Jubilee: a short history of a long tradition

The Queen of Pentacles

From the 2nd to the 5th of June, Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her Diamond Jubilee, marking 60 years of reign, a landmark anniversary that is cause for celebration in the United Kingdom. We would also be amiss if we didn't note that the Astrologer Royal was doubtless consulted when selecting the spectacularly auspicious end date of the festivities, the same day that Venus, "the Queen of Heaven," begins to transit the face of the sun, which last occurred in 2004 and won't occur again for another 113 years.

In one of nature's boundless displays of beauty, Venus's orbit when seen from earth traces a pentagram over an eight-year cycle known as the grand quintile, succinctly elaborated at lunarplanner.com; they also created the excellent graphic below (you may need to click on the image to enlarge it for clarity).

The pentagram traced by Venus is actually a fractal one, and when plotted graphically (below) reveals a nexus of symbolic meanings: the five petalled rose (the English rose), the lily (the royal fleur-de-lys) and the alchemical quintessence, the fifth and pentultimate of the classical elements (earth, wind, fire and water), the æther. In short, we are being invited to witness a royal apotheosis, and I for one am expecting a jolly good show.

The Good Sumerians

The celebratory ceremony of the jubilee is as old as civilization itself, a tradition that stretches back through medieval Christianity to ancient Israel and ultimately to Sumer and First Dynasty Egypt, whereupon it is lost to recorded history.

The first recorded ruler to proclaim a jubilee is Enmetena, king of Lagash, an ancient Sumerian city-state. His proclamation of "freedom" (ama-gi, written in cuneiform above and literally translated as "a return to the mother") is documented in a tablet dating from ca. 2400 BC:

A remission of the obligations (ama-gi) of Lagash he instituted.
He returned the mother to the child
and returned the child to the mother,
and a remission (ama-gi) of interest-bearing barley loans he instituted.

Some fifty years later, a successor king of Lagash, Urukagina, also declared a universal pardon and is the first ruler known to institute reforms to fight inequities and corruption, detailed in surviving tablets such as the following excerpt from a praise poem of his reign. The poem recounts man's eternal subjegation to taxes and takings and is profoundly depressing when one considers that it was written four and a half millenia ago, yet begins with the words:

From time immemorial, since life began,
in those days, the head boatman appropriated boats, the livestock official appropriated asses, the livestock official appropriated sheep, and the fisheries inspector appropriated [fish].... These were the conventions of former times!

Egypt: Run for your throne! Run for your life!

Though adapted over time, the Egyptian Heb Sed, or royal jubilee, was a codified test of the pharaoh's fitness to rule. After 30 years' reign, pharaohs were to prove their physical and mental acuity and stamina by running, singing and performing ritualized dances and ceremonies intended to renew their authority, vigor and divinity.

(Below: a view of the Heb Sed courtyard at Saqqara. In the foreground is the socle representing the double throne of Upper and Lower Egypt, with the Heb Sed pavilions and the famed stepped pyramid of Djozer rising behind.)

During the Heb Sed ceremonies, the pharaoh also raised the djed pillar, a phallic fertility symbol, from which derives, I believe, the English-language double entendre of "raising the dead." Thereafter the festival was repeated every three years until the ruler's death. What scraps of information remain concerning the ceremonies indicate nothing concerning those elements of the Heb Sed not directly involving the pharaoh, so we do not know if pardons were involved as well. However, if we go back to the earliest known incarnation of the Heb Sed, pharaohs who failed the test were ceremonially put to death—indicating that society ultimately governed the pharaoh and not the reverse.

"And on the seventh day He rested"

The Jewish jubilee (from the Hebrew yobhel, or ram's horn, blown on the Day of Atonement) was based on a seven-year cycle of crop rotation; in the Torah, Jehovah commanded Moses that fields and orchards were to lie fallow every seventh year, the sabbath year, or shmita. The jubilee year was celebrated at the end of the seventh year of the seventh shmita cycle, or every 50th year. All debts were erased, all sins forgiven, all foreclosed land returned to its prior guardians and a universal pardon was proclaimed.

