Elite Occult Practice: A Historical Research Compilation

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Documented instances of political, military, scientific, and financial elites participating in initiatory occult traditions. Primary sources, declassified records, and academic histories — no conspiracy theory required.
Contents 15 sections

Thesis: Elite occult practice is documented historical record, not conspiracy theory.

The following cases are drawn from academic histories, declassified government records, primary source archives, and credible biographies. Each represents documented instances of people holding genuine political, military, scientific, or financial power who were simultaneously participants in deliberate initiatory occult traditions.

1. THE HELLFIRE CLUB (c. 1749-1766)

What it was: Formally called the “Knights of St. Francis” or the “Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe,” founded by Sir Francis Dashwood. Meetings held at Medmenham Abbey on the Thames (leased 1751, rebuilt in Gothic Revival style by architect Nicholas Revett) and later in the West Wycombe Caves.

Earlier precedent: Philip Wharton, 1st Duke of Wharton (b. 1698, elevated to duke at age 17 in 1715), founded an earlier “Hellfire Club” in London in 1718. The club blended social revelry with deliberate mockery of religious norms, including profane toasts and burlesque ceremonies parodying Christian sacraments. King George I issued an Order in Council on April 28, 1721, explicitly targeting the Hellfire Club, condemning its promotion of “immorality and profaneness” through blasphemy and irreverent mockery. The royal decree effectively suppressed the club, reflecting governmental concerns that such societies served as potential hotbeds for sedition amid post-Jacobite tensions. Dashwood’s later organization inherited the name but was a distinct group.

Documented members and their positions:

  • Sir Francis Dashwood – Chancellor of the Exchequer (1762-63). He ran British finances while running the club.
  • John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich – First Lord of the Admiralty. Head of the Royal Navy.
  • Thomas Potter – MP, son of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
  • John Wilkes – MP, journalist, radical politician, later Lord Mayor of London.
  • Frederick, Prince of Wales – heir to the British throne.
  • William Hogarth – the most famous English artist of his era.
  • Benjamin Franklin – On November 3, 1772, Franklin wrote to his son William that he “spent 16 Days at Lord Le Despencer’s most agreably, and return’d in good Health and Spirits.” (Dashwood held the title Lord Le Despencer.) Franklin’s visits to Dashwood’s estate at West Wycombe Park and the caves are documented in the Dashwood family papers, reproduced in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (Yale University Press). Franklin and Dashwood also collaborated on an abridged Book of Common Prayer (1773).
  • George Bubb Dodington – Baron Melcombe, prominent political figure.

What actually happened there: As member John Wilkes put it, the club existed to “celebrate woman in wine” – copious fine wine, lavish banquets, and sexual liaisons with “Nuns” (women, possibly prostitutes) in private cells within the abbey. The club adopted mock-monastic rituals parodying Catholic ceremony. One documented incident: a baboon dressed as the Devil was released from a chest during a meeting, terrifying Wilkes.

What we don’t know: Club secretary and steward Paul Whitehead (also a satirical poet) ordered all club records burned three days before his death in 1774. His heart was bequeathed to Lord Le Despencer (Dashwood) and placed in an urn in the mausoleum at West Wycombe. Everything we know comes from members’ correspondence, diaries, and contemporary accounts – not official club minutes. The destruction of these records has left historians unable to definitively determine the full scope of the club’s activities.

The political fact: The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the First Lord of the Admiralty, an heir to the throne, a dozen MPs, and a Founding Father of the United States were all documented participants in pseudo-occult ritual practice that deliberately mocked institutional religion.

Sources:

2. JACK PARSONS AND JPL/OTO (1930s-1952)

The scientific credentials (not in dispute):

  • Co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), now a NASA facility.
  • Co-founder of Aerojet Engineering Corporation.
  • Invented castable composite rocket propellant (GALCIT-27) – the foundational technology for solid rocket fuel.
  • Developed JATO (Jet-Assisted Take-Off) for the U.S. military.
  • Member of the GALCIT Rocket Research Group at Caltech under Theodore von Kármán.
  • Received a $3 million military grant that expanded GALCIT into JPL.

