December 7, 1979

NEW SOLIDARITY Page 5

A Cryptic Tale
by John Thompson

Canon West: "Return to witchcraft"

Nearly a year after the mass "suicide" of the Jonestown Peoples Temple cult,
I stood outside the menacing hulk of the half-built Cathedral of St. John on a
damp, grey November day in New York City. It was to a secret ceremony
that was about to be performed in this structure that my researches into the
cause of the mysterious Peoples Temple deaths had ultimately led me. A
picture of the serried ranks of the dead in Jonestown, laid out in rigid formation around the battered cauldron that news accounts said was full of KoolAid laced with cyanide, leapt into my consciousness as I mounted the Cathedral steps and passed the gargoyles that surrounded the carved bronze door
into the clammy dusk of the interior.

This same image of unreasoned death, and others far more terrible, had
rushed through my mind when I first accepted the Transylvanian Knight's
invitation to attend the annual investiture of the Most Venerable Order of the
Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem at the Cathedral. It was to a small, inner
cabal within this British branch of the ancient, chivalric Order of St. John of
Jerusalem that I and my associates had followed the trail of evidence from
Jonestown.
A week earlier these same associates of mine had received an unexpected
telephone call. The Comte de Pierredon, head of the Catholic branch of the
Order, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, had warned that the Knights
would soon take matters into their own hands if we continued to reveal to
French authorities the findings of our investigations into Jonestown and
dozens of other crimes committed by the Order. Shortly after these warnings, my colleagues had been subjected to a series of professional beatings.
For this reason I initially attributed the feeling of dread that threatened to
overwhelm me as I entered the Cathedral to a fear of physical danger. I knew
that an "intruder" had been shot on the Cathedral grounds during a previous
undercover visit I had made there, and yet, strangely, when I scanned the
papers the next day, there had been no mention of the incident. On that same
visit I had explored the chambers behind the main vault of the Cathedral,
where the Knight had said that I could meet other members of the Order
after the ceremony. In one of the chambers, the statue of an ass is prominently (and properly) enshrined behind the iron portcullis that guards the
entrance; next to another a hidden shaft has been sunk, no one knows quite
how deeply, through the bedrock of Manhattan until it meets a small river
which courses under the island in Stygian darkness. Knowing the seclusion
of these dank chambers and the treacherous history of the Order, I had spent
anxious moments pondering what sort of encounter had been prepared for
me.
But this physical fear evaporatedto be instantly replaced by anotheras I
began to walk the gloomy length of the Cathedral. There is something fundamentally evil about this structure, which has been dubbed "St. John the
Unfinished" by those Harlem residents who pay quit-rent to live in the
rotting ghetto properties under its shadow. Unlike the great Renaissance
cathedrals of Europe, or the simple churches of my childhoodboth of
which in their own ways exult the unity of God and Manthe Cathedral of
St. John looms over this squalid setting as if suspended from sudden decay

Jonestown: Where the trail began

and dissolution by some Dorian Gray pact that its oligarchic builders have
concluded with Satan.
It was this oppressive odor of lunacy that assailed me as I walked past the
emaciated statue of a starving Holocaust victim, past a "construction" of
charred timbers that had been bound together to memorialize the fallen of
New York's Fire Department, past a Buddhist altar and the chamber behind
it, where, I knew, a dusty model of the Cathedral's ultimate shape is used to
hawk Bloomingdale's-style religious artifacts, and, finally, past the stainedglass window commemorating Motherhood, that had been dedicated on a
visit by Britain's Queen Mother.
I knew from my investigations that a story as hideous as that underlying the
mass "suicides" of the Jonestown Peoples Temple cult was behind each of
the seemingly incongruous objects that I walked by. I remembered, for
example, why the ghoulish statue of a Holocaust victim lay stretched out on
the floor of the Cathedral; how in 1973 the Duke of Gloucester, uncle of

Queen Elizabeth II and Prior of the Most Venerable Order of St. John, had
commissioned the Cathedral to conduct an International Symposium on the
Holocausta cruel, sadistic venture that was led by such "experts" as Elie
Wiesel, a student of Kabbalistic mysteries and a Cathedral Fellow, who had
described himself as one of the "living dead" in his semi-biographical
accounts of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. I knew that it was the ensuing
media obsession with the Holocaust that permitted certain Zionists to rationalize their suicidal demand for Eretz Yisroel, and in the process to hold the
world hostage to the threat of thermonuclear Holocaust. I knew that it was
images like the obscene statue lying on the Cathedral floor that drove Zionist
youth to commit atrocities against their Arab neighbors in no way different
than the S.S. "Deathshead" had committed against their own people.
Yet another horror story lay behind the pyre of charred timbers that had been
assembled nominally to commemorate firemen who fell in the line of duty. I
recalled how at the last "Spirit of the City" banquet sponsored by the cathedral, the Anglican church leaders had loudly applauded as then Treasury
Secretary Michael Blumenthal demanded "belt-tightening, budgetary austerity"the sort of austerity that axiomatically spells death for police and
firemen from overwork and unrepaired equipment; the sort of austerity that
means that large ghetto landlords like the Anglican Cathedral would hire
street gangs to torch their unprofitable buildings, leaving gaping pockets of
despair and desolation in the city as they counted their insurance moneys.
Preoccupied with these musings, I almost missed the hidden significance of
the edifice that now engulfed me. The vault of the Cathedral reveals the
secret that renders the dissipated eclecticism of the interior painfully coherent. It is built out of massive, pyramiding blocks of granite, and the workmen had been hastily ordered to down their tools decades earlier before they
could mask the Byzantine folly of its design under the pseudo-Renaissance
limestone masonry that faces the rest of the Cathedral. In the vault this
contrived mixture of Western architecture and that of Eastern mysticism
stands barely hidden under crumbling medieval tapestries; here is revealed
the black soul of the Order of St. John and of the "Christians who are not
Christians" who built the Cathedral.
The Evil Tradition
Founded in the 1050s by Amalfi merchant families based in Constantinople,
the Order of St. John functioned at the beginning as an espionage outpost for
the Norman berserkers whom the rotting Byzantine Empire and its Black

Guelph allies within the Catholic Church (under the evil Pope Gregory I)
would soon send ravaging through the Holy Land in the name of Christianity. These second-generation Norsemen, whose relatives are today the
leaders of the British Most Venerable Order of St. John of Jerusalem, had
already demonstrated their merit in the reduction of Anglo-Saxon England
and the Priories of Ireland into "Domesday Book" feudal imbecility.
Steeped by their patrons in the ancient Egyptian cult of Isis and those Babylonian cults identified in St. John's Apocalypse with the "Great Whore of
Babylon," whose rites had been conduited wholesale through the Roman
Empire to Constantinople, the Knights of St. John melded their pseudoChristian "kookery" with the hermetic cultism of the Ayatollah Khomeinis of
the 11th to 14th centuries. Together they proclaimed a jihad, a holy war,
against those Neoplatonists (for example, Frederick Barbarossa and the
Templar Knights, the Ismailis and Jewish scholars of the Toledo School)
who were pursuing a Grand Design of uniting the humanist elite of the
Moslem, Christian, and Judaic worlds as the cadre force to launch a Renaissance. The Dark Ages, when pestilence, famine, war, and death rode
unbridled across the land, marked the ultimate triumph of these feudal
oligarchs associated with the Order of St. John over the program for
scientific progress and cultural development of the humanists.
This evil tradition struck me anew as I turned from the vault to gaze back at
the nave of the choir. There on a dais stood an altar, flanked by two huge
vases filled with plumes, draped with a white mantle on which the eightpointed cross of the Order of St. John had been stamped in black. It was this
scene, altogether reminiscent of a Turkish seraglio, which awaited the beginning of the ceremony of the modern Knights.
The Procession Begins
The organ moaned sepulchrally and my gaze instantly shifted. At a side
entrance to the vault, figures dressed in floor-length black capes had silently
formed in procession. Slowly the Knights entered the vault, gliding to a
cadence punctuated only by the blasts of trumpets from the entrance of the
Cathedral, as their own ranks were hyphenated hierarchically by men
bearing wands, swords, and other paraphernalia of the Order. Following
behind the Most Venerable Order's standard, as if to herald their vassalage,
came representatives from the two other major branches of the ancient order
of chivalry; the German, Protestant Johanniter-Orden and the Catholic
Sovereign Military Order of Malta, among whose leaders are those who can

