>>40676320
>Which makes me wonder... what was masonry called prior to "freemasonry". I'm not talking about which Templar group founded the first lodge. I'm talking about the tradition of lodges. What is that? Are ancient temples just lodges?
It's not the continuation of some grand tradition... that's the mistake people make.
Masons don't even claim such, despite what so many seem to think.
Guilds were big in Medieval Europe. There were guilds for everything. You started off as an Apprentice, eventually you got recognized as a Journeyman, and hopefully you eventually made it to being a Master in your guild.
Medieval guilds existed in a religious time. Everyone speculated about everything in religious terms. And so did the Stonemason guilds, especially given that they were building churches and cathedrals. God built the heavens and the world and they were building buildings. Medieval thinking relied a lot on thinking in analogies. So they thought in terms of building King Solomon's Temple, which is representative of the soul, and tools as reflecting important values and lessons.
As society moved into enlightenment times, wealthy outsiders saw their philosophy and were interested in it. The stoneworkers were "operative masons", while these wealthy outsiders who started associating with them became speculative masons. And it's out of speculative masonry that what we know as Freemasonry started developing in earnest.
There is no ancient tradition. Claims to that came later, by people trying to impose a grandiosity that didn't really exist (it makes sense from an allegoric standpoint but there's no historical evidence for that). The attempts to frame it in terms of the Mystery Schools was done by those who wanted to move it away from the Christian traditions in which it arose.

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>the most powerful crime mafia in the world >can blackmail world leaders >they've murdered royalty and presidents and got away…

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>can blackmail world leaders
>they've murdered royalty and presidents and got away…