booknetsaWebster-secretSocietiesAndSubversiveMovements

This passage would alone suffice to show that Christ and His apostles did not inhabit communities
where all were equal, but followed the usual practices of the social system under which they lived, though
adopting certain rules, such as taking only one garment and carrying no money when they went on journeys.
Those resemblances between the teaching of the Essenes and the Sermon on the Mount which Dr. Ginsburg
indicates refer not to the customs of a sect, but to general precepts for human conduct-humility meekness,
charity, and so forth.
At the same time it is clear that if the Essenes in general conformed to some of the principles laid down
by Christ, certain of their doctrines were completely at variance with those of Christ and of primitive Christians,
in particular their custom of praying to the rising sun and their disbelief in the resurrection of the
body.(90) St. Paul denounces asceticism, warning the brethren that " in the latter times some shall depart
from the faith, giving heed seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils,... forbidding to marry, and commanding
to abstain from meats which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and
know the truth. For every creature of God is good and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving...
If thou put the brethren in remembrance of these things, thou shalt be a good minister of Jesus Christ."
This would suggest that certain Essenean ideas had crept into Christian communities and were regarded
by those who remembered Christ's true teaching as a dangerous perversion.
The Essenes were therefore not Christians, but a secret society, practising four degrees of initiation, and
bound by a terrible oaths not to divulge the sacred mysteries confided to them. And what were those mysteries
but those of the Jewish secret tradition which we now know as the Cabala? Dr. Ginsburg throws an important
light on Essenism when, in one passage alone, he refers to the obligation of the Essenes " not to divulge
the secret doctrines to anyone,... carefully to preserve the books belonging to their sect and names of
the angels or the mysteries connected with the Tetragrammaton and the other names of God and angels,
comprised in the theosophy as well as with the cosmonogy which also played so important a part among the
Jewish mystics and the Kabbalists." (91) The truth is clearly that the Essenes were Cabalists, though doubtless
Cabalists of a superior kind. The Cabala they possessed very possibly descended from pre-Christian
times and had remained uncontaminated by the anti-Christian strain introduced into it by the Rabbis after the
death of Christ.(92)
The Essenes are of importance to the subject of this book as the first of the secret societies from which a
direct line of tradition can be traced up to the present day. But if in this peaceful community no actually
anti-Christian influence is to be discerned, the same cannot be said of the succeeding pseudo-Christian sects
which, whilst professing Christianity, mingled with Christian doctrines the poison of the perverted Cabala,
main source of the errors which henceforth rent the Christian Church in twain.
The Gnostics
The first school of thought to create a schism in Christianity was the collection of sects known under the
generic name of Gnosticism. In its purer forms Gnosticism aimed at supplementing faith by knowledge of
eternal verities and at giving a wider meaning to Christianity by linking it up with earlier faiths. " The belief
that the divinity had been manifested in the religious institutions of all nations " (93) thus led to the conception
of a sort of universal religion containing the divine elements of all.
Gnosticism, however, as the Jewish Encyclopædia points out, " was Jewish in character long before it
became Christian."(94) M. Matter indicates Syria and Palestine as its cradle and Alexandria as the centre by
which it was influenced at the time of its alliance with Christianity. This influence again was predominantly
Jewish. Philo and Aristobulus, the leading Jewish philosophers of Alexandria, " wholly attached to the ancient
religion of their fathers, both resolved to adorn it with the spoils of other systems and to open to Judaism
the way to immense conquests." (95) This method of borrowing from other races and religions those
ideas useful for their purpose has always been the custom of the Jews. The Cabala, as we have seen, was
made up of these heterogeneous elements. And it is here we find the principal progenitor of Gnosticism. The
Freemason Ragon gives the clue in the words: The Cabala is the key of the occult sciences. The Gnostics
were born of the Cabalists."(96)
For the Cabala was much older than the Gnostics. Modern historians who date it merely from the publication
of the Zohar by Moses de Leon in the thirteenth century or from the school of Luria in the sixteenth
century obscure this most important fact which Jewish savants have always clearly recognized.(97) The
Jewish Encyclopædia, whilst denying the certainty of connexion between Gnosticism and the Cabala, nevertheless
admits that the investigations of the anti-Cabalist Graetz " must be resumed on a new basis," and it
goes on to show that " it was Alexandria of the first century, or earlier, with her strange commingling of
Nesta H. Webster — Secret Societies and Subversive Movements — Part I
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