Author: Aldo Reno

Scholars of the Craft divide the history of Freemasonry into two distinct periods. They mark 1717 as the year when the first period, known as Operative, ended and the second period, called Speculative, began. This is the classic division of the History of Freemasonry, although other classifications have been formulated, many of them bordering on fantasy and absurdity.

The historians themselves can be  divided in two groups: those who lost their reason in the search for dubious or extravagant origins of  Freemasonry, and those who complained about how hard  it is to establish the theory that is closest to the truth. The Masonic historian and Anglican minister  John Sebastian Marlow Ward [1] , was of the opinion that Freemasonry originated  from the Knights Templar, one of the three major Christian military-religious orders established in Holy Land during the Crusades.  Andrew Michael Ramsey [2] was actually the first person to have advanced  such argument.   Ramsay was a catholic Scotsman who lived a good part of his  life in France , where after James III had made him a baronet in 1735,  became  more commonly known as Chevalier Ramsay.  In England he had been initiated in Freemasonry on March 10, 1730  at the Horn Lodge, that met in Westminster. In 1737 he was in France and occupying  the office of Grand Orator of the Order when Cardinal Fleury [3] prevented him from giving a lecture[4], later published, in which he declared that Freemasonry saw the light  in the Holy Land during the time of the Crusades and had been founded by The Knights of the Temple or Templars[5]. There is little to prove this theory but at least it presents a more plausible argument than that of some other authors who claim that Freemasonry had the same origin as and dated back to the time the world was created  (George Oliver[6]); that “God and the Archangel Saint Michael were the first grand masters of the first Lodge of the Freemasons established by the sons of Sete, after the fratricide of Cain” (Enoch); that “Patriarch Adam, faithful to the instructions received from the Most High, formed the first lodge with his children” (Marc Bédarride[7]); or that Freemasonry comes from God himself and begins in the time of chaos.

These are Ramsay’s words  with  reference to the noble and Christian character of the Freemasons :

“(…) We must not take the word Freemason in a literal (…) and material sense, as if our founders had been simple workers in stone or merely curious geniuses who wanted to perfect the Arts. They were not only skilful architects (…) but also religious and warrior Princes who designed, edified and protected the living Temples of the Most High.  And (…) whilst they handled the trowel and mortar with one hand, in the other they held the sword and the buckler.  We must therefore consider our order as (…) an order founded in the antiquity, renewed in the Holy Land by our ancestors in order to recall the memory of the most sublime truths amidst the pleasures of the society.”  

In  “Les Plus Secrets Mysteres des Hauts Grades (iii., 194), M. Berage  added more ground to the Templar theory by writing: “The Order of Masonry was instituted by Godfrey de Bouillon[8], in Palestine in 1330 after the defeat of the Christian armies, and was communicated only to a few of the French Masons sometimes afterwards, as a reward for the services which they had rendered to the English and Scottish Knights”.

At the  end of the tragic third Crusade, the knights and their supporting civilians sailed from the Holy Land and headed west.  Amongst those men you would have found monarchs who were returning to their Kingdoms, Princes who would later ascend to a throne, Lords whose wealth had risen tenfold during their term in Palestine, and some  knights of a lesser noble lineage who would only have received life  lasting privileges as a reward for their services.   The whole Christendom held the Templars in high regard and  considered them to be the guardians of mystical doctrines and secrets  discovered in Jerusalem , the holiest city on earth; the same secrets on which the Freemasons claim they found their Order.

Ramsay also believed that Freemasonry had reached England from Scotland as he wrote : “John, Lord Stewart or Grand Master of the House of the King of Scotland, brought our science from the Holy Land in 1286 and established a lodge at Kilwinn in Scotland in which he received as freemaçons the Earls of Gloucester and Ulster. Since that time, the old Kingdom and intimate ally of France was the depository of our secrets, the Center of the order and the conservator of our laws. From Scotland, our society spread in England, under the great Prince Edward, son of Henry III”. 

But Ramsay  was a Scotsman seeking  to obtain the support of the King of France and  of the Pope for the restoration to the throne of England, Scotland and Ireland of the catholic House of Stuarts. It is not therefore unreasonable  to say  that Ramsay probably came up with such a singular story, that wrapped Freemasonry in a blanket of religious greatness, principally to please and indulge both the Church State of Rome and catholic France. The plan  did not come together but what Ramsey succeeded into,  was to plant seed that gave birth to the Masonic Higher Degrees Orders , to which the aristocrats of all Europe flocked in vast numbers.  Indeed, the Baron Karl Gotthelf von Hund [9] used Ramsay’s romantic account as the principle upon which he founded the Rite of Strict Observance [10].  

