10. The Society of the Dilettanti

Hellfire Club

The Illuminati attracted literary men such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Gottfried Herder, the leading exponents of the Romantic movement and Weimar Classicism, who were admirers of Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729 – 1786), the central figure in the development of the Haskalah, or “Jewish Enlightenment” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to a list of ordination found in a certificate held in the Schiff Collection at the New York Public Library, Mendelssohn was a successor of Shabbetai Zevi. The certificate, which was mentioned briefly by Jewish historian Jacob Katz in Out of the Ghetto, was preserved by Mendelssohn’s friend, the notorious Illuminati publisher Friedrich Nicolai (1733 – 1811).[1] Mendelssohn was also a close friend of another Illuminatus, the German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 1781), who in 1767, together with Joachim Christoph Bode (1731 – 1793), Councilor of Legation in Saxe-Gotha, who would become a leading recruiter for the Illuminati, created the J.J.C. Bode & Co. publishing firm and store in Hamburg.[2]

Goethe, like many others of the German Romantic period, including Moses Mendelssohn and his friends Lessing and Herder, was an admirer of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717 – 1768), a German art historian and archaeologist who had a decisive influence on the rise of the Neoclassical movement.[3] Winckelmann was an open homosexual, which defined his writings on aesthetics. Richard Payne Knight (1751 –1824), a classical scholar and archaeologist, led the Society of the Dilettanti to write its ultimate work, Specimens of Antient Sculpture, whose various homoerotic tributes to Greek works of art owed a debt to the influence of Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art.[4] Knight best known for his theories of picturesque beauty and for his interest in ancient phallic imagery, as he expounded in A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786/87). The pagan fertility god Priapus was the ugly son of Dionysus and Aphrodite, whose symbol was a huge erect penis, and the Greek, half man—half goat god, Pan. According to Henry Cornelius Agrippa in Chapter 39 of his book De Occulta Philosophia published in 1531–1533:

 

Everyone knows that evil spirits can be summoned through evil and profane practices (similar to those that Gnostic magicians used to engage in, according to Psellus), and filthy abominations would occur in their presence, as during the rites of Priapus in times past or in the worship of the idol named Panor to whom one sacrificed having bared shameful parts. Nor is any different from this (if only it is truth and not fiction) what we read about the detestable heresy of the Knights Templar, as well as similar notions that have been established about witches, whose senile womanish dementia is often caught causing them to wander astray into shameful deeds of the same variety.

 

Along with Hellfire Club founder Sir Francis Dashwood (1708 – 1781), Charles Sackville, 2nd Duke of Dorset (1711 – 1769), was member of the Society of Dilettanti, a British society of noblemen and scholars who, inspired by Winckelmann, sponsored the study of ancient Greek and Roman art, and influenced the rise of neo-Classicism.[5] Though the exact date is unknown, the Society is believed to have been established as a gentlemen’s club in 1734 by a group of people who had been on the Grand Tour. In 1743, Horace Walpole denounced the group and described it as “…a club, for which the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk: the two chiefs are Lord Middlesex and Sir Francis Dashwood, who were seldom sober the whole time they were in Italy.”[6] The name Hellfire Club is most commonly used to refer to the Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe, founded by Dashwood, the same year he was elected to the Royal Society. The first official Hellfire Club was founded in London in 1718, by Philip, Duke of Wharton (1698 – 1731), a Freemason, Grand Master of England, and an ardent supporter of the Jacobite cause. Wharton also founded an offshoot of the Hellfire club based in Twickenham, called The Schemers, which inclined more towards debauchery than blasphemy. In 1721, these clubs were disbanded by King George I, who, influenced heavily by Wharton’s political rival Robert Walpole, announced a bill against immorality specifically aimed at the Hellfire Club.[7]

Wharton arranged to be elected the sixth Grand Master in 1722, and appointed Desaguiliers as his Deputy and James Anderson a Grand Warden. However, Wharton apparently abandoned Freemasonry in 1723, and then founded the Ancient Noble Order of the Gormogons, whose he first known Grand Master (or Oecumenical Volgi) was Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay, then at Rome in attendance upon the Young Pretender. From the group’s few published articles it is thought that the society’s primary objective was to hold up Freemasonry to ridicule.[8] The Gormogons were first mentioned in the London Daily Post for September 3, 1724, which claimed that the order was “instituted by Chin-Qua Ky-Po, the first Emperor of China (according to their account), many thousand years before Adam, and of which the great philosopher Confucious was Oecumenicae Volgee.” The order was said to have been brought to London by a “Mandarin,” who in turn initiated several “Gentlemen of Honor” into its ranks.

