"Come Here, Worthy!"

This story of modern occultism cannot be approached without understanding the role of what are popularly called secret societies. That understanding proves elusive. Perhaps no other topic within the occult field is more persistently mangled or subject to I-heard-it-somewhere judgment—stoked by YouTube videos, podcasts, and friend-of-a-friend sourcing. Supposition abounds. Supposition is not evidence. It is emotion awaiting evidence. This article, adapted and updated from my 2023 historical study Modern Occultism, attempts to untangle this web—at least from the perspective of clarifying how contemporary initiatory orders in the West arose from the revival of and backlash against Renaissance occultism. I have previously considered the late-ancient roots of occultism and its rediscovery during the late-medieval era. I now turn to the vessels—initiation and fraternity—that safeguarded some of occultism’s symbolical and developmental philosophies amid oppressions that eclipsed spiritual experimentation as the Renaissance ebbed. To clarify a misconception: I am not a Freemason. I am a friend of Freemasonry. Weaving spiders beware: this article warranties my affections. -M-

The question of secret societies is perhaps the most contentious in the occult.

I write these words in an era of suspicion. The notion that a group called the Illuminati or some other secret organization is manipulating and depriving us of power is common fare on podcasts, social-media posts, YouTube documentaries, below-the-radar bestsellers, and so on.

Once upon a time, I appeared on a streaming talk show for the Gaia network where I have lots of friends. I made laudatory remarks about the Illuminati as a historical group—and a veritable defender of principles and values that most thinking people now embrace, such as separation of church and state, freedom of search, belief in individual potential, and perpetuation of initiatory religious experience. I received a swath of hate comments and email. A producer informed me that some of it came from in-house.

“Hey Mitch,” a (sharply) smiling creative executive approached me before a return gig, “you gonna get us in trouble again?” In trouble. For heralding a short-lived coterie of radical Jeffersonians. Of all the controversial topics I have probed, from parapsychology to Satanism I have never experienced such blowback.

Those who perceive undercurrents of evil almost always regard themselves, by nature, as an opposing “Light realm,” to borrow a gnostic phrase. The question of projection or self-awareness never seems to burden them. The question of conduct versus stated conviction is nonexistent.

Let me be clear: forces and currents that deprive the individual of power are, of course, real. But the Illuminati, a project of covert and occult-themed classical liberalism in monarchical Europe which endured for under a decade, is not where to locate them. (To my fellow Americans, look instead at your refrigerator magnet from UnitedHealthcare.) One nevertheless hears the term Illuminati so often, and with so little definition, that its repetition functions as a point of validation.

Although it is important to note current mood and crises, my aim is not to dwell on social or psychological triggers behind the present culture’s fascination with, and emotional intensity toward, its perception of secret societies, particularly Freemasonry and the Illuminati. Nor is it my purpose to consider exclusive fraternities in general, such as Yale’s storied Skull and Bones, Bohemian Grove, or related groups that, rightly or not, are deemed clandestine power centers.

Before moving on, however, topicality requires that I say a word about the Grove and, separately, the Epstein circle. Neither fit the criteria of this article. But cultural currency necessitates comment.

I have no special knowledge of the Epstein calamity—save one: it had no occult connections in the historical and classical sense in which I use the term. I am six years the junior of the offender when he died. Hence, we share relative vintage. He routinely “collected” intellectuals at salons in New York, my hometown. I was—thankfully—never invited. Some of my distant interlocutors were. By interlocutors, I mean ideological adversaries, if I have any: i.e., ultra-physicalist intellectuals with whom I occasionally spar over the validity of ESP research and parapsychology.

Scan Epstein’s guest list and you will derive some sense of his ideology: value-free pseudo-rationalism. Pseudo because rationalism is not outcome but method. Members of his intellectual circle rejected even the most stringent and replicable methodological evidence for the extra-physical, such as telepathy and clairvoyance.

Here I speculate: the disposable manner in which Epstein and his closest cohort treated people—and the serial abuse—is abetted by arch-certainty (i.e., unwarranted certainty) of there existing no tendrils of connection among human lives, or what I term reciprocity. The “moist robots” definition of humanity—adopted from Dilbert by ardent materialists—amounts to gutter justification of nonethical, or non-empathic, conduct. Conduct is the sole measure of ethics.

Certainly there exist lingering questions. Certainly there exist injustices to redress and participants to hold to justice. But Epstein’s crimes fit neither the paradigm nor documentable storyline of what I record in this article.

A factually unrelated but culturally adjacent issue involves Bohemian Grove, the storied source of boundless, often unsupported, speculation as the ultimate—and most nefarious—of modern secret societies. The 2,700-acre Northern California club ground is infamous for secrecy or at least extreme privacy. Its insignias—such as the owl surrounded by the Shakespearean epithet “weaving spiders come not here”—and its baroque “Cremation of Care” opening rite—strike enthusiasts as set pieces from Stanley Kubrick’s haunting and psychologically perspicacious Eyes Wide Shut.

That the finest book about the Grove—which is to say, the one well-documented historical account: The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness by sociologist G. William Domhoff (1974, 2021)—is available via the CIA website will allay few speculations.

Weaving spiders take note: a more up-to-date version of Domhoff’s book, with a 2021 introduction by the author, as well as his valuable 1981 article about Ronald Reagan’s Grove membership, appears here. Since 2010, I have written extensively, including for the Washington Post, on Reagan’s literary—and possibly personal—relationship with occult scholar Manly P. Hall (1901-1990).

Hence, I do not shrink from questions of occultism and power. But—is the Grove where to look? As alluded, the effigy-burning Cremation of Care ceremony arouses ire. As does the 40-foot Owl of Bohemia shrine with its moss-covered bird of wisdom—and prey. By the Grove’s 1872 founding, however, occultic and esoteric imagery had already grown de rigueur among America’s fraternal orders, including the middle-class Knights of Pythias (my father belonged) and Odd Fellows, in line with Freemasonry’s inceptive influence and popularity. Today’s Grove, in my best estimate, is a somewhat frumpy old-boys’ network in a new era of tech-wealthy power elite—the Musks, Bezoses, Zuckerbergs—for whom its bucolic frolicking belongs to dad’s world. “A boy scout camp for old guys,” Domhoff terms it.

