We noted earlier that Schwaller de Lubicz emphasised the significance of the number nine in the ancient Egyptian religion, and also that he — uniquely — translated the Egyptian neter, meaning ‘god’, as ‘principle’, often speaking of the ‘Nine Principles’. He wrote:

This is exactly how the Council of Nine first introduced themselves to Andrija Puharich through Dr Vinod back in 1952. It was not just the term ‘Nine Principles’ that Schwaller de Lubicz shared with the Council of Nine, but also the same mystical interpretation of the numbers one to nine and their relationship with the number ten. As he wrote in 1913: ‘As number it is 10, containing and surrounded by the nine principles, the irreducible One, the eternal fecundator.‘⁴ And John Anthony West wrote in Serpent in the Sky: ‘The Grand Ennead ... is not a sequence, but the nine aspects of Tum [Atum].‘⁵ This perfectly reflects the words of Tom (allegedly Atum) himself in 1974: ‘We are the nine principles of the Universe, yet together we are One.’⁶

This seems to be too much of a coincidence. Had the Council of Nine read Schwaller de Lubicz, or had he written those words while under their influence, way back in the early years of the twentieth century? His master work, the three-volume Le temple de l‘homme (The Temple of Man) was published in 1958, six years after the ‘Nine Principles’ had introduced themselves to Puharich through Dr Vinod. However, the key neter/Principle interpretation also appeared in Schwaller de Lubicz’s similarly named Le temple dans l‘homme (The Temple in Man), published in 1949. (It would have been very obscure in terms of its influence in the United States as it was published only in French and with a very small print run in Cairo. An English-language edition did not appear until the 1970s.) Schwaller de Lubicz first published his mystical interpretation of the number nine as long ago as 1913, in a series of articles he wrote for the French Theosophical journal Le Théosophe, where he described the number ten as ‘containing and surrounded by the nine principles; the irreducible One, the eternal fecundator’. But at that time he did not elaborate: the parallel with the Egyptian Ennead came later.

So Schwaller de Lubicz seems to have been a key figure in the genesis of the Nine well before Puharich’s machinations, taking the story much further back than we had anticipated. But as we delved further into his occult philosophy and the traditions that inspired him, a very different picture emerged from the dispassionate, scholarly mystic so carefully and respectfully portrayed by John Anthony West and others. We discovered that the occult interests of Schwaller de Lubicz are generally played down. Hancock and Bauval, for example, simply refer to him as a ‘mathematician’.⁷ However, the truth is that first and foremost he was an esotericist, his particular interests being Hermeticism and alchemy.

We should clarify our own position on the subject of the occult. By now it should be obvious that we ourselves are by no means opposed to most manifestations of the esoteric, and deplore the popular concept that anything ‘occult’ is automatically superstitious and worthless at best, and downright evil at worst. In our view, some forms of ‘occultism’, particularly Hermeticism, represent the highest and most noble search for knowledge the world has ever known, and many of today’s scientific and technological triumphs are the end result of the so-called ‘black art’ of alchemical research. It may be that writers do not mention Schwaller de Lubicz’s occult leanings either because they do not know about them or because they have no wish to lose their audience or waste precious pages on lengthy explanations and caveats. However, Schwaller de Lubicz’s occultism is not the only aspect of his life and works that is not widely acknowledged. Less mention is made of his political ideology, with good reason, for it would seriously antagonise the majority of today’s readers.

Schwaller de Lubicz has been described as a ‘protofascist’:⁸ he was a highly influential figure in the development of the mystical underpinnings of Nazism, and a particular inspiration for Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s complex, occult-minded deputy. For such a highly influential figure, Schwaller de Lubicz seemed curiously disinclined to bask in the limelight: on the contrary, he appeared to be more than content to lurk in the shadows, so it is difficult to find biographical detail about him. Only since his death - and because of his ideas about ancient Egypt — has his name reached a wider public. Apart from Isha Schwaller de Lubicz’s somewhat sanitised 1963 biography of her husband, which skips over lengthy portions of his life, the only source is AL-Kemi, written by the American artist André VandenBroeck in 1987, but even that only covers the two-year period (1959 — 60) that he spent with Schwaller de Lubicz as his pupil in Plan-du-Grasse in the south of France.

VandenBroeck’s book largely describes his own struggle to define why he found Schwaller de Lubicz so fascinating, and why he felt compelled to move to the south of France to be close to him. This fascination was even more of a puzzle when he discovered that his hero was in fact very much ‘a man of the right’⁹ — the political opposite of VandenBroeck himself - and he was shocked to the core to discover that Schwaller de Lubicz was, as befitted an eminence grise of the Nazi party, vehemently anti-Semitic.¹⁰ VandenBroeck had some serious soul-searching to do, for he is himself of Jewish descent. Curiously, his mentor still held a fascination for him, and he helped out by correcting more than seventy factual errors in Le temple de l’homme, including some fundamental mistakes in his discussion of harmonics.¹¹

VandenBroeck visited Schwaller de Lubicz’s house many times before he was offered the chance to become his pupil in Hermeticism and alchemy, a rare privilege. The teacher made it clear that he only made the offer once he had ascertained that VandenBroeck knew nothing whatsoever about the subjects. As he said: ‘You see, I have to be careful. There are people who would like to know what I do.’ Then he added by way of explanation : ‘Governments.’¹² But significantly, he elaborated on this cryptic statement, saying: ‘It is well-known that both the USA and the USSR are running experiments with dabblers in all kinds of occult stuff, from psychics to pseudo-alchemists and who knows what not. It has always been a good policy not to attract attention, particularly in times like ours.’¹³

Originally simply René Schwaller, the future Nazi guru and mystical Egyptologist was born in Asnières in Alsace in 1887. After serving an apprenticeship as a chemist, at the age of eighteen he moved to Paris, where he was drawn irresistibly into occult studies and became deeply involved in the Theosophical Society. In Paris he also joined an alchemical group called the Brotherhood of Heliopolis. His name has even been put forward as that of the mysterious writer - under the pseudonym ‘Fulcanelli’ — of Le mystère des cathédrales (The Mystery of the Cathedrals), published in 1925, one of the most influential books to come out of that time and place. This masterwork argued that the Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe carry encoded alchemical and esoteric symbolism in their architecture and decoration. The real identity of the author has long been hotly debated: for a time it was believed to be Schwaller de Lubicz himself,¹⁴ but although he was not Fulcanelli, he knew and inspired the man who was: Jean-Julian Champagne.¹⁵ In fact, it was Schwaller de Lubicz who claimed to have been the first to discover the Hermetic principles encoded in the Gothic cathedrals, enabling him to recognise the same principles in the temples of Egypt later in life.

In 1918, with his wife Isha, Schwaller founded a group called Les Veilleurs (The Watchers), to (in Isha’s words): ‘give a new momentum with new words, with the aim of revealing to the troubled world the knowledge (conscience) of the aim of human existence’ [her emphasis].¹⁶ He also founded a journal called L’Affranchi (The Emancipated), later changing its title to Le Veilleur. Les Veilleurs began within the Theosophical Society, but later became an independent organisation, primarily because of its political ambitions. It was mostly composed of esotericists and artists, but among its members also boasted the famous astronomer Camille Flammarion, perhaps significantly one of the first proponents of the idea of life on Mars. As the leader of this group, Schwaller took the mystical name Aor, which may also have been used as a ‘pseudonym’ for channelled material, for André VandenBroeck wrote, without elaborating further: ‘What is signed ‘Aor’ comes from a mystic source . . . a private source of knowledge with which Aor alone had contact, and he took its name.’¹⁷ One of Schwaller’s greatest supporters at this point in his life was a member of Les Veilleurs, a Lithuanian nobleman and poet called O.W. de Lubicz Milocz, who in 1919 adopted Schwaller into his clan, giving him the right to use the title Chevalier de Lubicz.

Reading through the articles written by Schwaller de Lubicz and others in Le Veilleur, one soon discerns a rather disquieting undercurrent, exemplified in their slogan ‘Hiérarchie! Fraternité! Liberté!’, substituting ‘hierarchy’ for the French Republic’s original ‘equality’. The over-riding concept in Schwaller de Lubicz’s ideology was that of an élite who, being more spiritually aware than their fellow man, should be allowed to govern.

