Freemasonry and The Goddess

A while ago I was looking around to see if there is more information available on the world wide web about Freemasonry and heathenism. I ran into a “blog” of William Bond called “Freemasonry And The Hidden Goddess” (url “masongoddess.blogspot.com”). It is a book published almost a decade ago and it is available as printing-on-demand, ebook, but also entirely from the website. I decided to give it a go.

The author is not a Mason. He is a lay-scholar on Goddess religion(s) who ran into a book about Freemasonry and was amazed by the amount of “Goddess symbolism” he found there. He did a little research and eventually wrote a fairly large book.

In the first parts of the book, Bond has some Masonic symbolism that he interprets in his own way. As the book continues, the Masonic information becomes thinner and thinner and the texts about matriarchal religions, women’s questions, etc. overshadow the apparent subject of the book.

What annoys me is the fact that the author lumps together a variety of information about Freemasonry, descent and awful. When he finds an image of Freemasons worshiping Baphomet he concludes that Freemasons “worship” a God with breasts. The logo of The Order Of The Eastern Star is -to him- one of the symbols of Freemasonry and somehow he has found out that: “one of symbols of Freemasonry […] is a Christian Cross with entwined around  it a snake”.

Then there is a the point that the author finds vaginas at every corner of the street. The square and compasses are “an open vagina”, the Holy Grail is a vagina (but what does it have to do with Freemasonry?), an arch is a vagina, and Masons use flowers as a vagina symbol (which is a remark on an image that is not Masonic…).
Every image of a woman in Masonic symbolism is a Goddess (Faith, Hope and Charity are something like Matronen, etc.) and a broken pillar is symbol of the destruction of masculine power.
Of course in this way you can read your point in any symbolism.

The idea is that Freemasonry arose when witchcraft was rooted out by Christianity. Freemasonry is the keeper of Goddess worship, but in time Masons no longer understood this (or some did) and Goddess elements were got rid off. Bond even goes so far to state that Albert Pike censored the rituals.

So there is a lot of ‘yada yada’ to wade through. The author would do good to conduct a better study of Freemasonry, so a suggestion that a door on a second degree tracing board would be an image of entering the womb could at least be left out. You can read a lot of different things in Masonic symbolism, but there is a structure and many things have their meanings in a context.

That said, Bond presents a wholly different take on Masonic symbolism. His book is neither well written (many stylistic and spelling errors), nor good (jumping conclusions and drawing obviously faulty conclusions), but it is always amusing to find out what other people make of the symbols so familiar to us.

So, Freemasonry as the keeper of Goddess worship. Why not?

Read the book yourself here: masongoddess.blogspot.com.