The Order of Psalmanazar

Exposed For What it Has Become

Of obscure and secret societies, the Order of Psalmanazar is one of the more obscure and secret. But its very obscurity has tended to cause people to overlook a group whose influence on events shaping our world has only been verified (either by luck or at the cost of painstaking investigation) in a fraction of those in which it has been involved.

There's a reason why The Pentagon is shaped like that, you know.

According to Order lore, the group was founded in the late seventeenth century by an ex-Jesuit priest who took on the name George Psalmanazar. Psalmanazar had been a subscriber to the disumbrationist heresy, which challenged clerical authority, and was forced to leave the church when that point of view came under harsh papal scrutiny.

Psalmanazar had been both a priest and a puppeteer, and led a travelling carnival from town to town in which religious parables were told in the populist media of puppets. The shows, which could be vulgar, and which poked fun at both the state and ecclesiastical authorities, got him pilloried in a public square soon after he lost the church's protection.

The Legend of George Psalmanazar

This is where the historical figure of George Psalmanazar ends and the legend begins. Members of the Order learn the following fairy tale:

George took with him only the clothes on his back, his pipe, and his carving knife. He felt that he had been reduced to being a beggar; with no home, no posessions, reputation stained by state decision, church derision and public humiliation.

George started East, walking around cities where he was known, and coming finally on a part of the world he'd never been to before.

On the road he met a man and woman and their child of about five years who were also travelling with few possessions and who were strangers in the town they were approaching. George asked them how it was that they felt safe going from town to town where they didn't know anybody and didn't know what people thought of strangers.

The woman responded that everywhere they went they had been treated wonderfully and that they hope that they hoped to go back the way they came and visit everyone they met. She said that they were kind and generous to whoever they met, they were too poor to rob, and they descended from Persian royalty and that these things protected them.

George sat down with his pipe and smoked some tobacco flowers and started to work on his carving and think this over, and on that day he walked into town and sought out the first members of what he called The Pantagruelian Order and what we call today The Order of Psalmanazar.

This is when the more familiar tale kicks in; Psalmanazar appears on the scene, pretending to be "Formosan" royalty a la the American Emperor Norton, and founding his self-important order of palace guards. He had people going for a while - lecturing about Formosa at Oxford at one point - but he was assassinated by members of his own Order after he confessed to the fraud.

Somehow, the cult survived this inauspicious beginning, and "Psalmanazar's Order of Honour" spread, now more-or-less spottily covering the civilized world. Benjamin Franklin brought it from France to the United States where the order's ideals meshed nicely with the libertarian philosophy of those forming the new government.

But what does it mean that a bizarre and unaccountable secret society claims such an influence over world affairs? And what is the Order's program?

The Agenda of The Order

An exposé brought to you by
The Disumbrationist League