The word “Illuminati” has become a catch-all term for the defacto Rulers of Planet Earth. Definition is crucial because the words “Conspiracy” and “Illuminati” have themselves become code-words for the occult (hidden) machinations of the Powers That Be. With the advent of the internet and its rough cut of “news” and disinformation, what was once considered esoteric knowledge has been revealed for all to see. Even the cowans – a derogatory Masonic term for non-Masons – and the goys – a derogatory Yiddish term for non-Jews – are learning about the Illuminati black magic hoodoo that permeates the planetary matrix.

Illuminati originally meant “the enlightened ones” in Latin, and it refers to those who control the political, economic and social infrastructures of the planet. By their reasoning, they believe they are the (self) designated rulers of Planet Earth.

Also called “Olympians” and “Moriah Conquering Wind,” the Illuminati are a “network” of interconnected “bloodlines” who call themselves “The Family” or “The Circle.” Intergenerational satanism, or more accurately Luciferianism, is their primary Belief Structure (That’s BS to you, pardner).

Also don’t forget their fatal flaw… The Illuminati consider themselves a tribe apart – Bande à part – a proud super-race who trace their genealogical origin back to the biblical Nimrod.

To add to the confusion, people sometimes refer to the Illuminati as the Bavarian secret society which infiltrated Freemasonry – even as the term “Illuminatus” is an actual title in Freemasonry.

Current understanding of the Illuminati comes from first-hand knowledge of mind control survivors like Arizona Wilder, Cathy O’Brien, author of Trance Formation of America, Brice Taylor, author of Thanks for the Memories, Kathleen Sullivan, author of MK, and Annie McKenna, author of Paperclip Dolls.

Their accounts describe a parallel Illuminati “culture” whose primary goal is to keep the populace “productive” and under control, as their corporate motto promises to deliver, “Ordo ab Chao” (Order Out of Chaos).

This parasitic Illuminati culture also uses mind control programming to keep its own members of the Family, as well as the rest of society, locked in a grid of compliance. (See “Mind Control Slavery and the New World Order”, www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=36&contentid=8774)

Various authors have further introduced errors in their “exposés” of the Illuminati by interpreting history with a bias that reflects their own political and religious indoctrination.

For example, the works of Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler, while informative about the Illuminati’s sociopathic “traditions” (no es mi costumbre) and psychopathic behaviour, which includes torture, human sacrifice and mind control, nevertheless belie a Christian programming which adds to the chaos and confusion of trying to untangle history from disinformation.

Likewise even as the writings of John Coleman, author of The Committee of 300 and Eustace Mullins, author of The World Order, describe various Illuminati organisations which exercise political and religious control in pursuit of their oft-stated goal of establishing a New World Order (One World Government), their asides reveal a rigid Christian fundamentalist mindset which undermines their credibility.

The greatest confusion, however, seems to lie in the connection between the Illuminati and the Gnostics. For example, authors like Nesta Webster in her book on Secret Societies claims the Illuminati can be traced back to the Gnostics. In other words, she frames her argument that Illuminati and the Gnostics are “bad” because they appear to be antithetical to Christianity.

This conflict then refers to the perennial battle between the Gnostics, representing the Mystery Schools, and the Roman Catholic Church which fought fiercely against self-knowledge, mysticism and other metaphysical concepts, inimical to the mind control confabulations of the Vatican.

Today this animosity is evident in the Belief Systems (BS) of Christian evangelicals, among others, who see all secret societies, Gnostics, New Agers, and the like as devil worshippers and ignorant (or conscious) agents of the Illuminati.

Not so… The Mystery Schools were pre-Christian mystical communities that were in effect educational centres with libraries and workshops amid a vibrant cultural life.

This just may be the scene of the crime, so to speak, and the origin of the current metaphysical confusion.

Was this where the great ideological schism, or the Dividing of the Way, began?

Gnostics vs. Illuminati

Comparative mythologist John Lamb Lash, the world’s foremost authority on Gnosticism and esoteric traditions, is the author of the indispensable groundbreaking book Not In His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology and the Future of Belief.

According to Lash, Mystery School adepts (so-called Gnostics) were originally members of the Magian order of shaman-initiates whose purpose was to guide humanity as teacher-mystics in pursuit of spiritual/ human evolution.

The controversy began when certain initiates of the Mystery Schools began to abuse their mystical knowledge and redirect it into behavioural manipulation, psychological programming and mind control technology. In essence, the Illuminati gave up their role as teachers to become social engineers and advisors to the Ruling Class. This coincided with the rise of the patriarchal Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, which also required techniques of mind control to keep their followers (“believers”) in line.

“Around 4000 BCE with the rise of urban civilisation in the Near East, some members of the Magian order chose to apply certain secrets of initiation to statecraft and social engineering,” writes Lash, describing the spiritual devolution of the Kali Yuga. “They became the advisors to the first theocrats of the patriarchal nation-states, but in fact the advisors were running the show.”

“Their subjects were systematically programmed to believe they were descended from the gods,” continues Lash. “The Illuminati inaugurated elaborate rites of empowerment, or kingship rituals. These rituals were in fact methods of mind control exercised on the general populace through the collective symbology and mystique of royal authority.”

Civilisation – the Civil Lie in Action – needed an iron fist in a velvet glove from the beginning, and the Illuminati were there to ensure compliance. “Kingship rituals were distinct from the rites of initiation that led to instruction by the Light and consecration to the Great Goddess,” writes Lash. “Their purpose was not education and enlightenment but social management.”

The control freak tendencies of the Illuminati are evident everywhere now, as their failure in managing the world financial system is rushing the planet headlong into economic collapse.

“Gnostics refrained from assuming any role in politics because their intention was not to change society, but to produce skilled, well-balanced, enlightened individuals who would create a society good enough that it did not need to be run by external management,” Lash continues. “The intention of the dissident Magians to run society by covert controls was based on their assumption that human beings are not innately good enough, or gifted enough, to create a humane world.”

Of course Lash is being too “liberal” in labelling the Illuminati as “dissident” since their spiritual betrayal in the Mystery School was more of a bitch slap to Gaia, than the red flag of a covert rebellion.

“The difference in views of human potential was the main force that precipitated the division of the Magians,” writes Lash, meaning that the judgmental arrogance of the Illuminati who believed they were indispensable, even as they think they’re nothing less than “God’s gift to mankind.”

“It’s simple enough to see that this mind set would develop the hierarchal structures in society today,” Lash continues.

True enough. The so-called Global Elite keep the planet under control utilising Illuminati Gofers known as politicians, military personnel, police officers, and religious leaders, whose function is to be the shepherds of society – guarding the sheep… until they’re ready for slaughter in their endless wars and intertribal rivalries.

People who behave as sheep, or so-called “sheople,” are always the ones who suffer the most because of their programming. Meanwhile the Illuminati Gofers pretend that this is the way it’s supposed to be. This long-standing ideological disagreement in the Mystery Schools has, it appears, resulted in the gross inequities of life on Planet Earth.

“The Illuminati program was (and still is) essential to patriarchy and its cover, perpetrator religion,” writes Lash, describing the global conspiracy which has conquered the world.

“While it cannot be exactly said that the deviant adepts known as Illuminati created patriarchy, they certainly controlled it,” continues Lash. “And still do. The abuse of initiatory knowledge to induce schizophrenic states (‘entrainment’), manipulate multiple personalities in the same person (‘platforming’), and command behaviour through posthypnotic suggestion (The Manchurian Candidate technique) continues to this day, with truly evil consequences for the entire world.”

Attempting to disentangle the erroneous idea that Gnostics and Illuminati refer to the same characters, Lash writes: “If we accept that the Mysteries were schools for Gaian co-evolution dedicated to the Goddess Sophia, they could not have been run by the Illuminati, as some contemporary writers (who believe they are exposing the Illuminati) have supposed. Everything the Gnostics did in the schools was intended to counterbalance and correct the machinations of the deviant adepts.”

Right intent once again becomes critical and the radical difference in ideology between the Gnostics and the Illuminati become self-evident.

“Initiation involved melting ego boundaries in preparation for deep rapport with nature, not lowering the ego consciousness, so that the subject could be behaviourally programmed using the power of suggestion, imprinting and other psychodramatic methods. These behavioural modification tools of the Illuminati were strictly forbidden in the Mysteries overseen by the Gnostics.”

The metaphysical perverts known as the Illuminati have structured today’s society to reflect the manipulation of humankind through religious belief systems, political affiliations as well as the non-stop onslaught of media programming known as “news” and “entertainment.”

The Defeat of the Illuminati

As renegades from the Mystery Schools who betrayed the Mysteries and subverted Gnosis (“Knowledge”), the Illuminati plan to divide, conquer and rule the world has worked quite well because people are easily programmed into belief systems contrary to their own welfare.

As Lash notes, “Skilled in theology and dialectical argument, the Gnostics were able to refute fanatical beliefs, but unable to protect themselves against the violence driven by those beliefs.”

In other words Judeo-Christian Annihilation & Apocalyptic Theology sponsored by the Illuminati was responsible for the destruction of the Mystery Schools and the murder of the Gnostics, who were no match for those who perceived them as a threat to their planetary dominion.

“Not only were the gnostokoi like [the female philosophy teacher] Hypatia [who was murdered by the Church] apolitical, they deliberately refrained from involvement in politics in order to dissociate themselves from the other type of initiates, the Illuminati who had been enmeshed in patriarchal and theocratic power games from their outset,” Lash concludes.

The Illuminati may be considered to be apostate Gnostics who abandoned their role of enlightening humankind in order to reap the benefits and entitlements of the Ruling Class.

Now as before the Illuminati continue to move towards their goal – a feverish dream of world domination culminating in the so-called New World Order (One World Government), which simply means Global Techno-Feudalism.

This has always been Metaphysical Warfare. And humankind’s choice is once again – Freedom or Slavery.

Maybe the “Know-It-Alls” – a derogatory term used by the Church against the Gnostics – might be able to help them out…

Writer and Artist URI DOWBENKO is the author of Bushwhacked: Inside Stories of True Conspiracy and Hoodwinked: Watching Movies with Eyes Wide Open. He is also the founder and publisher of www.ConspiracyPlanet.com, www.ConspiracyDigest.com, www.AlMartinRaw.com, and www.InsiderIntelligence.com, as well as the publisher of The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider by Al Martin. You can visit Uri at www.UriDowbenko.com and www.NewImprovedArt.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 18.

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Perfidious Albion – “Treacherous England,” “Faithless England,” or, if you prefer, “Dirty, Low-down, Sneaky England” – is commonly assumed to derive from the French La Perfide Albion. The epithet’s best known appearance is in the 1793 poem “L’ere de Francais” by the Marquis de Ximenez. The year is not without significance. In February 1793, the increasingly radical and beleaguered French Republic declared war on Britain, and Ximenez exhorted his revolutionary countrymen to carry the fight to the enemy’s shores. One wonders what he would have made of the theory, advance many years later, that the very Revolution he praised was the clandestine handiwork of Perfide Albion.

In any event, the good Marquis was hardly the first or the last to invoke the term. References to something of the kind date back to the late Middle Ages. In 1919, Canon Charles O’Neil enshrined it in the lyrics of “Foggy Dew,” which lauded Ireland’s Easter Rebellion. The Spanish, recalling the ill-fated Armada and the depredations of Sir Francis Drake, speak of Perfida Albion, the Italians of Perfida Albione, and the Germans of Perfides Albion. In any language, it boils down to the same thing: the English displayed a special knack for underhanded behaviour and more that they were damned good at it.

Is such sniping just the reflexive bitterness of losers, or was the rise and success of the British Empire really abetted by dirty tricks and not just hardy seamen, stiff upper lips and the will of the Almighty? If so, much of the dirty work falls into that category loosely termed espionage or “secret service.” But the English did not invent spying, which if not the world’s second oldest profession, must be the third. Nor can it be that Britain’s alleged sin was simply putting its interests above that of any other nation, be it friend or foe. What other country can really claim to have done otherwise, and why should anyone expect them to?

Of course, we are talking about more than mere intelligence gathering; suborning treason, inciting rebellion, even war, not to mention blackmail and assassination are neither the least nor the greatest crimes of which Perfidious Albion stands accused. Indeed, some might argue that the British Empire was born and maintained through a pact with the Devil himself. In any case, the likes of Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay argue that the long history of skulduggery manifests the hand of a British “Secret State” which continues to guide the policies and destiny of the United Kingdom.¹

The notion than England possessed a special talent for deceit and underhandedness may be a myth, but it has proved an effective and enduring one. After all, though the Empire is gone, the most famous secret agent in the world, James Bond, remains a Briton. The long list of historical figures who stand accused of being Albion’s tools (whether they knew it or not) includes Christopher Marlowe, Benjamin Franklin, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky and Adolf Hitler. Those who, to one degree or another, definitely were, include Aleister Crowley, Harry Houdini, Benito Mussolini and Noel Coward. What follows will take a necessarily very selective look at some of the persons and events involved in Britain’s clandestine affairs from the era of Elizabeth I to the Second World War. Some may be familiar, others definitely obscure, but each played a part in the Secret History of the British Empire.

