masonic mystery box

Sometimes I just can´t help myself.



I walked past a small curiosity shop, not far from where I live, today. It was quite strange actually, because even though I´m quite fascinated by antiques and curiosities, I never saw the little shop before. I noticed something fascinating in the window and I went in. The owner, an old man sitting in a corner inside, smoking, told me the shop had been located there the last twelve years...

I got the feeling I had been transported to an old american horror comic book from the 1950s. There´s always this guy who sees something strange in the window of a curiostity shop he never noticed in the neighborhood before. He walks in and the old man behind the counter says the shop´s been there forever. The main caracter of the comic buys the strange object he saw in the window. Weird things start happening and when the guy returns to the shop to inquire furter about the object he bought, the shop is nowhere to be found, and an old woman, sitting on a bench near by, says she´s been living in that street all her life and there never was a curiosity shop there.

That´s kind of the feeling I got.

And I just had to buy this strange little box you can see in the picture above. It´s obviously masonic, with the square and the compass and the capital G, but the box is kind of upside down, the lid is where the bottom should be, or better said: the ornamentaion on the sides of the box is upside down. The box is made of lead, with walls almost a centimeter thick, and even though it´s rather small, ca 15 x 15 x 15 cm, it weighs a ton (not litterally, mind you). The owner of the shop claimed to be a mason himself, showing me his masonic ring, but saying that he did not know what the box was used for in the lodge, but he said he thought it was perhaps to keep something very hot in. I got an eerie feeling he knew more than he was telling me.

So now I just have to wait for the weird things to start happening!