BLACK MAGIC WHITE SOLDIER (
RENASSAINCE & REFORMATION PART 2 )
Luther’s Catholic enemies accused him of
being a crypto-Jew trying to destroy the papacy.12 As in other parts of Europe,
violent persecution had been growing in
Spain and Portugal, where in 1391,
hundreds of thousands of Jews had been forced to convert to Catholicism.
Publicly, the Jewish converts known as
Marranos, and also as Conversos,
were Christians but secretly they continued to practice Judaism. While many Jews of course conceded
to forced conversion to avoid persecution, others seem to have used to the
opportunity to carry out subversive activities against the Christian Church,
often marked by the assimilation of
Kabbalistic ideas into Christianity and the creation of Christian
heresies. While secret conversion of Jews to another religion during the
Spanish inquisition is the most known example, as Rabbi Joachim Prinz explained
in The Secret Jews, “Jewish existence in disguise predates the Inquisition by
more than a thousand years.”13 There were also the examples of the first
Gnostic sects, which comprised of
Merkabah mystics who entered Christianity. Likewise, in the seventh century,
the Quranadvised the early Muslim community, “And a faction of the People of
the Scripture say [to each other], “Believe in that which was revealed to the
believers at the beginning of the day and reject it at its end that perhaps they
will abandon their religion.”14
As demonstrated by Louis I. Newman in Jewish
Infl uences on Christian Reform Movements, a similar tendency can be attributed
to the advent of Catharism and eventually to Protestantism and other Christian
heresies. As reproduced in 1608 in La
Silva Curiosaby Julio-Inigues de Medrano in 1492, Chemor, chief Rabbi of Spain,
wrote to the Grand Sanhedrin, which had its seat in Constantinople, for advice,
when a Spanish law threatened expulsion. This was the reply:
Well-beloved brothers in Moses, if the king
of France forces you to become Christian,
do so, because you cannot do otherwise, but preserve the law of Moses in your
hearts. If they strip you of your possessions, raise your sons to be merchants,
so that eventually they can strip Christians of their possessions. If they
threaten your lives, raise your sons to be physicians and pharmacists, so that
they can take the lives of Christians. If they destroy your synagogues, raise
your sons, to be canons and clerics, so that they can destroy the churches of
the Christians. If they inflict other
tribulations on you, raise your sons to be lawyers and notaries and have them mingle
in the business of every state, so that
putting the Christians under your yoke, you will rule the world and can then take your revenge.15
After 1540, many Marranos fled to England,Holland, France,
the Ottoman Empire , Brazil and other
places in South and Central America. In places like England and Germany, Marranos began their existence as nominal
Catholics and secret Jews before
the Reformation. They continued in this
secret guise long after those areas had broken with Catholicism, since the Protestant authorities did not
grant official acknowledgment to the Jews. At first, Luther’s challenge to Roman Catholicism was
welcomed by Jews who had been victimized
by the Inquisition, and who hoped that breaking the power of the Church would
lead to greater tolerance of other forms of worship. There were even some, like
Abraham Farissol, who regarded Luther
as a Crypto-Jew, a reformer bent on upholding
religious truth and justice, and whose iconoclastic reforms were
directed toward a return to
Judaism.16 Some scholars,
particularly of the Sephardi diaspora, such as Joseph ha-Kohen (1496 – c.
1575), were strongly pro-
Reformation.17
About 1524,
Jews coming from Europe described with joy to the Kabbalist Abraham ben Eliezer ha-Levi in Jerusalem the anti-clerical tendencies of the
Protestant reformers. On the basis of this report, the Kabbalists regarded Luther
as a kind of crypto-Jew who would educate Christians away from the bad elements
of their faith.18 Abraham ben Eliezer related that a great astrologer in
Spain, named R. Joseph, wrote
in a forecast on the significance of the sun’s eclipse in the year 1478, as prophesying a man
who would reform religion and rebuild
Jerusalem. Abraham b. Eliezer adds that “at first glance we
believed that the man
foreshadowed by the stars was Messiah b.
Joseph [ Messiah]. But now it is evident that he is none other than the man
mentioned [by all; i.e., Luther], who is exceedingly noble in all his undertakings
and all these forecasts are realized in
his person.” 19
Marranos were also involved in the creation
of the order of the Jesuits. It was supposedly in response to the growing influence of Protestantism that Ignatius of
Loyola founded the Jesuits in
1534, who spearheaded the CounterReformation.
