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.