“It is the unvarying rule of secret societies that the real authors never show themselves.” So reported 19th-20th-century British historian Nesta Helen Webster, who researched “subversive movements” for over two decades.
Esoteric and occult organizations can be curious and obscure enough on their own. But, when they seem to crystallize – and gain momentum – seemingly out of nowhere, or when they turn out to be world-historic in their impact, mysteries ramify.
In this video, I will sketch profiles of ten (10) people who are, for all intents and purposes, ciphers. Yet, their influence – meditated through heirs that are much better known – is nearly incalculable.
Caveats and Disclaimers
There are serious doubts about the lives – and even the existence – of some (or perhaps most) of the individuals here profiled. The video is intended for educational or entertainment purposes, only, and should not be understood as the final word on any of the events or people it discusses. The aim is to provide viewers with informational background and research leads for their own investigations.
Additionally, given the arcane nature of the topic, trying to find a credible way to rank our entrants proved difficult. Therefore, with only one major exception (to be identified in good time), the list has been arranged in more or less chronological order. But, without further ado…
The Top Ten
1. The Man Behind Gnosticism: Dositheos
Gnosticism has been a major current in the Western occult tradition.[1]
We introduced the constellation of ideas, and tried to distinguish it from other terms with which it is >often confused,[2] in our video “10 Arcane Words.”
Those with more interest, and a little more time, may be interested to note that we also explored the erotic fixations of so-called “Spermo-Gnostics” in “Top 10 ‘Sex-Magic’ Cults.”
Because these other materials provide an adequate foundation for the relevant concepts, I won’t spend much energy reinventing the wheel, here. Suffice it to say that Gnosticism was a religious worldview – flourishing around the second century A.D. – that focused on spiritual advancement through the acquisition of hidden knowledge. It combined Christian, Jewish, and pagan elements.[3]
Here’s the relevant bit. The reputed founder of Gnosticism was the Biblical figure Simon Magus. (He’s
also called “Simon, the Sorcerer,” since magos is a Greco-Roman word for “magician.”[4])
Simon appears in the New Testament Book of the Acts of the Apostles, where it says (chapter 8, verse 13) that he became a believer in Jesus Christ. Simon observed the apostles Peter and John effecting the reception of the Holy Spirit. Verse 18 explains that Simon “offered them money” for knowledge of the power they possessed.
This episode that was the seminal instance of Simony, which today is defined by Catholic sources as the sin of buying or selling church favors.
In the Bible, Peter immediately rebukes and dismisses Simon.[5] Thus, our “prototype …heretic and black magician”[6] began traveling with a Phoenician prostitute, gathering his own disciples who were impressed with his occult prowess.
But, would you believe that the story doesn’t actually stop there? – even if it’s telling often does.
For, at some point, the enigmatic Simon Magus was reputed to have been taught by an even more secretive adept named Dositheos.[7]
Although Dositheos was reputed to have been a Samaritan,[8] some legends speak of an Egyptian sojourn, where he – and his disciple, Simon – allegedly acquired fantastic abilities such “as invisibility, levitation, and shape-shifting into …animal” form.[9]
At least some of our modern knowledge about the obscure Dositheos – who was acquainted with John the Baptist and may have had connexions to Essenism – comes by way of discoveries made in caves at Qumran, an archaeological site in the Palestinian Occupied Territory known as the “West Bank.”[10]
The Wikipedia article on Dositheos[11] quotes from the book The Dead Sea Scrolls and Primitive Christianity by the Jesuit Modernist theologian – and later Catholic Cardinal – Jean Daniélou.[12] As a crypto-political aside, Daniélou was discovered dead in 1974, under suspicious circumstances, in the house of a known prostitute.
But speaking of Dositheos and Simon Magus, the duo’s impact was remarkable. Not only did Simonian >Gnosticism persist for centuries, but later writers such as 19th-century French occultist Jules Doinel, 19th-20th-century British Theosophist G. R. S. Mead, and even the “Great Beast” himself, British magician Aleister Crowley, would resurrect it for their own esoteric purposes.
Most simply characterized as an expanded and mystified variety of the famous Greek philosopher Plato’s Theory of Forms, Neoplatonism – as a contributor to the “core” of Western esotericism – has few rivals. One thinks only, for instance, of Hermeticism or Pythagoreanism, …
…the latter being our focus in the video “Pythagoras.”
Generally speaking, Neoplatonism presents a picture of a world in which true reality is hidden behind (or above) the mundane realm of appearances. In this way, the worldview underwrites practical magic. For consider that, on Neoplatonic assumptions – several of which are echoed in Eastern thought – “…every event in the visible world is the effect of an ‘image,’ that is, of an idea in the unseen world. …[E]verything that happens on earth is only a reproduction, as it were, of an event in a world beyond our sense perception… [S]ages …have access to these ideas …and are …able to intervene decisively in events in the world.”[13]
I intend to expound on the history and philosophy of Neoplatonism in a future video. But, for now, I’ll just say that there are four names usually listed as being among “the most visible [ancient] Neoplatonists in later esoteric literature.”[14]
In reverse chronological order, these are the 5th-century expositor Proclus, the 3rd-4th-century magician Iamblichus, the 3rd-4th-century codifier Porphyry, and the man usually regarded as the wellspring for the whole enterprise, the innovative, 3rd-century theorist Plotinus.
However… Plotinus’s speculations didn’t arise in a vacuum. It turns out that he received instruction from a shadowy autodidact by the name of Ammonius Saccas.[15]
Vanishingly little is known about his personal views. Yet, he is routinely cited for the profound impact he is alleged to have exerted upon Plotinus and, by extension, on the establishment of Neoplatonism.
Ammonius was later claimed as a fellow traveler by adherents of both Christianity and paganism. This presents a puzzle and leads some scholars to suppose that there may have been two thinkers with the same name who were contemporaries.
Of Ammonius’s origins, no one can say for sure. He taught Plotinus in the important city of Alexandria, Egypt which was then under the control of the Roman Empire.
The city had a large Greek population, suggesting that Ammonius Saccas was ethnically Greek.
But, some analysts have observed that his given name, “Ammonius,” contains a Latinized reference to the Egyptian deity, Amun – the primordial god of air. This raises the possibility that he may have been a Copt. (Similar questions surround Plotinus’s background.)
Stranger still, a few have proposed that Ammonius Saccas may actually have been of Indian extraction.
If true, this would help to explain two curious pieces of data. Firstly, Ammonius Saccas had an affinity for Indian thought that he apparently transmitted to his pupil. According to the biographer and systematizer, Porphyry, Plotinus’s decade-long training by Ammonius Saccas primed him “to make acquaintance with the Persian philosophical discipline and that prevailing among the Indians.”[16]
Secondly, tenets of Neoplatonism are redolent of Vedanta, the dominant stream of philosophical Hinduism which was derived from a collection of sacred texts called the Upanishads.
A core notion of this viewpoint is often (albeit opaquely) articulated as the slogan “Atman is Brahman.” This is to say that all individual souls (Atman) – yours, mine, and everyone else’s – are identical with the ultimate principle of reality (designated Brahman).
There is a striking similarity between this doctrine and the crucial Neoplatonic notion that all reality is an “emanation” of, and seeks to “return to” unity with, the One. Stay tuned for further explorations of these abstractions.
According to academic Arthur Versluis, the traditions of Indian religion and Neoplatonism coalesced in the 19th-century American Transcendentalist movement – famously associated with American writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It’s interesting to entertain the possibility that this represented a reunion of divergent strands that previously emerged from the same basic source.
3. The Man Behind Renaissance Magic: Johannes Trithemius
One of the most epochal textbooks on magic theory ever published was the three-volume De Occulta Philosophia, by the 15th-16th-century German Kabbalist and Neoplatonist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa.
We showcased Agrippa twice already. First, he appeared in our video “Top 10 Occultists of All Time,”
…and then again in “10 Occultists Who Were Accused Spies.”
Agrippa was born and received his early education in the German city of Cologne.
This is significant because Cologne had been a stronghold of Medieval Scholasticism, a composite philosophical-theological system expounding Christianity using the logical apparatus of Aristotle.
Within that context, debates still broke out. At Cologne, the majority of the faculty followed the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas, known as “Thomism.” But a minority of school men opted instead for “Albertism,” a competing system drawn from Aquinas’s most distinguished teacher, Albert the Great (also known by the Latinized version of his name, Albertus Magnus).[17]
Although Albertism is little-mentioned today, it was (for a time) preserved in Cologne – where Albert had spent time lecturing – by a coterie of scholars devoted to his outlook. A key point, here, is that Albert was regarded as having been sympathetic to both alchemy and astrology.
As for the latter, in his Speculum Astronomiæ (“The Mirror of Astronomy”), published circa 1260, Albertus Magnus had argued that astrological investigations were compatible with Christianity. Much later, Agrippa read this work and cited it as instrumental on his thinking.
In the 14th century, Albertism was combined with Neoplatonism by the largely unknown Dominican Berthold of Moosburg (ca. 1300-1361). Thus, Agrippa would have been trained in what is now referred to as the “Cologne Tradition of Neoplatonism.”
Simultaneously, Agrippa mastered – and would also lecture on – humanist-Catholic thinker Johann Reuchlin’s seminal Kabbalistic treatise, De Verbo Mirifico, printed in 1494.[19] Incidentally, that title roughly translates to “About the Miraculous Word” and is a sustained explication of the alleged magical power of the name “Jesus.”[20]
Reuchlin had been introduced to Jewish mysticism by the found of so-called “Christian Cabala,” the Italian Renaissance innovator, Pico della Mirandola, whom we will discuss further in a bit.[21]
It is difficult to overstate Agrippa’s significance. Occult Philosophy was, in effect, the first attempt at a comprehensive encyclopedia of esotericism and magic.[22] His thesis? “…[T]hat the hermetic texts …and the Kabbalistic writings… were the gateway to true wisdom” and would restore the control of nature to humanity, who had lost it due to the sin of Adam.[23]
Early 20th-century English historian Frances Yates relates the opinions of two specialists who believed that Agrippa “and his associates formed some kind of secret society…”.[24] Incredibly, “[s]ome historians of the origins of Protestantism in Geneva have regarded Agrippa and his circle … ‘as the seed-bed of the reformed faith’.” Of course, “Reformed Christianity” is merely another name for Calvinism, or the branch of Protestantism owing to 16th-century French theologian John Calvin.
Not only was Agrippa at ground zero for what developed into Calvinism, but he was also operating in humanist circles in England.[25] This would have placed him in the orbit of the unfortunately named “Oxford Reformers”:[26] provocative New-Testament translator Desiderius Erasmus, English statesman and Catholic martyr Sir Thomas More, and – particularly – Renaissance standard bearer, John Colet.
And once again, behind Agrippa – the figure who was apparently so pivotal for preparing the ground for momentous religious changes on the continent and the British Isles[27] – we find a more obscure intriguer lurking in the shadows.
For, before writing his magnum opus, “[i]n 1509-10, Agrippa was in Germany, visiting the learned [Benedictine] abbot [Johannes] Trithemius,” to whom De Occulta Philosophia would be dedicated.[28]
4. The Man Behind Trithemius: Pelagius of Majorca
19th-century French occultist Éliphas Lévi, on whom see “Top 10 Occultists of All Time,” …
…praised Trithemius as having been the most accomplished magician of his era.
Besides Agrippa, Trithemius had at least one other illustrious student. The revolutionary alchemist and medical reformer Paracelsus (born Theophrastus von Hohenheim) – regarded as the Martin “Luther of the Physicians” – “…identified… the famous Cabalist Johannes Trithemius… [as] among his tutors.”[29]
Additionally, Dr. John Dee, Queen Elizabeth I’s astrologer royal, whom we also ranked one of the occult practitioners with the most enduring legacies.
Dee’s extensive library, one of the world’s largest of his time, contained several of Trithemius’s books on its shelves. This included Trithemius’s the Steganographia (written ca. 1500),[30] which “contained many numerological and astrological calculations connected with angels as well as instructions on how to summon them, to gain knowledge, and how to send messages over long distances by means of angelic agency.”[31]
Because of these alleged angelological dealings, Trithemius garnered a reputation as “a demonic magician,”[32] necromancer, and “sorcerer.”[33]
Like the mysterious abbot himself, Dee developed a reputation as a sorcerer.
and De Septem Secundeis (1508), a treatise on astrology and Kabbalistic magic;
And, as we noted in “10 Occultists Who Were Accused Spies,” Dee may have exploited Trithemian ciphers to send coded messages for the English crown.
Along with his students, Agrippa and Paracelsus, Johannes Trithemius would be cited by the previously named Lévi in his influential Histoire de la magie (1860).
Confidence in his monumental importance for later streams of occultism is inversely proportional to relative uncertainty about the details of his early life and intellectual formation. In various biographical “snippets” readily available online, one finds unfailingly repeated a fairy-tale-like anecdote about Trithemius’s unlikely – and inexplicably swift – ascent. A twenty-year-old Trithemius was supposedly returning home from university when he was caught in a snowstorm. The ferocity of the storm was such that he sought refuge in a Benedictine Abbey. The story goes that he decided to stay there, and – within a year – he was made “Abbot,” or head monk.
Trithemius himself claimed that he had been schooled in various esoteric arts by one “Libanius Gallus,” an otherwise unknown adept. But the autobiographical questions ramify when we learn that Libanius Gallus himself was said – again, by the precocious abbot himself – to merely have been an intermediary between Trithemius and an even more secretive mage.
Allegedly named “Pelagius of Majorca,” after Mallorca, the Spanish island that is one of the top-ten largest in the Mediterranean Sea.
Stay tuned for more on these sorts of crypto-politically magnetic areas.
Some historians, such as Paola Zambelli, have concluded that “both Pelagius and Libanius were fictions invented by our abbot.”[34]
Another possibility is that they are veiled acknowledgements of real people. One thinks, for instance, of the 13th-century “proto-Cabalist” Ramon Llull who happened to be from Mallorca.
Still, as Michael Hoffman remarks, due to Trithemius’s preposterous account of his own rise and influence, we must assume that the abbot was assisted by a person (or persons) unknown.[35]
Along a similar line, writer Rosemary Guiley states that, early in his own intellectual formation, Trithemius went to Heidelberg – a center of alchemy and occultism – where he became the student of an unknown teacher.”[36]
5. The Man Behind ‘Christian Cabala’: Flavius Mithridates
Speaking of Kabbalists, the short-lived Renaissance syncretist, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, exercised an outsized influence on subsequent esotericism – especially in its Neoplatonic incarnations.
His main contributions were twofold. Firstly, particularly via his captivating Oration on the Dignity of Man,[37] Pico gave expression to his “…magical view of man as master of the created world.”[38]
Later interpreters understood Pico to have been asserting “…that man is set apart from the rest of creation, and is completely free to form his own nature.”[39]
This arguably becomes a major component of later philosophies – such as those of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche – which place an emphasis upon will.
But, it also forms the part of the foundation for various occult currents, such as those involving figures like Éliphas Lévi – according to whom the Pentagram symbolized “[t]he sovereignty of the will…”[40] – and Aleister Crowley, both of whom we surveyed in “Top 10 Occultists.”
Secondly, Pico is credited with introducing the Jewish mystical Kabbalah into Western occultism. This would have a monumental impact. In the first place, it created – right away – the curious amalgam known as “Christian Cabala.”
Of course, predictably, it seems that Pico wasn’t acting on his own hook. Standing behind him were several figures about whom little else is known – beyond their tutelage of the young Italian.
One of them was the noteworthy Jewish Averroist, Elijah Delmedigo. Among other effects, Delmedigo seems to have primed Pico for his interest in an Aristotelianism that was separate from the usual Catholic framework set in place by the great Dominican theologian St. Thomas Aquinas.
Another was Rabbi Yohanan Alemanno, from whom Pico learned the rudiments of Hebrew. Alemanno was also known for his view “…that natural magic was inferior to the Kabbalah, which provides the keys to a ‘divine’ magic.”[41]
But, it was from one Samuel ben Nassim Bulfarag, alias Guglielmo Raimondo de Moncada, alias Flavius Mithridates, Pico’s tutor in Aramaic, that Pico would learn the most about Kabbalistic secrets.
British Renaissance historian Frances Yates reports that, “[c]hief among …[the Spanish Jews who instructed Pico] was the mysterious character known as Flavius Mithridates who provided Pico with Cabalist manuscripts.”[42]
In the words of University of California, Los Angeles Professor Brian Copenhaver, “Flavius Mithridates …[was] his [Pico’s] most prolific Jewish informant, [who] translated (and mistranslated) thousands of pages of Kabbalah into Latin for him.”[43]
Copenhaver’s aside raises questions about Flavius’s honesty. A commentator (of unknown reliability) introduces a record of one of Flavius’s speeches, delivered on Good Friday in front of the pope no less, by saying that – although he “dazzled the clerics” with his linguistic abilities – he fabricated evidence in the manner of “[a] clever charlatan.”[44]
As an added layer of intrigue, the Encyclopædia Judaica observes that, in Rome, Flavius had once been “…under the patronage of Giovanni Battista Cibo, bishop of Molfetta, [who] later [became] Pope Innocent VIII.”[45]
Yates draws attention to the high strangeness of the relationship between Pico and Flavius,[46] stating that the latter “…encouraged Pico in the Christian interpretation of Cabala, even to the point of inserting into the texts interpolations of his own pointing in a Christian direction.”[47]
Yates candidly confesses her own astonishment, asking: “What can have been Flavius’s motive in thus encouraging and directing Pico towards his momentous adoption of Cabala into Christianity…[?]”[48]
6. The Man Behind Renaissance Neoplatonism: Elissæus
Similar weirdness also surrounds the earlier, 14th-15th-c. Constantinopolitan scholar Gemistos Pletho (circa 1355-1452). He was a well-connected, Byzantine Greek who rejected Eastern Orthodoxy and advocated a return to paganism – ostensibly combined with a Neoplatonic form of Christianity.
Pletho – sometimes alternatively called Plethon – was a major catalyst for Italian Renaissance interest in Plato.[49] First of all, he was a celebrated participant in the Council of Ferrara-Florence – held over almost a twenty-year period from 1431 to 1449. The council was called to try to undo the Great Schism of 1054. Also called the “East-West Schism,” you’ll recall that this separated Christianity into Eastern Orthodoxy, on the one hand, and Roman Catholicism, on the other.
Secondly, Pletho gave numerous, well-attended lectures “On the Difference Between Aristotle and Plato,” some of which were apparently heard by Florentine banker Cosimo de’Medici.
De’Medici proceeded to establish a Platonic Academy in Florence. Subsequently, he funded the research-and-translation projects of Italian priest-scholar Marsilio Ficino. Ficino, along with the previously mentioned Pico della Mirandola, would basically open wide the doors for mysticism, magic, and revived Neoplatonism in the Catholic Church.
In fact, Pletho arguably paved the way for Pico.
And, wouldn’t you know it? According to Pletho’s dogged ideological adversary, Georgios Scholarios (ca. 1400-1473), a man who would later become Patriarch of Constantinople under the name Gennadios II, some of Pletho’s ideas had been suggested to him by a Kabbalist named Elissæus.[50]
Of course, the allegations, while provocative, are far from historically certain. Nevertheless, if true, they would mean that two major esoterically oriented streams – Kabbalism and Neoplatonism – were introduced into Western Christianity partially under Rabbinic superintendence.
7. The Men Behind Cagliostro (I): Altotas
Fast-forwarding to the Enlightenment, Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, allegedly born with the more modest name Giuseppe Balsamo was an 18th-century Sicilian-Jewish adventurer and Hermeticist.
We covered Cagliostro, who was recently incorporated into the Dr. Strange story line in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in our video titled “Top 10 Occultists of All Time,” where we noted his institution of a so-called “Egyptian” variety of Freemasonry with Kabbalistic-sorcerous overtones.
“Some accounts suggest that Cagliostro” – who was allegedly trained in sex magic by an adept whose identity will be disclosed in a few minutes – “forced his wife to sell sexual favors in order to augment his income.”[51]
According to his critics, he was a swindler who gallivanted about Europe engaging in confidence scams and evading his creditors. That is… until he ran afoul of the Roman Inquisition – allegedly trying to found a lodge of the “Brotherhood” right in the Vatican’s backyard – and, for his efforts, was imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo.
Viewers of Ron Howard’s 2006 film, Angels and Demons – Dan Brown’s sequel to the wildly successful The Da Vinci Code – will recognize the imposing, cylindrical mausoleum from an exciting scene as the movie builds toward its climax.
In any case, some say that Cagliostro was eventually moved to the Fortress of San Leo, where he died.
But legends suggest that Cagliostro possessed coveted secrets for the attainment of limitless wealth and miraculously long life – if not immortality.
For more information on these fabled goals of alchemy, see “Top 10 GOLD-MAKING Alchemists.”
No prison could hold a man so supernaturally empowered as Cagliostro. Or… so some say. Therefore, rumors of his magical escape and subsequent reappearances gained currency in esoteric circles.
From where – or who – had he acquired his arcane knowledge?
According to one persistent account, young Guiseppe Balsamo had served as famulus to a mysterious Greek adept named Altotas.[52]
Versions of the story differ slightly. Either the future Count Cagliostro had apprenticed with Altotas on the Island of Malta, or, to advance their learning, the two had journeyed to Malta together.
Malta, of course, was the headquarters for one of the Catholic Church’s oldest military-religious orders. Originally founded as the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, otherwise known as the Hospitallers, a string of defeats prompted their periodic relocation. First they ended up on the island of Cyprus, then Rhodes, and – finally – Malta.
Supposedly, Altotas was so connected that he was able to effect Cagliostro’s introduction to the Grand Master of that august organization, into which our mysterious count claimed to have been initiated.
What happened to Altotas after this, no one seems to have discovered. He simply receded into the background while his pupil proceeded to revolutionize the ritualism of Masonry. Unless, well… hold that thought.
8. The Men Behind Cagliostro (II): Comte de Saint-Germain
Cagliostro is perhaps the best-known of a number of 18th-century adventurers who were able – at least for a short time – to capitalize on the venality of European nobles.
Among this group, also, were the prodigious “lover” Giacomo Casanova, and the curious Comte de Saint-Germain.
In fact, Saint-Germain is often said to have initiated Cagliostro into some form of Illuminism. “Illuminism” is a somewhat opaque synonym for Enlightenment. During the heyday of the intellectual movement by that name, which occurred roughly in late-17th and 18th centuries, there was an exaltation of the powers of the human mind. This illumination could take the form of a Gnostic-like “awakening” precipitated by contact with some tantalizing bits of “hidden knowledge” – …
…as we have covered in out several videos on Gnosticism.
Or, Illuminism could depend, instead, on an exaggerated confidence in human brain power and ingenuity. This “rationalism” in a broad sense was typical of philosophers of the period, regardless of whether they favored a priori argumentation, as was pioneered by René Descartes and carried on by such thinkers as Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
…or whether they leaned more heavily on a posteriori, empirical methodology, as did John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume.[53]
The difficulty with a figure like the Comte is situating him along this continuum. In the words of Antoine Faivre, men like Saint-Germain were “expert in exploiting the taste for the marvelous…” that prevailed in their age.[54] The consensus Ivory-Tower view seems to be something like this: Saint-Germain used early developments in science, to dazzle the mob and pretend spiritual Enlightenment.[55]
Were we previously to have catalogued the top eleven occultists, instead of ten, he would have contended for extra spot.
And, given rumors that he was an agent in the service of Prussian ruler Frederick the Great, we could have featured him in “10 Occultists who Were Accused Spies.”
Saint-Germain’s pedigree is as debated as other aspects of his life. At various times, and by diverse observers, he has been labeled a Hungarian prince or the fabled “Wandering Jew” – and quite a few things in between.
A preposterous array of “past lives” have been assigned to Saint-Germain – whether by popular acclaim or by retelling of his own autobiographical declarations. These include: Joseph, the human father or (depending on the source) step-father of Jesus Christ; the 13th-century proto-scientist Roger Bacon; and the 16th-17th-century English essayist and statesman, Sir Francis Bacon…
…who we have mentioned before.
Saint-Germain was a reputed Rosicrucian and, like Cagliostro, maintained numerous connexions to Freemasonry.
Perhaps more than his contemporaries, Saint-Germain seemed to become larger than life in the years following his alleged death around 1784 or 1785. I say “alleged death” since stories of “sightings” of the miracle-worker pile up in a manner similar to those about Elvis Presley.
A year after his reported demise, Saint-Germain was supposedly elected by Masons – including the groundbreaking hypnotist, Franz Anton Mesmer – to represent their order at an upcoming convention.
Subsequently, he was also supposedly seen retiring to Tibet, which seems to have given rise to – or at least encouraged – the belief that Saint-Germain had joined the ranks of an exalted class of mystics variously designated “Ascended Masters” or Mahatmas.
Indeed, Helena P. Blavatsky, whom we covered in “Top 10 Occultists,” …
…principal founder (in 1875) of the Theosophical Society, which we discussed in “10 Arcane Words,” …
…references Saint-Germain along with other supposed Masters – Morya and Koothoomi – as collectively directing earth’s affairs behind the scenes as the “Great White Brotherhood.”
Madame Blavatsky’s intellectual and spiritual heirs, including Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater, claimed to have had dealings with the Count.
Saint-Germain’s influence extends even further. Several key “New Agers” professed the Comte’s involvement in their enterprises. For instance, Guy and Edna Ballard established the I AM Movement under the auspices of the Saint Germain Foundation.
Elizabeth Clare Prophet, matron of the Church Universal and Triumphant, articulated a complicated lore surrounding “Saint Germaine,” including the belief that he somehow “inspired” the Constitution of the United States. Throughout her tenure as “Guru Ma,” Prophet claimed continual – or periodic – contact with various Ascended Masters, especially Saint-Germain.
These tales have cemented Saint-Germain’s legacy as one of the most powerful and proficient adepts of all time.
Runner Up: The Man Behind Éliphas Lévi
Let me momentarily interrupt the Cagliostro saga, with all the various behind-the-scenes operators. For there is one aspect of it that is probably best introduced by way of example.
For the illustration, we’ll turn to the man who, for all intents and purposes, kickstarted the so-called “Occult Revival” in the 19th-century – which we highlighted in the video “10 Arcane Words.”
Born Alphonse Louis Constant, he is far better known under his assumed (and “Hebræcized”[56]) name, Éliphas Lévi.
Of course, Lévi was a major name in “Top 10 Occultists of All Time.”
His chief contribution to occultism was his suggestion that there were “…esoteric correspondences between the twenty-two paths on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and the twenty-two major trumps in the Tarot pack of cards.”[57]
>Lévi’s synthesized a “transcendental” magic out of material gleaned from a wide variety of sources. These included: idiosyncratic 16th-17th-century German mystic Jakob Böhme, 17th-18th-century Swedish theosopher[58] Emanuel Swedenborg, 18th-century Freemason and Tarot enthusiast Antoine Court de Gébelin, 18th-19th-century German “animal-magnetism” theorist and hypnotist, Franz Anton Mesmer; 18th-19th-century French poet Antoine Fabre d’Olivet; and 18th-19th-century French esoteric Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, founder of Martinism.
These were centered around the Jewish-mystical Kabbalah, which we have repeatedly encountered. What was additionally unique about Lévi, however, was that he seems to have fused two Kabbalistic streams together.
