14. Weimar Classicism

Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach

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 Goethe, Lessing and 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.

In 1815, when his son was promoted to Journeyman in Weimar’s Masonic lodge, Goethe wrote a poem entitled Verschwiegenheit (“Secrecy”), in which he extolled the society’s practice of discretion:

No one should and will see
what we have confided in one another:
For upon silence and trust
the temple is built.

What was to become known as Weimar Classicism was established by Illuminati member Karl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1757 – 1828), a close friend of Frederick William III, notably by bringing his friend Goethe there.[1] Saxe-Eisenach was an Ernestine duchy ruled by the Saxon House of Wettin, which like the houses of Savoy, Gonzaga, Cleves, Lorraine and Montferrat, all began their ascent after they were recognized by Emperor Sigismund, founder of the Order of the Dragon. The town of Eisenach is the location of Wartburg Castle, site of the Miracle of the Roses performed by Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. In 1207, the legendary Sängerkrieg supposedly took place there, organized by Elizabeth’s father-in-law, Hermann I, Landgrave of Thuringia, and which involved Wolfram von Eschenbach, author of Lohengrin, the story of the Knight of the Swan. One of the most famous interpretations is Wagner’s Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg (1845).

The union between Saxe-Weimar and Saxe-Eisenach became permanent when they were inherited by Karl August’s grandfather, Ernest Augustus I, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1688 – 1748), in 1741. Ernest Augustus I was the grandson of John VI, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, nephew of Christian of Anhalt, the chief advisor of Frederick V of the Palatinate of the Alchemical Wedding, 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, Dorothea of Anhalt-Zerbst, married Augustus the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, a friend of Johann Valentin Andreae, the reputed author of the Rosicrucian manifestos, and of Rabbi Templo.

Also from the Ernestine branch the House of Wettin, was John Frederick I of Saxony, who planned what would become the University of Jena, in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. 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.[2]

Ernest Augustus I’s son, Ernest Augustus II, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1737 – 1758), was Karl August’s father. Karl August’s mother was Duchess Anna Amalia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1739 – 1807). Anna Amalia was a distant cousin of Weishaupt’s friend, Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, former Grand Master of the National Grand Lodge located in Berlin, and the great-grandfather of Prince Albert the husband of Queen Victoria. Like Ernst II, Anna Amalia was a great-great-grandchild of Augustus the Younger and Dorothea of Anhalt-Zerbst. Anna Amalia’s mother, Princess Philippine Charlotte of Prussia, was a sister of Frederick the Great and Louisa Ulrika of Prussia, the mother of Charles XIII of Sweden and Gustav III of Sweden, Grand Masters of Swedish Freemasonry and patrons of Swedenborg.[3] Anna Amalia’s father, Charles I, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, was the brother of Ferdinand Duke of Brunswick, Illuminatus, Grand Master of the Strict Observance and member of the Asiatic Brethren. Charles I and Ferdinand were first cousins of Empress Maria Theresa—Jacob Frank’s protector—and Peter II of Russia. Their sister, Duchess Luise of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, was the mother of Frederick William II, a member of the Golden and Rosy Cross.

During Karl August’s minority, Anna Amalia administered the affairs of the duchy. A literate patron, pianist and composer, Anna Amalia held a famous literary salon, the Musenhof, and prepared Weimar to become a “New Athens.”[4] As a patron of the arts, Anna Amalia drew many of the most eminent people in Germany to Weimar. She gathered a group of scholars, poets and musicians, professional and amateur, for discussion and music at the Wittum palace. She succeeded in engaging Abel Seyler’s theatrical company, considered the best theatre company in Germany at that time.[5] She also established the Duchess Anna Amalia Library. Among its special collections is an important Shakespeare collection, as well as a sixteenth-century Bible connected to Martin Luther. One of the library’s most famous patrons was Goethe, who honored her in a work titled Zum Andenken der Fürstin Anna-Amalia.

In this Musenhof (“court of the muses”), as Wilhelm Bode called it, members included Herder, Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller.[6] As a boy, Schiller came to the attention of Charles Eugene, Duke of Württemberg (1728 – 1793), whose sister, Duchess Auguste of Württemberg, was married to Karl Anselm of Thurn and Taxis, and a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece, whose banker was Amschel Rothschild. Charles Eugene was educated at the court of Frederick II of Prussia and also studied keyboard with Bach’s son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714 – 1788), who dedicated his “Württemberg” sonatas to him. C.P.E. Bach, who was born in Weimar, obtained an appointment in Berlin in the service of the future Frederick the Great. During his time there, Bach mixed with many accomplished musicians, including several notable former students of his father, and important literary figures, such as Illuminatus Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, with whom he would become close friends. In 1744, Charles Eugene ordered that the corpse of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer (1698? – 1738), a German Jewish banker and court Jew for his father Charles Alexander, Duke of Württemberg (1684 – 1737), who was executed by the Duke of Württemberg-Neuenstadt, and whose decaying corpse had been suspended in an iron cage by Stuttgart’s Prag gallows for six years, be taken down and given a proper burial.

