Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery (25 page)

Northeast and northwest of the Ellipse centre, beyond the White House, are two matching parks, each with circles at their centres. They are two of the main features in the original layout for Washington. The one to the northeast is McPherson Square and the one to the northwest is Farragut Square. The distance between the middle of the Ellipse and centre of each of these parks is 2,988 ft, which is 3 × 366 MY. In other words, each park is precisely 3 Megalithic Seconds of arc from the centre of the city.

Now, someone might protest that it was probably meant to be 3,000 ft (i.e. 1,000 yd) and they made a bit of an error. But why should there be any integer distance for these features? This has nothing to do with the street layout – this is a web beneath the superficial city plan. And the centre of the Ellipse has never, openly at least, ever been described as significant for anything. And why would they measure in feet?

If the Capitol and these squares are the only features of Washington that have relationships that are integer in terms of Megalithic Seconds of arc, then maybe it is just a weird coincidence.

Further to the northeast of the Ellipse is Logan Circle Park. This is another of the legacies of the original Washington ground plan. Its distance from the Ellipse was
6
× 366 MY, and therefore
6
Megalithic Seconds of polar arc.

To the northwest is a matching circle park, this one called Dupont Circle. It too is 6 × 366 MY and
6
Megalithic Seconds of polar arc,
⁴
but from the western foci of the Ellipse this time. The accuracy for both of these circles was not quite as good as the inner circles but it was still better than a 99.5 per cent fit.

Even a sceptic will by now have wrinkled brow. This is not a coincidence. Somebody has carefully, and secretively, planned all this!

Lower in the northwest is Washington Circle Park. The measurement from the centre of the Ellipse to the centre of this park is 5 × 366 MY or 5 Megalithic Seconds of arc. There is a corresponding park in the northeast that is named Mt Vernon Square and this is also 5 × 366 MY from the meridian stone marker at the centre of the Ellipse. In both these cases the measurements are under 5,000 ft and much closer to being the 4,980 ft expected for 5 × 366 MY. Once again there seems no practical or obvious reason for such strange measurements to exist at all.

Another important road intersection is Seward Square, about 3.3 km southeast of the Ellipse. Its centre is 11 × 366 MY from the centre of the Ellipse.

About 615 m north of the centre of the Ellipse, and also just north of the White House, is Lafayette Square, a park named after one of the most important French Freemasons who fought for the American Republic at its foundation. At the centre of the square is an oval containing a monument. The distance between this oval centre and the centre of the Ellipse in megalithic terms is 2 × 366 MY. At each of the corners of Lafayette Park are freestanding monuments. The distance around all of these monuments totals 2 × 366 MY.

There can be no doubt about it: Washington DC has been planned so that major sites are linked by a web measured in Megalithic Degrees. There is no possibility of coincidence and whilst the street plan of the city is on open view, this under-scheme is invisible to anyone who does not know it is there. And whoever created it kept it entirely secret.

The Ellipse is situated almost immediately to the south of the White House and has an interesting and somewhat mysterious background. When Charles L’Enfant designed Washington, the Ellipse was one of his first and central features. From what we have discovered it must have been designated as the focal point of the new city from the outset. The centre of the Ellipse is at:

Latitude        38° 52' 38.17002" North

Longitude     77° 02' 11.55845" West

Elevation      5.205 m (17.077 ft) above sea level

During the Civil War (1861–65) the area was known as the ‘White Lot’ and was used to garrison troops, leading to it becoming a complete dump. The Ellipse was finally laid out during 1877–80 by the Army Corps of Engineers under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Lincoln Casey. Casey’s 1878 report indicates that levelling the land for the new Ellipse is well underway – all except for an area right at the centre that he says was not under his authority but that of the ‘District Commissioners’, apparently on account of an incomplete sewer below the ground.

Once the Ellipse was complete the land that now forms the National Mall (running west from the Capitol as far as the Lincoln Monument) was drained of water.

