BLACK MAGIC WHITE SOLDIER ( THE YEAR
1666 PART 2 )
Sabbatai Zevi arranged to fulfill an interpretation of the prophecy of the Messiah whereby
he was destined to marry an unchaste woman. During the Chmielnicki massacres in
Poland, a Jewish orphan girl named Sarah, about six years old, was found by
Christians and sent to a convent. After ten years, through some miracle, she
escaped, and made her way to Amsterdam. She eventually went to Livorno where,
according to some reports, she led a life of prostitution. She also conceived
the notion that she was to become the bride of
the Messiah, who was soon to
appear. When the report of Sarah’s adventures reached Sabbatai, he claimed that
such a consort had been promised to him in a dream, in fulfillment of prophecy. He reportedly sent messengers to Livorno to bring Sarah to him, and they
were married. Through her, a new romantic and licentious element entered
Sabbatai’s teachings.
Passing through the city of Gaza, where there
lived an important Jewish community, Sabbatai met Nathan of Gaza, who professed to be the
risen Elijah. In 1665, Nathan announced that the Messianic age was to begin in the following
year. Nathan helped explain Sabbatai’s sinning by suggesting that, from the
beginning of time, the soul of the Messiah
was held captive in the realm of darkness. The
Messiah must therefore descend into sin to pull his soul from the
darkness that held him captive. Sabbatai spread this announcement widely,
together with many additional details to the effect that the world would be
conquered by him and Elijah, without
bloodshed; that the Messiah would then
lead back the Ten Lost Tribes to the
Holy Land, “riding on a lion with a seven-headed dragon in its jaws.” These types of messianic
claims were then widely circulated and believed.
Finally, after some hesitation, he publicly
declared himself as the expected Messiah in, not accidentally, 1666. Accounts
of his activities were exaggerated and spread among Jews in Europe, Asia, and Africa. His
popularity grew as people of other religions repeated his story as well.
The Messianic movement spread to Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands and the Jews of Hamburg and Amsterdam heard about the
events in Smyrna from Christians.
Menasseh’s coconspirator, Queen
Christina, became so fascinated with the claims of Sabbatai Zevi that she nearly became a
disciple. She danced in the streets of Hamburg with Jewish friends in
anticipation of the apocalyptic event.24
In Amsterdam, almost the entire Jewish community
had become followers of Sabbatai Zevi. A
prominent member of Sabbatai Zevi’s
followers in Amsterdam was the very wealthy Abraham Pereyra, who had provided
the main financial backing for the famous printing and publishing enterprise as well as for the other varied
intellectual activities of Menasseh
ben Israel all over Europe. 25 The
Jewish community of Amsterdam had been kept informed of the progress of
Sabbatai’s mission through Peter
Serrarius, at whose home Menasseh
ben Israel first shared his conviction in the immanent advent of the Messiah. As soon as news reached Amsterdam about Sabbatai Zevi, Serrarius was publishing pamphlets in
English and Dutch telling everyone about the signs of the messianic era and
that the King of the Jews had arrived. 26
Serrarius, a leading millenarian who was also a patron of the
philosopher Baruch Spinoza, had met
frequently with Kabbalistic thinkers at
the synagogue in Amsterdam, and worked on
Gematria with them, seeking to determine when the Messiah would appear.
27 Among Serrarius’ intimate friends were John Dury, Comenius, both of whom he was able to
convince about the messiahship of
Sabbatai Zevi. 28 Serrarius was also in contact with the alchemist
Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont, author
of the Alphabetum Naturale Hebraicum(1667), and the Christian Kabbalist Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, famous for his Kabbala Denudata.
Van Helmont had served on a diplomatic mission on behalf of Elisabeth of Bohemia, the daughter of Elizabeth
Stuart and Frederich V of the
Palatinate who was living in Herford, Germany, when he met with Henry More and Robert Boyle. Serrarius was also in contact with another acquaintance of Menasseh, Henry Jessey, a founding member of
the Puritan religious sect, who worked behind the scenes of the Whitehall
Conference. Serrarius sent regular
reports to England, where the known millenarians associated with Menasseh, like Royal Society founder Henry Oldenburg, as well as Puritan millenarian Nathaniel Homes and Thomas
Chappell and others anxiously awaited the latest news. 29
Serrarius had also been informing Jean de
Labadie (1610–1674) on the progress of Sabbatai’s mission. Originally a Jesuit
priest, Labadie became a member of the Reformed Church in 1650, before founding
the community which became known as the Labadists in 1669. In 1672, de Labadie
and his followers sought refuge with Elisabeth of Bohemia. In 1676, Elisabeth also first met
the son of Sir William Penn, William Penn, the founder of
Pennsylvania. Penn became close friends
with Elisabeth Stuart, celebrating her in the second edition of his book No
Cross, No Crown. Penn, also a friend of John Dury, was a member of the Lantern,
a circle around Rotterdam merchant Benjamin Furly, which included
alchemists van Helmont, Lady
Conway, Henry More and John Locke. Furly
and van Helmont were also connected with a group of students of Jacob Boehme
which included Serrarius and who also knew and associated with Spinoza. Furly,
like Penn, was a Quaker and a close supporter of George Fox, the founder of the
movement, which provided the guiding principles of new state of Pennsylvania.
