While watering my father's tropical jungle out in the eastern sticks of San Diego county, it occurred to me that my father is an alchemist. Once a barren wasteland perched on a hillside locally known as “Rattlesnake Mountain,” the now fertile soil sprouts more spectacular color, fresh scents, and abundant sounds of nature than one can adequately absorb in a lifetime. Among the bird of paradise bush, the Peruvian chirimoya trees, and alarmingly sweet and seedless tangerine trees, the desert still rears its head with the palm cactus groves just beyond the rust-wire fence, and occasional belly-up alligator lizard snacked down by one of my parents' seven-inch-tall dogs.
Lead into gold.
It has inspired the entire neighborhood to follow suit, with his trade-mark stone terraced walls, affinity for preserving the land, and patience to watch it go through constant transformation.
Likewise, my mother is an Amazonian Shaman. Though she was raised by Catholic nuns in various parts of Peru, her heritage stretches deep within the Amazon forest, from where the secrets of the sacred Ayahuasca plant whisper the formulas of the universe. She still hears these whispers, and has made it her life's quest to transcribe them in a language that's not her own.
With nothing but a point of turquoise light, she re-imagined herself in an American life, living on a mountain of rattlesnakes and black widows.
One plus one is three. And here I am.
My father is also a Freemason. As a child, I was always intrigued by the plaques on the walls of the house, filled with bizarre images of eagles with two heads, eyes on top of pyramids emanating light. I'd also snoop through his private drawers, and marvel at the strange relics he'd keep tucked away, boxes engraved with symbols that were far beyond my comprehension. I'd ask what they all meant, and he'd just shluff off answering me, usually saying he'd tell me someday when I could understand.
Eventually the plaques came down, and the hidden places developed into even deeper hidden places. I'd ask over the years, and he'd just claim to not really know, or remember, and that his membership in something called the “Scottish Rite” was of little importance to him, even though he never failed to pay his dues, and always collected the monthly newsletter that came to him.
I'd later come to discover that one of the symbols I'd see in both his secret boxes and on the Scottish Rite newsletters were the compass and the square, the symbol of the Freemasons, of which, the Scottish Rite is a branch.
“Their children all had secrecies to have their own societies...”
(“Honeycut,” RM)
Now, the Freemasons aren't a secret society, but perhaps more, a society with secrets. Many of the founding fathers, including George Washington, were members of the Freemason society, but what it means exactly to be a member, when and where the society actually began, and details surrounding its rituals all seem to be matters of speculation fueling many to wonder what, if any importance the society had to our success as a United States, and even if their influence is the power behind the curtain.
But my father is tight lipped.
“There's a lot there,” is one of the cryptic phrases he uses these days when I ask him about it, “And it's there for me if I need it. A lot of people can claim to be masons, but not too many really understand what it really means to be one,” ... even though you might find license plate covers that say “2B1ASK1” with the compass and square symbol prominently displayed.
“I'm going to terrace that hillside and plant these corn seeds there,” he says to me, pointing at the one part of his masterpiece yard that still resembles the rest of the desert we reside in. The corn kernels aren't just any kernels, but ones specific to the Andean culture of Peru. It's interesting to note, the Incas were masters of agriculture, learning to work with the land, creating the terraced landscapes that are clearly visible in postcards of Machu Piccu.
My childhood, which was spent mostly exclusively with my mom, I consider somewhat of an apprenticeship. Early on, I learned to dismantle and let go of many “western myths” that are so pervasive in our culture. From not celebrating Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter, I began to understand life as a constant gift, not something to be set aside for arbitrary dates placed on the calendar.
Before I learned about atomic structures in science class, my mom was busy showing me how we are made up of nothing more than space and vibrations.
“Put your hands up, in front of your chest, palms out.” As early as the age of six or seven, we'd stand in open fields, conducting experiments concerning the nature of the universe. “Now, I'm going to put my hands up next to yours. I'm not going to touch them. Just relax.” And within moments, the heat would transfer from her hands to mine. Then not only could I feel heat, but actual vibrations, some kind of communication between our hands.
“Do you feel it?” And when I looked at her, she was no longer my mother. She was a child, a young school girl trapped in her Catholic Peru, wanting only to dance in a most beautiful dress, as created by Incan descendants weaving the finest alpaca wool into colors conceived in imagination.
Approximately 60,000 years ago, our modern Homo sapien ancestors were leaving Africa and populating the world. At around 45,000 years ago, humankind hit the first major fork in the road and the first great schism in human consciousness occurred: some of us split for Europe. We can trace our DNA lineage back to the Middle East to show where people who originally going east for India, suddenly turned around and went west.
It's interesting how the Middle East is still the most volatile place on earth today.
When the early European humans (called Cro-Magnon man) began colonizing the land, they met a formidable force which competed for their safety and survival, the Neanderthal, who had been there for about 300,000 years already. Also, the earth was ten thousand years deep into its latest ice age, of which we are rapidly approaching the end now. For Cro-Magnon man, Europe was a cold and hostile place. And so began a record of tyranny which still haunts us, 45,000 years later.
Within 15,000 years of Cro-Magnon's arrival, Neanderthal had been reduced to a few cave systems on the Iberian peninsula. Even though they were faster, stronger, and were better adapted for the cold than Cro-Magnon, perhaps Cro-Magnon thought of himself as smarter; able to pick up Neanderthal's methods for adaptation, expand upon them and even possibly exploit them. What we can extrapolate from the fossil record of Cro-Magnon's impact on the fate of Neanderthal Man is a matter of serious debate, but one thing remains certain: the Neanderthal fossil record ends 30,000 years ago, leaving only one species of man alive, us.
For the next 20,000 years, it seems modern man had not much to do but hunt, walk, and ponder its place in the universe. And so we began to take notice and gather knowledge. What a strange world it must have been for early man, where every day the one thing that brings light, warmth and life to you goes crashing down towards the horizon plundering you into a long cold darkness land-mined by the unknown for a period of time that seems to get longer and longer... then suddenly, shorter again. Maybe sometimes the night-lite was left on, but that too would appear and disappear in various phases. And with it, the seas rose and retreated. What else was beyond the shores? Where did the life giving rays of light go? How can we know it will come back?
And so for 20,000 years, we watched, and hoped, and made observations that told us those hopes just might be right, that the sun would rise again, that salvation would come, and we would be born again into a new world. Cycles stretching from twenty four hours (the earth around the sun) to 25,000 years (the earth's axial wobble) were observed, and noted. From a sense of history arose a reasoning that deduced one could guess what would happen in the future with some kind of certainty.
But what kind of certainty?
European Homo sapiens watched their Neanderthal cousins become extinct, perhaps at their own hands. They had already been split off from their own counterparts inhabiting the middle east and India. They were very alone, their skin was turning white, and their very survival rested upon the state of disturbance which had endured their existence. Was there anything in the stars that would tell them they'd be okay? Was there a magic cycle that could predict the outcome of their lives?
Then, between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago, it all came together: agriculture, domestication, sedentary lifestyles, civilizations, crossing of the the Bering Land Bridge, Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, Hinduism, Judaism, calendars, alchemy.
The answer was heard around the world, yes there is. If you watch closely, you'll see all the signs you need to turn lead into gold, you can become the master of your own destiny. When the Indians of the east eventually populated the Americas, they brought with them these years of observations. For those who stayed, this became the foundations of Hinduism, which stresses a true eternal self, as opposed to one rooted only to earth-bound cycles of night and day. In the new world, these people became the indigenous Indians we think of today, like the Maya, who recorded all of this in what we call the Mayan Calendar. Further south in Peru, the Incas harvested gold by the room-fulls.