Loyola had been a member of a heretical sect known as the Alumbrados, meaning “Illuminated,” who are
thought to be a precursor to the Bavarian
Illuminati of the eighteenth century. The Alumbrados claimed that the human soul could
reach such a degree of perfection whereby it could contemplate the essence of
God and comprehend the mystery of the Trinity. In this state of complete union
with God, much like the Sufis, the Alumbrados
believed all external worship was
superfluous and sin
impossible. Persons in this
state could therefore indulge in sexual license and commit other sinful acts
freely without harming their souls. The Alumbrados
consisted of mainly crypto- Jews known as
Marranos. As Ezer Kahanoff notes in “On
Marranos and Sabbateans,”
speaking of groups like the Alumbrados:
More significant for inquisitors, perhaps,
was the fact that nearly every person
implicated in those groups was a Converso: the beata Isabel de la Cruz, Pedro
Ruiz de Alcaraz, Maria de Cazalla and her Franciscan brother Juan, and
auxiliary Bishop of Avila, Bernardino Tovar, the beata Francisca Hernandez, the
Franciscan preacher Francisco Ortiz, and many others.20
Marranos joined not only the Jesuits, but also the Carmelites, Dominicans and
Franciscans. Many rose to positions as Bishops and Cardinals. Although there is
no direct evidence that Loyola himself
was a Marrano, according to “Lo Judeo Conversos en Espna Y America” (Jewish Conversos in
Spain and America), Loyola is a
typical Converso name. 21 Although accounts that Loyola himself was a Jew are unconfirmed, as revealed by Robert Maryk, in The Jesuit
Order as a Synagogue of Jews, Loyola’s successor Diego Laynez was a Marrano
as were many Jesuit leaders who came
after him. 22 In fact, Marranos
increased in numbers to the point where the papacy imposed “purity of blood”
laws, placing restrictions on the
entrance of New Christians to institutions like the Jesuits.
The
Renaissance tradition of prisca theologia had an important influence in the emergence of the Rosicrucian movement of the early seventeenth
century, which was closely tied to the advent of the Freemasons and the legend of the Templars. It
is believed that Freemasonry derived
from “operative” masonry, or craft guilds of masons, and then evolved into
“speculative” masonry or a secret society based on the mystical interpretation
of rebuilding the Temple of Solomon. In
1598, William Schaw (c. 1550 – 1602),
Master of Works to James VI of
Scotland for building castles and palaces, issued a code of statutes regulating
the organization and conduct of masons. In 1588 Schaw was amongst a group of
Catholics ordered to appear before the Edinburgh Presbytery, and English agents
reported him as being a suspected Jesuit and holding anti-English views during the 1590s. In 1599, two lodges, Aitchison’s Haven and
Edinburgh were incepted and the Lodge of
Haddington appears on records. In the same year, a second code of statues by Schaw was issued partly
addressed to Kilwinning Lodge and mentioning also the lodges of
Edinburgh and Stirling. A fifth lodge was at Dunfermline. In 1600 or
1601, Schaw and representatives of the
five lodges confirmed the position of William Sinclair of Roslin as
hereditary patron of the craft. After
presiding over the order for many years, William Saint Clair went to Ireland,
and in 1630 a second Charter was issued granting to his son, Sir William Saint
Clair, the same power with which his father had been invested. According to
David Stevenson, the tradition of patronage of Freemasonry by the Sinclairs of Roslin was likely connected to
the famous church of Rosslyn built
by William Sinclair, earl of Caithness
and Orkney.24
The birth of
Freemasonry was closely associated with the Order of the Rosy Cross,
also known as the Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians derived their name from the red
[rose] cross of the Templar s . Though
the Templars were officially disbanded
in 1314, their traditions seem
to have taken
on a new guise under the Order
of the Garter. The inspiration of the order, founded in 1348 by Edward III King of England as “a society,
fellowship and college of knights,”
was King Arthur and the Round Table. The most popular legend involves
the “Countess of Salisbury,” who while dancing her garter is said to have slipped to the floor. When the surrounding courtiers snickered, the king supposedly
picked it up and tied it to his own leg, exclaiming Honi soit qui mal y pense,
meaning “Evil upon he who thinks it.” This phrase has since become the motto of
the Order. As historian Margaret Murray pointed out, the garter is an emblem of witchcraft. Garters are worn in
various rituals and are also used as
badges of rank. The garter is considered the ancient emblem of the high priestess. In some traditions, a high
priestess who becomes Queen Witch
over more than one coven adds a silver
buckle to her garter for each coven under
her. According to Murray:
The importance of the lace or string among
the witches was very great as it was the
insignia of rank. The usual place to carry it on the person was round the leg
where it served as a garter. The beliefs of modern France give the clue as to
its importance. According to traditions still current, there is a fixed
number of witches in each canton, of
whom the chief wears the garter in token of his (or her) high position; the
right of becoming chief is said to go by seniority. In Haute Bretagne a man
who makes a pact with the Devil has a
red garter.25
Members of the Order of the Garter wear a uniform bearing
the red cross of Saint George upon a
white shield, recalling the emblem of the
Templars. According to one legend, King Richard the Lionheart was
inspired in the twelfth century by Saint George the
Martyr while fighting in the Crusades, to
tie garters around the legs of his knights, who subsequently won the battle.
Saint George, the patron saint of England, Georgia and Moscow, is also the
origin of the knightly tale of rescuing a maiden from a dragon, symbolizing the
ageold motif of the dying-god’s struggle with the Dragon of the Sea. The cult
of Saint George first reached
Englan when the templars were introduced to the cult presumably through their contact with
the Rubenids of Armenian Cilicia, returned from the Holy Land in 1228.
The Cross of St. George,
now the flag of England, is a red cross on a white background, which had been the emblem
of the Templar s . The “red cross” of
the Templars is also a “rose cross.” The
rose was already a popular occult symbol. While the lily came to represent the
royal house of France, the rose became
the heraldic symbol of the two competing houses involved in the War of the Roses. A red five-petal rose became the
symbol of the House of Lancaster, and
a white rose that of the House of York. The antagonism between the two houses
erupted when Henry of Bolingbroke established the House of Lancaster on the
throne in 1399, when he deposed his cousin Richard II and was crowned as Henry
IV. The short reign of Henry IV’s successor, Henry V, was challenged by Richard,
Earl of Cambridge, who was executed in 1415 for treason. Henry V died in 1422
and Cambridge’s son, Richard, Duke of York, grew up to challenge his successor
King Henry VI.
Richard Duke of York was the great-grandson
of Edward III, and also a member of the
Order of the Garter. Through his mother Anne de Mortimer, Richard Duke
of York received the combined Grail
heritage of House of Brittany and of
Lusignan. 26 Richard was
the first to use the surname
Plantagenet since Geoffrey of Anjou, as
though it had been a hereditary surname for the
whole dynasty, to emphasize that his claim to the throne was stronger
than that of Henry VI. With King Henry’ VI’s insanity in 1452, Richard was made
Lord Protector, but had to give up this position with the King’s recovery and
the birth of his heir, Edward of
Westminster. Richard gradually gathered together his forces, however, and the civil wars known as
the Wars of the Roses eventually broke
out in 1455. The House of York was victorious over the Lancastrians, but Richard had been unable to seize the throne
for himself, though Parliament did
agree to the compromise of making him heir to the throne. Meanwhile, the Lancastrians, led by Henry’s wife,
Margaret of Anjou, continued the war,
during which Richard was finally killed in 1460. Nevertheless, Richard’s eldest
son finally succeeded in putting the Yorkist
dynasty on the throne in 1461 as Edward
IV of England.
Edward IV, however, disappointed his allies
when he married Elizabeth Woodville. Elizabeth had insisted on marriage, which
took place secretly on May 1, 1464, at her family home, with only the bride’s
mother and two ladies in attendance. Thus, Elizabeth managed to reintroduce the
lost lines of the Lusignans and of Brittany, Elizabeth being a distant relative
of Alain IV of the Grail lineage of Brittany, and Almaric
of Lusignan, the son of Melusinde, daughter of Baldwin II and Morphia of Armenia. Elizabeth Woodville was widely
believed to have been a witch and
Edward’s brother Richard III tried to show there had never been any valid
marriage between Edward and Elizabeth, that it was result of love magic perpetrated by Elizabeth and her
mother. With Edward’s sudden death in 1483, Elizabeth briefly
became Queen Mother, but in 1483 her marriage was declared void by Parliament,
and all her children illegitimate. Richard III accepted the crown. Elizabeth
then conspired with Lancastrians, promising to marry her eldest daughter
Elizabeth of York to the Lancastrian claimant to the throne, Henry Tudor, if he
could supplant Richard. Henry Tudor’s forces defeated Richard’s in 1485 and
Henry Tudor became King Henry VII of England. Henry then strengthened his
position by marrying Elizabeth of York. Thus, both the Red Rose of Lancaster
and the White Rose of York were merged to
a single ten-petal flower, to form the
Tudor Rose that symbolized the union of the two houses.
In England, the
most significant consequence of the
Protestant Reformation had been the establishment of the independent church
by King Henry the VIII, followed in due course by the establishment of the
Church of England under Queen Elizabeth
I. When Queen Elizabeth I succeeded to
the throne after her father Henry VIII, the son of Henry VII and Elizabeth York,
there had been a great revival of the
Order of the Garter, including its ceremonies, processions and ethos,
which Elizabeth regarded as a means of drawing the nobles together in common service to the Crown. 28 Queen Elizabeth I’s court was steeped in esoteric thought. It began to flourish atatime when, on the
continent, the reaction against
Renaissance occultism was growing in intensity as part of the Counter-
Reformation effort spearheaded by the
Jesuits. Edmund Spenser’s magical poem The Faerie Queeneand his
Neoplatonic hymns in Elizabeth’s honor, published in the 1590’s, were a direct
challenge to that Counter- Reformation and their attitude to Renaissance philosophy. The poem, inspired by
the Order of the Garter, follows several
knights, like the Redcrosse Knight, the hero of Book One who bears the emblem
of Saint George. Additionally,
Christopher Marlowe wrote Doctor Faustus, a play developed from the Faust
legend in which a man sells his soul to the devil for power and knowledge.
