by Mark Booth
If the people make love so that they become illumined, the world will become a world of shadows. When they awake again, meaning will have settled on the world like dew.
THE ROOTS OF ROMANTICISM, therefore, were both sexual and esoteric. The German poet Novalis talked of ‘magical idealism’. This magic, this idealism, this volcanic spirit, conjured up the music of Beethoven and Schubert. Beethoven found himself hearing a new musical language, feeling and expressing things that had never been felt or expressed before. Like Alexander the Great he became obsessed with trying to identify this divine influx, the source of his unstoppable genius, reading and rereading Egyptian and Indian esoteric texts. For him his Sonata in D Minor and the Appassionata were his equivalents to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the most explicit expressions of his occult ideas.
In France the Martinist Charles Nodier had written of the conspiracies of secret societies in the armies of Napoleon to bring the great man down. Later Nodier introduced the young French Romantics, including Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Dumas fils, Delacroix and Gérard de Nerval, to esoteric philosophy.
Owen Barfield wrote that there is always a great current of Platonic ideas, a current of living meaning that from time to time fine intellects like Shakespeare and Keats can discern. Keats called the ability to do this ‘Negative Capability’, which he said was when a man is capable of being ‘in uncertainties, mysteries and doubtes without any irritable searching after fact and reason’. In other words he was applying to poetry the same deliberate holding off imposing a pattern and waiting for a richer pattern to emerge that Francis Bacon had advocated in the scientific sphere.
‘Weave a circle around him thrice… /For he on honey-dew hath fed, /And drunk the milk, of Paradise.’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge carried an aura of the supernatural. He was deeply immersed in the thought of both Boehme and Swedenborg. But it was his friend William Wordsworth who wrote the purest, the most simple and direct expression of the feeling that lies at the heart of idealism as a philosophy of life. When Wordsworth wrote that he ‘felt /A presence that disturbs me with the joy/Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused,/Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,/And the round ocean, and the living air,/and the blue sky, and in the mind of man,/ A motion and a spirit, that impels,/All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/And rolls through all things…’ he is writing about what it feels like to be an idealist in a way which still feels quite modern.
Even people who on a conscious level would deny the existence of the higher reality Wordsworth is alluding to here, recognize something in this poem, Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey. Something, somewhere inside them, calls out in recognition, or it would be completely meaningless to them.
At the time that Wordsworth was writing, people did not have to struggle to discern such feelings. Goethe, Byron and Beethoven led a great popular movement.
So why did it all go wrong? Why did this impulse for freedom end up in the abuse of power?
To understand the roots of this catastrophe it is necessary to trace the infiltration of the secret societies by the proponents of materialism. Chevalier Ramsay had specifically forbidden the discussion of politics in the lodges he founded in 1730, but Freemasonry had a hold on the political leaders of Europe. To anyone who wanted to exert political influence, it must have been a temptation.
26. THE ILLUMINATI AND THE RISE OF UNREASON
The Illuminati and the Battle for the Soul of Freemasonry • Occult Roots of the French Revolution • Napoleon’s Star • Occultism and the Rise of the Novel
THE STORY OF THE ILLUMINATI IS ONE of the darker episodes in the secret history and it has blackened the reputation of secret societies ever since.
In 1776 a Bavarian professor of law, Adam Weishaupt, founded an organization called the Illuminati, recruiting the first brothers from among his students.
Like the Jesuits, the Illuminati brotherhood was run on military lines. Members were requested to surrender individual judgement and will. Like earlier secret societies Weishaupt’s Illuminati promised to reveal an ancient wisdom. Higher and more powerful secrets were promised to those who progressed up the ladder of initiations. Initiates worked in small cells. Knowledge was shared between cells on what modern security services call a ‘need to know’ basis — so dangerous was this newly rediscovered knowledge.
Weishaupt joined the Freemasons in 1777, and soon many of the Illuminati followed, infiltrating the lodges. They quickly rose to positions of seniority.
