THE MORE CERTAINTY WE HAVE IN OUR LIVES, THE MORE WE are intrigued by mysteries. Their entertainment value is obvious, but we may also need threats to our security in order to fully appreciate it. In the process, we speculate about things we cannot explain, and often become fixed on threats and events well removed from our day-to-day lives. It's more comforting that way, which perhaps explains why the greatest concentration of secret society concerns rests in urban Europe and affluent North America, whose residents have the most to lose materially and spiritually.
For those of us detached from direct association with shadow people, it is the secrecy that is most worrisome, and the potential impact on our lives that is most threatening, an attitude that varies according to proximity. To citizens of Calabria and Sicily, the Mafia is a reality that need not be speculated about, because its presence and influence are evident. Similar attitudes may be found among residents of Hong Kong and Macau, who experience Triad activities first hand, and Japanese businessmen encountering crimes committed by Yakuza. To both groups, the “secret” in secret societies is something of a contradiction when their direct impact is confronted daily.
At the other end of the spectrum, Yak farmers in Mongolia, refugees in Somalia and Inuit on Baffin Island grapple daily with a range of challenges to their survival that middle-class Americans and Europeans cannot grasp. Plotting their very existence occupies too much of their consciousness to speculate about the impact of millennia-old and foreign-based conspiracies, even as entertainment.
To the rest of us, “secret” denotes mystery, and mysteries demand solutions. Where solutions are unavailable, speculation will do. And when speculation is unleashed from reason and motivated by innuendo, we begin to sense that we are surrounded by conspiracies, believing in their existence even when faced with evidence to the contrary.
The more comfortable and predictable our lives become, the more positively we react to the notion of widespread conspiracies because their existence provides a resolution to various unsolved mysteries. Conspiracies supply blame for terrible events that remain beyond our ability to fathom them. No better example exists than the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Those who cannot accept that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, could gun down one of the most admired men of his time look for evidence to support their disbelief. In this incidence there may be much yet to be found, as we saw with the examination of Skull & Bones. On a grander scale, we may ascribe the failure of our economic dreams to an unfathomable and shadowy cartel, the defeat of a favored politician to an international cabal, and unexplained climatic events to supernatural forces controlled by covens.
The growing appeal of secret explanations for catastrophic events has paralleled the impact of contemporary popular culture, with each element feeding the other. Popular novels and movies once dealt with people engaged in direct association with each other; their motivations varied between love and war, often involving both, but they were for the most part open, not shadowy, occurrences. Today's popular culture vehicles find more inspiration not in events we can fathom but in secrets that defy our explanation, held by organizations operating within shadows.
Consider the mystery novel. Most observers trace its origins back to Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 tale The Gold Bug. Poe's literary descendant Dashiell Hammett created the prototypical private eye to solve crimes committed by individuals whose closest association with an international conspiracy was usually “The Syndicate,” code for the Mafia. Others, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan, Sax Rohmer (creator of Fu Manchu) and Sapper (pen name for Herman Cyril McNeile, author of the Bulldog Drummond series), pursued criminals who functioned on a one-to-one scale with their victims while committing robbery, murder and similar unsavory and intriguing activities.
Secret societies rarely appeared in popular literature until relatively recently. Readers of Ayn Rand suggest that her novel Atlas Shrugged deals with values associated with the Illuminati, which may explain the basis for the book's popularity. Communists were a familiar target in American novels of the 1950s, but in this case familiarity appears to have bred boredom; communists were an everyday element in news broadcasts, which made them feckless villains in fiction for the most part.
It took Ian Fleming, and progeny such as Robert Ludlum and John Grisham, to address readers’ fears of shadowy conspirators exerting widespread power over the lives of ordinary people. A variation on this plot device blasted the Harry Potter series into the records as history's most successful publishing phenomenon in children's books and literature generally. At least three secret societies, such as the Order of the Phoenix, are involved in the Potter plots, each threatening not only the hero and his cohorts but the security of the world itself.
