Science : Ben Franklin and Rosicrucian Dragons - Trepanning
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Ben Franklin and Rosicrucian Dragons - Trepanning
Benjamin Franklin's house: the naked truth
Restoration reveals secrets of American campaigner
Maev Kennedy, arts and heritage correspondent
Monday August 11, 2003 The Guardian
Some time in 2005 visitors will be able to visit the tall narrow Georgian house in the heart of London where Benjamin Franklin once sat stark naked by the large first floor sash windows, "air bathing" and thinking about bifocals, electricity, economics, American politics, British diplomacy, or how to get the fire in his back room to draw better.
It is a fair bet that however passionately interested the visitors are in the political history of American independence, and the intellectual history of the Age of Enlightenment, what will transfix them is the windowless basement room, once part of the garden.
As restoration work by the Friends of Benjamin Franklin House began on 36 Craven Street, a Grade I listed house rescued from the brink of tottering collapse, a small pit was found in the basement room. A human thigh bone was found.
The coroner and the police were notified. Excavation continued. More human bone surfaced. And more. And more, until more than 1,200 pieces of bone were recovered.
Since the bones were too ancient to trouble Scotland Yard, they are now in the care of the Institute of Archaeology, where experts have already determined that they range from an old man to a human
baby. Several skulls have been trepanned, and arm and leg bones chopped through.
The most plausible explanation is not mass murder, but an anatomy school run by Benjamin Franklin's young friend and protg, William Hewson. He had been a pupil of the most brilliant anatomist of the day, William Hunter, but the two fell out and Hewson started his own anatomy school - at the home of his mother-in-law Margaret Stephenson, just off the Strand, where Benjamin Franklin was also a lodger for 16 years.
He had a rich source of subjects at hand: the resurrection men could deliver bodies stolen from graveyards to the Thames wharf at the bottom of the street, while there was a weekly public execution at the gallows on the other side of the garden wall.
Benjamin Franklin, who was interested in absolutely everything - he was lucky to escape killing himself or his guests at the demonstrations of electricity he was wont to give during dinner parties - must have attended the public dissections. {For Dragons like the later Skull and Bonesmen who like Pierre Dupont de Nemours and Rufus King would be into the same ritual I trace and Gardner admits to.}
Hewson died young of blood poisoning after he cut himself during a dissection.
Franklin eventually returned to the United States, but was estranged from his abandoned family, and separated from the illegitimate son who shared his London years when Franklin declared for American independence and the son was exiled for his loyalty to England.
The house was less than 30 years old when Franklin came to London and rented the best first floor rooms, where he was visited by all the leading figures in radical politics, science and philosophy. (2)
Franklin was also a member of The Hellfire Club and you should know about John Dee and the Necronomicon as mentioned in this excerpt.
John Montagu, Lord Sandwich (the face in the halo) and George Selwyn, (a close friend of Horace Walpole who visited in 1763) were among the inner circle of twelve. One of the female members, Lady Betty Germaine, became a particular friend of Walpole's; through her Walpole acquired one of Dr. Dee's celebrated scrying stones, the Angelic Stone, now in the British Museum. Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Sandwich's grandmother and a member of the earlier Hellfire Club, was also said to have been a member.
Satirized in the novel Chrysal, or the Story of a Guinea by Charles Johnstone, and referenced in Charles Churchill's The Candidate, these Medmenhamites were a probable influence on Matthew Lewis's The Monk.
Benjamin Franklin joined the group on occasion and collaborated with Sir Francis to revise the Book of Common Prayer or Franklin Prayer Book still in use in America. Franklin was also associated with the radical Lunar Society which included Erasmus Darwin, Richard Edgeworth (Maria Edgeworth's father), and William Godwin's friend, Joseph Priestley. (2)
About the Author Author of Diverse Druids Columnist for The ES Press Magazine Guest 'expert' at World-Mysteries.com
