Baal Shem of London

The first documented Europeans to visit Tibet were the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, António de Andrade and Manuel Marques, who arrived in 1624. A year later, with the full support of the King and Queen of Guge, Andrade and Marques established a permanent mission at Tsaparang, in the Garuda Valley of western Tibet's Ngari region.[1] On Andrade’s advice, a second Jesuit mission was sent to southern Tibet from India in 1627. Reportedly welcomed by the King of Ü-Tsang, The Portuguese missionaries João Cabral and Estêvão Cacella established their mission there in Shigatse in 1628, and provided the first information about Shambhala to reach the West.[2] Because both of the Portuguese missions were evacuated in 1635 after becoming embroiled in the power struggles for control of Tibet at that time, it would be another twenty-five years before the next documented European visit to the country.[3] The first Europeans to meet a Dalai Lama were probably the two Jesuits, Johannes Grueber of Austria and Albert Dorville, who travelled through Lhasa in 1661 on their way from Beijing to Agra, India. It is from this expedition which the engraving in China Illustrata, by the Jesuit and Kabbalist Athanasius Kircher, which is purported to depict 5th Dalai Lama Lobsang Gyatso (1617 – 1682).[4] The most famous of the early European missionaries to visit Tibet was Ippolito Desideri or Hippolyte Desideri (1684 –1733), who was the first documented European to have successfully studied and understood Tibetan language and culture.

In 1738, Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688 – 1772) apparently contacted some Jesuits interested in alchemy when he visited the Royal Academy of Sciences in Turin, which was housed in the old Jesuit cloister. At the Academy was the prized exhibit of the Tabula Isiaca which had fascinated Freemasons since the time of Sir Robert Moray. In Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652), Kircher used the tablet as a primary source for developing his translations of Egyptian hieroglyphics, which are now known to be incorrect. While reading Kircher’s works, Swedenborg learned of the Jesuit scholar’s Kabbalistic interpretation of the tablet, which drew heavily on the Sepher Yetzirah and Zohar.[5] Through the influence Swedenborg, the Left-Hand Tantra taught a repudiation of conventional morality, where the Sabbateans could see a similarity to their own doctrine of the “Holiness of Sin,” which contributed to the legend of an “Oriental Kabbalah” into Freemasonry. Swedenborg explains that the Lost Word, an important symbol in Freemasonry, existed in Asia long before the Israelites. Freemasonry attains its climax in the symbolism of the Lost Word, and a quest for its recovery. The mythical history of Freemasonry claims that there once existed a Word of great power, which was known only to a few, but was eventually lost during the building of Solomon’s Temple.[6] According to Swedenborg:

Respecting this ancient Word, which was in Asia before the Israelitish Word… It is still preserved among the peoples who inhabit Great Tartary. I have conversed with spirits and angels who were in the spiritual world from that country, who said that they possess a Word, and have possessed it from ancient times… Moreover, they related that they do not suffer foreigners to come among them, except the Chinese, with whom they cultivate peace… Inquire for it in China, and perhaps you may find it among the Tartars.[7]

Samuel Jacob Falk (1708 – 1782), a Kabbalist known as the Baal Shem of London, was a neighbor to Swedenborg, on whom he exercised a great influence.[8] Rabbi Jacob Emden accused Falk of being a Sabbatean, as he invited Moses David of Podhayce, a known Sabbatean with connections to Jonathan Eybeschütz, to his home.[9] David, who was awed by his abilities as a sorcerer, wrote to Eybeschütz about Falk, “who is still human but already above human.”[10] Falk collaborated with a Sabbatean Frankist network in England, Holland, Poland, and Germany, and who would exercise an important influence in Masonic and occult circles during the eighteenth century.[11] Some Masons believed that Falk was the “Old Man of the Mountain”—the traditional name of the leader of the Ismaili Assassins—or an “Unknown Superior” of illuminist Freemasonry.[12]

Falk was linked by some illuminist Masons to Jacob Frank.[13] Falk was born in Poland to a Sabbatean family and came to England in 1742 and set up shop on the old London Bridge.[14] In Westphalia, Falk was sentenced to be burned as a sorcerer, but escaped to England. Falk rapidly gained fame as a Kabbalist and worker of miracles, and many stories of his miraculous powers were current, which he was reputed to exercise through his supposed mastery of the magical names of God. Falk kept a diary containing records of dreams and the Kabbalistic names of angels, which can be found in the library of the United Synagogue in London.[15] The following is a summary provided in the Jewish Encyclopedia:

Falk claimed to possess thaumaturgic powers and to be able to discover hidden treasure. Archenholz (England und Italien, I. 249) recounts certain marvels which he had seen performed by Falk in Brunswick and which he attributes to a special knowledge of chemistry. In Westphalia at one time Falk was sentenced to be burned as a sorcerer, but escaped to England. Here he was received with hospitality and rapidly gained fame as a Cabalist and worker of miracles. Many stories of his powers were current. He would cause a small taper to remain alight for weeks; an incantation would fill his cellar with coal; plate left with a pawnbroker would glide back to his house. When a fire threatened to destroy the Great Synagogue, he averted the disaster by writing four Hebrew letters on the pillars of the door.

Dr. Hermann Adler, the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire from 1891 to 1911, observed that a horrible account of a Jewish Kabbalist in The Gentleman’s Magazine of September 1762, “obviously refers to Dr. Falk, though his name is not mentioned.”[16] This Kabbalist is described as a christened Jew and the biggest rogue and villain in all the world,” who had been imprisoned everywhere and banished out of all countries in Germany.” The writer goes on to relate that the Kabbalist offered to teach him certain mysteries, but explained that before entering on any “experiments of the said godly mysteries, we must first avoid all churches and places of worshipping as unclean.” He then bound the writer to an oath and proceeded to tell him that he must steal a Hebrew Bible from a Protestant and also procure “one pound of blood out of the veins of an honest Protestant.” The writer therefore robbed a Protestant, and had himself bled of a pound of blood, which he gave to the sorcerer. He then describes the ceremony that took place, when the following night they went into the writer’s garden, and the Kabbalist put a cross, painted with the blood, in each corner, and in the middle a threefold circle. The, all in blood, in the first circle were written all the names of God in Hebrew; in the second the names of the angels; and in the third the first chapter of the Gospel of John. He then described the ritual sacrifice of a he-goat.

Swedenborg

Swedenborg was a Swedish pluralistic-Christian theologian and mystic, best known for his book on the afterlife, Heaven and Hell (1758). A large number of important cultural figures have been influenced by his writings, including Robert Frost, Johnny Appleseed, William Blake, Jorge Luis Borges, Daniel Burnham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Flaxman, George Inness, Henry and William James, Carl Jung, Immanuel Kant, Honoré de Balzac, Helen Keller, Czesław Miłosz, August Strindberg, D.T. Suzuki, and W. B. Yeats. His philosophy had a great impact on King Carl XIII of Sweden (1748 – 1818), nephew of Frederick the Great, who as the Grand Master of Swedish Freemasonry built its unique system of degrees and wrote its rituals.

Swedenborg had already become immersed in Sabbatean influences, which had made an important penetration in Sweden. At the University of Uppsala, Hebraists and Orientalists were familiar with Sabbatai Zevi’s mission through Abraham Texeira, Queen Christina’s confidant and Resident in Hamburg. Texeira kept the Christian Hebraist Esdras Edzard who had been a believer in Sabbatai Zevi informed, before exploiting the disillusionment with the mission of Zevi’s apostasy towards converting hundreds of Jews to Christianity. Swedenborg’s father, Bishop Jesper Swedberg, spent ten weeks in the home of Edzard, where he learned of his host’s Sabbatianism.[17]

Swedenborg was also exposed to Sabbateanism through the influence of his brother-in-law, the Swedish Scholar Eric Benzelius (1675 – 1743), his chief mentor for forty years, who founded the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala in 1739, of which Swedenborg became a member. When Benzelius set off on his travels in summer 1697, his primary goal was to visit Leibniz, where he had the opportunity to converse with Francis Mercurius Van Helmont. They discussed Kabballah, Pythagoreanism, Chinese religions, and various millenarian ideas. They also discussed Trithemius’ system of Kabbalistic cryptography and angel magic. Benzelius was so impressed that he acquired rare editions of the Kabbala Denudata and Trithemius’s Polygraphie.[18]