Harry Potter is fun, of course, even when he's scooting over the moors pursued by shadowy villains. This is unusual. In spite of near-farcical aspects of organizations such as the Rosicrucians, likely born of a college-student prank, and the unfortunate death of a Freemason initiate, secret societies are rarely subject to parody in popular culture. On television, Jackie Gleason's early 1950s comedy The Honeymooners frequently included the International Order of Friendly Sons of the Raccoons, whose lodge members acted suspiciously like Masons and Shriners, engaging in code words and flapping the tails on their coonskin caps to each other. More recently, and more acerbically, the television series The Simpsons has included the Stonecutters in several of its plots. Clearly based on Freemasonry, the Stonecutters meet weekly in a pyramid-shaped building where they honor their Sacred Parchment before drinking heavily and playing Ping-Pong. For proof of their power, the Stonecutters claim to control the British monarchy and prevent the metric system from being used in the USA. It is an accurate, devastating and hilarious parody of the lighter side of secret societies.
In a semi-serious vein, film adaptations of Ian Fleming's James Bond series were among the first to spark Hollywood's interest in international conspiracies, partially because Fleming managed to tap the public's fascination with evil secret societies. Bond's nemesis spectre (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) elevated the idea of foreign-accented men with sociopathic qualities and unlimited sources of wealth to an over-the-top level that was consistently entertaining but never within the realm of reality. Similarly, later films based on books by Robert Ludlum, Len Deighton and others usually based their conspiracies and conflicts on clashes between the American cia, the British mi6 and the Russian kgb, with periodic excursions into the realms of Nazi revivals and the Israeli Mossad.
It took Frances Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy to depict Cosa Nostra with shocking realism, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first of Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones series, to explore contemporary antics of ancient secret societies with a healthy injection of clichéd Nazi villains.
Perhaps because its current existence is, for the most part, unconfirmable, the Bavarian Illuminati often serves as murky villains in movies and video games. The 2001 film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider reversed the traditional order of games spinning off movies when it adapted a best-selling video game into a major film production starring Angelina Jolie and John Voight. The plot, not surprisingly considering its source, suggests a new definition for silliness, pitting Ms. Jolie's character against the Illuminati's ability to control time as part of that organization's plans for world domination.
Another popular computer game, Deus Ex, also features the Illuminati as a secret society controlling the world in company with the Knights Templar. In addition to its political and economic powers, exerted via the World Trade Organization, in Deus Ex the Illuminati maintains a hidden store of viruses to be unleashed on groups or entire countries that fail to meet its demands. The Templars are less clearly drawn, representing one of four forces the player may join to achieve the game's objectives. Neither group, as presented here or elsewhere, bears much similarity to the actual namesake organizations.
Through all of these literary, cinematic and computer game productions, readers and viewers found it easy to draw a distinct line between fantasy and reality. Viewers of The Godfather, for example, left the movie theater feeling they had acquired an insight into the operations of Cosa Nostra, but few felt any new threat to their lives. Both the film and the book it was based upon ignored the historic heritage behind the organization, choosing to focus on actions of ruthless criminals united by blood and marriage who saw their work as simply a means of doing business. The groups were real, but the threat, while also real, remained distant, and the Mafia's historical roots were never addressed.
Not until Umberto Eco's philosophical satire Foucault's Pendulum, in which three Italian editors become caught up in an apparent linkage between historical secret societies extending back to the Crucifixion, did a major novel deal with historical facts. In Eco's rampant and often hilarious tale, organizations such as the Templars, Freemasons, Priory of Sion, Assassins, Rosicrucians, Kabbalah, Druids, Gnostics—the entire pantry of secret societies and their primary characters—pop up both as historical relics and contemporary participants. Part Marx Brothers movie script, part Robert Ludlum thriller and part philosophical treatise, Eco's 1988 narrative satisfied two widely disparate groups: conspiracy buffs who suspect that 8 billion lives on the planet are controlled by a handful of shadowy plotters, and skeptics who revel in the delight of seeing the emperor's new wardrobe finally being revealed.
Foucault's Pendulum was clearly inspired by a 1982 book ostensibly published as non-fiction, but widely assessed as a work of fantasy loosely based on fact. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail appeared six years before Eco's opus, and while the latter was amusing and enlightening to readers who could follow its meandering plot and respond to its cynical humor, the former ignited something else among a more gullible public.
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was inspired by the experience of a British film producer and former actor named Henry Soskin, whose previous claim to fame had been performing bit parts in the 1960s tv series The Avengers. Changing his name to Henry Lincoln, and changing his position from in front of the camera to behind it, Soskin detected a missing translation of an encrypted message in an obscure book on Rennes-le-Chateau. After researching the tale of Father Saunière and his mysterious wealth, Lincoln produced a documentary film about the supposed treasure, milking the story of every nuance to heighten the drama.
