(ThyBlackMan.com) The Revolution of 1776 took place during the height of the Enlightenment, the era when Western Science was being formed. the leading European thinkers at the time, all mathematicians, saw themselves as the Enlightened Ones, illuminated by newly found knowledge. They saw the precision and “rationality” of Mathematics as the one and only language of Science, the quest to unlock the secrets of the universe. “Illuminati” is Latin for “the Enlightened Ones.” Hence, it is the generic term for these Enlightenment thinkers, but there was also a specific group, a secret society, with this moniker.
Science’s quest is but the extension of each individual’s hunger to understand the enigma of existence. And there is another all-consuming riddle. Who is running things? What forces, and which individuals, are behind the stage upon which politics is played? Many of our young people today believe that in the daily torrent of imagery the media exposes them to, they can discern signs and symbols of a secret society that rules the world. Meaning the secret society is putting these things before us and knows they are being 
detected. Thus, it is equally likely that this secret society, if it exists, is presenting these signs and symbols as distractions, shiny objects to have us mistakenly focus on an arcane Enlightenment society that, though once real, no longer exists.
And so there are three enigmas: the universe, ourselves and the government. Government mediates between the self and the universe. The Egyptians called this MAAT, the Europeans saw it as the “social contract.” At root, though, they are both rationales for the hierarchy said to have been sanctified by the Creator.
THE THREE REVOLUTIONS
Thirteen years after the Revolution of 1776, in 1789, the French Revolution began and two years after that came the Haitian uprising, all three, inspired by Enlightenment ideas of the Rights of Man, were deeply intertwined. Frenchmen and Haitians fought in the Revolutionary War. And so, the successful model of defeating a European power, and their participation in that victory, fanned the flames of “Equality, Liberty and Fraternity” in France which quickly spread to Haiti. However, the US, after securing its independence, reneged and kept slavery firmly in place, and the French Revolutionary government sent an army to fight against the Haitian revolutionaries.
Ironically, though the US actively supported France in that conflict, it was France’s eventual defeat that led it, in 1803, to sell the extensive Louisiana Territory to the US thereby doubling the size of the fledgling nation.
In 1815, and in 1816, Haiti sent weapons, ammunition and soldiers to help Simon Bolivar in the liberation of Gran Colombia, later partitioned into Colombia, Panama, Venezuela and Ecuador. However, Haiti, facing a crippling demand for reparations in order to end the trade embargo leveled by the colonial powers, soon turned inward, nominally free but economically prostrate. Thus, the Haitian Revolution is an unfinished Revolution, and by extension the French and American Revolutions also have yet to reach fruition. Ironically, of all the Western powers, the US and France suffered the most casualties in the post-colonial struggles, fighting to suppress the very forces that they themselves had unleashed.
THE FREEMASONS
At the precise turn of the 18th century, 1798 – 1801, Napoleon led a French army into Egypt, following the example of Julius Caesar at the birth of the Roman Empire, who was himself imitating Alexander’s occupation of that land at the beginning of the Hellenistic era. Why? “Up to the Eighteenth Century, Egypt was seen as the fount of all ‘Gentile’ philosophy and learning, including that of the Greeks; and that the Greeks had managed to preserve only some part of these. The sense of loss that this created, and the quest to recover the lost wisdom, were major motives in the development of science in the 17th century.” (Diop, Civilization or Barbarism, p. 3)
Note, Isaac Newton the Father of Physics, was, according to Lord Maynard Keynes, “not the first scientist but ‘the last sorcerer.’” Newton spent more time on Egyptian and Hebrew texts, believed to contain fragments of the Hermetic Tradition, then on Physics and Chemistry. They heavily informed his vision. Keynes documents the fact that Newton “left behind more than a million words on the subject of alchemy. . . . (T)he influence of Newton’s researches in alchemy was the key to his world-changing discoveries in science. His alchemical work and his science were inextricably linked. Newton shared the view of many intellectuals of the period that the most ancient civilization was also the most knowledgeable, the most pure, the most advanced.” (White, The Last Sorcercer, p. 97)
Unlike the legendary Illuminati, the Freemasons are an arcane group that we know still exists. The Masons are said to have preserved the knowledge of the Workmen’s Guilds of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries that built Europe’s cathedrals. But these Guilds were themselves said to have possessed the know-how of the craftsmen that constructed the pyramids. Whether any of this true, the fact that these claims are made, illustrates the prestige of ancient African knowledge up until the Nineteenth Century. However, as the contradiction between the treatment of enslaved Africans and the accomplishments of African culture became more glaring, the latter was progressively diminished to the point of negation.
But the signs and symbols of ancient Egypt transmitted via the Enlightenment symbols in the layout of Washington, DC, the Washington Monument, the Great Seal of the United States, the artwork on pieces of US currency and the miniature pyramids and temples that top many a skyscraper, are testament “that just as modern technologies and sciences came from Europe, so did, in antiquity, universal knowledge stream from the Nile Valley to the rest of the world, particularly to Greece, which would serve as a link.” (Diop, p. 3)
These signs and symbols also foster the growing awareness of the need to somehow return to the balance and harmony of MAAT and turn away from the “war of all against all” said to be the motivator and guarantor of the “Social Contract.” In fact, that may be why these signs and symbols were put into place, as solid, enduring testimony of the need to establish and maintain equilibrium with each other and with planet Earth.
Staff Writer; Arthur Lewin
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