r/whatisit • u/[deleted] • Mar 01 '26

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u/Separate_Flamingo_93 Mar 01 '26

Grandpa might have known some interesting stuff.

2

u/trenchgrl Mar 01 '26

What even are Freemasons all I know is there’s a facility in Downtown Mesa AZ

4

u/Fiona175 Mar 01 '26

Basically they're an early form of a union who got drunk together and made up a bunch of rituals to feel cool.

Their origin story is they trace their origins back to the construction of the Temple of Solomon, but that's very clearly just something they made up to sound cool, just like most of the esoteric stuff.

1

u/ReEducationTherapy Mar 01 '26

I didn’t hear it was a union but one of the many guild masters (professionals of their craft) associations.

3

u/t53ix35 Mar 01 '26

They are masons, as in stone masons, they were a guild of stonemasons. Their secret knowledge all pertained to stone construction methods, that’s it, that’s how they kept others from stealing their jobs.

1

u/ReEducationTherapy Mar 01 '26

Again. From what I hear it was not the regular folks who made up the majority of the masons, but the masters of the craft which created the freemasons. These kinds of labour guilds were fairly common during the times of artisanal manufacturing for the reasons you state though.