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There are numerous difficulties in trying to discern what among the proliferation of new or revived faiths might be regarded as working to usher forth a New Age based on eternal values, and those that work to establish the rule of malignant, matter-bound forces. The problem is that there are often superficial resemblances that occur between them. Even within the same occult orders, such as Freemasonry, there are a range of views that might be in opposition but are mistaken as being part of a single, all-embracing conspiracy. There is a tangle of terminology, groups, personalities, ‘Hidden Masters’, accusations and counter-accusations of black magic, and so forth. This article considers ways in which the positive and negative currents within the ‘New Age’ might be identified.

The Cycles of Rise and Fall

The school of Perennial Tradition regards traditional cultures, religions and spiritualities as sharing core beliefs, values of an eternal nature, on which are founded Civilisations and societies in their cycles of health. Hence, in the analogous cycles of cultures as far removed geographically and ethnically as the Japanese, Hindu, Norse, and Arabian, all will possess analogous beliefs in regard to social hierarchy, chivalric ethos, and a nexus that exists between the Divine and the temporal. In such a society one’s highest calling, whether as peasant or prince, is to work in accord with one’s cosmic duty, or what the Hindus call dharma. In such a society castes reflect the Divine order on earth: ‘as above, so below’, and degenerate into contending economic classes in the cycle of decline.¹

This cyclical view of history² is another shared featured of various Traditional cultures, expressed in the Norse,³ Hindu,⁴ Hopi oral lore,⁵ and many others. In our own era the German historian-philosopher Oswald Spengler provided empirical evidence for the cyclicity of cultures.⁶ The two primary Traditionalist exponents of cultural cyclicity in our era are Rene Guenon⁷ and Julius Evola.⁸ Esoterically, it is the cycle of life expressed in ‘The Wheel’ of the ‘Major Arcana’ of the Tarot, which is derived from the Medieval ‘Wheel of Fortune’ or Rota Fortuna depicted in Gothic Churches.⁹ 

Tradition, Anti-Tradition & Counter-Tradition

A glance at cultural cycles is necessary to identify the occult forces that work in the context of Tradition for a return to eternal values based on a reconnection with the Divine, and those that want to enslave humanity to matter. Again, recourse to Tarot symbolism is instructive. Here we see that the Counter-Tradition that stands behind Anti-Tradition, is in the esoteric sense, literally satanic. Paul Foster Case¹⁰ provides a meaning for ‘The Devil’ trump that is particularly relevant:

In its most general meanings, it signifies Mammon and thus big business, the conventions of society, the injustice and cruelty of a social order in which money takes the place of God, in which humanity is bestialised, in which war is engineered by greed masquerading as patriotism, in which fear is dominant. Students of astrology will have no difficulty in seeing how this corresponds to Capricorn, the sign of big business, and the sign of world fame.¹¹

In this one paragraph Case says much. He cogently differentiates the Traditionalist from the Anti-Traditionalist in what is an occult war. Case identifies the Counter-Tradition that controls Anti-Tradition as ‘Mammon’. Mammon infers something more than simply plutocracy; it is the spirit behind plutocracy. Plutocracy controls the present era. Oswald Spengler pointed out that Money rules in the epoch of decline of a Civilisation. It is not merely the temporal influence of Money which Spengler is referring to, but the spirit behind Money, or what Case calls Mammon. “The dictature of money marches on, tending to its material peak in the Faustian [Western] Civilisation as in every other.”¹² 

The other significant point raised by Case is the ‘bestialisation’ of humanity. In this trump ‘The Devil’ is depicted enchaining the human pair to matter. Like the ‘Devil’, the human pair is depicted with tail and horns. This is suggestive of the esoteric belief in cyclic regression rather than lineal progression, when humanity regresses from a higher state of Being, of a spiritual mode, descending ever more into a baser, material existence. Anti-Tradition is the agency for this decline and enslavement. The modern world is therefore, according to the Traditionalist perspective, not ascending upward toward the Godhead, nor toward manifesting the God within; but is in a downward spiral towards – metaphorically – ‘The Devil’ – the master of our base drives.

