ABSTRACT
Printed editions containing texts of masonic rituals are often dated explicitly, and even if they are not, we usually know from other texts, such as letters, diaries or advertisements, when they appeared. Nevertheless, such sources may well contain rituals which are much older than the publication concerned. In this volume, however, we also include transcriptions of some manuscripts, and here establishing a date becomes even more complicated. As long ago as the eighteenth century, some Masons, such as Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, became real collectors of rituals. They would not only collect original manuscripts, but also borrow manuscripts from fellow collectors in order to make a transcript of them for their own collection. This way such famous collections were created as the Maçonnerie des Hommes (the manuscript of which, containing around 100 rituals, probably dates only from c. 1780, but which contains many older rituals) or the manuscript of Andrew Francken from 1783 (an English translation of older French rituals, in the early nineteenth century misunderstood as a Rite, which was then developed into the Ancient and Accepted (Scottish) Rite). Since such collectors, as a rule, intended to make the most accurate copies possible, we should take as the date of the rituals in such copies the date of the manuscript copied, rather than that of the copy. During the nineteenth century, collectors such as Lerouge or Kloss transcribed hundreds of rituals extremely accurately. In many cases the location of the original is no longer known, if it survived at all. We therefore have no choice, but to gratefully accept this careful work. Such copies do not always explicitly mention a date of the original copied, and indeed, many original manuscripts we have are undated. In such cases we often have no more than the watermark in the paper of the copy, as an indication of when about that copy was made. But we should always bear in mind that the ritual copied may well be significantly older. A more accurate dating is then possible only by comparing the text concerned with other ones of which we have more information.
