Freemasons: Who They Really Are, What Their Sign Means and Where the Plot Ends

Freemasons in plain words

On 24 June 1717, in a London tavern called the Goose and Gridiron, a few steps from St Paul’s Cathedral, representatives of four lodges sat down to dinner. They declared themselves a Grand Lodge and elected a first Grand Master, Anthony Sayer. By the standards of the age it was a modest event: a dinner and the election of a chairman. Yet Masons count this date as the start of their organised history, and a bar in London’s Freemasons’ Hall now carries the name of that tavern.

Freemasons are a fraternity that admits men through a ritual of initiation and meets in groups called lodges. Most Masonic historians trace it to the guilds of medieval stonemasons who built castles and cathedrals, which is where the aprons, the square, the compasses and the language of “building” come from. It is not a church and not a party. A candidate is expected to believe in a Supreme Being, but he chooses his own faith.

How many are there today? The United Grand Lodge of England puts its own membership at roughly 170,000 to 180,000, and Masons estimate about six million worldwide (figures from the UGLE website on 16 October 2026). There is no single headquarters: there are hundreds of independent grand lodges that recognise one another, or do not.

The Masonic sign: square, compasses and the “all-seeing eye”

The main Masonic sign is the square and compasses, a builder’s tools, often with a letter G between them. It is linked to “geometry” and to “God”. The leather apron is also a trade inheritance: it protected a stonemason from sharp chips, and for a Mason it became a mark of membership.

The “all-seeing eye”, an eye in a triangle, stands in Masonic tradition for the Great Architect of the Universe, meaning God. But the same picture can be read another way. In 1782 the US Congress described such an eye on the reverse of the Great Seal as a sign of Providence, and it later landed on the one-dollar bill. Who read it as Masonic, and when, is in the dossier.

So the honest answer to “how do you recognise a Mason by his sign” is duller than the legend. A square and compasses on a building or a ring says only that its owner was connected to a lodge. An eye in a triangle on a banknote or a logo is not a pass into a secret union.

Two stories that built the legend

Masons have been suspected of everything: of revolutions, of Satanism, of secret power over money and governments. The first to condemn them was Pope Clement XII. His bull In eminenti apostolatus of 28 April 1738 threatened excommunication for any Catholic who joined a lodge. The argument was simple: if a society hides from the light, its deeds must be evil. The bull offers no proof; it leans on rumour.

A century and a half later a French journalist, Léo Taxil, invented a Satanic order inside Freemasonry and a fictional priestess, Diana Vaughan, fooled the press and church dignitaries, and on 19 April 1897 publicly confessed to the fraud. Then in 1981 Italian financial police found a list of 962 names in a safe: a plot inside a lodge, it turned out, can be real. Between those two stories runs the whole border between invention and document.

What the dossier holds

The dossier covers what the 1738 bull and the bans that followed actually say, how Taxil led Rome by the nose and how his evening in a Paris hall ended, what Italy’s parliament established about the P2 lodge, why the “eye” on the dollar says nothing about Masons, and how the ban on lodges looked in Russia, from the arrested publisher Novikov to the rescript of 1822 and the pledges of 1826. And where exactly the document stops and the invention begins.