NEW WORLD

ORDER

FREEMASONRY AND
THE ROMAN SPIRIT
©Terry Boardman June 2002

Christ came to earth so that each one of us

could find the meaning of our own being - our
relationship to the spiritual world - for ourselves
in true spiritual freedom. With the Incarnation of
Christ the age of spiritual elitism or spiritual
aristocracy - the age of priests - came to an end;
the seeds were planted for a spiritual democracy.
Few lessons stand out more clearly from the way
in which Christ dealt with the spiritual authorities
in the Holy Land at that time. He referred to
those would-be spiritual authorities, the
Sadducees and Pharisees, in no uncertain terms.
He may have told Peter to feed His sheep, but
this was no injunction to perpetuate priestly
elitism in the form of a Roman Papacy, although
the Bishops of Rome and the later authorities in
the Vatican were to take it as such. His disciples,
still uncomprehending, may have called Him
"master" (Rabboni) but he called them brothers
and said that human beings were to become as
gods. The spiritual childhood of the mass of
mankind was drawing to a close. However, it
was to be a very long time - until the
Reformation of the 16th century - before this
was realised in Europe.

The Irony
A great historical irony has taken place since the
Incarnation, the kind of irony with which history
is replete, though this has been one of the
greatest of all such ironies. Many of the Gnostics
and Manichaeans knew the secret that ultimately,
evil is a former good turned bad, and that evil
can also be turned once again to the good.
Despite the Incarnation and Christ's union with
mankind and the Earth, those who could not free
themselves from the thinking of the spiritual
aristocracy of priests and priest kings - sought
to maintain dominance of that aristocracy in the
Churches of Rome and Byzantium. Those who
had justifiably been the shepherds of mankind
prior to the Incarnation wished to remain the
shepherds for all time; this is still the intention of
the Vatican today. Consequently, they sought to
repress those who, either out of a pre-Christian
or out of a Christened Gnostic consciousness,
wished to find their own path to the divine. This
led to the persecutions of 'the heretics' and a
centuries-long attempt to snuff out a Christian
Gnosis based on the individual's self-
enlightenment. From Rudolf Steiner's insights
into the deeper structure of history and the
evolution of consciousness, it is clear that this
effort by the authoritarian forces of the past,
doomed though it was in the long term,
nevertheless played a vital role in the
development of mankind, because without it, the
European culture of the West would not have
been able to develop a materialistic and scientific
society. It would, like the non-European cultures,
have remained focused on the spiritual and
divine planes of existence Natural science would
not therefore have developed and the modern
world would not have have developed its rich
knowledge of the physical and material aspects
of earthly life. This knowledge is essential to
earthly man; it is part of the the total process of
self-knowledge, but only insofar as we are
physical beings. Since we are not merely
physical beings but also spiritual beings,
physical knowledge must be complemented by
spiritual knowledge. One of the most important
keys for understanding the history of the modern
age since 1500 is the thought that the age of
natural scientific knowledge is being permeated
with and complemented by spiritual scientific
knowledge and indeed, if this process is
somehow frustrated and blocked by those
convinced materialists who believe that only
natural science has validity, then human culture
will increasingly be afflicted by sickness and
death.

The Gnostic and Manichaean stream with its rich

veins of Near Eastern esoteric knowledge of
spiritual illumination available to the individual
was forced underground as a result of repression
by the established Church. Over the centuries it
flowed on underground and metamophosed into
the streams of the Bogomils and Cathars. With
the Crusades, it returned to its roots in the Near
East, was replenished and flowed back with
renewed vigour into Europe in various forms,
for example, in the form of the Templars and
their later successors, the Freemasons as well as
various later Protestant mystical sects. However,
while the Bogomils and Cathars had few friends
in high places and were rooted out and
exterminated wherever they could be found, the
more successful Templars and Freemasons
managed to ensconce themselves within the very
Establishment of Christendom. The Templars
became the elite knights and bankers of Christian
Europe, while Freemasonry was ultimately to
become the private religion of many in the
social elites of 18th and 19th century Europe and
America. After the brutal suppression of the
Templar Order throughout Europe by the French
King Philip IV aided by his puppet, Pope
Clement V, the surviving Templars re-
established themselves in Portugal, where they
became the Order of Christ; in Prussia, where
they joined the Teutonic Knights; and especially
in the Scotland of Robert the Bruce, where they
married into Scottish aristocratic families and,
led by the Sinclair family, later midwifed the
birth of modern Freemasonry.

And now comes the great irony. A significant

part - though not the whole - of this great
stream of underground Gnostic esoteric life
which had been constantly persecuted by that
ghost of the Roman Imperial spirit, the
Vatican, and had been constantly struggling
against that spirit in innumerable ways, has
itself, since the 18th century, metamorphosed
into that same Roman spirit: anti-democratic,
imperial and aristocratic. This transformation
reached its apotheosis with the founding of the
United States of America, or better named, the
United States of Freemasonry. Such a
nomenclature may seem like an exaggeration, but
that was how the USA was in fact regarded by
many Masons, especially in the period 1775-
1830. [1] The momentous year 1776 - which
incidentally also saw the publications of Adam
Smith's Weath of Nations, the first volume of
Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, Friedrich von Klinger's Die Zwillinge
(The Twins) and Sturm und Drang, as well as
the founding of the Illuminati secret society by
the Jesuit-trained Adam Weishaupt - witnessed
the foundation of a completely new kind of state,
a self-conscious Utopia or Promised Land,
forged and led by men who were either
Freemasons or who were infomed by the spirit of
Freemasonry, a spirit which, by the late 18th
century, had become largely non-Christian and
was predominantly Deist. The United States was
self-consciously founded by Freemasons and
non-Freemasons with a New Rome in mind. The
early 18th century Freemasonic emphasis on
brotherly love and gentility receded in favour of
the patrician Roman concept of virtue, which
was seen as the glue that would be able to hold
together the turbulent social forces of the
insecure new Republic. Ancient Rome of course
saw a continuous struggle between those within
it who wished to maintain Rome's republican
heritage and those who looked back to an older
monarchical heritage; these latter were the
supporters of Roman imperialism, who backed
the Emperor against the Senate. The republican
tradition was the legitimate and modern historical
direction for Rome; it was a step forward in
social and political development, whereas the
notion of the divine Caesars was a harking back
to the past ages of Egypt, Persia, Babylon and
the age of oriental despotism. A similar struggle
between the imperial and aristocratic element on
the one hand and the republican or democratic
element on the other hand revealed itself very
early on in the history of the United States in for
example, the struggle between Thomas Jefferson
and Alexander Hamilton. Something of the same
had been prefigured in the split that broke out
within Freemasonry itself in the 1750s, first in
Britain, the homeland of Freemasonry, and soon
spread to the colonies. The wealthier, more elitist
gentlemen of post-1717 Freemasonry, identified
with the Hanoverian successionm who became
known as the Moderns were opposed by the
upstart Antients, whose members often had
Jacobite sympathies and were initially drawn
more from lower social orders. By the time of
the Revolution, the Antients had come to
dominate American Freemasonry yet by 1820
they too had become elitists as American
Freemasonry enjoyed its golden age of prestige
and authority.

Right from the very beginning of the colonisation

of North America by the British, there had been
this polarity. In Virginia the first royal colony
was founded at Jamestown under the aegis of
King James I, formerly James VI of Scotland
(1603-25), who had himself brought the Templar
heritage of Freemasonry south when he
succeeded Elizabeth I as King of England. A
highly complex character, a dualistic Geminian
named by Steiner as the greatest occultist of his
day, James attempted to make peace with Rome
and the Catholic Powers, was severe with those
he considered witches and Puritans, was
responsible for the production of the King James
Bible, refused to aid the Rosicrucian-inspired
Frederick of the Palatinate, King of Bohemia, his
own son-in-law, thus unintentinally provoking
the 30 Years War, and held strongly to the
mediaeval notion of the divine right of kings.
Steiner saw James as a symptom of his age in
that he had a foot in both the mediaeval and
modern consciousnesses. In much of James' life
we do indeed see the symptoms of the ancient
stream of Gnostic wisdom but his case, as with
King Solomon (and James was often called the
Solomon of his time), attached to a royal and
imperial cause which had its roots in even earlier
times. With the Crusades, however, the Gnostic
stream had bifurcated into an aristocratic and
hierarchical, even priestly element - the Templars
- and a more democratic element: the Cathars
and those proto-Protestant groups that came after
them, such as the Wyclifites, the Lollards, the
Brothers of the Common Life, and others who
became ever more radically democratic,
culminating in the Levellers and Diggers of the
English Civil War. James' aristocratic
Freemasonic stream put down roots in Virginia
and the later southern states of the USA, while
the more democratic Protestants arrived in the
North on the Mayflower in 1620. Already in that
year the seeds of the American Civil War were
planted, for the two streams - the one more
modern, democratic, and egalitarian; the other
ancient, oligarchic, hierarchical - were bound to
clash, as they had in their homeland of England.