According to American Rosicrucian legend,
their order was brought to America in 1694 under the leadership of Grand Master Johannes Kelpius. Born in Transylvania,
Kelpius was a follower of Johann Jacob Zimmerman, an avid disciple of Jacob Boehme and who was referred to by
German authorities as a “most learned astrologer, magician and cabbalist.” 30
It is likely that Knorr von Rosenroth,
the famous author of Kabbala Denudata, introduced Kelpius and Zimmermann.
According to Kelpius’s biographer, Zimmermann was also “intimately acquainted” with Benjamin
Furly. 31 Answering Penn’s call to establish a godly country in his newly
acquired American lands, Kelpius and his
followers crossed the Atlantic and established a colony in the valley of
the Wissahickon Creek in Philadelphia.
At the beginning of the year 1666, Sabbatai
left Smyrna for Istanbul as Nathan of Gaza had prophesied that Sabbatai would
place the sultan’s crown on his own head. However, when the Sultan Mehmed IV
was informed of his ambitions, Sabbatai was taken to Adrianople where the
sultan’s physician, a former Jew, advised him to convert to Islam. On the following day, on September 16,
1666, before the Sultan, Sabbatai removed his Jewish attire and donned a
Turkish turban on his head as a symbol of his conversion to Islam. The sultan
is said to have been very pleased and rewarded Sabbatai by conferring the title
Effendi and appointed him as his doorkeeper with a high salary. Despite the
immense disappointment experienced by
Jews across the world, Zevi’s conversion was positively received by
many Jews who had been hiding their
Jewish identity as a result of the Spanish expulsion of 1492, like the Marranos or
Conversos, and other crypto- Jews. Numerous secret societies of Sabbateans developed particularly in Eastern
Poland at the end of the seventeenth century. The Polish rabbis attempted to
ban the “ Sabbatean heresy” in 1722, but could not fully succeed, as it was widely
popular among the Jewish middle class.
Viewing Zevi’s apostasy as a sacred mystery,
some of Zevi’s followers in Ottoman
Turkey imitated his conversion to Islam.
Sarah and a number of Sabbatai’s followers also converted to Islam. About 300 families converted and came
to be known as Dönmeh, from a Turkish
word meaning “convert.” They practiced
Islam outwardly though secretly keeping to their Kabbalistic doctrines. The Dönmeh community was localized in Salonika, in
Ottoman Greece, which by the time
of Sabbatai Zevi’s mission was renowned as a haven for Conversos and as a center of Kabbalah and rabbinic scholarship. It was
described by one writer as “the only Jewish city in Europe (aside from
Warsaw).”32
The
Dönmeh maintained associations with
a number of Sufi orders. This is
largely based on the contention that Zevi’s exile into the Balkans brought him
into close contact with several forms of heterodox S u fi
s m in the region. Salonika was also known for its Sufis, like
the followers of the path of Mevlana, Jalal ad-Din Rumi, known as the Mevlevi, made famous for their Whirling Dervishes.
The Dönmeh became actively involved
with the Mevlevi. Some alleged
similarities between Dönmeh and unorthodox Sufi
practice seem to exist, including the
violation of Halal, sexual taboos, ecstatic singing, mystical interpretations of sacred scripture, and the
practice of ritual meals.
Sabbatai Zevi incorporated both Jewish tradition
and Sufism into his theosophy and, in particular, was to have been
initiated into the Bektashi Sufi order, which long had associations with the Dönmeh.33 The
Order was founded in the thirteenth century by the Persian saint, Haji Bektash
Veli. They were found particularly throughout Anatolia and the Balkans among a Shia community known as the Alawis, who believe
in a trinity of Allah, Muhammad, and Ali, whom they regard, along with Haji
Bektash Veli, as the “Perfect Human
Being,” the Primordial man of the Sufis
. Bektashi doctrines are derived from the Kabbalah . 34The Bektashis incorporated Kabbalistic doctrines of letter and number
symbolism that linked devotion to the divinity of Ali with beliefs in anthropomorphism,
the manifestation of God in human form and reincarnation. Their beliefs also
comprise a syncretism of shamanism, Buddhism
, Manichaeism, Christianity , and Neoplatonism . Bektashism is also heavily
permeated with Shia concepts, such as the
veneration of Ali, and the Twelve Imams.
