Religious Development in the Sixteenth Century

Religious Development in the Sixteenth Century
Thomas Allen

AlombradosThe Alombrados, the Illuminati of Spain, was an illuministic sect founded about 1520 in Salamanca, Spain. By a supernatural or “illuminated” union of minds, initiates concentrated on the will of the master. They taught a form of Gnosticism. Man’s spirit could attain direct knowledge of God—thus, rendering trappings of formal religion unnecessary for those who found the light. In 1623 the Grand Inquisition condemned and suppressed the Alombrados. Out of the Alombrados came Ignatius Loyola.

Jesuits
Loyola, a Spanish nobleman and soldier and a member of the Alombrados, founded the Order of the Jesuits (Society of Jesus) in 1541. It was ostensibly founded to defend the Catholic faith and the pope. The doctrines of the Society of Jesus are similar to those of the Jewish Mishnah.[1] Like the Assassins, Jesuits had unquestionable, unhesitating obedience to the Order’s cause and its leaders. It was divided into six grades. Its initiate rituals and ceremonies resembled those used by the Assassins and Freemasons.

According to Chaitkin, “The Venetian house of Contarini detained Ignatius Loyola, and obliged him to head up a new worldwide secret intelligence service to serve the Venetian interests, the Jesuits.”[2] The Jesuits became the pope’s intelligence agencies, the Vatican’s CIA. The Order’s primary goal was to destroy Protestantism. In carrying out its objective, it used indoctrination, blackmail, and coercion. The Jesuits are credited with, among other great historical events, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, fomentation of the Thirty Years War, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685.

Knights of Malta
When Rhodes failed to the Turks in 1522, the Hospitalers who were on the island fled to Malta. Here they reorganized as the Sovereign and Military Order of Malta or the Knights of Malta. Some recent members of the Knights of Malta are William F. Buckley (“conservative” writer), William Casey (CIA director), J. Peter Grace (chairman of W. R. Grace Co.), Alexander Haig (Reagan’s Secretary of State), Joseph P. Kennedy, Lee Iacocca (chairman of Chrysler), Clare Boothe Luce (American dramatist and diplomat), John McCone (CIA director), William Simon (Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury), and William Wilson (ambassador to the Vatican). Today, the Knights of Malta serves as the principal channel of communication between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Vatican.[3]

Peasant’s War
In 1517 Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, and the Reformation was underway. The disturbance caused by the Reformation gave Illuminists many opportunities to work their mischief. They began by stirring up the peasants in Germany. They moved on to remove the Church condemnation of usury, a la Calvin, and to attack the divine nature of a resurrected Jesus, a la Socinus.

The year 1520 is often cited as the starting point of the leftist revolutionary movement:[4] unrestrained sensual pleasure; destruction of the family; collective ownership of property; subversion of science, literature, and arts; democratic despotic government; mass slaughter; and animosity toward God, i.e., the God of the Christians, and Christianity. The leader of this revolution was Thomas Munzer, a disciple of Nicholas Storck. Munzer claimed that inspiration came not from the Bible but from divine illumination or inner light. He devised a communistic doctrine of unrestricted equality. He advocated abolishing all temporal authority. His goal was to establish a theocratic communistic state. His preaching led to the Peasants’ War in 1524.

The Peasants’ War was an uprising of German peasants and of poor classes of the towns. Once the revolt broke out, Munzer took control when he came to the aid of Heinrich Pfeiffer. The revolt was crushed in 1525, and Munzer was beheaded.

A similar revolt occurred in Munster between 1533 and 1535. Like the Peasants’ War, this revolt sought equality and communion of goods. Lasciviousness was popular among the rebels.

Calvinism
According to Mullins, Calvinism was one of those movements organized by Illuminists that sweep across Europe periodically creating revolutions or turmoil.[5] Unlike previous Christian sects, Calvinism was compatible with the money interest. Instead of emphasizing austerity and vows of poverty, it approved of charging interest and acquiring wealth.

John Calvin of Noyons, France was the founder of Calvinism. His “religious movement was based on a literal Jewish interpretation of the Ten Commandments, Old Testament philosophy, and the prohibition of graven images.”[6] With the rise of Calvinism came the expansion of Jews into commercial activities besides banking, which they had historically dominated.

Calvinism revealed its kinship with Oriental despotism of Nimrod by its coercive nature. With his Ecclesiastical Ordinance, Calvin imposed absolute discipline on the inhabitants of Geneva. The penalty for objecting to Calvinism was death.

SocinusIn 1547, Laelius Socinus met with like-minded people in Vicenza. They laid plans to overturn orthodox Christianity and to replace it with their doctrines. They proposed executing their plans through a secret society. Upon learning of this conspiracy, the Republic of Venice captured and executed two members, Julian Trevisano and Francis de Rugo. The others fled and became involved in forming or capturing other secret societies across Europe. The secret society of Vicenza is among the ancestors of modern-day Freemasonry.[7]

Faustus Socinus, a Rosicrucian and nephew of Laelius Socinus, got his uncle’s papers after his uncle’s death. Using the doctrines in his uncle’s papers, he founded Socinianism from which came Unitarianism.

Socinianism rejected the teachings that Jesus had a divine nature. He was merely the human instrument of divine mercy. The Holy Spirit was nothing more than the activity of God. Although the Scriptures were considered authoritative, they were interpreted from the perspective of rationalism.

HuguenotsAnother reformation movement was the Huguenots. Huguenots were the Calvinist Protestants (Presbyterians) of France. They founded their church in 1559. The Huguenot massacres began in France soon after Catherine de Medici became Regent on the accession of her son, Charles IX. In 1568, she issued an edict that outlawed the Huguenots. As Huguenots had acquired great wealth, placing them outside the law invited their plunder. Hoping to prevent the impending slaughter of a tenth of his population, Charles began negotiating with the Huguenot leaders. While Charles negotiated, Catherine plotted their extermination. When Huguenot leaders assembled in negotiation, Catherine’s forces attacked and killed them. She had killed all the important Huguenot leaders. This massacre occurred on August 24, 1572, and became known as St. Bartholomew’s Massacre. This massacre lead to others until most Huguenots had been killed or driven from France. King Charles died soon after his mother betrayed his trust. His son Henry II died at the hands of an assassin because he seemed unwilling to slaughter the Huguenots.

The Huguenots received an uneasy peace between the issuance of the Edit of Nantes by Henry IV in 1598 and it revocation in 1685 by Louis XIV. Its revocation resulted in most of the remaining Huguenots fleeing France for the American colonies. (France’s unnecessary loss became America’s fortunate gain. France’s decline can be dated from the St. Bartholomew’s Massacre.)


Endnotes
1. Eustace Mullins, The Curse of Canaan: A Demonology of History (Staunton, Virginia: Revelation Book, 1987), p. 91.

2. Anton Chaitkin, Treason in America From Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman (New York, New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1984), p. 141.

3. Jim Marrs, Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids (New York, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2000), pp. 312-313.

4. Clarence Kelly, Conspiracy Against God and Man: A Study of the Beginnings and Early History of the Great Conspiracy (Belmont, Massachusetts: Western Islands, 1974), p. 29.

5. Mullins, pp. 81-83.

6. Ibid., p. 81.

7. Denis Fahey, Grand Orient: Freemasonry Unmasked as the Secret Power behind Communism through Discovery of Lost Lectures Delivered by Monsignor George F. Dillon, D.D. at Edinburgh, in October 1884 (New and Revised Edition. Metairie, Louisiana: Sons of Liberty, 1950), pp. 12-13.

ReferenceChaitkin, Anton. Treason in America From Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman. New York, New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1984.

Daraul, Arkon. A History of Secret Societies. New York, New York: The Citadel Press, 1961.

Fahey, Denis. Grand Orient: Freemasonry Unmasked as the Secret Power behind Communism through Discovery of Lost Lectures Delivered by Monsignor George F. Dillon, D.D. at Edinburgh, in October 1884. New and Revised Edition. Metairie, Louisiana: Sons of Liberty, 1950.

Kah, Gary H. The New World Religion. Noblesville, Indiana: Hope International Publishing, Inc., 1998.

Kelly, Clarence. Conspiracy Against God and Man: A Study of the Beginnings and Early History of the Great Conspiracy. Belmont, Massachusetts: Western Islands, 1974.

