§ C. A THEORY OF HERMETIC INTERFERENCE

Having given an example of the manner in which symbolical Masonry explains, as if almost on its own part, how the old craft guild was taken over and transformed, and--although it is by no means suggested that Mary's Chapel and Canongate Kilwinning should burn their earliest records--having seen that the surface explanation is characterised by great insufficiency, I will now show another side of the same subject, prior to which it is assumed that even if craft Masonry may be subject to certain errors of enthusiasm, it has always good faith on its side. On the other hand, outside its records and their inferences, and shipped upon the great sea of speculation, I have seldom met with any subject which has produced more explicit falsehood in the manufacture of historical materials

Orthodoxie Maconnique, p. 5). "It is from this primitive source that the Masonic world has drawn that light which illuminates its labours" (ib.). In the same year, being that which saw the reception of Ashmole into the old building guild, a society of Rosicrucians, formed on the plan of Bacon's New Atlantis, assembled at Freemason's Hall, London. Ashmole and the other brethren of the Rose-Cross, seeing that speculative Masons already exceeded the diminishing remnant of operative members,

ib., p. 99). The learned alchemist codified all the oral traditions; they assumed a form and body; and this was the true and proper beginning of Freemasonry, as we now have it (ib., p. 292).

It will be seen that I have not overestimated the force and finality of these statements; it would appear almost incredible that they could be a pure invention of Ragon, or a mere fable which he took over from some earlier source that cannot now be identified; yet this is the case actually, and outside the bare fact that Ashmole was received into the old craft guild, as he records in a few cold and detached lines of his private diary, there is no particle of evidence to support it. That it were otherwise I could well desire, for I have said that the craft was acquired, and that which took it over knew well enough the purport of the Ancient Mysteries, or, under all its veils and subterfuges, we could never have had the legend of the Chief Degree, nor the equally memorable closing which is attached thereto. But the bodies of tradition, which may coincide, and that closely--which may reflect on one another--which may independently testify to each other--are not derived from one another, and the Alchemists, as such, did not invent Masonry. I do not propose to go

§ C. A THEORY OF HERMETIC INTERFERENCE

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