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Old May 12th, 2015 #1
Karl Radl
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Default Arthur Conan Doyle and Freemasonry

Arthur Conan Doyle and Freemasonry


As an aside to three articles I am currently working on in regards to the famous novelist and short story writer, Arthur Conan Doyle, whose best-known creation is the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes. I wanted to briefly discuss Conan Doyle's involvement with Freemasonry.

This involvement has been much commented on by writers determined to assert the existence of a global Freemasonic conspiracy (1) and has even been used to try and link Conan Doyle with the horrific killing spree of Jack the Ripper in London in the summer of 1888. (2) While Conan Doyle did comment on the Ripper murders; (3) I'd like to save the discussion of that for another article.

The facts are simply that when Conan Doyle arrived in Portsmouth (or Southsea to be precise) in June 1882; he enrolled himself into the order of the Freemasons soon after. Specifically he joined Phoenix Lodge Number 257 in Southsea. (4)

Some of Conan Doyle's biographers simply pass over this Freemasonic activity without any mention. (5) This isn't to suggest they have necessarily suppressed mention of it, but rather they more than likely felt that the detail was relatively unimportant. I would broadly agree with that interpretation given that Conan Doyle, after an initial phase of interest, didn't really participate too much. (6)

Lycett however I think gets closer to the truth of Conan Doyle's limited involvement with Freemasonry when he speculates that Conan Doyle's reason for joining was to gain access to allegedly vast amount of secret ('occult') knowledge that he (and was commonly) believed was sitting at the heart of Freemasonry. (7)

This jives with the fact that we know that while at the elite Jesuit preparatory school of Stonyhurst (although possibly earlier); (8) Conan Doyle all but abandoned Catholicism, because he couldn't reconcile the Catholic Church's beliefs regarding heaven, hell and divine grave with what he was discovering/learning about the world. (9)

This (fairly typical) religious doubt lead to Conan Doyle's adopting an especially vague form of Unitarianism (cf. Conan Doyle's 1895 'The Stark-Munro Letters') that he claimed was just a misnamed form of Spiritualism. (10) All of his life Conan Doyle delved deeper into what we might, with some justification, call the 'occult' and worked his way around almost every 'occult' trend going including (but not limited to) Theosophy, Spiritualism, the existence of Fairies/Gnomes (or 'Little People'), Ghosts and the use of psychic mediums.

This is indicated by the rather odd fact that he befriended the jewish 'magician' and skeptic Harry Houdini (who attacked, insulted and belittled Conan Doyle on a fairly regular basis) (11) on the basis (partly at least) of their shared belief in the immortality of the soul and the existence of an afterlife. (12)

From this we can take the fact that from his formal break with Roman Catholicism in Edinburgh in the 1880s (13) to his death; Conan Doyle was a proverbial adept seeking to absorb as much 'forbidden' or 'secret' knowledge about the Godhead (which he still believed existed) as possible. Lycett's point about gaining access to such secret information as was alleged (and commonly believed) to existent at the heart of Freemasonry then becomes poignant.

Further evidence for this view can be seen in the fact that the only Freemason in the Holmes stories who appears around this time (Jabez Wilson in 'The Adventure of the Red-Headed League' written in 1891) is an absurd, downright stupid and non-threatening character who belongs to a 'secret brotherhood', while at the same time wearing the symbol of his membership on his watch chain (which Holmes uses to deduce he is a Freemason).

I would read this as Conan Doyle's somewhat acerbic remark (as he had become inactive in Freemasonry after having moved away from Portsmouth in 1890) (14) on the absurdity of the pretensions of Freemasonry to have special knowledge of any kind, but rather as being a group of stuffy self-important men who were largely of no intellectual consequence whatsoever.

This is more or less what one might have expect from an insignificant provincial branch of Freemasonry with members who were likely more interested in feeling important and powerful than actually being able to manipulate anything more than the price of cabbage at the local greengrocer. A fact, which I might add, is oft forgotten by proponents of the idea of broad Freemasonic conspiracies is that most Freemasons have nearly always been insignificant people who would be about as useful as wet toilet tissue in an active conspiracy.

Additional evidence for Conan Doyle's having had unusual reasons for joining the Freemasons is found in the fact that he did attend one more meeting of Freemasons that we know about.

This was an emergency meeting on 5th April 1900 at Rising Star Lodge (Number 1022 of the English Constitution) in Bloemfontain in South Africa. (15) This emergency meeting likely had something to do with the Second Boer War, which was then raging in the area and Conan Doyle found a desire in himself to recapture the comradeship inherent in Freemasonry in this particularly stressful time of war. (16)

After this till his death in 1930 Conan Doyle attended no more Freemasonic meetings or functions that we know about, which is rather the point in regards to him. Conan Doyle's association with Freemasonry was incidental and driven by an external desire for knowledge rather than to join a conspiracy.

Simply put Conan Doyle's joining the Freemasons is simply irrelevant, because he did so to learn their secrets and when they turned out to not be nearly as 'profound' as advertised/rumoured he simply lost interest and let his membership fall into abeyance.


References

(1) While I don't doubt or dispute the existence of conspiratorial Freemasonic behaviour; I do take serious issues with any thesis of anything more wide-ranging than national or local level conspiratorial behaviour. It should also be stated that such is what the documentation we have on Freemasonry suggests anything wider is very speculative and proponents of such claims usually, as Revilo Oliver put it so well in his 1966 lecture 'Conspiracy or Degeneracy?', base their arguments on a few points of fact and an awful lot of wishful thinking and hot air.
(2) Cf. Michael Coren's comments in his 1995, 'Conan Doyle', 1st Edition, Bloomsbury: London
(3) Harold Orel (Ed.), 1991, 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Interviews and Recollections', 1st Edition, MacMillan: Basingstoke, pp. 72-73
(4) Coren, Op. Cit., pp. 73-74; Andrew Lycett, 2007, 'Conan Doyle: The Man who Created Sherlock Holmes', 1st Edition, Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London, p. 129
(5) Notably Charles Higham, 1976, 'The Adventures of Conan Doyle: The Life of the Creator of Sherlock Holmes', 1st Edition, Hamish Hamilton: London and Daniel Stashower, 2000, 'Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle', 1st Edition, Penguin: London
(6) Coren, Op. Cit., pp. 73-74
(7) Lycett, Op. Cit., p. 129
(8) Coren, Op. Cit., p. 14
(9) Higham, Op. Cit., pp. 39-40
(10) Coren, Op. Cit., pp. 27-28
(11) For example Lycett, Op. Cit., p. 402
(12) Coren, Op. Cit., p. 178
(13) Higham, Op. Cit., p. 49
(14) Lycett, Op. Cit.p. 254
(15) Ibid.
(16) Ibid.

-------------------------------------

This was originally published at the following address: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...eemasonry.html
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Old May 15th, 2015 #2
FranzJoseph
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Karl,

A very diverse number of modern men, such as the late Laurence Gardiner, went round the same mulberry bush with the masons. He was researching ancient anamolies and thought the masons actually had some straight dope.

Gardiner was told to "come back next year" or "pay up and go one grade higher, we'll give you some of the inner knowledge" and after 8-10 years of that sort of stalling, Gardiner quit in disgust.

Masons are good at tossing bullfeathers around honest researchers. Perhaps it's a diversionary tactic but my own take, after a few years wrestling with their hooey, is that most of them are just lifetime frathouse clowns.
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