Antiquity of the Illuminati

Ordo Antichristianus Illuminati^®

Secret societies have existed since Mankind first began to record its myths and religions. For thousands of years societies have existed safeguarding secret religious teachings transmitted through the generations. Monuments, Apocrypha, ordained occult knowledge, catacombs, forgotten ciphers, and secret sacrifices all have been kept guarded by the heritage of the Illuminati, an umbrella term for a vast matrix of secret societies. Illuminati are at the forefront of many conspiracy theories pertaining to religion and a shadow history. Religious orders such as the Rosicrucians, Freemasonry {York, Scot, and Memphis-Misraïm Rites}, Theosophical Society, Knights Templar, Bavarian Order of Perfectibilists {later, Illuminated Seers of Bavaria, or simply, Bavarian Illuminati}, Golden Dawn, Order of the Assassins, Roshaniyya, Cathari, Knights Hospitaller of Malta, all exist or existed in history as custodians of secret knowledge

Such ordained knowledge transmitted by secret societies can be traced through rituals, and language with religious syncretism. From the twenty-first century to the time when Mankind first recorded myths about the stars and the gods, Ægypt has been the repository of imperial magic and religion. The Magi of ancient Ægypt knew that a manifest destiny existed, and was necessary for a greater heritage of the race. For thousands of years this heritage and manifest destiny has been safeguarded through the rise and fall of world empires, world wars, and the advent of religions. Across the Æons we have sought to emulate the gods and stars above, hereupon earth and inside our own immortal souls. This series of books I present to you, “Babylon: Secret Rituals

The earliest religious organizations to possess the Holy Name Illuminati were the Roshaniyya, "Enlightened Ones" of the ancient Arabian mountains, and the Alumbrados, "Illuminated" of medieval Spain. The Roshaniyya flourished during the 16th Century in the mountains of northern Arabia and claimed spiritual descent from the 'Ansar', the helpers of Muhammad whom assisted in his flight from Mecca in ^A.D.622. As a reward for their service to Muhammad, these ancestors of the society were bestowed initiation into the mysteries of the Nizari-Ismaili religious sect. The Mystick founder of the Sect, Bayezid Ansari established an initiatory school where he secretly taught the Keys of the Invisible to the elect. The sect disappeared in the 1700's, shortly before the inauguration of the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati. The Alumbrados of medieval Spain was birthed in e.v. 1512 in Guadalajara, ascending in the circles of Franciscan friars responsible for the most inspiring works of mysticism in that era. The central precept of the sect was the process of self-gnosis via the illumination of the "Holy Spirit" and intense contemplation similar to the Sufi "khilwat." The Spanish sect of Illuminates was finally suppressed in e.v. 1623 after several edicts of condemnation by the Spanish Inquisition.

The ancient Magi whom parented an Imperial Religion in ancient Ægypt were the custodians of secret rituals and initiatory mystery traditions. These hidden traditions were transmitted through ceremony, initiation, hidden sacrifices, and forgotten tongues. Through a fusion of Isma’ili and Sufi mystic teachings with Gnostic Christianity and Jewish Qabalist metaphysics, the Legacy of the Gift coagulated from these three esoteric currents during the era of the Crusades. Ægypt is the bygone birthplace of esoteric teachings. As the Magi migrated with their mystery colleges into Rome, Greece, and Persia, we can trace observable threads of occult knowledge progressing into Gnostic, Isma’ili, and Qabalist bounties of enlightenment.

Imperial Ægypt is the matrilineal progenitor of esoteric teachings that married into the world religions. It is the depository of hidden occult knowledge that has endured, even written histories of Mankind. The Magi of Ægypt initiated an imperial religion based upon antediluvian magic. The marriage of forgotten alphabets with secret funerary rites and volumes of religious invocations birthed the foundations of magic preserved in papyri, sculpted carvings, mortuary scrolls, frescoes, monolithic temples, painted jewelry, and sarcophagi. These mysteries spawned an esoteric migration from Ægypt into the surrounding worlds of ancient Greece, Rome, Persia, and beyond. The Eleusinian teachings believed to have been initiated and practiced as initiation ceremonies for the cults of Demeter and Persephone beginning around 1500BC during the Mycenaean Era.