In the paper “Ramsay and his Discours revisited” , Brother Alain Bernheim[11] summed up the life of the exiled Scottish Freemason in these words : “What he did and chose not to do, what he thought and chose not to write, can be summarized in a few words : he was a true Jacobite, poor and, most of all, dependent on the good will of various groups of persons–French aristocrats, Stuart exiles, Freemasons of different origins – whose opinions were different. And he needed them all”. 

Disappointing as it may seem to the devotees of fanciful and patriotic theories of the birth of the operative Freemasonry on the British isles , the provenance of the phenomenon is actually rather different from that recounted by the Scottish Chevalier. The Masonic historian Bernard E. Jones [12]  in his Freemasons’ Guide and Compendium, wrote: “the old-fashioned Masonic books , so often tell a story that is more romantic than factual and repeat fallacies that should long ago have died a natural death”.

The operative Freemasons that appeared across the Channel in the Middle Ages were only native rough stone-masons who benefited of  the superior knowledge imported by greatly skilled laborers from the Mediterranean basin; a geographical region which had  for millennia been the source and the guardian of all Arts. The true genesis of operative Freemasonry is found in  an era that predates the Holy Wars and  witnessed Rome , with its mighty Empire and superior civilization, rule the western world!

The Romans were extraordinary builders who had learned the art of constructions from regions of their dominion like Greece , Egypt and the Middle East, whose populations had even older knowledge and traditions than theirs. The Romans improved  and perpetuated those skills through the specialised Collegia that they instituted throughout their Empire. The higher Roman education curriculum included the teaching of the Artes Liberales (Liberal Arts) like languages (Latin and Greek), written composition, rhetoric, philosophy, Law,  Maths. But there were also Collegia that specialised in practical subjects like ship-making, bakery , wine-dealing,  medicine, and even brothel keeping! Some of those teaching institutions were also active and particularly influential in politics.  There was probably also a very  large presence of  Collegia throughout the Empire, because in Roman Law it sufficed to have had an ensemble of three teachers to receive the appellation of Collegium.

Each Collegium had its own constitution and regulations on both religious and secular matters. It was also organised like a modern Masonic lodge with a Master and two guardians to preside over a membership of three grades : apprentice, companion, and teacher.

In addition to excelling in the Liberal Arts,  the Romans were also great soldiers. Their Army  did not just consist of  disciplined and brave soldiers who fought fearlessly in  single combat. The Roman legionaries  benefited also from an efficiently run and  organised military war machinery that consisted of auxiliaries. These were  highly skilfull civilians  who travelled with the troops and provided  them with relief and support. They were engineers specialised in building bridges, fellows who set up and run the military encampments, cooks, priests, craftsmen who forged and repaired arms,  hostlers who looked after the horses, physicians and members of many other professions.  Those men congregated in groups which were the precursors of the Guilds and were the forerunners of the Middle Ages Freemasons with their Associations.  

THE MAGISTRI COMACINES

Speculative Freemasonry , the kind that we take part in nowadays, is only a few centuries old.  In contrast,  the operative Freemasonry belongs to a much earlier Era and sprung out neither from native Scottish or English semi-barbarians stone-masons nor from infiltrated Knights and former Crusaders, but from a group of skilled Master Builders from the Italian peninsular. They were the men who maintained  “the light of the arts alive” through the Dark and Middle Ages. 

The hoards of Barbarians who in the IV century descended from northern Europe and occupied the western provinces of the Roman Empire, sought to wipe out every form of that remarkable civilization before , in time, eventually adopting it themselves. The Eastern part of the Roman Empire –  identified in history as the Byzantine Empire, with Byzantium [Constantinople] as capital – was one of those territories left  untouched by the destructive waves of Barbarian together with a few other confined provinces both on the Italian Peninsular and in the rest of Europe.

The isle of Comacina on Lake Como is one of those territories that kept its independence and became the new and secure home of  scholars of the Roman Arts and Sciences. Presence of substantial stone quarries near Como, in what was the Lombard Kingdom of Northern Italy,  was also a contributory factor for settling in that area. The Comacines craftsmen were a tight and powerful society of builders and were also known as Masons Magistri  where the word Magistri comes from Magister which was a higher Roman College. They could design and build almost everything , having a broad grasp of  many Arts including sculpture,painting, mosaic work. The Comacines preserved civilization until the Barbarians themselves became ready and accepted communal life and peace.  According to Albert McKay : “The Longobards who had come from northern Germany , settled in northern Italy in c. 568/569 and employed the Comacines for their construction work in what is now identified  as Lombard Architecture, famous all over Europe”.  The earliest known written reference to the Comacines was in the Edictum Rothari  issued by the ruling Lon(go)bard King Rothari  in the year 643, centuries  before the first Crusade!

One of the symbols of the Comacines Masons was the “Comacines Knot” or “Solomon’s knot” or “Sigillum Salomonis” in Latin.     It represents time ,  the “immortality and eternity” of the Comacines’s great work, but also  the ancient hidden forces that regulate our Universe. The symbols of the endless, interwoven cord (Italian Intreccio) and the “lion’s paw” are further and more recent Comacines’s trademarks; almost every Cathedral and religious edifice they built had their logo affixed, by way of a signature, on the stonework. We can find their traces in Europe as far north as Sweden and as far south as Sicily.   

An interest in the Comacines was shown for the first time in the early 20th century by Lucy Baxter , described as the first woman to have written  about that topic in the world of Freemasonry. She adopted the pen-name of Leader Scott and wrote a book entitled “The Cathedral Builders”  wherein  she mentioned and described the “Magistri Comacines” as the ancestors of the Freemasons. Little more was subsequently mentioned on the subject by Masonic authors and historians, perhaps in an effort  to preserve  the legend of  Freemasonry having been  established under the protection of catholic sympathetic monarchs on the British isles by Scottish knights who had returned from the Crusades and some others who had  escaped persecution in France. 

Thomas Hope [13] in his “Historical treatise on architecture” declared: “The [Comacines] builders and sculptors formed a single great fraternity whose aim was to find work outside of Italy. In fact, distance and obstacles were nothing to them.”  They travelled  East under the Lombard Dukes and went to England with  the Italian Benedectine monk (Saint) Augustine [14]  who Pope Gregory the Great(Gregory 1^st) [15] had chosen to lead  a mission to convert King Aethelbert [16] of Kent in 595.  Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury !

The Comacines also travelled to France under Charlemagne [17]  –  King of the Franks and subsequently the Holy Emperor of Rome –  and to Germany, first under (Saint) Boniface [18] and later under (Saint) Albert the Great [19]. Indeed, the Comacines can be encountered everywhere throughout the centuries. They mostly worked for the Church State of Rome in all those places where Christian missionaries had preceded them and prepared the ground. “In those times of constant war and struggle, of military service and feudal slavery, [the Church] was the only asylum for those who wished to cultivate the arts of peace”, wrote Hope. Only in this contest one can accept Ramsay’s statement  of Freemasonry being strictly Christian.  For the historian Albert Mackey [20] , Freemasons are indebted to the Catholic Church and to those masons [the Comacines].  “We, Speculative Freemasons” he wrote “should give full credit to the Roman Church for employing and fostering our Operative Brethren through many centuries and making possible the speculative Freemasonry of today (…)”.

When in the year 1000DC  the world did not end, as people expected ,the high dignitaries of the Church and  various Lords expressed their relief and joy by commissioning works dedicated to God. They spent their money in erecting cathedrals, abbeys, convents and churches between 1066 and 1189. J. S. M. Ward wrote: ‘The Comacines travelled from place to place to find work. When a church or castle was finished, they had to go elsewhere”. Have you never realised , when visiting ancient magnificent castles and cathedrals, that there is an extraordinary similarity in their details and general architectural style even though they may be in different parts of the country or even abroad? 

Thomas Hope expanded this concept by writing: “A corps of operative Freemasons would appear in a city or place near the castle of a great lord who wished to build a church or expand his castle. They were under the rule of a Master chosen from among them, who nominated one man in ten as Warden to oversee the other nine. First they erected temporary huts for their own use, and then a central Lodge. If they needed help with the hard work, they called in the local Guild masons, but they do not seem to have admitted them to the assembly in the Lodge with which they opened the work each day. They met in secret, only the Freemasons were present, and with a Tyler to guard the door against the cowans and spies.”

In History of Italian Architecture , the Marquess Amico Ricci [21] noted that the Comacines  were free to travel about at will. When the missionaries came to England from Rome to spread Christianity, they brought with them many of those men and monks experienced in the art of building whose services would be indispensable to raise or modify the edifices required by the disciples for their devotion. The Italian Chronicles record that Pope Gregory I  sent the missionary monk Saint Augustine to Britain in the company of several Masons capable of building churches, oratories and monasteries on the island. Two centuries later a Pontiff with a similar name to the former, Gregory III  [22] , dispatched Saint Boniface to Germany with  “credentials, instructions and a large following of monks versed in the arts of building and of lay brethren who were also architects, to assist them”.   One of the first issues of the Encyclopedia Britannica, says E. Jones, mentions that “the Masters from Como [the Comacines] were fraught with Papal Bulls granting to them the right of building directly and solely for the Church of Rome. They gained the power to fix the price of their labour and to regulate their own internal government, exclusively in their own general chapters, prohibiting all native artists not admitted into their Society from entering into any sort of competition with it. Wherever they came, they appeared headed by a chief surveyor who governed the entire troop, and out of every ten men they designated  one, named Warden, to overlook the nine others. The architects of all the sacred edifices of the Latin Church  (… ) derived their science from the same central  school; obeyed in their designs,  the dictates of the same hierarchy, and  rendered every minute improvement the property of the entire body. It is claimed that from this company of travelling masons is derived “the fraternity of adopted masons, accepted masons or freemasons.” 

As work on the splendid castles and cathedrals extended over many years, a close association of the Comacines with  the local masons became unavoidable and the two groups eventually blended. But ,although the Comacines were in some way  what the Guild Masons subsequently became, their Order predates the latter by some significant time. It  is also responsible for passing on to the native islanders  the methods and doctrines of the ancient Art of construction and the custom of gathering into Guilds. The Comacines were possibly the truly first operative Freemasons in Europe, and therefore of  the British Isles too. 

The Masonic historian , Reverend Joseph Fort Newton [23] ,  in the 1914 issue of The Builders wrote: “With the conquest of Britain by the Romans, the Collegia, without which no Roman society was complete,  made their advent into the island (…) Under the direction of the mother College at Rome, the Britons are said to have attained to high degree of excellence as builders, so that when the city of Gaul and the fortresses along the Rhine were destroyed, [the Roman Emperor] Constantius Chlorus , in AD 298, sent  for architects from Britain  to repair or rebuild them”.

After the Romans gave up their attempt to submit the British isles and withdrew, nothing is heard of the Comacines Master Builders until 598 AD when Bishop Wilfred of York [24] sent for some Masons to return and build in stone “after the Roman manner”. In The Builders,  Newton describes the Comacines in these words  “They may not actually have been called Freemasons as early as Leader Scott [akas Lucy Baxter] insists they were, but they were in fact free[men], travelling far and near wherever there was work, following Church missionaries to England (…)”.

CONCLUSIONS

Of all the building works carried out in every corner of the European Continent between   800AD and 1000AD , the best part was produced by the Comacines Master Builders akas  Magistri Comacines akas  Builders of the Order of the Cathedral.

R.F. Gould [25], in the original edition of his Concise  History of Freemasonry, speaks his mind clearly : “At the present day the idea of there having been, in the early part of the 13^th century, Colleges of Masons in every country of Europe which received the blessing of the Holy See, under an injunction of dedicating their skill to the erection of ecclesiastical buildings, may be dismissed as chimerical”.  Only the Comacines received that seal !

We Freemasons should  cease to give our Fraternity an impossible antiquity and accept that neither Scotland or England were its birthplace. The story that the Templars fled to Scotland after their Order was destroyed in France in 1307 by King Philippe le Bel [26] and that having kept all their  beliefs and traditions alive,   resurfaced centuries later as Freemasons, is dismissed as fiction by many Masonic scholars. “All this is speculative…because there is absolutely no historical evidence of the existence of a secret society specifically based on the (fugitive) Templars”, writes John J. Robinson [27].

The Comacines Order had lodges, Grand Masters, secrets (they kept a secret book called L’Arcano Magistero) , wore aprons, dispensed charity, possessed means of identification and employed symbolism like the square , compasses, mosaic pavement , Solomon’s knot and so forth and , like in the speculative Freemasonry,  its members were divided in degrees.    

The Comacines Magistri Order was considerable older, more skilled, more artistic and pious than that of the Templars and of the Guild Masons and ultimately prove the theory – as it remains such , albeit a more plausible one than that in many Masonic books – that  Freemasonry came from  ancient Rome [28].

