# The Freemasons are a secret society that covertly controls governments, banking, and world events

**Verdict: Contradicted.** Freemasonry is a real fraternal order with genuine secrets: passwords, handshakes, and closed rituals descended from medieval stonemason guilds, formally organized into grand lodges from 1717. Many influential men have been members, and in the 1826 William Morgan affair some Masons really did commit a crime and close ranks. The claim we rate is larger and different: that Freemasonry is a single, unified society secretly running governments, finance, and world events, in some versions through satanic or occult worship. That claim is debunked. Masonry is decentralized into hundreds of sovereign, mutually feuding grand lodges; its rituals have been published since 1730; its membership has collapsed rather than grown; and the satanic material traces directly to a hoax its own author, Leo Taxil, confessed to inventing in 1897.

Category: Secret Societies & Power · Era: 1717 origin, enduring myth · First circulated: Anti-Masonic panic dates to the 1826 William Morgan affair and the Anti-Masonic Party of the late 1820s; the satanic and world-control versions took their modern shape in the 1880s-1890s, notably through Leo Taxil's fabricated Palladism · Believed by: A recurring strand of anti-Masonic sentiment across two centuries, carried by religious opposition, the 19th-century Anti-Masonic movement, and, in the internet era, New World Order and 'secret rulers' folklore
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/freemasons

## Summary
Freemasonry is genuinely a secret society: it keeps real passwords and grips, holds closed ceremonies, and has bound members by solemn oath since it emerged from medieval stonemasons' lodges and organized into grand lodges beginning in London in 1717. Its ranks have included founding fathers, presidents, and famous men, and in one documented 1826 case some Masons abducted a man who threatened to publish their rituals. The claim rated here is the far bigger one: that this order is a unified hidden hand steering governments, banks, and history, sometimes cast as a satanic cult. That version is debunked. Masonry is fractured into rival, self-governing grand lodges that refuse to recognize one another; its 'secrets' have been in print for nearly three centuries; its numbers have fallen sharply; and the lurid satanic charge comes from a hoax the fabricator, Leo Taxil, publicly admitted. (The distinct Bavarian Illuminati, often merged into Masonic lore, is treated in its own case file.)

## The claim
That Freemasonry is not merely a fraternal club but a single, coordinated secret society that has used its rituals, oaths, and well-placed members to covertly direct governments, central banks, and major world events for centuries, and that in its darker forms it conceals an occult or satanic cult of hidden global rulers.

## Origin and timeline
- Medieval–1600s: Operative stonemasons in Britain and Scotland organize into lodges to regulate their craft, guard trade secrets, and identify qualified 'freestone' masons through recognized words and signs. Over time lodges begin admitting non-working 'accepted' or 'speculative' members, gentlemen drawn to the ritual and fellowship.
- 1717-06-24: Four London lodges meet at the Goose and Gridiron alehouse and form the Premier Grand Lodge of England, the first Masonic grand lodge and the conventional birth date of organized 'speculative' Freemasonry.
- 1723: James Anderson's 'Constitutions of the Free-Masons' is published, codifying the order's mythologized history, moral charges, and governance. Freemasonry spreads rapidly across Europe and the American colonies.
- 1730: Samuel Prichard publishes 'Masonry Dissected,' a printed exposure laying out the rituals, passwords, and catechisms of the three degrees. It becomes a bestseller and the first of many published exposures, undercutting from the start the idea that the order's secrets could be truly hidden.
- 1738: Pope Clement XII issues the bull 'In eminenti,' forbidding Catholics from joining Freemasonry, the first of numerous papal condemnations. Religious opposition becomes a lasting engine of anti-Masonic suspicion.
- 1826: In Batavia, New York, William Morgan, a disaffected Mason, announces he will publish an exposé of the rituals. He is arrested on dubious charges, then abducted, and disappears, presumed murdered. Several Masons are convicted of the kidnapping, but no body is conclusively identified and no one is convicted of killing him.
- 1828–1838: Outrage over the Morgan affair fuels the Anti-Masonic Party, the first significant third party in United States history and the first to hold a national nominating convention. Masonic membership plunges amid the backlash, a demonstration that the order could be publicly humbled, not that it was invincible.
- 1877: The Grand Orient de France drops the requirement that members profess belief in a Supreme Being. The United Grand Lodge of England withdraws recognition, and the split endures to this day, a stark illustration that world Freemasonry is not one body but many that will not even acknowledge one another.
- 1885–1897: French writer Leo Taxil publishes elaborate accounts of a satanic Masonic cult called Palladism, complete with a fictitious high priestess, Diana Vaughan. On 19 April 1897 he calls a press conference and confesses the entire thing was a hoax he concocted to embarrass the Catholic Church that had embraced it. The fabricated satanic material outlives his confession and circulates to this day.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: Freemasonry is a single, unified organization that coordinates its members to control world events.
  Evidence: There is no unified Freemasonry to do the controlling. The order is split into hundreds of sovereign 'grand lodges,' one or more per country or American state, each governing itself with no superior authority above it. They frequently refuse to recognize one another: the United Grand Lodge of England and the Grand Orient de France have been in open non-recognition since 1877 over whether belief in a Supreme Being is required. A worldwide conspiracy requires a chain of command; Masonry's defining structural feature is that it has none.
- Claim: The order's secret rituals and oaths conceal a hidden agenda for power.
  Evidence: The rituals have been published, by outsiders and defectors, since Samuel Prichard's 'Masonry Dissected' in 1730, and comprehensively in works like Duncan's 'Masonic Ritual and Monitor' in 1866. Anyone can read them. What they contain is moral allegory built on stonemasons' tools, the square, the compasses, the level, teaching lessons about virtue and mortality, plus modes of recognition. The genuine secret is largely the means of proving oneself a member; it is not a blueprint for governing nations.
- Claim: That founding fathers, presidents, and powerful men were Masons proves Masonic control of governments.
  Evidence: Prominent membership is real: George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were Masons, as were later presidents and many notables. But individuals belonging to a fraternity is not the same as the fraternity directing policy, and the inference does not survive scrutiny. Most of the Constitution's signers were not Masons; Masonic presidents governed in every direction and against each other's interests; and no decision has ever been traced to a lodge command. Shared membership among some elites is a correlation mistaken for a hidden hand.
- Claim: Freemasonry secretly worships Lucifer or conceals a satanic cult of global rulers.
  Evidence: This charge traces almost entirely to a single admitted fraud. Between 1885 and 1897 Leo Taxil invented a satanic Masonic order, 'Palladism,' and a fictional priestess, Diana Vaughan, feeding a receptive anti-Masonic public. In 1897 he stood before an audience and confessed he had made all of it up to ridicule the Church. The satanic-Masonry genre is his hoax, still circulating with its origin filed off. Masonry does require belief in a Supreme Being (in the mainstream lodges) but leaves the member's specific religion to him; it prescribes no deity of its own.
- Claim: The William Morgan affair proves Masons murder to protect their secrets and answer to no one.
  Evidence: The Morgan affair is the strongest real fact the dark story has, and it cuts the other way. Some Masons did abduct Morgan and several were convicted of the kidnapping, a genuine crime and cover-up. But it did not demonstrate untouchable power; it triggered the opposite. Public fury drove prosecutions, mass defections, and the Anti-Masonic Party, and Masonic membership collapsed for a generation. An order that could be so battered by a single scandal is not one quietly running the world.
- Claim: Masonic membership signals a growing grip on hidden power.
  Evidence: The trend runs the wrong way for a group tightening its hold. United States Masonic membership peaked around four million in the late 1950s and has fallen to roughly one million, with lodges aging, merging, and closing for want of recruits. Comparable declines have hit Britain and elsewhere. A secret society consolidating control of the planet would not be struggling to fill its own meetings.

