The Esoteric Kubrick : 1945

by Stanley Kubrick (Aged 16)

Look Magazine, April 1945

Heidi Fleiss, Koki Organd and the Israeli Hollywood Ecstasy Mafia

"Do you think any of this would have happened if you hadn't been attracted to the person most likely to destroy you...?" 

Nick Broomfield 

"...that, I have to give a lotta thought to... That's the best I can answer that right now..."

Heidi

In the 1976 melodrama "Trackdown," an innocent country girl heads for Hollywood looking to fulfill her

dreams. Instead, she is lured into prostitution.

The movie was based on a story written by Ivan Nagy, a Hungarian immigrant who, at the time, was a

photographer eager to make a name for himself in the entertainment business. But the film was panned, summed up in one review as having "all the sleazy elements and people who couldn't care less about another's life."

Now, Los Angeles police are alleging that Nagy--the former lover of alleged Hollywood madam Heidi

Fleiss--is involved in the same prostitution trade he was writing about then.

Nagy, 55, was arrested Wednesday for allegedly recruiting young women to become call girls. The arrest came after a woman--whom police would not identify--signed a complaint on Tuesday alleging that Nagy had tried to recruit her. Police are alleging that Nagy and a partner ran a Westside prostitution ring involving 15 to 20 call girls.

Nagy's arrest, made by the same task force that arrested Fleiss in June, has sent yet another jolt through a tightly knit entertainment community already worried about what secrets Fleiss may reveal. Since the late 1970s, Nagy has worked as a mid-level television and film director, with credits for directing television movies as well as episodes of such shows as "Starsky and Hutch" and "The Powers of Matthew Star."

In the wake of Fleiss' arrest, gossip columns have reported rumors that unnamed studio executives may have used film development funds for procuring prostitutes.

The rumors prompted Columbia Pictures executive Michael Nathanson on Tuesday to issue a public

denial that he has any connections to Fleiss. Nathanson, through a spokesman, acknowledged that he has known Nagy professionally for years but denied any wrongdoing.

Columbia has begun an internal investigation into whether any company executives may have used

company funds to pay for prostitution or drugs, and, sources said, no evidence of misuse of funds has

been found so far.

Capt. Glenn Ackerman, head of the Los Angeles Police Department's administrative vice unit, said that to date police have nothing more than unsubstantiated rumors about studio money and call girls. "We

haven't seen any solid evidence," he said. "We hear all of this conjecture and innuendo. If somebody

wants to bring in some solid evidence for a change we would take a look at it."

Nagy, who Thursday did not return calls seeking comment, is free on $25,000 bail. In an interview in late June, Nagy said that, except for a 1991 bookmaking arrest that he called "a tremendous misjudgment," he had never had any dealings outside the law. In that case, Nagy pleaded no contest--the equivalent of a guilty plea--court records show.

He denied assertions by Fleiss and some of her friends that he was involved in prostitution and other

vices. "That is a lie," he said. "I have no involvement in any escort services. No gambling. . . . It's an out

and out lie. These are vicious vindictive people."

Associates of Nagy describe him as a brusque, disciplined director who can work fast, something critical for low-budget films that lack a financial safety net.

"He looks intimidating, but he's a pussycat," said actor Ted Raimi, who stars in the upcoming "Skinner" that Nagy directed. "He's this big guy with a thick Hungarian accent. I had no problem with him."

"Skinner" ended something of a directing dry spell for Nagy. The film has been described as a "Silence of the Lambs"-type thriller, featuring former adult film star Traci Lords--whose name in the film, ironically, is Heidi.

Its executive producer is Brad Wyman, a friend of Nagy. Wyman once had a production deal at Columbia Pictures and tried to get Nagy a credit on a Columbia film that was never made, according to a private investigator hired by Nathanson. The studio declined to comment on Nagy, and Wyman has not returned numerous telephone calls seeking comment.

How Cookie Crumbled

Logan Corcoran, 17, clearly remembers what it's like to be high on Ecstasy at a rave party. She worries that most teens don't realize the drug's danger. KRT photo by J. Kyle Keener/Detroit Free Press

To his mates in the New York prison where he awaits sentencing for a drug-smuggling conviction, the bearded, soft-spoken Israeli, who Customs Department officials say regularly ministers to a small flock of religious Jewish prisoners, is known as "Rabbi Ya'akov." 

The rest of the world, however, knows the "rabbi," a former Los Angeles resident, as Jacob "Koki," or "Cookie" Orgad. Until his arrest in April 2000, he was the biggest Ecstasy, or MDMA, trafficker ever to be convicted in this country.

According to the 23-count indictment issued by a federal grand jury in the Central District of California in July, Orgad was the leader of an Ecstasy-smuggling organization accused of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiracy to import and distribute narcotics, and other violations. His sentencing, scheduled for October, could cost him 20 years and $1 million in criminal fines.

In the world of drug smuggling, groups from many countries have made their mark. Israelis, according to drug enforcement officials, were prominent in one of the first rings -- their presence in Europe and connections in the diamond industry allowed them to stake out a big piece of the market. The Israelis also involved Chassidic couriers and others in the Jewish community, drug enforcement officials say.

Within the last year, law enforcement officials have arrested dozens of people tied to these rings, including 25 in connection with Jacob Orgad.

On Monday, witness after witness confirmed to the Senate Government Affairs Committee, led by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., that Ecstasy's popularity has mushroomed.

An investigation into the life and times of Cookie Orgad provides some of the reasons why.

Orgad's name first reached the public's attention in 1995, when HBO screened British documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield's exposé, "Heidi Fleiss, Hollywood Madam." Broomfield, who got his start with the BBC, had come to Los Angeles in mid-1994, about a year after Fleiss, born into an affluent family, had been arrested for pandering. Broomfield's inquiries centered on why someone of Fleiss' privileged background had operated a brothel.

Interviewing Ivan Nagy, depicted in the documentary as Fleiss' sometime lover, Svengali and ultimate betrayer, Broomfield noticed several bullet holes in Nagy's apartment ceiling and asked where they came from. Nagy told him that a person named Cookie was responsible for them. Nagy alleged that Cookie worked for Fleiss as "an enforcer and procurer," and that he operated a beeper store called J&J Beeper.

Later, having pursued the shadowy Orgad around various beeper shops, Broomfield interviewed a woman who alleged that Orgad beat her. He also obtained a tape recording of a conversation between Nagy and Cookie in which Orgad urged Nagy to harm the woman. Finally, Broomfield obtained Orgad's beeper number, and called it. Orgad answered, declined to comment on whether he shot up Nagy's apartment, and suggested that Broomfield might end up with "a bullet in his ass."

"Orgad," Broomfield told The Journal, "was Ivan's [Nagy's] enforcer, and then he defected to Heidi. After the film came out, I actually ran into him at Heidi's lingerie store in Santa Monica. He was quite charming, a little jittery. He hadn't seen the film yet, but he had seen our surveillance cameras. The rumor around town -- and certainly Heidi believed it -- was that Cookie had been a Mossad agent."

According to a U.S. Customs agent familiar with the Orgad investigation, there was no such evidence of such an association. But Orgad, a.k.a. Tony Evans, a.k.a. Cookie, a.k.a. "The Keebler Man," had succeeded -- certainly in the two years prior to his arrest and probably for several years before that -- in creating an Ecstasy-trafficking organization of breathtaking efficacy and sophistication.

Orgad's credit card statements, say Customs investigators, show that he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a month flying from homes in Los Angeles, New York and Miami, to tend to his business interests in Las Vegas, Phoenix and Austin, and as far afield as Paris, Luxembourg, Amsterdam and Tel Aviv.

Recruiting strippers and, later, lower-middle-class suburban couples in their 30s and 40s, Orgad outfitted them at malls, trained them as couriers, and pumped millions of Ecstasy (or E) pills manufactured in the Netherlands into virtually every major city in this country, say Customs and Justice Department spokesmen.

The main measure of Orgad's sophistication was the degree to which he had managed to remove himself from most of these transactions, Customs officials say.

During the '90s, Orgad owned a fleet of Mercedeses and BMWs, outfitted his living rooms with the hottest big-screen TVs and designer furniture, and stocked his closets with Armani suits. Orgad was wont, moreover, to drop $5,000 or $6,000 dollars a pop entertaining entourages at the Key Club or Café Maurice.

In Los Angeles, law enforcement officers had linked Orgad to prostitution, pandering, money-laundering and cocaine dealing, but for the last decade or so, he had fallen off their radar screen.

About two years ago, though, after debriefing various Orgad couriers, Law Enforcement identified a man named Kevin McLoughlin as one of Orgad's lieutenants. When police arrested McLoughlin for drug smuggling, he confirmed his relationship with Orgad, and helped flesh out what law enforcers had managed to piece together about Orgad's dealings.

Ironically, Israeli émigrés were perhaps the first to achieve dominance in both markets, although one can argue as to which of the markets ultimately had the greater impact on illicit drug use in the United States.

Expected to go to jury this week in L.A. Federal Court is the case of Gilad Gadasi, 26, of Woodland Hills, who was arrested May 6 and charged with conspiracy to distribute more than 118,000 Ecstasy tablets.

And last week, police in New York arrested two Israelis, David Roash, 28, and Israel Ashenazi, 25, for possession of 450 pounds of E, more than a million tablets packed into eight duffel bags and a suitcase.

Also earlier this month, New York prosecutors secured a guilty plea from another Israeli, Sean Erez, who, according to Justice Department documents, had used Chassidic couriers to import more than a million tablets between late 1998 and June 1999.

In May, DEA agents arrested Oded Tuito, another major trafficker ostensibly based in Los Angeles and New York.

Cookie Orgad, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office, had forged ties with the New York-based trafficking group led by organized crime figure Ilan Zarger, who had sold 40,000 pills to the Arizona-based organization led by Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano, a former underboss of the Gambino crime family.

Zarger, Gravano and dozens of compatriots have pleaded guilty to trafficking charges in recent weeks.

Fordham Law School Professor Abraham Abramovsky, who has studied Israeli organized crime both in Israel and in the United States, told The Journal that Israelis may have become aware of Ecstasy use in Europe, as well as in Israel, long before Americans. Hence, not only were Israeli youngsters among the first to use the drug at raves, but Israeli criminals were quick to recognize an opportunity to exploit a new market, and to work out the mechanics of manufacturing, smuggling and distributing the drug. "Some of this [involvement] may be related to the former diamond smuggling operations," Abramovsky says. Ecstasy tablets, he explains, are quite small, lending themselves to the same smuggling techniques long reserved for diamonds. In addition, he says, "The drug seems to move along the same routes as the diamond smuggling trade."

Ecstasy, a chemical (methylenedioxymeth-amphetamine or MDMA) made in drug labs, is produced for the most part in Holland and Belgium, at a cost of pennies per tablet. Sold to wholesalers for about $2 a pill, they retail, in the United States, Canada and Australia, where demand has virtually exploded during the last few years, for between $20 and $30 a pill.

The pills, moreover, are marketed rather ingeniously, often with designer labels or pop culture icons imprinted on them. (One batch of E even had Jewish Stars on them.)

Ecstasy acts on those parts of the brain that produce the neurotransmitter serotonin, causing a six-hour high characterized by enhanced feelings of empathy and sociability. Certainly there is no comparing it to crack, which often causes frequently hyper-violent mood swings among users. If anything, Ecstasy achieves the opposite effect -- users are more impelled to reach out and tongue someone to death than to kill them outright.

Ecstasy was first synthesized in 1912 as an appetite suppressant, but attracted little interest until the 1970s, when psychotherapists began to explore its potential to enhance empathetic understanding and emotional release.

Although not believed to be physically addictive, the drug is, in fact, a stimulant, a mild hallucinogen, and a hypnotic. It is also a neurotoxin, whose side effects include elevated blood pressure, heart rate and body temperature. Teenagers who have used it at all-night raves have experienced dehydration, heat stroke, and even heart attack. Researchers, meanwhile, believe that long-term use can cause significant cognitive and mood impairment.

There is mounting evidence, moreover, that however benign the high, the trade in Ecstasy, which has become wildly profitable, is also increasingly beset by violence. According to The New York Times, police first became aware of the propensity for bloodshed about 18 months ago, when an Israeli drug dealer was found dead inside a locked car trunk at LAX. Drug Enforcement Administration officials attributed the hit to a couple of hired hands from Israel.

"It's certainly becoming a free-for-all," says Dean Boyd, a Customs Department spokesman based in Washington. "We're beginning to see murders among rival trafficking groups. Now, we're seeing suburban kids getting in over their heads, with the result that 21-year-olds are being found shot in the head for suspected Ecstasy thefts. Although the Israelis were among the first, we now see many different people chasing more and more money, including Russians, Eastern Europeans and Dominicans."

According to U.S. Customs, however, Cookie Orgad enjoyed a certain pride of place within the trade. Since he was older than most of the newcomers and was recognized as a fixture and a force to be reckoned with, he was rarely challenged.

"Given his reputation," said an agent familiar with the case, "I was pretty surprised when, after two years of investigations, I finally met up with him. I was expecting to see I don't know what, and here was this soft-spoken little guy, somewhat arrogant and uncooperative, but not at all what I envisioned."

The scion of a family of Moroccan immigrants to Israel, Orgad arrived in the United States about two decades ago, becoming a U.S. citizen under the name of Tony Evans in 1995. Investigations of his background in Israel turned up evidence of a brother, Zohar, with a police record in Israel, but nothing on Orgad per se, leading Customs to suspect for a time that perhaps the name Jacob Orgad might have been an alias as well.

During court appearances since his arrest in April 2000, Orgad purportedly put his Armanis in mothballs, sporting a yarmulke and giving the impression he led a pious existence. In prison, "Reb Ya'akov" has grown a beard, eats glatt kosher food and leads prayer services and Torah study.

As part of his plea agreement with the government, Orgad waived his right to contest his extradition to France, where he faces separate charges. If convicted there, Orgad could end up where glatt may be even harder to come by than a hit of Ecstasy.

From Details: The X-Files

Official Selection, Best American Crime Writing, 2002

From Details
Sept, 2001

Israeli Immigrant Jacob “Cookie” Orgad Was an Unlikely Godfather: A King of the International Ecstasy Market Whose Subjects Included Strippers, Hasidic Teens and a Texas Couple with a Retarded Son.

By Julian Rubinstein

In the early evening of April 7, 2000, one of the strangest and most lucrative careers in the history of American drug smuggling was coming to an end. Twenty undercover agents, most from the U.S. Customs Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration, fanned into position outside a plush midtown Manhattan high-rise waiting for Jacob “Cookie” Orgad, the enigmatic Israeli king of ecstasy, to return from dinner.

When he arrived, at around 9:30—a babe on each arm and reeking of cologne—the former “Beeper King” of Los Angeles calmly consented to a search of his three-bedroom penthouse. What would a 43-year-old self-described former rabbinical student have to hide? But with Cookie, nothing was ever the way it seemed. As the search commenced, one of his girlfriends entertained the agents by showing them the marijuana leaf tattooed on her ass.

Such was the bizarre and incongruous world of Jacob Orgad—a.k.a. Tony Evans—a man feared by some and considered a joke by others, whose rise to prominence on the Hollywood scene as a close associate of Heidi Fleiss gives new meaning to the immigrant ideal of the self-made man. Was Cookie the Pablo Escobar of ecstasy? Was he responsible for an increase in ecstasy addiction? If so, he went down without so much as a splash. “Wait up for me,” he told the girls through his thick Israeli accent as he was cuffed and put into a waiting car. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”

But Cookie wasn’t going to be coming home for a long, long time. There were too many people—from the notorious former Gambino crime family underboss Sammy “the Bull” Gravano down to the Las Vegas strippers and Brooklyn Hasidic teens employed as drug mules—who had been convicted for working in the worldwide ecstasy empire Cookie shrewdly came to rule. “It was one of the most sophisticated and complex operations we’ve seen,” says Dean Boyd, a spokesman for U.S. Customs. It was also one of the most unlikely.

Cookie’s rise and fall traces a precipitous Wall Street–like graph: His fortunes boomed spectacularly in the mid-to-late 1990s—when the emergence of a massive market for ecstasy reconfigured the power structure of the world drug market—before crashing at the tail end of an investigation that spanned three continents and tore up the lives of scores of the most unlikely pushers imaginable. Take 19-year-old Simcha Roth, a Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn who pleaded guilty to ecstasy-smuggling charges in a related case. At his bail hearing, he was released to the custody of two rabbis.

As much as 90 percent of the world’s ecstasy supply is manufactured in secret, high-tech labs scattered throughout the Netherlands, where the materials to make the hallucinogen are not as closely regulated as they are in the rest of Europe and the United States. For years, a cabal of Israelis have used Holland as a base for diamond smuggling through the ports in Antwerp and Rotterdam. In the mid-nineties, some of them noticed that an even more lucrative trade had blossomed around them, one with few players as well positioned to cash in as they were. “Israelis are everywhere, and they get to know each other very fast because of the language and the tradition,” says an Israeli intelligence official familiar with his countrymen’s stronghold on the world ecstasy market. “It doesn’t take long for a guy like Cookie to get big.”

Authorities say that by the time of his arrest, Cookie had brought in more ecstasy to the United States than any other individual ever has: an estimated 9 million pills with a street value of more than $270 million. A former discount-electronics salesman, Cookie climbed to the top of the world drug trade chiefly by lying with such élan that emboldened associates were eventually threatening to “whack” Mafia made man Gravano. But in the end, Cookie’s sex-filled gangster paradise grew too big for its own good.

“I was stupid,” Cookie told me through his lawyer from a federal detention facility in Brooklyn—one of the few comments he agreed to make for this story. “It was a macho thing.”

Cookie: The self-made godfather created himself a sex-filled gangster paradise

What most people who knew Cookie in his early L.A. days remember is that he was a member of Mossad, Israel’s elite intelligence organization. Cookie grew up in Israel—in a big Moroccan Jewish family in the north of the country—and followed his ex-wife, Sigal, and 6-year-old daughter, Ravid, to the United States in 1985. He spent a few years in Fort Lauderdale before moving to Los Angeles in 1989. And though he has been able to keep many of the facts about his life a mystery even to the authorities who tracked his case for years, one thing is certain: Cookie was never an intelligence agent.

Cookie might never have amounted to more than a street-level salesman if it weren’t for his extraordinary ability to exploit opportunity—the Southern California equivalent of good genes. An opportunity presented itself to Cookie in the form of Heidi Fleiss, who showed up at his electronics store one afternoon in 1990, looking for a bargain on a big-screen television. Not that Fleiss needed a bargain. She was already running what she brags was the best operation of its kind in the world—a $1,500-a-night call-girl service. (The “Hollywood Madame” eventually drew three years in prison.) “I dealt with the richest people in the world and the best-looking girls,” Fleiss crows from her Los Angeles home, where she remains sequestered as part of her parole agreement.

Cookie knew who Fleiss was; a mutual Israeli friend had told him that she would be coming in for a deal on a TV. Law-enforcement officials here and in Israel believe Cookie was already involved in drug dealing—cocaine, mostly—but it was small-time stuff; it’s unlikely that’s why Fleiss sought him out. What is clear is that Cookie sold Fleiss a television and drove it to her now-infamous $1.6 million Benedict Canyon pleasure palace himself.

“Next thing you know, Cookie’s doing favors, running errands,” says Ivan Nagy, Fleiss’s boyfriend at the time. The call-girl market, much like the ecstasy scene that would soon explode, was fiercely competitive. With demand exceeding supply, many girls were looking to use Fleiss as a springboard to their own service.

Cookie didn’t look like much—short, pudgy, hairy, with a sartorial style reminiscent of Steve Martin’s Wild and Crazy Guy: tight pants, shirts unbuttoned to his navel, lime-green Valentino jackets, and chest-nesting gold chains. But Cookie recognized Fleiss’s need for someone to protect the business, and the Mossad tale was born. “Heidi and I looked at him like he was a moron,” says Nagy. “But at that time, anyone who suggested they could be some kind of an enforcer was valuable.”

Fleiss (who has little bad to say about Cookie) says she never believed his Mossad yarn but did make use of it. “I had a lot of enemies,” she says. “Sometimes I needed to find out something about a girl and he’d help me.”

“He and his friends would wait around for the girls to come home and then sneak up on them and say, ‘When are you going to go see Heidi?’” recalls one source. “They killed one girl’s cat.”

As Fleiss’s “enforcer,” Cookie had found a place for himself in the Hollywood scene. But he quickly came to realize that the role was limiting. He had a legendary libido—”He could fuck all day,” says one source—but being feared didn’t get you much action that you didn’t have to pay for. Nor did it command respect. While dapper johns like Charlie Sheen were whisked into the clubs with the Fleiss posse, Cookie had to stand in line with the rest of the losers.

But not for long. If there was one thing his days with Fleiss seems to have drilled into Cookie’s head, it was this: Girls are the universal currency; they’re accepted anywhere, and the more you have the more powerful you become. Soon, Cookie’s services to Fleiss involved more than just security. He began recruiting women for her, picking one girl up outside a Western Union by offering to shoot modeling photos. Cookie also ingratiated himself with women by providing them with drugs. “Sometimes guys would request drugs from the girls,” says the source, “mostly coke and ‘ludes.”

The official federal case against Cookie, which charges him as the leader of an international ecstasy-smuggling conspiracy, involves offenses committed only between 1998 and 2000. But law-enforcement sources say he was operating well before that. “He began moving a lot of cocaine in the early nineties,” says one source at Customs.

Fleiss refuses to comment on the drug allegations, but doesn’t deny Cookie was pimping for her. “He knew a lot of really cute girls,” she says. “Some needed money, a little makeover. I turned these girls into millionaires and they loved Cookie for the introduction. I paid him, on average, $500 a girl.”

Around this time, Cookie moved out of his dingy apartment and into a swanky high-rise just off Sunset Boulevard. He was now in the heart of Hollywood, where self-invention is standard operating procedure. But he soon learned that trying to prove you’re legit in an illegitimate world can also be dangerous. Within a year, his new twelfth-floor bachelor pad became the scene of an incident that nearly sidelined him before he became a true contender.

In February 1993, Cookie began spending time with a beautiful 22-year-old named Laurie Dolan. They’d known each other about two weeks when Cookie showed up at her apartment one evening in a limousine and whisked her and another young woman to dinner at the popular fashionista hangout Tatou. “She called me from there,” remembers her father, Paul. “It was obvious that she was out partying, but she said, ‘Dad, I’ll be all right.’”

After dinner, the group showed up at their regular hangout, Bar One, where Cookie was now a part-owner—no more waiting in line for him. He made a show of buying buckets of the best champagne before heading back to his apartment with Dolan and two other women. (“He always liked three or four women in his bed,” says one former associate. “It was like Caligula every night.”)

Dolan surfaced around 5 p.m. the next day, when Cookie left her comatose body at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She never regained consciousness and three days later was pronounced dead, the victim of a massive drug overdose. An investigation into the death didn’t begin in earnest until four months later, in the wake of Fleiss’s June arrest. When the media put together the Fleiss-Cookie-Dolan connection, the mysterious death of one of Heidi’s supposed call girls became fodder for Hard Copy and tabloid headlines all the way to London.

Fleiss claims that she never met Dolan before in her life. But perhaps it was only a matter of time. “A girl like Laurie Dolan was worth $50,000 to Heidi,” says Nagy. “She was gorgeous, natural, young.” Nonetheless, the investigation into her death was eventually dropped after witnesses refused to speak to authorities, and Cookie was never charged. That fact hasn’t changed the mind of her father. “He should have been arrested for murder,” says Paul Dolan. “He took away Laurie’s innocence, her beauty, her life. This is what he did for a living. He drugged girls up, got them hooked, and turned them into prostitutes.”

As the Fleiss affair filled the tabloids in the fall of 1993, casual acquaintances began to reconsider their association with the woman the New York Post called “the Heidi Ho.” For Cookie, who appeared by that time to be using the Fleiss scene as cover for his growing drug business, their relationship meant danger.

As L.A. burned, Cookie split town. For several months, he began showing up nightly in the high-end strip clubs in New York City and Las Vegas, throwing his money around like a sultan. “He would drop $10,000 to $20,000 a night,” says the owner of a New York club.

But in 1994, three clubs he frequented barred him from the premises. “He was soliciting the women,” says one of the New York managers who banned him. “He liked the bisexual ones with big tits. He’d tell them, ‘I’ll take you shopping tomorrow. We’ll go out to eat.’ Soon, they were on his payroll and not coming to work anymore. I thought he was a pimp, not a drug dealer.”

With Cookie, who left almost no paper trail and few documents registered to his name, it was always hard to tell. While he appeared to be angling to succeed Fleiss—at least outside California—back in L.A., he was returning to his straight sales roots. A year earlier, he’d opened a pager store called J&J Beepers, and in 1994, he began a major promotional campaign. According to his own newspaper and radio ads, Cookie was now the “Beeper King” of Los Angeles.

But if Cookie was really looking to go clean, he chose an odd location for his headquarters….

War

The Heisenberg Device

Reports on the Atom-Splitting Bomh.

This bomb is revolutionary in its results, and it will completely upset all ordinary precepts of warfare hitherto established. I am sending you, in one group, all those reports on what is called the atom-splitting bomb: 

It is a fact that in June of 1943 the German Army tried out an utterly new type of weapon against the Russians at a location 150 kilometers southeast of Kursk. Although it was the entire 19th Infantry Regiment of the Russians which was thus attacked, only a few bombs (each round up to 5 kilograms) sufficed to utterly wipe them out to the last man. 

Part 2. The following is according to a statement by Lieutenant-Colonel UE(?) I KENJI, advisor to the attache in Hungary and formerly (? on duty?) in this country, who by chance saw the actual scene immediately after the above took place: “All the men and the horses (? within the area of?) the explosion of the shells were charred black and even their ammunition had all been detonated.” 

Moreover, it is a fact that the same type of war material was tried out in the Crimea, too. At that time the Russians claimed that this was poison-gas, and protested that if Germany were ever again to use it, Russia, too, would use poison-gas. 

Part 3. There is also the fact that recently in London-in the period between October and the 15th of November-the loss of life and the damage to business buildings through fires of unknown origin was great. It is clear, judging especially by the articles about a new weapon of this type, which have appeared from time to time recently in British and American magazines-that even our enemy has already begun to study this type. 

To generalize on the basis of all these reports: I am convinced that the most important technical advance in the present great war is in the realization of the atom-splitting bomb. Therefore, the central authorities are planning, through research on this type of weapon, to speed up the matter of rendering the weapon practical. And for my part, I am convinced of the necessity for taking urgent steps to effect this end. 

Part 4. The following are the facts I have learned regarding its technical data: Recently the British authorities warned their people of the possibility that they might undergo attacks by German atom-splitting bombs. The American military authorities have likewise warned that the American east coast might be the area chosen for a blind attack by some sort of flying bomb. It was called the German V-3. 

To be specific, this device is based on the principle of the explosion of the nuclei of the atoms in heavy hydrogen derived from heavy water. (Germany has a large plant (? for this?) in the vicinity of Rjukan, Norway, which has from time to time been bombed by English planes.). Naturally, there have been plenty of examples even before this of successful attempts at smashing individual atoms. However, 

Part 5. as far as the demonstration of any practical results is concerned, they seem not to have been able to split large numbers of atoms in a single group. That is, they require for the splitting of each single atom a force that will disintegrate the electron orbit. On the other hand, the stuff that the Germans are using has, apparently, a very much greater specific gravity than anything heretofore used.

 In this connection, allusions have been made to SIRIUS and stars of the “White Dwarf” group. (Their specific gravity is (? 6?) 1 thousand, and the weight of one cubic inch is 1 ton.) In general, atoms cannot be compressed into the nuclear density. However, the terrific pressures and extremes of temperature in the “White Dwarfs” cause the bursting of the atoms; 

and Part 6. There are, moreover, radiations from the exterior of these stars composed of what is left of the atoms which are only the nuclei, very small in volume. According to the English newspaper accounts, the German atom-splitting device is the NEUMAN disintegrator. Enormous energy is directed into the central part of the atom and this generates at atomic pressure of several tons of thousands of tons (sic) per square inch. This device can split the relatively unstable atoms of such elements as uranium. Moreover, it brings into being a store of explosive atomic energy. A-GENSHI HAKAI DAN. 

That is, a bomb deriving its force from the release of atomic energy.

Inter 12 Dec 44 (1,2) Japanese; 

Rec’d 12 Dec 44; 

Trans 14 Dec 44 (3020-B)

Iraq Flexes Arab Muscle - by Christopher Hitchens, 2nd April 1976

Iraq Flexes Arab Muscle

From The New Statesman 2 April 1976

Hitchens, now an American citizen, remains one of the fiercest and most unrepentant enthusiasts for the US-British overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But, back in 1976, when working for the New Statesman, he took a more admiring view of the Iraqi dictator, as this article shows. Young Hitchens saw Saddam as an up-and-coming secular socialist who would transform Iraq into a progressive model for the rest of the Middle East.

Selected by Robert Taylor

An Arab country with the second largest proven oil reserves, a fierce revolutionary ideology, a large and recently-blooded army, and a leadership composed almost entirely of men in their thirties is obviously a force to be reckoned with. Iraq, which has this dynamic combination and much else besides, has not until recently been very much regarded as a power. But with the new discussions in Opec, the ending of the Kurdistan war and the new round of fighting in Lebanon, its political voice is being heard more and more. The Baghdad regime is the first oil-producing government to opt for 100-per-cent nationalisation, a process completed with the acquisition of foreign assets in Basrah last December. It was the first to call for the use of oil as a political weapon against Israel and her backers. It gives strong economic and political support to the ‘Rejection Front’ Palestinians who oppose Arafat’s conciliation and are currently trying to outface the Syrians in Beirut. And it has a leader — Saddam Hussain — who has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser.

