Sometimes, it’s worthwhile to survey the general lay of the land, so to speak, and get one’s bearing.
This is especially true in these bewildering latter days of the Kali-Yuga, the foreboding and sinister Age of Iron, when there is so much happening, and so quickly, as the pace and flow of time itself accelerates precipitately in an almost rapturous anticipation of the Eschaton.
That’s why, now and then, I like to read the more recent works of certain authors, to gain some degree of insight into what contemporary thinkers are concluding about the situation in which we find ourselves. Wherefore, from time to time, I will include brief reviews of select contemporaneous books in this Substack. It’s not the sort of thing I had in mind when I created this newsletter, certainly, but I reckon there’s something of definite value to be gleaned from the occasional inclusion of some recent book or other that has, one might say, slipped through the cracks and thence fallen entirely out of sight and mind of the moderns—the “new barbarians,” as I call them, a race not known for breadth of perception and depth of penetration.
Now’s as good a time as any to begin this project, I suppose, and so I give you today’s review—The Occult and Subversive Movements, by Kerry Bolton.1 Now, Mr. Bolton appears to be a curious individual, with a rather substantial body of work and activities that seem to blend occultist, rightist, and even National Socialist interests. The man is either on more “blacklists” and “watchlists” of today’s increasingly senile and paranoiac subsidiary governments of the Liberal-Democratic Imperial Regime than you can shake a stick at, or he is pure and simply one of their agents, and thus a kind of amanuensis for their insufferable and stifling propaganda (which, however, I have no reason to believe that he is).
Be that as it may, I am no expert on the man, and so I leave his biography there; as an intriguing parenthesis, I will observe that he is apparently associated with and even the founder of certain occult organizations in New Zealand—including the whilom Black Order—which seem to have a connection with the Thelemic ideas of Aleister Crowley as well as various aspects of esoteric Hitlerism.
All of this, of course, is Counter-Traditional and Counter-Initiatic in the extreme, and therefore, inevitably, the man’s conclusions must be taken with a salutary grain of salt. Nevertheless, The Occult and Subversive Movements presents some interesting data for those who are interested in the role that certain secret societies and occult organizations have filled in the inception, evolution, and eventual domination of leftist and Counter-Traditional systems of government in the modern world. The book is, in many ways, little more than a detailed genealogy of Subversion in the late Kali-Yuga—that it is to say, the recent centuries of our own age. It is very similar, therefore, to other works by the same author, such as Revolution From Above,2 which it complements in its somewhat scatterbrained and wide-ranging historiography of the ongoing Counter-Traditional movements.
Now, it is not possible for me to agree fully with the thesis presented in this book. For one thing, there is far too much emphasis placed on the role of the Freemasons in the revolutions and subversive movements that have convulsed society since the period of the so-called Enlightenment. Too, the book invests a great deal of its reputational capital in the part that Illuminist conspiracies have had to play in these convulsions; that is to say, the Bavarian Illuminati are accorded a far too central place in the web of conspiracies that have been woven throughout recent human history, whereas I am inclined to shunt them to a less significant periphery.
Moreover, whether through ignorance or deliberate omission, Mr. Bolton presents no information in his book anent the Counter-Traditional, Counter-Initiatic, and subversive activities of such groups as the Order of the Red Glyph, the Paladins of the Left-Hand Path, Ordo Dei Nefandi, or even such a comparatively better-known organization as The Confraternity of Samaël (or Nebro, according to some authorities). I suppose there’s nothing particularly surprising in this omission; after all, these groups are hardly household names. Still, I confess that I was disappointed to find no mention of them at all in the book, for their role in history is not to be discounted.
Perhaps I shall write about them myself in future issues of this Substack.
In any case, despite those shortcomings, the book does present some very intriguing material. For instance, Mr. Bolton does a commendable job in demonstrating that the so-called “rationalistic” and “progressivist” ideas and aims of Enlightenment-era secret societies is often little more than a cover for decidedly more occult and Counter-Initiatic goals. For instance, in the book’s Preamble, we find this intriguing passage:
“Another seeming anomaly is that many of these occult societies were at the forefront of promoting rationalism and scientism using the language, rituals and symbols of the occult while proclaiming their opposition to all religions and superstitions. From a Traditionalist perspective, these ‘rationalists’ in mystical garb were the ‘Anti-Traditionalists’ performing the work of the ‘Counter-Tradition.’ This is a dialectic in which rationalism and materialism are used as a means of destroying all Faiths that pose a barrier to what some have called the ‘Black Adepts’ who aim to impose their own authority over the world and set up their own religion on the ruins of the old beliefs. Hence rationalistic, atheistic, materialistic, and communistic doctrines are a means to an end, and not the end.”3
This is an important point, and it cannot be overstated and must not be overlooked; indeed, it is the central and organizing theme of the book—the manifest occultism and inverted esotericism of the scientistic and rationalistic secret societies of the eighteenth century and beyond is no anomaly. Satanism, in the etymological sense of that term, is, so to speak, baked into the cake of these groups. As Mr. Bolton himself observes:
“The hatred of established religion often assumed the form of outright Satan and Lucifer adulation, especially during the 19th century, when these figures were given heroic proportions as the archetypes of rebellion against tyranny. Such Luciferic rebellion was established within certain occult degrees of initiation, and the ‘Light-Bringer’ also became a god of the ‘Enlightenment’ and of ‘Rationalism,’ supposedly against superstition. It is an example of what Traditionalists such as René Guénon recognised as the façade of Anti-Tradition working for the goals of Counter-Tradition in the name of ‘science’ but for the ultimate purpose of establishing something quite different. The aim, whether with the use of myth and superstition or with ‘reason’ and ‘science,’ is world power.”4
And what is the ultimate end of this “world power,” if it is not indeed merely power for its own sake? We read Mr. Bolton’s answer, and it has a powerful resonance:
“The aim of these ‘Black Adepts’ of what Crowley called the ‘Black School of Magick’ and what Guénon called the Counter-Tradition, is to enchain humanity to the dead weight of matter; hence the use of materialistic ideologies, epitomised by the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx. Such theories postulate that man is nothing other than ‘matter in motion’ and that history is nothing more than a struggle for material interests. Hence, the ‘Black School of Magick’ by such means seeks to detach humanity from its nexus with the Divine. Such a nexus is the foundation of all Traditional societies, where each individual ‘knows his place’ in the cosmic order. Marxism, with its doctrine of ‘class struggle’ where the cosmic hierarchy reflected on earth as ‘castes’ is turned upside down, is a method by which the ‘Black Adepts’ wreck the cosmically based foundations of a traditional culture, upon which can be erected their own edifice of material enslavement.
[…]
“This goal of bounding humanity to the tyranny of matter—and one does not have to be a Christian or Muslim to call it ‘satanic’—is the reason why ostensibly mystical and esoteric bodies have promoted rationalistic and materialistic doctrines.”5
This is, of course, what all Traditionalists recognize; Julius Evola explicates this aim of the Counter-Tradition or what he calls “Subversion” at great length in his theory of the “Regression of the Castes.”6 Mr. Bolton also correctly identifies the ultimate goal of the “Satanic” dialectics of Marxism, liberal-democracy, and other materialistic and scientistic doctrines—it is, in short, the idea of “perfectibilism,” and, as Mr. Bolton notes, the Bavarian Illuminati were originally known as “the Order of Perfectibilists.”
