Mixed Multitude

In The Aryan Myth: The History of Racist and Nationalistic, Leon Poliakov explained that the chief promoter of the myth of an Aryan race at the beginning of the nineteenth century was Friedrich Schlegel (1754 – 1819), who was married to Dorothea Mendelssohn, daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, leader of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, and a purported successor of the false-messiah Sabbatai Zevi. Contrary to popular assumption, the outlandish racial theories of the Nazis were not a new development, but rather, the entire aspirations of their regime derived from a tradition of German nationalism that dated back to Romantic era of the early nineteenth century, which was influenced by the occult legends of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry. Merged with the myth of Atlantis, the notion of “Oriental Kabbalah,” derived from Écossais Freemasonry, had allowed the formulation of the theory that occult doctrines were developed in ancient Asia, primarily Tibet, long before they were appropriated by the Jews. The theory was rooted in attempts to tie the ancestors of the Europeans to the Khazars, and ultimately the Lost Tribes and Gog and Magog, which contributed to the invention of the myth of the Aryan race. According to Voltaire, for example, the Jews “stole” what was of worth in their religion from the Aryans, people whom they called Gog and Magog.[1]

The European idea of nationalism is founded on the notion of a single national identity, based on a combination of shared culture, ethnicity, geography, language, politics, religion, traditions and history.[2] Scholars frequently place the beginning of nationalism with the American Declaration of Independence or with the French Revolution, for their impact on European intellectuals.[3] The notion of nationalism, as a method for mobilizing public opinion around a new state based on popular sovereignty, went back to such philosophers such as Rousseau and Voltaire, whose ideas influenced the French Revolution.[4] Much of the nineteenth-century European nationalism arose with Napoleon’s rise to power, when he took advantage of his invasion of much of Europe to spread revolutionary ideas.[5]

German nationalism after the Congress of Vienna was inspired by the ideals of the Romantic Era. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744 – 1803), a member of the Illuminati, was among those chiefly responsible for the rise of romantic nationalism, which fundamentally influenced the formation of the myth of the Aryan Race.[6] It was as a result of their influence exercised at the Masonic congress at Wilhelmsbad of 1782 that the Illuminati came to wield enormous influence in the world of European secret societies. Many influential intellectuals, clergymen and politicians counted themselves as members of the Illuminati, including Ferdinand Duke of Brunswick, Grand Master of the Order of Strict Observance, and the diplomat Xavier von Zwack, who became the Illuminati’s second-in-command. 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. In their rejection of the Enlightenment and the imperial ambitions of French under Napoleon, they helped shape the growing German nationalism and its attended occult-based theories of race which exploded with catastrophic consequences under the Nazis in the twentieth century.

By advancing the basis of the Lurianic Kabbalah, the Illuminati philosophers were responsible for the development of the idea of progress, a fundamental assumption of Western Civilization, where human values and institutions are believed to be on an inexorable path of improvement over time, having begun in Greece, and progressed through Rome, and finally Europe. The Western idea of progress was mediated from Lurianic Kabbalah by way of Freemasonry. As explained in The Meaning of Masonry, by W.L. Wilmshurst:

This—the evolution of man into superman—was always the purpose of the ancient Mysteries, and the real purpose of modern Masonry is, not the social and charitable purposes to which so much attention is paid, but the expediting of the spiritual evolution of those who aspire to perfect their own nature and transform it into a more god-like quality. And this is a definite science, a royal art, which it is possible for each of us to put into practice, whilst to join the Craft for any other purpose than to study and pursue this science is to misunderstand its meaning.[7]

Later in the book, Wilmshurst further explains:

Man who has sprung from earth and developed through the lower kingdoms of nature to his present rational state, has yet to complete his evolution by becoming a god-like being and unifying his consciousness with the Omniscient—to promote which is and always has been the sole aim and purpose of all Initiation.[8]

Kant wrote the essay Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitical Point of View (1784), in which the idea of the progress of mankind is made central. Marquis de Condorcet, a member of the Philalethes and Bonneville’s Cercle Social, wrote in Outline of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), published after his death, that the history of civilization is one of progress in the sciences, emphasizing the connection between scientific progress and the development of human rights and justice, and outlines the features of a future rational society founded on scientific knowledge. Moses Mendelssohn’s closest friend Lessing incorporated Enlightenment ideas of human advancement in The Education of the Human Race (1883). Illuminatus, another admirer of Mendelssohn, in Outlines of a Philosophy of History of Man (1784), presents mankind in a ceaseless process of evolution.

It was not until the concept of nationalism itself was developed by Herder in 1772 in his “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” stressing the role of a common language, that German nationalism began.[9] This trend began the conception that a nation was not defined by a shared ideology or religion which a citizen could choose of their own free-will, but rather by inherited factors such as language, race, ethnicity, culture and customs, which came to be associated with the Aryan race, supposed ancestors of the German Volk (“people”). That the racist theories of the Aryan race were due in part to the nationalistic tendencies of the eighteenth century has been indicated by Leon Poliakov, in The Aryan Myth. In addition, however, as Ivan Hannaford has pointed out, in Race: the History of an Idea in the West, these theories were also influenced by pseudo-scientific tendencies derived from the occult, and paradoxically, ultimately from the Jewish Kabbalah. Where Christianity preached that virtue was measured by piety and good works, through the influence of Kabbalistic practices, such as astrology and physiognomy, a person’s virtue came to be associated with physical characteristics, and most importantly: race.

Despite its anti-Semitic associations, the myth of the Aryan race is borrowed from the Jewish Kabbalah. As explained by Charles Novak, in his history of Jacob Frank, the Frankists’ conception of the unfolding of history, following the Sabbatean concept of “defeating evil from within,” conforms to a perception that one of the secrets of the Bible is that its true history reads in reverse: the banished are the true heroes, and the false heroes are the banished of future times:

It goes without saying, therefore, that the Frankist ideal—anti-Talmudist—fights for the rehabilitation of Esau at the expense of Jacob, and this rehabilitation is part of an even wider field, for it concerns Leah and Rachel, Melchizedek, Hagar banished by Sarah and above all Ishmael, the ancestor of Islam, expelled in favor of Isaac, son of Sarah. And finally, the supreme extrapolation, the Serpent, Samael and Lilith expelled from paradise, then opposing Adam and Eve and in this case, I come back to the redemption of Evil, Evil that will be forgiven one day.[10]

When the Frankists were chastised by the rest of the Jewish community, they were denounced as remnants of the “mixed multitude” (erev rav) mentioned in Exodus. Jewish tradition interpreted the phrase erev rav as referring to a group of foreigners who joined the Israelites who followed Moses out of Egypt.[11] The majority of rabbinic scholars saw in the mixed multitude the source of corruption. The erev rav were to have enticed Israelites to worship the Golden Calf and angered God by demanding the abolition of the prohibition of incest.[12] As recounted in the Zohar, the erev rav were the impurity that the serpent imparted to Eve. They were offspring of the demonic rulers, Samael and Lilith. They were the Nefilim or “sons of God” who intermarried with the female descendants of Cain prior to the Flood. They practiced incest, idolatry, and witchcraft. They contributed to the building of the Tower of Babel and caused the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. They were the cause of the imprisonment of the Divine Presence in the demonic realm of the “husks” (kelippot) and the exile of Israel among the nations.[13] According to the Zohar:

It is them [the mixed multitude] who cause the world to revert to the state of waste and void. The mystery of this matter is that because of them the Temple was destroyed, “and the earth was waste and void” [Gen. 1:2], for [the Temple] is the center and foundation of the world. Yet as soon as the light, which is the Holy One, blessed be He, comes, they will be wiped off the face of the earth and will perish.[14]

However, occultists were rarely aware of the true history of the Kabbalah, and instead subscribed to the legend that the Kabbalah originated with Solomon, or before him with Moses, and dated as far back as the Book of Genesis. Essentially, the Kabbalah teaches that its secrets were imparted to humanity before the Flood by a race of beings referred to in the Bible as the “Sons of God,” recognized in esoteric literature as the Fallen Angels, or the devil and his legions, who were cast out of Heaven. The Sons of God intermarried with the descendants of Cain—one of the two sons of Adam and Eve, who had been cursed for killing his brother Abel—giving birth to a race of giants, to whom they taught the knowledge they had stolen in their descent from Heaven.

As occultists are Gnostics, they reverse their interpretation of the Bible and reject the orthodox interpretations. They therefore rejected the idea of the Jews being the originators of the Kabbalah, which they preferred to attribute to the descendants of Cain, whom they equated as the ancestors of the Europeans. Though Renaissance scholars had tended to regard Egypt as the fount of the “Ancient Wisdom,” colonization opened India to the West, and many Upanishads and other Vedic literature became available, and therefore, in “a desire to discover in the ancient Orient a rival society to that of the Hebrew,”[15] scholars of the Enlightenment turned to that region of the world as the possible origin of all occult knowledge. Ultimately, recognizing the presence of doctrines similar to those sacred to the occult tradition among the traditions of the ancient Egyptians, Indians, Greeks and Celts, European occultists falsely presumed the occult to represent the vestiges of the “Ancient Wisdom.” Such a theory thereby provided the basis to build the myth of the “History of Western Civilization,” where ancient Greek society incepted a process of intellectual evolution that led away from the belief in God and culminated in the secularism of the Enlightenment and beyond.

Indo-Europeans

Growing interest in India stimulated further linguistics inquiries, pioneered by Frenchman Anquetil-Duperron (1731 – 1805) and English philologist and Freemason Sir Willilam Jones (1746 – 1794), who both showed an interest in the Cochin Jews of the Malabar coast of India. In 1771, Duperron completed the translation of the Zend-Avesta, the scriptures of the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism. Finally, the mysteries of the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit were revealed. About 1780, the Brahmins of Bengal were given orders to translate into English the ancient laws and sacred writings of India. In 1783, William Jones was appointed Justice of the High Court of Bengal. He set himself to study Sanskrit and soon recognized certain similarities with Greek, Latin, Celtic and Germanic languages. Later, Franz Bopp showed that Avestan, Armenian, and the Slavic languages were also related.

These hypotheses were somewhat disputed, but eventually approved by most Orientalists. For convenience, these languages were referred to as Indo-German by most German authors, while other countries preferred the term Indo-European. Though initially asserted as merely a linguistic relationship, it was eventually theorized that, if there had once existed an “original” Indo-European language, there must also have been an “original” Indo-European race. As Robert Drews summarizes:

It is an unfortunate coincidence that studies of the Indo-European language community flourished at a time when nationalism, and a tendency to see history in racial terms, was on the rise in Europe. There was no blinking the fact, in the nineteenth century, that most of the world was dominated by Europeans or people of European descent. The easiest explanation for this was that Europeans, or at least most members of the European family, were genetically superior to peoples of darker complexion. It was thus a welcome discovery that the ancient Greeks and Persians were linguistically, and therefore, one could assume, biologically, “related” to the modern Europeans. The same racial stock, it appeared, had been in control of the world since Cyrus conquered Babylon. This stock was obviously the white race. India, it is true, presented a problem and required a separate explanation. Aryans had invaded India no later than the second millennium BC, and successfully imposed their language on the aboriginal population, but the Aryan race had evidently become sterile in that southern clime and was eventually submerged by the aboriginal and inferior stock of the subcontinent.[16]

Following Gnostic tradition, the scholars of the Enlightenment and Romantic period apparently imparted a positive the interpretation to the Sons of God. Thus, borrowing from the biblical story of the Sons of God, as well as the legends of Atlantis, these scholars proposed that the “Aryans” survived the Flood, and landed in the Caucasus in Southern Russia, the original location of the Scythians, from where they spread out to conquer the known parts of the world, bringing with them their occult knowledge everywhere they went, including in particular Persia, India, and Europe. In 1779, Jean Sylvain Bailly (1736 – 1793), a member of the Illuminati-connected Masonic lodge called Neuf Soeurs in Paris,[17] in his Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne, developed a theory of migrating races, which he based on certain recurrent errors in astronomical tables brought back by missionaries from India; errors, he maintained, which could not have been drawn up from observations made in India, but only in Central Asia. Bailly concluded that Atlantis was Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean, which in ancient times had a warm climate, but its subsequent cooling made the Atlanteans migrate south to Mongolia. Later, this race of giants dwelt in the Caucasus and laid the foundations for all the ancient civilizations of Asia.

In 1803, Bory de Saint-Vincent published his Essais sur les iles Fortunees et l’antique Atlantide, in which he set forth the conventional Atlantis story. Saint-Vincent assumed that Atlantis was the original home of civilization, and that when subjected to a cataclysm, its inhabitants were forced to conquer the known world in search of new territories.[18] In 1805, Francis Wilford advanced a hypothesis according to which, in order to account for the occult teachings of the Celtic Druids, the British Isles must have been a remnant of a former Atlantic continent, where the events of the Old Testament had actually taken place.

