William Stukeley (1687-1765) was without doubt one of the foremost British antiquarians of the 18th century. He was also a Freemason, being initiated on 6 January 1721 at the Salutation Tavern in Tavistock Street, London. During a meeting at the Fountain Tavern on the Strand on 27 December 1721, a new lodge was constituted by consent of the Grand Master, and Stukeley was chosen as its Master. He would later record how:

I was the first person made a freemason in London for many years. We had great difficulty to find members enough to perform the ceremony. Immediately after that it took a run, & ran itself out of breath thro’ the folly of its members.

Who was William Stukeley?

William Stukeley was born in Holbeach, Lincolnshire, the son of a lawyer. In 1703 he went to Bene’t College (later Corpus Christi College), Cambridge, where he studied medicine and took a keen interest in natural philosophy. In 1717 he moved from his home in Lincolnshire to London where he became a Fellow of the College of Physicians and the Royal Society, where he made many influential friends, including Sir Isaac Newton, with whom, among other things, he discussed gravity, astronomy and Solomon’s Temple. Another friend was John, 2nd Duke of Montagu, who had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on the same day as Stukeley. The Duke became Grand Master of the Freemasons on June 24 1721. Stukeley recorded that on that day the Grand Master “produc’d an old MS. of the Constitutions which he got in the West of England, 500 years old.” (Surtees Society Vol I.p.64). In 1717 Stukeley was involved in the re-establishment of the Society of Antiquaries, serving as its Secretary until he left London for Grantham in 1726. There he “set up a lodg of freemasons, wh[ich] lasted all the time I lived there”. In a letter to Samuel Gale of 6 February 1726/7, he described how he had “erected a small but well disciplined Lodge of Masons”. Stukeley pursued his interest in antiquities and religious history by making annual Summer trips to examine, measure and record the ancient stone “temples” of Avebury and Stonehenge in Wiltshire. His two books published on the subject in the 1740s would firmly establish as ‘fact’ his belief that the Druids had been their builders. This interest chimed in with the account of masonic history published in the Book of Constitutions (1723) commissioned by the Duke of Montagu from the pen of Presbyterian minister James Anderson (?1680-1739). Therein can be found the notion that the Craft of Masonry spread as far afield from the East as “the Celtic Edifices, erected by the ancient Gauls, and by the ancient Britains too, who were a colony of Celtes, long before the Romans invaded this island.” (Anderson. 1723. pp. 27-8.)
    But was this shared historical interest the only reason why Stukeley become a Freemason? In an account of his life published in 1753, he recorded that “his curiosity led him to be initiated into the mysterys of Masonry, suspecting it to be the remains of the mysterys of the antients.” This remark has been repeated in all accounts of Stukeley and his interest in Masonry, but what he meant by this statement has never really been answered, leaving a gap in our understanding of quite what he expected to gain from his initiation. But in the archives of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, I have recently discovered a manuscript essay written by Stukeley in 1735 which sets out exactly what he meant by “the mysterys of the antients”. The essay is titled Palaeographia Sacra, or Discourses on Monuments of Antiquity that relate to Sacred History Number II. A Dissertation on the Mysterys of the Antients in an explication of that famous piece of antiquity, the table of Isis.

The Document

Stukeley began this antiquarian essay by explaining how “Since I have been engaged in the study of divinity, I have endeavord (Such is my temper) to goe up the fountain head, as near as I could. There, we must expect the purest & unsophisticated truth...” Stukeley’s ambition was to discover “a scheme of the first, the antient, & patriarchal religion” that had first existed the world over before the birth of Moses and Christ. Though this original religion had been “the most excellent gift of heaven”, like his friend Newton he believed it had soon become corrupted by mankind, and “its native charms were miserably defac’d, obscur’d & perverted into superstition & idolatry.” The teachings of Moses and then Christ had served to restore this original religion. Behind this perception stands Stukeley’s keen awareness of the Hermetic and Neoplatonic tradition, the which tradition declared the existence of an ancient ‘pristine’ theology, familiar to other educated Freemasons such as Elias Ashmole (who died when Stukeley was five). The function of this perception was to constantly clear away the debris of ignorance - brought about by mankind’s perpetual tendency to corruption - by holding forth a vision of the original and the true. (In ancient Masonic traditions the original and primal knowledge was inscribed on pillars or tablets which were built to survive deluges of flood or fire. Bro Ashmole (1617-1692) considered the Dissolution of the Monasteries to be one such “Deluge”, and the job of the Antiquarian being primarily to bring back to light that which ignorance had left to decay. This also was Stukeley’s task and largely explains his and other enlightened mens’ enthusiasm for Freemasonry).
    Stukeley believed that one of the causes of this earlier corruption “was this affair of the mysterys. Nothing is more celebrated in antient learning, than the mysterys: into which it was a fashion for all great men to be initiated, in all ages: & that under cover of the most impenetrable secrecy. & truly, so well have they guarded the deposit, that with difficulty we come to any tolerable knowledg of it...” The mysteries, therefore, had existed throughout the ancient world, and it was this secret religion - a fragment of the primeval patriarchal religion - which Stukeley believed the Druids had possessed, and which he had hoped to rediscover in the secrets of Freemasonry. For although the Mosaic writings “contain the memoirs & antiquity of the jewish polity & religion, but they do not propose any regular account of the first & patriarchal religion...” Instead, “I found it necessary & very useful, to have recourse to heathen antiquity, where much truth may be learnt from the corruption of truth, & the mythologic dress it is put in. & such was the craft of the evil power that perverted true religion...”
    He then examined the purpose of the ancient mysteries:

It will be first inquired, what was the intent, the inducement of their initiation into these mysterys? The answer will be, they learnt thereby taciturnity, or the art of keeping a secret, a thing of great use in the political part of life: they learnt to cultivate an inviolable friendship: they learnt morality: & at length a sublimer notion of religion than the rest of the world enjoy’d... The friendship hereby seald among the initiated, took a sacred & inviolable character: they were brothers ever after.
    Those who were initiated into the mysteries were thought to be bound by an oath, or sacramental tye, to lead a very vertuous course hence forward, both in word & action; agreably to that exacter knowledge of religion whih they learnt herein... so that these mysterys were intended to make a better notion of the deity & a better religion, than that publickly proffessd; it was a religious act of a higher kind than the common, & was attended as they thought with a divine influence, better hopes & reward. All which considerations dictate it, to be only a corruption of some patriarchal institution, & that it was built upon the foundation of some more solemn part of the first & true religion; which history has not particularly transmitted to us...
    They that were initiated gave in their names, some time before the ceremony, sufficient for an enquiry into their life & conversation. & good care was taken to trust a matter of such consequence, in worthy hands, who would not divulge, or abuse it. The candidates were to be persons of good characters, & free from any remarkable infamy, from murder, tho’ involuntary, & by accident. Magicians & such sort of people were particularly forbid: & in general all kinds of wicked & profligate folks... A guard was set before the door with a sword drawn in his hand, to hinder all profane persons from approaching & such as were not fit to be admitted...
    The origin of the mysterys (as we hinted before) is no other than the first corruption of tru religion, when they [first] began to deviate from the patriarchal religion, into idolatry & superstition. & this was nigh as early as the renovation of mankind, after the noachian deluge...

From these remarks, written in 1736, I believe we can witness what prompted at least one Englishman to participate in early 18th century Masonry, a participation based on a perception of the antiquity of Masonry and whose existence confirmed his picture of the past: the loss of knowledge and the corruption of an ancient pristine, patriarchal religion.

David Haycock is writing a new biography of William Stukeley. He is a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford.