Suppose you have joined freemasonry recently and are working through the three ceremonies of initiation, passing and raising. You enjoy their uplifting admonitions to personal improvement and want further reading, as it were, to broaden your understanding of the ideas presented in the degrees as well as the intellectual currents that informed them.

Reading, though, is so twentieth-century. You want to listen to easily digestible podcasts that deliver the thinking of top-drawer academics in no more time than it takes walk to commute to work. What you need is BBC Radio 4’s programme on the history of ideas, In Our Time.

What follows then is an entirely unofficial, biased(!) and personal list of IOT episodes you could listen to in the days immediately following each of the three degree ceremonies, with a general category to give a flavour of some of the ideas that inform masonic culture.

1st degree

Altruism – 23 Nov 06

Friendship – 2 Mar 06

The Oath – 5 Jan 06

Freedom – 4 Jul 2002

Progress – 18 Nov 1999

2nd Degree

Rudolph II – 31 Jan 2008

Alchemy – 24 Feb 2005

Baconian Science – 2 Apr 2009

Human Nature – 7 Nov 2002

Mathematics – 6 May 1999

Nature – 10 Jul 2003

Renaissance Magic – 17 Jun 2004

Science’s Revelations – 29 Oct 1998

The Royal Society – 23 Mar 2006

Pythagoras – 10Dec 2009

Virtue – 28 Feb 2002

Renaissance Maths – 02 June 2005

3rd Degree

Death – 4 May 2000

The Soul – 6 Jun 2002

Masonic Culture

Politeness – 30 Sep 2004

The Encyclopédie – 26 Oct 2006

King Solomon – 7 Jun 2012

Paganism in the Renaissance – 16 Jun 2005

Empiricism – 10 Jun 2004

Toleration – 20 May 2004