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Historisk tidskrift 131:3 • 2011

Innehåll (Contents) 2011:3

”Död är liv”. Iscensättning av döden i det europeiska 1700-talsfrimureriet

Andreas Önnerfors

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Summary

“Death is life”: staging of life in European eighteenth century freemasonary

This article treats Freemasonry and its transgression of death in the age of enlightenment as cultural performance. After the emergence of modern Freemasonry in London in 1717, its ritual practice was disseminated across Europe and beyond. The Third, or Master’s, Degree staged a ritual transgression of death. The article claims that by offering this experience to tens of thousands of members, freemasonry contributed to a change of attitude towards death; a turn from concepts of divine punishment towards a doctrine of afterlife, influencing ethical action during life. It starts in an analysis of the article on “death” in the German enlightenment encyclopaedia Zedlers Universal Lexicon, which suggests that a purely theological interpretation of death now was scrutinized, negotiated and questioned. Occasional poetry and rhetoric contributed to a literary treatment of individual death. Subsequently the narrative structure and performance of the Third Degree within Freemasonry is exemplified. Next, two normative texts of Freemasonry, one published in a hotbed of German enlightenment, Vienna, and the second on its relative outskirts, Swedish Pomerania, are analysed extensively. Finally the transgression of death as practiced within Masonic ritual is tested against Dan Edelsteins recent suggestion that the epistemology of enlightenment in fact oscillated between Illuminism and rationality and that it was characterized by a significant amount of fuzziness. By staging a transgression of death, the performative practice of Freemasonry extended the boundaries of psychological understanding. Concepts of afterlife were subsequently liberated from earlier ideas of punishment and instead embraced promises of extended knowledge, vision and light. In the long run these new attitudes towards death underpinned ideas of felicity, individual autonomy and self-determination, the Leitmotifs of the enlightenment.

Keywords

freemasonry, death, cultural performance, ritual, epistemology, enlightenment, rhetoric, normative discourse