Thus is the basis of the “ Johannite” legend of Freemasonry, which has
equated these “Eastern Mystics” with the Mandaeans, who revered John the Baptist, instead of Jesus. The legend purported that they
belonged originally to a Jewish sect
that followed the Kabbalistic teachings
taught by Moses, meaning the Essenes , or
Therapeutae of Alexandria. They later converted to Christianity , or Gnosticism , and then survived in Egypt
through Islamic times, preserving their teachings
of Hermeticism , falsely regarded as representing
an ancient Egyptian wisdom. Then, at the
time of the Crusades, they came in contact with the Templar s . This led to the
understanding that equated them with the
Sabians and Mandaeans, or
the Brethren of Sincerity, or even the
Ismailis they influenced, who ruled Egypt as the Fatimid dynasty at the
time of the Crusades. According to
Scottish Rite legend, when these “Eastern Mystics” left Jerusalem, these Gnostic Christians
eventually settled in Scotland, and founded a new chapter of the Templar Order, which later merged with a
lodge of Freemasonry. 25
Saint-Martin also showed an interest in the
Swedish mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg
(1688 – 1772), who had
a prolific career as an inventor
and scientist before turning to more occult matters. Swedenborg’s philosophy had
a great impact on King Carl XIII, who as the Grandmaster of Swedish Freemasonry,
having built its system of degrees and rituals. In 1710, during his first visit to London, Swedenborg is
thought to have beeninitiated into a Jacobite
lodge. In Emanuel Swedenborg, Secret Agent on Earth and in Heaven, Marsha Keith Schuchard proposes that Swedenborg was
a Jacobite spy on behalf of the Swedish
government and used secret Masonic
networks to pass intelligence back to
Sweden or to carry out secret missions.
In 1741,
Swedenborg entered into a spiritual phase during which he experienced
dreams and visions. This culminated in a spiritual awakening through which he
claimed he was appointed by the Lord to write a New Church Doctrine to
reform Christianity. According to the
New Church Doctrine, the Lord had opened his spiritual eyes to allow him to
visit heaven and hell and talk with angels, demons, and other spirits. He said
that the Last Judgment had already occurred in 1757, though it was only visible
in the spiritual world where he had witnessed it. That Judgment was followed by
the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which occurred, not by Christ in person, but
by a revelation from Him through the inner, spiritual sense of the Word.
Swedenborg ideas and practices have been influence by the teachings of Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk, whom he visited in London, where Falk
was at the center of an occult community comprising Freemasons, Kabbalists, Rosicrucians, alchemists
and the Moravian Brethren, a crypto-
Sabbatean cult and followers of the ideals of Jan Huss and Commenius. The
Moravian Brethren were led by Count Nicolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf, whose bizarre Kabbalistic sex rites influenced Swedenborg. 26 According to the Kabbalistic theories adopted by Zinzendorf,
God and the universe are composed of dynamic sexual potencies (the Sephiroth), which interact with each other and
produce orgasmic joy when in perfect equilibrium. 27 The adept meditates upon
the male and female potencies of Hebrew
letters and numbers until he reaches a state of visionary trance. Zinzendorf and his followers held meetings
called “love feasts,” which included couples
making love in view of the others, accompanied by singing and dancing.
However,
Swedenborg gradually located the source of his Kabbalistic theories not among the Jews, but in Asia. Swedenborg was fascinated
with the “ Shambhala” myth, and under cover of employment for the Swedish
East India Company and his appointment
to the Swedish Court as Master Ironmaster and Miner, he had journeyed to India and Central Asia, bringing back with
him the sexual rites that went into his New
Jerusalem Society, later to be frequented by
William Blake. Influenced by the
Sabbateans and their
sexual doctrines, Swedenborg
became intrigued by the similarity of Yogic Tantra techniques of meditation and
sexual magic to Kabbalistic techniques. Swedenborg argued that
the Yogis of Central Asia discovered the
secrets of Kabbalism long before the Jews. There was some truth to Swedenborg’s
claims, as Gershom Scholem also noticed
that, already in the thirteenth century, in the
Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafi a,the techniques used “to aid
the ascent of the soul, such as breathing exercises,
the repetition of the Divine Names, and meditations on colors, bear a marked
resemblance to those of both Indian Yoga and Muslim Sufism .” 28
However, any such similarities can be
attributed more likely to later
Gnostic influence in India. Tantra is a style of religious ritual and meditation
recognized by scholars to have arisen in medieval India no later
than the fifth AD, after which it influenced Hindu traditions and spread with Buddhism to East Asia and Southeast Asia. The Gospel of
Thomas, discovered among the Gnostic
gospels near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in December 1945, is named for the apostle
Thomas, who is traditionally believed by Christians in Kerala, in south-west India,
to have spread Christianity among the
Jews there. Edward Conze, a British scholar of Buddhism, pointed out that
“Buddhists were in contact with the Thomas Christians [Christians who knew and
used the Gospel of Thomas] in south india.” 29 Gnostic scholar Elaine Pagels
mentioned that, “Trade routes between the Greco-Roman world and the Far East were
opening up at the time when gnosticism flourished (A.D. 80-200); for generations, Buddhist
missionaries had been
proselytizing in Alexandria.”30 Pagels also reports that Hippolytus, a Christian
scholar in Rome, wrote about the Indian Brahmins “heresy.”
