Talisman

By the Same Authors

BY GRAHAM HANCOCK

The Sign and the Seal

Fingerprints of the Gods

Heaven’s Mirror (WITH SANTHA FAIIA)

Underworld

BY ROBERT BAUVAL

Secret Chamber

The Orion Mystery (WITH ADRIAN GILBERT)

BY GRAHAM HANCOCK AND ROBERT BAUVAL

Keeper of Genesis

The Mars Mystery (WITH JOHN GRIGSBY)

www.grahamhancock.com
www.robertbauval.com
For further details and regular updates on the many issues and mysteries raised in Talisman, go to www.talismanthebook.com

MICHAEL JOSEPH

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2004
1

Copyright © Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval, 2004

The moral right of the authors has been asserted

All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book

EISBN 978–0–141–90671–3

I dedicate this book to my mother Yvonne Bauval (née Gatt), whose boundless Latin good nature and unflinching love for her family has been the bright flame that has guided us all through our mini Diaspora out of Egypt, and to my inimitable brother Jean-Paul and twin sister Thérèse, who have always supported me in my many years of mixed success, strife and tribulations.

Robert G. Bauval

For my father. Your warmth and wise advice are sorely missed.

Graham Hancock

PROLOGUE:

The Sacred Cities

Chapter 1

Behind the Veils

‘The boat of Isis, a feast which was celebrated in Rome with great pomp, was known as Navigium Isidis; after it had been launched in the water, it was brought back to the temple of Isis and prayers were made for the prosperity of the emperor, for the empire and for the Roman people…’ (F. Noël, Dictionaire de la fable, Paris, 1823)

‘No one ignores that Paris was originally enclosed in the island (de la Cité). It was thus, since its origins, a city of navigation… As it was in a river rife with navigation, it took as its symbol a boat, and as tutelary goddess, Isis, goddess of navigation; and this boat was the actual one of Isis, symbol of this goddess.’ (Court de Gebelin, Monde Primitif analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, Paris, 1773)

On 14 July 1789 a furious crowd ran riot on the streets of Paris and stormed the great prison known as the Bastille. Less than an hour later the fate of France hung in the balance and European history seemed set on a new and alarmingly unpredictable course.

Contemporary engravings of the Bastille show a forbidding rectangular structure flanked by eight tall towers. It does not look easy to storm. Built in the late fourteenth century as a fortress to protect eastern Paris, it was converted in the seventeenth century into a squalid and ghastly prison for dissidents. By the time of the Revolution it was firmly established in the public mind as an instrument of tyranny and as a powerful symbol of the despotism of the French Crown.

The day after the storming of the Bastille an enterprising local contractor, Monsieur Pierre-François Palloy,¹ took it upon himself to mobilize a workforce of 800 citizens to dismantle the hated prison stone by stone.² The work was so well done that within a month most of the structure had been reduced to rubble with only a small part of the perimeter wall and foundations still intact.

At this point something curious occurred. The suggestion was made, and for a while taken seriously, that the stones of the Bastille should be salvaged in order to construct a replica of an ancient Egyptian pyramid on the site.³ And although the project later stalled for lack of funds, the core idea of making a symbolic connection with ancient Egypt persisted behind the scenes. If a pyramid could not be managed, something less would have to suffice. Thus it was that on 10 August 1793 a group of revolutionaries ceremoniously installed a large statue of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis where the Bastille had formerly stood. Depicting the goddess seated on a throne flanked by two lions, the statue had been conceived by Jacques-Louis David, the famous artist and propagandist of the Revolution. It was to be one of the props in a macabre republican feast hastily put together in order to celebrate the decapitation of Louis XVI six months previously and the forthcoming guillotining of Queen Marie-Antoinette still two months ahead.