This article of Mosaic law is detailed in Leviticus 25: 9-10 (KJV):

Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubilee to sound on... the day of atonement... throughout all your land. And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.

All roads lead to Rome

Pope Boniface VIII, much more economically stingy than Jehovah but spiritually much more indulgent, proclaimed the first Christian Jubilee on the 22nd of February in the year 1300. In return for 15 days of visits to the basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul for pilgrims and 30 days for native Romans, the penitent faithful (above) received complete absolution of sin.

No debt relief came with purity of soul, and in fact pilgrims indebted themselves to undertake their journeys; nonetheless, the pope's gesture was enthusiastically received throughout Christendom and began a tradition—initially at fifty year intervals, then for a time 33, reverting again to 50, and finally, with Paul II's proclamationin the late 1400s, settling upon a 25-year interval—that continues to this day. In 2000, John Paul II greatly liberalized the requirements for receiving a Jubilee indulgence, though confession, Communion, prayer for the Pope and freedom from all attachment to sin remain mandatory prerequisites.

The British Jubilee

The tradition of the British monarchy celebrating royal jubilees began with the anniversary of George III's 50th year of reign on 25 October 1809, which was celebrated thoughout Britain and the colonies. A private service was held at Windsor and a grand fete and fireworks were offered at Frogmore.

Queen Victoria, the longest reigning British monarch, also celebrated Gold and Diamond Jubilees in 1887 and 1897. Two days of pomp, feasting, processions and fireworks were attended by foreign monarchs and administrators from across the Empire, and witnessed by massive crowds. Of her Diamond Jubilee carriage ride, the Queen wrote in her diary, "No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given to me, passing through those 6 miles of streets... The cheering was quite deafening & every face seemed to be filled with real joy. I was much moved and gratified."

"What would Jesus do?"

Which brings us to the present day: a world engulfed in The Depression that Dare Not Speak its Name and rising calls, amid vertiginously rising national and world debt that has reached truly Biblical proportions, for a Biblical response equal to the problem. For those fond of asking, "What would Jesus do?", it is well worth noting that the only time Jesus ever became violent was when driving the money changers from the temple—literally with a whip. Makes one stop a moment to ponder, doesn't it?

Caveat Victor

Throughout history, human societies have recognized the need for renewal, cleansing and release—a reset button, if you will—to resolve inequities and to relieve injustices and imbalances that would otherwise destabilize them and eventually cause outright collapse. The imperative was so strong, in fact, that the jubilee became enshrined as an essential societal regulator and was sacralized as the Word of God as received by Moses. Whatever one's political persuasion, it cannot be denied that the world today is not only in social, political and financial turmoil, but actual distress.

The causes are far too complex to ever outline here, but if we take a few steps back and consider the proverbial Big Picture, it becomes obvious that long unchecked and exponentially accelerating debt creation, coupled with a steadily increasing concentration of wealth and power, threatens the very fabric of society itself.

Of course, those who have amassed most of the marbles won't like giving some of them back, and other inequities will certainly be engendered in doing so. But if we stay with the game metaphor for a moment, has anyone ever finished a game of Monopoly in peace and harmony, or finished the game at all? Inevitably, when the endgame comes into view, dissension arises and a handswipe—or worse—finishes things off. No one plays things out until there is an actual winner.

The Origin of the Orders: Egypt

The colonnade at Saqqara

The origin and meaning of the classical columnar orders has been debated for centuries, with quite some fanciful ideas tossed about to explain how the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders came to be.

This is the first in a series of posts that will re-examine the elements and origins of the classical orders and posit new interpretations of their meanings. But before we look at the classical orders, we should first examine the sacred architecture of the ancient Egyptians, who after all invented the column (not to mention architecture itself), and who were also the source and wellspring for high learning in the Classical world.

