A small quiz about mistakes and inconsistencies in the Legend of the Craft

I hope that the following short article can catch your interest as I would like to propose a small quiz, unfortunately for you with no prizes!

First of all a premise to be clear, I'm an amateur researcher who claims to have decoded the Legend of the Craft (I know that someone would call me a "crackpot", and likely it could be true, but I'm not alone ) to which I have dedicated some years (of my free time obviously) and I have written also a book about, but only in Italian.

Basically, in my opinion, the Legend really tells a story of a group of persons who were our ancient Brothers. The history, even if "heretical" if referred to what we currently believe, is absolutely in line with what has happened in certain places and at certain times. Unfortunately it is not possible to demonstrate with certainty if this story is real or simply "invented" (using real facts) in order to give an historical background to the Brotherhood. I have to say that there are some clues that it could be real. Unfortunately there is not any "not Masonic" text, which says clearly "masons were XXXX" except some versions of the Legend so this question will remain likely unanswered.

The key to understand the method used to compose the Legend is that, a part of some misspelling and some later changes, the composer (or composers) has used simply "nicknames" or alternative definitions to identify the personages, while some of them are called with their own real name. Some nicknames have been invented by Masons (Abraham and Euclid, for example), but others not and those not invented by Masons can be traced in the non Masonic history. Another important point is that the author has avoided to give some indications, or it has hidden them with symbolical terms, when it was clear that the information would have allowed to identify who were the Masons and this has avoided him to lie, so we can be confident that history, at least, is sincere. Unfortunately passing the time the history has been modified as the memory of some facts or names had been lost. One example is about Athelstan's son. Initially the responsible who has given the final Charges to Freemasons was Athelstan (Regius). Later it becomes Athelstan's son (Cooke). However as no son of Athelstan is known, someone thought that the "son" should have been Edwin, the brother. But "son" can have different meaning and indeed I can say that Athelstan had one "son" or better, based on the same explanation and according to history, he had at least two sons: one of them is the one that is interesting for the Legend.

Coming back to the "nicknames" what it has been written was something that any learned people of the Middle Age could easily decode. This explains why not all the information have been given and why there are so many mistakes and inconsistencies like the meeting between Abraham and Euclid, but also the whole part dedicated to king David and to king Solomon. The reference to the Bible is simply a way to mislead the "not Mason" reader, but also is according to a tendency existing in the Middle Age to relate a current fact to a similar one of the Bible, in order to give the idea of a "divine Will" behind the fact itself. Knowing the history behind the Legend it is simple to verify that mistakes and inconsistencies do not exist (a part those introduced later by our Brothers themselves).

Now, after this long introduction, here is the little quiz that I have invented about the Legend of the Craft. Pay attention that the Legend talks about two Salomons (one of the inconsistencies). One is the son of king David, but the other one lived more or less in the same days and was not a son of king David (at least it could have been an illegitimate as his father is unknown) therefore the Legend makes some confusion about them. Knowing this, the quiz is the following: "if king Salomon was not king Salomon and king David was not king David but king Salomon is known to the History as king Salomon, with which name is known to the History king David?".

Indipendently from the fact that about the Legend I could be right or wrong, this quiz can be solved from everybody as it is not so difficult but needs a little search. Enjoy!

JamestheJust said:

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(As a side note, I once joined a spiritual group and within a week had lost my astral clairvoyance.)

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so your saying you can have out of body experiences and stuff? come on bro?!

You said astral which insinuates that you could go to another plain....which I believe to be hog wash.

JamestheJust said:

My cat, when indoors would often look fixedly at something that I could not see. I even tried passing my hand just in front of its eyes but it would not be distracted from whatever it was looking at.

Just because adult humans cannot see much, does not mean that others are so limited.

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Just because most adult humans can not see any, does not mean none can. Somewhere around 1-2% of adults detect the spirits of the world around us. A few ghosts at the annual lodge memorial service that none of the other Brothers appear to have noticed and other such observations going back into childhood. Some sensitives get a lot more detail. Some sensitives get a lot less detail.

I've watched cats chase after spirits I could notice. If I notice a spirit it is obvious to many cats. I've watched cats chase after stuff I could not detect at all. To me it's clear that cats detect spirits far better than I ever have. To most what they see is cats chasing after nothing, not most of the time the way I see it, but every time. That's the nature of how 98-99% of people don't detect spirits. Because there is never any instrumental detection, those of us who detect the spirits of the world around us must never insist that others accept our observations. We learn at some point that others don't detect them.

On astral projection, it's easy enough to trigger the feeling, but no one who reports astral projection ever reports events that happened on the other side of sound proofed walls. As far as I can tell the feeling of astral projection is a feeling not an actual relocation.

I'm sorry but it looks like the matter has gone off topic! I do not know if there is an appropriate section for this kind of discussions.

Coming back to the quiz and referring to what seems to be an anwer, unfortunately Suleiman the Magnificent is an interesting figure but he has nothing to do with Freemasonry. Referring instead to the three ruffians, who do not appear in any point of the Legend of the Craft, the oldest traces are in the middle of eighteen century except, perhaps, if you accept "The Hiram key" and similar books as a reliable sources. In any case, in my opinion, an "undocumented source" is a "not existing source". If it exist it can be and it must cited. For example I say that there are two Salomons because there are copies of the Legend which report both names and they were different not only in the same manuscript, but also among the different version. This means that the writers have voluntarily written the two names differently because they must indicate two different persons:

Dowland Manuscript (1500): "Salamon" and then "this Solomon"
York Manucript (1600): "Solomon" and then "this Sollomon"
Grand Lodge No 1 (1583): "Salamon" and then "Solomon".
(the dates are those on which there is a general consensus about)

Only later the "mistake" was corrected however, like in the case of Edwin, I do not believer that it has been a good idea!


PS: by the way, Tesla did not "discover" the three phase current as this is a method to use alternating currents. He was an inventor but he has to share the merit with a lot of other persons like the italian Galileo Ferraris, for example (nothing to do with Galileo Galilei obviously). Tesla is very popular and he was a good inventor, but he is also much overestimated thanks to the Internet!

Where / what are those manuscripts my Brother and how did this tread get restarted ?


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I have cited manuscripts which reports the Legend of the Craft. An old collection is in the book "The old charges of British Freemasons" of Willam James Hughan, edited in 1872, which reports also the history of when and how they have been found. Updated information can be found online in some studies made specifically on each manuscript.
The second part of the question is not clear to me: the thread had been closed?

jdmadsenCraterlake211 said:

so your saying you can have out of body experiences and stuff? come on bro?!

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Brother, I appreciate your insight, and comments. Don't stop.

Luigi Visentin said:

I'm sorry but it looks like the matter has gone off topic! I do not know if there is an appropriate section for this kind of discussions.

Coming back to the quiz and referring to what seems to be an anwer, unfortunately Suleiman the Magnificent is an interesting figure but he has nothing to do with Freemasonry. Referring instead to the three ruffians, who do not appear in any point of the Legend of the Craft, the oldest traces are in the middle of eighteen century except, perhaps, if you accept "The Hiram key" and similar books as a reliable sources. In any case, in my opinion, an "undocumented source" is a "not existing source". If it exist it can be and it must cited. For example I say that there are two Salomons because there are copies of the Legend which report both names and they were different not only in the same manuscript, but also among the different version. This means that the writers have voluntarily written the two names differently because they must indicate two different persons:

Dowland Manuscript (1500): "Salamon" and then "this Solomon"
York Manucript (1600): "Solomon" and then "this Sollomon"
Grand Lodge No 1 (1583): "Salamon" and then "Solomon".
(the dates are those on which there is a general consensus about)

Only later the "mistake" was corrected however, like in the case of Edwin, I do not believer that it has been a good idea!


PS: by the way, Tesla did not "discover" the three phase current as this is a method to use alternating currents. He was an inventor but he has to share the merit with a lot of other persons like the italian Galileo Ferraris, for example (nothing to do with Galileo Galilei obviously). Tesla is very popular and he was a good inventor, but he is also much overestimated thanks to the Internet!

