Wednesday, April 13, 2005
VISUAL ARTS AND FREEMASONRY
An article at Freemasonry Today describes the presentations at Canonbury Masonic Research Center's Third International Conference. This one is a surprise:
Solomon's Temple and Auschwitz
Professor Robert van Pelt, of Waterloo University, Canada, an historian of architecture, presented a paper on the conceptions of the design of Solomon's Temple.
He had acted as an expert witness in a recent case involving denial of the Holocaust. Because of Professor van Pelt's information it collapsed spectacularly. As a result of his research, Professor van Pelt knows a thing or two about the Nazi death-camps.
"Auschwitz and the plan of Solomon's Temple have close similarities", Professor van Pelt declared. Mouths dropped. Had we misheard?
There had always been speculation about the dimensions and the role of King Solomon's Temple in the Christian monastic tradition; Jewish scholarship remained uneasy about such representations. In the 16th century, a Jesuit, Juan Bautista Villalpando published illustrations of the Temple drawn from details given in the books of Kings and Chronicles and the vision described by Ezekiel (Chaps 40 - 43).
Villalpando described Solomon's Temple as an image of the universe - deriving from the desert tabernacle: the twelve tribes around it related to the zodiac, the four classes of the Levites serving it related to the four elements. The Temple itself had seven courtyards which were dedicated to the seven planets. The altar was in the centre which echoed the Ptolemaic universe with the earth at its' centre.
This influenced the design of the Escorial. And, in a dark twist of fate, it also influenced the design of Auschwitz. Most chillingly, the crematoria at Auschwitz were placed at the position of the Holy of Holies in Solomon's Temple. Professor van Pelt placed a transparency of Auschwitz over an illustration of Villalpando's design. All could see that he was correct. Something deeply disturbing lay behind Nazi architecture.
