Chapter 1

Caution!—You Are Now Entering The Forbidden Zone

What you will read and see in this book is forbidden to you. Discovering these things could be highly dangerous to your health. Forbidden knowledge is sweet, but also deadly. Many men have died for revealing far fewer secrets than are found herein.

I am not being overdramatic nor attempting to be sensationalist. This is a warning: Make very sure that you possess the daring and the courage to proceed before you go any further.

Lingering in my mind are the names of courageous men who have gone before you and I and are now dead because they exposed the forbidden knowledge of the Illumined Ones. Captain William Morgan—abducted, kidnapped and ritually murdered, his lifeless body dumped in a lake after he published a book unmasking Masonic secrets. Danny Casolaro—suicided, having his wrists cut and bleeding to death in a hotel room where he had gone to meet a confidential source; Paul Wilcher, found nude, his body stiff as it sat on a toilet in his home, only days after he mailed his exposé manuscript to U.S. Attorney-General Janet Reno; and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the world-famous classical composer, who paid the ultimate penalty, the Aqua Toffeta, arsenic poisoning that wracked his body.

Poor Mozart. He, too, had revealed some of the secrets of Freemasonry. Blackballed by The Order, so frightened were his friends and family that not one human soul so much as attended his funeral. It is said that Mozart’s faithful dog followed dutifully behind the lonely funeral wagon. The sad and forlorn canine was the only living creature in sight as the body of the man all of Europe had once toasted and applauded was taken to its burial site.

So, I ask you, dear friend, once again: Do you dare to discover the secrets many have been punished for merely knowing, let alone revealing? Are you sure, very sure, you want to enter the Forbidden Zone?