The trail of the Serpent: New edition

FIVE years ago we published Light Bearers of Darkness, largely based on our own experiences and investigations into various individual secret societies, their affiliations, their occult practices, their pseudo religious and political activities.

To-day, in The Trail of the Serpent, we issue a further instalment of these researches, built up almost wholly from contributions to the Patriot from 1930 to 1935. Going back to Patriarchal times, we attempt to trace, step by step, the worship of the ancient Serpent, the Creative Principle, the God of all initiates, from the early Cabiri, through Paganism to the pseudo-Christianity of the Gnostics and Cabalists, these latter largely emanating under the influence of the Hellenised Jews of Alexandria.

We have endeavoured to prove that the aim, in the higher grades of these varied mysteries and cults, is to awaken this serpent, the sex-force or ＂God within＂ man, raising it by processes and yogic methods, uniting it with the Universal Creative Principle without developing the latent senses or, so to say, deifying the adept, but only that he may be enslaved by some astute, outside, and stronger mind or group of minds, who, it would seem, seek to rule the nations through hypnotically controlled adepts. For one and all of these modern mysteries are dominated and ruled by some unknown hierarchy, just as in the Ancient Mysteries the Egyptian high-priests were the masters of the old world through their knowledge and power to manipulate these invisible serpent forces, the magnetic forces of all nature, by means of which they bound and dominated the mystes and even the epoptes and through them the masses.

These revolutionary mysteries first appear as pseudo religions, until by means of some kind of seemingly religious uplift the necessary link with the master-mind is formed. Then it becomes openly political and revolutionary, subverting all aspects of the nation’s life, seeking by internationalism and universalism to unify all peoples, socially, economically, politically, in arts and religion, preparing for some New Era, some New Heaven and New Earth.

We have finally sought to materialise these invisible masters and, allowing the Cabalists to speak for themselves, we arrive at the revolutionary and cabalistic Jew, the most cosmopolitan of peoples, who look for the Coming of their Messianic Era. To some of these the Messiah is their race and their race is their God, the Tetragrammaton, the Creative Principle, this Serpent Power, binding and unifying, leading to the hope of merging all races, all faiths under the Law of this their Unity of Race, thus creating the ＂Greater Judaism＂ spoken of by the Jewish World, 9 and 16 February, 1883.