Glorious REvolution

In 1738, Swedenborg was in Lyons where he visited the library of the Jesuits, where the Mason Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686 – 1743) had earlier studied the mystical manuscripts brought by Jesuit missionaries from China.[1] Swedenborg’s notion of a Chinese “pre-Kabbala” was especially promulgated by Ramsay, which was assimilated into some Écossais (“Scottish”) Masonic rites.[2] Ramsay assimilated Chinese notions of the “Heaven-Man” into the Kabbalistic idea of the Adam Kadmon, themes that he wove into his Masonic philosophy.[3] Like Swedenborg, explains Marsh Keith Schuchard, Ramsay felt pressured to de-emphasize the Jewish origin of Kabbalah, noting that “the Cabbalists have lost all credit among the learned, because of the extravagant fictions mixed in their mythologies.”[4] Ramsay then hinted at possible existence of the Masonic “Lost Word” in China:

In these last and dangerous times, wherein charity is waxed cold, faith almost extinguished, hope expired, and incredulity come to its highest pitch, perhaps Providence has opened a communication to China, so that we might find vestiges of our sacred religion in a nation, which had no communication with the ancient Jews.[5]

It was Ramsay who was responsible for connecting Scottish Freemasonry with the legend of the Knights Templar. The legend was promulgated in France by exiles of the Jacobite cause, the political movement in Britain dedicated to the restoration of the Stuarts, who came to be believed to be descended surviving Templars who had escaped to Scotland, from which can be traced the origins of the notorious Bavarian Illuminati. The rite of Scottish Rite Freemasonry was associated with the Jacobite cause, who were devoted to preserving the royal lineage descended from Rosicrucian “Alchemical Wedding” of Frederick V of the Palatinate and Elizabeth Stuart.

After the death of Frederick V in 1632, his wife Elizabeth Stuart and their daughter Elizabeth of Bohemia worked tirelessly to have the Palatinate restored to her son Charles I Louis (1617 – 1680), a knight of the Order of the Garter, and support the Protestant cause. When the Peace of Westphalia ended the war in 1648, Charles I Louis regained the Lower Palatinate but ranked lower in precedence than the others. When Philippe I, Duke of Orleans (1617 – 1680) married Charles Louis’ daughter Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate he claimed half of the Palatinate for France. Philippe I was the younger son of Louis XIII of France, the son of Henry IV and Marie de Medici. Louis XIII married Anne of Austria, the daughter of Philip III of Spain, Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and fathered Philippe I and his brother Louis XIV of France, the “Sun King,” whose chief advisors included Cardinal Richelieu and Cardinal Mazarin. Mazarin’s sister, Anne Marie Martinozzi, was married to Armand, Prince of Conti, the brother of Louis, Prince of Condé, who was involved in a conspiracy with Menasseh ben Israel, Isaac La Peyrère and Queen Christina to create a world government of the Messiah based in Jerusalem.[6]

Genealogy of the Alchemical Wedding

• King James I of England + Anne of Denmark

  • ALCHEMICAL WEDDING: Elizabeth Stuart + Frederick V of the Palatinate

    • Charles Louis, (1617 – 1680)

      • Charles II (1651 – 1685) + Princess Wilhelmine Ernestine of Denmark

      • Elizabeth Charlotte, Madame Palatine + PHILIPPE I, DUKE OF ORLEANS (Order of the Golden Fleece, brother of Louis XIV, “the Sun King”)

        • Élisabeth Charlotte d’Orléans + Leopold, Duke of Lorraine

          • Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor (Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece) + Maria Theresa (supporter of JACOB FRANK)

            • Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor (Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece, had affair with Eva, daughter of JACOB FRANK, see below)

            • Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor (Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece) + Maria Luisa of Spain (d. Charles III of Spain, Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece)

            • Archduke Ferdinand of Austria + Maria Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Massa

              • Maria Theresa of Austria-Este, Queen of Sardinia + Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia

            • Marie Antoinette + Louis XVI

            • Archduke Maximilian Francis (Grand Master of the Priory of Sion)

          • Charles Alexander (Order of the Golden Fleece, Grand Master of the Priory of Sion)

        • Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (friend of CHEVALIER MICHAEL RAMSAY) + Françoise Marie de Bourbon (daughter of Louis XIV, King of France + Marquise de Montespan, close to Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, and accused of Black Mass in Affair of the Poisons))

          • Louis, Duke of Orléans (1703–1752)

            • Louis Philippe I, Duke of Orléans (1725 – 1785)

              • Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (1747 – 1793), aka PHILIPPE ÉGALIETÉ, Grand Master of the Grand Orient of France, and member of the Illuminati)

    • Edward, Count Palatine of Simmern + Anna Gonzaga

      • Princess Anne of the Palatinate + Henri Jules, Prince of Condé (son of Louis, Prince of Condé, in conspiracy with Menasseh ben Israel, Isaac La Peyrere and Queen Christina)

        • Louis III, Prince of Condé + Louise Françoise de Bourbon (sister of Françoise Marie de Bourbon)

          • LOUIS, COUNT OF CLERMONT (Grand Master of the GRAND LODGE OF FRANCE)

      • Benedicta Henrietta + John Frederick, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg

        • Charlotte Felizitas of Brunswick-Lüneburg + Rinaldo d'Este, Duke of Modena (son of Francesco I d'Este, Duke of Modena)

        • Wilhelmine Amalia of Brunswick-Lüneburg + Joseph I, Holy Roman Emperor (son of Leopold I)

          • Maria Josepha, Queen of Poland + Augustus III of Poland (godfather to JACOB FRANK, and BARON VON HUND, the founder of the STRICT OBSERVANCE, was his Intimate Counselor)

          • Maria Amalia, Holy Roman Empress + Charles VII, Holy Roman Emperor

            • Maria Josepha of Bavaria + Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor (see above)

    • Sophia of Hannover + Ernest Augustus, Elector of Hanover (1629 – 1698)

      • Sophia Charlotte (1668–1705) + Frederick I of Prussia (1657 – 1713)

        • Frederick William I of Prussia (1720 – 1785) + Sophia Dorothea of Hanover (see below)

      • George I of England (1660 – 1727)

        • Sophia Dorothea of Hanover + Frederick William I of Prussia (see above)

          • FREDERICK II THE GREAT OF PRUSSIA (1712 – 1786)

          • Prince Augustus William of Prussia (1722 – 1758)

            • FREDERICK WILLIAM II OF PRUSSIA (1744 – 1797, member of GOLDEN AND ROSY CROSS) + Frederica Louisa of Hesse-Darmstadt

          • Louisa Ulrika of Prussia + Louisa Ulrika of Prussia (1710 – 1771)

            • CHARLES XIII OF SWEDEN (1748 – 1818, Grand Master of the Swedish Order of Freemasons) + Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotte of Holstein-Gottorp (Hesse-Kassel)

            • GUSTAV III OF SWEDEN (1746 – 1792, patron of Swedenborg and Grand Master of Swedish Rite of Freemasonry) + Sophia Magdalena of Denmark

        • George II of England (1683 – 1760) + Caroline of Ansbach

          • Frederick, Prince of Wales + Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha

            • Princess Augusta of Great Britain + Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick

              • Caroline of Brunswick + George IV of England

            • King George III (1738 – 1820) + Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz

            • Caroline Matilda of Great Britain + Christian VII of Denmark

          • Princess Louise of Great Britain (1724 – 1751 + Frederick V of Denmark (1723 – 1766)

            • Sophia Magdalena of Denmark + GUSTAV III OF SWEDEN (see above)

            • Christian VII of Denmark (1749 – 1808) + Caroline Matilda of Great Britain (see above)

              • Frederick VI of Denmark (1768 – 1839) + Marie of Hesse-Kassel (see below)

            • Louise, Princess Charles of Hesse-Kassel (1750–1831) + PRINCE CHARLES OF HESSE-KASSEL (see below)

          • Princess Mary of Great Britain (1723 – 1772) + Frederick II, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel (direct descendants of Maurice, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, from the circle of the first Rosicrucians, a friend of Frederick V)

            • William I, Elector of Hesse (1743 – 1821)
              (hired Mayer Amschel Rothschild who founded Rothschild dynasty)

            • PRINCE CHARLES OF HESSE-KASSEL (Member of ILLUMINATI and ASIATIC BRETHREN, friend of Comte St. Germain)+ Louise, Princess Charles of Hesse-Kassel (see above)

            • Prince Frederick of Hesse-Kassel + Princess Caroline of Nassau-Usingen

  • Charles I of England + Henrietta Maria (sister of Louis XIII of France)

    • Charles II of England + Catherine of Braganza

      • Lady Mary Tudor + Edward Radclyffe, 2nd Earl of Derwentwater

        • James Radclyffe, 3rd Earl of Derwentwater

        • CHARLES RADCLYFFE (founder of the Grand Lodge of England, officer in the Order of the Fleur de Lys, and Grand Master of the PRIORY OF SION)

    • Mary, Princess of Orange + William II, Prince of Orange (grandson of WILLIAM THE SILENT, Order of the Golden Fleece)

      • William III of England + Mary II of England (known as William and Mary, overthrew James II in Glorious Revolution)

    • James II & VII + Anne Hyde

      • Anne, Queen of Great Britain (succeeded by George I of England)

    • James II & VII + Mary of Modena (of the HOUSE OF DAVID)

      • James Francis Edward Stuart (“The Old Pretender”) + Maria Clementina Sobieska (related to JACOB FRANK)

        • CHARLES EDWARD STUART (Bonnie Prince Charlie, "the Young Pretender")

        • HENRY BENEDICT STUART (Cardinal Duke of York)

    • Henrietta of England + PHILIPPE I, DUKE OF ORLEANS

      • Anne Marie d'Orléans + Victor Amadeus II of Sardinia

        • Charles Emmanuel III of Sardinia + Polyxena of Hesse-Rotenburg

          • Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia + Maria Antonia Ferdinanda of Spain

            • Charles Emmanuel IV, King of Sardinia

            • Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia (Order of the Golden Fleece)

            • Charles Felix, King of Sardinia (Order of the Golden Fleece)

Upon inheriting the title of Duke of Orleans, Philippe I also became the Premier Prince du Sang, the most important personage of the French kingdom after the king’s immediate family. Through the children of his two marriages, Philippe I became an ancestor of most modern-day Roman Catholic royalty, giving him the nickname of “the grandfather of Europe.”[7] Philippe I’s first wife was his first cousin, Princess Henrietta of England, the sister of Charles II of England. Their parents were Charles I of England and Henrietta Maria of France, the sister Louis XIII of France. Henrietta Maria’s sister, Christine Marie, married Victor Amadeus I of Savoy, the son of Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy, whose birth was prophesied by Nostradamus, and who was also titular King of Cyprus and Jerusalem.[8] Charles Emmanuel I was also the grandson of Francis I of France, a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and supporter of Guillaume Postel and Leonardo da Vinci. Christine Marie also rebuilt Palazzo Madama in Turin following the advice of master alchemists.[9] Francis I’s son, Henry II of France married Catherine de Medici, sponsor of Nostradamus and practitioner of the Black Mass.

