Final exam study guide

The final examination will consist of three or four passages from contemporary (late twentieth- or twenty-first-century) nonscholarly, nonacademic texts. You should write a separate essay analyzing each passage.

The author of each passage will be identified briefly on the exam. S/he could be, for instance:

1. an antimasonic conspiracy theorist

2. an “apologetic” masonic historian

3. an independent, neutral reporter or nonacademic scholar

4. a novelist taking poetic liberties with freemasonry’s history

Substantively, the passages are likely to likely to range from the half-baked to the downright kooky, but don’t assume this: they may be perfectly legitimate, even from a scholarly, academic perspective.

Some issues likely to be covered in one or more passages:

1. the extent to which freemasonry is a secret society: what we know, don’t know, can’t know, and/or shouldn’t know about Blue Lodge and/or higher-degree freemasonry. Examples: death ritual, passwords to “power,” significant differences between lower and higher degrees, the “secret” revealed, “open” (innocuous) secrets versus “real” (and more sinister) secrets

2. the legendary origins of freemasonry in ancient and medieval times. Examples: Solomon’s Temple, Hermes Trismegistus, the Knights Templar, the Druids

3. the exclusion of women and the nature of male homosociality. Examples: the lodges of adoption, the Victorian crisis of masculinity

4. the infiltration of freemasonry by conspiratorial, “underground,” revolutionary, utopian, and/or violent elements: the Illuminati, the Morgan affair, the Rosicrucians

Your responses should take the form of essays. Their format and structure are up to you, but in every case you should aim at producing a readable analysis governed by a thesis statement and covering the following bases:

1. you should distinguish among the following, ideally through line-by-line criticism:

facts: things we know to be correct

lies: things we know to be incorrect

half-truths: things we know to be partly correct, but which are inaccurately contextualized or incompletely presented

speculations: things we don’t know

fabrications: things we can’t know

insinuations: things we don’t or can’t know that nonetheless seem plausible based on things we can and do know

2. you should step back and look for a pattern to the distortions of fact: what is the author’s motive or axe to grind? How does the author propose to make us believe otherwise incredible or implausible statements and conjectures?