The result, in 1865, was an inevitable victory for

the forces of historical progress. Just as Roman
imperialism was doomed to collapse under the
weight of its own obsolescence and decadence,
so too was Southern aristocracy. And yet within
a year, the ancient forces struck back, using the
old weapons of clandestine manouevre the
Gnostic underground had been forced to rely on
during their long centuries of suppression by the
Vatican. In April 1866, Albert Pike, a leading
member of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in the
USA was invited to the White House by
President Andrew Johnson, "whereupon he was
conferred the title of 32nd degree Scottish Rite
freemason. Just a few months prior to that, Pike
was hiding in Canada, hunted by the U.S. Army
for complicity in the Lincoln assassination.
Johnson, however, soon pardoned him upon
assuming office." [2]. Both in Britain and in the
USA in the 18th and 19th centuries, aristocratic,
oligarchical and anti-democratic forces working
within the hierarchical structure of Freemasonry
ensconced themselves within the political
establishments of those countries - to what end ?
Study of the ideas of the leaders of these forces
within Freemasonry reveals that their dream,
intention and plan was to create out of Britain
and America a New Rome, a new World Empire,
a new uniformity of thought and lifestyle that
would embrace the whole world. To this end, a
new state, the United States of America, was
established, the first "world state", made up of
immigrants from all over the world rather than
just from one ethnic community - a New Atlantis
as intended by the British Elizabethan occultist
John Dee, adviser to the Virgin Queen, and by
Francis Bacon, James I's Chancellor, and ruled
by a scientific priestly elite. This is how the
Freemasons of the Revolutionary and post-
Revolutionary generations saw themselves.
"Through Washington, Lafayette and other
master mins and heroic brethren Freemasonry
gave to this country the principles of civil and
religious liberty, and has preserved those very
'fundamental laws and principles' which
guarantee to all freedom and eqality."[3] The
Masons suffered a major setback in the northern
States of the Union when their movement fell
from grace in the late 1820s and early 30s as a
result of the populist Antimasonic campaign
which even produced the USA's first third
political party, the Antimasonic Party. Although
the aristocratic South was not as strongly
affected by the antimasonic furore in the North,
Masonry suffered a huge blow to its reputation in
the USA; membership plummeted and did not
revive until the 1850s. The insecurities of the
Civil War and President Johnson did much to
restore its fortunes, so that by the 1880s
Freemasonry was once again at the top of the
American social pole. When the 22-story
Chicago Masonic Temple was opened in 1894, it
was the tallest building in the world and the most
expensive.

The aristocratic and elitist social order of the

19th century received a severe setback in the
cataclysm of the First World War; in Europe
aristocracy could no longer flaunt itself in the
way it had done before 1914. Alarmed by the
victories of the Communists in Russia and
elsewhere, aristocrats and hierarchs in European
and American 'democracies' veiled themselves
and retired from the limelight. So too did their
accomplices and fellow travellers in the
Freemasonic movement. Before 1914, Masonic
processions and ceremonies in public were
common throughout Europe and America. After
1918 they became less and less visible. The
trappings of pseudo-mediaevalism were less
attractive in the harsh modernist atmosphere of
the 1920s. The Craft became tremendously
popular in the USA in the 1920s but was forced
by the temper of the times to become
increasingly secular. The Depression was a
hammer blow to American Masonry just as the
Antimasonic movement had been exactly a
hundred years before. Masonry in the UK, where
socialism in the 20s and 30s was a more real
threat to middle class values, hid its light under
a large bushel of silence and invisibility which
continued until the early 1980s when it was
forced back into public scrutiny by critical
expose books such as Stephen Knight's The
Brotherhood . In response, the Masons, led by
their Grand Master, the Duke of Kent, were
forced into damage limitation PR exercises. In
the context of the enormous social changes
brought about by the First World War, the
oligarchical forces which had been working
through the higher echelons of Freemasonry
sought new avenues by which they could
influence events in a semi-clandestine way.
There were the so-called 'thinktanks' and research
institutes such as The Royal Institute of
International Affairs (Chatham House), founded
1919 on the back of The Round Table (1910) and
the American offshoot of the RIIA, The
Council On Foreign Relations (1921). Many
more followed and are still with us. These
organisations, such as the Bilderbergers (1954),
the Trilateral Commission (1973), the New
Atlantic Initiative (1996) and the like pretend to
be non-conspiratorial and open to public
scrutiny, but in fact, their networking and policy-
influencing operations, more or less clandestine,
are elitist to the marrow. They are merely
instruments of applying oligarchical leverage in a
democratic age, when the more overtly ancient
ceremonial forms of the secretive Freemasonic
lodges arouse too much suspicion and are no
longer deemed as effective.

The circle has thus been completed: from

spiritual resistance to the first imperial Rome and
its Papal successor, to spiritual inspiration of the
second imperial Rome - this has been the path of
one significant element of the stream that began
with the Gnostics around the time of Christ, or
perhaps, one could even say, of the stream that
began with Cain's struggle with Abel. The Order
of the Templars carried within it something truly
noble in the spiritual sense, but it was also
infected by historical illegitimacy, a harking back
to an essentially pre-Christian esotericism in an
effort to combat what was seen as the Satanic
spirit of Rome - the spirit of total control and
unfreedom - the denial of the individual's own
path to God. The same is true of much in the
New Age or neo-pagan movements of today,
which, in their ignorance of the esoteric essence
of the Christian mystery, and appalled by the
many crimes of the Christian churches over the
centuries, throw the baby out with the bathwater,
and reject all that is connected with Christianity
as either deceitful or defunct.