Likewise, explains Dame Frances Yates, in The
Rosicrucian Enlightenment,
“Shakespeare’s preoccupation with the occult, with ghosts, witches, fairies, is understood as deriving
less from popular tradition than from deep-rooted affinity with the learned
occult philosophy and its religious implications.”29
Sir
Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626)
was chancellor of England in the reign of King James, and was suspected as the true
author of Shakespeare’s plays as well as to have supervised the translation of
the King James Bible. There are also
theories that he was the illegitimate son of
Elizabeth I and the Earl of Leicester.30 He is considered the father of
modern science, having emphasized the importance of experimentation in his landmark
work, The Advancement of Learning. However, recent scholarship has shown that
he was committed to the Renaissance
occult tradition, and his survey of science included a review of magic,
astrology, and a reformed version of
alchemy. 31 In 1618, Francis Bacon
decided to secure a lease for York House, where he would host banquets that
were attended by the leading men of the time, including poets, scholars, authors,
scientists, lawyers, diplomats, and foreign dignitaries.
The esotericism of Elizabeth’s reign was also
coupled with imperial ambitions.
John Bale, writing
in the
1540s, had identified the Protestant Church of England
as an actor in the historical struggle with the “false church” of Catholicism,
supported by his interpretations of the
Book of Revelation. The views of John Foxe, author of what is popularly
known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, became widely accepted within the Church of
England for a generation and more. According to Foxe, a war against the Antichrist
was being waged by the English people, but led by the Christian Emperor
(echoing Constantine I) who was
identified with Elizabeth I. Foxe,
referring to it as “this my-country church of England,” characterized England’s
destiny as the “elect nation” of God. 32
Like Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the British accepted
the prophecy of Merlin, which proclaimed
that the Saxons would rule over the Britons until King Arthur again restored them to their
rightful place as rulers. The prophecy was related by Geoffrey of Monmouth (1100 – 1155), a
cleric and one of the major figures in the development of British
historiography and the popularity of tales of
King Arthur. He is best known for his chronicle, Historia Regum
Britanniae, which relates the
purported history of Britain, from its
first settlement by Brutus, a descendant of the Trojan hero Aeneas. The prophecy
was adopted by the British people and eventually used by the Tudors who through
their ancestor Owen Tudor claimed to be
descendants of Arthur and rightful rulers of Britain. 33
An important source of these tendencies was
sorcerer John Dee. Dee believed that he
found the secret of conjuring angels by numerical configurations in the
tradition of the Kabbalah. He claimed to
have gained contact with “good angels,” from whom he learned an angelic language
composed of non-English letters he
called Enochian. In 1588, in his capacity as royal astrologer, Dee was asked to
choose the most favorable date for the coronation of Elizabeth I, and subsequently tutored the new
queen in the understanding of his mystical writings. It has been suggested that
Dee used Enochian as a code to transmit messages from overseas to Queen Elizabeth
in his alleged capacity as a founding member
of the English secret service.
Dee was thus among the first to
merge his career as a sorcerer with that of a spy, a tendency that would then
come characterize almost all leading
occultists ever since. As such, Dee was the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s “James Bond” character. John
Dee would sign his letters to Elizabeth I with 00 and an elongated 7, to
signify they were for her eyes only.
Dee has been credited with the coining of the
term “British Empire.” Believing himself
to be of ancient British royal descent as
well, Dee identified completely with the
British imperial myth around Elizabeth
I.34 In his 1576 General and rare memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of
Navigation, Dee advocated a policy of
political and economic strengthening of England and imperial expansion through
colonization and maritime supremacy into the New World. Elizabeth might lay claim to these lands, Dee
believed, through her mythical descent
from King Arthur.35 In the frontispiece
of the book Dee included a figure of
Britannia kneeling by the shore beseeching
Elizabeth I to protect her empire
by strengthening her navy. 36 Britannia is an ancient term for Great
Britain and also a female personification of the island. In the second century, Roman
Britannia came to be personified as a goddess armed with a
trident and shield and wearing,
like the Greek Athena, a helmet. Britannia
is later depicted with a lion at her
feet, the heraldic symbol the Tribe of Judah. She is the
personification of the goddess of the occult, represented in the Kabbalah as the Shekhinah. In France she is known as
Lady Liberty, in Switzerland as
Helvetia, in Germany as Germania, in Poland as Polonia, and in Ireland as
Hibernia.