Sir Francis Walsingham

Credit for creating the first “regular” English secret service usually goes to Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham.² He faced a predicament shared by many of his successors; the need to combat both external and internal threats and the collaboration of the two. In the case of the Protestant Walsingham and his Protestant Queen, the unifying factor among their enemies was devotion to Catholicism. Walsingham battled this menace by recruiting agents at home and abroad and waging an aggressive campaign of counter-subversion. His most successful weapon was the provocateur or “mole” who penetrated and compromised hostile conspiracies. He also followed the maxim that England’s enemy’s enemy was her friend, or at least an exploitable tool. In addition to Protestant sympathisers and dissident Catholics, he is also supposed to have enlisted the help of witches, sorcerers and atheists in Albion’s cause.³

Little surprise that one of Walsingham’s better known operatives was an Elizabethan occultist whose interests included hermeticism, alchemy, astrology and conversing with “angels.” This was Dr. John Dee (1527–1608), a man whose encoded signature – a stylised representation of handled spectacles – was later appropriated by Ian Fleming for his “007.”⁴ Among other things, Dee was a prophet of England’s Manifest Destiny. He allegedly coined the term “Britannia” and conjured up the image of the small island kingdom as the centre of a world-girdling maritime empire.

While Dee served Walsingham well, he was first and foremost a scholar and seems to have lacked the ruthless quality often required of a secret agent. Thus, it surely was Walsingham’s hand that in 1582 steered Edward Kelley into his path. Dee wished to commune with the spirits but lacked mediumistic powers. Kelley had them – or claimed to – and the pair formed a team which endured for some seven years. Kelley was a dubious character, a convicted forger and counterfeiter whose occult interests included necromancy and maybe outright diabolism.⁵ Since the angels “spoke” through Kelley, and Dee was inclined to do whatever they decreed, Kelley was ideally positioned to “manage” Dee. Kelley would have had no qualms about doing whatever Walsingham required. Little wonder that some three centuries later another English occultist-spy, Aleister Crowley, would proclaim himself the reincarnation of Edward Kelley.

Dee and Kelley’s most important mission was their extended visit to Central Europe in the 1580s. This brought them to the court of Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II, nephew of England’s nemesis, Philip II of Spain, and host to a dangerous cabal of Catholic exiles. Kelley ultimately infiltrated and betrayed this group and their co-conspirators in England. Dee ingratiated himself (and by extension, Kelley) to Rudolf by providing the Emperor with rare tomes of esoterica. Dee is generally assumed to have sold Rudolf a very strange volume later dubbed the Voynich Manuscript after the book dealer who rediscovered it in the early 20th century.⁶ It is an illustrated manuscript depicting mysterious plants and rituals and written in an unknown and indecipherable alphabet. Among the multitude of theories about the book is one that holds Dee concocted it as cryptographic experiment based on the angelic or “Enochian” revelations received through Kelley.

Britain’s Alliance with the Jews

Half a century after Dee’s death, England was under a very different political regime but facing a remarkably similar security predicament. In the mid-1650s, power rested in the hands of a Puritan dictator, Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell’s principle enemies were the royalist partisans of the dethroned Stuarts who brewed sedition at home and plotted abroad with the Catholic kings of Spain and France.

At this time there lived in London a wealthy Portuguese-Spanish merchant named Antonio Fernandez de Carvajal. In fact, Carvajal was a Marrano or crypto-Jew, a descendent of Iberian Jews compelled to accept Catholicism in the previous century. Like many of his secret co-religionists, Carvajal hated Spain and all it stood for. He also sought to legitimise his and other crypto-Jews’ status in England and permit other Sons of Judah to live there openly. The obstacle was Edward I’s 1290 Edict of Expulsion which forbade Jews to dwell in England. In 1655, Carvajal arranged for Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel to come from Amsterdam and make a personal appeal to Cromwell. The Lord Protector formally repealed the Edict two years later. Part of the quid pro quo was that Carvajal put Cromwell’s agents in contact with a far-flung network of “Jewish Intelligencers” who operated in the Netherlands, the Levant, Spanish America and inside Spain itself.⁷ As early as 1656 this secret alliance proved its value when Carvajal’s agents exposed royalist intrigues in Holland.

Jump ahead 260 years and British agents in the Middle East, among them a certain T. E. Lawrence, were being aided by another network of Jewish spies, this one the Zionist NILI ring which worked against the Ottoman Turks.⁸ At the same time, Albion’s operatives spun visions of independence before the Arabs while quietly plotting to divide up the whole region with France. The leading light of the NILI ring, Aaron Aaronsohn perished in a mysterious plane crash over the English Channel in 1919. As in the later cases of the Duke of Kent (1942) and General Wladyslaw Sikorski (1943), suspicious minds saw the hidden hand of Perfidious Albion ridding itself of an “inconvenience.”⁹

At the very least, had Edward I’s Edict remained in force, British history would have been very different. No Rothschilds would have lent their weight to London’s financial might, no Benjamin Disraeli would have become prime minister, nor would a Polish Jew named Shlomo Rozenblium have become Sidney Reilly, the Ace-of-Spies.

The French Revolution has spawned its share of conspiracy theories. Perhaps the most resilient of these is the “Illuminati-Masonic Conspiracy” promoted by Abbe Augustin de Barruel in his Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797–98) and John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy against All Religions and Governments of Europe… (1797). Both writers point accusing fingers at the recently disbanded Bavarian Illuminati who, they allege, infiltrated French Freemasonry and spawned the head-chopping excesses of the Jacobins. It is worth noting that both Barruel and Robison wrote their books in Britain and that the government of Sir William Pitt the Younger embraced and promoted their ideas. At the very least, Pitt exploited the conspiracy theory to effectively discredit and demonise the French Revolution.

In the 20th century, the doggedly anti-British researchers associated with Lyndon Larouche’s Executive Intelligence Review argue that the hidden hand of England both helped to get the Revolution rolling and steered it into the hands of the fanatical Jacobins. In modern parlance, it was all a “destabilisation” effort designed to cripple France economically and politically. Even the storming of the Bastille was part of the plot.¹⁰ In the “Bestial British Intelligence of Shelburne and Bentham,” Jeffrey Steinberg singles out Lord Shelburne (William Petty) the evil genius of the venture who used the monetary power of the East India Company to carry out a silent coup against weak King George III.¹¹ According to this view, British intelligence ever since has been the tool of the same secret power. If so, were the works of Barruel and Robison sponsored disinformation designed to divert attention away from the real conspiracy to a manufactured one?

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the British secret services had to negotiate a shifting landscape of alliances and real or potential enemies. In the 1850s, Britain joined traditional foe France in the Crimean War against Russia, but in the 1890’s France allied itself with Russia, a combination that was almost as troubling to Britain as it was to the rising power on the block, Germany. Up to the first years of the 20th century, Tsarist Russia remained the Empire’s #1 adversary, but when, after 1900, the Germans embarked on the creation of a big navy, British interests demanded an alliance with France (1904) and subsequently Russia (1907).

Of course, just because you were allied to someone, didn’t mean you would or should stop spying on them. To better manage intelligence operations, a War Office Intelligence Division appeared in 1873. The Admiralty followed suit with a Foreign Intelligence Committee in 1882 which became the Naval Intelligence Department (NID) a few years later.

William Melville

Nevertheless, the man who was the closest thing to a British spymaster in the late 19th century, and who arguably laid the basis for British intelligence in the 20th, came from the London Metropolitan Police – Scotland Yard. His name was William Melville and he was, of all things, a Catholic Irishman from County Kerry. Originally a baker, Melville entered the Metropolitan Police in 1872 and ten years later joined its new Irish Branch. The latter was designed to combat Fenian conspiracies, particularly bomb attacks in London. Despite his background, Melville became an implacable enemy of the Irish rebels and a bitter foe of anarchists and radicals generally.

In 1887, Melville was involved in ferreting out the so-called Jubilee Plot in which a Fenian cabal aimed to blow up Queen Victoria and most of her cabinet in Westminster Abbey.¹² The key instigator turned out to be a British agent. Much the same emerged five years later when Melville masterminded the destruction of the Walsall Plot in which a group of anarchist workmen went to prison for scheming to build a bomb. Once again, the man at the centre of plot turned out to be one of Melville’s provocateurs.¹³

Befitting a servant of Perfidious Albion, such deviousness did not go unrewarded. In 1893 Melville became Superintendent of Special Branch and earned an almost mythical reputation as the ever-watchful guardian of public order. Always on the lookout for new angles in trickery and deception, in 1900 Melville enlisted the talents of American magician Harry Houdini. He even inveigled Houdini to spy for him during his tours of Germany and Russia.¹⁴

Still, this did not inhibit Melville from establishing cooperative arrangements with the secret services of those very same countries. In 1901, he worked with German agents to forestall an assassination attempt against Kaiser Wilhelm II at Queen Victoria’s funeral.¹⁵ He evolved a more elaborate relationship with Pyotr Rachkovsky, the equally cunning chief of the Russian Government’s Okhrana section in Paris. Melville’s men spied on Russian exiles in London, while Rachkovsky supplied Melville with intelligence gleaned from radical circles on the Continent. They even shared agents.

A case in point is the Pilenas brothers, Casimir and Peter. They were Lithuanian subjects of the Russian Empire who fled to London in the 1890s and moved in revolutionary circles. Casimir became a spotter and informant for Scotland Yard around 1896 and he and his brother worked as London operatives for the Okhrana.¹⁶ Their recruiter was one of Melville’s officers, Michael Thorpe who also, with Melville’s approval, worked for Rachkovsky.

The Okhrana came to doubt the Pilenas’ reliability and cut them loose in 1913. This may have had something to do with their peripheral involvement in a sensational robbery-murder in London in December 1910. The so-called Houndsditch Murders resulted from a botched burglary attempt by a group of Latvian-Russian anarchists.¹⁷ Three policemen were shot dead and not long after two of the suspects died in a fiery shoot-out in the East End’s Sidney Street. Despite what first appeared to be overwhelming evidence, the surviving robbers were all acquitted. One reason for the acquittals may have been that there was one or more police agents among the accused.

The group’s shadowy ringleader, “Peter the Painter,” was never found, but among those suspected was Peter Pilenas who conveniently left England for America just days before the robbery went down. Peter soon was followed to the States by brother Casimir. When the First World War broke out, British intelligence in New York re-mobilised him as an agent, and he similarly returned to Albion’s service (if he ever left) in 1939.

There is something fishy about the Houndsditch/Sidney Street business, and the suspicion that it involved State-inspired provocation is not unjustified. In that respect, a not insignificant detail is that the Home Secretary who personally oversaw the Sidney Street shoot-out was Winston Churchill, a man who some believe “had already sealed an indissoluble bond” with the Realm’s secret services.¹⁸

Melville resigned his Scotland Yard post in October 1903 but immediately opened a private detective agency under the name William Morgan. In fact, Melville’s outfit was a cut-out for the War Office and served the Empire’s secret needs at home and abroad. Basically, Melville’s agents did the Empire’s dirty work under a cover of complete deniability. In 1909, most of his organisation was subsumed into two new agencies created to handle domestic and foreign intelligence (what would become MI5 and MI6) and Melville served as MI5’s Chief Detective until his real retirement in 1917.

Sidney George Reilly

One of Melville’s most notable recruits was the Russo-Polish Jew mentioned earlier, Shlomo, or Salomon, Rozenblium. He would be much better known as Sidney George Reilly. His career is too convoluted to summarise here, but among other things, he is frequently cited as the role model for James Bond.¹⁹ Like so many things about Reilly, it turns out to have no basis in fact. In reality, Reilly was more a confidence man than a spy, and his loyalty to Britain, or anything else, was doubtful. A report on his character in early 1918 concluded that he was “a shrewd businessman of undoubted ability, but without patriotism or principles and therefore not to be recommended for any position which requires loyalty….”²⁰ Other terms applied to him included “untrustworthy” and “unscrupulous.” Among the few things said in his favour was that he had excellent sources of information and “connections in almost every country.”²¹ Reilly liked to hint of his connections to the “Occult Octopus,” his name for the more secretive aspects of international business and finance.²²

Nevertheless, despite his mercenary reputation, or maybe because of it, in the spring of 1918 the chief of London’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), chose Reilly to undertake an ultra-secret mission inside newly Bolshevised Russia. The main fruit of this venture was the so-called Lockhart or Ambassadors’ Plot which reached its crescendo in late August of that year. The plot centred on a plan, spearheaded by Reilly, to subvert the Latvian troops guarding the Kremlin and use them in a palace coup against Lenin’s government. The goal was less the total overthrow of the Red regime than a change in its leadership, and there is little doubt that an almost simultaneous, but botched, effort to kill Lenin was connected.²³ The Latvian gambit abruptly fell apart with the result that all the Allied secret services in Russia were compromised. Reilly and his British colleagues escaped unscathed, but his American counterpart, the unlikely named Xenophon Kalamatiano, was not so lucky. He alone was tried, convicted and imprisoned by the Bolsheviks for three gruelling years. To his dying day Kalamatiano maintained that Reilly had deliberately betrayed him and other Allied agents.²⁴ What he never seemed quite sure of was why.

