Last week, I talked a little about the Counter-Tradition and the Counter-Initiation, the latter of course being the ultimate goal or endpoint of the former—in a final inversion that René Guénon calls the “Great Parody.”
Of course, it’s understandable that the bewildered reader might wonder about the origins of this “Counter-Tradition”—where does it come from, who or what is behind it, and how long has it been a part of human history? Now, I’m not alone in finding that a difficult question to answer. Ask a dozen different occultists, esotericists, theosophers, theurges, and Traditionalists, and you’ll get a dozen different answers. Most likely these answers will comport with the idiosyncratic cosmologies and eschatologies that these individuals personally subscribe to; sometimes, if you’re clever enough and astute enough, you’ll be able to suss out the occult Truth that lies back of all these genealogies of the Counter-Tradition.
Take, for instance, one of the more popular “conspiracy theories” these days—that of David Icke’s so-called “Reptilians,” a race of evil and Archontic beings with shapeshifting and unspeakably evil proclivities that he arraigns as the true culprits behind the enslavement of mankind, and the ultimate authors of what the Traditionalists would call the Counter-Tradition. It’s an elaborate theory, complete with fantastical genealogies documenting with meticulous care the bloodlines of these malevolent entities—which he claims are alluded to in many ancient religious and Gnostic texts—and tracing their descent through to the most powerful families of today’s so-called élite.
And despite the seemingly well-deserved ridicule and scorn that is liberally heaped upon such an outlandish conspiracy theory, I have my own reasons for suspecting that it might not be utter hogwash—at least up to a point. The reason for this suspicion was my discovery of an at least partial “confirmation” of the theory in the occult histories of the College of Seth, which I have quoted before in this Substack, and which present a great deal of occult data that frequently countervail the prehistoric reconstructions of modern science. In this respect, the Collegians even go much further than the Theosophists, whose detailed prehistories are notorious in occult circles.
In any case, the Collegians speak of the “Serpent Men” as one of the many “antediluvian” races in their catalogue of the earth’s prehistoric “noëtic” or “minded” species, and they also indict them as being among the most evil, as well as one of the chief authors of the Counter-Tradition:
“The Serpent Men were the first truly indigenous intelligent race to evolve upon the prehistoric earth; they first appeared, in a very primitive incarnation, during the late Triassic, but their evolutionary and cultural pinnacle was not achieved until the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous, nearly one hundred million years later. They are known by many names, not a few of which antedate the human species itself, but I include only some of the most commonly encountered—Reptoids, Reptilians, Ophidiani, Nagas, Lamiae, and Nebroelohim.
“Despite their name, the Serpent Men are neither serpents nor are they even reptilian—the identification, however, is understandable, considering their rather startling native appearance. The Serpent Men evolved during the Triassic, not from the archosaurian reptiles of the period, but rather from that peculiar class of creatures whence the mammalian stock itself stemmed: the therapsid mammal-like reptiles. These animals were not fully reptilian, nor had they become fully mammalian; they were particularly common during the Permian, when a profusion of strange not-quite-reptiles inhabited the Pangaean supercontinent. Such creatures were also present on the newly-formed continent of Lemuria, and it was here that a group of them—related to the terrifying, almost wolf-like gorgonopsid predators (familiar from the South African Karoo strata) such as Lycaenops—began to slowly evolve into a compact, dextrous arboreal omnivore that anticipated in many ways the much later evolution of the mammalian primates…Eventually these furtive, frugivorous precursors of the Serpent Men developed larger and more varied forms; soon, they came to be characterized by a startling increase in skull capacity and brain size, fed by the need to process complex sensory information and survive in an unforgiving environment.
