The nineteenth-century writer and Masonic scholar Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie (1833 86) studied occultism with Frederick Hockley, and met the famous French occultist Eliphas Levi in 1861. He was also involved in the foundation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This extensive encyclopaedia, first published in 1877, is considered to be a classic Masonic reference work. It includes detailed information on the symbols, rites, legends, terms, people and places associated with Freemasonry. Some of the symbols are illustrated and lists of rankings are given, including a 'traditional' list of Grand Masters of England that includes Sts Swithin and Dunstan, Alfred the Great, Sir Christopher Wren (twice) and Charles II. Mackenzie aims in his entries to be critical when relevant: as he says in the Preface, freemasonry has 'received a willing tribute' in his book, but he hints at difficulties encountered in publishing material about a famously secretive society.

The Scottish natural philosopher and historian of science Sir David Brewster (1781 1868), best remembered as a friend of Sir Walter Scott and the inventor of the kaleidoscope, contributed reviews and articles on a huge variety of subjects to such periodicals as the Edinburgh Review and Fraser's Magazine. (His Letters on Natural Magic Addressed to Sir Walter Scott and his two-volume life of Isaac Newton are also reissued in this series). In this work, published in 1804, Brewster is determined to refute the allegations often directed against the Freemasons, as representing 'caverns of darkness, in which the most detestable schemes have been hatched'. He does so by tracing the history of the 'peaceful institution' of Freemasonry from antiquity until the end of the eighteenth century. He then describes the history of the Grand Lodge of Scotland from its institution in 1736, basing his account on the records of the Lodge.

In May 2010, Britain's new Coalition government embarked on its journey to the Big Society. But how did we reach this point? Politicians and commentators have long bemoaned the supposed decline of civic life, fretting about its health and its future. In fact, the real story of voluntarism over the last hundred years has not been decline, but constant evolution and change. Whether we use the terms charity, philanthropy, civil society, non-governmental organisations, the third sector or the Big Society, voluntary endeavour is one of the most vibrant and dynamic areas of British public life. The senior, established and exciting new scholars featured in this collection show how the voluntary sector's role in society, and its relationship with the state, has constantly adapted to its surroundings. They have raised new agendas, tackled old problems in new ways, acted as alternatives to statutory provision and as catalysts for further government action. Voluntary groups have emerged out of citizens' concerns, independent of government and yet willing to work with politicians of all persuasions. By surveying the sheer extent and diversity of the sector since the start of the First World War, this volume demonstrates that voluntarism not only continues to thrive, but is also far larger than any political agenda that may be imposed upon it.

Making Surveillance States: Transnational Histories opens up new and exciting perspectives on how systems of state surveillance developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taking a transnational approach, the book challenges us to rethink the presumed novelty of contemporary surveillance practices, while developing critical analyses of the ways in which state surveillance has profoundly shaped the emergence of contemporary societies. Contributors engage with a range of surveillance practices, including medical and disease surveillance, systems of documentation and identification, and policing and security. These approaches enable us to understand how surveillance has underpinned the emergence of modern states, sustained systems of state security, enabled practices of colonial rule, perpetuated racist and gendered forms of identification and classification, regulated and policed migration, shaped the eugenically inflected medicalization of disability and sexuality, and contained dissent. While surveillance is thus bound up with complex relations of power, it is also contested. Emerging from the book is a sense of how state actors understood and legitimized their own surveillance practices, as well as how these practices have been implemented in different times and places. At the same time, contributors explore the myriad ways in which these systems of surveillance have been resisted, challenged, and subverted.

For more than one hundred and fifty years the Cambridge Apostles have played an influential role in the development of the British intelligentsia. Peter Allen's concern is with the origins and early history of this long-lived coterie and in particular with those years just before the first Reform Bill when the central figures among the Apostles were F. D. Maurice, Arthur Hallam and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He explains the reasons for the club's extraordinary powers of survival and traces the stages of its early development. Using manuscript material, he describes the principal members of the Apostolic group and reveals its inner life through extensive quotation from their correspondence. The early Apostles' role in the formation of the Victorian intelligentsia is exemplified, and they are shown to have made important contributions to the rising movement of liberal intellectualism, a movement which brought about profound changes to Victorian opinion and in society itself.

Max Weber is best known as one of the founders of modern sociology and the author of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, but he also made important contributions to modern political and democratic theory. In Democracy and the Political in Max Weber's Thought, Terry Maley explores, through a detailed analysis of Weber's writings, the intersection of recent work on Weber and on democratic theory, bridging the gap between these two rapidly expanding areas of scholarship.Maley critically examines how Weber's realist 'model' of democracy defines and constrains the possibilities for democratic agency in modern liberal-democracies. Maley also looks at how ideas of historical time and memory are constructed in his writings on religion, bureaucracy, and the social sciences. Democracy and the Political in Max Weber's Thought is both an accessible introduction to Weber's political thought and a spirited defense of its continued relevance to debates on democracy.

Playing Out of Bounds investigates the North American Chinese Invitational Volleyball Tournament (NACIVT), an annual event that began in the 1930s in the streets of Manhattan and now attracts 1200 competitors from the U.S. and Canada. Its two key features are the 9-man game, where there are nine instead of the usual six volleyball players on the court, and the fact that player eligibility is limited to "100% Chinese" and Asian players, as defined in the tournament rules. These rules that limit competitors to specific ethno-racial groups is justified by the discrimination that Chinese people faced when they were denied access to physical activity spaces, and instead played in the alleyways and streets of Chinatowns. Drawing on interviews, participant-observation, and analysis of websites and tournament documents, Playing Out of Bounds explores how participants understand and negotiate their sense of belonging within this community of volleyball players and how membership within and the boundaries of this community are continually being (re)defined. This identity/community building occurs within a context of anti-Asian racism, growing numbers of mixed race players, and fluidity of what it means to be Canadian, American, Chinese, and Asian.

Based on unprecedented access to the Order's internal documents, this book provides the first systematic social history of the Orange Order - the Protestant association dedicated to maintaining the British connection in Northern Ireland.
Kaufmann charts the Order's path from the peak of its influence, in the early 1960s, to its present-day crisis. Along the way, he sketches a portrait of many of Orangeism's leading figures, from ex-Prime Minister John Andrews to Ulster Unionist Party politicians like Martin Smyth, James Molyneaux, and David McNarry. Kaufmann also includes the highly revealing correspondence with adversaries such as Ian Paisley and David Trimble.
Packed with analyses of mass-membership trends and attitudes, the book also takes care to tell the story of the Order from "below" as well as from above. In the process, it argues that the traditional Unionism of West Ulster is giving way to the more militant Unionism of Antrim and Belfast which is winning the hearts of the younger generation in cities and towns throughout the province.

This book offers a highly engaging history of the world's most famous secret society, the Cambridge 'Apostles', based upon the lives, careers and correspondence of the 255 Apostles elected to the Cambridge Conversazione Society between 1820 and 1914. It examines the way in which the Apostles recruited their membership, the Society's discussions and its intellectual preoccupations. From its pages emerge such figures as F. D. Maurice, John Sterling, John Mitchell Kemble, Richard Trench, Fenton Hort, James Clerk Maxwell, Henry Sidgwick, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes. The careers of these and many other leading Apostles are traced, through parliament, government, letters, and in public school and university reform. The book also makes an important contribution in discussing the role of liberalism, imagination and friendship at the intersection of the life of learning and public life. This is a major contribution to the intellectual and social history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to the history of the University of Cambridge. It demonstrates in impressive depth just how and why the Apostles forged original themes in modern intellectual life.

THIS 7 PAGE ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM THE BOOK: Woman and Freemasonry, by Dudley Wright. To purchase the entire book, please order ISBN 0766100901.

"The Hiram Key" is a book that will shake the Christian world to its very roots. When Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, both Masons, set out to find the origins of Freemasonry they had no idea that they would find themselves unraveling the true story of Jesus and the original Jerusalem Church. As a radically new picture of Jesus started to emerge, the authors came to the startling conclusion that the key rituals of modern Freemasonry were practiced by the early followers of Jesus as a means of initiation into their community.

Keep the people in ignorance, fear, and at war with themselves. Divide, rule and conquer while keeping the important knowledge to yourself. If you are happy with your life the way it is, if you believe everything the media tells you, then this book is not for you. However, if you feel that there is something wrong with the world, that everything around you is pulling at your thoughts, then this book is for you. This book uncovers a lot, but not all of the different ways your mind can and is being controlled. You the reader now holds the truth, what you do with it is the future. There will be times throughout this book you will have feelings of anger, sadness, even fear due to knowing the truth. You might even start to question the information due to how extreme it will sound. This is due to the fact you have been programmed to think that subject matters that sound outrages are outrages. The good news is once your eyes are open you can and will see the mind control all around you. This book will uncover the movies, music, television shows, religion, drugs, the programming of how it works and so forth. Before you are done reading this book, your mind will be open to the Illuminati formula for total mind control. Reviews: This book is too powerful for the slave minded NWO In Review. This book requires a strong stomach it spares no punches. The Illuminati News The information in this book is disturbing, but a must read, I would suggest it to everyone mature enough. To Deep Newsletter Without this information you will never understand how things really work behind the scenes. D&D Nobody can read this book cover to cover and be the same person as when they started. This is truly an amazing work of art. Ian Michael

