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The Path of Freemasonry: The Craft as a Spiritual Practice
A practical guide to the symbols and rituals of Freemasonry as a path of spiritual development and self-realization
• Shares the history and meaning of Freemasonry and its symbols
• Offers thoughtful explorations of different areas of Masonic experience, drawing on esoteric doctrines and paralleling them with experiences found in daily life
• Provides simple exercises and practices to help internalize and personalize the lessons presented, including dreamwork, journaling, meditation, and prayer
In this practical guide, Mark Stavish details the spiritual lessons and rituals of Freemasonry as a step-by-step path of spiritual development and self-improvement for both Masons and non-Masons, men and women, alike. He explores the history and meaning of Freemasonry and its symbols--from its origins in the Temple of Solomon to the Medieval craft guilds to the Renaissance--and explains how the Craft promotes personal growth through the symbolic building of self and an inner Temple of Wisdom in much the same way that Masonry’s rituals symbolize the building of Solomon’s Temple in accordance with the mystical architectural instructions of Hiram.
Drawing on esoteric doctrines, including the Qabala, alchemy, sacred geometry, John Dee’s angelic magic, and the secrets of the Gothic cathedral builders, each chapter addresses an area of the Masonic experience, paralleling them with experiences each of us finds in our own lives. The author provides simple practices to help internalize and personalize the lessons presented, including dreamwork, journaling, meditation, prayer, and understanding sacred architecture. The author also examines the crafting and use of the spiritual and symbolic tools of Freemasonry, such as the trestle or tracing board and the Chamber of Reflection.
Providing the tools to make the Craft an initiatic experience of self-improvement, the author shows that, ultimately, the Masonic experience is the human quest for self-realization and self-expression, so that we each may find our place in the Temple of Wisdom.
• Shares the history and meaning of Freemasonry and its symbols
• Offers thoughtful explorations of different areas of Masonic experience, drawing on esoteric doctrines and paralleling them with experiences found in daily life
• Provides simple exercises and practices to help internalize and personalize the lessons presented, including dreamwork, journaling, meditation, and prayer
In this practical guide, Mark Stavish details the spiritual lessons and rituals of Freemasonry as a step-by-step path of spiritual development and self-improvement for both Masons and non-Masons, men and women, alike. He explores the history and meaning of Freemasonry and its symbols--from its origins in the Temple of Solomon to the Medieval craft guilds to the Renaissance--and explains how the Craft promotes personal growth through the symbolic building of self and an inner Temple of Wisdom in much the same way that Masonry’s rituals symbolize the building of Solomon’s Temple in accordance with the mystical architectural instructions of Hiram.
Drawing on esoteric doctrines, including the Qabala, alchemy, sacred geometry, John Dee’s angelic magic, and the secrets of the Gothic cathedral builders, each chapter addresses an area of the Masonic experience, paralleling them with experiences each of us finds in our own lives. The author provides simple practices to help internalize and personalize the lessons presented, including dreamwork, journaling, meditation, prayer, and understanding sacred architecture. The author also examines the crafting and use of the spiritual and symbolic tools of Freemasonry, such as the trestle or tracing board and the Chamber of Reflection.
Providing the tools to make the Craft an initiatic experience of self-improvement, the author shows that, ultimately, the Masonic experience is the human quest for self-realization and self-expression, so that we each may find our place in the Temple of Wisdom.
- GenresEsoterica
272 pages, Paperback
Published October 26, 2021
24 people are currently reading
105 people want to read
About the author
Mark Stavish
44 books38 followersMark Stavish, the Director of Studies for the Institute for Hermetic Studies (which he established in 1998), is a life-long student of esotericism with over 25 years experience in comparative religion, philosophy, psychology, and mysticism with emphasis on Traditional Western Esotericism. His articles have appeared in academic, specialty, and mass market publications specializing in spiritual studies, making Mark one of the leading authorities in Hermeticism today.
