This article represents an attempt to characterize the worldview of Russian Freemasons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Instead of relying on the concept of “Christian mysticism,” which Khalturin finds to be highly problematic, it draws on the theory of “Western esotericism as a form of thought” developed by Antoine Faivre, applying it to the study of archival materials from the Masonic collections in the Russian State Library’s Manuscript Division. The benefits of this new conceptualization are as follows: firstly, it helps to explain contradictions in the Masonic worldview; secondly, through reconstructing this worldview as an integral system, it provides a key to understanding certain enigmatic Masonic texts; thirdly, it can help us to situate Russian Freemasonry historically so that we can understand its role as the “third pillar” of Russian culture along with Orthodox Christianity and Enlightenment rationalism.