14. The Palladian Rite

Alta Vendita

In 1771, according to Barruel and Lecouteulx de Canteleu, a certain Jutland merchant named Kölmer, who had spent many years in Egypt, returned to Europe in search of converts to a secret doctrine founded on Manicheism that he had learned in the East. Lecouteulx de Canteleu suggests that Kölmer was Altotas, described by Figuier as “this universal genius, almost divine, of whom Cagliostro has spoken to us with so much respect and admiration.” On his way to France, Kölmer stopped at Malta, where he met the famous charlatan Count Cagliostro (1743 – 1795)—the notorious mystic widely regarded as a charlatan, and another important disciple of Jacob Falk—but he was driven away from the island by the Knights of Malta after he nearly brought about an insurrection amongst the people. Kölmer then travelled to Avignon and Lyons, where he made a few disciples amongst the Illuminés. In the same year, Kölmer went on to Germany, where he encountered Adam Weishaupt and initiated him into all the mysteries of his secret doctrine.[1] According to Cagliostro’s own admission, his mission “was to work so as to turn Freemasonry in the direction of Weishaupt’s projects,” and that the funds which he drew on were those of the Illuminati.[2]

The Simonini letter, explains Norman Cohn, “seems to be the earliest in the series of antisemitic forgeries that was to culminate in the Protocols.”[3] In 1806, Barruel received a letter from Jean-Baptiste Simonini, captain in the Piedmontese, in which he first congratulated him for having “unmasked the hellish sects which are preparing the way for Antichrist,” but then criticized him for sparing the “Judaic sect” from his study, who he claimed were the real “Unknow Superiors” behind the conspiracy. Realizing this must seem like an exaggeration, Simonini related a personal account, where explained that during the revolutionary years he had impersonated a Jew while living in Turin. The Jews showed him “sums of gold and silver for distribution to those who embraced their cause,” and promised to make him a general on the condition that he become a Mason.[4]

After presenting Simonini with three weapons bearing Masonic symbols, his Jewish confidants revealed their greatest secrets: Mani, the prophet of the Gnostic sect of Manicheanism was Jewish, as was Hasan-i Sabbah, also known as the “Old Man of the Mountain,” cult leader of the Ismaili Assassins, who are reputed to have imparted their occult knowledge to the Templars. The Freemasons and the Illuminati were both founded by Jews. They would use money to take over governments and usury to rob Christian populations. In less than a century, they would be masters of the world. More immediate goals were full emancipation and the annihilation of the Jews’ worst enemy: the House of Bourbon, the royal House of France.[5]

According to the Simonini Letter, written to Barruel, the Jews also boasted that they had already infiltrated the Catholic clergy, up to the highest echelons, and aimed to someday succeed in having one of their own elected pope.[6] A similar plot was revealed when Pope Leo XIII (1810 – 1903) requested the publication of the Alta Vendita. The Alta Vendita, a text purportedly produced by the highest lodge of the Italian Carbonari and written by Thomas Carlyle’s friend Giuseppe Mazzini (1807 – 1872), who purportedly succeeded Weishaupt as head of the Illuminati.[7] It was first published by Jacques Crétineau-Joly (1803 – 1875) in The Church and the Revolution. The pamphlet was popularized in the English-speaking world by Monsignor George F. Dillon in 1885 with his book The War of Anti-Christ with the Church and Christian Civilization. The document exposes the details of a Masonic plot to infiltrate the Catholic Church and ultimately install a Masonic pope.[8] According to the document:

 

Our ultimate end is that of Voltaire and of the French Revolution—the final destruction of Catholicism, and even of the Christian idea…

The Pope, whoever he is, will never come to the secret societies; it is up to the secret societies to take the first step toward the Church, with the aim of conquering both of them.

The task that we are going to undertake is not the work of a day, or of a month, or of a year; it may last several years, perhaps a century; but in our ranks the solider dies and the struggle goes on.[9]

 

In response, in 1884, Pope Leo XIII (1810 – 1903) had published his condemnation of Freemasonry, the encyclical Humanum genus. On his mother’s side, Leo XIII was a descendant of the Italian leader Cola di Rienzo (1313 – 1354) whose demagogic rhetoric, anti-establishment and populist appeal some considered an early form of proto-fascism.[10] Having advocated both the abolition of the Pope's temporal power and the unification of Italy, Rienzo re-emerged as a romantic figure in the nineteenth century, as a precursor of the Risorgimento led by Giuseppe Mazzini. Cola di Rienzo’s life and fate have formed the subject of a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1835), tragic plays by Gustave Drouineau (1826), Mary Russell Mitford (1828), Julius Mosen (1837), and Friedrich Engels (1841), and also of some verses of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818) by Lord Byron. In 1873, only three years after the founding of new Kingdom of Italy, the rione Prati was laid out, with the new quarter’s main street being Via Cola di Rienzo and a conspicuous square, Piazza Cola di Rienzo.

Leo Taxil (1854 – 1907) published his notorious hoax, Le Diable au XIXe siècle (“The Devil in the 19th Century”) in 1892, and even succeeded in gaining the Leo XIII’s endorsement for his anti-Masonic writings. Taxil, whose real name was Gabriel Jogand-Pagés, was a swindler and the author of various screeds against the Catholic Church, but who later claimed to have repented and converted to Catholicism. In Le Diable au XIXe siècle, writing under the name of Dr. Bataille, and in collaboration with Domenico Margiotta, a former high-ranking Freemason, Taxil revealed the existence of the so-called Palladian Rite, a Luciferian rite that was the pinnacle of Masonic power. However, in 1897, Taxil finally confessed that the revelations were a hoax, causing quite a scandal. Margiotta too confessed, declaring that he invented all such stories after he signed a “barbarous contract” with Taxil. Afterwards, Margiotta was never seen or heard from again.[11]

Curiously, however, Taxil was close to Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807 – 1882), a co-conspirator of Mazzini, who also was supposedly a founding member of the Palladian Rite that Taxil originally claimed to expose.[12] Mazzini, along with Otto von Bismarck (1815 – 1898), and Albert Pike (1809 – 1891), all thirty third degree Scottish Rite Masons, supposedly completed an agreement to create a supreme universal rite of Masonry that would arch over all the other rites. Civil War General Albert Pike was Sovereign Commander Grand Master of the Supreme Council of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in Charleston, South Carolina, and the reputed founder of the notorious Ku Klux Klan (KKK).[13] Pike, in honor of the Templar idol Baphomet, named the order the New and Reformed Palladian Rite or New and Reformed Palladium. The Palladian Rite was to have been an international alliance to bring in the Grand Lodges, the Grand Orient, the ninety-seven degrees of Memphis and Misraim of Cagliostro, also known as the Ancient and Primitive Rite, and the Scottish Rite, or the Ancient and Accepted Rite. Also according to Margiotta, Rothschild agent Gerson von Bleichröder—a member of the Gesellschaft der Freunde, founded by leading members of the Haskalah in the circle of Moses Mendelssohn and the Hamburg Temple—also financed Otto von Bismarck’s plans for the unification of Germany.[14]

As a member of the Carbonari, Mazzini was a leader of the Risorgimento (“Resurgence”), a political and social movement that consolidated different states of the Italian peninsula into the single state of the Kingdom of Italy. The Carbonari, meaning “charcoal burners,” a quasi-Masonic revolutionary secret society formed in southern Italy early in the nineteenth century through the influence of Philippe Buonarroti (1761 – 1837).[15] Buonarroti was a leader of the Illuminati cover, the Philadelphes.[16]  After the Illuminati were disbanded in 1787, as a new cover for the order, Bode declared: “We agreed… for France, we would adopt the name Philadelphes instead of Illuminati.”[17] Chaillon de Jonville, deputy Grand Master of the Grand Lodge, the institution which preceded the Grand Orient, in a text which appeared in 1789, denounced the Philadelphes as responsible for the revolutionary disturbances.[18] Buonarroti, a descendant of Michelangelo’s brother, attended the University of Pisa and studied law.[19]  Historian Carlo Francovich asserted that in 1786 Buonarroti also joined an Illuminati lodge in Florence.[20] Buonarroti became editor of the revolutionary Corsica paper, Giornale Patriottico di Corsica (1790), operated by Illuminatus Baron de Bassus, who referred to him by the Jewish alias of Abraham Levi Salomon.[21] According to historian James H. Billington, its first issues specifically identified the French Revolution with the Illuminati, and praised all the social upheavals taking place in Europe.[22] The revolutionaries spoke of Buonarroti as “an occult power whose shadowy tentacles extended… over Europe.”[23]

Of the several theories about the origins of the Italian Mafia is one that it was founded by Mazzini. Mafia is purportedly an acronym for Mazzini Autorizza Furti Incense Avvelanamenti, meaning “Mazzini authorizes theft, arson and poisoning.” The Mafia have a ritual similar to that of the Carbonari, and remotely, to Freemasonry as well. The ritual of the Carbonari involves knives, blindfolds, blood, fire and the invocation of a saint (Saint Theobald), and culminates in an oath to secrecy similar to that in Freemasonry: “I consent, and wish, if I perjure myself, that my body may be cut in pieces, then burnt, and my ashes scattered to the wind.”[24]

Mazzini held a high position among the Florentine Masons, and served as Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy, as did Giuseppe Garibaldi, who are both considered among of Italy’s “fathers of the fatherland,” along with Count of Cavour (1810 – 1861) and Victor Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy (1820 – 1878). The House of Savoy descended from Charles Emmanuel I, whose birth was prophesied by Nostradamus, and had links with the House of Habsburg and the Order of the Golden Fleece, and who claimed the hereditary title of Kings of Jerusalem. [25] Victor Immanuel II’s mother was Jacob Frank’s sponsor, Maria Theresa of Austria, who was the double granddaughter of Empress Maria Theresa and Francis I. Like his father, Victor Emmanuel II was a knight of the Order of the Garter as well as knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece. In 1904, when Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, met with of Victor Emmanuel II’ grandson, Victor Emmanuel III of Italy (1869 – 1947), he revealed that one of his ancestors had been a co-conspirator of Shabbetai Zevi.[26]

“In his time,” as noted by Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati, Mazzini “ranked among the leading European intellectual figures, competing for public attention with Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville.”[27] On the responsibility of pursuing revolutionary ideals, Mazzini stated:

 

Duty points the way to the object we should seek: that is, the triumph of the moral law, and the suppression of whatever stands in the way of its fulfillment; the reconstitution of Europe; the sovereignty of the free and equal associated nations; aid from all to all for the emancipation of those who are oppressed, for the relief of those who suffer, and for the education, the independence, the armament of all.

This object—why not say it?—is a last great holy crusade, a battle of Marathon in the service of Europe for the triumph of the principle of progress over the principle of inertia and reaction.[28]

 

As pointed out by R. John Rath, because of a various similarities like their  means of correspondence, some recent scholars like Carlo Francovich and Arthur Lehning have argued that the Carbonari were organized by the Illuminati.[29] “In his time,” as noted by Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati, Mazzini “ranked among the leading European intellectual figures, competing for public attention with Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville.”[30] Mazzini held a high position among the Florentine Masons, and served as Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy. Mazzini worked closely with Lord Palmerston (1784 – 1865), Grand Patriarch of Freemasonry, who was twice Prime Minister, holding office continuously from 1807 until his death in 1865, and dominated British foreign policy during the period 1830 to 1865, when Britain was at the height of its imperial power. In 1836, Mazzini left Switzerland and settled in London. Under Lord Palmerston’s guidance, Mazzini had organized all his revolutionary sects: Young Italy, Young Poland, Young Germany which were under the aegis of Young Europe.[31] Many Jews joined Giovane Italia (“Young Italy”), which was founded by Mazzini in 1831 and soon supplanted the Carbonari.[32]

Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane had become among Mazzini’s closest English friends in London by 1840, as attested by many the references to him in their letters.[33] Carlyle was a close friend of another admirer of Mazzini, Emerson’s mentor, John Stuart Mill, who encouraged Carlyle to write his French Revolution (1837), which made him famous. Fuller consciously adopted Madame Germaine de Staël as her role model.[34] Each of Carlyle’s subsequent works were highly regarded throughout Europe and North America, including On Heroes (1841), Past and Present (1843), Cromwell's Letters (1845), Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), and History of Frederick the Great (1858–65). Carlyle and his wife Jane introduced Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller to Mazzini.[35] Fuller met Mazzini in London where she began a friendship and correspondence with him, regarding him as “not only one of the heroic, the courageous, and the faithful,” she wrote, “but also one of the wise.”[36] Fuller actually fought in the Italian revolution alongside her lover, Giovanni Ossoli, who was a friend of Mazzini.[37] In 1847, Fuller befriended crypto-Frankist Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz.[38]

 

Egyptian Rite Freemasonry

Egypt became the main esoteric reference point for several new Masonic orders, influenced by the tide of Egyptomania initiated after Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. One of the first orders to give itself an Egyptian tradition was the Golden and Rosy Cross.[39] Especially influential was the Egyptian Rite founded in 1784 by Giuseppe Balsamo, alias Alessandro Count of Cagliostro (1743 – 1795), through his association with the Grand Master of the Order of the Knights of Malta, Manuel Pinto de Fonseca, appointing himself its Grand Copt, claiming to be in possession of a never revealed mysterium magnum, as well as of the Philosopher’s Stone. Though it was said that Cagliostro had been initiated into the rite by the Comte St. Germain, Marsh Keith Schuchard presented evidence that it was Samuel Jacob Falk who sent Cagliostro on the mission of Egyptian Freemasonry.[40] Cagliostro’s Egyptian Rite was a very complex system of oracles, quasi-Egyptian rituals and ceremonial magic. Although the masonic rite was divided into men’s and women’s lodges. However, as noted by psychical researcher Paul Tabori, in his Secret and Forbidden, the main degree initiation ceremony in the “ladies lodges” were openly orgiastic. According to Tabori:

 

After passing through several tests, novices assembled at dawn in the “temple.” A curtain rose and the spectators gazed at a man seated on a golden globe, completely nude, holding a snake in his hand.

The naked figure was Cagliostro himself. The “high priestess” explained to the amazed ladies that both truth and wisdom were naked and that they (the ladies) must follow their example. Thereupon the beauties stripped and Cagliostro delivered a speech in which he declared that sensual pleasure was the highest aim of human life. The snake which he held gave a whistle, whereupon thirty-six “genii” entered, clad in white gauze. “You are” Cagliostro said, “chosen to fulfill my teachings!” This was the sign for the beginning of the orgies. [41]

 

Cagliostro’s Egyptian Rite was also the origin of the Rite of Misraim, named after the Hebrew name for Egypt.[42] The Rite of Misraim developed quickly in Milan, Genoa and Naples, and three Jewish Masons, brothers Joseph, Michel and Marc Bédarride established it in France in 1814. The Bédarride brothers came from a Sephardic Jewish family from Provence, who had been familiar with Kabbalistic currents in Judaism there through the Dönmeh movement. Marc Bédarride (1776 – 1846) served as part of Napoleon’s Army as an officer during the French campaign in Egypt in 1798, when he became involved in Freemasonry. Marc was a scholar of Egyptology and an honorary member of the Bonapartist Lodge of the Philosophical Scottish Rite “Saint Napoleon” of Palazzo Cocchi-Serristori in Florence. In 1801, he organized a meeting in Pisa of the most important Masonic lodges of the Kingdom of Etruria, together with Jacob Bédarride, Mathieu de Lesseps (1771 – 1832), the Consul General of France in Florence and father of Ferdinand de Lesseps, and “Philalete Abraham.” Marc is remembered for having founded the Masonic Rito Egizio di Misraim in 1813 and, together with Jacob and Joseph, constituted the first Egyptian Rite of Paris in 1815, called Arc en Ciel (Arcobaleno).

The Rite of Misraim makes up the so-called “Egyptian Freemasonry” together with the Rite of Memphis. Samuel Honis, a native Egyptian, was supposedly initiated at the Grand Lodge of Cairo, and afterwards brought the rite to France. In 1815, a lodge, the Disciples of Memphis, was founded by Hones, Marconis de Negre and others.[43] In his history of the order, Marconis wrote:

 

“Whatever may be the source wherefrom we derive Free- masonry,” says Brother Quentin in his “Dict. Maç.,” “it is evident that it presents, even its minor details, memories and traditions of the ancient initiation.” “It is in Asia,” says Brother Valleteau de Chabrefy in his “Masonic Annals,” “the cradle of the human race, that we find the most ancient institution of this kind—that of the Brahmans (Brahminy as now known in India). From Asia the knowledge of these sublime truths passed into Africa, where were celebrated the mysteries of Isis, which have a striking relationship to Freemasonry.”[44]

 

Marconis traces the beliefs of the Templars to Mani, founder of Manicheanism. An Egyptian named Scythion, an Arab by birth, fully instructed in the secrets of the Magi, had a pupil named Ferbulio, who went to Palestine and finally Persian, where he called himself Buddas. Being persecuted by the Egyptian priests of Mythra, he took refuge in the house of a widow, who purchased a slave, who gained knowledge from the books of Ferbulio. This slave changed his name to Manes (Mani). Referring to the persecution that was meted out against the followers of Mani, Marconis explains:

 

The reproach was unjust, for by their teaching they only inculcated the observance of the three gradations prescribed in Egypt for education—first, Dualism, or belief in two principles; second, Zabaothism [ancient sources record the god worshiped by the Jewish people, Yahweh, Dionysus-Sabazius[45]], admiration of the forces of Nature; third, Jobaism, or the worship of an only God, a Sovereign independent of the material world. They therefore did not preach Dualism as the true doctrine, but as a way to pass in order to arrive at the manifestation of Truth in its entirety. Many ages afterwards the Knight Templars embraced this doctrine, whose mysteries they celebrated with the utmost secrecy, and adopted, after its example, the designation of the “Sons of the Widow,” and symbolised the death of Manes, under the name of Hiram, architect of the Temple of Solomon.

 

According to Marconis, in Alexandria, borrowing from the legends of the Golden and Rosy Cross, Mark the Evangelist converted Ormus, a priest of the cult of Seraphis who Christianized the Egyptian mysteries—understood to refer to Hermeticism—and created the initiatory society of the Wise Men of the Light.  Ormus also initiated some Essenes, who then transmitted their secrets to the Knights Templar in Palestine, who in their turn took the tradition to Scotland, where it gave rise to an order of oriental Masonry. This Gnostic tradition then supposedly survived in Egypt, where it was kept by the “Knights of Palestine.” They were also known as the “Brethren of the Rosy Cross of the Orient.”[46] According to the legend of the Rite of Memphis, eighty-one Mason under the conduct of a certain Garimont, Patriarch of Jerusalem, travelled to Europe in 1150, and went to the Bishop of Upsala in Sweden, who they initiated into their mysteries and entrusted. They entrusted their to the Bishop of Upsala, who concealed them in the tower of the “Four Crowns” which was the crown treasure chamber of the King of Sweden. When the Templars were established in Europea, they were imparted with the  treasure. Thus, explains Masonic historian Schio Reghellini, “in a short time the Knights Templars became the receivers and depositors of the mysteries, rites and ceremonies which had been brought over by the Masons from the East—the Levites of the true Light.”[47]

