Introduction
You often notice that radical political spaces replicate the very dogmas, hierarchies, and exclusions they aim to dismantle. You struggle to understand how secular movements can harbor rigid orthodoxies, ritualistic boundary-making, and unacknowledged spiritual premises.
Modern radical political movements retain unacknowledged theological, hermetic, and esoteric premises that continue to shape activist culture and exclusionary boundary-making.
Erica Lagalisse demonstrates in Occult Features of Anarchism that the intellectual genealogy of the left is deeply intertwined with ancient theology, Renaissance hermeticism, and secret societies. You will trace how these hidden currents migrated from mystical traditions into Enlightenment science, Freemasonry, early socialism, and classical anarchism. The book explores how modern secularism conceals religious architecture and how contemporary activist culture uses charges of conspiracy to police class boundaries.
You might wonder as you read:
- How did hermetic philosophy shape the rise of modern materialism and radical politics?
- What role did clandestine brotherhoods play in early socialist and anarchist organization?
- Why do contemporary leftist movements maintain exclusionary cultural practices disguised as secular rationality?
1. First Premises and the Radical Enlightenment
Modern political theories and social sciences repeat ancient theological debates. Carl Schmitt and Marshall Sahlins demonstrate that theories of human nature and authority rely on older assumptions about the divine. You find that hierarchical institutions assume a transcendent God and a flawed human nature. Antiauthoritarian movements instead draw on syncretic pagan traditions that view the universe and humanity as fundamentally immanent.
Political ideologies retain ancient theological debates regarding transcendence and immanence, while hermetic and esoteric traditions provided the foundational fount for modern radical politics and scientific methods.
The Theology of Politics
You can trace the roots of modern antiauthoritarianism to historical heresies. These early movements rejected divine transcendence in favor of an immanent divine force present within all people. This theology of politics shapes how you understand collective action and human agency today.
The conflict between transcendence and immanence defines political splits. Hierarchical systems require a ruler situated above the subjects, much like a transcendent creator. Radical movements invoke an immanent spirit of equality that resides directly within the social microcosm.
A Heretical Account of the Radical Enlightenment
Hermetic texts, platonic philosophy, and Islamic mathematics entered Europe and changed intellectual history. In 1460, a monk arrived in Florence carrying Hermetic texts. Cosimo de Medici instructed his translator to set aside Plato's dialogues and focus immediately on translating the works of Hermes Trismegistus.
Texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus introduced a worldview where humanity acts as a microcosm connected to a divine universe. This magical and mathematical composite shaped Renaissance natural philosophy and early heretical movements. The classical art of memory evolved through these influences into systems of combining ideas and symbols.
Giordano Bruno combined the classical art of memory and Lullism by placing images on rotating concentric wheels. Gottfried Leibniz later substituted numbers for images using similar combinatorial principles to develop calculus. These mnemonic techniques directly contributed to modern scientific methods, classification systems, and algebraic notations.
Elite men were encouraged to practice natural magic, alchemy, and science. Johannes Kepler was appointed Imperial Mathematician while his mother was simultaneously imprisoned and prosecuted for witchcraft. Lower-class women working as traditional healers and midwives faced intense persecution.
European witch hunts functioned as a gendered class war that enforced primitive accumulation. State-sponsored violence eliminated traditional birth control methods and criminalized healing practices. This process transformed women into reproducers of labor for the emerging capitalist order by enclosing the body.
2. Freemasonry and Revolutionary Brotherhoods
Speculative Masonry and clandestine brotherhoods adopted pantheistic worldviews and pyramidal structures to organize early social levelling projects and revolutionary resistance.
While rulers used the Hermetic Tradition to assert worldly dominion, literate radicals mobilized these same doctrines from below. These ideas provided a religious and cosmological foundation for emerging social levelling projects and subversive political action against systemic power.
Freemasonry, Pantheism, and the Hermetic Tradition
Speculative Masonry emerged after the witch hunts and the decline of artisans' guilds. Drawing on Hermetic and cabalistic lore, Masons adopted pantheism, which deified the material order and framed social progress as the manifestation of a new heaven on earth through human agency. This outlook was inspired partly by the life span of Baruch Spinoza from 1632 to 1677 and the publication year of his Theological-Political Treatise in 1670.
John Toland elaborated a new ritual combining Druid and ancient Egyptian traditions in his 1720 work Pantheisticon. The establishment of the Grand Lodge in London occurred in 1717.
