Let me first say this is an interesting forum, I saw your advertisement at our book club website. It's also a privilege to be the first to post here in the book section of this forum. I recently finished reading Dan Brown's latest novel, "The Lost Symbol", which centers around the Freemasons. In the book it tells about some of the initiation rites that one must do in order to become a Freemason (I believe they have 33 levels) and even though these rituals were a little disturbing and weird they didn't involved hurting anyone. Just the other day I overheard a very disturbing conversation about a particular initiation involving raping their daughters in order to get into the Freemasons. Has anyone else heard this rumor or is it a rumor? I haven't been able to find anything on Google but maybe I'm not asking the right questions. Can anyone give me a link if this initiation does exist? Or does anyone have any personal experiences to relate? I would be very interested in knowing more. I also heard that there are a couple of women who are coming out and telling the newspapers that they Masonic fathers raped them as initiation. I hope I am posting this in the right category, I did see the "something we should know" category of the forum that this would have fit too I think.

I know this is extremely late....but welcome to the site, elliana!

First off, I can tell you I'm pretty certain that there is no raping of daughters in order to get into the freemasons. My wife is the daughter of a freemason, and she was never raped by her father. True, there are a lot of rumors surrounding this very exclusive, clandestine group, but I'm willing to bet that they don't go as far as hurting their family members.