Here I turn to Domhoff’s 2021 update, in which he recounts early reaction to his 1974 book among factional thinkers:

Things didn’t get any better when a few left-wing activists grabbed on to the book and said that there were in fact political conspiracies hatched at the Bohemian Grove. They said that the atomic bomb was planned at the Grove, for example, a claim that misses all the key points about what I said in my book on this issue. (A member of the Grove asked the club president if he could use the area during an off-season month to meet with other A-bomb planners; no other Bohemians were present, or knew about the secret meeting, which could have been held elsewhere if the Bohemian Grove did not happen to be available.)

A few years later, several extreme ultraconservatives happened upon the book and concluded that the Cremation of Care ceremony, the harmless put-on that starts the encampment, in fact promotes devil worship and homosexuality. One rightist even suggests there is child sacrifice at the Bohemian Grove. An alarmist video and a web site make these incredible claims. But the history of the Cremation of Care ceremony, and the observation of it by two journalists who witnessed it surreptitiously, after this book was published in 1974, show that none of this is true (Shoumatoff, 2009; Weiss, 1989). It is held on the first Saturday night after the campers arrive and takes place at the base of a 40-foot Owl Shrine, constructed out of poured concrete and made even more resplendent by the mottled forest mosses that cover much of it. The ceremony is called the Cremation of Care because it involves the burning of an effigy named Dull Care, who embodies the burdens and responsibilities that these busy Bohemians now wish to shed temporarily. More than 250 Bohemians take part in the ceremony as priests, elders, boatmen, and woodland voices.

The cremation ritual is summed up in Domhoff’s work by the club’s librarian and an academic historian: it “incorporates druidical ceremonies, elements of medieval Christian liturgy, sequences directly inspired by the Book of Common Prayer, traces of Shakespearean drama and the 17th century masque, and late nineteenth century American lodge rites.” [1] Domhoff’s surprisingly under-viewed 1994 docu-video on the Grove reveals more:

Turning to broader social trends, membership in civic, fraternal, and mutual-aid societies, from the Jaycees and Rotaries to the Lions and Freemasonry itself has precipitously declined nationwide. When I was growing up in the 1970s in Queens, New York, my father was a member of the Knights of Pythias, and many neighbors had some similar affiliation. The Knights’ newsletters arrived home weekly—but my father never ventured to activities. “Dad,” I asked, “Why do you belong to the Knights of Pythias if you never go to the meetings?” He replied with Archie-Bunker weariness: “So I have some place to be buried!” He belonged, as did others, for funerary benefits.

In 2026, Dad was cremated, his membership having long lapsed. Therein lies a demographic parable: at its peak in the early 1920s, the Knights counted nearly a million members. Today, the order numbers fewer than 50,000. I know few people of my generation who join the fraternal orders that once dotted America. We are no longer a nation of clubbers. Unless you attend a twelve-­step or support group, you probably take a “go it alone” approach, finding community, such as it is, on social media.

One last qualifier. Do I belong to a secret society? I am an apologist for cloaked schemers—or one myself?

On occasion, denizens of social media burst through open doors by name-dropping me as a speaker at Peter Thiel’s Hereticon conferences—which I have twice addressed gratis on topics including parapsychology and magick for nonbelievers.

So plain are my tracks that weeks after delivering my first talk in 2022, I posted it (with others following) on YouTube. I belong to and serve nothing—but the search.

My aim in this article is to probe the historical foundations and self-designated purpose of the secret society in modern occulture. By studying our history we are studying our present because human nature remains constant. Hence, many issues surrounding the question of early modern secret societies—why they formed and their purpose—are not dissimilar to those we face today.

I write as a historian, albeit with critical sympathy for my subject. To echo a point: supposition, however elegant, is not evidence. It is hypothesis awaiting evidence. This article is evidence.

It is a given across human history that individuals and generational cohorts have organized into communities of interest and mutual aid, clubs, fraternities, pressure groups, and lobbies. But the secret society played a distinct role in the development of modern esoteric and occult spirituality.

To a significant extent, what is historically termed the secret society grew largely in response to the backlash against the occult and esoteric search; as such, the secret society represents a vessel—of greater and lesser quality—for occult ideas that may have proven socially endangering to the seeker. And may yet.

When I write of danger to the seeker, that is not abstract. Deep into the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, witch trials and persecution of occultists persisted. In 1790, Italian magician, self-styled Freemason, and occult adventurer Alessandro Cagliostro (1743–1795) was lured under false pretenses to Rome, where he was arrested by the Vatican’s Office of the Inquisition. Sentenced to death in 1791, he received a stay of execution but died of disease four years later in the dungeons of the Inquisition at the brutal Fortress of San Leo. His crimes? Heresy and Freemasonry.

In my 2023 Modern Occultism, I note the stake-burning of Renaissance-era Hermeticist and scientist Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) and the exile and impoverishment of Elizabethan magician and polymath John Dee (1527–1608). Today, these may seem like historical bygones, but that depends on where you live. In most contemporary nations of the Middle East, for example, Freemasonry is illegal. If you embark on organized or group study of Freemasonic practices of initiation, occult and esoteric symbolism, passion plays or dramas, and you reside within certain nations, you are violating the law. Application or severity of punishment varies.

It is no minor aside to note that the occult search is not something modern people should take for granted. In 2021, a still-at-large arsonist burned down the historic home of members of the Church of Satan in Poughkeepsie, New York, in the Hudson Valley. Two residents sleeping inside narrowly escaped alive.

Tracking the story of secret societies in the modern West requires looking back on Old-World Europe. Witch hunts, denunciations, arrests, jailings, loss of life, privilege, and property were basic realities in a Europe that had seen a flowering of—and backlash against—occult spirituality.

The continent itself entered a generation of warfare in 1618 with the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. The conflict ravaged Central Europe, the German-speaking region bordered by the Rhine Valley in the West and Prague or Bohemia in the East. For three decades, Catholic and Protestant armies clashed across this vast swath of land, once home to some of the most radical experiments growing from the Reformation and occult Renaissance, ranging from alchemy and astrology to Christian Kabbalah and spell casting.

Long after the Thirty Years’ War ended in 1648, that area of Central Europe suffered devastation, famine, and terrorism by brigands, often demobilized soldiers. Although the war had many causes, it was, in part, a reaction against religious liberalism and occult spirituality by the papal Habsburg Empire.

The devastation brought dire consequences for religious radicals, some of whom migrated from Central Europe, crossed the Atlantic, and reached the American colonies. I am going to set aside, for now, the migratory impulse, and the need (or urgency) for religious innovators to travel. Rather, we are going to consider the fate of those who stayed behind.

