Massomafia –Mahmud
By Lilith Mahmud | Published on March 8, 2021
Citizens have the right to form associations freely and without authorization for those ends that are not forbidden by criminal law.
Secret associations and associations that, even indirectly, pursue political aims by means of organizations having a military character shall be forbidden.
—Article 18, Italian Constitution
Freemasonry is the quintessential Western secret society, one that since its foundations has been mythologized in countless works of fiction and in the collective imaginary. Depictions of the brothers performing esoteric rituals in their black robes and conspiring to bring about a new world order have inspired not only best-selling books and movies but also journalistic and police investigations that, in countries like Italy, have attributed to the lodges a virtually unlimited power to infiltrate the highest levels of government. And yet, the women and men Freemasons I came to know over the course of eighteen combined months of fieldwork were adamant about one thing: Freemasonry is not a secret society.
What is a secret?
At the heart of the contention are different understandings of the secret. It was by accusing Freemasons of harboring particular kinds of secrets—terrorist plots, coups d’état, corruption rings—that Italian state agencies could deploy the political and legal discourse of transparency against them. For my informants, however, the content of the secret was rather different. For them, the “Masonic secret” was an initiate secret, only relevant and only understandable in the context of ritual experience. It therefore had nothing to do, from their perspective, with the profane notion of “secret” with which the Italian state was concerned. “We have nothing to hide” was a statement I heard repeatedly from my interlocutors and especially from the public faces of the lodges: the Grand Maestri and Grand Maestre. Taken literally, the statement “we have nothing to hide” does not necessarily mean that nothing is hidden. “We have nothing to hide” means that what is hidden is nothing or that what is hidden does not have to be so.
To explain the paradoxes of secrecy that characterize Italian Masonic experiences, in my work I have chosen to foreground the ethnographic category of “discretion” to suggest that Freemasonry could be more precisely understood not as a secret society—bounded and separate from the larger Italian context—but, rather, as a discreet society. Borrowing Freemasons’ own ideas of “discrezione,” I have used the word discretion to mean a set of embodied practices that conceal and reveal potentially significant information and that performatively establish a subject’s positionality within a specific community of practice (Mahmud 2012b). It is important to understand discretion both as a practice of concealment and as a practice of disclosure. As the extensive anthropological literature on secrecy and secret societies has shown, the power of secrets rests on the knowledge that they exist. It is this formality, rather than any particular content, that often promotes the allure of secrecy, the impression that something secret ought to be important (Simmel 1906).
Discretion
In my informants’ usage of the term, discretion allowed its practitioners to occupy a murky and shifting positionality that was neither firmly nor consistently rooted in any one location. Even in the information-driven 21st century, in Italy one does not know for sure who Freemasons are or where their temples might be located. From the first moments of initiation, when a new Apprentice takes an oath of secrecy, to the more advanced degrees of Freemasonry, when Fellows and Masters learn secret handshakes, esoteric symbols, passwords, and formulae, secrecy remains an inherent part of the ritual process. In my fieldwork, I observed Freemasons’ practices of secrecy as my interlocutors related to the world around them. For instance, it was only after some careful negotiations and my production of impeccable references that I was even able to begin my research. Discretion was the term that my interlocutors used when they had to explain why, for instance, they would not advertise their “public” events, or why they would not disclose even to their loved ones their identities as Freemasons. Being discreet was for them an embodied disposition that allowed them to assert their belonging in a community of initiates at the same time as it shielded them from the intrusive gaze of Italian media and law enforcement. Freemasons were not secret, they would insist, but they were very discreet people, and their discretion mediated their ability to thrive in a fraternal society that was also highly suspect. Whenever I spent time with my informants socially, joining them in their “profane” world, going to dinner at their homes or out to a movie with their friends, in our e‑mail communications, during phone calls that they feared might be tapped, or during meetings in cafes or restaurants whenever a waiter might be within earshot of a conversation about Freemasonry, I too was asked to be very discreet.
