Dark secrets of the Federal Reserve

Serious observers of our political hierarchy agree that the "insiders" pick their successors at certain East Coast institutions of higher learning. Harvard has not received nearly as much attention, in this regard, as has Yale. Although everyone knows about Skull and Bones, few outside Harvard know about the dark history of Winthrop House. Most Americans remain blissfully unaware of that "innocent" college dormitory and its ties to the European esoteric tradition.

Our focus today is on Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Although Bernanke is Jewish, I find this incident telling:

Fellow Dillon native Kenneth Manning, an African American who would eventually become a professor of the history of sciences at MIT, helped assure the family that "there were Jews in Boston". Once at Harvard, Manning took Bernanke to a Rosh Hashanah services in Brookline his freshman year. Manning says that he found the services more meaningful than Bernanke did.

One explanation may lie in the fact, at this point in his life, Bernanke had joined Winthrop House, which has proven to be every bit as odd and secretive as Yale's Skull and Bones. Many of the people who have shaped this country's destiny -- including two presidents, John Kennedy and Barack Obama -- have come out of the Harvard milieu.

It is perhaps significant to note that, during his years at Winthrop House, Bernanke's roommate was none other than Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. Other notable Winthrop alumni have included Robert Rubin (Clinton's Treasury Secretary), Grover Norquist, Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, probable Soviet agent J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Elliot Richardson, who played such a key role in the Watergate conspiracy to unseat Richard Nixon (one of the few recent presidents who did not emerge from the East Coast power nexus).

Although official histories do not take note of the fact, Winthrop House was founded by freemasons. It was re-established in Harvard in the key year of 1912 exactly 38 years after the original freemasonic headquarters in Boston, also called Winthrop House, burned down in a "mysterious" fire.

Some of the important portraits presumed destroyed at that time now hang in the Harvard structure. Report has it that the "lost" valuable masonic regalia and ritual objects are also stored there in an underground repository known as the blue chamber.

It is well-known that John F. Kennedy attended Winthrop House, and that his room is now reserved for visiting VIPs. One sinister figure who looms large in the modern history of Winthrop House is the consummate power-player John Kenneth Galbraith, an avowed socialist who was JFK's tutor during his time there.

At times, Galbraith could be surprisingly candid. He admitted to one interviewer that, early in JFK's political career, he (Galbraith) functioned as Kennedy's control agent: "First, he would call up and say, 'How should one vote on this?'” Later, however, Kennedy stopped asking for directives: "And the third stage was when he didn’t feel it necessary to call at all, when he knew himself." Undoubtedly, that was the moment when the assassination conspiracy began.

There can be no doubt that Bernanke was an apt pupil of Galbraith, as this New York Times analysis from 2008 makes clear:

Bernanke summed up the administration’s new economic outlook with a phrase that could have come right out of Galbraith. In October, he declared: “We have developed … a serious too-big-to-fail problem.” Four small words that signal a very large intellectual shift.

That was the origin of the 4.7 trillion dollar Wall Street bailout which outraged the world. Although many have sought to blame Bernanke, George W. Bush or Barack Obama, few have thought to point the accusatory finger at John Kenneth Galbraith and the conspiratorial milieu at Winthrop House. That milieu derives, in large part, from Freemasonry and the occult.

The "sex magick" connection may seem difficult to comprehend at first, until one learns that the grandest event at Winthrop House is the yearly Debauchery Ball...

Winthrop House’s notorious “Debauchery” dance, known for “gratuitous displays of flesh, excessive gyrations of...pelvises and inappropriate employment of...oral cavities,” according to a former Winthrop house master

Some would argue that these are simply displays of collegiate hijinx. Yet the details of "Debauchery" ceremony (such as the "Swearing on the horns") correspond precisely with what is known about the Beltane celebrations of modern Wiccans.