The Cathedral: Where the trail led

trace their lineage in unbroken succession to the days of the Caesars, when
the Isis cult first took its stranglehold upon Rome. Slowly the procession of
caped ones snaked around the audience, looking every bit like a procession
of Boris Karloffs. As they passed, their glazed eyes fixed forward, I could
not help but wonder what frightful scene each Knight was contemplating.
More to the point, I could not understand what held the Knightsamong
whose ranks marched the elite bankers, attorneys, and other policymakers of
the Anglo-American establishmentin such trance-like obedience to this
bizarre, medieval ceremony. Not until I recognized certain Anglican priests
in the contingent of clerical brethren that made up the rear of the procession
did I think I had the answer.
Prominent among them was Canon Edward West, who, in his white cassock
and with his balding pate and long, pointed salt-and-pepper beard, looked
every bit the high priest of some ancient Druidical Order. Canon West told
an associate of mine who had approached him undercover about the "mystical 30-year perspective" that the Anglican hierarchy had secretly adopted to

mold his "elite" so that it will be fit to enter "the New Jerusalem" which the
Order of St. John and its crazier British patrons are planning to establish.
Sounding very much like a parody of William Butler Yeats's satanical poem,
"The Second Coming," Canon West had told my associate, "The fundamental concern of the elites is mystical religion, such that the social activism of
10 years ago is no longer a driving force in society. The mystical relationship of the whole of man [has] started to be talked about in terms of ecology:
the whole human thing is not only the relation with land, but to land; not
only relations with animals, but to animals. You see, the human interior
doesn't live on mechanics. It has a tendency to return to witchcraft," West
said. "Our task is to clothe the ancient mysteries in the language of today.
Religion must be wrapped in a shroud of sorts, it must be wrapped up in the
right sort of icons. The mystical 30-year perspective is the New Jerusalem."
Nor was Canon West the only cultist priest associated with the Order.
Slightly behind him dressed in a habit of purple, marched Bishop Paul
Moore. According to an indiscreet remark by an old acquaintance of the
Bishop, Moore had received an agitated phone call late on the night the first
announcements were made of the mass deaths at Jonestown. The caller
questioned him excitedly on what had caused the Peoples Temple cult's
destruction. The caller was Rabbi Maurice Davis, who is known to the
anxious parents of cult members as a leading "deprogrammer." But it was
Davis who, reportedly in consultation with Moore, provided Jim Jones with
his first Temple in Indianapolis, where the two "religious leaders" were then
stationed. Identified as the Devil by certain cults, Davis's true role is that of
a cult controller, holding terrified youth in bondage to cult leaders out of fear
of being kidnapped and brutally "deprogrammed" by Rabbi Davis's minions.
Since his promotion to Bishop of New York, the Rt. Rev. Paul Moore has
continued his evil patronage of cults and their creators, making such "New
Dark Ages" institutions as the Zen Center, New Alchemy, and Lindisfarne
affiliates of the Cathedral of St. John, which also headquarters the British
Order of Knighthood. The Zen Center is largely credited with giving the
Jesuit-trained governor of California, Jerry Brown, his final aura of otherworldliness, while Lindisfarne has built a model of the "New Jerusalem" that
Canon West and his colleagues have planned for humanity: a ninth-century
village.

Bishop Moore: A late-night call about Jim Jones

'The Black Dragon's Blood'

At one of four sermons given at the Cathedral of St. John last year on the
topics of "Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water," Dr. William Thompson, the founder
of Lindisfarne, explained why it would be necessary to take mankind on a
forced march back to the Dark Ages by using Iran as his model. "I believe
in the Apocalypse. All the asymptotic cures are toward the year 2000," he
said. "I really think we're in for it. The industrial age is a Dark Age, the
black dragon's blood. Look at what is going on in Iran: the evil image of
the black dragon's blood, of industrial power, was enforced by the malecontrolled ego of the merchants and the warriors.
"We should be sympathetic with Khomeini. We've Los Angelesized
Teheran, destroyed Iran, and when the old religious mullahs cry 'enough!' we
have the audacity to object. . . . We're living in a conversion period. A
period of civilizational collapse. This is what I discovered in Christianity at
the Church of St. John of the Apocalypse."
Again, my thoughts were interrupted. At the front of the choir, where the
procession of caped ones had now assembled, the most solemn part of the
ceremony was starting. Four Knight-Electsstanding before a faldstool

