Jose Rizal The Mason



Bro. Dimasalang



May 3, 1882

The first documented exposure of Rizal to masonry

The first documented exposure of Rizal to masonry took place in 1882. May 3, 1882, he started on his journey to Madrid. June 11, his ship docked at Naples, [ where he saw] a multitude of posters set up by masons announcing the death of Giuseppe Garibaldi, their Grand Master. Rizal wrote about what he saw in a letter to his parents and brothers. That letter marked the first time Rizal made a written mention of Masonry, but not the last.

II. Rizal's First Years As A Mason

Upon his arrival in Spain, Rizal found it a country strongly influenced by Masonic thought. The atmosphere of freedom had a profound impact on Rizal who was then smarting from the abuses of the friars in his native land, particularly the injustice inflicted upon his mother. When he was only ten years of age, his mother was arrested on a trumped-up charge and forced to walk from their residence in Calamba, to the prison in Sta. Cruz, the capital of Laguna, a distance of over thirty kilometers. She was later exonerated, but only after two-and-a half years in jail.

Ferdinand Blumentritt, Rizal's good friend, assessed the impact of free Spain upon him, thus:

During his sojourn in Spain he came upon a new world. The

horizons of his mind widened considerably, opening up to

him new ideas. He came from a country where the friars,

the bureaucrats, military officers, and the rest of the

Spaniards exercised absolute power. In Madrid, he saw the

exact opposite; freethinkers and atheists spoke freely and

disparagingly of his religion and his Church; the authority

of the State, he found out, was weak; he expected to see

liberals and clericals fighting each other, but he saw

quite the opposite… At the sight of all this, a feeling of

bitterness overwhelmed him when he compared the unlimited

freedom in the Mother country with the theocratic

absolutism in his own land.

[Rizal] soon came under the influence of several outstanding masonic thinkers.

Miguel Morayta, a Grand Master, was his college professor who molded his views of history, while the ex-president of Spain, the Catalan Francisco Pi y Margall, who also became his friend, gave direction to his political thoughts. Among the first Spaniards to advocate emancipation of the Philippines were the masons Rafael Labra y Cardano and Sovereign Grand Commander Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla. Small wonder, therefore, that Rizal decided to apply for membership in Acasia Lodge No. 9, a lodge in Madrid under the Gran Oriente de Espaòa, at that time the principal and biggest Grand Orient in Spain. Upon his initiation, Rizal chose Dimasalang as his symbolic name in Masonry.

Early on Rizal and other Filipino expatriates realized that the enemy of reform in the Philippines was not Spain or religion, but the friars. [Starting] a patriotic propaganda for the improvement of conditions Rizal quickly rose to the forefront of this movement. In 1884 he started writing his famous novel, Noli Me Tangere, an incisive indictment of the Philippine political and religious regime. [The same] year Rizal spoke at a banquet [held] in honor of Juan Luna and Felix Resurrecion Hidalgo, Filipino artists named first and second prize winners in a painting contest held in Madrid. Rizal saluted Spain, but flayed the friars in the Philippines. When copies of the newspapers carrying his speech reached Manila, authorities branded him a subversive.

Completing his studies in Madrid, Rizal left for France in July 1885 to specialize in opthamology. He trained in Paris for four months, then he left for Heidelberg, then considered the most advanced center of opthalmic research in Europe. From there he moved to Wilhelmsfeld, Leipzig and Berlin and met some of the most eminent men in Europe.

Dimasalang: The Masonic Life of Dr. Jose Rizal

By Raymond S. Fajardo, 33º

Edited by Fred Lamar Pearson, Jr., 33º