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designed the US Capitol building stood in a dirt trench on September 18, 1793 with a silver plate beneath his feet, a massive ox roasting nearby for an after party, and a crowd of men in full Masonic attire chanting around him. And the man we're talking about was George Washington. He's wearing a Masonic apron and consecrating the foundation of the nation's most important building with a ritual that hadn't changed in centuries. And the whole thing was reported in the newspaper the next day. Not as a scandal, not as a secret, just a regular Wednesday. And today, that exact same gavel that Washington used during that ceremony is still owned by the Masonic lodge in Washington D.C. that's how baked into the bones of this country Freemasonry is. And today we're breaking down the real story of DC. Everything from the pentagrams, the 555 foot obelisk, the sphinxes guarding a temple a mile north of the Oval Office office, the tombs hidden inside its walls, the painting on the Capitol dome that literally turns George Washington into a God. This is the Masonic symbolism hidden throughout Washington D.C. so if you ever walked around our nation's capital and saw some of these crazy buildings and these giant obelisks dedicated to Washington and thought, why is that there? Well, today we break it all down. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. What's up, people? And welcome back to camp. My name is Mark Gagnon and thank you for joining me in my tent, where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from around the world. From all time, forever. That is what I do here, is I deep dive on all the most strange and interesting mysteries that are plaguing my mind at the present moment. And oh boy Today we have a fascinating one. But before we jump in, I want to say a few camp bulletins. I want to say thank you so much to you. Yeah, dude or lady. For tuning in. Every time you click on an episode and you listen while you're supposed to be working and you're not doing that, you help me out a lot. So continue that ethic. It really is great. And you really keep the lights on at the campsite and you help keep the fire burning here in the tent. I also want to give a big shout out to my pal, Christos Papadopou. How are you, Christos? Doing great. All right, Chris, there's no time because we're going through all the symbolism of Washington, D.C. now, this is something that my mother has talked to me about for years. If you don't know anything about my lovely mom, she is a. A classical conspiracy theorist. This is the woman that raised me, that put me on to game when I was just a boy. We would walk around D.C. when I was just a ute, and she would point to stuff and be like, you see that Masonic? And I'd be like, mom, you're crazy. And I would just kind of brush her off. But now, as an adult, I know that not only is she not crazy, she might have been right about everything all along. And so, based off of my love for my mother, but also my interest in symbolism hidden in plain sight, I have decided to jump into a crazy escapade to break down all the Masonic symbolism that you will see in Washington, D.C. see today. Now, in order to understand the symbolism in dc, you have to start with the man who drew the whole city. His name is Pierre Charles Lon. Now, Pierre was born in France and trained at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris. And he came to America as a volunteer to fight in the American Revolution. And he had a pretty tough time. He took a musket ball in the siege of Savannah in 1779, got captured in Charleston a year later, and then eventually landed on George Washington's personal staff as a major. Now, after the war, he settled in New York and became Washington's go to architect for anything that needed to look really awesome. So he redesigned the Federal hall, the building where Washington took the oath of office as the first president. He designed the Eagle Medal for the Society of Cincinnati, this very exclusive club of former Continental army officers. And then in 1791, Washington gave him the gig of a lifetime. Designed the new Federal Capitol from scratch. I mean, not the easiest job in the world, but. L' Enfant was ready. He was handed a diamond shaped piece of swampland between Maryland and Virginia that was essentially off the grid. And you have forests and marshes and a couple plantations. And to l', Enfant, this was just a blank canvas. So what did he actually do with it? Well, l' Enfant didn't invent his ideas from nothing. Thomas Jefferson, who was Secretary of State at the time, said sent him maps of various European cities to use as models. But instead of copying just any single one, l' Enfant pulled different ideas from many different maps. The biggest influence was the world that he'd grown up in, of course, the city of Paris and the grounds of