On the one hand, Lévi was acquainted with “Christian Cabala,” as it had originated with Pico and filtered down to the 17th-century German Hebraist Christian Knorr von Rosenroth. In 1684, Rosenroth had published the influential compendium Kabbala Denudata, or “Kabbalah Uncovered.”[59]
On the other hand, there were several separate strands of Kabbalah originating in Poland. One of these owed to Jacob Frank, a follower of the curious, 17th-century Messianic pretender, Sabbatai Zevi.[60]
We touched on both Zevi and Frank in “10 ‘Sex-Magic’ Cults.”
Another Polish current came from Hasidism. Fittingly for the present topic, its history is complex and obscure. But it seems to have been introduced into Poland from Prague, during its so-called “Golden Age” in the 17th century. At that time, the community presumably was in custody of the teachings of the 16th-century Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, known as the Maharal of Prague. He is still remembered for his supposed magical creation of a Frankenstein-like monster called a “Golem.”
From the Bohemian capital of Prague, Kabbalistic teachings passed to a line of practitioners known as “Baal Shem.” Literally signifying “Lord of the Name,” the specific reference is to the Tetragrammaton, or the four letters making up the name Yahweh – which is regarded as the ultimate magical formula.
Various Baal Shem are reputed to be adept at such things as manufacturing magical amulets and talismans, casting – and averting – the “evil eye,” summoning and controlling demons, and so on.
In any case, the Hasidic movement was founded in the 18th century Poland by one Israel ben Eliezer, better known as the Baal Shem Tov. In the words of the late historian James Webb, the Baal Shem Tov fashioned “…Hassidism [sic] …[into] a mass movement” by “placing …emphasis on an interpretation of the popular elements in the Cabala…”.[61]
As a consequence, “…the often abstruse doctrines of the Jewish mystical philosophers …[were] rendered …more intelligible to …Gentile[s]. Judæo-Christian sects sprang up throughout Poland and Russia, with rituals based on [these] esoteric doctrines…”.[62]
Our magus – Éliphas Lévi – was initiated into this form of Kabbalism by the 18th-19th-century Polish-born French émigré Józef Maria Hoëne-Wroński.
Among other things, Wroński was a mathematician. He therefore brought a dose of Neo-Pythagoreanism into his metaphysician speculations, which he also communicated to Lévi.
Similarly to his star pupil (Lévi), Wroński himself “was well versed in Kabbalah, Boehme, and Gnosticism.”[63]
No word on what would have become of Alphonse Louis Constant without his fateful encounter with his obscure Polish master. But it may well be that just as it was Lévi’s “work [which] formed ‘the narrow channel through which the whole Western tradition of magic flowed to the modern era’,”[64] it was Wroński’s work through which important aspects of that tradition were communicated to Lévi.
9. The Men Behind Cagliostro (III): Baal Shem of London
With those, later historical developments in place, let’s return to Cagliostro. You see, among the mysterious count’s teachers was yet another rabbinical “Shem Tov.”
In this case, we’re referring to Rabbi Ḥayyim Samuel Jacob Falk,[65] otherwise called the “Baal Shem of London.”
Apparently, Londoners referred to him as “Doctor Falken”[66] – which creates a curious “synch” with the reclusive computer genius by the same name from the 1983 movie War Games.
Rabbi Falk emerged out of “Shabbateanism,”[68] that is, a modified, messianic form of Judaism.
Shabbateanism sought to preserve the legacy of Sabbatai Zevi, whom we mentioned in passing moments ago, and whom we sketched in “Top 10 ‘Sex-Magic’ Cults.”
Like several entrants on this list, Falk “became known early as a magician…”.[69] And like Cagliostro and Saint-Germain, specifically, Falk had numerous run-ins with civil authorities. Apparently, he was almost executed in Germany for practicing sorcery and witchcraft.
In one dark episode, for example, Falk supposedly “sacrifice[d]… [a] black calf” in the presence of several noblemen,[70] one of whom saw his valet suffer a fatal injury to his spine.[71] According to the report, the unnamed “young man” had his neck so “twisted” that, “had he lived after the accident that [in fact] took his life, could have only seen backward.”[72]
Falk decamped for England where, initially, he was on the “outs” with the Jewish community in London,[73] perhaps because he was laboring under suspicion of “fraud” and heresy – accusations that had been thrown at him by influential German Talmudist Jacob Emden, who had ties to the city.[74]
However, again as with Cagliostro and Saint-Germain – as well as with numerous other occultists, such as Jacob Frank – Falk managed to secure financial assistance from a wealthy family.[75] When he died, Falk was “in relatively affluent circumstances…”.[76]
Falk’s relationship with the broader community improved when he reportedly “saved the Great Synagogue from destruction by fire by means of a magical inscription” – presumably, representation of the Tetragrammaton – “which he [applied] to the doorposts.”[77]
Doctor Falken supposedly had an unnatural-seeming silver candelabrum that illuminated his study without visible use of conventional oil or wax. And – like Saint-Germain – it was said of him that he could subsist for long periods of time without eating or drinking.[78]
By feats such as these, “…he achieved notoriety in both Jewish and non-Jewish circles for his Kabbalistic practices based on the used of the mysterious Name of God, hence becoming known as a Ba’al Shem (‘Master of the [Divine] Name’).”[79]
Among other things, Falk was believed to be able to effect cures by manufacturing and using “Kabbalistic talismans”.[80] By wielding a magic wand constructed from a “rolled-up scroll,”[81] the Baal Shem of London seemed to exert “control over angelic spirits”.[82]
According to the esteemed British Jewish historian Cecil Roth, Falk maintained some sort of “kabbalistic laboratory on” the symbolically charged London Bridge.[83]
It may have been Saint-Germain who “personally initiated” Cagliostro “into the Lodge of Illuminists at his castle in Holstein,”[84] but it was “[t]he Rabbi Jacob Falk [who] taught [him] sex magic…”.[85]
10. The Man Behind the ‘Illuminati’: Kolmer
Perhaps no word provokes as many strong reactions – whether out of curiosity, derision, or enthusiasm – as “Illuminati” (and its cognates).
The term has so many colloquial and technical variations that it would be best if I saved its exploration for a dedicated study. Still, I can’t help but to introduce it, here, on account of its relevance for this particular investigation.
Often imagined representing the upper echelon of an all-encompassing, global, economic-and sociopolitical control apparatus, it was established in Bavaria, in what is now Germany – as a bona fide, quasi-Masonic organization.
It was founded in 1776, no less (which, you’ll probably agree, was a pretty important year as far as world-historic events go).
The key player was a twenty-something year old law professor named Adam Weishaupt.
The story of the Illuminati is extraordinarily tangled and it is frequently difficult to separate fact from fiction. The “official record” – if there is such a thing – associates the group with some minor characters such as the German writer Adolph Knigge.
Its goals were said to be furtherance of the sort of anti-clerical and anti-monarchical program that one would expect from an Enlightenment-era movement.
And, according to the surface-level narrative, the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati was outlawed – along with other secret societies – and disbanded sometime between 1784 and 1787.
There is, however, no shortage of dissenting opinions on these – and other – pertinent matters. But, more interesting for us, at present, is the observation that the Order of the Illuminati was linked with more prominent individuals: for example, the 18th-19th-century German “animal-magnetism” theorist, Franz Anton Mesmer, and the previously named Count Cagliostro. That, and (of course) the further fact of the claimed influence of yet another “mystery man.”
Nesta Webster wrote of him: “Kolmer remains the most mysterious of all the mystery men of his day…”.[86]
That such a man may have been behind Weishaupt is extraordinary. For consider that Weishaupt has been linked both to the Jesuits[87] and to the Rothschild banking powerhouse.[88]
We intend to probe these topics more fully in upcoming videos. For example, stay tuned for “10 Precursors to the Bavarian Illuminati.”
Copyright 2023, TheSynchroMystic. All rights reserved.
[1] The term “Gnosticism” was said to have been coined by Cambridge Neoplatonist Henry More. See Michael Williams, “Gnosticism,” Encyclopedia Britannica, <https://www.britannica.com/topic/gnosticism>.
[2] Such as “Esotericism,” “Hermeticism,” “Mysticism,” and “Neoplatonism.”
[3] It fed into various streams of philosophy as well and, along with other currents (such as Aristotelianism, Cynicism, and Stoicism), resulted in so-called “Middle Platonism.” Middle Platonism, in turn, combined with Neo-Pythagoreanism and issued in Neoplatonism which, confusingly enough, “back fed” into Gnosticism.
[4] It derives from even older forms, such as those of Media and Persia. It shows up in references such as to the “Magi” who paid tribute to the Christ child in the New Testament.
[6] Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Magic and Alchemy, New York: Infobase; Checkmark Books, 2006, p. 294.
[7] Alternately spelled “Dositheus.” His Wiki article (“Dositheos (Samaritan),” Jun. 25, 2022, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dositheos_(Samaritan)>) gives “Nathanael” as an alias, justifying the variant by remarking that both names mean “gift of god.”
[8] Samaritans have an interesting history. You’ll recall that King David had ruled over a united kingdom (ca. 11th – 10th centuries, B.C.) – as did David’s son, Solomon (10th c. B.C.). But when Solomon died (a typical date given is 930 B.C.), the kingdom split into Northern and Southern halves, both of which were eventually conquered. The Southern Kingdom, called Judah, is usually said to have survived until around 587 or 586 B.C., when it was taken over by Neo-Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar II. But the Northern Kingdom of Israel didn’t last as long. It fell to Neo-Assyria; the Northern Kingdom’s capital, Samaria, was overrun circa 722 / 721 B.C. So, the story goes that the “Samaritans” were (and, I suppose, still are) a remnant that claims descent from the original inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom who managed to remain in Samaria after the arrival of the Assyrian invaders. The history is complicated by the “return” of exiled Jews from Babylon after the Neo-Babylonian Empire was displaced by the Persian. A number of factions arose within the religion of Judaism, with the Pharisees and Sadducees being prominent representatives. Main differences lie in the facts that the former maintained bases of operation in small assembly houses (called “synagogues”) and insisted on adherence to a so-called “Oral Law” in addition to the written books of (what we would commonly know as) the Old Testament; Pharisaic Judaism morphed into Rabbinic Judaism. The latter Sadducees – as high priests – were headquartered in the Temple. Both the Sadducees and the Samaritans rejected the “Oral Torah,” but had other differences (including ethnic / racial). These were exacerbated by military conflicts (especially the campaign of John Hyrcanus, circa 128 B.C.). By the time of Jesus of Nazareth, the Samaritans held to their pre-rabbinical form of Judaism and were considered “outsiders” from the viewpoint of mainline Judaism.
[13] Richard Wilhelm, “Introduction,” The I Ching, or Book of Changes,” [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967, n.p.,] qtd. by Mitch Horowitz, Occult America, New York: Bantam, 2010, p. 8. Wilhelm is writing on the views of Confucius and Lao-tse, but could just as easily be discoursing on Platonism.
[14] Antoine Faivre, Western Esotericism: A Concise History, Christine Rhone, transl., Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2010, p. 26.
[15] He may also have once been a student of the Alexandrian Christian theologian, Origen.
[16] Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, A Threat to Public Piety: Christians, Platonists, and the Great Persecution, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 2012, <https://books.google.com/books?id=K_2tDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA74>; citing Porphyry, Plotinus, 3.16.
[17] See Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction, New York & Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008, p. 55.
[18] Some alchemical – or, at least, pro-chemical – opinions presented in Albert’s De mineralibus (ca. 1248-1262). However, more overtly alchemical-magical texts – preëminently, the grimoire known variously as the Grand Albert or the Secreta Alberti – are now believed to have been falsely attributed to Albertus Magnus (and, thus, belong to what is called the pseudo-Albertine literature).
[19] Reuchlin’s mature thought, including Neo-Pythagorean elements, is on full display in De Arte Cabalistica (“On the Art of the Cabala”), published in 1516.
[20] “Jesus” is rendered as an expansion of the holy Tetragrammaton, or the “Four Letters” – YHWH or JHVH – which signify Yahweh or Jehovah. In the Christian-Cabalist analysis, the name of Jesus (IESU) is Kabbalistically equivalent to (or may be rendered as) the Pentagrammaton: “Five Letters,” given as YHSWH or IESVE, and yielding (something like) “Yeshua,” which is a Hebrew name translating to “Joshua” …or Jesus.
[21] Though, Agrippa also knew the brothers Agostino and Paolo Ricci, the latter responsible for translating (1515) a major Kabbalistic work titled (in Latin) Portæ Lucis, and (in Hebrew) Sha’arei Ora, both meaning “Gates of Light,” written by the 13th-century Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla. Giktilla had studied under Abraham Abulafia.
[22] Book 1 dealt with “natural magic,” such as the use of herbs and stones, as pertained to the terrestrial elements. Book 2 concerned itself with “mathematical magic,” including “magic squares” and numerology, imported from Neo-Pythagoreanism (via Reuchlin), and linked with the “celestial” spheres. Finally, Book 3 focused on “angel magic” – invocations, summonings, and the like – associated with what Agrippa termed the “super-celestial” realm. This book, in particular, earned him a reputation as a black magician who made pacts with demons. A “Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy” – pertaining to ceremonial magic and geomancy – was published several decades after Agrippa’s death. However, Agrippa’s student Johann Weyer maintained that it was falsely attributed to his former master.
[24] Or, even, that Agrippa “…may have been the centre of [several] secret societies,” all according to Frances Amelia Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, London and New York: Routledge, 1999, p. 44.
[25] Additionally, of course, Agrippa influenced later occultists such as Éliphas Lévi, Francis Barrett, and the members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, among others.
[26] “It is usual to speak of Colet, Erasmus and More as the ‘Oxford Reformers,’ but the title is misleading. If they advocated reforms, they did not undertake any. Although they had all three been in Oxford, London was the real centre of their influence.” H. Maynard Smith, “The Catholic Reformers,” chapt. 11, Pre-Reformation England, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1963, <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00406-5_12>; <https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-00406-5_12>.
[27] Agrippa was convinced that Roman Catholicism has lost the true faith – as, he believed, was evidenced in the inability of Churchmen to perform miracles. See Goodrick-Clarke, op. cit., p. 59.
[34] See P. Zambelli, “Chapter Three. Magic, Pseudepigraphy, Prophecies and Forgeries in Trithemius’ Manuscripts. From Cusanus to Bovelles?” in the volume White Magic, Black Magic in the European Renaissance, Leiden: Brill, 2007, pp. 73-100, <https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004160989.i-282.11> and <https://brill.com/display/book/9789047421382/Bej.9789004160989.i-282_008.xml>. Trithemius refers to a mysterious, “now lost” text, “attributed to Pelagius of Majorca,” for whom our “only witness is Trithemius”, ibid. Cf. Michael >Hoffman, The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome, Coeur d’Alene, Id.: Independent History and Researc, 2017, p. 243, who calls both Labanius and Pelagius “imaginary sages,” as well as “Frater Acher,” who refers to Pelagius as an “invented persona” in “Paracelsus & Trithemius – Musings on a Bewitched Relationship,” Theo Magica [weblog], Feb. 1, 2022, <https://theomagica.com/blog/paracelsus-and-trithemius>.
[35] See Hoffman, op. cit., pp. 238ff, where he repeatedly refers to Trithemius’s unnamed “handlers.”
[39] E. J. Ashworth, “Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni,” p. 619. Significantly, Ashworth demurs on almost all the standard summaries of Pico. Pico “…hoped to write a Concord of Plato and Aristotle”; so, he shouldn’t be considered a “Neoplatonist” in an unqualified sense. Pico “is often described as a syncretist” – as I have done – “but in fact he made it clear that the truth of Christianity has priority over the prisca theologia or ancient wisdom found in the hermetic corpus and the cabala.” Finally, Ashworth thinks that the interpretation of Pico as announcing an almost unrestricted capacity for individual liberty has to be checked by the facts that: firstly, in his Heptaplus (1489), Pico downplays human freedom. Secondly, Ashworth insists that Pico’s anthropology interprets mankind “as a microcosm” of the universe and “thus firmly within the hierarchy of nature…”. (All quotations, ibid.) It seems to me, however, that the stated aim of reconciling Aristotle and Plato belies Ashworth’s rejection of Pico’s syncretism. Furthermore, that Pico gave “Christianity …priority” over Hermeticism must be assessed in light of the Pico’s overall Neoplatonizing tendencies and his “Christian Cabalism.” In other words, it would be a colossal mistake to read Pico’s supposed ranking of “Christianity” over Hermeticism as a preservation of Medieval Scholasticism or Thomism. The caveats about Pico’s endorsement of the notion of alchemical correspondence between humans (as microcosm) and the universe (as macrocosm) are well taken. But, maybe the point is that, divested of his Hermeticism (as occurred during the Enlightenment), Pico’s praise of human freedom takes on larger proportions.
[40] Goodrick-Clarke, op. cit., p. 193. In Lévi’s conception, “…the primary function of magic was to enable the magician to focus and direct his will.” Ibid.
[42] Frances Amelia Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, London and New York: Routledge, 1999, p. 22.
[43] Brian Copenhaver, “Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,” Edward N. Zalta, ed., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2020 ed., <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/pico-della-mirandola/>. Copenhaver elsewhere remarked: “Kabbalah, which Pico saw as the holier Hebrew analog of the gentile ‘ancient theology’ revealed by Marsilio Ficino, is provocatively on display in the 900 Conclusions: 119 of them, including the final and culminating 72, are Kabbalist theses—outlandishly Kabbalist from a Christian point of view. …Because of its Mosaic origin, Kabbalah was holier to Pico than the pagan wisdom that Ficino had traced to Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus, in ancient Chaldaea and Egypt, where Ficino found the beginnings of Platonic philosophy.” Ibid. At the same time, Pico wrote subtly. Again, Copenhaver: “Large portions of the Oration, drawing on these texts, are also informed by Kabbalah in ways that no contemporary Christian could have detected—least of all a Christian who lacked the clues provided by the Conclusions.” Ibid.
[45] Menachem E. Arton, updated by Nadia Zeldes, “Mithridates, Flavius,” Fred Skolnik and Michael Berenbaum, eds., Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd ed., vol. 14, Detroit: Thomson Gale; Jerusalem: Keter Publ. House, 2007, p. 370.
[46] Arton and Zeldes (ibid.) state that “…in his writings, Mithridates in very explicit about his homosexuality…”. This is suggestive, since Pico is also alleged to have had male lovers. “Quattrocento humanists, based largely in Florence and including such notable figures as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, vigorously explored a Neo-Platonism with …inherent homosexual overtones. … See Leonard Barkin’s Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) and James Saslow’s Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). Marsilio Ficino (1443-99), whose influential commentary on Plato’s Symposium, 1469, questioned (in the form of a dialogue) the inclusion of “desire” in [“?]friendship.” Pico della Mirandola (1463-94) and the poet Girolamo Benivieni “wrote passionate sonnets to each other and were buried in the same tomb in San Marco, like husband and wife,” although the poet died 40 years after Pico. Saslow admits that there is “little concrete evidence to suggest that Ficino’s deep love for Giovanni Cavalcanti—whom he enthroned as the hero of his annual symposium commemorating the death of Plato on November 7—was anything other than chaste.” Likewise, there are no explicit accounts of sexual activity between the Pico and Benivieni. (Saslow, Ganymede, 29).” From Robert Diamond, A Gay Neoclassical Movement, thesis, master of arts, Stony Brook, N.Y.: Stony Brook Univ., May 2012, p. 6, footnote 14, <https://ir.stonybrook.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11401/76793/Diamond_grad.sunysb_0771M_10949.pdf>.
[50] See George Karamanolis, “George Gemistus Plethon,” Henrik Lagerlund, ed., Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy: Philosophy Between 500 and 1500, Dordrecht & New York: Springer, 2011, p. 390, <https://books.google.com/books?id=x5FiMR3kd_8C&pg=PA390>. Alternative spellings are: Elisaeus and Eliseus.
[51]Mysteries of the Unknown: Secrets of the Alchemists, vol. 21, Time-Life, p. 102.
[53] We would also want to situate many important French thinkers – e.g., Denis Diderot, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire – in the vicinity. And, of course, we would need to deal with Immanuel Kant.
[55] To put it another way, Saint-Germain, and – perhaps – his students (such as Cagliostro), essentially utilized the results of Illuminism in sense number two (rational-empirical investigation and the primitive – by our lights – technology that it produced) to fake possession of Illuminism in sense number one (i.e., “Gnosis”)!
[56] That is, the alleged attempt to transliterate “Alphonse Louis” into Hebrew letters.
[58] “Theosophy” merely designates the “wisdom of God.” I write “theosopher” in order to distinguish Swedenborg from the disciples (and offshoots) of H. P. Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society (founded 1875), who are generally called theosophists.
[64] Goodrick-Clarke, op. cit., p. 195; quoting Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot, London: Duckworth, 1996, p. 168.
[67] Raphael Patai, The Jewish Alchemists, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994, p. 456.
[68] Again, alternatively spelled “Sabbatæanism,” “Sabbateanism,” “Sabbatianism,” etc.
[69] Cecil Roth, “Falk, Samuel Jacob Ḥayyim,” Encyclopædia Judaica, vol. 6, Jerusalem: Keter, 1972, p. 1159. Cf. Patai, op. cit., p. 455: “early” in his “career” he was “primarily a magician and conjurer…”.
[70] Patai records the testimony as referring to the “Comte de Westerloh” and the “Duc de Richelieu,” p. 460. The latter appears to have been Louis François Armand de Vignerot du Plessis. I have so far been unable to ascertain the identify of the former personage. “Westerloh” could be Westerloo/Westerlo; if so, Jean Philippe Eugène de Merode might have been a candidate, except he seems to have died too soon. (Patai wrote that Rantzow recorded his impressions between 1736 and 1739; Jean Philippe Eugène de Merode died in 1732. Of course, it is possible that Rantzow’s observations were recorded some years after the events they purport to describe.) Jean Philippe’s son, Philippe-Maximilien, was born in 1729, which suggests that he would have been far too young to have been a perceptive or reliable observer.
[71] Patai, op. cit., p. 460; quoting George Louis Albert de Rantzow.
[72] Patai, op. cit., p. 457; quoting George Louis Albert de Rantzow
[73] Though, Joseph Jacobs and Herman Adler report that Falk was “[r]eceived in London with hospitality” and that “Falk rapidly gained fame as a cabalist and worker of miracles, and many stories of his powers were current.” Joseph Jacobs and Herman Adler, “Falk, Ḥayyim Samuel Jacob (Also Known as De Falk, Dr. Falk, or Falkon),” Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906, <https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/5992-falk-hayyim-samuel-jacob>.
[74] For example, Jacob Emden’s son, Israel Emden (known as Meshullam Zalman, or Meshullam Solomon) was Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom from about 1765 to 1780. See “Emden, Jacob,” Wikipedia, Nov. 22, 2022, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Emden>; citing Jacob Emden, Megilat Sefer: The Autobiography of Rabbi Jacob Emden (1697–1776), PublishYourSefer.com, p. 353, <https://books.google.com/books?id=dOfOc56BFdkC&pg=PA353>.
[75] In Falk’s case, the Goldsmids: “Falk’s principal friends were the London bankers Aaron Goldsmid and his son.” Jacobs and Adler, loc. cit.
[83] At least, according to Roth! (Op. cit., p. 1159; emphasis supplied.) Falk also operated “a private synagogue in his house in Wellclose Square…,” ibid.
[88] See the comments from Joseph “Doc” Marquis, in Christian J. Pinto, Eye of the Phoenix, dvd, N.p.: Antiquities Research Films, 2008; <https://www.worldcat.org/title/430836014>.
For the necessarily age-restricted video version of this presentation, see our YouTube channel.
Introduction
Top 10 Groups That Practiced ‘Sex Magic’
Sex magic?[1] Yes, really! So what is one to make of this salacious, risqué and frankly vulgar phrase that has attained currency among contemporary cognoscente?
…Even as STDs (sexually transmitted diseases) supposedly spiral out of sight in Euro-American public health.
One gathers that this is, to some extent, from the baleful renown of a certain Edward Alexander “Aleister” Crowley. Being featured on the cover of the Beatles’ 1967 Sgt Pepper’s record album – and even possibly as the real identity of the eponymous Sgt. –seems to have clinched (or validated) the idea of psychoneurotic sexuality for credulous millions.
The self-styled “Great Beast 666” Crowley – the “wickedest man in the world” – was the personification of demented eros, even though he himself, for all his supposed powers, ended his days an impoverished terminal heroin addict in December 1947. We will meet “Mr. Crowley” again, shortly.
All right: down to particulars. “Sex” I suppose needs no special explication, except that – more precisely – it is the adjectival form, sexual, that is implied here. Magic (or magick, Crowley style) is much more historically reverberating, as we will see throughout this presentation. A definition supposedly popularized by Crowley and repeated by an admiring Wikipedia is: “a technique for bringing about change in the physical world through the force of one’s will.”[2]
But with this basic groundwork in place, in this video, we will look at ten groups (and some of the often-notorious people associated with them) for whom sacred rituals have revolved around sexual intercourse, or what is sometimes given the lofty sounding title magia sexualis – that is, “sex magic.”
Caveats and Disclaimers
Just a few words of caution: As usual, no claim is being made for completeness. In other words, this presentation will merely be a survey, rather than an exhaustive exploration. Additionally, nothing herein should be construed as an allegation of wrongdoing on the part of any individual or organization. This isn’t a legal brief; it’s a video! And it’s for entertainment purposes, only! We will be looking at some of the racier characterizations that have been made of various institutions. But we leave it to viewers to decide whether these accounts are exaggerations, fabrications, or reliable histories.
Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ contains depictions of what — at least on the surface — appear to be the inner workings of a modern-day sex-magic cult. (Obtained from Wikipedia; By The poster art can or could be obtained from Warner Bros.., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56814432; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/73/Eyes_Wide_Shut_%281999%29.png)
20th & 21st Centuries
The phrase “sex cult” may immediately recall images from the ritual-orgy sequence in the blockbuster erotic tour de force, Eyes Wide Shut.[3] In the film, the late, inimitable Hollywood director Stanley Kubrick has main character Dr. Bill Harford, played by Tom Cruise, unwittingly infiltrate a group of wealthy debauchees. Harford observes masked participants in flagrante delicto. Ultimately, he himself is unmasked and threatened for his deception.
It is standard to hear movie analysts and critics (whether System-approved or self-proclaimed) issue blanket denials that Kubrick intended to lend his considerable weight to the opinion that such secret societies actually exist.[4]
It would be presumptuous of me to suppose that I could settle the question of what was on the famed movie-maker’s mind. However, recent developments must surely call into question dismissals that are pronounced in the usual, all-too cavalier manner.[5]
After all, in 2018, major media outlets disclosed the arrest of one Keith Raniere. Raniere was ostensibly the head of a successful marketing company called NXIVM (“nexium”) that provided “personal-development” seminars to white-collar, executive types.
But, according to stories, underneath this sleek veneer, Raniere billed himself “Master of Slave Women”[6] and operated a sex-trafficking network with the help of a coterie of female accomplices, including actress Allison Mack and Seagram’s-liquor heiress Clare Bronfman.
This was followed, one year later, by the re-arrest of sex-offender and former financier, Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein also appears to have had some kind of interaction or relationship with high-profile persons such as former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, Microsoft mogul Bill Gates, Britain’s Prince Andrew, and numerous others. And he also supposedly utilized the “fairer sex” to entice fresh meat into his predatory (and sex-obsessed) orbit.[7]
Or, consider the earlier Children of God group, also sometimes referred to as the Family International. Once upon a time, the group enticed the parents of notables such as actress Rose McGowan as well as of the “Phoenix” siblings – Joaquin, Liberty, Rain, River, and Summer.
