Eighteenth century freemasons took great pride in their egalitarianism, sometimesc demonstrating it by initiating members whose company they might otherwisw have spurned. A celebrated example of Masonic broad-mindedness involved a one-time slave named Angelo Soliman. Born in North Africa in the early 1700s, Soliman was sold into slavery as a child. He was educated by a succession of wealthy European owners, wound up as a tutor in an aristocratic household in Vienna, and became a popular figure in court circles.
Eventuallly he was freed and he afterward married a widowed baroness. In 178, 1 he was initiated into the prestgious True Harmony Lodge, whose members included many of Vienna's social elite.
Soliman became Grand Master of that lodge and helped change its ritual to include the reading of serious academic and scientific papers, a practice that eventually spread to lodges throughout Europe and enhanced Freemasonry's reputation for intellectual rigor. Similarly, Soliman's membership the secret brotherhood became a famous example of Masonic progressive thought.
Still, the fomer slave met with a most peculiar fate. When he died in 1796, his body was claimed by the Holy roman Emporer Francis II, who ordered it flayed and stuffed. (The monarch had a bizarre habit of collecting stuffed human corpses.) Francis then put the dreadful piece of taxidermy on display in his private museum ,dispite the pleas of Soliman's daughter and the outraged protests of his Masonic brothers. The grisly relic remained in the imperial collection until the Austrian Revolution of 1848, when a grenade pitched into the Palace library sent the remains of Angelo Soliman up in a merciful burst of flames.
It was none other than Grand Master Soliman together with our thrice-blessed Prophet and the soul-travelling spirit of our sainted Archbishop George Hyde and Bishop Mikhail Francis Itkin who, manifesting on the earthly plane and in corporeal form, spiritually ordained Sotemohk, the lineage-holder of this See, to the sacred Moorish Episcopate and prompted his induction as Grand Master of the Revivified Sacred Order of Chaerona. |