Although no official membership list of the Illuminati includes his name, Schiller was surrounded by members of the order all his life, including Goethe, Herder, Voigt, and J.C. Bode, who with Moses Mendelssohn was a mutual friend of Lessing, and who succeeded Weishaupt as the leader of the order in 1784 and would contribute to instigating the French Revolution on his trip to Paris in 1787. As a young man, Schiller attended Karlsschule Military Academy in Stuttgart, founded by Duke Charles Eugene of Württemberg, where he was taught in philosophy by Illuminatus Jacob Friedrich von Abel (1751 – 1829), who would remain a good friend his entire life. Even the theme of his famous play Don Carlos (1787), which was always suspected of being rife with allusions to the Illuminati, was suggested by his friend Baron Karl Theodor von Dalberg, a high-ranking Illuminatus.[7] In 1787, Schiller settled in Weimar and in 1789, he was appointed professor of History and Philosophy at the University of Jena. In the 1790s Schiller’s patron, the Danish Prince Friedrich Christian von Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg (1765 – 1814), aimed to reform the Illuminati. He financed Weishaupt, who at that time lived in exile in Gotha, and involved the Danish poet Jens Baggesen (1764 – 1826), who travelled throughout Europe as his emissary, in the project to revive the order. Schiller was invited to serve as a theoretical leader and was regularly updated.[8]

 

Anna Amalia zu den drei Rosen

On October 24, 1764, the birthday of its namesake, the Anna Amalia zu den drei Rosen (“Anna Amalia of the Three Roses”) Masonic lodge was founded by Jakob Friedrich von Fritsch (1731 – 1814), with brothers from the previously dissolved Jena Lodge.[9] Fritsch was a member of the Duchy’s governing Geheimes Conseil (“Privy Council”), the highest political and judicial body in the Duchy, and was responsible for all important political decisions of the state. It reported directly to the Grand Duke and was the central authority of the duchy, overseeing all other authorities as well as the Duchess Anna Amalia Library.

As a tutor for her son Grand Duke Karl August, she hired a member of the Anna Amalia zu den drei Rosen, Christoph Martin Wieland (1733 – 1813), an important poet and noted translator of William Shakespeare, who would become one of the central figure of Weimar Classicism. Wieland’s novel Agathon, which was one of “the most widely read German novels of the period,” according to Nicholas Till, “made a huge impact on Adam Weishaupt… who frequently cited it as one of the most important influences upon his own conception of the meaning of Masonic initiation.”[10] Wieland’s work, along with that of Illuminati member Christoph Meiners (1747 – 1810) was recommended reading for members of the order.[11] German eighteenth-century homoerotic works about “Greek love” include the academic essays of Meiners and Alexander von Humboldt, and Wieland’s Comische Erzählungen of 1765, one of which was the tale Juno und Ganymede, omitted in later editions, and A Year in Arcadia: Kyllenion (1805), a novel about an explicitly homosexual love affair in a Greek setting by Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1772 – 1822), the son of Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg.[12]

Goethe, fresh from the success of his novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774), settled in Weimar where he became advisor to Karl August. The relationship between Goethe and Karl August was unusually intimate and has been described by the psychoanalyst Kurt Eissler as latently homosexual.[13] As summarized by W. Daniel Wilson:

The sum of this evidence suggests a homosexual subculture in classical Weimar, or, at the very least, demonstrable fascination with homoerotic themes in this circle of men—none of whom, it might be added, was conventionally and monogamously married at this time.[14]

 

The following year, Goethe appointed his friend Herder, a Mason in Riga and a member of the Strict Templar Observance, as general superintendent of the Lutheran consistory and ecclesiastical advisor to the court.[15] In 1775, Karl August reached his majority and assumed the government of his duchy. In that same year he married Princess Louise of Hesse-Darmstadt, whose sister, Natalia Alexeievna, was the wife of Paul I of Russia. 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.

“The entire Weimarer school,” in the words of one scholar, “was a nest of Illuminati.”[16] Bode, who was Procurator Generalis for the Seventh Province of the Strict Observance, was private secretary of the widow of the former Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Countess Charitas Emilie von Bernstorff, who held a salon in Weimar.[17] Bode, who had been living in Weimar since 1778, recruited members of the Masonic lodge Anna Amalia as Illuminati, including Karl August, Goethe and Herder, who became a Mason in Riga and joined the Strict Observance. Goethe was initiated into the Anna Amalia lodge in 1780, and admitted into the Strict Observance in 1782. He was insinuated into the Illuminati in 1783, and attained the rank of Regent in 1784.[18] Karl August was initiated in 1782, in the presence of his brother, Prince Frederick Ferdinand Constantin of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1758 – 1793), and Weishaupt’s friend, Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, former Grand Master of the National Grand Lodge located in Berlin.[19] On February 25, 1777, Ernst II was initiated into the Strict Observance in the castle of Ferdinand Duke of Brunswick, where “a banquet table, brought in by the Duchesse and seven ladies of the court, had the shape of a T—‘a symbol noticeable on monuments of the old Knights Templar’”[20] Ernst II was initiated the Illuminati in 1783, appointed the inspector of upper-Saxony, and Coadjutor to the National Superior, Stolberg-Rossla in 1784, National Director of Germany, after helping Weishaupt escape.[21] Karl August became Regent in the Order in 1784. He took alias Aeschylus, named after the Greek playwright and tragedian of the sixth century BC, traditionally believed to have been the author of Prometheus Bound.[22] Bode was a regular guest of Karl August. At least fifteen members of the Illuminati lodge at Weimar represented the elite of Weimar, and among them are three of the four members of the Geheimes Conseil: Duke Karl August and Goethe, and Fritsch, as well as a future member of the Conseil, Christian Gottlob Voigt (1743 – 1819, President of the State Ministry.[23]

Just as the Bavarian state banned the Illuminati, Weishaupt became a candidate for a philosophy chair at the University of Jena. Goethe played a central role in determining Weishaupt’s qualifications for Duke Karl August, who finally rejected his candidacy.[24] According to W. Daniel Wilson, the reason would have been because of fears on the part of Goethe and Karl August of attracting undue attention to their on-going activities.[25] Instead, Weishaupt ended up in the nearby duchy of Saxe-Gotha, headed by branch of the same family as Karl August, Weishaupt’s friend Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg.[26]  As pointed out Wilson, just before the Weimar Illuminati papers were confiscated during the Nazi persecution of Freemasonry and then disappeared for half a century, they were viewed and partly published by at least four scholars. After earlier studies had begun to highlight the importance of Bode’s revival of the Illuminati following their suppression in Bavaria, Hermann Schüttler, who had access to the newly-available Weimar documents, concluded that Weimar and Gotha became the center of the reformed Illuminati.[27] State Councillor Clemens von Neumayr  and a companion, both former members of the Illuminati, set out to determine whether the order had survived in Northern Germany by visiting Weishaupt in Gotha and Bode near Weimar, and discovered that in the summer of 1789 student organization in Jena had as its goal “to re-establish the Illuminati order.”[28] As Wilson concludes, “When we put all these facts together, it seems clear that Bode was working through the students in Jena to revive the Illuminati.”[29]