For some who remained, the response to oppression, warfare, and outlawing of heretical ideas was not to desist searching or to attempt the dangerous and uncertain journey across the Atlantic. The response was the secret society. It was to study, seek, learn, develop, initiate, and reform self and others within a closely guarded atmosphere. My contention is that the secret fraternity was necessary, both spiritually and, in closed societies, politically.

It is a near-universal truth of human nature that we harbor affinity for rank, drama, symbol, and pageantry. The secret society held some of that appeal, too. But to a great extent, the secret society, as it developed in late-Renaissance Europe, and sometimes exported itself to other parts of the world, grew in response to political and social oppression.

One of the many historical episodes that ignited the Thirty Years’ War involved clusters of people dedicated to esoteric spirituality, including monarch Rudolph II (1552–1612). It is from this drama that the modern secret society, and much else in Western counter-culture, arose. The student of history must understand these little-gleaned but seismic events.

Rudolph II was a ruler within the Habsburg Empire. The Habsburgs were a long-running, land-holding cluster of royals closely, although not exclusively, allied to the Vatican. Rudolph, however, was also an acolyte of alchemy, astrology, and occult sciences. He was specifically interested in the work of Christian Kabbalist Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522); magician-scholar John Dee; and alchemists Michael Maier (1568–1622), who was a court counselor, and the legendary Paracelsus (c. 1493–1541).

Swiss alchemist Paracelsus was among the most celebrated physicians of the sixteenth century, pioneering important aspects of occupational illness, modern medical theory, toxicology, and pharmacology. As a Hermeticist, Paracelsus believed in correspondences, not only between mind and cosmos but also mind and body, mapping early awareness of mind-body medicine and the mental factor in illness.

Paracelsus’ career was hampered only by his bombastic and cantankerous temperament, which resulted in his assailing the reputations—and even burning the books—of perceived historical and contemporaneous medical rivals. He was, nonetheless, a figure of national pride in Switzerland later known as the “Hermes of the North” and the “Trismegistus of Switzerland.” Today, a Swiss pharmacy chain bears his name.

Returning to Rudolph, in 1583 the monarch relocated the Habsburg capital from Vienna to Prague, which was then part of Bohemia, already a center of occult study. Bohemia grew into a hub for Hermeticists, Pietists (a mystical wing of Lutheranism), alchemists, and Kabbalists. In 1609, Rudolph issued a document called the “Letter of Majesty” that extended religious freedom to residents of Bohemia, acceding to concerns of Protestants. Among the Habsburgs, this was considered outrageously radical.

As noted, much of the Habsburg line allied with the Vatican. Naturally, they wanted to push back against Protestantism, radical Lutheranism, the Reformation, and religious experimentation. Many Habsburgs bristled that one of their own backed almost unprecedented religious liberalism.

Rudolph died in early 1612 before any formal moves were made against him. After his death, he was replaced for about five years by his brother, Matthias (1557–1619), a more conservative but passive and conciliatory figure who, to the dismay of the Habsburgs, did little more than maintain the status quo.

By 1617, the House of Habsburg had enough. The aging and childless Matthias was effectively replaced by a more iron-fisted ruler and strict counter-Reformist, Ferdinand II (1578–1637). In 1618, Ferdinand revoked Rudolph’s “Letter of Majesty,” igniting tensions with Protestant forces in Bohemia. In May, this resulted in Protestant partisans throwing three of Ferdinand’s advisors from a third-floor castle window in Prague, an episode called the Defenestration of Prague. The men survived but weeks of unrest followed. This served as the ignition point of the Thirty Years’ War.

Within Bohemia, Protestants, Pietists, occultists, and esotericists had grown accustomed to a fair degree of religious freedom. Under Ferdinand, this vanished. A cohort of partisans moved against Ferdinand, appealing for help to yet another aristocrat from the Habsburg family.

Their hoped-for savior was young Frederick V (1596–1632), a Calvinist married to Elizabeth Stuart (1596–1662). Elizabeth was the daughter of James I, who in 1603 succeeded Queen Elizabeth. The rebels essentially asked Frederick and Elizabeth to enter Bohemia and serve as their new rulers. They counted on Elizabeth receiving military support from her father’s English throne. Frederick, like Rudolph, was steeped in the occult, esoterica, and religious liberalism. He accepted the rebels’ entreaties and secured enough electors—Bohemia was an elective monarchy—to replace Ferdinand in late summer of 1619. But disaster ensued.

The Habsburgs, seeking to reassert Vatican control over religious life in Europe, amassed an army to depose Frederick and Elizabeth. After a year of rule, Frederick and Elizabeth’s forces were routed in fall 1620 outside Prague at the Battle of White Mountain. James I refused to enter the conflict and left his daughter and son-in-law to languish and flee. Ferdinand was restored—yet the Thirty Years’ War, a series of continual and bloody skirmishes, plodded on for decades.

Religious freedom in Bohemia, meanwhile, ended and occult experimentation all but vanished. Bohemia previously hummed with studies into philosophy, the arts, alchemy, astrology, divination, number symbolism, the magical uses of hymn—all igniting the Bohemian mind. Indeed, the term bohemian came to denote one who is offbeat, outspokenly artistic, a renegade or freethinker. This approach to life was publicly erased in the territory from which the term arose.

Although the Bohemian mosaic withered, some surviving experimenters, seekers, intellects, heretics, reformers, and religious radicals did not fade away. In certain instances, they, like other persecuted seekers, went underground to forge a community of ideas. As historian James Webb memorably put it in his 1974 The Occult Underground, “Bohemia is a land without a geography: but its capital is Paris.” And its outposts abound.

In 1614, during the lead-up to the tensions of the Thirty Years’ War, there began circulating in Central Europe an enigmatic text written in German called the Fama Fraternitatis, roughly The Story of Our Brotherhood. The work, in existence as early as 1610 but aboveground for the first time, purported itself the manifesto of a secret brotherhood, or “invisible college” as it was later termed. The fraternity was Brothers of the Rosy Cross or Rosicrucians. [2]

As religious freedom and reform were entering their twilight, the Fama Fraternitatis heralded an unseen order of adepts intent on instigating a new age of learning, mysticism, esoteric study, radical ecumenism, and decentering of the church from political power and regulation of the spiritual search. The Fama raised hopes that the developed individual, who rose up through systems of esoteric initiation, could self-govern and required no outside power, whether church, aristocratic, military, or judicial, to mediate life.

