9. The Lost Word

Jacobites

As reported by Marsha Keith Schuchard, through the influence Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 – 1772), who was also associated with the Fetter Lane Society of Zinzerndorf’s Moravian Church,[1] that the Left-Hand Tantra, which taught a repudiation of conventional morality, was recognized by Sabbateans as similarity to their own doctrine of the “Holiness of Sin,” which contributed to the legend of an “Oriental Kabbalah” into rites of Écossais Freemasonry.[2] The first documented Europeans to visit Tibet were the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, António de Andrade and Manuel Marques, who arrived in 1624. A year later, with the full support of the King and Queen of Guge, Andrade and Marques established a permanent mission at Tsaparang, in the Garuda Valley of western Tibet’s Ngari region.[3] On Andrade’s advice, a second Jesuit mission was sent to southern Tibet from India in 1627. Reportedly welcomed by the King of Ü-Tsang, The Portuguese missionaries João Cabral and Estêvão Cacella established their mission there in Shigatse in 1628, and provided the first information about Shambhala to reach the West.[4] Because both of the Portuguese missions were evacuated in 1635 after becoming embroiled in the power struggles for control of Tibet at that time, it would be another twenty-five years before the next documented European visit to the country.[5] The first Europeans to meet a Dalai Lama were probably the two Jesuits, Johannes Grueber of Austria and Albert Dorville, who travelled through Lhasa in 1661 on their way from Beijing to Agra, India. It is from this expedition which the engraving in China Illustrata, by the Jesuit and Kabbalist Athanasius Kircher, which is purported to depict 5th Dalai Lama Lobsang Gyatso (1617 – 1682).[6] The most famous of the early European missionaries to visit Tibet was Ippolito Desideri or Hippolyte Desideri (1684 –1733), who was the first documented European to have successfully studied and understood Tibetan language and culture.

The rites of Écossais Freemasonry, the origin of the later Scottish Rite, were developed by members of the movement of the Jacobites, defenders of the dethroned House of Stuart, who had been replaced by George I of Great Britain (1660 – 1727), who was nevertheless also a Stuart, and most importantly the grandson of the Alchemical Wedding, and from him would descend all later British kings and queens. Of thirteen children, the eldest daughter of Frederick V and Elisabeth Stuart of the Alchemical Wedding was Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia, who corresponded with Descartes, but had no children. Her brother Rupert (1619 – 1682), gained fame for his chemical experiments as well as for his military and entrepreneurial exploits, including the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada, and also played a role in the early African slave trade. Louise Hollandine (1622 – 1709), was an accomplished painter and student of Gerritt van Honthorst. Sophia, who became the Electress of Hanover, was renowned for her intellectual patronage, particularly of Leibniz and John Toland.[7] She was well-read in the works of Descartes and Spinoza.

The eldest son, Charles I Louis, Elector Palatine (1617 – 1680), and his younger brother Rupert spent much of the 1630s at the court of his maternal uncle, Charles I of England, hoping to enlist British support for his cause. Charles Louis was still in England in 1648 when the Peace of Westphalia restored the Lower Palatinate to him,  and remained in England long enough to see the execution Charles I by the forces of Oliver Cromwell. He then returned to the devastated Palatinate in 1649. In 1650, he married Landgravine Charlotte of Hesse-Kassel, the granddaughter Maurice of Hesse-Kassel. Over the more than thirty years of his reign there, he strove with some success to rebuild his shattered territory. In foreign affairs, he pursued a pro-French course, and in 1671 married his daughter Elizabeth Charlotte to Philippe I, Duke of Orleans (1617 – 1680).

Philippe I was the younger son of Louis XIII of France, the son of Henry IV and Marie de Medici. Philippe I’s brother was Louis XIV of France, the “Sun King,” whose chief advisors included cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin. Mazarin’s sister, Anne Marie Martinozzi, was married to Armand, Prince of Conti, the brother of Louis, Prince of Condé, who was involved in a conspiracy with Menasseh ben Israel, Isaac La Peyrère and Queen Christina to create a world government of the Messiah based in Jerusalem. As Joscelyn Godwin explained in The Theosophical Enlightenment, “The whole Orleans family, ever since [Philippe I, Duke of Orléans], was notoriously involved in the black arts.”[8] Philippe I was close to Louis XIV’s mistress, Madame de Montespan, who was involved in the L’affaire des poisons (“Affair of the Poisons”), where Catherine Monvoisin, known as La Voisin, and the priest Étienne Guibourg performed Black Masses for human sacrifice for her.[9]

After the death Elizabeth Stuart’s brother, Charles II of England, in 1685, his Catholic brother James II of England (1633 – 1701) ascended to the throne. James II married the niece of Cardinal Mazarin, Mary of Modena, from the ducal house of Medina-Sidonia of allegedly crypto-Jewish background.[10] Their son, James Francis Edward Stuart (1688 – 1766), nicknamed The Old Pretender, married Maria Clementina Sobieska, whose family was related to Jacob Frank.[11] Princess Maria Klementyna Sobieska, granddaughter of the Polish King and Lithuanian Grand-Duke, John III Sobieski. Their sons included Charles Edward Stuart (1720 – 1788), known as Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Young Pretender, and his brother Henry Benedict Stuart, the Cardinal York (1725 – 1807), the fourth and final Jacobite heir to claim the thrones of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland publicly, who was a great supporter of the Frankists.[12] In crypto-Jewish circles, it was thought that Henry Benedict had an affair with a Jewish woman named Reyna Barzillai of Venice.[13]

