Chapter 115. The Occult Revival: Martinism, Theosophy, the Golden Dawn and Anthroposophy

The Revolution broke up most eighteenth-century occult societies, but the nineteenth century rebuilt them on a larger scale. Masonic high degrees, French Martinism, Kabbalah and the new interest in Asian religion merged into a few organisations that shaped Western esotericism down to the New Age. These were Papus’s Martinist Order, Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Steiner’s Anthroposophical Society. Each recast the Christian Devil: Blavatsky’s Lucifer is a “Harbinger of Light”, and Steiner balanced Lucifer against the Persian Ahriman. This chapter follows the revival through Greer’s encyclopedia, the founders’ own texts in the library, and the reference shelf, and notes where the sources disagree on dates and facts.

Martinism: From the Elect Cohens to Papus

Greer traces Martinism to Martinez de Pasqually (1727-1774), whose Order of Elect Cohens (Ordre des Élus Coens) “taught a system of ceremonial magic rooted in Freemasonry”. Pasqually’s rites, “evasively called La Chose (‘The Thing’)”, were performed at the equinoxes “to conjure the intelligences of the spiritual realm into visible appearance”. Success was shown by “passes”, mysterious lights and sounds [Greer, The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies, #64911, “Elect Cohens”]. His pupil Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803) mastered the system but “turned away from ceremonial magic and embraced the Christian mystical teachings of the German visionary Jakob Böhme”. According to Greer, Saint-Martin’s ideas spread through the Strict Observance into Germany and Russia. The Asiatic Brethren “made his book Des Erreurs et de la Vérité (About Errors and the Truth, 1775) a textbook for initiates”. In 1884 Papus (Gérard Encausse, 1865-1916) “launched a revived Martinist Order” with “only secondhand links” to the original. It borrowed one degree from Cagliostro’s Egyptian Rite and another from Willermoz, and it “became the fount from which essentially all later Martinist orders descend”. More than 20 such orders are active today [Greer, #64911, “Martinism”]. Blavatsky herself names “the followers of the Marquis de St. Martin — the Martinists” as the people who called the great magic agent “astral light”, the force “which the Church calls Lucifer” [Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, vol. II, #80385, p. 511].

Eliphas Lévi, the Hinge

Greer dates “the great revival of occult studies” from “the 1845 publication of Eliphas Lévi’s Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic” [Greer, #64911, “Martinism”]. The reference shelf gives a different date. Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie “appeared in two volumes between 1854 (Dogme) and 1856 (Rituel)”, each in 22 chapters paralleling the tarot. The Baphomet image appeared in the 1856 volume [Wikipedia: Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie; Wikipedia: Baphomet]. Greer’s “1845” therefore does not match the dates of the book he names. Lévi’s influence on the next generation is documented in the library. Greer says Isis Unveiled drew “especially” on “the writings of Eliphas Lévi and P.B. Randolph” [Greer, #64911, “Theosophical Society”], and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor’s correspondence course used material “ranging from Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516) to Eliphas Lévi (1810–75)” [Greer, #64911, “Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor”]. In The Secret Doctrine Blavatsky quotes Lévi’s Histoire de la Magie at length: “Lucifer, the Astral Light … is an intermediate force existing in all creation, it serves to create and to destroy”. She also cites his maxim that “for the initiates … the devil is not a person but a creative Force, for Good as for Evil”. But she says Lévi’s “genius and crafty intellect had to submit to a certain compromise dictated to him from Rome” [Blavatsky, #80385, pp. 510-511]. The library holds his Elements of the Qabalah [Lévi, Elements of the Qabalah, #77581].

Theosophy: Blavatsky, the Masters and Lucifer

The Theosophical Society was founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Col. Henry S. Olcott “and a handful of other students of the occult”. According to Blavatsky, it was “sponsored and supported by the Brotherhood of Luxor”. For a time it “operated as a secret society with its own passwords and grades of initiation”. Isis Unveiled (1877) was “the largest and most comprehensive occult critique of religious orthodoxy and scientific materialism in its time”. In India (Adyar, 1879-1884) Blavatsky worked with the Arya Samaj “against the British colonial government”. She then attributed her teachings to the Mahatmas Koot Hoomi and El Morya, whom K. Paul Johnson has identified with Indian political and religious leaders. The Society for Psychical Research investigation, built on the housekeeper Emma Coulomb’s testimony that the “miracles” were “sleight-of-hand tricks”, made headlines “on five continents”. The Secret Doctrine (1888) set out seven “rounds” and seven “root races”, with Indo-Europeans placed in “the fifth, or Aryan root race” [Greer, #64911, “Theosophical Society”]. The Society’s public creed, in The Key to Theosophy, is “to form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, colour, or creed”. In the same book Blavatsky claims that America’s Bellamyite “Nationalist clubs and party … were started in the first instance by Theosophists” [Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy, #51074, sect. 3].

