This spring, 18 Cal alumni gathered inside the Odd Fellows Hall on Bancroft Avenue, just across from Edwards Stadium, to perform a centuries-old secret ceremony to institute the Fiat Lux Masonic Lodge—the first such lodge to meet in Berkeley in at least 25 years. They hope to attract students with a curiosity for mysticism and the fraternity’s secret rituals.
First, for the uninitiated: Masonry, or Freemasonry, is a 300-year-old men’s fraternal order with chapters, or lodges, located in just about every country in the world. Members undergo secretive ritual ceremonies that use the allegory of the building of King Solomon’s Temple in the Bible to deliver moral lessons and practice self-improvement.
The Masons have long been a source of fascination and conspiracies for outsiders. Given that at least 14 U.S. presidents and 19 of the 40 governors of California were Masons, the group’s reputation as filled with backroom rulers is perhaps rooted in a kernel of truth, if also hyperbole. (For a so-called secret society, Masonry isn’t particularly secretive: Around the midcentury, it’s estimated that 1 in 10 men in the U.S. belonged to a lodge.) At its peak, the fraternity counted 250,000 members in California; today, that number is closer to 40,000.
The new lodge marks a continuation of a long, if largely forgotten, chapter in Cal’s history. The Fiat Lux Masons are the inheritors of a significant fraternal tradition at the University of California—one that traces its history back to the UC Berkeley founder and first president, Henry Durant, who was a member of an Oakland lodge.
In fact, some of the most important names in the university’s history have been Freemasons: John Whipple Dwinelle, the state legislator and UC regent who wrote the 1868 law that established the UC system, and David Farquharson, the architect of South Hall who ritually consecrated its cornerstone when it was laid in 1873 with corn, oil, and wine—a Masonic custom symbolizing early stonemasons’ wages.
From the 1920s through the 1960s, the Masonic presence at Berkeley was hard to miss. A student clubhouse operated just steps from Sather Gate, offering study rooms, lounges, and social clubs for young Masons and the children of Masons. At the same time, a faculty-focused lodge met regularly at the nearby Odd Fellows Hall, alongside Greek fraternity and sorority houses.
Though fraternal orders like the Masons have waned in recent decades, from 1923 to 1972, the Henry Morse Stephens Lodge No. 541 thrived at Berkeley’s Odd Fellows Hall. With around 300 members drawn from university faculty and staff—including notable figures like naturalist William Herms and athletic director Milton T. Farmer—it was an important part of campus life. In addition to that lodge, as many as six other Masonic groups met in Berkeley, many inside the Berkeley Masonic Temple, a block away on Bancroft Avenue.
The true center of fraternal activity on campus was the Masonic student clubhouse on the corner of Bancroft and Bowditch, four blocks away from where the new lodge stands. The state’s Masons raised more than $100,000 (about $1.7 million today) to buy and erect the clubhouse, hoping to imbue in the future leaders of the state a sturdy moral foundation.
The brick, Georgian-Colonial clubhouse opened in 1923 to serve what had until then been an unofficial club at the university, made up of young Masonic students. The idea for the clubhouse was to provide a place for young members of the Masonic “craft” to socialize and, as a one grand master put it, supply “as nearly as humanly possible the touch of home life and home comforts that are so deplorably absent in a great institution of more than ten thousand students.”
The hub proved popular. Members formed men’s and women’s clubs; a “degree team,” which rehearsed and performed the formal initiation rituals; the Ashlar Club, a social and support group for college students whose parents were Masons; and a club for older students who had aged out of Masonic youth programs. Similarly, a sorority, Phi Omega Pi, was launched in Berkeley in 1922 for young women associated with the Order of the Eastern Star, a related women’s Masonic organization.
For the young Masons, it also served more practical purposes: a service committee helped new students enroll in classes and find housing, while an employment bureau helped them land jobs.
For several years, the clubhouse flourished, peaking at about 800 members in 1946. But in the postwar years, after an initial surge of GI Bill applicants, the university experienced a precipitous drop in enrollment. The Masonic club shrank to 405 members by 1950; five years later, it was at 180—while at the same time, an “increasing number of student centers are appearing on or near the campus and the effect of competition is being felt by the Masonic Club,” according to an annual report filed by the clubhouse’s trustees that year.
With the clubhouse serving fewer students, in 1967, the state’s Masons decided to shutter it. The UC Berkeley Masonic Clubhouse was sold, with the proceeds forming the basis for a new California Masonic Foundation endowment, which today provides college scholarships for high school students. Within just a few years, most of Berkeley’s Masonic lodges were closed, with the last vestige of those groups finally pulling up stakes in 2001.
Now, into that void step the charter members of Fiat Lux Lodge. Fred Loeser ’73, the master of the new Masonic group, points out that he often speaks to young people interested in learning more about a group that their grandfather might have belonged to.
Tigran Agadzhanyan ’19, another charter member of the group, says he hopes the lodge can do for future students what the Rockridge lodge on College Avenue did for him at age 19. Fascinated by Masonry’s connection to historical figures (George Washington, Mozart, Simón Bolívar), he approached the group expecting a world of secrets and connections. Instead, he found a group of mentors who helped him navigate school and his early career. “I felt almost immediately like I was at home there,” he says. “Like, this is the place for you.”
