BLACK MAGIC WHITE SOLDIER (
RENASSAINCE & REFORMATION PART 3 )
The Draculs were descended from the House of
Basarab, a family which had an important role in the establishing of the Principality
of Wallachia. The name “Basarab” likely originates from the Cumans or
Pechenegs, a semi nomadic Turkic people of the
Central Asia, who gained control of Wallachia through the tenth and
eleventh century, until defeated around 1091, when the Cumans of southern Russia took control of the lands of Moldavia
and Wallachia.49 Vlad III Dracul was a Voivode of Wallachia,
ruling mainly from 1456 to 1462, the period of the incipient Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, and
inspired the name of the vampire “Count
Dracula” in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. During his lifetime, Vlad III’s
reputation for excessive and sadistic cruelty spread abroad, to Germany and elsewhere
in Europe. The total estimated number of his victims range from 40,000 to
100,000. He acquired the name “The Impaler” for his preferred method of torture
and execution of his enemies by impalement. Several German woodcuts show Vlad
feasting in a forest of bodies on stakes, while a nearby executioner cuts apart
other victims. It was reported that an invading Ottoman army turned back in horror when it encountered
thousands of rotting corpses on the banks of the Danube. It has also been said
that in 1462 the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II “the Conqueror” returned to
Constantinople after being sickened by the sight of 20,000 impaled corpses
outside Vlad’s capital in Wallachia.
Following Sigismund’s death in 1437, the
Order lost prominence. However, the prestigious emblem of the Order was
retained on the coat of arms of several Hungarian noble families, the most
prominent being Bathory, Bocskai and Rakoczi. The Bathory family produced one
King of Poland, and began the rule Transylvania as
princes under the Ottomans in 1571,
and briefly under Habsburg suzerainty
until 1600. The Calvinist magnate of Bihar county, Stephen Bocskai, managed to
obtain through the Treaty of Vienna (1606) religious liberty and recognition as
independent sovereign prince of an enlarged Transylvania. Under Bocskai’s
successors, most notably Gabriel Bethlen and
George I Rakoczi, Transylvania passed through a golden age. George
II Rakoczi then married Sophia Bathory,
uniting the two families. However, George
II Rakoczi’s defeat in Poland, combined with the subsequent invasions of Transylvania by the Turks, led to
Transylvania becoming a powerless vassal of the
Ottoman Empire.
The most infamous member of the Bathory family
was Countess Elizabeth Bathory
(1560-1614), who is regarded as the worst female serial killer in history, who
was said to bathe in the blood of virgins to retain her youth. She is therefore
remembered as the “Blood Countess,” and compared with Vlad III the Impaler. After her husband’s
death, she and four collaborators were accused of torturing and killing
hundreds of girls, with one witness attributing to them over 650 victims,
though they were convicted for only 80. Elizabeth herself was neither tried nor
convicted but, in 1610, she was imprisoned in Slovakia where she remained until
her death four years later.
Frederick was personally invested with
the Order of the Garter at Windsorby his
future father-in-law King James, a week before the wedding. The king presented
him with a jewel-studded pendant of St.
George and the Dragon. Thus Frederick was to accept to fight the Dragon of Wrong and the defense of the Monarch. 50
In arranging the marriage of Frederick
to Elizabeth Stuart it was hoped that her father, King
James of England, who appeared to support the
Protestant cause, would come to the assistance of his son-in-law in the
case of an uprising against the Catholic Church and its Hapsburg supporters. In 1618 the
largely Protestant estates of Bohemia rebelled against their Catholic King
Ferdinand, triggering the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. Expecting that
King James would come to their aid, in 1619, the Rosicrucians granted the throne of Bohemia to Frederick in direct opposition to
the Catholic Habsburg rulers. Frederick
accepted the offer and was crowned on 4 November of that year. However, James
opposed the takeover of Bohemia from the
Habsburgs, and Frederick’s allies in the
Protestant Union failed to support him militarily by signing the Treaty
of Ulm in 1620. Frederick’s brief reign as King of Bohemia ended with his defeat at the Battle
of White Mountain in the same year. Imperial forces invaded the Palatinate and Frederic had to flee to Holland in 1622, where he
lived the rest of his life in exile with Elizabeth and their children, mostly
at The Hague, and died in Mainz in 1632. For his short reign of a single
winter, Frederick is often nicknamed the “Winter King.”
The last to be heard of the Rosicrucian brotherhood was a brief scare
in France when, in 1623, a notice
declared: “We, deputies of the principal College of the Brethren of the Rosy
Cross, are staying visibly and invisibly in this town by the Grace of the Most
High, to whom the heart of the Just turns.” Another placard offered membership
“to all those who wish to enter our Society and Congregation.” 51 The posters
though gave no further instruction as to how or where prospective members might
apply to the Rosy Cross brotherhood, but they suggested indirectly that those
worthy would be recognized and contacted in due course.
An anonymous work also published in 1623,
titled Horrible Pacts made between the Devil and the Pretended Invisible Ones,
claims that thirty-six “deputies” of the Rosy Cross had convened in Lyons where
they celebrated a grand Sabbath. There
the members prostrated themselves before an emissary of the devil, and swore
they would renounce all the rites and sacraments of the Christian Church. In
return, Satan’s representative bestowed
upon them magical powers, including the ability to transport themselves
wherever they pleased, to speak with such eloquence and apparent wisdom that
people would always be drawn to listen, to disguise themselves so cleverly that
they would always appear to be natives of whatever place they found themselves,
and to keep them forever supplied with gold. Finally, the manifestos confirmed that
six missionaries had instantaneously been posted to Paris, where
they went into hiding in a quarter of the city favored by Protestants. No more
posters appeared, no applicants for membership made themselves known, and
the Rosicrucians apparently vanished
from Paris.
The legend inspired the chief exponents of Rosicrucianism,
Robert Fludd (1574-1637) and the German
Jew Michel Maier. Fludd travelled for six years in France, Germany, Italy and
Spain, where he studied with Jewish Kabbalists and was visited by Maier, Rudolf II’s personal physician. By his
own account, Fludd also spent a winter in the Pyrenees studying theurgy with
the Jesuits. 52Fludd’s Apologiaopens
with an invocation of the traditions of the prisca theologia, particularly
“Mercurius Trismegistus,” or Hermes
Trismegistus, as the reputed author
Corpus Hermeticumand the supposed
Emerald Tablet, a work highly prized by the Arab alchemists. Fludd defended the Rosicrucians from charges of “detestable magic and diabolical superstition.” The Rosicrucian brothers, explains Fludd, only used good kinds of magic—Magia,
Kabbalah and Astrologia—that were mathematical and mechanical. The magic of the
Kabbalah was holy, he argued, teaching how to invoke the sacred names of
angels.
In the
Rosicrucian Enlightenment,
Frances Yates argues that, in addition to the influence of John Dee,
Bacon’s movement for the advancement of learning was also closely
connected with the German Rosicrucian
movement, while Bacon’s New Atlantisportrays a land ruled by Rosicrucians. 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. On 22 January 1621, in
honour of Sir Francis Bacon’s sixtieth birthday, a select group of men assembled
in the large banquet hall in York House without fanfare for what has been described as a Masonic banquet.53 Only those of the
Rosicrosse (Rosicrucians) and the Masons
who were already aware of Bacon’s leadership role were invited. 54 On that day,
a long-time friend of Bacon, the poet Ben
Jonson, best known for his satirical plays, Volpone, The Alchemist, and
Bartholomew Fair, gave a Masonic ode to
Bacon.
According to Robert Fludd, following the collapse of the Rosicrucian movement in the Palatinate, “those who were formerly called
Brothers of the
Rosy Cross
are today called the Wise, the name (of Rose Cross) being so odious to
contemporaries that it is already buried away from the memory of man.” 55 During
the Thirty Years War, Andrea had created a network of secret societies known as
the Christian Unions. Their original purpose was to preserve what was deemed threatened knowledge, especially
the recent scientific advances, many of
which the Church deemed heretical. They also functioned as a refuge for persons formerly associated with the
defeated Rosicrucians in Germany. Once
in England, these men, both English and
European, formed the Invisible College in obvious allusion to Bacon’s college of initiates suggested in
his New
Atlantis.
Masonic tradition holds that Bacon’s The
New Atlantisprovided the original
vision for the political development of America. The Atlantis myth was first mentioned by Plato, referring to a lost continent that had
supposedly existed in the Atlantic
Ocean. Medieval European writers, receiving the tale from Arab geographers,
believed the mythical island to have actually existed and later writers tried
to identify it with an actual country. When America was discovered, the Spanish historian Francesco Lopez de
Gomara, in his General History of the Indes,
suggested that Plato’s Atlantis and the new continents were the
same. The theory was repeated by Francis Bacon, in his utopian romance, The New Atlantis. The work signifi cantly resembles Johann Valentin Andreae’s Description of the Republic of
Christianopolis. In The New Atlantis, published in 1627, after the foundation
of the English colonies in the Americas,
Bacon suggests that the continent of America was the former Atlantis where there existed an advanced race
during the Golden Age of civilization.
