After the Saturnian division, Hermetic man saw himself as
separate and, inevitably, above nature, though always quick to
identify himself as nature's benign shepherd. This mighty,
occult shepherd-king figure has emerged in history under the
forms of Arthur, Merlin, Pendragon, and Prestor John. He is
the personification of the manipulation of nature by secret
technology on behalf of a secret hierarchy which, if known at
all, is always careful to present itself as the supreme friend of
divine creation.
If the expulsion from the Garden of Eden—that is to say the
literal alteration of man's circumstance of living solely upon
Michael A. Hoffman II Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare Page 13
God's bounty and providence—was the result of Satanic
intervention, why has it not dawned on us that civilization is
itself Satanic?
In the Hermetic-masonic tradition the secret identity of Satan
is the force represented in occult lore as emanating from the
star Sirius, the so-called dog star, Canis major. In the secret
tradition of the Freemasons, Sirius is overwhelmingly
identified with a single primary attribute, the bringing of
civilization to earth.
The heirs of this magical current were saluted by the
Illuminist and master-alchemist Comenius in his 1668 book
The Way of Light, dedicated to the first scientific organization
in Western history, Britain's august Royal Society. In it,
Comenius addressed the first formal scientists as "illuminati"
and outlined their scientific purpose, "…which is to secure… the
empire of the human mind over matter."
In a key Rosicrucian description of the City of Utopia it is
shown to be dominated by science and mechanics and more
ominously, by the medical dissection of cadavers, in other
words by the hyper-analytical obsession of Rationalism with
dead matter and measurement.