(National Treasure, the dim-witted but smashingly successful Nicholas Cage adventure, may not have been good history or a good movie, but it did get one thing right: Freemasonry was an extremely powerful force in early America. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were both Masons, and for Lewis in particular, the ethics and spiritual values he discovered in the Masonic lodges of Virginia and St. Louis were central to his life. In fact, his identity as a Mason appears to have been weighing on his mind in his last hours on this earth.
A little background helps explain how Freemasonry became so central to the lives of Lewis, Clark, and other elite men of early America. As the name indicates, Freemasonry has its roots in the medieval guilds of bricklayers and stonemasons who built the great cathedrals of Europe. How it evolved into a powerful secret society is a subject of some historical dispute. The short version is this: as the Catholic Church locked horns with dissidents and reformers all across Europe, an event known as the Protestant Reformation, the old medieval guilds were taken over by outsiders–mostly intellectuals, well-to-do middle class men, aristocrats, and clergymen. In a world where taking the wrong side was often fatal, witches and heretics were still being burned, the Inquisition was in full swing, and Galileo was on trial for insisting that the earth revolved around the sun, it seems probable that these men were seeking an underground means to exercise freedom of thought and be able to discuss moral and scientific issues safely.
This Masonic symbol on the back of the U.S. one-dollar bill includes the All-Seeing-Eye of God and a Latin motto that translates “Announcing Conception of the New World Order.”
Though this movement may have been gradual, modern Freemasonry is generally dated from 1717, when four London lodges amalgamated under the leadership of a Presbyterian minister named James Anderson. At that point, it spread rapidly through Great Britain, Europe, and America. As the decades progressed, Freemasonry dovetailed nicely with the spread of the Enlightenment, a philosophical movement that rejected religious dogma, elevated reason and scientific inquiry, and gave rise to the idea that freedom, democracy, and tolerance should be central to human existence.
In fact, it can said without much exaggeration that “truth, justice, and the American way” are principles from the Masonic creed that became embedded in our culture to the point that we now naively believe them to be universal truths shared by all. Freemasonry’s religious and spiritual underpinnings were embodied in secret lore that included ethics, philosophy, and degrees men worked to achieve, both to measure their own progress and as a symbol of the passage from youth to manhood to old age and death. The lore incorporates much Christian language and symbolism, and often leads people to conclude erroneously that the Founding Fathers espoused modern-day Christian beliefs.
Meriwether Lewis's Masonic Apron
The symbolism on Lewis’s apron explained
In early 1797, at the age of 22, Meriwether Lewis joined the Door to Virtue Masonic Lodge #44 in his home of Albemarle, Virginia. Never one to do anything casually, Lewis threw himself into the fraternity in spite of being an active-duty Army officer at the time. He rose quickly to Royal Arch Mason, held office in the lodge, and promoted charitable activities for the men to become involved in. And just because Lewis went west in 1803 doesn’t mean he forgot about being a Mason. From some journal notations, it appears that Lewis began recruiting William Clark to join the Masons while the Expedition was still preparing to get underway at Camp River Dubois in the winter of 1803-04. He seems to have continued to reflect on Masonic ideas while in the wilderness.
Meriwether Lewis's Wisdom River (now the Big Hole)
On August 6, 1805, while exploring the high country near present-day Three Forks, Montana, Lewis named the Jefferson River, then assigned Masonic names to three of its tributaries, dubbing them the Wisdom, Philanthropy, and Philosophy. Lewis noted that the names would commemorate Thomas Jefferson’s ”cardinal virtues, which have so eminently marked that deservedly selibrated character through life,” but it should be noted that they may also correspond to the pillars of human virtue embodied in Freemasonry. The names didn’t stick, and today the three tributaries are known as the Big Hole River, Ruby River, and Willow Creek.
Symbolic rendering of the three pillars of Masonic thought.
A couple of weeks later, Lewis’s penned one of his most famous journal passages. The birthday reflections of August 18, 1805, are often seen as a wilderness cri de coeur, a sad foreshadowing of Lewis’s death just four years later. But some historians have suggested they might just as easily be Lewis’s attempt to write his own Masonic “words to live by.” Judge for yourself:
This day I completed my thirty first year, and conceived that I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this Sublunary world. I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the hapiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended. but since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least indeavour to promote those two primary objects of human existance, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestoed on me; or in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.—
Read the Full Artical Here.
Friday, February 19, 2010 at 03:45PM 
