Terry Boardman - Rome and Freemasony/The Greatest Irony

8/7/2019 Terry Boardman - Rome and Freemasony/The Greatest Irony

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NEW WORLD

ORDER

FREEMASONRY AND

THE ROMAN SPIRIT

Terry Boardman June 2002

Christ came to earth so that each one of uscould find the meaning of our own being - our

relationship to the spiritual world - for ourselves

in true spiritual freedom. With the Incarnation of

Christ the age of spiritual elitism or spiritual

aristocracy - the age of priests - came to an end;

the seeds were planted for a spiritual democracy.Few lessons stand out more clearly from the way

in which Christ dealt with the spiritual authorities

in the Holy Land at that time. He referred to

those would-be spiritual authorities, the

Sadducees and Pharisees, in no uncertain terms.

He may have told Peter to feed His sheep, but

this was no injunction to perpetuate priestly

elitism in the form of a Roman Papacy, although

the Bishops of Rome and the later authorities inthe Vatican were to take it as such. His disciples,

still uncomprehending, may have called Him

"master" (Rabboni) but he called them brothers

and said that human beings were to become as

gods. The spiritual childhood of the mass of

mankind was drawing to a close. However, it

was to be a very long time - until the

Reformation of the 16th century - before this


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was realised in Europe.

The IronyA great historical irony has taken place since the

Incarnation, the kind of irony with which history

is replete, though this has been one of the

greatest of all such ironies. Many of the Gnostics

and Manichaeans knew the secret that ultimately,evil is a former good turned bad, and that evil

can also be turned once again to the good.

Despite the Incarnation and Christ's union with

mankind and the Earth, those who could not free

themselves from the thinking of the spiritual

aristocracy of priests and priest kings - sought

to maintain dominance of that aristocracy in the

Churches of Rome and Byzantium. Those who

had justifiably been the shepherds of mankind prior to the Incarnation wished to remain the

shepherds for all time; this is still the intention of

the Vatican today. Consequently, they sought to

repress those who, either out of a pre-Christian

or out of a Christened Gnostic consciousness,

wished to find their own path to the divine. This

led to the persecutions of 'the heretics' and a

centuries-long attempt to snuff out a Christian

Gnosis based on the individual's self-enlightenment. From Rudolf Steiner's insights

into the deeper structure of history and the

evolution of consciousness, it is clear that this

effort by the authoritarian forces of the past,

doomed though it was in the long term,

nevertheless played a vital role in the

development of mankind, because without it, the

European culture of the West would not have

been able to develop a materialistic and scientificsociety. It would, like the non-European cultures,

have remained focused on the spiritual and

divine planes of existence Natural science would

not therefore have developed and the modern

world would not have have developed its rich

knowledge of the physical and material aspects

of earthly life. This knowledge is essential to

earthly man; it is part of the the total process of


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self-knowledge, but only insofar as we are

physical beings. Since we are not merely

physical beings but also spiritual beings,

physical knowledge must be complemented by

spiritual knowledge. One of the most important

keys for understanding the history of the modern

age since 1500 is the thought that the age of

natural scientific knowledge is being permeatedwith and complemented by spiritual scientific

knowledge and indeed, if this process is

somehow frustrated and blocked by those

convinced materialists who believe that only

natural science has validity, then human culture

will increasingly be afflicted by sickness and

death.

The Gnostic and Manichaean stream with its richveins of Near Eastern esoteric knowledge of

spiritual illumination available to the individual

was forced underground as a result of repression

by the established Church. Over the centuries it

flowed on underground and metamophosed into

the streams of the Bogomils and Cathars. With

the Crusades, it returned to its roots in the Near

East, was replenished and flowed back with

renewed vigour into Europe in various forms,for example, in the form of the Templars and

their later successors, the Freemasons as well as

various later Protestant mystical sects. However,

while the Bogomils and Cathars had few friends

in high places and were rooted out and

exterminated wherever they could be found, the

more successful Templars and Freemasons

managed to ensconce themselves within the very

Establishment of Christendom. The Templars

became the elite knights and bankers of Christian

Europe, while Freemasonry was ultimately to

become the private religion of many in the

social elites of 18th and 19th century Europe and

America. After the brutal suppression of the

Templar Order throughout Europe by the French

King Philip IV aided by his puppet, Pope

Clement V, the surviving Templars re-

established themselves in Portugal, where they


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became the Order of Christ; in Prussia, where

they joined the Teutonic Knights; and especially

in the Scotland of Robert the Bruce, where they

married into Scottish aristocratic families and,

led by the Sinclair family, later midwifed the

birth of modern Freemasonry.

And now comes the great irony. A significantpart - though not the whole - of this great

stream of underground Gnostic esoteric life

which had been constantly persecuted by that

ghost of the Roman Imperial spirit, the

Vatican, and had been constantly struggling

against that spirit in innumerable ways, has

itself, since the 18th century, metamorphosed

into that same Roman spirit: anti-democratic,

imperial and aristocratic. This transformationreached its apotheosis with the founding of the

United States of America, or better named, the

United States of Freemasonry. Such a

nomenclature may seem like an exaggeration, but

that was how the USA was in fact regarded by

many Masons, especially in the period 1775-

1830. [1] The momentous year 1776 - which

incidentally also saw the publications of Adam

Smith's Weath of Nations, the first volume ofGibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman

Empire, Friedrich von Klinger's Die Zwillinge

(The Twins) and Sturm und Drang, as well as

the founding of the Illuminati secret society by

the Jesuit-trained Adam Weishaupt - witnessed

the foundation of a completely new kind of state,

a self-conscious Utopia or Promised Land,

forged and led by men who were either

Freemasons or who were infomed by the spirit of

Freemasonry, a spirit which, by the late 18th

century, had become largely non-Christian and

was predominantly Deist. The United States was

self-consciously founded by Freemasons and

non-Freemasons with a New Rome in mind. The

early 18th century Freemasonic emphasis on

brotherly love and gentility receded in favour of

the patrician Roman concept of virtue, which

was seen as the glue that would be able to hold


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together the turbulent social forces of the

insecure new Republic. Ancient Rome of course

saw a continuous struggle between those within

it who wished to maintain Rome's republican

heritage and those who looked back to an older

monarchical heritage; these latter were the

supporters of Roman imperialism, who backed

the Emperor against the Senate. The republicantradition was the legitimate and modern historical

direction for Rome; it was a step forward in

social and political development, whereas the

notion of the divine Caesars was a harking back

to the past ages of Egypt, Persia, Babylon and

the age of oriental despotism. A similar struggle

between the imperial and aristocratic element on

the one hand and the republican or democratic

element on the other hand revealed itself veryearly on in the history of the United States in for

example, the struggle between Thomas Jefferson

and Alexander Hamilton. Something of the same

had been prefigured in the split that broke out

within Freemasonry itself in the 1750s, first in

Britain, the homeland of Freemasonry, and soon

spread to the colonies. The wealthier, more elitist

gentlemen of post-1717 Freemasonry, identified

with the Hanoverian successionm who becameknown as the Moderns were opposed by the

upstart Antients, whose members often had

Jacobite sympathies and were initially drawn

more from lower social orders. By the time of

the Revolution, the Antients had come to

dominate American Freemasonry yet by 1820

they too had become elitists as American

Freemasonry enjoyed its golden age of prestige

and authority.

Right from the very beginning of the colonisation

of North America by the British, there had been

this polarity. In Virginia the first royal colony

was founded at Jamestown under the aegis of

King James I, formerly James VI of Scotland

(1603-25), who had himself brought the Templar

heritage of Freemasonry south when he

succeeded Elizabeth I as King of England. A


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highly complex character, a dualistic Geminian

named by Steiner as the greatest occultist of his

day, James attempted to make peace with Rome

and the Catholic Powers, was severe with those

he considered witches and Puritans, was

responsible for the production of the King James

Bible, refused to aid the Rosicrucian-inspired

Frederick of the Palatinate, King of Bohemia, hisown son-in-law, thus unintentinally provoking

the 30 Years War, and held strongly to the

mediaeval notion of the divine right of kings.

Steiner saw James as a symptom of his age in

that he had a foot in both the mediaeval and

modern consciousnesses. In much of James' life

we do indeed see the symptoms of the ancient

stream of Gnostic wisdom but his case, as with

King Solomon (and James was often called theSolomon of his time), attached to a royal and

imperial cause which had its roots in even earlier

times. With the Crusades, however, the Gnostic

stream had bifurcated into an aristocratic and

hierarchical, even priestly element - the Templars

- and a more democratic element: the Cathars

and those proto-Protestant groups that came after

them, such as the Wyclifites, the Lollards, the

Brothers of the Common Life, and others who became ever more radically democratic,

culminating in the Levellers and Diggers of the

English Civil War. James' aristocratic

Freemasonic stream put down roots in Virginia

and the later southern states of the USA, while

the more democratic Protestants arrived in the

North on the Mayflower in 1620. Already in that

year the seeds of the American Civil War were

planted, for the two streams - the one moremodern, democratic, and egalitarian; the other

ancient, oligarchic, hierarchical - were bound to

clash, as they had in their homeland of England.

