OCCULT ESPIONAGE
Scratch a Magus, Find a Spy
by Iona Miller, 2007
When you begin to look, nearly every historical magus of note was also a spy:
Dr. John Dee, Count St. Germain, Cagliostro, Mme. Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, etc.
Often the occult is used as cover for the even blacker arts.
Magician John Dee spied, spelled and encrypted for Queen Elizabeth I; St. Germain spied in England, Scotland, France, Belgium, Holland and throughout his travels; Cagliostro is accused of being a Jesuit spy; Blavatsky a Russian spy; Aleister Crowley a double agent who Ian Fleming used to pattern LeChifre, and on it goes...
OCCULT ESPionage:
http://occultespionage.50megs.com
Aleister Crowley as Intelligence Agent 666
“SemperOccultus” (“Always Secret”)
Paranormal *Altered States * Sex Magick * Espionage * SpyFi * Digital Drugs * Occulture * Subliminazis * Neurohacking * Psi Wars * Mind Control * Transformation * Psychotronics * Manipulation * Countermeasures * Persuasion *Gnosis * Charisma * Personality Cults * Arcana * PsiFi *Wizards, Spooks & Psiwarriors * Mind Reading * Spiritual Warfare * Thought Injection * Psy-Strat * Invisible War * Soft Kill * Intelligence * High Weirdness
Tales From the DarksideIs it Crowleyanity or Truth? In the world of Aleister Crowley, it is impossible to say definitively, but the notorious legends surrounding Crowley are nothing if not wildly entertaining. In OCCULT ESPionage we follow the meandering path of Crowley's magickal journey into the shadowlands of psychic warfare, occult spies and occult power visions. The daisey chain connects the worlds of irregular freemasonry to the political machinations of both Hitler and the Bush family.
It is a circuitous route, a widdershins spiral of weird coincidence into a vortex of implausible synchronicity. There is little doubt that Crowley's larger than life occult philosophy and writing influenced virtually all of his contemporary occultists and many of those to follow, as well as artists and musicians. Magick isn't outlawed but it is suppressed through ridicule. Yet it is successfully practiced by the elite (Skull & Bones; Bohemian Club), governments and organized crime.
Crowley's Charisma
Many of his ideas had their roots in the minds of other deep thinkers, but no one executed them with more "energized enthusiasm." Sex Magician, "Wickedest Man on Earth," was he a spy and even possible double-agent, besides? Was Barbara Bush his love child? Was Hitler his doppelganger? Are L. Ron Hubbard and Tim Leary his legacy? Was he Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land?" Was he a culture-jamming crypto-anarchist? The first edge-celeb? Decide for yourself.
SIGMA 666
Crowley was a mercurial character. A Hermetic scholar and practitioner, he wrote "The Book of the Law," "Magick In Theory & Practice," "The Book of Lies"and commissioned his own tarot deck, "The Book of Thoth." Thoth, Hermes, and Mercury are all the same archetypal force or godform.
In ancient Egypt, Thoth was the deity of scribes or writers and magicians, and such a force seems to have blessed Crowley with its particular gifts. Hermes is also an androgyne, the original hermaphrodite, and Crowley wasn't beyond a bit of gender bending with his ceremonial psychodramas ~ he embodied both High Priest and Priestess. In Tarot, the corresponding trump of the Major Arcana is The Magician, The Juggler, The Magus...and he was all that, and more.
The Secret: To Dare, To Will, To Know, To Keep Silent
Intelligence is the key to understanding the world today. What spies have in common with magicians is an uncanny ability to connect the seemingly unconnected, to notice what goes on behind the scenes and to see through misdirection ~ it takes one to know one. Both have learned to synthesize and interprete data, how to pace and lead people (hypno-patsies) with rapport. The opening gambit of psychological warfare and mind control is flattery.
As trained observers, magicians and spies are adept at people-reading and keeping secrets; both are actors -- performers. Both are in secret societies that rely on craft and often use collaborators or confederates, and mentors. How much different is stealth and surveillance than a spell of invisibility? Each have their rules of engagement in the Great Work and the Great Game.
Clandestine Craft
Even some of the elements of tradecraft are the same. Both are cryptic, using encryptions and codes. Each has its own arcane language, symbols and rituals veiled from the profane. Remote Viewing or psychic spying is virtually identical with clairvoyance. Ceremonial psychodrama is played out in public, in personality cults and "ritual" murders.
Both use passwords and slogans for security. Cryptography is now ubiquitous. All domestic and foreign electronic communication is monitored by programs like Echelon. Spies and magicians both are cracking the Brain Code, the wetware of humanity.
Cryptocracy refers to a type of government where the real leaders are hidden. There may possibly be a fake government that appears to be in charge and this fake government might not know themselves that they are not in charge. It can also be used when referring to similar arrangements in organisations, orders, sects and cults.
<>Everywhere is Ground Zero
In military terms psychic operations are called psychotronics. Adversaries are rogue psi operatives, psiwarriors who battle like sorcerers. Psychic self defense employs thought disruption, shielding techniques, mind drain and energy manipulation. Psionics is scientific magic ~ magecraft, the product of extraordinary human potential. Precogs, like analysts, are attuned to the future.
Deep Cover
They understand viscerally that things are often not what they seem. Both are masters of disguise, the hidden environment, intelligence, espionage, and covert action. Both aim to 'tweak the timeline' with small perturbations that pump up to macroscopic results, setting up currents of intentional influence. They also tweak minds by controlling the environment. No one can resist what they cannot detect.
Both are Inside Outsiders, working at the fringes of the System. The "outsider" aesthetic is charged by a desire to break free from the contrivances of tradition. They look boldly outside the system and deep within themselves for inspiration that arises directly from Creative Source.
Both work sub rosa. This phrase comes from the Latin meaning 'under the rose' for confidentiality, black ops. It comes from the Masonic fraternal tradition. The rose is the emblem of Horus, God of Silence and Secrecy, Crowley's "Crowned & Conquering Child."
Wise Guys
The Magnum Opus, the Great Work of alchemy, is the utter transformation of oneself into a being of light, an energy body. Crowley lived larger than life. If his webpresence is any indicator, his legend and influence is bigger than ever. He may have just been lurking in the Astral Plane, waiting for this psychic rebirth. Perhaps, cutting through spacetime, he made a leap of faith into the electronic Astral Plane.
Aleister Crowley is a Conspiracy of One - the number of THE MAGUS.
THE MAGUS Arcana
The occult is one of the keys to world events; reality is also defined by politics. Like nature, history is cyclic. Drug companies are as powerful as banks and oil. Corporate feudalism has replaced democracy as the new elitist rule. Corporations compete with nation-states and international mafia-style crime rings.
It takes intelligence to be a magician, but a magician can also be an active agent of intelligence, figuratively and literally.The real question is, rather, how and why and who and what do these things serve?Restoring self and society is the essential wisdom of the Grail.But this quest can be coopted for narcissistic or pathological ends.The Secret Doctrine can introduce both positive and negative praeternatural forces.
