Secret Societies And Subversive Movements Part 14

At any rate, whatever were the methods employed by Frederick the Great for obtaining control over Masonry, the fruitful results of that "very trifling circ.u.mstance," his initiation at Brunswick, become more and more apparent as the century advances. Thus when in 1786 the Rite of Perfection was reorganized and rechristened the "Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite"--always the same Scottish cover for Prussianism!--it is said to have been Frederick who conducted operations, drew up the new Const.i.tutions of the Order, and rearranged the degrees so as to bring the total number up to thirty-three[415], as follows:

26. Prince of Mercy.

27. Sovereign Commander of the Temple.

28. Knight of the Sun.

29. Grand Scotch Knight of St. Andrew.

30. Grand Elect Knight of Kadosch.

31. Grand Inspector Inquisitor Commander.

32. Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret.

33. Sovereign Grand Inspector-General.

In the last four degrees Frederick the Great and Prussia play an important part; in the thirtieth degree of Knight Kadosch, largely modelled on the Vehmgerichts, the Knights wear Teutonic crosses, the throne is surmounted by the double-headed eagle of Prussia, and the President, who is called Thrice Puissant Grand Master, represents Frederick himself; in the thirty-second degree of Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret, Frederick is described as the head of Continental Freemasonry; in the thirty-third degree of Sovereign Grand Inspector-General the jewel is again the double-headed eagle, and the Sovereign Grand Commander is Frederick, who at the time this degree was inst.i.tuted figured with Philippe, Duc d'Orleans, Grand Master of the Grand Orient, as his lieutenant. The most important of these innovations was the thirty-second degree, which was in reality a system rather than a degree for bringing together the Masons of all countries under one head--hence the immense power acquired by Frederick. By 1786 French Masonry was thus entirely Prussianized and Frederick had indeed become the idol of Masonry everywhere. Yet probably no one ever despised Freemasonry more profoundly. As the American Mason Albert Pike shrewdly observed:

There is no doubt that Frederick came to the conclusion that the great pretensions of Masonry in the blue degrees were merely imaginary and deceptive. He ridiculed the Order, and thought its ceremonies mere child's play; and some of his sayings to that effect have been preserved. It does not at all follow that he might not at a later day have found it politic to put himself at the head of an Order that had become a power....[416]

It is not without significance to find that in the year following the official foundation of the _Stricte Observance_, that is to say in 1752, Lord Holdernesse, in a letter to the British Amba.s.sador in Paris, Lord Albemarle, headed "Very secret," speaks of "the influence which the King of Prussia has of late obtained over all the French Councils"; and a few weeks later Lord Albemarle refers to "the great influence of the Prussian Court over the French Councils by which they are so blinded as not to be able to judge for themselves."[417]

But it is time to turn to another sphere of activity which Masonry opened out to the ambitions of Frederick.

The making of the _Encyclopedie_, which even those writers the most sceptical with regard to secret influences behind the revolutionary movement admit to have contributed towards the final cataclysm, is a question on which official history has thrown but little light.

According to the authorized version of the story--as related, for example, in Lord Morley's work on the Encyclopaedists--the plan of translating Ephraim Chambers's _Cyclopaedia_, which had appeared in 1728, was suggested to Diderot "some fifteen years later" by a French bookseller named Le Breton. Diderot's "fertile and energetic intelligence transformed the scheme.... It was resolved to make Chambers's work a mere starting-point for a new enterprise of far wider scope." We then go on to read of the financial difficulties that now beset the publisher, of the embarra.s.sment of Diderot, who "felt himself unequal to the task of arranging and supervising every department of a new book that was to include the whole circle of the sciences," of the fortunate enlisting of d'Alembert as a collaborator, and later of men belonging to all kinds of professions, "all united in a work that was as useful as it was laborious, without any view of interest ... without any common understanding and agreement," further, of the cruel persecutions encountered at the hands of the Jesuits, "who had expected at least to have control of the articles on theology," and finally of the tyrannical suppression of the great work on account of the anti-Christian tendencies these same articles displayed.[418]

Now for a further light on the matter.