Benzelius had visited Edzard and studied Kabbalah with Leibniz and Van Helmont, and worked closely with Rabbi Johann Kemper (1670 – 1716), formerly Moses ben Aaron of Cracow, who had been a follower of the Sabbatean prophet Zadoq before converting to Christianity.[19] Kemper’s esoteric writings on the angel Metatron would influence later Swedish Freemasons who developed Kabbalisitc rites cantered on “Metatron, the Middle Pillar.”[20] Kemper and Benzelius placed great hopes in the Charles XII, the young king of Sweden, who shared the philo-semitism of his father. For Benzelius, these sympathies promised a new opening of Sweden to new ideas in religion, science and economics. From his study of Johannes Bureus’ “Nordic Kabbalah,” he argued that Kabbalistic studies were central to Sweden’s national identity. Benzelius collected Bureus’ manuscripts and inscribed his name on Bureus’ elaborate illustration of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Kemper was also interested in Bureus’ system, which provided “a highly individual path of initiation which leads to unity with God.”[21] He and Benzelius learned of John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica on Bureus’ Rosicrucianism. They learned from Leibniz that the theories of Knorr von Rosenroth and Van Helmont were important to mathematical and scientific advancement.[22]

In 1709, Swedenborg submitted his thesis, Selecta Sententia, which revealed the influence of his studies in Storgöticism, the pansophic belief in “great Gothic Sweden.” Swedenborg acquired various publications expressing Storgöticist, like those of Sigrid Forsius, who bolstered Gustavus Adolphus’ war effort, and Johannes Messenius, the great Storgöticist historian. Swedenborg drew on Loccenius’ Rerum Suecicarum Historia (1654), which described the role of Bureus’s theories runic “Gothic Cabala” in Gustavus Adolphus’s nationalist agenda. Loccenius also discussed Georg Stiernhielm’s linguistic theories about the Hebraic roots of Swedish, as well as the traditions of incantations and “magica deliraments” that fascinated Queen Christina and other Swedish scholars. Loccenius referred further to the Jewish lore of Philo, Bodin, Grotius, and Normann, as well as the neoplatonism of Pythagoras and Macrobius.[23]

According to Marsha Keith Schuchard, “Rather than becoming a Newtonian, Swedenborg became a Wilkinsian, for it was John Wilkins, original founder of the ‘Invisible College,’ who most fired Swedenborg’s imagination and ambition.”[24] Swedenborg purchased Wilkins’s posthumously published Mathematical and Philosophical Works (1708), and he wrote Benzelius that his writings “are very ingenious.”[25] Swedenborg’s readings about Kabbalistic linguistic and mystical techniques would be reinforced by his readings of similar studies by a member of Wilkins’ group at Wadham College and a founding member of the Royal Society, Robert Hooke (1635 – 1703). Swedenborg had learned about Dee’s symbolic language in London, when he made a careful study of Robert Hooke’s Posthumous Works (1703). Hooke had delivered a Cutlerian Lecture to the Royal Society in which he argued that Dee’s descriptions of conversations with angels and spirits were an elaborate diplomatic code. Hooke argued that Dee had learned from Trithemius’s Steganographia about the value of such a “celestial” code for dangerous intelligence and diplomatic work. Swedenborg also met Dr. John Woodward, a fellow of the Royal Society and an active Freemason, who collected works by Hermes Trismegistus, Dee, Maier, Van Helmont, Ashmole and Kircher.[26] As Schuchard remarked, “that Swedenborg’s friend John Woodward owned Casaubon’s book on Dee, Ashmole’s account of Dee, and Hooke’s analysis of Dee’s cryptography means that Swedenborg had access to all three while in London.”[27]

In 1741, Swedenborg entered into a spiritual phase during which he experienced dreams and visions. This culminated in a spiritual awakening through which he claimed he was appointed by the Lord to write a New Church Doctrine to reform Christianity. According to the New Church Doctrine, the Lord had opened his spiritual eyes to allow him to visit heaven and hell and talk with angels, demons and other spirits. He said that the Last Judgment had already occurred in 1757, though it was only visible in the spiritual world where he had witnessed it. That Judgment was followed by the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which occurred, not by Christ in person, but by a revelation from Him through the inner, spiritual sense of the Word.

