Masonic Terrorists

Masonic lodges in Scotland have been completely infiltrated by a Northern Irish terrorist gang, and anti-terror police are now engaged in a massive campaign to root the rogue members from the ranks of Scottish Freemasons.

Members of the outlawed Ulster Defense Association managed to hold secret strategy sessions within the Masonic temples and even held huge fundraising parties inside the lodges, all under cover of being regular members of the secret society.

"The UDA is one of Ulster's most brutal paramilitary organizations," Scotland's Sunday Herald reported this week.

"Using the cover-name the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) it waged a campaign of sectarian assassination against Northern Ireland's Catholics. One of its most notorious 'brigadiers,' Johnny 'Mad Dog' Adair, fled to Ayrshire after his expulsion from Belfast following an internecine loyalist feud."

"I was horrified to find out that this had been going on," said one lodge official, provincial grand master David Wishart.

It's hardly the first time the esoteric order has been used by those wanting political change, whether peaceful or violent.

Freemasons trace their secret society back to the time of King Solomon and the Pharoahs. But history only leads as far back as the early 1300s, when documents first revealed the London Masons Company and a Masonic lodge at York in Northern England.

Masonic lodges have become the headquarters of many underground groups over the centuries, including the freethinking Bavarian Illuminati formed by Adam Weishaupt in 1776, the anti-royalists who plotted the French Revolution of 1789, and the American intellectuals who instigated the Revolutionary War against England.

Masonic rituals are the source of everything from Aleister Crowley's satanic magick to the feminist Wicca movement. There's even a mystical Boy Scout-style youth group called the Order of De Molay, named after the last grand master of the Knights Templar who was burned at the stake by French King Philip the Fair.

As a movement dedicated to "the doctrine of religious and intellectual tolerance" and natural rights of mankind, Freemasons were regularly targeted by kings and popes, with statutes and edicts delivered over the centuries that demanded the closing of Masonic temples.

But these days, conspiracies hatched within the private walls of Masonic lodges are less likely to be about the edification of humanity.

Besides the current outrage in Scotland, U.K. lodges have been caught up in all manner of unseemly activities -- including brutal police departments in which every cop was a Mason. The abuses were so widespread that in 1998 a new law was unveiled by Home Secretary Jack Straw demanding judges, police and prosecutors declare their membership in secret fraternities.

One of the most notorious recent abuses of a Masonic lodge occurred in Italy, where neo-fascist elites created the P2 lodge. From 1965 to 1981, the lodge directly controlled Italian politics and much of the European banking industry, not to mention the Vatican. Anyone who got in their way was ritually murdered.

As gruesome ritual murders, bloody Vatican intrigue, assasinations, banking scandals, bizarre CIA torture schemes and the usual political corruption have hardly vanished in Italy, the P2 lodge most likely still exists under a new cover.

America laughs at Shriners

The secretive Freemasons have a weird problem in America. While there's never been more popular interest in "the craft," not many people actually want to join the ritualistic fraternity. (An upcoming Dan Brown book about Masons in America and a sequel to the popular "National Treasure" movie are just two of the big-money entertainment projects covering the history of U.S. Freemasons.)

The Shriners, an Freemasonry spinoff best known for financing burn wards and driving little tiny cars while wearing Fez hats, are a good example of the decline of Masonry in the United States.

Their numbers have dropped by half, to just 411,000 members. In 1980, there were nearly a million Shriners.

The secret fraternity has been holding marketing meetings to come up with ways to lure younger men to the organization -- because at the rate Shriners are dropping dead, there won't be any in a few years.

But Americans don't join such esoteric clubs these days, both because Americans have become increasingly isolated and lonely during the past 20 years, and also because those few who still take part in social activities find the Shriners to be ridiculous.

American Freemasonry hit its peak in 1959, when 4 million U.S. men belonged to the brotherhood, while hundreds of thousands of their wives belonged to Masonic sisterhoods.

Today, there are only 1.5 million U.S. Freemasons, and the iconic Masons' lodges on every Main Street in America are mostly empty today, with major lodges in big cities generally converted to concert halls or event centers.