Masks of the Illuminati Read Online Free PDF Page B

knowledgewas based on real scholarship, might one dare to believe the frequent claim that the Rosy Cross order still existed and commanded the
Vril
force that could mutate humanity into superhumanity?
    Q: Under what other names has the Vril been described by diverse persons before and after Lord Bulwer-Lytton?
    A: Before: ch’i [Chinese, c. 3000 BC.] prajna [Hindic philosophers, c. 1500 BC.], telesma [H. Trismegistus, c. 350 BC.], Vis Medicatrix Naturae [Hippocrates, c. 350 BC.], Facultas Formatrix [Galen, c. 170 AD.], baraka [Sufis, c. 600 AD.], mumia [Paracelsus, c. 1530 AD.], animal magnetism [Mesmer, 1775 AD.], Life Force [Galvani, 1790 A D.],
Gestaltung
[Goethe, 1800 A D.], OD force [Reichenbach, 1845 AD.]. After: etheric formative force [Steiner, 1900 A D.],
Elan Vital
[Bergson, 1920 A D.], Mitogenetic radiation [Gurwitsch, 1937 AD], orgone [Reich, 1940 A D.], bioplasma [Grischenko, 1944 A D.], Good Vibes
[anon, hippie domesticas
, c. 1962 A D.], inergy [Puharich, 1973 A D.], the Force [Lucas, 1977 A D.].
        Sir John was, by this time, twenty-four years old and romantically, painfully, convinced of a vast temperamental abyss between himself and his contemporaries. He was frankly bored by grubby, money-centered business concerns (he had all the money he could ever possibly want) and repelled by the flabbiness of the Anglican clergy—the only church career family tradition could have countenanced and yet so milkwater that, as Trollope said, it interfered neither with a man’s politics nor his religion; thus, he seemed to have no future but pedantry. That was also unattractive, because he regarded himself as alienated and rebellious (although within the limits of good taste, sound morals and British common sense, of course; he was still chaste, since whores were the victims of social exploitation he could not sanction and it was indecent tomake an advance to a lady, even if he had known how). Worse: he was resolved not to be corrupted by his out-landishly large independence (a word he preferred to “inheritance”) and could not bear to think of himself as a social butterfly or wastrel. He would write books, then; and if no audience larger than could easily gather in a water closet were ever to read them, that would not matter. He had at least a role if he had not yet found a soul; he was “the scholarly one of the Babcocks.”
    Sir John had majored in medieval history and Near Eastern languages; his master’s thesis, on the influence of Jewish Cabala on medieval occult societies, became his first book,
The Secret Chiefs
, which was favorably reviewed in the few places where it was noticed at all. The most hostile single line in any critique appeared in the University of Edinburgh
Historical Journal
, and was by Professor Angus McNaughton. It chided Babcock mildly for “a certain romantic turn of mind which leads the youthful and ardent author to imagine that some of the secret societies discussed might have survived even into our own age of enlightenment—a thesis that belongs in one of Lord Bulwer-Lytton’s romances, not in a work of alleged history.”
    Like most young authors, Babcock received every criticism as a mortal blow, and it was mortifying to have the novelistic inspiration of his ideas so easily spotted. He wrote three drafts of a long letter to Professor McNaughton for impugning his spotless accuracy; and the third draft, with five pages of relentlessly pedantic footnotes, he actually mailed to the University of Edinburgh
Historical Journal
. It was printed, with a caustic rebuttal by McNaughton, beginning, “Young Mr. Babcock’s sources are, one and all, as impressionable and immature as Mr. Babcock himself,” and went on to argue that no current groups calling themselves Freemasons or Rosicrucians had any documented connection with any groups of the same namesin medieval times. The group with the single best-documented history, McNaughton said, was the Scottish Rite of Ancient and Accepted