This is so dishonest you might want to call it bullshit. Warming to his topic, McLeod quotes Warren himself: ‘Whilst engaged in excavating among the ruins of the Temple of King Solomon, I had the pleasure of assisting at the holding of a Lodge, almost directly under the old Temple.’
‘Presumably,’ suggests Bro McLeod, ‘this must have been one of the projects of the American entrepreneur, Rob Morris, P.G.M. of Kentucky.’10
He presumes right.
But these ‘slight traces of Masonic activity’ can be compared with the slight traces of alcohol in Gordon’s gin. So slight were they that there’s actually a detailed architectural plan of their location, Warren memorialising the world’s most exclusive Masonic lodge with his very own name.
Consecrated as ‘the Reclamation Lodge of Jerusalem’, Warren amended its title to ‘Warren’s Masonic Hall’, a shift that could hardly be described as ‘slight’. This slight trace is the Christian equivalent of consecrating a church under Calvary, for it was above this very spot that the three wretched assassins Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum were supposed to have put Freemasonry’s first Grand Master, Hiram Abiff, to death.
Quite a significant environment for a young Freemason, wouldn’t you say? And even if it wasn’t, it was to become so, because it was here that Warren and his companions claimed to have brought Freemasonry back to the Holy City of Solomon for the first time in seven hundred years. It was Warren and his associates who participated in the establishment of the first and only Masonic lodge in Jerusalem since the time of Saladin and the Knights Templar. Only a dissembler with the disingenuousness of McLeod could call this ‘slight traces of Masonic activity’. It was in fact the apogee of Masonic aspiration, a spellbinding experience fraught with considerable danger. Islam had no truck with Freemasonry – to Muslims it was an infidel perversion, the stuff of heathen wizards – and had the Brethren been discovered there was an unexceptional risk of them losing their heads. But it was a dream, and would be one of the most indelible memories of Bro Charles Warren’s Masonic career.
At Goulston Street in the East End of London, it was to become his Marley’s Ghost. Jack was a complicated psychopath, from the Iago school of gentlemen. An ingredient of his amusement was the persecution of Warren, and it would hardly take an Alan Turing to decipher the word ‘Juwes’ that, as we will see, he wrote upon a wall.
We need to stroll a little further down memory lane, and we can start with Robert Morris. To nullify Charles Warren’s Masonic credentials, it’s also necessary to diminish those of Bro Morris. McLeod’s description of him as an ‘American entrepreneur’ is somewhat less than adequate. In reality he was a Masonic poet, author and lecturer, and one of the most celebrated Freemasons on earth. After his death the Brotherhood erected a shining monument to his memory at La Grange, Kentucky.11
Morris published many revered Masonic books, one of them detailing his sojourn in Palestine. ‘While in Jerusalem,’ he relates, ‘I held two Masonic meetings at the Mediterranean Hotel, near the Damascus Gate, in which assemblies several officers of the British warships lying at Joppa were present; also the venerable Brother Petermann, Prussian Consul, and Captain Charles Warren RE, who was in charge of the explorations. Nothing can exceed the zeal of our English Brethren upon such occasions.’12
The lodge numbers and names of the five Brits present are given, but the only Freemason of specific interest here is Warren, ‘the learned and zealous officer who has charge of the excavations going on here under the Palestine Exploration Fund’.13
It is of note that Morris describes Warren as ‘learned’, while McLeod dismisses him as ‘only a novice’, a falsehood that conveniently renders him incapable of understanding Jack’s message on the wall at Goulston Street. No such handicap is recorded in Jerusalem, where the translation of potentially Masonic hieroglyphs was a cause for excited enquiry all round. Indeed, the walls of Solomon’s Temple were scrutinised for any sign of them, Warren recording one such example in his own book, Jerusalem Underground (1876). And here he is, in happier darkness, intrigued by a Masonic signature.
Warren’s description of the symbols on the wall is more precise than in the woodcut: ‘A gallery was also driven,’ he writes, ‘where the rock was found to rise very rapidly, cutting the fourth course at 15 feet from the angle. On this course two red paint-marks were found, L’s overturned and reversed.’ An approximation of their size is given by the woodcut and in Warren’s description. A pair of ‘L’s overturned and reversed’:
Representing one of the archetypal symbols adopted by Freemasonry, the ‘squares’ discovered by Warren at Solomon’s Temple caused hearts to flutter and an exchange of correspondence in Freemasonic journals. In 1884 an American Brother wrote to the Philadelphia Keystone proclaiming that ‘Lieutenant Colonel Warren [the] energetic explorer, had made discoveries of the highest significance,’ and insisting that such symbols were indivisible from the ‘whole crux of the Masonic Legend [and] thus bear silent and unconscious witness to the loyalty and reality of our ancient Masonic traditions’.14 This ‘silent witness’ meant a lot to Freemasons, even if loyalty didn’t mean much to one rampaging through Whitechapel with a vengeful knife.
But I digress, and must return to Bro Morris and his Masonic rendezvous at the Mediterranean Hotel: ‘This gentleman [Charles Warren] in some extremely happy observations, expressed his pleasure at this meeting, called together under such singular circumstances, and was equally impressed with the importance of introducing Freemasonry, though cautiously and judiciously, into the Holy Land.’15
It wasn’t many days before the dream became a reality. On the afternoon of Wednesday, 13 May 1868, as a matter of fact. Setting off from outside the Jerusalem walls, Morris, Warren and the chosen few disappeared into the excavations: ‘Entering with a good supply of candles, we pushed southwards as far as we could penetrate, and found a chamber happily adapted to our Masonic purpose. An upright stone in the centre served us for an altar. About ten feet above the Master’s station there was an immense opening in the wall, which led, for aught I know, to the original site of the Temple of Solomon. We felt as we had never felt before,’ wrote Morris. ‘How impressive is a place that none but the All-Seeing-Eye can penetrate. Leaving my Bible open on the central stone, three burning candles throwing their lustre upon it, and the trowel, Square, etc., resting nearby, a few opening remarks were made by myself, to the effect that never, as far as I knew, had a Freemasons’ Lodge been formed in Jerusalem since the departure of the Crusading hosts more than seven hundred years ago; that an effort was now making to introduce this, the mother country of its birth; that a few of us brethren, providentially thrown together, desired to seal our friendship by the associations peculiar to a Masonic Lodge.’16
This would be heady stuff for anyone, never mind a bunch of enraptured Freemasons.
‘To break the long stillness of these ancient quarries by Masonic utterances, we had now assembled, and would proceed to open a Moot Lodge, under the title of Reclamation Lodge of Jerusalem. This we now proceeded to do in a systematic manner. A prayer was offered, echoing strangely