Versailles. Versailles had been laid out in the Baroque style by a designer named Andre Le Notre. And the whole idea of that style was long, straight and dramatic sight lines that cut across the landscape so that wherever you stood, you were always looking down a wide lane at something interesting. And that's where lfon got this style from. He started off with a normal grid of streets, kind of like the boring rectangular blocks that you would find in any city. And then he laid broad diagonal avenues right on top of the grid, slicing it at all angles. Now, wherever those diagonals cross the grid, they opened up squares, circles and triangles and, you know, natural spots to drop monuments and fountains later on. And you can see here a map of kind of how this looks now. Before he drew a single street, he picked his anchor points by walking the actual land and finding the high ground for the buildings that mattered the most. So, of course, he put the Capitol on the highest ridge, a place that was called Jenkins Hill, which he described as a pedestal awaiting a monument. And then he placed the President's house on a slightly lower ridge and tied the two together directly with Pennsylvania Avenue. The entire plan was built to focus on those two buildings, the Capitol and the Presidential Mansion. The. And he also carved out a wide mile long stretch of open green running west from the capital, which he eventually called Grand Avenue. And that is what eventually became the National Mall, as we know today. And then he gave each of the 15 states its own square to build on and design whatever they want, with the idea being to create a, you know, little friendly competition between them. And the result was something that had never existed in America before. It is still to this day the only fully baroque city plan that in the country. And that's the entire point. L' Enfant deliberately wanted Washington to look nothing like the old capitals of Europe, even while he was barring all of their Grandeur. Now, this is where the conspiracy starts, because l' Enfant was a Freemason, sort of. The records of Holland Lodge number eight in New York City show that on April 17, 1789, 12 days before Washington's inauguration, a Major Francis L' Enfant was initiated as an entered apprentice. And that's the very first of the three degrees of the Blue Lodge. The 33rd degree and master Mason stuff that people picture is associated with Scottish Rite and York Rite Freemasonry, which is a separate thing entirely. We actually still have the manuscript records from his initiation. And his first task was to take the necessary measures to ventilate the lodge rooms, literally. His opening assignment as a brand new Mason was like H Vac, figuring out how to clear the heat and cigar smoke out of a lodge room. But after that, the trail just stops. He never advanced past that first degree. And his biographers describe him as a very difficult man who burned bridges constantly, which is probably a polite way of saying that he was just a nightmare to work with. Other Lodge members got bumped up to the second degree within weeks, but Lafond didn't. He was a Mason on paper for like a minute, but it didn't seem like he ever came back, or possibly he wasn't invited back. He actually got pushed out of the DC Project and fired by George Washington for the same exact reason, because he refused to compromise with anyone. And that's the part that actually matters for the symbolism question, because l' Enfant never finished the city that he designed. While l' Enfant was drawing, a surveyor named Andrew Ellicott was on the ground mapping the district's boundaries and actually helping lay out the city. And then in February 1792, Ellicott told the commissioners that L' Enfant had never gotten the plan engraved and that he was, you know, basically refusing to hand over an original copy that he was sitting on. So Ellicott, working with his brother Benjamin, revised the plan himself, despite l' Enfant's objections. And he realigned and straightened Massachusetts Ave, Cut five short radial avenues and added two others, removed a bunch of plazas and squared off the borders of what became the Judiciary Square. He also changed some of l' Enfant's circles into rectangles. And then shortly thereafter, Washington dismissed l' Enfant entirely. Ellicott's revised version is the one that got engraved and printed and circulated, and it became the actual blueprint that the city was built from. And that's important because a lot of the Symbolism we're about to go into depends on exact street alignments. And some of those alignments were set by ellicott and not L'. Enfant. Now, the last thing on the man himself. L' Enfant ended up dying in 1825 with only about $46 to his name. And he was buried in an unmarked grave on a friend's farm in Maryland. And then in 1909, 84 years later, Congress dug him up and actually gave him a state