Secret Missions
Who is served by the Holy Grail of occult knowledge? What is the Grail, and who does it serve?The secret is in the power and the power is in The Secret.It is a meaningless metaphor without the experiential process of self-transformation to back it up.That’s why it can’t be told.It is the panacea, a personal path of recovery for “what ails thee.”The Grail is a metaphor for connection to the mystical Source of everything, the ever-renewing Fount of all manifestation. All paths lead toward a personal journey of transformation and enlightenment, though not all journeys fulfill the total potential of creativity, compassion, engagement, and spirituality. On a classical “hero’s journey” like Parcival, when you find the Grail, and are called to its service, no knowledge remains hidden for long.Magick was the first transdisciplinarian occupation, drawing on all areas of knowledge.Before science divorced the occult arts it was called Natural Philosophy.
Trump Card
A Magus is a “worker of magic” which eludes rational definition.The Magus is both a symbol of enlightenment and deception (disinformation)-- just like the Tarot card, The Magician, is a card of duality: Wisdom and Folly.
"Now you see it; now you don't" is the forte of the illusionist, the juggler of realities, who is master of Orwellian double-think – holding the tension of the opposites.You alternate between faith and skepticism until you go beyond the ordinary boundaries of both - "slay each thought with its opposite." Myths present themselves as systems of antinomies, or opposites: heaven/hell, good/evil, life/death. The Magus lives at the Paradox.
Traditionally, the Magus is one who can demonstrate hands-on magic: healing, transformative rituals, metaphor therapy, alchemical transmutations, charging of talismans, spirit comm, etc. Magick works on the principle that man is a microcosm.
Arts Magian
A modern Magus is any person who completes the circuit between heaven and Earth, one who seeks to bring forth the divine 'gold' within her or himself.He or she is also a Mentor, an Initiator, divining and reading the signs and revealing deeper purpose and meaning in “the godgame.”
But that is how the outer world sees it. Every Magus has a foot in both worlds.Their inner life is mercurial, a complex psychic layer-cake of inner planes of transcendent experience where quantum leaps of consciousness are possible and messages are exchanged with the Great Unknown.
Metaphysician
Perception of what is real and what is not dims and vanishes in a whirlwind of synchronicities. Imagination is reality. Magicians understand the world we live in, or think we live in, is an illusion, a construct of our own perceptual apparatus and a malleable interpretation of our brains.
But the hyperdimensional gifts of the Spirit come at a price.The magician taps into, becomes one with, an essence that pop culture calls The Force.Photons and phonons are quantized modes of vibration. This subatomic vibration of Light and Sound is the enlivening force, which feeds creation and allegedly responds to focused intention.Information controls and patterns energy.
Hermetics is a Spiritual Technology
For masters of the Hermetic Arts, all magick is wrought through this impressionable ether – the Astral Light --a plenum of potential, using true properties of nature, it's laws, forces, and principles.Science now describes it as the scalar physics of subspace.The mage seeks to selectively establish an internal order out of this chaos, then externalize it, according to his vision.He is the soul guide who initiates the transformation process.
The Hermetica included works on magic, alchemy, astrology, healing, gnosis, theurgy, ritual and philosophy. Sympathetic magic contends that like substances sharing an essence can influence one another through resonance effects. Likewise the hypnotic and magnetic qualities of charismatic individuals can create rapport with others to influence them.
The Great Work The magnum opus is pre-eminently the creation of man by himself, that is, the full and complete conquest which he can make of his faculties and his future; it is pre-eminently the perfect emancipation of his will.The Magus: Intel or Intelligentsia?
Mind Phreak
Cosmic Intelligencer
Wizards and Spooks
Whip Me; Beat Me; Call Me Thelema
Reinventing the World
The Occult Revival
Tavistock Brainwashing Institute
OTO: Ordo Tempi Orientis
OTO as Intelligence Tool
Agent 666
Misdirection
No Man Is An Island
Course Correction
In Thelema the Great Work is viewed as being the individual quest for Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. Aleister Crowley, the self-styled prophet of Thelema, believed that the individual Great Work contributes ultimately to the Great Work of the Universe:
The first condition of membership of the A.'.A.'. is that one is sworn to identify one's own Great Work with that of raising mankind to higher levels, spiritually, and in every other way. (Magick Without Tears, ch. 9)
According to Thelemic philosophy, the accomplishment of the Great Work is the discovery of one's True Will the practitioner's Secret Self Hadit in the universe of infinite possibilities Nuit.
According to Thelemic doctrine, it may take many incarnations for one to achieve this Supreme Goal. Each Thelemite finds for himself or herself a unique method for accomplishing the Great Work. Crowley cautions against the "lust of result" for such desire reveals limitations which hinder one's development.
Crowley's occult system initially focuses on attaining the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, which will (by assumption) help the practitioner to achieve his or her True Will. The system does not give any absolute rule for reaching this point, nor any certain way to test another person's Holy Guardian Angel.
Professor William James, in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," has well classified religion as the "once-born" and the "twice-born"; but the religion now proclaimed in Liber Legis harmonizes these by transcending them. There is no attempt to get rid of death by denying it, as among the once-born; nor to accept death as the gate of a new life, as among the twice-born. With the A.'. A.'. life and death are equally incidents in a career, very much like day and night in the history of a planet. But, to pursue the simile, we regard this planet from afar. A Brother of A.'. A.'. looks at (what another person would call) "himself", as one --- or, rather, some --- among a group of phenomena. He is that "nothing" whose consciousness is in one sense the universe considered as a single phenomenon in time and space, and in another sense is the negation of that consciousness. The body and mind of the man are only important (if at all) as the telescope of the astronomer to him. If the telescope were destroyed it would make no appreciable difference to the Universe which that telescope reveals.
*******
.....Who makes a good spy or a good liar?
I don’t think there’s any one answer to that. Being a good actor, being a good poker player. Being a good con man. Con men are people who are sociopathic, who do not feel remorse, and who are very attuned, strangely, to other people and can read them very well. If I know what you really want to hear and what is in your heart of hearts, your fondest desire, because I’m good at reading you and I’m street-smart about assessing you, then I can feed you what you want to hear. A good con man does that. A good magician does that. You also have to have a good memory.....(Discover Magazine)
MIND PHREAK Magick Metaprograms
This power card also represents the fine line dividing white magic from black magic, toxic or malignant black ops. Sensory deprivation, loss of equilibrium, confusion techniques, social isolation, physiological stress, severe shock and ceremonial terror tactics were the forerunners of brainwashing techniques.
This is the realm of psychic attack and psychic self defense, of sorcerers stealthily vying with one another for power. Weaponized ESP can affect the body, mind and soul of one's opponent. But it can boomerang back on the sender 3-fold, according to the cautionary prescription.
