7. Mason Kings

Tikkun Olam

Historian Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson argued that the secular Zionism of Theodor Herzl cannot be understood without reference to the Sabbatean movement of the seventeenth century, the first important development of the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria.[1] The sixteenth century renaissance of Kabbalah in Safed, which included Isaac Luria, was shaped by his particular spiritual and historical outlook. The Lurianic Kabbalah is radically different from earlier Kabbalist thought. In Luria’s theology, messianism was fundamental. He was preoccupied not with the world’s creation but with its end: with the salvation of souls and the arrival of the millennium. However, according to Luria, salvation would be achieved not by divine grace but by collective human effort, or what he referred to as Tikkun (repair), a concept derived from his interpretation of classic references in the Zohar.

The next important development in Lurianic Kabbalah was the mission of Shabbetai Zevi (1626 – 1676), who declared himself “Messiah” in 1666, duping nearly half of the world’s Jewish population, before converting to Islam when confronted by the Ottoman Sultan. Elizabeth Stuart of the Alchemical Wedding  was the chief sponsor of the “three foreigners,” Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600 – 1662), John Dury (1596 – 1680) and John Amos Comenius (1592 – 1670), whose “Invisible College” inspired the founding of the Royal Society and the rise of Freemasonry, and who were connected with Menasseh ben Israel (1604 – 1657) and the spread of the mission of Sabbatean movement, the most important development of the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria.[2]

 In 1663, the Invisible College became the Royal Society when a charter of incorporation was granted by Elizabeth’s nephew, Charles II of England (1630 – 1685) and named Robert Boyle (1627 – 1691), a friend of Samuel Hartlib, a member of the council. Elizabeth Stuart’s brother was Charles I of England (1600 – 1649), Charles II’s father, who married Henrietta Maria, the daughter of Henry IV of France and Marie de Medici. In 1649, after Charles I’s execution, and the establishment of the Cromwellian Commonwealth, his exiled son Charles II was initiated into Freemasonry.[3] As “Mason Kings,” explains Schuchard, King James, his son Charles I and grandson Charles II, considered themselves Solomonic monarchs and employed Jewish visionary and ritual themes while they sought to rebuild the “Temple of Wisdom” in their kingdoms.[4] After the Stuarts returned to Britain from their exile in The Hague in 1660, Charles II granted his personal protection to the Jews, despite attempts by various Puritans to persecute or exploit them.[5]

It was through its promotion of the “Great Instauration” initiated by Francis Bacon, that the Royal Society provided the philosophical underpinnings of the Scientific Revolution, which marked the emergence of modern science in Europe towards the end of the Renaissance and continued through the late eighteenth century, influencing the Enlightenment. Paradoxically, the Scientific Revolution begins with the study of magic as “natural philosophy” initiated by Bacon, who was believed to represent the advent of Elias Artista. “This transformation of both Elias and Elisha from prophets into magi and natural philosophers,” observed Allison P. Coudert, “reveals the way apocalyptic and messianic thought contributed to the emerging idea of scientific progress.”[6] As explained by Herbert Breger, in “Elias artista: a Precursor of the Messiah in Natural Science”:

 

A common association in the 19th century and one which has persisted into the 20th century, was to link the development of natural science with the improvement of the human condition. Thus, it would appear that the figure of Elias artist a was a forerunner of the liberal definition of progress in natural science: scientific advancement as vehicle of social advancement, individual well-being and as a means of attaining a more humane society.[7]

 

Zevi’s mission was closely followed by the Rosicrucians associated with Menasseh ben Israel, a Kabbalist and leading rabbi and of the Jewish community of Amsterdam, and teacher of the famous philosopher and Jewish heretic, Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677). Menasseh’s alliance with a scion of the Abarbanel family, in whose tradition of Davidic descent he was a firm believer, inspired him with the idea that he was destined to promote the coming of the Messiah.[8] Kepler speculated that the Star of Bethlehem followed by the Magi was the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 7 BC. As noted by Roy A. Rosenberg, “Bearing in mind Kepler’s speculation as to the identity of the “star,” we find that there is indeed a Jewish astrological tradition linking the appearance of the Messiah, and other great events, with the conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn.”[9] According to the calculations of the Rosicrucian Paul Nagel, the Great Conjunction of 1623, the year the Rosicrucians announced themselves to the world, was associated with the year 1666.[10]