In addition to being a member and officer of several prominent Rosicrucian and Martinist societies, he served as the Director of Research for the Occult Research and Applications Project, of the Philosophers of Nature (PON). The Philosophers of Nature was founded by Jean Dubuis in France in 1979 and for twenty years was the leading resource for practical information on mineral and plant alchemy, as well as qabala. ORA, a statistically based research wing of the American branch of PON performed detailed exploration into the validity and practicality of various traditional esoteric methods. Original research from the ORA Project was published in the organization's journal, The Stone.
A graduate of King's College, in Theology (B.A.), and Communications (B.A.), and Rhode Island College (Providence), with a Master's degree in Counseling emphasizing psycho-spiritual modalities and Psychosynthesis, he brings a unique blend of tradition with modern research to the application of esoteric philosophy.
In addition to being a member and officer of several prominent Rosicrucian and Martinist societies, he served as the Director of Research for the Occult Research and Applications Project, of the Philosophers of Nature (PON). The Philosophers of Nature was founded by Jean Dubuis in France in 1979 and for twenty years was the leading resource for practical information on mineral and plant alchemy, as well as qabala. ORA, a statistically based research wing of the American branch of PON performed detailed exploration into the validity and practicality of various traditional esoteric methods. Original research from the ORA Project was published in the organization's journal, The Stone.
A graduate of King's College, in Theology (B.A.), and Communications (B.A.), and Rhode Island College (Providence), with a Master's degree in Counseling emphasizing psycho-spiritual modalities and Psychosynthesis, he brings a unique blend of tradition with modern research to the application of esoteric philosophy.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 14, 2025
There are books about Freemasonry that behave like keys on a ring: you pick the one you need, fit it to a lock, and move on. Mark Stavish’s “The Path of Freemasonry: The Craft as a Spiritual Practice” wants to be something stranger and more demanding. It is not content to describe the Craft as history, sociology, or even philosophy. Stavish treats it as a lived discipline – a spiritual practice with a curriculum, an atmosphere, and a cost. Read in that spirit, the book feels less like a tour of a tradition than like instructions for how to stand inside a room you thought you already knew.
Stavish writes in the register of a patient instructor who is also a convinced participant. The sentences are clean, the tone earnest, and the assumptions are stated with a calm firmness. He is less interested in adjudicating scholarly disputes than in recovering a particular kind of attention: the ability to take symbols seriously without making them brittle, to hold myth without demanding that it behave like documentary fact, and to understand ritual as something that acts on the inner life. This approach gives the book its appeal and also its limits. The voice is practical, encouraging, and sometimes insistently certain, as if hesitation were merely a failure to practice long enough.
The first chapter asks “What is Freemasonry?” and begins with the familiar formulation that it is a moral system taught by allegory and symbols. But Stavish does not leave that definition alone. He keeps worrying it, widening it, testing it against behavior. The operative-to-speculative story is here, yet he tells it less as antiquarian lineage than as psychological metaphor: the tools of a builder’s trade become tools for building the self. The most persuasive move is his insistence that the Craft is not primarily information but formation. You do not “learn” Masonry in the way you learn a set of facts; you are shaped by repeated contact with forms that work on you slowly, the way a place you live in begins to rearrange your habits of mind.
Chapter 2, on Solomon’s Temple and the legend of Hiram Abiff, is where the book’s imagination declares itself. Stavish treats the Temple not merely as biblical architecture but as an interior blueprint: cosmic order rendered in proportion, then mirrored in the lodge’s layout and movement. Pillars, veil, staircase, chamber – the built environment becomes pedagogy. He also performs an important clarification that many Masonic books either underplay or sentimentalize: Masonry is a borrower of biblical material, but it borrows to construct a symbolic machine, not to deliver a catechism. In Stavish’s reading, the Temple is less about proving a lineage than about giving the mind a stable image of order so that the self can be brought into order.
