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THE TRUE HISTORY OF SCOTTISH

ESOTERIC MASONRY

by Eric Wynants

Last Modified: March 22, 2014

In 1988 the Scottish historian David Stevenson published his research on the late sixteenth-century Scottish origins and subsequent Scottish development of "modern" Freemasonry, which he placed within a European intellectual context of serious interest in the occult sciences. (1)

Working from the surviving Scottish documents of operative and speculative lodges, Stevenson filled the frustrating gaps between early Stuart culture, its links with Scottish Masonry, and its preservation within the Jacobite diaspora after the expulsion of the last Stuart king, James VII and II.

Stevenson's doctoral student Lisa Kahler carried this research further into the early eighteenth century and documented the inaccuracies and distortions of the "orthodox" English version of Masonic history, which served Hanoverian-Whig political purposes. (2)

More importantly for my own research, this revisionist history enabled me to trace the eighteenth century ramifications of Ecossais Masonry back to their early roots in Jewish and Scottish architectural history.

Stevenson's illuminating discussions of the role of the Art of Memory a mnemonic technique of architectural visualization-in the training of operative masons in Scotland provided a missing link to the similar art of visualization practiced by heterodox Hebraic mystics in the Jewish diaspora. (3)

It thus became possible to utilize objective scholarly accounts of ancient and medieval Jewish building practices, guild organization, and stone-technology to build a real world base for the imaginative flights of visionary Temple-building which appear in Jewish mystical literature. (4)

Reinforced by Elliot Wolfson's studies of the persistence of "iconic representation and visualization" in officially anti-iconic Judaism, it is possible to connect the previously perplexing role of Cabalism in Freemasonry to the Whig-Newtonian-Hanoverian culture that allegedly created "modern" Freemasonry. (5)

Pre-modern Scotland provided a uniquely "Judaized" culture for the preservation of architectural and Solomonic traditions that were largely suppressed or ignored in other Western countries especially in Scotland's southern neighbor and traditional enemy, England.

The work of Arthur Williamson on the strange history of the "judeo Scots" sheds light on this peculiarly Hebraic national self-image that made Scotland-a land with no public Jewish community-a major repository of rare Jewish traditions. (6)

Moreover, an accident of geological history the ready availability of "hewable" stone for monumental architecture in ancient Israel and medieval Scotland-provided an unusually technological base for similarities of development in Jewish and Scottish national myths.

According to Stevenson, Masonic history has been generally led astray by the prevailing misconception that the emergence of Freemasonry took place in England - "a belief maintained in the face of the overwhelming preponderance of Scottish documentary evidence relating to the process, evidence which is often simultaneously explained away ... and then used in an English context to make up for the lack of English evidence." (7)

Because the occultist systems of Masonry that survived underground in post-Stuart Britain and that flourished in eighteenth-century Europe developed out of the architectural, scientific, religious, and political policies of the Scottish descended Stuart kings of Britain, it is necessary to examine those elements of early Stuart culture which were preserved within the secret enclaves of Ecosaisses lodges. The vigorous revisionism currently undertaken by historians of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scotland and England makes possible a new factual context, which sheds light on the deliberately secret history of Stuart Freemasonry. (8)

With the expulsion of James VII and II from the British throne in 1688, political exiles carried Masonic traditions throughout the 'Jacobite" diaspora, where they attracted a startling variety of monarchs, philosophers, scientists, and artists to their supposedly defeated creed and culture. The Hermetic-Cabalistic masques of the Stuart court, which were often designed and constructed by Masons, disappeared from Britain after the "Glorious Revolution," but they eventually reappeared in the elaborately theatrical ceremonies developed by Jacobite exiles and their local supporters in Ecossaises lodges. (9)

The revival of the Masonic "masque" in late nineteenth-century Scottish Rite lodges in the United States is revealed in the recently published paintings and photographs of the scenic designs, theatrical techniques, and illusionistic effects which recreated the Solomonic magnificence and mystical radiance of the early Stuart performances. (10)

With the accession of the Elector of Hanover as King George I of England in 1714, Masonic supporters of the Stuarts mounted a decades long, clandestine campaign to regain the British throne.

In 1717 a rival Hanoverian system of Masonry was established, which aimed to suppress and defeat that campaign. When the Hanoverian victors in England-and their descendants among Whig historians wrote the histories of this great cultural and political rivalry, they created their own myth of Protestant progress and toleration, which almost obliterated the Celtic-Catholic-Jewish elements in the opposition's struggle and which ignored the survival of those elements in an international Jacobite culture.

However, the investigations of academic Jacobite studies-. led by Eveline Cruickshanks, Paul Nionod, Frank McLynn, Edward Corp, Bruce Lenman, and Murray Pittock-overturns much of the conventional wisdom about the Whig-Newtonian-Hanoverian culture that allegedly created "modern" Freemasonry."

THE INVENTION OF THE ANCIENTS / PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY

The today untenable idea of an Ancient Wisdom Tradition that Theosophists and Esotericists are referring to, had its roots in the Renaissance where the Cabalah as "the oral Torah," was considered the Ancient Wisdom Teaching.

Renaissance philosophers (deemed "science") taught the Cabalah contained the secret teachings of Moses, an oral supplement to Scripture, making it possible to accurately interpret the written Word of the Bible. (Pico della Mirandola "On the Dignity of Man" p. 29)

In other words the Renaissance philosopher/scientists worked within a view of history in which their own tradition was represented as an ancient philosophy, contemporary with Moses, only to have this legend gradually undermined by scholarly studies, the Enlightenment rejected this old order.

Renaissance Neo-Platonist used the "prisca theologia" (ancient wisdom tradition) theory to support their claim that Platonism was reconcilable with Christian doctrines.

The notion of a "perennial philosophy," a wisdom which the ancient sages had once been in possession of but since then had been lost to mankind, is a common theme in Renaissance scholarship. The Calvinist scholar Michel Servet summarized it in this paragraph:

"This was from the beginning of the world the received doctrine about the Wisdom of God, published in the Holy Scriptures, and taught to the Greeks by the Chaldeans and Egyptians from the tradition of their ancestors ...

Zoroaster and Trismegistus taught it, from whom, chiefly from Trismegistus, all the Greeks learnt it, from Orpheus to Plato." (As quoted and translated in Walker, "The Prisca Theologia in France", p. 249.)

HIGH DEGREE MASONRY AND STUART POLITICS

Scottish Masonry had less to do with “Knights Templar” from the middle ages as is often claimed in frince cottage industry History books, but rather with an interest in the Cabalah, and later for a period of time, in the restoration of the Stuart Monarchy.

Elias Ashmole and John Evelyn were both suspected by Parliament of maintaining contact with royalists abroad, and they may have facilitated communications with Moray's Scottish Masonic network. When Sir Robert Bruce left the company of Moray and Alexander Bruce in Holland and returned to England, he called on Ashmole and Evelyn. Evelyn also received a Visit from the Marquis of Argyll, Lord Lothian, and "some other Scotch noblemen, all strangers to me. At this time, Moray believed that Argyll would support the royalist cause, which may explain Evelyn's growing intimacy with him. Though Lothian had developed friendly relations with some of Cromwell's officers in Scotland, his motivation was the alleviation of his exiled father's poverty. Despite some royalists' suspicions, Moray maintained his trust in Lothian's essential loyalty.

Evelyn also communicated with Sir John Denham, who had returned to London in late 1653, where his presence was noted by Hartlib, who described him as "a Mighty ingenious man for all manner of waterworks and other ingenuities" and "a great mechanical traveller." (11)

It was perhaps these interests and skills that led to his alleged association with Masonry and to his later friendship with Moray. In 1655 Denham was arrested as a royalist plotter, but two years later he was privy to the plans of Buckingham to return to England, "upon some design, for a rising in the city or against the Protector's person. (J.Denham “Poetical Works” p. 16)

The royalists hoped to 'Win Sir Thomas Fairfax to their cause, and Buckingham succeeded in marrying his daughter. As noted earlier, Buckingham was also named as a Mason, probably initiated during his service in Scotland. Throughout the Interregnum, Evelyn carried on a ciphered correspondence with the exiles, while Ashmole was kept under surveillance. In August 1659 Ashmole recorded that "My Study was broken open by the Soldiers, upon pretence of searching for the King, but I lost nothing out of it. (12)

Moray's other Masonic contact in England was Lauderdale, his "friend at Windsor," who sent word to him about the work of Dr. Brian Walton on the English Polyglot Bible (1654-57), which stimulated a revival of' interest in Villalpando's interpretations of the Temple. (13)

Walton's Polyglot featured an elaborate architectural engraving on the frontispiece, designed by John Webb, as Well as complex depictions of Jewish architecture by N. Venscelas Hollar. That Moray wanted to see this London publication on the restored Temple of Jerusalem points to the cross-channel links established in the late 1650's which laid the Masonic groundwork for the king's restoration. That these links also included a Swedish dimension would become important to the international spread of Stuart-style Freemasonry in the eighteenth-century.

Since Alexander Bruce's arrival in Bremen, Moray had solicited news about the Swedes and Danes, whom the royalists assiduously courted. On 29 April 1658 Moray informed Bruce that he was anxiously awaiting the arrival of Bellenden, whose effort to gain Swedish support now depended on the many Scottish residents in Gothenburg. (14)

He also recalled his earlier friendship with a Swedish military officer, whose name he uncertainly spelled as Col. Owagh Clough or Clook, and who was an expert on fortifications. "Clook" was a fellow prisoner at Ingolstach, at the time of Moray's correspondence with Kircher, and the two spent much time in discussions of their mutual interests. Moray would later maintain contact with Swedish scientists.

Thus, it is possible that he was privy to the clandestine establishment of a Masonic lodge, named "St. Magnus," in Gothenbur , which was chartered from Edinburgh.

The lodge is mentioned in ' Johan Starck, Apologie do Franc-Macons (Philadelphie. 17 79) p. 68: also see Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Lessing's Masonic Dialogues (1778) , trans. A. Cohen 'London. 1927', p.99-100. Both Starck and Lessing attended Swedish Rite lodges in Germany.

From 1656 on, there were rumors that General Monk, who was currently employing the Swedish Freemason Tessin on fortification work at Leith, was leaning towards the royalist cause. (15)

Christina, who had earlier recruited members of the Tessin family to Swedish service, now used her influence with Swedes, Spaniards, Germans, and Jews to build support for Charles. (16)

While this multi-national, Masonic network carried out its clandestine collaboration, an additional secret network was utilized for the restoration effort. Since January 1654 the younger sons of old royalist families in England had organized a resistance movement known as "The Sealed Knot." Collaborating with its agents were the Scottish royalists Lauderdale, from his prison cell, and Elizabeth Murray, daughter of the exiled William Murray. Earl of Dysart. Elizabeth exploited her f'riendship with Cromwell's wife to prevent the execution of' Lauderdale and to arrange his transfer to a less onerous prison in Windsor Castle. (17)

Now granted considerable freedom, Lauderdale added to his great library and continued his investigations of alchemical, architectural, and mathematical lore. Like Moray, Lauderdale studied Druslus, Scaliger, Amama, Kircher, and Alsted, and he acquired Rosicrucian and Fluddian works. (18)

Considered a "master of Hebrew," he gathered rare works on the Jewish traditions, and he apparently developed his "extraordinary memory" through study of his Lullist trcatiscs." In line with Charles II’s policy of bringing together royalists of different religious faiths, Lauderdale established communications with the Puritan Richard Baxter and other advocates of religious pacification.

The king's ecumenical agenda was not shared by his English advisor Edward Hyde, who was distrusted by Scottish Presbyterians and British Catholics. Contemptuous of Balcarres and Dysart and suspicious of Moray, Hyde instigated "false accusations" and "unjust persecution" of their Scottish party. (19)

In 1655 the Scots and Catholics protested to Charles II that Hyde subverted their restorationist efforts. Dr. Alexander Fraser, the king's Scottish physician, joined with Balcarres and "other Scots at court" to draw up a petition to the king that the Scottish Presbyterians could provide valuable advice and services but "were discouraged and hindered" by Hyde, who was "an old known and declared enemy to their party; in whom they could repose no trust." (20)

They urged that Hyde be removed from the council or "at least not be suffered to be privy to anything that should be proposed by them." Fraser had accompanied Charles 11 to Scotland, where he carried out important intelligence and military operations, and he enjoyed the full confidence of the king and the Scottish "Masonic" party. His distrust of Hyde was shared by Dr. Massonet, who accused Hyde of disloyalty and collusion with Cromwell. From now on, the separation of Scottish from English plotting would be reflected in the activities of Scottish Masons and English "Knotters."

Despite the Anglo-Scottish rivalries, the energetic Elizabeth Murray tried to provide a link between the two factions. When William Murray died in December 1655, Elizabeth assumed his title and became the Countess of Dysart. Gilbert Burnet, a later protege of Moray, noted that the beautiful Lady Dysart had "a wonderful quickness of apprehension" and had studied divinity, history, philosophy, and mathematics. (21)

Using the cover of arranging her family's business affairs in Belgium, she often travelled to the Continent with messages from Lauderdale to Moray, her late father's cousin and confidante. Earlier, Dysart had hoped his daughter would marry Moray, but now the two maintained a "true friendship." Learned in the occult sciences and gifted with second sight, she collaborated with Moray on the production of invisible inks and other chemical services to the king's cause Jane Clark argues that the Dysarts were undoubtedly Masons and that Elizabeth utilized Masonic symbols and techniques of communication to transmit her messages to royalists abroad. (22)

With considerable courage and defiant insouciance, she also carried out dangerous missions for the Sealed Knot, while she cultivated friendships with Cromwell's wife and intimates.

In March 1657 Cromwell received reports that Balcarres, from his base in Holland, was holding "a secret intelligence" with Monk; even worse, Balcarres was spreading rumors that Generall Monk is revolted" in order to build support for the royalists' "intended insurrection." (23)

Though Monk defended himself to Cromwell and continued to enforce the military occupation in Scotland, his letters suggest some ambivalence in his position. In September he reported from Dalkeith that the Scottish ministers "begin to pray again for Charles Stuart, so there may be a new project." He then added offhandedly that he had arrested "some straggling fellows come over lately, the most of them from the King of Sweden's army." In May Cromwell's spies reported that Colonel Alexander Hamilton, kinsman of Moray's late comrade, "brought 64 Scottish soldiers from the Swedish army to Ostend. (24)Were these recruits members of the lodge at Gothenburg and ready to Join their brethren in Holland and Scotland?

A rare surviving masonic document, composed at Perth in December 1658, suggests that there was a renewal of royalist commitment among local masons. John Mylne, who had cooperated with Monk in the building of fortifications and served with the Scottish commissioners to Cromwell, subsequently resigned all share in the conduct of public affairs. However, he retained the mastership of the "Ancient Lodge of Scone and Perth" until shortly before his death in late 1657. Though it is unknown whether Mylne was the inspiration for the proud assertions made in the 1658 document, it is clear that the Perth masons were determined to reclaim their ancient independence and royal patronage. Thus, on 24 December they issued a new "Contract by the Master Masons and fellow-craftsmen ... on the decease of John Mylne, Master Mason and Master of the said Lodge":

"That as formerly we and predecessors have and had from the temple of temples building on this earth one uniform community and union throughout the whole world from which temple proceeded one in Kilwinning in this our nation of Scotland and from that of Kilwinning many more within this kingdom of which there proceeded the Abbey and Lodge of Scone, built by men of art and architecture where they placed that lodge as the second lodge within this nation, which is now past memory of many generations, and was upheld by the Kings of Scotland ... the said Masters, Freemen, and Fellow Crafts, inhabitants within the said Burgh of Perth, were always able within themselves to maintain their first liberties, and are yet willing to do the same as the Masters, Freemen, or Fellow Crafts did formerly (whose names we know not)-But to our record and knowledge of our predecessors there came one from the North country named John Mylne, a mason, a man well experted in his calling, who entered himself both Freeman and Burgess of this Burgh, who in process of time by reason of his skill and art was preferred to be the King's Majesty's Master Mason and Master of the said Lodge at Scone, and his son John Mylne being after his father's decease preferred to the said office, and Master of the, said Lodge, in the, reign of His Majesty James the Sixth of blessed memmy, who by the said second-John Mylne was by the King's own desire entered Freeman, Alason, and Fellow Craft, and during all his lifetime he maintained the same as one member of the Lodge of Scone--so that this Lodge is the most famous Lodge (if well ordered) within this kingdom-of which name of Mylne there had continued several generations of Master Masons to his Majesties the Kings of Scotland ." (25)

The rest of the document dealt with the choosing of a new master and warden for the lodge and instructions about the traditional duties (including the gift of gloves) incumbent upon the members. That John Mylne fils was not elected to fill his father's role was probably due to his residence in Edinburgh, where he was employed on various architectural projects (such as erecting a great vertical sundial). Importantly, the younger Mylne also represented the City at the Convention of' Royal Burghs in 1655-59, when he gained the acquaintance of' General Monk.

All the royalist plans were thrown into full gear when news arrived on the Continent of the death of Oliver Cromwell in September 1658. When the inept Richard Cromwell assumed the Protectorship, the royalists increased their overtures to Monk in Scotland. On 30 September a Cromwellian officer in Leith wrote to Thurloe that Scottish preachers were now using mystical language, while they pray for the deliverance of' the exiles and captives to be delivered from the yoke of Pharaoh and out of Egypt: "Thus they speake, but so ambiguously that they can evade, if questioned; yet see plainly that the whole people knowes their meaning." (26)

The use of mystical Hebraic terminology harked back to the days of the first Covenantand its underlying Masonic organization. Moreover, many Scottish masons were currently employed on the fortifications at Leith, which were directed by the Swedish architect Tessin and his commander Monk. Tessin had earlier been initiated in the Edinburgh Lodge, which was directed by John Mylne.

Monk had no respect for Richard Cromwell, and he sensed that the political situation would become increasingly volatile. Thus, he began the systematic reversal of the late Protector's policies in Scotland. While he replaced Englishmen with Scots on the courts of justice and Exchequer, he consolidated his own power and made his rule more acceptable to the subjects of the northern kingdom. (27)

Unlike Oliver Cromwell, who despised the Scots, Monk enjoyed the company of local nobles, soldiers, and craftsmen. During his travels to all parts of' the kingdom, he had developed an intelligence network that kept him abreast of the growing royalist sentiments of all segments of the population. More significantly, he allegedly became a Freemason and thus privy to the communication networks, oaths of secrecy, and bonds of' loyalty between the brethren. According to a report made in 1741 by the exiled Jacobite Mason Andrew -Michael Ramsay, certain royalist Masons knew of Monk's affiliation and sought to attract him to their cause.

A.F. von Busching in “ Beitraege” VI, 329, Busching noted that when Ramsay lectured in the lodges, he did not mention Monk's Masonic strategy for the Restoration because he did not want to arouse suspicions that the Masons in France where active in affairs of state. See also Andre Kervella, La Maconnerie Ecossaise dans la France de l’Ancient Regime Paris, 1999, 208.