In the famous speech of the Chevalier Ramsay already quoted, which was delivered at Grand Lodge of Paris in 1737, the following pa.s.sage occurs:

The fourth quality required in our Order is the taste for useful sciences and the liberal arts. Thus, the Order exacts of each of you to contribute, by his protection, liberality, or labour, to a vast work for which no academy can suffice, because all these societies being composed of a very small number of men, their work cannot embrace an object so extended. All the Grand Masters in Germany, England, Italy, and elsewhere exhort all the learned men and all the artisans of the Fraternity to unite to furnish the materials for a Universal Dictionary of all the liberal arts and useful sciences; excepting only theology and politics. The work has already been commenced in London, and by means of the unions of our brothers it may be carried to a conclusion in a few years.[419]

So after all it was no enterprising bookseller, no brilliantly inspired philosopher, who conceived the idea of the _Encyclopedie_, but a powerful international organization able to employ the services of more men than all the academies could supply, which devised the scheme at least six years before the date at which it is said to have occurred to Diderot. Thus the whole story as usually told to us would appear to be a complete fabrication--struggling publishers, toiling _litterateurs_ carrying out their superhuman task as "independent men of letters"

without the patronage of the great--which Lord Morley points out as "one of the most important facts in the history of the Encyclopaedia"--writers of all kinds bound together by no "common understanding or agreement,"

are all seen in reality to have been closely a.s.sociated as "artisans of the Fraternity" carrying out the orders of their superiors.

The _Encyclopedie_ was therefore essentially a Masonic publication, and Papus, whilst erroneously attributing the famous oration and consequently the plan of the _Encyclopedie_ to the inspiration of the Duc d'Antin, emphasizes the importance of this fact. Thus, he writes:

The Revolution manifests itself by two stages:

1st. _Intellectual revolution_, by the publication of the _Encyclopedie_, due to French Freemasonry under the high inspiration of the Duc d'Antin.

2nd. _Occult revolution_ in the Lodges, due in great part to the members of the Templar Rite and executed by a group of expelled Freemasons afterwards amnestied.[420]

The masonic authorship of the _Encyclopedie_ and the consequent dissemination of revolutionary doctrines has remained no matter of doubt to the Freemasons of France; on the contrary, they glory in the fact. At the congress of the Grand Orient in 1904 the Freemason Bonnet declared:

In the eighteenth century the glorious line of Encyclopaedists formed in our temples a fervent audience which was then alone in invoking the radiant device as yet unknown to the crowd: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." The revolutionary seed quickly germinated amidst this _elite_. Our ill.u.s.trious Freemasons d'Alembert, Diderot, Helvetius, d'Holbach, Voltaire, Condorcet, completed the evolution of minds and prepared the new era. And, when the Bastille fell, Freemasonry had the supreme honour of giving to humanity the charter (i.e. the Declaration of the Rights of Man) which it had elaborated with devotion. (_Applause_.)

This charter, the orator went on to say, was the work of the Freemason Lafayette, and was adopted by the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly, of which more than 300 members were Freemasons.

But in using the lodges to sow the seeds of revolution, the Encyclopaedists betrayed not only the cause of monarchy but of Masonry as well. It will be noticed that, in conformity with true masonic principles, Ramsay in his oration expressly stated that the encyclopaedia was to concern itself with the liberal arts and sciences[421] and that theology and politics were to be excluded from the contemplated scheme.

How, then, did it come to pa.s.s that these were eventually the two subjects to which the Encyclopaedists devoted the greatest attention, so that their work became princ.i.p.ally an attack on Church and monarchy? If Papus was right in attributing this revolutionary tendency to the _Encyclopedie_ from the time of the famous oration, then Ramsay could only be set down as the profoundest hypocrite or as the mouthpiece of hypocrites professing intentions the very reverse of their real designs.

A far more probable explanation seems to be that during the interval between Ramsay's speech and the date when the _Encyclopedie_ was begun in earnest, the scheme underwent a change. It will be noticed that the year of 1746, when Diderot and d'Alembert are said to have embarked on their task, coincided with the decadence of French Freemasonry under the Comte de Clermont and the invasion of the lodges by the subversive elements; thus the project propounded with the best intentions by the Freemasons of 1737 was filched by their revolutionary successors and turned to a diametrically opposite purpose.

But it is not to the dancing-master Lacorne and his middle-cla.s.s following that we can attribute the efficiency with which not only the _Encyclopedie_ but a host of minor revolutionary publications were circulated all over France. Frederick the Great had seen his opportunity. If I am right in my surmise that Ramsay's speech had reached the ears of Frederick, the prospect of the _Encyclopedie_ contained therein may well have appeared to him a magnificent method for obtaining a footing in the intellectual circles of France; hence then, doubtless, an additional reason for his hasty initiation into Masonry, his summons to Voltaire, and his subsequent overtures to Diderot and d'Alembert, who, by the time the first volume of the _Encyclopedie_ appeared in 1751, had both been made members of the Royal Academy of Prussia. In the following year Frederick offered d'Alembert the presidency of the Academy in place of Maupertuis, an offer which was refused; but in 1755 and again in 1763 d'Alembert visited Frederick in Germany and received his pension regularly from Berlin. It is therefore not surprising that when the _Encyclopedie_ had reached the letter P, it included, in an unsigned article on Prussia, a panegyric on the virtues and the talents of the ill.u.s.trious monarch who presided over the destinies of that favoured country.

