First, welcome to my blog, where you can post questions about Freemasonry. I can't -- ok, I won't -- answer any questions that would violate my obligations to silence, but I am generally free to discuss symbolism and quite willing to tell you what is false about Freemasonry.
I am especially interested in commenting about Dan Brown's books, which have had a positive and a negative impact on Freemasonry in the public mind.
For starters, I want to direct you to a wonderful book, whose facts about zodiacs and other details, including astronomical data I have confirmed. However, I hasten to add that I do not share the interpretations of the author. It is David Ovason's book about the architecture and design of Washington, DC., particularly of what is known as the Federal Triangle.
I lived in DC for years, and after I read Ovason's book, I happened to go back for a business trip and in one afternoon, retraced the path he outlines regarding the architectural details that allude to zodiacal alignments and the rising of Virgo. They all check out. However, to say that the Founding Fathers and Masons involved in the design of DC were therefore star worshipers is just too big a stretch.
This book is one more example of how a wealth of information still needs to pass through the restraining fire of reason. For Dan Brown, as a writer of exciting fiction, the passion for a plot often eclipses (pun intended) and extinguishes good analysis of the facts. But one only needs to be concerned in an ethical sense when the fiction begins to be accepted as fact.
Readers of Dan Brown seem to be in search of something that was lost -- a feature that puts them on a wavelength that is harmonious with much in Freemasonry. At the same time, I ask all you Dan Brown fans: Do you read his works as escapist literature or are you in search of something? What is it about the modern world that is not filling a need?
Ironically, Freemasonry attracts men who are quite different from one another in many ways, and unites them into one body of friends and brothers. How do Freemasons recognize each other -- apart from perhaps wearing a ring or lapel pin?
You may have seen "exposures" -- but be warned that they cannot be trusted. Dan Brown fell into that trap when he claimed that a ritual of drinking blood was a Masonic practice. The Southern Jurisdiction of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite issued a statement to clarify that what Dan Brown used was a text from a different, renegade form of Scottish Rite that was around in the 19th century.
One reason I started this blog was to correct the misunderstandings out there.