By Sirbelius

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[1] John Sebastian Marlow Ward, born in Belize 22.12.1985, died in Limassol, Cypru, 2.7.1949

[2] Andrew Ramsay was born in Ayr, Scotland, in 1686, and died in Saint-Germain, France, in 1743

[3] André-Hercule de Fleury, (born June 22, 1653, Lodève, Fr.—died Jan. 29, 1743, Paris), French cardinal and chief minister who controlled the government of King Louis XV from 1726 to 1743.

[4] which was published in 1738

[5]  The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ derived the name for which they have become famous in history, by   having  established their Order’s  headquarters next to the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem.  

[6] George Oliver, D.D. was an English cleric, schoolmaster, topographer, and writer on freemasonry. Born: 5 November 1782, Papplewick Died: 3 March 1867, Lincoln

[7] Marc Bédarride ( was a jewish Napoleonic military officer, French writer and a Freemason. He founded the Masonic “Egyptian Rite of Misraim” in 1813.

[8] Godfrey of Bouillon was a French nobleman and one of the pre-eminent leaders of the First Crusade. He was the first ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem from 1099 to 1100. Born: 18 September 1060, Baisy-Thy, Genappe, Belgium ; Died: 18 July 1100, Kingdom of Jerusalem ; Place of burial: Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem

[9] Karl Gotthelf, Baron von Hund und Altengrotkau (11 September 1722, Unwürde – 8 November 1776, Meiningen) was a German Freemason who in 1751, he founded the Rite of Strict Observance.

[10] The Rite of Strict Observance was particularly devoted to the reform of Masonry, with special reference to the elimination of the occult sciences  which at the time were widely practiced in many Masonic lodges

[11] “Ramsay and his Discours revisited” by Bro. Alain Bernheim ( born 1931  Paris, France )

[12] Bernard E. Jones , P.A.G.D.C., Freemason  member of Pen and Brush Lodge N. 2909, UGLE,  and of  the Research Lodge Quatuor Coromatorum

[13] Thomas Hope (30 August 1769 – 2 February 1831) was a Dutch and British merchant banker, author, philosopher and art collector

[14] Augustine of Canterbury (born in Italy in early  6th century – died probably 26 May 604) was a Benedictine monk   who became the first Archbishop of Canterbury in the year 597. He is considered the “Apostle to the English” and a founder of the English Church

[15] Pope Gregory I, commonly known as Saint Gregory the Great, was the bishop of Rome from 3 September 590 to his death. He is known for instigating the first recorded large-scale mission from Rome, the Gregorian Mission, to convert the then-pagan Anglo-Saxons in England to Christianity.

[16] Aethelberht I, (died Feb. 24, 616 or 618), king of Kent (560–616) who issued the first extant code of Anglo-Saxon laws. Reflecting some continental influence, the code established the legal position of the clergy and instituted many secular regulations.

[17] Charlemagne.  Born in France on 2 April 742 – Died in Aachen, France on 28 January 814 circa

[18] Saint Boniface, Latin Bonifatius, original name Wynfrid or Wynfrith, (born c. 675, Wessex, England—died June 5, 754, Dokkum, Frisia [now in the Netherlands]; feast day June 5), English missionary and reformer, often called the apostle of Germany for his role in the Christianization of that country.

[19] St. Albertus Magnus, English Saint Albert the Great, German Sankt Albert der Grosse, byname Albert of Cologne or Albert of Lauingen, (born c. 1200, Lauingen an der Donau, Swabia [Germany]—died November 15, 1280, Cologne; canonized December 16, 1931; feast day November 15), Dominican bishop and philosopher best known as a teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas. By papal decree in 1941, he was declared the patron saint of all who cultivate the natural sciences.

[20] Albert Gallatin Mackey (March 12, 1807 – June 20, 1881) was an American medical doctor and author. He is best known for his books and articles about freemasonry, particularly the Masonic Landmarks.

[21] Amico Ricci Petrocchini, Petruccini or Petruchini, was born in Macerata, Italy and died  in Modena in 1862. He was an Italian art historian and marquess. He is most notable for his 1834 Memorie storiche delle arti

[22] Pope Gregory III was elected Supreme Pontiff in 731 CE. Born, Syria ?—died November 741 and was pope from 731 to 741. As a Syrian, he is one of few non-European popes, and the last one until the Argentine Pope Francis was elected in 2013.

