Supplementing “Bitter Winter” series on Freemasonry, a look at an organization about which little is known outside the United States.
March 20, 2025
On July 4, 2012, the residents of Charlotte, North Carolina, were treated to the largest parade in their city’s history. Thousands of members of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, just renamed Shriners International and simply known as the Shrine, gathered in Charlotte for their national convention, paraded through the city’s streets in fez and Arab garb. The names of their local temples? Mecca, Medina, Sudan… You can also see in several American cities the great Shrine temples—even if many have been sold off because of the economic crisis and are now theaters or shopping malls—that could easily, at first glance, be mistaken for mosques. For more than a century, Shrine parades have been held regularly in several US cities. But what exactly is the Shrine?
When members of the Shrine, the Shriners, appeared at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the Ottoman delegation first thought they were American converts to Islam. The Turkish representatives were surprised to discover that they were not Muslims at all, but good American Protestants and Freemasons. Indeed, to be a Shriner, one must first be a Freemason. For American Freemasonry of the Belle Époque, the Orient was a mythical place, both symbolically and historically. Traces of an ancient Freemasonry derived directly from the Temple of Solomon and ancient Egypt were sought in the Near East, and were regarded as still present within Islam.
Rob Morris (1818–1888) is best known in the history of Freemasonry as the founder, in 1850, of the women’s Masonic auxiliary organization known as the Order of the Eastern Star. But American lodges also financed his trip to Palestine and Syria, where in 1868 he met the exiled Algerian revolutionary Abd el-Kader (1808–1883), a Freemason, whom he hailed as a great initiate. In 1873, a friend of Morris, the Reverend Henry Roush Coleman (1833–1926), founded the Oriental Order of the Palm and Shell, intended for Freemasons wishing to study the Masonic mysteries allegedly existing behind Islam. Coleman and Morris also proposed a distinction between what they disparagingly called the religious “imposture” of Muhammad and the “truths” of the Quran.
Meanwhile in New York, Captain William Fowler (1827–1897) had founded the Thirteen Club in his Knickerbocker Cottage restaurant, dedicated to mocking superstitions about the number 13. There was nothing esoteric or Masonic about the club, but the restaurant was close to the Grand Lodge of New York, and the thirteen men who sat at Fowler’s table were all Freemasons. It was in 1870, while sitting with fellow Masons at Captain Fowler’s 13-seat table, that Dr. Walter Millard Fleming (1838–1913), a Rochester physician who had moved to New York, had the idea of launching an independent organization, reserved for Freemasons with the 32nd or 33rd degrees in the Scottish Rite or Knights Templar in the York Rite. He prepared an “Arab” or “Muslim” ritual to exploit the Oriental mania that was rampant in American Freemasonry, and also to poke a little fun at it.
Of course, the first members of the new order, called the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, had to be 13. Fowler was not one of them, but became a member immediately afterwards. Fleming considered an internationally renowned actor, William Jermyn Florence (1831–1891, real name Conlin), who gave the Shrine a taste for the theater, as co-founder with him, but Charles Thompson McClenachan (1829–1896) and William Sleigh Paterson (1844–1913) were no less important in the foundation.
The ritual, preserved at the George Washington National Masonic Memorial in Washington, is in Fleming’s handwriting, but others probably contributed. In this document, oriental clothing, including the famous fez, titles such as “Imperial Potentate” (the supreme leader of the Shriners) and “Noble” (each member), references to the Quran and the Arab world rub shoulders with parodic aspects. The candidate is bathed in hot water and told it’s dog urine, and is invited to urinate publicly in the hall himself to “renounce the profane world”—but is stopped when he begins to perform…
The first Shriners wanted to have fun in an organization reserved for Freemasons, but not part of Freemasonry or subject to its rules. According to American historian Susan Nance, the ritual could be seen as the intention of free-thinking, rationalist Freemasons to poke fun at the Orientalist mania of some of their brethren. The interpretation is controversial, and in any case things changed after the first few years.
