Theosophical Sources of David Icke's Reptilian Theory

Although most recently popularized by David Icke, the notions of the connection of a worldwide conspiracy orchestrated by Reptilian beings, like the UFO mythos itself, has its origins in Theosophy, the occult tradition founded by H. P. Blavatsky, godmother of the New Age movement, and pre-eminent personality of the Occult Revival of the late nineteenth century.

Essentially, Icke, like other conspiracy researchers such as Jordan Maxwell, Michael Tsarion, and Acharya S, is an ardent critic of the Illuminati, but presents the myriad speculations of Theosophy as the truth being suppressed. All his main teachings are Theosophical, and therefore identical to those of the Illuminati, which is he is purportedly denouncing.

As revealed in another excellent documentary by Chris White, called David Icke Debunked, Icke claims to be imparted with insights from a spiritual entity named Rakorski, who he also identifies with the name St. Germain, a notorious charlatan who was a key occult figure of the late eighteenth century, and regarded as a spiritual master of Freemasonry.

Rakorski is none other than the “Master Rakoczi” of Alice Bailey, Blavatsky’s leading representative in the twentieth century, whose channeled information not only shaped much of the New Age, but guide many of the programs of the United Nations, which is seen to be the seat of World Government awaited with the coming of the Age of Aquarius. To Baily, Rakoczi is one of the “Ascended Masters” of Theosophy, the “Lord of Civilization,” whose task is the establishment of the new civilization of the Age of Aquarius. Icke calls Rakorski the Lord of All Creation, saying that he is “directly responsible for the changes the earth will undergo.”

The concept of making contact with extra-terrestrial beings begins with the Occult Revival, when it became popular to conduct séances to make contact with lost relatives or long-gone famous personalities. Blavatsky contributed to this trend by claiming to be in contact with a beings she called “Ascended Masters,” who resided in the mystical city of Shambhala of Buddhist legend, led by Sanat Kumara, as King of the World, which she identified with Lucifer and the Fallen Angels. Alice A. Bailey believed that Sanat Kumara came to Earth 18,500,000 years ago from the etheric plane of the planet Venus, accompanied by 30 “Lords of the Flame.”

Thus the spirit channeling of the Occult Revival became the “UFO” contact of the twentieth century, a mythos that continued to be closely tied with Theosophy. Christopher Partridge wrote that the works of Bailey and Theosophy in general all influenced the so-called “UFO religions.”^[1] “UFO religions” are groups which deal with alleged communication between humans and extra-terrestrial beings, and include the Aetherius Society, Church of the SubGenius, Heaven’s Gate, Industrial Church of the New World Comforter, Raëlism and even the Nation of Islam.

Partridge writes that the first UFO religion was the “I AM” Activity, founded by Guy Ballard, in 1930. Almost all communication from his Ascended Masters though came “telepathically,” or by appearing to him from the etheric plane. During his first encounter he met the ascended master St. Germain in a cave underneath Mount Shasta, who showed him a television set that could receive transmissions from the planet Venus. An I AM offshoot was the Church Universal and Triumphant, established in 1958 in Montana and led by Mark Prophet and later by Elizabeth Clare Prophet, where St. Germain was also a central figure. The movement gained media attention in the late 1980s and early 1990s while preparing for potential nuclear disaster.

Mount Shasta is a volcanic peak in northern California, which has long been rumoured to be inhabited by faeires and Sasquatch figures, known for frequent UFO sightings, and which contributed to the legend of the Reptilians. It was first brought to attention in a novel, A Dweller on Two Planets (1894), in which Frederick Oliver related information he received telepathically from “Phylos the Tibetan.” Oliver’s account, which discussed a hidden citadel of Atlantean Masters within the mountain, became popular with occult and Theosophical communities in America.

Spencer Lewis, founder of the Rosicrucian order AMORC (Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis), published Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific (1931), which claimed Shasta was riddled with caverns in which ancient Lemurian masters preserved their ancient wisdom. According to the ancient manuscripts allegedly in his possession, northern California was once part of Lemuria, a lost continent mentioned in the works of Blavatsky, where Shasta was among the highest mountains in the world, making it an ideal refuge for those seeking to escape the great Flood.

A similar account was also put forward by Maurice Doreal, also known as Claude Doggins—or Dr. Doreal as he preferred to be called. In Denver about 1930, Doreal founded the Brotherhood of the White Temple, the first major occult movement to refer to Shambhala, which to Doreal was an underground city. Doreal claimed that as he was lecturing in Los Angeles in 1931, the year after Ballard’s experiences, he met two Atlanteans who transported him to a gigantic cavern twelve miles beneath Shasta.^[2] Fearful of nuclear attack, he relocated the Brotherhood to a rockbound valley west of Sedalia, Colorado, in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Doreal was also in part responsible for the dissemination of the theory that linked UFOs to Reptoids. In a pamphlet called Mysteries of the Gobi, Doreal offered a revisionist history of the world, which featured an ancient war between human beings and a “Serpent Race.” The latter, he wrote, had “bodies like man, but... heads... like a great snake and... bodies faintly scaled.” They also possessed hypnotic powers that allowed them to shapeshift into human form.^[3]

Similar ideas appeared in a long poem, The Emerald Tablets, reputedly the work of “Thoth, an Atlantean Priest-King.” The work recalls a text by the same title prized by the Arab alchemists of the Middle Ages, who attributed it to an ancient Egyptian sage named Hermes Trismegistus, also identified with the god Thoth. Doreal claimed to have translated the work when he was given the tablets from the Great Pyramid of Egypt in 1925. In his accompanying commentary, Doreal adds a dire political warning about this Serpent Race: “gradually, they and the men who called them took over the control of the nations.”^[4]

These ideas, suggests Barkun, author of A Culture of Conspiracy, may have originated with an obscure pulp fiction author, Robert E. Howard (1906 – 1936). Howard is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre and is probably best known for his character Conan the Barbarian. In 1929, Howard published a story in Weird Tales magazine called “The Shadow Kingdom” in which the evil power was the snake-men whose adversary Kull came from Atlantis. These creatures had bodies of men but the heads of serpents, and like Doreal’s Serpent Race, had the capacity to shapeshift into human form. In Howard’s story they were thought to have been destroyed, but returned by insinuating themselves into positions of power.

Howard became a member of “The Lovecraft Circle,” a group of writers all linked to H. P. Lovecraft, who consequently incorporated serpent men into his own work. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American author of weird fiction, is best known for his Cthulhu Mythos story cycle and the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. Stephen King called Lovecraft “the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.”^[5]

Lovecraft constantly refers to the “Great Old Ones,” a pantheon of ancient, powerful deities from outer space who once ruled the Earth and founded ancient civilizations and were worshipped as gods. Lovecraft summed up the significance in “The Call of Cthulhu,” wherein a young man discovers the shocking secret of a race of aliens that served as gods to a strange cult:

There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them… were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.^[6]

Although Lovecraft referred to Theosophical material as “crap,” he drew inspiration from the Book of Dzyan, which formed the basis of Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, in developing the Cthulhu Mythos’ own account of pre-human or occult texts. Blavatsky claimed to have discovered the book, written in the language of Senzar in Tibet, where it was guarded by an Occult Brotherhood. Lovecraft declared that they “antedate the earth,” in The Diary of Alonzo Typer, in which he transformed Theosophy’s spirit Venusians into aliens who flew across the solar system in space ships to “civilize” planet Earth.

Lovecraft’s The Great Old Ones from the Cthulhu Mythos equate with The Great Old Ones of the Night Time, a phrase which occurs in rituals of the Golden Dawn. Crowley’s disciple Kenneth Grant, head of the Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis, suggested in his book The Magical Revival (1972) that there was an unconscious connection between Lovecraft and the Golden Dawn’s most notorious member, Aleister Crowley.

Also contributing to the Reptoid theory was the 1951 publication of Robert Ernst Dickhoff’s Agharta, the underground realm of occult legend, closely associated with Shambhala. Dickhoff styled himself the “Sungma Red Lama of the Dordjelutru Lamasery,” though his lamasery was located in his New York City bookshop. Dickhoff referred to The Emerald Tablets, but without mentioning their “translator” Doreal. Dickhoff claims to have studied in Asia, from a Buddhist Lama who told him that the King of the World came from Venus, and initially inhabited a serpentine or reptilian form, but has since transformed into a human one, and asserts that this being is the serpent of the Bible.

In addition, Dickhoff also wrote about humanoid serpent men who came from Venus, who exploited an pre-Flood tunnel system in order to infiltrate and capture Atlantis and Lemuria. Survivors of these sunken continents supposedly escaped to underground hideouts in Agartha and in the Antarctic Rainbow City. Although the serpent men were to have been defeated, they and their agents have infiltrated circles of political authority through their powers of “mind control.” The remaining reptilians lie in polar suspended animation, waiting for the moment to strike.^[7]

The belief of reptilian aliens had begun to gain popularity in the 1990s, through the influence of Albuquerque physicist and businessman Paul Bennewitz, who was also involved in the infamous Majestic 12 (or MJ-12) documents hoax, and important contribution to the government “cover-up” myth. MJ-12 was the supposed code name of a secret committee of scientists and government officials formed in 1947 by an executive order of US President Harry S. Truman, purportedly to investigate the recovery of a UFO north of Roswell in 1947.

As revealed by Greg Bishop in Project Beta, the earliest mention of the term “MJ Twelve” surfaced in a US Air Force Teletype message from 1980. Known as the “Project Aquarius” Teletype, it was given to Paul Bennewitz in 1980, by US Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) counterintelligence officer Richard C. Doty. It was part of a disinformation campaign to discredit Bennewitz, who had photographed and recorded electronic data of what he believed to be UFO activity over and nearby Kirtland AFB, a sensitive nuclear facility. Bennewitz reported his findings to officials at Kirtland, including Doty. Later it was discovered the Aquarius document was phony and had been prepared by Doty.^[8] As Greg Bishop writes:

Here, near the bottom of this wordy message in late 1980, was the very first time anyone had seen a reference to the idea of a suspected government group called 'MJ Twelve' that controlled UFO information. Of course, no one suspected at the time the colossal role that this idea would play in 1980s and '90s UFOlogy, and it eventually spread beyond its confines to become a cultural mainstay.^[9]

What came to be known as the “MJ-12 papers” first appeared on a roll of film in late 1984, in the mailbox of television documentary producer Jaime Shandera, who had been collaborating with Roswell researcher William Moore since 1982. Moore had also been contacted by Doty in 1980, who described himself as representing a shadowy group of 10 military intelligence insiders who claimed to be opposed to the UFO “cover-up.” In January 1981, Doty provided Moore with a copy of the phony Aquarius document with mention of MJ-12. Moore would later claim in 1989 that he began collaborating with AFOSI in spying on fellow researchers such as Bennewitz, and dispensing disinformation ostensibly to gain the trust of the military officers, but in reality to learn whatever truth he could glean about UFOs, and how the military manipulated UFO researchers.

Moore claims that he tried to push Bennewitz, who had been in a mental health facility on three occasions after suffering severe delusional paranoia, into a mental breakdown by feeding him false information about aliens. Later it would turn out that some of the UFO documents given to Moore were forged by Doty and compatriots, or were retyped and altered from the originals.^[10]

However, Bennewitz apparently became convinced he had located a secret alien facility that he called Dulce Base, after intercepting what he thought were electronic communications originating from alien spacecraft located outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. According to his account, a treaty was brokered between the aliens and the US government, according to which the base was to be operated jointly by the aliens and the CIA. However, treaty violations on the part of the aliens led to open conflict. The aliens are of such power, however, that they cannot be removed.

By 1982, Bennewitz had begun to spread his ideas about the Dulce base to others in the ufology community. Bennewitz wrote Project Beta in 1988, which was mostly concerned with how the base might be successfully attacked. In 1988, William F. Hamilton III and Jason Bishop III both visited Dulce and wrote extensively about the base. Hamilton described the aliens as “small humanoid beings [that] may belong to the class we know as Reptilia rather than Mammalia.” Bishop called them “descendent [sic] from a Reptilian Humanoid Specie.”^[11] Thomas Edwin Costello, who claimed he had been a security guard at Dulce, called the aliens at Dulce “reptilian humanoids.”

As Barkun also noted, the area had already attracted the attention of people interested in the paranormal. The Colorado-New Mexico border region had emerged as one of the major sites for the cattle-mutilation stories then current in the West. Dulce is also only about 150 miles from the Baca ranch in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado, owned by Maurice Strong, which is one of the areas of most intense paranormal activity in the US. Strong, who has been heralded as the “indispensable man” at the center of the U.N.’s global power, is also the Finance Director of the Lindisfarne Center. According to the authors of Dope Inc, Strong is also a top operative for British Intelligence and controls the Order of the Golden Dawn, which is now an international drug ring.^[12]

The San Luis Valley and northern New Mexico also happen to be regions where there has been discovered a tradition of secret Jews, descended from Spanish Marranos, and still secretly Catholic.^[13] This may suggest a Kabbalistic and perhaps Sabbatean origin of the paranormal phenomena.

