Camp Gagnon - The OCCULT Symbolism that Founded America

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

Today, we look at the occult symbolism that is scattered around Washington D.C. We’ll review the Initiation Into Freemasonry, Washington’s Masonic Cornerstone Ritual and other interesting topics. Welcome to Camp! 🏕️Shoutout to our sponsor: BlueChewWant the even WILDER theories?SIGN UP TO THE PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CampGagnon👕🧢 Shop CAMP Merch: https://camp-rd.com/collections/ufo🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets: https://markgagnonlive.com🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.comTimestamps0:00 Intro1:28 Camp Bulletin + Christos YAPPIN3:00 Creator of Masonic Layout6:30 Initiation Into Freemasonry9:51 Washington’s Masonic Cornerstone Ritual12:23 Pentagram Layout14:34 The Federal Triangle18:35 DC’s Egyptian Obelisk22:34 Washington Memorial Stones24:32 Deification of George Washington28:05 Sphynx at House of The Temple31:38 Tombs Inside The Temple32:49 The Masonic Connection34:52 Drop Your Thoughts!#occult #freemasons

The man who designed the U.S. Capitol building stood in a dirt trench on September 18, 1793, with a silver plate beneath his feet, a massive ox roasting nearby for an after-party, and a crowd of men in full Masonic attire chanting around him. And the man we're talking about was George Washington. He's wearing a Masonic apron and consecrating the foundation of the nation's most important building with a ritual that hadn't changed in centuries. And the whole thing was reported in the newspaper. for the next day. Not as a scandal, not as a secret, just a regular Wednesday. And today,

that exact same gavel that Washington used during that ceremony is still owned by the Masonic Lodge in Washington, D.C. That's how baked into the bones of this country, Freemasonry is. And today, we're breaking down the real story of D.C. Everything from the pentagrams, the 550-foot obelisk, the sphinxes guarding a temple a mile north of the Oval Office, the tombs hidden inside its walls, the painting on the Capitol Dome that literally turns George Washington into a god. This is the Masonic symbolism hidden throughout Washington, D.C. So if you ever walked around our nation's capital and saw some of these crazy buildings and these giant obelists dedicated to Washington and thought, why is that there?

Well, today we break it all down. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. What's up, people, and welcome back to camp. My name is Mark Gagnon. And thank you for joining me in my tent for every single week. we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from around the world from all time forever.

That is what I do here is I deep dive on all the most strange and interesting mysteries that are plaguing my mind at the present moment. And, oh boy, today we have a fascinating one. But before we jump in, I want to say a few camp bulletins,

I want to say thank you so much to you. Yeah, dude, or lady, for tuning in every time you click on an episode and you listen while you're supposed to be working and you're not doing that. You help me out a lot. So continue that ethic. It really is great.

And you really keep the lights on to the campsite, and you help keep the fire burning here in the tent. I also want to give a big shout to my pal, Christos, Papadapadus. How are you, Christos? Doing great. All right, Chris, there's no time because we're going through all the symbolism of Washington, D.C. Now, this is something that my mother has talked to me about for years. If you don't know anything about my lovely mom, she is a classical conspiracy theorist.

This is the woman that raised me, that put me on to game when I was just a boy, we would walk around D.C. when I was just a Ute and she would point to stuff and be like, you see that? Masonic. And I'd be like, Mom, you're crazy. And I would just kind of brush her off. But now as an adult, I know that not only is she not crazy, she might have been right about everything all along. And so, based off of my love for my mother, but also my interest in symbolism hidden in plain sight, I have decided to jump into a crazy escapade to break down all the Masonic symbolism that you will see in Washington, D.C. today. Now, in order to understand the symbolism in D.C., you have to start

with the man who drew the whole city. His name is Pierre Charles L'Enfant. Now, Pierre was born in France and trained at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris, and he came to America as a volunteer to fight in the American Revolution, and he had a pretty tough time. He took a musket ball in the siege of Savannah in 1779, got captured in Charleston a year later, and then eventually landed on George Washington's personal staff as a major.

Now, after the war, he settled in New York and became Washington's go-to, architect for anything that needed to look really awesome. So he redesigned the federal hall, the building where Washington took the oath of office as the first president. He designed the Eagle Medal for the Society of Cincinnati, this very exclusive club of former Continental Army officers. And then in 1791, Washington gave him the gig of a lifetime, designed the new federal capital from scratch. I mean, not the easiest job in the world, but Lafault was ready. He was handed a diamond-shaped piece of swamp land between Maryland and Virginia that was essentially off the grid and you have forests and marshes and a couple plantations. And to Lafantleau, this was just a blank canvas.

So what did he actually do with it? Well, Lafant didn't invent his ideas from nothing. Thomas Jefferson, who was Secretary of State at the time, sent him maps of various European cities to use as models. But instead of compying just any single one, Lafant pulled different ideas from many different maps. The biggest influence was the world that he'd grown up in, of course, the city of Paris and the grounds of Versailles. Versailles had been laid out in the Baroque style by a designer named Andre Le Nautres. And the whole idea of that style was long, straight, and dramatic sight lines that cut across the landscape so that wherever you stood, you were always looking down a wide lane at something interesting. And that's where L'Enfant

got this style from. He started off with a normal grid of streets, kind of like the boring rectangular blocks that you would find in any city. And then he laid broad diagonal avenues right on top of the grid, slicing it at all angles. Now, wherever those diagonals crossed the grid, they opened up squares, circles, and triangles, and, you know, natural spots to drop monuments and fountains later on. And you can see here a map of kind of how this looks. Now, before he drew a single street, he picked his anchor points by walking the actual land and finding the high ground for the buildings that matter the most. So, of course, he put the Capitol on the highest ridge,

a place that was called Jenkins Hill, which he described as a pedestal awaiting a monument. And then he placed the President's House on a slightly lower ridge and tied the two together directly with Pennsylvania Avenue. The entire plan was built to focus on those two buildings, the Capitol and the Presidential Mansion. And he also carved out a wide, mile-long stretch of open green running west from the Capitol,

which he eventually called a green. Grand Avenue, and that is what eventually became the National Mall, as we know today. And then he gave each of the 15 states its own square to build on and design whatever they want, with the idea being to create a little friendly competition between them. And the result was something that had never existed in America before. It is still, to this day, the only fully Baroque city plan in the country. And that's the entire point. L'Enfone deliberately wanted Washington to look nothing like the old capitals of Europe,

even while he was barring all of their grandeur. Now, this is where the conspiracy starts, because L'Enfant was a Freemason, sort of. The records of Holland Lodge number eight in New York City show that on April 17, 1789, 12 days before Washington's inauguration, a major Francis L'Enfant was initiated as an entered apprentice. And that's the very first of the three degrees of the Blue Lodge, the 33rd degree and master mason stuff that people picture is

associated with Scottish Wright and York Wright Freemasonry, which is a separate thing entirely. We actually still have the manuscript records from his initiation, and his first task was to take the necessary measures to ventilate the lodge rooms. Literally, his opening assignment as a brand-new mason was like, HVAC, figuring out how to clear the heat and cigar smoke out of a lodge room. But after that, the trail just stops. He never advanced past that first degree. And his biographers describe him as a very difficult man who burned bridges constantly, which is probably a polite way of saying that he was just a nightmare to work with. Other lodge members got bumped up to the second degree within weeks, but Lafonne didn't. He was a mason on paper for like a minute,

but it didn't seem like he ever came back or possibly he wasn't invited back. He actually got pushed out of the D.C. project and fired by George Washington for the same exact reason, because he refused to compromise with anyone. And that's the part that actually matters for the symbolism question because L'Enfant never finished the city that he designed. While L'Enfant was drawing a surveyor named Andrew Ellicott was on the ground mapping the district's boundaries and actually helping lay out the city. And then in February 1792, Ellicott told the commissioners that L'Enfant had never gotten the plan engraved and that he was basically refusing to hand over an original copy that he was sitting on. So Eilacott, working with his brother Benjamin, revised the plan himself

despite L'Enfant's objections. And he re-aligned and straightened in Massachusetts Ave, cut five short radial avenues and added two others, removed a bunch of plazas, and squared off the borders of what became the judiciary square. He also changed some of L'Enfant's circles into rectangles, and then shortly thereafter, Washington dismissed L'Enfant entirely. Ellicott's revised version is the one that got engraved and printed and circulated,

and it became the actual blueprint that the city was built from. And that's important because a lot of the symbolism we're about to go to depends on exact street alignments, and some of those alignments were set by Ellicott and not L'Enfant. Now, the last thing on the man himself, L'Faun Féne ended up dying in 1825, with only about $46 to his name, and he was buried in an unmarked grave on a friend's farm in Maryland. And then in 1909, 84 years later, Congress dug him up and actually gave him a state funeral, and then reburied him at Arlington National Cemetery on a hill overlooking the entire national mall that he had helped design. His tombstone is engraved with his original map of DC. Now, the guy died broke and got

reburied as like a national hero on the highest point above his own city. So that's the designer. A barely Mason French perfectionist who never went back to the lodge after a second meeting, whose finished plan was rewritten by someone else and, you know, absolutely knew how much people loved symbolism. So let's get to the actual city itself. It's September 18, 1793, George Washington crosses the Potomac River into the unfinished federal city. He's met by two brass bands, an artillery company, and delegations of masons from Maryland and Virginia. This is the first parade ever held in Washington, D.C. They march about a mile, maybe like a mile and a half, into the construction site of the U.S. Capitol, where a trench has already been dug for the

southeast cornerstone. The southeast corner is significant in Masonic tradition. It's where the cornerstone of King Solomon's Temple was traditionally laid, and Solomon's Temple is the foundational mythological structure for all of Freemasonry. You can check out an episode we did on King Solomon over on Religion Camp if you haven't seen it, but basically Washington steps down into the trench wearing a Masonic apron and places a silver plate on the ground engraved by a Georgetown silversmith named Caleb Bentley, listing the names of the commissioners and the architects and the date, and then he lowers the cornerstone on top of it. Three worshipful masters. These are like the highest ranking members of a local lodge, then approach the cornerstone with three vessels.

They have corn, wine, and oil. Corn is supposed to be symbolic for nourishment, wine for refreshment, and oil for joy. These are the three substances that masons have used to consecrate buildings since at least the 1700s, and the symbolism goes back even further all the way to basically the Old Testament. And the ceremony opens with the Brethren chant and Washington steps out of the trench, and then, because nothing says spiritual ceremony

like a after-party, they roast a 500-pound ox and feast until the evening. Now, one of the weirdest parts of the story is that the silver plate has never been found. The capital has been expanded multiple times, so the original southeast corner is now somewhere buried, inside the modern building. And despite multiple searches over the centuries, including one in 1893

for the ceremony's 100th anniversary, no one's ever located it. So somewhere in the capital, there's a congressman whose office is possibly sitting on top of a 230-year-old Masonic time capsule. And that gavel that Washington used at that event is now at the Potomac Lodge number five in Georgetown. And over the past two centuries, it's been used at the cornerstone ceremonies for the Washington monument, the Smithsonian Institute, the National Cathedral. It's basically the most well-traveled hammer thing in American history. And now we get to the part that you've probably seen on TikTok, okay? This is the pentagram pointing at the White House. So this is weird. If you draw lines across Massachusetts Ave, Vermont Ave, Connecticut Ave, Rhode Island Ave, and a stretch of K Street,

you will allegedly get a five-pointed star with the White House at the bottom point. The five points are supposedly DuPont Circle, Logan Circle, Washington Circle, Mount Vernon Square, and the White House itself. And to the people who will talk about this theory, it's not random. The inverted pentagram is associated with what they call Baphomet, or the Goat of Mendez. And they argue that the entire executive branch sits at the tip of a satanic sale carved in the streets of the capital. And it's an awesome theory. I mean, myself being a symbolism fanatic, you can see it right here. you're like, wow, that looks like a pentagram with the White House right at the end. But there's an issue.

A true pentagram has five points formed by five lines of equal length, and the DC version only has four lines that actually connect, because Rhode Island Ave doesn't extend west of Connecticut Avenue. So there's no line completing the top part of the star. Ah, don't you hate that? A perfectly good theory just ruined by city planning, you know? So the K Street segment that's supposed to close it is dramatically longer than the other lines, which also kind of breaks the geometry. The Mount Vernon Square, one of the other supposed star points, was an empty patch of grass until 1902, and there was literally no building there for over 100 years after the plan was drawn.

So if Laun Fault was hiding in Pentegram, he did it pretty poorly, and if you hit it so subtly that it wouldn't be complete for over a century, then maybe that's just a high IQ move. even the Grand Lodge of D.C. when asked about it directly, they just laughed, but also that Mason's would laugh, right? Their communications director said the only part of the pentagram theory that is true is that there are streets in Washington, D.C. Kind of snarky. Now, this is where it gets interesting. That doesn't mean that the city has zero symbolism, because there absolutely is. It just means that the pentagram isn't necessarily the best one to look at. It's still a fun theory, but I don't think it holds a ton of substance.

Now, there is actually some geometry that's pointing. and this is called the Federal Triangle. Now, the White House, the Capitol, and the Washington Monument create a near-perfect right triangle in the heart of D.C. With the monument at the right angle. And that's actually not an accident. Remember, L'Enfant placed the Capitol on what was then called Jenkins Hill.

So he aligned the White House and what would eventually become the monument on perpendicular axes. And that takes us to the next alignment. Author David Overson wrote an entire book called the secret architecture of our nation's capital, arguing that the federal triangle is intentionally aligned with real stars that frame the constellation Virgo. And he calls these Arcturus, Spica, and Regulus. And he claims that every August 10th through the 15th, as the sun

sets over Pennsylvania Avenue, the constellation Virgo rises directly above the White House. Now, whether you buy it or not, and most historians don't, Ovison did document something that nobody disputes. There are at least 23 zodiac signs displayed in art and architecture around DC. So the National Academy of Sciences has all 12 signs worked into its bronze entrance. And out front, the Einstein Memorial shows Einstein looking down at a star map charting the exact positions of the sun, moon, and planets over Washington the day it was dedicated. The Federal Reserve, Eccliss building, has the 12 signs running around the rim of a glass light fixture. The Library of Congress has the zodiac inlaid in brass on the marble floor of the Great Hall,

and its cornerstone was laid on a day that Ovison notes the sun was sitting in Virgo. And it just keeps going. A ceiling mural in the old Ariel Rios building wraps the four seasons around all 12 signs. The melon fountain has them cast into its bronze basin. The freer gallery has zodiac light fixtures. The National Shrine has a zodiac arch. The Capitol Statuary Hall has an 1819, 19, sculpture whose chariot wheels double as a clock ringed with, you guessed it, the Zodiac signs.

Now, you don't have to believe in the Virgo alignment to notice that, you know, the Zodiac and the 12 signs of, you know, the Zodiac Star signs are appearing all the time throughout D.C. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I want to tell you a scary story. Yeah, specifically for the dudes, all right? Imagine you're going out with your wife, okay? You're having some dinner, you know, you get some drinks, the vibes are good, and you go back to your apartment, your house, the lights are low. You got a little Miguel playing on the radio. And all of a sudden you realize your piece is like, yeah, dude, I'm actually good. You know, wait, what? But we're, we're ready to go. And your piece is like, nah, dude, I'm just actually going to set this out.

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you know, giant image of him on like a horse or something. It's not. It's actually a 555-foot Egyptian obelisk in the middle of the National Mall. And it's not inspired by an obelisk or kind of looks like an obelisk. It is literally an obelisk. And you might ask, what is an obelisk? Well, it's modeled directly after the obelisk that ancient Egyptians built to honor the sun god raw at the entrances of temples like Karnak and Luxor. Now, the architect, Robert Mills, was a Freemason.

