Vfew people really know that Professor Antony Sutton revealed throughout his historical research that an American power elite, otherwise known generally among Conservatives as the “Liberal Establishment”, had effectively a substantial role in three significant twentieth-century historical events: the 1917 Lenin-Trotsky Revolution in Russia, the 1933 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States, and the 1933 seizure of power by Adolf Hitler in Germany. So, we are dealing here with a fundamental historical research almost totally unexplored by the academic world, especially concerning the Portuguese one.
Meanwhile, regarding the rise of Hitler in pre-war Germany, the British Professor also puts in evidence another area to be explored by independent and competent researchers, such as in the stretch:
«The role of this American power elite in the rise of Hitler should also be viewed in conjunction with a little-known aspect of Hitlerism only now being explored: the mystical origins of Naziism, and its relations with the Thule Society and with other conspiratorial groups. This author is no expert on occultism or conspiracy, but it is obvious that the mystical origins, the neo-pagan historical roots of Naziism, the Bavarian Illuminati and the Thule Society, are relatively unknown areas yet to be explored by technically competent researchers. Some research is already recorded in French; probably the best introduction in English is a translation of Hitler et la Tradition Cathare by Jean Michel Angebert.
Angebert reveals the 1933 crusade of Schutzstaffel member Otto Rahn in search of the Holy Grail, which was supposedly located in the Cathar stronghold in Southern France. The early Nazi hierarchy (Hitler and Himmler, as well as Rudolph Hess and Rosenberg) was steeped in a neo-pagan theology, in part associated with the Thule Society, whose ideals are close to those of the Bavarian Illuminati. This was a submerged driving force behind Naziism, with a powerful mystical hold over the hard-core SS. faithful. Our contemporary establishment historians barely mention, let alone explore, these occult origins; consequently, they miss an element equally as important as the financial origins of National Socialism»[1] .
Werner Gerson, the author of an interesting work entitled Le Nazisme Société Secrète, is another researcher who has also studied the occult forces in the side-scenes of human history. In his book, comes mentioned the main role of Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Orden der Illuminaten, a secret society with origins in Bavaria. As we know, Weishaupt was born on 6 February 1748 in Ingolstadt, a university city at the time as well as an active centre on behalf of the Counter-Reformation. In 1773, Weishaupt became a professor of Canon Law at the University of Ingolstadt, from where some of his students were recruited into the ultra-secret Order of the Illuminati[2] , in which most historians still believe as having been a branch of Freemasonry.
Nevertheless, it is a fact that Weishaupt’s Order was somehow inspired on Masonic Constitutions, as it is possible to see through the esoteric and symbolic language used in the Order, such as apprentice, companion, master, Scottish shield bearer, Scottish Knight, etc. The Order’s mission consisted in the subversion and destruction of all monarchical governments and state organized religions in Europe and its colonies[3] . So, the character of such Order was an elaborate network of spies and counter-spies based on secret reports.
Moreover, Weishaupt knew very well how the Lodges of Freemasonry, namely the Blue one constituted by three degrees – apprentice, companion and master -, would be very useful to counterfeit the true objectives of the Bavarian Illuminati. After all, those degrees could indeed emerge as a veil to simulate the lowest degrees of Weishaupt’s Order. And, in fact, the founder of the Illuminati used his secret society in such a way that every candidate would see it accordingly to his own personal view, or even through his particular interest eventually focused on a specific branch of Freemasonry, or perhaps on a Rosicrucian circle, whenever not in a political association.
Usually presented as a conspiracy theorist, John Robison published in 1797 his work full titled Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati and Reading Societies. By some means or other, the author provides interesting material on how the Illuminati have started a subversion process that many others[4] believe susceptible to be carefully traced in subsequent organizations throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries[5]. Besides, a French Jesuit priest, named Augustin Barruel (1741-1820), developed a similar view about the infiltration of the Illuminati in the Continental Freemasonry, from which would supposedly come the excesses of the French Revolution as it is historically known.
Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme became Barruel’s book published in 1797-98. It can be considered a crucial document made up of four volumes in which Barruel claims that the French Revolution was deliberately consecrated to the annihilation of Christianity according to a plot hatched by a coalition of philosophers, Freemasons and the Order of the Illuminati. In other words, Barruel alleged that a conspiracy was ultimately carried out by the Jacobins to overthrow the throne and the altar in the name of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”.
On the other side, Barruel’s charges relapse into “philosophism”[6] and intelectual framework promoted by some proponents of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Montesquieu. Barruel inclusively believed that Voltaire, d’Alembert and Frederick II, the King of Prussia, were working from behind the scenes to plan the course of events that lead to the French Revolution[7]. Besides, Diderot’s Encyclopédie was a Masonic project[8].
Meanwhile, Edmund Burke, an Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher, wrote a letter expressing his admiration about the author of the Memoirs. Significantly, he states: «I forgot to say, that I have known myself, personally, five of your principal conspirators; and I can undertake to say from my own certain knowledge, that as far back as the year 1773, they were busy in the plot you have so well described, and in the manner, and on the principle you have so truly represented. To this I can speak as a witness»[9] . In turn, Joseph de Maistre, a French philosopher and a key figure of the Counter-Enlightenment, rejected Barruel’s conspiracy theory, particularly regarding the implication of the Illuminati in order to overthrow the Church and destroy all monarchies in Europe.