The occult credentials (equally not in dispute):

  • Joined the Agape Lodge (Pasadena chapter of Ordo Templi Orientis) in 1939 with his wife Helen.
  • Rose to head of Agape Lodge, becoming Aleister Crowley’s American representative for the O.T.O.
  • Established “The Parsonage” – a commune at his home on South Orange Grove Avenue, Pasadena, populated by artists, writers, and occultists.
  • Conducted the Babalon Working (January-March 1946) with L. Ron Hubbard as his “scribe.” This was a series of Enochian magic rituals aimed at incarnating the Thelemic goddess Babalon, inspired by Crowley’s novel Moonchild.
  • Took Marjorie Cameron (former Navy WAVE) as a magical partner, believing her to be the “elemental” summoned by the Working.

The Hubbard connection:

  • Parsons met L. Ron Hubbard in 1942 at the Manana Literary Society (a science fiction writers’ gathering).
  • Hubbard participated in the Babalon Working as scryer/scribe.
  • Hubbard then co-founded “Allied Enterprises” with Parsons, into which Parsons invested his life savings ($20,970). Hubbard absconded with the money on a boat-buying scheme.
  • Crowley’s verdict, in a letter to Agape Lodge member Louis T. Culling: “I feel sure that he had fine ideas, but he was led astray firstly by Smith, then he was robbed of his last penny by a confidence man named Hubbard.”
  • Hubbard never publicly acknowledged Parsons or the Babalon Working. He went on to found Scientology.

Security clearance and FBI:

  • The U.S. Air Force advised the FBI that a “religious cult, believed to advocate sexual perversion, was organized at subject’s home” and was “reported subversive.”
  • FBI stripped Parsons of his security clearance. Declassified FBI documents reveal the primary concern was actually his former Marxist associations at Caltech and ACLU membership (Red Scare era), with the O.T.O. activities as additional justification.
  • Clearance was reinstated by the Industrial Employment Review Board (insufficient evidence of communist sympathies), then revoked again in 1950 after he removed classified explosives documents without authorization.
  • Parsons died in 1952 in a home laboratory explosion. Circumstances remain debated.

The institutional fact: A man who literally invented the fuel that launched the American space program was simultaneously the head of an occult lodge, performing sex magic rituals in his living room, with the full knowledge of the FBI and U.S. Air Force. JPL – the institution that runs Mars rovers – was co-founded by a practicing Thelemite.

Sources:

3. ALEISTER CROWLEY‘S INTELLIGENCE NETWORK

Documented intelligence connections:

  • WWI (1914-1918): Crowley lived in New York and wrote pro-German propaganda for The Fatherland and The International. American military intelligence discovered he “was an employee of the British Government on official business of which the British Consul, New York City, has full cognizance.” His biographers established that he had infiltrated the pro-German movement to assist British intelligence.

  • Maxwell Knight (MI5): Knight was head of Department B5(b), the countersubversion section of MI5 – the real-life model for “M” in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Knight was introduced to Crowley by Dennis Wheatley and accepted occult initiation from Crowley, becoming his pupil. Around 1936-37, Crowley entered a documented relationship with Knight’s MI5 branch.

  • Dennis Wheatley: Occult novelist whose wife worked for MI5. Wheatley met Crowley through Tom Driberg (journalist, later Labour MP), whom Knight used as an agent inside the Communist Party of Great Britain. The Crowley-Knight-Wheatley-Driberg network represents a documented intersection of British intelligence, occultism, journalism, and parliamentary politics.

  • Ian Fleming: Fleming (Naval Intelligence, later creator of James Bond) was involved in a scheme to use Crowley’s occult connections to lure Rudolf Hess to Scotland. The exact nature of the operation remains debated, but Fleming’s involvement is documented.

  • MI5 file: A 1930s MI5 document from the Public Record Office bears reference PP 2573, CROWLEY. When queried, MI5 confirmed they held a record under that reference but it “was destroyed (we think) in the 1950s.”

Scholarly assessment:

  • Richard B. Spence (historian, University of Idaho), Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult (2008) – peer-reviewed article preceded the book (2000). Based on archival sources from British, American, French, and Italian repositories.
  • Marco Pasi (University of Amsterdam), Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (Routledge) – contends Crowley was more accurately an “occasional informant” than a formal agent.
  • Tobias Churton, Aleister Crowley: The Biography – based on complete access to restricted papers at the Warburg Institute and O.T.O. archives.

