d during the middle ages, and possessed grades of
officers and secret signs by which, on coming to a strange place, they
could be recognized as real craftsmen and not impostors." To this day, in
some parts of Germany and Bohemia, the swastika is the sign or mark of the
stone-mason's guild which has survived from the mediaeval times. In the
organized bands of masons whose mark was the swastika and who introduced
Eastern cosmical symbolism into Europe and gradually developed, upon this
basis, a purely Christian form of architecture, we may perhaps see the
descendants of those ancient builders who, filled with the conception of
the sacred Central power, the Four Quarters, the Above and Below, planned
the square, seven-stoned zikkurats of Babylonia-Assyria, the pyramids,
obelisks and sphinxes of Egypt, the columns and cruciform tombs and
sanctuaries of Greece, Asia Minor and Rome, the cruciform temples and the
topes of India and the domes of the Pantheon and St. Sophia.(152)

It would appear that these ancient builders were also the designers and
founders of cities and states. It is, for instance, known that Hippodamus,
the son of Euryphon, a Milesian, and by profession an architect, gained
celebrity in his own art by constructing the Piraeus at Athens and by
improving the method of distributing streets and planning cities ... and
also wrote a treatise concerning the best form of government.

A kinship of thought undoubtedly exists between the trained builders of
cosmical structures in the Old World and the ah-men, the amantecas and
toltecas of Central America and Mexico, who also reared pyramids,
cruciform vaults, circular temples, with openings to the four quarters
(see fig. 30, p. 97), altars and pillars, and in their temples wrought, in
stone, endless variations of the great human theme: the sacred central,
stable power, the four quarters and elements, and the heaven and earth
with the dualities of Nature, and likewise instituted an artificial scheme
of social organization, a calendar and religious rites based on these same
fundamental principles, which can be traced back to primitive pole-star
worship. It has been of utmost interest to me, as I was approaching the
end of the present investigation, to become acquainted with Hewitt's work
and his view that it was the seafaring Turanians, originally a northern
race, the worshippers of Tur=the pole, who claimed descent from the seven
stars of Nagash, the serpent=Ursa Major,