Freemasonry traces back to the stonemason guilds of medieval England, but this film is more interested in what the brotherhood became afterward: a fixture of revolutions, politics, and centuries of suspicion. It moves through the organization's symbolism and rituals, and through the historical figures tied to it, from George Washington to Albert Pike, weighing their actual roles against the myths that grew around them. The film covers the anti-Masonic panic that swept nineteenth-century America, when entire political movements formed around opposing the lodges, and later the Freemasons' fraught relationship with Nazi Germany, which banned and persecuted the order as a supposed enemy of the state. Historians and commentary walk through each episode, separating documented influence from the conspiracy theories that cast Freemasons as secret puppet-masters of world events. The result is a survey of six centuries of an organization that has been simultaneously ordinary, in its charitable lodges and civic ties, and, in the public imagination, sinister.