‘Sir Robert Moray Seminar: Masonic History in the Making’

    

I really wish I could tell you about this outstanding event, but no one is talking. September 26 is not a Lodge Sir Robert Moray 1641 meeting date; this event is not listed on the Provincial Grand Lodge’s calendar; the research lodge itself is mum (at least with me).

As you know, Matthew Leigh is the author of The Masons and the Mysteries in 18th Century Drama (2019), of which its publisher says: “The fathers of modern Freemasonry sought a classical pedigree for their rituals and forms of association. This volume offers the first academic study of how Freemasons writing in the first half of the 18th century deployed their knowledge of antiquity to bolster this claim and how the creative literature of the period reflected their ideas.” He is a professor of Classics at St. Anne’s College, Oxford University. (I hope he’s a Mason, but I don’t know.)

Lodge Sir Robert Moray 1641

Bro. Bruce is fifth from front. He is Marchmont Herald at the Court of the Lord Lyon.

Bro. Adam Bruce is a Past Master of Lodge Robert Moray 1641, a research lodge. Bro. Charles Winston’s name is recognizable from back issues of The Philalethes, and he is secretary of the Grand Lodge of Scotland’s History and Heritage Group.

This is not the first Sir Robert Moray Symposium. They seem to be held every couple of years.

It’s frustrating not knowing what these guys are up to! I can’t even find the start time.

If you’re unfamiliar with Robert Moray, the Scotsman was initiated into Freemasonry in 1641, during the Scots’ siege of Newcastle upon Tyne during the First English Civil War, making him the first non-operative made a Freemason on English soil—five years before Elias Ashmole.