The Secret Temple: Masons, Mysteries, and the Founding of America

by Peter Levenda

Overview

This is a unique history of Masonry written from the perspective of an educated outsider. The author is sympathetic to Masonic goals, a historian of secret societies and political conspiracies, and an exhaustive researcher. He looks back to the earliest roots of the Craft, and then traces its influence into modern times. From the Bible’s Temple of Solomon through the Knights Templars, to the Rosicrucians and Illuminati, we learn of Masonry’s roots and early history. Enlightenment philosophy and the revolutionary currents of eighteenth-century Europe opened an opportunity for the American experiment. Sacred geometry and architecture combined to create Washington, DC, and the rest, as they say, is history. This second revised and enlarged edition includes a new chapter on Freemasonry in South America—from the revolution of Simón Bolívar to the capture and execution of Che Guevara.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780892541881
Publisher:	Nicolas-Hays, Inc
Publication date:	08/15/2020
Edition description:	Second Edition, New Edition, Updated & Revised
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	492,631
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Peter Levenda is a well-known author of many published works on esoteric subjects. Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult was nominated for a Bram Stoker award for nonfiction in 1995. Ratline: Soviet Spies, Nazi Priests, and the Disappearance of Adolf Hitler and Hitler Legacy: The Nazi Cult in Diaspora—How It Was Organized, How It Was Funded, and Why It Remains a Threat to Global Security in the Age of Terrorism, all by Ibis Press, round out this important trilogy of Nazi history. Levenda is also the author Ibis Press titles Tantric Temples: Eros and Magic in Java, and The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic. He is also working with Blink 182 rock star Tom DeLonge on the Sekret Machines project.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Foreword to this Second Edition xiii

Introduction to the First Edition xix

Part 1 Veiled in Allegory

1 Who Are the Masons? 3

2 The Prehistory of Masonry 25

3 The Knights Templar 41

4 Sacred Geometry 65

Part 2 America Beyond

5 The First Rosicrucians in America? 81

6 New Rites, Ancient Memories 103

7 A Conspiracy of Intriguing Men 129

8 Magic and Mormonism 149

9 Princes and Pretenders 171

10 Freemasonry and the Founding of the Latin American Republics 187

Conclusions 211

Appendix: Edgar Allen Poe's "A Cask of Amontillado" 217

Endnotes 222

Bibliography 237

Index 245

Editorial Reviews

With all the mystery surrounding the Freemasons, along with the recent vogue in secret societies (see The Da Vinci Code and its many followers), it's hard to see how historian Levenda (Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult) managed such a dry treatment. Though it's perfectly acceptable, even laudable, that Levenda seeks to dispel the mythic, romanticized construct of the Freemasons in favor of provable facts, he drains the magic from their history without answering any of his questions-most notably, "Is it possible to understand Masonry without being a Mason?"-in a meaningful way. Without a narrative line, Levenda skips from tangent to tangent, producing what is more or less a catalogue of his unsynthesized research. Whole sections pass without any conclusions being reached, and while Levenda certainly isn't responsible for all the answers, readers will expect more than a complex set of historical data jazzed with occasional factoids and appearances from other secret societies like the Illuminati and Yale's Skull and Bones. Readers interested in the secrets of Freemasonry will be surely disappointed, and history buffs will grow quickly frustrated with Levenda's poor organization and sleepy prose.
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