Unfortunately, this was not just an organisation with a high regard for authority. The pages of Le Veilleur contained strong anti-Jewish sentiments: a Christmas 1919 article called ‘Letter to the Jews’, written by Aor himself (or even the ‘private source of knowledge’ mentioned by VandenBroeck, perhaps entities he channelled), urged the Jews to return to the promised land and build their own country. Superficially, this may seem fair, not to say farsighted, but the implication was very much that Jews should get out of our beloved France — or else... Schwaller de Lubicz was emphatically, unequivocally, racist. He wrote in Le Veilleur that there is ‘an insurmountable partition between one race and another‘,¹⁸ and elsewhere that, based on studies of ancient Egyptian corpses, apart from a few exceptions, ‘there are no blacks properly so called [in dynastic Egypt]’.¹⁹ (This is patently untrue — archaeological evidence conclusively proves that the ancient Egyptian people were composed of several different races, including ones racially defined as black.²⁰ Indeed, many see the features of the Sphinx itself as being decidedly negroid.)

At this point in his life - in the years immediately after the First World War - Schwaller de Lubicz designed a uniform for himself and his disciples, which was subsequently adopted by the SA (Stiirmabteilung - Storm Section), the forerunner of the SS, who were instrumental in Hitler’s rise to power.²¹ Many of the members of Les Veilleurs were involved in right-wing political events that led both directly and indirectly to the rise of fascism in Europe, such as Vivien Postel du Mas, a major influence on Rudolf Hess. The deputy führer was himself a member of a French group called Tala, which was affiliated to Les Veilleurs.²²

In 1920, Schwaller de Lubicz disbanded the organisation, instructing the membership to carry the work into their chosen profession or field of influence. Aor and Isha’s own work took them to Switzerland, where they established the Scientific Station Suhalia near St Moritz in the Alps to undertake research, with several others, into such fringe alchemical sciences as homeopathy, crystallography and the therapeutic effects of plants. They also built an observatory. In 1927 Schwaller de Lubicz and Isha left Suhalia for Plan-du-Grasse in the south of France, moving on three years later to Majorca. But in 1938 they made their most significant move - to Egypt, where they remained for fifteen years, mainly studying the Temple of Luxor. Finally, in 1952, they returned to their home at Plan-du-Grasse, where Schwaller de Lubicz remained until his death in 1961.

These were not random moves, nor were they occasioned by wanderlust or economic necessity. Neither may they have been entirely the travels of esotericists seeking out their own kind. Schwaller de Lubicz may have been a celebrated mystic, but he was also a political philosopher. It is notable that his departures from both Spain and Egypt coincided with successful right-wing takeovers, just after the Spanish Civil War had been won by Franco, and just after a military coup d’état in Egypt in July 1952. The victors in both cases were people of whom Schwaller de Lubicz would undoubtedly have approved - if not the world’s greatest dictators, they were certainly dictatorial - yet he moved on once they came to power. Perhaps he had simply done his job, or, like many others before and after him, he combined his occultism with intelligence-gathering, maybe on behalf of some powerful international cabal.

Like many people in this investigation, it is a mystery how Schwaller de Lubicz acquired his money. He came from an ordinary family and his books — most of which were written towards the end of his life — were never bestsellers, yet he always seems to have been affluent. He kept on his large house in Plan-du-Grasse for the full fifteen years that he was in Egypt. Was he paid for his part in setting the scene for various political and military coups? Was he on some kind of retainer for his services as undercover agent for one - or more - intelligence agencies? Both scenarios seem likely, but Schwaller de Lubicz was so successfully secretive that we shall probably never know for sure.

He also always concealed the influences that shaped his own philosophy, but an examination of his ideology places him firmly in the context of a specific politico-esoteric system, a movement known as Synarchy. This is ‘government by secret societies’, or by a group of initiates who operate from behind the scenes. It is an analogue of ‘theocracy’, or rule by a priesthood. Schwaller de Lubicz was a fervent Synarchist, which is why he admired ancient Egypt so much, ruled as it was by divine kings and priesthoods. One of his books was entitled Le roi de la théocratie pharaonique (The King of the Pharaonic Theocracy).

The founder of Synarchy, a Frenchman named Joseph Alexandre Saint-Yves d‘Alveydre (1824-1909), explained that the term was the opposite of anarchy. Whereas anarchy is based on the principle that the state should have no control over individuals, Synarchy proposes that it should have complete control. He proposed that Synarchists achieve power by taking over the three key institutions of social control: political, religious and economic. With its own members in positions of power, the Synarchists would, in effect, secretly govern entire states. And why stop there? One of the aims of Synarchy, from its very inception, was — from the words of a Synarchist document — the creation of a ‘federal European Union’.²³ Is it any coincidence that we are now moving rapidly towards such a European state? Significantly, those words were written as far back as 1946. Interestingly, several commentators discern a sudden burst of activity by Synarchists in France in 1922, soon after Schwaller de Lubicz disbanded Les Veilleurs with the instruction to carry his ideology into their particular spheres of influence.

The Synarchists were a real threat in at least the first two decades of the twentieth century, influencing the rise of fascism, which, by and large, accords very well with their aims, although they had problems with the fanatical nationalism of Nazi Germany. The Synarchist movement was especially active in France, where it had close associations with right-wing terrorist groups such as the Cagoule (composed of army officers) and its civilian counterpart, the CSAR (Comité Secret d’Action Revolutionnaire), which was active in the 1930s. Many members of the CSAR were also members of Synarchist orders.²⁴

As might be expected from a movement dedicated to governing by secret societies, Synarchy had close ties with some of the most powerful of such organisations, including the Martinist Order, of which Saint-Yves d‘Alveydre was Grand Master. As the French writer Gérard Galtier states: ‘The synarchic ideal influenced all the Martinists and occultists of the beginning of the century.’²⁵ Not unexpectedly, Synarchists were also members of French Masonic Lodges, and their ranks included former disciples of Schwaller de Lubicz, including Vivien Postel du Mas (who wrote a document called The Synarchist Pact — effectively its manifesto — in the 1930s²⁶) and Rudolf Hess.

Synarchy is by definition a shadowy group lurking behind many uprisings and revolutions, and whose jealous gaze is automatically fixed on any stable regime or established government unless it already conforms to their ideals. Schwaller de Lubicz’s serial domiciles coincided with successful changes of government in his previous country of residence: not only was he a Synarchist in word but also in deed, truly a prime mover in the events that shaped his epoch. Indeed, history may one day come to admit, albeit reluctantly, that he was one of the major political influences of the twentieth century.

There is another aspect to Synarchy. The concept of nine legendary leaders plays a large part in its philosophy. They derived this from the fusing of two legends. One was a tale brought from India and popularised by a French diplomat and travel writer, Louis Jacolliot (1837 — 90), which told of the Nine Unknown Men, a secret group said to have been formed by Asoka, the third-century BCE Buddhist emperor of India, to secretly rule the world.²⁷ The other tradition was that of the Knights Templar, founded by nine French knights shortly after the First Crusade. The Templars were believed by Saint-Yves d’Alveydre to have represented the supreme expression of Synarchy in the medieval world, because they had almost total political, religious and financial control during the two centuries of their existence yet remained at heart a secret, heretical order whose real agenda was known only to its membership.²⁸

In nineteenth-century France several secret societies all claimed to be the true descendants of the medieval Knights Templar. Saint-Yves drew upon their ideals and practices for his movement, especially those of certain types of occult Freemasonry known as the Strict Templar Observance and its successor, the Rectified Scottish Rite, thus bestowing on the primarily political movement a strong undercurrent of mysticism and magical rites.²⁹ This proved to be a two-way traffic, for the Synarchist ideal was adopted by several occultists and their organisations, such as Papus (Gérard Encausse, 1865-1916), an enormously influential figure who was the French Grand Master of both the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) and the Masonic Order of Memphis-Misraïm, whose rituals, significantly, were based on the rites and ceremonies of the ancient Egyptian priesthood. Papus considered Saint-Yves to be his ‘intellectual Master’.³⁰ As Gérard Galtier wrote: ‘Without doubt, the Martinist directors such as Papus ... had the ambition to secretly influence the course of political events, notably by the diffusion of synarchic ideals.’³¹

Papus put the Synarchist ideals into practice by working to bring together the various secret societies of his day, merging orders where possible and creating ‘confederations’ where representatives of the organisations could meet. The bodies he created fragmented during the First World War, but others, notably Theodore Reuss and H. Spencer Lewis, created similar groups afterwards.³²

Undoubtedly, Saint-Yves was hugely influential on the development of Western occultism. Theo Paijmans, an authority on nineteenth-century European esotericism, pointed out to us that Saint-Yves introduced the seminal idea of Agartha, the mysterious underground realm from which highly evolved Adepts psychically direct the development of the human race.³³ This was to become a common feature of Western occultism — as in the works of Madame H.P. Blavatsky — and was the basis for a belief in Hidden Masters, or Secret Chiefs, which we will discuss shortly. Saint-Yves claimed that he had travelled astrally to Agartha, and that he was in telepathic contact with its inhabitants. He also claimed that he had derived his Synarchist ideology from them.

