‘“NEW YORK PRESS CLUB, January 11, 1877. (continued)…
“These bogus constitutions, written by Anderson, were compiled about then, and in order to palm off his miserable rubbish yclept history, on the Craft, he had the audacity to state that nearly all the documents relating to Masonry in England had been destroyed by the 1717 reformers. Happily, in the British Museum, Bodleian Library, and other public institutions, Rebold, Hughan and others have discovered sufficient evidence in the shape of old Operative Masonic charges to disprove this statement.
“The same writers, I think, have conclusively upset the tenability of two other documents palmed upon Masonry, namely, the spurious charter of Cologne of 1535, and he forged questions, supposed to have been written by Leylande, the antiquary, from a MS., Of King Henry VI., of England. In the last named, Pythagoras is referred to as having ‘formed a great lodge, at Crotona, and made many Masons, some of whom traveled into France, and there made many, from whence, in process of time, the art passed into England.’ Sir Christopher Wren, architect of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, often called the ‘Grand Master of Freemasons’, was simply the Master or President of the London Operative Masons Company. If such a tissue of fable could interweave itself into the history of the Grand Lodges which now have charge of the first three symbolical degrees, it is hardly astonishing that the same fate should befall nearly all of the High Masonic Degrees which have been aptly termed ‘an incoherent medley of opposite principles.’
“It is curious to note too that most of the bodies which work these, such as the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Avignon, the Order of the Temple, Fessler’s Rite, the ‘Grand Council of the Emperors of the East and West – Sovereign Prince Masons’, etc., etc., are nearly all the offspring of the sons of Ignatius Loyola. The Baron Hundt, Chevalier Ramsay, Tschoudy, Zinnendorf, and numerous others who founded the grades in these rites, worked under instructions from the General of the Jesuits. The nest where these high degrees were hatched, and no Masonic rite is free from their baleful influence more or less, was the Jesuit College of Clermont at Paris.
“That bastard foundling of Freemasonry, the ‘Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite’, which is recognized by the Blue Lodges was the enunciation, primarily, of the brain of the Jesuit Chevalier Ramsay. It was brought by him to England in 1736-38, to aid the cause of the Catholic Stuarts. The rite in its present form of thirty-three degrees was reorganized at the end of the eighteenth century by some half dozen Masonic adventurers at Charleston, South Carolina. Two of these, Pirlet a tailor, and a dancing master named Lacorne, were fitting predecessors for a later resuscitation by a gentleman of the name of Gourgas, employed in the aristocratic occupation of a ship’s clerk, on a boat trading between New York and Liverpool.
“Dr. Crucefix, alias Goss, the inventor of certain patent medicines of an objectionable character, ran the institution in England. The powers under which these worthies acted was a document claimed to have been signed by Frederick the Great at Berlin, on May 1st, 1786, and by which were revised the Masonic Constitution and Status of the High Degrees of the Ancient and Accepted Rite. This paper was an impudent forgery and necessitated the issuing of a protocol by the Grand Lodges of the Three Globes of Berlin, which conclusively proved the whole arrangement to be false in every particular. On claims supported by this supposititious document, the Ancient and Accepted Rite have swindled their confiding brothers in the Americas and Europe out of thousands of dollars, to the shame and discredit of humanity.
The modern Templars whom you refer to in your letter, are but mere magpies in peacock’s plumes. The aim of the Masonic Templars is the sectarianization, or rather the Christianizing of Masonry, a fraternity which is supposed to admit the Jew, Parsee, Mahometan, Buddhist, in fact every religionist within its portals who accepts the doctrine of a personal god, and spirit immortality. According to the belief of a section, if not all the Israelites, belonging to the Craft in America – Templarism in Jesuitism. …””
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 