When James II issued a Declaration for Liberty of Conscience, allowing various opposing creeds to co-exist, the Parliament not only condemned the king but had him deposed for daring to acknowledge the alternative faiths. Seven prominent Englishmen wrote to William III, Prince of Orange (1650 – 1702), inviting him to invade England and accept the throne. The throne was then offered jointly to William  III and his wife Mary, sister of Charles II and James II, known as the reign of “William and Mary.” Though William and Mary were of Stuart lineage, the Scots were disappointed at the loss of a Stuart monarch, and in 1689, the year of James II’s deposition, Bonnie Dundee led a force of Highlanders against government troops at Killiecrankie. The rebellion was called a Jacobite Rising, because of their support of James II, which is derived from the Latin Jacomus, or Jacob in Hebrew.

Parliament passed the Bill of Rights barred Roman Catholics from the throne of England, and gave the succession to Mary’s sister, Anne who inherited the throne when William III died in March 1702. However, Parliament had passed the Act of Settlement in 1701, to settle the succession to the English and Irish crowns on Protestants only, whereupon Sophia, Electress of Hanover, as the next Protestant in line, was designated the next heir to the British throne. When Sophia died a few weeks before Anne, the Act of Settlement was responsible for the accession of Sophia’s son George I in 1714.

The Masonic Grand Lodge of England was founded shortly after George I ascended to the throne and the end of the first Jacobite rising of 1715. The federalization of four London lodges in the Grand Lodge of London and Westminster was founded in London on St. John the Baptist’s day, June 24, 1717, coinciding with the summer solstice. One of the first Grand Masters was followed Jean Theophilus Desaguiliers (1683 – 1744), scientist and, later, a cleric ordained into the Church of England. Desaguiliers was a British natural philosopher, clergyman, engineer who was elected to the Royal Society in 1714 as experimental assistant to Newton. In 1721, a Scottish Presbyterian pastor, Reverend James Anderson (c. 1679/1680 – 1739), was instructed by Grand Master Desaguiliers to revise and condense the Old Masonic Manuscripts observed by the English Lodges. This would lead to the 1721 Anderson’s Constitution. Anderson’s Constitution was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1734 by Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790), who was that year elected Grand Master of Masons in Pennsylvania.

The foundation of Grand Lodge in London had been followed by the inauguration of Masonic Lodges on the Continent, in 1721 at Mons, in 1725 in Paris, in 1728 at Madrid, in 1731 at The Hague, and in 1733 at Hamburg. Several of the first lodges on the Continent received their warrant from the Grand Lodge of England. But this was not the case with the Grand Lodge of Paris, founded in 1725, which did not receive a warrant till 1743. The men who founded this lodge were Jacobites, whose leader was Charles Radclyffe (1693 – 1746), a grandson of Charles II of England and Catherine of Braganza, and cousin of Bonnie Prince Charlie. While English Freemasonry offered three degrees of initiation that became universal throughout the order about 1730, Radclyffe, became responsible for promulgating Écossais Freemasonry, which introduced higher degrees.

After Radclyffe, the second Masons responsible for the spread of Écossais Freemasonry to France was a member of the Royal Society, Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686 – 1743), known as Chevalier Ramsay, was. Ramsay was the orator of the lodge of Le Louis d’Argent, whose Worshipful Master was Charles Radclyffe. In 1737, Ramsay wrote his: Discourse pronounced at the reception of Freemasons by Monsieur de Ramsay, Grand Orator of the Order, which provided the basis for Masons’ claims of a Templar inheritance, when he asserted that Freemasonry had begun among crusader knights and that they had formed themselves into Lodges of St John. It is often mistakenly reported that Ramsay mentioned the Templars in his oration. Nevertheless, perceptive listeners would have understood the mention of the “Crusader knights” to be an indirect reference to the Templars, the memory of whom was still controversial in France. Therefore, when Ramsay sent a copy to Cardinal Fleury (1653 – 1743), chief minister of France, asking for a Church blessing of the principles of Freemasonry, the obvious allusion to the heretical Templars led Cardinal Fleury to reply with an interdiction of all Masonic reunions, and may have led to the Pope’s indictment of the organization a year later.[14]

 

Oriental Kabbalah 

In Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision, Marsha Keith Schuchard proposes that Swedenborg could have learned about Tantric Yoga from members of the crypto-Sabbatean Moravian Church, who had sent missionaries in the 1740s to India, China, Tibet, Tartary, and central Russia, and from Moravian converts among the Cochin Jews, who traveled to London and Holland. Swedenborg was a follower of Count Zinzendorf who was familiar with Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century account which branded the Yogis of Malabar as alchemists, and with François Bernier’s popular Travels in the Mogul Empire (1670), which presented Yogic and Sufi mysticism as a form of Kabbalism. Bernier further claimed that this Yogic philosophy was the same as that of Robert Fludd, and thus part of the Rosicrucian tradition. The anti-Rosicrucian writer Heinrich Neuhaus, in his Pia et Utilissima Admonitio de Fratribus Rosae Crucis (1618), claimed that the Rosicrucians had departed for India.[15] According to alchemist Michael Maier, the Rosicrucians were preceded by a College of Gymnosophists among the Ethiopians, a College of Magi among Persians, a College of Brahmins in India.[16] In the preface to his 1652 translation of the Rosicrucian manifestos, Thomas Vaughan offers a parallel between the Rosicrucians and the Indian Brotherhood visited by Apollonius of Tyana.[17]