behind which were assembled the Lord Prior, Chancellor, and Vice-Chancellor of the Ordergravely acknowledged their submission to the awesome
oath spoken by the Chancellor: "Confrres do you promise to pay due
obedience to the Governing Authorities of the Most Venerable Order of the
Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem?" No sooner were these words spoken
than I felt anger rising within me. And, as if in counterpoint to this oath, I
recalled the words from a document written to guide the conduct of this
nation and its citizens: "No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United
States: And no Person holding Office of Profit or Trust under them shall,
without the Consent of Congress, accept any present, Emolument, Office or
Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State."*
* There is no doubt that the spirit that motivated these words in the Constitution

was for them to be universally applied to all citizens, not simply those holding
government office. To the Founding Fathers, elected officials were ideally those
who had more rigorously applied themselves to a process of development that all
citizens of the republic were morally obligated to take part in. That the Founding
Fathers were aware of the fundamental difference between the American System
and the dominant kook faction in the Order of St. John is demonstrated in James
Monroe's ironic response to a proposal from the Order that it be allowed to relocate to the United States in 1794 from its headquarters on the island of Malta:
"CitizenI have received with great pleasure the considerations you were pleased
to present me: pointing out the mode by which the United States of America and
the Isle of Malta may be serviceable to each other. The United States possesses at
present extensive and very valuable territory. It is their intention to dispose of it
by sale; by which however the right of soil only will be conveyed: the jurisdiction still remaining with them. The government too of such territory is already
prescribed: It must be elective or republican, and forming a part of the existing
national system." This response was sufficient to stave off the open attempts of
the Order of St. John to enter America.
Extreme subterfuge was used by the British Most Venerable Order of the
Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem to establish an organization here in 1978. As the
official history of the British Order points out, the "religious aspect" of the Order
was to be stressed through "its connexion with the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John
the Divine in New York City." Further, the titles of American members are qualified by the term "Associate"nominally because the oath they take is somewhat
different. But the Order has not yet adopted a uniform oath for Americans because
of the fact that all such titles issued by foreign monarchies are, broadly speaking,
unconstitutional. Sometimes, the oath reads: "do you promise to pay due obedience . . . as laid down in its [the Order's] Charter in all things consistent with your
duty to your own country?" At other times it ends with the stipulation: "in all
things consistent with your duty both to your Country and to the Sovereign Head

Their oaths finished, Lord Harold Anthony Caccia, the Lord Prior of the
Order, addressed them, saying, "By virtue of the powers vested in us, we are
about to receive you in the grade of Knight of the Most Venerable Order of
the Hospital on Behalf of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, its Sovereign
Head, and acting on the part of our Grand Prior." Each Postulant knelt
before their Lord Prior to be invested with the eight-pointed cross and
draped in the long, black cape of the Order. This task completed, the Lord
Prior then said, "Rise, Confrrewe receive you as a Member of the Most
Venerable Order, in the grade of Knight."
Again I recalled the words written by our Founding Fathers as an ultimate
warning to guard our citizens against such folly: "Treason against the United
States, shall consist in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." These provisions to the Constitution
had been written at a time when Britain, La Perfide Albion, was universally
acknowledged to be the number-one enemy of the American System of republicanism. They had been written as a guidepost against precisely that
sort of long-term subversion of which the Founding Fathers knew the British
oligarchy to be capable, which has today resulted in a situation where
citizens will tolerate their peers holding titles in a foreign order of chivalry
which is dedicated to the destruction of the American System and the return
of mankind generally into feudal subjugation.
That this is the hidden purpose of the Order of St. John's leaders is repeatedly verified by the known actions of the Order's more prominent members.
As colleagues of mine extensively documented in the book Dope, Inc.,
Knights and Commanders of the British Most Venerable Order of St. John
oversee every key aspect of the $200-billion-a-year international drug trade,
from the production of opium in the Golden Triangle of Asia, which is
carried out under the auspices of the Knights who run the Bank of Hong
Kong and Shanghai; to the processing and distribution of heroin through
organized crime networks established during Prohibition in North America
by such member families of the Order as the Bronfmans and the Kennedys;
and, finally, to the channeling of funds from this deadly trade and from other
illicit activities (prostitution, gambling, and so on) into offshore banks in
of the Order [Queen Elizabeth]?'"
Equally indicative of subterfuge is the Order's refusal to make its secret list
of 469 American "Associates" public. It is believed that this list includes several
elected officials and civil servants, who would be strictly accountable for violating
the Constitution.

