I’m looking for information about the system mentioned in Symbols of Freemasonry which, instead of being about Hiram and the Temple of Jerusalem, was supposedly about the building of the Tower of Babel, also switching King Solomon for King Nimrod.
I ran across some interesting pages whicle looking for this. Apparently, there’s some evidence that the origin of Masonry around 1717 was a 2 degree system, not a 3 degree system, nor did it have all the additional Royal Arch degrees which are the Hiramic degrees. [A Pragmatic Masonic History by Leo Zanelli]
That kind of makes me wonder if the Tower of Babel degrees were not a precursor to the Hiramic degrees, but rather one of the mentioned systems a la mode.
“They were the arm of Freemasonry, which called themselves Jacobins. (8) The Jacobin cries of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” led the first major accomplishment of illuminized Freemasonry, The French Revolution. The Jacobins named a rebellious ex-Jesuit, Adam Weishaupht, “Grand Patriot”. (9) Weishaupht embraced the occult mysteries and organized The Order of the Illuminati in 1776. By 1778 he infiltrated Masonry as a fully-initiated Master Mason. He then inducted the influential European elite of Masonry into the Illuminati—600 men by 1783. (10) On the other side of the Atlantic, mystical Masons were under siege by the occult Illuminists. The Illuminists saw America as the 13th step in evolution, and America’s spiritual destiny as accomplishing world union in the spirit of liberty, equality, and fraternity. (11) By 1789 the mystical Masonry of the New World succumbed to the occult one-world vision of the Weishaupht Illuminati, the guardians of the Ancient Mysteries of Nimrod.”
– Yes, Virginia, Freemasonry is a religion by Mac Dominick
And here, all this time, I’ve looked at the Jacobean tartan as a kind of retared cousin to the “real” tartans …
From the same site, here’s an interesting rant about the idea of Freemasonry having an Inner and Outer Temple.
Oh, yeah, now I remember something else, from reading a little bit from the Matthew Cooke Manuscript, about Nimrod sending workers, masons, to work on the Temple of Jerusalem, to help King Solomon. Well, so there’s a reference, and it’d be easy to assume in that some kind of transfer of reference from Babel to Jerusalem. Perhaps this had to do with the sciences on the two pillars, and such, and then is really the two degree system, not something more. If the dating of that MS. is accurate, then the Babel verions must have been very, very old, since that’s several hundred years earlier than the 1717 Grand Lodge.
At any rate, the Grand Lodge of British Columbia and the Yukon’s site, which I’ve mentioned before, as a nice set of writings to gander through.