Rite Ecossais Rectifié

Freemasonry arrived in France from Great-Britain in the 1730s, a France that had revoked the Edict of Nantes and where Catholicism was the only recognised religion. How did these British émigrés, who were protestant and Freemason, pull the wool over the eyes of French police between 1720 and 1901? Their astuteness also allowed them to establish a genuine honeymoon period in France’s attitude to Freemasonry. What do we know about the reaction of French intellectuals to Freemasonry and in turn, how did France contribute to Freemasonry’s development?

Questions about Freemasonry’s origins occupy a particular place in the Masonic imagination. Preoccupied with handing down its traditions, certain Freemasons decreed rules and established laws which created a new “Speculative” history for the movement that was inspired by the “Anderson Constitutions”.

Treaty on the Two Natures  The“Treaty on the Two Natures” is a work by Jean-Baptiste Willermoz (1730-1824), the theosophist and Christian freemason.  Espousing the Christian Theosophist outlook of the second half of the 18th century, this work can be seen as an exegetical meditation on the holy mystery of the Divine incarnation.   Keeping continuity with Martinès de Pasqually ‘s system of spiritualist thought, it insists upon the necessary distinction between the two natures, human and Divine, in Jesus Christ, to show how these two wills can be extricated from each other within man, in order that the work of turning a man towards the Divine, can commence.