Chapter 17: Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, Part 17

NARRATIVE of WARD COURIER, Continued

September, 2007

BUFFALO, NY

After my lukewarm experience at the jewelry show, I had gone about the second half of my day-off routine as planned, including that visit to the Irish pub in the city's Black Rock section. By ten I was ready to head home. The quickest way from where I was seemed to be to take Niagara Street south till I picked up the entrance to the 190. The two avenues run right alongside each other for a good while, and for some of my course I could see headlights on the expressway on which I would soon be driving, the only thing between me and the mighty river to the west. The Niagara, though, is more properly a straight: a connector of two big bodies of water. Lakes Erie and Ontario, after all, are inland oceans. I came to one Neoclassical building on the west side of Niagara Street that was spectacular enough to bring me to a stop. I had to get out and inspect it.

From its style I guessed that this structure dated from the 1840s. While its limestone construction and Yankee-classical features were similar to those of other Niagara Frontier buildings that I knew dated from as early as the 1820s, it could not have been even a decade older. All the buildings near the river in this part of Buffalo were destroyed by the British one late December night in that little dustup we call the War of 1812.

What had caught my eye from the street had been the graceful portico with four colossal white columns that drew the glance upward. I could tell by the square-and-compass etched into the pediment that this frontier Federal building had once been a Masonic hall, and a big one. The real eyecatchers, though, were closer to street level: two large Egyptianate sphinxes perched on the brickwork framing the broad steps like cats on the armrests of a rocker. Female ones with transcendent expressions and shapely breasts, they made this structure look like a temple. They were the oddest features I had ever seen on a Buffalo building. I approached.

Twelve feet long and maybe eight at their highest, these icons fit so well on their slabs at the base of the two central columns that it was as if the building had been built to hold them. Otherwise they were outsized. They were big enough to have been visible high up on a monument. That was my first thought, that they were precise imitations of fixtures on some famous ancient temple. It would have been a lot of effort to post them here.

Their most bizarre quality, though, was their coloring. The one on the right was a typing paper white. The other was a deep tone that I would bet daylight would reveal as flat black. They clashed mightily in hue, shape, and texture with the smoky stone that held and backed them. This only added to their mystery. Were they restored features of the original building?

Thematically, those effigies were right in line with the Egyptianate, Greek, and Hermetic-Cabalist imagery we get so used to in Western occult symbolism. Otherwise, they were so disproportionate to the size of the structure behind them that they really did look like transplants.

I climbed the few low, broad steps and stood between the sphinxes, studying one, then the other. They were too perfect to be antiquities, and they didn't show even a century of the Niagara Frontier's weathering. The third clue that they were not components of the original structure came when I walked up and tapped one. It felt hollow and made of thin wood, if not even plastic. It was hard to tell which underneath the heavy coats of paint. What were they doing here?

Had this building been built to be a lodge or consistory or had it merely been used for one? Most buildings even temporarily adopted by the Masons are given suggestive features. They often linger as ornaments after the building's reuse by successive owners. This building could have been no more than a rock box onto which at some point a classical facade was added like a mask. Buildings the Masons build for their own use from the ground up are more complex. After all, their architecture is based on their philosophy. If this building had been designed to hold those sphinxes, it could only have been one of the most significant Masonic structures in the upstate. Why hadn't I heard of this one? The presence of other symbolic features of both structure and ornamentation would go a long way toward making a case. I set out to circle the building to see what was there.

Another big building was jammed right up against it on the south. I walked north where from the dim street things had looked a lot more open. My course was quickly blocked, though, by a fenced-in lot stocked with planters, pillars, sundials, fountains, and obelisks. I realized with a bolt that this had to be the same site that had been catching my attention from the other direction for years as I'd driven by on the northbound expressway. This building housed the shop of a dealer who specialized in architectural antiques. The drab backside it presented to the river and the expressway before it, the 190, would never catch your eye, but the monumental wares outside were visible from a long way off. That facade you passed on Niagara Street was so different from its hind end that you needed to see the lot to make the connection. I couldn't make it past the fence for any better overlooks of the building itself, but a picture fell into place for me about those sphinxes: They had arrived here for sale.

As Buffalo's fine architecture crumbles under a declining economy, urban sprawl, estate taxes, a culturally clueless local government, and Erie County's fearsome property taxes, almost anything valuable that can be pried or hauled away is likely to end up somewhere else someday. The most cumbersome items often find their way to this dealer, along with a lot of other strange, symbolic old things. Surely, someone yanked these sphinxes off of an old estate or lodge.

The explanation for the positioning of these icons could also be simple: Their current perches gave them the best free advertising they could get to attract the right eclectic collector.

You could debate their ambience as fixtures, but the fact that they had been found and inventoried in Buffalo wasn't all that weird. The city itself and the whole Niagara Frontier have had a rich Masonic history. In Buffalo's Victorian-era golden age, many splendid public and private sites in the area were adorned by the Moorish Revival imagery associated with the various orders of the Lodge. I could see these sphinxes having come off a Masonic consistory somewhere, if not one of the former Shrine Centers, one of the Masonic spin organizations/appendant bodies often nicknamed "Templars" or "Shriners." (Their official name and initials, I have since found out, are "Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine" and A.A.O.N.M.S.) My grandfather had been a Shriner. The big shrines served as restaurants and social clubs. When I was a kid, we had the occasional Sunday dinner at one of the temples in Buffalo and I got plenty of looks at the regalia.

Despite the way TV uses the word "paranormal," the subject includes a lot more than ghosts. It overlaps or encompasses many other topics, including occultism and its spin, occult conspiracy. Part of my work is to prepare myself to recognize symbols and signals when I encounter them. I have to understand them in general terms and know where to go for more answers. This was part of my fascination with that building.

Still, the scenario had become more than analytical. The visual experience was saying something to my interior self, and something about it was familiar. I remember communing longer than I recommend at that place and hour trying to bring to articulation what it was. I decided toward the end that the source of it was not only the dramatic sphinxes in their framework of portico and pediment, but that the sheer composition of the scene was making a statement, intended or not, in shapes and symbols, and possibly even in proportion. It was likely that the geometry of the street side, the east-facing facade, was a perfect recreation of a famous temple with overlapping Golden Rectangles and the rest. Like an architectural archetype, it was also possible that when regarded face-on this haunting vista before me in three dimensions matched a 2D image from a book, maybe one of the old occult seals I'd seen or even a stamp that could have been etched for a coin, cartouche or medallion.

I spotted something interesting on the lintel over the entrance. At first in the dimness it looked like just a splotch that could have been a sign of neglect or vandalism. When I got closer and saw a bit of sheen on it reflecting the lights of the street, I realized that it was a sort of irregularly-shaped plaque that looked like a plywood cut-out, posted over the entrance like a banner. About three feet long and one and a half high at its thickest, it was painted in sections almost like different countries on a map in a rainbow of colors vivid enough to be suggested in the dimness. Like some of the shingle-signs I'd seen, it was the outline of something hard to distinguish. It could have been totally ornamental, like a waving flag or even just a cloud. My imagination made something biomorphic of it, though, at first a crawling snail. It was about those proportions, with the mass that could have been the shell in the middle and the head coming out one way and the tail dragging behind from the other. As I studied it longer, I could also see it as an impossibly compressed coiling snake with an apparently toothed mouth gaping to the left and some sort of crest or headdress at its nape.

I doubted that it was any more of a clue to the history or uses of the building than the two sphinxes. That didn't stop me studying it. The only hint to its significance was the letter Q painted in black just below the center of the image. Still suspecting that its connections might be Masonic, I made a point to track down that logo. I figured the letter Q would make it an easier go. In my bouts of arcane study, I could not recall ever seeing that image or spotting any Masonic buzzwords that start with Q. The list of possibilities would be short.

I stood focusing on that icon and that building as a whole for up to twenty minutes. I left only when I had reached a sense of satisfaction that I had made enough progress for one visit, and that a deeper resolution was likely to come. I resolved to come back soon during the day and take pictures. Then I would get out the old books and make some comparisons. I would also track down that banner.