One of Dee’s staunchest supporters at court
was Sir Christopher Hatton who was the main backer for Sir Francis Drake’s world voyage. Sir Francis Drake (1540-1596) was knighted by
Elizabeth in 1581. His exploits were legendary, making him a hero to the
English, but a pirate to the Spaniards to whom he was known as El Draco, “the
Dragon.” He also carried out the second circum navigation of the world, from
1577 to 1580. Dee wrote the proposal for the circumnavigation that went before
the Privy Council, with the aim of seeking the best homeward passage by way of the Pacific. Drake was Vice-Admiral of the English fleet against Spanish Armada in 1588. When Elizabeth
had consulted John Dee on how to best
counter the advancing Spanish ships, he
advised her
and Sir Francis Drake to refrain from
pursuit because the Spanish fleet would be broken up by storm. When a
storm did destroy the Armada and aided the English victory many
courtiers were convinced that Dee had conjured it. Thus Dee became the model
for the character of the sorcerer Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. But it
was also believed Drake was a wizard and sold his soul to the Devil in exchange
for success over the Spanish. It is claimed that he also organized several
covens of witches to work magically to
raise the storm and prevent the invasion. 37
Dee was a close friend of the spy and
explorer Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618).
Raleigh rose rapidly in Queen Elizabeth
I’s favor and was knighted in 1585. Instrumental in the English colonization of
North America, Raleigh was granted a royal patent to explore Virginia, which
paved the way for future English settlements. In 1594, Raleigh heard of a “City
of Gold” in South America and sailed to find it,
publishing an exaggerated account of his experiences in
a book that contributed to the “El Dorado” legend. In his History of the World,
Raleigh explains that for the most part the reputation of magic was unfairly maligned, and quotes
Pico della Mirandola who called it an
“art” that “few understand and many
reprehend, …as dogs bark at those they know not.” 38 Because, according to
Raleigh “…as Plato affirmeth, the art of
magic is the art of worshipping God.” 39 He explains that in former
times magicians were known as wisemen: to the Persians as Magi, to the Babylonians as Chaldeans, to Greeks as philosophers, and
to Jews Kabbalists. It was Abraham
himself, claims Raleigh, who taught the Egyptians astrology which he learned
from the Chaldeans. Most noble is the aspect of
magic he believes is the philosophy of nature, in other words science:
“that which bringeth to light the inmost virtues, and draweth them out of nature’s hidden bosom
to human use.” In this camp he lists
alchemists like Albertus Magnus, Arnaldus de Villa Nova, Raymond Lully and
Francis Bacon, and ancients
like Zoroaster and Apollonius of Tyana, “who better understood the power of nature,
and how to apply things that work to
things that suffer.”40
Elizabeth did not marry, had no direct heir,
and was therefore succeeded by King
James IV of Scotland, who became King
James I of England, the first Stuart monarch to preside over England. James
did not share Elizabeth’s sympathies for
Dee, and when he appealed to the king for help in clearing his reputation from charges
of conjuring devils, the King ignored
him. Dee finally died
disgraced and in abject poverty in 1608. However, prior to his death, Dee had
found his way to Prague, where he seems to have been the leader of not only
an alchemical movement, but one for religious
reform. The objective of Dee’s mission
was referred to by a contemporary observer:
A learned and renowned Englishman whose name
was Doctor Dee came to Prague to see
the Emperor Rudolf
II and
was at first well received by him; he predicted that a
miraculous reformation would presently come about in the Christian world and
would prove the ruin not only of the city of Constantinople but of Rome also.
These predictions he did not cease to spread among the populace.41
Rudolph II, the Hapsburg ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, had moved the capital from
Vienna to Prague in Bohemia, which
became an occult oriented court, the center of
alchemical, astrological, and magical studies of all kind. Prague became
a haven for those interested in seeking to study esoteric sciences, coming from
all over Europe. There arrived John Dee
and his associate Edward Kelly, Johannes Kepler, and Giordano Bruno, the famous
Renaissance heretic and occultist. Rudolph devoted vast sums of money to the building
of his library, which comprised of the standard corpus of Hermetic works as
well as the notorious Picatrix.
The emperor’s fascination with Hermeticism was matched by his interest in
the Jewish Kabbalah. The reign of Rudolph
was a golden age of Jewry in Prague. The anti-Jewish offensive of the papacy in
the early thirteenth century little affected the conditions of Bohemia’s Jewish community. In the sixteenth
century, many Jewish refugees who were expelled from Moravia, Germany, Austria
and Spain came to Prague, where they studied Kabbalah undisturbed. One of the most famous
Jewish scholars of the time was Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, also known as
Maharal, who had positive relations with Rudolf II. Rabbi Loew published
more than fifty religious and philosophical books and became the focus of
legends, as the mystical miracle worker who created the Golem. This was
an artificial man made of clay brought to life through
magical combination of the sacred letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which acted
as a guardian over the Jews.
