Category: Articles

From New Dawn 190 (Jan-Feb 2022)

Shortly after 9:00 pm on 27 February 1933, alarm bells clattered in fire stations across Berlin. The Reichstag, the massive glass-domed home of the German parliament, was ablaze. The first fire crews arrived within minutes, and it was immediately apparent that separate fires had deliberately been set throughout the parliament using flammable liquid. Despite their brave efforts, the Reichstag was destroyed. What the firefighters could not know was that they were witnessing thekey event in establishing Nazi Germany and a defining moment of the twentieth century. All of Europe and much of the world, like the Reichstag, would soon be engulfed in flames.

With the Nazi party facing losses to communists at the forthcoming general election six days’ later, Hitler blamed them for destroying the home of German democracy. A young Dutch leftist, Marinus van der Lubbe, would be executed for the crime. A communist revolution, Hitler informed the nation, was imminent, and the Reichstag fire was part of a Bolshevik plan to seize power. The communist vote consequently slumped at the election while the Nazi party’s share increased dramatically to make them the largest party. Hitler seized power, suspended the constitution, and sent communist members of parliament to Dachau concentration camp. Within weeks all political parties in Germany apart from the Nazi party were banned. Historian Professor Antony Sutton relates: “From that point on there was no turning back for Germany; the world was set upon the course to World War II.”¹

Van der Lubbe was a patsy, and it is clear nearly ninety years on that the fire was deliberately started not by communists but by the Nazis themselves. Astonishingly, the man who deployed the arsonists that night, Ernst Hanfstaengl (known to all as Putzi), was a Harvard University graduate and secret agent of the closely collaborating Anglo-American secret intelligence services. As such, he spent almost 17 years at Adolf Hitler’s side, grooming him for power. Some readers may find that hard to believe but read on and examine the evidence before dismissing it. In his book, Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich, historian Professor Guido Preparata details how the Anglo-American elites funded Hitler and the Nazis throughout the 1930s and armed them to the teeth.

It was an astounding political manoeuvre willingly performed by the Allies to resurrect in Germany a reactionary regime from the ranks of her vanquished militarists… with a view to conjuring a belligerent political entity which she encouraged to go to war against Russia: the premeditate purpose was to ensnare the new, reactionary German regime in a two-front war (World War II), and profit from the occasion to annihilate Germany once and for all.²

We contend it would be a misconception for anyone to think British and American banking and political elites brought Hitler to power because they respected him or his politics or hoped Germany would thrive under him. In reality, the destruction of Germany once and for all as an economic, commercial, and industrial competitor was the goal of this hideous Anglo-American bankers game.

Who was Putzi Hanfstaengl?

Putzi Hanfstaengl was born into an extremely wealthy family in Munich in 1887. Two years later, when Diphtheria brought him close to death, he was saved thanks to three days of round the clock attention from an old family servant. Throughout, she repeatedly crooned, ‘drink, Putzi, please drink Putzi’, encouraging him to take sips of water. The name, a Bavarian term of endearment for ‘little fellow’, stuck throughout his life despite growing to a six-foot-four towering hulk of a man with an enormous head, prognathous jaw, and huge hands.

Putzi and sibs had three governesses and were educated privately at top German schools. He was an accomplished classical pianist, taught by the cream of European musicians. Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, and Richard Straus had been friends of his parents and grandparents before he was born. Mark Twain was another. Putzi was named after his father’s godfather, Duke Ernst of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the brother of Prince Albert, who married Queen Victoria.

Putzi’s mother was American, and he always considered himself half American. Like his father, she came from an extremely wealthy and well-connected family. Several of Putzi’s forebears were famous Union Army Generals and close friends of Abraham Lincoln. His mother’s cousin, General John Sedgwick, fell in the Civil War and is honoured by a statue at West Point. His grandfather, General William Heine, helped carry the coffin at Lincoln’s funeral.

Between 1905 and 1909, the young Putzi attended Harvard, the oldest and most prestigious university in America. He was immediately taken under the wing of his American relative, the famous and well-connected president of the university, Charles William Eliot. Highly popular at Harvard, Putzi regaled his fellow students with fight songs at pep rallies for the football team, songs that would later inspire him to compose Nazi marching songs.

Putzi befriended many important individuals such as President Theodore Roosevelt and future President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and mixed at Eliot’s home with men at the very top of Wall Street banking such as J.P. Morgan and Jacob Schiff. A close friend of Charles Eliot’s, Jacob Schiff, is known to have funded Trotsky in preparation for the Bolshevik revolution. Putzi regularly played the grand Steinway at White House parties and frequented the President’s summer retreat at Sagamore Hill. This, together with many more famous names, was the undergraduate milieu of Putzi Hanfstaengl.

After graduation, Putzi served for a year in the elite Royal Bavarian Foot Guards. Like the regiment, he was unstintingly loyal to the monarchy. He returned to the US to run the family art gallery on exclusive Fifth Avenue, mixing with famous personalities such as Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin, Toscanini, and the great Caruso. Unlike many young German Americans, Putzi made little effort to return to Germany when the country went to war in 1914. And, unlike others of German origin, he was never harassed or interned when America entered the war in 1917. Putzi dined every day at the exclusive Harvard Club in New York, socialising there and elsewhere with many international celebrities, leading politicians, and Wall Street bankers. Across the Atlantic, he was a friend of Winston Churchill and other members of the British ruling class. What does it tell us that he associated with Sir Robert Vansittart, a leading figure in the British Foreign Office and Secret Intelligence services?

During his ten years in New York (1911-1921), Putzi also associated with agents of the British secret service operating in the city, including the infamous Aleister Crowley, who was deeply implicated in the false-flag sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. British agents were active there with the consent of the US government and in the closest collaboration with the nascent US secret services. The head of British Secret Intelligence in the US, Sir William Wiseman, was a close friend of banker Jacob Schiff whom Putzi knew well. It was to this closely allied Anglo-American Secret Intelligence network that Putzi Hanfstaengl enlisted during WWI. Despite utterances otherwise, his allegiance now lay very firmly with America and Britain, not Germany.

In late 1921 after spending the greater part of the past 17 years in America, Hanfstaengl, now age 34, gave up his wonderful life there and took his American wife and baby son, Egon, to Germany. Why? What on earth possessed a wealthy, well-connected now-American businessman with a beautiful young wife, Helene, and baby son Egon, to move to a country riven by faction and utterly desolate thanks to the war, raging inflation and widespread poverty? On arrival in Munich, they even found it impossible to get milk for their child. Putzi’s stated reason for going because he felt “nostalgic for his native land” is surely not credible.

The Rise of Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler’s background was the polar opposite of the well-bred, highly educated, sophisticated and cultured Putzi’s. Born in Austria, Hitler’s mother was a peasant girl, his father a minor civil servant who was allegedly often drunk and beat him. Sent to local village schools, he showed little interest in education. The teenage Adolf demonstrated an aptitude for art but twice failed to gain a place at the Art Academy. For years he was an unemployed, friendless vagabond living in men’s hostels or sleeping on park benches. The unhappy, angry, and frustrated artist survived by earning a few pfennig’s painting and selling postcards on the streets. Hitler was turned down by the Austrian army as too weak to handle weapons but found a place in the German army during WWI as a dispatch runner. He suffered a shrapnel wound to the leg at the Somme in 1916 and was gassed and temporarily blinded at Ypres in October 1918. When the war ended, he decided to stay in the army for another two years. Awarded the Iron Cross first class for bravery, he proudly wore the medal for the rest of his life. In 1920, Hitler ended six years of military service as a lowly lance corporal. Biographer William Shirer writes:

As soldiers go, he was a peculiar fellow, as more than one of his comrades remarked. No letters or presents from home came to him as they did to the others. He never asked for leave; he had not even a combat soldier’s interest in women. He never grumbled… and was the impassioned warrior, deadly serious at all times about the war’s aims and Germany’s manifest destiny. “We all cursed him and found him intolerable,” one of the men in his company later recalled.³

Hitler re-joined the ranks of the unemployed, rented a tiny, cheap room in Munich where he lived a shadowy existence and took to the beer halls as a political agitator. He was but one of the hundreds of similar rabble-rousers in the political turmoil of post-war Munich. Rare mentions in local newspapers failed even to spell his name correctly. Putzi describes Hitler as being like an awkward “down at heels clerk” or a “suburban hairdresser on his day off.” However, his ability as an orator to incite crowds brought him to the attention of the Allies. Planning to fund and build a reactionary movement in Germany, the Money Power was on the lookout for a suitable reactionary to run it.

In Munich in 1922, Putzi got the call to action from an old Harvard friend, Warren Delano Robbins. Now second in command at the American Embassy in Berlin, Robbins just happened to be a first cousin of Putzi’s close friend, future President F Delano Roosevelt. The ruling elite’s tentacles were ubiquitous. He would send the embassy’s military attaché, Truman-Smith, to Munich to discuss political events in the city with Putzi. Individuals in such embassy positions are not simply regular bona fide diplomats. To put it bluntly, military attachés act as secret agents and spies, and Truman-Smith was no exception. He arranged for Putzi to attend a beer hall meeting in Munich where an as yet little known 32-year-old called Adolf Hitler would be speaking.

Having clearly been forewarned by Truman-Smith, Hitler shook Putzi’s hand and greeted him warmly when he approached and introduced himself, “Ah, yes, the big American.”⁴ Putzi feigned Nazi sympathies, inveigled his way into Hitler’s company, and quickly became the otherwise friendless loner’s bosom buddy. It should be understood from the outset that it was a charade. Putzi was never a Nazi sympathiser – probably detested them if truth be told – and had nothing whatsoever in common with Hitler. He was acting out a part, a deadly serious part, in the Money Power’s ‘Great Game’.

The ghostwriter of Putzi’s ‘autobiography’, Brian Connell, states that Putzi’s task was “to mould into some statesmanlike form the spell-binding oratorical gifts and immanent potential of Adolf Hitler and make him socially acceptable.”⁵ Putzi himself relates that Hitler was open to influence and he “felt encouraged to continue exerting all he could.” Putzi ploughed money into the small Nazi newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter, enabling it to purchase more printing presses, triple its size and increase circulation.

Hitler dined regularly at Putzi and Helene’s home and played on the floor with his godson, Egon. Much to Hitler’s joy, Putzi would hammer out Wagner pieces on the piano. He also played football marching tunes picked up at Harvard.

I explained to Hitler all the business about cheerleaders and marches, countermarches and deliberate whipping up of hysterical enthusiasm. I told him about the thousands of spectators being made to roar “Harvard, Harvard, Harvard, rah, rah, rah!” in unison and of the hypnotic effect… I even wrote a dozen marches or so myself over the course of the years. Rah, rah, rah! became Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil! but that is the origin of it and I suppose I must take my fair share of the blame.⁶

Putzi was close by Hitler’s side for the next decade and more and became his Foreign Press chief, dealing daily with the international media. Hitler was infatuated with Helene, and after dinner would occasionally lie on the sofa with his head on her lap as she stroked his hair. She considered him a ‘neuter’. Court historians dismiss Hanfstaengl’s role as of no significant historical importance. He was little more than Hitler’s piano player, a “court jester and buffoon” ready and willing to entertain him. William Shirer describes Putzi as “an immense, high-strung, incoherent clown” and “an eccentric with a shallow mind.”⁷ All part and parcel of the Establishment whitewash to conceal Hanfstaengl’s real background as a secret agent.

Putzi’s Role in the Reichstag Fire

On Hitler’s behalf on the night of the Reichstag Fire, the “shallow-minded, incoherent clown” was coordinating and deploying a team of highly specialised Nazi storm trooper arsonists. According to official accounts, Putzi was due to join Hitler and Goering for dinner at Goering’s house in Berlin that evening. Putzi relates in his ‘autobiography’ that he felt “shivery,” wanted to lie down, and phoned Hermann Goering with his apologies. President of the Reichstag, Goering, offered him a bed in the Reichstag president’s palace. The given reason for Putzi being in the palace on the night of the fire rings false, for he owned his own house in Berlin just minutes from the palace.

In all likelihood, Putzi went to the palace that night not because he felt “shivery” but to fulfil the massively important role of overseeing the burning of the Reichstag. How did a specialist team of arsonists with large quantities of flammable fuel gain access to the Reichstag without being seen? Only one door to the building was unlocked after 8 pm, and it was guarded throughout by security staff. Watchmen routinely toured the inside of the entire building just before it closed at 9 pm that evening and saw nothing untoward. No one could gain entry after 9 pm, and no one was seen to enter or leave.

The very reason Putzi was in the palace that night lay in the fact that unknown to all but a select few, an underground passage linked it to the Reichstag directly opposite. In Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Professor Antony Sutton relates: “Hanfstaengl directed operations within the Palace, the propaganda apparatus stood ready, and the leaders of the Storm Troopers were in their places.… the scheme was almost perfect.”⁸ Under Putzi’s direction, the arsonists entered the Reichstag unseen via the tunnel, set multiple fires in the massive building, and returned via the tunnel to the palace. Putzi says he was asleep in the bedroom in the palace when the housekeeper rushed in shouting that the Reichstag was burning. He immediately phoned Goering and Hitler to inform them. In reality, he was calling to say, ‘Job done!’

Putzi & the Beer Hall Putsch

The Reichstag Fire was not the first time Putzi had been centre stage in Hitler’s violent attempts to seize power. Ten years earlier, a major event first brought the little corporal to national and international attention: the famous Beer Hall Putsch. On the bitterly cold evening of 8 November 1923, Hitler and Putzi stuffed pistols in their coat pockets and went to a meeting in the massive Burgerbrau beer keller in Munich. They stood drinking beer to the side of the crowd of 3,000 while the Bavarian State Commissioner, Gustav von Kahr, addressed his audience. 20 minutes into the speech, the audience was startled to hear the deep rumble of heavy trucks and clatter of hundreds of steel studded boots on the streets outside. Dozens of Nazi brownshirts burst in through the doors waving machine guns menacingly, while hundreds more sealed off the streets outside. Hitler handed Putzi his beer stein and, with his bodyguard at his back, strutted through the alarmed crowd towards the speaker. Jumping up on a chair, he silenced the crowd by firing his weapon into the ceiling and shouted: “The national revolution has broken out. This hall is occupied by six hundred heavily armed men. The Bavarian government and the Reich government are deposed. The police and army are now advancing under the banners of the swastika.”

