Carlile's Key-Stone

[Tamrin]

THE KEY-STONE OF THE ROYAL ARCH

[Introductory chapter (pp.iii / xv) to Richard Carlile’s,
Manual of Freemasonry, c.1825, Reeves & Turner, London.]

If we make ourselves acquainted with all that Masons know of their freemasonry, we shall find a blank, and that, in fact, they know nothing worthy of being called a secret. I am of [the] opinion, that nothing useful to be known should be made a secret, and that there is nothing of the kind a secret among mankind. I hold, that the mere profession of having such a secret is a vice. The question reasonably arises, why should it be a secret? Of Freemasons, I boldly say, that they have no secret; but there is a secret connected with their association, and they have not known it. The late Godfrey Higgins¹ once observed to me, without explanation, that there were but two Masons in England—himself and the Duke of Sussex. I put in a claim to be a third.² He asked me to explain, on the condition that he was not to commit himself by any observation. I did so, as here set forth. He smiled and withdrew.³ The secret is now out. I will clear up the doubt and difficulty and teach Masonry to Masons.

The following forms of opening, working, and closing lodges are literally and truly the formularies of the three common degrees in Masonic Lodges, or that secret system which is called Craft Masonry. It has been communicated to me by Masons; it has been confirmed by other Masons; it has been the Standard Manual of Masonry, since it was first published in “The Republican,” in 1825; it has made many Masons: without the lodge initiation, and, by its direction, I have been assured that men who were never in a lodge have successfully and profitably taught practical masonry. The higher degrees form the subject of other volumes. They are not common; are denominated orders of chivalry; and but very few Masons go beyond the Royal Arch Degree.

The great subject of Masonry is Solomon’s Temple. The two first secret words are Boaz and Jachin, the pillars of the porch of that temple. Through all the Masonic degrees, ancient or modern, the subject continues to be a dark development of the building of the temple. I am about to throw light upon it. My historical researches have taught me that that which has been called Solomon’s Temple never existed upon earth: and that the supposed history of Israelites and their temple is nothing more than an allegory relating to the mystery of physics generally, and the moral culture of the human mind. Hence the real secret of masonry.

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¹ Higgins was the author of Anacalypsis; An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil of the Saitic Isis; or an Inquiry into the Origin of languages, Nations and Religions (1833), which was a principal source of H.P. Blavatsky’s, Isis Unveiled (1877).
² According to Prof. Prescott, Carlile had originally said that both Robert Taylor and he were the third and fourth English Masons but later dropped the reference to Taylor.
³ Which is all one would expect, especially if the person disagreed.

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The word temple is derived from the Latin word tempus, time; and therefore, the ancient structures called temples were in reality intended to be records of time and archives of human knowledge. Such institutions would have been a great benefit to mankind; but the veil of superstition was thrown over them; it was deemed politic or profitable to the few to deceive the many; that which should have been a simple record of fact was worked up into an allegory: there arose an esoteric doctrine for those initiated in the secrets of the temple, and a deceptious exoteric doctrine for the multitude; and this was the origin of priesthood; this the lamentable change from science to priestcraft; this the secret of Free¬masonry, the key of the mysteries of the Christian religion, and the basis of Judaism. Judaism, Christianity, and Freemasonry, are, in principle, one and the same, as to secret origin and mystery. Let us endeavour to turn the stream; to go from priestcraft to science, from mystery to knowledge, from allegory to real history.

But for planetary motion, there could have been no division of time. The relations of the sun to the planets and fixed stars make up all the natural divisions of time; such as the day, the month, the year, and the corresponding seasons. The day is marked by the motion of the earth on its own axis. The month (lunar) by the appearances of the moon; and [the year] (solar or calendar) by the grouping of stars into twelve divisions, which are called the Zodiac, pictorially marked by signs, and seen opposite to the solar side of the earth, in the successive months. The year is complete when the sun appears to return to a given spot from which it is said to start. The polar motions of the earth cause the sun to appear in a state of birth, growth, maturity, decay, and death, in the course of a year, pro¬ducing our seasons. These appearances have been poetically allegorized and personified; and hence all that has been invented about god or gods, about new born god, living god, dying god, descending god, resurrection god, ascending god. There is no plain historical truth, no revelation, about god, in existence, other than those of the relations of the sun to the planets and stars, in physics, and the cultivation of the human mind in morals. All other such pretensions to history may be historically disproved. We are prepared with historical disproofs of the existence of such a people as Israelites or Jews as a nation. They were a religious or philosophical sect, who had been made adepts in the higher Pagan Mysteries: a sect among nations; but not a nation among sects.

