The Brotherhood of Freemason Sisters

Gender, Secrecy, and Fraternity in Italian Masonic Lodges

Lilith Mahmud

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780226096056
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

From its traces in cryptic images on the dollar bill to Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, Freemasonry has long been one of the most romanticized secret societies in the world. But a simple fact escapes most depictions of this elite brotherhood: There are women Freemasons, too. In this groundbreaking ethnography, Lilith Mahmud takes readers inside Masonic lodges in contemporary Italy, where she observes the many ritualistic and fraternal bonds forged among women initiates of this elite and esoteric society.Offering a tantalizing look behind lodge doors, The Brotherhood of Freemason Sisters unveils a complex culture of discretion in which Freemasons simultaneously reveal some truths and hide others. Women—one of Freemasonry's best-kept secrets—are often upper class and highly educated but paradoxically antifeminist, and their self-cultivation through the Masonic path is an effort to embrace the deeply gendered ideals of fraternity. Mahmud unravels this contradiction at the heart of Freemasonry: how it was at once responsible for many of the egalitarian concepts of the Enlightenment and yet has always been, and in Italy still remains, extremely exclusive. The result is not only a thrilling look at an unfamiliar—and surprisingly influential—world, but a reevaluation altogether of the modern values and ideals that we now take for granted.

1

Spaces of Discretion

It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.

‹MICHEL DE CERTEAU, The Practice of Everyday Life›

“Di qua d’Arno,” on this side of the Arno River, the center of Florence was more often than not picture perfect. The brightly lit windows of fashion designer stores illuminated day and night a pedestrian path along very narrow sidewalks, where people walked in single bidirectional lines, slaloming to avoid dog excrement, and squeezing to fit on the tiny stretch of raised pavement according to more or less explicit Darwinian hierarchies. Those who did not make it overflowed onto the street below, if traffic allowed it, or just lingered at the edge of a piece of sidewalk barely wide enough for their feet, as they waited for their turn to walk. When a bus drove by, pedestrians on most sidewalks had to come to a halt, turn our backs against the fashion windows, hold in our breaths and stomachs, and then just wait for there to be room to push and move and spill again.

When I returned to Italy for a year of fieldwork research in the summer of 2005, I decided to make a home in Florence. There were various reasons for that decision. First, Florence is strategically located in the middle of the country. After visiting lodges and individual Freemasons in different parts of Italy I realized that, if I wanted to follow the widespread networks of Masonic lodges, traveling would be an essential component of my fieldwork. Second, the region of Tuscany broadly and its capital city of Florence specifically have a uniquely rich Masonic history in Italy, which makes Florence an especially important site for my project. Finally, the national headquarters of the women-only Grand Women’s Masonic Lodge of Italy (GLMFI) were in Florence. During one of my early meetings with Paola Foggi, then Grand Maestra of the GLMFI, in her Florentine home, she had told me that their group was relatively small and did not have as many local lodges in other cities, unlike the much larger men-only Grand Orient of Italy (GOI), its subsidiary Order of the Eastern Star (ES) for female relatives of the GOI, or the mixed-gender Grand Lodge of Italy–Piazza del Gesù (GLDI).¹ While the national headquarters of those three other Masonic organizations were in Rome, they all had well established local lodges in Florence. Therefore, living in Florence would allow me to stay in close contacts with members of those lodges while also being attentive to the specificities of the women-only GLMFI, most of whose activities were based exclusively in Florence.

Growing up in Italy, I had been to Florence several times, mostly to visit its famous museums and quaint street markets. Living in Florence, however, was a rather different experience, one that entailed a sense of dislocation I had not anticipated. Scholars of Italy often comment on the lack of a cohesive national imaginary, which, for historical reasons, and particularly for older generations, tends to be replaced by campanilismo, an urban or regional imaginary of community, metaphorically centered on the campanile, the bell tower, of the local church. While I would argue that much of this localism has given way to a nationalist sense of belonging since at least the early 1990s, as the marked visibility of foreign immigration has provided a counterpoint for nationalist imaginaries and downplayed internal differences, experientially Florence still felt in many ways like a foreign site to me. The menus of local restaurants offered dishes I could not decipher, while grocery stores and household stores displayed names derived from the Florentine dialect. A mesticheria, for instance, was a small home-supplies store like the one at the corner of my street, where I could buy anything from nails and batteries to kitchen tools to stock my new home. In my hometown, a mesticheria was instead a specialized art supplies store, where in my schooldays I had bought canvases, paint brushes, and oil colors.

