by Farwerck

Here is an example of Farwerck as Masonic historian. Farwerck published texts in a periodical called Bouwsteenen which was made available by two of his Masonic brothers. Later the subtitle was changed and another editor turned the periodical in a much less Masonic publication. Farwerck contributed but one text to this second version, a reaction to a text written by the new editor himself. Farwerck shows himself a well-read and critical writer.

This is the second oldest text of Farwerck that I know. It was published in an internal publication of the Dutch federation of Le Droit Humain in 1922. I only have photos of the text. I tried ‘to OCR’ them online and then threw the text through Google translator. Of course I have made some corrections, but the text won’t be a perfect translation of a century old Dutch text.

Farwerck used quite a few abbreviations. Instead of translating them to English abbreviations I just gave the English terms for most of them. Terms such as “lesser lights” or “Sr. Warden” aren’t that exciting anymore I think.

Here is a chapter from the book Noord-Europa, Een der bronnen van de Maçonnieke symboliek. It gives a fair idea of how Farwerck presents his ideas. The translation was done by Google with a few corrections of myself. Images are below.

It therefor appears, that with masonic usages there is a large number, that have a striking resemblance with those of Heathen-cultic societies, and also with the, to the latter related world-view and practices. Considering each separately the proof for coherence with the past for several correspondences are weak and also debatable, but taken in its entirety, it is likely, that also these cases of doubt can be connected to the Heathen past. For a large number of points of masonic symbolism no references could be found, but this is the result of the earlier mentioned reasons (later additions of building symbolism, Christian-Jewish symbols and hermetic, kabbalistic, alchemical symbolism, etc.).