John Robison (1739-1805) was a Scottish scientist, who late in life wrote the one of the definitive studies of the Bavarian Illuminati. He was a contemporary and collaborator with James Watt, with whom he worked on an early steam car, contributor to the 1797 Encylopedia Britannica, professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and inventor of the siren. Although Robison was very much an advocate of science and rationalism, in later life, disillusioned by the French Revolution, he became an ardent monarchist. In this work, Proofs of a Conspiracy, Robison laid the groundwork for modern conspiracy theorists by implicating the Bavarian Illuminati as responsible for the excesses of the French Revolution. The Bavarian Illuminati, a rationalist secret society, was founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776 in what is today Germany. They had an inner core of true believers, who secretly held radical atheist, anti-monarchist and possibly proto-feminist views, at that time considered beyond the pale. They recruited by infiltrating the numerous (and otherwise benign) Freemasonic groups which were active at the time on the continent. Necessarily they had a clandestine, compartmentalized, hierarchical organizational form, which has led some modern conspiracy theorists to identify them as the original Marxist-Leninist group. However, this is most likely simply a case of parallel evolution. Since we don't have convenient access to the source documents of the Bavarian Illuminati we have to rely on Robison and the Abb Barruel's Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, both in the 'opposing views' category, for information on this group. The Illuminati have today become a byword for a secret society which hoodwinks its junior members and puppet-masters society at large. This reputation is in no little part due to Robison's book. However, reading between the lines, it becomes obvious that the Bavarian Illuminati were what the American Old Left called a 'talk shop, ' barely able to organize a picnic, let alone the Terror. Instead, it seems, they were only expressing views widespread in intellectual circles of the day. They were not, as Robison claims, the fuse that lit the downfall of the French Monarchy. Nonetheless, this book make fascinating reading, and in conjunction with other historical accounts of the French Revolution, helps dimensionalize the period for students of history.

THIS 36 PAGE ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM THE BOOK: Text-Book of Advanced Freemasonry, by Anonymous . To purchase the entire book, please order ISBN 1564593347.

Contents: Masonry and Religion; From Darkness to Light; Initiation, Real and Ceremonial, The Purpose of the Mysteries, The Ideal Lodge; Light on the Way, The Knowledge of Yourself, The "G," The Ladder, The Superstructure, The Cable-Tow, The Apron, The Wind, Seeking a Master, Wages, The Law of the Mount; Fulness of Light, Observations and Examples, Apocalypsis; The Past and Future of the Masonic Order. Freemasons, this book should be in your Masonic library!

This book explores the development of late 19th century study societies in China against the context of the decline of the imperial Qing government and its control on ideological production, widespread social unrest, and intrusions by Western imperialist states. The author uncovers the history of civil society activism in China by examining the study societies in Shanghai, Beijing, and Hunan, which were organized around the goal of promoting and defending the Confucian religion. Illustrating a facet of the civil society that emerged in China as a reaction to the influences of Christianity, the modernization of Confucianism, and nationalist state formation, this study extends understanding of the unique and complex processes of Chinese political and cultural modernization in ways that differed from that of Western societies.

The complete work of the Entered Apprentice, Fellow-craft and Master-mason's Degrees, with their ceremonies, lectures, etc. It has doubtless been a matter of comment and surprise among the Members of the Fraternity that all the books which are avowedly intended to serve as guides to the Work of a Lodge invariably contain more or less than their professed object demands. They are usually deficient in the very points that may be most needed, rendering the use of a separate Monitor unavoidable; while, on the other hand, they include a great deal of information on matters with which every Mason is necessarily perfectly familiar, and which it is neither needful nor desirable to be communicated to the uninitiated. It has been the aim of the Compiler of this little volume to avoid both these defects: first, by omitting all Passwords, Grips, and other esoteric subjects; and second, by giving the Work of the first three degrees monitorially as well as ritually complete, in plain language for ready reference, and entirely free from the tedious perplexities of cypher or other arbitrary and unintelligible contractions.

This book tells the untold story of Australia's veteran bikers. Like other motorcycle clubs, the Australian War Fighters (pseudonym) are a fringe-dwelling subculture that provokes strong opinions. Newspaper editors have been salivating over motorcycle club imagery since the subculture emerged in California in the middle of the twentieth century. Motorcycle clubs remain the subject of persisting 'moral panics' in Australia and have been the subject of successive crackdowns, police operations, and hard-hitting legislation aimed at driving them out of existence. The War Fighters operate on the periphery of the hard-core one percent element of the subculture. While they enjoy the notoriety of looking mean, the War Fighters do significant charity work, and the seemingly bizarre combination of outlaw biker subculture aesthetic with raising money for local hospitals means these men enjoy the paradox of looking bad while doing good. Drawing on sociological research Edward Scarr tells the true story of how and why the veteran motorcycle club subculture came to be. What follows is an ultimately hopeful story of redemption from despair and the salvation of lives that had been all but given up on.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

The Ritual of the Order of the Eastern Star; The Ritual of the Original Rose of Seven Seals; The Ritual of the Lady-Knights of Templars; and Women's Masonry or Masonry of Adoption.