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