Congregational Illuminism
You ever have one of those moments of experience when something you're doing just clicks? It's like when you get a truly good night's sleep. You close your eyes, you crash out and sleep right through. You wake up feeling completely refreshed. That rarest night of sleep and real rest. Congregational Illuminism, sometimes called Free Illuminism, was like that for me. In a way.
Some time ago, author Allen Greenfield reached out to me asking if it would be ok if he republished an article I had written for Gods and Radicals and published here about my criticism of initiation and rejection of hierarchy in Western Esoteric Tradition. At first, I didn't make the connection. I get the occasional email from people who read this blog once in a while, but it's usually someone looking for advice about magic or something but then it occurred to me as I was replying to his mail, this is the dude that wrote Secret Cypher of the UFOnauts. Until Hellier came along and put it on front street, Secret Cypher was pretty obscure but I loved it. It didn't exactly satisfy my need for UFO shit as I was expecting some sort of grimoire but it highlighted a hidden cypher similar to gematria in The Book of the Law and that fascinated the hell out of me. This random encounter kicked off a series of events that neatly tie together in a string of synchronicities that has completely blown my mind.
Our long email chain wasn't just about my article. Allen introduced me to his esoteric movement, Congregational Illuminism. Now, everything I do, including the occult, intersects somehow with politics. Everything we do is a political act and up to this point, I'd really struggled with the authoritarian qualities of occult study. It grated on me. Traditions that fall under the umbrella of Western Esoteric have an innate authoritarian quality to them at their most optimistic and are mired in fascism at their worst. Where should a commie turn if their interests lie not in practical spellwork but the lofty ambitions of The Great Work? Building the body of light seems accessible only through rigid hierarchies of initiation. Allen struck that notion down with a decisive blow when he hit me with the concept of Free Illuminism. You take the spiritual development of Freemasonry, strip it of its Boomer social club qualities and you smash what's left up against the notoriously murky revelations of Michael Bertiaux's Voudon Gnostic Workbook and the following tenets as found in Spirit Builders by Tau Palamas:
Spiritual growth is incompatible with authoritarian structure.
Scientific Illuminism requires a non-dogmatic, experimental approach.
A free society linked in free communion should be actualized.
We facilitate, we do not lead. We do the Work, we do not extract oaths or dues, or require dogmatic beliefs.
Bertiaux is a fascinating dude and even though I'm hardly a quarter of the way through the problematic VGW (what occult tome isn't, though?), I can see what all of the middle-period American mystics and magicians seem to agree on. It's the real deal. It's a modern grimoire the likes of which could never be published today. Leaving aside the racist assertions about the Caribbean slave trade, the material that Bertiaux puts forward is dense, disorganized and quite advanced. His motive for taking on Vodun, or Voudon, as his primary expression of spirit is the farthest thing from what you might expect. White people who package voodoo for sale tend to put the focus on the racist and cynical exploitation of hoodoo: curses, money spells, voodoo dolls, etc. Bertiaux does not. As a matter of fact, the model that was used to put my concerned mind at ease about white people voodoo in Congregational Illuminism was the fact that Bertiaux was sent to Haiti on a Episcopalian mission and ended up converted and initiated in the Vodun mysteries in a way that transformed his entire worldview and view of spirituality. Voudon, to Bertiaux, is the original spirituality of the people that occupied Atlantis, if you get down with that sort of thing, and that Atlantis lay somewhere between the west coast of Africa, and Haiti. His anthropology gets pretty murky and requires you to believe that the Earth was once occupied by spiritually advanced people that eventually perished. Lucky for him, this all dovetails quite nicely with all my arch-weirdo beliefs.
