By Matthew Ehret
This is the third entry in a series: Part 1 focused on Alexander Hamilton, while Part 2 focused on Abraham Lincoln.
Among the most pervasive slanders against Ben Franklin over the past 270 years has been his relationship to the evil Hellfire Club, which was formed in the early 18th century as a central agency of occult operations across the British Empire.
Of course, if this was the whole truth of the story, then one could certainly argue that the American revolution itself were nothing more than a controlled occult revolution sponsored by those very forces that were simultaneously running the British Empire.
But is this the whole truth?
While Franklin’s involvment with England’s Hell-Fire Club during 1728-1730 is a fact, a much larger story has been lost in the piles of gossip, which I hope to clarify in the course of this third installment of an ongoing series.
What Was the Hell-Fire Club?
In the 18th century, the ceremonies of the Eleusinian Mysteries would be performed by leading figures of London’s satanic Hellfire Club that met in underground caverns located under Medmenham Abbey, leased by Sir Francis Dashwood (Chancellor of the Exchequer of England). The Abbey had formerly been a Cistercian Order in the 13th century, and like all Mithraic cults, selected its location based upon the vast caverns located below, which had been Mithraic altars built during Roman times.
Above the caverns, Dashwood restored the decrepit St. Lawrence Church in 1751, using as inspiration the Sol Invictus (Mithraic) Temple that had recently been discovered in Palmyra, and he dubbed his occult society ‘The Order of Knights of St. Francis, (sometimes called ‘The Medmenham Monks,’) as a not-too-subtle reference to:
1) his own name,
2) the Abbey above the caverns, and
3) St. Francis of Assisi whom, as we established, created an order which served as a bridge between the Cistercian elite (who created the Knights Templar
) and later Jesuits.
None other than Scottish Rite Grandmaster, confederate general and leading occultist Albert Pike took note of the Templar-Jesuit connection when he wrote in his Morals and Dogma that, “Templars were unintelligent and therefore unsuccessful Jesuits.”
The satirical painter William Hogarth astutely captured this irony in his biting rendition of Sir Francis Dashwood dressed as St Francis of Assisi, except featuring an erotic novel instead of a bible, a naked woman instead of Jesus, a Venetian masque, and the figure of fellow Hellfire leader Lord Sandwich as a lunar god instead of a hallow, indicating the Dionysian orgiastic ceremonies performed at night by the initiated.
Hellfire Club member John Wilkes (Royal Society member, and grandfather of Lincoln’s assassin) stated, “No profane eye dared to penetrate the English Eleusinian Mysteries of the Chapter Room where the Monks assembled on solemn occasions […] secret rites performed and libations to the Bona Dea”.
Bona Dea was the name for earth mother Magna Mater, whom as established earlier is known variously as Demeter, Aphrodite, Venus and Cybele.
After redesigning the abbey above the caverns under the gothic style, Dashwood placed a banner above the entrance that read, “Do What thou Wilt”… which was later adopted by arch Satanist Aleister Crowley as the foundation for his theology of Thelema.
By the 1750s, literally every member of the British government were members of Dashwood’s Hellfire Club, and this occult agency was quickly penetrating masonic lodges, beginning with the Grand Lodge of England that had been established in 1717. When the Hellfire Club was created, it took control of the management, of global networks of witch covens and black mass cults that had already been seeded into the English colonies in the wake of the 1642-1660 Civil War, and short lived republican revolution of England.
The Enduring Problem of Witch Covens
The frenzy of witch covens (often overseen by Druid priests typically left untouched by many of the ‘witch trials’ of Europe) spread deeply into the colonies, and from 1648-1663 an effort was made to put an end to the spread of satanic cults. Centering in Connecticut, the trials involved 80 accused witches and a total of 15 executions, a second wave of witch trials occured in Salem Massachusetts from 1692-1693, involving a total of 19 executions.
Cotton Mather and his father Increase Mather played a dual role of exposing the actual satanic covens on the one hand while simultaneously resisting the more fanatical zealots among superstitious puritans who were threatening to transform a serious fight against evil into a paranoia-led terror.
In ‘Cases of Conscience,’ published in 1693, Increase Mather attacked the use of ‘spectral evidence,’ and wrote, “It were better that ten suspected witches should escape, then that one innocent person should be condemned”.
The relatively small number of executions and quick end to the trials by 1693 settled the storm for a period, but the threat did not disappear.
With the death of Queen Anne and the ascension of George I of Hanover to the throne of England in 1714, the Hell-Fire Club high priests became the dominant force of British Imperial strategy, which a young Franklin was recruited to combat by an aging Cotton Mather.
Lowry writes:
“In 1721, at the age of fifteen, Benjamin Franklin joined the battle against these forces, in the middle of one of the most intensive campaigns to destroy the Mathers that their opponents had ever mounted.
