October 2026
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What is Freemasonry really for? Its symbols and ceremonies are familiar, but the purposes they serve have received remarkably different explanations. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Freemasonry (1915), Roscoe Pound examined four influential answers: William Preston’s conception of the lodge as a school of knowledge; Karl Christian Friedrich Krause’s account of moral development…
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Could the origins of Masonic symbolism extend hundreds of thousands of years into the prehistoric past? In 1920, the physician and Masonic author Albert Churchward advanced one of the most extraordinary theories ever proposed concerning the antiquity of Freemasonry. He believed that its working tools, symbols and ceremonies preserved fragments of humanity’s earliest language of…
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This Saturday on From the Quarries, we turn to Albert Churchward and one of the most extraordinary attempts ever made to reconstruct the origins of Freemasonry. Writing in 1920, Churchward traced the Craft’s symbols, rituals and working tools far beyond the medieval guilds, beyond Egypt, and into what he believed was the prehistoric symbolic language…
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What can astronomy, geometry, ancient Egyptian ritual and Kabbalah bring to our understanding of the Royal Arch? This compendium edition of From the Quarries gathers four lectures from the archive exploring different approaches to its esoteric symbolism. Beginning with celestial and geometrical interpretations, the collection moves through comparisons with Egyptian ritual to the possibilities of…