Commonwealth countries that are run by Barclays, National Westminster,

Royal Bank of Canada, and other banking institutions dominated by
members of the Order.
The Weapons of the Knights
In place of the medieval weapons wielded by their predecessors, the modern
Knights of the British Order of St. John have fielded an army that uses drugs
as its secret weapon to subvert the social order of America and to destroy its
children. Through beast-like addiction to drugs and immersion in the
hideous counterculture that goes with it, the Order has rendered American
youth unable to assimilate the advanced knowledge necessary to participate
in continued scientific progress and development under the American
System. Instead they have been primed for slavish obedience to the plethora
of cults created by members of the Order of St. John and its affiliates.
Moreover, a "Knight of Justice" of the Order, Maj. Mortimer Louis Bloomfield, oversees the drug-network-related assassination bureau known as
Permindex. It is among the crueler ironies of the investiture ceremony that
Lord Caccia, before whom American citizens knelt to be invested, was in his
former capacity as Permanent Under-Secretary of the British Foreign Office,
part of a "Kook" faction within the British oligarchy that made the final
decision directing Permindex agents to assassinate President John F. Kennedy and, according to French authorities, to carry out over 30 attempts on
the life of French President Charles de Gaulle in the early 1960s. In the
1962 Cuban missile crisis this kook factionincluding Lord Caccia, Lord
Alec Douglas-Home, the Marquess of Salisbury, Harold Macmillan, and
othersrelayed the minute-to-minute decisions that brought the United
States to the brink of destruction through another "Knight of Justice," Lord
Harlech, who was then British Ambassador to Washington and, moreover, a
member of the President's inner policy-making body, "Excomm." Lord
Harlech had been selected for this post because he was one of several
Knights related by marriage to the Kennedy family, whose patriarch, Joe
Kennedy, had himself been invested into the Order while serving as
American Ambassador to the Court of St. James. The oligarch's decision to
eliminate Kennedy through a secret act of war against this nation stemmed
largely from his adamant refusal after the Cuban Missile Crisis to continue a
Cold War policy of thermonuclear confrontation with the Sovietsa course
which the Marquess of Salisbury and other of the crazier elements in the
kook faction favored as a short-cut to ushering in the New Dark Ages.

As I got up to leave the Cathedral, I heard the names of tens more American
citizens being called up to be invested by Lord Caccia as Commanders and
Officers in the ranks of the British Order of St. John's New Dark Ages army.
I finally realized what underlay the sense of dread I felt when I first entered
the gloomy Cathedral.
Through books like Dope, Inc. my associates and I had amassed extensive
evidence of heinous crimes committed by members of Britain's Order of St.
John of Jerusalem. Yet many Americans would not act upon this evidence,
for what I now realized was a very simple reason. It is almost impossible for
many people raised under the benefits of American republicanism to conceive that the utter evil of the sort embodied by the caped figures who led
the ancient ceremony that I just left could possibly exist outside European
histories and fairy tales, it was a similar form of almost willful unawareness
which had permitted certain of the more unwitting Americans whom I had
just seen invested to ignore the explicit admonitions of the Founding Fathers. For these pathetic, infantile people, the ceremony they had just taken
part in was no different from the secret society and blood-oath taken by
Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain's novel.
But the Founding Fathers were well aware of the extreme danger which such
orders represented to this republic. They and their successors recruited a
group of informal U.S. intelligence officersincluding, notably, Samuel
Morse, and Edgar Allan Poeto develop a method for dealing with the cults
and secret societies with which the British oligarchy and its Hapsburg/Jesuit
allies sought to subvert the country. In the early 19th century they waged a
secret war against groups like Scottish Rite Freemasonry, and also the
Knights of the Golden Circle and Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, whose robes
and ceremonies were imitative of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. When
I returned home, I reread Poe's doubly-coded poem, "Valentine,'' which mentions a former Grand Master of the Order of St. John, and I again looked at
his Dupin murder mystery series, whose references to Maltaan old base of
the Order in the Mediterraneanshow that Poe was well aware of the
Knights' evil nature. It was in Poe's coded method that I thought I found a
solution to the problem.