Bacon tells the story of a country ruled by philosopher-scientists in
their great college called Solomon’s House. They possess a superior knowledge
which was imparted to them by heavenly beings,
and have flying machines and ships which travel underthe sea.
Solomon’s House was modeled on the lines of
the Invisible College advocated in Rosicrucian writings, and Bacon’s books often featured title pages with
what became Masonic symbols, including the
compass and the square, the two pillars of Solomon’s temple and the blazing
triangle, and the eye of god. In a speech to Parliament, Bacon alluded to the establishment of
Solomon’s House in the American colonies as the blueprint for the country, and
has been acknowledged as such by
Freemasons, who regard America as imparted with an
important destiny in
fulfilling Plato’s vision for a
universal state. Bacon played a leading
role in creating the British colonies, especially in Virginia, the Carolinas,
and Newfoundland in northeastern Canada. Francis expressed his views on this
subject several times, claiming that the New Kingdom on Earth which was
Virginia exemplified the Kingdom of Heaven.
The
Invisible College later became the
Royal Society, a learned society devoted to the study of the natural
sciences, founded in 1660. They were influenced by the
scientific method of the
“new science,” as promoted by Francis
Bacon in his New Atlantis. Therefore, paradoxically, the Western scientific
tradition of empiricism, which today is understood as having been opposed to
superstition and the belief in the supernatural, was wrought from the superstitions
of the occult. The only “superstition” it opposed was traditional religion.
Magicians, as Pliny the Elder pointed
out in the first century AD, have often adopted the pretense of science
to justify their false teachings. Astrology became astronomy; alchemy became
chemistry. In The Scientifi c Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science,
John Henry remarked that, “a number of historians of science have refused to
accept that something which they see as so irrational could have had any impact
whatsoever upon the supremely rational pursuit of science. Their arguments seem
to be based on mere prejudice, or on a failure to understand the richness and
complexity of the magical tradition.” 56 Western science has its origin in what
was known as Natural Philosophy, a branch of magic that sought to study the
universe in order to discover, and later
manipulate, its occult properties.
Virtually all the founding members of
the Royal Society were Freemasons. It is not known exactly at what
date Freemasonry was created, as it is
difficult to separate fact from legend. Following the establishment of the
Scottish lodges, The first initiation into Freemasonry on record is that of Elias Ashmole, to have taken place in 1646. Ashmole, an antiquarian and astrologer also
interested in alchemy, was a founding
member of the Royal Society. Ashmole was also deeply interested in
Rosicrucianism, having written a letter admiring the aims of the order and
requesting admittance.
Speculative masonry gradually dissociated from
operative masonry with the rise in interest in classical architecture.
Early Masonic writings identify building
and architecture with geometry, or “sacred geometry,” actually referring to the
art of divination known as geomancy. In sacred geometry, symbolic and sacred
meanings are ascribed to certain geometric shapes and certain geometric proportions.
According to the Constitutions of Freemasons,
published by James Anderson in 1725, in “ignorant times” it was “condemn’d for conjuration.” Masonic legend maintains that geometry was discovered
before the Flood, and was taught to the Egyptians by Abraham. The invention of
geometry is also attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, who is identified with Euclid. As Frances Yates explained:
Thus the origins of geometry, or masonry, and
therefore of Freemasonry, recede into
the most distant Hebraic or Egyptian past, and are surrounded by mystiques
which clearly relate to the Renaissance conception
of ‘ancient wisdom’, of the prisci theologi, or pristine theologians, whence all
true wisdom is derived. In the masonic mythology, the true ancient wisdom was enshrined in the geometry of the
Temple, built by Solomon with the aid of
Hiram Abif, King of Tyre.57
As Marsha Keith Schuchard pointed out, by appropriating
the Kabbalistic speculations of the
Jewish mason-guilds, the God of
Freemasonry became the Great Architect of the Universe, and the true ancient
wisdom was enshrined in the geometry, the craft employed in the rebuilding of
the Temple of Solomon. 59 The original
Temple was built with the aid of Hiram Abiff, whose martyrdom forms the basis of the Gnostic
dying-god ritual, whose imitation is designed to represent the death and rebirth of the initiate.
