What are the ancient landmarks of the craft

The ancient landmarks are the unwritten laws derived from ancient and universal customs dating from a period so remote that no record of their origin exists 1. They represent the constituent elements necessary to preserve the fixed, inalterable identity of the institution, functioning as standards against which any proposed change or potential innovation is tested 1. Because landmarks derive their authority from antiquity, no modern governing body or universal congress has the power to enact a new landmark or repeal an existing one 1.

The phrase "landmarks of our Order" first appeared in George Payne's General Regulations of 1721 1. Albert Mackey published the first distinct enumeration of twenty-five landmarks in 1858, which exerted a profound influence in American jurisdictions, though roughly half adopted his list while others framed their own or rejected the possibility of a definitive list altogether 1. Scholars and jurists have proposed widely divergent enumerations 1. For example, Chetwode Crawley reduced the landmarks to three core principles—the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and the Life to Come—while J. W. Horsley identified five indispensable landmarks: belief in a personal God, belief in a future life, the Volume of the Sacred Law, secrecy, and the modes of recognition 1.

Specific landmarks historically enumerated by Mackey include a belief in God as the Grand Architect of the Universe 1, belief in a resurrection to a future life 1, candidate qualifications requiring a candidate to be a freeborn man of mature age 1, the division of symbolic degrees 1, the legend of the Temple Builder in the Third Degree 1, the government of a lodge by a Master and two Wardens 1, the necessity of tiling the lodge against uninitiated observers 1, the right of visitation 1, and the right of appeal to a Grand Lodge 1. In Ancient Craft Masonry, the United Grand Lodge of England affirmed in 1813 that Craft Masonry included the Holy Royal Arch within its degree structure 1. Quatuor Coronati Lodge notes that Laurence Dermott positioned the Antients Grand Lodge as maintaining the ancient landmarks, and highlights the masonic theory constituting a landmark that none but the free are entitled to initiation.