Undercover
Power can be used in either a self-serving manner, or one in service to the All. In order for The Magus to achieve his aims, there must be constant awareness and self-examination, pressing on and exploring one’s boundaries, breaking through into the boundless realms.
This is also the Trump of discernment.The Magus can discriminate between various realities and fantasies, between various points of view, without buying into any belief system, literally.The sorcerer orchestrates and works within others’ belief systems.
By molding worldviews, a magician creates the perception, manipulates and defines the perceived reality, creates the structure for self-organizing transformation.He believes no metanarratives but orchestrates them for others.He is an opportunistic paradigm shifter, shapeshifter, chameleon, trickster.If you assume a role does that make it real?If not, fake it till you make it.Better to be an inspired lunatic than uninspired, or so Crowley’s arc implies.
Legacy
Another magnetic mercurial personality, Tim Leary, took notes on Crowley's cult of personality. Leary admitted Crowley inspired him and bootstrapped his book 'The Game of Life' (Part 4 of his Future-History Series) from the scientific-occult philosophy of Aleister Crowley and Tarot.He understood Crowley was on a similar path, only using different language. He called Crowley an 'Agent of Evolution.'
LSD rascal-guru Timothy Leary was a Crowley enthusiast. He said: “I’ve been an admirer of Aleister Crowley. I think that I’m carrying on much of the work that he started over a hundred years ago … He was in favor of finding yourself, and ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’ under love. It was a very powerful statement. I’m sorry he isn’t around now to appreciate the glories he started.” (Late Night America, Public Broadcasting Network, cited by Hells Bells, Reel to Real Ministries). Leary also had his own relationship with both the mystic arts and the CIA. One of his famous early books was called HIGH PRIEST. He was called "the Pope of Dope.". Both fearlessly explored the outer limits of human potential. Psychologists - essentially psychic engineers - exert both local and remote control on human minds and behavior. see http://espionagecentral.50megs.com
The occult is one of the keys to world events; reality is also defined by politics. Like nature, history is cyclic. Drug companies are as powerful as banks and oil. Corporate feudalism has replaced democracy as the new elitist rule. Corporations compete with nation-states and international mafia-style crime rings.
It takes intelligence to be a magician, but a magician can also be an active agent of intelligence, figuratively and literally.The real question is, rather, how and why and who and what do these things serve?Restoring self and society is the essential wisdom of the Grail.But this quest can be coopted for narcissistic or pathological ends.The Secret Doctrine can introduce both positive and negative praeternatural forces.
Secret Missions
Who is served by the Holy Grail of occult knowledge? What is the Grail, and who does it serve?The secret is in the power and the power is in The Secret.It is a meaningless metaphor without the experiential process of self-transformation to back it up.That’s why it can’t be told.It is the panacea, a personal path of recovery for “what ails thee.”The Grail is a metaphor for connection to the mystical Source of everything, the ever-renewing Fount of all manifestation. All paths lead toward a personal journey of transformation and enlightenment, though not all journeys fulfill the total potential of creativity, compassion, engagement, and spirituality. On a classical “hero’s journey” like Parcival, when you find the Grail, and are called to its service, no knowledge remains hidden for long.Magick was the first transdisciplinarian occupation, drawing on all areas of knowledge.Before science divorced the occult arts it was called Natural Philosophy.
Trump Card
A Magus is a “worker of magic” which eludes rational definition.The Magus is both a symbol of enlightenment and deception (disinformation)-- just like the Tarot card, The Magician, is a card of duality: Wisdom and Folly.
"Now you see it; now you don't" is the forte of the illusionist, the juggler of realities, who is master of Orwellian double-think – holding the tension of the opposites.You alternate between faith and skepticism until you go beyond the ordinary boundaries of both - "slay each thought with its opposite." Myths present themselves as systems of antinomies, or opposites: heaven/hell, good/evil, life/death. The Magus lives at the Paradox.
Traditionally, the Magus is one who can demonstrate hands-on magic: healing, transformative rituals, metaphor therapy, alchemical transmutations, charging of talismans, spirit comm, etc. Magick works on the principle that man is a microcosm.
Arts Magian
A modern Magus is any person who completes the circuit between heaven and Earth, one who seeks to bring forth the divine 'gold' within her or himself.He or she is also a Mentor, an Initiator, divining and reading the signs and revealing deeper purpose and meaning in “the godgame.”
But that is how the outer world sees it. Every Magus has a foot in both worlds.Their inner life is mercurial, a complex psychic layer-cake of inner planes of transcendent experience where quantum leaps of consciousness are possible and messages are exchanged with the Great Unknown.
Metaphysician
Perception of what is real and what is not dims and vanishes in a whirlwind of synchronicities. Imagination is reality. Magicians understand the world we live in, or think we live in, is an illusion, a construct of our own perceptual apparatus and a malleable interpretation of our brains.
But the hyperdimensional gifts of the Spirit come at a price.The magician taps into, becomes one with, an essence that pop culture calls The Force.Photons and phonons are quantized modes of vibration. This subatomic vibration of Light and Sound is the enlivening force, which feeds creation and allegedly responds to focused intention.Information controls and patterns energy.
Hermetics is a Spiritual Technology
For masters of the Hermetic Arts, all magick is wrought through this impressionable ether – the Astral Light --a plenum of potential, using true properties of nature, it's laws, forces, and principles.Science now describes it as the scalar physics of subspace.The mage seeks to selectively establish an internal order out of this chaos, then externalize it, according to his vision.He is the soul guide who initiates the transformation process.
The Hermetica included works on magic, alchemy, astrology, healing, gnosis, theurgy, ritual and philosophy. Sympathetic magic contends that like substances sharing an essence can influence one another through resonance effects. Likewise the hypnotic and magnetic qualities of charismatic individuals can create rapport with others to influence them.
The Great Work The magnum opus is pre-eminently the creation of man by himself, that is, the full and complete conquest which he can make of his faculties and his future; it is pre-eminently the perfect emancipation of his will.The Magus: Intel or Intelligentsia?
Mind Phreak
Cosmic Intelligencer
Wizards and Spooks
Whip Me; Beat Me; Call Me Thelema
Reinventing the World
The Occult Revival
Tavistock Brainwashing Institute
OTO: Ordo Tempi Orientis
OTO as Intelligence Tool
Agent 666
Misdirection
No Man Is An Island
Course Correction
In Thelema the Great Work is viewed as being the individual quest for Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. Aleister Crowley, the self-styled prophet of Thelema, believed that the individual Great Work contributes ultimately to the Great Work of the Universe:
The first condition of membership of the A.'.A.'. is that one is sworn to identify one's own Great Work with that of raising mankind to higher levels, spiritually, and in every other way. (Magick Without Tears, ch. 9)
According to Thelemic philosophy, the accomplishment of the Great Work is the discovery of one's True Will the practitioner's Secret Self Hadit in the universe of infinite possibilities Nuit.