Sidney Reilly disappeared on another mission to Russia in the fall of 1925. According to contradictory Soviet accounts, either he was executed soon after his capture or almost two years later. In London there were routine denials and whispers of defection. In what purports to be an account of his interrogation, Reilly emphatically states that there had been no British agents in Russia since 1919.²⁵ It may be that one purpose of Reilly’s mission was to convince his Soviet captors that this was true. Persons in London may have willingly sacrificed Reilly to make that point.

It was vital that the Soviets believe him, because nothing could be further from the truth. As researcher Phil Tomaselli has unearthed, from the fall of 1919 through at least mid-1923, MI6 received scores of reports, many very detailed, from a source with access to the highest levels of the Soviet Government. The source was also particularly well-versed in the secret collaboration between the Russians and the German military. Codenamed D-57, the agent’s identity was carefully disguised; indeed, it is not clear whether D-57 was an individual or a network of informants. As far as can be determined, the information provided was reliable.

D-57 was only a part of a much more extensive British intelligence operation in Red Russia. As a 1927 American military intelligence summary put it, “Just what agencies are maintained [by the British] in Russia, of course, cannot be found out, but according to recent Soviet claims, which are undoubtedly exaggerated, the British have an extensive system of espionage in that country.”²⁶ Actually, the Soviets were not hallucinating. London had intelligence officers imbedded in its trade and diplomatic missions, and in the ranks of private firms operating in Russia. Through the 1920s, a super-secret MI6 station existed in Moscow, though, like D-57, it remains completely unacknowledged in that agency’s official history.²⁷ Why? Why would such a seemingly outstanding success be covered-up? Could it be that to reveal the story of D-57 and related affairs would also reveal some darker secrets of the Empire, those that must forever remain in the file of Things That Never Happened?

Dr. Cornelius Herz

The Soviets were not the only ones who had to fret about the nefarious activities of English spies. The French had ample reason to maintain a healthy paranoia about L’Intelligence Service. Around 1877, a certain Dr. Cornelius Herz appeared in Paris. Although supposedly born in France, Herz claimed American citizenship, but his origins are, to say the least, obscure. He used his not inconsiderable wealth, the source of which was also a mystery, to dabble in finance and politics, initially to great success. He cultivated political figures in the Third Republic, most notably the sabre-rattling General Georges Ernest Boulanger, who almost staged a coup against the Republican regime at the end of the 1880s. Herz also befriended a rising politico named Georges Clemenceau, the future “Tiger of France.”

However, Herz’s little empire came crashing down when, along with another wheeler-dealer, the Baron de Reinach, he became mixed-up in the Panama Canal Scandal that hit France at the beginning of the 1890s. The Scandal, which included charges of bribery and official malfeasance, rocked the Republic to its foundations. To avoid prosecution, Herz, like others implicated, fled aboard, but it was the place of refuge he chose that raised eyebrows. Herz decamped to England in 1892 where, despite vigorous French efforts to force his extradition, he remained safe and silent until his rather untimely (some might argue convenient) death six years later.²⁸ In France it became an article of faith that Herz had been an “agent-of-influence” of Perfide Albion and that his aim all along was to destabilise the Third Republic any way he could. Some of his critics charged that Herz was nothing less than the “chief of the Intelligence Service in France.”²⁹ Herz, naturally, denied any such thing.

It was not lost on certain persons, among the outspoken anti-semite Eduoard Drumont, that Herz and Reinach were Jews, and this played into another scandal that hit the Republic in 1894 and raged for several years – the infamous Dreyfus Affair. By 1898–99, it had polarised France into pro- and anti-Dreyfusard camps and again brought the Third Republic to the brink of collapse. Britain’s secret services were not above fishing in these troubled waters. One man who thought the Republic’s crisis might be his opportunity was Victor Bonaparte, Prince Napoleon, or as die-hard Bonapartists referred to him, Napoleon V. From his exile in Belgium, he boasted of organising a march on Paris to seize control and restore order. Among the surviving records of War Office Intelligence, there is reference to the fact that in May 1901, British agents met with Prince Napoleon in Holland where they “sounded out” his views about affairs in France and elsewhere.³⁰ So, the Empire’s agents now connived with the heir of the man they had worked so hard to bring down almost ninety years before.

Basil Zaharoff

Some thought it more than coincidence that just as Herz’s star began to fade, another foreigner of mysterious wealth and provenance popped up in Paris.³¹ This was Basil Zaharoff, who had already gone through half a dozen aliases and careers in places as far ranging as Constantinople, London, Cyprus and America.³² No one was certain, or ever would be, whether Zaharoff was of Greek, Jewish, or Russian origin. He established a special relationship with British interests in the 1870s and that endured, to one degree or another, until his death in Monte Carlo in 1936. In the interim, Sir Basil, as he was later known, earned infamy and vast wealth as the world’s paramount arms dealer or, as the less charitable termed him, the “Merchant of Death.” Zaharoff later spread his tentacles into ship-building, banking, radio communications and, perhaps most prescient of all, oil. The basis of his business success was what he called the “System.” In essence, this involved selling arms to both sides in a conflict and even instigating conflicts when need or opportunity arose.

Zaharoff maintained an official residence in Paris and was rewarded by the French with enrolment in the Legion of Honor. But it was London which gave him an Order of the British Empire and a Knight Grand Cross of the Bath for his special services. Sir Basil was intimately connected with the British-owned Vickers firm and British politicians like future Prime Minister David Lloyd George.³³ His influence reached its peak during the First World War. According to T. P. O’Connor, “Allied statesmen and leaders were obliged to consult with him before planning any great attack.”³⁴ He was also rumoured to operate a private intelligence service which put the French Surete to shame.³⁵ His legion of sub-agents allegedly included the above-mentioned Sidney Reilly and arch-schemer Ignatius Trebitsch-Lincoln.³⁶ French investigative journalist Roger Menevee, the first to attempt a biography of Zaharoff, was convinced that not only was he a key British asset, but also was a kingpin in a shadowy “International Oligarchy” which dominated the world’s economy. One can only wonder how that connected to Reilly’s “Occult Octopus” or to the “High Cabal” alluded to by Winston Churchill.³⁷ Was Zaharoff a manifestation of the link between British imperial interests and some sort of “Illuminati”? If so, who was running who?

Yet another example of British spying on France, this one in the wake of the First World War, provides a little comic relief. In December 1925, the Surete arrested three male British subjects and two French female accomplices on charges of espionage. All were convicted in subsequent proceedings. The leading figure in the case, Capt. John Henry Leather, and his two colleagues, Ernest Phillips and William Fischer, were employees of the Paris office of the Burndept Wireless Co. They also all had recent backgrounds in British military intelligence. As of 1925, in fact, Leather was still attached to MI2(b), the War Office outfit handling intelligence in Western Europe.³⁸

The Foreign Office, Air Ministry and Admiralty ritually denied any connection to the men. Naturally, no one asked the “Agency That Didn’t Exist,” MI6. But there was no doubt about the guilt of Leather and his pals. Their undoing came about because he and Fischer had developed rival romantic interests in one of the French femmes, Marthe Moreuil, better known as “Mlle. Foxtrot,” whom they had used to coax information out of smitten French officers. For reasons never made clear, Moreuil tossed a packet of love letters out the window of a train, but managed to include a stash of compromising documents. These were retrieved by a curious farmer who dutifully turned them over to authorities. The main target of the Leather gang’s espionage was the French air force, then reckoned by London as the only air force that could pose a threat to Britain.³⁹

Sir William Wiseman

British intrigues in France pale in comparison with those conducted in America during and between the two World Wars. In the fall of 1918 Sir William Wiseman, who for the past three years had headed the MI1c (MI6) station in New York, assured his Chief that “the details and extent of our organisation [the Americans] have never known, and don’t know to this day.”⁴⁰ Sir William and his colleagues had conducted an aggressive, devious and very successful campaign against German operations in the US as well as the Irish and Indian nationalists with whom the Germans plotted. For instance, in 1917 San Francisco, British agents instigated a high-profile mass prosecution of Indians and Germans in the so-called “Hindu Conspiracy Trial.”⁴¹

No small part of this success was due to the fact that Wiseman and friends were able to finesse or coerce the collaboration of ostensibly neutral Americans. A vital part of this network of influence was the financial alliance between the British Crown and the 500-lb. gorilla of American finance, J.P. Morgan & Co.⁴² With utter disregard for policies in Washington, the Morganites aligned themselves with London in 1914 and used their clout to compel other American firms to do likewise. In this regard, Wiseman’s pre- and postwar career as an investment banker is not insignificant. It again smacks of Reilly’s “Occult Octopus,” and that is fitting because Reilly, along with Aleister Crowley and Casimir Pilenas, was among Wiseman’s small army of agents and informants.

By far Wiseman’s greatest achievement was his cultivation of the man who arguably was the second most powerful man in Washington, President Wilson’s confidential adviser and all-around eminence grise, Col. Edward Mandell House. The English-educated House was probably London’s man from start, and he had close ties to the Morgan interests. Wiseman credited House with making the President believe that Britain and America were joined in a “special relationship” to combat German militarism and that Wilson needed to consider British views and needs ahead of any others.⁴³ Wiseman could credit himself and his organisation with achieving the Great Work of British imperial alchemy in the First World War – bringing America into the war.

Some American officials, among them J. Edgar Hoover, were bothered by the fact that British intelligence operations on American shores did not cease on 11 Nov. 1918.⁴⁴ Not only did British surveillance of Irish and others continue, but so did their meddling in US immigration matters and the blatant collection of commercial information. Wiseman’s replacements took a keen interest in the American radical scene and infiltrated agents into the nascent US Communist movement. Some British agents were even accused of funding radical activity.⁴⁵ In 1920, then British Director of Intelligence Sir Basil Thomson admitted that his organisation had enticed one of the leaders of the Communist Party of America, Louis Fraina, into London’s employ.⁴⁶

William Wiseman returned to New York soon after the war and joined one of Wall Street’s biggest investment banks, Kuhn, Loeb & Co. In the 1930s, he became the firm’s point man in Hollywood and used his influence to encourage a favourable portrayal of the British Empire in American films. He never ceased to be Albion’s agent-of-influence. When war again broke out in 1939, Sir William was back in the saddle where he conducted back door negotiations with German and Japanese diplomats and helped set up the British Security Coordination (BSC) later headed by Sir William Stephenson.⁴⁷ Following the pattern established by Wiseman in the last war, the BSC ran roughshod over American neutrality laws while it mounted a vast propaganda campaign aimed once again at bringing the US into the fray. Among those recruited for this effort was the influential press and radio columnist, Walter Winchell.⁴⁸

As noted, the above examples barely scratch the surface in exploring the exploits of British intelligence and the “secret history” of the Empire it served. However, they hopefully offer a little glimpse of the history, reasoning and methods of Perfidious Albion.

Lead image courtesy of www.micahwright.com.

Footnotes:

1. See, for example, Dorril and Ramsay’s Smear: Wilson and the Secret State, London: HarperCollins, 1992 and, more broadly, Lobster: The Journal of Parapolitics.

2. See Stephen Budiansky, Her Majesty’s Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham and the Birth of Modern Espionage, New York: Viking, 2005.

3. Ellen Wilson, “Raleigh’s Secret Society: Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘School of Night’ in Elizabethan England” (7 May 2008), www.tudorhistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_school_of_night.

4. Richard Deacon, John Dee: Scientist, Geographer, Astrologer and Secret Agent to Elizabeth I, London: Frederick Muller, 1968, 5.

5. Ibid., 123-125.

6. For a good overview, see Rene Zandbergen, “The Voynich Manuscript,” www.voynich.nu. The dealer, a Pole named Wilfrid Voynich, also happened to be an early associate of Sidney Reilly.

7. Lucien Wolf, “Cromwell’s Jewish Intelligencers,” in C. Roth (ed.), Essays in Jewish History, London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1934, 93-112.

8. Ronald Florence, Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T. E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, New York: Viking (2008).

9. Ben Cohen, “The Amazing Life of Aaron Aaronshon,” The Daily Banter (14 Aug. 2007), www.thedailybanter.com/tdb/palestine/.

10. Pierre Boudry, “Jean-Sylvain Bailly: The Benjamin Franklin of the French Revolution,” www.schillerinstitute.org/educ/hist/bailly.html.

11. Jeffrey Steinberg, “The Bestial British Intelligence of Shelburne and Bentham,“ www.hiddenmysteries.org/conspiracy/history/bestialbrits.shtml.

12. Andrew Cook, M: MI5’s First Spymaster, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2004, 60-63.

13. Ibid., 87-93.

14. William Kalush and Larry Sloman, The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero, New York: Atria, 2006, 99-101, 135.

15. Cook, 134-135.

16. Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA, Okhrana Records, IIIf, Deep Cover Agents – Russian, (L-Z).