The sculptors Suzanne and Cartelier did not have sufficient time to cast the statue in the preferred medium of bronze, so they simply moulded it in plaster and coloured it with bronze paint.⁴ From the bare nipples of the ‘goddess Isis’ water could be seen being ejected into an open basin below the statue. Known as the ‘Fountain of Regeneration’, the general idea was for the crowd of people to pass in procession in front of ‘Isis’ and drink ‘from her fertile breasts the pure and salutary liquor of regeneration’.⁵

De-Christianization

Everyone knows that philosophical ideas, notably those of Rousseau and Voltaire, were part of the ferment that led to the French Revolution. Still, it is hard to explain why an overtly religious ritual – such as the Isis ceremony described above – should have received official sponsorship from the revolutionary government as early as 1793. That it did so, moreover, on a site so powerfully symbolic as the Place de la Bastille raises an interesting question. Is it possible that spiritual and even ‘religious’ beliefs could have played a greater role than has hitherto been recognized in precipitating and sustaining the changes that gripped France after 1789?

For example, although the matter has been little studied, it became clear in the early days of the Revolution that its core objectives included not only the eradication of the monarchy and a radical readjustment of the social and economic order, as might be expected, but also another, even more far-reaching goal: the eradication, no less – one might almost say the extirpation – of Christianity from the soil of France. This objective was adopted as official policy in the winter of 1793, a few months after the Isis rituals at the Bastille, and set in train an intense and systematic national campaign of ‘de-Christianization’.⁶ As French historian Michel Vovelle sums up, this now almost forgotten facet of the Revolution was not some passive and progressive attempt at conversion, but a methodical and forceful enterprise imposed though violence and intimidation.⁷

Why this sudden rush to stamp out Christianity?

Was it just that the Revolutionaries saw Christianity as a rival for the loyalty of the masses and hated and resented the ancient ties between the monarchy and the Church?

Or was there another, deeper game being played?

Very Christian King Beheaded by Cult of Supreme Being

The kings of France liked to trace their origins back to the Merovingians, a Frankish dynasty of the fifth to the eighth centuries AD. Nothing is known about Merovech, the semi-legendary founder of the dynasty, but his son, Childeric I, is a historical figure who ruled a tribe of Salian Franks from his capital at Tournai circa AD 470. In AD 481 or 482 Childeric was succeeded by his son, Clovis I, who united almost all of Gaul and converted to Christianity around AD 496.

Clovis died circa AD 511, but the Merovingian dynasty continued to rule much of what is now France until AD 750. It was succeeded by the Carolingian dynasty, which gained great renown circa AD 800 with the dramatic coronation by Pope Leo III of Charlemagne as the very first ‘Holy Roman Emperor’. Thereafter all kings of France were regarded as the protectors of the Roman Church and to this effect bore the title Roi Très Chrétien – ‘Very Christian King’. Indeed, so pious were France’s medieval kings that one of them was actually canonized as a saint – Louis IX, a hero of the Crusades, whom we will meet in Part I.⁸

Meanwhile, to return to that terrible year of 1793–4 – the year, in fact, of the revolutionary ‘Terror’ with its unruly orgy of beheading – a different kind of religious phenomenon was suddenly widely observed in France: Catholic priests began to ‘abdicate’ their positions in droves⁹ and a new, officially sponsored cult was launched by the Convention (the revolutionary government) within recently ‘de-Christianized’ churches and cathedrals all across the land. Sometimes referred to as the ‘cult of Reason’, but more commonly as the ‘cult of the Supreme Being’, it seems that this new religion was the brainchild of the revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre and that its establishment was masterminded once again by the artist Jacques-Louis David (who had previously been involved in the Isis/Bastille stunt).

The Tricolour Goddess with the Phrygian Cap

In street festivals staged during the French Revolution, the ‘goddess Reason’ was routinely personified by an actress garbed with a tricolour red, white and blue veil and wearing the so-called Phrygian cap. This same little red cap was in great vogue with the general public in the early part of the Revolution and was worn especially by the Sans Culottes, the most zealous faction, who partook in the thousands of guillotine executions in Paris and throughout the country.

The Phrygian cap is the typical headwear of two well-known pagan deities: the goddess Cybele and the god Mithras.