“According to this doctrine, humanity is infinitely malleable, putty in the hands of self-appointed improvers. This perfectibility of humanity is the stated aim of Masonry, symbolised by the rough hewn ‘ashlar’ or stone block, representing humanity, chiselled into smoothness by Masons. This doctrine found its most excessive expression first in the Reign of Terror inaugurated by the French Revolution, then under Communism. In its ‘softer’ version it is the same doctrine now considered normal and ‘democratic,’ based on the doctrine of environmentalism: change the environment and humanity is changed; perfect the environment and humanity is perfected…The problem is that when the block does not shape up to the desired result, the mason of ‘perfectibility,’ whether calling himself a Communist or a Liberal, keeps chiselling away until there is nothing left. That is the doctrine behind both Communism and Liberal-democracy, and it is fallacious.”7
Moreover, the evil of “perfectibility” lends itself to the fallacy of evolutionism, which was only ever secondarily meant to be an explanation of the origins of life and man; primarily, evolutionism is future oriented, and is intended to furnish the ultimate tool wherewith the “improvers” of mankind will, to continue Mr. Bolton’s analogy, sculpt the roughhewn block of humanity into something much more acceptable. When coupled with occultism—as in Theosophy and Spiritualism, for instance—or even with traditional religions—as in the “theistic evolutionism” of Teilhard de Chardin—perfectibilism yields the heretical abomination of the so-called “evolving God:”
“This evolving God, or what the Theosophists and New Agers call the ‘Christ within’ humanity that is the spark of evolution is ‘satanic’ because it ‘openly submits the Divinity to becoming.’ What Guénon identified as ‘spiritist evolutionism,’ and consequently an inversion of Tradition, is the same as the ‘Perfectibilist’ doctrines of Illuminism, Masonry, Theosophy and the ‘New Age,’ which preach the ‘perfectibility of man’ in common with the atheistic creeds of socialism. We have today accepted this perfectibilist doctrine under the term ‘progressive.’”8
Despite their now-fallen state, as Mr. Bolton indicates, the Freemasons did not begin as a Counter-Traditional institution; they were, over time, infiltrated, subverted, and inverted through a gradual process that likely escaped the notice of any but the highest and most initiated—“Anti-Traditionalists infiltrated, subverted, and usurped the institutions of Tradition: the venerable Medieval guilds that had been the foundation of the Traditional social order of Europe for centuries, became a subversive antithesis.”9
Nevertheless, subverted they were, and the result was revolutions that undermined and overthrew the—admittedly corrupt and tottering—Traditional relicts of the European kingdoms (especially France) and the Russian Empire, preparing the way for the modern world and its presently congealing World State. Preceding and presaging these revolutions, however, was the founding, in the late eighteenth century, of the first Masonic state—the United States of America, the reification of Bacon’s fictional New Atlantis in the New World, which now provides the military (and formerly the economic, though that has long since diminished) muscle of the Empire of the Counter-Tradition:
“…the dominant power around which the creation of the New World Order is centred is the USA. America fulfils its ‘mission’ of creating the Universal Republic with the same types of slogans that have been used to construct the tyrannies of [its] predecessors, Jacobin France and the USSR—‘human brotherhood’ and ‘human rights,’ while bombing any resistant state into submission. Just what this ‘goodwill’ means in erecting the Novus Ordo Seclorum is shown by the regard [Theosophist] Alice Bailey had for the USA which she said, ‘expresses the will-to-love…It is [here]…that people are most sensitive to the influence of the Hierarchy.’ Hence, it is through the power of the USA that the world state is to be achieved.”10
I have already discussed, to some extent at least, the eschatology and teleology of the Counter-Tradition. The world is now tending, inevitably I fear, toward its consummation in the celebrated Novus Ordo Mundi or “New Order of the World,” prophesied by the “conspiracy theorists,” that global Empire of the Antichrist whose advent St. John of Patmos warned us of nearly two thousand years ago.11
All in all, The Occult and Subversive Movements is, if not exactly a page-turner, certainly an important book for those who are interested in the genealogies and interrelationships of those seemingly innocuous secret societies of Enlightenment vintage that have been so very busy in recent human history. The book has its flaws; the aforesaid dearth of material on some of the more important Counter-Traditional orders and societies, for instance, and it could benefit from the services of a more attentive editor, since it abounds in certain errors of grammar and spelling that are easily corrected. Moreover, some of the supposedly sinister activities of Masons and Theosophists, for example, are better explained by over-earnestness and sincere belief on their part, rather than the existence of a malevolent conspiratorial agenda.
Still, for those who are interested in this sort of thing—and who isn’t?—the book is a serviceable introduction to the complex occult and Counter-Traditional underpinnings of those secret societies and little-known organizations that have had an outsize role in the shaping of human history in recent centuries.
By all means, give it a perusal. At the very least, you’ll learn a little of the history behind history…
The Occult and Subversive Movements: Tradition and Counter-Tradition in the Struggle for World Power (London: Black House Publishing, Ltd., 2017).
Revolution From Above: Manufacturing ‘Dissent’ in the New World Order, Kerry Bolton (London: Arktos Media, Ltd., 2011).
The Occult and Subversive Movements, pg. 4.
Ibid., pg. 7.
Ibid., pp. 19-20.
Cf., for instance, Part II: Chp. 35 in Revolt Against the Modern World.
The Occult and Subversive Movements, pp. 95-6.
Ibid., pg. 122.
Ibid., pg. 87.
Ibid., pg. 258.
“And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8). Cf., also, Rev. 18:1-11.