The Order of the Red Glyph
Some Thoughts on a Rare Counter-Traditional and Counter-Initiatic Order…
There are very few genuine, bona fide Counter-Traditional and Counter-Initiatic orders and secret societies in the modern world.
At least, that’s where my own research has led; perhaps, after all, that’s no great cause for surprise, given the extraordinary lengths these organizations have gone to in order to conceal themselves and the role they play in the disorders of the Kali-Yuga, the Dark Age or “Iron Age” wherein we find ourselves.
But in the case of the Order of the Red Glyph, we have a clear instance of one of the few open agents of Subversion in our world—a “Satanic Order” in the etymological sense of the word.
It is, without question, one of the most active and prolific Counter-Initiatic organizations operative in modern times, and its inverted hierarchy of “archimages” and “mystagogues” undoubtedly makes up much of the Counter-Traditional “cryptocracy” that exerts such influence in world councils. Still, I’m not aware that any members of the Order of the Red Glyph are associated or affiliated in any way with other, smaller Counter-Initiatic organizations, such as the Paladins of the Left-Hand Path, the Ordo Dei Nefandi, the Confraternity of Samaël, or even the Ἑταιρεία τῆς Ἑκάτης (The Brotherhood of Hecate).
So just what is the Order of the Red Glyph? Variously known as the Ordo Signi Sanguinei, or the Ἑταιρεία τοῦ Χαρακτῆρος τοῦ Φοίνιου,1 the Order of the Red Glyph claims for itself an ancient pedigree (as is common in these cases), which extends at least back to the Classical world. Frankly, it is said to stretch back even further than that; if rumors are to be believed, the Counter-Initiatic order boasts roots that can be traced into the anterior cycles of the world—that is to say, to the Manvantara or even Manvantaras that preceded our own.
In other words, we are compelled to reckon with the Order of the Red Glyph as a manifestation of the regnant forces obtaining in the terminal ages, the Kali-Yugas if one may be so bold, of antecedent cycles of incognizable antiquity; these relict forces have survived and perhaps lain dormant or latent within subsequent cycles, including our own, before gaining strength and influence in the terminal age of our own Manvantara—in other words, the modern world.
It’s a bold claim, to say the least, but there may be some substantiation of it from a most unexpected quarter. The Order of the Red Glyph derives its name from a peculiar crimson character—the aforesaid “Glyph”—which is supposed to be the only remaining written evidence of the so-called Aius Infandus, the “ur-language” of our planet which is ancient beyond human understanding, and which is mentioned occasionally and with a sort of reverential awe in certain occult tomes, most notably the De Rebus Occultis of Apuleius.
What the Red Glyph represents is lost to a history that must be reckoned in millions of years; not even the members of the Order itself understand its meaning anymore, though presumably there were some who did at some point in its lengthy history. Nevertheless, the Order—along with the Glyph it has adopted as a kind of motto—claims descent from the civilization of what it pleases some occultists to call “Lemuria.” This is not quite the civilization of the traditional “Third Root Race” or “Sweat-Born” of the Theosophists, though the conception of the latter is derived from a memory of what the College of Seth, and apparently the Order of the Red Glyph as well, calls the “true” Lemurian civilization:
“The so-called ‘Third Root Race,’ hereafter ‘Lemurians’ for the sake of convenience and concision, was not, as the Theosophists foolishly supposed, the direct ancestor of present-day humankind, nor was it descended from the First and Second Root Races (the Martians). We believe that the Lemurians were not even an outgrowth of native terrestrial evolution—the most widespread and valid hypothesis is that they were teased forth from a curious Venusian organism, neither vegetable nor animal nor anything even classifiable by earthly standards, that was apparently the only form of life produced by that planet. These organisms were likely transplanted to the terrestrial oceans almost one billion years ago by the Martians (for unknown reasons), shortly before the complete collapse of the Venusian biosphere and that planet’s utter and catastrophic desiccation eight hundred million years ago. The weird creatures were remarkable only for being entirely plastic, without any settled form at all; they were malleable and genetically protean to an incredible degree, and what answered in them for a genome could be easily manipulated and induced to produce new shapes and forms. Recognizing this, the Serpent Men produced a strange race of humanoids from these creatures, to act the part of a slave-caste; at first they created merely grotesque abortions, vaguely manlike shapes of horror that flopped and floundered, their bones too pliant and plastic to provide them any sort of support or erect bearing, and without even the rudiments of understanding.