 

Villa Albani

With the advent of the Grand Tour, a fad of collecting antiquities began that laid the foundations of many great collections spreading a Neoclassical revival throughout Europe.[9] Winckelmann was an open homosexual, which defined his writings on aesthetics. “By no people,” Winckelmann asserted, “has beauty been so highly esteemed as by the Greeks,” but by “beauty,” for Winckelmann was homoerotic titillation from depictions of the male nudes.[10] In 1755, Winckelmann published his Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (“Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture”), which contained the first statement of the doctrines he afterwards developed, the ideal of “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” and the definitive assertion that, “[t]he one way for us to become great, perhaps inimitable, is by imitating the ancients.” The work made Winckelmann famous, and was it was reprinted several times and soon translated into French and English.

On the strength of the Gedanken, Augustus III of Poland—who was Jacob Frank’s godfather at his baptism, and for whom Baron von Hund, founder of the Strict Observance, served as Intimate Counselor[11]—granted him a pension so that he could continue his studies in Rome. Winckelmann arrived in Rome in November 1755. His first task was to describe the statues in the Cortile del Belvedere: the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, the so-called Antinous, and the Belvedere Torso, which represented to him the “utmost perfection of ancient sculpture.”[12] Winckelmann was named librarian to Cardinal Passionei (1682 – 1761), who was impressed by his Greek writing. “Cardinal Passionei, a jovial old man of seventy-eight years,” Winckelmann openly confessed, took him:

 

…for drives… and he always escorts me home in person. When I accompany him to Frascati, we sit down to table in slippers and night-caps; and if I choose to humour him, in our night-shirts too. This may seem incredible, but I am telling the truth.[13]

 

Winckelmann was supported by the nephew of Pope Clement IX (1649 –1721), Cardinal Albani (1692 – 1779), who maintained a correspondence with Sir Horace Mann (1706 – 1786), the British envoy at Florence, whose duties included reporting on the activities of the exiled Stuarts, the Old Pretender and the Young Pretender.[14] Beginning as librarian-companion to Cardinal Albani, Winckelmann became first Librarian and finally Controller of Antiquities in the Vatican. In Rome, Winckelmann had an affair Franz Stauder, a pupil of Anton Raphael Mengs, who had been appointed the first painter to Augustus III of Poland.[15] Mengs, like Winckelmann, was supported by Cardinal Albani. Mengs’ pagan-themed fresco painting Parnassus at Villa Albani gained him a reputation as a master painter.[16] The Villa Albani was built to house Albani’s collection of antiquities, curated by Winckelmann. Albani developed into one of the most powerful and enterprising collectors of Roman antiquities and patron of the arts of his day.[17]

Albani also maintained a friendship with Philipp von Stosch (1691 – 1757), a Prussian antiquarian who lived in Rome and Florence. Jonathan I. Israel described Stosch as “the legendary deist, freemason, and open homosexual.”[18] Stosch was a founder of a Masonic Lodge in Florence in 1733, which Pope Clement IX’s cardinal-nephew Neri Corsini accused of having become “corrupt,” leading to the ban on Catholics becoming Freemasons. As Stosch was employed by the Foreign Office in London and was likely using Freemasonry as a cover to spy on the exiled Stuart cause in Rome, as Clement IX, who was sympathetic to the Jacobites, kept the Old Pretender as his guest in Rome.[19]

 

Priapus 

In 1751, Dashwood, leased Medmenham Abbey, which incorporated the ruins of a Cistercian abbey founded in 1201. Dashwood had the abbey rebuilt, but to look like a ruin, and decorated with various pornographic scenes. Rabelais’ motto Fais ce que tu voudras (“Do what thou wilt”) was placed above a doorway in stained glass. After the Black Mass, club members entered the Abbey where were waiting professional prostitutes dressed as nuns and masked from whom they selected to participate in an orgy. However, a few of the participating women were wives or relatives of the club members. John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, inventor of the sandwich, boasted that he seduced virgins to enjoy the “corruption of innocence, for its own sake.”[20]