Blavatsky’s revaluation of Lucifer is explicit. Reading Genesis against the “Elohim” who barred man from the tree of life, she writes that it is “but natural … to view Satan, the Serpent of Genesis, as the real creator and benefactor, the Father of Spiritual mankind. For it is he who was the ‘Harbinger of Light,’ bright radiant Lucifer, who opened the eyes of the automaton created by Jehovah … [and] can only be regarded in the light of a Saviour” [Blavatsky, #80385, p. 243]. Later: “Lucifer is divine and terrestrial light, the ‘Holy Ghost’ and ‘Satan,’ at one and the same time”. The “Fallen Angel” “had become from that day his Manas, Mind and Self-consciousness”, so that Lucifer “is in us: it is our Mind — our tempter and Redeemer” [Blavatsky, #80385, p. 513]. Her monthly journal was named Lucifer. It first appeared in London in September 1887, co-edited with Mabel Collins and later with Annie Besant, and ran to twenty volumes until August 1897 [Wikipedia: Lucifer (magazine)]. Her metaphysics of darkness belongs to the same reading: “Darkness is the one true actuality, the basis and the root of Light … Light is Matter, and Darkness pure Spirit” [Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, #84896, “Cosmic Evolution”]. Elsewhere she writes: “The Zohar speaks of ‘Black Fire,’ which is Absolute Light-Wisdom … Esoteric philosophy admits neither good nor evil per se, as existing independently in nature” [Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, #78362]. She rejects the Manichaean “King of Light” against “King of Darkness” picture as exoteric [Blavatsky, #80385, p. 509]. That rejection sets her against the Zoroastrian dualism discussed in Chapters 11 and 16, and against the Christian dualism she accuses Rome of preserving.

After Blavatsky’s death (1891), Greer writes, Annie Besant turned The Secret Doctrine “into an orthodoxy”, allied the Society with Co-Masonry and the Liberal Catholic Church, and in 1911 founded with Leadbeater the Order of the Star in the East to proclaim Jiddu Krishnamurti the coming World Teacher. The Order “collapsed overnight in 1929 when Krishnamurti courageously disavowed the claims made about him and disbanded it” [Greer, #64911, “Theosophical Society”].

The Golden Dawn

Greer calls the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn “the most influential magical secret society of modern times”. He dates its founding to 1887 by three Freemasons, William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell Mathers and William Robert Woodman. The founding story centres on a cipher manuscript and a German adept. “The cipher manuscript actually existed, but the letters from ‘Fraulein Sprengel’ … are clumsy fakes written by someone with little knowledge of German”. The likeliest source is Kenneth Mackenzie, whose papers reached Westcott and whose “draft rituals for the Hermetic Brotherhood of Egypt” probably “provided the template”. “Unlike the Masonic secret societies of the time, it admitted women as well as men”, and it offered “a complete course of instruction”. The order split by 1903 into the Stella Matutina, Waite’s Holy Order and Mathers’ Alpha et Omega. Regardie, a Stella Matutina member in 1933-1934, began publishing its papers in 1937. Greer judges that Golden Dawn practice remains “fundamental to more than half of all occult secret societies active today” [Greer, #64911, “Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn”]. Regardie’s compilation preserves its Kabbalistic curriculum: the ten Sephiroth are divided into “the right-hand Pillar of Mercy … the left-hand Pillar of Judgment … and the middle Pillar of Mildness”, and “in their totality and unity the ten Sephiroth represent the archetypal man”. The grades run from Neophyte to Adeptus Minor [Regardie, The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic, #43635]. In My Rosicrucian Adventure Regardie describes how the Stella Matutina temples each appointed their own chiefs, which “began the downfall of organised magical instruction” [Regardie, My Rosicrucian Adventure, #64107]. Mathers’ translation of the Zohar texts links the order back to the Jewish Kabbalah [Mathers, The Kabbalah Unveiled, #77911].