[23] Rev. Joseph Fort Newton. Born 27 July 1780, Decatur, Texas – Died 24 January 1950 in Merion, Pennsylvania. He was an American Baptist minister and author of a number of Masonic books

[24] Wilfrid (c. 633 – 709 or 710) was an English bishop and saint. he entered religious life as a teenager and studied at Lindisfarne, at Canterbury, in Gaul, and at Rome; he returned to Northumbria in about 660, and became the abbot of a newly founded monastery at Ripon

[25] Robert Freke Gould – Ilfracombe 10 November 1836 – London 26 March 1915

[26] Philip IV (April–June 1268 – 29 November 1314), called Philip the Fair, was King of France from 1285 to 1314. By virtue of his marriage with Joan I of Navarre, he was also King of Navarre as Philip I from 1284 to 1305, as well as Count of Champagne.

[27] John J. Robinson (c. 1918 – 1996) was an American author, best known as the author of Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry.

[28] Historic city and capital of Italy located in the central portion of the Italian peninsula, on the Tiber River . Its history spans 28 centuries and for more than a millennium it was also the capital of the Roman Empire. Rome  defined the whole western world. The Roman Empire in 117 AD extended for  approximately 6.5 million square kilometres (2.5 million square miles) of land surface.

SOURCES

“Encyclopedia of Freemasonry and its kindred sciences” by Albert C. Mackey 

“Ramsay and his Discours revisited” by Bro. Alain Bernheim

“Freemasons’ Guide and Compendium”  by Bernard E. Jones 

“The Builders” [1914] – Joseph Fort Newton

“The Pilgrimage Route to Rome” by George Nebolsine  (www.jstor.org)

Wilkipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica

“The Comacine Masters’ global Masonic Knot” by Moe-  Gnosticwarrior.com/comacine-masters.html 

“History of Freemasonry” by |Robert Freke Gould

“The confused origins of Freemasonry”, by David V Barrett, The Square  Dec 2014

The blog “Masonic Heathens.NL”

“Governo do Rito Escoces  Antigo e Aceito ” byAilton Elisiário de Sousa (Revista O Buscador”, Brazil, Year 1, Number 2, pages 01-10,)

We know almost all there is to know of the Italian Masonic historiography. We have done some progress concerning the study of Freemasonry presence and history in countries of the Mediterranean basin, but in Latin America the research is still in its inception. The purpose of this paper is to present a basic historical look at the relation between the Grand Orient of Italy (GOI), the most important Masonic Obedience in the Country, and the Italian lodges in Brazil.   

The city of São Paulo has always had a large presence of Lodges run by foreigners, and in such a reality it felt natural for Italian-speaking settlers to gather and form their own first Lodge in early 1884. Shortly after that event , however, a disruptive and problematic issue came to light: the eagerness of  those Freemasons to submit to the Grand Orient of Italy in Rome. Such intense yearning in the vast community of Italian immigrants , whether already Freemasons or aspiring men, imposed a dilemma upon the leadership of the GOI. A constant-rising  of Lodges in South America controlled by the Grand Orient of Italy  would have enhanced its reputation and influence in the world, but only at the cost of creating international tensions. In such a highly delicate context, the Grand Orient of Italy temporarily withdrew its design.

The Italian Freemasons’s unrelenting resolve to have their own Grand Lodge paid off in 1888 when the Grand Orient of Rio de Janeiro sent to São Paulo a commission to consecrate the Loja Italia. The ceremony was of extreme significance for the colony of Italians, and  it turned out to be remarkably well attended by  other local Lodges too. When in 1892, the Loja Roma of São Paulo organized a procession in reminiscence of the death of the philosopher Giordano Bruno, the delegates of other Lodges of the City, and the profane community, took part in big numbers. The presence at that ceremony of Cesare Roncaglia, a ‘brother’ from the Grand Orient of Italy in Rome, reveals how close was the relationship of the Italians residing in Brasil with their homeland and how important was for them to reassert such closeness to their Country of birth or descent. It was not coincidental that the Lodge’s banner had been made in Naples !

In the early months of 1894, seven Lodges in the district of São Paulo separated and formed the Grand Orient de São Paulo. Faced with the schism, the Italian Masonic leadership came off the fence and established a Grand Lodge under the Obedience of the GOI , Rome. It was  named  Giuseppe Petroni (in honour of the late Italian Grand Master) to emphasise Continue reading FREEMASONRY IN THE ITALIAN COMMUNITY OF BRAZIL (1872-1925)