Sun of God

1717 And All That...

When did Freemasonry start?

That question is almost impossible to answer, because we have to decide WHAT Freemasonry is before we can even attempt an answer at WHEN it started?

The Craft, as Freemasonry is also known, emerged into the world of light from an unknown past. It emerged in the British Isles, and arose in the 18th Century as three separate groupings around the main divisions of England/Wales - Scotland - and Ireland. From there it spread around the globe, at first in lodges that were subordinate to the three British jurisdictions, but which then went on to govern themselves with their own Grand Lodges.

From that, a vast array of Masonic organizations grew, some of which are in strict accord with the three original British Isles constitutions  and are recognized as legitimate - and others, less faithful to the original ways, which are not. 

So what started the Masonic ball rolling? 

On St. John the Baptist's Day, 24th of June 1717, four London lodges assembled in the Goose and Gridiron Alehouse in the St. Paul's Churchyard area of England's capital, to form the very first Grand Lodge in the world. Ireland followed suit eight years later in 1725, and in 1736 the Scottish did likewise.

This has led to a general acceptance that Masonry started in London and grew outwards throughout the country over the following 19 years. The difficulty with that theory is that there are many historical indicators that the Craft's true home is not London, but is north of the border in Edinburgh.

That debate aside, however, it is nevertheless a fact that 1717 was when Freemasonry first acknowleged its existence to the world, but what preceeded that date?

Freemasonry owes much of it's ritual and structure  to the mediaeval stone-working industry - but there is a great deal of difference between the older lodges of working stonemasons who used to build in stone, and  the lodges of 'gentlemen' Freemasons of more modern times whose building was of the character, rather than actual.    

To diferentiate between the two, modern Freemasons, because they do not actually work in stone, are referred to as 'Speculative' Masons, whereas those masons of yesterday who wielded the chisel and maul, and who physically worked in stone, are known as 'Operative' masons.

Elements of today's Freemasonry can be identified as far back as as the 12th Century in the earliest lodges of working stonemasons who worked on the great cathedrals of that era.  But all we have from that time is knowledge that the stonemasons banded into groups and called those groups lodges. There is no evidence that their rituals carried any particularly esoteric aspects - and it is the esoteric content of Freemasonry that makes it what it is. The 'Holy Grail' of Masonic research is pinpointing the moment in time that the arcana we can see in today's lodges  was introduced to the rituals of the ordinary working stonemasons.    

The current academic view is that up until the middle of the 17th Century there was nothing untoward about the lodges of stonemasons, and that in the mid-1600s  the initiatory structure of their lodge system caught the attention of the outside world.

When they became aware of this, men, who had no interest in working with stone, presented themselves at the door of the Craft and sought membership. Through time the working stonemasons faded from the lodges and the new 'gentlemen' took over, converting what they had inherited into a semi-secret fraternity - their labours kept private from those in the world outside by the complex initiations that the stonemasons had previously used. 

Those that hold this  viewpoint generally believe it was at that point that the inner workings of the lodges were embellished with pseudo-archaic rites of the newcomer's own invention. By definition, then, those rites will be a concoction of symbolic notions relating directly and solely to the tools and working practices of the stonemasons, and would have no meaning beyond that.

An example is the right-angled square used to 'square' the blocks of stone for inclusion in the building. On a symbolic level this refers to 'squaring' ones actions in life. Likewise the compasses that are used to scribe a circle can become an allusion to the need to circumscribe our actions within a moral code, if we would live in peace with our fellow-man. We can work through the rest of the tools of the trade in similar fashion, and build up what can be called the moral ethos of Freemasonry. And that is as far as it goes for the vast majority of academic Masonic researchers.

Few look further, to see if those concepts could have deeper, more ancient meanings, and consider that the stonemasons of yesteryear appreciated those selfsame meanings. 

My own research was inspired in large part by the implausibility of the above theory of origin, for what would have driven gentlemen to ask their social inferiors for permission to join their party  - when they could so easily have formed their own organisation along similar lines - and constructed their own teachings from their own symbols. 

What I uncovered gave a much more likely scenario - for it suggests that the esoterica that is present in the Craft today - it's curious signs and symbols, and the quirky rites that convey them - are truly ancient, and carry an advanced understanding of the cosmos from a time before recorded history.