Tantra betrays several similarities to
Gnosticism. Essentially, the doctrines of
Tantra preach a non-dualism, proposing a vision of reality as the selfexpression
of a single Divine Consciousness, and are characterized by rituals that propose
the possibility of achieving heightened spirituality through the mundane,
identifying the microcosm with the macrocosm. The Tantric practitioner seeks to use prana, an
energy that flows through the universe, including one’s own body, to attain
goals that may be spiritual, material or
both. Long training is generally required to master Tantric methods, into which pupils are
typically initiated by a guru. Yoga, including breathing techniques and
postures (asana), is employed to subject the body to the control of the will.
Mudras, or gestures, mantrasor syllables, words and phrases, mandalas and yantras,
symbolic diagrams of the forces at work in the universe, are all used as aids
for meditation and for the achievement of spiritual and magical power.The
Left-Hand Tantra in particular, taught a
repudiation of conventional morality where the Sabbateans could see a similarity
to their own doctrine of the “Holiness of Sin.” While taboo-breaking elements
are symbolic for “righthand path”
Tantra (Dakshinachara), they are practiced literally by “left-hand path” Tantra (Vamachara). Vamacharais a mode of
worship or sadhana(spiritual practice) that is considered heretical according
to Vedic standards. Secret ritual may include feasts of otherwise prohibited
substances, sex, cemeteries, and defecation, urination and vomiting. Mirroring
the “sacred marriage” of Gnosticism, most important is the ritual sexual union
known as Maithuna, during which the man and the woman for the time being become
divine: she is the goddess Shakti, and he the god Shiva.
Adepts of Chinese and Tibetan Tantra claim that refraining from
ejaculating leads to a heightened experience, culminating in the ability to
communicate with spirits, perform automatic writing, clairvoyance, and astral
travel. Similarly, as explained Marsha Keith Schuchard, in an article titled
“Why Mrs. Blake Cried, Swedenborg, Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual
Vision:”
…while associating with Moravian and Jewish
mystics in London, the fifty-six
year-old Swedenborg learned how to
perform the mystical Kabbalistic
marriage within his mind, through the sublimation of his sexual energy into
visionary energy. By meditating on the male and female potencies concealed in
the vessels of Hebrew letters, by visualizing these letters in the forms of
human bodies, by regulating the inhalation and exhalation of breath, and by
achieving an erection without progress to ejaculation, the reverent Kabbalist could achieve an orgasmic trance
state that elevated him to the world of spirits and angels. 31
Swedenborg frequently recorded his personal
achievement of these paranormal states and the Yogic techniques, which, along
with the notion of an Asian pre- Kabbalah , were infused into some Kabbalistic - Rosicrucian rites of Écossais [Scottish]
rites of Freemasonry. Swedenborg was
also influenced by La Crequinière whose book, Agreement of the Customs of East
Indians with Those of the Jews(1705),
claimed an Asian origin for the sexual rites of the Jews, which
were represented by
erotic sculptures of
male and female fertility figures. 32 The theory of an
ancient “Asian Kabbalah” was especially
promoted by the Chevalier Michael
Ramsay, who had a major influence on Écossais and Swedish Freemasonry.
