Fortitude Lodge #47

Seen in downtown La Grange: a nice triumvirate of old signage for the Masonic Fortitude Lodge #47, the Scottish Rite Albert Pike Club, and the Rob Morris grand chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star. (The only thing that could make them even more fun is if they were neon.)

La Grange was named after Freemason Marquis de Lafayette, whose wanderings around Kentucky seem to have had quite an influence - one that may be continuing to reverberate to this very day via the so-called "Fayette Factor".

Man Called Daveiss

Kentucky's Daviess County is named after Joseph Hamilton Daveiss, the Grand Master of Freemasonry in Kentucky. And no, that's not a typo - his name was actually spelled "Daveiss", despite it uniformly being misspelled as "Daviess" on everything from roads to schools to courthouses to entire counties. This would also suggest that the correct pronunciation of his name would be like "Davis" and not "Davies".

Daveiss was something of an eccentric sort, preferring to practice law dressed in the buckskin outfit of a frontiersman. He was the first lawyer west of the Appalachians to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, and he wore his woodsman suit even there. Far from being appalled, at least some were apparently impressed with something about Daveiss: he ended up marrying Chief Justice John Marshall's sister Nancy while he was in town!

Daveiss became the U.S. District Attorney for Kentucky, and relentlessly pursued Aaron Burr. In 1806, Daveiss brought treason charges against him but Burr somehow managed to get those charges dismissed thanks to his slick attorney: Henry Clay.

Despite being opponents in the courtroom, Clay and Daveiss were brothers in the lodge: they were both fellow members of the Freemason Lexington Lodge #1 in Fayette County. (And Chief Justice John Marshall was also a Mason - the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Virginia, in fact.)

Strangely, at the age of 47, Daveiss volunteered to fight with the Indiana militia in Tecumseh's War and was killed at the Battle of Tippecanoe. The Freemasons have erected a monument sign dedicated to him on the battlefield site.

The Fayette Factor

Most serious students of Fortean phenomena and the paranormal are aware of what has become known as the "Fayette Factor".

In the late 1970s, when home computerization first started researchers on the road to properly collating and sharing their own personal paranormal case files, a glaring coincidence became apparent to author William Grimstad. It seemed that an uncanny number of the incidents involved the word/name Fayette, Lafayette, or variations thereof.

In the Spring 1978 issue of Fortean Times magazine, Grimstad wrote an essay on his findings, entitled "Fateful Fayette". Since then, the subject has been expanded upon and expounded upon by many other researchers, most notably by author Loren Coleman.

It appears that, for those who believe such things possible, there is a definite mythic resonance and power around the name Lafayette and its abbreviated version, Fayette.

Some, like the aforementioned Coleman, suggest a connection to Freemasonry and the French Marquis de Lafayette:

The cities, towns, and counties across the United States, which are the Fortean hotspots linked to the Fayette Factor, are tied to the renamed Masonic lodges and affiliated sites that the Marquis de Lafayette visited on his grand tour of the country in 1824-1825. His visits were highly ritualized happenings, in which he is involved with laying many cornerstones. The locations where he is taken to visit are a virtual roadmap of the "special places" in this land. For example, in 1825, The Marquis de Lafayette, on board the ship (please note!) "Enterprise," visited the Cahokia mounds, and the significant Bloody Island, which then was so large that half of the Mississippi flowed east of it. (Intriguingly, Lafayette returned to France in 1825, on the day after his birthday, demonstrating a keen eye on the calendar and a desire to celebrate September 6th in America.)

Others believe the harmonic significance and coincidence-inducing energy around the name Lafayette must go back even further, to something older, prehistoric; antediluvian, even. Such patterns of resonance, reverberating in the woof and warp of the timespace continuum, like Rupert Sheldrake's Morphic fields, if they exist (and I have seen convincing evidence that they do) may predate man entirely.

