Willermoz, main author of the Rectified Scottish Rite (Part 2)

Although the French provinces were attached to the Strict Templar Observance, they never fully followed it. Their craft lodges were attached to the Grand Orient of France, while the Inner Order was directly dependent on the German Order, which was not without its difficulties. Around 1777, the Brethren of Strasbourg, who wished to gain greater independence, considered changing the regulations and called for a convent to bring together the French provinces of the Order. Willermoz agreed to their request, but for a different reason, which was to be expected given what we already know about his thirst for superior spiritual knowledge.

If Willermoz had chosen to bring the Freemasons of Lyon into the Dresden Reformed Freemasonry, it was because he believed that it contained spiritual secrets at least as profound as those he had discovered in Martinès de Pasqually. But he soon realised that this was not the case, and he was very disappointed by the rituals that his German superiors had passed on to them. The three craft degrees were very banal and, apart from a few allegories relating to the Templar legend, offered nothing original. They resembled all the known rituals of the years 1740-1760, only worse. The rank of Green Scottish Master was of great inanity, as it simply expected the recipient to imitate the virtues of four animals (the courage and generosity of the lion, the skill of the monkey, the foresight of the sparrowhawk and the cunning of the fox), and to reveal to him that Hiram was already halfway out of the tomb and would rise again in the form of NOTUMA (an anagram of AUMONT, the supposed successor of Jacques de Molay, according to the legend of the Strict Templar Observance). As for the degrees of the inner order, which was openly knightly and Templar, the initiation ceremonies for novices, knights and professed knights were limited to imitating the rituals of Catholic religious and military orders, without any real content or originality.

The holding of a convent in the French provinces of the Order would allow Willermoz to fulfil his dearest wish : to create a new Masonic rite of the Martinezian tendency within an existing structure. He set about this task with a few Brothers whom he trusted in Lyon and Strasbourg, and thus conceived the Rectified Scottish Rite and the Order of the Knight Benevolent of the Holy City. Initially, he took up a proposal from Strasbourg to remove the degree of Green Scottish Master from the Inner Order and include it in the craft degrees. A small group worked with Willermoz to rewrite the rituals of the craft degrees, including the 4th degree: They were Jean André Périsse du Luc, Jean Braun and Jean Paganucci, of the province of Auvergne (Lyon), and Friedrich Rudolf Saltzmann, of the province of Burgundy (Strasbourg) ; Jean de Turckheim, of Strasbourg, was responsible for the Inner Order, with the degrees of Squire and Knight ; Willermoz reserved for himself the drafting of the two degrees of the higher and secret class, which he intended to place at the top of his rite, the Professed and the Grand Professed. It was in these two degrees that he explicitly expounded the doctrine of Martinès, which had only been progressively alluded to in the previous degrees.

 

An important question was also raised in this work : was the Order really descended from the Knight Templars ? It is clear that for Willermoz this question was completely irrelevant. The objective of restoring the Order of the Temple to its material possessions was of little importance to him, or rather, this materialistic quest was as suspect to him as that of alchemy, from which he had turned away in disgust years before. And even if he considered that the Templars had been unjustly condemned, Willermoz could not deny that many abuses had crept into the life of the Order, which was far from blameless. As a Frenchman and a devout Catholic, he felt uncomfortable claiming to revive an order that had been abolished by the King of France and the Pope. He was also afraid of upsetting the royal authorities, who might have regarded such an undertaking as subversive. The situation in France was very different from that in Germany, where most of the Order's leaders were Protestants, living in states where the Templars had suffered very little persecution and which had now embraced the Reformation.

Willermoz therefore chose to abandon the title of Knight of the Temple in favour of that of Knight Beneficent of the Holy City. He did not invent this title, but found it in a system of Higher degrees in use since 1770 in the Chapter of the Saint-Théodore Lodge in Metz. In this original degree, Saint Martin cut off his cloak with a sword to share it with a beggar, and the Holy City was Rome. But this title suited Willermoz for more than one reason : the term "Knight Beneficent" corresponded exactly to his idea of a Freemason, who should not be content with altruistic words, but should practise true benevolence towards suffering humanity. And the Holy City could easily be applied to Jerusalem, especially since the Council of Troyes, which approved the Templars' rule in 1179, had given them the name Pauperi Commilitones Templi in Sancta Civitate, i.e. Poor Fellow Soldiers of the Temple in the Holy City. The title of Knight Benevolent of the Holy City thus allowed Willermoz to claim the spiritual heritage of the Templars in the purity of their origins, without worrying about the Order's infamous end or its possible material survival.

