customs and habits Archieven - De Vrijmetselaar

Open book with Masonic symbols representing Montaigne and Freemasonry connection

Montaigne on Customs and Their Connection to Freemasonry

Imagine sitting at a table with someone from an entirely different culture. You eat differently, greet differently, dress differently. Yet when you look into their eyes, you recognize the same curiosity, the same longing for connection. Michel de Montaigne captured exactly this feeling in his essay ‘Of Custom,’ showing how deeply habits are embedded within us — and how liberating it can be to see past them. For Freemasons, this essay strikes at the heart of their work: looking beyond outward differences to discover what truly unites people. Why Customs Make Us Blind In this forty-ninth essay from his first book, Montaigne assembled a colorful parade of customs from every corner of the world. Peoples who ate naked, cultures where blowing your nose was considered rude, societies with radically different views on property and marriage. His aim was never to shock. It was to reveal how arbitrary many of our daily habits truly are. What you experience as ‘normal’ is utterly foreign to someone else — and vice versa. This insight has immediate consequences for everyday life. Think about how you react when a colleague tackles a problem differently than you would. Or how uncomfortable you might feel encountering an […]

Open book with mirror and rough ashlar stone symbolising Masonic self-reflection

Montaigne on Custom: What Our Habits Reveal About Us

A spoon. A simple piece of cutlery we raise to our mouths without a second thought. But what if you grew up in a culture where eating with your hands was the only respectable way to dine? In his twenty-third essay, Michel de Montaigne invites us to pause and reflect on such everyday habits — and to discover what they reveal about the human condition. In ‘Of Custom,’ he unfolds a rich collection of examples that compels us to question everything we consider normal. The Core Idea of the Essay In this essay, Montaigne examines the vast diversity of human customs and habits — from eating practices to funeral rites, from dress codes to forms of greeting. His central thesis is as simple as it is unsettling: what we experience as natural and self-evident is almost always the product of habit and upbringing. The power of custom is so great that we are barely able to look at it critically. Montaigne draws from classical sources such as Herodotus, Pliny, and Seneca, but also from travel accounts of his own time about newly discovered peoples in the Americas and Africa. He places the customs of these distant cultures alongside those of […]