The first historical architect (and also engineer and physician) is Imhotep ("he who comes in peace"), one of the greatest intellects ever to walk the earth. Imhotep (2635-2595 B.C.) served as chancellor to the Third Dynasty Pharaoh Djozer and was high priest of the sun god Ra at On, better known by its Greek name of Heliopsis, "city of the sun." He was also a poet and philosopher and one of the few non-Pharaohs in the long history of Egypt ever to be depicted in stone. Eventually, 1400 years after his death, he was deified.

The stepped Pyramid of Djozer at Saqqara

In traditional Egyptology (though the simple existence of the Osirion at Abydos, as well as the advanced erosion of the Great Sphinx and Valley Temples at Giza should give one great pause in blindly accepting the conventional, increasingly untenable chronology), Imhotep is credited with the first systematic use of dressed stone construction, embodied in the design and construction of Djozer's stepped pyramid and temple complex at Saqqara from 2630 to 2611 BCE, and the invention of the column is often attributed to him as well. An altogether astounding personage.

The ceremony of raising the Djed pillar

The concept of the column is ultimately traceable to the Djed pillar, a truly ancient phallic fertility symbol depicting the base of the spine of Osiris (and also that of a bull, or Taurus). The ceremony of the raising of the Djed was a festival of fertility and renewal (Djedu was the Egyptian name for Busiris, a center of cult worship for the Pharaoh, and many pharaohs, Djozer among them, bore the title of Djed among their honorifics).

It is also I suspect the origin of the phrase "raising the dead" and the traditional English wordplay of confounding death with ejaculation. For example, Shakespeare was quite fond of the phrase "I die in your lap," which appears both in Hamlet and Much Ado about Nothing ("nothing" also refers to a woman's sexual organs). This use of double entendre, homonyms and multiple meanings in language and literature has always been an important element of occult and esoteric knowledge. Philology and etymology are rife with such resonant convergences; to give but one well-known example, right and left: right comes from the root reg- and means good, straight, righteous, royal and wise. Then there are write and rite, right? Left derives from the Old English lyft, foolish or weak, and ultimately from OE slinken, to crawl (like a snake). Left in German is links and sinister in Latin, the English synonym for evil.

Now that we've dealt with how Shakespeare entertained the groundlings, let us consider the surprise of surprises: columns are ultimately phallic symbols. Who ever would have guessed? To underscore the fertility symbolism, even the earliest columns were depicted with abstracted vegetal motifs. Though much of the architecture of Saqqara is remarkably modern in its abstract geometry and volumetric lucidity, its columns are among the few elements that incorporate recognizable decoration, all of it vegetal in inspiration.

A frieze of Djed pillars a Saqqara

Actual Djed columns appear as ornamental motifs at Saqqara (above) but others, such as the magnificent colonnade, are quite abstract, while the elongated engaged columns decorating the false shrines of the so-called Jubilee (Heb Sed) Court (below) feature exaggerated lotus-flower capitals.

Saqqara, the colonnade

Engaged columns with lotus flower capitals at the Jubilee or Heb Sed Court at Saqqara

The convex fluting of the majestic colonnade at Saqqara, one of the most beautiful spaces in all of Egypt, abstracts bundled papyrus stalks and in Egyptian cosmology the papyrus, along with the lotus flower that gives its form to so many Egyptian capitals, was found at the primordial mound at the beginning of time. Papyrus stalks held up the arching goddess Nut, the sky, just as the lotus flower opened to give birth to the sun. The papyrus also symbolized Lower Egypt, while the lotus represented Upper Egypt; thus the two main symbols incorporated into the columns that held up the roof or sky of Egyptian temples also symbolically united the Two Lands of Egypt itself and encapsulated the origins of the universe. As above, so below.

Nut the sky goddess arching over her lover Geb, the earth god; note the Djed pillar at left, found just beneath an Ankh

But we should not stop there. The papyrus is also the source of paper and thus also a cipher for knowledge and for civilization itself, the pillar or spine of consciousness which holds up the vault of Heaven which shelters man.

Isis stands at far right, bearing a papyrus staff indicating her divine stature, from Kom-Ombo

In turn, the sacred lotus, or the blue water lily also held feminine attributes and was linked to fertility, as well as the sun, rebirth and resurrection. It is also intimately related to the goddess Isis, wife and sister of Osiris and daughter of Geb and Nut.

The Egyptian lotus, or blue water lily (Nymphaea Caerulea)

Its flower has also recently been recognized to contain mild psychoactive properties when steeped or eaten, offering episodes of mildly heightened awareness and introspection, and a new generation of Egyptian researchers posit that the lotus flower, known in ancient Egypt for its healing properties, may also have been used in divination rituals, much like the well-known sacred hallucinogens of native North and South American cultures. Though this thesis may shock those who might reflexively attribute our own society's condemnation of psychoactive substances to other cultures, the ancients had no such scruples.

The great hall of Amun-Re at the temple complex of Karnak, ancient Thebes

The column is an Egyptian invention and so must embody the unity of opposites that is the basis of all Egyptian thought, just as it must also incarnate Egyptian cosmology. The male Djed is wed to the female vegetal symbols, just as Geb is wed with Nut and Osiris is wed with Isis. Papyrus, symbol of divinity, logic and civilization itself, is wed to the spiritual and the mystical, embodied by the sacred lotus.

As above, so below.

Coming soon, the Doric order.

Gilgamesh, a new interpretation

This was the man to whom all things were known; this was the king who knew the countries of the world. He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood. He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labour, returning he rested, he engraved on a stone the whole story.

The Sumerian story known today as the Epic of Gilgamesh is among the world's oldest surviving texts, commonly dated to the seventeenth to eighteenth century BC, though the earliest Sumerian poems can be traced to the Third Dynasty of Ur (2150-2000 BC). The Akkadian version, consisting of twelve tablets edited by the scribe Sin-liqe-unninni sometime between 1300 and 1000 BC, was rediscovered in 1853 in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in Nineveh. Sin-liqe-unninni conflated several much more ancient stories to create the Epic of Gilgamesh we know today, and he is also the oldest known 'author' in history, being the first to sign his name to his work.

At heart, Gilgamesh combines two stories, that of the friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and later, Gilgamesh's odyssey in search of immortality. Here, we will examine the first part of the epic: the story of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, "two-thirds god and one-third human... terrifying" in his perfection, and his "noble" companion Enkidu, the domesticated savage, his name literally meaning [the god] Enki's creation, formed of "a pinch of clay, let fall into the wilderness."

Such primal word pictures indicate that Gilgamesh is much more than a mere work of fiction; it is clearly a myth: a story that encodes, preserves and transmits truths about the origins and prehistory of humanity in allusive form.

We know today that we are actually a hybrid species: ancient homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals until their extinction some 30,000 years ago. Our Neanderthal genetic inheritance ranges from 1% to 5% of our DNA, with the highest percentages found in modern Europeans. With this in mind, the story of the friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu takes on an entirely new meaning and is, I believe, in great part a parable recording ancient man's cohabitation with Neanderthals and their subsequent extinction.

Let us first consider Gilgamesh's attributes:
When the gods created Gilgamesh they gave him a perfect body. Shamash the glorious sun endowed him with beauty, Adad the god of the storm endowed him with courage, the great gods made his beauty perfect, surpassing all others, terrifying like a great wild bull. Two thirds they made him god and one third man...

...none can withstand his arms. No son is left with his father, for Gilgamesh takes them all; and is this the king, the shepherd of his people? His lust leaves no virgin to her lover, neither the warrior's daughter nor the wife of the noble.

All this is very clear: Gilgamesh is the "perfect" man, his parentage two-thirds from the gods and the rest from earlier men, with massive strength and lust to match. His fecundity was so boundless and disruptive that the gods needed to quell it by creating "his equal, like him as his own reflection, a second self" as a counterbalance to Gilgamesh's "stormy heart."

That task fell to Araru, goddess of creation, apparently bidden by Enki (above, who also created mankind to serve the gods and saved them from the flood):

She dipped her hands in water and pinched off clay, she let it fall in the wilderness, and noble Enkidu was created... There was virtue in him of the god of war, of Ninurta himself. His body was rough, he had long hair like a woman's; it waved like the hair of Nisaba, the goddess of corn. His body was covered with matted hair like Samugan's, the god of cattle. He was innocent of mankind; he knew nothing of the cultivated land... Enkidu ate grass in the hills with the gazelle and lurked with wild beasts at the water-holes; he had joy of the water with the herds of wild game.

Well, this is all quite obvious, really: Enkidu = Neanderthal. But Enkidu, the wild man, was causing civilized men great trouble by interfering with their hunts. A trapper recounts, "there is a man, unlike any other, who comes down from the hills... He fills in the pits which I dig and tears up my traps; he helps the beasts to escape and now they slip through my fingers." So a clever plot is hatched by the trapper's father; Enkidu will be seduced to sleep with a whore, and once tamed, he will "change the old order" and put King Gilgamesh in his place.

[The whore] was not ashamed to take him, she made herself naked and welcomed his eagerness; as he lay on her murmuring love she taught him the woman's art. For six days and seven nights they lay together, for Enkidu had forgotten his home in the hills; but when he was satisfied he went back to the wild beasts. Then, when the gazelle saw him, they bolted away; when the wild creatures saw him they fled. Enkidu would have followed, but his body was bound as though with a cord, his knees gave way when he started to run, his swiftness was gone. And now the wild creatures had all fled away; Enkidu was grown weak, for wisdom was in him, and the thoughts of a man were in his heart.

Interbreeding with ancient humans has civilized the Neanderthals, but also weakened and deracinated them, estranging them from nature. Indeed, the process is cast as a seduction and wisdom a degenerative corruption perpetrated by a whore (the whore of civilization, who will later reappear as the Biblical whore of Babylon, and their "six days and seven nights" of fornication will echo in the creation story of Genesis. Likewise, Adam's eating of the forbidden fruit of knowledge proffered by Eve also finds a thematic foreshadowing.)

The whore then convinces Enkidu to come to Uruk (above, the city's legendary brick ramparts today), to meet Gilgamesh:
Enkidu was pleased; he longed for a comrade, for one who would understand his heart. ‘Come, woman, and take me to that holy temple, to the house of Anu and of Ishtar, and to the place where Gilgamesh lords himself over the people. I will challenge him boldly, I will cry out aloud in Uruk, "I am the strongest here, I have come to change the old order, I am he who was born in the hills, I am he who is strongest of all."'

But the whore knows already which man will dominate; Gilgamesh, whose mind is more variable, who is more perfect, stronger and wiser and with greater intuition. And after all, it is Gilgamesh who is king:

"O Enkidu, you who love life, I will show you Gilgamesh, a man of many moods; you shall look at him well in his radiant manhood. His body is perfect in strength and maturity; he never rests by night or day. He is stronger than you, so leave your boasting. Shamash the glorious sun has given favours to Gilgamesh, and Anu of the heavens, and Enlil, and Ea the wise has given him deep understanding. I tell you, even before you have left the wilderness, Gilgamesh will know in his dreams that you are coming."

The Neanderthal extinction

As "servant" of King Gilgamesh, Enkidu weakens living in the city:
The eyes of Enkidu were full of tears and his heart was sick. He sighed bitterly and Gilgamesh met his eye and said, 'My friend, why do you sigh so bitterly? But Enkidu replied, 'I am weak, my arms have lost their strength, the cry of sorrow sticks in my throat, I am oppressed by idleness.'

Gilgamesh, seeking both challenge and renown, decides that together they will kill the evil Humbaba, "a great warrior, a battering-ram... the watchman of the cedar forest who never sleeps." They set off on their quest to the cedar-forested mountain and are ultimately victorious in battle, capturing Humbaba. Gilgamesh, swayed by Humbaba's pleas for mercy, considers sparing him, but Enkidu urges his death, warning of future treachery, and Humbaba curses Enkidu, saying, "May he not live the longer of the two."