According to Thelemic doctrine, it may take many incarnations for one to achieve this Supreme Goal. Each Thelemite finds for himself or herself a unique method for accomplishing the Great Work. Crowley cautions against the "lust of result" for such desire reveals limitations which hinder one's development.
Crowley's occult system initially focuses on attaining the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, which will (by assumption) help the practitioner to achieve his or her True Will. The system does not give any absolute rule for reaching this point, nor any certain way to test another person's Holy Guardian Angel.
Professor William James, in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," has well classified religion as the "once-born" and the "twice-born"; but the religion now proclaimed in Liber Legis harmonizes these by transcending them. There is no attempt to get rid of death by denying it, as among the once-born; nor to accept death as the gate of a new life, as among the twice-born. With the A.'. A.'. life and death are equally incidents in a career, very much like day and night in the history of a planet. But, to pursue the simile, we regard this planet from afar. A Brother of A.'. A.'. looks at (what another person would call) "himself", as one --- or, rather, some --- among a group of phenomena. He is that "nothing" whose consciousness is in one sense the universe considered as a single phenomenon in time and space, and in another sense is the negation of that consciousness. The body and mind of the man are only important (if at all) as the telescope of the astronomer to him. If the telescope were destroyed it would make no appreciable difference to the Universe which that telescope reveals.
*******
.....Who makes a good spy or a good liar?
I don’t think there’s any one answer to that. Being a good actor, being a good poker player. Being a good con man. Con men are people who are sociopathic, who do not feel remorse, and who are very attuned, strangely, to other people and can read them very well. If I know what you really want to hear and what is in your heart of hearts, your fondest desire, because I’m good at reading you and I’m street-smart about assessing you, then I can feed you what you want to hear. A good con man does that. A good magician does that. You also have to have a good memory.....(Discover Magazine)
MIND PHREAK Magick Metaprograms
This power card also represents the fine line dividing white magic from black magic, toxic or malignant black ops. Sensory deprivation, loss of equilibrium, confusion techniques, social isolation, physiological stress, severe shock and ceremonial terror tactics were the forerunners of brainwashing techniques.
This is the realm of psychic attack and psychic self defense, of sorcerers stealthily vying with one another for power. Weaponized ESP can affect the body, mind and soul of one's opponent. But it can boomerang back on the sender 3-fold, according to the cautionary prescription.
Undercover
Power can be used in either a self-serving manner, or one in service to the All. In order for The Magus to achieve his aims, there must be constant awareness and self-examination, pressing on and exploring one’s boundaries, breaking through into the boundless realms.
This is also the Trump of discernment.The Magus can discriminate between various realities and fantasies, between various points of view, without buying into any belief system, literally.The sorcerer orchestrates and works within others’ belief systems.
By molding worldviews, a magician creates the perception, manipulates and defines the perceived reality, creates the structure for self-organizing transformation.He believes no metanarratives but orchestrates them for others.He is an opportunistic paradigm shifter, shapeshifter, chameleon, trickster.If you assume a role does that make it real?If not, fake it till you make it.Better to be an inspired lunatic than uninspired, or so Crowley’s arc implies.
Legacy
Another magnetic mercurial personality, Tim Leary, took notes on Crowley's cult of personality. Leary admitted Crowley inspired him and bootstrapped his book 'The Game of Life' (Part 4 of his Future-History Series) from the scientific-occult philosophy of Aleister Crowley and Tarot.He understood Crowley was on a similar path, only using different language. He called Crowley an 'Agent of Evolution.'
LSD rascal-guru Timothy Leary was a Crowley enthusiast. He said: “I’ve been an admirer of Aleister Crowley. I think that I’m carrying on much of the work that he started over a hundred years ago … He was in favor of finding yourself, and ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’ under love. It was a very powerful statement. I’m sorry he isn’t around now to appreciate the glories he started.” (Late Night America, Public Broadcasting Network, cited by Hells Bells, Reel to Real Ministries). Leary also had his own relationship with both the mystic arts and the CIA. One of his famous early books was called HIGH PRIEST. He was called "the Pope of Dope.". Both fearlessly explored the outer limits of human potential. Psychologists - essentially psychic engineers - exert both local and remote control on human minds and behavior. see http://espionagecentral.50megs.com
THE OCCULT GRAIL
The occult is one of the keys to world events; reality is also defined by politics. It takes intelligence to be a magician, but a magician can also be an active agent of intelligence, figuratively and literally. The real question is, rather, how and why and who and what do these things serve? Restoring self and society is the essential wisdom of the Grail. But this quest can be coopted for narcissistic or pathological ends. The Secret Doctrine can introduce both positive and negative praeternatural forces.
Who is served by the Holy Grail of occult knowledge? What is the Grail, and who does it serve? The secret is in the power and the power is in The Secret. It is a meaningless metaphor without the experiential process of self-transformation to back it up. It is the panacea, a personal path of recovery for “what ails thee.” The Grail is a metaphor for connection to the mystical Source of everything, the ever-renewing Fountain of all manifestation.
All paths lead toward a personal journey of transformation and enlightenment, though not all journeys fulfill the total potential of creativity, compassion, engagement, and spirituality. On a classical “hero’s journey” like Parcival, when you find the Grail, and are called to its service, no knowledge remains hidden for long, for magick was the first transdisciplinarian occupation, drawing on all areas of knowledge. Before science divorced the occult arts it was called Natural Philosophy.
A Magus is a “worker of magic” which eludes rational definition. The Magus is both a symbol of enlightenment and deception (disinformation)-- just like the Tarot card, The Magician, is a card of duality: Wisdom and Folly."Now you see it; now you don't" is the forte of the illusionist, the juggler of realities, who is master of Orwellian double-think – holding the tension of the opposites. Myths present themselves as systems of antinomies, or opposites: heaven/hell, good/evil, life/death.
Traditionally, the Magus is one who can demonstrate hands-on magic: healing, transformative rituals, metaphor therapy, alchemical transmutations, charging of talismans, spirit comm, etc. Magick works on the principle that man is a microcosm.
A modern Magus is any person who completes the circuit between heaven and Earth, one who seeks to bring forth the divine 'gold' within her or himself.He or she is also a Mentor, an Initiator, reading the signs and revealing deeper purpose and meaning in “the godgame.”
But that is how the outer world sees it. Every Magus has a foot in both worlds.Their inner life is mercurial, a complex psychic layer-cake of inner planes of transcendent experience where quantum leaps of consciousness are possible and messages are exchanged with the Great Unknown.
Perception of what is real and what is not dims and vanishes in a whirlwind of synchronicities. Imagination is reality. Magicians understand the world we live in, or think we live in, is an illusion, a construct of our own perceptual apparatus and a malleable interpretation of our brains.
But the hyperdimensional gifts of the Spirit come at a price.The magician taps into, becomes one with, an essence that pop culture calls The Force.It's subatomic vibration of Light and Sound is the enlivening force, which feeds creation and allegedly responds to focused intention.Information controls and patterns energy.