As reported by Richard Popkin, in “The religious background of seventeenth-century philosophy,” recent discoveries have pointed out that Louis de Bourbon, the Great Condé (1621 – 1686), Oliver Cromwell (1599 – 1658)—who led a Rosicrucian government known as the Commonwealth of England[11]—and Queen Christina of Sweden (1626 – 1689), were negotiating to create a world government of the Messiah, with Prince Condé as his regent, based in Jerusalem, after assisting the Jews in liberating the Holy Land rebuilding the Temple.[12] Isaac La Peyrère (1596 – 1676), the secretary of the Prince of Condé, is also considered an early proponent of Zionism, for advocating a Jewish return to Palestine. As Richard Popkin noted:

 

Recent findings indicate that Conde, Cromwell, and Christina were negotiating to create a theological-political world state, involving overthrowing the Catholic king of France, among other things. La Peyrère had been proclaiming that the Jewish Messiah would soon arrive and would join with the king of France (the prince of Conde), and with the Jews to liberate the Holy Land, to rebuild the Temple, and to set up a world government of the Messiah and his regent the king of France.[13]

 

Christina’s grandmother, Christine of Hesse, was the great-granddaughter of Philip I Landgrave of Hesse. Her Grandfather, Charles IX of Sweden, had first been married to Maria of the Palatinate, whose nephew was of Frederick V of the Palatinate of the Alchemical Wedding. Known as the “Minerva of the North,” Christina is remembered as one of the most learned women of the seventeenth century.[14] As detailed by Susanna Åkerman, Christina’s library contained approximately 4500 printed books and 2200 manuscripts on the subjects of Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, alchemy, Kabbalah and prophetic works.[15] Christina was in secret contact with the Roman Jesuit and polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602 – 1680). He was taught Hebrew by a rabbi in addition to his studies at school.[16] Kircher cited as his sources Chaldean astrology, Hebrew Kabbalah, Greek myth, Pythagorean mathematics, Arabian alchemy and Latin philology. Kircher was in contact with the German Kabbalist Abraham von Franckenberg (1593 – 1652), a close friend and biographer of Balthasar Walther, who inspired the legend of Christian Rosenkreutz.[17] In 1646, Franckenberg sent to Kircher a copy of FaMa e sCanzIa reDUX (1616) by Johannes Bureus (1568-1652), who highlighted the affinities among the early Rosicrucians to the doctrines set out by Guillaume Postel.[18] Addressing himself to the Rosicrucians, Bureus proclaimed in his FaMa e sCanzIa reDUX that the north belonged to a distinct Hyperborean tradition that was preserved in the Gothic-Scandinavian Runes, represented what he referred to as “Gothic Cabala.”[19]

In late 1665, Queen Christina, who abdicated her throne in Sweden, converted to Catholicism and had moved to Rome, went to Hamburg, and she arrived just as the news of Sabbatai Zevi’s announcement reached the Jews of Hamburg. She danced in the streets of Hamburg with Jewish friends in anticipation of the apocalyptic event.[20] In 1665, Nathan announced that the Messianic age was to begin in the following year. Zevi claimed that since he, a messiah, arrived, the laws of the Torah were no longer applicable. His new prayer was, “Praised be He who permits the forbidden.” Zevi abolished the laws concerning sexual relationships, and eventually declared that all of the thirty-six major biblical sins were now permitted and, much like the Gnostics before him, instructed some of his followers that it was their duty to perform such sins in order to hasten the Redemption. Nathan helped explain Zevi’s sinning by suggesting that, from the beginning of time, the soul of the Messiah was held captive in the realm of darkness. The Messiah must therefore descend into sin to pull his soul from the darkness that holds him captive. Zevi spread this announcement widely, together with many additional details to the effect that the world would be conquered by him and Elijah, without bloodshed; that the Messiah would then lead back the Ten Lost Tribes to the Holy Land, “riding on a lion with a seven-headed dragon in its jaws.” These types of messianic claims were then widely circulated and believed.[21]

After his conversion to Isalm, Zevi incorporated both Jewish tradition and Sufism into his theosophy and, in particular, was to have been initiated into the Bektashi Sufi order, which would long had associations with the Dönmeh.[22] Bektashism is a mystic order of Sufi origin, that evolved in thirteenth-century Anatolia and became widespread in the Ottoman Empire. It is named after the saint Haji Bektash Veli (c. 1209–1271), who taught the teachings of the Twelve Imams, whilst incorporating some traditions from Tengrism, a religion originating in the Eurasian steppes, based on shamanism and animism.[23] The Bektashis acquired political importance in the fifteenth century when the order dominated the Janissary Corps.[24]

 

Invisible College

In pursuit of his reforms, as reported by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Cromwell based his policies on the ambitions of the “three foreigners,” Hartlib, Dury and Comenius.[25] Working closely with Dury and Cromwell, who was leading England as Lord Protector, Menasseh ben Israel helped achieve the readmittance of the Jews to England, who had been expelled from the country by Edward I of England in 1290. Once in England, Menasseh’s followers established the Creechurch Lane synagogue, which became known as Bevis Marks Synagogue, the first synagogue in London, often headed by rabbis belonging to the Sabbatean movement. Hartlib had been the head of a mystical group like Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christian Unions, a cover for the Invisible College, which pursued Rosicrucian idea.[26] At the end of Comenius’ Labyrinth of the World, a pilgrim escapes from the maze of worldly events and finds himself in “the Paradise of the Heart.” There, angelic teachers impart him with “secret knowledge of diverse things.” Similar angelic teachers were found in Andreae’s Christianopolis. Comenius referred to these angelic teachers as an “invisible college.”[27]

The man chiefly responsible for communicating the mission of Shabbetai Zevi to the English millenarians and Rosicrucians of the Hartlib Circle was Petrus Serrarius (1600 – 1669), who worked behind the scenes of the readmittance of the Jews to England.[28] Serrarius had been able to convince both John Dury and Comenius of Sabbatai Zevi’s messiahship.[29] Serrarius was a close associate of Adam Boreel (1602 – 1665), the founder of the Collegiants, which included Spinoza. [30] The Collegiants were also closely associated with the movement of the Quakers, founded by George Fox (1624 – 1691) and his wife, Margaret Fell, popularly known as the “mother of Quakerism.” Lady Anne Conway (1631 – 1679), whose work was an influence on Leibniz, became interested in the Lurianic Kabbalah, and then was introduced by the Rosicrucian alchemist Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614 ‑ 1699) to Quakerism, to which she converted in 1677.[31] Van Helmont and Christian Kabbalist Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636 – 1689) were also both in contact with Serrarius.[32]

Boreel assisted Rabbi Jacob Judah Leon Templo (1603 – after 1675) in his famous design of a model the Temple of Jerusalem.[33] Templo was a Jewish Dutch scholar, translator of the Psalms, and expert on heraldry, of Sephardic descent, who was famous for his design of the Temple of Jerusalem.[34] His fascination with the Temple gained him the appellation, “Templo.” Templo’s model was exhibited to public view at Paris and Vienna and afterwards in London. According to Jewish and Masonic historians in the eighteenth-century, Templo was welcomed by Charles II of England as a “brother Mason,” and he designed a coat of arms featuring Kabbalistic symbols for the restored Stuart fraternity.[35] Charles II’s mother Henrietta Maria herself examined Templo’s model of the Temple and studied his explanatory pamphlet.[36]