Moravian Church

Swedenborg was associated with the Fetter Lane Society was the first flowering of the Moravian Church in England, founded by Count Nicolaus Zinzendorf (1700 – 1760), a German religious and social reformer, bishop of the Moravian Church, and a major figure of eighteenth-century Protestantism. The Moravian Church, formally named the Unitas Fratrum (Latin for “Unity of the Brethren”), was derived from the Hussite movement started by Jan Hus in early fifteenth century Bohemia, to which had belonged Bishop John Amos Comenius, a core member of the Hartlib Circle. Hus was burned at the stake at the Council of Constance in 1415, despite the protection he had received from King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia and his brother Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor and founder of the Order of the Dragon.[28]

Like the Rosicrucians, following the Protestant defeat at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, the Brethren were forced to operate underground and eventually dispersed across Northern Europe as far as the Low Countries, where Comenius attempted to direct a resurgence. After 1620, descendants of the Bohemian Brethren, who stayed in Bohemia and Moravia—referred to as “the Hidden Seed” which Comenius had prayed would preserve the evangelical faith—made up the core of a regrouping a century later under the influence of Zinzendorf. The refugees established a new village called Herrnhut, an Upper Lusatian town in the Görlitz district in Saxony, Germany.

Zinzendorf was raised by a grandmother who corresponded with Leibniz in Latin, read the Bible in Hebrew and Greek, and studied Syrian and Chaldean, and exposed him to themes of Jacob Boehme and Christian Kabbalism.[29] This would bring Zinzendorf into contact with heterodox Jews, whose sympathies for the teachings of Sabbatai Zevi led them to positions close to Christian students of Kabbalah, seen by many Pietists as a medium between the two religions.[30] Zinzendorf was the pupil and godson of the direct originator of Pietistm, Philipp Jakob Spener (1635 – 1705). Pietism was a movement within Lutheranism that began in the late seventeenth century, whose forerunners were Jakob Boehme and Johann Valentin Andrea, the author of the Rosicrucian manifestos.[31] Spener was powerfully influenced by the preaching of the converted Jesuit preacher Jean de Labadie (1610 – 1674). Originally a Jesuit priest, Labadie became a member of the Reformed Church in 1650, before founding the community which became known as the in 1669. Labadie was among those who had been kept informed on the progress of Sabbatai Zevi’s mission by Peter Serrarius, and spoke about the Sabbateans in his sermons.[32]

Labadie’s movement attracted some notable female converts such as the famed poet and scholar, Anna Maria van Schurman (1607 – 1678), and the entomological artist Maria Merian (1647 – 1717). Among Schurman’s friends were Dutch composer Constantijn Huygens, who was in touch with René Descartes, Rembrandt, John Donne and the painter Jan Lievens. Through correspondence in Latin, Hebrew and French, Schurman established a network of learned women across Europe, including John Dury’s wife Dorothea Moore, Bathsua Makin, the feminist Marie de Gournay, Marie du Moulin, Elizabeth of Bohemia, and Queen Christina of Sweden.[33] Makin, who was influenced by the writings of Comenius, was known as the most learned woman in England, and was tutor to the children of Charles I of England, and governess to his daughter Elizabeth Stuart.[34] In 1670, Labadie, Schurman and his congregation moved into a house in Herford, Germany, provided as a refuge by Elisabeth of Bohemia.[35]

According to Masonic historian Arthur E. Waite, Zinzendorf organized his followers into a hierarchical secret society that functioned as an offshoot of “irregular” or “illuminist” Freemasonry.[36] In 1722, Zinzendorf created a secret society called the Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed, connected to Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism. The order was revived in 1739, when Zinzendorf managed to recruit to it the archbishops of Canterbury and Paris, as well as Christian VI (1699 – 1746), King of Denmark. It was also one of the first innovatory orders introduced into early German Freemasonry, meaning orders which added new material, often Christian or Templar, to the traditional three-degree system. In 1803, C.G. von Murr wrote that the Order of the Mustard Seed was a “pale imitation of the Society of the Rosicrucians” and a form of “spiritual Freemasonry.”[37] Critics charged that Zinzendorf “bestows orders of knighthood,” while his initiates wore a “Templar style cross.”[38] The first article of the Order affirmed that “the members of our society will love the whole human family,” and as crusaders for Christ seek conciliation with the Jews.[39]

In 1722, Zinzendorf had offered asylum to a number of persecuted wanderers from Moravia and Bohemia, and permitted them to build the village of Herrnhut on a corner of his estate of Berthelsdorf. As Herrnhut grew it became known as a place of religious freedom, and attracted individuals from a variety of persecuted groups, including the Schwenkfelders, founded by Kaspar Schwenkfeld, who had flourished in Görlitz in Jacob Boehme’s time and who were later closely related to the Collegiants.[40] Although Schwenckfeld did not organize a separate church during his lifetime, in 1700 there were about 1,500 of his followers in Lower Silesia, who became known as Schwenkfelders. Many fled Silesia under persecution of the Austrian emperor, and some found refuge on Zinzendorf’s lands of and his Herrnhuter Brüdergemeinde. A group arrived in Philadelphia in 1731, followed by five more migrations up to 1737.[41]

Fetter Lane Society

In 1738, Peter Boehler, the London Moravian leader, and his followers established the Fetter Lane Society in London, the first flowering of the Moravian Church in England. Following their practice in Germany, the had a custom of fellowshipping at a common meal, or a “love feast,” prior to taking communion. Most of their members were Anglicans, most prominently John Wesley (1703 – 1791), his brother Charles Wesley (1707 – 1788), and George Whitefield (1714 – 1770). Charles Wesley records in his journal for January 1, 1739:

Mr. Hall, Hinching, Ingham, Whitefield, Hutching, and my brother Charles were present at our love feast in Fetter Lane with about 60 of our brethren. About three in the morning, as we were continuing instant in prayer, the power of God came mightily upon us insomuch that many cried out for exceeding joy and many fell to the ground. As soon as we were recovered a little from that awe and amazement at the presence of His majesty, we broke out with one voice, “We praise Thee, O God, we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord.”[42]

Swedenborg was a visitor from 1744-5 and again in 1748-9, of the Fetter Lane Society. In London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd observed that the obscurity surrounding the origin of the name Fetter Lane suggests that “the city was trying to conceal its origins”:

A more simple connection has been made with the workshops of the street which manufactured fetters or lance vests for the Knights Templar who also congregated in the vicinity… Throughout its history Fetter Lane acted as a boundary, or has been recorded as frontier territory;… it has attracted those who live upon “the edge.”[43]

In 1749, Zinzendorf leased Lindsey House, a large manor on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea built on the estate of Sir Thomas More to be a headquarters for work in England. Zinzendorf lived there until 1755, when the Moravians in London became so mired in controversy that Zinzendort was forced to leave the country. In a sensational exposé that received wide public attention in London, Henry Rimius, a Prussian who visited the Moravians in London, described them as a subversive secret society, whose leaders “are gradually sapping the foundation of civil government in any country they settle in, and establishing an empire within an empire.”[44]

According to Glenn Dynner, it was possibly at this time that the Moravians and Rabbi Eybeschütz, then denounced as a crypto-Sabbatean in the Emden- Eybeschütz controversy, discovered their mutual interests.[45] Zinzendorf was so fascinated by Jacob Frank’s mission, that after thousands of Frankists converted to Catholicism in Poland, he sent missionaries among this Jewish followers who converted to Moravianism to meet with Frank’s disciples.[46] Zinzendorf then adopted the antinomianism of the Frankists by elaborating Kabbalistic sex rites into bizarre Christian teachings. According to the Kabbalistic theories of Zinzendorf, God and the universe are comprised sexual potencies, the Sephiroth of the Kabbalah, which interact with each other and produce orgasmic joy when in perfect equilibrium, recalling the union of the cherubim in the Holy of Holies.[47] Kabbalists claimed that the cherubim were embraced in the act of intercourse, symbolizing God’s union with the Shekhinah. After the destruction of the Temple, the reunion of the cherubim depends on ritual intercourse between Kabbalist and his wife.[48]

According to James Hutton, an English Moravian who became a lifelong friend of Richard Cosway, the public society held open meetings in the Fetter Lane Chapel, while the elite interior order met secretly, lived communally, and practiced Kabbalistic rituals.[49] Zinzendorf began the practice of “adjusting” marriages by switching partners, and often held “mass adjustments” during which a large number of young boys and girls were brought together in sexual unions within the meeting house.[50] In public sermons, the Count claimed that “a person regenerated enjoys a great Liberty,” because “Christ can make the most villainous act to be a virtue and the most exalted moral virtue to be vice.”[51] Because the genital organs of either sex are “the most honorable of the whole body,” he commanded the wives, when they see the male member to honor that “precious sign by which they resemble Christ.” The female vulva is “that little Model of a Chapel of God,” to which husbands are to offer worship.[52]

Like the Frankists before him, Zinzendorf created a theology of “Sacred Wounds” of Christ. The Frankists were at the forefront of the revival of Catholic mystical and devotional practices centered on Our Lady and the Eucharistic Lord such as the Rosary, novenas, devotion to the Sacred and Immaculate hearts, Benedictions, the forty hours devotions and Perpetual Eucharistic adoration.[53] Devotion to the Sacred Heart developed out of the devotion to the Holy Wounds, in particular to the Sacred Wound in the side of Jesus, The Five Holy Wounds or Five Sacred Wounds are the five piercing wounds Jesus suffered during the Crucifixion. These practices grew from the influence of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, patron of the Templars, and Saint Francis of Assisi, who according to Steven Runciman was influenced by the Cathars.[54] Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus marked the spirituality of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century and of Saint Bonaventure and St. Gertrude the Great in the thirteenth.[55] This devotion was strongly opposed in and out of the Church and suppressed in many places.

During the so-called sichtungszeit, or “sifting period,” a series of experiments in egalitarianism, magical and sexual practices, Zinzendorf led the Moravians into interpreting every aspect of the Passion and Death of Christ in increasingly erotic terms. Zinzendorf interpreted the wound in Christ’s side caused by the soldier Longinus in overtly sexual terms. The wound became a vaginal orifice, the seitenholchen, or “little side cave.” Zinzendorf enjoined his followers to meditate upon the Cave and to enter it, in a phallic sense, to take pleasure therein. The wound became, for Zinzendorf, the birth canal of the Christian Church.[56] According to Zinzendorf, meditation on Christ’s sexual organs as well as his wounds would lead to a mystical experience. As he explained, “all the senses must be mobilized, the whole body must participate.”[57] According to Zinzendorf, meditation on Christ’s sexual organs as well as his wounds would lead to a mystical experience. As he explained, “all the senses must be mobilized, the whole body must participate.”[58]

Like Zinzendorf, Swedenborg considered the Sabbatean version of Kabbalah could end the ancient divisions between Judaism and Christianity. Though Swedenborg broke with the Moravians, he continued to infuse Kabbalistic concepts into his Christian theosophy, such as Zinzendorf’s bizarre Kabbalistic sex rites.[59]  In 1741, Swedenborg had entered into a spiritual phase during which he experienced dreams and visions. This culminated in a spiritual awakening through which he claimed he was appointed by the Lord to write a New Church Doctrine to reform Christianity. According to the New Church Doctrine, the Lord had opened his spiritual eyes to allow him to visit heaven and hell and talk with angels, demons and other spirits. He said that the Last Judgment had already occurred in 1757, though it was only visible in the spiritual world where he had witnessed it. That Judgment was followed by the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which occurred, not by Christ in person, but by a revelation from Him through the inner, spiritual sense of the Word.

Oriental Kabbalah

In Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision, Marsha Keith Schuchard proposes that Swedenborg could have learned about Tantric Yoga from members of the crypto-Sabbatean Moravian Church, who had sent missionaries in the 1740s to India, China, Tibet, Tartary, and central Russia, and from Moravian converts among the Cochin Jews, who traveled to London and Holland. Swedenborg was a follower of the crypto-Sabbatean Count Nicolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf (1700 – 1760), who was familiar with Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century account branded the Yogis of Malabar as alchemists, and with François Bernier’s popular Travels in the Mogul Empire (1670), which presented Yogic and Sufi mysticism as a form of Kabbalism. Bernier further claimed that this Yogic philosophy was the same as that of Robert Fludd, and thus part of the Rosicrucian tradition. The anti-Rosicrucian writer Heinrich Neuhaus, in his Pia et Utilissima Admonitio de Fratribus Rosae Crucis (1618), claimed that the Rosicrucians had departed for India.[60] According to alchemist Michael Maier, the Rosicrucians were preceded by a College of Gymnosophists among the Ethiopians, a College of Magi among Persians, a College of Brahmins in India.[61] In the preface to his 1652 translation of the Rosicrucian manifestos, Thomas Vaughan offers a parallel between the Rosicrucians and the Indian Brotherhood visited by Apollonius of Tyana.[62]

