Page 168 - Global Freemasonry

GLOBAL FREEMASONRY

pole's son Horace, one of Dashwood's political enemies and certainly a
stranger to the abbey, mocked: "Whatever their doctrines were, their
practice was rigorously pagan: Bacchus and Venus were the deities to
whom they almost publicly sacrificed; and the nymphs and the
hogsheads that were laid in against the festivals of this new church,
sufficiently informed the neighbourhood of the complexion of those
hermits." …
The membership roll of the Medmenham Monks no longer exists, if it
ever did, but the names most reliably associated with the group include
Dashwood's brother, John Dashwood-King; John Montagu, Earl of Sand-
wich; John Wilkes; George Bubb Dodington, Baron Melcombe; Paul
Whitehead; and a collection of the local lesser gentry and professional
men. …a group of men sufficiently in the public eye to create scandal.
The whole question of religion is central to the fascination that Dash-
wood continues to exercise. …A more sophisticated interpretation might
seize upon the rumours of sexual magic, the abbey's kabbalistic book, the
recurring image of Harpocrates, Dashwood's tenuous connection with
the Masonic Order of the Temple, and of course the Thelemic motto on
Medmenham Abbey to conclude that the Hell-Fire Club was an early
manifestation of "Crowleyanity." A more sober-minded approach
would pick out Dashwood's Masonic contacts and conclude, probably
correctly, that the "chapter-room" was a Masonic temple. 121

The reason for including this lengthy quotation is to get an idea of the
atmosphere in which eighteenth century Masonry developed and of the in-
fluence it had on people. Masonry appeared as a secret, and curiously at-
tractive organization, whose opposition to the general beliefs of society
provided a kind of psychological satisfaction to its members. The basic
characteristic of Masonic rites, as stressed in the above quotation, was the
sanctification of pagan symbols and concepts instead of those of traditional
monotheistic religions. So, those who became Masons, and turned their

back on Christianity, became paganized, though not necessarily by adopt-
ing paganism as a belief, but at least through the adoption of its symbols.

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