He won the design competition in 1836. And even though his original plan included a giant Greek-style colonnator, around the base that never got built. The obelisk part was always the core idea. Now, here's where the symbolism gets pretty weird. In ancient Egypt, the obelisk was a stone ray of sunlight. It was meant to channel the energy of the sun god down to the temple complex. So every Egyptian temple had two. The Egyptians always built them in pairs in front of the entrance of a sacred space. Now, there are exactly two original Egyptian obelisk from the same pair sitting in two of the largest cities on Earth right now. So Cleopatra's needle is in New York

Central Park and its identical twin in London on the River Thames. They were both originally built by Pharaoh Tuthmos III around 1450 BC and they're now separated by an ocean and in two former British colonies. Now, back to D.C. The Washington Monuments dimensions are also very intentional. A true Egyptian obelisk has a height that's about ten times the width. of its base. Now, the monument base is 55 feet wide, and its height is 555 feet and 5.5 and 1 eighths inches. So, yes, 55 times 10 is not 550 feet, it's 550. However, the obelisk itself, without the capstone is 550, but when the capstone was being put on top, it made the height 555. Now, the original design called for a 600-foot obelisk, but Congress reduced it significantly to match

the classical Egyptian proportion. So in feet, it's 555. In inches, it is 6,660. And yes, conspiracy theorists love that. Of course, you know, 6,666 is close enough to 666, the biblical number of the beast. But realistically, the 555 number came from George Marsh, a scholar who pushed for the height reduction in order to make their proportions historically accurate. But now, here's where things get even weirder. At the very top of the monument on the capstone is a 100 ounce piece of solid aluminum. Now at the time it was cast in 1884, aluminum was extremely difficult to refine, so much so that it was actually more valuable than silver. So the piece at the top of the monument was, at the moment, it was placed one of the largest pieces of pure aluminum on Earth. And on its east face, the side

that the sun hits first every morning is engraved two words. Louse, Praise be to God. Now, here we have a pyramid-tipped sun-aligned obelisk in the middle of the capital, capped with one of the most valuable pieces of metal on earth at the time, inscribed with a Latin prayer that only the sun can read. Kind of cool. Maybe interesting, a little. One other thing, the monument's cornerstone was laid on July 4, 1848.

Three U.S. presidents attended. You got James Polk, the sitting president, and two future presidents, Andrew Johnson and Abraham Lincoln. The man who actually laid the cornerstone was a mason named Benjamin French using the same trowel that George Washington had used to lay the capital cornerstone 55 years before. So, as the monument went up,

the society running it asked states and cities and organizations to donate carved memorial stones for the interior walls of the obelisk. And about 193 ended up getting embedded there. Of those, 22 came from Masonic Lodges, 14 from Grand Lodges, and eight from individual ones. This means the lodge held more space than any other single organization that contributed. So the stones arrived between 1848 and 1875, and they are not small. A lot of them are carved with the compass and the square, the all-seeing eye, and other Masonic symbols. And crazy enough,

even the Knights Templar Association sent a memorial. Now here's the part that people love. almost no one sees them because they're sealed into the interior walls along the staircase. And since most people ride the elevator now, you can catch a glimpse of a couple on the way down, but most people kind of miss it. So the most Masonic heavy collection of stones in the country sits inside the most famous monument, maybe in the entire country, in the capital, and it's effectively hidden in plain sight. I mean, that's great. You can see some of the pictures of the monuments here that are kind of along the staircase.

It's pretty great. Now, the monument has been struck by lightning thousands of times. The aluminum cap was originally meant to partly be a lightning rod, which is kind of what has been doing for 140 years, which is pretty crazy. Now, that's just the Washington monument. Pretty strange that, you know, Washington, a famous Mason now has this giant stone sun ray dedicated to raw.

Just kind of sitting there. Also, interestingly, you can see the different stones are used. that the bottom part, I think, is like limestone and the top part is like sandstone. And it was because of like the costs of like building it and like the quarry that was nearby. You can fact check me on that, but I'm pretty sure that's what it is.

