Washington DC Monumental Core Shown to Be
Analogous to The Plan for the Milan Cathedral

The Pagan Mystery

The full title of the Canon is, "Canon: An Exposition of the Pagan Mystery Perpetuated in the Cabala As the Rule of All Arts". As I said earlier, the book suggests that, the building secrets as well as the canon of the other arts and sciences, were secrets comprising the esoteric doctrine of the church. The title of the book suggests that this esoteric church doctrine was identical to the Cabala, which was itself a continuation of the ideas contained in the ancient mystery religions.

The now infamous Albert Pike writes, "All truly dogmatic religions have issued from the Kabalah and return to it, everything scientific and grand in the religious dreams of all ilumminati is borrowed from the Kabalah, and all the Masonic associations owe tomit their Secrets and their Symbols. ("Morals and Dogma" page 744).

Lesser and Greater

The mysteries, you may recall, were divided into what were called the lesser and the greater mysteries. The lesser mysteries were open to most everyone, while the greater mysteries were more restrictive and required some preparation. The lesser mysteries were concerned with notions of "the cause and continuance of life", and constitute what we would call Nature Religion, while the greater mysteries were philosophical.

We could call them natural and supernatural mysteries. While the natural mysteries deal with the "facts of life", the supernatural mysteries deal with the divine plan, and with God himself (theosophy).

In "Clausen's Commentaries on Morals and Dogma", we read, "We (meaning here the Scottish Rite of Masonry) reveal truly the wisdom of the Lesser and Greater Mysteries, and their words and phrases long considerd lost"; the implication being that what many writers consider to be a defunct system, is not lost, but has just gone into hiding, again.

The lesser mysteries retain one element from their distant past when they were all cults of a Mother religion centered around the goddess and her male consort. Originally they were all fertility rites, next they evolved into a cult legend, and then into a mystery rite which celebrates the annual death and resurrection of nature, the growth, generation and death of living creatures, and which honors the Great Mother as the all-generating force of nature. (See the Priestess card above.)

The natural mysteries were a calling for a festive commeration of life itself, which the Puritains found repugnant. The reformation put an end to, not only that, but also the building of allegorical structures, and by extension the priviledges afforded to the guilds that did the work on those. Remember that there had always been freemasons with exclusive priviledges and the secrets required for building temples under ecclesiastical authority.

The Church an Outgrowth of the Mysteries

The view of the Canon is diametrically opposed to the view that "Christianity has nothing in it's genesis or growth, fundamental in common with the ancient mysteries". You may recall that the notion that Christainity has "borrowed" from the mysteries is familiar to many thinking people; having been first put forth in writing in 1655 by a Calvanist Christian Isaac Casaubon, who represented the Catholic Church as a direct outgtrowth of the ancient mysteries.

Inspite of the obvious similarities between the Church and the Mysteries, "literalist" continue to suggest that "The gospel of Christ crucified is utterly unmythical", that "Christian revealtion is not about myth, but history". These people continue to insist that Christianity is distinguished from the mystery religions by it's historical character, and that an entirely different significance is attributed to the coming and death of the Christian Redeemer than is attributed to other mythological characters.

The White Goddess

The topic of Robert Graves' book, "The White Goddess", is poetic myth, which he calls "a magical language bound up with popular religous ceremonies in honor of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some dating from the Stone Age". Graves points out that since the early Greek philosophers saw this magical poetry as a threat to their notions of logic, "the sense of most myths belonging to the previous epoch was either forgotten or kept a close religous secret, though they were still preserved pictorally in religous art".

Consider this image featuring Isis with Horus. Note especially the headress composed of cow horns and the moon, the square pad on which her feet rest, and the cubic throne.

As Graves describes the Theme of poetic myth, we begin to get a sense for a rhetorical canon that directed the poets:

"The Theme is an antique story, which falls into thirteen chapters and an epilogue (symbolizing the 13+ lunar months each year), of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the Spirit of the Waxing Year, the Goddess's Son or lover. All true poetry celebrated some incident or scene in this very ancient story. A true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living."

Note the depiction, in this image of Mary and Jesus, of the circle, the triangle, the square, and the pentagon (3,4,5), and how God the Father is enclosed in the triangle, symbol of transcendent divinity, and the Mother and Child are enclosed in the square, symbol of immanent divinity, of God or divine order revealed in the world.

He points out that Christainity has incorporated all the old pagan festivals commerative of the Theme; suggesting that "many of the medieval clery not only connived at popular paganism but actually embraced it", producing a Catholic doctrine centered around the Queen of heaven and her Son. "The popular appeal of modern Catholicism, is, (despite the patriarchal Trinity and the all-male preisthood,) based on the Aegean Mother-and-Son religous tradition." The puritan religion, he says, was a reaction against this Virgin-worship.

A Lost Art?

According to Graves, the ecclesiastic discipline has become decidedly anti-poetic (anti-mythological), and the Theme has been mutilated.

"The rift now seperating Christainity and poetry is the same that divided Judaism and Ashtaroth-worship after the post-Exilic religous reformation. (See "When God was a Woman".) Attempts at bridging it have left their mark on Church ritual and doctrine. It has become impossible to combine the once identical functions of priests and poet."

Compare that to this from the Canon:

"The creed of the philosphers was concealed in parables of which the old theology was composed. The Greek poets composed their philosophy in a language of twofold meaning, to hide the inner meanings from those who are unable to comprehend it's metaphoriacal or allegorical signification, while the Pythagoreans concealed their doctrines in a numerical and geometric system."

"Artists in the Church no longer represent her mysteries in metaphorical shapes, and the priests have as little skill in the old art of myth-making. Few people have an adequate understanding of this lost principle, the art of working symbolically."

Then, from Graves again, "In ancient times painters were supplied their themes by the poets. [Today] the so-called surrealists, impressionists and expressionists are concelaing their unhappy lack of secrets. There are no poetic secrets now, except of course the sort which the common people are debarred by their lack of poetic perception from understanding, and by their anti-poetic education from understanding.

The Old Way of Seeing Things

The subtitle of Jonathan Hales book "The Old Way of Seeing Things" is "How Architecture Lost It's Magic". One chapter is entitled "1830: The Loss of the Old Way of Seeing"; and in it we read:

"There is a line of demarcation where the old way of seeing began to be lost. The turning point for architecture was the decade of 1820. The meaning of design had changed. Before 1830 pattern dominated design."

Although it speaks of a different time period, this is parallel to a statement in the Canon that reads, "The secret methods of all previous temple builders left in the hands of the Freemasons fell into disuse and were gradually forgotten"; a conclusion that I would like to challenge.

Washington, D.C. 1791

The folowing image has been dudded "the line drawing" by the people at the National Archives, where it is stored. It is a sketch for the ground plan for Washington, D.C. that accompanied an August 19, 1791 letter from Pierre L'Enfant to President George Washington (to which I have added red lines to emphasize those already on the map). Note the regular grid pattern, the two different rhombus and cross figures, and the pentagram that grace this image.

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