Stories of the Origins of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion AND ITS USE AGAINST THEOSOPHY
Maurice Joly, an ill-fated Parisian attorney during the reign of Emperor Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) lived a life both comedy and tragedy. It is Maurice Joly who wrote the politically satirical Conversations between Machiavelli and Montesquieu in the Kingdom of the Dead or The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. Once loyal, after failing to attain higher office in the government of Napolean III after a decade, Joly turned into a vindictive, troubling and bitter enemy.
In 1865 of March, police seized 15 copies of The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, and another 23 copies April 25th that were due en route from Brussels to Paris in the bag of a merchant from Charleroi, Monsieur Grandjean.
THE PRAGUE CEMETRY AND CIRCULATION OF THE PROTOCOLS
Umberto Eco writes in his novel The Prague Cemetry, that “In the spring of 1865, Lagrange invited Simonini to the Luxembourg Gardens one morning and there on a bench showed him a crumpled book in a yellow cover, Brussels, 1864, without the author’s name, entitled “Dialogue in the Hell of Machiavelli and Montesquieu, or the Politics of Machiavelli in the Nineteenth Century.”
This was the Preface to that anonymous edition in 1864 entitled “Dialogue in the Hell of Machiavelli and Montesquieu“:
“This book describes the common features that are inherent in any government to one degree or another. In addition, the author set himself a more specific task: to depict the main features of the current political regime of France.
A worthy answer to the current state of affairs cannot be written in newspaper style, since the taste of the modern reader is too refined to perceive the crude anger of the day. The apparent success of some of the unscrupulous writings glorifying current politics is puzzling. However, the author dares to hope that the civic feeling among the people is still alive and that the day will come when heavenly punishment will overtake the creators of these low-grade panegyrics.
It is better to judge some phenomena and events from afar, from the outside. Viewing familiar objects from an unusual angle of view can sometimes make the observer tremble.
This book is written in secret writing, a cipher, the key to which the author deliberately conceals. The reader must find the hidden meaning on his own, without prompting. I venture to hope that the reading of this book will not be without some pleasure, but it should be read slowly, as befits the study of works devoted to subjects not too frivolous.
You should not ask whose pen these pages belong to. For certain reasons, the author chose not to disclose his name. And it doesn’t matter. This pamphlet is society’s response to the call of conscience. The author recedes into the background; he only writes down the thoughts that are in the air.”
The Conversations were distributed underground, and we know this author’s name is our Maurice Joly, that we have been discussing here. Eco’s The Prague Cemetry explores the nineteenth-century novels plagiarized in the forgery that inspired Adolf Hitler’s holocaust in Germany, The Protocols of Zion. Joly’s motivations for publishing the Dialogues, was to personally attack Napoleon III.
On April 24, 1865, the 6th Chamber of the Paris Court issued a ruling, finding Joly guilty of blasphemy, contempt and inciting of hatred against His Imperial Highness. Both the merchant (for six months) and Joly (for fifteen months) were sentenced to imprisonment and a fine of francs.
It is in the beginning of the twentieth-century, we find the circulation of the Protocols and other instigations in feuilletons (talk of the town supplements attached to political section of French newspapers) being forged through the use of Joly’s Conversations or Dialogues. It became second in print circulation to the Bible in Tsarist Russia.
Another important figure comes into play, and his name was Adolphe Crémieux, a fellow lawyer and mentor to Maurice Joly. Crémieux would have a falling out with Joly, although at the outset of their friendship, they both shared a hatred for Napoleon III. Crémieux moves on to become a key figure in the French Third Republic, unlike Joly.
Crémieux was a Jew, head of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and chief of the Grand Orient Lodge. He was in fact both head master of the Masonic Scottish Rite in France, and the Scottish Rite ‘Supreme Council’ in Switzerland, which he organized.
SERGEI NILUS AND THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF THE PROTOCOLS
There are multiple versions of the Protocols. The original version that appears in 1903 was titled The Protocols of the Sessions of the World Alliance of Freemasonry and the Sages of Zion, outlining not merely a Jewish conspiracy plot, but a Judeo-Masonic plot. Masonic lodges were considered the main front for the elders’ secret society of “Sages of Zion.”
It has been established, that almost half of the Protocols were plagiarized and paraphrased from Maurice Joly’s Conversations. The Protocols were said to be published in 1905 by Sergei Nilus, who distributed a number of versions in the first half of the twentieth-century. However, Italian researcher Cesare de Michelis had demonstrated that the Protocols first appeared in 1903 in a small St. Petersburg paper called Znamya. Znamya was the main point of propaganda for a violently anti-Semitic group called the Black Hundreds. The Times correspondent Philip Graves exposed the plagiarism in 1921. In the Protocols are spread three-hundred bits and pieces undoubtedly lifted from the Conversations, scattered throughout, which have been identified sometimes by a sentence or two, or by paragraph and phrases.
