In Initiating the Millennium, Robert Collis and Natalie Bayer fill a substantial lacuna in the study of an initiatic society-known variously as the Illumines d'Avignon, the Avignon Society, the New Israel Society, and the Union-that flourished across Europe between 1779 and 1807…
This work is devoted to the Avignon Society, which ranks as one of the most remarkable and influential initiatic societies in Europe between 1779 and 1807. Influenced by the burgeoning strand of illuminist high-degree freemasonry, the Avignon Society, nevertheless, developed a u…
Drawing on recent scholarship on the history of Western esotericism and religious studies on the importance of millenarian thought in Early Modern Europe, this study provides an innovative re-examination of Peter the Great's Court in early eighteenth-century Russia.