The result, in 1865, was an inevitable victory for

the forces of historical progress. Just as Roman

imperialism was doomed to collapse under the

weight of its own obsolescence and decadence,

so too was Southern aristocracy. And yet within


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a year, the ancient forces struck back, using the

old weapons of clandestine manouevre the

Gnostic underground had been forced to rely on

during their long centuries of suppression by the

Vatican. In April 1866, Albert Pike, a leading

member of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in the

USA was invited to the White House by

President Andrew Johnson, "whereupon he wasconferred the title of 32nd degree Scottish Rite

freemason. Just a few months prior to that, Pike

was hiding in Canada, hunted by the U.S. Army

for complicity in the Lincoln assassination.

Johnson, however, soon pardoned him upon

assuming office." [2]. Both in Britain and in the

USA in the 18th and 19th centuries, aristocratic,

oligarchical and anti-democratic forces working

within the hierarchical structure of Freemasonryensconced themselves within the political

establishments of those countries - to what end ?

Study of the ideas of the leaders of these forces

within Freemasonry reveals that their dream,

intention and plan was to create out of Britain

and America a New Rome, a new World Empire,

a new uniformity of thought and lifestyle that

would embrace the whole world. To this end, a

new state, the United States of America, wasestablished, the first "world state", made up of

immigrants from all over the world rather than

just from one ethnic community - a New Atlantis

as intended by the British Elizabethan occultist

John Dee, adviser to the Virgin Queen, and by

Francis Bacon, James I's Chancellor, and ruled

by a scientific priestly elite. This is how the

Freemasons of the Revolutionary and post-

Revolutionary generations saw themselves."Through Washington, Lafayette and other

master mins and heroic brethren Freemasonry

gave to this country the principles of civil and

religious liberty, and has preserved those very

'fundamental laws and principles' which

guarantee to all freedom and eqality."[3] The

Masons suffered a major setback in the northern

States of the Union when their movement fell


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from grace in the late 1820s and early 30s as a

result of the populist Antimasonic campaign

which even produced the USA's first third

political party, the Antimasonic Party. Although

the aristocratic South was not as strongly

affected by the antimasonic furore in the North,

Masonry suffered a huge blow to its reputation in

the USA; membership plummeted and did notrevive until the 1850s. The insecurities of the

Civil War and President Johnson did much to

restore its fortunes, so that by the 1880s

Freemasonry was once again at the top of the

American social pole. When the 22-story

Chicago Masonic Temple was opened in 1894, it

was the tallest building in the world and the most

expensive.

The aristocratic and elitist social order of the

19th century received a severe setback in the

cataclysm of the First World War; in Europe

aristocracy could no longer flaunt itself in the

way it had done before 1914. Alarmed by the

victories of the Communists in Russia and

elsewhere, aristocrats and hierarchs in European

and American 'democracies' veiled themselves

and retired from the limelight. So too did theiraccomplices and fellow travellers in the

Freemasonic movement. Before 1914, Masonic

processions and ceremonies in public were

common throughout Europe and America. After

1918 they became less and less visible. The

trappings of pseudo-mediaevalism were less

attractive in the harsh modernist atmosphere of

the 1920s. The Craft became tremendously

popular in the USA in the 1920s but was forced

by the temper of the times to become

increasingly secular. The Depression was a

hammer blow to American Masonry just as the

Antimasonic movement had been exactly a

hundred years before. Masonry in the UK, where

socialism in the 20s and 30s was a more real

threat to middle class values, hid its light under

a large bushel of silence and invisibility which

continued until the early 1980s when it was


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forced back into public scrutiny by critical

expose books such as Stephen Knight's The

Brotherhood . In response, the Masons, led by

their Grand Master, the Duke of Kent, were

forced into damage limitation PR exercises. In

the context of the enormous social changes

brought about by the First World War, the

oligarchical forces which had been workingthrough the higher echelons of Freemasonry

sought new avenues by which they could

influence events in a semi-clandestine way.

There were the so-called 'thinktanks' and research

institutes such as The Royal Institute of

International Affairs (Chatham House), founded

1919 on the back of The Round Table (1910) and

the American offshoot of the RIIA, The

Council On Foreign Relations (1921). Manymore followed and are still with us. These

organisations, such as the Bilderbergers (1954),

the Trilateral Commission (1973), the New

Atlantic Initiative (1996) and the like pretend to

be non-conspiratorial and open to public

scrutiny, but in fact, their networking and policy-

influencing operations, more or less clandestine,

are elitist to the marrow. They are merely

instruments of applying oligarchical leverage in ademocratic age, when the more overtly ancient

ceremonial forms of the secretive Freemasonic

lodges arouse too much suspicion and are no

longer deemed as effective.

The circle has thus been completed: from

spiritual resistance to the first imperial Rome and

its Papal successor, to spiritual inspiration of the

second imperial Rome - this has been the path of

one significant element of the stream that began

with the Gnostics around the time of Christ, or

perhaps, one could even say, of the stream that

began with Cain's struggle with Abel. The Order

of the Templars carried within it something truly

noble in the spiritual sense, but it was also

infected by historical illegitimacy, a harking back

to an essentially pre-Christian esotericism in an

effort to combat what was seen as the Satanic


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spirit of Rome - the spirit of total control and

unfreedom - the denial of the individual's own

path to God. The same is true of much in the

New Age or neo-pagan movements of today,

which, in their ignorance of the esoteric essence

of the Christian mystery, and appalled by the

many crimes of the Christian churches over the

centuries, throw the baby out with the bathwater,and reject all that is connected with Christianity

as either deceitful or defunct.

How and why has this circle been closed ? Why

have the modern successors of the original

proponents of spiritual freedom become the

architects of unfreedom in the crypto-totalitarian

New World Order that is being created in the

21st century ? As Rudolf Steiner said manytimes, this question can only be understood in the

light of esoteric knowledge.

Unlike the life of Buddha, that of Jesus Christ

was inextricably bound up with the question of

evil. Right at the beginning of the life of Jesus in

the Gospel of Matthew, Herod ordered a

massacre of infants in an effort to destroy Jesus.

Jesus had to confront the spiritual and political

authorities of his day, Jewish and Roman. He

was betrayed by a kiss from his own disciple,

tortured and killed by the imperial power of

Rome, and his name was later appropriated by a

Roman Church that committed or endorsed

frequent acts of torture, massacre and

persecution. Christianity has thus passed through

its own Crucifixion - something which can be

seen as necessary in its own development since

the Resurrection, which is the very essence ofChristianity, could not occur without a death

preceding it: no new life without a death

beforehand. And that Resurrection had to follow

a violentdeath, not merely a death resulting from

illness or age, as in the case of the Buddha who

lay down and died at the the age of 80.

Furthermore, Christ's violent death was presaged

by a betrayal by one of His own disciples. It was


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not merely a violent death, but one brought about

by betrayal - the perversion of what was right.

Christ was not merely murdered but executed -

an execution sanctioned by the whole legal and

political system of His day, including the pre-

eminent 'global' superpower; all were involved;

indeed a crowd of His own people, urged on by

their spiritual leaders, called for His execution.The nature of evil is very much involved here:

what was originally right and justified - the

spiritual leadership of the people of Israel, the

Republic of Rome (SPQR: the Senate and the

People of Rome), the Temple in Jerusalem

(Christ was arrested by the captains of the

Temple - Luke Chapter 22:52) - all become

perverted in an act of deceitful persecution and

official murder.

The Temple and the Roman

Imperial SpiritThe Jerusalem Temple and Imperial Rome: these

are what have linked Freemasonry with the New

Rome of the New World Order since the days of

the Templars, who based their esotericism on the

symbology of the Temple of Solomon which

they had learned in the Crusades. Their veryname was associated with the Temple, and many

of Freemasonry's rites too are based on the

Temple of Solomon. The god-given esotericism

of ancient Israel was thus conjoined with what

was essentially an imperial Roman will to power.

Today we see again an alliance between those

forces that lead the Jewish people and those that

lead the New Rome; indeed the State of Israel

today, just as in Herod's day, is a client state ofan Imperial Rome, the only difference being that,

unlike Herod's kingdom, without the aid of the

New Rome, the modern State of Israel would

very likely not have survived.

The support of the New Rome (USA) for modern

Israel is based on several factors, two of which

are of direct Gnostic origin. First, the elitist 'neo-


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Gnostics' (those 'in the know') who presume to

guide America's destiny are the heirs to those

elitist Freemasonic leaders of 18th, 19th and 20th

century America (from Benjamin Franklin and

George Washington to 33rd degreee Masons

Harry Truman and Franklin D. Roosevelt) whose

traditions centred on the Temple of Solomon.

Their interest is thus in the land of Israel andwith the people of Israel - both of which are

essentially pre-Christian Old Testament

motivations. Second, the other, more democratic

'Gnostics', the fundamentalist American

'Christians', are heirs to the Puritan tradition of

the Pilgrims, which ultimately goes back to what

I have characterised as the non-oligarchical

stream of Gnosticism.[4] Those in this stream

saw themselves in the New World as God'sChosen People, just like the Israelites, removed

by God from out of the land of perdition. They

also believed, based on their misinterpretation of

Biblical texts, and still believe, that they have a

mission to help the Jews return to the Holy Land

so that the Second Coming can take place.

