Secret Of The Masons: It's Not So Secret

[Siddhartha]

Best-selling author Dan Brown’s latest novel, The Lost Symbol, draws heavily on the lore and mystique of the Freemasons. A visit to one of the locations in the novel, a prominent Masonic building in Washington, D.C., serves as an introduction to the history of the once feared and even reviled secret society.

The House of the Temple, the headquarters of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in the Southern Jurisdiction of the United States, is an impressive and dignified edifice on Washington’s 16th Street. The design was inspired by the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, in Turkey. A couple of sphinxes on huge pedestals flank the steps.

In the center of the temple room is a large altar. Brent Morris, a mathematician by trade and editor of the Scottish Rite Journal, tells Robert Siegel that when a Masonic meeting is open, a volume of sacred law is open representing God’s revelation to man.

“When a man becomes a member,” Morris says, “he is asked to place his hand upon the book that he considers binding on his conscience.” The temple has copies of the Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Old Testament, the Zend-Avesta, the Sutras and the Quran.

“This, we figured, will cover 99.9 percent [of members],” Morris says. “And if it doesn’t, we’ll get whatever’s needed.”
…
The rites inside the temple are at some level spiritual, and though they are related to religion, Freemasonry is not a religion. Morris explains that when the group was organized from a stonemasons’ guild in 1717, its members adopted the radical proposition that men of different faiths can agree on God’s existence.

 

[ljubim]

umm… how about some commentary?