100 SECRETS OF THE WIDOW'S SON

they turned against "black" witchcraft in the Salem trials. But there were many waves of religious immigrants, increasing in numbers, frequency, and variety. It was, religiously and philosophically, the spread of many beliefs and movements from England, France, and elsewhere that easily crossed the Atlantic and took root in the New World.

'<~Shaking the Cocktail "-f43'

An extreme example of a very mixed-up religious con­coction is the famous religious commune at Ephrata, Pennsylvania. It held to genuine Rosicrucian beliefs with forms of alchemy, along with German Baptist (Dunker) faiths, Pietism, and even some practices that approached Judaism.

Ephrata's main strand of religious belief came through a mystic, Johann Conrad Beissel, who needed no text or Bible to preach, but merely closed his eyes and began to spout long, fiercely animated "sermons," or what would be called "rants" today. He had tried to be a religious hermit several times, but followers kept showing up at his cabin door. So he founded a sect that eventually grew to about three hundred, mostly German religious refugees streaming into Pennsylvania.

Beissel · was described as "physically diminutive, emaciated, a living skeleton until h is death , but possessed of such a magnetic personality that his influence, benign or malign, was felt by almost all with whom he came into contact.''

Beissel preached strict, total celibacy, so a joiner

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had to give up any marriage that he or she held. This car ried an attraction to certain married women of the area around Ephrata. Thus, on more th an one occasion, Beissel was attacked by an angry husband. Other times, a man might be severely d isciplined for sleeping with h is wife. Members of the order wore white robes and slept on narrow wooden platforms with stone pillows. Like ancient Jews, they rose at midnight to study Scripture and pray, and they adopted ·Saturday as their Sabbath, getting them in trouble with civil authorities.

Beissel believed in certain Hermetic traditions, including alchemical marriage (philosophically but not sexually), and in his later years he pursued real alchemy, searching for the Philosopher's Stone. In fact, his tenets were practically straight from Hermetic and Rosicrucian texts. In one legend, man was complete, being both male and female in spirit, before the conflict between the archangel Lucifer and God. T hrough celibacy, faith, and revelation, the masculine could reunite with the feminine to become a perfect spirit. The members of the Ephrata sect were therefore known as perfecti.

Beissel, raised as a baker by trade in Germany, was in fact a widow's son, born after the death of his father. It is said that as a young man he joined a Rosicrucian chapter that, because the order was banned, had to meet under the guise of a Pietist conventicle. His mem­bership became known in Heidelberg where Pietists were persecuted, however, and he was forced to flee, eventually m aking his way to Pennsylvania. To those Pietists remaining behind in Germany, the group that

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102 SECRETS OF THE WIDOW 'S SON

had gone to America was called "the Woman Wandering in the Wilderness." Beissel intended to

join them, but he wound up founding his own sect. With only rudimentary knowledge of music, Beissel

put together his own theory of harmony, wrote about two thousand hymns, and was the fiery choirmaster of the women of Ephrata. He saw music in a Kabbalah­like way, considering the musical notes to be' 'letters." Thus, a hymn was a coded form of divine guidance. Music was viewed in "Aeolian" or Pythagorean terms.

All over America, for most of its history, diverse religious groups have frequently seen a reason to proclaim the Second Coming, a new Messiah, or the End of Days. This was not particularly different from Europe and elsewhere, where new Messiahs and · M illennia h ad been regularly announced for centuries. (It is a very real, very courant undercurrent amo ng American religious fundamentalists today.)

Ephrata got a taste of this. In 1742, a comet was seen for several weeks in the night sky. The elders were convinced it meant the End of Days, and some of the brethren had to be restrained from killing themselves through starvation. Later, a dispute broke out when an elder detected hints that Beissel was preparing to

declare himself a new Christ. The Beisselianer, as they were known, practiced

agapas, or love-feasts, tracing back to the earliest C hristians. These were holy celebrations in which everyone, including servants and slaves, ate together and gave one another the kiss of peace. Agape is Greek for "love." Agapa was part of the m ason's mark of the famous Scottish Freemason, Sir Robert Moray (see

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page 139, Sexual Overtones of Dan Brown). The Ephrata brethren were followers of the

apocryphal wisdom of Sophia-which is Greek for "wisdom" and figures in the plot of DVC, explaining Sophie Neveu's name. It is a significant part of G nosticism.

lfM-" The Brotherhood of Zion ~

Ephrata was strange enough, but within the commune there arose a subsect that readers of DVC will find downright spooky.

Around 1738, a secret society formed at Ephrata called the Brotherhood of Zion (I kid you not). This has a truly eerie resemblance to the Priory of Sian that figures so prominently in DVC, the brotherhood founded among the Templars that supposedly carries the bloodline of the Merovingian kings, through Leonardo da Vinci to the Illuminati, and continues to Jacques Sauniere, Sophie's grandfather.

At Eph~ata, the Brotherhood of Zion con sisted of thirteen adepts who built themselves a circular chap­terhouse that, it is said, was/based on plans handed down from ancient Freemasonry. (In DVC, ·D an Brown says the Knights Templar characteristically built round churches.)

