I read Fire in the Minds of Men by James Billington a while back, which is focused on the history of the revolutionary movements, its key participants and ideologies, covering roughly the period of the French Revolution in the late 18th century to the Russian Revolution in the early 20th. In the words of its blurb, “Billington claims with considerable evidence that revolutionary ideologies were not shaped so much by the critical rationalism of the French Enlightenment as by the occultism and proto-romanticism of Germany” - relating to for instance the influence of Adam Weishaupt’s infamous Illuminati secret society of the late 18th century.
This however, in its desire to entice would-be readers, probably suggests a more colourful notion of this very detailed and dense book than many of its readers might have hoped for, especially as the book moves on beyond that more humanly intimate level of the pre-industrial era and extends onwards through the increasingly mechanised and materialistic 19th century.
In terms of future impact the French Revolution tended to have far greater appeal and impact on the revolutionary spirit than the American one which, very untypically in such scenarios, rather than simply focus on overthrowing present tyranny and gaining power, put great thought into checking the inevitable future impulses towards tyranny, even if seemingly from within this own movement. The French Revolution by contrast, despite its seeming emphasis on external slogans such as Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood, in practice was broadly of a spirit of crude simplicity: revolution and revolutionaries good, all opposition bad and to be eliminated or annihilated without remorse. And thus in Paris, the Revolution very quickly produced the Reign of Terror and the guillotine era, and attendant theories justifying dictatorship by a revolutionary elite which would educate the ignorant and the use of terror as a purifying tool on society.
That Freemasonry was a breeding ground for the revolutionary impetus and the relevant conspiracy movements is pretty common knowledge, but beyond the convenience of the aspiring revolutionaries being able to tap into these already existent societies and the secretive structures they offered, the actual occult ‘spiritual’ aspect of these movements, or elements within them, may be more surprising. (To add though, these revolutionary movements and impulses encompassed far too many peoples and varying backgrounds and desires to pretend everyone involved were anything like united in one uniform mindset.)
So, for instance, in terms of this occult influence, in the aftermath of the 1789 Revolution, basically pagan or Nature worship festivals, such as the Feast of Unity and Indivisibility were held in Paris and on a massive scale, while the Feast of the Supreme Being festival in 1794 apparently had an astonishing, in terms of populations of the time, 500,000 participants. These celebrations served as ritual spectacles designed to unite and deepen the bond of the citizens within this new regime, just as, leaping forward, the mass spectacles of the Nazis’ Nuremberg rallies in the 1930s were designed to overwhelm the individual consciousnesses, and so society in the secular modern western era, instead of a chaos of self-willed individuals, is intended to be fused in some great and easily directed group mind.
As an indication of this messianic/secular sense attendant to the French Revolution there was even a new though short-lived calendar conceived to mark this declared new age. So just as the time had been a Before and After Christ, now there was literally a New Age of glorification of man on earth, where darkness was now in the past, and utopia was to be achieved and experienced here and now. This, to emphasise, is the dawning of the modern New Age movement, or at least it’s emerging from the shadows of the occult secret societies into the mainstreams of life.
So, particularly amongst the intellectual elites directing things, there was a dual spirit of both Nature worship - thus typically the stress on ‘the Universe’ rather than God in New Age thinking - but also of atheistic materialism, with particularly God in a Christian sense regarded extremely negatively.
And meanwhile in Paris, during these same days of mass ritualistic celebrations marking this new glorious era, great numbers of people were being publicly executed using the newly invented guillotine. And this new instrument of murder, rather than considered as an unfortunate if necessary contradiction to the new spirit of freedom, was instead hailed as a symbol of the new democratic spirit of liberty. The genuine hype was that the guillotine was a mark of the revolutionaries’ humanity that they were killing without causing unnecessary pain, and so, rather than carried out behind closed doors, as it were, instead these executions were enacted as public ritualistic spectacles to be savoured daily by the public. The intensity of partaking in these adrenaline-rich rituals would again serve to deepen the communal bonds of this new society - in modern parlance, along the lines of the trauma bond. And in terms of what quickly became revolutionary ideology and methdology, through these executions society was supposedly being removed of human ‘impurities’, and hence speedily distilled to a greater, utopian state of truth. By a simple process of subtraction, you eliminate the bad and then you’re left with the good.
To bring this thinking a little more starkly into the light: imagine various people sharing life in a house, and there is one person the rest aren’t getting on well with. The solution:
“Why don’t we just kill him?! Think how great things then will be!”
“Oh yes! Although . . .”
“Although what?”
“You don’t think we might be changed by the experience of killing someone?”
“What do you mean? Changed for the worse?”
“Yes, mightn’t we become darkened, and the atmosphere of the house actually ending up far worse. We might be united in some deeper sense by the act, but in a very messed up way.”
“Oh no! You’re making things far too complex. All that will happen is this annoying person will be gone and we’ll be left. If anything we’ll be purified by this act, where we’ve courageously committed ourselves to making a better world. Annoyingly or bad person gone, good people left.”
It might also be worth regarding the two ritualistic phenomena of the early 1790s, spiritual celebration on the one hand and spectacles of murderous repression on the other, not as uneasy, contradictory bedfellows but actually as of one deeper essence. And treating the phenomenon spiritually, just as with ancient pagan ‘deities’ like Baal, who were fed a diet of human sacrifices, especially children, then one could regard the guillotined as sacrifices to whatever or whoever this ‘Supreme Being’ really was. And as a bit of an aside, it might not be too far off to regard a certain sacred cause of the modern progressive era very much in the light of this ancient practice of child sacrifice.
So almost as soon as the French Revolution succeeded in attaining power, factions started to divide, and the new regime of liberty, equality and brotherhood turned very quickly to the form of totalitarian dictatorship, with former friends and allies now felt as threats to be eliminated, declared enemies of the State, and perhaps swiftly executed. So the extremely crude ‘revolutionary logic’ here is that the Revolution equates to Good, any impediments to Bad, and so execution is an extremely quick way of ‘cancelling’ the Bad, and purifying reality. Thus, of course, ‘cancel culture’ where all opposition to the revolutionary elite are demonised as, for example, ‘far right’. There are no grey areas.
And so in the interests of the success of the Revolution the intentional use of Terror was quickly exalted as a purifying tool, and this was particularly enacted by the Jacobins under Robespierre and his Reign of Terror, even and especially against former revolutionary allies, until Robespierre and his key and even more extremist colleague, Louis de Saint-Just, were themselves in turn seized and executed.
[This became much longer than intended, and because so hasn’t got to where was intended, and has ended very abruptly for now above. Ideally I’ll add to it later, but we’ll see.)