He was lying. When he and his armed gang advanced down the road towards central Munich the following day, the police and army remained loyal to the government. Gunfire was exchanged with several police officers and 16 putschists killed and many wounded. Hitler was pulled to the ground, dislocating his shoulder. Extricated from the bloody scene by bodyguards, he was driven to Putzi’s farm at Uffing, an hour’s drive south of Munich. As prearranged, Helene was waiting there. She tended to Hitler and hid him in an attic bedroom. Putzi says he became separated from Hitler during the melee and escaped over the border into Austria.

The following day, local police were tipped off, and several truckloads of officers duly arrived to arrest Hitler. He allegedly drew his pistol to commit suicide, and allegedly Helene grabbed the weapon. He was taken to Landsberg Prison and charged with high treason. The previously unknown Hitler made the headlines in newspapers across the world.

Putzi returned several weeks later but was never arrested or charged. He regularly visited Hitler in prison over the 11 months he served a five-year sentence. It was in Landsberg that Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in which he set out his political philosophy and anti-Semitic views. Several authors have suggested that Putzi played a significant part in the proofreading of Mein Kampf, if not indeed the writing. Hitler trusted him implicitly and they remained firm friends throughout his imprisonment. On release, his first port of call was to Putzi, Helene and Egon at their house in Munich.

In Reichstag elections held in December 1924, the radical right-wing parties picked up just three per cent of the votes, and the Nazis appeared to be a spent force. Inflation gradually came under control, bringing a much-needed period of stability to the ravaged country. Chastened by failure, Hitler decided to bide his time and attempt to gain power via the ‘democratic’ route. The Nazi party made little impact at elections over the 1920s, and Hitler entered his ‘quiet years’ at his comfortable home near the Alps. He and Putzi met regularly. During this quiet time, Putzi obtained a degree from Munich University with a thesis on eighteenth-century Bavaria. He was now Herr Doktor Hanfstaengl.

Extremely Dangerous Game

The Wall Street crash of October 1929 was music to the ears of Hitler, for he knew the German people would suffer badly as unemployment rocketed and look for radical solutions. “The Nazis could scarcely have hoped for a more propitious set of circumstances.”⁹ Hitler, with Putzi at his side, travelled by car or private plane campaigning in cities throughout Germany. As the economy disintegrated through 1930-32, the Nazis steadily gained votes and shared power in various coalition governments. Throughout that time, Putzi was making regular trips to London to meet Establishment figures who allegedly regarded Hitler with benevolence.

Even Lloyd George [Father of the House of Commons and former British Prime Minister] on whom I called, was no exception. He gave me a signed photograph to take back, on which he had inscribed: “To Chancellor Hitler, in admiration of his courage, determination and leadership.”¹⁰

This, as we shall see in part two, was part and parcel of the ‘appeasement’ game and duping of Hitler being played out by the British ruling class.

One evening on the campaign trail in Berlin, Putzi made excuses and slipped away for a meeting with an American journalist and secret service agent called John Franklin Carter. Carter came as an emissary from Putzi’s old friend Franklin Delano Roosevelt who was soon to become US President. FDR sent his warm greetings. Aware that Putzi was playing an extremely dangerous game on behalf of the Anglo-American elites and would be tortured and shot if Hitler uncovered the truth, Roosevelt warned him: “If things start getting awkward, please get in touch with our ambassador at once.” Putzi relates: “The message heartened me enormously, and in due course I would do just that.”¹¹

In April 1932, Winston Churchill and his son Randolph – both friends of Putzi’s – visited Munich and invited him to dinner at their plush hotel. Churchill allegedly discussed the possibility of an Anglo-German alliance with him and was very keen to broach it with Hitler. Hitler, however, declined Churchill’s invitation to dinner. After a raucous evening with Putzi at the piano and the wartime British Minister singing, Churchill wished the Nazi’s success in the elections. Eleven months later, that success would come thanks to the Reichstag Fire.

Part two of this article, published in New Dawn 191, examines the major role played by Putzi’s masters – bankers on Wall Street and the City of London – in financing Hitler throughout the 1930s and building up the German war machine in preparation for the planned conflict with Russia. Franklin Roosevelt’s concerns for Putzi’s welfare became a reality in 1937, and he fled Germany for his life. Roosevelt takes him to Washington as a White House adviser, with a good salary, nice house, servant, and Steinway grand for his entertainment.

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Footnotes

1. Antony Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, 118

2. Guido Giacomo Preparata, Conjuring Hitler, How Britain and America Made the Third Reich, xvii

3. William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 30

4. Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler – The Missing Years, 36

5. Ibid, 14-16

6. Ibid, 51

7. Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 47

8. Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, 120

9. Peter Conradi, Hitler’s Piano Player, 77

10. Hanfstaengl, Hitler – The Missing Years, 212

11. Ibid, 188

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 16 No 5 (Oct 2022)

Russia gets into your blood. It got into mine when I studied Russian at the United Nations Language School in New York in the 1980s and 90s while working as a UN information officer, having already learned the basics when I was 19.

I can still hear our teacher Alla coming into the classroom and saying: “Today, my dear students, we going to study our beautiful Russian verbs – first the imperfective and then the perfective verbs.” Who could fail to fall in love with Russian verbs with such a charming teacher? If you happen to read this, Alla, I send you a big wave.

But it was not only the verbs. Other intricacies of Russian grammar intrigued me – rules like “don’t forget that if the verb is negative the noun has to be in the genitive.” And the beautiful Cyrillic alphabet would dance before my inner eyes. Then there was my Russian girlfriend around the same time, who told me that “to sound like a Russian you must smile inwardly when you speak.” Indeed, they do this even when they are conveying something sad or, more likely, sad and funny at the same time – a combination at which the Russians excel.

Russian literature, too, captivated me. I became familiar with Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, Andrei Bely’s extraordinary novel Petersburg and the equally extraordinary Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Reading these works, one becomes aware of the deeply spiritual nature of the Russian soul. Furthermore, these last two authors revealed another side to Russia that intrigued me, namely a strong current of fascination for things magical, esoteric and other-worldly. I decided to go deeper into this domain, and my latest book Occult Russia was the result.

Of course, I was devastated when the war in the Ukraine began, and I feel deeply for all my Russian and Ukrainian friends. As I write I can only pray that the conflict will not be prolonged. As a stop-press item, I must express my deep outrage and sadness at the death of Alexander Dugin’s daughter Darya who was killed on 20 August 2022 by a car bomb possibly intended for her father. Through this cowardly act, the life of a radiant human being has been tragically cut short. My deepest sympathy goes out to all her family.

I offer the book Occult Russia in the hope that it will contribute to a deeper understanding of the Russian mind and soul. What follows is a foretaste of it, abridged and edited from the Introduction.

