Occult Theocracy Chapter XLII - XLIV

CHAPTER XLII

THE CONVULSIONARIES OF ST. MEDARD

(Founded 1731)

St. Medard was the name of a cemetery in Paris wherein was the tomb of a famous Jansenist, the deacon Francois de Paris, and it was said that miracles of all descriptions took place there.

The first recorded case of convulsions in the St. Medard cemetery occurred in August 1731.

On this subject, Madden tells us the following : —

" The tomb of the deacon Francois became the scene of wonderful cures, and some very remarkable conversions, which were reputed miraculous. People who came there, especially afflicted with nervous disorders, appear to have been affected in a singular manner, some with cataleptic, others with hysteric and convulsive symptoms.

" The convulsionnaires exhibited not only occasionally, but frequently, all the phenomena which are ascribed by mesmerists to animal magnetism, somnambulism, ecstasies, raptures, submission of the will and the senses to the power of the volition of another person, connected in some way with the dominant idea which possessed their minds at the time of falling into the trance. Increased subtlety of thought, quickness of perception, heightened powers of imagination, a vivid energizing influence, fraught with enthusiasm and even eloquence ; claims to clairvoyance, to communion with another world, to ' spirit life ' ; all these phenomena were to be found too, though not all in the same individual, in occasional instances in this epidemic of convulsive theomania...

" Till the month of August, 1731 ", says Picart, " the wonders wrought at the burying place of the deacon Paris were not accompanied with any considerable difference from those mentioned in Scripture or ecclesiastical history. Those who were afflicted with sickness, and begged the holy deacon's intercession, were laid upon or under his tomb-stone, which was raised from the ground, and were cured. But in August, 1731, God was pleased to work his miracles in a different manner ; violent pains, agitations of the body, extraordinary convulsions, were the means by which the sick were healed, not all at once, but gradually. This happened to one Abbe Becheran, to Chevalier Follard, an ancient officer in the army, and to several others. The number of people afflicted with convulsions increased so fast, and consequences of the meetings at the tomb appeared, or were represented to the King, so dangerous, that on the 27th of January, 1732, he issued an order to shut up the little churchyard belonging to St. Medard's parish, where M. de Paris was buried, and to open it only when necessary for burials. Some weeks afterwards, the Abbe Becheran was arrested and confined at St. Lazare, and set again at liberty about three months after in June. But the miracles and convulsions did not cease upon these oppositions ; on the contrary, they daily spread further, and gained ground.

" Towards the end of the year 1732, those who were in convulsions began to foretell what was to happen, to discover secrets, to make speeches, pathetic exhortations, sublime prayers; even those who at other times were wholly unable to perform any such things.

" Montgeron informs us : ' There is nothing which the convulsionnaires did not undertake to mortify themselves, to break down and to enfeeble their bodies. The most of those from the time they had convulsions, hardly made use of a bed; they laid down with their clothes on, winter and summer, with only one covering, some lying on planks, and others on the bare ground, others on logs of wood, and some of them on bars of iron. '

" The fact is, not only the means used for effecting cures were evil in themselves, but many of the leading persons by whom the remedy of the Grand Secours was administered or superintended were persons of ill repute.

" Montgeron reckons that four thousand enthusiasts were employed to kick, and to strike without cessation the infirm, and all those young girls who begged for the violence of their blows. ' They were not ashamed to maintain' says Calmeil ' that it was to be ignorant of pious and charitable duties, not to obey under these circumstances the desires of the convulsionnaires whilst the reasonable Jansenists repeated aloud, that it was only a frantic madness which could suggest to these young women to encounter such dangers, and make an excuse for the criminal barbarity of those who had the audacity to boast of the advantages of so scandalous a mode of mortification, or rather martyr dom, and the wickedness to consent to take on them the office of executioners'.

" An observer has recounted that a young girl named Jeanne Mouler, had insisted upon their administering to her as many as a hundred blows with an andiron, on the stomach, and that a brother, who had one day given her sixty, had caused a breach in a wall at the twenty-fifth blow, and then went on repeating the same violence on her person which had been previously inflicted upon her. Montgeron, acknowledging that he was the person designated ' the brother', who inflicted the blows, adds : ' The convulsionnaire continued to complain that the blows that I was giving her were so slight that they did not bring her any relief, and she forced me again to put the andiron into the hands of a large strong man... This person in no way spared her. Having seen, by the proof that I had already given, that he could not administer too violent blows, he bastinadoed her in so frightful a manner, always in the hollow of the stomach, that they shook the wall against which she was leaning.

" The convulsionnaire made them immediately give her, with all their force, the hundred lashes that she had already asked for, counting as nothing, those sixty which I had already given her. '

" A physician, hearing an account of these things, maintained that they could not be true, as according to him it was physically impossible. He objected, amongst other things, that the flexibility and the softness of the skin and flesh, and all the other fibrous parts of which the skin and the flesh are essentially composed, are incompatible with a force and resistance so extraordinary... They allowed him to make an anatomical demonstration, to set forth all his proofs, and in the end, for reply, they said to him — Come and verify the facts — He hastened to do so, and at the very sight he was struck with astonishment. Scarcely believing his eyes, he begs to administer himself the secours...

They immediately put into his hands the iron instruments, the strongest and the fittest to beat effectually ; He spared nothing, he struck with the greatest violence, he thrust into the flesh the instrument with which he was armed, he made it penetrate beyond the surface... Notwithstanding which, the convulsionnaire laughed at all his vain efforts ; all the blows which he gave her only served to do her good, without leaving the slightest impression, the least trace, or any vestige whatever, not only in the flesh, but even on the skin itself ".

