With his last comment, Reverend John Lamb had managed to rivet the attention of the small group seated around the conference table. Even J.D. Blackstone, who was trying to look uninterested, had both eyes fixed on the elderly religion professor.
“I’ve told you first, that Freemasonry is, fundamentally, a secret religious order. But not just any religious order.”
Then he looked Blackstone in the eye.
“This goes to your comment, Nephew,” Reverend Lamb said, “about Masonry having the same structure as all religions. Maybe you’re right in a certain sense. But I would qualify that. Not just like any other religion. Certainly not. In fact, and here is my second point, Masonry adopted religious beliefs, but not those of Christianity. Just the opposite. Masonry adopted the doctrines of the chief opponent, the most vicious competitor, of early Christianity.”
“Chief competitor of the early Christians,” Julia, the lapsed Catholic, said out loud. “That’s got to be the Roman government. It persecuted the church. Nero lit the Christians on fire.”
“You would think so,” Reverend Lamb said, shaking his head, “but no—that’s not it at all. Of course, the Roman government used its political might, including the power to arrest and torture and murder, to try to subdue the Christians. Without success. Rome collapsed. Christianity flourished. But no, I’m talking about something a great deal more dangerous than the powerful Roman Empire—I’m referring to Gnosticism.”
“Say again?” Tully said loudly.
“It’s a sect of Christianity,” Blackstone interjected, and then directed his comments to Reverend Lamb. “Wouldn’t you agree? Gnosticism, from what I know about it, is related to Christianity because it originated from the early beliefs of the Christians.”
“Not really,” Lamb said shaking his head. “Gnosticism, at its core, is no more related to Christianity than, say, weeds that grow up in a flower bed are related to the flowers. They both grow from the same soil at the same time of course, but one is a separate growth process altogether—a parasite, really, which threatens to strangle the life out of the other.”
Then Lamb thought on it for a few seconds and found the point he wanted to make. “Gnosticism was a crude, pagan counterfeit of Christianity that adopted a few of the Christian ideas here and there, and a few features of Christian terminology—enough to cause confusion in the minds of some of the early Christians. It bandied the name of Christ around, but at its base it was a belief system built on a strange mixture of Greek philosophy and Egyptian mysticism, and other pagan ideas. By the third and fourth centuries, hundreds of years after Christ, some of its heretic leaders were writing phony ‘gospels’ on the life of Jesus, trying to modify history, portraying Jesus as some kind of pure spirit without humanity—denying the crucifixion of Christ—making it out as if Jesus were the leader of some secret cult full of magic words and mysterious revelations.”
“I think I saw a TV documentary on that,” Jason said excitedly. “They dug these ancient gospels up out of the desert.”
“Yes,” Lamb said nodding his head. “Near a village in Egypt called Nag Hammadi, several hundred miles south of Cairo. In 1945 a couple of Bedouins stumbled across it while they were digging. They found human skeletal remains, and also an ancient jar. Inside the jar were document fragments from what scholars are now calling ‘the Gnostic gospels.’ Experts figure the writings in the jar were buried there around AD 400.”
Then Reverend Lamb opened his arms to the group as if the conclusion he was about to share was fully self-evident.
“You see,” he said, “that is why the apostles in the New Testament, and then the Church Fathers in the hundreds of years immediately after the death of the apostles, spent so little of their writings focusing on the brutality of the Roman government—but instead, spent much of their time warning of the false doctrines of the false teachers. Those who were presenting nonhistorical versions of the life of Christ and passing them off as truth. Chief among those religious heretics were the Gnostics. You see, a clever half-truth about Christ the Messiah, the Promised One, the Savior, is at its core still a lie, but it is more deceptively dangerous to the souls of true spiritual seekers than all the fires that Nero ever lit.”
“So that’s it? Your shocking revelation?” Blackstone broke in abruptly. “That Freemasonry is, number one, a religion, and number two, specifically the religion of Gnosticism? That’s it? That’s all you’ve got?”
Tully cleared his throat. Jason was wiggling nervously in his chair.
Blackstone said it again.
“That’s it?”
“No,” Reverend Lamb said calmly. “You’re impatient, Nephew. You need to practice the art of listening. An art that brilliant men like you sometimes neglect.”
Julia was chuckling.
Blackstone leaned back and spread out his arms to his uncle, beckoning him to bring the discussion to a conclusion.
“Let me introduce my third and final point with a question. Just think about this,” Lamb said, wagging his finger as he spoke. “What is the principal problem with any movement that wants to become a permanent and enduring influence in the world, but which is built on human leadership?”
No one answered at first. Then Blackstone, with a controlled smirk, raised his hand like a smart-aleck middle-school student.
“Me, teacher, please call on me!” Blackstone shouted out.
Reverend Lamb was working hard to tolerate his nephew’s disrespect and nodded with a smile toward Blackstone.
