Having gone underground with the arrest of the Templars in 1312, the occult European occult tradition re-emerged when they announced themselves to the world as the Rosicrucians in 1623, deliberately timed with the Great Conjunction, the most important event in astrology, often associated with the coming of the messiah. According to their calculations, based on the Kabbalah, the event would mark the dawn of a new “millennium” which would endure just 42 years, until the Last Judgment in 1666, the year that Sabbatai Zevi took the Jewish world by storm when he announced himself the expected messiah.
Zevi disappointed the majority of his followers when he converted to Islam, but a few interpreted his apostasy in mystical terms, and continued to advance his subversive mission. They contributed to the explosion of secret societies in the eighteenth century, most infamously the Bavarian Illuminati, and contributed to the Enlightenment and ultimately the French and American revolutions. Thus, they succeeded in transplanting the traditional enemy of the occult underground, the Catholic Church, and incepted the separation of Church and State, beginning the secular rule that characterizes most Western governments today.
Although historians discount the continued influence of the Illuminati, because the order was disbanded in 1786, they survived as the Carbonari, whose goal was the creation of the Kingdom of Italy, and ultimately, a Masonic Pope. The Carbonari also played a conspiratorial role in fomenting the Civil War, in league with the Order of the Skull and Bones and Ku Klux Klan, seeding the racist sentiments that would continue to divide American society, until they were again exploited to support the election of Donald Trump.
