Edges of Western Freemasonry and Southern Slavic Enlightenment

This paper analyzes the edges of Western Freemasonry and the Southern Slavic Enlightenment. Generally it is thought that the entrance of Southern Slavs into Europe would not have been possible if it were not for the Masons. In the Balkans, where the literature has always been the real battlefield and where fiction has constantly and closely been interlaced with reality, literature itself provides the information about the links between Western Freemasonry and Southern Slavic illuminists. In this paper Atanasije Stojković’s work Kandor ili otkrovenje egipatskih tajni [Kandor or the revelation of Egyptian secrets] (1800) is analyzed as a part of the European Egyptomania, and its unique status as the only initiation novel in Illyrian literature is considered. Stojković’s work is analyzed comparatively, framed in the European Enlightenment environment: it has been assumed that Ralph Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) could have exerted an important influence on Stojković since it was one of the fundamental texts of the Enlightenment, as is also the case of Jean Terrasson’s Séthos (1730) which has been a basic text for Freemasonry considering the fact that it has to do with the mysteries of Egypt.