Éliphas Lévi and the ‘Profanation’ of Tradition: Part Three

by Kerry Bolton

Dr. Kerry Bolton discusses the intricate concepts of the Universal Republic and the ‘New World Order’, unraveling the symbolic and esoteric elements embedded in global institutions, and revealing the influential role of secret societies in steering the course of history.

Also read parts one and two.

Universal Republic

This Novus Ordo Seclorum is also called the ‘new world order’. Although it is erroneous to think that the latter is an English translation of the former, a semantic matter made much of by Masonic apologists in dismissing the contentions of anti-Masonic writers and conspiracy theorists, the terms nonetheless mean the same in principle. Alice Bailey, heir to the Theosophical mantle descended from Helena Blavatsky, and who had a seminal influence on what is generally called the ‘New Age’, wrote of the ‘New World Order’ (sic) as an esoteric aim: ‘To reorganise world affairs and so initiate the new world order. This is definitely in the realm of ceremonial magic…’¹ Bailey states that such a ‘new world order’ would emerge out of a demand for peace from a world wracked by conflict, the process being recognisably dialectical:

The factor that must and will relate the ‘Principle of Conflict’ to the expression of harmony and bring about the new world order, the new civilisation and culture, is the trend and the voice of public opinion, and the opportunity offered to people everywhere to bring about social security and right human relations.²

The United Nations Organisation has a prominent role to play in establishing this universal republic, and is regarded as such by the adepts of Counter-Tradition. Bailey states that the UNO is a vehicle for so-called ‘Hidden Masters’, or what others might regard, in the words of Éliphas Lévi, as ‘those seeking to erect a throne for themselves over the ruins of the world’, or in the words of Guénon, as ‘having worked always in the shadows, to inspire and to direct invisibly all modern movements…’:

The Hierarchy is at this time attempting to channel the forces of reconstruction into the Assembly of the United Nations. (The forces of reconstruction are related to the Will aspect of divinity and are effective mainly in relation to those entities, which we call nations.) The use of these impersonal energies is dependent on the quality and the nature of the recipient nation; on its measure of true enlightenment and on its point in evolution. Nations are the expression today of the massed self-centredness of a people and of their instinct to self-preservation. The main object of the Hierarchy is so to distribute these constructive energies that the theory of unity may slowly be turned into practice and the word ‘United’ may come to have a true significance and meaning. Also in The Reappearance of the Christ³ it is stated that the one who works to produce at-one-ment, unification and fusion is generating a slowly growing will-to-unity within the Assembly of the United Nations. This being can only channel His energies through the mass consciousness or through a group conscious entity, such as the U.N.⁴

The role of Masonry as the world religion is explained by Bailey, as is the hierarchy of power that would be established under the Universal Republic, and the allusion to the All-Seeing Eye of Masonry and revolution:

The Masonic Movement ... will meet the need of those who can, and should, wield power. It is the custodian of the law; it is the home of the Mysteries and the seat of initiation. It holds in its symbolism the ritual of Deity, and the way of salvation is pictorially preserved in its work. The methods of Deity are demonstrated in its Temples and under the All-Seeing Eye the work can go forward.

It is a far more occult organisation than can be realised and is intended to be the training school for the coming advanced occultists ... in Masonry you have the three paths leading to initiation. As yet they are not used, and one of the things that will eventuate – when the new universal religion has sway and the nature of esotericism is understood – will be the utilisation of the banded esoteric organism, the Masonic organism and the Church organism as initiating centres. These three groups converge as their inner sanctuaries are approached. There is no dissociation between the One Universal Church, the sacred inner Lodge of all true Masons, and the inner-most circles of the esoteric societies.⁵