17. See Donald Rumbelow, The Houndsditch Murders and the Siege of Sidney Street, London: MacMillan, 1973.

18. Guido Preparata, Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich, London: Pluto Press, 2005, 109.

19. Donald McCormick, 17F: The Life of Ian Fleming. London: Peter Owen, 1993, 208.

20. UK, Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), File CX 2616, CX 023100, 13 March 1918.

21. Ibid., CX 023996, 20 March 1918.

22. Gill Bennett, Churchill’s Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence, London: Routledge, 2007, 61.

23. Re the “Lockhart Plot,” see Richard B. Spence, Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly, Los Angeles: Feral House, 2002, 200-229.

24. Richard B. Spence, “The Tragic Fate of Kalamatiano: America’s Man in Moscow,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 12, #3 (Fall 1999), 354.

25. Richard B. Spence, (ed.), “Sidney Reilly’s Lubianka ‘Diary’, 30 October – 4 November 1925,” Revolutionary Russia, Vol. 8, #2 (December 1995), 183.

26. U.S. National Archives, Records of the Military Intelligence Division (MID), 9944-A-81, G-2 Report 6110, “England (military)”, 5 July 1927.

27. Phil Tomaselli, “C’s Moscow Station – The Anglo-Russian Trade Mission as Cover for SIS in the Early 20s,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 17, #3 (Sept. 2002), 173-180, and Tomaselli to author.

28. “Dr. Cornelius Herz Dead,” New York Times (7 July 1898), 7.

29. Charles Rochat-Cenisse, Roi des Armes: La Vie Mysterieuse de Basile Zaharoff. Bienne: Editions du Chandlier, 1943, 77.

30. U.K. National Archives, Intelligence Department Records, HD3/111, Pt. 1.

31. Rochat-Cenisse, 76-77.

32. Donald McCormick, Peddler of Death: The Life and Times of Sir Basil Zaharoff, New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1965, 22-47.

33. Ibid., 98-99.

34. Ibid., 150.

35. George Tallas and Anthony Stephen, Peddler of Wars: The Sir Basil Zaharoff Story, Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2007, vii.

36. Re Trebitsch, see: Richard B. Spence, “The Mysteries of Trebitsch-Lincoln: Con-Man, Spy, ‘Counter-Initiate’?”, New Dawn, #116 (Sept-Oct 2009).

37. Moss David Posner, “The High Cabal,” The American Chronicle (15 Sept. 2005), www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/2406.

38. Phil Tomaselli, Tracing Your Secret Service Ancestors, Barnsley, S. Yorkshire: Penn & Sword, 2009, 123

39. Ibid., 124.

40. Yale University, Sterling Library Special Collections, Sir William Wiseman Papers, Box 6, File 174, Wiseman to Chief, 6 Sept. 1918, 2.

41. Richard B. Spence, “Englishman in New York: the SIS American Station, 1915-21,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 19, #3 (Autumn 2004), 518-919.

42. Richard B. Spence, “Sidney Reilly in America, 1914-1917,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 10, #1 (Jan. 1995), 95.

43. Spence, “Englishman in New York,” 523.

44. MID, 9944-A-178, “British Espionage in the United States,” 15 Feb. 1921, 1-2.

45. U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Investigation Investigative Files, #8000-357986, “Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Mina Lowensohn,” 29 December 1919, 16-17.

46. MID, “British Espionage in the United States,” 6.

47. William Stephenson, British Security Coordination: The Secret History of British Intelligence in America, 1940-45, New York: Fromm International, 1999, 233-235.

48. Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44, Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 1998, 202.

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 Special Issue 11.

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—

Every civilisation needs a myth; but woe to the civilisation whose myth has been found wanting. That is the position of Christianity today. It came to ascendance at a time when the myths of Greece and Rome had lost their credibility. The pagans themselves laughed at the stories of their gods; Plato sought to censor them. Christianity triumphed because it offered its sacred scriptures not as myth but as fact. Mystical adepts had always known that the stories in the Bible were not meant to be taken entirely at face, but as the religion degenerated into priestcraft, these insights were forgotten or suppressed.

Today we have come full circle. Over the last two centuries a staggering number of scholars – the vast majority Christians themselves, many of them clergymen – have laboured on the great project of seeing how much of the Bible is historically valid. The verdict has not, in general, gone in the Bible’s favour. Little by little its validity as a plausible source for the facts it claims to recount has been eroded. In the nineteenth century, scientists such as Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin showed that the epochal changes in geology and biology could not have happened in the six thousand years allotted to them by Genesis, while the German scholar David Friedrich Strauss (who was a Lutheran pastor) showed that much that the Gospels said about Jesus was probably not accurate in any factual sense, but consisted of stories and legends that had accumulated around him after his life.

But the inquiry did not end there. Much of the Hebrew Bible consists of history – the history of Israel from primeval times to around 500 BCE. It tells of patriarchs such as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; of the bondage of the Israelites and their miraculous liberation by the hand of God; and of David and Solomon and their successors to the thrones of Israel and Judah.

Until fairly recently scholars took much of this account at face value. But as our knowledge of the first millennium BCE in the Near East has improved, it has become more and more obvious that the Bible cannot be entirely trusted even in these areas.

I must digress here to make an important point. Many of the articles in New Dawn present what is called “alternative history” – views of the past that run counter to what conventional scholars believe. This approach is valuable and refreshing, if only because academics tend to operate like a team of horses with blinders on. Nevertheless, what I am going to be saying in this article (and in the following article, “God’s Forgotten Wife”) is not alternative history. It is conventional scholarship, and it consists of things that anyone would learn at a mainstream seminary or divinity school, although these findings have not always trickled down to the public at large.

To take one fairly simple example, two hundred years ago nearly everyone in the Judeo-Christian world believed that the first five books of the Bible (known to the Jews as the Torah, to the Christians as the Pentateuch) were written by Moses. Today practically no scholar who is not a fundamentalist believes this. Many scholars do not even believe that a person such as Moses ever lived, or that an exodus from Egypt ever occurred in anything like the way it is described. Moreover, a generation ago it was generally accepted that the accounts of David and Solomon in the books of Samuel and Kings were reasonably accurate – even contemporary – accounts. But today it is agreed that these histories were written centuries later, and the glories ascribed to these two monarchs were vastly overstated.

To summarise all these findings, an article of this length cannot hope to be complete. All the same, it is possible to sketch out some of the major findings along with their implications.

Israel in History: The Archaeological Evidence

The history of Israel begins with the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The general setting for their lives is best placed in the early second millennium BCE. The original texts (there were several) that make up what today we call Genesis were not written until around the seventh century BCE. Consequently, what we have about these patriarchs is a collection of legends with an interval of a millennium between the events and the written accounts. It would be hard to find anything here that could be called real history.

As we come closer to the present, the picture becomes clearer, although it does not necessarily validate the Bible as a source. The descent of Jacob and his twelve sons into Egypt to escape a famine in Canaan does resonate with a well-documented period (in the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries BCE) in which Egypt was ruled by the Hyksos, Semitic “foreign kings” that came from the northeast. But here too it is very hard to reconcile the biblical account (again written almost a thousand years later) with the Egyptian documents. They portray the Hyksos not as slaves but as rulers; indeed an Egyptian king list includes one “Yaqub” – identical to “Jacob.”¹ They did not flee a tyrannical Pharaoh but were thrown out by the Egyptians themselves – an almost complete reversal of the biblical account.

As for the flight of the Israel to the land of Canaan to escape their Egyptian taskmasters, this too is hard to accept, because in the period in which this is supposed to have happened – the thirteenth century BCE – Canaan was an Egyptian province, complete with governors and forts and garrisons. Egypt would retain control over Canaan until around 1160 BCE.

In fact the first mention of Israel in any contemporary text comes from a stele from the reign of Pharaoh Merneptah, the son of Rameses II (often portrayed as the pharaoh of the Exodus), and it dates to 1207 BCE. It tells of an Egyptian campaign into Canaan, and in it Merneptah boasts, “Israel is laid waste; his seed is not.”² Obviously this is an exaggeration, but it suggests that at this time the people of Israel were an already well-established population at a time when Pharaoh still ruled the land.

Scholars generally agree that there was no conquest of Canaan by the Israelites as described in the book of Joshua. How, then, did Israel come to be? To understand this, we have to grasp something about the geography of Palestine. The country can be roughly divided into three north-south strips. The first is a fertile coastal plain parallel to the Mediterranean shore. The second is a band of hill country east of the plain. The third and easternmost is the Jordan River valley. It was the second of these regions, the hill country, that was the Israelite homeland. In the Late Bronze Age (1500-1200 BCE), it was sparsely populated. But at the beginning of the Iron Age in the thirteenth century, its population rose dramatically. And it is these Iron Age settlements that scholars believe were the homes of the proto-Israelites. There was very little in their material culture (alphabet, pottery, and so on) that differentiated them from the Canaanites of the coastal plain, except that the proto-Israelites’ culture was more primitive – the pottery was crude and poorly ornamented, for example – and, strangely, the bones of pigs are almost completely absent from the animal remains that are found at these sites, indicating that these people, whoever they were, had a taboo against eating pork even in the earliest times.

Where did these hill people come from? Scholars do not agree entirely, but they are more or less unanimous in stating that most of them were not freed slaves coming up from Egypt. In all likelihood, they were people fleeing the social breakdown in the Bronze Age culture of the Palestinian coastal plain – itself only a localised version of the end of Bronze Age civilisation that was taking place all around the eastern Mediterranean. They were probably augmented by a small number of nomads who adopted sedentary ways of life. These hill people were not city dwellers; their social units were extended families that were themselves organised into tribes, which in turn formed a loose confederation that resembles the one described in the book of Judges.

Myth Made History: Moses, David & Solomon

Did Moses live? There is no reference to him in any contemporary source. The name Moses is a curious one; it is Egyptian, and it literally means “son,” as we see in some Egyptian names: Thutmosis (or Thutmose), the name of several pharaohs, means “son of Thoth,” the god of learning. It would be odd if Moses had been the prophet’s original name, just as in the English-speaking world there are many Johnsons and Williamsons, but practically nobody with the surname “Son.” Possibly his name originally included the name of an Egyptian god that Moses himself – or later chroniclers – chose to remove.

Scholars thus have stopped believing in any great migration that resembles the biblical account. To the extent that they lend any credence to the story of Exodus at all, they grant the possibility that a charismatic leader led a small band of former Semitic slaves to the hill country of Palestine and that as Egyptian power began to wane in that area, this people, along with the hill people that had already settled there, was able to shake off its chains.

To move on to the late eleventh and tenth centuries BCE, the period that biblical historians call “the united monarchy,” when Israel was supposedly ruled by a single king – Saul, followed by David and David’s son Solomon. According to the Bible, this was the zenith of Israel’s power and influence. David supposedly ruled over a territory that stretched from the Euphrates to Gaza (1 Kings 4:24), while Solomon accumulated vast riches and a thousand wives. But the archaeological remains and extrabiblical texts say virtually nothing about these rulers; some scholars go so far as to doubt whether there ever was a united monarchy at all. Richard A. Freund, professor of Jewish history at the University of Hartford, Connecticut, in the US, sums up the situation:

If… David was so prominently involved in the lives of so many different peoples in the region, it stands to reason that he would be mentioned in one of these different non-Israelite literatures. If… Solomon conducted international relations with Egypt, marrying into the royal family and importing horses, why wouldn’t there be a record somewhere in Egypt that would corroborate this relationship?…. But no independent corroboration of these events exists from archaeological evidence or source not influenced by biblical tradition, save perhaps an early medieval collection called the Kebra Nagast, the national epic of Ethiopia.³

The earliest extrabiblical reference to David comes from an inscription found at Tel Dan in northern Galilee in 1993. Dated to the ninth century BCE, it contains a claim by Hazael, king of Aram, that he has killed Ahaziah, king of Israel, and Jehoram, “king of the house of David.”⁴ Hazael, Ahaziah, and Jehoram are all mentioned in the Bible, so this inscription confirms these men lived and ruled and that there was a house of David in the ninth century BCE. Nevertheless, this inscription dates more than a hundred years later than David is supposed to have lived, so it confirms nothing more about him.

Nor is there much archaeological evidence for the existence of Solomon’s Temple, which would have been built around 940 BCE.⁵ Indeed the archaeologist Israel Finkelstein contends that Jerusalem, supposedly Solomon’s magnificent capital, was actually a rather humble place. “Digging in Jerusalem has failed to produce evidence that it was a great city in David or Solomon’s time,” he argues. “Tenth century Jerusalem was rather limited in extent, perhaps not more than a typical hill village.”⁶

There is archaeological evidence for a highly prosperous and centralised monarchy in Israel, but, Finkelstein contends, it was in the ninth century BCE and not the tenth. Remains include palaces, storage centres, and even stables. They are centred around Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel (the ten tribes that seceded from the house of David after Solomon’s death, ending the united monarchy). They were the work of the Israelite king Omri and his heirs – every last one of whom, according to the Bible, “wrought evil in the eyes of the Lord” (1 Kings 16:25).⁷ The most notorious of the Omrid dynasty was Ahab, whose queen was the proverbially wicked Jezebel.⁸

It is thus really only in the ninth century BCE that biblical history and the extrabiblical evidence begin to converge, and in the eighth century the picture becomes still clearer. The Bible tells of the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel at the hands of the king of Assyria in 722 BCE (2 Kings 17:3-23); this is confirmed by an Assyrian stele. The Bible also says that Hezekiah, king of the southern kingdom of Judah, was able to save his tiny nation from destruction by the Assyrians. This too has a parallel in the surviving Assyrian records – although these happen to mention the huge tribute of gold and silver that Hezekiah had to pay in return. The Bible, by contrast, credits the survival of Judah to the miraculous intervention of Yahweh, whose angel “smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand” (2 Kings 19:35-36).

