THE BOOK OF HIRAM. Freemasonry, Venus and the Secret Key to the Life of Jesus Christopher Knight & Robert Lomas, Century, London, 2003. Hardback, 482 pages, £18.99. ISBN 0 7126 94382

As far as making a daily increase in Masonic knowledge is concerned, The Book of Hiram, like the young Luke Wordsworth’s Michael, is ‘Something between a hindrance and a help.’ The subtitle gives a clear indication of the sort of stuff that one can expect to discover within and one is nor disappointed. The various theories put forward are constructed on the foundations laid down in Messrs. Knight and Lomas’s previous volumes: The Hiram Key and Uriel’s Machine. These titles have been best sellers and are immensely enjoyable to read but they’re hardly educational.
    One wonders, even, if Knight and Lomas want us to take them seriously, or whether the Genuine Secret of their books is that they don’t believe a word of them either. On Page One the reader is informed that ‘The rituals of Freemasonry form the most ancient oral tradition of the Western world.’ This claim came as a surprise to me I must confess, and I was keen to learn what evidence the writers would offer to support it. Precious little, as it happens, but the journey that one’s taken on in search of it is a right, rollicking roller-coaster ride. Starting out with a rather interesting and provocative interpretation of various elements of the Third Degree ceremony, the book moves on to examine the achievements of the Grooved Ware people, in particular their observations of Venus and their use of the Megalithic Yard (0.82966 metres). This leads us, naturally, via the Pyramids and King Solomon’s Temple onwards, inevitably, to Rosslyn Chapel. One innovation that I appreciated especially was a digression involving the Vikings. I’m a big fan of the Vikings, I have Norman blood in my veins and I often feel a close affinity with Eirik Bloodaxe and Harald Bluetooth, and I once, just for fun, cobbled up an hypothesis for the origin of Freemasonry based on the Norse Myths. Knight and Lomas employ exactly the same quotation that I used, about Odin being hanged and being pierced with a spear, echoing the dangers facing the initiate etc., etc., etc. I got it from Bullfinch’s Mythology, it took me about an hour to write the piece. That’s not scholarship. The Book of Hiram isn’t scholarship either, but what larks!
    The latter part of the book comprises – wait for it – The Masonic Testament! This consists of a hundred and three (is there significance in that number, one wonders) pages of random quotations from various Masonic and quasi-Masonic rituals, present and past, a number of which, we are told, were passed to the authors, invariably by an ‘elderly brother’, in brown envelopes, after their lectures. Why don’t younger brethren ever have any of these things? Why do the old boys who do carry them round with them? On the off-chance of bumping into Mr. Knight or Mr. Lomas, presumably.
    The Book of Hiram is, in the words of Miss Jean Brodie, ‘the kind of thing that people who like that kind of thing will like…’
    Andrew Montgomery