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Billy Kay presents a series on the history of Scottish Freemasonry which has a strong claim to be the spiritual home of a world wide brotherhood numbering close to 6 million people. Along with freemasons and academic historians from Scotland and the United States, Billy will explore the craft's early history among the country's medieval stonemasons, revealing and dramatising their rituals. He will also examine why, from the 17th century onward, non-stonemasons and gentlemen were sufficiently intrigued by the mason's word and grip, and the mason's lore, that they transformed the craft into the speculative Freemasonry that took off round the world in the 18th and 19th centuries.

A passage from the chapter The Mason Word in Billy Kay's book The Scottish World

While Freemasonry is regarded as a benign, charitable organisation in many countries of the world where the Scots put down roots, here in Scotland itself it is often regarded as a dangerously exclusive, sectarian, self serving organisation which is inimical to the public weel. In an interview for my series, The Mason Word, the emminent Scottish historian Dr David Stevenson recalled the extreme reaction he experienced from colleagues at his university when he mentioned that he was doing research into masonic history. It was so negative, that it struck him forcibly that if he had said he was researching Naziism, no one would have batted an eyelid or presumed that he had Nazi sympathies, yet somehow he was tainted by being interested in Masonic history! Dr Stevenson is not a Freemason, and neither am I but the Masons have been such an important institution in Scotland and in the Scottish world for so long that I find their history fascinating and deserving of attention. Show less