Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form, page 15
The purpose of this particular chapter is not to offer a comprehensive history of secret societies; even if I had an extra thousand pages at my disposal, it still couldn’t be comprehensive. However, I will offer a brief outline of the most important historical events with which secret societies have been involved.
Ishmael Reed once wrote, in the pages of his classic novel Mumbo Jumbo , “The history of the world is the history of the warfare between secret societies.” In the realms of the occult, there are two forms of warfare: the exoteric and the esoteric. In this chapter we will be focusing on the exoteric. The exoteric would represent the traditional forms of war with which secret societies have been involved. In can be demonstrated through historical fact that secret societies played an integral role in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Greek War of Independence, the Civil War, and World War II, just to name five—rather significant—examples.
The Invisible College
This influence can be seen as both positive and negative. In 1660, a quasi-Masonic secret society called “the Invisible College” was formed by rogue astronomers who wished to practice real science without being burned at the stake by the Inquisition. Only thirty years before, in 1633, Galileo was forced to recant by the Inquisitors-General of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church for daring to suggest the truth: that the earth revolved around the sun, and not the other way around. This tragedy was no doubt a major impetus for the formation of the “Invisible College” (Lomas 17). These scientific men, who believed in reason over faith, put their lives on the line to promote “free thinking” and to actively oppose religious demagoguery. Such an organization of revolutionaries would require absolute secrecy in order to survive in a totalitarian regime. They would require oaths of loyalty and secret grips and specific rituals to prove one’s membership in the College. When an authoritarian government is observing one’s every move, secrecy is the only defense for the powerless.
I find the paranoia that surrounds the subject of secret societies to be somewhat bemusing. Rather than be afraid of the idea, I suggest starting your own secret society. Given recent trends in global affairs, you might have to do just that if you wish to go to the bathroom without ending up on a tape somewhere. (I recommend the recent book Freemasonry and the Birth of Modern Science by Robert Lomas for more information on “the Invisible College.”)
The American Revolution
Manly P. Hall, in his 1944 book The Secret Destiny of America , conjures a poetic vision of the vital role Freemasonry played in the formation of the United States. Again, the idea that a ragtag group of revolutionaries would need to meet in secret in order to topple a repressive regime should not be a surprise to either historians or lay people. Respected mythologist Joseph Campbell had much to say about the Masonic symbolism woven into the very fabric of the United States of America; the flags, seals, monuments and icons of the United States all bore great Masonic significance. Discussing the symbols on the dollar bill, Campbell says, “These founding fathers who were Masons actually studied what they could of Egyptian lore. In Egypt, the pyramid represents the primordial hillock. After the annual flood of the Nile begins to sink down, the first hillock is symbolic of the reborn world.” Campbell elaborates:
Now here is the Great Seal of the United States. Look at the pyramid on the left. A pyramid has four sides. These are four points of the compass…. But when you get up to the top, the points all come together, and there the eye of God opens…. These were eighteenth century deists, these gentlemen. Over here we read, “In God We Trust.” But that is not the god of the Bible. These men did not believe in a Fall. They did not think the mind of man was cut off from God. The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal concerns, beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God. Reason puts you in touch with God. Consequently, for these men, there is no special revelation anywhere, and none is needed, because the mind of man cleared of its fallibilities is sufficiently capable of the knowledge of God. All people in the world are thus capable because all people in the world are capable of reason.
All men are capable of reason. That is the fundamental principle of democracy. Because everybody’s mind is capable of true knowledge, you don’t have to have a special authority, or a special revelation telling you that this is the way things should be….
These were, after all, learned men. The eighteenth century Enlightenment was a world of learned gentlemen. We haven’t had that quality in politics very much. It’s an enormous good fortune for our nation that that cluster of gentlemen had the power and were in a position to influence events at that time. (Campbell 25-29)
The French Revolution
These learned gentlemen also had an enormous influence on the French Revolution. George Washington, for example, was very close friends with the Marquis de Lafayette, one of the early supporters of the French Revolution. In 1777 General Lafayette had been a volunteer in Washington’s army. Both were Masons, and Washington may very well have introduced Lafayette into the ranks of the Brotherhood (Wilgus 29.) Thomas Paine, too, had an enormous impact on the French Revolution. Neal Wilgus, an objective and thorough researcher who nonetheless manages to weave some welcome snatches of humor into his work, relates the travails of Thomas Paine after the formation of the United States. In part, he has this to say about Paine:
He was in France when the fall of the Bastille touched off the rebellion against monarchy and he was chosen by Lafayette to take the key of the prison to America as a symbol of “the spoils of despotism, and the first ripe fruits of American principles transplanted into Europe,” as Paine later wrote to Washington.
