Masonic History: Were Our Founding Fathers Masons?
Many of America’s most revered “founding fathers” were Freemasons. Benjamin Franklin was a Grand Master in 1734, and edited and published the first Masonic book in America that same year. Thomas Paine, also a Mason, wrote An Essay on the Origin of Free-Masonry in the early 19th century. Important historical figures who may have been Masons include Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, Francis Scott Key, John Hancock, Paul Revere, Elbridge Gerry, Josiah Bartlett, and George Clinton. Even George Washington. In fact, he has a memorial called the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia, to show for it.
This may explain the ongoing allegations that everything from the shape of the Pentagon to the symbolism of the Liberty Bell to the Statue of Liberty and the American Eagle and the eye and pyramid on the dollar bill all have esoteric, if not downright occult or Masonic, meaning behind them.
But a vast majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were not Freemasons, and had no association with any Masonic lodges. This means that the Masons were not behind all of the alleged conspiracies they’ve been accused of, including being the Illuminati engineering the New World Order from dark and smoky backrooms, Reptilians ready to take over the world and install alien rule, and the key power players behind every aspect of governance of these United States.
In fact, much of the architecture and symbolism we see in our great land has other origins, possibly from ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian deities and beliefs, or no doubt Christian foundations—heck, even the pagans get represented in the form of the lovely lady who welcomes all into the New World, the Statue of Liberty, which was a gift to us from France and clearly a representation of a pagan goddess with her seven rays beaming out from her crown.
The pyramid on our dollar looks an awful lot like those at Cheops. Not everything is, was, or will forever be a big Masonic conspiracy!
When our ancestors thought about passing on important knowledge, especially that of the esoteric kind, they didn’t always have to turn to big secret societies, or large chapels and cathedrals. In fact, sometimes they used very small items that may have seemed insignificant on the surface, or embedded that knowledge in pre-existing knowledge like a palimpsest they hoped no one would notice.
Hidden Images and Codes
The actual art/science of writing hidden messages that only the sender and recipient can see is called steganography, and though this focuses mainly on concealed writing or coded writing, rather than the visible encrypted messages of modern technology, it can also include messages that are in a sense “hiding in plain sight.” One of the oldest uses of this art form dates back to 440 BC in the form of a coded warning about an oncoming attack that was written on the wooden backing of a wax tablet before applying its beeswax surface.
Through history, we’ve learned imaginative ways to hide messages and codes, with secret inks, different typefaces to create a patterned message, tiny codes under postage stamps on envelopes, and even the blinking eyes in Morse Code of American POW Jeremiah Denton, who was able to spell out “torture” during a 1966 press conference and confirm that our soldiers were being tortured in North Vietnam.
One of the most talked about and controversial hidden message systems is said to exist right in the Bible itself.
The Bible Code
Thirteenth-century Rabbi Bachya ben Asher might have been the first to suggest that a type of code called ELS was present in the Torah, an idea later confirmed by other rabbis and then written about in a modern pop culture phenomenon called The Bible Code by American journalist Michael Drosnin in 1997. ELS stands for “Equidistant Letter Sequence” and was first publicly presented in 1994 by Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosbenberg, who had studied the presence of ELS in the Book of Genesis.
What we now call Bible codes are patterns of letters that are at exact and equal distances apart that create specific words, or phrases, often apocalyptic and prophetic. Found in both the Old Testament and New Testament, these alleged codes could also be displayed simultaneously as an “ELS letter array” by writing out text in a grid with the same number of letters in each line, then cutting it out in rectangle form. You would have to choose a specific starting point and pick a skip number, then select all letters in the text at equal spacing as given by the skip number. So, you could start at the beginning word, and then choose every fifth letter to create your coded message.
Sometimes, ELS can draw out entire sentences with prophetic meaning, which means that the pattern outcome would less likely be a result of sheer chance. The longer the ELS are extended, the more likely you have a real pattern or coded system at work.
Though Drosnin popularized the Bible code with his mass market book and a second one, Bible Code II: The Countdown (released in 2002), a number of critical studies and objection experiments showed that ELS could be applied to any book, including Moby Dick and War and Peace, and eventually a pattern would emerge, thus rendering the Bible messages as nothing more than sheer chance, and not the divine code of the holy book’s authors who painstakingly set down the letters in their proper orders thousands of years ago. Drosnin was accused of leaving out of his examples intersecting passages and phrase extensions that would render the ELS code null and void. A group of mathematicians and statisticians even went on record signing a statement saying they did not believe there to be anything valid to the Bible code phenomenon, all of them having examined the evidence at hand and finding it unconvincing.
Regardless, there are still those who believe that the codes in the Bible warned us of assassinations, terrorism, comets and meteors, and even the end times—or it was just another example of people seeing what they wanted to see where they wanted to see it.
