The Trail of the Serpent
describes a recent rivalry between Reuben Swinburne Clymer and H. Spencer Lewis, who both claimed to be the legitimate head of American Rosicrucianism. Clymer (a 32nd degree Mason), claimed that he had been given his authority by no less a person than the social reformer Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825 — 75) - a friend of Abraham Lincoln - whom the European Rosicrucians had authorised to take the Order to America in 1852, many years before H. Spencer Lewis founded AMORC. The resulting dispute led to Clymer taking the matter to court, which found in his favour and accepted his registration of the title ‘Rosicrucian’ in 1935.
Clymer claimed that the doctrines of his society, the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, were endorsed by a secret order that directed it from France - called the Council of Nine. He published a letter from them in 1932, which proclaimed:
This is the New Dispensation, and the work of the Spiritual and Mystical Fraternities must be re-established throughout the world, so that all peoples may be taught the Law and thereby enabled to apply it towards universal improvement as the only means of saving mankind... We, the Council of Nine, have selected your organization, as one of the oldest in America, to help do this work.
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The letter was signed by the excessively immodest ‘Comte M. de St Vincent, Premier Plenipotentiary of the Council of Nine of the Confraternities of the World’. As with the Synarchist ideal, Clymer’s group - as Stoddard points out - professed ‘to embrace the esoteric side of all religions’.
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Another title of the Council of Nine, according to Clymer, was the ‘Secret School’,
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which will prove to have extraordinary significance. The important point here is that the term ‘Council of Nine’ was in use in the 1930s, specifically linked to the same politico-esoteric milieu in France that spawned Schwaller de Lubicz.
Many of the nineteenth-century writings of Dr Paschal Beverly Randolph, Clymer’s mentor, contain such precise parallels with the later Nine material and the teachings of Alice Bailey’s Tibetan that they stretch coincidence far beyond breaking point. Randolph believed that throughout history a series of initiatory orders has existed which is controlled by higher spiritual beings known as the Great White Brotherhood, and Clymer claimed that the Grand Master of his order was directly accountable to them.
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More important is the fact that Randolph used the name ‘the Hierarchy’ to describe these higher spiritual beings
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- the same term used by Bailey, Hurtak, Puharich and Whitmore. And besides believing that a Council of Nine directs certain esoteric schools from France, Randolph writes of a Council of Twenty-Four
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, which also appears in Hurtak’s
The Keys of Enoch.
Interestingly, Randolph believed that ‘spiritual beings from other planets’ often visit Earth.
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With distinctly synarchist overtones, Clymer described the Hierarchy as ‘guardians of the world’s religions’
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(which is surely very odd, as many of them are exclusivist and teach intolerance — and worse - towards the others. One wonders what game plan these guardians really have in mind.)
Apart from his Rosicrucian Order, Clymer set up several interconnected esoteric organisations, including the Secret Schools and a mystical brotherhood known as the Priesthood after the Order of Melchizedek. He claimed that the latter was already well established in France, and that its secrets originated in a manuscript handed down from the Paris Temple - in other words, from the Knights Templar.
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In his ground-breaking 1979 book,
Messengers of Deception,
Jacques Vallée describes his investigations into an occult group called the Order of Melchizedek. He first encountered them in Paris, becoming interested in their fusion of ‘traditional’ esoteric ideas with a belief in extraterrestrial contact. When he returned to his adopted home in San Francisco, Vallée was surprised to find that the same group was operating right on his own doorstep in California. He soon realised that the Order of Melchizedek has many such branches throughout the world.
In April 1976 he met James Hurtak, who was appearing with Andrija Puharich on a San Francisco television programme. In conversation afterwards, Hurtak described his experience of having
The Keys of Enoch
beamed into him in 1973. He then invited Vallée ‘to join a new psychic group designed to change the destinies of the world by occult means’.
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This group was known, Hurtak explained, as the Sons of Light of the Order of Melchizedek. But Vallée was no fool, having had his suspicions honed over decades of researching UFO contactee stories. He writes:
Where does this alleged wisdom come from? From the distant stars? I am beginning to wonder.
Could the source of the so-called ‘wisdom
’
be right here on Earth?
Could there be human manipulators behind all this?
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And who is this Melchizedek? Also spelled Melchisedec, he appears in Genesis 14:18 — 20 as the priest-king of Salem who blessed Abraham. Later, Paul speaks of the ‘Order of Melchisedec’ in somewhat mysterious terms in his Epistle to the Hebrews (Chapters 5 — 7): it appears to have been a special order of priests distinct from the Levites, which has fired imaginations ever since. Like other Biblical characters such as Enoch, who are clearly important but about whom little information is given, the ‘Order of Melchisedec’ is fertile ground for speculation. As a result the name turns up, almost as a cliché, in many of the more unconventional Christian systems. It is the name of the senior priesthood of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or Mormons, to which all male members aspire after their earlier membership of the ‘Aaronic’ priesthood. Confusingly, however, several esoteric — and Christian fundamentalist — groups all call themselves the Order of Melchizedek. For example, there is a small Order in Applegate, California, which has existed since 1889.
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The Order with which Vallée associates Hurtak has a particularly interesting agenda. Their literature reveals that, to them, Melchizedek has exactly the same role as Alice Bailey’s Lord of the World, that of a higher being who descended to Earth in the ‘Lemurian epoch’, guiding the spiritual evolution of the human race. His Order is endowed with a somewhat grandiose — if rather sinister-sounding - goal. As Hurtak writes in
The Keys of Enoch:
The Order of Melchizedek is in charge of the
consciousness reprogramming
that is necessary to link physical creation with the externalization of the divine hierarchy [our emphasis].
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The Keys of Enoch
and the doctrines of Alice Bailey can be seen as
one and the same,
although Hurtak’s version is careful to boast a New Age gloss. They even use the same words - the Hierarchy, Seven Rays, root races — to describe identical concepts.
What Hurtak is attempting to do matches the Synarchist interpretation of the works of Alice Bailey given by Christina Stoddard. We have already seen how
The Keys of Enoch
outlines a system that incorporates all the major religions of the Western world as well as New Age beliefs. Christianity, Judaism and even Mormonism, fashionable Eastern religions and indigenous beliefs (such as those of the Native Americans): Hurtak’s theology embraces them with equal fervour. He also claims to explain the ‘message’ that lies behind them all.
The dark side of Sirius
The esoteric concept of the importance of Sirius also appears - this time in a markedly twisted form — in the doctrines of the Order of the Solar Temple, whose mass deaths shocked the world in the mid-1990s. On the night of 4 — 5 October 1994, fifty-three members of the cult died in Switzerland and Canada, while on 15-16 December 1995, another sixteen died in France in what were probably suicide pacts, although many suspect it was coldly premeditated ritual murder. Yet this was not the end of just another minor, if mad, cult. The Order itself did not die with its faithful on those tragic nights, and neither is the Order of the Solar Temple an organisation of little consequence. Its influence stretches very high up the social ladder.
The Order of the Solar Temple was closely connected with another group, the confusingly similarly named Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple, founded at the chateau of Arginy, in the Beaujolais region of France, on 12 June 1952.
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One individual who was instrumental in this event was the alchemist Eugène Canseliet, who was previously a member of the Brotherhood of Heliopolis with Schwaller de Lubicz.
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The Sovereign Order soon made inroads into high society, being officially recognised by Prince Rainier III of Monaco, although its relationship with his family was much more intimate: his wife, the legendary Princess Grace, was actually a member.
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The exact relationship between the Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple and the more notorious Order of the Solar Temple, which was created around 1980, is hotly disputed. Was it an offshoot, a breakaway group, or the result of a merger between the Sovereign Order and some other neo- Templar society? Perhaps the truth will remain elusive because the Sovereign Order has since been keen to play down its connections with its notorious cousin. But some relationship exists, as several leaders of the Order of the Solar Temple had once been members of the Sovereign Order, and perhaps even continued to be ... More fundamentally, the doctrines of both orders were identical.
The ‘manifesto’ of the Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple, entitled
Pourquoi le resurgence de l’Ordre du Temple? (Why the Revival of the Order of the Temple?),
published under the pseudonym ‘Peronnik’ in Monte Carlo in 1975, talks of the existence of a planet called Heliopolis, which orbits Sirius. The leaders of both Orders believed that they were in contact with the inhabitants of this planet. ‘Peronnik’ explains:
Several times in the past interplanetary missions have left Heliopolis in the direction of our Earth. This was notably the case during the erection of the Great Pyramid, when, after an agreement was made with certain Egyptian initiates to consolidate and perfect the esoteric initiation, a mission of 25 specialists came to contribute to the construction itself.
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The Orders’ doctrines also emphasise the importance of the secret priesthood of Melchizedek: the man himself being an emissary of Heliopolis/Sirius, who returned to his home planet when his mission was completed.
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The Sovereign Order’s book explicitly proclaims them as a
Synarchist
organisation, thereby linking them directly to the ideology of Schwaller de Lubicz.
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Significantly, the reason for the alleged suicide of the sixty-nine cult members was that they believed their souls would return ‘home’ to the Sirius system. Documents posted to the media on 5 October 1994 by the leaders of the cult include the statement: ‘The Great White Lodge of Sirius has decreed the Recall of the last authentic Bearers of an Ancestral Wisdom.‘
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Although they have put their own idiosyncratic - not to say perverted - twist on the idea, it clearly derives from the works of Alice Bailey, who explicitly uses the term ‘Great White Lodge’ in the context of Sirius. And, of course, the Solar Temple stressed the importance of the Great Pyramid, which, they claim, will be the focus for some momentous event in the next few years.
The concept of contact with Sirius has become somewhat fashionable in certain circles in the last few years. In 1985 a book entitled
The Lion Path
appeared on the New Age market. The author, given as one ‘Musaios’, claimed to outline an ancient Egyptian system of individual transformation and enlightenment, derived primarily from the Pyramid Texts. The Osiris-king’s journey to the otherworld to become a ‘body of light’ before taking a new, Horus, form, was seen as a description of the process of transformation undergone by every soul after death, but which can also be experienced during life (an idea that we believe is truly revelatory). Now, Musaios promises us, that transformation is open to everybody.
However, disappointingly, what really emerges from
The Lion Path
is a passive process, a series of meditation exercises, described in superficial and simplistic New Age speak, to be carried out at astrologically significant times, with the objective of enabling the practitioner to ‘tune in’ to higher intelligences in the universe — specifically those in the Sirius system.
To follow the Lion Path, one simply has to meditate in the correct way at specific times, tuning in to astrological forces (using a completely reinvented astrology that includes two as yet undiscovered planets in our solar system, as well as Sirius A and B). The final force, the object of the Lion Path, is Sirius. When contact with Sirius is achieved, the practitioner will have achieved personal transformation, though Musaios fails to say exactly what will happen as a result. The clear implication is that some form of communication will have been established with the beings from Sirius. Musaios writes:
In the Vulcan(-Ptah) Session and interval we begin to assemble the seed-pod (in terms of consciousness-space, a starship or flying disk) for later travel to the domain of Sirius; and in the Horus Session we begin to use it. During the Vulcan Session ‘re-wiring’ and the new circuitry for that super-shamanic journey are prepared. In the Vulcan-Sothic or 25th Session the process is completed.
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The passivity of the exercises is, in itself, a direct contradiction of the principles on which the Lion Path claims to be based. The journey in the Pyramid Texts is essentially an active process, in which the individual is directly responsible for the outcome. It is not a passive state in which they simply allow outside forces to direct them.