Christopher Knight - 8 July

This book is dedicated to the memory of Earl William Sinclair,
builder of Rosslyn Chapel and creator of Freemasonry.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Directly and indirectly many people have assisted us in the creation of this book and we thank them all. However wed like to offer specific thanks to the following:

Our partners, Caroline Knight and Kate Butler, for their patience and forebearance, and Kate for her efforts with the index.

Our publisher Michael Mann, who guides and advises but never cajoles.

Peter Bently, whose incredible editing of this book has taken him well above and beyond the call of duty.

John Ritchie, both for his permission to employ written material on Rosslyn Chapel and the excellent photographs he also allowed us to use.

We would also like to offer thanks to Prof. Philip Davies, Dr Jack Millar and Prof. James Charlesworth.

Contents

All illustrations have been created, photographed or, where it is a generic heraldic design, manipulated by the authors unless otherwise stated.

What had just happened to me, I asked myself? The evening had started entirely normally but then I had been stripped of my clothes and dressed in virtual rags. My valuables had been taken and I was then hustled forward by men on either side, each with a tight hold on my upper arm.

As soon as I had stepped into the room I had been blind the darkness was near total. Yet I could sense the large group of people around me the odd creak of a chair, a small cough, the occasional shuffle of feet. My guides walked me for quite a distance from point to point with questions being fired at me from time to time.

Then my minders pulled me to a halt and relaxed their grip. A figure suddenly moved close in front of me. Even though my eyes had by now adjusted to the gloom I couldnt make out his face but he seemed to be very tall and he began to tell me a story something about an ancient builder and a Temple in Jerusalem.

The words made no sense to me and I had closed my eyes for a second or two. I opened them again just in time to catch a glimpse of something moving quickly out of the darkness towards me and I felt a glancing blow crack down on my cheek. Before I could blink, hands grabbed at me pushing me down onto one knee. I recovered my footing and quickly received a second blow and then a third hit me square in the forehead. I was pulled down before being wrapped in a sheet by many unseen hands.

At this point I definitely felt like I was in some bizarre dream, as funereal organ music filled the air and countless footsteps seemed to be circling around my prostrate body. It all stopped suddenly after a minute or so and the cloth was peeled back from my face. A man took my hand out of the shroud and tried to pull me up but I fell back as the hand slipped away. Another attempted to raise me but failed then I felt a powerful hand take firm grip around my right wrist and I was yanked to a standing position.

Suddenly the light increased a little. Everything was in monochrome but thanks to a star-shaped beam of light above the shoulder of my attacker I could take in the dozens of faces that filled the windowless room. The man in front pointed behind me and told me to turn and look at the spot where I had been lying. There, by the light of the single star, I could just make out a small cluster of objects. At first I could not recognize them but as I stared in the half-light I could make out a human skull and some bones of some long-decomposed cadaver.

The ritual was now finished and I dressed myself once again in my black suit and tie and joined the celebrations with my brothers, for the world now had one more Master Mason. As of that moment I was a fully qualified Third Degree Freemason.

Now, at last, I was permitted to ask my fellow Masons to explain all three rituals I had endured over the preceding six months. This is going to be interesting, I told myself.

That was in September 1976. Thirty years have now passed since I walked out of the Masonic Temple wearing the small leather apron of a Master Mason given to me under the authority of the United Grand Lodge of England. I was brimming over with curiosity and enthusiasm but I had no inkling at all as to just how much the proceedings of that evening were going to change my life.

To be honest, I had joined the Craft in the first place as a matter of simple nosiness. I wanted to know what these men did behind closed doors that had given rise to all kinds of rumours. I knew that Freemasonry was a secretive fraternal order found mainly in Europe and those areas of the globe where the British Empire or its offspring, the American empire, had ever had influence. But was it the benign organization it seemed to be or did it have a covert agenda as critics sometimes suggest?

As a young Master Mason it slowly dawned upon me that none of the importantly titled Freemasons had a clue as to what the rituals were really about. They would have a meal and plenty of beer after the evenings ritual was over and compliment each other on the sincerity with which they had delivered the memorized mumbo-jumbo but there was never any discussion about what it all meant or where it came from.

From Calcutta to Calgary and Canberra to Cape Town, men dressed in splendid if somewhat oddball regalia meet in windowless rooms to perform arcane rituals in word-perfect manner without understanding why. The rituals are passed on from generation to generation, word for word but for what?

Like every candidate for the Third Degree, I was made to act out the role of Hiram Abif, the man who is said to have been the architect of King Solomons Temple in Jerusalem nearly 3,000 years ago. The legend tells how his own workmen attacked Hiram because they wanted to extract a great secret from him. The architect refused to give them the unspecified secret and was killed by the third of three blows to the head.

I began my personal investigation into the origins of Freemasonry as soon as I realized that no answers to my various questions existed. As the years of research rolled on and I started to uncover some tantalizing facts, I began to think that a book written about it might be of interest to at least a few people. I enlisted the help of a fellow Freemason, Robert Lomas, and several years later the result was finally published under the title The Hiram Key.

One man who read that book was Alan Butler, and he saw immediate parallels with his own research. Alan made contact and we began a process of sharing our deepest findings into the origins of Freemasonry and the extraordinarily ancient science that we found lies behind it.

Alan and I have now been conducting research jointly for the last ten years. This is our third book together and it is the one that goes right back 3,000 years to tell the full story of a group of hereditary super-priests from Jerusalem who set out to change the world. The Hiram Key was the book that uncovered the ancient heritage behind Freemasonry, but, inevitably, it raised far more questions than it provided answers.

The task we have set ourselves in this book is to investigate deeper and wider in order to piece together, step by step, the progress of an ancient priesthood, which, according to Masonic ritual, was established by King Solomon. These people were almost a cult within a cult Jews with a secret knowledge of the movements of a blazing star they called the Shekinah. This brilliant astronomical wonder lit up the pre-dawn sky of Jerusalem at the dedication of Solomons Temple and appeared again at propitious occasions heralding great events including the birth of the promised Messiah a millennium later.

The mark of these secretive power brokers whom we call the Star Families was two equilateral symbols overlaid one upon the other to form a six-pointed star, a device that, as we will explain in Chapter 1, precisely describes the latitude of Jerusalem in astronomical terms.