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BACK NEXT Spring 2008 Issue 44 Letter from the Editor Grand Lodge News News and Views On The Level International News Beyond the Craft A Fresh Eye European Grand Master's Conference Secrecy and Suppression What is the Central Purpose? Mysteries of the Standing Stones Texas and the Alamo The Potters' Art Brother Lightfoote's Journal Review: Masonic Networks and Connections Review: Seeing the Light Review: Western Esotericism and Rituals of Initiation Review: Masonically Speaking Letters to the Editor Internet Library & Museum of Freemasonry Grand Lodge Quarterly Communication Masonic Charities Canon Richard Tydeman: Without Detriment Copyright 1997-2008 FREEMASONRY TODAY Designed and Maintained by: Cyberpoint Limited

FREEMASONRY TODAY Esoterica What is the Central Purpose? It is clear that there is a wide and diverse opinion of what Freemasonry actually is, and what could or should be done to arrest a membership that is slowly leaking away. It is probable that the two issues are linked. Outside my Masonic activities I am actively involved in working with organizations that are struggling to understand how they arrived at their current position and to help them devise actions which will create their desired future ... Mysteries of the Standing Stones For untold generations, prehistoric people venerated natural sites, but from around 6,000 B.C., when settled agriculture and animal husbandry began to supplant nomadic hunter-gatherer ways of life around the globe, many cultures started to build monuments of stone or earth. Key among these were standing stones. These were placed in groups, such as circles or rows, or erected as solitary pillars, ‘monoliths’ or ‘menhirs’. Some stones ... Eternity in View While most people who nearly die from some accident or medical emergency recall nothing when they are resuscitated, some do, and their reports tend to contain common features. Typically, the person’s consciousness seemingly leaves the body and floats a few feet overhead. Everything that is going on is seen and heard, even though the physical body is unconscious. The person can then feel as if being rapidly drawn away elsewhere, often with ... Seeking the Light: Freemasonry and Initiatic Traditions The first weekend in November saw the Canonbury Masonic Research Centre hold its seventh international conference – an event that drew speakers and delegates from as far afield as Finland, Italy, Poland, Romania and the United States. The North London based centre was established in 1999 to help facilitate scholarship on matters relating to Freemasonry, and the theme of this year’s conference, ‘Seeking the Light: Freemasonry and initiatic traditions’, focused on the heart of the matter – on Freemasonry’s role as an initiatory society ... Beyond the Brain Acrucial philosophical struggle is taking place within science about the nature of the mind and its place in the physical universe. The outcome of this will determine the future course of human destiny, and so should concern Freemasonry which, behind its social, secular activities, its fellowship and philanthropy, has philosophical principles as its integral guiding lights. The side that currently has the upper hand in this philosophical discussion within science ... Nearer to the Great Architect in a Garden At first sight you might not think that there is much of a connection between gardens and Freemasonry. Masonic symbolism is surely all about architecture, and gardening is about working with things that grow. Nevertheless there is a connection, in fact many connections, and if this seems far-fetched it may be because we need to widen our conception of both gardening and what a ‘masonic garden’ might be ... Dreaming of Time Past In the last issue of Freemasonry Today we looked at the practice of ‘temple sleep’, conducted at selected sacred sites by numerous ancient cultures in order to obtain dreams for initiation, divination, or healing purposes. It was noted that 50 years ago the novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell had found evidence that modern people sleeping near ancient Greek dream temples experienced unusual, powerful, and disturbing dreams ... Sacred Sleep The practice of ‘temple sleep’ involved sleeping at a special temple or a venerated natural site with the aim of having dreams for initiation, divination or healing purposes. Certain ritual actions collectively known as “incubation” would be conducted prior to sleep to help direct the dreaming mind. Such dream-seeking procedures go back to the dawn of history ... The Paths of Heavenly Science Freemasonry teaches by means of symbols. It is not alone in this. From the earliest times teachers have sought a means of expressing the ineffable, that for which words prove too limited; symbols allow the expression of a depth of ideas beyond mere words. In all ages buildings have been constructed and guided by symbolic principles; they thus share certain similarities – an incorporation of number symbolism, underground tunnels, stairs up to the light - all are used to serve an initiatory rather than a commercial or residential function ... Soundtracks of the Ancients Many of us like to visit the ruins of ancient monuments and temples, trying to picture what went on at these places. But it tends to be a silent movie running in our minds, one that does not tell us what these ancient sacred places sounded like. Fortunately, archaeologists are at last beginning to realise that sound was vital to the religious practices of ancient peoples and so, gradually, the various soundtracks of antiquity are beginning to be investigated ... Stone Poems The Land-mark A Time to Gather Stones Together The Gavel The Craftsman Samson Solomon A Time to Cast Away Stones From Labour to Refreshment An Egyptian Mystery There are three chambers within the Great Pyramid of the Pharaoh Khufu: the upper, placed in the centre of the pyramid, is called the King’s Chamber, and is entered by a passage-way leading off the end of the huge interior ‘Grand Gallery’. This Chamber is around 34 feet long, east to west, a little over 17 feet wide and 19 feet high. It is lined with well finished granite brought down river from Aswan, 500 miles to the south. Within the chamber stands ... At A Perpetual Distance Since the beginning of the 20th century, Western man has become increasingly aware of the importance of what is called ‘myth’. But myth is not confined to the legends of antiquity. More recent people, places, and events have assumed the status of myth – the ‘Wild West’ for America, Napoleon in France, John F. Kennedy and the unanswered questions pertaining to his death, and Diana, Princess of Wales. The creation of myths is a spontaneous activity of the human psyche – as spontaneous as the generation of dreams. By means of myths, man not only ... Egyptomania Decorative motifs, artefacts, and designs derived from ancient Egyptian precedents have been known in Western Europe for a very long time: the Mediterranean Sea was a great highway in Antiquity and there were many cultural influences that flowed from Egypt. This tendency became more potent when Alexander the Great ... The Green Man An enigmatic figure is to be found in thousands of images carved in stone in the Medieval churches of Europe. It appears normally as just a face, usually male, sprouting foliage, becoming foliage, or growing from foliage. It has been suggested that this figure, now known as the Green Man, was a special sign for the stonemasons but there are probably just as many in wood as in stone. He is, though, almost confined to the building trades ... Navel of the World Many ancient cultures possessed the notion of there being a symbolic world centre – a "world navel" or omphalos as it was called in the Classical age. Although strange to us, of all the ruling themes of ancient thought, it was one of the most fundamental and pervasive. The ancient mind perceived the world navel motif at all scales. At the largest, cosmic, level the north or pole star, Polaris, was often its symbol for peoples in the northern hemisphere ... Heart and Mind We are living now in a crucial time of choice – a time of stupendous scientific discoveries which are enlarging our vision of the universe, shattering our old concepts about the nature of reality. Yet the delicate organism of life on our planet and the survival of our species are threatened as never before by technologies driven by a need to conquer and control nature, technologies applied with an utter disregard of the perils of our interference with the complex web of relationships upon which the life of our species depends ... Entering the Oracle of the Dead The most terrifying and dangerous of all ancient rituals for foretelling the future was undertaken by means of the descent into Hell. This took place at the Oracle of the Dead, at Baia, near Naples in southern Italy. It was not just a poetical or mythological allegory: it actually happened. During the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus, in the last decades BC, the underground Oracle of the Dead was closely packed with soil and rubble and sealed ... The Way of the Labyrinth There is today a renewal of interest in an ancient pattern which represents the inner path at the heart of all traditions. For millennia people have laid out on the ground the pattern of a labyrinth, or elsewhere marked out labyrinth images. The earliest are prehistoric, but the most prominent are in medieval cathedrals and churches. It is almost undeniable that these had a ritual significance arising in prehistory and brought into Christian service during ... Temples of the Sons of May When the dull haze lifts from the black peat at Lindow Moss it is still possible to envisage why, for our predecessors, this was a sacred location. And although silence may still skulk – as it did limitless lifetimes ago – there also remains an overwhelming babble of recollections cradled by the secret and coiling wind blowing in across the Cheshire Plain from the Irish Sea. It was here, on August 1, 1984 (the Celtic festival day of Lugnasad ... Masonic Tattoos In 1849, the body of an unknown man was found drowned in San Francisco Bay. The only available signs for his identification were the emblems of an Entered Apprentice tattooed on his left arm and the emblems of a Fellow Craft on his right arm. On his left breast were the Lights of Masonry and over his heart was the pot of incense. Other tattoos of masonic symbols found elsewhere on his body were the beehive, the sword and heart, the all-seeing eye, the hourglass, sun, moon, stars and comet, the three steps, together with a weeping virgin and Father Time ... Forbidden Technology Technology is forbidden when it is not allowed to exist. It is easy to forbid technology to exist in the past because all you have to do is to deny it. Enforcing the ban then becomes a simple matter of remaining deaf, dumb, and blind. And most of us have no trouble in doing that when necessary. I have discovered an avalanche of evidence proving the existence of a very remarkable ancient technology, one which is well and truly forbidden because ... Mystery Set in Stone On the edge of the village of Rushton, in