THE DEVIL'S ARCHITECT

Christopher Wren is remembered as the chief architect of modern London, but his assistant Nicholas Hawksmoor towers above him in occult circles thanks to his 12 churches built in accordance with the 1711 Act. These made a break from the traditional Gothic style and introduced a new and alien geometric vocabulary of obelisks, pyramids and cubes. His supposedly morbid interest in pagan cultures and pre-Christian worship has helped darken his reputation.

 

Hawksmoor’s churches are based on a layout of intersecting axes and rectangles, which he described as being based on the “rules of the Ancients”. His work borrows from Egypt, Greece and Rome – all revered by the Freemasons – and often in a grand manner. The nave of St George’s Bloomsbury church is a perfect cube, with a tower in the shape of a pyramid. Seven of the keystones are decorated with flames, the eighth bears the Hebrew name of God inside a triangular plaque surrounded by a sunburst; the symbolism of this is obscure.

 

Hawksmoor’s St Mary Woolnoth is based on the idea of a cube within a cube. This has represented the squaring of the circle from ancient times, which takes us back to the ideal proportions of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man… and, of course, the Freemasons.

 

But it is the alignment of Hawksmoor’s churches as much as their architecture that has provoked speculation, starting with the writer Iain Sinclair’s book-length prose-poem Lud Heat in 1975. This describes how Hawksmoor’s churches form regular triangles and pentacles, and “guard, mark or rest upon” the city’s sources of occult power. Sinclair even provides maps to prove the alignments, which are a clear sign of Hawksmoor’s true satanic affiliation.

 

Sinclair was the first to connect Hawksmoor’s churches with some of the most shocking crimes in London’s history – the now largely forgotten Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 and Jack the Ripper’s killing spree in 1888. Sinclair suggests that the malign influence of Christ Church, Spitalfields, is so great that it attracts dark acts of violence to its vicinity.

 

The theme was taken up in Peter Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor in 1985, which switches between the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire and a modern serial killer case. Ackroyd, a great scholar of London, playfully names his modern detective Hawksmoor, while the book’s 17th-century architect is Nicholas Dyer.

 

The idea of Hawksmoor as a manipulator of dark forces was further refined in Alan Moore’s hugely ambitious graphic novel From Hell. This involved a unified conspiracy theory linking Hawksmoor, the Freemasons and the Jack the Ripper killings. The Ripper murders, in this version, are carried out by Queen Victoria’s personal physician to conceal an illegitimate child conceived by her grandson, Prince Albert, Duke of Clarence.

 

Moore taps into an earlier strand of Ripperology connecting the killings with the Freemasons. The oath of secrecy taken by Freemasons includes a very colorful description of the supposed penalties, including mention of a cut throat and the statement “that my left breast had been torn open and my heart and vitals taken from thence and thrown over my left shoulder” and “my body had been severed in two in the midst”. Freemasons insist that this oath is symbolic and the penalties have never actually been inflicted on oath-breakers. A number of commentators, though, have suggested that the way the Ripper’s victims were mutilated closely parallels these specific injuries.

 

Stephen Knight went even further in his book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution in 1976. Graffiti found near two of the murders read: “The Juwes are not the men who will be blamed for nothing”. Knight claimed that “Juwes” was not a misspelling of “Jews”, as usually supposed, but is actually a Masonic term referring to Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum. These are three murderers in Masonic legend who are linked with the gory penalties set out in the oath. Knight’s book received something of a mauling (or perhaps a disembowelment) from other Ripper experts, though it has proved influential, spawning numerous books and films.

 

Even if the Ripper killings were some sort of enactment of the Masonic penalties, it does little to solve the case. Were they a warning, or was there some other symbolic purpose? Was the Ripper a crazed Free­mason? Or is it all, as Sinclair suggested, down to the influence of Hawksmoor’s dark architectural patterns?