The Master Game

by Graham Hancock

  In spring 1790 Paine travelled to Paris to advise Lafayette on constitutional matters, and during this first visit Lafayette presented him with the key of the (now nearly demolished) Bastille.91 On the same trip, Paine made contact with the Freemason and writer Nicolas de Bonneville, who, with the Abbé Fauchet, had recently founded the so-called Cercle Social (the ‘Social Circle’), a radical literary group that promoted deism and republican virtues and ideals. Later, in 1812, Nicolas de Bonneville would translate Thomas Paine's Origins of Freemasonry into French. In this work, Paine argues that the ancient Egyptian cult of the Sun and of Osiris are at the root of Masonic rituals.92

  Among Paine's other Parisian friends and supporters was the Marquis de Condorcet, also a Freemason and a friend of Voltaire. A renowned mathematician as well as champion of human rights, Condorcet was a member of the Nine Sisters lodge – where fellow members included Benjamin Franklin, the occultist and inventor of the Tarot, Court de Gébelin, and the astronomer Lalande. Let us recall in passing that it was Court de Gébelin who, in 1781, had written in his celebrated book, Le Monde Primitif analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, that: No one ignores that Paris was originally enclosed in the island [the Île de la Cité]. It was thus, since its origins, a city of navigation … As it was in a river rife with navigation, it took as its symbol a boat, and as tutelary goddess, Isis, goddess of navigation; and this boat was the actual one of Isis, symbol of this goddess.93

  The reader will recall from Chapter Seventeen that Court de Gébelin, who belonged to the ‘Scottish Rite’ and ‘Templar’ Freemasonry, had met the famous Cagliostro, inventor of ‘Egyptian’ Freemasonry, and admitted himself not qualified ‘to interrogate a man so much his superior in every branch of learning’.94

  It was Court de Gébelin who, along with Franklin, was given the ultimate honour of escorting Voltaire during the latter's Masonic initiation at the Nine Sisters lodge in 1778. Why, out of all the many illustrious members available, was Court de Gébelin selected to officiate in this most historic of initiations? The reason, we suspect, may well be in the alleged connection linking the Scottish Rite's ‘degrees’, the Tarot's ‘cards’ and the Cabalistic ‘paths’ – with the number 32 being the mystical common denominator for all three.

  We saw in Chapter Fifteen, that the 33rd degree Scottish Rite author Charles Sunmer Lobingier, historian for the Grand Commandery of the Scottish Rite in Washington, DC, deduced that in the Cabala's 32 paths of wisdom95 ‘we doubtless have the origin of the number of degrees as formulated by the Grand Constitution’ of the Scottish Rite.96 It is well known that the modern esoteric Tarot is largely modelled on the ideologies of the Cabala and the Cabalistic Sephiroth. Even more interestingly in this context, we may recall that it was Court de Gébelin himself who had attributed to the Tarot an ‘Egyptian origin’ and furthermore had asserted that the so-called Star in the Tarot deck was none other than the star of Isis, Sirius. And even though Thomas Paine could not have met Court de Gébelin (the latter died several years before Paine came to Paris) all this goes to show the potent brew of Cabalistic and Hermetic ideologies that was bubbling amongst Paine's circle of friends in Paris at the precise time that he was preparing to publish his celebrated Rights of Man.

  In early May 1790 Paine returned to London just as Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the French Revolution – a broadside attack on the uprising of the French people against the monarchy. Paine's outraged response was his celebrated Rights of Man, the first part of which he wrote and rushed into print before going back to Paris in early 1791 to establish the first ‘republican’ club there and to write his Republican Manifesto. By July 1791 the energetic Paine was once again in London where he wrote the second part of Rights of Man and dedicated it to Lafayette.97

  It was during his visits to Paris that Paine met Thomas Jefferson who would become his friend and confidante.98 Meanwhile in London he frequented an elite group of radical thinkers including the famous English poet William Blake. For all these radical intellectuals, as Professor David Cody has shown, the French Revolution in its early stages: … portrayed itself as a triumph of the forces of reason over those of superstition and privilege … [and] as a symbolic act which presaged the return of humanity to the state of perfection from which it had fallen away.99

  Not unexpectedly Thomas Paine's Rights of Man was immediately banned by the British government and, rather disturbingly, effigies of Paine were burnt outside churches. Paine himself was indicted for ‘seditious libel’ which, in those dangerous days, carried the death penalty. He narrowly managed to escape arrest, however, through the timely intervention of his good friend, William Blake, who warned Paine not to return to his home and helped him flee immediately to France.