Dining with an old man on a houseboat moored in the Tigris, I discovered that he inadvertently embodied the history of modern Iraq. He had been imprisoned in 1941 for opposing the British, again in 1959 for hostility to Kassem’s pro-Russian line and finally in 1969 by the present regime. The last of these had, he said, been easily the worst. He was personally interrogated by Nadim Kzar, then head of the secret police and since executed for his crimes. There had been torture and brutality of a far worse sort than his previous incarcerations. And yet he declared that he thought the present government the best Iraqi Administration he had seen. Why? ‘Because it has made us strong and respected.’ There seems no getting round this point. From the festeringly poor and politically dependent nation of a generation ago, Iraq has become a power in every sense — military, economic and ideological. Currently, it is pressing for a more aggressive Opec pricing strategy in order to raise more cash for its development projects, and envisages a doubling of oil production from 2m. barrels per day to over 4m. within the next ten years.

Strangely, its ally in this push against the Saudis is none other than neighbouring Iran, with which Iraq has only recently ceased a near state of war over Kurdistan. The Shah and his ‘White Revolution’ also need quick money to finance internal development, enormous military expansion and foreign aid programmes. The difference is that while the Shah ranges himself against communism and sends troops to the Gulf to fight Arab guerrillas, Iraq is dedicated to the idea of a single socialist Arab nation from Gibraltar to the Indian ocean; the original Ba’athist dream.

In their different crusades, both Iraq and Iran take a distinctly unsentimental line on internal opposition. Ba’ath party spokesmen, when questioned about the lack of public dissent, will point to efforts made by the party press to stimulate criticism of revolutionary shortcomings. True enough, there are such efforts, but they fall rather short of permitting any organised opposition. The argument then moves to the claim, which is often made in Iraq, that the country is surrounded by enemies and attacked by imperialist intrigue. Somewhere in the collision between Baghdad and Teheran on this point, the Kurdish nationalists met a very painful end. We now know, from the US committee of investigation, chaired by Congressman Otis Pike, that there was a Nixon- Kissinger strategy of arming and encouraging a Kurdish revolt, not for the purpose of creating a Kurdish state (which would have horrified the Shah) but for the purpose of de-stabilising Iraq. It was specifically argued, by those who planned the operation, that the Kurds should not be allowed to win.

They were allowed to take heavy casualties and suffer appalling refugee problems; and then were dumped unceremoniously when it became clear that the Iraqi government was not going to crumble. ‘Even in the context of covert action,’ says the report, ‘ours was a cynical enterprise.’ As one who had, on previous visits to Baghdad, scorned the argument that the Kurds were foreign puppets, I should say that ‘cynical’ is the mildest adjective that could be used about this latest triumph of the Secretary of State.

The Kurds now have a very attenuated version of autonomy, and former members of the Barzani armed forces are being moved to the South. At least, however, Iraq constitutionally recognises that she is a partly Kurdish state, which is more than Iran or Turkey do. Further tests for the regime lie ahead. The quarrel with Syria, which involves differences over Ba’athist ideology as well as a dispute over Syrian damming of the Euphrates river, has now extended to the Lebanon, where Syrian troops have attacked newspapers and buildings controlled by Iraqi-sympathising Palestinians. Relations with Iran are still far from cordial. In response to requests for criticism in the party press, some demands were raised for a constituent assembly, and other complaints voiced about the tightness of the regime. All these remain to be acted on, and as the situation grows more complicated Saddam Hussain will rise more clearly to the top. Make a note of the name. Iraq has been strengthened internally by the construction of a ‘strategic pipeline’ which connects the Gulf to the northern fields for the first time. She has been strengthened externally by her support for revolutionary causes and by the resources she can deploy. It may not be electrification plus Soviet power, but the combination of oil and ‘Arab socialism’ is hardly less powerful.

Kwanzaa

"The name 'symbionese' is taken from the word symbiosis and we define its meaning as a body of dissimilar bodies and organisms living in deep and loving harmony and partnership in the best interest of all within the body."

"Symbionese Liberation Army Declaration of Revolutionary War & the Symbionese Program"

UCLA Black Student Union members John Huggins and Bunchy Carter, also members of the Black Panther Party, were shot and killed in Campbell Hall on January 17, 1969.

The Grasshopper Shall Be a Burden

"...And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, who come of the giants. And we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.”

Numbers 13:33

The Grasshopper shall be a burden.

"At these last words, Pinocchio jumped up in a fury, took a hammer from the bench, and threw it with all his strength at the Talking Cricket.

Perhaps he did not think he would strike it. But, sad to relate, my dear children, he did hit the Cricket, straight on its head.

With a last weak “cri-cri-cri” the poor Cricket fell from the wall, dead!"

"Cowardice asks The Question: Is it Safe? 

Expediency asks The Question: Is it Political? 

Vanity asks The Question: Is it Popular?

But Conscience asks The Question: Is it Right?"

– Dr. Martin L. King, Jr

“Am I the only one who knows? I'll bet I am; nobody else really understands Grasshopper but me - they just imagine they do.” 

― Philip K. Dick, 
The Man in the High Castle

"They..!! THEY!!

I remember... It started.... With THEM!! But I couldn't see anything but them... Like you took out of that hole... With the eyes, and the horns - creatures!! But they were alive - hopping, and running! Hundreds of them - they knew I was one... Jumping!! Leaping!!  In and out; big places... In and out of them... Huge!! Right up into the sky!!"

Quatermass & the Pit: 05 The Wild Hunt

"A Prague chronicle describes the epidemic in China, India and Persia; and the Florentine historian Matteo Villani, who took up the work of his brother Giovanni after he had died of the plague in Florence, relays the account of earthquakes and pestilential fogs from a traveller in Asia...

A similar incident of earthquake and pestilential fog was reported from Cyprus, and it was believed that the wind had been so poisonous that men were struck down and died from it.

German accounts speak of a heavy vile-smelling mist which advanced from the East and spread itself over Italy... people were convinced that they could contract the disease from the stench, or even, as is sometimes described, actually see the plague coming through the streets as a pale fog.

The earth itself seemed in a state of convulsion, shuddering and spitting, putting forth heavy poisonous winds that destroyed animals and plants and called swarms of insects to life to complete the destruction."

Captioned as "Wodan's wilde Jagd". 

Wodan leads an immense host of people and animals through the night sky; his wild hunt. 

A female figure struggles on the ground below.

Published in 1882

"In Brandenburg [in Germany] there appeared in 1559 horrible men, of whom at first fifteen and later on twelve were seen. The foremost had beside their posteriors little heads, the others fearful faces and long scythes, with which they cut at the oats, so that the swish could be heard at a great distance, but the oats remained standing. When a quantity of people came running out to see them, they went on with their mowing."

The Black Death

THE CENTRALIZATION OF Papal power culminated under Pope Innocent IV, who held the Papal reins from 1243 until 1254. Innocent IV attempted to turn the Papacy into the world’s highest political authority by proclaiming that the Pope was the “vicar [earthly representative] of the Creator (to whom) every human creature is subjected.” It was under Innocent IV that the Inquisition was made an official institution of the Roman Catholic Church. 

Despite the oppression of the Inquisition, Europe in the13th century was beginning to recover from the economic and social disruption caused by the Crusades. Signs of a European renaissance were visible in the widening of intellectual and artistic horizons. Trade with other parts of the world did much to enrich European life. Europe was entering an era in which chivalry, music, art, and spiritual values were playing greater roles. Hardly a century of this progress had passed, however, before a disastrous event abruptly brought it to a temporary halt. That event was the Bubonic Plague, also known as the Black Death.

The Black Death began in Asia and soon spread to Europe where it killed well over 25 million people (about one third of Europe’s total population) in less than four years. Some historians put the casualty figure closer to 35 to 40 million people, or about half of all Europeans. 

The epidemic first spread through Europe between 1347and 1350. The Bubonic Plague continued to strike Europe with decreasing fatality every ten to twenty years in short-lived outbreaks all the way up until the 1700’s. Although it is difficult to calculate the total number of deaths from that 400-year period, it is believed that over 100 million people may have died from the Plague. 

Two types of plague are believed to have caused the Black Death. The first is the “bubonic” type, which was the most common. The bubonic form of plague is characterized by swellings of the lymph nodes; the swellings are called ”buboes.” The buboes are accompanied by vomiting, fever, and death within several days if not treated. This form of plague is not contagious between human beings: it requires an active carrier, such as a flea. For this reason, many historians believe that flea-infested rodents caused the Bubonic Plague. Rodents are known to carry the disease even today. A number of records from between 1347 and the late 1600’s speak of rodent infestations prior to several outbreaks of the Black Death, lending credence to the rodent theory.

The second form of plague contributing to the Black Death is a highly contagious type known as “pneumonic” plague. It is marked by shivering, rapid breathing, and the coughing up of blood. Body temperatures are high and death normally follows three to four days after the disease has been contracted. This second type of plague is nearly always fatal and transmits best in cold weather and in poor ventilation. Some physicians today believe it was this second form, the “pneumonic” plague, which was responsible for most of the casualties of the Black Death because of the crowding and poor hygienic conditions then prevalent in Europe. 

We would normally shake our heads at this tragic period of human history and be thankful that modern medicine has developed cures for these dread diseases. However, troubling enigmas about the Black Death still linger. Many outbreaks occurred in summer during warm weather in uncrowded regions. Not all outbreaks of bubonic plague were preceded by rodent infestation; in fact, only a minority of cases seemed to be related to an increase in the presence of vermin. The greatest puzzle about the Black Death is how it was able to strike isolated human populations which had no contact with earlier infected areas. The epidemics also tended to end abruptly. 

To solve these puzzles, an historian would normally look to records from the Plague years to see what people were reporting. When he does so, he encounters stories so stunning and unbelievable that he is likely to reject them as the fantasies and superstitions of badly frightened minds. A great many people throughout Europe and other Plague-stricken regions of the world were reporting that outbreaks of the Plague were caused by foul-smelling “mists.”Those mists frequently appeared after unusually bright lights in the sky. The historian quickly discovers that “mists” and bright lights were reported far more frequently and in many more locations than were rodent infestations. The Plague years were, in fact, a period of heavy UFO activity. 

What; then, were the mysterious mists?

There is another very important way in which plague germs can be transmitted: through germ weapons. The United States and the Soviet Union today have stockpiles of biological weapons containing bubonic plague and other epidemic diseases. The germs are kept alive in canisters which spray the diseases into the air on thick, often visible, artificial mists. Anyone breathing in the mist will inhale the disease. There are enough such germ weapons today to wipe out a good portion of humanity. Reports of identical disease-inducing mists from the Plague years strongly suggest that the Black Death was caused by germ warfare. Let us take a look at the incredible reports which lead to that conclusion. 

The first outbreak of the Plague in Europe followed an unusual series of events. Between 1298 and 1314, seven large “comets” were seen over Europe; one was of “aweinspiring blackness.”¹ One year before the first outbreak of the epidemic in Europe, a “column of fire” was reported over the Pope’s* palace at Avignon, France. 

* This was a second unauthorized pope who assumed the title as the result of a schism within the Catholic Church. The complete title is, 

A chronicle of prodigies and portents that have occurred beyond the right order, operation and working of nature, in both the upper and lower regions of the earth, from the beginning of the world up to these present times. 

Earlier that year, a “ball of fire” was observed over Paris; it reportedly remained visible to observers for some time. To the people of Europe, these sightings were considered omens of the Plague which soon followed. 

It is true that some reported “comets” were probably just that: comets. Some may also have been small meteors or fireballs (large blazing meteors). Centuries ago, people were generally far more superstitious than they are today and so natural meteors and similar prosaic phenomena were often reported as precursors to later disasters even though there was no real-life connection. 

On the other hand, it is important to note that almost any unusual object in the sky was called a “comet.” A good example is found in a bestselling book published in 1557, "A Chronicle of Prodigies and Portents..." by Conrad Lycosthenes. On page 494 of Lycosthenes’ book we read of a “comet” observed in the year 1479: 

“A comet was seen in Arabia in the manner of a sharply pointed wooden beam ...”

The accompanying illustration, which was based on eyewitness descriptions, shows what clearly looks like the front half of a rocketship among some clouds. 

The object appears to have many portholes. Today we would call the object a UFO, not a comet. This leads us to wonder how many other ancient “comets” were actually similar rocketlike objects. When we are confronted with-an old report of a comet, we therefore do not really know what kind of thing we are dealing with unless there is a fuller description. A report of a sudden increase in “comets” or similar celestial phenomena may, in fact, mean an increase in UFO activity.

The link between unusual aerial phenomena and the Black Death was established immediately during the first outbreaks of the Plague in Asia. As one historian tells us:

The first reports [of the Plague] came out of the East. They were confused, exaggerated, frightening, as reports from that quarter of the world so often are: descriptions of storms and earthquakes: of meteors and comets trailing noxious gases that killed trees and destroyed the fertility of the land...²

The above passage indicates that strange flying objects were doing more than just spreading disease: they were also apparently spraying chemical or biological defoliants from the air. The above passage echoes the ancient Mesopotamian tablets which described defoliation of the landscape by ancient Custodial “Gods.” Many human casualties from the Black Death may have been caused by such defoliants. 

The connection between aerial phenomena and plague had begun centuries before the Black Death. We saw examples in our earlier discussion of Justinian’s Plague. We read from another source about a large plague that had reportedly broken out in the year 1117—almost 250 years before the Black Death. 

That plague was also preceded by unusual celestial phenomena: 

In 1117, in January, a comet passed like a fiery army from the North towards the Orient, the moon was overcast blood-red in an eclipse, a year later a light appeared more brilliant than the sun. This was followed by great cold, famine, and plague, of which one-third of humanity is said to have perished.³ * 

* I have seen no mention of this plague in any other history book. It may have been a local plague which destroyed not a third of humanity, but a third of the afflicted population. 

Once the medieval Black Death got started, noteworthy aerial phenomena continued to accompany the dread epidemic. Reports of many of these phenomena were assembled by Johannes Nohl and published in his book, The Black Death, A Chronicle of the Plague (1926). According to Mr. Nohl, at least 26 “comets” were reported between 1500 and 1543. Fifteen or sixteen were seen between 1556 and 1597. In the year 1618, eight or nine were observed. 

Mr. Nohl emphasizes the connection which people perceived between the “comets” and subsequent epidemics: 

In the year 1606 a comet was seen, after which a general plague traversed the world. In 1582 a comet brought so violent a plague upon Majo, Prague, Thuringia, the Netherlands, and other places that in Thuringia it carried off 37,000 and in the Netherlands 46,415.⁴

From Vienna, Austria, we get the following description of an event which happened in 1568. Here we see a connection between an outbreak of Plague and an object described in a manner remarkably similar to a modern cigar or beam-shaped UFO:

When in sun and moonlight a beautiful rainbow and a fiery beam were seen hovering above the church of St. Stephanie, which was followed by a violent epidemic in Austria, Swabia, Augsberg, Wuertemberg, Nuremburg, and other places, carrying off human beings and cattle.⁵

Sightings of unusual aerial phenomena usually occurred from several minutes to a year before an outbreak of Plague. Where there was a gap between such a sighting and the arrival of the Plague, a second phenomenon was sometimes reported: the appearance of frightening humanlike figures dressed in black. Those figures were often seen on the outskirts of a town or village and their presence would signal the outbreak of an epidemic almost immediately. 

A summary written in 1682 tells of one such visit a century earlier: 

In Brandenburg [in Germany] there appeared in 1559 horrible men, of whom at first fifteen and later on twelve were seen. The foremost had beside their posteriors little heads, the others fearful faces and long scythes, with which they cut at the oats, so that the swish could be heard at a great distance, but the oats remained standing. When a quantity of people came running out to see them, they went on with their mowing.⁶

The visit of the strange men to the oat fields was followed immediately by a severe outbreak of the Plague in Brandenburg.

This incident raises intriguing questions: who were the mysterious figures? What were the long scythe-like instruments they held that emitted a loud swishing sound? It appears that the “scythes” may have been long instruments designed to spray poison or germ-laden gas. This would mean that the townspeople misinterpreted the movement of the “scythes” as an attempt to cut oats when, in fact, the movements were the act of spraying aerosols on the town. 

Similar men dressed in black were reported in Hungary: 

. . . in the year of Christ 1571 was seen at Cremnitz in the mountain towns of Hungary on Ascension Day in the evening to the great perturbation [disturbance] of all, when on the Schuelersberg there appeared so many black riders that the opinion was prevalent that the Turks were making a secret raid, but who rapidly disappeared again, and thereupon a raging plague broke out in the neighborhood.⁷

Strange men dressed in black, “demons,” and other terrifying figures were observed in other European communities. The frightening creatures were often observed carrying long ”brooms,” “scythes,” or “swords” that were used to “sweep” or “knock at” the doors of people’s homes. The inhabitants of those homes fell ill with plague afterwards. It is from these reports that people created the popular image of “Death” as a skeleton or demon carrying a scythe. The scythe came to symbolize the act of Death mowing down people like stalks of grain. In looking at this haunting image of death, we may, in fact, be staring into the face of the UFO.

Of all the phenomena connected to the Black Death, by far the most frequently reported were the strange, noxious “mists.” The vapors were often observed even when the other phenomena were not. Mr. Nohl points out that moist pestilential fogs were “a feature which preceded the epidemic throughout its whole course.” ⁸ A great many physicians of the time took it for granted that the strange mists caused the Plague. This connection was established at the very beginning of the Black Death, as Mr. Nohl tells us: 

The origin of the plague lay in China, there it is said to have commenced to rage already in the year 1333, after a terrible mist emitting a fearful stench and infecting the air.⁹

Another account stresses that the Plague did not spread from person to person, but was contracted by breathing the deadly stinking air:

During the whole of the year 1382 there was no wind, in consequence of which the air grew putrid, so that an epidemic broke out, and the plague did not pass from one man to another, but everyone who was killed by it got it straight from the air.¹⁰

Reports of deadly “mists” and “pestilential fogs” came from all Plague-infested parts of the world: 

A Prague chronicle describes the epidemic in China, India and Persia; and the Florentine historian Matteo Villani, who took up the work of his brother Giovanni after he had died of the plague in Florence, relays the account of earthquakes and pestilential fogs from a traveller in Asia.

The same historian continues: 

A similar incident of earthquake and pestilential fog was reported from Cyprus, and it was believed that the wind had been so poisonous that men were struck down and died from it.¹²

He adds: 

German accounts speak of a heavy vile-smelling mist which advanced from the East and spread itself over Italy.¹³

That author states that in other countries: 

. .. people were convinced that they could contract the disease from the stench, or even, as is sometimes described, actually see the plague coming through the streets as a pale fog.¹⁴

He summarizes, rather dramatically: 

The earth itself seemed in a state of convulsion, shuddering and spitting, putting forth heavy poisonous winds that destroyed animals and plants and called swarms of insects to life to complete the destruction.¹⁵

Similar happenings are echoed by other writers. A journal from 1680 reported this odd incident: 

That between Eisenberg and Dornberg thirty funeral biers [casket stands] all covered with black cloth were seen in broad daylight, among them on a bier a blackman was standing with a white cross. When these had disappeared a great heat set in so that the people in this place could hardly stand it. But when the sun had set they perceived so sweet a perfume as if they were in a garden of roses. By this time they were all plunged in perturbation. Whereupon the epidemic set in in Thuringia in many places.¹⁶

Further south, in Vienna: 

.. . evil smelling mists are blamed, as indicative of the plague, and of these, indeed, several were observed last autumn.¹⁷

Direct from the plague-ravaged town of Eisleben, we get this amusing and perhaps exaggerated newspaper account published on September 1, 1682: 

In the cemetery of Eisleben on the 6th inst. [?] at night the following incident was noticed: When during the night the gravediggers were hard at work digging trenches, for on many days between eighty and ninety have died, they suddenly observed that the cemetery church, more especially the pulpit, was lighted up by bright sunshine. But on their going up to it so deep a darkness and black, thick fog came over the graveyard that they could hardly see one another, and which they took to be an evil omen. Thus day and night gruesome evil spirits are seen frightening the people, goblins grinning at them and pelting them, but also many white ghosts and specters.¹⁸

The same newspaper story later adds: 

When Magister Hardte expired in his agony a blue smoke was seen to rise from his throat, and this in the presence of the death; the same has been observed in the case of others expiring. In the same manner blue smoke has been observed to rise from the gables of houses at Eisleben all the inhabitants of which have died. In the church of St. Peter blue smoke has been observed high up near the ceiling; on this account the church is shunned, particularly as the parish has been exterminated.¹⁹

The “mists” or Plague poisons were thick enough to mix with normal air moisture and become part of the morning dew. People were warned to take the following precautions: 

If newly baked bread is placed for the night at the end of a pole and in the morning is found to be mildewed and internally grown green, yellow and uneatable, and when thrown to fowls and dogs causes them to die from eating it, in a similar manner if fowls drink the morning dew and die in consequence, then the plague poison is near at hand.²⁰

As noted earlier, lethal “mists” were directly associated with bright moving lights in the sky. Other sources for the stenches were also reported. For example, Forestus Alcmarianos wrote of a monstrous “whale” he had encountered which was: 

28 ells [105 feet] in length and 14 ells [33 feet] broad which, coming from the western sea, was thrown upon the shore of Egemont by great waves and was unable to reach the open again; it produced so great a foulness and malignity of the air that very soon a great epidemic broke out in Egemont and neighborhood.²¹

It is a shame that Mr. Alcmarianos did not provide a more detailed description of the deadly whale because it may have been a craft similar to modern UFOswhich have been observed entering and leaving bodies of water. On the other hand, Mr. Alcmarianos’ whale may have been just that: a dead rotting whale which happened to wash up on shore just before a nearby outbreak of the Plague. 

It is significant that foul mists and bad air were blamed for many other epidemics in history. During a plague in ancient Rome, the famous physician Hippocrates (ca. 460337 B.C.) stated that the disease was caused by body disturbances brought on by changes in the atmosphere. To remedy this, Hippocrates had people build large public bonfires. He believed that large fires would set the air aright. 

Hippocrates’ advice was followed centuries later by physicians during the medieval Plague. Modern doctors take a dim view of Hippocrates’ advice on this matter, however, in the belief that Hippocrates was ignorant about the true causes of plague. In reality, huge outdoor bonfires were the only conceivable defense against the Plague if it was indeed caused by germ-saturated aerosols. Vaccines to combat the Plague had not been invented and so the people’s only hope was to burn away the deadly “mists” with fire. Hippocrates and those who followed his advice may have actually saved some lives. 

Significantly, bubonic and pneumonic plagues were not the only infectious diseases in history to be spread on strange lethal fogs. The deadly intestinal disease, cholera, was another: 

When cholera broke out on board Her Majesty’s ship Britannia in the Black Sea in 1854, several officers and men asserted positively that, immediately prior to the outbreak, a curious dark mist swept up from the sea and passed over the ship. The mist had barely cleared the vessel when the first case of disease was announced.²²

Blue mists were also reported in connection with the cholera outbreaks of 1832 and 1848-1849 in England. 

As mentioned earlier, plagues had a very strong religious significance. In the Bible, plagues were said to be Jehovah’s method of punishing people for evil. “Omens” preceding outbreaks of the Black Death resembled many of the “omens” reported in the Bible:

Men confronted with the terror of the Black Death were impressed by the chain of events leading up to the final plague, and accounts of the coming of the14th-century pestilence selected from among all the ominous events that must have occurred in the years preceding the outbreak of 1348 those which closely resemble the ten plagues of Pharoah: disruptions in the atmosphere, storms, unusual invasions of insects, celestial phenomena. ²³

In addition, the Bubonic form of plague was very similar, if not identical, to some of the punishments inflicted by ”God ” in the Old Testament: 

But the hand of the Lord was heavy upon the people of Ashdod [a Philistine city], and he destroyed them, and killed them with emerods [painful swellings].

1 SAMUEL 5:6 

. .. the hand of the Lord was against the city [Gath, another Philistine city] with a very great destruction: and he killed the men of the city, both young and old, and they had emerods in their secret parts.

1 SAMUEL 5:9 

. .. there was a deadly destruction throughout all the city; the hand of God was very heavy there. And the men that survived were afflicted with the emerods: and the crying of the city went up to heaven.

1 SAMUEL 5:11-12 

The religious aspect of the medieval Black Death was enhanced by reports of thundering sounds in connection with outbreaks of the Plague. The sounds were similar to those described in the Bible as accompanying the appearance of Jehovah. Interestingly, they are also sounds common to some UFO sightings:

During the plague of 1565 in Italy rumblings of thunder were heard day and night, as in a war, together with the turmoil and noise as of a mighty army. In Germany in many places a noise was heard as if a hearse were passing through the streets of its own accord .. .²⁴

Similar noises accompanied strange aerial phenomena in remarkable Plague-related sightings from England. The object described in the quote below remained visible for over a week and does appear to be a true comet or planet (such as Venus); however, some of the other objects can only be labeled “unidentified.” 

Historian Walter George Bell, drawing on writings from the period, summarized: 

Late into dark December nights of the year 1664 London citizens sat up to watch a new blazing star, with “mighty talk” thereupon. King Charles II and his Queen gazed out of the windows at Whitehall. About east it rose, reaching no great altitude, and sank below the south-west horizon between two and three o’clock. In a week or two it was gone, then letters came from Vienna notifying the like sight of a brilliant comet, and “in the ayr [air] the appearance of a Coffin, which causes great anxiety of thought amongst the people.” 

Erfurt saw with it other terrible apparitions, and listeners detected noises in the air, as of fires, and sounds of cannon and musket-shot. The report ran that one night in the February following hundreds of persons had seen flames of fire for an hour together, which seemed to be thrown from Whitehall to St. James and then back again to Whitehall, where after they disappeared. 

In March there came into the heavens a yet brighter comet visible two hours after midnight, and so continuing till daylight. With such ominous portents the Great Plague in London was ushered in.²⁵

Other less frequent “omens” were also reported in connection with the Black Death. Some of those phenomena were obvious fictions. Significantly, the fictions were not widespread and were rarely reported outside of the communities in which they originated. 

The preceding quotes provide evidence that UFOs (i.e. the Custodial society) have bombarded the human race with deadly diseases. This evidence is particularly intriguing when we consider claims made by a number of modern UFO contactees who say that they are relaying messages to mankind from the UFO society. Some of them claim that UFOs are here to help mankind and that UFOs will eradicate disease on Earth. The UFO civilization reportedly has no disease. If the Custodial civilization is indeed so healthy, perhaps it is only because it is not bombarding itself with germ weapons. If UFOs truly intended to bring health to the human race, maybe all they needed to do was to stop spraying infectious biological agents into the air.

The Black Death not only killed a great many people, it also caused deep psychological and social wounds. People in the past were convinced that the epidemics were God’s punishment for sin, and this caused deep introversion. It was natural for people to accuse themselves and their neighbors of wickedness and to wonder what they had done to “deserve” their punishment. It rarely occurred to the victims that plagues, even if deliberately inflicted, had nothing to do with trying to make human beings more virtuous. After all, the social and psychological effects of the Plague produced the opposite result. 

The misery and despair generated by the massive death tolls brought about widespread ethical decay. In a dying environment, many people will no longer care about whether their actions are right or wrong; they are going to die anyway. In the fearful climate of the medieval Plague, spiritual values noticeably declined and mental aberration sharply increased. The same results are observed during war. Although the Bible and other religious works may preach that plagues and wars are created by “God ” to ultimately make the human race more virtuous and spiritually advanced, the effect is always the opposite. 

The cataclysmic nature of the Black Death overshadowed another disastrous occurrence of the Plague years: a renewed attempt by Christians to exterminate the Jews. False accusations circulated that Jews were causing the Plague by poisoning wells. These rumors stirred up a fearsome hatred of the Jews inside those Christian communities being devastated by the epidemic. 

Many Christians participated in the genocides, which may have claimed as many lives, if not more, than the slaughter of Jews by the Nazis in the 20th century. According to Collier’s Encyclopedia: 

That country [Germany] figured... as the site of brutal massacres on the widest possible scale, which periodically swept the country from end to end. These culminated at the time of the terrible plague of 1348-1349, known as the Black Death. Perhaps because their medical knowledge and hygienic way of life rendered them somewhat less susceptible than others, the Jews were preposterously accused of having deliberately propagated the plague, and hundreds of Jewish communities, large and small, were blotted out of existence or reduced to insignificance. 

After this, only a broken remnant remained in the country, mainly in the petty lordships which protected and even encouraged them for the sake of financial advantages which they brought. Only a few large German Jewish communities, such as Frankfurt-am-Main or Worms, managed to maintain an unbroken existence from Medieval times onward.²⁶

The genocides were often instigated by German trade guilds, which excluded Jews from membership. Many of those guilds were direct offshoots of the ancient Brotherhood guilds. In fact, membership in Brotherhood organizations and European trade guilds still overlapped heavily in the 14th century with leadership in the guilds often being held by men who were members of other Brotherhood organizations. Here again was an instance in which the corrupted Brotherhood network was a significant contributor, if not the primary source, of a major historical genocide. 

Germany was not the only nation to host Jewish slaughters. The same occurred in Spain. In 1391, a massacre of Jews was perpetrated throughout much of the Spanish peninsula. 

Although frightened Christians supplied the manpower for these terrible genocides, their activities were not always endorsed by the Papacy. To the credit of Clement VI, who served as Pope from 1342 until 1352, he tried almost immediately to protect the Jews from massacre. Clement VI issued two Papal bulls declaring the Jews to be innocent of the charges against them. The bulls called upon all Christians to cease their persecutions. Clement VI did not fully succeed, however, because by that time many of the secretive trade guilds had become a united faction engaged in anti-Papal activity. Pope Clement also did not dismantle the Inquisition, and the Inquisition did much to create the generally oppressive social climate in which such massacres could occur. 

The combination of Plague, Inquisition, and genocide provided all of the elements needed to fulfill apocalyptic prophecy. The Catholic Church was on the brink of collapse due to the many clergymen lost to the Plague and from the loss of popular faith in the Church caused by the Church’s inability to bring an end to “God’s Disease.” A great many people were proclaiming that the “End Days” were at hand. True to prophecy, out of this tumult emerged new “messengers from God” with promises of an imminent Utopia. The teachings and proclamations of those new messiahs had an electrifying effect on the ravaged Europeans and brought about an event of major importance: the Protestant Reformation. 

Luther and The Rose

IN THE 14TH century, that region of Europe we know today as Germany consisted of numerous independent principalities and city-states. By that time, several of those principalities had emerged as the primary centers of Brotherhood activity in Europe, with most of that activity concentrated in the central German state of Hesse. In Germany and elsewhere, the Brotherhood and some of its most advanced initiates had become known by a Latin name: the “Illuminati,” which means “illuminated (enlightened) ones.” * 

*This Illuminati should not be confused with another iesser “Illuminati” founded in 18th-century Bavaria by Adam Weishaupt. The true Illuminati and Weishaupt’s Illuminati are two distinct organizations. Weishaupt’s Bavarian Illuminati will be briefly discussed in an upcoming chapter.

One of the Illuminati’s most important branches in Germany was the mystical Rosicrucian organization. Rosicrucianism was first introduced to Germany by the emperor Charlemagne in the early ninth century A.D. Germany’s first official Rosicrucian Lodge was established in the city of Worms in the German state of Hesse in the year 1100 A.D. Rosicrucians achieved fame for their dedication to alchemy, their complex mystical symbols, and their secret degrees of initiation. The links between the Illuminati and early Rosicrucians were quite intimate in that advancement through the Rosicrucian degrees often resulted in admittance to the Illuminati.

A number of Rosicrucian histories mistakenly state that the Rosicrucians did not begin their existence until the year 1614—the year in which German Rosicrucians published a dramatic pamphlet in Hesse announcing their presence and inviting people to join them. One reason this mistake is so commonly made, and why the Rosicrucian Order has been so difficult to trace as one consecutive existence, is a policy the Order adopted of engaging in 108-year cycles of “activity” and “inactivity.” 

According to the regulation, each major branch of the Rosicrucian Order was required to establish an official date of its founding. From that date, each branch was to then compute successive 108-year periods. The first period would be a time of well-publicized “outward” activity during which the branch’s existence would be made widely known to the public and the branch would openly recruit new members. The next period was to consist of concealed, silent activity in which there was to be no publicity and no one outside of the members’ immediate families would be admitted to membership. 

Each Rosicrucian branch would then alternate between these two phases every 108 years. As Rosicrucian bodies switched back and forth between their “outward” and “hidden” phases, it seemed to observers that Rosicrucian Orders were appearing and disappearing in history. According to Dr. Lewis of AMORC, “just why this new regulation was brought into effect is not known.”1 

The Illuminati and Rosicrucians were major powers behind a new wave of religious movements during the Plague years. One of the earliest of those movements was a mystical religion known as the “Friends of God.”

The Friends of God appeared in Germany in the same year that the Black Death first struck Europe. The Friends organization was founded by a banker named Rulman Merswin who had begun his financial career early in life and had made a sizable fortune from it. According to Merswin, in the year 1347 he was approached by a stranger claiming to be a “friend of God.” The identity of the mysterious stranger was never revealed by Merswin, leading to suspicion that Merswin had merely invented him. It appears, however, that Merswin’s “friend” was quite real, and quite influential, as evidenced by the sudden change in Merswin and by the considerable support that the Friends movement was able to so quickly gather.

During one of their earliest encounters, Merswin’s mysterious friend stated that he had had many mystical revelations directly from God and that Merswin had been chosen to disseminate those revelations to the rest of the world. Merswin was deeply impressed. After that meeting, Merswin gave up his banking business, “took leave of the world,” and devoted himself and his personal fortune to spreading the new religion which the mysterious stranger was bringing him.

As it turns out, what the stranger caused Merswin to create was another branch of the Brotherhood network. The teachings of the Friends were deeply mystical and were divulged through a system of secret degrees and initiations. History records that “illuminated” mystics and other Illuminati were among Merswin’s principle backers.

The teachings of the Friends of God were not only mystical, they were also heavily apocalyptic. The Friends preached a powerful End of the World message to gain converts. Merswin claimed to be the recipient of many supernatural “revelations” in which he was told that God had grown disgusted with the Pope and the Catholic Church. God was now placing His faith in people like Merswin to carry out His sacred plans. According to Merswin, God was planning to severely punish humanity in the near future because of mankind’s increased corruption and sin. 

Merswin had the sacred duty of preaching the need for everyone to therefore become completely obedient to God. Merswin was not alone in spreading this dire message. Similar prophets also found their way into the Friends movement bearing identical warnings. They all emphasized the need to unwaveringly obey God on the eve of the world’s destruction. Merswin and his fellow doomsayers were certainly correct about one thing: the world was about to undergo a cataclysm. The Black Death was just getting started.

The Friends of God attracted a large following in Europe. Adherents were taught a nine-step program to become utterly and unquestioningly obedient to God. They were made to believe that this regimen would save them from the plague and resulting social devastation occurring around them. 

The first step of the program was a sincere confessional to restore health. A properly-done confessional can have a highly beneficial effect on an individual, although a poorly-done or unnecessary confessional can be damaging. The second step was a resolution by adherents 

“to give up their own will and to submit to an illuminated Friend of God, who shall be their guide and counselor in the place of God.” ²

By the seventh step, a member had completely given up all self-will and had “burned all bridges” to become completely subservient to the Lord.

By the final step, all personal desire was to be destroyed, the individual was to be “crucified to the world and the world to them,” enjoying only what God does and to wish for nothing else. These teachings were a program to make human beings obedient to an ultimate degree. Members were taught that obedience was a spiritual being’s highest calling and something to be striven for as a quest. 

Merswin’s conversion to his mysterious “friend’s” religion was very damaging to Merswin, as it no doubt was to many others. Merswin soon began to suffer strong “manic-depressive” symptoms: the phenomenon of alternately being in a happy state and then inexplicably experiencing mental depression, back and forth. In Merswin, these symptoms became severe and they were erroneously perceived by his followers as a sign of religious transformation. Many people today would recognize such symptoms as an indication that Merswin was connected to a repressive influence—in this case, the corrupted Brotherhoodand probably his mysterious “friend.” 

During his life in the Friends movement, Merswin continued to claim many mystical experiences, including “joint revelations” with his “friend.” In one of those revelations, Merswin was told to use his money to buy an island in Strausberg for use as a Friends retreat. Strausberg was Merswin’s home city and is located by the southwestern French-German border. Five years later, Merswin had another joint revelation in which he was told to turn the whole Friends operation over to an organization called the Order of St. John, which governed the Friends movement thereafter.* 

* Exactly what the Order of St. John was, and where it came from, is quite a mystery. It has been described in Albert MacKey’s Encyclopedia of Freemasonry as a 17th-century system of Freemasonry with a secret mission. Is the Order of St. John described by MacKey the same one which had taken over the Friends of God movement three centuries earlier in the 14th century? I do not know. 

The Friends of God religion was one of many mystical movements that proliferated during the Plague years. Those movements were usually Christian in nature, but they advertised themselves as an alternative to the Catholic Church and attracted many disgruntled Catholics on that basis. This began to split apart the Christian world. Unfortunately, the split did not mean that Christians were returning to Jesus’s maverick teachings. The new mystical religions only strengthened the emphasis on obedience and apocalypticism. This began to drive many people out of religion altogether and helped lay the foundation for the radical materialism which began to arise out of Germany shortly thereafter.

The Friends of God and other mystical practices of the time became a juggernaut which brought about one of the greatest challenges ever faced by the Catholic Church: the Protestant Reformation of Martin Luther. 

Luther began his famous ecclesiastical rebellion in the early 1500’s. By that time, the Catholic Church had fallen into the hands of Pope Leo X, son of Lorenzo Di Medici. Lorenzo Di Medici was the head of a wealthy international banking house in Florence, Italy. The Medici family had become involved with the Papacy a generation earlier when the Medicis financed an archbishop who later became the schismatic (“anti-Pope”) Pope John XXIII. Under John XXIII, the Medicis were awarded the task of collecting taxes and tithes that were due this Pope. The Medicis operated a far-flung network of collectors and sub-collectors to accomplish this undertaking. The fees earned from this operation helped make the Medici family one of the wealthiest and most influential banking houses in Europe. 

The involvement of profit-motivated bankers in Church affairs transformed many spiritual activities of the Catholic Church into business enterprises. For example, Catholics believed in the importance of paying “indulgences.” An indulgence is money paid to compensate for sin. When paid in conjunction with a properly-done confessional, monetary penance can often be effective in relieving guilt, especially if the money is used to assist the injured party. Most indulgences, however, went into Church coffers. Medici collectors were more often concerned with how much money a person could pay than whether or not the penitent achieved any spiritual benefit from paying it. Understandably, many Catholics grumbled and their discontent helped pave the way for Martin Luther.

History books tell us that Martin Luther was a German Catholic priest and educator. He had begun his career as a monk in the Augustinian Order and worked his way up to holding the chair of Biblical study at the University of Wittenberg in the German state of Saxony. 

As a Catholic priest, Luther was subject to the strict regimen imposed upon all clergy of the Church. That included regular attendance at confessional. In Catholic confessional, a person tells a priest in confidence of wrongs that the confessor has committed. This is designed to help unburden a person spiritually. As already mentioned, a properly done confessional has a positive effect and, interestingly, it does appear to be necessary at some point for nearly everyone’s spiritual advancement. By Luther’s day, however, confessionals were often done improperly or unnecessarily so that people often felt little relief.

Luther eventually found going to confessional difficult. He had already come to hate the angry condemning God of the Catholic religion and, as a result, he began to lose his faith in the Catholic way to salvation. 

There was, however, another equally important reason why Luther was having difficulty in confessional: he had committed acts which he felt unable or unwilling to confess. Luther claims that he tried to purge himself of every conceivable sin, but some acts still “eluded” his memory when it came time to divulge them to his confessor. In part because of this, Luther did not feel himself advancing spiritually and he despaired of ever achieving salvation. He felt compelled to seek another path to spiritual recovery that would not force him to endure the uncomfortable confessionals. 

Although Luther voiced many legitimate criticisms of the Catholic Church and claimed that he was trying to re-establish the primitive Christian Church of Jesus, Luther was, to an extent, a man driven by the demons of unconfessed wrongs. As a result, he helped create a new form of Christianity that only further departed from the true teachings of Jesus. 

Despite the East Roman corruption of Jesus’s teachings and the brutal methods of the Inquisition, Catholicism during Luther’s time still retained several important elements of Jesus’s maverick lessons. For example, the Catholic Church continued to preach that salvation was up to the individual to achieve. It taught further the importance of doing good works,* the need to confess sin when sin had been committed, and the importance of rectifying wrongs or compensating for them. 

*Good works are important to the extent that they improve a person’s environment and bolster his level of ethics, which in turn helps provide a foundation for an individual’s ultimate spiritual recovery. Unfortunately, the Catholic Church used good works as a scorecard. Catholics believed that a person’s good works (“merits”) were added up like points by God, and once a person had accumulated enough merits in his or her “treasury,” the person was guaranteed salvation (provided that a few other requirements were also met). 

.

The Church taught that saints had a surplus of merits and that the Pope could transfer merits from the saints’ treasuries to other people whose treasuries were lacking. The lucky recipients were naturally expected to contribute money to the Church for the favor. Luther rightly rejected the notion of merits and treasuries, and that became a major issue over which Luther was eventually excommunicated. Unfortunately, Luther did not restore an understanding of the true relationship of good works to salvation, but instead he wrongly eliminated the doing of good works altogether, even though it is one ingredient which can help lay the foundation for a person’s spiritual recovery. 

The Catholic Church emphasized that man had the free will to either accept or reject salvation, that salvation could not be imposed upon anyone against his or her will (even by a monotheistic God), and that all people were endowed with the right to seek salvation. While Catholic teachings still had many serious flaws and lacked a true science of the spirit, these ideas reflected some of the truth and decency which were at the heart of Jesus’s message. 

Luther’s key to reform would have been to reinforce the good tenets still alive in Catholicism while eliminating the blatant commercialization and the East Roman changes to Christian doctrine. That was not the road Luther chose to take. He taught instead the false idea that a person has no personal control over his spiritual salvation. Luther convinced people that salvation is dependent entirely upon the grace of a monotheistic God. There was only one action an individual could take to obtain God’s grace, said Luther, and that was to believe in Jesus as Saviour and to accept Christ’s agony and crucifixion as penance for one’s own sins. 

Luther’s curious notion that Jesus’s crucifixion can be the penance for other people’s sin is partially based upon the concept of “karma.” “Karma” is the idea that all acts in this universe eventually “come back” at a person in the future. People frequently invoke the idea of karma when they ask, ”What did I do to deserve this?” In modern science, “karma” has been expressed as: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” In monotheism, “karma” usually comes in the form of God’s inevitable punishments for sin and rewards for good. 

On a personal level, the principle of karma seems to hold true in the sense that the world one creates, good or bad, through action or inaction, is ultimately the world that comes back to one. Poor ethics seem to boomerang in the form of spiritual degradation. A major benefit of a properly-done confessional is that it actually seems to break the negative “boomerang” effect and it will thereby help start a person back on the road to spiritual recovery. 

Because Luther’s confessionals were unsatisfactory, he felt compelled to invent another way to escape the “karma” cycle enforced by the rewards and punishments of his monotheistic God. Luther therefore developed the idea that God would allow Jesus’s pain and suffering on the cross to become the “boomerang” for everybody. In other words, by “believing in” Jesus, you will not spiritually suffer for the bad things you have done in the past because Jesushas already suffered for you. This is a wonderfully magical notion, but it is hardly a philosophy of responsibility, nor is it fair to Jesus that he should be expected to take the brunt for everyone else’s wrongs. 

More importantly, Luther’s solution simply does not work. Many people do feel and act better after “proclaiming Christ” because they have acknowledged their spiritual existences in a way they had not done before and they often begin more ethical behavior as a result, but their act of belief has not caused them to overcome the many other barriers which stand in the way of complete spiritual recovery. 

Protestants continued to practice confessional, although it was no longer considered vital for achieving salvation. Practical knowledge of the spirit was also largely ignored. Luther’s method amounted to “quickie salvation”: a simple act of belief. Luther taught that salvation was guaranteed by God for as long as a person continued to adhere to a belief in Jesus as Saviour.

Luther’s ideas were clearly mystical. This is not surprising when we consider that Luther had been greatly influenced by some of the mystical religions which were so popular in his country. Luther’s primary mentor in the Augustinian Order, Johann von Staupitz, preached a theology containing many elements from the writings of the prominent German mystics Heinrich Suso and Johann Tauler. Tauler was one of the most widely-read mystics of the 14th century and he was associated with the Friends of God movement. Luther became an avid reader of Tauler’s works. 

Evidence of a more direct connection of Luther to the Brotherhood network is found in Luther’s personal seal. Luther’s seal consisted of his initials on either side of two Brotherhood symbols: the rose and the cross. The rose and cross are the chief symbols of the Rosicrucian Order. The word “Rosicrucian” itself comes from the Latin words “rose” (“rose”) and “crucis” (“cross”). 

Both during his life and after, Luther counted among his supporters important individuals and families who were active in the Illuminati and in Rosicrucianism. One of them was Philip the Magnanimous, head of the powerful royal house of Hesse, whose descendants would later hold important leadership positions in Brotherhood organizations, especially in German Freemasonry, as we shall later see. 

As one of the prime leaders of the Reformation, Philip the Magnanimous founded the Protestant University of Marburg and organized a political alliance against the Catholic German Emperor, Charles V. After Luther’s death, his religion was supported by Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who was atone time the Lord Chancellor of England. Bacon was also the highest executive of the Rosicrucian Order in Great Britain. One of Bacon’s greatest contributions to the Reformation arose from his efforts as the coordinator of a project to create an authorized English Protestant Bible under his king, James I. This Bible, known as the “King James Version,” was released in 1611 and became the most widely-used Bible in the English-speaking Protestant world.

Luther and his supporters created the single largest schism in Christian history. Enormous power was wrested from the Roman Catholic Church. The Protestant sects today account for about one third of all Christians worldwide, and nearly half of all Christians in North America. The Catholic Church did not allow this to happen without a fight, however. The Catholics launched a Counter-Reformation in an unsuccessful attempt to squelch the Protestant heresies. Leading the Counter-Reformation was, interestingly, a new Brotherhood-style organization created for the purpose: the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits. 

The Jesuit Order was founded in 1540 by a soldier-turned-cleric named Ignatius of Loyola. The Jesuits were a Catholic secret society with degrees of initiation, periods of probation, and many secret rituals. It was also militant. Jesuits were encouraged to adopt a soldierly spirit of loyalty to their “captain” Jesus. Ignatius was chosen to be the first “general” of the Order in April 1741. The image of Jesus as a quasi-military captain may seem rather humorous to anyone familiar with Jesus’s teachings, but the image was helpful in making the Jesuit Order an effective cadre for combating the Protestants.

Although it is true that the Reformation led the human race further away from spiritual understanding, it did have one very beneficial effect: it helped break the back of the Catholic Inquisition. The Inquisition had been one of the most oppressive institutions to burden the human spirit. Inquisitors meddled in nearly every human endeavor—from religion to the sciences to the arts. The Inquisition enforced some of the most hopelessly antiquated scientific thought by threatening people with torture and death. It hindered the development of many of the fine arts, notably theatre. It probably did not greatly matter what the Protestants taught; they would have still been able to bring enormous relief to Europe as long as they were able to reduce the power of the Catholic Inquisition. There was an eventual price to be paid for this benefit, however, and that was the price of an ever-deepening materialism. Philosophies of “humanism,” “rationalism,” and similar ideologies with a materialistic bent took on renewed vigor in the Reformation climate. 

Most importantly, many of the positive effects of the Reformation were offset by the fact that Protestantism was yet one more human faction placed in irresolvable conflict with other factions over erroneous religious issues. Luther himself contributed to this by hinting that the Pope represented the forces of the “anti-Christ.” The result has been more war, this time between Catholics and Protestants—notably today in Ireland. 

Despite the Brotherhood network’s continued pattern of generating conflict during the centuries discussed in this chapter, it is important to note that a maverick influence had manifested itself in the Rosicrucian organization by the early 1600’s. The Rosicrucian goal of individual spiritual recovery and some of its teachings were remarkably similar to some earlier maverick goals. Modern Rosicrucian literature from the United States continues to reflect some of this positive influence by attempting to propagate a more scientific view of spiritual phenomena and by teaching that humans can intelligently control their lives. Unfortunately, modern Rosicrucianism still contains many Custodial elements which will prevent adherents from achieving full spiritual rehabilitation. 

Although Rosicrucians contributed to the success of the Reformation, they did not achieve much fame until the year 1614 when, as noted earlier, a lodge of German Rosicrucians began a phase of “outward” activity by mass-producing a leaflet announcing the presence of Rosicrucians in Hesse’s largest principality, Hesse-Kassel. The pamphlet created a stir by urging all people to abandon their false teachers, such as the Pope, Galen (a popular ancient Greek physician), and Aristotle. 

The pamphlet also told the story of a fictitious character, “Christian Rosenkruez,” to symbolize the founding of the Rosicrucian- Order. The pamphlet is best known by its shortened name, the Fama Fraternitas (“Noted Fraternity” or “Famous Brotherhood”). The full title of the leaflet, translated to English, is: Universal and General Reformation of the Whole Wide World, together with the Noted Fraternity of the Rosy Cross, inscribed to all the Learned and Rulers of Europe. Despite the quaint high-sounding tone, the leaflet’s title revealed a deadly serious intent: to create broad universal changes in human society. By the time of the Fama Fraternitas, the Brotherhood network had already launched its program to bring about this transformation. 

For the next several hundred years, the Brotherhood network supplied the world with leaders who inspired and led violent revolutionary movements in all parts of the world in an effort to bring about a massive transmutation of human society. They succeeded, and we live today in the world they created.