Then in 1785 it came about that a man called Jacob Lanz, travelling to Silesia, was struck by lightning. When he was laid out in a nearby chapel, the Bavarian authorities found papers on the body revealing the secret plans of the Illuminati. From these papers, including many in Weishaupt’s own hand, and together with others seized in raids around the country, a complete picture was built up.
The seized writings revealed that the ancient secret wisdom and the secret supernatural powers promulgated within the Illuminati had always been a cynical invention and a fraud. An aspirant progressed through the grades only to discover that the spiritual element in the teachings were merely a smokescreen. Spirituality was derided, spat upon. Jesus Christ’s teachings, it was said, were really purely political in content, calling for the abolition of all property, of the institution of marriage and all family ties, all religion. The aim of Weishaupt and his co-conspirators was to set up a society run on purely materialistic grounds, a revolutionary new society — and the place where they would test their theories, they had decided, would be France.
Finally it was whispered in the candidate’s ear that the ultimate secret was that there was no secret.
In this way he was inducted into a nihilistic and anarchistic philosophy that appealed to the candidate’s worst instincts. Weishaupt gleefully anticipated tearing down, destroying civilization, not to set people free, but for the pleasure of imposing his will upon others.
Weishaupt’s writings reveal the extent of his cynicism:
‘…in concealment lies a great part of our strength. For this reason we must cover ourselves in the name of another society. The lodges that are under Freemasonry are the most suitable cloak for our high purpose.’
‘Seek the society of young people,’ he advises one of his co-conspirators. ‘Watch them, and if one of them pleases you, lay your hand on him.’
‘Do you realize sufficiently what it means to rule — to rule in a secret society? Not only over the more important of the populace, but over the best men, over men of all races, nations and religions, to rule without external force… the final aim of our Society is nothing less than to win power and riches… and to obtain mastery of the world.’
Following the discovery of these writings, the order was suppressed — but too late.
By 1789 there were some three hundred lodges in France, including sixty-five in Paris. According to some French Freemasons today, there were more than seventy thousand Freemasons in France. The original plan had been to impregnate people with hope and will for change, but lodges had been infiltrated to the extent that it has been said that ‘the program put into action by the French Constitutional Assembly in 1789 had been put together by German Illuminati in 1776’. Danton, Desmoulins, Mirabeau, Marat, Robespierre, Guillotin and other leaders had been ‘illuminated’.
Diagram by Weishaupt. He writes to his co-conspirators, ‘One must show how easy it would be for one clear mind to direct hundreds and thousands of men.’
When the king was slow to agree to further reforms, Desmoulins called for an armed uprising. Then, in June 1789, Louis XVI tried to disperse the Assembly and called his troops to Versailles. Mass desertions followed. On 14 July an angry mob stormed the Bastille. Louis XVI went to the guillotine in January 1793. When he tried to speak to the crowd, he was cut short by a roll on the drums. He was heard to say, ‘People of France, I am innocent, I forgive those who are responsible for my death. I pray to God that the blood spilled here n
ever falls on France or on you, my unfortunate people…’ That this should happen in the heart of the most civilized nation on earth opened the door to the unthinkable.
It is said that in the melee that followed a man jumped on to the scaffold and yelled, ‘Jacques de Moloy, you are avenged!’ If this is true, its sentiment was in stark contrast to the king’s grace and charity.
In the anarchy that followed France was threatened from within and without. The leaders of the Freemasonic lodges took control. Soon many of their number were accused of being traitors to the Revolution — and so began the Terror.
There are different estimates of the numbers executed. The driving force was the most principled of Freemasons, the austere and incorruptible lawyer Maximilian Robespierre. As head of the Committee of Public Safety and the man in charge of the police department, he was sending to the guillotine hundreds per day, adding up to some 2750 executions. Out of this latter total only 650 were aristocrats, the rest ordinary working people. Robespierre even executed Danton. Saturn was eating his own children.
