Co-Operative Publishing Co.
1873
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NOTE |
Fringe historians are fond of conspiracy theories that link the Knights Templar back to secret Egyptian wisdom and to the Freemasons. The following conspiracy theory, published as a prefatory note to an address by the anarchist labor movement known as the Working-People’s International Association, later involved in the Haymarket bombing and riot of 1886, is notable for presaging almost completely the Templar conspiracy favored by conspiracy theorist Scott Wolter, from Egyptian origins of Templar wisdom, to the Templar-Freemason machinations, to the goddess connection to France.
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Publisher’s Note
The Working-People’s International Association has from the beginning of its existence, naturally shrouded itself in mystery. Whenever there has been anything to be said, or shown, in the way, of self-glorification, the Society has openly appeared to be weak in influence; but whenever there has been anything to be done, in the way of upheaving the nations, then, on the contrary, kings, statesmen and prelates have turned pale at the sight of the energy displayed by it, and in view of the real power it has wielded, and continues to wield. And yet the International is not at all a secret society. Its statutes, and the proceedings of its congresses, are printed in pamphlets that have been distributed, not by thousands, but by hundreds of thousands, perhaps by millions. The key of the contradiction is this: Many of its more energetic members work under the scrutiny of despotic governments, and beneath the shadow of the hangman’s halter, the knout and the guillotine: a display of themselves, and of their own merits, would be almost certain death. They are, therefore, condemned to work, not for office, not for popular applause, but, in silence and in darkness, for the aim of their endeavor, which is the Social Revolution. They die, their names pass out of the memories of men, and the Revolution advances over their dead bodies. Besides, the Association has the faculty, in the presence of danger, of quarrelling with itself, of lapsing into utter anarchy, of going completely out of existence, and of then reappearing, in its original strength, at the first call of its occult and continually changing leaders.
Of course, the Co-operative Publishing Company are incompetent to give any really adequate history of the International Association. They know little, or rather nothing, of the secrets that are hidden from the eyes of Bismark, M. Thiers, Cardinal Antonelli, and their practiced spies. In matters of mere fact, when they baflie the ingenuity of the French, German and Russian police, the Co-operative Publishing Company give up investigating. Nevertheless, the following particulars may be stated; although we are obliged to begin our narration very far back.
The Order of the Knights of the Temple (for it is with the famous half-priest, half-soldier, TEMPLARS, that we shall have to begin) was originally established, at Jerusalem, in the year 1118 (some say in the year 1100) by Hugues de Paganis, and was confirmed by the pope in 1146. It was not, however, until about eighty years later that the Order received from the council of Troyes its definitive rules of discipline. Towards the end of the first crusade, and while the second was being preached in Europe by Saint Bernard, the Templars in the Holy Land, where their allegiance to the church had waxed somewhat weak, fell in with a widely extended mystical association which taught—or affected to teach—both to the Christians and to the Saracens, indiscriminately, but to adepts only—secrets of hermetic science, and especially of social organization, which date back—or were affirmed to date back—far beyond the times of Abraham, to the building of the Great Pyramid of Egypt. The Templars were thus—or, at the least, they held themselves to be—the successors and representatives, by traditional initiation, of the builders of the Great Pyramid of Egypt. This is the origin of the affiliation in which we always find the Templars, on the one side with the occult practical building-corporations of the middle ages, and, on the other, with the traditional secret societies of speculative social-architects. The Great Pyramid, with its lower, middle and upper chambers, became their symbolic Temple. Solomon’s Temple, although it had no lower, middle and upper chamber, was an analogical representative of the Great Pyramid of Memphis, and now serves, although it was long ago destroyed, as a figurative symbol of it. The Tower of Babylon was an opposition temple, anterior to both the others, and built from an opposite plan.
In 1307, Phillipe-le-Bel (king of France) and Clement V (the pope), jealous of the wealth, power and influence of the Templars, conspired to destroy the Order. The knights were, the greater number of them, suddenly arrested, cast into dungeons, and there tortured. The Order was dissolved, and its property confiscated. The grand-master, Jaques Bernard de Molay, was burned alive in Paris, near the pont neuf, in the year 1313; and while dying, he cited the king and the pope to appear and answer him, within a year and a day, at the bar of Almighty God. (The king and the pope both died within the year.) Those of the knights who survived, became exiles without property, without the right of assembling and without recognised influence; but they secretly preserved their traditions, and transmitted them to posterity.