Now, there's another thing that we need to look at. And that's this idea of apotheosis. Now, if you ever stand on the Washington Rotunda and look up, you'll see a fresco called the Apotheosis of Washington. Now, apotheosis literally means the elevation of a mortal into a god. The painting was finished in 1865 by an Italian artist named Constantino Brumidi, who had spent

three years before that working inside the Vatican under Pope Gregory the 16th. He immigrated to America in 1852 and spent the last 25 years of his life painting inside the Capitol building. Now, the fresco that we're talking about is 4,664 square feet. And the figures in it are up to 15 feet tall and at the dead center, you see George Washington, sitting on a throne in the clouds, draped in royal purple, sitting next to Liberty and Victory, surrounded by 13 maidens representing the original colonies.

You can see the image right here. It's a pretty stunning painting. I mean, pretty crazy, right? Now, around him are six scenes featuring Roman gods. So you have Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, advising Benjamin Franklin, Robert Fulton, and Samuel Morse. And then you have Neptune, God of the Sea, holding his trident, Mercury, the messenger god, handing a bag,

of gold to Robert Morris, the financier of the revolution. Then you have Vulcan, the blacksmith god at an anvil. And then you have Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, riding a McCormick Reaper, which was a harvesting machine. And then you have Columbia, the female personification of America, vanquishing tyranny with a sword. So the most important building in American democracy has at the absolute spiritual center, the founding father being literally turned into a god in the company of the Roman pantheon. This is in the capital right now. That's like pretty crazy to think about, right? Like, why does no one talk about this stuff? It's great. It's not, that's not, it's like, again, I'm not saying like, oh, this is Satan. I'm just saying it's weird. Like, it's like a little

interesting. People always look at George Washington. They're like, oh, he was the most humble guy ever. He just bowed out at the very end. And here he is being turned into a god. Now, in fairness, this was created and painted many years after he died. But still, I mean, what's going on with the deification? What happened to this whole no king's thing? right that's like a kind of America's whole deal I mean yeah this is what Congress wanted they were like this is this is what we're going to do now here's the thing that no one really talks about

Washington actually died in 1799 and when he did Congress proposed building a giant marble pyramid inside the capital of Rotunda to hold his remains in the style of an Egyptian pharaoh that's real you can look that up his family refused and they

kept him at Mount Vernon but the proposal is still on the record they literally wanted to entomb the first president inside a pyramid in the middle of the legislative branch. Not a conspiracy theory, just a thing that Congress kind of floated out there. Is that not weird? It's weird.

It just like, imagine I die and my family's wishes to entomb me in a giant pyramid. You'd be like, huh, strange. Well, you weren't the father of a country, but... Still, though, it's like, he's supposed to be the most humble guy ever. He walked back to Mount Vernon just to go, you know, enjoy his millions of millions of Let the record show Washington also retired as, like, one of the richest men in history? Well, deserved. Sure, well, deserved, but it's like part of the reason he wanted the revolution is because he was going to be super rich if it worked out.

I'm just saying, he had a lot of interest. I'm not bashing on Washington here. I'm just saying no one person has a singular story, you know? There's a lot of propaganda. Sure. Anyway, one mile north of the White House on 16th Street sits a building that if you weren't equipped, you would assume is like a federal courthouse for like a federal courthouse for like a embassy or something, but it's actually not. It's called House of the Temple, the international headquarters of the Scottish right of freemasonry in the southern jurisdiction. And it is the

single most architecturally Masonic building in the entirety of the United States. Cretaceos, if you get a picture of this, it is a crazy-looking thing. Look at that. I mean, yeah, that's a Masonic building. And what do you see out front there? A couple of sphinxes. Now, it was designed by John Russell Pope, the same architect who later designed the Jefferson Memorial and the National Archives. Now, construction on this baby went from 1911, although up to 1915, and Pope didn't just design a building. He copied almost exactly the mausoleum of Hallocarnassus, one of these seven wonders of the ancient world. It was built without any metal beams. It is genuinely just pure stone the way the ancients did it. The building is ringed with 33 ionic columns that are each 33 feet tall.

