On joining

I frequently get a question in the vein of: “Hello, I want to join.” Actually, there isn’t much I can do for you there.

This website lists hundreds of organisations which are separate organisations with their own staff, procedures, etc. I’m in contact with almost none of them. I just looked around the internet putting information together on one place (this website). There is no central administration of (mixed gender) Freemasonry, no ‘super super grand lodge’.

When you want to join a lodge, hopefully the information per country helps you to locate the nearest lodge. What you have to do next is contact them yourself. Should there be no response, the email address is no longer valid, the website is down or whatever, I can’t really do anything more than you can yourself: search the internet for more (current) information.

Procedure

Not every organisation will have the same procedure, but roughly the procedure of joining comes down to the following:

• Get in contact with a lodge. In some cases lodges ask people to join. Whatever the case, take the initiative yourself and you will hopefully find out how things fare at the lodge of your choosing;
• You will have an informal talk with one or more members of the lodge;
• If that goes well, you will do a formal request to join;
• This request will be read in the lodge and all other lodges of the grand lodge this specific lodge fall under (and sometimes also befriended grand lodges);
• When there are no reasons to decline your request, there may be a more formal talk;
• A record of this talk will be processed in the lodge;
• If that goes will, you will get an invitation for initiation;
• This initiation will have to fit in an agenda that most likely is already largely filled (a lodge doesn’t just sit around doing nothing waiting for someone to be initiated), so you may have to wait a bit before the big day is there;
• In total, this may take some time. For both parties the procedure is exciting and all want to make a good decision.