Chapter 3 shifts from temple-myth to initiation, and its most useful insistence is that initiation is not theater in the dismissive sense. It is theater in the older sense: a staged ordeal meant to educate the whole person, not only the intellect. Stavish lingers over preparation, solitude, and the stripping away of ordinary identity. He is attentive to how ritual’s form can imprint meaning even when the mind cannot yet articulate it, and he treats the first encounter with “Light” as an experience before it is an idea. The chapter is at its strongest when it describes the candidate’s passage as a deliberate disturbance of normal perception, a controlled disorientation whose purpose is not humiliation but receptivity.
The middle stretch, Chapters 4 through 6, makes a larger claim: to understand Masonic symbolism you must, at least for a time, inhabit the Renaissance worldview that helped incubate modern esotericism. Chapter 4 compresses a mental world in which science, religion, and occult philosophy were not yet severed into rival departments. Imagination is treated as an instrument of knowledge, nature as a living field of correspondences, and ritual as a technology of participation. Stavish’s point is not merely historical. He is asking the reader to notice how modern life starves the faculty that older esoteric traditions cultivated: the ability to treat symbol as a mode of perception rather than as decoration.
Chapter 5, on sacred geometry and Gothic cathedrals, is the book’s strongest chapter and the one most likely to change how a reader looks at the world. Stavish reclaims the ubiquitous “G” as geometry and asks the reader to consider proportion not as decoration but as metaphysical assertion. He writes about cathedrals with a reverence that is almost tactile: light as doctrine, height as aspiration, harmony as a spiritual fact. His argument – that sacred architecture can function talismanically, shaping perception and inner state – is the sort of claim modern readers often file under superstition until they remember how strongly rooms alter mood, how a ceiling height can make the body feel either cramped or expanded, how sound changes thought. Stavish is persuasive precisely because he grounds the mystical claim in the ordinary fact of the senses.
Chapter 6, devoted to the Lost Word, is where Stavish’s spiritual project becomes both most intriguing and most disputable. The Lost Word is treated not as a password to be recovered but as a metaphor for the human condition: ignorance, substitution, then longing for direct knowledge. Stavish draws on traditions of sacred names and letters and uses them to argue that speech is not morally neutral – that language reveals, and also shapes, the quality of attention we bring to life. He is at his most practical here, returning again and again to the ethical dimension of speech: the ways we bless and curse our own lives through casual phrases, habitual cynicism, or disciplined gratitude. The chapter’s idealism is bracing. It is also easy to misread as a promise of control. The book is careful, overall, to frame the true “Word” as inner transformation rather than outward power, but readers drawn to esoteric glamour may still hear the undertone they want to hear.
The last third of the book traces the rise of “esoteric Masonry” in recognizable historical terms: Scottish Rite, occult bodies of the eighteenth century, York Rite, then the European occult revival. Chapters 7 and 8 are briskly encyclopedic, and Stavish’s gift for synthesis is on display. He shows how higher-degree systems became laboratories for mythmaking and spiritual ambition – how Crusader and Templar legends generated rites, how French “high grades” proliferated, how figures like Albert Pike attempted to systematize symbolism into a comprehensive philosophy. These chapters read like a compressed genealogy of yearning: again and again, the Craft becomes for certain practitioners not merely a fraternity but a scaffold for the Great Work, however one defines it.
At the same time, the speed can be dizzying. The reader meets names and systems in quick succession: Elus Cohen, Egyptian rites, Cagliostro, Pernety and the “Illuminati” of Avignon, Martinism, the Golden Dawn, Co-Masonry, and later the OTO. Stavish knows these genealogies intimately and sometimes writes as if the reader already shares his map. A reader coming for narrative may wish for more scene, more differentiation between primary evidence and later retelling, and more moments where the author pauses to weigh claims rather than to relay them. Stavish does acknowledge, more than once, when legend outruns proof, but the book’s momentum tends to carry the reader forward on the current of connection.
