I feel a strong desire to join the Freemasons. Somebody talk me out of it

You'll be a spineless, godless prostitute, you will sell your dignity and freedom in exchange for material and social benefits that the "club" provides.

Freemasons are a scourge.

>godless
>one requires to believe in a deity to join the Masons

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The occult shit is why I want to become a mason. They seem really keen on hermetic stuff, but for the purpose of self improvement of the soul in the here and now and not for some afterlife and as far as I can tell, only as a metaphor and not literally. The fact that you just need to believe in some sort of higher being aka prime mover without any of the dogma that a religion excepts from you also makes it appealing to me. Religious symbolism and ritual, but without concrete dogma. Seems like a syncretic meta religion, which is exactly what I am after because I'm too much of a smartass to actually join the catholic church, even though it seems really cool.

It sounds exactly like the type of thing I am yearning for, but that's why I am so suspicious. Gives of some red flags and comes across as low key predatory. Like a Scientology for people not naive enough to join an actual cult.

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I'm not interested in nepotism, masonry just looks really cool from where I am standing. Like a more self aware version of Christianity.

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The fact that you posted this on the internet in Veeky Forums no lest meant you're just a larping faggot or one of those mason apologist who adores them but would never invite you

Masonry seems pretty cool and after listening to a bunch of Masons talking about what the goal of Freemasonry is, I felt a desire to become one myself. How is that larping? Plenty of statesmen and artists I admire were masons (like Frederick The Great and Goethe), so it seems like a noble thing to me.

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Not occult as in cute hermetic stuff and potions, occult as in Satan worship and human sacrifices. But you won't encounter anything that "interests" you until you become a very high degree, I think most serious stuff starts at degree 29. It would take you 40 or 50 years to progress that far and all you'll be doing until then is charity and fundraising, nothing occultish.

Yeah I'm interested too. Seem like neat people. Wonder if they'd take an Evolafag like me

What's the source, your ass?

I'm a former Mason

Nothing but meme rituals, nepotism and old people organizing 'charities'

Proof? Which lodge?

>Not occult as in cute hermetic stuff and potions, occult as in Satan worship and human sacrifices
Actually sounds kinda neat.

"To be one, ask one."

Freemasons will never, EVER "invite" you, though interviews and vetting processes are standard procedure.

And further one must be a Christian to join Cryptic/Yorke Rite and it's extensions.

The 32nd degree of the Scottish Rite is literally all about Christian Love. The rituals have been public for a looooooong time.

It might be up your alley, then. The actual mystical or occult content that you get will be highly dependent on your local body's familiarity with and, and a LOT of Freemasonic outfits just go through the motions.

I mean the fist degree Scottish Rite should contain an explication of the Gematria of Christ, so if you're in a decent local body you'll be getting some mystery shit pretty fast.

(and anyone else interested)
Find your local body on google.
Find when they hold their regular meetings for lodge matters.
Drive up about fifteen minutes before the lodge lets out.
As folks filter into the parking lot, calmly, confidently, and not-weirdly walk up to someone and introduce yourself: "I would like to speak with the Most Worshipful Master, if that's at all possible, please and thank you."
Explain who you are, what you do, a tiny bit of personal details, and inform him (or whoever is willing to listen) that you would like to apply for membership.
Usually they'll schedule someone to drop in to your house and/or meet you somewhere to get a handle on who you are.

Also if you're interested in the rituals in an academic sense, my library is usually linked in the Veeky Forums books thread, and then there's this little gem:

stichtingargus.nl/vrijmetselarij/ritualen_en.html

(If you don't want to join or don't care about ruining the surprise, the above link is a great resource for identifying abject liars trying to demonize the system)

Are you a mason?

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My relative is a Mason and from the sounds of it he's quite important, would that help me in?

Mainstream newspapers in my country report on freemason elections.

Nope, I'm OTO but I associate with a shitload of Freemasons, Martinists, etc.

Maybe, ask him for the app instead of doing a cold-call to a lodge.

Great, maybe you can answer a few questions for me:
When it comes to all the hermetic shit, do masons actually believe this or is it just all a metaphor?

