In Freemasonry in Context: History, Ritual, Controversy editors Arturo de Hoyos and S. Brent Morris feature work by renown Masonic scholars. Essays explore the rich and often times controversial events that comprise the cultural and social history of Freemasonry.

This book details a philosophical approach to Freemasonry and a Freemasonic approach to philosophy. It provides a system of esoteric work, interdisciplinary education, philosophical reflection, and social and political thought, and a method of understanding the reality of the world and the reality of consciousness. The actual state of Freemasonry is overtaken by inherent old conceptions, but this book looks to take Freemasonry from where it is to where it has never been. Thus, it exposes the Ritual of the “Modern and Perfecting Rite of Symbolic Masonry,” composed by the author, and it explains the ethos, the structure, and the substantive content of the Autonomous Order of the Modern and Perfecting Rite of Symbolic Masonry, of which the author is the Founder and Grand Master. The book expresses a keen longing for unifying, all-embracing knowledge and for instituting a Freemasonic system that creates, unites, and supports polymaths for the sake of knowledge and a better world order. As such, it presents a creative synthesis between Western esotericism, philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, political theory, political economy, mathematics, physics, and biology.

This book explores the role of freemasonry in the Volunteer movement of the 1780s and in the struggles over Catholic emancipation, parliamentary reform, revolution and counter-revolution in the 1790s. Based on original research, the book addresses many common myths about the nature of early Irish freemasonry. It also explores the controversial relationship between masonry and Orangeism. The masonic lodge had many other roles besides secret rituals, convivial gatherings, and occasional political involvement. Lodges provided a measure of social security for the members, helpedÃ?Â?Ã?Â?emigrants integrate, enforced a code of respectable behaviour and arbitrated in disputes. Their public parades on St John's Day displayed masonic ceremonial rituals to the wider community. By 1800, there may have been as many as 20,000 freemasons in Ulster alone, many of them Catholics.