Like English Freemasonry in the 19th century, the Shrine adopted a mythical history in 1877. According to this legend, the Shrine was founded in Mecca in 644 by Ali (600–661), the future fourth caliph of Islam, existed for centuries in connection with the Bektâchîs brotherhood, and then gave rise to Abd-al-Kader’s movement in Africa as well as the Bavarian Illuminati and the Carbonari in Europe, also organizing the unification of Italy. Florence was said to have been initiated in Marseille and Algiers, where he traveled with his troupe as an actor.
Between 1882 and 1892, John Worthington (1840-?), a Shriner who was U.S. consul in Malta, received $500 a year to liaise with the Shrine’s “Arab temples.” He regularly sent more or less fanciful reports to the United States, which shows, however, that during these years American Shriners believed in the reality of the order’s mythical history, and didn’t regard it as a mere form of amusement.
William Bromwell Melish (1852–1927), who twice served as Imperial Potentate between 1892 and 1895, tried to have the Shrine’s mythical history officially declared an invention of the founders, and to stop payments to Consul Worthington. He met with serious resistance. In the end, the Shriners decided that, true or not, the mythical story was useful to the success of the order and should therefore be kept.
The relationship between the Shrine and the Theosophical Society has gone largely unnoticed, but is nonetheless decisive. Fleming and Paterson asked the American painter Albert Leighton Rawson (1829–1902), who had traveled extensively in the Near East, for (paid) help in writing the mythical history of the Shrine. Rawson had been an early member of the Theosophical Society. He has been all but erased from the official histories of the Shrine, but also from Theosophy, although he is mentioned as an initiate in Madame Helena Blavatsky’s (1831–1891) classic “Isis Unveiled.” Rawson met Blavatsky, of whom he made several portraits, in Cairo in 1851, made several journeys with her in search of the Masters of the Near East and was again at her side in Paris and New York.
Historian Paul Johnson believes Rawson to be the inspiration behind the words “I have loved one man deeply” in a letter from Blavatsky, the authenticity of which is disputed. Rawson left writings and portraits on Blavatsky’s experiences with hashish that many Theosophists prefer to ignore. But above all, he was a witness to an early phase in Blavatsky’s evolution, when the Masters of the Middle East were more important than those of India. He later denounced what he called the “invention” of the Indo-Tibetan Masters as a deception.
Together with Charles Sotheran (1847-1902), one of the founding members of the Theosophical Society, Rawson founded an organization called “Shaykhs of the Desert, Guardians of the Kaaba and Guardians of the Mystical Sanctuary.” What we know of the mythical history of these “Guardians of the Mystic Shrine” from the English “fringe” Freemason John Yarker (1833–1913), who was an honorary member, closely resembles the legend Rawson created for the Shrine founded by Fleming.
Among Rawson’s ideas that found their way into the Shrine was the concept of the esoteric unity of Islam, Judaism and Christianity through a single secret order, which was also heir to the mysteries of ancient Egypt. Islamic symbolism thus rubs shoulders with Egyptian and Christian references in the Shrine, and titles of Jewish origin such as “Grand-Rabban.” The mythical story also states that Ludovico Marracci (1612–1700), the first translator of the Quran into Italian, was initiated into the Arabic Shrine order in 1698 and translated its ritual for the first time into a Western language, i.e., Italian. The Shriners were quite anti-Catholic, and Marracci, who is honored to this day in the Shrine temples, was a Catholic priest and religious, of the order of Clerics Regular of the Mother of God. Another legend was thus created, according to which Marracci was persecuted for belonging to a secret society, and his book burnt.
Yarker was also active, along with Rosicrucian and Freemason Kenneth Mackenzie (1833–1886), in the “Sons of Ishmael”, which he described as “the oldest secret society in the world”, said to have been founded to protect the Kaaba in Mecca before Islam. According to him, the “Sons of Ishmael” were the “parent society” of Rawson’s Guardians of the Shrine and the American Shrine. But this can also be seen as a kind of “old-fashioned” Theosophy, which sought the sources of wisdom in Arabia rather than India or Tibet.
Source: bitterwinter.org
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