Phil Baker - 'City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley'

I have already mentioned the pillars of Joaquin and Boaz used on Masonic tracing boards and on our Ouija board.

But on some Masonic tracing boards, there are actually three pillars.

Between the pillars of strength and mercy, there's the pillar of beauty.

corresponding to the middle pillar on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

On Masonic tracing boards, this pillar is shown as physically behind the other two, and more towards stage left than right, is the sleeping beauty of the middle pillar than most do not see, but which provides, in Kabbalistic tradition, the most direct route to the highest form of enlightenment.

This hidden path is indicated frequently on Masonic tracing boards by a staircase leading up to a hidden portal of light shown up in the sky, off in the distance.

This is indicated by the depiction of a light source shining brighter than the sun and moon, which are usually placed above the left and right pillars.

It is shown variously as another brighter sun or as the letter G inside of a hexagram or inside of a square and compass or some combination of these things.

I've even seen it drawn as just an opening in the sky with a light shining through it.

Leading up to that opening, there is usually a pathway which appears physically impossible.

It is either a ladder, like a painter's ladder, leaning up against seemingly nothing, or a staircase or a road that appears to twist in a non-Euclidean trajectory.

This is because the positions of the three pillars form a right triangle when viewed from above.

This shape is the subject of Euclid's 47th Proposition, which Albert Pike summarized as well as anybody in his Masonic Instruction Manual, Morals and Dogma.

The largest of the three big squares contains 100 squares.

That's the square of 10, and this layout is what you get when you surround the 64 squares of a chessboard with another 36 squares.

But what does this have to do with a ladder leading to a portal in the sky? Leaning up against empty air or a paved street spiraling off from the ground into the clouds with no visible means of support? After all, a right triangle is something drawn on a two-dimensional surface, right? How does that relate to what's being shown in the Masonic tracing boards with three pillars? Recall that the positions of the three pillars form a right triangle when viewed from above.

What the masons are trying to show their initiates is the idea that when viewed from another angle beyond the third dimension, the thing supporting the staircase or ladder is visible for those with eyes to see it.

But the light bouncing off this thing or group of things is traveling at an angle or on a wavelength that makes it invisible to normal human eyes.

In this picture is concealed the allegory of the Lost Word.

The master mason, having completed his labors, becomes a worker on a higher plane than the one in which the ordinary builder is permitted to work.

The mason becomes the capstone of the Universal Temple.

But did Solomon's Temple ever even really exist in physical reality? Considering Anatoly Fomenko's research into the potential falsehood of the chronology of history and the fakeness of all ancient history, I am quite skeptical.

When it comes to the Holy Land, over which people have been fighting for centuries, they may all be projecting a mirage onto a barren landscape.

Manly P.

Hall talks about the Master Mason working on, quote, a higher plane.