A problem of identifying who belongs to what arises because forces work behind the guise of Tradition, while they are in reality the initiates of Anti-Tradition and Counter Tradition, or what Aleister Crowley called the ‘Black Magick School’. The purpose of Anti-Tradition is that of subversion and the sowing of confusion to pave the way for Counter-Tradition. ‘Anti-Tradition’ was stated by Perennial Traditionalist scholar and initiate Rene Guenon to be “pure negation and nothing more.”¹³ In regard to Counter-Tradition there is a “counter-initiation,”¹⁴ representing a satanic current of those who seek the severing of the nexus between the terrestrial and the divine. Guenon wrote of this:

After having worked always in the shadows, to inspire and to direct invisibly all modern movements, it will in the end contrive to ‘exteriorise’, if that is the right word, something that will be as it were, the counterpart of a true tradition, at least as completely and as exactly as it can be so within the limitations necessarily inherent in all possible counterfeits as such.¹⁵

To Guenon the Counter-Traditionalist movements are void of spiritual content. This can be seen in the many movements and ‘orders’ professing a ‘tradition’ and having a mystical or spiritual façade, yet who expound a materialistic universal republic. This is why various esoteric orders can be seen to be promoting materialistic doctrines such as Marxism, and such Anti-Traditional dogmas as those expressed in slogans like “liberty, equality, fraternity,” to usher in the “reign of quantity.”¹⁶ Anti-Traditionalist movements and ideologies are only a means, and not the end. Guenon aptly uses the term “satanic”¹⁷ to describe these currents.

Of these Counter-Traditions, Guenon states that they can never be anything other that a “parody,” an “inverted spirituality” involving organisations of “counter-initiation.”¹⁸ Guenon regarded these movements as being of supernatural origin, as satanic and believed that a figure analogous to the “The Anti-Christ” will manifest at the head of a world order.¹⁹

Guenon described the order which Counter-Tradition tries to impose by at first using the doctrine of “egalitarianism” as a means of overthrowing the remnants of Tradition and spirituality, after which will be erected in place of the divine hierarchies a “counter-hierarchy,” atop which sits an individual that seems analogous to “The Anti-Christ,” Guenon describing him as “nearest to the very bottom of the ‘pit of hell’.”²⁰

Of the numerous orders that were emerging, especially in France during the 19^th century, Guenon referred to them, regardless of their pretensions, as “anti-tradition.” One might say that they reflect the zeitgeist²¹ of the present epoch of Western decline. Guenon refers to the numerous orders that claimed to be “Rosicrucian.”²² Of these, the primary order is that of Freemasonry, from which much of the current “occult revival” derives, including cults purporting to represent a “New Age.” They are, in Guenon’s term, “counterfeits,” and as counterfeits are intended to be, often difficult to detect.

Profanation of Tradition

Eliphas Levi²³ was one of the primary theoreticians of the modern occult revival. Among Levi’s books, The History of Magic provides insights into the history, nature and influence of Anti-Traditional, Counter-Traditional and counter-initiatory currents. Levi was well-placed to offer informed opinion. He had been a prominent socialist propagandist, having been jailed for his views²⁴ and seems to have been a highly initiated Freemason.²⁵ However, Levi rejected socialism in favour of a conservative, monarchical position, and came to see Freemasonry as having had a noble tradition that had been “profaned” by Anti-Tradition. Having defended what he regarded as the genuine traditional and spiritual legacy of Masonry, Levi then posed and answered the question:

Now if Masonry is thus holy and thus sublime, we may be asked how it came to be proscribed and condemned so often by the Church?… Masonry is the Gnosis and the false Gnostics caused the condemnation of the true.²⁶

Levi contends that the Traditionalists were driven underground for fear of being associated with the “sacrilege” of the “false interpreters… the enemies of all belief and all morality”:

Masonry has not merely been profaned but has served as the veil and pretext of anarchic conspiracies descending from the secret influence of the vindicators of Jacques de Molay,²⁷ and of those who continued the schismatic work of the Temple. In place of avenging the death of Hiram²⁸ they have that of his assassins. The anarchists have resumed the rule, square and mallet, writing upon them the words Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – Liberty, that is to say, for all the lusts, Equality in degradation and Fraternity in the work of destruction. Such are the men whom the Church has condemned justly and will condemn forever.²⁹

Levi states that during the 18^th century,

A schism took place in illuminism:³⁰ on the one hand, the wardens of the traditions concerning Nature and science wished to restore the hierarchy; there were others, on the contrary, who desired to level all things by disclosing the Great Arcanum, thus rendering the royalty and priesthood alike impossible in the world. Among the latter, some were ambitious and unscrupulous, seeking to erect a throne for themselves over the ruins of the world. Others were dupes and zanies. The true initiates held with dismay the launching of society toward the abyss, and they foresaw all the terrors of anarchy.³¹

Levi is here referring to the Order of the Illuminati, founded in Bavaria in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, with the purpose of inaugurating a communistic universal republic; and similar cabals generally emanating from Freemasonry, including the French revolutionary Jacobin Club and Lodges that formed after the French revolutionary tumult from whence came the subversive creeds, including that of Karl Marx.

The revolutionary atheists, rationalists and humanists flocked to the Lodges during the 18^th and 19^th centuries, where they “worked the degrees” of the ancient Mysteries for their own counter-initiatory purposes. Of the type of profanation Levi referred to, we can state the following.

Philippe Buonarroti, the Italian exponent of the French Revolution, was initiated into Masonry in 1786. In 1808 he formed Les Sublimes Maîtres Parfaits. Buonarroti had a major influence on revolutionist Auguste Blanqui, and through his book Conspiration pour l’Egalité dite de Babeuf, suivie du procès auquel elle donna lieu he was also a seminal influence on the revolutions that erupted throughout Europe in 1848. Buonarroti also advised Mazzini and other revolutionaries in Italy.³²

Buonarroti had co-founded with Francois Babeuf, another significant revolutionist, the Society of the Pantheon, one of the first of the revolutionary secret societies to emerge from the French Revolution, believing the Revolution had failed; and he organised a group of ‘Philadelphe’ Masonry within the Lodge ‘Amis Sincères’. Dr. J M Roberts states:

What may be termed the first international political secret society, the Sublimes Maîtres Parfaits, was founded by Buonarroti, perhaps in 1808. Only freemasons were admitted to it. The Elect were aware that they were to work for a republican form of government; only the Areopagites knew that the final aim of the society was social egalitarianism, and the means to it the abolition of private property.³³

Marxism was the 19^th century culmination of this Anti-Traditional current of a long line of secret societies. Although numerous conspiratologists have written of the alleged role of the Illuminati in ‘hiring’ Marx to write the Communist Manifesto, via the League of the Just, reliable documentation is infrequent. However, there is scholarly evidence that Marx was part of the Anti-Traditionalist current. Blanqui organised the League of the Just, which was called the League of Outlaws by German exiles in Paris. This became the Communist League, and in 1847 this cabal asked Marx to write the Communist Manifesto. It is from Blanqui that the dictum now credited to Marx, the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” originated.³⁴ Marx was initiated into the Mysteries of Memphis-Mizraim Masonry. Prof. Mark Lause, a scholar of labour history,³⁵ writes:

…Certainly, the tangled history of freemasonry has largely mirrored the political and social views of those drawn to the craft, and some of those drawn to the more peculiar pseudo-Egyptian forms of the order reflected views that were accordingly distinctive.³⁶

The 18th century Cabalistic mystic Cagliostro founded the Rite of Memphis in 1779. He insinuated himself into the French Court, like Philippe de Lyon insinuated his way into the Court of the ill-fated Czar Nicholas II.³⁷

Lause cites I Nicolaevsky³⁸ as an authoritative source in stating “that the nineteenth century Order of Memphis actually did mask the ongoing revolutionary activism of French radicals both at home and abroad, strikingly so in the case of émigré circles at London.”³⁹ This confirms the statement by occult historian Lewis Spence, who in a laudatory entry on Cagliostro writes that the Mizraim Rite included the communistic doctrines of the Illuminati.

In 1785 Cagliostro was implicated in a scandal in the French Royal Court and exiled himself to England where he wrote revolutionary propaganda against the monarchy and declared that the French Throne would be overthrown. His 1786 ‘Letter to the French People’ declared prophetically that the Bastille would be stormed and the governor killed.⁴⁰ 

Spence states that Mizraim had been set up to subvert the traditional society of Europe and, significantly, received large financial backing:

There is a small question that the various Masonic lodges which he [Cagliostro] founded and which were patronised by persons of ample means, provided him with extensive funds, and it is a known fact that he was subsidised by several extremely wealthy men, who, themselves dissatisfied with the state of affairs in Europe, did not hesitate to place their riches at his disposal for the purpose of undermining the tyrannic powers which then wielded sway.⁴¹

London was the centre of revolutionary intrigue where political refugees from throughout Europe sought refuge and, with the help of English Masons, founded the Internationale.⁴² Masonry provided acceptance for diverse and radical views, and a model for a secret revolutionary structure. Lause writes of this:

In any event, if your declared purpose was something as radical as that of the Philalethes, the perfection of the human race, it helped legitimise the goal by describing oneself as an “Ancient and Primitive Rite of Masonry.”⁴³

Lodges were established in England and elsewhere, the most important being La Grand Loge des Philadelphes at London in 1851. Lause states that the Order of Memphis “fostered what became the International Association in March 1855 [and] provided almost all of the French members of the General Council of the later International Workingmen’s Association.”⁴⁴ Another prominent socialist historian, Dr. Bob James, identifies as Masons Garibaldi, Mazzini,⁴⁵ Charles Bradlaugh⁴⁶ and Karl Marx, stating this was “neither an accident nor an aberration.”⁴⁷

Crowley on the Schools of Black and White Magick

Aleister Crowley is perhaps the best example of how unclear can be the identification of Traditional, Anti-Traditional and Counter-Traditional currents.⁴⁸ Crowley claimed Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Illuminati, among the “saints” of his religion, Thelema.⁴⁹ However, the doctrines of Thelema and the Illuminati are polar opposites. Crowley, in contrast to the communistic doctrines of Illuminism, sought the establishment of a neo-aristocratic society: the revival of hierarchy.⁵⁰ It is notable that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the antithesis of communistic and liberalistic doctrines, is also a “Saint” of Thelema.⁵¹

Evola acknowledged Crowley as a genuine initiate of Tradition. Evola also regarded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, under which Crowley served his magickal apprenticeship and which was a seminal influence on the modern occult revival as, “to some extent,” a successor “to those of an initiatic character.”⁵² Evola granted that Crowley’s system of Magick was drawn from Traditional initiatic practices: “It is certain that in Crowleyism the inoculation of magico-initiatic applications is precise, and the references or orientations of ancient traditions are evident.”⁵³

Why then did Crowley identify with Adam Weishaupt and the Illuminati, whose doctrines are antithetical to Thelema? Perhaps the reason is that Crowley took on a certain role when assuming the mantle of leadership of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) founded by Theodor Reuss, who was in the employ of the German secret service. Reuss is said to have revived the Order of the Illuminati by virtue of what he claimed to be family connections with the 18^th century cabal.⁵⁴ He was an initiate of Martinist and Mizraim Masonry headed by ‘Papus’.⁵⁵ He was also in contact in 1902 with Dr. William Wynn Westcott, a high initiate of Grand Lodge Masonry, head of the Societas Rosicrucia in Anglia and founder of the Golden Dawn.⁵⁶ Reuss had influential international connections.⁵⁷ As Dr. Richard Spence of the University of Idaho has shown, Crowley was involved with the British secret service at least from 1913, when he was acting for British interests in Moscow,⁵⁸ and was called on during both World Wars.⁵⁹ Reuss was obviously a valuable asset to the Germans, and Crowley was ideally placed to track him.⁶⁰ 

