The Alchemy Key.pdf - Veritas File System

France. 1193 An impressive two thousand seven hundred churches, chapels
and cathedrals were finished in the Paris basin alone during the century
from 1140CE to 1240CE. 1194 The limestone Paris basin contains over
ninety percent of all the early Gothic churches.
According to the Venerable Bede, who lived from 673CE to
735CE, the Magistri Comacini reached Anglo-Saxon England where they
built a church in Northumbria. 1195 However, there was an even earlier
tradition of Masonic guilds in third century England when the martyr St
Alban commenced the building of abbeys. 1196 Around 935CE, Athelstan
King of Wessex called an assembly of Masons at York and issued them
with a charge.
Some historians believe that at this time, ancient teacher of the
arts, the Culdees, controlled the Masonic Collegia in York, Kilwinning,
Melrose, and Aberdeen. An old Scottish tradition suggests that this
Syriac Christian or Culdee heresy was preserved in Scotland and survived
for some centuries after the Knights Templar suppression. 1197
These early efforts aside, it is likely that the main migration of the
Compagnonnage building guilds into Britain was subsequent to the
1066CE Norman Conquest when they constructed Melrose Abbey and six
other abbeys and churches in Scotland. These masons brought with them
the basis of today's Craft Freemasonry, but this was to be developed and
fashioned in a unique context. 1198
Although the Compagnonnage masons were nominally Christian,
they carved a strange profusion of symbols into nearly all pre-
Reformation Churches. The Reformation in England commenced about
1534 when Henry VIII prevailed upon Parliament to appoint the king and
his successors to be the supreme head of the Church of England. Between
1536 and 1539, Henry VIII suppressed the Roman Catholic monasteries
and seized their property.
Over six hundred pre-Reformation churches throughout England,
Ireland, Spain and France contain images of the Green Man and Sheelana-gig
carved in stone. 1199 The Green Man has always symbolized a
vegetation god but he is not a happy character. 1200 The Greeks showed
him as Tantalus dressed in fruit-hung boughs, in agony from flogging and
horror-stricken by fear of drowning or immolation on a pyre. 1201 The
Balkans flung their Green Man, whom they called Green George into a
river as a pharmacos or scapegoat. People of Normandy ducked, beat and
burned him at their mid-summer bonfire. 1202
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