Yahweh’s Companions?

But it is when we turn to the religious history of ancient Israel that the picture becomes truly astonishing. After all, the intense interest in the Bible has a great deal to do with the part that is said to be played by God in history: specifically the revelation of the one true God, Yahweh, to the nation of Israel, and his granting of the land of Canaan to them in perpetuity on condition that they obey his law and worship him alone. But here, too, the extrabiblical sources create a much more checkered picture. Egyptian texts of the Late Bronze Age do show some familiarity with a god called “Yhw” (Egyptian, like Hebrew, did not employ vowels in its script) in connection with some nomads located in the southern part of Jordan.⁹ This resonates with the biblical account, which has Moses learning about Yahweh in Midian (see Exodus 3), which is in the same area. And it is possible, as we have seen, that a charismatic leader like Moses could have led a small band to Canaan and used this god as a rallying-cry to unify the hill folk and create a national identity for them. But even so, the reality would be very different from the story narrated in the Pentateuch.

Scholars today generally agree that the revelation of a monotheistic Yahweh to Moses and his spiritual heirs is not an accurate picture of what happened. Instead, they contend, Yahweh only gradually – over the course of several centuries – came to be seen as the sole god of Israel and as the supreme god of the universe. Frank Moore Cross, one of the most distinguished Old Testament scholars of his generation, has argued that originally Yahweh was an epithet of El, the high god of the Canaanite pantheon, in his function as patron deity of a confederation of tribes known as the Midianite League. Cross says that Yahweh later became differentiated from El among the proto-Israelites, and eventually came to displace him.¹⁰

Margaret Barker, another biblical scholar, has an even more radical suggestion. She contends that throughout most of the era of the First Temple (c.940-586 BCE), both El and Yahweh were worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem as separate deities, forming a trinity with Asherah, Yahweh’s divine consort (see the next article). El retained his position as the high god – the lord of the universe – whereas Yahweh was the national god of Israel alone. It was only with the “reforms” of the religion of Judah that took place under King Josiah in 621 BCE (2 Kings 23) that Asherah was discarded and Yahweh was conflated with El. In fact, Barker claims, the Josianic “reform” was actually a radical restructuring of the faith. The Bible portrays it differently, as a purge of alien elements, but that is because the Bible was written by the party that instigated the purge. It was this party that created the Deuteronomic history in the Bible (comprising Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings), which has shaped our historical understanding of this period to this day. Nearly all the biblical texts I have mentioned above are taken from the Deuteronomic account.

Obviously there is a great deal more to say about these matters, and endless numbers of books have been written about them. I have limited my discussion here to the Hebrew Bible simply because of space. The New Testament is problematic as well, but for different reasons. Here it is not archaeology or the larger historical context that is the question: there is ample extrabiblical evidence for the existence of the Second Temple, which was still being completed at the time of Christ and was sacked by the Romans in 70 CE. Indeed the Temple’s western wall, today called the Wailing Wall, still survives. There is also ample extrabiblical documentation of figures such as Herod the Great and Pontius Pilate. There is no such documentation for Jesus, but this is not in itself problematic. We might reasonably expect some archaeological evidence for the existence of David and Solomon, who were supposedly great monarchs, but Jesus was comparatively obscure in his own day. It is only when we ask who Jesus was and what his earliest followers thought him to be that the controversies arise.

In any event, we have seen a strange reversal over the last two hundred years. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the educated world in the West took the Bible as history while the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were written off as legend. Then in the early 1870s, the pioneering archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann unearthed the ruins of Troy in Asia Minor, and scholars realised that the Homeric poems – whether or not their specific characters ever lived – were firmly grounded in the world of Late Bronze Age Greece. Ironically, when scholars examined the Bible in the same fashion, they came up with little more than a few isolated inscriptions and the stables of the wicked King Ahab.

Literal Truth of the Bible Under Attack

Does this all matter? Does the Bible have to be true in a historical sense? Not necessarily. As I noted at the outset, esotericists have long acknowledged that these stories are in many ways symbolic of higher truths. The book of Exodus, with its ten plagues and miraculously gushing stones, is in all likelihood not true historically. But the British Kabbalist Warren Kenton, writing under the pen name Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, gives an intricate and profound analysis of the mystical dimensions of this saga in his book Kabbalah and Exodus.

What the original authors of the biblical texts may have intended is a difficult question to answer, since we do not even really know who they were. Nevertheless, Christianity has often proselytised on the premise that the stories in the Bible are literally true. It is reasonable to assess the Bible in terms of the claims that its proponents have made for it, and those claims have been found wanting.

All this said, the scholars who have delved so deeply into the historicity of the Bible over the last two hundred years have shown tremendous moral and intellectual courage. They have not, for the most part, been debunkers but have been serious scholars of Judaism and Christianity who are often profoundly committed to their faith. Some have turned to archaeology to validate this faith and have had to admit they were wrong. Joseph Callaway, an American professor of biblical archaeology, tried to find the city of Ai, supposedly destroyed by Joshua (Joshua 7-8), but he concluded that the city did not exist in Joshua’s time. He wrote: “For many years, the primary source for the understanding of the settlement of the first Israelites was the Hebrew Bible, but every reconstruction based on the biblical traditions has floundered on the evidence from the archaeological remains.”¹¹ Callaway took early retirement from his very conservative seminary rather than cause any embarrassment on this count.

Many journalists have lacked Callaway’s integrity, so you can pick up an American newsmagazine such as Time and read an account of Moses that treats him as if he were Churchill or John F. Kennedy.¹² To bring the far more elusive truth to light would no doubt cause many readers to cancel their subscriptions. Sometimes the weaker a myth is, the more stridently it is defended.

Sources:

Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God, Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992.

Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of Religion of Israel, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1973.

William G. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the History of Ancient Israel, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2001.

–  – . Who Were the Ancient Israelites and Where Did They Come From?, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2003.

Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Richard A. Freund, Digging through the Bible: Modern Archaeology and the Ancient Bible, Plymouth, U.K.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.

Simon Goldhill, The Temple of Jerusalem, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, Kabbalah and Exodus, London: Rider, 1980.

Hershel Shanks, et al., The Rise of Ancient Israel, Washington: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1992.

D. Winton Thomas, ed., Archaeology and Old Testament Study, Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1967.

Footnotes:

1. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?, 10.

2. Finkelstein and Silberman, 57; see also Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?, 202.

3. Freund, 117.

4. Freund, 117–18.

5. Goldhill, 31.

6. Finkelstein and Silberman, 124, 133.

7. Biblical quotations are taken from the Authorised (King James) Version.

8. For an account of the archaeological findings and their relation to the house of Omri, see Finkelstein and Silberman, ch. 7.

9. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites?, 128.

10. Cross, 44, 71.

11. Quoted in Dever, 47–48.

12. A good example is Emily Mitchell and David Van Biema, “In Search of Moses,” Time, Dec. 14, 1998; www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,989815-7,00.html; accessed Sept. 21, 2010. The article is worth careful deconstruction. It does, for example, ask “Did Moses even exist?” and mentions such evidence as the Merneptah inscription. But the vast bulk of it is devoted to a retelling, in Time-style prose, of the biblical account as literally true. The reader is subtly led to believe that somehow, in the end, all these things did happen. The article is a cover story, timed to the release of the film The Prince of Egypt. A more recent article, “How Moses Shaped America,” by Bruce Feiler (Time, Oct. 12, 2009; www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1927303-3,00.html; accessed Sept. 21, 2010) discusses the political uses made of the Moses story by American politicians without attempting to touch the historical issue of whether this figure actually lived.

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RICHARD SMOLEY’s 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; 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. 123 (Nov-Dec 2010).

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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.

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The world is governed by far different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.
– Benjamin Disraeli, nineteenth century British prime minister, in a speech to Parliament

On 1 May 1776, the year of the beginning of the American revolution against British colonial rule, a young university professor, Adam Weishaupt (1748–1830), from Bavaria, founded the Order of Perfectibilists, later to become world famous as the Illuminati or ‘Enlightened Ones’.

Weishaupt’s family had Jewish ancestry, but he was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith and educated by the Jesuits. His father died when he was seven and he was fostered by his godfather, a German aristocrat called Baron Ickstett. Although schooled by priests from the Society of Jesus, the young boy spent hours in his godfather’s extensive library reading learned works on philosophy and science. As an undergraduate at university, Weishaupt studied the ancient Greek Eleusian Mysteries and the mystical doctrines of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras. Even at this young age he was thinking about forming a secret society based on the pagan mystery schools. He later wrote:

At a time, however, when there was no end of making game of and abusing secret societies, I planned to make use of this human foible for a real and worthy goal, for the benefit of people. I wished to do what the heads of the ecclesiastical and secular authorities ought to have done by virtue of their offices.

Adam Weishaupt became a lay professor in canon law at the Jesuit-run University of Ingoldstat near Munich while still a young man. His sudden rise to prominence in the university and his radical views caused consternation among the Jesuit priests. This led him to become involved in many bitter disputes with them about matters pertaining to religion.

In 1774 in either Hanover or Munich Weishaupt became interested in Freemasonry. However, he was disappointed in what he found, believing the Freemasons did not understand Masonry’s occult significance, and refused to accept its roots in the ancient pagan religions. In 1777, he finally joined the Masonic Lodge of the Strict Observance Rite in Munich, which practised a form of neo-Templar-Masonry.

At this time the Order of Perfectibilists also became known as the Order of Illuminists or the Order of the Illuminati, sometimes known to its members as the Society of the Hidden Hand. Illuminati was the plural of the Latin Illuminatus, from illumino meaning lighten or enlighten, or ‘enlightened one’, a term used to describe the initiates of the pagan Mysteries. At first the Order had only five members who were radical freethinkers, but they soon attracted the attention of Bavarian society and within ten years of its foundation there were over 2,000 members.

Illuminism spread from Ingoldstat all over Bavaria and then to other German regions such as Saxony, Westphalia and Franconia that were at the time ruled by feudal princes. It was also exported abroad to the Austria-Hungarian Empire, France and Italy. The Illuminati’s membership was largely drawn from the middle and upper classes and in this respect it is ironic that revolutionary movements are seldom started by the working-class. Instead, they are usually led by intellectuals and disenchanted members of the ruling power elite. Members of the Illuminati allegedly included doctors, teachers, lawyer, judges, university professors, priests, police and military officers, and aristocrats such as Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, Duke Ernst of Gotha, Duke Karl of Saxe-Weiner, Prince Augustus of Saxe-Gotha, Prince Carl of Hesse, and Baron Dalberg.

The inclusion of these aristocratic and royal rulers in its membership roll seems strange considering the aims of the Illuminati. Adam Weishaupt’s personal vision was a utopian pacifist society without monarchy, private property, social inequality, national identity and religious affiliation. In this new state people would live together in harmony in a universal brotherhood based on peace, free love, spiritual wisdom, intellectual and scientific knowledge, and equality. According to Weishaupt’s doctrine in his own words:

Salvation does not lie where strong theories are defended by swords, where the smoke of censers ascends to heaven, or where thousands of strong men pace the rich fields of harvest. The revolution which is about to break [the French Revolution] will be sterile. It is not complete.

The Illuminati’s main targets for criticism were the rule of the European royal families, the power of the Roman Catholic Church and the rich landowners who kept the peasants in a feudal state of servitude and poverty. According to its enemies, this doctrine was represented in the oath of allegiance taken by new members when they joined the Order. They allegedly promised to hate and resist, “The altar [the Church] and the throne [monarchy] and to crush the God of the Christians and utterly extirpate the kings of Earth.”

Initiation into the Illuminati

The anti-royalist and anti-clerical nature of the Illuminati was also reflected in its initiation ceremony. The candidate was led into a small room where, in front of an empty throne, a table stood with the traditional symbols of kingship – a sceptre, sword and crown – on it. The candidate was invited to pick up these objects, but if he did then he would be refused entry into the Order. Having passed this test, he was led into a second room with a table draped in black cloth. On this table were a plain wooden cross and a red Phrygian cap as worn by initiates of the ancient Mithraic Mysteries. The cap was given to the initiate and he was told to wear it proudly as it was worth far more than the crown of any king.

New members were called Minervals, from the pagan goddess of wisdom Minerva, and the Order’s primary symbol was a wreath of oak leaves surrounding an owl sitting on an open book. This represented the essential combination of wisdom and knowledge, and the owl was also the sacred bird of Minerva. This symbol was made into a pendant that the Illuminati could wear secretly under their ordinary everyday clothes. It is tempting to see a connection between this emblem and the giant statue of an owl that features in the modern rituals at Bohemian Grove in California. At this private estate an annual gathering of male politicians, businessmen and media executives takes place, and it is claimed by some conspiracy theorists to be an Illuminati front.