The Ægyptians entertained no doubt about the existence, the persistence, or the firmament of the præter-human spirit or ghosts of man. Taking into account the scrolls and mortuary texts that whisper of Ægyptian secret rituals in the times before the first Pharaohs, the worship of the ghosts or ancestral spirits of the dead was that which followed the two previous dynasties of the elemental powers of earth and the Kronidae in Ægyptian astronomical mythology. We know these præter-human intelligences from the genesis of Ægyptian pantheon in nature as elemental powers or animistic spirits, which were divinized because they were superhuman, and therefore not human.

Sut, the soul of darkness; Horus, the soul of light; Shu, the soul of air or breathing force; Seb, soul of earth; Nu (or Num), the soul of water; Ra, as soul of the sun, were gods, but these antediluvian beings did not birth from any dead men’s ghosts. Moreover, Man did not make his gods in his own image, Ægyptian theology was propagated by Magi who closely observed the laws of nature, astronomical processions, mathematics, architecture, and spiritual phenomena. Such ordained knowledge was preserved in the language of hieroglyphs and hidden alphabets. In the beginning of Ægyptian creationism was the void, otherwise designated the abyss. Darkness being the primordial unmanifest point, or first cause (called by the Persian Magi, qutub), it followed naturally that prototypes in religious representation should be a figure of darkness. This was the mythical dragon, or serpent Apep, the ever-devouring reptile, the monster Maw, the prototype of evil in nature. Apep rose up by night from the abyss and coiled about the Mount of Earth as the swallower of the light; who in another phase drank up all the sacred Nile, as the dreaded dragon of southern drought. The voice of this huge, serpent was the thunder that shook the firmament; the drought was its blasting breath that dried up the Nile inundations and withered fertile vegetation. Other præter-human beings of the void were likewise elemental, antinomian to agriculture and Man.

These were the spawn of pestilence, drought, and plague. The aim of initiation into the mysteries is to prepare for immortality. By taking up the Great Work and its sacred studies, the neophyte allied his or her entire consciousness and existence to the divine, that uncreated firmament of limitless light. This divine essence was never born, never manifest, and shall never perish in the multiverse of infinite diversities. Initiation is the means of Self-reformation where men and women are strewn asunder into the endless Sea. This endless Sea is the farthest reaches of human consciousness and imagination. The Path of Initiation arrogates strength & skill of Will. Occult initiation is a dire ordeal of the deathless soul as the initiate is often bewitched by the "Dark Night of the Soul" in the Chapel Perilous of the Grail legend, or the "Valley of the Shadow of Death.”

The root of the word itself stems the Latin noun initium, which literally means ‘beginning’; ‘a commencement anew.’ Thus, initiation means the beginning of a new perception and attitude toward life, death, and rebirth. Moreover, it is the entry into entirely new archetypes of existence. Initiation means, above all, spiritual maturity and reformation -- a definite mark in the epoch of human spiritual history. It is in such a revelation of the secrets of one's intimate destiny and true self that the candidate accomplishes Initiation. Neophytes whom learned the secret doctrines from the Magi found themselves in the presence of custodians of hidden knowledge so profound it was maddening and impenetrable save to the most purified hearts and exalted intellects, so potent that these secrets were revealed only to postulants whom had been tested with the most perilous trials, whom had given up their destinies to the path.
Initiates of the arcane Arts, are the secret few lonely hissing serpents whom are above the worms of the river Styx, learning well the lessons of the Path, ready to win the Rose of the Adept, and burn in the cremation grounds as a Babe of the Abyss.

The lives of these initiates were attested to by some of the most illustrious sages and statesmen in sacred institutions, academies, and temples. The life of the initiate became perilous at the moment of the first uttering of the oath, binding the soul to the breaches of the black seas of infinity. As one archaic initiation ceremony states, “My soul wanders in darkness and I seek the Light of Hidden Knowledge.” With new eyes, the Neophyte sees the unseen, with new ears s/he hears the unspoken, with new hands the initiates touches the Holy Ghost, with new feet s/he walks into the unknown worlds in perfect beauty and living Light.

The underlying obligation of initiation into the Mysteries was that the Preceptors were consecrated brethren, and matrons, of the Gift not “layman of the brute herd”¹. When the naked, bound, and pestilent candidate strips the mind of all psychological deconditioning (to unlearn), has mortified and excited the intolerable ache of the flesh (sensory deprivation), abandoned religious memes (occult science), s/he rises from a mystical death to reclaim the divine spark of Light, the Kingdom within. True and real initiation into the Hidden Light of the Arts and Sciences left an indelible mark on the soul. Such a Gift of the sacred and holy Magi of the secret academies was played out during a mystical reenactment and orchestrated pageantry of sacred myth and theology.

Through the daunting pageantry of mythic recreations, consecrations by scripture and the elements, psychological deconditioning, and sensory deprivation, terror and pity were forcibly impressed upon the Candidate’s fractured mind inducing an intolerable ache of the heart. Catharsis has been the fundamental nature of ritual initiation in all ages and sacred institutions of the Invisible College. The Epopts of this Invisible College today and yesterday knew the forbidden arts and sciences. The great strength of the antiquities of the Illuminati lay in their concealment, never appearing in any place in one single name, but always shrouded by another name and occupation. Within their Temples are the vessels of the forgotten, sons and daughters of the Pyramids whose progeny birthed bloodlines in the power of the Light, prophesized with the Light of Wisdom, made penitence in the Mercy of the Light, and who knew the Light had healing in its divine Wings. The Brethren of the Gift taught that the limitless Light of Gomer, Oz, Dabar is within a refuge of souls, within the stars themselves. Initiation transmitted this Gift through flesh, bloodline, and spirit. Through our Heritage of the Illuminati, we are never deprived of that Light. This is our Babylon.

Faith is a measurement of the divine stage, highlighted in the procession of the Tarot Trumps, created by the human impetus to the Holy. The Adepts who issued the Tarot, and forgotten alphabets of the Serpent, did not refer to the Great Work as “my” Will, “my” religion, “my” Path. Physicist Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger writes: “the goal of Man is to preserve his Karma and to develop it further…when man dies his Karma lives and creates for itself another carrier.”² Their goal was to become the Way, to form a synergistic bloodline that echoes the secret saturnalia and sacred institutions began by the progenitors of Ægypt’s Imperial Illuminati. The Initiate, one whom adopts the Hermit life, and duly invokes the four Hermetic powers of the Sphinx has taken up the holy obligations of rectitude, and sacrifice, thus instead of seeking a refuge of souls, the Initiate of the Mysteries has become a refuge of Light. The four Hermetic powers of the Sphinx respectively, are: scire, velle, audere, tacere, and the least understood “fifth” power, ire. “To Know, to Will, to Dare, to Keep Silence, and to Go.” In their perilous quest for lust, the secret sacrifices, and forgotten rites are kept from those who shun destinies. The grace of destiny is of the elect, for many are called but few chosen.

The illuminated minds of the Mysteries viewed the reformation of the world’s religions, and the procession of the stars across and beyond time, between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Illuminati conceal the secrets of G.O.D., the secrets of death and arts of Lust. Initiated Seers and oracles were the pillars of the ancient secret societies. A brutal ordeal of initiation into the Invisible College is for the eh Neophyte to be denied the divine Light, thereafter experiencing a common crisis of destiny the Magi of the Cross refer to as the “Dark Night of the Soul,” or as the Templars called it, the Chapel Perilous. In this psychological terror, the Rose disintegrates in an alchemical crisis of the spirit. If the ordeal is overcome, the Neophyte awakens from the sleep of history and enters into eternity. Barriers of magical heritage and genealogies are penetrated with the secret of secrets.

To this “Invisible College,” every wise man and woman has an indefeasible right to belong by the constitutions of his or her dignity and virtue, as each, if even unbeknownst to the other, are divided for love’s sake, to unite in fraternity and sorority under the One Light of Truth, the Truth of Darkness, that is the Kindred Arts, the Science of the Stars, the Keys of Religion, the Veil of the Antediluvian Mysteries. To those having challenged the burning grounds, the desert sands, and the black earth, it is known silently that innumerable orders, congregations, temples, societies, etc., have been inaugurated during the last one hundred years all following lineages of Occult Art and Science. From the ashrams of India and monasteries of Tibet to the basilicas and Lodges of the Illuminated Seers, the Adepts of these sacred institutions consecrated rites and sacrifices where the living and dead prevailed over the destroyers of form, extinguishers of breath, seizers of karmic memory, and eclipsers of æthereal Light. Naïve is the lost soul whom denies the Legacy of the Gift {the Illuminati inheritance} was not birthed in Love, beings copulating as Man lay in lust with Angels..one heritage..one blood.

