At 11:42 AM -0800 10/31/98, James A. Donald wrote:
-- At 10:01 PM 10/30/98 -0500, Robert Hettinga wrote:
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but the United States is now a country in which a man who believes that the President is an agent of the Illuminati has a regular program on public television.
This is not quite as deranged as it seems. The Masons are of course not a conspiracy, but one of the services they provide their members is a facility for constructing and operating conspiracies. As a result Masons have been big players on all sides in most revolutions.
Masons also had good contacts in what passed for the "intelligence business" back a few hundred or more years ago. In a time when there was not much mobility in Europe, as most folks worked farms or ran small shops, masons were, by their nature, mobile and itinerant construction workers. They moved to where large building projects were happening, then moved on when the cathedral or bridge or whatever was completed. They also needed places to stay when they were in town, so "masonic lodges" developed. Paid for out of dues collected, with facilities then built. (No need for such things today, what with hotels and such, but more needed in, say, 1400.) The Masons who moved around from town to town and who saw a lot and who met with other Masons would have access to lots of intelligence about which kings were planning to expand, about unrest in various areas, etc. Same as the intelligence that village priests collected in the confessionals and then fed back through secure channels to Rome. (Not surprising that the Masons and the Catholics viewed each other with suspicion.) And then there are the Knights Templars, Cathars, Priory of Sion, and all the rest of that stuff. (An entertaining read is "Holy Blood, Holy Grail.") And like many guilds and unions, the flow of knowledge was modulated in various ways (as usual, to benefit the senior memembers, the bureaucrats, the "shop stewards," and with the likely cuts to the local kings and satraps). There was the expected mumbo jumbo about the knowledge going back to the Ancients, to the Pyramid builders (back side of the dollar bill fnord), and secret handshakes (to serve as an indentity credential, as it were). Eventually the Masons learned to increase their revenues by letting in folks who were not actually stoneworkers, and masonry became a professional contact organization. Hence the large number of Masons who signed the Declaration of Independence (to royalist Europe, surely a sign of secularist conspiracy!). And the memetic power of any secret society is such that various revolutionaries, mystics, troublemakers, and such will claim connection to various secret societies, or will recruit from them, etc. Illuminati, Bilderbergers, Bohemian Grove, etc. Besides, the Queen of England almost certainly _is_ a dealer of drugs, as was George Bush and the Boy from Mena. --Tim May Y2K: A good chance to reformat America's hard drive and empty the trash. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments.