My grandfather was a 32nd degree Mason.
My parents ended up with one of his books called "Morals and dogma" published by the Masons.
I remember looking through it years ago and seeing multiple mentions of Jehovah.
As it turns out, it's in the public domain on project Gutenberg and is there fore searchable.
Found this interesting in light of Chuck Russell's alleged Mason connection.
It says about Jehovah and the divine name...
Whether the legend and history of this Degree are historically true, or
but an allegory, containing in itself a deeper truth and a profounder
meaning, we shall not now debate. If it be but a legendary myth, you
must find out for yourself what it means. It is certain that the word
which the Hebrews are not now permitted to pronounce was in common use
by Abraham, Lot, Isaac, Jacob, Laban, Rebecca, and even among tribes
foreign to the Hebrews, before the time of Moses; and that it recurs a
hundred times in the lyrical effusions of David and other Hebrew poets.
We know that for many centuries the Hebrews have been forbidden to
pronounce the Sacred Name; that wherever it occurs, they have for ages
read the word Adonaï instead; and that under it, when the masoretic
points, which represent the vowels, came to be used, they placed those
which belonged to the latter word. The possession of the true
pronunciation was deemed to confer on him who had it extraordinary and
supernatural powers; and the Word itself, worn upon the person, was
regarded as an amulet, a protection against personal danger, sickness,
and evil spirits. We know that all this was a vain superstition, natural
to a rude people, necessarily disappearing as the intellect of man
became enlightened; and wholly unworthy of a Mason.
It is noticeable that this notion of the sanctity of the Divine Name or
Creative Word was common to all the ancient nations. The Sacred Word HOM
was supposed by the ancient Persians (who were among the earliest
emigrants from Northern India) to be pregnant with a mysterious power;
and they taught that by its utterance the world was created. In India it
was forbidden to pronounce the word AUM or OM, the Sacred Name of the
One Deity, manifested as Brahma, Vishna, and Seeva.
These superstitious notions in regard to the efficacy of the Word, and
the prohibition against pronouncing it, could, being errors, have formed
no part of the pure primitive religion, or of the esoteric doctrine
taught by Moses, and the full knowledge of which was confined to the
Initiates; unless the whole was but an ingenious invention for the
concealment of some other Name or truth, the interpretation and meaning
whereof was made known only to the select few. If so, the common
notions in regard to the Word grew up in the minds of the people, like
other errors and fables among all the ancient nations, out of original
truths and symbols and allegories misunderstood. So it has always been
that allegories, intended as vehicles of truth, to be understood by the
sages, have become or bred errors, by being literally accepted.
It is true, that before the masoretic points were invented (which was
after the beginning of the Christian era), the pronunciation of a word
in the Hebrew language could not be known from the characters in which
it was written. It was, therefore, possible for that of the name of
the Deity to have been forgotten and lost. It is certain that its true
pronunciation is not that represented by the word Jehovah; and therefore
that that is not the true name of Deity, nor the Ineffable Word.
The ancient symbols and allegories always had more than one
interpretation. They always had a double meaning, and sometimes more
than two, one serving as the envelope of the other. Thus the
pronunciation of the word was a symbol; and that pronunciation and the
word itself were lost, when the knowledge of the true nature and
attributes of God faded out of the minds of the Jewish people. That is
one interpretation—true, but not the inner and profoundest one.
Men were figuratively said to forget the name of God, when they lost
that knowledge, and worshipped the heathen deities, and burned incense
to them on the high places, and passed their children through the fire
to Moloch.
Thus the attempts of the ancient Israelites and of the Initiates to
ascertain the True Name of the Deity, and its pronunciation, and the
loss of the True Word, are an allegory, in which are represented the
general ignorance of the true nature and attributes of God, the
proneness of the people of Judah and Israel to worship other deities,
and the low and erroneous and dishonoring notions of the Grand Architect
of the Universe, which all shared except a few favored persons; for even
Solomon built altars and sacrificed to Astarat, the goddess of the
Tsidunim, and Malcūm, the Aamūnite god, and built high places for Kamūs,
the Moabite deity, and Malec the god of the Beni-Aamūn. The true nature
of God was unknown to them, like His name; and they worshipped the
calves of Jeroboam, as in the desert they did that made for them by
Aarūn.
