REGULAR

A Lodge working under the legal authority of a Warrant of Constitution is said to be regular. The word was first used in 1723 in the first edition of Anderson’s Constitutions. In the eighth General Regulation published in that work it is said: “If any set or number of Freemasons shall take Upon themselves to form a Lodge without the Grand Master’s Warrant, the regular Lodges are not to countenance them.” Ragon says (Orthodoxie Maçonnique, page 72) that the word was first heard of in French Freemasonry in 1773, when an Edict of the Grand Orient thus defined it: “A regular Lodge is a Lodge attached to the Grand Orient, and a regular Freemason is a member of a regular Lodge.”