Italian Symbolic Rite
The Italian Symbolic Rite, or Serene Grand Lodge of Italian Symbolic Rite, is a masonic body that a Master Mason of Grand Orient of Italy may join.
Origins
The birth of the Rite (1st January 1862) goes back to the will of the Turin Ausonia Lodge to constitute a national freemasonry unitary and independent of the foreign influences that had characterized the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, in order to support the project of national unity of the Risorgimento[1][2][3]
In addition to the political aims, characteristic and prevailing of Italian Freemasonry at least until the completion of the unity of Italy (20 September 1870), the Rite project also aimed at a return to the spiritual and initiatory origins of freemasonry incardinate in the so-called Constitutions of Anderson. Therefore, value was only recognized for the first three traditional degrees of freemasonry.
Historical development
In the years between 1874 and 1922, the Symbolic Rite was an active part and contributed on several occasions to the defense of the principles of unity and brotherhood in Italy, in the difficult years of the consolidation of freemasonry, made structurally fragile by the fact that the Grand Orient of Italy nominally exercised the control of the blue lodges, ie those operating in the first three degrees, which constituted the real basis of the institution. For these merits, it began to be spoken of the Rite as 'sentinel of the Order'. This path begins ideally in 1874, with the voluntary merging of its Lodges into the Grand Orient of Italy, passes for the establishment of its own Serenissima Grand Lodge in 1879, and culminates with the renunciation of jurisdiction over the Lodges in 1922, thus allowing the realization of the unitary project for Italian Freemasonry.
After the banishment of freemasonry by Mussolini in 1925, the Symbolic Rite did not proceed, unlike the Grand Orient of Italy and the associated Rites, to declare its proper dissolution to secure members from the regime's repression. However, it will only be with the post-war period that the activities will resume regularly, especially after the Constitutions of Grand Orient of Italy of 1949 definitively sanctioned the separation of the prerogatives between rites and order (G.O.I.).
Since then, the Rite has continued its work of defense of an ideal model of freemasonry without conducting proselytism among the members of the Grand Orient of Italy. Today there are about 500 members, divided into about 20 Collegi di Maestri Architetti; from which we can see the characteristic of the élite of the Rite, considering that the number of Masons belonging to the Grand Orient of Italy exceeds 23,000 brothers (2018).
Initial Assumptions
From the initiatory point of view, the Symbolic Rite has made its own the "five points of the Brotherhood" proclaimed in Turin in 1862, a true manifesto of the spiritual and social aims of freemasonry. With the will to find its own cultural characterization that would enhance its characteristic of Italianness, and at the same time differentiate it from the Christian-chivalrous or Syriac-Egyptian lines of other ritual institutions, the Symbolic Rite has placed at the base of its identity the recovery and the study of the tradition of the School of Pythagoras.
Related entries
References
External links
- Official Homepage
- Italian Symbolic Rite on Grand Orient of Italy official site
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