Henrietta Maria patronized Jewish scholars who “practised divination through the medium of the Cabbalah.”[10] In 1642, when she tried to raise money for her husband in Holland, she visited the Portuguese synagogue and the residence of Rabbi Jacob Judah Leon Templo, who later caused a great stir when his model Solomon’s Temple was exhibited before her son, Charles II, and which would become the basis for the coat of arms of the English Grand Lodge of Freemasonry. Henrietta Maria was accompanied by Charles II’s sister Mary, who shortly afterwards married her first cousin William II, Prince of Orange, whose father was Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, the son of William the Silent, a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Frederick Henry’s step-sister, Countess Louise Juliana of Nassau, was the mother of Frederick V of the Palatinate.

Philippe I was, nevertheless, a notorious homosexual. During his childhood, Queen Anne would address Philippe I by such nicknames as “my little girl” and encouraged him to dress in feminine clothing as a young man, a habit retained all his life.[11] A contemporary would refer to him as the “silliest woman who ever lived.”[12] According to court gossip, Cardinal Mazarin’s own nephew Philippe Jules Mancini, the Duke of Nevers, had been the “first to [have] corrupted” Philippe.[13] Among his lovers, Philip of Lorraine-Armagnac, Chevalier de Lorraine, was described as “insinuating, brutal and devoid of scruple.”[14]

As Joscelyn Godwin explained in The Theosophical Enlightenment, “The whole Orleans family, ever since [Philippe I, Duke of Orléans], was notoriously involved in the black arts.”[15] Philippe I was close to the wife of his brother Louis XIV, Madame de Montespan (1640 – 1707), who was involved in a scandal known as L’affaire des poisons (“Affair of the Poisons”), where Catherine Monvoisin, known as La Voisin, and the priest Étienne Guibourg performed Black Masses for human sacrifice for her.[16] Authorities rounded up a number of fortune tellers and alchemists who were suspected of selling divinations, séances, aphrodisiacs, and “inheritance powders,” an euphemism for poison. Some confessed under torture and provided authorities lists of their clients. La Voisin was arrested in 1679 and implicated several important courtiers, including Olympia Mancini, the Countess of Soissons, her sister, the Duchess of Bouillon, François Henri de Montmorency, Duke of Luxembourg and Madame de Montespan. La Voisin claimed that the Marquise bought aphrodisiacs and that she performed black masses with her in order to keep the king’s favor over rival lovers. The rituals were a mockery of the Catholic Mass, featuring the Marquise lying nude as an altar, with the chalice on her bare stomach, and holding a black candle in each of her outstretched arms. The witch and the Marquise would call on the devil (Astaroth and Asmodeus), and pray to him for the King’s love. They sacrificed a newborn by slitting its throat with a knife. The baby’s body was crushed, and the drained blood and mashed bones were used in the mixture. Louis’ food was tainted in this way for almost thirteen years, until La Voisin was captured after a police investigation where they uncovered the remains of 2,500 infants in her garden.[17] It was alleged that La Voisin paid prostitutes for their infants for use in the rituals.[18]

After Charles II’s death in 1685, his Catholic brother James VII and II (1633 – 1701) ascended to the throne of England. The Scottish Freemasons published a manifesto in support of his succession, in which they utilized “cryptick” architectural and numerical symbolism to justify his legitimacy.[19] James II married the niece of Cardinal Mazarin, Mary of Modena, of the House of Este who had long-standing associations with the houses of the de Medici, Savoy, Gonzaga and Habsburgs. According to the genealogical studies of Edward Gelles, The Jewish Journey:

There was some Jewish admixture in the earlier Stuart line as in most European ruling houses. Some goes back to the descendants of Davidic Exilarchs. Mary of Guise and the ducal house of Lorraine have such a David-Carolingian connection and so did the d’Este of Ferrara and Modena. The mother-in-law of Charles II was from the ducal house of Medina-Sidonia of allegedly crypto-Jewish background.[20]

Writing in 1748, in the wake of the recently crushed Stuart rebellion, Henry Fielding (1707 – 1754), a Whig propagandist known for his comic novel Tom Jones, denounced the conspiracy of Jacobites, Jews, and Freemasons. Referring to the Jewish support of James II, he noted:

…the Jacobite rabbins tell us, that on Friday, Feb. 6, 1685 one of the Angels, I forget which, came to Whitehall at Noon-day, without being perceived by anyone, and brought with him a Commission from Heaven, which he delivered to the then Duke of York, by which the said Duke was indefeasibly created King of England, Scotland, and Ireland…

And as there is so great an Analogy between the Jews and Jacobites, so hath there been the same likeness between their Kings.[21]

The Scottish Masonic manifesto was reinforced by a loyal address presented to James II by the Jewish community in London, whose leaders visited his palace on five occasions during the first two months of his reign.[22] After his accession in 1685, James II’s overt Catholicism alienated the majority of the population. In 1687, James II issued the Declaration of Indulgence or Declaration for Liberty of Conscience, a first step at establishing freedom of religion in the British Isles, granting toleration to the various Christian denominations, Catholic and Protestant, within his kingdoms. The declaration was supported by William Penn, who was widely perceived to be its instigator.[23] The declaration was viewed positively by Jews, Quakers and Familists, but opposed by Protestants, who viewed it as a way to promote Catholicism. Public alarm increased when Queen Mary gave birth to a Roman Catholic son and heir, James Francis Edward (1720 – 1788), known as Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Seven prominent Englishmen, including one bishop and six politicians of both the Whig and Tory parties, wrote to William III, Prince of Orange (1650 – 1702), the son of William II and Mary, inviting him to invade England and accept the throne. William was both James II’ nephew and by his marriage to Mary II of England, James II’s daughter by Anne Hyde, his son-in-law, and heir apparent. As recorded by William Thomas Walsh in his history of Philip II, William III joined the Freemasons and with their connivance, invaded England on November 5, 1688, in an action that ultimately deposed James II and won him the crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland, what became known as the “Glorious Revolution.” The expenses for the expedition, reported Walsh, were paid for by a Jewish banker of Amsterdam, Isaac Suaso, who in return was made Baron de Gras, while other Jews, particularly Sir Solomon de Medina and Alfonso Rodrigues, who provided the finances for the final conquest of Ireland.[24] James II fled to France. The Scots were disappointed at the loss of a Stuart monarch, and in 1689, the year of James II’s deposition, John Graham, 1st Viscount Dundee (c. 1648 – 1689), known as Bonnie Dundee, led a force of Highlanders against government troops at Killiecrankie. The rebellion was called a Jacobite Rising, derived from the Jacobus, the Latin version of James.

William was now asked to carry on the government and summon a Parliament, which agreed to treat James II’s flight as an abdication and to offer the crown, with an accompanying Declaration of Rights, to William and Mary jointly, known as the reign of “William and Mary.” Large parts of the Declaration into a Bill of Rights, which barred Catholics from the throne and gave the succession to Mary’s sister, Anne, who inherited the throne when William III died in March 1702. The failure of either Anne or her sister to produce an heir precipitated a succession crisis. Parliament then passed the Act of Settlement in 1701, to settle the succession to the English and Irish crowns on Protestants only, whereupon the sister of Charles Louis of the Palatinate, the Electress Sophia of Hanover, the next Protestant in line, was designated heir to the British throne. The philosopher Leibniz was a friend and advisor to Electress Sophia and her daughter Sophia Charlotte of Hanover. Both women carried on substantive philosophical correspondence with him in which he clarified his philosophical views.[25] When Sophia died a few weeks before Anne, the Act of Settlement was responsible for the accession of Sophia’s son George I in 1714—notwithstanding the claims of 57 persons closer by the rules of inheritance than Sophia and George—thus granting the throne to the grandson of the “Alchemical Wedding.” George married Sophia Dorothea of Celle, instigated by the machinations of his mother, Electress Sophia.

George and Sophia’s children included later King George II of Great Britain (1683 – 1760) and Sophia Dorothea, later wife of King Frederick William I of Prussia (1688 –1740), and mother of Frederick II of Prussia (1712 – 1786), known as the Great. The Kingdom of Prussia, with its capital in Berlin, was a German kingdom that constituted the state of Prussia between 1701 and 1918, and was the driving force behind the unification of Germany in 1871 and the leading state of the German Empire until its dissolution in 1918. The Duchy of Prussia resulted in 1525, when Albert of Prussia, Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, listened the advice of Martin Luther to convert Prussia into a hereditary duchy for himself. Luther worked to spread his teaching among the Prussians, while Albert's brother George, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, presented the plan to Sigismund I the Old, the great-grandson of Emperor Sigismund, founder of the Order of the Dragon.[26] Sigismund I the Old, a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, who married Bona Sforza. Their daughter, Anna Jagiellon married Stephen Bathory, sponsor of John Dee and uncle of the “Blood Countess” Elizabeth Báthory.

When Albert died in 1568, his teenage son Albert Frederick inherited the duchy. This Order of the Swan, founded by Albert’s grandfather, disappeared when the house of Brandenburg adopted Protestantism in 1525, but the marriage of Albert Frederick to Mary Eleanor, sister and heir of John William, duke of Cleves, who died in 1609, introduced the Hohenzollerns a new and more prestigious descent from the Swan Knight, from whom would descend the later famous Kings of Prussia.[27] The Polish king Sigismund III Vasa permitted Albert Frederick’s son-in-law, John Sigismund (1572 – 1619), to succeed him in 1611, thereafter ruling Brandenburg, and Duchy of Prussia in personal union. This personal union is referred to as Brandenburg-Prussia. John Sigismund’s son, George William, Elector of Brandenburg (1595 – 1640) married Elisabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, sister of Frederick V of the Palatinate, and granddaughter of William the Silent. Their son, Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg (1620 – 1688), achieved full sovereignty over the duchy under the 1657 Treaty of Wehlau, confirmed in the 1660 Treaty of Oliva. Frederick William married Countess Louise Henriette of Nassau, daughter of Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, son of William the Silent.