35 They had a secret doctrine revealed only to initiates that involves contempt for Muhammed, the founder
of Islam. 36 The Bektashis
ignore most conventional Islamic rules, such as abstention from alcohol
and pork, the veiling of women and the requirement to face Mecca when praying. 37
When
Sabbatai Zevi would visit Constantinople he became “accustomed to living
in a dervish monastery,” Gershom
Scholem wrote, “[a]nd it can hardly be doubted that there were early
secret ties between the order of the Bektashi and the
Dönmeh.” Also according to
Scholem:
It is known that among the Bektashi orders the doctrine of takiye (dissimulation)
was widely practiced; it permitted the adherents of even radical mystical
heresies in Islam to appear to the
outside world as a wholly orthodox segment of the Sunni community in order to avoid
persecution. It is also known that their enemies always claimed this duplicity
of the Bektashi and accused them of it.
Often they also added the even more far-reaching accusation that the Bektashi, or at least certain of their
subgroups, secretly subscribed to a religious nihilism. Now it is just this theory and practice of
takiyewhich, though here for purely internal Jewish reasons, determined
the Dönmeh’s way of life in which the
external appearance stood in radical contradiction to what they taught and
stood for. Their common status as a mystical heresy with often extreme
aberrations was bound to create sympathy between these two groups. Perhaps it
is also no accident that the cemetery of the most extreme group of the Dönmeh, with the grave of its leader Baruchya
Russo (in Islam: Osman Baba), was located
in the immediate vicinity of the
Bektashi monastery of Salonika. According
to Dönmeh tradition, moreover, aside
from several groups of Sabbatean
families which still later joined them from Poland, a number of Turkish and
Greek nonJewish families also passed over and joined one of their subsects. 3
THE ILLUMINATI
As explained by Joscelyn Godwin, a leading
historian of the occult traditions of the nineteenth century, “Conspiracy
theory is anathema to the historian, but indispensable to the history of
occultism.” 1 And no name is more firmly associated with “conspiracy theory”
than the notorious Illuminati, who came to prominence with the assistance of
the powerful Rothschild family, who were pivotal to the rise of banking and
Europe as a colonial power.
In 1603, King James I negotiated the Treaty
of London, ending the conflict with Spain. England’s attention shifted from
attacking the colonial interests of other nations to establishing overseas
colonies of its own. Thus, the British Empire began consolidating itself during
the early seventeenth century, with the British settlement of North America and
the smaller islands of the Caribbean, and the establishment of private
companies, most notably the English East India Company, to administer colonies
and overseas trade. The growing power of England in the eighteenth century was
largely attributable to the readmittance of the Jews who brought with them
their more sophisticated business practices and international commercial
networks, culminating in the founding of the Bank of England in 1694.
While usury, or interest-based banking, was
forbidden in Catholic Christianity, a reversal of this tradition took form with
the advent of Protestantism. While Martin Luther and John Calvin both admitted
to a certain extent the evil inherent in usury, they both declared it
impossible to universally condemn. Francis Bacon in his Wo r k ssupported usury
and criticized the Scholastics for “almost having incorporated the contentious
philosophy of Aristotle into the body of Christian religion,” adding that Aristotle
was “full of ostentation” and
“heretical.” 2
By 1682, the redefinition of interest became “a reward for forbearing the use of your own money for a term of time agreed
upon, whatsoever need your self may have
of it in the meanwhile.” The trend continued toward distinguishing
between
“interest” and “usury,” as defined by
Jeremy Bentham, who defined usury as, “the taking of a greater interest than the
law allows… (or) the taking of greater
interest than is usual.” 3 Bentham’s In Defence of Usuryis a further example of
the denunciation of Aristotle. But it was Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which finally replaced the Bible’s definition of usury and
became the “ Bible of capitalism” in
which he redefined interest as follows:
The interest or the use of money… is the
compensation which the borrower pays to the lender,
for the profit which he has an opportunity of making by the use of the money. Part of
that profit naturally belongs to the
borrower who runs the risk and takes the trouble of employing it; and part to the lender, who affords him
the opportunity of making thisprofit. 4
Throughout the seventeenth century, precious
metals from the New World, and other places like Japan had been channeled into
Europe. Due to the free coinage, the
Bank of Amsterdam, and the heightened trade and commerce, Netherlands
attracted even more coin and bullion. The advent of this excess wealth brought
about the development of the fractional-reserve system of banking and payment
that spread to England and elsewhere. The main developers of banking in London
were the goldsmiths, who transformed from simple artisans to becoming
depositories of gold and silver holdings. The safeguarding of the gold of
merchants in strong rooms and issuing notes of credit in return to the
depositors allowed an opportunity for credit to be artificially created. The
formula of the safe-keepers became known as fractional-reserve banking, which relies on the probability that
the majority of depositors will not attempt to cash their deposits all at the
same time. Therefore, notes of credit can be used in the marketplace as “legal
tender.” This practice became the forerunner of the check system and banknotes.
Once the public accepted the creditworthiness of these credit notes, the safe-keepers
of the deposits realized that only a fraction of the actual wealth held on
deposit was necessary to keep in the vaults and that an additional 90% could be
lent out at interest.
In the middle of the eighteenth century Jacob
Henriques claimed that his father had planned the establishment of the Bank of England. 5 Partly as a consequence of
the marriage between Charles II and
Catherine of Braganza, and especially after William and Mary became joint
sovereigns of England, London too became a
center of Sephardi
banking, leading figures being Anthony
(Moses) da Costa, Solomon de Medina and Isaac Pereira. The Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 replaced
the reigning king, James II,
with the joint monarchy of his
Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange. The
revolution imposed important limitations on royal authority. Parliament gained
powers over taxation, over the royal succession, over appointments and over the
right of the crown to wage war independently,
concessions that William considered a price worth paying in return for
parliament’s financial support for
his war
against France. William’s wars, however, profoundly changed the British
state. Their massive cost led to the growth of modern financial institutions, most notably the
Bank of England, established in imitation of the Bank of Amsterdam. The Bank of England, which is the central bank of
the United Kingdom and the model on which
most modern central banks have been based, was privately owned and
operated from its foundation. In the reign of Queen Anne (1702–14), Manasseh Lopes was a
leading banker, and during the eighteenth century Samson Gideon, Francis and Joseph Salvador,
and the Goldsmid brothers, leading
members of the Ashkenazi community, were particularly infl uential.
It was the Rothschilds, originally of Germany,
who were the preeminent banking family of the modern age, and who created a
banking empire that established branches all over Europe. The dynasty was
founded by Amschel Mayer Bauer (1744-1812), who took on the name Rothschild, for “red shield” in German. Rothschild’s wealth was largely achieved
through his association with the family of
Hesse-Kassel. Rothschild served a
three-year apprenticeship in Hanover at the Bank of Oppenheim, at the service
to Lt. Gen. Baron von Estorff, who was the principal adviser to Landgrave
Frederick II of HesseKassel. Frederick
II was the great-grandson of Elizabeth Charlotte, the of Frederick V of the Palatinate, and a member of the Order of the Garter, as well as the wealthiest man in Europe.
Frederick II of Hessen-Kassel married Maria Princess of Hanover, the daughter
of George II King of England. They had two sons, Prince Wilhelm of Hesse (1743–1821) and Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel (1744-1836).
Rothschild business grew through the provision
of banking services to Crown Prince Wilhelm, who became Wilhelm IX, Landgrave
of Hesse-Kassel in 1785. Business
expanded rapidly following the French Revolution
when Rothschild handled payments from Britain for the hire of Hessian
mercenaries to Great Britain during the American Revolution. By the early years
of the nineteenth century, Mayer Amschel
Rothschild had consolidated his position as principal international
banker to Wilhelm IX and began to issue his own international loans, borrowing
capital from the Landgrave.
According to Rabbi Antelman in To Eliminate
the Opiate, the Rothschilds, who were the founders of the Bavarian Illuminati, were a Sabbatean family belonging to a sect known as
the Frankists. Also known as Zoharists,
the Frankists were founded in 1755 by
Jacob Frank, originally Jacob Leibowicz, who declared himself a
reincarnation of Zevi, and who rejected the Talmudin favor of the Zohar. Jacob Frank is believed to have been
born in Eastern Poland, now Ukraine, in about 1726 into a Sabbatean family. As a traveling merchant he
often visited Ottoman Greece where he earned the nickname “Frank,”
a name generally given in the East to Europeans. He also lived in Smyrna and Salonika
where he was initiated into the Sabbatean Kabbalah by the radical Dönmeh circle that
emerged from Osman Baba (Baruchya Russo). In 1755 he reappeared in Poland,
gathered a group of local adherents and began to preach the “revelations” which
were communicated to him by the Dönmeh
in Salonika.
