Did You Know Auld Lang Syne is Linked to Freemasons?

Author’s note: This article is summarized from various sources and attributions are linked within.

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Did you know Auld Lang Syne is linked to Freemasons? If not, surprise. It’s true. Though in this case there’s no conspiracy or dark meaning to it. Beyond the song, a tradition of crossing arms and hands with others while singing is part of a Masonic tradition though not practiced as much in the United States as other countries.

The University of Edinburgh researched the original song and found the Hogmanay tradition is connected to freemasonry. Hogmanay, in case you don’t know, is what the Scottish call the last day of the year.

Musicologist Dr Morag Grant discovered the connection in the archives at Glasgow's Mitchell Library. A newspaper report of an Ayrshire lodge's Burns Supper in 1879 describes Auld Lang Syne being sung as members formed "the circle of unity" - a Masonic ritual also called the "chain of union". Dr Grant said the tradition of singing the song at times of parting, with crossed hands, emerged in the mid-19th century among Freemasons and other fraternal organisations.

Beyond the Freemasons though, this song has been used for centuries for many reasons in several countries. Per Dr. Grant, "Some of the earliest reports of the song's use at parting come from American college graduations in the 1850s.

The many traditions and rituals associated with the song - as well as its simple, singable tune - are key to understanding its phenomenal spread, and why we still sing it today."

Poet Robert Burns was a Freemason who wrote the lyrics originally. Thankfully for him, “the organisation was instrumental in promoting the poet's work during his life and after his death.” The research shows that Burns was inspired by earlier folk songs. Though he wrote the lyrics in 1788, the tune wasn’t added until

after his death. Though not in the first verse that’s more well-known “In the final verse the singer offers his hand of friendship to an old friend, and asks for one in return. Burns wrote: ‘And there's a hand, my trusty fiere. And gie's a hand o' thine.’”

In the Masonic and other traditions, that was the point in the song where “the hands are crossed and offered to the those on either side in the circle of singers.”

Dr Grant did extensive research for her book Auld Lang Syne: A Song And Its Culture, which explores the songs’ popularity, including “written accounts, newspaper reports, theatre playbills, printed music and early recordings.”

Even before the invention of sound recording and the broadcast era, the song had global fame. It was often played at Japan graduations and is still played in some businesses to mark the end of day. There it’s known as Hotaru no Hikari.

“In 1877, Alexander Graham Bell used it to demonstrate the telephone, and in 1890 it was one of the first songs recorded on Emil Berliner's gramophone.”

It was around that time it began to be used to ring in the new year with “Scots gathering outside St Paul's Cathedral in London and others living abroad…and was sung at the end of the first World Scout Jamboree in 1920 and versions in French, German, Greek and Polish soon followed.”

It was so well known by 1929, that a line from the song was displayed on the “electronic ticker at celebrations in Times Square, New York.”

Per Dr. Grant, “Auld Lang Syne is a song about the ties that bind us to others across the years and even though its appeal is now global, it's very much rooted in the world Burns inhabited."