Written In Stone

While out and about in Nashville, Tennessee with a friend recently, we took a moment to visit a local cemetary. That sounds weird off the top, so I'll explain.
The attraction of this place is that it's very old and contains a large number of civil war era graves and markers. In fact that's what caused us to go there in the first place. We'd driven past on another errand. But from the road we noticed what looked like very unusual monument stones. Now both my friend and I are history buffs, and we're also interested in historic articles connected with Freemasonry. The giant obelisks on the the graves here are quite remarkable. it's not an exageration to say that some of them are as high as 30 feet tall. That's what we first got out of our car to get a closer look at. But those psuedo-Egyptian monuments paled in comparison to what next caught our eye.
The real clincher of our visit would be the civil war era grave of a man who'd had himself buried inside a pyramid. Yeah. Buried inside a pyramid. Its base is about 13 x 13 square, and it might be 10 or 11 feet tall ( these are estimations ) But this is a pretty remarkable sight.
First, there are very few average citizens who'd ask that they be buried under a pyramid of any kind. So it seems clear to my friend and me, that the man buried here, one Major Eugene C. Lewis ( 1847 - 1917 ) Wasn't just an average citizen. He was a wealthy freemason. And not just that, but he was a serious, deep, hard-core freemason. One very much engaged and interested in all the serious esoteric aspects. You just don't see this stuff every day. At the top of this entry is a shot of the triangular plaque on the tomb.

Devotion to those sun-worship concepts of inner Freemasonry is still more evident when you get a look at the tomb head-on. The idea seems to be to rebuild the Egyptian tomb ideal in miniature.
Just one more illustration to get to my point. When you stand at the back of this pyramid, and gaze out into the open field of the cemetery, you're greeted by a forest of obelisks. They're evident in various sizes throughout the enormous graveyard. It raises a question. What kind of nineteenth century American Patriot has himself buried under and ancient Egyptian Pyramid? Why would a stalwart, upstanding white American place an obelisk, the sign of the Egyptian Sun God, over his grave?

The answer of course, is that the monuments aren't about Nationalism at all. They're about religion. The religion that venerates the ancient Egyptian dieties of Osiris and Isis. The fact that the obelisk is meant to represent the Sun God's phallus drives the point home all the more.
The people buried here are unquestionably Americans. But are they Christians? I don't think so. Not as most common people understand Christianity
( the veneration of Christ, not Osiris ) And that's what I mean by the previous blog entry.

This whole graveyard episode is a very nice example to me, of how things and people who seem one way, may be just the opposite. Just as deep Freemasonry often hides under a facade of Christianity in America, so we see that much of what appears to be one thing in our society, is actally something else. That fact may not be obvious at first, but eventually, we begin to see the signs. And sometimes, as in our civil war graveyard, those signs are written in stone.