Templar Edification

40 days after the birth of Jesus Christ, the Church celebrates an oft-overlooked holiday that goes by many names. For Protestants, it is the Presentation of Our Lord. Catholics call it the Purification of the Blessed Virgin. For the Orthodox, it is simply Hypapante, “the Meeting.” Yet I confess my own preference for the Anglican name: Candlemas. We find the story of Candlemas in the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel, concluding that early section of canticles we sometimes call Luke: The Musical. 40 days after childbirth complete Mary’s period of ritual cleansing according to the Law of Moses. She may now travel to the Temple in Jerusalem in order to redeem Jesus as her firstborn Son. This harkens back to the tale of the Exodus, when God claimed the firstborn of Israel as His own, be they man or beast—“the males that first open the womb.” The number 40 always carries symbolic importance in the Scriptures; ancient peoples knew that it takes roughly 40 weeks for a pregnant woman to come to ...

References to the ‘Lion of Judah’ notwithstanding, as this is geared toward Christian specific bodies including Templary, many references remain quite important to all given the fact ‘Jesus’ was not named specifically in the time of Hiram Abif or the timeline of this story, beginning long before Jesus was born. At the time when premonitions of ‘a’ Savior were made by Founding Fathers of the Craft, the Lord’s Temple had yet to be completed. Please enjoy. Thank you. SK Eric Erfourth An excerpt from: Freemasonry and Catholicism By: Max Heindel - 1919 {the entirety of the book may be found in the public domain at  https://www.google.com/books/edition/Freemasonry_and_Catholicism/d0BIAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1  } Part IV. CASTING THE MOLTEN SEA “As the spiritual gifts of the Sons of Seth flowered in Solomon, the wisest of men, and enabled him to conceive and design a marvelous temple, according to the plan of his creator, Jehovah, so Hiram, the clever craftsman, embodied within himse...

     So what is a magus exactly? Strictly speaking, “magi” refers to the Zoroastrian priests of ancient Persia; renowned astrologers for whom sacred fires were the preëminent symbols of the presence of God. The thought of their founding prophet, Zoroaster, falls somewhere between dualism and monotheism, and the faith that he left behind both influenced and was influenced by biblical Judaism.      Persians generally come off pretty well in the Hebrew Bible. When the Chaldeans of the Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered Judah and scattered the Jewish people into Exile, most settled in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) right next to Persia (modern day Iran). Zoroastrian ideas of angels, demons, and a coming Final Judgment found fertile ground in Judaism, while Jewish monotheism firmed up Zoroastrian concepts of God.      When Cyrus the Great soon thereafter arose as Emperor of the Persians and Medes, Jewish prophets hailed him as an anointed liberator se...