What it all boils down to, leaving out the really wonky parts, is that Bertiaux had a revelation that the shamans of Africa and Haiti got everything right and the most direct path to the divine was through their traditions. His book, which desperately needs a newly edited edition, is a testament of how to work that system, along with other effective ingredients that evolved from the African Traditional Religions to the Western Esoteric Tradition as the ATR influence migrated around the world with the rest of mankind. Bertiaux adds bits and pieces from Crowley's OTO, Kenneth Grant's Lovecraftian Typhonian Order, Esoteric Christianity, and a bunch of elements. It's hectic and I've heard more than a few horror stories about people going quite insane from its practice. The key piece for Congregational Illuminism, though, is something that Bertiaux calls Points Chauds (pronounced Pwa Show -- it's French). It's a series of 97 hot points on the human body; points of power akin to chakras. This is the key point where Congregational Illuminism parts ways with the Voudon Gnostic Workbook and veers into Freemasonry.
One of the members of my lodge, The Sothis Lodge, is an active Freemason and the guy that organized us all into the lodge parted ways with conventional Freemasonry some time ago. Both of them seemed to engage in the philosophical and spiritual studies of Masonry but every dude I know, personally, that's involved with the Masons is an A+ jabroni who couldn't possibly have any interest in the esoteric. I just don't believe it. If they are, they're really fucking good at hiding their knowledge of the mystical behind a cloak of pot luck dinners with old men and light beer socials. It's why I eventually dropped my interest in joining the Freemasons. I seem to know people from both sides, but the guys that don't do much beyond charity fundraising seem to be far more common than the ones that match my interests. Illuminism is the perfect compromise and if I'm being honest, isn't much of a compromise since I get to work the mysterious portions of it without having to go hang out at a lodge that smells like Ben Gay and cigarette smoke.
The Masonic elements to Illuminism, specifically, are a cast off pair of rites called the Rite of Memphis and the Rite of Misraim. The history of these two rites is pretty convoluted and I won't go into it, but they were, at one time, a big part of Freemasonry before being pared down to the 33 degrees of -- I think -- Scottish Rite Freemasonry. These were combined at some point into a single 300 or 360 degree initiatory system called The Antient and Primitive Rite of Memphis and Misraim before it ended up cut down to 97 degrees. So, you have 97 degrees of Memphis and Misraim which also happen to coincide with the 97 Points Chauds of Bertiaux's Voudon system. It's one of those wildly synchronistic moments like Poke Runyon's mapping of the Tantric chakras to the Hebrew Tree of Life. The pieces just fit. Which, as things progress, you'll see are kind of on-brand for Greenfield.
This is where Greenfield comes in. He's been a student of the occult since God knows when and has a bit of a reputation of a rogue; a real anarchist. He was actually excommunicated from the Ordo Templi Orientis for reasons that everyone I know seems to be really cagey about discussing. I have no idea why. He'd probably tell me if I asked, but I don't want to seem like I'm fishing for controversy. The occult has enough low-stakes beef and schadenfreude and I'd really hate to be a contributing factor to something that I'm sure is going to eventually come calling. I honestly don't know why I trust Greenfield. I just do. There's something about him that makes me think that we're both cut from the same spiritual cloth and as things have evolved since our first emails, I think that he's the Hierophant that I was supposed to meet in order to really get the ball rolling on my occult studies. We're both aggressively allergic to authoritarianism. We both see the intersection between UFOlogy and the occult. I see a sort of "stars are right" threat on the horizon related to certain adversarial powers that sometimes manifest in our universe as aliens and sometimes as cryptids and he may be of the same mind on that topic.
