rick the Great were added to
those of the Orleanistes for the circulation of seditious literature
throughout the provinces.[422]

So as the century advanced the association founded by Royalists and
Catholics was turned into an engine of destruction by revolutionary
intriguers; the rites and symbols were gradually perverted to an end
directly opposed to that for which they had been instituted, and the two
degrees of Rose-Croix and Knight Kadosch came to symbolize respectively
war on religion and war on the monarchy of France.

It is no orthodox Catholic but an occultist and Rosicrucian who thus
describes the role of Masonry in the Revolution:

Masonry has not only been profaned but it has been served as a
cover and pretext for the plots of anarchy, by the occult influence
of the avengers of Jacques du Molay and the continuers of the
schismatic work of the Temple. Instead of avenging the death of
Hiram, they have avenged his assassins. The anarchists have taken
the plumb-line, the square, and the mallet and have written on them
liberty, equality, fraternity. That is to say, liberty for
envyings, equality in degradation, fraternity for destruction.
Those are the men whom the Church has justly condemned and that she
will always condemn.[423]

But it is time to turn to another masonic power which meanwhile had
entered the lists, the Martinistes or French Illumines.

French Illuminism

Whilst Frederick the Great, the Freemasons, the Encyclopaedists, and the
Orleanistes were working on the material plane to undermine the Church
and monarchy in France, another cult had arisen which by the middle of
the century succeeded in insinuating itself into the lodges. This was a
recrudescence of the old craze for occultism, which now spread like
wildfire all over Europe from Bordeaux to St. Petersburg. During the
reign of Anna of Courland (1730-40) the Russian Court was permeated with
superstition, and professional magicians and charlatans of every kind
were encouraged. The upper classes of Germany in the eighteenth century
proved equally susceptible to the attractions of the supernatural, and
princes desirous of long life or greater power eagerly pursued the quest
of the Philosopher's Stone, the "Elixir of Life," and evoked spirits
under the direction of occultists in their service.

In France occultism, reduced to a system, adopted the outer forms of
Masonry as a cover to