Brandenburg-Prussia, predecessor of the kingdom, became a military power under Frederick William, known as “The Great Elector.” In return for an alliance against France in the War of the Spanish Succession, Frederick William’s son, Frederick III (1657 – 1713), was allowed to elevate Prussia to a kingdom in the Crown Treaty of 1700. Frederick crowned himself “King in Prussia” as Frederick William I, and married Sophia Charlotte of Hanover, the daughter of Electress Sophia of Hanover. Their son was Frederick William I, who married Sophia Dorothea. As a kingdom, Prussia continued its rise to power, especially during the reign of their son Frederick II the Great.[28]

In 1740, Frederick the Great came to the throne and invaded Silesia, thereby beginning the War of the Austrian Succession, when France, Prussia and Bavaria exploited the pretext was the right of Maria Theresa (1717 – 1780)—a supporter of Jacob Frank—to inherit from her father Emperor Charles VI 1685 – 1740), to challenge Habsburg power. When Charles VI succeeded his brother in 1711, he was the last male Habsburg heir in the direct line. Following the death of his relative Charles II of Spain, in 1700, without any direct heir, Charles IV declared himself King of Spain. The ensuing in the War of the Spanish Succession culminated with the Treaty of Utrecht ratified in 1713, which recognized Philip as King of Spain, in return for accepting its permanent separation from France. France withdrew backing for the exiled Jacobites and recognized the Hanoverians as heirs to the British throne. The decentralization of the Holy Roman Empire continued, with Prussia, Bavaria and Saxony increasingly acting as independent states.

Since Habsburg possessions were subject to Salic law, barring women from inheriting in their own right, Charles VI’s lack of a male heir meant they would be divided on his death. Charles VI paved the way for Maria Theresa’s accession with the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713. However, upon his death, Saxony, Prussia, Bavaria, and France all repudiated the sanction. In 1936, Maria Theresa would marry Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor, who would become Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Francis I was the son of Leopold, Duke of Lorraine (1679 – 1729) and Élisabeth Charlotte, Duchess of Lorraine, the daughter of Philippe I, Duke of Orléans and Elizabeth Charlotte, granddaughter of Frederick V of the Palatinate and Elizabeth Stuart. Frederick the Great, who became Maria Theresa’s greatest rival for most of her reign, promptly invaded Silesia, igniting the War of the Austrian Succession. During the course of the war, Maria Theresa successfully defended her rule over most of the Habsburg Monarchy, apart from the loss of Silesia and a few minor territories in Italy, though she later unsuccessfully tried to recover Silesia during the Seven Years’ War that began in 1756.

The Pretenders

The emblem of the Jacobites, was the five-petal White Rose of York. Like the House of Este, the Jacobites also maintained close links with the House of Savoy, hereditary claimants of the Kings of Jerusalem. The modern House of Savoy are descended from Charles Emmanuel I, Duke of Savoy, whose advent was prophesied by Nostradamus, after his parents, Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, and his wife, the daughter of Francis I of France, Margherita of Valois, appealed him to him to assist in producing an heir. Nostradamus told the princess to rejoice, because the child with whom she was pregnant, “Would be a Son, who would be called Charles, and who would become the greatest Captain of his century.”[29] Charles Emmanuel I, known as the Great, was Marquis of Saluzzo, Duke of Savoy, Prince of Piedmont and Count of Aosta, Moriana and Nice and also Titular King of Cyprus and Jerusalem.

Genealogy of the Pretenders

• Charles I of England (1600 – 1649) + Henrietta Maria (1609 – 1669, d. of Henry IV of Frane + Marie de' Medici)

  • Charles II of England (1630 – 1685)

    • Lady Mary Tudor + Edward Radclyffe, 2nd Earl of Derwentwater (1655 – 1705)

      • James Radclyffe, 3rd Earl of Derwentwater (1689–1716)

      • Charles Radclyffe (1693 – 1746, Grand Master of Jacobite Freemasonry in France)

  • Mary, Princess of Orange + Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange (1596 – 1632) s. of William the Silent)

    • William II, Prince of Orange (1626 – 1650) + Mary II of England (d. of James II), together known as William and Mary.

      • William III of England, King of England, Ireland, and Scotland

  • James II and VII of England, Scotland and Ireland + Mary of Modena

    • James Francis Edward Stuart (1688 – 1766) “The Old Pretender” + Maria Clementina Sobieska (related to Jacob Frank)

      • Charles Edward Stuart “Bonnie Prince Charlie” (1720 – 1788)

      • Henry Benedict Stuart, the Cardinal York (1725 – 1807, supporter of the Frankists)

Charles Emmanuel I married Catherine Micaela of Spain, the daughter of Philip II, Holy Roman Emperor, Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece. From Charles Emmanuel I and Catherine’s son was Thomas Francis of Savoy, Prince of Carignano (1596 – 1656), from whom descend the junior branch of Savoy-Carignano. Charles Emmanuel’s son, Victor Amadeus I, Duke of Savoy (1587 – 1637) married Princess Christine Marie of France, the daughter of Henry IV of France and Marie de Medici, granddaughter of Cosimo I de Medici, a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and Eleonora of Toledo, who was brought up in Naples at the household of Jacob Abarbanel’s son Don Samuel Abarbanel and daughter-in-law Benvenida.[30] Marie’s sister, Eleonora married Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, also a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and nephew of Louis Gonzaga, a purported Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. According to legend, Christine Marie herself was interested in the occult, and built Palazzo Madama in Turin, following the advice of master alchemists. Apparently, when she became regent after Victor Amadeus I’s death in 1637, the alchemists divulged the secret of the locations of the cave entrances to her.[31]

Victor Amadeus I’ great-grandson, Victor Amadeus II of Sardinia (1666 – 1732), married Anne Marie d’Orléans, the daughter of Philippe I, Duke of Orléans and Henrietta of England. Charles Emmanuel I’s daughter Isabella of Savoy married Alfonso III d’Este, Duke of Modena (1591 – 1644), whose grandson Alfonso IV d’Este (1634 –1662) married Laura Margherita Mazzarini, the sister of Cardinal Mazarin. Their daughter was Mary of Modena, the second wife of James II of England. Their son, James Francis Edward Stuart (1688 – 1766), nicknamed, also nicknamed The Old Pretender, married Maria Clementina Sobieska, whose family was related to Jacob Frank.[32] Princess Maria Klementyna Sobieska, granddaughter of the Polish King and Lithuanian Grand-Duke, John III Sobieski. Their sons included Bonnie Prince Charlie and his brother Henry Benedict Stuart, the Cardinal York (1725 – 1807), the fourth and final Jacobite heir to claim the thrones of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland publicly, who was a great supporter of the Frankists.[33] In crypto-Jewish circles, it was thought that Henry Benedict had an affair with a Jewish woman named Reyna Barzillai of Venice.[34]

The next significant Jacobite Rising—backed by the French as part of the War of Austrian Succession—took place in 1745 when Bonnie Prince Charlie was symbolically crowned King Charles III by the clergy of Scotland’s Episcopal Church. Though, a year later, in 1746, the Young Pretender was disastrously defeated at the Battle of Culloden Moor, and the Jacobites’ attempt to take London and install a Stuart king were foiled. An original letter of the 3rd Duke of Perth (1713 – 1746) to Earl of Airlie Lord Ogilvy (1725 – 1803) shortly after the Jacobite victory at Prestonpans, described a secret ceremony at Holyrood in which the prince was elected Grand Master of the ancient chivalry of the Temple of Jerusalem on Tuesday September 24, 1745.[35] Unlike his brother and his father, James Francis Edward Stuart, Henry Benedict made no effort to seize the throne. After Charles’s death in January 1788, the Papacy did not recognize Henry as the lawful ruler of England, Scotland, and Ireland, but referred to him as the Cardinal Duke of York.

Hellfire Club

English Masonry, however, lost all trace of affection for the Stuart cause. The Grand Lodge was founded shortly after George I ascended to the throne in 1714 and the end of the first Jacobite rising of 1715. The federalization of four London lodges in the Grand Lodge of London and Westminster was founded in London on St. John the Baptist’s day, 24 June 1717, coinciding with the summer solstice. The members of these four lodges carefully chose a nobleman, Thomas Sayer, as the Grand Lodge first Grand Master. Sayer was followed by George Payne and by Jean Theophilus Desaguiliers (1683 – 1744), scientist and, later, a cleric ordained into the Church of England. Desaguliers was a British natural philosopher, clergyman, engineer who was elected to the Royal Society in 1714 as experimental assistant to Newton. In 1717, Desaguliers lodged at Hampton Court and lectured in French to King George I and his family. In 1721, a Scottish Presbyterian pastor, Reverend James Anderson (c. 1679/1680 – 1739), was instructed by Grand Master Desaguiliers to revise and condense the Old Masonic Manuscripts observed by the English Lodges. This would lead to the 1721 Anderson’s Constitution.

Anderson’s Constitution was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1734 by Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790), who was that year elected Grand Master of Masons in Pennsylvania. From the mid-1750s to the mid-1770s, Franklin spent much of his time in London. Franklin is known to have occasionally attended meetings of the Hellfire Club during 1758. Hellfire Club was a name for several exclusive clubs for high-society rakes established in Britain and Ireland in the eighteenth century. The first official Hellfire Club was founded by Philip, Duke of Wharton (1698 – 1731), an ardent supporter of the Jacobite cause. Young Wharton met with James Francis Edward Stuart (1688 – 1766), the “Old Pretender” and son of James II, who created him Jacobite Duke of Northumberland in 1716. Wharton then went to Ireland where he entered the Irish House of Lords as Marquess Catherlough. He was created Duke of Wharton in 1718 by George I in the King's effort to solidify his support.

Wharton founded the original Hellfire Club around 1719 in London. According to at least one source, their activities included mock religious ceremonies and partaking in meals containing dishes like “Holy Ghost Pie,” “Breast of Venus,” and “Devil's Loin,” while drinking “Hell-fire punch. Members of the Club supposedly came to meetings dressed as characters from the Bible.[36] Wharton's club came to an end in 1721 when George I, under the influence of Wharton’s political enemies, namely Robert Walpole, put forward a Bill “against ‘horrid impieties” aimed at the Hellfire Club.[37] Wharton became a Freemason, and in 1722 he became the Grand Master of England.[38]

The name Hellfire Club is most commonly used to refer to the Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe, founded by Sir Francis Dashwood (1708 – 1781), the same year he was elected to the Royal Society. The group were known as the Franciscans, not after Saint Francis of Assisi, but after its founder, Francis Dashwood. Franklin joined the group on occasion and collaborated with Dashwood to revise the Book of Common Prayer or Franklin Prayer Book still in used in American Protestant churches today. Their intent was “to attract the young and lively, and relieve the well-disposed from the inflection of interminable prayers.”[39]

Dashwood, like fellow-member and politician John Wilkes, a distant relative of John Wilkes Booth, were fellows of the Royal Society. An original member of the Hellfire Club was John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, who was First Lord of the Admiralty, and as a member of the House of Lords where he was a follower of the Duke of Bedford, one of the wealthiest and most powerful politicians of the era. But he is perhaps best known for the claim that he was the eponymous inventor of the sandwich.