When the Spanish Conquistadors arrived in the new world, it was their brothers whom they had separated from 45,000 years earlier that they met, and slaughtered to extinction.
A 45,000 year long anxiety, never healed.
The ancient Egyptians had a much easier way to deal with the big unknowing. They painted a pretty picture around it in the form of a story about Horus, the sun god. In the story, Horus was born of a virgin mother on December 25th. Astronomically, the Egyptians had anthropomorphized star groupings to represent what happened on the earth during the times of the year they were in view. Today, this is known as astrology and the twelve signs of the Zodiac. In this case, to the perspective of ancients in Egypt, the place in the sky where the sun rose on the winter solstice was represented by a virgin carrying wheat, symbolizing the coming spring, what we today call Virgo. This was significant because it meant the nights would be getting shorter, and a time for renewal and growth would be coming. This was pointed to by the three stars of Orion's Belt, as the three stars (known then as the Three Kings) and the sunrise align on that day.
Horus' nemesis, night, or Set, would rage battle against Horus every day. Every night, Horus was killed by Set, but Horus would always rise again. For the three days after the winter solstice, the battle between Horus and Set comes to a standstill when the sun doesn't appear to move along the horizon at sunrise. And miraculously, after three days, the sun jumps in its position three degrees. Horus' miraculous resurrection isn't celebrated until the spring equinox however, when the sun (Horus) rises on the southern cross.
In 30 BC, the Roman Empire overtook Egypt and turned it into a province.
In 313 AD, Constantine I signed into law the Edicts of Milan, legalizing Christianity. This was done under the guise of “religious tolerance” as for the good of the people, and ended up as a “religious justification for the exercise of power and a tool in the expansion and maintenance of empire.”
In 1119, during the Crusades (Christianity's century-long war on everybody not Christian), an order of knights, The Knights Templar, were established to protect pilgrims coming to the newly captured Holy Land, Jerusalem. Right back where we had started, right at the corner point of the original schism, to defend the very story that we had told ourselves in order to not feel so all alone, and so afraid. Headquartered atop what was the site of The Temple of Solomon, said to have been the final resting spot of the Arch of the Covenant, it is theorized that the Knights learned a great deal during their time in Jerusalem. It's possible they found the Dead Sea Scrolls, learned about the Gnostic traditions and ancient alchemists, as there is evidence to suggest all of this though none of it has been proven.
What is known for sure is that they did start the world's first international banking system, and quickly grew in popularity, prominence and influence. As a free army with vast amounts of wealth, and a curious institute for fine masonry which could rival that of the Incas at Cuzco, the group decided to erect cathedrals all over Europe. The strange thing about the cathedrals is their seeming use of astrological and alchemical clues left in the structures, whispering secret knowledge passed down from the time when attaining enlightenment simply meant being illuminated by the sun in the morning, and not something you had to kill people to protect.
King Philip IV owed the Knights a lot of money, and instead of paying them back, he pressured Pope Clement V to dissolve the order on charges of heresy in 1312.
Those who weren't captured and tortured fled for safety in the south of France (recall our Neanderthal relatives retreating to caves in Iberia), where they left a clue as to their future legacy for the world; a secret code embedded on the Cross of Hendaye. Purportedly built by the Knights in the French city of Hendaye, the cross appears to be a kind of calendar with deep knowledge of shifts occurring in 25,000 year cycles, our axial wobble, and a time when something called by alchemists as the Iron Age will turn into the Golden Age. In the far away kingdom of the Maya, astronomers there built monuments to the same exact things. Even the Christian bible was saying the current age, represented by the constellation of Pisces, will give way to the Age of Aquarius, the bearer of water.
Most interesting on the Cross is the symbol of a compass a square, the symbol of the Freemasons.
