18th century

In the novel, the 18th century is the hinge between medieval Templar legend and modern secret-society mythology. Aglie describes Freemasonry’s transformation from working lodges into fashionable philosophical associations, and the researchers fold that account into a much larger supposed history of hidden lineages. The period matters not as a settled explanation of events, but as material repeatedly rearranged to make a secret Plan seem to run through history.

Lodges, craft, and invented ancestry

Aglie links the Templars to early associations of master masons said to have formed during the building of the Temple of Solomon. In his account, some Templars joined artisan confraternities after their persecution, bringing with them a story of vengeance for Jacques de Molay. The masons’ own legend of Hiram, the Temple’s murdered architect, could then be joined to the Templar grievance: two tales of a slain figure and a duty to avenge him became a bridge between medieval knights and later lodges.

Aglie distinguishes the working lodges of London from the later symbolic and philosophical Masonry that attracted men of standing. He says that, in the 18th century, respectable gentlemen sought admission to operative Masonry, changing its character. Desaguliers, a popularizer of Newton, encouraged the Protestant pastor Anderson to draft constitutions for a deist association of Masonic brothers. Anderson’s account gave the confraternities an ancestry reaching back four thousand years to the founders of the Temple of Solomon. The historical claim thus serves a social purpose in Aglie’s telling: it gives the lodges an august genealogy as they acquire new members and meanings.

The lodge becomes a meeting place for groups seeking different kinds of advantage. Its apron, trowel, and T-square perform the signs of craft, while the ancient pedigree it advertises attracts aristocrats. The bourgeoisie, in turn, gains access to noble company and, in Aglie’s wry account, permission to wear a short sword. The lodge helps stage contact between inherited rank and new capital: nobles encounter producers of wealth, while those producers seek recognition and elevation.

Degrees, secrecy, and conflicting uses

Aglie treats the multiplication of Masonic degrees as a technology of hierarchy. London Masonry, he says, had three degrees—apprentice, fellow craft, and master—whereas the Scottish rite multiplied them, multiplying at the same time levels of initiation and secrecy. He describes Scottish Masonry as a Franco-German invention and connects its development to Ramsay, whose direct association of Masonry with the Templars he declines to discuss in detail. Aglie suspects Jesuit influence behind Ramsay, but presents that suspicion as his own conjecture, not as demonstrated fact.

The crucial irony in Aglie’s account is that the elaborate grades need not protect an actual secret. He says there was no secret; if there had been one, the growing complexity of initiation might have seemed to justify it. The structure could instead persuade members that a secret existed and make them feel like heirs to a hidden mission. Aglie characterizes the appeal as a promise that respectable tradesmen might become princes of vengeance. Secrecy therefore functions not only as concealment but as an inducement: the appearance of inaccessible knowledge can create belief in the knowledge itself.

The lodges gather an unusually mixed membership. Aglie recalls churchmen, barons, shopkeepers, and members of royal families among the expanding societies, with some lodges associated with military circles and others with sociability or status. He names Goethe, Lessing, Mozart, and Voltaire in connection with the Templar Strict Observance, and places figures such as Cagliostro, Mesmer, Casanova, d’Holbach, and d’Alembert within the broader culture of lodges. His inventory deliberately unsettles any single account of Masonry: the same institutional form can contain philosophical ambition, political plotting, fashionable membership, occult practice, and pleasure-seeking.

That mixture also makes the lodges vulnerable to contradiction. Aglie observes that members of the same lodge could find themselves on opposing sides when the Revolution began, and that the brotherhood seemed unable to recover from the division. The Neuf Soeurs lodge, for instance, welcomed Franklin, whom Aglie describes as pursuing secular political aims, while another grand master pursued an elixir of longevity and died after poisoning himself in his experiments. Cagliostro likewise appears in incompatible roles: an inventor of Egyptian rites and a participant in the Diamond Necklace Affair. In this telling, the lodge is not a unified agent directing history but a crowded institution in which incompatible interests coexist.

From history to conspiracy

The researchers’ larger construction depends on treating the period’s competing societies as successive manifestations of a single hidden tradition. Aglie, however, draws a distinction between esotericism and the 19th-century occultism that publicized fragments of esoteric learning. Esotericism, as he defines it, seeks knowledge transmitted through symbols and closed to the uninitiated; occultism is its visible surface, marked by the rush to publish secrets of magic, theurgy, cabala, and tarot. His distinction makes silence appear as evidence of authentic initiation, while public display becomes evidence of a lesser, exhibitionist pursuit—a distinction that can protect the theory from disproof by making absence itself meaningful.

The conversation also places 18th-century Masonic stories inside the researchers’ later account of anti-Semitic conspiracy literature. Diotallevi attributes the late-century anti-Semitic campaign to the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Russia, and Belbo expands this into a fabricated genealogy in which supposed branches of a Jerusalemite group become neo-Templars, scientists and bankers, and Russian conspirators. The dialogue illustrates the Plan’s method rather than establishing these claims as history: political and religious conflicts are made to look like the operations of inherited secret organizations.

The text then traces how accusations change hands. It describes Jesuit writers adopting an existing document and attributing it to Jews, followed by later authors who reused the supposed Plan. In its account of the Protocols, the novel relates the text to Maurice Joly’s political pamphlet against Napoleon III and to earlier material attributed to Sue; it then recounts how the Times identified Joly’s book as a source. Rather than accepting this disclosure as the end of the conspiracy story, the researchers’ reasoning converts plagiarism into further proof: the supposed author becomes an initiate who knew the Plan, and the alleged resemblance between the Plan and Templar aims is treated as confirmation of Templar authorship.

The narration makes the cost of that method unmistakable when Belbo extends the Plan to the Nazi genocide of Jews. He imagines the bureaucratic stages of persecution as a search for a concealed message held by a representative of the Thirty-six Invisibles, and connects that imagined search to telluric currents and the hollow-earth theory. This is Belbo’s conspiratorial reinterpretation, not an explanation validated by the novel’s historical account. Its grotesque substitution of occult pattern for the persecution and murder of real people demonstrates how the Plan absorbs evidence of atrocity and makes it serve its own mythology.

The century as a machine for making continuity

The 18th century’s function in these passages is consequently double. It supplies the researchers with institutions, symbols, and disputes that can be arranged into a continuous Templar tradition; at the same time, the novel shows how contingent and divided those institutions were in Aglie’s account. Operative craft, fashionable sociability, political ambition, occult experiment, and invented antiquity do not naturally resolve into one secret command. They become one only when the interpreters connect them.

This contrast links the discussion of Freemasonry to the novel’s larger critique of conspiratorial reading. A genuine historical fragment—an old symbol, a lodge’s claimed ancestry, a text borrowed or forged—can be made to corroborate another fragment once resemblance is treated as proof. The century’s proliferation of degrees and stories about hidden knowledge provides an especially fertile setting for that process: the more elaborate the imagined lineage becomes, the more its own elaboration can be mistaken for evidence. The 18th century is thus both a chapter in the researchers’ invented history and a demonstration of how that history is manufactured.