The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor

Afghani would have purportedly been a representative of a mysterious Egyptian quasi-Masonic secret society, which supposedly represented a survival of the Sabian teachings of the Grand Lodge of the Ismailis of Cairo, which became known among Western occultists as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor (H.B. of L.), also thought to have had originally been the influence behind the creation of Samuel Honis’ Rite of Mizraim.

One of Afghani’s closest associates was James Sanua. Sanua was born in Cairo to a well-connected Italian Jewish family of Sephardic origin, who was wholeheartedly devoted to the teachings of Mazzini. Sanua was also responsible for establishing the foundation of the modern Egyptian theater, a forerunner to its well-known film industry. Both Sanua and his girlfriend, Lydia Pashkov, were also friends and travelling companions of Helena P. Blavatksy, who in 1856, Mazzini had initiated into the Carbonari.⁹¹

Blavatsky, the famous medium and mystic, is recognised as the godmother of the occult revival of the late nineteenth century. After writing monumental works such as Isis Unveiled, and The Secret Doctrine, the Theosophical Society was formed in 1875, to spread her teachings worldwide. Among the early members was also Albert Pike. According to Manly P. Hall, a leading Masonic historian:

The Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled are Madame Blavatsky’s gifts to humanity, and to those whose vision can pierce the menacing clouds of imminent disaster it is no exaggeration to affirm that these writings are the most vital literary contribution to the modern world. No more can they be compared with other books than can the light of the sun be compared with the lamp of the glowworm. The Secret Doctrine assumes the dignity of a scripture.⁹²

Although there is no direct evidence of Blavatsky having met with Afghani, according to K. Paul Johnson, in The Masters Revealed, circumstances would suggest such contact. Not only was Afghani familiar with her associates Sanua and Pashkov, but he and Blavatsky were both in India in 1857 and 1858, both in Tbilisi in the mid-sixties, and both in Cairo in 1871. Again, Afghani left Egypt for India in late 1879, the same year that Blavatsky and Olcott arrived there. After leaving India in late 1882, he resided in Paris throughout 1884, the year in which Blavatsky spent the summer there.

Through Jamal Afghani, Johnson claims, Blavatsky acquired her central doctrines, derived from Ismailism, which she would then communicate to the Western occult community. As Johnson points out, in Blavatsky’s article, The Eastern Gupta Vidy and the Kabbalah, she claims the “real Kabbalah” is to be found in the Chaldean Book of Numbers. Although it is unknown to scholars, Blavatsky cites this book frequently in her tomes, Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. She claims to have received it from a “Persian Sufi”, and as K. Paul Johnson points out, Afghani is its most likely source.

According to Johnson, a fundamental structure in Blavatsky’s doctrines can only be attributed to one source, which is also related to the ideas of another occultist, Gurdjieff: Ismaili Gnosticism. The Chaldean Book of Numbers teaches a sevenfold cosmology similar to the eclectic Ismaili mysticism.⁹³

In 1872, when the Egyptian Rite came to be known as the Ancient and Primitive Rite, the Grand Mastership of the order was assumed by John Yarker, having been handed to him by Marconis de Negre. Yarker met Blavatsky in England in 1878, and appears to have conferred on her a Masonic initiation, though there have been attempts to refute her involvement in Freemasonry.

In Paris, Yarker met Pascal Beverly Randolph, an African-American occultist who had travelled to Egypt, where he was supposedly initiated by a secret priestess of the Ismaili Muslims. Yarker passed on the tradition of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, which was reborn as the Hermitic Brotherhood of Light, a continuation of the Frates Lucis or Asiatic Brethren.

In 1873, Carl Kellner, an associate of Randolph, was another of the many occultists associated with Egyptian Freemasonry, who had travelled to Cairo in the time of al Afghani’s activity. There he met, for the first time, a mysterious young man, then going by the name of Aia Aziz, also known as Max Theon. Actually, this Max Theon was the son of the last leader of the Frankist sect, Rabbi Bimstein of Warsaw, Poland. Max Theon traveled widely, and in Cairo worked with Blavatsky, and also became a student of Paulos Metamon, a “Coptic magician”. Metamon was also Blavatsky’s first “Master”, whom she met in Asia Minor in 1848, and again in Cairo in 1870, and who introduced her to the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light.

It was Carl Kellner and Thoedore Reuss, another member of Bulwer-Lyttons’ Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, who would put together the ritual of Egyptian Rite Freemasonry, chartered to Reuss by John Yarker, to convey the inner secret of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. John Yarker supposedly provided a charter for the founding of the Ordo Templi Orientis, or O.T.O., founded by Reuss, which attempted to revive the traditions of the Ancient Mysteries, the Knights Templars, the Freemasons, Rosicrucians and the Illuminati. Ordo Templi Orientis meant “Order of Eastern Templars”, in reference to the Johannite myth of Sabians or Ismailis.

Reuss was succeeded as head of the O.T.O. by the notorious Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley, a thirty-third degree Mason of the Scottish Rite, had also been a member the Golden Dawn. The order was founded in 1888 by Masons and members of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia. This Isis Cult was organised around the 1877 manuscript Isis Unveiled by Helena Blavatsky. The Order of the Golden Dawn included, among others, William Butler Yeats, Maude Gonne, wife of Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Edward Waite. The Golden Dawn was led at the time by McGreggor Mathers, who traced the spiritual ancestry of the order to the Rosicrucians, and from there, through to the Kabbalah and to Ancient Egypt.

It was Crowley who took the deviant sexual traditions of the Shabbeteans and popularised them as Sex Magick. And it was while in Egypt, in 1904, that Crowley made contact with an entity by the name of Aiwass, which dictated to him the content of his Book of the Law, containing the famous dictum of modern occultism, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

Footnotes:

91 1941: Iraq and the Illuminati.
92 Manly P. Hall (33rd degree mason), The Phoenix, An Illustrated Review of Occultism and Philosophy, 1960 The Philosophical Research Society, p. 122
93 The Masters Revealed, p. 146.