• • •

Upon hearing the word “Russia” you may think of military parades in Red Square, the war in the Ukraine, the annexation of the Crimea, gangsters, internet hackers, assassinations of journalists and imprisonment of opposition politicians. This book is not about those things but about a different Russia that is invisible to many people in the West – namely the inner Russia, the Russia of mysticism, myth, magic, the esoteric and the spiritual. Like a vast river, long ice-bound, the spiritual force deep in the Russian soul is moving again. In the wake of the collapse of communism, the Russian people are seeking new – or often old – ways of giving meaning to their lives. This search has given rise both to a revival of ancient spiritual traditions and to a plethora of new movements, cults, sects, -isms and -ologies, most of which would have been banned in the Soviet era. Out of this ferment exciting things are emerging.

Today’s spiritual quest in Russia covers an enormous spectrum. Millions are turning or returning to the Orthodox Church, and thousands of new churches are being built. As for alternative forms of spirituality, many people are turning to doctrines such as Theosophy, Anthroposophy and the teachings of Nikolai and Helena Roerich. Another group is turning back to the pre-Christian gods of Russia or to shamanism, often of the variety practiced by the urban intelligentsia. Meanwhile the indigenous pagan communities such as the Mari and the various shamanic peoples of Siberia are enjoying a new lease of life. In Russia the shamanic and pagan traditions have long existed side by side with the Orthodox religion – if not always in peaceful co-existence at least in a modus vivendi that the Russians call dvoeverie (dual faith).

History can be driven by mythical motifs, and this perhaps applies particularly strongly to Russia. One useful term for such a motif is the word “meme,” coined by the British biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Originally used in the biological context, it has come to mean an idea or notion that spreads like a message through a society, transmitted from person to person or through the media.

A phenomenon with some similarities to the meme, but operating at a deeper level, is that of the egregore, a collective thought-form on the invisible plane, created by many people focusing on the same ideas and symbols. Deriving from a Greek word meaning “watcher,” an egregore can take an infinite variety of forms – an angel or demon, a god or goddess, a hero or heroine, an object of special veneration, a sacred place or a compelling narrative. The concept of the egregore overlaps to some extent with the notion, developed by the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, of the archetype, an inherited motif in the collective unconscious of humanity. In exploring Russia’s mystical quest we find various powerful memes, egregores and archetypes at work. They include the following:

Holy Russia

The notion of Holy Russia is searchingly explored by Gary Lachman in his book of that title. Deeply engrained in the Russian collective soul is the conviction that Russia has a special spiritual mission. This is reflected in the powerful mystique of the Orthodox Church and the concept of the “Third Rome” – the first Rome being the city on the Tiber, the second being Constantinople and the third and final one being Moscow. All of this has given rise to an egregore of enormous vitality, which has enabled the Orthodox religion to flourish anew after the communist era.

The Warrior Hero

An early example of this figure is the semi-legendary Ilya Muromets, who features in various Russian epics as well as in films, novels and art. Probably a composite of various different people, he appears as a defender of Kievan Rus in the 10^th century and in later incarnations he fought the Mongols and saved the Byzantine Emperor from a monster. He eventually became a saint of the Orthodox Church. The role of the warrior hero has also been played by certain real historical figures such as Prince Alexander Nevsky who defeated the Teutonic Knights in the thirteenth century, Tsar Peter the Great, and even Joseph Stalin.

The Never-Never Land

This motif crops up repeatedly in Russian history in various forms and under various names: Byelovodye (Land of the White Waters); Opona, the utopia of peasant folklore; and Hyperborea, the vanished promised land in the north. The Never-Never Land is also thought of as the source of an ancient wisdom tradition that has the power to transform human life if one could only access it.

The Rustic Sage

This figure is typified by Tolstoy’s character of Platon Karataev, the wise peasant who is a fellow prisoner of the hero Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace. Tolstoy himself adopted this persona in his later years.

The Holy Fool

Alternatively “fool for Christ,” this term is applied to someone who adopts an apparently mad way of life, marked by great austerity and extreme piety. It can overlap with the concept of the starets, the independent, god-illuminated holy man or woman. It has been pointed out to me by my correspondent Dana Makaridina that there are two kinds of holy fool, namely the blazhennyi (“blessed”) and the yurodiviy (“foolish”). The distinction is subtle. The former are characterised by a state of saintly bliss, whereas the latter are conspicuous by their craziness and weird, antisocial behaviour. Both are associated with freedom, being unconstrained by any social norms and able to communicate directly with God. Dana Makaridina mentions a friend who has had the nickname blazhennyi since childhood because of his strange, otherworldly behaviour. She writes that “now he is an extravagant rock musician and performance artist dealing with topics of freedom and death.”

The New Messiah

Prophets and messiah figures have abounded in Russian history, overlapping somewhat with the starets and the fool for Christ, and they continue to appear in the present day. A typical example is the case of Sergei Anatoljewitsch Torop, an artist and jack-of-all-trades who, in 1991, proclaimed himself to be Jesus Christ returned. Adopting the name Vissarion, he founded a community called the Church of the Last Testament, gathered several thousand followers and established an ecospiritual settlement in Siberia. At the time of writing he is in prison facing a charge of extorting money from his followers and subjecting them to emotional abuse.

The Woman Clothed with the Sun

This figure originates in a passage in chapter 12 of the book of Revelation in the New Testament. To quote the King James Bible:

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.

This image of the woman clothed with the sun crops up repeatedly in Russian prophetic writings.

My own perception of Russia has been through different stages. As far as I can remember, the country meant little to me until 1953, when I was nine years old, and one morning at breakfast my father picked up the newspaper and remarked that Stalin had died. I may have asked who Stalin was and been told that he had been the leader of our powerful eastern ally during the Second World War.

Later I absorbed the Cold War propaganda. Russia came to mean the suppression of the Hungarian uprising, defectors from the West like Burgess and Maclean, Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table at United Nations General Assembly, the Cuban missile crisis, the crushing of the Prague Spring, the persecution of dissidents.

At the same time I was fascinated enough by Russia to start learning the language when I was nineteen years old, a process that I resumed in my fifties, by which time I had witnessed the advent of Gorbachev and perestroika, shortly to be followed by the break-up of the Soviet empire and the collapse of communism itself. While these tumultuous changes were going on I visited Russia for the first time in 1991 with an American contingent of very amiable born-again Christians, whose tour group I was able to join through the facilitation of an acquaintance.

A particularly vivid memory of that trip was visiting a Russian Orthodox seminary near Saint Petersburg. On entering the building I found myself transported into another world, marked by candlelit icons, the fragrance of incense and an atmosphere of still reverence. There was a quiet dignity about the priests and seminarists moving about in the dim corridors. One of them, looking startling like the photographs I had seen of the wild-eyed prophet Rasputin, was a young man with long, black hair and a solemn expression, dressed all in black in a sort of peasant’s tunic, trousers, and boots. We were shown to the chapel of the seminary where a service was held, and I began to understand why Madame Blavatsky, non-Christian though she was, always vehemently defended the Orthodox Church.

At the present time, in the wake of the collapse of communism, the Orthodox religion is once again playing a central role in the life of the nation. Churches are full, and thousands of new ones are being built, with the state playing a supporting role. But not everyone is happy with the current situation, and some of the initial post-perestroika religious enthusiasm is waning. Many believers oppose what they see as an increasing tendency towards a merger of state and Church, while people of other persuasions do not want Orthodox Christianity to be imposed on the population.

