The principles

Spica (Latin, “ear of grain”)

Conscience comes first. Freemasonry in the liberal current asks no one to accept a creed, a revelation or a doctrine, and it holds no official view on the largest questions: whether there is a God, what follows death, what a human life is for. These remain each person’s own, to be answered, revised or left open.

This is not indifference. It rests on the conviction that a belief worth holding has to be freely held, and that a conscience under pressure has stopped being a conscience. The Temple is a place where no one has to hide what they think, and no one has to pretend to think what they do not.

The same freedom extends to the symbols. The square, the level, Light and darkness carry no single authorised meaning. They are offered rather than explained, and every honest reading of them is a legitimate one.

Zavijava (Arabic, “corner of the barking dog”)

Three tools, used together. Reason keeps the inquiry honest: claims are weighed rather than received, and a good argument counts for more than a loud one.

Dialogue keeps it shared. In a Masonic gathering people speak in turn, are not interrupted, and address the whole room rather than argue with one another. It is a simple discipline, and it turns disagreement into something people can learn from.

Symbolism keeps it open. An image or a gesture can hold more than a sentence, and it lets people with very different vocabularies think about the same thing without first having to agree on the words. None of these tools delivers a final truth. Together they make it possible to go on looking for it in company, which may be the rarer achievement.

Vindemiatrix (Latin, “the grape-gatherer”)

Freemasonry is old, and its age is a resource. Its rituals, symbols and customs were shaped over three centuries by people asking the same questions under very different skies, and they draw on far older sources: the stonemasons’ Lodges it took its name and its tools from, the philosophers of antiquity, the religious and spiritual traditions of many peoples, the science and the coffee-house debates of eighteenth-century London and Paris.

Learning from all traditions and philosophies means taking each of them seriously before deciding what to make of it: reading the old texts, understanding why a gesture or a word stands where it does, and recognising wisdom wherever it was first written down, whether in a Masonic ritual, a philosophical treatise or a sacred book that is not one’s own. It also means studying philosophical currents of every kind, whether current or ancient, popular or obscure, with the same curiosity and the same critical eye.

Tradition, here, is neither a cage nor a museum, and no single tradition owns the truth. Together they are closer to a long conversation that each generation enters, listens to and carries on.

Porrima (a Roman goddess of prophecy)

Respecting tradition does not mean treating every custom as sacred. Some conventions keep their meaning; others survive only because no one has asked why. The liberal current itself grew out of questions of exactly this kind: whether a belief should be demanded at the door, and whether half of humanity should be kept outside it.

To question a convention is not to tear it down. It is to ask what it is for, whether it still serves that purpose, and what would be lost or gained without it. Sometimes the answer is to keep it, understood a little better. Sometimes the answer is to let it go.

What matters is that the question can be asked aloud, calmly, by anyone, and that the habit of asking it travels from the Temple into the rest of life, where dogmas and unexamined habits are just as common.

Heze (origin unknown)

For most of its history Freemasonry was a society of men, and in many places it still is. The liberal current took another path. In 1882 the writer and campaigner Maria Deraismes was initiated in a Lodge near Paris, and in 1893 she and Georges Martin established Le Droit Humain, the first Masonic order to admit women and men alike.

In Triangle Astraea women and men stand side by side, with the same rights and the same voice. This is neither a concession nor an experiment. A space meant for the free exchange of ideas would be poorer, and less honest, if it heard only half of human experience.

Equality here is simply the norm: no separate ranks, no separate rooms, the same chance to speak and to be listened to.

Minelauva (Arabic, “in the lunar mansion of the barker”)

Fraternity is the most familiar of the three great words, and perhaps the most demanding. It asks for more than friendliness among people who already agree. It asks for a bond with people of other countries, other languages, other convictions and other Masonic traditions.

The Triangle holds that this bond is universal and belongs to no one. Borders, jurisdictions and institutions have their uses, but they are human arrangements, and they come after the thing they organise. Where Freemasons of goodwill meet in good faith, they know each other first as brothers and sisters, and only afterwards as people from here or from there.

An English-speaking Triangle in a city as international as Berlin feels this keenly. Universality is not an abstraction. It is a habit of hospitality.

Zaniah (Arabic, “corner”)

The Temple is the room where Freemasons meet, but what they learn there is meant for everywhere else. The point of learning to listen, to doubt honestly and to treat a stranger as an equal is to do those things at home, in public life, and in the small daily decisions that make a society more or less just.

Freedom, Equality and Fraternity are not a slogan to recite but a direction to keep. Freedom, so that each person can think, speak and live according to conscience. Equality, so that dignity never depends on birth, sex, origin or belief. Fraternity, so that the first two do not turn cold.

Freemasonry has no programme to impose and no party to support. It hopes, more modestly, that people who spend time with its symbols return to the world a little more attentive, a little more tolerant, and a little readier to stand up for what is right.