Saint-Yves, Synarchist supreme, held a deeply mystical view of the evolution of civilisation, believing in the existence of an advanced ancient science and technology, as well as Atlantis. Saint-Yves believed that the Great Sphinx of Giza was built before the emergence of the Egyptian civilisation by visitors from Atlantis.³⁴ He explained that, as the Atlanteans were red-skinned, this was the reason the Sphinx was originally painted red (as classical authors asserted, and which seems likely, judging from the small traces of red colouring that have been found on it). Saint-Yves writes that the Atlantean civilisation existed between 18,000 and 12,000 BCE — exactly the same dates given for Altea/Atlantis by James Hurtak in The Keys of Enoch.³⁵ Significantly, a central concept in Saint-Yves’s mystical writings is that of the Holy Light, otherwise known as Aor,³⁶ the name taken by Schwaller de Lubicz.

Saint-Yves, in his idiosyncratic reconstruction of history, describes a great Celtic warrior called Ram who conquered the ‘degenerate’ black races in 7700 BCE. According to Saint-Yves, it was Ram, the superhero, who created the first Synarchist Empire, which extended from Europe to India.³⁷ Curiously, in a discussion about far distant events, Edgar Cayce said: ‘[This was] some... years before the entry of Ram into India.’³⁸ This uniquely Synarchist character could only have found his way — as a historical fact - into Edgar Cayce’s writings via Saint-Yves, who invented Ram and all his works.

Clear links lie between the godfather of the New Egyptology — Schwaller de Lubicz — and mystical Synarchist movements that encompass a belief in Atlantis and Nine mysterious figures who seek to rule the world. The twentieth-century legacy of today’s ‘Nine’ is even more colourful, and involves one of the most flamboyant and controversial figures of our times - the ritual magician Aleister Crowley.

A few days later, in the Cairo Museum, Rose — who had never visited it before - confidently led her husband through the halls to stand before one particular exhibit, a rather unremarkable Twenty-Sixth-Dynasty painted wooden stele showing an Egyptian priest standing before Horus in his form of Ra-Hoor-Khuit (a variation of Ra-Horakhti, who is closely associated with the Sphinx). This has been known ever since in the occult world as the Stele of Revealing. Crowley was impressed by the synchronicity of the exhibit’s number — 666, the number of the Great Beast of Revelation, which also happened to be Crowley’s own proud alter ego, thanks to an overliteral interpretation of the Bible by his religious-maniac mother. (When we saw the stele in April 1998, we were amused to note that, although it is now exhibit 9422, the original 1904 label, bearing the number 666 in a beautiful but faded copperplate hand, has been laid beside it in the display case. Could there be Crowleyite sympathisers on the staff of the Cairo Museum?)

This led Crowley, somewhat reluctantly, to take his wife’s words seriously. He duly carried out the magickal ritual - now known simply as the Cairo Working — which turned out to be a pivotal moment not only in his own bizarre career, but also in the whole history of modern occultism. As a result of this working, he came into contact with an entity called Aiwass (sometimes, for magickal reasons, spelt Aiwaz) who, over the course of three days — 8-10 April 1904 — ‘dictated’ to Crowley what has become his ‘gospel’, The Book of the Law. It has been said that, without this book, it is unlikely that Crowley would have achieved his present lofty status among the new fin de siècle occultists. As his biographer and literary executor John Symonds writes, somewhat mischievously: ‘Without the Law of Thelema [which is embodied in the Book], he would just have been a minor magician like Éliphas Lévi or MacGregor Mathers.’⁴⁰

The purpose of the Book and the task for which Crowley had been chosen was the announcement of the advent of the Aeon of Horus, a new age that succeeded the Aeon of Osiris, when patriarchal religions based on dying and rising gods, such as Christianity, held sway. That, in turn, had succeeded the much longer era of Isis, when goddess-based spirituality was predominant (and when, if many modern anthropologists are right, the whole notion of paternity was far from being understood or accepted).

Clearly, the ushering in of a new aeon — of Horus, the Child — is no minor task, perhaps especially when the wild and difficult characteristics of children are taken into consideration. Whereas the features of motherhood and fatherhood are, by and large, relatively easy to recognise, those of newborns and youngsters are more fluid and elusive. Children are spontaneous, excitable, inquisitive and consumed by the excitement of living in the here and now, but they are also volatile and contradictory, capable of emotional excess. Their spontaneity can be exhilarating, but once the moment has past one is left facing a future for which no provision has been made. If there is such a thing as the Aeon of the Child, then those of us who live in the era of its birth should realise that we are in for a very bumpy ride.

Another characteristic of children is the natural psychic ability that seems to come as part of the human ‘package’, only to fall away dramatically as the reality consensus — the shared, unspoken belief that the paranormal is only good for science fiction and ghost stories but has no basis in fact — begins to corrode their heightened sensitivity. As parapsychologist Dr Ernesto Spinelli has demonstrated, the younger the child the more psychic he or she is. It is as if children really do come into the world ‘trailing clouds of glory’, as William Wordsworth so memorably put it, retaining memories of another realm in which the power of the mind holds sway. Paranormal abilities are a double-edged sword, however. The psychic aspect of the new Age of Horus is potentially worrying, for Crowley said that The Book of the Law effectively opened up communications with ‘discarnate intelligences’ and that: ‘I have opened up communication with one such intelligence; or, rather, have been selected by him to receive the first message from a new order of beings.’⁴¹

Crowley was a bombast, who rejoiced in notoriety and whose descriptions of his many magickal workings were suspiciously colourful. One of his favourite, quasi-Wildean, aphorisms was ‘Always tell the truth, but lead so improbable a life that no one will ever believe you’. But was Crowley telling the truth about opening up communication with ‘a new order of beings’? Even if he believed it himself, had it really happened?

Crowley certainly came to believe that his spirit communicator Aiwass was one of the Secret Chiefs, a group of discarnate entities who directed the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn - a highly respected magickal order of which he was a member, and that this contact with Aiwass bestowed authority on him over its membership. According to the leading authority on Crowley, Kenneth Grant, Aiwass was ‘an occult intelligence of incalculable power’.⁴²

The notion of Secret Chiefs or Hidden Masters ran throughout nineteenth-century occultism, and is generally understood to be a convenient device whereby the leaders of various orders assumed authority by alleging they had received it from a higher source to which they alone had access, including the Unknown Superiors of some of the Neo-Templar groups of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Hidden Masters of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s highly influential movement of Theosophy and Saint-Yves’s Masters of Agartha. Often, as in Blavatsky’s case, the Hidden Masters were said to be spiritually advanced human beings who lived in remote parts of the world, such as the mountain fastnesses of Tibet. (Interestingly, the Secret Chiefs of the Golden Dawn appeared astrally as hawks,⁴³ reminding us of Saul Paul Sirag and Ray Stanford’s experience with Spectra.)

Despite the potential for acclaim in his contact with Aiwass and The Book of the Law, Crowley had a great aversion to both. He came to believe that Aiwass was merely a manifestation arising from the depths of his own subconscious mind, and said: ‘I was setting my whole strength against the Secret Chiefs. I was trying to forget the whole business.’⁴⁴

But Crowley was not allowed to forget it. Bizarre synchronicities and weird phenomena continually pushed The Book of the Law under his nose, together with a series of unexplained setbacks in his career. Only when he returned to promoting the Book did the obstacles melt away, so reluctantly he came to accept that he had no option but to do the Secret Chiefs’ bidding.

Crowley’s subsequent career centres around two magical orders, the Ordo Templi Orientis (Order of the Oriental Templars, or OTO) — now somewhat notorious for its sexual rituals — and the less well-known Argenteum Astrum, or A∴A∴ (‘Silver Star’). This was the Third Order of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Only the highest initiates were admitted, and they were believed to be in direct contact with the Secret Chiefs. The Golden Dawn itself fragmented around 1900, largely because of a power struggle between Crowley himself and the head of the Order, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854 — 1918), but the A∴A∴ survived independently under Crowley’s control. The ‘Silver Star’ of the order’s name is Sirius, which holds a central place in its magickal philosophy, because the Secret Chiefs - the discarnate entities believed to govern the order — were somehow connected with Sirius. This would have extraordinary influence in shaping the prehistory of the Nine.

The OTO also resulted in the coming together of certain influential bedfellows. Founded in 1895 by the Austrian Karl Kellner, it was taken over after his death in 1905 by Theodore Reuss, after which it expanded rapidly. Crowley joined in 1911, and Reuss began to incorporate the teachings of The Book of the Law into the OTO’s rituals. When Reuss died in 1922, he nominated Crowley as his successor, but many German members refused to accept him as their leader, leading to a bitter schism and a decline in Germany even before its termination by the Nazis. With either extraordinary foresight or remarkable happenchance, Crowley moved to California, mecca of the weird and wonderful, and was so successful in building up the membership that, in the words of Francis King, ‘for the next ten years [until Crowley’s death in 1947] California was the main centre of OTO activity’.⁴⁵

In California the OTO and the A∴A∴ underwent significant developments. As they both fell under Crowley’s influence, they were closely interlinked, but the OTO always attracted more attention because of its emphasis on sex magick (Crowley always insisted on the ‘k’). We believe that this was a deliberate move by him and his followers to keep the focus away from the A∴A∴, which was in fact the more important of the two orders.

Under the powerful influence of Charles Stansfeld Jones, the idea of Crowley’s guides being extraterrestrial rapidly took hold in California. One of the initiates of Jones’s Vancouver lodge, Wilfred T. Smith, established an OTO lodge in Pasadena, California in 1930. Their temple on Mount Palomar subsequently became the site of the Mount Palomar Observatory, which was involved in George Adamski’s controversial ‘classic’ UFO contact story in the 1950s.

Like Paris in the 1890s, in the postwar years California was a veritable hotbed of occult beliefs and practices. The great melting pot of humanity drawn into it also included the rocket scientist John (Jack) Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard, later the founder of the Church of Scientology.

Parsons, who has a crater on the Moon named after him, was a pioneer in developing rocket fuels. He and his wife Helen joined the Californian OTO in 1939, and he soon rose through the ranks, becoming head of the branch in 1944, being described by some as Crowley’s successor. In 1949 he spoke of ‘crossing the Abyss’ - a term meaning entering the A∴A∴ — and described himself as Master of the Temple (the first of the three grades of the A∴A∴).⁴⁸ At the same time, during the Second World War, he was working on classified military projects, developing prototype rockets. In 1944 the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was established in Pasadena as a development of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, for which he had worked during the war, and he was one of its early members. (Ironically, JPL now controls space probes such as those sent to Mars.) Parsons died on 18 June 1952 in an explosion in his laboratory, although it is still a matter of debate as to whether it was an accident or suicide. It may be that dark forces had a hand in his death. As Grant says:

Obviously, contact with nonhuman intelligences can turn very nasty. It is not enough to communicate with them. They must be controlled, or kept in their place, which has not happened with the Nine, who are virtually worshipped by their followers. Perhaps the suicide of Don Elkins — and the near-suicide of Bobby Home — were only too similar to the fiery death of occultist Jack Parsons.

Parsons was one of those curiously common individuals who may excel in pioneering scientific work or be involved in intelligence operations, but who is, at the same time, also deeply committed to occult beliefs and practices. Crowley himself was repeatedly accused of working for various intelligence agencies, and it seems that was the case (what is less easy to ascertain is whose side he was on). Hard-headed scientist Jack Parsons was one of those who believed most passionately in an extraterrestrial element in Crowley’s magick. When the flying saucer craze began in 1947, Parsons stated that the discs would, in some way, help to convert the world to Crowley’s magickal religion.⁵⁰ As things turned out, he would have a hand in helping to create quite another belief system. Parsons met L. Ron Hubbard in August 1945 and introduced him to the OTO, after which the two collaborated in magickal rituals together, although Hubbard would later claim that he only joined the order as part of an infiltration exercise by the Office of Naval Intelligence.⁵¹ Even if true, this would be very telling about the intimate association of occult groups and intelligence agencies at that time.

Hubbard had been an admirer of Crowley since coming across a copy of The Book of the Law in the Library of Congress as a teenager. Whatever may be claimed for his past associations by his followers now - after all, few contemporary public figures care to be known as former friends of Aleister Crowley — in a lecture in Philadelphia in 1952 Hubbard referred to the ‘Great Beast’ as ‘my very good friend’.⁵²

Although it is easy to understand the appeal of magick to someone like Hubbard, who was naturally a mystic at heart, the involvement of a rocket scientist like Parsons is harder to comprehend. Yet this is by no means a unique combination. Many of the most influential occultists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were fascinated by technology. One of the few to research this neglected field is Theo Paijmans, who has written about the work of John Worrell Keely, whose ideas about sonic technology have been seized upon recently as possible explanations of how the pyramids were built,⁵³ although it was actually Madame Blavatsky who first made the link.⁵⁴ A striking — and very relevant — example is the fact that the reading list for new members of the Argenteum Astrum included The Fourth Dimension by C. Howard Hinton.⁵⁵ Published in 1904, this was one of the earliest works to deal with the subject of higher dimensions and their possible visible manifestations in our three-dimensional world. This was the direct forerunner of ideas that Richard Hoagland invokes in his Message of Cydonia. Initiates of Crowley’s magickal order were required to familiarise themselves with this work, because it dealt with hyperdimensionality, which even today is considered a highly abstruse and specialised field of science and mathematics.

The magickal philosophy of the Argenteum Astrum, derived from The Book of the Law, has many striking parallels to that of another group of alleged extraterrestrial intelligences, the Nine. The A∴A∴’s doctrines centre on Sirius, which is regarded as a source of great magical power: Aiwass was, in effect, an emissary from Sirius. In the A∴ A∴’s system of magickal correspondences, the number of Sirius is nine.⁵⁶ Crowley stressed that Mars was going to be of supreme importance in the coming Aeon of Horus, because of that deity’s association with Mars. Obviously, the onset of the Aeon of Horus is connected with the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. In the A∴ A∴’s system the ‘influence’ of Aquarius is transmitted to Earth through the planet Saturn⁵⁷ and in the Ra communications through Carla Rueckert, the Council of Nine explicitly connected themselves with that planet. Perhaps more significantly, James Hurtak teaches that Saturn plays an important role in balancing the forces in our solar system and that the pyramids of Mars are directly influenced by that planet.⁵⁸ Clearly, the Nine are a more modem manifestation of Aleister Crowley’s magickal system.

In the revised 1998 edition of The Sirius Mystery, Robert Temple explains how he came to write the book.⁵⁹ His attention was first drawn to the Dogon’s mysterious knowledge of Sirius B by Arthur M. Young, his mentor when he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1960s. In 1966, at the age of twenty-one, Temple became secretary of Young’s Foundation for the Study of Consciousness, presumably also aware that Young had been one of those present at the ‘first contact’ of the Council of Nine in 1952.

Young first mentioned the mystery surrounding the Dogon and Sirius to Temple in 1965. Two years later, having moved to London, Temple decided to follow up the story, and wrote to Young for details, receiving the translation of Griaule and Dieterlen’s Le renard pâle that was later stolen by the CIA, with the injunction ‘Don’t get me into it’⁶⁰ and an explanation about how he had first heard about it from a character called Harry Smith, who had given him the translation.

Best known as a surrealist film-maker and artist, Harry Smith (1929 — 1991) was also a keen experimenter with hallucinogenic drugs, although he had a huge range of diverse interests. It was his character that fascinated all who met him. Eccentric, undisciplined, non-materialistic and mystical, he was the ideal guru. What is not widely known is that he was also a committed member of the OTO. As another member of the order, Jim Wasserman, said of him:

Born in 1929 in Oregon of Theosophist parents, and with a high-ranking Freemason as a grandfather, Smith studied anthropology at the University of Washington between 1941 and 1943. He moved to California in 1945, where he took what was to be his only regular job, as an office clerk. Thereafter he devoted himself to art, film-making, musicology and esoteric studies, surviving on grants and handouts from friends and followers for the rest of his life. He also received grants from Arthur M. Young. In the early 1950s he lived among the Kiowa in Oklahoma, studying their shamanistic rituals, involving the hallucinogen peyote.

Smith became a hero of the Beat generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. (In the last years of his life he was supported financially by the rock band The Grateful Dead.) Among his achievements was the compilation of early American folk recordings, the Folkways anthology, which became an enormous influence on artists such as Bob Dylan, who acknowledged his debt to the collection and recorded several songs from it. Smith received a Grammy award for his contribution to popular music in 1991.

