Carlile R.

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First published in book form London, 1833. Many reprints.
This electronic edition issued by Celephaïs Press, some-
where beyond the Tanarian Hills, and manifested
in the waking world in Leeds, Yorkshire,
England, A.L. 6005.
This work is in the public domain.
Release 1.01 : 28.05.2005
MANUAL OF
FREEMASONRY
BY
RICHARD CARLILE
Celephaïs Press
Ulthar - Sarkomand - Inquanok – Leeds
2005
EDITORIAL NOTE
This electronic edition of Carlile’s
Manual of Freemasonry
is based on a
facsimile of an unspecified printing, issued by Kessinger Publishing in Kila,
Montana. A few manifest typographical errors have been corrected. The
publisher’s introduction from that edition is omitted for copyright reasons.
Layout and style from the print edition has been retained, although no
attempt has been made to match the typeface.
Carlile’s exposure was originally printed by instalments in a radical
magazine called
The Republican
in 1825. An earlier book version was
issued in 1831. Over the course of successive publications, Carlile’s com-
mentaries were revised significantly. Carlile, with a background in working-
class activism and radical publishing, which included several years of
imprisonment for issuing “blasphemous” writings (specifically Thomas
Paine’s
Age of Reason
), initially attacked Freemasonry from a materialist
and anti-religious point of view, dismissing the pretensions of the fraternity
to fantastical antiquity and denouncing its social influence as pernicious.
In subsequent editions of the exposure, as Carlile shifted his views on the
subject under various influences, his commentaries were rewritten, firstly
reflecting the idea that Freemasonry derived from ancient solar cults (this
idea perhaps derived from Thomas Paine’s
Essay on Free Masonry
, but it
reflects a more general intellectual fashion of the period to explain all
manner of religions in terms of solar myths, as reflected in the works of
Jacob Bryant, Godfrey Higgins, and others) and interpreting its teachings
in terms of astronomical mythology (apparently under the influence of
Robert Taylor, a former Anglican clergyman, nicknamed ‘The Devil’s
Chaplain,’ with whom Carlile associated after his release from prison in
1825), and finally emphasising the moral teachings of the craft. (Carlile
later fell out with Taylor and deleted a reference to him in his “introd-
uctory Key-stone to the Royal Arch”; in the earlier version, Carlile tells us
that he claimed to Godfrey Higgins that he and Taylor were the third and
fourth Freemasons in England.)
References for the above
:
Andrew Prescott, “The Devil’s Freemason: Richard Carlile and his
Manual of
Freemasonry
”; web-published, 2001. Online at
“Publisher’s introduction” to an edition of
Manual of Freemasonry
issued by
Kessinger Publishing, Kila, MT, USA; n.d. but 1990s.
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