Art, Architecture & Urban Design

San Francisco is brimming with secrets in plain sight. I’ll take you on a tour through some of them in this post so sit back and enjoy the ride.

Stephen O’Rourke wrote a fascinating article about the masonic history of San Francisco. He identified a street pyramid in the Streets of San Francisco (which incidentally is the name of a great TV series from my childhood).

Many of the state’s pioneers, Fremont, Stevenson, O’Farrell and Montgomery were Masons. The first Masonic meeting in fact took place only two years after the US took control of San Francisco, on October 17, 1849, at 728 Montgomery Street…[in the adjacent block to where the Transamerica Pyramid now stands]. -Stephen O’Rourke

The streets of O’Rourke’s “unfinished” pyramid (just as on the dollar bill) are Montgomery at the top, Columbus and Market on the sides, and Van Ness at the bottom. These are all very important streets in the urban plan. Market doesn’t perfectly mirror Columbus but the pyramid is clear enough.

The Transamerica Pyramid is at the upper left corner, Aquatic Park and Fort Mason are in the lower left, and City Hall is near the lower right corner. See how the curved breakwater guides the eye around to Fort Mason. We’ll get to Pier 33 later on.

California Street bisects the pyramid and 1111 California Street stands where the Kings’s chamber would be in the heart of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

1111 California is the address of the Masonic Center at the top of Nob Hill (see Repeating Ones and 11-11). Cable cars run up and down California street.

In fact I used to ride the cable cars almost every day right past 1111 California when I lived in Pacific Heights and commuted to UC Berkeley in Architecture school from 90-91 (connecting to BART under the Bay). Masonic Center is a famous auditorium where I saw Ravi Shankar perform circa 95.

Image source

There is a frieze on the building exterior representing a gigantic tug of war between good and evil forces where they are pulling on the Sun. The interior strangely contains gravel and soil from each of the 58 counties in California, suggesting some kind of sympathetic magic at work.

Directly across from 1111 California is Grace Cathedral, an Episcopal cathedral done in the gothic style and completed in 1964.

Richard Cassaro has discovered what he calls Freemasonry’s Lost Secret encoded in gothic cathedral architecture.

Image by ShakataGaNai under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Contained in the cathedral are stained glass windows by noted artists that depict over 1100 figures ranging from Adam and Eve to Albert Einstein. 32 windows or window groups…including The Chapel of Grace and baptistry window series contains over 32,000 pieces of glass. -Source

Laid out on the floor of Grace Cathedral is a labyrinth that is based on the famous medieval labyrinth of The Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres (see my Chartres videos). There is a similar labyrinth outside that you can walk almost anytime to simulate the journey of the soul.

Image by Marlith under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The red dot identifying Downtown San Francisco in Google Earth is on Mason street. Cable cars also run on Mason (they don’t run on many streets).

The Transamerica Pyramid (see my San Francisco video) and 555 California (see Snowflake and the Flower) are the two tallest buildings in the City (left and right below). I used to work in between them at two architecture firms in the late 90s.

Image by Danjahaner under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

Enough about California Street, let’s now consider the Great Seal of California.

The Seal of California depicts the Goddess Minerva having sprung full grown from the brain of Jupiter. This was interpreted as analogous to the political birth of the State of California without having gone through the probation period of being a Territory.-Source

Minerva appears to be sitting where UC Berkeley is located in the East Bay, just a coincidence.

Minerva is displayed on the Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration awarded by the United States government.

Note the inverted pentagram which reminds me of the inverted broken pentagram in the streets above the White House. Interestingly the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle (where JFK’s funeral was held) is just one building away from the intersection where the pentagram is broken.

Minerva is often depicted with her sacred creature, an owl, which symbolizes her ties to wisdom.-Source

There appears to be an owl depicted in the landscaping surrounding the US Capitol.

The Bohemian Club logo features an owl and this plaque is on their headquarters at 624 Taylor Street in San Francisco.

“Weaving spiders, come not here;

Hence, you long-legg’d spinners, hence!

Beetles black approach not near;

Worm nor snail, do no offence.”- Shakespeare (Midsummer’s Night’s Dream)

The quote tells the members to relax and take a break from the relentless plotting to take over the world or whatever it is they regularly do.

The Bohemian Club membership lists are private. Some prominent figures have been given honorary membership, such as Richard Nixon and William Randolph Hearst. Members have included some U.S. presidents (usually before they are elected to office), many cabinet officials, and CEOs of large corporations, including major financial institutions. Major military contractors, oil companies, banks (including the Federal Reserve), utilities, and national media have high-ranking officials as club members or guests. Many members are, or have been, on the board of directors of several of these corporations. -Source

The Bohemian Club has a 2700 acre summer camp about an hour’s drive from SF they call the Bohemian Grove where they enact the Cremation of Care ceremony. It’s the original Burning Man.

The participants enact a ritual sacrifice in front of a colossal stone owl. A boatman recalling Charon arrives to begin the ceremony (see Airports).

Alex Jones had a camera snuck into the Cremation of Care ceremony at Bohemian Grove in 2000:

In a fascinating interview with Josh Reeves on Red Ice radio I learned that there is a statue of Saint John of Nepomuk at Bohemian Grove. This catholic saint was confessor of the queen of Bohemia who was martyred because he refused to divulge the secrets of the confessional. Nepomuk is depicted holding a finger to his lips…meaning keep quiet.

Image by Urharec under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The subtext to the elite is keep quiet or you will suffer the same fate.

Martyrdom of St. John Nepomuk by Szymon Czechowicz (1750)

In the interview Henrik Palmgren and Josh Reeves both agreed that the owl is the true illuminati symbol.

My friend Jan Thulstrup was doing some research on the Royal Arch in freemasonry and discovered some amazing correlations with Pier 33:

Pier |pi(ə)r| noun:

1 a structure leading out from the shore into a body of water, in particular a platform supported on pillars or girders, used as a landing stage for boats.

2 a solid support designed to sustain vertical pressure, in particular a pillar supporting an arch or a bridge.

Pier 33 clearly features an arch with keystone flanked by two symbolic piers (definition 2).

I used to drive by Pier 33 every day from 97-02 when I taught at the Academy of Art University’s Architecture campus in Fisherman’s Wharf. I never gave it a second thought at the time.

The Royal Arch is part of the York Rite. Freemasons who reach this degree may continue to Cryptic Masonry or go straight to the Knights Templar. -Source

Here is a Royal Arch tracing board:

18th century image from David Ovason’s Secret Architecture of Our Nations Capital

Here, the progression of the signs is from left to right, and we see the sign of Cancer as the entire keystone. The reason that the signs appear to be going in the wrong direction is that we are looking into the “temple” from the outside [of the galaxy]. Notice that a cluster of 7 stars float below the keystone, which are symbolic of the Pleiades.

Notice also the heraldric shield that depicts an ox, an eagle, a lion, and a man. These are direct references to the fixed signs of the zodiac, namely Taurus, Scorpio, Leo, and Aquarius. The Sun and Moon hover above the arch, and above the two pillars that support the arch. These pillars are called Jachin and Boaz, are sometimes simply labeled as J and B, and are important elements in understanding the Royal Arch via operative Masonry. Source

The bottom of the tracing board depicts a coffin, ark of the covenant, and one other object I’m not sure of on the left (tablets of Moses maybe?). There is a star with a tail suggesting a comet under the arch.

Please remember the sign Cancer is at the top of the royal arch.

Jan stretched a cord along the actual pier (definition 1) where the ferry to Alcatraz docks adjacent to Pier 33 and discovered it has a bearing of 33 degrees true north.