The Royal Society was influenced by the “new science,” as promoted by Francis Bacon in his New Atlantis.[37] Bacon suggests that the continent of America was the former Atlantis where there existed an advanced race during the Golden Age of civilization. Bacon tells the story of a country ruled by philosopher-scientists in their great college called Solomon’s House. Hartlib specifically mentions Solomon’s House with reference to the kinds of institutions he would like to see created, such as his Invisible College, which inspired the founding of the Royal Society.[38] Among the first Freemasons on record were Robert Moray (1608 or 1609 – 1673) and Elias Ashmole (1617 – 1692) who became original members of the Royal Society.[39]

As early as 1638, a hint as to a connection between Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry was published, with the earliest known reference to the “Mason Word,” in a poem at Edinburgh in 1638:

 

For what we do presage is not in grosse,
For we be brethren of the Rosie Crosse:
We have the Mason word and second sight,
Things for to come we can foretell aright…[40]

 

In 1689, a Williamite bishop, Edward Stillingfleet (1635 – 1699), asked his Scottish visitor, Reverend Robert Kirk, about the Scottish phenomenon of second sight and the Mason Word. Rejecting Kirk’s explanation of second sight, Stillingfleet called it “the work of the devil” and then scorned the Mason Word as “a Rabbinical mystery.”[41] Provoked by this conversation, Kirk visited the Bevis Marks synagogue in order to observe the ceremonies, which were led by its Haham or Chief Rabbi, Solomon Ayllon (1660 or 1664 – 1728), a follower of Sabbatai Zevi from Salonika.[42] After returning to Scotland, Kirk published his findings in 1691:

 

The Mason-Word, which tho some make a Misterie of it, I will not conceal a little of what I know; it’s like a Rabbinical tradition in a way of comment on Jachin and Boaz the two pillars erected in Solomon’s Temple; with an addition of some secret signe delivered from hand to hand, by which they know and become familiar with another.[43]

 

Rosenroth is famous for his Kabbala Denudata (“Kabbalah Unveiled”), whose editors included John Dury’s son-in-law was Henry Oldenburg (c. 1618 – 1677), an original member of the Hartlib Circle and the first secret of the Royal Society.[44] Oldenburg kept a close watch on Shabbetai Zevi’s mission, due to his interest in the restoration of the Jews.[45] Oldenburg forged a strong relationship with John Milton (1608 – 1674) and his lifelong patron, Robert Boyle. Dury was connected to Boyle by his marriage to Dorothy Moore, an Irish Puritan widow. Their daughter, Dora Katherina Dury, later became the second wife of Henry Oldenburg. When Menasseh ben Israel arrived in London in 1650, Cromwell appointed a committee of important millenarian clergymen and government officials to receive him. Lady Ranelegh, Robert Boyle’s sister, had dinner parties for Menasseh, and Oldenburg met with him as well.[46]

According to Chris Matthews in Modern Satanism, “Shorn of all theistic implications, modern Satanism’s use of Satan is firmly in the tradition that John Milton inadvertently engendered—a representation of the noble rebel, the principled challenger of illegitimate power.”[47] Lucifer’s statement in Milton’s Paradise Lost, “Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav’n,” became an inspiration for those who embraced the rebellion against God. As noted by Frances Yates, that there was an influence of Kabbalah on Milton is now generally recognised. Denis Saurat believed that he had found traces of Lurianic Kabbalah in Paradise Lost.[48] In 1955, the eminent Hebrew scholar Zwi Werblowsky: “Milton is influenced not by the Lurianic tsimtsum, still less by the Zohar, but by Christian post-Renaissance Cabala in its pre-Lurianic phase.”[49]

Moray was an intimate correspondent with Athanasius Kircher, and son-in-law of Lord Balcarres (1618 – 1659), a grandson of Alexander Sutton and collector of Hermetic and Rosicrucian texts.[50] In 1652, Ashmole befriended Solomon Franco, a Jewish convert to Anglicanism who combined his interest in Kabbalah and the architecture of the Temple of Solomon with support for the English monarchy.[51] Ashmole copied in his own hand an English translation of the Fama and the Confessio, and added a letter in Latin addressed to the “most illuminated Brothers of the Rose Cross,” petitioning them to be allowed him to join their fraternity. Ashmole revered John Dee, whose writings he collected and whose alchemical and magical teachings he endeavored to put into practice. In 1650, under the pseudonym James Hasolle, he published an English translation of Fasciculus Chemicus, an anthology of alchemical works compiled by Arthur Dee (1579 – 1651), the son of John Dee.

 

Philadelphian Society 

John Winthrop (1587 – 1649) a wealthy English Puritan lawyer sailed across the Atlantic on the Arbella, leading to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.[52] Winthrop’s noted words, a “City upon a Hill,” refer to a vision of a new society, not just economic opportunity. On 12 June 1630, the Arbella led the small fleet bearing the next 700 settlers into Salem harbor. Salem may have inspired the city of Bensalem in Bacon’s New Atlantis, which was published in 1627. The settlement of Salem by Rosicrucians would explain the existence of witchcraft in the city, which would have given cause to the famous witch trials of 1692. Frances Yates notes that Dee’s influence later spread to Puritanism in the New World through John Winthrop’s son, John Winthrop, Jr., an alchemist and a follower of Dee. Winthrop used Dee’s esoteric symbol, the Monas Hieroglyphica, as his personal mark.[53] In 1628, to acquire the alchemical knowledge of the Middle East, Winthrop sailed to Venice and Constantinople, further extending his abilities and chemical contacts. Winthrop was famously eulogized Cotton Matther as “Hermes Christianus,” and praised as one who had mastered the alchemical secret of transmuting lead into gold.[54]

In Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture (1606–1676), Walt Woodward asserts that, although less famous than his father, John Winthrop, Jr. was one of the most important figures in all of colonial English America, and describes how he used alchemy to shape many aspects of New England’s colonial settlement, and how that early modern science influenced an emerging Puritanism. Winthrop joined his father in New England in 1631. Following the collapse of New England’s economy at the outbreak of the English Civil War, Winthrop returned to Europe from 1641 to 1643. While there, he was influenced by Samuel Hartlib and members of his circle, including John Dury and Jan Comenius. Dury as well was an active advisor and fundraiser for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, having also attempted to get Comenius appointed the first President of Harvard.[55]

Rev. George Phillips, the founder of the Congregational Church in America, arrived on the Arbella in 1630 with Governor Winthrop. In 1781, Phillips’s great-grandson, banker Dr. John Phillips, established Exeter Academy, a prestigious American private prep school in New Hampshire, and is one of the oldest secondary schools in the US. The Economist described the school as belonging to “an elite tier of private schools” in Britain and America that counts Eton and Harrow in its ranks. Exeter has a long list of famous former students, including Mason and serial killer H.H. Holmes, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Jay Rockefeller, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Henry Morgenthau Jr., Gore Vidal, Stewart Brand, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, novelist John Irving, and Dan Brown the author of The Da Vinci Code and the Masonic-inspired The Lost Symbol.

In 1681, the Quaker William Penn (1644 – 1718), was elected Fellow of the Royal Society.[56] Penn was a member of the circle around Rotterdam merchant Benjamin Furly, known as the Lantern, which included Van Helmont, Lady Conway, Henry More, Adam Boreel and John Locke.[57] Furly was a Quaker and a close supporter of George Fox. In 1681, Penn was elected Fellow of the Royal Society.[58] Penn was personally acquainted with several members of the Royal Society, including John Wallis, Isaac Newton, John Locke, John Aubrey, Robert Hooke, John Dury and William Petty.[59] In 1682, Penn founded the city of Philadelphia, named after one of the “Seven Churches of Asia” mentioned in the Book of Revelation 3:10. Another possible reason for the use of the name was the Society of the Philadelphians. Both George Fox and William Penn knew its founder, Jane Lead (1624 – 1704), who was influenced by Jacob Boehme. Central to the founding of the society were visions Lead received of the “Virgin Sophia,” the Feminine Aspect of God, who promised to unfold the secrets of the universe to her. Lead declared herself a “Bride of Christ.” The society made many proselytes in England and on the Continent of Europe, in Holland, Belgium, and Germany.[60]

