All Cults Are Equal, but Some Are More Equal than Others: Freemasonry and the Double Standard

Freemasonry

All Cults Are Equal, but Some Are More Equal than Others…

By Valérie Dole, member of the CICNS

Introduction The masonic orders in France What difference, in the texts, between a masonic lodge and a “cult”? Behind the scenes of a women’s lodge The Freemasons and the police in France

An initiatory order, with rites, rituals and symbols, in which the follower travels a path of evolution through the High Grades and the Orders of wisdom to reach the status of Grand Master… after having gone through a period of initiation and sometimes waited up to two years before being accepted, where men and women are clearly separated, where proselytism is practised in order to become known and, of course, to recruit new followers… what does that make you think of?

Reading the texts that follow concerning Freemasonry, one catches oneself dreaming:

When will there be “airtime” for everyone?

A press favourable to each, or at the very least equitable and open to every form of spirituality in France?

When will there be a “book fair” open to all, including the new spiritualities?

The right for everyone to follow openly and without fear the “method of spiritual awakening” of their choice?

The right “to flourish and develop one’s consciousness” along the paths that suit one?

To realise an “ideal of universality”?

The freedom for everyone “to choose the Light that can best illuminate their Being”?

To “gather freely” for “profound spiritual reflections” without becoming the opprobrium of the local community?

Might Freemasonry be entitled to preferential treatment?

If what Alain Pozarnik, Grand Master of the Grande Loge de France, says is true: in what way does Freemasonry distinguish itself from the other French spiritual movements which for the most part have no other intention than to apply the wise counsel of the wise: “Know thyself”?

We will doubtless be met with the reply that a number of “cults” are dangerous, according to ten criteria of dangerousness established principally to serve the aims assigned to the Renseignements Généraux. But it is an open secret: a single one of these criteria erected into a bogeyman applies at most to one group in 1,000. Must all the others suffer for it? Or can we envisage that the preferential treatment granted to Freemasonry be extended to all?

If that is not possible, it will one day be necessary to say why… unless Freemasonry is something other than what its followers say it is.

And let there be no mistake: we are not asking for a modification of the treatment granted to Freemasonry, and whether the rights conferred on it are deserved or not is not our purpose. We do wish, on the other hand, that they be accessible to all, so that “human rights” become something other than mere privileges of freemasons.

The Freemasons in France: Grand Orient de France

(GODF, founded in 1773): the leading French masonic obedience.

1,030 lodges, 42,000 members (35,000 masters, 10,000 high initiates, average age 56, annual budget 5 million euros). Abandonment of the Great Architect of the Universe (God) in the statutes of the Grand Orient de France in 1877.

Grande Loge nationale française (GLNF, founded in 1913): 1,400 lodges, 30,000 members.

Grande Loge de France (GLF, founded in 1738): 700 lodges, 26,000 members.

Fédération française du Droit humain (DH): 500 lodges, 14,000 members.

Grande Loge féminine de France (GLFF): 340 lodges, 11,000 members.

Grande Loge traditionnelle et symbolique Opéra (GLTSO): 170 lodges, 3,600 members.

Grande Loge mixte de France (GLMF): 80 lodges, 1,800 members.

Grande Loge mixte universelle (GLMU): 50 lodges, 800 members.

Grande Loge féminine de Memphis-Misraïm (GLFMM): 35 lodges, 850 members.

Loge nationale française (LNF): 25 lodges, 250 members.

That is about 150,000 members in all.

The French Socialist Party has since 1981 been the instrument of the Grand Orient de France: “One could not say today with precision which, of the Socialist Party or the Grand Orient de France, has taken over the other” (Le Monde of 13 August 1981).

In June 2001, nine French obediences decided to constitute among themselves a common space of dialogue, work and expression named “La Maçonnerie Française” (or the masonic institute of France). It was in this capacity that, a few months later, its nine grand masters and grand mistresses were received together by the President of the Republic, Jacques Chirac. This initiative evidently marks a new stage in French masonic relations and makes it possible to establish a “harmonious organisation of freemasonry in France”.

The principles evoked below resemble, to a fault, those of numerous spiritual minorities… One struggles to see the difference that would make the lodges spaces more secure than those of the said “cults”.

Is masonic teaching more oral than written?

“The teaching permitting the evolution, the perfecting and the completion of man must be adapted to each of the seekers so that he acquires the total freedom proper to an accomplished Man. This path, which is travelled in the secrecy of hearts and of the spirit, has never been appreciated by the political or religious authorities, which has led these transmissions to be oral.”

“Freemasonry is the last bastion of the values that our society seeks so ardently.”

Can a freemason publish articles and books? Does he not risk unveiling the famous masonic secret?

