Royal Bloodlines.

The Claim

The modern self-image of the democratic and meritocratic west holds that hereditary aristocracy is an institution of the pre-modern past, that the transition to modernity (variously dated to the english civil war, the american and french revolutions, the abolition of feudal tenures, the extension of the franchise, the rise of industrial capitalism, and the other milestones the standard history cites) replaced the principle of inherited position with the principle of earned position, and that the contemporary distribution of power in the west reflects the operation of competitive processes rather than the continuity of specific families across the generations. The self-image is load-bearing for the legitimacy of the contemporary arrangement, because the contemporary arrangement’s claim on the cooperation of the populations it governs depends on the populations’ belief that the arrangement is the product of fair competition rather than of inherited privilege.

The self-image is also, on the empirical evidence the standard historiographic and prosopographic methods supply, substantially false. The continuity of specific families and specific bloodlines at the centre of power across the transitions the standard history treats as the moments of aristocratic displacement is the feature the evidence consistently displays, and the coexistence of the self-image with the evidence is one of the more remarkable features of the modern condition. The standard explanation — that the families who have remained at the centre of power are there because of the continuing competitive advantages their inherited resources give their individual members, rather than because of the structural continuity of aristocratic privilege — is internally coherent but requires the reader to accept that the cosmetic feature of the modern arrangement (its meritocratic framing) is a substantive description of the arrangement, rather than the feature it is on the evidence: a cosmetic.

The structural reading that the alternative-research literature has been developing for decades identifies the contemporary configuration of power in the west as the continuation of an older aristocratic arrangement under cosmetic modernisation, with the specific families whose continuity the evidence supports forming the actual governing class of the arrangement, and the electoral-democratic and meritocratic-competitive features of the arrangement operating as the legitimation layer that produces the cooperation of the populations the arrangement governs. The reading is contested and requires a reader willing to take seriously a claim the modern self-image has trained its participants to dismiss. The evidence the reading rests on is the evidence the standard historiography also uses, interpreted in the light of a different assumption about what the evidence means.

The Case at the Level of the Data

The prosopographic evidence for bloodline continuity is extensive and is not principally the product of esoteric research; much of it is the product of mainstream academic work that has been conducted for other purposes and whose results are then available for the structural reading even though the researchers who produced the results would not endorse the structural reading themselves. The most accessible is the genealogical work on the american presidents, which has established that the vast majority of the people who have held the office are related to one another through descent from a relatively small number of colonial and british aristocratic ancestors. The most cited single piece of this work is the research by BridgeAnne d’Avignon (published in 2012 when she was a twelve-year-old researcher) that traced all the american presidents except martin van buren to a single common ancestor, king john of england (the king compelled under baronial force to seal magna carta in 1215, whose reign ran from 1199 to 1216). The work is not a fringe claim; it is genealogical research that any reader can check against the same sources the researcher used, and the result — that 42 of the 43 unique individuals who had held the presidency by 2012 share common descent from a single english king eight centuries earlier, with martin van buren, of dutch descent, the sole exception — is the kind of result that the random-selection hypothesis about the presidency has to stretch to cover. The methodological objection — that with forty or more generations of descent, king john is a probable statistical ancestor of a significant fraction of all people of european ancestry — does not dissolve the finding; the claim’s force is not simple common descent but the density and consistency of that descent within a pool the meritocratic self-image presents as selected by open competition rather than by genealogical proximity to a medieval english bloodline.

The institutional genealogical mainstream corroborated the finding independently. Harold brooks-baker, publishing director of burke’s peerage — the canonical reference work for british aristocratic genealogy — stated publicly in the 1990s that every american president had been related to every other through descent from british and european royalty, and specifically commented before the 2000 presidential election that both george w. bush and al gore were close genealogical relations of the british crown. The observation that the two candidates in a supposedly open democratic competition were near kinsmen through european royal descent received minimal coverage in the mainstream press.

