When I wrote Mystery Babylon Rising I noted both the common Hermetic stream and operational connections that would form the chain of custody from Babel to the present. At times these occult networks could operate in the open. There were other times that they operated very secretly because it was inconvenient to operate openly. As entities of Mystery Babylon these would become demonic strongholds . The very word ‘occult’ means secret.
One such secret society is called Freemasonry. Freemasonry in its current form emerged in the early 1700’s when Rosicrucians and other occultists hijacked stonemason guilds. These guilds began accepting people into their ranks who were not apprenticed stone masons. These non- stone mason masons were called Freemasons. Today very few Freemasons are apprenticed carpenters or stone masons, and the symbols of masonry are allegorical.
Problems with Freemasonry involve both incompatibility with Christian faith as incompatibility with an open, free society. In this article I shall evaluate Freemasonry by both consultation with Albert Pike’s The Morals and Dogma of Freemasonry and comparison with Scripture. This article shall evaluate the following difficulties of Freemasonry
- Freemasonry denies the exclusivity of Christ at the front door.
- Freemasonry affirms itself as the Ancient Mystery Religions, deny full plenary verbal inspiration.
- Freeemasonry affirms an enlightened elite who can see past the “literary framework.”
- Freemasonry affirms Hermeticism and NeoPlatonism, with their pan-en-theistic views of God.
- Freemasonry promote cronyism en route to creation of the Hermetic state as god on earth.
The Following video has resources at New Covenant Church of the Apostles
Freemasonry denies the exclusivity of Christ at the front door.
Freemasonry simultaneously denies it’s a religion while maintaining ideas that intersect religion and have profound religious implications. One must believe in a god or higher power, but they do not care which god. Initiates use the sacred book of their choice in Masonic rituals. Freemasonry views it’s members as a spiritual brotherhood. Lodge leaders are called “Worshipful Masters.” All of this amounts to a denial of the exclusivity of Christ in a spiritual context – the idea that Christ is the only way to God.
This alone is ground for the Christian to reject Freemasonry as damnable heresy. While it is marketed on the front end as a fraternity like organization, its agenda is deeply spiritual. Because if the progressive nature of this heresy, many are deceived concerning what they are becoming entangled with, and therefore their minds and hearts are being slowly cooked in the juices of this heresy as it subtly creeps inward.
The rest of the analysis of Freemasonry in this article is based on The Morals and Dogma of Freemasonry by Albert Pike. This was given to 14 degree Masons. Initiates and lower degree Freemasons might not fully understand how deep this demonic snake hole goes, but everyone knows that the exclusivity of Christ is denied from the beginning. We are going to see that this denial is not the endpoint of a mere fraternity, but the beginning of a descent into a demonic snake hole to doctrines of demons, The following quote should expose the spiritual agenda of the Freemason and why their denial of the exclusivity of Christ needs to take seriously as damnable heresy
Though Masonry neither usurps the place of, nor apes religion, prayer is an essential part of our ceremonies. It is the aspiration of the soul toward the Absolute and Infinite Intelligence, which is the One Supreme Deity, most feebly and misunderstandingly characterized as an “ARCHITECT.” Certain faculties of man are directed toward the Unknown– thought, meditation, prayer. The unknown is an ocean, of which conscience is the compass. Thought, meditation, prayer, are the great mysterious pointings of the needle. It is a spiritual magnetism that thus connects the human soul with the Deity. These majestic irradiations of the soul pierce through the shadow toward the light. It is but a shallow scoff to say that prayer is absurd, because it is not possible for us, by means of it, to persuade God to change His plans. He produces foreknown and foreintended effects, by the instrumentality of the forces of nature, all of which are His forces. Our own are part of these. Our free agency and our will are forces(Pg 6 [ 20-21). {Page numbers are the format pagnum on physical book [pagnum in PDF] }
Freemasonry affirms itself as the Ancient Mystery Religions, deny full plenary verbal inspiration.
Freemasonry sees itself as the successors to the Mystery Religions of Mystery Babylon.
Masonry, successor of the Mysteries, still follows the ancient manner of teaching. Her ceremonies are like the ancient mystic shows,–not the reading of an essay, but the opening of a problem, requiring research, and constituting philosophy the arch expounder. Her symbols are the instruction she gives. The lectures are endeavors, often partial and one-sided, to interpret these symbols. He who would become an accomplished Mason must not be content merely to hear, or even to understand, the lectures; he [p. 23] must, aided by them, and they having, as it were, marked out the way for him, study, interpret, and develop these symbols for himself.
Though Masonry is identical with the ancient Mysteries, it is so only in this qualified sense: that it presents but an imperfect image of their brilliancy, the ruins only of their grandeur, and a system that has experienced progressive alterations, the fruits of social events, political circumstances, and the ambitious imbecility of its improvers. After leaving Egypt, the Mysteries were modified by the habits of the different nations among whom they were introduced, and especially by the religious systems of the countries into which they were transplanted. To maintain the established government, laws, and religion, was the obligation of the Initiate everywhere; and everywhere they were the heritage of the priests, who were nowhere willing to make the common people co-proprietors with themselves of philosophical truth(pgs 23-24(48)).
Freemasonry teaches that the language of all religious texts are allegorical, meant only as a literary framework through which secret knowledge is communicated. Freemasonry views more fundamentalist/literalist approaches to the text as ignorance. Freemasonry denies full verbal plenary inspiration, which is the very thing the Bible claims for itself.
IN the Ancient Orient, all religion was more or less a mystery and there was no divorce from it of philosophy. The popular theology, taking the multitude of allegories and symbols for realities, degenerated into a worship of the celestial luminaries, of imaginary Deities with human feelings, passions, appetites, and lusts, of idols, stones, animals, reptiles. The Onion was sacred to the Egyptians, because its different layers were a symbol of the concentric heavenly spheres. Of course the popular religion could not satisfy the deeper longings and thoughts, the loftier aspirations of the Spirit, or the logic of reason. The first, therefore, was taught to the initiated in the Mysteries. There, also, it was taught by symbols. The vagueness of symbolism, capable of many interpretations, reached what the palpable and conventional creed could not. Its indefiniteness acknowledged the abstruseness of the subject: it treated that mysterious subject mystically: it endeavored to illustrate what it could not explain; to excite an appropriate feeling, if it could not develop an adequate idea; and to make the image a mere subordinate conveyance for the conception, which itself never became obvious or familiar. (Ch 2 The Fellow Craft, pg 22(47)
In contrast to this, the Bible claims full verbal plenary inspiration. It is full – “All Scripture is God-breathed(2 Tim 3:16).” It is verbal – “All Scripture is God-breathed(2 Tim 3:16); also Num 24:4, Num 24:16, 1 Chr 25:5, Psalm 107:11, John 3:34, Rev 17:17, 1 Cor 2:11-16)” being the very words of God stated plainly in terms interpretetable by a grammatical-historical hermeneutic and not some vague allegory of cleverly devised tales, It is plenary – full and complete, and as such “…is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. (2 Tim 3:16-17; also 2 Peter 1:2-4).” Biblical revelation is public knowledge, not secret knowledge. Christianity is NOT Gnosticism.
Freeemasonry affirms an enlightened elite who can see past the “literary framework.”
Given that Freemasonry views Scripture, along with all other religious documents as merely a literary framework through which secret knowledge is hidden, they must posit that there exists an “enlightened elite” with secret access to this knowledge and deny that there is public access.
Masonry, like all the Religions, all the Mysteries, Hermeticism and Alchemy, conceals its secrets from all except the Adepts and Sages, or the Elect, and uses false explanations and misinterpretations of its symbols to mislead those who deserve only to be misled; [p. 105] to conceal the Truth, which it calls Light, from them, and to draw them away from it. Truth is not for those who are unworthy or unable to receive it, or would pervert it. So God Himself incapacitates many men, by color-blindness, to distinguish colors, and leads the masses away from the highest Truth, giving them the power to attain only so much of it as it is profitable to them to know. Every age has had a religion suited to its capacity.
The Teachers, even of Christianity, are, in general, the most ignorant of the true meaning of that which they teach. There is no book of which so little is known as the Bible. To most who read it, it is as incomprehensible as the Sohar. So Masonry jealously conceals its secrets, and intentionally leads conceited interpreters astray. (Pgs104-105(152))
This idea that the learned people are to intentionally mislead the masses as their mission should serve as a HARD STOP for Christians who been mixed up in these deep things of Satan. It is Satan who is “The Father of Lies” while claiming to be the Light Bringer, aka Lucifer (John 8:44, 2 Cor 11:14-15; also Isaiah 14:3-23). This is their admission that they are doing the devil’s work. Freemasonry here seems to single out Christianity as the most ignorant religion concerning its message. This is gaslighting at its finest, pouring enough gas to ignite the blazing fires of hell and damnation.