Voltaire strove to demonstrate that Adam had taken over everything, even his name from the Indians. He considered that all occult knowledge was ultimately of Indian origin: “…I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc…”[19] The Encyclopedie of Diderot, in the article on India, suggested that the “sciences may be more ancient in India than in Egypt.” Kant placed the origin of mankind in Tibet, because “this is the highest country. No doubt it was inhabited before any other and could even have been the site of all creation and all science. The culture of the Indians, as is known almost certainly came from Tibet, just as all our arts like agriculture, numbers, the game of chess, etc., seem to have come from India.”[20]

Friedrich von Schlegel supposed that, as a result of mingling, a new people had formed itself in northern India, and that this people, motivated “by some impulse higher than the spur of necessity,” had swarmed towards the West. Wishing to trace the origin of this people back to Cain, he then theorizes, “must not this unknown anxiety of which I speak have pursued fugitive man, as is told of the first murderer whom the Lord marked with a bloody sign, and have flung him to the ends of the earth?”[21] To Schlegel, “everything, absolutely everything, is of Indian origin.” He carried his conviction a step further, suggesting that even the Egyptians were educated by Indian missionaries. In turn, Egyptians founded a colony in Judea, though, the Jews were only partially indoctrinated with the Indian truths, since they seemed to have been ignorant of a significant doctrine of the occult tradition, the theory of reincarnation, and especially, of the immortality of the soul.[22]

Romanticism

The early theory of the Indo-Europeans appropriated more nationalistic significance through the German intellectuals of the Romantic Era. The Romantic movement was rooted in widespread disillusionment after the Reign of Terror and the dictatorship of Napoleon followed the French Revolution, which was blamed on an excessive emphasis on reason and scientific rationalism. Before 1750, upper class Germans looked to France for intellectual, cultural and architectural leadership, as French was the language of high society. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Aufklärung (“The Enlightenment”) transformed German high culture in music, philosophy, science and literature. Romanticism therefore instead emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.

Romanticism was linked to the Counter-Enlightenment, a term first used by Isaiah Berlin, to refer to a movement that arose primarily in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Germany against the Enlightenment ideals of rationalism, universalism and empiricism. Berlin’s essay “The Counter-Enlightenment,” argues that, while there were opponents of the Enlightenment outside of Germany, such as Joseph de Maistre, the German reaction to the French Enlightenment and Revolution, imposed upon them first by the reforms of Frederick II the Great, then by the armies of Revolutionary France and finally by Napoleon, was crucial to the shift of consciousness that occurred in Europe at this time, leading eventually to Romanticism.

Berlin identifies the chief inspiration behind the anti-rational movement as Johann Georg Hamann (1730 – 1788), a Kabbalist and Bohemian. Also from Königsberg, Hamann was also formerly in contact with Kant, whom he Kant to Hume and Rousseau. Hamann, who known as the “the Magi of the North,” disputed the claims of pure secular reason, and was exceptionally influential in his time. Hamann was used by Herder as a main support of the Sturm und Drang movement, where individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression. Hamann’s theses, explains Berlin, rested on the conviction that reason is impotent to demonstrate the existence of anything and that instead all knowledge relies on faith. Hamann celebrated Hume’s defiance against the claim that there is an a priori source to reality, insisting that all knowledge is ultimately dependent on perception. Hamann believed that scientific analysis of truth only produced empty calculations, and therefore cared only for the inner personal life of the individual, art and religious experience. “God is a poet, not a mathematician,” he declared.[23]

Hamann was a mentor to Herder. A Spinozist, Herder broke new ground in philosophy and poetry, as a leader of the Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”), a proto-Romantic movement in German literature and music that occurred between the late 1760s and early 1780s. In 1762, Herder had enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he became a student of Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), who had tried to reconcile rationalism and religious belief, individual freedom and political authority. In 1774, Herder, who according to Glenn Alexander Magee, “was a lifelong Hermeticist,” published Uber die älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts, discussing Hermes Trismegistus and the Kabbalah. In 1801, in his journal Adrastea, Herder published a dialogue between Hermes and Pomander, styled after the dialogues found in the Corpus Hermeticum.

Although they only met once, Herder much admired the work of Moses Mendelssohn. As a young man Herder expressed his respect of the Mendelssohn, who was fifteen years his senior, referring to the Literaturbriefe, which Mendelssohn edited, the best German journal.[24] Herder spoke of Mendelssohn as the German Socrates: “Socrates brought philosophy to mankind; here is the writer of our nation who is supposed to have united philosophy with the beauty of style… It is he, indeed, who knows how to put his philosophy into the light of clearness as if the Muse herself had said it.”[25] Herder had read Mendelssohn’s “Phaedon” and resolved to enter a correspondence with him to discuss with him his objections. But after one letter in 1769, Herder declared himself not satisfied with the philosopher’s explanations. But in I779, Herder sent Mendelssohn his treatise on the Book of Revelation. After Lessing’s death in 1781, Herder again wrote to Mendelssohn to console him and confessed, “I love you heartily and sincerely, and like you more with each advancing year of my life…”[26]

“You see, my friend,” Herder wrote, “how holy and exalted these books are for me, and how much I (according to Voltaire’s scornful words) become a Jew when I read them.”[27] Herder added, “Israel was and is the most distinguished people of the earth; in its origin and continued life up to this day, in its good and bad fortune, in its merits and faults, in its humiliation and elevation so singular, so unique, that I consider the history, the character, the existence of the people the clearest proof of the miracles and the writings which we know and possess of it.”[28] Herder put forward that, to a large extent, the faults of the Jews were caused the cruel treatment they received from the nations who hosted them Herder argued that Jews in Germany should enjoy the full rights and obligations of Germans, and that the non-Jews of the world owed a debt to Jews for centuries of abuse, and that this debt could be discharged only by actively assisting those Jews who wished to do so to regain political sovereignty in their ancient homeland of Israel.[29]

Goethe

Despite his romantic ideal of the “Aryan race,” Schlegel was married to Dorothea, the daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, member of the Illuminati and godfather of the Jewish Haskalah. The early theory of the Indo-Europeans appropriated more nationalistic significance through the German intellectuals of the Romantic Era. The Romantic movement was rooted in widespread disillusionment after the Reign of Terror and the dictatorship of Napoleon followed the French Revolution, which was blamed on an excessive emphasis on reason and scientific rationalism. Before 1750, upper class Germans looked to France for intellectual, cultural and architectural leadership, as French was the language of high society. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Aufklärung (“The Enlightenment”) transformed German high culture in music, philosophy, science and literature. Romanticism therefore instead emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.

Romanticism was linked to the Counter-Enlightenment, a term first used by Isaiah Berlin, to refer to a movement that arose primarily in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Germany against the Enlightenment ideals of rationalism, universalism and empiricism. Berlin’s essay “The Counter-Enlightenment,” argues that, while there were opponents of the Enlightenment outside of Germany, such as Joseph de Maistre, the German reaction to the French Enlightenment and Revolution, imposed upon them first by the reforms of Frederick II the Great, then by the armies of Revolutionary France and finally by Napoleon, was crucial to the shift of consciousness that occurred in Europe at this time, leading eventually to Romanticism.

Schlegel also collaborated with the famous German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 –  1832), a member of the Illuminati and an important influence on German Romanticism. Goethe was also influenced by the ideas of Jacob Boehme. According to Magee, Goethe’s work “was a major conduit for the indirect influence of alchemy, Boehme, Kabbalah, and various other Hermetic offshoots.”[30] As a young man, he read Paracelsus, Basil Valentine, van Helmont, Swedenborg and the Kabbalah. In several instances, he used the imagery of the rose and the cross in Die Geheimnisse. In 1768, Goethe participated in alchemical experiments with Suzanna von Klettenberg, a follower of Count Zinzendorf.[31]

Goethe was admitted into the Strict Observance in 1782, was initiated into the Illuminati in 1783, and became Regent in 1784. Goethe was an enthusiastic Mason and composed songs and orations in honor of deceased Masons. He shared Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry’s quest for a universal religion. Goethe was a freethinker who believed that one could be inwardly Christian without following any of the Christian churches, whose histories he criticized as a “hodgepodge of fallacy and violence.”[32]  Goethe cited Spinoza alongside Shakespeare and Carl Linnaeus as one of the three strongest influences on his life and work.[33] In his 1793 essay on Newton, Goethe praised Francis Bacon for his advocacy of experiment based as one of the greatest strides forward in modern science.[34]

A year before his death in 1832, Goethe wrote that he had the feeling that all his life he had been aspiring to qualify as one of the Hypsistarians, an ancient Jewish-pagan sect of the Black Sea region who worshipped Dionysus-Sabazius. In Goethe’s understanding, they sought to reverence, as being close to the Godhead, what came to their knowledge of the best and most perfect.[35] Many of Goethe’s works, especially Faust, depict erotic passions and acts. Goethe wrote of both boys and girls: “I like boys a lot, but the girls are even nicer. If I tire of her as a girl, she’ll play the boy for me as well.”[36] 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.”[37]

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) cited Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship as one of the four greatest novels ever written.[38] Ralph Waldo Emerson selected Goethe as one of six “representative men” along with Plato, Napoleon and Shakespeare. There are frequent references to Goethe’s writings throughout the works of Hegel, Schopenhauer, Soren Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Goethe’s poems were set to music throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by a number of composers, including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Mahler.

Goethe wrote The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in 1797, which was popularized in the animated 1940 Disney film Fantasia. In the poem, an old sorcerer leaves his apprentice with chores to perform. Tired of fetching water by pail, the apprentice uses magic to enchant a broom to do the work for him. When he is unable to stop the broom, the apprentice splits the broom in two with an axe, but each of the pieces becomes a new broom that takes up a pail and continues fetching water, now at twice the speed. Finally, the old sorcerer returns and breaks the spell, and advises the apprentice that powerful spirits should only be called by the master himself.

Sir William Jones’ translation of Kalidasa’s Sanskrit play The Recognition of Sakuntala, captured the admiration of many, notably that of Goethe, who expressed his admiration for the play.[39] Goethe went on to borrow a device from the it for his Faust, Part One.[40] Goethe’s Faust was based on the legend of Doctor Faustus first popularized by Christopher Marlowe. In the play, Mephistopheles makes a bet with God that he can lure Faust—God’s favorite human being, who is striving to learn everything that can be known—away from righteous pursuits. Faust, despairing at the vanity of scientific, humanitarian and religious learning, turns to magic for the showering of infinite knowledge. Faust makes an arrangement with the devil, where the devil will do everything that Faust asks while here on Earth, and in exchange Faust will serve the devil in Hell. Ultimately, Faust goes to heaven, for he loses only half of the bet. Angels, who arrive as messengers of divine mercy, declare at the end of Act V: “He who strives on and lives to strive/ Can earn redemption still.”[41]

Weimar Classicism

Goethe and the German poet Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805) were notable proponents of the Sturm und Drang movement early in their life, although they ended their period of association with it by initiating what would become Weimar Classicism, a cultural and literary movement based in Weimar that sought to establish a new humanism by synthesizing Romantic, classical and Enlightenment ideas. What was to become known as Weimar Classicism was established by Illuminati member Karl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, of the Albertine House of Wettin, and a close friend of Frederick William III, notably by bringing Goethe there.

Karl August, like his distant cousin Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, as a great-great-grandsons of John VI, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, nephew of Christian of Anhalt, the chief advisor of Frederick V of the Palatinate, and architect of the political agenda behind the Rosicrucian movement. Christian’s brother was Augustus, Prince of Anhalt-Plötzkau, who headed Rosicrucian court that included the millenarian Paul Nagel, a collaborator of Baltazar Walther, whose trips to the Middle East inspired the legend of Christian Rosenkreutz and was the source of the Lurianic Kabbalah of Jacob Boehme. John VI’s sister was Dorothea of Anhalt-Zerbst, who married Augustus the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, a member of the Fruitbearug Society along with his friend of Johann Valentin Andreae, the reputed author of the Rosicrucian manifestos, and of Rabbi Templo, who created the famous model of the Temple of Jerusalem, and whose design of the cherubim became the basis for the coat of arms of the Grand Lodge of Antients.. Karl August’s only surviving daughter, Caroline Louise, married Frederick Ludwig, Hereditary Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and was the mother of Helene, wife of Ferdinand Philippe, Duke of Orléans, grandson of Illuminatus Philippe Égalité.

Also of the House of Wettin, but from the Ernestine branch, was John Frederick I of Saxony, who planned what would become the University of Jena. It was John Frederick I who along with Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, was one of the main supporters of Martin Luther, and who commissioned his rose seal. The plan was established by his three sons in 1548 as the Höhere Landesschule at Jena. It was awarded it the status of university in 1557 Emperor Ferdinand I, a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece.[42]

The conversations and various common undertakings throughout the 1790s with Hegel, Herder, Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Alexander von Humboldt, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and August and Friedrich von Schlegel have, in later years, been collectively termed Weimar Classicism, a German literary and cultural movement, whose practitioners established a new humanism, from the synthesis of ideas from Romanticism, Classicism, and the Age of Enlightenment. Weimar Classicism lasted thirty-three years, from 1772 until 1805, and then was concentrated upon Goethe and Schiller during the period 1788–1805. Although there is no record of his membership in the order of the Illuminati, Schiller regularly socialized with Bode and Herder.

