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It is remarkable what happens when you abandon your preconceptions about Christianity – hard though that might be, if, like us, you were brought up as a churchgoer – and approach the subject as objectively as possible.

When we began our latest book, The Masks of Christ: Behind the Lies and Cover-ups About the Man Believed to be God, we thought we had already reached certain conclusions in our 1997 The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ (which Dan Brown acknowledges as a major inspiration for The Da Vinci Code). But as our research progressed we became enthralled – perhaps even a little shocked – by what we were faced with, but which only served to reinforce and clarify our previous conclusions.

We begin with a great mystery.

The Great Debate

Of the many puzzles surrounding Jesus, perhaps the most fundamental is the clash between the Jewish and pagan elements in his mission.

Certain New Testament passages are unequivocally hardcore Jewish nationalist, such as Jesus’ claim to the title of Messiah, a role which (despite Christians’ later redefinition) only makes sense in Jewish terms. The Messiah – ‘Anointed’, in Greek ‘Christos’ – was to be the great deliverer, who would reassemble and lead the twelve tribes of Israel in kicking out the Romans, before finally fulfilling God’s promise to extend their rule to all other nations.

Of course, Jesus conspicuously failed to fulfil that role. From the Jews’ perspective he achieved the exact opposite, spawning a religion that, in his name, subjected them to centuries of subjugation. That is why his besotted early followers changed the whole emphasis of ‘Messiah’, with Paul initiating the new spin with the notion that has underpinned Christianity ever since: instead of being a hard-nosed Jewish military leader, the new Messiah was a god-man whose redeeming death and resurrection offered eternal life to all who accepted him, regardless of their ethnic or religious background.

Yet the gospel writers still ensured Jesus was associated with the old prophecies of the Messiah, such as entering Jerusalem on a donkey, which was an unequivocal declaration of Messiahship.

Even though by the time of the gospels the Christian movement had adopted Paul’s doctrine that the message was for all mankind, clearly the internal evidence shows that Jesus himself intended to confine the ‘Good News’ to the people of Israel. We see this in the tale of Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark’s Gospel, where at first he refuses to heal her possessed daughter because she is not one of the chosen people – even calling her ‘dog’, the racist term used by Jews of Gentiles – only changing his mind when she implicitly acknowledges his God’s superiority. As several scholars admit, since this contradicts the gospel writer’s own position, it must be authentic.

Jesus the Pagan

On the other hand, some Biblical passages are hard to equate with Judaism, especially those about Jesus’ more private rituals, most obviously the Eucharist, the symbolic eating of his ‘body’ as bread and drinking of his ‘blood’ as wine that he supposedly established at the Last Supper. Such a rite, even symbolically, was unthinkable for a Jew, for whom ingesting human blood was an abomination. In fact, it resonates much more neatly with the mystery cults of the Romans, Greeks and Egyptians, where gods were symbolically devoured to forge a spiritual communion between the cult member and the deity. Importing such practices into Judaism would have been regarded by the mainstream as blasphemous.

Evidence has also accumulated over the last few decades that Jesus modelled his cures and exorcisms on pagan magicians’, primarily from Egypt, echoing – or perhaps confirming – early Jewish claims that he had been schooled in sorcery in Egypt. And if the suppressed ‘Gnostic Gospels’ are accepted as genuinely representing certain sides of Jesus’ beliefs and teaching – as we do – then they, too, show a thinking not obviously associated with the Judaism of his day, especially where the spirituality of the feminine is concerned, as exemplified in his relationship with Mary Magdalene.

The majority of New Testament scholars simply reject the non-Jewish parts of the gospels as inauthentic, arguing that the Eucharist was invented by the apostles of the new religion – Paul again! – to make it more Gentile-friendly, something familiar from the sects that celebrated dying-and-rising saviour gods who incarnated as a mortal man. The academics assume that this was borrowed from one of many such cults, perhaps that of Mithras or Dionysus, and was applied to the meal that Jesus’ first followers held purely in memory of him (with no mystical connotations).

But in fact, there is no reason to reject these passages except the impossibility of fitting them into a Jewish context. The logic is that, since we know that Jesus was Jewish, and no Jew could possible have entertained such practices, then he couldn’t have done so, and therefore they must be later inventions.

However, the evidence simply isn’t there. It is hard to imagine later followers inventing Jesus using pagan magic in such detail – even down to specific phrases found in earlier Greco-Egyptian magical papyri. And the internal evidence of the New Testament itself points to the Eucharist being one of the earliest Christian practices, going back to Jesus himself. It is the one element that appears virtually identically in all four gospels and Paul’s Letters. (It is generally agreed that Paul’s Letters predate the gospels, although we would argue that Mark’s Gospel might be contemporary with some of Paul’s writings.)

Even odder, as Paul clearly struggled to fit the Eucharist into his ‘revealed’ version of Jesus’ mission, evidently he would even have been happier to ignore the rite entirely, but it was already too well established. His solution was to transmute the rite into a memorial, specifically to dodge the ‘communion’ aspect. So ironically the evidence points to the exact reverse of the conventional position – instead of Paul adding the ‘mystical communion’ element, he tried to get rid of it!

Part of the Christian process of redefining the meaning of the ritual meal was linking it to the Last Supper the night before his crucifixion. However, the evidence of John’s Gospel is that Jesus actually instituted the rite earlier, when he was preaching in Galilee – which led to a mass desertion of disciples appalled by his injunction that they must drink his blood.

It must be stressed that such practices are not merely difficult to reconcile with Judaism – as a would-be Messiah had to be – but impossible. They are totally incompatible.

So, as some scholars are now beginning to argue, could the Jewish parts be the invention? But that solution doesn’t work either, since it means rejecting passages that are strongly evidential – such as the episode of the Syro-Phoenician woman and the entry into Jerusalem.

So we hit an impasse. According to accepted thinking, Jesus could never have been both a Jewish leader and a proponent of mystery school rites. Is there any possible solution?

Enter the Magus

One potential way forward, we realised – with some astonishment – lay in exploring the parallel between Jesus and that flamboyant scriptural bad boy to end bad boys, Jesus’ hugely unconventional contemporary, Simon Magus, whose very name underlines his apparently pagan credentials, ‘Magus’ meaning ‘occultist’ or ‘magician’.

The earliest reference to Simon Magus (or Simon of Gitta, after the town of his birth in Samaria) comes in the Acts of the Apostles, the continuation of Luke’s Gospel that takes the story on after Jesus’ crucifixion. After the first persecution of Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem that began with the stoning of the first Christian martyr, Stephen, some of Jesus’ disciples, led by Philip, fled to Samaria. This was within, at most, ten years of the crucifixion – probably less. Here they find that many Samaritans follow Simon Magus, regarded as the ‘Great Power’ sent by God. Philip not only successfully converts Simon’s followers to Christianity, but also the Magus himself. Some time later Peter and the disciple John go to Samaria to take the Holy Spirit to the community established by Philip, and Simon Magus reveals his true colours by offering them money for the secret of the Holy Spirit, earning a stern condemnation from Peter.

Clearly, as the Simonites found it so easy to switch their allegiance there must have been a marked similarity between the messages of Jesus and the Magus. And Simon himself was, albeit briefly, once a member of the Christian community in Samaria. Although Acts attributes his success there to sorcery, as we now know Jesus himself indulged in pagan magic, so this points up a similarity between them.

Although Acts’ story ends with Simon asking forgiveness, other early Christian sources show he went on to challenge the fledgling Jesus movement, appearing in the writings of the Church Fathers as the ‘first heretic’ who attempted to lead the early Christians astray. Again, the term suggests a basic similarity between Simon and Jesus – heresy being a variation of a religion.

A major source is the related texts known as the Clementina or the Pseudo-Clementine Literature. Written around 150 CE but drawing on earlier material, it describes the struggle between Peter and Simon Magus for the hearts, minds and souls of the Samaritans.

It is crystal clear that the Church Fathers’ big problem was that Simon Magus was far, far too similar to Jesus, performing miracles and healings – even being regarded as an incarnate god. The early Christians were anxious to point out to their flock that, although Simon appeared to be cut from the same cloth as Jesus, this was a ploy by the Devil to sow confusion. Epiphanius of Salamis wrote that Simon “worked under the cloak of Christ” and even hinted that he claimed to be Jesus resurrected. Hyppolytus of Rome said bluntly: “He was not the Christ.” But do they protest too much?

The Magus, too, promoted a seemingly peculiar blend of Jewish and pagan ideas. The Clementina makes the apparently extraordinary statement that, while he taught that there were “many gods,” he was citing the books of Moses (i.e. the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament). This seemed so weird that the Clementina was dismissed as nonsense – but in 1842 a work of Hippolytus was discovered in which he had included (in order to point out the errors) large extracts from Simon’s own treatise, the ‘Great Revelation’, whose one-time existence was known but which was believed to have been lost.

The ‘Great Revelation’ reveals an elevation of the sacred feminine and an emphasis on sexual mysticism that fit awkwardly with the patriarchal character of Judaism, and which caused much outrage among the Church Fathers, to whom Simon’s rituals were obscene and disgusting. Notoriously, he is said to have travelled with one Helen, a former prostitute from Tyre – described as a black woman who danced in chains, and who he claimed was the incarnation of God’s ‘First Thought’, the female power through whom God had created the material world. (Of course there are intriguing parallels between the relationships of Simon and Helen, and Jesus and Mary Magdalene as portrayed in the Gnostic Gospels.)

An even more extraordinary link between Simon and Jesus is that, again according to the Clementina, the two men shared the same teacher: John the Baptist. Indeed, it states that it was Simon Magus, not Jesus, who John chose as his successor.

But what does all this have to tell us about the historical Jesus?

The big clue comes from the fact that Simon Magus was a Samaritan, one of those who, despite an ethnic kinship with the Jews, were detested by them – a feeling that was decidedly mutual.

On the subject of Jesus and Samaria, the gospel writers appear to differ awkwardly. In Matthew, Mark and Luke Jesus is depicted as shunning the land and its people (with some exceptions, notably the parable of the Good Samaritan). On the other hand, John’s Gospel has him extending his mission into Samaria.

There is, in fact, strong evidence that the enigmatic Gospel of John was originally written for an early Samaritan Christian community, which would explain its positive view of the Samaritans. For example, it describes the first person to whom Jesus chooses to reveal his Messiahship as the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well in the heart of Samaria, and the first to recognise him as the Messiah are Samaritans. We suggest it was written for Samaritan converts from Simon Magus’ following – after all, some of the gospel’s unique stories, particularly those with an unexpected sexual subtext, seem to have been specifically included (or contrived) to subvert Simon’s teaching.

The key figure of John the Baptist was also active in Samaria. According to John’s Gospel, one of his centres was Aenon (modern Ainûn), in Samaria.

So, Jesus and John the Baptist both took their missions into Samaria – another parallel with Simon Magus. But what is it about that land that explains the Jewish/pagan paradox of both Jesus’ and Simon’s teachings?

The key lies in the reason for the animosity between Jews and Samaritans, which had its roots in the earliest days of Israel. The Samaritans were descended from the Israelite tribes of Ephraim and Manesseh, and still inhabited their lands, between Judea and Galilee. Originally, Ephraim was predominant: Moses’ successor and the conqueror of the Promised Land, Joshua, was from Ephraim and the tribe was given the honour of being custodians of the Ark of the Covenant in its sanctuary at Shiloh. Some historians and archaeologists believe that Ephraim and Manesseh were two of only three tribes (the other being Benjamin) that came out of Egypt, the others being native Canaanites who were converted to the religion of Moses. And intriguingly, legend linked them with the Egyptian religion of Heliopolis, since their progenitors, Ephraim and Manesseh, were sons of Joseph and Asenath, the daughter of the high priest of Heliopolis.

After the creation of the kingdom of Israel a power struggle developed between the tribes of Ephraim and Judah. King David usurped Ephraim’s status by taking the Ark to Jerusalem, the new religious centre in Judah’s territory. After Solomon, the kingdom split in two, Ephraim heading the ten tribes of the larger Kingdom of Israel in the north, with the smaller Kingdom of Judah (which gave its name to the Jewish people and religion) in the south. A new sanctuary and temple, a rival to Jerusalem, was built in Ephraim’s land on Mount Gerizim.

Although larger and more powerful, the northern kingdom collapsed when it was invaded by the Assyrian empire in the eighth century BCE. The Jews later claimed that the Assyrian influence corrupted the religion of the north, a taunt that was returned when Judah underwent its own trauma of invasion and mass deportation in the Babylonian Captivity two centuries later. When the Jews returned to Jerusalem after their seventy-year exile, they set about codifying and reforming their religion, incorporating concepts from that of Babylon. So both the Jews and the Samaritans believed that only they practised the ‘pure’ religion of Moses, and that the other’s version was heretical. Victors’ history decided that the Jews won, but the Samaritans could have been right…

The rivalry reached a climax when, about two centuries before Jesus, the Jews conquered Samaria and destroyed their temple – yet another reason for Samaritan resentment. It was only with the advent of Roman rule that Samaria was freed from Jewish subjugation.

Not unnaturally, by Jesus’ day, the Jews and Samaritans detested each other. The hostility even affected their respective end times speculations: all the prophecies foresaw a re-gathering of the twelve tribes – one of the functions of the Messiah – and a reconciliation of Judah and Ephraim, but opinions differed over which tribe would come out on top. Naturally, the Jews thought it would be them. Moreover, their deeply-ingrained prejudice made the idea of bringing the Samaritans back into the fold deeply distasteful. Meanwhile, the Samaritans believed in a coming saviour, the Taheb (‘Restorer’ or ‘Returner’), who would reassemble the tribes under the authority of Ephraim, restoring the situation that had existed at the very beginning of Israelite history. And part of the Taheb’s function was to overthrow Judah. (The Samaritan woman would therefore have recognised Jesus as the Taheb.)

Many scholars and archaeologists have shown that the Israelites’ original religion was far from the monotheistic and patriarchal institution it was to become, and that it owed much to either, or both, the native, pagan religions of Canaan and Egypt. The classic study is Raphael Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess (1967, revised 1990), which argued that, before the split after Solomon’s reign, the Israelites had worshipped a goddess, Asherah, alongside Yahweh, revealing both polytheism and an awareness of the sacred feminine. (Images of cherubim excavated from ninth-century Israel are almost identical to Egyptian depictions of the winged Isis.) Patai also showed that early Israelite tradition incorporated a female figure which manifested God’s power of creation.

And as we know, all of these are characteristics of the teaching of the Samaritan Simon Magus – which makes sense if, as the Samaritans claimed, they really did preserve the original form of the Israelite religion.

But we believe it would also resolve the basic contradiction about how Jesus’ career could incorporate ‘Jewish’ and pagan elements. If, instead of ‘Jewish’ we think in terms of the ‘people of Israel’ – i.e. the original religion and tribes – then much about his mission falls into place.

The Samaritan connection also offers an explanation of the origin of the Eucharist. One of the texts that might include a possible Jewish precursor to the Christian Eucharist is the late BCE or early CE ‘The Book of Joseph and Asenath’. Normally described as a product of the Jewish community in Egypt, it includes a ritual involving the eating of bread and the drinking of wine – the nearest ceremony to the Eucharist in any Jewish source, and, although the key element of equating the bread and wine with body and blood is absent, some have suggested that it may have influenced either Jesus’ rite or the practices of the first Christians, who added the communion element.

However, as ‘The Book of Joseph and Asenath’ describes the Biblical tale of the union of the patriarch Joseph and the daughter of the Egyptian high priest of Heliopolis, it was clearly written by or for a community to which their marriage was particularly important. As the sons of Joseph and Asenath were Ephraim and Manesseh, the legendary ancestors of the Samaritans – and there was a large Samaritan community in Egypt – it seems the text is Samaritan and not Jewish.

So in the Samaritan connection we find clues to the apparent discrepancy between the Jewishness and paganism found in Jesus’ teachings. And it was against the background of age-old simmering tribal hatred that the extraordinary character of Simon Magus – the ‘bad’ Samaritan – arose, challenging the cult of Jesus with his miracles and claims of divinity.

It is all too easy to accept the rather garbled version of his later life as given by the early Church fathers, in which he is tamed by the apostles and dies in a magical battle with Saint Peter. Yet this is the man who it seems John the Baptist nominated as his official successor – and not Jesus… But that, as they say, is another story…

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Despite often bitter opposition from many vested interests, LYNN PICKNETT and CLIVE PRINCE have fearlessly exposed cover-ups and conspiracies, from the faking of the Shroud of Turin (Turin Shroud), the Rudolf Hess mission (Double Standards), the battle among the Second World War Allies (Friendly Fire), the British royal family (War of the Windsors), the New Age movement and the hijacking of ancient Egypt (The Stargate Conspiracy), the Priory of Sion (The Sion Revelation) – and the origins and history of Christianity (The Templar Revelation) as well as their latest book The Masks of Christ. Their website is www.picknettprince.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 111 (November-December 2008).

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Since the time of Elizabeth I, British secret services have worked according to the principle of ‘the end justifies the means’. Money, bribery, blackmail – these are their recruitment methods…
– Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), October 2007

It is not really surprising that historically occultism and espionage have often been strange bedfellows. The black art of espionage is about obtaining secret information and witches, psychics and astrologers have always claimed to be able to predict the future and know about things hidden from ordinary people.

Gathering intelligence is carried out under a cloak of secrecy and occultists are adept at keeping their activities concealed from sight. Like secret agents they also use codes, symbols and cryptograms to hide information from outsiders. Occultists and intelligence officers are similar in many ways, as both inhabit a shadowy underworld of secrets, deception and disinformation. It is therefore not unusual that often these two professions have shared the same members.

The ‘father of the British Secret Service’ was the Elizabethan lawyer, politician, diplomat and spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham. He was a Protestant and as a young man during the bloody reign of the Catholic Queen Mary was forced to flee abroad to escape persecution. While in exile, Walsingham learnt Italian and French and became acquainted with the work of the famous Venetian Secret Service that used its spying skills for trade and commerce under the cloak of diplomacy.

When Queen Elizabeth I was crowned Francis Walsingham returned to England. He was appointed as a secretary to the English ambassador to the French court in Paris and also worked as a secret agent reporting back the intelligence he gleaned to Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, Sir William Cecil, later Lord Burghley. Between 1568 and 1570 Walsingham, who had become a Member of Parliament, worked in England in domestic counter-espionage exposing Catholic plots against the monarchy.

In 1570 Walsingham was appointed as the new ambassador to France. He proceeded to set up his own network of undercover agents in France, Italy, Spain and the Low Countries. The late Cecil Williamson, who worked for British Intelligence during World War II and later ran a witchcraft museum, told this writer that Walsingham often used witches as spies.

The Mysterious Dr Dee

One of the famous occultists he is known to have recruited was Queen Elizabeth’s court astrologer and the magical architect of the British Empire, the Welsh magician Dr John Dee. Walsingham was involved in the machinations for the proposed marriage of the Duc d’Anjou and Elizabeth. At the spy master’s personal recommendation, the queen dispatched Dee to France with orders to report back on the progress of the marriage negotiations. The magus travelled to the Duchy of Lorraine and drew up the birth charts of both the Duc and his brother, who was also regarded as a possible husband for the English monarch. Dr Dee, probably influenced by Walsingham, diplomatically reported back to London that the stars suggested a political alliance would be far wiser than matrimony and the queen took his advice.

In 1573 Sir Francis returned to London and became a privy councillor. This placed him at the heart of government and he proceeded to set up what amounted to the first organised foreign espionage service to operate from England. In 1566 he had put in place a pan-European network of spies extending as far to the east as Turkey and Russia, where Dr Dee reported on the goings-on at the Tsar’s court. This network mostly gathered intelligence on the military activities of the Spanish, who were England’s primary enemies at this time. Walsingham was also responsible for foiling the Catholic plot whose exposure led to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Using Dr Dee’s psychic powers, he was apparently able to discover that the plotters were passing secret messages to the imprisoned Scottish queen hidden in bottles of wine.

While travelling in Europe in 1562, Dr Dee had come across a book written by Abbot Trimethus of Spanhiem (1462-1516). This was a guide to writing ciphers and secret codes for magical purposes and Dee informed Sir William Cecil about his discovery. On his return to England Dr Dee adapted the abbot’s cryptography and gave it to Sir Francis Walsingham for use by his secret agents. He also passed on the political and military intelligence he had acquired during his travels across Europe. It has been alleged that Dee used the famous Enochian magical alphabet as a code to disguise this information. If he had been arrested his captors would not have understood it and dismissed it as nonsense.

In 1587 Dee even claimed he had received a spirit message from one of his angelic contacts concerning a threat to the English Fleet. The message said that a group of disguised Frenchmen working for the Spaniards was secretly visiting the Forest of Dean. The forest was the centre for English ship-building and the French agents planned to bribe disloyal foresters to burn it down. Dr Dee sent his supernatural intelligence to Walsingham and the saboteurs, who were masquerading as squatters, were arrested.

Information supplied to Sir Francis Walsingham from his European spy network convinced him that a Spanish armada would be launched against England in 1588. He asked Dee to use his knowledge of astrology to calculate the weather prospects for an invasion. The magus told him there would an impending disaster in Europe caused by a devastating storm. When news of this prophecy was leaked and reached Spain, naval recruitment fell and there were desertions of sailors from the Spanish Fleet. In Lisbon an astrologer who repeated the prediction was charged with spreading false information. In an act of psychological warfare, Dr Dee also informed Emperor Rudolf of Bohemia (the modern Czech Republic) and King Stephen of Poland that the predicted storm would “cause the fall of a mighty empire.” Rudolf, who was an occultist and Dee’s patron when he stayed in Bohemia, passed on the warning to the Spanish ambassador.

It is a fact that in 1588 a great storm did scatter the ships of the Spanish Armada in the English Channel and aided the English victory. This metrological event was popularly credited to a magical ritual performed by the buccaneer Sir Francis Drake on the cliffs at Plymouth. Superstitious people believed Drake was a wizard and sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for success over the Spanish. It is claimed that he also organised several covens of witches to work magically to raise the storm and prevent the invasion. Meanwhile, as a result of scrying in his shewstone or crystal, Dr Dee saw a symbolic vision of a castle with its drawbridge drawn up (England) and the image of the elemental king of fire. As a result he urged the Navy to employ fire-ships against the Armada and they did so with good results.

After Sir Francis Walsingham’s death in 1590, and the ascension to the English throne of the Scottish king James, Dr John Dee fell into royal disfavour. The new king had an unhealthy obsession with witchcraft and his early reign was dominated by this preoccupation. It led him to employ the Secret Service in his own personal vendetta against suspected witches. James I ordered its agents to hunt down alleged practitioners of witchcraft and expose their alleged plots against the monarchy. One of those involved was the Earl of Bothwell, accused of high treason for organising a coven of Scottish witches to work magic against the king in an attempt to seize the throne. To assist his secret agents in their new witch-hunting activities, King James persuaded Parliament in 1604 to pass a new and stronger Witchcraft Act to deal with the problem. The Bill was rushed through and it was made law within three months.

