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Mystic Masonry

J. D. Buck's Mystic Masonry, first issued in the 1890s and reprinted for decades, is the classic attempt to read the craft's symbols as survivals of the ancient Mysteries. A homeopathic physician and early student of the Theosophical movement, Buck argues that Freemasonry preserves, in sign and symbol, a doctrine of human nature and destiny once taught openly in the initiation temples, and that the keys to it lie in the same wisdom tradition H. P. Blavatsky called the Secret Doctrine, to which his fifth chapter is devoted by name. The book moves through the principles of the order, the symbolism of the lodge, the legend of the third degree and the lost word, and sets the whole against the science and religion of its day, whose perpetual conflict, Buck argues, dissolves once the spiritual constitution of man is restored to the center. Geometry and number receive their due, from Pythagoras to the great pyramid. Written in the measured Victorian register of the American Theosophical circles that produced it, the volume remains a primary document of the esoteric reading of Freemasonry.

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