Freemasonry affirms Hermeticism, with its pan-en-theistic view of God.
Freemasonry affirms pan-en-theistic philosophies such as Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, and Kabbala. Pen-en-theism affirm god-in-all. Like Pantheism, it affirms that god and the natural world have the same ontology. Whereas Pantheim affirms everything if god, pan-en-theism affirms that only some of the natural world is God. The difficulty of Pantheism is that even a worm is god. The elephant in the room is, if I am God, why can’t I simply will things into existence like God. The Eastern answer of lack of enlightenment. If I am God, how could I not be enlightened? Pan-en-theism answers this by positing that the material world is a series of emanations from absolute deity. These emanations are not equal in their divine energies, so some have more of the divine energies than others. This lays the groundwork for an enlightened elite and the state as god on earth. While this obscures the problem with Pantheism, it does not eliminate it. If emanations have varying degrees of divinity, then god composed parts that are decomposable, and suffers from evolution, time and elemental change. Such a god is not the absolute, self-existing God, but a demigod.
Hermeticism asserts that an emanation of deity broke off from the godhead and lives in the world as a power and intelligence that suffers time and elemental change in the world. In Hermetic eschatology, this divine substance evolves in the world and is actualized in the created things, and eventually re-unites with the absolute godhead. This is expressed here as the “who is his own father, self-begotten, and has only one Parent.“
In the ancient Hermetic books, as quoted by Iamblichus, occurred the following passage in regard to the Supreme Being: “Before all the things that actually exist, and before all beginnings, there is one God, prior even to the first God and King, remaining unmoved in the singleness of his own Unity: for neither is anything conceived by intellect inwoven with him, nor anything else; but he is established as the exemplar of the God who is good, who is his own father, self-begotten, and has only one [p. 615 paragraph continues] Parent. For he is something greater and prior to, and the fountain of all things, and the foundation of things conceived by the intellect, which are the first species. And from this ONE, the self-originated God caused himself to shine forth; for which reason he is his own father, and self-originated. For he is both a beginning and God of Gods, a Monad from the One, prior to substance and the beginning of substance; for from him is substantiality and substance, whence also he is called the beginning of things conceived by the intellect. These then are the most ancient beginnings of all things, which Hermes places before the ethereal and empyrean and celestial Gods.” Pg 614-615(929)
Here is described the method of emanation in terms of monad, duad, and Triad. The Monad is the emanation of absolute deity and is represented as the male. The duad is the emanation of matter and is represented as female. When the monad and duad come together in unity not unlike that of sexual intercourse, the triad is birthed. The triad represents both the creation in its complexity and the unity of the world with god. It was from this doctrine that Hegel formed the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The Hegelian dialectic is a key idea in both the various forms of Marxism and in modern occultism.
The interpretation of the Hermetic fables shows, among every ancient people, in their principal gods, first, 1, the Creating Monad, then 3, then 3 times 3, 3 times 9, and 3 times 27. This triple progression has for its foundation the three ages of Nature, the Past, the Present, and the Future; or the three degrees of universal generation. . . Birth, Life, Death… Beginning, middle, end.
The Monad was male, because its action produces no change in itself, but only out of itself. It represented the creative principle.
The Duad, for a contrary reason, was female, ever changing by addition, subtraction, or multiplication. It represents matter capable of form.
The union of the Monad and Duad produces the Triad, signifying the world formed by the creative principle out of matter. Pythagoras represented the world by the right-angled triangle, in which the squares of the two shortest sides are equal, added together, to the square of the longest one; as the world, as formed, is equal to the creative cause, and matter clothed with form.(pg 631 (949-950)
Here it is being argued that the Hermetic writings are to be understood allegorically.
It is in this sense we are to understand the parables of the Hermetic philosophers and the prophets of Alchemy; but in their works, as in the Great Work, we must skillfully separate the subtile from the gross, the mystic from the positive, allegory from theory. (pg790(1133))
This is a description of Neo-Platonism. This section presents the Neo-Platonist doctrine that individual souls are simply instance of the world soul, which is God. Differing instances have varying levels of divine emanation, accounting for the variations of souls from animal to man to gods.
Cleanthes, a disciple of ZENO, regarded the Universe as God, Or as the unproduced and universal cause of all effects produced. He ascribed a soul and intelligence to universal nature, and to this intelligent soul, in his view, divinity belonged. From it the intelligence of man was an emanation, and shared its divinity. Chrysippus, the most subtle of the Stoics, placed in the universal reason that forms the soul and intelligence of nature, that divine force or essence of the Divinity which he assigned to the world moved by the universal soul that pervades its every part.
An interlocutor in Cicero’s work, De Natura Deorum, formally argues that the Universe is necessarily intelligent and wise, because man, an infinitely small portion of it, is so. Cicero makes the same argument in his oration for Milo. The physicists came to the same conclusion as the philosophers. They supposed that movement essentially belonged to the soul, and the direction of regular and ordered movements to the intelligence. And, as both movement and order exist in the Universe, therefore, they held, there must be in it a soul and an intelligence that role it, and are not to be distinguished from itself; because the idea of the Universe is but the aggregate of all the particular ideas of all things that exist.
The argument was, that the Heavens, and the Stars which make part of them, are animated, because they possess a portion of the Universal Soul: they are intelligent beings, because that Universal Soul, part whereof they possess, is supremely intelligent; and they share Divinity with Universal Nature, because Divinity resides in the Universal Soul and Intelligence which move and rule the world, and of each of which they hold a share. By this process of logic, the interlocutor in Cicero assigned Divinity to the Stars, as animated beings gifted with sensibility and intelligence, and composed of the noblest and purest portions of the ethereal substance, unmixed with matter of an alien nature, and [p. 671] essentially containing light and heat. Hence he concluded them to be so many gods, of an intelligence superior to that of other existences, corresponding to the lofty height in which they moved with such perfect regularity and admirable harmony, with a movement spontaneous and free. Hence he made them “Gods,” active, eternal, and intelligent “Causes”; and peopled the realm of Heaven with a host of Eternal Intelligences, celestial Genii or Angels, sharing the universal Divinity, and associated with it in the administration of the Universe, and the dominion exercised over sublunary nature and man. pg670-671 (994-995)
The universal Soul of the World, motive power of Heaven and of the Spheres, it was held, exercises its creative energy chiefly through the medium of the Sun, during his revolution along the signs of the Zodiac, with which signs unite the paranatellons that modify their influence, and concur in furnishing the symbolic attributes of the Great Luminary that regulates Nature and is the depository of her greatest powers. The action of this Universal Soul of the World is displayed in the movements of the Spheres, and above all in that of the Sun, in the successions of the risings and settings of the Stars, and in their periodical returns. By these are explainable all the metamorphoses of that Soul, personified as Jupiter, as Bacchus, as Vishnu, or as Buddha, and all the various attributes ascribed to it; and also the worship of those animals that were consecrated in the ancient Temples, representatives on earth of the Celestial Signs, and supposed to receive by transmission from them the rays and emanations which in them flow from the Universal Soul.
All the old Adorers of Nature, the Theologians, Astrologers. and Poets, as well as the most distinguished Philosophers, supposed that the Stars were so many animated and intelligent beings, or eternal bodies, active causes of effect here below, animated by a living principle, and directed by an intelligence that was itself but an emanation from and a part of the life and universal intelligence of the world: and we find in the hierarchic al order and distribution of their eternal and divine Intelligences, known by the names of Gods, Angels, and Genii, the same distributions and [p. 474] the same divisions as those by which the ancients divided the visible Universe and distributed its parts. And the famous divisions by seven and by twelve, appertaining to the planets and the signs of the zodiac, is everywhere found in the hierarchical order of the Gods, and Angels, and the other Ministers that are the depositories of that Divine Force which moves and rules the world. Pgs 473-474 (709-710)
Freemasonry promotes cronyism en route to a Hermetic State as god on earth.
Freemasonry sees itself as the means to fashion the state into a polished gem that is god on earth, and promotes cronyism as the means to bring this agenda forth. Pike writes considerably concerning politics, the body politic, and the relationship of Freemasonry to it. In the following section it is asserted that “The FORCE of the people cannot, by its unrestrained and fitful action, maintain and continue in action and existence a free Government once created.” There are three points made in this section relevant to the Masonic method of cronyism.
- It is not the RAW power of the people that effectively maintains a free government, but constrained, organized power. Government by caprice is weak and short lived. Government that can scale in power and endure long must have strong institutions, traditions, and a rule of law.