For masters of the Hermetic Arts, all magick is wrought through this impressionable ether, a plenum of potential, using true properties of nature, it's laws, forces, and principles.The mage seeks to selectively establish an internal order out of this chaos, then externalize it, according to his vision.He is the soul guide who initiates the transformation process.
The Hermetica included works on magic, alchemy, astrology, healing, gnosis, theurgy, ritual and philosophy. Sympathetic magic contends that like substances sharing an essence can influence one another through resonance effects. Likewise the hypnotic and magnetic qualities of charismatic individuals can create rapport with others to influence them.
This power card also represents the fine line dividing white magic from black magic, toxic or malignant black ops. Power can be used in either a self-serving manner, or one in service to the All. In order for The Magus to achieve his aims, there must be constant awareness and self-examination, pressing on and exploring one’s boundaries, breaking through into the boundless realms.
This is also the Trump of discernment.The Magus can discriminate between various realities and fantasies, between various points of view, without buying into any belief system, literally.The sorcerer orchestrates and works within others’ belief systems.
By molding worldviews, a magician creates the perception, manipulates and defines the perceived reality, creates the structure for self-organizing transformation.He believes no meta-narratives but orchestrates them for others.He is an opportunistic paradigm shifter, shapeshifter, chameleon, trickster.
If you assume a role does that make it real?
If not, fake it till you make it.
Better to be an inspired lunatic than uninspired, or so Crowley’s arc implies.
Who is served by the Holy Grail of occult knowledge? What is the Grail, and who does it serve? The secret is in the power and the power is in The Secret. It is a meaningless metaphor without the experiential process of self-transformation to back it up. It is the panacea, a personal path of recovery for “what ails thee.” The Grail is a metaphor for connection to the mystical Source of everything, the ever-renewing Fountain of all manifestation.
All paths lead toward a personal journey of transformation and enlightenment, though not all journeys fulfill the total potential of creativity, compassion, engagement, and spirituality. On a classical “hero’s journey” like Parcival, when you find the Grail, and are called to its service, no knowledge remains hidden for long, for magick was the first transdisciplinarian occupation, drawing on all areas of knowledge. Before science divorced the occult arts it was called Natural Philosophy.
A Magus is a “worker of magic” which eludes rational definition. The Magus is both a symbol of enlightenment and deception (disinformation)-- just like the Tarot card, The Magician, is a card of duality: Wisdom and Folly."Now you see it; now you don't" is the forte of the illusionist, the juggler of realities, who is master of Orwellian double-think – holding the tension of the opposites. Myths present themselves as systems of antinomies, or opposites: heaven/hell, good/evil, life/death.
Traditionally, the Magus is one who can demonstrate hands-on magic: healing, transformative rituals, metaphor therapy, alchemical transmutations, charging of talismans, spirit comm, etc. Magick works on the principle that man is a microcosm.
A modern Magus is any person who completes the circuit between heaven and Earth, one who seeks to bring forth the divine 'gold' within her or himself.He or she is also a Mentor, an Initiator, reading the signs and revealing deeper purpose and meaning in “the godgame.”
But that is how the outer world sees it. Every Magus has a foot in both worlds.Their inner life is mercurial, a complex psychic layer-cake of inner planes of transcendent experience where quantum leaps of consciousness are possible and messages are exchanged with the Great Unknown.
Perception of what is real and what is not dims and vanishes in a whirlwind of synchronicities. Imagination is reality. Magicians understand the world we live in, or think we live in, is an illusion, a construct of our own perceptual apparatus and a malleable interpretation of our brains.
But the hyperdimensional gifts of the Spirit come at a price.The magician taps into, becomes one with, an essence that pop culture calls The Force.It's subatomic vibration of Light and Sound is the enlivening force, which feeds creation and allegedly responds to focused intention.Information controls and patterns energy.
For masters of the Hermetic Arts, all magick is wrought through this impressionable ether, a plenum of potential, using true properties of nature, it's laws, forces, and principles.The mage seeks to selectively establish an internal order out of this chaos, then externalize it, according to his vision.He is the soul guide who initiates the transformation process.
The Hermetica included works on magic, alchemy, astrology, healing, gnosis, theurgy, ritual and philosophy. Sympathetic magic contends that like substances sharing an essence can influence one another through resonance effects. Likewise the hypnotic and magnetic qualities of charismatic individuals can create rapport with others to influence them.
This power card also represents the fine line dividing white magic from black magic, toxic or malignant black ops. Power can be used in either a self-serving manner, or one in service to the All. In order for The Magus to achieve his aims, there must be constant awareness and self-examination, pressing on and exploring one’s boundaries, breaking through into the boundless realms.
This is also the Trump of discernment.The Magus can discriminate between various realities and fantasies, between various points of view, without buying into any belief system, literally.The sorcerer orchestrates and works within others’ belief systems.
By molding worldviews, a magician creates the perception, manipulates and defines the perceived reality, creates the structure for self-organizing transformation.He believes no meta-narratives but orchestrates them for others.He is an opportunistic paradigm shifter, shapeshifter, chameleon, trickster.
If you assume a role does that make it real?
If not, fake it till you make it.
Better to be an inspired lunatic than uninspired, or so Crowley’s arc implies.
Mercurial Espionage
Gathering intelligence is carried out under a cloak of secrecy and occultists are adept at keeping their activities concealed from sight. Like secret agents they also use codes, symbols and cryptograms to hide information from outsiders. Occultists and intelligence officers are similar in many ways, as both inhabit a shadowy underworld of secrets, deception and disinformation. It is therefore not unusual that often these two professions have shared the same members.
The Mysterious Dr Dee
One of the famous occultists he is known to have recruited was Queen Elizabeth’s court astrologer and the magical architect of the British Empire, the Welsh magician Dr John Dee. Walsingham was involved in the machinations for the proposed marriage of the Duc d’Anjou and Elizabeth. At the spy master’s personal recommendation, the queen dispatched Dee to France with orders to report back on the progress of the marriage negotiations. The magus travelled to the Duchy of Lorraine and drew up the birth charts of both the Duc and his brother, who was also regarded as a possible husband for the English monarch. Dr Dee, probably influenced by Walsingham, diplomatically reported back to London that the stars suggested a political alliance would be far wiser than matrimony and the queen took his advice.
In 1573 Sir Francis returned to London and became a privy councillor. This placed him at the heart of government and he proceeded to set up what amounted to the first organised foreign espionage service to operate from England. In 1566 he had put in place a pan-European network of spies extending as far to the east as Turkey and Russia, where Dr Dee reported on the goings-on at the Tsar’s court. This network mostly gathered intelligence on the military activities of the Spanish, who were England’s primary enemies at this time. Walsingham was also responsible for foiling the Catholic plot whose exposure led to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Using Dr Dee’s psychic powers, he was apparently able to discover that the plotters were passing secret messages to the imprisoned Scottish queen hidden in bottles of wine.
