From the Apennine Sibyl to The Hellfire Club: The Occult Takeover of America and Mary Rogers' Murder as Ritual Revenchism
Edgar Poe as Cultural Warrior Part 11
Part 1: The Society of the Cincinnatus: Solving a 170 Year Murder Mystery
Part 2: Poe, Beethoven and Houdini VS the Cult of Artificial Intelligence
Part 3: Poe’s Tales of Ratiocination and the Real C. Auguste Dupin
Part 4: Culture Wars: Mazzini's Minions Enter the Stage
Part 5: Poe's Eureka vs Emerson's Transcendentalism
Part 6: The Syncretic Revival of Paganism- Transcendentalists and Theosophists
Part 7: The Mormon Role in the the Purge of Republican Freemasonry
Part 8: Why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Despised Edgar Allan Poe
Part 9: The Occult Underpinnings of Mary Rogers’ Murder: An Exercise in Ratiocination
Part 10: Sibyl’s Cave and the Epicenter for World Occultism
It will assist the reader greatly if parts 9 and 10 are read prior to this last segment.
By the start of the 18th century, the ceremonies of Eleusis, and rosicrucian mystery rituals associated with the Apennine Sibyl would be performed by leading figures of London’s satanic Hellfire Club that met in underground caverns located under West Wycomb Abbey leased by Sir Francis Dashwood (Chancellor of the Exchequer of England).
The Abbey had formerly been a Cistercian church in the 13th century, and featured vast caverns located below the abbey which had been Mithraic altars built during Roman times. Following the Rosicrucian obsession with integrating matter and spirit in a ritualistic pursuit of ascension, the caves so integral to Hellfire Club practices served to similarly symbolize an entry into the land of the dead in order for initiates to be “reborn”.
A prominent element of Rosicrucian symbolism is actually the figure of the Deus Leontocephalus (a snake rapped around a nude man and featuring a symbol of a lion- featured in the etching below).
This icon did not originate with the Rosicrucians, but was also a symbol found in many Mithraic subterranean alters across the former Roman Empire. This character was actually dubbed Ariamanus (or “Ahriman” in the Zoroastrian system)- three images featured below).
Prior to Dashwood’s leading role in the satanic cult, the Hellfire Club had been run by The Duke of Wharton, who founded the elitist society in 1719.
Although the English Government and even British Grand Lodge of Freemasonry condemned the Hellfire Club in 1722, Wharton and the Club’s membership continued to be primarily Grand Lodge members with Wharton acting as Grand Master of the Premier Grand Lodge of England in 1723. Wharton was a Knight of the Order of the Garter, and a leading member of another secret society dubbed ‘The Gorgomons’ which also professed to be anti-Masonic.
As outlined in The Purge of Republican Freemasonry, these apparently contradictory stances indicate a larger game of controlled gang/counter-gang strategy to pose a fake opposition to satanic cults on the surface while promoting them in secret.
Above the caverns, Dashwood restored the decrepit St. Lawrence Church in 1751 using as inspiration the Sol Invictus (Mithraic) Temple that had recently been discovered in Palmyra, Syria and he dubbed his occult society ‘The Order of Knights of St. Francis (sometimes called ‘The Medmenham Monks’) as a not-too-subtle reference to 1) his own name, 2) the Abbey above the caverns, and 3) St. Francis of Assisi whom, as we established, created an order which served as a bridge between the Benedictines (who also controlled the Pagan center of the Isle of Capri for several centuries) and later Jesuits.
The satirical painter William Hogarth astutely captured this irony in his biting rendition of Sir Francis Dashwood dressed as St Francis of Assisi, except featuring an erotic novel instead of a bible, a naked woman instead of Jesus, a Venetian masque, and the figure of fellow Hellfire leader Lord Sandwich as a lunar god instead of a halo indicating the Dionysian orgiastic ceremonies performed at night by the initiated.
Hellfire Club member John Wilkes (Royal Society member, and grandfather of Lincoln’s assassin) stated “No profane eye dared to penetrate the English Eleusinian Mysteries of the Chapter Room where the Monks assembled on solemn occasions […] secret rites performed and libations to the Bona Dea”. Bona Dea was the name for earth mother Magna Mater, who was known variously as Demeter, Aphrodite, Venus and Cybele.
Like the caves of the Apennine Sibyl, or the caverns under the Apennine Colossus featured above, the importance placed upon caves within these occult ceremonies cannot be under-estimated, and are inextricably linked to the Eleusinian Mystery rites discussed by Wilkes above.
