carrying on the teachings of
Weishaupt, the chief of whom was the President of a group of Pan-German
secret societies, and it seems not improbable that the mysterious
S.D.A., under whose directions the Golden Dawn was founded, might be
located in this circle.

A few years before the war, Steiner, whilst still a Theosophist, started
a society of his own, the Anthroposophical Society, a name borrowed from
the work of the XVIIth century Rosicrucian, Thomas Vaughan,
"Anthroposophica Magica." The ostensible leader of Rosicrucianism in
Germany was Dr. Franz Hartmann, founder of the "Order of the Esoteric
Rose Croix." Although in some way connected with Engel's Illuminati and
more definitely with the Theosophical Society, Hartmann was believed to
be a genuine Christian mystic. Steiner also made the same profession,
and it seems probable that he formed one of the group of mysterious
personages, including besides Grand Orient Masons, Baron von Knigge,
great grandson of Weishaupt's coadjutor "Philo," who met together in
secret conference at Ingoldstadt where the first Lodge of the Illuminati
had been founded in 1776, and decided to revive Illuminism on Christian
mystic lines used in a very elastic sense amongst occultists. At the
same time Steiner introduces into his teaching a strong vein of
Gnosticism, Luciferianism, Johannism, and Grand Orient Masonry, whilst
reserving Rosicrucianism for his higher initiates. On this last point he
is extremely reticent, preferring to call his teaching "occult science,"
since he recognizes that "real Rosicrucians never proclaim themselves as
such"; it is therefore only in the inner circle of his society, on which
no information is given to the public and into which members are
admitted by much the same forms of initiation as those used by the Grand
Orient, that Rosicrucianism is mentioned. Some of Steiner's imitators in
The Rosicrucian Fellowship at Oceanside, California, however, openly
profess what they call Rosicrucianism and at the same time claim
superior knowledge on the subject of Masonry. Thus in a book by the
leader of this group we find it solemnly stated that according to Max
Heindl, Eve cohabited with serpents in the garden of Eden, that Cain was
the offspring of her union with "the Lucifer Spirit Samael," and that
from this "divine progenitor" the most virile portion of the human race
descended, the rest being merely the "progeny of human parents." Readers
of the present work will