Ernst II figures prominently in the preservation of Volume X of the Schwedenkiste (“Swedish Box”), a collection of correspondences between members of the Illuminati from the estate of J.J.C. Bode. Upon his death at the end of 1793, Bode’s possessions became the property of Ernst II.[30] The collection was confiscated by the Nazis in 1933, brought to Moscow by Soviet commissioners in 1945, and returned to the State Archives of the German Democratic Republic at the end of the 1950s, with the exception of Volume X, which remained in Moscow, and now in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz (“Secret State Archives Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation”) in Berlin.[31] The agency represents archival work of the former states of Brandenburg-Prussia, including their main roots in the Teutonic Knights, which to cover “nine centuries of European history between Königsberg and Cleves.”[32]

Pantheism Controversy

In 1794, Schiller and Goethe became friends and allies in a project to establish new standards for literature and the arts in Germany. Initially, the Weimar Illuminati lodge brought together nobles and administrators of the duchy, including Friedrich Justin Bertuch (1747 – 1822), private secretary to the duke. With Wieland, Bertuch founded the Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung in 1785, which became the highest-circulation and most influential German-language newspaper of its kind during this period. The journal, whose editor was Illuminatus Gottlieb Hufeland (1760 – 1817), consisted “exclusively of book reviews, furnished anonymously and largely… by Jena professors.”[33] According to Goethe, it was the “voice and, so to speak, the Areopagus of the public.”[34] Its best-known contributors included Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Alexander von Humboldt, whose friends and benefactors included Moses Mendelssohn’s eldest son Joseph and David Friedländer.[35]

Weimar Classicism was formed between 1786 and Schiller’s death in 1805, when he and Goethe worked to recruit to their cause a network of writers, philosophers, scholars, including Herder, Schiller and Wieland, as well as Alexander von Humboldt, came to form a part of the foundation of nineteenth-century Germany’s understanding of itself as a culture and the political unification of Germany.[36] Herder’s mentor was Johann Georg Hamann (1730 – 1788), a Kabbalist and Bohemian, known as the “the Magi of the North.” Hamann was, moreover, a mentor to and an admired influence on Goethe, Jacobi, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Lessing, Schelling and Mendelssohn. Friedrich Schelling (1775 – 1854), like his mentor Fichte, was also associated with the Illuminati, and interested in Boehme, Swedenborg and Mesmer.[37] Another leading protégée of Hamann was Illuminati member Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743 – 1819).[38] Jacobi was converted to Hamann’s anti-Enlightenment philosophy, and became his most energetic advocate.[39] Jacobi maintained correspondences with the likes of Moses Mendelssohn, Wieland, Goethe, Lavater, Herder, the Humboldt brothers, Diderot, duchess Anna Amalia, National Superior of the Illuminati, Count Johann Martin zu Stolberg-Rossla (1728 – 1795), and the adept Masonic Rosicrucian, author and publisher, suspected Illuminatus Georg Forster (1754 – 1794). Forster was among the founders of the Jacobin Club in Mainz, the Gesellschaft der Freunde der Freiheit und Gleichheit (“Society of the Friends of Liberty and Equality”), developed as a revival of the Illuminati in 1792.[40]

Moses Mendelssohn would eventually become engaged in the Pantheismusstreit [pantheism dispute], to defend Lessing against allegations made by Jacobi that Lessing had supported the pantheism of Spinoza. After a conversation with Lessing in 1780, concerning Goethe’s then-unpublished pantheistic poem Prometheus, Jacobi embarked on an intense study of Spinoza and partook in debates with other philosophers over the matter. This led to the publication of Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn [“On the Teaching of Spinoza in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn”] (1785), in which he criticized Spinozism as leading to atheism and rife with Kabbalism.

The entire issue, which Kant rejected, became a major intellectual and religious concern for European society at the time. Mendelssohn was thus drawn into an acrimonious debate, and found himself attacked from all sides, including former friends or acquaintances such Herder. Mendelssohn’s contribution to this debate, To Lessing’s Friends 1786, was his last work, completed a few days before his death. When Mendelssohn died in 1786, Nicolai continued the debate on his behalf. 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.” 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.’”[41]

Another disciple of Spinoza, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 – 1834), who had been educated among the Moravian Church of Count Zinzendorf, and sided with Jacobi and studied Spinoza, and took some ideas from Fichte and Schelling.[42] Schleiermacher was among the founders of the Zionites, created by members of the Philadelphian Society, who were inspired by Jacob Boehme.[43] In later years, although no longer officially a functioning group, many of the Philadelphian Society’s views and writings remained influential among certain groups of Behmenists, Pietists, and Christian mystics such as the Society of the Woman in the Wilderness, led by the Rosicrucian Johannes Kelpius, the Ephrata Cloister, and the Harmony Society, among others.[44]

Herder was also a friend of Kant. In one of his letters to his friend Moses Mendelssohn, Kant expressed regret at having never met Swedenborg.[45] According to Paul Rose, despite his criticisms of Judaism, Kant’s public embrace of Moses Mendelssohn is explained by his belief that that only the most enlightened Jews are at present capable of being admitted into German intellectual life.[46] Because, according to Kant:

Certainly it seems strange to conceive of a nation of cheats, but it is just as strange to conceive of a nation of traders, most of whom—tied by an ancient superstition—seek no civil honor from the state where they live, but rather to restore their loss at the expense of those who grant them protection as well as from one another.[47]

Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793) announced that “the Jewish religion is not really a religion at all, but merely a community of a mass of men of one tribe [Stamm],” in other words, merely a national community shaped by an ad hoc set of pseudo-religious rules. To Kant, Judaism was not a religion founded by “pure moral belief,” but was based rather on obedience to an externally imposed law that was the result of the absence of an inner moral conscience, or what he would call, of “freedom.” As Rose explains:

The most sinister implication of Kant’s critique of Judaism was that it acknowledged no validity or even right to an independent existence of Judaism, which was seen not only as immoral, but obsolete in the modern world. “The euthanasia of Judaism,” he confidently affirmed, “is the pure moral religion!”[48]

Like Kant, Herder traced Jewish moral defects to an original and collective national character. But, Herder believed that emancipation was the solution to these errors:

We observe the Jews here only as the parasitic plant that has attached itself to almost all the European nations, and draws more or less on their sap. After the destruction of old Rome, they were yet only few in Europe, but through the persecutions of the Arabs they came in great crowds… During the barbarian centuries they were exchange- men, agents, a n d imperial servants… They were oppressed cruelly… and tyrannously robbed of what they had amassed through avarice and cheating, or through hard work, cleverness, and diligence… There will come a time when in Europe one will no longer ask who be Jew and who Christian. For the Jew too will live according to European law and contribute to the good of the state. Only a barbarian constitution may impede him from doing that or render his ability dangerous.[49]

Herder sent Mendelssohn his treatise on the Book of Revelation in I779. “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.”[50] 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.”[51] 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.[52]

Jena Circle

It was Jacobi who transmitted Hamann’s thought to the Romantics, engaging with in further philosophical arguments with Goethe, Herder, Fichte and Schelling.[53] The contemporaneous movement of German Romanticism was in opposition to Weimar and German Classicism, and especially to Schiller. With Johann Fichte (1762 – 1814), Friedrich Schelling and Novalis (1772 – 1801)—who were all active Masons—on the teaching staff, the University of Jena, under the auspices of Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, became the center of the emergence of German idealism and early Romanticism.[54] The best-known thinkers of German idealism, which developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, are Fichte, Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831).

Many in this circle were identified by the French imperial police as members of the Illuminati, based on anonymous work titled a Mémoire sur les Illuminés et l’Allemagne (“Memoirs about the Illuminati and Germany”), written around 1810. The author recounted the confidences given to him by a certain Corbin, inspector of supplies during Napoleon’s campaigns of in Germany, and a Freemason who had been initiated into écossais degrees in Scotland. Based on these facts, the police arrived at the idea of Illuminism as a vast association, with main centers in Gotha, Berlin, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Constantinople, Vienna, Munich, Stuttgart and St. Gallen. All these locales communicate with each other through various channels, notably through the members of the association, who are part of the Masonic lodges of the Scottish Rite, and the Berlin lodge, the Grand Lodge of Prussia, called Royal York of Friendship, and considered one of the main intermediary points for the communications with Denmark, Sweden and Russia, as far as Moscow. From there, the correspondence passes to the Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg, then through Constantinople and enters Germany, through Hungary and Austria.[55]

The Royal York of Friendship, or Grand Lodge of Prussia, had provided a patent for the founding of the Illuminati lodge, Theodore of Good Counsel, by instructions from the Willermoz’s Chevaliers Bienfaisants at Lyons.[56] In 1765, the lodge Royal York of Friendship initiated Prince Edward, Duke of York and Albany, brother of King George III, and the second son of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, whose nephew was Illuminatus Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Alternburg. Prince Edward’s godparents were Frederick William I of Prussia and Duchess Anna Amalia’s father, Charles I, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. In his commentary on Le Livre fait par force, a book by Claude-Etienne Le Bauld-de-Nans (1735 – 1792), Grand Master of the Royal York lodge, François Labbé, in Le message maçonnique au XVIIIe siècle (“The Masonic Message in the 18th Century”), points out that the lodge represents the enduring rationalist trend in Germany, showing an interest in the Illuminati, and thus positioned itself in opposition to the esoteric Three Globes.[57] Le Bauld was an actor, director and French teacher at the court of the Prussian princess and later Queen Frederica Louisa of Hesse-Darmstadt, the wife of Frederick William II of Prussia, and sister of Princess Louise of Hesse-Darmstadt, the wife of Karl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. He also taught the von Humboldt brothers.[58]

According to the anonymous report, “These dreamers, referred to as Idealists, basically have the same goal as the Illuminati, with whom they have close ties,” and “They preach a moral and political regeneration that will ensure the independence of the German people and the reign of the Ideas.” Aiming at the same goal as the Illuminati, their allies are all those personalities in Germany known for their hostile sentiments against France. A list of some 140 names, which included not only a few genuine Illuminati such as Sonnenfels and Maximilian von Montgelas (1759 – 1838), but also well-known enemies of Illuminism such as Starck, and in which von Dalberg—who was served by Mayer Amschel Rothschild as “court banker”—was depicted as its most ruthless enemy. Included as well was Baron Franz Karl von Hompesch-Bollheim (1735 – 1800), the Bavarian Minister of Finance from 1779 until his death, and the brother of the 71st Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, Ferdinand von Hompesch zu Bolheim (1744 – 1805), and the first German elected to that office.

Among the Illuminati listed were Jacobi, Schelling, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the eminent jurist Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach (1775 – 1833). In 1801, Feuerbach was appointed extraordinary professor of law without salary, at the University of Jena, and in the following year accepted a chair at Kiel, where attended the lectures of Karl Leonhard Reinhold and fellow Illuminati member Gottlieb Hufeland (1760 – 1817). In 1780, Reinhold was ordained as a priest, and in 1783 he became a member of the Illuminati lodge, the famous Masonic Viennese lodge Zur wahren Eintracht, which was led by the Sabbatean Joseph von Sonnenfels and Ignaz Edler von Born.[59] In 1784, after studying philosophy for a semester at Leipzig, he settled in Weimar, where he became Christoph Martin Wieland’s collaborator on Der Teutsche Merkur, and married Wieland’s daughter Sophie, with Herder officiating at the wedding.[60] As a result of publishing his Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie (“Letters on the Kantian Philosophy”) in Der Teutsche Merkur, which were important in making Kant known to a wider audience, Reinhold received a call to the University of Jena, where he taught from 1787 to 1794. Schiller himself reported that one of the major sources for his essay, “The Legation of Moses,” which belongs in Schiller’s series of lectures on Universal History from the summer of 1789 at Jena University, first published in Thalia, Schiller’s journal of original poetry and philosophical writings, was Reinhold The Hebrew Mysteries, or the Oldest Religious Freemasonry.