Cybele was one of the great mother goddesses of antiquity and, more particularly at one stage, of Rome, whose ‘republic’ the French revolutionaries tried to emulate. As the name of her cap suggests, her cult origins were in ancient Phrygia (modern Turkey). In statuary she was routinely associated with two lions, either depicted harnessed to her chariot or flanking the ceremonial throne used by the high priests of her cult. Medieval and Renaissance scholars frequently identified her with the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis. It therefore seems unlikely to be an accident that a Cybele-like goddess was to figure so prominently in the iconography of the French Revolution – for example in the so-called Génie de la République, a marble sculpture by the artist Joseph Chinard, made in the aftermath of the fall of the Bastille, which shows ‘République’ as a young woman in Graeco-Roman garb wearing the Phrygian hat.¹⁰

In the strange and terrible year of 1793–4 the so-called cult of Reason spread like wildfire in the French provinces alongside the de-Christianization process. It became common to witness large processions, or street theatres, in which the goddess ‘Reason’, wearing the Phrygian cap, was towed on a cart to the nearest church or cathedral. Such events might look like nothing more than excuses for men and women to get drunk together, yet in France there were always more serious undertones. On 7 November 1793, for example, no less a figure than the Bishop of Paris was forced by the Convention to recant his faith. Three days later, on 10 November, huge celebrations were organized at his cathedral in honour of the alternative cult of ‘Reason’.

As the highlight of the celebrations a certain Mlle Aubry, a beautiful and popular actress wrapped in a white veil and blue tunic and wearing the red Phrygian cap, emerged from a ‘temple’ dedicated to ‘philosophy’ and was sat on a throne while the crowds came to pay homage to her. The procession then marched to the Convention, where Citizen Chabot, a zealous revolutionary and one of the co-architects of the new cult, decreed that henceforth the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, the oldest and most revered Christian sanctuary in the land, was to become the ‘Temple of Reason’. Several ceremonies then followed where the role of the ‘goddess’ was assumed by various Parisian beauties, among them Mlle Maillard, Mlle Lacombe and Mme Momoro.¹¹

The Obelisk and the Painting

In 1813, twenty-six years after the storming of the Bastille, the great culture-changing momentum of the French Revolution seemingly came to a grinding halt with the defeat of Napoleon. Seizing the moment, the exiled Count de Provence, Louis-Stanislas-Xavier, younger brother of Louis XVI, promised the French people that he would uphold some of the tenets of the Revolution in a new form of monarchy. Then, advised by the brilliant statesman Talleyrand, he entered Paris in May 1814, where he was received with open arms by the war-weary French and, amid much jubilation, was installed on the throne as Louis XVIII.¹²

Louis XVIII ruled for ten years. He was a Freemason. On his death in 1824 he was succeeded by his brother, the Count d’Artois – also a Freemason – who took the name Charles X. Both monarchs showed a marked preference for ancient Egyptian symbolism in their public works and two projects of Charles X are of particular interest in this regard. The first involved transporting an intact ancient Egyptian obelisk to Paris. The second called for the commissioning of a gigantic painting in the Louvre.

The Obelisk

In 1827, Jean-François Champollion (dubbed the ‘father of modern Egyptology’ for his breakthrough decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs) was commissioned by Charles X to arrange for the importation to Paris of a 3500-year-old obelisk – one of a pair – that stood at Alexandria in Egypt.¹³

The obelisk was destined for the Place de la Concorde, a prestigious location of great personal significance to Charles X. It had originally been named in honour of his father, Louis XV, an equestrian statue of whom had once graced it. But the statue had been pulled down and destroyed during the 1789 Revolution and the site renamed by the Convention as ‘Place de la Concorde’. Here also the guillotine had been erected that had beheaded Louis XVI in January 1793 and Marie-Antoinette in October of the same blood-stained year. May we speculate that the installation of the obelisk was to commemorate the idea of a reborn and restored monarchy, with the ancient solar symbol of the divine kings of Egypt rising in the heart of the Parisian skyline like a ‘phoenix’?

The Painting

Charles X’s second noteworthy project was to commission the artist François-Edouard Picot to decorate the ceiling of his personal museum at the Louvre with a specific ‘Egyptian’ theme.

Picot, like many promising artists of the time, had studied under the master Jacques-Louis David – the man responsible for the statue of Isis in the Place de la Bastille. We should not be surprised, therefore, that the very same ‘Isis’ is found on Picot’s painting for Charles X.