This perceived link was reinforced by Samuel Richter (Sincerus Renatus), a Protestant pastor from Silesia, who reported in 1710 that “all Rosicrucians have left Europe and gone to India.”[18] It was Renatus’ Die wahrhafte und volkommene Bereitung des philosophischen Steins der Brüderschaft aus dem Orden des Gülden und Rosen Kreutzes, published in Breslau in 1710, which sparked off the renewal of interest in Rosicrucianism in the eighteenth century. Here, the Rosy Cross now became the Golden and Rosy Cross, demonstrating a new alchemical emphasis.[19]

Swedenborg located the source of his Kabbalistic theories not among the Jews, but in Asia. Influenced by the Sabbateans and their sexual doctrines, Swedenborg became intrigued by the similarity of Yogic Tantra techniques of meditation to Kabbalistic ones.[20] He was fascinated with the “Shambhala” myth, and journeyed to India and Central Asia, bringing back with him the sexual rites that were incorporated into his New Jerusalem Society.[21] Adepts of Chinese and Tibetan Tantra claim that refraining from ejaculating leads to a heightened experience, culminating in the ability to communicate with spirits, perform automatic writing, clairvoyance, and astral travel.[22] Similarly, as explained Schuchard:

 

…while associating with Moravian and Jewish mystics in London, the fifty-six year-old Swedenborg learned how to perform the mystical Kabbalistic marriage within his mind, through the sublimation of his sexual energy into visionary energy. By meditating on the male and female potencies concealed in the vessels of Hebrew letters, by visualizing these letters in the forms of human bodies, by regulating the inhalation and exhalation of breath, and by achieving an erection without progress to ejaculation, the reverent Kabbalist could achieve an orgasmic trance state that elevated him to the world of spirits and angels.

 

During Swedenborg’s early participation with the Moravian Brethren, one of Zinzendorf’s missionaries to the Jews also recruited East Indians from Malabar who came to London. In London, Swedenborg and his Moravian associates studied Kabbalist forms of meditation, visualization, breath control, and sexual yoga that were similar to Tantric practices. At the same time, Schuchard explains, Swedenborg maintained a love-hate relationship with the Jews from whom he continued to learn Kabbalistic techniques of meditation and Bible interpretation. However, the prevailing anti-Semitism in Sweden led Swedenborg to gradually displace his theories of the sources of the Kabbalah from Israel to Asia.[23]

Taking advantage of the great interest in Asian culture generated by the Swedish East India Company, which secretly employed him, Swedenborg argued that the Yogis of Great Tartary discovered the secrets of Kabbalism long before the Jews. In “The Secret of Great Tartary,” Anders Hallengren argues that Swedenborg’s “Great Tartary" was among the Turkic-Mongolian people of Mongolia, between Tibet and Siberia, and that he had access to rare Asiatic manuscripts and oral traditions brought back by returning relatives and colleagues.[24]

In his Spiritual Diary, Swedenborg drew on the travel journal of Philip Strahlenberg (1676 – 1747), a Swedish officer and former prisoner, to describe the spiritual relation between the Tibetans, Tartars, Chinese, and Siberians. Swedenborg shared an interest in Strahlenberg with James Parsons, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who was well versed in Hermeticism, the Talmud, and the Zohar. Like Swedenborg, Parsons studied Strahlenberg’s reports and earlier Swedish theories of Gothic history, which led him to propose similarities between Kabbalistic, Tibetan, Nordic-Gaelic, and Christian beliefs in a triune godhead. Parsons published his findings in The Remains of Japhet (l767).

Swedenborg also acquired a rare book that explicitly linked the Yogic and Kabbalistic mystical traditions, de la Créquiniére’s Conformite de la Coutoumes des Indiens Orientaux avec celles des Juifs (1704), which was translated into English by the radical pantheist John Toland and provoked much interest among Masonic students of the esoteric sciences.[25] La Crequinière’s claimed an Asian origin for the “priapic rites” of the Jews, which were represented by erotic sculptures of male and female fertility figures. The Priapic rites purportedly remained in India until the time of Solomon, and “in the sixty-fifth year of Jesus Christ, they were carried into China.”[26]

