Pillar route
Religion and ideology
How belief systems, rituals, sacred authority, denominations, and moral worldviews organize identity, obedience, and meaning.
Religion and ideology
Churches, lodges, orders, magic, belief, and the systems that explain authority.
- religion
The Church of England and the lodge: Anglicanism and Freemasonry
How organised Freemasonry grew up inside the Anglican establishment: the clergy who helped found it, its respectability among the gentry, an Archbishop of Canterbury in the craft...
politicsreligionsociety - religion
The Stoics: virtue, reason, and the life in accord with nature
From Zeno's painted porch to Marcus Aurelius: the Stoic teaching that virtue is the only good and freedom lies in accepting what we cannot control, through Chrysippus, Seneca, Epictetus, and the modern revival.
- religion
The Logos: reason, the Word, and the defence of life
The idea of the Logos, the hidden reason ordering the world: from Heraclitus and the Stoics through Philo and the Gospel of John to Justin Martyr's logos spermatikos...
- religion
African belief and the biblical parallels
Kenyan traditional religion against the Bible: the monotheist high god the missionaries borrowed, circumcision as covenant, and the Meru Exodus.
religionculturesocietypolitics - society
The Rotary Club: service, fraternity, and suspicion
Paul Harris's 1905 service club grown into a global network of the Four-Way Test and PolioPlus, its fraternal overlap with Freemasonry, and the Catholic Church's old suspicion, with the 'masonic front' claims attributed.
societyeconomypoliticsreligion - religion
Talmud and Kabbalah: reason and mysticism in Judaism
The long rivalry between Judaism's two great strands: the rational-legal tradition of the Mishnah and Talmud and Maimonides synthesizing the faith with Aristotle...
religionculturesocietyscience - nation
The Ashkenazi Jews: from the Rhineland to the Pale
The Jews of Ashkenaz, from the Rhineland to Eastern Europe: the ShUM communities and the birth of Yiddish, Rashi and the Tosafists; the 1096 Crusade massacres and the expulsions that drove them east...
societyreligionpoliticsculture - nation
The Sephardic Jews: golden age and exile
The Jews of Sepharad, from a golden age to a scattered people: the flowering of poetry, philosophy, and science under Muslim Al-Andalus and Maimonides; the Almohad persecution and the 1391 massacres and conversos...
religionsocietypoliticsculture - religion
1492: expulsion, conversos, and the New World
The thread from Jewish expulsion to the Atlantic world: the 1492 Alhambra Decree and the conversos it created, Columbus sailing the day after the deadline with converso officials funding the crown...
religionsocietypoliticseconomy - culture
Masonic words hidden in everyday English
The craft left its mark on the language: genuinely Masonic words and phrases, from a lodge 'warrant' and the 'landmarks' to 'cowan,' 'blackball,' 'hoodwink,' 'the third degree,' and 'laying the cornerstone,' where the...
culturesocietytechnologyreligion - religion
Race in the Mormon Church and in Freemasonry
Two fraternal-religious institutions and their racial lines: the LDS Church's priesthood-and-temple ban on Black members, the 'curse' and 'Lamanite' doctrines, and the 1978 revelation ending it...
religionsocietyculturepolitics - society
Famous initiates: who really belonged, and who was only claimed
A roster separating the documented from the rumored: real Freemasons from Washington and Franklin to Churchill and Nkrumah, and the Skull and Bones men from Taft to the Bushes...
societypoliticsculturescience - politics
Secret societies: Templars, Illuminati, and Skull and Bones
The real secret societies behind the legends: the medieval Knights Templar and their suppression, the Rosicrucian manifestos, Weishaupt's Bavarian Illuminati, Yale's Skull and Bones...
politicssocietyreligionculture - culture
Freemasonry in stone: cornerstones, temples, and obelisks
The Masonic mark on the built world: the cornerstone ceremonies that consecrated the US Capitol and countless civic buildings, the great Masonic halls and temples...
culturepoliticssocietydiplomacy - religion
The modern occultists and their circles
The magicians of the modern age and their strange reach: Aleister Crowley and the founding of Thelema, the rocket-scientist magician Jack Parsons and the Babalon Working that ties JPL to the occult and to Scientology...
religionculturescience - religion
The old gods hidden in everyday English
The pagan gods are still in our mouths every day, unnoticed: money from Juno Moneta, cereal from Ceres, panic from Pan, museum and music from the Muses, ocean from Oceanus, volcano from Vulcan...
religionsciencecultureeconomy - religion
Easter, Lent, and the roots of the spring festival
Where Easter comes from: its source in the Jewish Passover, its date fixed by the moon at Nicaea, its fast (Lent) a fourth-century creation, and its English name alone drawn from the Germanic goddess Eostre...
religionculturesocietyscience - religion
Hermes Trismegistus and the Hermetic tradition
The 'thrice-great' Hermes, a fusion of the Greek Hermes and Egyptian Thoth, credited with the Hermetica: the Greco-Egyptian texts of magic, astrology, and alchemy whose maxim 'as above...
religionscienceculture - religion
The Norse and Germanic gods
The religion of the Germanic peoples, from Tacitus's account to the Norse gods of the Viking Age: Odin, Thor, Loki, Yggdrasil, and Ragnarok, preserved by Snorri's Eddas...
religionculturepoliticswar - pillar
The pillars of modern power
The load-bearing power blocks of modern society, read off the data itself: money and finance; state, law, and coercion; military and security; production and labor; land and resources; infrastructure and logistics...
pillarpoliticseconomysociety - religion
The old gods and their long shadow
The ancient pantheons and how they still shape the modern world: the Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Norse, and Mesopotamian gods; the syncretism between them...
religioncultureeconomysociety - religion
Scientology and the occult-rocketry nexus
The strange documented nexus where rocket science met the occult: Jack Parsons, co-founder of JPL and a Thelemite, his Babalon Working with L...
religionpoliticsscienceculture - religion
The Catholic Church as a world power
The Church as a rival power through history: the papacy and the empires, the crusades and inquisitions, the Reformation split, the Counter-Reformation, the loss and defense of temporal power...
religionpoliticssocietywar - religion
The Rosicrucians and the invisible college
The Rosicrucian current: the 17th-century manifestos that announced a hidden brotherhood, the orders that later claimed the name, and the esoteric Christianity and alchemy at its heart.
religionscienceculturesociety - religion
The Kabbalah and the hidden tradition
Jewish mysticism and its long reach: the Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar, Luria's broken and mended vessels, tikkun olam, and the flow into Christian Kabbalah and Western esotericism.
religionculturesocietypolitics - religion
The story of Judaism
From the rabbinic era after the Temple through the diaspora, expulsion, Hasidism, and Zionism.
religionculturepoliticssociety - religion
How Islam began and spread
From the first revelation and the Hijra through the succession crisis, Karbala, the caliphates, and the modern era.
religionpoliticsculturewar - religion
How Christianity grew and split
From the Edict of Milan through the councils, the Great Schism, the Reformation, and the modern movements, Mormonism included.
religionpoliticssocietyexploration - religion
The biblical timeline
The chronology printed in old King James Bibles - Archbishop Ussher's dating from Creation in 4004 BC through the patriarchs, the Exodus, the kingdoms, the exile, and the New Testament.
religionpoliticswarculture