This pier (definition 1) is called Alcatraz Landing. Known as The Rock, Alcatraz was one of the world’s most forbidding prisons before it closed in 1963. Officially no one ever Escaped from Alcatraz although 3 men were lost at sea which reminds me of Admiralty law (another dark rabbit hole).

Alcatraz Island Lighthouse is the oldest light station on the US West Coast. How’s that for a symbol of illumination? Here it is from Pier 33.

Image by Bruce C. Cooper under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Fisherman’s Wharf is located nearby at Pier 39. Its symbol is a crab (cancer is Latin for crab) because from the city’s early days during the Gold Rush where Italian emigre fishermen settled in the area and fished for the Dungeness Crab. From then until present day it remained the home base of San Francisco’s fishing fleet.

Fisherman’s Wharf became a tourist attraction in the 70s and continues to this day. Millions of tourists enjoy eating dungeness crab before of after taking the ferry to Alcatraz and exploring the historic prison. The last time I did this was when my Italian friend Luciano from Trieste visited me in SF.

Image by Fred Hsu under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

The Royal Arch is really an astronomical allegory:

Image source Robert Hewitt Brown’s Stellar Theology and Masonic Astronomy

The Egyptian sky goddess Nut forms another royal arch. Her brother-husband Geb forms the earth.

Nut and the Royal Arch of the York Rite probably come from the arching Milky Way:

Image by Bruno Gilli/ESO under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Cancer is the sign of summer solstice in the northern hemisphere and Capricorn rules the winter solstice.

Image source

The tropics of cancer and capricorn are so named because they represent the circles of latitude on the Earth that mark the most northerly and most southerly positions at which the Sun may appear directly overhead at its zenith.

The imaginary line is called the Tropic of Cancer because when it was named, the Sun was in the direction of the constellation Cancer at the June solstice. However, this is no longer true due to the precession of the equinoxes. According to International Astronomical Union boundaries, the Sun now is actually in Taurus at the June solstice. -Source

Image based on work by WikiLaurent and Thesevenseas

Jan Thulstrup sees Alcatraz Landing as the Gate of Man…

…and the Golden Gate as the Gate of God. There is definitely a resemblance (made in his image they say).

Image by Rich Niewiroski Jr.

There is something to this. The journey to The Rock is a journey of the soul into incarnation in the prison of the body. The light that shines from within is the light of spirit. After death the soul passes through the Golden Gate on its way to the Duat (see my San Francisco video).

I was reading Goro Adachi’s mind-blowing post on Elenin: Lucifer’s Comet and came across a key piece of information relating to San Francisco.

Image by Goro Adachi

Another equally impressive geometric message, initially hinted in the name “Golden Gate” (in San Francisco), has to do with the Golden Ratio (or “Phi”) which is fractally encoded in pentagram…

1: 1.618

Turns out the Birthquake latitude is exactly 1.618 times that of the Tropic of Cancer (~23.44° North), i.e. Golden Ratio. (Big thanks to reader “Azazel” for discovering this and independently noting Elenin’s pentagrammic approach to Earth.) -Goro Adachi

That’s right SF’s latitude = Phi x Tropic of Cancer. The Tropic of Cancer shifts in a complicated manner over time. That’s why it creates a band when multiplied by Phi.

Image by Roberto González under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

I was looking at the map and realized that the center of the dome of San Francisco’s City Hall, the Masonic Temple at 1111 California Street, and Alcatraz Landing at Pier 33 are all located in a perfect line.

I stretched a cord and lo and behold the distance from the top of the dome of SF City Hall to the beginning of Pier 33 is 3333 meters exactly.

This reminds me of the shafts in the Great Pyramid that point to Orion and Sirius (the Duat).

Discovered by Robert Bauval in The Orion Mystery

SF City Hall has a floor area of 46,000 square meters, recalling Obama reading Psalm 46 on 9/11/11 (see 11:11). City Hall is an impressive structure having the fifth largest dome in the world.