Swedenborg’s notion of a Chinese “pre-Kabbala” was especially promulgated by Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay, which was assimilated into some Écossais (“Scottish”) Masonic rites.[27] In 1738, Swedenborg apparently contacted some Jesuits interested in alchemy when he visited the Royal Academy of Sciences in Turin, which was housed in the old Jesuit cloister. At the Academy in Turin was the prized exhibit of the Tabula Isiaca which had fascinated Freemasons since the time of Sir Robert Moray. In Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652), Kircher used the tablet as a primary source for developing his translations of Egyptian hieroglyphics, which are now known to be incorrect. While reading Kircher’s works, Swedenborg learned of the Jesuit scholar’s Kabbalistic interpretation of the tablet, which drew heavily on the Sepher Yetzirah and Zohar.[28] In the same year, before travelling to Turin, Swedenborg was in Lyons where he visited the library of the Jesuits, where Ramsay had earlier studied the mystical manuscripts brought by Jesuit missionaries from China.[29]

Ramsay assimilated Chinese notions of the “Heaven-Man” into the Kabbalistic idea of the Adam Kadmon, themes that he wove into his Masonic philosophy.[30] Like Swedenborg, explains Marsh Keith Schuchard, Ramsay felt pressured to de-emphasize the Jewish origin of Kabbalah, noting that “the Cabbalists have lost all credit among the learned, because of the extravagant fictions mixed in their mythologies.”[31] Ramsay then hinted at possible existence of the Masonic “Lost Word” in China:

 

In these last and dangerous times, wherein charity is waxed cold, faith almost extinguished, hope expired, and incredulity come to its highest pitch, perhaps Providence has opened a communication to China, so that we might find vestiges of our sacred religion in a nation, which had no communication with the ancient Jews.[32]

 

Swedenborg had already become immersed in Sabbatean influences, which had made an important penetration in Sweden. At the University of Uppsala, Hebraists and Orientalists were familiar with Sabbatai Zevi’s mission through Abraham Texeira, Queen Christina’s confidant and Resident in Hamburg. Texeira kept informed the Christian Hebraist Esdras Edzard (1629 –1708) who had been a believer in Sabbatai Zevi, before exploiting the disillusionment with of Zevi’s apostasy. Swedenborg’s father, Bishop Jesper Swedberg, spent ten weeks in the home of Edzard, where he learned of his host’s Sabbateanism.[33]

Swedenborg was also exposed to Sabbateanism through the influence of his brother-in-law, the Swedish Scholar Eric Benzelius (1675 – 1743), his chief mentor for forty years, who founded the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala in 1739, of which Swedenborg became a member. Benzelius had visited Edzard and studied Kabbalah with Leibniz and Van Helmont, and worked closely with Rabbi Johann Kemper (1670 – 1716), formerly Moses ben Aaron of Cracow, who had been a follower of the Sabbatean prophet Zadoq before converting to Christianity.[34] From his study of Johannes Bureus’ “Nordic Kabbalah,” Kemper argued that Kabbalistic studies were central to Sweden’s national identity.[35]

 

Rite of Heredom 

It was after 1738, when Radclyffe was succeeded by Louis de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Duc d’Antin (1707 – 1743), that the additional degrees were first heard of. The Rose-Croix degree first adopted by the Freemasons of France in about 1741, was so Catholic in character that is aroused suspicions that it was devised by the Jesuits.[36] At the death of the Duc d’Antin in 1743, he was replaced by Count of Clermont (1709 – 1771), the great-grandson of Louis, Grand Condé, becoming the fifth Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of France.[37] Clermont was also descended from Madame de Montespan, as his mother was the Duc d’Antin aunt. Clermont’s father was Louis III, Prince of Condé, the grandson of Louis, Grand Condé, the co-conspirator with Menasseh ben Israel, Isaac La Peyrère and Queen Christina.[38] According to some sources, the Comte of Clermont retained the position of Grand Master until his death in 1771, and was succeeded by his cousin, Louis Philippe d’Orléans.[39]

In 1741, Swedenborg and his Masonic colleagues in London assimilated the sexual practices of the Sabbateans within the Order of Heredom.[40] The paternity into highly Christianized degrees within a special order of Freemasonry, the Royal Order of Heredom of Kilwinning, which claimed Bonnie Prince Charlie as its Grand Master, is generally attributed to Ramsay.[41] The degree the Scottish Rite known in modern Masonry as “Prince of the Rose-Croix of Heredom or Knight of the Pelican and Eagle” became the eighteenth and the most important degree in what was later called the Scottish Rite. According to the tradition of the Royal Order of Scotland this degree had been contained in it since the fourteenth century, and had been instituted by Robert Bruce in collaboration with the Templars after the battle of Bannockburn.[42] In answer to a question about the ritual term “Heredom,” Charles R. Rainsford (1728 – 1809), a British MP, Swedenborgian Freemason, replied that it did not refer to an actual mountain in Scotland but rather to the Jewish symbol for Mons Domini or Malchuth, the tenth Sephira of the Kabbalah:

 

The word “Heridon” [sic] is famous in several degrees of masonry, that is to say, in some invented degrees (grades forges), or in degrees of masonry socalled. Apparently, the enlightened brethren who have judged it proper to make the law, that Jews should be admitted to the Society have received the word with the secrets (mysteres) which have been entrusted to them.[43]

 

After travels that took him to the Jewish communities of Hamburg, Prague, and Rome, Swedenborg came to London again in 1744, entering the semi-secret society of the Moravians. It was through a Moravian friend that apparently met a close friend of Charles R. Rainsford, Samuel Jacob Falk (1708 – 1782), a Kabbalist known as the Baal Shem of London, and over the next decades, their mystical careers would be closely intertwined.[44] Falk collaborated with a Sabbatean network in England, Holland, Poland, and Germany, and who would exercise an important influence in Masonic and occult circles during the eighteenth century.[45]

As Schuchard explained, the Kabbalistic belief that proper performance of Kabbalistic sex rites rebuilds the Temple and manifests the Shekhinah between the conjoined cherubim was particularly attractive to the initiates of the Order. One of the leaders of this rite, the French artist and engraver Lambert de Lintot, produced a series of hieroglyphic designs, which included phallic and vaginal symbolism, representing the regeneration the psyche and the rebuilding the Temple of the New Jerusalem.[46] In the Rite of Seven Degrees, to which belonged Falk and Swedenborg, de Lintot cited the Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orleans (1747 – 1793), another friend of Jacob Falk and Grand Master of the Grand Orient of France, as his Deputy Grand Master.[47] As Joscelyn Godwin explained in The Theosophical Enlightenment, “The whole Orleans family, ever since ever since Philippe's great-grandfather the Regent, was notoriously involved in the black arts.”[48]

Philippe I, Duke of Orleans (1617 – 1680) married Elizabeth Charlotte, the granddaughter of Frederick V of the Palatinate and Elizebeth Stuart of the Alchemical Wedding. Philippe I was the younger son of Louis XIII of France, the son of Henry IV and Marie de Medici. Philippe I’s brother was Louis XIV of France, the “Sun King,” whose chief advisors included cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin. Mazarin’s sister, Anne Marie Martinozzi, was married to Armand, Prince of Conti, the brother of Louis, Prince of Condé, who was involved in a conspiracy with Menasseh ben Israel, Isaac La Peyrère and Queen Christina to create a world government of the Messiah based in Jerusalem. Philippe I was close to Louis XIV’s mistress, Madame de Montespan, who was involved in the L’affaire des poisons (“Affair of the Poisons”), where Catherine Monvoisin, known as La Voisin, and the priest Étienne Guibourg performed Black Masses for human sacrifice for her.[49]

From the activities recorded by Falk’s servant Hirsch Kalisch in his diary of 1747-51, evidence emerges in the journals, correspondence, and diplomatic reports of visitors to London which suggests, explains Schuchard, “that Falk became involved in a clandestine Masonic system that utilized Kabbalah and alchemy to support efforts to restore James Stuart, the ‘Old Pretender,’ to the British throne.”[50] From the first published report of his Kabbalistic skills, the Count of Rantzow’s Memoires (1741), reported that Falk also performed a magical ceremony with a black goat before the Duke of Richelieu (1696 – 1788), French ambassador in Vienna, and the Count of Westerloh, during which Westerloh’s valet had his head turned backward and died of a broken neck.[51] Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu, was the Marshal of France and the lover of Marie Louise Élisabeth d’Orléans, Duchess of Berry, the eldest of the surviving children of the Duke of Orléans.

The first high-degree “Scottish” lodge was started in 1756 with Carl Friedrich Eckleff (1723 – 1786), whose father had worked closely with Swedenborg, as Master. In 1759, Eckleff started the Chapitre Illuminé “L’Innocente,” which utilized the seven-degree system of the Royal Order of Heredom and the Clermont Rite.[52] Eckleff established his lodges of higher and lower degrees based on certain files received from abroad, dating from around 1750, referred to as Grand Chapitre de la Confraternité I'Illuminée, a chapter in Geneva that had received its knowledge from another in Avignon, where there was a high-level system of Illuminés.[53]

 

Rite of Perfection 

In 1754, Chevalier de Bonneville founded a chapter composed of “distinguished persons of the court and of the town,” in which some elements of the order of Knights Templars were introduced, and which was known by the name of the Chapter of Clermont because the assemblies were held in the Jesuit college of Clermont.[54] According to Henry W. Coil, however, the chapter was named in honor of the Comte de Clermont.[55] The members of this Clermont Chapter were mostly adherents of the Stuart Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie.[56] C. Lenning, a German bookseller and Freemason living in Paris, claimed in a manuscript titled “Encyclopedia of Freemasonry,” probably written between 1822 and 1828 at Leipzig, that King James II of England, after his flight to France in 1688, resided at the Jesuit College of Clermont, where his followers fabricated certain degrees for the purpose of carrying out their political ends.[57] The system of Freemasonry Bonneville practiced received the name of the Rite of Perfection, or Rite of Heredom, and consisted of twenty-five degrees.[58] In 1758, these Degrees were taken by Marquis de Lernais to Berlin where in the following year they were placed under a body called the Council of the Emperors of the East and West, which was formed at Paris from the ruins of the Clermont Chapter.[59]

There are several theories about to the origin of the Scottish Rite, but as it evolved in France it dates from about 1754 when the College of Clermont was founded in Paris with seven degrees. By 1758, the system had become a Rite of twenty-five degrees known as the Rite of Perfection, whose Grand Regulations would be issued in 1762.[60] In 1761, the Council of Emperors of the East and the West had granted a patent to a French Jew named Stephen Morin, creating him “Grand Inspector for all parts of the New World,” and signed by officials of the Grand Lodge in Paris, under the authority of the Grand Master, the Count of Clermont. Morin was invested with the title of “Grand Elect Perfect and Sublime Master” was sent to America by the “Emperors” with a warrant from the Grand Lodge of Paris to carry the “Rite of Perfection” to America.[61] American Masons recruited to this rite provided the network that helped bring about the American Revolution, the second of the major modern political success of the occult secret societies.

