The Secret History of the World

wisdom — and in the secret tradition, as the magical controller of demons. In the secret traditions of Freemasonry — as we know from an oration by Chevalier Michael Ramsay in 1736 — Solomon recorded his magical knowledge in a secret book which was later laid in the foundations of the second Temple in Jerusalem.

In Jewish folklore Solomon’s reign was so splendid that gold and silver became as common as stones in the street. But because the Jews had no tradition of building temples up to this time, having been a nomadic people, Solomon chose to employ as architect for this project a Phoenician, Hiram Abiff. If the building seems, on the evidence of the measurements given in the Old Testament, no larger than a parish church, it was nevertheless crammed with ornamentation of unparalleled magnificence.

In its middle stood the Holy of Holies, lined with gold plate and encrusted with jewels. It was designed to contain the Ark of the Covenant, containing the tablets of Moses. The Cherubim whose wings stretched protectively over it were, as we have seen, representatives of constellations of the zodiac belt. On the corners of the altar stood four horns, representing the moon, and a golden candlestick with seven lamps — of course, a representation of the sun, the moon and the five major planets on either side. The Pillars of Jakim and Boaz measured the pulse of the cosmos. They were so placed as to mark the furthest points of the sun’s risings of the equinoxes, and according to the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, and Clement, the first bishop of Alexandria, they were topped with ‘orreries’, mechanical representations of the motions of the planets. Decorative, carved pomegranates are mentioned several times in the biblical account. The robes of the priests were decorated with precious stones representing the sun, the moon, the planets and the constellations — emeralds being the only stone named.

The most extraordinary feature of the temple seems to have been a sea — or according to the Koran, a fountain — of molten brass. Again, as with the bronze serpent nailed to a pole by Moses, this image of smelting should alert us to the presence of secret practices dedicated to transforming human physiology.

Hiram, the Master Builder, employed a brotherhood of craftsmen to realize his designs. He classified them according to three grades, the Apprentices, the Companions and the Masters. Here we see ideas of fraternity that will eventually spread beyond the narrowly esoteric to transform the organization of society as a whole, and in the story of the murder of Hiram Abiff we see a warning of how it may all go wrong.

THERE IS AN UNDERCURRENT OF RIVALRY between Solomon and Hiram Abiff in some of the secret traditions. The Queen of Sheba visited Solomon, but she was also curious to meet the man who had designed such a miraculous temple.

And when she felt Hiram Abiff’s gaze on her, she experienced a sensation like molten metal inside.

She asked Hiram how he had managed to bring the beauty of the heavens down to earth in the architecture of the Temple. He responded by holding aloft a Tau cross, a cross in the shape of the letter T. Immediately all the many workers swarmed into the temple like ants.

Again the image of the insect. There are traditions preserved in the Talmud and the Koran that the Temple was built with the aid of a mysterious insect able to carve stone called the Shameer. As with the image of the beehive, we have here an image of spiritual forces — which Hiram is able to command.

^{Solomon’s Temple in an eighteenth-century print. The Freemasonic scholar Albert Pike called it ‘an abridged image of the cosmos’. The twin pillars Jakim and Boaz contain many layers of meaning, including, on a physiological level, the rhythmic motions of red and purple blood and, on a cosmic level, the spirit’s rhythmic entry alternately into the spiritual and material worlds.}

Three of Hiram’s workers were jealous of his secret powers. They decided they wanted to know the secrets of the molten sea. They ambushed him at the end of the day as he was leaving the Temple. When he repeatedly refused to disclose his secrets they murdered him, each dealing him a massive, haemorrhage-inducing blow to the head.

It is said that certain secrets died with him and are still lost, that the secrets divulged in the Mystery schools and secret societies ever since have been lesser secrets.

There is a hint of a sexual element in the account of Sheba’s burning sensation and the Tau cross, but to begin to understand Hiram’s secrets we must ask ourselves, given all the astronomical elements in the design and decoration of the Temple, what was its particular orientation?

