Chapter 3:

Conspiracies

Although the general public and the scientific investigators of unexplained phenomena started showing a major interest in conspiracy theories only after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, conspiracies have been a major theme in occult literature for centuries.

Many of these stories are merely warnings about conspiracies to persecute occultists, or answers to accusations that occult organizations have conspired to overthrow religious and political establishments; but the ones that interested me are much more positive in tone.

They're the sort of thing that I read and hope is true, such as the rumors about secret societies of high-level "Masters" who conspire to use their advanced knowledge and formidable psychic powers for benign causes, especially the advancement of human civilization in every area: spiritual, cultural, political, and technological.

I felt instinctively from an early age that such positive conspiracies have in fact existed at various times during the past five or six centuries and have been significant in building our modern society.

One of my major goals for a long time was to find such a group, if any had survived to the present, both to learn whatever they would teach me and to help them with what they were doing. In a sense, I found it when I made my breakthrough, but it wasn't a conspiracy of living people at all.

However, it's still worthwhile to tell of my efforts to trace down the source of the rumors about benign conspiracies of advanced occultists who contribute to the progress of Western civilization.

One of the chief focal points for such rumors is the Masonic Order of the eighteenth century, so that's where I'll begin. Detailed histories of some of these lodges and relatively complete descriptions of their doctrines are now in general circulation. They're supposed to be secret, but they really never have been - see William Heckethorn's Secret Societies of all Ages and Countries, first published in 1875 and available in many public libraries.

However, there's very little in these books to help researchers find hidden occult conspiracies within the secret societies.

For example, many historians admit that a large number of the men who made major breakthroughs in many different fields during the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment - Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and dozens of others - belonged to such lodges.

And one of the modern Rosicrucian groups acts as if this is proof that the lodges had access to important occult knowledge:

"What secret did these men possess?"

Actually, it's just as proper to answer with another question:

"With men of that caliber in them, what need did the lodges have of secret occult knowledge to make an impact on the course of history?"

Studying the basic philosophical and ethical teachings of the eighteenth century Freemasons and Rosicrucians doesn't directly reveal the existence of a secret occult conspiracy either.

There is no doubt that ideas like "consent of the governed" and "inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property" and "the only God we can know is Reason" were widely discussed and taught within the lodges, and considered extremely radical; but there was nothing really new or secret about them even then.

They had been published and openly discussed by intellectuals for centuries, and the only unique thing about the Age of Enlightenment is that these theoretical concepts finally began to be put into practice on a large enough scale to affect the evolution of human society.

Also, the "secret" histories of the Masonic lodges reveal that they have always been very similar to what they are today: social organizations devoted to mutual aid among members, charitable works in the community, and a philosophy most of us would call "Basic American values."

The members underwent initiations into various "degrees" and regularly attended quasi-religious rituals, but the histories make it clear that most lodge brothers considered them mere dramas to stir the emotions and create a mood.

The exact details of these rituals are virtually the only things about such lodges that aren't readily available to the public.

However, some members of modern occult groups that trace their descent back to certain Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges have put important elements of these traditional rituals into their writings for the general public. The writings of Aleister Crowley and the other Golden Dawn members are the best-known examples. And when one studies these rituals, evidence to support the existence of an occult conspiracy finally begins to emerge.

Many of them are directly derived from the rituals of advanced medieval occultism, and there's no doubt that performing them puts the participants in profoundly altered states of consciousness.

The OTO (Order of Eastern Templars) and other modern occult groups that use these rituals are among the most advanced magical lodges in existence. (And yes, some people in these groups have very bad reputations for misusing magic. But this reflects only on their morals, not on their knowledge or skills.)

The fact that advanced magical techniques were used in the rituals without being openly explained to all of the members is evidence that the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges may have been front organizations for a "secret society within a secret society", which manipulated the other members for its own purposes.

Many occultists have postulated the existence of such a group, and named it the "Invisible College."

According to this theory, the Invisible College was a group of men with advanced knowledge of medieval occultism, derived from the Knights Templar or other secret societies of the late Middle Ages.