Stephen Morin, who had been involved in high-degree Masonry in Bordeaux, returned to the West Indies in 1762 or 1763, to Saint-Domingue, where he spread the high degrees throughout the West Indies and North America. Morin, acting under the authority of Frederick II of Prussia, appointed Henry Andrew Francken (1720 – 1795) as Deputy Grand Inspector General (DGIG), who was most important in assisting Morin in spreading the degrees in the New World.[62] Francken traveled to New York in 1767 where he granted a Patent for the formation of a Lodge of Perfection at Albany, which was called “Ineffable Lodge of Perfection.”[63] While in New York, Francken also communicated the degrees to Jewish businessman Moses Michael Hays (1739 – 1805), the leading figure among the Jews in connection with early Masonry in the United States.[64] The Hays family was one of the most important Jewish families in New York with connections to other wealthy Jewish families across the colonies through marriage. Hays was a prominent member of Shearith Israel, where he served as Second Parnas and as a Trustee.[65] In 1769, Hays organized King David’s Lodge of Freemasons in New York, the nation’s oldest Jewish Masonic lodge.[66] However, the next year, he and his family moved to Newport, and used the same warrant to transfer King David Lodge.[67]

The sister synagogues of Bevis Marks in the United States played an influential role in the American Revolution, including Shearith Israel in New York, Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, Touro in Newport, Rhode Island, and Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina. Mikveh Israel, which was named after the Hebrew title of Menasseh ben Israel’s book, Hope of Israel, was founded with contributions from Benjamin Franklin and David Rittenhouse an American astronomer, inventor and member of the Royal Society of London.[68] According to James Arcuri, author of a biography titled For God and Country: A Spy and A Patriot, Haym Salomon gave his Fortune and his life for Liberty and The Cause, Haym Salomon (1740 – 1785), a Polish-born American Jewish businessman and member of Mikveh Israel who financed the American Revolution, was Rothschild agent, despite the fact that they were simultaneously supporting the British on the opposing side.

After the end of the American Revolutionary War, many of these Jews moved back from Philadelphia to their original communities, such as Charleston, helping to spread Scottish Rite Masonry. Among those returning to Charleston was Isaac Da Costa (1721 – 1783), the Grand Warden, Grand Inspector General for the West Indies and North America of the Sublime Lodge of Perfection in Philadelphia. Da Costa received religious training from Isaac Nieto (1702 – 1774), who succeeded his father Rabbi David Nieto (1654 – 1728) as haham of Bevis Marks.[69] In 1749, he helped found Congregation Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, one of the oldest Jewish congregations in the United States.[70] Five of the eleven “Founding Fathers” of the Scottish Rite, who became known as “The Eleven Gentlemen of Charleston,” were congregants of Beth Elohim.[71]

Barnard M. Spitzer was among four of eight Jewish Masons from Mikveh Israel that Hays appointed Deputy Inspectors General, who later played important in the establishment of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in South Carolina, and which included Isaac Da Costa.[72] Under the authority he had received through Spitzer, Hyman Isaac Long, a Jewish physician from Jamaica, who settled in New York City, went to Charleston in 1796 to appoint eight French men who arrived as refugees from the island of Saint-Domingue.[73] Long was the son of Isaac Long, a Dutch writer, one of the foremost members of the Moravian Church, and closely connected with crypto-Sabbatean Count Zinzendorf.[74] In 1796, in Charleston, Long issued a patent to Alexandre Francois Auguste de Grasse (1765 – 1845), making him and his father-in-law Jean-Baptiste Marie de La Hogue and six other French refugees from Saint-Domingue, each Deputy Grand Inspector General (DGIG).[75]

The Rite of Perfection changed its name and appearance in 1801, when Dr. Frederick Dalcho and Colonel John Mitchell, who was nominated Deputy Grand Inspector by Henry Andrew Francken, arrived in Charleston with a document dated to 1786 granting the bearer the right to establish new chapters of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, allegedly under the authority of Frederick the Great.[76] In 1801, according to Domenico Margiotta, a former high-ranking Freemason, Hyman Isaac Long brought with him the Baphomet idol of the Templars and what he claimed was the skull of their Grand Master Jacques de Molay which they had purportedly manage to purchase from his executioner before fleeing to Scotland. With John Mitchell, Doctor Frederic Dalcho, Abraham Alexander, Isaac Auld and Emanuel de la Motta, Long’s plan was to create a rite of 33 degrees destined to become universal. They adopted twenty-five degrees of the system of Heredom, six Templar grades in which were merged four degrees borrowed from the Weishaupt’s Illuminati, and two grades called grades of administration, the last of which supplanted the function of Deputy Inspector (Sovereign Prince of Jerusalem) and took the title of Sovereign Grand Inspector General 33rd and last degree.[77]

The bodies already established in Charleston accepted the new regime and adopted the new degrees, and in 1801 a convention was held and preliminary steps inaugurated to form a Supreme Council of the 33rd and Last Degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, after which the Charleston lodge in became the Mother Council of the World.[78] The Founding Fathers of the Scottish Rite who attended became known as “The Eleven Gentlemen of Charleston.” Five of the eleven founders were congregants of Beth Eholim: Isaac Da Costa, Israel DeLieben, Abraham Alexander Sr., Emanuel De La Motta and Moses Clava Levy.[79] The others included John Mitchell, James Moultrie, Frederick Dalcho, Alexandre Francois Auguste de Grasse, Jean-Baptiste Marie de La Hogue, Thomas Bartholemew Bowen, and Isaac Auld. The Supreme Council, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction, USA, in Charleston—commonly known as the Mother Supreme Council of the World—was the first Supreme Council of Scottish Rite Freemasonry. It claims that all other Supreme Councils and Subordinate Bodies of the Scottish Rite are derived from it.[80]

The Scottish Rite adopted the double-headed eagle, or Reichsalder, symbol of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors, which represented the dual realms of the Council of Emperors of the East and West.[81] The “Knights of the East,” according to Masonic tradition, represented the “Freemasons” who remained in the East after the building of the First Temple, referring to the Essenes and their successors in the East, like the Brethren of Sincerity and the Assassins. The “Knights of the East and West,” on the other hand, represented those who traveled West and disseminated the “Order” over Europe, but who returned during the Crusades, and reunited with their ancient “Brethren.” In obvious allusion to the Templars, they were said to have organized the Order in the year 1118 upon the return of the Holy Land.[82]

 

 

 


[1] Schuchard. “Why Mrs Blake Cried.”

[2] Schuchard. “Why Mrs Blake Cried.”

[3] John MacGregor. Tibet: A Chronicle of Exploration (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1970), pp. 34–39.

[4] Edwin Bernbaum. The Way to Shambhala. (Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., Los Angeles, 1989), pp. 18–19.

[5] John MacGregor. Tibet: A Chronicle of Exploration, pp. 47.

[6] Johann Grueber. China Illustrata (1st ed.). Amsterdam: Athanasius Kircher (1667). pp. 64–67.

[7] Lloyd Strickland (ed. and transl.). Leibniz and the Two Sophies: The Philosophical Correspondence, (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011).

[8] Joscelyn Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, (State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 101.

[9] Ibid., p. 101.

[10] Edward Gelles. The Jewish Journey: A Passage through European History (The Radcliffe Press, 2016), p. 154.

[11] Catholic Jew. “Frankists and the Catholic Church.” alternativegenhist.blogspot.ca (April 15, 2014).

[12] Ibid.

[13] Gelles. The Jewish Journey, p. 151.

[14] Christopher Hodapp & Alice Von Kannon. The Templar Code for Dummies (Wiley Publishing Inc., 2007), p. 197.

[15] Christopher Mcintosh. The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology and Rituals of an Occult Order, 2nd rev. edn (Wellingborough: Crucible, 1987), pp. 80–1.

[16] Waite. Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, p. 324.

[17] Ibid., p. 375.

[18] Cited in Jeff Bach. Voices in the Wilderness: The Sacred World of Ephrata (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2003), p. 188.

[19] Christopher Mcintosh. Rose Cross and the Age of Reason (SUNY Press, 2012), p. 30.

[20] Keith Schuchard. “Why Mrs. Blake Cried.”

[21] Fr L. “Esotericism and Espionage: the Golden Age, 1800 – 1950.” Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition, No. 16, Vol. 2. Vernal Equinox 2009.

[22] Ruan. Sex in China (New York: Plenum, l991) 60-68.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Anders Hallengren, “The Secret of Great Tartary.” Arcana, I (l994), pp. 35-54.

[25] Schuchard. “Why Mrs Blake Cried.”

[26] Cited in Schuchard. “Why Mrs Blake Cried.”

[27] Schuchard. “Why Mrs. Blake Cried.” See A.M. Ramsay. The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (Glasgow: Robert Foulis, l748-49), II, pp. 173-85, 304, 356, 537-38.

[28] Keith Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, p. 259.

[29] Ibid., p. 257.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Swedenborg. Apocalypse Revealed, #11. Cited in Keith Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, p. 259.

[32] Ramsay, Philosophical Principles, II, 304. Cited in Keith Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, p. 259.

[33] Keith Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, p. 15.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Clavel. Histoire pittoresque de la Franc-Maçonnerie, p. 166.

[37] Supreme Council, 33 ̊ U.S.A. Condensed History of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite Masonry from Its Introduction Into the United States (Drummond & Neu, 1887), p. 5.

[38] Richard Popkin. “Chapter 14: The Religious Background of Seventeenth Century Philosophy.”

[39] Henry Wilson Coil. Coil’s Masonic Encyclopedia (Richmond, Virginia: Macoy Publishing Co., 1961).

[40] Schuchard. “Why Mrs. Blake Cried.”

