When the king was slow to agree to further reforms, Desmoulins called for an armed uprising. Then, in June 1789, Louis XVI tried to disperse the Assembly and called his troops to Versailles. Mass desertions followed. On 14 July an angry mob stormed the Bastille. Louis XVI went to the guillotine in January 1793. When he tried to speak to the crowd, he was cut short by a roll on the drums. He was heard to say, ‘People of France, I am innocent, I forgive those who are responsible for my death. I pray to God that the blood spilled here never falls on France or on you, my unfortunate people…’ That this should happen in the heart of the most civilized nation on earth opened the door to the unthinkable.
It is said that in the melee that followed a man jumped on to the scaffold and yelled, ‘Jacques de Moloy, you are avenged!’ If this is true, its sentiment was in stark contrast to the king’s grace and charity.
In the anarchy that followed France was threatened from within and without. The leaders of the Freemasonic lodges took control. Soon many of their number were accused of being traitors to the Revolution — and so began the Terror.
There are different estimates of the numbers executed. The driving force was the most principled of Freemasons, the austere and incorruptible lawyer Maximilian Robespierre. As head of the Committee of Public Safety and the man in charge of the police department, he was sending to the guillotine hundreds per day, adding up to some 2750 executions. Out of this latter total only 650 were aristocrats, the rest ordinary working people. Robespierre even executed Danton. Saturn was eating his own children.
How could this be? How could the most enlightened and reasonable of men justify this bloodshed? In an idealistic philosophy the ends never justify the means, because, as we have seen, motives affect the outcome, however deeply hidden they may be. Robespierre shed blood as a grim duty, to protect the rights of citizens and their property. From a rational point of view he did what he did for the common good.
Yet in Robespierre’s case this yearning to be completely reasonable seems to have driven him mad.
On 8 July 1794 a curious ceremony took place in front of the Louvre. The members of the National Convention sat in a vast, makeshift amphitheatre, each holding an ear of wheat to symbolize the goddess Isis. Facing them was an altar by which stood Robespierre, wrapped in a light blue coat, his hair powdered white. He said, ‘The whole Universe is assembled here!’ Then, calling upon the Supreme Being, he began a speech which lasted several hours and ended, ‘Tomorrow, when we return to work, we shall again fight against vice and tyrants.’
If members of the Convention had hoped he was going to call an end to bloodshed, they were to be disappointed.
Then he stepped up to a veiled effigy and set light to the cloth, revealing a stone statue of a goddess. The set had been designed by the Illuminated Freemason Jean-Jacques Davide so that the goddess, Sophia, would seem to arise from the flames like a phoenix.
The poet Gerard de Nerval would later claim that Sophia had represented Isis. Yet the ruling spirit of the times was not Isis, the lifting of whose veils leads to the spirit worlds; neither was it Mother Nature, the gentle, nurturing goddess of the vegetable dimension of the cosmos. This was Mother Nature red in tooth and claw.
Robespierre was accused of trying to have himself declared a god by an elderly prophetess called Catherine Theot. Revulsion at the relentless bloodletting reached a pitch, and a crowd laid siege to the Hotel de Ville. Robespierre was at last cornered. He tried to shoot himself, but only succeeded in blowing away half his jaw. When he went to the guillotine, still wearing his light blue costume, he tried to declaim to the assembled multitude, but could only manage a strangulated cry.
NAPOLEON FAMOUSLY FOLLOWED HIS star. This has been taken as a poetic way of saying that he was destined for great things.
Goethe said of him: ‘The daemon ought to lead us every day and tell us what we ought to do on every occasion. But the good spirit leaves us in the lurch, and we grope about in the dark. Napoleon was the man! Always illuminated, always clear and decided and endowed at every hour with energy enough to carry out whatever he considered necessary. His life was the stride of a demi-god, from battle to battle, and from victory to victory. It might be said he was in a state of continual illumination… In later years this illumination appears to have forsaken him, as well as his fortune and his good star.’
How could Napoleon fail to have sense of destiny? He succeeded at everything he set his mind to, seemingly able to bend the whole world to his will. To himself and many of his contemporaries he was the Alexander the Great of the modern world, uniting East and West by his conquests.
French troops moved into Egypt. It was not a particularly glorious campaign — but it was important to Napoleon from a personal point of view. According to Fouche, the head of the French secret police, Napoleon had a meeting with a man purporting to be St Germain inside the Great Pyramid. It certainly seems to be the case that Napoleon chose the esotericst and astrologer Fabre d’Olivet as one of his advisers, and also arranged to spend a night alone in the Great Pyramid. Did Napoleon meet St Germain in the flesh or in spirit?
Napoleon ordered the making of a catalogue of Egyptian antiquities,
His empire would expand to include not only Italy and Egypt, but Germany, Austria and Spain. No emperor had been crowned by the Pope since Charlemagne, but in 1804 Napoleon had Charlemagne’s crown and sceptre brought to him, and having forced Pope Pius VII to attend, Napoleon symbolically snatched the crown from his hands and crowned himself Emperor.
Napoleon employed a team of scholars to come to the conclusion that Isis was the ancient goddess of Paris, and then decreed that the goddess and her star should be included in Paris’s coat of arms. On the Arc de Triomphe Josephine is portrayed kneeling at his feet carrying the laurel of Isis.
We can infer from this that Napoleon did not identify himself with Sirius, he followed it, as Orion follows Sirius across the sky. In Freemasonic initiation ceremonies candidates are reborn — as Osiris was reborn — looking up at a five-pointed star that represents Isis. Osiris/Orion the Hunter is the masculine impulse towards power, action and impregnation, pursuing Isis, the gatekeeper to life’s mysteries.
This is how Napoleon thought of Josephine, born of a family deeply immersed in esoteric Freemasonry and already a Freemason herself when he met her. Napoleon could conquer mainland Europe, but he could never quite conquer the sublimely beautiful Josephine. He longed for her as Dante had longed for Beatrice and longing made him aspire higher.
Osiris and Isis are also, of course, associated with the sun and the moon and on one level, as we have seen, this is to do with the cosmos’s arranging of itself in order to make human thought possible. In ancient Egypt the heliacal rising of Sirius in the middle of June presaged the rising of the Nile. In some esoteric traditions Sirius is the central sun of the universe around which our sun rotates.
This complex nexus of esoteric thought, combined with his love for Josephine, informed Napoleon’s sense of destiny.
But in 1813 the powers guiding and empowering Napoleon left him, as they always leave everyone, quite suddenly, and, as Goethe had described, the powers of reaction rushed in from all sides to destroy him.
We see the same process in the lives of artists. They struggle to find their voice, reach an inspired period during which they cannot put a brushstroke wrong, perhaps leading art into a new era. Then the spirit suddenly leaves them and they are unable to recapture it, no matter how hard they try.
THROUGHOUT THIS HISTORY WE HAVE repeatedly referred to the series of experiences a candidate must go through to achieve initiation, including the experience of
The secret societies were preparing for this event, helping humanity to develop the sense of self and other qualities that would be needed during the ordeal.
In the middle decades of the eighteenth century Freemasonry spread throughout the world — to Austria, Spain, India, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Russia, Denmark, Norway and China. Following in the footsteps of the American and French brethren, Freemasonry inspired republican revolutions all round the world.
Madame Blavatsky wrote that among the Carbonari — the revolutionary precursors and pioneers of