As explained by Dr. John Palo, in New World Mystics, after Penn’s first trip to America in 1681, on several trips he made back to Europe, he had come into contact with individuals in England, Holland and Germany, who were playing an important role in executing a plan to establish a Rosicrucian colony in America by 1694. Notable among them were William Markham of the Philadelphian Society in London, who would serve later as Penn’s Deputy Governor of Pennsylvania, and Jacob Isaac Van Bebber, a German Rosicrucian, who later purchased a thousand acres of land from Penn for the purpose of establishing a colony in America. [61]

According to Rosicrucian legend, Bacon’s The New Atlantis inspired the founding of a colony of Rosicrucians in America in 1694 under the leadership of Grand Master Johannes Kelpius (1667 – 1708), who was a friend of Lead’s secretary, Heinrich Johann Deichmann. Born in Transylvania, Kelpius was a follower of Johann Jacob Zimmerman, an avid disciple of Jacob Boehme, who was also “intimately acquainted” with Benjamin Furly, who was Penn’s agent in Rotterdam.[62] Zimmerman was referred to by German authorities as “most learned astrologer, magician and cabbalist.”[63] Kelpius came to know the Kabbalist Knorr von Rosenroth, and later used many of his hymns as the inspiration for his own.[64] According to Elizabeth W. Fisher, his later writings indicate that he was well acquainted with the Rosicrucian manifestos.[65]

With his followers in the Society of the Woman in the Wilderness, Kelpius came to believe that the end of the world would occur in 1694. This belief, based on an elaborate interpretation of a passage from the Book of Revelation, anticipated the advent of a heavenly kingdom somewhere in the wilderness during that year. Answering Penn’s call to establish a godly country in his newly acquired American lands, Kelpius felt that Pennsylvania, given its reputation for religious toleration at the edge of a barely settled wilderness, was the best place to be. With the help of Furly, Kelpius and his followers crossed the Atlantic and settled in the valley of the Wissahickon Creek in Philadelphia from 1694 until his death in 1708.[66]

 

 

 

 

 


[1] Matt Plen. “Who Was Shabbetai Zevi?” My Jewish Learning. Retrieved from https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/shabbetai-zevi/

[2] Trevor-Roper. The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, p. 26; Frances Yates. “Science, Salvation, and the Cabala” New York Review of Books (May 27, 1976 issue); Hugh Trevor-Roper. The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1967).

[3] Keith Schuchard. “Judaized Scots, Jacobite Jews, and the Development of Cabalistic Freemasonry.”

[4] Vaughan Hart. Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts (London: Routledge, 1994); Keith Schuchard. “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk,” p. 207.

[5] David Katz. The Jews in the History of England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994), p. 143.

[6] Allison P. Coudert. “Kabbalistic Messianism versus Kabbalistic Enlightenment.” in M. Goldish, R.H. Popkin, Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture: Volume I: Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World (Springer Science & Business Media, Mar. 9, 2013), p. 117.

[7] Herbert Breger. “Elias artista - a Precursor of the Messiah in Natural Science.” in Nineteen Eighty-Four: Science between Utopia and Dystopia, ed. Everett Mendelsohn and Helga Nowotny, Sociology of the Sciences, vol. 8 (New York: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984), p. 49.

[8] M. Gaster. “Abravanel’s Literary Work,” in Isaac Abravanel: Six Lectures, ed. J.B. Trend and H. Loewe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), pp. 69-70.

