Chrétien-Guillaume Riebesthal
for the installation of the Les Coeurs Fidèles Lodge in its new locale on July 2 , 1826 , only a few months before the publication of his book . These ceremonies must have evoked memories for some older Masons given that , during the Revolution , the Strasbourgeois had celebrated the new cults “ with gravity and conviction .” 157
It is , to say the least , singular to find , at the height of the reign of Louis XVIII and Charles X , a group of men continuing to practice , behind the veil of Freemasonry , ceremonies inspired by the religions of the Revolution . It is true that , up to the great rupture of 1877 , which saw the Grand Orient pass from the Voltairean rationalism inherited from the eighteenth century to the agnostic rationality of Auguste Comte , Freemasonry considered itself as the very incarnation of natural religion . In this capacity it sought to struggle against the two perversions of the human spirit , atheism and fanaticism , and to organize the homage of men to nature and to its creator . Chrétien- Guillaume Riebesthal and his ceremonies illustrate particularly well the philosophical attitude and religious sensibility of Freemasonry up until the last third of the nineteenth century . But he also created a tradition that was to survive the paradigm shift of 1877 . Under the Second Empire , his paramasonic ceremonies would be reprised and developed further by Marconis de Nègre and Ragon . In the 1880s , the Grand Orient would legitimate them by integrating them into its corpus of ritual and officially sanctioning them . If most of these ceremonies have now fallen into disuse , today , when Brothers pay homage to one of their number recently departed by organizing a funeral service , the ritual used is still largely that conceived in 1825 by Brother Riebesthal .
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 157 Mathiez , La Théophilanthropie et le Culte décadaire , 491-492 .
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