Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry

Rating:
Summary: Look at the evidence
Review: Folks, the evidence that the Templars are the forerunners of the Masons is enormous. Lynn Picknett's book The Templar Revelation, the works of Baigent and Lincoln, and more just can't be ignored. Those who say that Freemasonry was founded by workingmen in Great Britain are people who are more emotionally comfortable with simple explanations.
One of the most interesting aspects of this whole Templar-Magdalene-alternate to standard Christian worldview genre is this: the importance of Egypt in the development of Western culture. We were taught as children to think of ancient Egypt as a bizarre hotbed of mummies and Sphinxes, with sideways drawings of cool people and animals, as having captured our spiritual forefathers (the Hebrews) but as hopelessly benighted pagan ignorami. This just won't cut it any more!

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating historical speculation. But there's more.
Review: Robinson does his homework and writes well. I read this book several years ago, and it sparked my long-term interest in reading about Freemasonry's verifiable origins. Recently, this led me to read 'The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century, 1590-1710', by David Stevenson, which I now recommend more highly than 'Born in Blood'.

'Scotland's Century' is the only work on the origins of Freemasonry I have ever seen that ignores the movement's vast myth-making literature and focuses instead on the surviving records of the earliest known Masonic lodges. Stevenson--who teaches history at the University of St. Andrews--paints a solid, sober, believable portrait of Freemasonry's rather prosaic origins in the operative masonic lodges of early 17th-century Scotland.

Stevenson's book is a welcome and refreshing antidote to all the junk that has been written about Freemasonry in the past three centuries. It explodes Masonic authors' extravagant claims for an origin in ancient civilizations and possession of power supernatural secrets. It also undermines anti-Masonic authors' equally bizarre accusations of pacts with supernatural forces of evil. It replaces these fanciful images with the story of a remarkable human institution whose recent, humble, workaday origins are far more interesting than its myths.

'Born in Blood' is lots of fun to read, and I still recommend it highly. But the tale told in 'Scotland's Century' is probably a lot closer to what really happened.