Visiting Russia reinforced my view that it has a special destiny, as many prophets have predicted. One of them, the German writer Oswald Spengler, wrote in an essay entitled “The Two Faces of Russia” (1922):

The bolshevism of the early years has thus had a double meaning. It has destroyed an artificial, foreign structure, leaving only itself as a remaining integral part. But beyond this, it has made the way clear for a new culture that will some day awaken between “Europe” and East Asia. It is more a beginning than an end.

Thirteen years later Spengler’s vision for Russia was illustrated in a cartoon by the artist Olaf Gulbransson, which appeared in 1935 in a literary-satirical journal originally produced in Munich under the name Simplicissimus, but by then published in exile in Prague under the title Simpl. The cartoon, entitled Melancholia, is a parody of Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving known under the same title.

In the foreground sits a melancholy Spengler, quill pen in hand, beside an even more melancholy dog and various other objects including an obstetric forceps, perhaps indicating that the New Age in Russia will have a difficult birth. In the background is an image of the New Age itself in the form of a naked young woman riding a rather complacent-looking bear, both framed in a large rising sun. The woman in the background riding a bear symbolises Spengler’s prediction that a new culture will come out of Russia.

Gulbransson’s cartoon appeared in 1935 during a troubled time. Germany had been through a military defeat, followed by the ravages of inflation and depression and then by the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. In Russia the Bolsheviks ruled. Another war was on the horizon. But Gulbransson pictured a bright future coming from the direction of Russia and symbolised by the maiden riding the bear. Between then and now there are certain parallels. The present era is overshadowed by war and by high tensions between Russia and the West. But I believe the maiden riding the bear still carries a hopeful message.  J

Christopher McIntosh’s book, Occult Russia: Pagan, Esoteric, and Mystical Traditions, is available from Inner Traditions International (ISBN-13: 9781644114186).

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From New Dawn Special Issue 18 (Dec 2011)

The symbol of the All Seeing Eye appears regularly among writings by conspiracy theorists. It is alleged the reverse of the Great Seal of the USA is a Masonic symbol and proves that Masonry helped found the United States of America.¹ It is also widely believed the All Seeing Eye is the symbol of the Illuminati,² and where the symbol appears that is evidence of a continuing Illuminatist influence. 

While there is much exaggeration and outright falsification based on individual bias, often religiously based, there is also the antithetical position of certain Masons, especially from the Anglophone ‘United Grand Lodge’, who hold there is little significance to the symbol, and that where the symbol appears in association with subversive movements, these are not “genuine Masons.”³ Although this writer has not been able to find any reliable evidence that the All Seeing Eye is in fact the symbol of the Illuminati, the debunkers of all critiques of Masonry are also often in error or are disingenuous. This article examines some examples of the All Seeing Eye as a graphic indicator of conspiracies.⁴

The Great Seal of the United States: A Masonic Symbol?

Some branches of Masonry, particularly the Grand Orient of France with its tradition of radicalism, atheism and rationalism, acknowledge that many brethren were involved in the American, French and other revolutions.⁵ The enigmatic symbols on the reverse side of the Great Seal of the USA, more familiarly seen on the US One Dollar Bill, have long caused speculation as to whether this is a sign of Masonic influence. There have recently been attempts at refutation, contending that the combination of the All Seeing Eye and triangle or pyramid motif is not a symbol of Masonry, or at least was not until after the American Revolution and the designing of the Great Seal; and that any subsequent use of the symbol by Masonry was not widespread.

The British Columbia and Yukon Grand Lodge, for example, operates a website with a section devoted to refuting anti-Masonic theories. On the US Great Seal, the Canadian Masons write:

Of the four men involved in designing the USA seal in 1776, only Benjamin Franklin was a freemason, and he contributed nothing of a Masonic nature to the committee’s proposed design for a seal…

Congress declined the first committee’s suggestions as well as those of its 1780 committee. Francis Hopkinson, consultant to the second (1782) committee, used an unfinished pyramid in his design. Charles Thomson, Secretary of Congress, and William Barton, artist and consultant, borrowed from earlier designs and sketched what at length became the United States Seal. None of the final designers of the seal – William Baron, Charles Thomson, Sir John Prestwick – were freemasons.

The single eye was a well-established artistic convention for an ‘omniscient Ubiquitous Deity’ in the medallic art of the Renaissance…

The first ‘official’ use and definition of the all-seeing eye as a Masonic symbol seems to have come in 1797 with The Freemason’s Monitor of Thomas Smith Webb – 14 years after Congress adopted the design for the Seal…

Neither the eye nor the pyramid have ever been uniquely Masonic symbols, although a few Grand Lodge jurisdictions incorporate them into their seals. The combining of the eye of providence overlooking an unfinished pyramid is a uniquely American, not masonic, icon. There are no available records showing the all-seeing eye, with or without a pyramid, associated with freemasonry prior to 1797…⁶ 

This Masonic refutation has widely appeared elsewhere in both Masonic and non-Masonic sources including an entry in Wikipedia. There are a number of important points that need questioning.

Early Masonic Use of All Seeing Eye 

The website ‘Pietre Stones Review of Freemasonry’ only accepts articles from Master Masons of the United Grand Lodge (UGL) and those recognised by the UGL. It is therefore an authoritative source from that perspective. In a section illustrating ‘Masonic Tracing Boards’⁷ there are a number which depict the All Seeing Eye as a major symbol. The earliest shown is not from the USA or from the American Colonies, but from Germany going back to 1770, well before the designing of the US Great Seal. Illustrations of early tracing boards incorporating the All Seeing Eye motif include:

• ‘Ancient Tracing Board, Germany, 1770’.⁸
• ‘Lodge Union No. 129 Kendal 1772’.⁹
• ‘1796 Union Lodge, Boston’.¹⁰

George Washington’s Masonic Apron (left), given to him as a gift from the revolutionist General LaFayette, includes the All Seeing Eye, and dates to 1784.¹¹ 

Ironically, the Canadian Masonic website includes a section headed ‘Masonic Art’. One of the examples is a painting by the Florentine artist Jacopo Carucci, entitled ‘Supper at Emmaus’ (1525). The Masons involved with this website have isolated the All Seeing Eye and triangle detail from the painting, and present three enlarged images of it.¹² Of twelve examples of ‘Masonic art’ given by the Canadian Masons, three feature the All Seeing Eye. One is labelled ‘eye in a triangle’.¹³ Another is Washington’s Apron featuring the All Seeing Eye.¹⁴

In an article entitled ‘The Masonic Landmarks’ by Dr. Athena Stafyla, written for ‘Pietre Stones Review of Freemasonry’, she (or the graphic artist) includes illustrations of both the Great Seal of the USA and a painting (presumably Masonic) of Egyptian ‘masons’ working on an incomplete pyramid.¹⁵ The pictures are carried without explanation. The pyramid without its capstone symbolises the work of Masonry, which is to complete the perfection of humanity, as per the Enlightenment and the humanistic and often communistic doctrines which were used as a means of subverting the Traditional social order of Europe and elsewhere from the 18^th century. The Masonic doctrine is that the initiated Freemason is working to craft humanity towards Perfection. 

