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contain nothing against honour or conscience?'
    The tone I assumed had thrown the lodge into confusion. The brethren surrounded. me, telling me I had taken things too much in earnest, and in too literal a sense: that they had never pretended to engage in anything contrary to the duties of every true Frenchman, and that in spite of all my resistance I should nevertheless be admitted. The Venerable soon restored order with a few strokes of his mallet. He then informed me that I was passed to the degree of Master, adding, that if the secret was not given to me, it was only because a more regular lodge, and held with ordinary ceremonies, was necessary on such an occasion. In the meanwhile he gave me the signs and passwords for the third degree, as he had done for the other two. This was sufficient for me to be admitted into a regular Lodge, and now we were all brethren. As for me, I had been metamorphosed into apprentice, fellowcraft, and master, all in one evening ...

    At some later point in his membership, Barruel did receive the final initiation, and was made privy to the central Masonic secret. He describes the revelation in the third person. After an apprentice had taken his oath, the Abbe tells us, "the Master said the following words to him: `My dear brother, the secret of Masonry consists in these words EQUALITY AND LIBERTY; all men are equal and free; all men are brethren." This formula, he tells us, was later expanded to mean "the twofold principle of liberty and equality is unequivocally explained by war against Christ and his Altars, war against Kings and their Thrones!"
    William Blake
    William Blake (1757-1827) is not usually considered an occultist. For a long time, the standard view of Blake was that he was a natural mystic, naive in the Romantic sense, unintellectual, primitive, and uninfluenced by book learning of any sort. Although his `prophetic books' were thought incomprehensible, in some ways he was considered a `simple' poet; poems like "The Tyger" and others from Songs of Innocence and of Experience still turn up regularly in anthologies of childrens' poetry. Yet the image of Blake as a kind of unlearned genius, singing his songs as unselfconsciously as a bird, is wrong. Even if we plump for Blake as an 18th century shaman, we are still somewhat off the mark. He was, of course, inspired; Blake considered himself a prophet, and accounts of his visionary experiences, both by himself and those by others, are clear evidence that he had some strange faculty for perceiving what he called the spirit world, and which we today would consider expressions of the unconscious. Yet, as the late poet and Blakean scholar Kathleen Raine makes clear, it is a mistake to think of Blake as "an example of the spontaneous manifestation of archetypes." In books like Blake and Tradition (1968), Raine argues persuasively that Blake saw himself as a poet in the hermetic tradition, drawing on the rich underground stream of ancient magical and occult knowledge, and hammering out in his didactic and aphoristic verse a new synthesis of what she calls the "perennial philosophy." Yet Blake was not only an astute student of the occult thinkers of the past. The London Blake lived in was awash in the same currents of magical thought and radical politics that flooded France, and the research of scholars like Marsha Keith Schuchard suggests that the image of Blake as a kind of holy man, aloof from the influences of his own time, is inaccurate. Though not mad, as some of his contemporaries believed, Blake certainly confessed to some eccentric beliefs, and it would not be wholly mistaken to see him in the company of those we might consider crackpots, cranks and charlatans.

    Blake's natural affinity to mystical visions and paranormal events surfaced early; as a young boy he was beaten by his father for saying he saw angels in a tree, and on another occasion he was saved from a second beating only through the solicitations of his mother.