Our common temples, like those of the ancients, gave generally, and only with a few modern exceptions, been built due east and west, in respect to the rising and setting of the sun. The steeples have been conical emblems of flame, which is again emblematical of the sun. Etymology will carry every word connected with religion back to primitive sun-worship, and mental cultivation. The emblems of the most ancient temples of which we have ruins, are emblems of time, of planetary bodies, their motions and relations, and of sun-worship, &c. It is therefore calling for no great stretch of the imagination, for no strange credulity, to call for the admission that the first temples were dedicated to the sun; that the first principles of religion consisted of a scientific record of the sun’s annual path through the signs of the Zodiac, with [nothing] other than known science; and that the first efforts of priestly and cunning men would be to deceive the vulgar upon this subject, to preach the reality of the personified god, which science forbad, and the existence of which the principles of matter or of nature rendered impossible.

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When man began to make God like himself, he began also to give God a dwelling-place, such as he found or could make on earth. The first temples that were imagined by ingenuity were temples in the heavens, time marked by planetary partitions. Thus we read of the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven as a dwelling place for the saints of the earth. The seven churches of Asia were seven imaginary temples in heaven, reduced to a figurative tale, and then imitated on earth. Thus again that which is called the building of the first Solomon’s Temple [sic] never took place on earth; but the story of the temple was fabricated; and the first Jewish historian we have (Josephus) allows that it was allegorical and emblematical of the universe, or of all the physical phenomena. The true meaning, then, of the building of Solomon’s temple in Freemasonry is, and the practice of the lodges should be, to the effect that the grand secret of all religion is this allegorical typification of the solar relations and planetary motions with mental and moral cultivation, and that such, in truth, is the great lost secret of Freemasonry. The masons have lost the initiatory secret—have been numbered among the vulgar, and deceived with the exoterical doctrine of personal deity.

Mr. Paine had a glimmering light on this subject, but he was ignorant of the details. He made a shrewd guess at the thing, and guessed rightly as to a part of the principle, though he could not fill out the history and origin. The esoterical principle of Freemasonry, as of Christianity and of Judaism, is SUN-WORSHIP AND SCIENCE, AS THE BASIS OF HUMAN CULTURE AND DISCIPLINE, the common Paganism of the human race. Mr. Paine guessed at this in relation to Freemasonry, but knew it not in relation to Christianity and Judaism.

I propose to furnish here nothing more than the Key-stone to the Arch of Freemasonry, which is the moral and gist of the Royal Arch Degree, at which Masons have played, not worked, without knowing what they were about. For a further proof that I present the right key, I refer the reader to the theologico-astronomical, or Sunday evening discourses, at the Rotunda, of the Rev. Robert Taylor. They are so many philosophical lectures on masonry, though the exposure professedly relates to Christianity. They form two volumes of a cheap publication, entitled “The Devil’s Pulpit,” I refer him also to the works of Dupuis, Volney, Sir William Drummond, and Rhegellini.

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Masons claim Pythagoras as one of their fraternity. They may also claim every Grecian and Roman sage, who sought out the Pagan mysteries. But the Modern Masons are not very worthy disciples of these ancient men.

The proper business of a Mason is astronomical, chemical, geological, and moral science, and more particularly that of the ancients, with all the mysteries and fables founded upon it. A good Mason would, in fact have no superstition. It should be his boast, that his science takes him out of modern religion. He who can build Solomon’s Temple, in the allegorical sense, is disqualified from being a fanatic. Deism has been charged upon, and even boasted of, by modern Masons; but as a sect, they are innocent of any science that can take them out of the common impressions of modern religious doctrines.