Now, why 33? If you know anything about Freemasonry, the bells are going off. 33 is the highest degree of Scottish right. Freemasonry, the rank Albert Pike, Teddy Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, Buzz Aldrin, that they all held. Esoterically, 33 is the ultimate master number mirroring the 33 vertebrae of the human spine, which is also said to be the ladder of spiritual enlightenment. and can also be connected to the 33 years of Christ's life

and the exact number of years it takes for the solar and lunar calendars to realign. 33 is also the ultimate symbol of human completion. So inside the house of the temple, the staircase is divided into flights of 357 and 9, the sacred numbers of Pythagoras, a Greek mathematician whose mystery school taught that the universe was built out of mathematical ratios.

And then outside the buildings are what I talked about before, two 17-ton sphinxes. The one at the north has its eyes wide open, and it represents power. The one on the south side has its eyes half-closed, and it represents wisdom. They're carved on top of solid blocks of limestone by Adolf Weinman, the same sculptor who designed the Mercury dime and the Walking Liberty half dollar. So the guy who carved those sphinxes also designed the coins that were in like your great-grandparents' pockets and maybe your pocket if you're like a coin collector.

But the sphinxes aren't really sphinxes. According to Scottish Rite Freemasonry themselves, they represent two brazen pillars that stood at the entrance of King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, Joaquin and Boaz. Now, the Hebrew names Joaquin and Boaz are actually inscribed on the pedestals in Phoenician characters. Now, Phoenician script hasn't been used

as a living language for over 2,000. here's sitting on a building one mile from the White House. Inside the atrium you have bronze lamps shaped like the head of Hermes, the Greek messenger god, also known as Hermes Tresmegistus, the patron of Western occult tradition. There are even statues of Egyptian gods card from a single piece of black marble that are guarding the staircase to the temple room, a 100-foot-tall chamber containing a black marble altar,

gilded serpents and a purple velvet throne. What's crazy about this building is that there are also tombs inside the walls. So in 1944, the U.S. Congress passed a special act allowing the masons to dig up the remains of Albert Pike, the man who literally wrote the modern rituals of the Scottish Rite, from Oak Hill Cemetery and place him inside the walls of the house of the temple. And then in 1953, they did the same thing for John Henry Cowles, another Grand Commander. this time before he had even died. And that's right, the Masons got Congress

to legally pre-approve a tomb inside the walls of a private temple for a man who is still alive. The two bodies are sealed inside nine-foot-thick walls of the building right now. Now, the roof, by the way, is a stepped pyramid. The Masons even have a name for the building among themselves. Herodom, which probably comes from the Greek Heros Damos, meaning the holy house.

I mean, it's just a fascinating little, just a fascinating little piece of American history. You have a pyramid-roofed, sphinx-guarded, pillar-en-cased Greek temple with bodies in the wall sitting a mile from the president of the United States. It's just a little fun fact. Now, pretty much all of this gets linked right back to the Freemasons. Now, Freemasonry in the 18th and early 19th century wasn't a fringe cults in America.

It was where men of power networked and did change. charity work and made some deals and by some estimates between a third and a half of those men who signed the constitution were masons. Washington was a mason for 47 years. Ben Franklin was a mason, Paul Revere was a mason. So were 14 future presidents. So of course, Masonic symbolism is going to be embedded into the architecture of Washington. The architecture was built by people who genuinely believed that these symbols had meaning and that liked their fraternity of freemasonry and they weren't really trying to hide it anymore. They were open. publishing it in newspapers the day after they laid the cornerstone.

Now, the bigger question is whether the symbols themselves carry any real spiritual weight. This is where my mother would say, yes, they do. Whether an obelisk really is a stone ray of solar energy from the sun god, whether the federal triangle really does mirror the stars of Virgo, whether placing a fresco of the first president as a god on the ceiling really does have some effect on the country below it. I don't know. Albert Pike, the man buried in the walls in the house of the temple,

wrote in his 1871 book, Morals and Dogma, that Masonic symbols are tools for teaching ethical lessons, not channels for supernatural power. But Pike also wrote in that same exact book, The symbols of every age have been multiform and have more meaning than they expressed. And maybe that's the symbolism of Washington. I don't know. A city built on a swamp designed by a Frenchman who was kind of a freemaste,

full of cornerstones laid by other men that are definitely Freemasons, walked through every day by 700,000 people who have no idea what they're standing next to. I mean, these buildings aren't really hiding, you know? You just have to know what you're looking at. And maybe that's the part of this that is so interesting to me, is that you could walk through Washington all day and see little bits of symbolism in every single building. And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes part one of my deep dive into, Washington DC's Masonic symbolism.