A major custom of Beltane, or back then also known as Walpurgisnacht, was for pagan people to run off in the forest, and have sex with anyone they wanted, no strings attached. They might have been some equivalent of married, but they could be with anyone in the forest. They came out of the forests in the morning carrying boughs of flowers and leaves and probably had a rather ethereal (or ravaged) glow to them. One point in doing this was to ensure fertility of all the things they needed for the upcoming agricultural season. Of course this pagan practice, like so many others, was stamped out or modified by the Christian church.

What if this wild and fertile holiday was now practiced wide-scale in America today?

Seeing in these words a clue to a possible Wicca/Winthrop House connection, I set out to investigate further.

It is well-known that Wiccans consider the area around Harvard -- indeed, the whole of Massachusetts -- to be friendly territory. For example, this part of the country is home to the notorious Black Hat Society, which seeks to convert young people to the worship of ancient gods and goddesses, and to promulgate such practices as "intuitive diagnosis, massage," and "Reiki."

I contacted someone well-versed in the Massachusetts Wiccan scene in order to determine if there was any special linkage between the Craft and Winthrop House. This informant, who prefers to be known as Starflower, assures me that such a linkage did indeed exist in the past, although modern practitioners of Wicca in the area may well be sincerely unaware of the Harvard connection.

"Not many people know this," Starflower told me in an exclusive interview, "but JFK worked as a journalist for a while right after the war. He covered the elections in Britain in 1945." Of course, being the son of the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, JFK had come of age in that country.

Apparently, it was during the 1945 sojourn that young Kennedy first came into contact with Gerald Brousseau Gardner, a.k.a. "Scire," the alleged founder of modern Wicca. (He was actually initiated into a previously extant group called the New Forest Coven.)

He would go on to develop his own variant of the Craft that has come to be named after him, Gardnerian Wicca, which combined the teachings that he had received from the New Forest coven with additional ideas taken from a number of disparate sources, including Freemasonry, ceremonial magic, mediaeval grimoires and the writings of the occultist Aleister Crowley, a man whom Gardner knew personally.

Crowley himself was an extremely high-ranking Mason, and even refered to himself as a "past Grand Master," as the Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon admits. (Also see here.) Not only was Crowley the 20th century's foremost exponent of sex magick (his preferred spelling), he was continually seeking to expand his following in the United States.

According to Starflower, it was JFK himself who made the initial introductions between Gardner's followers -- who had already infiltrated much of Britain's high society -- and the power elite in Massachusetts. It was a strange mode of transmission, since JFK himself is known to have taken no serious interest in any form of the occult. (His wife Jackie confirmed to interviewers that he was in fact a practicing Catholic who routinely said his prayers before going to bed.) Nevertheless, it was shortly after this period that Wicca began to make recruits in the New England area. Starflower assures me that the Masters of Winthrop House (already steeped in freemasonic tradition) became fervent converts to the Gardnerian variant. There is at least one report, which I cannot confirm at this time, that the blue chamber is formally known as "Scire lodge."

We thus have a direct line of transmission: From Crowley to Gardner to Winthrop House to Ben Bernanke and Lloyd Blankfein. In this unbroken chain of secret ritual and covert ideology, we may find an origin point for our modern economic crisis.

(Nota bene: I have found absolutely no evidence support the contention that Ben Bernanke and Lloyd Blankfein ever participated in a sex magick "power ritual" in the blue chamber beneath Winthrop House. However, it is undeniable that both men did, in fact, achieve positions of consummate power.)

Grandmaster Galbraith himself revealed much of this covert dimension to American politics when he authored (under the name Herschel McLandress) the well-known Report From Iron Mountain. That Report reveals much, although Galbraith was careful to make no mention of the occult ties which underlie much of the power structure. Later, Galbraith convinced much of the so-called intelligentsia that the Report was simply a parody concocted by a nonentity named Lewin.

"That's how they do it," Starflower explained. "They like to make things as open as possible. And then when too many people start to wake up, they say 'Just kidding' and 'It was all a gag.' That way, the truth is always discredited."

If this claim is correct, then we should expect to see more "satires" and elaborate jests which are actually accurate descriptions of what is going on. The people who reveal these truths will later claim to be mere parodists. Don't believe them.