Through these influences, the pursuit of alchemy reached its peak at the end
of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth. Allusions to alchemy
were found already in the Zoharand it
was certainly an important component of the
Kabbalah of medieval times. Astrology and alchemy were two aspects of what is known as
practical Kabbalah, which according to Gershom Scholem was understood to refer to all
magical practices that developed in Judaism
from Talmudic times through to the Middle Ages. 42 As a result, as David Stevenson describes:
… alchemy has been described as the greatest
passion of the age in Central Europe. The search for the philosopher’s stone
was not, in the hands of the true alchemist, merely a materialistic search for
ways of turning base metals into gold, but an attempt to achieve ‘the moral
and spiritual rebirth of mankind.’ 43
The popularity of alchemy was associated with the proliferation
of witchcraft in general. And with the
Protestant Reformation, Catholic
authorities became much more ready to suspect heresy in any new ideas,
including those of Renaissance humanism. Among the Catholics, Protestants,
and secular leadership of the European Late Medieval to Early Modern period,
fears about witchcraft rose to fever pitch, and sometimes led to
large-scale witch-hunts. The
medieval witch-hunt was instigated
through the publication in 1484 of the Malleus Malefi carum, or “Hammer of the
Witches,” written by two Dominican monks who were members of the Inquisition. Until
then the medieval Church had dismissed the
witches as ignorant peasants suffering from delusions and worshipping
pagan gods, but this
document significantly altered
that perception. According to it, witchcraft was a diabolical heresy
which conspired to overthrow the Church and establish the kingdom of Satan on Earth. Pope Innocent VIII agreed
with the diagnosis and in 1486 issued a papal bull condemning witchcraft. The
peak years of witch-hunts in southwest
Germany were from 1561 to 1630. During this period, the biggest witch trials were held in Europe, notably
in Trier (1581–1593), Fulda (1603 –1606), Würzburg (1626 –1631) and Bamberg
(1626 – 1631).
These German
witch-trials coincided with the rise of the Rosicrucian movement, headquartered nearby in
Heidelberg. Crisis had come upon the Protestant movement when Rudolph II died in 1612, threatening the
immunity enjoyed by esoteric circles among the Protestants of Germany. It was
at this point that the German prince
Frederick V, Elector of the
Palatinate of the Rhine, began to be seen as the ideal incumbent to take
the place of leader of the Protestant resistance against the Catholic Hapsburgs. Frederick had powerful connections
with French Protestants. Most importantly, in 1613, Frederick had married Elizabeth
Stuart, daughter of King James of England, representing an important
dynastic alliance, forged primarily through the efforts of John Dee, to bolster the Protestant movement.
The movement was organized by the secret
occult society of the Rosicrucians, also
known as the Order of the Rosy Cross, whose primary objective was the destruction
of the Church of Rome, and its Hapsburg
supporters. A year after Frederick’s marriage to Elizabeth, and largely as a result of Dee’s influence in Germany, the notorious
Rosicrucian Manifestosmade their appearance. They were written,
purportedly, by Johann Valentin Andreae (1586 –1654).
The first of these was the Fama Frateritatis, an allegorical history of
the Rosicrucians, which appeared in
1614, and followed by a second tract a year later. The Manifestosclaimed to
represent a combination of “Magia, Cabala, and Alchymia,”and purported to issue
from a secret, “invisible” fraternity of “initiates” in Germany and France. The Fama was part of a larger Protestant treatise titled, The Universal and
General Reformation of the Whole Wide
World; together with the Fama Fraternatis of the Laudable Fraternity of the
Rosy Cross, Written to All the Learned and the Rulers of Europe.Following the Fama Fraternatis,
several lodges of the Order were founded whose members claimed that the Rosicrucians had been active in the events
that surrounded the Reformation, and the rise of the Lutheran movement
in Germany and Switzerland. It has been
noted that Luther used as his personal
seal the symbol of a rose and a cross.
