The first part of “The Elected of the Dragon” describes how a chaste girl was turned into a sex magic initiate and a lover of Satan.
by Massimo Introvigne
Article 3 of 6. Read article 1 and article 2.
Having discussed how the book “The Elected of the Dragon,” a main source for 21st century conspiracy theory about the Ninth Circle, came to the light in 1929, I would now summarize the content of the text itself.
A “warning to the readers” announced the main thesis of the volume: “Satan is the real political master of France, on behalf of Lucifer and through International Freemasonry. The latter is the real ‘Élue du Dragon’: this is the sense, the objective, the range of this work. No, we are not in a time of democracy, but in a time of demonocracy.”
The reader is immediately introduced to the protagonist, an Italian by the name of Clotilde Bersone, who defines herself as “beautiful, of that beauty that is often considered fatal.” At the age of eighteen, she was in exotic Constantinople, visiting her father, who was a freethinker and a libertine who lived separate from her mother. Clotilde had been educated “in a great international college of the [Italian] peninsula: a sort of ultra-secular monastery.” She was a smart girl, and perceived that her father led a double life. Without telling her, he frequented a very mysterious “lodge” or “society.”
The enterprising girl convinced her father to sneak her into the lodge, where she was struck by “a strange beast of white marble,” “with seven heads and an almost human face; some appeared as that of a lion but without really resembling it; others were with horns.” Clotilde learned that this was the “Dragon, the Hydra of the Kabbalah and of the Illuminati.” The Dragon, she was told, had already been served by two “nymphs” who died: but the third “will not die and will speak in the name of the Dragon.”
Over the course of a few pages, after Clotilde had been introduced to a libidinous eighty-year-old Turk initiate called Ahmed Pasha, we discover that the young Italian girl will become the third Nymph, the new Elected of the Dragon. In fact, although she was not yet initiated, she was allowed to participate in a strange lodge session, where the adepts wore masks in the shape of horse heads, which became animated thanks to a “magical process,” giving the impression of talking horses.
Initially, the chaste Clotilde was afraid of her role of Elected of the Dragon and of the “brothel-like” activities that occurred in the lodge, to the extent that she even attempted suicide in the Bosporus. She returned to Italy, where her anti-Catholic mother pushed her into the arms of a “Count Daniele F.,” a low-level Freemason of whom she became the lover.
In Italy, a letter from Ahmed Pasha reached Clotilde and invited her to go to France for “serious business.” She felt she should accept, and she left with Daniele, proclaiming: “Yes, I will be a Freemason, because fate pushes me there with relentless ferocity; but a Freemason ready to grasp the power and the secrets and turn them all against the authors of my disgrace.”
According to the book, Clotilde arrived in Paris on June 29, 1875. She did not find Ahmed Pasha, detained in Turkey, but met another interesting character: James Abram Garfield (1831–1881), the future President of the United States. He harbored the degree of “Grand Orient,” which in the book was not an organization, as it normally is in French Freemasonry, but a person. He presided over a “French Grand Lodge of the Illuminati,” and controlled all the secret organizations of the country.
Garfield fell in love with Clotilde, although initially she treated her “brutally, like a lost girl.” The American easily overcame the rivalry of the cowardly Daniele, whom Clotilde hated and would eventually ruin, causing his suicide. Garfield made the young Italian his lover and led her, one after the other, into the highest initiations in the Grand Lodge of the Illuminati—and beyond, to the summit of it all, the Ninth Circle.
The girl thus discovered some interesting secrets: for example, that to be initiated it was necessary to stab with a dagger what appeared to be a mannequin but was in reality an enemy of the lodge, adequately drugged for the ceremony. Every initiate, and Clotilde as well, thus had on their conscience “like an infernal baptism” at least one murder.
She also discovered that the “Supreme Being” whom the initiates worshipped in the lodge and who presides the Ninth Circle was Satan, the Dragon. Not surprisingly, at least for the readers of French anti-Masonic literature, it was part of Clotilde’s duties to break crucifixes and steal consecrated holy wafers, which were then desecrated, defiled, and given to prostitutes, who would use them for “ignoble touching” and “refinements of impiety and impurity, unconceivable and impossible to describe.”
She was also entrusted with more important missions, such as that of cooperating, using the false name of “Madame Cerati,” with Prince Humbert of Italy (subsequently King Humbert I, 1844–1900), to poison his father, King Victor Emmanuel II (1820–1878), who was no longer sufficiently docile to the wishes of the lodges.
She was also asked to take secret messages to the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), a mission that put her in new trouble. The chancellor was not insensitive to the extraordinary beauty of Clotilde and became a rival of Garfield, whose ruin he started to plan.
Although the young protagonist was not exactly a paragon of chastity, her only true love was neither Garfield nor Bismarck: it was Satan, the Dragon himself, whom Clotilde learned to summon regularly. The Dragon also provided some small services to her: for instance, he killed a singer, a certain Mina, who had tried to steal Garfield away from Clotilde. Satan also ensured the success of her spying ventures all over Europe, where she traveled under the assumed name of “Emilia de Fiève, Countess of Coutanceau.”
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
