tonesforjonesbones
01-28-2009, 11:28 AM
Has anyone noticed what was written at the bottom of that missive? "Oh Lord My God is there no help for a widow's son?" ThAT is freemason stuff. They all use that phrase it is code. TOOOO dang weird for me. Look at this!
In searching for answers in the allegory known as the legend of Hiram Abiff, it was necessary to bear in mind that in Secret Masonry the Master Mason was a master of men, not a master of an art or craft. The bulk of the Masonic order had been made up of Fellows, the full members, and of Entrants, those whose discretion and trustworthiness were not yet acceptable enough to merit their invitation to full membership. Most of those Entrants would have known only those brother Masons who were in their own cell, or lodge. The Masters were the masters of territory or of lodges, which required that they maintain communication with one another. This communication, and even the occasional secret general assembly, would have been absolutely necessary for the important matter of standardization - for arriving at common agreements as to hand and arm signals, passwords, and catechisms by means of which a brother Mason could seek help and by which members could identify one another with some sense of security. When it is even suspected in a secret society that security has been breached, those secret signs must be changed, with meetings held to make the change and then to spread the word. Also, in order to direct a brother on the run to the next lodge, it was obviously necessary that someone know the locations of those other lodges, at least on a regional basis. Thus, the Masters were at the same time the most important and the most dangerous members of the fraternity. Brothers whose acquaintances were limited to their own individual cells could betray no more than the membership of that single cell, whether in their cups or on the rack; but a Master could jeopardize the very existence of the society by revealing the names of other Masters, all of whom possessed much broader information, including the names and locations of still other Masters. That would be the reason why only the Master had need for a Grand Hailing Sign of Distress and a special call for help when in the dark, or just out of sight of assistance: "Oh, Lord my God, is there no help for a Son of the Widow?"
Every Master was the "widow's son." He was the continuation of the Master-line that had apparently been broken with the death of the first Grand Master, Hiram Abiff. In the initiation drama he had been assigned the role of Hiram Abiff, whose mantle, thus assumed, became the central feature of the candidate's role in the secret society. In that same role he would emulate Abiff, who had died rather than give up the secrets of the Master Mason. In that role he would thwart the effects of the attack by three assassins who had wanted those secrets badly enough to kill, not caring that the murder of Hiram Abiff meant an end to the building of the unfinished temple.
That continuation of the function of the Grand Master and temple architect, a kind of immortalization of a dream kept alive by these to come after him, was symbolized by the branch of acacia, a symbol of immortality much older than Christianity. To ancient peoples, the weather and the reactions of crops were the determinates of life and death, of good living or near starvation during the year ahead. The changes in seasons, too much or too little rain, and crop-killing frosts were much more understandable and more easily addressed in religious worship than were total mysteries such as molds, fungi, and animal diseases, which were usually ascribed to witchcraft or the evil eye. With no fresh food to look forward to and no means to preserve the food they had, the most dreaded season was winter, when the days grew shorter as the Power of Darkness each day gained ground over the Power of Light. As though to maximize their misery, every bush, tree, and plant died. All, that is, except the evergreen. It stayed bright and green and so had to be occupied by a spirit stronger than the Power of Darkness, preserving life until the sun could manage its inevitable, but temporary, victory. That strong spirit helped to bridge the gap from autumn to spring, preserving the thread of life. In some areas, an evergreen tree was cut down in order to bring the good spirit into the house, where the branches were draped with gifts, a tradition of the old natural religion which we still preserve at Christmastime. Thus the evergreen became a symbol of immortality, and one of those evergreens was the acacia.
The acacia would have been selected as the symbol of Hiram Abiff's "immortality" for very specific reasons. It was of acacia wood that God ordered that the Ark of the Covenant be made, the ark that was to be housed in the Sanctum Sanctorum of Solomon's temple, where the Grand Master made his plans for the next day's work. The acacia was also the host of a special breed of mistletoe with a flame-red flower. Not only was that mistletoe - which not only stayed green, but actually bore its fruit in the winter - a strong symbol of immortality in itself, but many believe that the acacia, covered with a blanket of fiery mistletoe blossoms, was the "burning bush" of the Old Testament. In addition, the Egyptian acacia bears a red and white flower, a reminder of the Templar colors, based upon a white mantle with red cross.
Hiram Abiff's immortality lies not in the eternal existence of his soul in some heavenly kingdom, but in the minds and bodies of those Masters who came after him, men charged to take his place and to finish what the mythical Grand Master had begun. Their duty was to make the plans and direct the "workmen," the Entrants and Fellows of the Craft, in achieving Abiff's goal, the completion of the Temple of Solomon.
All this has only the vaguest connection with the biblical account. According to scripture, Hiram was not an architect but a master worker in brass and bronze. He was not murdered but lived to see the temple completed and then went back to his home. The clues to Masonic origin and purpose are found in the allegorical legend, not in the scriptures.