The origin of the Kabbalistic notions of the Rosicrucians in the Middle East are acknowledged in the
Manifestos. As recounted in the Fama Fraternitatis, a mystic known as
Christian Rosenkreutz supposedly founded
the Rosy Cross brotherhood as early as the 1300s after studying in the Middle East under various masters. Rosenkreuz
was said to have traveled to Egypt , and upon his return to Europe, to have
established a secret “House of the Holy Spirit,”
modeled on the Ismaili “House of Wisdom”
in Cairo. 44 A hundred and twenty years after
Rosenkreutz’ burial, the text relates, his vault was discovered by one
of the brethren, which they took as a signal for them to declare themselves and
invite the learned of Europe to join. As Christopher McIntosh explained, the
image of the vault occurs in a book called the Aim of the Sage, which was
circulated among the Brethren of Sincerity
, who would have been active around the time that Christian Rosenkreutz was supposed to have made his
journey to that region. 45
According to occult historians, the Rosicrucians acquired their symbol of the
rose from the Sufis . Idries Shah, secretary and companion to Gerald Gardner, the founder of the modern
religion of witchcraft known as Wicca, and
close associate of the godfather of twentieth century Satanism, Aleister Crowley, claimed the Rosicrucians derived from the influence of the Qadiriyya Sufi
order, to which Ibn Taymiyyah
belonged. Christian Rosenkreutz would have supposedly come into contact with
the Qadiriyya during his travels in
the Middle East.Jilani, the founder of
the Qadiriyya, was known as the “Rose of
Baghdad.” The rose became the symbol of his order and a rose of green and white
cloth with a six-pointed star in the middle is traditionally worn in the
cap of
Qadiriyya dervishes. According to
Idries Shah:
Ignorance of this background is responsible
for much useless speculation about such entities as the Rosicrucians who merely repeated in their
claims the possession of the ancient teaching which is contained in the
parallel development called alchemy, and
which was also announced by Friar Bacon
[ Francis Bacon], himself claimed as
a Rosicrucian and alchemist and illuminate.
The origins of all these societies in
Sufism is the answer to the question as to which of them did Bacon belong, and what the secret doctrine
really was. Much other Rosicrucian symbolism is Sufic. 46
Yates also suggests that the Manifestoes
could have derived their influence from Isaac
Luria, the foremost rabbi and Jewish mystic in the community of Safed
in Ottoman Palestine, in the sixteenth century.
Isaac Luria (1534 – 1572) is
considered the father
of the New Kabbalah , his
teachings being referred to as
Lurianic Kabbalah. Luria, who attained knowledge of esoteric matters
through a “revelation of Elijah,” expounded
on the Zohar, offering an important
development in the anthropomorphic
doctrine of the Kabbalah. Luria
developed a notion of historical progress which became the basis of Western
conceptions of history when it was inherited by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. According to Luria’s
Kabbalah, history represents the evolution of God coming to know himself
through man. Mirroring a tradition found in
Islam, Luria characterized God as
having initially been an unknown treasure, and, wanting to be known, He created
man. But where in Islam it is understood
that God created man to worship Him, according to Luria, in creating man God created an “other”
of Himself. At the outset, this “other,” or man, was unaware that he was God.
Therefore, history is the progress of God, or man, coming to know himself.
Initially, man would worship God as something outside of himself, but as he
progressed intellectually, he would eventually arrive at the discovery that he
himself is God.
Tied to
this idea is the notion
of Redemption where history is fulfilled
with the coming of the Messiah. Also
crucial to Luria’s conception of history
is the exercise of magic, which is
considered to be a practice that demonstrates man’s “divine” potential.
Ultimately, the Kabbalists secretly interpret the Biblein reverse. Like the ancient Gnostics,
it is Lucifer who offers “ Liberty” to
man by showing him to the Tree of
Knowledge, which represents the forbidden knowledge of magic that he himself might become like a
“god.” Therefore, the Kabbalist is to assist in the progress of history and the
arrival of the Messiah through the use
of magic. Ultimately, this messiah will be the first man to come to the realization that he is God, and
therefore worshipped as such.
Luria’s ideas were transmitted to the Rosicrucians and to European philosophy in
general by way of Jacob Boehme. Born
in Bohemia in 1575, Boehme came to
articulate his version of the Kabbalah
for the Christian mystics of Europe. The man responsible for communicating Lurianic influence
to Boehme was his mentor, Balthasar Walther.
In 1598–1599, Walther had undertaken a pilgrimage
to the Holy Land in order to learn about the intricacies of the
Kabbalah from groups in Safed and elsewhere, including amongst the followers of Isaac Luria.
The perceived importance of the marriage of
Frederick and Elizabeth Stuart was
enshrined in occult and alchemical symbolism
in a Rosicrucian tract called The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. Frederick derived from the also
important House of Guelph (or Welf ), the
older branch of the House of Este, a dynasty whose oldest known members lived
in Lombardy in the ninth century AD. For this reason, it is sometimes also
called Welf-Este. The Guelphs represented the lineage of the Ottonian dynasty who intermarried with the
Piasts of Poland, the Arpads of Hungary, the Tsars of Bulgaria and the Hohenstaufen dynasty.
Conrad III, the first of
the Hohenstaufens, was succeeded by his nephew Frederick I Barbarossa. It
was Barbarossa who first called the Empire “holy,” and introduced the
idea of its “Romanness,” as an attempt to justify its power independently of
the Pope. Barbarossa made several
unsuccessful attempts to regain Italy. The supporters of Frederick became known
as Ghibellines. While campaigning in
Italy to expand imperial power there, the Lombard League and its supporters became known as Guelphs, “Guelph”
being most probably an Italian language
form of Welf.
