Chapter 13 THE SECRET BRIDGE. Rulers of Evil by F. Tupper Saussy in HTML Web Format

 

Chapter 13 THE SECRET BRIDGE. Rulers of Evil by F. Tupper Saussy in HTML Web Format

Rulers of Evil by F. Tupper Saussy in HTML Web Format

 

Chapter 13 THE SECRET BRIDGE

 

“The papal prohibition might even have encouraged Masonry by identifying opposition to the group with Catholic tyranny and superstition.” — STEVEN C . BULLOCK, REVOLUTIONARY BROTHERHOOD, 1996

THE New Catholic Encyclopedia identifies the men who attacked the Society of Jesus as “the radical devotees of the rationalistic Enlightenment – richly talented and influential writers, such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and other ‘philosophes’ among the Encyclopedists, the followers of Freemasonry, and high placed government officials.” Attacking the Jesuits was for them “a step toward their ultimate objective of abolishing all religious orders, the papacy, and finally the Church itself.”

The masterpiece of the encyclopedists (most of whom happened to be philosophes), was the
monumental Encyclopedia of Sciences, Arts, and Trades (1743-1751). The Encyclopedia was the flame of the Enlightenment, the fulfillment of Cardinal Wolsey’s dream of flooding the world with print containing “learning against learning.” It brought so much learning (secular learning, as against Scriptural learning) that it became its own paradigm demanding radical change in existing norms. The Enlightenment called for a “new age” that placed Reason above any Church, above even the Bible. The new age issued in the elegant neo-gnostic religion of Deism, the thinking man’s alternative to Roman Catholicism and its imperious hold on the human conscience.

Nowhere was Deism more methodically practiced than “around the altars of Freemasonry,” as the great Masonic scholar Albert Pike put it. Here, wrote Pike in his influential Morals and Dogma (1871), “the Christian, the Hebrew, the Moslem, the Brahmin, the followers of Confucius and Zoroaster, can assemble as brethren and unite in prayer to the one God who is above all gods.” The brethren prayerfully climb the gnostic pyramid of successive illumination until, hopefully, a oneness with the supreme God is attained. As Pike explained, the Deists (like the papacy) looked upon the Bible as something of a stumbling block:

The Freemason does not pretend to dogmatic certainty, nor vainly imagine such certainty attainable. He considers that if there were no written revelation, he could safely rest the hopes that animate him and the principles that guide him, on the deductions of reason and the convictions of instinct and consciousness.
He studies the wonders of the Heavens, the framework and revolutions of the Earth, the mysterious beauties and adaptations of animal existence, the moral and material constitution of the human creature, so fearfully and wonderfully made; and is satisfied that God IS….

Most of the philosophes, including Frederick the Great, the Protestant King of Prussia who subsidized the entire Encyclopedia project, were Deistic brethren. As were the “high placed government officials” who pushed for the disestablishment of the Jesuits. All the Bourbon monarchs employed as their official advisors “ardent members of the Lodge,” to use Professor Martin’s phrase.1 The Marquis de Pombal of Portugal was a Mason. Charles Ill’s advisor the Count de Aranda, Louis XV’s Minister de Tillot and the Duc de Choiseul, as well as Maria-Theresa’s Prince von Kaunitz and Gerard von Swieten – all belonged to the secret brotherhood.
Since it was no secret that the Enlightenment aimed to make Roman Catholicism passée, Pope Clement XII promulgated in 1728 the constitution In eminenti, which appeared to condemn Freemasonry thusly:

CONDEMNATIO SOCIETATIS DE CONVENTICULORUM DE FREEMASONS, UNDER THE PENALTY IPSO FACTO INCURRED, OR EXCOMMUNICATION; ABSOLUTION FROM IT BEING RESERVED TO PONTIFEX MAXIMUS
Free Masons of whatever sect or religion, confederate together in a close and inscrutable bond, according to secret laws and orders agreed upon between them, and bind themselves as well by strict oath taken on the Bible as by the imprecations of heavy punishments to preserve their mysteries with inviolable secrecy
The great mischiefs which generally accrue from secret bodies are antagonist to civil and canonical laws.
Wherefore, by the advice of the cardinals and of our mere motion, and from the plenitude of the apostolic power, we do condemn and prohibit the meetings of the above-named society of Free Masons.
We strictly command that no one, under any pretext or color, dare to presume to promote, favor, admit, or conceal in their houses members of assemblies of this abominable order, nor in any way aid or assist in their meeting in any place, or to administer medicine to them in their sickness, or in any manner, directly or indirectly, by themselves or others, afford them counsel or help in their hour of trial and affliction, or persuade others to join said Order….

