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The York Rite

I bought Robert Davis’ The Mason’s Words, because I wanted to understand American Freemasonry better, in particular the ritual diversity. This proves to be a difficult subject and even though Davis sketches an interesting portrait of the prehistory of American Freemasonry, I was still unsure how things developed towards the current situation. I did some asking around and digging and perhaps what follows is helpful to someone in some way.

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Frieda Harris (1877-1962)

In August 2025 I got an email from Ebay that a sale had been added concerning the Masonic tracing boards of Frieda Harris. Apparently I had been looking for them and created a reminder at Ebay. The description was: “Frieda Harris Masonic Tracing Boards Litho Prints 1976 1st Printing” and the price was fixed.

I quickly looked around the internet to find out if the fixed price was reasonable, but I did not find much. There is one past auction in which I cannot see the price. Taking the gamble, I quickly made the purchase to prevent somebody else being faster than me. Then it was waiting for a couple of weeks for the prints to arrive.

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Writings of Arturo Reghini

Writings of Arturo Reghini (1878-1946) are quite unknown outside Italy, but things are beginning to change. I heard of Reghini long ago, but it was only until Fabio Venzi’s book Studies on Traditional Freemasonry (2013) that I could read something of him. Then in 2016 there finally was an extensive biography with one translated text. Also, even though the two had their disagreements, Julius Evola (1898-1974) did not leave out the texts of “Pietro Negri” from the UR/KRUR texts that are translated to English as the three volumes of Introduction to Magic (2001, 2019, 2021).

A while ago I ran into the website La Melagrana (‘the pomegranate’) which contains 25 texts of Reghini in Italian. Most of them are descent PDFs (a few are scanned books) which I could just open in Microsoft Word en translate to Dutch. Sure, the translations are not great, but the texts are understandable. It took me a while to work through them all as the total covers quite a few pages. Unfortunately La Melagrana does not mention the sources or years of publication of the texts. Only when the author is listed as “Pietro Negri” I know that it is a (KR)UR text, but of the rest I have no idea.

I was quite surprised to learn that Reghini wrote more about Freemasonry than I expected. Several of the titles are entirely or partly about Masonic subjects. The entire range of subjects of the collection is fairly wide and the length of the texts are as well. They go from articles of a few pages that were initiatally published in articles (also UR/KRUR), to complete books.

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La Géométrie du Maçon

More and more valuable ancient documents become available to the larger public. There are a couple of massive Masonic archives that have been handed over to professional archives. These archives have started to digitize material and put it on their websites. So we have the famous collection of Johann Georg Burckhard Franz Kloß (also: Kloss) (1787-1854). The “Bibliotheca Klossiana” was gifted by the long time Grand Master of the Grand Orient of the Netherlands, Willem Frederik Karel (Frits) (1797-1881) to the Grand Orient which has digitized it all and the result is freely available on the website of the Dutch Museum of Freemasonry (1). The Kloss archive is massive and contains many old rituals, correspondence, histories and what not. The archives of the Grand Orient de France, the largest Masonic organisation in France, was confiscated by the Germans during World War II. During the liberation, the Russians ran into the… Read More »La Géométrie du Maçon

Stephansdom figure

Recently I was in Wien/Vienna, Austria and I thought to find the figure that the following image is based on. I know this image from Farwerck and I had the idea that he gives Guido von List as a source for his image, but I cannot find (anymore) where he says that. It occurred to me that I never saw a photo of the image where this drawing was based on, so I wanted to find out if it is really a figure of the Stephansdom and if it still exists. Let us first start to trace some sources for the image. The image above is from Farwerck’s posthumous book Noordeuropese Mysteriën en hun Sporen tot Heden (1978), below right. A slightly different version of the image appears in Noord-Europa, een der Bronnen van de Maçonnieke Symboliek (1955), below left. Also in the 1954 Het Teken des Levens has the… Read More »Stephansdom figure

Pierre Cubique

Spoiler alert. This text is about an item/image, variations of which still appear in some French (style) versions of the Rite Moderne (IInd order), the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite (14º) and Memphis-Misraim (2º/4º). I do not explain the images on the “cubic stone” or its place in the ritual. The text is mostly a search for the origin of the image, but if you are afraid of seeing an image that is used in a degree you have yet to reach, remember this text for another time.

A couple of years ago, I bought two of the coloured prints that Adam McLean partly thanks his alchemical fame to. I went for not too obviously alchemical prints and opted for the Masonic one on the right. It is dated 2012.

I knew this “Cubischer Stein” from another source. It is a four sided cubic that is often displayed folded out. McLean took one side and the top for his image.

The image I knew was this one (but it took some effort to find it again):

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Schizoid culture and the Russian esoteric underground

I fell down a Russian rabbit hole. A while ago I ran into a ‘spiritual auto biography’ of a Dutch woman. The reason was that she was shortly member of a mixed gender lodge of Freemasons, but in her book she mentions “spiritual Russians”. It turned out she actually helps publishing books of one of them: Konstantin Serebrov. I have not found when Serebrov was born and if he still lives, but the best thing I found is that he was born: “in the Caucasus region in the fifties of the last century” (1), so there is a good chance that he is still around. In his books, Serebrov describes how he met his spiritual “Master G.” and follows him around the esoteric underground in Russia in the 1980’ies. “Master G.” was Vladimir Stepanov (1941-2011) whose name led me to the “Iuzhinskii Kruzhok” (‘Iuzhinskii Circle’, sometimes spelled ‘Yuzhinsky’). A few… Read More »Schizoid culture and the Russian esoteric underground

From operative to speculative alchemy

You may have ran into the discussion when and how Freemasonry went from being “operative” (workmen doing their job) to “speculative” (thinking about the symbolism of the job and its tools). A similar distinction is sometimes made for Alchemy. Some alchemists actually tried to make gold from base metals, while others called such people “puffers” and were of the opinion that the transformation should take place within the alchemist himself. In a 1894 article in six parts What Is Alchemy? the British author Arthur Waite (1857-1942) suggests that alchemy had a similar transition from ‘operative’ and ‘speculative’, or at least, that these two approaches existed. Waite uses the descriptions: “physical and transcendental alchemy” and wonders where both originate. Waite has various places of ‘origin’ of Alchemy: Egypt/Greece, Byzantium, Arabia and Syria. Later, following a lead of Helena Blavatsky, he adds China to the list. Alchemy in these countries and regions… Read More »From operative to speculative alchemy