Introduction to Books by Robert Lomas

In Autumn 2007 Robert completed his triology of books investigating the traditional three keys of Freemasonry, held by each of the mythical Grand Masters. Each key deals with a different aspect of the teaching of Freemasonry.

The first book, Turning the Hiram Key was completed in 2005 and it dealt with the emotion of why anybody should want to become a Freemason and what spiritual rewards they derive from The Craft. Naturally as a scientist Robert looked into the phyical mechanisms of spiritual rewards as well as the subjective feeling taking part in rituals invokes.

The second book, Turning the Solomon Key, published in 2006, addressed the Masonic key to the "hidden mysteries of nature and science" reputedly held by King Solomon. This key is linked to the Masonic myth of the 'Bright Morning Star' which had inspired US Freemason, President George Washington when laying out the city which bears his name.

The last book in the triology, Turning the Templar Key , (which he completed in 2007 - exactly 700 years after the destruction of the Original Knight Templar) looks at the final lesson of the Masonic Third Degree - the nature and implications of personal death. Making use of the ritual messages in Templar Masonry, Robert looks at how this teaching developed and traces the myths which inspired both the Knights Templar and the later Orders of Templar Freemasonry to discover roots buried deep in the evolution of human society.

During 2004 Robert had been adding to his WebofHiram site at Bradford University, looking at closely at the ideas about the origins of Freemasonry from previous Masonic writers such as WL Wilmshurst, JSM Ward, RF Gould, AE Waite and William Preston. He noticed a common thread in the way the English Masonic establishment had rushed to condemn any ideas which might suggest Freemasonry was older than the 1717 Grand Lodge of London. He decided to revisit the work of these earlier writers and redraft their ideas to make them more widely available to a modern Masonic audience. He also added a commentary on the initial reception of these ideas of the self-proclaimed "Rulers of English Freemasonry". The result was The Secrets of Freemasonry which, when it was published in 2006, made available in one, indexed, volume the most controvertial writing about the beginnings of Freemasonry from the last 200 years.

The Spring of 2003 was a busy time for Robert. He had just launched a new book in the United States for Fair Winds Press, entitled Freemasonry and the Birth of Modern Science. It's a detective story about the life and times of the first Freemason to be made on English soil, Sir Robert Moray. Moray was a soldier; a spy; a scientist; and the one of the earliest, well-documented Freemasons. Robert's problem with understanding Moray lay in the fact that the story of his life and deeds was spread over a whole range of different sources, and this book is about how Robert reassembled the story of how and why Moray formed the foremost scientific society in the world .

Also in 2003 Robert completed his final book with occasional collaborator Chris Knight, for Century in the UK. Called The Book of Hiram it contains a full retelling of the complete myth of Freemasonry as it was once told to all Freemasons, prior to a major restructuring of Masonic ritual in 1813. It also gives interesting new insights into the real nature and exploits of King Hiram of Tyre, who was one of the world's most successful civil engineers just over 3,000 years ago.

Whilst researching The Book of Hiram Robert had created an electronic database of a lot of the early ritual material he was using, to make it easier for him to search and sequence it. Speaking to the Webmaster he described the website he created as 'rather like a Masonic rubbish heap, which had all the old embarrassingly dirty washing that United Grand Lodge of England had been trying to hide for the last two hundred years'.

Robert's University has since taken over this useful Masonic research resource over and a link to it can be found in the Book of Hiram section of this website.

At the 2001 Orkney Science Festival, in a session sponsored by the Institute of Physics, Robert gave a very well received talk on Moray and his role in founding modern science. In this new book he told the full and fascinating story of Sir Robert and his fellow founders of the Royal Society.

In 1999 Robert wrote a biography of Nikola Tesla, the engineer who gave his name to the unit of magnetic flux, The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century, It was launched at the 1999 Orkney Science Festival, where Robert gave a talk on Tesla in conjunction with Andrej Detela from the Department of Low and Medium Energy Physics at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubijana, Slovenia.

In 1996 he had first teamed up with Chris Knight to write about a shared interest in the origins of Freemasonry. Over five years he co-authored four books with Chris Knight, whilst continuing to write independantly. The four co-authored books were The Hiram Key, The Second Messiah, The Holy Grail, and  Uriel's Machine. Robert also contributed to the compilation Mysteries of the Ancient World.

Robert wrote his first book, a text book on Sales Forecasting, with Geoff Lancaster, in 1985. It was entitled Forecasting for Sales and Materials Management and was a practical guide to the techniques of mathematical forecasting.