Marrs, Jim. Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids. New York, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2000.

Monteith, Stanley. Brotherhood of Darkness. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma: Hearthstone, 2000.

Mullins, Eustace. The Curse of Canaan: A Demonology of History. Staunton, Virginia: Revelation Book, 1987.

Preuss, Arthur. A Dictionary of Secret and Other Societies. St. Louis, Missouri: B. Herder Book Co., 1924.

Queenborough, Lady (Edith Starr Miller). Occult Theocracy. Two Volumes. Hawthorne, California: The Christian Book Club of America, 1933.

Copyright © 2009 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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The Assassins and Roshaniya

The Assassins and Roshaniya
Thomas Allen

[Editor’s note: Footnotes in the original are omitted.]

During the seventh century, a great disturbance came out of Arabia and swept across North Africa into Spain and across the Middle East to Afghanistan and into the Balkans eventually to Austria and Hungary. It was Islam. Mohammed founded Islam, which he built on three basic dogmas: monotheism, belief in the Prophet (Mohammed), and the law of retribution.

Assassins
Out of Islam came the Assassins. The Assassins formed a secret society that appeared in the eleventh century in Persia. The Assassins were drug users; they used hashish. They grew out of Ismailism.

In the middle of the seventh century following Mohammed’s death, the Moslem world split between the Sunni and the Shia (Shiite) sects.

The Sunni were the orthodox Moslems. They believed that Mohammed was the giver of divine revelation.

The Shia believed in absolute obedience to the imams, or priest-kings, who were the direct descendants of Mohammed through his daughter. They regarded Ali, the fourth imam, more highly than Mohammed.

In the eighth century the Shia sect split into the Twelvers (the majority) and the Seveners or Ismailis. The Twelvers believed that the millennium would come with the twelfth imam of the Mohammedan line. The Seveners believed that the millennium would come with the seventh imam of the Mohammedan line.

The Sunni far out numbered the Shia. To survive, the Shia resorted to secret societies. With secret societies, the Shia sought to gain control of the Moslem world and, eventually, the whole world.

One of their most successful secret societies of the Shia was the House of Wisdom (Abode of Learning, House of Knowledge) in Cairo. In 1004, the sixth Caliph, Hakim, established the House of Wisdom, which was a repository of ancient illuministic knowledge. It trained Moslems to become fanatics. This society operated under the direction of the Caliph of the Fatimites. The instructors in this society were high-ranking officials and included the supreme judge, the commander-in-chief of the army, and the minister of the court. The House of Wisdom had nine degrees of initiation. The Fatimites endeavored to substituted a natural religion for a revealed religion. To do this, they instilled doubt in the minds of their followers. Nothing was to be believed, and everything was lawful. The House of Wisdom provided the foundation for the Assassins.

Hasan-i Sabbah, founder of the Assassins, was reared in a Twelver Shia family in Khorasan of western Persia. As a young man he converted to Ismailism. After the Sultan of Persia exiled him for accounting irregularities, Hasan went to Cairo in 1078 and asked the Caliph’s permission to carry Ismailism to Persia. Permission was granted. Hasan went to Persia and the Assassins or Nizaris were born in 1090. (Abu Mansur Sadakah ibn Yussuf, a Jew and vizier of the Caliph of Egypt, was Hasan’s protector during his missionary work in Persia.[1])

Hasan began using political power to gain spiritual power. To achieve this power, he changed the role of the Ismaili initiate to the role of assassin. He eventually made himself the absolute ruler of the territory around Alamut on the Caspian Sea.

He established a loyal obedient following of assassins through the awesomeness of his authority and the use of drugs. These followers unhesitantly obeyed his commands even unto death. The lower ranks of the uninitiated were required to follow strict Islamic beliefs. The higher-ranking adepts believed in nothing but power. They disregarded all acts or means with indifference. (A basic tenet of the higher initiates of the Assassins was “nothing is true and all is allowed”—the end justifies the means.) Only the ultimate goal of world donation was considered. Concealing their lust for power in religious piety, a few men sought to achieve world donation. The method by which this was to be established was the wholesale assassination of those who opposed them.

The murderous practices of the Assassins lead to a divided disorganized Moslem world, which aided the Christian Crusaders when they arrived in the Holy Land.

By the twelfth century, the Assassins had fractured. The Persian Assassins had adopted the Sunni version of Moslem law. The Syrian branch had become assassins for hire.

When the Mongols conquered Persia and Syria in the thirteenth century, they destroyed the Assassins. The Mongols utterly slaughtered the Persian Assassins. Sultan Baybars turned all the Syrian Assassins into his hired killers.

The Assassins provided a model for the Templars, Bavarian Illuminati, Carbonari, and Irish Republican Brotherhood.

Roshaniya
In the sixteenth century a powerful secret society called the Roshaniya, or Illuminated Ones, arose in Afghanistan. Its roots go at least as far back as the House of Wisdom at Cairo. Bayezid Ansari founded this society after he had converted to an Ismaili cult that claimed to hold a secret doctrine handed down in the family of Mohammed.

Ansari established a school near Peshawar where he instructed initiates in the knowledge of the supernatural. During the course of instruction, the initiate “was to receive the illumination which was emanated from the supreme being, who desired a class of perfect men—and women—to carry out the organization and direction of the world.”[2]

The Roshaniya planned to reform and reorganize the social system of the world by taking control of individual countries one by one. Among its basic tenets was the abolition of private prosperity, religion, and nation states.

Members of the Roshaniya did not worship any particular deity. They “believe that there was a supreme overall power, which was known by the sum of its individual powers (lordship, protection, and so on) and when one had meditated upon them all, and they had become the ‘property’ of the invocant, he would thence forward be a man of complete power.”[3] Once an Illuminists reached this state (the Enlightened One of the fourth degree in the Roshaniya), he was no longer limited by any theological or social bonds. He was free to do as he pleased. Once an adept reached the fourth degree, he could communicate directly with the unknown superiors who had revealed secret knowledge to their followers throughout the ages.

Later Ansari moved his headquarters to the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan. From here he directed his empire to conquer the East. Many merchants and soldiers joined his society. As his society grew more powerful, Ansari began to preach a hedonistic doctrine: eat, drink, and be merry; look after yourself; gain all the power you can; your only allegiance is to the Roshaniya; anyone not a member of the Roshaniya is lawful prey.

Ansari created much havoc in the Mogul Empire. Eventually, Mohsin Khan, Governor of Kabul, arrested and imprisoned him. On the advice of Sheikh Attari, the Governor’s religious guide, Ansari was allowed to escape. (Attari was suspected of being a secret adherent of the Roshaniya.)

After his escape, his power and popularity grew. He set about to take India and Persia by force. He later died of a wound that he received in India in an encounter with Mohsin Khan’s army. His son and grandson in turn became leaders of the society, and each in turn died in battle against the Moguls.

The basic structure and tenets of the Roshaniya appeared in Europe in various Illuminati orders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as the Alombrados or Illuminated Ones of Spain, the Illuminated Guerinets of France, and the Order of the Illuminati of Bavaria.

Endnotes
1. Lady Queenborough (Edith Starr Miller), Occult Theocracy. (Two vols. Hawthorne, California: The Christian Book Club of America, 1933), p. 140.

2. Arkon Daraul, A History of Secret Societies (New York, New York: The Citadel Press, 1961), p. 221.

3. Ibid., p. 222.

References
Daraul, Arkon. A History of Secret Societies. New York, New York: The Citadel Press, 1961.

Frost, Thomas. The Secret Societies of the European Revolutions, 1776–1876. Two volumes. London, England: Tinsley Brothers, 1876.

Larson, Bob. Larson’s Book of Cults. Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. 1982.

MacKenzie, Norman, ed. Secret Societies. New York, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967.

Marrs, Jim. Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids. New York, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2000.

Queenborough, Lady (Edith Starr Miller). Occult Theocracy. Two Volumes. Hawthorne, California: The Christian Book Club of America, 1933.

Ward, J. S. M., Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods. London, England: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. Ltd., 1921.

Webster, Nesta H. Secret Societies and Subversive Movements. Palmdale, California: Omni Publication, 1924.

Copyright © 2009 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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