While travelling in Europe in 1562, Dr Dee had come across a book written by Abbot Trimethus of Spanhiem (1462-1516). This was a guide to writing ciphers and secret codes for magical purposes and Dee informed Sir William Cecil about his discovery. On his return to England Dr Dee adapted the abbot’s cryptography and gave it to Sir Francis Walsingham for use by his secret agents. He also passed on the political and military intelligence he had acquired during his travels across Europe. It has been alleged that Dee used the famous Enochian magical alphabet as a code to disguise this information. If he had been arrested his captors would not have understood it and dismissed it as nonsense.
In 1587 Dee even claimed he had received a spirit message from one of his angelic contacts concerning a threat to the English Fleet. The message said that a group of disguised Frenchmen working for the Spaniards was secretly visiting the Forest of Dean. The forest was the centre for English ship-building and the French agents planned to bribe disloyal foresters to burn it down. Dr Dee sent his supernatural intelligence to Walsingham and the saboteurs, who were masquerading as squatters, were arrested.
Information supplied to Sir Francis Walsingham from his European spy network convinced him that a Spanish armada would be launched against England in 1588. He asked Dee to use his knowledge of astrology to calculate the weather prospects for an invasion. The magus told him there would an impending disaster in Europe caused by a devastating storm. When news of this prophecy was leaked and reached Spain, naval recruitment fell and there were desertions of sailors from the Spanish Fleet. In Lisbon an astrologer who repeated the prediction was charged with spreading false information. In an act of psychological warfare, Dr Dee also informed Emperor Rudolf of Bohemia (the modern Czech Republic) and King Stephen of Poland that the predicted storm would “cause the fall of a mighty empire.” Rudolf, who was an occultist and Dee’s patron when he stayed in Bohemia, passed on the warning to the Spanish ambassador.
It is a fact that in 1588 a great storm did scatter the ships of the Spanish Armada in the English Channel and aided the English victory. This metrological event was popularly credited to a magical ritual performed by the buccaneer Sir Francis Drake on the cliffs at Plymouth. Superstitious people believed Drake was a wizard and sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for success over the Spanish. It is claimed that he also organised several covens of witches to work magically to raise the storm and prevent the invasion. Meanwhile, as a result of scrying in his shewstone or crystal, Dr Dee saw a symbolic vision of a castle with its drawbridge drawn up (England) and the image of the elemental king of fire. As a result he urged the Navy to employ fire-ships against the Armada and they did so with good results.
After Sir Francis Walsingham’s death in 1590, and the ascension to the English throne of the Scottish king James, Dr John Dee fell into royal disfavour. The new king had an unhealthy obsession with witchcraft and his early reign was dominated by this preoccupation. It led him to employ the Secret Service in his own personal vendetta against suspected witches. James I ordered its agents to hunt down alleged practitioners of witchcraft and expose their alleged plots against the monarchy. One of those involved was the Earl of Bothwell, accused of high treason for organising a coven of Scottish witches to work magic against the king in an attempt to seize the throne. To assist his secret agents in their new witch-hunting activities, King James persuaded Parliament in 1604 to pass a new and stronger Witchcraft Act to deal with the problem. The Bill was rushed through and it was made law within three months.
Rudolf Hess & the British Occult Connection
During World War II British Intelligence invited many occultists into its ranks because it needed their specialist knowledge and skills. The assistant director of Naval Intelligence during the war was Lt. Commander Ian Fleming RN, best known later as a thriller writer and the creator of the famous fictional spy James Bond 007. Fleming was also interested in astrology and numerology and he was a friend of the notorious magician Aleister Crowley, who had worked for MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service) during World War I and in the 1920s and 1930s spying on Germans with occult interests (see ‘The Magus Was A Spy’ by Dr Richard Spence in New Dawn No. 105, November-December 2007).
Ian Fleming conceived an audacious plan to lure a high-ranking member of the German government into defecting to Britain so as to provide a morale-boosting propaganda coup. This idea had been inspired by a novel written by Fleming’s brother, Peter, called Flying Visit (Jonathan Cape 1940). Peter Fleming was a journalist and also worked for both MI5 (the Security Service) and the propaganda section of the clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE). The novel imagined that Hitler’s plane crash-landed in England and he was captured. The Reichminister and deputy fuehrer himself, Rudolf Hess, was chosen as a suitable candidate for the actual plot. This was because he was a supporter of peace with Britain and was also under the influence of astrologers and occultists. It was believed this could be used against him.
Commander Fleming recreated The Link, a defunct Anglo-German friendship society of the 1930s that had a wealthy membership of Nazi sympathisers drawn from the British Establishment. Ironically, or perhaps coincidentally, The Link had been founded by Admiral Sir Barry Domville, an ex-director of the Naval Intelligence Department (NID), after he retired in 1930. Domville was arrested and interned in May 1940 because MI5 believed he was plotting a fascist coup d’etat supported by aristocratic peacemongers. The admiral was a friend of Major-General J.F.C. ‘Boney’ Fuller CBE, a famous military analyst who designed the tactics for the first tank battle in World War I. Fuller also invented the concept of blitzkrieg used so successfully in World War II by the German Panzers. Fuller was an open admirer of Hitler (he attended the fuehrer’s 50th birthday party in 1939), a leading member of Sir Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF), a friend of Ian Fleming and a leading disciple of Aleister Crowley. In the 1930s Fuller formed the extreme-right wing Nordic League (aka the White Knights of Britain), allegedly established by Nazi agents. However in the 1950s he was a member of a MI6 supported group of Russian émigrés engaged in anti-communist propaganda. It has been suggested that Fuller was not interned during the war with other leading fascists such as Mosley and Domville because he was a MI6 double-agent.
Ian Fleming’s idea was to persuade the German High Command in Berlin, and especially Rudolf Hess, that when war broke out The Link had not disbanded but had gone underground. It had allegedly regrouped and recruited even more prominent pro-Nazi members in the British Establishment including aristocrats and royalty. These were represented by the NID as influential people with the political muscle to overthrow prime minister Winston Churchill’s national wartime government, call a ceasefire and agree to a peace treaty with Germany. Under its terms Britain would keep control of its Empire and Germany would have free reign in occupied Europe. The Nazis also hoped that British troops would be sent to fight alongside the German Wehrmacht and the SS against the Soviet Union in a joint anti-communist crusade.
Hitler did not want to invade and occupy Britain. Instead he would have preferred to negotiate a treaty with a sympathetic new government in London. It has been suggested that the only reason the fuehrer abandoned Operation Sea Lion – the proposed invasion of Southern England – and instead invaded the Soviet Union was to force Churchill to accept peace terms. If the Red Army had been defeated Britain would truly have been standing alone, as Hitler did not believe the Americans had the political will to enter the war. Unfortunately he underestimated the ability and resolve of the Soviets to defend their motherland and also the clandestine support that the US was already offering Great Britain.
