The Shadow of Solomon: The Lost Secret of the Freemasons Revealed. Laurence Gardner

is in English masonic records that, on 18 May 1691, a great meeting of accepted masons took place at St Paul’s to adopt Sir Christopher Wren as a brother. The lodge to which this refers is uncertain, but it is presumed to be the Goose and Gridiron lodge, which actually dates from that year, and later became known as the Lodge of Antiquity. Wren is now listed as having been Master of that lodge, but this is fanciful myth.¹⁹ Wren was a staunch Tory supporter, a well-known Jacobite, and already a long-term mason who would certainly not have joined a Whig lodge to become its Master. There never was any such meeting at St Paul’s. In fact, there was no St Paul’s. The old building had been completely demolished; work was not begun on the new cathedral until 1675, and the scaffold and screens were not taken down until the winter of 1708. Meanwhile, no one but the workmen were allowed beyond the screens, and in May 1691 Christopher Wren was busy in Richmond, working at Hampton Court Palace for Queen Mary.²⁰

      St Paul’s Cathedral was the last of London’s reconstructions and, with the work finished, the once low-slung, shambling city displayed an elegant skyline of towers, domes, steeples and spires. It should have been the most wonderful culmination, but by that time Wren had few surviving friends or family with whom to share his triumph. Twice a widower and not marrying again, he had also lost his beloved daughter Jane. His dear friend Robert Hooke, with whom he rebuilt the City, had died in 1703, as had Samuel Pepys, while Robert Boyle had died earlier in 1691, and John Evelyn in 1706.

      King Charles had been succeeded by his brother James, who was deposed by the Whigs, in favour of William and Mary in 1688, and the Royal House of Stuart—Europe’s longest reigning dynasty—had reached its monarchical end. So too went the heritage of the Rosicrucian Order from Britain, and the philosophical mind-set which had inspired and fuelled the pioneers of the Gresham brotherhood, moved into France and Italy.

      It was Christopher Wren’s inaugural Gresham College lecture in 1657 which had cemented the original group into a formal Society. But now his visits to the coffee houses and theatres were over, for the old haunts had gone and the new ones were quite different without his friends. They had become business places for a new breed of financial marketeers. As the resurrected city became operative once again, so the fraternity of Wren’s early years became a figment of history. The days of their pioneering collaboration were done, and irrespective of how the Royal Society might progress in the future, that magical half-century could never be repeated. Nevertheless, as Britain moved towards a new era of Industrial Revolution, everyone knew that none of it would have been possible were it not for the grand legacy of invention, design and discovery, unrivalled in all history, and the incomparable genius of those few.

       5 Power and Politics

      Builders and Bees

      Freemasonry is described these days as being concerned with speculative rather than operative stonemasonry, but the word ‘speculative’ is an odd choice when used as an alternative to ‘non-operative’. Freemasons use a system of signs, tokens and passwords in accordance with medieval masonic practice, and the Great Lights and working tools of lodges include various implements associated with architectural design and building: compasses (dividers), a setsquare, a ruler (called a 24-inch gauge), a plumb line and so forth. But that really is about as far as lodge-working goes in symbolic stonemasonry terms, apart from allegorical representations to alignment, rectitude and perfection in life as they might be construed in practical building.

      It is only since the 18th century that the term ‘speculative’ has fallen into common masonic use since its inclusion in a letter from the Deputy Grand Master of the premier Grand Lodge in London to a colleague at The Hague on 12 July 1757. Significantly, however, an earlier building trade publication in 1703 had used the term in a very specific way, explaining:

      Some ingenious workmen understand the speculative part of architecture or building. But of these knowing sort of artificers there are few because few workmen look any further than the mechanical, practick or working part of architecture; not regarding the mathematical or speculative part of building.¹

      In architectural terms, a building is speculative before it becomes a physical reality. That is to say, when it is the province of the speculator—the architect—rather than the builder. At that stage, when at the drawing board, the architect is free of the masonry, but must have knowledge of all the operative practicalities. This includes not just an awareness of stone and building materials, but also the scientific aspects of stresses, strains and other such matters. The true free-mason is therefore the architect, just as Hiram was the architect for King Solomon’s Temple, while in a broader sense the Supreme Being of Freemasonry is defined as the Great Architect of the Universe.

      Historically, architects and surveyors have often been practical builders too, and have certainly operated as site overseers or masters of works. In this sense, speculative masons are not, therefore, a product of modern symbolic Freemasonry. Back in 1620, when operative members were ‘admitted’ into the Worshipful Company of Masons of the City of London, it was stated that speculative mem bers were also ‘accepted’.²

      When considering the furniture and tools of Freemasonry, their scope moves from the compasses of the architect to the trowel of the artisan, with the compasses and square being two of the Three Great Lights along with the volume of Sacred Law. In the 18th-century, William Blake portrayed the Great Architect with his compasses in his depictions of the Ancient of Days (see plate 1), but this was not a newly contrived image. The French illuminated Bible Moralisée used the same theme back in 1245 (see page 236), as did the vernacular encyclopedia, Li Livres dou Tresor, by Dante Alighieri’s mentor, Brunetto Latini, from the same era.

      Greatly admired by Isaac Newton was the Rosicrucian alchemist Michael Mair (b. 1566), physician to the German Emperor Rudolph II and a colleague in England of Robert Fludd. His book Atlanta Fugiens became one of the earliest textual models for the Royal Society.³ In this work, Mair introduced the image of a master mason using compasses to prepare the architecture of the Philosophers’ Stone as described in the Rosary of the Philosophers⁴—the Rosarium Philosophorum:

      Make a round circle of the man and the woman, and draw out of this a square, and out of the square a triangle. Make a round circle, and you will have the stone of the philosophers.

      For his symbol of London’s rebirth from the fire, Christopher Wren selected the phoenix—the mythical bird which rose from the ashes in a blaze of new enlightenment. The great phoenix effigy which commands the south portico pediment of St Paul’s Cathedral was carved by the Danish sculptor Caius Cibber, who also produced the distinctly masonic plaque at the base of the Monument. This image shows London as a collapsed and grieving woman,⁵ holding the sword of the City (see plate 32). Accompanying her is the figure of Expedition and some citizens, with the buildings aflame behind them. To the right of the plaque, the masons construct the new city, while Envy skulks in the gutter below. Peace and Plenty survey the scene from above, and King Charles II approaches (wearing Roman attire), along with Justice, Victory and Fortitude. Central to the scene is Natural Science, accompanied by Liberty and Architecture who carries the requisite square and compasses.⁶ And between the figures of London and Natural Science there is a beehive.

      Not only are bees the biblical creature most associated with King Solomon, the beehive is also a recognizable emblem of Freemasonry, and it denotes industry. Honeycomb, being constructed of hexagonal prisms, was considered by philosophers to be the manifestation of divine harmony in nature, and bees have always been associated with insight and wisdom, as defined in the Proverbs of Solomon 24:13-14:

      My son, eat thou honey, because it is good…So shall the knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul.

      The hexagon is formed by dividing the circumference of a circle by chords equivalent to its radius. This produces a figure of six equal straight sides, as found in the cells of some organic life. Consequently, bees were held to be endowed with geometrical forethought, employing strength with economy of space as their guiding principles. King