The genealogical research on the european royal houses produces similar results. The tracing of the major european royal and princely families through the eleventh through the twenty-first centuries shows the persistent recurrence of intermarriage within a small pool of aligned families, with the result that the vast majority of the monarchs of europe through the relevant period are close cousins of one another, are members of a single extended kinship network, and are therefore members of what is in the technical genealogical sense a single family. The first world war, which was fought between coalitions whose monarchs were all first or second cousins to one another (george V of britain, wilhelm II of germany, and nicholas II of russia — george V and wilhelm II were victoria’s grandsons by blood (george V through his father edward VII, wilhelm II through his mother victoria the princess royal), while nicholas II was connected to the victoria network through his wife tsarina alexandra, victoria’s granddaughter — all three closely bound through the broader european royal kinship network), is the illustration the standard history cannot quite absorb: a continental war between close cousins, conducted by armies raised from the populations of the cousins’ respective domains, whose alignments and outcomes were not reducible to the usual framings of national-interest or ideological competition because the national-interest and ideological framings did not adequately describe the actual kin relationships among the contending parties.

The habsburg dynasty is the most extensively documented case of deliberate dynastic expansion through intermarriage in european history. The phrase traditionally attributed to matthias corvinus — bella gerant alii, tu felix austria nube (let others wage war; you, happy austria, marry) — captures the operative strategy by which the habsburgs assembled an empire spanning spain, the holy roman empire, the netherlands, and substantial parts of italy and central europe across the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries through the management of marriage alliances rather than primary reliance on military conquest. The habsburg-lorraine continuation of the dynasty into the modern period maintained dynastic identity across the formal modernisations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries without interruption. Otto von Habsburg served as a member of the european parliament from 1979 to 1999, carrying the dynasty’s engagement with continental political architecture into the period of EU formation; the pan-european picnic of august 1989, one of the catalytic events in the breach of the iron curtain, was co-organised by otto von habsburg through the pan-european union whose founding had been backed by the warburg banking network six decades earlier. The trajectory from austrian dynastic marriage politics in the fifteenth century to pan-european institutional architecture in the twentieth is the dynastic-continuity thesis operating across its longest documented span.

The research on the contemporary american and british governing classes produces the same pattern in the modern register. The bush family’s prominence across the twentieth century — samuel bush as a senior industrialist in the pre-first-world-war period, prescott bush as a senator and business partner of the dulles network in the post-war period, george h.w. bush as CIA director and president, george w. bush as president, jeb bush as governor and unsuccessful presidential candidate — is the kind of continuity that would be treated as dynastic if it occurred in a country whose self-image were explicitly aristocratic, and that is treated as the legitimate product of earned position in a country whose self-image is meritocratic. The clinton, kennedy, roosevelt, harrison, taft, adams, and rockefeller families display the same pattern at lesser or greater intensities across different periods of the republic’s existence. The statistical density of these family connections within the governing class is the density that would be predicted by a dynastic-aristocratic model of the class’s reproduction, and the density is not the density that would be predicted by an open-competitive model. The observation is not esoteric; it is visible in the routine biographical registers of the contemporary governing class, and the routine refusal to remark on the observation is the feature that makes the observation so reliably available.

The british case is the same pattern more openly acknowledged. The british establishment has never fully adopted the meritocratic self-image the american establishment claims, and the persistence of specific aristocratic families at the centre of british power across the modern period is a feature the british establishment’s own self-descriptions acknowledge without embarrassment. The dominance of the old british landed families in the cabinet, the foreign office, the bank of england, the higher judiciary, the colleges of oxford and cambridge, and the senior positions of the armed forces is documented in the standard historical literature and has continued through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century with only the cosmetic adjustments required to make the continuation compatible with the country’s formal democratic institutions. The house of windsor provides the compressed illustration. In 1917 george V changed the royal family’s name from saxe-coburg and gotha to windsor because the german dynastic name had become politically insupportable during the first world war; the dynasty was unchanged, the name was changed, and the transition drew no comment about the persistence of the same family beneath the new cosmetic. The operation — dynastic continuity under cosmetic modernisation, managed by the dynasty itself in full public view — is the mechanism the standard historiography documents and then declines to generalise.

The american case is the british case with a thicker cosmetic layer.

The Black Nobility

The black nobility is the term used in the alternative-research literature for a specific group of italian families — principally venetian, roman, and genoese — whose prominence in the financial and political operations of the european order runs from the early modern period to the present and whose influence on the modern financial and political arrangement is argued to be substantially greater than the mainstream historiography acknowledges. The term itself derives from the black clothing the roman aristocratic families wore during the period of the kingdom of italy (1861-1946), when those families who remained loyal to the pope after the sack of rome and the loss of the papal states in 1870 dressed in mourning as a gesture of their continued allegiance to the papacy against the secular italian state. The term came to be applied, in the alternative-research literature, more broadly to the network of italian families whose continuity of influence across the medieval and modern periods has been the object of particular attention.

The venetian component of the black nobility is the most structurally significant for the modern financial order. Venice, during the period of its independence as the serenissima republic from the eighth century through 1797, developed the institutional infrastructure of modern banking and insurance: double-entry bookkeeping, the commercial letter of credit, the joint-stock company, the practice of state-chartered monopolies, the use of debt instruments for long-term financing, the development of the bill of exchange as the basis for international trade, and the broader set of financial techniques that would subsequently be exported to the rest of europe and eventually to the global financial system that descended from the european arrangement. The venetian banking families that developed these techniques — the mocenigo, the contarini, the foscari, the morosini, the grimani, and several others — operated as a tightly coordinated network whose members controlled the republic’s political institutions and whose members’ descendants did not disappear when the republic fell to napoleon in 1797.

The claim the alternative-research literature has been developing is that the venetian banking families, foreseeing the fall of the republic, relocated their capital and their operational expertise to the two other major commercial cities of europe that were in a position to absorb them: amsterdam first, then london. The relocation involved specific families and specific fortunes, and the receiving cities’ subsequent development as the principal financial centres of the modern world is argued to be the direct consequence of the venetian infusion rather than an independent development. Amsterdam’s rise in the seventeenth century as the centre of the european financial world, with the establishment of the bank of amsterdam (1609) and the amsterdam stock exchange (1602), coincides with the period of venetian decline in ways the coincidence explanation has to work to cover. London’s subsequent rise in the eighteenth century, with the establishment of the bank of england (1694) and the gradual transfer of the centre of european finance from amsterdam to london across the eighteenth century, coincides with the period of the venetian-amsterdam network’s further migration to the british capital.

The mainstream historiography acknowledges parts of this pattern but has not integrated the parts into the structural reading the alternative literature has proposed. The most cited mainstream work on the venetian financial tradition is frederic lane’s Venice: A Maritime Republic (1973), which documents the venetian techniques without pursuing the relocation thesis. The work of economic historians jan de vries and ad van der woude (The First Modern Economy, 1997) and jonathan israel (Dutch Primacy in World Trade 1585–1740, 1989), along with the work of the american historian earl hamilton on the broader european price-revolution and capital-movement patterns, supplies the additional pieces that make the relocation thesis empirically testable. The alternative literature’s synthesis of these pieces produces the picture of the modern european financial order as the institutional descendant of the venetian commercial republic, with the specific families involved in the descent operating as the continuing governing network of the order they created.

The roman component of the black nobility is the component that connects the financial lineage to the older aristocratic and ecclesiastical tradition that pre-dated venice. The families of the roman nobility — the colonna, the orsini, the borghese, the farnese, the barberini, the chigi, the odescalchi, the doria-pamphili, the massimo, the torlonia, and several others — are the continuing branches of the senatorial aristocracy of the roman republic and empire, as preserved through the medieval period under the institutional protection of the papacy and as continued into the modern period through the adjustments the papacy and the families jointly made to accommodate the secular italian state’s demands for cosmetic reform. The families’ land holdings, art collections, archival resources, and marriage networks form a continuous thread from the ancient roman period through the present, and the families’ relationships with the papacy and with the broader european aristocratic network have been the object of extensive continuing research by the italian genealogical and historical community. The farnese connection is particularly direct: it was pope paul III, born alessandro farnese, who in 1540 approved the founding of the society of jesus, establishing the jesuit order as the primary organizational mechanism through which papal and roman aristocratic financial and political influence would be projected into the modern period — a connection developed in The Society of Jesus.

The structural significance of the black nobility reading is that it supplies a lineage of continuity that bridges the period from the ancient roman aristocratic order through the medieval papal-imperial order to the modern financial-political order, and identifies the specific families and specific institutional mechanisms through which the continuity has been maintained. The reading’s most extensive development in the alternative-research literature is the work of eustace mullins (Secrets of the Federal Reserve, 1952; The World Order, 1984), whose research is contested on specific points and whose broader framework has been developed by subsequent researchers including f. william engdahl (A Century of War, 1992), david icke, jim marrs, and others. The contestation of specific points in mullins’s work does not disable the broader framework, which has been corroborated on the points that can be independently checked through the mainstream genealogical and archival sources.