More direct involvement came in 1791 when Paine, back in England again, published the first part of The Rights of Man , a stirring defense of the early stages of the revolution…. (78-9)
There is no doubt that the same cast of characters who fomented revolution among the American Colonies was hard at work in France bringing about “order out of chaos” as well. Furthermore, that the vast majority of these players were Freemasons is a fact not in dispute.
Neal Wilgus’ writing exists on the fringes of popular culture, and perhaps would be dismissed by the more discerning reader. Nonetheless, for more information about the role of secret societies during the French Revolution, I highly recommend chapters two and three of Wilgus’ highly informative and amusing 1978 book, The Illuminoids . It’s an enjoyable compendium of little-known facts about the history of secret societies and political paranoia. When he allows himself to indulge in speculation, Wilgus clearly labels it as such.
If Wilgus is not to your liking, however, perhaps we should refer instead to an extremely well-respected historian who received his doctorate as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and taught history for seventeen years at Harvard and Princeton Universities before moving on to become the director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, located in the Smithsonian Institute Building in Washington, D.C. This is a man whose credentials are impeccable. Despite this, strangely enough, hardly any writer interested in conspiracy theories ever mentions James H. Billington or his most important work, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith . Published in 1980 by Basic Books in New York, it traces the history of revolutionary movements beginning with “occult Freemasonry” and moving all the way up to the present day. In Chapter Four, “The Occult Origins of Organization,” Billington writes:
Masonry imparted to the revolutionary tradition at birth the essential metaphor that revolutionaries used to understand their own mission down to the mid-nineteenth century: that of an architect building a new and better structure for human society…. The rituals leading to each new level of membership were not, as is sometimes suggested, childish initiations. They were awesome rites of passage into new types of association, promising access to higher truths of Nature once the blindfold was removed in the inner room of the lodge…. Masonry ritualized fraternity and provided upward mobility more easily than outside society. The Masonic title of “brother” fulfilled on the continent some of the function of blending bourgeoisie and aristocracy that was assumed in England by the envied term “gentleman.” In the Masonic milieu, normally conservative people could seriously entertain the possibility of Utopia—or at least of a social alternative to the ancient regime. Philip of Orleans was the titular head of French Masonry (the Grand Orient); and most of the pro-revolutionary denizens of the cafes of the Palais-Royal were his Masonic “brothers.”
In the early days of the revolution, Masonry provided much of the key symbolism and ritual—beginning with the Masonic welcome under a “vault of swords” of the king at the Hotel de Ville three days after the fall of the Bastille. To be sure, most French Masons prior to the revolution had been “not revolutionaries, not even reformers, nor even discontent”; and, even during the revolution, Masonry as such remained politically polymorphous: “Each social element and each political tendency could ‘go masonic’ as it wished.” But Masonry provided a rich and relatively nontraditional foraging ground for new national symbols (coins, songs, banners, seals), new forms of address (tu, frere, vivat! ), and new models for civic organizations, particularly outside Paris.
Most important for our story, Masonry was deliberately used by revolutionaries in the early nineteenth century as a model and a recruiting ground for their first conspiratorial experiments in political organization. (92-3)
And to be sure, these “conspiratorial experiments” did not end with the French Revolution….
The Greek War of Independence
Not many Masons, and certainly not the general public, are aware of how major a role Freemasonry played in the seven-year-long Greek War of Independence. Today, Freemasons are not allowed to discuss political or religious matters within the confines of the Lodge. And yet, in the early nineteenth century, Freemasons actually constituted a “military expeditionary lodge to travel to Greece and fight for the independence of the country” (230). The name of the lodge was Les Enfants Adoptifs de Sparte et d’Athenes , and was formed from the combined members of three Marseilles lodges.
According to retired journalist (and 32nd Degree Freemason) Andreas C. Rizopoulos:
In 1828 the State of Greece was officially acknowledged, but it was not until almost 120 years later that the country obtained its present borders and territories. The occupation of the country had started in 1453 when Constantinople, the besieged capital city of Byzantium, fell to the Ottomans. In the following four centuries the Ottomans controlled most of the areas of the present Greece with the exception of the Ionian Islands and parts of the Peloponnese. The former were successively under the control of the Venetians, the French, the Russians, again the French, and finally were placed under British Protection between 1815 and 1864. The latter was partly occupied by the French. During the four-hundred-year period there have been a number of unsuccessful uprisings. Then in the early part of 1814 the seeds of the War of Independence were indeed sown in a Masonic lodge. (224-25)
General Charles Fabvier, an honorary member of this lodge, played a significant role in the war; this included leading his fellow Masons in a commando-style raid on the Acropolis. There were over five hundred soldiers involved in this raid, the vast majority of whom were regular military; however, almost all the volunteers were members of the newly constituted Marseilles lodge. Five Masons died in the battle, and were buried on the Acropolis. Fabvier and his troops (including the Masonic volunteers) held the Acropolis for six months, until the war finally ended.