Maistre also refused the idea that Freemasons were behind the French Revolution, though being himself a member of the Scottish Rite Masonic lodge at Chambéry from 1774 to 1790[10] . In spite of his interpretation of the Revolution of 1789 as a providential event, Maistre finally understood that the crimes of the Reign of Terror were the consequence of the rationalist rejection of Christianity, to which the monarchy worked in general by not attending, untimely, the spiritual, social and political tensions developed through the Ancien Régime. So, instead of directing the influence of French civilization to the benefit of mankind, the monarchy somehow promoted the atheistic doctrines of the eighteenth century philosophers, who, intellectually speaking, were indeed responsible for the disorder and bloodshed of the French Revolution.
Besides, the influence of Maitre’s thought on the “utopian socialists”, such as Saint Simon and Auguste Comte, can and should be explained by means of his own analysis of the problem of authority and its legitimacy. That is why Comte acknowledged that the absolute monarchy was not abruptly overthrown by new Enlightenment principles of equality, citizenship and inalienable rights. It was, on the contrary, a gradual process in which feudal, aristocratic and religious privileges, as well as the respective form of government were mostly responsible for the collapse of the status quo.
At the same time, Comte also admitted that the major principles which inspired the final assault against the European feudalism – such as the principle of liberty of conscience, or the principle of popular sovereignty –, were, once having achieved the revolutionary process, no more useful to develop, scientifically, a new secular ideology in the wake of European secularization. The scientific stage[11] , meanwhile designed to come after the failure of the revolution and of Napoleon, could now be the right one wherein a special science, primarily known as “social physics”[12], would be established to dethrone the so called metaphysical stage[13]. Thereon, while Maistre’s writings, postulating a hierarchical society and a monarchical State, could influence not only “utopian socialists”, but also conservative political thinkers – such as the Spanish Juan Donoso Cortés and, later, the French monarchist Charles Maurras and his counter-revolutionary political movement Action Française –, Comte could, in turn, set his main influence on Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill and George Eliot, as well on Harriet Martineau, Herbert Spencer and Émile Durkeim.
By the way, Maistre inclusively saw Bacon as an indisputable forerunner of the Enlightenment. In short, the dubbed “Father of Experimental Science” made from the very beginning a crucial influence[14] on groups of physicians and natural philosophers that finally came up, in 1660, with the “Royal Society of London”. Originally known as the “College for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning”, this Society began to be a research group with occult interests, as it can be reported by some illustrious members, among which overtops the astrologer and alchemist Sir Isaac Newton, who also became the Society’s President from 1703 until his death in 1727[15].
Regarding Bacon’s Instauratio Magna[16], it is a matter of greater importance to see how Aristotle’s physical, logical and metaphysical thought was subverted in the Modern Age. With Bacon behind the dawning of the Industrial era, nothing could now prevent the scientific revolution practically made by personalities that, generally speaking, were more interested on Biblical hermeneutics and occult studies than on science and mathematics. So, even when Isaac Newton was able to conceive his theory of colour demonstrating that a prism could decompose white light into a visible spectrum of colours[17], or, eventually, shared the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of differential and integral calculus, he could really do it without discarding his religious character[18].
Having acquired many of Newton’s writings on alchemy, John Maynard Keynes stated that “Newton was not the first of the age of reason: He was the last of the magicians”. This surely explains Newton’s Hermetic ideas of attraction and repulsion in order to expound his corpuscular theory of light, or even his idea of action at a distance, without which he might not have developed his theory of gravity[19]. But, in the end, what really matters is that Newton’s conception of the Universe based upon natural and rationally understandable laws would be one step away from atheism, as largely promoted by Enlightenment ideology.
Since Bacon’s involvement in scientific inquiry, there had to be some way by which his method could become widespread. And we have already said how “The Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge” had started this method with the help of natural philosophers whose influence resided in Bacon’s New Atlantis. But now is time to say something about Maistre’s work titled Examen de la philosophie de Bacon (1836).
The author began to examine how Bacon’s new system of logic, as practically depicted in his new instrument of science (Novum Organum Scientiarum), pretended to be a superior one. This superiority was proclaimed on behalf of what Bacon called true induction in opposition to a pure deduction as a means of discovering truth in natural philosophy. Besides, the Baron of Verulam speaks by himself, as follows:
“The syllogism is made up of propositions, propositions of words, and words are markers of notions. Thus if the notions themselves are confuse, and recklessly abstracted from things, nothing built on them is sound. The only hope therefore lies in true Induction. (I, Aph. XIV)
In front of Bacon’s eliminative induction opposed to deductive reasoning stemmed on general axioms, or first principles, Maitre argues pointing out the other side of the shield:
1. The Syllogism is profoundly connected with man in such a manner that, changing it, is like changing the real and spiritual nature of the second one.
2. Aristotle’s glory consisted on discovering different types of syllogism and its respective laws. Such discovery can be inclusively understood as a “spiritual anatomy” through which the human thought can be perpetually examined and demonstrated.