As we search British history to find an unfinished temple as a basis for an exclusively British secret society, we find just one answer, in the religious order that often called itself by that simple name alone: the Temple. Jacques de Molay and his predecessors signed documents over the title Magister Templi, Master of the Temple. And that temple, taking its name from the Temple of Solomon, certainly was left unfinished upon the murder of its masters, who also had been tortured to reveal their secrets by three assassins who ultimately destroyed them. Not Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum, but Philip the Fair of France, Pope Clement V, and the order of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. Many who have read only the Catholic church's summations of the Templar suppression may object, stating that only the king of France could be considered the "assassin" of the Knights Templar, having done all of the dirty work and having coerced a weak pope to help him. True, that is the church's usual version to this very day, but the historical facts speak somewhat to the contrary.
When Edward II of England declined to torture the Templars, the pope could have thrown the problem back to Edward's father-in-law, the king of France: No one forced Clement V to dispatch ten church torture specialists to London. The pope could have lived with the acquittal of the Templars on Cyprus: No one forced him to demand a new trial, or to dispatch a torture team with the power to draw upon the local Dominicans and Franciscans if extra help was required. Nor did the king of France prevail in his desire that one of his family be made the head of a combined Hospitaller/Templar order, with full access to their combined wealth. And if Clement V had been merely a timorous puppet pope with Philip pulling the strings, as church historians would have us believe, the kings of France would have been the new owners of the Templar properties in France, not the Hospitallers. The pope was much tougher, or at least much more obstinate, than we have been led to believe and it would appear that he had contrived a plan of his own in concert with the Hospitallers.
That order has managed to escape any criticism in the matter of the Templar suppression, but apparently only because it had kept a low profile throughout, probably for the very good reason that its role and its rewards had been worked out in advance. It is well known that the papacy was in favor of a union of the Templars and Hospitallers and had already determined that Foulques de Villaret, master of the Hospitallers, would be the Grand Master of the combined orders. The Templars, at their headquarters on Cyprus, had heard of the serious intent to combine the orders and had taken the time to prepare a written rebuttal. The Hospitallers, at their own headquarters on that same island, must have received the same information, yet they prepared no rebuttal, written or verbal. In fact, de Villaret managed to stay away from the meeting in France altogether, with no recorded papal criticism for his absence. That was undoubtedly because his presence wasn't needed and because there was no point in chancing a confrontation between the two orders, especially since the pope was already dedicated to looking after the interests of the Hospitallers. Not only did the Hospitallers offer no objection to the concept of the merger, but they made no attempt whatever to speak up for their brother warrior-monks as they were arrested and tortured. They simply stayed out of it and bided their time, until Clement V, much to the anger of King Philip, declared that all of the confiscated Templar property would go to the Knights Hospitaller and that all released Templars could be taken into the Hospitaller order, thereby achieving de facto the union he had been planning all along, with full Hospitaller approval and cooperation. If one looks for motive, the Hospitaller order was the major beneficiary of the suppression of the Templars, as had probably been planned from the beginning. The pope and the Hospitallers together thwarted the aims of Philip of France, and there should be no doubt that the Hospitallers rank as one of the three assassins of the Order of the Temple.
An interesting point about the legend of Hiram Abiff is that in it, the three assassins have already been punished, have been "brought to the Jube." Certainly there were wars with France before and after the Templar suppression, and it becomes increasingly probable that the punishments meted out to the Hospitallers during the Peasants' Rebellion, including the murder of their prior, were acts of vengeance carried out under the cover of a political disturbance. As for punishment of the Holy See, the Templar-spawned underground movement was probably the most effective enemy the church had in the British Isles before, during, and after the Reformation. Over five hundred years after the Templar suppression, popes were still condemning Freemasonry for welcoming members of all religious faiths and for failing to acknowledge Roman Catholicism as the one true church. In Secret Masonry, religious dissenters and protesters had an organization that would help them, hide them, and provide communication with others of their kind, and as the years went by, conflicts between popes and kings, between popes and the people, and between popes and their own priests provided a river of recruits for a secret society that permitted them to worship God in their own ways. All three assassins of the Order of the Temple had reason to regret their actions against the bearded knights.