In addition to the prostitutes were amateurs known as “dollymops,” some of them prominent society women, such as a Jewess named Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston (1721 – 1788).[21] The duchess was also the mistress of the James Hamilton, 6th Duke of Hamilton (1724 – 1758), a Freemason and cousin of another member of the Society of Dilettanti, British diplomat Sir William Hamilton (1730 – 1803), who collaborated with Richard Payne Knight on A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus.[22] Hamilton, whose embassy was in Naples, assembled a collection vases and other classical antiquities, which he sold to the fledgling British Museum. Their cataloguing and publication was entrusted by Hamilton to Pierre-François Hugues d’Hancarville (1719 – 1805), who concluded that vases referred to the Eleusinian Mysteries, whose great secret was the unity of God, which was the key to the universal religion of antiquity, which had been brought to classical Greece from the Phoenicians and Etruscans by way of Orphism.[23] A similar conclusion was published in 1772, L’Antiquité dévoilée par ses usages (“Antiquity Unveiled Through its Uses”), attributed to Nicholas Boulanger but rewritten by the Baron d’Holbach (1723 – 1789), a French philosopher admired by Adam Weishaupt.[24] Holbach used his wealth to maintain one of the more notable and lavish Parisian salons, which soon became an important meeting place for the contributors to the Encyclopédie. Among the regulars were Diderot, Condorcet, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Horace Walpole, Edward Gibbon, and Benjamin Franklin.[25] Holbach was also strongly admired by Adam Weishaupt.[26] According to Boulanger, Orphism resembled the system of the Brahmins, with their successive creations and destructions of the world.[27]

In 1781, Sir William Hamilton learned of the phallic procession of Saints Cosmas and Damian being celebrated in the remote town of Isernia, in the Abruzzo. Hamilton wrote of his discovery to his friend Sir Joseph Banks (1743 – 1820), President of the Royal Society and Secretary-Treasurer of the Dilettanti, which voted to print Hamilton’s letter for private circulation among its members. Banks was a cousin and close friend of General Charles R. Rainsford, who collaborated with Jacob Falk.[28] Hamilton introduced d’Hancarville to a fellow Dilettante, Charles Townley Charles Townley (1737 – 1805), who invited him to catalogue his collection of ancient sculpture and to stay in his house in London. While living with Townley, d’Hancarville wrote most of his Recherches sur l'origine, l'esprit, et les progrès des arts de la Grèce.[29] The first of the principles advanced by d’Hancarville was that the world had originally had “one cult, one theology, one religion, and very likely one language.”[30] The primordial religion, whose main symbols were the Bull and the Serpent, both representing the Creator God, left its mark on the arts of China, Tartary, and India, from all of which were represented in Townley’s collection.[31] Later the bull was personalized as Bacchus, the Roman Dionysus, a “mythological phantom” later identified as the Scythian leader who carried this cult across Asia, where it survived in India as the cult of the cow and of “Brouma.”[32]

Sir William Hamilton collaborated with Richard Payne Knight (1751 – 1824) a classical scholar and archaeologist, who was converted to d’Hancarville’s thesis, himself deducing that the universal archetypes from the iconography of religions ancient and modern, eastern and western, asserting that “the BRAHMA of the Indians is the same as the PAN of the Greeks.”[33] In 1785, Knight visited Hamilton in Naples, and the next year he published a book-length essay, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and its Connexion with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients, within the same covers as the accounts of the modern Priapic rites of Isernia.[34] The central claim of the book was that an international religious impulse to worship “the generative principle” was articulated through phallic imagery, and that this imagery has persisted into the modern age. In his analysis, Knight claimed to follow the “true Orphic system,” which he believed probably represented the “true catholic faith.”[35] Knight recognized in the Bhagavad Gita “the same one principle of life universally emanated and expanded, and ever partially returning to be again absorbed in the infinite abyss of intellectual being.”[36]

Sir William Hamilton was the husband of the infamous Emma Hamilton (1765 – 1815). Also known as Lady Hamilton, she was an English model and actress, who is remembered as the mistress of Admiral Lord Nelson (1758 – 1805), regarded as one of the greatest naval commanders in history. Emma had also been a mistress of the politician Charles Greville (1749 – 1809). However, when Emma stood in the way of a search for a wealthy wife, Greville pawned her off on his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, from whom she derived her title.[37] Lady Hamilton became famous for a form of striptease she developed, what she called her “Attitudes,” or tableaux vivants, in which she portrayed semi-nude sculptures and paintings before British visitors. Emma’s performances were a sensation with visitors from across Europe and even attracted the attention of Goethe. In 1800, Emma became Dame Emma Hamilton, a title she held as a member of the Order of Malta, awarded to her by the then Grand Master of the Order, Tsar Paul I, in recognition of her role in the defense of the island of Malta against the French.[38]

 

Greek Love

Winckelmann’s subsequent influence on Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Hölderlin, Heinrich Heine, Nietzsche, Stefan George and Oswald Spengler has been called “the Tyranny of Greece over Germany.”[39] It was largely under the appeal of  Winckelmann that many German philosophers began to develop an appreciation for the ancient Greeks. Winckelmann’s major work, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764, “The History of Ancient Art”), which deeply influenced contemporary views of the superiority of Greek art, was translated into French in 1766 and later into English and Italian. Lessing, based many of the ideas in his Laocoön (1766) on Winckelmann’s views on harmony and expression in the visual arts. Reviewing the 1756 edition in the first issue of Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste, the journal he had recently co-founded with Moses Mendelssohn, the young Friedrich Nicolai—who would later become the Illuminati publisher—praised “Herr Winckelmann, who has now embarked upon a voyage to Rome,” as a man “from whom the fine arts will undoubtedly derive great benefit.”[40]

Adam Friedrich Oeser (1717 – 1799), who studied with Mengs and Winckelmann, was the drawing teacher of Goethe, with whom he kept up friendly relations afterwards at Weimar. Winckelmann subsequently exercised a powerful influence over Goethe. For example, Goethe’s journey to the Italian peninsula and Sicily from 1786 to 1788 was of great significance on the development of his aesthetic and philosophy. During the course of his trip, Goethe met and befriended the Swiss Neoclassical painter Angelica Kauffman (1741 – 1807) and the German painter Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein (1751 – 1829), as well as encountering Lady Hamilton and Count Cagliostro.[41] In 1783, upon the recommendation of Goethe, Tischbein had received a stipendium from Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1745 – 1804), a friend of Adam Weishaupt, who was the great-grandfather of Prince Albert the husband of Queen Victoria.[42]

In Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert (“Winkelmann and his Century”), Goethe claimed that literary classicism owed its ideal of beauty to Winckelmann who was able to develop to convey because of his homosexuality.[43] Goethe’s relationship with his male servant, Philipp Seidel, which was certainly described by Seidel as homoerotic.[44] Goethe also defended pederasty: “Pederasty is as old as humanity itself, and one can therefore say that it is natural, that it resides in nature, even if it proceeds against nature. What culture has won from nature will not be surrendered or given up at any price.”[45] Goethe published his famous poem about Ganymede (1789), the myth that was a model for the Greek social custom of paiderastia, the romantic relationship between an adult male and an adolescent male. It immediately follows Prometheus, and the two poems together should be understood as a pair, Ganymede—who is seduced by God (or Zeus) through the beauty of Spring—expressing the sentiment of “divine love,” and the other misotheism, the “hatred of the gods” or “hatred of God.”

In a letter to Johann Georg Zimmermann in 1784, Moses Mendelssohn pictured “the ideal man […] who would do for the cause of God what Winckelmann did for paganism.”[46] Winckelmann also posited the existence of an art tradition in ancient Israel, that would have preceded anything in Greece, recalling the wrought images in the Bible. As Winckelmann believed that artistic excellence was conditioned by climate and physiology, he speculated that the physical conformation of the ancient Jews would have been suitable for the expression of ideas of beauty. Hebrew art, Winckelmann surmised, must have achieved a degree of excellence, if not in sculpture, than in drawing and other art forms, taking note that Bible recorded that the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar exiled from Jerusalem a thousand artists expert in inlaid work.[47]

About Egypt and Egyptian art, however, Winckelmann expressed only contempt. The opinion was therefore reciprocated in Mendelssohn. for similar reasons. According to Braiterman, “Although he never would have admitted it to others or seen it himself, Mendelssohn’s Jewish thought was part of the neoclassical rebellion against ‘tradition,’ which in this context means the fusion of parts in seventeenth-century baroque art and culture.” Braiterman notes that David Sorkin, in his book on Mendelssohn, made reference to “baroque Judaism,” by which he meant Judaism of Talmud and Kabbalah, and that Gershom Scholem compared Sabbateanism to the contemporary European baroque. Mendelssohn’s interest in the neoclassicism of Winckelmann was, therefore, seen as a reform of ancient Judaism by proposing that there were new ways of interpreting the beauty it was capable of producing, that could compete with the Enlightenment’s emphasis on “reason” of its new artforms.[48]

 

 


[1] Rabbi Antelman. To Eliminate the Opiate. Volume 2 (Jerusalem: Zionist Book Club, 2002). p. 102.

