No.6, VOL. 12.] LONDON, Friday, August 12, 1825. [PRICE 6d. TO WILLIAM WILLIAMS, ESQ., M. P. PROVINCIAL GRAND MASTER OF THE ASSOCIATION OF FREE MASONS FOR THE COUNTY OF DORSET. LETTER V. SIR, Dorchester Gaol, July 30, As I shall address my description of the Royal Arch and other higher degrees of Masonry, to some persons whose titles and assumed rank in society are nominally higher and more appropriate than yours, nothing now remains for me to do with you, but to review my four letters, to complete the developement of the history and the mystery of the first three and only real degrees of masonry. Thus far I have been serious; after this, I must necessarily be satirical, to notice the subsequent frivolities with any good effect. Zerubbabel, Haggai, and Joshua, Priests, Prophets, Scribes, Sojourners and Knights, and Perfect Master Harodim, do not form a subject for philosophical or moral gravity. In my first letter, I noticed Mr. Paine's Essay on Free Masonry, as an erroneous account of its origin. I am still assured, that it is erroneous on the ground of origin; but I have since learnt, that Mr. Paine was not far wrong in the purpose for which he wrote that essay. It was not written to be published, as it has been published; but as a chapter in his unpublished reply to Bishop Watson. His executrix, who published it, also, mangled its references to the Christian Réligion. I have now a perfect copy of it. In his reply to the Bishop, Mr. Paine has a chapter to shew, that the Christian Religion was a mere corruption of sunworship and he wrote this chapter on Masonry to corroborate his arguments. I cannot say, if he has reached the Printed and Published by R. Carlile, 135, Fleet Street. conclusion, that all religions have sprung from sun-worship; but I have reached. that conclusion, and for the following reasons: The sun is the only planet that produces an effect on the earth sensible to the animal senses. The moon exhibits magnitude, but in point of effect felt, it is a mere occasional or periodical lanthorn. To the untutored ideas of mankind, the sun must have appeared, what was the true fact, the parent of all the animal and vegetable productions of the earth, the apparent universal creator. To this untutored mind, the earth exhibited nothing but materials for the sun, a powerful body, to work with. Hence, it is clear, that the sun must have been the first object of uncorrupted human worship: confining our ideas of humanity to this earth. This conclusion is supported by the fact, that, take what name you will of a God, that has been the chief God of any nation, a name that admits an etymological definition, and you come alike, with all, to the sun. I make no exception. Take Jupiter, Jehovah, or Jesus Christ: take all, or take any take Moses, take Bacchus, take Hercules, take Osiris, take Chrisna, and you trace the etymological definition to be the sun, or an emblem of the sun. The fireworship of Persia, was a worship of the sun. The very candles of the Christian Church is a misunderstood and corrupted emblem of that same fire or sun worship. Our modern bonfires are misunderstood relics of the same thing. The religion of the Druids was a worship of the sun, practised within a circle formed with huge stones, and as little corrupted as any recorded. The Moloch of the Carthaginians and the multi-named Baal or Bel, of the Phenicians, and of many other nations, were also clearly but national or corrupted names of the sun. Let him who can produce an exception to this conclusion. Doubtless, Priestcraft was not tardy in rising upon this simple religion, to which alone the words natural and rational will apply if they can be applied to that word or idea under any definition. It fixed its cruel talons on this artless and grateful effusion of untutored humanity, personified the sun, gave him wives and an offspring, made him and his offspring alike cruel, that, under the pretence of intercession and mediation; intercessors or mediators, as a standing priesthood, should be deemed by the cheated ignorant an indispensible institution. Hence arose sacrifices of human beings, or of other animals, as substitutes; hence the fabled death of Jesus Christ as an atonement to gratify ex his own or his father's revenge; and hence all those bloody abominations, which have perpetually desolated the animal world, and deluged the earth with blood, in a waste of that life, for the grateful acknowledgment of the possession of which religion ignorantly originated. I say ignorantly, without presumption, as, gratitude, applied where there is no sensation to receive it, is misapplied: and, on this ground, I maintain the mischief of the unnecessary principle of religion; that it is a corruption, and, consequently, a vice. This conclusion maintains, and is corroborated by, all the astronomical theories of the origin of different religions. It is a tracing of the whole fabrication to that centre, when working upon which, you say, a Master Mason cannot err. It circumscribes alike the physitheist, the pantheist, the polytheist, the mytholigist, the monotheist and atheist. In relation to the physi-symbolical figures of Pythagoras, it may be observed, that the sun presents the only constant and perfect circle, in what we call the natural world. A full moon is also a perfect circle to the eye, but it is not permanent. The sun is the only geometrical figure presented to the human eye in this natural world, referring to the earlier ages of mankind; for the modern discoveries in chrystallization were unknown to Pythagoras, though he seems to have had a symbolical idea of them, or a geometrical notion of the compactings of matter. To the eye of an ignorant man, there is not a geometrical figure to be seen on or from this planet, except the sun or periodical full moon, all else even to mycroscopic view, is