All Seeing Eye on Dollar Bill

Reporting on an exhibition of Rosicrucian MSS at the Rosicrucian Museum (San Jose, USA), Gary Singh writing in Metro reports a conversation he had with the curator on the Great Seal and the All Seeing Eye:

We then come back to Roerich’s volume and discuss the Great Seal of the United States and the all-seeing eye. I mention it’s amazing that it took so long for the seal to make it onto the back of the dollar, and that I wonder why George Washington and crew didn’t put it there from the beginning. “Yeah,” said Armstrong. “Considering they were all Masons.”¹⁶

Discussing a book by the Rosicrucian author, mystic and painter Nicholas Roerich:

Roerich, a Rosicrucian, played an influential role in the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as he was the mover and shaker behind FDR putting the Great Seal of the United States and the all-seeing eye on the back of the $1 bill. The eye is a Masonic and Rosicrucian symbol dating back centuries.¹⁷ 

The influence on the Roosevelt Administration to get the All Seeing Eye on the Dollar Bill came via Vice President Henry Wallace, a devotee of Roerich and a 32º Mason. If the All Seeing Eye was not a Masonic symbol, one must wonder why it was considered so important by Roerich, Wallace and President Roosevelt? 

Masonic authority Manly P. Hall¹⁸ believed the Great Seal represents a specific occult influence on the founding of the USA:

On the reverse of our nation’s Great Seal is an unfinished pyramid to represent human society itself, imperfect and incomplete. Above floats the symbol of the esoteric orders, the radiant triangle with its all-seeing eye… There is only one possible origin for these symbols, and that is the secret societies which came to this country 150 years before the Revolutionary War… There can be no question that the Great Seal was directly inspired by these orders of the human Quest, and that it set forth the purpose for this nation.¹⁹ 

Henry Wallace was imbued with occult doctrine, particularly that inspired by Masonry. He regarded the USA as having a manifest destiny to lead the world into a new world order, and he saw that mission symbolised in the Great Seal. Alluding to the Masonic significance of the unfinished pyramid, the Masonic conception of God as the Great Architect of the Universe, and the motto on the Great Seal referring to a ‘new order of the ages’, Wallace wrote:

It will take a more definite recognition of the Grand Architect of the Universe before the apex stone [capstone of the pyramid] is finally fitted into place and this nation in the full strength of its power is in position to assume leadership among the nations in inaugurating ‘the New Order of the Ages’.²⁰ 

Wallace’s interpretation of the ‘new order of the ages’ was that of a ‘new world order’, not simply a new era for the USA (hence the reference to the USA leading the ‘nations’ into this international regime). This ‘new world order’ has now become quite familiar after US President George H.W. Bush Snr announced its official inauguration, being ushered in after the first Gulf War war against Iraq.²¹ His son, President George W. Bush, reiterated the aim fourteen years later when stating, in specific reference to the motto of the Great Seal: “When our Fathers declared a ‘new order of the ages’, they were acting on an ancient hope which is meant to be fulfilled.”²² The reference to an “ancient hope” implies something arcane that would be recognised by the initiated.

All Seeing Eye of Grand Orient Masonry

The All Seeing Eye is an important symbol in Grand Orient and associated forms of Masonry on Continental Europe. United Grand Lodge Masonry can eschew the subversive nature of the Grand Orient and others by the simple expedient of stating they are not “true Masons.” Be that as it may, this oft-cited difference did not prevent important figures such as Benjamin Franklin being initiated into the revolutionist Lodge of the Nine Sisters in Paris, nor Thomas Jefferson lauding the noble virtues of Illuminatist Adam Weishaupt.²³ 

Grand Orient Masonry and its derivatives are of an Illuminatist nature, aiming to overthrow all traditional social orders, to inaugurate a world order ushered in by a faithless, materialistic rationalism, as a prelude to establishing a universal cult as was seen in the aftermath of the French Revolution when rival cults contended on the ruins of the Church and unleashed new forms of un-reason. 

The Grand Orient of France (GODF), the mother of Grand Orient throughout the world, does not disguise its rationalist, humanistic and revolutionary pedigree:

But in this period when the new ideas of Liberty, and Equality were to be born, which would lead to the French Revolution and the Republic, France entered the age of enlightenment. From being a sort of ‘Club’ as in England, the Masonic Lodges which very quickly spread in our country became a sounding board for these great new ideas and turned into places where debates about the emancipation of Man and Society took place. The Grand Orient de France which was set up in 1733 and was, until the end of the 19th century, the only Masonic Order in France, is still fighting for these ideals.²⁴

The motto of the GODF is that of the French Revolution, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. That is to say, the Revolutionaries adopted the motto from the Freemasons. The GODF adds:

Thus Lafayette received a sword from George Washington in honour of the part played by French Freemasons in the American War of Independence. In this way, the preparation of the ideas of Liberty and Equality in the Masonic Lodges contributed to the great reforms of the French Revolution…²⁵

The GODF claims to be continuing the legacy of various revolutionary thinkers and activists including the most extreme anarchists Blanqui and Bakunin whom they identify as Grand Orient Masons:

For the freemasons of the Grand Orient de France, the search for progress has always been the force behind their reflection and their activities, to such an extent that this principle is an integral part of the tradition of this form of Masonry. We are the heirs of men and women who all, in their own way, worked to improve Humankind: Voltaire,²⁶ La Fayette,²⁷ Garibaldi,²⁸ Auguste Blanqui,²⁹ Victor Schoelcher, Emir Abd-El-Kader, Louise Michel, Bakounine,³⁰ Jean Zay, Félix Eboué, Pierre Brossolette and so many others whom we are proud to know have enriched our Lodges with their presence. Therefore, the Grand Orient de France is a vigilant defender of the principles contained in its motto which is also that of the Republic: ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’.³¹

Therefore, when academics have a clichéd tendency to ridicule ‘conspiracy theories’ on Masonry as simplistic and ignorant, they would do well to consult the Masonic literature, including that of the present day.

As one would expect, the All Seeing Eye makes its looming appearance in the symbology of both the Grand Orient and the French Revolution. 

The card of the Cordeliers Club that depicts the All Seeing Eye above the word ‘Surveillance’.³² It is pertinent to ask whether this supposed ‘Eye of Providence’ or ‘Eye of God’ is in reality the eye that sees all under a totalitarian state?

The Symbol of the Grand Orient de France includes an All Seeing Eye above the Masonic Compass & Square, surrounded by the Ouroboros serpent.³³

The Temple of the GODF features the All Seeing Eye at centre place.³⁴

1848 GODF medal commemorating the French Republic. This shows an All Seeing Eye within a triangle, around which is the GODF motto: ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’.³⁵

The symbols illustrating the French Revolutionary ‘Declaration on the Rights of Man and the Citizen’ feature the All Seeing Eye radiating above Moses-type tablets etched with the Declaration. Below that symbol is the self-devouring serpent, Ouroboros.³⁶

It is also of interest that the title page of the seminal Encyclopedie,³⁷ compiled by the rationalist philosophers³⁸ under the direction of Denis Diderot, intended as a compendium of scientific knowledge to repudiate the ‘superstition’ of Christianity, is decorated with esoteric symbolism. Leading American atheist Conrad Goeringer, in writing on the contribution of Freemasonry to revolutionary ferment, states that the central figure of the title page is Lucifer, surrounded by the compass and square symbols of Masonry:³⁹ 

If the bible was the holy book of the Christian enlightenment, then the Encyclopedia was the inspiration of the Enlightenment. Here was a compendium of human knowledge dealing with arts, sciences, mechanics and philosophy which swelled to some 36 volumes by 1780. Begun by the atheist Diderot in 1751, the Encyclopedia bore the imprints of Voltaire, Montesque, Rousseau, Buffon, Turgot and others. Gracing the title page of Diderot’s compendium in the first edition was a drawing of Lucifer, symbol of light and rebellion,⁴⁰ standing beside the masonic symbols of square and compass.⁴¹ 

Why did the rationalists and humanists of the French Revolution, supposedly eschewing ‘superstition’, decorate their new holy writ with arcane symbolism? The answer is that such creeds are intended not as the end of religious worship, but as a stepping-stone by which traditional faiths are destroyed, to be replaced by a universal humanistic religion where man replaces God, and where the ultimate step is to enthrone a leader as Man-become-God.