The Schlegel brothers were leaders of the first phase of Romanticism in German literature, from about 1798 to 1804, was represented by the work of a group centered in Jena, which around 1790 became the largest and most famous among the German states. With Johann Fichte (1762 – 1814), Friedrich Schelling (1775 – 1854), Novalis (1772 – 1801) and Schlegel—who were all active Masons—on the teaching staff, the University of Jena became the center of the emergence of German idealism and early Romanticism.[43] Fichte was accused of being a member of the Illuminati, and while the claim cannot be substantiated, a good many of his friends were indeed members of the order, and he was also active as a Mason in the 1790s.[44] Fichte became a Mason in Zurich in 1793 and wrote two lectures on the “philosophy of Masonry.”[45]

The first mention of Jacob Boehme in the Jena circle was in a letter by Friedrich Schlegel to Novalis where he discusses the project of creating a new religion and mentions some of its forerunners: “Tieck studies Jacob Boehme with great love.”[46] In 1798, Ludwig Tieck (1773 – 1853) married and in the following year settled in Jena, which around 1790 became the largest and most famous among the German states, where he became the leader of the early Romantic school, also known as Jena Romanticism. With Fichte, Schelling, Novalis and Friedrich von Schlegel—who were all active Masons—on the teaching staff, the University of Jenna became the center of the emergence of German idealism and early Romanticism.[47] In 1798, Tieck married and in the following year settled in Jena, where he became the leader of the early Romantic school, also known as Jena Romanticism.

The founding publication of German Romanticism was the Athenaeum, a literary magazine established in 1798 by the Schlegel brothers, featuring the work of Moses Mendelssohn’s daughter Dorethea Schlegel, and August Schlegel’s wife Caroline Schelling, among others. Caroline was the daughter of Johann David Michaelis (1717 – 1791), a famous scholar of Hebrew from the University of Göttingen. Caroline and August Schlegel married in 1796 and she moved to Jena, where he had received a professorship. Their house became a meeting place for the young literary and intellectual elite later associated with German Romanticism. His brother Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich's wife Dorothea Veit moved in. They were at the center of Jena Romanticism. Schelling was involved in the literary projects of her husband and his brother Friedrich. In 1803, Caroline divorced Schlegel and married the young Schelling.

Moses Mendelssohn’s children included the composers Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, who converted to Christianity, and became one of the principal composers of the first phase of Romanticism, along with Berlioz, Chopin and Liszt. Moses’s son Joseph was the founder of the Mendelssohn banking house, and a friend and benefactor of Alexander von Humboldt. His daughter Dorothea married German Romantic painter Philipp Veit, and subsequently left him to marry Friedrich von Schlegel. Dorothea was the common link to a cultural scene that also included her brother Felix, Lessing, Germaine de Staël, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, and other leading lights of the Romantic era.

The use of the word Romanticism was invented by Schlegel, but spread more widely across France through its persistent use by Madame Germaine de Staël (1766 – 1817).[48] A Franco-Swiss woman of letters and political theorist from Geneva, de Staël witnessed first-hand the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era up to the French Restoration, following the first fall of Napoleon in 1814 and his final defeat in the Hundred Days in 1815. She was present at the Estates General of 1789 and at the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Madame de Staël held a salon in the Swedish embassy in Paris, where she gave “coalition dinners,” which were frequented by Thomas Jefferson and Marquis de Condorcet. In 1796, she published Sur l'influence des passions (“On the Influence of the Passions”), in which she praised suicide, a book that attracted the attention of Schiller and Goethe.[49] When Napoleon was elected first consul for life in 1802, de Staël compared him to Machiavelli.[50] Napoleon is to have said, “I have four enemies: Prussia, Russia, England and Madame de Staël.”[51] In 1803, Napoleon finally decided to exile de Staël without trial.

Madame de Staël’s intellectual collaboration with Benjamin Constant (1767 – 1830) between 1795 and 1811 made them one of the most celebrated intellectual couples of their time. Constant was a Swiss-French political activist and writer on political theory and religion. His mentor was Jakob Mauvillon (1743 – 1794), a member of the Illuminati and a close friend of the Comte de Mirabeau. While at the Protestant University of Erlangen in 1783, Constant gained access to the court of Duchess Sophie Caroline Marie of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, the niece of Ferdinand of Brunswick, Illuminatus and member of the Asiatic Brethren. She acted as a maternal mentor to him until his appointment to the court of her brother Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, that required him to move north. De Staël, disappointed by French rationalism, became interested in German romanticism. She and Constant set out for Prussia and Saxony and travelled with her two children to Weimar. Duchess Anna Amalia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel welcomed them the day after their arrival.

In Weimar, de Staël and Constant met Schiller and Goethe, and in Berlin they met the brothers August and Friedrich von Schlegel. A the Coppet Castle in Switzerland, de Staël became the center of the Coppet group, which had a considerable influence on the development of nineteenth century liberalism and romanticism. Around the core group which consisted of the hosts at Coppet Castle, the family of Jacques Necker and his daughter, Germaine de Staël and her longtime lover, Benjamin Constant (1767 – 1830), with her cousin by marriage, Albertine Necker de Saussure, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Jean de Sismondi, Charles Victor de Bonstetten, Prosper de Barante, Mathieu de Montmorency and August Wilhelm Schlegel, there was a stream of international visitors of influence. Stendhal referred to the Coppet guests as “the Estates General of European opinion.”[52]

Madame de Staël found mysticism “so attractive to the heart,” saying that it “united what was best in Catholicism and Protestantism” and that it was the form of religion that best suited, and served, a liberal political system.[53] She hosted  noted mystics such as  Madame  de  Krüdener (1764 – 1824), and Zacharias Werner (1768 – 1823). Madame  de Krüdener was a Baltic German religious mystic, who exerted influence on the Moravian Church and Tsar Alexander I of Russia. Werner was a German poet, dramatist, preacher and Freeemason. Several of his dramatic poems were designed to evangelize Freemasonry, including The Templars in Cyprus and The Brethren of the Cross: a dramatic poem. Madame de Staël also read Saint-Martin, who she later described as a man with a “superior mind” who wrote books containing “glimmers of the sublime.”[54] A much-quoted letter, one friend commented to another about this circle: “these people will all be turning Catholic, Böhmians, Martinists, mystics, all thanks to Schlegel; and on top of all that, everything is turning German.”[55] Tieck, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel were attracted to Saint-Martin, who had done the French translation of the works of Jacob Boehme, who much in vogue in Jena.[56]

Another leading protégée of Hamann was Illuminati member Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, who was involved in the patheism dispute against Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn.[57] Jacobi was converted to Hamann’s anti-Enlightenment philosophy, and became his most energetic advocate.[58] It was Jacobi who transmitted Hamann’s thought to the Romantics.[59] Hamann was, moreover, a mentor to Herder and an admired influence on Goethe, Jacobi, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Lessing, and Mendelssohn. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) also admired Hamann. Like his mentor Fichte, Schelling was also associated with the Illuminati, and was interested in Boehme, Swedenborg and Mesmer.[60]

Jacobi continued to engage in further philosophical arguments with Goethe, Herder, Fichte and Schelling. The effective result of the controversy was that Jacobi inadvertently contributed to a revival of Spinozism and pantheism. Frederick C. Beiser writes that “Spinoza’s reputation changed from a devil into a saint.” Those who became disciples of Spinoza included “Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin, Herder, Schlegel, Hegel, Schleiermacher and Schelling.”[61] Novalis called Spinoza the “God-intoxicated man.” According to Glenn Alexander Magee, “the significance of the Pantheismusstreit [pantheism dispute] of the late eighteenth century cannot be overstated. Thanks to Jacobi’s revelations, pantheism became, as Heinrich Heine would put it in the next century, ‘the unofficial religion of Germany.’”[62]

Volk

The second phase of Romanticism, comprising the period from about 1805 to the 1830s, was marked by cultural nationalism and a new attention to national origins, as attested by a deepening interest in the culture of the German volk (“folk”), which was tied to the emergence of theories of the Aryan race. The term Aryan was borrowed a little earlier by Anquetil du Peyron from Herodotus to designate the Persians and Medes, from the Persian word “Arian,” from which is derived the word “Iranian.” The term gained widespread usage due to Friedrich Schlegel, justified by connecting the root Ari with the German word Ehre, or “honour.”