33 There was also a legend that Pasquales
had journeyed to China to learn secret traditions which were
assimilated into certain Scottish
Rite lodges in France. 34
A variety of important writers, artists and philosophers, were influenced by Swedenborg, including
Immanuel Kant, William Blake, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Jung, Honoré de Balzac, Helen Keller, and
W.B. Yeats. The famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 –1804) wrote positively of Swedenborg, referring to his “miraculous”
gift, and characterizing him as “reasonable, agreeable, remarkable and sincere”
and “a scholar,” in one of his letters to his friend Moses Mendelssohn, and expressing regret at having
never met him. Kant tried to later distance
himself from Swedenborg, writing a
mockery titled Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. However, there has long been suspicion
among some scholars that Kant
nevertheless held a secret admiration
for Swedenborg. Moses Mendelssohn remarked that there was a
“joking pensiveness” in Dreamsthat
sometimes left the reader in doubt as to whether it was meant to make “metaphysics laughable or
spirit-seeking credible.” 36
The most notorious figure of the era was the enigmatic Comte de St. Germain. He was the
supposed Grand Master of Freemasonry and
had become an acquaintance of Louis XV King of
France and his mistress Madame de Pompadour. His true identity has never
been established, but speculations at the time tended to agree that he was of
Jewish ancestry. He was believed to have
alchemical powers that allowed him to transmute lead into gold, as well
as many other magical powers such as the ability to teleport, levitate, walk
through walls, influence people
telepathically, and even to have been immortal.
As such, he continues to be regarded among occultists as perhaps the leading figure of their modern history. He is
also described as one of the later incarnations of Christian Rosenkreutz.
St. Germain’s famous pupil was another notorious
charlatan, the Count Cagliostro, another student of Rabbi Falk. Born in 1743,
like St. Germain, he was often reputed
to be a Jew, the son of Pietro Balsamo, a Jewish trader from Sicily.
However, Cagliostro himself stated
during a trial that he had travelled as a child to Medina, Mecca, and Cairo.
Upon return to Malta, he claims to have
been admitted to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, who descend from the Knights Hospitallers, with whom he studied alchemy, the
Kabbalah , and magic. As to his
mysterious origins, or that of his wealth, in his own word, Cagliostro
explained, “I have always taken pleasure in refusing to gratify the public
curiosity on this score. Nevertheless, I will condescend to tell you that which
I have never revealed to anyone before. The principle resource I have to boast is that as soon as I set foot in any countryI find there a
banker who supplies me with everything I want.” 37
In 1771, an amalgamation of all the Masonic groups was effected at the new lodge
of the Amis Réunis. A further development
of the Amis Réuniswas the Rite of the
Philalethes, formed by Savalette
de Langes in 1773, out of Swedenborgian, Martinist, and Rosicrucian mysteries,
into which the higher initiates of the Amis Réunis, like Willermoz and others
were initiated. The Philalethes also included Marquis de Condorcet, who would
play a leading role in the coming Revolution of 1789. Savalette de Langes was Grand Officer of the Grand
Orient, the chief body of Freemasonry in France, instituted by French Masons in
1772. Its Grand Master was the Duke of
Orleans, later “Philippe Egalité,” as Grand Master. Philippe was the
great-grandson of Philippe, Duke of Orleans, supposed Grand Master of the Order
of the Temple. Philippe was also another pupil of Rabbi Samuel Falk. 38
But it was at the Congress of Wilhelmsbad in
1782 that all these various bodies of Freemasonry came under the influence of a new order, the notorious Bavarian Illuminati. According to Rabbi Marvin S.
Antelman, in To Eliminate the Opiate, it was the founder of the Rothschild dynasty, Mayer Amschel Rothschild,
who convinced Adam Weishaupt to accept
the Frankist doctrine and who afterwards financed his founding
of the Illuminati.
Weishaupt created the Illuminati in
1776, with the aim of fulfilling the Frankist plot of subverting the world’s
religions. 39 Though born Jewish, as a young boy Weishaupt was educated by the Jesuits and was referred to as “a Jesuit in disguise” by his closest associate,
Baron von Knigge. 40 Pope Clement
XIV dissolved the Jesuits in 1773, but three years later, on
May 1, 1776, Weishaupt announced the
foundation of the Order of Perfectibilists, which later became more widely
known as the Illuminati. John Robison,
who in 1798 exposed the evolution of the
Illuminati in Proofs of a Conspiracy, remarked of German Freemasonry, “I
saw it much connected with many occurrences and schisms in the Christian church;
I saw that the Jesuits had several times
interfered in it; and that most of the exceptionable innovations and dissentions
had arisen about the time that the order of
Loyola was suppressed; so that it should seem, that these intriguing brethren had attempted to maintain their influence
by the help of Free Masonry.” 41
The first Masonic body with which the Illuminati formed an alliance was the Strict Observance to which the Illuminati members Baron von Knigge and Bode both belonged. Cagliostro, who had also formed a link with
the Martinists, had been initiated into the
Illuminati near Frankfurt and was then employed in its propagation.
