friends who had helped on the great work."
What was the aim of this occult power? Was it merely the plan of destruction that had originated in the brain of a Bavarian professor twenty years earlier, or was it something far older, a live and terrible force that had lain dormant through the centuries, that Weishaupt and his allies had not created but only loosed upon the world? The Reign of Terror, like the outbreak of Satanism in the Middle Ages, can be explained by no material causes--the orgy of hatred, lust, and cruelty directed not only against the rich but still more against the poor and defenceless, the destruction of science, art, and beauty, the desecration of the churches, the organized campaign against all that was noble, all that was sacred, all that humanity holds dear, what was this but Satanism?
In desecrating the churches and stamping on the crucifixes the Jacobins had in fact followed the precise formula of black magic: "For the purpose of infernal evocation ... it is requisite ... to profane the ceremonies of the religion to which one belongs and to trample its holiest symbols under foot." It was this that formed the prelude to the "Great Terror," when, to those who lived through it, it seemed that France lay under the sway of the powers of darkness.
So in the "great shipwreck of civilization," as a contemporary has described it, the projects of the Cabalists, the Gnostics, and the secret societies which for nearly eighteen centuries had sapped the