The fruit of the work of Willermoz and his friends was presented to the Convent of the French Provinces of the Order, held in Lyon in 1778 and known as the Convent of the Gauls. Willermoz also presented a new Code, i.e. a new set of rules. The discussions were lively, as not everyone was ready to abandon the Templar legend and draw a line under the recovery of the Order's property. However, Willermoz's side prevailed and the new rituals (which were not yet complete), the new code and the new concept of the purely spiritual link with the Order of the Temple were adopted.

The decisions of the Convent of the Gauls, known as the Reform of Lyon, marked the beginning of the Rectified Scottish Rite and of the Order of the Knights Beneficent of the Holy City, which would soon extend to the entire Order.

Willermoz's tempered victory at Wilhelmsbad

In the second half of the 1770s, the German Order of the Strict Templar Observance was in deep crisis. As early as 1772, at the Convent of Kohlo, doubts had been expressed about the patent that Baron de Hund boasted of holding from Charles Edward Stuart and about the so-called Unknown Superiors to whom the Order was supposedly subject. Hund was given the benefit of the doubt and simply replaced at the head of the Order by Duke Ferdinand of Braunschweig-Luneburg (1721-1782). This was not the case at the Convent of Braunschweig in 1775 : Hund was summoned to provide proof of his claims, and he finally admitted that they were all fabrications on his part.

The Order was in danger of disintegrating and many lodges left it to join other systems (the Swedish Rite, the Zinnendorf Rite, the Golden Rosycross of Ancient System, etc.). In an attempt to salvage what could be salvaged, Ferdinand of Braunschweig convened a convent at Wilhelmsbad in 1782, but not before sending a circular to the chapters of all provinces in 1780, asking them to answer a series of questions which can be summarised as follows : Does the Order have superiors ? Who were they ? Does the Order go back to the Templars ? Can the Order of the Temple be restored ? Are the rituals appropriate ? Should the aims of the Order be secret or public ? Does the Order have knowledge that no one else has ?

 

The questions posed by the Duke of Brunswick corresponded almost exactly to the concerns expressed by the Convent of the Gauls in 1778. The French delegates therefore presented the Reform of Lyon to the Convent of Wilhelmsbad. And it was this reform, essentially the work of Willermoz, that the Convent of Wilhelmsbad adopted in 1782, agreeing to renounce the direct Templar origin and no longer to demand the return of the Order's property. Willermoz's victory was not total, however, as the Convent did not approve the degrees of Professed and Grand Professed, to which he was most attached and in which he had incorporated all the Martinezian doctrine. These degrees obviously competed too much with the mystical current of the Swedish Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), who was favoured by German and Scandinavian Freemasons.

Thanks to the work of Willermoz and his friends, the Strict Templar Observance, which became the Rectified Scottish Rite, was revived, but this momentum was short-lived, as the Order finally collapsed with the death of the Duke of Braunschweig in 1792. The Rectified Scottish Rite survived only in France and Switzerland.

The discovery of mesmerism and the affair of the Unknown Agent

Between 1782 and 1792, one might have expected Willermoz to work hard to develop his rite and try to get the last two degrees approved by the Order as a whole. This did not happen, and it must be said that he abandoned ordinary Freemasonry for several years. In 1784, an event caught Willermoz's attention and occupied part of his time : the arrival in Lyon of Cagliostro (real name Giuseppe Balsamo, 1743-1795), who wanted to open a lodge of his Egyptian Rite. Willermoz had no intention of allowing a rival to set up on his land, so he made enquiries about the newcomer. He quickly identified Cagliostro as a charlatan, but Cagliostro still managed to seduce some Freemasons in Lyon and set up the Sagesse Triomphante lodge. But in 1785 the Queen's Necklace Affair broke out and Cagliostro, who was involved in it, was imprisoned before being expelled from France in 1786. He was soon forgotten in favour of a far more serious figure, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), the inventor of the theory of animal magnetism.

