Political Occultism, Occult Politics (Part One)
One should not underestimate the role that esotericism and occultism have played in French political history — a role that need not take a back seat to that of secret societies.
Alright. We see where this is going. L’ECLAIREUR’s logo is an owl — the owl of Minerva, symbol of wisdom and clear-sightedness, capable of seeing in the dark. So obviously our little publication must be the offshoot of some secret society, à la Bohemian Club. And isn’t the Bohemian Club’s own emblem an owl, by the way? Ergo, L’ECLAIREUR - The Enlightener in English - has to be the Illuminati.
Nice try. More prosaically, the owl was simply the unofficial insignia of the Human Intel Units of the Chasseurs Alpins, France’s elite light mountain infantry, now folded into the Mountain Commandos. Just a tribute to the one French army that was never defeated — the Army of the Alps. The Alps is where we’re from. FAFO. :D
We are not writing these lines from some off-grid cabin deep in the Écrins massif, tinfoil hat clamped to our heads to ward off CIA rays and chemtrails. Think us as batshit crazy as you like: we’ll wager that by the end of this series, it’s you who’ll be seeing the world upside down.
This summer serial is not a manual, not a cheat sheet for passing the entrance exam into Freemasonry, the Rosicrucians, the Order of Malta, the Templar lodges, Bilderberg, or any other secret society. We are, needless to say, not talking about cults but about secret societies made up of sane people who take part of their own free will, in no way held in thrall by some guru exercising total dominion over their free judgment.
Our aim here is to shine a journalistic light — this is not a historian’s work — on a social and political reality: the influence of secret societies on French society. And when it comes to secret societies meddling in politics, we French are world champions. Take “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.” A Masonic slogan first, before it became the motto of the French Republic.
Did we not see criminologist Alain Bauer, former Grand Master of the Grand Orient of France 1, pounding the table on every TV set to order Emmanuel Macron — who had just come down hard on the judiciary — to “shut up about the Lyhanna affair” ? 2
Consider that the legal professions, the judiciary included, have traditionally supplied a substantial contingent to Freemasonry since the 18th century. The about-face of the senior judiciary — which for twenty years has constantly meddled in politics, to the point of helping get Emmanuel Macron elected in 2017 and defending him tooth and nail ever since — has just called recess to an end. Through an appeals ruling, through the very words of the Paris prosecutor general on TV, and through a press release from the Cour de cassation3, it has signaled that Marine Le Pen will not be deprived of her liberty during her presidential campaign (no electronic leach), and has decreed, by implication, that she will be eligible — whatever the Constitutional Council4 may say...
Yes, alright, fine. You've got us there: we're sinking into magical thinking and conspiracy-mongering. No, truly, not a shred of irony on our part. Stop it! We're telling you our act of contrition is sincere.
Let’s begin, if you don’t mind (as if you had a choice), by defining occultism and esotericism, neither of which we practice.
Occultism is too often synonymous with satanism — a conflation we owe, for obvious reasons, to the Catholic Church. Any revealed religion sits uneasily with a rival body of practice that claims the existence of hidden forces or knowledge, invisible to ordinary mortals, and purports to grant access to or mastery over them through esoteric methods.
Esotericism is the set of doctrines and currents of thought that posit a deep, hidden, or symbolic knowledge of the world, reserved for a narrow circle of initiates and transmitted through particular means — initiation, symbols, correspondences.
So what’s the difference between occultism and esotericism? Simple: esotericism is theory, knowledge; occultism is practice. You might say esotericism is the map of the hidden world — its symbolic and philosophical cartography — while occultism is the use of that map to try to act upon the world: to heal, predict, influence, transform, etc.
And by what magic is esotericism put into occult practice? Simple: by magic. Magic that history’s most famous occultist, Aleister Crowley, defined as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will” — spelling it “Magick” to distinguish it from mere prestidigitation (that is theatrical magic). Consider the etymology of “prestidigitation”: nimble fingers, quick and deft.
Magic? As old as humanity itself. From the oracles and pythias of antiquity, and shamans, all the way to Christian priests. For the priest is God’s interpreter and, alone, through the ritual of the Eucharist, can transform a piece of bread into the body of Christ and a glass of wine into his blood, to present to the communicant faithful. This is transubstantiation, formally defined at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and reaffirmed at the Council of Trent (1545–1563). The priest is not just anyone. He has been “initiated” at seminary, then ordained, and belongs to a restricted circle: the clergy. The Science and Art of causing Change in conformity with Will — God’s, in this case?
