The Usual Suspects: Proofs of a Conspiracy pp. 6-9

I'm pretty sure I've used that title in the previous book discussing Allen's postulations concerning the Illuminati and we will talk about the "who" in a bit. When we last left off, someone had stolen money from Tsarina Caterina the Great, and left Robison a box. Now we find out what was in the box. 

Inside the box were the secrets of French masonry along with four extra degrees (ranks). Ok...cool, but what of it? Even Robison is disinterested in the contents having abandoned the order. While this seems like a real find for someone in the conspiracist set, it amounts to the rules of Masonry in Paris. He claims that he would make them available to anyone who asked, provided that no one could use this information to enter a lodge that was not already a member. This isn't a story that is going anywhere. 

I think even Robison is aware of the non-sequitor so he returns to the book that spurned this entire writing in the first place. Remember from last post, the impetus to write was that he found a magazine called "Religious Occurences" which discussed a new thread in Continental Masonry. Now, he's finally going to explain what he read that motivated him so. 

The first thing is that he read about a fanaticism for the rites that he found so tiresome when he was a member. That along with schisms within Masonry that were utterly foreign to him and that some of the more respectable members were not only frequenting the lodges but also travelling across Europe to visit other lodges. I have nothing to go on but this work, but it reads like Masonry had an influx of new blood (i.e. younger members) that were very interested in the idea of Masonry but didn't like the orthodoxy that some members clung to. It's important to remember that the world is changing in the 18th century. Travel is much safer and with that brings trade and different ideas. So a Parisian Mason could hear about a Bavarian Masonic rite and want to have it in Paris. Robison, even though he's no longer into it, finds the new thing strange so he's got to do some investigating.

Now I wonder if this first book in the Illuminati conspiracy theory is just the musings of a very bored man who is worried about how a hobby he had when he was younger had changed? That is quite worrying, but also very plausible. It also means that my friend "Jeff" might be inadvertently starting the 2232's version of the Q conspiracy when he complains about how Dungeons and Dragons' 5th edition is just shit compared to 2nd edition. What worries Robison is that too many people have been bringing their fads into Masonry and thus corrupting it from its original intent. 

Robison is telling us that he's an aristocratic snob and that these new Masons are just the rabble trash. In a long paragraph that only serves this purpose he lauds the French. They were to him, it seems, the epitome of culture and refinement and their lodges should have reflected that. The purpose of the French masonry was to mirror the French courts, and the goal then was refinement in all areas of life. To make the Paris the Athens of Europe (wasn't Athens the Athens of Europe?). Instead France has called, and we only need to look at "the plunder of Italy by the French Army, to be convinced that their low-born generals and statesmen have in this respect the same notions with the Colberts and Richlieus."

So what happened? Well Masonry has been infiltrated by the rabble and their adherence to the Jesuits, mystics like Swedenborg, the Rosicrucians, and the occultists. The new masons are ignorant of the true purpose of masonry and its first principles. This is all said by a man, who just a bit earlier, claimed that he wasn't really into it in the first place...and I can't figure out why he cares so much. To return to Dungeons and Dragons--I played a bit in the 90s, Dark Sun and Ravenloft mostly, but I haven't played or read a new text in decades. People like my friend "Jeff" have strong opinions on the new edition, but I can't pretend to care. I was out during the adoption of the third edition. Robison never cared about Masonry other than the networking, so this, is just weird. 

No matter what his motivation: he's still doing this but let's run down these people. 

I was raised Catholic, but in the Fransiscan tradition; I know a little about the Jesuits. They get a large mythology that they were the secret police of the Vatican. They had eyes, ears, and daggers everywhere. None of this is true, well it's not unique to them anyway. That they were the office of assassins for the Vatican is false, that they courted political intrigue was just as true as any of the other orders. The Fransiscan tradition just held them as rivals with bad interpretations of things: which I'm sure was their view of the Fransiscans and the Benedictans. The original idea of this story comes from an attempted assassination of King Henri IV in 1594 by a man who attended a Jesuit school. This caused the blame to placed on the Jesuits (which was probably at the behest of one of the other orders) and the myth was born. 

Swedenborg must be Emanuel Swedenborg, an 18th-century scientist who created a diagram for a flying machine, and studied anatomy and physiology. He was, however, most known for his mystical and psychic writings including a book on interpreting dreams. He'd be considered a new age guru today, believing that he was in communication with spirits from other planes and planets. He was very popular and enjoyed endorsement from no less a person than German Philosopher Immanuel Kant. 

The Rosicrucians are a real wrench in this machine because it's hard to tell who they were at all, and most important--if they actually existed. In the 17th century, three manifestos appeared from a group known as the "Order of the Rosy Cross." Even the Wikipedia entry for the group remains agnostic on the fact of their original existence. The three manifestos claimed to be working to reform the culture of Europe and that they would be working in secret to this end. To me, it sounds like a hoax or some wishful thinking, but what matters is that enough people took it seriously. The idea of an invisible group of the intelligentsia was influential enough that it inspired the formation of the Invisible College in England, which eventually became the Royal Society. The original manifestos are just esoteric well-wishing. There are so many groups today that claim lineage to them, or that are alleged to have a lineage. The Dan Brown types well link them to the Templars. There are modern Rosicrucians that claim unbroken allegiance and then there are the Masons. 

Robison must be the origin of this as a conspiracy theory. The problem here is that he actually does have a point: injecting Rosicrucian rites into Masonry is problematic because there are no Rosicrucian rites that we know of. The three manifestos were unsigned and no evidence of them ever appeared until pretenders took up the mantle a century later. The Rosicrucian rites are just as much fiction as someone claiming that they have evidence for what an Illuminati ritual looks like. It's a problem only if the idea of a baseless utterly invented rite is a problem--which, to be fair, all of the Masonic rites are as well. Robison's point though, isn't that Rosicrucianism is wholly invented, his point is that it's not what he's used to and he doesn't like all of this mysticism in the club he was kind of into once upon a time. 

All of this influence from the outside that the newcomers have brought in has resulted in, what Robison believes, a twisting of Masonry into an organization with the express and singular goal of, "ROOTING OUT ALL THE RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS, AND OVERTURNING ALL THE EXISTING GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE" (his capitalizations). This is quite the jump from A to B. Masonry has some new initiates that are into esotericism and magnets to the complete obliteration of Europe's political landscape. The book is obviously going to connect these dots, or at least it's hopefully going to make this attempt. So far though, it sounds like old man is slippery sloping because he doesn't like a new thing.