Bro. William S. Burkle tells us that, far from being a pseudo-science, alchemy holds an “animist view” of existence and aims to elevate all living things. We also learn of the historical stages of the Royal Art.
If ever there was a man who represented the core tenets of Freemasonry—Brotherly Love, Relief, and Truth—it was Thurgood Marshall. Marshall is famous for being the first African American justice of the Supreme Court, but his legacy and influence on our culture are so much greater than that. Brother Marshall had an astute legal mind and ardently voiced his support for civil rights and the policies needed to achieve them.
In a time of controversy and division in the USA, Bro. John F. Lowe reminds us that through proper application of the working tools we can “return civility to its rightful place” in our lives and society.
Richard Kaczynski reveals Crowley’s journey through fringe Masonry to the Ordo Templi Orientis—-and how he nearly made the latter into an Order of higher degrees for regular Freemasons.
Fight Club – What does it have to do with Freemasonry? It’s gritty and vulgar, certainly two descriptors of what Freemasonry is inherently not. Fight Club is, on the surface, a testosterone filled cinematic experience that puts on a pedestal those ideas of power, masculinity and sexual prowess.
Behind the curtain however lays a deeper story.
The operative Masons chose the two Saints John, St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, as patron Saints because one prepared the way and the other builded thereon, or as an old ritual has it, “One finished by his learning what the other began by his zeal, and thus drew a second line parallel to the former.”
In France as well as Jerusalem, Templars and Freemasons existed side by side and must have influenced each other’s esoteric knowledge. An examination of architecture when the Gothic style was adopted reveals that the first European churches built deliberately in the new Gothic style began to be constructed after Jerusalem’s conquest by the crusaders.
In the master’s lecture of the Fellow Craft degree, we are told that “Geometry, the first and noblest of sciences, [is]... the basis upon which the superstructure of Freemasonry is erected.” By the time we reach this lecture in our Masonic journey, we probably have figured out that the medieval stonemasons from which our fraternity evolved used geometry to design and erect the structures on whose construction they were employed. At this point in the lecture, we expect additional instruction on the symbolism inherent in the builder’s trade. Instead, the master throws us a curve: He tells us that geometry can help us trace nature to her most concealed recesses in order to discover the power, wisdom, and goodness of the Great Architect of the Universe.
The expression, “the magic of Freemasonry,” takes on a different meaning when one realizes the great number of professional and amateur magicians who are and have been members of the Ancient Craft. It was only natural that these skilled performers of the art of producing baffling effects and illusions should band together to share their interests with the Fraternity.
Gold changed the destiny of a nation. Its accident discovery in 1848 by a moody, not-too-bright carpenter set off the most frenzied gold rush in the history of the world, and the greatest mass migration of human beings ever known. It turned California — until then a sparsely populated, largely unknown region — into a household word throughout the world.
Nothing in the human story is more striking than the persistent, passionate, profound protest of man against death. Even in the earliest time we see him daring to stand erect at the gates of the grave, disputing its verdict, refusing to let it have the last word, and making an argument on behalf of his soul.
Tarot is defined as one of a set of figured playing cards used in Italy as early as the fourteenth century; also a game played with such cards in which 22 Tarots (the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet), all being trumps, and called the “Major Arcana,” are added to a set of 56 cards of usual Italian suits called the “Minor Arcana.”
Sun-worship played a prominent part in the religion of the ancients and was introduced into the mysteries, says [Bro. Albert] Mackey, not as a material idolatry, but as a means of expressing an idea of restoration to life from death, drawn from the daily reappearance in the East of the solar orb after its nightly disappearance in the West.
