I sometimes enjoy reading some of the shorter conspiracy-theory rants I find in the land of orphaned PDFs. It’s good to get a bird’s-eye view of the various perspectives promulgated by the various players in the world stage. And wasn’t that the purpose of the Illuminatus! trilogy? To bombard us with so many conflicting conspiracy theories so as to immunize us from all of them? To force skepticism?
Today I came across yet another anti-Freemasonry rant. It seemed a bit long at 28 pages, but I started slogging through it anyway. The title: Freemasonry: The Worship of Lucifer, SATAN Part 1 of 5.
Of course, from the title I already recognized the angle and didn’t expect to find anything earth-shattering. Of course, I was unsurprised. A section on the use of the five-pointed star wandered predictably into the one-point-up-good vs two-points-up-bad trope. You know, the whole Baphomet/Goat of Mendes thing. And to a non-immunized mind, or one already prone to defense of simplistic evangelical Christian dogma, this is probably effective. But they added and unnecessarily specific detail which ruins their point for those who are paying attention. Oh, the conspiracy folks love their numbers and math:
It should be noted that from the way the pentagram is normally seen (one point up, two down), rotating the pentagram 33 degrees you get a Satanic Pentagram. 33 is the highest degree there is in Freemasonry.
This didn’t sound mathematically or geometrically correct to me, so I loaded a pentagram image into GIMP. By using the arbitrary rotation feature, I determined that the actual rotation required to turn a one-point-up pentagram into a two-points-up pentagram is 36 degrees, not 33, which makes perfect sense (360 degrees in a circle / five points in a star = 72 degrees, and half of that will move a one-point-up into a two-points-up).
I won’t even get into the 33 = highest degree claim, because it’s nuanced; also, it has been mathematically invalidated by the wrongness of the first premise.