The historical significance of this is that the secret meditations and prayerful practices of a handful of initiates created a popular surge of feeling against materialism. A new way of making love, of re-enacting the creation of the cosmos, was a way of saying that right isn’t simply a matter of might, that there are higher ideals than expediency or enlightened egotism, that if you work yourself into the right frame of mind, you can experience the world as meaningful.
If the people make love so that they become illumined, the world will become a world of shadows. When they awake again, meaning will have settled on the world like dew.
THE ROOTS OF ROMANTICISM, therefore, were both sexual and esoteric. The German poet Novalis talked of ‘magical idealism’. This magic, this idealism, this volcanic spirit, conjured up the music of Beethoven and Schubert. Beethoven found himself hearing a new musical language, feeling and expressing things that had never been felt or expressed before. Like Alexander the Great he became obsessed with trying to identify this divine influx, the source of his unstoppable genius, reading and rereading Egyptian and Indian esoteric texts. For him his Sonata in D Minor and the Appassionata were his equivalents to Shakespeare’s
In France the Martinist Charles Nodier had written of the conspiracies of secret societies in the armies of Napoleon to bring the great man down. Later Nodier introduced the young French Romantics, including Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, Dumas
Owen Barfield wrote that there is always a great current of Platonic ideas, a current of living meaning that from time to time fine intellects like Shakespeare and Keats can discern. Keats called the ability to do this ‘Negative Capability’, which he said was when a man is capable of being ‘in uncertainties, mysteries and doubtes without any irritable searching after fact and reason’. In other words he was applying to poetry the same deliberate holding off imposing a pattern and waiting for a richer pattern to emerge that Francis Bacon had advocated in the scientific sphere.
‘Weave a circle around him thrice… /For he on honey-dew hath fed, /And drunk the milk, of Paradise.’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge carried an aura of the supernatural. He was deeply immersed in the thought of both Boehme and Swedenborg. But it was his friend William Wordsworth who wrote the purest, the most simple and direct expression of the feeling that lies at the heart of idealism as a philosophy of life. When Wordsworth wrote that he ‘felt /A presence that disturbs me with the joy/Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused,/Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,/And the round ocean, and the living air,/and the blue sky, and in the mind of man,/ A motion and a spirit, that impels,/All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/And rolls through all things…’ he is writing about what it feels like to be an idealist in a way which still feels quite modern.
Even people who on a conscious level would deny the existence of the higher reality Wordsworth is alluding to here, recognize something in this poem,
At the time that Wordsworth was writing, people did not have to struggle to discern such feelings. Goethe, Byron and Beethoven led a great popular movement.
So why did it all go wrong? Why did this impulse for freedom end up in the abuse of power?
To understand the roots of this catastrophe it is necessary to trace the infiltration of the secret societies by the proponents of materialism. Chevalier Ramsay had specifically forbidden the discussion of politics in the lodges he founded in 1730, but Freemasonry had a hold on the political leaders of Europe. To anyone who wanted to exert political influence, it must have been a temptation.
26. THE ILLUMINATI AND THE RISE OF UNREASON
THE STORY OF THE ILLUMINATI IS ONE of the darker episodes in the secret history and it has blackened the reputation of secret societies ever since.
In 1776 a Bavarian professor of law, Adam Weishaupt, founded an organization called the Illuminati, recruiting the first brothers from among his students.
Like the Jesuits, the Illuminati brotherhood was run on military lines. Members were requested to surrender individual judgement and will. Like earlier secret societies Weishaupt’s Illuminati promised to reveal an ancient wisdom. Higher and more powerful secrets were promised to those who progressed up the ladder of initiations. Initiates worked in small cells. Knowledge was shared between cells on what modern security services call a ‘need to know’ basis — so dangerous was this newly rediscovered knowledge.
Weishaupt joined the Freemasons in 1777, and soon many of the Illuminati followed, infiltrating the lodges. They quickly rose to positions of seniority.
Then in 1785 it came about that a man called Jacob Lanz, travelling to Silesia, was struck by lightning. When he was laid out in a nearby chapel, the Bavarian authorities found papers on the body revealing the secret plans of the Illuminati. From these papers, including many in Weishaupt’s own hand, and together with others seized in raids around the country, a complete picture was built up.
The seized writings revealed that the ancient secret wisdom and the secret supernatural powers promulgated within the Illuminati had always been a cynical invention and a fraud. An aspirant progressed through the grades only to discover that the spiritual element in the teachings were merely a smokescreen. Spirituality was derided, spat upon. Jesus Christ’s teachings, it was said, were really purely political in content, calling for the abolition of all property, of the institution of marriage and all family ties, all religion. The aim of Weishaupt and his co-conspirators was to set up a society run on purely materialistic grounds, a revolutionary new society — and the place where they would test their theories, they had decided, would be France.
Finally it was whispered in the candidate’s ear that
In this way he was inducted into a nihilistic and anarchistic philosophy that appealed to the candidate’s worst instincts. Weishaupt gleefully anticipated tearing down, destroying civilization, not to set people free, but for the pleasure of imposing his will upon others.
Weishaupt’s writings reveal the extent of his cynicism:
‘…in concealment lies a great part of our strength. For this reason we must cover ourselves in the name of another society. The lodges that are under Freemasonry are the most suitable cloak for our high purpose.’
‘Seek the society of young people,’ he advises one of his co-conspirators. ‘Watch them, and if one of them pleases you, lay your hand on him.’
‘Do you realize sufficiently what it means to rule — to rule in a secret society? Not only over the more important of the populace, but over the best men, over men of all races, nations and religions, to rule without external force… the final aim of our Society is nothing less than to win power and riches… and to obtain mastery of the world.’
Following the discovery of these writings, the order was suppressed — but too late.
By 1789 there were some three hundred lodges in France, including sixty-five in Paris. According to some French Freemasons today, there were more than seventy thousand Freemasons in France. The original plan had been to impregnate people with hope and will for change, but lodges had been infiltrated to the extent that it has been said that ‘the program put into action by the French Constitutional Assembly in 1789 had been put together by German Illuminati in 1776’. Danton, Desmoulins, Mirabeau, Marat, Robespierre, Guillotin and other leaders had been ‘illuminated’.