Elite social network (Golden Dawn period):

Crowley was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (joined 1898), which by 1896 had 315 initiated members including:

  • W.B. Yeats – Nobel Prize-winning poet, later Irish Senator.
  • Maud Gonne – Irish revolutionary, political activist.
  • Constance Wilde – wife of Oscar Wilde.
  • Moina Bergson – sister of philosopher Henri Bergson.
  • Annie Horniman – tea heiress, theatrical patron.
  • Florence Farr – prominent actress.
  • Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood – major literary figures.

Sources:

4. THE PROCESS CHURCH OF THE FINAL JUDGMENT (1966-1974)

Origins: Founded in London, 1966, by Robert de Grimston and Mary Ann MacLean. Both were former Scientologists expelled from the Church in 1962 (declared “Suppressive Persons” by Hubbard in 1965). They first created a Scientology splinter group called “Compulsions Analysis” before evolving it into the Process Church.

The “elite” angle:

  • Robert de Grimston came from an upper-class British family, had served as an officer in the British Army, and studied architecture.
  • Mary Ann MacLean’s background was the inverse – grew up in poverty in Glasgow. Various accounts document that she worked as a high-end prostitute in London servicing prominent figures in British business and politics.
  • The group’s first commune was at 2 Balfour Place, Mayfair – one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in London.

Theology: Synthesized four deities – Jehovah, Lucifer, Satan, and Christ – into a neo-Gnostic system. Members wore distinctive black robes and used Scientology-derived techniques alongside occult ritual.

Alleged criminal connections: The Process Church was accused of connections to Charles Manson and the Son of Sam killings (primarily by journalist Maury Terry in The Ultimate Evil). These allegations have been extensively investigated and are generally regarded by scholars as unsubstantiated. The church successfully sued and had references removed from Ed Sanders’ The Family.

Transformation: De Grimston was expelled in 1974. Under MacLean, those who remained gave up on Satan and occult imagery, though they remained convinced the end of the world was near. The group renamed itself the Foundation Church of the Millennium (1974), then Foundation Faith of the Millennium (1977), then Foundation Faith of God (1980). The foundation moved from England to Florida in 1970, then to Arizona in 1978, and began relocating animals to property in Kanab, Utah, in 1984. In 1993, the organization changed its name to Best Friends Animal Society and removed all reference to religious ideas from its statutes. It is today one of the largest no-kill animal rescue organizations in the United States.

Best Friends’ own website describes its founders as friends who were on a spiritual quest to create a better world but eventually grew tired “of complicated cosmologies that added nothing to the preferred simplicity of a life based on service and the Universal Law.”

The institutional fact: An organization founded on a theology synthesizing Satan, Lucifer, Jehovah, and Christ – that was accused of connections to Charles Manson – is now running America’s largest no-kill animal sanctuary. The transformation is either the most complete reinvention in religious history or the most effective rebranding.

Sources:

5. SKULL AND BONES (1832-present)

What it is: Secret society at Yale University, founded 1832 by William Huntington Russell (inspired by a German occult society) and Alphonso Taft (future Secretary of War, father of President William Howard Taft).

Documented members in power:

  • Presidents: William Howard Taft, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush.
  • Secretary of State / 2004 Presidential candidate: John Kerry.
  • Founder of Time magazine: Henry Luce.
  • Numerous CIA, Fortune 500, and State Department figures.

Documented rituals: In 2001, New York Observer reporter Ron Rosenbaum captured video of initiation rites at “The Tomb” (the society’s windowless meeting hall at Yale). The footage, aired by ABC News, showed neophytes kissing skulls and acting out murder scenes. Per a dossier of the 1940 initiation ritual, initiates are placed in coffins and “reborn” into the society.

The fact: Three U.S. Presidents, major intelligence figures, and media barons went through occult-flavored initiation rituals involving coffins and skull-kissing at Yale. In the 2004 presidential election, both the Republican and Democratic nominees (Bush and Kerry) were Bonesmen.

Sources:

6. BOHEMIAN GROVE (1878-present)

What it is: Annual two-week retreat of the Bohemian Club at a private 2,700-acre old-growth Redwood grove near Monte Rio, California. All-male membership.

Documented attendees: Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, Herbert Hoover, George H.W. Bush. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (documented by ProPublica, 2023). Senior media executives, business leaders, military figures.

The ritual: The Cremation of Care ceremony, conducted annually since 1881 before a 40-foot stone owl statue at an artificial lake. Members perform a theatrical ritual “cremating” a symbolic effigy representing worldly concerns. Alex Jones and cameraman Mike Hanson infiltrated and recorded the ceremony on video in July 2000.

Richard Nixon’s recorded assessment: Nixon is on tape describing Bohemian Grove as “the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine.”

Sources:

7. JOHN DEE — OCCULT ADVISER TO THE CROWN (1558-c.1605)

Position: Appointed by Queen Elizabeth I as her astrologer and occult adviser. Known publicly as “Queen Elizabeth’s Merlin.” Also a mathematician, navigator, and cartographer who coined the term “British Empire.”

Practice: Conducted years of Enochian magic sessions with scryer Edward Kelley (1582 onward), channeling an angelic language through crystal-gazing. Recorded meticulously in Dee’s journals (now held at the British Library and Bodleian Library). The Enochian system they produced became foundational to later Western ceremonial magic (Golden Dawn, Crowley, etc.).

The fact: The adviser to the most powerful monarch of her era was simultaneously conducting angel-summoning rituals and developing an entire magical language system. This was not secret – it was his job description.

Sources:

8. NAZI OCCULTISM — HIMMLER AND THE AHNENERBE (caveat)

What is documented:

  • Heinrich Himmler founded the Ahnenerbe (“Ancestral Heritage”) in 1935 as an SS appendage.
  • Himmler brought occultist Karl Maria Wiligut into the SS (eventually reaching Brigadefuhrer rank) and used Wiligut’s prophecies to select Wewelsburg Castle as an SS ceremonial center.
  • The Thule Society (Munich, post-WWI) was a real organization with occultist and volkisch elements, though historians emphasize it was primarily a right-wing political organization.

The scholarly caveat: Historians (notably Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke) stress that most popular literature on Nazi occultism is unreliable. The Thule Society’s role as “incubator of Nazism” is largely the product of founder Sebottendorff’s self-aggrandizement. Himmler’s personal occult interests are documented, but they were not shared by Hitler or most of the Nazi leadership.

Sources:

SYNTHESIS: THE PATTERN

What the historical record shows, without any conspiratorial inference required:

  1. The Hellfire Club (1718/1749): The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and a Founding Father participated in pseudo-occult ritual at a rebuilt abbey. Records deliberately destroyed.

  2. Jack Parsons (1930s-1952): The co-founder of JPL and inventor of solid rocket fuel was simultaneously head of an occult lodge performing sex magic. The FBI and Air Force knew and monitored it.

  3. Crowley’s network (1900s-1940s): A practicing occultist maintained documented relationships with MI5 countersubversion (Maxwell Knight), Naval Intelligence (Ian Fleming), parliamentary politics (Tom Driberg), and the literary/cultural elite (Golden Dawn membership).

  4. The Process Church (1966-1993): Emerged from Scientology, operated from Mayfair, synthesized Satanic and Christian theology, then transformed into an animal rescue charity.

  5. Skull and Bones (1832-present): Three Presidents and a generation of CIA/State Department figures underwent occult-flavored initiation. Filmed in 2001.

  6. Bohemian Grove (1878-present): Presidents and Supreme Court Justices perform an annual pseudo-pagan ritual before a giant owl. Filmed in 2000.

  7. John Dee (1558-c.1605): The most powerful monarch of the 16th century employed a court magician who developed an entire system of angel-summoning.

The thesis holds: these are not fringe allegations. They are primary-source historical facts drawn from government archives, declassified intelligence files, members’ own diaries, academic peer-reviewed publications, and in several cases, video recordings. The question of whether deliberate initiatory practice persists at elite levels is open – but the historical precedent is not a matter of opinion.

Source URLs

Key Academic Works

  • Richard B. Spence, Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult (Feral House, 2008)
  • Marco Pasi, Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (Routledge, 2014)
  • Tobias Churton, Aleister Crowley: The Biography (Watkins, 2011)
  • George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons (Harcourt, 2005)
  • Jason M. Kelly, The Society of Dilettanti (Yale UP)
  • Carole Cusack, “Process Church of the Final Judgment” in International Journal for the Study of New Religions
  • G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America (UC Santa Cruz — Bohemian Grove chapter)
  • Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (corrective to popular myths)