In 1751, Dashwood, leased Medmenham Abbey, which incorporated the ruins of a Cistercian abbey founded in 1201. On moving into the Abbey, Dashwood had numerous expensive works done on the building. Dashwood had the abbey rebuilt, but to look like a ruin, by the architect Nicholas Revett in the style of the eighteenth-century Gothic revival. He had the walls covered in various pornographic scenes, including that of the “Twelve Apostles,” the name of the superior members of the club, in various indecent poses. A fresco on the ceiling was described by Wilkes as so terrible as to be “unspeakable.”[40] Underneath the Abbey, Dashwood had a series of caves carved out from an existing one, which was again decorated with mythological themes, phallic symbols and other topics of a sexual nature. A library contained what was generally admitted to be the best collection of pornographic books in Great Britain, including Fanny Hill and Kama Sutra. John Cleland (1709 – 1789), the author of Fanny Hill, may have been attended the club’s meetings.[41] First published in London in 1748, Fanny Hill is considered the first prose pornography and one of the most prosecuted and banned books in history.

Rabelais’ motto Fais ce que tu voudras (“Do what thou wilt”) was placed above a doorway in stained glass. Sir Nathaniel Wraxall in his Historical Memoires (1815) accused these “Monks” of performing Satanic rituals, but the claims have, as usual, been dismissed by historians. According to one of the club’s critics, Horace Walpole, the members’ “practice was rigorously pagan: Bacchus and Venus were the deities to whom they almost publicly sacrificed; and the nymphs and the hogsheads that were laid in against the festivals of this new church, sufficiently informed the neighborhood of the complexion of those hermits.”[42]

Club meetings often involved mock rituals, items of a pornographic content, drinking, banqueting and wenching.[43] After the Black Mass, club members entered the Abbey where were waiting professional prostitutes dressed as nuns and masked from whom they selected to participate in an orgy. Recruitment of the prostitutes followed a pattern similar to those of Jeffrey Epstein and his partner Ghislaine Maxwell, where cunning madams recruited naive girls from rural areas looking for their fortunes in the cities. Once they were seduced, they were drugged and raped and coerced into forced prostitution.[44] However, a few of the participating women were wives or relatives of the club members. A contemporary writer criticized, “They attempt all females of their own species promiscuously—grandmothers and mothers as well as their own daughters. Even their sisters fear their violence.”[45] The Earl of Sandwich boasted that he seduced virgins to enjoy the “corruption of innocence, for its own sake.”[46]

In addition to the prostitutes were the amateurs known as “dollymops.” A few dollymops were prominent society women, such as a Jewess named Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston (1721 – 1788).[47] She was the daughter of Colonel Thomas Chudleigh, and in 1743 she was appointed maid of honor to Augusta, Princess of Wales, the mother of King George III. One of the Duchess’s most infamous incidents took place in 1749, when she attended a masquerade ball at the King's Theatre during the King's Jubilee Celebration dressed as the Greek mythological character Iphigenia, ready for sacrifice. It is said that she dressed in flesh-colored silk that made her appear virtually naked. The Duchess is the only woman in British history to be tried and convicted of bigamy in an open trial before the House of Lords. Long known as an “adventuress” and sexual intriguer at the courts of kings George II and George III, her trial for wrongful marriage to a duke when she was already wife of an earl was the sensational scandal of 1776. The Duchess was the mistress of the Earl of Bath and the Duke of Hamilton, and later secretly married to the Earl of Bristol, but started living with the Duke of Kingston.

Chudleigh was forced to leave the country and went to the continent where she had houses in Paris and Rome, befriended the Pope Clement XIV. She lived with Frederick the Great, and several of the French and Russian nobility, and bought a large estate outside St. Petersburg.[48] She started living with the Evelyn Pierrepont, 2nd Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull (1711 – 23 September 1773), and Freemason with the Premier Grand Lodge and a member of the Royal Society. When the Jacobite rising of 1745 broke out, Pierrepont raised a regiment called “Kingston’s Light Horse,” which distinguished itself at the Battle of Culloden. The duke attained the rank of general in the army. She married Pierrepont in 1769.

In 1775, the Duchess was forced to return to England after her late husband's nephew, Evelyn Medows, brought a charge of bigamy against her. She was found guilty of bigamy at a trial by her peers at Westminster Hall that attracted 4,000 spectators. Chudleigh was forced to leave the country and went to the continent where she had houses in Paris and Rome, befriended the Pope Clement XIV. In Poland, she befriended Prince Karl Stanislaw Radziwill (1734 – 1790), the ancestor and husband of Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister, who apparently proposed to her.[49] The fortune of the Radziwills, who were related to the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs, was considered the greatest in Poland.[50]

Premier Grand Lodge

Anderson’s Constitution is divided into three parts: the history of the Freemasonry, the Duties and Charges, and the General Regulations, the latter were compiled by George Payne, the second Grand Master in the history of English Grand Lodge. Anderson was responsible for rewriting the historical part that narrates relevant historical and theological events, such as the role Adam in Creation, the story of Noah and the Great Flood, the magistery of Abraham, Moses as prophet and leader of Israel, and particularly the role of King Solomon as the builder of the first Temple of Jerusalem. The Chaldean Magi too were responsible for preserving the science of geometry, which was eventually inherited by the Greeks, whose famous constructions, like the Citadel at Athens, the Parthenon or the Temple of Athena, were in imitation of the Temple of Solomon. In time, the so-called “Royal Art” of architecture was preserved by King James and his descendants the “Mason Kings” until the reigns of James II, William III of Orange and finally George I.

Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales (1707 – 1751), the eldest but estranged son of King George II, was initiated was initiated at a special Lodge at Kew Palace by Desaguliers in 1737.[51] Frederick was the father of King George III (1738 – 1820). Desaguliers became an equerry to George III. As detailed by George William Speth, in Royal Freemasons (1885), many of George III’s brothers were Freemasons. William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1721 – 1765), was initiated in 1743. George III’s brother, Edward Augustus, Duke of York (1739 – 1767), was initiated in 1765 in the Berlin Lodge of Friendship, which became the Grand Lodge of Prussia. In 1767, Edward and his next two brothers, Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh (1743 – 1805) and Prince Henry, Duke of Cumberland and Strathearn (1745 – 1790), received the Honorary Rank of Past Grand Master of England. In 1782, Prince Henry was elected Grand Master of England, an office which he maintained until his death in 1790.

The Grand Lodge records of 1723 show the names of several Jews, such as Benjamin Deluze and Simon Ansell, and in 1725 Israel Segalas and Nicholas Abrahams. In 1731, when Lodge N° 84 raised columns in London, at the Daniel Coffee House on Lombard Street, among the brethren listed were several Jews: Salomon Mendez, Abraham Ximenez, Jacob Alvarez, Abraham de Medina, Benjamin Adolphus and Isaac Baruch. In the Daily Post of September 22, 1732, one of the earliest press reports of the initiation of a Jew, reports that Edward Rose, a tavern-keeper, had been initiated “in the presence of Jews and non-Jews, the Master officiating being Daniel Delvalle, an eminent Jew snuff merchant.”[52] Solomon Mountford, Solomon Mendez, Abraham Ximenes, and Abraham Cortissos had become members. Each year the Grand Lodge appointed a number of Grand Stewards who had the important task of organizing the annual Grand Festival.

Under the William III’s reign, at least one Jewish royalist, the first known Jewish Freemason, Francis Francia (b. 1675), continued his support for the exiled James II, and in 1702 he risked arrest to praise the legitimate Stuart descent of Queen Anne.[53] Francia was the grandson of Domingo Rodrigues Isaac Francia, an ex-Marrano of Vila Real in Portugal, who arrived in London from Bordeaux in 1655 and became a leading member of the London community. After George I became king in l714, Francia collaborated with the Swedish ambassador Carl Gyllenborg and an international network of Jacobite supporters. Francia allegedly became a Freemason and organized “a noble society” or “club” of Jews.[54] Because the Jacobites increasingly utilized Jewish themes and terminology in their propaganda, the radical Whig John Toland (1670 – 1722) to publish again the repeated charge that the Scots were descendants of the Jews who fled to Scotland in the twelfth century. Toland reminded the bishops of Great Britain, “you further know how considerable a part of the British inhabitants are the undoubted offspring of the Jews,” because “a great number of ‘em fled to Scotland, which is the reason so many in that part of the Island, have such a remarkable aversion to pork and black-puddings to this day, not to insist on some other resemblances easily observable.”[55] 

In l7l7, as noted by Marsha Keith Schuchard, in the wake of Francia’s arrest on charges of treason and the subsequent exposure of the Swedish-Jacobite plot, supporters of George I organized a new system of “modern” Masonry, which was devoted to the Hanoverian succession, Newtonian science, and Whig politics.[56] However, Francia was acquitted by a London jury opposed to Hanoverian policies, and he moved to northern France, where he continued to act as financial and diplomatic liaison between Jacobites and their French, Swedish, and Russian supporters.[57] In a sensational trial, the “Judaized” Jacobites were denounced by government prosecutors, perhaps influenced the anti-Hanoverian satire of The Freemasons: an Hudibrastick Poem (1723). After remarking that “Some likewise say our Masons now/ Do circumcision undergo,/ For Masonry's a Jewish Custom,” the author further noted that “From hence they've been for Traitors taken,/ But still have Masons sav’d their Bacon,” for “They never once have been detected:/ As Plotters and Confederates.”[58]

In Anderson’s New Book of Constitutions (1738), several Jews are listed as Grand Stewards, including Solomon Mendez (1732), Dr. Meyer Schomberg (1734), Benjamin Mendes da Costa (1736), and Isaac Barrett, Joseph Harris, Samuel Lowman, and Moses Mendes da Costa (all in 1738). Schomberg (1690 – 1761, was a German-Jewish physician who moved to London and became a fellow of the Royal Society.[59] The Mendez were a family of Marrano origin traced to Fernando Moses Mendes (1647 – 1724), a Marrano physician, arrived in London in 1669 and became court physician to Queen Catherine of Braganza, wife of Charles II of England. In 1747, Fernando’s grandson, Benjamin Mendes da Costa (c. 1690–1758), bought the lease of the ground on which the building stood, and presented it to the congregation, vesting the deeds in the names of a committee consisting of Gabriel Lopez de Britto, David Aboab Ozorio, Moses Gomes Serra, David Franco, Joseph Jessurun Rodriguez, and Moses Mendes da Costa (d. 1747) has sometimes been said to have been on the board of the Bank of England.[60]

Another famous English Jewish Masonic was John Coustos (1703 – 1746) was a Swiss businessman living in England and a member of the Premier Grand Lodge of England. Schuchard, claims that Coustos, allegedly of Marrano descent, came to London in the aftermath of the trial of Francis Francia which caught the attention of the British government. British Whig Prime Minister and knight of the Order of the Garter, Robert Walpole (1676 –1745), a supporter of the new Hanoverian regime, allegedly recruited Coustos to spy on French Masonic lodges in London from 1730-32 and report back on any activities of exiled Jacobites in Paris.[61] While traveling on business he founded a Masonic lodge in Lisbon and was arrested by the Portuguese Inquisition for being a Mason. He was released in 1744 as a result of the intercession of George II of England.

