Originally posted by Trinityman
Nowhere in the article quoted is it noted or even implied IMO that freemasons use the obelisk as a specific symbol. They just seemed to be swept up in
the excitement of the time in the discovery of the genius of Ancient Egypt. However the article, being written by a freemason for a masonic audience,
repeatedly refers to Henry Gorringe as a freemason and unfortunately this could imply to the non-masonic reader that he brought the Needle to NY
in
his capacity as a freemason, when in fact he was employed by Vanderbilt to do this, presumably though connections with the Navy, and nothing
whatsoever to do with freemasonry at all.
It is interesting to note (in the context that you outline
) that the transportation of London's Egyptian obelisk is almost completely thanks to a
Freemason, Sir William James Erasmus Wilson.
In 1878 he earned the thanks of the nation on different grounds, by defraying the expense of bringing the Egyptian obelisk inaccurately called
Cleopatra's Needle from Alexandria to London, where it was erected on the Thames Embankment. The British Government had not thought it worth the
expense of transportation. He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1881, and died at Westgate-on-Sea in 1884
The London needle is in the City of Westminster, on the Victoria Embankment near the Golden Jubilee Bridges. It was presented to the United
Kingdom in 1819 by Mehemet Ali, the Albanian-born viceroy of Egypt, in commemoration of the victories of Lord Nelson at the Battle of the Nile and Sir
Ralph Abercromby at the Battle of Alexandria in 1801. Although the British government welcomed the gesture, it declined to fund the expense of
transporting it to London.
's_Needle
Skilful investments in the shares of gas and railway companies made him a rich man, and he devoted his wealth to various charitable objects, for
he was a prominent Freemason. He restored Swanscombe Church; he founded a scholarship at the Royal College of Music; and was a large subscriber to the
Royal Medical Benevolent College at Epsom, where he built a house for the head master at his own expense. At a cost of nearly £30,000 he built a new
wing and chapel at the Sea-Bathing Hospital at Margate, where diseases of the skin were extensively treated, and in 1881 he founded the Erasmus Wilson
Professorship of Pathology at the University of Aberdeen in memory of his father. The bulk of his fortune reverted to the Royal College of Surgeons of
England in 1884 on the death of Lady Wilson.
Wilson was particularly fond of foreign travel. He visited the East to study leprosy, Switzerland and the Vallais to examine goitre, and Italy to
become more closely acquainted with tinea pellagra and other diseases of the skin in the underfed and dirty vegetarian peasantry. He became
particularly interested in the study of Egyptian antiquities, and in 1877 he paid the cost (about £10,000) of the transport of ‘Cleopatra’s
Needle’ to London.
Whether he took this action because he was a Freemason and held a fascination with ancient Egypt such as you describe, or he was acting out of
patriotism is perhaps debatable, however, I think most likely it was his personal interest in antiquity. Either way, a great man, a credit to your
organisation and our country, if not to humanity as a whole.
[edit on 15-4-2008 by KilgoreTrout]