At any rate, Crowley’s identification of the White, Yellow and Black Schools of Magick show that the Illuminati and Freemasonry can be identified with the Black School or what Guenon called the Counter-Tradition and Anti-Tradition. Crowley explained that each School has its own “Hidden Masters.” While the Yellow School “stands aloof,” “the Black School and the White are always more or less in active conflict.”⁶¹ The Yellow School regards the universe as “neutral.” The Black regards it as a curse and a sorrow.⁶² Hence we might summarise the three Schools of Magick in regard to their philosophy of life as being: Yellow: Neutral, Black: Negative, White: Positive.

Crowley, like Eliphas Levi and Guenon, saw Masonry as having been subverted by the ‘Black School’ and referred to English Masons as being “in official relationship with certain masonic bodies whose sole raison d’etre is anti-clericalism, political intrigue and trade benefit,” despite English Masonry supposedly eschewing such motives.⁶³ These critical sentiments towards the subversion of English Masonry are not consistent with anyone who would be an adherent of Weishaupt and Illuminism, whose raison d’etre was anti-clericalism and political intrigue.

Crowley saw anarchism sweeping the world of the type that had been initiated by the Illuminati and other forms of Masonry during the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Again, it can be seen that Crowley’s attitude was anything but Illuminist. “The last quarter of a century had swamped”⁶⁴ the monarchies, and for Crowley the world was poorer for it:

The world is seething from the dissatisfaction that springs from insecurity. Men can adapt themselves to pretty well any conditions, but when they do not know from one day to another where some fundamental principle may not be abolished in the interests of progress, they no longer know where they are. They tend to adopt the principles of the man who flits from one place to another… Civilisation has become a hysterical scramble for momentary material advantage…⁶⁵

Syncretic Religion and the Perennial Tradition

The centuries of subversion of Tradition by Black adepts and their dupes has caused a confusion of cults, religions, and spiritualities, most of which claim to offer humanity the path to peace and happiness, and even to Godhood. As has been indicated throughout this article, it is not an easy matter to determine the real motives of many claiming the mantle of the Ageless Wisdom.

There is an abysmic gulf between adherents of the Perennial Tradition and the Anti- and Counter-Traditions, yet they will often appear similar, because of the ‘counterfeit’ nature of the latter. The Perennial Traditionalist sees a commonality between faiths over expanses of time and space, the assumption generally being that they all derived from a primordial source and differ in so far as they reflect differences of ethnos, geography and historical circumstances. The Perennial Traditionalist will seek to maintain the distinctiveness of these faiths.

The Black adept, while masquerading as a Traditionalist, aims to amalgamate the world’s faiths into one new syncretic faith, the altar to which all humanity will be chained under the guise of ‘universal brotherhood’, preludes of which were the bloody Reigns of Terror in Jacobin France and Bolshevik Russia. Therefore, when a State’s secular politicians, who also happen to be adherents of the aim of a ‘new world order’, start talking about ‘inter-faith dialogue’, under the guise of ‘representing all religions’, and of ‘tolerance’, one should be suspicious.

Those who adhere to the Ageless Wisdom of many faiths eschew materialistic agendas. The World Forum of Spiritual Culture, formed on the initiative of the President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, brings together those who seek a new civilisation, in the aftermath of what they regard as a technical civilisation that is “anti-cultural.”⁶⁶ Significantly, Nazarbayev is also a champion of a Eurasian geopolitical bloc⁶⁷ that would challenge the very possibility of a ‘New World Order’. Such a bloc could serve as the axis for a New Age founded on spiritual and cultural principles, and freed from the bonds of matter.

Dr, Kerry Bolton - https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/the-new-world-order-vs-the-new-age-separating-truth-from-falsehood

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