MANUAL OF FREEMASONRY - Masonic High Council the Mother ...

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INTRODUCTION
&c. It is therefore calling for no great stretch of the imagination,
for no strange credulity, to call for the admission
that the first temples were dedicated to the sun ; that the first
principles of religion consisted of a scientific record of the
sun’s annual path through the signs of the Zodiac, with
other then known science ; and that the first efforts of priestly
and cunning men would be to deceive the vulgar upon this
subject, to preach the reality of the personified god, which
science forbad, and the existence of which the principles of
matter or of nature rendered impossible.
When man began to make God like himself, he began also to
give God a dwelling-place, such as he found or could make
on earth. The first temples that were imagined by ingenuity
were temples in the heavens, time marked by planetary partitions.
Thus we read of the New Jerusalem, coming down from
heaven as a dwelling-place for the saints of the earth. The
seven churches of Asia were seven imaginary temples in heaven,
reduced to a figurative tale, and then imitated on earth.
Thus again that which is called the building of the first Solomon’s
Temple never took place on earth ; but the story of the
temple was fabricated; and the first Jewish historian we have
(Josephus) allows that it was allegorical and emblematical of
the universe, or of all the physical phenomena. The true
meaning, then, of the building of Solomon’s temple, in Freemasonry
is, and the practice of the lodges should be, to the
effect that the grand secret of all religion is this allegorical
typification of the solar relations and planetary motions with
mental and moral cultivation, and that such, in truth, is the
great lost secret of Freemasonry. The masons have lost the
initiatory secret—have been numbered among the vulgar, and
deceived with the exoterical doctrine of personified deity.
Mr. Paine had a glimmering light on this subject, but he
was ignorant of the details. He made a shrewd guess at the
thing, and guessed rightly as to a part of the principle, though