“By the late Jurassic, a number of humanoid mammal-like reptiles had appeared upon the Lemurian savannas…Within several million years of this, only one species of Serpent Men remained; they went on to develop the earth’s first native civilization. By the early Cretaceous, Lemuria was dotted with the mysterious cities of the Serpent People; these curious edifices were conceived and executed in a gigantic, megalithic style, employing Cyclopean stones for building-blocks, and conforming to an artistic and architectural aesthetic utterly remote and alien to anything even approximately human. At the height of their empire, around ninety million years ago, the cities of the Serpent Men could be discovered upon every continent on earth—from Hyperborea to Australo-Antarctica, and everywhere in between. The remnants of many of these cities have been found throughout the world, though they are almost uniformly dismissed as the products of natural geological processes, rather than artifacts of prehuman intelligence; some of these ruins the reader would recognize as famous natural monuments. Near the end of their heyday, the Serpent Men developed a means of spaceflight; the exact mechanics of their method, however, is not fully known. It is believed that their technology in this direction enabled them to colonize the planetary systems of some nearby stars (nearby at that time); but despite erroneous and foolish counter-claims, they never developed anything like a faster-than-light propulsion, and were probably reliant upon immense generation-ships for interstellar spaceflight. The so-called ‘flying saucers,’ observed in historic times, are undoubtedly a product of Serpent Men technology…
“The Serpent Men are not extinct, though their numbers are believed to be vastly reduced from their whilom height; they have evolved to such a point that they are capable of disguising themselves as human beings, freely intermingling with the general population, and the imposture is virtually undetectable. It is not known whether this is achieved through genetic engineering, some kind of sophisticated plastic surgery or prosthesis, or through an inconceivably advanced form of mesmerism. But the recession of the Serpent Men from their glorious noontide was almost as catastrophic and nearly as final as that of the Martians; and the period of the Serpent Men’s degeneracy may be traced to their cultivation—the first in the world—of that sinister religion we will have occasion to speak often of in this book. They were the first to raise altars to that dark god commonly called—in the debased symbology of these latter-days—the ‘Black Sun,’ but which those in this College are accustomed to call, in hushed tones, the Eldritch Entity. It is even quite likely that, in those early days, the Serpent Men communicated directly with that abominable Thing, and held daily mental intercourse with what deep of evil we can scarcely surmise. In that remote, Cretaceous world of contending monsters, the immense dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures so beloved in our childhood, the Serpent Folk made sacrifice and obeisance to the Eldritch Entity, offering to It the blood of their slaves, the primitive forerunners of the ‘Third Root Race,’ or Lemurians, and calling upon It for succor and surcease of care. It is almost needless to observe that no mention is made of the Serpent Men in palaeontological textbooks and children’s reading material.
“The religious folly of the Serpent Men was also their downfall. In their dissolute state, they apparently sought to hasten the ‘parousia’ of their god, to summon it from the hell that confined it; but this it was not appointed them to do. But for some tens of millions of years before this point, the Serpent Men—who had reached a dizzying evolutionary summit we can but dimly descry and imperfectly comprehend—had ceased to advance any further, and had stagnated and become ever more decadent; they had given themselves unreservedly to the vices of license and sensuality, of softness and self-indulgence, and they paid for it dearly with racial decline. The Serpent Men were weighed, and found wanting; the consequence of their unwise tampering with forces outside of even their tremendous wisdom broke their civilization apart, and ended their nearly hundred-million-year world empery. Lemuria was convulsed by colossal earthquakes and rent by catastrophic volcanism; the continent survived, but its geography was almost completely rewritten by the temblors and repaved by the gouts of magma that erupted from the earth’s unsettled interior. This disaster corresponds to the so-called ‘K-T Extinction Event’ sixty-five million years ago that swept the dinosaurs and pterosaurs and ammonites and many other creatures from the surface of the earth, and so befuddles the lay scientists.
“But the Serpent Men survived; they escaped total extinction to lick their wounds in their subterraneous redoubts—which remain even today beneath such places as Mt. Shasta, the Olympic Mountains in Washington, north Florida in limestone caverns, and virtually the entirety of Europe—and contemplate their manifold errors. In the sixty million years since their fall, the Serpent Men have achieved some very curious novelties in their long racial evolution, and at about the time of the emergence of our own species, they reemerged from their long racial slumber, appearing as the pale snakemen of remotest myth and dim legendry. They are, as we shall see, one of the two principal actors in the Great Conspiracy that is back of all human history. They are unspeakably ancient and unspeakably evil, and they are one of the greatest threats to the existence of our College—as, indeed, to all of humankind.”1
So there you have it. I think there’s good reason to suspect that David Icke’s “conspiracy theory” is drawn, wittingly or otherwise, from sources in the College of Seth, or else it represents a kind of garbled form of that more ancient tradition whence the College draws its own occult data.
Now, as I’ve said often enough before, I tend to place little stock in the College’s occult history of the world; despite my high esteem for certain of its members, its outlook and philosophy is staunchly evolutionistic, as the above passage makes perfectly clear, and this leads it inadvertently into activities that are at least anti-traditional, and occasionally flirt with the Counter-Tradition—although this is strictly due to ignorance, and not active and witting participation.
Still, the Collegians have some interesting beliefs about the origin of the Counter-Tradition. In the quoted passage, we can see that the so-called “Serpent Men” are implicated in it, but they are not alone, for they are but “one of the two principal actors in the Great Conspiracy that is back of all human history.”