This ancient wisdom included the carnal knowledge of trance-states, physiology, and time-induced hallucinogens {used by the ancient Order of Assassins, the Isma’ili Hashashiyya}, and introduced the Ægyptian doctrine of spiritual transmigration. The Adepts learned to transmigrate into the æthers, enter shamanic states of awareness and penetrate infinite diversities of space-time. Ancient Magi knew these secret rituals not only as gateways into spiritual paths the orthodox priesthoods considered unnatural, but also for their aesthetic beauty – as revelations of Art. “The Anaesthetic Revelation is the Initiation of Man into the Immemorial Mystery of the Open Secret of Being, revealed as the Inevitable Vortex of Continuity.” What the Sufi Adepti called Qīyâmat {judgment} and Qadar {fate} were divine states of consciousness that only Neophytes who had attained nine degrees of initiation could enter, a garden without walls, a sect without a church, a lost moment of history that refuses to be forgotten, standing outside time, a reproach or challenge to all religious doctrine, to all the cruelty of the exoteric. An invitation to paradise..a nightside of Eden where the well of Man’s midnight revealed unspeakable terror and ecstasy to those who dared deny death. Bloodline after bloodline, centuries of secret histories have preserved the antiquities of the Illuminati and their secret rituals.

A progression of ordained knowledge from ancient Ægyptian mortuary rites to secret saturnalia of Mithraic temples and ceremonies of the Scottish and York Rites has become the axis of the one true Invisible College. Myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical theologies give way to the beginnings of a ‘Science of Religions.’ This enlightened propensity seems to make room for a sort of ‘theistic science’ that segregates Occult arts and sciences from philosophic schizophrenia, i.e., the ongoing polemic between “magic,” and mysticism. On the uniformity of the secret doctrines, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky writes: "The best proof you can have of the fact is that every ancient religious, or rather philosophical, cult consisted of an esoteric or secret teaching, and an exoteric (outward public) worship. Furthermore, it is a well-known fact that the MYSTERIES of the ancients comprised with every nation the "greater" (secret) and "Lesser" (public) MYSTERIES -- e.g. in the celebrated solemnities called the Eleusinia, in Greece. From the Hierophants of Samothrace, Egypt, and the initiated Brahmins of the India of old, down to the later Hebrew Rabbis, all preserved, for fear of profanation, their real bona fide beliefs secret. The Jewish Rabbis called their secular religious series the Mercavah (the exterior body), "the vehicle," or, the covering which contains the hidden soul. -- i.e., their highest secret knowledge. Not one of the ancient nations ever imparted through its priests its real philosophical secrets to the masses, but allotted to the latter only the husks. Northern Buddhism has its "greater" and it’s "lesser" vehicle, known as the Mahayana, the esoteric, and the Hinayana, the exoteric, Schools. Nor can you blame them for such secrecy; for surely you would not think of feeding your flock of sheep on learned dissertations on botany instead of on grass? Pythagoras called his Gnosis 'the knowledge of things that are,' or e gnosis ton onton, and preserved that knowledge for his pledged disciples only: for those who could digest such mental food and feel satisfied; and he pledged them to silence and secrecy. Occult alphabets and secret ciphers are the development of the old Egyptian hieratic writings, the secret of which were, in the days of old, in the possession only of the Hierogrammatists, or initiated Egyptian priests. Ammonius Saccas, as his biographers tell us, bound his pupils by oath not to divulge his higher doctrines except to those who had already been instructed in preliminary knowledge, and who were bound by a pledge. Finally, do we not find the same even in early Christianity, among the Gnostics, and even in the teachings of Christ? Did he not speak to the multitudes in parables which had a two-fold meaning, and explain his reasons only to his disciples? 'To you," he says, 'it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven; but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables' (Mark iv. 11). 'The Essenes of Judea and Carmel made similar distinctions, dividing their adherents into neophytes, brethren, and the perfect, or those initiated' (Eclec. Phil.). Examples might be brought from every country to this effect."
The Arcanum so well articulated by Madame Blavatsky speaks of spiritual keys {“occult alphabets and secret ciphers”} used by the ancient Illuminati to yield up oracles of spirit and bestow direct language betwixt the wayfaring Hermits and the Elder Gods of space and time. Every footstep into the unknown, like the mystic path of the Fool in the Tarot Arcana, yielded the fullness of wise-blooded wisdom of the Ages. Such perilous steps into the Temples at Ephesus, Delphi, Alexandria, Alamut and many other sacred sanctuaries induced a denial of the finite self, a sort of ascetic deprivation found in religious experiences to be doorways to a greater life. This final mystery intertwines all Gnostic, Hermetic, and Ægyptian mysteries in all mystical writings past and future.