Freemasonic rituals have often placed a high import on caves, with the Jerusalem Lodge carrying out rites in the cavernous “mines of Solomon” under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Malheur Cave in Oregon, the Tennessee mountains where masons from around the globe flock every year to perform the master degree, the Copper Cave in Arizona, and the Torquay prehistoric caves at Kent’s Cavern England.
A key feature of the Eleusinian Mysteries involve a decent into Hades, (“the land of the dead”) which entails a series of rites and rituals that induce the initiate to “die in order to be reborn immortal”.
The spiritual alchemy expressed by the imagery of a phoenix, dying to be reborn more powerful than before is thus featured prominently among Masonic networks. The venturing down into the darkness of a cavern, the infusion of good and evil, and the use of mind-altering drugs all play into this ceremony of having communion with supposed devils and dis-embodied spirits.
After redesigning the abbey above the caverns under the gothic style, Dashwood placed a banner above the entrance that read “Do What thou Wilt”… which was later adopted by a leading satanist from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn named Aleister Crowley as the basis for his cosmology of Thelema in 1904.
Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), self-professed anti-Christ, occultist, and British Agent famously developed upon his own variation of the Rites of Eleusis while heading the German branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). In Crowley’s Eleusinian working, mescaline was the hallucinogenic drug of choice– which accompanied long days and nights of orgies, sacrifice and other ‘outer body’ experiences. In Crowley’s Eleusinian Ceremony, the same 7 gates of initiation as held by the Mithra Cult are featured prominently.
Crowley’s seven rites of Eleusis (which were made into a theatrical performance) were named ‘The Rite of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Venus, Mercury, and Luna.’
Crowley’s writings on the Lesser Key of Solomon co-published with MacGregor Mathers in 1904 was a hugely influential study that grew out of the excavations of Solomon’s Temple carried out by Sir Charles Warren as head of the Palestinian Expedition Fund between 1867-1870.
Crowley also relied on the work of Rosicrucian explorers Sir Richard Francis Burton, and Sir Charles Warren during the late 19th century, and these writings (combined with the 14th century grimoire ‘The Greater Key of Solomon’) had vast influence on occult rites for nearly every Rosicrucian group of the the 20th century and beyond.
The Rosicrucian Revenge
Christian Platonists like Nicholas of Cusa, Pope Pius II, Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin and Edgar Allan Poe did much to subvert the designs of this wicked mystery cult between the 15-19th century, but with the crushing of the Transcendentalist movement by Edgar Poe, a new wave was prepared within England and the United States.
In 1885, a Rosicrucian cult dedicated to ritual magic and integration of Jewish Kabbalism, Alchemy, Solomon Temple mythology, Egyptian occultism, shamanism and trantra practices was established in London and dubbed ‘The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’.
This order was created by three occultists named Macgregor Mathers, William Wynn Westcott and William Woodman and it soon grew to include such notable initiates as Y.B. Yeats, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley. Mathers, Westcott and Woodman were all members of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia founded in 1867 by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and all three were devoted to the teachings of French catholic occultist Eliphas Levi.
Westcott was both a prominent London coroner during the Jack the Ripper murders, and a Theosophist.
All three founders also had a close relationship with Sir Charles Warren, Grandmaster of the Freemasonic Quaotor Coronatti Lodge who led the first excavations of the Temple Mount (Dome of the Rock complex) in Jerusalem in 1864, and established the first masonic ritual in Solomon’s Caves in 1867.
After becomming the chief freemasonic expert on the reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple and one of the most decorated figures of the British Empire, Warren was strangely assigned to serve in the position of chief of London’s Metropolitan police during the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888, quitting his post on the day of the last murder.
Throughout the 20th century, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn spawned literally hundreds of spinoff groups professing ‘white’ and at other times ‘black’ magic rituals… but always with an outer exoteric shell and inner esoteric path for initiated ‘elites’.
While the Jack the Ripper murders were raging, the group established the Isis-Urania Temple in London with outlets across Europe and deep penetrations into the Esoteric Section of the new Theosophy movement of Madame Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott.
The Golden Dawn’s initiatory rituals originated in a 60 page cipher manuscript that was made by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873) and fellow Rosicrucian Hargrave Jennings (1817-1890)… both self-professed sorcerers were closely aligned with French occultist Eliphas Levi.
Rosicrucian scholar Samuel Robinson wrote of Hargrave Jenning’s role in shaping not only the rosicrucian and tantric sex magic revival in England, but also identifies both Jennings and Bulwer-Lytton as a bridge connecting the 18th century Hellfire Club and its practice of the Eleusinian Mysteries to the USA via Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825-1875), an occultist, trance medium and leading Roscrucian.
