I’ve been doing research on the famous image of King Solomon’s Temple which suddenly started appearing all over Europe towards the end of the 17th Century. Most famously, perhaps, this image was used by Gerhard Schott as his design for the enormous, 80 feet round and 13 foot high model of the Temple for an opera in Hamburg in the late 1690s, which was later taken on tour to London, and which many believe was an inspiration for the Third Degree which, in 1717 (the founding of the Premier Grand Lodge of England, celebrating its 300th Anniversary this year), had not yet been written.
This model, apart from being seen by many people at the time, was also reproduced in brochures of the exhibitions, and in prints, one of which may be seen at the Henry W. Coil Masonic Library & Museum at the Grand Lodge of California, CA (see print here).
It is also featured as a picture on the walls of many prints of English Masonic meetings of the time. Most interestingly, it made its way into editions of the King James Bible, too, for example the Mark Baskett edition used by St. John’s Lodge No. 1 in New York City, the famous George Washington Inaugural Bible (see here).
However, the usual image seen above actually comes from a rather older book, and most people who have seen the prints or Schott’s model or the image in the Baskett edition of the King James Bible probably won’t have seen the images at the top of this article. This version looks more like something out of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, or even the Hut of Baba Yaga of Russian mythology!
I will return to this extraordinary image very soon, and reveal all!