How and why has this circle been closed ? Why

have the modern successors of the original
proponents of spiritual freedom become the
architects of unfreedom in the crypto-totalitarian
New World Order that is being created in the
21st century ? As Rudolf Steiner said many
times, this question can only be understood in the
light of esoteric knowledge.

Unlike the life of Buddha, that of Jesus Christ

was inextricably bound up with the question of
evil. Right at the beginning of the life of Jesus in
the Gospel of Matthew, Herod ordered a
massacre of infants in an effort to destroy Jesus.
Jesus had to confront the spiritual and political
authorities of his day, Jewish and Roman. He
was betrayed by a kiss from his own disciple,
tortured and killed by the imperial power of
Rome, and his name was later appropriated by a
Roman Church that committed or endorsed
frequent acts of torture, massacre and
persecution. Christianity has thus passed through
its own Crucifixion - something which can be
seen as necessary in its own development since
the Resurrection, which is the very essence of
Christianity, could not occur without a death
preceding it: no new life without a death
beforehand. And that Resurrection had to follow
a violent death, not merely a death resulting from
illness or age, as in the case of the Buddha who
lay down and died at the the age of 80.
Furthermore, Christ's violent death was presaged
by a betrayal by one of His own disciples. It was
not merely a violent death, but one brought about
by betrayal - the perversion of what was right.
Christ was not merely murdered but executed -
an execution sanctioned by the whole legal and
political system of His day, including the pre-
eminent 'global' superpower; all were involved;
indeed a crowd of His own people, urged on by
their spiritual leaders, called for His execution.
The nature of evil is very much involved here:
what was originally right and justified - the
spiritual leadership of the people of Israel, the
Republic of Rome (SPQR: the Senate and the
People of Rome), the Temple in Jerusalem
(Christ was arrested by the captains of the
Temple - Luke Chapter 22:52) - all become
perverted in an act of deceitful persecution and
official murder.

The Temple and the Roman

Imperial Spirit
The Jerusalem Temple and Imperial Rome: these
are what have linked Freemasonry with the New
Rome of the New World Order since the days of
the Templars, who based their esotericism on the
symbology of the Temple of Solomon which
they had learned in the Crusades. Their very
name was associated with the Temple, and many
of Freemasonry's rites too are based on the
Temple of Solomon. The god-given esotericism
of ancient Israel was thus conjoined with what
was essentially an imperial Roman will to power.
Today we see again an alliance between those
forces that lead the Jewish people and those that
lead the New Rome; indeed the State of Israel
today, just as in Herod's day, is a client state of
an Imperial Rome, the only difference being that,
unlike Herod's kingdom, without the aid of the
New Rome, the modern State of Israel would
very likely not have survived.

The support of the New Rome (USA) for modern

Israel is based on several factors, two of which
are of direct Gnostic origin. First, the elitist 'neo-
Gnostics' (those 'in the know') who presume to
guide America's destiny are the heirs to those
elitist Freemasonic leaders of 18th, 19th and 20th
century America (from Benjamin Franklin and
George Washington to 33rd degreee Masons
Harry Truman and Franklin D. Roosevelt) whose
traditions centred on the Temple of Solomon.
Their interest is thus in the land of Israel and
with the people of Israel - both of which are
essentially pre-Christian Old Testament
motivations. Second, the other, more democratic
'Gnostics', the fundamentalist American
'Christians', are heirs to the Puritan tradition of
the Pilgrims, which ultimately goes back to what
I have characterised as the non-oligarchical
stream of Gnosticism.[4] Those in this stream
saw themselves in the New World as God's
Chosen People, just like the Israelites, removed
by God from out of the land of perdition. They
also believed, based on their misinterpretation of
Biblical texts, and still believe, that they have a
mission to help the Jews return to the Holy Land
so that the Second Coming can take place.
American support for Israel therefore comes both
from the elite clubhouse and lodge, and also
from the populist evangelical chapel.

