Category: Articles

From New Dawn 113 (Mar-Apr 2009)

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 available as an e-book.

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From New Dawn 112 (Jan-Feb 2009)

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.

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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

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