Īnother ceremony is the annual installation of the Master of the Lodge and his appointed or elected officers. In each of these ceremonies, the candidate must first take the new obligations of the degree, and is then entrusted with secret knowledge including passwords, signs and grips ( secret handshakes) confined to his new rank. At some later time, in separate ceremonies, they will be passed to the degree of Fellowcraft and then raised to the degree of Master Mason. Candidates for Freemasonry are progressively initiated into Freemasonry, first in the degree of Entered Apprentice. The bulk of Masonic ritual consists of degree ceremonies.

At the conclusion of the meeting, the Lodge may hold a formal dinner, or festive board, sometimes involving toasting and song. In addition to such business, the meeting may perform a ceremony to confer a Masonic degree or receive a lecture, which is usually on some aspect of Masonic history or ritual. The Lodge meets regularly and conducts the usual formal business of any small organisation (approve minutes, elect new members, appoint officers and take their reports, consider correspondence, bills and annual accounts, organise social and charitable events, etc.). The Masonic lodge is the basic organisational unit of Freemasonry.

ĭue to Freemasonry's tradition of not discussing its rituals with non-members, the fraternity has become associated with many conspiracy theories. There are additional degrees, which vary with locality and jurisdiction, and are usually administered by their own bodies (separate from those who administer the Craft degrees). These three degrees form Craft (or Blue Lodge) Freemasonry, and members of any of these degrees are known as Freemasons or Masons. The degrees are part allegorical morality play and part lecture. The candidate of these three degrees is progressively taught the meanings of the symbols of Freemasonry and entrusted with grips, signs, and words to signify to other members that he has been so initiated. The degrees of Freemasonry retain the three grades of medieval craft guilds, those of Entered Apprentice, Journeyman or fellow (now called Fellowcraft), and Master Mason. There is no international, worldwide Grand Lodge that supervises all of Freemasonry each Grand Lodge is independent, and they do not necessarily recognise each other as being legitimate. These private Lodges are usually supervised at the regional level (usually coterminous with a state, province, or national border) by a Grand Lodge or Grand Orient. The basic, local organisational unit of Freemasonry is the Lodge. Modern Freemasonry broadly consists of two main recognition groups: Regular Freemasonry, which insists that a volume of scripture be open in a working lodge, that every member profess belief in a Supreme Being, that no women be admitted, and that the discussion of religion and politics not take place within the lodge and Continental Freemasonry, which consists of the jurisdictions that have removed some, or all, of these restrictions. Freemasonry or Masonry refers to fraternal organisations that trace their origins to the local guilds of stonemasons that, from the end of the 13th century, regulated the qualifications of stonemasons and their interaction with authorities and clients.

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