The Secret History of the World

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:

‘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’.

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 never 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.’

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.

We see Comenius’s influence in, for example, Jane Eyre or David Copperfield — and we should be aware that it was very new then.

But the area of esoteric thought which would have the biggest effect on the novel would be that of the deeper laws. The novel provided an arena for novelists steeped in esoteric philosophy to show the working out of these laws in individual human lives.

THE TIME HAS COME TO GET TO GRIPS with this elusive concept which lies right at the heart of the esoteric view of the cosmos and its history.

We saw how Elijah, working behind the scenes of history, had helped bring about a split in consciousness between the objective Baconian consciousness and the subjective Shakespearean consciousness. We saw, too, how viewing the world as objectively as possible made the laws of physics snap into focus.

But what about subjective experience? What about the structure of experience itself?

In time the science of psychology would arise. But psychology would make the materialistic assumption that matter influences the mind, never the other way around. Psychology, then, turned a blind eye to a universal part of human experience — the experience of meaning.

We have already touched on the way that Rosicrucians had begun to formulate laws in line with oriental esoteric thought on ‘the nameless’ way, inextricably bound up with notions of human wellbeing. In the East there is an august tradition of tracing the operation of yang and its opposite ying, but in the West this remained an elusive element that slipped between the emerging sciences of physics and psychology.

If the laws that govern these elusive elements are difficult to think about in abstract terms, it is much easier to see them in action. Some of the great novelists of the nineteenth century wrote explicitly occult novels. In addition to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights shows a spirit pursue its beloved from beyond the grave. George Eliot’s Lifting the Veil, the fruit of her passionate investigation of the occult, was suppressed by her publisher. Then, as we shall see shortly, there was Dostoyevsky.

But as well as this explicit occultism, a more widespread influence is implicit in much more fiction. A great vision of the working out of the deeper laws in individual lives, the complex, irrational patterns that could not occur if science explained everything there is in the universe, can be found in the very greatest novels.

Jane Eyre, Bleak House, Moby Dick, Middlemarch, War and Peace hold up a mirror to our lives and point up the significant patterns of order and meaning that are our universal experience, even when science tells us not to believe the evidence of our eyes, hearts and minds.

ON ONE LEVEL NOVELS ARE ALL ABOUT egotism. A novel always involves seeing the world from other people’s points of view. Reading a novel, therefore, lessens egotism. Also the failings of characters in novels are very often to do with egotism, either in terms of self-interest or, more particularly, the failure to empathize.

But the greater contribution of the novel to the human sense of self is, as we have just suggested, the formation of the sense of an inner narrative, the sense that an individual life seen from the inside has a meaningful shape, a story.

Underlying these notions of shape and meaning are beliefs about the ways people’s lives are formed by their being tested — the labyrinth that keeps morphing.

What shapes lives in novels is life’s paradoxical quality, the fact that it does not run in a straight, predictable line, the fact that appearances are deceptive and that fortunes are reversed. The notions of the meaning of life and the deeper laws here come together.

IF THESE DEEPER LAWS REALLY EXIST AND are universal and so important and powerful, if history really does turn on them, isn’t it perhaps surprising that we are not more aware of them? In fact, isn’t it odd if we in the West don’t even seem to have a name for them?

It is surprising, not least because if these laws come into play when human happiness is at stake it should follow that they could be very useful when it comes to our hopes of living a happy life.

Of course the most common sets of rules for achieving a happy life are the down-to-earth wisdom contained in proverbs and the common-sense cautionary advice traditionally given to children.

But one difference is that both proverbs and the cautionary advice given to children only address the basics — how to avoid physical harm and obtain the bare necessities — while the deeper laws deal in grand notions of destiny, good and evil. As we shall see, they advise us on satisfying our craving for the highest, most ineffable levels of happiness, our deepest needs for fulfilment and meaning.

Compare the proverbial advice to ‘look before you leap’ with the recommendation contained in this perverse little parable by the proto-Surrealist Guillaume Apollinaire:

Inspired by the teachings of the secret societies, the Surrealists wanted to destroy entrenched ways of thought, to smash scientific materialism. One of the ways they did this was by promoting irrational acts. Here Apollinaire is saying that if you act irrationally, you will be rewarded by the irrational forces of the universe.

If what Apollinaire is saying is true, this is one of the deeper laws of the universe, a law of cause and effect lying outside the laws of probability.

Surrealists were unusually open about their irrational philosophy and its roots in the secret societies, but this same irrational philosophy is also implicit in much more mainstream culture. Take It’s a Wonderful Life, an old film that on the surface seems homely and comforting, together with its literary forebear A Christmas Carol, which Charles Dickens imbued with the philosophy of the secret society of which he was an initiate.

Scrooge is confronted by ghosts that present him with visions showing how his behaviour has caused great misery, together with a vision of what will result if he continues in the same vein. George Bailey, the character played by James Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life, believes his life has been a complete failure and he is about to commit suicide when an angel shows him how much unhappier his family, friends, the whole town, would have been were it not for him and his self-sacrificing nature.

