A Life in Many Colours

Julian Rees was born in 1936, the son of an Anglo-Catholic priest and a libertarian American mother, into a household where languages were debated at the dinner table, books lined every wall, and the life of the mind was simply what one did. He grew up through wartime Dorset, postwar London, and a stint in the British Army in Berlin, gathering the kind of formation that cannot be taught in lodges but that lodges, eventually, know how to use.He was initiated into Freemasonry in the 1960s and spent the following decades moving steadily away from the freemasonry of pomp and precedence toward something rarer: a Masonic life genuinely lived from the inside. The ritual fascinated him not as performance but as portal. The symbols demanded interpretation. The words, he felt, meant something, and he was not content until he understood what. He won the coveted Silver Matchbox at the Emulation Lodge of improvement, served as Grand Persuivant, co-founded the Canonbury Tower Lodge with Michael Baigent and the Marquess of Northampton, and edited and wrote for Freemasonry Today across more than two decades, championing the esoteric strand of Masonic thought at a time when the institution preferred not to acknowledge it. When the United Grand Lodge of England could no longer contain his convictions, he found a more congenial home in co-masonry, where the pathway he had always sought was openly valued and women were welcome to walk beside him.His books, among them Making Light, Tracing Boards of the Tree Degrees in Craft Freemasonry Explained, and Freemasonry for the Heart and Mind, have been translated into French and recognised internationally, most recently with the Arcana Veritas Distinction Award at the Grand Lodge of Scotland in Edinburgh in 2025.A life in many colours, as he calls it. Warps and wefts of different textures, good influences and contrary ones, all of them, in the end, forming the man.He is still at work.