After the execution of their Grand Master Jacques de Molay, fugitive Templars joined Robert the Bruce in Scottland, fighting in the Battle of Bannockburn against Edward III of England. They joined a new Order which Bruce had founded, and which resembled in many ways the Order of the Templars. The Scottish Templars were excommunicated by Harminius in 1324, corresponding to the separation of the Masons of Edinburgh Masons from those of Memphis, which took place in 1322. The Masons of Memphis purportedly remained faithful to the ancient tradition, the others founded a new Rite under the name of Heredom of Kilwinning, leading to the  surviving traditions of the Rite of Memphis and the Scottish Rite.[48]

 

Revolutions of 1848

Buonarroti and Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805 – 1881), a French socialist and Carbonari notable for his revolutionary theory of Blanquism, influenced the early French labor and socialist movements.[49] In May 1839, a Blanquist-inspired uprising took place in Paris, in which participated the League of the Just, forerunners of Karl Marx’s Communist League. Buonarroti’s work became a bible for revolutionaries, inspiring such leftists as Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820 – 1895).[50] Marx was tutored in communism by Moses Hess (1812 – 1875), early Zionist thinker and an ardent admirer of Mazzini.[51] As Jewish historian Paul Johnson pointed out in his History of the Jews, Marx’s theory of history resembles the Kabbalistic theories of the Messianic Age of Shabbetai Zevi’s mentor, Nathan of Gaza.[52] Karl and Jenny Marx were married in 1843, after which they moved to Paris and befriended his distant relative, Heinrich Heine (1797 – 1856), who also born Jewish. One of Marx’s grandparents was Nanette Salomon Barent-Cohen, whose cousin had married Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777 – 1836), head of the French branch of the family. From 1850, Marx’s private secretary was Wilhelm Pieper (1826 – 1898), who from 1852-56 as a teacher to Alfred de Rothschild (1842 – 1918), the second son Baron Lionel Nathan Rothschild (1808 – 1879), himself the son of Nathan Mayer Rothschild.[53] At the age of twenty-one, Alfred would take up employment at the NM Rothschild Bank, and in 1868, he became a director of the Bank of England, a post he held for 20 years, until 1889.

The famous German poet Heinrich Heine was a Freemason and a close friend of Marx and the Rothschilds. Heine, who converted to Lutheranism in 1825, famously referred to baptism as the “admission ticket” to European culture. As noted David Bakan, was the practice of feigned conversion to Christianity was typically associated with Sabbateanism.[54] Heine along with his fellow radical exile in Paris, Ludwig Börne (1786 – 1837), a Jewish convert to Lutheranism, were leading members of Mazzini’s Young Germany. Börne was a close friend of Mark Herz, a close friend of Moses Mendelssohn and David Friedländer, and husband of the salonnière Henriette Herz, and was also a member the Masonic Judenloge.[55] Moses Hess also befriended the “ingenious, prophetic Heine,” as he called him in his unpublished diary of 1836.[56] Heine also made the acquaintances in Berlin of Karl August Varnhagen and his Jewish wife, the famous salonnière Rahel, a friend of Henriette Herz. Heine was also a member of the Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Judenthums.

A great number of Frankists who had joined the Rite of Memphis participated in a spree of Marxist-inspired subversive movements, known as the Year of Revolutions of 1848, when Europe experienced a series of protests, rebellions and often violent upheavals, in the Netherlands, Italy, the Austrian Empire, and the states of the German Confederation.[57] According to his friend Alexander Herzen (1812 – 1870), the “father of Russian Socialism,” Mazzini was the “shining star” of the Revolutions of 1848.[58] The revolutions were inspired by ideals of “democracy,” referring to the replacement an electorate of property-owners with universal male suffrage, and “liberalism,” calling for the consent of the governed, separation of church and state, republican government, freedom of the press and the individual.[59]

The most famous of all the 1848 European revolutionaries was Hungarian Mason Lajos Kossuth (1802 – 1894). In 1849, Kossuth issued the celebrated Hungarian Declaration of Independence from the Habsburg Monarchy during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, and he was appointed regent-president. However, in response to the intervention of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, who was an opponent of revolution, and the failure of appeals to the western powers, Kossuth abdicated. Kossuth then first fled to the Ottoman Empire and finally arrived in England in 1851. There the other revolutionaries, including Mazzini, led a German delegation welcoming Kossuth into his British exile.[60] After his arrival, the press characterized the atmosphere of the streets of London as this: “It had seemed like a coronation day of Kings.”[61] Many leading British politicians tried without success to suppress the so-called “Kossuth mania.” Palmerston intended to receive Kossuth, but it was prevented by a vote in Cabinet. Instead, Palmerston received a delegation of Trade Unionists from Islington and Finsbury and listened sympathetically as they read an address that praised Kossuth and declared the Emperors of Austria and Russia “despots, tyrants and odious assassins.”[62]

As a period of harsh reaction followed the widespread Revolutions of 1848, the next major phase of revolutionary activity began almost twenty years later with the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), often called the First International, in 1864. As demonstrated by Boris I. Nicolaevsky, the creation of the First International was the result of the efforts of the Philadelphes of the Rite of Memphis, who had become supporters of Mazzini and Garibaldi.[63] The Grand Lodge of the Philadelphians brought together primarily, but not exclusively, by French émigrés in England, was formally part of an association that, at the beginning of the 1850’s, was known as the radical and revolutionary Order of Memphis, with members such as Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Louis Blan (1811 – 1882), the French socialist politician. They instituted a Grand Lodge des Philadelphes, which linked up with Buonarroti’s Carbonari, Mazzini’s Young Europe and were active in the founding of the Commune Révolutionnaire and the First International.[64]

Hess, an influential proponent of socialism, collaborated with a number of radical philosophers associated with Marx and Engels, including P.J. Proudhon, Bruno Bauer, Etienne Cabet, Max Stiner, Ferdinand Lassalle and the Luciferian and anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814 – 1876).[65] In 1864, Marx obtained control of the two-year-old First International, by which a number of secret societies were absorbed.[66] The First International eventually split between two main tendencies: the state socialist wing represented by Marx and the anarchist wing represented by Mikhail Bakunin, a Grand Orient Freemason, and an avowed Satanist connected to the Philadelphes.[67] Although 33º Mason of the Scottish Rite, Bakunin wrote to Herzen that he did not take Freemasonry seriously, other than it “can be useful as a mask or as a passport.”[68] In 1869, Bakunin wrote his Polémique contre les Juifs (“Polemic Against the Jews”) mainly directed against the Jews of the International. Bakunin described as “the most formidable sect” in Europe, and asserted that a leak of information had taken place in the secret societies, and that it was the reason for the breakup of his own secret society.[69] Nevertheless, Bakunin notes that the Jews are “one of the most intelligent races on earth,” and cites as examples: Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, his son Felix and his friend Meyerbeer, Heine, Börne and even Karl Marx. However, according to Bakunin, “But, beside these great minds, there is the small fry: an innumerable crowd of little Jews, bankers, usurers, industrialists, merchants, literati, journalists, politicians, socialists and speculators always.”[70]

Disappointed at the failure of the revolutions of 1848, many of its participants, known as “Forty-Eighters,” went into exile, emigrating to Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Leading “Forty-Eighters” included Gottfried Kinkel (1815 – 1882) and Johannes Ronge (1813 – 1887). In London, Kinkel had been involved with the Communist League but later joined the anti-Marx split led August Willich (1810 – 1878) and Karl Schapper (1812 – 1870.[71]  Kinkel developed a friendship with one of his students, Carl Christian Schurz (1829 – 1906), who fought for democratic reforms in the German revolutions of 1848–1849. Although he wasn’t himself Jewish, Schurz married a Jewish wife, Margarethe Meyer-Schurz (1833 – 1876).

Margarethe Meyer’s sister, Bertha Traun, married Johannes Ronge, the principal founder of the German Catholics, dissidents from the Roman Catholic Church. Ronge was obliged to flee to London, where he signed in 1851, with Ruge, Kinkel, Gustav Struve, and others, a democratic manifesto to the German people, and where, with Robert Blum (1807 – 1848), a German Jew who supported the German Catholics, he became the leader of the Freireligiöse, the forerunners of the American Freethinkers.[72] In Paris, Arnold Ruge (1802 – 1880), a friend of Carbonari member Alexandre Ledru-Rollin (1807 – 1874), briefly co-edited the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher with Marx.  In London, in company with Mazzini and other radical politicians, Ruge formed a European Democratic Committee. Fröbel’s nephew and star student was Julius Fröbel (1805 – 1893), who was a friend of Alexander von Humboldt, of Weimar Classicism—whose friend and benefactor was Moses Mendelssohn’s eldest son Joseph—called his uncle’s school, “a breeding ground of the contemporary revolutionary spirit.”[73] In 1859, the Ronges moved to Manchester where they opened a kindergarten at which they were joined by Maria Kraus Boelte, a pioneer of the methods of Friedrich Fröbel (1782 – 1852),  who laid the foundation for modern education and created the concept of the kindergarten.[74]

In France in 1848, King Louis Philippe, the son of Philippe “Égalité,” was overthrown and the revolution of Louis Blanc (1811 – 1882) established the French Second Republic, headed by Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (1808 – 1873). Blanc, one of the leading representatives of the Order of Memphis, was one of the organizers of its Supreme Council in London, where he was able to direct its policy and to influence the policy of the Lodge of the Philadelphians without officially becoming a member.[75] On December 2, 1851, Louis-Napoleon staged a coup that marked the end of the Second Republic and the beginning of the Second Empire, became the Emperor of the French, as Napoleon III. Mazzini regarded Napoleon III not only as a traitor and the most dangerous opponent of his goal of Italian unification. Consequently, Mazzini sent a group of terrorists to France to assassinate him. As most of the terrorists came from English territory, with the assistance of Englishmen, the French press accused the English government of supporting them.[76] The most famous attempt on Napoleon III’s life was carried out by Felice Orsini (1819 – 1858), with a grenade on January 14, 1858. Although the explosion missed its target, 156 people, including innocent bystanders, were killed.