Dashwood & the Hellfire Club

In the 18^th century the Secret Service became concerned at the activities of the so-called ‘Hellfire Club’ founded by Sir Francis Dashwood, later the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a close friend and political adviser of King George III. As a young man Dashwood went on the Grand Tour of Europe that was compulsory for aristocrats and he was initiated into a Masonic lodge in France. While visiting Italy he developed anti-Catholic views, violently broke up a celebration of the Mass and insulted the Pope. Even though he was an aristocrat, Dashwood was disgusted at the vast wealth of the Roman Church compared with the poverty of its devoted worshippers. He also became fascinated by classical mythology and decorated his country house at West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire with murals, paintings and statues of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses.

Sir Francis Dashwood founded a secret society called the Order of the Friars of St Francis of Medmenham (more popularly known as the Hellfire Club) named after the abbey he had purchased on the banks of the River Thames where its meetings were held. Rumours circulated in the coffee houses of London that the Friars practised sexual orgies featuring aristocratic ladies and prostitutes dressed up as nuns. There were also satanic rites such as Black Masses where the naked body of a noblewoman acted as an altar. However, according to one senior member of the Hellfire Club, this occult mummery was just an amusing diversion for the dandies. The inner circle of the Order was actually dedicated to the serious revival of the pagan Eleusian Mysteries and the worship of the Bona Dea or Great Mother Goddess. Dashwood’s present-day descendant, also called Sir Francis, confirmed this fact in a BBC radio interview some years ago,

It has been claimed secret agents infiltrated the Hellfire Club because of its many famous members. They included the Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu, who was the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Paymaster General Thomas Potter, several members of Parliament, the Lord Mayor of London, a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Earl of Bute, who was the prime minister, and it has been claimed even the Prince of Wales. At least four members of the group were known to be actively involved in espionage. They was a radical MP called John Wilkes, a transvestite French diplomat, Chevalier D’Eon de Beaumont, the American statesman and philosopher Benjamin Franklin, and Sir Francis Dashwood himself. Wilkes had allegedly recruited the chevalier into the British Secret Service.

During his stay in Russia on the Grand Tour Dashwood had spied on the court of the Tsar through his close friendship with the Grand Duchess Catherine. In Italy he gathered intelligence on the exiled Stuart dynasty and their supporters, although the head of the British Secret Service in Rome believed Dashwood was a Jacobite agent. In fact he was only pretending to support the Stuart cause and was passing on information about their activities directly back to London. In later years Sir Francis and Benjamin Franklin were involved in a clandestine plan to reconcile the American colonists and the British government to prevent the War of Independence.

Rudolf Hess & the British Occult Connection

During World War II British Intelligence invited many occultists into its ranks because it needed their specialist knowledge and skills. The assistant director of Naval Intelligence during the war was Lt. Commander Ian Fleming RN, best known later as a thriller writer and the creator of the famous fictional spy James Bond 007. Fleming was also interested in astrology and numerology and he was a friend of the notorious magician Aleister Crowley, who had worked for MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service) during World War I and in the 1920s and 1930s spying on Germans with occult interests (see ‘The Magus Was A Spy’ by Dr Richard Spence in New Dawn No. 105, November-December 2007).

Ian Fleming conceived an audacious plan to lure a high-ranking member of the German government into defecting to Britain so as to provide a morale-boosting propaganda coup. This idea had been inspired by a novel written by Fleming’s brother, Peter, called Flying Visit (Jonathan Cape 1940). Peter Fleming was a journalist and also worked for both MI5 (the Security Service) and the propaganda section of the clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE). The novel imagined that Hitler’s plane crash-landed in England and he was captured. The Reichminister and deputy fuehrer himself, Rudolf Hess, was chosen as a suitable candidate for the actual plot. This was because he was a supporter of peace with Britain and was also under the influence of astrologers and occultists. It was believed this could be used against him.

Commander Fleming recreated The Link, a defunct Anglo-German friendship society of the 1930s that had a wealthy membership of Nazi sympathisers drawn from the British Establishment. Ironically, or perhaps coincidentally, The Link had been founded by Admiral Sir Barry Domville, an ex-director of the Naval Intelligence Department (NID), after he retired in 1930. Domville was arrested and interned in May 1940 because MI5 believed he was plotting a fascist coup d’etat supported by aristocratic peacemongers. The admiral was a friend of Major-General J.F.C. ‘Boney’ Fuller CBE, a famous military analyst who designed the tactics for the first tank battle in World War I. Fuller also invented the concept of blitzkrieg used so successfully in World War II by the German Panzers. Fuller was an open admirer of Hitler (he attended the fuehrer’s 50^th birthday party in 1939), a leading member of Sir Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF), a friend of Ian Fleming and a leading disciple of Aleister Crowley. In the 1930s Fuller formed the extreme-right wing Nordic League (aka the White Knights of Britain), allegedly established by Nazi agents. However in the 1950s he was a member of a MI6 supported group of Russian émigrés engaged in anti-communist propaganda. It has been suggested that Fuller was not interned during the war with other leading fascists such as Mosley and Domville because he was a MI6 double-agent.

Ian Fleming’s idea was to persuade the German High Command in Berlin, and especially Rudolf Hess, that when war broke out The Link had not disbanded but had gone underground. It had allegedly regrouped and recruited even more prominent pro-Nazi members in the British Establishment including aristocrats and royalty. These were represented by the NID as influential people with the political muscle to overthrow prime minister Winston Churchill’s national wartime government, call a ceasefire and agree to a peace treaty with Germany. Under its terms Britain would keep control of its Empire and Germany would have free reign in occupied Europe. The Nazis also hoped that British troops would be sent to fight alongside the German Wehrmacht and the SS against the Soviet Union in a joint anti-communist crusade.

Hitler did not want to invade and occupy Britain. Instead he would have preferred to negotiate a treaty with a sympathetic new government in London. It has been suggested that the only reason the fuehrer abandoned Operation Sea Lion – the proposed invasion of Southern England – and instead invaded the Soviet Union was to force Churchill to accept peace terms. If the Red Army had been defeated Britain would truly have been standing alone, as Hitler did not believe the Americans had the political will to enter the war. Unfortunately he underestimated the ability and resolve of the Soviets to defend their motherland and also the clandestine support that the US was already offering Great Britain.

The NID plot to ensnare Rudolf Hess used bogus astrological predictions combined with political intelligence. Hess was persuaded that a Scottish aristocrat, the Duke of Hamilton, was willing to negotiate peace terms on behalf of the influential people at the top of British society who wanted to end the war. The duke had met Hess at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 and the deputy fuehrer for some reason thought he was a member of the surviving Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Ian Fleming commissioned an astrologer to produce a faked astrological forecast indicating that 10 May 1941 would be a propitious date for Rudolf Hess to fly to Scotland and meet secretly with the Duke of Hamilton and other members of the so-called British ‘peace party’. Hess’ occult advisors had also told him there would be an unusual planetary conjunction on 10 May. On that day six planets would be aligned in the zodiac sign of Taurus and conjoined to the full moon. At the same time Hitler’s chart showed ‘malefic’ astrological aspects. Hess saw himself in the role of a messianic hero saving Germany from possible future defeat by making peace with the British. All the (false) reports reaching the deputy fuehrer about the political situation in England and the astrological aspects convinced him that his mission would be a success.

Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland on 10 May 1941 in the firm belief that on landing he would be met by the Duke of Hamilton and the Duke of Kent and whisked off to London for a private audience with King George VI. He had been convinced by the misinformation fed to him by British Intelligence that these three men represented a genuine peace movement capable of removing the warmonger Churchill and agreeing to German terms. Hess had also previously met the Duke of Windsor when he had visited Berlin before the war. As a result Hess was persuaded that some members of the German-descended royal family were sympathetic to Nazism. Certainly the Duke of Saxo-Coburg, formerly Prince Charles Edward, a grandson of Queen Victoria and a close friend of the Duke of Windsor, had willingly embraced Nazism. In fact Hitler had appointed him as the head of the German branch of the Red Cross that was responsible for exterminating the mentally sick and physically disabled.

Unfortunately instead of meeting pro-Nazi aristocrats and royals when he landed, Hess was captured by a local farmer and a Home Guard unit. They handed him over to the police and he was transferred to London to be interrogated by MI5. Unfortunately the British government completely mishandled the capture of Hess. It has been suggested that Churchill believed the subterfuge by the NID and SIS suggesting leading members of the British Establishment might be pro-German may have been based on fact. For that reason the government did not capitalise on Hess’ ‘peace mission’. The German High Command had also disowned him and said that his flight had been unauthorised. They also suggested that Hess might be insane so his value for propaganda purposes was undermined and diminished.

Rudolf Hess’ apparent defection caused widespread panic in Berlin concerning the influence of occultism on the Nazi Party. The Gestapo immediately launched Operation Aktion Hess. On the direct orders of Hitler, they rounded up hundreds of occultists, psychics and astrologers, including Hess’s leading occult advisor Ernst Schulte-Strathaus. In June 1941 a decree was issued banning all public performances of clairvoyance, astrology, fortune-telling or telepathy. Anybody associated with Hess and his esoteric interests was thrown into concentration camps and occult secret societies were closed down. Because of staff shortages in the Gestapo, officers from the Naval Intelligence Service were drafted in to interrogate some of the arrested psychics. It has been claimed that they recruited some of them for secret operations using dowsing on maps with pendulums to hunt down British submarines.

It has also been claimed that Ian Fleming and the NID was involved in a plot to silence the Spiritualist medium Helen Duncan, the penultimate person to be charged under the old Witchcraft Act of 1736. She was arrested in 1944 after holding a séance during which allegedly the spirit of a dead sailor from the sinking of the HMS Bolham physically manifested. As the news of the loss had not been publicly released, and the Admiralty was keeping it secret for morale purposes, Duncan became a target for the security services. She and other psychics were regarded as a serious threat to national security and they became the object of a MI5/NID dirty tricks operation to silence leaks. This suggests that the Intelligence Services actually believed these mediums had genuine powers. Duncan’s arrest and subsequent trial, which in fact was condemned by Winston Churchill as a waste of public funds, was allegedly meant to deter other mediums. The War Office was paranoid that military secrets about the forthcoming D-Day landings in Normandy would be revealed at séances and become public knowledge or passed to the Germans.

Bibliography:

Derek Wilson, Sir Francis Walsingham (Constable 2007)

Richard Deacon, John Dee (Muller 1968)

Donald McCormack, The Hellfire Club (Jarrolds 1958)

P. Mannix, The Hellfire Club (Four Square 1961)

M.R.D. Foot, SOE: The Special Operations Executive 1940-46 (BBC publications 1984)

J.M. McKenzie The Secret History of the SOE 1940-1945 (St Ermins Press 2000)

Nigel West, The Secret War: The Story of SOE (Hodder & Stoughton 1992)

Richard Deacon, The History of British Secret Service (Frederick Muller 1979)

Donald McCormick, The Life of Ian Fleming (Peter Owen 1993)

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MICHAEL HOWARD has had a lifelong interest in intelligence matters and the strange links between the occult and politics. Since 1976 he has edited The Cauldron newsletter (http://www.the-cauldron.org.uk/) featuring witchcraft, folklore and Earth Mysteries. He is the author of Secret Societies: Their Influence and Power from Antiquity to the Present Day, published by Destiny Books USA.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 107 (Mar-Apr 2008).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
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© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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—

In 2001 as Australians celebrated the centenary of federation, no attention was paid to the role of mystic thinkers and esoteric ideas in Australian history. The vast majority of Australians know nothing of the “inner side” of their country’s political, cultural and religious evolution.

How many people are aware, for example, that the call sign of Sydney’s pioneering radio station 2GB stands for the martyred sixteenth century mage Giordano Bruno (GB)? Or that Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, a major force in the foundation of the Australian Commonwealth, was heavily involved in spiritualism and an enthusiastic student of Madame Blavatsky’s writings? Who knows of Walter Burley Griffin’s use of occult principles in the design of Canberra, the national capital? Who today remembers the Star Amphitheatre built at Sydney’s Balmoral Beach to welcome the “World Teacher, when He Comes”? Or that in the 1920s Sydney was proclaimed a “great theosophical centre”, home of the renowned and controversial occult teacher, the Bishop Charles Webster Leadbeater. A prolific writer on metaphysics and one of the world’s greatest clairvoyants, Leadbeater predicted the “emergence of the new ‘sub-race’ in Australia and New Zealand.”

In Other Temples, Other Gods, Nevill Drury and Gregory Tillett observe that, “despite its relative youth as a modern nation,” Australia, “has had a colourful and active history of occultists and occult movements.”1

Some of the leaders of progressive politics in Australian were also students of esoteric wisdom. In 1892 the labour organiser William Lane’s political novel The Workingman’s Paradise was published in Sydney. In it the working girl Nellie says scornfully, “There is no God. How can there be?” But the mysterious socialist Geisner rebukes her in words straight from Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine. There is at least “the imperishable breath of the universe”. For Geisner explains, “the Purpose of Life is self-consciousness…. God seeking to know God. Eternal Force one immeasurable Thought. Humanity the developing consciousness of the little fragment of the universe within our ken.”2

Disillusioned with the socialist movement in Australia, William Lane (1861-1917) established a communalist settlement in South America. A non-smoker and non-drinker, Lane was also a vegetarian who recognised the importance of a healthier attitude to diet. Inspired by Lane’s vision and example, hundreds of Australian workers sailed with him in 1893 to the “New Australia” colony in Paraguay.

The first Gnostic study circle was established in Melbourne in 1886. A year earlier the Reverend Charles Strong led most of his congregation out of Victorian Presbyterianism to found a native, ethical church, the “Australian Church”. Strong’s Australian Church sponsored the Religious Science Club, a forum for all manner of independent thought and spiritual enquiry.

AUSTRALIA & THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

Such was the interest in mysticism and spiritualism at the turn of the century that Australia came to prominence in the largest international occult movement of the day – the Theosophical Society.

“The occult movement which achieved the greatest publicity in Australian history,” explain Drury and Tillett, “and for which Australia was an international focus for many years, was the Theosophical Society.”3

In the early 1890s study circles devoted to Theosophy as presented in the texts of Madame Blavatsky had formed around Australia, leading to the founding of the Australasian Section of the Theosophical Society in 1895.

As Drury and Tillett explain:

The progress of the T.S. [Theosophical Society] was steady; lectures given, meetings held, leaflets and publicity material produced, and journals published. Lodges were established throughout Australia…. But it was the lecture tours of one man which established Theosophy as a movement of public interest in Australia: Charles Webster Leadbeater toured the country in 1905, following a lecture tour of several years in the U.S.A. during which he attracted thousands of enthusiastic listeners, and in 1914 he settled in Sydney, remaining there more or less permanently until his death in 1934.4

By the 1920s there were more paid-up members of the Theosophical Society than members of the Communist Party of Australia. The twenties witnessed a surge of Theosophical activism as Australian Theosophists sort to present a vibrant alternative to the mainstream, including the growing political ideologies of bolshevism and fascism. In addition to the public lectures, lodge meetings, and libraries, there was the Society owned Sydney Radio station 2GB as well as a successful publishing enterprise. Journals with titles like Advance! Australia and Theosophy in Australia, presented the society’s views and analysis of turbulent world events. Writing in Advance! Australia, one of the society’s leaders called for:

purified patriotism, the promotion of a noble type of Australian citizenship, vitally Australian, eagerly conscious of Australia’s specific place and part in the building of the future, no less eagerly conscious of the wider and equally vital citizenship involved in Australia’s membership of the British Commonwealth, and recognising too… there is a World citizenship, the obligations of which may no longer be ignored.5

Walter Burley Griffin wrote of “Building for Nature” and the “outdoor arts in Australia” in the pages of Advance! Australia. Together with Marion Mahoney Griffin, he set up an “organic” community at Castlecrag, Sydney. Griffin hoped for the awakening of “disused powers of the universal mind” and social renewal as people turned inward to reconnect with “the possibilities of co-operation between head and mind in social service and creative effort.”6

Adyar Hall, the Theosophical Society’s impressive Sydney centre, served as the meeting place for many original social, political and spiritual groups, among them “The Australia First Movement”. Founded by P.R. Stephensen, a one time associate of Aleister Crowley, Australia First campaigned against Australian involvement in the Second World War.
A.R. Mills, a Melbourne solicitor active in Australia First, had been on the fringe of the Theosophical Society. During the 1920s and 1930s, Mills formed the world’s first Odinist religion, a mixture of Nordic mythology and occultism.

A persistent notion running through all the organisations and individuals concerned with esoteric wisdom is the conviction Australia has a special role to play in the dawn of a new Golden Age. Although popularised mainly by the Theosophists, the idea of Australia’s secret occult destiny surfaces in various mystical circles. In the early decades of the twentieth century the tireless Veni Cooper-Mathieson who founded – among other orders and institutions – the Home of Truth Esoteric College, the Church Universal, the Universal Truth Publication Company, taught that Australia was the “land of the dawning.”

AUSTRALIA: HOME OF A NEW HUMANITY

Madame Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society, is credited with developing the theory that humanity evolves through a sequence of Seven Root Races, “four of which have already lived their day, the fifth still exists, and two are to appear in the future.”7

In a series of lectures delivered in Sydney in August 1915, Bishop Leadbeater proclaimed “Australia and New Zealand as the home of a new sub-race.” He had detected in Australia “children and young people of a distinctly new type.” A new antipodean human type characterised by intuition and the powers of synthesis. Jill Roe in her book on Theosophy in Australia writes:

Leadbeater urged his audience to align themselves with evolutionary law, assuring them that present confusions were merely transitional. He held that, despite distance and a small population, the Antipodes provided a favourable site for inauguration of a new era of brotherhood and cooperation, being neither decadent like Britain nor overblown by capitalist pride like America, and not yet delivered into unworkably democratic systems by ‘too young souls’. There was crudity, and reverse class legislation, but the wholesome environment held promise.8

In Leadbeater’s view, however: “It would be important to purify child-rearing practices, by abstinence from alcohol, meat and tobacco, and to educate the next generation correctly…. The reward would be the coincidence of a new sub-race and the World Teacher in fifteen or twenty years’ time.”9

By embracing techniques of physical and mental purification, Leadbeater believed in a couple of generations the whole of Australia would be controlled by a new people, who would constitute “what in Europe we should call the aristocracy of the country; that is to say, the best types”.10

Of course the Bishop’s message was not taken up by the Australian people and no new “aristocracy” emerged to lead the Antipodes into a new Golden Age. Was there any truth in Leadbeater’s predictions?

Nations, like individuals, have choices that eventually determine outcomes far beyond what can be recognised in the immediate. A collective – a group soul – like the individual soul must decide with which impulses to align. Nations can choose either the forces of materialism leading to decay and atrophy, or the higher influences of the spirit capable of leading to a New Beginning. In the case of Australia and New Zealand, the birth of the ‘new people’ was limited and distorted due to the infection of Mammonism. By concentrating on the search for outer happiness, following the path of the kingdoms of this world, the Australian nation stifled the quest for inner transcendence and the Kingdom of God.

By taking the way of materialism Australians cut themselves off from the subtle influences of the spirit and cosmic destiny. Manning Clark, Australia’s greatest historian, expressed the spiritual crisis of modern Australia when he said:

The decline of faith begat nihilism, and nihilism begat hedonism. It looked as though in the contest between Mammon and ‘millennial Eden’ Mammon had won. The dreams of all those who had migrated to the great south land had evaporated. The Aborigine had been corrupted and debased by contact with the white man. The voices of the Catholic who had spoken of a land dedicated to the Holy Spirit, the Dutch Protestants who had called for the discovery of a land that would yield ‘uncommonly large profit’, and the pleas of the followers of the Enlightenment with their faith in human perfectibility, had all dropped from a roar to a whisper, Mammon had won: Mammon had infected the ancient continent of Australia. The dreams of humanity had ended in an age of ruins.11

Yet in every generation, and in every nation, there is always a remnant of men and women who have not succumbed fully to negative earthly bonds. They are the silent ones who stand among the ruins of the modern era, living testimonies to the higher world of the spirit. The ability of any nation or people to realise their spiritual potential and partake in the dawn of a new Golden Age depends on the vitality of this remnant.

Have Australia and New Zealand forfeited their occult birthright?

Certainly some of the ‘new people’ characterised by intuition and the powers of synthesis are found today in Australia, as well as in many other places throughout the world. The future depends on the ability of this remnant to impact the greater society and become a new Noah’s Ark capable of surviving the coming times of tribulation and transition. True, nearly every nation has a myth promising them a leading role in the dawn of a New Age. The universality of this myth in no way detracts from the responsibility it places on a people with ‘ears to hear’ the message of the times. Every people are called to turn within and align with the New Era. And Australasia is not impervious to this call, to this great Thought.

Over a century ago, in 1892, the Australian socialist and mystic William Lane wrote:

The brute-mother who would not be comforted because her young was taken gave birth in the end to the Christs who have surrendered all because the world sorrows. And we, in our yearning and our aspirations, in our longings and our strugglings and our miseries, may engender even in these later days a Christ whom the world will not crucify….12

The earth still awaits the revelation of the Christ people, the new humanity destined to carry out the great work in which we all have a part to play. At the end of his book, William Lane challenged his readers with words that speak to us today:

Let us not be deceived! It is in ourselves that the weakness is. It is in ourselves that the real fight must take place between the Old and the New. It is because we ourselves value our miserable lives, because we ourselves cling to the old fears and kneel still before the old idols, that the Thought still remains a thought only, that it does not create the New Order which will make of this weary world a Paradise indeed.13

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Footnotes:

1. Nevill Drury and Gregory Tillet, Other Temples, Other Gods

2. As quoted in Jill Roe, Beyond Belief, Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939

3. Nevill Drury and Gregory Tillett, Other Temples, Other Gods

4. Ibid.

5. As quoted in Jill Roe, Beyond Belief, Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939

6. Ibid.

7. H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine

8. Jill Roe, Beyond Belief, Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939

9. As quoted in Jill Roe, Beyond Belief, Theosophy in Australia 1879-1939

10. As quoted in Gregory Tillett, The Elder Brother: A Biography of Charles Webster Leadbeater

11. Professor Manning Clark, A Short History of Australia

12. ‘John Miller’ (William Lane), The Workingman’s Paradise

13. Ibid.

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MEHMET SABEHEDDIN is a long time contributor to New Dawn magazine. He is conducting research into ancient wisdom traditions.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 3.

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
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—

Sex… a word with multiple meanings, manifestations and images that expresses the most fundamental instinct of the animal kingdom. For us mortals sexuality is the expression of how we experience ourselves as sexual beings biologically, physically, emotionally and so on.

The implication of this word, so popular it is the most searched for on the internet, can cover nearly all aspects of the human condition, embracing cultural, political, philosophical and spiritual issues. Regarding human sexuality, Leonardo Boccadoro and Sabina Carulli state:

Human sexuality is not simply imposed by instinct or stereotypical conducts, as it happens in animals, but it is influenced both by superior mental activity and by social, cultural, educational and normative characteristics of those places where the subjects grow up and their personality develops. Consequently, the analysis of sexual sphere must be based on the convergence of several lines of development such as affectivity, emotions and relations.1

However, apart from being the source of life, it can also mutate into a harbinger of demise for some. An endless tale of pleasure and obsession, evoking sublime beauty that can so easily become one’s worst nightmare. Some of the greatest achievements of humankind have been inspired by this primordial urge and sensation. It has dictated the course of history, both materially and immaterially. A wonder of human existence that has yet to be fully unravelled.

For many it is the vehicle of procreation, whereas for others merely a source of pleasure. Some have been inspired by it to pursue and develop spiritual paths and exercises endeavouring to transcend themselves and to partake in the ‘other’. Its power has also been used as the most dreadful weapon to destroy, humiliate and enslave. Despite these differences and many more, our relation to it is the one uniting feature of humanity that we all accept and recognise. Even the absence of it is a reaffirmation of its existence.

What is peculiar to modern societies is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploring it as the secret.2

Although it is evident from recovered art and artefacts, human achievements and monuments, that sex has always been a central feature of our existence in all its dimensions, never has it occupied such a powerful, ambiguous and obsessive presence as it does in our day and age. Wherever one turns, one is confronted by it, seduced, aroused and terrorised by it. Never has it been so available but also distant, like a spectre flirting with us elusively.

It is no wonder that sexuality has become intertwined with another fascinating, exciting and terrifying feature of human existence that has yet to be understood and fully accepted – magic. Two labyrinths of darklight becoming one…

A Short History of Sex Magic

Sexuality and the occult arts have long been in a state of unholy and tempting matrimony in Western imagination. Since at least the days of the alleged Gnostic heretical acts of worship, the continuing persecution of the Templars and the Cathars and the witch frenzy of the Middle Ages, it is evident that illicit sexual behaviour has easily, but not always objectively, been linked to acts of magic, or what the accusers believed to be acts of magic.

Beyond the realm of ecclesiastical condemnations and mislead evocations of an ungodly pagan past, sexuality has flourished within schools of Western esotericism. From the Jewish mystical Kabala to the Renaissance magic of Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno, and the sexual mysticism of Emanuel Swedenborg during the era of the Enlightenment. All of these embraced in their own individual way the concept of the physical union of male and female sexuality as being an earthly reflection of the conjoining of the active and passive aspects of the Divine. But it was not until the middle of the 19th century that the relationship between esoteric beliefs and sexuality actually manifested into a series of practices, detailed attitudes, and a specific magical category of its own.

Hugh B. Urban, in his exceptional book Magia Sexualis – Sex, Magic and Liberation in Western Esotericism, clearly identifies the superficiality and ignorant approach contemporary Westerners have towards sexual magic:

Judging by the titles in most popular bookstores or the rapidly proliferating Web sites dotting the cyber space, sexual magic is understood fairly in simple terms by most American readers: it is most commonly defined as the ‘art of extended orgasm’, or ‘peak experience in sexual loving’. According to Margo Anand, a widely read New Age author, “sexual energy can be refined and expanded, transporting you to realms of orgasmic delight that offer an endless variety of exquisite experiences. This is a type of magic.”

The question remains: why did sex magic flourish in the middle to the late 19th century and continues up until this day?

Despite many attempts on behalf of ‘authorities’ who endeavour to present sex magic as being the purest expression of an ancient heritage of Western esotericism and a well-kept occult secret that has reached us from the dawn of ages, this magical practice – like many of those who advocate it – is not a rejection of secular modernity but rather an affirmation of many of the ideals of modernity. These ideals are reflections of ideas such as progress, the affirmation of the individual as being an ultimate force in the universe, the recognition of the multidimensional and powerful reality of sex, a scientific endeavour to unravel the secrets of the universe and the overwhelming potential of free will as a form of liberation from suppressive institutions. This also coincides with the endeavour to re-enchant a demystified and secularised modern industrial world through the occult.

I am not implying that sex magic is a product of fantastical renderings superficially relating to a glorified past of arcane knowledge and constant sacred communion with the Divine. Indeed, contemporary occultism has been effectively inspired by esoteric traditions of the past, reaffirmed, rediscovered and reinterpreted in this day and age, and has to be admired for its courage to seek out means to adapt esotericism to a disenchanted world of secular thought and scientific cynicism.

Neither am I proclaiming that sex magic is merely a mask for movements of social change, implying that all ideas and practices revolving around sexual magical applications are romantic decorations of new radical movements that aspire only to cultural liberation and social transformation.

It is my belief that for sex magicians, their sacred art and science is one fully preoccupied with a search for esoteric truths through their personal relationship with the Absolute and the magical universe they inhabit. It might be a combination of effects, both socio-cultural and supranatural, which manifested sex magic into what it is in contemporary occultism.

The second question that remains is why so much attention has been drawn towards sex magic. According to occultists, sex magic transcends the principles of hedonism and in its unveiled essence is a powerful manifestation of magic aligned with cosmic forces and correspondences. The rationale behind this is that if non-spiritual sex can create new life, the intentional ritualised form of sexual intercourse can give birth to the greatest supernatural effects and results. As Aleister Crowley stated, “the root idea is that any form of procreation other than normal is likely to produce results of a magical character.”3

The Magical Eroticism of Paschal Beverly Randolph

The most important figure in the rise of modern sexual magic was arguably the fascinating yet generally neglected figure of Paschal Beverly Randolph. Born in 1825 to a wealthy Virginian father and a slave from Madagascar, Randolph was a poor, self-educated free black raised in the poorer parts of New York. He was orphaned at a young age and ran away from his foster parents to explore a vast range of new spiritual traditions and to travel the world.

Through his journeys in Egypt and the Middle East, he claims to have been initiated by various seers and holy men, including Egyptian mages and Indian Brahmins. Upon his return to the United States he became involved with various Spiritualist movements and was involved in political movements championing the cause and future of African Americans. These ideas of liberation would become a major theme in his spiritual writings and understanding of sex magic, especially in regards to gender equality.

He also founded a new religious order, which he labelled the Brotherhood of Eulis. Although he had been influenced by European Rosicrucian orders, he claimed his order would surpass them and that the core of their spiritual teachings had a sexual magical element. Unfortunately, Randolph’s life ended after a series of tragic events. An accident left him invalid, and this led him to excessive amounts of intoxication. Suspicious that his wife had betrayed him, he committed suicide in 1875.

Randolph’s work on sexual magic took place during the era of Victorian America, where the tremendous power of sexuality was slowly being recognised scientifically and socially, where it was praised within the confines of marriage and condemned outside of it. It was also an era of radical social movements and the foundation of various new religious movements, especially the Spiritualist movement, all of which were concerned with the spiritual side of sexuality but not all in the same fashion.

Randolph’s main contribution to Western occultism concerns sex. Apart from being an expert in the cure of sexual diseases and dysfunctions, he developed a system and practice of sexual magic that, as he claimed, could achieve all manners of marvels, both worldly and otherworldly. He saw his system of sexual magic as a path to a millennial new world.

Randolph’s teachings would later on inspire and influence a host of new magical orders, such as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and the Ordo Templis Orientis, and even various forms of sex magic now available in nearly every mainstream bookstore.

Randolph’s system of sexual magic has been described by Hugh B. Urban as “a system of magical eroticism, or affectional alchemy.” As Randolph continuously stresses:

LOVE LIETH AT THE FOUNDATION… and Love is convertibly passion, enthusiasm affection heat, fire, SOUL, God… The nuptive moment, the instant wherein the germs of a possible new being are lodged… is the most solemn, serious, powerful and energetic moment he can ever know on earth.4

Randolph believed that the sexual drive is the most potent and fundamental force in the universe, due to its natural attraction between the active/positive and the passive/negative. Following Franz Anton Mesmer’s pattern of thought, Randolph understood the male and female as opposite yet complimentary electromagnetic forces, with the male genitals being the positive and the female the negative. Because sexual attraction is the most potent and fundamental force in nature, the experience of orgasm is a very primordial, powerful and critical moment in human consciousness. It is the key to magical power. At the moment of climax the soul is exposed to the energies of the universe and new life pours from the spiritual into the material realm. At this point anything that is truly willed can happen.

The moment when a man discharges his seed – his essential self – into a womb is the most solemn, energetic and powerful moment he can ever know on earth; if under the influence of mere lust it be done, the discharge is suicidal… At the moment his seminal glands open, his nostrils expand, and while the seed is going from his soul to her womb he breathes one of two atmospheres, either fetid damnation from the border spaces or Divine Energy from heavens. Whatsoever he shall truly will and internally pray for when Love… is in the ascendant, that moment the prayer’s response comes down.5

A unique feature of his sexual techniques, apart from the employment and magical use of the orgasm as a means of acquiring otherworldly sympathies, was his emphasis on the mutuality and equality of male and female in their loving union. All forms of sexual abuse within the Victorian framework, whether through masturbation or excessive intercourse, drained the body of the vital energy required for the undertaking of a sexual magical operation.

Although he was accused by many as promoting promiscuity and sexual license under the guise of his sexual magical teachings, Randolph was indeed a very conservative character. His practice of sexual magic is anything but mere hedonistic license. Sex, for Randolph, is strictly for married couples in a state of pure love.

Free-love, disguise it as you may, means sensual license, no more, no less; and wherever its doctrine prevail there will you find either a worn-out debauchee, a freedom-shrieking woman of faded charms,… or brainly men, actually heartless unemotive, spasmodically lecherous.6

Although for many in 19th century Victorian America Randolph might appear to be a radical spiritual antinomian threatening the moral and spiritual foundation of society, his teachings on spiritualised love and sexual magic reflect and embody many of the basic sexual values of his day, both physically and spiritually. His system is unlike the sexual techniques developed by many magicians who were inspired by him. His teachings could be no further than the sex ‘magick’ of the notorious Aleister Crowley.

Sex Magick and the Great Beast

When one conjures up images and sensations of sexual magic, one generally stumbles upon Aleister Crowley before anyone else. Known in the press of his day as “the wickedest man in the world” and self-proclaimed “Great Beast 666,” Crowley was the object of much scandal and moral outrage. Rejecting the prudence of Victorian society, Crowley saw sex magic as a supreme source of magical power. Unlike Randolph, Crowley did not advocate sexual magic as being confined to a state of holy matrimony, and instead made use of ‘outraging’ sexual acts, such as masturbation and homosexual intercourse, which shocked and horrified British society.

However, despite being the sexual hedonistic deviant and the spawn of Satan as presented by the popular press of the early 20th century, Crowley’s importance and influence on Western occultism should not be overlooked. His rejection of Victorian morality and his identification of sex as being the supreme magical source introduced new dimensions to the study and practice of the occult. His study of Buddhism and Hinduism transmitted new ideas and techniques that affected the Western Esoteric Tradition in a tremendous way. These and many more have made him one of the most influential figures in the revival of magical traditions.

Born Edward Alexander Crowley in 1875, he was the son of a highly zealous and prudent father who was very well-established in the excessively puritanical Plymouth Brethren. He was raised in a strict Christian home in late Victorian England. Crowley, apart from turning to the occult and sexual excess, was also a prolific poet and an avid mountain climber.

Despite all excesses and taking delight in the accusations hurled at him, he was according to one of his biographers, Lawrence Sutin, an enigmatic, gifted and misunderstood character, and “one of the rare human beings… to dare to prophesy a distinctive new creed and to devote himself… to the promulgation of that creed.”7 He studied at the University of Cambridge and inherited a lot of money, which he spent travelling the world, publishing his works and wasting on excess.

He was first initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but his relationship with the Order and one of its founding members, MacGregor Mathers, ended in turmoil and controversy. From 1899 onwards, he began travelling to places such as India and Ceylon where he studied Hinduism, Buddhism and Yoga, and was exposed to Tantra. Although he only approached it from the naive and highly ethnocentric angle of the Orientalists of his day and age, it fuelled an interest in combining his version of magic, which he labelled magick, with sexual techniques.

In 1904 Crowley received a revelation from an entity called Aiwass, which Crowley claimed was his guardian angel. Aiwass appeared and dictated to him the Liber AL vel Legis (The Book of the Law), which claimed that Crowley was to be the herald of the third aeon of humankind – the Aeon of Horus. The infamy of him being a black magician and “the wickedest man in the world” was spawned in the period of the 1920s when he founded the Abbey of Thelema at a farmhouse in Cefalu, Sicily. The rule of this community was ‘do what thou wilt’ and in Urban’s words,

Crowley took Rabelais’ ideal a good deal further, however, by creating a utopian community in which every desire could be gratified and every impulse expressed, through free experimentation in drugs, sex and physical excess.8

By the 1940s Crowley had exhausted all his money, which he had largely spent by 1915, and his will to power. Although he continued to believe The Book of the Law might have a decisive role to play in the era to come, he spent his last years in a small guest house in London increasingly addicted to heroin until his death in 1947.

In his autobiographical account, Confessions, he wrote:

The battle will rage most fiercely around the question of sex… Mankind must learn that the sexual instinct is… ennobling. The shocking evils which we all deplore are principally due to the perversions produced by suppressions. The feeling that it is shameful and the sense of sin cause concealment, which is ignoble, and internal conflict which creates distortion, neurosis, and ends in explosion. We deliberately produce an abscess and wonder why it is full of pus… why it bursts in stench and corruption. The Book of the Law solves the sexual problem completely. Each individual has an absolute right to satisfy his sexual instinct as is physiologically proper for him.

Crowley continued the tradition of sex magic as set out by Randolph, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and the Ordo Templis Orientis, although he adapted to his own magical system. In 1910 Crowley became involved with the OTO and soon was declared the Sovereign Grand Master General of Ireland, Ioana and all the Britains.

Although the OTO were practicing sex magic before Crowley’s reception into the order, he had already revealed the secret of sexual magic in his Book of Lies. According to Crowley, the secret of sex magic is so tremendously powerful that “if this secret which is a scientific secret were perfectly understood… there would be nothing which the human imagination can conceive that not be realised in practice… If it were desired to have an element of atomic weight six times that of uranium that element could be produced.”9

Crowley’s own diary, Rex de Arte Regia, listed a series of 309 sexual magical acts for purposes both worldly and otherworldly. Also, Crowley wrote a series of rites for the OTO, with the highly dramatic ceremony of the Gnostic Mass being the most popular and central to his mystical system of Thelema within the OTO. He also revised the OTO’s initiatory degrees with the eighth degree consisting of an autoerotic sex rite, the ninth a heterosexual one and the eleventh, which he introduced, a homosexual sex rite. Peter Koenig summarises this:

Crowley’s VIIIth degree unveiled… that masturbating on a sigil of a demon or meditating upon the image of a phallus would bring power or communication with the divine being… The IXth degree was labelled heterosexual intercourse where the sexual secretions were sucked out of the vagina and when not consumed… put on a sigil to attract this or that demon to fulfil the pertinent wish… In the XIth degree, the mostly homosexual degree, one identifies oneself with an ejaculating penis. The blood (or excrements) from anal intercourse attract the spirits/demons while the sperm keeps them alive.10

It is now recognised that Crowley did have some very good knowledge of Indian Yoga and was aware of some of the key features and practices of Indian Tantra. Unlike most Orientalist scholars, he did not denounce Tantra, but instead described it as a valid form of religion and the most advanced form of Hinduism. In his works he frequently used the terms lingam and yoni, the male and female sexual organs, and he compared the IXth degree rite of the OTO with the Tantric view of semen and the rite of maithuna. However, as N. N. Bhattacharyya has argued, most Western authors and magicians, Crowley included, misinterpret and misrepresent Tantra as they only approach it in terms of its sexual elements. The difference lies in the fact that Western magical systems have placed emphasis on the act of sex from the beginning whereas in traditional Hindu Tantra sexual union is a minor part of the spiritual practices, and when it does take place it is merely only one method of awakening Shakti. Even one of Crowley’s most devoted students, Kenneth Grant, admitted that Crowley’s actual knowledge of Tantra was limited.

Crowley conceived the rational mind as an act of departing and an irregularity of the true human self. He believed he discovered with his system of sex magick a way of destroying the rational mind at the point of orgasm inducing a sense of natural trance and spiritual clarity not confined by the burden of the mundane and the rational. At this climaxing point the divine is allowed to enter into the magical consciousness of the magician. This can be compared, according to Crowley, to the transubstantiation of the elements of the Mass:

The sexual act… is the agent which dissipates the fog of self for one ecstatic moment. It is the instinctive feeling that the physical spasm is symbolic of that miracle of the Mass, by which the material wafer… is transmuted into the substance of the body.11

In The Book of Lies Crowley states:

As man loses his personality in physical love, so does the magician annihilate his divine personality in that which is beyond. In love the individuality is slain… Love death therefore, and long eagerly for it. Love destroyeth self… Love breedeth All and None in One.

Beyond the use of sex magic to acquire worldly things, Crowley believed that the purpose of sex magic was destined for achieving supreme spiritual power and the power to conceive a divine child and godlike being. Within this magical operation though, unlike Randolph, the woman, who Crowley regarded as being inferior and limited, was merely a passive vehicle for the male magician to use in his sexual magical rites.

The Bedchamber of Sex Magic

Modern sex magic has been associated with some very enigmatic, remarkable and sometimes radical personalities. Randolph and Crowley have been the ones most associated with the current of sexual magic and have influenced generations of magicians with their pioneering visions. What Randolph and Crowley came to represent in the popular imagination is an outcry for liberation from the suffocating pressures of the Victorians. This is evident from Randolph’s system of sex magic as being a path to the dawn of a new era where the inequalities of Victorian America will not exist and the innermost secrets of human life will surface. Although at first glance Crowley’s vision appears to not share some of these desires and hopes, upon further scrutiny it is apparent that Crowley too was a remarkable reflection of his era, and he was indeed struggling against what he conceived as being hypocritical and fallacious. According to John Symonds:

Crowley was a contemporary of Freud; he grew out of the matrix of Victorianism… He was one of many who helped to tear down the false, hypocritical, self-righteous attitudes of the time. What is peculiar in Crowley’s case is not that he chose evil but that in his revolt against his parents and God he set himself up in God’s place.12

These two sex magicians have come to stand as explorers of the ambivalence of the tension between romantic and sexual love, the place of non-reproductive sexual acts, the experimentation and importation of exotic sexual techniques from the ‘Orient’ and so on. They have come to reflect many of the themes and paradoxes of modernity, such as striving for individualism, a utopian future, the exploration of the meaning of sexuality and the essence of ourselves.

I have already stated in my introduction why Aleister Crowley conceived the art and science of sex magic to be one of the most powerful occult systems. Many esotericists have expressed the view that the human mind is the gateway of magic through which the magician gains access to the astral plane and through which the magical universe works. The basic structure of the psyche for some magicians consists of the conscious mind, also known as the waking consciousness, and the subconscious, also known as the unconscious, the realm of our being experienced in dreams and altered states of consciousness. There is also a kind of ‘censor’ that separates these two parts of the psyche and acts as a filter ensuring the selective gathering of empirical perception, and also the protection of the conscious mind from an uncontrolled flooding from the subconscious. Magic makes use of both the ‘rational’ and the ‘irrational’ parts of the psyche.

The key element in every magical operation is introducing this understanding of the psyche to the magical formula of combining will and imagination, which in turn affects the psyche. The aim of every magical rite is to temporarily ‘shut down’ this censor so the unconscious mind might gain immediate access to the conscious, sending forth its raw power and in turn this raw power being directed and assigned to various magical tasks. The key result is what can be referred to as a ‘magical trance’, the very peak of a ritual ecstasy where the cosmic forces are invoked and manifested. For sex magicians the best way to achieve this altered state of consciousness, this magical trance, this death-like feeling of emptiness where the magician becomes the vessel for magical forces, is the orgasm.

Beyond the social analysis, the psychological enquiry and the historical investigation, the true inspiration for these two magicians and others to come was the search for an ultimate magical system based on occult correspondences and a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of the Self. A way of communing with the magical universe and the pure whirling forces that inhabit it. Their efforts were more than just an outcry for liberation. More than just a struggle against oppressive taboos. For them it was a magical attempt to enchant a disenchanted world. A path that could lead them into a state of union with the divine. A method for them to acquire supreme spiritual powers that could affect both the natural and the supranatural. It was an expression of their Will and Imagination…

Footnotes

1. Leonardo Boccadoro & Sabina Carulli, Il posto dell’amore negato. Sessualità e psicopatologie segrete, Tecnoprint, 20082. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality – Volume 1, Vintage, 1980

3. Aleister Crowley, Victor B. Neuburg, Mary Desti, The Vision & the Voice With Commentary and Other Papers: The Collected Diaries of Aleister Crowley, 1909-1914 E.V. (Equinox), Weiser Books, 1999

4. Paschal Beverly Randolph, Eulis! The History of Love: Its Wondrous Magic, Randolph Publishing Co., 1874

5. Ibid.

6. Paschal Beverly Randolph, The Learned Pundit

7. Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002

8. Hugh B. Urban, Magia Sexualis – Sex, Magic and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism, University of California Press, 2006

9. John Symonds, Kenneth Grant, Eds., Confessions of Aleister Crowley – An Autohagiography, Hill and Wang Publ., 1969

10. ‘Ordo Templi Orientis, Spermo-Gnosis, Carl Kellner, Theodor Reuss, Aleister Crowley’, a lecture by P.R. Koenig, http://user.cyberlink.ch/~koenig/spermo.htm

11. Aleister Crowley, The Law is for All, Thelema Media, 1996

12. John Symonds, The Great Beast 666 – the Life of Aleister Crowley, Rider, 1951

.

DAMON ZACHARIAS LYCOURINOS has an avid interest and passion for the Western Occult Tradition, the Esoteric and the Mysteries. He holds a BA (Hons) in Anthropology from the University of Wales, Lampeter, an MSt in the Study of Religion from the University of Oxford and a PGCE in Religious Education from the University of Cambridge. When not conducting research or writing he can be found indulging in various conjurations, meditations, walking in the wilderness or dancing with the Gods.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 10.

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—

Whatever else may be said about Ignatius Timothy Trebitsch-Lincoln, few can match his resume. He started life in Hungary in 1879 as plain Ignacz Trebitsch, the son of a prosperous orthodox Jewish family. He ended it sixty-four years later in Shanghai as the Abbot Chao Kung. Or at least he probably did. In between, using innumerable aliases, Trebitsch played the parts of actor, petty thief, convicted forger, Christian missionary, Anglican curate, Buddhist monk, member of Parliament, oil tycoon, fugitive, self-proclaimed genius, international spy, adviser to warlords and arch-conspirator. And those are just the ones we can be sure of.

Trebitsch’s picaresque career has spawned at least a half-dozen biographies, including his own Autobiography of an Adventurer (1932). By far the most thorough is Bernard Wasserstein’s 1988 The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln. But even Wasserstein’s diligent detective work cannot fill in all the blanks. His portrait of Trebitsch, as with most of the other biographies, is a chameleon-like megalomaniac whose quest for fame and fortune mostly ended in failure and disappointment. Trebitsch comes off as a mentally-unstable confidence man; a mendacious, back-stabbing scoundrel.

I. T. Trebitsch-Lincoln was all those things, but he may have been something more. While anything he claimed, or anything claimed about him, must be taken with a large dose of salt, the standard view of Lincoln may be too quick to dismiss some “unsupported” assertions as pure fantasy.

In contrast, writers such as French esotericist Rene Guenon and Jean Robin, see a more secretive and sinister side to Trebitsch. To Guenon, Trebitsch was an obvious “agent of the Counter-Initiation,” a tool of hidden forces which sought to thwart and misdirect human enlightenment. Robin puts him in the service of the dreaded “72 Unknown Superiors” whose manifestations included the mysterious Green Dragon Society.1 Robin, among others, even makes him an influence on the up-and-coming Adolf Hitler.2 Historian Guido Preparata dubs Trebitsch a “midwife to Nazism.”3 Preparata also insists that Trebitsch was “neither a spy nor an imposter, [but] in all likelihood was, like [Alexander Helphand] Parvus one of those ‘specialists’ fluent in the art of subversion, who were part of a wider network of mercenaries fascinated in one form or another by the ways of power.”4 It’s an intriguing possibility, to say the least, but not one easy to prove.

Trebitsch-Lincoln’s career is much too long and convoluted to summarise in this article. It will focus instead on two areas of mystery regarding his person and actions. First, to what degree was Trebitsch actually involved in espionage? Next, what were his links to the realm of secret societies and the occult and how did these influence his fascination with Buddhism and Tibet?

Trebitsch-Lincoln the Spy

Wasserstein sees Trebitsch’s secret agent exploits as largely imaginary and finds “not a shred of convincing evidence” that Mr. Lincoln engaged in espionage prior to World War I.5 However, clandestine activities, by their very nature, are difficult to pin down. Done right, they should not leave incriminating records.

A firm proponent of Trebitsch’s spy career is British writer Donald MacCormick, aka Richard Deacon. If Wasserstein seldom strays from the security (false security?) of official documentation, McCormick eagerly embraces informal and undocumented sources, including rumour and hearsay. However, MacCormick was a British naval intelligence officer and had first-hand experience with the clandestine world and its inhabitants.

McCormick suspects that Trebitsch’s early religious conversions and travels (1897-1902) provided cover for some sort of intelligence gathering, though for just who is uncertain.6 The same may apply to his later conversion to Buddhism.

McCormick accepts Trebitsch’s claim to have early on visited South America, whereas Wasserstein observes that there is “no independent corroboration of this story.”7 McCormick links Trebitsch to Argentina and a Welsh immigrant there named Isaac Roberts. Roberts, claims McCormick, introduced young Mr. Trebitsch to an up-and-coming British politician, David Lloyd George.8 McCormick further argues that Trebitsch’s pre-war investigations into European social conditions were really political intelligence gathering for Lloyd George.9 McCormick alleges that Trebitsch served Lloyd George as a secret adviser on oil, a realm that also brought him into contact with, and possibly the employment of, the infamous “Merchant of Death,” Basil Zaharoff.10 Another source puts Trebitsch among Zaharoff’s intimates as early as 1909, though there is, of course, no real evidence.11 According to McCormick, who quotes Isaac Roberts, a “triangular association” existed among Zaharoff, Lloyd George and Trebitsch based on the fact that “each knew a secret about the other.”12 Zaharoff, for instance, knew that Trebitsch was a spy, and not just for himself and the little Welshman, but also for the Germans. McCormick believes that Trebitsch began selling information to the Germans as early as 1911.

World War I was a turning point for Trebitsch. From his arrival in London around 1897, he had pursued a path which led him into the Anglican Church, secured him British nationality and culminated in 1910 with his election to Parliament. In 1914, things took a very different path. Trebitsch committed forgery and then compounded his difficulties with a blundering attempt to play double agent for British and German intelligence. Fleeing to the neutral USA, he made a splash in New York with his sensational and very anti-British Confessions of an International Spy. This purported to reveal the secret origins of the war and Britain’s underhanded part in them. After arrest and long delay, and a headline-grabbing jailbreak, he was extradited to Britain in 1916 where he was convicted and imprisoned on the forgery charge. In the years following, Mr. Lincoln’s hatred of England was matched only by His Majesty’s loathing of him. Or so it seemed.

A contrary view holds that Trebitsch’s estrangement from Britain was all part of an elaborate cover scheme. According to this, Trebitsch remained a secret British agent for many years, perhaps for the rest of his life. That regular British officialdom had no inkling of this and vilified and harassed him at every turn was just as it should be; as an apparent enemy of the British Empire, he thus gained the attention and confidence of the Empire’s real foes.

It seems a ludicrous idea, yet there are things that give pause. For instance, in December 1914 Admiral William Reginald “Blinker” Hall, chief of the Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division, caught Trebitsch red handed in the clumsy attempt to double-deal the British and Germans. Instead of arresting him, however, Hall suggested that Trebitsch take advantage of the time remaining on his passport and go to New York. Given that Trebitsch was about to be picked-up for forgery, it was good and timely advice.

As noted, in the States Trebitsch turned his hand to anti-British propaganda and also tried to ingratiate himself with the Kaiser’s officials and spies. This was precisely the modus operandi employed by a British operative who arrived in America just a few months before Trebitsch – Aleister Crowley. While Crowley never lived down his outwardly treasonous behaviour, he also suffered no retribution from the British Government whose employee he was. This does not stop Rene Guenon from labelling Trebitsch and Crowley as “brothers” both as double-agents for London and Berlin and as agents of the Counter-Initiation.13 Of course, in stark contrast to Crowley, Trebitsch ended up in prison. The simple answer may be that Trebitsch was a real turn-coat while Crowley only pretended to be one. Or, it may be that while the self-proclaimed Beast was successful in penetrating the German apparatus in the US, Trebitsch was not. His German associates seem to have thought so little of him that one of them turned him for the reward. So, was Trebitsch’s extradition and trial really damage control to cover and punish a failed agent?

The notion that Trebitsch was and remained a British agent seems especially popular in French circles. According to McCormick, the French held him in suspicion since 1914 when they detected him sniffing out oil in Algeria, presumably for Perfide Albion.14 Guenon accepted the notion, noting later links between Trebitsch and British agents in Central Asia. As late as 1937, French writer Robert Boucard labelled Trebitsch an agent of L’Intelligence Service alongside T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell.15

Trebitsch’s name does pop up alongside Lawrence’s in some late 20s press reports. In January 1929, the Indian Government felt obliged to issue an official denial regarding the alleged involvement of the two adventurers in recent troubles in Afghanistan.16 Trebitsch was supposed to be fishing in these waters as a Soviet agent – a charge, as we will see, that surfaces elsewhere.

The staunchest advocate of the Trebitsch-as-British-agent theory is Guido Preparata. He points in particular to Trebitsch’s post-war shenanigans in Germany. Preparata even wonders whether Trebitsch was ever in a British prison or simply kept on ice waiting a new assignment. Wasserstein clearly documents Lincoln’s jail time, but he and Preparata do agree that Trebitsch was stripped of his British nationality and booted from England in the summer of 1919.

He landed on his feet, as he always did, in post-war Berlin where the fragile Weimar Republic clung to power. Somehow, he wormed his way into the confidence of a cabal of right-wing conspirators. In March 1920, in the so-called Kapp Putsch, the plotters seized control of Berlin, only to back down and flee a few days later. Trebitsch briefly basked in the limelight as press chief of the revolutionary regime and dreamed of becoming its future propaganda minister (a la Goebbels).

Trebitsch’s precise role in the Kapp affair is murky. Some dismiss him as a mere hanger-on, but a contemporary report reaching American intelligence labelled him the “organiser of the Kapp Putsch” and “the leader of the whole Revolution.”17 Robin believes that Trebitsch played a critical role in his brief alliance with the German militarists by convincing them that the Reich’s “road to glory” lay in the East, an idea that coincidentally or deliberately meshed with the concept of Lebensraum proclaimed by another early influence on the Nazis, “Geopolitician” Karl Haushofer.18 Robin sees Trebitsch, like Haushofer, as a source of “inspiration” for Hitler and the Nazis and, as such, another representative of the “72 Greens” or “Unknown Superiors.”19 The latter, he claims, were linked to the shadowy Green Dragon Society and the legendary kingdom of Agharthi.

The Hitler-Trebitsch web is spun more elaborately by Hennecke Kardel who insists that in the early 20s Trebitsch Lincoln was identical with Moses Pinkeles, a mysterious Jew who allegedly helped fund the early Nazi movement.20 Just who or what Pinkeles actually was remains an intriguing question, but it seems clear that he was not Trebitsch who was otherwise occupied adventuring and spying in China.

Preparata has another take on Trebitsch’s role in the Kapp business. He believes that the British used Trebitsch as “an agent steeped in counter-insurgency tactics and disinformation to thwart, expose and burn all the monarchist conspiracies against the Weimar Republic.”21 Preparata cites a British report which provocatively suggests that Trebitsch came to Germany at the instigation or with the encouragement of then Secretary for War Winston Churchill.22 Another reference to Trebitsch-Churchill collusion appears in a March 1921 US military intelligence report which unambiguously declares that I. T. T. Lincoln “was and still is an English agent.”23 Planned or not, Trebitsch soon fell out with his monarchist co-conspirators and absconded with their documents which he sold to the Czech Government.

One “friend” he preserved from the Kapp misadventure was a Prussian officer, Max Bauer. In the aftermath of the Putsch, Bauer surfaced in Moscow as a military adviser to the Red Army. His presence there was related to the secret collusion between the German and Soviet militaries, but there also is reason to suspect that Bauer acted as an agent of Soviet military intelligence in Germany and later in China. Preparata has Bauer and Trebitsch conniving with the Soviets as far back as 1919 and it is more than curious that the duo escaped post-Putsch Berlin with papers supplied by the Soviet Embassy.24

Was Mr. Lincoln also a Red agent? In 1919 British authorities delayed his departure from England until a short-lived Bolshevik regime in Hungary collapsed supposedly because they feared he would return to his homeland and join the Revolution. The aforementioned US intelligence report claims that when the rightist Kapp plot began to lose momentum, Trebitsch shifted gears and began “working to bring about Bolshevism in Germany.” Then again, by helping to undermine both the socialist Weimar regime and its right-wing opponents, Trebitsch may have been serving Moscow’s interests all along. More accusations of Bolshevik intrigue show up in reports reaching the US Bureau of Investigation. In April 1921, word came that Trebitsch was “actively engaged in the ‘Red Movement’” and “working in the interest of the Soviet Government in Austria and Hungary.”25 US officials were concerned by reports that he was coming to the States.

Trebitsch-Lincoln the Occultist

In October, under the name of Patrick Keelan, he did just that, but he was soon on to China. There, he became adviser and financial agent to a succession of warlords and likely peddled influence and information for anyone who would pay him. McCormick contends that Trebitsch worked for German interests in China which gains credibility from one of the “acquaintances” he made on the voyage to New York. This was Albert T. Otto, a German-American businessman who apparently was so impressed by Keelan/Trebitsch that he handed him some $50,000.26 Otto, however, was himself a man with an interesting history. Prior to 1917 he had been a representative of the Krupp armaments firm in the US and subsequently came under investigation as a German agent.27 He may have played the same part in 1921 by serving as a cut-out for Berlin’s financing of Trebitsch.

In the East, Trebitsch found someone else interested in his services: the Japanese. “Lincoln had long been watched and even courted by some Japanese secret agents,” says McCormick, among them Col. Kenji Doihara, the so-called “Lawrence of Manchuria” and a key figure in the secretive Black Dragon Society which served Imperial Japan’s espionage and subversive interests.28 McCormick believes that Trebitsch became an “active co-conspirator” with the Black Dragons, and that may not have been all.29

To get a handle on this and other connections, we need to look at Trebitsch’s known and alleged links to the occult. The first reference is about 1898, soon after his nominal conversion to Christianity. Briefly returning to Hungary, he “evidenced an interest in esoteric religion by becoming editor of a spiritualist paper.”30 A few years later, as an Anglican curate in Appledore, Kent, Trebitsch reportedly encountered Harold Beckett, an ex-Indian Army officer who became the young clergyman’s Western “initiator.”31 Beckett allegedly had contact with Continental occults such as Maitre Philippe and his pupil, Gerard “Papus” Encausse. Among the secrets Beckett supposedly revealed was that in each generation there were only seventy-two “true men.”32 Whether Trebitsch believed that he was one of these elect, or whether they were the same as the “72 Unknown Superiors” is also unclear. With this kind of guidance, claims Serge Hutin, Trebitsch went on to join numerous secret societies including the Freemasons, the Ordo Templi Orientis and Chinese triads.33

Nothing more is heard of his esoteric leanings until October 1925 when he underwent a “mystical experience” in a hotel room in Tientsin. “I made a great renunciation, I quitted the world,” he declared.34 What he embraced, however, was not Buddhism but Theosophy, that amalgam of Eastern-mysticism-for-Westerners concocted by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.

Trebitsch’s revelation awoke in him a burning desire to visit Tibet, the Holy Land of mystics and seekers of various stripes. He repeatedly petitioned British authorities to allow him to reach Tibet via India, only to be turned down each time. Whether he ever accessed Tibet through Chinese territory is unknown, but remains an intriguing possibility.

Trebitsch’s interest in Buddhism and Central Asia actually dated as far back as 1916. While awaiting extradition in New York, he boasted that before the war he had been “an active spy in Central Asia, working as a Buddhist monk.”35 Moreover, he claimed to have come up with a scheme to foment a “grand religious revival in the East,” which would destroy British power in Asia.36 One must wonder whether his 1925 conversion was simply the emergence of a long-prepared plan.

Tibet, of course, was widely perceived as the strategic high ground of the Eurasian landmass and figured in Haushofer’s theory of “geo-politics.” In the mid-20s, British, Soviet, German and Japanese agents all maneuvered for influence and advantage there, and Trebitsch would not have been the only operative to try to do so under the guise of religion.37

Instead of the Land of Eternal Snows, Trebitsch next surfaced in Sri Lanka as a novice in a Buddhist monastery. What brought him out of this splendid seclusion was the imminent execution in England of his eldest son, convicted of murder. Thanks again to the obstruction of British officialdom, he was unable to reach the boy before he hanged but claimed that he had been in psychic communication with his doomed son as well as his spiritual teacher back in Sri Lanka.38

Over the next several years, Trebitsch continuously shuttled between the Far East and Europe, his purposes and finances remaining, as ever, vague. In August 1926, he arrived in New York under the name of Hermann Ruh, a German engineer. His declared destination was Japan, but before proceeding there he spent months in San Francisco lodged in a Japanese hotel and studying with Zen master Nyogen Senzaki. This brings us back to McCormick’s charge that Trebitsch had fallen in with Japanese intelligence, and again raises the spectre of the mysterious Green Dragon. As discussed in a previous article for New Dawn, there is no consensus on what the Green Dragon Society was, or if it even existed, but there is persistent linking of the Society with Japan and Zen Buddhism. It is worth noting that Karl Haushofer is alleged to have been one of only two or three Westerners admitted to the Green Dragon Society.39 Was Ignatius Trebitsch-Lincoln one of the others? Under the name of the Lama Dordji Den, Trebitsch is even invoked in Teddy Legrand’s (Pierre Mariel) 1933 novel, Les Sept Tetes du Dragon Vert (“The Seven Heads of the Green Dragon”) which purports to reveal the Dragon as a sinister international conspiracy bent on world domination.40

Trebitsch’s whereabouts c. 1928-30 is especially hazy. He is identified in places as far flung as Shanghai, Tibet, Afghanistan, and perhaps most intriguing of all, Nice, France. According to Robin, Trebitsch, again as Dordji Den, lived there in the Villa Bleue.41 Overseen by a wealthy Swedish countess, the Villa was said to be the meeting place of occultists and “grand adepts” from across Europe. While there, Trebitsch reportedly impressed the denizens with his “magnetic [hypnotic?] powers” and received, in turn, access to further secret knowledge.42 While Trebitsch certainly was in France in 1929 and likely in Nice, there is no solid proof of the Villa Bleue’s existence.

Trebitsch is further alleged to have received initiation as Dordji Den at the Sera Monastery outside Lhasa.43 In fact, he supposedly received two initiations in Tibet, the second in 1930. This flies in the face of Wasserstein’s research which finds no demonstrable evidence that Trebitsch ever reached Tibet, and shows quite conclusively that he received the title of bhikkhu, or monk, at the Pao-hua Shan Monastery, near Nanking, in May 1931. It was here that he acquired the new name of Chao Kung, to which he promptly added the prefix of “The Venerable.” So, was Dordji Den just a figment of Guenon’s and others’ imaginations, someone else entirely, or was Trebitsch initiated three times. And initiated into what, exactly?

Trebitsch-Lincoln a Bodhisattva

Trebitsch surely demonstrated more commitment to Buddhism than he did to his previous religious affiliations. Barely a week after his ordination as monk, he received elevation to the rank of bodhisattva. In preparation for this, he endured the painful branding of twelve small stars on his scalp which represented the dozen spokes of the Wheel of Becoming. He also embraced a strict vegetarian diet and ever after only appeared in public in his monk’s robes.

In the summer of 1932, the newly-minted Chao Kung again sailed for Europe. His first stop was Marseilles where he was met by a delegation of Buddhists from Nice. These he apparently knew from his visit four years earlier. He remained in Nice for a few weeks and then headed for his real destination – Berlin.

Germany in the fall of 1932 was living through the death throes of the Weimar Republic. Hitler’s Nazi Party had scored huge gains in recent elections and in a few months he would be named chancellor. Riding high at the same time was the popular psychic Erik Jan Hanussen, a favourite of the Nazis until his predictions came a bit too close to home. Hanussen (like Trebitsch, of Jewish origin) was at least aware of Chao Kung’s presence in Berlin and publicly defended his reputation in the psychic’s newsletter.44 Also said to be haunting Berlin at this time was the mysterious “Man (or Lama) with the Green Gloves,” an Asiatic mystic variously linked to Tibetan adepts, the Green Dragon or even said to be Trebitsch himself.45

The new Nazi regime refused to renew Trebitsch’s visa, and he was forced to return to Shanghai in early 1933. However, his European trip was not without some success; he brought back to China a dozen or so acolytes, including several from the Nice group. Now in command of his own tiny sect, he proclaimed himself abbot. His band of followers was formally initiated in the autumn of that year.

Curiously, among the attendees at the initiation was the Soviet ambassador to China, Dmitrii Bogomolov. While Wasserstein dismisses this and other details as “probably coincidental,” Trebitsch’s name continued to be linked with Soviet officials or agents throughout the 30s.46 For instance, in 1936 Trebitsch was reported to make regular visits to the Chinese offices of Wostvag, a German trading firm that was a known front for the Comintern and Soviet military intelligence.

His name also continued to pop up in relation to Japanese agents and interests. McCormick claims that Trebitsch played an obscure part in drawing the ex-Manchu Emperor Pu-Yi into the Japanese camp and installing him as the puppet-ruler of Manchuria.47 Wasserstein acknowledges allegations that Trebitsch was a friend and confidant of Pu-Yi but again notes that there is no documentary evidence to back them up.

In 1934 the Venerable Chao Kung formed the League of Truth which aimed to promote Trebitsch’s personal blend of Buddhism. Its insignia was a reverse swastika over two hemispheres. Some argue that he conjured up the sect as a new tool in his war with the British Empire and, perhaps, to better serve his employers in Tokyo.48 Oddly, it also was in 1934 that he made his last attempt to enter Britain. He got as far as Liverpool before being arrested and put on a boat back towards Shanghai. On the way he was interrogated by Japanese police in Kobe. Of course, this also provided an ideal cover for an intelligence debriefing.

He never stopped trying to reach Tibet. Around 1935, he joined forces with a Russian-born adventurer named Gene Roubin (another Soviet connection?) who actually had visited Tibet for one dubious purpose or another. Three years later, alarming but unsubstantiated reports reached British officials in China that the determined Trebitsch was on his way to Lhasa claiming to be the simultaneous reincarnations of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas!49

In the late 30s, Chao Kung established a more or less permanent home in Shanghai. Soon after the outbreak of World War II, he grandiosely issued a call for world peace. He demanded the immediate resignation of the British French, German and Soviet governments (but not Japan’s) and warned that “otherwise, the Tibetan Buddhist Supreme Masters… will unchain forces and powers whose very existence are unknown to you and against whose operations you are consequently helpless.”50 Was he speaking on behalf of the “72” or the masters of Agharthi, or was he just blowing his own horn? In any case, the warring leaders paid him no heed.

In wartime Shanghai, Trebitsch collaborated with Nazi and Japanese officials. In 1942 he was reported to be part of a “group of fifth columnists who broadcast propaganda talks from Japanese secret radio stations in Tibet.”51 The chief of the German XRGS radio station in Shanghai definitely did solicit him to go to Tibet and set up propaganda broadcasts aimed at India. Trebitsch is also known to have collaborated with the Abwehr’s station in Shanghai, Buero Siefkin, which in 1941 informed Berlin that Chao Kung had long been a member of the “Grand Council of Yellow Cap Lamas” who exercised great influence in Tibet and India.52 He even won the confidence of the Gestapo’s local representative, Joseph “The Butcher of Warsaw” Meisinger who concocted a half-baked scheme to send Trebitsch to Berlin.

But so far as can be determined, Trebitsch never left Shanghai. He died there in the Japanese-run General Hospital on 6 October 1943. Reportedly, he feared being poisoned. Rumours spread that he had committed suicide or had been murdered by his erstwhile Nazi friends. Naturally enough, tales also surfaced that he still lived. McCormick notes one that appeared in the Times of Ceylon after the war stating that the former member of parliament had been sighted in Darjeeling, India, living peacefully on the doorstep of Tibet.

Whether or not Ignatius Timothy Trebitsch Lincoln was more than a venal megalomaniac remains a debatable proposition and probably will never be definitively settled. Myths and speculation clearly outnumber facts where he is concerned, but it also seems likely that the known facts alone do not tell the whole story. The possibility that he may have been among the most secret of British secret agents is tantalising as is his apparent connection to Soviet intelligence. So too are the hints that he was in contact with or at least aware of higher, secretive powers at work in the world. Whether these were the lords of Guenon’s “counter-initiation” we will never know for sure and, perhaps, neither did Trebitsch.

Footnotes:

1. Jean Robin, Hitler: l’elu du dragon (Paris: Guy Tredaniel, 2009), 140

2. Ibid., 77, and Serge Hutin, Governantes Invisiveis e Sociedades Secretas (Sao Paulo: Hemus, 2004), 46.

3. Guido Preparata, Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2005), 111.

4. Ibid., 102.

5. Bernard Wasserstein, The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 122.

6. Richard Deacon, A History of the British Secret Service (New York: Taplinger, 1969), 197.

7. Wasserstein, 31.

8. Deacon, BSS, 198.

9. Ibid., 198-199.

10. Ibid., BSS, 199.

11. George Tallas and Anthony Stephen, Peddler of Wars: Sir Basil Zaharoff Story (Bloomington, IN: Author-House, 2007), 83.

12. Donald McCormick, Peddler of Death: The Life and Times of Sir Basil Zaharoff (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965), 10.