This history provides context to the prior century circulation of gossip and instigations against the Theosophical Society in Russia spread by the clumsy police and Synod in Russia, that the main front of the Theosophical Society was Masonry.
This is an important piece to the history of the World Wars, which historians have either abused, ignored or spread misinformation about. It was explained that The Protocols of Zion is a major source of influence for the National Socialists and Fascists in Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy. It provided them with justification to persecute, police and send Theosophists to concentration camps.
Hermann Graml had stated in Antisemitism in the Third Reich (1992), that
“Hitler, like all the Nazis, was strongly impressed and probably continued to believe in the truth of the PROTOCOLS, although they were exposed as early as 1921 as a clumsy forgery on the part of the Tsarist secret police.”
HERMANN GRAML, ANTISEMITISM IN THE THIRD REICH, p. 76.
Adolf Hitler did not care if the Protocols were a forgery, and this did not stop their assault and censorship against Theosophists (Theosophy in Italy and Under Fascist Rule: The Prefect of Genoa Report, 1939). The history leading to the Holocaust was not just about Jews. After the War, more gossip spread, which led to further sensationalized conspiracy and blame against Theosophy from Jews, Christians and Muslims.
As established previously, there are in fact multiple stories for the origin source of The Protocols of Zion. None of those stories are definitively credible sources to draw a final conclusion as to the identity of its author.
The first, or original version of the Protocols in 1903 is titled The Protocols of the Sessions of the World Alliance of Freemasonry and the Sages of Zion. The work describes a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy (not simply a Jewish conspiracy) and claims that Masonic lodges are the main front for these “sages of Zion.”
THE STORY OF PAQUITA DE SHISHMAREFF AND YULIANA GLINKA
Aside from the story that the Protocols were produced by tsarist Russian intelligence services, there is another story about the origins of the Protocols involving the widow of a Russian officer killed fighting the Bolsheviks. This is the author of Waters Flowing Eastward (1931) who accused in an article of April 1921, that Jewish Zionist writer Asher Zvi Ginsberg was the author of the Protocols. The widow spoken of here is the American writer Paquita de Shishmareff. She wrote her works under the pen name, Leslie Fry and shares similarities with Fascist League member and author of Occult Theocrasy (published in 1933 shortly after her death), Edith Starr Miller (1887-1933).
Like, Edith Starr Miller, who built on gossip before her, Shishmareff held, that the Protocols was evidence of a Jewish plot to destroy Christian civilization.
Asher Zvi Ginsberg had to sue Shishmareff to force her to rebuke the slanderous accusations. In her opus, Waters Flowing Eastward, another story of the origins of the Protocols are presented, now that she could not attach Ginsberg to her theory.
This last story involves the claim that in 1884 an anonymous Russian noblewoman, Yuliana (Justine) Glinka “promoted” the Protocols, after stealing them from a Masonic lodge in Paris. Glinka was a maid of honor to the wife of the assassinated Tsar Alexander II. Paquita de Shishmareff was the source of this story and instigation, which attempts to connect Yuliana Glinka to Helena Blavatsky and Theosophy.
It thereby offered a means for confirmation bias about the “secret chiefs” or clandestine network of sponsors involved in the early operations of the Theosophical Movement. Edith Starr Miller drew her “Occult Luciferian” Judeo-Masonic religio-political conspiracy from this story.
There is ample research about those sponsors, which do include some Freemasons, but adepts and initiates in various parts of the world, such as Jamal al-din Afghani and James Sanua. However, the identification of the Theosophical Teachings with the “trans-Himalayan school” Blavatsky’s main sponsors presented is a different focus from Western Masonry or even “neo-Hinduism,” as research by the team at Prajna Quest and David Reigle demonstrate.
The hostility towards Freemasonry in this history by some include adopting and adapting the Glinka story.
In Shishmareff’s story, Glinka gave the manuscript to her uncle, General P. V. Orzhevsky, who tried, but did not succeed in showing them to Tsar Alexander III. Glinka’s stolen manuscript eventually comes into the hands of Sergei Nilus in 1905 who publishes them, according to this story.
The story that Yuliana Glinka is the source is an uncorroborated story of another story. No one has ever produced firsthand source proofs about that story.
Another detail about Yuliana Glinka and her connection to H.P. Blavatsky was that firstly, Blavatsky had several main assistants. However, there are no firsthand sources on Yuliana Glinka’s relationship to Blavatsky and its extent. It is true, that Yuliana Glinka was a devout spiritualist, though before ever knowing Blavatsky due to her family connections and personal interests. Yuliana Glinka’s main focus was not Theosophy, but the African voodoo tradition, Santeria.