 


[1] Webster. Secret Societies and Subversive Movements.

[2] Henri Martin. Histoire de France, Vol. XVI. p. 531; cited in Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, p. 233.

[3] Norman Cohn. Warrant for genocide: the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy and the Protocols of the elders of Zion (London: Serif, 2005), p. 31.

[4] Ibid., p. 32.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Reinhard Markner. “Giovanni Battista Simonini: Shards from the Disputed Life of an Italian Anti-Semite.” In Kesarevo Kesarju. Scritti in onore di Cesare G. De Michelis, a cura di Marina Ciccarini, Nicoletta Marcialis, Giorgio Ziffer (Firenze University Press), p. 312.

[7] Nicholas Hagger. The Secret History of the West (O Books, 2005), pp. 367, 373.

[8] George F. Dillon. War of Anti-Christ with the Church and Christian Civilization (M.H. Gill & Son, 1885).

[9] John Vennari. The Permanent Instructions of the Alta Vendita (Rockford, Ill: Tan Books, 1999), p. 6.

[10] Ronald F. Musto. Apocalypse in Rome: Cola di Rienzo and the Politics of the New Age (University of California Press, 2003).

[11] Massimo Introvigne. Satanism: A Social History (Leiden: Brill, 2016), p. 217.

[12] Ibid., p. 185–186.

[13] John C. Lester & Daniel Love Wilson. Ku Klux klan: its origin, growth and disbandment, p. 27. Retrieved from http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2j4OAAAAIAAJ&q=Pike

[14] Margiotta. Adriano Lemmi, p. 97; cited in Queenborough. Occult Theocracy, pp. 225.

[15] Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. The First Professional Revolutionist: Filippo Michele Buonarroti (1761-1837) (Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 11.

[16] “Philalèthes” Encyclopédie de la franc-maçonnerie, pocketbook, p.658, 659

[17] Bode. Travel Journal; cited in Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[18] Ibid.

[19] “Philalèthes” Encyclopédie de la franc-maçonnerie, pocketbook, p.658, 659

[20] Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. The First Professional Revolutionist: Filippo Michele Buonarroti (1761-1837) (Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 11.

[21] Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[22] Cited in Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[23] James H. Billington. Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (Basic Books 1980), p. 137

[24] Diego Gambetta. The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 149.

[25] “Giuseppe Mazzini” in Volume III K – P of 10,000 Famous Freemasons, William R. Denslow, 1957, Macoy Publishing & Masonic Supply Co., Inc.; Garibaldi—the mason Translated from Giuseppe Garibaldi Massone by the Grand Orient of Italy.

[26] Entry of January 23, 1904. In: Marvin Lowenthal (ed. and trans.). The Diaries of Theodor Herzl (London, 1958), pp, 425–426; cited in Robert S. Wistrichin. “Theodor Herzl: Between Myth and Messianism.” In: Mark H. Gelber & Vivian Liska (eds.). Theodor Herzl: From Europe to Zion (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag 2007), p. 19.

[27] Stefano Recchia & Nadia Urbinati (eds.). A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini's Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 1.

[28] Albert Thomas. “The League of Nations.” The Atlantic (November 1918). Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1918/11/the-league-of-nations/567347/

[29] R. John Rath. “The Carbonari: Their Origins, Initiation Rites, and Aims.” The American Historical Review, 69: 2 (January, 1964), p. 355.

[30] Recchia & Urbinati (eds.). A Cosmopolitanism of Nations, p. 1.

[31] Monsignor George Dillon. Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked (London: Britons Publishing Company, 1950) p. 89.

[32] Mario Rossi. “Emancipation of the Jews in Italy.” Jewish Social Studies 15, no. 2 (1953), p. 119–120. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4465154

[33] Marjorie Stone. “Joseph Mazzini, English Writers, and the Post Office Espionage Scandal: Politics, Privacy, and Twenty-First Century Parallels.” Branc Collective. Retrieved from https://branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=marjorie-stone-on-the-post-office-espionage-scandal-1844

[34] Joel Porte. In Respect to Egotism: Studies in American Romantic Writing (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 23.

[35] Judith Thurman. “The Desires of Margaret Fuller.” The New Yorker (March 25, 2013).

[36] David M. Robinson. “Margaret Fuller and the coming democracy.” OUPblog (August 21st 2017). Retrieved from https://blog.oup.com/2017/08/margaret-fuller-democracy/

[37] Michael Walzer “On Democratic Internationalism.” Dissent (Spring 2016). Retrieved from https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/democratic-internationalism-hungarian-revolution-irving-howe

[38] Kazimierz Wyka. “Mickiewicz, Adam Bernard.” Polski Słownik Biograficzny, vol. XX, 1975, p. 703.

