The Obelisk and Freemasonry

About this book

An Egyptian obelisk rises above a modern city. John A. Weisse examines its original religious setting and searches for connections with the signs and ceremonies of Freemasonry.

The Obelisk and Freemasonry belongs to the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for reading ancient Egyptian monuments as the ancestors of later secret traditions. Its comparisons can outrun the historical evidence, especially where similar symbols are treated as proof of direct descent. Yet the reproductions and arguments are part of the history of Egyptomania, recording how a stone monument could become a screen onto which a fraternal order projected its own antiquity.