The Journal of The Masonic Society
FROM THE EDITOR
Keys, Rocks, Cigars & Symbolism by Christopher l. Hodapp
D
an Brown made a big mistake. After telling everybody that his sequel to The Da Vinci Code would be a novel about the Freemasons and Washington DC called The Solomon Key, he didn’t publish anything for the next five years. Probably a stellar case of writer’s block. Consequently, the world has had way too much time to second guess every possible plot point, landmark and potential clue he might use. And I suspect every time a National Treasure movie comes out, his wife has to spend three days talking him in off the window ledge. When I was researching my own book, Solomon’s Builders, I was reading Bob Arnebeck’s Through A Fiery Trial, a mind-numbingly detailed account of the building of the new Federal City. In the stories of 1793, I came across a reference that leapt off the page, screaming “Dan Brown Alert.” In colonial days, the first solid ground on the marshy north shore of the Potomac, just north of where the Lincoln Memorial stands today, was an outcroping of rocks jutting into the river. On several old maps it is cryptically labeled the “Key of All Keys,” and for many years it bore a surveyor’s benchmark. But it’s more popular name was Braddock’s Rock, reportedly because British General Braddock and his red-coated soldiers, accompanied by the young British Lieutenant Colonel George Washington, landed there in 1755. This giant rock later became a quarry, and it was said to have furnished stone for the foundations of both the White House and the Capitol. About 1832, when the old C&O canal was extended below Georgetown to connect with the Washington City Canal, nearly all that was left of the original Braddock’s Rock was blasted away. All the riverside swamps have long since been filled in, and the land raised above the level of the original surface. During colonial times, the hillside above the rock was known as “Observatory Hill.” British naval ships frequently docked there to off-load troops and supplies. And in the early days of the building of Washington, the Old Naval Observatory was built on top of it. Now, if you are a fan of David Ovason’s book The Secret Architecture of Our Nation’s Capital, then all this observatory business does have a Masonic connection, since Ovason contends that the Masonic designers of Washington were all obsessed with the zodiac. The Old Observatory still stands in what is now the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery complex, just north of the Lincoln
Memorial, up the hill from the “Key of All Keys.” The original dome can still be seen; it was here that astronomer Asaph Hall, in 1877, discovered the moons of Mars. At this point, I was so excited I didn’t know which way was up. I just knew that the “Key of All Keys” was some kind of esoteric reference. It had astronomical connections, Masonic connections, was in the nation’s capitol, and had an occult name that just had to mean something big. In The Royal Secret written in 1923 by I. Edward Clark, an entire chapter is devoted to a very different “key of all keys”: “There is a key to every Mystery, and every such key has been so effectively hidden that centuries have elapsed, in some cases, before its discovery. . . . The swastika is the key of all keys, and a knowledge of the numerals of the Hebrew alphabet is necessary to unravel the Mysteries attached therein.” Great. A Hebrew swastika. It was a small setback, even if the swastika in 1923 hadn’t yet acquired its creepier, more sinister reputation. Still, I knew there had to be a symbolic explanation, and I knew I was on the trail of a Very Big Secret, one that even Dan Brown hadn’t uncovered. Adding to its Masonic allure, its location is directly east of what was Mason’s Island (now Roosevelt Island, named after Freemason Teddy Roosevelt). Better yet, the rock was chipped away and used as foundation stones by Masonic architect James Hoban for both the White House and the Capitol Building — both of which had cornerstones laid by the Freemasons. Which means both buildings contain jigsaw pieces of the “Key Of All Keys.” With understandable excitement, I perservered through one windy article or journal after another in my lone quest to uncover one of the lost secrets of Masonry. At last, I discovered a crushingly anti-climactic explanation of the Key, from one Wilhelmus Bogart Bryan in his 1914 History of the National Capital. He explained that it was simply a variation of the phrase “quay of all quays.” I remembered then that, on holiday in the Bahamas, I saw the locals detecting tourists by their pronounciation of the word - islanders always pronounce it “key.” Such is the shifting sand of the history of pronunciation. So, after weeks of research and pondering and searching for an ethereal meaning behind an intriguing and obscure reference, it turned out to be just a very big rock that was a really good place to tie up your boat. Or as Freud famously said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Summer 2008 • 39