The Romantics considered that the racial superiority of the German people, or Volk, was embedded in its language, culture and its folklore. Herder conceived of Nature and history as a process of evolving organic development, endowed with meaning (Bedeutung), and reaching its fulfilment in the spiritual world of man. “Man is part and continuation of nature at the same time — man, blood, and soil. Man’s thoughts and emotions are a manifestation of sorts of the vital force, which operates in nature throughout its chain of being, from inanimate substances up to abstract thought.”[63] However, it is not the individual who is evolving, but humanity, as part of the race, the tribe, and the nation. Every nation shapes its own ideals on the basis of its unique characteristics, and from its language evolve different forms of speech through which individuals, who make up the nation, express their unique spiritual-cultural aspirations.[64] Herder referenced the ancient history of the Jews as an early example of this process.[65]

Fichte, in particular, considered the founding father of German nationalism, brought German nationalism forward as a response to the French occupation of German territories in his Addresses to the German Nation (1808), evoking a sense of German distinctiveness in language, tradition, and literature that composed a common identity.[66]

Only when each people, left to itself, develops and forms itself in accordance with its own peculiar quality, and only when in every people each individual develops himself in accordance with that common quality, as well as in accordance with his own peculiar quality-then, and then only, does the manifestation of divinity appear in its true mirror as it ought to be; and only a man who either entirely lacks the notion of the rule of law and divine order, or else is an obdurate enemy thereto, could take upon himself to want to interfere with that law, which is the highest law in the spiritual world![67]

Of the most influential promoters of this new nationalism was Jacob Grimm. Inspired by the writings of Herder, Jacob and his brother Wilhelm Grimm compiled the famous Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a collection of folktales thought to represent the occult lore of the German people, and which included Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Hansel and Gretel. In the History of the German Language, Jacob Grimm claimed that:

All the people of Europe and, to begin with, those which were originally related and which gained supremacy at the cost of many wanderings and dangers, emigrated from Asia in the remote past. They were propelled from East to West by an irresistible instinct (unhemmbarer Trieb), the real cause of which is unknown to us. The vocation and courage of those peoples, which were originally related and destined to rise to such heights, is shown by the fact that European history was almost entirely made by them.[68]

Such ideas finally caught on in the rest of Europe. In his History of Rome, Jules Michelet, a French nationalist historian, who was interested in the occult and wrote the classic Satanism and Magic, stated: “follow the migrations of mankind from East to West along the Sun’s course and along the track of the world’s magnetic currents; observe its long voyage from Asia to Europe, from India to France… At its starting point, in India, the birthplace of races and of religions, the womb of the world…”[69] The chief propagandist of the Aryan myth in France was Ernest Renan, philosopher, historian, scholar of religion, leader of the school of critical philosophy in France, and Freemason, who began training for the priesthood, but eventually left the Catholic church after reading Goethe’s Faust. According to Renan:

We salute those sacred summits, where the great races, which carried the future of humanity in their hearts, contemplated infinity for the first time and introduced two categories which changed the face of the world, morality and reason. When the Aryan race, after thousands of years of striving, shall have become masters of the planet which they inhabit, their first duty will be to explore that mysterious region… No place in the world has had a comparable role to that of the nameless mountain or valley where mankind first attained self-consciousness. Let us be proud… of the old patriarchs who, at the foot of Imaus [Himalayan mountain], laid the foundations of what we are and of what we shall become.”[70]

Though England was not fond of the notion of a shared heritage with its colonial subjects in India, the Aryan myth was finally popularized largely through the efforts of German Orientalist and language scholar Max Mueller, who was one of the most renowned scholars of the nineteenth century. Originally a student of Sanskrit, Mueller eventually began studying the Zoroastrian Avesta, which led him to the study of comparative religion, and to the editing of the most ancient of Hindu sacred hymns, the Rigveda. His principal achievement though, was the editing of The Sacred Books of the East, translations of major Oriental scriptures. He was appointed deputy professor of modern languages at Oxford in 1850, and professor of comparative philology in 1868. He wrote:

The Aryan nations, who pursued a northwesterly direction, stand before us in history as the principal nations of northwestern Asia and Europe. They have been the prominent actors in the great drama of history, and have carried to their fullest growth all the elements of active life with which our nature is endowed. They have perfected society and morals; and we learn from their literature and works of art the elements of science, the laws of art, and the principles of philosophy. In continual struggle with each other and with Semitic and Turanian races, these Aryan nations have become the rulers of history, and it seems to be their mission to link all parts of the world together by the chains of civilization, commerce and religion.[71]

Hegel

Combined with the theory of the Aryan race, the notion of inevitable progress of led to the development of the Eurocentric history of Western Civilization, which celebrates Europeans and the vanguards of human intellectual progress. It was due to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831), a colleague of Friedrich Schlegel at the University of Jena, that Greece’s debt to the Ancient Near East was minimized, favoring its society as a “miracle,” and as the so-called “cradle” of Western Civilization. As demonstrated by Glenn Alexander Magee in Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Hegel’s philosophy was derived from the Luria’s Kabbalah—mediated through the thought of Jacob Boehme—positing that history was the unfolding and progression of “Spirit” (Geist). According to Hegel:

World history is the record of the spirit’s efforts to attain knowledge of what it is in itself. The Orientals do not know that the spirit or man as such are free in themselves. And because they do not know that, they are not themselves free. They only know that One is free… The consciousness of freedom first awoke among the Greeks, and they were accordingly free; but, like the Romans, they only knew that Some, and not all men as such, are free… The Germanic nations, with the rise of Christianity, were the first to realize that All men are by nature free, and that freedom of spirit is his very essence.[72]

Hegel was introduced to the ideas of Boehme through his reading of Illuminati member Franz von Baader, a devoted student of Meister Eckhart. Baader also influenced Franz Joseph Molitor, a member of the Asiatic Brethren and Grand Master of the Frankfurt Judenlodge. Hegel was also influenced by Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702 – 1782), a follower of Boehme, who was in contact with Kabbalists who introduced him to Knorr von Rosenroth’s Cabala Denudata and the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria. This knowledge helped him attempt a synthesis of Boehme and Kabbalah.[73] In 1730, Oetinger visited the Moravian Brethren and their founder Count Zinzendorf, and remaining there some months as teacher of Hebrew and Greek.[74] Oetinger was also in contact with Hermann Fictuld, one of the leaders of the Golden and Rosy Cross.[75] Oetinger also translated a part of Swedenborg’s philosophy of heaven and earth, and added notes of his own.