The modern history of unexplained occurrences at Baca began in the 1950s when green fireballs were reportedly seen by thousands, and even before that were rashes of “UFOs” that sound like what the Natives called “spirit lights.” So frequent are such reports in the valley that a UFO “watchtower” was erected. “From the fall of 1966 through the spring of 1970 there were hundreds of unidentified flying object sightings and many of the first documented cases of unusual animal deaths ever reported,” notes Christopher Obrien, in The Mysterious Valley, a website dedicated to a study of the strange occurrences and sightings in the region. According to Obrien, “During peak ‘UFO’ sighting waves in the late 1960s dozens of cars would literally ‘line the roads’ watching the amazing aerial displays of unknown lights as they cavorted around the sky above the Great Sand Dunes/Dry Lakes area.”^[14]

A mystic had informed Strong and his wife Hanna that the ranch, which they call “the Baca,” “would become the center for a new planetary order which would evolve from the economic collapse and environmental catastrophes that would sweep the globe in the years to come.” The first groups to join the Strongs in setting up operations at the site were the Aspen Institute and the Lindisfarne Association. The Baca is replete with monasteries, and Ashram, Vedic temple, Native American shamans, Hindu temple, ziggurat, and subterranean Zen Buddhist center. Shirley MacLaine’s astrologer told her to move to the Baca. Another of Strong’s friends, Najeeb Halaby, a CFR member, former chairman of Pan American, and father of the Queen of Jordan, wife to Freemason King Hussein, has built an Islamic ziggurat at the Baca. Apparently, the Kissingers, the Rockefellers, the McNamaras, the Rothschilds also make their pilgrimage to the Baca.^[15]

The Illuminati, to Icke, are descended from ETs, called the Babylonian Brotherhood, reptilian humanoid beings from the constellation Draco, who live in tunnels and caverns inside the earth. In his book on the reptilians, Children of the Matrix, Icke also made extensive use of Maurice Doreal’s translation of the so-called Emerald Tablets, where he presented dire political warnings about a Serpent Race. According to Icke, the tablets were found in a Mayan temple where they had been deposited by Egyptian priests. Their supposed author, Thoth, had written them thirty-six thousand years ago in an Atlantean colony in Egypt. Based on the influence of Zecharia Sitchin, Icke argues that the reptilians are the race of gods known as the Anunnaki in the Babylonian creation myth, Enuma Elish.

One of the main sources for David Icke’s reptilian hypothesis is a woman who goes by the name of Arizona Wilder. But on her Facebook page, she apparently retracted anything she confessed to David Icke, claiming she was deliberately programed for the interview.^[16] Another of David Icke's sources for the reptilian theory is Stewart Swerdlow, who claims to have been a victim of a mind control operation at Montauk Point from the age of 14 in the early seventies, when he was one of the so-called "Montauk Boys.” He claims to have personally witnessed Lawrence Gardner, author of Bloodlines of the Holy Grail, and conservative pundit William F. Buckley, shapeshift info reptilian form during human sacrifice rituals.

Swerdlow also claims his great-uncle, Yakov Sverdlov, was the first president of the Soviet Union, and that his grandfather helped found the Communist Party in the United States in the 1930s. To ensure his loyalty to the US government, he says, he was “recruited” for specific government mind-control research, including 13 years at the Montauk Project, which was supposed to have enhanced his natural abilities.^[17] Janet Diane Mourglia-Swerdlow, Swerdlow's wife and partner in offering their psychic healing services, "sees and hears frequencies on all levels,” an ability she ascribes of her mix of American Indian and Celtic ancestry, as well as her lineage from Mary Magdalene, which extends back through to the Waldensian heretics.^[18]

Icke is a classic example of the Aryan racism that typifies the channeled information of the occult. Icke teaches that Martians came to Earth and founded the Aryan race, which the reptilians used as a vehicle to overtake the planet, and that the Aryans who inhabited Atlantis were blond giants whose skin glowed white. As Atlantis was destroyed, our ultimate objective is to re-attain the powers we once had. According to Icke, we will enter the New Age by rediscovering our hidden psychological potential. Icke said, “Many of you will remember the Atlantean times, you will remember you communicated with, say, dolphins and whales, you understood these sentient creatures, you could levitate, you could manifest things, you could cause spontaneous combustion by not miraculous means at all.”^[19]

