Masks of the Illuminati Read Online Free PDF

mouse knew, seeing the whole billion-year struggle of predator and prey through Uncle Bentley’s Darwinian prism, weeping at last alone the tears he had been too numb and self-conscious to weep at Uncle Bentley’sfuneral. Feeling thrice orphaned, he wanted to dare the blasphemy of Job’s wife: to curse God and die.
    He never forgot that moment; and once, many months later, when he was asked his favorite lines from Shakespeare, by an instructor aware of his intellectual potential and sorry for his loneliness, Sir John immediately quoted, not the “To be or not to be” or “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquies, but the grim couplet from
Lear:
    As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods:
They kill us for their sport
.
    The instructor was so depressed by the despair of Sir John’s tone in quoting this that he decided the lad was “a hopeless case” and made no further avuncular overtures.
    But Sir John was also aware that the gods, or the blind impersonal forces of Uncle Bentley’s Darwinian universe, had, just as impassively as they murdered his mother and father and uncle, gifted him with an economic security generally considered a great blessing in a world where three-quarters of the population struggled desperately to get enough to eat day to day, and most laborers died, toothless and raggedy, before the age of forty, worn out by toil in those Dark Satanic Mills lamented by Blake. Yet everybody knew that those Mills were necessary to Progress and that the lot of most men and women had been even worse before electricity. Sir John was confused about all this, and even more confused about the universe’s intent toward him, if it owned any. While he was in the midst of his most searching philosophical ruminations, the whole world seemed to shudder at once, for Plehve, the Russian Minister of the Interior, was murdered—the latest in a series of senseless and incredible assassinations. The boy heard many older persons talking of the growing violence and lawlessness of the world; and he heard others,more ominously, speak of a worldwide conspiracy behind these violent attacks on government officials.
    Sir John graduated with honors from Trinity College, Cambridge, five years later, in 1909. The world was shuddering again, at the assassination of Prince Ito of Japan, and more talk was heard of worldwide conspiracies and secret societies (Zionist, said some; Jesuit, said others), but Sir John heard this only as background noise by now. His mind and heart were not in the world, but in the two scholarly realms known as history and mythology. Sir John refused to accept that distinction, having fallen totally in love with another world so long dead it was powerless to hurt him, unlike the present world, and yet was also rich in mystery and glamour.
    At this point Sir John read
Vril: The Power of the Coming Race
, by Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton and was mesmerized by its tapestry of adventure, Utopianism, romance, deep occult scholarship and profound knowledge of political psychology. But most fascinating of all, to Sir John, was the fact that the occult details in the book did not come from sheer fantasy and vulgar folklore, like the thrillers of Bram Stoker, but were derived from obviously genuine knowledge of medieval Cabala and Rosicrucianism. Within the next three months he purchased and read with mounting excitement all the works of Lord Bulwer-Lytton—
Reinzi, The Last Days of Pompeii
, all the other novels, the poems, the plays, the essays, even the fairy tales. It was an astounding body of literature to have been produced by a man who also edited a monthly magazine, served as a member of Parliament and became one of Disraeli’s principal advisors.
    And Sir John, even more than the hundreds of thousands of readers who made Bulwer-Lytton one of the most popular novelists of the nineteenth century, was captivated by the question tantalizingly raised again and again in those books: If so much of the occult