Even the experience of walking in Florence was different from what I was used to. Growing up just an hour north in the medieval city of Bologna, I had been spoiled by wide, tiled sidewalks, embraced by the protective arms of ever-present porticos, defiant of cars, motorcycles, and even rain. The pleasure of walking had been an integral part of city life. Walking in Florence, however, was not easy.

Unforgiving electronic eyes guarded all entrances to the city center, and their panoptic power kept most nonresident cars outside, circling around what is left of the old medieval walls, caught in an endless traffic jam. Those blessed with a resident permit, as well as taxis, buses, scooters, and all those willing to tempt fate, used to speed through so-called pedestrian streets, which, as I soon learned, in the center of Florence meant nothing more than streets in which people and authorized vehicles danced together to the loud rhythms of honks and sharp breaks. On days in which carbon monoxide levels in the air rose high enough to cause a pollution alert, not even permits could guarantee admission through the old walls.

Walking was thus often an unpleasant necessity, and typically a great source of stress among city dwellers. Insults, however, were relatively rare, even in high season, when crowds of tourists might linger a little too long in front of shiny windows or Renaissance monuments. Nose up in the air, they might stop the entire motion system of the single line of walkers behind them, who had nowhere to go and therefore just stood right there on the narrow sidewalk and waited, wishing out loud for a portable pedestrian honk or, alternatively, for a machine gun.

Walking or, rather, the impossibility of walking, was a common topic of conversation among residents. How was your day? It took me fifteen minutes to get between the Duomo and Piazza della Repubblica (a two-minute “walking” distance); it was impossible to get through, to pass through (non si riusciva a passare). Walker’s stress in Florence often seemed to replace, or at least to accompany, driver’s stress. More often than not, tourists were the target of blame and violent wishes.

With tourists, however, also came the promise of sunshine. Longer, warmer, brighter days illuminated the romantically polluted green waters of the Arno River, in which many Florentines would swear their grandparents could wash laundry but which now release a distinctive odor on humid days. At the beginning of the third millennium, the river’s presence in the heart of the city is perhaps less functional and more aesthetic. It still divides the center in two halves. Whereas the northern half, known as this side of the Arno (“di qua d’Arno”), is home to most of the city’s tourist attractions and to the train station, the bottom half, known as Oltrarno (literally “beyond the Arno”), is a popular neighborhood of artisans and students.

When I chose to live in Oltrarno, a few steps from Piazza Santo Spirito, many of my informants smiled with nostalgia. They claimed that it is hard nowadays to find true Florentines on this side of the Arno—“i fiorentini d.o.c.,” they would call them, as if they were precious bottles of wine—but insisted that neighborhoods beyond the Arno maintained some “authenticity” in the artisanal shops scattered throughout the area. Several of my informants were born in Santo Spirito and felt a special affection for the neighborhood, although they believed it had since changed for the worse, becoming a prime site of drug dealing. Virtually all the Freemasons I met had long moved out.

Indeed, Piazza Santo Spirito at night resembled in many ways any leftist social center in Italy. Students and young drug addicts sat on the church steps and on the tiled floor of the piazza with dogs, guitars, cigarettes, joints, beer bottles, drums, and drugs in a cheerful party atmosphere. With its population of both Italians and foreign citizens, including students, workers, and documented and undocumented immigrants, as well as a visibly lively queer community, Santo Spirito offered an illusion of diversity so hard to find not only in the rest of Florence but also elsewhere in Italy. Black bodies, Asian bodies, queer bodies, drugged bodies, and other socially marked bodies walked through its streets with relative ease.

Soon after I moved there, a group of Eritrean asylum seekers occupied part of a building one block away from my apartment to protest the harsh conditions and long waiting times imposed by Italian immigration law in the many detention centers for immigrants. My landlady, who was a thirty-something white leftist activist, got involved with some of the left-wing organizations and Catholic charities that were trying to engage in various forms of solidarity with the Eritreans. Knowing about my background, she asked me if I could help out with some translations. Unfortunately, I had to inform her that I do not speak more than a few words of Tigrigna or Tigré, or really any other Eritrean language, since I was born in Italy and my multilingual Eritrean parents spoke to me only in Italian. Nonetheless, the occupation, which resolved positively within two weeks, was an indication of the kinds of tensions for which the neighborhood of Santo Spirito had become a stage, and of the conflicting agendas of neighborhood and business associations, left-wing social organizations, Catholic groups, and right-wing political parties that in many neighborhoods throughout Italy are increasingly clashing over the novel presence of racial others (see Carter 1997; Merrill 2006).