That Ramsay revealed this political secret to Count Carl Gustaf Tessin, a Swedish kinsman of Monk's architect, gives it a certain piquancy.

Though Ramsay's account has been ignored by English historians of' the Restoration, there is enough evidence for Monk's Masonic contacts to give it credibility. Shortly after Cromwell's death, a young Scottish architect-William Bruce of Kinross -approached Monk to solicit his support for a Stuart restoration. Fenwick suggests that Bruce participated in the construction of Monk's citadels at Aire and Leith, which provided him contact with Tessin and Mylne, who directed the masons at those projects. (28)

Bruce would later become Charles II's Surveyor of Works in Edinburgh and, according to Anderson, the Grand Master of Scottish Freemasonry. (29)

During the Interregnum, he reportedly pursued his architectural studies in France and Holland. A friend of Moray and cousin of Alexander Bruce, he provided a link between their Masonic networks in Europe and Scotland .

Moray later collaborated with Sir William Bruce on architectural projects; see Henry M.Paton, "Letters from John, Second Earl of Lauderdale, to John, Second Earl of Tweeddale, and Others," in Miscellany of the Scottish Historical Society, VI 1939, 233.

Another cousin of William Bruce, the Countess of Dysart, provided communication between the exiled Masons and the Sealed Knot, and William visited her in London. From his later friendship with Lauderdale, it seems that William also contacted the latter during his imprisonment at Windsor. Through her contacts with Cromwell's inner circle, Lady Dysart may have learned that parliamentary spies had penetrated the "Sealed Knot" and had suborned its chief, Sir Richard Willis, who continued to correspond with Hyde and Nicholas while receiving Cromwellian bribes.

According to Burnet, who probably received the information from Moray or the Bruces, "Thus Cromwell had all the king's party in a net. He let them dance in it at his pleasure; and upon occasion clapt them up for a short while." (30)

"There is no department of knowledge that gives us more certainty of Christ‘s divinity than magic and cabala," wrote Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the translator of the so called writings of "Hermes" in 1486.

The ritualized unification of the Masters Word drew on Christian Cabalistic lore, in which the unification of the letters of the Tetragrammaton was "predicated on and facilitated by some form of visualization of these letters within the imagination.

Though the seventeenth-century Masons externalized the internal process into ritual gestures and Postures, they still re-enacted the Christian Cabalistic belief that "Whoever has knowledge it as if' the Temple were built in his life," because "such a person knows how to unify the unique name and it is as if he built the palace above.

But during the re-creation of Scottish Masonry at the courts of the exiled Stuart King in France, the search for "the lost word" signified "the royal word" given by Charles II that he would reclaim the throne; the "son of the widow" pointed to Charles II as son of Henrietta Maria. To increase security, these royalist symbols were changed to the "signs of the Rose-Cross Masons."

Initiates of the eighteenth-century Clermont Rite preserved a tradition that David Ramsay was succeeded as head of the order in 1659 by Charles II, with "Eduard Frazer" serving as his "Vikar." (31) Baron von Starck, the German source for these early Scottish-Templar Masons, was often inaccurate or confused about their forenames and spellings, and "Eduard" was probably Dr. Alexander Fraser, who had earlier distanced Scottish Presbyterian plotting from Hyde's English agenda. Since 1655 Fraser had worked as a confidential agent for Lauderdale and Moray. Starck claimed that Fraser's successors included William Bruce (1679-86) and Andrew Michael Ramsav (1708-14). Whether these Rosicrucian-Templar Restoration traditions were developed in the 1650's or after the 1688 fall of the Stuart dynasty remains an historical puzzle. But some pieces of that puzzle can be verified by historical documents.

Sir Robert Moray's letters provide a unique insight into the intellectual and spiritual world of an active Freemason in the 1650's. They also make clear that many "modern" trends of speculative Masonry were already emerging among the royalist exiles on the Continent. Moreover, Moray may have shared his Masonic interests with his "comrade" and fellow-lodger, the French physician Massonet, and the French military officers, with whom he regularly dined and socialized. (Kincardine MS,5049 p.24)

Peter Massenet was created an M.D. by Charles I in 1646, served as writing instructor to the princes Charles and James, and then fought for Charles II in England.

While in exile, he became the confidential friend of Balcarrcs and Moray. (E. Nicholas, Nicholas Paper, III, p.168.)

French historians refer to a murky tradition of Stuart-French Masonic interchange during the Interregnum, and Massonet may have been privy to Moray's Masonic strategies as well as his Hermetic experiments.

Though Moray claimed to live as a hermit in Maastricht, he continued to serve as a political intelligencer and contact person for the international royalist network. Thus, by examining that network in the context of possible Masonic associations, we can evaluate the plausibility of eighteenth-century claims about Masonic contributions to the Stuart restoration.

Unfortunately, there is a dearth of information on Freemasonry in England during the Interregnum, despite speculation about the possible Masonic activities of Ashmole and Thomas Vaughan. Fragments of evidence do suggest, however, that Moray and Lauderdale could have called upon a few royalist Masons in London. Though Ashmole did not record any further Masonic participation until 1682, he became friendly with John Evelyn who was currently investigating operative masonry. Both men travelled through England to inspect the condition of religious and royal architecture. (32)

They also helped William Dugdale's research for his royalist architectural treatise, The History of St. Paul's Cathedral (1658). Evelyn began a manuscript account of "Trades: Secrets and Receipts Mechanical as they come casually to hand," for which he tried to investigate the craft of masonry. (33)

Planning to fill over six hundred pages, Evelyn listed alphabetically the technical subjects he would cover. Among the few he actually recorded was section M on the duties and techniques of "the Free-Mason," which revealed his contact with operative masons who shared a few of their secrets. Evelyn noted the intellectual and manual challenges required in their work, and he included the architectengineer under L for "Liberal Arts," thus giving him gentleman status. However, these were not propitious years for the masons, for their trade suffered from Cromwellian iconoclasm. Evelyn's friend Christopher Wren later recalled that "there were no masons in London when he was a young man" (i.e., during the Interregnum). (34)Though it is unclear whether Wren meant operative masons or speculative Freemasons, Evelyn found the former disappointingly uncooperative. He ultimately confessed that the necessity "of conversing with mechanical capricious persons" proved too unpleasant to him.

After Cromwell's death, his successors were worried by rumors of new link-ups between royalists in Scotland, England, and Holland. Having penetrated the "Knot," they may have suspected a Masonic element in the plotting. A rare surviving Masonic manuscript, dated 1659, suggests that parliamentary intelligencers were investigating Masonry in Britain. The manuscript "Narrative of the Free Masons Word and Signs" was a "copia vera" drafted by Thomas Martin, whose identity is otherwise unknown. (35)

It provided an account, hostile in tone and apparently made by a spy, of contemporary lodge practices. In passages that would have interested suspicious government agents, Martin described in detail the recognition signs used by Masons-i.e., the signs, postures, movement of hat, square paper, crooked pin, etc., used to identify the "free" worker to other operative masons, who were bound by similar oaths. He pointed out that these techniques allowed them to secretly exchange money. Other more amusing signs were blowing the nose in a handkerchief, which is then held straight out and shaken; knocking at any door with two little knocks and then a big one; saying "Star the Guile" when the glass goes around too slowly, etc.

Martin expressed his scorn for the Masons' claim to international brotherhood:

To Discourse a Mason in France, Spain, or Turkey (say they) the sign is to kneel down on his left knee and hold up his right hand to the Sun and the Outlandish Brother will presently take him up, but believe me if' they go on their knees on that account they may remain there or any persons observe their Signs as long as the Jews will remain on their Beliefs, to receive their wish'd for Messiah from the East.

With Charles II currently trying to forge a unified front out of French, Spanish, and Jewish (Jews from Turkish territories?) supporters, Martin's criticism was perhaps relevant to rumors of international Masonic cooperation.

Martin then announced, "Here followeth their private Discourse by Way of Question and Answer," in which the esoteric and essentially Jewish traditions were obliquely expressed. To the catechistical questioner, the initiate answers that a "Just and perfect Lodge is ... two prentices, two fellow-crafts, and one Master on the highest hill or lowest Valley in the World without the crow of a Cock or the bark of a Dog." To the question, "from whence do you derive your principles," the initiate answers "From a greater than you." "Who is he on Earth that is greater than a free Mason" provokes the response, "He that carried to the highest pinnacle of the Temple of Jerusalem." Martin noted that "In some places they Discourse as followeth": "Where did they first call their Lodge? As the Holy Chappel of St. John." This allusion to the Knights of St. John of the Hospital suggests a chivalric theme in certain lodges-a point later reinforced by Swift's reference to "Lodges" of the "Knights of St. John of Jerusalem.

UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD OR TYRANNY

From the time of Charles II's oral commitments to the Jews at the Restoration, his philo-Semitic policies over the next twenty-five years fueled a secretive tradition of Jewish-Masonic collaboration that emerged dramatically in the next century. Moreover, this tradition would be strongest in the Rosicrucian degrees of Ecossais rites developed by exiled supporters of the Stuart dynasty. Because this linkage of Jews and Freemasons would prove so controversial and volatile, it is important to examine the Stuart context that fueled the rumors and the reality. Though the question of Stuart sympathy for Catholicism was the burning public issue of the latter part of Charles II's reign, it was intrinsically linked with less known but broader issues of tolerancc that would eventually define the "modern" Masonic theme of universal brotherhood. In the Stuart Temple of Wisdom, not only Protestants and Catholics but Jews and Moslems would be welcomed as comrades in chivalric fraternity.

In Tangier, the projected gateway to the Levant, the governors' cooperation with Jewish interpreters was crucial to completion of the great Mole and stone forts, projects of continuing interest to Moray and Wren. To facilitate the Barbados trade in which Davidson, Lauderdale, and other Scots were heavily invested, the king granted full privileges to their Jewish agents. (36)

In january 1663 Charles and his foreign secretary Arlington established a new precedent by allowing a naturalized Jew from Barbados, the diamond merchant Da Vega, to become a Freeman of a Company in London. (37)

Though Charles still could not count on parliamentary support, he communicated to various Portuguese Jews in April that "he was resolved to grant" permission to a large number of Marranos to immigrate to England. (38)

When Jacob Abendana dedicated Halevi's Kuzari to Davidson, the royalist panegyric smoothed the way for his brother Isaac Abendana to bring copies of the work to England and to establish himself as a Hebrew teacher at Cambridge in 1663. (39)

The king's policy also opened the doors for renewed Hebrew studies in Scotland, where it was well-known that Lauderdale was an expert in the language. One Jew travelled to Scotland, where he instructed Patrick Gordon, who became Professor of Hebrew at King's College, Aberdeen. (40)

At St. Andrews the king donated Pound 50 for a Professor of Hebrew, while at Edinburgh a converted Jew was invited to teach Jewish language and history. (41)

Rabbi Jacob Sasportas wrote from London to a friend in Rotterdam:

We live at a time in which God has seen fit greatly to ameliorate the condition of his people, bringing them forth from the general conchnon of serfdom into freedom ... specifically, in that we are free to practise our own true religion ... a written statement was issued from him [Charles II], duly signed affirming that no untoward measures had been or would be initiated against us., and that they should not look towards any protector other than his Majesty; during the continuance of whose lifetime they need feel no trepidation because of any sect that might oppose them, inasmuch as he himself would be their advocate and assist them with all his power. (42)

Shane observes that it was the king's answer "which established the right of the Jews to re-settle in England rather than the non-committal reply which Cromwell had earlier given to the petition of Menasseh ben Israel." (43)

Arlington, whom Anderson identified as a Freemason, would later be involved with Rabbi Leon's visit to London.

Encouraged by the king's policy, the London Jews began raising funds for the enlargement of their synagogue. They probably learned from their Dutch brothers that Leon's architectural theories received international exposure and critical praise, when Johan Saubert published an expanded Latin version of the rabbi's treatise, De Templo Hierosolymitano (1665).

The translation was printed at the request of Duke Augustus of Brunswick, and Saubert included Leon's Hebrew song of praise for Augustus. When the book first appeared, the latter's brother Duke Frederick of Brunswick visited the Royal Society on 25 February 1665. (44)

Thus, Wren and the Fellows could have learned about the architectural explications and designs that Leon contributed to the edition. Moray, especially, would have been interested in Kircher's letter to Saubert, in which his "epistolar correspondent" praised Leon's treatise. On 31 October 1664 Kircher sent Saubert his critical evaluation, which the latter published in the edition:

I also read with utmost enthusiasm your book about the Temple of Solomon, which your zeal for the public good and your concern for illumination ensured the publication at your own personal expense. It is a quite exceptional work and one which the literary world could not but value for its exposition of the minutiae. (45)

Saubert included a portrait of Leon, placed above his models of the Tabernacle and Temple, and an admiring biography, which recognized his importance as a Jewish savant. He also noted Leon's disagreement with Villalpando's explications of Jewish architecture, which the large fold-out engravings of Leon's designs demonstrated. Drawing purely on Jewish sources, including the "Kabbalistas," Leon made clear that he hoped for an actual rebuilding of the Temple and thus included practical advice relevant to operative masons involved in synagogue and church construction. He described the columns of Jachin and Boaz, the sculptured Cherubim, and the lapis fondationis-all subjects of interest to Jewish and Christian builders in London.

With Jews in Britain and its colonies, as well as their co-religionists on the Continent, now perceiving Charles II as their protector, the earlier Stuart support for Leon's architectural endeavors possibly provoked a Hebraic Masonic tribute.

In a manuscript entitled "The History of Masonry," written by Thomas Treloar in 1665, there is a striking merger of Scottish Masonic tradition and Hebrew royalist panegyric. An inscription on the manuscript reads: "History and Charges of Masonry, Copied by me Jon Raymond MDCCV." (46)

In the surviving fragment, there are inscriptions in Hebrew lettering which reinforce the stress of Jewish and Solomonic traditions in the restored fraternity. The text begins with the Hebrew inscription, "in the beginning God created the heaven and earth," and then recounts the story of' Hiram the architect.

The text then relates a highly Judaised version of the Old Charges, adding peculiar details and claiming Jewish sources for the discoveries of Euclid and Pythagoras. McLeod observes that in standard English texts of the Old Charges, Solomon's Temple is simply one episode of many and not the most important at that:

Euclid and Edwin both claim considerably more space. But for Jon Raymond [and Treloar] Solomon is at centre stage right from the preliminary verses. He includes an attestation, "All may witness my seal and hand," with the "signature" of "Solomon the King" (in Hebrew letters and in transliterated Hebrew) and "Solomon's Seal," the hexalpha within a circle. He adduces the Tabernacle of Moses as a prototype of the Temple. He describes the artificer of the Temple in these terms: "And Hiram the Tyrian widow's son was sent to King Solomon by Hiram the King of Tyre. And he was a cunning workman in brass and purple and all medals." (47)

McLeod expresses puzzlement at this "remarkable I early- naming of the architect as Hiram, but Stevenson suggests that the Hiramic legend in Scottish Freemasonry was already present in William Schaw's time. Thus, "the mental lodge" or "memory temple" described in late seventeenth-century catechisms contained the grave of Hiram, "the greatest of all architects." Through certain Cabalistic and necromantic rituals, the initiate could discover and rejuvenate Hiram. The emphasis on his role as the "widow's son" pointed to Charles II's role as Henrietta Maria's son----a Stuart reference that would take on more poignant significance for Jacobite exiles in the next century. (48)

Even more striking in the Treloar MS. were the unique references to certain sixteenth- and sevcnteenth-century monarchs claimed as rulers of "the whole Craft":

And yet another Henry did rule over ye whole Craft even ye seventh of' that name.

And after many days Charles did reign in ye land and lo his blood was spilled upon ye earth even by ye traitor Cromwell. Behold now ye return of pleasant for doth riot ye Son of ye blessed Martyr rule over ye whole land. Long may he reign in ye land and govern ye Craft. Is it riot written ye shall riot hurt ye Lords anointed.

The elimination of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I from Masonic history should not surprise, for they were considered enemies of ecclesiastical and royalist building projects. But the omission of James VI and I possibly indicates that James was not recognised as "governor" over English Masons, despite his initiation in Scotland. Or perhaps Treloar did not believe that true "Hiramic" Freemasonry really existed in England until the restoration of Charles II.

The Treloar MS. concludes its powerful royalist statement with an inscription in Hebrew, "Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?" This quotation from Psalm 2 was often applied to the radical Protestants of the Interregnum, and the rebellious heathen were subsequently admonished to serve the Lord's anointed king. In the year when the manuscript was written, the Jewish community in London must have worried that religious sectarians in Britain were linking their cause to Jewish millenarian developments in the Middle Last. Reports of the messianic claims of Sabbatai Zevi, a Cabalistic prophet in Smyrna, stimulated waves of enthusiasm among many Jews on the Continent.

Queen Christina became so fascinated by Sabbatai's claims that she almost became a disciple. In Hamburg she danced in the streets with her Jewish friends in anticipation of the apocalyptic moment. (49)

In London Oldenburg eagerly sought news about the movement from the alchemist Borri, the chiliast Serrarius, and the philosopher Spinoza, which revived his millenarial hopes-and made him vulnerable to royalist suspicions of sedition. (50)

In November 1665 Robert Boulter published in London a Sabbatian message to serve the agenda of radical dissidents, who opposed Charles II's policy of toleration. He claimed that he received a letter from Aberdeen which dcscribed the arrival on the Scottish coast of a mysterious ship, loaded with Hebrew-speaking Jews who were gathering their brethren from all over the world to return to Jerusalem. (51)

The Sabbatians boldly proclaimed on their satin sails, "THESE ARE THE TEN TRIBES OF ISRAEL," who would give liberty of' conscience to all (except the Turks). It is unclear whether Boulter believed there were actual Jews living in Scotland, or whether he hoped to insult the Scots and their Stuart king by implying that they where Jewish.

Meanwhile in Amsterdam, some Jewish admirers of Sabbatai Zevi hoped that the English king would assist them, despite the current state of war between England and Holland which had spread to the Mediterranean.

But when Sabbatal Zevi -under threat of death-apostasized to Islam, the royalists in Britain were relieved that the potentially incendiary movement fizzled out. There is little evidence that Jews in London supported the campaign, which threatened to undermine their delicate position under the king's protection. (52)

Oldenburg, however, continued to correspond about the millenarian implications of the affair, and his indiscrete comments to friends in Holland during the Anglo Dutch war placed him under government suspicion. Letters from the radical Serrarius were impounded, and an order for Oldenburg's arrest was issued in summer 1667. (53)

Evelyn noted that Oldenburg was held a close prisoner in the Tower "for having been suspected to write Intelligence, etc." (54)

Because Evelyn appreciated the secretary's work for the Royal Society, he got permission from Arlington to visit Oldenburg in the Tower, and he came away confident that he was innocent of seditious intent. However, Oldenburg's interest in Sabbatian millenarianism was still considered risky, and he was not released until a month after the signing of the Treaty of Breda. (55)

The perceived linkage between Sabbatians and Protestant subversives possibly spurred Solomon Franco to publish a royalist panegyric, Truth Springing Out of the Earth, which he dedicated to Charles II on 2 July 1668.

