Modern Masonry was founded in London in 1717 when four small Masonic lodges united to become the Grand Lodge of England. Subsequently, in 1736, the first Masonic Lodge in Europe, the Grand Orient Lodge in Paris, was founded.
With the founding of the Grand Lodge of England, Freemasonry known also as the Craft or the Brotherhood, was no longer a guild of operative stone masons who had built Europe’s great Catholic cathedrals. It had become a collection of intellectuals who out of pride valued reason over faith which in turn led to a descent into the spiritual darkness of self-deification.