video gallery
Over many years of lectures, interviews, and conference presentations, Julian Rees has spoken to Masonic audiences across the world on the subjects closest to his life's work: the esoteric dimensions of ritual, the symbolic language of the tracing boards, the inner journey that the Craft invites but rarely insists upon.
The recordings gathered here offer something that a book cannot quite replicate: the voice, the pace, the quality of attention that Julian Rees brings to these questions in person. Whether you are new to his work or have read every volume, there is something here worth watching slowly.
In this interview, Julian Rees joins host Jacques Carletto to explore the history and symbolic depth of Masonic tracing boards, the tableaux de loge, drawing on research that spans centuries of artistic and ritual practice. Julian Rees traces the aesthetic evolution of these remarkable objects, showing how early nineteenth-century English artists adopted three-dimensional perspective as both a creative choice and a commercial one, whilst setting this against the distinct visual languages that emerged separately in French and American traditions.
Working through celebrated designs including those of John Harris, Julian Rees unpacks the layered thinking embedded in images that most viewers might regard as merely decorative: the mechanics of the architectural hoist, the symbolic orientation of the winding staircase, the deliberate logic of the reverse-coded Masonic cypher contrived to keep the substance of the ritual beyond reach of the uninitiated. Throughout, Julian Rees draws with precision and authority the line between a symbol, which is static, and the allegory it sets in motion, demonstrating how these boards were never passive illustrations but instruments of moral and interior transformation, designed to prompt in the viewer a process of genuine self-examination and growth.
In this episode of the Historical Light Masonic Podcast, host Alex Powers invites Julian Rees to trace the history, philosophy, and development of mixed-gender Freemasonry, in a conversation that is as personal as it is scholarly. Julian Rees speaks with candour about his own journey from the United Grand Lodge of England to the International Order of Freemasonry for Men and Women, Le Droit Humain, a transition shaped by a deepening commitment to the spiritual and esoteric dimensions of the Craft.
Julian Rees brings his characteristic breadth to the late nineteenth-century origins of Co-Freemasonry in France under Maria Deraismes, examining the historical circumstances that produced the traditional exclusion of women and the currents of thought that eventually challenged it. What emerges is a considered argument that an inclusive approach to Freemasonry does not dilute its purpose but returns it more faithfully to the mission of human perfectibility at the tradition's heart.
Julian Rees closes with a thoughtful appeal for mutual respect and genuine open-mindedness across all Masonic bodies, setting aside administrative rivalries in favour of what the Craft, at its best, has always asked of its members.
In this interview, Julian Rees joins host Antonio to reflect on his literary career and the changing landscape of Masonic scholarship, in a conversation that moves between the personal and the philosophical with easy authority. Julian Rees recalls his early writing for the independent magazine Freemasonry Today and the formative influence of mentors such as Michael Baigent, whose guidance helped to orient his work towards the esoteric dimensions of symbolism and ritual rather than the merely historical or administrative.
Julian Rees observes how the past two decades have brought a discernible shift within the Craft, with successive generations of newer members arriving not in search of a social club but of a genuine path to self-knowledge, a change to which technology has contributed by making serious Masonic inquiry more visible and more accessible.
He describes how his own lodge met the disruption of the global lockdowns not with retreat but with invention, establishing digital discussion forums that drew a quality and depth of engagement rarely achieved in the lodge room itself, and using that experience to illuminate the difference between a merely superficial reading of symbols and the harder, more rewarding work of perceiving their moral significance.
The conversation closes with Julian Rees turning to his book Making Light, urging practitioners to treat every element of the Craft not as routine to be discharged but as ritual to be inhabited, and to understand their Masonic lives as an active, experiential journey of interior transformation.
In this lecture, Julian Rees explores the spiritual and esoteric dimensions that lie at the heart of Masonic practice, setting aside the merely historical in favour of a more demanding and more rewarding inquiry. Taking as his starting point the traditional definition of Freemasonry as a peculiar system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols, Julian Rees argues that genuine understanding requires the practitioner to move beyond the literal and learn to read the deeper allegories of self-knowledge encoded within the Craft's working.
He traces the progressive symbolic journey across the three degrees with the attentiveness of a guide who has walked the path himself, from the cultivation of the heart and the first stirrings of self-awareness in the first degree, through the intellectual awakening of the mind in the second, to the ultimate spiritual transformation that the third degree holds in prospect.
Examining foundational symbols including the point within a circle, Jacob's Ladder, and the graduated relationship between the square and the compasses, Julian Rees shows how each image is not an ornament but an instrument, designed to draw the practitioner's attention inward and past the superficial self, towards the spark of divinity that Masonic teaching has always maintained rests at the true centre of every individual.
In this presentation, Julian Rees offers an introduction to his specialised research into the tracing boards of the three degrees of Craft Masonry, opening a visual and conceptual door onto the symbolic landscape through which Masonic candidates have been instructed across the centuries.