They cut off his head; trees were felled, including the Great Cedar whose crown scraped the sky. From its timber a door was made—72 cubits high, 24 cubits wide and one cubit thick—for Enlil's temple in Nippur. Gilgamesh and Enkidu: their names will now be remembered by posterity, and by the gods.

Upon their return, the goddess Ishtar, "queen of Heaven," proposes marriage to Gilgamesh, who rejects it, citing her inconstancy and the horrible ends met by her discarded lovers. Enraged, she demands that her father Anu set the bull of heaven (the constellation Taurus) to wreak havoc upon Uruk, but together Gilgamesh and Enkidu slaughter the bull, and Endiku mocks Ishtar by tossing its severed leg at her. (The thigh of the bull was an important constellation to the ancient Egyptians, appearing countless times in their texts, and is assumed by Egyptologists to refer to the "imperishable stars.")

These killings enrage the gods (the bull Taurus was often depicted accompanying man's creator, Enki) and Anu passes judgment upon Enkidu, who sickens and dies over 12 days, and in his delerium curses Enlil: "what ingratitude for the sake of a door!"

As Enkidu slept alone in his sickness, in bitterness of spirit he poured out his heart to his friend. "It was I who cut down the cedar, I who leveled the forest, I who slew Humbaba, and now see what has become of me."

The bull of heaven episode can be understood as a marker for the actual zodiacal age when the epic was composed, the Age of Taurus, which spanned from circa 4300 BC to circa 2150 BC. However, if we accept that Enkidu = Neanderthals, then it appears that the bull story, which leads to Enkidu's death, is more probably encoding the time of the Neanderthal extinction.

To reach that prior Taurean Age requires the completion of a full cycle of precession of the equinoxes, a "Great Year" or "Great Return" of nearly 26,000 years, placing the Neanderthal extinction some 32,000 years ago—exactly in line with current estimates.

According to those who interpret myth in relation to ancient astronomical knowledge, massive trees such as the Great Cedar often symbolize the earth's polar axis and are markers for information about the Great Year—the earth's long, slow axial "wobble" through the twelve houses of the zodiac.

72 (the height in cubits of the temple door hewn from the Great Cedar) is the pre-eminent number in this numerical encoding, since 72 is the closest whole-number value for the number of years (71.6) required for a precessional shift of one degree along the ecliptic. (In Egyptian mythology, for example, Osiris is killed by 72 lackeys of Set.)

Twelve, recurrent in the text (most notably as the number of days of Enkidu's sickness) along with its double 24 (the width of the temple door), is of course the number of constellations in the zodiac, and the linkage of 72 with 24, not 12, may very well have been employed to indicate the second, earlier Age of Taurus. 30, appearing in the text as 300, the number of citizens of Uruk killed by the bull (100 then 200), is the number of arc-degrees each constellation occupies along the ecliptic. Thus 72 years x 12 constellations x 30 degrees of arc = 25,920 years, or one Great Year.

The prologue that begins this post is apparently quite literally true: Gilgamesh did indeed know secret things and brought us a story from a time before the flood (i.e., the end of the last ice age), preserving our earliest history in stone.

I. Objects of Awe

The Egyptian obelisk is Western society's most potent and coveted talisman and literally stands as the physical marker of civilization itself. Of the 21 ancient obelisks standing today, Egypt itself retains only four; Rome is graced by 13, all plundered by its ancient emperors, then re-erected during the Renaissance. The remainder are found in what the Victorians, who coveted them as profoundly as had the Caesars, would have called 'the great metropolises of Western civilization'—Istanbul, Florence, Paris, London and finally New York City. (The fourth Duke of Northumberland and Sir William Bankes each also pillaged an obelisk as the ultimate in Grand Tour souvenirs; today they stand in Durham University by way of Alnwick Castle and at Kingston Lacy in Dorset).

