Keys of This Blood (88 page)

In the prescientific, pre-Enlightenment world, before Francis Bacon “rang the bell that called the wits together,” around 1600, that mastery involved, among other things, what is popularly but erroneously called “cabalistic” methods of alchemy—the effort to change the elemental nature of substances, mainly metals. In fact, the dedicated humanist cabalists were always seeking what was called the Philosopher's Stone—a mineral that, by its merest touch, could transmute base metals such as lead into gold.

However, behind all that—behind the cabalists' search for a secret knowledge of the forces of nature, and behind the myth of the Philosopher's Stone—lay the yearning to regenerate the world, to eliminate the base or evil forces, and to transmute them into the gold of a peace-filled and prosperous human society.

Initiates of those early humanist associations were devotees of the Great Force—the Great Architect of the Cosmos—which they represented under the form of the Sacred Tetragrammaton, YHWH, the Jewish symbol for the name of the divinity that was not to be pronounced by mortal lips. They borrowed other symbols—the Pyramid and the All-Seeing Eye—mainly from Egyptian sources.

On such bases as these, the new associations claimed to be the authentic bearers of an ancient tradition that bypassed normative rabbinic Judaism and Christianity alike; a tradition from which both of those religions had sprung but which the cabalists insisted was purer and truer than either of them.

How far these occultist associations might have progressed and what their influence might have been in different historical circumstances must remain an open question. For, as it was, the humanist movement that produced such occult societies found fertile soil among dissidents beyond the Alps. As far as historical researches have gone, it would seem that through the entire swath of Central Europe—from the Alps right up through Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Germany and Scandinavia—there ran the same discontent with the established order, and the same tendency to throw over the dogmas of the Roman papacy in favor of a “more primitive” and, therefore, more faithful interpretation of the Bible events.

Without a doubt, the new secret associations were ready vehicles of that discontent. Over time, in fact, and through an unpredictable series of mergers and mutations, the offspring of these early-Renaissance humanist associations developed into a potent international religious and
sociopolitical force that would determine a whole new set of European alliances, and the fate of nations—including the dismal fate that awaited Poland.

For one thing, as they spread northward beyond the Alps, they found adherents among already existing dissident groups such as the Moravian Brethren of Hussite origin, the Unitarians and the neo-Arians. There was no doubt that revolt was building. As that climate intensified, the northward spread and acceptance of the occultist humanists meshed chronologically and most importantly with the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation in the early 1500s.

As we now know, some of the chief architects of the Reformation—Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Johannes Reuchlin, Jan Amos Komensky—belonged to occult societies. And both Fausto and Lelio Sozzini, the Italian anti-Trinitarian theologians, found patronage, funds and a supporting network outside their native Italy. Socinianism, which takes its name from the two Sozzinis, was in fact well received among the brothers of the occult up north in Switzerland, Poland and Germany.

In other northern climes, meanwhile, a far more important union took place, with the humanists. A union that no one could have expected.

In the 1300s, during the time that the cabalist-humanist associations were beginning to find their bearings, there already existed—particularly in England, Scotland and France—medieval guilds of men who worked with ax, chisel and mallet in freestone. Freemasons by trade, and God-fearing in their religion, these were men who fitted perfectly into the hierarchic order of things on which their world rested. In the words of one ancient English
Book of Charges
, medieval freemasons were required “princypally to loue god and holy chyrche & alle halowis [all saints].”

Freemasons were quite separate from other stoneworkers—from hard hewers, marblers, alabasterers, cowans, raw masons and bricklayers. Freemasons were wage earners who lived a life of mobility and of a certain privilege. They were traveling artisans who moved to the site where they would ply their skills, setting up temporary quarters for their lodging, rest and recreation, and for communal discussions of their trade.

As specialists employed by rich and influential patrons, these artisans of freestone had professional secrets, which they ringed around with guild rules—the “Old Charges” of English and Scottish freemason guilds. That being the case, their lodging, or lodge, was off limits to all but accredited freemasons.