The Jewish authorities in Poland excommunicated
Frank and his followers due to his heretical
doctrines, that included deification of
himself as a part of a trinity
and other controversial
concepts such as “purification
through transgression.” The Frankists
believed that in the Messianic age the
laws of the Torahwere no longer valid and all that had been formerly prohibited
was now permitted, or even mandatory. Like the ancient Gnostics, they therefore
indulged in orgiastic and sexually promiscuous and even incestuous rites, which
led the Jewish community to brand them as heretics.
As the previous Sabbateans had already passed through Judaism and Islam, the Frankists believed they ought now also to
assume Christianityoutwardly, using it
to conceal the real core of their belief of
Jacob Frank as the true Messiah
and the living God. Due to the persecution of the Jewish Rabbis for his heresy,
Frank gained the support of the Catholic Church upon which Frank publicly
burned the Talmud, declaring that he recognized only the Zohar. In 1759, members of the sect converted
to Christianity but persisted in their
heretical ways. Accompanied by his daughter Eve, Frank repeatedly traveled to
Vienna and succeeded in gaining the favor of the Holy Roman Empress Maria
Theresa, the last of the House of
Habsburg, who regarded him as a disseminator of Christianity among the Jews. It is even said that her son, Holy
Roman Emperor Joseph II, was fond of the young Eve Frank. Ultimately, Frank was
deemed unmanageable and he was obliged to leave Austria. He moved with his
daughter and his retinue to Offenbach, in Germany, where he assumed the title
of “Baron of Offenbach,” and lived as a wealthy nobleman, receiving financial support from his Polish and Moravian followers, who made frequent
pilgrimages to Offenbach.
At their height, the Frankists claimed perhaps 50,000 followers,
primarily Jews living in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. The
Frankists replicated the practices of the Sabbateans of Turkey, who, as Marc
David Baer in The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular
Turkshas shown, developed ways to recognize each other, though they outwardly
claimed to adhere to the dominant faith of the country, inter-married with each
others, and supported each other financially and
otherwise, to maintain their religious institutions in secret, from generation
to generation, for nearly four hundred years. Similarly, the dynasty’s founder,
Mayer Amschel Rothschild, ordered his sons to marry only their first cousins.
Once converted to Christianity , the Frankists nevertheless fully integrated into
mainstream Christian society, penetrating even to its highest echelons. Often Frankists ran independent businesses,
occupied public office, or became army officers. In Poland and
Austria, various families were
even admitted to the
aristocracy. Among Frank’s followers, according to Scholem, some were accepted into the
administration and aristocracy of the Habsburgs “but they preserved a few Frankist traditions and customs, so that a
stratum was created in which the boundaries between Judaism and
Christianity became blurred, irrespective of whether the members had
converted or retained their links with
Judaism.” 6 It was reported in the 1840s that Jews professing Christianity were found filling the offices of the ministry, and that Frankists had been discovered and probably
existed among the Catholic and
Protestant church dignitaries of Russia, Austria and Poland. 7 Continuity
was assisted through close intermarriage
among Frankists.
According to Gershom Scholem, Frank had preached a “Religious Myth
of Nihilism.” Ultimately, Frank taught
his followers that the overthrow and destruction of society was the only thing
that could save mankind. Despite the fact that they were all outwardly
religious, the Frankists sought “the
annihilation of every religion and positive system of belief,” and they dreamed
“of a general revolution that would sweep away the past in a single stroke so
that the world might be rebuilt.”8 Of
the revolutionary philosophy of the
Frankists, Gershom Scholem wrote, in
Kabbalah and Its Symbolism: “For Frank, anarchic destruction represented all the Luciferian radiance, all
the positive tones and overtones, of the
word Life.” 9 As a result, as Abraham Duker has pointed out,
anti-Jewishness was characteristic among
the Frankists, who rejected other Jews’ adherence to the Bible and resented the persecution they were
made to endure:
The
Frankists were also united by less positive aspects, namely dislike of the Jews who forced them into conversion and thus
cut them off from their near and dear ones as well as hatred of the Catholic
clergy which had its share in this drastic step… The task of raising a new
generation under such condition of
double Marranoism was indeed a difficult
one and required much cooperation and close-mouthedness. Kinship and the close
social relations have made Frankism to a large extent a family religion, that
has continually been strengthened by marriage and by economic ties through
concentration in certain occupations. 10
There were numerous examples of Frankists as secret Christians exercising anti-Semitic
views. Frankists were accused in 1794 of
treason and espionage on behalf of Russia with attempts at pogroms.11 In Jassy,
a city in north-eastern Romania, as
Duker reports, an old man, an “Epicurius,” told the missionaries that “both he and his son belonged to a
secret society in Tarnopol…” with the chief
rabbi there as its head: “They work like
Jesuits, conforming externally to
Judaism, but diffusing their principles in secret Jewish families in
Jassy, whose children are entirely under his influence, hating
Judaism and keeping Christian as well as the Jewish Sabbath. Another is baptized and is enjoined
to bring up the youth as Christian.” 12
A leading crypto- Sabbatean, who collaborated
with a Sabbatean network of Frankists
in England, Holland, Poland, and Germany, and who would exercise an important
influence in Masonic and occult circles during the eighteenth century was Dr.