But Islam, you’ll say, has no priesthood. That’s both true and false, since only the ulama — religious scholars recognized for their expertise in theology, jurisprudence (fiqh), and Quranic exegesis (tafsir) — hold the authority to interpret the Quran. Don’t confuse the absence of a centralized organization with the absence of religious authority. Islam also has its mystics, its occultists — the Sufis — with their initiatory practices: brotherhoods, spiritual masters or sheikhs, rituals such as dhikr or the whirling dervishes’ dance.
As for the Jews, they have the Kabbalah, a body of doctrines and practices aimed at uncovering the hidden meanings of the Torah and understanding the nature of God, creation, and the human soul, through symbolic, numerical, and meditative methods reserved for initiates.
And here we must slay a myth: that of conspiracy-mongering itself. Conspiracy, alongside war, is the engine of history. A conspiracy is an action devised by a small group of people, out of sight of the multitude, in order to bring about change in conformity with their will, in service of a shared objective. Isn’t what Crowley called “Magick,” among other things, simply a definition of politics?
An example? It was in the lodges of Thessaloniki that the Young Turks planned their 1908 coup against the Ottoman Sublime Porte, giving birth to modern Turkey — lodges including Macedonia Risorta (tied to the Grand Orient of Italy), Veritas (tied to the Grand Orient of France), Labor et Lux, and Perseverencia, working alongside the Committee of Union and Progress, the political party. Many Young Turk leaders — Talat Pasha, Djemal Bey, and others — were Freemasons, without the Young Turk revolution itself being a Masonic plot. Rather, these were networks of sociability and organization useful to the conspirators.
Conspiracy-mongering, in today’s common parlance — that of the media, of fact-checkers — is nothing more than a refusal to accept lived reality in its simultaneous multiplicity, substituting for it a single truth. It’s Delphine Ernotte, France’s Public Broadcasting System’s CEO, declaring that the role of France Télévisions is not to show France as it is, but as she wishes it to be. These people fancy themselves priests.
This, mind you, is magical thinking — a mode of thought whereby an individual establishes a cause-and-effect link between their ideas, words, actions, or symbolic objects, and events in the external world — a link resting on no real, logical, or scientifically verifiable causal relationship. Let’s not deny ourselves the pleasure: “lockdowns and Covid vaccines are effective” is a perfect illustration.
Secret societies most likely first appeared in France in the Middle Ages through compagnonnage — the organization of craft trades that passed down know-how through initiation rites and manufacturing secrets. Compagnonnage had its “devoirs” (internal rules), its signs of recognition, and its initiatory Tour de France. The Compagnons du Devoir, who still make their Tour de France to become master craftsmen, exist to this day.
In the seventeenth century, three works published in Germany and attributed to the Lutheran theologian Johann Valentin Andreae — the “Fama Fraternitatis” (1614), “Confessio Fraternitatis” (1615), and “The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz” (1616) — spread like wildfire through France, just before the revolt led by the Prince de Condé, who, though Catholic himself, used the Huguenots to broaden his base against the regent Catherine de Medici. These were indeed the three founding texts of Rosicrucianism, named for Christian Rosenkreutz (literally “Rose-Cross” in German).
In 1623, mysterious posters plastered across Paris announced the presence of “deputies of the Principal College of the Brothers of the Rosy Cross,” triggering a full-blown moral panic in the capital: rumor credited the Rosicrucians with occult powers — invisibility, the gift of tongues — and spawned a literature of denunciation, notably from the Catholic Church, which saw in it a heretical and diabolical threat. No organized society, however, was ever identified behind these posters.
Hold on a moment. Printing subject to royal privilege and censorship; authority itself under challenge; powers of invisibility and diabolical multilingualism? Why, this is version 1.0 of social media, of the DSA, of ChatControl, of artificial intelligence, of globalization, of neoliberalism, of “Europe” as an institution of authority — all set against a backdrop of moral panic among the powers that be...
Or were the Rosicrucians, at their origin, simply one big disinformation operation meant to weaken what was then the most powerful — and most bankrupt — state in continental Europe, at a time when power was exercised collegially under the Marquis de La Vieuville, superintendent of finances to Louis XIII, while at court a certain Cardinal Richelieu was plotting — and who got his way in 1624 by having himself named Prime Minister, holding sole power to decide the nation’s policies (still the prerogative of the prime minister today)?
Freemasonry itself was imported into France from England in the 1720s–1730s, and remains a strange phenomenon. What were these aristocrats, bourgeois, and intellectuals — all enlightened, naturally — doing playing at masons, they who couldn’t mix mortar or build? Not to mention that after their banishment under penalty of death in 1787, many Bavarian Illuminati (who did really exist) are said to have found refuge in France within the Masonic lodges.
All this to say: if such societies exist — discreet ones like Freemasonry, or secret ones like the Bilderberg group — it’s because they serve a function, and their members derive from them a benefit, collective and individual alike, be it spiritual, social, political, or economic. That doesn’t mean they are inherently malevolent, since all of them claim to pursue progress.
In the modern era, one can safely venture that every secret society aspires to the advent of a new society led by an enlightened elite, whether through political maneuvering or revolutionary action — like Carbonarism, which lay behind Italian unification and which in France, from 1821 onward, brought together students, officers, and liberal bourgeois opposed to the return of the Ancien Régime under the Restoration (Louis XVIII, then Charles X), and in favor of a more liberal, even republican, regime — and who never stopped conspiring on the brink of what we would call today domestic terrorism.
One last myth to send to the stake, since you’re bound to ask: the Templars. Not a secret society, nor a brotherhood, but an order of warrior-monks under the pope’s direct authority, whose original role was to protect pilgrims en route to the Holy Land — and who invented the letter of credit. Any pilgrim could deposit his gold in a temple, also called a perceptory, in exchange for a letter allowing him to withdraw it at other temples along the way, reducing the risk of being robbed or ransomed.
The Templars invented banking and fiat currency, to the point of lending not only to kings and nobles and anyone able to put up collateral (hence the French expression “le carreau du temple”) but, in France, of directly managing the royal treasury. The Templars also invented... the central bank!
Their arrest in 1307 — beyond being motivated by the fact that the crown had found a easy way not to repay the enormous debt it owed them — was the direct consequence of Philip the Fair’s decision, in the 1290s, to tax the Church without papal authorization, in order to finance the war against England. In 1296, pope Boniface VIII responded with the bull Clericis Laicos, forbidding clergy from paying taxes to secular powers without the Holy See’s consent, on penalty of excommunication.
Philip the Fair retaliated by banning the export of precious metals from the kingdom, depriving Rome of considerable revenue from France. Under this economic pressure, Boniface VIII backed down and issued a more conciliatory bull in 1297, conceding the king’s right to levy taxes in case of necessity — as an exception.
The conflict resumed with Philip the Fair’s arrest of Bernard Saisset, Bishop of Pamiers, accused of treason and insulting the king. The arrest of a bishop without reference to Rome was seen by Boniface VIII as a grave assault on the Church’s rights. The pope responded with another bull in 1302, Unam Sanctam, a landmark text asserting the supremacy of spiritual power (the pope) over temporal power (kings), and the necessity for every human being, for the salvation of their soul, to submit first to the Holly See.
Philip the Fair then convened the Estates-General (yes, already!) to secure the nation’s backing, and wasted no time: in 1303 he ordered the abduction of Boniface VIII by his legal counsel Guillaume de Nogaret and the head of the powerful Roman Colonna family. Promptly freed, Boniface VIII died a month later. His successor, Benedict XI, died in 1304, apparently poisoned.
In 1305, a French archbishop, Bertrand de Got, was elected pope under the name Clement V — under heavy pressure from Philip the Fair. Clement V never settled in Rome but in Avignon, hence the Palace of the Popes in this southern French town, built by his successors. It was he who pronounced the dissolution of the Templar order in March 1312, transferring its assets to the Hospitallers (the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, future Order of Malta) — except in France, where Philip the Fair managed to keep the bulk of them as “administrative fees.” No doubt in anticipation of the cost of sweeping up the ashes of Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Temple, and his companions, burned at the stake in 1314.
1314, the year of the curse said to have caused the deaths of Clement V, Philip the Fair, and his agent Nogaret? Read, or reread, Maurice Druon’s saga “The Accursed Kings,” which opens with the execution of Jacques de Molay. Not conspiracy theory — historical fiction.
Which goes to show — whatever French Freemasons may claim — that France’s unique form secularism (laïcité) doesn’t originate in the nineteenth century with the consolidation of the Republic as a political regime (we did warn you: it’s you who’ll end up seeing the world upside down).
And this marks a constant throughout the history of secret societies in France, which, from the Enlightenment onward, served as a means of defying moral and political authority and the strictures of the Catholic Church. Often these were smoldering wars — information wars — where blows were traded through tendentious publications - disinformation - even hoaxes and fabrications: fake news, in short.
In the next episode, we’ll turn to the richest recent period for occultism and secret societies: the second half of the nineteenth century through the eve of the First World War — the age of the Industrial Revolution, a major anthropological shift.
This article is freely accessible. Future episodes will be reserved for our paying subscribers. A commitment to journalism — which aims not to shape public opinion but to inform the public — isn’t enough to keep the fridge stocked. No one can live indefinitely on love and cold water alone, however strong the fervor and passion. Subscribe. Now. Do it.
And in the meantime, if you haven’t already, you can listen to our interview with Richard B. Spence, a historian specializing in Russia, espionage, and secret societies. Also free.
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