Anderson’s Consitutions of the Freemasons (1723) and (1738) served as propaganda for the “Modern,” Hanoverian system of Freemasonry, which for the rest of the century competed with “Antient” Jacobite Freemasonry for dominance in Britain and abroad.[62] The Ancient Grand Lodge of England, now called the “Antients,” was founded in 1751 by Laurence Dermott (1720 –1791), as a rival Grand Lodge to the Premier Grand Lodge of England, called the “Moderns,” which he claimed had moved away from the ritual of Scotland, Ireland. The first recorded Jewish officer of the Antients’ Grand Lodge was David Lyon, Grand Tyler (1760-63), later promoted to Grand Pursuivant (1764-65). In the Moderns’ Grand Lodge, the first was Moses Isaac Levi (alias Ximenes), appointed both Junior and Senior Grand Warden in 1785. That same year John Paiba, who had held some office since 1779, was appointed Grand Sword Bearer.[63]

Dermott, the first Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge of Antients, took a design by Rabbi Leon Templo as the basis for the coat of arms of the Antients. At the time, a number of models of the Temple of Solomon were popular. In 1728, Newton’s Chronology of the Ancients was published, which devotes an entire chapter, nearly one-fifth of the book, to a visionary description of the Temple. That of Councillor Schott had arrived in London, and was on exhibition in 1723 and 1730 and of Rabbi Jacob Jehudah Leon, originally developed for Charles II and built with the assistance of Adam Boreel—whose associates included the Sabbatean Peter Serrarius, and members of Samuel Hartlib’s Invisible College, Henry Oldenburg and John Dur—which was again exhibited in 1759-60.[64]

Dermott explained his choice for Templo’s design in The Book of Constitutions of this Grand Lodge or Ahiman Rezon, often said to be of the Hebrew language and variously mean “to help a brother,” “will of selected brethren,” “The secrets of prepared brethren,” “Royal Builders” and “Brother Secretary.” Templo’s coat of arms features the Kabbalistic symbols from Ezekial of two winged cherubim, at either side of a circle divided into four parts, representing the zodiac signs of the four elements or four seasons: the head of a man for Aquarius, a bull for Taurus, an eagle for Scorpio and a lion for Leo. Above the circle is the Arc of the Covenant. When the two Grand Lodges of England merged to form the present United Grand Lodge in 1813, this design was incorporated in its coat of arms.[65]

Écossais Lodges

Though Jews joined both systems of Antients and Moderns, the greater number were attracted to the Jewish and Kabbalistic themes of the Écossais higher degrees.[66] It was mainly in France, where first as lodges of expatriates and exiled Jacobites the 1720s, that Ecossais Masonry became again affiliated with the Stuarts. The Jacobite cause alleged that a Masonic lodge had been founded in Scotland, during the early eighteenth century, which drew its charter from a surviving Templar chapter in Bristol, that had already been in operation for several hundred years. It was maintained that during the Crusades, a small group of Syriac Christians, who claimed descent back to the Essenes (presumably the Sabians of Harran), were rescued from the Muslims by the Templars. When they left Jerusalem, these Gnostic Christians eventually settled in Scotland, and founded a new chapter of the Templar Order, which later merged with a lodge of Freemasonry.[67]

A manuscript from around 1760 found in Strasbourg, entitled Deuxième Section, de la Maçonnerie parmi les Chrétiens (“Second Section, of Masonry among the Christians”), asserted the uninterrupted survival of the Templars in Scotland. A few days before his execution on March 11 or 18, 1314, Jacques de Molay summoned his nephew, the Count of Beaujeu, who himself was the nephew of de Molay’s predecessor as Grand Master of the Templars, Guillaume de Beaujeu, who died during the siege of Acre in 1291. De Molay confided to him that the Templars had hidden their treasure in two columns that adorned the entrance of the Temple to the tomb of the Grand Masters, an allusion to the Masonic symbolism of Jachin and Boaz, the two pillars at the entrance of the Temple of Solomon. The treasure, which included, along with the annals and ancient letters, the main sublime knowledge of the Order, the most precious relic that Baldwin, King of Jerusalem, had given to the order, namely the index finger of the right hand of St. John the Baptist, the seven-branched golden candelabra and the four golden gospels, which decorated the Holy Sepulchre. De Molay explained that he had secretly transported the treasure back to Paris by hiding it in the casket of Beaujeu’s uncle Guillaume. Beaujeu was declared Grand Master of a restored Order of the Temple, with all the rights which belong to the crown of the kings of Jerusalem. After Beaujeu’s death, the seat of the order fell to Pierre d’Aumont, one of the dispersed Templars who had taken refuge in Scotland.[68]

In the seventeenth century, interest in Templarism became political after the execution of Charles I, with the idea that Stuart partisans invented a Templar degree, as the king’s death was to be avenged, as was the violent death in 1314 of Jacques de Molay, last Grand Master of the Templars.[69] The story told by Dom Calmet (1672 – 1757) was that Viscount Dundee, or Bonnie Dundee, was supposed to have been an early Templar Grand Master and to have fallen at Killiecrankie, during the first Jacobite Rising, wearing the Grand Cross of the Order.[70] John Erskine, Earl of Mar (1675 – 1732), a well-known Jacobite leader, who  became earl in 1689, the year of Killiecrankie, is then said to have held office in the Templar Order. Erskine participated in a failed revolt in 1715, after which he lost his estates and went into exile with James II in Rome. In 1721, he was appointed the Stuarts’ ambassador to France. After Erskine, the Templar Order was apparently inactive until its revival in 1745 by Bonnie Prince Charlie.[71]

The earliest reference to Ecossais or Scottish Masonry in England is a “Scots Masters Lodge” held at the Devil’s Tavern, Temple Bar, London, in 1733. This lodge met on the second and fourth Monday of each month, and the lodge was active until 1736. In 1735, twelve masons were “made” Scots Masters at Lodge No. 113 at the Bear Inn, Bath. Five years later, in 1740, there were at least three more references to Masons being made or “rais’d” Scots Masters. Ecossais Masonry appears to have spread to the Continent at an early stage, and references to this type of “High Degree” Masonry in Berlin date from at least 1741 and in France from around 1743.[72]

The foundation of Grand Lodge in London had been followed by the inauguration of Masonic Lodges on the Continent, in 1721 at Mons, in 1725 in Paris, in 1728 at Madrid, in 1731 at The Hague, and in 1733 at Hamburg. Several of the first lodges on the Continent received their warrant from the Grand Lodge of England. But this was not the case with the Grand Lodge of Paris, founded in 1725, which did not receive a warrant till 1743. The men who founded this lodge were Jacobites, whose leader was Charles Radclyffe (1693 – 1746). As a grandson of Charles II of England and Catherine of Braganza, Radclyffe was a cousin of Bonnie Prince Charlie. While English Freemasonry offered three degrees of initiation that became universal throughout the order about 1730, Radclyffe, who was eventually acknowledged grand master of all French lodges, became responsible for promulgating Écossais Freemasonry, which introduced higher degrees.

Radclyffe was the youngest son of Edward Radclyffe, 2nd Earl of Derwentwater and Lady Mary Tudor, an illegitimate daughter of Charles II by
his mistress, Moll Davies.[73] Radcliffe was the brother of Lord Derwentwater (1689 – 1716) who was executed on Tower Hill for treason. Derwentwater was brought up at the exiled court of St. Germain as a companion of the young prince, James Francis Edward Stuart, and remained there at the wish of his mother Queen Mary of Modena, until the death of this father in 1705. Radclyffe had succeeded in escaping from Newgate and made his way to France, where he assumed the title of Lord Derwentwater. It was this Lord Derwentwater, afterwards executed for taking part in the 1745 rebellion, who with several other Jacobites is said to have founded the Grand Lodge of Paris in 1725, and himself to have become Grand Master. Gould relates that “the colleagues of Lord Derwentwater are stated to have been a Chevalier Maskeline, a Squire Heguerty, and others, all partisans of the Stuarts.”[74]

Amongst the Jacobites supporting Radclyffe at the Grand Lodge of Paris was Bonnie Prince Charlie’s tutor and a close friend of John Erskine, as well as a member of the Royal Society, Andrew Michael Ramsay, known as Chevalier Ramsay, then living as an expatriate in Paris. In 1710, Ramsay was converted to the Roman Catholic faith by the Jesuit-educated Francois Fénelon (1651 – 1715), Archbishiop of Cambrai. As a young man, Ramsay joined a quasi-Rosicrucian society called the Philadelphians, and studied with a close friend of Isaac Newton. He later associated with other friends of Newton, including John Desaguliers. He was also a particularly close friend of David Hume. When he lived in Paris, he frequented the Parisian literary club Club de l'Entresol in the company of Montesquieu.

In 1715, during his stay in France, Ramsay also had formed a friendship with the Regent of France, Philippe II, Duke of Orleans (1674 – 1723), the son of Philippe I, Duke of Orléans and Elizabeth Charlotte, Madame Palatine. Philippe II married Françoise Marie de Bourbon, Mademoiselle de Blois, a legitimized daughter of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan. Philippe II was Grand Master of the Ordre de Saint-Lazare, instituted during the Crusades as a body of Hospitallers, who inducted Ramsay into the the neo-chivalric order, after which he known as “Chevalier.”[75] Ramsay was the orator of the lodge of Le Louis d’Argent, whose Worshipful Master was Charles Radclyffe. In 1737, Ramsay wrote his: Discourse pronounced at the reception of Freemasons by Monsieur de Ramsay, Grand Orator of the Order, which provided the basis for Masons’ claims of a Templar inheritance, when he asserted that Freemasonry had begun among crusader knights and that they had formed themselves into Lodges of St John. At the time of the last Crusades, many Lodges were already erected in Germany, Italy, Spain, France and from there in Scotland. James Stewart, 5th High Steward of Scotland (c. 1260 – 1309) was master of a Lodge at Kilwinning, and received Freemasons into his Lodge the Earls of Gloucester and Ulster, the one English, the other Irish. Eventually, explains Ramsay, their lodges and rites were neglected, and only remembered in Great Britain. Nevertheless, they were preserved by Scotsmen of who had received the patronage and protection of the Kings of France.