Astrology, gipsy fortune telling, Modern Freemasonry, Mohometanism, Christianity, and Judaism, now so called, have sprung from, and are so many corruptions of, the ancient mysteries of the Pagans. Star-gazing, without proper human culture, has been the source of all religion. Lunacy is a disorder improperly ascribed to Luna, or the Moon; for moon-struck madness had never befallen any one who had not been corrupted in education, and had the brain badly cultivated.

The first professions of Christianity, as visible in the New Testament, were professed revelations of the ancient Pagan mysteries; but, as a revelation, it was a failure—and it would have been better if the ancient Paganism had not been superseded by the grosser mysteries than have, in ignorance, been adapted, of the God’s-spell or gospel.

However, let them all now repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, and the key will be freely given to any one who will unlock and enter.

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That there was no such a nation as the Israelites, is a truth—found in the consideration that they are not mentioned beyond the Bible in any records whatever. Egypt knew them not, Persia knew them not, Hindoostan knew them not, Scythia knew them not, Phœnicia knew them not, Greece knew them not, as a nation. And in the first general notice that we have of the Jews, they are introduced to the world as a sect, or a series of sects, being Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes; and in that general notice, beyond that sort of mis¬taken allegorical history which Josephus has copied from the books of the Old Testament, and which is not otherwise corroborated, and no better authority than the book of the Old Testament, there is on presentation of the Jews as the descendants of a larger nation of Israelites; as a religious or philosophical sect of distinction, mixed up with, and found in real human history, they are not to be traced higher than the century before the Christian era. It is satisfactory to be able to show the origin of anything, for such a knowledge is a common passion and curiosity among mankind; and I think the Rev. Robert Taylor has discovered and developed the origin of the titles of Hebrew, Israelite, and Jew.

The Eleusinian mysteries were Pagan; the same in relation to Isis in Egypt, as to Ceres in Greece, and continued in relation to the Virgin Mary, as a part of the mistaken Christian mystery. It is the fault of Freemasonry, that it has had nothing feminine belonging to it; the ladies make no part of its mysteries, and to the ladies it has been a matter of great uneasiness. They very naturally, and very properly, suspect the propriety of all exclusively male association. The Jews have nothing feminine in their religion. No religion has provided a paradise, or future happy state, for earthly women. They should be all infidels of course. The modern construction and mistaken reading, under what is called the Christian Religion, has become a great burlesque on them.

The word Eleusis is the Greek of Adventus, the Latin, the Avent, of the Christian mystery; and signifies THE COMING (emphatically), and literally, the coming of light. The story of the transfiguration on the mount, in the New Testament, is an imperfect description of the holding of a Lodge of association in the highest degree of the Elusinian mystery. The Lodge was held by Peter, James, and John, or the personified months of January, April, or June, July, and August. The degrees of Freemasonry are allegorical of the same mystery. The very miracles of the New Testament are allegorical sketches of the different degrees of the same mysteries. The turning of water into wine is the process of vinous vegetation, and one of the mysteries of Bacchus, who was also that light which was to come, the Messiah; the Sun, in physics, or the physical saviour; the Logos, Christ, or principle of Reason; as the moral saviour. The marriage of Cana, in Galilee, was the marriage supper of the Lamb; the spring of the year; the midway between the watering-pot of Aquarius, or watery season, and the ripening of the grape. “Woman,” said Jesus to his mother, “what have I to do with thee? My time is not yet come.” Summer and Autumn are the time of Bacchus. But he turned the water into wine, and so he does every year. The feeding of the multitude with a few small loaves and fishes is a mystery signif¬icant of the prolific power in the earth in the growth of corn, and of the water in the pro¬duction of fishes. The curing of diseases, of lameness and blindness, casting out devils, allaying a storm, walking on the water, the resurrection of the dead, and of the ascension into heaven, are all so many solar mysteries or allegorical relations of the sun’s action upon the earth, figured with an association of scientific and moral powers in man. The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is the joint mystery of the union of Ceres and Bacchus—the Pagan producers of corn, or bread and wine, which, are truly, in an allegorical sense, the real body and blood of Christ. We shall find that Freemasonry has been a corrupted continuation of all those mysteries; and that the Masons have really, as they confess they have, lost their own secret. Let us see what learning can do to restore it to them. Much of the ritual of our church, even of our English church, is but a misunderstood continuation and corruption of the words and ceremonies of the ancient Pagan mysteries. The Rev. Mr. Taylor, has beautifully explained this in his discourses. I have only room to glance at it here.

