¡XRene Le Forestier, La Franc-Mayonnerie Templiere et Occultiste, Paris, Aubier, 1970, 2
The next evening, we invited Aglie to Pilade's. Though the bar's new customers had gone back to jackets and ties, the presence of our guest, in blue chalk-stripe suit and snow-white shirt, tie fastened with a gold pin, caused eyebrows to be raised. Luckily, at six o'clock Pilade's was fairly empty.
Aglie confused Pilade by ordering a cognac by its brand name. Pilade had it, of course, but the bottle had stood enthroned on the shelf behind the zinc counter, untouched, for years.
Aglie studied the liquor in his glass against the light, then warmed it with his hands, displaying gold cuff links that were vaguely Egyptian in style.
We showed him the list, telling him we had compiled it from the manuscripts of the Diabolicals.
"The fact that the Templars were connected with the early lodges of the master masons established during the construction of Solomon's Temple is certain," he said. "And it is equally certain that these associates, on occasion, recalled the murder of the Temple's architect, Hiram, a sacrificial victim. The masons vowed to avenge him. After their persecution then, many knights of the Temple must have joined those artisan confraternities, fusing the myth of avenging Hiram with the determination to avenge Jacques de Molay. In the eighteenth century, in London, there were lodges of genuine masons, and they were called operative lodges. Then, gradually, some idle but thoroughly respectable gentlemen were determined to join operative masonry, so it became symbolic, philosophical masonry.
"In this atmosphere a certain Desaguliers, popularizer of Newton, encouraged a Protestant pastor, Anderson, to draft the constitutions of a lodge of Mason brothers, deist in persuasion, and Anderson began speaking of the Masonic confraternities as corporations dating back four thousand years, to the founders of the Temple of Solomon. These are the reasons for the Masonic masquerade: the apron, the trowel, the T square. Masonry became fashionable, attracting the aristocracy with the genealogical tables it hinted at, but it appealed even more to the bourgeoisie, who now not only could hobnob with the nobles but were actually permitted to wear a short sword. In the wretched modern world at its birth, the nobles need a place where they can come into contact with the new producers of capital, and the new producers of capital are looking to be ennobled."
"But the Templars seem to have emerged later."
"The one who first established a direct relation with the Templars, Ramsay, I'd prefer not to discuss. I suspect he was put up to it by the Jesuits. His preaching led to the birth of the Scottish wing of Masonry.''
"Scottish?"
"The Scottish rite was a Franco-German invention. London Masonry had established three degrees: apprentice, fellow craft, and master. Scottish Masonry multiplied the degrees because doing so meant multiplying the levels of initiation and secrecy. The French, congenitally foolish, love secrecy..."
"But what was the secret?"
"There was no secret, obviously. But if there had been one¡X or if they had possessed it¡Xits complexity would have justified the number of degrees of initiation. Ramsay multiplied-the degrees to make others believe he had a secret. You can imagine the thrill of those solid tradesmen now at last able to become princes of vengeance..."
Aglie was prodigal with Masonic gossip. And in the course of his talk, as was his custom, he slipped gradually into first-person recollection.
"In those days, in France, they were already writing couplets about the new fashion, the Frimacons. The lodges, multiplying, attracted monsignors, friars, barons, and shopkeepers, and the members of the royal family became grand masters. The Templar Strict Observance of that Hund character received Goethe, Lessing, Mozart, Voltaire. Lodges sprang up among the military; in the regimental mess they plotted to avenge Hiram and discussed the coming revolution. For others, Masonry was a societe de plaisir, a club, a status symbol. You could find a bit of everything there: Cagliostro, Mesmer, Casanova, Baron d'Holbach, d'Alembert...Encyclopedists and alchemists, libertines and hermetics. At the outbreak of the Revolution, members of the same lodge found themselves on opposite sides, and it seemed that the great brotherhood would never recover from this crisis..."
"Wasn't there a conflict between the Grand Orient and the Scottish lodge?"
