“I’m sorry, Casaubon,” Belbo said, “but something here doesn’t add up. If what you say is true, the Jesuits couldn’t know that the meeting failed to come off in 1584.”
“Don’t forget that the Jesuits,” Diotallevi remarked, “were men of iron, not easily fooled.”
“Ah, as for that,” Belbo said, “a Jesuit could eat two Templars for breakfast and another two for dinner. They also were disbanded, and more than once, and all the governments of Europe lent a hand, but they’re still here.”
We had to put ourselves in a Jesuit’s shoes. What would a Jesuit do if Postel slipped from his grasp? I had an idea immediately, but it was so diabolical that not even our Diabolicals, I thought, would swallow it: The Rosicrucians were an invention of the Jesuits!
“After Postel’s death,” I argued, “the Jesuits—clever as they are—mathematically foresee the confusion of the calendars and decide to take the initiative. They set up this Rosicrucian red herring, calculating exactly what will happen. Among all the fanatics who swallow the bait, someone from one of the genuine groups, caught off guard, will come forward. Imagine the fury of Bacon: ‘Fludd, you idiot, couldn’t you have kept your mouth shut?’ ‘But, my lord, they seemed to be with us….’ ‘Fool, weren’t you taught never to trust papists? They should have burned you, not that poor wretch from Nola!’”
“But in that case,” Belbo said, “when the Rosicrucians move to France, why do the Jesuits, or those polemicists in their hire, attack the newcomers as heretics possessed by devils?”
“Surely you don’t expect the Jesuits to work in a straightforward way. What sort of Jesuits would they be then?”
We quarreled at length over my proposal and finally decided, unanimously, that the original hypothesis was better: The Rosicrucians were the bait cast, for the French, by the Baconians and the Germans. But the Jesuits, as soon as the manifestoes appeared, caught on. And they immediately joined in the game, to muddy the waters. Obviously, the Jesuits’ aim was to prevent the English and German groups from meeting with the French; and to that end any trick would do, no matter how dirty.
Meanwhile, they recorded events, gathered information, and put it all—where? In Abulafia, Belbo joked. But Diotallevi, who had been gathering information himself, said it was no joke. Surely the Jesuits were constructing an immense, tremendously powerful computer that would draw a conclusion from this patiently accumulated, age-old brew of truth and falsehood.
“The Jesuits,” Diotallevi said, “understood what neither the poor old Templars of Provins nor the Baconian camp had yet realized, namely, that the reconstruction of the map could be accomplished by ars combinatoria; in other words, with a method that foreshadowed our modern electronic brains. The Jesuits were the first to invent Abulafia! Father Kircher reread all the treatises on the combinatorial art, from Lullus on, and you see what he published in his Ars Magna Sciendi….”
“It looks like a crochet pattern to me,” Belbo said.
“No, gentlemen, these are all the possible combinations. Factor analysis, that of the Sefer Yesirah. Calculation of permutations, the very essence of the temurah!”
This was certainly so. It was one thing to conceive Fludd’s vague project of identifying the map by beginning with a polar projection; it was quite another to figure out how many trials would be required in order to arrive at the correct solution.
And, again, it was one thing to create an abstract model of all the possible combinations, and another to invent a machine able to carry them out. So both Kircher and his disciple Schott built mechanical devices, mechanisms with perforated cards, computers ante litteram. Binary calculators. Cabala applied to modern technology.
IBM: Iesus Babbage Mundi, Iesum Binarium Magnificamur. AMDG: Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam? Not on your life! Ars Magna, Digitale Gaudium! IHS: Iesus Hardware & Software!
In the bosom of the deepest darkness a society has been formed, a society of new beings, who know one another though they have never seen one another, who understand one another without explanations, who serve one another without friendship…. From the Jesuit rule this society adopts blind obedience; from the Masons it takes the trials and the ceremonies, and from the Templars the subterranean mysteries and the great audacity. Has the Comte de Saint-Germain simply imitated Guillaume Postel, who desperately wanted people to believe him older than he was?
—Marquis de Luchet, Essai sur la secte des illuminés, Paris, 178g, v and xii
The Jesuits knew that if you want to confound your enemies, the best technique is to create clandestine sects, wait for dangerous enthusiasms to precipitate, then arrest them all. In other words, if you fear a plot, organize one yourself; that way, all those who join it come under your control.
I remembered the reservation Agliè had expressed about Ramsay, the first to posit a direct connection between the Masons and the Templars; Agliè said that Ramsay had ties with Catholic circles. In fact, Voltaire had already denounced Ramsay as a tool of the Jesuits. Faced with the birth of English Freemasonry, the Jesuits in France responded with Scottish neo-Templarism.
Responding to this French plot, a certain Marquis de Luchet produced, in 1789, anonymously, Essai sur la secte des illuminés, in which he lashed out against the Illuminati of every stripe, Bavarian or otherwise, priest-baiting anarchists and mystical neo-Templars alike, and he threw on the heap (incredible, how all the pieces of our mosaic were fitting together!) even the Paulicians, even Postel and Saint-Germain. His complaint was that these forms of Templar mysticism were undermining the credibility of Masonry, which in contrast was a society of good and honest people.
The Baconians had invented Masonry to be like Rick’s in Casablanca, Jesuit neo-Templarism had parried that move, and now Luchet was hired to bump off all the groups that weren’t Baconian.
At this point, however, we were confronted with another problem, which was too much for poor Agliè to handle. Why had de Maistre, who was the Jesuits’ man, gone to Wilhelmsbad to sow dissension among the neo-Templars a good seven years before the Marquis de Luchet appeared on the scene?
“Neo-Templarism was all right in the first half of the eighteenth century,” Belbo said, “and it was all wrong at the end of the century; first because it had been taken over by revolutionaries, for whom anything served, the Goddess Reason, the Supreme Being, even Cagliostro, provided they could cut off the king’s head, and second because the German princes were now putting their thumbs in the pie, especially Frederick of Prussia, and his aims surely didn’t correspond to those of the Jesuits.
When mystical neo-Templarism, whoever invented it, began producing things like The Magic Flute, Loyola’s men naturally decided to wipe it out. It’s like high finance: you buy a company, you sell off its assets, you declare bankruptcy, you close it down, and you reinvest its capital. The important thing is the overall strategy, not what happens to the janitor. Or it’s like a used car: when it stops running, you send it to the junkyard.”
In the true Masonic code no other god will be found save Mani. He is the god of the cabalist Masons, of the ancient Rosicrucians, of the Martinist Masons…. All the outrages attributed to the Templars are precisely those attributed, before them, to the Manicheans.
—Abbé Barruel, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme, Hamburg, 1798, 2, xiii
The Jesuits’ strategy became clear to us when we discovered Father Barruel. Between 1797 and 1798, in response to the French Revolution, he writes his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme, a real dime novel that begins, surprise surprise, with the Templars. After the burning of Molay, they transform themselves into a secret society to destroy monarchy and papacy and to create a world republic.
In the eighteenth century they take over Freemasonry and make it their instrument. In 1763 they create a literary academy consisting of Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet, Diderot, and d’Alembert, which meets in the house of Baron d’Holbach and in 1776, plot after plot, they bring about the birth of the Jacobins. But they are mere marionettes, their strings pulled by the real bosses, the Illuminati of Bavaria—regicides by vocation.
Junkyard? After having split Masonry in two with the help of Ramsay, the Jesuits were putting it together again in order to fight it head-on.
Barruel’s book had some influence; in fact, in the French National Archives there were at least two reports ordered by Napoleon on the clandestine sects. These reports were drawn up by a certain Charles de Berkheim, who—in the best tradition of secret police—obtained his information from sources already published; he copied freely, first from the book by the Marquis de Luchet and then from Barruel’s.
Reading these horrifying descriptions of the Illuminati as well as the denunciation of a directorate of Unknown Superiors capable of ruling the world, Napoleon did not hesitate: he decided to join them. He had his brother Joseph named grand master of the Great Orient, and he himself, according to many sources, made contact with the Masons and became a very high official in their ranks. It is not known, however, in which rite. Perhaps, prudently, in all of them.
We had no idea what Napoleon knew, but we weren’t forgetting that he had spent time