Still decorating a ceiling of the Louvre, the great work was completed in 1827 and measures roughly 5 × 4 metres. Its title is L’Etude et le Génie dévoilent à Athènes l’Antique Egypte (‘Learning and Genius Unveil Ancient Egypt to Athens’). The figure of Isis dominates the scene and is depicted seated on a throne flanked by two lions – as was the case with David’s earlier Isis of the Bastille. The viewer, however, is immediately drawn to contemplate the sky above the goddess, where can be seen flying two angels in the act of ‘unveiling’ the secrets of Isis.

We catch a tantalizing glimpse of a haunting landscape containing in the far distance an obelisk and a group of pyramids at which Isis languidly casts her gaze. From the clouds next to the angels, the Greek goddess Athena appears with an owl at her feet symbolizing initiation and wisdom. To the left of Athena is a winged goddess wearing a laurel wreath symbolizing ‘Learning’ (l’Etude). To the right of Athena is the so-called Génie de Paris, a naked winged youth brandishing a torch in order to illuminate and reveal to Athena the Egyptianized landscape below.

After the abdication of Charles X in 1830, Louis-Philippe I became the new ruler of France. Also known as the Citizen-King, he commissioned a monument to commemorate the Trois Glorieuses, those three days of 26, 27 and 28 July 1830 that marked France’s Second Revolution. This monument, which was completed in 1836, is a tall pillar erected in the Place de la Bastille on the very spot where David had positioned his statue of Isis in August 1793. On top of the pillar is a close replica of the winged youth with the torch seen in Picot’s painting in the Louvre.

Is Picot reminding us that here, below the winged Génie de Paris, had once been a statue of Isis as also seen in his painting?

Coincidence, or Blueprint?

Let us imagine ourselves in Paris today, riding in a helicopter above the Bastille pillar and looking westward, along the line of sight of the Génie de Paris. We are hovering over the city’s oldest and most sacred quarters. Sprawled beneath us are some of the most impressive buildings and monuments that Paris has to offer. To our left runs the Boulevard Henri IV leading to the river Seine. The river itself runs roughly from east to west, and thus parallel to our westward line of sight, while beyond Boulevard Henri IV is the old Pont Sully arching over the eastern edge of the Ile St Louis, with its famous abbey of the same name. The western tip of the island is linked by a pedestrian bridge to the much larger Ile de la Cité, site of the celebrated Cathedral of Notre-Dame and the impressive Palais de Justice.

Across the Seine is the tall bell tower of the Abbey of St Germain – the latter, as we shall later see, intriguingly once a sanctuary dedicated to the goddess Isis. Yet all these wonders will pale when we focus our eyes along our line of sight westwards with the Génie de Paris, for before us will unfold the most enchanting urban landscape that Europe has to offer. Shooting westward and parallel to the Seine is the Rue de Rivoli, leading to the Church of St Germain L’Auxerrois – the oldest in Paris, where the ancient kings of France were traditionally baptized. Immediately beyond the church is the crab-shaped Grand Louvre, perhaps Europe’s most wonderful museum and, until 1663, the main palace of the kings of France.

And there is yet more to feast our eyes upon. Today an imposing glass pyramid – commissioned by President Mitterrand for the bicentennial celebration of 1989 – looms like a giant diamond in the Cour Napoléon of the Louvre. This out-of-place pyramid seems to define for us an open vista westward leading through Napoleon’s Arc du Carrousel and towards the impeccably groomed gardens of the Tuileries. Our line of sight further takes in the wide and perfectly straight Avenue des Champs-Elysées, the backbone of Paris that was once known as the Axe historique – the Historical Axis. At this point it is impossible not to see the tall Egyptian obelisk that rears up towards the sky in the Place de la Concorde at the entrance of the Champs-Elysées. And nor can we ignore the way in which the whole layout that we observe from the high vantage point of the Génie de Paris bears an uncanny and striking similarity to the layout and general scheme suggested in Picot’s painting. For if we examine this painting more closely and try to imagine ourselves now alongside the other winged Génie de Paris which hovers over the mysterious Egyptianized landscape of Picot’s masterpiece, something immediately becomes clear. The obelisk and the various pyramids that Picot included not only seem to define the central axis of the painting but, if transposed to the layout of Paris, will correlate with the Concorde obelisk and the Louvre pyramid that define the central or ‘historical’ axis of the city!