American support for Israel therefore comes both

from the elite clubhouse and lodge, and also

from the populist evangelical chapel.

There is a third factor at work in American

support for Israel, or rather, for US remote

control of Israel, which has deeper esoteric roots

and is only understandable in the light of

esoteric knowledge. This is that there will in the

near future be an incarnation of the spiritual

being known to Anthroposophers as Ahriman

and to traditional Christians as Satan. The

Russian writer and philosopher Vladimir

Solovyov (1853-1900) pointed to this over 100

years ago in his book "War, Progress and the

End of History: Three Conversations" (1899).

As described by Solovyov, this being will

attempt to seduce mankind, will make himself

Emperor of a New Roman Empire and will set

up his capital in Jerusalem with the intention of

surpassing Christ in the estimation of mankind.


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through with luciferic wisdom.....the

significance of the incarnation of Christ was

grasped because the power of the old Lucifer

incarnation still survived. This power did not

actually fade from the human faculty of

comprehension until the 4th century AD; and

even then it had its aftermath, its ramifications.

By this Steiner was referring to something he

spoke about on many occasions, namely the

closing of the doors of natural clairvoyant

perception. Until about 3100 BC large numbers

of human beings had natural clairvoyant

perception as an inborn faculty; they could see

into the spiritual world. In order for us to

develop in freedom, however, this faculty had to

disappear. From the 3rd millennium onwards,mankind gradually began to enter a state of

darkness with respect to the spiritual world.

Mystery centres and temples then began to

appear in all cultures that maintained the

connection with the spiritual world, but only for

neophytes that were prepared to undergo the

increasingly difficult training that was necessary

to maintain the connection. An inevitable and

indeed legitimate spiritual aristocracy cameabout. By the time of Christ's Incarnation, most

human beings, with the exception of a few, had

completely lost the faculty of clairoyant

perception; even doubts about the very existence

of God and the spiritual world had begun to

develop in the more sophisticated and more

urban cultures.

Moreover, Steiner discovered that three centuries

after Christ, a colossal development took place inthe spiritual world which had the effect of

plunging mankind even further into spiritual

darkness. The spiritual hierarchy of the Exusiai

(four ranks above mankind in the 9 hierarchies

of our solar system) who had been responsible

for the formation and regulation of the human

thinking process gave this responsibility over to

the hierarchical rank below them, the Archai.


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The Exusiai belonged to the Second Triad of

hierarchies, who were responsible for the forms

and concepts of the natural and spiritual worlds.

Consequently, since they also regulated Man's

life of concepts, when a human being perceived

something in the natural world, say, a tree, or

saw something inwardly as a result of some

spiritual training, for example, an angel or ademon, prior to the 4th century AD, he also

simultaneously perceived its concept and knew

what it was. Percept and concept were one. The

Archai and the other beings of the Third Triad of

hierarchies, the Archangels and Angels, had no

such responsibility for the action of the natural

and spiritual worlds; their work lay with human

souls. They were closer to human beings than the

Exusiai. Consequently, there occurred withinhuman thinking a disjunction from the 4th

century AD onwards between percepts and

concepts. This was to give rise to endless

confusion and ever increasing intellectual

disagreement about both spiritual and natural

matters. The age of theological controversies

began. Theologians no longer knew or felt really

sure who the Christ was, or the Father, or the

Holy Spirit, or the Holy Sophia, nor did theyunderstand how they related to each other. Vain

attempts were made to fix their understanding in

the dogmas and anathemas of the many

tempestuous Church Councils that were called.

Real spiritual insight was replaced by dogma and

based on authority and tradition. Meanwhile,

outside the Church, the doors of spiritual

perception went on closing inexorably as they

had since the third millennium BC. In the 6thcentury AD the Emperor Justinian finally closed

the last of the pagan Mystery schools (529).

Even in Asia, the great temple centres of

religious instruction in China, India, Tibet, Japan

slowly - more slowly than in the West, because

they were closer to the original luciferic

inspiration - lost their light. By 1600 they too

had run out of vision and become rigidified in


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dogma and moribund forms of tradition.

