by Oakey Dokey » 9:59 am
Having read 'Talisman' by Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval and found it repetitive and nauseating, I was pleasantly surprised at how it reinforced what I have found very suggestive in recent months when researching Masons and age-old religions. If you haven't read this book yet I will not spoil it except to say its main aim -- to prove a correlation of sky-ground, Egyptian, western hidden city similarities -- takes an age and could have been achieved in a book a quarter of the size without the 'padding'.
The original Kabbalah was a sort of mystical 'tag on' to the Hebrew beliefs using the Hebrew alphabet as its template.
There are basically two types of religion -- literal and allegorical.
The Masonic rites and the Kabbalah belong to the allegorical category with the deliberate intention to replace literal facts and events with symbolism and deeper meaning without the intention to deceive (the initiated). The Masonic degrees, at least up to the 30th, make no apology for getting history wrong.
For an example, different types of Masonic practice believe that it is founded from the builders of the second Solomon temple, others from the Tower of Babel (Israel's imprisonment and slavery in Babylon). The history time-lines are also skewed such as the lineage unbroken from before the great flood (of Noah) to David and the first temple, even though there are in some cases obvious gaps. The most interesting point is that the story they tell is more important to their ideology than the accuracy.
This is where things start to break down, or at least for me as I'm not adept at seeing symbolism above facts, so find great difficulty in understanding why such an eastern way of doing things is prevalent today amongst the learned and influential of Western culture.