Charles X’s decision to send Champollion to Egypt to bring back the obelisk was taken during the year 1826–7 while Picot was in the process of painting his masterpiece at the Louvre. We also know that Picot was deeply involved in the furbishing of Charles X’s Egyptian Museum at the Louvre palace and that he would almost certainly have been privy to the discussions surrounding the importation and positioning of the obelisk. Even though it was not until 1836 that it was finally raised up in the Place de la Concorde, therefore, it’s easy to understand why the artist might have been inspired to put an obelisk in his 1827 painting – and in the right place.

Much harder to explain is the relationship between the pyramids Picot shows in the painting and the glass pyramid visible in our aerial view. This is because the latter is a modern work, less than twenty years old at time of writing, designed by architect I. M. Pei and completed in 1984.

So the question is, how could Picot have anticipated I. M. Pei’s pyramid? Or – more conspiratorially – did the 1827 painting allude to some sort of occult plan or blueprint for Paris that has continued to be implemented over more than 150 years? Or is it just a huge coincidence that the Egyptianized landscape being unveiled in the painting has been reproduced in the architecture of Paris?

Was Freemasonry Behind the French Revolution?

We have already seen how during the 1789 Revolution it was proposed to raise a pyramid at the site of the Bastille – something that Picot would certainly have known of. Picot is also likely to have been aware of a number of other grandiose ‘pyramid’ projects that were planned before and after the Revolution but that had been stalled because of shortage of funds.

There had been, for example, a massive ‘pyramid tomb’ planned in Paris in honour of the scientist Sir Isaac Newton, who was a hero of the ‘Enlightenment’ and, consequently, of revolutionary ideals. The ‘pyramid’ was designed by the French architect, Joseph-Jean-Pascal Gay, in 1800, and was to have had a great perimeter wall with four gates modelled on the temple of Karnak in Upper Egypt, and an alley of eighteen sphinxes leading to the ‘pyramid’.¹⁴

There were, too, the various pyramids proposed by the architect Etienne-Louis Boullée. One of his surviving sketches is of a group of pyramids closely resembling the pyramids in Picot’s painting – where they are seen enveloped in clouds and haze with their capstones missing.¹⁵ The historian Jean Starobinski, in his study of the emblems and symbols of the 1789 Revolution, explains that the ‘language of the Revolution’ was intensely ‘symbolic’. Starobinski also speaks of a mood that seems to have seized architects in the immediately pre-revolutionary period: a novel need to use basic geometrical shapes – cubes, spheres, pyramids – on a monumental scale and to transform Paris into some sort of ‘utopian city’:

[there was a] need to add images to ideas, and to design the plans of an ideal city. This city, like all other utopic cities, would be governed by the laws of a simple and strict geometry… All these grand architectural styles in line with simple principles of geometry presented as projects remained unrealized. [And although] a harmonious city, a city for a new age… existed in the portfolios of certain architects, well-before the storming of the Bastille… the Revolution would have neither the time, nor the resources, nor perhaps the audacity to ask them to undertake these great civic projects…¹⁶

But why an Egyptianized utopian vision for Paris? Why pyramids and pseudo-Egyptian landscapes? Where did such strange ideas come from? And who was promoting them?

Such obsessions with Egyptian symbolism, architecture and particularly geometry once again suggest the influence of Freemasonry. Yet the authorities are divided on the matter. Scores of historians argue that an important role was indeed played by Freemasons in the French Revolution while, on the other hand, equal numbers argue that Freemasonry had nothing or little to do with it. This state of affairs is adequately expressed by the French historian J. Godechot, an expert on the subject:

There is a whole genre of literature, which shows no sign of abating, which attributes the responsibility of the Revolution, and especially the days of 1789, to the Duc d’Orléans [the first Grand Master of the Grande Orient, the supreme body which regulates Freemasonry in France]. According to this literature, it was the Duc d’Orléans who was responsible for the riots of the Reveillon, those of the 14th July, those of the night of the 4th August, and those of the days of October. The Duc certainly attempted to profit from these events but whether he was the cause of them seems highly doubtful. In any case, if he did play this game, his efforts constituted a small influence compared to the much larger forces that pushed the people, France and even all of the Western world towards Revolution…¹⁷