The mass of the Hebrews did not believe in the existence of one only God
until a late period in their history. Their early and popular ideas of
the Deity were singularly low and unworthy. Even while Moses was
receiving the law upon Mount Sinai, they forced Aarūn to make them an
image of the Egyptian god Apis, and fell down and adored it. They were
ever ready to return to the worship of the gods of the Mitzraim; and
soon after the death of Joshua they became devout worshippers of the
false gods of all the surrounding nations. "Ye have borne," Amos, the
prophet, said to them, speaking of their forty years' journeying in the
desert, under Moses, "the tabernacle of your Malec and Kaiūn your idols,
the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves".
Among them, as among other nations, the conceptions of God formed by
individuals varied according to their intellectual and spiritual
capacities; poor and imperfect, and investing God with the commonest and
coarsest attributes of humanity, among the ignorant and coarse; pure and
lofty among the virtuous and richly gifted. These conceptions gradually
improved and became purified and ennobled, as the nation advanced in
civilization—being lowest in the historical books, amended in the
prophetic writings, and reaching their highest elevation among the
poets.
Among all the ancient nations there was one faith and one idea of
Deity for the enlightened, intelligent, and educated, and another for
the common people. To this rule the Hebrews were no exception. Yehovah,
to the mass of the people, was like the gods of the nations around them,
except that he was the peculiar God, first of the family of Abraham,
of that of Isaac, and of that of Jacob, and afterward the National
God; and, as they believed, more powerful than the other gods of the
same nature worshipped by their neighbors—"Who among the Baalim is
like unto thee, O Yehovah?"—expressed their whole creed.
The Deity of the early Hebrews talked to Adam and Eve in the garden of
delight, as he walked in it in the cool of the day; he conversed with
Kayin; he sat and ate with Abraham in his tent; that patriarch required
a visible token, before he would believe in his positive promise; he
permitted Abraham to expostulate with him, and to induce him to change
his first determination in regard to Sodom; he wrestled with Jacob; he
showed Moses his person, though not his face; he dictated the minutest
police regulations and the dimensions of the tabernacle and its
furniture, to the Israelites; he insisted on and delighted in sacrifices
and burnt-offerings; he was angry, jealous, and revengeful, as well as
wavering and irresolute; he allowed Moses to reason him out of his fixed
resolution utterly to destroy his people; he commanded the performance
of the most shocking and hideous acts of cruelty and barbarity. He
hardened the heart of Pharaoh; he repented of the evil that he had said
he would do unto the people of Nineveh; and he did it not, to the
disgust and anger of Jonah.
Such were the popular notions of the Deity; and either the priests had
none better, or took little trouble to correct these notions; or the
popular intellect was not enough enlarged to enable them to entertain
any higher conceptions of the Almighty.
But such were not the ideas of the intellectual and enlightened few
among the Hebrews, It is certain that they possessed a knowledge of
the true nature and attributes of God; as the same class of men did
among the other nations—Zoroaster, Menu, Confucius, Socrates, and
Plato. But their doctrines on this subject were esoteric; they did not
communicate them to the people at large, but only to a favored few; and
as they were communicated in Egypt and India, in Persia and Phœnicia, in
Greece and Samothrace, in the greater mysteries, to the Initiates.
The communication of this knowledge and other secrets, some of which are
perhaps lost, constituted, under other names, what we now call
Masonry, or Free or Frank-Masonry. That knowledge was, in one
sense, the Lost Word, which was made known to the Grand Elect,
Perfect, and Sublime Masons. It would be folly to pretend that the
forms of Masonry were the same in those ages as they are now. The
present name of the Order, and its titles, and the names of the Degrees
now in use, were not then known. Even Blue Masonry cannot trace back
its authentic history, with its present Degrees, further than the
year 1700, if so far. But, by whatever name it was known in this or
the other country, Masonry existed as it now exists, the same in spirit
and at heart, not only when Solomon builded the temple, but centuries
before—before even the first colonies emigrated into Southern India,
Persia, and Egypt, from the cradle of the human race.