Chapter 9, on York Rite and the Knights Templar, offers one of the clearest demonstrations of how Stavish reads ritual vertically rather than horizontally. The story of vaults and hidden names becomes a teaching about where spiritual knowledge is found: not only in transcendent vision but in the ground of matter and daily life. The “descent” is the point. You dig for the secret, and the digging itself remakes you. In this reading, chivalric language becomes less a claim of literal lineage and more a moral demand: if you are going to wrap yourself in ideals, then you must live as if the ideals are real.
Chapter 10, surveying the European occult revival, is the book’s cautionary mirror. It is here that Stavish insists the esoteric world is not spared from ordinary human failure. Charters splinter, leaders feud, legitimacy becomes a weapon, and organizations devoted to higher ideals can become arenas for bruised egos. The revival is portrayed with a blend of fascination and warning: yes, these movements preserved and reinvented powerful symbolic systems; no, the presence of symbols does not guarantee maturity. In a quiet way, it is one of the book’s most contemporary chapters, because it suggests that the greatest threat to “esoteric Masonry” is not disbelief but childishness.
What, then, to make of “The Path of Freemasonry” as a whole? It is not a neutral introduction. It is a book with a thesis and an invitation. Stavish wants the reader – especially the Mason who has grown bored, or the seeker who suspects the Craft has become too thin – to remember that symbols can be used, not only admired. His recurring move is to turn explanation into practice: read this, then do this. Keep a journal. Build a small sacred space. Copy a tracing board. Study a symbol until it studies you back. The pedagogy is consistent: understanding is not a flash of insight but a relationship built over time with forms that resist the ego’s desire for quick mastery.
One of the book’s most characteristic features is its insistence on exercises. Nearly every chapter ends by nudging the reader away from passive comprehension and toward experiment: spend time in nature without the numbing chorus of screens, practice restraint in speech, sketch geometric forms until the hand learns what the mind cannot summarize, visit a sacred building as if you were a pilgrim, and watch what happens to perception. In a culture that often treats spirituality as consumption and identity, this simple demand to do the work feels almost subversive. Whatever one thinks of Stavish’s historical through-lines, the steady pressure to practice gives the book its distinctive moral texture.
That said, the very thing that gives the book its force also narrows it. Stavish is not especially interested in the sociological Freemasonry of dues, dinners, politics, and generational change. He rarely lingers on the lived contradictions of contemporary lodge life: the gap between proclaimed universality and actual belonging, the ways masculinity and hierarchy can shape a room, the pull between charity and inward work, the temptation to treat advancement as collection rather than transformation. None of this invalidates his project, but it can make the book feel, at moments, like an idealized template laid over an imperfect world. A few more pages spent in the friction between ideal and institution would have strengthened the book’s credibility without weakening its faith.
The book’s rhetorical risk is related. Because Stavish writes from inside the tradition he is advocating, he sometimes moves quickly from resonance to endorsement. Myth becomes instruction, and instruction can begin to sound like confirmation. The book is strongest when it keeps myth as vehicle rather than proof, and symbol as tool rather than trophy.
And yet it would be unfair to judge the book as if it were trying to be what it is not. Stavish is writing within a tradition that values transmission over debate, experience over footnotes, and transformation over closure. In that sense, “The Path of Freemasonry” succeeds when it persuades the reader to take Freemasonry – and the act of self-making – seriously. Its best argument is not a single claim but a mood: reverent practicality. The Craft, in Stavish’s telling, is not an escape from modernity but a method for becoming more humane inside it, by learning to see, to speak, to measure, and to act with greater deliberation.
I came away with a rating of 79 out of 100. The book is generous, wide-ranging, and frequently illuminating, especially when it treats geometry, architecture, and ritual as ways of training perception. It is also occasionally too eager – too quick to convert symbolic beauty into historical certainty and too willing to let the most dramatic currents of Western esotericism stand in for the quieter, messier variety of lived Masonry. Those are not fatal flaws, but they are the price of the book’s scope. Taken as a spiritual workbook in historical costume, it offers substantial value, and it asks something braver than agreement: it asks the reader to attempt practice, to accept that the “Work” is not a metaphor, and to risk becoming, over time, more awake.