"Only verbally. For example: the lodge of the Neuf Soeurs welcomed Franklin, whose goals, naturally, were secular; he was interested only in supporting his American revolution...But at the same time, one of its grand masters was the Comte de Milly, who was seeking the elixir of longevity. Since he was an imbecile, in the course of his experiments he poisoned himself and died. Or take Cagliostro: on the one hand, he invented Egyptian rites; on the other, he was implicated in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, a scandal devised by the rising bourgeoisie to discredit the ancien regime. And Cagliostro was indeed involved! Just try to imagine the sort of people one had to live with..."
"It must have been hard," Belbo said, with comprehension.
"But who," I asked, "are these barons von Hund who seek the Unknown Superiors....?"
"New groups sprang up at the time of the necklace farce, altogether different in nature. To gain adepts, they identified themselves with the Masonic lodges, but actually they were pursuing more mystical ends. It was at this point that the debate about the Unknown Superiors took place. Hund, unfortunately, wasn't a serious person. At first he led his adepts to believe that the Unknown Superiors were the Stuarts. Then he said that the aim of the order was to rescue the original possessions of the Templars, and he scraped together funds from all sides. Unsatisfied with the proceeds, he fell into the hands of a man named Starck, who claimed to have learned the secret of making gold from the authentic Unknown Superiors, who were in Petersburg. Hund and Starck were surrounded by theosophists, cheap alchemists, last-minute Rosicrucians. All together, they elected as grand master a thoroughly upright man, the Duke of Brunswick. He immediately realized that he was in the worst possible company. One of the members of the Strict Observance, the landgrave of Hesse, summoned the Comte de Saint-Germain, believing this gentleman could produce gold for him. And why not? In those days the whims of the mighty had to be indulged. But the landgrave also believed himself to be Saint Peter. I assure you, gentlemen: once, when Lavater was the landgrave's guest, he had a dreadful time with the Duchess of Devonshire, who thought she was Mary Magdalene."
"But what about this Willermoz and this Martinez Pasqualis, who founded one sect after another?''
"Pasqualis was an old pirate. He practiced theurgical operations in a secret chamber, and angelic spirits appeared to him in the form of luminous trails and hieroglyphic characters. Wilier- : moz took him seriously, because he himself was an enthusiast, honest but naive. Fascinated by alchemy, Willermoz dreamed of a Great Work to which the elect should devote themselves: to discover the point of alliance of the six noble metals through studying the measurements comprised in the six letters of the original name of God, which Solomon had allowed his elect to know."
"And then?"
"Willermoz founded many orders and joined many lodges at the same time, as was the custom in those days, always seeking the definitive revelation, always fearing it was hidden elsewhere¡Xwhich indeed is the case. That is, perhaps, the only truth...So he joined the Elus Cohen of Pasqualis. But in ¡¥72 Pasqualis disappeared, sailed for Santo Domingo, and left everything up in the air. Why did he leave? I suspect he came into possession of a secret he didn't want to share. In any case, re-quiescat; he disappeared on that dark continent, into well-deserved darkness."
"And Willermoz?"
"In that year we had all been shaken by the death of Sweden-borg, a man who could have taught many things to the ailing West, had the West listened to him. But now the century began its headlong race toward revolutionary madness, following the ambitions of the Third Estate.It was then that Willermoz heard about Hund's rite of the Strict Observance and was fascinated by it. He was told that a Templar who reveals himself¡Xby founding a public ass
ociation, say¡Xis not a Templar. But the eighteenth century was an era of great credulity. Willermoz ereated, with Hund, the various alliances that appear on your list, until Hund was unmasked¡XI mean, until they discovered he was the sort who runs off with the cash box¡Xand the Duke of Brunswick expelled him from the organization."
Aglid cast another glance at the list. "Ah, yes, Weishaupt. I nearly forgot. The Illuminati of Bavaria: with a name like that, they attracted, at the beginning, a number of generous minds. But Weishaupt was an anarchist; today we'd call him a Communist, and if you gentlemen only knew the things they raved about in that ambience¡Xcoups d'etat, dethroning sovereigns, bloodbaths....Mind you, I admired Weishaupt a great deal¡Xnot for his ideas, but for his extremely clearheaded view of how a secret society should function. It's possible to have a splendid organizational talent but quite confused ideas.