Julian Rees traces the remarkable development of these objects from their origins as simple chalk drawings made on the floor of the lodge room into the highly detailed, permanent paintings that survive today, their surfaces layered with architectural imagery and moral codes that reward sustained and careful attention.
Taking each degree in turn, Julian Rees examines the distinct artistic logic of the boards associated with the Entered Apprentice, the Fellow Craft, and the Master Mason, showing how each was designed not merely as illustration but as an instrument of initiation, guiding the practitioner's eye and, through it, his understanding.
The presentation establishes the foundations for a deeper exploration to follow, affirming the enduring role that tracing boards have played in helping Freemasons find, within images that might appear merely decorative, a precise and demanding map of their own interior journey.
In this lecture, Julian Rees frames Freemasonry not as a fixed philosophy to be absorbed through reading but as a continuous, experiential voyage of self-discovery that must be actively lived before it can be understood.
Drawing on the language of architectural grandeur and historical pilgrimage, Julian Rees establishes from the outset that the Craft's spiritual core is not accessible to the merely curious observer but opens only to those willing to enter it fully.
He turns to the optical paradoxes of M.C. Escher to illustrate what is lost when the mind is confined to a single, narrow perspective, contrasting that confinement with the Masonic winding staircase, whose ascending turns offer the practitioner ever-changing angles of moral and intellectual vision.
Grounding his argument in the Age of Enlightenment and in Kant's famous injunction to dare to know, Julian Rees issues a clear and considered challenge to modern practitioners, urging them to resist the reduction of the Craft to a social and dining club and to reclaim it as a dynamic pursuit that stretches human reason and presses each individual towards the hidden truths that lie within themselves.
In this lecture, Julian Rees examines the profound historical and personal thresholds that mark a candidate's entrance into the Craft, finding in that moment of crossing something far larger than a simple formality.
Julian Rees draws a compelling parallel between the individual's decision to seek Freemasonry and those rarer historical moments when human beings have chosen liberation over comfort, using the image of a rough stone separating itself from the quarry to evoke the act of choosing personal accountability and the pursuit of truth over the easier path of passive conformity. He reaches back into eighteenth-century Masonic custom, dwelling with particular care on the Chamber of Reflection, whose intense, introspective atmosphere made plain that the lodges of that era were not instruments of social advancement but spaces of slow moral contemplation and honest self-examination.
Grounding the whole in Pythagoras's maxim to know thyself, Julian Rees invites practitioners to understand their Masonic lives as an active pilgrimage eastward in search of wisdom, and to arrive at the conviction, which the Craft has always quietly insisted upon, that the human being is not a physical organism that happens to contain a soul but a soul that finds itself, for a time, clothed in a physical body.
In the final instalment of this lecture series, Julian Rees turns to the symbolism of travelling westward and to the transformative allegories carried within the Third Degree, completing an argument whose full weight can only be felt now that its earlier stages have been laid.
Julian Rees draws the distinction carefully: where the journey eastward represents a quest for knowledge of the world beyond the self, the journey westward demands something more difficult, a courageous passage into the setting sun of the unknown, where the practitioner must face the unpalatable truths and vulnerabilities that an outward-facing life makes it easy to avoid. He reframes the Master Mason degree not as a narrative whose subject is death but as one whose true subject is regeneration, the return from the grave understood as the moment in which the fallible, incomplete self is put aside and the individual re-enters the world carrying a heightened and hard-won state of consciousness.
Closing with the insistence that no final destination exists within this life, Julian Rees urges Masons to refuse the passivity of bulk initiation and to embrace instead a lifelong pilgrimage of self-examination, one in which the courage to keep asking questions and to think independently is not a means to an end but the very substance of the journey itself.
In this presentation, Julian Rees illuminates the nature of visual emblems and allegories as tools that are by design non-verbal and deeply individual, each one intended not to deliver meaning but to awaken it, differently, in every practitioner who encounters it. Julian Rees traces the historical transformation of the Masonic tracing board from its earliest form, when practitioners drew symbolic maps in charcoal directly onto the lodge floor, through its gradual evolution into the permanent, detailed paintings conceived for sustained moral contemplation that have come down to us today.
Drawing structural comparisons across traditions with the ease of a scholar entirely at home in his material, Julian Rees sets the tracing board alongside the Christian icon, Michelangelo's Pietà, and the Eastern sand mandala, showing how each of these objects uses geometry and sacred imagery to arrest the wandering attention and turn the ordinary mind towards something it would not otherwise reach.
Julian closes by unpacking a selection of foundational symbols with characteristic precision, among them the letter G as the emblem of geometry, the chequered pavement as a mirror of life's irreducible dualities, and the hexalpha, drawing each into relationship with the Hermetic maxim as above, so below, and arriving at the argument that these intricate allegories exist for one purpose above all others: to help each practitioner locate, within themselves, the unique and quietly waiting spark of true divinity that Masonic teaching has always held to be the destination of the inward journey.