Stavish writes in the register of a patient instructor who is also a convinced participant. The sentences are clean, the tone earnest, and the assumptions are stated with a calm firmness. He is less interested in adjudicating scholarly disputes than in recovering a particular kind of attention: the ability to take symbols seriously without making them brittle, to hold myth without demanding that it behave like documentary fact, and to understand ritual as something that acts on the inner life. This approach gives the book its appeal and also its limits. The voice is practical, encouraging, and sometimes insistently certain, as if hesitation were merely a failure to practice long enough.
The first chapter asks “What is Freemasonry?” and begins with the familiar formulation that it is a moral system taught by allegory and symbols. But Stavish does not leave that definition alone. He keeps worrying it, widening it, testing it against behavior. The operative-to-speculative story is here, yet he tells it less as antiquarian lineage than as psychological metaphor: the tools of a builder’s trade become tools for building the self. The most persuasive move is his insistence that the Craft is not primarily information but formation. You do not “learn” Masonry in the way you learn a set of facts; you are shaped by repeated contact with forms that work on you slowly, the way a place you live in begins to rearrange your habits of mind.
Chapter 2, on Solomon’s Temple and the legend of Hiram Abiff, is where the book’s imagination declares itself. Stavish treats the Temple not merely as biblical architecture but as an interior blueprint: cosmic order rendered in proportion, then mirrored in the lodge’s layout and movement. Pillars, veil, staircase, chamber – the built environment becomes pedagogy. He also performs an important clarification that many Masonic books either underplay or sentimentalize: Masonry is a borrower of biblical material, but it borrows to construct a symbolic machine, not to deliver a catechism. In Stavish’s reading, the Temple is less about proving a lineage than about giving the mind a stable image of order so that the self can be brought into order.
Chapter 3 shifts from temple-myth to initiation, and its most useful insistence is that initiation is not theater in the dismissive sense. It is theater in the older sense: a staged ordeal meant to educate the whole person, not only the intellect. Stavish lingers over preparation, solitude, and the stripping away of ordinary identity. He is attentive to how ritual’s form can imprint meaning even when the mind cannot yet articulate it, and he treats the first encounter with “Light” as an experience before it is an idea. The chapter is at its strongest when it describes the candidate’s passage as a deliberate disturbance of normal perception, a controlled disorientation whose purpose is not humiliation but receptivity.
The middle stretch, Chapters 4 through 6, makes a larger claim: to understand Masonic symbolism you must, at least for a time, inhabit the Renaissance worldview that helped incubate modern esotericism. Chapter 4 compresses a mental world in which science, religion, and occult philosophy were not yet severed into rival departments. Imagination is treated as an instrument of knowledge, nature as a living field of correspondences, and ritual as a technology of participation. Stavish’s point is not merely historical. He is asking the reader to notice how modern life starves the faculty that older esoteric traditions cultivated: the ability to treat symbol as a mode of perception rather than as decoration.
Chapter 5, on sacred geometry and Gothic cathedrals, is the book’s strongest chapter and the one most likely to change how a reader looks at the world. Stavish reclaims the ubiquitous “G” as geometry and asks the reader to consider proportion not as decoration but as metaphysical assertion. He writes about cathedrals with a reverence that is almost tactile: light as doctrine, height as aspiration, harmony as a spiritual fact. His argument – that sacred architecture can function talismanically, shaping perception and inner state – is the sort of claim modern readers often file under superstition until they remember how strongly rooms alter mood, how a ceiling height can make the body feel either cramped or expanded, how sound changes thought. Stavish is persuasive precisely because he grounds the mystical claim in the ordinary fact of the senses.