Since one of Kentucky's most prominent counties is Fayette County, it's not surprising that the Lexington Herald-Leader eventually got hip to the concept. On March 14, 2004, that paper had a feature article about the events of the previous day (which is March 13, same day as today, in case you haven't noticed, and no, I did not plan it thus):

It was already notable for being a Friday the 13th. But some saw more in the Adams Lane shootings that day. Two days before the shootings, Ufoinfo.com, a Web site devoted to the paranormal, republished a tract about "the Fayette factor"...

Should we be surprised in a year in which a sniper haunts the Fayette County, Ohio interstate, or Lafayette, Louisiana's St. Paul School Social Sciences Fair had juniors Chris Brown and Robert Egnatchik placing first in anthropology with "Bigfoot" that the whole Fayette Factor would be getting
conscious press attention?

Subscribers to the Marquis theory also find significance in the name "LaGrange", and rightly so: Kentucky's own city of La Grange is named for Chateau de LaGrange, which was the French home of the Marquis de Lafayette. And our La Grange does have a powerful mojo about it, perhaps in part because of the maximum security prisons there. And it is true that the place is the burial site of the poet laureate of Freemasonry. (Then again, at this late date in history, in any given town, throw a rock and you'll probably hit something Freemason-related.)

Fayette County is well known as a paranormal hot spot, with haunted sites galore and a compelling folklore about a series of enormous underground caverns. Reportedly, these subterranean chambers once held the remains of a mysterious civilization that long predated the Native American tribes that occupied America when the pilgrims showed up. Fayette County is also home to the haunted Hunt-Morgan House, and it's the place where I had my Men In Black experience.


What does it all mean? I'm pondering.

The image above is the Marquis de Lafayette, at his memorial site at Olomouc.

Under the Double Eagle

Like the Winged Disc of Horus, another ancient occult symbol often found on Kentucky's graves is the Double-headed Eagle. These two examples are in Louisville's Cave Hill.


The Double-headed Eagle is most commonly associated with the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, which is why you find it so often on gravestones. Manly P. Hall says it's an alchemical symbol of the union between the masculine and feminine principles in the individual, but as with most of his explanations to the public, there's probably much more than meets the eye.

The symbol itself predates the Scotch-Rite Masons, the earliest written reference to which is 1733. The Hittites held the symbol in great esteem, and were carving representations of it as early as two thousand years before the birth of Christ (see photo below). (Also note the resemblance to the Winged Disc symbol, with the downward pointing tail, the shield replacing the sun-disk, and the twin heads replacing the twin antennae or serpents.)



After that, the mysterious symbol turns up in all kinds of places throughout history, from the Byzantine Empire to the Holy Roman Empire to the German Confederation of 1815.

Today one can also find vestiges of this tradition in the flag of Albania, the flag of Serbia, the insignia of the Turkish Police, and in the symbology of the Greek Orthodox Church.



The tune "Under the Double Eagle" is a very popular instrumental in the Kentucky-based Bluegrass music genre, but most are unaware of its source. Bluegrass pickers learned it from old recordings of John Philip Sousa's version, but Sousa himself picked it up from German military bands, who in turn derived it from Josef Wagner's 1902 Unter dem Doppeladler. Wagner's tune's title referred to the Coat of Arms of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867), which in turn derives from the House of Habsburg (circa 1100).

Things with Wings

You've seen them. We've all seen them, or variations on the theme. Those very-official-looking, yet also very occult-looking, round-ish things with shieldlike wings. You know, this thing:


There are a surprisingly high number of them on graves in Kentucky cemeteries, including Louisville's Cave Hill:






There are many interpretations and uses of this symbol, and its many variants, by several different groups. The symbol, very loosely and generally called The Winged Dragon, The Winged Sun, The Winged Disc, etc. The book The Rosicruicians and their Teachings by Swinburne Clymer says:

The Winged Globe is pre-eminently a Rosicrucian symbol, although the Illuminati may lay claim to it, and it may be admitted that it is of Egyptian origin. The Winged Globe is the symbol of the perfected soul making its flight back to the source of its creation in the Elysian fields beyond.