Samuel Jacob Falk. Known as the “ Baal
Shem” of London, Falk had been denounced by Rabbi Jacob Emden as a Sabbatean, and in Westphalia
at one time Falk was sentenced to be burned as a sorcerer, but escaped to
England. Frank was unwelcomed among the Jewish community of London, until he
received the patronage of Aaron
Goldsmid, founder of the wealthy family of financiers.
Falk rapidly gained fame as a Kabbalist and worker of miracles, and many
stories of his miraculous powers were current, which he was reputed to exercise
through his supposed mastery of the magical names of God. Falk kept a diary containing
records of dreams and the Kabbalistic
names of angels, which can be found in the library of the United Synagogue in
London. 13 The following is a summary
provided in the Jewish Encyclopedia:
Falk claimed to possess thaumaturgic powers
and to be able to discover hidden treasure. Archenholz (England und Italien, I.
249) recounts certain marvels which he had seen performed by Falk in Brunswick and which he attributes to
a special knowledge of chemistry. In Westphalia at one time Falk was sentenced to be burned as a
sorcerer, but escaped to England. Here he was received with hospitality and rapidly
gained fame as a Cabalist and worker of miracles. Many stories of his powers
were current. He would cause a small taper to remain alight for weeks; an
incantation would fill his cellar with
coal; plate left with a pawnbroker would glide back to his house. When a fire threatened
to destroy the Great Synagogue, he averted the disaster by writing four Hebrew letters on the pillars of
the door. Dr. Hermann Adler, the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire from 1891 to
1911, observed that a horrible account of a Jewish Kabbalist in The Gentleman’s Magazineof
September 1762, “obviously refers to Dr.
Falk, though his name is not mentioned.” 14This Kabbalist was described as “a christened Jew
and the biggest rogue and villain in all the world,” who “had been imprisoned everywhere
and banished out of all countries in Germany.” The writer goes on to relate that
the Kabbalist offered to teach him
certain mysteries, but explained that before entering on any “experiments of
the said godly mysteries, we must first avoid all churches and places of
worshipping as unclean.” He then bound
the writer to an oath and proceeded to tell him that he must steal a Hebrew
Bible from a Protestant and also procure “one pound of blood out of the veins
of an honest Protestant.” The writer therefore robbed a Protestant, and had
himself bled of a pound of blood, which he gave to the sorcerer. He then
describes the ceremony that took place, when the following night they went into
the writer’s garden, and the Kabbalist
put a cross, painted with the blood, in each corner, and in the middle a three fold
circle. Then, all in blood, in the first
circle were written all the names of God
in Hebrew; in the second the names of the
angels; and in the third the first chapter of the Gospel of John. He then described the ritual sacrifice of a he-goat.
According to Nesta Webster in Secret
Societies and Subversive Movements, “ Falk
indeed was far more than a Mason, he was a high initiate—the supreme
oracle to which the secret societies
applied for guidance.” 15 Falk would have been one of the “ Unknown Superiors” which Karl
Gottlieb von Hund claimed
instructed him in his creation of a
new Scottish Rite in Germany, which he
renamed “Rectified Masonry,” and after 1764 the “ Strict Observance.” In Paris, Hund had become
acquainted with members of the Jacobite
cause and had supposedly learned from them their secrets. The Jacobites were a political movement in Britain
dedicated to the restoration of the Stuarts.
In what became known as the “Glorious Revolution,” in 1688 William of Orange
invaded England in an action that ultimately deposed the last Stuart King,
Charles II’s brother, James II of England. William won the crowns of
England, Scotland and Ireland, and ruled jointly with his wife Mary II, until
her death in 1694, a period referred to as the reign of “William and Mary.”
Though William and Mary were of Stuart
lineage, the Scots were disappointed at the loss of a Stuart monarch, and in
1689, the year of James II’s deposition, Bonnie Dundee led a force of Highlanders
against government troops at Killiecrankie. The rebellion was called a Jacobite Rising because of their support of
James II, a name derived from the Latin Jacomus, or Jacob in Hebrew. The emblem
of the Jacobites, was the five-petal
White Rose of York.