It is impossible to understand the history of secret societies without the profoundest knowledge of their scripting the past. Without a comprehension of the laws of nature and development of mythologies, and of ancient theurgy, we can have no reputable of how occult knowledge birthed in ancient Ægypt threaded together the Gnostic, Neo-Platonism, and Hermetic mystery traditions with Isma’ili and archaic Persian ordained truth. There is a secret history whispering of secret sacrifices and ancient magic veiled from the profane behind the walls of synagogues, mosques, temples, churches, and lodges of the Illuminati Inheritance. Yet within the volumes of one book it would be constraining to recklessly delve into every mystic tradition such as Rosicrucianism, Sufism, Freemasonry, Qabalah, Yoga, Tarot and the like that has produced recorded and viable traces of ritual initiation and occult knowledge. This book serves the reader as hieroglyph of some of the most impassioned and exotic rituals used by the traditions represented in this treatise.

A genealogy of theurgic initiations can be recounted by tracing magical heredity from generation to generation, maiden to mistress, Magister to Neophyte, brother to brother. You will find in this book unnatural pathways where the living meet the dead, where oral traditions marry forgotten alphabets reaching beyond mortal memory where secret societies direct the marriage of history with mythic time. The Epopts of the Arte drew these rituals from archaic languages of high witchery and cryptograms during unknown hours, where the well of prophecy deepens outside the bounds of sanity. This mystic point the Arab Adepts termed qutub. Wandering wayfarers that dared enter the path of Not crossed liminal breaches of Tomorrow and Yesterday, indwelling a fate of souls.

There is no beginning with the magical in the past before Man masters the mythical; this only leads to a labyrinthe, or to being lost in a mist of mystification, as soon as we are out of the bog of perverted superstitions. There were Illuminati in the mysteries of old, but they raised their ordained intelligence to coalesce with the sacred sciences, which took them seven or ten years to acquire. They were not degenerates, or meek scholar-practitioners, nor mere self-illuminati! The ancients knew that intuition and excessive superstitions could not take the place of research, and were careful to communicate all the occult sciences they inherited to those whom they deemed worthy of limitless truth. “Add to your faith knowledge” was the counsel of Saint Paul.

Bloodlines of the Invisible College have already initiated a new order centuries ago, kept in succession by the Lodges of Freemasonry and the Rose Cross in the Occident. One retains their magical hereditary has drank from the Holy Grail, the matrilineal depository of occult sciences. The All-Seeing Eye symbolizes the Arcana of the Illuminati heritage, posted for all the populace to behold on the obverse side of the American one-dollar note. The All-Seeing Eye is a hieroglyph of occult knowledge embedded in radio programs, schools, universities, entertainment media, in literature children read, the music teenagers undulate to, television programs, and the World Wide Web. The web of occult sciences has submerged an entire society in the illusions cast upon them by Adept magicians whom design and employ technology. The slave of illusion calls himself a master of magic, failing to understand the sacred sciences and natural laws of primacy.

The Magi are solitary figures, the pillars of secret societies once flourishing in Alexandria, Memphis, Ephesus, Rome, Carthage, Alamut, within the walls of Tibetan monasteries, in the gardens of Isma’ili alchemists, in the libraries of Vatican Basilicas, in Coptic abbeys, Masonic lodges, depositing their secret rituals in these sacred places and in the shadows of the Great Pyramids. In the search for the divine, to reclaim the sparks of light deep within the Dark Night of the Soul, and the Templars mystic Chapel Perilous, one is always alone. The Magi point the way, ever illuminating the nightside valleys of the shadows of death that await each seeker. The sigil of this Tarot Trump represents not only sexual innocence and inner-wisdom but also the virginal Light. The Hermit-Magi is the custodian of the Illuminati inheritance, preserving the secret sciences by concealing Light from mankind in his cloak. The Light withdrawn by the Magi Hermits reminds Mankind of his wayfaring into spiritual darkness and seeking the Light of the Gods reflected in the stars, and by the fallen human soul.