“But the Serpent Men gradually perfected their slaves, furnishing them with a supple, cartilaginous skeleton, a serviceable if elemental intelligence, and a crude sensory equipment. Later models, or ‘races,’ of these Lemurians were perfected by the constant tinkering of their masters. The original Lemurian was a monstrous giant, eighteen feet (nine meters) tall, with a repulsively soft and pliable body, without hair or other mammalian signatures, a ring of rudimentary eyes about the strange, conical head, and a mere puckered orifice in the ‘face’ for the assimilation of nutritive fluids; their reproduction was accomplished asexually—they were hermaphroditic, self-fertilizing and produced a small, soft-shelled egg after the manner of monotremes. But the ‘classic’ Lemurian of later epochs was somewhat smaller—twelve to fifteen feet (four to five meters) tall, with yellow-brown skin; a long, undershot jaw with unformed teeth; two small, fishlike eyes on either side of its bulbous, ovoid head; a giant, human-like third eye in the back of its skull; and immensely long arms and legs and gigantic hands and feet. The Lemurian’s heels, moreover, were long enough that they were almost a mirror image of the proper foot, and were furnished with vestigial toe-like appendages; this organ, combined with the arms and legs that could be flexed either forward or backward, and the backwards-facing third eye, enabled the Lemurian to move equally as well forward as backward—it possessed no real ‘front’ or ‘back,’ a deeply disconcerting thing to human beings. It was also asexual.
“The Lemurians were the slaves or ‘living machines’ of the Serpent Men, and served them in this capacity for almost one hundred million years, building their cities and temples and spaceships, and never evolving or acquiring a more advanced ‘inwardness’ during much of this protracted racial nightmare. However, toward the twilight of the Serpent Men’s empire, their control over their slaves was relaxed in direct proportion to their own fast diminishing self-control; the Lemurians began to evolve, and with this liberty came the first stirrings of an inchoate self-consciousness. They were never so powerful nor so organized as to challenge their masters outright; but when, in their arrogance, the Serpent Men tampered with powers outside of their understanding, and precipitated their downfall, the Lemurian slaves completed the dissolution of their empire by revolting and overthrowing the last vestiges of their domination. It was the Lemurians who drove the Serpent Men from their natal continent, and into those last, secret hypogean redoubts that would receive them until the period of their future reemergence.
“After the fall of the Serpent Men, the Lemurians were the sole heritors of the Lemurian continent; in the wake of the end-Cretaceous global cataclysm, the Lemurians sank into a protracted racial torpor, along with much else of life on the planet. But having been released from the onerous yoke of Serpent Men domination, the Lemurians were now free to pursue their own untrammeled biological and intellectual evolution. By the late Oligocene, the fifth Lemurian sub-race had evolved—the ‘classic’ Lemurians described above—and had created for themselves a remarkably brilliant civilization within the central lake provinces of Lemuria. Lemurian culture, during this brief noontide, was chiefly notable for its good, ‘moral’ qualities, in contradistinction to the evils of the Serpent Men, which had remained with them as a sort of racial memory and didactic corrective. The first semi-sapient anthropoid apes—the antecessors of mankind—arose in Lemuria at this time; they were the result of scientific breeding programs cultivated by the Lemurians for the purpose of understanding genetics, medicine, and the underpinnings of intelligence. Many of the fossils of early human ancestors, recently discovered by palaeoanthropologists such as the Leakeys in South Africa, were populations of these creatures transplanted from Lemuria.
“Eventually, however, the Lemurians recapitulated the mistakes of the Serpent Men. They discovered the ancient manuscripts and temple edifices, and acquired a taste for the bloodthirsty cult of the Black Sun. Gradually, their civilization destroyed itself through internecine attrition and that special form of madness which the unhealthy adoration of the Black Sun so universally induces. Finally, a period of geological spasms rived the continent of Lemuria apart; the Lemurians sank into savagery and racial slumber, eventually forgot all that they had been, or had striven to be, and once again experienced the nasty vicissitudes of evolution—for the last Lemurian sub-races had finally achieved a means of true sexual reproduction. They devolved by degrees into a number of different races; out of this welter emerged, upon the last fragments of Lemuria, the grotesque, prehuman Rmoahals. Elsewhere in the world, they became those numerous species of hirsute wildmen we call ‘Hairy Bipeds’ (HBs)—the North American ‘Bigfoot’ (Sasquatch), the ‘Abominable Snowman’ (Mi-Go) or Yeti of the Himalayas, the Alma of the Caucasus, the Roman pilosi and Gallic dusii, the Indonesian Orang-Pendek, the Australian Yowie, the Floridian ‘Skunk Ape,’ together with certain extinct Antarctic and Arctic races…”2
It is the sort of evolutionistic mélange of oddities that one would expect from the cosmological musings of the College of Seth; however, it is to this purported civilization, and these beings, that the Order of the Red Glyph traces its origins. Whatever the veracity of the claims of the College of Seth—and I have expressed my reservations about them often enough—there can be little doubt that the Order of the Red Glyph is real, and that it operates detrimentally in our world.