The NID plot to ensnare Rudolf Hess used bogus astrological predictions combined with political intelligence. Hess was persuaded that a Scottish aristocrat, the Duke of Hamilton, was willing to negotiate peace terms on behalf of the influential people at the top of British society who wanted to end the war. The duke had met Hess at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 and the deputy fuehrer for some reason thought he was a member of the surviving Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Ian Fleming commissioned an astrologer to produce a faked astrological forecast indicating that 10 May 1941 would be a propitious date for Rudolf Hess to fly to Scotland and meet secretly with the Duke of Hamilton and other members of the so-called British ‘peace party’. Hess’ occult advisors had also told him there would be an unusual planetary conjunction on 10 May. On that day six planets would be aligned in the zodiac sign of Taurus and conjoined to the full moon. At the same time Hitler’s chart showed ‘malefic’ astrological aspects. Hess saw himself in the role of a messianic hero saving Germany from possible future defeat by making peace with the British. All the (false) reports reaching the deputy fuehrer about the political situation in England and the astrological aspects convinced him that his mission would be a success.
Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland on 10 May 1941 in the firm belief that on landing he would be met by the Duke of Hamilton and the Duke of Kent and whisked off to London for a private audience with King George VI. He had been convinced by the misinformation fed to him by British Intelligence that these three men represented a genuine peace movement capable of removing the warmonger Churchill and agreeing to German terms. Hess had also previously met the Duke of Windsor when he had visited Berlin before the war. As a result Hess was persuaded that some members of the German-descended royal family were sympathetic to Nazism. Certainly the Duke of Saxo-Coburg, formerly Prince Charles Edward, a grandson of Queen Victoria and a close friend of the Duke of Windsor, had willingly embraced Nazism. In fact Hitler had appointed him as the head of the German branch of the Red Cross that was responsible for exterminating the mentally sick and physically disabled.
Unfortunately instead of meeting pro-Nazi aristocrats and royals when he landed, Hess was captured by a local farmer and a Home Guard unit. They handed him over to the police and he was transferred to London to be interrogated by MI5. Unfortunately the British government completely mishandled the capture of Hess. It has been suggested that Churchill believed the subterfuge by the NID and SIS suggesting leading members of the British Establishment might be pro-German may have been based on fact. For that reason the government did not capitalise on Hess’ ‘peace mission’. The German High Command had also disowned him and said that his flight had been unauthorised. They also suggested that Hess might be insane so his value for propaganda purposes was undermined and diminished.
Rudolf Hess’ apparent defection caused widespread panic in Berlin concerning the influence of occultism on the Nazi Party. The Gestapo immediately launched Operation Aktion Hess. On the direct orders of Hitler, they rounded up hundreds of occultists, psychics and astrologers, including Hess’s leading occult advisor Ernst Schulte-Strathaus. In June 1941 a decree was issued banning all public performances of clairvoyance, astrology, fortune-telling or telepathy. Anybody associated with Hess and his esoteric interests was thrown into concentration camps and occult secret societies were closed down. Because of staff shortages in the Gestapo, officers from the Naval Intelligence Service were drafted in to interrogate some of the arrested psychics. It has been claimed that they recruited some of them for secret operations using dowsing on maps with pendulums to hunt down British submarines.
It has also been claimed that Ian Fleming and the NID was involved in a plot to silence the Spiritualist medium Helen Duncan, the penultimate person to be charged under the old Witchcraft Act of 1736. She was arrested in 1944 after holding a séance during which allegedly the spirit of a dead sailor from the sinking of the HMS Bolham physically manifested. As the news of the loss had not been publicly released, and the Admiralty was keeping it secret for morale purposes, Duncan became a target for the security services. She and other psychics were regarded as a serious threat to national security and they became the object of a MI5/NID dirty tricks operation to silence leaks. This suggests that the Intelligence Services actually believed these mediums had genuine powers. Duncan’s arrest and subsequent trial, which in fact was condemned by Winston Churchill as a waste of public funds, was allegedly meant to deter other mediums. The War Office was paranoid that military secrets about the forthcoming D-Day landings in Normandy would be revealed at séances and become public knowledge or passed to the Germans.
Espionage and Occultism:
The True Nature of Secret Societies
Espionage and Occultism:
The True Nature of Secret Societies
editorial by Vincent Bridges
For as long as the hairless, semi-domesticated Killer Ape has been making war on the tribe next door, there has been espionage; spying, sabotage and subversion, intrigue, double dealing and power grabs, all of which can be considered as varieties of espionage. In their original sense, these activities were simply forms of politics, a sort of tertiary boundary layer that served as social and political sensory organs. But the skin that touches can also be the hand that grips, and soon after humans stopped roaming and began to build villages and farms, covert, or hidden, forms of political feedback, espionage, settled firmly into the mode of control apparatus.
As such, it shifted from a political to a religious framework. Information gathering and maintaining cultural superiority became the responsibility of the great religious organizations and priesthoods. By the time of the late Roman Empire, when Church and State had effectively merged, espionage, in the official and political sense, was a function of the Church. Due to its monopoly on literacy, the Church remained in this position right up to the Renaissance.
However, it was that same monopoly that allowed another form of espionage to survive. The pagan, and therefore oral, traditions survived in various forms, and this oral tradition was supplanted by a curious phenomenon, the traveler’s tale. Ideas and heresies traveled along this tall tale highway as pilgrims and healers and mystics traveled from Spain to Russia, Jerusalem to Norway. Along with them moved tinkers and peddlers, adventurers and freebooters, the restless and the dispossessed, and eventually all of these groups would form provisional “tribes” and guilds. By the late Middle Ages, this underworld had become a powerful and authentic alternative culture that viewed espionage, information collecting, as a kind of commodity trading. Knowledge of stone working, soldiering or counterfeiting was proprietary to the group or tribe, tricks of the trade we might say, but available to the official culture for its use.
The Church began to lose its real power with the Black Death of the late 14th century, and within a century, a cultural Renaissance was underway. Part of that Renaissance was the emergence of what had been sub-culture in the medieval world into the official high culture. The sections of the medieval underworld that underwent the greatest transformation were occultism and espionage. The rulers of the new states that were forming in Italy and Western Europe were more than happy to make use of both groups, no matter what the increasingly discredited Church thought about it.
As the Reformation and Counter-Reformation battered Europe in the 16th century the golden age of occultism and espionage began. With Europe split along ideological lines, north and east Protestant, west and south Catholic, the opportunities for both professional spies and revolutionary minded occultists seemed limitless. Elizabeth I and Phillip II of Spain went toe to toe over the whole issue of Protestant versus Catholic, culminating in 1588’s Armada, and achieved a draw. But, far to the east, the junior branch of the Hapsburg clan, Rudolph II, followed an entirely different path, one of tolerance and humanism, flavored of course by a large dollop of mysticism. We can think of these two styles, conflict versus conciliation, and power centers/conflict points, as the poles or axis of the age, around which swirled both the best of the new “magi” and the rising profession of spy.