Image by Cabe6403 under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

In a solar year the Sun rises 365 times but, during the same time, a star will have risen 366 times. It sounds odd but it’s true. Each day according to the rising of a star (a sidereal day), is 23 hours 56 minutes 4 seconds in length, whereas a mean solar day is 24 hours in length. That leaves a discrepancy of 236 seconds, which over a year amounts to another 24 hours. -Before the Pyramids by Knight and Butler

Furthermore 366 is the key to the ancient megalithic system of measure. Knight and Butler show how the earth’s meridian is divided into 366 Megalithic degrees. Each Megalithic degree is divided into 60 minutes and each minute is divided into 6 seconds. Amazingly each Megalithic second is equal to 366 Megalithic Yards (MY). Are you with me?

Knight and Bulter reveal that the width of Ellipse Park in front of the White House is 366 MY (see my post on Ellipses) and that Stonhenge’s henge (earth circle) has a circumference of 366 MY.

Alexander Thom invented the MY unit after surveying thousands of megalithic sites in the UK.

1 MY = 2.722 feet ± .002 feet

John Michell and Robin Heath had reason to believe this value was ever so slightly off (0.2% off from 1 MY to be exact). They define what they call an Astronomical Megalithic Yard (AMY) in The Lost Science of Measuring the Earth.

1 AMY = 36/7 x .528 = 2.715428715428715428…

The fractions defining the AMY remind me of the latitude of Avebury (360/7)° and the fact that there are 5280 feet in a mile. An amazing metrology.

The values of MY and AMY are both suspiciously close to the mathematical constant e.

e = 2.718281828…  (0.1% off from 1 MY).

Bernoulli discovered the constant e is an interesting transcendental number.

“One example is an account that starts with $1.00 and pays 100 percent interest per year. If the interest is credited once, at the end of the year, the value is $2.00.

If the interest is computed and added twice in the year, the $1 is multiplied by 1.5 twice, yielding $1.00 × 1.5 x 1.5 = $2.25. Compounding quarterly yields $2.44, compounding monthly yields $2.61.

Bernoulli noticed that this sequence approaches a limit. With continuous compounding, the account value will reach $2.718281828… which became known as e.

In the IPO filing for (SF Bay Area company) Google in 2004, rather than a typical round-number amount of money, the company announced its intention to raise $2,718,281,828 which is e billion dollars to the nearest dollar.” -Source

This is a fair use of the Google logo as I am discussing the Google IPO

Google is continuing to change the world in a compounding sort of fashion.

Now that I’m geeking out, I can tell you e is also part of “the most beautiful theorem in mathematics”, known as Euler’s identity. -Source

e‘s importance is is right up there with Pi, Phi, and 528 in my humble opinion. I discovered the following harmonious relationship between these constants (99.9% accurate). Call it the Onstott rationale:

528 is the heart of the solfeggio (ancient musical scale) which arises naturally out of the Ennead:

The ennead was encoded in the relationship between the angles of Columbus Ave, Mason Street (representing the street grid), the location of the Transamerica Pyramid and the location, length, and orientation of Treasure Island as shown in my San Francisco video.

Cort Lindahl discovered that the red line goes directly due north to Sundial Bridge in Redding, California. The distance from the base of the gnomon of Sundial Bridge to the center of the Ennead of San Francisco is 166.66 nautical miles.

Let’s not forget that the flag of the City of San Francisco features a Phoenix…

…or that the United Nations was chartered in SF’s civic center. The UN Emblem is divided into 33 sectors.

The Transamerica Pyramid is at the head of Columbus Ave [dove is columbae in Latin] that cuts across the street grid at a 40 degree angle (40 x 9 = 360).

666 Filbert is nearby this photo location. It is the Peter and Paul Catholic Church which is featured on the Transamerica Pyramid’s official website due to the resemblance of form perhaps.

Image source

Jim Alison has discovered something mind-blowing about Columbus Avenue. Read his article on SF to learn more about it and some fascinating masonic history involving the richest man in California.

