Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- Preface
- List of abbreviations and conventions
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Medieval contribution
- 3 William Schaw, master of works and general warden
- 4 The Sinelairs of Roslin and the masters of works
- 5 The Renaissance contribution
- 6 Rituals of identification and initiation
- 7 Sir Robert Moray: masonry, symbolism and ethics
- 8 The early Scottish lodges
- 9 Early Scottish and English freemasonry
- Appendix: Early (pre-1710) masonic lodges in Scotland
- Bibliographical note
- Index
- Plate section
7 - Sir Robert Moray: masonry, symbolism and ethics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- Preface
- List of abbreviations and conventions
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Medieval contribution
- 3 William Schaw, master of works and general warden
- 4 The Sinelairs of Roslin and the masters of works
- 5 The Renaissance contribution
- 6 Rituals of identification and initiation
- 7 Sir Robert Moray: masonry, symbolism and ethics
- 8 The early Scottish lodges
- 9 Early Scottish and English freemasonry
- Appendix: Early (pre-1710) masonic lodges in Scotland
- Bibliographical note
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
The life of Sir Robert Moray
Robert Moray was born in 1607 or 1608, the son of Sir Mungo Moray of Craigie, a small Perthshire laird. Nothing is known of his early life and education except for a few anecdotes that emerge from letters he wrote in later life. But these do reveal the early development of two major fields of interest which were to be lifelong: science and technology on the one hand, ethics on the other. The latter he regarded as the more important of the two, but in his mind the two were inseparable.
In philosophy Moray was a Christian stoic, and in 1658 he told a friend ‘it hath been my study, now 31 years to understand and regulate my passions’. The precision with which, so many years later, he dated the start of his lifelong attempt to achieve stoic control of the emotions to 1627 suggests that some turning-point in his life and outlook had then taken place, but we have no hint as to what it might have been. As to technological interests, Moray records that about 1623 he visited ‘the moat at Culros, when the coal was going there’. The ‘moat’ was an artificial island that had been constructed on the tidal mud flats of the Firth of Forth from which a mine shaft had been sunk. Much later, in about 1637, he was in Islington ‘in the company of some engineers who pretended great skill in aqueducts’ who were taking up old wooden water pipes and laying new ones.
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- Information
- The Origins of FreemasonryScotland's Century, 1590–1710, pp. 166 - 189Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988