BBC - The Secrets of the Freemasons

As someone who has done a deep dive into freemasonry (literally have been inside of and spent time exploring the nooks and crannies of every Masonic temple in the Bay Area), as well as Golden Dawn / O.T.O. I can state unequivocally that he is not misstating anything in that video.

When I was a child, learning my part as the role of Jacques DeMolay for the "big play" that we put on, I always wondered why we were told the stories of how the Knights Templar were executed for having Baphomets and defiling Bibles and kissing each other on the bunghole. I thought it rather odd as a 16-year old "why are you telling me this if they did not in fact do those things?", but no, that's the party line of the Freemasons "we didn't do ANYTHING and the bad old King just started killing on us and hanged our poor innocent Jacques… Oh Jacques! 😭"

Bay Area Golden Dawn temple is run by a 31° Mason. Masons permeate the O.T.O., Rosicrucians too. The esoteric ones like to collect degrees in every mystery school they can access. Masonic temples are full of esoteric/kabbalistic symbolism, and boy do some of them flaunt their extensive resources and real estate holdings. Every town in Amerika, you'll find them, same as cockroaches and rodents…

It's hardly a secret, all you have to do is ask to get in. After your initiations, if you pick up the esoteric clues, if you figure out where they get their "light", you'll find yourself invited into ever smaller circles. If not, you'll remain in the social club, never offered further clues. It is, after all, a carefully designed filter system. Is it the top of the pyramid? Hardly, but, the <10,000 at the top need a several million middle managers to run the planetary op. IMO that's where the Masons come in.

When I see the few at the top of the financial and political systems, I don't see any creativity, unless you consider theft, fraud, extortion, and bribery to be. I see this distribution to be proportional to the number of psychopaths able to get away with their crimes by demoralising and intimidating the vast majority who are basically decent.

Altiyan Childs is Christian which sold faith of the parents for money (name of his band is Masonia). When his career is about the end, masons are bad. So you consider this hypocrite as truth seeker?

Freemasonry was (and is) a loosely occult network of elite male societies whose various lodges played a crucial role in the development of modern Europe as well as the birth of the United States. Before the War of Independence, Masonic lodges formed perhaps the principal “intercolonial network” for revolutionary leaders; these societies also allowed the explosive ideas cranked out by European Enlightenment intellectuals like Locke, Hume, and Voltaire to trickle down through the ranks. Nearly every American general that rassled with the redcoats was a Mason, as was nearly every signator of the Declaration of Independence and nearly every major contributor to the Constitution. John Adams, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin were all Masons (the jury is still out on Thomas Jefferson). Like Franklin, Washington was a particularly passionate and active Mason, a onetime Grand Master who was inaugurated as president decked out in full Masonic regalia.

Long a topic of febrile speculation. Freemasonry is hardly the insidious leviathan envisioned by some conspiracy buffs. On one level. Masonic lodges simply functioned as the old boy networks of the Age of Reason institutions where ambitious men would gather in order to prop agate and hatch revolutionary new notions about reason, science, and the proper construction of civil society. The God they worshiped was the “Great Architect,” a distant demiurge whose hand was glimpsed, not in scripture, but in the new revelations of natural science. But even as lodge members helped to imagine and construct our secular world, with its anticlerical embrace of science, technology, and individual liberties. Masonic societies also served as the main channel whereby the ideas and psychology of gnostic occultism flowed into the heart of modernity. For the freethinking men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Freemasonry offered a social structure that bridged rationalism and esoteric mysticism, folding Enlightenment ideals and Deistic science into a ritualistic and deeply hermetic solar cult.

Though redolent with Rosicrucian rumors and tales of Templar knights, the symbols and rituals of “the Craft” principally derive from the traditions and guild structure of medieval stonemasons, whose practical lore was spiritualized by seventeenth-century English aristocrats into “speculative,” or mystical. Masonry. By tracing its origins to Hiram Abiff, the architect of Solomon’s Temple, Masons placed the image of the hermetic engineer at the heart of their mythological worldview. Bud ding lodge members were required to master an elaborate hierarchical system of secret hand signs, ritual tools, esoteric doctrines, and gnostic dramas of self-illumination. As they clamored up this Neoplatonic (and rather corporate) pyramid of grades and degrees, their rising status indicated the increasing, almost geometrical perfection of their souls. Developing themselves into Masonic “sons of light,” these self-illuminated ones transmuted the gnostic impulse from a mystical dream into a systematic social technology of Enlightenment.

Freemasonry based its cosmology on a new image of nature, one that combined old esoteric notions of cosmic order with the new empirical understanding of natural law. Like many scientists of the day. Masons subscribed to the philosophy of Deism, which held that God retired from his creation after constructing the vast machinery of the physical world, leaving men to tinker and improve the cosmic contraption on their own. As Hoeller writes of Deists, “theirs was the Alien God of the Hermeticists and Gnostics, also known at times as Deus Absconditus, ‘the God who has gone away.’ Though Masons worshiped their Great Architect as the Christian God, this absent engineer, whose creation is clearly less than perfect, also resembles the demiurge of Gnostic myth, whose flawed designs could be overcome only by human smarts.

With their perfectionist Prometheanism, Masonic lodges thus brought what the historian David Noble calls the “religion of technology” into the modern secular age. Noble traces the religion of technology to medieval monks who came to believe that human beings and societies can be brought into a paradisal state of Edenic perfection through the proper exploitation of the “useful arts.” Translated into secular terms, which are still very much with us, this millennialist mythology holds that technological and scientific men have a duty to understand, conquer, and tweak the world of nature for the sake of human salvation, both spiritual and practical. As Noble shows. Masons played a disproportionate role in the construction of scientific culture. Lodge members basically founded the Royal Society, the first modern scientific institution, and the generally recognized leader of speculative Freemasonry, John Theophilus Desaguliers, was also an avid natural philosopher and engineer who experimented with electricity, invented the planetarium, and investigated steam power. In England, France, and America, Masons organized scientific lectures, hyped the useful arts, and pushed forward the new encyclopedias and their “diffusion of the light of knowledge,” Through the development and dissemination of the technical arts and sciences, Masons believed that they were helping to build utopia.

As Noble shows. Masons also participated heavily in constructing the educational institutions that gave birth to the modern engineer. “Through Freemasonry, the apostles of the religion of technology passed their practical project of redemption on to the engineers, the new spiritual men, who subsequently forged their own millenarian myths, exclusive associations, and rites of passage.”*^In America, this techno logical evangelism was principally carried forward by Benjamin Franklin, an indefatigable promoter of science and technology and the onetime Grand Master of the French Loge des Neuf Soeurs. Like countless later American Masons, including Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the astronauts John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin, Franklin put into practice America’s cult of the technological sublime. As the American religious scholar Catherine Albanese argues in her discussion of American Masonry, “if any genuinely new popular religion arose in New World America, it was a nature religion of radical empiricism, with the aim of that religion to conflate spirit and matter and, in the process, turn human beings into gods.”

Albanese argues that America’s self-deifying nature religion was not based solely on empirical knowledge or Romanticism or Masonic politics; it also turned on the metaphysical notion of “natural” liberty, a notion which identified the essential freedom of the individual with the supposedly uncultivated wilderness of the new world. “Nature, in American nature religion, is a reference point with which to think his tory,” Albanese writes. “Its sacrality masks—and often quite explicitly reveals—a passionate concern for place and mastery in society. That is, nature’s aboriginal freedom from human society in turn becomes a basis for a new understanding of society, one which emphasizes the naturally endowed sovereignty of the individual and his pursuits. This imaginative and political relationship to the prima materia of virgin territory also helps explain America’s almost mystical obsession with the frontier, an obsession that, as we will see, plays directly into the early mythology of the Internet.