The list of Idealists included the two Schlegel brothers, Jean Paul, Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, Fichte, Zacharias Werner, Tieck and Madame de Staël.[61] Achim von Arnim (1781 – 1831) is considered one of the most important representatives of German Romanticism. In Halle, Arnim associated with the composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt, in whose house he became acquainted Ludwig Tieck. From 1800, Arnim continued his studies at the University of Göttingen, though, having met Goethe and Clemens Brentano (1778 – 1842), he opted from natural sciences towards literature. Brentano’s maternal grandmother was Sophie von La Roche (1730 – 1807), who had been engaged to friend of Christoph Martin Wieland. La Roche held a literary salon in their home in the borough of Koblenz, mentioned by Goethe in Dichtung und Wahrheit (“Fiction and truth”), and attended by Lavater and the Jacobi brothers. In the eighth volume of Dichtung und Wahrheit, written in 1811, Goethe reconstructed from memory how he had constructed an entire theogony and cosmogony from the most diverse alchemist and Gnostic manuals and Jewish and Christian esoteric works, to which “Hermeticism, mysticism and Kabbalah” made their contribution.[62] Arnim married Brentano’s sister, Bettina, the Countess of Arnim.

Brentano studied in Halle and Jena, and was close to Wieland, Herder, Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, Fichte and Tieck. In Berlin in 1794, Ludwig Tieck (1773 – 1853) contributed a number of short stories to the series Straussfedern, published by Illuminati publisher Friedrich Nicolai and originally edited by Johann Karl August Musäus (1735 – 1787). A member of her Musenhof, Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar-Einsenach appointed Musäus professor of classical language and history at the Wilhelm-Ernst-Gymnasium in Weimar. Musäus was initiated into Freemasonry in 1776 at Anna Amalia lodge in Weimar, and insinuated into the Illuminati by Bode in 1783.[63] In Weimar, Musäus cultivated friendships with Duke Karl August, Bertuch, Herder, Lavater, Nicolai, and Christoph Martin Wieland. Also listed in the Mémoire was the German dramatist who also worked as a consul in Russia and Germany, August von Kotzebue (1761 – 1819), the nephew of Musäus, whose Nachgelassene Schriften he edited.[64]

According to historian of philosophy Karl Ameriks, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Schiller, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel all developed their thought in reaction to the interpretation of Kant from Reinhold. [65] In 1792, Jacob Friedrich von Abel, a member of the Illuminati and close friend of Schiller, was a pedagogue of the Latin Schulen ob der Staig, during which time, according to Hegel’s sister, he adopted Hegel as his protege.[66] In 1788, Hegel had entered the Tübinger Stift, a Protestant seminary attached to the University of Tübingen, where he was roommates with Schelling and the poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin (1770 – 1843). The three became close friends and mutually influenced each other’s ideas. As Laura Anna Macor has shown, Hölderlin’s personal contacts with former Illuminati are a constant feature of his life, from his education at Tübingen University, through his stays in Waltershausen, Jena and Frankfurt am Main, up to the later stays in Homburg vor der Höhe and Stuttgart. In 1792, Hölderlin’s sister married the former Illuminatus Christian Matthäus Theodor Breunlin (1752 – 1800).[67] Schelling visited his friend Hölderlin in Frankfurt in the late Spring of 1796 after meeting the Illuminatus Johann Friedrich Mieg (1744–1811), who had recruited Abel in the early 1780s, and the Illuminatus Jacobin Georg Christian Gottfried Freiherr von Wedekind (1761–1831) in Heidelberg.[68] Wedekind was also one of the founding members of the Jacobin Club of Mainz.[69]

Also in the list was Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769 – 1860), a German nationalist historian, writer and poet. Early in his life, he fought for the abolition of serfdom, later against Napoleonic dominance over Germany. Arndt had to flee to Sweden for some time due to his anti-French positions. He is one of the main founders of German nationalism during the Napoleonic wars and the nineteenth-century movement for German unification. After an interval of private study he went in 1791 to the University of Greifswald as a student of theology and history, and in 1793 moved to Jena, where he came under the influence of Fichte.[70]

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.[71] Fichte became a Mason in Zurich in 1793 and wrote two lectures on the “philosophy of Masonry.”[72] Although there is no record of his membership in the order of the Illuminati, Schiller regularly socialized with Bode and Herder. In Der Geisterseher (“The Ghost Seer”), a fragment of a novel which appeared in several sequels between 1787 and 1789, Schiller describes the conspiracy of a Jesuit secret society that wants to convert a Protestant prince to Catholicism and at the same time secure the crown for him in his homeland in order to expand its own power base there. Combining elements such as necromancy, spiritualism and conspiracies, the text brought Schiller the greatest public success during his lifetime.[73]

The Prussian Grand Lodge was decisively shaped by Ignaz Aurelius Fessler (1756 – 1839), Capuchin monk from Hungary who was ordained a priest in 1779, but whose liberal views brought him into frequent conflict with his superiors. In 1796 he went to Berlin, where he founded a humanitarian society. In April 1800, through his introduction, Fichte was initiated into Freemasonry in the Royal York lodge. Fessler was commissioned by the Freemasons to assist Fichte in reforming the statutes and ritual of the lodge.[74] It is in this lodge that in 1800 Fichte delivered his lectures on the Philosophy of Masonry.[75] In 1815, Fessler went with his family to Sarepta, where he joined the Moravian Church, who founded the community in 1765 when Catherine the Great sought to attract German settlers to the area and expand crop production in southern Russia.[76]