I mean, truly fascinating. This is like the kind of stuff that I love. I would love to do a Masonic tour of DC and just walk through and look at all the stuff. I mean, first off, I think that there's just a sense where people are like, ah, the founding fathers, intense strict rationalists who never indulged in anything strange.

It's like, no, these guys were all masons. And again, whatever you think about the masons, they were intentionally doing this stuff because either they liked it, because the symbols have meaning, because there's some type of secret power behind this, like, sacred architecture. You know, I've talked to some people that claim that the masons are the holders of sacred geometry that actually understand how the secrets of the sages of a different time that built

Solomon's temple actually, you know, how it all actually works, and that they're the beholders of this, you know, secret knowledge. And so in building the United States, are they using that type of power to, you know, build it? That's one theory. That's probably what my mom would say. but is it also just like a bunch of successful dudes that are all in the same fraternity that like to use like their fraternity letters while they're designing stuff? Also a more skeptical, rational approach.

But the one thing you can't dispute is that the capital of our nation, one of the most powerful nations of all time ever, is steeped with all sorts of weird Egyptian symbolism. Which at the very least, you're just like, huh, it's a little strange. Yeah, I mean, look at this picture. Randall Carlson pointing out that

this painting of or this picture of George Washington doing a Masonic ritual right here. A hand gesture. And also interestingly enough, I can't find that picture anywhere on Google. Really? Rangel Carson has it. Interesting. I wonder how

he got it. I don't know, Mark. I don't know where, I mean, you can't just reverse image search it? Yeah. Weird. I mean, that's an interesting little image. I don't know. All that to say, it's like the fact like you can't walk around the capital and be like oh this egyptian obelisk like is just nothing it's like no like they were intentionally invoking this ancient kingdom because they wanted to either look powerful or kind of symbolize what like the old kingdom of egypt was or somehow

harness the power of whatever these statues and figures did for them i don't know but it's just a little quirky no also to have this on a government building. Kind of crazy. I mean, technically it's not a government building, but like it is in the capital. Like, it's right next to the White House. Like, it's, and it's, it's not like,

oh, this is like a tourist attraction. This is made out of solid stone to be a temple. Four freemasons. And it's a sphinx. And it's a sphinx. It's just weird. No? Like, I don't know.

Maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, but it's just all a little pisses. peculiar to me. And you got all the Mason stuff like lining the Washington Monument. Our currency, which we didn't even get into. I mean, yeah, maybe that's a whole other episode. It's just like all the stuff that's on the money. Again, I don't know what to make of it. I just go, interesting, weird. And I think anyone that's just like, no, this is completely normal. People, like, what would like a skeptic say to this kind of stuff? Again, I'm not even saying that the free missions are like bad inherently. I'm just like, maybe they are the ones that have all the, you know, ancient spiritual technology in order to, you know, insert the spark back

into humankind's secret, secret knowledge or something, I don't know. But it's just, no, it's not strange, I don't know. What do you guys think? Is it weird to you that our capital is full of like all sorts of weird Egyptian symbolism? I would love to know what you think. Please drop a comment. I read all of them on YouTube and Spotify, so just be nice, okay? Furthermore, if you're interested in religious content, like we talked about King Solomon quite a bit this episode, you can check that out at Religion Camp. If you are interested in history, I mean, we've talked about basically all of these different characters on history camp. You can check out that episode over there. And if you like to just deep dive on crazy mysteries and rabbit holes and all sorts of stuff to catch my fancy, well, great news.

We dropped these episodes, not once, but twice a week. So make sure you subscribe that we don't miss a drop. Thank you all so much for tuning to another episode of Camp. bless you all, and I'll see you next time.