The Ephrata brotherhood was headed by a Perfect Master, o r Prior. It thus could be called a "Priory of Zion.''

Later, the nuns of the cloister took on the name of th e O rder of the Roses of Sharon. Once again, we have th e rose as a symbol, almost certain ly linked to

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Rosicrucianism. This would fit perfectly in a Dan Brown setting.

The three-story Zion chapterhouse had a first floor with a refectory and provision rooms, a second story with no windows-just one candle in the center and thirteen wooden cots radiating outward-and finally, an upper floor containing the "mystical chamber, where the arcana of the rite were unfolded." (Would this make a great setting for a Dan Brown novel, or what?)

· To begin their spiritual journey, the thirteen brothers entered the building and locked the door behind them, then spent forty days in prayer. On the fortieth day they were visited by seven archangels, one of whom handed them a sacred parchment. On the parchment was a "sacred pentagon" containing the Ineffable Name of God. The Brotherhood chose the Virgin Mary as their patroness, and showed their dedication to her by shaving their heads like Catholic monks. In fact, the nuns of the cloister also began to shave their crowns in the same manner, known as a tonsure.

They walked wherever they went, typically single file, so the spectacle of white-robed monks and nuns following Beissel looked to outsiders like a hen and chickens, or a father with his children. Their spare, vegetarian diet left them very skinny, and visitors to their services were struck by the way the powerful harmonies would emerge from a choir of emaciated, spirit-like beings.

A very spooky legend has it that there are human footprints on the ceiling beams of one of the Ephrata

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buildings, put there one night at midnight when the Prior and another monk walked on the ceiling.

Although Ephrata seemed very odd to other Pennsylvanians at the time, it wasn't unique. There were dozens of strange religious communities in a colony that, after all, was intended as a haven for castaway religions. It certainly didn't stop Ephrata's commune from becoming a fixture in the area. Members were known for baking pumpernickel bread and sharing it with neighboring towns. In fact, Benjamin Franklin did the early printing work for Ephrata's hymnbooks and religious tracts and later, it was where foreign translations of the Declaration oflndependence were made, to be sent to foreign governments.

But Ephrata was almost guaranteed to fail as a religious experiment. Combining alchemy and mysticism with celibacy is not exactly a winning strategy. But it was part of the ever-changing cultural mixture in the colonies.

This American stew of philosophy, religion, and science informed many of the formative stages of our Revolution. Just one example is found in one of the most famous phrases of all, the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence beginning, "We hold these truths ... "

Jefferson drafted the Declaration based on many streams of thought (not th~ least of which was John Locke's concept of natural rights, plus heavily borrowed passages from George Mason, a prominent Virginian). But Jefferson turned it over to Franklin for editing.

Among Franklin's most powerful changes was to

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amend Jefferson's "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable." Franklin made it "self-evident," avoiding any religious justification and instead drawing on Enlightenment traditions of Newton in science and Hume and Leibniz in philosophy.

In essence, Franklin brings independence into focus as a self-creating goddess, not requiring a religious parent in order to be born. It was a genuine nose-thumbing at all the monarchs of Europe, who needed some form of religious authorization to hold their crowns.

As we have seen, Franklin was in a unique position to say such an audacious thing. He was a Freemason, one of the world's preeminent scientists, and an excellent representative of Enlightenment thinking, both in America and in the world. If Dan Brown takes advantage of Franklin as a major figure in The Solomon Key, I would not be surprised or disappointed, although I think the subject has now been covered by the 2004 movie National Treasure, starring Nicolas Cage. This perhaps may thwart Dan Brown's employment of Franklin.

In National Treasure, the hero is an heir of Freemasons from the Revolution named Benjamin Franklin Gates. On the trail of a vast Templar treasure that was protected by the Freemasons, he follows clues, including codes and symbols, presumably created by the clever and wily Ben Franklin. One of the artifacts used to view hidden symbols on the back of the Declaration of Independence is a set of special filtered eyeglasses, constructed by Franklin and left in a niche at Independence Hall. The decoding of one

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important clue is done with ciphers keyed to the "Silenc·e Dogood Letters," a series of anonymous letters to the editor that Ben Franklin wrote as a youth.

~ The Mason-Influenced Revolutionary Conspiracy Begins ~

I think it's funny when conspiracy theorists start talking about the original Masonic plot to take over America. Pssst! Didya know that a roomful of men started a big conspiracy in ~776 in Philadelphia?

For the record, yes, there was definitely a con­spiracy among the fifty-six signers of the Declaration oflndependence. They real! y plotted to overthrow the rule of the king of England and create a new form of government called a democracy.

Yes, it was secretive. The men in the room all knew that their signatures would get them hanged on the spot if they were captured by the British. For this very reason, the copies of the Declaration that they signed were not made public until about five months later. The document itself was read in public on July 8, 1776, but the identities of the signers were not revealed.

There were nine known Freemasons among the fifty-six signers (although some put the number of Masons even higher). The primary writer of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, was not a Freemason. The only other signer who became president was John Adams, and he was not a Freemason. Benjamin Franklin was a signer, a Freemason, a wily fellow, and a man of huge importance, but none of his pursuits smacked of a conspiracy t0 run the new country.