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Very interesting information. I'm looking forward to doing some digging on this and following the path you've laid out. Hopefully, today will remain uneventful enough for me to research this. Thank you!

Luigi Visentin said:

For example I say that there are two Salomons because there are copies of the Legend which report both names and they were different not only in the same manuscript, but also among the different version. This means that the writers have voluntarily written the two names differently because they must indicate two different persons

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With all due respect, sir, I'm not sure that I agree. Just looking at the Dowland manuscript alone, there are a great number of words and names spelled differently within the same document. Master/Maister, Bible/Byble, Ewclyde/Ewclide, etc. So I'm not sure that a difference in spelling can be equated to there being two different people.

It is a good remark and could be an alternative explanation. However I knew it already: initially I have related it to mistakes in the interpretation of calligraphy or due to tiredness of the writer (there are also many other explanations to this kind of mistakes) and I was convinced that Salomon and David were those of the Bible.
However in different documents there is the same type of mistake that is using a name and then using another one in the same point of the document. Taking in count that names differs from one manuscript to the other, this looks like an intentional mistake. My guess is that the original sources were a little wider and considered the two personnages separated but later the matter has been "compressed" and the only characteristic conserved was that the two name should differs. Later again the differences have been cancelled and appears one name only, likely because a part of the real meaning of the Legend had been forgotten.

I can admit that the explanation seems weak, but I know that the Legend, in this point, refers to a time were there were indeed two Salomons, and is not really citing the Bible (simply compare it). Moreover I know that there are some documents that includes enough elements that could allow anyone to write a similar part "imitating" the Bible. However if I tell you which are the documents (that you can find also online) I will give you the solution of the quiz....

I'm not entirely sure that I understand, but allow me to paraphrase and see if that makes it clearer.

If I am understanding you correctly, you are saying that somewhere (not in the Bible) there is reference to a second person named Solomon who lived around the same time? And that early versions of the Legend therefore are talking about two Solomons, not one. Is that correct?

I just read a book about something like this. A piece of stone was found in Israel that had a story on it that had been accounted for centuries to King Solomon, but this stone was said to predate everything else and instead attributed this story to someone else, whose name was similar and who was a Muslim. The Israelis didn't want this discovery to get out as it would completely destroy their claim to the Holy Land and the Muslims wanted to get it out for the same reasons. In the End it was determined that the stone was a fake, Faked by the man who "found" it as he was dying of Cancer and wanted the money from selling it to leave to his Kids and his wife that was in a nursing home with Dementia. It was a good book.

But back to your talking of the Legend, you know that the Masonic legend is just that....A LEGEND! It was made up to teach a lesson. There is no historical evidence that Hiram Abiff even existed. The original Masonic lore dealt with Noah and the Ark, which I know nothing about other then hearing it mentioned. Ive never read those early rituals.

jdmadsenCraterlake211 said:

There is no historical evidence that Hiram Abiff even existed.

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Nor is there any historical evidence that King Solomon existed. Or Jesus, or just about any other figure in the Bible. Even assuming that they are all completely fictitious and serve only to teach a lesson, how could you expect to learn anything from the lesson if you aren't reading the original story? The Legend is almost certainly inaccurate as it stands today. Was it ever accurate? Who knows. But assuming it was completely fabricated for the purpose of teaching something, and has since been changed, that means that the original lesson has been lost. The attempt at understanding the origins of the story, be it fabricated or fact, is what will lead the reader to understanding the lesson.

hanzosbm said:

Nor is there any historical evidence that King Solomon existed. Or Jesus, or just about any other figure in the Bible. Even assuming that they are all completely fictitious and serve only to teach a lesson, how could you expect to learn anything from the lesson if you aren't reading the original story? The Legend is almost certainly inaccurate as it stands today. Was it ever accurate? Who knows. But assuming it was completely fabricated for the purpose of teaching something, and has since been changed, that means that the original lesson has been lost. The attempt at understanding the origins of the story, be it fabricated or fact, is what will lead the reader to understanding the lesson.

