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A Question of Degrees The Scottish Rite, which belongs to an elite branch of Freemasonry known as the Supreme Council of the 33rd Degree, was founded in 1801 at the city of Charleston in South Carolina. Its origins are obscure, but it is generally agreed by Masonic historians that it started in the 1740s in the city of Bordeaux, France and brought to the American Colonies soon after. The idea was to link the normal or ‘craft’ Freemasonry with the elitist medieval order of the Knights Templar, a powerful political and financial organisation that originally was formed to protect the Holy Land --and especially Jerusalem-- from the Muslims. The Knights Templar, in fact, got their evocative name from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where had once stood Solomon’s Temple, and where these Christian knights had established their first camp during the Crusades. Jerusalem had been wrenched from the Muslims in the 11th century AD, and the new Christian ‘Kingdom of Jerusalem’ was placed under the protection the Christian knights, mostly Knights Templar, who had sworn a solemn oath to protect it. But in 1187 AD the Holy Land was lost again to the Muslims, when the army of Saladin crushed a Knights Templar’s army at the battle of Hattin on the 4th July. The Kingdom of Jerusalem eventually surrendered to Saladin on the 2nd October 1187, and from this time onwards, it remained in Muslim hands until modern times. Not surprising then, the rituals of Scottish rite Freemasonry are Judeo-Christian and those of the top degrees between the 30th and the 33rd are intensely ‘Templar’ inasmuch as they advocate the symbolic ‘rebuilding’ of the Temple of Solomon. Today, where once stood this much-fantasised Temple of Solomon, are to be seen the Mosque of Omar and the Mosque of Al Aqsa, two very sacred Muslim shrines and where the Prophet Mohamad is believed to have ascended to heaven. To put it mildly, the Temple Mound in Jerusalem is Islam’s most venerated place, some saying even more sacred than the Kaaba at Makka. By a terrible twist of fate it is also the most haloed place in Judeo-Christian tradition and, mostly, to neo-Templar secret societies such as the Scottish Rite. Central to the Scottish Rite rituals are the so-called Masonic ‘Tracing Boards’, which are usually a sort of sheet placed on the floor of the lodge on which can be seen various symbols representing the Temple of Solomon, the most prominent being two tall pillars, called Jachin and Boaz, leading to a five-pointed star or pentagonal altar known as the ‘Blazing Star’. The ‘Blazing Star’ symbolises ‘Light’ and was sometimes identified to ‘Lucifer’, which is very unfortunate, for it was not meant in this context to be seen in the malevolent sense that this name generally evokes today, but rather to the classical ‘Lucce-Ferre’ (Lucifer) which means ‘Bringer of Light’ or the ‘Morning Star’ of the Romans i.e. Venus, and which in the Bible is associated to Messianic events. But it can easily be seen how, to terrorist groups such as Hamas and Al Qaeda, such and elitist and secret society in America might be perceived as ‘Satanic’, hence the crude name of ‘Great Satan’ allocated by radical Arabs to the United States and it leaders. But to be fair, this ‘Satanic’ link, although of course wrong, is not altogether surprising to see. In 1881, for instance, a huge scam was mounted against the Scottish Rite Freemasons of Charleston by a French author called Leo Taxil, who ‘exposed’ the ‘Satanic’ rituals of this fraternity and named many senior politicians and clerics as being involved. The ‘Leo Taxil Hoax’, as it is know in Masonic circles, caused much bad press for the Masons, and brought a wave of anti-Masonic attacks from the general public and the Church. Now the 32 degree rituals of the Scottish Rite (the 33rd is a title an not a ritual) are said to be related to the 32 Paths of Wisdom of the Sephiroth or Tree of Life found in the Judeo-Christian Kabala. The Kabala is a mystical system of learning or initiation based on the idea that the Holy Scriptures, such as the Torah, the Talmud and the Old Testament, are somehow encoded in the ‘language of God’ the key of which (Kabala) was handed to Moses and passed on to the Jewish sages and Rabbis. Apparently the secrets of the Kabala are in the mystical understanding of the 22 letters of the Jewish alphabet. These letters, which are seen as ‘paths’ or ‘roads’, link up the 10 ‘emanations of God’ that make up the Sephiroth, and thus together they make up the 32 Paths. The same idea, interestingly enough, is also