As pointed out by Ernst Benz in Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy, the chief conduit of the ideas of Boehme to Hegel and the other German Idealists of the time was Saint-Martin. Hegel is regarded as the leading exponent of German Idealism, after Jacob Boehme, who heavily influenced him. Hegel studied Plato, Meister Eckhart, Grotius, Hobbes, Hume, Leibniz, Locke, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Schiller, Herder and Voltaire. Hegel said, “The fact is that Spinoza is made a testing-point in modern philosophy, so that it may really be said: You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.”[76] While it is not proven that Hegel was a member of the Illuminati, as demonstrated by Glenn Alexander Magee in Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Hegel did often refer cryptically to Illuminati and Masonic symbols. He was an avid reader of the quasi-Masonic journal Minerva, which disseminated the thought of the radical Jacobins. Hegel famously wrote, referring to the Illuminati symbol, that “The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.”[77]

In Berne, Switzerland, Hegel became part of a family circle, which according to H.S. Harris, “like all of Hegel’s subsequent connections in Frankfurt—as far as these can be traced—has strong overtones of Freemasonry.”[78] John Burbidge noted that “Whenever the young tutor arrived in a strange town he soon established contact with people known to be active in the most progressive stands of the Masonic order.”[79] According to Gerald Hanratty, “During his youth Hegel eagerly assimilated Masonic ideas and aspirations which were propagated in Germany by supporters of the French revolution. Throughout his life in interested himself in the Masonic movement so that its ideas and aspirations were important elements of the matrix from which Hegel’s Gnostic system emerged.”[80]

Ernst Benz wrote that, “In a certain sense one can refer to the philosophy of German Idealism as a Böhme-Renaissance, when Böhme was discovered at the same time by Schelling, Hegel, Franz von Baader, Tick, Novalis and many others.”[81] There are references throughout Hegel’s writings to many of the leading figures of the Hermetic tradition, including Meister Eckhart, Giordano Bruno, Paracelsus, and Boehme. In Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel couples Boehme and Francis Bacon as the twin representatives of “Modern Philosophy in its First Statement.”[82] Hegel said of Boehme, “through him… philosophy first appeared in Germany.”[83]

In a letter to Schelling, Hegel writes: “Reason and Freedom remain our watchword, and our rallying point the Invisible Church,” a term used by German mystics and Freemasons.[84] Harris notes: “It seems to be virtually certain that for Hegel, at any rate, the ‘invisible Church’ originally referred to the cosmopolitan idea of Freemasonry as envisaged by Lessing in Ernst und Falk.”[85] Lessing’s Nathan the Wise was a great influence on him.[86] Lessing’s play emphasizes the Masonic theme of a unity of the world’s religions, and therefore of an “invisible church.”[87] In another letter to Schelling, Hegel refers to Fichte’s conception of God as Absolute Ego as part of “esoteric philosophy,” and according to Magee, there is a very strong similarity between Fichte’s ideas of a dialectic of Absolute Ego and a dialectic in Boehme’s doctrine.[88]

[1] Voltaire 1885: 29.471; cited in Dorothy Matilda. Figueira Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority Through Myths of Identity (State University of New York Press, 2002) p. 17.

[2] Anthony Smith. Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History (Polity, 2010), pp. 9, 25–30; Paul James. Nation Formation: Towards a Theory of Abstract Community (London: Sage Publications, 1996).

[3] Philip G. Roeder. Where Nation-States Come From: Institutional Change in the Age of Nationalism (Princeton University Press, 2007). pp. 5–6.

[4] Lloyd S. Kramer. Nationalism in Europe and America (University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

[5] Alexander Motyl, ed.. Encyclopedia of Nationalism, 2 vol. (San Diego: Academic Press, 2001), pp. 171.

[6] Christopher Dandeker, ed.. Nationalism and Violence (Transaction Publishers, 1998). p. 52.

[7] W.L. Wilmshurst. The Meaning of Masonry (New York: Gramercy Books, 1980) p. 47.

[8] Ibid., p. 97.

[9] Christopher Dandeker, ed. Nationalism and Violence (Transaction Publishers, 1998), p. 52.

[10] Novak. Jacob Frank, p. 113.

[11] Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude (translated by DeepL), p. 3.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Zohar 1:28b. 13–16;  Zohar Hadash, 645, 31d. 17;  Zohar 1:25a–25b; 1:25b. 19; 2:191a, passim. 20.  Tikkune Zohar, Tikkun 19; cited in Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude, p. 3.

[14] Zohar 1:25b; cited in Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude.

[15] Edgar Quintet, cited from Leon Poliakov. The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe (New York: Basic Books, 1987), p. 185

[16] Robert Drews. The Coming of the Greeks (Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 5.

[17] Louis Amiable et Charles Porset. Une loge maçonnique d’avant 1789, la loge des Neuf Sœurs : étude critique (Paris, Les Éditions Maçonniques de France, 1789), pp. 176-180.

[18] DeCamp. Lost Continents, p. 81.

[19] Poliakov. The Aryan Myth, p. 185

[20] Ibid., p. 184

[21] Ibid., p. 192.

[22] Ibid., p. 191.

[23] Isaiah Berlin. “The Counter-Enlightenment,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas (1973).

[24] Alfred Apsler. “Herder and the Jews.” Monatshefte für Deutschen Unterricht, Vol. 35, No. 1 (January, 1943), p. 13.

[25] Herder-Suphan, v. i, p. 224; cited in Apsler. “Herder and the Jews,” p. 13.

[26] Kayserling, op. cit. p. 543-6; cited in Apsler. “Herder and the Jews,” p. 14.

[27] Briefe das Studium der Theologie betreffend (In Herder-Suphan, v. Io, p. 143); cited in Apsler. “Herder and the Jews,” p. 4.

[28] Ibid., p. 139.

[29] F. M.Barnard. “The Hebrews and Herder’s Political Creed.” Modern Language Review, vol. 54, no. 4, (October 1959), pp. 533–546.

[30] Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 61.

[31] Ibid., p. 59.