"In short, the Duke of Brunswick, seeing the confusion around him left by Hund, realized that at this juncture there were three conflicting currents in the German Masonic world: the sapiential-occultist camp, including some Rosicrucians; the rationalist camp; and the anarchist-revolutionary camp of the Illuminati of Bavaria. He proposed that the various orders and rites meet at Wilhelmsbad for a ¡¥convent,' as they were called then, an Estates-General, you might say. The following questions had to be answered: Does the order truly originate from an ancient society, and if so, which? Are there really Unknown Superiors, keepers of the ancient Tradition, and if so, who are they? What are the true aims of the order? Is the chief aim to restore the order of the Templars? And so forth, including the problem of whether the order should concern itself with the occult sciences. Willermoz joined in, enthusiastic, hoping to find at last the answers to the questions he had been asking himself all his life...And here the de Maistre affair began."
"Which de Maistre?" I asked. "Joseph or Xavier?"
"Joseph."
"The reactionary?"
"If he was reactionary, he wasn't reactionary enough. A curious man. Consider: this devout son of the Catholic Church, just when the first popes were beginning to issue bulls against Masonry, became a member of a lodge, assuming the name Josephus a Floribus. He approached Masonry in 1773, when a papal brief condemned the Jesuits. Of course it was the Scottish lodges that de Maistre approached, since he was not a bourgeois follower of the Enlightenment; he was an Illuminate."
Aglie sipped his cognac. From a cigarette case of almost white metal he took out some cigarillos of an unusual shape. "A tobacconist in London makes them for me," he said, "like the cigars you found at my house. Please....They're excellent..."He spoke with his eyes lost in memory.
"De Maistre...a man of exquisite manners; to listen to him was a spiritual pleasure. He gained great authority in occult circles. And yet, at Wilhelmsbad he betrayed our expectations. He sent a letter to the duke, in which he firmly renounced any Templar affiliation, abjured the Unknown Superiors, and denied the utility of the esoteric sciences. He rejected it all out of loyalty to the Catholic Church, but he did so with the arguments of a bourgeois Encyclopedist. When the duke read the letter to a small circle of intimates, no one wanted to believe it. De Maistre now asserted that the order's aim was nothing but spiritual regeneration and that the ceremonials and the traditional rites served only to keep the mystical spirit alive. He praised all the new Masonic symbols, but said that an image that represented several things no longer represented anything. Which¡Xyou'll forgive me¡Xruns counter to the whole hermetic tradition, for the more ambiguous and elusive a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power. Otherwise, what becomes of the spirit of Hermes, god of a thousand faces?
"Apropos of the Templars, de Maistre said that the order of the Temple had been created by greed, and greed had destroyed it, and that was that. The Savoyard could not forget, you see, that the order had been destroyed with the consent of the pope. Never trust Catholic legitimists, no matter how ardent their hermetic vocation. De Maistre's dismissal of the Unknown Superiors was also laughable: the proof that they do not exist is that we have no knowledge of them. We could not have knowledge of them, of course, or they would not be unknown. Odd, how a believer of such fiber could be impermeable to the sense of mystery. Then de Maistre made his final appeal: Let us return to the Gospels and abandon the follies of Memphis. He was simply restating the millennial line of the Church.
"You can understand the atmosphere in which the Wilhelms-bad meeting took place. With the defection of an authority like de Maistre, Willermoz would be in the minority; at most, a compromise could be reached. The Templar rite was maintained; any conclusion about the origins of the order was postponed; in short, the convent was a failure. That was the moment the Scottish branch missed its opportunity; if things had gone differently, the history of the following century might have been different."
"And afterward?" I asked. "Was nothing patched together again?"
"What was there to patch¡Xto use your word?...._ Three years later, an evangelical preacher who had joined the Illuminati of Bavaria, a certain Lanze, died in a wood, struck by lightning. Instructions of the order were found on him, the Bavarian government intervened, it was discovered that Weishaupt was plotting against the state, and the order was suppressed the following year. And further: Weishaupt's writings were published, containing the alleged projects of the Illuminati, and for a whole century they discredited all French and German neo-Templarism...It's possible that Weishaupt's Illuminati were really on the side of Jacobin Masonry and had infiltrated the neo-Templar branch to destroy it. It was probably not by chance that this evil breed had attracted Mirabeau, the tribune of the Revolution, to its side. May I say something in confidence?"