As Hebrew instructor of Ashmole, Franco may have learned that Ashmole's friend Evelyn was now undertaking a study of Sabbatai Zevi and similar radical enthusiasts. In his pamphlet, Franco announced his conversion to the Church of England, which he credited to the miraculous nature of Charles II's restoration and to the arguments of Christian friends that the Cabala proved that Jesus was the Messiah. He stressed that the ancient Jews were devoted to monarchy and that rebels against the king were punished with death. Franco was also determined to defend Cabalistic traditions against critics like Samuel Parker, who two years earlier had ridiculed Rosicrucian exponents of Cabala.

Perhaps Franco also hoped to forestall Evelyn's potential criticism of Sabbatai Zevi's Cabalistic pretensions. Thus, he gave detailed expositions of Cabalistic traditions of the male and female Cherubim, the role of the Shekinah in reception of divine influx, the architecture of the Temple, etc. In a passage with Masonic resonance, Franco affirmed: "The Temple, which is the Heart of the World, whose Influence is communicated to all parts of the Body, which now is of Stone, after the coming of the Messias shall be of flesh. (56)

With Cabalistic study reclaimed by Franco as permissable for royalist Christians, Evelyn's expose of the Sabbatian movement was rendered less threatening to Jews (and Marranos) who enjoyed the protection of the king.

Yo Arlington, Evelyn linked Christian partisans of the Sabbatians with Cromwellian radicals, who still posed a threat to the Stuart regime:

But whil'st the Time is not vet accomplish'd, I could wish our modern Enthusiasts, and other prodigious sects amongst us, who Dreame of the like Carnal Expectations, and a Temporal Monarchy, might seriously weigh how nearly their Characters approach the Style and Design of these Deluded Wretchcs [Jewish Sabbatians], least they fall into the same Condemnation, and the Snare of the Devil. (57)

Despite the attacks by militant Protestants, Charles II continued to welcome pacific Rosicrucians and Cabalists to his court. In October 1670, while attending the Newmarket races, he was joined by F.M. van Helmont, who was a longtime friend of Prince Rupert, the king's cousin and partner in chemical and artistic studies. (58)

Moray was familiar with Van Helmont's Alphabetum Naturae, which Oldenburg had reviewed for the Royal Society in January 1668, noting that Van Helmont learned Hebrew so well that he understood the whole Hebrew Bible. The "Judaizing Rosicrucian" then visited Henry More and Anne Conwav, who were currently studying the works of Hendrik Niklaus. founder of the "Family of Iove." Though Conway defended Familist doctrines, More criticized them as similar to Quaker beliefs. Van Helmont's Hebrew studies would soon stimulate Cabalistic interest and controversy in the mystical circles of Conway. More, and George Keith, the Scottish Quaker. (59)

With the Sabbatian movement and its millenarian supporters now discredited, Charles II expressed his appreciation for the loyalty of the Jews by appointing many of them as "sworn brokers."(61)

In The History of the Three Late Famous Impostors (1669), dedicated Queen Catherine, was also known as a friend and protector of Jews. Orrery worked with Webb to design an elaborate production by the King's Company to be held in January 1672, but a fire destroyed the Theatre Royal. From the script, it is clear that Orrery intended stunning views of the Temple, which would appear mysteriously while singing priests in white robes praise Herod on his sumptuous throne. Amidst the corruption, sensuality, and violence of' the Hebrew court, certain noble Jews were willing to die in order to save a friend. Thus, the themes of elevated conjugal love and mystical friendship were linked with the good Jews who tried to regenerate Jerusalem and the Temple. (62)

In The Tragedy of King Saul, composed circa 1671 but published posthumously, Orrery further elaborated the theme of fraternal bonding. As David and Jonathan make vows of eternal friendship ("one Soul in both our Bodies be"), they stand in contrast to oath-breakers who lift their hands against the Lord's anointed. (63)

The royalist panegyrics occur amidst scenes of a mystically-shrouded Temple, magician's cave, flying spirits, and prophetic visions.

"JESUIT CONSPIRACY"

As Eveline Cruickshanks describes in her book "The Glorious Revolution" (2000) Charles’s secretary of state Williamson was sent to the Tower because of his effort to employ Irish regiments released from French service. Charles believed that the Duke of Buckingham and Shaftesbury, now allied with the opposition Whigs in Parliament, instigated the actions of Tonge and Oates.

James Butler, who was privy to Buckingham's intrigues, added to the political complications with his charges of Franco-Scottish-Jewish sedition in Hudibras III, which was reprinted in 1679.

Because Francophilia makes marriage unfashionable (a dig at promiscuous courtiers and the profusion of royal bastards), Hudibras and the Scots now serve the cause of Papist agents: "your Presbyterian wits/Jump punctual with the Jesuits.” (Hubridas, p. 210, 214)

While Hooke and the Rosicrucianized virtuosos work with Napier's Bones, they implicitly support the Scots and Catholics. (p.250)

While they study Kircher's works, they not only support the Jesuits but the Jews:

"But Jesuites have deeper Reaches In all their Politick Far-fetches: And from their Coptick Priest, Kirkerus, Found out this Mystick way to jear us.

They thought, all Governments were best, By Hieroglyphick Rumps, exprest.

The Learned Rabbins of the Jews Write, there's a Bone, which they call Luez, I’ th' Rump of man, of such a Vertue, No force in Nature can do hurt to: And therefore, at the last Great Day, All th' other Members shall, they say, Spring out of this, as from a Seed, All sorts of Vegetals proceed: From whence, the Learned Sons of Art, Os Sacrum, Justly stile that part. (p.280-81)

The Cabalistic theory of the mystical bone Luz was explained in the Kabbalah Denudata, which was currently being discussed by vanious Fellows of the Royal Society. In a letter of 6 June 1679 John Locke, FRS, who had earlier studied under the Rosicrucian Sthael, noted that Robert Boyle informed him of the publication of the Zohar, newly translated into Latin by "un tres habil homme avec des notes qui expliquent Fancien Cabala des Juifs." (64)

Locke was interested in Helmontian theories of medicine, and he subsequently learned of F.M. Van Helmont's contribution to the Kabbalah Denudata, which he then acquired. Rosenroth later sent to Locke interesting Cabalistic commentaries on the philosopher's essays. In his letter to Boyle, Locke also revealed that Isaac Abendana "s'est brouille" with the authorities at Cambridge and thus took his Alishna project to Oxford. Rosenroth later complained of the harsh treatment he received from many clerics in Germany because of his publication of Kabbalah Denudata, and Helmont found the climate in England becoming increasingly intolerant.

With the country reeling from the sensational revelations of the phony "Popish Plot," the Whigs rummaged through Tonge's chaotic papers for more evidence of the Catholic conspiracy. For decades Tonge had collected occultist prophecies which he applied to imagined Jesuitical intrigues and which he now resolved to publish. Writing furiously in late 1679, Tonge prepared ”The Northern Star: The British Monarchy”, dedicated to Charles II and published early in 1680. Drawing on Abbot Joachim, Paracelsus, Agripa, Reuchlin, Postel, Nostradarnus, Napier, Sendivogius, and Maxwell, Tonge assured Charles II of his prophetic role as the northern king who would settle God's Temple in the North Country. In Chapter IV, entitled "The Confession of the Rosie-Cross," he linked Charles with the mythic God-Son C.R. who founded the R.C. society.

He further assured him of scientific support, for the secretary of the Royal Society (Oldenburg) had received similar prophecies in 1668. Ocular proof was currently provided by the German visionary Martin Eyler, who was in London with his agate shew-stone in which spiritual figures revealed political prophecies.

According to Ezerel Tonge, the only obstacle to Charles's role as Rosicrucian savior of international Protestantism was the nefarious plot of the Jesuits, who had learned from the "Assassins of Phoenecia" how to train adepts for their campaign. Because Tonge's bizarre linkage of Jesuits and Assassins would re-emerge in anti-Masonic propaganda in the eighteenth century, it is worth a brief look at his fevered argument.

In "Jesuits Assassins: or the Popish Plot Further Declared" (1680), he made oblique Masonic-sounding comments. The sect of Assassins lived in the mountains near Tyre, where their Master was, not hereditary but elected." (p.4-6) Called the "Old Man of the Mountain," this prophet was a great builder, who designed wonderful palaces adorned with pictures.

By intoxicating his disciples with a certain drink (hashish), he gave them a glimpse of paradise which inspired them to swear obedience to the Master, loyalty to their brothers, and death to their enemies. Having studied the Assassins, the Jesuits then adopted their methods in order to destroy Protestantism.

Rather than giving their agents hashish, the Jesuits used charms and exorcisms, performed in "Chambers of Meditation and other Recesses of Darkness": they "conjured up gradually to that prodigious fury, as to think that in bloody assassinations of Kings and Princes, and merciless blowing up of Kingdoms, they do acceptable service to God, and merit everlasting Life." Through their magical meditation techniques, the Jesuit agents become angelized and divinized to prepare for their deadly work.

Quoting the Spanish Jesuit Vaninus, Tonge interpreted his description of a brother who was sent to London, where he labored forty-nine days "in cutting stones," as an allusion to the Gun Powder Plot to blow up "the Walls under the Parliament House." Such false stone-cutters then arranged the murder of Charles I and the Great Fire of London.

Through his earlier work on church construction and his collaboration with Moray, Hooke, Harley, and various master masons, Tonge was familiar with operative masonry. Oates too had observed the masons at work in Tangier. However, it is unclear whether their paranoid polemics were consciously aimed at royalist Freemasonry. Nevertheless, the scare engendered by their revelations placed not only Masons but Rosicrucians and Cabalists in a hazardous position. That Buckingham, whom the king believed to be the inventor of the Popish Plot, allegedly served as an "indolent" Grand Master in 1679 gave an ironic twist to Tonge's revelations." (65)Probably pressured by an angry Charles II, Buckingham "demitted" from the office. He was replaced by his rival, the ever loyal Arlington, who however "was too deeply engaged in affairs of State to mind the Lodges."

Nevertheless, Arlington continued to represent the tolerant traditions of Stuart Freemasonry, for he was sympathetic to Catholics and Jews, as well as being a great admirer of Spanish and French architecture--subjects which filled Tonge with iconoclastic disgust. Evelyn considered Arlington a learned and pious man, who devoted his architectural skills to God's service. Two years earlier, Evelyn praised Arlington for rebuilding the church at Euston, making it "for elegance and cheerfulnes ... one of the prettiest country churches in England," and he was moved by Arlington's motives in the project:

My Lord told me his heart smote him that, after he had bestowed so much on his magnificent palace there, he should see God's House in the ruin it lay in. He has also re-built the parsonage- house, all of stone, very neat and ample. (66)

Though Anderson claimed that during Arlington's Grand Mastership, "the Fraternity was considerable still, and many Gentlemen requested to be admitted," there is no surviving evidence of developments in "speculative" Freemasonry in England over the next two decades. Stevenson observes that "English gentlemen non-operatives were not organised into lodges with set memberships of a Scottish or modern kind, but met in fluid occasional lodges" connected with building sites. (67)

However, when Charles sent his embattled brother James to Scotland in November 1679, the duke's intermittent presence over the next thirty months encouraged a revival of royalist Masonry in the north. In this political context lay the roots of the later dcvelopment of Jacobite Freemasonry, when Scottish and Irish Masons loyal to James VII and 11 took their "ancient" traditions into exile with their banished king.

Ouston argues that the king sent the Duke of York to Scotland to keep him out of the way of an English Commons inflamed by the Popish Plot and to enable him to develop an alternative political power base. (68)

During his previous "exile" to the Continent from May to August 1679, James appreciated the generous support of Kincardine, whom he in turn consoled when the earl had problems with Lauderdale. (69)

Kincardine now served as an Extraordinary Lord of Session, and he was instrumental in bringing factions together to welcome James to Edinburgh. From London Lauderdale helped to organize the loyal reception, and the heir apparent was greeted warmly by the aristocratic and professional classes. The latter had become fearful of civil war after the murder of Archbishop Sharp by radical Presbyterians in May, followed by an armed rising of Coverranters in June. Despite James's Catholicism, the ruling establishment viewed him as a beneficent presence, compared to the sadirons opponents of royal government. There was also popular enthusiasm for the first Stuart prince to establish a royal court in Edinburgh since 1603.

James cultivated an image of himself as the heir of his grandfather's Solomonic tradition, for James VI was still a revered figure in Scotland. Though he encouraged the architectural work of William Bruce, Robert Mylne, and James Smith (a Catholic-educated designer), Masonic historians have long assumed that he was the first Stuart king in three reigns who did not become a Freemason. However, that claim was made by Anderson who, though a native Scot, was a staunch supporter of the Protestant revolution which overthrew James 11 in 1688. According to the eighteenth-century Clermont Rite, Sir William Bruce served as chief of the secret Templar-Masonic order from 1679 until 1686, at the time when he was closely associated with James. (70)

Moreover, until the death of Kincardine in July 1680, James was the intimate friend of that loyal and idealistic Mason. As we shall see, James would receive important Masonic support in Scotland when he succeeded to the throne in 1685. Moreover, in 1777 his grandson, "Bonnie Prince Charlie," would reveal to an initiatic of a German Templar lodge that "the secret Grand Mastership of the Masons was hereditary in the house of Stuart." (71)

James was probably introduced to military masonry during the Interregnum, when he frequently worked with Scottish and Irish engineers serving with him in the French army. 172 During his residence in Edinburgh, he took a keen interest in architectural projects, which were often minutely supervised from Whitehall by Lauderdale. In fact, Cruickshanks argues that James "led an artistic renaissance with the rebuilding of Holyrood Palace." (72)

Many private as well as public buildings now included heraldic devices and deliberate reminders of Scotland's historic independence and links with a Wider European scientific and artistic world. (73)Determined to extend Charles's intellectual and virtuoso culture to Scotland, James made Edinburgh an extension of the Stuart court. During his cultural campaign, he received strong support from Sir George Mackenzie, Lord Advocate, who was an old friend of Lauderdale and Moray and who shared the latter's devotion to bonded friendship, stoic philosophy, and scientific heraldry. (74)

Like Moray, Mackenzie hoped that the New Philosophy could overcome religious fanaticism, and he published "Religio Stoici: the Virtuoso or Stoick with a Friendy, Address to the Fanatics of all Sects and Sorts." (1663).

Sharing James's interest in chivalric revival, Mackenzie now prepared a treatise on "The Science of Heraldry" (1680), which paid tribute to the "auld alliance" with France and defined many themes that would later emerge in the knightly degrees of Ecossais Freemasonry. Dedicating the work "to my country-men," Mackenzie lamented that .."We only of all nations have never published anything, to let the world know what marks of honour our predecessors had gained." (75)

He became fascinated by heraldry while studying in France, and he subsequently explored a vast literature on the subject. Drawing on Aldrovandus and Favyn, he cited a Biblical "Jacobite" origin for heraldry: "some think that the giving of arms arose from the example of Jacob blessing his children, in which he gave them marks of distinction." He then traced the contributions made by Godfrey of Bouillon and other crusaders at Jerusalem, as well as the French king who made the Scottish archers his personal bodyguard ("an honour they retain to this day"). Now encouraged by James, Mackenzie's friends revived the Royal Company of Archers, which had traditional links with the Garde Ecossais and which stressed fraternal loyalty, militaristic royalism, and patriotic achievement.

Provoked by Ashmole's claims for the Garter, Mackenzie argued the priority of the Order of the Thistle, which was created in 787 A.D. to honor the alliance between the French king Charlemagne and the Scottish king Achalus, who defeated the English king Athelstan. Robert the Bruce subsequently revived the Thistle and contributed new arms for the citizens of Aberdeen to honor their Victory over the English. After the Reformation the order was suppressed as "a Dreg of Popery," but many Scottish nobles kept its symbols alive in their heraldic arms, architectural decorations, and emblematic coins. (76)

Despite Mackenzie's nationalist fervor, he was careful to praise the current union of Scotland and England under their Stuart king. Determined to build a secure power base in Scotland, James was impressed by Mackenzie's claims, and he would later revive the Thistle as a royalist chivalric order.

In January 1679 Mackenzic was admitted freeman of a craftsman's corporation (which Gould reports in a Masonic context), and he had many Masonic associates. (77)His arguments about heraldry, the Thistle, and the Garter would later influence the development of chivalric high degrees in Scots-Irish and Ecossais Masonry.

Another strong supporter of James's virtuoso campaign was Sir Robert Sibbald, royal geographer, who had earlier been a protege of Moray. Like Gilbert Burnet earlier, Sibbald had visited the Jews' synagogue in Amsterdam and Catholic chapels in Paris, experiences that "disposed me to affect charity for all good men of any persuasion." (78)

Sibbald collected rare works on Cabalism, Lullism, Hermeticism, and Rosicrucianism, and his library became a valuable resource for students of "speculative Freemasonry." (79)

For the Catholic James, the support of the Episcopal Sibbald for toleration was invaluable during his stay in Scotland. In fact, the two men virtually revived Moray's earlier successful policy of religious and political moderation.

James introduced his English physician Sir Charles Scarborough to Sibbald, and the three men developed a plan to construct a Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh in 1681.

Scarborough had been the protege and successor of' Dr. William Harvey, the old friend of Robert Fludd, and he participated in their Hermetic and Cabalistic studies. While in Scotland, he solicited the support of James Drummond, Fourth Earl of Perth for the medical college, and the earl would later play a leading role in Jacobite Freemasonry.

Like Sibbald, Scarborough amassed a great occultist library, which included works by Rabbi Abraham, Trithemius, Postel, Dee, Bruno, Scaliger, Fludd, Kircher, Van Helmont.

John Falconer, a Scottish expert in cryptography, who was entrusted with James’s private cipher. Falconer argued that cryptography derived from Hebrew roots. Analyzing the methods of Trithemius, Baptista Porta, Bacon, Wilkins, and Kircher, he made important breakthroughs in code-making, which would later be used in Jacobite and French military intelligence. Like Robert Hooke, who argued that John Dee's angelic conversations contained an ingenious diplomatic code, Falconer argued that Trithermus's mystical expressions were "all cryptography."

Because Falconer knew many of the royalist Masons in Scotland, his instructions on "Saemaelogia" and "Dactylogy" (secret communication by signs, gestures, and fingers), as well as "Arthrologia" (discovering by "the joynts or remarkable parts of a Man's Body") may have influenced the complex and often indecipherable codes and body-language used by later Jacobite Masons.

John Falconer. Rules for Explaining and Deciphering All Manner of Secret Writing” London: Dan Brown, 1692), 6, 101-12-160 73. Falconer later deciphered the Duke of' Argyll's correspondence, which led to the exposure of his plot against James’s succession.