The French Revolution was the forerunner of communist revolutions that attempted to abolish Christianity. Amongst the anti-Christian fervour, babies were baptised not to the ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’, but to ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. In 1793 the word Sunday (dimanche) was dropped, the Gregorian calendar was replaced by a French Revolutionary Calendar, and it was prohibited to ring Church bells, display the crucifix, or hold religious processions. Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being was officially inaugurated in 1794,⁴² opened by hymns to the Supreme Being sang by the Paris Opera choir.⁴³ Yet these subterranean forces did not intend Paris as the capitol of the world, nor even Washington, but Jerusalem, a dream kept alive for centuries in the secret societies. 

Jerusalem, World Capitol, Under the Gaze of the All Seeing Eye

In Jerusalem, the United Nations (a truly United Nations) will build a Shrine of the Prophets to serve the federated union of all continents: this will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah. 
– David Ben Gurion, First Prime Minister of the State of Israel⁴⁴

Jerusalem holds a central place not only for the three Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, but for Freemasonry, possibly the result of the influence of the Knights Templar whom some researchers regard as the fathers of Masonry,⁴⁵ and whom the Masons themselves acknowledge as such in their tradition. A major aim of the Freemasons, like the messianic Jews, is the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon, around which Masonic rituals and allegories are based. Therefore, Masonry can be expected to have a special interest in the creation of the State of Israel. 

The importance of Jerusalem to Masonry was stated by Albert Pike, when describing the 30° of Knight Kadoth, when the initiate learns of Masonry’s Templar origins, where it is explained that the Templars seeking to destroy the Papacy aligned themselves with the Patriarch at Constantinople, the Templars’“secret object [being] the re-building of the Temple of Solomon on the model prophesied by Ezekiel.”⁴⁶ Leon Zeldis, 33° Adjunct Grand Master, Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite for the State of Israel, describes the importance of Jerusalem to Masonry, which happens to corresponds to messianic Judaism:

…King Solomon’s Temple already appears in the Old Charges of Operative Masons used by medieval Lodges and many legendary and ritual features of various Masonic degrees are related to its construction and architecture. For both Christians and Jews, Jerusalem is the focal point of the world, the place where heaven and earth touch each other (Heavenly and Earthly Jerusalem).⁴⁷

Masonry staked its mark on the borders of Israel. On the Egyptian-Israeli border a marker has been erected by Masonry consisting of a pyramid, the dividers and compass symbol of Masonry and the two columns or pillars, Binah and Chokmah, of the Cabalistic Tree of Life, a feature of Masonic Temples.⁴⁸

One of the most overt displays of Masonic symbolism is to be found in the Supreme Court building of Jerusalem. The building is replete with Masonic symbolism, and the crowning glory is the All Seeing Eye. Jerry Golden, a researcher resident in Israel, has numerous photographs of the Supreme Court building. In accord with many conspiracy theorists, Golden ultimately attributes this to the Illuminati. While there is no direct evidence of this, the Masonic symbolism is nonetheless apparent. Of additional interest is the involvement of the Rothschild banking dynasty in the construction of the building. Golden writes:

Showing the architectural design of the New Israeli Supreme Court Building designed and paid for by the Rothschilds reflects the presence of Free Masonry… The Supreme Court building sits on a plot of land opposite the Knesset [Parliament] and next to the Foreign Ministry and the Central Bank of Israel.⁴⁹

The Rothschild involvement in this overtly Masonic construction is perhaps the first reliable evidence of a Rothschild connection with Masonry. Golden writes:

The Engineers who were chosen for this job by the Rothschild’s were the grandson and granddaughter of Ben-Zion Guine from Turkey who worked for Baron Rothschild, Ram Kurmi, born in Jerusalem in 1931, and Ada Karmi-Melanede born in Tel-Aviv in 1936.⁵⁰

A plaque dedicated to the Rothschilds has been placed on the Supreme Court building. The emblem at the top left of the plaque is a radiating All Seeing Eye. Most evident, however, is the All Seeing Eye on a large pyramid that stands on the top of the Supreme Court building looking over Jerusalem. Golden states of this:

The first thing you will notice is the pyramid with the All Seeing Eye just like the one you will see on the American dollar bill. It sits in a circle to the left.⁵¹

These occult and Masonic correspondences suggest the Supreme Court building, in which the Rothschilds took an intimate interest, was constructed for purposes other than merely handing out sentences in the Israeli justice system. Such a building crowned with the pyramid and All Seeing Eye accord with the requirements of a World Court for a New World Order, the aim of the ages’ old traditions of occult societies to establish Jerusalem as the capitol of the universal republic.

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Footnotes

1. For a scholarly work on the founding of the USA by Freemasons and the dichotomy that occurred between Masons and Puritans see: Nicholas Hagger, The Secret Founding of America: The Real Story of Freemasons, Puritans & the Battle for the New World (London: Watkins Publishing, 2007). 

2. The Order of the Illuminati was a crypto-Masonic secret society founded by Professor Adam Weishaupt in Bavaria, Germany, in 1776, to overthrow the Church and all monarchies, and to establish a communistic universal republic. See: Prof. J Robison (1798) Proofs of a Conspiracy (Massachusetts: Western Islands, 1967).

3. There are branches of Grand Lodge Masonry, or ‘Regular Masonry’, that do however proudly cite the involvement of other forms of Masonry in revolutions as part of a wider Masonic heritage. 

4. While allegations of ‘conspiracy’ often appear exaggerated, even less scholarly is the stance of those ‘sceptics’ who insist that any form of conspiratology is delusional or ignorant. Scholarship accepts that the Thuggee was a criminal conspiracy based on religion, or that the Mafia is a criminal conspiracy based around Sicilian families reaching back centuries and spreading out from Sicily to encompass the world. Yet when someone suggests that Freemasonry, Illuminati, Bilderberger, Zionism or the Council on Foreign Relations might be involved in political and economic conspiracies, this is laughed out of academe with arrogant derision. 