There is a third factor at work in American

support for Israel, or rather, for US remote
control of Israel, which has deeper esoteric roots
and is only understandable in the light of
esoteric knowledge. This is that there will in the
near future be an incarnation of the spiritual
being known to Anthroposophers as Ahriman
and to traditional Christians as Satan. The
Russian writer and philosopher Vladimir
Solovyov (1853-1900) pointed to this over 100
years ago in his book "War, Progress and the
End of History: Three Conversations" (1899).
As described by Solovyov, this being will
attempt to seduce mankind, will make himself
Emperor of a New Roman Empire and will set
up his capital in Jerusalem with the intention of
surpassing Christ in the estimation of mankind.
The ultimate aim of Ahriman/Satan is to
persuade mankind that there is no spiritual world
and indeed no individual spirit in Man; only the
visible material world is real; only absorption in
the mass has reality. As Bill Gates has put it: "A
computer should only help one to have fun and
have a nice life in a collective mind" [5]. This is
one pole of spiritual life and experience, for
materialism itself is a spiritual idea. The opposite
pole is represented by the being traditionally
known as Lucifer ('bringer of Light'). His
temptation is to draw Man away from material
and social life altogether in a self-obsessed urge
to transcend and deny earthly life; the luciferic
spirit holds that only the spiritual life has
validity. Between Lucifer, who, according to
Rudolf Steiner, had a human incarnation in
China c.3000 BC and Ahriman, who is shortly to
appear in the West, stands the Christ, whose
human Incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth occurred
2000 years ago. Christ is the Balance between
the other two, the principles of seduction. Just as
He himself in the course of His life had to go
through temptations by these two beings during
the 40 days in the desert, so mankind has to
undergo these same temptations in order to find
its own balance, which is the Christ.

Why was it then that the stream of Middle

Eastern esoteric wisdom, which later
metamorphosed into that of the Cathars,
Templars and Freemasons, became historically
retrograde and sought to preserve an elitism and
oligarchy similar to that of its old enemy, the
Roman Catholic Church ? In a lecture of 4th
November 1919, Rudolf Steiner said:

....when the Mystery of Golgotha [i.e. the

Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ - TMB]
had taken place on earth, it was essentially the
luciferic wisdom [stemming from Lucifer's
incarnation in China in the 3rd millennium BC -
TMB] through which it could be understood.
The gnosis....was impregnated through and
through with luciferic wisdom.....the
significance of the incarnation of Christ was
grasped because the power of the old Lucifer
incarnation still survived. This power did not
actually fade from the human faculty of
comprehension until the 4th century AD; and
even then it had its aftermath, its ramifications.

By this Steiner was referring to something he

spoke about on many occasions, namely the
closing of the doors of natural clairvoyant
perception. Until about 3100 BC large numbers
of human beings had natural clairvoyant
perception as an inborn faculty; they could see
into the spiritual world. In order for us to
develop in freedom, however, this faculty had to
disappear. From the 3rd millennium onwards,
mankind gradually began to enter a state of
darkness with respect to the spiritual world.
Mystery centres and temples then began to
appear in all cultures that maintained the
connection with the spiritual world, but only for
neophytes that were prepared to undergo the
increasingly difficult training that was necessary
to maintain the connection. An inevitable and
indeed legitimate spiritual aristocracy came
about. By the time of Christ's Incarnation, most
human beings, with the exception of a few, had
completely lost the faculty of clairoyant
perception; even doubts about the very existence
of God and the spiritual world had begun to
develop in the more sophisticated and more
urban cultures.

Moreover, Steiner discovered that three centuries

after Christ, a colossal development took place in
the spiritual world which had the effect of
plunging mankind even further into spiritual
darkness. The spiritual hierarchy of the Exusiai
(four ranks above mankind in the 9 hierarchies
of our solar system) who had been responsible
for the formation and regulation of the human
thinking process gave this responsibility over to
the hierarchical rank below them, the Archai.
The Exusiai belonged to the Second Triad of
hierarchies, who were responsible for the forms
and concepts of the natural and spiritual worlds.
Consequently, since they also regulated Man's
life of concepts, when a human being perceived
something in the natural world, say, a tree, or
saw something inwardly as a result of some
spiritual training, for example, an angel or a
demon, prior to the 4th century AD, he also
simultaneously perceived its concept and knew
what it was. Percept and concept were one. The
Archai and the other beings of the Third Triad of
hierarchies, the Archangels and Angels, had no
such responsibility for the action of the natural
and spiritual worlds; their work lay with human
souls. They were closer to human beings than the
Exusiai. Consequently, there occurred within
human thinking a disjunction from the 4th
century AD onwards between percepts and
concepts. This was to give rise to endless
confusion and ever increasing intellectual
disagreement about both spiritual and natural
matters. The age of theological controversies
began. Theologians no longer knew or felt really
sure who the Christ was, or the Father, or the
Holy Spirit, or the Holy Sophia, nor did they
understand how they related to each other. Vain
attempts were made to fix their understanding in
the dogmas and anathemas of the many
tempestuous Church Councils that were called.
Real spiritual insight was replaced by dogma and
based on authority and tradition. Meanwhile,
outside the Church, the doors of spiritual
perception went on closing inexorably as they
had since the third millennium BC. In the 6th
century AD the Emperor Justinian finally closed
the last of the pagan Mystery schools (529).
Even in Asia, the great temple centres of
religious instruction in China, India, Tibet, Japan
slowly - more slowly than in the West, because
they were closer to the original luciferic
inspiration - lost their light. By 1600 they too
had run out of vision and become rigidified in
dogma and moribund forms of tradition.

