PURITAN NEWS WEEKLY

www.puritans.net/news/

1/20/03

 

 

HIGH LEVEL JESUITS AND HIGH LEVEL GNOSTIC FREEMASONRY

 

 

By J. Parnell McCarter

Puritan News Service

 

  

Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order, was himself a member of a Gnostic Illuminist group in Spain called “Los Alumbrados.” Evidence suggests that high level Gnostic Jesuits (following in the course of the Order’s founder) formed ties with other underground Gnostics for centuries before speculative freemasonry’s public rise in the early eighteenth century.   And there has been an historic connection between the Jesuit Order and higher level Gnostic speculative freemasonry, as documented in such books as Let My People Go and Rulers of Evil.

 

One such evidence of the Jesuit-Masonic connection in the history of the Masonic Knights Templar is found at http://www.templarhistory.com/mts.html :
 
1742. Lord Kilmarnock and other exiled Stuart participants showing that the Jacobite Templar link still existed receive Karl Gotthelf, Baron Von Hund into the Order of the Temple in Paris.

1745.
24th,September Prince Charles Edward Stewart, himself a senior Templar gives a soiree for the Chivalry of the Order in Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh. It is recorded in a letter from the Duke of Perth to Lord Ogilvie.

1754.
Meeting at College of the Jesuits in Clermont.

1796.
Alexander Deuchar becomes the Heritor to the Jacobite Templar legacy.

1807.
January, Deuchar holds a meeting of Knights Templar in Edinburgh.”
 

The meeting in 1754  illustrates the connection between the Jesuits and freemasonry.  The Roman Catholic Stuarts utilized freemasonry as a tool to try to re-gain the throne of England, a goal the Jesuits had as well, even as the Stuart Charles II seems to have used masonry to help accomplish his Restoration to power in the seventeenth century.

 

 

The Gnostic movement went public subtly in the form of speculative English freemasonry in the early 18th century in Protestant England.  Though started by “professed” (albeit questionable) Protestants, it was not long before the Roman Catholic Duke of York was the most powerful English freemason. And Scottish Rite and Knight Templar freemasonry was led by Romish Jacobites with Jesuit ties.

 

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/6583/secret012.html  offers useful insights into the establishment and character of Scottish Rite and Knight Templar freemasonry:

 

"Decades before the English Grand Lodge was created, many Masons in Scotland were already known to be helping the Stuarts. These Scottish loyalists used their lodges as secret meeting places in which to hatch political intrigues. Pro-Stuart Masonic activity may go as far back as 1660 - the year of the Stuart Restoration (when the Stuarts took the throne back from the Puritans). According to some early Masons, the Restoration was largely a Masonic feat. General Monk, who played such a pivotal role in the Restoration, was reported to be a Freemason.” 

Michael "Ramsey was a Scottish mystic who had been hired by James III to tutor James' two sons in France. Ramsey's goal was to re-establish the disgraced Templar Knights in Europe. To accomplish this, Ramsey adopted the same approach used by the Mother Grand Lodge system of London: the resurrected knights Templar were to be a secret mystical/fraternal society open to men of varied occupations. The old knightly titles, uniforms, and 'tools of the trade' were to be used for symbolic, fraternal and ritual purposes within a Masonic context."
- William Bramley, The Gods of Eden

During their stay in France in 1745, the "Young Pretender" Bonnie Prince Charlie and other Stuarts "had become deeply involved in the dissemination of Freemasonry. Indeed they are generally regarded as the source of the particular form of Freemasonry known as 'Scottish Rite'. 'Scottish Rite' Freemasonry introduced higher degrees than those offered by other Masonic systems at the time. It promised initiation into greater and more profound mysteries - mysteries supposedly preserved and handed down in Scotland. It established more direct connections between Freemasonry and the various activities - alchemy, Cabalism and Hermetic thought, for instance - which were regarded as 'Rosecrucian'. And it elaborated not only on the antiquity but also on the illustrious pedigree of the 'craft'."

"...It did not, like many rites of Freemasonry, consist primarily of free-thinkers and atheists. On the contrary, it seems to have been deeply religious and magically oriented - emphasizing a sacred social and political hierarchy, a divine order, an underlying cosmic plan. And the upper grades or degrees of this Freemasonry, according to M. Chaumeil [Le Tresor du triangle d'or] were the lower grades or degrees of the Prieure de Sion."
- Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail

 

Evidence therefore suggests that high-level Jesuit Gnostics used speculative freemasonry as a tool to promote Gnosticism and to undermine Reformed Protestantism. Gnosticism also served as a unifying bond with Jewish Cabalists who were involved in freemasonry.  This included the Jewish Rothschild family, who served as the Vatican’s treasurer and seems to have financed various Jesuit projects.  

Much of modern society has succumbed to Gnostic dogma by embracing various forms of New Agism.