Symbolically, the Lucis Trust, the organisation founded by Bailey as the basis of what most likely became the entire contemporary ‘New Age’ phenomenon, is the officially designated custodian of the so-called ‘holy of holies’ of the UNO, the UN Meditation Room, which has all the symbolism of a temple of profane religion. One of the adepts of the Bailey cult describes the UN Meditation Room as having a world-wide esoteric focus for adepts. Steven Nation, a Masonic initiate and a leader of the Bailey movement, has stated that ‘[s]ome of my most profound experiences in Freemasonry happened when I would sense the walls of the Masonic temple dissolving and feel as if I was witnessing and taking part in a ceremony within the General Assembly of the United Nations’. Nation considers the gatherings of the UNO to be the equivalent of collective magical rituals, stating to adepts: ‘… Now I don’t need to remind a group of esotericists that this view of UN activity as ritual involves the recognition that what’s happening at a deep, unspoken level at these conferences is the invocation and evocation of energies. …’⁶

That this UN Meditation Room is intended as a temple for a world syncretic religion is apparent from its interior symbolism, in the centre of which sits ‘a six-and-half-ton rectangular block of iron ore, polished on the top and illuminated from above by a single spotlight’. This seems to suggest what the Masonic adept Albert Mackey called ‘the Stone of Foundation… placed within the foundations of the Temple of Solomon, which holds the key place in Masonic allegory’.⁷

The focus in the Mediation Room is a mural on the back wall of the room. The predominant shape on the mural forms what can be readily seen as a large letter ‘Vau’ which interrelates all 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Its esoteric meaning is that of ‘a single line of light’, which can be related to the shaft of light that illuminates the cubic altar.

Rebuilding the Temple

The symbolism of the Universal Republic has already been erected in Jerusalem at the Israeli Supreme Court building. The rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon was the symbolic raison d’être of both the Templars and the Masons. In an article entitled ‘Jerusalem - Symbolic Cradle of Freemasonry’, Leon Zeldis,⁸ 33°, explains the importance the Temple has to Masonic tradition:

Jerusalem, the ‘City of Peace,’ is the city of David, King of Israel, who, in the 10th century BCE, unified the Holy Land under his rule and established Jerusalem as his capital. His son, Solomon, King of Israel, built a Temple to the G-d of Israel which became the archetypal Temple in Western thought and a central subject in Masonic tradition.

Zeldis states that Masonry has been using a cavern beneath the site of the Temple since 1868, and that the ceremonies draw Masons from around the world:

Beneath the wall encircling the Old City, there is a deep cavern known as King Solomon’s Quarries. … In this cave took place, on May 13, 1868, the first recorded Masonic ceremony in the Holy Land. A group of Freemasons led by Robert Morris (Past Grand Master of Kentucky) held a meeting in the Secret Monitor Degree. At present, the cave is used to hold a Mark Master degree once or twice a year, usually conducted in English and attended by numerous Brethren from abroad.

The Israeli Supreme Court was financed by the Rothschilds, and the architects chosen by them. A plaque dedicated to the Rothschilds has been placed on the building. The emblem at the top left of the plaque is a radiating All-Seeing Eye. Of particular significance is that on the roof of the Supreme Court the dominating feature is a pyramid surmounted by an eye. Jerry Golden, a resident of Israel, has observed: ‘The first thing you will notice is the pyramid with the All Seeing Eye just like the one you will see on the American dollar bill, it sits in a circle to the left. …’ ⁹ Other interesting features are ten steps of three ascending the building, and three libraries, thirty-three being suggestive of the 33 Degrees of the Scottish Rite. The first thirty degrees of the Scottish Rite are separated specifically from the last three degrees, by Masonic authorities. The last three degrees are conferred as honorary degrees for services rendered to Masonry.¹⁰ The three libraries in the Supreme Court are for specific categories, again suggesting three degrees: lawyers, judges and retired judges. Under normal circumstances, one would think that a single law library would be more practicable. Golden states that there are five courtrooms in the shape of a Jewish tomb, with three judges sitting in each room. ‘…Above the seats of the Judges there are smaller pyramids that shed light onto the Judges as they sit over those who are brought up from the prison cells below…’

The Supreme Court in Jerusalem seems very likely to have been designed as an esoteric Temple, albeit not THE Temple. It indicates the important role Counter-Tradition is playing in the present cycle. It is also perhaps the only (?) tangible evidence¹¹ of a direct relationship symbolically shown between the Rothschilds and Counter-Tradition.