Why this all came to be is quite obvious, for obelisks are quite simply the perfect monument: they are rare in the extreme, they were conceived as sacred monuments by the semi-divine rulers of the world's greatest ancient civilization, and they are the largest, heaviest and most elegant objects ever created by man. All hyperbole aside, everything about them is truly exceptional.

All ancient obelisks are monoliths quarried from the fine pink granite found at Aswan, ancient Selene, located on the banks of the Nile in Lower Egypt. The earliest obelisks were raised at On, the sacred ceremonial city known to us today by its Greek name, Heliopsis, city of the sun, or more exactly, city of the sun god Ra. Obelisks were always erected in pairs and stood at the forecourt flanking the entrance through the pylon, the massive, chamfered wall pierced by a central portal that gave access to the inner courtyard of the temple, as seen in the photograph of Luxor, above.

In form, an obelisk is defined by a square-sectioned, tapering shaft and a pyramid-shaped cap, known logically enough as the pyramidion. Like the classical Greek columnar orders (i.e., Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns), obelisks follow certain consistent proportional rules: the height of the shaft ranges from nine to eleven times the width of the base, and the pyramidion's height equals the width of the base. The largest obelisks are—excepting the extraordinary foundation stones at Baalbek, Lebanon—also the largest monoliths known to man. One unfinished obelisk, still lying in its quarry bed at Aswan but abandoned due to natural fissures, is estimated to weigh over 1,200 tons and would have stood 42 meters high—a staggering mass that even we today would find extremely difficult to maneuver.

Like the Greeks, Egyptian masons employed entasis—an imperceptible convex bulging—to give the long, straight shaft a pleasing visual equilibrium. The pyramidion and shafts were invariably carved with dedicatory hieroglyphs composed in the name of the Pharaoh who had commissioned the obelisk; the faces of the deeply incised glyphs were highly polished while the shaft itself was left in an unpolished state. Pyramidions were, as today seen on the other obelisk from Luxor now standing in Paris at the Place de la Concorde, capped with gold ("the flesh of the gods") and many also had their shafts sheathed with polished copper sheets, and more rarely with iron or entirely in gold.

The Egyptians called obelisks tejen, a word synonymous with "protection" or "defense." Obelisk is derived more prosaically from the Greek word obeliskos, a roasting spit. The orthodox explanation of their meaning offered by nineteenth-century scholars is that obelisks are a representation and invocation of the sun's rays, and thus of the sun god Ra himself. They reach toward the sun to draw its generative power to earth as well as to capture Ra's protection, and thus they dispel storms and evil influences. This interpretation makes perfect sense, since obelisks first appeared at On (Heliopsis), the city of Ra, though later they were erected before the most important temples throughout the Upper and Lower Kingdom.

However, left unspoken by the Victorians is the obelisk's obvious phallic symbolism, which is an overt invocation of Osiris—who, with his sister and wife Isis, was the most important god of the Egyptian pantheon. First-born of the union of the earth (Geb) and the sky (Nut) and first Pharaoh of the mythical "First Time," Osiris ruled wisely and mercifully as the "Lord of love" until he was murdered by his evil brother Set, who coveted his throne and who incarnated the desert. Set hacked Osiris' corpse into 14 pieces and cast them away but Isis retrieved all his members save his penis, which Set had thrown into the Nile. Isis fashioned a replacement phallus of gold and momentarily resurrected her brother/husband to copulate with him, bearing their son Horus, "the Savior" who overthrew Set to regain the throne and so was considered the progenitor of all later Pharaohs. Osiris then became ruler of the Duat, or the realm of the afterlife, and together with Isis incarnated mercy, fecundity, rebirth, immortality and the cycle of the seasons.

Most broadly then, the obelisk embodied the Egyptian belief of "as above, so below" and linked the male to the female, the human to the divine, the earth to the cosmos, the living to the dead, and the reigning Pharaoh to Osiris, god of the afterlife and of immortality. The male form standing before the interior recesses of the temple, the tejen drew Ra's essence down from the rays of the sun and Osiris' seed up from the underworld.