River Phoenix, you may remember, reportedly overdosed on drugs inside of Johnny Depp’s Viper Room nightclub, along the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood in 1993. He was transported to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, but died on Halloween night at the age of 23. According to an article that appeared in Esquire Magazine two years before his death, River supposedly called the Children of God “disgusting” and claimed that it was “ruining people’s lives.”[8]
Apparently, the Children of God’s sex-obsessed “…leader, David Brant Berg” recruited new members through seduction – “proudly refer[ring]” to his sexual missionaries “…as hookers for Jesus.”[9]
Of course, this smacks of Charles Manson’s notorious – and, ultimately, murderous – collection of hippie youths, who also referred to themselves as a “family.”[10] It’s not uncommon to see the Manson Family referred to as a sex cult. And it’s worth point out that Manson himself seemed inexplicably well-connected with California movie-and-music-scene personalities like actress Doris Day’s son Terrence “Terry” Melcher,[11] actress Angela Lansbury’s teenage daughter Didi,[12] Rat-Pack member Dean Martin’s daughter Deana,[13] and – most famously – Beach Boys’ co-founder Dennis Wilson.[14]
For his part, Manson may have been (partially) influenced by the London-based, and oddly named, Process Church of the Final Judgment. The brainchild of a pair of British occultists named Robert and Mary Anne De Grimston, the “Process” was described in media reports as “an offshoot of” Lafayette Ronald Hubbard’s Church of Scientology – the outfit that has attracted Hollywood “A-listers” like Tom Cruise and John Travolta, as well as other big names like Kirstie Alley, Stanley Kubrick’s daughter Vivian, Giovanni Ribisi, and others.
But, as an offshoot, the Process was a more sinister variant – one “…which practice[d] black magic and glorif[ied] sexual excess.”[15]
According to Ed Sanders, some Process members were decidedly Luciferian,[16] and – to help ourselves to Sanders’ euphemism – “celebrated… sensuality”[17] by participating in what the pornographic-movie industry routinely calls “gangbangs.”[18]
Given all these cultish and sexual shenanigans, it seems fair to ask: What might some of these groups have been up to? Borrowing a phrase from Baroness Kessler (in Roman Polanski’s 1999 film, The Ninth Gate), we may ask: are these just “social club[s] for bored” degenerates “…who use …meetings as …excuse[s] to indulge their jaded sexual appetites”? Or is there a deep secret, or arcanum arcanorum, lurking in the background?
‘Spermo-Gnosticism’: Salvation Thru Sex?
In the West, no study of sex magic would be complete without some mention of ancient Gnosticism. So, we may as well start with that.
I dealt with what you might call the “main lines” of Gnosticism in a video titled “10 Arcane Words.”[19] So, for a sober-minded account of foundational philosophical-religious terms such as “dualism” and “gnosis,” with no hanky-panky, see that presentation.
Here, we’ll only be concerned with the more sensational possibility that some rivulets of Gnosticism involved members in risqué ritualism. Many of these offshoots would (sometime later) be described as “spermo-gnostics,” in order to differentiate them from their milder-mannered cousins.[20]
The ‘Gospel of Judas’ is reputed to be a Sethian-Gnostic text and it illustrates a common Gnostic fascination — not to say rehabilitation — of Biblical villains.
Cainism, Ophism, Sethianism: Revolt Against Jehovah?
But, to kick things off slowly, in a three-way tie at number ten, we’ll look at some sects that have one conspicuous thing in common: their heroes come off as villains in the Bible.
For instance, consider the Cainites. In the Old Testament Book of Genesis, chapter 4, Cain is the firstborn son of Adam and Eve. When God favors the sacrifice of his younger brother, Abel, Cain also becomes the first murderer.
And then there’s the Ophites. The Greek root word – ophis – means “snake.” The reference, of course, is to the serpent that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, just two chapters before Cain and Abel.
The significance of serpentine references was perhaps uncovered by Thomas Inman. As George Ryley Scott summarizes: “The power of erection possessed by certain snakes” – and, here, he names “[t]he Egyptian asp and the Indian cobra” – “was likened to the same power exhibited by the male organ of generation.”[21]
The case of the Sethians is more complex.[22] But we can zero-in on a highly relevant detail by noting that they are widely believed to have been the composers of the Gospel of Judas, the first English translation of which was published to great media acclaim by the National Geographic Society in 2006.
In the canonical Gospels (according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), Judas is portrayed as the wretched betrayer of Jesus; whereas, in the Gospel of Judas, he is the beau idéal of the enlightened Gnostic and the sole Apostolic custodian of the “true teaching” that the crucifixion was necessary to liberate the Christ from his bodily prison.[23]
Why did the Gnostics have this predilection for inverting the Biblical narratives? Firstly, they sought to learn and possess, hidden doctrines, or “Gnosis,” lying beneath the literal storylines.
But, secondly, they also viewed the Old Testament God, variously transliterated Yahweh or Jehovah, as a fool or as an evil entity.[24] And they associated him with Plato’s Demiurge[25] – the being responsible for the physical world of privation and suffering.[26]
This led to the Gnostic conviction that the only appropriate reaction was to “[revolt] against” the Hebrew and Christian God.[27]
In the words of agnostic New Testament critic Bart Ehrman: “Anything that [the Old Testament] God commanded, [Gnostics] opposed, and anything that God opposed, they supported.”[28]
The 19th-c. French occultist Éliphas Lévi would later connect this mentality of revolt – which included “profanation of Christian mysteries” – with “black magic” that would arise “in the Middle Ages.”[29]
With this backdrop, we’re positioned to appreciate why many occult commentators have stated the “true God,” represented by the subversive serpent and Judas Iscariot, was in fact Lucifer.
Something of this is echoed by 19th-century Freemasonic majordomo Albert Pike, who put it starkly in his monumental, if largely unreadable, tome Morals and Dogma. “LUCIFER, the Light-bearer! Strange and mysterious name to give to the Spirit of Darkness! Lucifer, the Son of the Morning! Is it he who bears the Light…? Doubt it not!”[30]
Likewise, 20th-century Masonic philosopher Manly Palmer Hall states: “When the Mason …has learned the mystery of his Craft… [t]he seething energies of Lucifer are in his hands…”.[31]
How does one carry out this revolutionary and Luciferian project against Yahweh? In the words of the 18th-century French essayist Jean-Pierre-Louis de Luchet: You “destroy the works of God and …commit every kind of infamy.”[32]
This shows up in Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, where Lucifer’s servant-angel, Mephistophilis, tells the titular character:
“Therefore the shortest cut for conjuring “Is stoutly to abjure all godliness, “And pray devoutly to the prince of hell.”[33]
If this magical connexion seems farfetched, recall that the founder of Gnosticism was reputed to be the sorcerer Simon Magus, who appears in the Acts of the Apostles attempting to bribe Jesus’s apostles for the knowledge of how to “receive the Holy Spirit.”[34]
Apparently, Simon traveled with a Phoenician prostitute and encouraged his disciples to “…[follow] their own pleasure as though free…”.[35] It seems that, in these conditions, any Jehovian revolt would spill over into sexual deviancy.
Pretty salacious. But, you say: the case is merely inferential.
Okay, but what may be merely implicit for the Cainites, Ophites, and Sethians, becomes more obvious later, starting with a system called Valentinianism, which comes in at number nine.[36]
Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ and the movie by the same name, makes references to ‘sex rituals’ as well as a purported romantic entanglement between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. (Movie poster obtained from Wikipedia; Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5024537; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e9/The_da_vinci_code_final.jpg.)
Valentinianism Introduces the ‘Hieros Gamos’
For instance, the Valentinian-Gnostic Gospel of Philip uses “sexual imagery” to describe a “sacral rite” provocatively called the “bridal chamber.”[37] “[S]ome scholars [understand] the text as promoting sacred intercourse among group members…”.[38]
This same Gnostic “gospel” is mentioned both by author Dan Brown, in his 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code,[39] as well as in director Ron Howard’s 2006 movie adaption featuring famed American actor Tom Hanks and French actress Audrey Tautou.
The frenetic plot centers around the adventures of Harvard symbologist named Robert Langdon (Hanks), and French police cryptographer, Sophie Neveu (Tautou). In an attempt to solve the murder of Sophie’s grandfather, and lift suspicion from Langdon, the pair are pulled into the shadowy world of secret societies, and the search for the fabled Holy Grail.
In the course of the narrative, it is revealed that Brown’s heroine[40] “witnessed a sex rite” in her youth.[41]
The character Langdon explains that this ritual – which he refers to as a Hieros Gamos, or “Sacred Marriage”[42] – was meant to “achieve gnosis”.[43]
Saying #114 in the Gnostic ‘Gospel of Thomas’ — ‘Every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven’ — illustrates a preoccupation with androgyny and ‘gender-changing’ that pervades some streams of sex magic. (Source: https://d28hgpri8am2if.cloudfront.net/book_images/onix/cvr9781594770463/the-gospel-of-thomas-9781594770463_hr.jpg.)
Proponents of this sex-for-knowledge idea frequently attribute it to Jesus himself who, in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, allegedly endorsed it with cryptic remarks about “[making] the two one”.[44]
Viewers will also remember that Dan Brown has the character Sir Leigh Teabing assert that Jesus was “married” to Mary Magdalene, as implied in the Gospel of Philip. If you’re catching the drift, it’s implied that Mary Magdalene would have been Jesus’s sex-magic partner.
Of course, in context of The Da Vinci Code story, the Hieros-Gamos participants – including Sophie’s murdered grandfather, former Louvre museum curator Jacques Saunière – were members of a mysterious, and possibly fictitious, 20th-c. order called the Priory of Sion.
Priory of Sion Legend: Jesus’s Sacred Marriage Begat Royalty
The received view of the Prieuré de Sion is that it is a product of the fevered imagination of Frenchman Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair. Plantard claimed descent from an apparently long-extinguished line of kings known as the Merovingians.
Prevailing opinion has it that later writers, such as Anglo-Americans Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln,[45] notably in their bestselling 1982 volume, Holy Blood, Holy Grail,[46] provided Plantard’s delusions of grandeur with a backstory. So it goes that, in the expanded legend, the Priory – via its enforcement arm, the Knights Templar – were the protectors of a supposedly royal bloodline going back to Jesus of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene.
Brown’s fiction has a similar spirit. Or, at least, so it seemed to Baigent and Leigh, who brought an ultimately fruitless legal action against the Da-Vinci-Code creator for copyright infringement.[47]
Be that as it may, in his book, Brown has his lead male protagonist declare: “Sophie Neveu had unwittingly witnessed a two-thousand-year-old sacred ceremony.”[48] And that claimed pedigree, of course, situates Brown’s imaginary Hieros Gamos in the context of the birth of ancient Gnosticism.
The Most Noble Order of the Garter is a British fraternal society — and possible heir of Neo-Carpocratian principles — to which some members of the royal family (including the now-disgraced Duke of York, Prince Andrew) belong. (Source: By This W3C-unspecified vector image was created with Inkscape. – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid= 10967471; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Arms_of_the_Most_Noble_Order_ of_the_Garter.svg/800px-Arms_of_the_Most_Noble_Order_of_the_Garter.svg.png)
Carpocratianism Taught ‘Deconditioning’ Thru Sex Rites
Another early variant of Gnosticism, Carpocratianism, takes us to number eight.[49]
The Carpocratians took up Plato’s idea that human beings have preexisting souls that reincarnate after death.[50] But…with a twist.
Essentially, they maintained that, in order to facilitate the purification (and ultimate release) of the soul over its many cycles of reincarnation: “One must try everything, experience everything, unveil everything…”.[51] In order to grasp this, you must lay a lot of stress upon the word everything.
“Thus bad deeds as well and good deeds were …wrought in pursuance of this idea.”[52] Get the picture?
The late 20th-c. French classicist Jacques Lacarrière calls this “deconditioning.” It is something similar to “sensitizing,” and it involved breaking down, through repeated exposure, a subject’s resistance to something viewed as objectionable.
An allied concept surfaces in alchemy, where the Latin maxim solve et coagula refers (roughly) to a process whereby something – for example, the consciousness of the alchemist – is first “dissolved” and the resultant residue is “rejoined” in a novel way.
In later traditions, this would come to be expressed as the thought that, in order to advance spiritually, a person needs to destroy or otherwise “transcend” his or her “ego.”
And one way to do this, or so it is sometimes held, is to engage in activities that, although they may be morally or physically repugnant, facilitate “[t]he terror, agony and despair” that tamp down the ego.[53]
A kind of neo-Carpocratianism recurs in European movements beginning around the 14th century.[54] One core notion held in common by these groups could be expressed, in English, as the thought that “[t]here is nothing evil in nature except as men think it.”[55]
William Shakespeare appears to echo this sentiment when he has his Danish prince, Hamlet, exclaim: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”[56]
In France, where many of the medieval revivals originated, it might have been phrased: “Honi soit qui mal y pense,” or (roughly) “Evil to him who evil thinks.”[57]
The French phrase is all the more curious since it is the motto of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, a chivalric association to which numerous members of the British Royal Family belong.[58] (There’s that royal connexion, again!)
The concept of “subjectivizing” evil – or reducing morality to a matter of human convention – is, in this context, often related to something called “antinomianism.” And this, it turns out, is an overt part of another variety of ancient Gnosticism.[59]
Painting depicting an ‘Agape,’ or Christian ‘love feast’ — a revel interpreted more carnally by Nicolaites, among others.
Nicolaism: ‘Antinomianism’
Tradition holds that this system, Nicolaism, our number seven, also had a checkered past.
It may have originated with Nicholas, one of the first seven deacons in the Christian faith.
Interestingly, Fortean thinker Jim Brandon, in his 1983 study, The Rebirth of Pan: Hidden Faces of the American Earth Spirit,[60] touches upon the relationship of particular “names of power” with anomalism.[61]
Nicolaism was condemned outright in the New Testament Book of Revelation, where Jesus states to the church at Ephesus: “You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.”[63]
The antipathy of the mainstream ancient church for Nicolaism stemmed, partially, from the suspicion that Nicholas had taught the aforementioned antinomian heresy. The word, coined in the 1530s by seminal Protestant Reformer Martin Luther, literally means being “opposed to the law.”
Luther had argued with fellow reformer Johannes Agricola, because the guy taught not only that Christians could disregard the Mosaic Law, but also that they could set aside all moral constraints.
Agricola’s basic idea was that if, as even Luther maintained, doing good works isn’t going to help your chances of getting to heaven, then it’s hard to see why doing evil would hurt your chances!
But Agricola’s view was arguably a restatement of a belief that went back to the early days of Christendom. Specifically, it arose within various branches of Gnosticism.[64]
The basic rationale was this: your soul is “fallen” just because you’re trapped in a dirty, physical body. It doesn’t matter what you do with your body. You can’t make things worse than they are already!
This, or something like it, may help to explain why the Nicolaites were known for leaning toward libertinism and “…lead[ing] lives of unrestrained indulgence”[65],[66]
The Nicolaites were notorious for defiling an early Christian ceremony tantalizingly known as an Agape, which – in the present context – roughly translates into “love feast.”[67]
Apparently, the Nicolaites may have drawn too close a parallel between erotic “human love,” on the one hand, and “heavenly love…,” on the other.[68] And this is where the story takes a decidedly darker turn, with the inception of a group of Gnostics with an even more sordid reputation for sexual immorality during these “love feasts.”
Satanist Anton S. Lavey’s daughter, Zeena Schreck, with her co-author and husband Nikolas, report on the significance of the consumption of sexual fluids during sex-magical rituals: namely, the act is variously believed to rescue imprisoned subtle energies and imbue the sex magician with spiritual powers.
Borborite’s Secret Technique for Absorption of Magical Energies
This deeply shadowy sect is perhaps best known by the disparaging term “Borborites,” which means – provocatively – “filthy ones,”[69] and brings us to number six.
Similarly to the Sethians, the Borborites may have venerated an obscure entity known as “Barbelo.” A religious text called the Secret Book of John calls “Barbelo”: “…the Mother-Father, the first man, …the thrice-named androgynous one…”.[70]
“Androgyny,” of course, refers to the property of being sexually ambiguous in virtue of possessing both feminine and masculine properties. One of the prime symbols of alchemy has long been the androgyne – or “man-woman,” depicted here as the so-called Rebis, Latin for “dual thing.”
Dan Brown mentioned “androgyny” numerous times in The Da Vinci Code. For example, he claimed that the sex of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is ambiguous. He had participants in his fictional hieros-gamos sport “androgynous masks.” And, drawing from a Kabbalistic tradition that we will expound in a few minutes, he relates the belief that “[t]he Jewish tetragrammaton YHWH – the sacred name of God – in fact derived from Jehovah, an androgynous physical union between the masculine Jah and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, Havah.”[71] The theme of androgyny will come up again.
For the moment turning aside from esoteric bisexuality, and toward claims of the 4th-c. Catholic heresiologist St. Epiphanius, the Borborites treated the previously mentioned Agape meals as occasions for orgies and wife swapping.[72]
Not only this, but – if Epiphanius’s lurid retelling is credible – they also took semen,[73] as well as “the unclean menstrual blood” of the woman, when it was available, and consumed these as …get ready for it: the “body” and “blood of Christ.”[74]
Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey’s daughter, Zeena Schreck, comments on “[t]he practice of ritualized copulation” and the “consumption of the sexual fluids,” saying: “…the celebrants …swallow the sexual elixir …to devour magical energies…”.[75]
Though Zeena herself reportedly renounced her father’s beliefs in favor of Tantric Buddhism, her heritafe is interesting since the Borborites are routinely cited as precursors to the establishment, in ostensibly Satanic circles, of the so-called “Black Mass.”[76] This dark ritual, it is alleged, is essentially an “inversion,” or mockery, of certain elements of the Catholic Mass.[77]
When Satanism or other forms of supposed “devil worship” recurred in France, beginning in the 17th century, certain features of those tales – such as abortion, child sacrifice, and cannibalism – hearken back to early accounts of the Borborites.
Of course, the socio-religious context is important. During the heyday of Christendom, it was believed that “…magic …[was] taught by the Devil …and the practices were …more effective the more obscenely they were performed.”[78]
Unsurprisingly, this seems to have raised some hackles. Epiphanius, who was regarded as a defender of Christian orthodoxy, was especially incensed, since he understood these activities simultaneously as affronts to natural law as well as parodies and perversions of the Catholic Eucharist, also known as the “Lord’s Supper” or “Holy Communion.”[79]
Although initially a Persian (Parthian) movement, Manichæanism swept through the ancient world and influenced the development of later Gnostic ‘heretical’ cults, such as the Albigensians (Cathars). (Source: By Aldan-2 – File:Relief_map_of_Eurasia.png, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73877040; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0c/Spread_of_Manicheanism.png/1920px-Spread_of_Manicheanism.png.)
Manichæans Reserve Secrets for the ‘Elect’
A similar charge (of defiling the Catholic Eucharistic host) was leveled against the next group that we’ll consider – number five – the Manichæans, a group that exerted a powerful influence over various Church-proclaimed “heretics” for at least one thousand years of European history.
Manichæanism has been described as a blend of Persian Zoroastrianism and Gnostic Christianity.[80],[81]
A chief Manichæan innovation was its two-tiered initiation system. At the entry level were the “auditors” (or “hearers”) and, at the top, was a group of élites known as the “Elect” or “Perfect.”
St. Augustine, the towering 4th-5th-c. “doctor” of the Catholic Church, accused this upper echelon of engaging in “secret vices,”[82] including ritual nudism and – like the Borborites – consumption of “…a kind of eucharist including human sperm.”[83]
Presumably, Augustine would’ve known; he was a member of the group for several years![84]
In typical Gnostic fashion, Manichæans viewed the ingestion of human sexual fluids as means of freeing the latent “divine substances” that had been trapped inside.[85]
In fact, some Manichæans called themselves “…Catharists,” meaning “purifiers”. And they believed that they were redeeming or “purify[ing]…part of God” by eating sexual discharges.[86]
Interestingly, a kind of neo-Manichæanism surfaced in Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Its name? Catharism![87]
Cathars / Albigensians
These Cathari,[88] more commonly termed “Albigensians,” flourished in the south of France.
At the time, the region was geopolitically removed from the orbit of the French king, who was headquartered in Paris. And it was also free from direct control of the Roman Church, which operated out of Italy. Consequently, a form of anti-Catholic, Manichæan religion appealed to the people in this area.
Albigensianism included the Manichæan system of initiation: an upper level of “…a ‘pure’ élite …(perfecti, parfaits, bonshommes or hérétiques)…” and a “…mass of simple believers (credentes).”[89]
Like the Borborites: “They were said to consume the ashes of dead babies and indulge in incestuous orgies.”[90]
Troubadours
According to Freemasonic scholar Manly Palmer Hall, Albigensianism “descended from the same source” as the tradition communicated by traveling minstrels called troubadours.[91]
According to Hall, these medieval singers (and, later, the celebrated Italian writer Dante) transmitted features of the Manichæan gnosis through poems dealing with chivalry and “courtly love.”
Writer Donald McCormick adds that “…the Troubadours …had [a tremendous] influence in creating the [modern] idea of love…”.[92] Tho, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet must surely also be mentioned in this regard.
These balladist and lyrists created a repository of folklore that would furnish the materials for the stories of Excalibur, the Holy Grail, and the Knights of the Round Table.
Recall that a principal plot point in the Arthurian Cycle revolves around the adulterous romance between King Arthur’s bravest and most illustrious knight, Lancelot, and Queen Guinevere, retold – in a lighthearted fashion – to modern audiences in various performances (and revisions) of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s 1960 musical, Camelot.
Suffice it to say, one or more of these Gnostic streams feed into later sex-magical currents. So much for one of the primary western roots of magia sexualis. Now, let’s shift our attention to a different tradition with roots that stretch further East.
The Kabbalistic symbol known as the ‘Tree of Life’ simultaneously represents ideas of esoteric anatomy, cosmology, and mysticism. (Source: By Alan James Garner – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8542830; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Tree_of_Life_2009_large.png.)
Kabbalah: The Tree of Life
A second root comes from Jewish mysticism.[93] Scholar Hugh Urban puts it this way: “[O]ne of the most influential forces in the rise of modern sexual magic was the complex body of texts and traditions that make up Jewish Kabbalah. …Erotic symbolism is pervasive throughout Kabbalistic literature…”.[94]
Rabbi Moses de Léon, probable author of the major Kabbalistic text known as the Sefer Zohar (or, “Book of Splendor”) was “…a disciple of …‘Gnostic’ kabbalists…” who were preoccupied “…the world of the demonic …[and] with the sexual mysteries… [the alchemical] mysterium coniunctionis …[that] lies at the very heart of the Zoharic teaching.”[95]
A kabbalistic variation on the sacred-marriage theme was further developed in the anonymous, but highly influential, treatise titled Iggeret Ha-Kodesh (or, the “Holy Epistle”).[96]
The word Kabbalah itself signifies “tradition.” Specifically, we’re talking about a mystical tradition in which “[s]exual relations between a husband and wife were seen to replicate the union between [the] Shekinah and God.”[97] In Kabbalistic sex, “…the woman represents and to some extent becomesShekhinah [sic],” while her male partner identifies with masculine aspects of divinity.[98]
The dictionary definition of “Shekinah” is the “glory of the divine presence.”[99] In Kabbalistic circles, it is linked with another concept, Malkhut, and it is construed as the “feminine aspect of God” – something like the Jewish version of the “goddess.”[100]
Of course, this recalls the “sacred marriage” – or hieros gamos – that we encountered with Valentinian Gnosticism.[101] Though, in this case, it has a Jewish complexion.
The topic of Kabbalah (and its origins) is, predictably, huge and multifarious. Once again, for its most basic – and non-sexual – contours, see “10 Arcane Words.”
However, since knowledge of the Bible and history is instructive, for now, I’ll simply lay it down that the Kabbalah appears to be an amalgamation of Hebrew and other traditions,[102] some of which – like Gnosticism and Neoplatonism – we’ve touched on both here and in our other videos.[103]
But, it’s arguable that some influence came by way of the ancient Akkadian empire of Babylonia, which enforced a system of “sacred prostitution.” In the words of the ancient historian Herodotus: “The foulest Babylonian custom is that which compels every woman of the land to sit in the temple of Aphrodite and have intercourse with some stranger at least once in her life.”[104]
The influence that the Babylon sojourn exerted upon later Jewish religion is a complex and oft-debated matter. “Some Biblical scholars… have interpreted the story of Judah and Tamar [in the Book of Genesis, chapter 38] as a case of sacred prostitution.”[105]
Hargrave Jennings puts it directly when he asserts that ancient “Hebrew grove worship was …Phallic worship.”[106]
The case is hotly disputed, but we can get an intuitive “fix” on the overall, complicated situation another way. Subsequent Jewish religion would be importantly centered around a library of texts known as the Talmud. Although there are two versions of this encyclopedia-length corpus, arguably the most important of them is called the BabylonianTalmud.[107]
Whatever the extent of the comingling – and occultists sometimes go so far as to maintain that Moses encoded secret, ancient-pagan teachings into the Pentateuch, that is, the first five books of the Old Testament in the Bible – the fact is, Jewish interpretive tradition displays signs of syncretism.[108]
On a lighthearted note, the phrase mazel tov – commonly used to express congratulations and for joyous occasions – literally means “good star,” and invokes concepts of pagan astrology.
Chief among sex-magical ‘secrets’ is the notion that humanity was originally androgynous. Concurrently, a main aim of some contemporary occultists is the application of the ‘gay science’ (i.e., alchemy) to recreate, resurrect, or otherwise restore this primordial state.
More centrally and seriously, the 5th-c. commentary[109] known as Bereshith Rabba explains that when the Book of Genesis says that “God created man in His image …male and female He created them,” the text doesn’t refer to Adam and Eve, as readers may assume. Instead, according to the commentator, Genesis is saying that the “first man” was androgynous.[110]
In the occult imagination, this original human (sometimes called “Adam Kadmon”) was supposed to have been a composite entity – similar to the previously mentioned Barbēlo. In other words, the male Adam and the female Eve were formed from the preexisting, and hermaphroditic, “Adam Kadmon.”[111]
Some analysts connect this legendary Jewish character to “Baphomet,” the diabolical idol of the Knights Templar (according to some accounts), also known as “the Sabbatic Goat.” Baphomet was drawn in its now widely recognized form – and embellished with the alchemical maxim solve et coagula – by Éliphas Lévi as an illustration in his 1856 book, Dogma and Ritual of High Magic.
The correct recombination of “sacred” male and female energies is believed by some occultists to issue in the creation of the “divine child.” This conjunction of opposites[112] is sometimes said to be the mystical significance of symbols such as the right triangle in Freemasonry as well as the so-called “Star of David” hexagram in Judaism. Whether in Jewish-Masonic or Eastern lore, “[t]he downward-pointing and upward-pointing triangles …symbolize the sexual union of the female and male principles…”.[113]
Far from having been specifically a symbol of Jewishness from time immemorial, the Magen David (or “Shield of David”) hexagram appears to have come from medieval grimoires, of spell books. This magical use was then funneled through the work of idiosyncratic and highly influential Kabbalist Isaac Luria. Ultimately, the so-called “Star of David” was adopted as a Jewish flag, first in 14th-century Prague. Prague was a hotbed for alchemy, astrology, and other occult arts.
Either way, and “…ever since” this primordial sex-change operation, human beings have sought their “soul mates” to restore the complete perfection of this supposedly original androgyny.[114]
Notice that these musings hearken back to the Gnostic-Kabbalistic interpretation of the Tetragrammaton: namely, that it is a symbol of a quasi-sexual combination of male and female divine energies.
