18th century European scholarly societies and academies/Free Masonic Lodge "True Harmony"

Summary
Name of Society: Free Masonic Lodge "True Harmony"

Country: Austria

City: Vienna

Active Dates: 1781 - 1789

The Free Masonic Lodge "True Harmony" was founded March 12th, 1781 and consisted of free masons. Ignaz Fischer was the first leader of this society. Shortly after being founded, Ignaz Edler von Born joined the society and brought his following. Born was a scientist mainly dealing with mineralogy and mining. He brought forth improvements in mining and other mechanical things, one such method being extracting metal by amalgamation.

The Free Masonic Lodge had many Viennese writers contribute to it. Also many of these same writers believed it was an honor to be a part of the Lodge. The reason it is called a Lodge is because it follows the ideas of Enlightenment, or show that you are. The Lodge was the main society for intellectual life in Vienna but the strict rules such as following exact Enlightenment ideas and anti-clerical ideas limited what the Lodge could do in the world.

The downfall of the Free Masonic Lodge was the other group called the Illuminati. There are a lot of similarities between the Free Masons and the Illuminati. One difference between the two groups is that Free Masons are allowed to practice in public but Illuminati's were not allowed to and had to practice secretly in private. The reason Illuminatis had to practice secretly is because they had supported revolutionary activities and Kaiser Joseph II was scared of their actions. Joseph also thought since the Free Mason's had similar ideas, he enabled the Freimaurerpatent. This was put into place to get rid of secret lodges and also only allowed each city to have one lodge. Then this lodge must give in its membership list to the police of the city.

After this patent, the Free Masonic Lodge stopped all activities 4 days after it was put into place. Also membership declined because they did not want appear on the list that the monarch would see. The Lodge met rarely between 1787 and 1789. Finally in 1789, there was an unanimous decision to get rid of the Free Mason Lodge.