THE YEAR 1666
Members of the Invisible College were
responsible in fanning millenarian ideas
among the English Puritans about the approach of the Messianic time
that became popular in the seventeenth
century. Cromwell had led the forces of Parliament
against Charles I, son of King James I Stuart, in the English Civil Wars, which
challenged his attempts to negate parliamentary authority, while simultaneously
using his position as head of the English Church to pursue religious policies
which generated the animosity of reformed groups such as The Puritans. Charles was defeated in the First Civil War (1642 –45), after which Parliament expected him to accept
its demands for a constitutional
monarchy. Charles I had remained defiant by attempting to forge an
alliance with Scotland and escaping to the Isle of Wight. Cromwell then ordered
Colonel Pryde in 1648 to purge Parliament of those members who had voted in favor
of a settlement with the King, known as “Pryde’s purge.” The remaining members
were known as the “Rump Parliament.”
The Cromwellian government was commonly
regarded as a Rosicrucian circle. Samuel Butler (1612–1680), in his satire of the Restoration, Characters, tells of “the Brethren of the
Rosy-Cross” as having attempted a misguided reformation of “their government.”
A character in Butler’s other work Hudibras explains: “The Fraternity of the
Rosy-Crucians is very like the Sect of the antient Gnostici who called
themselves so, from the excellent Learning they pretend to, although they were really the most ridiculous
Sots of all Mankind.” 1 According to
Paul Benbridge, Cromwellians also referred to themselves as Rosicrucians, such as Andrew Marvell (1621– 1678), a
metaphysical poet who sat in theHouse
of Commons. The other prominent Rosicrucian-Cromwelllian was Marvell’s close
friend, John Milton, who had a strong interest in Hermeticism.2
Millenarian thinkers tended to show a very
high regard for the Jewish religion and its causes, such that they are often referred
to as “philo-Semitic.” Given that the era was one of much religious persecution
against the Jews, who continued to be forbidden entry into England, and taking
into account their tendency to follow interpretations that followed more
closely to Kabbalistic ideas, while often openly
flaunting Christian orthodoxy, we should
suppose that these millenarians were for the most part secret Jews, as their
affiliations with leading Jewish
philosophers and activists at the time
would further confirm.
Millenarian ideas included the redemption of
the Jews and their return to the land
of Israel from where they would rule the
world. As Christopher Hill has indicated, in Millenarianism and Messianism in
English Literature and Thought, 1650-1800,calculations of the precise date of the
end of the world, based on the Book of Danieland Revelation, occupied some of
the best mathematicians, from Napier in the late sixteenth century, to Newton at the end of the seventeenth. Consensus agreed that 1260 years should be added
to the date the Antichrist established his power, which Protestants took to be
the Pope. Various calculations therefore
settled on the years 1650-1656 for his destruction, the gathering of the Gentiles, the conversion of
the Jews and their return to Palestine. Other estimates offered the year
1666. 3
The conversion of the Jews and the spreading of Christianity to the rest of the world were
deemed necessary conditions for the millennium to occur. Another condition was
the destruction of the Ottoman Empire
which controlled Palestine and under whose rule most Jews lived. The conversion of the Jews and the “gathering of the Gentiles”
also provided justification for British colonialism, as it could supposedly be furthered by conquests
in the New World. The same anticipation
was found among the Jews, especially in
the Near East. The Zohar was said to
have predicted a return of the Jews
to Palestine for 1648. 4
The millenarians were also connected to
the Fifth Monarchy Men, who expected the
imminent end of the fourth empire, and a new age, based on the traditional
interpretation of the prophecies of the four kingdoms described in the Book of Daniel. They supported Cromwell’s Republic in the expectation
that it
was a preparation
for the “fifth monarchy” that
would succeed the Babylonian, the Persian, the Greek, and
Roman world empires. The last empire, they
concluded, would be established by the return of Jesus as King of Kings and Lord of Lords to
reign with his saints on earth for a thousand years. They also referred to the
year 1666 and its relationship to the number 666, Number of the Beast in the Book of Revelation, identified with the ultimate human despot to rule the world,
indicating the end of earthly rule by carnal human beings, but who would be replaced by the second
coming of the Messiah.
A desire to better comprehend prophesies of
the end times resulted in widespread interest in Jewish ideas on the subject.
Most sought after was the knowledge of
Menasseh Ben Israel, a Kabbalist rabbi living in Amsterdam, who was
devoted to the messianism of Isaac
Luria. 5 Unlike the persecution they suffered elsewhere, Jews were allowed to keep their Jewish
identity openly in Amsterdam, where they
achieved important commercial status.