This principle also motivates some sexual magic since, as Kabbalists put it: “humanity left Eden as a couple, …as a couple they must return.”[115] Therefore, practitioners operating on this wavelength view hieros–gamos-type rituals as part of an elaborate program of “repairing the world,”[116] resulting either in the creation of souls for ourselves or the restoration of our latent divinity (or perhaps both).[117]
This necessitates gaining self-knowledge; or, as the Delphic Oracle put it: “Know[ing] Thyself.”[118]
For example, in esoteric anatomy, the Kabbalistic “Tree of Life” is identified with the human spinal column. Said to contain the Freemasonically significant number of thirty-three vertebræ, the spinal column, also associated with the rod of Moses, is rooted in the sexual organs. The knowledgeable sexual Kabbalist will understand that the fiery, creative energy of Moses’ brazen serpent (see Numbers 21:8) is generated during sex.
Incidentally, in Eastern traditions this business is sometimes called “raising the Kundalini” and it connects back, in the minds of some authors (such as the 19th-c. British Freemason and Rosicrucian Hargrave Jennings) with Gnostic snake worship – which, we mentioned before.[119]
Kabbalists view themselves as custodians of hidden knowledge such as this. As we saw previously, in Greek, these secrets would be termed “Gnosis.” In Hebrew, the word is Da’ath.[120]
Both in the Bible and in other spiritual literature, the word Da’ath is sometimes used as a euphemism for sexual intercourse.[121]
For example, in The Book of Genesis, chapter four, verse 1, when it says that “Adam knew his wife,” the plausible interpretation is that he and Eve had sex.[122]
Craft Freemasonry is said to be fascinated with some of these Gnostic-Kabbalistic concepts, as are depicted in what is perhaps the most recognizable masonic emblem. As it is typically presented, the compass and square – which, if completed, would represent the interlaced triangles of the Star of David[123] – surrounds the letter “G,” often supposed to be shorthand for “Gnosticism.”
Also remember that another major set of Kabbalistic-Masonic symbols revolve around the fabled Temple of Solomon. In occult lore, Solomon was a powerful sorcerer who could summon and control demonic entities and other aethereal forces. But, he also had “700 wives and 300 concubines” – who, collectively, led him into apostasy.[124] This fact prompts some observers – like the previously named Rosicrucian Hargrave Jennings – to imagine that Solomon was a prodigious sex magician.
Apart from Freemasonry, another mysterious sect emerged from the syncretistic backdrop just sketched. These people, called “Frankists,” carry us to number 4 on our list of sex-captivated cultists.
Jacob Frank, an 18th-c. follower of the self-proclaimed ‘messiah’ Shabbetai Zevi, advocated ceremonially reversing moral prescriptions, in a Jewish version of Carpocratian & Tantric ‘deconditioning.’
‘Frankists’ Invert Judaism
First, we need a little historical context. In the inauspicious-sounding 1666, the same year as the Great Fire of London, Jewish theologian Nathan of Gaza proclaimed that the Messiah had come.[125] Nathan was the principal follower and promoter of the offbeat, 17th-c. Sephardic Kabbalist Sabbatai Zevi.[126]
Sabbatai Zevi had long garnered a reputation for having a “‘Luciferan’ [sic] side” that issued in “strange acts.”[127] For instance, he once busted in on a synagogue service and, wielding an axe, “forced [worshippers] to pronounce the sacred, always unspoken, four-letter Name of God”[128] – the previously mentioned Tetragrammaton. Or, another time, he “publicly [married] himself to a Torah scroll.”[129] One wonders whether that “marriage” was ever consummated.
Nevertheless, for a host of socio-political and other reasons, the pair initially won over a considerable number of followers, who became known as Sabbateans.[130]
Many of these disciples became disillusioned, however, when Sabbatai Zevi converted to Islam after being apprehended in Turkey.
Curiously, some of the Sabbateans remained faithful to their founder – and even converted with him, in solidarity. For example, to this day, in Turkey, one may still find a group called the Dönmeh, who endorse what, as a first pass, could be glossed as a blend of Islam and Judaism.
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, and like the varieties of Gnosticism that we previously surveyed: “The mystical cult of the [Sabbateans]”[131] was a mixed bag. Some genuinely embraced asceticism, while others “gave themselves over to licentiousness.”[132]
“The Polish rabbis attempted the extermination of the ‘Shabbethaian heresy’…, but” – as is evidenced by the existence of the Dönmeh – “could not fully succeed, as it was kept alive mostly in secret circles which had something akin to a Masonic organization.”[133]
Enter Jacob Frank. In 1726, he was born into a family of Sabbateans in what we would today know as Ukraine.[134] Frank was raised to be a merchant, and he supposedly traveled back and forth between Podolia and Turkey, where the Sabbatean Dönmeh were headquartered.
By 1755, Frank had somehow managed to attract his own congregation, which he turned on to his idiosyncratic version of Sabbateanism. His activities – and popularity – provoked the wrath of the local Rabbis, and the Frankists (as they began to be known) were dragged in front of rabbinical courts.
As the Jewish Encyclopedia puts it: “…[M]any of the sectarians confessed to having broken the fundamental laws of morality; and women confessed to having violated their marriage vows, and told of the sexual looseness which reigned in the sect under the guise of mystical symbolism.”[135]
For example, the “…bet din (Jewish court) …found [the Frankists] guilty of breaking numerous halakhic prohibitions …[including] adultery, …wife swapping, stud[ying] banned Sabbatian books, and profess[ing] the faith of Shabetai Tsevi.”[136]
Eventually, Frank claimed to be Sabbatai Zevi’s successor. The form of religion that he evidently preached called for his followers to invert (or ritually break) the Jewish law.
And similarly to Sabbatai Zevi, who apparently converted to Islam, Frank and his Frankists converted en masse to Christianity and were collectively baptized in what is now Lviv, Ukraine[137] in 1759.
Rabbi Marvin Antelman would link the Frankists with all manner of subversive movements, including the Illuminati.[138]
Frank himself went on the lam, as it were. He ended up in Germany and lived the remainder of his life in apparent luxury, assuming the title “Baron of Offenbach.”[139]
Some of “Count” Nicolaus Zinzendorf’s Pietistic Moravians believed that Christian men would eventually change genders in order to fulfill their quasi-sexual functions in the church, which is often called the ‘Bride of Christ.’
The Moravian Connexion
Allegedly, he had contact with – and may have been partially funded by – a group of Protestants known as Moravians. The original Moravian Brethren go back at least to the 15th century.
In the 18th century, a Lutheran-Pietist[140] named Nicolaus Zinzendorf – and known more commonly as “Count Zinzendorf” – resurrected the label “Moravian,” though “there is no real historical association between the two” movements.[141]
Dusting off a teaching reminiscent of Nicolaism, Zinzendorf made “…sex into such an important act that Moravians referred to it as a ‘sacrament.’”[142]
Zinzendorf also borrowed from the language of some “[m]edieval mystics …[and] held that sex …both symbolized and reenacted the unification of Christ and his bride, the church…”.[143]
Married Moravians were – somewhat unbelievably – supposed to have sex “…while focusing on their union with Christ.”[144]
But, if this imaginative effort alone made the difference between base and sacred sex, then it was hard to see why unmarried people couldn’t, well… get in on the action, too – provided only that they achieved the proper mental state.
Zinzendorf appears also to have believed and taught that, since males are part of the church, and the church is the “Bride of Christ,” males must somehow eventually become female. This queer notion initially issued in “homoerotic …liturgical language.”[145]
Ultimately, Zinzendorf’s son, Christian Renatus, and a group of likeminded brethren got the idea that they could effect this end state in the here and now. They did this by “[performing] a gender-changing ceremony,” after which they began calling themselves a “choir of sisters.”[146]
Predictably, nowadays, enthusiasts insist that “[t]he practice of sex magic does not require sex organs, male-female polarity, or a partner”![147]
Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg imagined that permissible sexual intercourse (or, divine ‘Conjugial Love’) was not so much a matter of legal formalities (e.g., earthly marriage), but of having a proper mental disposition.
The ‘Swedenborgian Church’
Speaking of redefining marital relations, 18th-c. Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg came to believe that Conjugal Love (the title of his 1768 book) bordered on the liturgical. It seems relevant that, while he lived in London, Swedenborg associated with a group of English Moravians.[148]
However, to bring things around full circle, we note that it has long been assumed that Swedenborg was influenced by erotic Kabbalism. Though, this hypothesis has seen scholarly challenges, lately.
But Marsha Keith Schuchard has argued forcefully that that Swedenborg was trained in Hebrew by one Johan Kemper, formerly known as Rabbi Moses Aaron of Krakow. Additionally, Swedenborg was almost certainly acquainted with Rabbi Hayyim Samuel Jacob Falk, better known as the “Baal Shem of London.” In the first place, for a while, the Baal Shem – which is Hebrew for “lord of the (divine) name” – was practically Swedenborg’s next-door neighbor while he lived in England. But, also importantly for our purposes, both Kemper and Rabbi Falk were suspected of Sabbateanism!
Count Cagliostro figures in this broader picture. For an introduction, see “Top 10 Occultists.”
In any case, Swedenborg exerted an influence on numerous, subsequent celebrities – for example, 18th-19th-c. English Romantic artist and poet William Blake.
By some accounts, Blake, and a circle of associates – including engraver John Flaxman, portrait painter Richard Cosway, and the curious, androgynous, cross-dressing Freemason and spy known as the Chevalier d’Eon – may have participated in nudism and orgies.[149] Both of which were uncharacteristic for respectable Englishmen of the period.
Some of Swedenborg’s followers would proceed to start congregations based upon his teachings, loosely designated “Swedenborgianism.” This “New Church,” as it came to be called, has arms in Europe and North America where, according to Wikipedia, “[i]t is …liberal on social issues and sexual ethics, such as the ordination of women, homosexuality, and abortion.”[150]
In this, it is faithful to Swedenborg, who advanced a “view of sexual relationships outside marriage” that was “startling at the time”. “Unlike modern Christian fundamentalists, he did not condemn all sexual activity outside marriage, but saw that there were degrees of behaviour. …Just as subversive, …was his teaching that truly conjugial love is enjoyed in heaven.”[151]
American occultist Paschal Beverly Randolph, and the erotic Rosicrucianism of his ‘Brotherhood of Eulis,’ was a crucial link in the belt of transmission for ‘hieros-gamos’ ritualism.
Erotic Rosicrucianism
Still on the subject of revolutionary marriage-modifying movements, let’s move to number three, and call it “erotic Rosicrucianism.”
Circa 1856, an American spiritualist named Paschal Beverly Randolph founded the Fraternitas Rosæ Crucis, first in San Francisco, and then in Boston and Philadelphia. This is the order for which he is primarily remembered – though, his heirs disclaim any connexion to sex magic.
Though, according to Manly Palmer Hall, phallic and sexual symbolism was the original significance of the rose and cross, Rosicrucian emblems going back at least to the 17th century.[152]
Bear in mind that Randolph conducted paid lectures and published numerous handbooks and novels[153] in which he advertised a mysterious set of privately printed manuscripts[154] that – he claimed – taught secret techniques of sex magic.
Randolph thus initiated select groups of customers during sub rosa meetings of his Brotherhood of Eulis – presumably introducing attendees our old notion of hieros gamos. His innovation was to place special attention on the idea that mutual climax – especially simultaneous orgasm of male and female partners – was especially powerful and can “[open] a momentary pathway to the cosmos” which, in turn, activates latent clairvoyant and psychic abilities.[155]
Randolph was interesting for several reasons, not least that he was of blended African-Caucasian extraction – which may have warmed him up to the alchemical-Rosicrucian notion known as coniunctio oppositorum, or the “union of opposites.”[156]
According to an apologetic offered in Hugh Urban’s volume Magia Sexualis,[157] Randolph would supposedly been horrified by any notion that a “sacred” sexual union could occur anywhere other than on a marriage bed.
However, according to Lara Langer Cohen, Randolph endorsed something close to Swedenborg’s view that “celestial marriage” is not to be confused with anything as base as an exchange of legal formalities in front of a justice of the peace. Professor Cohen contends that, in Randolph’s view, if mutual orgasm between two people is good, then the “best sex” involves “more than two participants.”[158]
In a CliffsNotes version, Randolph held that “true Sex-power is God-power.”[159]
Randolph’s influence extended far beyond his initial, possibly restricted circle. Numerous later practitioners, for example, the Russian-born artist, mystic, and (according to some commentators) Satanist Madame Maria de Naglowska, would take his insights in a variety of directions – such as in the rituals of Naglowska’s Parisian Brotherhood of the Golden Arrow. It is noteworthy that Naglowska claims to have translated – but may, in fact, have written – the volume Magia Sexualis that was published in Paris in 1931 with Paschal Beverley Randolph’s name on it.[160]
In their book, Demons of the Flesh, Nikolas and Zeena Schreck conclude that Randolph’s system has much in common with one final stream of sex-magical tradition,[161] which we will now take up.
Indian Tantra may represent the earliest form — and ultimate source — of sexual magic in the world. Alternatively, it may simply be the far-Eastern variant of traditions that also show up in Gnosticism and Kabbalah. (Source: By Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24774105; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cb/Vajradhara_L2012.81_03.jpg/800px-Vajradhara_L2012.81_03.jpg.)
Tantra
In fact, we’ll cheat a little and count this third important strand (in toto) as our top-two “sex-magical” cult. Of course, it’s the one that derives from the far-eastern mystical tradition known as “Tantra.”
Let me give a few prefatory words of caution, however.
At least since famed British explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton published the first English translation of the Kama Sutra,[162] there has been a tendency to sexualize wide swaths of Eastern philosophy. Although the Kama Sutra does contain portions that deal with sexual positions, which is the content it’s famous for, it is overall a treatise on how to live well – and not generally classified as “Tantra.”
Additionally, there are Eastern-religious practices that, for all their sexual appearance, are also distinguishable from Tantra, properly so-called. For instance, there is a maxim that, “[t]o prove one’s aloofness[,] one should lie with beautiful naked women in order to show self-control. Gandhi is said to have done this in the belief that it increased spiritual powers.”[163]
According to Donald McCormick: “The Tertiaries of the Catholic Order of St. Francis …[also] slept by the side of naked women” – and for similar reasons: supposedly “to test their powers of resisting temptation.”[164] Our attention will be focused elsewhere.[165]
Tantra, or Tantrism, is something of a blend of its parent traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism.
Preëminently, it is concerned with ritualized sex that purports to approximate – or identify with – the union of the god and goddess, in this case, Hindu deities such as Shiva and Shakti.
Some resources suggest that Tantrics, or practitioners of Tantra, may follow either of two “paths,” designated the “right hand”[166] and the “left hand.”[167] As a first pass, and although practitioners would bristle at the notion, you could think of this distinction as something like that between “white” and “black” magic in western occultism.[168]
So, the next set of sex-magic enthusiasts we’ll consider are those who adhere to this sinister track. (The word “sinister,” of course, comes from Latin, where it originally meant “left.”)
Left-Hand Tantrics: Taboo-Breaking
Left-hand Tantra,[169] or Vāmamārga,[170] ties back in with the concept of “deconditioning” that we mentioned, earlier. In Left-Hand Tantra, this deconditioning – or “destruction of the ego” – is frequently associated with the “breaking of ethical or social taboos” for the power that is believed to issue therefrom.
An entire procedure is prescribed, called (in English) the “Five Ms,” or Panchatattva.[171]
On the surface, the first four of the “M”-words uncontroversially represent substances that are generally taboo in Indian culture: madya (liquor), māṃsa (animal meat), matsya (fish), and mudrā (roasted grain).
However, the fifth word, maithuna, is of primary interest to us, here. Often translated “sexual intercourse,” maithuna provides us with an opportunity to take a peek under the surface, as it were.
Exoterically, it might appear that maithuna, the culminating taboo, is an action. On this superficial interpretation, which is also a common assumption for Western observers, sexual intercourse itself is seen as “taboo.” Therefore, having sex – at all; or, at least outside carefully circumscribed societal rôles – is tantamount to “taboo breaking.”[172]
But, seemingly more knowledgeable students of Tantra, such as Indologist David Gordon White,[173] disclose the explanation held by insiders: namely, that maithuna actually involves the ritual consumption of some combination of male and female sexual discharges or fluids.[174]
Ritual “consumption” or “reabsorption” may either be through oral ingestion (e.g., via cunnilingus) or through “…the drawing of the mixed essence …back into [the] still erect penis,”[175] in an alleged “flow reversal” that is bound up with various semen- and urine-retention techniques collectively known as amaroli, or the vajroli seal.[176]
We have seen ritual fluid ingestion before, with some forms of Gnosticism. Whether Tantra is, in some way now lost to history, the source of the Gnostic belief, or whether it is merely an allied system of thought, the fact is that later Western sex-magic practitioners recognized the similarities and began to look for ways to combine or syncretize the two.
This is sometimes put aphoristically to the effect that the way up is down or the adept must first descend in order to ascend.
So, for instance, some commentators reinterpret the Christian doctrine of “Original Sin” through this sort of lens, yielding the conviction that, with Gnostic-Tantric practices, “…the Fall into the body is reversed and human consciousness is able to escape its entrapment in matter.”[177]
On this view, Tantric sex is not simply an emblem for so-called “social liberation” – but it is literally a vehicle for spiritual liberation. In some streams of Tantra, for example, where “loss of semen is loss of soul,” having sex the “wrong way” may be spiritually deadly. Therefore, would-be yogis are either told to abstain totally, or else they are compelled to learn complicated breathing and meditative practices aimed at mastering the “correct” way to have sexual intercourse. There are competing theories, here.
‘Samael Aun Weor’
One suggestion comes from the South American apostate Catholic and neo-Gnostic Víctor Manuel Gómez Rodríguez, better known under the Hebraic-sounding appellation “Samael Aun Weor.” According to him, the aim is to have sex without achieving climax.[178] The rationale is that the orgasm is a wasteful expulsion of life energy and seed.[179]
In his 1961 book, The Perfect Marriage,[180] Aun Weor describes “Sexual Yoga” as divisible into three subsorts: white, gray, and black. In “white Tantra,” ejaculation is forbidden;[181] in “gray” and “black” varieties, on the other hand, it is allowed – to one degree or other.[182]
The movement of Tantra into the Anglo-American world is probably best understood against the backdrop of the so-called “19th-c. Occult Revival,” part of which included the creation of the Theosophical Society – which was partially characterized by a syncretism that sought to fuse Eastern and Western forms of esotericism. For the basics, see (again!) my video titled “10 Arcane Words.”
Ida C. Craddock
One illustration of the Theosophical Society’s influence can be seen in the curious figure of Ida C. Craddock. Craddock was born into a Quaker household in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1857. After a brief stint as a Unitarian, and ostensibly following some sort of contact with the Theosophical Society, Craddock founded a “Church of Yoga,” and declared herself its head. She devoted her life to teaching and promoting eroticism and mystical sexuality, before committing suicide at the age of 45, due (according to some commentators) to despair over the constant barrage of obscenity charges that were leveled against her.
Craddock’s case might be thought an insignificant footnote – even for a study as specialized as this one – were it not that her posthumously published volume, Heavenly Bridegrooms,[183] caught the attention of no less an occultist than Aleister Crowley who reportedly wrote: “No Magick [sic] library is complete without it.”[184]
Crowley himself was influenced by both Buddhism and Tantra. He was an inveterate connoisseur of erotic occultism. At one time or other, he became a member of Freemasonry as well as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.[185] And this brings us to our final sex-associated organization.
Of course, this study only hits highlights (or lowlights, depending on how you look at things). A more comprehensive treatment of sex magic would have to excavate traditions such as alchemy, Tarot, and Wicca, and would require in-depth study of groups such as the Knights Templar and ‘Palladian’ Freemasonry.
Honorable Mentions
But… before that, let me name a few “runners up” for this list. Mainly, these systems (or associations) were – for one reason or other – simply too complicated to tackle, here. Each of them deserves fuller treatments – which I hope to provide in forthcoming videos.
The first notable – which we have mentioned in passing – is the esoteric discipline of alchemy, one ancient name for which was the “Gay Science.”
Alternatively called the “science of god,”[186] its central theme is transformation. Many of the vivid images associated with alchemy contain sexual symbolism. Indeed, the mysterious process of alchemical transmutation itself is frequently likened to sexual intercourse.
Secondly, we have the Knights Templar. This Catholic military order, founded in the 12th century – partly due to the fervent support of mystic and saint Bernard of Clairvaux, attained then-undreamed-of heights of power and wealth following the Crusades. However, as many people know, the order was disbanded in the 14th century by French King Philip IV and Pope Clement V, and many – though possibly not all – of its knights were jailed and executed. The pretext? The Templars were first of all accused of blasphemy and idolatry – specifically, the worship of the previously named goat-headed entity “Baphomet.” They were also charged with sexual immorality – especially homosexuality – in conjunction with their infernal rites.
As writer Donald Michael Kraig helpfully summarizes: “The accepted history is that the Templars learned sex magic from the Sufis of the Middle East, who had learned it from the Tantrics of India. The Medieval alchemists received this information from the Templars and encoded it into some of their works.”[187]
Sufism, in brief, is a mystical tradition within Islam that has “many features of Gnostic doctrine”. In fact, “…at various times, Sufis were …called Gnostics,” that is, “knowers.”[188]
Thirdly, I wish I had time to dive into the divining cards known as the Tarot deck. Several of the face or “Trump” cards allegedly have sexual interpretations. And, in any case, no study of the 19th-c. “Occult Revival” – which gave birth to modern sex magic – would be complete without considering the Tarot.
But if the Hell-Fire Club’s Luciferianism is sometimes dismissed as irreverent mischief, it is worth noting that there were allegations – arising in late-19th-c. France, to the effect that serious devil-worshipping cults and even rogue Freemasons were engaging in sex magic. I have in mind the circle of the defrocked Abbé Boullan, Henri Antoine Jules-Bois, and the so-called “Order of the Palladium.” Whereas the former were accused of out-and-out black magic, the latter participants – called “Palladists” in some chronicles – were supposed to have been involved in a kinky variation on “co-masonry” (that is, a form of masonry that allowed the admission and initiation of women as well as men). However, since much of this is derided as a fraud perpetrated by a habitual double-dealer, operating under an assumed name, the affair is often dismissed as the “Léo Taxil Hoax.” Probably, given all attendant difficulties, a more responsible treatment of it would be in line. At any rate, it would take up more space than I could afford, presently. So…call it a runner-up.
Finally, a major – if not seminal – branch of contemporary neopaganism and witchcraft is Wicca. There are several varieties to consider – not least is “Gardnerian Wicca,” principally established by Gerald Gardner, whom we mentioned in our “Top 10 Occultists” presentation. But, a few acknowledge a ritual, frequently termed the “Great Rite,” which is a take-off from the hieros-gamos ceremonies that we have already examined.
But, without further ado… my pick for the number one “sex-magic” cult, is a mashup of the Ordo Templi Orientis (“O.T.O.”), and an associated sex-suffused, Thelemic brand of “Gnostic Catholicism.” Lemme try to explain.
The ‘O.T.O.,’ short for ‘Ordo Templi Orientis’ (which phrase is variously translated ‘Order of Oriental Templars’ or ‘Order of the Eastern Temple’) — originally founded by German occultists Carl Kellner and Theodor Reuss, and later infused by Aleister Crowley’s with the religious philosophy of ‘Thelema’ — represents the attempted fusion all previous forms of erotic spirituality into one, ‘sex-magick’ (Crowley’s spelling) tradition.
Ordo Templi Orientis
Crowley joined the O.T.O. in 1912. But, it had reportedly been founded more than a decade earlier (circa 1897) by a professed German Rosicrucian named Carl Kellner, and his associate Theodor Reuss.
At a high level of generality, the O.T.O. may be describable as a composite of magic and Masonic Templarism – both of which were largely focused through a lens of mystical sexuality.
Specifically, “Kellner and Reuss had in mind that they would form a new esoteric order that would fuse craft Masonry, Rosicrucianism, and Hindu Tantra.”[189]
Kellner’s organization was downstream, and partially derived, from the 19th-c. American occultist and spiritualist Paschal Beverly Randolph, whose sex-magical system we mentioned, above.
But Randolph’s admirers in the O.T.O. were also instructed and motivated by other currents.[190] One of the most important was the sex-infused teachings of the Kabbalistic Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.[191]
Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor
Allegedly founded by Louis-Maximilian Bimstein, who operated under the pseudonym “Max Théon,” The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor may – or may not – have exercised a formative influence on theosophist H. P. Blavatsky. But, in any case, its teachings were transmitted to the United States by the Scottish astrologer and psychic, Thomas Henry Burgoyne.[192]
According to Joscelyn Godwin, “…the primary result of the Order was to introduce occultists to the practical methods of P. B. Randolph.”[193] This was especially important, since “…[Randolph’s] detailed instructions in self-training were not easy to come by.”[194]
It’s not clear whether Kellner’s sex magic came from Randolph. For his part, Kellner claimed that he had been initiated into erotic mysticism directly by Sufi and Tantric masters.[195]
You’ll recall that, rightly or wrongly, widespread popular Western interest in Tantra was – ahem! – aroused (mistakenly, as we have said) in part by the aforementioned British scholar Sir Richard F. Burton, through his privately published (in 1883) early English version of the Kama Sutra. The Indian text is, of course, best-known for it’s explicit, illustrated representations of myriad sexual positions.
The ‘Magnificent Oom’
But another, lesser-known, belt of transmission came by way of the mysterious American Pierre Arnold Bernard,[196] who was known by the colorful – if nonsensical – nickname “The Great Oom.”[197]
Bernard’s family includes individuals with connexions both to Buddhism and Sufism.
He founded “the Tantrik Order of America in 1905” and “[promoted] self-hypnosis and yoga.”[198]
In press reports, Bernard was depicted as a sex-obsessed philanderer who may have utilized hypnotism to debauch numerous women – and even young girls.
Enter Mr. Crowley
Enter “Mr. Crowley.” There’s no question but that the main sex-magical practitioner of the 20th century – and possibly of all time – was British occultist Aleister Crowley.
Presently, we’ll start in 1909, with Crowley and his Jewish-English acolyte, Victor Neuberg, a poetry student who, incidentally, is credited as an early publisher of 20th-c. Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.
Venturing into the desert of Algiers, Crowley suddenly had the urge to have homosexual sex.[199] As author Rosemary Guiley puts it: “The ritual marked a turning point …in [Crowley’s] view of the importance of sex in magic.”[200]
This rite, which Crowley claimed put him in contact with a demon – “Choronzon” – that had been known to Elizabethan sorcerer John Dee, led him to seek out other sex-magic adherents.
Crowley, who was by all accounts fairly sex-obsessed in any case (having had numerous partners of both sexes), would go on to found the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu, Italy, on the Island of Sicily. The name was taken from a bawdy work of fiction titled The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, written in the 16th century by the Renaissance humanist and supposed Catholic monk, François Rabelais.
In 1923, Crowley’s “Thelemic” commune – with its sex-and-drugs experimentation[201] – was closed, and he himself was expelled from the country, by order of Benito Mussolini no less.
The proverbial “last straw” had been the death of a young Oxford literature student, Frederick “Raoul” Loveday, allegedly following a depraved black-magical ritual involving the ingestion of cat blood.[202]
Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica
Crowley drew upon these – and myriad other[203] – ceremonies to rewrite the O.T.O.’s ceremonials to include “the ritual consumption of semen and vaginal fluids,” masturbation, as well as heterosexual and homosexual intercourse.
Crowley also influenced the Gnostic Catholic Church.[204] In fact, Crowley’s “Gnostic Mass” would become its principal rite.
One of the mainstays of this Mass is the consumption of a “Cake of Light.” A useful summary of the ingredients is easily discovered by a visit to the pertinent Wikipedia page: flour, honey, oils, and …sexual fluids.[205]
Crowley used the phrase “Elixir of Life,” or the word Amrita, as euphemisms for these sexual secretions. Thus, he resuscitated themes found in ancient Gnosticism and Tantra.[206]
Not only these, but Kabbalism, too, is a huge part of Crowley’s magical system.[207]
One legendary – and widely fictionalized[208] – facet of Kabbalistic lore, generally, is the so-called Golem.[209]
Not unlike Frankenstein’s Monster, the creature of 19th-century gothic novelist Mary Shelley,[210] the Golem is a subhuman entity that is animated by rabbinic magic – specifically, various, math-like manipulations of the Hebrew alphabet.[211]
On this wavelength, would you believe that various Crowleyan sex rituals may have been geared toward the magical generation of a similarly soulless entity known as an homunculus?[212] And with this, we arrive at what is (if true) perhaps the darkest of the secrets of this current of magia sexualis.
The Homunculus
To start with, following particular strands of occult speculation, a fetus is held to be soulless until “…the third month of gestation.”[213]
In fact, Strong’s Condordance, a widely consulted Bible-reference book, defines “golem” as “embryo.”[214]
In Crowley’s imagination, this opens the door for the possibility that a rite of conception, properly performed according to formulæ derived from the Gnostic-Kabbalistic-Tantric tradition earlier rehearsed, will issue in the creation of an apparently living humanoid that is actually some incarnated “elemental or planetary spirit.”[215] The purpose of this operation is to create a minion – one variety of which Crowley termed a “Moonchild”[216] – that will carry out the magician’s bidding.[217]
Crowley intimates that this rarely succeeds.[218] Though, it’s a bit unclear just what “success” is supposed to look like. Consider the case of American occultist and “Thelemite” rocket scientist John “Jack” Parsons,[219] possible inspiration for Marvel Comic character Howard Stark – father of the Iron Man superhero, Tony Stark.[220]
Parsons was initiated into a California-based branch of the O.T.O. The outfit’s name – the Agape Lodge – recalls the ancient Christian “love feast” mentioned in conjunction with Gnosticism. Originally founded in Hollywood by one of Aleister Crowley’s acolytes, an esotericist named Wilfred Talbot Smith, the Agape Lodge came under Parsons’ control when it moved to Pasadena.
Parsons was said to have attempted (on several occasions, and failed in) the creation of homunculi with his then-wife Marjorie Cameron.[221]
At least one of their sex-magical ceremonies, the “Babalon Working,” supposedly had this aim.
There has also been speculation that Parsons was attempting some dangerous version of the homunculus rite when he died in a fiery explosion in his Pasadena home.
According to author John Carter, “…Cameron later claimed to have been impregnated by Parsons during their first two weeks together… She said she had an …abortion[222] with Parsons’ consent (and another abortion later on), then just a few days later they were performing another working.”[223]
Was the human fetus supposed to have been the “clay” out of which a flesh-and-blood homunculus was produced? Or was the sexual act merely intended to generate (or summon) some sort of “astral” or ethereal entity? At the end of the day, we’re left to guess whether the physiological pregnancies were the unintended byproducts of the rite, or whether the abortions were, so to speak, magical sacrifices.[224]
In any event, in Aleister Crowley, we have something of the Mount Everest of sex magic – a long and perilous climb to a mythical peak from which some, in attempted ascent have plunged headlong into inhospitable depths. Perhaps this is a fitting metaphor since Crowley was, in his youth, a mountaineer.
Concluding Thoughts
As a coda, Crowley’s O.T.O. brings us back, full circle, to some of the groups touched on in the introduction.
For the “Solar Lodge of the Ordo Templ[i] Orientis” has been characterized as a “magical cult specializing in blood-drinking [and] sado-sodo sex magic” – and that has ties to none other than Charles Manson.[225]
The upshot is that, even with Aleister Crowley’s death in 1947, Thelemic “magick” – including, one presumes, its sexual varieties – apparently lives on, probably in one or more of the myriad groups that dovetail (or identify themselves) with it.
Scattered reports even suggest that heirs of Crowleyite sex magic may even have wormed their ways into unlikely places – such as the Roman Catholic Church. But, that will have to be a study for another time!
In summary, though, magia sexualis preexisted Crowley, and it will certainly survive him.
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End Notes:
[1] I first became aware of “sex magic” through various presentations, such as: James Shelby Downard’s King Kill 33 (1998), Michael Hoffman’s Judaism’s Strange Gods (2000) and Hoffman’s Judaism Discovered: From Its Own Texts (2008) – all publications of Independent History and Research (operating out of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho) – as well as Jim Brandon’s audio recording Sirius Rising (privately circulated; ca. 1970s). Subsequently, I discovered that the topic had been taken up, to one degree or other (or, at the very least, touched upon), by numerous others, including (without limitation): Bob Dobbs, Phatic Communion With (Toronto: Perfect Pitch Eds., 1992); Francis King, Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (Port Townsend, Wash.: Feral House, 2002); Nikolas Schreck and Zeena Schreck, Demons of the Flesh: The Complete Guide to Left-Hand Path Sex Magic (London: Creation, 2002); John Carter, Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons (Los Angeles, Cal.: Feral House, 2005); Peter Levenda, in his trilogy titled Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft: Book One: The Nine (Walterville, Ore.: Trine Day, 2005), Book Two: A Warm Gun (Walterville, Ore.: Trine Day, 2005), and Book Three: The Manson Secret (Springfield, Ore.: Trine Day, 2006); former “Blondie” bassist, Gary Lachman, e.g., in his Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas (New York: Penguin, 2012); S. K. Bain, The Most Dangerous Book in the World: 9/11 as Mass Ritual (Walterville, Ore.: Trine Day, 2012); Sherwood Kent, Most Dangerous: A True Story (Walterville, Ore.: Trine Day, 2015); and Allen H. Greenfield, Dr. Randolph’s Magical Elixir: The Story of the 19th Century Genius Who Created WESTERN Sexual Magic (Martinez, Cal.: Paranoia Publ., 2020). Recently, the topic has been undertaken by academics as well, for example, in: Joscelyn Godwin, Christian Chanel, and John Patrick Deveney, The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor: Initiatic and Historical Documents of an Order of Practical Occultism (York Beach, Me.: Samuel Weiser, 1995); John P. Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nineteenth-Century Black American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician (Albany, N.Y.: State Univ. of New York Press, 1997); and Hugh B. Urban, Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (Berkeley, Cal.: Univ. of Cal. Press, 2006).
[4] For one example, see Rob Ager, “Are satanic societies really depicted in EYES WIDE SHUT?” Collative Learning (channel), YouTube, Apr. 27, 2018, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22UjKH-yrQw>.
[5] Not that I am accusing Ager, specifically, of being “cavalier,” necessarily. Though, in his brief (publicly available) analysis, he states that he has consulted the Kubrick Archives, and he evidences familiarity with Peter Brookesmith’s Cult and Occult (London: Guild Publ., 1985) – some claims of which he dismisses as “downright wacky.” It’s not obvious to me that this is a cogent counterargument. However, confessedly, I do not currently possess a copy of the book. Ager also references Francis King’s The Secret Rituals of the O.T.O. (originally published: London: Daniel, 1973), which – in a scanned copy of the American edition – I will have occasion to quote later, myself.
[6]The pseudo-Latin phrase that crops up repeatedly, here, is Dominus Obsequious Sororium (or “D.O.S.”).
[7] This included Epstein’s private island – Little St. James – which contained one odd, temple-looking structure (said to have been “a music pavilion” and which seems to have been the scene of innumerable crimes of molestation and rape in the synchromystically significant “U.S. Virgin Island” chain. See Mary K. Jacob, “Jeffrey Epstein ‘pedophile island’ gets price cut after two months for sale,” N.Y. Post, Jun. 9, 2022, <https://nypost.com/2022/06/09/jeffrey-epsteins-virgin-islands-properties-undergo-price-cut/>.
[9]Ibid. Berg allegedly called the “tactic …‘flirty fishing’,” ibid. Continuing, the article took a darker tone: “Berg also advocated incest and sex with toddlers, and mailed circulars with graphic pictures of molestation,” ibid. The cult was in the news as recently as 2020, when a former Family International “missionary,” Derek Lincoln, was apprehended after a five-year manhunt, charged, and convicted of sex crimes going back several decades. (Lincoln is also a curious name, synchromystically speaking.) See, e.g., Paul O’Hare, “Children of God cult rapist jailed for ‘horrific’ offences,” BBC Scotland, Aug. 7, 2020, <https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-53448774>.
[10] A forerunner, at least in name, seems to have been “Familism,” associated with the Familia Caritatis, or the “Family of Love.” This sect had been founded in 1539 by Henry Nicholis (see further on for a few remarks about “Nick” names), a native of Germany who was alleged to have had taken part in a political uprising known as the “Münster Rebellion.” Following this, he seems to have moved about – from various cities in Germany (including Cologne and Emden) to England and the Netherlands. Nicholis was inexplicably well-connected. His compatriots included humanist printer Christophe Plantin, artist Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and the cartographer Abraham Ortelius, who was in John Dee’s circle. John Dee, whom we highlighted in our video “Top 10 Occultists,” was best remembered as Queen Elizabeth I’s “astrologer royal.” Presumably exploiting some political connexions, the Familists requested religious toleration around 1604, during the reign of Scottish King James I. But the petition was rejected. Subsequently, they were lampooned in the anonymous play “The Family of Love,” possibly written by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker and published in 1608. As Wikipedia’s summary puts it: “The play satirises the sect’s reputation for sexual lasciviousness…”. See “The Family of Love (Play),” Wikipedia, Jan. 22, 2022, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_of_Love_(play)>. As a coda, Jakob Böhme’s foremost English apologist, John Pordage (who established “Behmenism” on the British Isles), might have been operating on the periphery of the Familist movement. “Possibly, Pordage’s opinions owed something to furtive influence of the Familia Caritatis, followers of the sectarian prophet Henry Nicholis (alias H. N.). In 1637, Pordage’s brother-in-law, Henry Faldo, was accused of Familism.” According to “John Pordage,” Wikipedia, Aug. 28, 2020, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Pordage>; citing David Como, “The Family of Love and the Making of English Revolutionary Religion: The Confession and ‘Conversions’ of Giles Creech,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 48, 2018, pp. 562-65.
[11]This connexion is well-known. But, for a sample, see: Tommy Udo, Charles Manson: Music Mayhem Murder, London: Bobcat Books, 2012, passim.
[12]See, e.g., Jeff Guinn, Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013, p. 134. Supposedly, Manson may also have been in contact with actress Candice Bergen, via Terry Melcher. See: James Buddy Day, Hippie Cult Leader: The Last Words of Charles Manson, Toronto: Optimum Publ., 2019, back matter, <https://books.google.com/books/about/Hippie_Cult_Leader.html?id=IdtAxQEACAAJ>.
[14]Again, this has been widely commented upon and reported. But, see: William McKeen, Everybody Had an Ocean: Music and Mayhem in 1960s Los Angeles, Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2017, esp. pp. 317f.
[18]To be sure, Sanders admits, “…in the early phases of …[Process] initiation sexual celibacy is practiced. Further on, however, in the trek toward higher ranks, all sorts of bunch-punchings take place,” Ibid., p. 84. Sanders’ prose can be nearly equal parts colorful and opaque. For those unfamiliar with the lingo, “bunch punch” is slang term for: “A sexual encounter between one woman and multiple men.”[18] See “Bunch Punch,” The Free Dictionary, citing Farlex Dictionary of Idioms, <https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/bunch+punches>. On the porno-flick term, see “Gangbang,” UrbanDictionary, Sept. 21, 2004, <https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gangbang>.
[20] See, e.g., Peter-Robert Koenig, “Ordo Templi Orientis: Spermo-Gnosis, Carl Kellner, Theodor Reuss, Aleister Crowley,” lecture, ParaReligion, 1994 / Mar. 2000 [these are the dates that appear at the following URL], <https://www.parareligion.ch/spermo.htm>.
[21] George Ryley Scott, Phallic Worship, reprint ed., London: Random House, 1996 [London: Luxor Press, 1966], pp. 68-69; citing Thomas Inman, Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names, Liverpool: privately printed, 1868, n.p.
[22] The name “Seth” seems to have been a reference to Adam and Eve’s third son by that name. The Gnostics appear to have read the Book of Genesis as if it were presenting a mythological cosmogony in disguise. In other words, as in certain pagan world-formation narratives, where one reads that Marduk slew Taimat or Cronus castrated Uranus, and it is perhaps not taken to have been literal, so too when Cain killed Abel, this was presumably understood as allegorical.
[24] “In general, Gnostics held that the …demiurge …was a fool (‘saklas’)… [and they identified this entity with the] god of the Old Testament,” according to Bart D. Ehrman, “Christianity Turned on Its Head: The Alternative Vision of the Gospel of Judas,” Rodophe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, and Gregor Wurst, eds., The Gospel of Judas, Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2006, p. 90.
[25] For the cosmos is “…the product of rational, purposive, and beneficent agency,” ibid.
[26] “In the [dialog titled] Timæus Plato …proposes …[that the universe] …is …the handiwork of a divine Craftsman ([also known as the] “Demiurge,” [or the] dêmiourgos… [citing Plato, Timæus, 28a6.])…,” Donald Zeyl and Barbara Sattler, “Plato’s Timaeus,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2022 Ed., Edward N. Zalta, ed., <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/plato-timaeus/>. Continuing: The Demiurge “imitate[es] an unchanging and eternal model, [and] imposes mathematical order on a preexistent chaos to generate the ordered universe (kosmos). The governing explanatory principle of the account is teleological: the universe as a whole as well as its various parts are so arranged as to produce a vast array of good effects. For Plato this arrangement is not fortuitous, but the outcome of the deliberate intent of Intellect (nous), anthropomorphically represented by the figure of the Craftsman who plans and constructs a world that is as excellent as its nature permits it to be,” ibid.
[27] Nesta Helen Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, London: Boswell Printing & Publ. Co., 1924. According to Webster: “…to whom they referred under the Cabalistic term of the ‘demiurgus’,” Nesta Helen Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, reprint ed., Escondido, Cal.: The Book Tree, 2000, p. 30.
[28] Ehrman, loc. cit. “…all the figures in Jewish and Christian history who stood against [the Old Testament] God” – like the Serpent in Eden and the fallen angel, Lucifer, as well as “Cain, the men of Sodom and Gomorrah, and eventually Judas Iscariot – were the ones who had seen the truth and understood the secrets necessary for salvation,” ibid.
[29] According to Webster’s summary of Lévi in Secret Societies…, 2000, p. 30.
[30] Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Richmond, Va.: L. H. Jenkins, 1947, p. 321; capitalization in original. Besides Pike’s Scottish Rite, this Gnostic-Luciferianism arguably surfaces in other esoteric such as Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. Further evidence for this will have to be the preoccupation of a forthcoming video. But, for now, see, “Are the Pyramid and All-Seeing Eye Symbols ‘Masonic’?” Bell Curve [weblog], Jun. 6, 2015, <http://curveofbell.blogspot.com/2015/06/are-pyramid-and-all-seeing-eye-symbols.html>.
[31] Manly P. Hall, The Lost Keys of Freemasonry, Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publ., 2009, p. 48.
[32] Again, Webster quoting, op. cit., p. 30; citing De Luchet, Essai sur la Secte des Illuminés, Paris & Londres [London]: 1789, p. 6. Webster: “…The glorification of evil …[also] constituted the creed of the Ophites, who worshipped the Serpent because he had revolted against Jehovah… and …of the Cainites,” ibid.
[33] Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, ca. 1588 / 1592; archived online at <http://www.lem.seed.pr.gov.br/arquivos/File/livrosliteraturaingles/faustus.pdf>. Marlowe’s work is understood as an adaptation of a preexisting folk legend regarding the life of the (ostensibly) real, 15th-16th-c. German Renaissance alchemist and sorcerer, Johann Georg Faust (sometimes called John Faustus). Later, famed German Romantic writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would also pen his own version (Faust, ca. 1780 / 1806). In 1947, Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann published Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn (Berlin: Surkamp), which was a retelling of the basic “Doctor Faustus” story as it pertained to the imaginary “…Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn…”. Additionally, there are innumerable film and stage performances – based on one of the underlying traditions – including Richard Burton and Nevill Coghill’s Doctor Faustus (Columbia Pictures, 1967).
[34]The Books of Acts, chapt. 8, verses 18-19, New International Version.
[35] Irenæus, Against Heresies, book I, chapter 23, paragraphs 2 & 3; as quoted by the 19th-20th-c. Gnostic and Theosophist G. R. S. Mead, in Simon Magus: An Essay on the Founder of Simonianism Based on the Ancient Sources With a Re-Evaluation of His Philosophy and Teachings, London: The Theosophical Society, 1892, electronic version, online at <http://gnosis.org/library/grs-mead/grsm_simon_magus.htm>. Mead’s citation reads: “Irenæus (Contra Hæreses, I. xxiii. 1-4). Text: Opera (edidit Adolphus Stieren); Lipsiæ, 1848,” ibid.
[36] For some Gnostics, such as the Valentinians, even cosmic emanation was reinterpreted sexually. The various syzygies were construed as “sexually complementary pairs,” “Valentinus,” New World Encyclopedia, <https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Valentinus>.
[37]Paul Foster, The Apocryphal Gospels: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009, p. 41.
[38]“…with the voyeuristic participation of the ‘sons of the bridal chamber’ as a type of ‘sacramental practice’ in the group.” Ibid.; emphasis added. Foster himself demurs.
[39]See Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, New York: Anchor; Random House, 2006, p. 266; <https://books.google.com/books?id=hbZ0Yfz-NG8C&pg=pa266>. (The original U.S. Edition, was New York: Doubleday, 2003, [where the reference is on p. 246].)
[49]It was started by Carpocrates in the important Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, in Egypt. Alexandria had been founded by Alexander the Great in the 4th century B.C. Not only was it crucial militarily and politically, Alexandria also became a hub of learning and was the location of a library that was the most famous in antiquity. Additionally, Alexandria had long preserved the intellectual legacy of the great ancient Greek philosopher Plato. It was ground zero for a modified version of that school of thinking, now called “Neoplatonism,” that was heavily influenced by neo-Pythagoreanism. Neoplatonism was sparked by the mysterious Ammonius Saccas and given its seminal formulation by Plotinus. (I touched on Neoplatonism in the previously named video “10 Arcane Words.”) Of course, I’m skipping some intermediate steps. To remedy the deficit, see Maren Niehoff, who summarizes some of the relevant history and notes: “Alexandria occupies a special place in the history of Platonism. The first edition of Plato’s works with text-critical signs was produced here in the second century BCE by Aristophanes of Byzantium. The same scholar also introduced the trilogical division of the corpus, based on literary criteria, which was subsequently replaced by the tetralogical division of Tiberius’ court philosopher Thrasyllus. Other Alexandrians significantly contributed to the interpretation of Plato’s works. Eratosthenes, the famous scientist and literary critic of the mid-third century BCE, was known as a Platonist interested in the mathematical aspects of philosophy. More importantly, Eudorus in the first century BCE played a decisive role in the revival of Platonism. He may also have authored the anonymous commentary on the Theaetetus, our earliest extant, running commentary on any of Plato’s works. Another anonymous Platonic treatise most likely stems from Alexandria, namely On the Nature of the World and the Soul. Finally, the city hosted important harbingers of Neo-Platonism. Ammonius Saccas, the “Socrates” of the new movement, taught here influential thinkers, such as Plotinus, who spent eleven years in Alexandria before establishing himself in Rome.” Maren R. Niehoff, “Dossier Philon d’Alexandrie: Philo’s Role as a Platonist in Alexandria,” Etudes Platoniciennes, no. 623, Jul., 2010, pp. 35-62; online at <https://journals.openedition.org/etudesplatoniciennes/623>.
[50] For instance, Plato had maintained that human beings are – at least partially – immaterial “souls” that had somehow “preexisted” our current, earthly lives. Additionally, Plato advanced a doctrine known as “metempsychosis,” whereby the soul also survives the death of the body, only to be physically “reincarnated” again in the future. The peculiarly Neoplatonic take on this had been to extend the metaphysical speculations by claiming that these preexistent souls had come out of, or “emanated from,” an absolute divine entity known only as the “One.” The One’s involvement was said to have been mediated via the Logos and the “World Soul.” Neoplatonists frequently framed the precise chain with material gleaned from Aristotle’s “four causes.”
[53] “In these experiences the ego will be totally altered or completely destroyed in the death that must precede a rebirth into life. The terror, agony and despair that accompany this process cannot be minimized,” John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons, ‘Freedom Is a Two-Edged Sword’ and Other Essays, Marjorie Cameron and “Hymenaeus Beta,” eds., New York: Ordo Templi Orientis; Las Vegas: Falcon Press, 1989, p. 56; quoted by John Carter, Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons, Port Townsend, Wash.: Feral House, 2004, p. xvi.
[54] Some of these include the Beghards, Beguines, and Brethren of the Free Spirit – and (possibly) such notables as Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart, though these associations are contentious.
[58] Seemingly for popular-level, public consumption, the French is alternately translated “Shame on him who thinks evil of it.” However, we believe that the rendering given by Oxford Reference (and quoted in the main text)is more faithful to the original sense.
[59] I may as well address (even if only briefly) what, for at least some viewers, will be a lingering concern. Specifically, many questions exist about whether Gnostic ritual was actually sexual in nature, or whether some opponents – or possibly some injudicious and unrestrained Gnostic rhetoric itself – simply made sensational use of sensual metaphor. As evidence for this, some writers, seemingly keen to offer a defense of Gnosticism, point out that there are parallel reports describing many sects as abstaining from marriage and sex and encouraging their followers to live chastely – even in an austere and (if I may be forgiven the anachronism) “Puritanical” manner. Probably, the truth of the matter is that there was what one writer calls a “Gnostic spectrum”, with “ascetic or libertine morality” on either extreme. Kenneth Cyril Carveley, Ecclesiological Docetism in Early and Medieval Dissent and Heresy in Eastern and Western Christianity, PhD. dissertation, Dept. of Theol. & Rel. Studies, Leeds, U.K.: Univ. of Leeds, Sept., 1990, p. 431, <https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/624/1/uk_bl_ethos_278360.pdf>. If this is so, then Gnostic groups – and individual Gnostics themselves – may have been variously situated at either pole of such a continuum, depending upon personal or psychological factors. Indeed, it is conceivable that certain people may even have swung back and forth from one extreme to the either.
[62] That includes “Nicholas” and other cognate forms, such as “Nichole” and “Nicholai” – whether feminine or masculine. For an introduction to this theme, take a look at the article titled “Alias Saint Nick” posted at the Bell Curve weblog.
[63]Revelation chapt. 2, verse 6b, New International Version (NIV).
[64] One reason Gnosticism was friendly to antinomianism was that, according to the Gnostic worldview, we live “…in a precarious world”; Carveley, op. cit., pp. 30-31; humans have been “…thrown into an alien environment from which gnosis is the only release for the self… This frees [the Gnostic believer] from the constraints of morality… This [freedom] could display itself in extremes of libertinism or austere asceticism…,” Ibid. In the middle, “…[m]any Gnostic groups were indifferent to moral issues,” ibid.
[65] At least, if the Catholic Church Father St. Irenaeus is to be believed! Patrick Healy, “Nicolaites,” Catholic Encyclopedia; vol. 11, New York: Robert Appleton Co., 1911, [p. 67a], <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11067a.htm>; citing Irenaeus, Adversus Hæreses, I, xxvi, 3; III, xi, 1.
[66] Some investigators, such as John Henry Blunt, thought that these references pertained to “fornication connected with religious rites.” John Henry Blunt, Dictionary of Sects, Heresies, Ecclesiastical Parties and Schools of Religious Thought, London: Rivintons, 1874, p. 371. Irenaeus’s (previously cited) charge appears to be a restatement of a claim found in the aforementioned Book of Revelation, also called the Apocalypse, where we read the somewhat mysterious comment that “some [people] …[held] to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin so that they …committed sexual immorality,” Revelation, chapt. 2, verse 14, NIV. Balaam, by the way, was a magician some of whose exploits were discussed in the Old Testament Book of Numbers (e.g., chapt. 22.) Blunt connected this sex magic with the common pagan practice of “ritual” or “temple prostitution” that had periodically crept into the Hebrew religion and perverted it from a pure worship of Yahweh (Blunt cites, inter alia, Genesis 38:21, Deuteronomy 23:18; 2 Kings 23:7; and Hosea 4:14.) – as, indeed, some of the Old Testament prophets testified. E.g., Ezekiel; in the Book of Ezekiel, chapt. 23.
[67] According to the analysis of the 19th-c. Anglican scholar John Henry Blunt, gesturing toward the New Testament Book of Jude, Blunt, op. cit., p. 372; cf. “follow[ing] …evil desires” (Jude [1]:16, NIV), resulting in unspecified “ungodly acts” (Jude [1]:15, NIV). Cf. Jude [1]:12, NIV; cf. 2 Peter 2:13. (As the Bible is conventionally divided, the Book of Jude has only one chapter.)
[69]See “Borborites,” Wikipedia, Apr. 13, 2022, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borborites>. The word is a play on the Greek word Bórboros, meaning “mire, filth” or “mud.” For the former definition, see: “Borboros,” Wiktionary, Mar. 8, 2022, <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B2%CF%8C%CF%81%CE%B2%CE%BF%CF%81%CE%BF%CF%82#Ancient_Greek>; for the latter, see “Borborite,” Wiktionary, Oct. 10, 2017, <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Borborite#English>. Though, they are referred to by an array of alternate names including the Borbeliotes, Borborians, and Barbelites or Barbeliotes. They appear to have been named after Barbēlōs, an entity held to have been a part of a complicated Gnostic-mythologic scheme of emanation. I sketch the rudiments of “emanationism” – in both Gnostic and Neoplatonic varieties – in “10 Arcane Words.” See, also, the succeeding paragraph in the main text (and the next footnote) of the present work for the reference to “Barbelo.”
[70]The Apocryphon of John (The Secret Book of John – The Secret Revelation of John), Frederik Wisse, transl., The Nag Hammadi Library, online at <http://gnosis.org/naghamm/apocjn.html>. (The Apocryphon of John and The Secret Book of John are the same book.) It also says: “The first power, the glory of Barbelo, the perfect glory in the aeons, the glory of the revelation, she glorified the virginal Spirit and it was she who praised him, because thanks to him she had come forth. This is the first thought, his image; she became the womb of everything, …the holy Spirit, the thrice-male, the thrice-powerful, …and the eternal aeon among the invisible ones, and the first to come forth,” ibid. The Æons were supposed to have been “good” emanations and stood opposed to the “bad” Archons. Contrast this notion with the Kabbalistic notions of the “Tree of Life” that has a Side of Holiness (Sitra Kedusha), producing divine emanations called the Sefirot, and the Other Side (of Evil; Sitra Achra) that emanates the impure Qliphoth (also spelled Kelipot), on which, see: Nissan Dovid Dubov, “Kelipot and Sitra Achra,” Chabad.org, n.d., <https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/361900/jewish/Kelipot-and-Sitra-Achra.htm>. And compare it with the Tantric Right-hand Path (DaksiniMarga or Dakshinachara) and Left-hand Path (VamaMarga / Vamachara).
[75] Nikolas Schreck and Zeena Schreck, Demons of the Flesh: The Complete Guide to Left Hand Path Sex Magic, London: Creation, 2002, p. 189. Gnostics, being preoccupied with escaping materiality, “…believed that drinking the sperm or menstrual blood would prevent souls from being born, delivering the unborn beings …to …a spiritual realm above …the sphere of matter,” ibid. The “safe,” spiritual realm – termed the Plēroma – is the province of the Æons; while the “unsafe,” material realm is controlled by the Archons.
[77] Anton LaVey himself at times downplayed the rôle of the Black Mass in Church of Satan ritual, once writing: “The usual assumption is that the Satanic ceremony or service is always called a Black Mass. A Black Mass is not the magical ceremony practiced by Satanists. The Satanist would only employ the use of a Black Mass as a form of psychodrama. Furthermore, a Black Mass does not necessarily imply that the performers of such are Satanists. A Black Mass is essentially a parody on the religious service of the Roman Catholic Church, but can be loosely applied to a satire on any religious ceremony,” Anton Szandor LaVey, The Satanic Bible, electronic ed. [orig. New York: Avon Publ., 1969], online at <https://ia802809.us.archive.org/23/items/the-satanic-bible/the-satanic-bible.pdf>. Though, in another place, LaVey speaks more admiringly, for example stating: “Historically, there is no ritual more closely linked with Satanism than the Black Mass,” Anton Szandor LaVey, SatanicRituals, New York: Harper Collins, 1976, p. 31.
[78] Charles Poncé, Kabbalah, Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 1997, p. 17.
[82]Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements From the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, Oxford (U.K.); Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publ., 2003, p. 6.
[83]Ibid. Specifically, he alleged, they developed a sex rite called the ischas. The word ischas “…means…wild fig.” In Christianity, the fig serves as a “…symbol of lewdness” and nudism, because Adam and Eve were said to have covered themselves with fig leaves once they realized they were naked in the Garden of Eden. St. Augustine, De Hæresibus, XLVI; reproduced in Roland Teske, transl., Arianism and Other Heresies, John Rotelle, ed., The Works of Saint Augustine, a Translation for the 2lst Century, Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 1995, p. 43, <https://wesleyscholar.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Augustine-Arian-Other-Heresies-1995.pdf>; Blunt, op. cit., p. 289. Cf. The Book of Genesis chapter 3, verse 7: “Then the eyes of both of them [i.e., Adam and Eve] were opened, and they realized they were naked; so, they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves,” New International Version.
[84] However, the Manichaeans are one of the sects that are also – and quite oppositely – said to have lived celibate lives of purity and self-denial. For example, see the doctrine of the so-called “three seals.” According to this, the Elect vowed abstinence as related to their mouths (e.g., they didn’t eat meat or drink alcohol), hands (they didn’t perform physical labor or go to war), and hearts (they renounced marriage and sex). “Three Seals (Manichaeism),” Wikipedia, Apr. 4, 2022, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Seals_(Manichaeism)>.Besides simply dismissing one of these contradictory reports as spurious, there are three possible resolutions to this apparent difficulty. Or, perhaps, there are three facets to a possible resolution. The first may lie in the already observed dual-membership structure of the cult. The idea is that one of the divisions (e.g., the Elect) had licentious sexual practices, while the other (the Auditors) did not. There is room for dispute even here, though. Others, like John Henry Blunt, suggest that it may have been the low-level “auditor[s] or catechumen[s],” instead, loc. cit. To add to the confusion, it’s sometimes unclear if commentators are referencing what might be called “human weakness” – and associating sex rites with that; or ruling on the issue of whether Manichaean theology countenanced a form of “holy sex.” In Blunt’s phraseology: The auditor’s “…enjoyed the license of the weaker nature and was not bound to the ascetic life,” ibid. Interestingly, he adds: “Even the elect …were permitted to retire, if strength failed them, into the humbler condition of the catechumen,” ibid. This brings us to the second possibility, that Manichaeans distinguished various types of sexual encounter. As one writer puts it, it may be wise to “…[differentiate] between sex during religious ceremonies and sex during the perfects’ day-to-day living,” James Edward Myers, “Morality Among Cathar Perfects and Believers in France and Italy, 1100-1300,” master’s thesis, Kalamazoo, Mich.: Western Mich. Univ., Dec., 1976, p. 58, <https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3378&context=masters_theses>.To round things out, a third possible resolution turns on the related question of the meaning of the word “purity.” Many viewers may assume that the word “purity” is a synonym for sexual abstinence. But, one of the innovations of Manichaeanism seems to have been its move away from the notion that “enlightenment” necessarily involved violating the commandments. The alternative view was that sex was a divine sacrament. And, again according to Augustine, the Manichaeans viewed themselves as God-ordained to the task of purifying the world. In their system of beliefs, this included “divine substances” – including human souls – imprisoned inside of physical bodies. Whereas we think in terms of digestion, the Manichaeans, in their pre-scientific era, apparently associated “purification” process with eating.
[86]Augustine, De Hæresibus, XLVI; in Roland Teske, op. cit., p. 44; emphasis added.
[87]In one place, Blunt defines “Cathari” as “Puritans,” op. cit., p. 16. Though, he is of course not insinuating that the 16th-17th c. English Protestants whose ambition was to reform the Church of England (which they viewed as too Catholic) were thereby implicated in this debauchery.
[88] Author Stephen O’Shea relates: “Their name, once thought to mean ‘the pure,’ is not their own invention; Cathar is now taken as a twelfth-century German play on words implying a cat worshiper. It was long bruited about that Cathars performed the so-called obscene kiss on the rear end of a cat,” Stephen O’Shea, The Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars, New York: Walker, 2000, p. 13. They were ostensibly related to the Bogomils, about which connexion O’Shea comments: “Also common [in application to the Cathars] was the epithet bougre, a corruption of Bulgar – a reference to a sister church of heretical dualists in eastern Europe. Bougre eventually gave English [the word] bugger, which is yet another proclivity once ascribed to Cathar enthusiasts,” ibid.
[89] Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, Barbara Bray, transl., New York: Vintage Books; Random House, 1979, p. viii. The pathway for turning Believers into Perfecti, and supposedly the only sacrament professed by Albigensians, was a ritual called the Consolamentum. Cathar expert Malcolm Lambert described it this way: “…[T]he consolamentum, of the act of consoling, …was …the rite …whereby entry was made into the small, dedicated elite of the perfect… It was described as the baptism of the Spirit, or the baptism by fire, in contrast to the conventional baptism by water, despised as the work not of Jesus but of John the Baptist, which made use of evil matter and, so far from incorporating the baptized into the Church of Christ, put him or her into the power of Satan,” Lambert, op. cit., p. 21. This passage is interesting because it suggests that there is a connexion between Catharism and what would later become Pentecostalism. Indeed, this appears to be an acknowledged link in some circles. See, e.g., “The Pentecostal Tradition,” Christian History Inst., 2022, <https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/pentecostal-tradition>. Although the Perfecti were supposedly chaste and renounced both marriage and sexual relations, one writer plausibly comments that “[a]s long as the Believers had not received the full initiation, if need be[,] they could live with a woman, but outside the bonds of marriage. Any sexual intercourse was undoubtedly bad, but cohabitation could be tolerated, but not marriage because, in the event of complete initiation, it seemed easier to sever an illegal bond,” “The Albigensian Crusade (3),” FSSPX.news (communication agency of the Priestly Society of St. Pius X; Fraternitas Sacerdotalis Sancti Pii X), Aug. 10, 2021, <https://fsspx.news/en/news-events/news/albigensian-crusade-3-67996>. In his book Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, Michael Hoffman attributes the licentiousness ritualism to the Perfecti.
[91] Manly Palmer Hall, The Adepts in the Western Tradition: Orders of the Quest, reprint ed., Los Angeles: Philosophical Research Society, 2013 [orig. 1949], p. 45.
[92] McCormick, Temple of Love, New York: Citadel Press, 1965, p. 172.
[93] Bear in mind, these strands overlap. E.g., Daniel Matt describes a “Gnostic Kabbalism,” loc. cit.
[94] Hugh Urban, Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism, Berkeley, Cal.: Univ. of Cal. Press, 2006, p. 42. Though, as Michael Hoffman has summarized, sexualization of religious concepts is not exclusive to Kabbalah. For instance, Talmudic interpreters compare Aggadah (or, non-legal, narrative texts) to the male penis, which membrum virile – incidentally – Rabbis sometimes identify with the “image of god.” In the comparison, Rabbinical Pardes hermeneutics is thought of as the manipulation or massaging of texts in order to “pull them” from a limp state (in which deep meanings are hidden under the surface, Peshat), to a fully erect state (in which deeper meanings, such as Remez, Derash, and – especially – Sod, become visible). For an introduction, see Hoffman, Judaism Discovered, op. cit., p. 237.
[95] Daniel Matt, The Zohar (Sefer ha Zohar), Stanford, Cal.: Stanford Univ. Press, 2004, p. xliii; also quoted in Hoffman, Judaism Discovered, op. cit., p. 282.
[97] “Kabbalah, Tantra, and Sexual Gnosis,” Tibetan Buddhist Encyclopedia, <http://tibetanbuddhistencyclopedia.com/en/index.php?title=KABBALAH,_TANTRA,_AND_SEXUAL_GNOSIS>. In the video presentation, I display the following: “This …is the Zoharic recipe for sex magic… In his Prayer of Moses, [Moshe] Cordovero develops the Zoharic model into a complete ritual script… [T]he text adds to this an imaginative preparation for role play, which determines the later placement of the participants’ bodies… “‘Here is its mystery and the meditation required with regard to it: firstly one will wash one’s hands at midnight or during the hours that follow and will purify one’s consciousness and void the spirit of all evil thought… The [the man] will gladden his wife with speech relating to the commandment [of sexual union], at the same time he will bring his awareness closer to the sacred… Then he will undertake to meditate on the secret of the embrace: he is at the level of Tiferet, she is at the level of Malkhut…’,” Brian Ogren, Kabbalah in America: Ancient Lore in the New World, Leiden, Netherlands & Boston, Mass.: Brill, 2020, p. 362; quoting Charles Mopsik, Sex of the Soul: The Vicissitudes of Sexual Difference in Kabbalah, Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2005, p. 140. Cf. Michael Hoffman, Judaism Discovered: From Its Own Texts, Coeur d’Alene, Id.: Independent History and Research, 2008 and Marla Segol, Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy, University Park, Penn.: Penn State Univ. Press, 2021. Mopsik draws, in part, from the work of a student of 13th-c. Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia, one Joseph ben Abraham Gikatilla – specifically, Le secret du mariage de David et Bethsabée [“The Secret of the Marriage of David and Bathsheba”]. Although the title is in French, the text is (presumably) in Hebrew.
[98] Elliot Kiba Ginsburg, The Sabbath in the Classical Kabbalah, Albany, N.Y.: State Univ. of N.Y. Press, 1989, p. 292. Continuing: The Shekinah is the woman’s “…archetype. At the same time she enters into relation with (and in some sense is completed by) Tif’eret, the divine Other,” ibid. As the book’s title indicates, Ginsburg is principally concerned with the Jewish Sabbath. In this context, he writes: “As in virtually all rituals, timing is of the essence here: the mystic and his wife must engage in marital intercourse at the appropriate moment. Although ordinary Jews may engage in marital intercourse during the week, the adept is bidden to wait until Shabbat, Edenic time par excellence, the hour when the divine hieros gamos occurs,” ibid. Jewish scholars Daniel Matt and Arthur Green amplify this, writing: “For the mystic, sex is not merely a personal act; it is an occasion for communion with God… See [Rabbi Moses] Cordovero’s comment on this passage…: ‘Their desire, both his and hers, was to unite Shekhinha. He focused on Tif’eret, and his wife on Malkhut (Shekhinah). His union was to join Shekhinah; she focused correspondingly on being Shekhinah and uniting with Her Husband, Tif’eret.’ This corresponds to the Tantric ritual of maithuna, in which the human couple focuses on identification with their divine models…,” Daniel Chanan Matt and Arthur Green, eds., “Their desire focused on joining Shekhinah…,” Zohar, the Book of Enlightenment, Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1983, pp. 236-237; citing Rabbi Abraham ben Mordecai Azulai, Or ha-Hammah (“The Light of the Sun”), “ad loc;” Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, New York: Pantheon Books, 1958, pp. 200-73; and Agehananda Bharati, The Tantric Tradition, London: Rider, 1965, n.p. Or ha-Hammah is a commentary on the Zohar that is an expansion of, and extensively quotes form, Rabbi Moses Cordovero’s treatise Pardes Rimmonim (“Garden / Orchard of Pomegranates”). Matt and Green also (ibid., p. 236) bid the reader “…cf. Zohar 1:49b-50a; 2:89a-b; 3:81a-b; 168a,” and (ibid., p. 237) “cf. above [in their own volume], ‘Male and Female’,” which is a major section beginning on page 55 (and following).
[100] The proliferation of innumerable goddess cults is viewed by some as remediation for the supposed, earlier, “patriarchal Christian” view that “[t]he Devil worked through women & [sic] women worked their evil through sex,” Poncé, op. cit., p. 19.
[101] According to the Talmud (see BT Yoma 54a-b), the cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant were depicted as being locked “in intimate embrace.”
[102] Jewish Studies Professor Nathaniel Deutsch further claims that the Kabbalah was cross-fertilized with the near-Eastern religious tradition of the Mandaeans – not to be confused with the Manichaeans discussed a moment ago. “…[I]nteractions [between Mandaeans and Jewish mystics in Babylonia from Late Antiquity to the medieval period] resulted in shared magical and angelological traditions,” Nathaniel Deutsch, “The Date Palm and the Wellspring: Mandaeism and Jewish Mysticism,” ARAM (Journal of the Aramaic Society for Syro-Mesopotamian Studies), vol. 11, no. 2, 1999-2000, p. 222. Deutsch continues: “During this phase the parallels which exist between Mandaeism and Hekhalot mysticism would have developed. At some point, both Mandaeans and Jews living in Babylonia began to develop similar cosmogonic and theosophic traditions involving an analogous set of terms, concepts, and images. At present it is impossible to say whether these parallels resulted primarily from Jewish influence on Mandaeans, Mandaean influence on Jews, or from cross fertilization. Whatever their original source, these traditions eventually made their way into the priestly – that is, esoteric – Mandaean texts … and into the Kabbalah,” ibid. “Sex to the pious Mandaean is the holiest mystery of life and it is enjoined upon him to regard it as such and to pronounce the most sacred name, ‘the great Life,’ before performing a sexual act. …[S]exual metaphors and images employed by initiates are protected by special oaths of silence…,” E. S. Drower, The Secret Adam: A Study of Nasoraean Gnosis, London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960, p. 10; archived at <http://khazarzar.skeptik.net/books/mandaean/adam.pdf>.
[103] In the first place, it proceeds from Merkabah mysticism, which recalls a vision of God beheld by the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel. But, Kabbalah was also informed by the time the Israelites spent exiled in Babylon. You should also keep in mind the twists and turns of Jewish history, as the Bible records it. After the period of the “judges,” the people clamored for, and instituted, a monarchy. This created what later became known as the United Kingdom of Israel and what was ruled first by Saul, then by David and finally by David’s son, Solomon. After Solomon died, circa 930 B.C., his son Rehoboam inherited the throne. Owing to Rehoboam’s heavy-handed and poor leading, a revolt was led by an apparently influential nobleman named Jeroboam. The resulting civil war split the nation into the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah. Around 720 B.C., the Northern Kingdom fell to Assyria. Assyria itself eventually fell to neo-Babylonia which, in short order, ransacked the Southern Kingdom around 586 B.C., destroyed Solomon’s Temple, and spirited many of the inhabitants of Judah to captivity in Babylon. Once Babylonia was conquered by Persia, some of these Judahites would be permitted to return to their homeland where, approximately 516 B.C., they constructed a smaller “second temple” that stood until A.D. 70 when it was leveled by the Roman Empire. But, before this return, the Judahites were interacting – and sometimes marrying – with Babylonians.
[108] Esotericists frequently hold that Judaism was partially informed by the traditions of Sumeria and Babylonia. See, e.g., Sex: The Secret Gate to Eden, dvd, Brooklyn, N.Y.: Thelema Press, 2006.
[111] According to Craig Heimbichner: “In the sub-rosa mythos of Judaism, God is the ‘Jewish male’ as personified by ‘Adam Kadmon’…Adam Kadmon …[is the] Kabbalistic concept of the archetypal man, the primordial being who is simultaneously the Judaic male and the ‘body of God.’ Adam Kadmon is the androgynous and balanced, completed male Jew who manifests his own deity in this world through emanations of sefirot, which include evil in the left-hand pillar of severity or judgment – one half of which must be balanced with the opposite right-side pillar of mercy …[on the] Tree of Life…,” Blood on the Altar: The Secret History of the World’s Most Dangerous Secret Society, Coeur d’Alene, Id.: Independent History and Research, 2005, pp. 124 and 136. According to Robert Graves and Raphael Patai: “Primeval man was held by the Babylonians to have been androgynous. …[T]he Gilgamesh Epic gives Enkidu androgynous features: ‘the hair of his head like a woman’s…’ The Hebrew tradition evidently derives from Greek sources, because both terms used in Tannaitic midrash to describe the bisexual Adam are Greek: androgynos, ‘man-woman’, and diprosopon, ‘two-faced’,” Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis, Manchester, England: Carcanet, 2005, p. 67, n. 2. Graves and Patai continue: “Philo of Alexandria, the Hellenistic philosopher and commentator on the Bible, contemporary with Jesus, held that man was at first bisexual; so did the gnostics. This belief is clearly borrowed from Plato. Yet the myth of two bodies placed back to back [sic] may well have been founded on observation of Siamese twins, which are sometimes joined in this awkward manner. The two-faced Adam appears to be a fancy derived from coins or statues of Janus, the Roman New Year god,” ibid. “…Graves’ embedded, passing mention of Plato refers to the dialogue entitled the Symposium – or ‘Drinking Party’ – in which the notion of ‘love’ is the main topic of discussion and reflection. …The basic idea of the androgyne, or man-woman, was that this combined state was part of the original order,” according to “Now Playing at the Century 16 Ampitheater of Eternal Wisdom: Aurora Consurgens, Part 2,” Bell Curve (weblog), Sept. 1, 2012, <http://curveofbell.blogspot.com/2012/09/now-playing-at-century-16-ampitheater.html>. Of course, in Greek mythology, it was “Zeus [who] divided the androgyne as punishment for hubris…,” Ibid. In Judaism, on the other hand, this division was attributed to the Hebrew God.
[114] “Now Playing…,” loc. cit. Continuing: ““And Aristophanes’ speech presents [erotic or romantic] love as a sort of searching for, discovering, and restoring this division of halves. On Aristophanes’ conception, the pair need not be male-female, but could be female-female or male-male,” ibid. Cf. Graves and Patai, loc. cit. Cf., also, Manly Palmer Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, reprint ed., Garden City, N.Y.: Dover, 2010, p. 351.
[119] See, e.g., Hargrave Jennings, Ophiolatreia: An Account of the Rites and Mysteries Connected with the Origin, Rise, and Development of Serpent Worship, N.p.: privately publ., 1889.
[120] A key notion is that soon after this separation of the sexes, humanity was expelled from Paradise. Rabbi and Zohar translator Daniel Matt, commenting upon what he views as a possible, alternative interpretation for Genesis 3:24 – which is conventionally and straightforwardly read as God’s expulsion of Adam from the Garden of Eden – says, instead: “Adam drove out, divorced, Shekhinah (the divine feminine), splitting Her from Her divine partner and from himself. Once, as Adam, humanity was wedded to God. The original sin lies in losing intimacy with the divine, thereby constricting our unbounded awareness.” “Zohar Questions – Daniel Matt,” <https://www.sup.org/zohar/QADM.pdf>. Matt continues: “This loss is inevitable—a consequence of tasting the fruit of knowledge, the price we pay for maturity and culture. But the spiritual challenge is to search for that lost treasure—without renouncing the self or the world.”
[122] K. J. Aaron, “Biblical Euphemisms for Sexual Activity,”, posted by Brian Worley, Ex-Minister.org, Jan. 21, 2010, <https://www.exminister.org/Aaron-one-biblical-euphemisms.html>. I’m quoting from “Ex-Minister.org” for the sake of convenience. Though, any number of Bible expositors, theologians, and current ministers readily admit the point.
[123] Cf. Michael A. Hoffman II, Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, Coeur d’Alene, Id.: Independent History and Research, 2001.
[131] Here, the Jewish Encyclopedia uses the slang abbreviation “Shebs.”
[132] Thus, the sect “…included the elements of both asceticism and sensuality: some did penance for their sins, subjected themselves to self-inflicted torture, and ‘mourned for Zion’; others disregarded the strict rules of chastity characteristic of Judaism,” and turned to the sexual shenanigans that have been our preoccupation, herein. All this, according to Herman Rosenthal and S. M. Dubnow, “Frank, Jacob, and the Frankists,” Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906, online at <https://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/9736-lejbowicz>.
[137] The Jewish Encyclopedia gives the location as “Lemberg.”
[138] See Marvin S. Antelman’s (possibly born Mosheh Shelomoh Anṭelman) twin volumes: To Eliminate the Opiate (volume 1), New York; Tel Aviv: Zahava, 1974 and To Eliminate the Opiate: Volume 2, Jerusalem: The Zionist Book Club, 2007.
[147] According to Donald Michael Kraig, Modern Sex Magick, Woodbury, Minn.: Llewellyn Publ., 2006, p. 220. Continuing: “…ask any transexual sex magician!” Ibid. Note that “transexual” is an alternate spelling for “transsexual.”
[154] Including, the Anseiretic Mystery, the Golden Letter, the Golden Secret, and the Mysteries of Eulis. See Lara Langer Cohen, “Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Occult Undergrounds,” Zoom lecture, Univ. of Penn., Nov. 2, 2020; recorded and posted to Penn’s Workshop in the History of Material Texts (channel), YouTube, Nov. 3, 2020, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoIeQTbW7cE>.
[155]Ibid. Author Donald Michael Kraig speculates that Franz Anton Mesmer, whose “animal-magnetism” techniques – which were called “mesmerism” and prefigured contemporary hypnosis – also used his powers (including the stimulation of supposedly healing “sexual arousal”) “to induce psychic abilities”, Kraig, op. cit., pp. 21 & 23.
[156] Randolph was also a “Pre-Adamite”; that is, he believed that humans existed on the earth prior to the Biblical Adam and Eve. This is too large a topic to cover, presently. But, the relevant Wikipedia article associates Pre-Adamism with – what it calls – various “racist” anthropological speculations. See “Pre-Adamite,” Wikipedia, Jul 2, 2022, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Adamite#Racist_pre-Adamism>. Again, Randolph’s “mixed” heritage may have motivated his interest in this doctrine.
[159] P. B. Randolph, The Anseiretic Mystery; reproduced in John Patrick Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nineteenth-Century Black American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician, Albany, N.Y.: State Univ. of N.Y. Press, 1996, p. 317. According to Randolph, “the list of powers attainable by the human being …number hundreds of distinct energies,” ibid.; quoted by Arthur Versluis, The Secret History of Western Sexual Mysticism: Sacred Practices and Spiritual Marriage, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008, pp. 125-126 (of electronic edition), <https://books.google.com/books?id=Q14oDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT125>.
[160] Paschal Beverly Randolph, Magia Sexualis, Maria de Naglowska, transl., Paris: Robert Gélin, 1931. On the angle that Naglowska may have written it herself – and on the description of her as a “Satanist” – see Schreck and Schreck, op. cit., passim, but esp. p. 183.
[162] Vātsyāyana (attributed), The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, Richard Francis Burton and Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, transl., eds., “Cosmopoli” [probably London]: Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares, 1883 (privately circulated).
[163] Richard Osborne, Introducing Eastern Philosophy, Borin Van Loon, illus., Cambridge, U.K.: Icon Books, 2001, p. 47.
[165] Though, in fairness, a Gnostic sect called the Adamites was said to have adopted practices for “…extirpating carnal desire by familiarizing the senses to strict self-control under the extremest [sic] form of temptation,” Blunt, op. cit., p. 5.
[172]For instance, an online version of the Encyclopedia of Hinduism states: “Sexuality outside marriage is looked upon as a negative thing.” Constance Jones and James Daniel Ryan,“Pancha Makara,” Encyclopedia of Hinduism, New York: Facts on File, 2007, n.p., <https://hinduism.en-academic.com/576/pancha_makara>.
[173]See, e.g., David Gordon White, Kiss of the Yogini: ‘Tantric Sex’ in its South Asian Contexts, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 77ff. Cf. The reference to the sacredness of “seminal fluid” by George Small, A Handbook of Sanskrit Literature: With Appendices Descriptive of the Mythology, Castes, and Religious Sects of the Hindus, London: Williams & Norgate, 1866, p. 182, <https://books.google.com/books?id=k9A9AAAAIAAJ&pg=pa182>.
[174]And, for some Tantrics, perhaps other “polluting substances,” such as excrement, menses (menstrual expulsion), urine, etc. White compares similar practices among the “Bāuls of Bengal” and the “Nizarpanthis, ‘Hinduized’ Isma’ilis of Western India” (op. cit., p. 77; where the “Nizarpanthis” are, presumably, followers of Nizari Isma’ilism and the Aga Khan [currently, number IV], and may be related to the Khojas.)
[175] Schreck and Schreck, Demons of the Flesh, op. cit., p. 96.
[177] “Bob Dobbs,” Phatic Communion With [Bob Dobbs], Toronto: Perfect Pitch Ed., 1992, p. 51. The name “Bob Dobbs” is frequently associated with a loose-knit organization known as the “Church of the SubGenius.” Wikipedia calls the so-called “Church” a “parody religion,” and claims that it was established in the 1970s by individuals such as “Ivan Stang” (born Douglas St. Clair Smith), “Philo Drummond” (born Steve Wilcox), and “Dr. X” (born Monte Dhooge). See “Church of the SubGenius,” Wikipedia, May 30, 2022, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius>. To confuse matters further, my copy of Phatic Communion… has a sticker on the publication-information page stating that the copyright holder is one “Robert Dean” – who may (or may not) be one and the same person as the now-deceased career-military man who became a fairly prominent “ufologist” during the 1990s. See “Robert Dean (ufologist),” Wikipedia, Nov. 18, 2021, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Dean_(ufologist)>.
[178] For an illustration, see the Home Box Office (HBO) network’s “The Master of Non-Ejaculation,” Real Sex, episode 7, 1993; at one point, archived at <http://www.tv.com/shows/real-sex/>.
[179] See, e.g., Sex: The Secret Gate to Eden, loc. cit.
[180] New York: Amer. Inst. of Universal Charities, 1961.
[181] Donald Michael Kraig (Modern Sex Magick, op. cit., p. 25) suggests that others advocating similarly include Alice Bunker Stockham (via her Karezza techniques) and John Humphrey Noyes (through his idea of “male continence”). Noyes, remembered for Utopian-Socialist Oneida Community in New York, also encouraged “communal” or group marriage, ibid.