The Division of the Gnostics

It was as a result of this great change in human
thinking about spiritual matters in the 4th century
that the bifurcation in the original Gnostic stream
had occurred by the time of the Crusades. The
real meaning of the Incarnation and Resurrection
of Christ was lost. Many of the Templars, deeply
affected by the remains of the old luciferic
wisdom that they encountered in the teachings of
the Sufis and the Ismailis and other such
streams, fell into a kind of monotheism or
pantheism which took little account of the
significance of Christ's Incarnation and looked
back to a syncretistic neo-Semitic religion more
akin to Islam or Judaism. It was this that passed
on to the Freemasons and which became the
Supreme Being or Grand Architect of the
Universe (GAOTU) deity of 18th century
Freemasonry.. This was the being against whom
the visionary artist, poet and Christian esotericist
William Blake railed so mightily and whom he
lambasted as Urizen the cosmic lawgiver, the
calculator, the weigher and measurer, for he
perceived in this Deist religion of Isaac Newton
and Francis Bacon (and of George Washington,
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson) a
turning away from the being of Christ and thus
from the very meaning of the Earth and of
mankind's existence on the Earth. Blake was one
of those Gnostics who, like Jacob Boehme in
Germany, struggled through in the spiritual
darkness of the age to his own heartfelt
conception of the Christ and a truly individual
realisation of the cosmic significance of Christ
and Christianity. Many others in the Gnostic,
Manichaean, Bogomil and Cathar streams and in
the proto-Protestant movements of the Middle
Ages managed the same lonely feat. They saw
through to the new Christianity in their souls
without harking back to pre-Christian religions.
The Quakers, for instance, were not interested in
disputing the meaning of this or that verse of the
Old Testament as so many other Puritans were,
nor were they concerned about the arcane
geometric symbology of the Temple of Solomon
like the Freemasons; rather, they sought direct
communion with the divine in the silence of their
hearts in this moment; not in lonesome
meditation in cell or on mountaintop, but rather
together with their fellows.

One more piece of spiritual research by Rudolf

Steiner can be adduced here. He pointed out that
whereas Lucifer had been the main source of
temptation for mankind prior to the Incarnation
of Christ, in the post-Christian centuries, up to
our own day and looking forward to the
incarnation of Ahriman himself, Ahriman
replaces Lucifer as mankind's main adversary. It
was in the 9th century that Ahriman struck into
human consciousness in an incisive way.
Ahriman always seeks to reduce the threefold
element within Man to a dyad and to remove the
mediating central heart element, rendering the
human organism one merely of intelligence and
will. It was no accident therefore, that at the 8th
Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 869-70,
the 11th Canon of the Council anathematised the
teachings of Photius, former Patriarch of
Constantinople, who it said, had been teaching
the doctrine of "twin souls", in which one of the
"souls" was actually the individual human spirit.
This was declared by the Council to be
anathema. In the church of the Holy Spirit, Hagia
Sophia, the human spirit was anathematised ! It
was declared that the human being consisted only
of two principles, not three, namely, the body
and the soul, the soul being recognised vaguely
as having certain "spiritual qualities". This was a
logical consequence of the theological confusion
about the nature of the Trinity which arose as a
result of the spiritual changes in the 4th century.
In the same year, 869-70, the threefold European
heritage of Charlemagne and his son Louis the
Pious was reduced to two when the kingdom of
Lotharingia (which stretched from modern
Holland through Burgundy and Switzerland
down to Rome) between the domains of Charles
of France and Ludwig the German was abolished
following its invasion by Charles and Ludwig.
Exactly1000 years later, in 1869-70, the First
Vatican Council was held, which proclaimed the
doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope when he
pronounce ex cathedra; the Kingdom of Italy
was founded and the Pope's temporal rule ended;
and the Franco-Prussian War began, that led to
the creation of the German Empire in 1871.