[9] Roy A. Rosenberg. “The ‘Star of the Messiah’ Reconsidered.” Biblica, Vol. 53, No. 1 (1972), pp. 105.

[10] Penman. “Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” pp. 201-226.

[11] Paul Benbridge. “The Rosicrucian Resurgence at the Court of Cromwell.” The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Revisited, (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1999) p. 225.

[12] Richard Popkin. “Chapter 14: The Religious Background of Seventeenth Century Philosophy.” In Daniel Garber & Michael Ayers (eds.). The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-century Philosophy Volume 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 407.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ruth Stephan. “Christina, Queen of Sweden.” Encyclopedia Britannica.

[15] Åkerman. “Hermeticism in Sweden,” in Western Esotericism in Scandinavia (BRILL, Mar. 31, 2016).

[16] John Edward Fletcher. A Study of the Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher, ‘Germanus Incredibilis’: With a Selection of His Unpublished Correspondence and an Annotated Translation of His Autobiography (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

[17] Leigh T.I. Penman. “A Second Christian Rosencreuz? Jacob Boehme’s Disciple Balthasar Walther (1558-c.1630) and the Kabbalah. With a Bibliography of Walther’s Printed Works.” Western Esotericism. Selected Papers Read at the Symposium on Western Esotericism held at Åbo, Finland, on 15–17 August 2007, p. 163.

[18] Åkerman. Rose Cross over the Baltic, p. 203.

[19] Håkan Håkansson. “Alchemy of the Ancient Goths: Johannes Bureus’ Search for the Lost Wisdom of Scandinavia.” Early Science and Medicine 17 (2012), p. 500.

[20] Popkin. Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought 1650-1800, p. 93.

[21] Kaufmann Kohler & Henry Malter. “Shabbetai Zebi B. Mordecai.” Jewish Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13480-shabbethai-zebi-b-mordecai

[22] Elli Kohen. History of the Turkish Jews and Sephardim: memories of a past golden age (Lanham: University Press of America, 2007), p. 120.

[23] Hege Irene Markussen. “Alevi Theology from Shamanism to Humanism.” Alevis and Alevism (2010). pp. 65–90; Denise Aigle. The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality. Studies in Anthropological History (BRILL, 2014), p. 107.

[24] Editors. “Bektashi.” Encyclopedia Britannica (January 13, 2025). Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bektashi.

[25] Trevor-Roper. The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, p. 26; Frances Yates. “Science, Salvation, and the Cabala” New York Review of Books (May 27, 1976 issue); Hugh Trevor-Roper. The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1967).

[26] Yates. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment.

[27] Gary Lachman. The Secret Teachers of the Western World (Penguin, 2015), p. 299.

[28] Daniel Frank. History of Jewish Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997) p. 607.

[29] Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie & Timothy Raylor (ed.). Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 134.

[30] Geoffrey F. Nuttall. “Early Quakerism in the Netherlands: Its Wider Context.” Bulletin of Friends Historical Association, 44: 1 (Spring 1955), p. 5.

[31] Allison Coudert. Leibniz and the Kabbalah (Springer, 1995). p. 36.

[32] Jonathan Israel. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford University Press, 1995). p. 589.

[33] Geoffrey F. Nuttall. “Early Quakerism in the Netherlands: Its Wider Context.” Bulletin of Friends Historical Association, 44: 1 (Spring, 1955), p. 5.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Vera Keller. Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 89.

[36] Arthur Shane, “Jacob Judah Leon of Amsterdam (1602-1675) and his Models of the Temple of Solomon and the Tabernacle.” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 96 (1983), pp. 146-69.

[37] R.H Syfret. “The Origins of the Royal Society.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. The Royal Society, 5:2 (1948), p. 75.

[38] Chloë Houston. The Renaissance Utopia: Dialogue, Travel and the Ideal Society (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 138.

[39] C. H. Josten, (ed.). Elias Ashmole (1617–1692). His Autobiographical and Historical Notes, his Correspondence, and Other Contemporary Sources Relating to his Life and Work (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), vol. II, pp. 395–396.

[40] Yates. Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 268.

[41] Robert Kirk. The Secret Commonwealth (1691), ed. S. Sanderson (London, l976), 88-89; D. Stevenson, Origins of Freemasonry, pp. 133-34.

[42] David Katz. The Jews in the History of England, pp. 161-62, cited in Keith Schuchard. “Judaized Scots, Jacobite Jews, and the Development of Cabalistic Freemasonry”; Louis Ginzberg. “Ayllon, Solomon ben Jacob.” Jewish Encyclopedia.

[43] Kirk. The Secret Commonwealth, pp. 88-89.

[44] Victor Nuovo. Christianity, Antiquity, and Enlightenment: Interpretations of Locke (Springer, 2001) p. 130

[45] Marsha Keith Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, Secret Agent on Earth and in Heaven (Leiden: Brill, 2011) p. 22.

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

[47] Chris Mathews. Modern Satanism: Anatomy of a Radical Subculture (Wesport: Praeger, 2009) p. 54.

[48] Denis Saurat. Milton: Man and Thinker (London, 1944); cited in Frances Yates. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (New York & London: Routledge, 1979). p. 208.

[49] R.J. Zwi Werblowsky, “Milton and the Conjectura Cabbalistica,” Journal of the Warburg Courtauld Institutes, XVIII (1955), p. 110. etc.; cited in Frances Yates. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (New York & London: Routledge, 1979). p. 208.

[50] De Poli. Freemansonry and the Orient, p. 37.

[51] Stevenson. Origins, 219-20; C.H. Josten. Elias Ashmole (Oxford: Clarendon, l966), I, 92; II, 395-96, 609. On seventeenth-century ambulatory military lodges, see John Herron Lepper, “‘The Poor Common Soldier,’ a Study of Irish Ambulatory Warrants,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 38 (l925), 149-55.

[52] Yates. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 226.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Neil Kamil. Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the Huguenots’ New World, 1517-1751 (JHU Press, 2020), p. 243.

[55] Laursen & Popkin. “Introduction.” In Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, Volume IV, p. xvii.

[56] Elaine Pryce. “A New Order of Things’: Benjamin Furly, Quakers and Quietism in the Seventeenth Century.” Quaker Studies, Vol. 23/2 (2018); Marion Balderston. “The Mystery of William Penn, The Royal Society, and the First Map of Pennsylvania.” Quaker History, 55: 2 (Autumn 1966), p. 79.

[57] John Marshall. John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and 'early Enlightenment’ Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2006). p. 494.

[58] Elaine Pryce. “A New Order of Things”; Marion Balderston. “The Mystery of William Penn, The Royal Society, and the First Map of Pennsylvania.” Quaker History, 55: 2 (Autumn 1966), p. 79.

[59] Quaker History, Volumes 58-59 (Friends Historical Association, 1969), p. 29 n. 20.

[60] J. Thomas Scharf. History of Philadelphia, 1609-1884 (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts & co., 1884), p. 155.

[61] Linda S. Schrigner, et al. Bacon’s “Secret Society” – The Ephrata Connection: Rosicrucianism in Early America (1983)

[62] Julius Friedrich Sachse. The German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1895; New York, 1970), p. 258.

[63] ‘doctissimus Astrologus, Magus et Cabbalista’, cited in Levente Juhász, “Johannes Kelpius (1673–1708): Mystic on the Wissahickon,” in M. Caricchio, G. Tarantino, eds., Cromohs Virtual Seminars. Recent historiographical trends of the British Studies (17th-18th Centuries), 2006-2007: 1-9.

[64] Elizabeth W. Fisher. “‘Prophesies and Revelations’: German Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 109:3 (1985), p. 318.

[65] Ibid.

[66] Ibid., p. 300.

Divide & Conquer