Customer Reviews

Isaac Newton's Freemasonry: The Alchemy of Science and Mysticism

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This disappointing book by Grand Master of the Grand Orient de France, Alain Bauer reads more like a slightly extended after dinner speech. The actual meat of the text is just 80 pages long, culled from other (better) books. It is padded with additional, and almost totally unrelated, material, including a timeline of the development of French Freemasonry, for no apparent reason. Unfortunately a bad case of misleading packaging.

A huge disappointment. No light to be found here.

The title suggests that the subjects of alchemy, science, and mysticism will be explored through the mind and actions of Isaac Newton. But the text fails to deliver.

This book was translated into English from French, and many of the references are French sources. The author was Grand Master of the Grand Orient masonry, but the book is pathetically inadequate, an almost worthless introduction to the subject, only for someone who has no knowledge about the subject at all, a very brief summary of an unproven hypothesis, not worthy of receiving a passing grade for a college paper. The author summarizes references to entire books by a mere single sentences, many of the references being books written in French. There is very little discussion of alchemy or mysticism, and the evidence for Newton being a Freemason is only a very small amount of merely circumstantial evidence. The author conceals, rather than reveals, which is typical for a Freemason, and typical for Freemasonry which requires bloody oaths of secrecy from its membership. A pathetic example of Masonic so-called scholarship. At most, this book might provide a few bibliography references for deeper research.

The Grand Orient of France ignores some very important rules of Freemasonry and therefore are not recogized by other Grand Lodges, leaving them clandestine. I'm not saying that this fellow cannot do research, but if your views are already skewed by clandestine masonry then who is to say your research isn't as well?