The Hiram Key: Pharaohs, Freemasons and the Discovery of the Secret Scrolls of Jesus - Hardcover

Knight, Christopher; Lomas, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1862040044 ISBN 13: 9781862040045

Publisher: Element Books Ltd, 1997

Synopsis

The authors recount their search for the origins of Freemasonry, describing how their research on Hiram Abif--the builder of King Solomon's Temple--suggests a new key to Western history

About this title

About the Author:

Christopher Knight has a degree in advertising and graphic design and is the managing director of a marketing and advertising agency. In 1976 he became a Freemason.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction:

Henry Ford once declared that ‘all history is bunk’. It may have sounded a little abrupt but when it comes to the ‘facts’ of the past which most Westerners are taught in school, it turns out that Mr. Ford was right.

Our starting point was a private piece of research to find the origins of Freemasonry — the world’s largest society that today has almost five million male members in regular Lodges and has in the past included many great men amongst its number, from Mozart to Henry Ford. As Freemasons, our goal was to try to understand a little about the meaning of Masonic ritual: those strange, secret ceremonies carried out by mainly middle-class, middle-aged men from Huddersfield to Houston.

At the center of Masonic lore is a character called Hiram Abif who, according to a story told to every Freemason, was murdered almost three thousand years ago at the building of King Solomon’s Temple. This man is a total enigma. His role as the builder of King Solomon’s Temple and the circumstances of his horrible death are clearly described in Masonic history, yet he is not mentioned in the Old Testament. For four of the six years we spent working on this research, we believed that Hiram Abif was a symbolic creation. But then he materialized out of the mists of time to prove himself very real indeed.

Once Hiram Abif emerged from the distant past, he provided nothing less than a new key to Western history. The intellectual contortions and labored conclusions that have previously formed Western society’s collective view of the past gave way to simple and logical order. Our researches led us first to reconstructing the ancient Egyptian kingmaking ritual of four thousand years ago; that in turn led us to uncover an assassination that took place around 1570 BC, which gave rise to a resurrection ceremony that is the direct antecedent of modern Freemasonry. As we tracked the development of this secret ritual from Thebes to Jerusalem, we uncovered its role in the building of the Hebrew nation and in the evolution of Jewish theology.

In startling contrast to what is currently held to be fact, the Western world actually developed according to a very ancient philosophy encoded into a secret system that has come to the surface at three key moments over the last three thousand years.

The final proof of our findings may well turn out to be the archaeological find of the century. We have located the secret scrolls of Jesus and his followers.

About this edition

• Publisher: Element Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1862040044
• ISBN 13: 9781862040045
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384