“Like Christianity, Freemasonry is a corpse from which the spirit long ago fled. In this connection, place may well be given to a letter from Mr. Charles Sotheran, Corresponding Secretary of the New York Liberal Club, which was received by us on the day after the date it bears. Mr. Sotheran is known as a writer and lecturer on antiquarian, mystical, and other subjects. In Masonry, he has taken so many of the degrees as to be a competent authority as regards the Craft. He is 32 
A., and P. R., and P. R., 94Memphis, K. R 
, K. Kadosh, M. M. 104, Eng., etc. He is also an initiate of the modern English Brotherhood of the Rosie Cross and other secret societies, and Masonic editor of the New York Advocate. Following is the letter, which we place before the Masons as we desire that they should see what one of their own number has to say:
“NEW YORK PRESS CLUB, January 11, 1877.
“In response to your letter, I willingly furnish the information desired with respect to the antiquity and present condition of Freemasonry. This I do the more cheerfully since we belong to the same secret societies, and you can thus better appreciate the necessity for the reserve which at times I shall be obliged to exhibit. You rightly refer to the fact that Freemasonry, no less than the effete theologies of the day, has its fabulous history to narrate. Clogged up as the order has been by the rubbish and drift of absurd biblical legends, it is no wonder that its usefulness has been impaired and its work as a civilizer hampered. Fortunately the great anti-Masonic excitement that raged in the United States during a portion of this century, forced a considerable band of workers to delve into the true origin of the Craft, and bring about a healthier state of things. The agitation in America also spread to Europe and the literary efforts of Masonic authors on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Rebold, Findel, Hyneman, Mitchell, Mackenzie, Hughan, Yarker and others well-known to the fraternity, is now a matter of history. One effect of their labors has been, in a great measure, to bring the history of Masonry into an open daylight, where even its teachings, jurisprudence, and ritual are no longer secret from those of the ‘profane’, who have the wit to read as they run.
“You are correct in saying that the Bible is the ‘great light’ of European and American Masonry. In consequence of this the theistic conception of God and the biblical cosmogony have been ever considered two of its great cornerstones. Its chronology seems also to have been based upon the same pseudo-revelation. Thus Dr. Dalcho, in one of his treatises asserts that the principles of the Masonic Order were presented at and coeval with the creation. It is therefore not astonishing that such a pundit should go on to state that God was the first Grand Master, Adam the second, and the last-named initiated Eve into the Great Mystery, as I suppose many a Priestess of Cybele and ‘Lady’ Kadosh were afterward. The Rev. Dr. Oliver, another Masonic authority, gravely records what may be termed the minutes of a Lodge where Moses presided as Grand Master, Joshua as Deputy Grand Master, and Aholiab and Bezaleel as Grand Wardens!
“The temple at Jerusalem, which recent archeologists have shown to be a structure with nothing like the pretended antiquity of its erection, and incorrectly called after a monarch whose name proves his mystical character, Sol-Om-On (the name of the sun in three languages), plays, as you correctly observe, a considerable share in Masonic mystery. Such fables as these, and the traditional Masonic colonization of ancient Egypt, have given the Craft the credit of an illustrious origin to which it has no right, and before whose forty centuries of legendary history, the mythologies of Greece and Rome fade into insignificance. The Egyptian, Chaldean, and other theories necessary to each fabricator of ‘high degrees’ have also each had their short period of prominence. The last ‘axe to grind’ has consecutively been the fruitful mother of unproductiveness.
We both agree that all the ancient priesthoods had their esoteric doctrines and secret ceremonies. From the Essenic brotherhood, an evolution of the Hindu Gymnosophists doubtless proceeded the Solidarities of Greece and Rome as described by so-called ‘Pagan’ writers. Founded on these and copying them in the matter of ritual, signs, grips, passwords, etc., were developed the mediaeval guilds. Like the present livery companies of London, the relics of the English trade-guilds, the operative Masons were but a guild of workmen with higher pretensions. From the French name ‘Macon’, derived from ‘Mas’, an old Norman noun meaning ‘a house’, comes our English ‘Mason’, a house builder. As the London companies alluded to present now and again the freedom of the ‘liveries; to outsiders, so we find the trade-guilds of Masons doing the same. Thus the founder of the Ashmolean Museum was made free of the Masons at Warrington, in Lancashire, England, on the 16th October 1646. The entrance of such men as Elias Ashmole into the Operative Fraternity paved the way for the great ‘Masonic Revolution of 1717’, when SPECULATIVE Masonry came into existence. The Constitution of 1723 and 1738, by the Masonic imposter Anderson, were written up for the newly fledged and first Grand Lodge of ‘Free and Accepted Masons’ of England, from which body all others over the world, hail today. …””
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 