Long before the destruction of the Order, the English corporations of operative stone-masons were placed by the king, Richard-Coeur-de-Lion, under the protection of the grand-master of the Templars; and it was at about this time that the socialistic ideas of the earlier Egyptians, of Moses, and of Pythagoras, began to infilter themselves among the trades-societies of European working men. After the burning of Jaques de Molay, such of the knights as succeeded in escaping from France, took refuge in an island of Scotland named Mull; where some of their brethren had preceded them, and had partially reorganized the Order. In 1314, Robert Bruce, king of Scotland, fused together the Order of the Templars, the Chapter of Herodom of Kilwinning, and the Scottish corporations of operative stone-masons. The soul of the Templar organization found here a fitting body. The combined association took the name of Freemasons. Centuries later, giving opportunity by their secret organizations for the unfolding, in germ, of the new society which has taken the place of the feudal society, the successors of these Freemasons furnished the mystic levers by which England, America, and France were upheaved, at the time of the English, American and French revolutions; and also the lever by which Germany was upheaved when it finally rose, en masse, against the despotism of the first Bonaparte.
The autocracy of the kings and priests having been effectually emasculated by the great revolutions, the money-power rose gradually in its place, and substituted itself for it as the ruler of the world. The successors of the Templars, finding the masonic association to be adapted to the overthrow of established iniquities, rather than to the nipping in the bud of rising dangers which had not yet unfolded their full proportions, organized the “Association of the Just” for Germany, “Young Italy” and the “Carbonari” for Italy, “Young Europe” for France and the rest of the continent, and a multitude of other like societies, too numerous to mention, for the same countries. These societies were immediately persecuted by the police, and excommunicated by the pope. They were forced to hold their meetings in secret places, were prohibited from making any open missionary efforts, and were thus prevented from getting any recruits among the people.
The spirit of the Templars once again found itself to be a disembodied soul, with no material organ through which to manifest itself. Masonry was found to be inadequate; and the new transfigured institution of the future existed not as yet. And then it was that the period for meditation, as divorced from all action, came. The disembodied soul perfected itself by pure thought. The history of all epochs of the world was studied, the nature and destiny of the existing civilization were determined, the future was prophetically guaged (sic) by scientific insight, and solutions were prepared, beforehand, for the problems of the coming age.
Meanwhile, the rise of the money-power had occasioned a correlative and growing uneasiness among the labouring class in the great cities of Europe, to whom the battle of life began to present itself, every day more and more, under the aspect of a disastrous defeat. Trades-organizations for resistance to employers sprang up everywhere, and their members were counted by thousands. Unfortunately, these organizations (except in some parts of England, and in the great cities of France, the American proletariat being then non-existent as yet) were, almost exclusively, composed of men and women who had been cramped, and whose fathers and mothers had been cramped, from generation to generation, by excess of physical toil, and by defective education. The divergency of their sentiments and material interests arrayed them against each other and gave them over, helpless, into the hands of the money-power. The great mass of the insurgent people was, throughout Europe, a mere body; and this body yearned everywhere—with many groanings—for an adequate soul.
At the last, the disembodied, deep-thoughted, and far-perceiving soul of the Templars, and this tumultuous and soulless—but vigorous and mighty—body of the insurgent people, found each other; and then the world-embracing Working-people’s International Association was created in a single day. No man can claim the merit of having made it: it came of itself. No man can destroy it. It may dissolve a hundred times; but every time it dissolves, it will crystallize anew. Its soul is immortal, and its body can never be annihilated; it is foreordained that it shall live under a thousand successive names. Multitudes of labour organizations which never heard of it, and of which it never heard, are natural, integral parts of it. It is vital in every member, and will live forever; or, at the least, until the wrongs of man upon this earth, which is God’s footstool, are righted. History repeats itself. The identical spirit, transmitted to it by regular initiation, and by authentic succession, now works in the entire proletariat of the world, that worked formerly in the insurgent Hebrews, when, with arms in their hands, and marching by fives, they broke forth from the bondage of the Pharaonic civilization. The same egg which hatched out the Hebrew commonwealth, the religion of Islam, and Christianity, those three daughters of the Bible, has also, in these latter days, hatched out the transfigured proletariat of the world.
The mere outward, material history of the special, now-existing, International Association, giving the epoch of its latest out-birth, the record of its congresses, its declarations of principle, and the like, may be purchased for twenty-five or thirty cents, probably for less, from the corresponding secretary of any regular section of the society; or of the American publishers who issue this work.
The following paragraphs are taken from a pamphlet which treats of the Commune of PARIS; and they may, perhaps, prove interesting to the reader.