After the onset of Ahrimanic influence into

Western consciousness in the 9th century,
Ahrimanic thoughts made ever greater headway
within the culture of Christendom. Many of
those drawn either to a luciferic consciousness
or who were struggling to find their own
mystical way to Christ were siphoned off by the
Church into monastic orders or, if they were too
radical, were persecuted as heretics. The
appearance of materialistic figures such as
Roger Bacon, Siger of Brabant and Philip IV of
France in the 13th century testified to the
growing power of ahrimanic thoughts. Ahriman
was at this time preparing for his own
incarnation in the West. He needed a global
vehicle for this just as he had inspired much in
the materialist culture of republican and imperial
Rome, the superpower of the day. The
foundations for his political vehicle were laid in
the British colonies in North America,
established in the reign of the first Freemason
King James I, which became the Freemason-led
United States. One of the characteristics of
American Freemasonry, particularly in the
decades following the Revolution, was that it
was less concerned with arcane esoteric secrets
and more with fostering natural science and
social networking amongst the many
businessmen and merchants who made up the
bulk of prominent Masons. Ahriman had
managed to insinuate his thoughts into the
desiccated husk of Gnostic Semitic wisdom that
was Freemasonry and he was able over the next
two centuries to turn it to his own purposes. This
was especially the case after the Protestant
Hanoverians came to power in Britain in 1714,
and the first Freemasonic Grand Lodge was
established in London in 1717 that was overtly
pro-Hanoverian and anti-Jacobite. British
Freemasonry directed from London became ever
more identified with the monarchy and
aristocracy from the late 1720s onwards. An
excellent and well-researched book that details
the extent of esoteric Masonic influence in 18th
and 19th cent America is "The Secret Zodiacs of
Washington DC - Was The City of Stars
Planned by Masons?" by David Ovason
(London: Century 1999), published in the USA
as " The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's
Capital: The Masons and the Building of
Washington, D.C." (HarperCollins).

At the time of Christ's first Incarnation, He was

met by ahrimanic thoughts working through the
materialism of the Roman Empire; these
represented Ahriman's only partially successful
attempt to manipulate the final socio-cultural
manifestation of the ancient Luciferic wisdom of
the East. Today, in the globalised New World
Order dominated by the USA, Ahriman comes
into his own in his own era. The Freemasonic
inspiration of the USA was based on Semitic
gnostic wisdom from the pre-Christian luciferic
era, and luciferic forces still try to insinuate
themselves into this modern polity in various
ways but they are no longer in pole position; this
is Ahriman's epoch and he will drive it as fast
and as hard as he can, for his time in the 5th
Post-Atlantean epoch (1413-3573) is short. The
Second Coming of Christ ("in the clouds") has
been with us since the 1930s and will apparently
- according to Rudolf Steiner - last until the end
of this 5th Epoch [6]. Once more the Christ, this
time not working through a man on a limited
piece of the physical plane but through an angel
on the global etheric plane of the biosphere, is
confronted by ahrimanic forces working
predominantly through the materialist culture of
the superpower of the age, and indeed shortly by
Ahriman himself in his own incarnation. As
Judas betrayed Christ to the oligarchical priests
of the Temple and ultimately to the Romans, so
the Freemasons and their more modern
successors in the lobby groups and thinktanks,
public and clandestine, have betrayed their
Gnostic roots and original impulse to individual
freedom and have allied themselves with the
conservative and oligarchical forces of
established religion (the Church of England and
American denominations) and imperial power
politics: what once was good turns into its
opposite. The opponent of the Old Rome has
become the New Rome.

Our epoch will has witnessed and will continue

to witness a titanic struggle between spiritual
idealism and materialism. The republican Roman
spirit with its polity based on the civic life and
mores of the individual was originally a
legitimate historical impulse but it became
perverted by the imperial and theocratic ghosts of
the previous Egypto-Babylonian epoch. Out of
this perversion emerged Byzantium and the
Papacy: would-be Roman Empires, both of
which became increasingly decadent after the
first millennium of their existence. Eventually, in
the Refomation, the gnostic will to individual
spiritual freedom, only partly christianised, burst
through the papal chains repressing it. When the
unchristianised gnostic underground surfaced in
the shape of the English Freemasonic movement
after 1717 and identified itself with the British
Protestant Hanoverians, the Papacy saw in
Freemasonry a powerful spiritual rival and
moved decisively against it; the first papal bull
against Freemasonry charged in 1738. A
tremendous battle spiritual tehn ensued behind
the scenes of European developments. The
Jesuits launched themselves into an assault on
Freemasonry, which responded by seeding itself
thoughout Catholic Europe. Irish Freemasons
split the Freemasonic movement in 1752 betwen
the Antients and the Moderns, a split which
lasted till 1813, while the Masons managed to
achieve the suppression of their sworn enemies
the Jesuit Order by the Pope himself in 1773 !
The Pope had been under pressure from the
Catholic monarchs of Portugal, Spain and the
Holy Roman Empire whose aristocracies were by
then riddled with Masons and masonic
sympathisers. The Jesuits fled to Protestant
Prussia and Orthodox Russia, but managed to
reingratiate themselves with the Vatican by 1814
when the Pope restored their Order together with
the Inquisition..