## Why people believe it
- The secrecy is genuinely real. Freemasons do swear binding oaths, use passwords and handshakes, and meet behind closed doors, so 'they are hiding something' begins from a true premise before it leaps to a false conclusion about what.
- The historical membership is real and impressive. Washington, Franklin, and a long roster of statesmen, generals, and celebrities really were Masons, which makes it easy to pattern-match from prominent members to the fantasy of a governing hand behind them.
- The symbolism looks esoteric and sinister to outsiders. Aprons, the all-seeing eye, the square and compasses, and solemn ritual are readily reinterpreted as occult menace by anyone unfamiliar with their plain, allegorical meaning.
- There is a real crime at the root of the legend. The 1826 abduction and probable murder of William Morgan, and the closing of ranks around it, gave the sinister version an authentic seed of Masons covering for one another, which the imagination then inflates to global scale.
- The fabrications have durable afterlives. Leo Taxil's confessed satanic hoax, papal denunciations, and later antisemitic 'secret cabal' propaganda have merged Freemasonry into a general folklore of hidden rulers, circulating long after their sources were exposed or discredited.

## Open questions
- William Morgan's ultimate fate remains a genuine historical mystery. He was abducted in 1826 and never seen again, several men were convicted only of kidnapping, and a body recovered from Lake Ontario was contested and never conclusively identified as his. The unresolved crime is real; what it does not establish is any claim of world control.
- The Propaganda Due (P2) lodge in Italy is a documented case in which a Masonic lodge, under Licio Gelli, became a genuine criminal and political conspiracy entangled in scandal in the 1970s and 1980s. It shows that a lodge can be captured for corrupt ends. It was expelled by Italy's Grand Orient and investigated by the state, which is the opposite of a hidden global order operating with impunity, but it is a fair caution against treating every lodge as merely a charity dinner.
- How much informal advantage fraternal networks have conferred, business referrals, hiring favoritism, mutual aid among members, is a legitimate and narrow sociological question, separate from and far smaller than any claim of a coordinated secret government.
- Why the satanic material persists despite Leo Taxil's own 1897 confession, and how a debunked 19th-century hoax keeps resurfacing as fresh 'proof,' is a question about the information environment more than about the lodges themselves.

## Sources
- The story of Freemasonry (official history of the order and the 1717 founding of Grand Lodge), United Grand Lodge of England: https://www.ugle.org.uk/discover-freemasonry/history-freemasonry
- Freemasonry, Encyclopaedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Freemasonry
- Masonry Dissected (Samuel Prichard's printed exposure of the Masonic degrees, rituals and passwords; fourth edition of 1731), Samuel Prichard; text via Internet Archive (1731): https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_masonry-dissected-being_prichard-samuel_1731
- Duncan's Masonic Ritual and Monitor (comprehensive published account of the ritual), Malcolm C. Duncan; text via Internet Sacred Text Archive (1866): https://www.sacred-texts.com/mas/dun/index.htm
- William Morgan (anti-Mason): the 1826 abduction and disappearance that triggered the Anti-Masonic movement, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morgan_(anti-Mason)
- Anti-Masonic movement (the first significant United States third party, born of the Morgan affair), Encyclopaedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anti-Masonic-movement
- Taxil hoax (Leo Taxil's fabricated satanic 'Palladism' and his 1897 public confession), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxil_hoax
- Grand Orient de France (the 1877 Supreme Being dispute and the enduring split with the United Grand Lodge of England), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Orient_de_France
- Propaganda Due (P2): the Italian Masonic lodge that became a documented criminal and political conspiracy, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_Due

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/freemasons