Why should esoteric organizations which study and teach the complexities of Cabala, surely the ultimate in intellectual spiritual contemplation, by bothered with Arthuriana? The clue lies in the dating. Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was as…
Category: Florilegium
David V. Barrett on soldiers and monks
Chivalry also meant that a knight should fix his thoughts on God, and be a holy man as well as a fighting man. Until the Knights Templar there was rarely any connection between the two;…
David V. Barrett on contradictions
One of the most important aspects of any esoteric teaching is that the same statement may have two or more quite different meanings – factual and allegorical, exoteric and esoteric – and may reveal different…
David V. Barrett on patterns
The problem turned out to be that, although not one single piece of information in either article was classified, GCHQ [Government Communications Headquarters] feared that the way that all the individual Unclassified details were put…
David V. Barrett on spies
Going back to the sixteenth century it is almost certain that, in different ways, John Dee, Giordano Bruno and Christopher Marlowe were all spies. – A Brief History of Secret Societies: An Unbiased History of…
David V. Barrett on the Chinese secret societies
The entire history of secret societies in China exemplifies the saying, ‘One man’s terrorist (or brigand, or bandit) is another man’s freedom fighter’. Many of these societies raised and maintained the devotion if their members…
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David V. Barrett on, er, rocket science
In a curious aside, [Aleister] Crowley was a significant influence on L/ Ron Hubbard, creator of the psychoanalytic system of Dianetics and founder of the controversial Church of Scientology. In 1945 Hubbard stayed for some…
David V. Barrett (& Gareth Knight) on the active imagination
One of the main initiatory rituals of the HOGD [the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn]’s Second Order took place in a seven-sided vault based on that in which Christian Rosekreuz’s uncorrupted body is supposed…
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Victoria E. Pagán on Conspiracy vs. Contingency
The best defence against conspiracies, it would seem from both Livy and Tacitus, is fortune, an irrefutable force impervious to contradiction. Yet, it is hollow comfort to concede that the powder keg of contingency is…
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Victoria E. Pagán on how conspiracy theories operate
Tacitus is our only source for the persecution of Christians in 64, and therefore out only source for the earliest state persecution of Christians. Of course, he may have inserted into his narrative an ideological…
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