the heart of the Northamptonshire countryside stands a mysterious stone edifice. Three stories high and illuminated by three windows on each side of each story, the building forms a perfect equilateral triangle. Each face has three gables rising to three pinnacles constructed from three stone triangles, and the roof is crowned with a three-sided chimneystack: the whole building is based around ... Some Masonic Gravestones Arriving home on Templar day, 13 October 1999, having had to extend my stay away, I hoped very much that when I got my second set of photographs developed they were going to be better than the first lot of dark, indecipherable images. I had been away in Wallasey, and my forwarded post contained a letter from your editor suggesting I include photos from Liverpool to send to him with some I had collected elsewhere in August (1999) ... The Riddle of the Stones More than 244 million years ago a desert was formed by what adventurers later called the Trade Winds at roughly the present latitude of our Sahara and Arabia. These warm dry zephyrs whipped and swirled and planed the petrified waste until the Earth’s crust coasted and drifted at the pace of the growth of stubble on an old man’s chin. This journey through time and space still continues at no great pace but, some time within these myriad years, a portion of this desert, now stone, was laid down at a place we now call Hollington in the moorlands of Staffordshire ... The Riddle of the Stones The still-sumptuous ruins of a Cistercian abbey, lovely in decay, snuggle contentedly in a lush valley surrounded by the majestic moorlands of Staffordshire, the seven centuries old weather-beaten red sandstone walls still keeping some of the myriad clues to a hoary riddle. Half a mile to the south, and a couple of hundred feet higher, a public house now known as The Raddle but, intriguingly, displaying a sign showing a stonemason chiselling away at a rock, watches over this valley. In the bar room of this public house, above the fireplace, a brass square ... The Mysteries The Mysteries existed for a simple reason: to satisfy the desire of those who wished to know the truth of who we are, what happens at death and what Divinity is. Certain Mysteries achieved widespread fame: those of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis for example (dating from at least the 6th century BC), and those of Isis and Osiris (from perhaps thousands of years earlier). Then there were the Mysteries of Mithras, of Dionysus, Bacchus, Orpheus, the Great Mother and many others. And as evidence slowly emerges, even the Great Pyramid is being seen as a place of ... A Marriage in Heaven With the coming of the Millennium, there is evidence of a growing angst about the future role of humanity, exemplified by a disillusionment with science and technology, so that some writers are even wondering if human intelligence is not a regrettable accident. In short, people are wondering whether science has robbed us of former religious certainties and comforts, leading to our extinction. From this it would appear that evolution or creation is actually pointless. If evolution is merely about the survival of DNA, then so it would seem to be, as such could have been achieved by unicellular Pre-Cambrian Age life. However, the last 100 million years show that just as Life ... Rosslyn, Chapel of the Century Roslin (current spelling for the village) is an old mining centre south of Edinburgh, lying half-way between Penicuik and Lasswade. The chapel stands at the end of a small lane, where the land rises to greet the Pentland Hills. The foundation stone was laid in 1446 by William Sinclair, the third and last Prince of Orkney. The construction work continued for forty years. William Sinclair appears to have acted as the Master of Works himself ... On The Pentagram Now mostly recognised through the mythology of witchcraft movies, graffiti and gutter-press Satanist exposés, the pentagram has almost everywhere become disembodied from its roots in geometry - everywhere, that is, except in Freemasonry. There we see it on the doorstep to London’s Freemasons’ Hall, for example, and we see its radiant stellar properties in the Royal Arch Degree ritual. Fully developed only in the 19th century, the ritual is in part based on the Platonic system wherein five solid geometrical bodies embody the principles on which ... The Mystery of the Royston Cave How true the celebrated medievalist's sceptical statement really is, can be amply demonstrated by a unique case study: the Royston Cave. Tucked away in the heart of a lovely English shire not far from Cambridge, the Royston Cave has jealously guarded its 'secrets' over the centuries. Behind an unassuming entrance, the gawping mouth of a narrow shaft alerts the visitor to the uncanny experience in store. The pale light of the electric bulb reveals ... A Mason in Prague The spirits of centuries gone by are never far away. One of them, Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor from 1576 to 1612, was celebrated last summer with a remarkable series of exhibitions relating to his life and reign. One contained objects from his famous cabinet of curiosities. Others were devoted to his patronage of scientists (Kepler, Tycho Brahe) and the arts, both visual and occult - there were probably more alchemists, cabalists and hermeticists in Rudolfine Prague than anywhere else in history. The occult aspects of Prague's history were also the subject of a magnificent exhibition entitled Opus Magnum, mounted under the initiative of Vladislav Zadrobílek ...   Esoterica © FreemasonryToday 1997-2008