Chapter 6, devoted to the Lost Word, is where Stavish’s spiritual project becomes both most intriguing and most disputable. The Lost Word is treated not as a password to be recovered but as a metaphor for the human condition: ignorance, substitution, then longing for direct knowledge. Stavish draws on traditions of sacred names and letters and uses them to argue that speech is not morally neutral – that language reveals, and also shapes, the quality of attention we bring to life. He is at his most practical here, returning again and again to the ethical dimension of speech: the ways we bless and curse our own lives through casual phrases, habitual cynicism, or disciplined gratitude. The chapter’s idealism is bracing. It is also easy to misread as a promise of control. The book is careful, overall, to frame the true “Word” as inner transformation rather than outward power, but readers drawn to esoteric glamour may still hear the undertone they want to hear.
The last third of the book traces the rise of “esoteric Masonry” in recognizable historical terms: Scottish Rite, occult bodies of the eighteenth century, York Rite, then the European occult revival. Chapters 7 and 8 are briskly encyclopedic, and Stavish’s gift for synthesis is on display. He shows how higher-degree systems became laboratories for mythmaking and spiritual ambition – how Crusader and Templar legends generated rites, how French “high grades” proliferated, how figures like Albert Pike attempted to systematize symbolism into a comprehensive philosophy. These chapters read like a compressed genealogy of yearning: again and again, the Craft becomes for certain practitioners not merely a fraternity but a scaffold for the Great Work, however one defines it.
At the same time, the speed can be dizzying. The reader meets names and systems in quick succession: Elus Cohen, Egyptian rites, Cagliostro, Pernety and the “Illuminati” of Avignon, Martinism, the Golden Dawn, Co-Masonry, and later the OTO. Stavish knows these genealogies intimately and sometimes writes as if the reader already shares his map. A reader coming for narrative may wish for more scene, more differentiation between primary evidence and later retelling, and more moments where the author pauses to weigh claims rather than to relay them. Stavish does acknowledge, more than once, when legend outruns proof, but the book’s momentum tends to carry the reader forward on the current of connection.
Chapter 9, on York Rite and the Knights Templar, offers one of the clearest demonstrations of how Stavish reads ritual vertically rather than horizontally. The story of vaults and hidden names becomes a teaching about where spiritual knowledge is found: not only in transcendent vision but in the ground of matter and daily life. The “descent” is the point. You dig for the secret, and the digging itself remakes you. In this reading, chivalric language becomes less a claim of literal lineage and more a moral demand: if you are going to wrap yourself in ideals, then you must live as if the ideals are real.
Chapter 10, surveying the European occult revival, is the book’s cautionary mirror. It is here that Stavish insists the esoteric world is not spared from ordinary human failure. Charters splinter, leaders feud, legitimacy becomes a weapon, and organizations devoted to higher ideals can become arenas for bruised egos. The revival is portrayed with a blend of fascination and warning: yes, these movements preserved and reinvented powerful symbolic systems; no, the presence of symbols does not guarantee maturity. In a quiet way, it is one of the book’s most contemporary chapters, because it suggests that the greatest threat to “esoteric Masonry” is not disbelief but childishness.
What, then, to make of “The Path of Freemasonry” as a whole? It is not a neutral introduction. It is a book with a thesis and an invitation. Stavish wants the reader – especially the Mason who has grown bored, or the seeker who suspects the Craft has become too thin – to remember that symbols can be used, not only admired. His recurring move is to turn explanation into practice: read this, then do this. Keep a journal. Build a small sacred space. Copy a tracing board. Study a symbol until it studies you back. The pedagogy is consistent: understanding is not a flash of insight but a relationship built over time with forms that resist the ego’s desire for quick mastery.
One of the book’s most characteristic features is its insistence on exercises. Nearly every chapter ends by nudging the reader away from passive comprehension and toward experiment: spend time in nature without the numbing chorus of screens, practice restraint in speech, sketch geometric forms until the hand learns what the mind cannot summarize, visit a sacred building as if you were a pilgrim, and watch what happens to perception. In a culture that often treats spirituality as consumption and identity, this simple demand to do the work feels almost subversive. Whatever one thinks of Stavish’s historical through-lines, the steady pressure to practice gives the book its distinctive moral texture.
