"The Successors of the Ancient Adepts Rose-Croix, abandoning by degrees the austere and hierarchical Science of their Ancestors in Initiation, became a Mystic Sect, united with many of the Templars, the dogmas of the two intermingling, and believed themselves to be the sole depositaries of the secrets of the Gospel of St. John, seeing in its recitals an allegorical series of rites proper to complete the initiation.
"The Initiates, in fact, thought in the eighteenth Century that their time had arrived, some to found a new hierarchy, others to overturn all authority, and to press down all the summits of the Social Order under the level of Equality."(42)
"The members of the Rose-Croix affirm that they are the legitimate authors of Freemasonry, to all of whose symbols they give a hermetical interpretation. The Masons, they say, came into England under King Arthur. Raymond Lully initiated Henry IV. The Grand Masters were formerly designated, AS NOW, by the titles of JOHN I, II, III, IV, etc..."(43)
"The disciples of the Rose-Croix came, in 1188, from the East into Europe, for the propagation of Christianity after the troubles in Palestine. Three of them founded in Scotland the Order of the Masons of the East (Knights of the East), to serve as a seminary for instruction in the most sublime sciences. The Order was in existence in 1196. Edward, the son of Henry III, was received into the society of the Rose-Croix by Raymond Lully. At that time only learned men and persons of high rank were admitted.(44)
"Their founder was a seraphic priest of Alexandria, a magus of Egypt named Ormesius, or ORMUS, who with six of his companions was converted in the year 96 by Saint Mark. He purified the doctrine of the Egyptians according to the precepts of Christianity, and founded the Society of ORMUS, that is to say, the Sages of Light, to the members of which he gave a red cross as a decoration. ABOUT THE SAME TIME THE ESSENES and other Jews founded a school of SOLOMONIC WISDOM, to which the disciples of ORMUS attached themselves. Then the society was divided into various Orders known as the Conservators of Mosaic Secrets, of Hermetic Secrets, etc.(45)" (46)
"The Oriental Rite of Memphis first appeared in 1838 when Jacques Etienne Marconis de Negre first established the Grand Lodge Osiris in Brussels. The underlying legend of the rite was that it descended from the Dionysian and Egyptian mysteries. The sage Ormus is said to have combined the mysteries with Christianity to produce the original Rose-Croix. The Oriental Rite of Memphis was a system of ninety-seven degrees, producing such August titles as Commander of the Luminous Triangle, Sublime Prince of the Royal Mystery, Sublime Pastor of the Hutz, Doctor of the Planispheres, and so on. See Waite, New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry, Vol. 2, p. 241ff. The rite was eventually reduced to thirty-three degrees, calling itself the Ancient[sic] and Primitive Rite. It was taken to the United States circa 1854-56 by H. J. Seymour, and to England in 1872 by John Yarker. It was later associated with the Ordis [sic]Templi Orientis. The Magazine of the Rite of Memphis, the Oriflamme, advertised the O. T. O. in its issues. In 1875 the rite was amalgamated with the Rite of Misraim[sic]. In History of the Antient and Primitive Rite of Masonry (London, 1875) the Rite of Memphis is said to derive from that of the Philadelphians of Narbonne, established in 1779."(47)
"At the beginning of the Christian Era an Egyptian Sage named Ormus, represented as a convert of St. Mark, married the Mysteries of Egyptian priests with those of the New Law, and so produced the Grade of Rose-Croix, according to the Memphis version."(48)
"According to Baron de Westerode, the founder of the Rosicrucians was one Ormesius, who had been converted by St. Mark, at Alexandria, in A.D. 46. He purified the Egyptian Rites, and reconciled them with Christianity, carrying his disciples with him, and founded the Society of ORMUS, or of the Light, each member wearing a red cross. To this society the Essenes and Therapeutae joined themselves, and conserved the Masonic Secrets."(49)
"The mystical meanings of the Rose as a Symbol are to be looked for in the Kabalistic Commentaries on the Canticles.
"The Rose was for the Initiates the living and blooming symbol of the revelation of the harmonies of being. It was the emblem of beauty, life, love, and pleasure. Flamel, or the Book of the Jew Abraham, made it the hieroglyphical sign of the accomplishment of the Great Work. Such is the key of the Roman de la Rose. The conquest of the Rose was the problem propounded to Science by Initiation, while Religion was laboring to prepare and establish the universal triumph, exclusive and definitive, of the Cross.
"To unite the Rose to the Cross, was the problem proposed by the High Initiation; and in fact the Occult philosophy being the Universal Synthesis, ought to explain all the phenomena of Being. Religion, considered solely as a physiological fact, is the revelation and satisfaction of a necessity of souls. Its existence is a scientific fact; to deny it would be to deny humanity itself.
"The Rose-Croix Adepts respected the dominant, hierarchical, and revealed religion. Consequently they could no more be the enemies of the Papacy than of legitimate Monarchy; and if they conspired against the Popes and Kings, it was because they considered them personally as apostates from duty and supreme favorers of Anarchy.
"What, in fact, is a despot; spiritual or temporal, but a crowned anarchist?
"One of the magnificent pantacles that express the esoteric and unutterable part of Science, is a Rose of Light, in the centre of which a human form extends its arms in the form of a cross.
"Commentaries and studies have been multiplied upon the Divine Comedy, the work of Dante, and yet no one, so far as we know, has pointed out its especial character. The work of the great Ghibellin(50) is a declaration of war against the papacy, by bold revelation of the Mysteries. The Epic of Dante is Johannite and Gnostic, an audacious application, like that of the Apocalypse, of the figures and numbers of the Kabalah to the Christian dogmas, and a secret negation of everything absolute in these dogmas. His journey through the supernatural worlds is accomplished like the initiation into the Mysteries of Eleusis and Thebes. He escapes from that gulf of Hell over the gate of which the sentence of despair was written, by reversing the positions of his head and feet, that is to say, by accepting the direct opposite of the Catholic dogma; and then he reascends to the Light, by using the Devil himself as a monstrous ladder.(51) Faust ascends to Heaven by stepping on the head of the vanquished Mephistopheles. Hell is impassable for those only WHO KNOW NOT HOW TO TURN BACK FROM IT. We free ourselves from its bondage by AUDACITY. (51a)
"His Hell is but a negative Purgatory. His Heaven is composed of a series of Kabalistic circles, divided by a Cross, like the Pantacle of Ezekiel. In the centre of this cross blooms a rose, and we see the symbol of the Adepts of the Rose-Croix for the first time publicly expounded and almost categorically explained.
"For the first time, because Guillaume de Lorris, who died in 1260, five years before the birth of Alighieri, had not completed his Roman de la Rose, which was continued by Chopinel, a half century afterward. One is astonished to discover that the Roman de la Rose and the Divina Comedia are two opposite forms of one and the same work, initiation into independence of spirit, a satire on all contemporary institutions, and the allegorical formula of the great Secrets of the Society of the Roses-Croix. (51b)
"The important manifestations of Occultism coincide with the period of the fall of the Templars; since Jean de Meung or Chopinel, contemporary of the old age of Dante, flourished during the best years of his life at the court of Philippe le Bel. The Roman de la Rose is the Epic of old France. It is a profound book, under the form of levity, a revelation as learned as that of Apuleius, of the Mysteries of Occultism. The Rose of Flamel, that of Jean de Meung, and that of Dante, grew on the same stem.
"Swedenborg's system was nothing else than the Kabalah, minus the principle of the Hierarchy. It is the Temple without the Keystone and the Foundation.
"Cagliostro was the Agent of the Templars,(52) and therefore wrote to the Freemasons of London that the time had come to begin the work of rebuilding the Temple of the Eternal. He had introduced into Masonry a new Rite called Egyptian, and endeavored to resuscitate the mysterious worship of Isis. The three letters L. P. D. on his seal, were the initials of the words 'Lilia Pedibus Destrue;' tread under foot the Lilies [of France], and a Masonic model of the sixteenth or seventeenth century has upon it a sword cutting off the stalk of a lily, and the words 'talem dabit ultio messem,' such harvest revenge will give.