The line that runs north to south through the centre of the Ellipse also runs through the White House to the north and the Jefferson Memorial to the south. Back in the earliest days of Washington, Thomas Jefferson decided that the new United States needed its own meridian.
⁵
Up to this time the infant United States had used the ‘prime meridian’ that ran, and still runs, through Greenwich in England. As we have explained in detail in our previous book
Civilization One
, Jefferson had tried to create a new system of length, weight and capacity for his new nation, and a zero meridian through the new capital city was a natural extension of this ambition. None of his suggestions was adopted, except for his currency idea, the dollar.

Charles L’Enfant originally proposed placing a Washington DC meridian one mile east of the Capitol, though why this should have been his preferred position is not known. By the time Thomas Jefferson become President of the United States in 1801 he, or someone close to him, had decided that the Washington DC meridian should run north–south straight through the centre of the Ellipse. At the centre of the Ellipse, and slightly below the surface, is the Meridian Stone.

Where the intended meridian intersected the line that ran directly west from the centre of the Capitol, another stone was placed. This marker became known as the ‘Jefferson Pier’ or ‘Jefferson Stone’ and it remained in its original place until after the Civil War, when it was apparently accidentally discarded. The Washington meridian was never adopted and it remains only as a historical curiosity demonstrating the spirit and unbounded drive that the Founding Fathers had to distance themselves from British rule and establish their own powerful nation. In an increasingly globalized world the United States has never replaced the prime meridian that runs through Greenwich in England.

The Jefferson Pier stone was found again and reinstated on 2 December 1889. Due to errors, either when the Jefferson Pier was initially surveyed or when it was replaced, its centre is now located 2.23 ft (0.680 m) south of the Capitol’s centreline. It had originally been a waterway and the Jefferson Pier had often been used as a hitching post for boats.

This stone marker, placed at ground level at the centre of the Ellipse, remains but it has never been a tourist attraction. It is quite small and carries the inscription ‘U – S Meridian 1890’. Strange, we thought, that this particular tiny point is the ‘true’ centre of Washington DC and therefore the United States – and, in terms of political power, the eye of the modern world.

In many ways Washington is what Jerusalem once was – the hub of the world. And this almost forgotten stone in the middle of the Ellipse is the epicentre of the hub, just as the Delta of Enoch, at the heart of Jerusalem, was believed to have resided in prehistoric times.

This was an analogy that would make increasing sense.

Thomas Jefferson was a great scientist and mathematician. We had studied him carefully for our book
Civilization One
, not least of all because he created a brand-new measuring system based on the length of a seconds-pendulum rod. This system, though Jefferson himself almost certainly didn’t know, turned out to be resonant with the ancient megalithic system and had much in common with it. Jefferson had an ever inquisitive mind and had known very well that apparently random imperial measurements, such as the pound, the pint and the foot used at this time, were far from being random at all. He reasoned that they must be remnants of a science from deep antiquity. He was particularly interested in geometry and it is entirely appropriate that the meridian marker is to be found at the centre of a great ellipse, because this was reportedly his favourite geometric shape.

At the time the Jefferson Stone was placed close to where the Washington Monument now stands, the new Washington DC meridian also had another marker stone about two miles away. This meridian marker was a good deal further north, in a place that is officially known as Meridian Park.

The distance from the centre of the Ellipse to the centre of Meridian Park is 10 × 366 MY.
⁶

We have already seen that there was a direct megalithic relationship in terms of the distance between the Ellipse centre and the Capitol building. What we wanted to establish now was whether or not the Capitol was another important focal point for megalithic measurements in its own right. We therefore measured the distance between the centre of the Capitol and the centre of a square intersection to be found just under a kilometre to the northeast. This is Stanton Square and it appears to have been part of the original L’Enfant plan for Washington DC. The distance between the centre of Stanton Square and the centre of the Capitol is 3 × 366 MY.

Parks and intersections on the original plan of Washington DC often had mirror images created for them, and such is the case with Stanton Park. To the southeast of the Capitol is Seward Square.
⁷
The centre of this square and intersection is also 3 × 366 MY from the Capitol.