“You’re obviously talking about the problem of successorship,” Blackstone said with a tone of boredom. “The Karl-Marx-to-Lenin-to-Stalin thing. The degradation of the original philosophy through successive titular leaders.”
“Exactly,” Lamb replied with a smile. “So…how does one cure that problem?”
“You make sure,” Julia chimed in, “that you exert strict controls over the training of the successive leaders.”
“Naw, never works,” Tully chimed in. “Not really. Human nature being the way it is, you can attempt any set of controls you want. I saw that at the NSA when I worked there—perfect protocols on paper. But then you put it into the hands of human beings, and you have what they call the ‘human behavioral factors.’ As something gets passed from hand to hand, there’s always degradation of the original content. Control? That’s just a relative term.”
“I don’t think that Reverend Lamb is talking about quality control over ideology or doctrine—are you, Uncle?”
“No, I’m not,” he said quietly. “Something altogether different.”
“Yes,” Blackstone said with a smile, and with a look in his eye that reflected an understanding no one else at the table shared with him except his uncle. Blackstone had already grasped Reverend Lamb’s point quickly. As usual, before anyone else. But the notion that his uncle was proposing was, to Blackstone, preposterous beyond description.
“You’re talking about quantity control—control of days…and years…that’s what this is all about?” Blackstone said, leaning over the table, staring at Reverend Lamb.
“I’ve been researching Freemasonry for two decades,” Lamb said in a strained, controlled voice. “I knew there was a primary, cultic center to it. If I could just find it—locate the missing center piece. What was the principal secret that the high echelon of Masonic thinkers and leaders were hiding, I would ask myself. What was their ultimate religious agenda? They say, in their writings, ‘the brotherhood of man.’ Yes, that is what the foot soldiers are told. But what did the architects and the generals really believe?”
“Then,” Lamb continued, “you brought me into this case, J.D. And I considered your question—about the significance of the tree as a religious symbol—and there it was…beginning to unfold right in front of me. Remember my reading you from the book called Builders of Man? Well, listen to this concluding statement by the English Masonic author. He says that the Freemason will have to continue to wear the Masonic garb, the white apron, and so forth…
…until the final Keystone of Universal Being is discovered ready, in the Stone by the Builders rejected, but now the Crown of life, the fulfillment of Hope.
“I recognize some of that,” Julia said, “from my old catechism days. ‘The stone rejected’—that’s a reference in the New Testament to Christ, isn’t it?”
“It’s intended that way in the New Testament, certainly,” Lamb shot back. “But in Masonry, which creates a whole substratum of secondary meanings hidden in their words, I would suggest it means something else. The key here is the use of the word stone. And its linkage to the concept of life—‘universal being’ as this Masonic author calls it.”
There was a pause around the table. Then Lamb broke the silence.
“Ever hear the term ‘philosopher’s stone’?” he asked.
Blackstone’s face reacted, but he kept his peace. Only Jason spoke up.
“Man, am I the only one around here who reads the Harry Potter books?” the young paralegal said with a tinge of embarrassment. “Okay, call me a dork. But I thought they were interesting.”
“Yes, you’re onto something, Jason,” Lamb said. “Magic potions and so forth. The philosopher’s stone for more than a thousand years has been the term that refers to a special substance that supposedly could be used in alchemy with very astounding results.”
“Turning base metals into gold, I thought that was the deal,” Blackstone shot out.
“Partially,” Lamb said. “But the deeply esoteric alchemists were after something much more powerful than that. They thought it possible to isolate and then apply a substance that would increase human longevity—human life—indefinitely. Immortality. That was what the alchemists were really after. And that is exactly what lies at the heart of the greatest secret of the Freemasons. The desire to find a way to cheat death. And thereby to continue the Masonic reign of the selected ones indefinitely.”
While the group around the table was trying to comprehend what Reverend Lamb had just said, the old Anglican professor put the period at the end of it all.
“And that, ladies and gentlemen,” he said with a flourish, “is my third, final, and most important point.”
Blackstone stood up.
“Alright, folks, shows over,” he said. “Let’s all get back to work. Do something productive.”
Julia stood up and smiled at Blackstone’s uncle.
“Thanks for all of that, Reverend Lamb,” she said with a smile. “Very interesting.” Then she threw her senior partner a look and left the room. Jason scurried after her.
Tully was chuckling and shaking his head as he walked out of the conference room.
“Now if you’ll excuse me,” Blackstone said to his uncle, “I have to try to keep my client out of the death chamber.”
“Don’t you have any response to what I just told you?” Lamb said with a sense of pleading in his voice.
“Yes, but I’d rather not insult you with it,” Blackstone said. “Look, this was probably my fault, bringing you into this. Criminal law is a tough business. The government doesn’t play games. It gets ruthless. And all you’ve got to offer me are your stories about magic and buried religious documents that are fifteen hundred years old, and…alchemy for heaven’s sake. Alchemy!”
With that, Blackstone turned and strode out of the conference room, leaving his uncle to gather up his books and papers and then find his own way out.