Through the Key Hole - RoseCroix.org.au

44
Finds the one in need, feeds the hungry, helps the sick and perhaps
also to the very mind he ought to instruct to build a temple perfect in
all its parts.
Thus the heart, the tongue, the hand and the mind of the really free
and accepted Mason are warmly engaged and diligently exercised in
all those grand principles of Masonic charity.
While we go to great pains to insure that the candidate is divested of
all money and metallic substances so as to impress upon his mind
that in a Masonic lodge all men are considered equal and no consideration
is made on account of worldly possessions, is this the only
reason that all money and metallic substances are removed from his
person?
There is another symbolic reason for this preparation, for at the time
of the building of the Temple, there was a peculiar pollution attached
to the contamination of metal tools. TGAOTU speaking of the construction
of an altar, commands that it be made of earth or rough
stones; observing that if metal tools were used in the fabrication, it
would be polluted. I like manner the Temple of Solomon was built
without the noise of metallic tools, the stones being hewn in the
quarry, there carved, marked and numbered; the timber felled in the
forest of Lebanon and there carved, marked and numbered also.
They were then floated down to Joppa and from thence conveyed
upon wooden carriages to Mount Moriah and there set up with
wooden mauls made for that purpose; so that there was no sounds of
axe, hammer or metal tool throughout the whole building, for fear that
the temple should be polluted.
The candidate is about to start building a Temple for his soul, and he
has been prepared as the well wrought materials of the Temple, and
brought into the lodge without the pollution of metallic substance,
only now can he braise a superstructure perfect in all its parts, honourable
to the builder.
132
LE ROI EST MORT
by Keith Stockley
This is one of the headlines that featured in the San Francisco
Chronicle on 9 January 1880.
The opening paragraph reads “ Last night at 8.15 p.m. Joshua
Norton, universally known, and known almost only as Emperor
Norton, died suddenly in this city. The similar death of the first
citizen of San Francisco, or the highest municipal officer of the
city, would not have caused so general a sensation as that of
the harmless old man whose monomania never distorted at
least a heart which was wholesome and hardly affected a mind
which had once been the shrewdest, other than in the method
of his sovereignty of the United States and Protectorate of
Mexico”.
Headlines from another newspaper, The Morning Call, include
the following:
9 January 1880
Norton the First, by the grace of God, Emperor of the United
States and Protector of Mexico, departed this life”
10 January 1880
“Norton I was buried today at the Masonic cemetery. The funeral
cortege was two miles long. 10 000 people turned out
for the funeral.”
His famous declaration which created the office of Emperor of
the United States of America was made on the 17 September
1869, reads as follows:
“At the pre-emptory request of a large majority of the citizens
of these United States, I Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay,
Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last nine years and ten
months past of San Francisco, California, declare and proclaim
myself the Emperor of these United States.”