Further east than Stanton Park and Seward Square is Lincoln Park. The distance from both parks to the statue 114 m along Lincoln Park, is 3 × 366 MY.

It started to become clear that there are at least two major nodes that have been present since the very foundation of Washington. The first is the centre of the Ellipse, which itself is situated on the proposed Jefferson Washington DC meridian, and the second is the Capitol building itself. Between them, these two nodes enjoy megalithic relationships with a high percentage of squares and circles that form the framework of Washington DC’s geographical layout. In effect, underpinning the road layout we see today is a ‘spectral’ plan based entirely on megalithic measurements The Capitol building is the seat of government and arguably the most important building in the country – even compared to the White House. But what, we wondered, makes the centre of the Ellipse so significant?

What we had found, almost by accident, is explosive.

Washington DC has a completely secret structural plan lying beneath its sidewalks. What is more, it demonstrates a good understanding of megalithic geometry that has, apparently, been lost to the world for some three and a half millennia. We needed to understand and look more closely at the group of men that created the city – with particular reference to their Masonic connections. For Freemasonry is the only conceivable conduit for the transmission such super-ancient information, as regards the last 600 years at least.

•

It is no secret that Freemasonry played an important part in the founding of the United States of America. Indeed, it would have been very strange if this had not been the case. The intellectually motivated radicals that inspired both the French Revolution and its counterpart in the British Colonies of North America were exactly the sort of men that would be drawn to Freemasonry. From its outset, Freemasonry espoused the virtues that were shouted in both Paris and along the eastern seaboard of the Americas as the white-hot anger of people who felt themselves sorely oppressed found its expression. These virtues were liberty, fraternity and equality.

So pivotal are these concepts to the very basis of Freemasonry that it might be suggested that the presence of Freemasonry was, in great part, what ‘allowed’ both the American and French Revolutions to take place at all.

At Freemasonic meetings all brothers are equal. Differences in class and station mean nothing in the lodge and all Freemasons are bound by the same rules and mutually held agreements. Together with the unambiguous secrecy of the Craft this made Freemasonry a wonderful conduit for revolutionary ideals and even revolutionary activity in the 18th century. British and American Freemasons might be quite circumspect about their early revolutionary credentials these days, but the Grand Orient of France – the governing body of many French Freemasons, makes no bones about its involvement in both the American and then the French Revolution. Its own website, discussing a French Freemason called Lafayette who assisted in the American War of Independence, says:

Thus Lafayette received a sword from George Washington [himself a high-ranking Freemason]
¹
in honour of the part played by French Freemasons in the American War of Independence.

In this way, the preparation of the ideas of liberty and equality in the Masonic lodges contributed to the great reforms of the French Revolution.
²
,
³

Jacobin Clubs, formed in pre-revolutionary France for the discussion of political ideas and the planning of specific activities associated with revolution, were often merely extensions of Freemasonic lodges. This was certainly the case with regard to the highly influential ‘Lodge Les Neuf Sœurs’, established in Paris in 1776. This lodge was derived from a charitable organization known as the ‘Société des Neuf Sœurs,’ which itself had close associations with the French ‘Académie des Sciences’ about which we will have more to say. These French lodges offered both advice and material support to the American colonialists in their efforts to split from Britain.

The existence of Freemasonic lodges in the American colonies allowed secret discussions to take place amongst the citizens of the colonies and ultimately led to the formation of militias that fought against the British Redcoats once revolution broke out in 1775. Some of the major happenings that spurred the American War of Independence were entirely led by Freemasons. A good example of this was the famous ‘Boston Tea Party’ in which a group of colonialists, dressed as American Mohawks, went aboard ships belonging to the East India Company. The entire cargo of tea aboard the ships was dumped into Boston harbour as a protest regarding the East India Company’s virtual monopoly on tea brought to the colonies. This event, which took place on 16 December 1773, is seen as being a major precursor to the American War of Independence. The attacks were planned at The Green Dragon Tavern in Boston, a building that had been purchased by the St Andrews Freemasonic Lodge of Boston in 1764.