found in the modern esoteric Tarot Cards, which were invented in the 1770s by a Scottish Rite Freemason in Paris, Court de Gebelin. But here is a curious thing: the 31th, 32nd and 33rd degrees, which are the most crucial to the ‘rebuilding’ of the Temple of Solomon, also are found in the actual geographical latitudes or parallels that encompass the modern State of Israel. Modern Israel is, in fact, contained, as it were, between those latitudes. Indeed, the 32nd degree parallel passes just a little south of the city of Jerusalem. It has often been remarked that the ‘Mother Lodge’ of the Scottish rite Supreme Council of the 33rd Degree was fixed at the city of Charleston in South Carolina because, in fact, the 33rd degree parallel passes almost right through it. Coincidence? Perhaps. But there is more. On some certificates of the Scottish Rite 33rd degree, the actual geographical latitude given in degrees is shown alongside the name and location of the issuing lodge indicating, perhaps, some sort of mystical connection between the “Degree” rituals and the geographical latitude “degree” of the lodge. One can easily see, therefore, how radical Muslim fanatics might perceive the creation of the modern State of Israel which they believe was masterminded in secret deals between the Zionist Organisation and F.D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman in the 1940s. The Source Many ‘Founding Fathers’ of the United States were, in fact, Freemasons. A year after the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776, Benjamin Franklin, the most famous of the signatories, was sent to Paris to obtain funds and military support for the American War of Independence against the British. Franklin, too, was a Freemason, and he immediately joined the famous and very influential Nine sisters Lodge in Paris. Also members of this lodge are said to have been the hero of the American War of Independence the marquis de Lafayette, the future US President Thomas Jefferson, and the future leaders of the French Revolution, George Danton and Jean-Paul Marat. Also at the Nine Sisters lodge were registered the inventor of the Tarot cards Court de Gebelin, the celebrated astronomer Gerome de Lalande, and the mathematician Gaspard Monge. Now this is most interesting: the last two were largely responsible for the creation of a new ‘Republican’ calendar based on 12 months of 30 days, with each months divided into three ‘decanis’ or ‘weeks’ of ten day, giving a total of 360 days. Five extra days, known as the ‘5 days of virtues’, were then added to make up 365 days of the solar year. This calendar was almost certainly framed on the ancient Egyptian prototype and may have been masterminded at the Nine Sisters lodge itself. It was also at this time that Court de Gebelin made the link between the ‘Blazing Star’ of the Freemasons with the five-pointed star, the symbol of Sirius, the ‘star of Isis’ and on which the original ancient Egyptian calendar was based. Eerily, Court de Gebelin identified this star to the Tarot card No. 17, known as ‘The Star’, which depicts a woman wearing a large star on her head. We shall see later how this symbol crops up in the 11th September attacks. Now Court de Gebelin, as all scholars at the time, knew that the original Egyptian calendar had been fixed on the first dawn rising of the star Sirius (the Egyptian ‘New Year’), which took place at the summer solstice, 21 June according to the Gregorian calendar. But when Gebelin’s made this connection with the Masonic and Tarotic ‘Star’, the Gregorian calendar had only recently been introduced to replace the old Julian calendar established by Julius Caesar in 46 BC. The conversion of the Julian dates into the Gregorian dates had, in fact, been imposed by Pope Gregory XIII in October 1582 but, in fact, was not adopted in the American colonies until 1752, by coincidence the same year that George Washington was initiated in Freemasonry at Fredericksburg. According to the old Julian calendar the 21 June was no longer the summer solstice but, instead, fell on the 4th July of the new Gregorian calendar. It was then customary during those early transitory years of the two calendars to include both the Julian and the Gregorian date on official documents. Interestingly, Freemasons consider their own ‘New Year’ to begin at the summer solstice, which in the old Julian calendar would be the ‘4th July’. Was the Declaration of Independence signed on that date for ‘Masonic’ reasons? Who knows. The question is not whether this happened or not. The question is whether some Anti-Masons and fanatics think it happened. |