ENGLISH ENDINGS

In 1679 when Alexander Dickson, professor of Hebrew at Edinburgh University, was removed for refusing to sign the oath of allegiance, James approved the appointment of Alexander Amedeus, a Florentine Jew, to the post. (80)

The royal brother's actions did not go unnoticed south of the border, where radical opponents linked toleration for Jews to Rosicrucian intrigue and Francophilia. In 1680 an English translation of ne Count of Cabalis appeared in London, claiming to be published by "the Cabalistical Society of the Sages, at the Sign of the Rosicrucian." The author worried that many of his friends "do seriously study" these "Mysteries of Cabalism," and therefore he must refute them "by the strength of solid arguments." (81)

The latter consisted of railing against the Frenchified nature of the eroticized spirituality of "the Cabalistic sciences." The Cabalist, both Jewish and Christian, is "a great hater of women; yet much addicted to Venery, in a philosophical way"; thus, "only a Frenchman would give credit to Cabalistic whimsies."

In the northern kingdom, James may have learned of Quaker interest in the Cabalistic system of Van Helmont, who was widely believed to be a 'Judaized" Rosicrucian. The duke was a close friend of William Penn, the Quaker leader and a supporter of the Stuarts' toleration policy. Van Helmont had won over Penn's Scottish friend George Keith to his Cabalistic beliefs, and Keith in turn recruited Helmont to Quakerism. Keith was convinced of similarities between the Quaker doctrine of inner light and the Christian-Cabalistic notion of the "Christ within." (82)

He and Helmont further believed that a synthesis of Cabala and Christianity could provide a "a nucleus for Thomas Bruce, Memoirs of Thomas, Farl, of Aiksbug. Roxburghe Club.

A religious movement uniting Catholics, Protestants, Pagans, and Jews. Encouraged by James's sympathy for Quakers, Penn's movement attracted many new followers in Scotland. Given this eclectic and tolerant environment, it is not surprising that lodge records in Aberdeen, written circa 1679-80, indicate the presence of Quakers, as well as "landowners, merchants and craftsmen," among the Freemasons. (83)

One royalist Mason who supported the Quakers was the Earl of Perth, who was Penn's partner in the settlement of East New Jersey in 1681. (84)

In the portraits of two members of the Aberdeen lodge there appear in the background the pillars of Jachim and Boaz, suggesting their Masonic initiation into Solomon's Temple. (85)

James's revival of his grandfather's Solomonic policies was effective and popular in Scotland, and his support of religious toleration was widely believed to be sincere. When he returned to London in March 1682, he left behind in Edinburgh a reservoir of good will and patriotic support, especially among the royalist Masons who would later defend his threatened throne.

In 1680 Christopher Wren was persuaded to accept the presidency of the Royal Society in what was an urgently needed salvage operation. At the same time, he continued his role as Surveyor of the King's Works, while he and Hooke carried on the massive task of rebuilding more than fifty churches in London. However, the Whigs' campaign to exclude James from the succession polarized England, while increasingly radical attacks were made on the royalist institutions which supported Stuart claims. Wren was dismayed when parliament withdrew its support and cut off the funds for many of his projects. (86)

Fighting back against the Exclusionists, the poet laureate Dryden published Absalom and Achitophel (1681) to counter critics who threatened to destroy hereditary monarchy. Portraying Buckingham as "Zimri," Dryden mocked the inconstancy and opportunism of the duke and his Whig opposition party. Zimri's enthusiasms shifted from

Despite James's political and architectural success in Scotland, Charles II found his policies under increasing attack by his religious opponents in England. The radicals' iconoclastic fury soon ramified to Tangier, where the fate of the greatest engineering project of the century was now in the hands of the parliamentary Whigs. What alarmed them most were reports of the successful progress of the fortification and military enterprises. In 1669 the king had sent the First Earl of Middleton, Moray's former colleague, to govern Tangier, where he drew on his experience as liaison with the Dutch Jews to continue the policy of toleration. (87)Because the stone for constructing the Mole and fortifications had to be quarried from outside the existing lines, it was crucial that he maintain good relations with the Jewish and Moslem inhabitants. Given his Scottish background and duties in Tangier, it seems likely that Middleton was a Mason; his grandson, the Third Earl, would later participate in the Jacobite lodge in Paris. (88)

Despite the heavy drinking that earlier led to his dismissal from Scottish office, Middleton was an effective governor until his death in 1674. (89)

His successor, the Irish governor Inchiquin, continued to rely on Simon Pariente, their trusted Jewish interpreter, and positive reports on Hebrew beliefs and customs were sent to London. Lancelot Addison, who spent several years in Tangier, drew on his conversations with local Jews to write The Present State of the Jews, Particularly Relating to Rose in Barbag (1675), a respectful and straightforward account. Addison dedicated the work to Joseph Williamson, secretary of state, who recommended it to his friend Hooke, who subsequently read and discussed it. In 1675, during a food shortage, Inchiquin utilized crypto-Sabbatians willing to break Jewish ritual law to import salted pork for the British garrison. (90)

Their heretical actions provoked the Beth Din of Tetuan to excommunicate the European Jews of Tangier, but Inchiquin insisted that the herein be lifted. When Morrocan authorities expelled all Jews as "suspected nationals" in 1677, he helped win their readmission as valuable traders in 1680.

During the 1670's, increasing numbers of masons and soldiers were shipped out from Scotland and Ireland, and they soon won popular fame for their courageous stands against Moorish attacks. However, in 1679 when the Whigs tried to force Charles II to accept the "Exclusion Bill," they linked his willingness to deny the succession to his Catholic brother with their willingness to provide funds for Tangier. Lurid charges of Papist conspiracy among the colony's governors, troops, and masons were flung during parliamentary debates. (91)

But Charles would not sacrifice his brother to save Tangier; instead, lie prorogued Parliament in March 1681 and governed without it until the end of his reign.

Despite Parliament's hostility, there was support for the colony ill the Royal Society, which had long followed the masonic work. Henry Sheeres, FRS, was chief engineer of construction, and he sent optimistic reports to the Fellows. In 1682 the Moroccan ambassador Hamet travelled to London to urge the king to preserve the colony, and he was welcomed by Evelyn, Ashmole, and interested virtuosos to the society, where he was elected a Fellow. (92)

Pressure also came from the Knights of Malta, who counted on the colonists' assistance in their struggle to liberate Christian slaves from their Moorish captors. In June 1683 the Grand Master of Malta arrived in London, where he pleaded the colony's cause and was entertained with Evelyn and Dryden.

Though Charles had proclaimed that Tangier was "the brightest jewel of his Crown," he succumbed to Parliament in 1683 and announced his decision to level the fortifications, destroy the Mole, ruin the harbour, and recall the garrison and colonists to England. It was a sad day in masonic history when the commission met in Tangier to plan the destruction of' the great Mole which, as Riley notes, was an engineering feat "comparable with the construction of the Channel tunnel today. (93)The Swedish architects Tessin and Beckman, as well as Sheeres, reluctantly agreed to undo their labor of two decades. (94)It would take two thousand men working round the-clock for three months to finally destroy the massive stone-works. When the evacuated "Tangerines" arrived in England in April 1684, they were welcomed by the royalists as returning heroes.

The question of' placing the returning troops greatly agitated Parliament, who feared that they formed a ready army to defend the Stuart cause. A Royal Warrant suggested the stationing of Lord Dumbarton's Scots regiment-which included veterans of the Garde Ecossaise at the strategic port of Portsmouth. Perhaps with an eye to that Franco-Scottish tradition, the king proposed to make the Scotch-Irish Grenadiers his personal bodygard. The Whigs protested these measures, and the troops were eventually dispersed throughout the country, where they were considered "eyesores." Colonel John Fitzgerald, who earlier served as Lieutenant Governor of Tangier, had labored to abolish "that national distinction between English, Irish, and Scotch" and to maintain the "remarkable" policy of toleration. (95)

Blocked from promotion by anti-Irish M.P.s, Fitzgerald was falsely accused of complicity in the Popish Plot. He and his Tangerine regiment would loyally serve the Stuarts through revolution and exile.

For many royalists, the destruction of Tangier was a betrayal of the great architectural and masonic traditions of the Stuart dynasty. An anti-Whig ballad, "Tangiers Lamentation on the Demolishing and Blowing up of the Town, Castle, and Citadel," lambasted the politicians whose political factionalism, xenophobic provincialism, and technological ignorance led to the destruction of architectural work worthy of Solomon, Hiram, and the ancient Jewish masons.

The seeds of future Masonic rivalries were planted on 6 February 1685 when Charles II, a "Mason King," died after a four-day illness. On his deathbed, he secretly converted to Catholicism and received the last rites of the Roman church." (96)

As far as the public knew, Charles had died as a tolerant Anglican, who hoped that Englishmen would now accept his brother, a tolerant Catholic, as King James II. However, the radical exclusionists now stepped up their campaign against the legitimacy of his brother's succession. In order to remind Britons of the earlier storms of civil war which disrupted the natural order and to bolster the claims of James, Thomas Otway composed "Windsor Castle" in March 1685.

In his poetic "monument" to the late king, Otway strolled through Windsor Castle, seeing in its massive stone architecture a revelation of the mind and heritage of Charles II. (97)He further praised the "wonders of Fraternal love," as exemplified by James's behavior at Charles's deathbed. That scene reminded him of the chivalric ideals of the Knights of' the Garter, so brilliantly expressed in the intricate stone carvings of the Gothic chapel at Windsor. As James II's cause came under fire from "The meeting of a numerous Senate," who provoked "bold Tumults and Disorders" throughout England, Otway's poem provided potent royalist propaganda.

With Britain headed into another revolution and possible civil war, the question of what "toleration" really meant took on urgent significance. Did it consist of liberty of conscience and universal brotherhood or protection of Protestantism and suppression of Catholicism? The contradictory answers would shatter the Stuarts' attempt to build a Temple of Concord. While one man's tolerance was defined as another's tyranny, the struggle would ramify into the emerging "modernist" development of Freemasonry.

THE EUROPEAN DIASPORA OF SCOTTISH-ESOTERIC MASONRY

The fate of Stuart Freemasonry during the early Williamite regime is difficult to piece together, because of destruction of documents and increasing secrecy maintained by Jacobite resisters and exiles. Anderson noted that "many of the Fraternity's records" from Charles II's reign were lost during James II's reign and "at the Revolution." (98)

William Bruce continued to secretly work for James's cause, and he was indirectly instrumental in the Jacobite outreach to Sweden-where many Scots fled after William's victories. Despite government surveillance, Bruce and his Jacobite-Masonic allies sought contacts with sympathizers in northern England, such as the steel-manufacturer Ambrose Crowley, who maintained important trade with Sweden and Scotland. Around 1688 -90 Crowley established a masonic lodge at Sunderland, close to Newcastle, which served the operative masons involved in constructing the large stone buildings for the steel works. (99)

The lodge probably also served as a means of bonding his religiously and ethnically diverse workforce. As a Quaker, Crowley was grateful to James II for his policy of' religious toleration and for the royal protection given to the steel-maker's foreign workmen, who included Catholics and Lutherans. (100)

Several Quakers had joined lodges in Scotland during James's residence in the north and, following their leader William Penn, they retained their sympathy for the Jacobite cause. Like Crowley's employees, they agreed with James that "liberty of conscience" would benefit industry and trade.

Crowley provides an early preview of Jacobite-Masonic links between Edinburgh, Newcastle, and Gothenburg that would endure for the next seven decades. By 1691 Sir James Montgomerie, radical Covenanter turned Jacobite plotter, gained Swedish support for James II's cause, and two years later the Swedish ambassador in London would hide Jacobite agents." (101)

The Swedish king Carl XI allowed a Scottish-affiliated lodge to continue meeting in Gothenburg. His son Carl XII would become a staunch supporter of James II's son, the "Old Pretender," and allegedly a protector of Ecossais Freemasonry in Sweden. (102)

The Tessin family would provide important support for Jacobite exiles and Masons in Sweden and on the Continent. By 1788 the Swedish king Gustaf III would inherit the Grand Mastership of the Masonic Knights Templar directly from James II's grandson, the "Young Pretender," Charles Edward Stuart. (103)

In the meantime in England, William III was preoccupied with European war plans and paid little attention to architecture in his new kingdom. After a hiatus in 1689, Wren managed to resume his position as Surveyor of Works, and he attempted to complete his rebuilding projects. However, as Summerson notes, during the next decade--"this vacant interval"---few churches were built in England. (104)

French and Continental historians argue that Wren maintained his private Jacobite sympathies, while he worked discretely and cautiously under the new regime." (105)Jeffery suggests that the lack of written documents about Wren's work during these years was deliberate:

... his tracks are usually well-hidden. His early brushes with authority had taught him to be wary of committing himself to paper and of exposing his ideas to public criticism and debate ... he may just have carried on, unwilling to record decisions on paper." (106)

Wren still maintained contact with Freemasons in Scotland, and the Hamiltons often consulted him and Bruce about the progress of their grandiose palace. (107)

After the Williamite repressions of December 1691, the exiled Scots were joined by thousands of Irish refugees, who fled to France, Italy, and Spain. These "Wild Geese" included nobles and soldiers who carried their "Masonic traditions into the armies of friendly Catholic sovereigns, who still maintained chivalric orders of military and religious knights." (108)

The Irish Masonic historian Lepper observes that the army "was a great disseminator of the true light," for "our militant forefathers" found that "the secrets of a mason were very useful pieces of equipment to carry with them to a campaign." (109)

He further argues that "masonic degrees were in full vogue long prior to the creation of the [modern English] Grand Lodge in 1717" and that "the lodges of St. John maintained their association with the operative lodges." He implies that the Jacobite lodges developed degrees beyond the basic operative ones.

The many French, German, Italian, Swedish, and Russian publications, issued from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, which reveal oral traditions about the export of Jacobite Masonry to the Continent will be discussed in my projected books on eighteenth century, high-degree Freemasonry. However, it is worth mentioning now the version of that history learned by a Scottish Mason, Professor John Robison, in the 1770's, when he participated in lodges established by Jacobite exiles and their supporters in France, Belgium, Germany, and Russia. Robison lamented "the heap of rubbish with which Anderson disgraced his Constitutions of Free Masony," which had unfortunately become "the basis of masonic history.

Recounting the different historical instruction he received in Ecossais lodges, John Robison asserted:

"We also know that Charles II was made a Mason, and frequented the Lodges ... His brother and successor James II was of a more serious and manly cast of mind, and had little pleasure in the frivolous ceremonies of Masonry. He did not frequent the Lodges.”

Rather than repeating Anderson's claim that James was not a "Brother Mason," Robison implied that he did not attend often or enjoy lodge meetings. Moreover, Robison added that the lodges had become the rendezvous of "accepted" Masons who had no association with actual building projects--which suggests that James "did not frequent" English lodges. In Scotland and Ireland, the lodges continued to be closely associated with practical architecture. After the Williamite revolution, James and "his most zealous adherents" took refuge in France:

“They took Free Masonry with them to the continent, where it was immediately received by the French, and was cultivated with great zeal in a manner suited to the taste and habits of that highly cultivated people. The Lodges in France naturally became the rendezvous of the adherents to their banished King, and the means of a carrying on a correspondence with their friends in England." (p.27)

From France the exiles scattered across Europe and established clandestine Masonic networks. Robison notes that "All the Brethren on the Continent agree in saying, that Freemasonry was imported from Great Britain about the beginning of this century [ca. 1690-1700] and this in the form of a mystical society." (p.541)

Robison then described a special chivalric degree created by the Jacobitcs:

It was in the Lodges held at St. Germain's that the degree of Chevalier Alafon Ecossais was added to the three SYMBOLICAL degrees of English Masonry . . . this rank of Scotch Knight was called the first degree of the Maton Parfait. There is a device belonging to this Lodge which deserves notice. A lion, wounded by an arrow, and escaped from the stake to which he had been bound, with the broken rope still about his neck, is represented lying at the mouth of a cave, and occupied with mathematical instruments which are lying near him. A broken crown lies at the foot of the stake. There can be little doubt but that this emblem alludes to the dethronement, the captivity, the escape and asylum of James II and his hopes of re-establishment by the help of the loyal Brethren. This emblem is worn as the gorget of the Scotch Knight. It is not very certain, however, when this degree was added, whether immediately after King James's Abdication, or about the time of the attempt to set his son on the British Throne. But it is certain, that in 1716, this and still higher degrees of Masonry were much in vogue in the court of France." (p.28)

These claims of chivalric developments within Jacobite Masonry continue to provoke arguments among historians, because of the dearth of contemporary documentation until the 1720's. However, an oblique reinforcement comes from Swift, who drew upon his experiences in Dublin in 1688 and Ulster in 1695 to later describe the chivalric (as well as Cabalistic, Lullist, and Rosicrucian) associations of Scots-Irish Freemasonry. Swift's comical summary of "Celtic" traditions in "a Lodge of Free-Masons at 0 ---- h in U ---- r" (Omagh in Ulster) throws a retrospective light on developments in the fraternity in the 1690's.(110)

In 1689 Swift fled the political turmoil in Dublin and moved to England, where he became amanuensis to the retired diplomat Sir William Temple at Moor Park. Temple shared Swift's sceptical curiosity about Rosicrucianism, which he had encountered in its radical form in Ireland during the 1650's. (111)

He also dealt with operative masons there, who drew on Scots-Irish traditions. After the Restoration, Temple was employed on delicate secret missions by Charles II and Lord Arlington, both Masons, and he was kept abreast of Scottish affairs while serving at The Hague. In 1668 Arlington sent Temple a paper written by Moray and praised the Scot's expertise in chemistry. (112)

Two years later Temple met Moray, who sought his assistance for the export to Holland of Kincardine's building stone, an enterprise which involved William Bruce and William Davidson. (113)

Thus, when Temple discussed with Swift the secret diplomacy of Charles II, he may have revealed the role of Freemasonry in Stuart politics.

In "Prose" vol. V, p. 328-29 we see J. Swift writing:

"The Branch of the Lodge of Solomon's Temple, afterwards call'd the Lodge of St John of Jerusalem ... is ... the Antientest and Purest now on Earth. The famous old Scottish Lodge of Kilwinning of which all the Kings of Scotland have been from Time to Time Grand Masters without Interruption down from the days of Fergus, who Reign'd there more than 2000 Years ago, long before the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem or the Knights of Maltha, to which two Lodges I must nevertheless allow the Honour of having adorn'd the Anticin Jewish and Pagan Masonry with many Religious and Christian Rules.

Fergus being eldest Son to the chief King of Ireland, was carefully instructed in all the Arts and Sciences, especially the natural Magick, and the Caballistical Philosophy (afterwards called the Rosecrution) by the pagan Druids of i'vlona, the only true Cabalists then Extant in the Western World ...

Fergus before his Descent upon the Picts in Scotland rais'd that famous Structure, call'd to this Day Carrick-Fergus, the most misterious Piece of Architecture now on Earth, (not excepting the Pyramids of the Egyptian Masons, and their Hieroglyphicks or Free Masons signs) ... he built it as a Lodge for a College of Free Masons in those days call'd Druids."

