Title: Frimurerne i Danmark og Norge   De hemmelige ritualene 1
Subtitle: Seyid0Riza (YouTube transcript)
Author: Seyid0Riza

1. About This Transcript

This book is an automated transcription, not a written work by the speaker.

The text that follows was generated automatically from the captions of the video "Frimurerne i Danmark og Norge De hemmelige ritualene 1" by Seyid0Riza. Source: the original video

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2. Unveiling the Secrets of the Lodge

"We are very happy that we can now show our house." Until a few years ago, no one other than the Freemasons themselves were allowed past the guard in the large lodge in Copenhagen. The Freemasons guarded their secret jealously. The time of lodge meetings was announced in a celestial code, and even the closest family was told nothing about what was going on behind the thick wall. The first non-Freemason to be allowed in was none other than Queen Margrethe. It was in 1993, on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Freemasons.

Since then, there have often been public tours of the main house. But one thing is that the physical surroundings are something completely different from the old rituals of the Freemasons. They were and still are surrounded by deep silence. That is why it caused a stir 32 years ago when the TV director Poul Martinsen wanted to make a feature about the Freemasons. It was a program called Secret Denmark, where other secret societies were also supposed to participate.

"I think it could be exciting to go on such a tour, anthropologically, to work and look at what makes it exciting for adult men — powerful men, actually, in many cases — to have something that is secret. What is this drive that makes it that their ceremonies should be something that not everyone has access to?"

Originally, I actually had no plans at all to show the secret rituals on TV. "We were actually set on from the start — an interview about the topic of secrecy. Secrecy — why is it necessary to have it? And then maybe a single procession of the Freemasons there. They went in there, and that was what we would have been satisfied with. But they didn't want that. They said no to that."

And then I decided to go other ways. We thought, "Well, it can't be the intention that we can't make a broadcast about Secret Denmark. And we can't do that if the Freemason isn't involved — it's the most important lodge at all. So of course they have to come along." So we did it. We went hunting, and then we found an older former brother who agreed to tell us about some of the ceremonies he had been part of. And then we made reconstructions of it.

And the one where you come in — the aspirant comes in and gets a blindfold, and then the right side or the left side, I can't remember — at least one side of his chest is then exposed. And it's dark, and then they take the blindfold off his eyes. Then, at the same time, a light is turned on, and he sees a whole bunch of gentlemen standing with their swords pointing at his chest, and then they say, "Let him see the light." And that was just part of that way. And then there was the third degree. There was something about the aspirant going up to the third degree: he is put down in a coffin, and there they say that the flesh has already rotted. And then he is lifted out of this coffin again. And then he can get out and then be a brother on a higher level. That was it. And we knew that the program was made. But shortly before the broadcast, something unexpected happened.

It was to be broadcast there — troops from up in the feed in Gladsaxe — and pay a larger amount, I think 120,000 kroner or something like that, and then file a lawsuit against Danmarks Radio and say that it must not be allowed to be broadcast. And so, yes, so it is out — can you say at least not shown. It subsequently came to a legal showdown between the Freemasons and DR, first in the High Court, where it was won, and then before the country’s highest court, the Supreme Court. It was a bit cheerful, I think now. I had also been through this for seven years.

Gradually I could start to hunt such different things at the actual ceremony, the ceremony that takes place in the court. And there it was a bit interesting. When they then showed on a monitor these recordings of our extras, who, with gear and something like that, came in, and up in the Supreme Court there were nine judges, each also provided with these robes. And there were a few of them who could well see the faces hidden in. They had a little difficulty hiding a smile when they saw what it was all about. They probably don’t know this book. There are not very many in Denmark who know it.

The book contains the names of 10,000 Danish men. It is the secret list of Denmark’s 10,000 Freemasons. Just before the Supreme Court handed down its judgment, Danish viewers got a glimpse of the rituals in a popular show on Denmark’s only TV channel at the time. "Now you are going to see something that very few have seen, namely the admission of a new member into the third degree of the Masonic lodge. It takes place at a ceremony that is based on the Old Testament account of the murder of King Solomon’s builder Hiram. In this ceremony the initiate is to undergo a symbolic death and resurrection."

