They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  Truth is not biodegradable, even after 3,000 years. Nor did it evaporate from late Victorian England. Truth was what had brought Warren to Jerusalem, and it was what, in Masonic terms, he found. But in that terrible darkness there was a caveat that none could have anticipated, and if it reads a little melodramatic, it reads just about right. For in the undisturbed mysteries of this building lay the seeds of the Whitechapel Murderer.

  While sojourned in Jerusalem, Warren’s life was at risk on an almost daily basis, both above and below the ground. Just as the rock threatened to crush him, the Muslims would quite literally have killed him had the extent of his excavations been known. ‘Our work was of such a nature,’ wrote Warren, ‘that, I may say, every week Sergeant Birtles had to act in such a manner as would, on active service, have assured him the Victoria Cross.’

  Faced as they were with hostile Turks, catastrophic roof falls and causeways choked with antediluvian filth, this was no exaggeration. Everything in this alien place conspired to want them dead. But Warren triumphed. When the pit props ran out, he did without, and when the money ran out, he spent his own.

  It isn’t possible to equate Warren’s dynamism here with his vacillating idiocy as a Police Commissioner twenty years later. To read of Warren in Jerusalem, and then of the neutered pomp of his failure in Whitechapel, is like reading about two different men. ‘His [archaeological] reports were being published in the English press,’ wrote Williams, ‘and causing intense interest.’ It is without question that these few Englishmen, clawing their way through thirty centuries of darkness, were men of justified fame. Warren’s resolve was indefatigable, his courage unkind to no one but himself. He earned his place in the history of Jerusalem, it’s his forever, and no one would ever wish to make ill of it.

  But there was a psychopath who tried.

  In terms of intellect, the Ripper was utilitarian, with no more sophistication than a spoiled child. Irrespective of the boundless efforts to swaddle him in cosmetic ‘mystery’, it is by his spite for Warren that he is betrayed. What a piece of work was this man, and what men were they that stood in his shame.

  We are about to explore the Masonic, archaeological and deeply personal significance of this catastrophe for Warren. But before journeying into the ‘black night of the abyss’, we need to hear briefly from a voice of contemporary Masonry. It belongs to an initiate by the name of Bro McLeod, a Masonic authority we shall be hearing more of. Of Warren’s archaeological adventures in Palestine, he writes, ‘there are slight traces of Masonic activity in the Jerusalem interlude’.9

  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 circumst
ances, 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 from that stony rock that had heard no such sound for centuries, and the other ceremonies proceeded.’17

  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.’