The Grand Lodges and Modern Freemasonry 267purpose of disdainfully rejecting any such vulgar association: "The
charters cited by Preston are not relevant to the Free Brothers of
Modern Masonry but to practical, material masons. Preston has no
doubt confused the former with the builder masons." This citation
clearly shows that the initiatory sense of traditional masonry had been
lost. After two years of such distractions, it was not necessary to be a
magician to prophesize with Cagliostro, who had refused to have any-
thing to do with the Congress and whose anthology of stories moreover
would have been enriched if it included his opinion: "Miserable
Philalethans, you sow in vain, you will reap naught but weeds."
Starting in the nineteenth century and continuing right on into the
present, these erring ways persist by staking claims to the respect of
imaginary sources. This has caused an amplification of both a trend of
pseudospiritualism and occultism and a modernist trend combining free
thought, scientism, agnosticism, and politics. This highly diffused situ-
ation has noticeably permeated the majority of rituals for the higher
degrees such as the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, despite the fact
that its motto is Ordo ab Chao [Order out of Chaos].
What path should be taken to restore the unity—in other words,
the truth—of the operative tradition created by the cathedral builders?
In 1938, in his book Qui est regulier?, Oswald Wirth discussed the
problem of knowing what remained faithful to pure Masonism under
the regime of the grand lodges inaugurated in 1717. In his appraisal of
this book Rene Guenon rightly observed that the authentic expression of
pure Masonism could apply only to the craft masonry of a bygone era.
He noted that if speculative Freemasonry would one day acknowledge
this, it would be logically led to the integral restoration of the old oper-
ative tradition. But, he went on to ask, where were those capable of
achieving such a restoration, a task that was most likely impossible?^23
The Survival of Operative MasonryAn integral restoration (and the necessary search for it beforehand) of
the ancient operative tradition: This is the primary concern that has
guided the writing of this book. There is an important aspect of this
subject that we have overlooked up to now: In our examination of the