The truth is that no historian, however thorough his or her research, can really know what ‘forces’, visible or occult, moved the French people to erupt in total revolution against the monarchy and the Church in 1789. By definition such ‘forces’ are impossible to gauge and sometimes may not be ‘visible’ or ‘documented’ at all. It is a similar problem attempting to catalogue the forces behind the Crusades in the Middle Ages or behind the Holocaust in Nazi Germany – or indeed those ‘forces’ that launched the United States on its war against ‘terrorism’ at the beginning of the twenty-first century. No single force, occult or otherwise, can be deemed solely responsible for any of these events; rather a combination of forces has in every instance been at play.

In the case of the French Revolution, it is clear that one of the main forces was generated by the terrible oppression of the people and the abuse of power by the monarchy. Yet no historian will deny that there was also a strong philosophical and/or intellectual undercurrent to the Revolution which exerted a powerful influence on the behaviour of key figures such as Robespierre, Danton and Marat, as well as others such as the painter Jacques-Louis David and the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. At this stage of our investigation Freemasonry remains as good a candidate as any for the source of this undercurrent.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in America, another, ‘sister’ Revolution had taken place a decade earlier. There, too, a strong philosophical/intellectual undercurrent can easily be detected which moved the main players such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and George Washington. And there, too, a utopian city was, quite literally, in the making – to an esoteric plan far less veiled than that of Paris.

Franklin, Freemasonry and Revolution

That the American Revolution or War of Independence was much influenced by Freemasons and Masonic ideologies and principles is a well-accepted thesis. There are several good works on this topic¹⁸ that leave little doubt that Freemasonry was one of the driving forces behind the ideals and tenets, and the attachment to republicanism, of the American Revolution. What is less well known is the fact that there was a very close connection between the French and American Masonic lodges at that time.

It is not clear whether or not Freemasonry might have entered North America before the establishment of United Grand Lodge in 1717, but the earliest surviving records of formal Masonic lodges in America are from Boston and Philadelphia in the early 1730s.¹⁹ The spread of Freemasonry in America occurred through the so-called ‘military lodges’, and by the eve of the War of Independence in 1775 it had become extremely popular among the ranking officers and gentry.

One of the first American Freemasons was Benjamin Franklin, who was initiated in February 1731 and became Master of the St John’s Lodge in the city of Philadelphia, where he ‘produced the oldest draft of American lodge by-laws still in existence’.²⁰ Franklin, who had founded the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729, is also renowned in Masonic circles for printing (in December 1730) the very first article in America which referred to Freemasonry.²¹

In those days Freemasonry in America was regulated by United Grand Lodge in England, which appointed ‘Provincial Grand Masters’ in various regions of the North American continent. In 1749 Franklin was appointed Provincial Grand Master of Pennsylvania. An intellectual, a brilliant politician and, above all, a cunning agent-provocateur, Franklin was to become the key figure in the American revolt against Britain and, of course, the most renowned ‘Founding Father’ of the United States.

Both as a young man and later in his adult life, Franklin passed three sojourns in England – a total of fifteen years accumulated between 1724 and 1726, 1757 and 1762, and 1765 and 1775. During these lengthy stays no one disputes that he gravitated in his choice of friendships towards influential Freemasons and radical intellectuals. On his return visits to America he became notorious for stirring up dissent against British colonial rule – so much so that the Privy Council of London found it necessary to summon him and severely warn him not to rouse anti-British sentiment in the colonies.

It was Franklin who, while in England, had encouraged the rejection of the so-called Stamp-tax imposed by the British on the American colonies (the tax required settlers to pay a fee to certify all legal documents and transactions). Franklin managed to intercept a series of letters written by Thomas Hutchinson, the British governor of Massachusetts, in which several important American political figures were spoken of in very hostile terms. Franklin dispatched copies of these letters to friends in America, who had them published, causing such an outrage that the British had to appease the situation by retracting the Stamp-tax.

By the spring of 1775 the pressure was mounting against Franklin in England, and he decided it was time to return to America. He arrived there on 5 May. While he had been at sea, war had broken out between the British and the American revolutionary forces at Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775.