The following century saw continuing struggle

between Jesuits and Freemasons until Pope Leo
XIII signalled a papal retreat in the 1890s with
his accommodation to the French Freemason-led
Third Republic in a bid to reposition the Vatican
favourably for the new challenges of the 20th
century. The Papacy, formally resolutely
opposed to the bourgeoisie, then introduced the
concept of Catholic Christian Democracy
attempting to build solidarity with the
bourgeoisie in the face of the rising power of the
socialist movement. In the 20th century, the
Roman Spirit of the Papacy made a further
major bid for a new kind of temporal power in its
efforts to influence the development of a united
Europe along the lines of a new Holy Roman
Empire in which, just as had been the papal
intention in the original Holy Roman Empire of
Charlemagne, the dynamism of the Germanic
nation (in its modern forms of France and
especially Germany) would be used as the
foundation of the new polity, guided by the
thoughts of the Vatican. The anti-Papal
transatlantic heirs of English-speaking
Freemasonry (in the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral
Commission, the New Atlantic Initiative and
others) have responded to this by seeking to
outflank the Vatican. The US government has
supported the EU project at almost every step,
its object being to take the whole EU under the
wing of a grand transatlantic system, guarded by
NATO and allied to Russia, a system which, it is
intended, will be able to withstand the 21st
century challenge of China. Their aim is to build
not just a new European or Mediterranean
Roman Empire, which is the rather pathetic
rearguard action of the fading luciferic power of
the Vatican, but rather, a truly global Roman
Empire based on an Atlantic Euro-American
Union, which will serve admirably as the vehicle
for the incarnating Ahriman, the spirit who
wishes to dominate the entire world and
transform it into his "collective mind". Free-
masonry has led to this: the creation of a global
Roman Empire of materialism.

"Free-masonry" - the word itself goes to the heart

of the meaning of this 5th Post-Atantean epoch
(1413-3573): freedom and masonry. Freedom is
a spiritual ideal. Masonry is a physical substance
shaped in accordance with spiritual principles.
The spiritual task of our epoch is to develop both
natural and spiritual science in freedom. In this
sense, "masonry" means the understanding of the
physical world. Esoteric knowledge reveals that a
free ego in the modern age can only develop on
this basis. Such was the insight of the
Rosicrucians - out of the knowledge of the death-
cross of the physical world, the sense world that
is given over to inevitable decay, arises the rose
sun of the free spirit.

********************************

Notes

[1] For the influence of Freemasonry in the

history of the USA, see Steven C.Bullock,
Revolutionary Brotherhood - Freemasonry and
the Transformation of the American Social
Order 1730-1840 (Chapel Hill: Univ of North
Carolina Press, 1996) and Lynn Dumenil,
Freemasonry and American Culture 1880-1930
(Princeton: Princeton Univ Press 1984). David
Ovason, "The Secret Zodiacs of Washington
DC - Was The City of Stars Planned by
Masons?" (London: Century 1999), published in
the USA as
" The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's
Capital: The Masons and the Building of
Washington, D.C." (HarperCollins). For the
relationship of Freemasonry and natural science,
see Robert Lomas, The Invisible College - The
Royal Society, Freemasonry and the Birth of
Modern Science (London: Headline, 2002)

[2]
http://speciesofangel.serverpro2.com/featured/zero12.htm

[3] American Tyler Masonic magazine 18 July

1889 p 6, quoted in Dumenil, p. 49

[4] Of course it can be argued that the Pilgrim

Fathers and other such Protestant groups always
had 'oligarchical' elders who steered their
communities, but the essence of Protestantism
was always that each man could interpret the
Word of God as he saw fit, whether from the
words of the Bible, or from charismatic
individual revelation - the antidote to established
oligarchy was thus always present, which of
course is the reason why so many Protestant
groups have proliferated: people objected to what
they were told by their 'leaders' and separated
themselves from them. By contrast, there was no
possibility of 'separation' from the Church of
Rome; excommunication meant ostracism and
ultimately, death or outlaw status. Rome was a
totalitarian state, just as the New Rome of the
New World Order is becoming a totalitarian
state. No credit card? No livelihood. No
gambling on the stock market? No pension. No
involvement in the freetrading, arms dealing,
drug running, eco-destructive global economy?
No decent standard of living. No DNA profiling?
No civil rights (well, that last one hasn't quite
arrived yet, but it's on its way....).

[5] Bernhard Guenter, Bill Gates. From

Computerfreak to Richest Man in America,
Munich, 1995, p 19

[6] See R.Steiner, The Reappearance of Christ

in the Etheric (New York: Anthroposophic
Press, 1983)
and the articles "What was the 20th Century?",
"Aspects of the Occult Significance of the Year
1998", "The Millennium in the Light of
Anthroposophy" in this web

© Terry Boardman June 2002

This page was created on 2nd June 2002 with

thanks to Lilian

Last updated 26th Jan. 2010

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