Chapter 113. Lodges in Conflict: Grand Orient, Continental versus Anglo-American Masonry, the Papacy and the Bavarian Illuminati

Between the first grand lodge (London, 1717) and the end of the nineteenth century, Freemasonry split along ritual, religious and political lines. On the Continent, Templar “high degrees” multiplied, and Rome condemned the Craft again and again. A Bavarian society, the Illuminati, used the Masonic model for Enlightenment politics and afterwards became the centre of a durable conspiracy literature. In 1877 the Grand Orient of France dropped the Supreme Being, and “regular” and “liberal” Masonry parted. The sources here are Greer’s encyclopedia, Le Forestier’s documentary history, the conspiracy writers Robison and Webster, the Grand Orient insider Keghel, and Steiner [Greer, The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies, #64911, “Grand Lodge”].

Templar Degrees and the Strict Observance

Greer traces the high degrees to France in the late 1730s, when Jacobites (partisans of the exiled Stuarts) and Hanoverians fought for control of the French lodges. The catalyst was “the famous 1736 oration of the Chevalier Ramsay, in which he argued that Masonry could trace its roots back to the knightly religious orders of the Crusades”. Ramsay was a Jacobite, and Greer says that most of the high degrees surfacing in the following two decades “had close connections to the Jacobite movement”. More than 2,000 high degrees appeared within Freemasonry over the following century [Greer, #64911, “High Degrees”]. Webster dates the oration to 1737. She opens her chapter “German Templarism and French Illuminism” with “the year after Ramsay’s oration—that is to say in 1738”: that year Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia was hastily initiated in a Brunswick hotel on the night of 14-15 August [Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, #69057, ch. VII]. The sources therefore disagree by one year on the date of the oration.

Webster’s chronology runs from the oration through von Marschall’s plan “for reviving the Templar Order” (1741) and von Hund’s arrival in Paris (1743) to the Strict Observance (1751). Von Hund claimed he was directed by “Unknown Superiors”. Webster notes that Prince Charles Edward “denied all knowledge of the affair” [Webster, #69057, ch. VII]. Le Forestier treats the same ground in Book Two (“The Strict Observance from 1751 to 1772”; “Greatness and Decline of the Strict Observance (1772–1780)”). He warns that, unlike the Illuminati papers, original documents on German Masonry “are either extremely rare or inaccessible”. These chapters are “a compilation of secondhand works”, and “the author absolves himself of any responsibility for the errors he may have committed in following them” [Le Forestier, The Bavarian Illuminati, #70667, “Note to the Reader”].

Rome against the Lodges

The papal ban opened with Clement XII’s bull In eminenti apostolatus specula, issued on 28 April 1738. The reference shelf’s article says the bull “arose from Jacobite-Hanoverian rivalry on the continent”, since the lodge in Rome was Jacobite [Wikipedia: In eminenti apostolatus]. Later condemnations include Providas Romanorum (1751), Ecclesiam a Jesu Christo (1821), Quo graviora (1826) and Qui pluribus (1846) [Wikipedia: Humanum genus]. Leo XIII’s Humanum genus (20 April 1884) followed the 1870 capture of Rome. It condemned naturalism, popular sovereignty, lay education and the separation of church and state, all of which it attributed to Masonry. It set the “kingdom of God on earth” against “the kingdom of Satan”, which it said was “led on or assisted by that strongly organized and widespread association called the Freemasons”. Its operative rule (HG 31) reads: “let no man think that he may for any reason whatsoever join the Masonic sect, if he values his Catholic name and his eternal salvation” [Wikipedia: Humanum genus].

Canon 2335 of the 1917 Code imposed excommunication ipso facto on those joining “a Masonic sect or other societies of the same sort, which plot against the Church”. The 1983 Code dropped the explicit mention of Masonry. On 26 November 1983, however, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger declared that “the Church’s negative judgment in regard to Masonic association remains unchanged” and that Catholic members “are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion” [Wikipedia: Declaration on Masonic Associations]. Keghel, a French Grand Orient Mason, reads the 1983 change differently. In a speech reprinted in his book he says that “the Roman Catholic Church has lifted the excommunication of Freemasons, but Freemasons of different disciplines in fact excommunicate each other” [Keghel, American Freemasonry, #62774, appendices]. Greer explains the conflict as “the bitter culture of hostility that developed between the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the Freemasons from the early eighteenth century onwards”. In his account, the Craft’s “principles of religious tolerance” and “commitment to liberal social and political ideals” were “guaranteed to antagonize a church that remained wedded to a hard-line conservatism” [Greer, #64911, “Roman Catholic Church”].