A German physician and astronomer, Mesmer mixed science and occultism, developing theories about the influence of the stars on the human body before becoming interested in magnetism and practising therapies using magnets. His idea was that there was a physical fluid in the world that was the link between living beings. It was the imbalance of this fluid that caused disease, and he claimed to be able to capture, store and direct it to bring about healing.

From 1778 Mesmer lived in Paris, where he founded the Society of Universal Harmony to promote his theories and practices. Considered a charlatan by some and a genius by others, he attracted many followers, particularly among the Freemasons. It was not until 1783 that Mesmerism arrived in Lyon, where some of Mesmer's disciples founded a local group called La Concorde, which Willermoz and several rectified Masons joined. This interest on the part of the Freemasons came at just the right time for Mesmerism, which had lost interest in Paris. The support it received from the arrival of an eminent Mason like Willermoz enabled it to survive longer in Lyon than in Paris, which Mesmer himself left in 1785.

But, as might be expected, Lyonian mysticism, of which Willermoz was a perfect representative, could not be satisfied with a purely physical, materialistic and 'scientific' interpretation of animal magnetism. In Lyon, mesmerism was taken up in the form of somnambulism, i.e. hypnosis and mediumship, and the animal fluid was seen not as a physical agent but as a genuine spiritual and supernatural force that connected living beings with God. And magnetic sessions were thought to provide access to the most hidden secrets of the universe. It is easy to understand why Willermoz, who had not experienced any supernatural manifestations with the theurgy taught by Martinès, was tempted by this new method. He devoted himself to it with enthusiasm and magnetised two young girls during the winter of 1784-1785. He then used a girl called Jeanne Rochette as his medium.

It was then, in 1785, that a Brother of his Lodge, the Chevalier de Monspey, sent Willermoz documents written for him by a mysterious 'Unknown Agent' in a state of somnambulism (today we would say automatic writing). This Unknown Agent instructed Willermoz to create a Society of Initiates to study his revelations, which he promptly did. He made it a kind of secret class, above the Professed and the Grand Professed. Even Louis Claude de Saint-Martin belonged to it, although he had left Freemasonry when Willermoz joined the Strict Templar Observance.

The Unknown Agent's notebooks were extremely confused, obscure and full of invented words and unknown graphics. Willermoz and his followers, certain that they would find traces of the Adamic language in them, studied them passionately. Willermoz even found strange similarities with the doctrine of Martinès, and considered himself fortunate to have access to the same truth in two different ways. This study also had repercussions on the Masonic rituals, since it was on the advice of the Unknown Agent that Willermoz replaced Tubalcain with Phaleg as the password for the first degree. But the Unknown Agent's communications became increasingly obscure, mystical and prophetic, sometimes predicting events that never came to pass. What's more, there were contradictions between the Unknown Agent's messages and those given orally by Jeanne Rochette, which were less lofty and more pragmatic. He decided to bring them together so that the Unknown Agent could teach Jeanne the art of magnetic writing.

 

It was at this meeting in April 1787 that Willermoz discovered the identity of the Unknown Agent: she was Marie-Louise de Monspey (1731-1814), known as Églée de Vallière, a canoness at Remiremont Abbey in the Vosges région ; she was the sister of the Chevalier de Monspey, who had given Willermoz the famous notebooks of the Unknown Agent. Had Monspey magnetised his sister ? If her messages were so close to the teachings of Martinès and testified to a certain knowledge of the Masonic mysteries, was it not because her brother had betrayed his oath and revealed to her the secrets of the Martinenezian Freemasons ? Willermoz had the unpleasant impression of having been manipulated. Swallowing his shame and dismay, he kept the secret for more than a year, but on 10 October 1788 he summoned the Society of Initiates to explain his doubts about the supernatural and miraculous quality of the Unknown Agent's communications. Enraged, Madame de Vallière retaliated by removing him from the leadership of the Society and giving it to Jean Paganucci (1729-1797), who, as you will recall, was one of the redactors of the rituals of the Lyon Reform.

This unfortunate episode weakened Rectified Freemasonry and led the Grand Professed of Lyon to neglect the craft lodges for several years. In addition, this delirious occultism had disturbed several Protestant Grand Professed of the Province of Burgundy in Strasbourg. On the eve of the Revolution, the Rectified Scottish Rite in France appeared stagnant and divided. Would Willermoz be able to lead it through the revolutionary  ? We'll find out in a future article.