The program was broadcast live, and the Freemasons therefore could not manage to impose a ban on the sequence. The program lasted three minutes, and the Freemasons protested afterwards, which even led to a work stoppage on Danmarks Radio. It was here in the studio the channel should have been broadcast now at 8 pm, with 60 guests from Jutland. Instead, a foreign nature film about Madagascar is being broadcast on the channel. The cancellation is due to this letter from the leadership of the Freemason order to the lodge brothers about the Freemasons’ attitude to the program about them on the channel last week. The channel wanted to make a short program about the letter, but yesterday, when the culture department program manager Verner Svendsen heard it, he demanded it be taken off the program, and it led to a number of meetings in TV-byen today. The journalists thought it was an infringement on their freedom of expression, and so the viewers had to make do with nature films from Madagascar. Shortly after came the ruling from the Supreme Court.

But before we look more closely at it, let’s take a look even further back, just from the start of Freemasonry 300 years ago. The secret rituals have been a thorn in the eyes of the surrounding society, the secret Craft, which has often been a target for jokes. Here, a monkey with the Freemasons whispers secrets to curious pigs, and here a lodge meeting is interrupted by a maid who falls through the attic where she has been lying and listening to the lodge brothers. Sometimes the secret Craft has triggered popular fantasies about what was going on in the Lodge, from ritual murder to planning revolutions. The conspiracy theories were strongly fueled by the fact that many of the leaders behind the American Revolution in 1776 were ardent Freemasons, and no fewer than 12 American presidents have been Freemasons. Note here that the first president of the United States, George Washington, is wearing his Freemason regalia when he lays the cornerstone for the Congress building on Capitol Hill.

“We have been blamed for many things. But, to start with the positive, I have no doubt that we have been very driving forces in both the American War of Independence and the American Declaration of Independence.”

The world has, through drawings and books, tried to reveal the secret rituals. The mystery of what must have been going on behind the closed lodge doors has been a constant curiosity throughout the centuries, but also fear and anxiety about what the Freemasons were up to. This American researcher in conspiracy theories tells that paranoia ran rampant in the USA in 1825 under very dramatic circumstances.

“A young Freemason in New York writes a book exposing the secret rituals of the Freemasons, and he is really — you know, maybe yes, maybe no, evidence is thin — but there’s basically an Anti-Masonic party formed in the US, and it sweeps through several states and becomes politically powerful. So the Anti-Masonic movement grew very large in a number of states. They ran candidates for public office all the way up to the presidency. They were highly influential in a number of state legislatures in America at the time. So this was not a tiny marginal movement. This was a major political movement in the United States.”

The Anti-Masonic movement people feared that behind the Freemasons there was a still secret lodge called the Illuminati, who would overthrow society. The French Revolution, all the Freemason lodges and Freemason lodge people involved in revolution around Europe — this became suspicion towards the Freemasons. And their secrets also became prevalent in Denmark.

In Denmark, the first lodge was started in 1743. At the time, there was the famous author and geographer Ludvig Holberg; he was probably at the top in his time. He wrote, even before it was started, that it was something dangerous. He had heard about it in Germany. The reason he thought it was dangerous was because it was secret; he didn’t like it. I think Holberg had a slightly more relaxed relationship with it.

It would be logical, you could say, Holberg was a Freemason because he was an Enlightenment man. But he had something like that in his epistles. He wrote at one point that there was a man who was going around and keeping all those secrets; he couldn’t stand it. About the Freemasons and other secret societies, Holberg wrote that they give rise to suspicion and therefore cannot be tolerated in a state, although they may be good and innocent. He wrote that they do give rise to evil factions and conspiracies, of which there are several examples. But at the same time, Holberg actually complained a lot about the Pope wanting to ban the oaths because he thought it was unfair that a pope wanted to ban something he knew nothing about.

Only once has Freemasonry in Denmark been directly banned, and that was during the Nazi occupation — however, not because of the secret rituals, but because the Nazis suspected the Freemasons of planning a world revolution as the extended arm of the Jews. After the war, the Freemasons could again indulge themselves undisturbed in the centuries-old rituals, until Poul Martinsen came on the scene.

After seven years of wandering through the legal system, the Supreme Court finally ruled in 1982 that Martinsen’s program with the famous secret rituals — as accepted by the judgment, those used for admission to the various degrees of the Masonic Order and kept secret by the Order — must be considered to belong to its private affairs. They are thus protected against unjustified publication. That was the essential thing in the judgment. And it clearly states that the Freemasons had the right to protect their ceremonies from public intrusion.

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