They infiltrated Freemasonry and the Rosicrucians around the beginning of the eighteenth century. Once they had assumed leadership, they started teaching the rational, humanistic doctrine that most people today associate with Masonry, which is also the political and ethical philosophy that forms the basis for modern Western civilization.

The Invisible College designed rituals (based on medieval occultism) that would have a hypnotic effect on the initiates so their resistance to the radical doctrine would be lowered. The emotional power of the rituals also positively reinforced acceptance of the doctrine. The term "operant conditioning" wasn't added to the vocabulary of science until the Twentieth century, but occultists have practiced the technique for hundreds of years.

And it worked very well, resulting in the birth of modern political democracy and liberalism, the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution, the rapid advancement of Science, and the decline of Puritanism and other forms of Fundamentalist Christianity that opposed material progress.

This particular conspiracy was large enough and effective enough to leave obvious traces in history, but it's much more difficult to trace the operations of similar conspiracies since. Most of the modern books labeled as "conspiracy theories" have been of little use to me in finding occult conspiracies, because they deal only with politics and economics on a completely materialistic level.

However, certain well-known mundane conspiracy theories have elements within them that do interest me. An example is the body of rumors about the "Bavarian Illuminati" that received a lot of publicity during the McCarthy-era controversy over Communist conspiracies back in the Fifties.

The rumors I'm talking about were published quite openly by members of the "lunatic fringe" of the anti-Communist movement, and some of them had the same "too wild to be untrue" quality as the Shaver Mystery did. They seemed to show a glimpse into another reality, as if the authors, like Shaver, were receiving messages from the spirit world that their conscious minds were totally incapable of interpreting.

For example, some of their accusations against the "Illuminati" made no sense at all back in the Fifties when the rumors were published, but when I reread this material in the Seventies and early Eighties, I found that several of their charges had been amazingly prophetic.

For example, these particular propagandists had joined the crusade against the fluoridation of public water supplies by claiming that it was part of a wider Illuminati plot to put "drugs and chemicals that weaken the will" into food and water all over America so that people would become more vulnerable to Communist brainwashing.

Even the majority within the anti-fluoridation movement - who merely considered fluoridation of water supplies a potential health hazard and a violation of individual rights by the government - thought the charges about "will destroying drugs and chemicals" were totally paranoid. However, when I reread them years later, I suspected that the authors might have had psychic forewarnings about the massive impact of mind-altering drugs on society that started in the Sixties.

And I'm not talking only about recreational drug use or LSD as an aid to consciousness-expansion here, but about something much more fundamental: the use of massive doses of powerful tranquilizers on people in prisons and mental hospitals, the frequent use of milder tranquilizers and sedatives by a large part of the population, the ever-increasing use of cocaine and amphetamines, etc.

Some of the other rumors started by these same "right-wing kooks" didn't make any sense until after I had made my breakthrough and started writing this book. One of them was that the conspiracies they were trying to expose were a set of Chinese Boxes.

On the outer layer were the majority of Americans, who were being brainwashed with false promises of peace and plenty from liberal politicians. The liberals themselves were being duped by Communist agents. Chief among these agents were Josef Stalin and his successors in the Kremlin, but they were not really sovereign over the "world-wide Communist conspiracy."

Most of their foreign propaganda and subversion was financed by cliques of Jewish bankers and other wealthy capitalists whose leaders were all members of the Bavarian Illuminati. And at the very center, the Illuminati themselves were accused of being under the control of the "Snake People," who were either "aliens from outer space," or "demons of Satan sent from Hell."

The strangest thing about this scenario is that it makes perfect sense if interpreted in terms of some of the information in Part Two of this book.

Before I made the breakthrough, I wasn't able to understand what was behind these weird writings; I just felt the authors had received information from "somewhere else." And this information seemed to support the idea that a mysterious conspiracy was doing things the conservatives and reactionaries didn't like. The most interesting thing about it was that telepathy seemed to be involved, which would imply a conspiracy of psychics.

There are some ideas almost as wild in Morning of the Magicians (1960), by Louis Pouwells and Jacques Bergier. Among many other things, the book gives evidence that a number of German Nazi leaders were involved with occultism and various pseudo-scientific belief systems closely related to it. Some of this material led me to conclude that the government of Axis Germany may have been infiltrated and manipulated by the same sort of occultists who worked through the old Masonic lodges.

Most occultists are reluctant to consider speculation of this kind, because they jump to the conclusion that if "Secret Masters" manipulated the Nazis, they must have done so to help them. Since it's natural to reject the idea that anyone with really advanced occult knowledge and psychic powers could be sympathetic to men as evil as Hitler and his followers, they usually conclude that Nazi occultism was on a rather low level.

After closely studying the available evidence, I came to a somewhat different conclusion. I found reason to believe that something similar to the old "Invisible College" influenced both sides in World War II, and that this manipulation was intended to ensure an Allied victory.

Since many of the Nazi leaders had been involved with occult organizations from an early age, I concluded that the Invisible College probably had started out trying to control this movement and use it to rebuild Germany after World War I. They obviously failed, though I wasn't sure why.

To explain evidence like this, many occultists and conspiracy researchers have postulated that there are two opposing factions of secret manipulators that contend for control of human society. Before I made the breakthrough, I found this concept of "the forces of good versus the forces of evil" too simplistic and unsophisticated to accept very easily, even though I kept discovering evidence to support it.

One thing is certain about World War II: whether or not high-level occult conspiracies were involved in such strategic events as the rise of the Nazis to power, occultism and psychic activities had a major impact on the course of the war.

History records quite clearly that Hitler and other Nazi leaders believed in occultism enough to listen to advice from psychics, and that much of it was harmful to the Axis cause. For example, Hitler's psychic advisors told him to stop trying to develop an atomic bomb.

They also encouraged him to invade the Soviet Union.

There is also evidence that Allied leaders received and acted on advice from psychics over the course of World War II, but this does not mean that people like Roosevelt and Churchill believed in occultism in quite the same way that some of the German leaders did.

In many cases, professional psychics passed useful military information to people in the regular Allied intelligence community who then passed it up the chain of command along with information gathered by conventional means.

If this was all there was to the evidence, there would be no reason to conclude that an important, high-level occult conspiracy was involved. Once it is assumed that psychic powers like telepathy exist, it's logical to make the further assumption that psychically talented individuals are going to use their powers to help whichever side they support in a war. In this context, it makes perfect sense that psychics who were reasonably ethical people would give bad advice to the Nazis and good advice to the Allies.

However, now that World War II is long over and most of the major figures involved are dead, some extremely interesting evidence has started to surface.

A number of the intelligence agents and low-ranking military officers who passed psychic advice to the Allied leaders are starting to admit that they lied when they said they got the information from professional occultists. That was just a cover story to deceive their colleagues in the intelligence community, who knew they couldn't have gotten such material through their usual sources of information.

How did these people really get the information? No one told it to them: they got it through psychic experiences of their own, and in many cases never had a similar experience before or since. Some of the stories they're now telling occult researchers are simply incredible unless you know something about mediumship. If you do, they're quite familiar.

Many of them describe getting information from the ghost of a dead comrade, usually in a dream or while falling asleep. Others heard it on the radio: the station the person was listening to would fade out, and the signal that replaced it would convey a few sentences of useful intelligence information. Hundreds of such accounts have now been reported.

I'll admit there's no hard evidence to prove most of them true, but they still impressed me, because they appear to be descriptions of mediumistic experiences by people who lack the knowledge to fake such a thing.

In addition to this, some of the conspiracy evidence I encountered through my own personal experience mystified and frightened me even more.

The Kennedy assassination fits into that category. If my only source of information about it had been the facts available in newspapers and history books, I would have assumed President Kennedy had been murdered for mundane political reasons, such as his liberal stand on civil rights, his equivocal handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion, his declaration of a "war on organized crime", or one of his other controversial policies.

However, I had some psychic experiences in 1962 and 1963 that strongly indicated that spiritual conspiracies were involved in the assassination.

I started having these experiences in late 1962. I would be in a trance state trying to read somebody's mind or contact spirits, and I'd get extremely hateful and threatening feelings about the President - feelings that I was sure didn't originate in my own mind. (Kennedy wasn't a hero to me, as he was to so many Americans at that time, but I didn't hate him, either. For example, I felt his strong stand on civil rights was merely what any decent person would take under the circumstances.)

These alien thoughts were just raw emotions, not messages expressed in words or mental pictures, but they were very strong.

This might have made sense if I'd been living in a place like Alabama, surrounded by the sort of people who later cheered when they heard that Kennedy had been killed; but I was in the middle of New York City, where he was extremely popular. So where were the negative messages coming from?

My personal experiences with telepathy at that time indicated that it was mainly a short-range phenomenon. Whenever I could identify the source of the thoughts and emotions I picked up telepathically, it was usually someone within a few miles of me. The literature is full of accounts of long-range telepathy, but I'd only experienced this a few times in my life.

So who was sending all the telepathic poison against Kennedy?

My guess was that a secret lodge of occultists with extreme right-wing political views was operating somewhere in New York. I knew vaguely that there were several "black lodges" in the area whose members claimed to be both powerful magicians and fascists. And I felt strongly that if people like that were sending out those telepathic hate messages, then the rest of the occult community should try to do something about it.

In the summer of 1963, when I first discussed this with various friends, all occultists about my own age, they talked me out of it.

After all, we were working to end the censorship that had banned some of the best contemporary literature as pornography, so why should we even consider practicing "psychic censorship"? And what harm could the messages do anyway? So a few psychics kept hearing "Kill Kennedy, kill Kennedy." So what? Weren't Presidents of the United States guarded with all the latest technology and virtually impossible to assassinate? (Yes, I really was this naive. So were most Americans in 1963.)

However, as November of 1963 approached, I could perceive the anti-Kennedy messages growing stronger and more frequent, and people with less and less conscious psychic ability were reporting receiving them.

Often, they were getting warnings, not threats: flashes that "Kennedy is in danger, something is going to happen to him." So many people had experiences like this and talked or wrote about them, that the authorities investigating the assassination after it happened filled whole files with them. However, these psychic messages were far too vague to give information about the identity of the actual assassins.

In September of 1963, I began to get some information from my own spirit guides about the telepathic hate campaign against Kennedy. At that time, it was extremely difficult for me to receive coherent channeled messages, because my mediumistic powers were not yet highly developed. However, I did manage to get some answers to my questions after weeks of strenuous effort, and they weren't at all what I'd been expecting.

Since I knew my spirit guides staunchly supported the Civil Rights movement and other liberal causes, I expected them to say they were trying to protect the President against psychic attacks from black magicians or evil spirits. Instead, they said that they and all the other good spirits on the astral plane were responsible for the anti-Kennedy campaign.

They said Kennedy was mentally unstable enough to start a nuclear war, and it was necessary to either disgrace him or kill him before he could do so.

The process of receiving this information in garbled bits and pieces took many days, but by the time it was done, I was convinced the anti-Kennedy messages really did come from good spirits, not reactionary magicians. Also, when I reread the news accounts of Kennedy's conduct during the Cuban Missile Crisis, they seemed to support the spirits' contention that he might start a world war.

There was evidence (though not the clear proof that's surfaced since) that the President's initial reaction had been to favor a nuclear first strike or massive invasion of Cuba, and that he'd compromised on a blockade only under heavy pressure from his advisors.

Because of this personal experience, I took a serious interest in the conspiracy theories that became a fad after the assassination. I also kept on trying very hard to develop my psychic powers and use them to look for evidence that telepathy was being used to guide the evolution of human society.

The resurgence of the counterculture and radical politics in the Sixties, which began to receive major publicity soon after the Kennedy assassination, proved to be an excellent source of such evidence, as we shall see in the next chapter.

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