3. The inductive reasoning contains virtually the syllogistic one. So, conversely, induction is a syllogism without a middle term.
4. The tri-logical nature of syllogism has an analogical resemblance to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.
Bacon effectively contrasted the new method of science with that of Aristotle’s works on logic. But, in reality, he spoke of it as a great reformation of all process of knowledge, wherein most sciences and arts – optics, astronomy, music, ethics, politics and medicine – should deeply depend on natural philosophy overruled by inductive reasoning purged of opinions, idols, and false notions. So, as much as the Aristotelian syllogism had been, through the ages, applied to natural and even spiritual realms beyond the physical, Bacon’s induction should now penetrate the forms of nature concealed by the Creator (I, Aph. CXXIV, CXXIX).
The British alchemist probably wouldn’t say, like Goethe did, that “Nature conceals God”, but he certainly would say that man could become much closer with the All-Good while working as “the minister and interpreter of nature”. Besides, if the Creation of God could not be denied by the senses, the best way to contemplate it required a strict scientific study of light at varying rates of vibration as it passes through matter.
For this purpose, Bacon distinguished two types of experiments, the first of which – the luciferous one – was especially directed to the light process impressed by God upon the primary particles of matter which makes them come together to produce all the variety of nature. Most useless from a materialistic point of view, this experiment seemed to be the touchstone from which depended the collected and experimental knowledge directed to divine, natural and human fulfillments. Finally, the fructiferous one only offered particular benefits without any solid foundation in scientific inquiry about the modus operandi of Nature itself (I, Aph. XCIX, CXXI).
The Novum Organum – written in Latin and published in 1620 –, was indeed an influential work where Bacon definitely proclaimed the purpose of obtaining knowledge of and power over nature[20]. In any case, this undeniable formulation of the scientific method centered on experimental research shall not be reduced to anti-religious and materialistic concepts. Thus, it is a common mistake to consider Bacon an empiricist, especially when he states that:
1. The aim of human knowledge is to discover the primal and universal axioms regarding the hidden forms, or, more properly, the laws of nature-engendering nature as Bacon said to express the source of emanation, or true difference of a given body. Once accomplished such knowledge of the forms, the aim of human power turns on producing a new feature or property and adding it to a given body, whereas the subordinate goal rests upon the transformation of one concrete body into another within possible limits. Therewith begins the latent processes of natures related to underlying causes that are too small or fast to be perceived, as well as the latent configurations of bodies reported to the atomic structure susceptible of producing the natural world (II, Aph. I, V, VI, VII).
2. The operative process in nature can be sometimes fruitless, because there are natural recesses in which man has no power to act if not produce.
3. The interplay of forms, matter and motion are mostly invisible to the senses[21] . Natural changes are always preceded and followed by all sort of internal and translational movements which cannot be explained through anatomical research. For that reason, all body implies what in it really corresponds to the spirit, or at least to its tangible essence.
Unlike Plato, to whom the unchanging and unseen World of Forms were Archetypes on which depended the apparent world perceived by the misleading senses, Bacon remarks that forms aren’t modeled after anything else, on pain of just being “figments of the human mind…” (I, Aph. LI). The form of a nature is therefore its source for being what it is. In this sense, the form is always present when the nature is present in such a way that implies all the similar and the most unlike cases. Likewise, if the form ceases to exist, the nature infallibly vanishes or simply disappears[22] .
Considering Aristotle’s four types of causes – the efficient, material, formal and final –, Bacon argues that only the formal cause may lead to new discoveries and reach the deeper boundaries of nature. Hence, forms are also described as the laws of action in Bacon´s parlance:
«For when I speak of Forms, I mean nothing more than those laws and determinations of absolute actuality, which govern and constitute any simple nature, as heat, light, weight, in every kind of matter and subject that is susceptible of them. Thus the Form of Heat or the Form of Light is the same thing as the Law of Heat or the Law of Light» (II, Aph. XVII).
Additionally, Bacon refused Aristotle’s concepts of potentiality (dynamis) and actuality (entelecheia) in association with the matter and the form. None the less it is true that, for the Greek philosopher, all universals are instantiated for the reason that each universal can be predicated from existing things. But, if actuality is the end (telos) to which potentiality is acquired, how could Bacon receive such principle except for issues which deal with human action?
Despite Aristotle’s disagreement with Plato on the existence of universal forms that are not a part of particular things, Bacon was very clear stating that many objects in science won’t have explicit end-goals or purposes. Instead, Aristotle believed that final causes guided all natural processes in a graded scale of perfection rising from plants on up to man. In a similar fashion, Plato’s disciple also held that the level of a creature’s perfection was reflected in its form, but not preordained by that form.
For Aristotle, the motion of natural things is determined from within them, while in the classical mechanics motion is determined from without, whether it results from gravity, friction, contact, or some other source. But, unfortunately, the laws of nature became more and more subordinated to mathematical methods in which motion remained uniformly expressed, as it can be seen in Galileo’s theoretical work on falling bodies. In broader terms, Galileo clearly stated that the laws of nature were mathematical, as he wrote in Il Saggiatore, published in Rome in 1623:
«Philosophy is written in this grand book — I mean the universe — which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth»[23].