Among other duly attested cases of torture to which the Convulsionnaires submitted the most astonishing are those of crucifixion and burning.

Like the Fakirs of India, these people seemed to have achieved invulnerability and the power to defy nature ! Science, so far, has still to find a satisfactory explanation of this phase of phenomena.

Hippolyte Blanc, another writer, records the following observations : —

" The girl Sonet, nicknamed ' The Salamander', was seen to rest in the flames for 36 minutes on one occasion without sustaining any burns.

" The mania of the convulsionnaires broke out at St. Medard, in the spring of 1731. The royal order, which caused the cemetery of St. Medard to be closed and the pretended miracles to cease, was issued in January, 1732. "

In 1733, the Due d'Anjou, the infant son of Queen Marie Leckzinska and Louis XV, fell a victim to a Jansenist plot which caused his death.

In Phantasmata, already quoted, we read further : .

" From 1732 onward the delirium of theomania began to manifest itself more signally than it had hitherto done, by ecstatic phenomena, and cataleptic symptoms, by predictions, and pretensions to miraculous operations, in the same way as the Calvinist convulsionnaires progressed in their fanaticism in the Cevennes, when they were interfered with by the civil authorities ; and many of their chiefs were imprisoned, as those of the Jansenists of St. Medard were immured in the Bastille, and the Bicetre. The plea or the pretext of persecution, and the consequent assemblage of the convulsionnaires of Paris in secret, concurred greatlyand rapidly to augment the evils which it was intended to prevent by those governmental measures. And those evils were not effectually repressed during the following ten years. Nor were they totally then put a stop to. It was of no avail that, in the year 1762, the ' Grand Secours ' was forbidden by act of parliament.

" The insanity of the convulsionnaires ", says Hecker, " lasted without interruption until the year 1790. "

The convulsionnaires of St. Medard and the Camisards were only manifestations of Gnosticism such as have existed in the esoteric branches of various sects, religious and secret societies ever since the days of Paganism.

Among others can be mentioned :

The Albigenses, The Moravian Brethren, The Anabaptists, the Baptists, the Quakers, The Waldenses, the Shakers, the Methodists etc. Their name is legion! Sects rise, sects fall or fade away, but God remains.

CHAPTER XLIII

THE ROYAL ORDER OF SCOTLAND

(Founded 1750)

The Royal Order of Scotland is composed of two degrees — HRDM and RYCS — or those of Heredom and Rosy Cross.

The antiquity and origin of " Mother Kilwinning " is a favourite theme with Masonic authors according to whom the degree of Heredom of Kilwinning was founded in the reign of David I, King of Scotland, and that of Rosy Cross by Robert Bruce in 1314.

Robert Freke Gould, however, places the date of the foundation of the Royal Order of Scotland in " the middle of the last century ", and gives us the name of William Mitchell, a Scotsman who obtained his patent as its founder from the Provincial Grand Master of South Britain on July 22, 1750. '

CHAPTER XLIV

THE STRICT OBSERVANCE

(Founded 1751-52)

The following main facts concerning the Strict Observance are mostly gathered from the profusely documented work of R. Le Forestier who, having made a comprehensive study of the subject, took as one of his chief authorities Nettelbladt.

The Templar rite of the Strict Observance was founded in 1751 by Charles Gotthelf, Baron de Hund (born 1722) Chamberlain and Councillor of the Elector of Saxony, King of Poland, as well as Councillor of the Empress Maria Theresa.

In 1764, the Anglo-Jewish adventurer Leucht, variously known as Johnson, de Martin, Robert de Leichten, Becher, Despocher, de Bousch, Somery, Scheel and Koenig, made an attempt to amalgamate the Templar System of Clermont, the control of which he had seized the previous year from Rosa, with that of von Hund, with the view of dominating the latter also.

In this he failed.

Rosa had been the Legate for Germany, Holland and the kingdoms of the north while, in Paris, the Comte de Clermont occupied a similar position with regard to France, Spain, Portugal and Italy.

The legend of the Strict Observance is very much involved. Stating that the Stuarts were the unknown superiors of the Order it claimed descent from Pierre d'Aumont, Banneret d'Auvergne, at the time of the death of the Grand Master Jacques de Molay and the successor of Beaujeu, Molay's nephew who, with two Commanders and five Knights had escaped to the Island of Mull where they encountered George Harris, the Grand Commander of Hampton Court, likewise a refugee. They elected d'Aumont Grand Master and adopted the costume and customs of Masons in memory of d'Aumont and his companions who, for two years, had lived thus in disguise while exercising the trade to earn a livelihood. Not daring to recruit openly, the Templars were eventually permitted to marry to perpetuate the order. For over 250 years, admission to the degree of Scotch Master had been restricted to the sons of Templars and only within the last 150 years had the secrets of this order been available to Scotch Masters born of free parents. D'Aumont was succeeded as Grand Master by Harris. " '

According to Le Forestier, again quoting Nettelbladt, the initiation ceremony ot the Strict Observance included the presentation to the postulant of a ribbon to which was appended a small cross which had been in contact with the Baphomet."

At the Convent, sitting from June 4 to 24, 1772, at Kohlo in the Basse Lusace, it was decided to refuse further obedience to the illusive " Invisible Superiors" continually referred to by Hund, and the Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick (Luneburg) (1721-1792) was, with the consent of the Banneret, elected Magnus Superior Ordinis per Germaniam Inferiorem and Grand Master of the United Lodges of Scottish Rites, the name of Strict Observance being abandoned as objectionable to Masons of other systems. From that time forward Hund's position in the order was purely an honorary one.

For root of this movement see Chapter XXII.

For development of this movement see Chapter XLVI I.