Steiner and Anthroposophy

Greer dates the Anthroposophical Society to 1912 at Dornach. Steiner, General Secretary of the German Theosophists, broke with Theosophy “over the latter’s promotion of Jiddu Krishnamurti”, and “more than 90 percent of German Theosophists followed him”. Steiner “obtained a charter for a lodge of the Rite of Memphis and Misraim … from German Masonic promoter Theodor Reuss”. The Society nonetheless “abandoned the secret society tradition in favor of a public teaching organization” [Greer, #64911, “Anthroposophical Society”]. The editor of The Karma of Untruthfulness adds that in 1904-1906 Steiner “spoke positively” about Freemasonry (The Temple Legend, GA 93). After 1914 “Steiner never again had anything really positive to say about Freemasonry as a spiritual stream” and turned to “the role that western Freemasonry (French as well as British) and occult groups had played in bringing about the war” [Steiner, The Karma of Untruthfulness, Vol. 1, #64946, Introduction].

Steiner’s demonology has two poles. In Disease, Karma and Healing he places “Lucifer in the sentient soul, Ahriman in the mind soul”. He teaches that at Golgotha Christ “appeared in the world beyond, in the realm of shades, and laid Ahriman in chains”. Without that deed, he says, humankind “would gradually have become shrouded in darkness” between death and rebirth, with an “infinite isolation and accentuation of human egotism” [Steiner, Disease, Karma and Healing, #69269]. His mystery dramas stage the same polarity: characters wander into “the domain of Lucifer” or “the sphere of Ahriman”, and Johannes Thomasius stands between them [Steiner, Păzitorul Pragului, #48649]. Steiner thus takes the Persian adversary Ahriman, under that name, into a Christ-centred scheme that he also presented as Rosicrucian Christianity [Steiner, #69269; Steiner, Cunoașterea lui Hristos: Antroposofie și Rosicrucianismul, #48586]. In December 1916 he devoted part of a lecture to “the destiny of H. P. Blavatsky” [Steiner, #64946, lecture 11 contents].

The German Scene and the Road Ahead

McIntosh describes how Theosophy took root in German-speaking lands: Friedrich Eckstein founded “the first Austrian lodge of the Theosophical Society” in 1887. He also describes a völkisch current that sought light “from the Germanic past and the heritage of the Volk”. One figure in it was Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954), “a former Cistercian monk” from Heiligenkreuz [McIntosh, Occult Germany, #64182]. Greer adds that Hitler read Lanz’s “virulently racist Ariosophical magazine” Ostara [Greer, #64911, “Hitler, Adolf”]. Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff presented Turkish dervish exercises as “the Practice of Ancient Turkish Freemasonry” and “the key to the understanding of alchemy”. Its signs of recognition match “the three signs … employed by modern Freemasons: sign, grip, and word” [Sebottendorff, Secret Practices of the Sufi Freemasons, #82052]. Sebottendorff’s later role in the Thule milieu belongs to a later Part of this study.

Key points

• Greer traces Martinism from Pasqually’s Elect Cohens (ceremonial magic, La Chose) through Saint-Martin’s turn to Böhme and his Des Erreurs et de la Vérité (1775) to Papus’s revived order of 1884.
• Greer dates Lévi’s Dogme et Rituel to 1845. The reference shelf dates it to 1854-1856. Blavatsky quoted and corrected Lévi on Lucifer as the “Astral Light”.
• In Greer’s account, the Theosophical Society (1875) began as a secret society, worked with Indian anti-colonial movements, and gave modern occultism its “root races” and Masters.
• Blavatsky makes Lucifer the “Harbinger of Light”, “the ‘Holy Ghost’ and ‘Satan,’ at one and the same time”, and identifies him with human Mind. Her journal Lucifer ran from 1887 to 1897.
• Greer calls the Sprengel letters behind the Golden Dawn (1887) “clumsy fakes” and traces the rituals to Mackenzie’s papers. The order admitted women, and its Kabbalistic system survives through Regardie.
• Steiner left Theosophy over Krishnamurti in 1912, taking over 90 percent of German members. He held a Memphis-Misraim charter and turned against Western Masonry after 1914.
• Steiner’s Lucifer-Ahriman polarity brings the Zoroastrian adversary into Christian esotericism. McIntosh and Sebottendorff lead on to the völkisch occultism treated in a later Part.