The response was shock and enthrallment. Who was this “invisible college” calling itself Brethren of the Rosie Crosse or Rosicrucians?

The following year, 1615, excitement grew when there appeared another anonymous Rosicrucian manuscript. This time written in Latin, it was called the Confessio Fraternitatis or Confessions of Our Fraternity.

The Confessio included magician-scientist John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica in a conjoined tract. During his period of relative safety, Dee proved uniquely important to the development of Renaissance occultism. Among his accomplishments was creation in 1564 of the all-encompassing symbol.

Dee’s sigil consisted of a simple cross surmounted by an astrological sun and crescent moon, with the rams-­horn glyph of Aries at its base. The Monas Hieroglyphica was designed to unite the zodiac and alchemy. Dee felt that his symbol, like a skeleton key, unlocked all of occult philosophy.

The Rosicrucians used the Confessio to reveal more of their backstory. The work described the birth and journeys of the group’s legendary leader, Christian Rosenkreuz, who traveled the world, including the Middle East, studying humanity’s religions. The esoteric pilgrim was said to have lived for 106 years and was entombed in secret.

In the most alluring part of the tract, initiated brothers discover the tomb of Christian Rosenkreuz, which they find is alchemically lit—not by the sun but by an unknown force within the chamber. The seven-sided tomb or vault is encrypted with symbols and layout communicating principles of initiation.

The Fama and Confessio forecast the dawning of a new era of spirituality in which everyday people would be educated, hospitals would open to the public, and privileges would be granted not on bloodline but merit.

In 1616, there appeared the third and final of the original Rosicrucian tracts, a religious allegory called the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, once more written in German. This work is attributed to Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1654), a Protestant reformer and Hermeticist. Andreae’s views shifted at various points in life, either out of changes of heart or self-protection.

The Chemical Wedding included further references to John Dee (his Monas Hieroglyphica now appeared on the title page and adjoined the wedding invitation) and principles of alchemy, specifically uniting masculine and feminine energies to create the divine hermaphrodite, a perfected individual, neither male nor female but a being of universal energies, qualities, and possibilities.

This alchemical parable was a religious allegory about a young seeker, Christian Rosenkreutz, called to assist in a royal wedding, a joining of masculine and feminine, active and passive, energies. In essence, the story told the progress of an occult pilgrim.

Other Rosicrucian-themed manuscripts included the 1618 Mirror of the Wisdom of the Rosy Cross, authored pseudonymously by Theophilus Schweighardt, believed to be alchemist Daniel Mögling (1596–1635). As pictured earlier, the book features a delightful symbolic illustration of an “invisible college”—a university tower on wheels.

Were these the works of an authentic hidden brotherhood—or just a philosophical provocation from one or more individuals? Seekers yearned to know. Some wished to join. We have no evidence that the Rosicrucians, if real, were ever located. History records no physical lodge with membership rolls, meetings, rosters, books, or fraternal rules.

Perhaps the Rosicrucian manuscripts were, as suggested by historian Frances A. Yates (1899-1981), an avengement by disgruntled followers of the exiled and impoverished John Dee. [3] Or, likelier, by radical Lutherans, deeply disappointed with the slowed progress of the Reformation and abandonment of religious freedom in Bohemia. The authors may have been Hermeticists and occult experimenters let down by prevailing regimes, including the British crown which, after Queen Elizabeth’s death, failed to defend religious liberty and deserted Frederick and Elizabeth Stuart in Bohemia. There existed any number of people with good reasons to present as Rosicrucians.

In any case, it is probable that the Rosicrucian order itself was more thought movement than actual fraternity. But it was a thought movement that ignited hopes among people deeply dejected—and even moved to arms—over anti-Reformist aristocracies and reasserted Vatican power in Europe.

For clarity, I must note that many later groups claimed lineage with the Rosicrucians. Several orders and individuals, starting in the mid-1800s through the early twentieth century and beyond, declared themselves Rosicrucians and quarreled over authenticity with rival organizations. As suggested, Rosicrucianism was more thought movement than identifiable brotherhood. No one, according to any records considered sound and evidentiary, ever identified a Rosicrucian order, hence claims of lineage are romantic at best.

Modern orders in the U.S. include AMORC, or Ancient and Mystical Order Rosæ Crucis, founded in 1915 by Harvey Spencer Lewis (1883–1939) and the Rosicrucian Fellowship, founded in 1908/1909 by Max Heindel (1865–1919). In summer 1989, AMORC’s then-leader acknowledged in an interview with Gnosis magazine that the group had no fraternal or historic bond to an ancient or Renaissance-based Rosicrucian society. [4] That noted, I think every seeker in every generation can identify with Rosicrucian ideals, including civic equality, the search, and ecumenism. I discourage doting upon pageantry, secrecy, or claims of ancient bloodlines. Violent and schismatic interruptions mark esoteric history and very little direct retention exists between our world and antiquity. But there do exist parallel insights and values.

For some, the ideals of the occult Renaissance could be sustained only by inner light, like the alchemically illuminated tomb of Christian Rosenkreuz. It was the light of the search, which is the essential point of Rosicrucianism.

I add a personal note. In summer 2026—on the eve of this writing—my wife, filmmaker Jacqueline Castel, and I visited AMORC’s Rosicrucian Park in San Jose, CA—a city-block-sized campus of Egyptian-styled monuments, gardens, shrines, and organizational buildings, including a formidable museum of antiquities. I was moved by how successfully the modern organization, through its museum and auditorium, introduces young people to exhibits and educationally sound (and well attended) presentations on Egyptian antiquity. We participated in a healing ritual in the campus’s main temple—a stirring rite steeped in Egyptiana revivalism. AMORC proves vitally alive as a seeking community.

Interestingly, in the wake of the Rosicrucian literature, we begin to detect the existence of another organization that is altogether real and, as such, has members, meeting places, rosters, rules, bylaws, and elected officers. That is Freemasonry.

Freemasonry is almost unique in modernity insofar as there exists no consensus, including within its own organizational structures, about the facts of its founding. Masonry has produced from within its ranks first-class historians. And yet there is no firm consensus within Freemasonry, either among rank-and-file members, leadership, or its roster of homegrown historians, as to the order’s origins.

There exists a mythos about Freemasonry extending to the building of King Solomon’s temple. Others more literally discuss Freemasons emerging from the stone guilds that built the Gothic cathedrals and abbeys of the Middle Ages.

“In quantitative terms,” wrote Joscelyn Godwin in his 2007 The Golden Thread, “the Gothic cathedrals are as astonishing as the Pyramids. In France alone, the ninety years from 1180 to 1270 saw the building of eighty cathedrals and nearly five hundred abbeys.”

There may be hardcore legitimacy to the Masonry-cathedral builder hypothesis. Stone building was a form of operative masonry, which necessarily integrated religious and symbolic understanding because its members were developing sacred architecture. In an era without abundant paper, mnemonic techniques, a core part of Masonry, proved necessary. But in order for historicism to prove definitive, we require accounts and records, which must be weighed for trustworthiness and corroboration. As noted at the outset of this article, circumstantial connections and theories, however plausible, are insufficient.

Among the early evidence we possess for establishment of Freemasonry, not strictly as an operative art but as a spiritual and esoteric path, appears in an epic poem composed in Scottish English in 1638 by Edinburgh poet and historian Henry Adamson, The Muses Threnodie; or Mirthful Mournings on the death of Mr. Gall.

A sprawling, early Romantic work, Adamson’s elegy to a lost friend depicts the nature of life in rural Scotland. It contains this intriguing passage:

For we be brethren of the Rosie Crosse; We have the Mason word and second sight, Things for to come we can foretell aright,

In his original, Adamson highlights the term Mason word and attaches it to “second sight.” It is among the earliest references we possess of Freemasonry as a speculative craft.

One of the few surviving records of early initiation into Freemasonry dates from 1641 involving British statesman and scientist Robert Moray. Hold his name in mind. As will be seen, Moray was later a founder of the British Royal Society, which was considered one of the bastions of Enlightenment Era thought. Minutes survive of Moray’s induction into the Lodge of Edinburgh at Newcastle. He signed the document, as he did future correspondence, with a pentagram, the Pythagorean five-pointed star used by Masons, adjoining his name.

Another early record of initiation dates to 1646. It appears in the diaries of British antiquarian and esotericist Elias Ashmole, who writes of being initiated into a Freemasonic lodge and identifying another inducted with him: “I was made a Free Mason at Warrington in Lancashire, with Coll: Henry Mainwaring of Karincham.” Related entries appear in 1682.

Ashmole was sufficiently enamored with Rosicrucianism that he copied by hand English translations of the Fama Fraternitatis and Confessio Fraternitatis. His private papers show that he wrote his own petition to join the Rosicrucians. It is unknown what, if anything, he did with his petition or if he ever came into contact with any actual Rosicrucians.

The dates I note are critically important because the Grand Lodge of England did not emerge aboveground until 1717. Thereafter, we begin seeing lodges proliferate and migrate to the American colonies, Spain, France, and Italy. Only in recent centuries has Masonry emerged as a visible organization. But these references demonstrate that lodge-based Masonry was operative in the wake of Rosicrucianism.

Rosicrucianism and Masonry share outlooks: that all religions are valid and equal; that the individual can self-develop through initiation and study; that illumination is handed down not by ancestry or central authority but through self-refinement; that ties between religious officialdom and state power must be severed; that rank and privilege are earned through peer election versus bloodline. Both Rosicrucianism and Masonry embraced alchemical and esoteric symbolism.

What Rosicrucianism endorsed in principle Masonry enacted in practice.

The backlash to Masonry came quickly. In 1738, Pope Clement XII issued a papal bull—the Vatican’s most solemn announcement—against Freemasonry. The edict prohibited church members from participating in Masonry and named it a heretical order antithetical to the church. Several related bulls and encyclicals appeared in generations following.

In 1884, Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical reasserting that Catholics could not be Freemasons. This same encyclical was reaffirmed in 1983 by Cardinal Ratzinger who later became Pope Benedict. (There are many Catholic Masons.) Speaking with reporters on July 28, 2013, the usually temperate Pope Francis condemned “Masonic lobbies.” [5]

The church has maintained persistent opposition to Freemasonry. Many forces within the Vatican view any kind of religious order or initiatory spiritual body outside its structures with suspicion. Masonry and the Vatican have also occupied opposing sides of political conflicts in Europe.

In sum, I think it is fair to argue that Masonry, the most widespread clandestine spiritual thought movement, the prototypical modern secret society, developed out of three factors: 1) the ideas of Rosicrucianism; 2) the ashes of the Thirty Years’ War; and 3) the disappointments of post-Elizabethan reaction against esoteric spirituality.

Masonry was, in a sense, the final outpost of the occult Renaissance.

I must add a further word about the speculated origins of Freemasonry and the suppressed Knights Templar. A connection is often posited and warrants consideration.

The Knights Templar was a banking and martial order that proved powerful and influential within the Catholic Church during the Crusades. When the Crusades ended in 1291 and into the early 1300s, questions arose about the role and purpose of the Knights Templar. The order represented a power center of its own, stoking anxieties within the conjoined French aristocracy and Vatican hierarchy.

In addition to its combat readiness, the Knights Templar was a financially powerful institution to which members of the French monarchy and Vatican administration were in debt. Hence, it was not difficult to imagine a scenario in which the Knights could become a competing institution.

In late 1306 or early 1307, Pope Clement summoned the grand master of the Knights, Jacques de Molay, to Avignon in France—soon the temporary home of the French-aligned papacy—under pretense of discussing a new Crusade. In 1307, on a dawn raid of Friday the thirteenth of October, secret agents of King Philip IV arrested Molay and all of his fellow Knights in France. Their property was seized and in months ahead Molay and members of the Knights Templar were imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, and coerced into confessions of heresy.

The former Crusaders were accused of idolatry, specifically of worshipping a disembodied human head—later conflated with a goat-headed god and identified with Baphomet (possibly an Old French corruption of Mahomet for Mohammed, prophet of the opposing forces)—defiling the cross, and having sex with men. Some members of the order made confessions, including Molay who later rescinded his. Fifty-four Templars, but not yet Molay, were burned at the stake in May 1310.

The Vatican formally dissolved the order in March 1312. Molay was condemned to the stake in March 1314. All of this was done with depraved cynicism, not because the Knights Templar were necessarily engaged in occult or heretical activity but because they were a martial and banking order that held debts and threatened the primacy of monarchic and Vatican forces.

Rumor holds that a lost fleet of the Templars made its way to Scotland and fought on the side of Robert the Bruce in his war of independence against England, also leaving its symbolic markings on Rosslyn Chapel, built in 1456.

In 1989, English historians Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, famous for their Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which informed some of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, considered in The Temple and the Lodge whether the surviving Knights formed the basis of Freemasonry.

I noted in a 2020 introduction to the book:

Although I write as a historian who shares the authors’ Masonic sympathies, I believe that Baigent and Leigh placed too much stock in secret historical retentions, by which I mean concealment and preservation of hidden bloodlines and traditions within highly placed families and social cliques.

Frankly, I detect little direct inheritance of esoteric traditions within the contemporary world. History is messy and family trees—especially family trees of ideas—rarely reach us intact. More common are self-styled “secret societies,” which pretend to ancient ties and whose acolytes sometimes unknowingly rely on hidden wisdom of no greater vintage than the occult revival of the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

None of this means that Baigent and Leigh were wrong about lingering and even seismic effects of occult philosophies. Ideas, symbols, practices, and insights not only endure across time but sometimes form unseen foundations. This is especially true of Freemasonic influences. Do you doubt that? Just look at the back of a dollar bill. The eye-and-pyramid is not a direct leaf from Masonry but reflects Masonic philosophy to the core: material life (the pyramid) is incomplete without the eye of providence.

In The Temple and the Lodge, Baigent and Leigh creditably explore Freemasonic influences on America’s framers and revolutionists, a fact of history that most mainstream historians until recently underappreciated or overlooked. In the American colonies, fraternity outweighed philosophy. “Most colonists did not actually read Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, any more than most British soldiers did,” Baigent and Leigh write. But a significant number of thought leaders, including Washington, Franklin, and Hancock, took vows to Freemasonry. In the agrarian world of the colonies—a landscape largely limited to church, home, and farm—fraternal ties carried outsized influence.

Freemasonic ideals—which included religious inclusivism, separation of church and state, and belief in the sanctity of the individual—forged a powerful bond and shared outlook among some of the founders, including a wide range of generals and signers of the Constitution. Baigent and Leigh (in what I consider a stretch) even suggest that Masonic sympathies blunted British commanders’ fighting resolve against the colonists.

Before moving on, let me venture an aside about a peculiar rhetorical device making digital rounds today in connection with anti-Masonry. When someone versed in Freemasonry, i.e., usually a Mason, corrects some of the more excitable denizens of online culture, he is often told that he is insufficiently “high ranking” to know what is really occurring in his house. This “high ranking” claim is the rhetorical equivalent of an urban legend. Everyone who repeats it has “heard it somewhere . . .” or has “a friend who . . .” or “everyone knows . . .” and so on. A YouTube link usually follows, replete with similar devices and misinterpretation. On occasion, a self-identified “ex-Mason” appears to reveal the house secrets (never justifying why listeners ought to trust someone who betrayed his own voluntary vows). As a historian, and as I think this article demonstrates, I labor to verify and reverify even supposedly basic facts. I assure you: repetition is not a source.

I mentioned earlier the British Royal Society, formed in 1660 to further the study of the arts and sciences. It was considered a bastion of Enlightenment culture and remains active.

One of the key founders of the Royal Society was chemist Robert Boyle, who in his letters of 1646 and 1647 lauded an “invisible college” and the work of an unseen community of thinkers, philosophers, and seekers. As seen, his term was sometimes associated with the Rosicrucians.

Another founding member of the Royal Society was John Wilkins, who had been chaplain to Frederick V, the ruler who, with his wife Elizabeth Stuart, was the ill-fated leader of Bohemia before his military loss to Habsburg forces. Wilkins quoted admiringly from the Fama Fraternitatis, the founding document of the Rosicrucians.

Another of the founding members of the Royal Society was Elias Ashmole who recorded his induction into Freemasonry in 1646, copied the Fama and Confessio by hand, and wrote a private petition to join the Rosicrucians.

Robert Moray, who was inducted into the Freemasons in 1641, was also a founding member of the Royal Society. These are among the critical figures at the group’s foundations.

What I write is inconclusive—but noteworthy. Consider the family tree of ideas, the reformists of Bohemia, the unseen voices of the Rosicrucian manuscripts, the early initiates into Freemasonry, and the founding names of the Royal Society. The search weaves above and below ground. Sometimes light must be taken underground. But that light nurtured, kept, and stoked can reemerge to influence broader society, which rarely understands esoteric sources behind some of its ideals.

Finally, I must consider the short life and enduring legend of the most controversial secret society in Western history, the Illuminati.

European monarchies and church hierarchies retained control of Europe into the late 1700s. Although reforms occurred, the progress of Enlightenment Age activity was stalled in the political reaches of public life. Ruling structures, and the privileges and laws they maintained, remained largely intact. Monarchies ruled Bavaria, Spain, France, England, Prussia, and the duchies of Italy. Religious and intellectual freedom was limited; the “invisible college” had gone only so far.

Among the dissatisfied was Bavarian law professor and philosopher Adam Weishaupt (1748–1830). On May 1, 1776, Weishaupt and four confederates founded an organization called “League against the enemies of reason and humanity” or Order of Perfectibilists. In 1778, they began calling themselves Order of Illuminati.

The handful of seekers believed that neither Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, the Royal Society or any other organizations invested in reform and human potential were sufficiently radical or effective. And certainly, the outer structures of political life held little promise for change.

Weishaupt and his collaborators believed that Europe needed a clandestine society that reasserted the earliest ideals of Masonry and the occult values of the Renaissance, namely that the individual himself is an extension of the cosmos and that through reclaiming ancient wisdom and passing through initiatory ranks, the individual could grow perfected or illumined. The illumined individual has as his birthright liberty from church, state, and narrowly prescribed judicial systems or doctrines imposed from above. Members of the Illuminati, as led by Weishaupt, believed, finally, that Europe required revolutionary movements echoing the goals of revolutionists in the American colonies.

Indeed, the Illuminati was founded about two months before the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, declared emancipation from the British crown. For Weishaupt and collaborators, directly challenging the aristocracy could result in imprisonment, banishment, or death. Hence, they organized their so-called illumined lodges with hopes that in secret, in the self-lit tomb of Christian Rosenkreuz, they could incubate ideas that would produce revolutionary consequences in outer life and forge a new legion of European leaders who were esoterically aware and had sufficient political power to loosen bonds of church and aristocracy.

At the Illuminati’s height, according to existing records, the lodge counted 600 to 650 followers. For a secret order, the Illuminati proved prodigious at record keeping. Some initiates were figures of influence, including a member of lesser nobility and Freemason named Adolph Knigge, who joined in 1780 and did a great deal to help with recruitment and formalization of ceremony and ritual. Knigge and Weishaupt never fully got along and Knigge quit of his own volition in 1784. [6]

Philosopher and dramatist Goethe, a Mason, joined in 1783. There is some question whether the composer Mozart, himself a Mason, belonged to the Illuminati. Mozart joined Freemasonry in late 1784 and remained a Mason until his death in 1791. His father, Leopold, was also a Mason. The year of Mozart’s death saw the first performance of his opera, The Magic Flute, which is suffused with Masonic themes. Some of its music is based upon Masonic ceremonies. Mozart also wrote compositions for Masonic pageants and festivals.

Regarding the possible Illuminati connection, the composer belonged to an Austrian lodge called Beneficence Lodge. The head of Beneficence Lodge, Otto von Gemmingen, was part of the Illuminati. Many members of Beneficence Lodge likewise appear on Illuminati membership rosters. Mozart attended lectures at another lodge of which he was not a member, True Concord, which likewise had a strong contingent of Illuminati. There is no evidence that Mozart joined the Illuminati but he was in proximity to some of its key figures.

Part of the Illuminati program was to recruit from, infiltrate, and remake Masonic lodges, Lenin-style, as vehicles for revolution. In that sense, the Illuminati could be regarded as a renegade Masonic movement. Several orders calling themselves Masonic lacked formal ties to Masonry but used the label independently, a practice that continues in various forms today. Since renegade lodges rarely advertise themselves as such, many members are personally unaware of being outside the traditional fold.

The Bavarian government’s secret police intercepted the Illuminati’s writings and branded them dangerously subversive—with that the order quickly fell under suppression. In 1784, the Duke of Bavaria, Charles Theodore, unilaterally passed a law outlawing all non-approved societies, whether intellectual, academic, scientific, or religious. This 1784 edict is often called a ban on secret societies, which is true enough, but it was actually a ban on all groups lacking monarchic approval. The following year, 1785, the Duke established another law that specifically disbanded the Illuminati, targeting the order directly. In 1787, another law authorized the monarchy to seize property belonging to Illuminati lodges and members. And finally, in 1790, the Bavarian aristocracy issued its final edict, prescribing death for members of the Illuminati.

No members or activity are evident since.

No executions are recorded but there were banishments. Targeted members were stripped of job, property, rank, privilege, and sometimes expelled from the nation. A wave of banishments occurred in January 1791, although this practice had been underway for several years.

I want to put a human face on this for a moment because when we talk of these movements and figures, the various names, Knigge, Weishaupt, Goethe, Mozart, can seem as distant and impersonal as visages on Mount Rushmore.

Who were the victims? What did they experience? What motivated them?

I do not mean to paint an idealized picture of the Illuminati. They were figures possessed of the same foibles and hunger for power and prestige that motivate many people. Indeed, some in proximity to the Illuminati, including Leopold Mozart, the composer’s father, disdained the group due to its program to infiltrate Freemasonry and transform lodges into covert vehicles. Centuries later, Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), who had esoteric associations of his own, wrote that any kind of secrecy runs counter to the ethos of democracy. Although the nonviolent revolutionary professed admiration for Madame H. P. Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, he never joined.

In a letter published in the newspaper Young India on September 9, 1926, Gandhi noted, “What has been a bar to my joining the society . . . is its secret side—its occultism. It has never appealed to me. I long to belong to the masses. Any secrecy hinders the real spirit of democracy.”

For his part, Weishaupt was prepared to employ secrecy and subterfuge. The Illuminist considered Freemasonry, at least in its current form, as weak tea. He experimented with Masonry before founding the Illuminati but found the larger group too passive, too exclusive, and too expensive. His one-time deputy Knigge also considered Masonry insufficient to the task of developing individuals who could take on the monarchy and extol classically liberal principles. Although the Illuminati’s leadership were disaffected with Freemasonry, they nonetheless sought to infiltrate its structure. That is ethically questionable.

But it is also important to understand something about what life becomes when you are targeted by the full power of the monarchical state with its laws, edicts, courts, and prisons. It is profoundly difficult to retain the existence you knew and the property and position you held. In that vein, I want to quote from a letter written to Weishaupt on November 29, 1785, by a former member named Ferdinand von Meggenhofen. It was soon after the first round of anti-Illuminist laws were issued. Meggenhofen wrote Weishaupt from a Franciscan monastery in Munich, where he was banished and imprisoned:

My teacher, my friend,

Here am I sitting in this lonely cell, my dear friend, to which superstition and fanaticism have condemned me, and my first thought is for you; my desire is to inform you of the amazing story of my inquisition. Could you, my teacher, ever have supposed, a few years ago, when we were rejoicing among ourselves at the progress made in our Institute, and at the tremendous advances which our country was making in enlightenment and culture—could you ever have believed that the reward for our labours would be, for you, banishment to a foreign country with your wife and children [in 1784, Weishaupt was fired from his position at the University of Ingolstadt and fled Bavaria], and for me, imprisonment in a monastery, by way of punishment because we attempted to enlighten our fellow-countrymen and to dam the strongly-flowing stream of spiritual despotism?—But a weak government allowed the evil against which we fought to grow strong roots, and we were defeated.

O friend! I should like to lament, like Jeremiah, about the destruction of our country, and to shed bitter tears over the ruins of our fine work. But why ruins?—The oak still stands firmly rooted.—The lightning of fanaticism has struck down a few branches, divided them, and enabled them to be planted in other districts, where they may grow more peacefully into trees . . .

The hardest task lay before me: that of informing my parents. At the end of the court-martial I went to see them, and eventually, after many devious approaches, I informed them of my suspension and dismissal.—O friend! never did I have greater need of my philosophy than at that moment. Let us draw a veil over that cruel scene or my heart will break and I shall go mad. Then I went on parade . . .

First they set before me letters from my friends, and made me answerable for certain expressions. . .I explained the passages in question in such a way as to do no harm to my correspondents, without denying the truth. . .O despotic suspicion! how petty, ridiculous and cruel can you be? In your blind eyes the slightest expression of friendship, and the free utterances of a blameless heart signify treachery and insult . . .

Then my examiner had the effrontery to ask why I had not handed in all my friends’ letters in which the Order was mentioned. “Because”, I answered, with a look of supreme contempt, “His Excellency cannot possibly suppose that I would betray my friends and act against all obligations of honour and righteousness.”

