confessed their conspiracy: in Masonic accounts of this incident, they wore white aprons as a sign that their own hands were free of blood. Solomon dispatched men in pursuit of Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, who were soon apprehended in Joppa.
The punishment of the killers is one of the most lurid flights of fancy in Masonic literature. It is claimed that when they were captured, all three men were crying out in horror at the crime they had committed: Jubela confessed an urge to have his throat cut and his tongue ‘torn out by the root and buried in the sands of the sea at low water, a cable length from the shore’. Sharing his woe, Jubelo demanded that his heart be ‘torn from under my naked left breast, and given to the vultures of the air as a prey’.
Having struck the fatal blow, Jubelum was the most contrite: his express wish was to have ‘my body severed in two, one part carried to the south, and the other to the north, my bowels burnt to ashes and scattered before the four winds of the earth’. The three murderers had their gruesome wishes granted: exercising his fabled wisdom, King Solomon decreed that each of them should meet their sorry end exactly as they had predicted.
The Widow’s Son
Masonic lore holds that Hiram Abiff’s last words before he died were ‘Is there no help for the widow’s son?’. This phrase holds an extraordinary resonance in Freemasonry, and is used by Masons in distress to seek help from fellow members. Dan Brown indicated that The Solomon Key would concern itself with Masonry by hiding the phrase in bold text on the front cover flap of The Da Vinci Code, then alerting readers to its existence via his website.
After Hiram Abiff’s death, King Solomon and Hiram of Tyre oversaw the completion of the project, but fate was not kind to their creation. After it had stood for four centuries on Mount Moriah, the Temple was demolished by King Nebuchadnezzar when he seized Israel for the Babylonians. The Babylonian forces sacked Jerusalem and burned the Temple and the entire city to the ground. The Temple treasures were looted—except for the Ark of the Covenant, which had mysteriously vanished. (The quest for elements of this ‘Holy Grail’, of course, formed the fulcrum of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.)
After half a century of exile in Babylon, the Jews returned to Israel and rebuilt King Solomon’s Temple under Zerubbabel in 520 BC. This structure fared little better than the original, being torn down by the Romans in AD 70 when the Jews were again banished from Israel.
Today, two of the holiest of Muslim edifices, the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome on the Rock, dominate Mount Moriah. The remains of the foundations of King Solomon’s Temple are known as the Wailing Wall, and thousands of Jews make pilgrimages there every year. Yet Solomon’s Temple lives on, bizarrely, in the arcane rituals of a secretive fraternity that was to spring up in Great Britain more than two millennia after Hiram Abiff was purportedly killed—the Freemasons.
Medieval Masons
Two thousand years after King David supposedly asked God for permission to build a temple in Jerusalem, spectacular houses of worship were springing up right across western Europe. The Roman Catholic Church was at the peak of its dominance and empire-building, and a succession of popes ordered the building of a series of magnificent cathedrals to inspire awe and devotion in all who set eyes upon them—and, as a consequence, to cement the Church’s own seemingly impregnable control over society.
The end of the eleventh century thus marked the arrival of Gothic architecture, the style whose majesty and opulence was intended to reflect the splendour and glory of an omnipotent God. This ornate school of architecture was first glimpsed in England and northern France, but by the middle of the twelfth century had spread through Germany and the Low Countries and as far south as Italy and Spain.
The Gothic style emphasized huge, towering vertical stone edifices that held enormous painted glass windows with ribbed vaults and pointed arches—the classic look of the medieval cathedral. These houses of worship were frequently decorated with statues on the outside, while the elaborate windows re-enacted Biblical stories—visual aids that were highly useful given that the vast majority of the congregation in those days would have been completely illiterate.
The stunning architecture of these portentous structures mirrored exactly the theological messages spreading from Rome. God—and his representatives on earth, the Catholic Church—were all-powerful and almighty. The sky-scraping Gothic cathedrals were his power made concrete: the sole response demanded of the ordinary man was unquestioning supplication. The floor plan of these temples of worship invariably spelt out a cross.
It is perhaps unsurprising that these towering edifices seemed like living miracles to the uneducated serfs and labourers of medieval England. It was certainly difficult to comprehend how the slender columns that rose from the floor of the building could support the neck-craning ceilings and heavy ornamentation. The overwhelmed worshipper could be forgiven for assuming that only divine intervention held the whole structure in place.
The truth was a little more prosaic: Gothic cathedrals benefited from the design feature known as the flying buttress, a projecting structure that was built on the outside of the building to counter the gravitational thrust of the roof. These external supports removed the need for bulky stone pillars inside the church and facilitated the vast and resplendent stainedglass windows.
Just as these cloud-bursting wonders of medieval engineering seemed divinely inspired, so the men who designed and crafted them were regarded as miracle workers. The handful of Master Masons possessed of the skill in geometry, mathematics and physics to oversee such constructions were held in veneration by kings, church leaders and the hoi-polloi alike. Few posts outside of the royal court held greater social cachet, or were more widely coveted.
Initially Masons came under the theoretical control of the Masons’ Livery Company, a regulatory body established in 1220 that sought to establish maximum fees, working conditions and guarantees of Godly behaviour upon Master Masons. Understandably profoundly unimpressed at these attempts to fix a low ceiling on their large earning potential, Masons reacted
The origins of the term Freemason
There is no agreed absolute etymological derivation of the term Freemason but, rather, two competing theories. Medieval construction workers were divided into the labourers who cut the hard stones from the quarries (known as Rough Masons) and the skilled workmen who shaped the softer, more malleable rock known as free stone. These workers became known as Free Stone Masons, later shortened to Freemasons. A simpler explanation is that these Masons, freed from regular employment, were able to travel around the country looking for work, and thus were genuinely Free Masons.
by creating their own stonemasons’ trade guilds.
Part-educational college, part-fledgling trade union, these guilds were initially illegal and their members forced to convene in secret. Their dual goals were to train up future Master Masons in the skills of designing and erecting vast cathedrals, while at the same time zealously guarding the knowledge and tricks of the trade that enabled them to do so. To this end, members were given signs (passwords) and grips (handshakes) by which they could identify fellow Masons before sharing crucial information with them.
Furthermore, the guilds operated on a strictly hierarchical basis. Students admitted to the fraternity, who were often as young as twelve, were schooled both in theory and on the job by Master Masons. As these Masons continued their training they were allowed privileges along the way, such as the right to carve their own identifying ‘mark’ into some cathedral stones.
However, even the most gifted student was highly unlikely to become a Master Mason in less than ten years. Were he to divulge even the most minor trade secret to an outsider, he would be instantly banished from the guild and ostracized by all Master Masons.
As Church and State became aware of the existence of stonemasons’ guilds, there were attempts to legislate them out of existence. In 1360, King Edward III passed a law banning all secret Masonic pledges and societies, and sixty-five years later the Regency