After travelling across Africa and Europe during the 1850s, Randolph found himself a student of occultist Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton where he was initiated into the mysteries. Upon his return to the USA, Randolph drafted rites that established the US-branch of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor in 1870 based on the sex magic theories he learned from Bulwer-Lytton and Jennings.
When the Theosophical society was created in New York in 1875, most founding members were simultaneously members of Randolph’s Brotherhood of Luxor indicating that the narrative that a feud ragged between Randolph and Blavatsky is little more than myth.
Knowing that the Theosophists were simply a re-branded version of the earlier masonic-gnostic Transcendentalists against which Edgar Poe fought tooth and nail, and knowing that Poe’s combat with the rosicrucian occultists was carried out through his many subtle yet powerful stories [14], we must review the murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers at Sibyl’s Cave in Hoboken New Jersey from a completely new contextual vantage point based on the facts cited above.
From Mary Rogers to Jack the Ripper
The murder of the ‘beautiful cigar girl’ was much more than a typical crime or botched abortion as generations of commentators have supposed for over 180 years.
By using the simple method of ratiocination which Poe demonstrated through his own works, we can take stock of the anomalies pervasive in the story of Mary Rogers’ murder, which though often ignored, doesn’t diminish from the much larger picture behind those anomalies which the active mind may discover.
Mary’s murder at Sibyl’s Cave involved the elimination of a family line of humanists that had valiantly led the republican colonization project put into motion by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa in the mid 15th century. Not only that, but as we have seen, those same anti-oligarchist leaders were also behind a direct war with the heirs of the pagan Babylonian high priests who found a sanctuary in the Sibili Mountain during the medieval period- meaning Mary’s murder represented a powerful symbol of revenge with deep occult significance.
Her murder also took place amidst a purge of the dwindling republican (anti-occult) masonic lodges under the fog of the Mormon-Scottish Rite led ‘anti-Masonic hysteria’ which was tied to the Tammany Hall takeover of America in 1832 as Scottish Rite Grandmaster Andrew Jackson was installed as President of the USA.
Mary Rogers’ employer John Anderson’s involvement with Tammany Hall and the masonic takeover of major press agencies of New York which she and her mother (grandmother ?) Phoebe Rogers operated within are anomalies that cannot be ignored. Her own association with the anti-occult networks of Edgar Poe, James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving are also of extreme importance.
Lastly, Mary Rogers’ murder signifies one of the earliest cases, if not the first case of mass media-driven sensationalism over urban murder which went far to drive the zeitgeist of Americans into a fear-driven tabloid obsessed frenzy seeking gossipy opinions often totally disjointed from reality by an increasingly consolidated press.
Thus both on the level of mass-psychological effects of media consumers of New York, Mary Rogers’ murder had many parallels to the psychological hysteria created in the minds of Londoners during the Whitechapel murders of 1888.
Historian Marta Miquel-Baldellou took note of this strange parallel writing in "Twice-Told Traumas: Whatever Happened to Mary Rogers or Poe's Revenge on Life”:
“As happened with Jack the Ripper in Victorian England, Mary Rogers’ murder acquired notorious relevance as evidence of the citizens’ manifest vulnerability in an increasingly corrupted city, where the police enforcement seemed powerless and at the mercy of gang violence. Resembling the crimes committed in the Whitechapel districts of Victorian England, Mary Rogers’ case also raised extensive newspaper coverage, and attracted much attention due to the youth and beauty of the victim as well as the unusual violence inflicted on her body. Resembling Jack the Ripper’s victims, Mary also presented abdominal mutilations and wounds around her neck that seemed to prove she had been raped and strangled.”
In the next installment of this series, we will then take a deeper look into the surprising connection tying Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, his mentor Dr. Joseph Bell and his character Sherlock Holmes to another black magic ritual that was popularly dubbed ‘the Jack the Ripper Murders’ of 1888.
Footnote
[14] Such stories composed by Poe include, but are not limited to, The Sphinx, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Shadow, A Tale of the Ragged Mountains, The Cask of Amontillado, The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion (The Destruction of the World), The Gold-Bug (on ciphers), Mesmeric Revelation, The Oval Portrait (Life in Death), Some Words with a Mummy.
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Matthew Ehret is the editor-in-chief of The Canadian Patriot Review, Senior Fellow of the American University in Moscow and Director of the Rising Tide Foundation. He has written the four volume Untold History of Canada series, four volume Clash of the Two Americas series and Science Unshackled: Restoring Causality to a World in Chaos. He is also co-host of The Multipolar Reality on Rogue News and Breaking History on Badlands Media
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