"Please."
"Men like me, interested in joining together again die fragments of a lost Tradition, are bewildered by an event like Wil-helmsbad. Some guessed and remained silent; some knew and lied. And then it was too late: first the revolutionary whirlwind, ! then the uproar of nineteenth-century occultism...Look I at your list: a festival of bad faith and credulity, petty spite, ! reciprocal excommunications, secrets that circulated on every I tongue. The theater of occultism."
"Occultists seem fickle, wouldn't you say?" Belbo remarked. "You must be able to distinguish occultism from esotericism. Esotericism is the search for a learning transmitted only through symbols, closed to the profane. The occultism that spread in the nineteenth century was the tip of the iceberg, the little that surfaced of the esoteric secret. The Templars were initiates, and the proof of that is that when subjected to torture, they died to save their secret. It is the strength with which they concealed it that makes us sure of their initiation, and that makes us yearn j to know what they knew. The occultist is an exhibitionist. As P61adan said, an initiatory secret revealed is of no use to anyone. Unfortunately, Peladan was not an initiate, but an occultist. The nineteenth century was the century of informers. Everybody rushed to publish the secrets of magic, theurgy, cabala, tarot. And perhaps they believed in it."
Aglie continued looking over our list, with an occasional I snicker of commiseration. "Elena Petrovna. A good woman, at j heart, but she never said a thing that hadn't already been written ; everywhere...Guaita, a drug-addict bibliomane. Papus: What a character!" Then he stopped abruptly. "Tres....Where does I this come from? Which manuscript?"
Good, I thought, he's noticed the interpolation. I answered vaguely: "Well, we put together the list from so many texts. Most of them have already been returned. They were plain rubbish. Do you recall, Belbo, where this Tres comes from?" "I don't think I do. Diotallevi?" "It was days ago...Is it important?" "Not at all," Aglie said. "It's just that I never heard of it before. You really can't tell me who mentioned it?" We were terribly sorry, we didn't remember. Aglie took his watch from his vest. "Heavens, I have another engagement. You gentlemen will forgive me."
He left, and we stayed on, talking.
"It's all clear now. The English Templars put forth the Masonic proposal in order to make all the initiate
s of Europe rally around the Baconian plan."
"But the plan only half-succeeds. The idea of the Baconians is so fascinating that it produces results contrary to their expectations. The so-called Scottish line sees the new conventicle as a way to re-establish the succession, and it makes contact with the German Templars."
"To Aglie, what happened made no sense. But it's obvious¡X to us, now. The various national groups entered the lists, one against the other. I wouldn't be surprised if Martfnez Pasqualis was an agent of the Tomar group. The English rejected the Scottish; then there were the French, obviously divided into two groups, pro-English and pro-German. Masonry was the cover, the pretext behind which all these agents of different groups-God knows where the Paulicians and the Jerusalemites were¡X met and clashed, each trying to tear a piece of the secret from the others."
"Masonry was like Rick's in Casablanca," Belbo said. "Which turns upside down the common view that it is a secret society."
"No, no, it's a free port, a Macao. A facade. The secret is elsewhere."
"Poor Masons."
Progress demands its victims. But you must admit we are uncovering an immanent rationality of history."
"The rationality of history is the result of a good recombining of the Torah," Diotallevi said. "And that's what we're doing, and blessed be the name of the Most High."
"All right," Belbo said. "Now the Baconians have Saint-Martin-des-Champs, while the Franco-Roman neo-Templar line is breaking down into a hundred sects...And we still haven't decided what this secret is all about."
"That's up to you two," Diotallevi said.
"Us two? All three of us are in this. If we don't come out honorably, we'll all look silly."
"Silly to whom?"
"Why, to history. Before the tribunal of Truth."
"Quid est veritas?" Belbo asked.
"Us," I said.
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