To foil intruders, they developed a sign among themselves—what English freemasons called the “'Word” but which might also be a phrase or
a sign of the hand—by which to recognize a member who enjoyed the privileges of entry and participation in their lodge.

No one alive in the 1300s could have predicted a merger of minds between freemason guilds and the Italian humanists. The traditional faith of the one, and the ideological hostility to both tradition and faith of the other, should have made the two groups about as likely to mix as oil and water.

In the latter half of the 1500s, however, there was a change in the type of man recruited for the freemason guilds. As the number of working, or “operative,” freemasons diminished progressively, they were replaced by what were called Accepted Masons—gentlemen of leisure, aristocrats, even members of royal families—who lifted ax, chisel and mallet only in the ultrasecret symbolic ceremonies of the lodge, still guarded by the “Charges” and the “Mason Word.” The “speculative” mason was born.

The new Masonry shifted away from all allegiance to Roman ecclesiastical Christianity. And again, as for the Italian occultist humanists, the secrecy guaranteed by the tradition of the Lodge was essential in the circumstances.

The two groups had more in common than secrecy, however. From the writings and records of speculative Masonry, it is clear that the central religious tenet became a belief in the Great Architect of the Universe—a figure familiar by now from the influence of Italian humanists, a figure that cannot be identified with the transcendent God who chose the Jewish race as a special people or with the transcendent God of Christian revelation incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth. Rather, the Great Architect was immanent to and essentially a part of the material cosmos, a product of the “enlightened” mind.

There was no conceptual basis by which such a belief could be reconciled with Christianity. For precluded were all such ideas as sin, Hell for punishment and Heaven for reward, an eternally perpetual Sacrifice of the Mass, saints and angels, priest and pope. Indeed, the whole concept of an ecclesiastical organization charged with propagating that Christianity, like the concept of an infallible religious leadership personalized in a pope wielding the irresistible Keys of Petrine authority, was considered to be false and antihuman.

In the inevitable rivalry that would develop between the Catholic and Protestant powers of Europe, the Roman papacy—still a temporal power well into the 1600s—would logically if unwisely take sides, even as the Lodge would associate itself with the Protestant elements involved in burgeoning struggle.

In the midst of all this gathering ferment stood Poland, still foursquare and vibrant in the strategic heart of Central Europe, and still foursquare
in its fealty to the Holy See of Rome as declared in the Piast Pact. For well over five centuries, as hereditary monarchy, then as constitutional monarchy and as Unitary Republic, Poland had been the bulwark of Roman Christianity, and the one military force that halted the onrush of the Ottoman Turks.

However, even before her third and final victory under Jan Sobieski, over the Turks at Vienna in 1683, Poland's geopolitical position in Europe had been radically altered by the Protestant Reformation launched over 150 years earlier, in 1517, by Martin Luther. In fact, whatever else it was intended or proved to be, in geopolitical terms the Protestant Reformation was a mega-earthquake. By the time of Sobieski's 1683 triumph over the Turks, Poland was practically surrounded and certainly menaced by a newly Protestant world: Prussia, Sweden, Saxony, Denmark, Transylvania (Protestant Hungary). The enmity of those countries for Poland was shared by other emergent powers in Europe—notably England and Holland, both Protestant nations by then.

In calm retrospect, it seems beyond the shadow of any doubt that one major contributing factor in the demise of the First Polish Republic was the influence—mainly among the Protestant enemies of Poland, but eventually, and to an important degree, within Poland as well—of the now humanist Freemasons.

In the era of Accepted Masonry, membership in the Lodge spread throughout the governing and academic classes in Protestant countries. The great universities of Europe in Germany, Austria, France, Holland and England, as well as the scientific establishments, all provided recruits to the Lodge. European Masonry became, in fact, primarily an organization of aristocrats, large landowners and realtors, bankers and brokers. Princes of the royal blood joined the Lodge in important numbers—George IV of England, Oscar II and Gustav V of Sweden, Frederick the Great of Germany, Christian X of Denmark, to name but a few.