13. Rene Guenon to Rene Schneider, 13 Sept. 1936.

14. Deacon, BSS, 199.

15. Robert Boucard, Paris Soir, (24 Oct. 1937).

16. “Afghan Throne,” The Argus [Melbourne)] (24 Jan. 1929), 7.

17. Investigative Case Files of the Bureau of Investigation (BI), #202600-1356, “Trebitsch Lincoln and the Kapp Putsch,” AmMission, Budapest, c. 1920.

18. Robin, 94.

19. Ibid., 90, 140.

20. Hennecke Kardel, Adolf Hitler—Founder of Israel (San Diego: Modjeskis Society, 1996), 53-54.

21. Preparata, 90.

22. Ibid., 108.

23. BI, #202600-1356-2, 5 March 1921, Col. Smith, MID to Baley, BI.

24. Preparata, 106, and BI, #202600-1356, “Trebitsch Lincoln and the Kapp Putsch.”

25. BI, #202600-1356, Baley to B. Morton, 22 April 1921.

26. Wasserstein, 231.

27. BI, #200975, Senes Detective Bureau to BI, 20 May 1918.

28. Richard Deacon, Kempei Tai: A History of the Japanese Secret Service (New York: Beaufort Books, 1983),134-135.

29. Ibid., 134

30. Wasserstein, 35.

31. Hutin, 28.

32. Robin, 103.

33. Hutin, 46.

34. Wasserstein, 256.

35. David Lampe and Laszlo Szenasi, The Self-Made Villain: A Biography of I. T. Trebitsch-Lincoln (London: Cassell, 1961), 79.

36. Ibid.

37. See, Richard Spence, “Red Star over Shambhala: Soviet, British and American Intelligence & the Search for Lost Civilization in Central Asia,” New Dawn, #109 (July-Aug. 2008), 53-58.

38. Bernard Grant, To the Four Corners. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1933, 181.

39. Wulf Schwartzwaller, The Unknown Hitler (New York: Berkley Books, 1990), 100.

40. Richard Spence, “Behold the Green Dragon: The Myth and Reality of an Asian Secret Society,” New Dawn, #112 (Jan.-Feb. 2009), 71.

41. Robin, 95-96.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Mel Gordon, Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2001), 224.-225

45. Hutin, 47, and “El Lama de los Guantes Verdes,” www.bolinfodecarlos.com.ar/020906_lama_guantes.htm.

46. Wasserstein, 301.

47. Deacon, BSS, 151.

48. “Trebitsch Lincoln, el Espia Ingles Que Se Convirtio en Enemigo de la Gran Bretana,” Prensa (23 Feb. 1936).

49. Wasserstein, 306-307.

50. Ibid., 309.

51. Lampe, 204.

52. Wasserstein, 311.

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Dr. RICHARD SPENCE is a professor of History at the University of Idaho. Among other works, he is the author of Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly (Feral House, 2002). His latest book is Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult, published by Feral House.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 116 (Sept-Oct 2009).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 116 (PDF version) for only US$5

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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—

Historians and archaeologists consistently ignore solid evidence that Captain James Cook was not the first European to discover Australia while government agencies regularly prohibit access to shipwreck sites which would uncover proof for this assertion.

Why is the true history of Australia being covered up? Why does history treat Captain Cook so kindly, despite the fact that in his later years he was an extraordinarily irritable man who, over the most trivial matters, did not hesitate to flog crew members or burn down entire native villages?

And even though all of the expeditions he led ended in partial or complete failure, Cook is generally, almost universally, lauded as the greatest of navigators and his expeditions seen as milestones in navigation history – and on top of all that it is claimed Cook discovered Australia.

Lately the claim has been modified a bit as most people now know that the Dutch were sailing along the coastline of west Australia a couple of hundred years before James Cook was born, and of course Abel Tasman sailed along the south of Australia (then called New Holland) and landed on Tasmania. We also know that the Indonesians traded with the Northern Australian Aborigines for at least 400 years before Cook. And most people now know that the Portuguese were trading out of Timor since the 15th century.

So now we say Captain Cook discovered the east coast of Australia, or did he? And why does it matter if he did or did not?

It matters because history shapes our world view, our culture and our social structures. If we believe a description of the past to be true when in fact it is false, our view of how we arrived at the present is flawed, which in turn allows powerful social structures and groups to exist which might not otherwise be able to justify their existence. This is why Japan avoids including true histories of World War II in its schools’ curriculum.

The idea that an Englishman discovered Australia is fundamental to the maintenance of the notion of Australia as a pre-dominantly white Anglo-Saxon society. There are several subtle messages laying behind the notion of Captain Cook, the great English navigator, sailing around the world and discovering the vast continent of Australia. One of these was important in the 19th and early 20th centuries, affirming the inherent superiority of English society and technology as a justification of the British Empire’s dominion over much of the planet. Another was fundamental to the English claims of ownership of Australia, all of Australia, even though Cook only discovered the east coast.

The British discovery of Australia also underpins Australia’s belief that the British system of government is the best, better than, say, the French or Spanish systems. Likewise, Australia’s legal system, both civil and criminal, is British as is the way we structure our police and miliary forces etc., not because they are the best ways of doing things but because they are the British way. Thus it has been important that the myth of the great Captain Cook was propagated and perpetuated over the last 200 years. Yet there were other nations who also had valid claims on Australia: the Dutch, the French and, importantly, the Spanish, England’s old nautical enemy.

The story of Captain Cook was propagated where ever the English could plant the seed, certainly throughout the British Empire and by default most of North America, but is it the truth? Was Captain Cook the first European to discover Australia, even just the east coast?

The answer in a nutshell is no. It’s as simple as that. Ask any Spaniard and he or she will tell you that Captain Cook used stolen Spanish maps to navigate his way around the Pacific. He also used copies of Abel Tasman’s maps, which he acknowledged because at the time Tasman’s maps were readily available. He does not acknowledge the Spanish maps, however when Cook arrived in Hawaii (which he claims to have been the first European to discover) he was recognised and greeted as a returning god, a god who had visited those islands many years before bringing the Hawaiians knowledge of agriculture. They recognised Cook as this god because he sailed a ship just like the one their previous visitor had sailed, and of which they still made venerated models. A tall, multi-masted ship with huge sails and no paddles: these were models of a Spanish ship.

Cook was quick to see the advantages of being mistaken for a god and pretended to be that god in order to restock his ships with food and water. Sadly for Cook he overplayed his hand and over-taxed the generosity and tolerance of the Hawaiians who realised they had been both duped and exploited, and as a result killed Cook, then cooked and ate him. (Yes Cook got cooked.)

The Spanish, who left the Hawaiians on better terms than Cook, had been regularly sailing the Pacific for about 300 years before Cook entered that vast ocean. Their presence there was the result of the combined efforts of Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan and Spain’s interest in maritime exploration, in the search of new lands. The Spanish ships sailed mostly from Mexico or Peru to Manila following a course utilising favourable winds and currents that flowed from east to west between 5 and 10 degrees south of the Equator until they reached Guam where they restocked with water and other supplies before the final leg of their journey to the Philippines. This was a treasure trade route vital to the Spanish and Mexican economies. Silver, gold and jewels were taken from the slave mines of South America to Manila in huge galleons where they were traded for silks, porcelains and other goods out of China and Asia. This was called the Manila galleon trade and each ship, and there were a number every year, carried enough wealth to equal a king’s ransom.

The Spanish considered the Pacific and everything in it, including Australia, their property and felt completely secure in their Pacific domain until Sir Francis Drake sailed around Cape Horn and began pillaging the Spanish treasure fleets there.

The Spanish Empire had been built around maritime exploration and expansion. It is inconceivable that Spanish ships sailed the Pacific Ocean for 300 years and not discovered a continent the size of Australia. But where is the proof?

The Dieppe Maps

The first and most obvious piece of proof which is continually ignored by mainstream Australian historians is a well known collection called the Dieppe maps, a set of maps made in the town of Dieppe in France in the 16th century. These provide clear proof of either Spanish or Portuguese exploration of Australia’s east coast at least two hundred years before Captain Cook. The maps clearly show the east coast of Australia as well as almost all the rest of Australia’s coastline. In the Dieppe maps the name given to the Australian continent is “Java la Grande.”

The Dieppe maps have proved to be actual copies of Portuguese maps; another similar set of maps are the Dauphin maps after a series of copies of the Dieppe maps made for the French Dauphin. Also there is the Vallard map which is essentially the same map as the Dieppe and Dauphin maps.

The Dauphin maps are elaborately decorated, not for any scientific or geographical reason but simply to make the maps more interesting to his Royal Highness the Prince Dauphin – an important thing to remember as many historians attempting to discredit these maps cite the images used in the decorations to dismiss the cartographic accuracy of the Dauphin maps.

When considering the Dieppe maps one should remember just how important navigation maps were in the European world of 400 years ago. It was the “Age of Exploration,” a historic time of maritime expansion, of empire building, of ruthless exploitation and greed. It was an age of conquest, trade, navies and more greed.

The rulers and populations of the European nations wanted wealth, whatever it took. The pathways to wealth were on the sea and those who possessed the navigation maps showing how to travel those pathways held the keys to unimagined riches.

In those days (up until the 19th century) the information contained in items such as the Dieppe and Dauphin maps was often priceless, top secret, government property, and jealously guarded as the plans to nuclear weapons or interplanetary space travel might be guarded today. For this reason various nations and their captains contrived ways of concealing the information contained within their maps – maps in code so to speak. Cracking the secret code of those ancient Dieppe maps was the work of Australian Army map maker and surveyor Brigadier Lawrence Fitzgerald O.B.E., a man of genius largely ignored by mainstream academia.

Brigadier Lawrence Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald with his extensive practical and theoretical experience with maps and map making could clearly see there were sections of the Dieppe maps that resembled Australia’s coastline but there were also sections that did not. After considerable research the Brigadier discovered that the maps which ancient navigators used on ships were not in the form we generally think of – that is a huge rolled up sheet of parchment or paper that covered the Captain’s entire table. No, they were in sections on separate sheets generally kept loose in a folio or even in separate folios. To protect the information in the maps, should they fall into rival hands, the maps did not join up neatly or even had small components to make reassembling and interpreting the maps difficult or impossible if the keys to the codified maps were not available.

Brigadier Fitzgerald realised that he only had to divide the Dieppe maps into the appropriate sections and then discover how to reassemble them in the correct order. This he did and in his book Java la Grande he clearly shows that the Portuguese had accurately and extensively mapped the Australian coastline more than 200 years before Cook. His work is largely ignored, even ridiculed, by most Australian and British historians. Why?

The next question most people ask is: “If the Spanish and/or the Portuguese visited Australia before Cook, why are there no archaeological traces of them?” The answer is simple: “There are many.” But they are ignored, covered up, or hidden.

Possible Pre-Cook Shipwrecks

Sand miners uncovered the remains of an oak ship under the sand on a beach near Byron Bay. The ship was reburied in the sandmining process but a private citizen paid for a piece of timber retrieved from the ship to be carbon-dated by an independent laboratory. The results came back that the wood (oak) dated to the 16th century. Archaeologists from the University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales got excited and they organised for a magnetometer survey of the area. The ship was relocated under the sand and a dig planned to excavate it and solve the mystery. A week before the dig was scheduled to begin word came high in the New South Wales government that the dig could not proceed, and it was stopped. There were no reasons given. That was in 1995, and the shipwreck is still sitting there under the sand.

Another example is a shipwreck buried under the sand dunes at Facing Island near Gladstone, Queensland. This shipwreck was seen after a storm in the early 19th century but its location was lost when the sand covered it again. A 5 feet (1700 mm) long bronze cannon with the date of 1596 stamped on it and other artefacts were found around Gladstone in the mid 19th century and the subject of articles in the early Australian press, several essays, investigations and books.

In the late 1990’s the wreck on Facing Island was again exposed for a few days by a cyclone. Fortunately a fisherman saw it and took photographs as well as noting the shipwreck’s location, all of which he gave to the local Maritime Museum. The Maritime Museum, with suitably qualified personnel, applied to the government for a permit to investigate the shipwreck. The application was refused and a warning given that anyone attempting to excavate or otherwise investigate the wreck would face prosecution under the draconian penalties of Australia’s “Historic Shipwrecks Act.” The wreck is still buried under the sand on Facing Island.

The list of possible pre-Cook shipwrecks is long and includes the “Mahogany ship” at Warrnambool. In the case of the Mahogany ship, the fact that it is described as being built of mahogany indicates it was built in either South America or the Caribbean as this is the only area that mahogany trees grow. As it was an old wreck in 1836 when it was first seen, it could only have been of Portuguese (Brazil) or Spanish (the rest of South America) origins.

The Stradbroke Island Galleon in Queensland is a ship built of European oak about 30 metres long. It lays in a peat swamp where it was first seen in the 1860s and which the local Aborigines said had been in the swamp a long time. In the case of the Stradbroke galleon, we actually have historic records of Aboriginal oral traditions that report the arrival of the shipwreck victims in an Aboriginal camp and even the fact that one of them was named Juan!

Both of these shipwrecks have an extensive presence on the Internet so I will not go into detail about them here; a simple Google search will bring up a wealth of information.

Another ancient shipwreck was noted by Governor Oxley in 1821 off the beach at Fingal Head in Northern NSW. There is also a shipwreck at Caravel Creek in the Hinchenbrook Channel in Queensland and the list goes on.

Pre-Cook Artefacts

Apart from the pre-Cook shipwrecks there are numerous artefacts that have been found scattered around the sites of these wrecks or actually taken off the wrecks in the early days before the government actively intervened to suppress information about possible pre-Cook shipwrecks.

For example, coins were found on the beach where the Mahogany ship is buried. These have generally been described as Spanish coins but I would guess they could be Portuguese as they have never been identified by experts.

In the case of the Stradbroke Island Galleon there have been coins, a sailor’s dirk, a brass walking stick head dated by experts to Spain or Portugal in the 16th century, a rapier sword blade, a ship’s bell and various other items.

A lead weight has been found by a university geologist while digging for pumice in undisturbed sand strata on Fraser Island, Queensland. This lead weight was accurately dated as having been laid down on Fraser Island over 400 years ago and, using radioactive isotope fingerprinting, the lead can be proved to have come from mines in the south of France.

A bronze 16th century Portuguese cannon is on display at the Queensland Maritime Museum in Brisbane, which was found on the Great Barrier Reef. And the list goes on and on.

Australian History

Why is all this evidence ignored by Australian historians and archaeologists? Why does the government continue to block the excavation of possible pre-Cook sites?

Until the Mabo court case and the granting of Aboriginal Land Rights, the obvious reason would have been the legal implications allowing a challenge to Cook’s pronouncement that Australia was Terra Nullus – unoccupied land. It was this proclamation that allowed Britain to occupy Australia without entering into negotiations with its existing occupants, the Aborigines.

After Mabo this reason no longer applies and an even sillier, pettier motive may exist: the defence of reputations. Many Australian historians and archaeologists have for so long scoffed at the idea any nation reached and explored the east coast of Australia before Cook that they have entrenched themselves in their position. There is no way for them to change their “official” position without admitting they ignored solid scientific evidence in defence of a historic status quo. In universities and museums there are professors and doctors of history and archaeology who have painted themselves into a corner by systematically deriding all those who present theories or evidence that Cook was not the first European to discover and explore Australia. They use their influence and position to block any attempts to get the final proof they are wrong, proof that would require history books to be re-written and leave reputations in tatters.

History shows us that these attempts to falsify history, to block discovery, ultimately fail. It’s only a question of time.

Greg Jefferys is the author of the book The Stradbroke Island Galleon, The Mystery of the Ship in the Swamp, which is also available as an e-book. He has also produced two DVDs, ‘The Lost Galleon’ and ‘Fire Through the Swamp’. These products can be purchased through the website www.stradbrokeislandgalleon.com.

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GREG JEFFERYS has a degree with majors in History and Archaeology from the University of Queensland, and is currently doing his Masters in History at the University of Tasmania. Apart from his important work on the Stradbroke Island Galleon mystery, Greg discovered and identified two other “mystery shipwrecks” on the South East Queensland coast. He has also written on several maritime mysteries including the controversial shipwreck on Long Island in the Whitsunday Group and the loss of the whaler “George” on Lord Howe Island. For more information on his exploration group, visit www.stradbrokeislandgalleon.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 113 (March-April 2009).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 113 (PDF version) for only US$5

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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—

History certainly has no shortage of enigmatic or controversial brotherhoods, orders, lodges and societies. The Knights Templar, for instance, are a perennial object of fascination and speculation. Whether the Templars were the inspiration for the no less controversial Freemasons, a band of depraved heretics or the innocent victims of a conspiracy born of greed and envy remains a topic of lively debate.

What no one can contest, however, is that the Knights existed. The beginning and formal end of the Order can be dated with precision, and the names of its leaders are a matter of historical record. Even a dubious organisation like the Priory of Sion can be shown to have had a genuine, if recent, existence, though its claims to centuries of tradition and hidden influence remain unsubstantiated. But there are other groups which seem to exist only in that gray zone between reality and imagination, ones whose origins, number, scope and purpose remain maddeningly vague.

One such entity is the quasi-mythical Green Dragon Society (GDS), also known as the Order of the Green Dragon or simply the Green Dragon. It most often is mentioned as a Japanese secret society, but that is not necessarily the whole story. Other evidence, or at least allegation, argues that its true origins lay in China or Tibet and that its influence extended to the power centres of Tsarist Russia and Nazi Germany. Historical figures from the Emperor Hirohito, to Adolf Hitler to Rasputin have been tied to the Green Dragon, legitimately or not. The waters have been further muddied by role-playing games which have combined the Society with H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and other fictional elements. Determining what is “real” and what is the playful figment of someone’s imagination can be tricky.

What follows will not solve the mystery of the Green Dragon, but it will try to separate fact from fiction and explain where claims and information came from. In doing so, it will offer a tantalising glimpse into a mysterious organisation that may have played a significant role in shaping modern history.

Enter the Black Dragon

The simplest explanation for the Green Dragon Society is that it is a muddled reference to the better known, and definitely real, Black Dragon Society (BDS) or Kokuryukai. The BDS first appeared about 1901 and was an offshoot of another, older Japanese secret society, the Black Ocean or Genyosha. Like its parent, the Black Dragon was a militant, “ultra-nationalist” body which worked to expand Imperial Japan’s influence on the Asian mainland. The BDS initially concentrated on combating Russian interests in the vast Chinese province of Manchuria. Indeed, the Society took its name from the “Black Dragon” or Amur River which separated Manchuria and Siberia. The Black Dragon’s network of spies and saboteurs took an active part in the subsequent Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) and the Black Dragons later expanded their operations and influence throughout Asia and Europe and even the Americas.

The nominal founder and leader of the Black Dragon was Ryohei Uchida, but the true master, or “darkside emperor,” was Uchida’s shadowy and sinister mentor, Mitsuru Toyama, also a founding member of Genyosha. He reputedly was steeped in “extreme Eastern religious beliefs.”1 That suggests the mysticism and occultism attributed the Green Dragon Society. Might the scheming and secretive Toyama have played a guiding role in both societies?

Were the Black and Green Dragons, if not one and the same, two sides of the same conspiratorial coin? For instance, just as the Black Dragon (Amur) River delineated the northern limit of Manchuria, further south the much smaller Qinglong or Green Dragon River roughly followed the dividing line between Manchuria and China proper. If the Black Dragon Society was primarily anti-Russian in its focus, might the Green Dragon have been anti-Chinese or anti-Western? While the Black Dragon focused on the political side, did the Green deal with the more secretive occult realm?

One obscure but important reference which clearly distinguishes between the Black and Green societies appears in the memoir of Chinese strongman Chiang Kai-shek’s “second wife,” Ch’en Chieh-ju.2 She recalls that her husband contemplated a “completely secret system of private investigators” and considered as models the “Green and Black Dragon Societies of Japan and the Triad societies of Shanghai.”3 Thus, in Chiang’s mind at least, the two Dragons were entirely separate (though not necessarily unrelated), Japanese, and appropriate models for secret intelligence gathering.

As noted, the Black Dragon Society was heavily involved in spying and the kindred spheres of propaganda and subversion. As such, it basically functioned as an extension of the Imperial Army’s “special organ,” the Tokumu Kikan. Not to be outdone in anything, the Japanese Imperial Navy maintained its own secret service, the Joho Kyoko. Just as the Army utilised the Black Dragon to augment or handle its “special needs,” might the Navy have used the Green Dragon in the same way?

Trevor Ravenscroft & Karl Haushofer

The identification of the Green Dragon as a fundamentally mystical order most evidently appears in Trevor Ravenscroft’s 1973 The Spear of Destiny. It is not insignificant that Ravenscroft was a follower of Anthroposophy and its founder Rudolf Steiner, and his book is a distinctly Anthroposophist take on the nefarious occult forces behind Hitler and his Nazi Regime. Ravenscroft firmly connects the Green Dragon to German geo-politician and mystic Karl Haushofer, one of Hitler’s presumed spiritual mentors. According to Ravenscroft, Professor Haushofer “gained… extraordinary gifts through membership of the Green Dragon Society of Japan in which the mastery of the Time Organism and the control of the life forces in the human body is the central aim of ascending degrees of initiation.” Ravenscroft adds that “one of the highest tests of this type of initiation in the Green Dragon Society demands the capacity to control and direct the life force in plants in a somewhat similar manner to the former powers of the Atlantean people.” “Only two other Europeans have been permitted to join this Japanese Order,” [and who, one wonders, were they?] continues Ravenscroft, “which demands oaths of secrecy and obedience of far more strict and uncompromising nature than similar secret societies in the Western world.”4

The major problem with all this is that Ravenscroft’s sources are hazy or non-existent. He likely took a cue from the 1960 work of Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians. Those authors claim that Haushofer “is said [by whom?] to have been initiated into one of the most important secret Buddhist societies and to have been sworn, if he failed in his ‘mission,’ to commit suicide in accordance with the time-honoured ceremonial.”5 Assuming this to be an allusion to the above GDS, we are still faced with the lack of any identifiable source for the authors’ information.

Ravenscroft goes on the claim that members of the Green Dragon Society set-up shop in 1920s Germany and there joined forces with a group of Tibetan monks called the “Society of Green Men.” The latter were, in fact, the “Adepts of Agharti and Schamballah” and their leader was a mysterious “Man with the Green Gloves.”6 It also turns out that the Green Dragons and the Green Men had “been in astral communication for hundreds of years.”7 The united brethren soon established communication with the rising Herr Hitler.

Others have since elaborated on the above by turning the Green Dragons into an “inner cabal” of both Genyosha and the Black Dragon, and making them “but an outpost of a much larger conspiracy based on the even more secretive group known and the Green Men.”8 While fascinating, such assertions appear not to have any basis in hard fact.

