Riddles in Stone, Part 3: A Broken Pentagram?

Exhibit AKey Evidence

1. Picking up right after Part 2 (about 2:34:45 into the full video), the narrator asks whether there really is a pentagram in the street layout.
2. Dr. Robert Hieronimus, an author and member of Co-Masonry: once he drew the lines himself, “it’s not a real five-pointed star. It doesn’t have legs.”
3. Trevor W. McKeown: you can draw a pentagram over some major streets, “but the streets don’t actually connect to form a pentagram.”
4. Dr. S. Brent Morris of the Scottish Rite Journal: a partial pentagram does appear in L’Enfant’s earliest published maps, “but it is just that,” because Rhode Island Avenue doesn’t connect through to Connecticut.
5. Morris: “if we Masons are so all-fired powerful… how come we weren’t smart enough or powerful enough to have it completed?”
6. The film’s answer, from Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages: the pentagram “may be broken at one point by not permitting the converging lines to touch… When used in black magic, the pentagram is called the sign of the cloven hoof, or the footprint of the devil.”
7. Fact check: the Hall quote is accurate but condensed. The full passage says a black-magic pentagram “always differs in one of three ways”: broken, inverted, or distorted. Hall published it in 1928, over a century after the 1791 plan, and wasn’t initiated into Freemasonry until 1954.
8. Hear both sides and “test all things; hold fast what is good.”