The Division of the GnosticsIt was as a result of this great change in human

thinking about spiritual matters in the 4th century

that the bifurcation in the original Gnostic stream

had occurred by the time of the Crusades. The

real meaning of the Incarnation and Resurrectionof Christ was lost. Many of the Templars, deeply

affected by the remains of the old luciferic

wisdom that they encountered in the teachings of

the Sufis and the Ismailis and other such

streams, fell into a kind of monotheism or

pantheism which took little account of the

significance of Christ's Incarnation and looked

back to a syncretistic neo-Semitic religion more

akin to Islam or Judaism. It was this that passedon to the Freemasons and which became the

Supreme Being or Grand Architect of the

Universe (GAOTU) deity of 18th century

Freemasonry.. This was the being against whom

the visionary artist, poet and Christian esotericist

William Blake railed so mightily and whom he

lambasted as Urizen the cosmic lawgiver, the

calculator, the weigher and measurer, for he

perceived in this Deist religion of Isaac Newtonand Francis Bacon (and of George Washington,

Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson) a

turning away from the being of Christ and thus

from the very meaning of the Earth and of

mankind's existence on the Earth. Blake was one

of those Gnostics who, like Jacob Boehme in

Germany, struggled through in the spiritual

darkness of the age to his own heartfelt

conception of the Christ and a truly individualrealisation of the cosmic significance of Christ

and Christianity. Many others in the Gnostic,

Manichaean, Bogomil and Cathar streams and in

the proto-Protestant movements of the Middle

Ages managed the same lonely feat. They saw

through to the new Christianity in their souls

without harking back to pre-Christian religions.

The Quakers, for instance, were not interested in


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disputing the meaning of this or that verse of the

Old Testament as so many other Puritans were,

nor were they concerned about the arcane

geometric symbology of the Temple of Solomon

like the Freemasons; rather, they sought direct

communion with the divine in the silence of their

hearts in this moment; not in lonesome

meditation in cell or on mountaintop, but rathertogether with their fellows.

One more piece of spiritual research by Rudolf

Steiner can be adduced here. He pointed out that

whereas Lucifer had been the main source of

temptation for mankind prior to the Incarnation

of Christ, in the post-Christian centuries, up to

our own day and looking forward to the

incarnation of Ahriman himself, Ahrimanreplaces Lucifer as mankind's main adversary. It

was in the 9th century that Ahriman struck into

human consciousness in an incisive way.

Ahriman always seeks to reduce the threefold

element within Man to a dyad and to remove the

mediating central heart element, rendering the

human organism one merely of intelligence and

will. It was no accident therefore, that at the 8th

Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 869-70,the 11th Canon of the Council anathematised the

teachings of Photius, former Patriarch of

Constantinople, who it said, had been teaching

the doctrine of "twin souls", in which one of the

"souls" was actually the individual human spirit.

This was declared by the Council to be

anathema. In the church of the Holy Spirit, Hagia

Sophia, the human spirit was anathematised ! It

was declared that the human being consisted only

of two principles, not three, namely, the body

and the soul, the soul being recognised vaguely

as having certain "spiritual qualities". This was a

logical consequence of the theological confusion

about the nature of the Trinity which arose as a

result of the spiritual changes in the 4th century.

In the same year, 869-70, the threefold European

heritage of Charlemagne and his son Louis the

Pious was reduced to two when the kingdom of


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Lotharingia (which stretched from modern

Holland through Burgundy and Switzerland

down to Rome) between the domains of Charles

of France and Ludwig the German was abolished

following its invasion by Charles and Ludwig.

Exactly1000 years later, in 1869-70, the First

Vatican Council was held, which proclaimed the

doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope when he pronounce ex cathedra; the Kingdom of Italy

was founded and the Pope's temporal rule ended;

and the Franco-Prussian War began, that led to

the creation of the German Empire in 1871.

After the onset of Ahrimanic influence into

Western consciousness in the 9th century,

Ahrimanic thoughts made ever greater headway

within the culture of Christendom. Many ofthose drawn either to a luciferic consciousness

or who were struggling to find their own

mystical way to Christ were siphoned off by the

Church into monastic orders or, if they were too

radical, were persecuted as heretics. The

appearance of materialistic figures such as

Roger Bacon, Siger of Brabant and Philip IV of

France in the 13th century testified to the

growing power of ahrimanic thoughts. Ahrimanwas at this time preparing for his own

incarnation in the West. He needed a global

vehicle for this just as he had inspired much in

the materialist culture of republican and imperial

Rome, the superpower of the day. The

foundations for his political vehicle were laid in

the British colonies in North America,

established in the reign of the first Freemason

King James I, which became the Freemason-led

United States. One of the characteristics of

American Freemasonry, particularly in the

decades following the Revolution, was that it

was less concerned with arcane esoteric secrets

and more with fostering natural science and

social networking amongst the many

businessmen and merchants who made up the

bulk of prominent Masons. Ahriman had

managed to insinuate his thoughts into the


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desiccated husk of Gnostic Semitic wisdom that

