So you found an image and me telling you what the title and the catalogue number is, or which book it comes from. Then what?
- The collection of Johann Georg Burckhard Franz Kloß (also: Kloss), (1787-1854) can be found on the website of the Grand Orient of the Netherlands. Note that with the native search on that website, you can’t use catalogue number. Use document title instead or your favorite external search engine;
- Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Fonds Maçonnique. The navigation is awful. You can use this as a ‘jumping page’ (open the “Fonds Maçonnique” sub menu with the arrow). Only when an entry has an icon with a G (of Gallica) it is available digitally. BnF.fr does look for document number, so their search bar is a good entry;
- Bibliothèque Numérique Patrimoniale, Fonds Gaborria. The only website of the three with proper navigation and search. Here you can actually click through the entire archive.
Other than that, I have used some books that can be found online. Not all are too easy to find, but all can be found online. The Manuel Maçonnique (1820) of André Vuillaume (1792-1800) (or Maurisches Handbuch for the German version) is a wonderfull collection of old degrees with many beautiful images. Mutus Liber Latomorum (1765) is a book with only images, no ritual texts or context. For the Mons images look for Dix-Sept Tableaux Symboliques du XVIIIe Siècle – conserves par la loge Maçonnique de Mons en Hainaut “La Parfaite Union”. Manuscrit Theodore Jean Tarade can be found on Archive.org.
About the sources
Kloss
Kloss was a collector of rituals and other Masonic information. There were quite a few people like him. He acquired documents, other archives, but most of all: he visited other collectors and copied their documents by hand. The collection is full of well-bound, but hand-written texts, only a few of them have images. The collection contains a couple of noteworthy documents. On this website you will find images from:
- Collection de 84 tableaux (1784) Kl.MS:XXV.1
- Maçonnerie des Hommes (1766) Kl.MS:XXXIV
- Twaalf potloodtekeningen van Tableaux J.J. Voûte Kl.MS:XI.A.9
Plus a few smaller documents.
The archive contains 1542 documents.
About Maçonnerie des Hommes. This was originally a six volume compilation. Each volume has 450 to 600 pages and is crammed with beautiful (colour) images. The compilation was discovered by André Joseph Lemuge (1760-1833), but he was only able to acquire five of the six volumes. The collection of Lemuge later fell in the hands of Kloss and he -of course- also only got volumes II to VI. These are the volumes that have been made available on the website of the Dutch Masonic museum. A copy of Volume I is in the possession of the National Library of Australia. It goes by the title “Cayers Maçonniques” (National Library of Australia, Clifford MS 1097/44). The registration can be found on nla.gov.au, but there is no digitized copy (yet). The research group Latomia has published the documents (Latomia 157.E) and Gerry L. Prinsen in 1998 published an English translation of the Latomia publication. The Prinsen version is available as Kessinger reprint. Prinsen made fairly crude line drawings of the images.
In March 2025 I requested the National Library of Australia to scan me the images of their manuscript. Even though they look much better than the redrawings of Prinsen, they actually are not full colour drawings as in Maçonnerie des Hommes. Also the handwriting is not the same in the Australian manuscript compared to the Dutch. The last degree of Cayers Maçonnique is the same as the first one in Maçonnerie des Hommes so it actually does appear to be Vol. I, but it is more likely that the National Library of Australia does not hold an original manuscript but a copy. It is unknown if an original copy still exists.
The images of the Australian manuscript have been reproduced in the book and on this website. They may not be public domain (if the library doesn’t publish the scans they made for me on their website), but since the images of the complete series have never been available anywhere until now, I decided to make this diversion of the original idea of the book.
Fonds Maçonnique
The Fonds Maçonnique of the National Library of France, contains the archives of the Grand Orient de France that were recovered from Russia late in the previous millenium. The archives had been confiscated by the Germans during WWII and then by the Russians during the liberation. They have been in the possession of Russia for decades until they were returned recently. The gigantic archives have been transferred to the National Library of France and a small portion of them can be accessed through the website of the library. There are numerous ancient ritual texts, some of them come with wonderful images. Some documents are compilations, other are separate rituals, but there is more than just rituals.
Besides the Grand Orient de France archives, the Fonds Maçonnique also contains the Masonic collection of Jean Baylot (1897-1976) and some smaller archives.
La Géométrie du Maçon par François-Nicolas Noël and was published in “5812” (1812) and counts 150 pages. Another 400 pages contains similar collections La Physique du Maçon and l’Alchemie du Maçon. These documents are part of the Fonds Maçonnique of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.
Fonds Gaborria
Another collector was Armand Gaborria (1753-1835). This collection is now in the possession of Bibliothèque Numérique Patrimoniale (Alençon, Normandy) and is accessible from their website in its entirity. This archive contains quite some Egyptian (Memphis, Misraim) material.
Other sources
Manuel Maçonnique (1820) of André Vuillaume (1792-1800) (also available in Geman under the title Maurisches Handbuch) is an interesting compilation of degrees. There were more such books, such as Le Parfait Maçon (1744), but Vuillaume includes a lot of images. These have been included on this website.
I have been in doubt whether or not to include the beautiful documents Mutus Liber Latomorum (1765) and the two volumes La Géométrie / Physique / l’Alchemie du Maçon, because they are not really ritual collections. They are both exquisite collections of images, some of which obviously refer to early Masonic degrees. I have included every image from the Mutus and a few images of the du Maçon works.
The lodge “La Parfaite Union” (‘the perfect union’) in Mons, Belgium, possesses a superb collection of wall decorations from the 18th century. They have been collected in the book Dix-Sept Tableaux Symboliques du XVIIIe Siecle (1992) (‘Seventeen Symbolic Paintings from the 18th Century’) by Maurice-Aurélien Arnould (1914-2001). That book found its way online on a few places. The images themselves are old, photos can be found here and and there, but in the mentioned book you can find the all together. I’m not sure if the book is complete, but I suppose it is.
I also used another few documents such as Les francs-maçons écrasés (1747), Collection complète des tous les grades connus dans l’Art Royal de la Francmaçonerie (1773), Adoption ou la Maçonnerie des Dames (1783) and the Tarade manuscript (another collection) and a few other old sources. When I find more 200+ year old sources I might add them as well.
Enjoy
Like I said: not complete, but I think I have ravaged the most interesting collections and documents, so now you can browse through, look up and compare these images. Make sure to check out the documents from which the images originate. They may contain texts that explain the images and usually a higher resolution than that I use on this website. Details of more than a handful of the images here are further explained on my other website (and book): Masonic Symbols Database – Find your Symbol of Freemasonry.