Adam Weishaupt believed in the eventual redemption of humanity and the restoration of human beings to the state of perfection that is supposed to have existed before the Fall and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. He also believed this redemption was only obtainable by following the esoteric teachings preserved by the pagan mystery schools who were the guardians of the Ancient Wisdom. Both men and women could become members of the Illuminati and they were taught religious freedom, and the choice to follow any or no religious belief. To live without the moral straitjacket of the sexually puritanical and corrupt Church was their birthright as human beings.

How the Illuminati Recruited and Expanded Across Europe

The new member was expected to recruit others into the Order like a modern form of pyramid selling. Because of Weishaupt’s involvement with Freemasonry, it was decided to use the movement to spread the Illuminati message and members were encouraged to join Masonic lodges. In 1780 Baron Adolf Franz Freidrich Knigge (1752–1796), a German diplomat, was initiated as an Illuminist. He was already a Freemason and under his direction Illuminism spread throughout the Masonic lodges of Europe. He also introduced several degrees or grades of initiation into the Order. These grades were Novice, Minerval, Illuminatus Minor, Illuminatus Major, Knight, Priest, and Magus. A Priest for instance was a person who taught the other members the occult sciences, philosophy, history, politics and the arts and crafts.

Weishaupt established a network of Illuminist agents throughout Europe with access to prominent politicians, priests and cardinals, nobility and royalty. They reported back to the Grand Master of the Illuminati supplying him with intelligence and gossip collected and used for his own personal purpose. It is possible the aim was to blackmail people in powerful positions and thereby control them. By this time his enemies were claiming Weishaupt had decided his utopian anarcho-libertarian society could not be achieved peacefully. Allegedly he began plotting to overthrow the monarchies and governments of Europe using force if necessary.

In 1784 Baron Knigge and Adam Weishaupt quarrelled about the direction of the Order and this coincided with the exposure by police spies of an alleged Illuminist plot to overthrow the ruling Habsburg dynasty of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the same year a royal edict was issued by Duke Karl Theodor, the ruling elector of Bavaria and a prince of the Holy Roman Empire, banning membership of all secret societies not officially recognised by the state. This edict specifically mentioned the Order of Perfectibilists, which was described as a renegade branch of Freemasonry.

Soldiers, police officers, judges, university professors, schoolteachers and anyone working for the civil service were forced to admit to their membership of secret societies and had to either leave or be dismissed from their posts. In 1785 Adam Weishaupt was removed from his own position at the University of Ingoldstat and banished from the city of Munich to live in the countryside on a state pension. He moved to Regensburg where he was protected by Duke Ernst of Saxe-Gotha, an ancestor of the present British royal family who are of German descent. In World War I they changed their family name from Saxe-Gotha-Coburg to the House of Windsor after anti-German protests.

In October 1786 the Bavarian authorities seized a cache of Illuminati secret documents from the home of a member of the diplomatic corp, Xavier Zwack, in Landstut and the castle of Sondersdorf belonging to Baron Bassus, both prominent members of the Illuminati. These were published in Munich in 1787 under the title Einige Originalschiften des Illuminaton Ordens. They revealed the full extent of the Illuminati’s alleged plans to destroy Christianity, topple the monarchy, overthrow the civil governments of Europe and eventually extend their influence worldwide. Even though it was claimed these documents were blatant forgeries, as a result of their publication the Order was legally prohibited and membership of it could result in the death penalty.

Many critics of the Illuminati saw its ‘hidden hand’ behind both the French and American Revolutions in the eighteenth century and believed it survived underground after its prohibition. The fact that Adam Weishaupt lived for another forty-three years in apparent obscurity led to speculation the Illuminati also survived. One of the founders of the French Revolution, the Comte de Mirabeau, was rumoured to have been a secret Illuminist. Some claim the plan for the original uprising to storm the Bastille prison in Paris that sparked the Revolution was discussed and agreed at a closed session of the Grand Masonic Convention in 1782. Count Mirabeau is supposed to have addressed the delegates and said his aim was to destroy the French monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church in France. In its place he said a “religion of love” would be established to replace it. In fact, during the French Revolution religious observance was temporally replaced with the secular worship of the Goddess of Liberty.

Groups Claiming to Inherit the Mantle of the Illuminati

Following the prohibition of the Order of Perfectibilists, several occult secret societies claimed to have inherited its mantle and to be carrying on its work. These included the Society of Illuminists founded in Avignon in the late 1780s by the unlikely partnership of an excommunicated Catholic priest and a Polish count. It later changed its name to the Academy of True Free Masons when it moved its headquarters from Avignon to Montpelier. Although it is rumoured the group still existed in 1812, it actually stopped functioning during the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror that followed it.

The Concordists were a Russian secret society founded around 1790 as the alleged successor of the Bavarian Illuminati. They were suppressed in turn in the early 1800s by the Russian government who outlawed them as a subversive political organisation. In the early 1900s a journalist and spy for the Prussian secret police called Albert Karl Theodor Reuss (1855–1923) used a charter of authority supplied by the English Freemason John Yarker to establish a new Academy of Masonry. The Academy was later amalgamated into the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Order of the Eastern Temple or Order of Oriental Templars founded by high-ranking German Freemason Karl Kellner.

The OTO was connected with John Yarker’s Masonic Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis and Mizraim and was supposed to possess the key to all the Masonic-Hermetic mysteries. Kellner claimed to have been taught these ‘secrets’ by three Eastern adepts. Theodor Reuss is mostly remembered today for initiating the notorious twentieth century occultist and magician Aleister Crowley into the OTO in 1912. The Great Beast 666, as he called himself, and known to the sensational newspapers as ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’ (surely not compared with his contemporaries Stalin and Hitler?) became the head of the Order in Britain and Europe. He claimed that the OTO was a Rosicrucian-Illuminatist group descended from the Bavarian Illuminati. Crowley was also a long-term secret agent working for MI6 or the British Secret Intelligence Service.

In the twentieth century the alleged surviving Illuminati in its various clandestine forms was seen as the eminence gris behind World Wars I & II, the Bolshevik Revolution and fall of the Romanovs in Russia in 1917, and the rise of both communism and fascism in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. It was widely believed by conspiracy theorists that the organisation would back any political group or doctrine or social movement and indulge in left and right-wing politics to achieve its age-old aims. Because Adam Weishaupt was of Jewish descent, the Illuminati became connected with Zionism, the international banking system, and even the entertainment industry and Hollywood where Jews are prominent.

In the modern world the Illuminati have been seen as a major factor and influence in international power politics, allegedly fomenting wars, civil disorder and revolutions in their attempt to establish a one-world government. They have variously been seen behind the contrasting ideologies of globalism and neo-conservatism, multiculturism, environmentalism and ‘green’ politics, the 1960s ‘permissive society’, and the New Age spiritual movement. The Illuminati have also been held responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union (which paradoxically they are supposed to have created) and the military policing actions by the United Nations, the Anglo-American alliance and NATO since the end of World War II.

It is claimed the draconian anti-terrorism laws introduced by Western governments in the wake of 9/11 and the emergence in recent years of a ‘Big Brother’ electronic surveillance society, where human rights and freedoms are restricted or infringed, is the work of the Illuminati from behind the scenes. Organisations such as the European Union (EU), the proposed North American Union (NAU) of the USA, Canada and Mexico, the UN, and the World Bank, are seen as Illuminati projects.

Secret ‘Shadow Government’ Groups

So-called ‘shadow government’ groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission set up after World War II, are also said to be fronts for the modern manifestation of the Illuminati. The CFR was founded in 1921 by Colonel Edward House, a political advisor to President Woodrow Wilson and financed by wealthy international bankers. Colonel House was denounced by his political enemies as a Marxist seeking to establish a socialist government in the USA leading to a one-world government. Paradoxically before World War II the CFR was accused of supporting and financing the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany. After the war it was labelled a populariser of international socialism through the UN. The CFR’s apparently contradictory political aims were explained by conspiracy buffs as typical of the Illuminati fronts that use both left and right politics. That is why the organisation recruited its US members from both the Democrat and Republican parties.

Allegedly, another sinister arm of the modern ‘shadow government’ and the Illuminati is said to be the Bilderberg Group. Founded in May 1954, it held its first meeting at the Bilderberg Hotel in Osterbeck near Arnhem in the Netherlands. The Bilderberg Group was organised with the support of the CIA by Dr. Joseph Retinger, a mysterious figure involved in international Freemasonry and secret intelligence work, and Prince Bernard of the Dutch royal family. In 1946 Retinger told a meeting of the CFR in London that his personal political vision was a united Europe as a bulwark against anti-Americanism and communism. His plans took a step forward eight years later when the Bilderberg Group began its annual meetings attended by representatives of the business world, international banking, the media, the military-industrial complex and politics.

Few people attending Bilderberg meetings have ever talked publicly about what happened or what was discussed. However, Denis Healey, a larger-than-life character who was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour government of the 1970s, once let the proverbial cat out of the bag in a television interview. Asked what the Bilderberg Group was, Healey admitted its ultimate political aim was “a single community throughout the world” or a one-world government.

The 2009 Bilderberg Conference was held from 14-17 April at a hotel in a town near Athens, Greece. Among the participants were the queen of the Netherlands, former prime ministers and prominent government ministers from the host country Greece, the USA, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, representatives of NATO, the UN, the American National Security Agency (NSA), directors of international banks, and the World Trade organisation, and the editors of national and international financial newspapers and magazines.

According to conspiracy theorists and professional Bilderberg watchers, those who attended this meeting apparently agreed to produce a false picture for the public of imminent economic recovery from the global recession and banking crisis. The attendees were to encourage banks and private investors to put their money back into the stock markets. The plan is apparently to create a new financial crisis in 2010 that will plunge the world into a deeper and more serious recession than we have so far experienced. This would cause high levels of unemployment and civil disorder and pave the way for more draconian laws to control the population. Eventually the situation would get so bad that martial law would have to be declared and there would be calls for a one-world government to be set up to restore global order. The meeting also allegedly backed the Lisbon treaty, which will eventually create a European federal super-state or United States of Europe with a single currency, the Euro.

In his State of the Union address in January 1991, President George H. Bush told US Congress the impending Gulf War to liberate the oil-state of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation was part of a new “big idea” he called the New World Order. He described it as bringing together diverse nations in a common cause to achieve “the universal aspirations of humankind, peace and security, freedom and the rule of law.” Many of those who heard or read the address interpreted President Bush’s remarks as a coded reference to the Illuminati’s aim of a global government.

With the election of the first black president in American history, Barack Obama, in November 2008, it seemed as if the neo-con forces with their New World Order agenda had been defeated. It was widely predicted by media commentators and political experts that America was entering a new stage in its development, a time of hope and change when the discredited right-wing policies of the neo-cons would be consigned to the garbage can of history. This was illustrated by postcards on sale in the UK showing the new president as a shining knight on a white horse. The picture was simply captioned ‘Hope’.

It has been pointed out that for the first time in a generation there appeared to be no known links between President Obama and ‘shadow government’ groups such as the Bilderbergers. However, rumours of a secret tryst between Senator Hilary Clinton and Senator Obama in Virginia during the Bilderberg Group meeting of 2008 held in that state raised suspicions. It was suggested both politicians may have secretly attended the meeting. Also several prominent members of the Obama administration have been identified as Bilderberg attendees and members of the CFR and Trilateral Commission, which as its name suggests brings together leading past and present politicians from Europe, the United States and Japan. This is not surprising considering that, Illuminati front or not, the so-called ‘shadow government’ acts as a training and recruiting agency for the Western world’s aspiring politicians.

At the time of writing President Obama’s honeymoon period with the American public seem to be over. Recently he has been criticised for his radical (by American standards) heath-care plans, his bailing out of international banks with taxpayers’ money, the delayed withdrawal from Iraq and his acceptance of the premature Nobel Peace Prize only days after he committed a further 30,000 troops to the ongoing Afghan War. In some extreme conspiracy theory circles, Obama is an Anti-Christ figure accused variously of being an Illuminati pawn promoting a one-world government, and a secret Muslim and socialist plotting to transform the United States into a military dictatorship.

This ongoing story of the Illuminati, and the secret societies claiming to succeed it, is one of a conflict between opposing forces seeking ultimate power for different reasons. It exposes a sinister agenda on those who have hijacked democracy and the idealistic concept of a utopian form of government guaranteeing real freedom to all its citizens. It is a noble concept corrupted for selfish political purposes using xenophobia, religious intolerance and fear as its weapons of choice.

The modern heirs of the Illuminati, if that is what they really are, are hardly ‘enlightened ones’ as they are only interested in the acquisition of personal power, the suppression of knowledge, and the control of the masses who they want to keep in a state of ignorance. However, there is still hope that genuine initiates of the Ancient Wisdom are working secretly behind the scenes of international politics to improve our modern world and lead it to a brighter future.