Once again, this overt success with the counterculture of the 1960s was only half the story. The innocuous-sounding Harry Smith was also a member of both the American Crowleyite orders, the OTO and the A∴ A∴, and profoundly involved with esoteric subjects. He was a keen student of the Hermetica, in particular the writings of the great Renaissance occult philosopher Giordano Bruno. He spent sixteen years creating a magickal system to integrate Bruno’s work with the doctrines of the OTO and the Enochian magic of the Elizabethan magus, Dr John Dee. This is serious magick; modern adepts advise that Enochian workings must not be undertaken light-heartedly or by the ill prepared, as their sheer power can backfire, causing many mental and spiritual problems. (Curiously Smith’s notoriously haphazard lifestyle was completely at odds with the discipline required for such ‘High Magick’, which is characterised by months of preparation, intense focus and physical and mental privations.) But as usual, it was his membership of the OTO that attracted the most attention. Smith was a devoted follower of Crowley, helping republish some of his works, and designing a tarot pack still used by the OTO. He claimed to be Crowley’s son; although the Beast’s lifestyle virtually guaranteed the existence of illegitimate offspring, it is unlikely that Smith was actually one of that exclusive band. Both men liked to weave elaborate myths about themselves and pass them off as fact.

Significantly, the man who introduced Smith to both the OTO and the A∴A∴ in 1940s California was Charles Stansfeld Jones,⁶² who, as we have seen, was extraordinarily influential in the life of Jack Parsons. It is very likely that Smith and Parsons knew each other. Parsons was head of the Californian OTO at the time and, like Parsons, Smith was a Master of the Temple of the A∴A∴.

Smith studied widely in the fields of mysticism and esotericism, but always acknowledged that his beliefs remained rooted in Crowley’s works.⁶³ Through all the vicissitudes of his remarkably eclectic career, he remained a staunch member of both the A∴A∴ and the OTO until his death in 1991. The OTO even performed a ceremony at his memorial service at St Mark’s Church in New York, which must have been something of a surprise for the Christian authorities.⁶⁴

The complex web of our investigation can now be seen to lead back to strangely few people and groups, some of whom — such as prime mover Aleister Crowley and the future founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard — have been linked with intelligence agencies. And both, in their own way, have also been connected with mind control. At the heart of this web was the occult order of the A∴ A∴, which nestled inconspicuously in the shadow of the more colourful OTO, yet which has had the most extraordinary effect, not just on our dramatis personae, but also through them, on many of the key events of the twentieth century.

The A∴ A∴ emphasised the importance of Sirius - the order was obliquely named after it - and believed in non-human intelligences, which, in postwar California, came to be seen as extraterrestrials. These are the key themes of Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, the inspiration for which, we now know, came ultimately from a member of the A∴ A∴, via someone who was involved with the Council of Nine. This cannot be a coincidence. It is also significant that, in the 1998 edition of his book, Temple has developed his original ideas to include the notion that the ‘space gods’ of the Dogon, the Nommo, did not return to the Sirius system after their civilising mission to Earth, but placed themselves in suspended animation in our solar system to return to check on our progress on their awakening. Temple hints that this time may not be far away, arguing that the spaceship containing the sleeping Nommo is orbiting Saturn.⁶⁵ But why did Temple choose Saturn, of all places in the solar system, as the place where his space gods are hibernating? Perhaps an answer lies in the fact that Saturn was of great importance to both Crowley and the Nine.

Madame Blavatsky has been described as ‘the most influential single figure of the nineteenth-century occult revival’.⁶⁷ Born in Russia (née Hahn), Madame Blavatsky soon revealed her characteristic appetite for food, magic and adventure, and the stories of her early life rival those of Aleister Crowley in their rakish and not always credible glamour. She finally settled in the United States in 1873, where she became a spiritualist medium, particularly good - one suspects - at either sleight of hand or, more charitably, at creating phenomena by artefact induction. However, mere table tilting was soon left behind, for she claimed to have made psychic contact with the Hidden Masters, or Great White Brotherhood, a group of adepts who secretly guided the human race from Tibet (derived from Saint-Yves d‘Alveydre’s Adepts of Agartha and the forerunners of the Secret Chiefs of the Golden Dawn). In a protracted torrent of words, she dashed out life’s works Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), which revealed, according to her followers, an extremely erudite synthesis of Western occult traditions and Eastern mystical religions. (According to her many critics, however, the books are garbled hotch-potches.) Her doctrines blended concepts of karma with the legend of Atlantis and the idea of ‘root races’, of which ours, the ‘Aryan’, is the fifth, the immediate successor to the Atlantean. There are two more root races to come. These ideas were a profound inspiration for the Nazis, and through Karl Haushofer (who, with Rudolf Hess, helped Hitler to write Mein Kampf) shaped their concept of Aryan supremacy and the ‘master race’.

Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in 1875, providing many future leading lights of the esoteric world with the basis of their ideology, including, as we have seen, Schwaller de Lubicz, whose early career as a French Theosophist influenced his later development of Les Veilleurs.

It is the work of Alice Bailey with which the Nine are most impressed. Born in Manchester in England in 1880 as Alice La Trobe-Bateman, she had a strange experience at the age of fifteen that was to shape the whole of her life. One Sunday afternoon, a man dressed in Western clothes but wearing a turban came into her home and announced that she had been chosen for some great task that lay in the future.⁶⁸ She emigrated with her first husband to the United States, they divorced, then she discovered the then relatively new Theosophical Society, which she joined in 1918. This was to prove a momentous decision on her part. She married Foster Bailey, a prominent American Theosophist, in 1919. He was to have a profound effect on the development of her ideology, not least because he was also a high-ranking Freemason.

In 1915, while reading Madame Blavatsky’s work, Bailey had a revelation: suddenly she knew the identity of her mysterious visitor of twenty years before. He was none other than the Master Koot Hoomi, the personal guide of Madame Blavatsky. Here, by implication, was her task: the continuation of the work of the founder of Theosophy.

In 1919 she made psychic contact with another of the Masters, a Tibetan called Djwhal Khul (often referred to simply as ‘The Tibetan’ or the ‘Master DK’). Through Bailey, the Tibetan dictated a series of twenty-four books of esoteric teaching, expanding Blavatsky’s doctrines into a system that included beings from other worlds who guide the evolution of the human race. They do this through a group of adepts called the Hierarchy of Brothers of Light (or simply, the Hierarchy), based in the Gobi Desert. Significantly, the Hierarchy is also sometimes referred to as the ‘Great Council’. Alice Bailey wrote of them in her Initiation, Human and Solar (1922): ‘[They are] the Group of spiritual beings on the inner planes of the solar system who are intelligent forces of nature, and who control the evolutionary processes.’⁶⁹ Most significant, however, is the fact that much of Bailey’s teaching is identical to James Hurtak’s in The Keys of Enoch, and also echoes the work of Edgar Cayce.

The key to Bailey’s esoteric philosophy was the concept of The Seven Rays, spiritual emanations from the ‘Seven Planes of the Solar System’. Interestingly, as we have seen, Dorothy Martin, the contactee from Chicago, called her mystical organisation — cofounded with the Laugheads — “The Abbey of the Seven Rays’. And the concept of the sacred number seven features prominently in the philosophy of Arthur M. Young, who derived his idea of seven levels of material existence from the notable Theosophist A.P. Sinnett’s channelled The Mahatma Letters.⁷⁰

The Tibetan’s teachings centre on the coming ‘New Age, the Age of Aquarius’, for which the Hierarchy are preparing humanity. This process will be, he says, in three phases: the first was between 1875 and 1890, which was activated through Madame Blavatsky; the second 1919 (the Tibetan’s first contact with Alice Bailey) to 1949 (her death); and the third and final phase was to begin in 1975 and last until 2025. Early in the twenty-first century a great initiate, the World Teacher, is to appear, resulting in the emergence of a new root race. This is, of course, remarkably similar to the teachings of Edgar Cayce concerning the opening of the Hall of Records at Giza, which he claimed would usher in a New Age, the return of the ‘Great Initiate’ and the beginnings of a new race. The words of the Hierarchy after 1975 were to be transmitted to the world through the medium of radio.

Bailey’s personal mission was to ‘prepare the world on a large scale for the coming of the World Teacher, and to take the necessary steps before They Themselves [the Hierarchy] come out among men, as many of them surely will towards the end of this century’.⁷¹ The similarity with the message of the Nine is glaringly obvious, but it grows even stronger. Part of Bailey’s work, as instructed by the Tibetan, was to set up a series of disciples to be known, for self-evident reasons, as the Groups of Nine, each group having specific roles such as healers, political organisers or educators of the New Age.⁷² There were to be nine such groups, with a tenth — also made up of nine initiates - to coordinate their work in the now-familiar pattern of nine plus one. Unfortunately, the process of setting up the Groups of Nine was interrupted by a curiously unforeseen circumstance - the Second World War.

The emphasis on nine as the ‘number of power’ is, of course, significant. When the ‘Nine Principles’ first made contact via Dr Vinod, it was to a group of nine sitters assembled by Puharich. (The doctor himself always tried to surround himself with groups made up of eight others, such as the ‘nucleus’ of followers at Lab Nine in Ossining, made up of nine people on Tom’s instruction.) Sir John R. Sinclair, in a 1984 book about Alice Bailey, finds the similarities between her stress on the significance of groups of nine and Schwaller de Lubicz’s Nine Principles remarkable, illustrating these similarities by quoting from that bastion of the New Egyptology, John Anthony West, in his Serpent in the Sky.⁷³

But there are other significant connections: Bailey and Puharich’s communications reveal striking similarities that go much further, well beyond the realms of coincidence. The Masters in Bailey’s system, although led by a being called the Lord of the World, who comes from a higher realm, are spiritually evolved human beings who have been ‘promoted’ to the Hierarchy, and who have been incarnated as the great names of religion and esotericism, such as the ‘Master Jesus’. The Tibetan often used just their initials: the two Masters with leading roles in preparing the world for the final phase are known as the Master R and the Master M.⁷⁴ The representatives of the Nine who spoke through Dr Vinod called themselves ‘R’ and ‘M’.⁷⁵

Does this suggest independent confirmation of contact with real beings through different people? Or have the more recent communications simply been deliberately shaped to fit the predictions of the Tibetan? Philip Coppens drew our attention to a lecture given by Puharich in Upland, California on 6 November 1982, in which he summarised his work and how it had developed. He admitted that his early experiments at the Round Table Foundation were inspired by reading the works of Alice Bailey⁷⁶ — and this was before his work with Dr Vinod. At the very least, this proves that Puharich was already aware of the Tibetan’s teachings before his first contact with the Nine.

Another significant aspect of Bailey’s work was the importance attached to Sirius. The star has a central role in Theosophical doctrines, where it is described as a kind of energy centre - likened to a cosmic equivalent of the human ‘third eye’ - with a powerful effect on our own solar system.⁷⁷ In Bailey’s view, it similarly channels energy, from the ‘cosmic centre’ through our solar system to Earth. Although there are many such influences, it is Sirius that is by far the most powerful and important. In her book Initiation, Human and Solar, she describes a series of ‘paths’ taken by initiates as they develop spiritually. One of them is called the Path of Sirius, but as this is the most secret little is said openly about it. As she said:

The Tibetan, communicating through Alice Bailey, also makes another major connection — with the secret teachings of Freemasonry. According to the Tibetan, Freemasonry is a terrestrial version of an initiatory school that exists on Sirius, and that the various hierarchical degrees of Freemasonry are parallels, or analogues, of the different levels of initiation that an adept must go through in order to enter ‘the greater Lodge on Sirius’. The Tibetan claimed that the Masons have a very ancient connection with Sirius:

Such statements can, of course, be taken with more than a pinch of salt, but they may help to explain the frequent involvement of Freemasons in the events of this investigation, including those surrounding the Giza and Mars conspiracies. And Alice Bailey herself was no stranger to direct Masonic influence - her second husband, Foster Bailey, was not only a leading light of the Theosophical Society and a devotee of his wife’s channelled teachings, but also a prominent Freemason. His book The Spirit of Masonry (1957) stated his intention ‘to bring to the Craft certain inner meanings of our Order’, based on the Tibetan’s teachings.⁸² He also lectured on the subject to his brothers (who were members of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, the dominant form of American Freemasonry) and wrote that Freemasonry was a remnant of the ‘primeval religion’ that had once been common to the whole world, citing the pyramids of Egypt and South America as ‘witnesses’ of this ancient world religion.⁸³ (The idea of a common wisdom tradition in the ancient world is, of course, a major feature of Graham Hancock’s increasingly fervent message, with its strong suggestion that the religion of old has some significance for our immediate future. This concept also underpins the largely Masonic belief in the coming New World Order.)

This is a truly explosive mixture. On the one hand the hugely seminal channelled teachings of Alice Bailey appear to have been influenced by the Masonic beliefs of her husband, but on the other it seems that, through Foster Bailey, the American Masons themselves were influenced by Alice Bailey’s teachings, at least where Sirius was concerned. The result is a hybrid, based both on tradition and ‘revealed’ material, each in its way, perhaps, just as open to question. Could Foster Bailey have made sure that his brother Masons espoused his wife’s channelled teachings about the ‘Siriun’ origins of Freemasonry as their own? Could this also be the reason why Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery attracted so much interest from American Freemasons? And Henry Wallace, one-time Vice-President of the United States and sponsor of Andrija Puharich, was a high-ranking - and passionately committed - Freemason and Theosophist, just like Foster Bailey himself.

Masons themselves may well claim that they knew about Sirius before Foster Bailey began to promote it. The American writer Robert Anton Wilson records that one of his many contacts from secret and esoteric societies both in the United States and Europe told him that the secret of the 33rd Degree - the highest rank in American Freemasonry - was that the Craft was in contact with intelligent beings from Sirius.⁸⁴ Wilson himself pours scorn on this, but in any case, only other 33rd degree Masons will know whether or not it is true. Sirius does feature largely in Masonic lore, though, since every lodge room is decorated with a symbol called the Blazing Star, considered by Masonic authorities to represent Sirius.⁸⁵

The great nineteenth-century American Freemason, Albert Pike, records a Masonic legend that specifically links the number nine to a stellar tradition connected with Sirius. This tells of the ‘Nine Elect’, the apprentice Masons who sought to avenge the death of their Master, Hiram Abiff, tracking one of his murderers to a certain cave. The Nine Elect are symbolised by the sequential rising of nine bright stars, including those of Orion’s Belt, which precedes the rising of Sirius.⁸⁶ (The Elect of Nine is the 9th degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite.)

What at first appears to be the Tibetan’s curious notion that Freemasonry is some kind of extraterrestrial institution is also found in other ‘inspired’ writings - this time those of H.C. Randall-Stevens, who way back in the 1920s wrote of secret chambers beneath the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid. Like Alice Bailey, he did not need to be in a trance to communicate with his guide, but simply took dictation from a voice in his head. The first of these dictation sessions happened on 9 February 1925, and they continued every night for several weeks, with little to show for it - just a page or so at a time. The communications always took place at, or around, nine o’clock in the evening. (Dr Vinod’s first contact with the Nine began at 9pm precisely.)

Randall-Stevens had two discarnate communicators, Adolemy (previously incarnated as Moses) and Oneferu. Between them, they described Giza as a ‘Pyramidal Masonic centre’ and talked of ‘Cosmic Masonry’, explaining: ‘The emigrants from Atlantis were people governed by the laws of Cosmic Freemasonry and those who landed in Egypt built centres of Masonic Initiation from which the country was administered.’⁸⁷

In the 1950s Randall-Stevens established a group called the Knights Templars of Aquarius on the instructions of his guides. (It still exists, with its headquarters in the Channel Islands.) From his own words it seems that the communications finally moved on to trance mediumship, as in 1956 they were tape recorded. In The Wisdom of the Soul (1956) he writes:

Although there are many similarities between Randall-Stevens’s and Alice Bailey’s received wisdom, there are differences too, and Randall-Stevens’ communicators, like the Council of Nine, also make elementary mistakes. For example, they refer to the Sphinx as ‘that great granite image’,⁸⁹ but of course it is made entirely of limestone.

As with many of the threads in this investigation, once again we find ourselves looking towards James Hurtak. The Keys of Enoch draws on many ideas from the same esoteric milieu encompassing Crowley, Blavatsky, Schwaller de Lubicz and Alice Bailey. Hurtak, Blavatsky and Bailey all term the ultimate authority in the universe the Great White Brotherhood, although Hurtak has upgraded their domicile from somewhere in Tibet to somewhere in the galaxy. But, like Bailey, Hurtak refers to them as the ‘Hierarchy’. And surely it is no coincidence that Hurtak’s The Keys of Enoch gives precisely the same dates for the duration of Atlantis - 18,000-12,000 BCE - as Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, the founder of Synarchy. Whatever else The Keys of Enoch might be, it is notably well versed in the work of other esoteric authors, particularly those of the late nineteenth century.

Stoddard discussed Saint-Yves’s Synarchist objectives, specif ically the control of the three key pillars of society, political, religious and economic institutions. She pointed out that this seemed to be happening in the religious sphere. Unlike the days when Christianity was the only sanctioned religion in the West, there were many different belief systems, making this area harder to control. To reverse this trend, the religions must first be unified, not by trying to supplant them, but by absorbing their main elements and effectively creating a new global religion. The best way of achieving this goal would be for some authoritative and charismatic leader to take control by explaining that God or the gods have, over the course of history, revealed certain truths to different people, which manifested as apparently disparate religions. But they all emanated from the same God. All that was needed was an understanding of the fundamental principles and the higher levels of spirituality to which mankind may now aspire. Tellingly, Stoddard gave as the prime example of this Synarchist synthesis the doctrines of Alice A. Bailey.⁹⁰

The Trail of the Serpent describes a recent rivalry between Reuben Swinburne Clymer and H. Spencer Lewis, who both claimed to be the legitimate head of American Rosicrucianism. Clymer (a 32nd degree Mason), claimed that he had been given his authority by no less a person than the social reformer Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825 — 75) - a friend of Abraham Lincoln - whom the European Rosicrucians had authorised to take the Order to America in 1852, many years before H. Spencer Lewis founded AMORC. The resulting dispute led to Clymer taking the matter to court, which found in his favour and accepted his registration of the title ‘Rosicrucian’ in 1935.

Clymer claimed that the doctrines of his society, the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, were endorsed by a secret order that directed it from France - called the Council of Nine. He published a letter from them in 1932, which proclaimed:

Many of the nineteenth-century writings of Dr Paschal Beverly Randolph, Clymer’s mentor, contain such precise parallels with the later Nine material and the teachings of Alice Bailey’s Tibetan that they stretch coincidence far beyond breaking point. Randolph believed that throughout history a series of initiatory orders has existed which is controlled by higher spiritual beings known as the Great White Brotherhood, and Clymer claimed that the Grand Master of his order was directly accountable to them.⁹⁴ More important is the fact that Randolph used the name ‘the Hierarchy’ to describe these higher spiritual beings⁹⁵ - the same term used by Bailey, Hurtak, Puharich and Whitmore. And besides believing that a Council of Nine directs certain esoteric schools from France, Randolph writes of a Council of Twenty-Four ⁹⁶, which also appears in Hurtak’s The Keys of Enoch. Interestingly, Randolph believed that ‘spiritual beings from other planets’ often visit Earth.⁹⁷

With distinctly synarchist overtones, Clymer described the Hierarchy as ‘guardians of the world’s religions’⁹⁸ (which is surely very odd, as many of them are exclusivist and teach intolerance — and worse - towards the others. One wonders what game plan these guardians really have in mind.)

Apart from his Rosicrucian Order, Clymer set up several interconnected esoteric organisations, including the Secret Schools and a mystical brotherhood known as the Priesthood after the Order of Melchizedek. He claimed that the latter was already well established in France, and that its secrets originated in a manuscript handed down from the Paris Temple - in other words, from the Knights Templar.⁹⁹

In his ground-breaking 1979 book, Messengers of Deception, Jacques Vallée describes his investigations into an occult group called the Order of Melchizedek. He first encountered them in Paris, becoming interested in their fusion of ‘traditional’ esoteric ideas with a belief in extraterrestrial contact. When he returned to his adopted home in San Francisco, Vallée was surprised to find that the same group was operating right on his own doorstep in California. He soon realised that the Order of Melchizedek has many such branches throughout the world.

In April 1976 he met James Hurtak, who was appearing with Andrija Puharich on a San Francisco television programme. In conversation afterwards, Hurtak described his experience of having The Keys of Enoch beamed into him in 1973. He then invited Vallée ‘to join a new psychic group designed to change the destinies of the world by occult means’.¹⁰⁰ This group was known, Hurtak explained, as the Sons of Light of the Order of Melchizedek. But Vallée was no fool, having had his suspicions honed over decades of researching UFO contactee stories. He writes:

And who is this Melchizedek? Also spelled Melchisedec, he appears in Genesis 14:18 — 20 as the priest-king of Salem who blessed Abraham. Later, Paul speaks of the ‘Order of Melchisedec’ in somewhat mysterious terms in his Epistle to the Hebrews (Chapters 5 — 7): it appears to have been a special order of priests distinct from the Levites, which has fired imaginations ever since. Like other Biblical characters such as Enoch, who are clearly important but about whom little information is given, the ‘Order of Melchisedec’ is fertile ground for speculation. As a result the name turns up, almost as a cliché, in many of the more unconventional Christian systems. It is the name of the senior priesthood of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or Mormons, to which all male members aspire after their earlier membership of the ‘Aaronic’ priesthood. Confusingly, however, several esoteric — and Christian fundamentalist — groups all call themselves the Order of Melchizedek. For example, there is a small Order in Applegate, California, which has existed since 1889.¹⁰²

The Order with which Vallée associates Hurtak has a particularly interesting agenda. Their literature reveals that, to them, Melchizedek has exactly the same role as Alice Bailey’s Lord of the World, that of a higher being who descended to Earth in the ‘Lemurian epoch’, guiding the spiritual evolution of the human race. His Order is endowed with a somewhat grandiose — if rather sinister-sounding - goal. As Hurtak writes in The Keys of Enoch:

What Hurtak is attempting to do matches the Synarchist interpretation of the works of Alice Bailey given by Christina Stoddard. We have already seen how The Keys of Enoch outlines a system that incorporates all the major religions of the Western world as well as New Age beliefs. Christianity, Judaism and even Mormonism, fashionable Eastern religions and indigenous beliefs (such as those of the Native Americans): Hurtak’s theology embraces them with equal fervour. He also claims to explain the ‘message’ that lies behind them all.

The Order of the Solar Temple was closely connected with another group, the confusingly similarly named Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple, founded at the chateau of Arginy, in the Beaujolais region of France, on 12 June 1952.¹⁰⁴ One individual who was instrumental in this event was the alchemist Eugène Canseliet, who was previously a member of the Brotherhood of Heliopolis with Schwaller de Lubicz.¹⁰⁵ The Sovereign Order soon made inroads into high society, being officially recognised by Prince Rainier III of Monaco, although its relationship with his family was much more intimate: his wife, the legendary Princess Grace, was actually a member.¹⁰⁶

The exact relationship between the Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple and the more notorious Order of the Solar Temple, which was created around 1980, is hotly disputed. Was it an offshoot, a breakaway group, or the result of a merger between the Sovereign Order and some other neo- Templar society? Perhaps the truth will remain elusive because the Sovereign Order has since been keen to play down its connections with its notorious cousin. But some relationship exists, as several leaders of the Order of the Solar Temple had once been members of the Sovereign Order, and perhaps even continued to be ... More fundamentally, the doctrines of both orders were identical.

The ‘manifesto’ of the Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple, entitled Pourquoi le resurgence de l’Ordre du Temple? (Why the Revival of the Order of the Temple?), published under the pseudonym ‘Peronnik’ in Monte Carlo in 1975, talks of the existence of a planet called Heliopolis, which orbits Sirius. The leaders of both Orders believed that they were in contact with the inhabitants of this planet. ‘Peronnik’ explains:

The Orders’ doctrines also emphasise the importance of the secret priesthood of Melchizedek: the man himself being an emissary of Heliopolis/Sirius, who returned to his home planet when his mission was completed.¹⁰⁸ The Sovereign Order’s book explicitly proclaims them as a Synarchist organisation, thereby linking them directly to the ideology of Schwaller de Lubicz.¹⁰⁹

Significantly, the reason for the alleged suicide of the sixty-nine cult members was that they believed their souls would return ‘home’ to the Sirius system. Documents posted to the media on 5 October 1994 by the leaders of the cult include the statement: ‘The Great White Lodge of Sirius has decreed the Recall of the last authentic Bearers of an Ancestral Wisdom.‘¹¹⁰ Although they have put their own idiosyncratic - not to say perverted - twist on the idea, it clearly derives from the works of Alice Bailey, who explicitly uses the term ‘Great White Lodge’ in the context of Sirius. And, of course, the Solar Temple stressed the importance of the Great Pyramid, which, they claim, will be the focus for some momentous event in the next few years.

However, disappointingly, what really emerges from The Lion Path is a passive process, a series of meditation exercises, described in superficial and simplistic New Age speak, to be carried out at astrologically significant times, with the objective of enabling the practitioner to ‘tune in’ to higher intelligences in the universe — specifically those in the Sirius system.

To follow the Lion Path, one simply has to meditate in the correct way at specific times, tuning in to astrological forces (using a completely reinvented astrology that includes two as yet undiscovered planets in our solar system, as well as Sirius A and B). The final force, the object of the Lion Path, is Sirius. When contact with Sirius is achieved, the practitioner will have achieved personal transformation, though Musaios fails to say exactly what will happen as a result. The clear implication is that some form of communication will have been established with the beings from Sirius. Musaios writes:

The passivity of the exercises is, in itself, a direct contradiction of the principles on which the Lion Path claims to be based. The journey in the Pyramid Texts is essentially an active process, in which the individual is directly responsible for the outcome. It is not a passive state in which they simply allow outside forces to direct them.

