The ceremony over, there were ancillary delights, confirming that they were doing the right thing in the right Freemasonic place: ‘The vast quarry thus consecrated by Masonic forms shows at every point the marks of the chisel as well-defined as the day the workmen left it. Slabs of stone partially dressed are lying upon the floor, others partially cut out of the wall stand where a few more blows would detach them. Many emblems of crosses, Hebrew characters, etc., remain, and the next visitor will see among them the Square and Compasses, as cut by our hand.’18
We know what a couple of squares looked like. How about a couple of compasses? They would look like this:
These were the symbols cut by Warren and his party into the walls of ‘Solomon’s Temple’. Both ancient and modern, sacred and trivial, the compasses are as readily to be found in the twenty-first century as they are in the earliest Masonic documents. No less than the cross for Christians, the compasses can justly be characterised as an icon of Freemasonry. The tool of T.G.A.O.T.U. (The Great Architect of the Universe), they are wherever Masonry is – in paintings, engravings, etched into drinking glasses; and carved by Jack the Ripper into Catherine Eddowes’ face.
They are literally a Mason’s ‘Mark’, what Bro historian J. Fort Newton describes as ‘a mark by which his work could be identified’. The ‘trademark’, if you will, of Freemasonry.19
The ‘mystery’ of Whitechapel starts here, in Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, as it must for all Brethren on their metaphoric journey in the footsteps of Hiram Abiff. ‘The road which we shall follow,’ writes Masonic historian J.S.M. Ward,
is like the Masonic pavement, checkered with black and white, and like that used in the RA [Royal Arch] it is flecked with crimson. We must descend into the black night of the abyss itself – the abyss of savagery and fear, and the lower we descend, the further back in time we venture, the blacker becomes the darkness, lit only by a glimmering ray – the unfaltering faith and quiet heroism with which man accepted the high office and the grim fate which savage and primitive ideas had assigned to them. Hiram, indeed, may be a real man of flesh and blood, who like thousands before and after him, has been sacrificed in the false belief that thereby the corn will be made to grow and the building to stand firm forever. That Hiram was not the last architect who was sacrificed on the completion of the building on which he had toiled these pages will show, and even today, in the dark corners of the earth humble, yet valent, representatives of our Master still follow the same bloodstained path that he once trod.20
Hiram Abiff was the First Master of Freemasons, and the architect of Solomon’s Temple. According to Masonic fable, he was murdered and buried underneath it. As Bro Ward says, he wasn’t the first or the last to pay with his life in this way: it is rumoured the architects of the Taj Mahal were either blinded or beheaded on completion of their task, a certain way of preventing them from ever building anything else that rivalled its magnificence.
Bro Ward’s pavement into the abyss takes us back to about 967 BC, the fourth year of King Solomon’s reign, when the husband of three hundred, father of seven hundred, and murderer of his brother Adonijah, began to build ‘the House of the Lord’ at Jerusalem. Its purpose, apart from self-celebration, was as a repository for the Ark of the Covenant (the chest containing the tablets on which God inscribed the Ten Commandments), wherein the cult of Yahweh could find a fixed place of worship. Details of its construction are to be found in the Book of Kings (6–7), and a good deal of this description found its way into the traditions of Freemasonry – indeed, every Masonic lodge ever built owes its symbolism to this mysterious pile. We learn that cedar was culled from the forests of the Lebanon, and monster stones said to be dressed with such fantastic precision in the quarries that no further hammer, saw or chisel was used. Hence, no metal tools were required at the building site. In deference to this fable, no metal – buttons, boxes or coins – is ever tolerated about a Freemason during induction: a tradition given full mischievous attention in the deadly Masonic games of Bro Jack.
It was a famed artisan in metal who became the first Grand Master of Masonic legend. All Freemasons are designated as ‘Sons of the Widow’, and Hiram Abiff was the first. ‘He was a widow’s son of the tribe of Nephtall,’ says the Bible, ‘a worker in brass; and he was filled with wisdom, and understanding, and cunning to work all works in brass.’ These were qualifications enough for King Solomon, who ‘sent and fetched Hiram out of Tyre’, hiring him to set about the business of adorning his temple by forging the biggest artefacts in metal yet seen on earth. ‘For he cast two pillars of brass,’ recounts the Book of Kings, ‘and he set up the pillars in a porch of the Temple; and he set up the right pillar and called it Jachim; and he set up the left pillar and called the name thereof Boaz.’
And it is here that Freemasonry integrates itself with the story of Solomon, adapting the Book of Kings to construct a mythology of its own.
The next picture, of a coffin, is a typical example of Hiram’s migration out of the Old Testament and into the mind-boggling eclecticism of Masonic symbol. The artwork comes from a third-degree (Master Mason) tracing board, and I reproduce it because it alludes to much of the great legend, including both the murder of Hiram and the skull-and-crossed-bones logo shared by the Knights Templar.
It’s in the essence of Masonry to conceal, and here (with the compasses above) we have Hiram’s name and accompanying date hidden in cipher. The letters above the skull read ‘H.A.B.’, for Hiram Abiff, and the date is in that curious Masonic calendar of Anno Lucis (year of light) 3000, about a thousand years before Christ. On either side of the plaque are the letters ‘T.B.’, representing the Biblical metal-worker Tubal Cain, an enigma we can do without. Distributed about the coffin are symbols of more pertinence. At its centre is Bro Ward’s chequered pavement, inviting our gaze into the mysteries of the temple where, according to Masonic legend, Hiram met his assassins. The tools of their trade, both manual and murderous, are also depicted. There are the square, the gavel and the rule. Above is a frond of acacia that sprang up like magic from the dead man’s ignoble grave.
We approach the murder of Hiram Abiff needing but one more player of antiquity to set the stage. An icon of Masonry, he is Ezekiel, a flaming mouth of the Old Testament whose sexual hang-ups read like a prognosis for the criminally insane. Big on revenge, Ezekiel was a sulphurous prophet of merciless righteousness, and of no small importance to the Ripper’s narrative.
The Temple of Solomon is manifest in the symbolic orientation of every Masonic lodge. But we need to travel via a hallucination to arrive at the place where Hiram met his death.
Into the endless violence that was Jerusalem came a Syrian king called Nebuchadnezzar, who flattened it yet again. Ezekiel was carried off in chains, and while a prisoner in Babylon he had his famous reverie of the reconstruction of ‘the House of the Lord’. ‘In the five and twentieth year of our captivity,’ he records, ‘in the visions of God brought He me into the land of Israel, and, behold, there was a man, whose appearance was like the appearance of brass, with a line of flax in his hand, and a measuring reed, and he stood at the gate. And the glory of The Lord came into the House by the way of the gate whose prospect was towards the East. So the spirit took me up, and brought me into the inner court; and behold, the Glory of the Lord filled the House.’
Ezekiel’s vision is full of measurements of such precision that twenty-five centuries later theologians were able to interpret it like an architect’s plan. Models were made and pictures drawn, presenting a romanticised idea of what the crime scene might actually have looked like. Hiram had built this sacred place, where the lamps flared on walls of pure gold. He had erected Jachim and Boaz, cast the bronze sea that stood outside on the backs of gargantuan bronze oxen,