I Know A Secret (and you don't)

If your one of the two readers that view my blog, thank you, your on your way to a Masonic education that only your great great great great grandfather would understand (hope I said enough greats).
Now to the crux of this enlightening blog entry, the real reason Freemasonry probably chose a secretive path (in my opinion).

Time to go back the fall of 1670, forty years before Freemasonry would out itself. Many of the cast and characters your about to meet were not Freemasons themselves, but I bet they may have had more influence in the hidden symbolism of Freemasonry than most would think.

In October (1670) Henry More (philosopher, theologian) was visited at Cambridge (England) by Francis Mercury van Helmont (Kabbalist), son of the famous alchemist Jan Baptista van Helmont. (you gotta love an alchemist that names his son Mercury)
More asked van Helmont, who was also a physician, if we would visit his friend and fellow philosopher Anne Conway, to treat the incessant debilitating headache which had troubled her for many years (and which had defeated every other medical practitioner).
It was during this time, and under the tutelage professor More, a German scholar named Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (and friend of van Helmont) undertook the task of translating the Zohar into Latin.
The western world was about to learn the secrets of the Kabbalah (Jewish Mysticism), but it would come with a cost.
Within the intellectual association of More and Conway were many of Enlightenment giants that I believed influenced the origins of modern Freemasonry, including Robert Boyle (Royal Society), John Locke (Royal Society, philosopher), and Isaac Newton (Royal Society, the real deal), all of which took a particular interest in the Kabbalah, an interest that would soon turn into secrecy.
Viscountess Conway's landmark treatise of the time, "Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy", is saturated with Kabbalist ideas, ideas apparently ruffled the wrong feathers. It should be noted that the separation of church and state had not occurred yet.
Newton himself was so strongly influenced by the Kabbalah that his theory of the mutual property of gravitation is rumored to have been derived from Zohar. He spent the last three decades of his life in relative seclusion in order to try to solve hidden codes and messages in the Bible, suggested by his reading of von Rosenroth's translation.
The Enlightenment's attempt to bring the Kabbalah out of its primarily Jewish domain ended with disaster. Conway's treatise was branded heresy by the college that “claimed” her, Cambridge, and effectively condemned her work, Indexed as Prohibited.
In the 1690s. Newton and Locke were both brought before Parliament and charged with heresy, largely because they refused to take Christian vows, but also because of their known association with Viscountess Conway, who's heretical Kabbalist treatise was published in London the previous year.
Locke escaped punishment by penning "On the Correctness of Being Christian" 1694. Newton was embarrassed by the charges on him, abdicated his Lucasian Chair at Cambridge as well as resigning his position as accountant to Parliament, also in 1694, in order to protect his reputation among scholars.
The heresy charges on Newton were dropped about the time of Conway's formal prohibition, which made one of the key pieces of evidence against him inadmissible in court.

I do understand that most would like to date the inception of Freemasonry to the time of Pythagoras, Seth, or even Osiris, I think (personally) you might want to look a little closer at the cast and characters above (and maybe look at the six degrees to Bacon, not Kevin, Francis). Some things are better discussed behind closed doors, our founding brothers learnt the hard way!