What, exactly, are the Masons and Shriners?
They’re fraternal organizations. Originally many of them were what is known as “benevolent societies.” Back in the days before social security, welfare and life insurance, [we’re talking 1700’s here] groups of like minded people would join together and pool funds so that in the event that something happened to one of them [injury on the job, death, old age] there was a sort of fund set up to take care of the worker, or take care of their families. So, originally, the Masons were masons. The Odd Fellows were people who did odd jobs [so one legend of how they came to be goes]. There are more smaller groups all over the US and the UK like the Order of Red Men, the Loyal Order of the Golden North, the Order of Woodsmen. Many of the lodges have some sort of women’s auxilliary and the ones that are really thriving tend to have full-fledged female sister organizations. I may be getting some of the names off but that’s the general gist. Now that these organizations don’t serve the same “social
Also, beyond the conspiracy theories, there are also reasons that Masonry, specifically, has survived for so long as a professional fraternity, and also gotten so many spiritual associations with it, like: 1) Back when all this really started, it was something pretty damn impressive to be able to stack up stones and make them stand. One of the key early roles of all these groups was to simultaneously hoard and pass along the “secrets of the trade”–to keep them valuable, but to make sure they didn’t die out. Of all the trades you could learn in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, it’s hard to imagine something more squarely important as the ability to put up a building that didn’t fall down, and it was _not_ a simple thing to do. Masons, as a profession, served a critical role, and their professional organization was understandably a prominent one. 2) That first point being said, it’s not too hard to see the figurative parallel with God and his role in building the world. In the lat