funeral and then reburied him at Arlington National Cemetery on a hill overlooking the entire National Mall that he had helped design. His tombstone is engraved with his original map of DC now, the guy died broke and got reburied as like, a national hero on the highest point above his own city. So that's the designer, a barely Mason French perfectionist who never went back to the Lodge after his second meeting, whose finished plan was rewritten by someone else. And, you know, absolutely knew how much people love symbolism. So let's get to the actual city itself. It's September 18, 1793. George Washington crosses the Potomac river into the unfinished Federal city. He's met by two brass bands, an artillery company, and delegations of Masons from Maryland and Virginia. This is the first parade ever held in Washington, D.C. they march about a mile, maybe like a mile and a half into the construction site of the US Capitol, where a trench has already been dug for the southeast cornerstone. The southeast corner is significant in Masonic tradition. It's where the cornerstone of King Solomon's Temple was traditionally laid. And Solomon's Temple is the foundational mythological structure for all of Freemasonry. You can check out an episode we did on King Solomon over on Religion Camp, if you haven't seen it. But basically, Washington steps down into the trench wearing a Masonic apron and places a silver plate on the ground engraved by a Georgetown silversmith named Caleb Bentley, listing the names of the commissioners and the architects and the date. And then he lowers the cornerstone on top of it. Three worshipful masters. These are like the highest ranking members of a local lodge, then approach the cornerstone with three vessels. They have corn, wine, and oil. Corn is supposed to be symbolic for nourishment, wine for refreshment, and oil for joy. These are the three substances that Masons have used to consecrate buildings since at least the 1700s. And the symbolism goes back even further, the way to basically the Old Testament. And the ceremony opens with the brethren chant, and Washington steps out of the trench. And then, because nothing says spiritual ceremony like a Afterparty, they roast a £500 ox and feast until the evening. Now, one of the weirdest parts of the story is that the silver plate has never been found. The capital has been expanded multiple times. So the original southeast corner is now somewhere buried inside the modern building. And despite multiple searches over the centuries, including one in 1893 for the ceremony's 100th anniversary, no one's ever located it. So somewhere in the Capitol, there's a congressman whose office is possibly sitting on top of a 230-year-old Masonic time capsule. And that gavel that Washington used at that event is now at the Potomac Lodge Number 5 in Georgetown. And over the past two centuries, it's been used at the cornerstone ceremonies for the Washington Monument, the Smithsonian Institute, the National Cathedral. It's basically the most well traveled gavel hammer thing in American history. And now we get to the part that you've probably seen on TikTok. Okay, this is the pentagram pointing at the White House. So this is weird. If you draw lines across Massachusetts Ave, Vermont Ave, Connecticut Ave, Rhode Island Ave, and a stretch of K Street, you will allegedly get a five pointed star with the White House at the bottom point. The five points are supposedly Dupont Circle, Logan Circle, Washington Circle, Mount Vernon Square, and the White House itself. And to the people who will talk about this theory, it's not random. The inverted pentagram is associated with what they call Baphomet or the Goat of Mendes. And they argue that the entire executive branch sits at the tip of a satanic seal carved in the streets of the Capitol. And it's an awesome theory. I mean, myself being a symbolism fanatic, you can see it right here. You're like, wow, that looks like a pentagram with the White House right at the end. But there's an issue. A true pentagram has five points formed by five lines of equal length. And the DC version only has four lines that actually connect because Rhode Island Ave. Doesn't extend west of Connecticut Avenue, so there's no line completing the top part of the star. Ah, don't you hate that? A perfectly good theory just ruined by city planning, you know, so the K Street segment that's supposed to close it is dramatically longer than the other lines, which also kind of breaks the geometry. The Mount Vernon Square, one of the other supposed star points, was an empty patch of grass until 1902, and there was literally no building there for over a hundred years after the plan was drawn. So if l' Enfant was hiding a pentagram, me did it pretty poorly. And if he hit it so subtly that it wouldn't be complete for over a century, then maybe that's just, you know, a high IQ movement. Even the Grand Lodge