On his arrival in Pennsylvania, Franklin was immediately appointed as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, the body that was soon to become the Congress of the United States of America. Other newly appointed members were Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Among the first decisions that the Congress made (on 15 June 1775) was the appointment of Washington as commander-in-chief of the revolutionary armed forces.

Washington was forty-three years old in 1775 and Franklin sixty-nine. Like Franklin, Washington was a Freemason. He had been initiated into the brotherhood in 1752 at Fredericksburg in Virginia, and had been raised a Master Mason the following year.²² John Hancock, a rich Harvard gentleman, was president of the Congress at the time. He, too, was a prominent Freemason, later to be distinguished as the first man to sign the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776.

In September 1776 the Congress agreed to send a commission to France in order to seek military and financial support for the war against Britain. Franklin was a member of the three-man commission. He arrived in Paris just before Christmas that year. Although France was not at war with England at the time, it was regarded as its natural enemy and, therefore, sympathetic to the American cause.

Franklin immediately struck up friendships with important figures in French society and, particularly, among the elite and the Freemasons. To the French he personified the unsophisticated nobility of the New World, and he quickly became the darling of French society and the hero of the intellectuals and military gentry. A sort of ‘Franklin cult’ was to emerge, and his portrait was seen everywhere, from snuffboxes to chamber pots. His company was in great demand by artists, intellectuals and high-society ladies. Spies and informers infested his house.

Franklin was to engage in secret negotiations with the Comte de Vergennes, Louis XVI’s Minister for Foreign Affairs. These negotiations lasted several years, and eventually treaties were signed in 1778 in which France pledged military and economic support to the revolutionary cause in America.

Meanwhile, in Paris Franklin pursued his social and intellectual interests with gusto by joining the illustrious Nine Sisters Masonic lodge.²³ This famous lodge was founded in 1776 by Joseph Lalande and the l’Abbé Cordier de Saint-Fermin, the latter the godfather of Voltaire. This was the same year that the Declaration of Independence was signed in America, with Franklin being the most senior of the signatories. Lalande was France’s most respected astronomer, and wielded much influence amongst Parisian intellectuals.

Nine Sisters Lodge

The Nine Sisters lodge, named after the nine muses of Greek mythology, was in fact the successor of an older lodge, Les Sciences, which Lalande had founded in 1766 with the philosopher and mathematician Claude Helvetius. Helvetius was a staunch advocate of absolute atheism whose political and philosophical ideas would much influence the 1789 Revolution. After the death of Helvetius in 1771, his wife, Anne Catherine Helvetius, joined forces with Lalande and Saint-Fermin in the creation of the Nine Sisters lodge. Her own elite salon in the Rue Sainte Anne in Paris was famous throughout Europe, and was dubbed ‘the general headquarters of European philosophy’.²⁴ Another of her salons in Auteuil near Paris maintained very close links with the Nine Sisters lodge.²⁵

Not surprisingly, Franklin was a regular visitor to Mme Helvetius’s salon. Another was the Marquis de Lafayette, a young officer in the French army. Lafayette belonged to a Masonic lodge, Le Contrat Social, which was linked to other important lodges throughout France. Notable amongst these was the lodge La Société Olympique, with its membership of young officers such as the Count de Chambrun, the Count-Admiral de Grasse, the Count-Admiral d’Estaing and the buccaneer John Paul Jones – all of whom would fight for the American cause a few years later.²⁶

In 1779 Franklin became the Venerable Master of the Nine Sisters lodge. Earlier, in 1778, he had been given the ultimate honour of assisting in the initiation of the 84-year-old Voltaire. It is said that the aging Voltaire was supported on the arms of Franklin and Court de Gebelin, the Swiss-French inventor of the modern esoteric Tarot.²⁷

In April 1777 Franklin’s agent in Paris, the diplomat Sileas Deane, succeeded in recruiting the young Marquis de Lafayette, then only nineteen years old, and dispatching him to America to serve under Washington.²⁸

All in all, therefore, there is ample evidence of Masonic activity – in France – focused on the care and nurture of the American Revolution and centred around Franklin and the Nine Sisters lodge. Such evidence is suggestive but does not permit us to deduce that the Nine Sisters lodge and/or Freemasonry in general were also responsible for the violent eruptions in Paris on 14 July 1789 with the storming of the Bastille and the total revolution that followed.