Descartes’ influence in mathematics is equally known, especially through his development of analytic geometry. Descartes also suggested that the body works like a machine, advocating that the pineal gland is “the seat of the soul” by means of which the body interacts. In contrast, Aristotle placed the rational soul in the heart, rather than the brain.
At any rate, who did not have a human heart was José Sebastião de Carvalho e Melo, also known as the most prominent and despotic Minister in the government of D. José I from 1750 to 1777. Ironically rewarded by the King of Portugal as Count of Oeiras in 1759, as well as Marquis of Pombal in 1770, the powerful Minister was instrumental in advancing the new secularist zeitgeist of the Enlightenment at the expense of individual liberty. From this viewpoint, Pombal showed no mercy in establishing censorship on one hand, breaking the power of the aristocracy on the other, to finally consolidate personal control and profit in the name of administrative, educational, economic and ecclesiastical reforms.
Having lived in Vienna and London, the latter city in particular being a major centre of the Enlightenment[24], Sebastião José began accusing the Jesuits of having a secret code of instructions in order to gain power, wealth and influence on behalf of world domination[25]. This propaganda war[26] was inter-connected with an international campaign for the suppression of the Society of Jesus, in which the Minister of D. José I managed to be a pioneer with the help of an organized system of works, laws, libels and pastoral charters[27]. So, as soon as the Portuguese crown expelled the Jesuits from Portugal in 1759[28], most European countries went carrying on the same process, such as France (1764), Spain, Austria, Parma, Naples and the Two Sicilies (1767).
Ensuring the tyrant’s victory against his enemies, Pope Clement XIV finally issued the brief Dominus ac Redemptor (21 July 1773) to suppress the Society of Jesus. Even so, in non-Catholic nations, particularly in Prussia and Russia, the order was plainly ignored. Nevertheless, the political moves that led to it would not only inspire, in the future, the upholders of the prerogatives of kings, but also new anticlerical movements settled by a large number of Freemasons as well as monarchical and republican positivists.
In due proportion to his subtle and unscrupulous character in attaining ends, Sebastião José kept for a long time the Inquisition with the help of his brother, Paulo de Carvalho, who, in one’s possession, preserved the older stratagems of torture and physical abuse to serve the crown interest. So, for at least twenty four years under the consulship of the Marquis of Pombal, the dungeons of the Inquisition were functioning alongside with the prisons of the Bugio, Foz, Pedrouços and suchlike. In the presence of this scaring scenario, neither the Duke of Choiseul could himself believe on how the Marquis dared to keep a tribunal independently established by the papacy.
Besides, the Pombaline reform of education[29], otherwise supported by new taxes, had but one goal: the centralization of every public and particular teaching structure in order to ideologically work into shape the professorship. In one word, all the teachers of “primary and secondary” schools – exactly the same as the university ones – changed into something ruled by bureaucratic and economical profits dictated by a heavy hand. On that account, the Pombaline Canon demanded the abolition of the neo-Scholastic movement based on the Aristotelian tradition carried on by whom, from the end of the 16th century, became the intellectual leader of the Roman Catholic world[30].
It is a fact that the Marquis of Pombal considered Aristotle abominable. But, in reality, his true enemy was not the Greek philosopher, as he perfectly knew. It was, on the contrary, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Francisco Suarez whose doctrine, adopted by the Dominicans and the Jesuits, advocated, if necessary, the act of killing a tyrant.
Descartes himself was surely acquainted with the Commentarii during his passage into the Jesuit Collège Royal Henry-Le-Grand at La Flèche (1606-1615). In truth, he was a student of Father Estevão Noel, who, apart from the Commentarii, used to teach the logic work of Pedro da Fonseca. The Météores, included with the Dioptrique and the Géométrie in the Discours de la méthod (1637), was, for instance, a Cartesian work inspired in the Aristotelian theory of meteors as exposed in the compendium (In Libros Meteororum, 1593) of Manuel de Góis.
In part, Immanuel Kant likewise developed his ideal of pure reason by studying the compendiums of the Portuguese schoolmen. In that way, Kant’s theory of transcendental idealism only proves that the previous Scholastic architecture, as taught in the European universities, became generally insufficient to elaborate a philosophical open system in which reason and faith are complementary rather than contradictory. Conceivable is thereby that Étienne Gilson, an “Immortal” member of the French Academy, would saw in Saint Thomas Aquinas the first of the modern philosophers as well as in Descartes the last of the scholastic one.
The most reliable thinker to eventually draw the inference about Aristotles’ exclusion of the Portuguese culture was Álvaro Ribeiro. Such a one has consisted above all in the outlaw of the philosophical thought from the academia establishment during the last two centuries. For that very reason, Positivism, Marxism and all forms of materialistic indoctrination have been unfortunately accepted and spread around every academic community and its subordinated educational system.
Aristotelian, Álvaro Ribeiro was also one of the first intellectuals able to see that the UN Organization was politically incompatible with the Portuguese spiritual ideal of a better world in support of individual freedom. For the rest, Álvaro´s criticism of the United Nations was overwhelmingly directed to the UNESCO, a specialized agency wherein the moral and the educational issues are strongly imbued of abstract and sociological methods. So, in his sharp-pointed view, the United Nations have been mostly created for the establishing of a one world government to which all the spiritual thinkers should definitely reply.
Further, the solution pointed out by Álvaro Ribeiro was basically focused on preserving and developing national tradition through philosophical thought. However, the fact is that throughout the 1960s Portugal became confronted with the armed revolutionary movements in Mozambique, Angola, and Portuguese Guinea. Salazar, firmly, resisted using, on one hand, military action against scattered guerrilla activity in Overseas Territories, while, on the other, ordered diplomatic reply in international organizations such as the UN as the most sneaky, criminal and perverted one.
Since 1945 and even before that, Salazar knew perfectly well how Western sovereign nations were eventually starting to migrate to a world government. With the UN Organization appearance, such process came into order with its parliamentary character more and more settled on abusive intervention in most countries’ policy around the world. Portugal, of course, was no exception, even when everyone knew how the terrorist attacks carefully planned and tactically perpetrated in its Overseas Provinces were equivalent to weaken the strategic fulcrum points of Western Civilization.
Comprehensively, Moscow, at the time, played this insidious game. But, unfortunately, Washington[31] , London and other leading capitals of the so called Western world also did it by means of financing, recruiting, arming and training gangs, factions and movements of guerrillas to subvert pacific populations in Portuguese Africa. Besides, being Portugal a multicultural, multiracial and a pluricontinental nation since the 15th century, it is not difficult to accomplish that, once questioned and deprived of its political rights based on historical tradition, the progress and the well-being of Africa’s continent would be forever lost.
There is a movement afoot known as the John Birch Society, founded in Indianapolis, Indiana, on December 9, 1958, by a group of 12 led by Robert Welch, Jr. (1899–1985). One of the first public activities of the society, otherwise pledged with Christian principles and conservative values, was a campaign which claimed in 1959 that the UN globalist agenda consisted of building a “One World Government”. In short form, the Bircher slogan campaign, pressing for an end to United States membership in the United Nations, was “Get US Out!”
In fact, Robert Welch denounced that the governments of both the United States and the Soviet Union were controlled by a cabal of corporate internationalists, greedy bankers and corrupt politicians whose roots could be found in the Enlightenment-age secret society of the Illuminati. Meanwhile, Welch somehow acknowledged how difficult it was to trace the Illuminati conspiracy after the Order suppression by the government agents of Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria, in his preemptive campaign to neutralize the threat of secret societies able to overthrow the Bavarian monarchy and its state religion: the Roman Catholicism. Nevertheless, Welch referred to the Conspirators as “The Insiders”, relating them with the international financiers widely known as the Rothschild and the Rockefeller families, as well as with nongovernmental organizations such as the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission as fronts for a master conspiracy in which the Communist movement was also a very useful instrument managed by a shadow government[32].
Today, we live undoubtedly in a less free world. Reasonable doubts, however, can exist about knowing if the Illuminati survived its suppression in 1784. But, in the end, one thing can be sure: “The Insiders”, whosoever they may be, will definitely lose because All-mighty God is the greatest “Conspirator” of all.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Antony Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Clairview, 2010, p. 14.
[2] This Order was founded on 1st May 1776 as the “Order of Perfectibilists”. From 1782 “Brother Spartacus”, the symbolic name adopted by Weishaupt, recruited in Weimar the Duke Charles August (Eschylus), Goethe (Abaris), Herder (Damasus pontifex), Schardt (Apollonius), von Fritsch (Werner). By the time, he also recruited the Baron Dalberg, the Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, the Count and the future Prince of Metternich, and last but not least, the Duke Ernest II of Saxe-Cobourg and Gotha.
[3] Weishaupt’s radical goal was from the very beginning not only directed towards the German society but to the entire world. Besides, he had developed a Gnostic worldview in order to achieve an age of Enlightenment raised by natural reason. Thus, a welcome reform would finally come through Deistic reeducation regarding the “moral perfection of human nature”.
[4] That is the case of Nesta Helen Webster, a British feminist writer who, inclusively, considered the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an “open question”. However, the crucial point regarding the Illuminati conspiracy proceeds from her book The French Revolution: a Study in Democracy, in which she says: «The lodges of the German Freemasons and Illuminati were thus the source whence emanated all those anarchic schemes which culminated in the Terror, and it was at a great meeting of the Freemasons in Frankfurt-am-Main, three years before the French Revolution began, that the deaths of Louis XVI and Gustav III of Sweden were first planned». Curiously, Winston Churchill himself praised her in a 1920 article entitled Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People, in which he asserted: «This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution» (Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920).
On the other hand, we have also the case of William James Guy Carr, whose works were notably influenced by the writings of Nester Webster and many other authors such as Léo Taxil, l’abbé Augustin Barruel and John Robison. Carr sustained a global conspiracy theory consisting of two main subjects: international communism and international capitalism, both controlled by the Illuminati and the international bankers, mainly represented by the Rothschild and the Rockefeller families. Carr also refers to an alleged plan for Three World Wars, inspired, as he believed, by the Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite Southern Jurisdiction, Albert Pike. Carr’s books such as Pawns in the Game (1955), The Red Fog over America (1955) or even Satan, Prince of This World (1959), were really influential among conspiracy believers like Dan Smoot (The Invisible Government, 1962), Gary Allen (The Rockefeller File, 1976; Kissinger: The Secret Side of the Secretary of State, 1976; Say “No!” to the New World Order, 1987), Richard T. Osborne (The Great International Conspiracy, 1974 ; The Coming of World War III, 2006), Myron C. Fagan (Audio Document (LP) : The Illuminati and The Council on Foreign Relations, recorded in 1967-1968).
[5] In Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), there is some evidence on how the “New World Order” is being carefully prepared, especially through the international banking system by means of the US Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In his book The Anglo-American Establishment: from Rhodes to Cliveden, written in 1949 but published posthumously in 1981, Quigley also purports that a secret society, formally established in 1891 by John Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner, has played a significant role in recent world history. Curiously, it seems that this secret society, which as a whole does not have a formal name, was simultaneously based on the Jesuit and the Masonic models, due to its elaborate hierarchical structure with an inner circle (“The Society of the Elect”) and an outer circle (“The Association of Helpers”). According to Professor Quigley, the outer circle became, through Lord Milner’s initiative, the British Round Table organization in 1909, namely responsible for several historical events, including the Jameson Raid, the Second Boer War, the founding of the Union of South Africa, the replacement of the British Empire with the Commonwealth of Nations, and many of Britain’s foreign policy decisions in the twentieth century.
In addition, the American historian states, in Tragedy and Hope, that he had been in direct contact with this organization, whose nature he contrasts to right-wing claims of a communist conspiracy: «This radical Right fairy tale, which is now an accepted folk myth in many groups in America, pictured the recent history of the United States, in regard to domestic reform and in foreign affairs, as a well-organized plot by extreme Left-wing elements…. This myth, like all fables, does in fact have a modicum of truth. There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the Radical right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other group, and frequently does so. I know of the operation of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies… but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known».
Yet, Antony Sutton stated in Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler: «Quigley goes a long way to provide evidence for the existence of the power elite, but does not penetrate the operations of the elite. Possibly, the papers used by Quigley had been vetted, and did not include documentation on elitist manipulation of such events as the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler’s accession to power, and the election of Roosevelt in 1933. More likely, these political manipulations may not be recorded at all in the files of the power groups. They may have been unrecorded actions by a small ad hoc segment of the elite. It is noteworthy that the documents used by this author came from government sources, recording the day-to-day actions of Trotsky, Lenin, Roosevelt, Hitler, J.P. Morgan and the various firms and banks involved».
[6] Barruel defined “philosophism” as «the error of every man who, judging of all things by the standard of his own reason, rejects in religious matters every authority that is not derived from the light of nature…» (Vol. I, chap 1, 4).
[7] Curiously, the individuals that played a direct role in the Enlightenment and within the planned conspiracy against Christianity used secret names: Voltaire was “Raton”, d’Alembert was “Protagoras”, Frederick II was “Luc”, and Diderot was known as “Plato”.
[8] As a Freemason, Condorcet was also an influential leader who supported the French Revolution. Too many others conspired equally, as, for instance, the Baron d’Holbach, Buffon, La Mettrie, Raynal, Abbé Yvon, Abbé de Prades, Abbé Morrelet, La Harpe, Marmontel, Bergier and Duclos.
[9]Edmund Burke to Abbé Barruel, May 1, 1797, in Thomas W. Copeland, ed., The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 10 Vols. (Chicago and Cambridge, 1958–1978), 9: 319–320.
[10] In turn, Gerard Encausse, a Parisian doctor whose esoteric pseudonym was Papus, said that Ramsay’s Scottish System was the one behind the French Revolution and the principles of atheism and materialism (cf. Martinésisme, Willermosisme, Martinisme et Franco-Maçonnerie, 1899). While claiming an alleged revenge of the Knights Templar, this System not only prepared and spread a revolutionary subversion within a great number of Masonic degrees, orders and bodies, but also applied the new dictatorial Masonic Constitutions to society. Meanwhile, a considerable opposition to such political revolving movement – and particularly to the Bavarian Illuminati of Adam Weishaupt –, came especially through Louis Claude de Saint-Martin and Jean-Baptiste Willermoz. They were both initiated in the Christian Enlightenment by Martinez de Pasqually, a Portuguese theurgical operator who founded the Ordre des Chevaliers Maçons Élus Cohens de L’Univers (Order of Knight-Masons Elect Priests of the Universe), which apparently functioned as a Masonic obedience in France.
[11] The scientific stage, rejecting introspective and intuitional attempts, resides on observation and classification of data derived from positive sense experience in order to establish cause and effect relationship. Therefore, Comte would say: “from science comes prediction; from prediction comes action.”
[12]Physique social, according to Comte, and later renamed sociology.
[13] Comte offered an account of social evolution based on the general “law of three stages”: (1) the theological, (2) the metaphysical and (3) the positive. The progression of the three stages is deeply connected with Comte’s proposal of a systematic and hierarchical classification of the sciences, developed in this order of growing complexity: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and sociology. However, there was a seventh science, one even greater than sociology, which was Anthropology or the true science of Man as the last gradation in the Grand Hierarchy of Abstract Science.
[14] This influence can, eventually, be found in Bacon’s work titled “New Atlantis”, in which the so called “Solomon’s House” seems to have inspired an attempt, in 1667, to establish a permanent “College” for the Society. For the rest, Frances Yeats, in her book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972), says that the Royal Society began to be a Masonic institution deeply influenced by figures such as Elias Ashmole and Robert Fludd identified themselves as Rosicrucians. So, the British historian not only points how Hermetic tradition and magical thinking played an important role in early modern science and philosophy, but also reveals how the “Invisible College”, exactly the same as described in the Rosicrucian Manifestos written in the early 17th century in Europe, finally became the Royal Society.
[15] Today, the Society formally acts as Her Majesty’s Government’s chief scientific advisor, and is the United Kingdom’s Academy of Sciences. Besides, the Royale Society acts as well as an advisor to the European Commission and the United Nations on matters of science.
[16] “The Great Instauration” is Bacon’s universal reform of knowledge inspired in the Work of the Six Days of Creation, as defined in the Bible, leading to the Seventh Day of Rest or Sabbath in which Adam’s dominion over creation would be restored.
[17] Regarding the refraction of light, Newton, due to his knowledge of “corpuscular alchemy”, was also capable, by using a lens and a second prism, of recomposing the multicoloured spectrum into white light. While doing so, his main conclusion was that colour is the result of objects interacting with already-coloured light rather than objects generating the colour themselves.
[18] It seems that Newton wrote more on religion than he did on natural science. As we know, Newton’s religious view rejected the Christian doctrine of the Trinity that defines God as three divine persons: the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit. Put another way, Newton, an unorthodox Christian, held an Arian view which taught that God the Father and the Son did not exist together eternally.
Newton’s studies of the Bible and of the early Church Fathers become specially known in a critical dissertation titled An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, where, besides blaming the Roman Church of “pious frauds”, claims to review all the textual evidence available from ancient sources on two dispute Bible passages: 1 John 5:7 and 1 Timothy 3:16. Based on the King James Biblical Version, Newton argues that the first passage must have been “He was manifest in the flesh” instead of “God was manifest in the flesh.” As far as the second one, Newton claims that the words “in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one” – which stands God in three persons co-equal, co-eternal and consubstantial –, did not appear in the original Greek Scriptures.
[19] It is also worth noting that Newton did not actually use the term “inertia” with regard to his First Law of Motion. In fact, Newton’s original idea, borrowed from Kepler’s definition of “inertia” in terms of a resistance to movement, was focused on “the innate force of matter” possessed by an object to preserve its present state, whether it be of rest or of moving uniformly forward in a straight line. Given this perspective, we must conclude that Galileo and Descartes were the ones who really unified the Aristotelian principles of rest and motion into one mechanical principle subjected to mathematic analysis.
[20] For Bacon, matters of policy were likewise inseparable from a widespread science revolution (I, Aph. LXXX). During Queen Elizabeth’s Office, he even advocated for the employment of a Minister for Science and Technology, which never took place. Then it is no surprise that Bacon’s view of the theory and practice of law and his view of the theory and practice of science were strictly parallel, as Barry Gower recognized more emphatically: «Those who concern themselves with the nature of justice and its relation to legitimate authority in a state need to reflect on the ways in which justice is administered, determined and delivered. In a similar way, those who would concern themselves with nature must have, or be prepared to acquire, knowledge of the ways in which nature works. If, to have that knowledge, they need experiments to make the world reveal its secrets, then there is a continuing parallel with the law in that … lawyers need inquisitions and trials to make justice prevail. As Bacon put it when drawing King James’s attention to the expenses incurred by experimenters: “as secretaries and spials of princes and states bring in bills for intelligence, so you must allow the spials and intelligencers of nature to bring in their bills.” The value of experiments which exhibit nature under investigation lies in their ability to reveal the truths nature would otherwise conceal, just as the value of espionage and inquisition lies in their ability to reveal the truths people would otherwise conceal» (Scientific method: An historical and philosophical introduction. London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 45-46).
[21] Leaning on the “physical” theory of Democritus which says that atoms are not visible to human senses, Bacon adds that all the instruments able to amplify and accurate those senses are worthless without science’s knowledge of and over nature (I, Aph. L).
[22] For more in this matter, Bacon explains: «For since the Form of a thing is the very thing itself, and the thing differs from the form no otherwise than as the apparent differs from the real, or the external from the internal, or the thing in reference to man from the thing in reference to the universe; it necessarily follows that no nature can be taken as the true form, unless it always decrease when the nature in question decreases, and in like manner always increase when the nature in question increases» (II, Aph. XIII).
[23] In this treatise, Galileo evaluates the astronomical views of a Jesuit, Orazio Grassi, who, based on mathematical reasoning, asserted that comets move above the Moon. Galileo, in turn, countered that comets were just an optical illusion.
[24] As the Portuguese ambassador to Great Britain, Melo was especially familiar with the anti-Jesuit British tradition, and in Vienna he had made friendship with Gerhard van Swieten, a confidant of Maria Theresa of Austria and a staunch adversary of the Austrian Jesuits’ influence.
