The Masonic Use of Anno Lucis

When we gather in this lodge, we are surrounded not only by our ritual and our symbols but also by a quiet set of customs that speak to the deeper rhythm of our Craft. One of these customs, often overlooked because of its familiarity, is the dating of our documents in a style that adds 4,000 years to the ordinary calendar. We call this the Anno Lucis, the Year of Light. Tonight, we reflect together on why we do this — and what it means for us as Freemasons.

Let us begin with something simple: nowhere in this practice is there an attempt to correct or replace
the calendar used by the world outside our doors. Anno Lucis is not astronomy, nor archaeology, nor
theology. It is something more subtle. When we write “A.L.” on a charter or a certificate, we are not
stamping the Earth’s age; we are acknowledging the moment when Light, in the Masonic sense, first
became present in the universe of our symbolism.

The choice of 4,000 years comes from an older intellectual era, when many scholars attempted to trace
the world’s beginnings through Biblical genealogies. They arrived at a symbolic Creation around 4000
BCE. Freemasonry, inheriting the intellectual climate of its earliest years, adopted that number — not
as an argument, but as a poetic anchor. It allowed our forebears to express, in a single stroke, the idea
that the world of Light began long before the calendar pages we turn today.
But the arithmetic itself — the simple “+4000” — is almost the least interesting part of the tradition.
What matters much more is the gesture behind it.

When a lodge records its work using Anno Lucis, it places that work in a continuum that stretches back
not merely to operative stonemasons or medieval guilds, but to the earliest stirrings of human
understanding. It is a reminder that the Craft’s central aspiration — the search for Light — does not
belong to any one century, nation, or culture. It belongs to the entire human story.
This dating system carries a quiet lesson. It encourages us to look at our efforts not as isolated tasks
performed in the present moment, but as contributions to a long lineage of builders. That lineage
includes the architects of the ancient world, the philosophers who sought the first principles of truth, and
every individual who devoted themselves to understanding, improvement, and order.
When we write a date in Anno Lucis, we are reminded that the candidate who stands before us at the
altar is part of something that began long before any of us, and will continue long after. It lifts our work
out of the realm of the ordinary. A lodge meeting becomes, in a sense, an event inside a story that has
been unfolding for six millennia — not literally, but symbolically.

This is why we continue the custom even when the outside world has moved on from the timekeeping
sciences that inspired it. Freemasonry preserves the tradition not because it is historically precise, but
because it is meaningful.

To write in the Year of Light is to acknowledge that our labors are illuminated by something that
predates us — and will outlast us.

So, Brethren, the next time we encounter the letters A.L. on a summons, a charter, or a cornerstone, let
us pause, if only for a moment, and remember that the number beside it is not simply a date. It is an
affirmation. It tells us that the Light we seek today is part of an ancient quest, and that we are inheritors
of a responsibility that reaches far beyond the boundaries of our own lifetime.

Presented by Bro. John Smit – January 2026