Thanks for the review on the mason book. I'm not sure what to make of the whole mason business. My grandfather was a mason and, of course, so were many of the founders. The Catholics have always been pretty down on them. There is no doubt a lot of neo-platonic occultism at the roots of a bunch of things coming out of the renaissance, including freemasonry. But I always have a great difficulty in lending credence to conspiracy theories.
Nonetheless, one has to admit that coincidences are often quite striking. Consider the following experience I had today. I have just struck up a correspondence with Peter von Sivers, a specialist in Middle Eastern history at the University of Utah. He got his doctorate in Munich under Voegelin and I requested a copy of a paper he presented at a Voegelin conference back in '96. I decided I would do a little web searching on him to see what I could find.
One interesting result was the following site
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge26.html
If you open the page and search for 'sivers', you'll find his brief remarks on someone with the totally unfamiliar name of Jared Diamond, which I read before I went to lunch. Later, while returning to work, I started glancing through a catalog we recently received from a bookseller. I had intended to throw it away, but hadn't quite made it yet. Lo and behold, there is Jared Diamond's _Guns, Germs and Steel_, which you had mentioned on Saturday! The whole thing seems pretty spooky to me since I don't recall hearing his name before, though you may have used it Saturday.
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