The Rothschild Operation

The rothschild family’s rise from the frankfurt ghetto in the late eighteenth century to a position of extraordinary influence over the european financial order by the mid-nineteenth century is the most extensively documented single case of dynastic financial consolidation in the modern period, and is the case the alternative-research literature has used most heavily as the template for its broader reading of the modern financial order. The standard historical account, whose most cited recent treatment is niall ferguson’s two-volume The House of Rothschild (1998-1999), documents the family’s operational methods in detail: the five-brother configuration in which mayer amschel rothschild placed his sons in five european capitals (frankfurt, london, paris, vienna, and naples) to form a coordinated family banking network; the use of private courier systems that allowed the family to move information across europe faster than any state or competing commercial network could do; the specific episode (documented in detail by ferguson, whose sympathetic treatment is the more credible for the purposes of the alternative reading because it cannot be accused of hostility) in which nathan rothschild in london used the family’s superior information about the outcome of the battle of waterloo in 1815 to execute a market operation that dramatically expanded the family’s capital base at the expense of the slower-reacting london market; and the subsequent use of the family’s consolidated capital to finance the state debts of the major european powers throughout the nineteenth century, producing a position of creditor leverage over the governments the family lent to that was without precedent in the earlier history of european finance.

Ferguson’s treatment is mainstream, respectful, and not inclined to pursue the structural implications of the family’s position. His account of the waterloo episode confirms the information-advantage and the resulting profit while complicating the specific mechanism of the popular legend — the rothschilds did not need to fabricate a panic in the london market when early accurate intelligence was itself sufficient to produce the advantage; the dramatic theatrical version of the story is a simplification of a mechanism that was real and less theatrical than the retelling suggests. The alternative literature’s treatment (mullins, engdahl, and the broader tradition) takes the same documentary evidence and asks the questions ferguson does not: what is the relationship between the rothschild family’s operations and the older venetian-genoese-jewish financial network from which the rothschilds emerged; what is the nature of the continuing coordination among the descendants of the five-brother configuration into the twenty-first century; what is the relationship between the rothschild network and the specific political operations (including the revolutions of 1848 and the broader nineteenth-century european turbulence) whose financing the network is documented to have handled on multiple sides; and what is the relationship between the nineteenth-century rothschild network and the twentieth-century network of central banks whose establishment coincides with the period of rothschild consolidation. The alternative literature’s answers to these questions supply the structural reading that the mainstream literature does not, and the answers are not refuted by the documentary evidence the mainstream literature has produced; they are simply not pursued by the mainstream literature, which operates inside a historiographic framework that treats the questions as inappropriate.

The hamburg-based warburg banking dynasty operated as the parallel axis of the dynastic financial network the rothschild story most visibly represents. Founded in hamburg in 1798 by moses marcus and gerson warburg, the m.m. warburg bank was among the primary banking houses of the hamburg-amsterdam-frankfurt sephardic-jewish financial corridor and constituted part of the broader european network from which both warburg and rothschild operations drew. The structural significance of the warburg family for the twentieth century runs along two axes whose combined reach illustrates the dynastic-financial-network thesis at its clearest. The first is american institutional architecture: paul warburg, having emigrated to the united states and joined kuhn, loeb & co., was the principal architect of the federal reserve act of 1913 — drafting the foundational proposal at the jekyll island conference of 1910 and serving on the first federal reserve board from 1914 to 1918. That connection is documented in the mainstream historical record and is developed in The Federal Reserve. The second is european political architecture: max warburg, directing the hamburg bank, was among the earliest financial backers of richard von coudenhove-kalergi’s pan-european union, founded in 1923, a patronage coudenhove-kalergi documents in his own memoirs. The warburg backing of pan-europeanism is the direct bridge between the dynastic financial-network argument and the continental political unification project whose founding patrons are documented in Demographic Engineering. The two axes — american central banking and european political architecture — represent the warburg family’s specific contribution to the twentieth-century institutional order; their absence from accounts centred solely on the rothschild axis leaves the architecture of dynastic financial continuity incomplete.