Tradition and Profanation in the Cycle of Decline

Spengler observed that in the cycle of decline that afflicts civilisation, the ‘Winter’ epoch as he called it, there arises a yearning to fill the spiritual void imparted by materialism and rationalism. The Isis cult in Rome, not the same as that of Egypt, became a dalliance of Roman high society. Chaldean astrology became fashionable. There were also countless charlatans and prophets. Spengler in his own time remarked on the rise of the ‘occultist and theosophist fraud’ in Europe and the United States, as well as bogus forms of Buddhism.

People in general during this epoch seek something other than the shallowness of materialism. ‘This next phase’, states Spengler, is ‘the Second Religiousness’, concomitant with the rise of ‘Caesarism’, his term for the restoration of tradition and authority in reaction to rule by money. Under such circumstances of a yearning for the return to the ‘Spring’ of a culture, new forms do not arise, but rather old forms reappear:

as if a mist cleared off the land and revealed the old forms, uncertainly at first, but presently with increasing distinctness. The material of the Second Religiousness is simply that of the first, genuine, young religiousness… It starts with Rationalism’s fading out in helplessness, then the forms of Springtime become visible…¹²

At today’s juncture in Western civilisation, contention exists between the proliferation of cults representing the anti- and counter-traditions of an ‘inverted spirituality’ (Guénon) offered up to the spiritually hungry by those who, in Lévi’s words, are ‘seeking to erect a throne for themselves over the ruins of the world’. Spengler already observed these trends in his own day of what he called ‘occultist and theosophist fraud’ and the fad of affecting Oriental religion. In our own time, this religious faddism has grown apace with the desire for something beyond the consumption society, as can be seen in the proliferation of fundamentalist Christian sects whose pastors recal the methods of a Madison Avenue advertising agency more than any form of traditional Christianity; and conversely with the popularity of bogus pagan ‘revivals’ such as Wicca, that reflect more the zeitgeist of this epoch than anything from ancient Europe. There are also the myriad ‘New Age’ movements and doctrines, and a mass of ‘countless charlatans and prophets’; as in the decaying days of ancient Rome.

Opposing this counterfeit spirituality is the Perennial Tradition as a vanguard of the ‘Second Religiousness’, arising as a prelude to the overthrow of ‘the dictature of money and of its political weapon democracy’, from whence comes a new ‘Spring’ of cultural reawakening.¹³

1 Alice Bailey (1948), The Reappearance of the Christ (New York: Lucis Trust, 1979), p. 494.

2 Alice Bailey, ibid.

3 Any reference to ‘Christ’ in New Age or other such occult currents should not be confused with the personage of Jesus Christ as Saviour, but rather the supposedly ‘Christ’ potential of Man.

4 Alice Bailey, Reappearance of Christ (New York: Lucis Trust, 1979), p. 77.

5 Alice Bailey, The Externalisation of the Hierarchy (NewYork: Lucis Trust, 1934), pp. 511-513.

6 S. Nation, ‘The United Nations and the Temple of Humanity,’ in Journal of Esoteric Psychology, vol. 2, no. 1 (2006).

7 A. G. Mackey, Symbolism of Freemasonry (South Carolina, 1869).

8 Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite for the State of Israel, Honorary Adjunct Grand Master.

9 J. Golden, ‘Masonic Supreme Court in Jerusalem – Seat of the New World Order’.

10 F. L. Pick and G. N. Knight, The Pocket Book of Freemasonry (London: Hutchison, 1992), p. 239.

11 In contrast to the many unproven assumptions and allegations.

12 Oswald Spengler, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 310-311.

13 Spengler, ibid., p. 506.