That said, the very thing that gives the book its force also narrows it. Stavish is not especially interested in the sociological Freemasonry of dues, dinners, politics, and generational change. He rarely lingers on the lived contradictions of contemporary lodge life: the gap between proclaimed universality and actual belonging, the ways masculinity and hierarchy can shape a room, the pull between charity and inward work, the temptation to treat advancement as collection rather than transformation. None of this invalidates his project, but it can make the book feel, at moments, like an idealized template laid over an imperfect world. A few more pages spent in the friction between ideal and institution would have strengthened the book’s credibility without weakening its faith.
The book’s rhetorical risk is related. Because Stavish writes from inside the tradition he is advocating, he sometimes moves quickly from resonance to endorsement. Myth becomes instruction, and instruction can begin to sound like confirmation. The book is strongest when it keeps myth as vehicle rather than proof, and symbol as tool rather than trophy.
And yet it would be unfair to judge the book as if it were trying to be what it is not. Stavish is writing within a tradition that values transmission over debate, experience over footnotes, and transformation over closure. In that sense, “The Path of Freemasonry” succeeds when it persuades the reader to take Freemasonry – and the act of self-making – seriously. Its best argument is not a single claim but a mood: reverent practicality. The Craft, in Stavish’s telling, is not an escape from modernity but a method for becoming more humane inside it, by learning to see, to speak, to measure, and to act with greater deliberation.
I came away with a rating of 79 out of 100. The book is generous, wide-ranging, and frequently illuminating, especially when it treats geometry, architecture, and ritual as ways of training perception. It is also occasionally too eager – too quick to convert symbolic beauty into historical certainty and too willing to let the most dramatic currents of Western esotericism stand in for the quieter, messier variety of lived Masonry. Those are not fatal flaws, but they are the price of the book’s scope. Taken as a spiritual workbook in historical costume, it offers substantial value, and it asks something braver than agreement: it asks the reader to attempt practice, to accept that the “Work” is not a metaphor, and to risk becoming, over time, more awake.
April 7, 2024
Too much right wing subtext
The author is far too obsessed with his hatred for social services. It's distracting and stopped me from reading.
Especially as it is based on the patent nonsense that all modern large buildings are solely for the purpose of administration of these services.
I wouldn't mind. But he's American, and they don't even have any social services!
The author is far too obsessed with his hatred for social services. It's distracting and stopped me from reading.
Especially as it is based on the patent nonsense that all modern large buildings are solely for the purpose of administration of these services.
I wouldn't mind. But he's American, and they don't even have any social services!
May 26, 2022
This is a wonderfully comprehensive guide to Freemasonry and its history. Mark has a wonderful understanding of ancient practices and how they are at the heart of Freemasonry. For those interested in mysticism, this is a fascinating book. It holds some beautiful guidelines to following a rich and spiritual life.
Watch Mark discussing his book on In The Light- Growing Your Soul
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHAyr...
Watch Mark discussing his book on In The Light- Growing Your Soul
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHAyr...
October 17, 2025
✅ I appreciated the reflective practice component at the end of each chapter based on the topics previously covered. A good way to connect the philosophy relevance or information into a practical component.
❌ It’s a very niche topic and not for everyone. Whilst it unpacked helpful details on the “why” for its founding, rituals and fraternity intent, the ancient religious meanings ie: Solomon’s temple etc were quite difficult to understand and navigate.
❌ It’s a very niche topic and not for everyone. Whilst it unpacked helpful details on the “why” for its founding, rituals and fraternity intent, the ancient religious meanings ie: Solomon’s temple etc were quite difficult to understand and navigate.
October 14, 2023
This book is a fantastic work of Masonic history and wets the appetite for anyone wishing to understand the traditions and working of this much maligned organisation. I found it a most worthy place in my library and my mind 93s
May 22, 2022
Excellent read!
January 1, 2024
Masonry is a path to improvement and is intellectually stimulating.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews