Russian Freemasonry

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Russian Freemasonry
(A sub branch of main root of  Zionism...--The CSR )
by Wor. Bro. Dennis Stocks, Barron Barnett Lodge.

Pierre gradually began to recover himself and look about the room and at the people in it. Round a long table covered with black sat some twelve brethren in garments like those he has already seen. Several of them Pierre had met in St. Petersburg society. At the head of the table sat a young man he did not know, with a peculiar cross hanging from his neck. On his right sat the Italian abbi whom Peter had seen at Anna Pavlovna's two years before. There were also present a very important dignitary, and a Swiss tutor who used to be in the Kuragin family. All preserved a solemn silence, listening to the words of the Worshipful Master, who held a gavel in his hand. Let into the wall was a star-shaped light. On one side of the table was a small carpet with curious figures worked upon it; on the other was something resembling an altar on which lay the New Testament and a skull. Round the table stood seven large candlesticks of ecclesiastical design. Two of the Brethren led Pierre up to the Altar, placed his feet at right angles and bade him lie down, saying he must prostrate himself at the Gates of the Temple.

"He ought to receive the trowel first," whispered one of the brethren.

"Oh, quite, please!" said another.

Perplexed, Pierre peered about him with his short-sighted eyes, without obeying, and suddenly doubts rose in his mind. "Where am I? What am I doing? They are making fun of me, surely? Will the time come when I shall be ashamed of all this?" But these doubts only lasted a moment. He looked at the serious faces of those around him, thought of all he had just gone through and realised that there was no stopping half way. He was aghast at his hesitation, and trying to summon back his former feeling of devotion cast himself down..." Tolstoy, WAR & PEACE.

Most of us have read or know about the Masonic sequences in Tolstoy's WAR & PEACE {Part V, Chapters 3 & 4} published in 1868 and, perhaps, although less well known, we have encountered THE POSSESSED by Dostoevsky.

Yet there are other authors such as V.I. Likin, N.M. Karamzin, M.M. Kheraskov, V.I. Maikov, A.N. Radishchev, A.A. Rzhevskii, A.P. Sumarokov and M.M. Shcherbatov who, in the final third of the eighteenth century, were attracted to the Society of Freemasons, joined the fraternity and began to integrate Masonic principles into their writings.

But to mention Freemasonry in the same context as "Russia" usually invokes an immediate reaction of surprise as if our perceptions of the Craft and the milieu of Russia are and always were antithetical.

We all have images invoked by the mentioning of that nation -- salt mines, the midnight knock on the door, bread queues and hunger, the KGB, the Gulags, mind-numbing cold, missiles, the Berlin Wall, pathological sadness, grey skies, grey cities, grey people, hostile, Enemies!

Yet, on reflection, I'm sure we all realised that the blanket term "Russia" we once used to describe the burgeoning nation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with its 8,649,489 square miles and a population in excess of 250 million spread over fifteen constituent republics was more than these mental images. Of course, that "Russia" no longest exists, though I am sure the term will long continue to be used as a convenient tag for the Commonwealth of Independent States. Yet the CIS is as far removed from our mental "Russia" as the old Russian Empire and it is with that Empire that this paper is primarily concerned.

In this paper, I would like to share with you some observations on the founding of Freemasonry in the old Russian Empire and some of the personalities involved.

There is an apocryphal story that the Tsar of Russia, Peter the Great, acquired a knowledge of Freemasonry during a visit to England in 1698 from Sir Christopher Wren. And it is claimed that Peter participated in the formation of a Masonic Lodge on his return to Russia in which he undertook the role of Junior Warden -- which would be typical of the unassuming Tsar Peter.

In spite of the doubt that Peter's English mentor, Wren, actually was a Freemason, the Russians claim Wren founded English Freemasonry. Robert Gould argued that this legendary basis of Wren's Freemasonry could be 'blamed' on Dr. James Anderson's reference to Wren in his Constitutions of 1738 which are irreconcilable with those in his earlier publication of 1723. A.G. Cross, on the other hand, claimed that much of the mythical character of this story stems from Russian reliance on German source material rather than English.

I used the word "apocryphal" when referring to Tsar Peter's Lodge. He is attributed with forming a Lodge with the aid of two intimate friends, Lefort of Geneva and Patrick Gordon, a Scottish Guard, in 1717. Unfortunately for this story, both Lefort and Gordon died in 1699!

But, putting this account aside for the moment, there is better agreement that Freemasonry in Russia began with the flamboyant Lord James Keith (1696 - 1758), a descendent from Scottish nobility, banished in 1715 for his support of the Stuart Pretender. He served in the Spanish Army, before moving to Russia in 1728 with the recommendation of Phillip V, and by the early 1740's was a leading Russian (sic) Army General. The Russian Empress Anna appointed him as the military governor of the Ukraine. But, importantly for our story, Keith was made Provincial Grand Master of Russian Freemasonry in 1740 by the Grand Master of England who also happened to be Keith's Cousin. Captain John Phillips had been appointed to this office for Russia in 1731, but there is no evidence to suggest he ever exercised it.

The minutes of the premier Grand Lodge of England for 24 June 1731 record:

"Then the Grand Master and his General Officers signed a Deputation for our Rt. Worshipful Brother John Phillips Esqr. to be Grand Master of free and accepted Masons within the Empires of Russia and Germany and Dominions and Territories thereunto belonging, and his health was drank wishing Prosperity to the Craft in those parts" (Batham, Transactions, p.34).

The 1738 edition of Anderson's Constitutions records Phillips' appointment as being Provincial Grand Master for Russia only. But, as Cyril Batham points out, the appointment of a Provincial Grand Master in those days did not necessarily indicate the existence of a Provincial Grand Lodge, nor even the existence of a single lodge within the Province, and, indeed, we have no reason to believe that Phillips had any lodge operating in this gigantic Province.

The later appointment of James Keith as Provincial Grand Master of Russian Freemasonry, of course, was only two years after the general suppression of the Craft by the Papal Bull of Pope Clement XIII. It is likely that Keith, as a Jacobite, only paid lip service to the English jurisdiction during the one-year Grand Mastership of his cousin and thereafter influenced Russian Freemasonry towards Germany as the inspirational source for ritual.

One of the powerful influences on Russian Freemasonry was the Rite of Strict Observance. This Rite was sponsored by Baron Karl Gotthelf von Hund (1722-1776), Provincial Grand Master of the Craft in Germany. This system, so-called because of its vows of unquestioned obedience to (unknown) superiors, was based on the myth that Templar secrets had survived the suppression of the Order in 1312 by fleeing to Scotland. It is interesting to note that von Hund, a man of integrity, was convinced that the unknown Grand Master was Charles Edward Stuart. In approximately 1744, von Hund claimed he had been received into the Order of the Temple in Paris in the presence of William, fourth and last Earl of Kilmarnock, who was also Grand Master Mason of Scotland in 1742-1743. Earl Kilmarnock was executed in 1746 for his support of Charles Edward Stuart (Smythe, pp.14-15). So, with these various links to the Stuart cause, you may see the attraction of this Rite to the Jacobean Keith. The Rite as such outlived von Hund by about eighty years.

Another interesting sidelight here was that also in 1740, protocol forced King George II to receive the exiled Keith as a diplomatic representative of Russia.

Boris Telepneff describes Keith as "one of the most remarkable personalities of his time".

In fact, his impact on Russian Freemasonry was such that a song in his praise exists:

After him [Peter the Great] Keith, full of light, came to the Russians; and exalted by zeal lit up the sacrifice. He erected the Temple of Wisdom, corrected our thoughts and hearts and confirmed us in brotherhood. He was an image of that dawn, the clear rise of which announces to the World the arrival of the Lightseeking Queen [presumably Freemasonry].

Keith left Russia to take up service with Frederick the Great (King of Prussia and another Freemason) in 1747. There is no evidence as to why Keith left Russia, but it could have been occasioned by the Austro-French coalition which saw Russia as one of the mainstays against Prussia and Great Britain.

Keith was killed in 1758 during the Seven Years' War but his groundwork saw to it that Freemasonry continued to grow in Russia. In 1756 the first Russian lodge to actually be consecrated with a name was formed in St. Petersburg under the patronage of the Anglophile Count R.L. Vorontsov, Worshipful Master of The Lodge of Silence. The members of Vorontsov's Lodge included many men who later became famous, viz: Sumarkov (author), Prince Scherbatov (Historian), Mamonov (Literary fame), Prince Dashkov, Prince Golitzin, Prince Toubetzkoy and Prince Meschersky.

That same year (1756) came the first official police investigations of Masonry carried out by the "Secret Chancellery of the Empire" who were investigating the "Masonic Sect" to determine "its foundation, and who constitutes its membership". This had been instigated when rumours began circulating about Freemasonry's foreign and seditious plans.

It is necessary to give background here. Peter the Great had dragged a feudal, agrarian Russia into the 18th century with education reforms, the construction of a navy, a few wars to push things along and a shake up of the bureaucracy based on a European model. This included advancement in the civil service by examination and demonstrated ability rather than by purchase or seniority. Russia's isolation and parochialism was hard to beat and two factions arose. The Westernizers who argued Russia could learn from the West. And, in a way they were correct. Russia was in a unique position to abstract from the West all those ideas and processes that had undergone centuries of trial and error, research and development in the West, adopting the latest concepts after due trials and refinements that had been test bedded in the West. In opposition were the Slavophiles who counter claimed that they were doing very nicely until Peter messed it all up. This Slavophile notion continued for centuries and, in fact, when Karl Marx was contacted by the Russian dissidents in the late 19th century, their argument (and poor old Karl tended to agree with them to keep them happy... after all they seemed to have been the only ones to have read his manifesto!)..the argument was that the innate, rural Muzhik of Russia -- the peasant serf and his accidentally socialist way of life in sharing everything was the model from which Europe could learn, and not the other way around! Mind you, anyone who associated with a Muzhik deserved everything he got along with fleas, starvation and more terminal diseases than you could shake a stick at.

This first investigation exonerated the Craft by finding that its membership was defined as "nothing else but the key of friendship and of eternal brotherhood", the reigning Tsar (Peter III who was later assassinated by his wife Catherine the Great) appears to have joined the movement, and a number of lodges were founded at places where the Tsar would reside -- St. Petersburg, Oranienbaum and so on. It may be imagined that the Emperor did not like to travel to meetings and, considering the state of the Empire's roads in the Spring thaw, who could blame him? Remember, this is primarily an agrarian society.

But there was no real organisational structure to the lodges... that is until Ivan Pertfil'evich Elagin [or "Yelaguin" according to Telepneff and Batham] (1725 - 1793) appeared.

Elagin was an extraordinary bureaucrat, wielding considerable power during the Reign of Catherine the Great who ruled Russia for 34 years -- 1762-1796. Catherine had a great deal of confidence in Elagin and sometimes signed her letters "Mr Elagin's Chancellor". Elagin was also tutor to Grand Duke Paul and one of the first Slavophiles.

Catherine found the English form of Russian Freemasonry quite acceptable and complimentary to the dilettantish atmosphere of her court. However, Elagin admitted that he had turned to Freemasonry in the 1750's out of boredom, curiosity and vanity. He was also attracted by the secrecy of the proceedings and by the hope of meeting high-ranking Russian courtiers and statesmen. Elagin initially perceived no other purpose in Freemasonry than providing a venue whereby discrete meetings could be arranged in order to exploit the friendship of fellow Lodge members for his worldly affairs. He wrote in his memoirs that he found the ceremonies "incomprehensible... strange (and involving) actions .. deprived of sense" and the rituals were full of "unintelligible symbols and catechisms unrelated to reason". (see Grinwald, p.22).

In 1762 a Templar Rite of Melesius sprang up, founded by a Greek Freemason and superposing four High Grades on those of the Craft. It seems to have lasted twenty years; but in 1765 there came a revival of the Strict Observance Rite which dominated Russian Freemasonry.

In 1771 the Engraved Lists of the Grand Lodge of England recorded as #414 their first lodge in Russia -- Perfect Union (or Peace and Union) in St. Petersburg. It should be emphasised, however, that although this Lodge had been entered on these lists at the date of the granting of its Constitution (1 June 1771), it had been active in Russia prior to that date. The Masonic position in Russia became even more complicated in 1771 with the introduction from Germany of the Zinnendorf System -- a Christian order of Masonry but a curious mixture of the three Craft degrees and various knightly orders.

On 28 February 1772, Elagin was made Provisional Grand Master of Russia by the Grand Lodge of England, a position he held until 1784. He was only the third Provisional Grand Master the Grand Lodge of England had appointed. For all his initial qualms as to the relevance of the Masonic ceremonies, he soon added to the rituals so that they became somewhat exotic. He argued that the exotic rituals were justified on practical grounds as substitutes for the rites of the Church. He described a Freemason as "A Free man able to Master his Inclinations...(and able) to Subornidate his Will to the Laws of Reason."

By 1774, Elagin's lodges had a membership of over 200 made up of Russian nobles and foreign diplomats and members from all levels of the civil and military service. In that year, five Russian Lodges were added to the Grand Lodge of England's Lists:

# 466 -- Nine Muses, St. Petersburg
# 467 -- Urania, St. Petersburg
# 468 -- Bellona, St. Petersburg
# 469 -- Mars, Jassy, Moldavia
# 470 -- Clio, Moscow<>

The list of members published by Telepneff (AQC Volume XXXV) emphasises two important points:

(a) Under Elagin, Russian Freemasonry, with the exception of one or two more-or-less foreign lodges, consisted of the members of the best Russian families who were shaping the destiny of Russia not only at court and in the various government departments, but also in the military and in artistic achievements.

(b) From their position, character and activities, they were sincere and serious about their commitment to Freemasonry.

The following year, a man who was to become one of the most influential Russian Freemasons joined the Craft. Nicolai Ivanovich Novikov joined Freemasonry in 1775 through Elagin's St. Petersburg lodge, although he refused to submit to the initiation rituals Elagin was using. Novikov was a prodigious organiser as we will see in a moment and one who opened paths of practical activity for the sedentary aristocracy.

There is a character in Russian literature named Oblomov who spends all his days in bed because he can't decide what actions he should undertake first. Mind you, his ideas of action centre about eating, drinking and women. This was an extreme example of the lethargy infecting the aristocracy.

Novikov was a member of the exclusive Izmailovsky regiment (the regiment that had put Catherine on the throne of the Russian Empire) and of Catherine's Legislative Commission. He wrote that he was dissatisfied with Elagin's rituals: that he felt many Russians were playing "Mason" like a child's game. What had become known as "Elagin's System" for the ritual was based on fundamental imitations of English Freemasonry with peculiar and artificial admixtures from other systems. For example, during initiation, or "ordeal" as Elagin called it, the candidate's shirt was covered with blood and his blood literally mixed with that taken from the attending brethren. (Telepneff, AQC XXXV, p.271).

"(Elagin) introduced, or at least authorised the introduction of other degrees, seven in all, the first Craft degrees, followed by:

40 -- The Dark Vault
50 -- The Scotch Master
60 -- The Philosopher's Degree
70 -- Spiritual Knighthood."

(Batham, Transactions, p.37)

Elagin defined the Order as:

"The preservation and transference to other generations of some great mystery which has come to us from the most ancient ages, even from the first man, and from which mystery may depend the fate of humanity, if in his benevolence to all peoples God would design to open it to the whole world".

For Elagin, this was not only Brotherly Love, Relief and Truth, but a mystical doctrine seeking the secret and precious tree of life; the fruits of which we were deprived when exiled from Eden.

But within a year, Novikov had sent Russian Freemasonry into its second and more intense phase by breaking with Elagin's dreamy and mystic quest and founding a new lodge with Moscow as its spiritual centre.

Moscow became the centre for all those opposed to Catherine at this time. The population of the city was somewhere around 400,000 -- twice that of St. Petersburg, and this made it the only city large enough to entertain the illusion of centralised control and uniform national culture for the entire disparate empire. Foreigners found Moscow uncongenial -- grey, bleak, unsmiling. The narrow streets, self-contained suburbs and its historical and geographical closeness to the heart of Russia made it forever suspicious of new ideas.

Under Novikov, Russian Freemasonry turned from the casual, fraternal activities of Elagin's "English" Masonry to the highly dedicated and esoteric orders of Scottish Masonry, introducing closer bonds of secrecy and mutual obligation, special catechisms and vows and new Quasi-Oriental costumes, and rituals. Freemasonry became the first ideological class movement of the Russian Aristocracy and opposed to the atheistic ideas permeating into Russia from France.

To understand the unique religious influences acting on Russian Freemasonry, it is necessary to make a brief explanatory divergence.

Russia had been converted to Christianity very late in history... in fact not until the 10th century -- in 986 AD.

Kiev was the obvious capital as it grew up around the major river obstacle (a series of rapids) in the Dnieper leading to Constantinople. Moscow was a collection of wooden huts at this time...something that didn't change very much even when it DID become the capital and which lead to periodic urban renewal occasioned by catastrophic fires.

A few centuries earlier, river pirates had forced the locals around Kiev to request mercenary help from the Varangians -- a Scandanivian tribe who came all the way down the river systems from the North, defeated the pirates and immediately took over running the country. Prince Rurik was the first ruler and founder of one of the only two families ever to Rule Russia -- the Rurik's and the Romanov's.

A descendant of Rurik, Prince Vladimir was ruling in Kiev at the time of the conversion of the Rus. He had secured his throne by killing all his brothers. But his grandmother, Olga had earlier converted to Christianity and applied pressure on her grandson to do likewise.

The Primary Chronicle (the Russian version of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or the Icelandic Kalevala) tells us Vladimir not only had seven wives, but three hundred (!) concubines at Vyshgorod, 300 at Belgorod and 200 at Berestovo. One wonders how he had the time to become the consummate soldier and administrator he really was.

But, being a good grandson and seeing political advantages in conversion, he considered the available options and saw four contenders: Islam, Judaism, the Church of Rome and Byzantine Orthodoxy. So he sent representatives to all four to investigate and have the contenders argue their case.

Well, as a grown man he didn't think much of circumcision, so Judiasm was out. Actually, when he asked the Jews why they had been expelled from Jerusalem, they replied:

"God was angry at our forefathers and scattered us among the gentiles on account of our sins".

Vladimir could see no promise in the faith of a dispersed people.

Nor was Prince Vladimir impressed by the Islamic abstention from alcohol. In fact, his emissaries found Moslem worship to be "frenzied and foul smelling". The Islamic contenders claimed that Mohammed would give each man 70 fair women. With 800 concubines, Vladimir was doing very well, thank you, in this department.

However, rather than being the also-ran in this contest, Orthodoxy's church service and beautiful churches made a deep impression. (The representatives were shown that most beautiful of all Orthodox temples, the Hagia Sophia).

Again, from The Primary Chronicle:

"The Greeks led us to the buildings where they worship their god and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on Earth. For on Earth there is no such splendour or such beauty and we are at a loss to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty."

Obviously a clear winner since they found no comparable glory in the Roman Church. It may also have helped that women were separated during the service so Vladimir could get some rest! The real point was that concrete beauty and not abstract ideas conveyed the essence of the Christian message to the Rus.

So the Rus were converted en masse in a universal ceremony. But with Christianity came the realisation that their country really had no glorious history. No cultural heritage. So somewhat amazing accounts were derived that insist that, for example, St. Andrew visited Moscow on his way to Rome from Palestine; that Russia was settled by the descendants of Shem and so on.

There also arose the semi-mystical concept of The Third Rome which was a very powerful influence in Russia. This argues that Russia is the repository of the true faith. The three Romes are Rome itself as the First, Constantinople as the Second after the shift in the Church to the east and the fall of Rome in 410 AD, and, as foretold in Revelations, the Third Rome will never be since its creation/foundation heralds the Final Days. Moscow as the Third Rome was an important influence in Russia after their conversion and the fiasco of the Third Crusade in which the western knights attacked Constantinople in a fit of rage and never even got to the Holy Land. Byzantine Orthodoxy had lost the ball on the one yard line and Russia had picked it up!

Also Russia saw itself (and still does) as the saviour of Europe. Offering itself as a sacrifice so the rest of Europe may be protected. Russia was invaded by the Mongols, by Napoleon and by Hitler -- all with horrendous loss of life and, perhaps justifiably, they claim their sacrifice saved western Europe. Of course there are problems here since Napoleon for one had defeated most of western Europe before the battle of Borodino. Nonetheless, these ideas reinforced the concept that Russia somehow had acquired a holy mission.

But at the time we were talking about, the typical member of the Russian intelligentsia still longed for the cultural antecedents of other European nations. So Novikov derived a rich pre-history based on St. Andrew who he argued had brought Christianity to Russia before St. Peter's visit to Rome.

The Westernising trends for Russia begun by Peter the Great, reached a zenith with Catherine. She was a cultural vampire, sucking up selected pieces of European culture and she especially drew to her court out-of-context aspects of the French Enlightenment. It may be said that the Russian psyche was such that the spark to evolve a Voltaire, Diderot, D'Alembert or Montesquieu could never have arisen in Russia.

In the West we have an image of melancholy Russians -- manic depressives to a man. On a whole, that is accurate. The HUGE spaces and absolute loneliness of the Russian forests engender a smallness in individual Russian mentality. Look around, and you can't see the forest for the trees.

In 1756 Russia had entered into a new diplomatic and cultural alliance with France. On her accession to the throne Catherine wrote:

If the gain is not great in commerce, we shall compensate ourselves with bales of intelligence.

So it was, that by the 1770s and 1780s, the Russian aristocracy under Catherine's influence found themselves at the crossroads of their religion and Voltairianism (Vol'ter'ianstvo) by which they meant Rationalism, Scepticism and a vague passion for Reform.

Catherine was thirty-four, Voltaire was seventy. His Philosophy of History had the unprecedented sales' figures of 3000 copies sold in St. Petersburg within a few days of its publication. He quickly became the official historian of the Russian Empire and a kind of saint for the secular aristocracy. Voltarianism became the ruling force in Western Culture much as Latinism had done in the fifteenth century.

Voltaire led the Deists of the French Enlightenment. Their approach to religion was ambivalent at best. They argued that the only valuable elements in Christianity were those identical with the teachings of the great philosophers. All else was nonsense. The Jews of the Bible, the so-called Chosen People, were primitive peasants with little culture (a sore point here in Russia for reasons outlined above) and with bad morals, thieves and murderers. The Church Fathers were little better; they were ignorant, superstitious, power-hungry, quarrelsome men. The Bible, both Old and New Testaments, was a collection of incoherent maxims and improbable stories celebrating crimes and absurdities.

They did believe in a Supreme Being -- but one who had created the Universe and retired. Thereafter the whole thing continued to operate by immutable laws. Miracles, for example, were impossible as they violated of the laws of nature.

Changes in the Slavonic Church ritual had already lead to a major schism some hundred years earlier. You may recall the trauma when the Latin Mass was replaced by the Mass in English. Well, in Russia an almost similar revision caused many to simply split away and follow the old ways -- The Old Believers -- who were prepared and did die for their beliefs. To us the changes seem insignificant, invoking the name of Jesus twice instead of three times, reducing the number of genuflections you must make and so on. But one Old Believer, Avatum, lived for 40 years in a hole in the ice as a protest. Others burnt themselves alive in their churches and so on.

But even those who followed the new church rituals were increasingly anxious to dissociate themselves from the agnosticism and superficiality of court life. They found in the Swedish system of Freemasonry a chance for inner regeneration and for a re-discovery of inner truth and the lost unity of the early Christian church.

Why Swedish?

Cross points out that the primary era of English influence on Russian Freemasonry was between 1770 and 1776. By 1770, there were at least twelve major lodges in Eastern Germany and the Baltic. This was to rapidly spread to Prussia and Russia. For example, in 1761 there had been a Field Lodge formed in the Russian Army which, at the time, had its Winter quarters in West Prussia and its head-quarters at Marienburg.

King Guastav III of Sweden gave Swedish Masonry a special stamp of respectability by freely flaunting his masonic ties in 1776 during a state visit to St. Petersburg and won the patronage of Grand Duke Paul -- a famous Russian patriot, historian and political rival to and personal enemy of Catherine. This lead to a linking of Russian and Swedish Freemasonry into one system when, in 1778, the Moscow Lodge of Prince Troubetskoy joined the Swedish System. Novikov closed his Petrograd Lodges and transferred their activities to Moscow.

Swedish Masonry at this time had nine grades and a secret tenth group of nine members... Commanders of the Red Cross. The strict observance and mystical-military nature of this had appeals in Prussia and by a kind of cultural osmosis spread to Russia. Members of the Swedish groups generally adopted new names as a sign of their inner regeneration and participated in communal efforts to discover through reading and meditation the inner truth of Christianity. I've explained the special role and relationship Russia saw for itself in Christianity. The Russian aristocrats saw this system as a vehicle whereby they could fortify their realm against incursions of the reformist ideas of the French Enlightenment.

On 25 May 1779, a Swedish Grand Provincial Lodge of Russia was officially opened according to the Swedish ritual and thereafter vied for supremacy with the Grand Provincial Lodge of Elagin. Efforts to unite all Russian lodges under one system and one grandmaster (the Duke of Sudermania, brother of Guastav III -- had failed when Elagin refused to hand control of Russian Freemasonry into foreign hands. The two Masonic systems therefore remained separate. Fears were aroused that the Swedish-directed lodges of strict observance were Jesuit-inspired, Catholic and absolutist in tendency. It was their political implications, however, rather than their esoteric aspects which alienated some Russians and many moved to Elagin's system.

In 1782 secret societies were prohibited by the Russian government, but Freemasonry was not included in this decree. Yet, in 1784 Elagin decided to close all lodges under his jurisdiction due to increased political pressures from the Crown.

More importantly for the Russian Freemasons, Prince Gagarin, a friend of Catherine's son Paul, founded links to the Berlin Lodge Minerva and brought back with him to Russia the teacher of occult lore Johann Georg Schwartz. Schwartz, a Transylvanian by birth, had arrived in Moscow in 1779 to take up a post as professor of German in the gymnasia of Moscow University, a post probably secured through his Masonic connections (see Madariaga, Russia in the Age..., p.522)

With Novikov, Schwartz immediately began to transform Russian Masonry. They formed the first secret society in Russia (The Gathering of University Foster Children) and tried to integrate Masonry with the Russian higher educational system. Schwartz was made inspector of a seminary established to train teachers for the expected expansion of Russia's educational system.

Novikov founded his own weekly satirical journal Truten' (The Drone) in which he voiced the increasing dissatisfaction of the native Russian nobility with Catherine's imitation of French ways and her toleration of social injustice. In the first issue, Novikov posed a question destined to be the central preoccupation of the Russian Intelligentsia movement. Confessing he had no desire to serve in the army, civil service or at court, he asked what could he do for society?; adding by way of explanation that to live on this earth without being of use is only a burden to it (see Pipes p.256).

His solution was to turn to publicistic and philanthropic work. He and his friends took over the moribund Moscow University Press and transformed the institution itself into a centre of intellectual ferment. The university then had less than 100 enrolled students who listened to uninspired lectures in German and Latin. Novikov organised a public library to be associated with the University and between 1781 and 1784 published more books than had appeared in the entire previous 24 years.

By 1791 the number of readers of the official University gazette rose from 600 to 4000.

Novikov set up the first two private printing presses in 1783. The next year he established the first joint-stock insurance company and organised a surprisingly successful nationwide famine relief system along with the first private insurance company. He published a regular journal Morning Light in which he sought to impart the philosophical basis of the classical thinkers. He also wrote a considerable number of books ranging from children's tales to history.

In all his writings, Novikov's principal target of attack was the "vice" he identified with the Russian 'aristocratic' qualities of idleness, ostentatiousness, indifference to the sufferings of the poor, immorality, careerism, flattery, ignorance and contempt for knowledge. In comparison, his "virtues" were industriousness, modesty, truthfulness, compassion, incorruptibility and studiousness.

The University Press made a considerable profit from Novikov's translations program. Works translated included Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of Old England (a work commissioned by Catherine herself), Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Rousseau's Emile, and Grotius' Discourse Against Atheism (translated by Archbishop Ambrosius of Moscow). For his part, Novikov's literary output included contributions to a number of periodicals, some with a pronounced Masonic slant, others catering to the developing interest in economic or cultural affairs designed to place informative rather than diverting literature in the hands of the noble and burgher families. These included such publications as Gorodskaya i derevenskaya biblioteka ('Town and Country Library') or Poko yushchisya trudolyubets ('The Busy Man at Rest') or his popular series for children Detskoye Cheniye.

But Novikov also held a passionate interest not only in editing and publishing, but in distribution and took a prominent role in the development of the book trade throughout provincial Russia.

At a time when the production of most of the provincial printing presses were unable to find a commercial outlet, censorship records show Novikov's publications were on sale in a number of important provincial towns from Archangel to Tambov, from Nizhniy Novogorod to Irkutsk. Madariaga (Russia in the Age...p 523) has argued that these provincial towns were nearly all towns in which there were Masonic lodges, often under the direction of the Moscow Masons, and many of those who supervised and supplied the book stores were active Freemasons.

With Novikov's organisation of a supporting program, by 1780, he and Schwartz had a number of wealthy patrons. They formed a Sientificheskia ("secret scientific") lodge named Harmony Lodge. This was dedicated to returning Russian society to Christianity. In 1782 the lodge formed a "fraternal learned society" with translators to publish selected foreign books. 21 of the 35 society members were drawn from Schwartz's seminaries.

Schwartz, unfortunately, fell under the spell of the Prussian Rosicrucian leaders, Johan Christoph Wollner and J.C.A.Theden, and was initiated into the Rosicrucian Order during a trip to Germany in 1781-1782, and was now empowered to set up his own province of the Order in Russia. Like Novikov, Schwartz had become disillusioned by the charlatanism present in some of the Masonic orders at that time.

On his return to Russia, Schwartz reorganised Harmony Lodge into a Rosicrucian centre, subordinated to Wollnerand Theden. Schwatrz had been empowered to recruit Freemasons and direct their activities, sending to his superiors in Prussia an annual report on newly admitted brethren and ten roubles for each new recruit. At the Willhelmstadt Masonic Conference in 1782, Schwartz secured the recognition of Russia as the eighth province of European Freemasonry under the grandmaster of European strict observance Freemasonry, Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick. Thus, though apparently affiliated to strict observance European Freemasonry under Duke Ferdinand, Schwartz's circle was in fact and possibly without the knowledge of most of its members, subordinated to the Berl in Rosicrucians. The post of provincial grandmaster for this eighth province was vacant, and it was hoped that Grand Duke Paul might occupy it. But Schwartz became chancellor of the Rosicrucians, and de facto head of an expanding network of provincial lodges. He alone knew the full list of Rosicrucians and only the masters of the sixty lodges eventually founded knew that Rosicrucianism was the central purpose of this system.

Largely due to his ascetic self-discipline of so-called healthy food, cold showers and so on, Schwartz died in 1784. He was 33! So much for the healthy life style!!

A new grand Master for the Rosicrucians (Baron Schroder) arrived from Germany to take over Schwartz's role, and numerous young Russians thronged the opposite way to Berlin hoping to unravel the "secret".

Originally, the Fraters of the Blessed Order of the Rosy-Cross were pledged to the relief of the suffering, to attempt the cure of diseases free of charge and to found hospices and retreats from the world for like-minded individuals. They spent their lives in search of truth, the knowledge of man and his possibilities and his relationship with other planes of existence beyond the material world.

These noble aims were quickly corrupted and added to so that by the 1680s members were now "scientific dabblers", chemical philosophers, alchemists and astrologers. Any educated person could find a place under the Rosicrucian banner. Primarily they sought the universal solvent (what to keep it in?) the universal cure or remedy and, of course, the transmutation of base metals into gold.

The movement died out in Europe during the Thirty Years' War but, for the Russians, science always had an attraction beyond the material gains it promises. Couple this with a mystical background and you may see what attraction this had for the budding intelligentsia in Russia.

Gradually the so-called "knightly" degrees fell into disuse and the work of the Russian lodges became centred entirely on the Rosicrucian Order. In 1786 Prince Frederick William, a practising Rosicrucian, became King of Prussia, and a bewildering profusion of occult fraternities flooded into a receptive Russia.

It was argued that the world was the supreme temple of Masonry. Rosicrucianism was the final level for which the earlier Masonic degrees were mere preliminaries. To attain this level, one had to flee the rationalism of the Enlightenment. The true task was to find the Light of Adam through inner purification and the dedicated study of the hieroglyphics of nature.

This idea that the world is some huge Rosetta Stone awaiting deciphering by the elite is not new. It goes back to Early Christianity and clearly evident in the 8th century writings of the Venerable Bede.

Schwartz had transformed the casual moralism and philanthropy of the early Russian Freemasons into a seductive belief that heaven on Earth (remember the words of the representatives from Prince Vladimir in the Hagia Sophia?) could be realised through the concentrated efforts of elite thinkers.

Novikov became increasingly uneasy about this turn to the occult which had overtaken Russian Freemasonry. In the late 1780s he proposed the formation of a purely Christian and philanthropic order. His increasing interest in the religious traditions of Old Russia permeated his publications with a kind of quasi-religious appeal and he adopted the Old Believer form of counting dates from the Creation rather than from the birth of Christ. He antagonised Catherine by criticising the Jesuits in 1784, accusing them of being a political order thus betraying the monastic ideal. Novikov had portrayed the Jesuits as faithless, power-seeking, aiming to set up a state within a state. His work, in fact was what many 'enlightened' mind considered to be an objective account of the Jesuits.

As the Jesuits' benefactress, Catherine stepped up her attacks on Novikov by writing three anti-masonic plays in which Freemasons were represented as charlatans and deceivers who, like Count Cagliostro, promised their victims philosophic gold, the elixir of life and contact with the world of spirits. Catherine also closed down the Masonic printing presses and finally had Novikov arrested in 1792.

These attacks were not limited to Novikov but included other Russian Freemasons such as Alexander Nicolaevich Radischev. Radischev wrote what is argued to be the first anti-Tsarist book -- A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. He was sentenced to death, but this was later commuted to exile in Siberia. He was later pardoned by Catherine's son Paul and died in 1802. These attacks were part of Catherine's general disillusionment with the French Enlightenment in the wake of the French Revolution which she took as a personal attack. As an enlightened despot, Catherine felt that the French had bit the hand that had fed them.

Certainly her opinions and distrust of the commoners seemed justified when, in March 1792, Gustav III, albeit an enemy of Catherine's, had been assassinated.

On 10 August 1792 the French monarchy was overthrown and the royal family imprisoned. In France in September that year approximately 1,200 people were massacred, most of them ordinary citizens of no political importance. The French armies were starting to successfully sweep through the Rhineland, annexing territory as they went. In January 1793, the execution of Louis XVI made Catherine physically ill. As an indication of the depth to which Catherine now rejected the French, in March 1794 the sale of French calendars which adopted the new revolutionary neo-classical chronology were banned. France had become a country of ravening beasts knowing only how to pillage and kill. The wave of executions and purge trials of each wave of revolutionary leaders was not to be seen again until Stalin's trials of the 1930's.

The publication in 1797 of a well-received denunciation of Continental Freemasonry by John Robinson (1739 -- 1805) didn't help the Craft. It was called Proof of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati and Reading Societies. This work had gone into 5 editions within one year of its first publication. It appears Robinson had been initiated into Freemasonry in 1770 before going to Russia as private secretary to Admiral Sir Charles Knowles. As with the other Masonic "Exposures" such as Three Distinct Knocks et cetera, Robinson's work contains interesting (albeit coloured) insights into the activities of eighteenth century Russian Freemasonry -- including what appears to be a Lodge for women!

All this simply reinforced Catherine's concept that Freemasonry was anathema to her continued governing of the country.

Catherine's attitude towards religion was based on toleration through indifference. She had been born a Lutheran, educated by Catholics and Calvinists and welcomed into the Russian Orthodox Church when she married the Tsar. While she was deeply suspicious of the Jews and sectarian extremists, she generally ruled without offending or persecuting other religious orders. She welcomed the intellectual and teaching abilities of the Jesuits and the agricultural expertise of the German pietists. The sects were left alone as long as they recognised her authority.

The later years of Catherine's reign were marked by increasing desperation in the religious communities. Monks fled the monasteries for ascetic settlements and a tribe of wandering prophets toured the outer edges of the Empire.

An extremist group called the Skoptsky arose. As a religious protest and as a purification ritual they would castrate themselves in public. Along with the self-burning Old Believers, and the Flagellants, the Skoptsky should not be seen as a masochistic curiosity. The acts were seen as a new baptism into the elect of the world to come and as a sacrificial atonement for the redemption of a fallen society.

Realising that her rule had aroused popular religious sentiment against the crown, she saw Freemasonry as having the potential to foster a concealed political schism in Russian society.

There is little direct evidence of the political opinions of the Moscow Rosicrucians, though by their behaviour one can deduce that they were not necessarily interested in political change so much as in social reform by means of philanthropy. The austere and high-minded Freemasons rejected Catherine's blatant disregard for the rules of Christian marriage, which contrasted so strikingly with the seeming domestic bliss of the ever-faithful Grand Duke Paul. Novikov, for instance, displayed portraits of the grand ducal couple on the walls of his country house, and the Freemasons sang hymns of greeting to Paul.

In you Paul we see
A ledge of heavenly lore.
In your wonderful union
We read the sign of the angel.
When you are adorned with the crown
You will be our Father.

(Madariaga, Russia in the Age.. pp.529-530)

Was Paul a Freemason? He denied it, but was certainly attracted to some aspects of mystical religion, possibly even to the occult. There was no "Pauline" Party per se, but a general trend in society against Catherine consolidated around her son, Paul. Paul was not adverse to criticising his mother's politics, but stopped short of real sedition.

It seems odd that Catherine should suppress a group supporting loyalty to the sovereign and teaching morality and a belief in God. But Freemasonry had involuntarily become associated with personal enemies of the Empress.

* First was her late husband, Peter III, who had been favourably disposed towards the Craft and Catherine was hostile to any favourites of the late-emperor.

* The Russian Freemasons were aligned to Germany and Frederick the Great was the arch enemy of Catherine.

* Russian Freemasonry was based on Russian Orthodoxy and opposed by and opposed to the Jesuits -- Catherine's favourites.

* Russian Freemasons were vitriolic in their opposition to the French Enlightenment.

* Freemasons in Russia had the support of Grand Duke Paul, who was now an open, personal enemy and political opponent of the Empress.

*> Novikov's charity and famine relief was believed to be for ulterior political purposes.

The Swedish ambassador, Count Stedingk, wrote that Catherine "felt a truly feminine repulsion towards Masonry". The Empress also had been bitterly hurt when that other paladin of Freemasonry, Gustav III, had attacked her "atheistic and idolatrous' school program".

To the Empress, Freemasonry (which she tended to lump together with Martinists and Illuminati) represented "one of the strangest aberrations to which the human race had succumbed," a strange fad among males only that she scorned as "a mixture of ritual and childish games." Indeed, in 1785-6 she publicly ridiculed its practices and practitioners in three crudely satirical comedies, Obmanshchik (The Deceiver), Obol'shchennyye (The Deluded) and Shaman Sibirskiy (The Siberian Shaman). She could not understand why Novikov, a prosperous nobleman who had retired from state service to become the Empire's pre-eminent private publisher, subscribed to such a bizarre doctrine.

Novikov and Catherine had "fought" a duel of words in the pages of the literary journals. That which Novikov lashed as a 'vice', she preferred to treat as human weakness and called him intolerant and bilious. Novikov responded in more temperate language, but had the temerity to criticise the Empresses' command of the Russian language. This unprecedented exchange between sovereign and subject would have been unthinkable one generation earlier. Catherine and her friends continued to support Novikov's projects throughout the 1770's.

Her amused tolerance had shifted towards overt opposition to the Craft after the 1779 visit to St. Petersburg by Count Cagliostro (the Sicilian Giuseppe Balsamo). It is Cagliostro she satirised as "Kalifankerstan" in The Deceiver in which he is shown as embezzling gold from his victims.

Moscow had a reputation for gullibility and chicanery, volubility and prodigality -- all vices Catherine felt could be capitalised upon by the Martinists and exploited for their own ends.

It was not especially difficult to channel Catherine's distrust of the "absurd society" of Freemasonry, although the next step in the attack was not aimed at them specifically. Her confessor was in frequent correspondence with Peter Alekseyev of the Moscow Archangel Cathedral. Via this channel, Catherine was informed of the large volume of religious works being churned out on secular printing presses in defiance of the official (lucrative) monopoly of the Holy Synod Press. On 27 July 1787, Catherine prohibited the printing of all prayer books, church books or religious works except those being produced by the authorised presses.

It was found that in Moscow alone, 313 titles of religious works had been published by secular presses (166 of these by Novikov).

In September 1788 Catherine, having studied the reports of the ecclesiastical censors, ordered the return of 299 of the 313 titles to their owners, but banned the other 14 and decreed that future requests to publish religious works by submitted to the Synod. Of the fourteen titles banned, eleven had been published by Novikov. It must be emphasised that they were not banned on political grounds, but on religious objections. As a result, Catherine determined not to renew Novikov's lease on the Moscow University Press when it should expire in 1789.

Novikov had left St. Petersburg in 1779 when he took up a ten year lease on the Moscow University Press. Here he established two private printing presses and a secret press on which Russian translations of the classics of mysticism and alchemy were printed. Yet it was not necessarily these Masonic activities that first attracted Catherine's attention. In 1784, Novikov had published two school textbooks breaching the exclusive licence of the Commission on National Schools which owned the lucrative monopoly on all text books. Novikov claimed he had been authorised by the governor-general to print the books, but was ordered to withdraw and destroy all copies although he was compensated.

In December 1785, Governor General Bruce and Archbishop Platon were ordered to inspect the books published by Novikov, to ensure they contained no "ravings", "stupid lucubrations" or "schism". Platon was also asked to determine Novikov's Christian beliefs.

The Archbishop not only voiced his confidence in Novikov, he reported that:

"I pray the Lord to let us find another Good Christian such as Novikov, not only in your flock and mine, but in the whole world" (see Grinwald, p.26).

The moral opposition to Catherine and what she stood for may explain Platon's ambivalence. In spite of his disapproval of Masonic "occult" literature, he probably felt closer to Novikov and his Masonic friends than to the secular "enlightenment" of Catherine, particularly in the field of education.

But Platon listed twenty-three of Novikov's books which he believed sought to introduce religious error. For instance, he found one title, On the Ancient Mysteries and Secrets of All Peoples, praised pagan rites found sinful by the Church and declared th at the Church derived its ritual and sacraments from paganism. Yet of the twenty-three, Catherine eventually banned only six -- all of them Masonic in content.

After the appointment of the new chief commandant for Moscow in February 1790, Catherine began increasing administrative pressures on Freemasons although no definite command of prohibition was issued.

Panicked by the excesses of the French Revolution, she wrote that the Masons were at the forefront of a new Raskol -- a schism -- in Russian society.

Evidence for this came in the form of a report of an unauthorised book treating religious matters from the perspective of the schismatic Old Believers sect. With clear "evidence" of past publishing transgressions, Catherine ordered both Novikov's Moscow residence and provincial estate searched for copies of the book or others like it.

Although he had been given a "comprehensive and immediate" command to carry out this search on 13 April 1792, Prince Prozorovskii, a former general notorious for his blunderbuss approach to civil affairs, waited eight days (until Catherine's sixty-third birthday) before sending officials to carry out the Empresses' command. The search party did not find the offending title, but discovered other prohibited books and several clandestinely published Masonic titles. Novikov and his books were escorted by a company of hussars to the Schlisselburg Fortress for interrogation.

It should be noted that Catherine had planned Novikov's arrest at a time he was out of Moscow. She had to keep moving him around since in every city in which he was jailed, popular support for him soon arose. Suspecting a conspiracy of fanatical "Martinists", well-financed and well-connected noblemen with ready access to the newly expanded medium of public expression, the Empress sought to forestall Novikov's martyrdom (by suicide or otherwise) and to squelch negating publicity by keeping his associates in the dark and silencing any imitators. Count Rrazumopusky wrote that Novikov was a poor man plagued by piles and besieged as if he was a city.

It has been suggested by some authors that Novikov was hounded until some valid reason could be found to arrest him in order to stifle his independent social and publishing activities. Yet the evidence does not support this. The only works of his that were banned were those Masonic titles judged by Archbishop Platon to be "harmful" seven years earlier.

Catherine's special animus against Novikov is difficult to understand. It is true that he had made satirical attacks against the throne in his journals during the 1770's and his social activities tended to be independent from the control of the Crown. He had engaged in large-scale charitable activities on borrowed money, to help both landowners and serfs during a famine. But while Catherine's distrust was fed by the enormous sums of money Novikov seemed to be able to call upon and dispose in these charitable works (he had debts in excess of 700,000 roubles), she continued to subsidise his journals and his schools founded by his Masonic friends in St. Petersburg.

Novikov was never tried, but the accusations against him were listed in the sentence eventually pronounced. He was charged with holding secret meetings at which people swore submission to the Duke of Brunswick; he was accused of corresponding in cipher with Wvllner (who was a Prussian Minister) and with attempting to lure a "Certain Person" (presumably Grand Duke Paul) into becoming a Freemason. He was condemned to fifteen years' imprisonment in Schlisselburg. But was allowed to take with him his private physician (the Rosicrucian M.I. Bazayansky) and his servant. The entourage was allocated one rouble per day for their keep (cf. 3 kopeks for ordinary prisoners).

Catherine's arrest of Novikov marks the end of her flirtation with the Enlightenment. Against the background of the French Revolution, the assassination of Gustav III, and the imagined threats to her own life, the existence of a group, orchestrated by her enemies (the Prussians) apparently with seemingly unlimited financial resources, inspired by Masonic tenets which could range from extreme egalitarianism to alchemical and occult "lucubrations" and apparently ready to dethrone her in the interests of Paul, may have seemed a more real threat to the ageing Catherine than can be appreciated today.

Yet Catherine's treatment of Novikov, notably the severity of his punishment compared to the leniency with which others among the Moscow Rosicrucians were treated, is somewhat inexplicable. Certainly, Paul believed himself to be partly responsible for Novikov's harsh treatment and one his first acts on accession to the throne was to have Novikov released.

It is true, however, that other Freemasons who were "punished" (N.Trubetskoy, I. Lopukhin and I Turgenev, for example were merely rusticated on their country estates) had not been directly involved in the efforts to enlist Paul into the M^Asited Paul on behalf of Novikov, escaped scott free. Madariaga (Russian in the Age...p.530) has suggested that this may be due to the fact that Trubetskoy et al were members of the highest aristocracy and Bazenov was too lowly.

A number of booksellers were arrested, interrogated and released with a warning. Some 20,000 copies of the mainly Masonic works confiscated when Novikov was arrested were burnt in 1793.

On Catherine's death in 1796 the situation for Freemasonry changed. Paul I not only abolished all prison sentences imposed on Freemasons (in including Novikov) but rewarded, protected and even consulted them on State affairs although Freemasonry remained officially prohibited. In 1797 an edict had been passed forbidding secret meetings and, although Freemasonry was not specifically mentioned, Paul elicited a promise from all Worshipful Masters not to open any lodges. It has been suggested that this may have been due to certain rivalries between Masonic Templar degrees and the Maltese Knights. Paul declared himself Grand Master of the Knights of Malta on 16 December 1798. (See Speth AQC VIII, p.232).

Novikov returned to Moscow, but his publishing days were over. He died on 31 July, 1818, aged 74. Yet he lived to see some of the Russian Freemasons rise to become outstanding generals against Russia's enemies such as Turks and Napoleon. Men such as Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov and some of the world's greatest authors such as Alexander Pushkin.

Alexander I (1777-1825) succeeded Paul after the latter's assassination on 11/12 March 1801. Alexander annulled the decree prohibiting all secret societies and became an initiate of the Craft. Dormant lodges were revived and new ones established. Those members of the Craft still attached to the spirit of mysticism that had permeated Russian Freemasonry under Novikov and Schwartz appear to have been especially active at this time.

Christian mysticism was in vogue and imparted a significant influence on fashionable society in St. Petersburg. The Rosicrucians opened a lodge (Neptune) in Moscow in 1803. A new Grand Lodge was formed in 1810.

Russian Freemasonry began to move in opposite directions -- a Conservative movement represented by the St. Petersburg and Moscow mystics and a Liberal one following French fashions and ideas (again!). A third "force", the revival of the strictly Christian Swedish Rite, reinforced the autocratic regime with its support of Autocracy and Orthodoxy.

Yet, in 1810, the Ministry of Police demanded the leaders of Russian Freemasonry produce their constitutions and rituals. As a result of this investigation, a member of the Lodge United Friends (also General Lieutenant aide-de-camp of the Emperor) was appointed Minister of Police. This was perhaps more subtle than it first appears. If the government wished to investigate Freemasonry, but also respected oaths of secrecy, who better to investigate them than a Minister of Police who was also a Freemason?

At the beginning of 1812, a Book of Constitutions had been prepared for the guidance of Freemasons. The thrust of the contents was clearly in patriotic support of the Tsar. Under these rules, none but Christians of Russian nationality were to be admitted to high office in the Craft and at the head was to be a Prefect, not responsible to his brethren, but to the Minister of Police and the Emperor himself. This was, perhaps, in opposition to the Swedish system. The Grand Lodge had now become dominated by the strict autocracy of Alexander and his Police Minister.

Following the defeated Napoleonic Armies back through Europe, the army of Tsar Alexander I was exposed even more to European ideas of freedom and reform. In 1814, 571 Russian Freemasons (including 62 Generals and 150 Colonels) met with their French brethren in Paris. On their return, the ground swell against the autocracy continued to consolidate.

While the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Forces during the Napoleonic Wars, Prince Michael Kutusov, was a prominent Freemason along with many of the high-ranking officers (all of whom had served their country with distinction), Tsar Alexander became increasingly influenced by Prince Metternich who was convinced the Craft in Russia now harboured highly suspicious members of secret political organisations.

Strong political elements had certainly penetrated the lodges. Masonic equality was misunderstood and attracted into the Craft men who were resolved to unite against class privileges and to end the autocracy with emancipation. Telepneff (AQC XXXVIII, p. 36) writes that conclusive proof exists that a dangerous political element had entered Russian Masonry.

In August 1815 the Grand Lodge Astrea was formed with a predominant German character and Russian Freemasonry began to loose its national characteristics. Its Statutes and Rituals (in French) occupied 154 pages. Also that year, a Swedish Provincial Grand Lodge was formed in Russia to work the Swedish Rite which regarded the so-called "higher" degrees as the acme and perfection of Masonry (see Batham, p.61). Astrea confined its attention to the three Craft Degrees and left its member lodges free to work whatever additional degrees their members wished. By 1818 there were about 1300 Russian Freemasons of whom about 1000 lived in St. Petersburg and met in twenty Lodges.

Signs of internal discord and corruption were becoming apparent. Within five years, no less than five different Rituals were being used in Lodge procedures. Igor Andrevich Kusheleov, Lieutenant General and Senator, Deputy Grand Master of Astrea in 1820, presented the Emperor with a report on Freemasonry.

The conservative Kusheleov's ideal was the Swedish Rite as originally introduced into Russia. He disapproved of the "modern" innovations destroying true Masonic doctrines and saw a danger of the Lodges becoming nests of "Illuminati" with revolutionary ideals. Kusheleov's attempts to restore the original ideals in Astrea were vigorously opposed by members holding Masonic and political ideals different to him. He saw his duty to Freemasonry and the government was to report what he felt was a danger.

His closeness to Freemasonry and high position within the Craft carried considerable weight with the Emperor. (See Telepneff AQC XXXVIII, pp.41-59 for a translation of Kusheleov's Report).

Kusheleov recommended that Freemasonry be placed even further under the control of the government or, alternatively, that all lodges be permanently closed.

The lodges had been constantly under police supervision and the Emperor must have been aware of the latest undesirable tendencies and doubtful membership of a number of lodges. In 1822, Count Gaugwitz (a Prussian Mason), like Kusheleov apparently distinguishing between useful and harmful Masonry, presented the Emperors of Russia and Austria with a memorandum strongly advising the closure of the lodges in the two countries, although the King of Prussia was extending his protection to all Prussian lodges.

Nine months after the presentation of the Kusheleov Report, on 1st August, 1822, Alexander I closed all Masonic lodges in Russia with the exception of Lodge Ovid, because it had been transferred to the Rumanian Jurisdiction. There must have remained an underground movement since the five Decembrist leaders are said to have been Freemasons and the Decembrist incident did not take place until 3 years later.

That Freemasonry continued in spite of the ban seems likely since Nicholas I, successor t

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

The Masonic science of Man innitially was largely a creation of the German professor Schwarz, using his position at Moscow University to spread Masonic ideology.The impression produced by Schwarz's lectures was tremendous. According to A. Labzin, who became one of the most noted mystics in the beginning of the nineteenth century, became one of the most noted mystics in the beginning of the nineteenth century.
    He refuted Helvetius, Rousseau, Spinoza, La Mettrie, and others, compared them with other philosophers opposing them, and, by demonstrating to us the difference between them, taught us also to discover the merit of each one.

    To the listeners, it was as though a new light began to shine! ... The most important, and for that time a dumbfounding phenomenon was the force with which his simple word took away from the hands of many the seductive and godless books in which, it appeared at the time, the entire intellect was contained, and replaced them with the Holy Bible. (Biograficheskii sLovar', 11, 592) On a popular level, the questions that Schwarz raised in his lectures were discussed, almost verbatim, in many Russian Masonry-related magazines. Man was an "extraction of all things," repeatedly stated Russian brothers following Schwarz. With his physical nature, man is connected to the rest of the world, and this connectedness does not allow bim to become the perfect man ("true man," or "new Adam," as Russian Freemasons often referred to). At the same time, man is God's creature that has divine elements in his essence.

    Schwarz lectured that the Creator sent down and implanted a new soul into the material body of each infant born; that this soul was incarnated for the purpose of trial and retribution, and was to be rewarded after death by dwelling in a Heaven of bliss, or to be punished in a hell oftorment. Accordingly, the human condition, like the his tory of the universe, needed to progress through the stages:1) before conversion, 2) during the conversion, 3) after the conversion. During the conversion (i.e. bis life on Earth), man was only a traveler on the way towards bis eternallife. Man's lot was to suff er, recalling bis past sins. Through suffering his conscience was awakened, and this was the knowledge of self which gave birth to the longing to be reunited with the source of all things, God. The ultimate goal of human life was, according to Schwarz, a union with God. This ideal state in which man was fully united with God and was in possession of a pure spirit could be achieved in three successive stages: through intensive knowledge of oneself, knowledge of Nature, and knowledge of God. Schwarz emphasized the power of feeling and spiritual regeneration, as weIl as individual illumination to perceive the Grand Architect's design.

    The idea of Man developed by Schwarz has little to do with mechanistic ideas of many enlighteners who saw man as a thinking machine conditioned by external environment. In materialistic philosophy man was regarded as a body of such excellent workmanship in which functions of the brain, spinal cord, nerves, and other organs sufficed to fulfiIl all his actions of man and to furnish his consciousness, will, emotions, and mental faculties. Freemasons did not deny the mechanical composition of the body. But they insisted that this view excluded altogether the need for, or the very existence of human soul or spirit. In his lectures, Schwarz emphasized that the Reason, being refined by useless sciences and reinforced by self-Iove or belief in own abilities makes our imagination bigger, which conveniently brings a person either to the perfect good or the perfect evil."Touching upon the ideas of the philosophes who afiliated that man was a perfect machine of the finest structure, manifesting mind, will and action; those who granted man a Soul and Body; and those who conceived of man as spirit, soul, and body, forming a human triad, Schwarz insisted that man was a complex composition of four components: spirit, human soul, animal soul (including intuition and passions), and material body. Schwarz taught that human being is made up of a spirit (dukh), a soul (dusha), and a body (lelo). He defined spirit as the highest soul (v)'sshaia dusha), i.e., the spark of original Adam's soul in man. On the other hand, the soul, anima sensitive was to hirn an animal soul in Man (dusha zhivotnaia), ruled by human passions and desires, which may lead a person away from a spiritual goal. Finally, the body was anima vegetative, which reflected physical feelings. Schwarz elevated heart, soul, feelings, faith, poetic inspiration, and imagination to the level of reason. He insisted that human beings were capable of "understanding" not only with their reason, but also with their heart. Moreover, reason could claim its knowing power only if aided by feeling, intuition, inspiration, and revelation. Going in the same direction, Tolstoy's character Mason Bazdeev in the War and Peace castigates those who strive to understand God and bis Creation as "more foolish and unreasonable than a little child, who playing with the parts of a skillfully made watch dares to say that, as he does not understand its use, he does not believe in the master who made it." (Tolstoy, War and Peace, 382.)

    For ages, Freemasons labored "to attain that knowledge [of God and Universe] and are still infinitely far from our aim; but in our lack of understanding we only see our weakness and His greatness..." But to come to "know Him [God] is hard." In his utopia Noveishee puteshestvie, through the character living in a "perfeet" society in the Moon, the author Freemason V. Levshin insisted that "It is enough that we acknowledge our omnipotent Maker who created all these wonderful things. .. and [we] do not doubt that the cause of their existence is in the omnipotent God's will." In the society that Narsim, a man who travels on the Moon, finds there [al thorough exploration of the unknown, and to say even more, aspiring to know the unknown is considered ... as utter foolishness. With his limited reason, man cannot and is not supposed to understand or penetrate the unyielding shield of the wise intentions of the Creator. Although the ultimate "knowledge" is hardly attainable, an intern al sensibility is inherent in every human being, and can and should be developed by a proper education. To understand things outside of them, stated Schwarz, people had nerves and feelings that were intractably connected into one "Sensus Comunis: the main sense, i.e. the feeling ofthe soul with which [we] feel beauty of a thing without further investigation, without any syllogisms. (NIOR RGB, fond 147. folder 142, Schwarz's lectures. 23rev.)

    Complicated by "human" components, reason itself acquired more dimensions and departed from the mechanistic ("Euclidian") reasoning of the philosophes. It was this complex mixture of human emotions, feelings, and reasoning that made people akin to the Creator. Man was a world hirnself, and just "like God' s imagination is able to create, so is human imagination." (NIOR RGB, fond 147, folder 142, Schwarz's lectures, 19rev.)

    Masons of related groups also in Germany and in France, postulated that humanity's very existence, with its rational and irrational side, constituted a perfectly harmonious system. On the physicallevel, a human was deemed a resemblance and copy of the greater world. Repeating the Rosicrucian postulate, leading Russian Masonic theorists insisted that man was a microcosm, and the world (or, Nature) was a macrocosm. Man was not alone in the world; he was "an extraction from nature, in which the wise creator breathed a breath of life." ( NIOR RGB, fond 14, folder 564, 4O rev.)

    All the elements of Nature, spirit, and matter come together and dash in a man, and this is his strength and his weakness. "Man is ... the creature that connects moral with material; he is the last among the spirits and the first among the material creatures" - so Schwarz and related groups,defined man's place in the hierarchy. Nature in Masonic philosophy represented not only the macrocosm but also macroanthropos, something dependent and defined by the end directions and goals of man' s development. The organic unity of the world was one of the foundational ideas of Russian Freemasons. This union was not a simple sum of the elements, but the building blocks connected into one organism by the ties of universal sympathy. The whole living totality of the world was created in a specific harmonious order out of love and benevolence.The idea of the organic body appealed to those Freemasons who had to withstand the authority of the State and established Church hierarchies and correlated with their need to legitimize the inspirational freedom of the spirit. (See, for instance, similar ideas expressed in Johanna Geyer-Kordesch, "Georg Ernst Stahl's Radieal Pietist Medicine and its Influence on the German Enlightenment," in The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, eds. Andrew Cunningham, Roger French, Cambridge University Press, 1990,67-87.)

    In his lectures, Schwarz pursued the relationship between the heterogeneous elements opposing each other to form a harmonious union, and the universe seemed to him a dynamic, living whole that affirmed the organic unity of nature and humanity.Like man, Nature was "the unity of forces of movement and resistance, even the forces of opposition that are constantly trying to destroy each other." The constant beneficial rotation of elements that the "infinite Wisdom" guided and coordinated the forces of Nature, explained V. A. Levshin in his discussion of Voltaire's Destruction Of Lisbon. Mutual attraction, "magnetism," the notion often used by the Freemasons by the end of the century, strengthened the ties of mutual love and affection. According to Professor Schwarz, in the grand scheme of things, individual's perfection and high purpose were not, however, in his likeness to the world of Nature, but in building the "Temple of the Living God." God was in man and man in God, and salvation was to rise through love to the life of the "spirit," to union with God. However, at this time, as Schwarz asserted, man was not able to reach the desired union with God. Man was perfect in the past but had fallen from grace.780 After the fall (Adam's fall from grace) man lost his purity, and with it all his knowledge about God and Nature that were given to bim by God bimself. The fall was reflected not in man' s perpetuallife in sin and pain, but the loss of the knowledge he once had. A fallen man lost his harmony and bis moral essence and donned on a decaying body.Created from the "dark soil," man, at the same time, in potential was ''the most perfect of all the creatures" because he belonged "to heavens with bis reasoning soul," and had, in bis essence, an ability to comprehend the world. (NIOR ROß, fond 147, folder 142, Schwarz's lectures, 88 (108)-88rev (l08rev.)

    According to the medieval mystical elements borrowed by tbe Russian Freemasons, boclies were not made of earth only, but the Matter in its various forms. Medieval philosophy also added heat, then considered as an element, but now described as a mode of motion. But without the realization of his potential, this vulnerable, sinful, imperfect, fragile, fallen, mortal man "cannot rise to the skies. They are unreachable to bim." The goal ofthe "rega science" of Freemasonry was pronounced by Schwarz as a "secretive moral revival" of fallen Nature and tbis "dark and decaying temple of the fallen essence" (ORKR NBMU, fond V. V. Velichko, inv. number 3975-6-60, 4rev. "Instruktsia masteru lozhi".)

    Thus the above rooted in Medieval Mysticism as it was, through the idea of "enlightenment" the Russian Masonic ideologues attempted to find a possibility of moral renaissance for Man and Nature. Man, alienated as he was from the source of light through bis fall, was, nevertheless, a microcosm of the macrocosm, the universe, and the three components of man .- the body, soul, and spirit -­ corresponded to the hierarchical gradations in the great Chain of Being, from the lowest matter to the highest spiritual being. Russian Masonic ideologues c1aimed that they could raise a new moral man and restore the broken Chain of Being. To help man make the ascent from body through soul to the life of "spirit" and union with God, they proposed joining together for the common good and making "chain by uniting ... hands."For the path to enlightenment, the Bible, the book of inspiration, was the only legitimate authority. The Bible contained a plan for the restoration and working of the rough stone that could be read as a coded message sent by the Great Architect of the Universe to those who could understand it. According to Schwarz's s and common to  Freemasons of his persuasion, they were heirs ofthe Jewish sects, especially the Essenes and the Theraputes. Essenes it was told, left their knowledge of the mysteries to the medieval Rosicrucians, and the Rosicrucians transferred the knowledge to the Masons. The book of Genesis written by Moses also retained remnants of the "spark of the light," and that is why Freemasons in Russia analyzed the book thoroughly along with the Bible. "God's word did not disappear from earth, because what is said by God once cannot be lost or destroyed," insisted Schwarz in his lectures on the types of knowledge. Echoing Renaisance philosophers like Pico de la Mirandola and Marchello Ficino, Schwarz encouraged his students to look for hidden messages in the Bible by saying that the first three books of Genesis were written in "kabalistic manner" (kabbalisticheskim obrazom) and that "for their [books']understanding it is necessary to work and try to interpret them with God's help." (OPI GIM, fond 398, opis' I, folder 23.)

    The Freemason was to leam not only about hirnself, but also about the world around him through learning the main Masonic "sciences." To the question, "What sciences should be known to a Freemason?" a Russian version of the catechism offers poetry, music, painting, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and architecture. Arts and sciences were not classified by the Russian ideologues as "worldly futility," but often contemporary methods of sciences were looked upon with suspicion because they aimed either at showing that God did not exist or showing that God and the Universe were ultimately knowable. In the Pietist tradition(for that is what we are partly dealing with here), Schwarz insisted that spiritual growth was inexorably linked to imagination and emotion. Both curious and pleasant knowledge were useful and should be cultivated as gifts of God to man, but they were nevertheless double-edged weapons which could bring armful consequences unless checked by the third, poleznoe (profitable), knowledge.This one came from initiation and inspiration that taught people "the meaning of true love, prayer, and aspiration ofthe spirit towards higher knowledge." These three types of knowledge can, in fact, be identified as rational knowledge, feeling, and mystical revelation. If everything in the Universe was in a harmonious union, and "the great mechanist [the Grand Architect ofthe Universe] created a stupendous rotation and conformity one among another," then analogy could be taken as the best way to learn about the world and the nature without losing sight of the Creator of everything. Schwarz insisted that since "He [the Grand Architect of the Universe] loves to vary the same mode of operation a thousand ways," this "curious diversity" points to the fact that "all his works seem ... [to] equally proclaim him their common founder and contributor."( NIOR RGB, fond 147, edinitsa khraneniia 142, "Lektsii Schwarza" 1782, 22rev-23.)

    In using analogy, the investigator intended the relationship and participated fully in the process. The intimate intertwining of the human being into nature forced the ideologues of Russian Freemasonry to overcome the experience of alienation common to "objective" Enlightenment science. They propagated a scientific investigation that was individualized and reflected in a process profoundly dependent on the person and his capacities to see pattern, form, and the archetype within the multiplicity of nature.

    Many Russian Freemasons also were also involved with Philology, in the form of the discovery of "slavonic" ("slavenskie," ) tales and "ancient wonders" ("starinnye dikovinki,"). Combining the genre of tale with the influence that poetry was thought to have on emotions, by the end of the eighteenth century many Russian intellectuals turned to a Russian bylina, a poetic heroic narrative carrying a moralizing grain. At the same time, a new concept of man emerged. The new hero was an individual with a unique personality. He was emotionally intense, sensitive and idealistic. Alienated from life, he c1ashed with the reality and defeated, fled from it. Such is the nature of the heroes in Goethe's The Sorrows ofYoung Werther (1774) and Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise (1761), which in turn provided the models for the heroes and heroines of the Russian sentimental tales and novels: Fedor Emin's Letters of Ernst and Dorara (1766), Nicolai Emin's Roza, A Partially True and Original Tale, P. L'vov's A Russian Pamela, or the History of Maria, a Virtuous Peasant Girl (1789), and Karamzin's Poor Liza (1792).816 Ifwe define Russian Sentimentalism (or pre­ Romanticism) as in essence the "transference of allegiance from reason to the heart but with a strong retention of c1assical restraint, a meeting point between Classicism and Romanticism, then a correspondence of its ideas and the ideas propagated by Freemasons in Russia after the 1770s becomes apparent.

    Freemasons furthermore, believed in direct correspondence and communion between human psychic inner world and external nature, and no subject within the intersecting realms of man's imagination and physical world, inc1uding alchemy, physiognomy, or chiromancy, could be excluded from the legitimate sphere of interest. While earlier, Russia did not undergo the Western European Renaissance; therefore, the classical revival, and with it the trends of physiognomy, astrology, and alchemy entered Russia rather late. While in the West, the pursuit of these "sciences" was at its peak several centuries earlier, Russia remained relatively isolated from most Western developments until the large-scale Westernization. Freemasons thought of esoteric sciences as useful for the betterment of man and enthusiastically promoted them. A significant part of Freemasons in Russia was toying with the ideas of what came to be called ,Rosicrucianism', fascinated by a theory of nature and the principles of alchemy and astrology on which it rested. They treasured the secret knowledge of the hidden cosmic forces and of the ultimate harmony of the world of which Man was a vital extract of all essences.

    Criticism of the philosophes, stress on religiosity and moral temperance and recognition of the irrational undercurrents of the human mind could develop into extreme mysticism, obscurantist asceticism, rejection of leaming as such, or excessive interest in occult. In his famous lectures Schwarz employed Boehme's cosmological ideas to describe the genesis of the world, from the gigantic outflow of the elements of divine nature forming the ideal uni verse to the stark tragedy of its temporary detachment from the divine matrix. Magie, for instance, was considered to be "that Godly science, with the help of which the Magi find the natural light and natural spirit. The Magus is the searcher of truth with whom nature speaks in all its created form through its spirit and explains its signature." In the study of the "practical" sciences, Russian Freemasons placed special emphasis on alchemy (and chemistry), astronomy, and physiognomy. As Elagin indicated, Freemasons were looking for a "I arger philosophy that could inc1ude not only an infinite amount of pompous words but would be based on the geometrie proofs and chemical tests."( NIOR RGB, fond 147.) On a similar note, Schwarz customarily opened his lectures with the statement:

    "Hermetic Philosophy is a mother: it is founded on the knowledge of Nature, it possesses the knowledge ofthe Elements, Matter, perfection of metals, and many other things, so that she [Hermetic Philosophy] is a Natural Teaching, i.e. Physics and Alchemy."(idem) According to the Freemasons immersed in the study of alchemy, any body was composed of three essences: salt, sulphur, and mercury. Every metal had in itself other metals "hidden" within. Gold was the most perfect metal because it contained equal proportions of all the three essences. Metals lived their life in aspiration of becoming gold. Since the difference between any metal and gold was deemed only in proportion, it was considered possible to find "semen of met als" (semia metalov) that, in its turn, formed a basis of the "philosophers' stone." It was believed that if the philosophers' stone was mixed with metals in a special proportion, it was possible to turn that metal into gold. The philosophers' stone was also deemed to eure all maladies and that is why it was often ealled a "universal panacea" or "general and universal medicine."

    Concerning alehemy, the Freemasons who believed in the postulates of a1chemy, can be divided into two categories: those who passionately pursued it and those who considered alchemy, with its search for gold, an occupation contrary to Masonie belief in the futility of worldly possessions. For instance, Lopukhin, whose printing house was responsible for almost all the books on alehemy printed in Russia in the 1780s, labeled all alchemists the servants in the "anti-Christ's Church." Aecording to hirn, people who were "attached to gold-making and to searching the means of prolonging [their] sinful life, to exercising in the letters of theosophy, kabala, seeret medicine and in this magnetism" could easily become "the best means for dissemination of and preparation for the actions of the dark forces." Besides theoretical confrontation, the problem with learning tbe tenets of alcbemy was, as Schröder explained to tbe leader of German Rosicrucians, that Russians were simply not interested in alchemieal work beeause they were not skilIed in the practical aspect of it. This opinion ean be indirecdy supported by the fact that compared to the amount of publications concerning moral perfection and  spirituality, books on alcbemy are relatively rare.When answering questions of potential candidates into Freemasonry, a member of the Moscow circle pointed out that "only those who are chemists in their rankings deal with simple chemistry." Novikov lamented the fact that Russian Freemasons did not devote any serious attention to magic and kabbalah because they were in lower grades, and he knew nothing of these sciences except for the names. Chemistry, on the other hand, should have been on the radar, but Freemasons in Russia "reluctantly did not start because there was no one to show them the basic principles."( NIOR ROB, fond 147.)

    Physiognomy was one of the tools for the study of mankind and the means of putting the mysterious and organic unity of man and the constant interaction of the inner and the outer seIf into a praetieal science built on observation and eategorization. The concept of man as harmony ofbody, reason, soul, and will forms the basis of Lavater's physiognomie studies. If Wolff described man as either "free" when in use of bis reason, or a "slave" when subject to his passions, following the Pietist tradition Freemasons in Russia propagated medical theory giving substantial support to the idea that emotion and mind were to be seen holistically. Although they recognized that the correlation between psychoIogical and physical refleeted in physiognomy had not necessarily reached absolute accuracy and distinguished between theory and practice, they, nevertheless, were generally persuaded of the validity of physiognomy as a scienee. In these comparisons, references to medical science were a part of the demand to denounce the traditional reliance of medical practitioners on "hypothetical explanations" and "imaginary systems" in favor of scientific experiments and clinical observations. The attitude towards physiognomy among the Moscow Masons seems to be of a dual nature, just as there was a dichotomy among them in their attitudes to alchemy or, in general, to rational and irrational. In a Russian-Ianguage Masonry-related magazine, for instance, we can also find an anonymous artic1e clearly opposing physiognomy in 1785. (Mentioned in N. S. Tikhonravov, Sochineniiia, vol. 3, Moscow, 1898, 77.)

    However, the most influential figure among Moscow Freemasons, Professor Schwarz, was most definitely adefender of physiognomy, as he lectured on the "justification of physiognomy" in his course on aesthetics. He insisted that the basis of physiognomy was observation and experiment and not sheer imagination and speculation. Masonic adepts of physiognomy departed from a pseudo-c1assical ideal of l'honnete homme and attempted to capture individuality and complexity of a human being as a mixture of features that reflected the inner self onto the outer self. Rather than simply providing a portrait or a visual image of man' s perfeet physical features, physiognomy offered the Freemasons an opportunity to glorify people' s virtuous behavior. In recognizing the fluidity of man's character, Freemasons postulated that a real human being was not an unchangeable "icon." (The Languages Of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought. ed. G. S. Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 297-98.)

    This theory opposed the idea that all men were born with the same natural abilities and characteristics, and that environment and educational opportunities alone shaped man' s character as weIl as his particular mind and talents. Providing the depiction of moral and the beginning of psychological analysis and evaluation was stimulated by the study of man on the anthropologicallevel and by the rational, scientific approaches of anatomy and physiology. Given the commitment to the study of man which characterized the epoch, it was only natural that the increasing preoccupation with man' s existence and with explaining the "vital phenomena" of life should lead to the study of the "whoie man." With this development, the concrete external began to assume an ever-increasing significance in the total structure of man; it provided a new means of understanding man and in turn a new means of character presentatActivities related to medicine thus also, played an important role in Masonic undertakings in Russia, although they are often overlooked. On a theoreticallevel, benevolence, a pertinent tenet of the Craft, figured in the work of many physicians of the time. But the practical implication of Masonic theories for the development of medicine went even further. The need to consider Nature and Man in their harmonious interrelationship is reflected in a common Masonic parallel between the doctor and theologian. Both medicine and theology are theoretical and practical; the theologian's theory is the revealed world and that of the physician is the laws of nature. A tale found in the papers of the eighteenth-century Russian Freemasons demonstrates their ideas about interconnectedness of body and soul: A man came to a hospital and asked the physician if there was a medicine to cure his sins. Without hesitating, the physician gave the man a detailed recipe: take obedience, prayers, and patience, the flowers of purity, fruits of good deeds, and grind them in the pot of silence; and filter them through the sieve of reasoning; then pour into the pot of humility; add water from the prayerful tears; light the fire of godly love; cover with charity, and when the light intensifies, cool down; add salt of brotherly love; and consume with the spoon of repentance; and you will be absolutely healthy. (NIOR, fond 237, carton 33, folder 9, 22-26. )

    Instead of separating mind and body, as Descartes had done, the Masonic objective was to ineorporate the spiritual into the material. Freemasoris tried to establish a correlation between cognitive, emotional, and physiologieal ehanges in human development. The intention of Masonic medieal theory was to prove that subconscious perceptions affect the mind and the body as a unity. If so, then the eure of the body and the cure of the soul were the same kind of activity, related to the phenomena of emotion, reason, and imagination that were eoordinated in the individual organism. Schwarz told his students that Freemasonry could be considered as a general healing beeause it cured the diseases stemming from vice; and vice is from sin; and the sin is in the soul. (NIOR RGB, fond 14, folder 618,8 (Sbornik molitv, izrechenii, vypisok iz besed 1. A. Pozdeevai L. E. Schwarza, 1806-09).

    As Karamzin put it in his Letters of a Russian Traveler, Why the moralists are not doing enough to make people better? That is because they [moralists] eonsider them healthy, and talk to them as to healthy people when they are siek, so then instead ofwordy persuasions they [people] should have been given several rounds of a purgative. Disorder of soul is always a result of the disorder of the body. When in our machine everything is in a perfect balance, then all the vessels are in order and dutifully exude different fluids; in a word, when every part executes a function that was vested in it by Nature, then soul is healthy; then a man thinles and acts weIl; then he is wise and virtuous, elated and happy. (This part is not included in the English-language edition Karamzin, Letters of a Russian Traveller. For the quote in Russian, see Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 84.)

    Freemasons viewed man as a composition of four worlds (or, four principles): divine, moral, intellectual, and emotional. Body and spirit were considered connected, balancing one another, allowing Man' s spiritual and material nature to achieve equilibrium, counterbalancing each other, creating the "universal harmony." The assumption that there was a strong relation between ethical values, morals, and soul contrasted sharply with mechanist and dualist assumptions. In his post-Cartesian enlightenment philosophy, for example, Christian W olff divided imagination into components that were either subservient to reason (the ability to envision abstract concepts) or subservient to the passions (images that stir up feelings). In his lectures on aesthetics, Schwarz emphasized a transitional shift from the rational aesthetics of Boileau to the aesthetics of sensibility advocated by Ch. Batteux in his Les Beaux Arts reduits a une meme principe (1747). Schwarz was the first professor who lectured on Batteux in Russia. His students followed the lead. For instance, for Karamzin's indebtedness to Baneux, see Nebel, N. M. Karamzin, a Russian Sentimentalist, 88-90. Compare also H. Rother, N. M. Karamzins Europäische Reise: Der Beginn des russischen Romans (Bad Hamburg, Berlin, Zürich: Gehlen, 1968), 59-62, A. Mashkin, "Esteticheskaia teoriia Batteux i lirika Derzhavina," Vestnik obrazovaniia i vospitaniia (Kazan', 1916); /storiia estetiki, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1964), 376-89; Peter Brang, "A. M. Kutuzov als Vermittler des europäschen SentimentaJismiuses in Russland," Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie 30 (1962): 44-57.

    In contrast, for Freemasons, emotion was connected to reason as weIl as to the imagination; they were coordinated in the individual organism. At the same time, it was a common understanding among eighteenth-century Freemasons that the mechanistic concepts that were embodied in the first three degrees of speculative Freemasonry were also applicable to the study of medicine. Since body and soul were a unity, health was regarded highly. In this life body was an instrument of soul, an essential vessel for thought and feeling, and it was necessary to educate people on how to make it work properly. Health had often been held as a supreme virtue, showing a living in accordance with nature. In contrast, the rational, scientific approaches of anatomy and physiology. Given the commitment to the study of man which characterized the epoch, it was only natural that the increasing preoccupation with man' s existence and with explaining the "vital phenomena" of life should lead to the study of the "whole man." With this development, the concrete external began to assume an ever-increasing significance in the total structure of man; it provided a new means of understanding man and in turn a new means of character presentation.See John Graham, "Character Description and Meaning in the Romantic Novel," Studies in Romanticism 5 (1966): 208-218. Edmund Heier, Studies on Johann Caspar Lavater, points out that since it was related to medicine, physiognomy was believed to supply a cornerstone and support for the philosophy of man in which improved public health would be indivisible from enlightened morality.

    Freemasons viewed man as a composition of four worlds (or, four principles): divine, moral, intellectual, and emotional. Body and spirit were considered connected, balancing one another, allowing Man' s spiritual and material nature to achieve equilibrium, counterbalancing each other, creating the "universal harmony." The assumption that there was a strong relation between ethical values, morals, and soul contrasted sharply with mechanist and dualist assumptions. In his post-Cartesian enlightenment philosophy, for example, Christian Wolff divided imagination into components that were either subservient to reason (the ability to envision abstract concepts) or subservient to the passions (images that stir up feelings). In contrast, for Freemasons, emotion was connected to reason as weIl as to the imagination; they were coordinated in the individual organism. At the same time, it was a common understanding among eighteenth-century Freemasons that the mechanistic concepts that were embodied in the first three degrees of speculative Freemasonry were also applicable to the study of medicine. (FHL, R. William Weisberger, John Theopilus Desaguliers: Promoter of the Enlightenment and of Speculative Freemasonry (typescript. n. d.), 8. For instance, the idea thatjust like Sun was deemed the center ofthe solar system, the heart likewise operated as the nucleus ofthe human body.)

    Since body and soul were a unity, health was regarded highly. In this life body was an instrument of soul, an essential vessel for thought and feeling, and it was necessary to educate people on how to make it work properly. Health had often been held as a supreme virtue, showing a living in accordance with nature. In contrast, sickness was a manifestation of God's wrath: "no illness might happen unless if sent to man from God as punishment, from which God did not create a special medicine or antidote... God also created a universal remedy from any illness."( NIOR ROß, fond 14, folder 690,4 ) Disease was deemed a result of the imbalance between material and spiritual, going too far in either direction of the body and spirit. As Schwarz pointed out, "[a]ncient philosophers defined that a human being consists of body, soul, and spirit, distinguishing illnesses into external and internal maladies." So when body was exhausted, then its spirit was affected too.Equally, when soul was not well, then mind could function normally. (NIOR ROß, fond 147, folder 102,91-J 11, Schwarz's lectures).

    Accordingly, there had to be special techniques and medicine to eure the illnesses of soul that modemdoctors could not even cure." Considering the interrelations between mind and body, Masonic doctors started interpreting, intellectualizing disease as an indication and result of disharmony. If illness was disharmony, to prevent it, Masonic tracts advised maintaining a balanced life: "Every malady can be prevented by modest and moderate way of living, especially in food, sleep, and daily exercise." (NIOR ROß, fond 147, folder 102. The had-written copy of the document was created on 8 October 1781. Judging by the number of Oerman words in the text, it was translated from Oerman.)

    "Organic" or "harmonious" to Freemasons meant a coordinated and integrated whole, the organism adjusting to its environment both on a conscious and unconscious level (sensually, emotionally and mentally) with immediate psychological results. As Schwarz taught his students, the network of nerves connected organism to external reality. If disturbed by the outside irritants, nerves transmitted signals to internal funetions. Aeeording to hirn, it was because of nerves that people perecived subjects: every part of human body had nerves to transmit information to the center in the brain. In the brain human beings had "a governor of the body, or mind," that created "images of the outside world" on the basis of this information. (NIOR RGB, fond 14, folder 378, 14-17; fond 147, folder 102,91,111).

    This medical theory about the interconnectedness of material and spiritual and the organic nature of human organism was a substantial part of the Masonic thought.Medical contributions to social progress were to be found in health care issues, such as, for example, the founding and reform of institutions (such as hospitals), or in the introduction of new standards of professionalisation. This was a medical theory that drew on and influenced the structure of ideological processes, and did not depend on state decisions. Just as Novikov-published tictional work, Chrysomander, eine allegorische und satyrische Geschichte (1783), depicts a magus-king named Hyperion, who used alchemy to relieve the hardship of bis subjects, Freemasons in Russia wanted to be involved in pharmacology and medicine to relieve the hardsbips of people and, ultimately, with continuous experiments, to find a better eure for the illnesses of mind and body. It is as a part of the goal of inspiring a "Christian spirit" and curing bodies that Freemasons opened a pharmacy in Moscow. As Lopukhin pointed out, many people assumed that it was an "embarrassment" for the nobles to be involved in the book trade and the pharmacy. He, however, strongly disagreed." (OPI OIM, fond 398, opis' I, folder 24, 13.)

    There is nothing nobler than book trade and pharmacy because these bring people only good."During the reign of Catherine the number of private pharmacies rose. In the last quarter of the century, St. Petersburg had at least three main and four collateral state-managed pharmacies and ten private. As William Tooke reports, the yearly salaries at the private pharmacies amounted to 6750 rubles a year, which could have been attractive for any foreign apothecary to take on a journey to Russia. However. the difficulty of introducing the new medical constitution and obtaining a sufficient number of expert physicians and surgeons remained until the ful1. scale commission by Zimmermann. The state-employed medical stuff received 800 rubles a year. Masons must help the humanity as much as possible, insisted Lopukhin, because it was "suffering from maladies, even through the loss of OUf property, trying to prepare the best medicine that would be different from the one prepared in other places driven by profit." To accomplish this task, ''the best foreign apothecary, Weinheim was invited." Anyone could use a Masonic pharmacy. Those who had money paid the regular price, while many poor received their medicine for free. Weinheim's reputation became so well­ established that even after Novikov's arrest and the dissolution of Masonic lodges in Russia his Moscow pharmacy was still considered the best.Another influential Masonic apothecary was doctor Frenkel', who received the permission of the govemment to open bis Moscow pharmacy in 1785. (NIOR ROB, fond 147, folder 6,41, letter from Trubetskoi to Rzhevskii, 30 July 1783).

    Frenkel's pharmacy seemed to face a promising future as a channel through wbich the idea of universal therapy could be made available to a larger public and supply Masonic circles with an attractive profit It was Frenkel' who was the first in Russia to import and prepare the so-called "Hoffman" drops, one of the most popular remedies in Russia. Frenkel' claimed to have received a recipe for making gold. The recipe that he sent to Wöllner turned out to be copies of the information contained in the book Annulus Platonis, a recommended reading for all Rosicrucians. But Frenkel's reputation did not suffer: he remained the authority on special prescriptions weIl into the nineteenth century.849 His assistants, Bindgeim, Kube, Linrodt, Ben, and Einbrot, opened their own successful pharmacies after the dissolution of the Novikov-Schwarz circ1e, and greatly contributed to the foundation of the pharmaceutical science in Russia. Schwarz stated that medicine was an experimental science based on the tests of those who practiced the craft. Medical knowledge was aposteriori knowledge.It is not coincidental that the majority of the students who were sent abroad by Russian Freemasons studied medicine. According to the story that Lopukhin told the authorities in 1792, the main goal in sending young Freemasons abroad was to prepare experienced teachers and translators. However, the majority of the students were sent to acquire knowledge either in medicine (like Mikhail Bagrianskii, V. Ia. Kolokol'nikov, and M. I. Nevzorov) or chemistry (like A. M. Kutuzov). It is notable that in Berlin the meeting place of the Masons related to Russia was the house of the Russian envoy and Freemason M. Allopeus. Baron Schröder met there with Kutuzov and Bagrianskii on several occasions.

    In 1792, Turgenev testified to the fact that sending students abroad on Masonic money had public benefit in view. The students' benefactors urged them to study chemistry, medicine, and natural history so that they could become "more easily apprenticed in the method and system of that order and become our laboratory assistants." Upon retuming, these students were to become the assistants who would provide their knowledge and guidance "to other members of Rosicrucian circles," the majority of whom did not "practice chemistry and alchemy." Their mission was the one of the enlightenment. Lopukhin thought that by sponsoring students to study medicine and ehemistry he was "performing an obligation of virtue in helping the poor and in assigning them to sueh profitable profession as medicine." But sending students to study medicine and ehemistry was not a simple-minded philanthropie enterprise. According to Rosicrucian instructions, knowledge of chemistry was the preparatory step toward admission to their "holy seienee," alehemy. In an article in the Morning Light we find referenee to alehemy as a seienee that, unlike modern medicine, provides a eure for "internal diseases affecting breathing, heart, blood, and stomach. " The article also claims that ''There are on this earth eertain alchemistie adepts chosen by God who can eure the intern al diseases and vices by the means of universal or general medication. But out misfortune is that such righteous men are extremely rare." Sent to Berlin, A. Kutuzov was supposed to carry out praetical work in chemistry and alchemy under the guidanee of a bankrupt merchant from Dresden, Du Bosque. Among the Rosicrusians, Du Bosque enjoyed special farne by his earlier association with Schröpfer, who, in the 1770s, had c1aimed to produce thunder and lightning and conjure dead spirits. Karamzin, Letters of a Russian Traveller, 84-86, offers several anecdotes to demonstrate that "al1 his [Schröpfer's] secret wisdom was only charlatanism" and makes paralleIs between Schröpfer and Cagliostro. Despite the dates 1789-1790 indicated in the book's tide, as A. G. Cross establishes, the letters were written as a novellater, in the beginning of the nineteenth century (in N. M. Karamzin: A Study of His Literate' Career).

    Kutuzov obtained from his teacher various alchemie recipes by paying him huge fees and relayed them to Trubetskoi. In the spirit of Renaissance, alchemy occupied a medial position between the arts and the sciences, a position also occupied by medicine. Thomas Aquinas, to cite one example, variously calls alchemy an "operative science," a "mechanical art," and an "operative art." He ranks "medicine, alchemy, and moral [philosophyl" together, since they have practical use and pertain more to specific subjects than do such fields as metaphysics, physics, and mathematics. But he also groups alchemy with agriculture and medicine as technological pursuits subordinate to physics. In a letter dated 13 February 1790, Trubetskoi asked Kutuzov to seek the advice of his teacher whether a combination called N could be applied to his niece and Novikov's wife who was dying from tuberculosis.858 Kutuzov answered that N and another prescription he obtained from Du Bosque, were both "applicable to all diseases."At the end, Tolstoy's Pierre turns away from Freemasonry, because "seeking and vacillating, he had not yet found in Freemasonry a straight and comprehensible path. But for many people in Russia, like Prince Golitsyn, a Freemason and member of a famous pre-Decembrist Souza russkikh rytsarei (Alliance of the Russian knights), "the ancient science of Freemasonry led ... to the truth that arranged ... the attitudes of man to God, to man, and to nature. (Quoted in A. Ia. Gordin, "Donos na vsu Rossiu," Zvezda 6, 1990, 121.)

    Although Catherine regarded Freemasonry as politically subversive from at least the mid-eighties, the majority of Masons in Russia proclaimed themselves to be above politics. They chose to concentrate on reforming the passions and morals of Masonic members, and rejected Voltairianism and extreme materialism in favor of achieving the ideal of the virtuous, enlightened man. The concern about the more extreme forms of Westernization of their country was not limited to Freemasons. Russian literature of the eighteenth-century presents endless examples of satires against Francomania and the petits-maitres from Kantemir to Fonvizin.

    It was the path of inner, moral regeneration, and not of political action. But by doing so they offered a way out of the impasse of superficiality and autocratic rule by urging re­-education of the individual as a preliminary to the restructuring of society. In this manner the Russian educated elite involved moral concern into their critical thinking and analytical ideas. The accusation most frequently leveled by historians against Russian Freemasonry in the eighteenth century is that dangers of intellectual obscurantism and reactionary social and political philosophy were inherent in the theosophical view of man and the universe which it introduced. But as we established, the intellectual position taken by the Freemasons in public, their emphasis on moral regeneration and self­ betterment, was the ideology of the Enlightenment in search of richer experience in the wider and deeper realms o fMan's inner world and the ultimate mystery of Nature. Examination of Masonic theories reveals the paradox of the immediate and total acceptance of romantic idealistic philosophies (and literature ) while retaining a rationalistic and Enlightenment form of thought. In awakening and cultivating moral and religious sensitivity, Freemasonry on this level converged with Sentimentalism which was beginning to replace c1assic formalism. What appealed to the generation of young Russians in this reworked and adapted body of ideas was not the radical novelty or the originality of the thoughts and sentiments expressed in Freemasonry' s philosophy, but rather its familiarity. The Masonic attitude expressed through the medium of printed, spoken, and written word and the idealistic credo reiterated the values and ..feelings" that were already circulating in the educated society. Freemasons' influence on Russian society was both ideological and practical. They worked in an inteIlectual environment shaped by the forces of the Enlightenment. Freemasons' Enlightenment in Russia was not a formed system of great scientific originality but rather one of elaboration, popularization, and the dissemination of a worldview feit to embody the best and the most useful ideas. Just as in the West, Russian sentimentalism was built on Enlightenment philosophy in exploring the relationship between the self, a political and social order, and nature. Just as in the West, it examined the legitimacy of the subject, as a source of aesthetic and moral judgments. Just as in the West, it displayed an interest in biography, history, and folk tradition as much to trace how a particular state of affairs came about, as to seek answers in the past to the questions of the present. (Andreas Schonle,"The Scare of the Self: Sentimentalism, Privacy, and Private Life in Russian Culture, 1780-1820," Slavic Review 57.4: 723-746.)

    By the end ofthe century, Russians had already been prepared emotionally and inteIlectually for the theories of sentimentalism. The Freemasons' seareh for divine and moral perfection in the individual and emphasis on religion and imagination was reflected in the idea that true philosophical knowledge should be based on tbe profound unity of all things in nature, and the insistenee that the creativity of the spirit is a vital element of the humanity in a human being. These ideas appealed to the Russians because they fitted in so well with what they needed and seemed to give a complete synthesis of the emotional, sentimental, and strietly philosophical issues. Many young Russian intellectuals believed that in Freemasonry they had found what they wanted: a philosophy that would provide them with a metaphysical basis for their own ideas of Russian nationality, and for a new cultural and intellectual synthesis that was both peculiarly Russian and universal. Eventually, from religious mysticism and the rhetoric of self-improvement Freemasons in Russia tumed to a patriotic assertiveness: Sincere love for the fatherland prompted in us the eagemess to try to become its worthy sons; and with this intention, we ventured to undertake the sharpening of our reason together with purification of our morals. The place in which we find ourselves in no small way helps us to carry out this double task, but our free will is the main motive for it and the most reliable support.Thus the subject of their concem was no longer the private world of feelings and sentiment alone, but also a larger entity called the fatherland and the civic society of which they regarded themselves as citizens. Expanding on the idea that there was so much variety in human and historical phenomena that it was utterly impossible to comprehend them in abstract and general terms alone, Freemasons in Russia viewed the process of betterment of the human beings in an organic manner. Applied to nationality, this meant that each human being, as weIl as "nations" had a soul and a body, and an individuality, which was expressed in its history, literature, religion, art, customs, and especially, in the language.

    In Part 5 then we research the political implications of the above activities.
     


    E. European Freemasonry P.1.

    E. European Freemasonry P.2.

    E. European Freemasonry P.3.

    E. European Freemasonry P.5.
     

    Archival Sources

    Russian Federation

    Nauchno-issledovatel'skii otdel rukopisei Rossiiskoi gosudarstvennoi biblioteki (NIOR RGB) [Manuscript Division ofthe Russian State Library, Moscow]

                Fond 14, V. S. Arsen'ev collection of Masonic manuscripts
                Fond 147. S. S. Lanskoi and S. V. Eshevskii collection ofMasonic manuscripts Fond 178, Museum collection
                Fond 237, D.I. Popov collection

    Otdel rukopisei Natsional'noi rossiiskoi biblioteki (OR NRB) [Manuscript Division of the Russian National Library, St Petersburg]

                Fond 487, N. M. Mikhailovskii collection
                Fond 550, Principal collection of the manuscript books

    Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov (RGADA) [Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents, Moscow]

                Fond 8, Kalinkin Dom and Files of Crimes against Morality
                Fond 8, opis' 1, I. P. Elagin papers
                Fond 10, Private Office of Catherine II
                Fond 17, Science, Literature, Art
                Fond 168. Relations of Russian Sovereigns with Governmental Posts and with Officials

    Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA) [Russian State Historical Archive, St Petersburg]

                Fond 796. Chancellery ofthe Ho1y Synod papers (1721-1918)

    Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI) [Russian State Archive of LiteratUre and An, Moscow]

                Fond 191, Efremov collection
                Fond 442, M. K. and T. O. Sokolovskii collection
                Fond 1189, M. M. Kheraskov papers
                Fond 1270, N. I. Novikov papers
                Fond 1764. I. P. Elagin collection and papers

    Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv (RGVA) [Russian State Military Archive, Moscow]

                Fond 175, Masonic Lodges and Chapters (1781-1939)
                Fond 1311, Knightly Orders (1785-1931)
                Fond 1412k, Documentary materials of Masonic Lodges
                Fond 1311, opis' 1-2, Documentary materials of Masonic Lodges (1755-1928)
                Fond 730, opis' 1, Masonic Lodge Astrea

    Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) [State Archive ofthe Russian Federation, Moscow]

                Fond 1137, G. V. Vemadskii collection

    Odel pis 'mennykh istochnikov gosudarstvennogo istoricheskogo muzeia (OPI GIM) [Division of Wrinen Sources of the State Historical Museum, Moscow]

                Fond 17, Uvarov's personal collection
                Fond 281, Document collection of the history of culture, science, and sodal movements
                Fond 282, Document collection of the Museum of the Revolution
                Fond 398, P. P. Beketov col1ection
                Fond 440, I. E. Zabelin collection
                Fond 450, E. V. Barsov collection

    Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Tverskoi Oblasti [State Archive of the Tver' Region, Tver']

                 Fond 103, opis' 1, folder 1169, collection of Masonic documents.


    Great Britain

    Archive and Library of the United Grand Lodge of England, Freemasons' Hall (FHL), London

                Archive of the United Grand Lodge of England (including Letter-books, Minutebooks, Freemasons' Calendars, and General Correspondence)
                Personal Papers of Eighteenth-Century Masons

    British Library, Modern British Collections and Manuscript Col1ections, London

                Add. 23,644-23,680, Correspondence and papers of General Charles Rainsford Sloane 3329 f. 142, Masonic papers
                Add. 20645 ff. 190, 199,211-256, Papers relating to Freemasons in Italy and France .
                Add. 29970, Proceedings of the lodge at the Thatched House Tavem (1777-1817) Add. 23675, Papers relating to Freemasonry (1783-1796)

    Bodleian Library, Oxford

                MSS, Dep. Bland Burges, Burges collection
                MSS Clar. Dep. C. 346-47, Clarendon papers
                Fld MSFP(2)-70-71, Somerville collection
                MS Rawlinson C. 136, Rawlinson collection of Masonic manuscripts

    National Library of Scotland (NLS), Edinburgh

                Ms 3942, f. 301v., 1. Robison's ]etters
                Ace. 4796 Box 104, A. Ramsay's papers
                Adv MSS 22.4.13, W. Richardson papers

    National Archive of Scotland (NAS), Edinburgh

                MSS Seafield Papers GD 248/518/6 H.M., Letters of Cameron' s workers GD 1/620, Rogerson papers
                GD 156/62 Elphinstone papers, Keith papers
                Abercairny MSS, GD24/1826, Mounsey letters

    Aberdeen University Archive (AUA), Aberdeen

                MS 3064/B 198, J. Keith papers MS 3064/B 146, J. Keith papers MS 3064/B 335, J. Keith papers
                MS 2711/1-12, Correspondence, family and estate papers of Keith family (155078)
                MS 2707 1/l1l and 1/l/2, Documents of A.W. Keith Falkoner
                MS 3163, Documents ofH. Godfrey
                Ms 3295, Documents from Marischal Keith's Despatch [sic] Box

    Archive and Library, Grand Lodge of Scotland, Edinburgh

             Minutes of the Grand Lodge of Scotland (1770-1800)

    Glasgow University Library, Glasgow

                 Ms Murray 503, ff. 5-6, William Poner, paniculars respecting Mr. Robison (1769-1774 )
                 Davis WestOn, Slavica: an Exhibition of Books and Manuscripts from the University's Collections (1990)


    Latvia

    Latvijas Valsts vestures arhivs (LVVA) [Latvia State Historical Archive, Riga]

                Fonda 4038,2 apraksts (1394), documents of the Lodge zur kleinen Welt.


http://soc.world-journal.net/E.EurMas_4text.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Dear listers,

Jules Levin expressed interest about Shafirov, a "personal friend" of the
Russian Tsar Peter I, the Great, doubted his Jewish origin and asked for new
information about him.
The reading of available texts allows to conclude that, generally speaking,
Russian historians do not doubt in the Jewish origin of P.Shafirov, neither
those who tolerate Jews nor those who hate them.

The story of P.P.Shafirov (1669-1739) begins with his Jewish grandfather who
migrated from Poland to Smolensk, a city in the West of Russia. This
migration began possible because in 1604-1610 the Poland-Lithuania kingdom
conquered the city, and Poland's Jews got the possibility to enter this
territory. Rather soon (1654) Russia got the city back, and Jews living
there were proposed to convert to Christianity. Some Jews chose to convert,
because Russian officials proposed good work conditions for experts with
knowledge of West, also for converted, but only for converted, Jews. What
happened with not converted Jews is not easy to say. In any case, they had
problems, because some Jews and other people were considered as war spoils
and made serfs.

A Jew of Smolensk named Shafir also converted in 1657 together with his family
and got the new name Pavel and evidently the surname of the family became
- Shafirov. No information exist to which extent the name "Shafir" is related
to Shapiro names, it is known only that the Shafir was busy as "shafor of the
shkolnik" i.e. kind of a manager in the home of the local melamed.

Three Shafirov children are known:

1.. a son Pavel (Paul), his Jewish name was Shaya Sapsayev - the future
father of Peter Shafirov - a statesman of the Tsar
2.. a son Michail - also a high positioned functionary of the Tsar, no
children.
3.. a daughter of unknown name married Pavel Veselovski - another
converted Jew from Smolensk who initially had migrated form a Polish town
Veselov.
Pavel Shafirov was good in foreign languages and got a job in Moscow in a
department busy with foreign affairs. It is known that he married a Russian
woman and had at least one son Peter (Pyotr). Peter also had got good
education and knew foreign languages and joined the same department in 1791.
He worked as a translator in close contact with the Tsar Peter I and
gradually got more and more important tasks.

It is easy to conclude that he was not a Jew according to the Judaism rules,
because he was not born by a Jewish woman. If his ethnic origin is
considered, he was not more than 50% Jewish by blood.

However all people in the Tsar's court, including the Tsar himself and all
Shafirov's rivals, knew his Jewish origin and considered him as a Jew. For
example, once in a court rout the Tsar wished to make drunk a Shafirov's
daughter. When she refused to drink, the Tsar got angry (he got angry very
easy, by the way) and shouted something like this - "you Jewish ***, I
shall teach you the obedience" and slapped her in the face twice. When in
1723 P.Shafirov felt into disgrace due to plots in the court and was tried
for the embezzlement of state property, he was accused also for hiding his
Jewish origin and for having contacts with Jewish relatives. The Tsar
eliminated all this Jewish stuff from the case and P.Shafirov was sentenced
to death for the embezzlement only. In reality the capital sentence was
changed to exile, however.

The assertion that he had contacts with the community of former Smolensk
Jews was correct. Really, it is known that he married Anna Kopiyeva who was
born in the family of a converted Jew. One of his cousins - Abram Veselovski
(1685-1782), a son or a grandson of his aunt, was brought up in his family
and became an adjutant of the Tsar.

For his service he was granted the nobility title of Baron, for the first
time in the Russian Empire, though this noble family soon expired, because
Peter had only one son who died childless. His 5 daughters married high
level Russian aristocrats and many important politicians were their
descendants, the most famous of them was the best known Russia statesman
S.Witte (1849-1915). Unlike P.Shafirov's ancestors, all his descendants are
relatively easy to follow, because they belonged to the nobility and were
carefully registered.

The family tree of his daughters is published by an Israeli historian S.
Dudakov in his book "Paradoksy i prichudy filosemitizma i antisemitizma v
Rossii (Paradoxes and whims of philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism in Russia)".
Moscow: Moscow State Humanitarian University, 2000. The book contains also
materials about other high positioned Jews in the service of Peter the Great
and other Tsars, and about other problems of Jewish history in Russia. The
author has written also a biography of P.Shafirov, and has published many
reports about Jewish history in Israeli and other magazines. All these texts
are written in Russian, however. Russian part of the Internet also has some
information about P.Shafirov that is not very new, I think, but only
nowadays it became possible to publish information about Tsar's command.

Hope it helps

Bruno Martuzans. Riga, Latvia

=== I have long known about the personal friend of Peter the Great--Peter

    SHAFIROV --and his supposed Jewish origins.
    In fact, I have occasionally brought up his existence as proof that there
    was a core East European Jewish population before
    the migration of Western Ashkenazi eastward and their entry into Russia
    thru the division of Poland. Without getting into that debate, I wonder
    if anyone has any new information about Peter Shafirov. According to his
    Wikipedia article, he is assumed to be of Jewish ancestry. His father was
    named Paul, and also worked in Russian government ministries. Shafirov
    himself held several jobs, and it seems his most important accomplishment
    was negotiating an important treaty with Sweden. The basis for
    considering him of Jewish ancestry, unless there is some documentation, is
    his surname, assumed to be connected to the Shapiro/Safire/Spira complex,
    and his extraordinary knowledge of foreign languages. He of course lived
    and died an adherent of the Russian Orthodox Church.

    Now I am becoming sceptical about his supposed Jewish origins.
    Is the Shapiro name group strictly Ashkenazi? I would find it easier to
    believe a Jewish origin for Shafirov from a relic population around the
    Black and Caspian seas, than from Western Europe.
    Jules Levin

http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive ... 00149.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

1745 - 1813 (24 Tevet 5573) SHNEUR ZALMAN (Lyady/Liadi, Russia)

Founded an intellectualized form of Hasidism called Habad (Chabad). The name is derived from the initials Chachma (wisdom), Binah (understanding) and Daat (knowledge). His intention was to bridge the gap between the Mitnagdim and the Hasidim, combining intellectualism and mysticism. His Lekutei Amarim (Collected Sayings) became known as the Tanya and is one of the important study texts of the Habad (Chabad) Hasidim.

1742 December 1, CZARINA ELIZABETH PETROVNA (Russia) (daughter of Catherine I and Peter the Great of Russia)

Expelled 35,000 Jews from parts of Russia. When advised of the financial loss she allegedly responded, "I do not want any benefit from the enemies of Christ."


1743 MENAHEM MAN AMELANDER

Published the most important and original historical work in Yiddish called She'erit Yisrael (The Remnants of Israel). It began with the destruction of the Second Temple in 72 CE and ended in 1740.


1743 - 1816 ABRAHAM ALEXANDER (USA)

Revolutionary officer and the first secretary general of the Masonic supreme council in Charleston. He married Ann Sarah Huguenin Irby, one of the first Jewish converts in the United States. Alexander served as a hazzan in the local congregation and even hand-wrote a high holiday prayer book. He also worked as an auditor for the United States customs service.


1743 February 23, - 1812 September 19, MAYER AMSCHEL ROTHSCHILD (Frankfurt. Germany)

Founder of the most famous Jewish banking and philanthropic dynasty. The Rothschild house influenced the economic and even political history of Europe for almost 200 years. As a young man, Rothschild met William Landgrave and joined his brokerage business in Hesse-Cassel. He slowly built his own banking business throughout Europe and left it to his five sons. He originally studied for the Rabbinate and remained religious until his death.


1743 August 27, TIBERIAS (Eretz Israel)

Suleiman Pasha, governor of Damascus, laid siege to the city. The local Jews, led by Hayim Abulafia, defended the city for 83 days. At the lifting of the attack and the subsequent death of the Pasha (5 Elul), a holiday was declared.

http://www.jewishhistory.org.il/history ... dyear=1749

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

SCARLET AND THE BEAST — Vol. 1 (Note: not well cited but interesting...particulary in regards to the Russian Revolution. I tend to ignore most mentions of Dan Brown's books or "Priory of Sion"  only because they not substantial. )

(Mentions "Scottish Rite as Jewish Rite Free Masonry")

A History of the War between English and French Freemasonry

By John Daniel

3rd edition

30 chapters, 20 appendices, notes, bibliography, index, 1300 pages

Table of Contents

Introduction: What is Freemasonry? Mason is short for Freemason. Freemason is short for "free and accepted Mason," a name acquired as a result of Freemasonry's successful fight for political and religious freedoms; to conceal Freemasonry's involvement in fomenting revolutions, secular history refers to Freemasons as "freemen"; Freemasonry is not Christianity, but a universal religion of salvation by works without Christ; in Freemasonry, Solomon's Temple secretly represents the Tower of Babel; thus, Freemasonry is both anti-Semitic and anti-Christian; a discussion of the bitter conflict between English (pantheistic) Freemasonry and French (atheistic) Freemasonry; sub-Masonic lodges for both male and female membership; degrees of initiation and knowledge; Masonry and conspiracy; Masonic propaganda; how Christians are deceived.

 

Chapter 1: The Conflict: Priory of Sion versus Knights Templar. Bloodline of Antichrist; historic trail of Holy Grail sect that teaches Mary Magdalene married Jesus and bore "holy" children by him; Merovingian kings of Europe claim to be of this "holy" bloodline; ancient parchments reveal Merovingian plan of establishing a universal throne at Jerusalem by this counterfeit line of David; Mystery Babylon enters Catholic Church (496 A.D.) through Merovee, founder of the Merovingian dynasty; Merovingians found Priory of Sion (1090) and begin Crusades (1099); Sion founds Knights Templar (1118) to protect Merovingian throne at Jerusalem; Templars rebel; 200-year conflict between Sion and Templars; Sion and Merovingian king of France plot destruction of Templars (1307-1314); Templars flee to Scotland, found Templar Masonry. Templars vow to destroy Merovingian throne.

 

Chapter 2: English Freemasonry and Revolution. A Scottish Templar King for England; Templar Freemasonry enters London with James Stuart I (1603); Grand Masters of Sion move from France to London to plot against Stuart dynasty; Sion founds Rosicrucian Freemasonry in opposition to Templar Freemasonry; Sion foments two Masonic revolutions to dethrone the Stuarts (1649 and 1688); Stuarts and Templar Freemasonry exiled to France; English Freemasonry unified, de-Christianized, and politicized (1717).

 

Chapter 3: The Religious Wars of France. Sion's "Great Plan" for word government is to create a Holy Grail bloodline to rule the world; during latter half of 16th century, Huguenots foil Sion's "Great Plan"; Sion against Bourbon dynasty; Bourbon king weds Merovingian princess, subdues contenders to French throne; Holy Grail blood flows through veins of Bourbon dynasty; Edict of Nantes (1598), toleration and flexibility; revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685); Voltaire, Sion and Freemasonry.

 

Chapter 4: From England to France. After the 1688 revolution, English Freemasonry unites under the name Grand Lodge (1717) and claims motherhood to all Freemasonry; Grand Lodge controls new Hanoverian constitutional monarchy; Stuarts and Templar Freemasonry exiled to France (1717); English Freemasonry plants Lodges on Continent, infiltrates Paris Templar Lodge, recertifies it as Grand Lodge (1743); Templar Freemasonry of Paris founds Scottish Rite (1748) with higher degrees patterned after the Jewish Cabala; Scottish Rite, known as Jewish Rite, begins plot against French throne in retaliation of Merovingian destruction of Templars in 1314; French Grand Lodge Masons, distressed by British control, found Grand Orient Freemasonry (1772); Priory of Sion creates Adam Weishaupt; Weishaupt founds Illuminati (1776) to infiltrate Grand Orient Freemasonry; Scottish Rite, French Grand Lodge, and French Grand Orient unite in revolution against French throne (1782-1785).

 

Chapter 5: Rejecting Christianity — Pagan Symbols of Freemasonry and the Illuminati. Illuminati symbols & allegories; esoteric meaning of square and compass; Illuminati holiday (May Day) commemorates revolution; Adam Weishaupt's meaning of pyramid and All-Seeing Eye; Bible prophecy and All-Seeing Eye; a call to Christians to come out of Masonry.

 

Chapter 6: Music and Revolution. Physical effects of music; Masonic music used in France to promote revolution (1785); modern rock and roll used by English Freemasonry to promote revolution; Lucifer, god of evil music.

 

Chapter 7: The Jewish Connection. Latter half of 18th century, Gentile Freemason Gotthold Lessing and Jewish Freemason Moses Mendelssohn promote revolution through media; Jacob Frank's assault on orthodox Judaism; Reform Judaism born (1800s); Reform Judaism makes pact with Grand Orient Freemasonry; Rothschild and English Freemasonry (1801); Templar Freemasonry raises Napoleon to power (1799); Sion and English Freemasonry oppose Napoleon; Rothschild finances Napoleon against monarchs and finances monarchs against Napoleon; French Grand Lodge and French Grand Orient both accept Scottish Rite degrees (1801); Scottish Rite, so-called Jewish Rite, is Synagogue of Satan of Revelation 2:9 and 3:9; according to Scripture, Scottish Rite is not controlled by Jews, but by Gentiles who claim to be Jews, but are not.

 

Chapter 8: The Jesuit Connection. Jesuit suppression of 1773 instigated by Masonry; Masonic infiltration of Catholic Church; Voltaire, Masonry, and anti-Catholicism (1726-1778); Masonic disinformation attracts Christians to Masonry, pits Protestants against Catholics, and discredits clergy; Pope John XXIII (1958) — a Masonic pope; after Vatican II (1962-1965) Jesuit generals join Freemasonry; South American Jesuits and Grand Orient Freemasonry cooperate in Liberation Theology; Masonic assassination of Pope John Paul I (1978); Freemasonry's attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II (1981)

 

Chapter 9: Secular Education: A Masonic Blueprint. Masonic creation of Karl Marx (1844); educational legacy of Marx; Masonic public schools in America (1820); Freemasonry founds National Education Association (NEA) in 1857; Freemasonry, force behind creation of Department of Education and consolidation of Schools; Freemasonry founds National Council of Churches; God, androgynous/neutered; list of churches led by pastors without faith; Freemasonry's plan to destroy Christianity in America through Masonic pastors; identical blueprint used against Church during French Masonic Revolution of 1789.

 

Chapter 10: Masonic Control of the Media. Adam Weishaupt's control of media to propagate revolution (1780); proof of Freemasonry's control of media before and after French Revolution; proof of Freemasonry's control of media prior to every revolution; proof of Freemasonry's control of media in America today; Freemason Voltaire's ten steps to destroy Christianity in old France in the 18th century has been in effect in America since 1940.

 

Chapter 11: First War Between English and French Freemasonry. Templar Mason Napoleon Bonaparte attempts to spread republicanism across Europe (1804-1812); Sionist plot against Napoleon; wealth of British Masonry guarantees Napoleon's fall; Congress of Vienna (1815), English Masonry's plan to thwart the spread of republicanism; one-world government proposed by Congress of Vienna; Switzerland, English Masonry's strongbox.

 

Chapter 12: French Freemasonry Tries, and Tries Again. French revolution of 1830; Freemasonry and the Italian Revolution (1834-1860); A Weishaupt-Mazzini connection? Joseph Mazzini, Italian revolutionary and founder of the Mafia, founds International Freemasonry (1871) to transport revolution worldwide; French Grand Orient Freemasonry develops concept of communism (1840s); French Communist Revolution of 1848; French Communist Revolution of 1871; France, a complete Masonic State.

 

Chapter 13: "The Morgan Affair" triggers the worldwide "Anti-Masonic Movement". Royal Arch Mason, Capt. William Morgan accepted Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, renounced Masonry, then planned to publish a book revealing the diabolical oaths and symbols of Masonry and the Illuminati. To silence Morgan, 69 Masons planned his abduction and subsequent murder on Sept. 11, 1826. Using the original court transcripts of witnesses to the abduction, as well as the deathbed confession of one of the murderers, John Daniel, author of Scarlet and the Beast, has coordinated these facts into a story that has been, and continues to be kept out of our history books. The Masonic murder of Morgan so affected the civilized world that a worldwide "Anti-Masonic Movement" forced European and South American Masonry to speed up its timetable of planned revolutions to 1848. Moreover, our own Civil War (1861-1865) was directly linked to "The Morgan Affair," as it subsequently became known.

 

Chapter 14: "American Masonic Civil War". The American Civil War was directly linked to the Masonic murder of Capt. William Morgan and the "Anti-Masonic Movement" it spawned. Freemasonry triggered the War for the express purpose of rebuilding its membership. Freemasonry writes, "By the time Masonry had recovered from its (Anti-Masonic) ordeal of persecution, the dark clouds of Civil War hung like a pall over the land.... Some day...the tale will be told of what Masonry did in those dark years — how it passed through picket lines, eluded sentinels, softened the lot of the prisoner of war, and planted the acacia upon the graves of friend and foe alike" [but only if friend and foe were Masons]. In this chapter you will read of the treasonous activity between enemies, so long as they gave the correct handshake, showed the Masonic stress signal, or verbalized the Masonic stress signal. Following are a few subtitles to this chapter:


Central Banking forced on Americans during the Civil War
Northern Jurisdiction of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, a Clandestine British Jurisdiction, founded during the Civil War
British Masonic Banks and the Northern Jurisdiction of Freemasonry
Masonic Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
Prosecution of Civil War Criminals

 

Masonic war criminals were pardoned if they gave the Masonic handshake to Pres. Andrew Johnson, himself a Freemason. You will see a photo of that handshake given by Pres. Johnson as he pardons a multitude of Masons, including 33O Albert Pike. During and after the Civil War, Freemasonry grew rapidly, to a count much higher than the count prior to the Anti-Masonic Movement.

 

Chapter 15: Lucifer: God of Freemasonry. Luciferian Rite for select few in Supreme Council; 33rd degree Freemason Albert Pike's Luciferian Doctrine (1889); Biblical account of Lucifer's fall; Faith versus Reason; Palladianism — Super Luciferian Rite; Luciferianism becomes universal doctrine of Masonry; New Age Movement is Luciferian Masonry of today.

 

Chapter 16: Freemasonry and the New Age Movement. Atheists, spiritists, and Luciferians unite at great Masonic Congress in Paris (1889); sub-Masonic lodges of the New Age; building the New Age Movement; 33rd degree Mason Aleister Crowley, head of two sub-Masonic New Age lodges that to this day perform satanic ritual murders, and push illegal drugs.

 

Chapter 17: New Age Movement unites English and French Freemasonry. English Freemasonry founds Quatuor Coronati Lodge of Masonic Research (1886); Quatuor Coronati organizes Order of Golden Dawn (1887); Golden Dawn uses swastika as its symbol and practices free sex under influence of drugs; Quatuor Coronati organizes Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) in 1902; OTO practices human sacrifice; Golden Dawn and OTO cooperate in creating drug/rock/sex counterculture of 1960s; OTO, mother of the New Age Movement, attempts to unite English, American, and French Freemasonry; Lucis (Lucifer) Trust of New York City, financier of the New Age Movement in America; list of prominent Americans who are members of Lucis Trust.

 

Chapter 18: The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Sion. History of the Protocols; birth of Zionism in Russia (1850s); revisionist authors confuse Sionism, a counterfeit Jewish secret society originating in France, with Zionism, a genuine Jewish political movement originating in Russia; a Sionist Masonic Lodge in France is source of Protocols (1884); Protocols, a Masonic plot against the Jews; Protocols of Sion linked to the Priory of Sion; historic and prophetic commentary on Protocols of Sion.

 

Chapter 19: "Freemasonry Topples the Ottoman Empire". Quoting 33O Freemason Henry C. Clausen: "Masons historically have been in the forefront of movements that fired the imagination of freedom-loving people throughout the world. Goethe, Mozart, Lafayette were enthusiastic Masons as was the great Hungarian hero of democracy Kossuth, who found temporary refuge in America.... Leaders of the Young Turkish Committee that in 1908 forced Sultan Hamid 'the Damned' to give their nation a parliamentary form of government, were Masons." The breakup of the Ottoman Empire is the main cause behind World War I. Following are subtitles in this chapter: Freemasonry's Role in the Breakup of the Ottoman Empire; Young Ottomans — Youth Corps of Muslim Freemasonry; Young Ottomans become Young Turks. To counter western Freemasonry, the Muslims founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, using the same pyramid structure as western Freemasonry. Then The Muslim Brotherhood founded al-Qaeda to counter the youth corps of Western Freemasonry, the DeMolay. Muslim members of the 9/11 attack on America were one-and-all members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and its offshoot, al-Qaeda. The final subtitle to this chapter is Why "Politically Correct" America cannot win the War on Terror."

 

Chapter 20: The First Masonic World War. During latter half of 19th century, Supreme Council of Universal Freemasonry embarks on 60-year plan to trigger world war to cast down all thrones and altars at once; Phase one — divide world into two warring camps (monarchies against republics) through peace treaties negotiated by Freemasonry over a 50-year period; Phase Two — trigger world war by creating incident in Europe that would cause treaties to take effect; from 1908 to 1913, seven incidents instigated by Freemasonry fail; Sarajevo (1914), the Masonic assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of the house of Habsburg, heir to the Austrian-Hungarian throne, triggers World War I; details of Masonic plot; excerpts from minutes of trial that convicted Masons who were involved in plot to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand.

 

Chapter 21: The Hungarian Masonic Revolution. Grand Lodge forms socialist government after World War I; Grand Orient considers Grand Lodge too bourgeois, demands government be run by proletariat and threatens counterrevolution; Hungary, weary of war and bloodshed, transfers power to Grand Orient communists; Soviet Republic of Hungary formed March 21, 1919; middle and upper class slaughtered by communists; Hungary ousts communists and outlaws Freemasonry; Hungarian Freemasonry calls on Masonic governments throughout world to come to its aid; United States demands Hungarian government lift ban on Masonry, or loan to boost economy will be denied/ Hungary refuses, loan miscarries.

 

Chapter 22: The Russian Masonic Revolution. Masonry's plan to experiment with communism; Russia targeted in 1843 for the communist experiment; century of Masonic intrigue in Russia; Grand Orient Mason and Satanist Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) prepares for communist revolution in Russia; Grand Orient Mason Vladimir Lenin carries Bakunin's banner; Rosicrucian Mason Joseph Stalin robs banks (1903-1905) to fund Lenin's revolution; Grand Orient Mason Leon Trotsky at odds with Lenin; two Russian Revolutions of 1917, socialist in February and communist in October; communists slaughter 50 million middle and upper class Russians between 1919 and 1938; USSR, first Grand Orient Masonic State; English Masonry's 59-year project to topple Soviet Union; English Mason Kim Philby defects to Russia (1962) with instruction to bring to power a communist who will dissolve the Soviet Union. USSR dissolved by Freemason Mikhail Gorbachev (1991).

 

Chapter 23: The Masonic Ritual Murder of Czar Nicholas II. Symbols and examples of Masonic ritual murders; assassination of Czar Nicholas II, a Masonic ritual murder.

 

Chapter 24: Competing for World Governance — The Round Table vs. the League of Nations. British race patriots; Mason Cecil Rhodes and Rhodes Scholarships (1902); Round Table (1909), an appendage of English Freemasonry; French Masonry founds League of Nations; Round Table founds in 1921 Council on foreign Relations (CFR) to infiltrate American politics; Round Table plots against League. CFR creates United Nations.

 

Chapter 25: English Freemasonry and the Hitler Project. Mystic fronts of English Freemasonry (Golden Dawn and OTO) create Hitler; Freemason Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (d. 1872), godfather of the Nazis; swastika, symbol of the Golden Dawn; Golden Dawn of Berlin founds Thule Society; English Freemasonry creates Holy Grail myth for Thule; anti-Semitism and Thule Society; Grail mysticism and Hitler; Hitler and anti-Zionism; English Freemasonry finances Hitler to destroy French Freemasonry.

 

Chapter 26: Hitler's Destruction of French Freemasonry. Fascist Italy outlaws Freemasonry in 1925; Italian Freemasonry plots assassination of Mussolini; hundreds of Masons banished to Lipari Islands to starve to death; Nazi Germany outlaws Freemasonry in 1935; abolishes Freemasonry in Austria in 1938 and sends 90 percent of Masons to concentration camps — many are Jews; closes all Masonic Lodges in Czechoslovakia in 1939, imprisons their members, shoots their leaders — many of whom were Jews; closes all lodges in Greece and Holland in 1940 and arrests hundreds of top Masons; Masons suffer equal punishment in Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, France, Spain, Japan, China, Philippines, Singapore, Malaya, Burma, Thailand, and Indo-China.

 

Chapter 27: Yalta, Post-War Masonry, and the United Nations. U.S.A. provokes Japan to attack Pearl Harbor; Hitler plans the "Final Solution" against the Jews; post-war Masonic politicians in Europe and Japan replace vanquished leaders; post-war governments reorganized under Masonic control; Freemasons negotiated with Stalin at Yalta; post-war restoration of German and Italian Lodges; protecting Masons at Nuremberg Trials; ex-Nazis hired to build Western intelligence; C.I.A.; Nazi International and South American drugs; English Freemasonry, the U.N., International Monetary Fund, and drugs.

 

Chapter 28: The Address of Scarlet. Modern Masonic revolutions foretold by Ezekiel; Mystery Babylon exits the Roman Church during the Inquisitions, enters Freemasonry; from Rome to London; Revelation 17-18 sheds light on English Freemasonry as Mystery Babylon; oaths identify Mystery Babylon as Masonic; Revelation 18:23b exposes English Freemasonry's drug trafficking; London sits on seven mountains (7-nation Trilateral Commission); Jeremiah describes London as modern Babylon; American Freemasonry has named Queen Elizabeth II "Queen of Babylon."

 

Chapter 29: In Search of the Beast Empire. The Beast empire will be born of Templar French Freemasonry; French Freemasonry places ten crowns on head of Beast; one of the ten crowns, or all ten could be Revived Rome; Germany as Revived Rome; Russia as Revived Rome; France as Revived Rome; the U.N. as Revived Rome; the United States of Europe as Revived Rome; the ultimate test for identifying Revived Rome is found in the numbers 666 printed (in Roman numerals according to the Greek text) on the national emblem of the Beast nation.

 

Chapter 30: Headquarters of the Beast Empire. Revived Rome must have the same 13 characteristics of ancient Rome. Ancient Rome: (1) was the melting-pot of the world; (2) was a democracy based on a two-party system [Optimates and Populares]; (3) had a divided balance of power [Roman Tribune and his Senate]; (4) was based on specific laws [Rome's 12 Tables]; (5) protected the rights of its citizens; (6) had a sordid history of slavery; (7) was capitalistic; ( practiced abortion as a means of population control; (9) loved R-rated entertainment [history of Pompeii]: (10) had a welfare program funded by taxes; (11) had a thriving business in Lawsuits; (12) watched sports as a pastime; and (13) had as its national emblem a single-headed flying eagle pointing west. Obviously, revived Rome is the United States of America. As further proof, in Daniel 7:8 the prophet's vision of the Beast Empire is identical to the upper half of the national emblem of the United States of America. Likewise, in Revelation 13:16-18 the apostle John's vision of the Mark of the Beast is found on the lower half of the national emblem of the USA.

 

 

Titles of Appendices

1. Masonic Revolutions in Spanish and Portuguese-Speaking Nations
2. Dossiers on a Few Conspiracy Authors
3. President Bill Clinton
4. Land for Peace (reference to Israel) prophesied in the Bible
5. The Cabala
6. History of the Prophet Mohammed
7. Shriners and their oath to Allah, God of Muslims
8. Masonic Oaths for the first three degrees
9. Instructions for Human Sacrifices in Masonic OTO Lodges
10. Luciferian Interpretation of Scottish Rite Masonic Degrees
11. Petition for Withdrawal from the Lodge and Renunciation of Masonic Oaths
12. Photos confirming the Masonic Murder of John F. Kennedy
13. Masonic U.S. Presidents — listed by name and date
14. Masonic U.S. Supreme Court Justices — listed by name and date
15. National Emblem of USA prophesied in the Bible
16. Masonic Agenda for the Church in America
17. Protestant Churches that Have Denounced Freemasonry
18. Mormon roots founded in Freemasonry
19. The "Rapture" — Why the word is controversial
20. King James Bible versus Modern Translations


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