In March 1702, William died and the throne
passed to Mary’s sister who became Queen Anne. The failure of either Anne or of
her sister to produce an heir precipitated a succession crisis, for, in the absence
of a Protestant heir, the Roman Catholic James II could attempt to return to
the Throne. The Parliament of England then passed the Act of Settlement in
1701, whereupon the Electress Sophia of Hanover, the sister of Elisabeth
of Bohemia, and both daughters of Frederick
of the Palatinate and Elizabeth Stuart of the Rosicrucian Chymical Wed d in g,
was designated heir to the British throne, if William III and his sisterin-law,
Anne, both died without issue. When Sophia died a few weeks before Anne, Sophia
of Hannover’s son became King George I in 1714. Through his mother, George
inherited the haplogroup T2, indicating secret Jewish ancestry, and became the
ancestor of the British Royal family into our time. 16 According to Leslie
Gilbert Pine, the editor of the prestigious Burke’s Peerage, Jews “have made themselves so closely
connected with the British peerage that the two classes are unlikely to suffer
loss which is not mutual. So closely linked are the Jews and the lords that a
blow against the Jews in this country
would not be possible without injuring
the aristocracy also.” 17
Since the exile of James II, the Jacobite Cause strove to return the Stuarts to the thrones of England and
Scotland, united in 1707 as Great Britain. The grandson of James II, Prince Charles Edward, also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, would lead the unsuccessful Jacobite uprising, which ended in defeat at
the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Among the
Jacobite exiles living in France was
Charles Radclyffe who in 1725 is said
to have founded a lodge in Paris, the
first Masonic lodge outside of
England, and was eventually acknowledged grand
master of all French lodges.
Radclyffe kept a relatively
low profile and seems to have worked through such men as the Chevalier
Andrew Ramsay, another supporter of
the Jacobite cause as well as a member of
the Royal Society. In 1737, Ramsay wrote
his: Discourse pronounced at the reception of
Freemasons by Monsieur de Ramsay, Grand Orator of the Order,in which he
alluded to Freemasonry’s connection to
the Templar s . Ramsay sent a copy to Cardinal Fleury, asking
for a Church blessing of the principles of
Freemasonry. However, the obvious allusion to the heretical Templars led Cardinal Fleury to reply with an
interdiction of all Masonic reunions.
While English
Freemasonry offered three degrees of initiation that became universal
throughout the order about 1730,
Radclyffe appears to have been responsible for promulgating, if not in
fact devising, Scottish Rite Freemasonry,
which introduced higher degrees and promised initiation into greater and more
profound mysteries, supposedly preserved and handed down in Scotland. The Jacobite cause alleged that a Masonic lodge had been founded in Scotland, during the early eighteenth
century, which drew its charter from a surviving Templar chapter in Bristol, that had already
been in operation for several hundred years.
Hund claimed to have been initiated in 1741
into the Order of the Temple by his “ Unknown Superiors,” whose identities he
was not to reveal. The history of the Order of the Temple is supposedly
revealed in a text known as the
Larmenius Charter, a manuscript purportedly created by Johannes Marcus Larmenius,
meaning “the Armenian,” in February
1324. Not surprisingly, however, most researchers have concluded that it is a
forgery, based on analysis of the
deciphered code, as well as of the circumstances of the supposed discovery of the charter. 18
In the document Larmenius claims that the Grand Mastership of
the Templars was transmitted to him by the imprisoned Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master. Larmenius was supposedly a Palestinian-born
Christian who had joined the Order during the Crusades. After the Templar exodus from the Holy Land to Cyprus,
after the fall of Acre in 1295,
Larmenius was left in charge as
Templar Seneschal, the second highest rank in the Order, until de Molay was tricked into coming to Paris to
be tried for heresy, for which he was eventually executed. In the
document, Larmenius states that he
transferred his Grand Mastership to
Franciscus Theobaldus, the Prior of the
Templar Priory still remaining at
Alexandria, Egypt . Thus he secured a line of succession through to its
semi-private unveiling at the Convent General of the Order at Versailles in
1705 by Philippe, Duke of Orleans,
elected Grand Master of the Templar
Order, and later also Regent of France.
Philippe, Duke of Orleans, was the son of
King Louis XIII of France and Anna of
Austria, a descendent of Barbara of
Celje. Though a notorious homosexual, he
married Elizabeth Charlotte, Princess Palatine, the granddaughter of Frederick V of the Palatinate and Elizabeth
Stuart, thus founding the House of Orleans, a cadet branch of the ruling
House of Bourbon. As Joscelyn Godwin explained in The Theosophical
Enlightenment, “The whole Orleans family, ever since Philippe’s
great-grandfather the Regent, was notoriously involved in the black arts.” 19 Last in succession in
the Larmenius Charterwas
BernardRaymond Fabré-Palaprat, who
revealed the existence of the Charterin 1804.
In Paris, in 1758, Jacobites participated in a Grand Council of
Emperors of the East and West which organized a Rite of Perfection, the
precursor to the Scottish Rite. In 1761, Frederick the Great, King in Prussia, was
acknowledged as the head of Scottish
Rite Freemasonry. Frederick, who had
been principally responsible for Prussia’s rise to power, was the grandson of
King George I of England, and therefore
great-grandson of Frederick V, Elector
of the Palatinate of the Rhine, and Elizabeth
Stuart. In 1761, a Jew named Stephen Morin bearing the title of “Grand
Elect Perfect and Sublime Master” was sent to America by the “Emperors” with a
warrant from the Grand Lodge of Paris with
orders of establishing a lodge. In 1766, however, he was accused by the
Grand Lodge of England of “propagating
strange and monstrous doctrines” and his
patent of Grand Inspector was withdrawn. Nevertheless, Morin succeeded
in establishing the Rite of Perfection in America, where sixteen inspectors,
nearlyall Jewish, were appointed. They included Isaac Long, Isaac de Costa,
Moses Hayes, B. Spitser, Moses Cohen,
Abraham Jacobs, and Hyman Long.
According to Jean-Pierre Bayard, the Ancient
and Accepted Scottish Rite, first practiced in
France, in which the 18th degree is called Knight of the
Rose Croix, was one of two Rosicrucian-inspired
Masonic rites that emerged towards the end of eighteenth century. The
other was the Rectified Scottish Rite, that issued from the influence of
Martinism.20 Martinism started with French mystic Martinez Pasquales, who founded the Ordre des
Chevalier Maçons Elus-Coën de
L’Univers(Order of the Knight Masons, Elected Priests of the Universe), in 1754. Gershom Scholem has called attention to the contacts between
Frankists and the Ordre de Elus-Coën, 21 and Pasquales had frequently been described as a
Jew. A Martinist named Baron de
Gleichen wrote that, “Pasqualis was originally Spanish, perhaps of the Jewish
race, since his disciples inherited from him a large number of Jewish
manuscripts.” 22
Saint-Martin devoted his later years almost
entirely to the translation of Boehme and
his chief works.
Through the influence of Jacob Boehme, Martinism became a form of
mystical Christianity . It involved
theurgical procedure, referring to the practice of rituals sometimes seen as
magical in nature, performed with the purpose of invoking the action or evoking
the presence of one or more “gods.”
Martinism purports to be concerned with the fall of the first man, his state
of material privation from his divine source, and the process of his
return, called ‘Reintegration’ or illumination. It was later propagated in
different forms by Pasquales’ two
students, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin and Jean-Baptiste Willermoz.
Willermoz was the formulator of the Rectified Rite, or Chevaliers
Bienfaisants de la Cité-Sainte (CBCS), as a variant of the Rite of Strict Observance, including some items
coming from the Elect Cohen Order. The occult historian A.E. Waite said of
the Rectified Scottish Rite that he “had
come to see the Régime Ecossais et
Rectifiéas maintaining, more than any other rite, the essence in ritual
form of that secret tradition that ‘tells us not alone that the Soul “cometh
from afar” and that the Soul returns whence
it came, but it delineates the Path of Ascent’.”23 It was, for him, truly the secret tradition in practice.
In the
Rectified Scottish Rite, which was widespread in Central Europe, there was a
strong presence of the Golden and Rosy Cross. The Golden and Rosy Cross (Gold- und Rosenkreuz)
was a revival of the seventeenth-century Rosicrucians organized in 1710 by a
Saxon priest, Samuel Richter, known as Sincerus Renatus, who had studied the
alchemist Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme. The
order began with Renatus’ The True and Perfect Preparation of the Philosopher’s
Stone of the Brotherhood from the Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross
Brotherhood. Under the leadership of Hermann Fictuld, because of political
pressure, the group reformed itself extensively in 1767 and again in 1777. Its
members claimed that the leaders of the
Rosicrucian Order had invented Freemasonry and only they knew the secret
meaning of Masonic symbols. The Rosicrucian Order, they also claimed, had
been founded by Egyptian “Ormusse” or “Licht-Weise” who had emigrated to
Scotland with the name “Builders from the East.” Then the original Order
disappeared and was supposed to have been resurrected by Oliver Cromwell as “Freemasonry.”2
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