This interpretation of the symbol is most likely why it turns up on tombstones as often as it does. But the ancient Egyptians traditionally depicted two serpents on the wings, representing the goddesses protecting Upper and Lower Egypt - it's a bit odd to maintain this practice in modern-day Kentucky. Unless there's more going on, symbolically speaking, than meets the eye.


Meanwhile, Albert Churchwald's 1913 book The Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man, describes it this way:

The Winged-Disk, with the Uraei of Egypt, the original of which we find in the text summarized by Naville in the "Myths of Horus," pII. xii. "Horus commanded Thoth that the Winged-Sun-Disk, with Uraei, should be brought into every sanctuary wherein he dwelt, and into every sanctuary of all the gods of the lands of the South and the North, and in Amentet, in order that they might drive away evil from therein...." This is what is meant by the Winged-Disks, with the Uraei, which are seen over the entrances of the courts of the temples of all the gods and goddesses of Egypt.

The early Egyptians called it Behedeti, and associated it with Horus and, some say, later Ra. A somewhat modified version, in a tribute to Horus, can been seen in this artifact from the Louvre:


Note the Shen Rings in Horus' falcon claws, and note the downward-pointing tail, features which appear on some variants of the Winged Sun but not on others. Note the tail does appear on this Zoroastrian depiction, which also includes a man's soul ensconced in the center, making his way Heavenward:


Then there's similarity to some depictions of mythical Firebird creatures, including Bennu, The Huma Bird, Fenghuang, Garuda, Simurgh, Zhar-Ptitsa (which Stravinsky's Firebird Suite was about), and of course, the Phoenix. The Phoenix myth is also symbolically appropriate for grave decoration, meaning as it does rebirth, rising from the ashes of Death - literally, not just figuratively. Some of these mythical creatures are distinctly dragon-like in many ways, and displaying oddly insectlike antennae.

Just last month, this crop circle with a Firebird motif caused more than the usual stir among the woo-woos of the world (myself included):


And here's a more classic example of the symbol in a 1999 crop circle:


I'm on the lookout for interesting variants of the Winged Sun/Disk/Dragon symbol on gravestones in Kentucky, so if the taphophiles lurking out there know of any, let me know. I'm also very interested in gravestones with the very similar motif of winged skulls, cherubs, and seraphim. Seraphim, incidentally, literally means "burning ones" in Hebrew (which brings us back to the Phoenix) - and also has an ancient slangy double-meaning connotation of flying reptiles (which brings us back to dragons).


Lastly, some of the aforementioned internet woo-woos have been saying that the symbol has been a warning all along about the eventual return of the double-tailed rogue planet Nibiru in 2012. It is true that the Babylonian God Nibiru was sometimes represented by the winged-disc insignia, but it also represents a celestial object (some say comet, some say planet, some say spaceship). What, if anything, all this has to do with the Nibiru of Zecharia Sitchin's theories, remains unclear to me. Supposedly, some say, the winged-orb emblem is mankind's vestigial memory of twin-tailed Nibiru's previous calamitous crossings of our own orbit:



Oh, and one more thing; Don't get me started on the Chrysler logo, which also seems to have an eye (of Horus?) in its center:

Secret Society Superfecta

This grave in Shelby County's Calvary Cemetery boasts not one, not two, but four fraternal organizations - The Freemasons, the Knights of Pythias, the Oddfellows, and the United Brothers of Friendship. What, no Loyal Order of Moose?

"His Column is Broken"

Although I'm not sure what quasi-architectural rigamarole the phrase refers to, "His Column is Broken" is apparently something traditionally said among Freemasons when one of their brethren dies unexpectedly and prematurely.

Poet Laureate of Freemasonry

I didn't even know there was such a thing as "the Poet Laureate of Freemasonry", but sure enough, his name was Rob Morris and he's buried at the Valley of Rest cemetery in La Grange, KY.

Historians can't seem to make up their minds if he was born in Boston or New York, or if his real name was Morris or Peckham. But his later life is much more documented: according to Wikipedia, he served as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Kentucky in 1858 and 1859, and in 1860 moved to LaGrange and became professor of the Masonic University.