Tarot Cards
Tarot cards are another means by which some occultists allege hidden knowledge has been passed on under the radar of religious authorities. The original tarot decks were playing cards from the mid-15th century used to play “tarocchini” in Italy and “tarau” in France. Only after the late 18th century were these cards used as a form of divination, with symbols embedded in the imagery that conveyed a deeper spiritual knowledge to those who knew how to “read” them.
The original decks had 78 cards of four suits with pip cards from ace to 10, and four face cards per suit. In addition, there was a 21-card “trump suit” and a single Fool card, much like our modern “Joker” card. Occultists now call the trump cards the “major arcana” and the suit cards the “minor arcana.” Though there is no valid proof of any use of these cards as anything but game decks before the 18th century, some tarot readers will still insist they are much older and filled with ancient knowledge.
The oldest picture card decks date back to around 1420 AD and were first mentioned as a 16-picture card deck with Greek gods, and suits depicting birds, not the usual images we know of today. Motifs and imagery usually involved astronomical objects, animals, poetry, deities, and heroes, with the hand-painted cards of the upper classes often done to portray and celebrate family members. The more occult symbolism began in the mid-1500s when the cards became a form of divination, maybe in part due to the book The Oracles of Francesco Marcolino da Forli, which depicted cards used in a simple, oracle-style reading.
A Swiss clergyman named Antoine Court de Gebelin, who portrayed the decks of the Tarot of Marseille specifically as ripe with symbolism of the Isis/Thoth mysteries, didn’t apply great magical meaning until around 1781 when the tarot became more associated with mysticism, in part due to the publication of Le Monde Primitif. From that point on, future decks were designed with specific themes in mind, such as the highly popular “Rider-Waite” deck, drawn to specific instructions by occultist Arthur Edward Waite in 1901. This deck more than any other is filled with esoterica and occult symbolism, but newer editions have been unfortunately altered and modified, and no longer reflect Waite’s true intent.
Even the older Marseilles deck contains imagery
that could be used for divining purposes, but the problem is, as with any kind of images and symbols, a matter of personal interpretation. Cards like the Fool or Death are often thought to be negative when in fact they may signify anything but a negative situation. Death cards are said to be about change and transformation, and the Fool, about choices and decisions. One deck focuses on Hermetic philosophies and teachings, called obviously the “Hermetic Tarot,” and uses symbolism important to the rituals and teachings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as well as Jungian symbolism of archetypes and the realm of the psyche.
The problem is always in the person who looks at these cards and attempts to make an interpretation based upon images and symbols that may or may not have much meat behind them at all. Most likely, these game cards were just that: game cards—and later allowed for a bit of personal expression of ideas that might not have been completely accepted in a public forum. But the tarot remains less a form of transmission of information and more a system of fun, and even divination, that might actually be based upon nothing more than the intuitive interaction of the reader and the one being read for.
Knowledge Gone Forever?
Not to end on a tragic note, but when it comes to hidden information, there is so much of it that will never reach our waiting minds and eyes, not because it is encoded in some form we cannot understand, but because it is gone—simply gone, never to be recovered.
When we try to imagine what knowledge might have been forever destroyed in ancient times, when parts of the Royal Library of Alexandria burned, it boggles the mind and breaks the heart. There are four possible end dates for this vast repository of the world’s largest library, dating from fire during the Alexandrian War in 48 BC to the Muslim conquest in 642 AD. Even after the main part of the library was destroyed, along with so much of our past with it, another smaller library that had been set up by scholars at a temple known as Serapeum was also destroyed by fire in 391 AD.
To this day, we cannot know the extent of the holy texts, the wisdom writings and scrolls, the art and artifacts contained in this massive complex that was dedicated to the collection of the world’s knowledge. And to think that the library was only a part of the bigger complex, which included a Museum and research center for the study of astronomy, anatomy, biology, and zoology, as well as experiments in physics, mathematics, medicine, and geography boggles the mind with just how vast a body of knowledge we have lost. Though there is much of the museum that has survived, the Roman philosopher Seneca referred to more than 40,000 stored books that burned with the library, and there is incredible debate to this day over what the true extent of the damage might have been.
Still, not every sacred text or holy scroll, body of knowledge or wisdom teaching, mystical tradition or esoteric learning system has been lost, and to this day we are still given the task of trying to figure out which of what remains is truly ancient in origin or the result of “addons” through time. And then there is the hope, too, that one day, the Vatican in Rome might open up its vast archives of documents, artifacts, texts, and information to the public eye, although that date seems somewhere way off in the future, if ever. And we can only wonder at the secrets held in those basement vaults and secret archives that are said to contain 52 miles of shelving and 35,000-plus volumes in the selective catalog, not to mention the yet-to-be-indexed materials, all of which are forbidden to us (qualified scholars can see some of the content, after going through a vigorous clearance process), yet hinted at in modern novels and movies that speak of world-changing mysteries of the highest order. Game changers. Shift shapers.