Not long after we start chatting, I discover the Planet Weird documentary series, Hellier. Right in first or second episode, they reference a dude named Terry R. Wriste. Terry appears in the pages of Secret Cypher of the UFOnauts. He's this paranoid anti-government paramilitary type who may or may not exist. A dude you might expect to find in a Ruby Ridge sort of scenario. Greenfield insists that he's a real person whom he hasn't seen since the 90's and seemed a bit offended that I had the balls to suggest that he made the character up or is some secret nom de guerre of his. Then the show directly references the UFOnauts book. Which is weird. It's not exactly a Llewelyn hot seller. It's published by PARANOIA Magazine, a real curiosity of 90's style conspiracy thought and publishing, one foot in the world of Aleister Crowley, the other in the world of Bill Cooper. Things went completely off the rails when I finished the first season of Hellier in time for the second season to start. This time, the Newkirks and crew start suspect that they're being initiated into some sort of mystery in their search for cave goblins, for the person who sent the first email that started the whole search, for Terry Wriste, and then Allen shows up in the series to more fully explain himself, his book, and his relationship to Terry Wriste and I start to realize that this is Allen's whole thing. His book and people in his orbit kicked off a grand adventure with the Newkirks and opened their minds to the spiritual parts of UFO thought. Allen also introduced me to Illuminism and since then it has felt as though he's been a step ahead of me, laying down the track that will lead me to my ultimate destination.
I eventually join the Worldwide Congressional Illuminism Facebook group. I meet local occultists there and one of them, a Johannite priest, is conveniently restarting a lodge that was once active in New Jersey only this time it will be operating 45 minutes away from my house. We get together in Salem for lunch and talk about the occult, about Illuminism, and about Allen, and what I learn about him is that he seems to be a force of initiation. He seems to have set a lot of people on this path. Dude has real trickster energy and we're all a part of this wonderful web of his. I express some concerns about white people appropriating Haitian spirituality. I can't think of anything more insulting to black people than the descendants of colonial powers invading their holy space and taking up with Lwa like we don't have centuries of atrocity to answer for. Allen explained it to me in a way that chilled me out, though. Vodun was an insurrectionary force that played a large role in eventually forcing out the colonial powers in the Haitian revolution. Read up on it. It's a seriously fascinating story. Bertiaux didn't appropriate vodun, he went there on a Christian mission and it eventually changed his point of view on spirituality rather than the other way around. White people still have a lot of 'splainin' to do but I did the reading, I appreciate my place in all of this, and I came to a conclusion that I was comfortable with. Appropriation tends to come in two forms. The first, and probably the most odious is the notion that these primitive heathens don't understand the power that they wield and that a civilized white person needs to wrest it from their hands and guide them as only an enlightened white European can. The other type is performative costuming. Like a girl painting her face like a Sugar Skull for Halloween. Bertiaux is doing neither of these things. He has taken a great deal of Vodun practice and injected it with his wild ideas about the hidden history of the human race, but he never once suggests that his vision of Vodun is qualitatively superior to that of the people practicing is across the African continent or in Haiti. As a matter of fact, he gives his interpretation a different name to distinguish it from the core practice of an entire culture with all its history and nuance. When Bertiaux gets up to describing the "big strong blacks" in his book, things tend to take a pretty sexual turn and I can't help but wonder if the good Patriarch is indulging some of his own fantasies.
And as I've said in the past, initiation is supposed to be an ordeal. You have to struggle in order to reach enlightenment. I'm not saying my mans is innocent. Like I said, this book has some really gross problems when it comes to talking about black people. One of the reasons I'd like to see a newly edited volume released is to see he Bertiaux's thoughts have changed since its original publication 1988. I wrestle with it. I didn't hang myself from a tree and pluck out an eye to gain insight but I did struggle and continue to do so and for my trouble, I received the first Point Chaud and it touched me in a way that none of my occult tinkering in the past has before.
Sothis Lodge met up for our first ceremonial working on Saturday, February 22, 2020 (02/22/2020, thats a whole lot of 2's, combined to make 10, I can't help but think of Qabalah) in Billerica, Massachusetts. New moon in Aquarius. Sun in Gemini/4th House. First gavel was at 2:22pm (not deliberately, but look at them 2's!), Hour of Mars. We performed a ceremony to open the lodge, received the first point, which made me wonder if one day someone would end up activating the points located on taint, boner, and b-hole. Then we got down and generated a good ecstatic trance state while invoking Elegba, and that's when the visions started. After the invocation, I received a striking vision of a white-faced king, with skin like onyx and a golden crown with points radiating in all directions. He was seated in the chair of the Worshipful Master in the East and large snakes writhed on the floor all around him.