The freemason is a free man of good morals. In freemasonry there is no secret since it is solely a matter of a method of personal awakening. Everything can be said. The difficulty is to live it. The great error often consists in dressing a possible discovery in one’s old ideas and one’s fears. Instead of setting off on a journey, one imagines the journey. The true masonic secret is the path we take to go from the man we are to the Man we could become. It is therefore a personal, intimate, deep and unsayable secret.

“The Freemasons, in the common pursuit of one and the same ideal, recognise one another by words, signs and touches which they communicate to each other traditionally in Lodge during the initiatory ceremonies. These words, signs and touches, like the rites and the symbols, are the object of an inviolable secret and cannot be communicated to anyone who is not qualified to know them.”

The true masonic work is not occultist but spiritualist, and serious masonic books participate in the flourishing and the development of consciousness. They form part of the riches of humanity in evolution.

With airtime, if you please… “The Grande Loge de France speaks to you”

On the third Sunday of each month, at 9.40 a.m. on France Culture, members of the Grande Loge de France express themselves, in their own name, on points of their respective masonic journeys, giving the general public the opportunity to familiarise themselves with what constitutes both the unity and the diversity of viewpoints of the members of the Grande Loge de France. http://www.gldf.org/content/view/46/105/lang,fr/

Read on: http://www.lexpress.mu/display_article.php?news_id=30289

Women freemasons lift the veil

They have always acted in discretion, indeed in secrecy. But from time to time, they reveal themselves. To make the movement known but also, without however ever admitting it explicitly, to gain new followers. It was thus that the world president of the Grande Loge féminine de France (GLFF), Marie-Françoise Blanchet, and a few Mauritian women freemasons faced the press yesterday. A presentation of this lodge and of the two Mauritian branches, that of the Rose de l’Aurore and of the Flamboyant.

These lodges are 100% female. They are neither a religion nor a cult, Marie-Françoise Blanchet specifies. (there we are, it was enough to specify it…) With 10,000 members in France and 1,500 in some thirty countries, of whom 35 in Mauritius, the women freemasons of this obedience have as their objective to build a better world in liberty, fraternity and equality.

“At 35, I was a happy and fulfilled woman. But I felt that a little something was missing, and it was at that moment that a friend suggested freemasonry to me”, declares Marie-Françoise Blanchet who, since then, has found “that little spark” and has given her life “an additional dimension” through the rites, “spiritual reflection without religion and deep reflections” on a wide range of subjects with her sisters of the lodge.

The freemasons have penetrated the police more than any other professional body: 1 superintendent in 4 is said to be a brother. Almost as many among the officers. But fewer at the base.

by Laurent Chabrun, François Koch, Jean-Marie Pontaut, Romain Rosso (extracts)

(…) It is a troubling liaison. Police officers are attracted to the temples like moths to the light. “Because they see in freemasonry a great republican institution, and even, consciously or not, a great corps of the State”, explains Roger Dachez, president of the Institut maçonnique de France. “Because they feel unloved and misunderstood, they give their vote to discreet structures where they can meet to talk”, adds the former masonic counsel of a police union. Confronted with a gloomy and violent daily life, police officers, more than any other profession, would need to air their minds.

(..) A police officer from the north of France, a worshipful master at the GO, asserts that his obedience numbers precisely 460 police superintendents, serving or retired. “If one extrapolates to the two other great obediences, the Grande Loge nationale française (GLNF) and the Grande Loge de France (GLF), one could count up to 1 superintendent in 4”, this senior officer ventures.

For Eric Vanlerberghe, president of the Mutuelle of the Ministry of the Interior and himself initiated at the GO, this rate is about 20% of the 14,939 officers, that is to say nearly 3,000 lieutenants, captains and police commanders, mostly at the GO. Which is colossal in view of the total number of masons within the French population: 135,000.

The police services are not equal before masonry. Public security, the Renseignements Généraux (RG) and the CRS are said to be more masonic than the judicial police (PJ).

But the masons remain in key posts. Currently, for example, one of the deputy directors of the RG is said to wear the apron. Likewise, most of the most influential trade unionists of the “big house” are masons. The brothers are also very present in the associations internal to the police, like the mutualist orphanage or the Association nationale d’action sociale de la police nationale (Anas). Moreover, their power, real or exaggerated, still causes fear. To a young superintendent, assigned to the RG, an “old” director gave this advice: “Never turn the freemasons against you: they can break your career.”

(…) Pierre Joxe, himself an initiate, had stuffed his cabinet with brothers. Likewise, some civil servants of the Paris police prefecture must have thought that it would perhaps be good for their careers to be co-opted into the GLF, where Philippe Massoni occupies the highest functions.

(…) Certain masonic police officers have also been, in the past, mixed up in genuine affairs of State. “Freemasonry is a replica of French society”, pleads Vanlerberghe: “there are as many deviances as elsewhere.”

Valérie Dole is a member of the CICNS. An independent journalist, she has been studying the New Spiritualities since 1977. Head of News at the CICNS. Presse@cicns.net