“The French word commune is the equivalent of our English word town. The word communiste may denote, in French, either (1) an advocate of the doctrine that women and property ought to be held in common, or (2) an upholder of the principle of municipal self-government. The Commune of Paris fought, in its recent great fight, not for a community of women and goods, but for municipal self-government. It was well known, both at Paris and Versailles, while the fighting was going on, that M. Thiers could have made peace with the insurgents, at any moment, by simply guaranteeing to the city of Paris an amount of municipal liberty equal to that which has always been enjoyed by the city of Boston. This fact, which cannot with any plausibility be denied, and which probably will not be denied, suffices, of itself alone, to put the merits of the dispute between the Commune of Paris and the Versailles government, in its true light, and to fully expose the calumnious misrepresentations of the Versailles party.
“We are of the opinion, that, taking fighting as it rises, the Commune made a passably good fight. We are especially proud of the heroic women with whom the honor of arms has definitively rested.
“We, nevertheless, take the liberty to recommend the Commune to be more circumspect, hereafter, in the matter of summary executions. Better things were expected of the Commune than of the Versailles government; for the Commune represents advancing civilization, while the Versailles government represents the commercial, industrial, and the financial feudalism of the present and the past. It will never do to follow evil examples, and meet murder with murder. The execution of spies and traitors, and the use of petroleum for incendiary purposes, are perfectly justifiable under the law of war; but the civilized world does not look with approval, and ought not to look with approval, upon the military execution of priests and other non-combatants. We know (or, at least, we have been informed) that the Commune offered to exchange the Archbishop of Paris for Blanqui, and that the offer was not accepted. This fact (if it be a fact) consigns the memory of M. Thiers to the execration of posterity; but it does not excuse the Commune.
“The existing French Assembly was elected, not at all to govern France, but to consult on the possibilities of a reconciliation between France and Prussia, and also, if advisable, to conclude and authenticate a treaty of peace. The Assembly has, therefore, no lawful governmental powers. When the treaty of peace between France and Prussia was signed, the mandate of the Assembly expired. The government of M. Thiers is a government of usurpers. Consequently, every disarmed prisoner of war, male or female, shot in cold blood after a combat, in pursuance of M. Thiers’s policy, whether sentenced or not sentenced by court-martial, is—from a legal point of view—simply a person assassinated. And the moral aspect of the question is coincident with the legal aspect. If the Communists committed excesses (and it seems they were human), they did so in defending themselves: their families, and their homes, against thieves and usurpers. Thiers fought to confiscate the liberties and control the money of the people of Paris; and Paris fought in defence of the natural rights of its own people, for self-rule.
“Three times the heroic people of Paris have been cheated out of their Republic: once in the great revolution; afterwards in 1830; and, again, in 1848. To-day the scales are still oscillating, and the result is yet undetermined. In the next great fight, or in the fight after the next, or in the next after that, the Republic will prevail.
“Now there are three holy cities—not two of them only: JERUSALEM, ROME, PARIS. But the holiness of Paris is virtual merely as yet. The religion of Humanity reaches higher than the Commune and the International Labor Union seem to think. Paris is Bar-Isis, Parisis, Paris. It is the sacred boat of Isis, and bears to-day the destinies of the world.”
Of course, the Co-operative Publishing Company are incompetent to give any really adequate history of the International Association. They know little, or rather nothing, of the secrets that are hidden from the eyes of Bismark, M. Thiers, Cardinal Antonelli, and their practiced spies. In matters of mere fact, when they baflie the ingenuity of the French, German and Russian police, the Co-operative Publishing Company give up investigating. Nevertheless, the following particulars may be stated; although we are obliged to begin our narration very far back.
The Order of the Knights of the Temple (for it is with the famous half-priest, half-soldier, TEMPLARS, that we shall have to begin) was originally established, at Jerusalem, in the year 1118 (some say in the year 1100) by Hugues de Paganis, and was confirmed by the pope in 1146. It was not, however, until about eighty years later that the Order received from the council of Troyes its definitive rules of discipline. Towards the end of the first crusade, and while the second was being preached in Europe by Saint Bernard, the Templars in the Holy Land, where their allegiance to the church had waxed somewhat weak, fell in with a widely extended mystical association which taught—or affected to teach—both to the Christians and to the Saracens, indiscriminately, but to adepts only—secrets of hermetic science, and especially of social organization, which date back—or were affirmed to date back—far beyond the times of Abraham, to the building of the Great Pyramid of Egypt. The Templars were thus—or, at the least, they held themselves to be—the successors and representatives, by traditional initiation, of the builders of the Great Pyramid of Egypt. This is the origin of the affiliation in which we always find the Templars, on the one side with the occult practical building-corporations of the middle ages, and, on the other, with the traditional secret societies of speculative social-architects. The Great Pyramid, with its lower, middle and upper chambers, became their symbolic Temple. Solomon’s Temple, although it had no lower, middle and upper chamber, was an analogical representative of the Great Pyramid of Memphis, and now serves, although it was long ago destroyed, as a figurative symbol of it. The Tower of Babylon was an opposition temple, anterior to both the others, and built from an opposite plan.
