It means "covered gallery located on the ground floor and / or first floor, supported by columns and open at the front, which serves as an outdoor meeting place since they are located with respect to a building on its side or front, being common that They were placed as a prelude to the squares to hold meetings and ceremonies there. "It is an element of Italian architecture used between the 16th and 17th centuries."
It is all that group or group of individuals that congregate around a specific objective but that also has the particular characteristic of being secret or not being able to make it known to the public. Lodges are very common institutions from previous centuries, moments in which they were generated and brought together around the debate of philosophical, political, cultural or religious ideas.
Masonic lodges can have different purposes. Some research on topics of interest and are called research lodges. Others are destined for the first three years of learning its philosophy and are the symbolic or blue lodges, which are the first in the formation of a Mason who will become their “mother house”. The union of several lodges, make up the Grand Lodge.
In Latin America, the Lautaro lodge that met since 1812 was a secret society that housed the patriots of Argentine and Chilean independence, to plan strategies there and to free themselves from Spain.
These are difficult institutions to define as long as their existence is not publicly recognized and in many cases they are not known by people who are not part of them. In all cases, the lodges are composed of members who have requested to be part of the lodge's practices and who have had to undergo initiation rituals whose main objective is to demonstrate loyalty to the secret of the lodge in question, as well as the understanding of the particular spirit of it. In some cases, the initiation rituals of some lodges can be very demanding and require the person to make great sacrifices to show an interest in participating.
In recent centuries, many of these lodges participated in important historical events, because in many cases their members were individuals of high purchasing power, with political, economic and cultural influences in the historical context in which they arose. In other cases, some lodges have been dedicated only to meditation on knowledge and the ways to develop it.