Icke is gifted with an affable charm that is the key to his popularity, and gives every impression that he is sincere. According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clark, author of Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, “it is clear from Icke’s book that he is a transmitter of this information rather than its originator. …Who is then guiding Icke and his New Age following toward the beliefs of the millenarian-conspiracy cults?”^[20] He remarks that recent investigations by Matthew Kalman and John Murray of Open Eye magazine suggest that far-right and neo-Nazi groups are exploiting Icke to penetrate the Green and New Age movements.

In his book The Robots’ Rebellion, Icke praised the popular New Age magazine Nexus, which has been exposed for its far-right links. Although formerly concerned primarily with Green issues and Third World causes, Nexus took up the subject of the U.S. Patriot movement under its new editor Duncan M. Roads. Roads visited Qaddafi in Libya in 1989, and is a close friend of the right-wing Qaddafi supporter and convert to Islam, Robert Pash. In the late 1970s, Pash was the Australian contact for the U.S.-based Aryan Nations and distributed material of the Ku Klux Klan.

As chairman of the Australian Peoples Congress, Pash is also closely involved with the Australian League of Rights, an ultra-right anti-Semitic organization. Among Pash’s other introductions to Libya is John Bennett, president of the Australian Civil Liberties Union, and an associate of Holocaust denier David Irving and Willis Carto. Bennet serves on the editorial committee of Carto's Journal of Historical Review. Nexus’ British agent is also an admirer of David Irving and Holocaust denier.^[21]

The London-based New Age magazine Rainbow Ark maintains an influential relationship with Icke, printing excerpts of his work and helping to organize his lectures and meetings. The magazine betrays a wide range of far-right links. In particular is Donald Martin, the anti-Semitic publisher of Bloomfield Books, who is the leader of the British League of Rights. Donald Martin represents the Australian League of Rights that Robert Pash is involved in. Martin has also run the ultra-right British Federation for European Freedom and the UK arm of the CIA-connected World Anti-Communist League (WACL).

Donald Martin has published in Spearhead, the magazine of John Tyndall, leader of the British National Party, who regards Martin as his ally in opposing immigration. Tyndall, an admirer of Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, was a former deputy to Colin Jordan of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement in the early 1960s, and corresponded with Savitri Devi, a leading figure in esoteric Hitlerism. In 2004, Tyndall joined in signing the New Orleans Protocol, written by David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK.

The editor of Rainbow Ark has steered Icke toward meetings with militant US patriots, and recommended Bloomfield Books. The same editor has hinted at their manipulation of Icke, by suggesting Icke wasn’t “ready for this yet,” referring to a spoof document entitled Further Protocols, outlining plans of “secret Zionism” for the “Goyim.”

Ultimately, David Icke’s message like that of the New Age itself, spells consequences with fascist overtones, foreboding a new holocaust intended for the “fundamentalists” of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, who refuse to adapt their age-old faiths for the ecumenism of the New Age movement. According to New Age or occult interpretation, the Atlanteans were destroyed because of their transgressions. Likewise, despite their wishy-washy claims of universal brotherhood and tolerance, the New Age warns of a coming confrontation with all those who resist the transformation promised by the Age of Aquarius.

Betraying these same fascist tendencies, according to Alice Bailey, “…let us never forget that its the Life, its purpose and its directed intentional destiny that’s of importance; and also that when a form proves inadequate, or too diseased or too crippled for the expression of that purpose, it is—from the point of view of the Hierarchy—no disaster when that form has to go. Death is not a disaster to be feared; the work of the Destroyer is not really cruel or undesirable… Therefore, there is much destruction permitted by the Custodians of the Plan and much evil turned into good…”^[22] 

Similarly, according to David Icke:

I do not seek to hide the severity of this period of fundamental change. It will be tough for every one of us… Many will return to light levels (die) in the wake of the physical events and the quickening vibrations. The Earth Spirit is already rising up the subplanes, and through the years ahead she will progress through the whole frequencies in her journey back to Atlantis and beyond... Those who cannot quicken their own vibrations through love and balance will find themselves out of synchronization with the environment around them. This process is already apparent.^[22]