According to his own admission, his mission “was to work so as to turn Freemasonry in the direction of Weishaupt’s projects,” and that the funds
which he drew on were those of the
Illuminati. 42 It was at Wilhelmsbad that Weishaupt’s emissaries managed to recruit
numerous members to the Illuminati from
among the Martinists and Amis Reunis,
and that the Rectified Scottish Rite
of Willermoz was established. Having
been superseded by the Illuminati,
the Strict Observance then ceased to
exist.
But it was a secret congress convened in 1785,
attended by Bode, Baron de Busche,
Cagliostro, Savalette de Langes
and others, having been invited by the Comte de Mirabeau, where the death of
Louis XVI was decreed.43 However, an evangelist preacher had been sent in July
1785, as an emissary of the Illuminati to
Silesia, but who on his journey was struck by lightning. The instructions of
the Order were found on his person, and its scheming revealed to the Government
of Bavaria and the Order was officially suppressed. Nevertheless, suspicion
remained that its members might still be working in secret, spreading subversive
ideas, and conspiring behind the scenes. Prior to the French Revolution, Weishaupt himself is to have said, “Salvation
does not lie where strong thrones are defended by swords, where the smoke of
censers ascends to heaven or
where thousands of strongmen pace the rich fields of
harvest. The revolution which is about to break will be sterile if it is not
complete.” 44
The
Illuminati nevertheless proceeded with their plot. The chief conduit of
their activities in France was the Amis Réunis, and the Loge des Chevaliers Bienfaisants
at Lyons. This Lodge stood at the head of French Freemasonry, and the fictitious Order of Masonic
Knights Templars was formed in this
Lodge. Its Grand Master was Illuminati
member, the Duke of Orleans, “Philippe Egalité.”
The Duke of Orleans’ primary motivation, besides his hatred of the King and his
wife, Marie Antoinette, was to himself succeed as King following the sought
revolution. To insure his succession to the throne, Falk is believed to have
given him a talisman consisting of a ring, which Philippe Egalité, prior to his
execution following the Revolution, is said to have sent to a Jewess, Juliet Goudchaux,
who passed it on to his son, subsequently King
Louis Philippe. 45
About eight years before the Revolution,
Philippe Egalité was elected Grand Master of France, and the whole association
of various lodges came to be known as the Grand Orient. The chief instigators
of the Revolution, Marquis de Mirabeau, Marquis de Condorcet, Rochefoucault and
others, were high-raking officers of
these lodges. The Count Mirabeau was himself
a member of the Illuminati, and had
attended the Grand Masonic Convention
in 1782, at Wilhelmsbad in Hesse-Kassel, where the ground-plan for the
coming revolution was reputed to have originally been discussed. In 1788,
deputies of the Illuminati were sent
upon his request to inform the French lodges on
strategy. Their first item of advice was the creation of a Political Committee in every lodge, from which arose
the Jacobins Club. Soon, nearly every lodge In the Grand Orient was
infiltrated by supporters of Weishaupt, who
became active in spreading the political policies of terrorism against the
state.
Already in 1785, the first plot towards
fomenting the revolution was enacted. Under instructions from the Illuminati,
Cagliostro was involved in the famous “affair of the diamond necklace,”
a mysterious incident at the court of Louis XVI
of France involving his wife,
Queen Marie Antoinette. The Queen’s reputation, already tarnished by gossip,
was ruined by the implication that she had participated in a crime to defraud
the crown jewelers of the cost of a very expensive diamond necklace. The Affair was historically significant as one of the events that led to the French populace’s disillusionment with the monarchy
which, among other causes, eventually
culminated in the French Revolution of
1789.
When the Bastille was stormed, the Comte de
Mirabeau, allegedly said, “the idolatry of the monarchy has received a death
blow from the sons and daughters of the Order of the Templars.” When Louis XIV,
King of France was executed, a voice in the crowd cried out “De Molay is
avenged!”46
Towards their goal of overthrowing the power
of the Church and the aristocracy, the
Illuminati had mobilized a legion of philosophesto emphasize the role of
“reason” over “superstition,” meaning religion. The name of the era, the Age
of Enlightenment, betrayed the influence of its hidden sponsors, the Illuminati. Paradoxically, while their
emphasis was supposedly to attack “superstition,” the Enlightenment philosophers’
ideas were developed from the occult. Rather, it was not superstition per
sethat they wished to attack, but rather
Christianity which they sought to characterize as such in order to
turn public opinion against it.
As described by the Catholic Encyclopedia,
the end-goal of Adam Weishaupt’s project was as follows:
By “enlightenment” men were to be liberated
from their silly prejudices, to become “mature” or “moral,” and thus to outgrow
the religious and political tutelage of Church and State, of “priest and
prince.” Morals was the science which makes man “mature,” and renders him
conscious of his dignity, his destiny, and his power. The principal means for
effecting the “redemption” was found in unification, and this was to be brought about by “secret schools
of wisdom.” These “schools,” he declares, “were always the archives of nature
and of the rights of man; through their agency, man will recover from his fall;
princes and nations, without violence to force them, will vanish from the
earth; the human race will become one family, and the world the habitation
of rational beings. 47
The project sought to undermine traditional
religion by exploiting the promotion of the scientific ideas of the Royal
Society, which proposed that an empirical basis to reality could be discovered,
suggesting the possibility of also determining a moral basis to human existence
through the use of reason instead of revelation. They rejected the inherent
moral nature of man, seeing Christian morality as a contrived construct, and
instead reduced man to the level of an animal driven by instincts, which could
be discerned through scientific analysis. It
was thus surmised that it would be possible to discover a set of “rights,” that would be used to
govern human society, and since their basis was in “reason,” could replace
religion because they could be accepted by all “rational” people.
Thomas
Hobbes (1588 –1679), a friend to Francis
Bacon and Ben Jonson, was among
the first to attempt to
construct a theory of rights substantiated by evidence other than revelation. In Leviathan, beginning from a mechanistic understanding
of human beings and the passions,
Hobbes postulated what life would be like without government, a condition
which he calls the “state of nature.” In that state, each person would have a
right, or license, to do whatever they pleased. This, Hobbes argues, would lead to a “war of all
against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes). As such, if humans wish to live
peacefully they must give up most of their natural rights and create moral obligations
in order to establish political and civil society. This is one of the earliest
formulations of the theory of government known as the “social contract.” Hobbes concluded that people will not follow
the laws of nature without first being subjected
to a sovereign power, without which all ideas of right and wrong are meaningless:
“Therefore before the names of Just and Unjust can have place, there must be
some coercive Power, to compel men equally to the performance of their
Covenants.” 48
It was Isaac
Newton’s conception of the universe based upon natural and rationally
understandable laws that became one of the seeds for Enlightenment ideology. However,
despite his influence on the development of
the Age of Reason, Newton’s
personal interests were decidedly irrational. According to Ernst Benz, the direct
influence of Jacob Boehme on
European philosophy was not in Germany, but in England, where it was found in
the philosophy of Newton and the alchemist and
Rosicrucian apologist Robert
Fludd. Another famous member of the
Royal Society, Isaac Newton (1642 –1727) devoted a great deal of study to the subject of alchemy.
Newton was committed to interpretations of the “Restoration” of the Jews to their own land of Palestine and spent
the remaining years of his intellectual life exploring the Book of Daniel.
These ideas were also advanced by John Locke
(1632 – 1704), an early member of the Royal Society, as well as friend of Newton, and connected to the alchemists and
Kabbalists Franciscus Mercurius van
Helmont and Knorr von Rosenroth. 49 Locke was a member along with van Helmont of the Lantern of Benjamin Furly,
who was associated with the Sabbatean
Serrarius as well as William Penn. The main thesis of Locke’s Essay on Human Understandingis, like
Hobbes, that there are “no Innate Principles.” In other words, that man is not inherently
moral. One of Locke’s fundamental arguments
against innate ideas is the very fact that there is no truth to which all
people attest. He postulated that at birth man’s mind was a blank slate or tabula
rasa, which is shaped by experience, sensations
and reflections as the sources of all our ideas. Unlike Hobbes, however, Locke
believed that human nature is characterized by reason and tolerance. But
like Hobbes, he believed that human
nature allowed men to be selfish. In a natural state all people were equal and independent, and everyone had a natural right to defend his “Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions.” Also like Hobbes,
Locke assumed that the sole right to defend in the state of nature was
not enough, so people established a
civil society to resolve conflicts in a civil way with help from government in
a state of society.
Similar arguments were developed by Scottish
philosopher David Hume (1711 – 1776), whose philosophy, especially his “science of man,” is often thought to
be modeled on Newton’s successes in
natural philosophy.50 Beginning with his
A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume strove
to create an entirely naturalistic “science of man” that examined the psychological
basis of human nature. He concluded that desire rather than reason governed
human behavior, saying:
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of
the passions.” He argued against the
existence of innate ideas, concluding instead that humans have knowledge only
of things they directly experience. He was also a sentimentalist who held that
ethics are based on feelings and governed by “custom” rather than abstract moral principles.