This perceived link was reinforced by Samuel Richter (Sincerus Renatus), a Protestant pastor from Silesia, who reported in 1710 that “all Rosicrucians have left Europe and gone to India.”[63] It was Renatus’ Die wahrhafte und volkommene Bereitung des philosophischen Steins der Brüderschaft aus dem Orden des Gülden und Rosen Kreutzes, published in Breslau in 1710, which sparked off the renewal of interest in Rosicrucianism in the eighteenth century. Here, the Rosy Cross now became the Golden and Rosy Cross, demonstrateing a new alchemical emphasis.[64]

Swedenborg located the source of his Kabbalistic theories not among the Jews, but in Asia. Influenced by the Sabbateans and their sexual doctrines, Swedenborg became intrigued by the similarity of Yogic Tantra techniques of meditation to Kabbalistic ones.[65] He was fascinated with the “Shambhala” myth, and journeyed to India and Central Asia, bringing back with him the sexual rites that were incorporated into his New Jerusalem Society.[66] Adepts of Chinese and Tibetan Tantra claim that refraining from ejaculating leads to a heightened experience, culminating in the ability to communicate with spirits, perform automatic writing, clairvoyance, and astral travel.[67] Similarly, as explained Schuchard:

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

During Swedenborg’s early participation with the Moravian Brethren, one of Zinzendorf’s missionaries to the Jews also recruited East Indians from Malabar who came to London. In London, Swedenborg and his Moravian associates studied Kabbalist forms of meditation, visualization, breath control, and sexual yoga that were similar to Tantric practices. At the same time, Schuchard explains, Swedenborg maintained a love-hate relationship with the Jews from whom he continued to learn Kabbalistic techniques of meditation and Bible interpretation. However, the prevailing anti-Semitism in Sweden led Swedenborg to gradually displace his theories of the sources of the Kabbalah from Israel to Asia.[68]

Taking advantage of the great interest in Asian culture generated by the Swedish East India Company, which secretly employed him, Swedenborg argued that the Yogis of Great Tartary discovered the secrets of Kabbalism long before the Jews. In “The Secret of Great Tartary,” Anders Hallengren argues that Swedenborg’s “Great Tartary" was among the Turkic-Mongolian people of Mongolia, between Tibet and Siberia, and that he had access to rare Asiatic manuscripts and oral traditions brought back by returning relatives and colleagues.[69]

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

Swedenborg also acquired a rare book that explicitly linked the Yogic and Kabbalistic mystical traditions, de la Créquiniére’s Conformite de la Coutoumes des Indiens Orientaux avec celles des Juifs (1704), which was translated into English by the radical pantheist John Toland and provoked much interest among Masonic students of the esoteric sciences.[70] La Crequinière’s claimed an Asian origin for the “priapic rites” of the Jews, which were represented by erotic sculptures of male and female fertility figures. The Priapic rites purportedly remained in India until the time of Solomon, and “in the sixty-fifth year of Jesus Christ, they were carried into China.”[71]

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

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

[3] John MacGregor. Tibet: A Chronicle of Exploration (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1970), pp. 47.

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

[5] Marsha Keith Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, Secret Agent on Earth and in Heaven (Leiden: Brill, 2011) p. 259.

[6] Albert G. Mackey. The Symbolism of Freemasonry (1882); George Mather, Larry A. Nichols. Masonic Lodge (Zondervan Academic, 2016).

[7] Swedenborg. Apocalypse Revealed (British & Foreign Swedenborg Society, 1876), p. 31.

[8] Webster. Secret Societies and Subversive Movements; Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, pp. 436, 445.

[9] Karl-Erich Grözinger & Joseph Dan. Mysticism, Magic and Kabbalah in Ashkenazi Judaism (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991).

[10] Ch. Wirzubski. “The Sabbatian Kabbalist R. Moshe David of Podhajce” [Hebrew], Zion 7 (1942), II, 83; cited in Marsha Keith Schuchard. “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk: A Sabbatian Adventurer in the Masonic Underground.” Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, Volume I, p. 215.

[11] Keith Schuchard, “Why Mrs. Blake Cried.”

[12] Marsha Keith Schuchard. “Falk, Samuel Jacob.” In Wouter J. Hanegraaff ed. Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2006). p. 357.

[13] Webster. Secret Societies and Subversive Movements; Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, pp. 436, 445.

[14] Gary Lachman. A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003), p. 19.

[15] Michal Oren. Samuel Falk, The Baal shem of London (Bialik Institute, 2002).

[16] Rev. Dr. H. Adler, Chief Rabbi, “The Ba’al Shem of London,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society, Vol. V. p. 162.