The other is darkly alluded to only as “the Elder Race:”
“The Elder Race—which is sometimes known by the names of Saddukoi, Phae-Dien or Phae-Dyen, Nahaucal, or the ‘False-Faced Ones’—constitutes one of the great lingering relict races of the ‘prehistoric’ world. It is in a sense a ‘lost race’—but it is lost in plain sight, a mysterious, fugitive civilization of ancient beings utterly at home and unsuspected amidst the great press of humanity. The Elder Race is the rival faction to the Serpent Men in the ‘Great Conspiracy,’ which is little more than an immense, history-spanning cold war waged by the hereditary enemies through their unwitting proxies—mankind.
“The Elder Race arose some 230,000 years ago, evolving upon the continent of Atlantis from the tag-ends of the Rmoahals that fled before the human hordes into the Daityan Mountains of the southern provinces. Perhaps as a result of interbreeding with certain of the more robust breeds of Tlavatli humanity, the Elder Race always represented a higher type than the Rmoahals; certain of their fossils, discovered earlier in the century in South Africa, and surnamed ‘Boskopoid,’ generated a sensation and were initially believed—on account of their capacious braincases—to belong to a more intelligent race of humankind, whence these fossils derived the specific name of H. capensis. The Elder Race was always more humanlike than the Rmoahals, and aside from certain racial peculiarities and subtle markers of ‘otherness,’ were passably human enough to walk unmolested among H. sapiens. In a way, the Elder Race may be compared to the ‘Roma,’ though it is a separate species, not merely a race, and it is far subtler than the gypsies ever were—it preserved, all unbeknownst to those among whom it lived, not only a distinct culture and folklore, but an entirely secret and unknown civilization, that was always of a higher order than anything mankind produced.
“And that was the secret to the success and longevity of the Elder Race, who never had anything like the numbers possessed by mankind. It was content to exist parasitically upon the cultural apparatus and economic superficies erected by human beings; the Elder Race infiltrated and often achieved supreme power in all the highest levels of human government. Religions, political organizations, revolutions, empires—all these were often the product of the fugitive Elder Race, who have constituted the monied and propertied elite, and the intellectual and religious clerisy, since the earliest Neolithic societies. They were present at Çatalhöyük and Jericho, at Ur and Carchemish, at Mohenjo-Daro and Harappan; they have been Pharaohs and Rajahs, Venetian doges and European princes, Mayan lords and Babylonish kings; they have been present in the Carthaginian gerousia, the Roman senatus, the Spanish el Escorial, and the Congress of the United States of America.
“The Elder Race often infiltrates human organizations wherein three essential conditions obtain—money, power, and sufficient ‘strangeness’ in the behavior and appearance of its members to ensure little threat of detection or exposure. All three prerequisites are easily observed today in the entertainment and power centers of the United States; for this reason, we may be reasonably certain that the Elder Race is principally concentrated in Hollywood, California and Washington, D.C. The current popularity in these areas of bizarre and disfiguring plastic and reconstructive surgeries among the elite is a certain clue to the presence of the Elder Race—bloated cheeks, expressionless faces, and stretched skins are some of their most distinctive racial hallmarks. The brilliance of the Elder Race is in how it has deluded its sycophantic satellites among our own species into undergoing elective surgeries so as to more nearly resemble itself. It has so contrived that its strange and repulsive features—which formerly its members were compelled to disguise in some way—are now considered marks of wealth and status. Some very well-known figures in popular culture and the American political class are known to be members of the Elder Race; the College of Seth contains extensive files on each of them in its Archives Department.”2
I think few will disagree that there is a great deal of food for thought in that interesting passage. It’s so often difficult to know just how to receive these occult data from the College of Seth; do they truly believe in the existence of the Serpent Men and the Elder Race, or is this exoteric symbology designed to conceal a more esoteric significance? The College is certainly a secret society, with at least superficial degrees of initiation, but given their unabashed materialism, I find this latter explanation hard to believe.
In any case, I know for a fact that the College does maintain files on this so-called “Elder Race” in their Archives, and they are incredibly detailed. For the time being, all that I can say is that, for David Icke as for the College of Seth, the origins of the Counter-Tradition are very clear…and they are not to be traced to human beings at all.
In the second part of this essay, we’ll take a look at what the Traditionalists have to say about the origins of the Counter-Tradition, as well as its more recent manifestations and the end for which they are preparing the world…
Diomedes Palaeologus, The Slaves of the Black Sun: A Secret History of the World (London: Sethian Publishing House, 1989), pp. 9-13.
Ibid., pp. 19-20.