In
France, the Enlightenment had its
origin in the salons and culminated in
the great Masonic project of the
Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot
with contributions by hundreds of leading philosophes, most of whom like Diderot himself as well as Rousseau and
Montesquieu were Freemasons. To ensnare the French people, the Illuminati exploited the Masonic ideal of “liberty.” Ultimately, there
is no such thing as absolute liberty. Unbeknownst to the credulous masses, the
notion of Liberty has a Gnostic origin,
because it is Lucifer who leads the mystic to “freedom” from God’s “oppressive”
commandments. The ideal of “Liberty” is a relative term, because by our
very natures and our co-habitation with fellow human
beings, our lives are defined by
limits. Ultimately, the false promise of “Liberty” was used to rally the
masses of France and America into
overthrowing their established powers and to open the way for their usurpation by the growing
banking powers.
In order to present the struggle for “liberty”
in context, the Illuminati constructed
the myth of progress, derived originally from Lurianic Kabbalah, as history
evolving from superstition to “freedom” from “despotism,” a euphemism for the
Catholic Church. According to Illuminati
member, Marquis de Condorcet, who wrote Outline of a Historical Picture of the
Progress of the Human Mind, the history of civilization is one of progress in
the sciences, emphasizing the connection between scientific
progress and the
development of human rights and justice,
and outlines the features of a future rational society founded on scientific knowledge.
Likewise, in The Education of the Human Race, Illuminati member Gotthold Ephraim Lessing incorporated Enlightenment ideas of
human advancement. Much more substantial and systematic was the work of Johann Gottfried Herder who in Outlines of a
Philosophy of History of Manpresents mankind in a ceaseless process of evolution. The final German Enlightenment philosopher of
note was Immanuel Kant, who wrote the
Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitical Point of View, in which the
progress of mankind is made central.
Enlightenment ideals spread across Europe
then to America, where they influenced Benjamin
Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, among
many others, and played a major
role in the American
Revolution. Among the fifty-six American rebels who signed the
Declaration of Independencein 1776, only six were not Masons, who were influenced by Locke’s arguments concerning liberty and the
social contract. Both Washington and Jefferson were ardent defenders of Adam
Weishaupt, while Jefferson even referred to him as an “an enthusiastic philanthropist.” George Washington wrote instead that he did
not deny “the Doctrines of the
Illuminati, and principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United
States.” “On the contrary,” he replied “no one is more truly satisfied of this fact than I am.”
He continued:
The idea that I meant to convey, was, that I
did not believe that the Lodges of Free Masons in this Country had, as
Societies, endeavored to propagate the diabolical tenets of the first, or pernicious principles of the latter
(if they are susceptible of separation). That Individuals of them may have done
it, or that the founder, or instrument employed to found, the Democratic
Societies in the United States, may have had these objects; and actually had a
separation of the People from their Government in view, is too evident to be
questioned.51
It was Jefferson who had been responsible for infiltrating
the Illuminati into the then newly
organized lodges of the Scottish Rite in
New England. Jefferson defended Weishaupt saying :
As Weishaupt lived under the tyranny of a despot
and priests, he knew that caution was necessary even in spreading information,
and the principles of pure morality. This has given an air of mystery to his
views, was the foundation of his banishment… If Weishaupt had written here,
where no secrecy is necessary in our endeavors to render men wise and virtuous,
he would not have thought of any secret machinery for that purpose. 52
Thus, the
French Revolution, as in the United States, succeeded in creating a new
secular state, removing the authority of
Christianity, and replacing it with ideals secretly promulgated by the
secret societies. These ideals were then enshrined in the American Declaration
of Independence, the United States Bill of Rightsand the French Declaration of
the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. As a cryptic clue to their true origin,
the Declaration of Human Rightsadopted
in France after the Revolution features
several prominent occult symbols. First, is the
Illuminati symbol of the All Seeing Eye within a triangle, now found on
the Great Seal of the United States.
Underneath the title is an Ouroboros, an ancient Gnostic symbol of Satan, found in Western alchemy. 53 Underneath it is a red Phrygian cap,
derived from the pagan Mysteries of Mithras.
The entire Declaration is guarded by the twin
Masonic pillars. As the Bonnet, the orator at the Grand Orient Assembly boasted in 1904:
When the Bastille fell, Freemasonry had the supreme honour of giving to
humanity the chart which it had lovingly elaborated. It was our Brother, de la Fayette, who first presented the “project
of a declaration of the natural rights
of the man and the citizen living in society,”
to be the first chapter
of the Constitution. On August 25,1789,
the Constituent Assembly, of which more than 300 members were Masons, defi nitely adopted, almost word for word,
in the form determined upon in the Lodges, the text of the immortal
Declaration of the Rights of Man. 54
Following up on the success of the French and
American revolutions, the leading
exponents of the secret societies, beginning with the Abbé de Saint -Pierre, Immanuel Kant, and the followers of Saint-Simon,
outlined the idea for a united Europe, as a voluntary “federation” of
independent nations in a covenant of mutual assistance and cooperation, and as
a step towards eventual world government.
Kant requires in his famous Second Defi nitive Article of Perpetual Peace that “each nation, for the sake of its
own security,” enter along with all other nations into a voluntary and loosely
institutionalized international federation. 55
The first practical attempt to establish
European unity was the failed conquests
of Napoleon. The German Romantic
philosopher, Friedrich Hegel (1770 –1831), regarded Napoleon as embodying the
“world-soul,” meaning, that in him was fulfilled the process of history.
Hegel is regarded as the leading exponent of German Idealism, after Jacob Boehme, by whom he was directly influenced.
As pointed out by Ernst Benz, in Mystical Sources of German Romantic
Philosophy, the chief conduit of the ideas of Jacob Boehme to Hegel, and the other German
Idealists of the time, was Saint-Martin.
While it is not proven that Hegel was a
member of the Illuminati, as
demonstrated by Glenn Alexander Magee in
Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition,
Hegel did often refer cryptically to
Illuminati and Masonic symbols. Hegel was an avid reader of Illuminati member Franz von Baader, through whom he was introduced to
the ideas of Boehme.
As Ernst Benz summarizes, “In a certain sense
one can refer to the philosophy of German idealism as a Boehme- Renaissance, when Boehme was discovered at the same time by Schelling, Hegel, Franz
von Baader, Tieck, Novalis and many
others.” 56 Baader believed himself charged with a mission of inspiring
the new philosophic trend through the revival of the mystical tradition:
I should like to draw your attention to the
two causes of the stagnation which has struck speculative theology for a long time: the first is the contempt
for the efforts and results of the theory known as mysticism, especially during the 14 th and 15th centuries;
and the second is the contempt for
philosophy of religion, or if you wish, for Jewish mysticism (that is
to say, for the cabala). I find it all the more necessary
to dwell on The first of these two causes
of the decadence of philosophy of
religion, as my own vocation and personal goal is to reintroduce the forgotten
or despised works of this old theory
into modern philosophy. 57
Thus,
through the indirect
influence of Lurianic Kabbalah , by way of Jacob Boehme,
Hegel was the first to articulate the need to interpret history as the progress of the
popular Masonic maxim, “ Liberty,” which
has become characteristic of Western propaganda ever since. As in the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, Hegel and the other Romantic philosophers
proposed that history was the unfolding of an idea, as God coming to know
himself. To Hegel, it is man who becomes
God, as Western civilization overcomes “superstition,” that is, man’s idea of God as an entity
outside of himself. Thus, history was the evolution of human society towards
secularism, or at least a rejection of conventional religion. Because, this was
an idea, as understood by mystics, which progressed with their assistance by
conspiring to overthrow the established order and replacing it with one based
on Kabbalistic principles, whose secret is
that man becomes God through the practice of magic. To Hegel,
Napoleon represented the fruition of this process. Speaking of Napoleon he said, “It is indeed a wonderful
feeling to see such an individual who, here concentrated into a single point,
reaches out over the world and dominates it.”