Marranos began arriving in Amsterdam in 1590, eleven years after the
Union of Utrecht (1579) and the creation of the United Provinces of the Netherlands as a Protestant state. Here,
too, Jews would have to wait until 1615
before their settlement was officially authorized. As a result, Amsterdam
became one of the greatest Jewish centers in the world in the seventeenth
century, becoming known as “the
Dutch Jerusalem.” The city was also a
haven for persecuted Jews from places
other than Spain and Portugal, including France in 1615 and Eastern Europe after the Chmielnicki
massacres in 1648.
Jewish involvement in banking proper really
begins with the activities of those
Conversos who, fleeing the Inquisition
in Portugal and Spain, settled in Antwerp, Hamburg, and Amsterdam,
some remaining nominally Christian and some openly returning to Judaism. In Antwerp, Jewish families of
merchant bankers had commercial relations extending as far as the East Indies
and Brazil. While they remained Catholics, those who emigrated to Hamburg and
Amsterdam formed Sephardi communities. In Hamburg, which was destined to become
one of the wealthiest and most productive Marrano centers, the settlement
of Jews
was not officially authorized
until 1612 and Jewish public worship not until 1650. In
Hamburg they participated in the founding of the bank in 1619. Local Jews were among its first shareholders, and some of
them were financial agents for various North European courts, especially those of Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein.
Most famous in Antwerp were Diego Teixeira de Sampaio, consul and paymaster
general for the Spanish government, and his son Manuel who succeeded him as financial agent of Christina of Sweden.
Manuel Teixeira was an outstanding member
of the Hamburg exchange and participated actively in the transfer of
Western European subsidies to the German or Scandinavian courts.
Millenarian beliefs were so prevalent that
Manasseh, in his letter to Oliver Cromwell and the Rump Parliament, appealed to
them as a reason to readmit Jews to England, saying, “[T]he opinions of many
Christians and mine do concur herein,
that we both believe that the restoring time of our Nation into their
native country is very near at hand.” 6 Menasseh
believed that the Messianic age
needed as its certain precondition the
settlement of Jews in all parts of the
known world. Fired by this idea, he
turned his attention to England where the
Jews had been expelled since
1290. The Puritans were inclined to support the readmittance of the
Jews whom they saw as victims of the persecution of their hated enemy,
the Catholic Church. Manasseh attracted
the notice of many Puritan theologians who
also became convinced of the immanent arrival of the Messiah.
But it was especially several of the more
mystically-minded of the Puritans in
England who had become interested in the question and Manasseh entered into correspondence with several of them,
including John Dury. Dury, together with Comenius, Bishop of the Bohemian Brethren,
and Samuel Hartlib, another acquaintance
of Menasseh, formed the core of a
correspondence network called the
Hartlib Circle. The Hartlib
Circle devoted themselves to the cultivation of the “new philosophy,” referring
euphemistically to their interest mainly in
alchemy. Like the Invisible
College, the Hartlib Circle was modeled
as a research institute described by Sir
Francis Bacon as “Salomon’s
House” in his New Atlantis. Not known in
his own day for his published writings,
Hartlib was virtually forgotten by historians, until the rediscovery of
an archive of his personal papers. The plan for
Andreae’s Societas Christianawas already set forth in two works that
were believed to have been lost until they were discovered recently among the Hartlib papers.
Hartlib had come to England in 1628, after
the Catholic conquest of Elbing in Polish Prussia, as part of the disruptions
of the Thirty Years War.
Hartlib had been the head of a mystical group
like Andreae’s Christian Unions, pursuing Rosicrucian ideals. When he arrived in
England, he collected around him refugees from Poland, Bohemia and the Palatinate.
Elizabeth Stuart, widow of Frederick V, Elector Palatine and sister of
King Charles I, was the chief patron
of Hartlib, Dury and Comenius. Dury, who was an enthusiastic supporter
of Hartlib’s projects, was also closely
associated with Elizabeth Stuart and
with her adviser Sir Thomas Roe, and took an active interest, as did Hartlib, in the restoration of her son, Charles
Louis to the Palatinate. Theodore Haak who was Comenius’ agent in England was also a refugee
of the
Palatinate. 7
Comenius met with the defeated Frederick V in The Hague to share with him
prophecies outlined in a work called Lux in Tenebris (“Light in Darkness”). It
contained the pronouncements of three prophets, one of whom named Christopher
Kotter who promised the future restoration of Frederick to the Kingdom of Bohemia. Kotter’s visions were apparently
brought to him by “angels” who would suddenly make themselves visible, show him
a vision and then disappear. Comenius
named Andreae as one of those who
inspired him towards the reform of education. Considered the father of modern
education, Comenius was one of the earliest champions of universal education, a
concept eventually set forth in his book Didactica Magna. 8 The Comenius Medal, a UNESCO award, honors outstanding achievements in the fields
of education research and innovation.