The Freemasons I knew in Florence always warned me to be very careful in Santo Spirito, especially at night. The large age gap between my informants and me meant that they often treated me with parental concern, and certainly insisted on driving me home after gala dinners or work sessions at the Masonic temple. I used to accept politely, although driving was often a nightmare, whereas walking around Santo Spirito was invariably a pleasure for me. Many of its twirling side streets were off the beaten tourist path, and I could walk uninterrupted past bakeries and Asian markets, wineries and calling centers, fruit vendors and bars. The biggest relief for me was to walk in Oltrarno without eliciting the constant gaze of others.

Watching others was a prime activity in the main half of the center, on this side of the Arno River, where the fashion business and the tourist industry are at their peak. It seemed impossible to walk “di qua d’Arno” without feeling the inquisitive gaze of strangers perforate my skin at all times. Over there, beautiful people sat on the outdoor patios of elegant cafés, people-watching and city-watching, speaking English, German, French, or Japanese. It was a rich kind of tourism, mostly white but also East Asian, primarily North American and Northern European. It was a tourism that engendered an entire underground economy whereby recognizing tourists was a crucial source of income for many. Walking through the streets of the center of Florence, tourists were targeted not just by pickpockets but also by street vendors with fake designer bags and artists offering to paint your portrait, write your name in Chinese, or guide you through the city’s wonders in your own language. Even a well-dressed tourist would be given away by her way of walking, her shoes, or her overly polite hesitation in ignoring the harassing comments of men. Passing for a local was quite difficult, and yet passing would bring some distinctive advantages, such as better service and better prices at many establishments.

In the guessing game of who’s who in the streets of Florence, I often felt like the wild card. Tourist? Italian? Immigrant worker? Exotic dancer? Within a sea of mostly fashionable, white bodies pushing to make their way through tiny sidewalks, I was, more often than not, among those who ended up on the street. Passing was never my strong point in Italy, but facing the uncomfortable gaze of others, I could certainly raise doubts.

“Signorina!”

A very old woman in a black dress with white hair pulled up in a bun startled me as I waited for the bus near my house in Oltrarno.

“Miss, be careful with your purse!” She tapped my right arm to demonstrate that my purse should remain securely clutched underneath my elbow, where it already was. Growing up in Italy, I learned to walk with my purse always protected under my arm, holding on to its strap, and carrying it on the side of my body away from the street. It is now an automatic gesture for me, and therefore, for a moment, I could not understand what the elderly woman wanted me to do that I was not already doing.

Then she pointed her finger at two young women waiting for the bus just a few steps away from us, and I understood. They had colorful sheer dresses layered on and long, straight dark hair flowing all the way down to their lower backs, their skin only a shade lighter than my own. They pretended not to listen, although the old lady was making no effort to conceal her contempt.

“Those are gypsies [zingare],” she informed me, using the derogatory term for the Roma people. “Be careful!” Then she returned to waiting for the bus a few feet away.

We all boarded the same bus when it came a few minutes later. The Romani girls and I smiled to each other briefly, and I wondered what had made me seem like a potential victim of theft in this elderly Italian woman’s eyes, rather than a perpetrator, as I had been imagined to be many other times before while shopping at high-end stores or simply boarding a bus. I concluded that my business casual outfit (I was going to meet an informant during her lunch break) did not hurt, but that ultimately the fluidity of racial attributions and the presence of two Romani teenagers—an Other more marginalized, persecuted, and dehumanized than any other racial minority group in Italy and, arguably, in much of Europe—had ensured that, on that particular day, I passed.

