that would give him access to the Templar treasure, but in the end the treasure of the Templars disappeared in the early morning hours of the arrest with the Templar naval fleet and was never heard from again.” What was this treasure? What happened to it? The most plausible explanation would be that the surviving Templars simply took it and spent it . . . but apparently there are other theories.
Other earlier GQ threads on the Templars, Freemasons, and related matters:
The most compelling argument I have read for tying the Masons to the Knights Templar was in the book Born in Blood. While I haven’t studied the subject throughouly, I did find the book to be rather persuasive as it makes a very good argument though, admittedly, much of it relies on coincidence and speculation. However, there are enough strong coincidences and matches between the two organizations that it seems to be to be the strongest argument out there.
I should also note that Robinson was not a Mason when he wrote the book and therefore had no agenda or point to prove. In fact, Freemasonry wasn’t even the original premise. He was merely going to write about the peasant’s revolt and his studies and research took him down this path instead.
I cannot prove that Born in Blood is correct, I would like to think it is. His explainations of the events of 1717 are certainly true. In that year Masonry became “open” and by that time it had hundreds of ancient Lodges around the world.
We can say for certainty that the Order was established well before 1717. Everything before that is darn hard to pin down.
But no one has ever denied that Freemasonry existed before 1717. What is incorrect - it’s an absurd exaggeration - is to say that by then there were ‘hundreds of ancient Lodges around the world’. No, what there was by then were dozens of documented lodges throughout the British Isles, the oldest of which are known to have been in existance for little more than a century. Far from being ‘darn hard to pin down’, the development of Freemasonry before 1717 can be reconstructed in some detail, which is precisely what Stevenson did do. The older lodges happily cooperated with him as they realised that it would be useful to have such a distinguished historian and non-Mason endorse their claims to be the earliest lodges. This was because there has always been a certain jockeying for position among these lodges for the right to claim to be the oldest of all. Had any of them had evidence that they dated back before the 1590s, they would have produced it. Stevenson’s arguments are based on real evidence (you know, actual original documents), not wild speculations.
In contrast, Robinson’s interpretation of the Peasants’ Revolt rests ultimately on how one decides to translate the phrase ‘magna societas’. Almost no professional historian of the Revolt believes that this referred to an actual organisation, but, even if it did, the Templars would still be among the least plausible candidates.