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The scenes and characters of the mysterious drama, as found in the Eleusinian Orgies of Greece, were:-

ELEUSIS—The Advent, or coming-in of light; the birth and character of the subject of the drama—the title of the whole play or mystery.

HIEROPHANT—The Expounder of the mysteries, the High Priest, the Pope, the Arch¬bishop.

HUPEREET—The Minister or Ordinary Priest.

DIACONOS—The Deacon, or Lower Officer.

DIADOCHOS—The Torch-Bearer.

PHOTAGOGUE—The Bringer-in of Light.

AUTOPTOS—The Candidate admitted to see the sight. The visitor of the Temple—the Church and Chapel goer.

AUTOPSY—The sight itself.

HEBREW—The initiated Candidate who had passed through all the degrees of the mystery.

TELEIOS—The adept, or perfected.

ISRAELITE—God-seer, purified from all guile.

JEW—The God himself, or the mysterious perfection and deification of the human character.

The whole a type of what may be made of human nature by cultivation of mind, which is the conditional promise of paradise, or kingdom of heaven. This is the revelation of all the mysteries.

Hebrew, Israelite, and Jew, are Syriac, Phœnician, and Egyptian terms used in the myst¬erious degrees; and it would be as reasonable to argue that the Freemasons are a dispersed nation, as that the Jews are, or were, a dispersed nation. The modern religion of both Jew and Christian is a misunderstood and forgotten connection, corruption, and continuation, of the ancient Pagan mysteries. Freemasonry is a secret attempt of the same kind, but a failure. The word revelation, throughout the New Testament, signifies the revealing of a mystery; but until now, or speaking as far as we can see by record, the real mystery has never been revealed. The true revelation of God—the true gospel or word of God, is a revealing, that all the allegories and mysteries of religion refer to the sun as the physical God; to the science of the human mind as the moral God This was the secret of the Eleusinian mysteries. That is religious truth, and the whole of religious truth; and the placing of the church on such a rock, as against which the gates of hell shall not prevail. Freemasonry is but a professed concealment of the same revelation, and may properly be styled a bastard or illegitimate mystery.

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With this key in his hand, the reader of the following MANUAL OF MASONRY will gain more knowledge of MASONRY as he proceeds, than MASONS themselves gain in their Lodges. Not one of them has had sense and learning enough to discover the real secret of the craft; and I claim this circumstance as a proof that it is INFIDELITY, as modern criticism and science have been called—modern infidelity, which is really becoming the light of the world, which is the light, life, and knowledge needed, and which is morally, scientifically, and properly speaking, the true Eleusis or Advent, or HE THAT SHOULD COME.

The sacred scriptures, or the books of the Old and New Testament, were not written with an intention that they should be used as they are now used; they were not intended to be translated into any vulgar language, and made the commonplace book or text book of the multitude, to be wrestled as St. Peter has forcibly observed, to their destruction—certainly to their injury; but they are deeply mysterious writings, not revealing, but concealing and misrepresenting, the ancient mysteries; forming from them a new mode of association springing from another, and making a new religion of the old Pagan mater¬ials, precisely upon the principle that we now see one sort of secret association springing from another—the Odd Fellows, for instance, in relation to the Masons; one sect of religious association springing from another, through common ignorance and fanatical but mistaken conceit of spiritual knowledge, as Quaker, Unitarian, and Methodist, springing from the Church of England, that from the Church of Rome, that from the Church of Greece or Egypt, those from the Persian, and the whole from the general Pagan mysteries; and precisely upon the principle that one language is seen to emanate from another, all having a common root.

In the first preaching of the allegory of Christ crucified, there was no imposition; there was a deeply laid and mysterious allegory, which the multitude took in its literal sense, and made for themselves a history from fiction. So it has been with the addition and union of the books of the Old Testament. The books of the Sibyls have been also supposed to be prophetic of the Christian religion: but the mystery is cleared up, when we find the root of the Christian and of the Jewish in the Pagan system whence all those books were formed. A development of this kind is the one great thing needful for universal brotherhood, which has not been found in Freemasonry, nor in Christianity, nor in Judaism, yet or now so called.

