It’s a bit hard to explain Freemasonry. There’s the intellectual part of it, there’s the humanitarian part of it, a bit of spiritual discourse “belief in supreme being and immortality of the soul” and then there’s certainly some theoretical western esotericism.. mostly, though, it’s just people trying to be a bit better, and setting of positive examples in the community.
It’s really cool how they’ve used sacred geometry and math to define architecturally beautiful spaces
A wise man once said (to me): in order to understand texts like these, one must look to the meaning of the words as they were at the time they were written.
So for example the phrase “a peculiar system of Morality veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols” was composed by Robert Preston in the late 18th century, around 250 years ago.
Language has changed in the past 250 years.
“Peculiar” nowadays means odd, but back then it meant singular or unique, without the negative connotation.
“Morality” nowadays means a set of principles which distinguish right from wrong, but 250 years ago, it also meant the method of teaching those principles (as in, “morality plays”). Etc etc etc.
Freemasonry is thus the perfect example of a “Tradition” – something which is “handed across” from teacher to student, who in turn becomes a teacher of new students in their own right. To understand Freemasonry properly ultimately one must take on the role of a historian and seek to understand the sources whence it derives.