Historian Katherine Thomson, who reproduced Meggenhofen’s letter in full in her estimable 1977 study The Masonic Thread in Mozart, notes in a postscript: “After his release Meggenhofen kept his resolve to live quietly and humbly. On 26 October 1790 he was drowned in the river Inn, when a boat in which he was traveling was overturned. Since his body was not immediately found a priest declared that he had been carried straight to hell as a member of the Illuminati. (His body was eventually found over a year later, thus dispelling the legend.)”

Over the course of the letter, Meggenhofen goes on to say how, even in his imprisonment, he did everything possible to practice and propagate the teachings that they studied together and live by their principles. He had been stripped of livelihood and property, removed from family, and was effectively imprisoned in a monastery where he was supposed to undergo religious reeducation. As noted, upon his release in 1790, he drowned and his body was not immediately found. A priest announced that because he had been a disciple of the devil, a member of the Illuminati, his body had ethereally gone straight to hell. The body later turned up. This is what families were subjected to.

Weishaupt lived out the remainder of his life in Gotha, another part of the German-speaking region, and continued his writing on Illuminism. He struggled to earn a living until his death in 1830.

I ask that we remember the human beings behind these stories. When people talk about the persistence of the Illuminati today, as some kind of a shadowy sinister group, return to the passage by Ferdinand von Meggenhofen and be reminded what a real member of the historical Illuminati experienced—and the human cost and pathos when thought movements are suppressed.

The Illuminati, of course, persist in legend. The fictional strand of Illuminism began soon after the French Revolution in 1789.

In less than ten years, apologists for the bygone regime issued conspiratorial tracts that reassessed the revolution not as a foreseeable reaction to absolutist power, political and economic suppression, and a caste system in which the individual would almost certainly die in the same strata into which he or she was born, but, rather, as the result of a hidden campaign by a suppressed sect.

The notion that the aristocratic structure could vanish so quickly and completely, with little retention of the familiar order, struck some observers with disbelief. One could examine the social causes of revolution and reach an orderly set of reasons why a suppressed population after centuries erupts in political ferment. It is no great stretch. But for some who were emotionally and financially attached to the aristocratic and church order, and who witnessed the life they knew so quickly upended, it proved more digestible and intriguing to posit the hand of a hidden foe.

So was born a branch of conspiratorial literature that has echoed into the twenty-first century. This is why the vanquished order, in fantasy versus fact, remains known at all. The first revisionist work, Proofs of a Conspiracy, arrived in 1798 from Scottish writer, inventor, and natural philosopher John Robison.

It is a long, belabored, and muddled tract in which Robison concludes that certain revolutionary branches of Freemasonry (seen as a cocoon to Illuminism) were founded by the Jesuits, another longstanding canard. This heightens the irony that another such tract appeared contemporaneously from Jesuit priest Abbé Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797/98, translated to English 1798/99).

Barruel contended that the Illuminati, this vanished group of a few hundred artists, intellectuals, and religious freethinkers, represented the hidden hand behind the French Revolution. In a letter of January 31, 1800, Thomas Jefferson praised Weishaupt and called Barruel’s work “perfectly the ravings of a Bedlamite.”

Jefferson additionally wrote, “Wishaupt [sic] believes that to promote this perfection of the human character was the object of Jesus Christ. That his intention was simply to reinstate natural religion, & by diffusing the light of his morality, to teach us to govern ourselves.”

The third president and author of the Declaration of Independence further noted, “if Wishaupt had written here, where no secrecy is necessary in our endeavors to render men wise & virtuous, he would not have thought of any secret machinery for that purpose.”

Did these esoteric rebels change anything? Were they more than fodder for rumors and histrionic theories echoed centuries later on digital media?

On July 4, 1776, two months after the founding of the Illuminati in Bavaria, the Continental Congress of the United States authorized a committee, chaired by Benjamin Franklin, a Freemason, to design a seal for the new nation. The Great Seal of the United States was ratified in 1782.

The front of the Great Seal shows the familiar American Eagle, clutching olive branches in its right talon and arrows in its left. But the reverse of the Great Seal conveys a more esoteric meaning. It appears today on the back of the U.S. dollar bill, where it was not actually placed until 1935—by, as it happens, two twentieth-century Masons: Secretary of Agriculture (and later Vice President) Henry A. Wallace and President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

On the reverse of the Great Seal appears the alluring eye-and-pyramid. The pyramid is completed by the All-Seeing Eye, the eye of inner knowing associated with the Ancient Egyptian Eye of Horus. The juxtaposition posits that material progress is incomplete without gnosis or greater understanding.

Surrounding the eye-and-pyramid is the Latin slogan, Annuit Coeptis Novus Ordo Seclorum, roughly translated Providence Smiles on Our New Order of the Ages.

The esoteric imprimatur was neither Freemasonic nor Illuminist. But it reflected values, imagery, and ideals of the secret orders of the search. And this, finally, is how ideas prevail: not in membership rolls and meetings, badges or attainments: but in shaping the views of individuals and polities in such a fashion that we cannot imagine life before them.

We honor these reforms through protection of the individual search for meaning and awareness of those who suffered to establish it. Ave Illuminati.

[1] Domhoff does further service to canny reportage on the Grove by reproducing journalist Philip Weiss’s article, “Masters of the Universe Go to Camp: Inside the Bohemian Grove,” Spy Magazine, November 1989.

[2] Historian Tobias Churton has done important work on the pre-history of the Fama in his Invisible History of the Rosicrucians (Inner Traditions, 2009). For translations and valuable introductions to the primary Rosicrucian literature, the seminal work is Rosicrucian Trilogy by Joscelyn Godwin, Christopher McIntosh, and Donate Pahnke McIntosh (Weiser Books, 2016).

[3] See Yates’s The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (Routledge, 1972) and The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (Routledge, 1979).

[4] Gnosis #12, “The GNOSIS Interview: The Imperator of AMORC: A talk with Gary L. Stewart, head of the largest modern Rosicrucian group” by Jay Kinney and Tim O’Neill

[5] “Pope Francis: ‘Masonic Lobbies. . .This Is The Most Serious Problem for Me’” by Michael W. Chapman, CNSNews.com, August 2, 2013

[6] Among the most useful sources for this section are Katherine Thomson’s unjustly rare The Masonic Thread in Mozart (Lawrence & Wishart, 1977) and a groundbreaking 2022 English translation by Jon E. Graham of French historian René Le Forestier’s 1914 study, The Bavarian Illuminati (Inner Traditions).