13. Are there any deeper roots of Freemasonry?
   The early “speculative” Freemasons seem to have been interested in a variety of yet earlier forms of  thought, especially the symbolic interpretation of pictures and of geometry and what is sometimes called the “perennial philosophy.”  Such interests connect Freemasonry thematically with a number of movements from antiquity through the Middle Ages and later: the Greek and Near Eastern Mysteries, the Pythagorean School, Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, the Knights Templar, the Kabbalah, and the Rosicrucians, to name only some.