A lodge is understood to be any 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 themselves known to the public. Lodges are very common institutions of previous centuries, moments in which they were generated and gathered around the debate of philosophical, political, cultural or religious ideas. Nowadays they are not so common but those that exist remain as to maintain the spirit of institutions closed to the public that do not make their existence known or that do not specify what is the objective of their existence.
Lodges are difficult to define institutions insofar as their existence is not publicly recognized and in many cases they are not even 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 that the person must make great sacrifices in order to demonstrate their interest in participating.
The definitive historical moment in which this type of institution arises is not known and this is due in large part to the hidden nature that they maintain as one of their main features. However, it is estimated that since the Middle Ages one can speak of Masonic lodges or groups whose members met to discuss philosophical, religious or political issues. In the last centuries many of these lodges participated in important historical events due to the fact that in many cases their members were individuals with 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.
