From the Quarries

Could the origins of Masonic symbolism extend hundreds of thousands of years into the prehistoric past? In 1920, the physician and Masonic author Albert Churchward advanced one of the most extraordinary theories ever proposed concerning the antiquity of Freemasonry. He believed that its working tools, symbols and ceremonies preserved fragments of humanity’s earliest language of signs and ritual, transmitted through prehistoric cultures, the ancient Egyptian mysteries and successive religious traditions.

In this extended, illustrated presentation, From the Quarries revisits Churchward’s remarkable intellectual construction, drawing extensively upon his own words from The Origin and Evolution of Freemasonry Connected with the Origin and Evolution of the Human Race. From the supposed prehistoric origins of the gavel and the two pillars to the priesthoods of Egypt, Horus of the Double Horizon and the Mysteries of Amenta, Churchward unfolds an immense symbolic genealogy connecting the modern Craft with the earliest stages of human civilisation.

Presented as an archival reading with carefully edited summaries and original illustrations, this lecture allows Churchward’s speculative history to unfold substantially on its own terms, offering a fascinating encounter with one of the more ambitious and imaginative figures in early twentieth-century Masonic literature.