[182] “Three types of Tantras exist in India; first White Tantra, second, black Tantra, third, grey Tantra. In White Tantra, Sexual Magic is practiced without the spilling of semen. In black Tantra there is spilling of semen. In grey Tantra, the semen is and is not spilled. [That is, s]ometimes the semen is spilled, and sometimes it is not spilled. This type of Tantra leads the devotee to black Tantra.”Samael Aun Weor, The Perfect Matrimony, reprint ed., Brooklyn, N.Y.: Thelema Press, 2001, p. 253.
[183]Ida C. Craddock, Heavenly bridegrooms; An Unintentional Contribution to the Erotogenetic Interpretation of Religion, Theodore Schroeder, ed., New York: n.p., 1918 (reprinted: Whitefish, Mt.: Kessinger, ca. 1990).
[184]Cited by “Ida Craddock,” Wikipedia, Jun. 11, 2022, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Craddock>; citing “Baphomet” [Aleister Crowley], The Blue Equinox, vol. III, Detroit: Universal, 1919. No link was provided by way of primary documentation. However, Googling yielded the following URL, especially following the words “Heavenly Bridegrooms.” <http://www.the-equinox.org/vol3/eqv3n1/eq0301275.htm>.
[185] Ordinarily, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn isn’t thought of as preëminent in this subject. But, Kraig (Modern Sex Magick, loc. cit.) summarizes recent scholarly work suggesting that various Dawn members – including Edward Berridge (following Thomas Lake Harris), Dion Fortune (born Violet Mary Firth), and most prominently Samuel Liddell “MacGregor” Mathers and his wife Moina Mathers (née Mina Bergson) – were at least aware of (or obliquely wrote about) sex magic. Possibly, the Mathers exhibited these “mysteries” of magia sexualis in Paris while performing their Rites of Isis. (For the claim, see Kraig, ibid.)
[186] E.g., see Carl Gustav Jung, Collected Works of C.G. Jung: Alchemical Studies, vol. XIII, London: Routledge; Taylor & Francis, 2014, p. 96.
[188] Andrew Phillip Smith, The Gnostics, London: Watkins Publ., 2008, pp. 152 & 150.
[189] Nevill Drury, Stealing Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011, p. 93.
[190] This includes the speculative “Phallicism” of Hargrave Jennings, the oriental pornography of Edward Sellon, the compilations of Hindu mythology produced by W. J. Wilkins, and the Sanskrit translations of “Arthur Avalon” (Sir John George Woodroffe).
[191] Nevill Drury: “The bridging link between Randolph and the O.T.O. is provided by two American esoteric orders, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and Randolph’s Brotherhood of Eulis,” ibid., p. 100. Donald Michael Kraig, op. cit., p. 4, says that Randolph “was initiated into the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.” Who knows?
[193] Joscelyn Godwin, The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor: Initiatic and Historical Documents of an Order of Practical Occultism, New York: Weiser Books, 1995, p. 61.
[195]Kellner supposedly named these as Soliman ben Aifa (Sufi), Bhima Sena Pratapa (Hindu), and Sri Mahatma Agamya Paramahamsa (Hindu).
[196]Tho, Bernard was reportedly born either Perry Arnold Baker or Peter Coon. And he may also have sometimes employed the alias “Homer Stansbury Leeds.”
[198] Isabel Stirling, Zen Pioneer: The Life and Works of Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Emeryville, Cal.: Shoemaker & Hoard; Avalon Publ., 2006, p. 7.
[199] Crowley refers to his spells as “calls,” and says that they were spoken in “Enochian,” an alleged ancient angelic language that owes its initial compilation and “discovery” to the Elizabethan sorcerer John Dee and his companion, Edward Kelley. This early linguistic material, which included an alphabet, was an important part of the communication, conducted over a period of years, that Dee and Kelley supposedly had with an assortment of preternatural entities during various sessions of crystal-ball gazing (or “scrying,” to use the technical term for it). Enochian largely faded into obscurity until it was rediscovered, as it were, by the British-based, 19th-c. Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn assigned it great importance, along with the grimoires (or spell books) known as the Key of Solomon and the Book of Abramelin. For a time, Crowley was a member of the Golden Dawn. But its emphasis on magic and Crowley’s differed precisely over the question of sex magic. For example, after resignation of William Wynn Westcott from his headship of the Golden Dawn, the position of leading “magus” (or Chief Adept) was assumed by Florence Beatrice Farr. Farr expressly objected to Aleister Crowley’s advancement on the grounds of his “sex intemperance,” Guiley, op. cit., p. 101.
[201] P. B. Randolph experimented with hashish and other drugs as well. The Schrecks (loc. cit.) perceive that Crowley may have derived many principles from Randolph without crediting him. They mention the similarity of Crowley’s maxim “Love is the Law; Love under Will” to Randolph’s Will reigns omnipotent; Love lieth at the foundation,” p. 181. One wonders whether Randolph’s “Eulis” may have put Crowley onto the “Rites of Eleusis,” which Crowley (and others) “performed” in London. See “Rites of Eleusis,” Wikipedia, Jan. 16, 2022, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rites_of_Eleusis>.
[202] Recall that one possible derivation of “Cathar” had to do with cat worship.
[203] There were other instances of sex magic, as well. E.g., on another such occasion, in 1918, Crowley and a female ritualist, one Roddie Minor (a.k.a., Roddie Warwick) reportedly engaged in a sexual “working” called the Almalantrah. There was also Crowley’s seminal “Cairo Working” in 1904 where his first wife, Rose Edith Kelly, allegedly made spiritual contact with a supernatural being referred to as “Aiwass.” Subsequently, Rose “channeled” a text that would become foundational for “Crowleyanity” and the religion of Thelema: namely, “The Book of the Law” (Liber Al vel Legis). Although the Cairo rituals are not generally considered sex-magical, per se, they occurred during Aleister and Rose’s honeymoon. Later Thelemites are careful to explain that the “honeymoon” has its origins in pagan fertility religions in which newly married couples essentially took religious pilgrimages to be taught sacred sexual techniques. (E.g., see Sex: The Secret Gate to Eden, dvd, Brooklyn, N.Y.: Thelema Press, 2006.) So, I guess, you do the math.
[205] “The Cake of Light is the eucharistic host found within Thelema, the religion founded by British author and occultist Aleister Crowley in 1904 and some neo-Gnostic religions. A common ‘cake of light’ contains kamut flour, honey, a few drops of Abramelin oil, olive oil, beeswing, ash, and sometimes particular bodily fluids such as semen, vaginal fluids, or a mix of both…,” “Cake of Light,” Wikipedia, May 28, 2022, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cake_of_Light>.
[206] Explicitly and literally in a form that many modern scholars deny had ever been actualized (until the 20th century). Moreover, Crowley definitely had Buddhist or Eastern-mystical influences, not least from his friend and teacher Allan Bennett, as well as from his experiences living in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). A major Buddhist revival had been launched in Ceylon in the 1880s by (among others) Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, one of the main co-founders, with H. P. Blavatsky, of the Theosophical Society.
[207] As, indeed, it had been to precursor organizations like the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
[208] See e.g., numerous retellings of the most infamous of these, the “Prague Golem,” allegedly created by the “Maharal,” Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel. But the stories go back at least to the Talmudic rabbi known as “Rava.” In Talmud Tractate Sanhedrin (section 65b), Rava generates a mute “manikin” that is destroyed by Rabbi Zeira. Gustav Meyrink wrote about the creature in his novel Der Golem (“The Golem,” Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1915). More recently, Golem folklore was taken up by writer Howard Gordon and director Kim Manners in an episode (“Kaddish,” season 4, no. 15, Feb. 16, 1997) of the Fox Network’s X-Files television show. For an accessible overview of all this, see “Golem,” Wikipedia, Jun. 29, 2022, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem>. For a scholarly study, see Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid, Albany, N.Y.: State Univ. of New York Press, 1990.
[209] See, also, Michael Hoffman, Judaism Discovered: From Its Own Texts, Coeur d’Alene, Id.: Independent History and Research, 2008.
[210] Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, 1818.
[211] These manipulations are cryptically communicated in a (circa) 3rd-century Jewish text known as the Sefer Yetzirah (the Book of Formation”). Although the Sefer Yetzirah is by no means a Golem-how-to manual, numerous rabbinic commentators, such as Eleazar of Worms (e.g., in his Perush ‘al Sefer Yeẓirah), have understood the text to contain all the necessary ingredients.
[212] On this, see: Michael Hoffman, Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, Coeur d’Alene, Id.: Independent History & Research, 2001, especially material deriving from Hoffman’s contact with synchromystic James Shelby Downard. As first reported by Jim Brandon in his Sirius Rising audio interviews, Shelby Downard had long speculated the U.S. government’s creation of an atomic bomb (spearheaded by General Leslie Groves and nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer), at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico (the “Land of Enchantment”), under the name the “Manhattan Project,” may have involved – whether centrally or tangentially – an attempt to create a homunculus.
[214] James Strong, “1564. Golem,” The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (“Strong’s Concordance”), Cincinnati: Jennings & Graham, 1890; Nashville, Tenn. & N.Y.: Methodist Press, 1890; reproduced on Bible Hub, <https://biblehub.com/hebrew/1564.htm>. The word golem is, from a biblical standpoint, a hapax legomenon – it is used only once, in the Book of Psalms, chapter 139, verse 16.
[216] Crowley wrote a novel in which this procedure is aimed at producing a homunculus imbued with a “lunar spirit.” See Aleister Crowley, Moonchild, N.p.: Mandrake Press, 1929.
[217] Not unlike Rabbi Judah Loew’s Golem of Prague.
[218] See remark: “…to have corn of so subtle a seed is a great thing once; to achieve it twice were the mark of a primal energy so marvellous, that We doubt whether there be one man born in ten times ten thousand years that hath such wonder-power,” King, op. cit., p. 188.
[223] John Carter, Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons, Port Townsend, Wash.: Feral House, 2004, p. 151. Carter comments that “[t]his abortion story …casts doubt upon the literal application of the term Moonchild” and “…actually serves as good evidence that Parsons was looking for an adult female to arrive,” (ibid.) were the ritual to have accomplished its intended objective.
[224] To put it slightly differently, there appear to be two primary possibilities. On the one hand, it could be that a physiological pregnancy is interpreted as a failure of the sex magic to create the desired homunculus – which, on this view, could be seen as some sort of “spiritual pregnancy.” On the other hand, it could be that the termination of a physical pregnancy – as a kind of magical sacrifice – is understood to be a sine qua non of the rite.
[225]Ed Sanders, The Family, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1971, p. 64.
The word “occult” simply means “hidden” or “secret.”1 Throughout history a number of people have dabbled – or specialized – in disciplines that are arguably characterizable as occultic (even if for different reasons).
For this list, I’m focusing on ten real-life figures who have sometimes been classified as “occultists.”
Some have been involved in the so-called “Hermetic arts” – alchemy, astrology, and magic – while others may be more correctly viewed as esoterics or mystics. One or two were apparently mixed up in practices that were a bit, well… darker.
There is no implication that the sometimes very different beliefs of these people are necessarily related. In other words, although some of these people may have interacted with one another and they bear sometimes interesting relationships, they were unique individuals and each entry stands on its own.
But, without further ado, here are my picks for the top 10 occultists who ever lived.
Supposedly born Giuseppe Balsamo in 1743 in Palermo, Italy, the man who would come to be known as “Cagliostro” was surrounded by controversy and mystery for most of his life.
He was praised by admirers as a powerful magician and mesmerist as fervently as he was denounced by detractors as a charlatan or infidel.
Cagliostro appeared on the scene in London in the momentous year 1776 – the same year the United States issued its Declaration of Independence from the British Empire, and the same year the ex-Jesuit Adam Weishaupt, under the name “Spartacus,” started the Bavarian Illuminati.
Cagliosto claimed to have been raised on the cryptopolitically significant Island of Malta – certainly a proverbial “hot spot” in arcane geography.2
And he said that he became a “Knight” in the Catholic religious Order of Malta – which traces its origins back to the crusading Knights Hospitaller, founded in the 11th century.
But, somehow, Cagliostri made his way to England, which island nation is occasionally referred to by the mystical name “Albion.”
Scattered and possibly unreliable reports suggest that he was subsequently “made” a Freemason, perhaps at the French Loge L’Esperance, then located in London.
Cagliostro himself claimed to be in possession of fantastic occult secrets – such as the formulas for the “Water of Life” and the so-called “Philosopher’s Stone” that had been the fabled goals of alchemy for hundreds of years.
He is noteworthy, in part, because of his introduction of a so-called “Egyptian Rite” into Freemasonry. Though, this association seems to have been more Kabbalistic than Egyptian.
“Kabbalah,” of course, is a stream of mystical and numerological tradition within the religion of Judaism, mainly associated with books such as the Bahir and the Zohar.
Cagliostro’s strange brand of masonry seems to have inspired later offshoots, such as the Rite of Memphis & Mizraim,3 which (in turn) may have motivated some urban planners in the U.S. to confer Egyptian-sounding names to cities like Memphis, Tennessee.4
Although Cagliostro held various odd jobs throughout his life, he is best remembered as something of a socialite who traveled across Europe (and possibly the Middle East) hobnobbing with royalty.
This pastime later created a few problems for him, however, as he was implicated (whether falsely or not) in a jewelry swindle involving French King Louis XVI’s wife, Marie Antoinette.
The event, called the “Affair of the Diamond Necklace,” was the subject of a 2001 Warner Brothers film,5 featuring Hilary Swank, Jonathan Pryce, and Christopher Walken as Count Cagliostro.
Historically, it was a major scandal and it increased popular resentment for the monarchy – feelings that paved the way to the bloody French Revolution – which some claim Cagliostro predicted.
The scandal was a factor in the growing resentment of the French people for the monarchy and helped lead to la révolution – which bloody event some claim Cagliostro predicted.
Imprisoned in the Bastille, he was eventually acquitted. But, shortly thereafter he ran afoul of the Catholic Church’s Roman Inquisition – which had earlier executed the 16th-century Dominican Hermetic philosopher Giordano Bruno and which should not be confused with the more notorious Spanish Inquisition run by Tomás de Torquemada at the behest of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.
Cagliostro is said by some to have died in the Castel Sant’Angelo while serving a sentence on heresy charges. Others maintain that he cracked the secret of immortality and effected a fantastic escape from his tormentors.
Either way, his memory was recently reinvigorated through his incorporation into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Scott Derrickson’s 2016 movie, Dr. Strange, makes several mentions of a mysterious grimoire referred to in the film as the “Book of Cagliostro.”
Born in 1486, Agrippa would become one of the most vilified occult philosophers of the Renaissance. He is frequently represented as having been a “black magician,” and depictions of him often include a black dog – his schwarzer pudel – which beast, in the lingo of witchcraft, was assumed to have been his “familiar spirit.”
“Familiar spirits,” of course, were entities – usually appearing as animals – who were believed really to be demons or other incorporeal beings who did the bidding of magicians and witches.
Ideologically, Agrippa fits broadly into a group of thinkers who lived at a time – after the fall of Byzantine Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire and after the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Catholic Spain – when Catholic Europe was exposed to Greek Neo-Platonism and Jewish mysticism.6
A core group of Italians, including Marsilio Ficino, Pico dela Mirandola, and Francesco Giorgi, first began to combine these disparate traditions into a cohesive new system.
On the one hand, they were operating within the umbrella of Roman Christianity which, due to its Platonic heritage, already had some mysticism – particularly as expressed in Franciscan spirituality.
It also displayed a robust Christian “angelology,” or study of angels, inherited from the writings of Pseudo-Dionysus – especially in the books De Coelesti Hierarchia (“On the Celestial Hierarchy”).
These Italians then assumed some of the metaphysical framework of the ancient Neo-Platonists.7 To this, starting with Pico della Mirandola, they added elements of Spanish-Jewish Kabbalah.
The way toward this assimilation was partially paved by a growing interest in the languages of Greek and Hebrew8 – first by various religious orders, including the Cistercians, Dominicans, and the Franciscans mentioned a moment ago, and, later, by Renaissance Humanists, such as Petrarch, Macropedius, and Erasmus.
Into this “Christian Kabbalah,” Agrippa and others further mixed what they perceived to be the ancient Hermetic traditions of the legendary Hermes Trismegistus – in the form of the newly rediscovered and translated Corpus Hermeticum.
They believed that they were bumping up against a prisca theologia (that is, an “old theology”) – perhaps one that had been delivered to some of Biblical figures such as Enoch or Adam.
The aim was to reconcile all religious traditions and philosophies – including those that promoted the use of magic – a goal later adopted by H.P. Blavatsky.
For Agrippa, magic permeates the entire world, which he divided into three “realms”: the elemental world of earth, the sphere of planets and stars, and the “intellectual” plane of the divine.
Each division of the world has its own associated magic: “natural” or herbal magic at the terrestrial level; mathematical magic at the celestial level, and ceremonial magic at the super-celestial level.
The numerological character of some of this – as seen, for instance, in the use of magic squares – had a decided Pythagorean flavor, borrowed partly from fellow Kabbalist and occultist Johann Reuchlin.
Each of the cosmological levels is superintended by angelic entities – of varying degrees of power; and each type of magic has its own astrological correspondences – which exemplify the alchemical as-above/so-below maxim. Some of this this will be echoed by Aleister Crowley in the 20th century.
And this represents one of Agrippa’s most biggest contributions to what historian Frances Yates calls the “Hermetic-Cabalist tradition”: namely, Agrippa introduces alchemy into the mix.9
Yet, extraordinarily, Agrippa seems to have conceived of all this as a species of Christianity – chiefly because he recognized the name “Jesus” as the highest of the words of power.
Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia (“The Occult Philosophy”) was first printed in 1531 and would have a profound effect on later esoterics and would-be magicians – including those like Arthur Edward Waite who comprised the memberships of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
Agrippa is memorialized with references in Christopher Marlowe’s play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (circa 1590), and in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).
If Agrippa represented the migration of Italian occultism to Germany, John Dee represented its arrival in England.
Dee was born in the tumultuous 16th century, when the Reformation seesawed his country back and forth from Catholicism to Protestantism.10
During this time, partly in the capacity of a “royal astrologer,”11 he was variously in and out of favor with an assortment of well-to-do patrons, including some of the English monarchs of the period.
Widespread belief in his ability to produce or “cast” a horoscope made him a much-sought-after personality during this age of political intrigue.
However, this renown was a double-edged sword. John Dee would spend time in prison and, eventually, die in obscurity, because of his affiliations and views.
During his life, Dee worked closely with an alleged clairvoyant or medium named Edward Kelley.
Sounding a note from Agrippa, together, Dee and Kelley engaged in various alchemical experiments – including the attempt to create gold from base matter.
They also picked up on some of the early-medieval angelology12 and made various attempts at “scrying,” that is, they tried divination using a crystal ball or similar paraphernalia – such as Dee’s obsidian “spirit mirror.”13
But, Dee is mainly remembered as having been something of a sorcerous character. And, indeed, at one time or other he owned several “grimoires” – or books of spells – including the Book of Soyga,14 the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy (falsely attributed to Agrippa),15 and the Sworn Book of Honorius.16
John Dee entertained socio-religious aspirations of a worldwide occultic-evangelical movement with Queen Elizabeth at the head – a view echoed by English poet Edmund Spenser in his epic The Faerie Queene (published around 1590).
Ostensibly to further this end, Dee visited Europe to spread his new “faith.”17
In any event, Dee and Kelley first met Polish King – and Transylvanian Prince – Stephen Báthory, uncle of the notorious, accused female serial murderer and torturer, Elizabeth Báthory.
Subsequently, the duo traveled to Prague in the Kingdom of Bohemia – now the capital of the Czech Republic – and visited the court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II.
Rudolf was well-known as a patron of avant-garde art,18 alchemy,19 and astrology.20 These pastimes brought numerous, curious personalities to Rudolf’s court, including alleged “prophet” Nostradamus,21 alchemist Michael Sendivogius,22 and Rabbi Judah Loew23 – who, legend has it, created a soulless, moving creature (called a “Golem”) out of clay.
These forays into geopolitics appear to have been mostly fruitless – possibly because Dee was regarded as an Elizabethan spy. Indeed, British journalist Donald McCormick, writing in 1968 under the pseudonym Richard Deacon, asserted that Dee was involved in espionage for the Crown and that he signed his correspondence “007.”24
However, after the death of Queen Elizabeth, who had been Dee’s faithful protector against lifelong allegations of heresy and sorcery, he fell out of favor with reputed “witch hunter” and Stuart King, James I (namesake of the King James Bible).
As a result, Dee died in poverty and the exact date of his death is unknown. (It was sometime either in 1608 or 1609.)
He was even left largely friendless, as he and Edward Kelley had had a falling out – possibly due to curious instructions they had received from a spirit who told the pair to swap wives (which, apparently, they did).
At the same time, something of his specter lives on.
For example, playwright William Shakespeare incorporated a Dee-like character – Prospero – into The Tempest (first performed in 1611).
On the modern scene, in H. P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Dunwich Horror,” we read that one of the characters possesses a copy of the Necronomicon that was a “priceless but imperfect copy of Dr. Dee’s English version” of that fabled document.25
Another, separate trajectory of Dee’s influence lies in so-called “Enochian magic.”26
This complicated system derives from the efforts of Dee and Kelley who claimed to have obtained it directly from contact with various angels.
It involves the use of a dedicated alphabet, referred to as “celestial speech,” and which was – according to Dee – the language spoken by the biblical Adam up to the time of Enoch.
Fascination with discovering the lingua Adamica (or, “Tongue of Adam”) was not unique to Dee. Other writers of the period, including the French mathematician and philologist Guillaume Postel, also speculated about the language that had been spoken in the Garden of Eden.
Postel, however, seems to have advanced the possibility that either some form of ancient Chaldean or Hebrew had been the mother of all subsequent dialects.
Finally, John Dee’s influence can be traced through the 19th-c. “occult revival” – for example, as manifested in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which billed itself as a sort of “academy for magicians”27 – and 20th-c. developments such as the “Chaos Magic,” associated with people like Peter Carroll, Phine Hine, and Austin Osman Spare.
Albert Pike was a 19th-c. American Confederate general and lawyer who is best remembered for having served as Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.
Born on the East coast, in Boston, Massachusetts, he spent considerable time in Arkansas – both before and after it was admitted into the United States.
Pike’s politics were a complicated amalgam. On the one hand, he advocated for Native Americans (then referred to as American Indians). On the other hand, he was known to have held anti-Catholic and pro-slavery views28 for much of his life.29
Among Pike’s primary masonic objectives was the reconfiguration of various “rituals” used by the fraternal order for initiatory and other purposes.
In general terms, “masonic ritual” refers to the particulars – including, actions, symbols, and words – pertaining to these ceremonies.
Similarly to John Dee, Pike had an expansive library on esoterica and the occult. Much of this collection was reportedly amassed in order for him to discharge his task of re-imagining freemasonry’s allegorical, historical, and spiritual framework.
The result of this highly influential – and admittedly monumental – effort (or, at least, Pike’s notes regarding his investigations) was the somewhat tedious tome, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (Charleston, S.C.: n.p.), first published in 1871.
During the course of his investigations, Pike surveyed – and arguably attempted to harmonize – “…the philosophies of the Gnostics, the Hebrews, the Alexandrians, the Druids, …the Essenes, …[and] the mysteries of Egypt, Persia, Greece, and India…”.30 – Quite a hefty undertaking.
His book became so important – at least in the Scottish Rite – that anti-Masons (among others) frequently refer to it as the “Bible of Freemasonry” – though practitioners of the “Craft” may usually be replied upon to disclaim this lofty designation.
Still, it is undoubtedly Pike’s magnum opus, and it would exercise some influence over Manly P. Hall, who would become one of the foremost Masonic theorists in the 20th century. According to Obadiah Harris,31 former director of Hall’s Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, no less a figure than President Franklin D. Roosevelt – himself a Freemason – was aware of Hall’s work and so, by extension, was influenced by Albert Pike.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky32 was a Russian/Ukrainian-born esoteric and writer who co-founded the Theosophical Society.33
A key aspect of Blavatsky’s system is its Eastern-mystical flavor.
To her, the kind of Renaissance Kabbalistic Neoplatonism canvassed earlier when discussing Agrippa had not gone quite far enough in trying to excavate and explicate what (she believed) was an ancient wisdom tradition that had once existed all over the earth.
To the end of articulating such a Secret Doctrine – the title of her 1888 multi-volume book – and managing a “Synthesis” of all “Science, Religion and Philosophy,” Blavatsky turned her eyes Eastward and borrowed numerous teachings from the religions of Buddhism Hinduism.34
Her first attempt at articulating her amalgamated Theosophy (which word, of course, means the “wisdom of God”) was in her book Isis Unveiled,35 complete with a subtitle claiming that her system was A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology.36
According to Blavatsky, a hidden group of adepts – sometimes referred to as “Ascended Masters” or “Mahatmas” – are custodians of this arcana and steer humankind from behind the scenes.37
She claimed personal acquaintance with several of these entities and later dropped two curious names: “Kuthumi” and “Morya,” stating that these entities resided in or near Himalayan Tibet.
According to historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Blavatsky’s influence extends both to the Occident and to the Orient.
For example, “…[Mohandas] Gandhi and [Jawaharlal] Nehru…” – both figures in the Indian independence movement – “…were drawn to Theosophy to rediscover their own religious and philosophical heritage.”38
Goodrick-Clarke goes on to say: “In the West, Theosophy was perhaps the single most important factor in the modern occult revival.”39
Blavatsky repackaged the notion of “…Hermetic …correspondences between the macrocosm and microcosm” in contemporary lingo.40 For example, she arranged her spiritual principles on an evolutionary framework, aligning Theosophy with prevailing anthropological, biological, and cosmological scientific language.
She maintained that our “individuality” will “…[pass] through all forms of existence …until we achieve complete union with spirit” – the One, Absolute, Monad, etc.41
Relatedly, Theosophy appears to have a cyclical view of history. Furthermore, at least as communicated by present-day adherents, Blavatsky’s schema teaches a universal “oneness” of all reality in what is probably best described as a form of pantheism – or, the belief that everything is divine.
Additionally, and in line with her syncretism, Blavatsky was committed to the now-pervasive idea that all religions point – to greater or lesser degrees – to a single body of truth.
Her influence can further be seen in the fact that distinctively Buddhist and Hindu religious concepts (which Blavatsky held in high regard) have gained wide acceptance outside of India.
For instance: “Several polls carried out in North America and Europe show that the professed belief in reincarnation is widespread. Roughly twenty percent of the interviewees …state that they have wholly or partly adopted a belief in reincarnation.”42 And this was over fifteen years ago!
5. Anton LaVey
Source: By http://www.unexplainedstuff.com/Religious-Phenomena/Anton-LaVey-s-First-Church-of-Satan.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20033361
Born Howard Stanton Levey, the man who would become known as Anton Szandor LaVey is best remembered for founding the Church of Satan in San Francisco, California on April 30, 1966 – which date is regarded as the “Satanic holiday” Walpurgisnacht.
LaVey is a difficult character to get a fix on. More than anything, he seemed to be a performer or showman.
LaVey claimed to have been cast in an uncredited role43 as Satan for the sex scene in Roman Polanski’s demonic horror classic, Rosemary’s Baby.44
Although released in 1968, the film was set during the end of 1965 and the beginning of 1966, which latter year LaVey had declared the inaugural year for the “Age of Satan.”