[32] The phrase Goethe uses is “Mischmasch von Irrtum und Gewalt”, in his “Zahme Xenien” IX, Goethes Gedichte in Zeitlicher Folge, (Insel Verlag 1982).

[33] “What people have said about Linnaeus". Linné on line. Linnaeus.uu.se. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20110513033923/http://www.linnaeus.uu.se/online/life/8_3.html

[34] Simon J. Richter. Goethe Yearbook 14 (Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 113–14.

[35] Lletter to Boisserée dated March 22, 1831 quoted in Peter Boerner. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1832/1982: A Biographical Essay (Bonn: Inter Nationes, 1981) p. 82.

[36] V.L. Bullough. History in adult human sexual behavior with children and adolescents in Western societies (Pedophilia: Biosocial Dimensions ed.) (Springer-Verlag New York Inc., 1990) p. 72.

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

[38] Arthur Schopenhauer. “The Art of Literature.” The Essays of Arthur Schopenahuer.

[39] John Telford (April 1876). Barber, Benjamin Aquila, “Classical Sanscrit,” The London Quarterly Review, XLVI, pp. 309–335.

[40] W. J. Johnson (transl). The Recognition of Sakuntala (Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 138.

[41] (V, 11936–7).

[42] Stefanie Kellner. “Die freiheitliche Geisteshaltung der Ernestiner prägte Europa.” Monumente (February, 2016)). pp. 9–16.

[43] Glenn Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Cornel: Cornell University Press, July 2001), p. 55.

[44] Radrizzani et al., J.G. Fichte: Philosophie de la maçonnerie et autres textes (Vrin: 1995).

[45] Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 55.

[46] Paola Mayer. Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Böhme: Theosophy, Hagiography, Literature (McGill-Queen’s Press - MQUP, 1999), p. 56.

[47] Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 55.

[48] Michael Ferber. Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

[49] Olaf Müller. “Madame de Staël und Weimar. Europäische Dimensionen einer Begegnung.” In: Hellmut Th. Seemann (Hrsg.): Europa in Weimar. Visionen eines Kontinents. Jahrbuch der Klassik Stiftung Weimar (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag 2008), p. 29.

[50] Madame de Staël. Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution: Posthumous Work of the Baroness de Stael (James Eastburn and Company at the literary rooms, Broadway. Clayton & Kingsland, Printers, 1818). pp. 90, 95–96.

[51] Laurence de Cambronne. Madame de Staël, la femme qui faisait trembler Napoléon (Allary éditions, 2015).

[52] David Ellis. Byron in Geneva: That Summer of 1816 (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 77.

[53] Helena Rosenblatt. “The Liberal Mysticism of Madame de Staël,” in Keith Baker & Jenna Gibbs (eds.), Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century (University of Toronto Press, 2016).

[54] Helena Rosenblatt. “The Liberal Mysticism of Madame de Staël,” in Keith Baker & Jenna Gibbs (eds.), Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century (University of Toronto Press, 2016).

[55] Karl Viktor von Bonstetten to Friederike Brun (October 12, 1809; cited in  Roger Paulin). “The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel” (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016). Retrieved from https://books.openedition.org/obp/2957?lang=en#ftn354

[56] “The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel” (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016). Retrieved from https://books.openedition.org/obp/2957?lang=en#ftn354

[57] Isaiah Berlin. The Magus of the North: J.G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1993), p. 2-3; cited in Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 77.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 77.

[60] Ibid., p. 7 n. 12.

[61] Frederick C. Beiser. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 44; cited in  Terry Melanson. Perfectibilists: The 18th Century Bavarian Order of the Illuminati (Kindle Locations 8436-8437). Trine Day. Kindle Edition.

[62] Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 78; Melanson. Perfectibilists (Kindle Location 8439).

[63] Yaacov Talmon. “Unity of Nation and Revolutionary Brotherhood” (Hebrew), in Unity and Uniqueness (Tel Aviv, 1965), p. 27; cited in Avraham Shapira, “Buber’s Attachment to Herder and to German Volkism,” Studies in Zionism, 14, no. 1 (1993), p. 11.

[64] Avraham Shapira. “Buber’s Attachment to Herder and to German Volkism.” Studies in Zionism, 14, no. 1 (1993), p. 11.

[65] See Levy, “The Position of Judaism in Herder’s Philosophy of History.” (Hebrew), Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Philosophy, 4, 1982, p. 243. Cited in Shapira. “Buber’s Attachment to Herder and to German Volkism.” p. 12.

[66] Gregory Jusdanis. The Necessary Nation (Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 82–83.

[67] Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Thirteenth Address, Addresses to the Gerrnan Nation, ed. George A. Kelly (New York: Harper Torch Books, 1968).

[68] Poliakov. The Aryan Myth, p. 198

[69] Ibid., p. 199

[70] Ibid., p. 208

[71] Müller. “The Veda”: Chips from A German Workshop, vol. 1, p. 63; cited in In Search of the Cradle of Civilization, p. 49

[72] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Lectures on the philosophy of world history. Introduction, reason in history (translated from the German edition of Johannes Hoffmeister from Hegel papers assembled by H. B. Nisbet) (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

[73] Ibid., p. 65.

[74] Ernst Benz. Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy, (Eugene, Oregon: Prickwick Publications, 1983) p. 29.

[75] Christopher Mcintosh. The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology and Rituals of an Occult Order, 2nd rev. edn (Wellingborough: Crucible, 1987), pp. 47.

[76] Hegel. History of Philosophy.

[77]   Hegel. Philosophy of Right (1820), “Preface”; translated by S.W. Dyde, 1896.

[78] Harris. Toward The Sunlight, p. 156; cited in Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 74.

[79] John Burbidge. Hegel in his Time (Lewiston, N.Y.: Broadview Press, 1988), p. viii; cited in Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition p. 74.

[80] Gerald Hanratty. Hegel and the Gnostic Tradition: II, p. 312-13, cited in Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 75.

[81] Ernst Benz. Adam der Mythus von Urmenschen (Munich: Barth, 1955), p. 23; cited in Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 47.

[82] Cited in Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 48.

[83] Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Section One: Modern Philosophy in its First Statement. B: Jacob Boehme.

[84] Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 73.

[85] Harris. Toward The Sunlight, p. 105; cited in Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 73.

[86] Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 55.

[87] Ibid., p. 55.

[88] Ibid., p. 74.

Volume Two

1. The Elizabethan Age

2. The Great Conjunction

3. The Alchemical Wedding

4. The Rosicrucian Furore

5. The Invisible College

6. 1666

7. The Royal Society

8. America

9. Redemption Through Sin

10. Oriental Kabbalah

11. The Grand Lodge

12. The Illuminati

13. The Asiatic Brethren

14. The American Revolution

15. Haskalah

16. The Aryan Myth

17. The Carbonari

18. The American Civil War

19. God is Dead

20. Theosophy

21. Shambhala