An exiled Scot and convert to "universalist" Catholicism, Ramsay wrote Swift to thank him for supporting The Travels of Cyrus (17 2 7), Ramsay's allegorical novel, which was suffused with Jacobite and Masonic themes. (114)

A decade later, Ramsay revealed to the Ecossais lodge in Paris a Jacobite version of Masonic history that echoed and colaborated many of Swift's revelations in A Letter from the Crand Mistress.

Swift stressed the Jewish roots of Masonry, noting that it was originally called Cabala, and he revealed the initiates' preoccupation with Cabalistic gematria and notarikon. (115)

For their Masonic relationship, see M.K. Schuchard, "Ramsay, Swift, and the Jacobite-Masonic Version of the Stuart Restoration," in Esoterisme, Gnosis et Imaginaire Symbolique (2001), 491-50.

Ramsay similarly stressed the Jewish origins and Cabalistic descent, noting that "The secret Science can be preserved pure only amongst God's people," the Jews, because the Masons' traditions... are founded on the annals of the most ancient race in the, world, the only one, still in existence with the same name as of old and not intermingled with other nations although so widely dispersed and also the only one that has preserved its ancient books, whereas those of almost all other races are lost." (116)

While Swift referred to the preservation of Jewish secrets in lodges of "the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem or the Knights of Maltha," Ramsay described the concealment of Solomon's hieroglyphic writing ("the original Code of our Order") in the foundations of the Second Temple and its subsequent discovery by the crusading knights who liberated Jerusalem.

According to Swift and Ramsay, when the crusaders returned to Europe, they infused the Solomonic secrets of Cabalism and Temple building into their lodges. More explicitly than Swift, Ramsay named "James, Lord Steward of Scotland" as "Grand Master of a Lodge established at Kilwinning" in 1286, when he also initiated the English Earl of Gloucester and the Irish Earl of Ulster. Obliquely identifying early Masonry with the Templars, Ramsay noted that "an intimate union" was formed with the Knights of St. John of jerusalerd (the Hospitallers'). Unlike Swift, he did not mention the Knights of Malta, who subsequently absorbed Templar and Hospitaller traditions and who underwent a short-lived revival in Ireland during James II's residence there in 1690. Since the merging of the chivalric orders into Masonry, the brothers continued to imitate their Jewish forefathers: "The union was made after the manner of the Israelites when they built the Second Temple, whilst some handled the trowel and the compasses, others defended them with sword and buckler."

Though little documentation survives concerning Freemasonry at the turn of the seventeenth century, the seeds were already planted for the almost startling growth of the fraternity in the eighteenth century. After the accession of the Elector of Hanover to the British throne in 1714, the suppression of the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, and the exposure of the Jacobite- Swedish plot of 1716, a rival system of "modern" Hanoverian Freemasonry was established in 1717, and it struggled in bitter competition with the "ancient" Stuart system until 1813.

Outside of Britain, the "ancients" recruited many more followers and became associated with nationalist movements in Eastern Europe and North and South America. For these liberationists, the Scottish traditions of resistance to foreign domination and mystical elevation of ordinary men to brotherhood with kings seemed fraught with contemporary relevance.

Throughout the eighteenth century, the "ancient" Stuart traditions were maintained in clandestine Jacobite lodges in Britain and in the lodges of the Stuart diaspora. The Jewish associations were carried on by Francis Francia (the 'Jacobite Jew"), Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk (the "Baal Shem of London"), Martines de Pasqually (the "Elu Cohen"); the Swedish-Stuart loyalties were preserved by Carl XIL Carl Gustaf Tessin, Carl Gyllenborg, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Gustaf III.

FOOTNOTES

1 David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasong: Scotland's Century (1590 -1710) Cambridge, 1988), and The First Freemasons: Scotland's Early Lodges and Their Members Aberdeen, 1988).

2 Lisa Kahler, "Freemasonry in Edinburgh, 1721-1746: Institutions and Context" Ph.D. Thesis, St. Andrews University, 1998).

3 Stevenson draws on Frances Yates's Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition London, 1964), and The Art of Alemog (London, 1966).

4 Salo Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Yews, 2nd rev. ed. (1937; New York, 1966); Erwin Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period (New York, 1953'~,; George Sarton, A Histog of Science (Cambridge, 1959); Mark Wischnitzer, A Histog oJ Jewish Crafts and Guilds (New York, 1965)

5 Elliot Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton, 1994).

6 Arthur Williamson, "A Pil for Pork-Eaters': Ethnic Identity, Apocalyptic Premises, and the Strange Creation of the Judeo-Scots," in The Expulsion of the Jews: 1492 and After, ed. R.B. Waddington and A.H. Williamson (New York, 1994), 237 58.

7 D. Stevenson, First Freemasons, 3.

8 For clear summaries of the revisionists' works, see Maurice Lce, Great Britain's Solomon: James III and I in His Three Kingdoms (Urbana, 1990); Roger Lockyer, James VI and I (1998); Julian Goodare and -Michael Lynch, eds., The Reign of James VI (Phantassie, 2000) ; Eveline Cruickshanks, The Glorious Revolution (New York, 2000).

9 For the architectural-masque culture, see especially Vaughan Hart, Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts (London, 1994). For illustrations of its revival in eighteenth-century Swedish Ecossais lodges, see Cold and Himmelblau. Die Zeitloses Ideal (Abo, 1993). An attempted revival of this Culture occurred in Britain in the clandestine Jacobite "Rite of Heredom of Kilwinning" (1741 -1800)

10 C. Lance Brockman, ed., Theatre of the Fraternity: Staging the Ritual Space of the Scottish Rite of Freemasons, 1896-1929 (Minneapolis, 1996).

11 Hartlib Papers: 28/2/81A. Ephermerides: part IV.

12 C. Josten, Ashmole, 11, 761.

13 Kincardine MS.5050.f.28 (18 April 1658). Amhmole spent much time at Windsor, while he worked on his history of the Order of' the Garter, and Lauderdale spent man), years in prison there. The two men became friends.

14 Kincardine MS.5050.ff.44; see also Goran Behre, "Gothenburg in Stuart War Strategy, 1649-1760," in G. Simpson, Scotland and Scandinavia, 90-99.

15 L. Nicholas, Nicholas Papers, III, 259.

16 D. Crips, Elizabeth. 39-50.

17 Lauderdale, Bibliolheca 168T. G. Burnet, History, 1, 184.

18 G. Burnet, History 1, 184.

19 F Routtedge, Calendar ... Clarendon, 111, 35, 259, 279.

20 Clarendon, Henry Hyde, Earl of, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W.D. Macray (Oxford: Clarendon, 1888), V, 170-71, 316, 324-29.

21 G. Burnet, History, 1, 437-39.

22 J. Clark, "Lord Burlington," 289-93, 304.

23 T Thurloe, Collection, IV, 50, 156, 183.

24 F. Routledge, Calendar ... Clarendon, 111, 283. General Alexander Hamilton, the Newcastle initiate, died in December 1649.

25 R. Xlylne, Master Masons, 128-29. Spelling modernized.

26 J. Thurloc, Collection, VII, 416.

27 Ted Jamieson, General Monck and the Revolution (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1975 , 11-12.

28 Hubert Fenwick, Architect Royal: The Life and Works of Sir William Bruce, 100 1710 (Kineton: Roundwood. 1970), xiii, xvi, 4-9.

29 J, Anderson, Constitutions (1738), 104.

30 G. Burnet, Hisloil', 1, 117-18

31 W. Zimmerman,Von den alten zur Neuen Freimaurerei.

32 C.H. Josten, Elias Ashmole, p.11 (1966)

33 British Library: Evelyn MS.65.

34 Wren's comment in August 1716; see Thomas Hearne, Reliquiae Heamianae, 2nd ed., ed. Philip Bliss (London, 1869), 11, 39.

35 Manuscript presently in Royal Society, London: TNIS. Register Book (C), IX, F.240 52. It was copied into the Register Book circa 1708.

36 W. Sanniel, "Reviex% of'... Barbados." 25-27, -14.

37 N. Roth. "Social and Intellectual Currents," 182-83.

38 L. Wolf', 'Jewry," 157.

39 D. Katz, "Abendana Brothers," 37-38.

40 G. Black, "Beginnings," 473.

41 A. Levy, "The Origins of Scottish Jewry. TJHSE, 20 1959-6F, 134--3,5.

42 D. Katz Jews in History, 143.

43 A. Sharie, "Leon," 158.

44 T. Birch. History, 11, 9.

45 Jacobi Jehuda Leonis de Templo Hierosolymitano( Helmstadt: Jacob Mullerus,1665), Libri IV, (d.2)

46 Reproduced by John Thorpe in "Old Masonic Manuscript. A Fragment," Lodge of Research, N. 2429 Leicester Transactions for the Year 1926-27, 40-48.

47 Wallace McLeod, "Additions to the List of' Old Charges," AQC. 96 1983. M 99.

48 D. Stevenson, Origins, 163.

49 S. Akerman, Christina, 188-91.

50 H. Oldenburg, Correspondence, 11, 481, 637-111, 447.

51 Reprinted in R.B. [Nathaniel Cronch], Memorable Remark) Upon the Ancient and Modern State of the Jewish Nation (Bolton: B. Jackson, 1786), 48, 125-63

52 Zvi Loker, “Juan de Yllan, Merchant Adventurer and Colonial Promoter. Studia Rosenthaliana. 17 (1983), 23.

53 H. Oldenburg, Correspondence, 111, xxvi-vii, 447,

54 J. Evelyn. Diary, 11, 278; 111, 491.

55 Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton (Cambridge UP, 1982),28.

56 S. Franco. Truth, 58.

57 John Evelyn Imposters (1669) p.131 (ClarkMemorial Library, 1968)

58 John Evelyn. The History of the 'Three Late Famouss Impostors (1669), Augustan Reprint Society, 131. (Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library, 1968)

59 A. Coudert, Impact, 155-56, 180- 8 1.

60 Philosophical Transactions, 11, no. 31, pp. 602-04.

61 Dudley Abrahams, Jew Brokers of the City of London," MJHSE, III (1937) 87-88.

62 R. Loeber, Bioq Dict., 25-27.

63 Roger Boyle, 'The Dramatic Works o Roger Boyle, Earl Orreg, ed. W.S. Clark Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1937'1, 1. W 11, 601-13.

64 Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E.S. dc Beer (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 11, 30: 11, 399-404.

65 J. Anderson, Constitutions (1738), 105.

66 J. Evelyn, Diag, IV. 114.

67 D. Stevcnson, Orpns, 226 230.

68 H. Ouston, "York in Edinburgh," 133.

69 Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688 1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989). 303.

70 F.M.G. Higham, King James the Second. (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1934), 44.

71 E. Cruickshanks, Glorious Revolution, 47.

72 M. Glendinning, Histog, 71-84.

73 Kincardine NIS-5050 f. 95; Stevenson, Origins.

74 Sir George Mackenzie, The Science of Heraldry (Edinburgh: printed by the heir of' Andrew Anderson, 1680), preface, 2.

75 Alexander Nisbet, A System of Heraldry, Speculative and Practical (Edinburgh: J. Mackuen, 1722),. 114; he utilized Mackenzie's manuscript collections on heraldry.

76 R. Gould, History, If, 60.

77 Robert Sibbald, 'The Rernains of Sir Robert Sibbald, Knight, ALD. (Edinburg 1833), 15 17, 30.

78 See Catalogus Bibliothecae Sibbaldiane ( Edinburgh, 1707), and Bibliotheca Sibbaldiana (Edinburgh, 1722).

79 W.S. Craig, History of the Royal College of Physicians, (1976) 61-62.

80 A. Levy, "Origins," 134-35. Amedeus may have converted to Christianity by this time.

81 The Count of Gabalis: trans. P. Ayres (London, 1680), Dedication, 1-2.

82 Allison Coudert, "A Quaker-Kabbalist Controversy: George Fox's Reaction to Francis Mercury van Helmont," JWCI, 39 (1976), 170-89.

83 D. Stevenson, First Freermasons, 136 39, 142.

84 James Drummond, Fourth Earl and First Duke of Perth," DVB. For his Masonic affiliation, see John Yarker, "Drummond-Earls of Perth," AQC, 14 1901" 138.

85 Stevenson, Origins, 147.

86 B. Little, Wren, 109.

87 George Hilton Jones, Charles Aliddleton: 'The Iife and Times of a Restoration Politician. (Chicago UP, 1967), 10 -17.

88 Edward Corp, Lord Burlington “The Man and His Politics "Lewiston: Edwin Nellen, 1998, 20.

89 The Diary of Samuel Pepys: 1662 by Samuel Pepys, Robert Latham, William Matthews.

90 T. Benady, "Role of Jews," 47.

91 J.C. Riley. "Catholicism and the Late Stuart Army: the Tangier Episode." Royal Stuart Papers XIIII Huntingdon: Royal Stuart Society (1993), 1 28.

92 J. Evelyn Diarry III, 75, 77, 84.

93 J. Riley, "Catholicism," 67.

94 Ensign Bernard Tessin, member of The Tangier Regiment in 1683, was probably Hans Ewald's son. Martin Beckman evidently, became a Freemason in Scotland: see Howard Tomlinson, "The Ordnance Office and the King's Forts (1610) 1711- 1716 (1973), 17.

95 J. Riley, "Catholicism," 11 12.

96 For a critical examination of the false accounts given of' Charles's conversion, see R. Hutton, Charles 11, 443 45.

97 T. Otway, Works, 11, 457-65.

98 J. Anderson, Constilutiom (1738). 105-06.

99 Leo Gooch, The Desperate Faction? The Jacobites of North-East England (Hull UP, 1995), 202n.14; also 39, 111.

100 M.W. Flinn, Alen ()f Iron: 'The Crowlg,s in the Eadv Iron Indusiq (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1962), 16, 39-40.

101 P.A. Hopkins, "Sir Jarnes Montgomeric of Skelmorlie," in E. Corp, Stuart Court, 51 56; Mark Goldie, "The Roots of True Whiggism," History of Political Thought, (1980), 228-29.

102 M.Schusshard "Swedenborg, Jacobitisin, and Freemasonry." in Erland Brock, ed., Swedenborg and His Influence (1988), 359 - 79.

103 Claude Nordmann, Gustave III.- un democrate couronne (Lille: Presses Universitaire, 1986), 214 M Frank 1\1cLynn, Charles Edward Stuart "1988; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991 ~, 532- 36.5)

104 J. Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530 1830 (London: Pelican, 19351), 184.

105 G. Bord, Franc-Alafonnerie, 55-5 7 -, Margaret Jacob, Liring the Enlightenment: Freemasong and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford UP. 1991), 92.

106 Paul Jefferv, 'The Cio Churche,s of Christopher Wren ( 1996), 28-29.

107 Charles Trench, Gace's Card.- Irish Catholic Landlords, 1690 1800 (Dublin: Mercier, 1997), 34; S. Murphy, "Irish Jacobitism," 74 82.

108 John Heron Lepper, The Pifferences Between English and Irish Alasonic Rituals Treated Historicall, (Dublin: George Healy. 1920), 17, 23, 39.

109 John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, (1798), 17. Though most historians rightfully scoff at Robison's charges of a Masonic conspiracy in the 1790's, they have not examined his accounts of his personal experiences in Ecossais lodges in the 1770's. The latter material is important for its insight into the Scottish-Jacobite traditions that were preserved in various European Masonic rites. These latter descriptions are corroborated by the Continental Masonic documents published in Charles Porset , Les Philadelphes el les Convent de Paris (1998).

110 J. Swift, Prase, V, 324.

111 William Temple, Five Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Samuel Holt (Ann Arbor: Michigan UP. 1963), 200-01; "Sir William Temple," DNB.

112 Arlington, letters, 450.

113 H. Paton. "Letters from ... Lauderdale," 173, 181, 190, 234-3,).

114 See The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift. ed. Harold Williams (1963), 111, 223, 331: Albert Cherel, In Advenurier Religieux an XVII e Siecle, A.M. Rainvil (1926)

115 J.Swift, Prose. V. 325 30.

116 C. Bathain, "Ramsay," 301-02.

#lost keys of freemasonry #house of stuart #jacobite #freemasonry #webofhiram #David Stevenson

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keshetchai · 7 years

Note

Question, do you have any thoughts on demonolatry? It is a path I am seriously considering and slowly researching. I'm still working my way through the book The Devil and the Jews, but what I've read so far plus what I've been coming across in my demonolatry research (Hebrew is a source language for many texts) plus still being very ignorant of Jewish traditions over all has me cautious. I feel comfortable in demonolatry but don't want to trespass/appropriate something I have no right to.

Oh goodness, I have….different takes on my gut reaction/answers. I’ll divide them into mini-answers!

Answer #1: [The most generalist answer about cultural appropriation]

If the source language for a variety of texts in something is in a language you don’t understand, and isn’t a heritage language for you, then chances are high it would be appropriative for you to adopt this kind of practice. This might not always be a hard and fast rule, but like…it’s a pretty sure bet in this case that a bunch of Gentiles who made a practice using misinterpreted and perverted Hebrew texts for their own needs and then continued on for several decades or centuries is just going to get you an end result of cultural appropriation/cultural perversion.

Answer #2: [The issue of Jewish appropriation & western Orientalism]

I honestly don’t know much about demonolatry, but from what I can tell it’s another spin on western occultism which was and is, at its core, appropriative of Judaism as an “exotic” flavor to be added as Gentiles saw fit. The whole “seal of Solomon” thing being appropriation by occultists is part and parcel with this kind of stuff, and it’s really really weirdly orientalist. The use of a holy language in Judaism (Hebrew) for this stuff is just….really trying to make it more “magic” seeming.

I mean some of these occult texts are what, 1500-1600’s? When you realize Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, and the inquisition continued to try and make sure that converso Jews didn’t revert to their heritage faith – I mean it’s just more of the same obsession with perceived connection between non-Christian (read: Jewish and Muslim) ties to demons and devil worship/working.

But then there’s later stuff, from what I can tell it’s like a chunk of stuff 1500-1600 and then again after the 1700’s a period 1800 - Today (at least the bulk of this stuff is before or after the Enlightenment period in Western Europe) and…. Surprise surprise, a bunch of white guys being obsessed with the magical secret demon rituals of the “exotic orient” is undeniably connected to gross European colonial/imperialist attitudes. Another generalization: stuff written by dead white guys about the “orient” or “near eastern” practices in the occult arts are full of shit.

Thing is – fear of cultural appropriation aside – is any of this NOT fully enmeshed in orientalist imperialist western attitudes? And is any of it going to hold up to any kind of academic-historical-archaeological scrutiny?

Answer #3: [The issue of “All religions have stuff we can’t prove, but some religions have more complete mishmash based on conflated facts and made up stuff that ignores academic study on the originating culture(s) than others.” AKA the Academics of Appropriation]

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh. If the PDF I found on my google search of the term is a real source on the demonolatry issue, then it just lumps a gazillion different devils/Angels/spirits/goddesses/gods/whatever that are all occurring over the span of what is in reality probably 2-3,000 years. They have nothing to do with each other in many cases! Like a “devil” that has an Arabic name naturally occurs much later in time than a really early babylonian type language spirit because of the timeline of when those languages began and developed. I’m also probably the wrong person to ask - the very mention of “Lucifer’ makes my eyes want to roll out of my head because anyone who ascribes that to a demonic-figure misunderstood that it was a criticism of a Babylonian King, and had zero to do with any kind of supernatural figure.

I don’t particularly know much about Mesopotamian/Fertile Crescent/Near Eastern/Levantine paganism but I do know an archaeological/art history scholar who does study the prehistoric/ancient near east and I just deeply truly feel like the emphasis on near eastern paganism is mostly about 19th century Orientalism. I’m going to guess that a majority of the stuff discussed by demonolatry is riddled with factual errors, misunderstandings, and conflations that come out of ignorance of the region, time periods, and religious practices that took place.

I try to be respectful of the fact that different people find solace in different kinds of religions, but I won’t lie - I found myself deeply dissatisfied with the whiteness, appropriation, and bad scholarship I found across pretty much all modern pagan variants some time ago. Like it’s not just not cohesive/disorganized, it also just…doesn’t have any grounding in the actual historical reality of these beings/spirits in the faith origins any of them come from? I find most people in paganism/neo paganism are really interested in only very specific texts. Like they’ll read someone’s (European) grimoire from the 1600’s but won’t pour over Sumerian archaeological digs and academic papers on Hittite worship - because the point is not really these ancient/prehistoric paganisms but the *idea* of them - the orientalist *concept* of the ancient near east. like why does everyone talk about the meaning of the color of the candle you use for an ancient (whoever) entity when candles….hadn’t even been invented yet? I’m pretty sure that spirit doesn’t care because wax/dipped (dyed & COLORED) candles weren’t a Thing Then. You know? the rituals mentioning pillar candles for something that was worshipped in like 3000 BCE just isn’t based in any actual practice of the time because they didn’t have that then. It’s a tiny detail, but you could expand that to almost anything you wanted.

Maybe that’s harsh of me? But like personally I deeply dislike this kind of stuff because I find it just as intellectually dishonest as many organized faiths can be, except these people tend to publicly emphasize their ancient spirituality/faith predates “xyz”. But if you can avoid Hebrew entirely, avoid Jewish-Hebraic entities AND Islamic AND Zoroastrian entities and are just focusing on like….worship of things from ancient religions which just don’t exist anymore? I mean, I guess? Like just don’t….use anything that at all uses or borrows from Hebrew/Judaism/Tanach (or the Christian Bible). That might help avoid Jewish appropriation but won’t get rid of the orientalist lens issue.

Anyways….

Last Answer: [The: “I have a Mom of Color” aka “the comedic kinda” answer]

NOPE NOPE NO NAH NU UH sure appropriation is bad but do you know what is ALSO BAD????? Inviting spirits into your life that have their own motives and powers and minds!!!!! NOPE.

Why would any spirit deign to work with your ass for free? THEY WOULDN’T! What makes u think they’re gonna let you set the price for their services? THEY WON’T! You also can’t work with someone else’s spirits, you have to work with your own!

Idk man I was forbidden from playing at seances as a child, my momma literally told me to never summon anything because you don’t know how powerful it is and whether or not it wants to hurt you I compulsively throw spilled salt over my shoulder to blind any devils behind me, I have a hand of hamsa amulet by my door, I grow sage at my windowsill, I have literally been trained my whole lil Mexican life to avoid the devil even though my mom explicitly does not believe in hell or an actual literal devil.

Honest we don’t believe in the devil but JUST IN CASE…..

So uh tl;dr:

1.) yes. It’s got appropriative elements 2.) and Orientalism/racism 3.) also I don’t even know if any of the sources I found actually are true of the origins of these entities in any historical or academic sense which is a large part of why I think it’s rooted in Orientalism/fetishizing of the near east 4.). I’m like ethically (ethnically?) obligated to tell you demons are Bad News and My Momma Says I Have to Go if Someone Uses so much as a Oujia Board, Right Now, Immediately, She is Calling Me for Dinner Probably. (I mean I can’t stop you and have met satanists/lucifer worshippers and wasn’t scared of them personally, and I don’t even believe in “The Devil,” but also I ain’t white.)

Thanks for asking though! Sorry if I seem….idk unfair? I think these criticisms I’ve made can be applied to a LOT of things, which is why I apply them also to any modern paganism strain.

#religion #demonolatry #paganism #avoiding Jewish appropriation #cultural appropriation

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bluewatsons · 4 years

Text

Alexander Naraniecki, Karl Popper on Jewish Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism, 17 The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms 623 (2012)

Abstract

This paper re-contextualizes Karl Popper’s thought within the anti-nationalist cosmopolitan tradition of the Central European intelligentsia. It argues that, although Popper was brought up in an assimilated Jewish Viennese household, from the perspective of the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah tradition, he can be seen to be a modern day heterodox Maskil (scholar). Popper’s ever present fear of anti- Semitism and his refusal to see Judaism as compatible with cosmopolitanism raise important questions as to the realisable limits of the cosmopolitan ideal. His inability to integrate an understanding of Jewishness in his cosmopolitan political ideal resulted in his strong opposition to Zionism and the state of Israel. By comparing Popper’s positions with those of Hermann Cohen, another neo-Kantian philosopher, I argue that although their solutions fall short in certain respects, their arguments have continuing purchase in recent debates on cosmopolitanism and the problem of the integration of minority groups. In addition, the arguments of the Jewish Enlightenment thinkers offer important insights for the current debates on minority integration and xenophobia.

Based on extensive research at the Karl-Popper-Sammlung archive in Klagenfurt, Austria (October 2006 to February 2007), this essay presents previously unpublished statements by Karl Popper concerning Jewish matters. The question addressed is whether Popper, one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century, can be regarded as a Jewish philosopher in the tradition of the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah. I argue that the Jewish influences on Popper’s thought can be found by looking at the ways in which Jewish religious beliefs and attitudes reappeared in secularized forms and arguments following the Jewish Enlightenment. The Jewish Enlightenment not only had direct consequences for the culture and values of the Popper household but can also explain certain idiosyncratic features of his political philosophical writings. Popper can thus be seen as a case study exemplifying how particular sets of Jewish Enlightenment ideas came to prominence within a Viennese setting. As well as shedding new light on Popper’s philosophy, it suggests the importance of looking to Bohemia for the origins of the values that prevailed among Vienna’s middle-class and progressively minded Jewry of the fin-de-sie`cle.

An important feature of the middle-class central European Jewish identity was its cosmopolitanism and hostility towards any expressions of Jewish nationalism. As such, many middle-class Jews in Vienna, and in other central European sites of cosmopolitan- ism, had a negative attitude to Zionism, particularly to its ‘‘revisionist’’ variety.1 Popper was no exception. As he saw it, Zionism was incompatible with the liberal cosmopolitan culture that the Popper family so well exemplified. As Popper was opposed to nationalism, even in its most innocuous guises, a Zionist culture that put the state in the place of the divine was antithetical to his Kantian inspired ideals. Although he did not regard himself as Jewish or Christian in any religious sense, Popper saw the moral substance of religion and the respect for a divine being as equally important. For him, all humans are fallible, yet where our knowledge in the objective sense cannot venture, we must remain silent and duly respectful. Putting his ‘‘faith in reason’’ over and above revelation was fundamental to his refusal to identify with any positive religious doctrine.

Yet Popper did not choose either of the two opposing forms—atheism or Spinozistic natural theology. Here the centrality of Kant in his thought is clear—for he would not allow reason to overstep itself; at the same time his position is post-Kantian in the sense that a space for faith (glauben) was not opened up outside of reason. Popper was venturing beyond Kant’s method without arriving at a Hegelian dialectical logic. The result was a respectful silence in relation to a transcendental subject, an ontology that was teleologically ‘‘open,’’ a Voltairian epistemological repudiation of theology, of the doctrines of positive religion, and of religious authority. Infallible historicisms such as Zionism, whether in its religious or secular variety, was, in modern parlance, a moral hazard that failed to learn the lessons of the century. As a consequence, Popper, who remained very Jewish in his secular, cosmopolitan Viennese high culture, was unable to deal positively with any mode—religious or nationalistic—of Jewish identity. The closest he could come to a positive attitude to Jews who did not follow his cosmopolitanism was to show his sympathy for their unfortunate circumstance of being a national minority.

Popper’s views and attitudes to Judaism and Jewish nationalism are rooted in his assimilated Jewish Viennese family background. The Haskalik elements in his cosmopolitan outlook are brought forth by comparing his view with those of another Jewish neo-Kantian, Hermann Cohen. Popper’s attitude towards his own Jewish identity can be seen as an embodiment of the failure of Cohen’s cosmopolitan ideal. Whereas Cohen went to great lengths to weave Judaism and cosmopolitanism together, Popper opted to keep them apart. The result was a negative attitude to Judaism that was pitted against a very sober cosmopolitanism. Cohen argued for an intimate relationship between the German and Jewish cultures resulting from a shared cultural spirit.2 But the failure of this ideal of cultural synthesis can be seen in the way Popper distanced himself from his Jewish ancestry whilst aspiring to a distinctly and traditionally Germanic Austrian aesthetic culture. Dialectally, however, this effort at Germanization is itself the legacy of Jewish Enlightenment traditions. Although the Jewish aspects of Popper’s thought are residual rather than overt, they reflect a Viennese Jewish cultural tradition that was noticeably non-Jewish in response to the threat of anti-Semitism.

An understanding of the Popper family background may yield some insights into how Karl Popper came to hold particular ideas and values, some of which had a prophetic dimension, which propelled his thought. There are, however, huge dilemmas in unravelling the Popper family tree, both because of the Holocaust and because ‘‘Popper’’ was quite a common name. What historians can do under such circumstances is only piece together various biographical elements of the Popper family.

Despite Popper’s desire to separate himself from the Jewish tradition and his ancestry and his desire to embrace the Austrian (and emphatically not German) cultural identity and the universal Kantian community, his early social milieu was decidedly Jewish. The lasting effects of any early Jewish influence are not immediately evident as there was little in his formative years that was overtly Jewish in a religious sense. This lack of any distinctive Hebraic cultural or religious traits was the legacy of a complex and lengthy process of intellectual and social development instigated by the European Enlightenment. Popper, through a number of complex historical avenues, was heir to the Jewish Enlightenment thought that culminated in mass apostasy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He was heir, more specifically, to the Bohemian Jewish Enlightenment that flowered into the golden age of Vienna’s baptised Jews. Popper’s father converted to Christianity, becoming a Protestant (Lutheran) as a result of the belief that a person living in a predominantly Christian society had an obligation to give as little offence as possible.3 Such conversions were common among Vienna’s upwardly mobile Germanized Jews, many of whom traced their origins to the regions of Bohemia and Moravia of the Austrian Empire. This process was given further impetus by the Josephinist reforms of the 1780s which saw the creation of the German-Jewish school system that was introduced into these regions.4 Popper’s parents were typical members of this newly affluent and professionally and socially successful segment of Vienna’s Jewish community. Simon Popper, Karl’s father, came from a German speaking household from Bohemia, and his maternal grandparents came from Silesia in Poland and from Hungary.5

The Popper name ( ) was common in Bohemia. According to Malachi Hacohen, Karl’s paternal grandfather Israel Popper (1821–1900) came from the backwaters of Kolin, but then moved to the more prosperous town of Raudnitz and eventually to Vienna.6 Karl Popper’s father became a partner in a successful legal practice and then master or Meister vom Stuhl of the Masonic lodge Humanitas.7 Freemasonry played a crucial role in enabling the upward social mobility of Vienna’s increasingly influential bourgeoisie. This was the case as far back as the 1780s when The Order of Asiatic Brethren, Die Ritter vom wahren Licht, actively accepted Jews as members.8 Simon Popper’s eventual apostasy is not surprising as Masonry and other movements such as the Frankists attracted Jews who sought a more prominent position in the broader Christian society and greater freedom from Rabbinical authority.9 Jenny Schiff, Karl’s mother, was representative of this Jewish Viennese haute bourgeoisie ideal.10 Both of Karl’s maternal grandparents were founding members of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Music Association), which had built the Musikvereinssaal in Vienna. This put the Schiff family in the upper echelons of the Viennese bourgeoisie that sought to emulate the cultural world of Fanny Arnstein, daughter of the leading Prussian banker who was also a founding member of Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. Thus in the 1770s Arnstein’s salon was the ideal that inspired Karl’s mother’s music concerts. Further, Karl’s maternal grandmother, ne ́e Schlesinger, also came from a musical family, one of whose members was Bruno Walter, for whom Karl performed in a production of Bach’s St Matthew Passion.11 The Popper household, according to Hacohen, was built on the virtues of Besitz (property), Recht (law), and Kunst (culture).12

Karl wanted to see himself as belonging to the Germanophone Viennese high culture and only incidentally to his Jewish ancestry. David Weinstein and Avihu Zakai contend that Popper exemplified what Leo Strauss called the ‘‘problem of the Western Jewish individual who or whose parents severed his connection with the Jewish community in the expectation that he would thus become a normal member of a purely liberal...universal human society, and who is...perplexed when he finds no such society.’’13 It is in this light that Popper’s ideal of the ‘‘open society’’ should be framed. As stated in a profile published in The Times, Popper was ‘‘an assimilated German Jew,’’ for the fact was that ‘‘many Jews did merge with the population—Assimilation worked.’’ The editor of The Times provocative response to this was: ‘‘I feel sure The Fuhrer would have readily agreed with him when he sent all the assimilated German Jews, no doubt contemporaries of Sir Karl’s to the Gas chambers.’’14 Popper was incensed by this, and wrote:

I do not consider myself ‘‘an assimilated German Jew’’: I think this is how ‘‘the Fu ̈ hrer’’ would have considered me. In fact, I was born, (like the Fu ̈hrer) in Austria, not in Germany, and I do not accept rationalism, [sic] even though it is a fact that I was born in a family that had been Jewish.15

As Hacohen points out, Popper indeed saw himself as a Lutheran: he’d been baptised at birth, his parents having been baptised in 1900 before he was born.16 He had never belonged to the Jewish faith and as such saw no grounds to consider himself a Jew. As he explained in a 1969 letter to Michael Wallach, editor of the Jewish Year Book, he stressed his Jewish origin in an effort to show his sympathy with minorities, rather than from any cultural attachment.17

Popper, Israel, and Jewish Identity

Any student of Popper would readily admit that it is not easy to identify vestiges of a Jewish culture or sensibility in his writings. But he who attempts it must categorize sets of ideas from which to reconstruct the traditions of thought that inform Popper’s works. The distinctions one uses to define such categories determine the way we perceive the convergences and conflicts amongst them. Unless we have a direct reference by a philosopher to the particular intellectual tradition that we seek to investigate, which can be traced back in time (notwithstanding omissions, dishonesty, and errors), the task of contextualising ideas becomes highly speculative and often unavoidable. Yet such contextualization remains fundamental to a correct understanding, though we must proceed with caution. In the case of Popper’s political thought, an understanding of his biographical context and of the ideas that he was exposed to can be used to counter anachronistic or partisan interpretations of his arguments for political ends.

Hacohen sees Popper as a typical member of the class of acculturated Viennese Jews, characterised by a German education, Enlightenment ethos, and liberal politics.18 There is no evidence that Popper regarded himself as a Maskil ( ), an adherent of the Haskalah movement, or in any way a descendant of the Haskalah. It is safer to say, as Hacohen does, that Popper embodied the spirit of Spa ̈taufklarung of the late Enlightenment.19 Notwithstanding this, when Popper is seen in the context of the Haskalik tradition, certain tendencies of the Jewish Enlightenment as well as the social roles and attitudes of the Maskilim may go some way toward explaining the kinds of Enlightenment ideas found in his thought.

The difficulty in pursuing this line of inquiry lies partly in the lack of direct evidence on specifically Jewish aspects in his works. The German-Jewish intellectual tradition, particularly in the Viennese context, had certain common features many of which continued to play a dominant role in Popper’s thought despite his sense of having extricated himself from it. It is evident from Popper’s personal letters that his attitude towards his own Jewish ancestry was complex and uneasy. The remarks he made on Jews and the Jewish tradition were neutral at best, hostile and antagonistic at worst. For example, in a letter to Ernst Gombrich, he stated: ‘‘I suppose that successful Jews are often not so nice.’’20 Such anti-Semitic remarks and hostility to what he saw as the ‘‘tribal’’ underpinnings of Jewish peoplehood can also be understood in the Viennese Jewish context. Victor Adler, the founder of Austria’s Social Democratic party, who like Popper was of Jewish parentage yet embraced Protestantism, was also not above making anti-Semitic remarks.21 Like many Jewish families, the Popper household (at least in the interwar period) were ardent in their social democratic political beliefs which were based on assimilationist and progressivist ideals.22 Karl’s father, Dr. Simon Siegmund Carl Popper, was greatly interested in social problems as attested by his personal library that included works by Marx, Engles, Lassalle, Kautsky, and Bernstein. Popper also referred to Adler as a ‘‘first-rate’’ politician, despite his objections to his party’s policy derived from Engels of using violence as a threat.23 While universalist ideals underpinned Jewish emancipation and German assimilation they also fostered an unintended negative attitude towards the Jewish tradition, as was apparent in some of Vienna’s most prominent Jewish intellectuals such as Karl Kraus, Otto Weininger, and Arthur Trebitsch.24 Thus Popper’s intellectual hostility towards Jewish beliefs and his distancing himself from Jewish traditions and customs can be seen as a lingering vestige that accompanied the drive of his social class to attain status and prestige in Viennese society.

But despite distancing himself from Jewish culture, Popper could not naively look to cosmopolitanism as the opposite ideal of Jewish nationalism and ‘‘tribalism’’ on the one hand, nor of anti-Semitism on the other. In the first draft of his autobiography, Popper was adamant that Jews were ‘‘guests’’ in Austria who were treated ‘‘as well, or better, than one could expect.’’ However the progressive acceptance of Jews into Austrian society both legally and politically, particularly after 1918, exposed the fundamental problems of the cosmopolitan ideal. For Popper this was when the Jews ‘‘understandably but not wisely, invaded politics and journalism . . . . The influx of the Jews into the parties of the left contributed to the downfall of these parties.’’ For him ‘‘living in an overwhelmingly Christian society imposed the obligation to give as little offense as possible...anti- Semitism was to be feared, and it was the task of all people of Jewish origin to do their best not to provoke it.’’25 Such statements reveal Popper’s concern with the ethnopolitical realities, the particular social position of the Jews, and the ever persistent fear of anti-Semitism. As long as there are chauvinistic forms of nationalism, such as anti-Semitism, cosmopolitanism can never attain its ideal. Thus, Popper’s Kantian inspired cosmopolitanism functioned as a regulative ideal restricted by practical social realities.

In a letter to Smith, editor of The Times, Popper stated that he regarded all nationalism as evil, including Jewish nationalism.26 This attitude may guide our understanding of Popper’s relationship to Isaiah Berlin, the Russian Jewish philosopher with whom Popper is often associated. While in terms of political philosophy Popper was in agreement with Berlin’s views of liberty and historical inevitability,27 in relation to matters of culture and tradition, he was hardly liberal, but shared many of the concerns of Austro-Marxists, such as Max Adler, regrading individualism and personal development. He feared the Austrian Volk, their drunkenness, violence and xenophobia. The difference in their immediate situations explains this: Berlin, working in Oxford, had married into a rich banking family, held liberal views that Popper, in economically depressed Red Vienna, did not share. However, in their letters, Popper never expressed any willingness to comment on or get involved in the then newly established State of Israel.28 Despite their shared commitment to a secularized cosmopolitan lifestyle, Berlin, unlike Popper, saw himself as a secular Jew who participated in Jewish cultural life, saw himself as part of the Jewish people, and maintained a Jewish identity. Berlin, for example, often attended a Synagogue when in a new city as a way of identifying himself with its local Jewish community.29 Popper, in contrast, did not allow himself any feeling of belonging to a collective of any sort, as a matter of principle, and expressed his particular dislike of collectives that he thought were based on religious or racial myths. Popper, in this regard, avoided all personal associations that conflicted with his Kantian universalist social aspirations.

Although Popper may not have exhibited any feelings of kinship with the Jewish people, as did Berlin, unlike the latter, Popper’s agnostic religiosity left some room for a theism. Given his Neo-Kantian belief in the limits of criticizability, which placed theological questions beyond rational argumentation, he did not treat theological problems in his written works. But there was one exception: when he provided his criticism or refutation of a religious argument that claimed to possess a truth that Popper believed was not possible. Hacohen gives a typical example as when Popper states that ‘‘[Moses’ Torah] was the source of religious intolerance and tribal nationalism, and nationalism is a terrible danger, especially the connection between religion and nationalism.’’30 However, in a posthumously published interview, not previously discussed by scholars, we can detect an affirmation of an aspect of Jewish values. Asked by Edward Zerin whether God had a place in his thinking, he responded:

Although I am not a Jew by religion, I have come to the conclusion that there is great wisdom in the Jewish commandment ‘‘not to take the name of God in vain.’’ My objection to organized religion is that it tends to use the name of God in vain. I don’t know whether God exists or not. We may know how little we know, but this must not be turned or twisted into a positive knowledge of the existence of an unfathomable secret. There is a lot in the world which is of the nature of an unfathomable secret, but I do not think that it is admissible to make a theology out of a lack of knowledge.... Some forms of atheism are arrogant and ignorant and should be rejected, but agnosticism—to admit that we don’t know and to search—is all right.31

Here, then, is a rare written example of Popper explicitly affirming a Jewish tenet. There is another famous instance in which Popper referred to a Jewish religious idea, however, he ascribed the source of it to the more famous Popper of Vienna in the fin-de- sie`cle, namely Joseph Popper, also known by the pseudonym Lynkeus. Popper-Lynkeus, a distant relative of Karl’s, developed a radical ‘‘half-socialist’’ theory that prevented him from gaining an academic position. Popper wrote that Lynkeus was called a ‘‘half-socialist’’ because he envisaged a private enterprise sector in his society, limiting the economic activity of the state to the care of the basic needs of all citizens. Popper’s social thought was greatly influenced by Lynkeus’s, especially in its emphasis on the reduction of negative utilitarianism.32 Popper-Lynkeus based his social thought on the Talmudic cornerstone—‘‘If you kill a man you have killed the world; when you support a man you support the world.’’33 While Popper accepted this wisdom, considering his later ‘‘Three Worlds Ontology’’ and evolutionary writings, it is clear that he rejected the mystical interpretation of this Talmudic saying. In the Babylonian Talmud it is written: ‘‘Whoever destroys a soul from Israel, the Scripture considers it as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life from Israel, the Scripture considers it as if he saved an entire world.’’ We can see that the ethno-culturally and religiously specific language is not in keeping with Popper-Lykeus’s ‘‘half-socialism’’ and humanistic and universalistic beliefs. Hence, Popper-Lykeus appropriates the version of this saying that appears in the Jerusalem Talmud: ‘‘Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.’’34

Clearly, this second Jerusalem version, in omitting reference to Scripture and Israel, is an example from within the Jewish tradition of an ethics that accords with Popper- Lykeus’s secular humanism. Popper-Lykeus’s use of this passage had a profound impact on Karl Popper, reworked this passage so as to reflect the particular epistemological orientation of his own philosophy. The Self and Its Brain (1977) Popper opens with a paraphrase of Popper-Lynkeus’s ‘‘every time a man dies, a whole universe is destroyed. (One realizes this when one identifies oneself with that man).’’35 It is evident that Popper’s interpretation is not concerned with the original Rabbinic or social signification but rather with existential and epistemological concerns. This is the only written instance where Popper shows an overt yet far removed connectedness to the Rabbinic scholarly tradition.

When we turn to matters concerning the state of Israel, Popper’s non-receptiveness can best be gauged by a statement documented by his former student Joseph Agassi, according to which Popper said that ‘‘the U.S. should grant free admission to all Israelis so as to reverse the process.’’36 In Exile and Interpretation: Popper’s Re-Invention of the History of Political Thought, David Weinstein and Avihu Zakai offer an even more negative example:

Popper’s ambivalence about being Jewish, despite being victimized by anti-Semitism and being forced into exile, was not accompanied by analogous ambivalence about Zionism. Jewish nationalism was both ‘‘stupid’’ and ‘‘wrong’’ racial pride like so many other nationalisms. Zionism was just the ‘‘petrified’’ tribalism of the European Jewish ghetto displaced to Palestine. Israel’s treatment of Palestinians made him ‘‘ashamed in [his] origin.’’37

When seen within Popper’s Jewish, progressivist Viennese context his strong opposition to Zionism is no surprise, for as Zohn has noted, the majority of Viennese Jews were opposed to the Zionist movement. Vienna’s professional Jewish class was looking forward to greater assimilation, as reflected in the Neue Freie Presse, the foremost newspaper at the time. The radical Zionist positions tended to find favour with the more recently arrived and less affluent Galizianer Jews who had emigrated from the region of Galicia.38

In the cosmopolitanism that Popper idealized the aim of humanity was to work towards the creation of a global ‘‘state’’ (or ‘‘federation,’’ given his adherence to Kant’s Perpetual Peace) that would make the existing state system and its emphasis on ethnic homogeneity obsolete. Such sentiments are admirable enough; yet this kind of cosmopolitanism seems unable to confront the fact of the creation of the state of Israel. In Popper’s case this impasse resulted in a near silence in his engagement with Israel and Zionists. His silence on this issue, which so importantly concerned him as a Jewish refugee, hints at a shortcoming of his professed ethos on the centrality of open, critical argument. As a philosophical principle, Popper’s critical rationalism was in keeping with the mores of his formative cosmopolitan environment, but, as we see, for this rational framework Zionism or the state of Israel presented an impenetrable obstacle. Popper’s neo-Kantian model of critical thought was of no practical use when it came to debate and problem solving between parties holding different ethical-political views. His social Kantian philosophy could not help him when, for example, he was addressed by a Carinthian member of the National Socialist Party, with the following words: ‘‘What, you want to argue? I don’t argue: I shoot!’’39

Popper’s unwillingness to engage in dialogue with those holding fundamentalist and exclusivist political views was reminiscent of the experience of his idol, Albert Einstein, who shared a similar cosmopolitan outlook and social milieu. Einstein directly confronted what he saw as the ‘‘narrow nationalism’’ of the followers of Zabotisky’s ‘‘revisionist’’ right-wing Zionism. It is evident from Einstein’s correspondence that not only did rational discussion and engagement fail in all its objectives but that basic congeniality also proved impossible.40 Einstein summed up the dilemma of Jewish intellectuals, like Popper, who held cosmopolitan world-views:

The problem is made even more difficult by the fact that the best and finest Jews, the prophets together with Jesus Christ, as well as our best philosophical teachers, were for the most part cosmopolitans whose ideal was guided by the human condition in general. How can fidelity to the Jewish community be combined with a general humanistic outlook, with the concept of world citizenship?41

Einstein describes here a central problem of political liberalism—that of relating communitarian and individualistic ethics to a cosmopolitan world-view. According to Malachi Hacohen (2009), Popper regarded Zionism as a colossal mistake and Israel as a tragic error. Zionism prevented an effective solution to the Jewish question and incited a national conflict between Jews and Arabs. However, once the state of Israel was established, Popper realised the need to prevent the annihilation of the Jews living in Israel and to oppose those who sympathised with Arab state attempts to expel them.42

Despite his lifelong distancing himself from the Jewish people, Popper nevertheless seems to have felt that he shared their fate, as, for example, when he invokes his Jewish or minority ancestry when supporting minority civil rights or opposing anti-Semitism. Thus, in an interview in 1984, it was the problem of Jewish nationalism rather than not anti-Semitism, which drove Popper’s continual involvement with Jews issues:

Jews were against Hitler’s racism, but theirs goes one step further. They determine Jewishness by mother alone. I opposed Zionism initially because I was against any form of nationalism, but I never expected the Zionists to become racists. It makes me feel ashamed in my origin: I feel responsible for the deeds of Israeli nationalists.43

The Jewish Enlightenments

To gain a clearer view of Popper’s Jewishness we must look to the sources from which his modern Jewish intellectual milieu emerged. More specifically, we must look to the Enlightenment, the particular intellectual processes that transformed much of Europe’s Jewry. There were, I believe, two Jewish Enlightenments: the first originating in Berlin and associated with Mendelssohn, and the later culminating in the golden age of Vienna’s Jewish intellectuals, exemplified, most notably, by Ludwig Wittgenstein.44 Further, the categorization of Jewish Enlightenments is not necessarily limited to the instances outlined above. Ko ̈nigsberg and Prague were also early centres of Haskalah, and important centres of Haskalah would follow in the commercial towns of Galicia, Odessa, and elsewhere throughout Poland and Russia.45

The Haskalah began in Berlin with Mendelssohn’s translation of the Torah into the vernacular German in 1778. For Moses Hess (1812–75) the Socilist-Zionist who was born into an orthodox Jewish family in Bonn, Mendelssohn showed that one could remain a Jew while embracing cultural and intellectual vistas that were far removed from Judaism. For Mendelssohn there was a link between Jewish loyalty and an inner freedom to discriminate between the various layers of Jewish tradition, not all of which he believed carried the same validity. He believed that a religion could not be a religion if it was in anyway coercive. Alexander Altmann states that as a result of emancipation, Mendelssohn envisaged a Judaism that was a pure religion, free of all attributes of power.46 It was this denominational rather than national view of religion that became the prevalent view among Vienna’s educated Jewry. Mendelssohn thus represents a tradition of Jewish Enlightenment thought which would continue in the work of modern German Jewish writers such as Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig. However, Cohen’s embracing of Kantian philosophy would open up new theoretical possibilities for Viennese Jews with the abandonment of Judaism altogether. Buildung and various Neo-Kantian and post-Kantian philosophical traditions would come to fill in the social and spiritual space left open by abandoning Jewish national sentiment, monotheism, and a reluctantly accepted Christianity.

To understand the role of Kant’s thought in providing a secular faith for baptised Jewish intellectuals I turn to the work of Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), founder of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism. Popper’s doctoral supervisor, Karl Bu ̈hler, was a member of the Wu ̈rzburg School of Cognitive Psychology, a research project that grew out of Cohen’s Marburg School.47 It was along this path—from Cohen to Bu ̈hler and finally to Popper—that Neo-Kantianism impacted Jewish philosophers. In Cohen’s writing we see a markedly Jewish approach to a number of Kantian philosophical ideals. As a pre-eminently German-Jewish Enlightenment representative Cohen can offset the residual Jewish elements’ whether conscious or not unconscious, that guided Popper’s thought in a particular direction.

Although Popper did not profess his faith in Judaism or in Christianity, he cannot be considered to be atheistic. His belief that human knowledge (doxa, Erkenntnis) was incapable of knowing the deity, whose name he was cautious not to invoke, points to a Jewish understanding of a God that is wholly transcendent and beyond our reach, which, in response, frames a Jewish mode of secularism. However, from a cultural perspective, Popper was clearly a progressive German-Austrian. Within his distinctly Jewish formative environment there was a tension between the Germanic aesthetic and intellectual side of his personality and the non-Jewish Jewish mentality it engendered. Popper appears to be a twenty-first-century example of Hermann Cohen’s failed synthesis between Judentum and Deutschtum, which attempts to find its tertium comparationis in Greekness.48 This Greekness, especially Platonism, was seen by Cohen to provide a nexus between the two cultures, the Jewish and the German. For Popper, this Greekness was also a way to transcend the incommensurable ethno-cultural world-views of the Jewish and German peoples. Greekness, in Popper’s thought, manifested itself as a philosophical commitment to Kantianism, Socratic fallibilism, a Platonic ontology of ‘‘World 3,’’ and a view of the Homeric epics, rather than the Bible, as the foundation of Western culture. Although Cohen’s synthesis was regarded as a failure even during his lifetime, the attempt at this synthesis provided new creative possibilities for central European Jewry. However, the failure of this synthesis, at least at the level of the individual, was to see the sublimation of Judentum by Deutschtum, which may explain Popper’s hostility towards Israel and his anti-Semitic remarks: his deep Jewish roots were hidden behind a thick Austro-German culture.

The major differences between Cohen and Popper reflect the different eras in which they lived. While Cohen was imbued with the ideas of German idealism and romanticism, he was among the first to raise the cry ‘‘Back to Kant!’’, much like Popper’s later ‘‘Back to the Presocratics!’’49 For Cohen, following Kant, the fundamental concept of ethics was mankind, though he perceived ‘‘mankind’’ as being reflected in the ethical notion of Deutschtum. According to Nathan Rotenstreich, for Cohen there was an affinity between Deutschtum and humanity, for he did not regard hatred to be a characteristic passion of the German soul.50 It was as a result of this romantic belief that Cohen sought to link Deutschtum with Judentum.51 Building upon Mendelssohn’s attempt to free Judaism from coercive elements of its religious tradition, Cohen sought to separate the Jewish national spirit from nationalism. For Popper, however, even such ideas of a national spirit were to be rejected as essentialist, unfalsifiable, and as reflecting the final stages of the scientific turn that neo-Kantianism was going through. Further, Vienna’s Jewish bourgeoisie had since found a new ancient tradition to accompany their mass apostasy— the revival of interest in classical Greek culture—that swept through German intellectual life. No Viennese family exhibited this fervent appropriation of an alternative Greek tradition more than the Gomperz family, with whom Popper was on close terms: it was Theodor Gomperz who had written Griechische Denker (Greek Thinkers), which, as Hacohen observes, popularized classical philosophy throughout the German and English speaking world.52 For Popper, there was a ‘‘faith in reason’’ (glauben) alone; monotheism could at best be treated agnostically. The most he was willing to ‘‘conjecture’’ about human nature was that each mind is fallible and has evolved to actively seek out and remove errors through progressive trials and problem solving operations.

Once we take Cohen’s belief in a people’s national spirit, such as Deutschtum or Judentum, out of the equation, we can better see a common Kantian inheritance. Cohen maintained a Kantian concern for the supreme importance of conscience and personal autonomy. Like Popper, he envisaged a society of autonomous individuals, governed by the rationality of such individuals. Humans are comprised of both a rational and non- rational part and it is for the betterment of society that individuals exert their rational capacity in matters of social organization; hence the emphasis upon individual and moral responsibility. The Kantian stress on the importance of personal autonomy requires a socialist dimension to provide order and social cohesion and to prevent the degenerative tendencies of excessive individualism. According to Wendell S. Dietrich, the ‘‘socialist’’ dimension of the prophetic ethos would direct individuals to develop a sense of empathy and responsibility for others in need, which idea is expressed in Cohen’s thought as a social goal of his prophetic messianism.53 In a similar way, Popper’s socialist leanings could be seen as originating in Jewish messianic ethical attitudes that were common among progressivist Viennese Jewry. It was basically the same prophetic quest that was expressed in Cohen’s notion of the Rechtsstaat. Thus works such as Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), Bloch’s Geist der Utopie (1918), and Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism (1957) and The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) may be seen to share a common ethical standpoint—a convictional imperative that derives from a Jewish prophetic messianism.

Popper’s constant use of the term ‘‘false prophets’’ to describe the likes of Hegel and Marx also suggests his preoccupation with prophetic individuals, and we can deduce from his writing that he saw the intellectual as a kind of modern day prophet. He saw himself as a modern Socrates, inspired by his messianic role of exposing the false prophets of the age, whether academic philosophers or misguided followers of Hegel, Marx, or Freud. In earlier times the Maskilim (literally, intellectuals) were willing to make great personal sacrifices in order to guide the Jewish community safely into the modern era, whether by avoiding parochial anachronisms of orthodox Rabbis, or by preventing the false-enlightenment of a culture of individualism, hedonism, and the abandonment of Judaism and any traits of Jewish culture.54 Thus it was that artists, writers, and philosophers of Jewish origin—Popper, Hayek, Wittgenstein, Mahler and countless others—took on themselves the role of the Maskil, to guide humanity to a new era fraught with imperceptible dangers and false prophets. Carrying out this duty was no less urgent in the times of Hayek and Popper than in the times of Cohen. Each of these thinkers risked more than he gained by writing works that celebrated the ideal of selfless duty. Hayek, for example, was aware that his book could compromise his reputation.55 For Popper, this duty led him to write the systematic investigation, his ‘‘fighting book,’’ The Open Society and Its Enemies, which sought to oppose the conventional way of viewing the Greek philosophers which aimed to draw out the origins of totalitarian thought in Plato which Popper believed had a profound impact upon the subsequent history of Western philosophy. Popper’s notion of the open society can therefore be seen as at least partly deriving from a particular Jewish messianistic mentality, even though the German language, the ideal of Buildung, Kantianism, and the Greek tradition—all of which together defined his cultural milieu—meant that there was no longer any need to explicitly use Jewish terms in defining his identity.

Finally, the dissimilarity between Popper and Cohen can be largely put down to the different historical contexts in which they lived. Cohen was both a German and a Jewish patriot whose cosmopolitanism was based on the idea of the nation state; Popper, on the other hand, was an assimilated Viennese Jew, for whom cosmopolitanism was part of the complex social reality of a multinational empire, the various national groups of which were often bitterly antagonistic to each other. We can take from Popper a sober view of cosmopolitanism, where the social realities of regionalism give rise to the pressures put on minorities to assimilate, to renounce differences, as a better alternative to conflict. As a counterpoint to the Maskil from Vienna, Cohen’s search for an overarching set of values by which to unify people of incommensurable cultural and religious traditions can be seen as the perpetual, if never fully attainable, task of a Kantian cosmopolitan intellectual. With the growth of Moslem communities in Europe and the West in the past few decades and the accompanying rise of Islamophobia, there may be useful lessons to learn from the attempts of implicitly Jewish Enlightenment figures such as Popper and Cohen to find solutions, even if unsuccessful ones, to similar problems.

Notes

The complex ideology of Revisionist Zionism emerged in the interwar period in opposition to Labor Zionism. For a detailed study of the philosophical basis of Revisionism, see E. Kaplan, Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).

Andrea Poma, ‘‘Hermann Cohen: Judaism and Critical Idealism,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy, ed. Michael Morgan and Peter Gordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 93.

Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (London: Routledge, 1974), 105.

Malachi Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 28. For an insight into the prevailing social circumstances underpinning this social migration and subsequent cultural transformation characteristic of the liberal Jewish families in Vienna of a high social standing, see P. Singer, Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna (Pymble, NSW: HarperCollins, 2004).

David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), 83.

Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 26–27.

Hacohen relates how Humanitas was the oldest and largest lodge in Vienna, which was heavily represented by Jews seeking an alternative to the established social hierarchy. See Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 41–42.

William McCagg, A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670–1918 (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 39.

Frankism or the followers of Jakob Frank (1728–91) was an influential messianic movement amongst Central European Jewry which had strong Masonic connections. See McCagg, A History of Habsburg Jews, 32–35.

Edmonds and Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker, 83.

Popper, Unended Quest, 53.

Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 29. S. Volkov had previously mentioned besitz and bildung as the two indispensable marks that characterised how the German Jews turned into a segment of the German bourgeoisie. See S. Volkov, ‘‘The Dynamics of Dissimilation: Ostjuden and German Jews,’’ in The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, ed. J. Reinharz and W. Schatzberg (Hanover: University Press of New England 1985), 206. On the extent to which Gibbon’s and Locke’s ideas of the transformative value of property became central to German Enlightenment values, see J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 115–19.

David Weinstein and Avihu Zakai, ‘‘Exile and Interpretation: Popper’s Re-invention of the History of Political Thought,’’ Journal of Political Ideologies 11.2 (June 2006): 201.

Smith to Popper, 28 July 1982.

Popper to Smith; Penn-7-82. Karl-Popper-Sammlung. Box 407.17.

Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 31.

Karl Popper to Michael Wallach, Editor, Jewish Year Book, 6 January 1969 (Jewish Chronicle)

Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 32–33.

Malachi Hacohen, ‘‘Dilemmas of Cosmopolitanism: Karl Popper, Jewish Identity, and ‘Central European Culture’,’’ The Journal of Modern History 71.1 (March 1999): 114.

Unpublished letter: Karl Popper to Ernst Gombrich, 25 September 1969, Karl-Popper-Sammlung. Box. 3005 Letters. Grombrich, Ernst 1956–83.

Harry Zohn, ‘‘Fin-de-sie`cle Vienna: The Jewish Contribution,’’ in Reinharz and Schatzberg, The Jewish Response to German Culture, 146.

For the assimilatory drive of the German and Austrian Jewish bourgeoisie, see Volkov, ‘‘The Dynamics of Dissimilation,’’ 195–211.

Popper, Unended Quest, 11, 109. Also see Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1945), chap. 18, n. 22; chap. 19, nn. 35–40, chap. 20, n. 44.

Zohn, ‘‘Fin-de-sie`cle Vienna: The Jewish Contribution,’’ in Reinharz and Schatzberg, The Jewish Response to German Culture, 141–44.

Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 307, 306.

Karl Popper to Smith; Penn-7-82. Popper Archive, 407.17.

For Popper’s support and criticism of Berlin’s famous lecture on the two concepts of liberty, see Popper to Berlin, 17 February 1959, Karl-Popper-Sammlung, Box 276–10. For their similar positions on the problem of historical inevitability and the friction that this caused, see Joseph Agassi, A Philosopher’s Apprentice: In Karl Popper’s Workshop (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 12. Also see Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 41–117. However, Weinstein and Zakai suggest that ‘‘Berlin was probably inspired by Popper in attacking historicism, and, in the process, set out a method of textual interpretation congenial to rationally reconstructing political theory’s cannon in Popperian fashion’’ (‘‘Exile and Interpretation: Popper’s Re-invention of the History of Political Thought,’’ 201). It is clear from the work of Popper and Berlin that there was an element of mutual influence, but in light of Agassi’s remarks on the uneasy relationship between the two as well as their letters, it can be easily seen why this is something that they both would not care to emphasise.

Karl Popper to Berlin, 16 February 1954. Karl-Popper-Sammlung, Box 276–10. In this letter Berlin required Popper’s assistance in the settling and educating in England of Yisrael Galili (1911–86), an Israeli member of the anti-communist left wing faction, who was later a member of the Knesset and a minister. The letter is imploring in tone and aimed to convince Popper of the righteous duty of helping such a man. Unfortunately, there is no known written response by Popper, which suggests that he probably refused any help.

John Gray, interview, A Tribute to Isaiah Berlin, 6 June 2009. The Philosopher’s Zone, ABC Radio National. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2009/2586694.htm

Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 67.

Karl Popper, After the Open Society: Selected Social and Political Writings, ed. Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner (London: Routledge, 2008), 48–49.

According to Hacohen, Joseph Popper-Lynkeus came from Kolin, the same city that Karl’s paternal grandfather Israel Popper came from. See Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 26. For Popper’s familiarisation with Lynkeus’s social thought, see Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2, 321, n. 7. Alexander Naraniecki, ‘‘Popper Re-appraised: New Perspectives on Karl Popper’s Method and its Applications’’ (PhD diss., 2009).

‘‘Wenn du einen Mensch to ̈test, hast du die Welt geto ̈ten, wenn du einen Mensch erha ̈ltst, erha ̈ltst du die Welt.’’ Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 111.

Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin 37a, 4.1.23a.

Karl Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (London: Routledge, 1977), 3.

Agassi, A Philosopher’s Apprentice: In Karl Popper’s Workshop, 128.

Weinstein and Zakai, ‘‘Exile and Interpretation: Popper’s Re-invention of the History of Political Thought,’’ 188.

Zohn, ‘‘Fin-de-sie`cle Vienna: The Jewish Contribution,’’ 140.

Karl Popper, Introduction to The Myth of the Framework (London: Routledge, 1994), xiii.

Einstein’s letters to sympathizers of ‘‘revisionist’’ Zionism are published in F. Jerome, Einstein on Israel and Zionism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009), 175.

See Einstein’s ‘‘Address at the Opening of Congress House for Refugees,’’ 30 October 1938, in Jerome, Einstein on Israel and Zionism, 121–22.

Malachi Hacohen, ‘‘The Strange Fact That the State of Israel Exists: The Cold War Liberalis Between Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism,’’ Jewish Social Studies 15.2 (Winter 2009): 58

Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 305.

I am not arguing that these are the only Jewish Enlightenments; other Jewish Enlightenments, such as that associated with Isaac Baer Levinsohn, the father of the Jewish Enlightenment in Russia, are beyond the scope of this study. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Shmuel Feiner, ‘‘The Pseudo-Enlightenment and the Question of Jewish Modernization,’’ Jewish Social Studies, N.S., 3.1 (1996): 62–88.

Alexander Altmann, ‘‘Moses Mendelssohn as the Archetypal German Jew,’’ in Reinharz and Schatzberg, The Jewish Response to German Culture, 23–24.

On the importance of Bu ̈hler and the Wu ̈rzburg School for Popper’s early development, see Naraniecki, ‘‘Popper Re-appraised.’’ Also see Arne F. Petersen, ‘‘The Role of Problems and Problem Solving in Popper’s Early Work on Psychology,’’ in Philosophy of the Social Sciences 14.2 (1984): 239–50; and William Berkson and John Wettersten, Learning from Error: Karl Popper’s Psychology of Learning (La Salle, PA: Open Court Publishing, 1984).

Poma, ‘‘Hermann Cohen: Judaism and Critical Idealism,’’ 93.

Karl Popper, The World of Parmenides: Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment, ed. Arne F. Petersen and Jørgen Mejer (London: Routledge, 1998).

Alexander Altmann, ‘‘Moses Mendelssohn as the Archetypal German Jew,’’ in Reinharz and Schatzberg, The Jewish Response to German Culture, 55.

See Hermann Cohen,‘‘Deutschtum und Judentum’’ (1915), in Ju ̈dische Schriften, ed. Bruno Strauss (Berlin, 1924).

Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 150. Franz Rozenweig may have lamented that families such as the Gomperz had an excess of Buildung, which coincided with a paucity of Jewish substance. See Altmann, ‘‘Moses Mendelssohn as the Archetypal German Jew,’’ 21. See also Franz Rosenzweig, ‘‘Buildung un kein Ende,’’ in Kleinere Schriften (Berlin, 1937), 79–93. On the importance of the Socratic and Presocratic traditions for Popper, particularly in his later thought, see Popper, The World of Parmenides.

Wendell S. Dietrich, Cohen and Troeltsch: Ethical Monotheistic Religion and Theory of Culture (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1986), chap. 1.

Feiner, ‘‘The Pseudo-Enlightenment and the Question of Jewish Modernization,’’ 62–88.

F. A. Hayek writes in the 1943 Preface to The Road to Serfdom (1944; London: Routledge, 2005): ‘‘For those who, in the current fashion, seek interested motives in every profession of a political opinion, I may, perhaps, be allowed to add that I have every possible reason for not writing or publishing this book. It is certain to offend many people with whom I wish to live on friendly terms . . . it is certain to prejudice the reception of the results of the more strictly academic work to which all my inclinations lead me.’’

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Is Destiny Still Relevant for Us Today?

Que sera, sera

Whatever will be, will be

The future's not ours to see

Que sera, sera

What will be, will be

Que Sera, Sera

Jay Livingston

Have you ever dreamed of changing the world, wondering if you were meant for something truly great, much like Neo in Matrix or Harry Potter suddenly discovering his magic wand?

Have you ever wondered if, “despite all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” you were being slowly and surely led to your ultimate triumph, where all the world will discover you and collectively thank you for making THE difference, much like the victor in a well-crafted computer simulation?

What Was the Traditional Understanding of Destiny?

In the Hebraic tradition, Father Abraham leaves Chaldea for Palestine, hearing the voice of the One, True God, to settle in the new land with his wife, Sarah. Out of his womb will come many nations, as the stars in the sky and the sands of the sea.

Moses is untimely born during a wave of Jewish persecution in Egypt and placed in a basket on the river. Then he is recovered by Pharaoh’s daughter and raised a prince. During temporary exile in the wilderness, he hears a Sacred Voice out of a burning bush, enjoining him to go back into Egypt and save his people.

In the Classic Greek tradition, the gods sport with human beings, much like amusing pets, lifting one man up, and dashing another one on mere caprice. If you were smart, you chose a powerful god. Odysseus, backed by Athena, comes back from Troy to suffer one adventure after another, yet nothing can stop him from returning to his beloved wife, Penelope.

Were Fate and Destiny the Same Thing?

The classic tradition treated fate and destiny differently. Fate usually had a negative connotation, as in the word “fatal,” bringing about death. As the quotation went, “For whom the gods would destroy, they first made mad.”

In the great tragedy, Oedipus, the young man returns to his homeland and inadvertently kills his father and marries his mother, only to blind himself when he discovers the unbearable truth.

In the Gospel, Jesus Christ is marked from birth as a world teacher whose destiny is to save humanity. Even though Jesus is born in obscurity, He rises to national prominence, enraptures the multitudes with the greatest words ever spoken and heals everyone He touches. When He deeply alienates the power structure of his day, He is ingloriously condemned to crucifixion, only to rise the third day unto everlasting life.

The idea of destiny went on to indicate those whom God favored, as opposed to those whom God had marked for destruction. One need only think of Judas Iscariot, who betrays Christ to the Pharisees, only to go out and hang himself once the sinister deed was done. Whereas, in the Calvinist tradition of Protestantism, everyone who comes to Christ is predestined to do so. No one and nothing can stop that from happening.

What Is the Contemporary Understanding of Destiny?

Destiny can simply indicate your destination, where you end up. It can tie in with the Hindu and Buddhist notion of Dharma, that every single one of us has a designated station in life and an appointed task.

If you adhere to your preassigned role, you will be happy, whereas, if you resist that role, everything in life will conspire to bring you straight back to its fulfillment, much like Jonah resisting his appointment to preach death and destruction to Nineveh, being swallowed up by a whale until he owned up to his true mission.

One need only think of three American Presidents.

Just think of Abraham Lincoln, who failed at almost everything he tried until he ran for high office, and won as America’s first Republic President. Abraham arrived in power at the very moment where he could save American from being torn into splinters, while freeing the slaves.

Just think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who arrived as President early on in the Great Depression, saw America through, and encouraged America to fight fascism. He got his opportunity on December 7, 1941 with Pearl Harbor. In 1942, it looked like both German and Japan were going to win. Yet several years later, America emerged as the greatest power the world had ever known.

Just think of Ronald Reagan, who started his career as an actor, and was considered by intellectuals as virtually illiterate. Reagan campaigned against the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire, only to befriend Mikhail Gorbachev, and bring to an end 70 years of Cold War.

Each of these Presidents seemed destined. They arrived in office at moments of impossible strain, executed brilliantly, and ended up changing the world.

How to Discover Your Own Destiny

In comparison, you may feel yourself spectacularly ordinary. You may not have a million dollars. You may not have even had a chance of graduating from Cambridge, Harvard or Yale. You may still be single, waiting for that dashing you man or woman to make you feel complete.

Whether you realize it or not, you have a unique, hidden talent that no one else has as well.

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You do, say or think something better than anyone else. If you really knew yourself, you could become world class at something, whether a great actor, dancer or martial artist. Even more important, you were born in the most momentous time in history, facing global warming and climate change on a scale never before imagined.

What do you care about? What is happening in the world today that is keeping you up at night? What is one problem you would do anything to tackle, but feel powerless to solve? Could you focus on just that one thing?

For example, Mahatma Gandhi started out his career in South Africa conspicuously awkward and timid. When he got thrown off the train on account of his color, he came up with the bright idea of bringing down the British Empire. It took him 50 years, but he did it!

What could you do if you had a bit of patience? When you play the news on your digital TV, do you find a shortage of massive issues worth tackling? Why not you?

As Rabbi Hillel once put it, “If not us, WHOM? If not now, WHEN?”

How to Consciously Create Your Own Destiny

What is available to us in our post-modern, planetary era, which was never before available, is not just the high-tech gadgetry that dazzles us. It is the knowledge that we are inherently, ineradicably divine.

As Dr. Deepak Chopra put it, “Divinity is hardwired into our very nervous system.” To be a son or daughter of God is to be a god or goddess in the sense of the ancient Greeks, unlimited life, wisdom and power.

Eastern philosophy and religion has gone global, and the revolutionary insights of Einstein and the quantum physicists have hit critical mass. We co-create our universe by the very act of perceiving it. We are not enclosed by our skin. The very galaxies spin within the context of our Absolute Being.

We, like Krishna, Buddha and Christ, are God made manifest. It is only that not all of us yet realize it.

Once you have a moment of enlightenment, a flash of satori, you recognize that you can have direct access to divine guidance, you can commune with God. If you turn this into a practice, morning and evening, eventually God will start talking to you, much as He did to Neale Donald Walsch.

Your direction will be unique to your particular mission in life. As Werner Erhard brilliantly put it at the close of his original book of aphorisms:

If God told you exactly what it was you were to do,

you would be happy doing it, no matter what it was.

What you’re doing IS what God wants you to do!

Be happy.

Erhard

How to Re-Enchant Your World with a Sense of Destiny

You can wave the magic wand by creating the context that you make a difference, that everything you think, say and do sends ripples around the world.

For example, how many wars are started by trivial incidents? When you become conscious that you are inherently divine, that you have a matchless role to perform on this global stage, and that God loves you absolutely, no matter what you do, you can step forth and “boldly go where no man has gone before.”

The hour we are living in demands no less. Be the magnificent man or woman that the Lord of Love created you to be!

Is Destiny Still Relevant for Us Today? appeared first on http://consciousowl.com.

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bluewatsons · 4 years

Text

Alexander Naraniecki, Karl Popper on Jewish Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism, 17 The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms 623 (2012)

Abstract

This paper re-contextualizes Karl Popper’s thought within the anti-nationalist cosmopolitan tradition of the Central European intelligentsia. It argues that, although Popper was brought up in an assimilated Jewish Viennese household, from the perspective of the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah tradition, he can be seen to be a modern day heterodox Maskil (scholar). Popper’s ever present fear of anti-Semitism and his refusal to see Judaism as compatible with cosmopolitanism raise important questions as to the realisable limits of the cosmopolitan ideal. His inability to integrate an understanding of Jewishness in his cosmopolitan political ideal resulted in his strong opposition to Zionism and the state of Israel. By comparing Popper’s positions with those of Hermann Cohen, another neo-Kantian philosopher, I argue that although their solutions fall short in certain respects, their arguments have continuing purchase in recent debates on cosmopolitanism and the problem of the integration of minority groups. In addition, the arguments of the Jewish Enlightenment thinkers offer important insights for the current debates on minority integration and xenophobia.

The Popper Family

Popper, Israel, and Jewish Identity

The Jewish Enlightenments

Notes

Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (London: Routledge, 1974), 105.

David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), 83.

Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 26–27.

Hacohen relates how Humanitas was the oldest and largest lodge in Vienna, which was heavily represented by Jews seeking an alternative to the established social hierarchy.

William McCagg, A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670–1918 (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 39.

Edmonds and Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker, 83.

Popper, Unended Quest, 53.

David Weinstein and Avihu Zakai, ‘‘Exile and Interpretation: Popper’s Re-invention of the History of Political Thought,’’ Journal of Political Ideologies 11.2 (June 2006): 201.

Smith to Popper, 28 July 1982.

Popper to Smith; Penn-7-82. Karl-Popper-Sammlung. Box 407.17.

Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 31.

Karl Popper to Michael Wallach, Editor, Jewish Year Book, 6 January 1969 ( Jewish Chronicle)

Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 32–33.

Malachi Hacohen, ‘‘Dilemmas of Cosmopolitanism: Karl Popper, Jewish Identity, and ‘Central European Culture’,’’ The Journal of Modern History 71.1 (March 1999): 114.

Unpublished letter: Karl Popper to Ernst Gombrich, 25 September 1969, Karl-Popper-Sammlung. Box. 3005 Letters. Grombrich, Ernst 1956–83.

Harry Zohn, ‘‘Fin-de-sie`cle Vienna: The Jewish Contribution,’’ in Reinharz and Schatzberg, The Jewish Response to German Culture, 146.

For the assimilatory drive of the German and Austrian Jewish bourgeoisie, see Volkov, ‘‘The Dynamics of Dissimilation,’’ 195–211.

Popper, Unended Quest, 11, 109. Also see Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1945), chap. 18, n. 22; chap. 19, nn. 35–40, chap. 20, n. 44.

Zohn, ‘‘Fin-de-sie`cle Vienna: The Jewish Contribution,’’ in Reinharz and Schatzberg,The Jewish Response to German Culture, 141–44.