Coppet Group

In 1798, Tieck married and in the following year settled in Jena, where he, the Schlegel brothers and Novalis, became the leaders of the Jena Romanticism. The early period of German Romanticism, roughly 1797 to 1802, is referred to as Frühromantik or Jena Romanticism. Jena became a second center of literature and philosophy with Alexander von Humboldt, Fichte, Novalis, Hegel, Schelling and Ludwig Tieck as well as the brothers Friedrich Schlegel (1772 – 1829) and his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767 – 1845), loosely based on Goethe’s motto: “Weimar–Jena a great city, which has a lot of good on both ends.” The Schlegel brothers laid down the theoretical basis for Romanticism in the circle’s organ, the Athenaeum, considered to be the founding publication of German Romanticism. In July 1797, Friedrich von Schlegel met Dorothea, the daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, who was them married to her Jewish husband, Simon Veit (1716 – 1786). In. 1799, Dorothea divorced Veit, and after obtaining custody of their younger son, Philipp, lived with him in an apartment in Jena, which became a salon frequented by Schelling, the Schlegel brothers, Novalis and Tieck.

Dorothea first converted to Protestantism and then Catholicism after she divorced Veit, and then married Schlegel in 1804, in the Swedish embassy in Paris. The publication in 1799 of Schlegel’s novel Lucinde, subtitled Bekenntnisse eines Ungeschickten (“Confessions of an Improper Man”), with an open portrayal of an adulterous sexual liaison based on himself and Dorothea became for Schlegel a major scandal.[77] The novel was, according to Schlegel, an attempt at “shaped, artistic chaos,” meant to be “chaotic and yet systematic.” According to George Pattison, speaking of the liberal mindset of the women in the world of the Romantics, “It was because women like Dorothea Veit were bold enough to break with established custom that a book such as Lucinde could be written at all.” Pattison adds:

Even its initial impact was due not so much to its intrinsic worth as to the fact that it functioned as an almost programmatic assertion of the unconventional life-style of that circle of Frühromantik [“early Romantic”] writers and thinkers of which Schlegel was a leading figure. A key element in this life-style was a relaxed attitude to conventional standards of sexual morality. It was in the sphere of what we tend to call “private” or “personal” morality that the Early Romantics were at their most “advanced.”[78]

 

One of the few people to come to Schlegel’s defense was his friend Friedrich Schleiermacher. Among the works most famously associated with Schlegel’s name from this period is the project of the journal Athenaeum, which published in the years 1798–1800 a set of fragments written by both Schlegel brothers, Novalis and Schleiermacher. It was during his time in Berlin that Schlegel also began a relationship with Dorothea. At Christmas 1797, Schlegel moved in with Schleiermacher, who revealed the level of their intimacy in a letter to his sister: “Our friends amuse themselves by describing our life together as a marriage, and they all agree that I must be the wife, and the jokes and more serious comments made about this are quite sufficient.”[79] Lucinde contributed to the failure of Schlegel’s academic career in Jena. In September 1800, he met four times with Goethe, who would later stage his tragedy Alarcos (1802) in Weimar, though with limited success. Schlegel remained in Jena until December 1801, and his departure on this occasion came at a time which marks a significant turning point in the history of Romanticism: the end of the “Jena circle” and its collaborations. In later years, Tieck also edited the translation of Shakespeare by August Wilhelm Schlegel, who was assisted by Tieck’s daughter Dorothea (1790 – 1841)

In 1806, Schlegel and Dorothea went to visit Aubergenville, where his brother lived with Madame Germaine de Staël (1766 – 1817), the daughter of Illuminati member Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod, a leading salonnière. 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’s mentor was Jakob Mauvillon (1743 – 1794), a member of the Illuminati and a close friend of the Comte de Mirabeau. Madame de Staël held a salon in the Swedish embassy in Paris, where she gave “coalition dinners,” which were frequented by Thomas Jefferson and Illuminatus Marquis de Condorcet.

Madame de Staël was present at critical events such as the Estates General of 1789 and the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Her association with revolutionary Freemasonry was mentioned by Charles-Louis-Cadet de Gassicourt, son of the illustrious chemist of that name, who as a lawyer and journalist, had closely followed the early developments of the French Revolution. Cadet Gassicourt recounts in great detail a solemn meeting at the time of the convocation of the Estates General, where all the venerable members of the Masonic lodges were to meet under the presidency of the Duke of Orléans, and which was to serve to unite his supporters with those of Necker. There were Mirabeau and other leaders of the revolution, like Duke of Aiguillon, Jean-Jacques Duval d’Eprémesnil and Gérard de Lally-Tolendal, an ally of Voltaire. The purpose was the reception of Madame de Staël as a Freemason.[80]

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.[81] She hosted  noted mystics such as  Madame  de  Krüdener, who exerted influence on the Moravian Church and Tsar Alexander I of Russia. Madame de Staël, who was to become her close friend, described von Krüdener as “the forerunner of a great religious epoch which is dawning for the human race.”[82] In 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.”[83]  When Kant inquired with a friend about the truth of Swedenborg’s psychic abilities, he was told that “Professor Schlegel also had declared to him that it could by no means be doubted.”[84]

Napoleon is to have said, “I have four enemies: Prussia, Russia, England and Madame de Staël.”[85] In 1803, Napoleon had finally decided to exile de Staël without trial. De Staël, ultimately 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. They arrived in 1803, where she stayed for two and a half months at the court of the Grand Duke Karl August and his mother Anna Amalia. In Weimar, de Staël and Constant met Schiller and Goethe, and in Berlin they met the brothers August and Friedrich Schlegel. Goethe, de Staël and Constant, shared a mutual admiration.[86]