  Upon arriving in Paris, Paine was hailed as a hero and friend of the revolutionaries and was promptly given honorary French citizenship and made a member of the National Assembly. But being a pacifist, Paine opposed the death penalty for Louis XVI and instead voted that the king be exiled. This stance infuriated the zealous Robespierre who had Paine thrown into prison in the old Luxembourg Palace. While incarcerated there, Paine managed to arrange for the publication of the first part of his most famous work, The Age of Reason.

  In Age of Reason Paine makes clear that he was a deist and believed in a Supreme Being while opposing the established Church. Naturally he must have been aware that at precisely this time, Robespierre and Jacques-Louis David were pressing on with their own cults of ‘Reason’ and the ‘Supreme Being’. And we know that ‘Reason’ and ‘Liberty’ – in the mind of at least David – were personified as the Egyptian goddess Isis during that strange ceremony that took place at the Bastille on 10 August 1793. In consideration of Paine's keen interest in Masonic origins, and his belief that Freemasonry owed its rituals to the Druids and the ancient Egyptians, it is not impossible that the personification of Paine's ‘Reason’ might also have veiled the same ancient goddess of the Nile …

  On 18 September 1793, barely five weeks after the ‘Isis’ ceremony in Paris, another republican ceremony was about to take place on the other side of the Atlantic on the summit of a low hill overlooking the Potomac River. But this time it was not to celebrate the demolition of a vilified national monument like the Bastille but rather to lay the cornerstone of a great ‘Temple of Liberty’ that would be built here – the brainchild of yet another adventurous Frenchman, Pierre-Charles L’Enfant.

  Engineer, artist, soldier

  On a warm and bright spring day in April 1909, D. H. Rhodes, the depot quartermaster of Digges Farm near Washington, DC, with the commissioners of the District of Columbia all present, supervised the disinterment of the remains of a man who had died 84 years previously, in 1825. The pitiful remains were gently gathered and placed in a metal-lined casket which was then covered with the American flag and taken to the Mount Olive Cemetery. Early in the morning of 28 April the casket was moved to the Capitol where it lay in solemn state until noon. Then, under military escort, it was finally taken to Arlington National Cemetery and buried in a permanent grave on sloping ground in front of the Custis-Lee Mansion and overlooking, in the distance, the city of Washington. A sum of $1,000 was allocated by Congress to erect a monument over the grave, featuring the street plan of the Federal City. Below the plan the name of the deceased may also be seen: Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, engineer, artist, soldier.

  Pierre-Charles L’Enfant was born in Paris in 1754, the son of a painter of landscapes and battle-scenes.100 Like his father before him, the young L’Enfant was educated at France's Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. There he learnt how to design military fortifications. He also studied the science of landscapes from the works of André Le Nôtre who, a century earlier, had designed the Tuileries Garden and the great Historical Axis of Paris. L’Enfant then joined the French army, and by 1776 when the American War of Independence began, he had reached the rank of lieutenant.

  Like Lafayette and many other young Frenchmen of the
time, L’Enfant was fired up with the new republican ideals of liberty and equality, and promptly offered his services to the American Revolutionary army. His knowledge of fortifications proved invaluable, and brought him to the attention of George Washington. L’Enfant was made ‘captain of engineers’, the embryo of what would later become the US Army Corps of Engineers. In March 1782 Washington was to write to L’Enfant: Your zeal and active services are such as reflect the highest honour on yourself and are extremely pleasing to me, and I have no doubt they will have their due weight with Congress in any future promotion in your Corps [of Engineers].101

  Networking with the Cincinnati

  We were intrigued to discover that L’Enfant had been associated with an organisation known as the Society of the Cincinnati.