was Freemasonry and he was able over the next

two centuries to turn it to his own purposes. This

was especially the case after the Protestant

Hanoverians came to power in Britain in 1714,

and the first Freemasonic Grand Lodge was

established in London in 1717 that was overtly

pro-Hanoverian and anti-Jacobite. BritishFreemasonry directed from London became ever

more identified with the monarchy and

aristocracy from the late 1720s onwards. An

excellent and well-researched book that details

the extent of esoteric Masonic influence in 18th

and 19th cent America is "The Secret Zodiacs of

Washington DC - Was The City of Stars

Planned by Masons?" by David Ovason

(London: Century 1999), published in the USAas " The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's

Capital: The Masons and the Building of

Washington, D.C." (HarperCollins).

At the time of Christ's first Incarnation, He was

met by ahrimanic thoughts working through the

materialism of the Roman Empire; these

represented Ahriman's only partially successful

attempt to manipulate the final socio-culturalmanifestation of the ancient Luciferic wisdom of

the East. Today, in the globalised New World

Order dominated by the USA, Ahriman comes

into his own in his own era. The Freemasonic

inspiration of the USA was based on Semitic

gnostic wisdom from the pre-Christian luciferic

era, and luciferic forces still try to insinuate

themselves into this modern polity in various

ways but they are no longer in pole position; this

is Ahriman's epoch and he will drive it as fast

and as hard as he can, for his time in the 5th

Post-Atlantean epoch (1413-3573) is short. The

Second Coming of Christ ("in the clouds") has

been with us since the 1930s and will apparently

- according to Rudolf Steiner - last until the end

of this 5th Epoch [6]. Once more the Christ, this

time not working through a man on a limited

piece of the physical plane but through an angel


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on the global etheric plane of the biosphere, is

confronted by ahrimanic forces working

predominantly through the materialist culture of

the superpower of the age, and indeed shortly by

Ahriman himself in his own incarnation. As

Judas betrayed Christ to the oligarchical priests

of the Temple and ultimately to the Romans, so

the Freemasons and their more modernsuccessors in the lobby groups and thinktanks,

public and clandestine, have betrayed their

Gnostic roots and original impulse to individual

freedom and have allied themselves with the

conservative and oligarchical forces of

established religion (the Church of England and

American denominations) and imperial power

politics: what once was good turns into its

opposite. The opponent of the Old Rome hasbecome the New Rome.

Our epoch will has witnessed and will continue

to witness a titanic struggle between spiritual

idealism and materialism. The republican Roman

spirit with its polity based on the civic life and

mores of the individual was originally a

legitimate historical impulse but it became

perverted by the imperial and theocratic ghosts ofthe previous Egypto-Babylonian epoch. Out of

this perversion emerged Byzantium and the

Papacy: would-be Roman Empires, both of

which became increasingly decadent after the

first millennium of their existence. Eventually, in

the Refomation, the gnostic will to individual

spiritual freedom, only partly christianised, burst

through the papal chains repressing it. When the

unchristianised gnostic underground surfaced in

the shape of the English Freemasonic movement

after 1717 and identified itself with the British

Protestant Hanoverians, the Papacy saw in

Freemasonry a powerful spiritual rival and

moved decisively against it; the first papal bull

against Freemasonry charged in 1738. A

tremendous battle spiritual tehn ensued behind

the scenes of European developments. The

Jesuits launched themselves into an assault on


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Freemasonry, which responded by seeding itself

thoughout Catholic Europe. Irish Freemasons

split the Freemasonic movement in 1752 betwen

the Antients and the Moderns, a split which

lasted till 1813, while the Masons managed to

achieve the suppression of their sworn enemies

the Jesuit Order by the Pope himself in 1773 !

The Pope had been under pressure from theCatholic monarchs of Portugal, Spain and the

Holy Roman Empire whose aristocracies were by

then riddled with Masons and masonic

sympathisers. The Jesuits fled to Protestant

Prussia and Orthodox Russia, but managed to

reingratiate themselves with the Vatican by 1814

when the Pope restored their Order together with

the Inquisition..