[41] David Murray Lyon, “The Royal Order of Scotland,” The Freemason (September 4, 1880), p. 393; cited in Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, p. 305.

[42] Albert G. Mackey. A Lexicon of Freemasonry (Philadelphia: Moss, Brother & Co., 1860), p. 267.

[43] G. Hills. “Notes on the Rainsford Papers in the British Museum,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 26 (1913 ), pp. 98-99; Schuchard. “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk,” p. 211.

[44] Schuchard. Why Mrs Blake Cried.

[45] Keith Schuchard. “Why Mrs. Blake Cried.”

[46] Ibid.

[47] Keith Schuchard. “The Secret Masonic History of Blake’s Swedenborg Society.”

[48] Joscelyn Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, (State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 101.

[49] Ibid.

[50] Keith Schuchard. “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk.”

[51] Ibid., p. 204.

[52] Keith Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, p. 511.

[53] “Eckleffsche Akten.” Freimaurer-Wiki. Retrieved from https://www.freimaurer-wiki.de/index.php/Eckleffsche_Akten

[54] J. G. Findel. History of Freemasonry (London: Asher & Co, 1866), p. 226.

[55] Henry W. Coil. “Clermont, Chapter of.” Coil's Masonic Encyclopedia (Richmond, Va: Macoy Publ. Co. Inc., 1996), p. 135.

[56] J. G. Findel. History of Freemasonry (London: Asher & Co, 1866), p. 227.

[57] Albert G. Mackey. “Stuart Masonry.” Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Chicago, IL: Masonic History Co., 1909), pp. 981–982.

[58] “Perfection, Rite Of.” Masonic Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://masonicshop.com/encyclopedia/

[59] “History and Mission of the Scottish Rite.” Dallas Scottish Rite. Retrieved from https://dallasscottishrite.org/about/history-and-mission/

[60] “History of the Rite.” Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry of Canada. Retrieved from https://scottishritecanada.ca/about-us/history/

[61] Rebold Emmanuel. Histoire des Trois Grandes Loges (Collignon, 1864). p. 49.

[62] Samuel Oppenheim. “The Jews and Masonry in the United States Before 1810.” American Jewish Historical Society, No. 19 (1910), p. 7.

[63] William L. Fox. Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle: Two centuries of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in America's Southern Jurisdiction (University of Arkansas Press, 1997).

[64] Zimmerman. “Men of Honour and Honesty,” p. 47.

[65] Julius F. Sachse. Ancient Documents relating to the A. and A. Scottish Rite in the Archives of the Free and Accepted Masons of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: The New Era Printing Company, 1915), p. 19.

[66] Sachse. Ancient Documents, p. 21.

[67] William Pencak. Jews & Gentiles in Early America, 1654-1800 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 92.

[68] James Peobody (ed.) John Adams (New York, 1973), p. 387.

[69] B.A. Elzas. The Jews of South Carolina (1905), index; C. Reznikoff and U.Z. Engelman. The Jews of Charleston (1950), passim; J.R. Marcus. Early American Jewry (1953), index; J.R. Rosenbloom. A Biographical Dictionary of Early American Jews (1960), pp. 28–29; Aubrey Newman. “Jews in English Freemasonry.” Transcript of a lecture delivered by Professor Aubrey Newman, Emeritus Professor of History at Leicester University, England, to the Israel Branch of the Jewish Historical Society of England in Jerusalem, Israel, on 14 April 2015.

[70] Barnett A. Elzas. The Jews of South Carolina (Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott Company), p. 36.

[71] “The Story of Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim of Charleston, SC.” Retrieved from https://images.shulcloud.com/1974/uploads/Documents/The-Story-of-KKBE

[72] Ibid.

[73] Alexander Cosby Fishburn Jackson. Rose Croix: A History of the Ancient & Accepted Rite for England and Wales (London: Lewis Masonic, 1987).

[74] Edith Queenborough. Occult Theocracy (Jazzybee Verlag, 2012).

[75] A.C.F. Jackson. Rose Croix: A History of the Ancient and Accepted Rite for England and Wales (rev. ed. 1987) (London: Lewis Masonic Publishers, 1980), pp. 66-68.

[76] Mark Stavish. Freemasonry: Rituals, Symbols & History of the Secret Society (Llewellyn Worldwide, 2007), p. 126.

[77] Margiotta. Adriano Lemmi; cited in Queenborough. Occult Theocracy.

[78] Nicholas Hagger. The Secret Founding of America. Kindle Location 3109.

[79] “The Story of Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim of Charleston, SC.” Retrieved from https://images.shulcloud.com/1974/uploads/Documents/The-Story-of-KKBE

[80] “Scottish Rite History” WebCite Scottish Rite California. Retrieved from https://www.webcitation.org/6EUOU3dHW?url=http://www.scottishritecalifornia.org/scottish_rite_history.htm

[81] “Double-headed Eagle (Eagle of Lagash).” Symbol Dictionary. Retrieved from http://symboldictionary.net/?p=2443

[82] Albert C. Mackey. “Knight of the East and West.” Encyclopedia of Freemasonry and Its Kindred Sciences; see also Baron de Tschoudy. L’Étoile Flamboyante, I. 20 (1766), pp. 24-9.

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