Prior to the 17th century, not much is known about the Freemasons other than they were a guild of stone masons usually housed in lodges near whatever site they happened to be working at, and because of their expert knowledge of craft were not tied to the land on which they roamed, hence, they were free. The system has interesting parallels to the Knight's order which basically granted them status as a free moving army with no borders. And so, it is suggested that having lived under the protection of the French royalty for quite some time, the group faded into the Scottish mason scene, where the Knights still had members scattered about, or at least influence and respect. Under the protection of their current outfit, the Knights could successfully employ and hand down their secret knowledge for generations. With the skills learned from building great cathedrals, and the powers of influence gained during their days as a multi-national banking institution, the guild tightly banded its brothers in their secret traditions, and over the course of three hundred years, established itself as a reputable fraternity, for which only the elite were granted access.
By the 1700's lodges were sprouting up everywhere, and its secret status could no longer be contained. Two of its branches were named Knights Templar and Scottish Rite, of which my father belongs to the second. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Jackson were all Freemasons. Bavarian Adam Weishaupt who founded the Illuminati was a Freemason. The Illuminati symbol of the pyramid-eye is on the back of our one dollar bills.
But what the Knights knew, what our founding fathers knew, what Adam Weishaupt knew has been obscured and sold to the very currency they all appear on now. Andrew Jackson vetoed extending the Second Bank of the United States, and adopted free banking. Now his face is stamped by the Federal Reserve corporation; a corporation that loans money to the United States at interest. It is a system designed to keep the people it governs in debt. And exactly like the Edicts of Milan passed by Constantine I, it is a “justification for the exercise of power and a tool in the expansion and maintenance of empire.” It is about using fear to control our destiny. It is the latest Pizarro sword to his long lost brother, it is fear bullying us into caves in the south of France.
Except that our caves these days are called vacation homes, and people can't throw enough money at banks to get one. If all of this is really just because we couldn't handle day and night, and needed to construct stories around them to make sense of it and now we're embroiled in the eternal battle, physically manifesting the battle between day and night as told in our stories, then, well, haven't we mastered what day and night are all about? We know what causes it. And unless an asteroid comes and knocks us around, we know the sun is going to come up again. And I propose, living in that unknowing is half the adventure. Here comes the sun. It's alright. Next.
The Freemasons are holding tight. They've seen it all before, and know what's coming.
“Bill Clinton will be impeached.”
“What? Daaaad! You don't believe that do you? Do you know what you just said?”
It was a completely random morsel of wisdom he plopped on the table one night at a Chinese restaurant back in 1992. I'm pretty sure it was an egg roll he choked on later. Seriously, he choked. My mom had to bust out the Heimlich on the poor guy. That is one Chinese restaurant experience I will never forget.
“Bill Clinton will be impeached.”
He said it with authority, and reassured me he knew exactly what he said.
“How could that happen? The only way that would happen is if he did something illegal, and this day and age, they can cover up anything, so he couldn't be found doing anything illegal. Besides, why would he? No one has in, like, a hundred years or something.”
I just took it as a sign of his over eager Republican-ness coming out about our newly elected president. He always carried a cynical view of the media, and was quick to yell out the opposite of whatever it was they were force feeding him. Anything positive they might dare to report was really negative in his view, and anything negative was just more fodder for mind control as far as he was concerned. I was excited about Bill Clinton. He was our grunge rock president. He wouldn't ever be impeached.
Seemingly random knowledge of world events is one of the features that keeps the Freemasons shrouded in mystique.
On my most recent trip home, he was reading a book about the Q'ero of Peru, said to be the only surviving Incan descendants. They have a mythology that speaks of a couple of ages, or time periods, on earth. The mythology says that in the new age still approaching, the Inca King returns from his death at the hands of the Conquistadors and begins to turn everything into silver and gold.
Some groups, especially those seen in New Age markets, tell this as the coming of a new species of Homo, Homo Luminous.
The Incan flag is the rainbow flag.
