Mark Booth - The Secret History of the World

This new way of looking at things was very bad for religion. If nature obeyed certain universal laws that ran along certain straight, predictable tracks, then it was indifferent to the fate of human beings. Life, as Thomas Hobbes put it, is a war of all against all.

THE WASTELAND OF CENTRAL EUROPE following the Thirty Years War became the spiritual wasteland of the Western world. It’s possible, if you are so minded, to see the decline of religion with sardonic glee, but for most people the gradual withdrawal of the spirit worlds has been experienced with an increasing sense of alienation. Without the living presence of beings from the higher hierarchies of gods and angels to help them, people were left alone to confront, as we say, their own demons — and demons.

Humanity was entering a new Dark Age. Neo-Solomonic temples sprang up all around the world. The esoteric aim of Freemasonry would be precisely this: to help lead humanity through the age of materialism while keeping the flame of true spirituality alive.

Of course Freemasonry is often thought of as atheistic, particularly by its enemies in the Church, but a Freemason has traditionally sworn an oath to ‘study the hidden secrets of Nature and Science in Order the better to know his Maker’.

From the start Freemasons had wanted to discard unthinking religion, false piety and the accretions of centuries of Church practice and dogma, particularly the crude idea of a vindictive father figure. But the higher orders have always sought direct personal experience of the spirit worlds. As philosophers they have always been interested in attempting to define what we can reasonably say about life’s spiritual dimension.

As we are about to see, many famous Freemasons of the eighteenth century who are usually thought of as sceptical, if not downright atheistic, were practising alchemists — and some even participated in ceremonial magic. Moreover, some great Freemasons from this period were reincarnations of great personages from the distant past. They were returning to fight in the greatest battle with the forces of evil since the first War in Heaven.

IF SCOTTISH AND ENGLISH FREEMASONS supported a constitutional monarchy working with a democratic parliament, the situation was very different for the American colonies.

George Washington was initiated in 1752.

On 16 December 1773 a group of men, apparently native Indians, played a large part in inspiring the American Revolution. After they had dumped British tea into Boston harbour they hurried back inside St Andrews Masonic Lodge…

In 1774 Benjamin Franklin met Thomas Paine in a Lodge in London and urged him to emigrate to America. Fond of quoting the words of Isaiah, Paine became the great prophet of Revolution, proposing a federation of states, coining the phrase, ‘The United States of America’. He argued for the abolition of slavery and state funding for the education of the poor.

In 1775 members of the Colonial Congress were staying as guests in a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their aim was to design the American flag. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were present and so was an old professor, who seemed to be staying there by coincidence. Somewhat to the surprise of the others, Washington and Franklin deferred to the professor. They seemed to recognize him as their superior, immediately and unreservedly, and all of his suggestions for the design of the flag were promptly adopted. Then he vanished and was never seen or heard of again. Was this stranger one of the Hidden Masters who direct the history of the world?

In their individual shape and in the pattern of their arrangement, the five pointed stars on the flag echo the symbols on the ceiling of a chamber in the Egyptian pyramid of Unas. In Egypt they were a symbol of the spirit powers raying down their sustaining and guiding influence on human history.

If we insist, against all the evidence, on seeing Freemasonry as an atheistic organization, spiritual only in an empty, modern sense, we will fail to understand how its leaders felt themselves both prompted by mysterious powers, some incarnated like the old professor, others the disembodied spirits of the stars.

The architecture of Freemasonry grows out of an occult, magical tradition of invoking disembodied spirits that goes back to ancient Egypt. ‘When the materials are all prepared and ready,’ it is said, ‘the architect shall appear.’

On the doors of the Capitol building in Washington, DC, there is a depiction of a Masonic ceremony that took place in 1793, when George Washington laid its cornerstone. If we contemplate Washington’s designs for the capital that would bear his name, with this building at its heart, we can begin to understand Freemasonry’s secret plans for the age. The key to this understanding — perhaps shockingly for those who would like to see Washington as a model of Christian piety — is astrology.

Freemasonry’s interest in astrology had good strong roots in the Royal Society. When Newton was challenged on the subject, he said, ‘Sir, I have studied the subject. You have not.’ Elias Ashmole had cast a horoscope for the founding of the Royal Exchange in London, soon to become the centre of world finance, as well as for St Paul’s Cathedral. When George Washington had a horoscope cast for the founding of the Capitol building he was acting in accordance with a solemn Freemasonic tradition which charted the history of humankind according to the movements of the stars and planets.

For esoteric Freemasons like Wren and Washington, the act of consecrating a cornerstone at an astrologically propitious moment meant inviting the hierarchies of heavenly beings to participate in the ceremony.

It is significant that at the very moment George Washington laid the foundation stone of the Capitol building, Jupiter was rising in the East. The phrase ‘Annuit Coeptis’ which hovers above the pyramid on the dollar bill is adapted from a line in Virgil’s Aeneid — ‘Jupiter, favour us in our undertaking.’

The phrase ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum’, also to be found on the dollar bill and which worries conspiracy theorists so much, is also adapted from Virgil. In the Eclogues he looks forward to a new age, when the people will be reunited with the gods so there will be no need for religion. The dollar bill, therefore, looks forward to the end of the Catholic Church’s world domination and the beginning of a new spiritual era. Replete with esoteric symbolism, it was designed under the aegis of President Roosevelt, a 33rd degree Freemason, who was advised on occult symbolism by his Vice President, Henry Wallace, a fellow Freemason and disciple of the theosophist and artist Nicholas Roerich.

After years of research and having been granted access to the Masonic archives, my old friend David Ovason wrote a magisterial book revealing in all but completely plain terms the esoteric plans that have motivated America’s leaders.

David Ovason has shown how the astrological orientation of Washington, DC, marks a complex pattern involving Jupiter, the sun, the moon, Sirius and the constellation of Virgo. He shows that a great triangle of streets with Pennsylvania Avenue as the hypotenuse was intended by Washington and Latrobe to mirror the constellation of Virgo. He shows, further, that in a spectacular light display to rival the greatest achievements of the Egyptians, Washington, DC, is laid out so that on 3 August every year the sun streams down Pennsylvania Avenue and strikes the pyramidion on the top of the Post Office tower.