Edward Postlethwayt Page (1782–1857), farmer and visionary, was a native of England. At age twelve he became a midshipman in the British navy, serving aboard HMS Leviathan in the West Indies. Later Page was a lieutenant with the British army in India before returning to England due to ill health. Although he considered becoming a foreign missionary, he instead immigrated in about 1807 to the United States, where he traveled and taught. In 1818 Page was in Clinton, New York, but by 1820 he had settled in Ohio. He spent the majority of his life thereafter based in and around Marietta, with occasional visits to New York and Philadelphia to promote his religious and philosophical ideas. Page’s worldview drew on geometry, astrology, numerology, and other occult influences while incorporating Masonic principles and symbolism. He authored numerous pamphlets, articles, and broadsides on these subjects, and he promoted utopian communities based on his beliefs. Page unsuccessfully petitioned the United States government multiple times, requesting first the franking privilege and later land or money as compensation for his discoveries. After one such request to the government for land in Florida was denied in 1824, he claimed to have traveled to South America and investigated the possibility of founding a utopian community there. Page sensed a kinship with Robert Owen’s followers and made contact with them. He was also aware of the work of Frances Wright but eventually formed his own community in Ohio at Emblem Place, his farm outside of Marietta (Madison, Papers, Retirement Ser., 2:105–6; Clay, Papers description begins James F. Hopkins and others, eds., The Papers of Henry Clay, 1959–92, 11 vols. description ends , 8:828; Page to TJ, [by 3 June 1820]; Page, Magic Harmonies; exemplifying the Second Advent Dispensation [New York, 1821], 22–3; Martin R. Andrews, ed. and comp., History of Marietta and Washington County, Ohio, and Representative Citizens [1902], 175–7, 259; Notes and Queries 18 [1900]: 159; Bombay Courier, 1 Aug. 1801; Laws of the State of New-York, Passed at the Thirty-Ninth, Fortieth and Forty-First Sessions of the Legislature [Albany, 1818], 283–4; DNA: RG 29, CS, Ohio, Marietta, 1820, Fearing, 1830, 1840, Salem Township, 1850; Manchester [Eng.] Iris, 13 Apr. 1822; Robert Dale Owen, Threading My Way. Twenty-Seven Years of Autobiography [1874], 233–6; Comet 1 [1832]: 330–3; JHR description begins Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States description ends , 25:443–4, 484, 27:567, 796, 29:433, 727 [6, 14 Mar. 1832, 28 Apr., 21 June 1834, 1 Mar., 20 Apr. 1836]; Baltimore Niles’ Weekly Register, 22 Nov. 1834; Daily Cleveland Herald, 3 June 1835; Knickerbocker 5 [1835]: 524–5; Carrollton, Ohio, Carroll Free Press, 18 Mar. 1836; New York Working Man’s Advocate, 28 Sept. 1844; New-York Daily Tribune, 3 Dec. 1844; New York Herald, 29 Dec. 1844; Natchez Semi-Weekly Courier, 4 May 1849; gravestone inscription in Mound Cemetery, Marietta).

Marietta, Ohio, was named for Marie Antoinette (maria [16 of france]), the wife of Louis XVI. It is home to several Native American mounds, some of which take the form of leveled pyramids or an elevated square (William P. Strickland, The Pioneers of the West; or, Life in the Woods [1856], 109; History of Washington County, Ohio, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches [1881], 440–3).

In the Bible, Luke 14.19, a man excuses himself from an invitation to a banquet by saying that he needs to test his new 5 yoke of oxen. The planet Uranus was sometimes referred to initially as Herschel (hershell) in honor of the British astronomer Sir William Herschel, who discovered it in 1781 (OED description begins James A. H. Murray, J. A. Simpson, E. S. C. Weiner, and others, eds., The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., 1989, 20 vols. description ends ).

When twelve leaders of the Israelites presented their staffs to Moses in the Bible, Numbers 17.1–12, only aaron’s 12th rod miraculously sprouted. In Masonic lore the Temple of Solomon is revered as the keeper of this rod in the inner Holy of Holies, which measured twenty cubits square (20 × 20 × 20) (Albert G. Mackey, An Encyclopædia of Freemasonry [1874], 1, 798). boaz and jachin are the pillars at the entrance to the Temple of Solomon (Encyclopædia of Freemasonry, 120, 372, 583). Admission into Freemasonry is known as reception and an initiate is in some cases called a recipient (Encyclopædia of Freemasonry, 631). The Bible refers to despising the day of small things in Zechariah, 4.10.

In 1818 the American army officer John Cleves Symmes published his theory that the earth was hollow and open at the poles (Symmes, The Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres, demonstrating that the Earth is Hollow, Habitable Within, and Widely Open About the Poles, ed. Americus Symmes [1878]). When Pythagoras demonstrated the forty-seventh proposition of Book 1 of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry using what was later known as the Pythagorean theorem, he was reputedly so pleased that he sacrificed one hundred oxen (a hecatomb) (Encyclopædia of Freemasonry, 283).

urim and thummim are Hebrew words sometimes translated as “light” and “truth” (Encyclopædia of Freemasonry, 848–9). They are invoked on multiple occasions in the Bible, such as Exodus, 28.30, where God commands Moses to place Urim and Thummim in Aaron’s breastplate of judgment. A rod for a fools back refers to Proverbs, 26.3. In Freemasonry the number of a lodge determines its precedency. English lodges were known by their numbers before unique names began to be adopted (Encyclopædia of Freemasonry, 521).

balaam’s ass speaks in protest of being beaten in the Bible, Numbers, 22.21–38. God gave Hezekiah a sign by reversing the sun 10 degrees of sun dial in Isaiah, 38.8. The sun & moon stand still in Joshua, 10.13, and Habakkuk, 3.11. Joseph’s brothers receive 20 pieces of silver for selling him into slavery in Egypt in Genesis, 37.28. xt: Christ. The people of israel were condemned to wander the wilderness for forty years as punishment in Numbers, 14.34. iscariot: Judas Iscariot.

Mount lebanon is celebrated in Scottish Rite Freemasonry as the source of the trees used to build the Temple of Solomon (Encyclopædia of Freemasonry, 447). An angel gives a little book to John to eat in the Bible, Revelation, 10.8–11, telling him that it will taste sweet like honey, but be bitter in his belly.