rugged and mis-shapen, all evidently the work of accident and blind, undesigned ciscumstances. The human skin presents a fine. texture to the eye; but look at it through a good microscope and you may instantly account for its growth. It is a surf thrown out from the blood vessels of the body, wave after wave, until there be a solid porus and adhesive surface. Almost every liquid has a power to form such a skin or surface. And Mackey has gone so far as to trace the origin of a planet to it, or to a very similar principle. Pythagoras, we know as a matter of history, was enitiated into the esoteric doctrines of the Egyptian Priests, and subsequently taught them to his pupils under symbolical or geometrical figures, making a circle the emblem of the sun, or what we term the universe; for, though, we, now, have something like a correct idea of other suns and solar sys tems, we have no proof, that any of the Grecian Philosophers bad the same ideas. As far as their cogitations could extend, without the aid of instruments and a knowledge of the science of chemistry, they approached to correctness; but the system of each phylosopher had many defects, whieh a further advance in knowledge has brought to light. Still, experience must have taught all mankind to look upon the sun as the fountain of animal and vegetable life, and deviation from that experience must have been the cause, of the fabled personifications of its powers and purposes. Hence, I infer, that the esoteric doctrines of the Egyptian Priests were those of sun-worship, or an attributing of animal and vegetable life to the powers of the sun upon the earth; and that the exoteric doctrines of those Priests were corrupted personifications of the same worship, under the names of Osiris, Apis and a multitude of other names and emblems. The sun, or a blazing circle, makes a point in all the known ancient mysteries, and was painted in almost all the ancient temples, and from this circumstance, combined with the foregoing observations, I also infer, that it has been an emblem copied among masons, as a relic of other mysteries, though they, one and all, from first to last, have been ignorant of its symbolical meaning. Every system, emblem or mystery of this kind, gets corrupted as it grows old, until the original purposes are wholly perverted. Hence, the source of mythology; and hence, the fountain of that vice called religion. When error once takes root, its growth is rapid, its branches and foliage become luxuriant, and it has the lamentable property of obscuring truth. To get fairly at truth, it is necessary to destroy this error, in root and branch, to leave the ground as open and as clear as it was before it had begun to take root. Truth is the nature of things, the properties of matter, always the same. Error is a rejection of experience, a building of hypothetical systems, system upon system, without any foundation: bubbles blown up and swimming in the atmosphere that attract our attention and often excite our admiration; but as soon as we attack them with any thing more solid, or even with.a breath, they burst and vanish. Thus must religion burst and vanish; thus must be extinguished that last and most contemptible of mysteries called Freemasonry. Mr. Paine, then, was right, so far as he made the emblem of the sun in masonic lodges to be symbolical, of sunworship. He erred only in allowing to Masons too much knowledge, a knowledge of the meaning of this emblem of the origin of its adoption, and of the origin and purpose of their association. Masons know nothing of the kind, until they learn it from me. Hutchinson, in his spirit of Masonry, has made some slight allusions to sun-worship, as a part of the ancient mysteries; but he did not rightly understand it; nor has he made any application of the fact to Masonry. That the masons are ignorant of the symbolical meaning, of the sun in their lodges is proved by their own publications. The scotch masons swore to admit no jews, Turks, Infidels, Madmen or Women; and at one time there was an exception to Papists. Much of the same spirit existed in the English lodges in the last century; but it has gradually worn away, and known Deists and Atheists are now members of different lodges. In an old Irish book called the Pocket companion for the Irish Masons, who were chiefly if not wholly Roman Catholics, I find the following liberal sentiment: "Religious disputes are never suffered in the lodge; for as Masons, we only pursue the universal religion, or the religion of nature. This is the cement which unites men of the most different principles in one sacred band, and brings together those who were the most distant from one another." This indicates something of sun worship, or atheism, or something like it; and it is corroborated in the same charge where it is said " we look upon him (God.) as the summum bonum which we come into the world to enjoy ; and according to that view to regulate our pursuits." But the Catholics of Ireland or England were never so illiberal as their protestant seceders have been. With reference to the history of Freemasonry, I have asserted, in my first letter, that it has no claim to the antiquity of which it boasts. Where we search for evidence upon such a subject and can find none beyond a certain date, we can only attack the system, negatively and by challenging evidence of its antiquity or of its existence before a certain date. It is thus, that I have detected the non-existence of Jesus Christ and of the antidating the origin of Christianity by a century. It is thus, that I have detected the false claims of the Jews to an antiquity as a nation in Asia. very clever writer, on the subject of the origin of the Rosicrusians and Freemasons, in the London Magazine for January 1824, after exhibiting much research upon the subject, thus concludes : A |