of D.C. when asked about it directly, they just laughed. But also, the Masons would laugh, right? Their communications director said the only part of the pentagram theory that is true is that there are streets in Washington, D.C. kind of snarky. Now, this is where it gets interesting. That doesn't mean that the city has zero symbolism, because there absolutely is. It just means that the pentagram isn't necessarily the best one to look at. It's still a fun theory, but I don't think it holds a ton of substance. Now, there is actually some geometry that's pointing. And this is called the Federal Triangle. Now, the White House, the Capitol, and the Washington Monument create a near perfect right triangle in the heart of D.C. with the monument at the right angle. And that's actually not an accident. Remember, l' Enfant placed the Capitol on what was then called Jenkins Hill. So he aligned the White House and what would eventually become the Monument on perpendicular axes. And that takes us to the next alignment authority. David Oveson wrote an entire book called the Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital, arguing that the Federal Triangle is intentionally aligned with real stars that frame the constellation Virgo. And he calls these Arcturus, Spica, and Regulus. And he claims that every August 10th through the 15th, as the sun sets over Pennsylvania Avenue, the constellation Virgo rises directly above the White House. Now, whether you buy it or not, and most historians don't, Ovason did document something that nobody disputes. There are at least 23 zodiac signs displayed in art and architecture around D.C. so the National Academy of Sciences has all 12 signs worked into its bronze entrance. And out front, the Einstein Memorial shows Einstein looking down at a star map charting the exact positions of the sun, moon, and planets over Washington the day it was dedicated. The Federal Reserve Eccles building has the 12 signs running around the rim of a glass light fixture. The Library of Congress has the zodiac inlaid in brass on the marble floor of the Great Hall. And its cornerstone was laid on a day that, Ovason notes the sun was sitting in Virgo, and it just keeps going. A ceiling mural in the old aerial Rios building wraps the four seasons around all 12 signs. The melon Fountain has them cast into its bronze basin. The Freer Gallery has zodiac light fixtures. The National Shrine lion has a zodiac arch. The Capital Statuary hall has an 1819 sculpture whose chariot wheels double As a clock ringed with, you guessed it, the zodiac signs. Now, you don't have to believe in the Virgo alignment to notice that you know the zodiac and the 12 signs of you know the zodiac. Star signs are appearing all the time throughout D.C. what's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I want to tell you a scary story. Yeah. Specifically for the dudes. All right? Imagine you're going out with your wife. Okay? You're having some dinner. 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Visit bluechew.com for more details and important safety information. And we thank Blue Shoe for sponsoring this podcast and making this show possible. Now, let's get back to it. Now we got to talk about maybe the most obvious one of all, the Washington Monument. Now, if you think of a monument dedicated to George Washington, you'd probably assume it would be, I don't know, a sculpture of George Washington. A giant, you know, giant image of him on like a horse or something. It's not. It's actually a 555 foot Egyptian obelisk in the middle of the National Mall. And it's not inspired by an obelisk or kind of looks like an obelisk. It is literally an obelisk. And you might ask, what is an obelisk? Well, it's modeled directly after the obelisk that ancient Egyptians built to honor the sun God Ra at the entrances of temples like Karnak and Luxor. Now, the architect Robert Mills was a Freemason. He won the design competition in 1836. And even though his original plan included a giant Greek style colonnade around the base that never got built, the obelisk part was always the core idea. Now here's where the symbolism gets pretty weird. In ancient Egypt, the obelisk was a stone ray of sunlight. It was meant to channel the energy of the sun God down to the temple complex. So every Egyptian temple had two. The Egyptians always built them in pairs in front of the entrance of a sacred space. Now, there are exactly two original Egyptian obelisks from the same pair sitting in two of the largest cities on earth right now. So Cleopatra's Needle is in New York Central park and its identical twin in London on the River Thames. They were both originally built by Pharaoh Thutmose III around 1450 B.C. and they're now separated by an ocean. And in two former British colonies, now back to D.C. the Washington Monuments dimensions are also very intentional. A true Egyptian obelisk has a Height that's about 10 times the width of its base. Now, the monument base is 55ft wide and its height is 555ft and 5 and 18 inches. So yes, 55 times 10 is not 550ft. It's 550. However, the obelisk itself without the capstone is 550. But when the capstone was being put on top, it made the height 555. Now the original design called for a 600 foot obelisk, but Congress reduced it significantly to match the classical Egyptian proportion. So in feet it's 555. In inches it is 6660. And yes, conspiracy theorists love that. Of course, you know, 6660 is close enough to 666, the biblical number of the beast. But realistically, the 555 number came from George Marsh, a scholar who pushed for the height reduction in order to make the proportions historically accurate. But now here's where things get even weirder. At the very top of the monument on the capstone is a 100 ounce piece of solid aluminum. Now, at the time it was cast in 1884, aluminum was extremely difficult to refine. So much so that it was actually more valuable than silver. So the piece at the top of the monument was, at the moment it was placed, one of the largest pieces of pure aluminum on earth. And on its east face, the side that the sun hits first every morning, is engraved two words. Laos Deo. Praise be to God. Now here we have a pyramid tipped sun aligned obelisk in the middle of the capital, capped with one of the most valuable pieces of metal on earth at the time, inscribed with a Latin prayer that only the son can read. Kind of cool. Maybe. Interesting. A little. One other thing. The monument's cornerstone was laid on July 4, 1848. Three US presidents attended. You got James Polk, the sitting president, and two future presidents, Andrew Johnson and Abraham Lincoln. The man who actually laid the cornerstone was a mason named Benjamin French, using the same trowel that George Washington had used to lay the Capitol cornerstone 55 years before. So Marvel Television's Wonder man, an eight episode series now streaming on Disney. A superhero remake. Not exactly what we'd expect from an Oscar winning director. Action. Simon Williams audition for Wonder Man. I'm gonna need you to sign this. Assuming you don't have superpowers. I'll never work again. If anyone found out. My lips are sealed. Marvel Television's Wonder man, all eight episodes now streaming only on Disney at. You know, as the monument went up, the society running it asked states and cities and organizations to donate carved memorial stones for the interior walls of the obelisk. And about 193 ended up getting embedded there. Of those, 22 came from Masonic Lodges, 14 from Grand Lodges and eight from individual ones. This means the lodge held more space than any other single organization that contributed. So the stones arrived between 1848 and 1875. And they are not small. A lot of them are carved with the compass and the square, the All Seeing Eye and other Masonic symbols. And crazy enough, even the Knights Templar association sent a memorial. Now, here's the part that people love. Almost no one sees them because they're sealed into the interior walls along the staircase. And since most people ride the elevator now, you can catch a glimpse of a couple on the way down. But most people kind of miss it. So the most Masonic heavy collection of stones in the country sits inside the most famous monument maybe in the entire country, in the capital. And it's effectively hidden in plain sight. I mean, that's great. You can see some of the pictures of the monuments here that are kind of along the staircase. It's pretty great. Now, the monument has been struck by lightning thousands of times. The aluminum cap was originally meant to partly be a lightning rod, which is kind of what it's been doing for 100 years, 40 years, which is pretty crazy. Now that's just the Washington Monument. Pretty strange that, you know, Washington, a famous mason now has this giant stone sun ray dedicated to raw just kind of sitting there. Also, interestingly, you can see the different stones are used that the bottom part, I think is like limestone and the top part is like sandstone. And it was because of like the cost of like building it and like the quarry that was nearby. You can fact check me on that, but I'm pretty sure that's what it is. Now there's another thing that we need to look at, and that's this idea of apotheosis. Now, if you ever stand on the Washington Rotunda and look up, you'll see a fresco called the Apotheosis of Washington. Now, apotheosis literally means the elevation of a mortal into a God. The painting was finished in 1865 by an Italian artist named Constantino Brumidi, who had spent three years before that working inside the Vatican under Pope Gregory XVI. He immigrated to America in 1852 and spent the last 25 years of his life painting inside the Capitol building. Now, the fresco that we're talking about is 4,664 square feet, and the figures in it are up to 15ft tall. And at the dead center, you see George Washington sitting on a throne in the clouds, draped in royal purple, sitting next to liberty and victory, surrounded by 13 maidens representing the original colonies. You can see the image right here. It's a pretty stunning painting. I mean, pretty crazy. Right? Now, around him are six scenes featuring Roman gods. So you have Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, advising Benjamin Franklin, Robert Fulton and Samuel Morse. And then you have Neptune, God of the sea, holding his trident, Mercury, the messenger God, handing a bag of gold to Robert Morris, the financier of the revolution. Then you have Vulcan, the blacksmith God, at an anvil. And then you have Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, riding a McCormick Reaper, which was a harvesting machine. And then you have Colombia, the female personification of America vanquishing tyranny with a sword. So the most important building in American democracy has, at the absolute spiritual center, the founding father being literally turned into a God in the company of the Roman pantheon. This is in the capital right now. That's, like, pretty crazy to think about, right? Like, why does no one talk about this stuff? It's great. It's not. That's not. It's like, again, I'm not saying like, oh, this is Satan. I'm just saying it's weird. Like, it's like a little interesting. People always look at George Washington. They're like, oh, he was the most humble guy ever. He just bowed out at the very end, and here he is being turned into a God. Now, in fairness, this was created and painted many years after he died, but still, I mean, what's going on with the deification? What happened to this whole no kings thing, right? That's like a kind of America's whole deal. I mean, yeah, this is what Congress wanted. They were like, this is. This is what we're going to do. Now, here's the thing that no one really talked about. Washington actually died in 1799. And when he did, Congress proposed building a giant marble pyramid inside the capital of Rotunda to hold his remains in the style of an Egyptian pharaoh. That's real. You can look that up. His family refused, and they kept him at Mount Vernon, but the proposal is still on the record. They literally wanted to entomb the first president inside a pyramid in the middle of the legislative branch. And not a conspiracy theory, just a thing that Congress kind of floated out there. Is that not weird? It's weird. It just like, imagine I die and my family's wishes to entomb me in a giant pyramid. You'd be like, huh, strange. Well, you weren't the father of a country. But still, though, it's like, he's supposed to be the most humble guy ever. He walked back to Mount Vernon just to go, you know, enjoy his millions and millions dollars. Let the record show Washington also retired as, like, like, one of the richest men in history. Well deserved. Sure, well deserved. But it's like part of the reason he wanted the revolution is because he was Going to be super rich if it worked out. I'm just saying he had a lot of interest. I'm not bashing on Washington here, I'm just saying. No, no, one person has a singular story. You know, it's a lot of propaganda. Sure. Anyway, one mile north of the White House on 16th street sits a building that if you weren't equipped, you would assume is like a federal courthouse or like an embassy or something, but it's actually not. It's called House of the Temple, the international headquarters of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in the southern jurisdiction. And it is the single most architecturally Masonic building in the entirety of the United States. Christos, if you get a picture of this, it is a crazy looking thing. Look at that. I mean, yeah, that's, that's a Masonic building. And what do you see out front there? A couple of sphinxes. Now, it was designed by John Russell Pope, the same architect who later designed the Jefferson Memorial and the National Archives. Now, construction on this baby went from 1911 all the way up to 1915. And Pope didn't just design a building, he copied almost exactly. The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It was built without any metal beams. It is genuinely just pure stone the way the ancients did it. The building is ringed with 33 ionic columns that are each 33ft tall. Now, why 33? If you know anything about freemasonry, the bells are going off. 33 is the highest degree of Scottish Rite, Freemasonry, the rank Albert Pike, Teddy Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, Buzz Aldrin, that they all held esoterically. 33 is the ultimate master number, mirroring the 33 vertebrae of the human spine, which is also said to be the ladder of spiritual enlightenment. It can also be connected to the 33 years of Christ's life and the exact number of years it takes for the solar and lunar calendars to realign. 33 is also the ultimate symbol of human completion. So inside the house of the Temple, the staircase is divided into flights of 3, 5, 7 and 9, the sacred numbers of Pythagoras, a Greek mathematician whose mystery school taught that the universe was built out of mathematical ratios. And then outside the buildings are what I Talked about before, two 17 ton sphinxes. The one at the north has its eye, has its eyes wide open, and it represents power. The one on the south side has its eyes half closed and it represents wisdom. They're carved on top of solid blocks of limestone by Adolf Weinman. The same sculptor who designed the Mercury dime and the walking Liberty half dollar. So the guy who carved those sphinxes also designed the coins that were in like your great grandparents pockets and maybe your pocket if you're like a coin collector. But the sphinxes aren't really sphinxes. According to Scottish Rite Freemasonry themselves, they represent two brazen pillars that stood at the entrance of King Solomon's temple in Jerusalem, Joachim and Boaz. Now the Hebrew names Joaquin and Boaz are actually inscribed on the pedestals in Phoenician characters. Now Phoenician script hasn't been used as a living language for over 2000 years. Sitting on a building 1 mile from the White House, Inside the atrium you have bronze lamps shaped like the head of Hermes, the Greek messenger God, also known as as Hermes Trismegistus, the patron of Western occult tradition. There are even statues of Egyptian gods carved from a single piece of black marble that are guarding the staircase to the temple room, a 100 foot tall chamber containing a black marble altar, gilded serpents and a purple velvet throne. What's crazy about this building is that there are also tombs inside the walls. So in 1944 the US Congress passed a special act allowing Masons to dig up the remains of Albert pike, the man who literally wrote the modern rituals of the Scottish rite from Oak Hill Cemetery and place him inside the walls of the house of the temple. And then in 1953 they did the same thing for John Henry Cowles, another grand commander, this time before he had even died. And that's right, the Masons got Congress to legally pre approve a tomb inside the walls of a private temple for a man who was still alive. The two bodies are sealed inside nine foot thick walls of the building right now. Now the roof by the way, is a stepped pyramid. The Masons even have a name for the building among themselves. Herodom. Which probably comes from the Greek heroes domos, meaning the holy house. I mean it's just a fascinating little, just a fascinating little piece of American history. You have a pyramid roofed, sphinx guarded, pillar encased Greek temple with bodies in the wall, sitting a mile from the President of. It's just a little fun fact. Now pretty much all of this gets linked right back to the Freemasons. Now freemasonry in the 18th and early 19th century wasn't a fringe cult in America. It was where men of power networked and did charity work and made some deals. And by some estimates, between a third and a half of those men who signed the constitution were Masons. Washington was a Mason for 47 years. Ben Franklin was a Mason, Paul Revere was a Mason. So were 14 future presidents. So of course Masonic symbolism is going be embedded into the architecture of Washington. The architecture was built by people who genuinely believed that these symbols had meaning and that liked their fraternity of Freemasonry. And they weren't really trying to hide it anymore. They were openly publishing it in newspapers the day after they laid the cornerstone. Now the bigger question is whether the symbols themselves carry any real spiritual weight. This is where my mother would say, yes, they do. Whether an obelisk really is a stone ray of solar energy from the Sun God, whether the Federal Triangle really does mirror the stars of Virgo, whether placing a fresco of the first president as a God on the ceiling really does have some effect on the country below it. I don't know. Albert pike, the man buried in the walls in the House at the Temple, wrote in his 1871 book Morals and Dogma that Masonic symbols are tools for teaching ethical lessons, not channels for supernatural power. But, but pike also wrote in that same exact book, the symbols of every age have been multiform and have more meaning than they expressed. And maybe that's the symbolism of Washington. I don't know. A city built on a swamp, designed by a Frenchman who was kind of a Freemason, full of cornerstones laid by other men that are definitely Freemasons, walked through every day by 700,000 people who have no idea what they're standing next to. I mean, these buildings aren't really hiding, you know, you just have to know what you're looking at. And maybe that's the part of this that is so interesting to me is that you could walk through