“The tendency towards arcane language in ‘obscure speeches’, in numbers and in enigmatic


pictures, is explained by a profound scepticism about the expressive possibilities of literal language, subjected to Babylonian corruption, which holds the Holy Spirit fettered in its grammatical bonds. The prehistoric knowledge, the prisca sapientia that was directly revealed to Adam and Moses by God, and which was handed down in a long, elite chain of tradition, had to be preserved in such a way that it was protected against the abuse if the profane. To this end, Hermes Trismegistus, who like Zoroaster,


Pythagoras and Plato, was seen as a major link in this hermetic chain, developed hieroglyphs.”19 In his Oration, Ramsay puts this idea of a universal language for the initiatedin the


followingwords: “True it is, that this Society hath its secrets; but let not those, who not are initiated, laugh at the


confession; for those figurative Signs and sacred Words, which constitute amongst Freemasons a language sometimes mute and sometimes eloquent, are only invented to prevent imposition, and to communicate at the greatest distance, and to know the true Member from the false, of whatever country


or tongue he may be.”20 Regardless of country and origin, freemasonry has established a universal


language of its own communicated through secrets. Still, however, the ambition is to contribute to the perfection of mankind as a whole, through the dissemination and transfer of knowledge.


The Order of Cosmopolitans”: Christoph Martin Wieland Are there other ways to combine cosmopolitanism and secrecy? Fifty years after


Ramsay’s oration, in 1788, on the eve of the French Revolution, the German Enlightenment writer, editor and freemason Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) published his prominent essay Das Geheimnis des Kosmopolitenordens (1788, “The Secret of the Order of Cosmopolitans”). The general message of the text, appearing in his journal Der Teutsche Merkur, is: cosmopolitans/cosmopolitanism need neither secrecy nor an Order. This is in line withWieland’s repeated attack on secret societies and Orders for their concealment. However, it is astonishing that Wieland’s and Ramsay’s views of world citizenship correspond to a large extent. It is even difficult to imagine that Wieland had not read Ramsay’s oration prior to his essay when looking at the following key passage:


“Cosmopolitans carry their name (citizens of the world) in its virtual and most eminent sense. They


regard all people of the globe as the same branch of one and the same family, and the universe as a state were they are citizens together with uncountable other reasonable beings, in order to – under general Laws of Nature – promote the perfection of theWhole, each of them according to his particular


species and manner industrious for its own prosperity.”21


19 Alexander Roob, Alchemy & Mysticism: The Hermetic Cabinet (Köln: Taschen, 2005), p. 9. 20 The Scientific magazine, and Freemason’s repository 1797, p. 36. 21 Christoph Martin Wieland, “Das Geheimniß des Kosmopolitenordens”, Der Teutsche Merkur, Weimar, August


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