Masonic Orthodoxy: Followed by Occult Masonry and Hermetic Initiation
Ragon, Jean-Marie
Synopsis "Masonic Orthodoxy: Followed by Occult Masonry and Hermetic Initiation"
First published in Paris in 1853, Orthodoxie maçonnique is the most ambitious work of Jean-Marie Ragon (1781-1862), the most widely read French Masonic author of his century and founder of the Paris lodge Les Trinosophes. Written as a call for reform, it sets out to separate what is authentic in Freemasonry from what is spurious, and to recover the initiatic teaching that Ragon believed lay hidden beneath its symbols. The book is in three parts: Masonic Orthodoxy is a critical history of the Order in England, Scotland, and France: the rival grand lodges, the quarrels that divided French Masonry, and the multiplication of high-grade systems in the eighteenth century, from the Scottish rites and the Strict Observance to the Supreme Councils of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite. Ragon examines rite after rite, often with rituals and documents of the grades he describes, and judges each by a single standard: does it preserve or corrupt the three symbolic degrees, which he held to be the true depository of the ancient initiation? Occult Masonry turns to the sciences Ragon considered a proper study for the enlightened Mason: the Pythagorean science of numbers; the occult philosophy of Agrippa, Cardano, and Paracelsus; animal magnetism, somnambulism, and Mesmerian Masonry; thaumaturgy, phrenology, and magism. Philosophic Masonry, or Hermetic Initiation, presents the Hermetic tradition as a course of Masonic instruction: Hermes and the Egyptian myth, the principles of alchemy, and the symbolic animals and hieroglyphic plants of the Hermetic philosophers. Learned, polemical, and often provocative, the book was widely read and widely criticized in its own century, and its conviction that the Masonic symbols conceal a cosmology and a philosophy passed into the French esoteric revival that followed. Translated from the French, with an introduction and notes, by Tau Phosphoros, this second, revised edition offers: The entire translation revised line by line against the 1853 French text Ragon's notes set as footnotes, with some 300 translator's notes identifying persons, sources, and quotations and correcting errors of fact Ragon's own errata of 1853 incorporated into the text Ragon's Analytical Table of Contents, translated in full The illustrations of the 1853 edition, including the ladder of the Sophisians, the model of a diploma, and the twenty-three signs of the Philosophic and Hermetic Alphabet A new index of names and subjects An expanded Translator's Introduction on Ragon's life and works, the book and its moment, the plan of the work, and how to read Ragon critically An essential primary source for members of Masonic and esoteric orders and for scholars of Freemasonry and Western esotericism.