The secrecy of the rituals kinda gives me the creeps and hints at something sinister, like a grown up version of fraternity hazing. Especially considering the death and rebirth symbolism and the blindfolds and everything, it wouldn't surprise me if some of those rituals would be quite dangerous or even potentially lethal. What do you make of: foxnews.com/story/2004/03/09/man-killed-during-initiation-at-masonic-lodge.html

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>They seem really keen on hermetic stuff, but for the purpose of self improvement of the soul

Thanks for the laugh

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What do you know of the Lautaro lodge? Is it a Mapuche variant or do they just use his name?

>Detective Lt. Jack Fitzpatrick said the ritual that went "tragically wrong" involves making a loud noise to frighten the new member.
>"The ceremony was designed to create a state of anxiety," he said.
>The lieutenant said the Masons sat James in a chair and placed cans on a small platform around his head.
>The alleged shooter, Albert Eid, was standing approximately 20 feet away holding a gun, Fitzpatrick said at a news conference. When the gun was fired, a man who had been holding a stick out of sight was supposed to knock the cans off the platform to make the inductee think they had been struck by bullets, he said.
>Eid had two guns — one with blanks and one with real bullets — and apparently pulled the wrong one out of his pocket and fired, shooting James in the face, the lieutenant said.
>"We believe it was completely accidental," Fitzpatrick said. Eid was quite "stunned and distraught" at James' death, he said.

My bullshit detector tells me that this ritual DOES use actual life ammunition and that the shooter always carries a second blank gun in order to explain the scene to the police in case something goes wrong.

>implying there is a 50 year old man on Veeky Forums

nice LARP

>When it comes to all the hermetic shit, do masons actually believe this or is it just all a metaphor?
Depends on the Freemason in question.
I know a lot who just use it as a social function. English Freemasonry gets more mystical as you get into larger cities, and outside of America. If your local lodge is in a town with 6k people in the middle of Bumblefuck Nebraska, you're not getting much more than basic Christianity with a touch of esoterica.

>The secrecy of the rituals kinda gives me the creeps
Again, they've been public for, like, a couple centuries. Anyone who thinks the ritual scripts are highly secret hasn't been looking hard enough.

>fraternity hazing
That was pretty much done away with in the 50's-60's.

> it wouldn't surprise me if some of those rituals would be quite dangerous or even potentially lethal
I mean that happens when you're waving around swords. Safety protocols are in place but if someone slips and stumbles into your ritual saber, then you just have to hope it's dull enough you don't get impaled.

There's no more risk than horsing around with your moron friends (not that YOUR friends are morons but you get my point, people horseplay rougher with buddies than happens at a lodge).

>foxnews
Sounds like exactly the sort of hazing that was sanctioned against decades ago, and a clear reason of why it's banned.

> English Freemasonry gets more mystical as you get into larger cities, and outside of America.
I'm German. How about Germany?

>Sounds like exactly the sort of hazing that was sanctioned against decades ago, and a clear reason of why it's banned.
But that happened in 2004!

>Again, they've been public for, like, a couple centuries. Anyone who thinks the ritual scripts are highly secret hasn't been looking hard enough.
How did they leak? And if they all got leaked, how come they are still pretending it's a secret?

>What do you know of Lautaro lodge
Nothing, first I've heard about it.
Freemasonry in Latin America is a bit of a wild west given that it was predominately a Continental form of Freemasonry squabbling for territory with English/Anglican outfits.

I'd probably avoid them.

Satyr (author of The Black Lodge of Santa Cruz) is like 50ish.

Can you tell me anything about the schism in freemasonry?

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>OTO
What's that? Google pointed me to the Ordo Templi Orientis.

Bingo!

>They're communistic occultists.
This but it's not hard to figure out early on if you pay attention to their ethics. The brotherhood of man ethic is synonymous with universalism and globalism. They have a slight egalitarian bent I don't find useful. You'll remember the exiting ceremony.

Germany has a long history of less "orthodox" groups, it was where Weishaupt activated the Perfectibilists, has a strong Continental base, and was the origin point for the OGRC. You even have Fraternitas Saturni.

So if you're looking for hermetica/esoterica there are probably better outfits for you to join than basic Freemasonry.

>But that happened in 2004!
Yeah, people are dumb, and ignore safety measures/go rogue.

>How did they leak?
Ex-members handed out ritual scripts to...whoever. First really large public leak was Duncan's Ritual, and various lodge manuals make their way into libraries all the time.

>pretending
I mean what do you mean, exactly?
They're not. It's common knowledge that rituals have been public for some time. Freemasonry generally doesn't care that much; they'll switch up some grips or kewords and move on.

Which one?

Ordo Templi Orientis is a Thelemic outfit that originated with a couple of Germans who were interested in Gnosticism and esoterica, rooted in the Rites of Memphis & Mizraim, and then Crowley re-wrote the rituals from the ground up ca like 1918-1921.

It's a shit club
t. Grandad was a freemason and all he ever talked about was how gay it was

My local lodge put an ad in the paper for an open house. So that or a referral.

>Which one?
Continental vs. Regular for a start.

What did he tell you?

They're pretty ignorant as an org. about certain symbols and obscure information on what ancients. Kind of sad. I actually mistook them for tektons before my initiation.

What ancients knew*

Sometimes my local body does pancake breakfasts.

Anglican Freemasons will tell you it's because the GO recognized an irregular body in Louisiana. I'm a GO sympathizer, so I'd put the split farther back around 1736. It all came to a head when the GO decided it didn't want to adopt the same Keystones as the Anglicans and drew up a variant constitution in 1877, because they were fine with atheists.

GO?

Grand Orient, as opposed to Grand Lodge.

So what's the difference between continental and regular?

He basically said it was a bunch of what we'd call LARPing with some infusion of fuck Catholics, he didn't hang around there very long though tbqh because he found it really tedious and much less fun than the union hall

There are a number of points of difference: For the Grand Orient, any holy text can be the Book of Law, admittance of seculars, generally co-masonic (men and women together), generally more politically active.

So, more leftist?

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I mean if that's the narrative you want to push, sure, whatever.

It does fly in the face of established history like what went down with P2 and the generally autonomous nature of the Grand Orient system, but don't let that stop you from memeing.

>Mason's
>leftist
Maybe classically leftist

So, classical liberalism with enlightenment values?

>Masonic lodge around the world would have been long since shutdown.
They've been chased out of towns with torches and pitchforks on more than one occasion.

Pretty much yes

>enlightenment
>occult rituals with the goal of self improvement

Doesn't it makes that romantic as well?

In its later 1800's years absolutely

Um, I'd be somewhat reluctant to describe the rites and initiations as "occult rituals for the goal of self improvement", these cats *generally* aren't theurgists trying evoke an archangel for a spot of luck, though there can be some overlap with that sort of thing in membership.

Adam Weishaupt and the bavarian influence on masonic tradition that came out of that era.

^This is also a thing.
It would also depend on your appendant body, if any, for example SRIA is going to be giving you a big ol' pile of alchemy and kabbalah.

The really neat occult-y romantic ritual stuff got deactivated in all but name for the last hundred years. It'd be NICE if SOMEONE either in the College of Rites or the Grand Orient chartered a Memphis/Mizraim body beyond the third degree.

If you ever read Weishaupt's rituals the influence was rather the other way around.

Freemasonry never really adopted Weishaupt's keywords, grips, signs, modes of recognition, or even ritual content. What relationship there was to normative Freemasonry was in their middle grades.

They liked to pull folks out of Freemasonic bodies because they already had some initiations under their belt, but if they got a new recruit who didn't have that kind of background Weishaupt did a redaction of Freemasonic degrees so they didn't have to feed the candidate into any one particular Freemasonic outfit, with a bunch of little variations and tweaks.

All of this has been in the original Germans since Bavaria cracked down on them, and recently in English through "Secret School of Wisdom" which is a fairly recent (and the only) translation of the ritual corpus into English.

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Didn't expect you not on /x/

I used to host some /omg/ threads on Veeky Forums until we got banned and told by a mod that we're off topic (but I guess preggo anne frank, constant nazi threads, the daily Romanov circlejerk, seven thousand "stoicism and buddhism are the same" threads, and fucking Mundus Millenialis are perfectly fine).

desuarchive.org/his/search/subject/occultism/

To be fair Mundus Millenials threeads gets deleted once a mod wakes up

Until you get sacrificed, maybe

I mean you're right but I just have a serious case of the salties because I guess the archaeology of astrotheological mysticism is less on topic than constant outflow of garbage this board has had for like two years.

Between Rei and Imperial Cult I have a really hard time coming here some days

>Imperial Cult
It's going to sound super mean but I'm glad that dude is Veeky Forums's problem now instead of /x/.

He should be banned on site for the redditor fuck he is

Bro you can't just join the Masons. They have to want you to joint. This is why they aren't a cult, they're very selective in who they ask to join.

It's not an evil organisation it's literally just connections between the rich and the powerful and they use this to acquire more wealth. Nothing sinister about it at all

It has nothing to do with wealth dude, if your relatives were mason you can become a mason regardless of class, they aren't some super elite organization

You're just going to pay membership fees and waste your free time attending seminars for little concrete benefits.

>Like a more self aware version of Christianity.
Honestly it sounds like you want to join the Martinists/Rosicrucians then, they're the ones who are actually big on Christian mysticism.

I dunno mate that social network is a pretty concrete benefit, particularly if you're in a low population region.

>Rosicrucians then, they're the ones who are actually big on Christian mysticism.
Good news is you can kill two birds with one stone if you're lucky enough to live near a SRIA body.

I've heard about the Rosicrucians while doing some research on alchemy. Can you give me a quick rundown? How do they differ from vanilla Hermeticism?

Just a social club for old blokes desu.

Except in Scotland and Ireland, then it gets weirdly political.

More reliance on Christian mysticism, canon, and symbolic mechanics than Corpus Hermeticum or like the Neoplatonists or w/e the case may be.

Much of it is tied up with John Dee's identification of LVX as the keyword of mystical attainment in the Hieroglyphic Monad.

>Except in Scotland and Ireland, then it gets weirdly political
Mason's are much the same in that regard

I thought we were talking about masons?

I get it man, your threads were very high quality and the infodumps on the history of various traditions were welcome to me.

Something completely different: The reason I've started to look into Freemasonry in the fast place was that I am working on an indie game with an alchemy theme. I'd like to imagine that Freemasons have some really neat book collections on all that occult stuff. I live very close to Frankfurt and the lodge there is apparently one of the oldest in Germany. If I approached them and kindly asked them to allow me assess to their library because I want to learn more about hermetic occult symbolism, they'd probably tell me to fuck off, right?

Also what's your take on the Emerald Tablet? It's not a tablet and not cast in emerald. If the original text was in Phoenician, then why can I only find a Latin version and various German and English translations based on the Latin one?

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Im scared to come off as "too interested" or seeming like an infiltrator of some sort

If it's an explicitly Freemasonic library, probably.

The emerald tablet is extracted from an Arabic grimoire (Secretum Secretorum) and is a grand total of fourteen sentences as exemplified by Newton's translation thereof:

Here's the entire thing:

"Tis true without lying, certain & most true.
That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing
And as all things have been & arose from one by the mediation of one: so all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation.
The Sun is its father, the moon its mother, the wind hath carried it in its belly, the earth is its nurse.
The father of all perfection in the whole world is here.
Its force or power is entire if it be converted into earth.
Separate thou the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross sweetly with great industry.
It ascends from the earth to the heaven & again it descends to the earth & receives the force of things superior & inferior.
By this means you shall have the glory of the whole world
& thereby all obscurity shall fly from you.
Its force is above all force. For it vanquishes every subtle thing & penetrates every solid thing.
So was the world created.
From this are & do come admirable adaptations whereof the means (or process) is here in this. Hence I am called Hermes Trismegist, having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world
That which I have said of the operation of the Sun is accomplished & ended."

I thought about joining the Odd Fellows but their last lodge that was close to me closed a long time ago and the other lodges are too far. The local Masons don't really seem to do much of anything and you only join if you plan on running for local political positions or higher church positions in a few years.

Sure, if you wanna go to hell.
youtu.be/dR4S5vexEyQ

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>Freemasonry is largely structured on the bible, of which the Hebrew old testament (Tanakh) is a part
Man do you guys accuse your own shadow of Jewish subversion when you get spook'd?

>33 masonic dubs

don't talk to me of my widows son ever again

or*

>memes
Elucidating historical insight, user.

Most of the great literary figures were masons. My friend is a Lewis, which helped him get off charges.

I'm considering joining when I'm a little older. I went to an open house a while back and it got me quite interested.

Any information or opinions about Freemasonry in the Netherlands?

Bump for more occult shit.

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bumping a good thread

>They're communistic occultists.
This sounds awesome. If I weren't a complete bum who probably wouldn't be allowed to join I would sign up now.