Customer Reviews

Masonic Temples: Freemasonry, Ritual Architecture, and Masculine Archetypes

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Prof. Moore has for many years been one of the best academic scholars of American Freemasonry. His reseach is now at long last in published form. I can not recommend this book high enough. He now offically joins such other great academic scholars as Bullock, Jacob, and Clawson. This is what Masonic history ought to be and how it should be written.

Masonic temples with external and internal features to evoke King Solomon's temple in ancient Jerusalem built throughout New York state from 1870 to 1930 were intended to "anchor [Freemasons] within a cognitive framework as they faced the existential crisis of being American men" in this period of profound, challenging, and often perplexing cultural change. New York state serves as an instructive example of the architecture of Masonic temples throughout the United States and the types of rituals and other activities they were built for because of this state's diversity embracing urban, suburban, and rural areas. The author is also familiar with New York Freemasonry from his one-time position as director of the Chancellor Robert R. Livingston Masonic Library in New York City, though he is not himself a Mason. This Masonic Library also contains an incomparable amount of Masonic literature for study. The main chambers of a Masonic lodge are built and furnished to define--and thus to anchor--different facets of masculinity as these are recognized by the different stages of Freemasonry's initiations and rituals. The four principle chambers known as the Masonic lodge room, armory and drill room of the Knights Templar, the Scottish Rite Cathedral, and the Shriners' mosque correspond respectively to the masculine facets of the heroic artisan, the holy warrior, the wise man, and the jester. Moore moves back and forth from physical aspects of these rooms, the relationship of these aspects to the different facets of masculinity, and how Masonic rituals, lore, values, and practices work to define these aspects and keep them in proper balance in the formation of the ideal Freemason.

MASONIC TEMPLES provides an excellent introduction to the structures American Freemasons erected over the sixty-year period from 1870 to 1930, analyzing their design, construction, and history and considering the surrounding milieu of Masonic sects and American culture of the times. This is a pivotal title recommended for any collection which already holds some more general Masonic titles: it offer analysis of four sets of Masonic ritual spaces and provides fine details on Masonic beliefs, rituals and architecture.

This is such a good book! What a tremendously complicated thing to well -situate, so to speak, the golden age of the Masonic building boom in terms that lead the reader to further insight and seriousness about Masonry itself. Instead of into platitudes, or their opposite. I notice that Mark Tabbert mentions Clawson's book in his review here, I assume referring to her Constructing Brotherhood, in praising this one. Actually, I think comparing them is very useful for pointing out the special character of Moore's . Clawson's is a good book in some ways, but its rather blunt and dated-sounding social analysis (almost Marxist in tone) , is nothing like the the purposeful subtlety of this one. What is wonderful about this one is that he conveys Masonic philosophy without rigid academic reflexes, but with academic rigor. And I can vouch for that particularly because this book was useful to me fairly recently in writing an academic paper on Masonry on a topic not specific to Temples per se. Thus, a very useful book, all the way around.

I had been very anxious to read this and finally got a hold of it through the library (I just have TOO many books), and read this fairly quickly as I found it to be very, very interesting.

Lots of nice photos, very good recap of Blue Lodge Masonry and other concordant bodies, also their history and how they related to the membership at the particular time of the organizations heydays.

I got a better perspective of how Masonry related to America at that period of time and see where it needs to go today to remain functional and with purpose in our day and age. I think it will.