The art of Frederick the Great, as of his successors on the throne of the Hohenzollerns, was to make use of every movement that could further the design of Prussian supremacy. He used the Freemasons as he used the philosophers and as he used the Jews, to carry out his great scheme--the destruction of the French monarchy and of the alliance between France and Austria. Whilst through his representatives at the Court of France he was able to create discord between Versailles and Vienna and bring discredit on Marie Antoinette, through his allies in the masonic lodges and in the secret societies he was able to reach the people of France.

The gold and the printing presses of Frederick the Great were added to those of the Orleanistes for the circulation of seditious literature throughout the provinces.[422]

So as the century advanced the a.s.sociation founded by Royalists and Catholics was turned into an engine of destruction by revolutionary intriguers; the rites and symbols were gradually perverted to an end directly opposed to that for which they had been inst.i.tuted, and the two degrees of Rose-Croix and Knight Kadosch came to symbolize respectively war on religion and war on the monarchy of France.

It is no orthodox Catholic but an occultist and Rosicrucian who thus describes the role of Masonry in the Revolution:

Masonry has not only been profaned but it has been served as a cover and pretext for the plots of anarchy, by the occult influence of the avengers of Jacques du Molay and the continuers of the schismatic work of the Temple. Instead of avenging the death of Hiram, they have avenged his a.s.sa.s.sins. The anarchists have taken the plumb-line, the square, and the mallet and have written on them liberty, equality, fraternity. That is to say, liberty for envyings, equality in degradation, fraternity for destruction.

Those are the men whom the Church has justly condemned and that she will always condemn.[423]

But it is time to turn to another masonic power which meanwhile had entered the lists, the Martinistes or French Illumines.

French Illuminism

Whilst Frederick the Great, the Freemasons, the Encyclopaedists, and the Orleanistes were working on the material plane to undermine the Church and monarchy in France, another cult had arisen which by the middle of the century succeeded in insinuating itself into the lodges. This was a recrudescence of the old craze for occultism, which now spread like wildfire all over Europe from Bordeaux to St. Petersburg. During the reign of Anna of Courland (1730-40) the Russian Court was permeated with superst.i.tion, and professional magicians and charlatans of every kind were encouraged. The upper cla.s.ses of Germany in the eighteenth century proved equally susceptible to the attractions of the supernatural, and princes desirous of long life or greater power eagerly pursued the quest of the Philosopher's Stone, the "Elixir of Life," and evoked spirits under the direction of occultists in their service.

In France occultism, reduced to a system, adopted the outer forms of Masonry as a cover to the propagation of its doctrines. It was in 1754 that Martines de Pasqually (or Paschalis), a Rose-Croix Mason,[424]

founded his Order of elus Cohens (Elected Priests), known later as the _Martinistes_ or the French _Illumines_. Although brought up in the Christian faith, Pasqually has been frequently described as a Jew. The Baron de Gleichen, himself a Martiniste and a member of the Amis Reunis,[425] throws an interesting light on the matter in this pa.s.sage: "Pasqualis was originally Spanish, perhaps of the Jewish race, since his disciples inherited from him a large number of Jewish ma.n.u.scripts."[426]

It was "this Cabalistic sect,"[427] the Martinistes, which now became the third great masonic power in France.

The rite of the Martinistes was broadly divided into two cla.s.ses, in the first of which was represented the fall of man and in the second his final restoration--a further variation on the masonic theme of a loss and a recovery. After the first three Craft degrees came the Cohen degrees of the same--Apprentice Cohen, Fellow Craft Cohen, and Master Cohen--then those of Grand Architect, Grand Elect of Zerubbabel or Knight of the East: but above these were concealed degrees leading up to the Rose-Croix, which formed the capstone of the edifice.[428] Pasqually first established his rite at Ma.r.s.eilles, Toulouse, and Bordeaux, then in Paris, and before long Martiniste lodges spread all over France with the centre at Lyons under the direction of Willermoz, a prosperous merchant living there. From this moment other occult Orders sprang up in all directions. In 1760 Dom Pernetti founded his sect of "Illumines d'Avignon" in that city, declaring himself a high initiate of Freemasonry and teaching the doctrines of Swedenborg. Later a certain Chastanier founded the "Illumines Theosophes," a modified version of Pernetti's rite; and in 1783 the Marquis de Thome started a purified variety of Swedenborgianism under the name of "Rite of Swedenborg."