While Eminenti’s stern rhetoric, which was renewed by Benedict XIV in 1751, seems to dig a wide ocean between Catholicism and Freemasonry, its fruits tell another story. Why, for example, were the Bourbon monarchs, all of them Roman Catholic, never penalized or excommunicated for admitting, promoting, and favoring Masonic advisors? And why, a decade after the Marquis de Pombal had shipped the Jesuits out of Portugal, did Clement XIV send an appeasing nuncio to the Portuguese court, elevate Pombal’s brother to Bishop, and confirm all Pombal’s nominees in bishoprics? ² The answer, of course, is contained in the bull’s title, which provides that absolution from penalties or excommunication is “reserved to Pontifex Maximus.” That is to say, associating with the abomination of Freemasonry, if done for a cause valuable to the papacy (such as weakening the Jesuits to the point everybody assumes they’re no longer a threat to Protestantism), will be absolved by the papacy. Given the historical context, does any other answer make sense?
The leading Jesuit-bashers were not only Freemasons, they were also the product of Jesuit learning against learning. It was the ratio studiorum – the Medici Library’s gnostic wisdom absorbed in an ambiance of casuistry, equivocation, mental reservation, and obedience of the understanding, combined with smatterings of Holy Scripture usually filtered through the commentaries of Church doctors – that had turned two centuries of Jesuited students into secular philosophes. The ratio studiorum dictated the form and scope of the Encyclopedia, which in turn codified the Enlightenment paradigm, whose Deistic litany was preached “around the altars of Freemasonry.”
Hold Freemasonry up to the light and you cannot help but see the black papacy’s watermark. Isn’t it reasonable, given the circumstances, that the “G” in the center of the familiar Masonic emblem represents the initial of “Gesu,” the residence of the black popes at the Jesuits’ world headquarters at Number 5, Borgo Sancto Spiritu, in Rome? Freemasons wouldn’t suspect this, nor would Jesuits. It would be information reserved uniquely to the unknown superior, who shares what he knows with no one. “Your enemies will serve you without their wishes,” said Sun-tzu, “or even their knowledge.”
Freemasonry was the natural, the reasonable, the only intelligent way for the Roman Catholic Church to control (a) the ongoing affront of Protestantism, (b) the increase in “divine right” kings heading their own national churches independent of Vatican control, and (c) the incredible explosion of international mercantilism. Like the aquatic creature whose mouth resembles a comfortable resting place to its prey, the Lodges were a sagacious recycling of the old Templar infrastructure into a dynamic spiritual and economic brotherhood that gave Protestants, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, agnostics, and anyone else an opportunity to build a better life outside Roman Catholicism, yet still under the Church’s superintending eye. For Sun-tzu said, “The General sees all, hears all, does all, and in appearance is not involved with anything.” The Jesuit General is the disembodied eye substituting for the pyramid’s missing capstone, the stone the builders rejected.
The Lodge’s secrecy and its condemnation by the Church were essential to sustaining the integrity of both institutions. And so the deepest Masonic secret, the secret that not even their Grandest Masters could penetrate, was that all their secrets were known to one man alone, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus. This should not surprise anyone aware of how thoroughly Freemasonry is suffused with Jesuitic technique. Both Freemasonry and the Society of Jesus are (a) humanist religious orders, (b) secretive, (c) fraternal, (d) socially conscientious and politically active – questing, like Aeneas, the prototypical Roman, for the greatest good for the greatest number. Both orders (e) hold Tradition, Reason, and Experience in equal if not greater esteem than the Bible, (f) employ carefully structured programs of gnostic visualization to achieve an ever-increasing knowledge of the divine, (g) condone “the end justifies the means,” and (h) require absolute obedience, secured by a blood oath, to a hierarchy of superiors culminating in the Jesuit General, whose orders are so wisely suited to the recipient that they are obeyed as though willed by the recipient himself.

THE first recorded member of American Freemasonry was Daniel Coxe, who was constituted Provincial Grand Master of the provinces of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania on June 5, 1730, on a deputation granted by the Duke of Norfolk, Grand Master of Masons in England.5 Evidently, Coxe was an industrious recruiter. Minutes of a meeting of the Grand Lodge of London on January 29, 1731 reflect that “Coxe’s health was proposed and drank [sic] as ‘Provincial Grand Master of North America.’”

Daniel Coxe was actually a junior, according to Sidney Hayden’s Washington and His Compeers (1868). He was “the son of Dr. Daniel Coxe of England, who was physician to the Queen of Charles II.” Dr. Coxe must be presumed a Roman Catholic sympathizer, as both Charles and his Queen were Catholics. The Queen, Catherine of Braganza (Portugal), flaunted a huge Vatican entourage, for which she was continually harassed by death plots. Charles converted to Catholicism in exchange for money from Louis XIV of France under the terms of the Treaty of Dover.
The junior Daniel Coxe deserves wider recognition as an American visionary, or at least the sole apologist of some undisclosed visionary. Thirteen years before Benjamin Franklin’s proposal of a “colonial Union” to the Albany congress in 1754, for which Franklin is credited with being the first to suggest a “united States,” Coxe published in England a dissertation promoting a scheme to settle “an extensive tract of country lying on the Gulf of Mexico” owned by his father, the Queen’s physician. The dissertation, entitled A Description of the English Province of Carolina, by the Spaniards called Florida, and by the French La Louisiane, promoted the elder Coxe’s tract as an English province allied with New England against the Spanish, French, and Indians. It called for “all the colonies appertaining to the crown of Great Britain, on the northern continent of America, [to] be united under a legal, regular, and firm establishment; over which a lieutenant or supreme governor may be constituted and appointed to preside on the spot, to whom the governors of each colony shall be subordinate.” With this union of governments under one president, Coxe foresaw “a great council or general convention of the estates of the colonies” to “meet together, consult and advise for the good of the whole.” These “united states” would provide “for their mutual defense and safety, as well as, if necessary, for offense and invasion of their enemies” – independently of the protections of the British Crown. Of course, these imaginings became reality forty years later with the fulfillment of Lorenzo Ricci’s strategy for dividing the British Empire. Considering the elements involved – lands owned by the Catholic Queen’s physician, lands managed and promoted by the physician’s son, who is a Freemason deputed to generate an American brotherhood by the eighth Duke of Norfolk, who himself was a member of England’s premier Roman Catholic family – Coxe’s dissertation appears to be the earliest formatting of the colonial conscience to divisive thinking by agents of the black papacy.
The Duke of Norfolk, “Grand Master of Masons in England,” was also known as Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundell. His nephew, Henry, Lord Arundell, occupied Wardour Castle near Tisbury in Wiltshire at the time Clement XIV disestablished the Jesuits. We shall see how, in the autumn of 1773, it was to Lord Arundell’s castle that John Carroll repaired when civil authorities closeci down the Jesuit school in Liège, Belgium, where Carroll had been teaching. For a year Carroll stayed at Wardour, serving as the Arundell family’s tutor and chaplain before sailing for America to participate in the Revolution.

THIRTY-THIRD degree Masonic scholar Manly P. Hall, in his gnostic extravaganza Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy (1988), remarked that “not only were many founders of the United States Government Masons, but they received aid from a secret and August body existing in Europe, which helped them to establish this country for a peculiar and particular purpose known only to the initiated few.”

Most histories of the American Government skim over the Masonic presence. Americans like their history told in high-definition icons of good and evil, liberty and tyranny, heroism and treason, might and right. They won’t buy a heritage polluted by dark spots of mystery. Yet the greater part of American governmental heritage is almost wholly mysterious.
The man best qualified to become our country’s greatest historian, certainly the man with the most complete access to primary sources in the Revolutionary cause, was Charles Thomson. An authentic classical scholar, a discreet Protestant steeped in Medici learning, Thomson was known as “Perpetual Secretary of the Continental Congress.” He inscribed minutes of every Congressional session from 1774 until ratification of the Constitution in 1789. With William Barton, a Freemason, he designed the Great Seal of the United States of America: the choice of its Virgilian mottoes is credited exclusively to Thomson.
Among his contemporaries, Charles Thomson’s name was synonymous with Truth. So accurate were his minutes of Pennsylvania’s negotiations with the Delaware Indians that the Delawares called him Wegh-wu-law-mo-end, “the man who talks the truth.” When he would take his daily reports of congressional proceedings to the streets, eager mobs would cry “Here comes Charles Thomson! Here comes the Truth!”
Once the Constitution was ratified, Charles Thomson retired to Harriton, his country home in Bryn Mawr. He destroyed his personal papers relative to the creation of the new republic. An article by Kenneth Boling in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (1976) says that Thomson actually wrote a lengthy history of the Revolution, which he also destroyed. Thomson biographer J. Edwin Hendricks of Wake Forest suggests a fate other than destruction, alluding to “persistent rumors that the Thomson papers are in the Pennsylvania Masonic records.” (Professor Hendricks assured me personally that numerous inquiries have failed to reflect Thomson’s membership in Pennsylvania Masonry.) Whether Thomson destroyed his history or surrendered it to the crypt of secrecy, it is clear that he knew there were certain elements in the formation of American government that must, must be ignored. “If the truth were known,” he told friends darkly, “many careers would be tarnished and the leadership of the nation would be weakened.”⁴
And so Charles Thomson occupied the remaining forty years of his life translating the Septuagint, the Greek-language Bible, into English. Still, he was frequently requested to write the definitive insider’s history of the Revolution. Dr. Benjamin Rush overheard Thomson’s reply to one such request and recorded it in his diary:
“No,” said he, “I ought not, for I should contradict all the histories of the great events of the Revolution, and shew by my account of men, motives and measures, that we are wholly indebted to the agency of Providence for its successful issue. Let the world admire the supposed wisdom and valor of our great men. Perhaps they may adopt the qualities that have been ascribed to them, and thus good may be done. I shall not undeceive future generations.”⁵
What I believe Thomson was meaning to say is simply that no historical account of the American Revolution can be truthful unless it discloses the role played by “the agency of Providence.” Notice that Thomson does not use the word “Providence” alone, which was understood in his day to mean “God” or “Christ.” He does not say “we are wholly indebted to God,” or “we are wholly indebted to Christ,” but rather to the “agency” thereof.
If Thomson knew the word “agency” was a synonym for “vicar,” and I can’t imagine that a professional linguist wouldn’t, and if he knew that the popes had been called “vicars of Christ” since the fifth century, and I can’t imagine that a biblical scholar of his quality wouldn’t, then Thomson was most likely saying “We are wholly indebted to the Vicar of Christ, that is, the Roman papacy.”
But what a ridiculous statement to the post-Revolutionary American mindset! Who would have believed such an outrageous notion, coming from even the man who talks the truth? The embattled, degenerate, dying papacy could not possibly have effected the Revolution! Anyone foolish enough to run with this idea would have crashed headlong into a wall of ridicule. For Thomson, there was no future in telling what he knew. Since he chose not to undeceive future generations, the American people have lived according to histories that can be contradicted by truth. They have been served by careers and leaders that truth could tarnish and weaken. They seem comfortable in their deception, which is generally the case among consenting subjects to Roman rule.
Let’s move now to the next chapter, wherein we shall see how the Jesuits, which we now recognize as the unsung architects of the Enlightenment, supplied the American colonists a philosophical basis for rebelling against Great Britain.