This golden age of espionage and occultism is the true origin point of our modern “secret societies.” The Rosicrucian movement of the early 17th century grew at least in part from Dr. John Dee’s apocalyptic missionary work in the 1580s, who, as Elizabeth I’s 007, is a prime example of the era’s overlap of occultism and espionage. These secret societies, instead of being either chivalric or guild based, were in fact more like a loose network of co-conspirators. Where they did collect into localized groups, they tended to form the early scientific organizations, the Royal Societies of England and France.
Between Dee and Bruno’s Hermetic Revolution of the late 16th century and the end of the religious wars in the late 17th century, new and very radical political ideas emerged. Democracy had been demonstrated when the people of England killed their King rather than go back to Catholicism; it wasn’t pleasant but it showed where the power actually lay in the new post Renaissance world. This split however led directly to the next round of “secret societies.”
Freemasonry, which had nothing to do with the stone mason’s guild of the Middle Ages, formed as a way to promote several different, and sometimes conflicting, political agendas. One of these was the preservation and restoration of the Stuart dynasty to the throne of England, while another was the attainment of a true democratic state, free from both kings and Church. These agendas were held together with the solid glue of occultism.
The ideals of these secret societies, derived ultimately from the occult humanism of the Renaissance, contributed to real revolutions, in America and France in the late 18th century. In the early 20th century, the swirl of occultism and espionage around the last Czar and his family produced a spontaneous revolution and the end of the Romanov dynasty. And of course, Hitlerian Germany was a product of the same overlapping confluence of occult concepts and direct espionage, and the same secret society-based mixture influenced even FDR’s New Deal. As late as the end of the 20th century, this same combination of influences would be used as a rationale for the genocide in the Balkans.
For the last 450 years, the search for esoteric knowledge and the practice of espionage have mingled and produced, sometimes, revolutionary results, both good and bad. Our modern world grew out of some of these results, and our awareness of that fact may allow us to reach back to that original humanism, that spark of democratic shamanism, that gave rise to the impulse to share our mystical experiences with the rest of the tribe.
The True Nature of Secret Societies
editorial by Vincent Bridges
For as long as the hairless, semi-domesticated Killer Ape has been making war on the tribe next door, there has been espionage; spying, sabotage and subversion, intrigue, double dealing and power grabs, all of which can be considered as varieties of espionage. In their original sense, these activities were simply forms of politics, a sort of tertiary boundary layer that served as social and political sensory organs. But the skin that touches can also be the hand that grips, and soon after humans stopped roaming and began to build villages and farms, covert, or hidden, forms of political feedback, espionage, settled firmly into the mode of control apparatus.
As such, it shifted from a political to a religious framework. Information gathering and maintaining cultural superiority became the responsibility of the great religious organizations and priesthoods. By the time of the late Roman Empire, when Church and State had effectively merged, espionage, in the official and political sense, was a function of the Church. Due to its monopoly on literacy, the Church remained in this position right up to the Renaissance.
However, it was that same monopoly that allowed another form of espionage to survive. The pagan, and therefore oral, traditions survived in various forms, and this oral tradition was supplanted by a curious phenomenon, the traveler’s tale. Ideas and heresies traveled along this tall tale highway as pilgrims and healers and mystics traveled from Spain to Russia, Jerusalem to Norway. Along with them moved tinkers and peddlers, adventurers and freebooters, the restless and the dispossessed, and eventually all of these groups would form provisional “tribes” and guilds. By the late Middle Ages, this underworld had become a powerful and authentic alternative culture that viewed espionage, information collecting, as a kind of commodity trading. Knowledge of stone working, soldiering or counterfeiting was proprietary to the group or tribe, tricks of the trade we might say, but available to the official culture for its use.
The Church began to lose its real power with the Black Death of the late 14th century, and within a century, a cultural Renaissance was underway. Part of that Renaissance was the emergence of what had been sub-culture in the medieval world into the official high culture. The sections of the medieval underworld that underwent the greatest transformation were occultism and espionage. The rulers of the new states that were forming in Italy and Western Europe were more than happy to make use of both groups, no matter what the increasingly discredited Church thought about it.
As the Reformation and Counter-Reformation battered Europe in the 16th century the golden age of occultism and espionage began. With Europe split along ideological lines, north and east Protestant, west and south Catholic, the opportunities for both professional spies and revolutionary minded occultists seemed limitless. Elizabeth I and Phillip II of Spain went toe to toe over the whole issue of Protestant versus Catholic, culminating in 1588’s Armada, and achieved a draw. But, far to the east, the junior branch of the Hapsburg clan, Rudolph II, followed an entirely different path, one of tolerance and humanism, flavored of course by a large dollop of mysticism. We can think of these two styles, conflict versus conciliation, and power centers/conflict points, as the poles or axis of the age, around which swirled both the best of the new “magi” and the rising profession of spy.
This golden age of espionage and occultism is the true origin point of our modern “secret societies.” The Rosicrucian movement of the early 17th century grew at least in part from Dr. John Dee’s apocalyptic missionary work in the 1580s, who, as Elizabeth I’s 007, is a prime example of the era’s overlap of occultism and espionage. These secret societies, instead of being either chivalric or guild based, were in fact more like a loose network of co-conspirators. Where they did collect into localized groups, they tended to form the early scientific organizations, the Royal Societies of England and France.
Between Dee and Bruno’s Hermetic Revolution of the late 16th century and the end of the religious wars in the late 17th century, new and very radical political ideas emerged. Democracy had been demonstrated when the people of England killed their King rather than go back to Catholicism; it wasn’t pleasant but it showed where the power actually lay in the new post Renaissance world. This split however led directly to the next round of “secret societies.”
Freemasonry, which had nothing to do with the stone mason’s guild of the Middle Ages, formed as a way to promote several different, and sometimes conflicting, political agendas. One of these was the preservation and restoration of the Stuart dynasty to the throne of England, while another was the attainment of a true democratic state, free from both kings and Church. These agendas were held together with the solid glue of occultism.
The ideals of these secret societies, derived ultimately from the occult humanism of the Renaissance, contributed to real revolutions, in America and France in the late 18th century. In the early 20th century, the swirl of occultism and espionage around the last Czar and his family produced a spontaneous revolution and the end of the Romanov dynasty. And of course, Hitlerian Germany was a product of the same overlapping confluence of occult concepts and direct espionage, and the same secret society-based mixture influenced even FDR’s New Deal. As late as the end of the 20th century, this same combination of influences would be used as a rationale for the genocide in the Balkans.
For the last 450 years, the search for esoteric knowledge and the practice of espionage have mingled and produced, sometimes, revolutionary results, both good and bad. Our modern world grew out of some of these results, and our awareness of that fact may allow us to reach back to that original humanism, that spark of democratic shamanism, that gave rise to the impulse to share our mystical experiences with the rest of the tribe.
