under the veil of secrecy, dangerous plans and harmful teachings can be accepted just as well as noble intentions and profound knowledge; because not all members themselves are informed of such depraved intentions, which sometimes tend to lie hidden beneath the beautiful façade

Terry Melanson, Perfectibilists: The 18th Century Bavarian Order of the Illuminati [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]

Hermetic quote Melanson Perfectibilists Illuminati veil secrecy dangerous plans harmful teachings accepted as well as noble intentions profound knowledge members not informed hidden beautiful facade

Consider also:

  1. “it has been shown that much of the work of Trithemius, Agrippa’s mentor and the progenitor of European ceremonial magick, was actually veiled cryptography, a brutal and embarrassing truth that much of the occult and neopagan revival, which ultimately stems from Trithemius, has never assessed.”
  2. “Suppose truth is not the aim of life. Imagine, all along great minds and intellects have been searching frantically for truth, looking in every nook and cranny of the world to uncover truth. It always seems to be slippery; when we finally grasp what we think is truth, it slips out of our hands and scurries off. Isn’t life all but a frantic search for truth?”
  3. Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea
  4. “Rationalism swept through Germany, more especially the illusion that man’s faculty could establish and secure a single, true, and salvation-guaranteeing religion. This rationalism expressed itself in pamphlets, in systems, in conversations, in secret societies and in many other institutions. It was not satisfied—indeed it did not even bother—to deny the distinctive doctrines of the Catholic church; its basis was rather the simple assertion: nothing in positive Christianity is acceptable except its ‘reasonable morality,’ the doctrine that God is the father of all things, and the proposition that man’s soul is immortal; what goes beyond these three assertions is either poetry or superstition or pure nonsense.”
  5. “The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality”