This tells us that it only required someone to make an appeal for the spiritual reform of humanity for the most paradoxical reactions to be unleashed, as though everyone were waiting for some decisive event.
Jorge Luis Borges, in his ‘”Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” writes of an improbable country, described in an unfindable encyclopedia. From the researches into this country it emerges, through vague clues based on texts that plagiarize each other, that in fact what is being talked about is an entire planet, “with its own architectures and wars, with the terror of its mythologies and the sound of its languages, with its emperors and seas, its minerals and birds, its fishes, its algebra and its fire, and its theological and metaphysical controversies.” This entity is the creation of “a secret society of astronomers, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, moralists, painters, geometers … under the guidance of an obscure man of genius.”
We are here faced with a typical Borges invention: the invention of an invention. Yet Borges’s readers know that he never invented anything; his most improbable stories come from his rereading of history. In fact, at a certain point Borges says that one of his sources was a work by Johann Valentin Andreae, which (though Borges got this information secondhand from De Quincey) “described the imaginary community of the Rosicrucians; a community that others later genuinely founded from the example of what he had imagined.”
In fact the Rosicrucian story produced historical developments of considerable significance. Symbolic Masonry, a transformation of actual masonry (which had real confraternities of artisans, who had preserved over the course of the centuries the terms and ceremonies of the ancient builders of cathedrals), emerges in the eighteenth century thanks to some English gentlemen. With Andersons Constitutions, symbolic Masonry tried to legitimize itself by maintaining the antiquity of its origins, which they claimed went back to the Temple of Solomon. In subsequent years, through the efforts of Ramsay, who created so-called Scottish Masonry, what is worked into this foundation myth is the relationship between the builders of the Temple and the Templars, whose secret tradition apparently reaches modern Masonry through the mediation of the Rosicrucians.
If in early Masonry the Rosicrucian theme introduces elements of mysticism and the occult into an organization that is by now a rival to throne and altar, at the beginning of the nineteenth century it will be in defense of throne and altar that the Rosicrucian and Templar myth will be taken up again in order to combat the spirit of the Enlightenment.
Already before the French Revolution people discussed the myth of secret societies and the fact that there existed Unknown Superiors who guided the destiny of the world. In 1789 the marquis de Luchet (in his Essai sur le secte des Illuminés) warned: “in the bosom of the thickest darkness a society of new beings has been formed, who know each other without ever having been seen…. This society takes from the Jesuit rule its blind obedience, from Masonry its trials and external ceremonies, and from the Templars its subterranean echoes and incredible daring.”
Between 1789 and 1798, as a response to the French Revolution, the Abbé Barruel wrote his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de jacobinisme, apparently a historical work but one that could however be read as a serial novel. After being destroyed by Philippe le Bel, the Templars turned into a secret society to destroy the monarchy and the papacy. In the eighteenth century they got hold of Masonry to create a sort of academy whose diabolical members included Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet, Diderot, and D’Alembert—and it was from this group that Jacobinism was born. But the Jacobins themselves were in turn controlled by an even more secret society, the Bavarian Illuminati, who were regicides by vocation. The French Revolution was the final outcome of this conspiracy.
It did not matter that there were profound differences between secular, enlightened Masonry and the Masonry of the Illuminati, which was occultist and related to the Templars, nor that the Templar myth had already been exploded by one of its brothers and fellow travelers, who would later take another road: I am referring to Joseph de Maistre…. No, it did not matter, it was too good a story.
Barruel’s book contained no reference to the Jews. But in 1806 Barruel received a letter from a certain Captain Simonini, who reminded him that both the Mani and the Old Man of the Mountains of Muslim memory (the Templars were suspected of being in league with the latter) were Jews (and you can see that here the network of occult ancestry becomes dizzying). Masonry then had been founded by the Jews, who had infiltrated all secret societies.