According to Mémoire sur les Illuminés et l’Allemagne, de Staël’s “close ties with the Schlegel brothers, especially William, gave her great influence among the Idealists.”[87] Together with brother-in-law Brentano, Achim von Arnim visited Madame de Staël in Coppet, and Friedrich Schlegel and his wife Dorothea in Paris. In 1804, de Staël returned to her family residence, the Château Coppet, an estate on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where she established what is known as the Coppet Group, which continued the activities of her previous salons, and included Constant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Jean de Sismondi, Charles Victor de Bonstetten, Prosper de Barante, Henry Brougham, Lord Byron, Alphonse de Lamartine, Sir James Mackintosh, Juliette Récamier and August Wilhelm Schlegel. The unprecedented concentration of European thinkers in the group was to have a considerable influence on the development of romanticism, but also the development of modern liberalism from classical liberalism. Constant, who looked to the Britain rather than to ancient Rome for a practical model of freedom in a large mercantile society, distinguished between the “Liberty of the Ancients” and the “Liberty of the Moderns,” based on the possession of civil liberties, the rule of law, and freedom from excessive state interference.[88]

Madame de Staël had in mind Lady Hamilton, another member of the group, when she composed Corinne, which Dorothea Schlegel translated into German.[89] The exchange of ideas with Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland had inspired de Staël to write De l’Allemagne (“On Germany”), one of the most influential books of the nineteenth century on Germany.[90] Like Friedrich Schlegel, de Staël viewed Romanticism as modern, because its roots are in the chivalric culture of the Middle Ages, and not in the classical models of ancient Greece and Rome.[91] Madame de Staël presented German Classicism and Romanticism as a potential source of spiritual authority for Europe, and identified Goethe as a living classic.[92] She praised Goethe as possessing “the chief characteristics of the German genius” and uniting “all that distinguishes the German mind.”[93] Her portrayal helped elevate Goethe over his more famous German contemporaries and transformed him into a European cultural celebrity.[94] The book was published in 1813, after the first edition of 10,000 copies, printed in 1810, had been destroyed by order from Napoleon.


[1] Stefanie Kellner. “Die freiheitliche Geisteshaltung der Ernestiner prägte Europa.” Monumente (February 2016), pp. 9–16. Retrieved from http://www.monumente-online.de/de/ausgaben/2016/1/ernestiner-herrscherhaus.php#.VsWv9k32bGg

[2] Ibid.

[3] In-Ho Ly Ryu. “Freemasonry Under Catherine the Great: a Reinterpretation” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1967), 136, 145-59; and “Moscow Freemasons and the Rosicrucian Order,” in J.G. Garrard (ed.) The Eighteenth Century in Russia (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), p. 215; cited in Marsha Keith Schuchard. “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk,” p. 217.

[4] “Anna Amalia zu den drei Rosen (Weimar).”  Musée virtuel de la musique maçonnique. Retrieved from http://mvmm.org/c/docs/loges/Amalia.html

[5] “Herzogin Anna Amalie von Weimar und ihr Theater.” in Robert Keil (ed.), Goethe’s Tagebuch aus den Jahren 1776–1782 (Veit, 1875), p. 69.

[6] Christine A. Colin. “Exceptions to the Rule: German Women in Music in the Eighteenth Century.” UCLA Historical Journal (1994). p. 242.

[7] Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[8] H.-J. Schings. Die Brüder des Marquis Posa. Schiller und der Geheimbund der Illuminaten (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996); cited in Laura Anna Macor. “Friedrich Hölderlin and the Clandestine Society of the Bavarian Illuminati. A Plaidoyer.” Philosophica, 88 (2013), p. 110.

[9] “Freimaurerliteratur.” Klassik-Archivs der Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek Weimar. Retrieved from https://www.klassik-stiftung.de/forschung/sammlungen-bestaende/sammlung/freimaurerliteratur/

[10] Nicholas Till. Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas (W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), p. 276; cited in Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[11] Melanson. Perfectibilists.

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

[13] Kurt R. Eissler. Goethe: Eine psychoanalytische Studie 1775–1786 (trans.) Peter Fischer and Rüdiger Scholz (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag), 1987, 1446–62. Cited in W. Daniel Wilson. “Diabolical Entrapment: Mephisto, the Angels, and the Homoerotic in Goethe’s Faust II.” in Goethe’s Faust: Theatre of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 175.

[14] Wilson. “Diabolical,” p. 176.

[15] “Anna Amalia zu den drei Rosen (Weimar).”

[16] W. Daniel Wilson. “Weimar Politics in the Age of the French Revolution: Goethe and the Spectre of Illuminati Conspiracy.” Goethe Yearbook, Volume 5, (1990), pp. 165–166.

[17] Yves Hivert-Messeca. L’Europe sous l'acacia, Tome 2: Histoire des franc-maçonneries européennnes du XVIIIème siècle à nos jours (Dervy, 2012), pp. 122–5. 

[18]  Melanson. Perfectibilists.

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

[20] le Forestier. Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-maçonnerie allemande, p. 397 n. 1.

[21]  Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Wilson. “Weimar Politics in the Age of the French Revolution,” pp. 166.

[24] Walter Müller-Seidel & Wolfgang Riedel. Die Weimarer Klassik und ihre Geheimbünde (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2003). Cited in https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11678

[25] Wilson. “Weimar Politics in the Age of the French Revolution.”

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

[27] W. Daniel Wilson. “Weimar Politics in the Age of the French Revolution: Goethe and the Spectre of Illuminati Conspiracy.” Goethe Yearbook, Volume 5, (1990), pp. 166.

[28] Wilson. “Weimar Politics in the Age of the French Revolution,” pp. 169, 182 n. 29.

[29] Ibid., pp. 166.