MICHAEL HOWARD is a writer, researcher, editor and publisher who has been interested in occult parapolitics all his adult life. He is the author of Secret Societies: Their Influence and Power from Antiquity to the Present Day (Destiny Books USA). He lives in England and can be contacted by e-mail mike@the-cauldron.fsnet.co.uk or by post at BM Cauldron, London, WC1N 3XX, England.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 11.

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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$2.95

© 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
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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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Russia has always perceived of itself as a Eurasian country.
– President V.V. Putin, November 2000

…an epochal, grandiose revolutionary admission, which, in general, changes everything. The prophecy of [French conspiratologist] Jean Parvulesco has come to pass… There will be a Eurasian millennium.
– Alexandre Dugin, Russian thinker and author

The French visionary writer Jean Parvulesco’s main agent – if not hope – for world change rests with Vladimir Putin. Parvulesco argues that – whether we are aware of it or not – we find ourselves at the crossroads of “great history,” where a totally new era is about to be born.

For such a new period to begin, the old needs to die first. For Parvulesco, this is the old “democratic system” of political correctness, which he feels has now reached its limits and is no longer supportable. It has become “a permanent and total nightmare.” Many will wonder how the “new world” is to come about. The best example of what appeared to be a sudden, almost instantaneous collapse is seen in the fall of the Soviet Union, two decades ago. It illustrates that powerful empires can, from one day to the next, completely disappear, requiring a new society and structure to be built from the ground upwards.

When news of the collapse of the Soviet Union appeared on television screens, the system had already imploded. It was just the public revelation of its death; the disintegration of the communist system had already occurred. According to Parvulesco, the collapse of “democratic Europe” has already taken place too, and we are now in the years between its collapse and the public acceptance of its demise – and the start of a new Europe.

For Parvulesco, the evidence of the collapse of this system is apparent in the recent political history of Italy and Germany, and to some extent that of France and Great Britain. But in each case he feels the same dire situation has transpired: an “immense empty desert,” the wasteland of “social democracy.” A local version of what he sees as a “worldwide conspiracy,” but one that has failed and will soon be sent back to the “black hole” from where it came.

Parvulesco knows what to write on the death certificate; but he also feels he knows what the New Europe will be: the “Eurasian Empire of the End Times.” He labels our timeframe an interregnum where what happened to Russia is actually evidence that dramatic political change is possible. The Soviet Union was the first domino to fall, with the others in Europe soon to follow.

Could he be right? In 1976, Parvulesco published “La ligne géopolitique de l’URSS et le ‘projet océanique fondamental’ de l’Amiral G.S. Gorchkov” (The geopolitical line of the USSR and the ‘fundamental oceanographic project’ of Admiral G.S. Gorchkov), which he labelled “political-revolutionary research.” In it he wrote that the Soviet Union would end up changing the course of history. And changing the course of history is, for Parvulesco, the only true goal politics should have.

Parvulesco therefore provides an interesting type of prophecy. Whereas most prophets predict the end of the world at a given time, his type of prophecy brings more detail about the type of change and how. As to its timeframe, it is very much like “when the time is right.”

So, what is meant to happen? Parvulesco argues that across Europe there are geopolitical groups at work – often clandestinely – laying the groundwork for the Eurasian agenda. Like the Project for a New American Century, there are other think tanks hard at work – and judging from the amount of newspaper headlines they don’t get, much more secretly – to bring about a new Eurasia. Despite their secrecy, Parvulesco was able to lay his hands on one article titled “The Imperial Eurasian Pact.” Similar to the idea put into action by the Neocons after 9/11 (an agenda that claimed to want to bring peace to the world by using the power of America’s military might), this group states that, “It is the confrontation of our imperial and catholic [universal] doctrines with the current political-historical reality […] which will see the final emergence of the catholic Great Empire which constitutes our ultimate objective, the Imperium Ultimum, the Regnum Sanctum, which should comport, in principle, three operational stages […].”

The first stage is the creation of a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis, that is considered to be the axis along which this major change will occur. This axis will tie together the destiny of three nations (France, Germany and Russia).

The second stage is the integration of what was traditionally known as West and East Europe, together with Russia, Siberia, India and Japan.

The final stage involves what is termed the destruction of the “global democratic conspiracy,” led by the United States, including a revolutionary liberation of its people, after which America as a whole (North and South) will become one entity. We can only wonder whether the present drive by the US to expand NAFTA and create a North American Union are steps in this direction.

The end of the planetary superpower that is the United States is forecast to be an act of self-destruction, a continental civil war very much on par with the first Civil War. The extreme dissatisfaction within the United States, the extreme disparity between the archconservative religious community and the more liberal, means that being elected as president on a genuine agenda (rather than one of total style but no substance) is almost impossible. For Parvulesco, it will be primarily America’s Catholic, ex-European community that will lead America towards its new destiny – and cause the demise of the current “global conspiracy.” There will be a new Europe, but also a new America.

In the end change is a social process, but it often needs a symbol. Hitler became the face of World War II, Lenin – more than Marx – that of communism, etc. So who is the new face of Europe, and who is the creator of this new Eurasian Empire? For Parvulesco, that “messiah” is already here: Vladimir Putin. Even though Putin is no longer president, his influence as Russian prime minister remains virtually omnipresent.

Vladimir Putin remains the face of the New Russia, a country with a vast territory and natural resources that is able to hold Europe to ransom, energy-wise, should it ever want to.

Who is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin? This is a question that many in a non-Parvulesco universe have also asked. Seen as a pawn of the KGB’s successor, in Parvulesco’s world, Putin is the direct emanation of the secret revolutionary groups of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union. These, he believes, are trying to make their decades-long secret battle open and public, moving from a type of synarchic, behind the scenes government, into a more open type of rule.

Whereas some conspiracy theorists claim the CIA and various secret societies like Skull & Bones are the real puppet masters of American politics, Parvulesco says the situation in the Soviet Union was not much different. Ruled for a long time by secret powerbrokers whose agents are now stepping out into the open taking the course of Russian politics into the direction they have been trying to steer it from behind the veil for a number of decades.

Unlike in the US where the “conspiracy” is often faceless, Parvulesco lists two people as Russia’s master conspirators. One was the chief of the Soviet security service (GRU) and one time Commander in Chief of the former Warsaw Pact, General S.M. Stemenko (died 1976), the other was Marshall N.V. Ogarkov, a former head of the Soviet military. Marshall Ogarkov, who died in 1994, is rumoured to have been behind a failed coup attempt which in turn led to a kind of counter-conspiracy that brought Mikhail Gorbachev to power.

Parvulesco is convinced that if this counter-conspiracy had not succeeded, the end of the Soviet Union would have occurred several years earlier, with a transition from the Soviet Union to the New Russia that would have been much harsher. Indeed, it underlines that years before the actual demise of the Soviet Union, the regime was comatose, ready for the taking, just like – in Parvulesco’s eyes – Western Europe (and the United States of America) is now.

Parvulesco is not alone in his assessment of these two men. French intelligence expert Pierre de Villemarest who wrote the history of the GRU, labelled “the Soviet’s most secret service,” says Gen. Sergei Matveevich Stemenko was “one of the first geopoliticians of the Soviet Union, perhaps even the first.” Though de Villemarest calls Stemenko a Soviet, he considered himself to be truly a “Great Russian.” “For this caste,“ writes de Villemarest, “the Soviet Union was an Empire that was called to dominate the Eurasian continent, not only from the Ural to Brest, but also from the Ural to Mongolia, from Central Asia to the Mediterranean.”

The “dream” of Russia à la Stemenko may be seen as merely returning back to the days when Russia was a true empire, before the days of the Bolshevic Revolution. But for Parvulesco, that in itself is part of a larger, and most intriguing puzzle – a mission.

The above is connected to this article in the same issue of New Dawn: Men of Mystery: Raymond Abellio & Jean Parvulesco – Their Vision of a New Europe

PHILIP COPPENS is an author and investigative journalist, ranging from the world of politics to ancient history and mystery. He is the editor-in-chief of the Dutch magazine Frontier and a frequent contributor to various magazines. His website is www.philipcoppens.com.

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

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Vladimir Putin was the subject of an article in the Sept-Oct 2001 issue of New Dawn that prophetically discussed the symbolic significance of his ascension to power and the important role he was destined to play in the future of not only Russia, but the world.

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

Raymond Abellio (1907-1986) & Jean Parvulesco (1929-2010)

By STEPHAN CHALANDON & PHILIP COPPENS—

Raymond Abellio and Jean Parvulesco are two prominent French esotericists who have visualised and tried to implement a roadmap for what Europe – and the Western world as a whole – should become. It is a future where the real role of the Priory of Sion comes into its own.

Raymond Abellio claimed that the Flemish occultist S.U. Zanne, pseudonym of Auguste Van de Kerckhove (1838-1923), was amongst the greatest initiates of the modern era. But hardly anyone knows who he is. Some have placed Abellio in the same category – he too is a great unknown for most. And those that have looked at Abellio largely conclude that he was a French fascist politician with an interest in esotericism.

Was he? Part of the problem is that Abellio’s writings – like that of so many alchemists – need a key. So much of their material is coded text, and Abellio himself used to laugh that most people’s keys “only opened their own doors” – not his. Who was he really, and what were his true political aims?

Raymond Abellio is the pseudonym of Georges Soulès (1907-1986), who rose to fame in France during World War II when he became the secretary general of the MSR (Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire) in 1942. The invitation to join the organisation had come from none other than Eugène Schueller, owner of the cosmetics giant L’Oréal. As the British researcher Guy Patton, author of Masters of Deception, points out: “This group had evolved out of the sinister Comité Secret d’Action Revolutionaire (CSAR), also known as the Cagoule. Soules was now to become acquainted with Eugène Deloncle, head of the political wing, dedicated to secret, direct, and violent action.”

Later, Patton adds: “So here we have a Socialist turned Fascist, deeply involved in political movements, who actively collaborated with the Vichy government. In the course of his political activities, he was to work closely with Eugène Deloncle, who […] was closely acquainted with a fellow engineer, François Plantard, and whose niece married [French President François] Mitterrand’s brother, Robert.”

Though never confirmed, it is claimed that Abellio was involved with Bélisane publishing, founded in 1973. Bélisane published several books on Rennes-le-Château, the village so intimately connected with the Priory of Sion. In his book Arktos, Joscelyn Godwin refers to Raymond Abellio as another ‘Bélisane’ pseudonym. For Guy Patton, Abellio is part of a network that tried to create a New Europe, ruled by a priest-king, whereby various modern myths, like the Priory of Sion, are meant to provide the modern Westerner with a longing of sacred traditions and rule, very much like the myths of King Arthur that gave a surreal dimension to European politics in medieval times.

Abellio’s political views have therefore been described as very utopian, and he has been suspected of synarchist leanings – the belief that the real leaders of the world are hidden from view, politicians being merely their puppets. But in truth, Abellio had a well-defined vision for social change. When the battle lines of the Cold War were drawn after World War II, he tried to find the best of both camps and hoped he could unite them. Why? To create a type of Eurasian Empire, stretching from the Atlantic to Japan, an idea later taken up by the novelist and theoreticist, his friend Jean Parvulesco.

French Esotericist Jean Parvulesco

“Parvu” is largely responsible for acquainting at least some with the visions of Abellio – though whether it was the real Abellio or a character created by Parvulesco remains open to debate. Guy Patton sums up Abellio’s view as being “typical of an extreme right-wing esotericism, the aim of which is to ‘renew the tradition of the West’. He wanted to replace the famous Republican slogan, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, with ‘Prayer, War, Work’, to represent a new society built on an absolute hierarchy led by a king-priest.”

The implication, however, is that several of the people involved were not truly devoted to esoteric spirituality and merely used it as a mask for making money, acquiring more power, and pushing an extreme right wing agenda. Though that is the case for some of those involved, within the mix of powerful and/or money-hungry people most agreed that Abellio was truly a ‘spiritual’ man. And it was Professor Pierre de Combas who is credited with Abellio’s transformation from politician Georges Soulès into the visionary Abellio (the Pyrenean Apollo), making him not merely a “man of power,” but also a “man of knowledge” – an initiate?

To understand his vision, we need to acknowledge that Abellio’s system, as mentioned, needs a key, and without a key there is no understanding – hence, no doubt, why he is often misunderstood. Secondly, his system is complex and difficult to summarise in a few words and is best described by listing some examples.

He wanted to “de-occultise” the occult (e.g. his book “The End of Esotericism,” 1973), whereby he hoped this would help science. His knowledge of science – acquired as a polytechnic student – meant that he could build bridges between the two subjects, for example between the 64 hexagrams of the Yi-Ching and 64 codons of DNA, or the correspondences between the numbers of the Hebrew alphabet and the polygons that could be inscribed in a circle.

The most famous of his works is “The Absolute Structure” (1965) which led to him being regarded as an heir to phenomenological philosopher Husserl. Such topics, of course, hardly make for bestsellers, but are the type of study one expects from a genuine alchemist.