LaVey advanced his points of view in several books, including The Satanic Bible in 1969,45The Compleat Witch in 197146 (which was retitled The Satanic Witch and published by Adam Parfrey in 198947), and The Satanic Rituals in 1972.48
At times, his brand of Satanism appears close to endorsing the notion that the “Devil” is to be understood as some hidden enlightening, progressive “force.” Though, representatives are quick to disclaim any belief in any sort of “supernaturalism” – including belief in God or the Devil as personal entities.49
At other times, however, one gets the impression that talk about Satan was merely a colorful way of expressing a Do-Your-Own-Thing ethos, in the pattern of Francois Rabelais and Aleister Crowley that we’ll discuss further in a few minutes.
Alternatively, a person might get the impression that some of LaVey’s words and actions were merely intended to lampoon or parody religious belief – particularly the convictions of Catholic-Christians.
In this spirit of mocking jest, LaVey’s writings could be viewed as an extension of the kind of profanity on display in the 12th-c. Carmina Burana liturgical satires or, later, the bawdy and debauched tomfoolery associated with 18th-c. English government minister Sir Francis Dashwood’s Hell-Fire Club.
The Hell-Fire Club was a diabolically themed gentleman’s club that counted among its members many British statesmen and even, reportedly, American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin.
In the 20th century, LaVey’s Satanic church would also attract celebrities – among whom were African-American entertainer and “Rat Pack” member, Sammy Davis, Jr., as well as actress and sexpot Jayne Mansfield.
In any case, and for its part, the current church disclaims illegal or otherwise nefarious goals, stating: “Let us …look at contemporary Satanism for what it really is: a brutal religion of elitism and social Darwinism that seeks to re-establish the reign of the able over the idiotic, of swift justice over injustice, and for a wholesale rejection of egalitarianism as a myth that has crippled the advancement of the human species for the last two thousand years.”50
LaVeyan Satanism may be understood as concentrating upon – and exulting – the individual and his or her will. In this way, it may be seen as an outgrowth and modification of the philosophies of thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche’s “will to power,”51 Arthur Schopenhauer’s Wille,52 Ayn Rand’s “Objectivism,”53 and Aleister Crowley’s “Thelema.”54
However, another of LaVey’s influences – or, at least, another of his precursors – was the 19th-c. “magus,” Alphonse Louis Constant, more usually referred to as Éliphas Lévi – sometimes pronounced more like /ELL-i-phus LEE-vie/ by anglophones.
He had a peculiar career. For example, he started out on a path towards becoming a Roman Catholic priest, even going as far as taking some of the requisite vows. However, his partiality for Gnosticism put him at odds with church hierarchies dominated by the anti-modernist Popes Gregory XVI55 and Pius IX.56
Lévi may also have had some fairly politically subversive opinions. This is perhaps not surprising given that he lived at a time characterized by the rise of political liberalism.
That he was viewed as something of a “radical” is evidenced by his imprisonment shortly after the publication of his La bible de la liberté (“The Bible of Liberty”).57
Lévi is sometimes said to have been influenced by socialism, perhaps somewhere in between the “New Christianity” of Henri de Saint-Simon and the “Utopianism” of Charles Fourier.
American-born esoteric writer Arthur Edward Waite, one of the preëminent occultists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, translated and condensed some of Lévi’s system.
Many of these references are still widely available in reprint editions – including Waite’s volume The Mysteries of Magic: A Digest of the Writings of Eliphas Lévi published in London by George Redway in 1886.
Lévi picked up on several, preëxisting undercurrents.
For one thing, his magical system depends heavily on an alleged grimoire known as the “Greater Key of Solomon” – referring to the biblical, Israelite monarch who, according to legend, had knowledge of how to command demons.
Lévi explains the potency of magic in terms of “imagination” and “will” – both concepts traceable to Medieval Scholasticism and found, in modified form, in Renaissance occultism.58
Cosmologically, he latches onto the alchemical-Hermetic notion of microcosmic/macrocosmic “correspondences” – a constellation of ideas also found in the Kabbalah.
Lévi seems to have been influenced by a wide range of Jewish-influenced Christian and pseudo-Christian mystics going back to the 13th-c. Majorcan thinker Ramon Lull and extending through to 18th-c. Swedish philosopher Emmanuel Swedenborg and 18th-19th-c. French composer Antoine Fabre d’Olivet (an-TWAN FABRI-dole-ee-vay).
Moreover, he appeared to want to repackage and syncretize the “herbal magic” of Paracelsus – as it had passed through Rosicrucianism – with a modernized version of Agrippa’s “ceremonial magic,” filtered through the 18th-c. English occultist Francis Barrett, particularly in his book, The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer.59
But Lévi’s real significance arguably lies in the fact that he was the “first to connect the Cabala with fortunetelling Tarot cards.”60
From this insight, Lévi extrapolated a complex series of linkages between the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the Tarot “Trumps.” This picks up the linguistic note sounded by John Dee, and others, and is later echoed by Arthur Edward Waite in his famed Rider-Waite Tarot deck, about which I will have more to say in a subsequent video.
On the literary front, among those who “admired” Lévi was Victorian author and politician Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton.61 Although largely unknown today, Bulwer-Lytton originated several still-used phrases such as “it was a dark and stormy night,” which was the opening line of his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford.62
Lévi’s primary influence was exercised upon subsequent occultists such as Madame Blavatsky, the Golden Dawn, and the Masonic philosopher Manly Palmer Hall.
3. Gerald Gardner
Source: By Published in a wide variety of sources, both online and in print., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36288734
The late-19th to early 20th-c. occultist born Gerald Brosseau Gardner was to exercise a tremendous impact on the reintroduction of “witchcraft” – first to the United Kingdom and, later, to the rest of the world.
Although Gardner was born into a fairly well-to-do family that had become prosperous in the lumber business, he appears to have been cast aside and left in the care of a somewhat aloof nursemaid.
After a time, Gardner’s nanny married a man who owned a tea plantation in Sri Lanka, where she moved taking young Gerald with her.
Gardner apparently learned the business and was successful enough at it to have the luxury of extensive travel and, eventually, an early retirement.
While in the east, Gardner familiarized himself Malaysian native religions.
And, although he was never formally educated, over the course of his life he read numerous esoteric-themed books including Charles Godfrey Leland’s folklore collection Aradia; or, The Gospel of the Witches,63 Florence Marryat’s 1891 Spiritualist classic There Is No Death64 and Margaret Murray’s seminal, though highly eccentric and heterodox, anthropological treatise The Witch-Cult in Western Europe.65
Additionally, at one time or other, he appears to have been a member of various secret societies, including Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism.
The consensus scholarly opinion has it that these resources, along with his own experiences with diverse traditions (from Buddhist and other ceremonial-magic practices on the one hand to folk herbalism and paranormal speculations on the other), coalesced into what became known as Wicca.
However, according to his own account, Gardner had been initiated into an an ancient Anglo paganism by a mysterious witch he referred to as “Old Dorothy.”
Regardless of its source, Gardner popularized Wicca through numerous avenues, for example, by writing about it in several books such as High Magic’s Aid 66 (published pseudonymously in 1949, two years before the repeal of the Britain’s Witchcraft and Vagrancy Acts that would have made his practices illegal), as well as Witchcraft Today67 in 1954 and The Meaning of Witchcraft68 in 1959.
Beyond this, the so-called Book of Shadows – originally Gardner’s working notes – is now also widely available and is held in high regard by some Wiccans.
If recent headlines can be believed,69 Gardnerian Wicca itself is among the fastest-growing religions in America and Great Britain, and, in any case, it has helped to give motivate a resurgence of neo-paganism more generally – a broad designation ranging many associations and movements that, besides Wicca, include Druidism, Heathenry, and Odinism.
Among Gardner’s influences – and one of the larger-than-life figures of the occult, generally – was Edward Alexander “Aleister” Crowley.
Born around the middle of the class-conscious Victorian Era, Crowley was initially given a strict Christian upbringing under the auspices of the Plymouth Brethren. The Brethren were an eschatologically obsessed Protestant group that included ministers, like John Nelson Darby, who had split from Anglicanism.70
For Crowley, this apocalyptic environment – combined, when he was only eleven years old, with the death of his father – seems to have galvanized him to embrace the persona of θηρίον (Thērion, the “Beast”) for – what seems in his mind to have been – an epic lifelong battle against Christianity.
He would come (no pun intended) to see this effort as being bound up with sex magic and it would involve him with numerous wives, mistresses, and other sexual partners – both female71 as well male.72
In a seminal instance of such “magick” (which word Crowley spelled with a final “k”), and revealing something of Crowley’s appreciation of Lévi, he and Victor Neuberg (a young Trinity-College graduate, poet, and student of the occult) supposedly crossed some sort of Kabbalistic “Abyss.”
According to Crowley’s (possibly embellished) account, the duo encountered a destructive “Guardian of the Threshold”73 named “Choronzon” – which entity had previously identified as a demon by John Dee and Edward Kelley.
Crowley, independently wealthy from a substantial trust fund, directed his money and time into accumulating occult knowledge. At various times he joined numerous secret societies, including the Freemasons, “MacGregor” Mathers’ Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and Theodor Reuss’s Ordo Templi Orientis (or the “Order of the Temple of the East”), abbreviated “O.T.O.”74
He even created his own order, typically designated only by the characters “A∴A∴.” Numerous possible interpretations of this name have been put forward, with the usual (though disputed) suggestion being that it stands for Argentium Astrum, meaning “Silver Star.”75
But, Crowley expressed dissatisfaction with many of these associations – and frequently disparaged fellow members as mere poseurs.
Apparently determined to excavate genuine magical secrets for himself, he embarked on a series of reportedly dangerous rituals in dynamic locations. One such, was the allegedly black-magical Rite of Abramelin that he undertook at Boleskine House on the shore of Loch Ness in Scotland.76
Or again, in Egypt, Crowley alleged that, in 1904, while on his honeymoon with first wife Rose Kelly, he channeled a document known as The Book of the Law77 from an entity named “Aiwass,” during a ritual referred to as the “Cairo Working.”
In Crowley’s view, The Book of the Law was to serve as a foundation for a new religious and social order, built – in part – atop the maxim “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”
Crowley attempted to model his ideal in Cefalù, on the Island of Sicily.
He styled this Italian-based occultic commune, the “Abbey of Thelema,” after a fictional predecessor78 featured in 16th-c. humanist-monk François Rabelais’s satirical and vulgar Gargantua and Pantagruel novels published in the 1530s.
It was a fairly short-lived experiment, however, as Crowley and his devotees were expelled by Benito Mussolini in 1923 following the death of young Oxford graduate Frederick “Raoul” Loveday, whose widow later reported that her husband had taken ill after drinking animal blood during a black-magical ceremony.
Regardless of the account’s veracity, it helped to cement Crowley’s reputation as the “wickedest man in the world” – as one newspaper headline once stated.
This notoriety was only furthered by his own writings, such as the Diary of a Drug Fiend, published in 1922,79 and The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, posthumously published in a full edition in 1969.80
Crowley was an inspiration to many of the pop-cultural icons promoting the “sex, drugs, and rock&roll” atmosphere of the 1960s, including John Lennon (who was apparently instrumental in seeing that Crowley’s image was featured on the Beatles’ 8th album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page (who later acquired Boleskine House), and – for a time – the members of the Rolling Stones (who had been introduced to Crowley via Lucifer Rising director, Kenneth Anger).
Runners up…
Of course, occultism owes much to numerous others. Attempting to list all the relevant names would be an exercise in futility. Suffice it to say that, apart from other actors already mentioned in passing, other characters such as Francis Bacon, the Biblical characters like Enoch and King Solomon, alchemical figures like Nicolas Flamel and Paracelsus, Neo-Platonists Iamblichus and Plotinus, and curious personalities like Hermes Trismegistus and Anton Mesmer – whether historical or fictional – will appear in forthcoming videos. But, for now…
Pythagoras was a truly pioneering Greek thinker who radically impacted the development of numerous important disciplines including cosmology, mathematics, and philosophy – which word, meaning the “love of wisdom,” he is said to have coined.
Blavatsky – true to her form – asserts that “…Pythagoras learned from the Egyptian hierophants” and “Hindu sages,” but also holds that he was the fountainhead of a philosophy that was subsequently delivered through Socrates and Plato.81
Pythagoras dramatically affected the course of subsequent Western occultism.
He was born on the Greek island of Samos in the Aegean Sea about the year 570 B.C.E. His life after that is something of a question mark.
Chroniclers say that he traveled widely and was initiated into numerous “mystery religions” and wisdom traditions.
Curious stories abound with respect to Pythagoras. He supposedly had magical powers and “a golden thigh; …he had the gift of prophecy; and he could be at different places at the same time. Like Orpheus, he had power over animals… All these characteristics indicate that Pythagoras was no ordinary human being; he was a ‘divine man,’ … or shaman…”.82
Pythagoras eventually founded his own commune in a what is now the Italian city of Crotone.
There, Pythagoras taught his students the secrets he had learned, creating an esoteric body of thought called “Pythagoreanism.”
Evidently, he did nothing to dispel the idea that he was a “miracle worker” and his awe-inspired followers submitted to an almost cult-like system of community regulations and rules – a system in which only a select group would be taught his entire philosophy.
Pythagoreanism seems to have involved numerous, original concepts.
Arguably, three of the most important were a belief in the reincarnation of souls, commitment to the notion that the visible world of objects issued or “emanated” from some ultimate metaphysical reality, and an assertion of the fundamental existence – and magical power – of numbers.
These ideas dovetailed in interesting ways, prompting Pythagoras have discovered noteworthy geometrical and numerical relationships, such as that between the hypotenuse and sides of a right triangle – an insight still conveyed to school children as the Pythagorean Theorem, and given towering mystical and symbolical proportions in Freemasonry.
Beyond contributions to abstract thinking, some observers look to Pythagoras as a precursor to modern science. For instance, he taught that the universe was a rationally ordered cosmos that could be understood mathematically.
But Pythagoreanism also helped shape such occult traditions as alchemy, Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, Paracelsianism, Rosicrucianism and, much later, the Theosophy and the New-Age Movement.
Aleister Crowley even wrote that “…the Qabalists who invented the Tree of Life were [probably] inspired by Pythagoras, or that both he and they derived their knowledge from a common source in higher antiquity.”83
This link between Kabbalism – and Merkavah mysticism – and Pythagoras is also asserted by Lévi (as translated by Waite), who adds the flourish that this ancient sage is also connected to the mysterious number “666” mentioned in Revelation 13:18.84
Finally, would you believe that the Pythagoreans may also have anticipated modern-day Vegans and others by embracing some sort of ancient vegetarianism? Some sources suggest that this was actually the case – either that or Pythagoras at least seems to have adopted and required his followers to observe dietary restrictions, not unlike those associated with Judaism (though, for different reasons).
With such a remarkable impact, it’s no wonder present-day Masons refer to Pythagoras as their “ancient friend and Brother.”
To paraphrase the wander maker, Ollivander, in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter franchise: Some of these esoterics and occultists “…did great things. Terrible? Yes. But… great!”
In your opinion, did I miss anyone? Who would you have added or removed? What’s your own top-10 list?
There are plenty more figures that I could have been included. I intend to remedy some deficits with future lists.
Hope to see you next time!
Notes:
1See Douglas Harper, “Occult,” Online Etymology Dictionary, n.d., <https://www.etymonline.com/word/occult>.
2See, e.g., Stephen Klimczuk and Gerald Warner, Secret Places, Hidden Sanctuaries: Uncovering Mysterious Sites, Symbols, and Societies, London & New York: Sterling Ethos, 2009, pp. 81ff.
3According to the celebrated 18th-19th-c. German playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Cagliostro may actually have been Jewish. If true, this would provide some context for his reputed knowledge of Hebrew tradition. Goethe, Italian Journey, 1786-1788, London: Penguin, 1970, p. 249; online at: <https://books.google.com/books?id=ioXNoJa6qNsC&pg=PA249>.
4See Jim Brandon, “Sirius Rising,” audio recording, ca. 1970s.
6Some of the Western exposure to Eastern/Greek ideas came via the Council of Florence (convoked to discuss the debate between Conciliarists and Papalists and the Great Schism), which was attended by hundreds of delegates, including “Plethon” (Gemistus Pletho). Plethon was noteworthy because he rejected Christianity in favor or a Neo-Platonically tinged version of paganism that was also reportedly a blend of angelology, astrology, and mysticism, seasoned with elements of Stoicism (presumably, some sort of asceticism) as well as Zoroastrianism. This combinatorial exercise will be echoed and repeated by many of the figures appearing on this list.
7This framework had been devised by the Hellenistic philosopher Plotinus and his more magically inclined succssor, Iamblichus.
8Together, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were sometimes designated the “Three Languages.”
9Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, London: Routledge, 1999, p. 97.
10First under King Henry VIII and Henry’s, son Edward VI (and John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, acting as regent), and then under Queens Mary and Elizabeth I.
11Believe it or not, this was once a respectable position, and it was held by numerous individuals such as famed astronomer Tycho Brahe (for Danish King Frederick II); Hermeticist Giordano Bruno (e.g., for the House of Mocenigo, which ultimately produced Bruno’s accuser, Giovanni Zuane Mocenigo); mathematician Gerolamo Cardano (for English King Edward VI); formulator of the “laws of planetary motion,” Johannes Kepler (for Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II); alleged French seer Nostradamus (for Florentine noblewoman and Queen Consort to French King Henry II, Catherine de Medici); and even scientific hero Galileo (for Tuscan Duke Cosimo II de’Medici).
12Today, Dee’s journal is known as De Heptarchia Mystica (or, “On the Mystical Rule of the Seven Planets,” ca. 1582).
13Since, obsidian is a black, volanic stone, it’s interesting (to this writer) that Charlie Brooker’s Netflix-original show has the title Black Mirror.
17In what was once metaphorically referred to by 20th -c. mystic and psychedelic advocate Terence McKenna as an occultic analog to the 1st -c. Christian-missionary journeys undertaken by St. Paul. See Terence McKenna, The Alchemical Dream: Rebirth of the Great Work, Sheldon Rochlin, ed., DVD, Sacred Mysteries Productions; Mystic Fire Productions; 2008.
18Including the “fruit portraiture” of Giuseppe Acrimboldo.
19Ostensibly in an effort to unlock the secrets of the “Philosopher’s Stone” and perhaps to create gold.
20Which had been a respectable European pursuit at least since Ptolemy’s pioneering Tetrabiblos. Though, undoubtedly, the notions go back to Egypt – if not earlier.
27Russell Adams, Jr., et al., eds., Mysteries of the Unknown: Ancient Wisdom and Secret Sects, Alexandria, Virg.: Time-Life Books, 1989, p. 153.
28It has even been alleged that Pike had something to do with – or, perhaps, held membership or leadership in – the infamous Ku Klux Klan. However, evidence for this appears scant and in in any case, the Klan is more typically associated with Pike’s Confederate colleague, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who indisputably served as the organization’s first “Grand Wizard.”
29Recent attempts have been made to rehabilitate Pike’s image vis-à-vis his “racism.” One such effort appears under the headline “Albert Pike did not found the Ku Klux Klan,” and was published on the website of the Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon (Nov. 26, 2012, <https://freemasonry.bcy.ca/anti-masonry/kkk.html>). The reference is prominent enough to receive a citation in Pike’s entry (“Albert Pike,” Sept. 9, 2021, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Pike>) for the popular internet-based encyclopedia Wikipedia.
In both resources (op. cit.), Pike is excerpted (see full citation for the original source, infra.) to the following effect: “I am not one of those who believe slavery a blessing. I know it is an evil, as great cities are an evil…”. Pike proceeds to compare the evil of slavery to evils of wage labor and military service – presumably because both of which, like slavery, undermine “free-will and individuality”.
However, this opinion did not stop Pike from participating in the institution of slavery. He also wrote, in the sentence preceeding the widely quoted statement (no less): “I have owned only such slaves as I needed for household servants.” (Fred William Allsopp, Albert Pike: A Biography, Little Rock, Ark.: Parke-Harper, 1928, p. 181.)
Thus, even the freemasonic website admits that Pike’s “racism …[is]nothing to be proud of”. (“Albert Pike did not found the Ku Klux Klan,” loc. cit.).
30Robert Lipscomb Duncan, Reluctant General: The Life and Times of Albert Pike, N.Y.: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1961, p. 155.
31Christian Pinto, “Eye of the Phoenix: Secrets of the Dollar Bill,” Secret Mysteries of America’s Beginnings: Volume 3, DVD, N.p.: Antiquities Research Films, 2009.
33Along with Americans Colonel Henry Steel Olcott and William Judge.
34This conjunction of East and West was part of the Zeitgeist, apparently, as one of the first “interfaith” conventions – called the “World’s Parliament of Religions” – convened, under the auspices of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, on September 11, 1893.
35London: Theosophical Publ. House,; New York: J.W. Bouton,1877;
36Blavatsky was accused of plagiarism, particularly by William Emmette Coleman. Coleman was a 19th-c. academic specializing in studies of the Far East and the Near East, then referred to as “Orientalism.” He was also an avid spiritualist, himself. So, prima facie, his criticisms do not seem to have been ideologically motivated. See William Emmette Coleman, “ The Sources of Madame Blavatsky’s Writings,” Vsevolod Sergyeevich Solovyoff, A Modern Priestess of Isis, London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1895, Appendix C, pp. 353-366; reproduced online at: Blavatsky Study Center, 2004, <https://www.blavatskyarchives.com/colemansources1895.htm>.
37Incidentally, Hermetic-Order-of-the-Golden-Dawn head honcho, Samuel Liddell “MacGregor” Mathers, also maintained that he was in contact with a coterie of “Secret Chiefs” who helped him steer his organization and draft its rituals.
38Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Helena Blavatsky, Berkeley, Cal.: North Atlantic Books, 2004, p. 17.
41See George Lachman, Madame Blavatsky, New York: Penguin, 2012, pp. 254-255.
42“A Case Study: Reincarnation,” Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age, Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004, p. 455; available online at: <https://brill.com/view/book/9789047403371/BP000008.xml>.
43Whether this story is true or not, I cannot say. But it is accepted – if only prima facie – by some scholars. See, e.g., Bengt Ankarloo, Stuart Clark, eds., Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Twentieth Century, Philadelphia: Univ. of Penn. Press, 1999, p. 96 & Susan Greenwood, The Encyclopedia of Magic & Witchcraft, London: Hermes, 2004, p. 239.
49See “Information for Prison Chaplains,” Church of Satan [website], n.d., <https://www.churchofsatan.com/info-for-chaplains/>.
50Peter Gilmore, “Satanism: The Feared Religion,” Church of Satan [website], n.d. [orig. 1992], <https://www.churchofsatan.com/satanism-the-feared-religion/>.
51The phrase owes to Nietzsche (see his aphorism “This world is the Will to Power—and nothing else!” in paragraph 1067 of his Nachlass, loc. cit., infra.), even though the title of the posthumously published Der Wille zur Macht (Leipzig: Naumann, 1901) was the brainchild of his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.
52Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (“The World as Will and Representation”), Leipzig: Brodhaus, 1819.
53As articulated, for instance, in her novels The Fountainhead (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1943) and Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957).
54The beginnings of which are found in Liber AL vel Legis (“The Book of the Law”) which Crowley attributed to a spirit or demon called “Aiwass” and which Crowley privately published in 1909. For a bit more, see the section on Crowley, below.
55See his encyclical Mirari vos (on liberalism and religious indifferentism, 1832).
56See Quanta cura (“Condemning Current Errors,” 1864).
57Alphonse-Louis Constant, Paris: Le Gallois, 1841.
58For example, according to him: “Imagination …is like the soul’s eye; …it is the glass of visions and the apparatus of magical life… [I]t is the imagination which exalts the will…”. Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual [orig. Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie], Arthur Edward Waite, ed., transl., Chicago: Occult Publ. House, 1910, pp. 34-35; online at: <https://books.google.com/books?id=XI_kwB0uW10C&pg=PA34>.
60Mysteries of the Unknown: Ancient Wisdom and Secret Sects, Arlington, Virg.: Time-Life, 1989, p. 66.
61Leslie George Mitchell, Bulwer-Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters, London: Hambledon and London, 2003, p. 142.
62London: John Dicks. More interestingly, the French magus may even have inspired – or informed – Bulwer-Lytton’s The Haunted and the Haunters (N.p.: n.p., 1857 / 1859) and A Strange Story (London: S. Low, Son & Co., 1862), at least, according to uncited information on an occultically themed website. See “Levi, Eliphas,” ca. 2003, <https://occult-world.com/levi-eliphas/>. Incidentally, the publication particulars are a bit difficult to discover through the usual channels (e.g., via WorldCat). It seems that the two publications are sometimes packaged together. E.g., see: A Strange Story And The Haunted & the Haunters (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1866); available online at: <https://books.google.com/books?id=JHIRAAAAYAAJ>.
66Scire (Gerald Brosseau Gardner), High Magic’s Aid, London: Michael Houghton, 1949.
67London: Rider, 1954. Of course, Rider was the company that published Arthur Edward Waite’s famous Tarot-card deck – now known as the Rider-Waite Tarot.
69See, e.g., N.a., “Wicca: What’s the Fascination?” CBN, n.d., <https://www1.cbn.com/books/wicca%3A-what%27s-the-fascination%3F>; “It’s a moot point, but Paganism may be the fastest growing religion in Britain,” Yorkshire Post, Oct. 31, 2013, <https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/its-moot-point-paganism-may-be-fastest-growing-religion-britain-1853590>; and Mary Jones, “’Wicca’: The Fastest Growing Belief System in the World Today,” Press Release Log, Nov. 20, 2008, <https://www.prlog.org/10144283-wicca-the-fastest-growing-belief-system-in-the-world-today.html>. Though, admittedly, other sources claim that Islam is growing quicker. Cf. “Islam: The World’s Fast-Growing Religion,” BBC, Mar. 16, 2017, <https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-39279631>.
70Darby is an interesting character in his own right, since he – arguably more than any other person – is responsible for the popularity of so-called “Premillennial Dispensationalism,” an interpretation of the Biblical books of Daniel and Revelation maintaining that much of the apocalyptic and prophetic language describes an “end-times” reign of the “Anti-Christ.” This story line was further developed by Hal Lindsey in his 1970 best seller, The Late, Great Planet Earth, (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan.) and made into a movie based on the Left Behind series of novels written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins (Carol Stream, Ill.: Tyndale House Publ., 1995.).
71Such as Leah Hirsig and Leila Waddell. Crowley apparently referred to these sexual partners as “Scarlet Women,” and thought they were incarnations of the Biblical “Whore of Babylon,” which he designated with the variant spelling, Babalon.
72E.g., Victor Neuburg. See, e.g., James Webb, The Occult Establishment, La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1991, p. 61.
73Also called the “Dweller on the Threshold,” which concept owes to the previously name Baron Bulwer-Lytton. See his Zanoni, London: G. Routledge, 1842.
74Just as Mathers is named along with co-founders William Wynn Westcott and William Robert Woodman, so too is Reuss also associated with two others: Carl Kellner and Franz Hartmann.
75Other suggestions include Arcanum Arcanorum (“Secret of Secrets”) and Argon Astron (“Silver Star” in Greek – alternatively, Asimēnio Astēri).
76According to S.L. “MacGregor” Mathers, citing his friend and fellow occultist Henri Antoine Jules-Bois; see The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Occult, 1975, p. xvi.
81H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol. 1, Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 1994, pp. 7, xx, and xvii.
82According to Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Collection of Ancient Texts, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2006, p. 42.
83Aleister Crowley, Book of Thoth, reprint ed., Boston: Weiser Books, 2004 [1944], p. 31.
84See Éliphas Lévi, transl., Arthur Edward Waite, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1938, p. 211.