The Lion Path includes an illustration of a ‘divine eye’ with a hieroglyph which, the caption tells us, means ‘Lord of the Nine’. This must be the Great Ennead. Why does Musaios specifically use the term ‘the Nine’?

The ultimate aim of the Lion Path is, we are told, the formation of a ‘liaison group’ of humans with the intelligences on Sirius. As Musaios wrote in 1985:

The intention appears to be the creation of a group of people who have done the spiritual exercises of the Lion Path and successfully achieved contact with Sirius. Then they will rule - or at least speak for - the world.

Musaios sums up the objective of the Lion Path with this quote from the Book of the Dead: ‘Now I speak with a voice and accents to which they listen and my language is that of the star Sinus.’¹¹⁴ (It should be pointed out that this is Musaios’ own translation of this passage. R.O. Faulkner’s rendition is: ‘I have spoken as a goose until the gods have heard my voice, and I have made repetition for Sothis.’¹¹⁵)

Attempts to contact beings from Sirius are not, by now, unfamiliar to this investigation. Not only do the Council of Nine claim that their chosen followers on Earth are conduits for Siriun communications, but Alice Bailey also wrote of the Path of Sirius as being the highest aspiration a seeker could have. But what is Musaios’s intention with his Lion Path? And who is the man behind the pseudonym?

It is not difficult to discover his true identity. ‘Musaios’ is none other than Dr Charles Muses, the internationally renowned mathematician and cyberneticist. We know, not just from suspicions arising from the way Musaios frequently references Musès’s work, and indeed vice versa, but also - significantly - from the fact that John Anthony West reveals the identity of the two in Serpent in the Sky when discussing The Lion Path.¹¹⁶

Undoubtedly, Musès is one of the most erudite and brilliant thinkers of today. A highly respected mathematician, inventor of the complex theory of “hypemumbers‘, Muses’s work, in the words of his biography, ‘span[s] problems on the complex interfaces between sociology, biology, psychology, philosophy, and mathematics. ’¹¹⁷ He has also written extensively on mythology. Muses is also famed as a neural cyberneticist: tellingly, however, in the early 1960s he worked with Warren S. McCulloch,¹¹⁸ who was Andrija Puharich’s mentor in his early work on electronic implants, such as tooth radios and the like. Curiously, Musès’s master work, entitled Destiny and Control in Human Systems came out the same year that his pseudonymous The Lion Path was published, yet the contrast between the two is, at first, inexplicably extreme. On the one hand, his masterwork is scholarly and erudite, revealing an immense breadth of learning, and providing astonishingly astute insights, yet on the other he produces what many of his academic admirers would dismiss as quaint and — frankly — almost mindless New Age pap. What on earth was Musès up to?

Perhaps it is significant that he was also one of the pioneers of the idea of extraterrestrial visitations in mankind’s early history. In the late 1950s, he undertook a study of certain Babylonian legends, reaching the same conclusions as Robert Temple in The Sirius Mystery: that they were actually accounts of visitations by amphibious aliens.¹¹⁹ Temple never mentions Musès’s work, which is curious because they were both close to the same hugely influential man: Arthur M. Young. Musès was the editor of the journal of Young’s Institute for the Study of Consciousness, and also co-edited a book with Young. Temple - as we have seen - was Young’s protégé, and briefly secretary of the Foundation For the Study of Consciousness.

If nothing else, the Musaios story reveals that some of the finest minds in the world are being co-opted, or volunteering themselves, into a network of people willing to contact beings from Sirius. Yet do people such as Muses — and indeed, James Hurtak — really believe that such things are possible? And can they really find no better representatives for our home planet Earth than ‘flaky’ New Age channellers?

We conclude that the Council of Nine’s communications have definite antecedents in the occult and mystical milieu of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the Council of Nine material of today is strikingly similar to its earlier manifestations, and this is obviously not coincidental. For example:

Underpinning the apparently disparate systems of Schwaller de Lubicz, Crowley and Bailey was an unquestioning acceptance of Madame Blavatsky’s basic principles, such as the idea of ‘root races’. Essentially they were Theosophist in background and fundamental belief, no matter how different their own developed systems may appear to be.

The initial contact with the Council of Nine at the Round Table Foundation in 1952 — 3 seems to draw the main sets of communications together into one coherent scheme. But how do we explain these connections? Basically, there are two options:

Neither solution is entirely satisfactory. There certainly seems to have been an element — to say the least — of manipulation on the part of Puharich, yet he himself appears to have genuinely believed in the possibility of such communications.

Another important factor in the postwar communications is the evident involvement of official government agencies such as the Pentagon and intelligence organisations like the CIA. We have seen their hand in the Round Table Foundation in the 1950s and in the events surrounding Lab Nine, as well as extending their influence into, and shaping, the daring new thinking of the 1970s.

Since that time, the Nine’s communications seem to have become more driven and purposeful, with a clearer agenda, linking their message to Cydonia and the mysteries of Egypt. And through works such as Hurtak’s The Keys of Enoch, the Nine are now reaching a considerably wider audience. Their message may not stand up to scrutiny, but few people know about their background - or their mistakes. Their impact, as a whole, is increasingly significant.

One scenario does make sense: the phenomenon of the prewar communications emerged spontaneously. Claims of contact with non-human entities were nothing new, but what was different was: (1) improved methods of communication that made it easy to spread the word and for connections to be made (books by Blavatsky, Crowley, Bailey, Cayce and Randall-Stevens were circulating in Europe and the United States simultaneously); (2) all of these contacts carry essentially the same message of coming global change, even if it is expressed in different terms — Crowley’s New Aeon of Horus, Bailey’s New Age, Cayce’s ‘return of the Great Initiate’, Randall-Stevens’s Age of Aquarius. This was a new phenomenon. Whereas, for example, the rise of spiritualism in the mid-nineteenth century had popularised the idea of communication with discamate beings, it had never been associated with any sense of impending upheaval.

It is easy to imagine that when this new trend in entity communication came to official notice, government agencies would have wanted to know what was going on. The corridors of power would have buzzed with urgent questions: Are the communications real? Will the prophesied changes actually take place? Is contact possible with nonhuman, extraterrestrial, beings, even with the old ‘gods’ themselves? Possibly as part of the new interest in psychological warfare and psychic abilities after the Second World War, the US government — through various outlets - seemed to focus attention specifically on the subject of communication with entities from the 1940s onwards. This might not have been official policy. All it needed was some individuals in the military and intelligence community to take the idea of contact seriously. If it was real, it could prove very useful.

It is a mistake to think that the military mind is inevitably coldly pragmatic. General Patton, for example, was a fervent believer in reincarnation, and Britain’s Air Marshal Dowding was a top spiritualist who believed himself to be in touch with dead airmen. By reaching Freemasons, Alice Bailey’s (or rather, the Tibetan’s) ideas also had a hotline to the movers and shakers of American society. It is hard to get much nearer to the top of the tree than the Vice-President, and Vice-President Henry Wallace was steeped in esoteric and mystical ideas. But the political and military mind is conditioned for expediency: its over-riding concern is to use anything and everything to further its goals or cause. If they were interested in contact with aliens, it would be to answer one question only: how can we turn it to our own advantage?

So if ‘they’ began to treat the idea of contact with other intelligences seriously, what would be the next step? It would seem logical to carry out experiments, which is precisely what Puharich’s Round Table Foundation did. In fact, there is no doubt about this: Terry Milner’s research shows that the Foundation was a front for the military to carry out psychological and medical experiments in the background of the public arena. Again, Henry Wallace’s involvement in funding the Foundation is significant. Puharich’s parapsychological experiments at Glen Cove centred specifically on people who, like Eileen Garrett, claimed communication with some kind of entity. This explains why Puharich first took Vinod there — and for whom he was working.

There is another highly significant factor in an assessment of the role of Puharich. It appears that he was actively seeking contact or, more precisely, seeking to observe and experiment with other people who made contact. This is important because the ‘prewar’ channellers seemed to fall into the practice spontaneously. They never sought it. Even the great magician Crowley was taken aback by the appearance of the entity called Aiwass.

What did these experiments demonstrate? What did Puharich conclude from them? Were the communications real, or delusions?

Once a phenomenon has been identified, it is then used. The change of direction in the Nine’s communications at the beginning of the 1970s, and the development of more distinct overtones in their message, occurred once they had established themselves and could start to spread their propaganda. But just what are the Council of Nine and their message being used for? Why are so many prominent leaders in so many fields keen to promote them, with greater or lesser degrees of openness, as in the case of Richard Hoagland and his Message of Cydonia?

There is, in our view, an over-riding need for caution here. Alarm bells may be heard clear and strong, for true or false, now the Nine have become the property of the intelligence agencies, it is wise to be vigilant — and perhaps even afraid.