The contemporary rothschild family, whose operations have been substantially restructured and partially divested over the twentieth century, is difficult to assess in the structural-reading terms because the family’s visible operations are a small fraction of the operations the family is reported to conduct through the cooperating institutional network in which the family’s influence is now principally exercised. The mainstream press has consistently framed the contemporary family as a diminished remnant of its nineteenth-century peak, and the framing may be substantially correct at the level of the family’s visible holdings while being substantially wrong at the level of the family’s actual influence, which operates through channels the visible holdings do not capture. The structural reading does not require a specific position on the contemporary status of any particular family to establish the broader claim that the pattern of dynastic financial continuity has been one of the load-bearing features of the european financial order from the early modern period through the present.

The Thirteen Families and the Limits of Specific Enumeration

The alternative-research literature contains several attempts to enumerate the specific families whose continuing operation constitutes the actual governing class of the modern world. The most famous is the thirteen families or illuminati families framework most extensively developed by fritz springmeier (Bloodlines of the Illuminati, 1995), who proposed that thirteen specific families (astor, bundy, collins, dupont, freeman, kennedy, li, onassis, reynolds, rockefeller, rothschild, russell, and van duyn, with the specific list varying in different presentations) form the core of the network. Springmeier’s work is the most widely circulated single treatment in the alternative literature and has been the subject of sustained attack from the mainstream press on both substantive and ad hominem grounds.

The list has the virtue of specificity and the weakness that the specificity cannot be fully defended on the documentary evidence available to the independent researcher. Some of the families on the list (rockefeller, rothschild, dupont) have the kind of documented continuity and continuing influence that the structural reading requires. Others (collins, freeman, van duyn) are families whose claim to inclusion on the list depends on the testimony of alleged insiders whose testimony is not independently verifiable and whose inclusion on the list has been contested by the other wings of the alternative-research literature. The list’s widespread circulation has served to discredit the broader structural reading by association with its weakest specific elements, which is the kind of effect the apparatus’s defensive operations rely on when the operations are working properly.

The broader framework the structural reading requires does not depend on any particular enumeration of the specific families. It depends on the empirical observation that dynastic continuity is the pattern the data supply at a level inconsistent with the meritocratic self-image the modern order presents, and that the specific families whose continuity can be documented with high confidence (the rothschilds, the rockefellers, the duponts, the british aristocratic families whose continuity is documented in the standard genealogical sources, the roman and venetian families whose continuity is documented in the italian archival sources, and the smaller number of american political dynasties whose continuity is documented in the standard biographical sources) form a governing network whose reach across the institutions of the modern order is the reach the structural reading identifies. Whether the network is best described as thirteen families or a different number or no specific number is not load-bearing for the reading itself.

The fixation of the alternative-research literature on specific enumerations has been, in the structural reading, one of the apparatus’s more successful defensive operations. The apparatus benefits from the fact that its opponents are drawn into unwinnable empirical disputes about specific family lists, while the broader pattern the specific lists imperfectly capture continues to operate uninterrupted by the disputes. The sophisticated reader of the alternative literature learns to hold the broader pattern as the structural claim and to treat the specific enumerations as working hypotheses whose details can be revised without disturbing the broader claim.

The Esoteric Layer

The deeper reading the structural framework permits is that the continuity of specific bloodlines at the centre of power operates through an esoteric principle the older traditions recognised and the modern world has forgotten, rather than as the accidental result of inherited material advantages. The principle is that certain bloodlines carry, as a matter of their genetic and spiritual inheritance, capacities and dispositions that are relevant to the governance function in ways the modern meritocratic framing is not equipped to recognise. The families that have remained at the centre of power through the transitions of the modern period are, on this reading, the families whose carriers the esoteric tradition has been selecting, cultivating, and deploying for the governance function across the centuries, and the modern meritocratic framing is the cosmetic under which the older selection mechanism has continued to operate.

The reading is at odds with the modern egalitarian assumption that differences among bloodlines are either nonexistent or irrelevant to social outcomes. The older traditions did not share this assumption. The vedic caste system, the egyptian temple-class system, the medieval european noble-and-commoner distinction, the classical chinese scholar-gentry tradition, and the older greek and roman aristocratic traditions all operated on the assumption that bloodline is a real and consequential factor in the suitability of a person for particular kinds of work, and the traditions developed elaborate systems for identifying, cultivating, and transmitting the bloodline qualities they valued. The modern egalitarian rejection of these systems is a modern-period adjustment whose empirical basis is thinner than the modern self-image suggests, and the persistence of hereditary patterns in the contemporary distribution of power is evidence that the older assumption is closer to the actual operation of the human social order than the modern assumption is.

