According to historian Geoffrey Cubbit [‘Conspiracy Myths and Conspiracy Theories’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 1989, 20(1): 12-26], conspiracy theories are a way of making sense of current events and the grand sweep…
Tag: occulture
Mark Sedgwick (& René Guénon) on the key concepts of Traditionalism
For a century and a half after Ficino, the idea that there was a Perennial Philosophy [the idea that “[a]ll religions shared a common origin in a single perennial (or primeval or primordial) religion that…
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David V. Barrett on Arthuriana
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…
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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