The FORCE of the people cannot, by its unrestrained and fitful action, maintain and continue in action and existence a free Government once created. That Force must be limited, restrained, conveyed by distribution into different channels, and by roundabout courses, to outlets, whence it is to issue as the law, action, and decision of the State; as the wise old Egyptian kings conveyed in different canals, by sub-division, the swelling waters of the Nile, and compelled them to fertilize and not devastate the land. There must be the jus et norma, the law and Rule, or Gauge, of constitution and law, within which the public force must act. Make a breach in either, and the great steam-hammer, with its swift and ponderous blows, crushes all the machinery to atoms, and, at last, wrenching itself away, lies inert and dead amid the ruin it has wrought(pg4-5 (17-19)).
- The key to effectively wielding power is force constrained by law. The concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity are mentioned. The first two would be universally applied. Fraternity here, however, would refer to the Masonic brotherhood. to have cronyism one must have cronies. The coupling of a brotherhood of limited application to these universal values introduced a contradiction. While the brotherhood of humanity would be affirmed as a basis of liberty and equality, the introduction of a specifically Masonic brotherhood that would be specifically on the path to secret knowledge of the divine would make some brothers more free and more equal than others. It is this condition of being more free and more equal that sets the stage for cronyism – and a crony network in which the cronies would have obligations to each other and the crony network.
The FORCE of the people, or the popular will, in action and [p. 5] exerted, symbolized by the GAVEL, regulated and guided by and acting within the limits of LAW and ORDER, symbolized by the TWENTY-FOUR-INCH RULE, has for its fruit LIBERTY, EQUALITY, and FRATERNITY,–liberty regulated by law; equality of rights in the eye of the law; brotherhood with its duties and obligations as well as its benefits(pg4-5 (17-19)).
- The relation of the people to the state is pictured as the relation of the “Rough ASHLAR and the Perfect ASHLAR. ” These would be jewels on display in the lodge. This language is eerily similar to ibn al Arabi in his Bezels of Wisdom. I quoted from Arabi in Mystery Babylon Rising to show his Islamo-Hermeticism. Arabi saw humanity as a cosmic mirror that reflected the divine nature put into him, but that different individuals differed in their ability to polish this mirror.
Potentially every man is a microcosm, but in practice men differ in their polishing of the cosmic mirror, with only a select few realizing their primordial nature. These are the prophets and saints, all of whom belong to the category of ‘the perfect man’ (al-insan al-kamil). They alone assume the character traits of God, which are latent in all human beings, and manifest them in perfect equilibrium.
“Muhammad is the ‘perfect man’ par excellence. (Ibn al-Arabi – Bezels of Wisdom)
The Masonic treatment of the rough and perfect ashlar is similar to al-Arabi treatment of humanity as cosmic mirrors. Whereas al-Arabi was focused on human individuals and posited that an enlightened elite of individuals led by Muhammad operated as god on earth, Freemasonry regards the state as the perfect ashlar – god on earth.
You will hear shortly of the Rough ASHLAR and the Perfect ASHLAR, as part of the jewels of the Lodge. The rough Ashlar is said to be “a stone, as taken from the quarry, in its rude and natural state.” The perfect Ashlar is said to be “a stone made ready by the hands of the workmen, to be adjusted by the working-tools of the Fellow-Craft.” We shall not repeat the explanations of these symbols given by the York Rite. You may read them in its printed monitors. They are declared to allude to the self-improvement of the individual craftsman,–a continuation of the same superficial interpretation. The rough Ashlar is the PEOPLE, as a mass, rude and unorganized. The perfect Ashlar, or cubical stone, symbol of perfection, is the STATE, the rulers deriving their powers from the con-sent of the governed; the constitution and laws speaking the will of the people; the government harmonious, symmetrical, efficient,–its powers properly distributed and duly adjusted in equilibrium.(pg4-5 (17-19))
Freemasonry sees itself as the workmen who polish the stone of state into the perfect representation of god on earth. In the phrase “a stone made ready by the hands of the workmen, to be adjusted by the working-tools of the Fellow-Craft,” the reference to Fellow-Craft is a reference to Freemasonry. They see themselves as fashioning the state as god on earth. This ends at the feet of the Antichrist, who will claim to be god on earth. This begins by establishing cronyism. Once Freemasons become sufficiently powerful in an area, they will engage in gatekeeping to ensure that access to power is limited to Freemasons and their friends. This process is done rinse and repeat until the whole world is transformed into this Masonic Hermetic image. This thinking leads straight to the feet of the Antichrist, The one “who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.” It is this same Antichrist that will set up a global police state according to Revelation 13, who will be defeated by Jesus Christ at His Coming and cast alive into the Lake of Fire (Rev 19:11-21).