The Key, then, to the mysteries of Freemasonry, as well as to the mysteries of the Christian and the Jewish religions, is the Eleusinian mysteries of the Pagan religion; and the further Key to all those mysteries, is a worship of the Sun as God, under a variety of personifications, in all the Zodiacal transits, in the personification of the year, of the seasons, of the months, of time generally, and of all the divisions of time, and as the source of all physical and all moral phenomena. The Masonic building of Solomon’s temple is the getting a knowledge of the celestial globe, knowing the mysteries of all the figures and grouping of stars on that globe; knowing further, that this globe is the foundation of all religion, knowing how to calculate the precession of the equinoxes, the return of comets and eclipses, and all the planetary motions and astronomical relations of time. Such is not the knowledge now gained in Masonic Lodges; I will present the reader with that knowledge; but such should be the knowledge; for such would be real and useful knowledge. The ancient priests thought that knowledge should be concealed from the multitude, or found it profitable that it should be so; and hence our sacred and mysterious writings. But now, we do not think that knowledge should be kept from the multitude, and hence our infidelity and our revealings.

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It may be well to mention here, that I am in possession of entire disproofs of the present pretended historical origination of the Christian religion; and I was in that possession, before I attempted to seek any other origin. I have long felt the necessity of tracing another origin, and I now do so, in connecting it with the ancient Pagan mysteries. On reading the New Testament, with the Key which I here present, and with the remembrance that, in relation to history, the book is altogether, from beginning to ending, a fiction; and on reading the Old Testament in the same way, there will remain on the mind something like knowledge gained from its mysterious matter; but now, in the course of reading under the commonly received notions of it, and beyond its moral precepts, there is no knowledge gained. Such is the case with modern Freemasonry.

I sum up these observations, with the conclusion that the Key Stone of the Royal Arch of Freemasonry is the ancient science of the Zodiac, with its moral counter-part of human culture made mysterious in secret and priestly associations; which is also the science of all religions that pretend to revelations; and also of the religion of the Druids, and of all the Pagans from Hindostan to Rome.

I have omitted all those remarks which, in the Nos. of the Vol. 12 of “The Republican,” must have been so offensive to Masons. My great object is here to instruct Masons as well as others, and not to give them offence. They ask for light. Here is light. They ask for fellowship. Here is the only basis of true and general fellowship. I see the evils of sectarianism among mankind, and I labour hard; I endure persecution patiently, for the sole purpose of rooting out those evils. I have objections for all societies, excepting those divisions of mankind which are essential, or may be essential, to good government and the most happy existence. Here we are, like other animals, for life, and nothing more; and it will be wise if we so carry ourselves, as to enjoy the greatest possible amount of happiness, and to make it an essential and primitive point of that happiness, to inflict no pain on man, woman, child, or other animal. However unpleasant or objectionable this doctrine may be, in relation to present education, it is true; and nothing opposed to it is true; for we cannot alter the facts of nature; we cannot change that which is immutable: though we may regulate our moral, we cannot regulate our physical destiny. Necessity is less stern in morals than in physics, and in morals, is called liberty. I have studied well the purpose and business of life; I have determined to spend mine well, and to form the best character the present times require. I strive to be the most useful and most important man living. My principles are Republican in politics, and Atheistical only as to a God made up of human ignorance, an idle God, nowhere more denounced than in the Bible. This signifies a fair equality of condition in life, and no pretentions to future life. These appear to me to be the extreme of good in principles: indeed I am sure that they are so; for the greatest amount of happiness among the greatest number cannot be imagined on any other ground of principle. We have seen enough of the mischief of monarchy and priestcraft, of mystery, sectarianism, and secret societies. Let us now be open, be inquisitive, and be equal in knowledge. Any secret recipe for human disorder is but murder towards those who need it and cannot reach it. I rejoice in having no secrets; I rejoice in being able to expose to the world the professed secrets of others. I am sure that secrecy is a vice; and I therefore expose and explain Freemasonry.

[Tamrin]

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