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My point is that the Masonic legend of King Solomons Temple is a fabrication. No historical fact other then maybe the deminsions of the pilliars and what not, im not sure as I haven't read the entire Bible. When people start looking for historical facts and "secrets" in our Lore is when I start to think that maybe they are a Cowan and became a Mason just to get the NWO secrets....

I suppose it's a matter of semantics. We are "a peculiar system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols", are we not? And one could say that something veiled is something hidden, and one could go on to say that something that is hidden is secret. Our ritual might not point the way to a cave filled with gold, but that doesn't mean that there isn't anything to be found by digging deeper.

Imagine the fable of the tortoise and the hare. Certainly an allegory with a useful lesson that might instruct us on a better way of living our lives, at least in one small facet. Now imagine that our fable had not been written down for a VERY long time. Much like a game of telephone, it changes over time and pretty soon you've got a bird and fish who don't arrive at their destination and the moral of the story is that you have to travel to arrive somewhere.
...okay, sure, there's still a lesson there, but something has been lost. The fact that a tortoise and a hare probably never got in a foot race against each other is irrelevant to the wisdom contained within it. Of course, by the time it gets to the story of the fish and the bird, the wisdom is quite distorted.

(and to bake your noodle even more, keep in mind that originally the story of the tortoise and the hare had nothing to do with procrastination and persistence but rather a mathematical paradox. Just gotta keep pealing back the skin of that onion)

JamestheJust said:

>Dowland Manuscript (1500): "Salamon" and then "this Solomon"
>York Manucript (1600): "Solomon" and then "this Sollomon"
>Grand Lodge No 1 (1583): "Salamon" and then "Solomon".

"Suleiman I ...or simply Solomon as a Biblical name; ...1494 – 1566), commonly known as Suleiman the Magnificent in the West and "Kanuni" (the Lawgiver) in the East," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suleiman_the_Magnificent

I wonder if the dating of the Dowland Manuscript is correct.

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While I'm not saying that Suleiman factors into the story, the Dowland Manuscript is almost certainly NOT dated correctly. Or, at least not with a high degree of accuracy. It was a submission to a newspaper with the person submitting it saying that it came from an old scroll, which he thought to be a copy of a previous manuscript. There are so many unknowns regarding the date that the date attributed to it have more to do with context as compared to other documents as it does to anything concrete.

jdmadsenCraterlake211 said:

I just read a book about something like this. A piece of stone was found in Israel that had a story on it that had been accounted for centuries to King Solomon, but this stone was said to predate everything else and instead attributed this story to someone else, whose name was similar and who was a Muslim. The Israelis didn't want this discovery to get out as it would completely destroy their claim to the Holy Land and the Muslims wanted to get it out for the same reasons. In the End it was determined that the stone was a fake, Faked by the man who "found" it as he was dying of Cancer and wanted the money from selling it to leave to his Kids and his wife that was in a nursing home with Dementia. It was a good book.

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Is this the item you're referring to? http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_joash.htm

It might be what the book was based on. When i get home ill post the name of the book

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hanzosbm said:

Nor is there any historical evidence that King Solomon existed. Or Jesus, or just about any other figure in the Bible. Even assuming that they are all completely fictitious and serve only to teach a lesson, how could you expect to learn anything from the lesson if you aren't reading the original story? The Legend is almost certainly inaccurate as it stands today. Was it ever accurate? Who knows. But assuming it was completely fabricated for the purpose of teaching something, and has since been changed, that means that the original lesson has been lost. The attempt at understanding the origins of the story, be it fabricated or fact, is what will lead the reader to understanding the lesson.

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I think the key here is "Was it ever accurate?". It has a hidden assumption that literal truth is required to be able to learn a lesson from a story. It's an invalid hidden assumption.

Humans learn best when their lessons are in stories. We seem to have an instinctive need for stories. When one set of stories are taken away we replace them with another set of stories. When comparative mythology was removed from the high school curriculum the Jedi stories in Star Wars became vastly popular for example.

People read and learn from novels that are intended to be fictional.

It's okay for stories to be based in a type of truth that is general and symbolic without being literally true. It's okay for stories to evolve over time to remain well received across the generations.

To me the material at the start of this thread isn't about mistakes. It's about how the story has evolved to remain well received across the generations.