So both George Bailey and Scrooge are invited to ask themselves how the world would have been different if they had chosen to live differently. At the end of this process of questioning both characters are asked to go through the same door they were about to go through at the beginning of the story — but this time do the right thing. George Bailey decides not to commit suicide and to face his creditors. Scrooge redeems himself by coming to the aid of Bob Cratchit and his family.

So in a way both It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol depict life as having a kind of circular quality and of being a test. They show how life directs us towards crucial decisions and how we may be made to loop round and come back to confront these crucial decisions again if we get it wrong.

I imagine that most of us feel that both It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol are in some way true. It’s difficult to see how anything in science or nature could account for life’s being patterned in this insistently testing way, but most of us probably feel that both these very popular works are more than just entertainments, that they say something deep about life.

A few moments consideration may now be enough to convince us that the same sorts of mysterious and irrational patterns also inform the structure of some of the greatest works of literature in the canon: Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Doctor Faustus and War and Peace.

Oedipus somehow draws to himself the thing he fears most, and ends up killing his father and marrying his mother.

Hamlet repeatedly ducks out of his life’s challenge — avenging his father’s murder — but this challenge returns to confront him in increasingly dire forms.

Don Quixote holds a good-hearted vision of the world as a noble place, and so strong is this vision that by the end of the novel it has in some mysterious way transformed his material surroundings.

In his heart of hearts Faust knows what he ought to do, but because he does not do it, a providential order in the universe punishes him.

Tolstoy’s hero, Pierre, is tortured by his love for Natasha. It is only when he lets go of his feelings for her that he wins her.

Imagine if you fed all these great works of literature — in fact all literature — into a giant computer and asked it the question: What are the laws that determine whether or not a life is ultimately happy and fulfilled? I suggest the result would be a body of laws that included the following:

If you duck out of a challenge, then that challenge will come round again in a different form.

We always draw towards us what we fear most.

If you choose the immoral path, ultimately you will pay for it.

A good-hearted belief will eventually transform what is believed in.

In order to hold on to what you love, you must let it go.

This, then, is the type of law that gives great narrative literature its structure, and if we read Oedipus Rex or King Lear or Doctor Faustus or Middlemarch and feel that in a deep and important sense they are true, it is surely because the working out of the laws they portray resonates with our experience. They accurately depict the shape of our lives.

Now imagine what would happen if you fed all the scientific data in the world into another gigantic computer and asked it the same question. The results, I suggest, would be very different:

The best way to keep something is to try your hardest to do so and never give up.

You cannot transform the world by wishful thinking — you must do something about it.

If you can avoid being found out and punished by your fellow man, there is no reason to suppose a providential order will punish you.

And so on. The implication is clear and confirms what we suggested earlier. We get very different results, two very different sets of laws, if we try to determine the structure of the world than we do if we try to determine the structure of experience.

This is a distinction that Tolstoy wrote about in his essay On Life. Though the same laws operate in the outer world of external phenomena and in our inner life with its concern for meaning and fulfilment, they seem very different when we consider them separately. As Abraham Isaac Kook, one of the great Cabalists of the twentieth century and the first Chief Rabbi of Palestine, put it: ‘God is revealed in the deep feelings of sensitive souls.’

The deeper laws can be discerned only if we view events in the external world with the deepest subjectivity, as an artist or a mystic might. Is it the subjectivity of these laws, the fact that they work so near to the centre of consciousness, that makes it difficult for us to keep them in focus?

Rainer Maria Rilke, the Central European poet, seems to come close to writing explicitly about these laws in a letter to an aspiring young poet. ‘Only the individual who is truly solitary is brought under the deep laws, and when a man steps out into the morning that is just beginning, or looks into the evening that is full of happenings, and when he feels what is coming to pass there, then all rank drops from him as from a dead man, although he is standing in the midst of sheer life.’ Rilke is using heightened, poetic language but he seems to be confirming that these deeper laws can only be discerned if we shut out everything else and concentrate on them over a long time with our subtlest and most intense powers of discernment.

IN THE COURSE OF WRITING this book I have met the young Irish mystic Lorna Byrne. She hasn’t read any of the literature that lies behind this book, nor even previously met anyone who might have passed its ideas on. Her extraordinary knowledge of the spirit words has come from direct personal experience. She meets Michael, Archangel of the Sun, and has encountered the Archangel Gabriel in the form of the Moon, divided in half yet pressed together and moving, she says, like the turning of pages in a book. She has described to me seeing in the fields near her home the group-spirit of the fox in the form of the fox but with human-like elements. She meets Elijah, who was once a human with the spirit of an angel, and she has seen him walk on water like the Green One of the Sufi tradition. Hers is an alternative method of perception, a parallel dimension that moves things around in our own.

IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY ANCIENT creatures began to stir in the depths of the earth, to slouch towards the appointed place.

Imprisoned since the first War in Heaven, the consciousness-eaters were on the move again.