[25] Pombal inspired himself in the Monita Secreta – otherwise known as Secret Instructions of the Jesuits – to orchestrate a conspiracy theory supporting the Order’s desire for power by means of crimes and abominations of every kind – immoralities, conspiracies, murders and regicides. It is widely known that such Secret Instructions were a forgery considered to be made by one Jerome Zahorowski, a Pole, who, having been a member of the Society, had been expelled in 1611. The Secret Instructions first appeared in Krakow in 1612 in the form of a manuscript, purporting to be a translation from the Spanish, and were printed in the same city in 1614. Amongst those who have argued that the Secret Instructions are a hoax are, for instance, Bishop Lipski of Cracow (1616), Fra Paolo Sarpi (the historian of the Council of Trent), the Jansenist Henri de Saint-Ignace and Blaise Pascal.
[26] Étienne Pasquier, a French lawyer, was one of the former propaganda theorists over against the Society of Jesus. In 1565, he became famous by pleading the cause of the University of Paris against the Jesuits, and won it. Later on, was published Pasquier’s work titled Le Catéchisme des Jésuites (1602), translated in seven languages at least.
[27] Most chief European libraries preserve many of these works, mostly translated to French, Spanish, Italian, German, English, Latin and even Chinese language.
[28] In the sequence of the attempted assassination of D. José I on September 3, 1758, Sebastião José took, at the very beginning, the opportunity to implicate the Jesuits by alleging their prior knowledge of the attempted regicide. Among those arrested and executed was Gabriel Malagrida, the Jesuit confessor of Leonor of Távora. Unfortunately, she and her husband the Count of Alvor, along with the Duke of Aveiro, the Marquis of Alorna and the Count of Atouguia, were not spared as well for the reason that they were also among the bitterest enemies of the “Prime Minister” of Portugal.
[29] The chief inspirer of such a reform was a representative of the Enlightenment: Luís António Verney (1713-1792). Owing to his anti-Jesuitical learning outlook, Portugal imported a great number of professors skilled in modern physics as thenceforth practiced in Central and Northern Europe. Thus, the Enlightenment’s entry in Portugal stemmed on denationalized professors of algebra, astronomy, surgery and natural philosophy.
[30] In Portugal, the neo-Scholastic movement was founded by the Jesuits of Coimbra, also known as the Conimbricenses. Between 1592 and 1601, they published eight voluminous commentaries on the philosophical writings of Aristotle titled Commentarii Collegii Conimbricensis Societis Iesu. Originally, these commentaries were dictations to the students by the professors and as such were not intended for publication. But, fortunately, the Commentarii were afterwards corrected and supervised for publication through the chief work of Manuel de Góis and his auxiliaries Baltazar Álvares, Cosme de Magalhães and Sebastião do Couto.
Written in flowing Latin, the Commentarii included all the commentators of Aristotle since the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry of Tyre (232–304) to the Andalusian Muslim Ibn Rush (1026-1198), commonly known as Averroes or, inclusively, “The Commentator” with regard to Aristotle’s philosophy. On the whole they included all the Greek, Roman, Arabian and Latin medieval schoolmen for the main purpose of setting reliable explanations and exhaustive discussion of the system of Aristotle. Besides, they were translated and used in many European countries, such as Germany, France, Italy, and also printed in Jesuit schools outside Europe, particularly in Bahia (Brazil), Goa and even China.
But, for the present, let us remind the Jesuit philosopher Pedro da Fonseca (1528–1599), known in his time as the “Portuguese Aristotle”. In fact, he was one of the first school teachers selected with tree others (Marcos Jorge, Cipriano Soarez e Pedro Gómez) to realize the Commentarii project, which, in the meantime, did not proceed under the auspices of such an illustrious group. Nevertheless, Father Pedro da Fonseca wrote two masterworks worthy of memory, such as the Instittutiones Dialecticarum and the Commentariorum in Libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis. The later one included the Greek text of Aristotle, while the first one – much appreciated by Gottfried Leibniz – enjoyed great success throughout European universities well into the eighteenth century.
[31] In Interdicted Dialogues (Vol. I, 1979), Franco Nogueira – the Salazar´s Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1961 and 1969 – records what, in May 16th, 1962, was told to him in Lisbon by an American journalist, Constantine Brown: 1. President Kennedy was a weak character entirely dominated by a group of a dozen personalities in which figured Bundy, Schlesinger and Rostow as the most likely influential of all; 2. This group had an ultimate goal: a) appease Russia by all means; b) sacrifice, if necessary, all Western Europe by destroying the Governments of Adenauer, De Gaulle and Oliveira Salazar; c) submerge all sovereign nation-states, including the US one; d) bring up a single world order ruled by the United Nations.
[32] Regarding the global conspiracy, Welch also pointed the government agencies like the Federal Reserve System and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Welch, inclusively, accused some collegiate fraternities (Skull and Bones) and gentlemen’s clubs (Bohemian Club) as front organizations on behalf of a “New World Order”. And more recently, the Birch’s society accused the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) by favouring political and economic globalization before the principles of the U.S. Constitution.
Olavo de Carvalho is the President of The Inter-American Institute and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Philosophy, Political Science, and the Humanities.