[2] Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[3] Bernd Witte. “German Classicism and Judaism.” In Steven E. Aschheim & Vivian Liska. The German-Jewish Experience Revisited. Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts, Volume 3 (De Gruyter, 2015), p. 50.

[4] Redford. Dilettanti, p. 164.

[5] Bruce Redford. Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2008), 164.

[6] Horace Walpole; cited in Jeremy Black. The British and the Grand Tour (1985), p. 120.

[7] “The Gorgomons.” The Square Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.thesquaremagazine.com/mag/article/202006the-gormogons/

[8] Ibid.

[9] Stephen L. Dyson. In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts: A History of Classical Archaeology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Yale University Press, 2006), pp. xii.

[10] Alex Potts. Flesh and the Ideal : Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 116.

[11] Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince. The Sion Revelation: The Truth About the Guardians of Christ’s Sacred Bloodline (Simon and Schuster, 2006), p. 319.

[12] “Apollo Belvedere.” The Classical Tradition (Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 55–56.

[13] Daniel J. Boorstin. The Discoverers (New York: Random House, 1983), p. 585.

[14] Lesley Lewis. Connoisseurs and Secret Agents in Eighteenth-Century Rome (1961).

[15] “Winckelmann, Johann Joachim.” Dictionary of Art Historians. Retrieved from https://arthistorians.info/winckelmannj/

[16] George Williamson. “Anthon Rafael Mengs.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 10. Retrieved from http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10189a.htm

[17] Seymour Howard. “Some Eighteenth-Century ‘Restored’ Boxers.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 56 (1993, pp. 238-255) p. 238f.

[18] Jonathan I. Israel. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford, 2011), p. 133.

[19] “A Concise History of Freemasonry.” Old Epsomian Lodge. Retrieved from http://www.oelodge.uklinux.net/history.htm

[20] Horace Walpole; cited in Black. The British and the Grand Tour, p. 31.

[21] James Shelby Downard. “Sorcery, Sex, Assassination and the Science of Symbolism,” in Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History, ed. Jim Keith (Feral House, l993), p. 59.

[22] John Isbell. “Introduction,” Germaine De Stael, Corinne, or, Italy, trans. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Worlds Classics, 1998), p. ix.

[23] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 4.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Philipp Blom. Enlightening the World: Encyclopédie, the Book that Changed the Course of History (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 124.

[26] Christopher McIntosh. Rose Cross and the Age of Reason: The Eighteenth-Century Rosicrucianism in Central Europe and its Relationship to the Enlightenment (SUNY Press, 2012), p. 103..

[27] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 4.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Bruce Redford. Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2008), 164.

[30] D’Hancarville, I, xiv; cited in Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 6.

[31] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 6.

[32] D’Hancarville, I, 71, 87, 103; cited in Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 8.

[33] Discourse, p. 103; cited in Redford. Dilettanti, p. 114.

[34] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 8.

[35] Knight. A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and its Connection with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients (Secaucus, NJ: University Books, 1974), p. 44; cited in Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 9.

[36] Ibid, p. 74, cited in cited in Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 9.

[37] D. Constantine. Fields of Fire: a life of Sir William Hamilton (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001), p. 137.

[38] T.J. Pettigrew. Memoirs of the Life of Vice-admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, vol. i. (London: T. & W. Boone, 1849), p. 324.

[39] Eliza M. Butler. The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (London: Cambridge University Press, 1935).

[40] Friedrich Nicolai (1757), p. 65.

[41] Will D. Desmond. Hegel’s Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 10.

[42] Robert Tobin. “German Literature.” Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia (Taylor & Francis, 2000).

[43] W. Daniel Wilson. “Diabolical Entrapment: Mephisto, the Angels, and the Homoerotic in Goethe’s Faust II.” in Goethe’s Faust: Theatre of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 177.

[44] Ibid., p. 176.

[45] Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche (Zürich: Artemis Verl, 1976) p. 686.

[46] Braiterman, “The Emergence of Modern Religion,” p. 18.

[47] Winckelmann. The History of Ancient Art, 31, 108–109. Cited in Braiterman, “The Emergence of Modern Religion,” p. 15.

[48] Braiterman, “The Emergence of Modern Religion,” p. 19.

Divide & Conquer