After Radclyffe, Ramsay, who was born at Ayr near the famous Lodge of Kilwinning, where the Templars are said to have formed their alliance with the Freemasons in 1314, was the second Masons responsible for the spread of Écossais Freemasonry to France. In discussing Masonic High Degrees of the eighteenth century, a distinction to be made between what are known as the Templar Degrees, on the one hand, and the Écossais Degrees on the other. These two types of High Degrees are the most characteristic degrees of eighteenth century Freemasonry. The Écossais degrees are largely concerned with the construction of a new Temple, while the Templar Degrees were entered on the legend that Freemasonry was derived from the Templars.[76] The first person to present this theory of Templar survival was Ramsay.

Rite of Perfection

After the resignation of Radclyffe as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Paris in 1738, Écossais Freemasonry “boldly came forward and claimed to be not merely a part of Masonry but the real Masonry, possessed of superior knowledge and entitled to greater privileges and the right to rule over the ordinary, i.e. Craft Masonry.”[77] It was after 1738, when Radclyffe was succeeded by Louis de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Duc d’Antin (1707 – 1743), great-grandson of Madame de Montespan, that the additional degrees were first heard of. The Rose-Croix degree first adopted by the Freemasons of France in about 1741, was so Catholic in character that is aroused suspicions that it was devised by the Jesuits.[78]

However, on the death of the Duc d’Antin in 1743, he was replaced by Count of Clermont (1709 – 1771), becoming the fifth Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of France.[79] Clermont was the great-grandson of Louis, Grand Condé, who with associates of Menasseh ben Israel, Isaac La Peyrère and Queen Christina, “were negotiating to create a theological-political world state, involving overthrowing the Catholic king of France, among other things.”[80] The Grand Condé’s son Henri Jules, Prince of Condé 1643 – 1709), married Anne Henriette of Bavaria, whose father was Edward, Count Palatine of Simmern (1625 – 1663), the son of Frederick V of the Palatinate and Elizabeth Stuart. Anne Henriette’s mother, Anne Marie Gonzaga, was a great-granddaughter of purported Priory of Sion Grand Master, Ludovico Gonzaga and Henriette of Cleves, a lady-in-waiting of Catherine de Medici. The Count of Clermont was a prince of the blood, as the third and youngest son of Louis de Bourbon, “Duke of Bourbon,” Prince of Condé (1668 – 1710) and Louise Françoise de Bourbon, Mademoiselle de Nantes (1673 – 1743), a legitimated daughter of King Louis XIV of France and his mistress Madame de Montespan. Louise Françoise’s sister, Françoise Marie de Bourbon, married Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, the son of Louis XIV’s brother, Philippe I, Duke of Orléans.

According to some sources, the Comte of Clermont retained the position of Grand Master until his death in 1771, and was succeeded by his cousin, Louis Philippe d’Orléans (1725 – 1785), the father of Philippe Égalité.[81] However, another source claims he was designated Grand Master in 1744 “but soon left the organization, abandoning his title to Lacorne, his dancing master.”[82] Comte de Clermont apparently took little interest in the Order and employed Lacorne, under whose influence the lodges fell into a state of anarchy. The period signified the Grand Lodge’s adherence to English Craft Masonry by proclaiming itself Grande Loge Anglaise de France and reissued the “Constitutions” of Anderson, first published in 1723. Freemasonry was thus divided into warring factions: Lacorne his followers founded a Grand Lodge of their own, and in 1756 the original Freemasons again attempted to make Craft Masonry the national Masonry of France by deleting the word “Anglaise” to become the Grand Loge Nationale de France.

It was not, until after Radclyffe resigned the Grand Mastership of the Grand Lodge of Paris in favor of the Duc d’Antin in 1738, that the additional degrees were first heard of, and it was not until eight years after the Stuart cause was defeated at Culloden, in 1754, that the Rite of Perfection in which the so-called Scots Degrees were incorporated. In 1754, Chevalier de Bonneville founded a chapter composed of “distinguished persons of the court and of the town,” in which some elements of the order of Knights Templars were introduced, and which was known by the name of the Chapter of Clermont because the assemblies were held in the Jesuit college of Clermont.[83] According to Henry W. Coil, however, the chapter was named in honor of the Comte de Clermont.[84] The members of this Clermont Chapter were mostly adherents of the Stuart Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie.[85] C. Lenning, a German bookseller and Freemason living in Paris, claimed in a manuscript titled “Encyclopedia of Freemasonry,” probably written between 1822 and 1828 at Leipzig, that King James II of England, after his flight to France in 1688, resided at the Jesuit College of Clermont, where his followers fabricated certain degrees for the purpose of carrying out their political ends.[86] The system of Freemasonry Bonneville practiced received the name of the Rite of Perfection, or Rite of Heredom, and consisted of twenty-five degrees.[87]

In 1754, the Grand Lodge of the members of the Chapter of Clermont had been founded, and in the following year the Grand Lodge of France acknowledged the privileges which were claimed to be possessed by the so-called Scottish Masons. This action may probably have been with a desire to counterbalance the influence of the Chapter of Clermont. As this order was decidedly aristocratic, and refused admission to less favored individuals, in protest the lower nobility founded Knights of the East, Princes and Sovereigns in 1756.[88] The Knights of the East are said to derive their origin from the captivity of the Jews in Babylon. After seventy-two years of servitude, they were restored to liberty by Cyrus the Great through the intercession of Zerubbabel and Nehemias and permitted to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.[89] The Knights of the East represented the Freemasons who remained in the East after the building of the first Temple, while the Knights of the East and West represented those who traveled West and disseminated the Order over Europe, but who returned during the Crusades and reunited with their ancient Brethren. In obvious allusion to the Templars, they were said to have organized the Order in the year 1118 upon the return of the Holy Land.[90]

Strict Observance

Whereas in England the Grand Lodge in London gave cohesiveness to British Masonry, in Germany there was no single central Masonic authority, which enabled many different varieties of Masonry to emerge. One system, which for a time dominated German Masonry, was the Strict Observance, which claimed to be a revival of the Templar Order. French masonic historian Claude Antoine Thory wrote that Baron Karl Gotthelf von Hund (1722 – 1776) took his Templar degrees in the Chapter of Clermont, established by the Chevalier de Bonneville. According to Masonic historians, the Chapter of Clermont was in existence before 1742. A certain von Marshall had been admitted in the previous year, von Hund himself following in 1743.[91] According to Thory, Baron Hund left France and erected his first Templar Chapter in Unwurde in 1751.[92]

A document of the Strict Observance followed a legend similar to the one reported in the Deuxième Section, de la Maçonnerie parmi les Chrétiens:

After the catastrophe, the Provincial Grand Master of Auvergne, Pierre d'Aumont, fled with two commanders and five knights. In order not to be recognized, they disguised themselves as masons and took refuge in a Scottish island where they found the Grand Commander Georges de Harris and several other brothers, with whom they resolved to continue the Order. On St. John’s Day 1313, they held a chapter in which Aumont, the first of the name, was appointed Grand Master. To avoid persecution, they borrowed symbols from the art of masonry and called themselves Freemasons. [In 1631, the Grand Master of the Temple moved his headquarters to Aberdeen and thereafter the Order spread, under the veil of Freemasonry, in Italy, Germany, Spain and elsewhere.[93]

Hund claimed to have then been initiated in 1741 into the Order of the Temple by “Unknown Superiors,” whose identities he was not to reveal. According to his own account, von Hund was received into the Order, in the presence of the Jacobite Lord Kilmarnock (1705 – 1746), a Scottish peer who joined the 1745 Jacobite Rising, was captured at Culloden and subsequently executed for treason on Tower Hill. Baron von Hund was then received into the Order by an unknown Knight of the Red Feather, whom he later claimed was Bonnie Prince Charlie and whom he assumed to be Grand Master. This person gave Hund permission to found a branch of the neo-Templars in Germany.[94] Falk was one of the “Unknown Superiors” of the Rite of Strict Observance, founded in the 1760s by Karl Gotthelf, Baron Hund (1722 – 1776).[95] Baron von Hund was Intimate Counselor to King Augustus III of Poland, who was Jacob Frank’s godfather at his baptism.[96]

The history of Hund’s Order of the Temple is supposedly revealed in a text known as the Larmenius Charter, a manuscript purportedly created in 1324 by Johannes Marcus Larmenius, meaning “the Armenian,” a Palestinian-born Christian who became a member of The Order of the Temple during the waning years of the Crusades. Not surprisingly, however, most researchers have concluded that it is a forgery, based on analysis of the deciphered code, as well as on the circumstances of the supposed discovery of the charter.[97] In the document, Larmenius claims that the Grand Mastership of the Templars was transmitted to him by the imprisoned Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master. After the Templar exodus from the Holy Land to Cyprus, after the fall of Acre in 1295, Larmenius was left in charge as Templar Seneschal, the second highest rank in the Order, until de Molay was tricked into coming to Paris to be tried for heresy, for which he was eventually executed. In the document, Larmenius states that he transferred his Grand Mastership to Franciscus Theobaldus, the Prior of the Templar Priory still remaining at Alexandria, Egypt. Thus, he secured a line of succession through to its semi-private unveiling at the Convent General of the Order at Versailles in 1705 by Chevalier Ramsay’s friend, Philippe II, Duke of Orleans.

A Convent in Altenberg in 1764 acknowledged Hund’s authority and the Strict Observance grew until there were branches in Russia, Holland, France, Italy and Switzerland with a membership containing many of the princes of Germany, who were prepared to swear allegiance to the Order, the Unknown Superiors and the Provincial Grand Master, Baron von Hund.[98] However, harmony did not prevail for long, as members of the strict Observance tired of waiting for instruction in the from the purported Unknown Superiors.