I have also discovered that  the square, the compass and the plumbline all carry far deeper allusions than are presently known, and that that knowledge had been  present in the mediaeval lodges for a very long time before outsiders took an interest in their  ways.  It was to avail themselves of that ancient wisdom, then, that the 'gentlemen' of the Age of Reason knocked on the door of the Craft seeking admission. 

The arcane secrets of the stonemasons' lodges were by then many centuries old, and though they had once been sacred, by that time they were purely symbolic of the individual's place in the cosmic scheme of things. Such  knowledge would have been like honey to the bee for the men of the Enlightenment who were in the process of throwing off the shackles of the blind ignorance of the past and replacing it with reason and scientific enquiry.  

More than two hundred and ninety years have passed since 1717. To some that is a long time indeed - but in terms of the sacred knowledge of the cosmos that the author has found in the symbols and rites of the lodge room, it is but the blink of an eye or the beat of a heart.

Put simply, then, the arcana of Freemasonry is as old as Man, and analysis of it's layer upon layer of meanings allows a chink of light to fall on an ancient landscape that has been dark for thousands of years.

And in illuminating that past, we are afforded a new understanding of ourselves and the signs and symbols that we all still use to express our present day view of the 'Here and Now' we inhabit, and the fathomless depths of the 'Hereafter' that awaits us.        

Chris McClintock   

A Book is Born...

SUN OF GOD. The genesis of a book.

It started in 2001. A trickle at first, that ended in a tidal-wave that quite literally swept me off my feet for seven years. When it started I had been a Freemason for  ten years.

A simple question from my wife started it all. 'Why do you do those funny things you do at your Masonic lodge meetings', she asked? It led to an evening-long discussion on why Masons do what they do. 

I had always been intrigued by the arcane ceremonies of the lodge room and the curious symbols that the Craft employs. I was of the firm belief that those rituals were not meaningless mumbo-jumbo, but that they actually had some underlying meaning that had been forgotten in the past.   I thought I had some notions as to what those symbols meant, but that night I was woefully unable to articulate those ideas.  

And that bothered me.

It bothered me that I had been performing rituals for ten years -  and enthusiastically - and yet I could not adequately explain either what they represented, or indeed why I performed them. So I resolved to try to form those vague, indistinct thoughts into a cohesive appraisal of what the rituals of the Craft actually meant, even if for no more reason than to understand them myself.

From then on I paid minute attention to every nuance and gesture in the rituals I witnessed during lodge meetings - to try to form a logical thesis that explained them. I also took to studying the myriad of obscure and disparate symbols that are found on Masonic objects of the 18th and 19th centuries - objects such as banners, certificates, pendants and delph-ware -to see if they too would explain themselves.  

For a long time nothing gelled. But then it started to come together.

The sun appeared to me to be  the most prevalent of those symbols, and indeed was also referred to often throughout the ceremonies in oblique ways. It was when I came round to the idea of looking at the rituals of the lodge room from the perspective of the sun that it all started to make sense, because all of a sudden I found a cohesion in the rituals - a singular purpose behind them all - that suggested they were structured around a  concept of deity that was far, far older than Christianity. The veneration of the sun. 

Freemasonry is non-denominational. In other words, as long as the candidate professes belief in a supreme being, irrespective of his particular religious views, he can be admitted to the order.

For obvious reasons the nature of God cannot be defined ( ie given a name)  in an organisation that is universal to all men  as Freemasonry is, so how then can deity be referred to in it?

There is only one way in which this can be adequately  done, and that is by representing God in a symbolic way. And what better symbol could one get for God than the very first symbol of deity that Man had ever had- the sun? Under such a universal metaphor, all men could meet in harmony without their religious differences ever coming between them, and honour the concept of God in an allegorical and symbolic way.   

From the perspective of my quest, the notion that the sun was represented allegorically in the rituals was therefore a distinct possibility, so I carried that idea forward by examining the ways in which ancient man worshipped the sun.

What I discovered, when considered with Freemasonry,  was truly enlightening, for not only did it make sense of Masonic ritual, but it opened a window on the development and spread of early Christianity too.

Concepts and symbols that are regarded as purely Christian were, for the first time ever, revealed to have their true origin in the sun-worship of the ancient past.

As I discovered I wrote, and as I wrote I discovered. On and on and on it went, getting deeper and more history-changing  with each page, and I ended up with enough material for three books.

The first of these is 'Sun of God', and its purpose is to introduce the world to the fact that  the symbols and rituals of Freemasonry, and those of Christianity, were derived from exactly the same source - THE SUN!          

The Trouble With History

The trouble with history.

Blog entry by Chris McClintock

What we call history will only ever be an interpretation of what happened in the past. That interpretation is constantly changing as new discoveries are made.

Broadly speaking historians fall into two categories - academic and alternative. Academic historians limit themselves to what can be proved, which is not perhaps an unreasonable position to adopt. If I were a professor of history of St. Someone or other's University, and my salary depended on never being proved wrong by my peer group, no doubt I too would stick to what can be proved from primary sources.

Speculation is anathema to academia, but much that happened in the past was not recorded, so no primary source relating to it can ever be found. Indeed to compound matters, in early times little was recorded that was unbiased by some motive or other. This is particularly important when it comes to those earliest scribes who recorded the coming of the true faith to Europe - Christianity. In the first five centuries of the Christian era, in the British Isles at least, the only writing done was in the monasteries and abbeys of the Church itself.   

So if a large percentage of what happened was never recorded, how then do we deal with it? Do we simply discard it from our thoughts? Or do we speculate to fill in the blanks?  Whilst the academic historian may not discard it altogether, he or she will nevertheless set it aside, and not allow it into the milieu from which ''history' emerges.

Alternative historians tend to be more relaxed when it comes to speculation, and are prepared to look past traditional views in their search for understanding. I am quite happy to be called an alternative historian, for it gives me the freedom to think outside the box in a way an academic historian cannot.

When Charles Darwin wrote 'On The Origin Of Species' he was thinking way outside the box too - which is made the more remarkable considering the repressive era in which he lived. And because he used original thought to come up with a theory to explain what he saw, rather than simply regurgitate what others before him had written - he was by definition an 'alternative' scientist.

It has taken a hundred and fifty years and the discovery of genes and DNA to finally silence his legion of critics and turn it from the THEORY of evolution to the FACT of evolution.  Would this gigantic revolution in thinking have come about at all if he had not at first thought the unthinkable and looked beyond mankind's previous beliefs?

My book, Sun Of God, deals in large part with the origin of some of our most prominent religious symbols, and nowhere do we need to be more cautious than in our reading of early religious sources. We must first realize that what was written about the triumph of Christianity over the pagan past was not the impartial observation of outsiders, but was written by those who implemented those changes. It follows, then, that those scribes recorded what told their story, rather than what was necessarily the truth. 

It is oft quoted, even by the religious establishment itself, that Christianity has pagan elements within. No one seems to carry that forward and ask why those pagan elements should be present and what are their implications?

The difficulty is that Christianity has been with us for such a long time that it's signs and symbols are ingrained in our subconscious to such a great degree that we have difficulty looking past their accepted meaning to discover if they could have another. 

That is exactly what I have done in my soon to be released book, and show that an overwhelming number of them can be traced back to long before Christianity, and thus their true origin is revealed. And in the overwhelming number of cases that origin is the same. The SUN

I have done the same with Freemasonry, and have found precisely the same ancient meanings. And they too are based around the same object. The SUN.

In Freemasonry the ancient meanings have survived because they can be used as universal metaphors, without dogma, in a fraternity that whilst it urges godliness in it's membership, does not seek to define God in any way.

In Christianity the pagan past was subsumed as the new faith took over, so long ago that the obsolete origins have been forgotten by the world. But that does not mean that the true, original meaning is not still there - if one chooses to look for it.  

The cross as a symbol is perhaps the most pertinent of all, for though it is taken as quintessentially Christian by Christians, it had been around for thousands of years before it became associated with the death of  Jesus. In its original form the cross referred to the sun, but almost two thousand years as a Christian symbol has obscured its original meaning.

Peeling away the later veneer calls for thinking outside the box, and looking past traditionally held beliefs about the past. It also confronts the 'established' view, and so is bound to draw hostile fire from those whose reputations are marinaded in that view. Few will therefore go 'over the top' and challenge the Status Quo, and so it continues.    

And THAT is the trouble with history.

Chris McClintock