On the enemy side, he found his eldest half-brother James, to whose printing business he had been unwillingly apprenticed in 1718, for the onerous term of nine years. James Franklin had returned the previous year from London, where he acquired his press and type for printing—and familiarity with the degenerate admirers of Bernard Mandeville.
By 1722, the Mathers were to accuse James Franklin of promoting “an Hell-Fire club.”
James Franklin set up his printing businessin Boston, and soon fell in with a circle of radical Anglicans attached to Boston’s only Episcopal church, and allied with the radical Whigs of Elisha Cooke, Jr.’s political machine in common cause against the Mathers’ republican leadership. At the center of the Anglican operation was one John Checkley, born in Boston in 1680, but subsequently trained in England at the Anglican stronghold of Oxford.
After an oddly-accounted-for decade in Europe “collecting art,” Checkley surfaced in Boston again in 1710, the year Cotton Mather launched his broadened republican organizing effort with his Essays to Do Good. Setting himself up as a bookseller, Checkley went on to become a major propagandist against the Mathers’ congregational doctrines, and the leading lay advocate for the Church of England in Boston.”
As outlined in his Autobiography, a young Benjamin Franklin had already been recruited by his mentor and secret patron Cotton Mather to the cause of battling the forces of evil.
Doing Evil = Cause of Good
Graham Lowry writes:
“Culturally, and thus politically, the nature of the beast had changed. Following George I’s taking the throne in 1714… Satanic cults proliferated among Britain’s elite. The most notorious were the various branches of the Hell-Fire Club, modeled after Mandeville’s doctrine that evil, vice, and corruption were the ideal means of the state’s controlling its servants, or the drones of the hive.”
Lowry is referencing the work of Bernard Mandeville, the leading philosopher of the Hellfire Club and spiritual father of ‘Laissez Faire’ economics, asserting that ‘Do What Thou Wilst’ should form the basis of all economic theory.
In his “Private Vices Public Benefits” (1714), Mandeville argues that a killer who steals money and buys time with a prostitute, is doing a service to society, since she will use that money to buy new buttons for her dress which employs a button maker, who feeds his family, etc…
Mandeville defines human nature as fundamentally lustful and selfish, saying,
“One of the greatest reasons why so few people understand themselves, is that most writers are always teaching men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their heads with telling them what they really are… I believe man to be a compound of various passions, that all of them, as they are provoked and come uppermost, govern him by turns whether he will or no.”
Mandeville’s famous 1705 poem The Grumbling Hive demonstrated his vile theory with a bit of creative edge:
“Vast numbers thronged the fruitful Hive;
Yet those vast Numbers made ’em thrive;
Millions endeavouring to supply
Each Other’s Lust and Vanity. …
Thus every Part was full of Vice,
Yet the whole Mass a Paradise
Flatter’d in Peace, and fear’d in Wars
They were th’ Esteem of Foreigners. …
Such were the Blessings of that State;
Their Crimes conspired to make ’em Great;
And Virtue, who from Politicks
Had learn’d a thousand Cunning Tricks,
Was, by their happy Influence,
Made Friends with Vice: And ever since
The Worst of all the Multitude
Did Something for the common Good.”
If “vice=good” then one must ask what becomes of “evil” in Mandeville’s strange world?
The answer is simple. Evil occurs when Nation states attempt to regulate or direct the economic behvior of society according to a moral principle.
Mandeville’s thesis was applied to de-regulate the economy of England, which soon became driven by the South Sea Bubble, premised upon rampant speculation not qualitiatively different from the bubbles, which have transformed our modern economies from industrial powerhouses into speculative globalized bubbles.
In 1720, the South Sea Bubble burst resulting in a vast wealth transfer and consolidation of power into the hands of the Hell-Fire Club dominated elite that was intent on turning England into the throne of a new global Venetian Empire.
Lowry writes:
“In 1720, the year of the Bubble and an unrestrained Venetian rampage against Britain, the Hell-Fire clubs played a major part in the intended shock treatment. The most prominent one was founded that year by the new Lord Wharton (later elevated to duke). The club’s dining menu included “Hell Fire Punch,” “Holy Ghost Pie,” “Devil’s Loins,” and “Breast of Venus” (garnished with cherries for nipples).
Even in London, such open Satan-worshipping was a bit ahead of its time, and in 1721 a King’s Order-in-Council was issued banning the Hell-Fire clubs—at least in such public forms.
But the Satanic notion, that there is no distinction between good and evil, continued to rule government policy, and was promulgated quite directly by George I’s chief minister, Robert Walpole. Increase Mather was entirely accurate, when in 1722 he charged James Franklin with promoting a “Hell-Fire Club” in Boston, for publishing the claim that man cannot distinguish between the work of God and the work of the Devil.