But that is not to say they may not have a germ of truth. For instance, there was an occult figure in late Weimar Berlin sometimes referred to as the “Magician with the Green Gloves” who did become a short-lived soothsayer for Hitler and the Nazi Party. He was no Tibetan but, of all things, a Jew who went under the name of Erik Jan Hanussen. When he became inconvenient by accurately predicting the Reichstag Fire (or arranging it), his erstwhile Nazi pals killed him.9

Likewise, there could very well be something to a Green Dragon-Tibet connection. A green dragon, or Zhug, plays an important role in Tibetan mythology where it symbolises the “God of Thunder… bravery and all-conquering force.”10 More to the point, perhaps, a Japanese Buddhist monk named Ekai Kawaguchi made two visits to Tibet in the years before World War I, around the same time Haushofer was in Tokyo. On the surface, Kawaguchi seemed a simple religious devotee, but he is known to have had contact with at least one Japanese secret agent while in the Land of Eternal Snows, Narita Yasuteru, as well as an operative of British Indian intelligence.11 Kawaguchi also had links to Annie Besant and her Theosophist sect, another group accused of subversion and general skullduggery.12 More significantly, Kawaguchi was a devotee of Zen Buddhism.

In his 1989 The Unknown Hitler, Wulf Schwarzwaller claims that Haushofer was a master of various Eastern mystical traditions and “had familiarised himself with the Zen teachings of the Japanese Society of the Green Dragon.”13 More recent sources emphasise the Green Dragon’s intimate association with Zen, specifically its Soto branch, and claim that the “Green Dragon has had a tradition of secret propagation,” whatever that means.14

The Buddhist connection may offer some important clues. Buddhism originated in India and spread to Tibet and China, and from there to Japan. Zen (Cha’an) doctrine also had its roots in China. One of the most revered Buddhist “saints” in Japan is Kukai, an 8th-9th century mystic who spent years studying in China. Interestingly, his main place of enlightenment was the Green Dragon Temple in Xian where he was trained in occult, tantric traditions originating in Tibet. Returning to Japan, Kukai incorporated these into his version of True Land (Shingon) Buddhism.15 The problem is that Shingon was and is quite distinct from Zen, so which, if either, is connected to the Green Dragon?

To further complicate the picture, there are numerous references to a Chinese Green Dragon Society. Most are linked to the martial arts. Green Dragon kung fu societies are active throughout the world, but most appear to be of fairly recent origin. Oddly enough, during the 1960s, the Chicago-based Green Dragon Society was locked in a bitter feud with the rival Black Dragon Society! One version of the Chinese Green Dragon’s history pegs it as a Taoist secret society formed in response to the 17th century persecutions launched by the Jesuit-influenced Emperor Kiang Hsi. According to this, the secret society emerged from the Pure Thought Mystical School of Tao, and along with an implacable hatred for the Manchu Dynasty, it remained dedicated to the “practice of Taoist Alchemy and Immortalist Techniques.”16 That sounds a bit like what Ravenscroft described. The Green Dragon also reputedly operated under numerous aliases and disguises. A secretive and even sinister Green Dragon Society also shows up in at least two martial arts films: ‘The Deadly Sword’ (1978) and ‘Seven Promises’ (1980). Finally, a Green Society or Green Gang was (and arguably still is) a major force in the Chinese underworld.

So, could there be two Green Dragon Society’s, one Japanese and Buddhist and the other Chinese and Taoist? This much seems clear: the inter-pollination of Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, and the sects and secret societies they spawned, is centuries old. Within that context, just about anything is possible.

Other oddments, which may or may not mean anything, include the fact that during his marriage to another wife, Chiang Kai-shek paid a visit to a Green Dragon monastery. The late scholar Charles Rice, after sifting through everything he could find on the Green Dragon Society, wondered whether it might be nothing more than the karate club of the Japanese Emperor’s Imperial Guard!17 Strangest of all, perhaps, is a 2004 article from the South China Morning Post which describes the recent arrest of three members of the “Green Dragon Temple Cult” on charges of running a prostitution ring.18 The female victims were assured a place in heaven if they earned enough money for the cult.

Seven Heads of the Green Dragon

There is another, more involved, though no less mysterious, description of the Green Dragon Society that predates Ravenscroft by forty years and Pauwels and Bergier by almost thirty. It is almost certainly the source for much of what he and others have had to say about the GDS since. The work in question is the 1933 Les Sept Tetes du Dragon Vert [“The Seven Heads of the Green Dragon”] by Teddy Legrand. The title evokes the dragon with “seven heads, ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads” mentioned in Revelations 12:3, although that beast is red, not green. At first glance the book seems to be just an obscure piece of French pulp fiction, albeit one replete with real people and real events along with many invented ones.

Basically, the book presents the Green Dragon or, more simply, “The Greens,” a sinister international cabal bent on world domination. An interesting detail is that these secretive conspirators number precisely 72 and were, presumably, the “72 unknown superiors” of conspiratorial legend.19 To achieve its nefarious aim, the Green Dragon generates war, revolution and chaos, and its hand is the unseen common denominator in such seemingly disparate events as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the instigation of the Bolshevik Revolution, the murder of the Romanovs, the 1922 killing of German foreign minister Walther Rathenau, the abduction of White Russian general A. P. Kutepov and the apparent suicide of millionaire Swedish “Match King” Ivar Kreuger. All in all, the Green Dragon sounds like another version of the infamous Illuminati who haunt so many conspiracy theories.

At the time of the book’s action, 1929-30, the mysterious Greens are busy facilitating the rise of the “The Man of the Two Z’s” under whose “sharp spurs” Europe would soon tremble.20 The latter is a thinly-veiled and rather prophetic reference to Hitler who had barely come to power when the book was published. The “Two Z’s” were the interlocking arms of the Swastika.

The central figure of Les Sept Tetes… is a British secret agent, the ace of L’Intelligence Service, James Nobody, who may be the original literary inspiration for James Bond. He had already starred in a series of pot-boiler spy novels by French writer Charles Lucieto, and the latest was an effort to continue the franchise after Lucieto’s recent death. Interestingly, Lucieto was a retired spy, having served the French secret service in World War I. He liked to claim that his Nobody and similar yarns were roman-a-clefs which revealed true, if hidden aspects of recent history and current events. His publishers later implied that this had something to do with his untimely demise.

To no great surprise, Lucieto’s successor, “Teddy Legrand,” was a pseudonym. In fact, the author was Pierre Mariel who turns out to be a rather interesting fellow. Nominally he was a journalist, but like Lucieto he had ties to French intelligence. That has led to the claim that the latter “inspired” or even directed his literary efforts as it had his predecessor’s.21 More importantly, perhaps, he was a self-proclaimed expert on the occult. Some years later, under the name Werner Gerson, he would author one of the first books on Nazi occultism.22 Mariel himself was a member of both the Freemasonic Martinist Order and a one-time French grand master of the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC).23 Interestingly, in Les Sept Tetes… Mariel paints the Martinist Order as a conspiratorial sect which played a behind-the-scenes role in the French Revolution and later political upheavals, and which just might have links to the mysterious Green Dragon.24

In the book, brother spies Nobody and Legrand are inspired by their common curiosity about the fate of the Russian Imperial family. The chief object of fascination is an icon on St. Seraphim, supposedly found on the Tsarina Alexandra’s body, which bears a puzzling inscription, in English: “S.I.M.P. The Green Dragon. You were absolutely right. Too late.”25 They quickly determine that the first element, which is accompanied by a six point “kabbalistic” symbol, stands for “Superieur Inconnu, Maitre Philippe” [Unknown Superior, Master Philippe], a French Martinist mystic who was an early guru to the Tsarina Alexandra.26 They also note the Tsarina’s predilection for the “Tibetan” Swastika as a good luck symbol. The rest of the story follows the duo’s efforts to discover who or what constitutes the Green Dragon.

Some interest inevitably falls on Maitre Philippe’s successor as royal spiritual guide, Rasputin, who comes across as a tool of the Green Dragon, if not an outright member. Legrand/Mariel correctly observes that during World War I, the dissolute holy man maintained communication with mysterious “Greens,” or simply “The Green,” based in Stockholm in which Mariel portrays as another piece of a larger conspiracy.27 Interestingly, Colonel Stanislaus de Lazovert, one of the men later involved in the plot to kill the dissolute holy man, claimed that Rasputin was a member of the “Green Hand,” a secret order presumably backed by Russia’s Austrian enemies.28 Most recently and reliably, Russian investigator Oleg Shishkin linked Rasputin’s mysterious friends to a Berlin-inspired conspiracy which included German occult lodges and members of the ethnic-German Baltic nobility. Their secret brotherhood, Baltikum, used a green swastika as its symbol.

Coincidentally or not, one of the antagonists encountered by Nobody and Legrand is a Baltic Baron, Otto von Bautenas, whom they identify as no less than one of the “72 Verts.” Bautenas turns out to have been a very real person: an ex-adherent of Baltikum, a close ally of Lithuanian politico Augustine Valdemaras and leader of the fascistic Iron Wolf movement.

Mariel also implies that Anthroposophy kingpin Rudolf Steiner was mixed-up in all this skullduggery and “secret politics” through his connections to pan-German secret societies.29 He also drops Gurdjieff’s and Besant’s names in the same murky mess.

While the book’s action stays within the geographic confines of Europe, shifting from Constantinople, to Scandinavia, to Paris to Berlin, there are numerous references to the Orient, especially Tibet. Legrand and Nobody enlist the aid of one of their old antagonists, Jewish-born “international spy” I.T. Trebitsch-Lincoln, whom has transformed himself into the Tibetan lama Dordji Den. Here again, there is at least a kernel of truth; in 1931 the chameleon-like Trebitsch was ordained a Buddhist monk and became “the Venerable Chao Kung.”30

The pair eventually find themselves in Berlin, in the presence of The Man with the Green Gloves, an apparently Asian soothsayer who has set himself up much as the real Hanussen. They observed an eerie figure that seemed to have “complete mastery of his reflexes.”31 Was this the “control of the life forces” mentioned by Ravenscroft? Like a living statue, “not a muscle in his face moved” as the weird seer conversed in “excellent Oxford English.” Nobody and friend finally realise that they are standing face-to-face with “one of those famous Greens.” The description has led one recent author, Christian von Nidda, to conclude that the Greens were nothing less than “reptilian” beings!32

In the end, Mariel never clearly defines just what the Green Dragon Society is and is not. Doubtless, that was never his intention. Interestingly, there is no suggestion of any Japanese connection. However, as the episode with the Man with Green Gloves suggests, there is the spectre of a powerful, mysterious Asiatic hand at work. The true purpose of the Russian Revolution, he believed, was to destroy Europe’s eastern barrier against Asiatic intrusion. Mariel sensed a kind of “permanent conspiracy against the white race – against Western Greco-Latin civilisation – which seeks to sap, fracture and shake the edifice of already unstable Europe.”33 When the time came, the conspirators would “substitute him” [the Man of the Two Z’s] as a means of bringing about a New Order.

It also remains uncertain to what degree Mariel intended Les Sept Tetes… to be taken seriously. Clearly, that has not prevented some from doing so. Truth, fiction, or some strange amalgam of the two, Mariel’s little book is undoubtedly the inspiration for most of the claims about the Green Dragon Society which have sprung up since. We are still left to wonder whether, if all the exaggeration, obfuscation, superstitious dread and outright lies were cleared aside, there would be anything there at all. Maybe.

Footnotes:

1. “Japan’s Dark Background, 1881-1945.” www.fortunecity.com/tatooine/lieber/50/bds1.htm [15 Oct. 2008].

2. Chieh-ju Ch’en, Chiang Kai-shek’s Secret Past: The Memoir of His Second Wife, Westview Press: Boulder, 2000.

3. Ibid.

4. Trevor Ravenscroft, The Spear of Destiny: The Occult Power behind the Spear which Pierced the Side of Christ, Weiser Books: Boston, 1982, 246-247.

5. Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, Avon Books: New York, 1960, 279.

6. Ravenscroft, 256.

7. Ibid.

8. Gil Trevizo, “The Order of the Green Dragons” (2003), http://odh.trevizo.org/green_dragons.html [15 Oct. 2008]. This and like articles are connected to the Delta Green role-playing games.

9. On Hanussen’s bizarre career, see Mel Gordon, Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant, Feral House: Los Angeles, 2001.

10. “Tibet’s Dragon Culture,” courtesy of Charles Rice, August 2006.

11. Alexander Berzin, “Russian and Japanese Involvement with Pre-Communist Tibet: The Role of the Shambhala Legend,” www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/archives/kalachakra/shambhala/russian_japanese_shambhala.html. [10 Sept. 2008]

12. Richard Spence, Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult, Feral House: Los Angeles, 2008, 184, 189.

13. Wulf Schwarz waller, The Unknown Hitler: Behind the Image of History’s Darkest Name, Berkley Books: New York, 1990, 100.

14. For a highly critical view of “Green Dragon Zen,” See: groups.google.com/group/alt.philosophy.zen/browse_thread/thread/da7a81921050f728.

15. Trevor Corson, “The Magic of Buddhism,” Kyoto Journal (1 July 2000), www.scrawlingclaw.com/blogs/ArticleArchive/Entries/2000/7/1_The_Magic_of_Buddhism.html [10 Nov. 2008].

16. “The Green Dragon Society & Brotherhood, Chi Tao Ch’uan Gung Fu: A Recent History,” www.orientalherb.com/index.php?cPath=35 [1 Nov. 2008].

17. Charles Rice to author, 3 July 2003.

18. Clifford Lo, “Sex Cult Might Have Lured 30 Women,” South China Morning Post (16 Jan. 2004).

19. Nolan Romy, Les Grandes Conspirations de Notre Temps, Bruxelles, 2002, 35-50.

20. Teddy Legrand, Les Sept Tetes du Dragon Vert, Berger-Levrault: Paris, 1933, 78.

21. Oleg Shishkin, Ubit’ Rasputina, Olma Press: Moscow, 2000, 36-37.

22. Werner Gerson, Le Nazisme: Societe Secrete, Productions de Paris: Paris, 1969.

23. Shishkin, 36.

24. Legrand, 32.

25. Legrand, 30-33.

26. True name: Nizier Anthelme Philippe.

27. Legrand, 39-40.

28. “Stanislaus Lazovert and the Assassination of Rasputin, 29 December 1916,” www.firstworldwar.com/source/rasputin_stanislaus.htm.

29. Legrand, 228-230.

30. Bernard Wasserstein, The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln, Penguin Books: New York, 1989, 274.

31. Legrand, 243-244.

32. Christian Von Nidda, Our Secret Planet, Lulu Publications, 124-125.

33. Legrand, 132

.

Dr. RICHARD SPENCE is a professor of History at the University of Idaho. Among other works, he is the author of Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly (Feral House, 2002). His latest book is Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult, published by Feral House.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 112 (January-February 2009).

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—

My name is surrounded with such hate and fear that no one can judge what is true and what is false, what is history, and what is myth.1
– Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, 1921

In Mongolia, there was a legend of the warrior prince, Beltis-Van. Noted for his ferocity and cruelty, he spilled “floods of human blood before he found his death in the mountains of Uliasutay.”2 His slayers interred the corpses of the Prince and his followers deep in earth, covered the graves with heavy stones, and added “incantations and exorcism lest their spirits again break out, carrying death and destruction.” These measures, it was prophesied, would bind the terrible spirits until human blood once more fell upon the site.

In early 1921, so the story goes, “Russians came and committed murders nearby the dreadful tombs, staining them with blood.”3 To some, this explained what followed.

At almost the same instant, a new warlord appeared on the scene, and for the next six months he spread death and terror across the steppes and mountains of Mongolia and even into adjoining regions of Siberia. Among the Mongols he became known as the Tsagan Burkhan, the incarnate “God of War.”4

Later, the Dalai Lama XIII proclaimed him a manifestation of the “wrathful deity” Mahakala, defender of the Buddhist faith.5 Historically, the same individual is best known as the “Mad Baron” or the “Bloody Baron.” His detractors are not shy about calling him a murderous bandit or an outright psychopath.

The man in question is the Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg. His exploits can be only briefly sketched here. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, Baron Ungern found himself in eastern Siberia where he aligned himself with the anti-Bolshevik “White” movement. However, his extreme monarchist sentiments and independent ways made him a loose cannon in that camp.

In 1920, he led his “Asiatic Mounted Division,” a rag-tag collection of Russian, Mongol, Tatar and other troops, into the wilds of Mongolia, a land seething with unrest against Chinese occupation. Rallying Mongols to his banner, in early February 1921 Ungern scored a seemingly miraculous victory by wresting control of the Mongol capital, Urga (today Ulan Bator), from a large Chinese garrison. He then restored the Mongols’ spiritual and temporal leader, the “Living Buddha” Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu Bogdo Gegen, or, more simply, Bodgo Khan and established himself as warlord over Outer Mongolia and the scattered White Russian detachments that had taken refuge there.

Surrounding himself with an inner circle of murderous sycophants and fortune-tellers, he instituted a reign of terror that claimed as victims Jews, real or suspected Reds, and hundreds of others who somehow aroused the Baron’s wrath or suspicion.6 In June of the same year, he launched an ill-fated invasion of Soviet Siberia which ended with his capture by the Red Army and his subsequent trial and execution on 17 September.

This article focuses on Baron Ungern’s real and alleged mysticism and its influence on his actions. A key question is whether his perceived “madness,” in whole or in part, was a misreading of his devotion to esoteric Buddhist, and other, beliefs.

Background and Early Years

While the Baron spent most of his life in the service of the Romanovs, he was almost entirely German by blood. He entered the world as Robert Nicholaus Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg on 10 January 1886 (new style) in Graz, Austria. In Russian-ruled Estonia, his father, Teodor Leonard Rudolf von Ungern-Sternberg, enrolled his son in the Tsar’s nobility as Roman Fedorovich. The Ungern-Sternbergs were an old and illustrious family. The Baron dated his line back at least a thousand years and boasted to his Bolshevik captors that seventy-two of his ancestors had given their lives in Russia’s many wars.7

There is a suggestion of mental instability, even madness, in his immediate line. For instance, one late 18^th century ancestor, Freiherr Otto Reinhold Ludwig von Ungern-Sternberg, earned infamy as a ship-wrecker and murderer who died in Siberian exile.8 Roman’s own father had a reputation as a “bad man” whose violence and cruelty led to divorce and a ban on him having any “influence” on his children.9

As regards Roman von Ungern-Sternberg’s mental state, obviously a diagnosis of insanity can be made only after examination by a psychiatrist, something impossible in this case.10 However, Dmitry Pershin, an eye-witness who took a somewhat positive view of the Baron, still felt that Ungern suffered from a “psychotic abnormality” which made him lose his temper at the “least provocation,” often with terrifying result.11

Later stories claimed that Roman’s aberrant behaviour was the result of a sabre cut to his head, but he manifested rebellious, violent tendencies much earlier. His school days were marked by constant problems; at the elite Naval Cadet Corps, he racked-up no less than twenty-five disciplinary charges before withdrawing in the face of certain expulsion.12 His education left him with a life-long aversion to “thinking” which he equated with “cowardice.”13

As a junior officer before and during World War I, he established a reputation as a violent troublemaker with a penchant for hard-drinking. However, he also earned medals for wounds and reckless bravery. In the words of one superior, the young Baron was a “warrior by temperament,” who “lived for war” and adhered to his own set of “elemental laws.”14 The latter were influenced by an interest in mysticism and the occult, especially of the Eastern variety.

The Baron as Mystic Warrior

Just when and where this interest began is uncertain. Ungern’s personal brand of faith, if it was Buddhism at all, adhered to the mystical Tibetan Vajrayana or Tantric sect. Young Roman got his first taste of the East as an infantryman during the Russo-Japanese War, and he spent 1908 to 1914 as a Cossack officer in Siberia and Mongolia. It was then, he later claimed, that he formed an “Order of Military Buddhists” to serve the Tsar and fight against the evils of revolution. The rules of his Order included celibacy and the “limitless use of alcohol, hashish and opium.”15 The latter was to help initiates overcome their “physical nature” through excess, but as the Baron confessed, it did not work quite as he had planned. Later, in Mongolia, he enforced a strict ban on drink. Still, he asserted, he gathered “three hundred men, bold and ferocious,” and some who did not perish in the fighting against Germany and the Bolsheviks were still with him in 1921.

Ungern resigned his regular commission at the end of 1913. Alone, he headed into the vastness of Outer Mongolia which had proclaimed independence from China. By one account, he rose to command the cavalry forces of the fledgling Mongolian Army, while another holds that he joined the marauding band of the bloodthirsty anti-Chinese rebel, Ja Lama. At some point, Ungern ended up in the western Mongolian town of Kobdo (Khovd) as a member of the guard of the local Russian consulate.

One of his comrades recollected that “when one observed Ungern, one felt himself carried back to the Middle Ages…; [he was] a throwback to his crusader ancestors, with the same thirst for war and the same belief in the supernatural.”16 Another recalled that he displayed “a great interest in Buddhism,” learned Mongolian and took to frequenting lama fortune-tellers.17 According to Dmitri Aloishin, a later, unwilling member of the Baron’s army, Ungern’s “Buddhist teachers taught him about reincarnation, and he firmly believed that in killing feeble people he only did them good, as they would be stronger beings in the next life.”18

The parallels between aforementioned Ja Lama and the Baron seem too close to be mere coincidence. Also known as the “Lama with a Mauser,” Ja Lama briefly made himself master of western Mongolia. Another “militant Buddhist,” he earned a fearsome reputation for ripping out the hearts of unfortunate captives and offering them up in skull-shaped bowls as bali (sacrifice) to the “Tibetan terror gods.”19 One such “Tantric” ritual slaughter occurred in Kobdo in the summer of 1912, just before Ungern arrived on the scene. In February 1914, the Russian consul in Kobdo arrested Ja Lama and Cossack troops, possibly including Ungern, and escorted the captive to exile in Russia. Did Ja Lama become a role model for the Baron, or even a religious inspiration?

A Tibetan angle figures prominently in Ungern’s subsequent Mongolian escapade. The Living Buddha was himself a son of the Land of Eternal Snows, and a small Tibetan community dwelled in Urga. A hundred or so of these men formed a special sotnia (squadron) in the Baron’s forces and played a critical part in the assault on Urga by snatching the Bogdo from under the noses of his Chinese guards. The Chinese and Mongols were convinced that the feat had been accomplished through sorcery. These Tibetans maintained a distance from the rest of the Baron’s army; apparently others were put off by their habit of dining out of bowls made from gilded human skulls, perhaps the same sort of vessels used in Ja Lama’s sacrificial rites.

The Tibetan nexus also provided the Baron with a link to Lhasa and the Dalai Lama, to whom he addressed personal letters. After his power in Mongolia collapsed, Ungern dreamed of leading the remnants of his division to far-off Tibet and putting himself at the service of the Buddhist holy man.20 The prospect of this gruelling, and potentially suicidal, trek was the final straw in provoking mutiny against the Baron.

Also serving under Ungern in his Mongolian adventure were fifty or so Japanese soldiers. This has fuelled accusations that he was a cat’s paw of Japanese imperialism. While it is clear that the Japanese military monitored the Baron’s activities and thought he might be useful, it is equally evident that they had no real control over him. Still, his tiny Japanese contingent received better rations and the unique privilege of consuming alcohol.21 Japanese military records suggest that the men were “mostly petty adventurers” acting on their own accord, but that is far from clear.22 Their commander, a Major or Captain Suzuki, had met the Baron in 1919 at a “Pan-Mongol Congress” and the pair maintained a special and secretive friendship.