Then we got down to do our scrying. The outcome was bananas. My initial scry was nonsense but the following day I meditated on it and the revelation that I was supposed to receive slapped me directly in the face. I need to find a way to get my intuition to move a little more quickly. I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about what a particular set of symbols means and I come to a good conclusion every time, but it would be nice if I could arrive at these conclusions in the moment rather than having to contextualize everything first. Each of us received visions and impressions that were thematically consistent and on-point for the degree of the Entered Apprentice. Visions of Jerusalem, building/rebuilding the Temple, the Tabernacle, The Ark, the renewed covenant with God.
The word I scried was RETURN, NAEQ = 104. Other 104 words that were significant to me:
Office, degree, succeed, recover, overthrow, teacher, balancings, secret, tribe, conduit, inflame, addicted, judgest, withstand, victory, brother, Hoor Par Kraat, be ready, decided, in turn, mystical, of heaven, thou wilt, thy name, thy way in all, under will, wonderful
A little ways back I had a dream that I was given a sword. It was either a gold or yellow krabi krabong style sword. The handle was notched for my fingers and felt like a part of me when I held it. The color significance dovetails nicely with our first degree ceremony but even weirder was how I was gifted a sword by a friend of mine the day before the ceremony. It wasn't gold and it wasn't a krabi krabong sword, though. It was a Masonic Tyler's Sword that was rescued from the trash at a theater who was throwing out props from their collection. My friend said that he didn't feel like it belonged in his collection and wanted it to be in the possession of someone that appreciated its significance. It's in remarkably great shape, with all parts intact and only a couple of dents to the scabbard and a good deal of tarnishing. The etching on the blade reads Hugh de Payens Encampment on one side and Fred Adams Barker (or maybe it says Barber on the other side). Fred was probably its original owner. The Hugh de Payens lodge is where things get interesting.
Hugh de Payens was the first Knights Templar lodge established in Canada in the mid-1800's. Canada's first prime minister was a member of that lodge. The Templars have a real cool relationship with Canada having probably landed somewhere on the Nova Scotia coast at some point. That part of Canada is littered with Templar symbols, and if you've watched The Curse of Oak Island at all, you see an awful lot of symbols turning up around the Money Pit as well as petroglyphs that were likely left behind to signal to landing Templar sailing ships.
I looked it up and Hugh de Payens is still operating somewhere between Montreal and Toronto. I emailed the Grand Priory in Canada looking for more information but I can't tell if the email got through or if anyone is even watching that inbox. The website is pretty low tech. The last detail that really hit me about the sword is the Maker's Mark. Stamped at the top of the scabbard in tiny letter are the words Ames Mfg Co. Chicopee Mass. I looked them up and it turns out that they used to make real high end blades from the mid-1700's to around 1900 when the company declined to the point that all of their production was spun off to other companies. I do believe that, based on the evidence, Fred was a member of this Templar lodge somewhere in the late 1800's and I have in my possession a real antique that may have a strange place in history. Antiques Roadshow is going to be near me in a couple months. I'll probably bring it down there to see what I can turn up about it.
But back to the mysticism. I received a sword from a Knights Templar lodge the day before I had a significant spiritual experience that was full of visions about The Temple, The Ark, and Jerusalem? When I last spoke to Allen about all of this he suggested that "I have been invited", which thrills me like you wouldn't believe. I have never had a string of synchronicity like this in my life. The magnitude of all of these things happening in 3 short days, and that I can still feel a bit of pressure on the first Point that I received is blowing my mind. I keep thinking that the Universe is a subtle machine that works like a Swiss watch on a mega-scale but every time I actually see the machinery of the universe it looks more to like an old neon sign with a big flashing arrow and an obnoxious buzz that you can't ignore.