Still, the suspicion lingers. As the French historian Bernard Fay explains:

The revolutionary impulse, the revolutionary funds, the revolutionary leaders, during the first two years of the Revolution, came from the privileged classes. If the Duc d’Orléans, Mirabeau, Lafayette; if the Noailles family, the La Rochefoucauld, the Bouillon, the Lameth and other liberal nobles had not deserted the nobility in order to join the cause of the people and the Revolution, the revolutionaries would have been deprived of this advantage which allowed them to triumph from the outset. Now, all these nobles who rallied in haste to the cause of new ideas, although at the end they lost their fortunes, their situation, their ranks, and their lives, were Freemasons and we cannot attribute this to hazard, unless we ignore the evidence.²⁹

Not surprisingly, Bernard Fay also sees the Nine Sisters lodge as being the focus of the activities that marked the early years of the French Revolution. This lodge, as we know, harboured not only several key players in both the French Revolution and the ‘sister’ Revolution in America, but also writers, intellectuals, politicians and artists, who used their talents to extol the virtues of the Republic in their publications and artwork. ‘It is certain’, writes Masonic historian Jean-André Faucher, that ‘the Freemasons [of the Nine Sisters lodge and other lodges] who contributed to the collapse of the monarchy and to the success of the Revolution were in great numbers.’³⁰

Another alleged member of the Nine Sisters lodge was the brilliant trained orator, lawyer and self-made politician Georges Jacques Danton. He is credited by many scholars with the pivotal role in toppling the French monarchy and in the creation of the First Republic in September 1792. He was also the founder of the infamous Club des Cordeliers, an ultraradical revolutionary society officially known as the Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Robespierre and the Cult of the Supreme Being

Danton was one of the so-called Triumvirs, contesting the control of the Republic with two other revolutionary leaders, Robespierre and Marat – the latter a Freemason. It has never been conclusively established that Robespierre was a Freemason too. Nevertheless, his intellectual ideals and obsession with the ‘virtues’, as well as his promotion of the cult of the Supreme Being, all reek of Masonic influence.

In Freemasonry God is often described as ‘the Grand Architect of the Universe’. His symbol is either a five-pointed star – the Blazing Star, in which is depicted the letter G – or a glowing pyramid or triangle with the all-seeing-eye (the eye of vigilance) inscribed within it. This symbol can still be seen on the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and appears quite obviously to have been modelled on the ‘Supreme Being’ of the Freemasons – likewise symbolized by the all-seeing eye in the glowing pyramid.

English Freemasonry in particular has gone to great lengths to assert that belief in a Supreme Being is a precondition of membership.³¹ Thus, in an official statement by the ‘Board of General Purposes’, ratified by Grand Lodge in London, it was confirmed that:

The Board has given the most earnest consideration to this subject, being convinced that it is of fundamental importance to the reputation and well-being of English Freemasonry that no misunderstanding should exist on either side of the craft. It cannot be too strongly asserted that Masonry is neither a religion nor a substitute for religion… On the other hand, its basic requirement that every member of the Order shall believe in a Supreme Being and the stress laid upon his duty towards Him should be sufficient evidence to all but the wilfully prejudiced that Masonry is an upholder of religion since it requires a man to have some form of religion before he can be admitted as a Mason…³²

The above statement was, in fact, construed from the Constitution of Freemasonry, drafted in 1723, where in the so-called First Charge, which is entitled ‘Concerning God and Religion’, the following statement appears: ‘Let a man’s religion or mode of worship be what it may, he is not excluded from the Order, provided he believe in the glorious Architect of heaven and earth…’³³

The term ‘Supreme Being’ is widely used in the information literature of United Grand lodge where, for example, an official leaflet declares that ‘members must believe in a Supreme Being, but there is no separate Masonic God’.³⁴ In other Masonic pamphlets the term ‘Grand Architect of the Universe’ is also extensively used. Clearly no distinctions are made between terms like ‘Glorious Architect of Heaven and Earth’, ‘Grand Architect of the Universe’ and ‘Supreme Being’. All are, quite obviously, considered appropriate and interchangeable epithets for the Masonic idea of ‘God’.

³⁵