F. Vassal, Grand Secretary of the supreme governing body of French Freemasonry, made a speech on December 27, 1825, in which he supported the militaristic, guerilla-like efforts of his brethren. He said, “…we have to admit that Freemasons have a great interest in the liberation of the Greeks. There is the cradle of our initiation….” (228).
Again, covertly inspiring revolutions can either have positive or negative results, depending on which side of the guillotine you’re on. The influence of secret societies on American history, in particular, has been both necessary and bloody. And sometimes they’ve just been bloody….
The Civil War
Consider the Civil War. Investigative journalist Warren Getler has recently published a comprehensive book detailing the role of Albert Pike in the Civil War via a quasi-Masonic secret society known as The Knights of the Golden Circle, which later evolved (or devolved) into the Ku Klux Klan.
Pike is the most influential and enigmatic figure in Freemasonry. He’s well-respected by the vast majority of Masons, mostly due to the fact that Pike designed the thirty higher degrees of the Scottish Rite as they are now performed today. Many Masons own copies of his encyclopedic book Morals and Dogma , and yet have not bothered to read it. This is not surprising, as its style certainly does not lend itself to a casual read. Most of the esoteric information in Morals and Dogma is adapted from previous occult texts; much of it, in fact, is lifted from the works of the famous Cabalist Eliphas Levi. Pike, himself, admits that he “extracted quite half of its contents from the works of the best writers and most philosophic or eloquent thinkers” (iii). The book, and the twenty-nine ritualistic degrees they comment on, was intended to compile the occult knowledge of the ages into one convenient package.
There’s no doubt that Pike was a learned man. He was a lawyer, a scholar, a military strategist, and a poet; indeed, his poetry, little known today, was praised by no less an authority than Edgar Allan Poe. What’s in dispute is whether he used this impressive intelligence for positive or negative ends. Masonic biographies attempt to paint a picture of Pike as some kind of saint. He did indeed use his knowledge and influence as a successful attorney to help many Indian tribes attain at least some amount of justice from the U.S. government. According to Getler, “… Pike pressed for federal payment of claims due for Indian lands that had been confiscated earlier in the nineteenth century. He obtained a six-figure settlement for the Creeks and went on to win other important suits and financial rewards for the aggrieved tribes” (59).
However, on the other end of the spectrum, Pike was also an “unabashed apologist for slavery” who “saw to it that key supporters of the Southern cause were corralled into the Supreme Council’s ranks by the fall of 1859” (56). With these supporters, Pike formed a separate secret society outside the ranks of Freemasonry known as the Knights of the Golden Circle. There are many parallels between the symbols and rituals of the Scottish Rite and the KGC, too many to detail here. These parallels served a strategic purpose for Pike’s militaristic goals.
The point that needs to be highlighted here is the central mission of Pike’s KGC. Thomas P. Kettell, author of the 1866 History of the Great Rebellion , states, “…the Knights of the Golden Circle, having for its primary object the extension and defense of slavery, was organized; and several degrees, as in the Masonic order, were open to the aspirant for high rank in it. To the initiated of the highest rank only was the whole plot revealed, and the others, with but an imperfect idea of its purposes, were employed to further its designs.” In other words, the organization had a pyramidal, top-down structure in which the “fully-informed elite” passed “instructions on to cells of obedient, ill-informed foot soldiers,” all for the purpose of furthering the Southern cause. According to Getler, “By late 1863, the designs of Pike and the KGC were twofold: to continue to strive for Southern independence by helping to defeat the North on the battlefield, and to prepare, simultaneously, for a future conflagration, post-Abraham Lincoln, if they lost the rebellion then under way” (64-65).
When the South lost the Civil War, that plan was apparently put in operation. Getler demonstrates many intriguing connections between John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, and the KGC. If you have not yet come across Getler’s work, I recommend seeking it out as soon as possible. His book is available in two editions; the 2003 hardcover goes by the evocative title, Shadow of the Sentinel ; the recent paperback was published by Simon & Schuster under the more literal title, Rebel Gold .
World War II
The negative influence of secret societies on history can be seen, as well, in the early days of World War II. A well-organized, shadowy secret society had a major impact on the politics of Adolf Hitler. In this case, the secret society in question was definitely not the Freemasons. In fact, Hitler despised Freemasonry with a passion, considering it to be one of the three worst influences at large in 1920s Germany, and did everything in his power to destroy every Masonic Lodge in the country. In his 1927 manifesto Mein Kampf , Hitler wrote:
The general pacifistic paralysis of the national instinct of self-preservation begun by Freemasonry in the circles of the so-called intelligentsia is transmitted to the broad masses and above all to the bourgeoisie by the activity of the big papers which today are always Jewish. Added to these two weapons of disintegration comes a third and by far the most terrible, the organization of brute force. As a shock and storm troop, Marxism is intended to finish off what the preparatory softening up with the first two weapons has made ripe for collapse. (320)
