Troy welcomes back Brother Joseph Wages for the story behind one of the most important Masonic source books of the last decade, The Secret School of Wisdom: The Authentic Rituals and Doctrines of the Illuminati.

This is not another Illuminati conspiracy episode. It is the opposite. Wages traces the five year project that carried him from a skeptical teenager reading of John Robison's Proofs of a Conspiracy to assembling, alongside translator Jeva Singh-Anand and co-editor Reinhard Markner, the order's actual ritual system in the words of the men who wrote it. Along the way, buying rare 18th century German books a hundred dollars at a time before Google Books existed, learning to read Kurrent cursive off microfilm, chasing the Urtext through thousands of pages of archival material, and decoding ciphers where even partial fidelity is enough to recover the meaning.

You will get the real architecture of the order, Knigge writing the rituals and Weishaupt writing the lectures, the Congress of Wilhelmsbad, and why the whole story makes far more sense as a Masonic phenomenon than a political one. Wages puts it plainly. These were men after a rationalist society with freedom of conscience, not a shadow world government, and the modern alarmism says more about us than about them.

The conversation closes on something quieter, the loss of Jeva Singh-Anand, and the decision to carry his translation work forward in his memory. If you are carrying something heavy, please reach out to someone you trust.

Looking ahead, Wages teases new work on the Bode reform and a remarkable retranslation of the early rituals of free people of color in Saint-Domingue.

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Links and resources

• Esotericism in Freemasonry Conference: masonicconferences.com
• RSVP for the upcoming conference: esotericmasonry@gmail.com
• Mystic Tye website and event calendar: mystictye.com
• Patreon (early episodes, extended cuts, artwork, extras): patreon.com/mystictye

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Happy to meet, sorry to part, happy to meet again.