Weishaupt’s Order, 1776-1786

Greer dates the founding to 1 May 1776. On that day Adam Weishaupt, a professor at Ingolstadt, and four friends founded the order to promote French Enlightenment ideas in Catholic Bavaria, against “a clique of ex-Jesuits whose influence remained intact even after the Society of Jesus had been dissolved in 1773”. Weishaupt had planned the name “Perfectibilists”. In 1779 the order had 54 members “divided among five colonies”; by 1784 more than 650 had received the Illuminatus Minor degree. Members used code names: Weishaupt was Spartacus, Zwack Cato and Knigge Philo, and Ingolstadt was called Eleusis [Greer, #64911, “Bavarian Illuminati”]. Greer says Weishaupt “became a Freemason in 1774”. Le Forestier’s account differs. Weishaupt sought admission at Nuremberg and Munich, found the fees too high and the printed grades “deeply disappointing”, and “abandoned his plan to solicit admittance into the society” in order “to found a model secret society himself”. The statutes were drafted under the name “Order of the Perfectibilists”, which Weishaupt soon changed because it “appeared to be too bizarre, or what is more likely, was not mysterious enough” [Le Forestier, #70667, Book One ch. 1].

Le Forestier says his documents “are abundant, and their authenticity is certain” [Le Forestier, #70667, “Note to the Reader”]. His Book Three describes Knigge’s reform, in which the Priest grade was to build an encyclopedic “Academy of Scholars” [Le Forestier, #70667, Book Three ch. 5]. In Book Four he attributes the Bavarian prosecutions “in large part” to the order’s own indiscretion. Young Minervals boasted that the order would establish a Sittenregiment through a “commission of morals” deciding all nominations, so that sovereigns would become “despicable, impotent ghosts and crowned slaves” [Le Forestier, #70667, Book Four ch. 3]. Greer summarises the end: a Bavarian edict against secret organisations in 1784, another proscribing the Illuminati by name in 1785, and the 1786 police raid on Zwack’s house, which seized “hundreds of the order’s documents” [Greer, #64911, “Bavarian Illuminati”]. In Weishaupt’s Theory of the Secret Society (Book Five), books cannot teach morality. A man had to be placed among “equals whose support he will be obliged to obtain through reciprocal favors” [Le Forestier, #70667, Book Five ch. 3].

The Making of the Illuminati Legend

Robison dated his dedication “Edinburgh, September 5, 1797”. He had been initiated at Liège, and he says his inquiry began in 1795 with the German periodical Religions Begebenheiten. His conclusion is printed in capitals: “an Association has been formed for the express purpose of ROOTING OUT ALL THE RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS, AND OVERTURNING ALL THE EXISTING GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE”. He adds that it “has Lodges in Britain corresponding with the mother Lodge at Munich ever since 1784” [Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, #84234, Introduction]. Barruel’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme is not in the library. Webster cites it (II.195, II.208, II.311), and so does Greer, who says it argued that the inner circle behind the Revolution “was none other than the Bavarian Illuminati”. Greer judges that “despite the complete lack of evidence presented”, the idea was “taken up enthusiastically by conservatives”. In his account Robison sought “to protect British Freemasonry by distancing it from the political activities of Masons in France and Italy” [Greer, #64911, “Bavarian Illuminati”; Webster, #69057, Preface notes].

Webster defends the Barruel-Robison line. “The first Masonic body with which the Illuminati formed an alliance was the Stricte Observance”, she writes. Knigge triumphed at Wilhelmsbad (1782), Bode and Busche brought Illuminism into the Paris lodge of the Amis Réunis in 1787, and “it was Illuminized Freemasonry that made the Revolution”. She calls Illuminism “less an Order than a principle” that worked “under other names and other occupations”, and promises “documentary evidence” that Weishaupt was active “twenty-five years later” [Webster, #69057, ch. X]. She “always differentiated between British and Grand Orient Masonry”. In a note she places the word “anti-Semitism” in inverted commas as “a misnomer coined by the Jews in order to create a false impression” [Webster, #69057, Preface and n. 10]. Le Forestier’s Book Six treats all this as a legend with its own history. It began in German anti-revolutionary journalism, such as the Hamburg Political Journal‘s 1790 story of a Paris society of “600 to 666 members”. He quotes the 1796 rebuttal by Rebmann, who called the thesis “absurd” and mocked the idea that two men, Philo and Spartacus, pulled “an invisible string” behind everyone from Mirabeau to Robespierre [Le Forestier, #70667, Book Six ch. 2]. Greer also records a different source on Wilhelmsbad: the Illuminati “went away empty-handed” because Willermoz already knew of their plans [Greer, #64911, “Bavarian Illuminati”].

In America the legend arrived with Jedediah Morse’s fast-day sermon of 9 May 1798. Morse told his congregation that the European association “had extended its operations to this side of the Atlantic” [Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (Gutenberg), Introduction]. The library’s modern literature carries the story further. Springmeier writes of “13 Illuminati bloodlines” [Springmeier, Bloodlines of the Illuminati, vol. 1, #62948]. Icke describes the Illuminati as “genetic hybrids” of a “reptilian extraterrestrial race” and humanity [Icke, A Concise Description of the Illuminati, #6150]. Zagami presents an “Illuminati Network of the Satanic New Age” [Zagami, Confessions of an Illuminati, #367409]. Greer places such works at the end of a chain from Barruel and Robison through Webster and Robert Welch [Greer, #64911, “Bavarian Illuminati”].

Carbonari, Grand Orient and the Great Divide

Greer derives the Carbonari from the French Charbonnerie. In Naples, Pierre Joseph Briot “blended the rituals and traditions of la Charbonnerie with elements from Masonic sources”. Members were “good cousins” who met in venditas, and each had to acquire “a rifle, fifty cartridges, and a dagger” [Greer, #64911, “Carbonari”].

The French grand lodge adopted the name “Grand Orient” in 1773. In 1877 its delegates “almost unanimously adopted a resolution removing belief in a Supreme Being from the requirements for membership”. The United Grand Lodge of England and most other grand lodges “immediately withdrew recognition”. Even so, the Grand Orient “remains the largest French Masonic jurisdiction today” [Greer, #64911, “Grand Orient”]. Keghel’s timeline is longer. London-Paris recognition talks had already failed in 1776, and the American break came from Scottish Rite quarrels, with “the definitive rupture” in 1859. Some grand lodges kept relations “until 1913” [Keghel, #62774, ch. 8]. Keghel’s appendices reproduce later attempts at bridge-building, among them the Geneva Declaration of the Scottish Rite jurisdictions (7 May 2005) [Keghel, #62774, Appendix V]. Steiner gave these streams an occult role in the run-up to 1914. In a December 1916 lecture he said that public “moods” matter “when streams such as that of the ‘Grand Orient de France’ come into play and when occult impulses of this kind start to take a hold”. In his account the “Massonieri” “know where the forces are of which they must make use” [Steiner, The Karma of Untruthfulness, Vol. 1, #64946, Lecture 5].

Key points

• Greer dates Ramsay’s crusader-origin oration to 1736 and Webster to 1737. Both make it the start of the Templar high degrees and of von Hund’s Strict Observance (1751).
• The papal ban runs from In eminenti (28 April 1738) to Humanum genus (20 April 1884), canon 2335 (1917) and the 1983 Declaration, which keeps membership a “grave sin”.
• Greer and Le Forestier agree that the Illuminati (founded 1 May 1776) were an Enlightenment society opposed to the ex-Jesuits. They disagree on whether Weishaupt himself became a Mason in 1774.
• Le Forestier calls the order’s surviving documents “abundant” and certainly authentic. He treats the Revolution-conspiracy thesis as a legend born in German anti-Jacobin journalism.
• Robison (1797), Barruel (as cited by Webster and Greer) and Webster (1924) hold that “Illuminized Freemasonry” made the French Revolution and survived its suppression.
• In 1877 the Grand Orient removed the Supreme Being from its requirements. Greer dates the withdrawal of recognition to then. Keghel traces the American break to 1859-1913.
• Steiner, speaking in 1916, counted the Grand Orient de France among the occult “streams” that shaped the political moods before the Great War.