Some time later, Lincoln encountered a university lecturer and budding novelist named Richard Leigh, who harbored a fascination with the Knights Templar. Perhaps the Templars and the Saunière mystery could be linked together, tracking a tale extending from Christ's crucifixion down to contemporary times. Leigh recruited a former photo-journalist named Michael Baigent, and together this triumvirate invested four years researching, speculating, postulating and finally writing a book that spun 100,000 words of conjecture into a theory connecting virtually every secret society extant, in reality or fantasy, over two thousand years. At the core of the tale were three unproved (and unconfirmable) assertions:
1. Christ did not die on the cross; an impostor took his place, permitting Christ to escape across the Mediterranean to the south of France.
2. Christ was not single and celibate; he married Mary Magdalene and fathered at least one child, who accompanied the parents on the journey.
3. The descendants of Christ's children have been active in determining the fate of the world for twenty centuries.
As the premise for a historical novel, this is splendid stuff. In the hands of authors as divergent in their periods and styles as Thomas B. Costain or Don de Lillo, it could have been a respectable flight of fancy and an entertaining, even informative, peek at some of history's most interesting events.
The authors and their publisher did not see it this way. They believed that the impact of a non-fictional hypothesis had a better opportunity of generating interest and sales than a historical novel, and they were proven correct when The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail appeared on the best-seller list almost from the day of its publication in 1982. It also managed to inspire the only book that has seriously challenged the Harry Potter series for sales volume in recent years: Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Until that point, Brown had hardly distinguished himself as a writer destined for greatness. His previous work, Angels and Demons, blended the Illuminati and Syrian Ismailis in a laughingly awkward manner, and included the author's erroneous assumption that Muslims in Syria, Iraq, Iran and India all speak and write the same language.
Holy Blood and Da Vinci are as closely linked as any literary parent and progeny can be, even to the extent of each mirroring the other: Holy Blood is imaginative fiction posing as reality, and Da Vinci is pseudo-reality posing as fiction.
Despite his assertions that many of the organizations, characters and events in his book are real, Brown can neatly sidestep criticisms about his novel by pointing at the “fiction” designation. The trio of authors who concocted Holy Blood have no such defense except their protests of unfair attacks by skeptical critics, delivered with great passion and conviction in later editions of their book. But complaints of unfair criticism cannot overcome weaknesses that fail to suspend disbelief among perceptive readers.
Throughout their tale, the authors frequently pose the query, “What if?” What if the power of the Templars rose to the same extent as a prominent individual who happened to be their contemporary? Does that point to a relationship? Perhaps, but it hardly proves it. Once their “what if?” premise is established, it is treated from that point forward like a proven assertion on which an entire network of suppositions can be strung. The result is a spider web that supports its builder, but is quickly swept away in the first fresh breeze.
Most serious works of non-fiction base their premise on accessible facts, established by a credible source identified to the reader. The Holy Blood authors take a startling new stance. History can only be seriously interpreted, they claim, when the researcher seeks conclusions from among apparently unrelated events, even when the events are, at best, apocryphal. In effect, they are suggesting that documented facts are no more important—and perhaps less so—than colorful myths. If this is truly the case, an enormous volume of new information awaits discovery by imaginative historians who link, for example, the early-1944 consolidation of Nazi power in Europe with that winter's unprecedented levels of snowfall in North America.
The analogy of a spider's web may favor the strength of the web over the ability of Holy Blood to sustain close examination, because the authors themselves ask the reader to forgive their frequent sleight of hand. Consider these exit doors for truth, appearing on consecutive pages of the 1996 paperback edition:
This, of course, was only a speculative hypothesis, with no documentary confirmation. (p. 115)
The possibility cannot be proved, but neither can it be dismissed out of hand. (p. 116)
On the basis of these connections, we have formulated a tentative hypothesis. (p. 117)
Repeatedly, Lincoln et al. seize on colorful speculation that advances their theories while discarding any hard evidence that discredits them. They also proffer, as corroboration for their argument, material that is not only suspect in veracity but often confirmable as fraudulent. Much of their case rests on Les dossiers secrets de Henri Lobineau, supposedly containing detailed lineages tracing the Merovingian dynasty from the fifth-century Frankish leader Meroveus through the mysterious Giselle de Razes to the ninth-century Sigisbert vi. These had already been declared a forgery by the man acknowledged as their creator, the prankster and dipsomaniac Philippe de Chérisy, when he filed court documents suing Pierre Plantard to recover payment for producing the fraudulent documents. Plantard, who declared himself a direct descendant of Dagobert and Giselle, and director of the Priory of Sion, never disputed de Chérisy's claim, although he later concocted the story that de Chérisy had merely copied originals in Plantard's possession. Nowhere in Holy Blood is de Chérisy's lawsuit against Plantard mentioned, nor anything about de Chérisy's questionable background.