Henry the Black, duke of Bavaria from
1120–1126, was the first of the three dukes of the Guelph dynasty. Henry the Proud was then the favored
candidate in the imperial election against
Conrad III of the Hohenstaufen.
But Henry lost the election, as the other princes feared his power and
temperament, and was dispossessed of his duchies by Conrad III.
Henry the Lion then recovered his father’s two duchies: Saxony in 1142
and Bavaria in 1156. In 1168, he married Matilda, the daughter of Henry II of
England and Eleanor of Aquitaine.
In Carolingian times, the count palatine was
merely the representative of the king in the high court of justice. In 937 AD,
Otto the Great appointed a count palatine for Bavaria and several other
duchies, with the Elector of Lorraine later
foremost in rank. In 1155 AD, after the death of its Elector,
Frederick Barbarossa transferred the office to his half-brother
Conrad, who united the lands to his own
possessions on the central Rhine, and made his residence at Heidelberg. Thus the palatinate of Lorraine became the
palatinate “of the Rhine.” Conrad’s daughter,
Agnes of Hohenstaufen, married Henry I
of Saxony and Bavaria, the son of Henry the Lion and Matilda, and their son
Henry II became Elector of the
Palatinate of the Rhine in 1195 AD.
Thus, the marriage of Frederick and Elizabeth
united two important dynastic families that had been estranged from each other
for centuries. Elizabeth Stuart, like her brother later King Charles I of
England, belonged to the genetic haplogroup T, through their mother Anna of
Denmark. The marker entered the family with
Barbara of Celje, Slovenia. Barbara of Celje (1392-1451) married
Sigismund, King of Hungary and later Holy Roman Emperor, from whom were
descended the kings of Bohemia, making Elizabeth Stuart a distant relative of
Rudolph II.
Thus, the marriage of Frederick and Elizabeth
united two important dynastic families that had been estranged from each other
for centuries. Elizabeth Stuart, like
her brother later King Charles I of England,
belonged to the genetic haplogroup T, through their mother Anna of Denmark. The
marker entered the family with Barbara
of Celje, Slovenia. Barbara of Celje (1392 –1451)
married Sigismund, King of Hungary and later Holy Roman Emperor, from whom were descended the kings of Bohemia, making Elizabeth
Stuart a distant relative of Rudolph II.
Haplogroup T again suggests likely secret
Jewish ancestry. T includes slightly
fewer than 10% of modern Europeans, and is currently found in high concentrations
around the eastern Baltic Sea, Ireland and the west of Britain. It is also
present as far east as the Indus Valley bordering India and
Pakistan, and as far south as the
Arabian peninsula. It is also common in eastern and northern Europe. Barbara of Celje belonged specifically to subclade T2, whose distribution
varies greatly with the ratio of subhaplogroup T2e to T2b, from a low in
Britain and Ireland, to a high in Saudi
Arabia. Within subhaplogroup T2e, a very
rare motif is
identifed among z Sephardic Jews of Turkey and Bulgaria and suspected Conversos from the New World. 48
Barbara of Celje was instrumental in creating
the Order of the Dragon, founded by her
husband Sigismund in 1431, to protect the royal family and of fight the “perfidious
Enemy, and of the followers of the
ancient Dragon,” being a reference to
heretics and other anti-Christians, but primarily the Muslim Empire of the
Ottomans. The creation of the Order of
the Dragon was part of a trend of founding chivalric orders during the
fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, often dedicated
to “crusades,” especially after the
disaster of the battle of Nicopolis (1396). The battle had resulted in the rout
of an allied army of Hungarian,
Wallachian, French, Burgundian, German and assorted
troops at
the hands of an Ottoman force, raising
of the siege of the Danubian fortress of Nicopolis and leading to the end of
the Second Bulgarian Empire.
The
Order of the Dragon was modeled after the earlier Order of St. George, a Hungarian monarchical order founded
by King Carol Robert of Anjou in 1318. It adopted Saint George as its patron saint, whose
legendary defeat of a dragon was used as
a symbol for the military and religious ethos
of the order. The Order of the
Dragon adopted the red cross and the
Gnostic symbol of the ourobouros, or serpent—in this case a dragon—biting its own tail. Included in the
Order were a number of important vassals and nobles, like Vlad II Dracul (c.
1393-1447), father of Vlad III Dracul of Transylvania. The name Dracula means “Son of Dracul,” and was a
reference to being invested with the
Order of the Dragon. In the Romanian language, the word dracul can mean
either “the dragon” or, especially in
the present day, “the devil.”