A major mystery of the Legend of Hiram Abiff is the identity of "that which was lost." Some Masonic historians take the allegory literally, almost always a mistake, and state that what was lost was the "word" of the Grand Master, or the "secrets" of the Master. What the Templars had lost, literally, was their wealth, respect, and power. What the allegory suggests was lost was the architect, the planner who was needed to finish the temple and provide the leadership to move forward. The man being initiated as a Master by acting out the murder is being turned into another Hiram. Every Master takes that role, and becomes Hiram (a name by which Masons sometimes address each other). He is the "son of the widow," and it is his task to replace that which was lost: the leadership, the direction, the work required to "finish" the building of the (Order of the) Temple, which was brutally stopped by beatings and murder. Now, of course, that leadership, that elevation to the role of one of the supreme leaders of the society, has been changed. Every Mason has the opportunity to become a Master, and the initiate may be somewhat confused that what appears to him to be just another degree on his ladder of progress in Masonry should be so emphatic about the means of seeking and providing help, and so emphatic about the need to guard his brother Master Masons' secrets.
In summary, the legend of Hiram Abiff tells us that it is not a coincidence that two organizations found their central identification in the Temple of Solomon, because one group gave birth to the other. It explains the purpose of the successor group, the Freemasons, by recounting, allegorically, the fate of the prior group, the Order of the Temple. The temple was left unfinished because of the murder of the Grand Master. The man being exposed to this legend in his initiation takes the role of the Grand Master and then assumes his task, the completion of the Temple. In this sense, the Freemason is neither an "operative" mason with tools in his hands nor a "speculative" mason who joins a guild of masons as a nonworking member. Rather, he is a symbolic mason, whose building task is not connected to any actual building but is concerned only with the survival and growth of the symbolic temple, the Order of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon: the Knights Templar.
As the true origins of Masonry were obscured by time and then lost altogether, the Freemasons were left with the allegory only, and they created a fantasy world by accepting that allegory as factual. One Masonic writer was awestruck that Masonry had preserved for over two thousand years these details of the building of the Temple of Solomon which had escaped the authors of the Old Testament. The legend of Hiram Abiff was taught not as legend but as a recitation of historical fact.
Along with the acceptance of Hiram Abiff as a real person, Freemasonry for generations taught that the order had been founded among the workmen who built the Temple of Solomon. That building became a focal point for Masonic reverence and respect. Artists' renderings of Solomon's temple came to decorate the walls of Masonic temples, and some Masons made pilgrimages to the site. Some managed to bring back to their lodges a piece of stone from the Temple Mount or from nearby quarries, relics that were displayed proudly with all of the aura of religious relics. Even today, long after Masonry shifted its claims of origin from the construction of the temple to the medieval guilds of stonemasons, there are Masons firmly convinced that their order began in the building of that temple.
Finally more sober minds did prevail, and Masonry did come to acknowledge that the story of Hiram Abiff was not factual but was an important piece of Masonic mythology. Its acceptance as fact had caused the whole fraternity to bend in the direction of the building trades and had led them to identify every common stonemason's tool as a Masonic symbol, to identify the Supreme Being as the Great Architect of the Universe, to teach that Masons had built the great Gothic cathedrals, and to include details of architecture and building in the Masonic rituals.
Now that the story of Hiram Abiff has been recognized as legend, not fact, all of the building-trade symbolism generated by the literal acceptance of the story remains, and that symbolism serves to confuse origins and purposes because it has become imbued with a reality and antiquity it does not have. In the absence of written records, centuries of time played their inevitable role of obscuring beginnings and purposes, and the rush to embrace the building trades built a screen few cared to look behind. The symbolism born of allegory was accepted as factual.
The mystery is simply this: If the story of Hiram Abiff and the Masonic role in the building of Solomon's temple are acknowledged as myths, how did that temple become central to Masonic ritual and legend? Certainly medieval stonemasons provide no answer to that question, and as the medieval guild theory itself falls away, there appears to be no answer to that mystery ... except one. The temple that is so honored and revered by Freemasonry is not a building but is the only other order that ever identified itself with that building; the Knights of the Temple. John J. Robinson. Evidence In The Legend Of Hiram Abiff. Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry. M. Evans and Company Inc., New York. 1989
http://www.jcs-group.com/mystery/temple.html
Anti Federalist
01-28-2009, 04:28 PM
http://i66.photobucket.com/albums/h277/123donnay/33415_formatted_welldone30f.gif?t=1232756106
MsDoodahs sig line:
"...when government turns bad, the best people ultimately become criminals. The people don't change; the laws do. Initiative, dissent, individual pleasures and exercise of one's basic rights become "crimes"....
The ideal citizen of a tyrannical state is the man or woman who bows in silent obedience in exchange for the status of a well-cared-for herd animal. Thinking people become the tyrants worst enemies.
Before their thunder roars, there is a period of anticipation, in which more occurs than the literal-minded tyrant can ever understand. A few overt acts of sedition shatter the heavy peace. But the greater force, unrecognized, rolls forward in near silence, as millions of individuals quietly withdraw their consent from the state. The pundits call it apathy.
They could not be more wrong.
That time is now. And we are those people.
This book is dedicated to you, the enemy of the state."
Claire Wolfe - 101 Things to Do Til the Revolution
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