An intriguing possibility is that Suzuki was not an emissary of the Mikado’s Army but of one of the secret societies that permeated it, such as the Black Dragon Society or the even more secretive Green Dragon Society. The latter was based in a sect of esoteric Buddhism, and its Pan-Asiatic, Pan-Buddhist agenda meshed with Ungern’s own beliefs.23 The Baron felt that the West had lost its spiritual moorings and had entered a stage of moral and cultural disintegration. The Russian Revolution was but a manifestation of this advanced corruption. Only in the East, specifically in Buddhism, did he see a force capable of resisting this decay and restoring spiritual order in the West.

The Baron’s Lamas and Fortune-Tellers

Ungern was fascinated by all forms of divination. He allegedly carried a deck of Tarot cards with him, even in the heat of battle. As noted, in Kobdo he consorted with lama soothsayers and in Urga he surrounded himself with a small army of fortune-tellers (tsurukhaichi), sorcerers and shamans.24 Aloishin recalls that the Baron’s diviners were forever consulting the roasted shoulder blades of sheep, pouring over the cracks “to determine where the troops must be stationed, and how to advance against the enemy.”25 On other occasions, Ungern ordered his troops to stop “at various places in accordance with old Mongolian prophecies.”26

The Baron’s staff physician, Dr. N. M. Riabukhin, damned the fortune-tellers as “brazen, filthy, ignorant and bow-legged” and decried the fact that Ungern “never took any important step” without consulting them. The soothsayers convinced him that he was the incarnation of Tsagan Burkhan, the God of War. To White officer Boris Volkov, the Baron’s dependency on these types seemed proof of the “moronic mentality of the degenerate who imagined himself the saviour of Russia.”27

Prior to his advance in Red Siberia, Ungern spent 20,000 precious Mexican dollars to hire thousands of lamas to “perform for him elaborate services in the temples and to call to his assistance all their mystic powers.”28 One drugged shamaness’s prediction of the Baron’s approaching doom proved eerily accurate, and helped convince him to undertake the disastrous invasion.29 The fortune-telling lamas failed him when they counselled a two day delay in the attack on Troitskosavsk, a key border town.30 This gave the Reds opportunity to bring up reinforcements and repel the assault. Later, officers bribed a Buriat fortune-teller to change his predictions, which led Ungern to call-off further advance and order retreat to Mongolia.31

But if Ungern was influenced – and mislead – by the supernatural, he also knew how to use it to his advantage. Prior to his final attack on Urga, he dispatched fortune-tellers into the city where they “filled the Chinese soldiery with superstitious fear” by predicting his imminent arrival and spreading rumours that the White Baron was immune to bullets and could appear and disappear at will.32 He also ordered nightly bonfires set on the surrounding hills. His Mongol agents told the credulous Chinese that the fires were Ungern offering sacrifices to the spirits who would take their vengeance on the sons of China.33

One person struck early by the Baron’s peculiar nature was mystical philosopher Count Hermann Keyserling who knew Roman and his brother Constantin from childhood. Keyserling later regarded the Baron as “the most remarkable person I have ever had the good fortune to meet,” but also a mass of contradictions.34 He saw Ungern as one whose “nature was suspended… in the void between heaven and hell,” someone “capable of highest intuition and loving kindness” alongside “the most profound aptitude for the metaphysics of cruelty.”35 The Baron’s metaphysical ideas, Keyserling believed, were “closely related to those of the Tibetans and Hindus.”36 Keyserling was convinced that Roman possessed the occult power of “second sight” and “the faculty of prophecy.”

Keyserling was not the only one to come to such conclusions. Years later, fascist and occult philosopher Julius Evola opined that Baron Ungern possessed “supernormal faculties” including clairvoyance and the ability to “look into the souls” of others.37 Ferdynand Ossendowski claimed that he did exactly that at their initial meeting. “I have been in your soul and know all,” the Baron proclaimed, and Ossendowski’s life was secure.38

Much the same is repeated in the testimony of others who knew Ungern. Aloishin thought the Baron patently insane but also felt that he “possessed a dangerous power of reading people’s thoughts.”39 He recounts how Ungern would inspect recruits by staring into each man’s face, “hold that gaze for a few moments, and then bark: ‘To the army’; ‘Back to the cattle’; ‘Liquidate’.”40 Riabukhin mentions that on their first meeting “it was as though the Baron wanted to leap into my soul.”41 Another anonymous officer recounts that “Ungern looked at everyone with the eyes of a beast of prey,” and this instilled fear in all who met him.42 A Polish soldier in Mongol service, Alexander Alexandrowicz, accepted the Baron’s “second sight,” but believed that it was his “superior” intellect that helped him “size up any man in a few minutes.”43

The Mysterious Ferdynand Ossendowski

Arguably, no one did more to create the prevailing image of Baron Ungern than the above noted Polish writer Ferdynand Ossendowski. However, he is a far from an impeccable source. Prior to his encounter with the Baron, Ossendowski had a long history as spy, intriguer and purveyor of fraudulent documents. He almost certainly was an agent of the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. In 1917-18 he was mixed-up with the infamous Sisson Documents, a fake (if fundamentally accurate) dossier on German-Bolshevik intrigues.44 Later, in Siberia, Ossendowski served White “Supreme Ruler” Admiral Kolchak as an economic adviser and, probably, a spy. Ossendowski arrived in Mongolia as a refugee from the Red tide. In his widely-read 1922 book Beasts, Men and Gods, the Pole describes his meeting with the “Bloody Baron” in vivid detail, and not without some sympathy for the subject. Nevertheless, Ossendowski knew that “standing before me was a dangerous man,” and that “I felt some tragedy, some horror in every movement of Baron Ungern.”45 Nor did Ossendowski mince words about the climate of fear that gripped Urga under the Baron. He describes Ungern’s brace of murderous underlings such as the psychotic “strangler” Leonid Sipailov, the equally repellent Evgeny Burdukovsky and the sadistic Dr. Klingenberg. What Ossendowski conveniently side-steps is the mystery of his own survival in that precarious environment.

In the views of others who witnessed the Baron’s rule, Ossendowski was not just lucky and no innocent observer. Konstantin Noskov notes that from the moment of his arrival in Mongolia, “Professor” Ossendowski played “a strange role understood by no one.”46 “He interfered in everything,” adds Noskov, “quarrelled very skilfully [and] wove complicated political intrigue….” Pershin charges that Ossendowski was another who exploited Ungern’s obsession with the supernatural, a view echoed by one of the Baron’s officers, K.I. Lavrent’ev.47 By encouraging “the Baron’s faith in occultism and other things of the beyond,” Ossendowski became an “adviser” to the Baron, which may explain a later claim that the Pole became Ungern’s “chief of intelligence.”48

Ossendowski, according to Pershin, “wormed his way into a position close to the Baron” and so “extracted all the advantages he wanted.”49 Those included money and safe passage to Manchuria “in comfort and, perhaps, with something more than that.” Dr. Riabukhin and Noskov both recall that Ossendowski was inexplicably the sole survivor among a group of refugees whose other members were murdered on Ungern’s orders.50 Boris Volkov adds that Ossendowski played a key role in formulating the Baron’s infamous and “mystical” Order #15, and so secured his life and a large sum of money.51 Noskov flatly declares that Ossendowski was the author of the Order.52

“Order #15,” the closest Ungern ever came to outlining a philosophy or mission, deserves closer examination. Since the Baron was not in the habit of issuing numbered orders, the #15 is meaningless in that context. According to Aloishin, that number and the date of its issue were more work of the “learned lamas” who picked them as lucky numerals.53 Basically, the Order outlines a grandiose scheme to initiate an ever-expanding wave of counter-revolution that would cleanse Russia of its radical contagion and restore the Romanov throne under the late Tsar Nicholas’s brother, Mikhail Alexandrovich. The Baron, as many others, was not aware that Mikhail had been dead since June 1918. The Order proclaimed that “the evil which has come to Earth in order to destroy the divine principle of the human soul must be destroyed at the root,” and that “the punishment may be only one: the death penalty, in various degrees.”54

The most notorious article, though, was #9 which declared that “Commissars, Communists and Jews, together with their families, shall be destroyed.” The Baron had a pathological hatred of Jews, and wherever his power held sway there was a ruthless extermination of that community. Even Pershin, who felt that “stories concerning [Ungern’s] mercilessness have been much exaggerated,” admitted that the mass killing of Jews was regrettably true and that the Baron was implacable on the matter.55 Volkov felt that Ungern used pogroms as a tool to exploit anti-Semitism among the émigrés and troops, but there was an almost religious zeal to his hatred. In a letter to a White Russian associate in Peking, the Baron warned against “international Judaism” and even the insidious influence of “Jewish capitalists” who were an “omnipresent, though very often undetected, enemy.”56 At his trial, the Baron assured his Jewish, Bolshevik prosecutor, Emelian Yaroslavsky, that “the Communist International was organised 3,000 years ago at Babylon.”57 In his feelings towards Jews, Ungern certainly prefigures the Nazi mentality, and much the same could be said for his whole weird mixture of mystical anti-modernism.

In August 1921, the Baron’s despotic reign came to an end when desperate officers of the Asiatic Mounted Division staged a coup against him and his dwindling cadre of loyalists. Almost miraculously, Ungern escaped the general slaughter and found a brief, final refuge among his Mongol soldiers. They too soon abandoned him to the approaching Reds, but without harming a hair on his head; they were still convinced that he was the Tsagan Burkhan and could not be killed.58

The Soviets suffered from no such delusions. At his trial in Novo-Nikolaevsk, he was a calm, even dignified, prisoner. He had foreseen his fate and accepted it. The prosecution was most interested in portraying him as an agent of the Japanese, which he denied. However, the Baron readily admitted to mass killings and other atrocities. So far as his brutal discipline was concerned, he proclaimed himself a believer in a system that had existed “since Frederick the Great.”59 He went before the firing squad quite convinced that someday he would be back.

A final point brings us back to Ossendowski, who claimed that the Baron sought contact with the mythical subterranean kingdom of Agarthi and its mysterious ruler, the “King of the World.”60 Agarthi, of course, is identical with Agarttha or Shambhala, a mystical land enshrined in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. In the early twentieth century, the story was picked-up and elaborated by Western esoteric writers such as Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre and Nikolai Roerich who believed that it described an actual realm hidden somewhere in northern Tibet or a nearby Central Asia. By an interesting coincidence, another officer in Ungern’s Division was Vladimir Konstantinovich Roerich, Nikolai’s younger brother. Then again, perhaps it was no coincidence at all. But that brings us to a story that is best saved for a following article: “Red Star over Shambhala: Soviet, British and American Intelligence and the Search for Lost Civilisation in Asia.”

Footnotes:

1. Ferdinand Ossendowski, Beasts, Men and Gods [BMG] (New York: Dutton, 1922), 238.

2. Konstantin Noskov, The Black Year: The White Russians in Mongolia in the Year 1921 (Harbin, 1930), 75.

3. Ibid.

4. Tsagan Burkhan roughly translates as “White God” but can also be used to mean “White Buddha.” The use of the term for Ungern seems to have started among his Buriat troops and spread to other Mongols.

5. Markus Osterrieder, “From Synarchy to Shambhala: The Role of Political Occultism and Social Messianism in the Activities of Nicholas Roerich,” presented at “The Occult in 20^th Century Russia: Metaphysical Roots of Soviet Civilization,” Munich, March 2007, 10, n. 51.

6. Boris Volkov, About Ungern (trans. Elena Varneck), 6 , Hoover Institution Archives [HIA], Stanford, CA,.

7. Izvestiya (23 Sept. 1921). Standard genealogy puts the beginning of the line in the mid-13^th century with one Hanss von Ungern or Johannes de Ungaria who took service under the Bishop of Riga: Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels (Glueksburg: C.A. Starke, 1952), 467.

8. Marquis de Custine, Empire of the Czar: A Journey through Eternal Russia (New York: Anchor, 1989), 61-65.

9. Vladimir Pozner, The Bloody Baron: the Story of Ungern-Sternberg (New York: Random House, 1938), 50-51.

10. I. V. Ladygin, “Chetyre mifa o barone Ungerne,” http//army.armor.kiev.ua/hist/ungern.shtml.

11. D. Pershin, “Baron Ungern, Urga, i Altan Bulak,” 113, HIA, Stanford.

12. Paul du Quenoy, “Warlordism a la russe: Baron von Ungern-Sternberg’s Anti-Bolshevik Crusade, 1917-21,” Revolutionary Russia, Vol. 16, #2 (December 2003), 4. This article provides an excellent overview of Ungern’s career.

13. Pozner, 81-82.

14. Baron Petr N. Vrangel’ (Wrangel), “Yuzhnyi front,” Beloe delo, Vol. V (1927), 12-13.

15. Ossendowski, “With Baron Ungern in Mongolia,” Asia, Vol. 22, #8 (1922), 618.

16. Pershin, 53c.

17. Boris Volkov, “On Ungern,” 45, trans. by Elena Varneck, HIA, Stanford.

18. Dmitri Aloishin, Asian Odyssey (New York: Henry Holt, 1940), 230.

19. Charles R Bawden, The Modern History of Mongolia (New York; Praeger, 1969), 198.

20. N. M. Riabukhin, “The Story of Baron Ungern Sternberg As Told by His Staff Physician,” 30, trans. by Elena Varneck, HIA, Stanford.

21. Volkov, 47.

22. Fujiko Isono, “The Mongolian Revolution of 1921,” Modern Asia Studies, Vol. 10, #3 (1976), 388.

23. My thanks to the late Charles Rice for this information.

24. Pershin, 53c.

25. Aloishin, 228. See also Ossendowski, BMG, 218.

26. Aloishin, 231.

27. Volkov, 5.

28. Aloishin, 258.

29. Osssendowski, “Baron,” 661-662.

30. Riabukhin, 23, and Volkov, 42.

31. Riabukhin., 28.

32. Pershin, 45.

33. Ibid., 49.

34. Pozner, 81.

35. Hermann Keyseling, Creative Understanding (New York: Harper, 1929), 276 and Pozner, 81-82.

36. Ibid.

37. Julius Evola, “Ungern-Sternberg, el Baron Sanguinario,” trans. from Roma (9 Feb. 1973).

38. Ossendowski, “Baron,” 615.

39. Aloishin, 229.

40. Ibid.

41. Riabukhin, 2.

42. Ungernovets, “Memories of Ungern-Sternberg: Memories of a Participant” (c. 1933), 11, trans. by Elena Varneck, Varneck Collection, HIA.

43. Rene Guenon. Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001), 311.

44. George Kennan, “The Sisson Documents,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 28, #2 (June 1956), 130-154.

45. Ossendowsky, BMG, 226.

46. Noskov, 14.

47. Pershin, 53c.

48. Osterrieder, 11, n. 70.

49. Pershin, 53c.

50. Noskov, 16.

51. Volkov, 6.

52. Noskov, 26

53. Aloishin, 258.

54. “Order No. 15 issued by Baron Ungern Sternberg,” trans. by Elena Varneck, Varneck Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, 5.

55. Pershin, 59, 59c, 66, 75. See also Volkov, 15, 20, 26, 50.

56. Ungern to “Grigorii,” (20 May 1921), 7-8, “Letters Captured from Baron Ungern in Mongolia,” HIA, Stanford.

57. “Trial of Ungern,” from Izvestiya (23 Sept. 1921), trans. by Elena Varneck, Varneck Collection, HIA, Stanford.

58. Aloishin, 267-268.

59. “Trial,” Ibid.

60. Ossendowski, BMG, 301-312.

.

Dr. RICHARD SPENCE is a professor of History at the University of Idaho. Among other works, he is the author of Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly (Feral House, 2002). His latest book is Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult, published by Feral House.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 108 (May-June 2008).

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Strictly speaking, a pagan Christ is a contradiction in terms. The very concept of paganism was constructed by Christians who wanted to distinguish their faith from the old religion of Greece and Rome, which by the end of classical antiquity was observed only by peasants in remote rural areas – the pagani, or “country people,” or – to use words that are similar in tone – rustics, rubes, hayseeds. So there can be no pagan Christ. Paganism is all that Christianity is not.

Once we go past this elementary point, however, we see that the situation is not so simple. The resemblance between Christianity and its rivals could never be entirely overlooked. The Church Father Augustine (354–430) wrote, “That which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist from the planting of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion which already existed began to be called Christianity.” Whatever Augustine meant by this – and it’s not entirely clear from the context – one thing it could mean is that the “true religion” is universal and has always existed; only comparatively late did it come to be codified in the teachings of Christ.

Before I go further into what this “true religion” might be, it’s necessary to stop and take a look at early Christianity in its context. Christianity, as is well known, grew up in the Roman Empire, a time of remarkable fecundity in religious belief, with a huge and dizzying marketplace of gods and cults and philosophies for the seeker to choose from, many of which bore more than a passing resemblance to one another. It’s impossible to believe that Christianity was not affected by this background. Although the Christians insisted that their religion was true and all the others were false, they still had to account for the fact that theirs was not so different from many of those they were denouncing.

Over the past century, one of the most influential views of the relationship between Christianity and paganism has been that of Sir J.G. Frazer (1854–1941), author of the classic work The Golden Bough, first published in 1890 and updated in many editions thereafter. A pioneer of comparative mythology, Frazer delved into the compendious collections of lore and legend that scholars were amassing in his time and noticed that Christianity had taken many of its elements from the religions it would eventually displace.

The most famous instance is Christmas. The birthday of Christ was not recorded and is not known; in the early centuries of the religion that bears his name it was not celebrated. But by the fourth century, Christ’s birthday came to be observed as a holiday. In the East (starting in Egypt), the date selected was January 6. But the Western church, which had never observed this date, set Christ’s birthday as December 25. Why? One Christian writer quoted (but not named) by Frazer explains: “It was a custom of the heathen to celebrate on the same twenty-fifth of December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity. In these solemnities and festivities the Christians also took part. Accordingly when the doctors of the Church perceived that Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnised on that day and the festival of the Epiphany on the sixth of January.”

Another, possibly more revealing, case involves the festival commemorating the death and resurrection of Christ. Today Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the full moon after the March equinox. (This is to some extent a simplification of the complex process of fixing the date of Easter, but it will serve our purposes here.) Frazer noted that there was an ancient tradition by which the death of Christ was observed on March 25, regardless of the phase of the moon. Remarkably, this coincided with the date on which the death and resurrection of a pagan god, Attis, was celebrated. Still more significantly, the parts of the world where Christians observed Easter on this date – western Asia Minor and Rome – were precisely the areas where the cult of Attis was most popular.

Attis, according to the myth, was a handsome young shepherd who was born of a virgin. Beloved of the Great Goddess of life, he was said in some legends to have been killed by a boar, in others to have died after castrating himself. (The priests of the Attis cult were all self-made eunuchs, in imitation of him.) After his death, he was changed into a pine tree.

It’s curious that the death and resurrection of Christ should have been celebrated in such close conjunction with that of one of the deities that the Christians so detested. What’s even more interesting is the underlying similarity of the myths: both are celebrations of a god, born of a virgin, who has died and risen again. More surprisingly still, Attis was not the only god in antiquity who was believed to have died and risen again. There was also Adonis, worshipped in Babylonia and Syria. Adonis, another beautiful young man, was said to die every year. His death caused passion to cease and beasts and men to forget to reproduce; all life would be extinguished if Ishtar, the goddess of life, did not rescue him annually from the halls of death. And of course there is Osiris, the slain and dismembered king of Egypt who was reassembled by his wife Isis (another goddess of life) to serve as the lord of the dead.

Even this cursory sketch suggests how many parallels we can find between Christianity and pagan religions. Moreover, it was obvious that the pagan faiths were much older than the Christian one. Christianity looked like a mere copycat of these religions, and that’s exactly what many of its pagan critics contended. The Christian fathers countered with a remarkably clumsy response: that Satan, foreseeing that Christ would come to earth, came down first and created religions that were merely diabolical imitations of the truth.

Those of us who find this argument implausible are left wondering exactly what the relationship between Christianity and these pagan cults was. Frazer saw the mystery religions of Attis and Adonis and Osiris as essentially fertility cults: Their rites were designed to mimic and foster the rebirth of life each spring. According to Frazer, Christ had come as a teacher of “ethical reforms”; the mythologies of the fertility cults were gradually assimilated to the faith of Christ’s followers “so as to accord in some measure with the prejudices, the passions, the superstitions of the vulgar.” Frazer writes:

To live and to cause to live, to eat food and to beget children, these were the primary wants of men in the past, and they will be the primary wants of men in the future so long as the world lasts…. These two things, therefore, food and children, were what men chiefly sought to procure by the performance of magical rites for the regulation of the seasons.

This all may sound plausible – as it certainly did to Frazer’s rationalistic late-Victorian contemporaries – but there’s one small problem with it. The idea that the mysteries of Attis and Adonis and Osiris, and by extension of Christ, were mere attempts to reproduce and sustain the cycles of life was known to the ancients and explicitly refuted by them. Plutarch, writing in the late first century CE, contends:

And we shall also get our hands on the dull crowd who take pleasure in associating the [mystic recitals] about these Gods either with changes of the atmosphere according to the seasons, or with the generation of the corn and sowing and ploughings, and in saying that Osiris is buried when the corn is hidden by the earth, and comes to life and shows himself again when it begins to sprout.

Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher (106–43 BCE), also says there is something more to the mysteries:

These Mysteries have brought us from rustic savagery to a cultivated and refined civilisation. The rites of the Mysteries are called “initiations” and in truth we have learned from them the first principles of life. We have gained the understanding not only to live happily but to die with better hope.

We can safely say this much: The ancient mysteries were more than rites intended merely to ensure that the crops grew and the animals bred. But what, then, were they? What is the dying “with better hope” that Cicero mentions? And why does the story of Christ, springing from the monotheistic world of Judaism, so much resemble those of the gods that went before?

At this point it would be helpful to address an extremely important issue: the reliability of the historical accounts of Jesus. Apart from a few extremely brief references in non-Christian writers such as Tacitus and Pliny the Younger (which talk about the Christians as a sect but say practically nothing about Christ himself), we have to rely on the canonical gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Scholars unanimously accept these as the oldest gospels, with the possible exception of the Gospel of Thomas, an early sayings collection with a strongly Gnostic tinge; the many other gospels that were written are almost certainly later – one reason they didn’t find their way into the New Testament.

Unfortunately, even these texts present Jesus at a remove. None of them, it is now generally acknowledged, was written by any of the Twelve Apostles or even by anyone who knew or saw Jesus personally. The earliest Gospel, Mark, is dated to around 70 CE; the latest, John, to around 100 (these dates are highly approximate). Nowhere in these Gospels is the claim that the writer himself has seen what he is describing. Indeed most scholars today agree that none of the texts in the entire New Testament was written by any of the Twelve Apostles.

The only surviving eyewitness account of Christ is found in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Paul did not know Jesus when he was alive, but he writes that after Jesus had appeared to Cephas (Peter), the twelve, and various other witnesses, “last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time” (1 Cor. 15:5). (Biblical quotations are from the Authorised King James Version.) This experience, usually equated with Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1–7), is an eyewitness account: Paul is claiming that he has had a vision of the risen Christ like that of the other apostles. Inasmuch as Paul died during Nero’s persecution in Rome in 64 CE, this text is almost certainly earlier than any of the Gospels. But Paul does not say anything more about his experience, and he says almost nothing at all about Jesus before his death.

In their 1999 book The Jesus Mysteries, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy argue that the extreme scarcity of direct evidence about Jesus, together with the strong resemblance of his story to other pagan myths, means that Jesus did not exist as a historical figure. He was created by Gnostic sages as a kind of Jewish equivalent of the dead and reborn gods of the pagan Mediterranean world.

Freke’s and Gandy’s view, although interesting, seems to be an overstatement given the evidence. They say that Paul’s vision (as described by himself) may have been a later addition to 1 Corinthians, a claim that, to my knowledge, no reputable scholar would agree with; or perhaps that it was a mystical vision of some sort. But the context of 1 Corinthians 15 indicates that, as Christians have always claimed, Paul, like the others who claimed they had witnessed the resurrection of Christ, regarded it as an actual encounter with the risen Jesus. Whatever it was they saw or did not see, this much seems indisputable. Indeed, if we go to 1 Thessalonians, another letter of Paul’s, which was the first New Testament book to be written (it’s generally dated to around 50 CE), we see Paul saying, “The Jews… both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets” (1 Thess. 2:14–15). “We believe that Jesus died and rose again,” he writes in the same letter (1 Thess. 4:14). In both these instances, he is stressing the historical actuality of these events: they are not a myth. Furthermore, Paul is not introducing this idea as a novelty but as a premise that he expects his readers to share.

About the historical Jesus, then, we can say this much: that as early as 50 CE, no more than twenty years after his death and still well in the lifetime of his disciples, his followers preached that he had suffered and died and was resurrected. These facts are not later mythic accretions but among the first things the historical record says about Jesus.

What, then, does this all mean? Paul’s own ideas seem to have grown and changed over time. In 1 Thessalonians, his first surviving epistle, he sounds like a modern-day fundamentalist, obsessed with the Rapture. In fact the idea of the Rapture comes from 1 Thess. 4:17: “Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with [the dead] in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.” Later, Paul becomes more mystical. In 1 Corinthians he explicitly denies the physical resurrection of the dead: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body…. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption” (1 Cor. 15:44, 50). This, incidentally, puts mainstream Christianity in the bizarre position of teaching a doctrine – the resurrection of the physical body – that is explicitly denied by its own scriptures. I do not know of any other such case in all of world religion.

Nonetheless, resurrection is at the core of Christianity from its earliest days, just as it was of the mystery religions of Attis and Adonis and Osiris that preceded it. And, like the pagan mysteries, which enabled its initiates to die “with better hope,” Christianity viewed the resurrection not an isolated case that happened to one (possibly divine) man, but something that is the common human inheritance, potentially available to everyone: “Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept” (1 Cor. 15:20). This was not the concept of resurrection as commonly taught, but part of what the Church Father Origen (185–253) called “the deeper and more mystical doctrines which are rightly concealed from the multitude.”

The nature of this resurrection lies at the heart of the old pagan mysteries and the Christian faith alike. To best understand it in a short space, it would be helpful to use the common metaphor of a seed, used both by Jesus in the Gospels and by Paul (as well as in some of the pagan mysteries). A seed is something extremely small and contains only in germ the full plant; this is the metaphor Paul uses to compare what he calls “the resurrection body” with the “natural body.” Christ in the Gospels likens the kingdom of heaven to a seed on several occasions as well: for example, “the kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed” (Matt. 13:31).

What, then, is this “seed”? What is the kingdom of heaven, for that matter? If you were to read the works of many theologians, you might conclude that they don’t know. But this is a central concept in esoteric Christianity. It is not difficult to grasp, but it is subtle. I’ve discussed it in detail in my book Inner Christianity, but in essence it comes to this: There is that in you which says “I.” It is consciousness in its pure form; it is never seen, but always that which sees. You may think you are your body or your emotions or your thoughts, but the fact that you can step back and look at all these things at a distance proves that these things are not you – not in the truest and fullest sense. In fact it is your very confusion of your “I” with your thoughts, emotions, and sensations that constitutes the fundamental problem of human existence. Liberation or enlightenment or, as the early Christians called it, gnosis is the freeing of the “I” from its identification with its own experience. Paul writes, “That which thou sowest is not quickened until it die” (1 Cor. 15:36). Esoterically, this means that the “I” must “die” – must detach itself from its former identifications – before it can be “resurrected” or “born again,” that is, realise its fullest potential in a life that is not limited by the body or the psyche. In the course of this liberation the “I” realises its own immortality.

This, in the simplest and most concise language that I can muster, is the secret that I believe lies at the heart of esoteric Christianity and of the Christian mystery itself. To speak of the resurrection of the physical body, explicitly denied by Paul, is to misunderstand; it is the symbolic death and rebirth of the true “I” – called “I am” in the Gospel of John – that is really the point. But it is an arcane point, and not everyone can grasp it. Early Christianity eventually allowed ordinary believers to believe in a physical resurrection because it was easier to understand; only those who wanted to go deeper were told the truth. As Origen writes, “The resurrection of the body,… while preached in the churches, is understood more clearly by the intelligent.” Origen is saying that the doctrine “preached in the churches” is not the whole story. Regrettably, however, as Christianity developed in later centuries, those who had only an inaccurate, secondary understanding of this truth came to lead the church. Because they did not understand the deeper message, they suppressed it, with consequences that have been disastrous for the spiritual life of the West.

In any event, the revelation of the true nature of the “I” makes the correspondence between the Christian mystery and those of the pagans much easier to understand. If these things are true, they are universally true, and if they are universally true, they must have been known in many times and places and cannot be the bailiwick of a single religion. That, I would suggest, is why Augustine can say that the “true religion” always existed. It’s also why the mystery religions so resembled Christianity. They were expressing a universal truth to which Christianity was also pointing.

All the same, this does not entirely explain the innumerable parallels between the Christ of the Gospels and the figures of ancient myth. Often it does seem that characteristics of the ancient pagan gods were later associated with Christ – and at a fairly early stage. The virgin birth, for example, is not mentioned in Mark, the earliest canonical Gospel, or for that matter by Paul. But it does appear in Matthew and Luke, which are generally dated to between 80 and 100. This suggests that by this point certain myths and legends had attached themselves to the basic story of Christ’s death and resurrection.

Exactly how this happened is unclear. There is no contemporary documentation of this process, or, for that matter, of Christ himself apart from the Gospels to serve as a check. The best guess seems to be something like this: The earliest Christians believed they had some experience of the risen Christ, and this was the central part of their message from the very beginning. By the end of the first century, as the Gospels were being written, the historical kernel of the story of Christ was expanded and recast, partly to imitate familiar aspects of pagan myths but also to symbolically express certain truths. That’s why Origen could write:

Very many mistakes have been made because the right method of examining the holy texts has not been discovered by the greater number of readers… because it is their habit to follow the bare letter….

Scripture interweaves the imaginary with the historical, sometimes introducing what is utterly impossible, sometimes what is possible but never occurred…. [The Word] has done the same with the Gospels and the writings of the Apostles; for not even they are purely historical, incidents which never occurred being interwoven in the “corporeal” sense…. These passages, by means of seeming history, though the incidents never occurred, figuratively reveal certain mysteries.

This process began with the Gospels but did not end with them. It continued for several centuries later, as we’ve seen with the Christian appropriation of Christmas and Easter in the fourth century. Later still, in the fifth century, when the cult of the pagan goddesses was suppressed, there was a need for a feminine face of divinity, and the mother of Christ was elevated to this role; many of the attributes of Ishtar and particularly Isis were then attached to her. Christianity’s success was at least partly due to its remarkable genius and flexibility in adapting pagan myths to its own ends. Ultimately, however, the true greatness of the faith lies in its profound and haunting expression of what may be the central mystery of human existence.

Bibliography

Raymond E. Brown,  Introduction to the New Testament, New York: Doubleday, 1997.

J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, New York: Macmillan, 1922.

Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “Original Jesus” a Pagan God?, New York: Three Rivers, 1999.

The Greek New Testament, edited by Kurt Aland et al. Third edition. N.p.: United Bible Societies, 1966.

G.R.S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes: Studies in Hellenistic Theosophy and Gnosis, York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1972. Originally published 1906.

Origen, Contra Celsum, translated by Henry Chadwick, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953.

Origen, On First Principles, Edited and translated by G.W. Butterworth, New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

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RICHARD SMOLEY has over thirty years of experience studying and practicing the Western esoteric traditions. His latest book is The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe. His other works include Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (with Jay Kinney); Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition; The Essential Nostradamus; Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism; and Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity. He is editor of Quest Books and executive editor of Quest magazine, both published by the Theosophical Society in America. His website is www.innerchristianity.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 105 (Nov-Dec 2007).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 105 (PDF version) for only US$5

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

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With the publication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail in the mid-nineties and the Gnostic Gospels found in Nag Hammadi, a new perspective on the role of Mary Magdalene in the revelation and dissemination of the esoteric teachings of Christ has emerged onto the public stage. With the release of The Da Vinci Code, she has been placed firmly in the public consciousness, her story awakening both excitement and controversy.

It is my contention that Mary Magdalene was the carrier of a tradition of respect and reverence for the Divine Feminine, a secret initiatory tradition that leads back through Jesus, Gnosticism, the esoteric teachings of Judaism, and the Egyptian mysteries of Isis to the ultimate ground or source of all religions. By seeking out the alternative roads to understanding, by looking at the Gnostic texts, legends, symbols, and iconography, one discovers the distinct possibility Mary Magdalene was not only first witness to and herald of the Resurrection, but the chief disciple and recipient of Christ’s’ gnosis, as well as teacher and transmitter of these extraordinary Mysteries to the people of France.

On the shores of the Mediterranean Sea outside Marseilles at Les Saintes Marie de la Mere there is a small chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalene and consecrated by Archbishop Roncalli (who later became Pope John XXIII). Given a place of prominence within this chapel are paintings of her arrival from Palestine in a small rudderless boat.According to legend, soon after the crucifixion and Resurrection, Mary Magdalene and her family were expelled from the Holy Land, set adrift on the Mediterranean Sea and made their way to this region, particularly the area around Southern France and Northern Spain. At this time in history, aside from the already established Celts, many Greeks, Arabs, Jews and others lived and travelled in this area. There was even a Jewish city known as Glanum Levi whose ruins can be found today in Provence.

In the midst of this cosmopolitan confluence of cultures, along with the exchange of goods there must have been an exchange of philosophical and religious ideas. It is very possible that during this period many spiritual and symbolic links were discovered between these diverse peoples and their traditional belief systems that stretched back to the temples of Egypt. Before her arrival in Les Saintes Marie Sur Les Mere, France was riddled with Isis cults. The name Paris etymologically can be linked to the pre-Celtic ParIsis, the grove of Isis. Clearly this region was fertile ground for Mary Magdalene’s mission.Following her arrival in France, she was said to have travelled the land, preaching the authentic Gnostic gospel of Jesus, which had been directly transmitted to her during his time on Earth and in mystic visions after his return to the more subtle dimensions of light. French religious literature from the Middle Ages is filled with legends and stories of the life of Mary Magdalene from this period until her death. Tales abound of her miraculous healings, her performance of the ritual of baptism, her aid in fertility and childbearing and even her ability to raise the dead. There are even reports of a secret tradition of the healing arts that exists today in France and traces its roots back to Mary Magdalene.1

After this prophetic mission was accomplished, Mary is reported to have withdrawn to a cave in Ste. Baum, where she spent the remainder of her days in pray and seclusion. She is believed to have been buried at Ste. Maximin where her remains were watched over by Cassianite monks from the fifth century until the Saracen invasion. Then in 1058, in a papal bull, Pope Stephen acknowledged the existence of her relics in the church of Vezeley, which became one of the major places of pilgrimage during the Middle Ages.

But before we look at the evidence for her distinctive role as Apostle of the Apostles and prophetic mission, let us take a look at the hidden history of Gnosticism, the powerful doctrine of Divine grace, healing and illumination that she was said to have transmitted.

The Gnostic Teachings

It was during the Hellenistic period that the mystic knowledge of Egypt, the great symbols, myths, astronomical, scientific and metaphysical teachings passed into the heart of the Mystery Schools of Greece and Rome, which included the region of Gaul where Mary Magdalene is reported to have lived and preached. These secret initiatory teachings of the Egyptians were also retained and transmitted through the inner circles of Judaism to Jesus himself.

At the heart of this lineage of transmission was an extraordinary metaphysical teaching known as Gnosticism. This teaching is believed to be the spiritual basis of his essential message to humanity, a message revealed to Mary Magdalene, his disciples and followers through the vehicles of metaphor, allegory and parable. Unlike the patriarchal, dogmatic, materially based teachings prevalent during this period, Gnosticism placed primary value on the feminine qualities of receptivity, intuitive perception, visionary experience and the art of healing. It was a teaching of love, selflessness, harmony and communion.

The mystic experience of, and communion with, the essential grace and majesty of Divinity, lay at the heart of this Gnostic transmission. The clear and immediate experience of this awakening was known as gnosis or wisdom. Often translated from its Greek root as ‘knowledge’, Gnosticism goes much deeper than mere intellectual understanding. Like a brilliant flash of light arising from the darkness, this understanding arises in the individual as a bright lucid awareness – an intuitive realisation of the pure essence, nature and energy of Divinity as it flows within oneself, the luminous realms and all of creation.

From the Gnostic viewpoint, the answers to all of life’s mysteries can only be found when one “opens oneself to this divine current and allows oneself to be penetrated by it to the point where one is fully transformed and illuminated by it.”2 From the viewpoint of many early Gnostic communities, this divine current was perceived as the feminine, healing and nurturing energy of God’s Holy Spirit.

The fundamental doctrine of the Gnostics relates the dualistic nature of the world in which we reside, the eternal struggle between good and evil. They believed that Jehovah, the wrathful god of the Old Testament was a false god and expression of what they called the demiurge. For how could a fully enlightened divinity contain within him the base emotions of anger, jealousy and vengeance? For them, the real God was a loving deity equally and directly accessible to all. This God taught that love, compassion and the true sacrifice and transformation of the self, or ego, was the highest spiritual path.

The Gnostics believed that the plan of this demiurge, or Satan, was to trap spirit in matter, and the Earth itself was a prison in which souls were exiled from their divine home. For them, the real world was the non-material world of spirit and all of their rituals and practices were designed to purify them and provide them with the means to find their way out of the impure world of matter, darkness and suffering and return to their true home in the Light.

Clearly, these sacred esoteric teachings were revolutionary. Unlike the fixed, restrictive, hierarchical systems prevalent during this period, these teachings were open to all, female, male, rich, poor Jew or Pagan. This all-inclusive transmission of teachings formerly reserved for the elite was at odds with the practices of Orthodox Judaism and the emerging Church of Rome. For once the seeker had been touched by this Gnostic current, she or he came to recognise their own divine nature and perceive their place in the world from a whole new perspective. No longer did they need the intercession of a priest or rabbi to connect them with their spiritual inheritance.

Evidence of Mary Magdalene’s primary role as disciple, visionary, mediatrix and herald of these revolutionary teachings can be found in a number of Gnostic texts. These include The Pistis Sophia, The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Mary and more.

Apostle of the Apostles

The Pistis Sophia is a Coptic Gnostic revelatory work composed and/or compiled in Egypt around the middle of the second century CE. It claims to disclose the “secret teachings of the Savior,” reserved for his inner circle of initiates during the eleven years following his Resurrection. Filled with powerful, poetic imagery, this text reveals the intimate connections between this emerging form of Christianity, Paganism and beliefs and rituals founds in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.3 It also clearly recognises and demonstrates Mary Magdalene’s essential role as foremost disciple, seer and prophetess.

It appears the teachings found in the Pistis Sophia were created specifically for the apostles who would go forth and spread his gospel. It takes the form of a dialogue between Jesus and these apostles and consists primarily of questions and answers. It is fascinating to note that in this text, out of the forty-six questions asked of him, thirty-nine of them come from Mary Magdalene. Due to her sincerity, astute level of inquiry and ability to comprehend the essence of his words, time and time again she is praised and recognised by him for her clarity and insight.

For example, after Jesus presents the first part of these mystical teachings concerning the aeons, orders and regions of the “Great Invisible,” he acknowledges Mary Magdalene’s superior capacity for contemplation, insight and revelation.

It came to pass then, when Mary had heard the Savior say these words, that she gazed fixedly into the air for the space of an hour. She said: “My Lord, give commandment to me to speak in openness.” And Jesus, the compassionate, answered and said unto Mary:

“Mary, thou blessed one, whom I will perfect in all mysteries, of those of the height, discourse in openness, thou, whose heart is raised to the Kingdom of Heaven more than all thy brethren.”

Throughout the text, after listening to her interpretation of his teachings, he acknowledges her perceptive abilities,

Well, said, Mary, for thou art blessed before all women on earth, because thou shalt be the fullness of all fullness and the perfection of all perfections.

This is only the first of a number of texts that speak of Mary Magdalene’s gifts and unique relationship with Jesus. According to a group of Gnostic Gospels discovered in 1945 in a cave in Upper Egypt near the village of Nag Hammadi, she was said to be an inspired prophetess who continuously experienced the living presence of her Lord within her.

In The Gospel of Mary, from this collection, Mary Magdalene, the visionary, reveals to the other disciples teachings that were transmitted to her through visionary experience. In this gospel, she clearly takes the lead, not only soothing and reassuring the male apostles who fear capture and death, but relating to them teachings of the Savior that she alone has been privileged to receive. As in the Pistis Sophia, the Savior blesses her for her visionary capacity. When Peter questions her vision, Levi responds with, “If the Teacher held her worthy, who are you to reject her? Surely the Teacher knew her very well, for he loved her more than us.”4

In The Gospel of Philip, from the same collection, the disciples appear to be jealous of the intimate relationship between the Savior and Mary Magdalene.

The Companion of the savior is Mary Magdalene. But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” The Savior answered and said to them, “Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness.”

Because I have no reason to doubt Philip’s account or the words found in these early texts, I feel that the Christianity brought to France by Mary Magdalene has a different feel about it because it was closer to the authentic teachings of Jesus. If Mary Magdalene truly was the Apostle of the Apostles, then Jesus transmitted more to her or perhaps she understood this transmission better than the rest of the apostles. Through this lens we can begin to perceive and acknowledge the different understanding and practice of Christianity that emerged in Southern France, one that lasted over 1,200 years and in a sense pervades the place to this day.

Magdalene’s Legacy

When one looks at the history of the region one finds evidence that with her arrival, a surge of spiritual awareness, code of ethics and respect for feminine values began, which wove itself into the very fabric of the psychic landscape of Europe. The Order of the Knights Templar was created in this region. The alchemists began their flurry of Cathedral building to preserve the secret metaphysical teachings passed down to them from ancient Egypt. The Crusades and the entire Back to Jerusalem movement began in this area. The mystical Kabbalistic texts the Bahir and Zohar emerged from this region, bringing to the Jewish people knowledge of the Shekhina, or ‘indwelling presence’ and ‘feminine potency of God’. The cults of the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene and Black Madonna, symbolically representing the three aspects of Isis in her role as Universal Goddess, arose here and spread throughout Europe.

It was here the troubadours and poets such as Wolfram von Eschenbach, Robert de Bouron and others sang their songs of devotion to the feminine principle and wrote their fables of the Holy Grail. And it was here in the beautiful mountains and valleys of Provence and Languedoc that the Cathars, as carriers of the Gnostic transmission of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, rebelled against what they considered to be the excesses of the priestly hierarchy, renounced all worldly possessions and fully committed themselves to the path of spirit. Among the Cathars, women as well as men were priests who transmitted divine grace and healing power through the laying on of hands in their sacred initiatory rites that link back to Mary Magdalene, Isis and the healing traditions held by the temple priestess.

As time marched on, the Church of Rome, threatened by the inroads these powerful Gnostic teachings were making among the local populace, labelled them heretical and moved to suppress them. To cement the rule of the Church of Rome, Pope Innocent III called for a Crusade against this Gnostic Cathar heresy. This crusade, which had as its focus the torture, murder and eradication of these loving and compassionate people was the starting point of a wave of fear, suffering and suppression of the feminine in both her divine and worldly aspects that would spread throughout Europe and become known as the Holy Inquisition.

Closer to our time, there are the visions of Saint Bernadette and the healing waters of Lourdes, as well as the mystery of Father Sauniere, Rennes Le Chateau and his strange chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalene. Then there is the saga of Otto Rahn searching through the hills and valleys of this region for the Nazis trying to find the Holy Grail for the upper echelon of the SS. There are the legends of the secret alchemists who live in a magical castle somewhere in the Pyrenees recently popularised in the Harry Potter series. Finally, emerging from this region, is the mystery of the Alchemical Cross of Hendaye, the prophetic visions of Nostradamus and the Basque legend that John of the Apocalypse still lives in a cave in the Pyrenees and will leave that cave only at the end of time.5

These events and stories reveal that Mary Magdalene and the Gnostic current may very possibly be the driving force behind the rich history of this region. Whether it is fact or legend that Mary Magdalene actually came to this area is less important than the power and impact her life and teachings had upon the people of France. It is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes to see, that early in the history of this grace-filled tradition, Mary Magdalene, Apostle of the Apostles entered and has remained at the heart of Christianity.

Footnotes:

1. From a conversation with minister and playwright Lila Sophia Tresemer, co-author of the play and DVD, Re-Discovering Mary Magdalene (written with her husband, David Tresemer), for which I created the choreography. In their travels through France, she discovered a tradition of using the healing oils of Mary Magdalene that was said to have been passed down to healers now living in the south of France.

2. Sharron Rose, The Path of the Priestess; A Guidebook for Awakening the Divine Feminine (Inner Traditions, 2002) p.104

3. From the forward by Leslie Shepard to G.R.S. Mead’s, Pistis Sophia (University Books, 1974), p. xvii

4. From the recent translation by Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene (Inner Traditions, 2002).

5. For greater insight into these events see Weidner and Bridges, The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye: Alchemy and the End of Time (Destiny Books, 2003) and the Sacred Mysteries DVD, Secrets of Alchemy: The Great Cross and the End of Time.

Top image caption: The “Mother of the World” by mystic and artist Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947). Nicholas and his wife Helena taught that the World Mother has manifested many times over the millennia. (Image courtesy of the Nicholas Roerich Museum, New York, www.roerich.org).

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SHARRON ROSE, MA.Ed, is a filmmaker, writer, choreographer and teacher. She is the author of The Path of the Priestess; A Guidebook for Awakening the Divine Feminine and the DVD, Yoga of Light. Together with her husband, Jay Weidner, she has produced numerous documentaries and instructional DVDs for their company Sacred Mysteries Productions. Sharron’s web site is www.sharronrose.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 2.

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn Special Issue 2 (PDF version) for only US$5

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.