Anderson's Constitutions

Anderson's Constitutions are the rules Protestant pastor Anderson drafted in 1721 for English Freemasonry. In the novel, they mark a decisive step in the shift from working masons’ lodges to a deist, philosophical fraternity: the constitutions gave the emerging brotherhood an ancient pedigree and helped make its symbols and social promise attractive to both aristocrats and the bourgeoisie.

Origins and Historical Setting

The timeline places the Great Lodge’s creation in London in 1717, followed four years later by Anderson’s drafting of the English Masonic constitutions. It also records the initiation of Peter the Great in London and his founding of a lodge in Russia in 1721, setting the text amid Freemasonry’s early institutional expansion.

A later account traces the drafting to Desaguliers, a popularizer of Newton, who encouraged Anderson to prepare constitutions for a lodge of Masonic brothers described as deist in persuasion. Anderson, in turn, represented the Masonic confraternities as corporations extending back four thousand years to the founders of the Temple of Solomon. The text’s authority therefore rests not only on its role in organizing a lodge, but on its assertion of a remote history.

From Operative Craft to Philosophical Masonry

The constitutions belong to a transition between operative masonry and symbolic masonry. The account describes genuine masons’ lodges in eighteenth-century London, then explains that respectable gentlemen with leisure gradually sought entry into them. As the lodges admitted men who were not practicing masons, the craft’s working identity gave way to a symbolic and philosophical one.

The change is embodied in the Masonic apron, trowel, and T square. These tools served as a masquerade of the craft’s origins while allowing the new fraternity to preserve a recognizable connection to the builders’ trade. The ancient history claimed by Anderson’s constitutions thus gave symbolic masonry a genealogy: it could present itself not as a new association of gentlemen, but as the inheritor of an immemorial brotherhood.

Social Function and Later Templar Claims

The Masonic fashion drew aristocrats through the promise of genealogical distinction, while appealing especially to the bourgeoisie by admitting them into company with nobles and permitting them to wear a short sword. The explanation is reciprocal: nobles needed a place to meet new producers of capital, while those producers sought ennoblement. The constitutions helped frame a shared institution in which those unequal groups could encounter one another under the sign of ancient fraternity.

The text’s early antiquity claims should be distinguished from the later direct Templar connection. The speaker asserts that Templars had links with early lodges of master masons associated with the building of Solomon’s Temple, and that some knights may have joined artisan confraternities after persecution. But the direct relation, in this telling, was established later by Ramsay, whose preaching gave rise to the Scottish wing of Masonry; the speaker suspects Jesuit influence and declines to discuss Ramsay further. Anderson’s constitutions therefore belong to the institutional beginnings of symbolic Masonry, while the explicit Templar genealogy enters the story afterward.