[17] Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, p. 15.

[18] Ibid., p. 21.

[19] Ibid., p. 15.

[20] Ibid., p. 30.

[21] Susanna Åkerman, “Three Phases of Inventing Rosicrucian Tradition in the Seventeenth Century,” in James Lewis and Olav Hammer, eds., The Invention of Sacred Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 160–64.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., p. 34.

[24] Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, p. 65.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid., p. 58.

[27] Ibid., p. 89.

[28] Hugh Chisholm, ed. “Sigismund.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1911).

[29] Marsha Keith Schuchard. Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision (Vintage, 2013).

[30] Ibid.

[31] Dickson. The Tessera of Antilia, p. 19; R.H. Popkin, John Christian Laursen, James E. Force. Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, Volume IV (Springer Science & Business Media, 2001) p. 108.

[32] Matt Goldish. The Sabbatean Prophets (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press), p. 17.

[33] Suzanna van Dijk & Jo Nesbitt. I Have Heard about You: Foreign Women's Writing Crossing the Dutch Border : from Sappho to Selma Lagerlöf (Uitgeverij Verloren, 2004), p. 121.

[34] Jane Donawerth. Rhetorical Theory by Women Before 1900: An Anthology (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). p. 74.

[35] Beate Köster (1992). “Labadie, Jean de.” In Traugott Bautz, Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL) (in German). 4. Herzberg: Bautz. cols. 905–907.

[36] Arthur E. Waite. A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (London: William Ryder, l921), 194.

[37] Christoph Gottlieb von Murr. Uber den wahren Rosenkreutzer und des Freymaurerordens (Sulzbach: J. E. Semler, 1803), p. 81.

[38] Rimius, Supplement, p. xlix; Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 465.

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

[40] Andrew Cooper Fix. Prophecy and Reason: The Dutch Collegiants in the Early Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 45.

[41] “Schwenckfelder Church.” New Catholic Encyclopedia (The Gale Group, 2003).

[42] John Telford. The Life of John Wesley (London: The Epworth Press, 1947). p. 394.

[43] Peter Ackroyd. London: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), p. 230; cited in Keith Schuchard. “Why Mrs Blake Cried.”

[44] Henry Rimius. A Candid Narrative of the Rise and Progress of the Herrnhutters (London: A. Linde, 1753), I, 9-10; II, 3, 19-22, 36, 77, 80.

[45] Glenn Dynner. Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe (Wayne State University Press, 2011).

[46] Erich Beyreuther. “Zinzendorf und das Judentum,” Judaica, l9 (l963), pp. l93-246; Markus Schoop. “Zum Gespräch Zinzendorfs mit Israel,” Reformatio, 16 (l967), p. 240; Cited in Keith Schuschard, “Why Mrs Blake Cried.”

[47] Raphael Patai. The Hebrew Goddess (New York: Ktav, l967), pp. 101-03, 120-22.

[48] “Sexuality and Spirituality in the Kabbalah,” in David Biale. Eros and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, l992), pp. 101-20.

[49] 19 Daniel Benham. Memoirs of James Hutton (London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., l856), p. 118. On Zinzendorf's “règle du secret, disciplini arcani,” see Pierre Deghaye. La Doctrine Esotérique de Zinzendorf (1700-1760) (Paris: Klincksieck, l969); cited in Keith-Schuchard. “Why Ms. Blake Cried.”

[50] Jim Keith. Secret and Suppressed, p. 105.

[51] Rimius. A Candid Narrative of the Rise and Progress of the Herrnhutters, pp. 3, 60, 64.

[52] Keith-Schuchard. “Why Ms. Blake Cried.”

[53] “Frankists and the Catholic Church.” Zoharist Stories. Retrieved from https://zohariststories.blogspot.com/2019/09/frankists-and-catholic-church.html

[54] Ean Begg. The Cult of the Black Virgin (London: Arkana, Penguin Books, 1985).

[55] Frederick Holweck. “The Five Sacred Wounds.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 15 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912).

[56] Ibid., p. 107.

[57] Lars Bergquist. Swedenborg’s Secret (London: Swedenborg Society, 2005), p. 204

[58] Ibid., p. 204

[59] Schuchard. “Why Mrs. Blake Cried: Swedenborg.”

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

[61] A. E Waite. Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993), p. 324.

[62] Ibid., p. 375.

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

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

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

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

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

[68] Ibid.

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

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

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

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