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This chapter explores the relationship between male friendship and the transformational aspects of Freemasonry's initiation, known as the “apprentice ritual” (rite d'apprenti). Drawing from more than twenty different manuals used by brethren to perform the apprentice ritual, dating from the 1740s to the French Revolution, the chapter reconstructs what an apprentice candidate likely experienced once he stepped into a French lodge. More specifically, it examines the initiate's multiple encounters with lodge members and spatial zones and how these interactions fit into the wider pedagogical project of symbolically breaking down the candidate's egoistic self. It shows how the initiation ritual generated a form of “ritualized friendship” that was anchored in the moral foundation of an ecumenical Christianity. The chapter argues that Freemasonry's apprentice ritual symbolically recast the neophyte into a new form, emptying him of specific undesirable psychological elements which otherwise would have made friendship a problematic, unstable relationship.

This book has explored the social history of male friendship in Enlightenment France by focusing on the institution of Freemasonry. It has identified two forms of friendship that converged within masonic sociability: ritualized friendship and unritualized friendship. It has discussed Freemasonry's emphasis on ritualized friendship as a relationship grounded in restrained sentimentalism rather than emotional freedom, which complicates the emotional history of eighteenth-century France laid out in the work of William Reddy. By analyzing the various speeches delivered by men in their lodges during the 1770s and the 1780s, the book has also revealed how Freemasonry blended an older, more formalized brand of ritualized friendship with a new culture of sentimentalism or sensibility that became ever more pronounced as the Old Regime drew to a close. Finally, it has examined how the French Revolution profoundly transformed Freemasonry and some of the ways that lodges helped shape the political culture of modern France.

Chapters 7 discuss the social dynamics of the court society. It is shown how relations at court were structured by the Greek moral complex of philia (ritualised friendship) and xenia (guest-friendship). Ritual, protocol, and the practice of ritualized gift-exchange structured social relations, as well as the developing system of court titles that hierarchized later Hellenistic court societies. Throughout their existence, the Hellenistic courts remained in essence face-to-face societies. This part also contains a section on royal patronage of the arts and sciences, which is understood as part and parcel of the social fabric of the court, court poets like Theokritos and Kallimachos being philoi competing with one another for favour and prestige.