When Benjamin Franklin arrived in London, a most vital intelligence task would have been to dissect this new form of the beast: the politically powerful networks of the Hell-Fire.”
Lowry’s rigorous proof of Franklin’s role as a young counter-intellegence agent of Cotton Mather’s republican resistance is laid out in detail within his essay, ‘Who Was the Real Benjamin Franklin,’ and 1987 masterpiece, ‘How the Nation Was Won vol 1.’
Getting to know the Real Benjamin Franklin
Franklin’s worldview stood in direct contrast to Mandeville’s Hell-Fire thesis of ‘Private Vices = Public Virtues’, where the young republican’s approach to indiscriminate acts of improvement were highly motivated by his early studies of a 1710 book by his mentor Cotton Mather called “Essays to Do Good,” which Franklin described as “an influence on my conduct through life; for I have always set a greater value on the character of a doer of good, than on any other kind of reputation; and if I have been, as you seem to think, a useful citizen, the public owes the advantage of it to that book.”
Upon his return to the United States from England, Franklin quickly became a leading republican figure within the networks established by Cotton Mather, Jonathan Spotiswood and William Pitt. The figure of Spotiswood’s advisor James Logan played a special role in shaping the mind of young Franklin, who was introduced to the writings of continental scientists such as Gottfried Leibniz through Logan’s vast library.
In 1729, Ben Franklin had drafted some of the most important policies that led to the sovereign control over currency from his, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of Paper Currency.
For many years, Franklin was not in favor of a full revolution, but believed that it were possible to reform the British Empire (which had only recently been hijacked by the Venetian Party faction during the Glorious Revolution of 1688).
During Franklin’s lifetime, the republican spirit of Thomas More, Erasmus and Shakespeare was still very much alive, and it was this Promethean Christian spirit that he felt could be kindled to transform the Empire from a Satanic Hellfire Club operation into something viable and in harmony with humanity’s well-being[1].
Franklin’s Battle over Science
This belief led Franklin to transform Britain itself through his creation of the British Lunar Society while acting representative to Britain in 1757.
This group featured such scientists as Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgewood and Erasmus Darwin, and uniquely drove the advancement of internal improvements (roads, canals, bridges, steam power, sewage etc), industrial growth and living standards in Britain.
Franklin’s influence throughout England, France and beyond had much to do with his hard earned reputation as the leading scientist on the planet, whose discoveries into electricity trumped the greatest minds of Europe.
Despite having had no formal education beyond the age of 10, Franklin’s genius and humble origins demonstrated that the deeply set belief in “aristocratic nobility” and hereditary institutions prevalent throughout Europe had no foundation in truth upon which to sit.
It cannot be overlooked that Franklin’s years of research into the nature of electricity was intimately tied to his concepts of natural law and government that later shaped the crafting of the US republic, and his published discoveries of 1751 transformed the world, as Franklin became known in Europe as the ‘Prometheus of America’.
The Battle over the Arts
In the arts, Franklin’s close friend and fellow Phildelphian Benjamin West was sent to Italy and then Britain, where the great republican painter organized the creation of the Royal Academy of the Arts in the heart of the Empire in 1772, and remained its president until his death in 1830. The famous painting of Franklin plucking electricity from the heavens showcased above was painted by non other than his friend Benjamin West.
Benjamin West’s access to the courts of Europe gave this Philadelphian republican artist access to conversations among the inner courts of George III, which undoubtedly provided invaluable intelligence for his colleagues in France and the young republic both before, during and after the revolutionary war.
A Devotion to Systematic Acts of Goodness
In the 13 colonies of America, Franklin created the first fire department (1736), public library (1731), and founded the University of Pennsylvania. As a leading printer and later post-master general, Franklin knew that the American population of the 1730s did not yet have the moral or cognitive fortitude to induce a revolutionary positive change for the world, and as such, he created the influential Poor Richards Almanac which wrapped moral lessons and insights into poetry, science, astronomy and philosophy lessons with every single issue.
This popular journal probably did more than anything else as a form of mass cultural education, which empowered Americans to eventually think on a level sufficient to understand why concepts like Freedom were worth dying for (taxation without representation was merely one of 27 points enumerated in the Declaration of Independence).
In preparing the foundations for a reform of the world political-economic system, Franklin studied Chinese culture and strove to model western reforms on the best principles of Confucianism and the Chinese constitution. His printing presses published the first english translations of Confucius’ Analects in the colonies in 1750, and when asked how one should organize a nation state, he wrote:
“This is what Confucius proposed to the princes, to instruct them how to rectify and polish first their own reason, and afterwards the reason and person of all their subjects. But to make the greater impression, after having gradually descended from the wise conduct of the whole empire, to the perfection of the understanding, he re-ascends, by the same degrees, from the illuminated understanding to the happy state of the whole empire.”
Outlining his moral philosophy in 1747, Franklin wrote, “Confucius was my example. I followed Confucius.”
Franklin applied the best techniques of satirist-republican Jonathan Swift and wrote countless hilarious essays under pen names like Silence Dogood, Martha Careful, Richard Saunders and Anthony Afterwit.
He also followed Swift’s lead, as he argued against British population control in his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind.
As early as 1729, Franklin codified a system of banking tied not to the worship of money or markets, but rather internal improvements, which argued for the creation of colonial scrip (not controlled by private central bankers). These insights would derive from his studies of Colbertist Dirigism and preceded the later work by his protégé Alexander Hamilton, who established the American system of Political economy in his 1790-91 reports.
Most importantly, Franklin worked to coordinate an international network of collaborators among the enlightened intelligentsias of Russia, France, Germany, Prussia, Spain, Italy, and even India and Morocco!
In this way, the scientist/poet/statesman walked in the footsteps of the great Gottfried Leibniz, who had attempted a similar grand design when Franklin was still a boy.
Ben Franklin in Canada
Franklin’s efforts at nation building did not leave out Canada.
Today, Canadians (and Americans) find themselves shocked when confronted with the fact that Canada’s first postal service and first newspaper were both created by … Benjamin Franklin!
Established in 1753 in Halifax as part of Franklin’s overhaul in communications infrastructure in the Americas, mail services were extended to Quebec City and Montreal after the French were defeated in the Seven Years’ War in 1763, as France’s colony north of Vermont fell to the British. Franklin had been made Post-Master General in 1753 (the same year his famous kite experiment made him an international sensation).
Montreal’s Gazette was founded by a French republican named Fleury Mesplat, recruited by Franklin in order to help counteract the destructive effects the French feudal system had on the cognitive powers of the Quebec colonists, whose rampant illiteracy dovetailed their non-existent appetites for representative government or freedom. In this feudal culture, blind obedience to authority (whether political or religious) was seen as preferable to thinking for oneself.
Although Franklin created these cultural milestones and was an active diplomat working to persuade the Quebecois of the importance of becoming a 14th member of the united colonies, his mission failed due to a series of bribes, acts of treason and short sighted thinking by men who should have known better.
Ultimately, the Quebecois chose submission to Crown rather than risking their lives for freedom, resulting in one of the very few failures Franklin faced throughout his life.
In a future article, we will explore Franklin’s role in crafting the Declaration of Independence, US Constitution and his leading role in combating the institution of slavery.
Appendix 1: Keystones of Benjamin Franklin’s Life
Inventor of bifocals, Glass Armonica, Rocking Chair, lightning Rod, discovered Gulf Stream in 1775, discovered electricity and invented terms like “battery”, “charge”, and “conductor”.
Created first fire department (1736), public library in Philadelphia (1731), and founded the University of Pennsylvania
1725: Deployed to England on counter-intelligence operation of London Hellfire Club
1729: Set up Pennsylvania Gazette and began printing Poor Richards Almanac from 1733-1759
1743: Authored Proposal for Promotion of Useful Knowledge “One society be formed of virtuosi or ingenious men, residing in the several colonies, to be called the American Philosophical Society, who are to remain in constant correspondence”
1748- Elected to Philadelphia City Council
1751- Member of the Colonial Assembly
1752- Discovered electricity and appointed Post-Master general of the Americas
1753- Created Canada’s Post Office in Halifax and extended lines to Quebec City and Montreal in 1763
1754- Authored first Proposal to unite the 13 colonies (Plan of Union adopted by Albany Congress)
1757- Appointed Pennsylvania ambassador to England
1760- Wrote Canada Pamphlets which won control of Canada
1775- Elected to the Continental Congress
1776- Made Commissioner to Canada and worked to get Canada to join revolution as 14th Colony
1776- Led four-man committee to draft the Declaration of Independence
1776- Made Ambassador to France
Organized the Treaty of Alliance with France (1778), the Treaty of Paris establishing peace with Great Britain (1783,) and the U.S. Constitution (1787)
Appendix 2: Franklin Enriches the English Language and Cognitive Powers of the People
1. “Content makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor.”
2. “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
3. “Well done is better than well said.”
4. “A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.”
5. “Honesty is the best policy.”
6. “You may delay, but time will not.”
7. “Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy.”
8. “Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.”
9. “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
10. “ They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
11 “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
12. “A penny saved is a penny earned.”
13. “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
14. “Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.”
15. “It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.”
16. “Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?”
Matthew Ehret is the editor-in-chief of The Canadian Patriot Review, Senior Fellow of the American University in Moscow and Director of the Rising Tide Foundation. He has written the four volume Untold History of Canada series, four volume Clash of the Two Americas series and Science Unshackled: Restoring Causality to a World in Chaos. He is also host of Pluralia Dialogos and Breaking History on Badlands Media where this article was first published.
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