[39] De Poli. Freemansonry and the Orient, p. 21.

[40] Webster. Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, p. 174.

[41] Cited in Keith. Secret and Suppressed, p. 104.

[42] “Freemasonry, Secret Societies, and the Continuity of the Occult Tradition in English Literature.” Ph.D. diss., (Austin: University of Texas, 1975) p. 353; “Yeats and the Unknown Superiors: Swedenborg, Falk, and Cagliostro,” Hermetic Journal, 37 (1987) p. 18.

[43] John Yarker. “The Antient and Primitive Rite of Masonry.” The Kneph, Vol. VIII, No. 1, September, 1888.

[44] N.E. Kenny. “The Sanctuary of Memphis, or Hermes.” The Masonic Magazine, 77: 7 (November, 1879), p. 194. Retrieved from https://masonicperiodicals.org/static/media/periodicals/119-MMG-1879-11-01-001-SINGLE.pdf

[45] Plutarch. Symposiacs, iv, 6.

[46] Allan H. Greenfield. The Roots of Modern Magick: 1700 thru 2000 (Manutius Press, 2006) p. 137

[47] Schio Reghellini. La Maçonnerie, Considérée Comme Le Résultat Des Religions Égyptienne, Juive Et Chrétienne (Paris: La Librairie Orientale due F. Dondey-Dupré, 1883), p. 437; cited in Mackey. The History of Freemasonry (1898). Retrieved from http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/mackeyhi15.html

[48] N.E. Kenny. “The Sanctuary of Memphis, or Hermes.” The Masonic Magazine, 77: 7 (November, 1879), p. 196. Retrieved from https://masonicperiodicals.org/static/media/periodicals/119-MMG-1879-11-01-001-SINGLE.pdf

[49] Thomas Kurian (ed). The Encyclopedia of Political Science (Washington D.C: CQ Press, 2011), p. 1555.

[50] Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels. The Holy Family.

[51] Benjamin Peixotto. “Principality, now Kingdom, of Roumania.” Menorah, I: 1 (July, 1886), p. 345.

[52] Paul Johnson. A History of the Jews (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987). p 348.

[53] “The Knight of Noble Consciousness.” Vol. 12 (New York, 1854), p. 479

[54] David Bakan. Sigmund Freud and The Jewish Mystical Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1958), p. 196.

[55] Katz. Jews and Freemasons in Europe 1723-1939, p. 82.

[56] Edmund Silberner. “Zwei unbekannte Briefe von Moses Hess an Heinrich Heine.” International Review of Social History, 6, 3 (1961), p. 456.

[57] Clark Marvin H., Jr. Karl Marx: Prophet of the Red Horseman. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20051225173451/http://morveninstituteoffreedom.org/pdfs/marx.pdf

[58] Stefano Recchia & Nadia Urbinati. Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations (Princeton University Press, 2009).

[59] Paul Wiriath. “France: History.” In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. 10, 11th ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1911), 867.

[60] Nicolaevsky. “Secret Societies and the First International.”

[61] Phineas Camp Headley. The Life of Louis Kossuth: Governor of Hungary (Publisher: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1856), p. 241.

[62] Jasper Ridley. Lord Palmerston (Publisher Pan Macmillan, 2013).

[63] Boris I. Nicolaevsky. “Secret Societies and the First International.” The Revolutionary Internationals, 1864-1943; ed. Milorad M. Drachovitch, (Stanford University Press, 1966).

[64] Ibid.

[65] Nahum Norbert Glatzer. The Judaic Tradition: Texts (Behrman House Inc., 1969) p. 526.

[66] Nesta H. Webster. World Revolution Or the Plot Against Civilization (Kessinger Publishing) p. 187.

[67] Ibid; Nicolaevsky & Maenchen-Helfen. Karl Marx, pp. 22–27.

[68] T.R. Ravindranathan. Bakunin & the Italians (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), pp. 26

[69] James Guillaume. Documents de l’Internationale, I. 131. Cited in Nesta Webster. Secret Societies and Subversive Movements. Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19104/19104-h/19104-h.htm

[70] Ibid.

[71] Collected works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Volume 11 (International Publishers: New York, 1979), p. 708.

[72] Marx & Engels. Heroes of the Exile. Chapter X. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/heroes-exile/ch10.htm

[73] Rolland Ray Lutz. “‘Father’ Jahn and his Teacher-Revolutionaries from the German Student Movement.” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 48, No. 2, On Demand Supplement (June, 1976), p. 16.

[74] Rolland Ray Lutz. “‘Father’ Jahn and his Teacher-Revolutionaries from the German Student Movement.” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 48, No. 2, On Demand Supplement (June, 1976), p. 3.

[75] Eisenstein. The First Professional Revolutionist, pp. 43-4; Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[76] Nicolaevsky & Maenchen-Helfen. Karl Marx, pp. 22–27.

Divide & Conquer