The aim of the cabalist humanists had always been sociopolitical change. But with such a membership as it attracted, European Masonry wanted no social revolution. The main aim of European Freemasons was political: to ensure the balance of power in Europe for England, Prussia, Holland and Scandinavia.

The nub of the matter was, however, that any strategic reckoning of these countries, which had been newly reborn as Protestant powers, had to envisage the removal of the First Polish Republic, if their dream of the great northern Protestant alliance was ever to take flesh.

In the 1500s, Poland's eyes for culture, learning, art, thought and
philosophy were on Paris. Its sabers were directed to the nascent duchy of Moscow in the east, and to the European Ottoman power to the south. Its heart remained fixed on Rome. Within its own borders, it was a federation of five or six ethnic groups within a republic based on constitutional freedom of religion and worship, which fostered Catholicism, lived at peace with the Protestants in its midst, and provided Jews with legal, religious and civil autonomy in a homeland away from their homeland. The country had become militarily strong, economically prosperous, politically mature, culturally advanced.

Most important for the dream of the northern Protestant alliance, however, was that in two respects Poland remained what it had always been.

Geopolitically, it was still the strategic
plaque tournante
of Central Europe. Out of Europe's total population of 97 million, only France, with a population of 15.5 million, exceeded Poland's 11.5 million. Poland's borders ran from the river Oder, in the west, to 200 kilometers beyond the riverine land of the Dnieper, in the east; and from the Baltic Sea in the north to the river Dniester in the south.

Religiously, meanwhile, Poland was still thoroughly Romanist and papal in its heart, its mind and its allegiance.

As a people, as a unitary nation and as a strategic linchpin, Poland therefore was the one major power standing in the way of a Northern European hegemony for the Protestant powers.

The basic plan for the final liquidation of the Polish Republic began as early as the latter half of the 1500s, as a strictly military undertaking. First, it seems to have taken the form of a classic and unremitting pincers movement: the Ottoman Turks attacking from the south, the Swedes from the north and the war flotilla of Protestant Holland acting in coordination with the Turkish and Swedish attacks by harassing Polish beachheads in the Baltic.

Sweden's Gustavus II Adolphus had an added impetus for his involvement in this effort against Poland. As a brilliant strategist, he surely appreciated the importance of liquidating Poland for the sake of establishing the desired Protestant hegemony. But in a world where royal bloodlines crossed every border and were part of every international initiative, whether friendly or hostile, he had his own dynastic quarrel—an ill-fated one for him, as it turned out—with Poland's King Zygmunt II, who was in fact King of Sweden from 1597 to 1604.

Bloody as they were, these early efforts against Poland came to ruin
with the Turkish defeat of 1571 at the naval battle of Lepanto, the second Turkish defeat, at the hands of the Poles, in 1621, and the sudden death of Gustavus II Adolphus in battle, in 1632.

When war alone failed to achieve the aim of the Protestant powers to deliver Poland's territory into the hands of the Protestant allies and eliminate her from the scene as a power, the effort shifted toward a carving up of the territory of the First Republic on the apparently legitimate score of dynastic succession.

While there is no doubt at all that constant wars weakened Poland seriously, it was this “diplomatic” effort—long and complex and with many players involved—that was to prove Poland's undoing. And into the bargain, finally it would set a new pattern for international dealings that would reach well into the twentieth century.

Among the many and complex factors in this new assault on Poland were the wide-ranging plans of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of the English Republic from 1653 to 1658. Cromwell's foreign policy aimed at a weakening of imperial Spain and at the creation of a grand Protestant alliance between England, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and a Holland freed from Spanish domination.

A second, closely related factor was perhaps the oldest of the secret associations that arose in Germany in the 1600s: the Order of the Palm. The order recruited its members in Germany, Scandinavia and Ottoman Turkey; all three had long since understood that the presence of Poland constituted the gravest obstacle to their mercantile and trading plans. The historical researches of the Polish scholar Jan Konapczynski have rightly pointed to the importance of Cromwell's attempted cooperation with the Order of the Palm. But with or without Cromwell, by the closing years of the 1600s, the order concerned itself seriously with the choice of who would become Poland's elected king.