The obelisk before St. Peter's basilica at the Vatican evokes this regenerative symbolism quite explicitly, standing as it does at the center of the female forms of Bernini's oval colonnade and before Michelangelo's dome; likewise, the Washington Monument faces the Capitol's dome in symbolic re-enactment of the Isis-Osiris myth.

Wholly apart from these vast, monumental urban ensembles, the original schema of the obelisk has also been preserved and retransmitted, almost ad infinitum, by its transmutation into classical architecture in the form of paired columns flanking an entry portal. Ultimately, the pair of posts bracketing the lowliest front door derives from Egyptian temples, and the most famous example of this schema is of course the pair of finely worked bronze columns that stood before Solomon's Temple and which are minutely described in the Bible. These freestanding columns were so important that Hiram, the bronzeworker who King Solomon "fetched out of Tyre" to furnish the Temple, had given them names: the right pillar, Jachin and the left pillar, Boaz. Immediately thereafter, the Bible recounts that Hiram "made a molten sea, ten cubits from one brim to the other"—that is, he cast a massive bronze basin that stood in the Temple's courtyard and held "two thousand baths" of water. Biblical scholars have long speculated what function this basin served, and posit either a symbolic linkage to the "primordial waters" of the book of Genesis or its use in ritual ablutions—even though the Bible states that Hiram also fashioned ten smaller basins explicitly for this purpose. Whatever its true purpose, the circular basin doubtless also symbolized attributes of Isis: the feminine, fertility, the womb.

Of course here we have also just encountered several foundational traditions of freemasonry. The bronzeworker Hiram of Tyre is known to every mason as Hiram Abiff (linked through his own murder to Osiris); and, according to the Masonic Old Ritual, hidden inside Hiram's hollow columns were ancient records and the most valuable secrets of the Jewish people (and those they inherited from their captors, the Egyptians)—the veritable ancient secrets of the occult mystery schools. And such is the influence of freemasonry that, if you were to dig beneath almost any significant public structure erected since the nation's founding, you would likely as not discover Masonic tokens beneath its cornerstone and Masonic symbolism incorporated into its site: Over 9000 freemasons paraded up Fifth Avenue to celebrate the laying of the cornerstone for the New York obelisk on October 2nd, 1880, in a ceremony presided by the Grand Master of Masons of the State of New York.

Though in steady decline since the Depression era, freemasonry has recently received renewed attention, and with it vilification and demonization, exemplified by the enormous success of the conspiratorial fiction of Dan Brown. Masonic societies are believed to harbor a powerful Luciferian brotherhood, an elite network that is one of the pillars of the "unseen hand" guiding world events. Its occult symbols are woven into the fabric of our society and our built world. Doubtless the contemporary reality of Masonic influence is far more prosaic than this, though nonetheless the preceding sentence is entirely true: Masonic symbolism is indeed woven into the fabric of our built world—because freemasonry's symbols are derived from our common legacy as a civilization. Occult is an ancient word meaning "hidden" and has no prima facie connotation of sinister, as so many today believe. The point here is not to defend freemasonry but rather to attempt to disentangle its oft-contentious reputation from the realm of architecture and its meaning.

To be clear, there is nothing inherently sinister in obelisks, paired columns, sphinxes, pyramids, or any other ancient architectural elements adopted by the masons, nor have they become corrupted in how they have been employed or reinterpreted. To give but one example already cited: the great obelisk on the Mall in Washington, DC, was designed by masons and stands in a city whose plan was designed by a mason and is dedicated to the first president of the United States, a 33rd degree Scottish Rite freemason. Few structures on earth besides their own lodges are more Masonic than the Washington Monument, and yet it is a magnificent monument to a truly great man whose symbolism echoes through the ages, well over 4,000 years, to its roots in ancient Egypt. However, it does not follow that its meaning is the same as that the Egyptians gave to their obelisks, nor does it follow that it is some dark perversion of it; rather its meaning is the summation of all that has come before commingled with the aspirations of its builders, and with the greatest part reserved for its intended purpose, to honor the nation's founder with a form synonymous with immortality.