M&D p.210 (spoiler)

[Daniel Torop]

On Tue, 13 May 1997, Brian D. McCary wrote:

<snip>
> 3) 	p. 210, at Stonehenge.  Mason comments that his family has
> been millers and bakers for generations, not cutters and movers of
> stone.  Idle curiosity:  could milling have been one of those professions
> which would evolve out of masonry, what with finding, cutting, and 
> transporting the millstone?  Bakers could certainly evolve professionally
> from millers.  If so, is there a silent and as yet un-revealed connection
> between Mason and the Masons?  When were the Masons (Freemasons?) founded?
> I tend to doubt the connection, but the Masons seem like a classic subject
> for the paranoid, and we've seen them surface before in GR.
> 
> Brian McCary.
> 
There are a number of official (and not) sources about the freemasons on
the web.  I quote from http://www.charlton.demon.co.uk/UGLE/history, the
first one I came across in a quick search:

"Freemasonry is believed to have originated in England in the late 16th or
early 17th centuries, descending directly or indirectly from the craft of
the mediaeval stonemason. Directly, by operative lodges accepting
non-operative members who gradually took over and transformed the lodges
into purely speculative ones.  Indirectly, in that a group of men
interested in promoting tolerance in an intolerant age came together and
adopted the stonemason's tools and customs as allegorical aids to teach
their precepts."

The story I have heard goes that in medieval Europe workers in cities
formed guilds in order to protect themselves from the
management/nobility/bosses.  Masons often had jobs out in the country (you
know, building those big nifty castles), far from the protection and
organization of big city guilds.  Therefore, the masons building the
castles & manors and all would often build for themselves in the woods
near the work site a "lodge", a place they could meet, protectected from
the eye/hand of the management.  It's sort of like an...uh...counterforce.
They had secret handshakes and all the rest to make sure no agents of the
management would infiltrate them, and they used their unity/collective
bargaining power to keep from being too oppressed by the guys in power.

At some point in Masonry's history (16th or 17th cent.?), it became cool
to be a Mason, lodges were established in the cities, lords and princes
started becoming members, and Masonry became thoroughly coopted into
society & was also internationalized and generalized (i.e.  "non-operative
members who gradually took over and transformed the lodges into purely
speculative ones" ), and we have masonry as we know it today. 

I won't speculate on whether this relates to the above-quoted Pynchon
passage, except to say that I would guess millers & bakers are more of a
city/town based profession and therefore did not need the protection of
the original Masonic organization which was intended to protect those who
ended up in desolate locations to fulfill the will of the powerful.  (Like
anyone we know?)

Apologies to any Masons for my semi-Marxist massacring of their history.

Dan Torop