Jim says if you extend a great circle all the way around the Earth along the vector of Columbus Avenue…

…it goes right over the Nazca plains in Peru (see how it matches the azimuth of the bold white line scraped into the ground)…

…and then the great circle passes right over the Angkor Wat Complex in Cambodia. Ankkor Wat is the world’s largest religious building. Angkor Wat means City Temple.

More amazing than that is the relationship between these sites. They encode double Phi relationships.

Image courtesy Jim Alison

“The distance from Nazca to Angkor is 12,446 miles, one half of the circumference of the earth. San Francisco is 4,754 miles from Nazca. San Francisco is 7,692 miles from Angkor. These distances express double φ (Phi) relationships as follows:

• 12,446/7,692 = 1.618
• 7,692/4,754 = 1.618

These are precise expressions of the golden section.” -Jim Alison

What does that tell you? My research is consistently leading to the spacefaring, four-dimensional gods. It stands to reason that four dimensional entities would deliberately impulse people to encode patterns in space as well as time.

See again Richard Cassaro’s research that ties disparate cultures together which archaeologists think had no contact with each other in space or time.

For what it’s worth I ran a bunch of JCN full matches on many of the topics in this post. Here is what turned up. It’s not to be relied on as fact, but JCN is a powerful tool for divination that can definitely lead one in interesting directions.

Which Number Represents Golden Gate	The Destiny of American Freemasonry
Which Number Represents Alcatraz	The Great Theft of the Human Spirit
The Meaning Of Alcatraz Landing	The Deception About The Godhead
Transamerica Pyramid	The Daughter of Lilith
Treasure Island	The Star of Miriam
Masonic Center	Temple of Sarah
Eleven Eleven California	The Book Named Tree of Life
The Ultimate Secret Of Fort Mason	The Astronomy Of The Astral Plane
The Astronomy Of Grace Cathedral	The Cause Of Member Of Illuminati
Five Hundred Fifty Five California	The Guardians Of Pain And Suffering
The Effect Of Six Hundred Sixty Six Filbert	The Secret Of Lucifer Ownership Of The Soul

 

San Francisco’s namesake is Saint Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) who founded the Franciscan order. Francis was a wealthy young man and soldier who had an ecstatic vision while fighting a war.

Ecstasy of Saint Francis by Caravaggio, c.1595

After the ecstasy Francis returned to Assisi, gave up all his possessions and wealth to lead an ascetic life. On a pilgrimage to Rome, Francis begged with the beggars at St. Peter’s. The experience moved him to live in poverty. He founded the Order of Poor Clares for women and became known as the patron saint of animals and the environment.

Pope Innocent III endorsed his Franciscan order in 1210. That’s the same “Innocent” who ordered hundreds of thousands of Cathars massacred in the Albigensian crusade. In 1219, Francis went to Egypt where crusaders were besieging Damietta, hoping to find martyrdom at the hands of the Muslims.

I find St. Francis to be a complex character. I admire him for his attitudes toward women, the poor, animals, and the environment. Less clear is his relationship with Innocent III and his motives for going to Egypt. There is brilliance and shadow in everyone.

Yin and yang are not opposing forces (dualities), but complementary opposites that interact within a greater whole, as part of a dynamic system. Everything has both yin and yang aspects as light cannot exist without darkness and vice-versa, but either of these aspects may manifest more strongly in particular objects, and may ebb or flow over time. Source

Perhaps that is the message of San Francisco. It is a dynamic city where light and dark dance in the ever evolving transformation of human consciousness.

After this post I’m going to take a break from blogging and weave my videos, blog, and additional research together in a book / ebook / maybe video. Please add your email address to the ‘new video’ list on the right sidebar if you’d like to be notified when it’s done.

©2011 Scott Onstott – All Rights Reserved. If you enjoy my writing please donate. It takes a lot of time.