His drive for an “absolute structure” is a vital ingredient in his idea of the “Assumption of Europe,” i.e. what he sees as the destiny of Europe: “the Occident appears to us not to be only as an interval separating the opposing masses of the East and the West, but is the most advanced carrier of the dialectic of the present time.” Abellio did not believe in the subject-object duality that continues to drive most politicians into fear-mongering and the other usual tactics employed by their ilk, but instead preferred a more complex model, centred on Conscience (the zero point), which evolved along the base towards Quantity (science) and upwards to Quality (knowledge), which gave him a six-armed cross. This is the “hypercubic” cross, to use Salvador Dali’s words, a man who also spoke of the “Assumption of Europe” in some of his paintings. The “hypercubic cross” allowed Abellio to express all ontological and spiritual problems in dynamic terms – and it is clear that he used complex wording, making his thinking difficult to understand, which is no doubt why he is easily misunderstood, was thought to be writing mumbo-jumbo, or simply neglected.

First of all, to get our heads around his terminology, we need to know that the Bible was one of Abellio’s most often consulted books and he described the stages of the evolution of a civilisation in Christian terms: birth, baptism, communion, etc. This is why he said that the next stage in Europe’s development mimicked Assumption, which is specifically linked with the Virgin Mary – the Saint deemed to play a pivotal part in Europe’s future. She is, of course, a supernatural being who is said to have appeared on numerous occasions to counsel Christian Europe on which direction to take, such as in the politically charged “secrets” of Fatima in 1917.

In 1947, in his book “Towards a New Form of Prophecy, an essay on the political notion of the sacred and the situation of Lucifer in the modern world,” he notes, “not more than any other being, man is but an addition, a juxtaposition of Spirit and Matter, but an accumulator and an energy transformer, of variable power according to the individual, and capable of passing his energetic quantity from one qualitative level to another, higher, or lower.” Thus, we see a mixture of Christian eschatology, prophecy, as well as Gnostic doctrines on what it is to be truly human.

The visionary Abellio was also an astrologer. He predicted the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, as well as the ascent of China. He qualified its Marxism as “Luciferian,” which he did not suggest should be interpreted in a moral sense, but that Chinese materialism had to be integrated in terms of the Absolute Structure, in opposition to the individual and “Satanic” materialism of the United States.

In the West, it was the task of freedom fighters – terrorists? – to bring about this change. These “heroic” battles were brought to life in his novels. In retrospect, he said that his first three novels were indeed “apprenticeships,” where his heroes evolved, while his final novel – published 24 years after “The Pit of Babel” (1962) – “Motionless Faces” (1986) was for him “that of the companion who is trying to become master.”

However, many consider “The Pit of Babel” to be his best work and it is here that he plots intellectuals that are disengaged from all forms of ideology and scruples engaging in widespread terrorism. It is a theme he revisited in “Motionless Faces,” where the primary character attempts to poison the population of New York, not by any straightforward means but by using the creation of an illuminated architect who had built a type of “counter-structure” underneath Manhattan, which was reserved for an elite – a type of urban Agarttha.

The heroine of his last novel is named Helen, also – not coincidentally – the name of the companion of Simon Magus. In the end, she perishes, taken to the centre of the earth by a subterranean stream underneath Manhattan. In the case of the historical Simon Magus, Helen was the personification of Light held prisoner by matter. Abellio specifically chose his name because he identified himself with Apollo, another deity connected with light, and Raymond Abellio’s initials – RA – were of course those of the Egyptian sun god.

Abellio himself never met his “ultimate woman,” even though he searched for her. She may have been Sunsiaré de Larcone, herself a writer of fantasies as well as a model, who died at the age of 27 in a car crash in 1962. She called herself his disciple. Other equally beautiful women had gone before, and would go after, but no-one was apparently worthy of being “his” woman. Hence, his tomb contains an empty space for his “Lady.”

It is “Motionless Faces” that Jean Parvulesco studied in detail in his essay, “The Red Sun of Raymond Abellio,” published in 1987. Parvu is a novelist who was both close and far removed from Abellio. Close, because they shared a similar vision of the “Great Eurasian Empire of the End.” He, too, had his initiators, and he saw himself heir to the “Traditional School,” represented by authors such as René Guénon and Julius Evola, whom he met in the 1960s. Parvu was preoccupied with “non-being,” the forces of chaos, which make him into something of a dualist, i.e. a Gnostic. With Evola he shared the idea that there is a need for a final battle against the counter-initiatory and subversive forces (the non-being). Like Evola, he had an interest in Tantrism.

Parvulesco often uses the term “Polar” in reference to the “polar fraternities” with which Guénon had once associated. He sees these as important instruments in the creation of modern Europe. He also used the term to refer to the Hyperborean origins of the present cycle of humanity, which he argued would soon end with a polar reversal. Here he is close to Guénon, but far from Abellio’s thinking, who had an altogether more optimistic vision of the future. So despite their kinship and a common goal, they were not agreed on how exactly the New Europe would be accomplished.

Parvulesco has often been cited by extreme right-wing European authors. Some of them have claimed him as one of their own, but it is clear that no single writer is in charge of who and where his name is used.

In the early 1960s, Parvu was close to the OAS, the “Organisation Armée Secrète,” a terrorist group opposed to Algerian independence from France. This put him in opposition to De Gaulle, yet he is known to have claimed to be a strong supporter of De Gaulle. Incidents such as this make it difficult to place him on the political spectrum, and it’s best simply not to try and put him into one category. Indeed, what sets him and Abellio apart is largely that they had an independent vision of the future – and the role of politics. They realised that the world was radically changing, and though their models might in the end prove not to work or be unrealisable, it does not negate the fact that they were innovative thinkers.

It is Parvulesco who provides further details as to what this New Europe would be and why, specifically, a priest-king is needed as its ruler. In ancient times, these rulers were primarily seen as a denizen of both worlds, a mediator between this reality and the divine realm. Parvulesco makes it clear that “the beyond” is guiding us towards Europe’s destiny, whereby the role of European leaders is first and foremost to correctly interpret the signs, rather than invent new goals and targets.

Interdimensional Gateways

A few constant themes run through Parvu’s writings, one of them being that of gateways to other dimensions. Whenever historical people (most often politicians) make appearances in his novels, they are not the politicians we know but their doubles who evolve in our and another dimension. The novels of Parvulesco are hence often seen as those of the “eternal present,” or the “ninth day.”

In “Rendez-vous au manoir du Lac,” the setting is a strange site where there is a gateway to heaven – Venus in particular – from where, according to Parvulesco, some chosen ones have to transit. In “En attendant la junction de Vénus,” he repeats this claim, but links it with French president François Mitterrand and specifically the Axe Majeur of Cergy-Pontoise, near Paris. This axis is the creation of artist Dani Karavan and is the “soul” of this new town. It stretches for three kilometres and if ever archaeologists stumbled upon its remains in future centuries, it would be classified as a leyline. Though the project commenced before Mitterrand’s presidency, it was during his term in office that the line became properly defined and executed. Today, it is seen – in France – as an enigmatic work, far superior to the Louvre Pyramid or Arche de la Défense, which has set the likes of Dan Brown and Robert Bauval questioning the reasons behind these projects. The Axe, however, is a far more ambitious, greater and more enigmatic project. When we note that Abellio was closely associated with the Mitterrand family, we can merely ponder whether he had a hand in the project.

With the Axe Majeure, it is clear that we are in a strange world where politics and esoterica mingle, partly in this dimension and partly in a divine realm. Well, Abellio hoped that from this mixture a new form of politics and a New Europe would arise. And it is here where we need to see the role of the Priory of Sion, not so much – as Dan Brown and others would like it – as the preservers of a sacred, old bloodline, but a new priesthood – a mixture of politician and esotericist, i.e. like Abellio himself – that can rule a New Europe.

So even though Abellio and Parvulesco are often described as synarchists, they repeatedly referred to themselves as freedom fighters laying the foundation for this New World. The new powerbrokers would not always remain hidden puppet masters, but would clearly one day step to the forefront to take up the role of priest-king. And for such thinkers, it was a given that France had come closest to attaining this ideal under De Gaulle, whereby the “Great Work” of Mitterrand was seen along the same lines, though clearly not to the same extent.

Abellio and Parvulesco were therefore New Agers building “An Age of Aquarius.” However, they did not focus on personal transformation, but on social transformation. As an author one might argue that Parvulesco operates within the domain of the “esoteric thriller,” which in Hollywood is seen in Roman Polanski’s ‘The Ninth Gate’ or Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. But both works have great difficulty in convincingly integrating the “passage to another world” within their storyline, often leaving the reader/viewer unsatisfied, or – alternatively – unconvinced of the end goal. Lovecraft has a better reputation and others argue that Parvulesco, thanks to the influence of both Abellio and Dominique de Roux, has gone further, and done better. But the main point is that his esoteric thrillers were to make this step through this “interdimensional passage” not as an individual, but as a society – as Europe.

De Roux (1935-1977) greatly inspired those authors who evoked what is known as “novels of the End” – however they saw the transformation of Europe. Parvulesco actually began his literary career in the magazine Exil published by de Roux. De Roux travelled widely, and in 1974 wrote “The Fifth Empire,” about the struggle for independence in Portugal’s colonies, which brings up the same struggle for a country’s new future. The title “The Fifth Empire” is an allusion to a popular Portuguese myth, namely that of the lost king. Like King Arthur, the Portuguese king Dom Sebastian was said to one day return to lead his people to a fabulous destiny – which, as can be expected in light of Abellio and Parvulesco’s ideology, was not necessarily of this plane. To quote the Portuguese poet and occultist Fernando Pessoa (a friend of Aleister Crowley): “We have already conquered the sea, there only remains for us to conquer the sky and leave the earth for others.”

Russia, Putin and the New Europe

What Algeria and De Gaulle had been for Abellio, what Portugal was for De Roux, Putin’s Russia is for Parvulesco. But it is in Abellio’s preface to “The Fifth Empire” that we find an interesting note explaining the true context and “key” that unlocks their works: “Those who attach a profound meaning to coincidences cannot be but stricken by the fact that the last message of Fatima was delivered in October 1917, at the moment when the Bolshevik Revolution began. What subtle link of the invisible history was thus established between the two extremities of Europe?”

For esotericists who saw our dimension as being infiltrated by the other plane of existence, the coincidences of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima and her clearly political messages to do with the future of Russia and how it should embrace the Virgin Mary, are part and parcel of this Great Empire. Not merely a political ambition, but part of their vision as to how “real politicians” work together in league with the “denizens of the otherworld” so as to accomplish the Assumption. Hence why Parvulesco believes Putin’s Russia to be so important. This is why, no doubt, Abellio tried to make contact with the Soviets to enable this New Europe, which indeed has come about largely under Putin’s presidency.

As mentioned, for British author Guy Patton, Abellio and Parvulesco are French fascists who abused newly created myths like that of the Priory of Sion to increase their influence, power and wealth. But this, of course, is merely one interpretation. Take the literature of the Priory and its creator Pierre Plantard and we discover he was close to De Gaulle’s regime. Plantard in fact ran part of De Gaulle’s “terrorist cells” in Paris when De Gaulle was struggling for power. Then, Plantard used the Priory to create an ideology that saw a unified Europe, from the East to the West, and it is obvious those involved in the promotion of the Priory later spoke of the importance of François Mitterrand.

The Priory is indeed a fabricated myth, a non-existent secret society. But it is equally clear the individuals involved (Plantard) and those linked to it (Abellio, and to some extent Parvulesco), had genuine convictions of what a future Europe should be. Their interest in Marian apparitions was genuine, and they saw them as divine guides along the path that Europe had to walk to its future and its next stage, its Assumption. As Parvulesco pointed out, it depends whether you believe in coincidences or not. If not, then you will argue the major political events of the past century are but tangentially related to the messages received from these apparitions. If you do believe coincidences have meaning, then it is clear this New Europe is slowly emerging.

In the 1980s, Parvulesco reviewed a strange novel, “La boucane contre l’Ordre Noir, ou le renversement,” by one “Father Martin,” who had already published “livre des Compagnons secrets. L’enseignement secret du Général de Gaulle.” For an avowed Gaullist, Parvu was obviously in his element. The novel itself has certain common points with one volume of the tetralogy of Robert Chotard, “Le grand test secret de Jules Verne.” Both books speak of a “reserved region” in Canada from where there is a conspiracy directed to change the world’s climate. The base is controlled by the sinister “Black Order” and aims to create a pole reversal – a theme also explored by Jules Verne. We can only wonder whether the stories of HAARP – set in nearby Alaska – might be inspired, or reflective, of this. But it is here that we see the final framework of their political ambition: they saw their quest not so much as a desire, a longing, but as a genuine struggle of good versus evil – if a New Europe did not come, the “Black Order” would have won. And in the end, perhaps Abellio and Parvulesco should thus be seen as modern knights, fighting for Europe – a new Europe.

The above is connected to this article in the same issue of New Dawn: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin & the Eurasian Empire of the End Times

PHILIP COPPENS is an author and investigative journalist, ranging from the world of politics to ancient history and mystery. He is the editor-in-chief of the Dutch magazine Frontier and a frequent contributor to various magazines. His website is www.philipcoppens.com.

STEPHAN CHALANDON is a French researcher, who has done extensive research into secret societies and esoteric subjects. He has written a number of articles for the French magazine Les Carnets Secrets.

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

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