Dionysiac Architects - A Preamble

 
Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii, Fresco 4

Years ago sometime in 2013, I was a newly made Master Mason attending my first Masonic lecture given by Timothy Hogan. Like many Masonic presentations of an esoteric slant, the lecture was all over the place with no clear direction. One of the things Hogan mentioned was the Dionysiac Architects. I myself was finishing my Masters in Architecture, and I had a focus on classical architecture and architectural history. Having been fascinated by mystery cults of antiquity and my architectural background, I was naturally drawn to Freemasonry. However, also given that background, I immediately thought: what the hell are the Dionysiac Architects? This was a question that would plague me for years. I came across references to them online, mostly citing Manly P. Hall's Secret Teachings of All Ages (shocker). I even tried reading that tome and got a glimpse of what he understood about them (I eventually lost patience with Hall's terrible scholarship and total confabulations, giving up about a fifth of the way through). Ultimately I presumed these Dionysiac Architects were something Hall just made up or, as is more his style, he came across something, took it out of context, and ran with it.

That is until recently while trying to decipher the ritual of Henry P. H. Bromwell's rite of Free and Accepted Architects, I found in the Royal Architect Degree a passing reference to the Dionysiac Architects, in which, like Hall, he claims Hiram Abif was a member and that they assisted in the building of King Solomon's Temple. Now, Hall published his monumental tome of scholastic nightmares in 1928, while Bromwell had composed the ritual for the Royal Architect in 1875. Naturally, I presumed there are earlier sources, and somewhere along the way something legitimate or legendary got corrupted into some bogus myth of a fraternity of ancient builders devoted to the drunken god Dionysus, and both these men bought into it.

If one does any digging beyond Hall, one will very quickly find that these Dionysiac Architects are more legitimately referred to as the Διόνυσον τεχνιτων or "Dionysiac Artists." However, because of the use of techniton in the name, they can be easily misconstrued and frequently are misrepresented as "artificers," "craftsmen," and "architects." This is the source of much of the misrepresentation of an actual ancient organization of actors, poets, musicians, and other aspects of the theater. Strabo makes mention of them in his Geography §14.1.29 (c. 44 BCE - 23 CE), as does Aulus Gellius in Attic Nights §20.4 (c. 117 CE). These two ancient sources both describe them as a traveling theater troop, similar to a circus or other itinerant performers like Annie Oakley or Buffalo Bill. They were indeed a real group that traveled about Ionia and Anatolia in the first few centuries before the common era.

We have two persons to thank for the utter misrepresentation of this group of itinerant entertainers into something like the modern Masonic conception of traveling stonemasons: Alexander Lawrie, a Scottish Freemason, and John Robison, an English Anti-Masonic polemicist. These two individuals in particular begin the whole process of corrupting this group into something else. Upon examining sources like Manly P. Hall, as well as Albert G. Mackey and even Redding Moses, there is a trail, a chain of transmission in which we may trace how these Dionysiac Artists became corrupted into a precursor or prototype for Freemasonry. Sometimes these writers are misunderstanding source texts, and other times they are explicitly and deliberately misrepresenting them.

Since we can more or less trace the lineage of corruption, it has become my intention to detail this transmission and changes. It is not my intention to peruse or detail any writers after Manly P. Hall, since these later writers, such as Graham Hancock and Timothy Hogan, are basing their information off of Hall. Hall more or less popularized the concept that is disseminated today about the Dionysiac Architects, and since it is totally unnecessary to look at anything that follows Hall's spurious and capricious assertions about this group, we will examine and detail sources up to and including Hall, but no further.

Thus, I will begin a series of posts that address the following items:

1. What are the initial issues concerning a "fraternity" of builders dedicated to the drunken god Dionysus, and why it is problematic to associate them with Freemasonry?
2. Why did these Freemasons feel compelled to associate these Dionysiac Artists with the Medieval guilds and ultimately Freemasonry?
3. What are the source texts, what information do they provide, and how does each successive writer corrupt the Dionysiac Artists into a fraternity of architects?
4. Perhaps as a bonus critique, why do Freemasons feel the need to distort information to suit their purposes (and probably critique the Theosophists while we are at it)? And ultimately, address some concerns over whitewashing and cleaning up problematic aspects of antiquity to suit an agenda. Why is so essential to distort facts to suit a symbolic agenda?

This is our research tract. At this moment I am working on a translation of portions of Edmund Chishull's Antiquitate Asiaticae, as he provides source information from fragments concerning this group in Aetolia. However, the source texts are in Dorian Greek, and the translations are in Latin, and the work has never been translated into English (or any other language as far as I am aware). I do not know any ancient Greek dialects, save some etymological background to double check a few words. Then my Latin is really rusty. So while I brush up on that and tediously verify Greek words, we will address other aspects of this research tract.

In the next post, we will begin exploring the problems of such a fraternity of ancient builders — both historical and legendary — and dive into some of the claims about them, and set those against a historical context.

It will ultimately be my aim to publish this information in a printed publication, however, publications suited for this kind of material oftentimes are niche and difficult to access, so providing this line of research on a blog has merit to reach a larger audience, as well as to track my own research. I have been considering publishing much of my past research that has been printed in the Rocky Mountain Mason here on this blog. So stay tuned for those at some point in the future.