The following century saw continuing struggle

between Jesuits and Freemasons until Pope Leo

XIII signalled a papal retreat in the 1890s with

his accommodation to the French Freemason-led

Third Republic in a bid to reposition the Vatican

favourably for the new challenges of the 20th

century. The Papacy, formally resolutely

opposed to the bourgeoisie, then introduced the

concept of Catholic Christian Democracyattempting to build solidarity with the

bourgeoisie in the face of the rising power of the

socialist movement. In the 20th century, the

Roman Spirit of the Papacy made a further

major bid for a new kind of temporal power in its

efforts to influence the development of a united

Europe along the lines of a new Holy Roman

Empire in which, just as had been the papal

intention in the original Holy Roman Empire of

Charlemagne, the dynamism of the Germanic

nation (in its modern forms of France and

especially Germany) would be used as the

foundation of the new polity, guided by the

thoughts of the Vatican. The anti-Papal

transatlantic heirs of English-speaking

Freemasonry (in the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral

Commission, the New Atlantic Initiative and

others) have responded to this by seeking to


22/24

outflank the Vatican. The US government has

supported the EU project at almost every step,

its object being to take the whole EU under the

wing of a grand transatlantic system, guarded by

NATO and allied to Russia, a system which, it is

intended, will be able to withstand the 21st

century challenge of China. Their aim is to build

not just a new European or MediterraneanRoman Empire, which is the rather pathetic

rearguard action of the fading luciferic power of

the Vatican, but rather, a truly global Roman

Empire based on an Atlantic Euro-American

Union, which will serve admirably as the vehicle

for the incarnating Ahriman, the spirit who

wishes to dominate the entire world and

transform it into his "collective mind". Free-

masonry has led to this: the creation of a globalRoman Empire of materialism.

"Free-masonry" - the word itself goes to the heart

of the meaning of this 5th Post-Atantean epoch

(1413-3573): freedom and masonry. Freedom is

a spiritual ideal. Masonry is a physical substance

shaped in accordance with spiritual principles.

The spiritual task of our epoch is to develop both

natural and spiritual science in freedom. In thissense, "masonry" means the understanding of the

physical world. Esoteric knowledge reveals that a

free ego in the modern age can only develop on

this basis. Such was the insight of the

Rosicrucians - out of the knowledge of the death-

cross of the physical world, the sense world that

is given over to inevitable decay, arises the rose

sun of the free spirit.

********************************

Notes

[1] For the influence of Freemasonry in the

history of the USA, see Steven C.Bullock,


23/24

Revolutionary Brotherhood - Freemasonry and

the Transformation of the American Social

Order 1730-1840 (Chapel Hill: Univ of North

Carolina Press, 1996) and Lynn Dumenil,

Freemasonry and American Culture 1880-1930

(Princeton: Princeton Univ Press 1984). David

Ovason, "The Secret Zodiacs of Washington

DC - Was The City of Stars Planned byMasons?" (London: Century 1999), published in

the USA as

" The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's

Capital: The Masons and the Building of

Washington, D.C." (HarperCollins). For the

relationship of Freemasonry and natural science,

see Robert Lomas, The Invisible College - The

Royal Society, Freemasonry and the Birth of

Modern Science (London: Headline, 2002)

[2]

http://speciesofangel.serverpro2.com/featured/zero12.htm

[3] American Tyler Masonic magazine 18 July

1889 p 6, quoted in Dumenil, p. 49

[4] Of course it can be argued that the Pilgrim

Fathers and other such Protestant groups always

had 'oligarchical' elders who steered theircommunities, but the essence of Protestantism

was always that each man could interpret the

Word of God as he saw fit, whether from the

words of the Bible, or from charismatic

individual revelation - the antidote to established

oligarchy was thus always present, which of

course is the reason why so many Protestant

groups have proliferated: people objected to what

they were told by their 'leaders' and separatedthemselves from them. By contrast, there was no

possibility of 'separation' from the Church of

Rome; excommunication meant ostracism and

ultimately, death or outlaw status. Rome was a

totalitarian state, just as the New Rome of the

New World Order is becoming a totalitarian

state. No credit card? No livelihood. No

gambling on the stock market? No pension. No


24/24

involvement in the freetrading, arms dealing,

drug running, eco-destructive global economy?

No decent standard of living. No DNA profiling?

No civil rights (well, that last one hasn't quite

arrived yet, but it's on its way....).

[5] Bernhard Guenter, Bill Gates. From

Computerfreak to Richest Man in America,Munich, 1995, p 19

[6] See R.Steiner, The Reappearance of Christ

in the Etheric (New York: Anthroposophic

Press, 1983)

and the articles "What was the 20th Century?",

"Aspects of the Occult Significance of the Year

1998", "The Millennium in the Light of

Anthroposophy" in this web

Terry Boardman June 2002

This page was created on 2nd June 2002 with

thanks to Lilian

Last updated 26th Jan. 2010

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