Beneath all these occult sects one common source of inspiration is to be found--the perverted and magical Cabala of the Jews, that conglomeration of wild theosophical imaginings and barbaric superst.i.tions founded on ancient pagan cults and added to throughout seventeen centuries by succeeding generations of Jewish occultists.[429] This influence is particularly to be detected in the various forms of the Rose-Croix degree, which in nearly all these a.s.sociations forms the highest and most secret degree. The ritual of "the eminent Order of the Knights of the Black Eagle or Sovereigns of the Rose-Croix," a secret and unpublished doc.u.ment of the eighteenth century, which differs entirely from the published rituals, explains that no one can attain to knowledge of the higher sciences without the "Clavicules de Salomon," of which the real secrets were never committed to print and which is said to contain the whole of Cabalistic science.[430] The catechism of this same degree deals mainly with the trans.m.u.tation of metals, the Philosopher's Stone, etc.

In the Rite of Perfection as worked in France and America this Cabalistic influence is shown in those degrees known under the name of the "Ineffable Degrees," derived from the Jewish belief in the mystery that surrounds the Ineflable Name of G.o.d. According to the custom of the Jews, the sacred name Jehovah or Jah-ve, composed of the four letters yod, he, vau, he, which formed the Tetragrammaton, was never to be p.r.o.nounced by the profane, who were obliged to subst.i.tute for it the word "Adonai." The Tetragrammaton might only be uttered once a year on the Day of Atonement by the High Priest in the Holy of Holies amid the sound of trumpets and cymbals, which prevented the people from hearing it. It is said that in consequence of the people thus refraining from its utterance, the true p.r.o.nunciation of the name was at last lost. The Jews further believed that the Tetragrammaton was possessed of unbounded powers. "He who p.r.o.nounces it shakes heaven and earth and inspires the very angels with astonishment and terror."[431] The Ineffable Name thus conferred miraculous gifts; it was engraved on the rod of Moses and enabled him to perform wonders, just as, according to the Toledot Yeshu, it conferred the same powers on Christ.

This superst.i.tion was clearly a part of Rosicrucian tradition, for the symbol of the Tetragrammaton within a triangle, adopted by the masonic lodges, figures in Fludd's Cabalistic system.[432] In the "Ineffable degrees" it was invested with all the mystic awe by which it is surrounded in Jewish theology, and, according to early American working: "Brothers and Companions of these degrees received the name of G.o.d as it was revealed to Enoch and were sworn to p.r.o.nounce it but once in their lives."

In the alchemical version of the Rose-Croix degree referred to above the Ineffable Name is actually invested with magical powers as in the Jewish Cabala. Ragon, after describing the Jewish ceremony when the word Jehovah was p.r.o.nounced by the High Priest in the Holy of Holies, goes on to say that "Schem-hamm-phorasch," another term for the Tetragrammaton, forms the sacred word of a Scotch degree, and that this belief in its mystic properties "will be found at the head of the instructions for the third degree of the Knight of the Black Eagle, called Rose-Croix," thus:

Q. What is the most powerful name of G.o.d on the pentaculum?

A. Adonai.

Q. What is its power?

A. To move the Universe.

That one of the Knights who had the good fortune to p.r.o.nounce it cabalistically would have at his disposal the powers that inhabit the four elements and the celestial spirits, and would possess all the virtues possible to man.[433]

That this form of the Rose-Croix was of purely Jewish origin is thus clearly evident. In the address to the candidate for initiation into the Rose-Croix degree at the Lodge of the "Contrat Social" it is stated:

This degree, which includes an Order of Perfect Masons, was brought to light by Brother R., who took it from the Kabbalistic treasure of the Doctor and Rabbi Neamuth, chief of the synagogue of Leyden in Holland, who had preserved its precious secrets and its costume, both of which we shall see in the same order in which he placed them in his mysterious Talmud.[434]

Now, we know that in the eighteenth century a society of Rosicrucian magicians had been inst.i.tuted in Florence which was believed to date back to the fifteenth century and to have been partly, if not wholly composed of Orientals, as we shall see in the next chapter; but it seems probable that this sect, whilst secretly inspiring the Rose-Croix masons, was itself either nameless or concealed under a disguise. Thus in 1782 an English Freemason writes: "I have found some rather curious MSS. in Algiers in Hebrew relating to the society of the Rosicrucians, which exists at present under another name with the same forms. I hope, moreover to be admitted to their knowledge."[435]