Initially restricted to elite men, Masonic lodges gradually lowered fees and abolished literacy requirements to admit small artisans and proletarian workers. These sites created the first formal public associations in Britain to address the workers' question through philanthropy and discussion.
In prerevolutionary France, lodges began accepting small artisans and workers. By the time of 1789, there were between twenty thousand and fifty thousand members in over six hundred lodges in France.
The Revolutionary Brotherhoods
Revolutionary brotherhoods like Adam Weishaupt's Illuminati adopted pyramidal, Masonic-inspired structures to pursue the complete dismantling of the state, Church, and private property. Weishaupt founded the Illuminati in 1776, using a hierarchical secret society structure to propagate Enlightenment ideas and an immanent revolution of the human spirit while evading political repression.
The Illuminati grew from Weishaupt and five students in 1776 to fifty-four members in five Bavarian cities by 1779. Members later included Goethe, Schiller, Mozart, and Herder.
Filippo Buonarroti utilized established Freemasonic lodges as nurseries for revolutionary ideas by infiltrating their hierarchies and adding secret higher grades. Believing in the necessity of clandestine organization against the Holy Alliance, Buonarroti founded the Sublime Perfect Masters and required candidates to rise through Masonic lodges to align the two structures.
Buonarroti founded the Sublime Perfect Masters in 1809.
3. Esotericism in Socialism and the Marxian Dialectic
Socialist symbols, Bakunin's secret networks, theosophical cosmologies, and the Marxian dialectic all preserve structural archetypes and teleological frameworks traceable to hermetic and religious origins.
Illuminism in the IWA
Common communist and anarchist symbols such as the red star and the circle-A derive directly from Masonic iconography and esoteric traditions. The star symbolizes the second degree of membership in Freemasonry. The circle-A is composed of the compass, level, and plumb line. Early socialist groups and Memphite lodges adopted these specific markers.
The seal of the Consejo Federal de España de la A.I.T. circa 1870 clearly incorporates Masonic tools.
The first preparatory meeting of the IWA occurred at the Free Masons Tavern in 1862. The official founding meeting of the IWA took place on September 28, 1864. Mikhail Bakunin advocated for a secret revolutionary brotherhood to guide the masses toward self-determination without exercising visible political authority. Rejecting the Marxist idea of a temporary state dictatorship of the proletariat, Bakunin proposed an invisible, decentralized revolutionary leadership acting as lightning rods to electrify the popular movement.
Bakunin founded his secret International Brotherhood in Florence in 1864.
Theosophy and Other Esoterica
Theosophical and spiritualist cosmologies heavily influenced international anarchist and socialist thinkers, shaping their approaches to revolution and social transformation. Thinkers and activists across the Americas and Europe fused socialist politics with theosophy, pantheosophy, and spiritualism. These co-religionaries included Plotino Rhodakanaty, Ricardo Flores Magón, and Augusto César Sandino.
Plotino Rhodakanaty drafted the pamphlet Neopanteísmo in Mexico in 1864.
The president of the American Association of Spiritualists published the first English translation of The Communist Manifesto in 1872.
Occult Features of the Marxian Dialectic
Both Hegel's and Marx's dialectical systems preserve structural archetypes, eschatology, and geometric constructions traceable to Hermetic traditions. Hegel's dialectic of emanation and return mirrors Hermetic concepts of unity and intellectual ascent. While Marx materialized this logic, both systems retain Christian and Hermetic teleological structures that contrast with Bakunin's total negation.
Hegel published the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807 and followed with his Logic in 1812. Hegel sketched a triangle diagram with the sides reading 'Spiritus'.
Modern anti-systemic critique and collective action relied on the re-enchantment of the world through scientized and secularized religion rather than pure disenchantment. The historical rise of modern radicalism cannot be separated from the influx of ancient magical wisdom, popular religion, and materialism. This demonstrates that the rejection of capitalist exploitation and materialist philosophy are deeply intertwined.
Henry Ford distributed five hundred thousand copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the early twentieth century.
4. Anarchism, Conspiracy, and Class Exclusion
Standard anarchist and secular analyses reproduce gendered and colonial prejudices by dismissing religious or non-secular viewpoints expressed by indigenous women activists. You can see this dynamic in ethnographic fieldwork where white settler anarchists marginalized an indigenous community health worker named Magdalena. Because Magdalena framed her struggle in religious terms and focused on opposing forced sterilization rather than participating in union politics, her contribution was disqualified as non-political.
Secular Western anarchism relies on colonial dichotomies that marginalize indigenous spirituality, while the label of conspiracy theory functions to police movement spaces and enforce class exclusion.
Maintaining a neat separation between rationality and spirituality only makes sense within a colonialist rubric where the religious Other forms the limit of the rational West. Insisting on a purely disenchanted universe limits the radical imaginary. While European traditions conceptualize sovereignty through state power and domination, indigenous scholars like Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith frame sovereignty as an active web of human, material, and spiritual relationships built on mutual obligations. Anarchist notions of autonomous self-maintaining individuals mimic capitalist and monotheistic stories of human mastery over nature, whereas contemporary biology and indigenous science emphasize symbiosis and mutualism.
Anarchism as a Historical Object
During a speaking tour in Quebec and Ontario in 2011, indigenous health worker Magdalena discussed her grassroots work as a promotora against forced sterilization and emphasized harmony with Creation, but was dismissed by anarchist audiences for lacking a formal political and economic analysis. You will find that standard political categorizations frequently erase non-Western epistemologies.
The Conspiracy of Kings
The label conspiracy theory functions primarily to disqualify subaltern and popular ideas from respectable consideration rather than to apply consistent analytical criteria. The term lacks monothetic defining criteria and is used as a mechanism of narrative disqualification against popular or working-class political ideas, while elite-communicated falsehoods escape the label.
The theory that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction was used to justify the war on Iraq but was never categorized as a conspiracy theory despite being factually incorrect. For example, 50 percent of United States citizens continued believing that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction even after it was proved otherwise.
Professional-class activists use concepts like intersectionality and anti-oppression as cultural capital to launder class power into personal moral superiority. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theories, middle-class activists perform good politics and allyship to signal moral distinction from peers while evading structural critiques of their own class privilege and ignoring the working class.
An Occupy Wall Street listserv in early 2012 featured an unpolished newcomer making anti-Semitic remarks who was swiftly banned by elite white activists for making spaces unsafe, while well-positioned white activists who made similar points escaped expulsion due to their higher cultural capital. You navigate these same activist circles from 2006 to 2016, the decade the author researched the historical essay. The dismissal of conspiracy theories serves as a euphemism for class exclusion within contemporary activist circles. Professional-class leftists associate conspiracy theories with the working class and marginalized ethnic groups, using them as a boundary marker to police movement spaces and protect their own bourgeois social enclaves.
The friction between social science and popular conspiracy theories stems from opposing theories of history: impersonal structural forces versus voluntarist individual agency. While orthodox social theory relies on structural or post-structural explanations where history unfolds via impersonal forces like discourse or economic dialects, conspiracy theories employ a voluntarist model where specific individuals and groups actively direct historical events. Academic literature demonstrates that state intelligence agencies like the United States Central Intelligence Agency have a vested interest in promoting existing dismissive categories in media discourse to obscure true elite political conspiracies and oligarchical neoliberal policies.
10 Key Ideas
- Hierarchical institutions assume a transcendent God and a flawed human nature, whereas antiauthoritarian movements draw on syncretic pagan traditions viewing the universe and humanity as fundamentally immanent.
- Texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus introduced a worldview where humanity acts as a microcosm connected to a divine universe, which contributed directly to modern scientific methods, classification systems, and algebraic notations.
- Speculative Masonry drew on Hermetic and cabalistic lore to adopt pantheism, deifying the material order and framing social progress as the manifestation of a new heaven on earth through human agency.
- Revolutionary brotherhoods like Adam Weishaupt's Illuminati adopted pyramidal, Masonic-inspired structures to pursue the complete dismantling of the state, Church, and private property while evading political repression.
- Common communist and anarchist symbols such as the red star and the circle-A derive directly from Masonic iconography and esoteric traditions.
- Both Hegel's and Marx's dialectical systems preserve structural archetypes, eschatology, and geometric constructions traceable to Hermetic traditions.
- Secular Western anarchism relies on colonial dichotomies that marginalize indigenous spirituality by treating the religious Other as the limit of the rational West.
- While European traditions conceptualize sovereignty through state power and domination, indigenous scholars frame sovereignty as an active web of human, material, and spiritual relationships built on mutual obligations.
- The label conspiracy theory functions primarily to disqualify subaltern and popular ideas from respectable consideration rather than to apply consistent analytical criteria.
- Professional-class leftists associate conspiracy theories with the working class and marginalized ethnic groups, using them as a boundary marker to police movement spaces and protect their own bourgeois social enclaves.