The Valley of Jehoshaphat and religious toleration

 

Since the foundation of the Premier Grand Lodge in 1717, speculative Freemasonry began to show a decidedly ecumenical and tolerant character that would make it a meeting place for people of different creeds.

Until then, however, Masonic manuscripts had always had a strong religious bias. The Old Charges manuscript showed numerous Catholic allusions, while the catechisms of the Mason Word had a distinctly Calvinist slant. Nonetheless, it was common for Anglican (or Episcopalian, in Scotland) and Calvinist Masons to work together in operative lodges, and for this reason some of the catechisms existing from the late 17th and early 18th century are of a mixed character. The perfect example is Dumfries Ms. (1710), which offers a distinctly Catholic part and a distinctly Calvinist part (this is probably due to the fact that Dumfries had a Presbyterian area to the north, Ayrshire, but Carlisle and Northern England to the south, and recruited stonemasons from both areas).

Apparently, not even the harsh persecution suffered by the Calvinists during the 17th century, which only ended with the enactment of the Toleration Act (1689), seemed to have made the oppressed tolerant. In the Edinburgh Register House Ms. (1696), of clear Calvinist content, we find the following paragraph:

ffirst when he enters again into the company he must make a ridiculous bow, then the signe and say God bless the honourable company. Then putting off his hat after a very foolish manner only to be demonstrated then (as the rest of the signes are likewise) he sayes the words of his entrie which are as follows...

Why should the candidate make a ridiculous bow and take off his hat in a foolish manner? Most probably because in that lodge they wanted to prevent Quakers from being in possesion of the Mason Word, and in this way the candidate proved that he was not (Quakers refused to take their hats off or bow to anyone regardless of title or rank).

However, it was clear to the founders of the Premier Grand Lodge that speculative lodges should be places where members of different faiths could develop together their masonic work. Therefore they would create a new ritual which would allow Brethren of different creeds to work together with the same script. Masonic ritual had necessarily to be de-Christianised, for the theology of the New Testament was an insurmountable barrier for this ecumenical purpose, whereas the Old Testament, with its much simpler theology, was more adaptable to non-Christian members. But apart from these alterations, they would introduce a symbolic element which has not survived to the present day but was intended to biblically support the coexistence of other religions outside official Anglicanism: the Valley of Jehoshaphat.

We find the Valley of Jehoshaphat in Wilkinson Ms. (1727) and Masonry Dissected (1730), and its existence in Masonic texts continues at least until 1781 in the French Recueil précieux de la Maçonnerie adonhiramite. In Wilkinson and Masonry Dissected (1730) it is accompanied by another interesting symbolic element: the Holy Land, which probably reinforces its ecumenical character.

In Wilkinson we can read:

Q. - How is your Lodge Situated?
A. - Due East & West as all holy Places are or Ought to be.
Q. - Where does it Stand?
A. - Upon holy Ground in the Vale of Iehosophat or Elsewhere.

And in Masonry Dissected we can read:

Q. - Where does the Lodge stand? 
A. - Upon Holy Ground, or the highest Hill or lowest Vale, or in the Vale of Jehosaphat, or any other secret Place.

If we look in the Bible, we find that the Valley of Jehoshaphat appears in 1 Kings and 2 Cronicles. In 1 Kings 22:41,43 the text reads:

Jehoshaphat son of Asa became king of Judah in the fourth year of Ahab king of Israel. (...) In everything he followed the ways of his father Asa and did not stray from them; he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord. The high places, however, were not removed, and the people continued to offer sacrifices and burn incense there.

And in 2 Cronicles 20:33:

The high places, however, were not removed, for the people still had not set their hearts on the God of their ancestors.

That is to say, while remaining faithful to the official cult (Jehovah), Jehoshaphat allowed pagans and polytheistic Jews to keep on making offerings to other gods. In this way they could justify that, alongside one official religion (the Anglican Church), other cults (Quakers, Puritans, etc.) could co-exist.

The element that accompanies the Valley of Jehoshaphat in the two aforementioned documents is the Holy Land. Quite possibly, the Holy Land, as it appears in Exodus, reinforces the ecumenical character of the Valley of Jehoshaphat, because of its defence of religious freedom. In Exodus 3:7-9 we can read the following passage, which probably highlights the sense of freedom that the Valley of Jehoshaphat conveys:

The Lord said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey — the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them.

In short, these allusions to the Valley of Jehoshaphat and the Holy Land in both Wilkinson and Masonry Dissected were probably the biblical argument that the Moderns employed to defend religious toleration. 

We cannot know how long the Valley of Jehoshaphat was maintained in Modern Freemasonry. It does not appear in the Antient disclosure Three Distinct Knocks (c.1760), nor does it appear in Jachin and Boaz (1762). Interestingly, it does appear in Recueil précieux de la Maçonnerie adonhiramite (1781), although we cannot know whether the fact that it was kept in France was only because they had copied it from the English Modern ritual or whether they were aware of its symbolic content. The French Rite is essentially a French translation of the Modern Rite, and in Recueil the Valley of Jehoshaphat still appears, though not in the Entered Apprentice degree (as is the case in Wilkinson and Masonry Dissected), but in the catechism of the Fellowcraft degree, where we read "Where does your Lodge stand? In the East of the Valley of Jehoshaphat, in a place where peace, truth and union reign". It might make sense to retain this symbolic element in a French ritual from 1781, for only four years earlier, in 1787, the Edict of Versailles had been promulgated, which granted non-Catholics in France access to certain civil rights, including the right to marry without having to convert to the Catholic faith (although the edict did not include the freedom to publicly profess religions other than Catholicism, nor did it permit the wearing of distinctive clothing by pastors or ministers of other faiths). But in 1801, with the publication of the Régulateur du Maçon (reference text of the French Rite), the Valley of Jehoshaphat will have disappeared, just as it will not appear in the Emulation Ritual (1816).

Mention to the Valley of Jehoshaphat in Recueil précieux de la Maçonnerie adonhiramite (1781). "Where does your Lodge stand? In the East of the Valley of Jehoshaphat, in a place where peace, truth and union reign."