Читать книгу Unlocking the Masonic Code: The Secrets of the Solomon Key - Ian Gittins - Страница 12

It is—to say the least—a moot point whether a gifted early stonemason named Hiram Abiff was really killed at King Solomon’s Temple. The Christian scriptures that detail the building of the temple make no reference to this occurrence, and nor do Islamic texts covering this period. Despite this, the murder has become a centrepiece of Masonic faith, education and ritual.

Freemason literature claims that Hiram Abiff, as well as being the chief designer and architect of the temple, supervised the project’s prodigious workforce: beneath him, claims the Book of Kings, were 3,300 foremen and 150,000 masons and labourers. Solomon and the two Hirams are said to have divided these workers into three ranks, dependent on ability.

These levels were Entered Apprentice, Fellow of the Craft and Master Mason. The rates of pay increased as a worker improved his skills and was promoted, with a Master Mason being the most prestigious and best remunerated. Workers queuing to be paid by King Solomon’s clerks would identify their rank by giving the wages clerk the secret password and sign that identified each level of employment.

One of Hiram Abiff’s many duties was deciding which employees were ready to take on more onerous duties and be promoted to Fellow of the Craft or Master Mason. The chief architect set exacting standards and was notoriously hard to impress, and fifteen of his workers hatched a plot to confront Hiram Abiff and issue him with an ultimatum: either he promote them to the higher rank or they would beat, or even kill him.

Masonic legend has it that twelve of the conspirators got cold feet and dropped out. However, three of them—with the hugely unlikely, nursery rhyme-friendly names of Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum—lay in wait at the three separate entrances of the Sanctum Sanctorum, and confronted Hiram Abiff as he left his customary midday private prayers.

Hiram Abiff emerged from the east door and was met by Jubela, who put his demand to be elevated to Master Mason. When Hiram Abiff refused, an irate Jubela slashed open his boss’s throat with one of the tools of the Masonic trade—a 24-inch measuring gauge. Mortally wounded, Hiram Abiff staggered to the south door, where Jubelo attacked him with an architect’s square. With the last strength in his body, he crawled to the west entrance, where Jubelum killed him with a blow to the head with a maul, or gavel.

Panicking, the murderers hid the chief architect’s body in a quarry near to the Temple, returning hours later to bury him in a shallow grave—it was said to be six feet long, six feet wide and six feet deep—with a sprig of acacia on top. Having covered their tracks, they then fled Jerusalem and took refuge in a small Mediterranean town named Joppa.

The twelve conspirators who had backed out of the plan to confront Hiram Abiff went to see King Solomon the next day and confessed their conspiracy: in Masonic accounts of this incident, they wore white aprons as a sign that their own hands were free of blood. Solomon dispatched men in pursuit of Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, who were soon apprehended in Joppa.

The punishment of the killers is one of the most lurid flights of fancy in Masonic literature. It is claimed that when they were captured, all three men were crying out in horror at the crime they had committed: Jubela confessed an urge to have his throat cut and his tongue ‘torn out by the root and buried in the sands of the sea at low water, a cable length from the shore’. Sharing his woe, Jubelo demanded that his heart be ‘torn from under my naked left breast, and given to the vultures of the air as a prey’.

Having struck the fatal blow, Jubelum was the most contrite: his express wish was to have ‘my body severed in two, one part carried to the south, and the other to the north, my bowels burnt to ashes and scattered before the four winds of the earth’. The three murderers had their gruesome wishes granted: exercising his fabled wisdom, King Solomon decreed that each of them should meet their sorry end exactly as they had predicted.