  Founded in 1783 for officers who had served in the War of Independence, to help them and their families in case of need, the society still exists today. Named after the fifth century Roman soldier Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus, it is a patriotic and elitist military organisation with the peculiarity of being based on hereditary membership and only open to the eldest male descendants of the original members. George Washington was its first president and, in 1790, the society gave its name to the city of Cincinnati.102 Its membership would include America's first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, first secretary of war, Henry Knox, and future president, James Monroe – the latter whose name is immortalised, of all places, in West Africa as ‘Monrovia’, the capital of Liberia.103

  Although the Society of the Cincinnati is not a Masonic order as such, many of its founder members – Lafayette, Hamilton, Knox and Washington – were Freemasons, and thus not surprisingly ‘the Cincinnati shared a rhetoric of fraternal affection and honour as well as a significant number of members with Masonry.’104 In 1785 L’Enfant opened an architectural practice in New York, and through his Cincinnati connections, managed to land many lucrative design projects. When, in 1789, L’Enfant heard that plans were being made to establish a new federal capital for the United States in Virginia, he wrote directly to his old friend George Washington. According to Jean Jules Jusserand, author, historian and formerly French ambassador to the United States:105 L’Enfant, with his tendency to see things en grand, could not fail to act accordingly, and the moment he heard that the Federal City would be neither New York nor Philadelphia, nor any other already in existence, but one to be built expressly, he wrote to Washington a letter remarkable by his clear understanding of the opportunity offered to the country, and by his determined purpose to work not for the three million inhabitants of his day, but for the one hundred of ours, and for all the unborn millions that will come after us. The letter is dated from New York, 11th of September, 1789. ‘Sir’, he said, ‘the late determination of Congress to lay the foundation of a city which is to become the capital of this vast empire offers so great an occasion of acquiring reputation to whoever may be appointed to conduct the execution of the business that your Excellency will not be surprised that my ambition and the desire I have of becoming a useful citizen should lead me to wish a share in the undertaking … No nation, perhaps, had ever before the opportunity offered them of deliberately deciding on the spot where their capital city should be fixed

  … And, although the means now within the power of the country are not such as to pursue the design to any great extent, it will be obvious that the plan should be drawn on such a scale as to leave room for that aggrandizement and embellishment which the increase of the wealth of the nation will permit it to pursue at any period, however remote. Viewing the matter in this light, I am fully sensible of the extent of the undertaking.106 [Emphasis added]

  ‘Templar’ Octagons again, and the Tree of Life

  In early 1791 George Washington asked Thomas Jefferson to instruct L’Enfant to proceed to Georgetown to join and give assistance to Andrew Ellicott, a Quaker and Freemason from Pennsylvania who was also the land surveyor for the District of Columbia. Ellicott, who was 37 at the time, was the son of a watchmaker from Bucks County in Pennsylvania and had grown up with a keen interest in astronomy. He had attained the rank of major during the War of Independence, and had somehow worked his way into a close friendship with Washington and Benjamin Franklin – the latter being particularly interested in Ellicott's by then very good knowledge of astronomy and of the techniques of stellar observation.107

  In 1790 Washington appointed Ellicott as surveyor for the new federal capital – a job that he pursued with diligence over the coming year with the assistance of his younger brother Joseph. Ellicott had good reason to believe that he was Washington's chosen man for the job. L’Enfant, however, was to change all that. The strong-willed and pompous Frenchman simply barged in armed with Washington's instruction to ‘assist’ and practically took over from Ellicott.

  L’Enfant's specific task was to ‘have a drawing of the particular grounds most likely to be approved for the site of the federal town and buildings.’108 L’Enfant worked closely with Jefferson to produce a preliminary plan by June 1791, and in September, he received a letter from the newly appointed commissioners responsible for the administration of the project informing him that the: Federal district shall be called the ‘Territory of Columbia’ and the Federal City the ‘City of Washington’.109

  L’Enfant, described by many who knew him as hot-tempered and arrogant, soon began to antagonise the commissioners and refused to obey their instructions. The situation deteriorated rapidly, and in February 1792 George Washington was forced to ask Thomas Jefferson to give L’Enfant a severe warning that he must recognise the authority of the commissioners. L’Enfant, however, was unwilling to compromise, and resigned from the project.

  That same year Washington promoted Ellicott to surveyor general for the United States and gave him the task of completing the plan for Washington, DC based largely on L’Enfant's original design.110 Within a month Ellicott had an engraving ready.

  The suspicion has been raised that both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson participated directly in the evolution of this plan, here and there putting in their own specific ideas. For example, in their book The Temple and the Lodge, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh point to curious octagonal patterns that seem to underlie the layout of Washington, DC, and argue that these were Templar symbols introduced by Washington himself. The octagons are huge and can be clearly made out in two distinct areas centred on the Capitol and the White House.111

  The first printed edition of L’Enfant's plan, measuring 8.5 x 10 inches, is kept at the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, in Washington, DC.112 The engraving was made by the artists James Thackara and John Vallance, and is thought to be the earliest surviving print of Washington, DC. Attached to the print is an article, published in the Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine in March 1793, entitled Description of the City of Washington, in the territory of Columbia, ceded by the States of Virginia and Maryland to the United States, by them established as the Seat of their Government.113

  The first observation to make about L’Enfant's plan is its grand ambition. For what the Frenchman had in mind was a splendid metropolis for 800,000 inhabitants, with classical buildings and monuments appropriate to the capital of an eventual gigantic republican empire of 500 million citizens. Now at the time, the entire population of the United States could not have then been much more than four million. The population of the whole of Europe was, in fact, less than 200 million and the world's population would have been around 900 million. Today there are more than 300 million people in the United States, a figure that is expected to double by the next century.114 If it does, the US population would meet up with L’Enfant's staggering projection nearly 300 years later.

  The plan itself is as ingenious as it is intriguing. Immediately one is struck by the similarity – or more precisely the combined similarity – to the city plan of Paris, to the plan of Versailles and, even more intriguing, to Wren's and Evelyn's aborted plans for London. But this is perhaps not so surprising
. Apparently Jefferson, who was himself an accomplished architect and who had visited and studied many European urban centres, had supplied L’Enfant with plans of several European cities to serve as a guide.115

  Like Paris and London, L’Enfant's plan features a dominant east-west layout, emphasized by the alignment of the Mall (which he called Grande Avenue) that runs from the US Capitol to the (future) Washington Monument. This would understandably lead a casual observer to conclude that the main axis of the city was fixed, whether by intent or by coincidence, to the equinox sunrise and sunset.116 A closer examination of the map and contemporary accounts, however, makes it clear that the principal axis that L’Enfant had in mind was a presidential avenue (Pennsylvania Avenue), which joined the US Capitol to the presidential palace (the White House).

  It does not take much to see that L’Enfant's plan was heavily inspired by the layout of Paris and, perhaps even more so, by the ‘unexecuted’ layouts of the city of London made by Wren and Evelyn after the Great Fire.117 Most notable is the diamond-shaped design that evokes the Sephirothic Tree of Life; although not as evident as on Evelyn's plan for London, it can easily be discerned in the layout scheme which emanates from the Capitol in the east and culminates at the Washington Monument – a gigantic obelisk – in the west.

  In Robert Cameron's excellent book Above Washington,118 a series of stunning aerial photographs show that, in the main, the modern city has stayed fairly true to L’Enfant's scheme. Starting with the Capitol as the node of the plan looking west, two major avenues shoot at an angle, one to the southwest (Maryland) and to the other to the northwest (Pennsylvania) forming the classical upper portion of the Sephirothic Tree of Life which has as its node the first sephirah (divine emanation) representing the godhead. And although it may seem strange to equate the Capitol with the godhead, we note that in 1830 Congress commissioned a massive statue of George Washington seated on a throne in the style of Zeus, the godhead par excellence of the classical world. Initially placed in the forefront of the Capitol, the statue, sculpted by Horatio Greenough, was then moved to a less ostentatious location on the east side of the Mall, and today can be seen in the Smithsonian Museum.119