Everything the Mystery Babylon series argues rests on one structural claim: that a single religious tradition has been handed down, without a break, from the sun worship of the ancient world to the institutions of the present. The series never states this chain in one place. It builds it across 42 broadcasts, adding a link at a time as its source books happen to supply one. This page sets the whole chain out at once, link by link, with the episodes that establish each and the position of mainstream scholarship on each.
The claimed chain, in the order the series builds it:
Ancient sun worship → The Mystery Schools and initiation → Gnosticism → The Assassins → The Knights Templar → Freemasonry → The Illuminati and the Roshaniya → The Rose Cross Order → Skull and Bones → Theosophy, the New Age and the Third Reich
Reading it this way is the fastest route to understanding both the appeal of the argument and its weak point. Almost every individual link connects two things that genuinely existed. The load is carried by the arrows, not the boxes, and the arrows are where the documentary evidence is thinnest.
The Chain, Link by Link
Link 1: Ancient sun worship
What the series claims. The origin point. Cooper argues that early priesthoods built a religion around solar observation and personified the sun as a dying and rising god, and that every later institution in the chain preserves that religion in disguised form. The Egyptian Osiris, Isis and Horus cycle is treated as the template.
Episodes. MB00, MB01, MB02, MB03, MB04, MB16
Where scholarship differs. Solar and astral symbolism in ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman religion is genuine and well documented. What historians of religion do not accept is that these traditions constitute one religion with a single continuous priesthood, or that the point-by-point parallels drawn between solar myth and the Christian gospel narrative hold up against primary texts.
Link 2: The Mystery Schools and initiation
What the series claims. Cooper argues the solar religion was formalised into graded initiatic schools with oaths, passwords and staged degrees, and that this initiation structure, not the doctrine, is what survives intact into the present.
Where scholarship differs. Greco-Roman mystery cults such as the Eleusinian and Isiac mysteries did exist and did involve initiation and secrecy. Classicists do not find evidence that they formed a single institution, that their degree structures match those described in the eighteenth-century sources the series relies on, or that they were transmitted onward as an organisation.
Link 3: Gnosticism
What the series claims. Presented as the point at which the tradition shifts from worshipping an external deity to worshipping the intellect, with Lucifer recast as the liberator who gave humanity knowledge. Cooper asserts that the letter G in the Masonic lodge stands not for God but for Gnosticism.
Episodes. MB09
Where scholarship differs. Academic scholarship treats Gnosticism as a diverse cluster of religious movements of roughly the first through third centuries, not a continuous underground society. No mainstream historical or fraternal scholarship supports a Gnostic-to-Masonic institutional descent, and the reading of the lodge letter G is Cooper’s own.
Link 4: The Assassins
What the series claims. The medieval Nizari Ismaili order under Hassan-i-Sabbah is presented as the tradition’s institutional form in the Islamic world, with a graded initiation ladder ending in the teaching that nothing is true and everything is permitted.
Where scholarship differs. The Nizari Ismailis are a real historical community with a documented history. The lurid initiation ladder and the celebrated maxim come largely from hostile medieval polemic and from Marco Polo’s second-hand account, and are not accepted by modern Ismaili studies as descriptions of actual Nizari practice.
Link 5: The Knights Templar
What the series claims. Cooper argues the Templars absorbed the Assassins’ doctrine in the Holy Land, were suppressed in 1307 for possessing it, and survived the suppression by going underground with their fleet and their treasure.
Where scholarship differs. The order, its 1307 suppression and the 1314 execution of Jacques de Molay are established history. The claim of doctrinal transfer from the Nizaris, and the survival of the order as a continuing organisation after 1312, are not supported by the documentary record; the confessions extracted in 1307 were obtained under torture and are treated by historians accordingly.
Link 6: Freemasonry
What the series claims. The central link. Cooper adopts John J. Robinson’s thesis that fugitive Templars created Freemasonry as a mutual-protection society, and reads Albert Pike, Albert Mackey and Manly P. Hall as insiders admitting in print that the fraternity preserves the old solar and Luciferian doctrine.
Episodes. MB05, MB13, MB15, MB16, MB18, MB20, MB21, MB22, MB27
Where scholarship differs. Institutionally, Freemasonry is documented from the early eighteenth century, with the first Grand Lodge founded in London in 1717; the Templar-origin thesis is a popular hypothesis without accepted documentary support. Pike, Mackey and Hall did write extensively about solar and esoteric symbolism, which is why the series can quote them at length, but Masonic scholars read those passages as symbolic and comparative rather than as confessions of a hidden cult.
Link 7: The Illuminati and the Roshaniya
What the series claims. Cooper argues that Adam Weishaupt’s Bavarian Illuminati of 1776 and the medieval Afghan Roshaniya are the same organisation, citing shared degree names and parallel calendars, and that the order survived its suppression by abandoning the name.
Episodes. MB09, MB14, MB23, MB28
Where scholarship differs. The Bavarian Illuminati existed, was founded on May 1, 1776, and was suppressed by the Bavarian state in the mid-1780s; the Zwack raid and its seized papers are real. Historians find no evidence of institutional continuity with any Afghan order, nor of survival past the suppression as an operating body. The claimed link rests on Arkon Daraul’s 1961 popular history, not on primary sources.
Link 8: The Rose Cross Order
What the series claims. Cooper reads the Rose Cross Order’s own 1916 and 1917 publications as written admissions that the Illuminati is its public-facing arm, and that its American branch conducted Egyptian-style initiation at Beverly Hall in Quakertown, Pennsylvania.
Episodes. MB19, MB36, MB37, MB38
Where scholarship differs. The Quakertown organisation and its publications are real, and the series is quoting genuine printed material. Historians of Rosicrucianism treat those texts as the self-descriptive claims of an early twentieth-century esoteric society constructing a prestigious lineage for itself, which is a normal feature of the genre, rather than as evidence that the lineage is factual.
Link 9: Skull and Bones
What the series claims. Presented as the American terminal of the chain, an elite chapter placed inside Yale, drawing on Antony Sutton’s research to argue continuity with the German orders and influence over American institutions.
Episodes. MB13
Where scholarship differs. Skull and Bones is a real Yale senior society founded in 1832 whose membership has included prominent Americans, and its secrecy is genuine. The claim of descent from German illuminist orders comes from Sutton’s 1986 book and is not accepted by historians of American universities or of secret societies.
Link 10: Theosophy, the New Age and the Third Reich
What the series claims. The final movement of the series argues the same doctrine surfaces twice in the twentieth century: in Theosophy and the New Age movement, and in the occult nationalism that fed the Third Reich, with Blavatsky’s root-race scheme as the shared root.
Episodes. MB06, MB30, MB39, MB40, MB41
Where scholarship differs. Historians of Nazism do accept that occult and volkisch currents including Theosophical race theory, Guido von List and the Thule Society formed part of the intellectual environment of early Nazism, and the documentary Cooper airs is broadly reflecting that scholarship. What is not accepted is the further step: that this environment and the modern New Age movement are two branches of one organisation reaching back to ancient Egypt.
Why the Chain Holds Together as an Argument
Two features make the lineage persuasive on first hearing. The first is that the institutions named are real. The Nizari Ismailis, the Knights Templar, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Quakertown Rose Cross organisation, Skull and Bones and the Theosophical Society all existed and all left records. A listener checking any single name finds it confirmed, which builds confidence in the whole. The second is that the series quotes esoteric writers at length in their own words. Albert Pike, Albert Mackey, Manly P. Hall and R. Swinburne Clymer really did write about solar symbolism, Egyptian mysteries and claimed ancient lineages, and Cooper is reading them accurately. What is at issue is not whether those passages exist but whether they are admissions of a hidden institutional history or the ordinary self-mythologising of esoteric societies, which is a well-studied genre in its own right.
Where the Chain Breaks
The transitions carry claims the sources cannot support. There is no documentary evidence of the Nizaris transmitting doctrine to the Templars, of Templars founding Freemasonry after 1312, of the Bavarian Illuminati continuing after its suppression, or of any of these connecting to a single ancient priesthood. Several of the connective claims trace to a small number of twentieth-century popular books, in particular Arkon Daraul’s A History of Secret Societies (1961), which the series reads across six consecutive episodes and treats as settled history. The source map shows how heavily the argument concentrates on a handful of texts, and the series timeline shows the same claims arranged by date.
Every book recommended across this series is collected, with a note on what each one is actually good for, on the Top Picks reading list.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Mystery Babylon lineage?
It is the chain of transmission the series argues for: ancient sun worship passing through the Mystery Schools, Gnosticism, the Assassins, the Knights Templar, Freemasonry, the Illuminati and the Rose Cross Order to Skull and Bones and the twentieth-century New Age and occult-nationalist movements, as one continuous tradition under changing names.
Do historians accept this lineage?
No. The individual institutions are real and separately documented, but mainstream historians study each as a distinct phenomenon with its own origins. The continuity between them is the contested part, and the evidence offered for it comes largely from twentieth-century popular and esoteric literature rather than primary sources.
Which episodes establish the lineage?
The chain is built across the whole series, but its spine runs through MB09 on Gnosticism, MB10 and MB11 on the Assassins and Templars, MB13 on the Templar-to-Freemasonry thesis, and MB14 on the Illuminati and the Roshaniya.
Where can I listen to the episodes?
The surviving audio is preserved at the Internet Archive: Mystery Babylon audio collection on archive.org. This site links the archive.org copies and never hosts or distributes the recordings.
Related Reference
- Series timeline — every dated claim in chronological order
- Source map — every book read on air, mapped to episodes
- Mystery Schools hub
- Secret Societies hub
- Freemasonry hub
- Knights Templar hub
- All 42 episode summaries
- Sources and bibliography
