The Age of Enlightenment was in full swing: an explosion of philosophy, science, the resurgence of hermeticism and occult experimentation all competed directly with the traditional teachings of the Church, and the Jesuit monopoly, in the Universities and Colleges.

Terry Melanson, Perfectibilists: The 18th Century Bavarian Order of the Illuminati

Consider also:

  1. Greater Feast of Grady Louis McMurtry
  2. “In the Love of Romeo and Juliet was no Flaw; but family Feud, which imported nothing to that Love, was its Bane; and the Rashness and Violence of their Revolt against that Repression, slew them.”
  3. “A foreign organism had infiltrated his body. It was spreading through his blood, attaching to his nervous system, and trying to take root in its native soil.”
  4. “This 4T is, by the system of the Circumference, but and indicator of another name. Counting 4 to the right we find 22h (note 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet), 22 to the right we find 11A, 11 to the right a5, 5 to the left o10, 10 the left t11 and 11 to the left h alone, ending the name and spelling ThAaoth. The reduplicated ‘a’ is eliminated according to the angels, leaving Thaoth. This name is clearly a rendering of Thoth, Thauth, Theuth, etc., the Tahuti of the Egyptians, the Mercury of the Romans and Hermes of the Greeks, and identified in the Renaissance, after the discovery of the Corpus Hermetica with Hermes Trismegistus, the Thrice Great Hermes.”
  5. “There is surely, too, no need for us to join a secret society to be taught that the volume of the Sacred Law is a fountain of truth and instruction; or to go through the great and elaborate ceremony of the third degree merely to learn that we have each to die.”