mddm: the jesuit's secret societies around 1776/: a zauberer sample

[Dave Monroe]

Thanks!  Will see if I can dig up the translation. 
And see as well ...

Koselleck, Reinhart.  Critique and Crisis:
   Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern
   Society.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988 [1959].

No trans. listed, but the "Foreword" is by one Victor
Gourevitch.  See esp. Ch. 7,  "The Political Function
of the Lodges and the Plans of the Illuminati," pp.
86-97 ...

"Lessing's Conversations for Freemasons between Ernst
and Falk makes clear the political function of the
Masonic secret and sheds new light on it.  The
intellectual elite that saw through and understood the
polemical functions of the Masonic conceptual arsenal
were few in number.  Lessing was the pre-eminent
German member of that group.  His skill in allusion
was surpassed only by his skill at concealment....
what enbaled Lessing to allude and conceal so
effectively was his astute understanding of the
political symptoms ....  His discriminating conceptual
sense gave him insight into the political-moral
contradiction of the duplicitous thinking and attiudes
of the Enlightenment ...." (p. 86)

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Ernst und Falk - Gespräche
für Freymäurer (1776-78) ...

http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/8343/ernsufal.htm

   "The Masons grew, according to Lessing, by their
philanthropic and pedagogical activities.  The
practice of morality was part of their exoterics. 
'Their true deeds are their secrets', asserts Falk,
the initiate....  They have done 'all the good that
still exists in the world--in the world, mark you--and
continue to work at all the good that will still be
done in this world--in the world, mark you'.  The
world, this experimental stage of the Freemasons,
harbours three fundamental evils ....  These are,
first, the didvision of the inhabited world into
different States separated from one another by
'chasms' and 'dividing walls' ....  The second is the
stratification resulting from the social distinctions
within the States, and the third is the separation of
people by religion.  With this Lessing has drawn up a
schema of the three main points of attack of the
cosmopolitan Freemasons: States, social strata,
Churches.  However, and this is the crucial element of
Lessing's thought and proves him to be a political
thinker--the enumerated evils, the products of
mankind's differences, its boundaries and divisions,
are not chance occurences which can be forgotten or
eliminated, but are part of the structure of
historical reality.  In Lessing's view, mankind's
dissmiliarities ontologically preceded their
historical manifestations--the States, social
stratification, and religions....  There exist 'evils
without which even the happiets man cannot live', and
the State and its governing structure are among the
evils man cannot escape...." (pp. 86-7)

   "Freemasonry constitues a focused, powerful
counter-movement against that 'inescapable evil', the
matrix and subject of State policy.  The fundamental
role of the Masons is to oppose essentially
'disadvantageous matters' ....  The initiated Mason
recognizes the inevitability of States and social
differences, hence also of politics, but his ultimate
goal is to prevent the evils brought on by politics
'from making greater inroads than necessity dictates. 
To render the effects as harmless as possible'.... 
Lessing transformed the historical starting-point of
the bourgeois secret associations into their
historical role.  Just as the society develops under
the aegis of the State yet at the same time kept
istelf apart so as to take up its position against it,
so according to Lessing's 'ontology' the shortcomings
of the world from which the Masons separated
themselves dualistically so as to work against it were
the root causes of their activities...." (p. 88)

   "The ultimate goal of the Masons ... was to make
the State superfluous.  The virtuous, pefect bourgeois
society which they as brothers personified was, so
they believed, nature's ultimate purpose.  They, as it
were, threw the mantle of moral purpose over the
existing state, and that purpose turned the state into
a willing tool of bourgeois society, a tool 'for the
people'." (p. 88)

"The Masons thus not only fight ordinary evils
exoterically ... bus as esoterics they simultaneously
rise above the commonplace sphere of good and evil. 
Once the motive for good deeds, namely political
evils, ceases to exist goodness also loses its
significance.  When evil disappears, goodness becomes
so self-evident that the term becomes superfluous.... 
However, the secret of this esoteric step, in content
Utopian, in its function was highly political.  And
this is precisely what Lessing alludes to.  The moral
long-term goal, ostensibly beyond suspicion, was
sooner or later bound to become the root of all evil,
and had from an historical persepctive to conflict
with the sphere of State policy.
   "Thus, the critical distinction between morality
and politics is also found in Lessing, but beyond it
he makes clear its dialectic: on the one hand, the
political activity of the Masons was possible only
because of the 'inevitable evil of the State'; on the
other, it was directed against it.  Awareness of this
dialectic constituted the political arcanum of the
Masons.  The secrecy papered over the fact that their
work on behalf of morality would inevitably lead into
the political sphere.... hiding the indirect political
nature of that activity ...." (p. 89)

   "Lessing's writings influenced the Illuminati, but
they lacked his political acumen.  Deficient in
political consciousness, they made use of the
available literature of the Enlightenment to brew a
popular potion....  Yet it was precisely in this
caricature, so to speak, that the schema of the
century began to take shape.  The shift from defence
to attack--from the creation of an indirect force to
the indirect assumption of power--that took place
under the cover of the secret ... became demonstrably
clear with the foudning of the Illuminati in 1776, the
year of the American Declaration of Independence. 
>From the day of its inception the order stood on the
front line of the fight against Absolutism and the
'religionists'." (pp. 90-1)

"... a new type of 'dissimulation'....  The political
skill of obscurement was proof of the degree of
political liberation...." (p. 91)

"Unlike most lodges up until then, the Illuminati no
longer tried to gain influence by using the direct
support of the prince, but, on the contrary, sought to
bpass it and gain control for themselves....  Behind
the secret there formed not only a power independent
of the State, but one that also planned ... the
extension of the moral ruling system alraedy existing
within the order to the world outside." (p. 92)

   "Education, training, propaganda and enlightenment
were in themselves not enough to achieve the moral
objective.  Its attainment called for political
action, to make virtue triumph over evil....  The
programme of political action called for the indirect,
silent occupation of the State....  The State is run
from the moral inner space ...." (p. 93)

"The Illuminati, or 'Perfectibilists', as they first
called themselves ... with enthusiatic plans for
universal happiness and morality." (p. 94)

"The Illuminati, standing outside the State, also
believed they were entitled to stand above it.... this
conviction originated with the separation of morality
and politics ...." (pp. 94-5)

"Between the political impotence of the new society
and the power it aspires to, the secret is at work. 
It is the other side of the Enlightenment, and in
Germany the Illuminati were the most fervent chapmions
of the Enlightenment." (pp. 95-6)

For example ...

--- lorentzen-nicklaus
<lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de> wrote:
> 
>  + this afternoon - after 10 days of sunshine some
> clouds moved in - when i was reading the magic
> mountain in my balcony room, i came across passages
> discussing the twisted history of secret societies
> in the second half of the 18th century....


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