How could this be? How could the most enlightened and reasonable of men justify this bloodshed? In an idealistic philosophy the ends never justify the means, because, as we have seen, motives affect the outcome, however deeply hidden they may be. Robespierre shed blood as a grim duty, to protect the rights of citizens and their property. From a rational point of view he did what he did for the common good.
Yet in Robespierre’s case this yearning to be completely reasonable seems to have driven him mad.
On 8 July 1794 a curious ceremony took place in front of the Louvre. The members of the National Convention sat in a vast, makeshift amphitheatre, each holding an ear of wheat to symbolize the goddess Isis. Facing them was an altar by which stood Robespierre, wrapped in a light blue coat, his hair powdered white. He said, ‘The whole Universe is assembled here!’ Then, calling upon the Supreme Being, he began a speech which lasted several hours and ended, ‘Tomorrow, when we return to work, we shall again fight against vice and tyrants.’
Napoleon said on more than one occasion that as long as no one else could see his star, visible here in the sky, he would not allow anyone to distract him from following his own destiny.
If members of the Convention had hoped he was going to call an end to bloodshed, they were to be disappointed.
Then he stepped up to a veiled effigy and set light to the cloth, revealing a stone statue of a goddess. The set had been designed by the Illuminated Freemason Jean-Jacques Davide so that the goddess, Sophia, would seem to arise from the flames like a phoenix.
The poet Gérard de Nerval would later claim that Sophia had represented Isis. Yet the ruling spirit of the times was not Isis, the lifting of whose veils leads to the spirit worlds; neither was it Mother Nature, the gentle, nurturing goddess of the vegetable dimension of the cosmos. This was Mother Nature red in tooth and claw.
Robespierre was accused of trying to have himself declared a god by an elderly prophetess called Catherine Théot. Revulsion at the relentless bloodletting reached a pitch, and a crowd laid siege to the Hôtel de Ville. Robespierre was at last cornered. He tried to shoot himself, but only succeeded in blowing away half his jaw. When he went to the guillotine, still wearing his light blue costume, he tried to declaim to the assembled multitude, but could only manage a strangulated cry.
NAPOLEON FAMOUSLY FOLLOWED HIS star. This has been taken as a poetic way of saying that he was destined for great things.
Goethe said of him: ‘The daemon ought to lead us every day and tell us what we ought to do on every occasion. But the good spirit leaves us in the lurch, and we grope about in the dark. Napoleon was the man! Always illuminated, always clear and decided and endowed at every hour with energy enough to carry out whatever he considered necessary. His life was the stride of a demi-god, from battle to battle, and from victory to victory. It might be said he was in a state of continual illumination… In later years this illumination appears to have forsaken him, as well as his fortune and his good star.’
How could Napoleon fail to have sense of destiny? He succeeded at everything he set his mind to, seemingly able to bend the whole world to his will. To himself and many of his contemporaries he was the Alexander the Great of the modern world, uniting East and West by his conquests.
French troops moved into Egypt. It was not a particularly glorious campaign — but it was important to Napoleon from a personal point of view. According to Fouché, the head of the French secret police, Napoleon had a meeting with a man purporting to be St Germain inside the Great Pyramid. It certainly seems to be the case that Napoleon chose the esotericst and astrologer Fabre d’Olivet as one of his advisers, and also arranged to spend a night alone in the Great Pyramid. Did Napoleon meet St Germain in the flesh or in spirit?
Napoleon ordered the making of a catalogue of Egyptian antiquities, Description de l’Egypt. It was dedicated to ‘Napoleon le Grand’, inviting comparison with Alexander the Great. He was portrayed on the front of the catalogue as Sol Invictus, the Sun god.
His empire would expand to include not only Italy and Egypt, but Germany, Austria and Spain. No emperor had been crowned by the Pope since Charlemagne, but in 1804 Napoleon had Charlemagne’s crown and sceptre brought to him, and having forced Pope Pius VII to attend, Napoleon symbolically snatched the crown from his hands and crowned himself Emperor.
Napoleon employed a team of scholars to come to the conclusion that Isis was the ancient goddess of Paris, and then decreed that the goddess and her star should be included in Paris’s coat of arms. On the Arc de Triomphe Josephine is portrayed kneeling at his feet carrying the laurel of Isis.
We can infer from this that Napoleon did not identify himself with Sirius, he followed it, as Orion follows Sirius across the sky. In Freemasonic initiation ceremonies candidates are reborn — as Osiris was reborn — looking up at a five-pointed star that represents Isis. Osiris/Orion the Hunter is the masculine impulse towards power, action and impregnation, pursuing Isis, the gatekeeper to life’s mysteries.
This is how Napoleon thought of Josephine, born of a family deeply immersed in esoteric Freemasonry and already a Freemason herself when he met her. Napoleon could conquer mainland Europe, but he could never quite conquer the sublimely beautiful Josephine. He longed for her as Dante had longed for Beatrice and longing made him aspire higher.
Osiris and Isis are also, of course, associated with the sun and the moon and on one level, as we have seen, this is to do with the cosmos’s arranging of itself in order to make human thought possible. In ancient Egypt the heliacal rising of Sirius in the middle of June presaged the rising of the Nile. In some esoteric traditions Sirius is the central sun of the universe around which our sun rotates.
This complex nexus of esoteric thought, combined with his love for Josephine, informed Napoleon’s sense of destiny.
But in 1813 the powers guiding and empowering Napoleon left him, as they always leave everyone, quite suddenly, and, as Goethe had described, the powers of reaction rushed in from all sides to destroy him.
We see the same process in the lives of artists. They struggle to find their voice, reach an inspired period during which they cannot put a brushstroke wrong, perhaps leading art into a new era. Then the spirit suddenly leaves them and they are unable to recapture it, no matter how hard they try.
THROUGHOUT THIS HISTORY WE HAVE repeatedly referred to the series of experiences a candidate must go through to achieve initiation, including the experience of kama loca, or purgatory, where the soul and spirit, still united, are attacked by demons. Now it is time to touch on the idea taught in the esoteric schools that the whole of humanity was to undergo something like an initiation.
The secret societies were preparing for this event, helping humanity to develop the sense of self and other qualities that would be needed during the ordeal.
In the middle decades of the eighteenth century Freemasonry spread throughout the world — to Austria, Spain, India, Italy,
Sweden, Germany, Poland, Russia, Denmark, Norway and China. Following in the footsteps of the American and French brethren, Freemasonry inspired republican revolutions all round the world.
Madame Blavatsky wrote that among the Carbonari — the revolutionary precursors and pioneers of Garibaldi — there was more than one Freemason deeply versed in occult science and Rosicrucianism. Garibaldi himself was a 33rd degree Freemason and Grand Master of Italian Freemasonry.
In Hungary Louis Kossuth, and in South America Simon Bolivar, Francisco de Miranda, Venustiano Carranza, Benito Juarez and Fidel Castro, all fought for freedom.
Today in the USA there are some 13,000 lodges, and in 2001 it was estimated that there were some seven million Freemasons worldwide.
WE HAVE SEEN HOW JESUS CHRIST planted the seed of the interior life, how this interior life was expanded and populated by Shakespeare and Cervantes. In the eighteenth century and, particularly, the nineteenth century the great initiate-novelists forged the sense we all enjoy today that this interior world has its own history, a narrative with meaning, highs and lows, reversals of fortune and dilemmas, turning points when life-changing decisions may be made.
The great novelists of the age — we think of the Brontës, of Dickens — were also full of a sense that, just as human consciousness was understood in esoteric thought to have evolved through history, so consciousness also evolves in individual human lives.
John Comenius grew up in the Prague of Rudolf II where he attended the coronation of the Winter King. He knew John Valentine Andrae in Heidelberg, and was then invited by his friend, the occultist Samuel Hartlib, to join him in London ‘to help complete the Work’. By his educational reforms Comenius would introduce into the mainstream of history the idea that in childhood we experience a very different state of mind from the one we develop in adulthood.