The Book of Hiram: Freemasonry, Venus and the Secret Key to the Life

Add one part heresy, one part detective story, and one part archaeology, and you get "The Book of Hiram". Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas have concluded their 14-year quest for the historical Jesus, the roots of Christianity, and the origins of the Freemasons with this book. In their previous works, "The Hiram Key", "The Second Messiah", and "Uriel's Machine", Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight set out to discover the mysterious origins of the Freemasons. What resulted was a mixture of archeological surprises, pre-historic science, conspiracies, and heretical Christology. Among their discoveries were: freemasonry is in the possession of ancient esoteric secrets that go back to the time of King Solomon; Jesus was in possession of that knowledge; the Knights Templar rediscovered those secrets in their excavations of the Temple in Jerusalem during the Crusades; ancient scrolls taken from Jerusalem by the Knights Templar are most likely buried on the premises of Rosslyn Castle; and there were two universal floods (one of them described in Genesis). Pre-historic man developed a technology to predict those floods (as evidence at Stonehenge). "The Book of Hiram" both recapitulates the findings that appear in their previous books and expands on them, presenting additional research that further bolsters their thesis that Freemasonry possesses ancient, albeit somewhat garbled and misunderstood wisdom. The second half of the book is The Masonic Testament. A comprehensive chronological collection of the rites of the Freemasons. Those rites - combined with the authors' commentary - represent a document analogous to the Old and New Testaments. It is a document that adds to our knowledge of ancient Judaism, as well as adding a strand of esoteric knowledge that appears nowhere else.