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

mankind and, in referring to the great masters of old, he wrote in a letter to his Royal Society colleague, Robert Boyle, ‘There are things which only they understand.’

      Newton believed that the dimensions and geometry of the Jerusalem Temple floor-plan contained clues to timescales,¹² and he used these mathematics in his calculations when developing his theory of gravitation.¹³ The Temple, he said, was the perfect microcosm of existence, and his diagrammatic Description of the Temple of Solomon is held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. At the centre of the Temple, in the Sanctum Santorum (Holy of Holies) was kept the Ark of the Covenant, and Newton likened this heart of the Temple to a perpetual fire, with light radiating outwards in circles, while also being constantly attracted back to the centre. In line with this thinking, a point within a circle was indeed a symbol for Light in ancient Egypt and, in the lodge ritual of Freemasonry, there is a related conversation which takes place between the Worshipful Master and his Wardens concerning the lost secrets. The Master asks the Question: ‘How do you hope to find them?’ Answer: ‘By the centre’. Question: ‘What is a centre?’ Answer: ‘That point within a circle from which every part of its circumference is equidistant’. In due course we shall discover that a point within a circle

is the most important of all masonic devices.

      Although the Temple of Solomon commands primary attention in modern Freemasonry, far older masonic documents than Anderson’s Constitutions suggest that, for all his great wisdom, Solomon (c. 950 BC) was the inheritor of a much more ancient tradition. From this point, we shall travel back in time to trace the history of Freemasonry as it developed through the ages. What we know at this stage, however, is that the majority of what existed in English masonic circles prior to the 1688 Revolution disappeared from Britain’s shores with the deposition and exile of the House of Stuart. This was explained in 1723 by James Anderson, whose Constitutions formed a base for the development of Freemasonry thereafter. Indeed, it follows that the immediate answer to the question ‘What is Freemasonry?’ can be summed up by saying that it is not the same thing today as it once was.

       2 Masonic Origins

      Secret Signs

      Masons, in the operative sense, are stoneworkers, but the term Freemason is not so readily understandable. Many views have been put forward as to what the word actually means, but even Freemasons tend to disagree. The best routes to the origin of words are good etymological dictionaries—these have no vested interest and do not need to slant their descriptions in any particular way. The most famous of such early works is the 1721 edition of Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological Dictionary. This was published just two years before James Anderson’s Constitutions and, interestingly, the word Freemason does not appear. Neither does it in the revised edition of 1736.

      Writers such as John Hamill (librarian and curator for the United Grand Lodge of England in 1986) consider that ‘freemason’ is a contraction of ‘freestone mason’—a worker in finely grained freestones such as limestone and sandstone, which have no flaws and are easily cut.¹ Although quite plausible, this is not in keeping with general masonic theory which suggests that the prefix ‘free-’ relates to the realm of the ‘speculative’ rather than ‘operative’—ie, not a working stonemason as such. However, the term ‘freestone mason’ is recorded as far back as 1375, while the epitaph of a freestone quarryman at St Giles Church, Sidbury, describes him as ‘John Stone, free mason’. It is thought that he was the father of the celebrated sculptor Nicholas Stone, who became Master of Works in 1619 for the great architect Inigo Jones at London’s Banqueting House in Whitehall. Among the noted achievements of Devonshire-born Nicholas Stone (1586-1647) is the gate at St Mary’s Hall, Oxford, the monument to the poet John Donne at St Paul’s Cathedral, and numerous tombs including that of Viscount Dorchester at Westminster Abbey. In 1625, he was appointed as Master Mason at Windsor Palace by King Charles I.

      When entitling his Constitutions, James Anderson hyphenated the word as ‘Free-Masons’ and, in earlier times, two separate words were sometimes used—which may explain the non-existence of ‘freemason’ in old dictionaries. Another early use of the term comes from 1435, when ‘John Wode, mason, contracts to build the tower of the Abbey of St Edmundsbury in all manner of things that longe to free masonry’.² In line with this, the Oxford Word Library explains that, in those times, stonemasons’ guilds would emancipate (or free) their local members so that they might travel from place to place in order to gain work contracts. When arriving in unfamiliar surroundings, they would communicate their degrees of proficiency by way of secret signs known only to others of their craft.

      This makes reasonable sense and certainly gives a valid reason for the use of signs and passwords in order to gain employment at the right level of attainment. However, latter-day Freemasons are, for the most part anyway, not operative stonemasons and do not require the signs for this purpose. Either way, it is clear that by the mid-1600s operative masonic guilds did afford membership to non-operatives³ (for example, selected employers, who would need to know the signs and symbols when hiring their workmen). Thus, as is commonly believed in masonic circles, the structural framework of Freemasonry (even if not the inherent subject matter) does seem to emanate from the methods employed by the medieval workers’ guilds.

      The Old Charges

      The two oldest known masonic documents held in Britain have traditions from around 1390 and 1450 respectively. The first, which is called the Regius Manuscript, is a vellum at the British Museum containing a rather long (and not very good) poem of rhyming couplets.⁴ In 1757, a facsimile bearing the arms of King George II was produced for the Royal Library, and the original was discussed by Mr Halliwell-Phillips at the Society of Antiquaries in 1838. Subsequently, some transcribed copies were made, entitled The Early History of Freemasonry in England. The document makes no mention of King Solomon, but does feature the Alexandrian mathematician Euclid (c. 300 BC), along with an account of England’s King Athelstan of Mercia (c. 930) and his precepts concerning the duties of master masons and apprentices.

      Rather more informative and entertaining than the Regius is the 15th-century Matthew Cooke Manuscript, which is also listed in the British Museum catalogue.⁵ Edited by a Matthew Cooke, it was published in London in 1891 and is believed to have originated in middle England. The two-part contents—known as the History and the Old Charges—formed part of the masonic General Regulations compiled in 1720, and were also used as reference material for James Anderson’s Constitutions three years later.

      From a prayer-like beginning, the document moves to an explanation of the Seven Liberal Arts: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. It then tells how the sciences which formed the bedrock of Freemasonry began with the biblical offspring of Lamech, namely Jabal, Jubal, Tubalcain and their sister Naamâh (Genesis 4:19-22). In line with the Bible, Tubalcain is featured in the 3rd degree of Craft masonry (the Masters degree) as an instructor of metal artificers, and historically this takes us back more than two millennia before Solomon to around 3500 BC when Tôbalkin the vulcan, son of Akalem (Lamech), was a prince in southern Mesopotamia.

      Lamech was fourth in succession from Enoch (Henôkh), the son of Cain of Kish, and the manuscript relates that his offspring inscribed the sciences on two imperishable stones. They were of such virtue that one of them, called marbyll, would never burn—and the other, called latres, would not perish in water.

      In part of the text the stones are referred to as ‘pylers’, and this has generally been assumed to relate to ‘pillars’. The same definition was also given in a 19th-century English translation from the 1st-century work of Flavius Josephus of Galilee, who had related a version of the same story in his Antiquities of the Jews.⁶ The translation from Josephus has been criticized by scholars because of its many inaccuracies, among which are