The further reading the esoteric tradition supplies is that the bloodlines in question are not limited to ordinary genetic inheritance. The older traditions hold that the bloodlines carry, in addition to the genetic material, the subtle-level inheritance the older traditions called variously the ancestral spirit, the family genius (in the roman sense of the genius as the guiding spirit of the family line), the egregore of the lineage, or the soul-family in the more specifically hermetic framing. The subtle-level inheritance is the mechanism through which the lineage transmits across the generations not only the physical capacities but the particular relationships with the non-physical order that the older traditions regarded as the basis for the governance function. The specific lineages that have remained at the centre of power are, on this reading, the lineages whose subtle-level inheritance is aligned with the particular ontological arrangement the modern order serves, and the alignment is the feature that makes the lineages structurally essential to the arrangement in a way the merely material framing does not capture.

The specific subtle-level arrangement the modern governing lineages are argued to be aligned with is a matter of continuing contention within the esoteric tradition. The hermetic, kabbalistic, and related western esoteric currents have developed varying accounts of the alignment, with some currents identifying the alignment as broadly beneficial (the argument that the lineages carry the accumulated wisdom of the higher planes and transmit it to the human order through their governance function) and other currents identifying the alignment as a disordered or negative one (the argument that the lineages are bound to specific non-human intelligences whose relationship to humanity is parasitic rather than beneficial, and whose continuing operation through the bloodlines is the deeper meaning of the parasitic ecology the alternative literature has been describing). The second reading is the reading the alternative-research tradition has been developing most actively in the past century, drawing on sources including rudolf steiner’s lectures on the karmic and ahrimanic streams, the theosophical literature on the dark brotherhood, the various gnostic currents whose cosmology includes the archons as rulers of the lower orders, and the more recent work of the researchers (david icke most prominently, but also including others working in different vocabularies) who have identified the governing lineages as the carriers of a specific non-human influence whose operation through the lineages is the structural feature that matters most for the understanding of the modern order.

The straussian reading is that the esoteric layer of the bloodline question is the layer the older traditions transmitted in carefully guarded forms for reasons that are clear once the layer is understood. The transmission was guarded because the knowledge of the layer is operationally consequential in a way the ordinary-political knowledge is not, and the older traditions judged — correctly, on the evidence of what has happened in the periods when the knowledge has become more widely known — that general exposure of the knowledge would produce social disturbances whose costs would exceed the benefits of the exposure. The contemporary condition, in which the knowledge has been partially exposed by the alternative-research literature while remaining officially denied by the mainstream establishment, is an unstable intermediate state whose resolution is one of the open questions the current period is working on.

The American Case in the Esoteric Frame

The american republic is, on the structural reading, not an exception to the bloodline pattern but a particular form of it, in which the european aristocratic lineages were translated across the atlantic in the colonial and early republican periods and have continued their operation under the cosmetic of the republic’s democratic and meritocratic framings. The founding families of the colonial period — the adams, the jefferson, the madison, the randolph, the washington, the lee, the harrison, and the other families whose members produced the first several generations of the republic’s leadership — were, with few exceptions, members of the english landed gentry or of the closely associated colonial merchant class, and their transatlantic connections to the british aristocratic network were maintained through the revolutionary period and into the subsequent century by means the standard historiography does not always foreground.

The mid-nineteenth-century american governing class was the continuation of the founding class with specific admixtures from the later immigration waves. The industrial-capitalist class that emerged in the post-civil-war period (the carnegies, the rockefellers, the morgans, the vanderbilts, the astors) was constituted partly by the advance of individual entrepreneurs who were not of the founding class and partly by the intermarriage of the new industrial wealth with the older landed-gentry lineages, producing the integrated american governing class of the twentieth century whose members combined the colonial-gentry descent with the industrial-capitalist resources. The institutions through which the class reproduced itself — the elite boarding schools (groton, st. paul’s, milton, phillips exeter, phillips academy andover), the ivy league universities, the social clubs (the century association, the knickerbocker, the harvard club, the metropolitan in washington), the country clubs, the summer colonies (newport, bar harbor, the hamptons), the philanthropic foundations (rockefeller, carnegie, ford, guggenheim, and the smaller family foundations) — are the institutional infrastructure through which the class maintained its identity and transmitted its characteristic formations to each succeeding generation.

The american case is the european aristocratic pattern translated into the institutional forms compatible with the republican self-image. The compatibility has required the cosmetic framing of the class’s reproduction as merit-based selection rather than as hereditary succession, and the framing has been sufficiently successful that the american self-image has been substantially able to forget the class’s existence even while the class has been operating visibly through the institutions the cosmetic identifies as meritocratic. The american dynastic studies of the past several decades — the work of william domhoff (Who Rules America?, multiple editions since 1967), c. wright mills (The Power Elite, 1956), gabriel kolko, and the broader american power-structure-research tradition — have established the basic facts of the american governing class at a level the contested-claim objection cannot now dismiss, and the remaining disputes are about the interpretation of the facts rather than about the facts themselves.

The esoteric reading of the american case adds the layer that the american founding itself was, on the evidence of the founders’ documented memberships in the freemasonic and broader hermetic-esoteric traditions of the eighteenth century, a consciously designed operation by a specific esoteric current whose purposes included the construction of a continental-scale republic on a particular metaphysical basis. The freemasonic framing of the founding is visible in the washington-dc layout (the pierre l’enfant plan with its geometrical references to freemasonic and astrological patterns, the great seal of the united states with its all-seeing eye and the novus ordo seclorum legend, the specific dates and ceremonies associated with the founding acts), and the continuing esoteric dimension of the american ruling-class institutions is visible in the specific ritual practices the institutions maintain (the skull-and-bones rites, the bohemian grove annual gathering whose ritual content has been documented by observers including alex jones’s 2000 infiltration of the cremation of care ceremony, the various less-well-known rites of the senior elite institutions that surface occasionally in the public record).

The american republic, in the esoteric reading, is the contemporary form of the mystery-school project that the founders initiated, and the continuing bloodline element of the american governing class is one of the components of the project. The project’s purposes are not those the founders publicly stated in the democratic-republican framings of their public writings. The purposes are those the founders’ membership in the esoteric traditions suggests they were actually pursuing, and the reading of the republic in the light of the esoteric purposes produces a different account of the republic’s meaning than the standard historiography permits.

The Withdrawal

The structural counter-operation the theater-state framework supplies for the bloodline configuration is complicated by the fact that the bloodline configuration is not a discrete object the population can withdraw attention from in the same way the population can withdraw attention from the bio-fear grid or the press or the two-party theater. The bloodline configuration is the underlying substrate on which the other configurations are built, and the withdrawal has to be correspondingly deeper.

The practical form the withdrawal takes is the refusal to accept the meritocratic self-image at face value while maintaining a clear view of the actual pattern the empirical data display, combined with the refusal to fall into the simple-resentment response the configuration’s existence naturally elicits from the populations that are not members of the governing lineages. The simple-resentment response is the response the configuration has been designed to expect and absorb; it produces political movements whose leaders are then absorbed into the configuration (either through direct co-option or through the elimination of leaders who refuse the co-option) and whose followers are then left in a worse position than they were in before the movement began. The older political traditions that effectively challenged aristocratic arrangements (the seventeenth-century english civil-war puritans, the eighteenth-century american revolutionaries in their best phases, the earlier phases of the french revolution before its capture by the jacobin operation, the various nineteenth-century populist and agrarian movements in their working phases, and a small number of more recent examples) operated from positions that were not reducible to simple resentment, and their effectiveness was proportional to their ability to maintain the position.

The deeper form, in the rendering frame, is the recognition that the bloodline configuration is one of the specific features of the consensus reality the population’s sustained attention generates, and that the withdrawal of the population’s attention from the configuration is one of the factors that affects the configuration’s continued stability. The configuration’s operational purchase depends on the population’s implicit acceptance of the framings the configuration’s ideology supplies; the population that withdraws its implicit acceptance is the population that begins to reduce the configuration’s operational purchase; and the reduction compounds across generations as the children of the withdrawn population inherit a different relationship to the configuration’s framings than the children of the compliant population do.