5. For example, the Portuguese revolution of 1910: A M Goncalves, Breve historical da Maconaria em Portugal, Pel Irmao Mestre Macom, R L Anderson No. 16 Grande Loja Regular de Portugal/GLLP, 14° Grau do Rito Escoces Antigo e Aceite. A Shortened History of Freemasonry in Portugal. English translation by W. Bro. Don Falconer, Pietre-Stones Review of Freemasonry, www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/arnaldoGeng.html. On the March 1917 Russian Revolution see: Richard L Rhoda, ‘Freemasonry in Russia’, www.mastermason.com/hempstead749/RussiaMas.htm

6. Grand Lodge of British Columbia & Yukon, ‘Anti-Masonry Frequently Asked Questions’, Section 2, version 2.9, II SYMBOLS, 3. ‘Is the eye and pyramid a Masonic symbol? No’. http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/anti-masonry/anti-masonry02.html

7. Masonic Tracing Boards comprise symbols for the instruction of Masons as they are initiated into each degree. They are laid out on the chamber floor and form the basis for lectures on Masonic allegory, history, ritual and doctrine relevant to that degree. Any symbol on a Tracing Board is therefore of importance to Masonry.

8. R. Robinson, ‘Collection of Masonic Tracing Boards’, www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/TBs.html

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. ‘Brother Washington’s Masonic Apron’, Grand Lodge of Free & Accepted Masons of Pennsylvania, www.pagrandlodge.org/mlam/apron/

12. ‘Eye of God’, Masonic Art, Grand Lodge of Yukon & British Columbia, http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/art/pontormo.html

13. ‘Eye in a triangle,’ Ibid., http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/art/eye_triangle.html

14. ‘George Washington’s Masonic apron’, Ibid., http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/art/washington_apron.html

15. Dr. A Stafyla, ‘The Masonic Landmarks’, Pietre-Stones Review of Freemasonry, www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/athena1.html

16. G. Singh, ‘Mystic Pages’, Metro, 24-31 March 2004, www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/03.24.04/rosicrucian-0413.html

17. Ibid.

18. Hall was a 33º Scottish Rite Mason who founded the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, USA. He was honoured by Scottish Rite Journal which called him ‘The Illustrious Manly P. Hall’ in September 1990, and honoured him as ‘Masonry’s Greatest Philosopher’.

19. Manly P. Hall, The Secret Destiny of America (Los Angeles: The Philosophical Research Society, Inc., 1944), 174. 

20. H.A. Wallace, Statesmanship and Religion (New York: Round Table Press, 1934), 78-79. 

21. George H.W. Bush, US Congress, 6 March 1991.

22 George W. Bush, Second Inaugural Address, United States Capitol, 20 January 2005.

23. V Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (Columbia University Press, 1918), 312; cited by N Hagger, op. cit., 142. 

24. Grand Orient de France, ‘History’, www.godf.org/foreign/uk/histoire_uk.html

25. Ibid. (These entries seem to have been deleted since accessed in 2006). 

26. Voltaire and Rousseau were the primary ideological inspirers of the French Revolution. They are depicted on the posters of the Declaration of the Rights of Man & the Citizen, along with Masonic symbolism. G. Hancock and R. Bauval, Talisman: Sacred Cities, Sacred Faith (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 21. Voltaire was escorted during his initiation into the Nine Sisters Lodge in 1778 by de Gebelin and Benjamin Franklin. G. Hancock and R. Bauval, Ibid., 460. 

27. Lafayette served with the American revolutionary army, and later drafted France’s Declaration on the Rights of Man & the Citizen. 

28. Garibaldi along with Mazzini, were the primary Italian revolutionaries, the latter founding a worldwide movement of which Young Italy was a constituent. Garibaldi became the first Grand Master of Memphis-Misraim Masonry, G. Hancock and R. Bauval, op. cit., 422. 

29. Blanqui was a precursor of Karl Marx, and the Communist League derived from Blanqui’s League of Just. D. Conway, A Farewell to Marx (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), 146. 

30. Mikhail Bakounine was the organiser of the Anarchist movement and the primary rival to Karl Marx for leadership of the First Internationale. 

31. ‘Our Values’, Grand Orient de France, www.godf.org/index.php/pages/details/slug/nos-valeurs

32. www.histoire-fr.com/revolution_francaise_monarchie_constitutionnelle_2.htm. The ‘Club of the Cordeliers’ or ‘Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’, were ultra-revolutionaries founded in 1790 to guard the ideological purity of the French Revolution. Significantly, the Club was named after the place of its foundation, a former monastery that had been seized from the Church and taken over as state property; a forerunner of communism. The Cordeliers seem to have acted as the Trotskyites of their day.

33. A depiction of the GODF symbol appears at ‘The secession of the Grand Orient de France’, Loja Luz Do Oriente No. 80, http://luzoriente.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html

34. A depiction of the GODF Temple appears at: C Hoddap, ‘Women not flocking to the Grand Orient of France’, http://freemasonsfordummies.blogspot.com/2011/04/women-not-flocking-to-grand-orient-of.html. Hoddap is a 33º Scottish Rite Mason.

35. H. Nguyen, ‘Symbols of Revolution’, http://halleynguyen294.wordpress.com/category/symbols-of-revolution/

36. Declaration of the Rights of Man & the Citizen, http://libertyeverywhere.blogspot.com/2010/12/declaration-of-rights-of-man-and.html

37. Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers was published in France between 1751 and 1772.

38. The so-called Encyclopedists.

39. Rt. Hon. Dr. J. Morley, M.P., ‘Denis Diderot (1713-1784)’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ninth Edition, 1902, www.1902encyclopedia.com/D/DID/denis-diderot.html

40. 18 and 19^th century radicals, including Freemasons such as the anarchist leaders Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, regarded Lucifer or Satan in romantic terms as the archetypal rebel. Bakunin, for example, wrote: “Satan is the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds.”M. Bakunin (1883), God & State (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 112. Karl Marx wrote plays and poems extolling Satanic themes, including The Player and Oulanem. According to Australian Labour history scholar Dr. Bob James, Marx was an initiate of the Loge des Philadelphes, as were the French radical Blanc, and Italian revolutionaries Garibaldi and Mazzini. R. James, Secret Societies and the Labour Movement, Biennial Conference of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Wollongong, 1999; Radical Tradition, www.takver.com/history/secsoc01.htm. Carducci, a leader of Italian Republicanism and of Scottish Rite Masonry, wrote a lengthy poem, Inno a Satana (1863) lauding a revolutionary Satan.

41. C. Goeringer, Conrad. The Enlightenment, Freemasonry, and The Illuminati, Part I – The Enlightenment, www.atheists.org/Atheism/roots/enlightenment/

42. G. Hancock and R. Bauval, op. cit., 15-16. 

43. Ibid., 20. 

44. David Ben Gurion, Look Magazine, 16 January 1962. 

45. M. Baigent and Richard Leigh, The Temple and the Lodge (London: Jonathan Cape, 1989). 

46. Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma, 1871, 815-16.

47. http://web.mit.edu/dryfoo/Masons/Reports/israel.html

48. J. Golden, ‘Mason’s making a move in Israel, and a closer look at the Road Map’, Golden Report, 23 February 2005, ‘Masonic Monument in Eilat’, Cassiopaea Forum, 9 August 2010, http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=19165.0

49. J. Golden, ‘The Roots of Evil in Jerusalem’, 21 February 2011, www.thegoldenreport.com/special-reports/5-the-roots-of-evil-in-jerusalem

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid.

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