What is especially interesting is that both Vintras' Church of Carmel and the Naundorff supporters were a shadowy sect called `the Saviours of Louis XVII' - otherwise known as the Johannites. A complex and elusive group, they were primarily concerned with the restoration of the monarchy in France, although they supported less obvious individuals and causes. These particular Johannites appear somehow to have `stage-managed' visions of the Virgin at La Salette in 1846, probably as part of a wider campaign to elevate the Feminine, first by emphasizing the role of Mary the Mother, then through more overtly sexual means and active hostility to the Church. Vintras' own link with the Johannites was through the evocatively named `Sister Salome' (Madame Bouche), but on his death the Order passed to the keeping of the scandalous Abbe Joseph Boullan (1824-93), who had set up the Society for the Reparation of Souls in 1859 with the much younger Adele Chevalier, whom he had seduced at the convent at La Salette. Matters escalated from highly controversial to outright shocking when Boullan extended his sex rites to the animal kingdom, and rumours spread like wildfire that he and Chevalier had sacrificed their own child during a Black Mass in 1860: interestingly, neither was even arrested for such an offence, although they were convicted of fraud.
The plot thickens, however. After serving a custodial sentence, Boullan of his own volition presented himself to the Inquisition in Rome, but even they could find no fault in him. He was free to return to Paris'21 where he threw himself into leading Vintras' Church of Carmel into ever increasing scenes of wild sexual licence, first declaring himself to be the reincarnation of John the Baptist. This may have inspired his portrayal as `Dr Johannes' in Huysmans' La Bas - also one of Boullan's aliases - although it would be quite wrong to assume that he was the villain of the piece. In fact, he was a friend of Huysmans who depicted him as a crusader against Satanism, though much maligned by the Church. But to this day there are major questions to be answered about Boullan. As we wrote in The Templar Revelation:
While in Rome Boullan wrote his doctrines down in a notebook (known as the cahier rose, overtly after the colour of the cover), which was found by ... Huysmans among his papers after his death in 1893. The precise details of the contents are unknown - though it was described as a `shocking document' - and it is now locked away in the Vatican Library. All applications to see it are refused .27
Was Boullan actually a sort of agent provocateur for the Vatican, infiltrating a heretical group in order to undermine it? Certainly it is very odd that, despite all the melodramatic and salacious rumours, he was only convicted for fraud and the Inquisition could find no fault with him. But if not a Vatican agent, perhaps he knew some great secret that he could wield as blackmail even against the might of Peter's Church. Perhaps it was connected with what may well have been the real John the Baptist, and the sex rites of the original Christians, including Jesus and the Magdalene ... To most ordinary Christians, that would seem like Satanism.
Orgies in the caves
Secret and semi-secret societies mushroomed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, perhaps inspired by the new wave of Romanticism, revolutionary politics or the radical thinking that would produce embryonic trades unions, but they were more likely to concentrate on drinking and leching, with a hefty pinch of pseudo-Satanism thrown in for added spice. In England, the most famous of these clubs for the terminally bored was the Order of the Friars of Wycombe, or The Monks of Medmenham, the Order of the Knights of West Wycombe, or - most famously but inaccurately - the Hellfire Club.
It was founded by Sir Francis Dashwood (1708-81), a wellestablished MP and former Treasurer to George III and Postmaster General: the epitome of the successful English gentleman. On the obligatory Grand Tour of Italy, he had come to hate the Catholic Church and, having met the legendary `Bonnie Prince Charlie' - the exiled Prince Charles Edward Stuart - he was enrolled as a Jacobite agent. He went on to become involved in various Rosicrucian, neoTemplar and Masonic Lodges. In 1738 Pope Clement XII had prohibited Freemasonry and excommunicated all the Italian brotherhood on pain of being handed over to the Inquisition, but Dashwood remained in contact with the Italian lodges. As a young traveller through France he had been an observer at a Black Mass, which intrigued him, but only at the more puerile level of insulting the Church.
Back in England he founded the Society of the Dilettanti, one of the many London clubs devoted to phenomenal alcohol consumption and whoring. In 1746 he founded the Order of the Knights of Saint Francis, which met at the sixteenth-century George and Vulture pub in the City of London, made famous in Charles Dickens' riotous first novel, Pickwick Papers (1836-7). They met in an upper room, the focus of which was `an everlasting Rosicrucian lamp', a massive crystal globe surrounded by a gold snake with its tail in its mouth, and topped by silver wings - a profoundly Gnostic design, which also appeared on the font Dashwood later presented to West Wycombe Church.
It was close to West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire that Dashwood and his cronies established their infamous `Hellfire Club', at Medmenham Abbey on the River Thames near Marlow in 1751. Dashwood lavishly renovated the former medieval monastery - no expense was spared - complete with the now infamous motto carved over the entrance `Do as thou will'. The temple to hedonism was complete with a priapic statue and a voluptuous statue of Venus in the well-tended gardens. As she was bending over, a clumsy newcomer would find himself already in a compromising position before he had even entered the house.
Two ancient deities of Silence - the Egyptian Harpocrates and the Roman goddess Angerona - adorned the Abbey's sumptuous dining room, perhaps as a reminder to the Order's members never to speak of the goings-on there in the outside world. Pagan gods were everywhere in Dashwood's life: one whole wing of his house, designed by Robert Adam, was a replica of a Temple to Bacchus, while Ariadne, Dionysus and a whole host of cavorting satyrs frolicked over the ceiling. Statues of other ancient deities graced the gardens, which some said were laid out in the rather graphic shape of a naked woman.
In 1750 Dashwood enlarged the honeycomb of tunnels and caves under West Wycombe Hill in which to hold the Order's meetings, although word spread that they took the form of orgiastic couplings. As occult writer and Dashwood expert Mike Howard explains:
These caves featured individual `cells' for the `monks' to entertain their female guests ... An underground stream, known to the monks as the River Styx had to be crossed to give access to the Inner Sanctum, a circular room where so-called "Black Masses" were said to be performed."
Heavily made-up prostitutes from London were delivered by the carriage-load to act as officiating masked 'nuns', while high-born ladies offered their naked bodies as altars for the Black Mass. Most people would dismiss the activities of Dashwood's circle as a fairly unimaginative attempt to stave off ennui by indulging in a little light whoring and blasphemy in excitingly spooky surroundings. However, there appears to be more to it than that. One of the leading `Friars' was John Wilkes, who declared: `No profane eye has dared to penetrate the English Eleusinian Mysteries of the Chapter Room [the inner sanctum] where the monks assembled on solemn occasions . . . secret rites performed and libations to the Bona Dea [the Good Goddess].'29 While many, if not most, of the Medmenham `monks' - whose number included some extremely well-known names, such as the Prince of Wales and possibly even the American statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) - probably enjoyed their naughty caperings at an adolescent level, some clearly observed them in a more ancient spirit. It is significant that the so-called `Hellfire Caves' dated back to prehistoric times, known locally as `pagan catacombs', with an altar to an unknown deity nearby. Mike Howard concludes:
As one nineteenth-century writer put it, `Sir Francis himself officiated as high priest ... engaged in pouring a libation from a communion cup to the mysterious object of their homage.' From the available evidence, it is safe to surmise that this `mysterious object of their homage' was, in fact, the Goddess and that Sir Francis Dashwood and his merry monks were not Satanists but follow
ers of the pagan Mysteries.30
However, the enactment of the Black Mass - if indeed it were anything more than rumour - suggests not only a reverence for the ancient gods of fertility and sensual indulgence, but also an active detestation and mockery of Christianity. When Dashwood paid for the renovations of his local church, the result was `an Egyptian hall' that gave `not the least idea of a place sacred to religious [i.e. Christian] worship'."
However, once again, we find what was basically a Luciferan outbreak of orgiastic high spirits and pagan joy in sexuality being deliberately contaminated with faux Satanism. Perhaps rumours of the Black Mass were encouraged simply to keep away prying eyes, but it seems that some did indulge in that tasteless and ultimately pointless activity. Did they, perhaps, like some Knights Templar, Johannites and other Luciferans believe in their heart of hearts that they were indeed as evil as they stood accused? Christianity was, and to some extent still is, a most potent form of conditioning, and to subvert its teachings is for many brought up in the faith a very grave step, no matter how loud and brittle their pseudo-Luciferan bravado.
Last of the magicians
As the Enlightenment took hold of hearts and minds, science progressed by leaps and bounds, aided not only by a new secular freedom but by the astonishingly under-estimated mass drug of choice - caffeine. Tea, coffee and chocolate poured into the coffee shops and homes of the West, kick-starting a whole new level of energy and enquiry. Foremost among that blossoming of exciting new talent was, of course, Isaac Newton, who came second in a recent survey of the world's most influential people - after Mohammed (1) but before Jesus Christ (3).11 He is seen as the epitome of the no-nonsense rationalist, the atheistic scientist par excellence, but - as with Leonardo - nothing could be further from the truth.
At the end of the entry on Newton in Chambers' Biographical Dictionary (1990), very much as an apologetic afterthought, there is a passage of just three-and-a-half lines about his religious and esoteric interests, beginning: `Newton was also a student of alchemy ...'33 He was indeed: as the economist John Maynard Keynes remarked after reading Newton's previously lost notebooks (which were `of no scientific value'): `Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians."'
Born in 1642, Newton was to write over a million words on the subject of alchemy, although the Royal Society declared they were ,not fit to be printed'. He is most famous for his discovery of the Law of Gravity in 1665 or 1666, the fall of an apple in his garden suggesting the earth's irresistible pull.
In his specially constructed laboratory on the edge of the fens near Cambridge, Newton obsessively studied the construction of telescopes and the refraction of light through prisms, which led him to build reflecting telescopes, although they were to be considerably refined by William Hershel (1738-1822) and the Earl of Rosse (1800-67) 35 In the near-literal sense of the word, Newton was a true Luciferan, for he believed that light - his lifelong fascination - embodied the word of God, echoing the obsession of the Gnostics and esotericists with Light as both metaphor and actuality.
One of Newton's servants recorded:
He very rarely went to bed until two or three of the clock, sometimes not till five or six, lying about four or five hours, especially at springtime or autumn, at which time he used to employ about six weeks in his laboratory, the fire [furnace] scarce going out night or day. What his aim might be I was unable to penetrate to.36
From his writings, we now know he was striving to create the Philosopher's Stone that would convert base metals into gold. Perhaps it was this unusual hobby that prompted him to accept the occupation as Director of the Royal Mint, with the responsibility of looking after England's store of gold, instead of accepting a Cambridge professorship.
An eccentric scientist to his fingertips, Newton is said to have only laughed once in his life - when he was asked what use he saw in Euclid. He nearly ruined his eyesight by sticking a knife behind his eyeball to induce optical effects. A tortured and introverted homosexual, his only romantic involvements appear to have been with younger men, one of whom induced a nervous breakdown. Obsessed with the apocalyptical interpretations of the Old Testament Book of Daniel, he wrote on the subject extensively, and as a vehemently anti-Catholic Puritan he saw himself as a kind of prophet. As F. E. Manuel writes in his The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974):
The more Newton's theological and alchemical, chronological and mythological work, set by the side of his science, the more apparent it becomes that in the moments of his grandeur he saw himself as the last of the interpreters of God's will in actions, living on the fulfilment of times.37
Despite this, he was more heterodox than orthodox in his theology, subscribing to the Arian heresy, which upheld the theory that Jesus was not divine. But it was his passion for alchemy that primarily drove him. As Michael White notes in his Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer (1997):
Newton was motivated by a deep-rooted commitment to the notion that alchemical wisdom extended back to ancient times. The Hermetic tradition - the body of alchemical knowledge - was believed to have originated in the mists of time and to have been given to humanity through supernatural agents.3x
That body of esoteric knowledge was known as the Emerald Tablet, and its guardian was the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, inspiration throughout the ages to the likes of Nicholas Flamel and, one assumes, Leonardo da Vinci. Isaac Newton translated the Tablet:
It is true without lying, certain and most true. That which is Below is like that which is Above and that which is Above is like that which is Below to do the miracles of the Only Thing. And as all things have been and arose from One by the mediation of One, so all things have their birth from this One Thing by adaptation. The Sun is its father; the Moon its mother; the Wind hath carried it in its belly; the Earth is its nurse. The father of all perfection in the whole world is here. Its force or power is entire if it be converted into Earth. Separate the Earth from the Fire, the subtle from the gross, sweetly with great industry. It ascends from the Earth to the Heavens and again it descends to the Earth and receives the force of things superior and inferior. By this means you shall have the glory of the whole world and thereby all obscurity shall fly from you. Its force is above all force, for it vanquishes every subtle thing and penetrates every solid thing. So was the world created. From this are and do come admirable adaptations, whereof the process is in this. Hence I am called Hermes Trismegistus, having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world. That which I have said of the operation of Sun is accomplished and ended 39
It is easy to understand how even his short passage might obsess and even madden generations of seekers after alchemical truth. Newton cautioned fellow alchemist-scientist Robert Boyle (1627-91) against letting the uninitiated into their secret hot-house world `if there be any verity in the warning of the Hermetic writers. There are other things besides the transmutation of metals which none but they understand' ao
Some authorities" suggest Newton (who was knighted in 1705) may have actually achieved the fabled Great Work - after all, secrecy is no proof of failure, especially in such an intensely private discipline as alchemy. Look at how Leonardo triumphed behind closed doors, although his natural secretiveness did little to prevent the spread of rumours about his `sorcery'.
However, in the case of the British scientist Andrew Crosse, such a reputation - and worse - was to cost him a very promising career and the prospect of being feted throughout history as the discoverer of something very strange, perhaps even the creator of life itself ...
One who, according to his second wife, `delighted in whatever was strange and marvellous', Andrew Crosse was born in 1784 in the west of England and grew into a clever, questing young man. Probably because his father knew Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley, both pioneers of the new science of electricity, Crosse was fascinated by it from the age of twelve. After some wasted years as a typical `lad-about-town', he settled down to experiments into electro-crystallization in partner
ship with George John Singer. But then in 1837 something happened that remains bewildering to this day, as Crosse explains:
In the course of my endeavours to form artificial minerals by a long continued electric action on fluids holding in solution such substances as were necessary to my purpose, I had recourse to every variety of contrivance that I could think of; amongst others I constructed a wooden frame, which supported a Wedgwood funnel, within which rested a quart basin on a circular piece of mahogany. When this basin was filled with a fluid, a strip of flannel wetted with the same was suspended over the side of the basin and inside the funnel, which, acting like a syphon, conveyed the fluid out of the basin through the funnel in successive drops: these drops fell into a smaller funnel of glass placed beneath the other, and which contained a piece of somewhat porous red oxide iron from Vesuvius. This stone was kept constantly electrified ...
On the fourteenth day from the commencement of this experiment I observed through a lens a few small whitish excrescences or nipples, projecting from about the middle of the electrified stone. On the eighteenth day these projections enlarged, and stuck out seven or eight filaments, each of them longer than the hemisphere on which they grew. On the twenty-sixth day these appearances assumed the form of a perfect insect, standing erect on a few bristles which formed its tail ... On the twenty-eight day these little creatures moved their legs ... After a few days they detached themselves from the stone, and moved about at pleasure 42
The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code Page 27
