Yes, Swami Vivekananda was indeed a Freemason. He joined the Anchor and Hope Lodge in Calcutta and was raised to the degree of Master Mason within three months of joining.
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This answer was written by AI from the works cited above. AI can make mistakes — please verify anything that matters against the source itself.
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Much of what a Freemason would like to know is already written down — in Anderson's Constitutions and Dermott's Ahiman Rezon, in Preston and Mackey, in Knoop and Jones on the mediaeval mason, in Claudy for the newly made Mason, in Pike for the Scottish Rite, and in papers read before lodges of research over three centuries. The difficulty has never been that the answers do not exist. It is that they sit in works few of us have to hand.
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