In 1307, Phillipe-le-Bel (king of France) and Clement V (the pope), jealous of the wealth, power and influence of the Templars, conspired to destroy the Order. The knights were, the greater number of them, suddenly arrested, cast into dungeons, and there tortured. The Order was dissolved, and its property confiscated. The grand-master, Jaques Bernard de Molay, was burned alive in Paris, near the pont neuf, in the year 1313; and while dying, he cited the king and the pope to appear and answer him, within a year and a day, at the bar of Almighty God. (The king and the pope both died within the year.) Those of the knights who survived, became exiles without property, without the right of assembling and without recognised influence; but they secretly preserved their traditions, and transmitted them to posterity.
Long before the destruction of the Order, the English corporations of operative stone-masons were placed by the king, Richard-Coeur-de-Lion, under the protection of the grand-master of the Templars; and it was at about this time that the socialistic ideas of the earlier Egyptians, of Moses, and of Pythagoras, began to infilter themselves among the trades-societies of European working men. After the burning of Jaques de Molay, such of the knights as succeeded in escaping from France, took refuge in an island of Scotland named Mull; where some of their brethren had preceded them, and had partially reorganized the Order. In 1314, Robert Bruce, king of Scotland, fused together the Order of the Templars, the Chapter of Herodom of Kilwinning, and the Scottish corporations of operative stone-masons. The soul of the Templar organization found here a fitting body. The combined association took the name of Freemasons. Centuries later, giving opportunity by their secret organizations for the unfolding, in germ, of the new society which has taken the place of the feudal society, the successors of these Freemasons furnished the mystic levers by which England, America, and France were upheaved, at the time of the English, American and French revolutions; and also the lever by which Germany was upheaved when it finally rose, en masse, against the despotism of the first Bonaparte.
The autocracy of the kings and priests having been effectually emasculated by the great revolutions, the money-power rose gradually in its place, and substituted itself for it as the ruler of the world. The successors of the Templars, finding the masonic association to be adapted to the overthrow of established iniquities, rather than to the nipping in the bud of rising dangers which had not yet unfolded their full proportions, organized the “Association of the Just” for Germany, “Young Italy” and the “Carbonari” for Italy, “Young Europe” for France and the rest of the continent, and a multitude of other like societies, too numerous to mention, for the same countries. These societies were immediately persecuted by the police, and excommunicated by the pope. They were forced to hold their meetings in secret places, were prohibited from making any open missionary efforts, and were thus prevented from getting any recruits among the people.
The spirit of the Templars once again found itself to be a disembodied soul, with no material organ through which to manifest itself. Masonry was found to be inadequate; and the new transfigured institution of the future existed not as yet. And then it was that the period for meditation, as divorced from all action, came. The disembodied soul perfected itself by pure thought. The history of all epochs of the world was studied, the nature and destiny of the existing civilization were determined, the future was prophetically guaged (sic) by scientific insight, and solutions were prepared, beforehand, for the problems of the coming age.
Meanwhile, the rise of the money-power had occasioned a correlative and growing uneasiness among the labouring class in the great cities of Europe, to whom the battle of life began to present itself, every day more and more, under the aspect of a disastrous defeat. Trades-organizations for resistance to employers sprang up everywhere, and their members were counted by thousands. Unfortunately, these organizations (except in some parts of England, and in the great cities of France, the American proletariat being then non-existent as yet) were, almost exclusively, composed of men and women who had been cramped, and whose fathers and mothers had been cramped, from generation to generation, by excess of physical toil, and by defective education. The divergency of their sentiments and material interests arrayed them against each other and gave them over, helpless, into the hands of the money-power. The great mass of the insurgent people was, throughout Europe, a mere body; and this body yearned everywhere—with many groanings—for an adequate soul.
At the last, the disembodied, deep-thoughted, and far-perceiving soul of the Templars, and this tumultuous and soulless—but vigorous and mighty—body of the insurgent people, found each other; and then the world-embracing Working-people’s International Association was created in a single day. No man can claim the merit of having made it: it came of itself. No man can destroy it. It may dissolve a hundred times; but every time it dissolves, it will crystallize anew. Its soul is immortal, and its body can never be annihilated; it is foreordained that it shall live under a thousand successive names. Multitudes of labour organizations which never heard of it, and of which it never heard, are natural, integral parts of it. It is vital in every member, and will live forever; or, at the least, until the wrongs of man upon this earth, which is God’s footstool, are righted. History repeats itself. The identical spirit, transmitted to it by regular initiation, and by authentic succession, now works in the entire proletariat of the world, that worked formerly in the insurgent Hebrews, when, with arms in their hands, and marching by fives, they broke forth from the bondage of the Pharaonic civilization. The same egg which hatched out the Hebrew commonwealth, the religion of Islam, and Christianity, those three daughters of the Bible, has also, in these latter days, hatched out the transfigured proletariat of the world.
The mere outward, material history of the special, now-existing, International Association, giving the epoch of its latest out-birth, the record of its congresses, its declarations of principle, and the like, may be purchased for twenty-five or thirty cents, probably for less, from the corresponding secretary of any regular section of the society; or of the American publishers who issue this work.
The following paragraphs are taken from a pamphlet which treats of the Commune of PARIS; and they may, perhaps, prove interesting to the reader.
“The French word commune is the equivalent of our English word town. The word communiste may denote, in French, either (1) an advocate of the doctrine that women and property ought to be held in common, or (2) an upholder of the principle of municipal self-government. The Commune of Paris fought, in its recent great fight, not for a community of women and goods, but for municipal self-government. It was well known, both at Paris and Versailles, while the fighting was going on, that M. Thiers could have made peace with the insurgents, at any moment, by simply guaranteeing to the city of Paris an amount of municipal liberty equal to that which has always been enjoyed by the city of Boston. This fact, which cannot with any plausibility be denied, and which probably will not be denied, suffices, of itself alone, to put the merits of the dispute between the Commune of Paris and the Versailles government, in its true light, and to fully expose the calumnious misrepresentations of the Versailles party.
“We are of the opinion, that, taking fighting as it rises, the Commune made a passably good fight. We are especially proud of the heroic women with whom the honor of arms has definitively rested.
“We, nevertheless, take the liberty to recommend the Commune to be more circumspect, hereafter, in the matter of summary executions. Better things were expected of the Commune than of the Versailles government; for the Commune represents advancing civilization, while the Versailles government represents the commercial, industrial, and the financial feudalism of the present and the past. It will never do to follow evil examples, and meet murder with murder. The execution of spies and traitors, and the use of petroleum for incendiary purposes, are perfectly justifiable under the law of war; but the civilized world does not look with approval, and ought not to look with approval, upon the military execution of priests and other non-combatants. We know (or, at least, we have been informed) that the Commune offered to exchange the Archbishop of Paris for Blanqui, and that the offer was not accepted. This fact (if it be a fact) consigns the memory of M. Thiers to the execration of posterity; but it does not excuse the Commune.
“The existing French Assembly was elected, not at all to govern France, but to consult on the possibilities of a reconciliation between France and Prussia, and also, if advisable, to conclude and authenticate a treaty of peace. The Assembly has, therefore, no lawful governmental powers. When the treaty of peace between France and Prussia was signed, the mandate of the Assembly expired. The government of M. Thiers is a government of usurpers. Consequently, every disarmed prisoner of war, male or female, shot in cold blood after a combat, in pursuance of M. Thiers’s policy, whether sentenced or not sentenced by court-martial, is—from a legal point of view—simply a person assassinated. And the moral aspect of the question is coincident with the legal aspect. If the Communists committed excesses (and it seems they were human), they did so in defending themselves: their families, and their homes, against thieves and usurpers. Thiers fought to confiscate the liberties and control the money of the people of Paris; and Paris fought in defence of the natural rights of its own people, for self-rule.
“Three times the heroic people of Paris have been cheated out of their Republic: once in the great revolution; afterwards in 1830; and, again, in 1848. To-day the scales are still oscillating, and the result is yet undetermined. In the next great fight, or in the fight after the next, or in the next after that, the Republic will prevail.
“Now there are three holy cities—not two of them only: JERUSALEM, ROME, PARIS. But the holiness of Paris is virtual merely as yet. The religion of Humanity reaches higher than the Commune and the International Labor Union seem to think. Paris is Bar-Isis, Parisis, Paris. It is the sacred boat of Isis, and bears to-day the destinies of the world.”
Source: “Publisher’s Note,” Address of the Delegates of the Boston Section No. 1 (French) of the Working People’s International Association (Princeton, Mass.: Co-Operative Publishing Co., 1873), iii-vii.