The esoteric form of the withdrawal, in the registers the older traditions used, is the cultivation of the population’s own lineage inheritances in the non-material sense: the practices of ancestor veneration, family tradition, local rootedness, and subtle-level alignment with the ancestral-stream of the participant’s own bloodline rather than with the lineages that have been presented as the only legitimate carriers of the function. The older traditions across the world’s cultures universally recognised the importance of the subtle-level ancestral connection, and the modern abandonment of the practices that cultivate the connection has been one of the conditions under which the governing lineages’ influence has been able to expand into the vacuum the abandonment created. The recovery of the ancestral practices, in forms appropriate to the participant’s own tradition and circumstances, is the deeper form of the withdrawal and the form the older traditions would have recognised as the operative one.

The bloodline configuration is ancient. Its continuity has survived the ends of many previous orders whose collapses the configuration’s members anticipated and prepared for. Its continuity into the next configuration, whatever that configuration turns out to be, is the working assumption the structural reading treats as most likely correct. The condition under which the configuration’s influence can be reduced is the condition under which the population it governs has recovered the inherited capacities the configuration has been relying on the population’s loss of for the past several centuries, and the recovery is the real work of the period the population is currently living through.

References

• Mullins, Eustace. Secrets of the Federal Reserve: The London Connection. Bankers Research Institute, 1952. The foundational alternative-research treatment of the financial-dynastic pattern.
• Mullins, Eustace. The World Order: A Study in the Hegemony of Parasitism. Ezra Pound Institute of Civilization, 1984.
• Engdahl, F. William. A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. Edition.engdahl, 1992, revised 2004.
• Ferguson, Niall. The House of Rothschild: Money’s Prophets 1798-1848 and The World’s Banker 1849-1999. Viking, 1998-1999. Mainstream-sympathetic documentation of the family’s operations.
• Corti, Egon Caesar. The Rise of the House of Rothschild. Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, 1928. The earlier mainstream treatment.
• Morton, Frederic. The Rothschilds: A Family Portrait. Atheneum, 1962. The popular-journalism treatment.
• Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope. Macmillan, 1966. The establishment-historian account of the anglo-american power network.
• Quigley, Carroll. The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden. Books in Focus, 1981.
• Sutton, Antony C. America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones. Liberty House Press, 1986.
• Domhoff, G. William. Who Rules America?. Multiple editions since 1967.
• Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. Oxford University Press, 1956.
• Baltzell, E. Digby. The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America. Random House, 1964.
• Aldrich, Nelson W. Jr. Old Money: The Mythology of America’s Upper Class. Knopf, 1988.
• Davis, John H. The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster. McGraw-Hill, 1984.
• Lane, Frederic C. Venice: A Maritime Republic. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
• de Vries, Jan, and Ad van der Woude. The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815. Cambridge University Press, 1997. Economic-historical documentation of the amsterdam commercial transition.
• Israel, Jonathan. Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740. Oxford University Press, 1989. The definitive account of the amsterdam exchange and the venice-amsterdam capital and technique transmission.
• Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Armand Colin, 1949. The broader context of the italian financial traditions.
• Springmeier, Fritz. Bloodlines of the Illuminati. 1995. The most widely circulated attempt at specific enumeration of the governing lineages.
• Icke, David. The Biggest Secret. Bridge of Love Publications, 1999. The non-human-influence reading of the bloodline pattern.
• Steiner, Rudolf. Various karmic lectures. Anthroposophic Press. The hermetic-christian reading of lineage and karmic inheritance.
• Hall, Manly P. The Secret Destiny of America. Philosophical Research Society, 1944. The esoteric reading of the american founding.
• Hieronimus, Robert. America’s Secret Destiny: Spiritual Vision and the Founding of a Nation. Destiny Books, 1989.
• d’Avignon, BridgeAnne. Presidential genealogy research, 2012. The genealogical-fact documentation of common royal descent of the american presidents.
• Burke’s Peerage. Multiple editions. The canonical reference for british aristocratic genealogy; Harold Brooks-Baker (publishing director) made specific public statements in the 1990s and 2000 on the genealogical relationship of all american presidents to one another and to the british crown.
• Marrs, Jim. Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids. HarperCollins, 2000.