The activities of the Order of the Red Glyph are twofold, and they are wholly subversive. Firstly, since the period of about the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries—commonly considered to be the end date of the mediaeval European Traditional civilization—the Order has been deeply involved in the accumulation and amassing of wealth, and its history is inextricably linked with the rise of the early European banking guilds and systems.
This has continued to the present day, and the Order is heavily implicated in the over-financialization of the world system, and the spread of the mechanisms for the concentration of wealth, to say nothing of the profusion and institutionalization of usury and usurious systems, which have contributed so much to the erosion of Tradition and the manifestation of degeneracy and disorder in the world.
Secondly, and much more recently, the Order of the Red Glyph has been a primary moving force behind that bland, sterile sort of “Posthistoric futurism” that has attained such popularity of late; that obnoxious species of popular scientism that mixes a monomaniacal obsession with technology with the worst platitudes of leftist progressivism, environmentalism, and social justice drivel. In short, the dystopian technocratic nonsense that oozes like a kind of putrescent puss from the Davoisie, the WEF types that gather in Switzerland to draw up their mean and meager plans for the future.
You know the sort of thing I’m talking about—the obsession with artificial intelligence, central bank digital currencies, genomic technologies of every kind, genetic engineering, mind-machine interfaces, distributed decision-making (whatever that means), “reimagined” living spaces, inedible foodstuffs milked or otherwise ground out of or coaxed from insects or synthetic precursors, and much talk of “stakeholders,” democracy, equity, “rule of law,” and the like.
It is, in other words, the transhumanist or “post-human” blather that has grown so tiresome of late, and it does indeed bear an eerie similarity to the attitudes and activities attributed to the doomed “Serpent Men” in the above quote, whom the historians of the College of Seth place in the terminal age of a very ancient Manvantara or anterior cycle.
Is it then any wonder that the Order of the Red Glyph, among the world’s foremost Counter-Traditional and Counter-Initiatic organizations, traces its origins to the long-dead Lemurians of ancient lore, who are supposed to have fallen victim to their own version of the Counter-Tradition? These fools would bring the same fate upon us, unaware that they are recapitulating once again a story that has been replayed many times—or are they unaware? Perhaps they are indeed sensible of this fact; maybe they are locked in a role they are doomed to play, repeated cycle after cycle, as are we all.
But there is a fatalism in that outlook that I have no wish to subscribe to. Anyhow, my thoughts wander. The Order of the Red Glyph is said to be unaffiliated with other Counter-Traditional orders, as I mentioned earlier…but I’m not so sure. I have discovered, in my own research, vague linkages between its members and the Confraternity of Samaël (or Nebro), as well as the Ἑταιρεία τῆς Ἑκάτης.
That would associate them with the even more unsettling “cryptocracy” that has such great power in the modern world—one might even say rules over it—and which orchestrates the various plague pandemics, mass shootings, epidemics of murder and social chaos and upheaval, as well as the unceasing wars, as propitiatory hecatombs meant to invoke and call forth darker powers, those “subtle inferior forces” and Pestilences That Walketh in Darkness, which batten so evilly on the human world and drag us ever further into the nefandous abysms of the Counter-Initiation.
But I will discuss more of this in a future post…
In his monumental Secret and Magickal Societies (1759), Sir John Haversleigh translates this as “the Brotherhood of the Blood-Red Charact,” and it is by this name that the Order of the Red Glyph is often known in earlier accounts.
Diomedes Palaeologus, The Slaves of the Black Sun: A Secret History of the World (London: Sethian Publishing House, 1989), pp. 13-16.