"A Lodge inaugurated under the auspices of Rousseau, the fanatic of Geneva, became the centre of the revolutionary movement in France, and prince of the blood-royal,(53) went thither to swear the destruction of the successors of Philippe le Bel on the tomb of Jacques de Molai.(54) The registers of the Order of the Templars attest that the Regent, the Duc d'Orleans, was Grand Master of that formidable Secret Society, and that his successors were the Duc de Maine, the Prince of Bourbon-Conde, and the Duc de Cosse-Brissac.(53a)
"The Templars compromitted the King; they saved him from the rage of the People, to exasperate that rage and bring on the catastrophe prepared for centuries; it was a scaffold that the vengeance of the Templars demanded. The secret movers of the French Revolution had sworn to overthrow the Throne and the Altar upon the Tomb of Jacques de Molai. When Louis XVI was executed, half the work was done; and thenceforward the Army of the Temple was to direct all its efforts against the Pope.
"Jacques de Molai and his companions were perhaps martyrs, but their avengers dishonored their memory. Royalty was regenerated on the scaffold of Louis XVI, the Church triumphed in the captivity of Pius VI, carried a prisoner to Valence, and dying of fatigue and sorrow, but the successors of the Ancient Knights of the Temple perished, overwhelmed in their fatal victory."(55)
It has been written that the Johannite Legend was concocted by some high-ranking French nobles who were High Grade Freemasons, including Fabre Palaprat and Jean Marie Ragon. The book on which the story is based is known as the Levitikon. It is said to be a forgery, or at least a late invention.
It could be, but it doesn't explain the fact that there are ties to the Gnostic tradition that weren't known in the 18th and 19th Centuries e.v. It wasn't until 1945 e.v. that the Nag Hammadi Library was discovered, and it wasn't until much later that the larger portion of the public became aware of its contents. Also, the story exists in several places, not just in the Levitikon. It is true that there were several high ranking French nobles, in various wings of the government, who wanted to establish a Templar Order, a Templar Church, that had an existence independent of both the Grand Lodge of England and the Grand Orient of France. Grand Orient was like a large software or media company. It bought out (took over, really) any and every Rite it could, for the purpose of controlling them all and putting them "to sleep" ~~~ something which it tried with the Rite of Memphis, several times, unsuccessfully.
We see hints of the story of the Prieuré de Sion. Did the Prieuré de Sion actually exist, or was it, too, the romantic fabrication of some warped French drunks in the 1950s e.v.? Again, there is good reason to believe that Sion has an existence going back several centuries.Even if Sion or the Johannites were bogus, it wouldn't explain away many anomalies in the History of the Esoteric Tradition that have constantly baffled researchers. There is a tradition concealed underneath the more visible ones, which we have been allowed to uncover. This tradition is intimately connected with Qadosh, not only the Degree of Qadosh, but the tradition of Qadosh. It is also very closely linked to the Johannite Gnosis, which has a long history, both in the Classical period and in the Historical period. It is connected to the Scottish bloodlines, to the Hohenstaufens, and to the Merovingians. It is connected to the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, and the Templars, as well as to Memphis, Yarker, Kellner, Reuss, Papus and Crowley. It is connected to several Middle Eastern sects, which facilitated the survival of the Gnosis and its transmission to Europe during the Crusades. And, going back, past the Gnostic period, it is connected to survivals of the Sumerian Tradition, the originators of the Johannite tradition, through the priesthood of the Wise Ones, the Apkallu. And, these were headed up by Enki, or U-An. It will be the entire subject of the present book, the unveiling of the Qadosh Tradition, and its survival through the centuries. It is important to bear in mind that both Qadosh and the Rose-Croix may be relatively recent nomenclatures in the Initiatory Tradition, but that is only a half-truth. Both of these go back thousands of years, to the origins of the High Initiation on planet Earth. We shall get to our reasons for this, and the evidence as well, even if some of it, at best, is conjectural.
42.M&D, 820-1.