Barruel did not take up this rumor publicly, and in any case it did not produce any interesting effects until the middle of the century, when the Jesuits began to worry about the anticlerical originators of the Risorgimento, such as Garibaldi, who were affiliated with Masonry. The idea of showing that the Carbonari were emissaries of a Judeo-Masonic plot appeared to be useful as a polemic.
But still in the nineteenth century, the anticlerical supporters in turn tried to defame the Jesuits, to show that the latter were doing nothing other than plotting against the good of humanity. More than some “serious” authors (from Michelet and Quinet to Garibaldi and Gioberti), the writer who made this motif popular was a novelist, Eugène Sue. In The Wandering Jew, the evil Monsieur Rodin, the quintessence of Jesuit skulduggery, clearly appears as a replica of the Unknown Superiors of both Masonic and clerical memory. Monsieur Rodin reappears on the scene in Sue’s last novel, The Mysteries of the People, where the notorious Jesuit plot is exposed down to the last detail. Rudolph of Gerolstein, who has migrated from The Mysteries of Paris to this novel, denounces the Jesuit plot, warning “with what cunning this infernal plot has been organized, and what terrifying outrages, what horrendous slavery, what despotic destiny it meant for Europe….”
After Sue’s novels came out, a certain Monsieur Joly wrote a pamphlet of liberal inspiration in 1864, directed against Napoléon III: in it Machiavelli, who stands for the cynical dictator, converses with Montesquieu. The Jesuit plot described by Sue is now attributed by Joly to Napoléon III.
In 1868 Hermann Goedsche, who had published other clearly libelous pamphlets, wrote a popular novel, Biarritz, under the pseudonym Sir John Retcliffe, in which he describes an occult ceremony in the cemetery in Prague. Goedsche is simply copying a scene from Dumas’s Joseph Balsamo (1849), which describes the meeting between Cagliostro, head of the Unknown Superiors, and other Illuminati, when they are all plotting the affair of the Queen’s necklace. But instead of Cagliostro and company, Goedsche has representatives of the twelve tribes of Israel appear at a meeting, as they prepare to take over the world. Five years later the same story will be taken up in a Russian work ( The Jews, Masters of the World), where it is treated as if it were real history.
In 1881 Le Contemporain reprints the same story, claiming that it comes from a reliable source, the English diplomat Sir John Readcliff. In 1896 François Bournand uses the story of the Grand Rabbi again (but this time he is called John Readcliff) in his book Les Juifs, nos contemporains. From this point onward, the Masonic meeting invented by Dumas, blended with the Jesuit plot invented by Sue and attributed by Joly to Napoléon III, becomes the real speech made by the Great Rabbi, which then resurfaces in various forms and in various places. There now comes on the scene Pëter Ivanovic Rakovskij, a Russian already suspected of contacts with groups of revolutionaries and nihilists, who later (having duly repented of his past) would become involved with the Black Centurions, a terrorist organization of the extreme Right, and then turn informer before becoming head of the czar’s political police (the Okhrana). Now Rakovskij, to help his political protector (Count Sergej Witte), who had been worried by an opponent of his, Elie de Cyon, had Cyon’s house searched and found a pamphlet in which Cyon had copied Joly’s text against Napoléon III, but attributed Machiavelli’s ideas to Witte. Rakovskij, fiercely anti-Semitic—this was happening at the time of the Dreyfus affair—takes that text, cancels all references to Witte, and attributes the ideas to the Jews. One cannot be called Cyon, even with a C (rather than an’S), without evoking a Jewish conspiracy.
The text altered by Rakovskij probably constituted the primary source for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It betrays its novelistic source since it is not really credible, except in a novel by Sue, that the “baddies” should express their wicked plans in such an open and shameless way. The Elders openly declare that they have “a vaulting ambition, an all-consuming greed, a ruthless desire for revenge and an intense hatred.” They want to abolish the freedom of the press but encourage libertinism. They criticize Liberalism but uphold the idea of capitalist multinationals. To stir up revolution in every country, they intend to exacerbate social inequalities. They want to build subways so