According to Adam Mickiewicz, regarded as the greatest poet in
all Polish literature, who was also a secret
Frankist as well as a Martinist,
there existed in France at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, “a numerous Israelite sect, half Christian, half
Jewish, which also looked forward to Messianism and saw in Napoleon the
Messiah, at least his predecessor.”58 These beliefs, notes Mickiewicz,
were related to those of Jozef Maria Hoene- Wronski, a Polish philosopher and
crackpot scientist. Sarane Alexandrian writes in Histoire de la philosophie occultethat “ Wronski holds in
occult philosophy the place that
Kant holds in classical
philosophy.” 59 Wronski exercised a
profound influence on the famous
occultist Eliphas Lévi (1810–1875),
whose real name was Alphonse Louis Constant, and who is often held to have
incepted the French occult revival in 1855 with his Doctrine and Ritual of High
Magic. Levi was also heavily influenced by a leading French Martinist and astrologer, Fabre d’Olivet, who had been hired by Napoleon
as one of his advisors.60 Eliphas Lévi
was also a friend of Edward Bulwer-Lytton,
a leading Rosicrucian who led the Oxford
Movement . Lévi was fi rst
initiated into the occult by Wronski. In an obituary, Lévi wrote of Wronski that he had “placed, in this century of
universal and absolute doubt, the hitherto unshakeable basis of a science at
once human and divine. First and foremost, he had dared to define the essence of
God and to find, in this definition
itself, thelaw of absolute movement
and of universal creation.” 61
A recent genetic study of Napoleon’s DNA has proven him to have been of
Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Napoleon was
a rare example of Haplogroup E1b1b1c1. This group originated approximately in
the area of Lebanon and can most
frequently be found in Israel, the
Palestinian territories and Lebanon.
Similar profiles can be found among Sephardic Jews in
Greece and Italy. It is not sure when Napoleon’s ancestors moved to Italy
from the Near East. One hint to
Napoleon’s ancestry is already given by the genealogy of his family. One
of his ancestors, Francesco Bonaparte has been called “il Mauro,” the Moor. His
ancestors can be traced back to the city of Sarzana in northern Italy. During the Middle ages, Sarzana had
frequently been under attack by the Muslims who controlled the Mediterranean
Sea at this time. Therefore, Napoleon’s
Arab and or Jewish ancestors probably came to
Italy during the Islamic expansion as conquerors or merchants. 62
The Sabbateans’ veneration of Napoleon, which survived beyond his death,
was related to Jacob Frank’s messianic
prophecies. Frank had been prophesying a “great war” to be followed by the
overthrow of governments and foretold that the “true Jacob will gather the
children of his nation in the land promised
to Abraham.” 63 Gershom Scholem revealed
that George Alexander Matuszewics, a
Dutch artillery commander under Napoleon
was the son of a leading Frankist. 64 Wenzel Zacek cited an anonymous
complaint against Jacob Frank’s cousin, Moses Dobrushka, and his followers, which stated:
The overthrow of the papal throne has given
their [the Frankists] daydreams plenty
of nourishment. They say openly, this is the sign of the coming of the Messiah, since their chief belief consists
of this. [ Sabbatai Zevi] was saviour, will always remain the saviour, but
always under a different shape. General Bonaparte’s conquests gave nourishment
to their superstitious teachings. His conquests in the Orient, especially the conquest
of Palestine, of Jerusalem, his appeal to the Israelites is
oil on their fire, and here, it is believed, lies the connection between them and between the French society (Franceschen).
65
After his uncle’s death in 1791, Dobrushka was offered the leadership of the Frankist
movement, but he refused. Dobrushka had
converted to Christianityand entered
the Habsburg nobility with the name of
Franz Thomas von Schoenfeld. Dobrushka was the grandson of Jonathan Eybeschütz
(1690 –1766), the Rabbi of
Poland, Moravia, and Bohemia, from whom
he inherited his grandfather’s collection of
Sabbatean Kabbalistic works.
Along with Jacob Emden, Eybeshütz is
well known as a protagonist in the Emden- Eybeschütz Controversy, a momentous
incident in Jewish history of the period, credited with having crushed the
lingering belief in Sabbatai Zevi
current even in some Orthodox circles. As reported by Jewish historian Jacob
Katz in Out of the Ghetto, a
certificate held in the Schiff Collection at the New York Public
Library, published by the notorious
Illuminati publisher Nicholai, ranks Eybeshütz as sixth in direct
succession from Sabbatai Zevi in a list
of ordination. 66 First to succeed was
Nathan of Gaza
(1643 – 1680) who was
anointed a prophet by Sabbatai Zevi. Next was Solomon Ayllon
(1655 –1729) his disciple and a Rabbi in
London and Amsterdam where he tried to hide his
Sabbatean leanings. Ayllon’s successor, was Nechemiah Chiyon (1655– 1729)
who was excommunicated in several communities and wandered over Europe and North Africa.
He ordained his successor Judah Leib Prossnitz in Moravia. Prossnitz was known
as a Kabbalist and charlatan healer who confessed to sacrificing to the devil and demons, after which he
was publicly banished into exile for several months. Following his ordination
as\ successor to Zevi, after first
proclaiming himself the Messiah, Judah Leib then passed on the title to Rabbi
Eybeshütz
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