The City Laid Out in Stone

Study Three walked through the great temples of Washington: the obelisk, the Pantheon dome of the Capitol, and the Zeus-like Lincoln on his throne. This study looks at the spaces between them — the lines drawn across the ground, the long pools of still water, the temple-tomb a short way north of the White House, and the statues most visitors pass without a second look. Washington was not only built with pagan buildings. It was laid out as a pagan map.

The Triangle on the Mall

Draw a line south from the White House and a line west from the Capitol. They meet on the Mall at the spot chosen for the monument to Washington. The President’s House, the Capitol, and the Monument form a right triangle across the heart of the city. (The obelisk was built slightly off the true corner because of soft ground; a small marker called the Jefferson Pier still stands on the exact spot.)

The right triangle is the shape behind the theorem of Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher who taught that number and geometry were the hidden language of the gods. Freemasonry honors it directly. The jewel worn by a Past Master of a lodge carries the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid, the proof of the Pythagorean theorem, as one of the craft’s emblems.

Its religious meaning is older than Pythagoras. The Greek writer Plutarch, in On Isis and Osiris (about AD 100), records that the Egyptians likened the perfect right triangle, with sides of three, four, and five, to their divine family. The upright side was Osiris, the father. The base was Isis, the mother. The long side joining them was Horus, the son. One triangle, three gods.

That is the figure drawn between the seat of the president, the seat of the lawmakers, and the obelisk of the sun. The men who designed and consecrated the city were steeped in the craft, and the craft prized the triangle for exactly this reason. A god in three parts was the religion of Egypt long before it became a church creed. Israel was given a different confession at Sinai.

Deuteronomy 6:4Hear, O Israel: Yahuah our Elohim is one Yahuah.

As Above, So Below

Two long sheets of still water stretch across the Mall. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, finished in 1923, doubles the obelisk between the Lincoln Memorial and the Monument. The Capitol Reflecting Pool, added in 1971, doubles the dome at the other end. On a calm day each monument appears twice, once against the sky and once in the water.

Visitors see a postcard. The mystery traditions see a teaching. The best-known saying of the occult world is “as above, so below,” drawn from the Emerald Tablet credited to the legendary Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus. It teaches that the earth mirrors the heavens, and that a man who builds the pattern below can draw down the power above. A sun pillar standing in the sky and again in the water is that saying set in stone.

The Greeks told a story about a reflection too. Narcissus saw his own face in a pool and could not look away until he wasted at the water’s edge. A nation that builds monuments to its own heroes and then admires them doubled in the water is doing the same thing in public.

The “above” in the occult saying is the host of heaven — the sun and the stars the city was aligned to (Studies Two and Three). Scripture names that pull directly.

Deuteronomy 4:19And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them.

The House of the Temple

Follow Sixteenth Street north from the White House about a dozen blocks and the street opens onto a massive stone building guarded by two sphinxes. This is the House of the Temple, the headquarters of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Southern Jurisdiction, completed in 1915. Its architect, John Russell Pope, modeled it on the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus — the tomb of a pagan king and one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

The roof is a stepped pyramid with a flat top. Like the pyramid on the dollar bill (Study Seven), it rises toward a peak that is not there. Inside its walls lie the remains of Albert Pike, the author of Morals and Dogma, the man who wrote that Sirius still glitters in the lodges as the Blazing Star (Study Two). The headquarters of the craft stands on a straight street north of the presidency, built as a pagan tomb and crowned with an unfinished pyramid.

Ezekiel was shown the elders of Israel serving their images in a hidden chamber, saying Yahuah could not see them (Ezekiel 8:12). The House of the Temple is not hidden at all. It stands open on one of the capital’s main streets, and most who pass it see only a museum.

The Child Between the Two

On the Ellipse, just south of the White House, stands the Boy Scout Memorial, dedicated in 1964 and sculpted by Donald De Lue. A bronze Scout strides forward in uniform. Behind him tower two classical figures, a man and a woman, unclothed in the Greek manner, said to stand for American manhood and womanhood watching over the boy.

The arrangement is an old one: a father, a mother, and the child who carries the hope of the nation — the same family Plutarch found in the Egyptian triangle, where Horus was the son of Osiris and Isis, the young god who grew up to rule the land. Whether or not the sculptor intended it, the memorial sets a child between a god-like father and mother a short walk from the triangle drawn in their names.

Deuteronomy 4:16Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female.

The Bearded Faces

The bearded father-god is the oldest face in the pagan world. In Greece he was Zeus, in Rome Jupiter, the sky god who threw the lightning and sent the rain. In Canaan the same storm god was Baal. Washington is full of him.

In front of the Library of Congress stands the Court of Neptune (1898), a bronze fountain of the bearded sea god of Rome rising among tritons and sea serpents. Inside the Smithsonian sits Horatio Greenough’s marble George Washington (1840), carved for the Capitol rotunda and modeled on the seated Zeus of Olympia — bare-chested, robed, one arm raised to heaven. The Lincoln Memorial follows the same Zeus pattern (Study Three). Bearded masks and heads look down from keystones over doors and windows across the city.

Elijah’s contest on Mount Carmel was fought over the question these faces keep asking: who sends the rain?

1 Kings 18:21How long halt ye between two opinions? if Yahuah be the Elohim, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word.

The fire fell on Elijah’s altar, and the rain came at Elijah’s prayer (1 Kings 18:38, 45). Yahuah settled the question there. Washington carved the other answer into its walls.

Reading the Stones

None of this requires a believer to stay away from Washington or fear its stones. It requires clear eyes. The triangle on the Mall is Egypt’s divine family. The reflecting pools are a mystery teaching set in water. The temple on Sixteenth Street is the craft’s own tomb. The bearded faces are the old storm god in a new city. Revelation warns of a day when the whole earth will be told to make an image and worship it (Revelation 13:14–15). The habit is learned long before that day, one statue and one admiring look at a time.

Come out of her, my people.

Revelation 18:4Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.