Washington all day and see little bits of symbolism in every single building. And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes part one of my deep dive into Washington D.C. masonic symbolism. I mean, truly fascinating. This is like the kind of stuff that I love. I would love to do a Masonic tour of D.C. and just walk through and look at all the stuff. I mean, first off, I think that there's just a sense where people are like, ah, the Founding Fathers. Intense, strict rationalists who never indulged in anything strange. It's like, no, these guys were all Masons. And again, whatever you think about the Masons, they were intentionally doing this stuff because either they liked it because the symbols have meaning, because there's some type of secret power behind this, like, sacred architecture. You know, I've talked to some people that claim that the Masons are the Holders of sacred geometry that actually understand how the secrets of the sages of a different time that built Solomon's temple actually, you know, how it all actually works and that they're the beholders of this, you know, secret knowledge. And so in building the United States, are they using that type of power to, you know, build it? That's one theory. That's probably what my mom would say. But is it also just, like, a bunch of successful dudes that are all in the same fraternity that like to use, like, their fraternity letters while they're designing stuff? Also a more skeptical, rational approach. But the one thing you can't dispute is that the capital of our nation, one of the most powerful nations of all time ever, is steeped with all sorts of, like, weird Egyptian symbolism, which at the very least, you're just like, huh, it's a little strange. Yeah. I mean, look at this picture. Randall Carlson pointing out that this painting of. Or this picture of George Washington doing a Masonic. A Masonic ritual right here. A hand gesture. And also, interestingly enough, I can't find that picture anywhere on Google. Really? Randall Carlson has it. Interesting. I wonder how he got it. I don't know, Mark. I don't know where. I mean, you can't just reverse image search it. No. Weird. I mean, that's an interesting little image. I don't know all that to say. It's like the fact, like, you can't walk around the capital and be like, oh, this Egyptian obelisk, like, like, is just nothing. It's like, no, like they were intentionally invoking this ancient kingdom because they wanted to either look powerful or kind of symbolize what, like, the old kingdom of Egypt was, or somehow harness the power of whatever these statues and figures did for them. I don't know, but it's just a little quirky. No, Also, to have this on a government building, it's kind of crazy. I mean, technically it's not a government building, but, like, it is in the Capitol. Like, it's right next to the White House. Like, it's. And it's. It's not like, oh, this is like a tourist attraction. This is made out of solid stone to be a temple.
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rules and restrictions apply for Freemasons. And it's a sphinx. And it's a sphinx. It's just weird. No. Like, I don't know, maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, but it's just all a little peculiar to me. And you got all the mason stuff, like lining the Washington Monument, our currency, which we didn't even get into. I mean, yeah, maybe that's a whole nother episode. It's just like all the stuff that's on the money again. I don't know what to make of it. I just go, interesting, weird. And I think anyone that's just like, no, this is completely normal people. I don't like. What would, like, a skeptic say to this kind of stuff again? I'm not even saying that the Freemasons are like, bad inherently. I'm just like, maybe they are the ones that have all the ancient spiritual technology in order to insert the spark back into humankind's secret knowledge or something. I don't know. But it's just. No, that's not strange. Anyone? I don't know. What do you guys think? Is it weird to you that our capital is full of all sorts of weird Egyptian symbolism? I would love to know what you think. Please drop a comment. I read all of them on YouTube and Spotify, so just be nice, okay? Furthermore, if you're interested in religious content like we talked about King Solomon quite a bit this episode, you can check that out at Religion Camp. If you are interested in history, I mean, we've talked about basically all these different characters on History Camp. You can check out that episode over there. And if you like to just deep dive on crazy mysteries and rabbit holes and all sorts of stuff to catch my fancy. Well, great news. We drop these episodes not once, but twice a week, so make sure you subscribe. That way you don't miss a drop. Thank you all so much for tuning to another episode of Camp. God bless you all and I'll see you next time. Peace.