Returning to Sergei Nilus, the story that Sergei Nilus was the author of the Protocols was put in repute by Cesare de Michelis. He demonstrated that the Protocols was first distributed in 1903, whereas the version of Sergei Nilus is published in 1905, and only forms one chapter in his book.
It is most likely, that the vindictive Maurice Joly himself wrote the Protocols by adapting his own old work as an attack against his former friend, Adolphe Crémieux.
CONTEMPORARY GOSSIP INVOLVING THEOSOPHY AND GLINKA
Those who have adopted the story of Glinka have in the present-day abused sources and the words of Blavatsky to once more falsely accuse H.P. Blavatsky of being a secret Freemason, as well as tie the origins of the Theosophical Society to Freemasonry.
I came across this two years ago, The Freemason Invention of the Nazi Party published by Joseph Atwill claiming to “reveal the structure of Western Civilization.”
This has been further used to support conspiracy spread in contemporary scholarship, that the National Socialist Party, which existed over a decade prior to Hitler, was the invention of the Freemasons.
If they were an invention of the Freemasons, then explain the involvement of the Catholic Church and Jesuits with the National Socialists, who historically were enemies of the Republicans, Carbonari, Freemasons and Theosophists. If Theosophy was “secret Freemasonry” and Freemasonry invented the Nazi Party, then explain Maurice Joly’s developed hatred for Crémieux, a Jewish-Mason; and also explain the persecutions by the Conservatives and German National Socialists against Theosophists under the Reich and Fascist State. Do we ignore the fact, that Adolf Hitler was employed by the Conservatives to spy on Drexler’s German Workers’ Party? Hitler took over the reins of the Party, which would become the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, and then the Conservatives made Hitler Chancellor (Last Days of the Weimar Republic: Tactics used to Censor Press in a Totalitarian State).
How does the blame fall on H.P. Blavatsky who represented an extremely rough dichotomous vision from the National Socialists and Bolsheviks in Russia? Blavatsky explains, that the swastika is a global symbol. It does not belong to the Freemasons, or Hitler.
Even when persons read the works of Blavatsky, they parse passages and misquote, deliberately. This reveals ignorant or vested interests against Theosophy, which have bled into the public forming part of the history of this gossip with real world consequences. The instigations against other groups and their consequences, especially when believed by the public are never quite as thoroughly dealt with, such as the fact the Protocols implicates Freemasons and not just Jews.
H.P. Blavatsky never asserted a superiority of the “Aryan Race,” in any manner Hitler and the Christian crypto-zoologists of that time defined it, to the Jews. H.P. Blavatsky highlights the consequences resulting from the logic, truth-claims and religious supremacism evinced by the order of a world, which regards the religion of the Jew, Christian or Muslim as the only valid sources of religious knowledge. Theosophy therefore displaces the Jews, or the Christian, or the Muslims from their position of dominance, through historical facts and explanations about pre-Christian antiquity and the origins of the Mysteries. This history details at once, the roots of ritualism in both Church “Tradition” and Masonry.
This goes back to what Samuel Fales Dunlap wrote, who H.P. Blavatsky used as a resource:
“The work of the Old Testament is the first offshoot from the Mysteries; the New Testament is the second. The Old Testament is the Reformed Judaeo-Phoenician or Rabbinical Church—The New Testament is the Essene-Nazarene Glad Tidings. Adon, Adoni, Adonis, called also Bol, was the Deity in both the Old-Phoenician and the Judaeo-Phoenician styles of worship. The Hebrew Religion stepped out from the noblest side of the Dionysian-worship, influenced no doubt, to some extent by Persian and Babylonian ideas, but still retaining the Phoenician impress.” (Samuel F. Dunlap. 1860. Sōd: The Mysteries of Adonai, pg. iii-iv.)
As one of the principles of the Theosophical Society explain, “The principle of the Brotherhood of Humanity is one of the eternal truths that govern the world’s progress on lines which distinguish human nature from brute nature.” What is also needed is to impress men with the idea that, if the root of mankind is one, then there must also be one truth which finds expression in all the various religions — except in the Jewish, as you do not find it expressed even in the Kabala.”
The lines directly after this, which Joseph Atwill does not include state thus:
“ENQ. This refers to the common origin of religions, and you may be right there. But how does it apply to practical brotherhood on the physical plane?
THEO. First, because that which is true on the metaphysical plane must be also true on the physical. Secondly, because there is no more fertile source of hatred and strife than religious differences. When one party or another thinks himself the sole possessor of absolute truth, it becomes only natural that he should think his neighbor absolutely in the clutches of Error or the Devil. But once get a man to see that none of them has the whole truth, but that they are mutually complementary, that the complete truth can be found only in the combined views of all, after that which is false in each of them has been sifted out — then true brotherhood in religion will be established. The same applies in the physical world.
What this passage leads us to study are cross-cultural impediments, general semantics and translatability, as addressed in Age of the Rule of Faith: Valerie Tarico on the Christian Emphasis on Right Belief vs Pagans and Eastern Religions.
The cause of Blavatsky and her teachers were not the same as the National Socialists (see The Issue of Theosophy, Occultism, and National Socialism in Germany (1880s-1930s): Blavatsky and Theosophical Notions of Race against Hitler, List, & Liebenfels) and the Bolsheviks, thus representing opposing forces. Rex Curry’s dishonest research, which people like Joseph Atwill use for their contemporary gossip like in the days of Joly must be exposed as having no basis in fact.
Such bogus slander appears in the works of Peter Staudenmaier in Between Occultism and Fascism: Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race and Nation in Germany and Italy, 1900-1945 on Academia. There are numerous so-called scholars and sensationalist theories claiming to ground their theory in facts squeaking through the floorboards of academia attacking Theosophists like they don’t exist. Theosophists act like they don’t exist. If they are being attacked, they would produce as many, and more defenses and rebuttals as have been produced, and widely advocate and circulate those rebuttals.
CONCLUSION
Blaming the Jews and Masons for the world’s troubles has for a long time conveniently masked and diverted the suspicions of the masses away from the real culprits of instigations by very cunning constructors of hoaxes and anti-Jewish libel. This is the work of individuals who get a kick out of being chaos agents (like Abdullah Hashem in our day who created The Arrivals 2008 documentary), or by violent groups like the ultra-nationalist Black Hundreds in Russia.
Instigations have played upon various mass audiences, whether Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox. Hoaxes have been constructed against Jew, Theosophist and Jesuit alike. What we certainly find in this history are real conflicts, wars, decline and great death in a struggle of ideas.
H.P. Blavatsky had written of a French Catholic writer and habit of scapegoating the Freemasons and Templars, when she stated that:
“The fact alone that he traces the modern Mason to the Templars, and points them out as secret assassins, trained to political murder, shows how little he knew of them, but how ardently he desired, at the same time, to find in these societies convenient scape-goats…”
Blavatsky was observing the Roman Catholic Church’s evolution in her time, not ours and it was different. The world was different, and the Catholic Church was in a different position of authority than our world today. Many Conservatives in our time bemoan the decline of “Christendom.” As one theosophist said in those times, “When a religion dies, it dies with throes of agony.” So much, that you go foaming about the mouth searching for who to blame.
In common knowledge, people are made to think of only the Jews or the Freemasons, but everyone sort of gets pulled into a string of conspiracy and instigation. The public will listen to the sensationalist conspiracy, rather than listen to its defendant.
The Church had fully integrated and reformed the Jesuits by the time Blavatsky began writing about them, and her view was that both the Church and Freemasonry had become degenerated and a corpse. It was time for Theosophy, and Blavatsky was concerned with infiltration within the Theosophical Society. It was explained that the Freemasons had lost their secrets, which was last possessed by the Templars. H.P.B. claims, that the Freemasons were infiltrated by the Jesuits.
I had proposed the idea, that she might have heard or read of the Monita Secreta at the time, which was similar to the Jewish-Masonry conspiracy, except a hoax focused on accusations against the Jesuit order.
What prevails today is what she called a “pseudo-Masonry.” Freemasons did not “infiltrate the Church” according to Charles Sotheran, a Mason, but in the reverse. This theory attempts to explain the Christianizing of Freemasonry, and the appropriation and preservation of Templarism, which is now inseparable today from Jesuitism. When people see certain symbolism, they immediately begin to attack esotericism, occultism, Freemasonry, the Illuminati, Theosophy and the Jews. The scapegoats in history have faced the actual real consequences, bodily and received no public acknowledgement or apologies.
The Jews have, but to bring up the other history to the public would put the actions of everyone involved in this history of conflict and libel into question. The consequence of these actions, I have argued has deflated the entire repute of Religion and Theology. Now, all that is left to us is nothing but the dreams of theocrats and sweat-faced authoritarians; and nobody wins, except for the exploiters, pretenders and the ignorant.
The postcolonial critiques of Theosophy aren’t strong anymore, and its main attackers know this, so all they have left is to re-circulate as much similar gossip and confused information in this age of post-truth as can be done. Every critique about Theosophy from any conspiracist, Catholic, Jesuit or “Traditionalist” has been blown a hole in. When you examine the critiques, they are empty distractions full of mockery, slander and jealousies.
The implications of Theosophy, which combine the legacies of both Je Tsongkapa and Ammonius Saccas are very powerful, and despite the condition of its movement, still serves a purpose and must. It must find a way to triumph over the vulgar and crude instigations, which plagued Joly’s time into the hell of the twentieth-century.
The American Minervan 
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