THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE The Royal Society, Freemasonry and the Birth of Modern Science Robert Lomas, Headline, London, 2002. Hardback, 374 pages, £18.99. ISBN: 0 7472 3969 X

When one views someone trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole, it can, I'm told, evoke a certain amount of compassion. Assiduity and tenacity are, after all, admirable qualities. But when one merely witnesses the same person, tirelessly repeating the same mistake, despite a cacophony of cautionary advice, compassion is not a word that immediately springs to mind.
    Once again this writer of popular masonic whodunnits has employed a posthoc ergo procter hoc approach to history; the thesis is first formulated, before the evidence is selectively made to fit. The golden rule of this genre, is that they must, on face value at least, appear cogent, reasoned, even sane, and like all such offerings, seductively simple. "Freemasonry started in Scotland, at Roslin, sometime before 1440" our author avers, before it eventually gave rise to the Royal Society, the progenitor of modern science. The key to the seduction here rests with the revelation that the first known 'freemason' was also the first interim President of the Society, the eclectic Sir Robert Moray.
    Yet, delve a little deeper and the narrative reveals the usual litany of errors. He quotes verbatim from the modern initiation ritual, clearly not appreciating that it dates from the early nineteenthcentury and is radically different from the original masonic catechisms of a century earlier. He argues, that because the infant Royal Society in the 1660s forbad the discussion of religion and politics at their meetings, the Society must be the progeny of freemasonry, even though the first mention of such a practice in a masonic context occurs only in 1723, more than half a century later. He then preposterously asserts, 'Desaguliers seems to have received all his early instruction in Freemasonry from Scotland …', despite the fact that Desaguliers was already a Past Grand Master in England when he arrived in Scotland. And, in a farcical denuding of the English Old Charges, he dismisses the two earliest masonic manuscripts of circa 1400, because they 'only mention Masons in passing' when, in actual fact they contain the oldest evidence we have of masonic lore and legend. Caveat Emptor!
    Matthew Scanlan