Passwords

The notion of “passing” has been central to the elaboration of critical studies of race in Anglophone scholarship and, more recently, to feminist and queer studies as well (Butler 1993; Delaney 2002; Ginsberg 1996; McDowell 1986; Pile 2011). Judith Butler (1993), for instance, has famously read Nella Larsen’s text, Passing, as a site of convergence in the articulation of both racial and sexual injunctions constituted through each other. Here, however, I am interested in a different version of passing, one etymologically cognate to the kind of passing that has preoccupied race and queer studies scholars, but also different in connotation. The practices of “passing” that I observed in my fieldwork, both my own and my informants’, were attempts at passare, which is more accurately translatable as “passing through” or “advancing,” as in learning the password (“la parola di passo”) to a higher step of Masonic initiation, or passing through the city without harassment. For Freemasons in Italy, the point was not simply to pass for a more privileged identity category—as in Larsen’s black characters, who pass for white—but rather to get through what they called “the profane world,” the world of non-Masons, unmarked and undetected.²

Freemasonry’s reputation in Italy as an elite secret and criminal organization underscored every aspect of my informants’ relationship to the rest of society and to their own feeling of being persecuted, despite the privileged class positions of most members. For historical reasons and unlike members of Masonic lodges elsewhere, Italian Freemasons at the time of my fieldwork continued to be highly secretive and highly suspect. The vast majority of my interlocutors, for instance, concealed their identity as Freemasons even from their profane loved ones, and the location of their temples was known only to the initiated.

When I began my field research, I paid close attention to the reactions that a disclosure of my project would elicit among non-Masons in Italy. Although anthropologists are quite accustomed to researching topics that offend the sensibilities of dominant political parties or local people (Vidich and Bensman 2000), the specific reactions that mention of my project elicited among non-Masons in Italy are crucial to understanding both the status of Freemasonry there and also the discursive power of Freemason as an identity category. Oftentimes, people simply fell silent upon hearing the word Freemasonry. With a concerned look on their faces, they might ask me if I studied Freemasonry historically, through archival research. When I proceeded to explain that I studied Freemasonry ethnographically by interviewing Freemasons and observing their practices and daily lives, most would incredulously ask me how I got access. In some cases, people close to me even expressed concerns for my safety. A friend once told me to make sure not to ever let Masons blindfold me or take me into a car without a safety plan. While that reaction was quite extreme, I almost always received a polite exhortation to “be careful.”³

In conversations with non-Masons, I found that their initial shock and fear at discovering what my project was about were usually followed by curiosity. What are Freemasons really like? Where are their temples hidden? Are Freemasons just a political and financial business network, or do they actually do rituals? Are there really women Freemasons, too? Such prurient curiosity entwined with widespread repugnance about Freemasonry was a sign of the organization’s powerful status in Italy. The intensity of public sentiment about Freemasonry—manifested in proposed legislation, animated political debates, or hushed kitchen table discussions about this or that coworker whose promotion inspired jealousy and suspicion—also reified at every juncture the inescapable truism of Freemasonry as the most powerful secret society in the country.

Walking through Florence one day, on this side of the Arno River, I stumbled upon a powerful reminder of why studying Freemasonry could seem so daunting for Italian audiences, even to a degree that might be hard to fathom in other countries. I went the wrong way behind the famous Uffizi Museum, and found myself standing in Via dei Georgofili. It was a quiet alley, away from the hustle and bustle of the museum and its adjacent street economy. There was nobody there. It was easy to understand why someone had chosen precisely that alley to place a bomb in 1993 that had taken innocent lives, destroyed part of the Uffizi, and woken up a country that had just begun to sleep comfortably again. Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, Italy had been devastated by terrorist acts, but by 1993 the period of terror was supposed to be over. I stopped under the memorial plaque that commemorates those who died in that bombing. It reminded me of all the times growing up that I had stood under a similar plaque: the one commemorating the victims of the Bologna train station bombing of 1980, the deadliest terrorist attack on Italian soil to date. In both cases, and regardless of what police investigations eventually uncovered, the usual suspects were Freemasons.

The question of Freemasons’ secrecy needs to be approached from a few different angles. Here I focus in particular on Freemasons’ often invisible presence in central sites of the Italian social and political landscape in order to begin to unravel a central paradox of my interlocutors’ life experiences. Despite how steeped in secrecy their daily practices were, the Freemasons I met always maintained that the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the Path
• 1. Spaces of Discretion
• 2. Initiations
• 3. Brotherly Love
• 4. Speculative Labor
• 5. Transparent Conspiracies
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index