When Adam Weishaupt founded the Illuminati, he stated his goal to be that of "illumination, enlightening the understanding by the sun of reason, which will dispel the clouds of superstition and of prejudice." Influenced by Gnostic traditions, he sought to “achieve a communal state with nature, freed of government and organized religion.” He applied this to his work with the Masons in Bavaria, which is where my father's family comes from.
The one time I went a gay bar in Germany, I was confronted with twenty men who all looked exactly like my dad, giving me the eye-over. My dear German friend Georg is quick to point out that as for my last name, Mauzy, “Germans wouldn't put letters like that together... zy.” I guess that comes from our French ancestry, probably in the south, in caves.
In San Diego in 1978, a Freemason and a descendant of the descendants of the Inca came together to evoke illumination, to turn lead into gold, to return the king, Homo Luminous... not before, however, taking in a screening of the movie Grease, starring my first love, Olivia Newton-John. Later in 1979, on Cher's birthday, signaled by the growling of a Puma (my mom was coloring a large black cat in a coloring book when she went into labor, and ancient Incan cities were laid out in the shape of the puma), well, you see where I'm taking this.
“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing,” Socrates.
I can't really lay claim to know anything about the Freemasons or the Knights Templar. That which I didn't look up on the Wikipedia, I got from DVDs my mom collects on the esoteric, and the rest I made up. But the problem is, is that it makes sense. It makes much more sense to me than the current version of things I'm being asked to believe. I live in a place called Berkeley, which, historically is a hot bed of progressive thinking complete with liberals staging protests. Currently, there's a place you can go where sign holders wave signs that say “Honk for peace.”
Honk?
For peace?
Beep beep... I'm on my way to fill up my tank with four dollar per gallon gasoline that's going directly to fund a war I'm honking against! Beep beep.
It is shocking to discover that the idea of a “liberal” does not necessarily equate with the idea of “free thinker.” In fact, the further I go in life, the more I discover, the world is not made up of “free thinkers.” It is made up of those invested in the Zeitgeist, or, non-free thinking, bordered thought. And by that, I just mean that every step you take, every word you read, every time you eat food, it is filtered through a world view that is not your own, but something decided upon by every moment that lead to this one, and one that we trust implicitly to deliver us, however littered with hypocrisies it may seem to be.
All that has been presented here is just a re-arrangement of that Zeitgeist, an example of its arbitrariness. To me it holds together much more fabulously than “Honk for peace;” believing that when Benjamin Franklin called for revolution, he wanted to set up the exact same dependent system he was revolting from; or believing that George Bush could really destroy democracy in eight years, and that we asked for it. It gives me a sense of purpose and dare I say, faith, or hope, when otherwise I would have to concede that just by running this computer to write this, I'm contributing to a society of supply and demand that sustains on my need to want more, to never be fulfilled, to always seek its validation.
As much as I love to try to deny it, you can't deny the Zeitgeist. You can't just up-root and take shelter in a bubble free of humanity or thought. At that point, something in your higher consciousness would bring you back down to lead people away from their unconscious suffering, and therefore, you'd need another Zeitgeist. It is our way of interacting with the unknown world, like a language, or a computer program. If you remove it, another will be there to take its place. But to believe in it, that is the fallacy. Every story has two sides, and though we can lay claim to know both those sides, we will never know the truth. So our search for such then becomes not much more than an enigmatic fable that we attribute our language and world view onto. Anything beyond that gets shrugged off as “just the way it is.”
It is the unknowing, the uncertainty that propels us forward. Discomfort is evolution, life going towards the unknown. It is inherent in us as much as expansion is inherent in the universe.
Buddhist nun Pema Chodron talks about this when she discusses the bhodichitta, a Sanskrit word meaning “awakened heart.” It is in our hardest moments, we can see the tenderness of life:
“We train in the bodhichitta practices in order to become so open that we can take the pain of the world in, let it touch our hearts, and turn it into compassion.”
Again, it comes right back to turning lead into gold.
