Restoring the Temple of Vision: Cabalistic Freemasonry and Stuart Culture

by Marsha Keith Schuchard

This book uncovers the early Jewish, Scottish, and Stuart sources of "ancient" Cabalistic Freemasonry that flourished in Écossais lodges in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Drawing on architectural, technological, political, and religious documents, it provides real-world, historical grounding for the flights of visionary Temple building described in the rituals and symbolism of "high-degree" Masonry. The roots of mystical male bonding, accomplished through progressive initiation, are found in Stuart notions of intellectual and spiritual amicitia .
Despite the expulsion of the Stuart dynasty in 1688 and the establishment of a rival "modern" system of Hanoverian-Whig Masonry in 1717, the influence of "ancient" Scottish-Stuart Masonry on Solomonic architecture, Hermetic masques, and Rosicrucian science was preserved in lodges maintained by Jacobite partisans and exiles in Britain, Europe, and the New World.

860 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2002

Reviews

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a real shame that with most of her books, she puts out all the information, but her interpretation and connecting of events is tremendously flaky

Her Blake stuff annoys me more than the rest, and all the claims of Swedenborg has as much wishful thinking

You just wish she explored all the possible interpretations and just said this is my pet theory, no matter how unlikely the evidence is

Reminds me of those Victorian Billard books where the instructive part is knowing where you can recognize the mistakes, but their historical value is probably in the unique trick shots with a few examples, and the cover in rare cases were it's not exceedingly ugly.