Conspiracy Theorizing
Such negotiations around secrecy resulted from Freemasonry’s troubled political history. Before the term terrorist was co-opted as a signifier of a Muslim/Arab/jihadist brown or black other in much of the world in the early twenty-first century, it used to evoke quite a different image in Italy. Black or red, Fascist or Communist, the figure of the terrorist crystallized in the 1970s and 1980s, during the period known as the Lead Years (Anni di Piombo), when bullets and bombs brought the country to chaos. In those years, the fight for political control played out as much in official campaigns as in the violent confrontations between far-left revolutionary groups, such as the Red Brigades, and far-right neo-Fascist militias. A string of bombings of streets, trains, and train stations, mostly attributed to right-wing groups, killed and injured hundreds of people, producing a state of generalized insecurity in the country. At the same time, political attacks culminating in the kidnapping and murder of Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978, attributed to the Red Brigades, attempted to paralyze the state’s political machinery.
The role of Freemasonry in the terrorist acts of the Lead Years has been a profoundly controversial subject, debated in Italy’s highest judicial courts’ rulings. Popular representations of the Lead Years have suggested that state intelligence agencies worked with parastate actors and, allegedly, with Freemasons to create the conditions of possibility for a far-reaching repression of leftist organizations. While Masonic lodges have not been legally convicted of any crimes, individual Freemasons have been repeatedly under investigation for political corruption, for nepotism, and for their alleged involvement with the Mafia. The self-evident association between Freemasonry and right-wing terrorism continues to prevail not as a fringe conspiracy theory but rather as a popular common sense, espoused by mainstream news outlets, left-wing politicians, and ordinary citizens. Many in the Italian Left and Center have long suspected the lodges of being behind the “strategy of tension” of the Lead Years.
The discursive merger of organized crime, Freemasonry, and the state found in popular conspiracy theories about Freemasonry, posits the state not simply as a static arbiter and enforcer but, more significantly, as itself an object of mistrust. The state often appears infiltrated, compromised, and thus delegitimized. Paul Silverstein (2002) has suggested that conspiracy theorizing is a multivalent tool capable of reinforcing the dialectical structure of hegemonic processes. In Italy too, where conspiracy theorizing is a style of political engagement readily available to all ideological sides, conspiracies about Freemasons have the effect of both strengthening and weakening the state. Conspiracies that portray Freemasonry and the state as simultaneously oppositional and metonymical have the effect of casting a shadow of doubt on the integrity of both.
Political lexicon
Such representations are not unique to Freemasonry, but they are instead part of a wider political lexicon used to articulate tensions among the state, organized crime (e.g., the Mafia, the Camorra, and other similar groups), Vatican influences (e.g., Opus Dei, Catholic parties), and ideologically divided party politics (Galt 1994; Herzfeld 2009; Jacquemet 1996; Kertzer 1980; Però 2007; Schneider and Schneider 2002). It is therefore helpful to recognize the representations of Freemasonry in Italy not as exceptional but, rather, as indicative of broader ideological tensions that structure Italian politics.
Freemasons in Italy were not only the objects of conspiracy theories, but they also constructed their own conspiratorial ideations about the state and about Catholic and Communist forces in the country. Many of my informants, for instance, often complained that “only in Italy” could such displays of anti-Masonic sentiments occur. Comparing their experiences to those of European and American Freemasons, my interlocutors were disappointed that in those “truly democratic countries” Freemasons did not need to be as secretive. We often joked together about how absurd it would seem in Italy to list a Masonic temple in the phone book (“under M, right after the Mafia,” they would laugh), even though that is precisely the case in many other countries. My interlocutors, and especially the women Freemasons among whom I conducted fieldwork, worried about being unjustly harassed by state officials, but they also worried about potential acts of interpersonal or terrorist violence against them simply because of how many people in Italy loathe the Masons. “What if a madman decides to leave a bomb outside the temple?”
Such fears for their safety, as well as fears of “persecution” by state agents, meant that while the lodges might not have anything to hide, individual privacy had to be protected at all costs. Indeed, my interlocutors often evoked the notion of “privacy” to legitimate their discretion. The paranoia that alimented my interlocutors’ discretion, as much as it alimented anti-Masonic sentiments in Italy, was founded on Italy’s political history. While the Freemasons I met usually attributed their sense of persecution to the undue influence of the Catholic Church on Italian politics and to the dominance of left-wing parties on politics and media, much of the public attributed Freemasons’ ongoing impunity to their powerful social connections, including their alleged ties to the Mafia.
