The Scottish Rite: Ritual, Myth, Power, and the 33 Degrees Explained
The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite is often described as the pinnacle of Masonic education—but what lies behind its famous 33 degrees? In this lecture, we trace the Rite from its eighteenth-century Caribbean origins under Étienne Morin, through the formation of the first Supreme Council in Charleston in 1801, to its evolution into a global…
Masonry and its Symbols
This lecture introduces Harold W. Percival’s Masonry and Its Symbols (1952), a distinctive twentieth-century interpretation of Freemasonry that approaches the Craft through the lens of symbolic philosophy rather than institutional history. Percival presents Masonic ritual and imagery as expressions of a broader metaphysical system, centred on the concept of consciousness and articulated through his model…
Secret Teachings
Good evening Quarrymen This weekend I’ll be taking a closer look at Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928), a work that has shaped how many modern readers understand the symbolic traditions of the West. Hall attempted something rather ambitious: to gather Hermeticism, Pythagorean philosophy, Kabbalah, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry into a…
Which Masonic Authors Are Actually Worth Reading?
In this video I try something a little different from the usual From the Quarries format: a tier list of Masonic authors. A tier list is simply a ranked set of categories, from S (exceptional) down through A, B, C, and D. I’m judging these writers by a mix of usefulness to serious Masonic study,…
Ranking Writing
Good evening Quarrymen A slightly different kind of video is coming to From the Quarries this weekend. This time, instead of a formal lecture or deep historical treatment, I’ve put together something more conversational: a tier list of Masonic authors. After well over 1,400 videos on the channel, I thought it might be interesting to…
Why Rome Condemned Freemasonry
This omnibus explores one of the longest and most misunderstood tensions in modern religious and Masonic history: the relationship between the Church and the Craft. Drawing together three earlier talks, it examines the Catholic Church’s condemnations of Freemasonry, the question of whether Freemasonry is a religion, and the issue of its compatibility with Christianity. Grounded…
World Freemasonry – 5 Traditions, one Craft
This compilation offers concise, historically grounded introductions to major Masonic traditions—Russia, Japan, Ireland, Sweden, and Prince Hall (USA)—tracing their origins, key turning points, and the distinctive features of their rites and lodge culture, so you can see how the Craft expresses itself differently across jurisdictions while remaining recognisably Masonic.
Where to from here? – have your say!
In 2024 I ran a simple 10-question survey to capture how people actually see Freemasonry—Masons, non-Masons, and the simply curious. It generated a huge spread of responses and became the backbone of a conference presentation and video. Since then, the YouTube channel has grown to 33,000+ subscribers and the audience is much broader and more…
The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (The First Day)
The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, first published in Strasbourg in 1616 and attributed to Johann Valentin Andreae, is the most elaborate of the Rosicrucian manifestos, presenting a seven-day allegorical narrative that fuses Lutheran theology, Renaissance alchemy, and Hermetic symbolism. Though sometimes read as a literal esoteric revelation, Andreae later described the work as a…
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