In 1767, a new Order, Clerici Ordinis Templarii, attempted to fill the vacuum. Johann August Starck (1741 – 1816) was a prolific author and controversial Königsberg theologian, claimed to be an emissary of this order. While teaching in St. Petersburg, Starck had met a Greek by the name of Count Peter Melesino, a lieutenant-general in the Russian Imperial Army, and whose Masonic order claimed the clerics of the Templars as its ancestors.[99] Stack believed that the original Templars had inherited their occult lore from Persia, Syria, and Egypt, passed down to them by an Essene secret society operating in the Middle East during the Crusades.[100] In 1768, Starck joined his clerical brand of Templarism to the Strict Observance. In 1771, there was a grand convention of all the Masonic lodges claiming mystical descent from the Templar Order. Starck’s group was amalgamated to the Strict Observance, while Hund, who could not offer any evidence of the origins of his version of Templarism, was forced to retire and took only an honorary position in the new order. Starck returned to St. Petersburg in 1768, and then in Königsberg in 1769, where he lived next door to Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).[101] Stark’s writings on comparative religion and his peculiar brand of freemasonry led to considerable controversy and unpopularity. Starck’s publication of Hephästion (1775), which traced certain features of Christianity back to pagan roots, precipitated a strong reaction among clerics and the academic community. His anonymous Defense of Freemasonry (1770), that argued the teachings of the Eleusinian mysteries, freemasonry and Christianity were essentially all one.[102]

Frederick the Great

The sister of Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick (1721 – 1792), the Grand Master of the Strict Observance, was married to Frederick II the Great of Prussia (1712 – 1786), who ruled from 1740 to 1786, transforming a backwater patchwork of Baltic lands under Prussia, which would go on in the nineteenth century to unite Germany into a nation-state. Frederick the Great’s father, Frederick William I of Prussia, was married to Sophia Charlotte of Hanover (1668 – 1705), the granddaughter of Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart. Frederick II was therefore a nephew to King George I of England. Sophie Charlotte commissioned the construction of the famous Charlottenburg Palace, the largest palace in Berlin.

The idea of the “enlightened despot” is the theme of an essay by Frederick the Great, a distant cousin of Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel, defending the Prussian system of government.[103]  An enlightened despot is an authoritarian autocrat who exercises his political power based upon the principles of the Enlightenment. Frederick explained: “My principal occupation is to combat ignorance and prejudice… to enlighten minds, cultivate morality, and to make people as happy as it suits human nature, and as the means at my disposal permit.”[104]

In 1738, the year after Ramsay’s oration, Frederick the Great (1712 – 1786), then Crown Prince of Prussia, who for two years had been carrying on a correspondence with the notorious French philosopher Voltaire (1694 – 1778), suddenly showed a curiosity in the secrets of Freemasonry which he had until then denounced as Kinderspiel (“child’s play”). Voltaire was famous for his criticism of Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic Church, known for his use of the phrase “écrasez l’infâme,” referring to aristocratic establishment and the superstition and intolerance of the clergy. Voltaire, who had been imprisoned and persecuted by the French government, eagerly accepted Frederick’s invitation to live at his palace in 1750. Nesta Webster surmised that Frederick recruited Voltaire to undertake the construction of a Templarist narrative subversive of the Catholic Church.[105]

Most modern biographers agree that Frederick was primarily homosexual, and that his sexual orientation was central to his life.[106] At age sixteen, Frederick seems to have embarked upon a love affair with Peter Karl Christoph von Keith, a page of his father who was a year older than him. As a result thereof, Keith was sent away to near the Dutch frontier, while Frederick was temporarily sent to his father's hunting lodge “to repent of his sin.”[107] Frederick’s relationship with Hans Hermann von Katte, a Prussian officer several years older than Frederick, was also believed by his father King Frederick William to be romantic, he had von Katte put to death.[108] Hellfire Club member William Hogarth’s painting The Toilette features a satirical depiction of Frederick where a flautist is standing next to a painting of Zeus as an eagle abducting Ganymede, a symbol for the beautiful young male who attracted homosexual desire and love.[109] After a demoralizing defeat on the battlefield, Frederick wrote: “Fortune has it in for me; she is a woman, and I am not that way inclined.”[110] Frederick spent a lot of time at Sanssouci, his favorite residence in Potsdam, in a circle that was exclusively male, and whose palace gardens included a Temple of Friendship, which celebrated homoerotic themes of Greek Antiquity, and which is decorated with portraits of Orestes and Pylades, has been presented by some authors of the Roman era as romantic.[111] At Sanssouci, Frederick entertained his most esteemed guests, especially Voltaire, whom he asked in 1750 to come to live with him. Their friendship and correspondence, which spanned almost fifty years, began as a flirtation.[112]

As such, he underwent a speedy initiation on the night of August 14-15, as he was passing through Brunswick.[113] In 1740, after his accession to the throne, Frederick presided over a lodge at Charlottenburg, where he received into the Order two of his brothers, his brother-in-law, and Duke Friedrich Wilhelm of Holstein-Beck. At his request, the Baron de Bielfeld (1717 – 1770) and his privy councillor Jordan founded “The Three Globes” lodge at Berlin, the Masonic Grand Lodge of Germany, which by 1746 had no less than fourteen lodges under its jurisdiction.

Webster notes the significance of that fact that in 1753, a year following the official foundation of the Strict Observance, Lord Holdernesse, in a letter to the British Ambassador in Paris, headed “Very secret,” refers to “the influence which the King of Prussia has of late obtained over all the French Councils.” A few weeks later Lord Albemarle mentioned “the great influence of the Prussian Court over the French Councils by which they are so blinded as not to be able to judge for themselves.”[114]

In 1762, Frederick was acknowledged as the head of Freemasonry in Germany, and formulated the Grand Constitutions of 1762. In 1758, according to Scottish Rite history, the Chapter of Clermont merged into a body organized at Paris called the Council of Emperors of the East and the West, which had its Chamber in the old Grand Lodge of France, the supreme Masonic authority in France. Both bodies were under the same Grand Master, Count of Clermont.[115] The members of Council of Emperors of the East and the West assumed the titles of Sovereign Prince Masons, Substitutes General of the Royal Art, Grand Superintendents and officers of the Grand and Sovereign Lodge of St. John of Jerusalem. They organized the Rite of Perfection, which consisted of twenty-five degrees, the highest of which was the Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret. Also in 1758, the degrees were established in Berlin and adopted the Grand Lodge of the Three Globes, which Frederick the Great is said to have merged with the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite.[116] It is said that Frederick the Great “formed and promulgated” what is known as the Grand Constitutions of 1762, which were finally ratified in Berlin, Prussia, and proclaimed throughout the world for the government of all Lodges, Councils, Chapters, Colleges, and Consistories of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite over the surface of the two hemispheres. In 1767, the Mother Lodge “The Three Globes” became submerged in the Rite of Strict Observance as L’union.

[1] Marsha Keith Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, Secret Agent on Earth and in Heaven (Leiden: Brill, 2011) p. 257.

[2] Schuchard. “Why Mrs. Blake Cried.” See A.M. Ramsay. The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (Glasgow: Robert Foulis, l748-49), II, pp. 173-85, 304, 356, 537-38.

[3] Marsha Keith Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, Secret Agent on Earth and in Heaven (Leiden: Brill, 2011) p. 257.

[4] Swedenborg. Apocalypse Revealed, #11. Cited in Keith Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, Secret Agent on Earth and in Heaven, p. 259.

[5] Ramsay, Philosophical Principles, II, 304. Cited in Keith Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, Secret Agent on Earth and in Heaven, p. 259.

[6] Daniel Garber & Michael Ayers. Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, Volume 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 407.

[7] Nancy Mitford. The Sun King (Penguin Publishing, London, 1966), p 55.

[8] Samuel Guichenon. Histoire généalogique de la royale Maison de Savoie justifiée par Titres, Fondations de Monastères, Manuscripts, anciens Monuments, Histoires & autres preuves autentiques (Lyon, Guillaume Barbier, 1660), p. 708. Retrieved from http://cura.free.fr/dico3/1101cn135.html 

[9] Diana Zahuranec. “Turin Legends: Royal Alchemy.” (August 23, 2015). Retrieved from https://dianazahuranec.com/2015/08/23/turin-legends-royal-alchemy/

[10] James Picciotto. Sketches of Anglo-Jewish History, ed. Israel Finestine (1875; rev. ed. Soncino Press, l956), 41; Cecil Roth. “The Middle Period of Anglo-Jewish History (1290-1655) Reconsidered,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 19 (1955-59), p. 11.

[11] Louis Crompton. Homosexuality & Civilization (Harvard University Press, 2006), p 342.

[12] Ibid., p 341.

[13] Philippe Erlanger. Louis XIV, translated from the French by Stephen Cox, (Praeger Publishers, New York, 1970, p. 75 (footnote); Claude Dufresne. Les Orléans (Paris: Criterion, 1991, p. 33.

[14] Dirk Van der Cruysse. Madame Palatine, princesse européenne. (Fayard, 1988), p. 165.

[15] Joscelyn Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, (State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 101.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Eleanor Herman. Sex with kings: 500 years of adultery, power, rivalry, and revenge (New York: Morrow, 2004), pp. 113.

[18] Montague Summers. Geography of Witchcraft (1927; reprint Kessinger Publishing, 2003).

[19]. Marsha Keith Schuchard. “Judaized Scots, Jacobite Jews, and the Development of Cabalistic Freemasonry.” Revision of Paper Presented at Symposium on “Western Esotericism and Jewish Mysticism,” 18th International Congress of International Association for History of Religions (Durban, South Africa, August 2000).

[20] Edward Gelles. The Jewish Journey: A Passage through European History (The Radcliffe Press, 2016), p. 154.

[21]. Henry Fielding, The Jacobites’ Journal and Related Writings, ed. W.B. Coley (Wesleyan UP, l975), pp. 282, 285. For his linking of Jacobites, Freemasons, and Cabalists, see pp. 95-98, 103, 109.

[22]. D. Katz. Jews in History, pp. 146-52.

[23] Richard Lodge. The History of England – From the Restoration to the Death of William III 1660–1702 (1910), p. 268.

[24] William Thomas Walsh. Philip II (New York, Sheed & Ward, Inc., 1937).

[25] Lloyd Strickland (ed. and transl.) Leibniz and the Two Sophies: The Philosophical Correspondence, (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011).

[26] Hugh Chisholm, ed. “Albert.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 1 (11th ed.). (Cambridge University Press, 1911), p. 497.

[27] Anthony R. Wagner. “IV.—The Swan Badge and the Swan Knight.” Archaeologia, 97 (1959), p. 133.

[28] D. B. Horn. “The Youth of Frederick the Great 1712–30.” In Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia, 9–10. 3rd ed. (London: English Universities Press, 1964).

[29] Guichenon. Histoire généalogique, p. 708.

[30] Stefanie Beth Siegmund. The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community (Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 446 n. 37.

[31] Diana Zahuranec. “Turin Legends: Royal Alchemy.” (August 23, 2015). Retrieved from https://dianazahuranec.com/2015/08/23/turin-legends-royal-alchemy/

[32] Catholic Jew. “Frankists and the Catholic Church.” alternativegenhist.blogspot.ca (April 15, 2014).

[33] Ibid.