As this book is being written, antiquities in Egypt are being destroyed in the violence of political and religious uprising. It’s a shame, because the anger of today is literally wiping out the knowledge of yesterday. So we are left to sort through the information that comes to us via the surviving pathways and try to understand what they, our ancestors, wanted us to know.
Chapter 7
Outsourced: Ancient Aliens, Invisible Fields, and Other Outside Information Sources
Aliens!
—Giorgio Tsoukalos, on the hugely popular History Channel show Ancient Aliens
According to StatisticsBrain.com, in 2011 more than 2,273,000 American jobs were outsourced to other countries. (No information was available for 2012.) Of the CFOs surveyed, 35 percent said they outsourced jobs, with 24 percent favoring China and 18 percent favoring outsourcing to India.
There is so much talk over jobs, and information, such as banking and medical records, being sent overseas to places where the work needed can be done faster, cheaper, and easier. Most CFOs cited reduced costs as their main goal, but a whopping 38 percent went to outside countries for research and development, and 49 percent did it to gain access to information technology and management ideas and innovations not available “internally.”
There are people who believe we may have gotten a little outsourced information of our own a long time ago, a little help with advancing our knowledge, science, and technology from our friends, only not in other countries...but on other planets.
Ancient Astronauts and Aliens
The ancient astronaut/alien theory is a simple one: Through time we have been visited by aliens, who have changed, shifted, altered, and advanced our own limited civilization. Although academically, this theory is not accepted, if even entertained in general, it has become an idea for our time, thanks in part to the very successful History Channel show Ancient Aliens, which has exposed these ideas to millions of viewers.
Talk about taking it viral.
Yes, we in the past have had our In Search Of, with Leonard Nimoy narrating, but the History Channel scored a viewership coup with the program that features a variety of writers, researchers, and even a few skeptics discussing the possibility that our advancement was outsourced to the stars.
Though we are not writing a book about ancient aliens—that has been done by so many other writers—we do want to look at this particular theory in general as a means of possible transmission of information. Is it valid? Does it make sense? Can we prove it? Yes, maybe, and no.
The theory also proposes that the gods, goddesses, and other deities of old religions might have actually been aliens, but were described as gods because of the limited knowledge of the people at the time (although why believing in an alien is more “advanced” than believing in a deity has never been explained well enough), who did not truly know how big the Universe was and how many possible habitable planets might exist. Of course, this is to deny the power of the imagination, for we have to stop here and ask if our ancient ancestors didn’t envision science fiction stories in their heads just as we do today in books, TV, and movies.
But, let’s get back to the theory.
Might we even be descendants of alien? Whereas this book desires to focus on the transmission of knowledge and information, the idea that we either have alien DNA or were created by aliens could indeed change the way we think of our own capabilities. Some ancient astronaut/alien believers think that aliens altered the course of evolution, or that they genetically engineered humans and that would account for the gaps in evolutionary theory. But for now, let’s go with us being perfectly human. Occam’s razor, you know?
Ancient astronaut theorists suggest that the only way big leaps in advancement in our progressive civilization could have possibly occurred was via outside help—the help of advanced civilizations that were not anywhere to be found on earth. Thus, they must be star people who took on the responsibility of coming to earth, helping us out intellectually, and leaving behind objects and things out of place and time such as those we discussed in an earlier chapter, including legends and stories of their visitations, before going back to the stars from whence they came.
Some of the proponents point to biblical stories of giants among men, the Nephilim of the Book of Genesis who were said to be “sons of God” who mated with human women, and mentions of chariots in the sky like those witnessed by
Ezekiel in the Old Testament, and objects like the Hindu vimanas, or flying cars that sound very much like aliens and their craft. They also point to glyphs and drawings throughout various ancient cultures of helmeted men, winged beings, and bizarre craft-like objects spewing fire behind them.
Is It Proof?
Although all of this could be called evidence of ancient alien visitation, also referred to as “paleocontact,” and to those who have made a living out of the study, research, and writing of just such a thing, this is at most circumstantial evidence, not outright proof. The key players in the ancient astronaut/alien theory are not entirely new, possibly having their start, as so many alien concepts do, in the science fiction of the late 19th century on, before becoming a subject for real serious study.
We are not talking UFOs here, or close encounters of the first, second, third, or any other kind. What we want to understand is whether or not there is any real evidence of validity to the idea that humans could not have been responsible for the leaps of transmission of information, not to mention the quality of the information. Dozens of books have been written on the ancient astronaut/alien theory—most pro, a few balanced, not many skeptical. The skeptics have remained somewhat silent, with a couple of serious scientists speaking out at the inconsistencies of the theory’s key aspects, and a few Christian-leaning videos, blogs, and articles approaching the theory from their own limited belief system. One of the debunking sites did absolutely nothing to disprove the entire theory, while successfully picking apart specific claims, such as a stone figure wearing a clearly animal-headdress that the show claimed was an alien astronaut “helmet,” neither did it offer alternative explanations that might have made more sense about the claim overall.
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