[[RAMBLE.ALERT!RANT.ALERT!ENRAGE:ENRAGE!]]
There's not very much public knowledge about who Prince Hall really was so, as a fiction writer, I've written my own 'fan-fiction' about the Legend surrounding the man's name...
Which has practically been forgotten by modern scholastic community. Reading this, which parts do you think are true and which are obviously false?
Fact:
My Self Is related to Prince Hall who formed the first black Free Masonry Society in the United States.
There were many black men with the name Prince Hall during the Revolutionary War time frame. Very little is known about the private life of the actual Prince Hall, who became the first black Grand Master of Free Masonry through the machinations of the Grand Master of the Mother Grand Lodge of England, H. R. H. The Duke of Cumberland on September 20, 1784. Though the actual man was known to be an eloquent speaker for the Abolitionist cause, ran a school geared towards the education of blacks out of his own home and was himself an educated individual (though whether self or formally educated is not known for certain), if or not he actually fought in the Revolutionary War and, if so, in what capacity he did participate in the conflict remains a matter of speculation and conjecture.
Fact:
The Spanish Conquistadors who sacked the Mayan Empire in the mid 1600's were commanded by the Spanish Church to destroy all written documentation of the ancient Mayan culture as works of paganism and heresy. Thousands of year's worth of ancient intellectual awareness was obliterated in the flames of Spanish Inquisition and an entire society's worth of cultural knowledge was reduced to smoke and ashes practically overnight. Almost the entirety of the Mayan civilization, those most and well versed in the ancient ways of a cosmically aware empire, practically vanished from the face of history shortly thereafter, possibly as a direct result of the destruction of the written codices that had comprised the accumulated scriptures of many centuries of religious practice.
The Spanish Conquistadors quite literally destroyed the original "Bibles" of the ancient Mayan's entire religious system, quite possibly a precipitating factor in the old Mayan culture's eventual fall into historical oblivion.
Meta Fiction:
In 1765, at the genesis of the American Revolution, there were 23 men named Prince Hall living in the vicinity of Boston, Massachusetts. According to the then, mostly untranslated texts in the possession of the grand master of the Mother Grand Lodge of England, The Duke of Cumberland; there would come seven men with skin of night who would serve to fight in impossible battles. On the strength of the words written in the meticulously preserved documents, The Duke of Cumberland, through his personal network of cleverly placed spies throughout the burgeoning American governmental system, secretly followed the lives of these 23 men named Prince Hall, one of which was known from some translation of ancient documentation, was prophesized to become the first black Grand Master of Free Masonry.
Throughout the conflict during the Revolutionary War, The Duke of Cumberland and his network of Free Mason spies clandestinely funded a secret organization of freed black men and slaves who fought in the war on the side of the American cause, completely unaware of the national origins of their enigmatic "Grand Master". Prince Hall was one of seven men named Prince Hall who all served in the same special force of secret agents during the Revolutionary War; who fought clandestine actions and guerrilla warfare alongside such legendary historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere and even George Washington during his seminal crossing of the Delaware in 1851.
Upon the conclusion of the Revolutionary war and under much racist resistance to black men being integrated into white Free Masonry, the mysterious Grand Master issued a charter for the African Lodge No. 1 later renamed African Lodge no. 459 September 20, 1784. The African Lodge was so popular and Prince Hall was such an excellent leader that the Grand Lodge of England made him a Provincial Grand Master on January 27, 1791. As part of Prince Hall's initiation into the mantle of Grand Master, he was shown the ancient writings in which his name and station were some of the only things that could be accurately translated to date. It is commonly said that, upon viewing the first set of books, Prince Hall stared at the pages and pages of indecipherable ideograms and incomprehensible hieroglyphics for many silent minutes before exclaiming in the presence of the greatest British Free Masons of the day...
"I can read them. I can read them all!" And so fell into the hands of Black Free Masonry, the last remaining collection of Mayan Codices, preserved from destruction by the highly superstitious Spanish Church, in particular Bishop Diego de Landa in July of 1562, over 200 years past. Diego de Landa had written of these hated pagan writings: "We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction." Such codices were primary written records of Maya civilization, together with the many inscriptions on stone monuments and stelae that survived. Even then, the British Government, being well versed in the arts of espionage, managed to secret away a large number of the books, stelaes and scrolls, replacing the priceless cataloguing of ancient records with cleverly disguised replicas to be sacrificed in the fiery ignorance of Spanish Inquisition...
It was there-in that Prince Hall would translate and discover the true nature of the 13 Mayan Gods of the Underworld, their role in the next Era of Humanity come December 21st, 2012 and how his family line was somehow integral in the process of it all...