[34] Edward Gelles. The Jewish Journey: A Passage through European History (The Radcliffe Press, 2016), p. 151.

[35] Arthur Edward Waite. New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (1921).

[36] Frater Alamantra. “Looking into the Word,” Ashé Journal, Vol 3, Issue 1, Spring 2004. p. 49.

[37] Ibid., p. 48.

[38] Ibid., p. 62.

[39] Daniel P. Mannix. The Hellfire Club (eNet Press, 2015), p. 107.

[40] Ibid., p. 24.

[41] Ibid., p. 43.

[42] Geoffrey Ashe. The Hell-Fire Clubs: A History of Anti-Morality (Great Britain: Sutton Publishing, 2005), p. 114.

[43] Ibid., p. 133.

[44] Mannix. The Hellfire Club, p. 38.

[45] Ibid., p. 33.

[46] Ibid., p. 31.

[47] James Shelby Downard. “Sorcery, Sex, Assassination and the Science of Symbolism,” in Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History, ed. Jim Keith (Feral House, l993), p. 59.

[48] “Chudleigh, Elizabeth (1720–1788).” Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia.

[49] William Hunt. “Chudleigh, Elizabeth.” Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 10.

[50] James Shelby Downard. “Sorcery, Sex, Assassination and the Science of Symbolism,” in Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History, ed. Jim Keith (Feral House, l993), pp. 62-63.

[51]  George William Speth. Royal Freemasons (Masonic Publishing Company, 1885), p. 3.

[52] Aubrey Newman. “Jews in English Freemasonry.” Transcript of a lecture delivered by Professor Aubrey Newman, Emeritus Professor of History at Leicester University, England, to the Israel Branch of the Jewish Historical Society of England in Jerusalem, Israel, on 14 April 2015.

[53]. Marcus Lipton. “Francis Francia--the Jacobite Jew,” Transactions of Jewish Historical Society of England, 11 (l911), pp. 190-205.

[54]. John Shaftesley. “Jews in English Regular Freemasonry, 1717-1860.” Transactions of Jewish Historical Society of England, 25 (l977), p. 159.

[55]. J. Toland, Reasons, 37.

[56]. Marsha Keith Schuchard. “Judaized Scots, Jacobite Jews, and the Development of Cabalistic Freemasonry.”

[57]. Ibid.

[58]. Wallace McLeod. “The Hudibrastick Poem of 1723,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 107 (1994), pp. 15, 20.

[59] Leon Zeldis. “Some Sephardic Jews in Freemasonry.” Masonic Papers. Pietre-Stones Review of Freemasonry. Retrieved from http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/zeldis14.html

[60] “The Families of Mendes and da Costa.” The Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. 82, Part 1 (January 1812), p.23.

[61] Marsha Keith Schuchard. Emanuel Swedenborg, Secret Agent on Earth and in Heaven: Jacobites, Jews and Freemasons in Early Modern Sweden (2011).

[62]. Schuchard. “Judaized Scots, Jacobite Jews, and the Development of Cabalistic Freemasonry.”

[63] John F. Shaftesley, “Jews in English Freemasonry in the 18th and 19th Centuries.” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum (AQC), Vol. 92 (1979), pp.25-63.

[64] Jonathan Israel. The Dutch Republic (1995), pp. 587-591.

[65] Leon Zeldis. “Some Sephardic Jews in Freemasonry.” Masonic Papers. Pietre-Stones Review of Freemasonry. Retrieved from http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/zeldis14.html

[66] Schuchard. “Judaized Scots, Jacobite Jews, and the Development of Cabalistic Freemasonry.”

[67] Michael Howard. Secret Societies: Their Influence and Power from Antiquity to the Present Day (Simon and Schuster, 2007), p.48.

[68] De la maçonnerie parmi les chrétiens/Section 2. Retrieved from: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/De_la_ma%C3%A7onnerie_parmi_les_chr%C3%A9tiens/Section_2

[69] Edward Corp. The Stuart Court in Rome: A Legacy of Exile (Ashgate, 2003.).

[70] Keith Schuchard. Restoring the Temple of Vision, p 767.

[71] “The History Of The Order of the Temple in Scotland. The Autonomous Grand Priory of Scotland.” Retrieved from http://www.skt.org.uk/Our%20History%202/our_history_page_2.html

[72] Henrik Bogdan. “An Introduction to the High Degrees of Freemasonry.” Heredom, Volume 14, 2006), p. 2.

[73] Darryl Lundy (2010-02-05). thePeerage.com, Retrieved from http://www.thepeerage.com/p10843.htm#i108424

[74] R.F. Gould, History of Freemasonry. III, p. 138.

[75] Facsimile of the ms Minutes, Renaissance Traditionnelle, 114 (April 1998):110-111; cited in Ramsay’s Life, The Beginnings of French Freemasonry, The Two Main Versions of the Discours by W.Bro.Alain Bernheim, PS Review of Freemasonry. Retrieved from http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/bernheim_ramsay01.html

[76] Henrik Bogdan. Western Esotericism and Rituals of Initiation (SUNY Press, 2012),. p. 96.

[77] E. J. Castle. Proceedings against the Templars, A.Q.C., Vol. XX. Part III.

[78] Clavel. Histoire pittoresque de la Franc-Maçonnerie, p. 166.

[79] Supreme Council, 33 ̊ U.S.A. Condensed History of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite Masonry from Its Introduction Into the United States (Drummond & Neu, 1887), p. 5.

[80] Richard Popkin. “Chapter 14: The Religious Background of Seventeenth Century Philosophy.” In Daniel Garber & Michael Ayers, (eds.). The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-century Philosophy, Volume 1. (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

[81] Henry Wilson Coil. Coil’s Masonic Encyclopedia (Richmond, Virginia: Macoy Publishing Co., 1961).

[82] Dictionnaire de biographie française, eds. vol. 8 (Prevost & d'Amat, Paris: Letouzey, 1959), p. 1491.

[83] J. G. Findel. History of Freemasonry (London: Asher & Co, 1866), p. 226.

[84] Henry W. Coil. “Clermont, Chapter of.” Coil's Masonic Encyclopedia (Richmond, Va: Macoy Publ. Co. Inc., 1996), p. 135.

[85] J. G. Findel. History of Freemasonry (London: Asher & Co, 1866), p. 227.

[86] Albert G. Mackey. “Stuart Masonry.” Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Chicago, IL: Masonic History Co., 1909), pp. 981–982.

[87] “Perfection, Rite Of.” Masonic Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://masonicshop.com/encyclopedia/

[88] Albert C. Mackey. The History of Freemasonry. Vol. 7 (New York: The Masonic History Company).

[89] Albert C. Mackey. “Knight of the East.” Encyclopedia of Freemasonry and Its Kindred Sciences.

[90] Albert C. Mackey. “Knight of the East and West.” Encyclopedia of Freemasonry and Its Kindred Sciences; see also Baron de Tschoudy. L’Étoile Flamboyante, I. 20 (1766), pp. 24-9.

[91]  Arthur Edward Waite. “The Templar Orders in Freemasonry” (1927).

[92] Albert C. Mackey. The History of Freemasonry. Vol. 7 (New York: The Masonic History Company).

[93] Paul Arnold. La Rose Croix et ses rapports avec la franc-maçonnerie (G.-P. Maisonneuve & Larose, 1970), p. 237; Complete text in Claude-Antoine Thory. Acta latomorum ou Chronologie de l’histoire de la franche-maçonnerie française et étrangère (Dufart, 1815), V. 1, p. 329.

[94] Gould. History of Freemasonry, III. pp. 101,
110.

[95] Webster. Secret Societies and Subversive Movements.

[96] Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince. The Sion Revelation: The Truth About the Guardians of Christ’s Sacred Bloodline (Simon and Schuster, 2006), p. 319.

[97] Christopher Hodapp & Alice Von Kannon. The Templar Code for Dummies (For Dummies, 2007), p. 176.

[98] “The Rite of Strict Observance.” Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon. Retrieved from http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/texts/strict_observance.html

[99] “Johann August, Freiherr von Starck (1741-1816).” The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers, ed. Heiner F. Klemme & Manfred Kuehn (Bloomsbury, 2010).

[100] Howard. Secret Societies, p. 69.

[101] “Johann August, Freiherr von Starck (1741-1816).” The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers, ed. Heiner F. Klemme & Manfred Kuehn (Bloomsbury, 2010).

[102] Ibid.

[103] Reprinted in Isaac Kramnick. The Portable Enlightenment Reader. (Penguin Books, 1995).

[104] Giles MacDonogh. Frederick the Great: A Life in Deed and Letters (2001) p. 341

[105] Nesta Webster. Secret Societies and Subversive Movements.

[106] Reinhard Alings. “Don’t ask – don’t tell: War Friedrich schwul?” In Friederisiko: Friedrich der Große: Die Ausstellung (Munich: Hirmer, 2012), pp. 238–247.

[107] Margaret Goldsmith. Frederick the Great. (Van Rees Press, 1929). pp. 50–53, 57–67.

[108] Nancy Mitford. Frederick the Great (New York: nyrb, 1970), p. 34.

[109] Bernd Krysmanski. Das einzig authentische Porträt des Alten Fritz? Is the only true likeness of Frederick the Great to be found in Hogarth’s ‘Marriage A-la-Mode’? (Dinslaken, Germany: Krysman Press, 2015).

[110] Tim Blanning. Frederick the Great: King of Prussia (New York: Random House, 2016), p. 230.

[111] J.D. Steakley (1988). “Sodomy in enlightenment Prussia: From execution to suicide.” Journal of Homosexuality, 16 (1–2): 163–75.

[112] Louis Crompton. Homosexuality and Civilization (Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 504–518; Giles MacDonogh. Frederick the Great: A Life in Deed and Letters (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2001), p. 117.

[113] R.F. 
Gould. History of Freemasonry, III. p. 241.

[114] cited in Webster. Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, p. 92.

[115] Supreme Council, 33 ̊ U.S.A. Condensed History of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite Masonry from Its Introduction Into the United States, p. 5.

[116] Albert G. Mackey. A Lexicon of Freemasonry (Philadelphia: Moss, Brother & Co., 1860), p. 134.

Volume Two

1. The Elizabethan Age

2. The Great Conjunction

3. The Alchemical Wedding

4. The Rosicrucian Furore

5. The Invisible College

6. 1666

7. The Royal Society

8. America

9. Redemption Through Sin

10. Oriental Kabbalah

11. The Grand Lodge

12. The Illuminati

13. The Asiatic Brethren

14. The American Revolution

15. Haskalah

16. The Aryan Myth

17. The Carbonari

18. The American Civil War

19. God is Dead

20. Theosophy

21. Shambhala