43.The Baron de Gleichen, in MACKEY'S ENCYCLO. OF FREEMASONRY (hereafter I or II MACKEY'S), sv. Rose-Croix of Gold, Brethren of. II Mackey's 635.The Baron de Gleichen was attached to the Lodge known as Amis Reunis, a very important and secret Lodge, which was one of the powers behind the Bavarian Illuminati. The Rose-Croix of Gold were, as we shall relate in another place, the lineal descendants of the Templar Order, as well as the 18th Century e.v. successors of the Rosicrucians of the 16th and 17th Centuries e.v. in Southern Germany. And, they, too, were the ancestors of the orders which later became known as the Ordo Templi Orientis. Also, the reference to the titles of the Grand Masters, quoted above, suggests the Prieuré de Sion, who, as all informed students of the Secret Societies know, titled their grand masters (and grand mistresses) John or Jeanne.
44.Unlike the time this quote was originally penned!
45.For more on ORMUS, see Section Four of the present Book. It might be worth noting some ideas pertaining to this name. First, we see OR plus Virgo plus US, or Virgo plus ORUS, which could be Horus, or also an obscure grammatician, from Miletus in the 2nd Century c.e., also it means "elm", like the elm at Gisors which was chopped down. In reference to this it might be relevant that Kellner's wife was, according to a recent biography of Kellner, named Delorme, "from the elm".
46.II Mackey's 636, quoting the Baron de Westerode, who was associated with the Rite des Philalethes, also related to the Amis Reunis.
47.HBHG, p. 461(pbk ed.) Ormus, it will be remembered was one of the devices used by the Prieuré de Sion. The Philadelphians of Narbonne are also associated with the Amis Reunis and the Philalethes.
48.Arthur Edward Waite, A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry (Hereafter I or II Waite), Volume II, p. 241. [II Waite 241,] As we shall be surveying the Rite of Memphis later in the present Book II, we shall only quote the above now.
49.Mackenzie, p. 538, sv. Ormus.
50.Although in our edition, translated and edited by John Ciardi, Dante is said to have been a White Guelph, and Dante's work betrays an antipathy towards the supporters of the Hohenstaufens. We, by ancestry, are aligned with the House of Hohenstaufen, as we are also, by ancestry, aligned with the House of Stuart. And, in both cases, ruination came via the Guelphs. In the former case, it was the old feud between Church and State, the Church excommunicating and condemning to extermination the Hohenstaufens and endorsing the Guelphs. In the latter case, the Hanoverian monarchs who ruled England by deposing the Stuarts, were Guelphs. Yet, see his excellent essay, On World Government. This was not published during his lifetime, and was a condemnation of the Church's erroneous and arrogant notions of legitimate power.
51.Compare the Tibetan attitude. By meditating upon and paying reverence to the Wrathful Deities of the second Bardo, while in life, the yogin will be able to recognize them when they dawn in the Bardo, and attain liberation. "In this lieth the Art."~The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Bk. I, Part II, Introduction, 'The Dawning of the Wrathful Deities, from the Eighth to the Fourteenth Day.' Oxford Ed. pp. 132-3.
51a. We received the enigmatic phrase in one of our own workings, "Hell is the depth of Heaven." It was as if the flames of hell are the necessary power plant to power the place called Paradise. Also, in reference to the paragraph, "We free ourselves from its bondage by AUDACITY," -- that is clearly the Adept's secret, for that is what foils those things which seek to control us.
51b. John Yarker, The Arcane Schools, pp. 198-200:
"It is very probable that many of our own northern minstrels transmitted from the time of the Culdees, who existed until the Templar persecutions, an anti-papal programme, and were in the secrets of the Continental Minstrels in the time of Wycliffe, and later. The artistic participation in this propaganda is shewn in the way that the vices of clerics and monks are satirized by stone and wood carvers; as in the representation of an ape carrying the Host; a nun in the lewd embrace of a monk; or a pope amongst the damned. [Findel, Hist. Freem.]
"Gabriel Rossetti [Disq. on the anti-papal spirit which produced the Reformation,] shews that the species of writing which we have named was introduced from the East by the Manichees, who passed it on to the Cathari, Albigensis, Ghibellines, and Templars, through whom it spread over Europe. Logic was considered by them the science of expressing thought in a subtle manner. Many persecutions arose from this species of writing, but the Papal Conclave at length determined to close its eyes, rather than make the allegory apparent to all the world. The reformation liberated to the world various Mystic Societies. With the object of proving his views he quotes largely from Dante, Petrarch, Boccacio, and other poets and writers of the middle ages, and arrives at the conclusion that there existed three principal branches of Sectaries, which indoctrinated their Disciples by a secret Initiation of seven or nine degrees, according to the Rite or Sect. The allegory used was often that of a journey, and to go on a Pilgrimage to the temple of St. John signified to become a proselyte of the Templars; to go to St. James in Galicia was to be of the Albigensis; and St. Peter's at Rome of the Ghibellines; the Albigensis, in alluding to the first named, expressed Faith; to the second Hope, and to the last Charity. We have an oriental pilgrimage in Boccacio's Filocopo, which means a young workman; seven companions figure in this account; the names of four are already known to the Pilgrim and represent the Cardinal virtues; the other three are unknown until he has accomplished his journey, or initiation, upon which it appears that they are Faith, Hope, and Charity; in allusion thus to the ancient ladder of the Mysteries of 3, 7, or 12 steps. The object was to found a Christian Jerusalem to rival Rome; and the allegory frequently alludes to the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the return of its people; the later Reformers drew upon the same idea as we will show."
52.Cagliostro was initiated by Daniel Wolf, the original St. Germain. At least, according to Nesta Webster, so it must be true! Also, he and Weishaupt received the same Initiation from that elusive 'Jutland Merchant', Kolmer, or so we are also told by Webster. It isn't impossible, after all. Cagliostro, moreover, was immersed in Swedenborgianism, in the various Rites of Antoine Joseph Pernetty, and in the Rite of the Philadelphes. Also, Cagliostro's Egyptian Rite was one of the foundation stones for what would later become known as the "Disciples of Memphis." It is interesting that Cagliostro is characterized as little more than a charlatan, but he was nothing of the sort. He was, in fact, what we would today call an "insider", "in the loop" and so on. He was very well-connected. His public image was similar to Crowley's, and his overall influence on the Tradition the same. That is, he immensely influenced the Occult tradition.
Also, we find the following interesting admission in Holy Blood, Holy Grail [Quoting a passage from Myriam, "Les Bergers d'Arcadie," Le Charivari, no. 18, p. 49 ff.]:
"The King is, shepherd and pastor at the same time. Sometimes he dispatches some brilliant ambassador to his vassal in power, his factotum, one who has the felicity of being subject to death. Thus René d'Anjou, Connétable de Bourbon, Nicolas Fouquet... and numerous others for whom astonishing success is followed by inexplicable disgrace -- for these emissaries are both terrible and vulnerable. Custodians of a secret, one can only exalt them or destroy them. Thus people like Gilles de Rais, Leonardo da Vinci, Joseph Balsamo, the dukes of Nevers and Gonzaga; whose wake is attended by a perfume of magic in which sulphur is mingled with incense -- the perfume of the Magdalen."
See page 206 of the paperback edition of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and Chapter 8 for that matter, from where it comes.
53.I.e. the Sang-Real.
53a. This is where the French Order of the Temple comes into the story. Also, it is to be remembered that the secret letter of the Abbé Louis Fouquet, which described his meeting with Nicholas Poussin -- ended up in the possession of the Cosse-Brissac family, a family intimately connected with Freemasonry sinde the eighteenth century, according to Holy Blood, Holy Grail. "He and I discussed certain things, which I shall with ease be able to explain to you in detail -- things which will give you, through Monsieur Poussin, advantages which even kings would have great pains to draw from him, and which, according to him, it is possible that nobody else will ever rediscover in the centuries to come. And what is more, these are things so difficult to discover that nothing now on this earth can prove of better fortune nor be their equal." -- Holy Blood, Holy Grail, p. 45.
54.This would be the Loge Social Contrat. In our research, we find ties to the Bavarian Illuminati, and to their predecessors, the Lodge Theodore of Good Counsel, etc.
55.M&D, pp. 821-4. In some of this we recognize the hand of the Church, in some of it we recognize the writing of Eliphas Levi, especially the portion discussing the birth of the Rose-Croix.
|[HOME]|[CONTENTS]|[PREVIOUS]|[NEXT]|[MAIL]|