Johann Valentin Andreae recognized Comenius
as his heir and encouraged him to carry on his reforming Rosicrucian ideas. Comenius was concerned with founding an “
Invisible College,” which he envisioned as a network and intellectual
meeting-ground for people of science and learning all over the world. Hans
Schick said of Comenius:
We have in him not only the middleman between
the father of Rosicrucian thought, J.
V. Andreae, and those who stood as
godparents at the birth of English
Freemasonry, such as Hartlib,
Dury and others, but also the bridge from
Rosicrucian ideology to organized
Freemasonry in general. He received the torch from Andreae and carried it to the British Isles.9
The
Hartlib papers revealed his personal correspondence to have been extensive.
It ranged from Eastern and Central as well as Western Europe, Great Britain and
Ireland and New England. Among the extensive network of the Hartlib Circle
were John Milton, author of Paradise
Lost, and John Winthrop, one of the
leading figures in the founding of
the Massachusetts Bay Colony, The first major settlement in New England after
Plymouth Colony. Winthrop was also an alchemist and follower of John Dee. 10 Comenius would later turn down
an invitation from Winthrop to become president of Harvard University, which
had been founded in 1636.
John Dury introduced Manasseh to the views of
Antonio de Montesinos, the Portuguese traveler who brought back reports that
some of the Lost Tribes were living
among the natives of the Andes in South America. In response to this, Menasseh wrote on 23 December 1649: “…I think
that the Ten Tribes live not only there… but also in other lands scattered
everywhere; these never did come back to the Second Temple and they keep till
this day still the Jewish Religion…” 11 Manasseh therefore wrote a treatise on
the Lost Tribes, and in support of the
readmission of the Jews into England
published his Esperança de Israel(“Hope of Israel”).
The
millenarian prophecies had been mostly illegal and regarded as subversive
until they began to be deliberately promoted by
Cromwell’s parliament. Popkins describes their publishing of scholarly
works discussing the coming of the millennium as “shrewd policy,” in their
struggle against the notion of the divine right of kings. By regarding Charles I and his advisors as supporters of the Pope, they justified that good Christians ought to
fight for their overthrow. The excitement fanned by the Parliamentarian
publicists grew as millenarians became more involved in politics. A pamphlet of
1648 had referred critically to “all these Cabbalistical Millenarians and Jew
restorers.” 12
Cromwell was also closely acquainted with the
sizeable number of Marrano merchants settled in London, who formed there a
secret congregation, at the head of which was Antonio Fernandez Carvajal. When
their group at Rouen was denounced to the authorities as secret Jews, many of them eventually fled to London. All were
living nominally as Catholics, attending mass regularly in the Chapel of the
French or Savoy Ambassador. They
conducted extensive business with the Levant, East and West Indies, Canary
Islands, and Brazil, but particularly with the
Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal. By forming an important link in
the network of trade spread throughout the Spanish and Portuguese territories
by the Marranos, their position enabled
them to provide Cromwell important information as to the plans both of
Charles Stuart in Holland and of the
Spanish in the New World.
Lord Alfred Douglas, who edited Plain English,
in an article of September 3, 1921, explained how his friend, Mr. L.D. Van
Valckert of Amsterdam had come into possession of a missing volume of records
of the Synagogue of Muljeim, which contained records of letters written to, and
answered by the Directors of the Synagogue. A letter written to the Directors
of the Synagogue of Muljeim, dated June 16, 1647, had stated: “From O.C.
[Olivier Cromwell] to Ebenezer Pratt: In return for financial support will advocate admission of Jews to England. This
however impossible while Charles living. Charles cannot be executed without
trial, adequate grounds for which do not at present exist. Therefore advise
that Charles be assassinated, but will have nothing to do with arrangements for
procuring an assassin, though willing to help in his escape.” On July 12, 1647, Ebenezer Pratt replied, “Will grant financial
aid as soon as Charles removed, and Jews admitted. Assassination too dangerous.
Charles should be given an opportunity to escape. His recapture will then make
trial and execution possible. The support will be liberal, but useless to
discuss terms until trial commences.” 13 Eventually King Charles surrendered and finally, in 1649, he was tried and beheaded. With no king to consider,
Parliament established an interim period of Commonwealth. In 1653, Oliver Cromwell terminated both his Parliament and
the Commonwealth and, appointing himself Lord Protector, ruled by military
force alone.
In 1954,
Menasseh Ben Israel met in Belgium with
millenarian Isaac La Peyrère
and Queen Christina of Sweden, an avid
student of the occult. Michel Le Bion, her Amsterdam-based art consultant, was
rumored to be a Rosicrucian. 14 Christina
had established numerous important relationships with Jews, also hoping to open Sweden to Jewish
immigration. Her doctor was a Jew, Benedict de Castro, who combined Kabbalah with physiological research. Her
collection included John Dee’s Monas
Hieroglyphica, parts of a Picatrixand a
Latin version of the Sefer-ha-Raziel, a book of angelic magic. Susanna Akerman argues that the
Sefer-ha-Razielwas the De Magia Cabalistica of Menasseh and that it was the alleged source
book of the Rosicrucian movement. 15
La Peyrère (1596 –1676) was a
Kabbalistic messianist born into a Huguenot family in
Bordeaux, and possibly of Marrano Jewish descent. He was influenced by
Thomas Hobbes, a friend of Francis
Bacon and Ben Jonson, and was an influence on Baruch Spinoza. The abdicated Queen Christina of Sweden paid for the
publication of his Praeadamitae in 1655. In Prae-Adamitae, La Peyrère argued that Paul’s words in his
Epistle to the Romansshould be interpreted such
that “if Adam sinned in a morally meaningful sense there must have been
an Adamic law according to which he sinned. If law began with Adam, there must have
been a lawless world before Adam, containing people.” 16 Thus, according
to La Peyrère there must have been
two creations: first the creation of the Gentiles and then that of Adam who was
father of the Hebrews. The existence of pre-Adamites,
La Peyrère argued, explained Cain’s life after Abel’s murder, which
according to Genesisinvolved the taking of a wife and the building of a city.
But Prae-adamitaewas banned and burned everywhere for its heretical claims that
Adam was not the first man, that the Bible is not the history of mankind,
but only the history of the Jews, that
the Flood was a local event, that Moses did not write the Pentateuchand that no
accurate copy of the Bible exists.
La Peyrère also served as secretary to the
Prince of Condé. It has since emerged that, in fact: “Condé, Cromwell and Christina were negotiating to create
a theological-political world state, involving overthrowing the Catholic king
of France, among other things.” 17 La Peyrère,
who is sometimes regarded as the father of
Zionism, argued that the Jews are
about to be recalled, that the Messiah is coming for them, that they should join
the Christians, and with the king of
France rebuild Zion. 18 After reading
La Peyrère’s Du Rappel des Juifs, Menasseh rushed back to Amsterdam
where he excitedly told a gathering of millenarians at the home of John Dury’s
schoolmate and friend, Peter Serrarius, that
the coming of the Jewish Messiah was
imminent. La Peyrère also argued that the
Messiah would join with the king of France, meaning the Prince of Condé, not Louis
XIV, to liberate the Holy Land, rebuild the Temple and set up a world
government of the Messiah with the king
of France acting as regent. Then the
Jews will rule the world from
Jerusalem.
Menasseh departed for England to present a
petition to Cromwell. In England, where
he stayed between 1655 and 1657, he met often with leading English thinkers,
including two founding members of the
Royal Society, Robert Boyle and John Dury’s son-in-law Henry Oldenburg, as well as Ralph Cudworth,
and Henry More of the Cambridge Platonists,
to discuss theological and philosophical topics. The Hartlib papers show that both Hartlib and Dury were very much involved in
the translation of Menasseh’s books, and
in the events which culminated in his trip to England to negotiate with Cromwell. Dury had been managing the
discussions and helped Menasseh explain
that It was necessary to fulfill all the prophecies before the messianic age
would begin. 19 Cromwell
summoned the most notable statesmen, lawyers, and theologians of the day to the
Whitehall Conference in December of 1655. The chief result was the declaration
that “there was no law which forbade the
Jews’ return to England.” Though nothing was done to regularize the
position of the Jews, the door was
opened to their gradual return.
Cromwell had
been moved to sympathy with
the Jewish cause chiefly because he foresaw the importance for English commerce of
the presence of the Jewish merchant princes, some of whom had already found
their way to London. As Richard Christopher Hill explained:
The
Jews’ potential usefulness to the development of a forward colonial and
commercial foreign policy was an additional reason for English interest in
them. As early as 1643 Jews in the Netherlands were said to be financing
Parliament. Their command of bullion was enormous; they controlled the Spanish and
Portuguese trades; the Levant trade was largely in their hands; they were interested
in developing commerce with the East and West Indies. To governments they were
useful as contractors and as spies. If the ambitious scheme for Anglo-Dutch union
put forward by the Commonwealth in 1661 had come off, then the Jews in the
Netherlands would have been taken together with the Dutch colonial empire and its trade. When the
Dutch refused to be incorporated into the British Empire, Dutch merchants were
to ally excluded from all British
possessions by the Navigation Act of 1651.
This development made many Jews in
the Netherlands—especially those trading
with the West Indies—anxious to transfer to London: and it redoubled the
interest of the English government in attracting them there. The policy paid
off: Jewish intelligence helped the preparations for
Cromwell’s Western Design of 1655. 20
The Western
Design was a part of the
Anglo-Spanish War, a conflict between the English Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell and
Spain, between 1654 and 1660. It
involved an attack on the Spanish West Indies that was intended to secure a
base of operations in the Caribbean from which to threaten trade and treasure
routes in the Spanish Main, thus weakening Catholic influence in the New
World. In 1655, Cromwell sent an expedition
led by Sir William Penn, and General
Robert Venables, who invaded Spanish territory in the West Indies with the
objective of capturing Hispaniola. However, the assault failed because the Spanish
had improved their defenses in the face of Dutch attacks earlier in the century.
Despite various subsequent successes, such as an established presence in Jamaica, Cromwell saw the operation as a general failure,
and Venables and Penn were imprisoned therefore in the Tower of London on their
arrival on England.
When
Cromwell died in 1658, his despotic legacy fell to his son Richard who
did not possess his father’s ruthlessness, with the result that it was not long
before Charles II the late king’s son was invited back to rule as King of
England. The “Restoration” of Charles
II Stuart to the throne thus occurred
in 1660. In that same year, the Royal
Society was established and Charles II
became its patron. The foundation of the
Royal Society was the contacts and correspondents of the Hartlib Circle. Theodor Haak of the Palatinate is credited with having started
the meetings which led to the foundation of the
Royal Society. He was joined by John Wilkins, an author of a book based
on ideas of John Dee and alchemist
Robert Fludd, and later chaplain to Prince
Elector of the Palatinate in London. 21 Another
founding member was Henry Oldenburg, who
was also a close friend of fellow Royal Society and Hartlib Circle member, Robert Boyle. Both had
met with Menasseh on his visit to
London. In a dedication, Comenius addressed the members of the Royal Society as “ Illuminati,” thus
identifying them as a realization of the
intellectual college he envisions in his book, the Way of Light. Deliberately
excluded from the Society’s areas of study were typical university disciplines
of metaphysic, divinity, morals, grammar, logic and rhetoric. Instead, studies
were strictly secular, focusing on manufacture, machines and inventions and
also the recovery of ancient skills and secrets. “It seems likely,” explains
Christopher McIntosh, “that the Royal
Society, founded in 1660, was an attempt to realize in practical terms the Rosicrucian ideals of a brotherhood of
learning and enlightenment which would help usher in the kind of Utopia visualized by Bacon,
Andreae, Comenius, and others.” 22
As a result of their millenarian expectations, several members of
the Royal Society were much concerned with the advent of the notorious false messiah, Sabbatai Zevi. On his visit to Cromwell in 1655, Menasseh had been accompanied by Raphael
Supino, a leading member of the Jewish community of Livorno, Italy, who would also become a follower
of Sabbatai Zevi. 23 Sabbatai Zevi was
born in Smyrna, in Ottoman Greece, in 1626. Although as a child Zevi was enrolled in a Yeshiva to study
the Talmud, he was fascinated by mysticism and the Kabbalah , as
influenced by Rabbi Isaac Luria. When he was about twenty years of age,
Sabbatai would sink alternately into deep depression or become filled with
ecstasy during which he would break Judaic laws, like eating non-kosher food,
speak the forbidden name of God and commit other “holy sins.” At age 22, in 1648, Sabbatai
started declaring to his followers in Smyrna that he was the Messiah. In order to prove this claim he started
to pronounce the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew, an act which Judaism emphatically prohibited to all but
the Jewish high priest in the Temple in
Jerusalem on the Day of Atonement.
Sabbatai Zevi’s Messianic pretensions finally led the Rabbis to place him and his followers under a ban of
cherem, a type of excommunication in
Judaism. Sabbatai claimed that since he as messiah arrived, the laws of
the Torah were no longer applicable. His new prayer was, “Praised be He who
permits the forbidden.” Sabbatai abolished the laws concerning sexual
relationships, and eventually declared that all of the thirty-six major
biblical sins were now permitted and, much like the Gnostics before him,
instructed some of his followers that it was
their duty to perform such sins in order to hasten the Redemption.