Two independent-minded Masonic researchers, Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, have worked out this orientation, starting from the clue that Hiram came from Phoenicia, where the principal deity was Astarte — or Venus. Of course, this ties in, too, with the decorative details, already mentioned, the pomegranates which are the fruit of Venus and the emeralds which are the precious stones of Venus.

According to Clement of Alexandria, the curtain which sectioned off the Holy of Holies had cut into it the shape of a five-pointed star. The five-pointed star has always been a symbol of Venus, because the pattern that Venus traces around the ecliptic in its eight-year cycle — five appearances in the morning sky and five in the evening sky — forms a five-pointed pattern. It is the only planet to draw a completely regular figure in this way. This figure is seen sometimes as a pentagram, sometimes as a five-pointed star, and sometimes, as we shall see when we come to investigate Rosicrucianism, as a five-petalled flower, the rose.

As well as being a symbol of Venus, the pentagram is highly significant in geometry because, as Leonardo’s mathematics teacher Luca Pacioli revealed in his book on divine proportion, it embodies the Golden Proportion in every part of it.

But there is more. This sacred geometry operates in time as well as space.

Five Venus cycles of 584 days take place over exactly eight solar years, which means that a Venus cycle is 1.6 of a solar cycle. We have come across this number 1.6 before. It is the beginning of the Golden Proportion, one of the irrational and magical numbers that describe the precipitation of mind into matter.

In the ancient and secret doctrine, the planets and the stars control this precipitation of matter.

The Venus associations multiply, one dimension opening up into another like the bubble universes of modern science. There are many rival etymologies of the name Jerusalem, one being that the original name of the city was Urshalem, ‘ur’ meaning founded by and ‘Shalem’ being an ancient name of Astarte — or Venus — in her evening setting. In Masonic tradition its own lodges are modelled on the Jerusalem Temple. The five-pointed star of Venus is represented above the ceremonial chair of the Grand Master, and initiates greet each other in a fraternal five- pointed ceremonial embrace. Lodges contain dormer windows, aligned in such a way that the light of Venus shines through them on certain important days. A Master mason is raised into rebirth facing the light of Venus at an equinox.

Bearing in mind the identification of Venus with Lucifer, these associations might at first seem a bit disconcerting. But in esoteric history Lucifer is always a necessary evil. The human capacity for thought was forged out of a balance between Venus and the moon — and the moon, as we have just seen, also features prominently, in the design of the altar of the Temple.

The mission of Solomon was to lead humankind down into a darkening, more material world, keeping the flame of spirituality alive. It was the same mission that Freemasonry would take up in the seventeenth century at the dawn of the modern age of materialism.

THE SOLOMONIC LEGENDS FIND A DISTANT echo in the British Isles. Modern scholarship tends to hold the view that, if the legends of Arthur have any historical basis at all, this lies in the ‘Dark Ages’ following the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain, when a Christian warlord might have fought glorious but ultimately futile battles to repel pagan invaders. An intriguing case has been made that the historical figure behind the Arthur legends was Owain Ddantgwynne, a Welsh warlord who defeated the pagan Saxons at the Battle of Badon in 470. Arthur would in this case have been a title, meaning ‘the bear’.

But the original King Arthur lived at Tintagel a little earlier than Solomon, in about 1100 BC, when the peaceful, rural communities of Bronze Age Britain were overrun by the more militaristic hill-fort people of the Iron Age. His spiritual mentor, Merlin, the wizard of Cellydon Wood, was a survivor from the age of the stone circles. He helped Arthur to keep the Sun Mysteries alive. King Arthur himself was a Sun king, surrounded by the twelve knights of the zodiac and married to Venus, Guinevere being the Celtic form of Venere or Venus. His crown was a crown chakra ablaze to lead his people — as Solomon led his people — down through the darkness.

^{Herodotus recorded that in Iran the king was believed to emit such an intense unbearable light}