Speculative Freemasonry 241who called each other brother, devoted themselves in complete freedom
to philosophical discussion and to working to improve the conditions
of the lower classes and advance true religion and morality.
One final avatar whose plans for an ideal society offer many analo-
gies to the tenets of modern Freemasonry is the famous Czech peda-
gogue Jan Amos Komensky. The persecutions suffered by reformers in
Catholic countries during the Thirty Years' War and the sight of the
bloody collisions among races and religions had inspired in some noble
souls the conception of a humanitarian mysticism for which Komensky
was an eloquent spokesman. He dreamed of the reconciliation of the
principal Christian factions. In his Pansophia Diatyposis (1643) and his
De rerum humanarum emendatione catholica, whose first parts were
published in 1666 under the titles Panergesia and Panaugia, he pro-
posed the founding of a society with the purpose of spreading the ideas
of tolerance and respect for the individual. The objective of this society
would be the construction of a Temple of Wisdom, similar to the
Temple of Solomon, built upon Mount Moriah (in other words the
Temple Mount). Komensky also proposed the creation of a large inter-
national organization, the Collegium Lucis, which would be a Wisdom
school to provide an education for those seeking to enter the Celestial
Academy. All steps taken in this regard had to be taken secretly and
Komensky's full treatise was to be shared only with those participating
in the undertaking. All the academies and societies throughout Europe
were to be encompassed within this vast organization, which would
take London as its hub.
From the end of the fifteenth century and throughout both the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, we can observe the creation
of associations of thought that enjoyed the indispensable backing of
sovereign authority. The goals of these associations, the oldest of which
first saw the light of day in Italy, cradle of the Renaissance, corre-
sponded more or less to those of fiction's imaginary societies.
Marsilio Ficino founded a Neoplatonic society in Florence as early
as 1460. It was certainly no secret association—its patrons were the
Medicis—nor an initiatory one. But it was still novel for its time. The
philosophy Ficino taught there would leave a significant mark on the
next generation, influencing Cornelius Agrippa, Thomas More, and