[30] Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[31] Hermann Schüttler. “Die ‘Schwedenkiste’” Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20070623203757/http://www.2hap.org/Geheime-Gesellschaften/Illuminaten/schwk.html

[32] “Das Geheime Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz.” GStA PK. Retrieved from http://www.gsta.spk-berlin.de/geschichte_und_gegenwart_431.html

[33] Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Isidore Singer & A. Kurrein “Friedländer, David.” Jewish Encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=398&letter=F

[36] Andreas W. Daum. “Social Relations, Shared Practices, and Emotions: Alexander von Humboldt’s Excursion into Literary Classicism and the Challenges to Science around 1800.” Journal of Modern History. 91:1 (2019), p. 1–37.

[37] Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 7 n. 12.

[38] 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.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[41] Magee. Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 78; Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[42] Thomas Erne. “Friedrich Schleiermacher und Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy – religiöse Bindung und freies Spiel.” Evangelischen Kirche Berlin-Brandenburg-schlesische Oberlausitz (November 2020). Retrieved from https://www.ekbo.de/index.php?id=16959

[43] Charles Herbermann (ed.). “Zionites.” Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company). Retrieved from http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15761a.htm

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

[45] Ernst Benz. Emanuel Swedenborg: Visionary Savant in the Age of Reason (Swedenborg Foundation, 2002), p. xiii.

[46] Paul Lawrence Rose. German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism From Kant to Wagner (Princeston: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 96.

[47] Kant. Anthropologic. Cited in Paul Lawrence Rose. German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism From Kant to Wagner (Princeston: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 94.

[48] Rose. German Question/Jewish Question, p. 96.

[49] Ideen, pp. 435-3. Cited in Rose. German Question/Jewish Question, p. 99.

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

[51] Ibid., p. 139.

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

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

[54] Ibid., p. 55.

[55] Leopold Engel. Geschichte des Illuminaten-Ordens (Berlin: Hugo Bermühler Verlag, 1906), pp. 447–461 (trans. DeepL). Retrieved from https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Geschichte_des_Illuminaten-Ordens/Der_Fortbestand_des_Ordens_und_die_Furcht_vor_ihm

[56] Robison. Proofs of a Conspiracy (1798).

[57] François Labbé. Le message maçonnique au XVIIIe siècle (Dervy, 2006), p. 194; cited in “La Royale York de l’Amitiè Berlin.”

[58] Karl Bruhns. Alexander von Humboldt. Band 1. (Leipzig 1872), p. 31.

[59] Karl Leonhard Reinhold. Essay on a New Theory of the Human Capacity for Representation (Walter de Gruyter, 2011), p. x.

[60] Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[61] le Forestier. Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-maçonnerie allemande, pp. 707–709

[62] Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Dichtung und Wahrheit, in Hamburger Ausgabe, t. IX, éd. par E. Trunz, (Hambourg, 1961), 350-353; cited in Christoph Schulte. “Les formes de réception de la kabbale dans le romantisme allemand.” Renue Germanique Internationale, 5 (1996). Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.4000/rgi.547

[63] Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[64] Hugh Chisholm (ed.). “Tieck, Johann Ludwig.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 26 11th ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1911), p. 962.

[65] Karl Ameriks. Reinhold: Letters on the Kantian Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. xl.

[66] Alexandra Birkert. Hegels Schwester (Stuttgart 2008), p. 43ff.

[67] Laura Anna Macor. “Friedrich Hölderlin and the Clandestine Society of the Bavarian Illuminati. A Plaidoyer.” Philosophica, 88 (2013), p. 113.

[68] Ibid., p. 114.

[69] Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[70] Hugh Chisholm (ed.). “Arndt, Ernst Moritz.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. 2, 11th ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1911), pp. 627–628.

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

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

[73] Otto Dann. “Der Geisterseher.” In Schiller-Handbuch, Leben – Werk – Wirkung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), p. 311.

[74] Hugh Chisholm (ed). “Fessler, Ignaz Aurelius.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. 10, 11th ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1911). pp. 293–294.

[75] “La Royale York de l’Amitiè Berlin.”

[76] Hugh Chisholm (ed). “Fessler, Ignaz Aurelius.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. 10, 11th ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1911). pp. 293–294.

[77] Allen Speight. “Friedrich Schlegel.” Edward N. Zalta (ed.). (Spring 2021 Edition). Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/schlegel/

[78] George Pattison. “Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde: A Case Study in the Relation of Religion to Romanticism.” Scottish Journal of Theology, 38 (1985), p. 546.

[79] Ibid., p. 549.

[80] Nicolas DesChamps. Les Sociétés Secrètes Et La Société, Ou Philosophie De L'histoire Contemporaine. Volume 3 (Avignon: Seguin Aineè, 1874-1876), p. 78.

[81] 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).

[82] “Krüdener, Julie de (1764–1824).” Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia (Encyclopedia.com) Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/krudener-julie-de-1764-1824

[83] 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

[84] Signe Toksvig. Emanuel Swedenborg: Scientist & Mystic (West Chester, Pennsylvania: Swedenborg Foundation Press), p. 185.

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

[86] Dennis Wood. Benjamin Constant: A Biography (Routledge, 2002), p. 185.

[87] Leopold Engel. Geschichte des Illuminaten-Ordens (Berlin: Hugo Bermühler Verlag, 1906), pp. 447–461 (trans. DeepL). Retrieved from https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Geschichte_des_Illuminaten-Ordens/Der_Fortbestand_des_Ordens_und_die_Furcht_vor_ihm

[88] “Constant, Benjamin, 1988, ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns’ (1819), in The Political Writings of Benjamin Constant, ed. Biancamaria Fontana, Cambridge, pp. 309–28.”

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

[90] Biancamaria Fontana. Germaine de Staël: A Political Portrait (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 206.

[91] A. W. Halsall. “De l’Allemagne (On Germany) 1810.” In Murray, Christopher John (ed.). Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850 (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), p. 266.

[92] Gerald Ernest Paul Gillespie & Manfred Engel. Romantic Prose Fiction (John Benjamins Publishing 2008), p. 44.

[93] Ibid.

[94] Ibid.

Zionism