Noel Corbu, who invented much of the fable as a means of building traffic to his hotel and restaurant, is mentioned in Holy Blood only as the purchaser of Villa Bethania, a man left frustrated by the death of Marie Denarnaud before she could relate details of her past. Nothing more is said of him or of the tale played to guests at Corbu's restaurant while they dined. Both facts, of course, would trip up the entire thesis presented by the authors, who prefer that nothing obstruct their claim to solving perhaps the greatest mystery of all time.
Holy Blood challenges its readers to prove the existence of a negative reality by asking them to show that a hypothesized event did not occur. Proof that something does not exist may work in mathematics, where negatives can be theorized and assessed, but not in history. To demonstrate the vacuity of Holy Blood’s premise, imagine a non-fiction work on the existence of Santa Claus, based upon evidence that no one has yet proven he does not exist.
This could all be a matter of literary bashing, suitable for bookish nabobs to lob back and forth in The New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Review, producing little more than bruised egos and fits of jealousy among authors and editors (“Why didn't I get the idea for that book!!??”). If this were the sole by-product, none of us would or should give it a thought. There may be more to the picture, however.
While it may be entertaining to trace the tracks of stampeding minds among historical clues, stitching dozens of links together to create an apparent chain of proof, the practice creates risks from certain unstable members of society. The more outrageous of this group reside on the far fringes of the left and right wings of political thought, who are quick to identify every problem in life, on either a personal or global scale, as rooted in a secret cabal of power brokers. On the surface, this should be of little consequence. Paranoia is not new nor, when spread among groups with nothing better to do with their spare time, is it necessarily cause for concern. Unfortunately, the basis for much of this paranoia is often racial, and that's where the game grows serious.
If Holy Blood can lend credence to such easily proven frauds as Priory of Sion, it can also convince those who are open to such persuasion that aberrations like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are rooted in reality.
The Protocols are mentioned in Holy Blood in an unfortunately typical manner. First, the authors disown its veracity (“Experts today concur—and rightly so, we concluded—that the Protocols, at least in their present form, are a vicious and insidious forgery.”). Later, after agreeing with respectable sources that the Protocols are a forgery, they claim this discredited tome is “of paramount importance to the Prieuré de Sion.”
How and why are they important? No details are given. Almost 230 pages later, the Protocols are mentioned again, but only briefly and for the last time, when a reference to them is used to support the authors’ claim that a new king will carry “the holy seed of David.” If the Protocols are “a vicious and insidious forgery,” why rely upon the document for anything at all? The authors are performing a dance here, waltzing around a scurrilous text while remaining close enough to use it for support when it serves their purposes.
Nothing established about the Protocols suggest they are anything more than a fable presented as fact to achieve questionable, often nefarious, goals. Here, in brief, is their history:
In 1868 a German novelist named Hermann Goedsche, using the English pen name Sir John Retcliffe, published a novel titled Biarritz. The plot centered on a Jewish cabal intent on taking over the world. Goedsche appears to have been inspired by the French writer Maurice Joly, whose Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu spun a tale based on opposition to Napoleon iii. Goedsche, a notorious antiSemite, lifted Joly's plot device, introducing Jews to the story line as the villains.
All of this might have slipped out of sight beneath the waves like similar bad writing except for the precarious position of Russian czar Nicholas ii near the end of the nineteenth century. In a move designed to strengthen his hand among the Russian people and weaken his political opponents, the czar demanded a device that would expose his enemies as allies in a conspiracy involving world domination. From our perspective today, the “world domination” motive sounds like a Hollywood scriptwriter's pitch for yet another James Bond movie, but in the heady paranoia of Russia in 1895, it carried enough whiffs of validity to convince some of the people some of the time.
With the czar's directive, the Russian Okhrana secret police force plundered various sources for inspiration. They found it in Goedsche's novel, and in 1897 published as fact the section dealing with the Jewish plot. Eight years later, the Protocols were translated into English and widely circulated as minutes recorded during the First Zionist Congress held in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897 presided over by “the Father of Modern Zionism,” Theodor Herzl.
The Protocols, intended to be read like an instruction manual for running the world, are either chilling or absurd, depending on your gullibility and appreciation for black humor. Assisting in the ambitious project of global domination, the documents declare, are the Freemasons, whose agenda is being manipulated by the Elders, and the Bavarian Illuminati, who are either dupes or willing participants.
Practical lessons in the Protocols vary between chilling generalizations and outright farce. Protocol No. 1, for example, lectures, “Therefore, in governing the world the best results are obtained by violence and intimidation, and not by academic discussions,” while Protocol No. 23 proposes that the general public should be made unhappy, and thus subdued, by passing laws prohibiting drunkenness.
Many of the most troubling Protocols were adopted by right-wing politicians of their day as a means of motivating their most ardent supporters. By selecting the elements that best served their needs and loading them on the always-rolling anti-Semitic bandwagon, everyone including Adolf Hitler claimed the Protocols were authentic.
They became a treasure-trove of rationales for racists. “We shall destroy among the masses the importance of the family and its educational value,” Protocol No. 10 declared. Protocol No. 12 promised, “We shall saddle and bridle [the press] with a tight curb…. Not a single announcement will reach the public without our control.” To tighten the thumbscrews a little more, Protocol No. 14 proclaimed, “It will be undesirable for us that there should exist any other religion than ours…. We must therefore sweep away all other forms of belief.”
In the economic and political chaos that followed World War i and the Russian revolution, it took only the briefest of references to the Protocols for much of American and European popular culture to seize on them as proof of a secret conspiracy. Among the advocates was automotive magnate Henry Ford, who launched the Dearborn Independent newspaper in 1920 partially as a means of disseminating the Protocols, along with periodic attacks on Communists. For a time, Ford clung stubbornly to his opinion that the Protocols were indicative of a Jewish conspiracy for world domination. In an interview appearing in the February 17, 1921, issue of the New York World, Ford said: “The only statement I care to make about the Protocols is that they fit in with what is going on. They are sixteen years old [sic], and they have fitted the world situation up to this time. They fit it now.” Meanwhile, Hitler was quoting the Protocols in Mein Kampf, and selections from the book were being read in the Romanian parliament as a rationale for expelling Jews from that country.
Theodor Herzl, “the Father of Modern Zionism,” is assumed in some quarters to be the creator of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Little by little, thanks to serious investigation conducted by skeptical journalists, the truth of the Protocols’ origins became known. Among the first to expose their fraudulent basis was a London Times reporter named Philip Graves, who traced their genesis back to Joly and Goedsche. Slowly, the weight of proof rose to such a mass that even crusty Henry Ford admitted he had been mistaken. In 1927, in a public retraction, he apologized for his support of the Protocols hoax, blaming his assistants for duping him.
The perception persists, however. Holy Blood’s weak denunciation of the Protocols before employing them later as support for its premise adds to the suspicion, among those who grasp at any available straw, that such wild speculation bears heeding.
Among the political and industry leaders who promoted the truth of the Protocols was Henry Ford.
Hitler quoted from the Protocols in Mein Kampf.
By inserting the Protocols into their opus, the authors of Holy Blood create the mirroring effect mentioned earlier. In their case, a work of reputed non-fiction treats a fictional event as though it contained vestiges of reality. In his book The Da Vinci Code, author Dan Brown uses a work of fiction to deride a real organization, Opus Dei, as though it were a threat to humanity as genuine and treacherous as the fictional Protocols.
Brown's reckless use of facts to add verisimilitude to his work of fiction has been criticized in great detail by numerous critics elsewhere; in this context, only the author's skewed depiction of Opus Dei will be dealt with.
Opus Dei is the de facto villain in Brown's tale, so dedicated to protecting the secret of Christ's supposed bloodline that it employs hired assassins, at least one of whom is a decidedly sadistic character. This may be suitable for James Bond stories and the fictional spectre, or Len Deighton tales involving familiar evils of Nazism, but ascribing such illusory qualities to an existing organization in support of a fantastic premise strikes many people, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, as outrageous.
The Roman Catholic Church is as appropriate a target for criticism as any, and considering many of its less admirable activities over the past millennium, more suitable than most. But the family-oriented agenda of Opus Dei, as much as liberal Catholics may disagree with its conservative bent, is portrayed in an especially bizarre manner by Brown. Key to the author's plot involving a sadomasochistic albino monk is the premise that Opus Dei operates as a monastic order. This is a fabrication and a complete reversal of the organization's actual premise: monks seek holiness by withdrawing from society; Opus Dei chooses to function in the midst of secular society.
Other aspects of Brown's tale can be considered nothing less than character assassination. These include references to Opus Dei recruits being drugged into silence, the use of a barbed cilice belt as a masochistic tool, and the suggestion that Opus Dei “bailed out” the Vatican when its bank encountered financial difficulties, purchasing special favors from the papal office in the process. In a manic effort to denigrate the organization, Brown even got the entrances to the Opus Dei Manhattan headquarters wrong. Men and women may enter any door to the building they choose, but since the headquarters includes separate residences for celibate men and women, occupants of each section enter through one door or another to reach their own quarters more directly. Brown stretches this to claim that all men must enter through the main door on Lexington Avenue, and all women must enter through a side door. Not only is this gender restriction false, it is backwards regarding the residents: women enter their residence area off Lexington; the entrance for male residents is via the adjoining street.
Apologists for Brown and his publisher note that Da Vinci is, after all, a work of fiction and carries the familiar disclaimer opposite the dedication page (“All of the characters and events in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.”). Turn that page, however, and you encounter Brown's claim that the Priory of Sion “is a real organization,” that Opus Dei has been alleged to conduct “brain-washing, coercion and a dangerous practice known as ‘corporal mortification,’” and that “all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” All three claims are made without any hint of irony.
How seriously should we take these and other discrepancies in the book? After all, it is merely a novel, and not a very serious one at that. Authors must be permitted the luxury of freedom when giving their imagination rein to create tales whose primary goal is entertainment, whether their basis is a cheap detective novel or a tome worthy of Dickens or Hemingway. This premise will not be challenged in this book or, it is hoped, elsewhere.
Imagination is one thing; unfairly and inaccurately maligning an existing organization or individuals for the purpose of adding realism is another matter. It is no exaggeration to compare the initial and extended impact of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion with Da Vinci, and their first appearance in a work of fiction; while the Catholic Church is not nearly as vulnerable to the kinds of abuse the Protocols created for Jews, the principle remains unchanged.
For hundreds of years Masons, Rosicrucians, Druids, Gnostics, Wiccans and others whose practices were benign, if out of the mainstream, suffered attacks from people who see a conspiracy behind every innocent symbol and plots behind every unforeseen event. In many cases, these fringe elements influenced the main fabric of society with unfortunate results. For almost a century now, the hysterical and anti-Semitic scribblings of Nesta H. Webster have been accepted as factual by otherwise astute readers of her book Secret Societies & Subversive Movements.
Webster's work, turgid almost without exception, has nevertheless remained in print for almost eighty years. Impressively comprehensive (her references to often obscure sources are exceptional in their scholarly approach), it represents an ideal example of a blend of good academic research leading to a shaky premise and motivated by deeply rooted racism. From her viewpoint immediately following World War i, Webster identified the major threats to world peace as Grand Orient Freemasonry, Theosophism, Pan-Germanism, International Finance and World Jewry.
As a superpatriotic Briton, her concerns about German nationalism were not quite as prescient as they appear; the entire British Empire remained furious at the inhuman Huns while Webster was writing her book in the early 1920s. Her political stance was extreme right wing, her hatred of any socialist goals was almost palpable, her anti-Semitic stance was unwavering, and her blinkers were large and narrowly set—she made no mention, for example, of Marx, Lenin or any reference to Communism at all, and she continued to insist that the French Revolution was conducted according to an agenda of various secret societies. Interestingly, the American Revolution received as much attention from her as Communism did.
Secret societies investigator Nesta H. Webster has been praised despite her overt racism.
Webster had a right to express her views, and readers should continue to maintain the freedom to absorb them. The same freedom, it can be argued, should be provided Hitler's Mein Kampf and Mao's Little Red Book.
These freedoms must bring with them an appreciation of the risk that social organizations, and individuals within them, may be targeted in a manner that defies their ability to prove their innocence, a principle of freedom of the press that we neglect at our peril.
On the reverse side of this coin is the risk that truly menacing organizations could be underestimated and disregarded if grouped among the darlings of the fringe-dwellers. Like wolves concealing themselves among the sheep, at least a handful of secret societies may represent a genuine source of concern easily grouped in the minds of the public as either benign or misunderstood.
It is easy to dismiss these organizations in this manner. It may also be dangerous.
