The Mystery Babylon series moves through history in the order its source books happen to be read, not in the order events happened. A claim about Constantine can arrive twenty episodes after a claim about the 1990s. This page reorders every dated claim in the series into a single chronological line, so the shape of the argument as a claimed history becomes visible in one view. Each row cites the episode it came from, so any entry can be checked against the full episode summaries and the books listed on the sources and bibliography hub.
How to read this timeline. Every row records a claim as broadcast. This site documents what the series says; it does not endorse it. Some entries describe events that are uncontested historical fact and are disputed only in the meaning the series assigns them, such as the arrest of the Templars in 1307 or the donation of the UN Meditation Room altar in 1957. Others are contested or rejected outright by mainstream historians. Where a claim is disputed, the episode page carries a Historians’ View section setting out the scholarly position; follow the episode link in the third column to reach it.
Antiquity
| Date claimed | Claim as broadcast | Episode |
|---|---|---|
| c. 4000 BC | Cooper claims the Mystery Babylon calendar runs 6,000 years, beginning in 4000 BC and ending in the year 2000, and that this chronology is encoded in the passages and chambers of the Great Pyramid of Giza. | MB31 |
| c. 1000 BC | Cooper claims the Masonic lineage begins with the Dionysian Artificers, a secret society of craftsmen appearing around this date, passing later to the Roman College of Architects under Caesar Augustus and then to the Comacine Masters. | MB34 |
| 1st century BC to 1st century AD | The series grounds its solar-religion thesis in the Egyptian Osiris, Isis and Horus cycle, read primarily through Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris and Diodorus Siculus. | MB03, MB04 |
Late Antiquity and the Early Church
| Date claimed | Claim as broadcast | Episode |
|---|---|---|
| c. AD 55-68 | Cooper, reading Ellen G. White, dates the first Roman persecution of Christians to the reign of Nero, and frames it as the opening phase of a war against Christianity that later shifted from force to infiltration. | MB07 |
| Early 4th century AD | Cooper claims Constantine moved the Christian day of rest from the seventh day to Sunday because Sunday was the pagan day of sun worship, at the urging of bishops seeking influence among pagans. | MB07 |
| AD 692 | Cooper claims early Christianity operated as a secret society and did not open its worship to all comers until a church council ruling of this year. | MB08 |
| AD 787 | Cooper claims the Second Council of Nicaea erased the second commandment against image worship and split the tenth commandment to preserve the count of ten. | MB07 |
The Medieval Period
| Date claimed | Claim as broadcast | Episode |
|---|---|---|
| 11th century AD | Cooper claims Manco Capac, founder of the Inca dynasty, established the religion of the sun in Peru and carried a golden falcon, a form of the phoenix, as a token of the adept doctrine. | MB26 |
| 1110 | Cooper claims a secret order called the Prieure de Sion appeared on the Temple Mount and commissioned the nine founding knights of the Knights Templar. | MB11 |
| 13th century | Cooper claims the Inquisition was established as the most terrible engine of papal control and was responsible for the deaths of millions. | MB07 |
| 1299 | Cooper claims Pope Boniface VIII, at the first jubilee year, wore the robes of a Roman emperor and had heralds cry Behold, I am Caesar, which Cooper reads as an admission that the Roman Empire became the Catholic Church. | MB07 |
| Friday, October 13, 1307 | Cooper calls the mass arrest of the Knights Templar in France the original October surprise, and claims it is the origin of Friday the 13th as an unlucky day. He further claims the Templar treasure had already been moved out of France and was never recovered. | MB02, MB12, MB13 |
| November 22, 1307 | Cooper claims the date on which Pope Clement V’s bull ordering Edward II to arrest the English Templars was sent has direct bearing on later events in history. | MB12 |
| 1314 | Cooper claims Jacques de Molay cursed Philip IV and Clement V from the stake and that both were dead within the period he named. | MB12 |
| 1381 | Cooper claims England’s Peasants’ Revolt was directed by a secret Great Society and led by Walter the Tyler, whose title matches the sentry officer of the Masonic lodge, and that the phrase now is time in John Ball’s letters recurs in later political slogans. | MB13 |
1500 to 1800
| Date claimed | Claim as broadcast | Episode |
|---|---|---|
| 1516 | Cooper claims the Rose Cross Order regarded this as its founding year, and that its October 1916 convocation was staged as a four-hundredth anniversary. | MB36 |
| 1623 | Cooper claims Ignatius Loyola led the Alumbrados, the Spanish Illuminated Ones condemned by the Inquisition, and that the Society of Jesus is the same sect renamed. | MB14 |
| May 1, 1776 | Cooper claims Adam Weishaupt formally organised the Bavarian Illuminati on this date, while insisting the order neither began nor ended with him. Jordan Maxwell repeats the same dating in the later interview episode. | MB05, MB28 |
| July 14, 1776 | Cooper claims the Continental Congress committee appointed to design the Great Seal of the United States, consisting of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, were all members of the Mystery tradition. | MB37 |
| 1776 | Cooper claims the founding of the United States was designed to bring the New Man, the illumined man, into the world, and reads the numerals of 1776 as encoding a three-fold six. | MB23 |
| 1778 | Cooper claims Weishaupt, writing in this year, authorised murder as a tool of the order and required willingness to kill as a condition of membership. | MB06 |
| 1785 | Cooper claims an anonymous German pamphlet of this year documented the seven highest degrees of ancient Egyptian initiation and is the authentic original of modern initiatic degrees. | MB09 |
| 1786 | Cooper claims the raid on the lawyer Zwack’s house exposed Illuminati plans to recruit women as instruments of influence, along with instructions for forging the seals of important persons. | MB14 |
| 1798 | Cooper tells listeners that if they read nothing else he recommends, they must read John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy. | MB17 |
The Nineteenth Century
| Date claimed | Claim as broadcast | Episode |
|---|---|---|
| 1826 | Captain William Morgan publishes Illustrations of Masonry. The series returns to Morgan repeatedly, and Cooper’s three-part interview episodes are conducted under the Morgan pseudonym. | MB15, MB20, MB21, MB22 |
| Spring 1844 | Cooper claims Joseph Smith established the secret Council of Fifty three weeks after his initiation into the Nauvoo Masonic Lodge, and was subsequently crowned king on earth by that council. | MB29 |
| 1845 | Cooper claims Friedrich Engels confirmed that the Communists of this period were followers of Ludwig Feuerbach, whose philosophy placed man in the position of God. | MB18 |
| 1846 to 1989 | Cooper catalogues uses of the phrase new world order across this span, including Rockefeller in 1968, Kissinger in 1975 and the Declaration of Interdependence in 1976, to argue the phrase long predates its popular association with George H. W. Bush. | MB05 |
| 1858 | Cooper claims the Rose Cross Order was founded in America in this year. | MB19 |
| 1866 | Cooper claims the Assassin cult never died out but survived underground and resurfaced in the Aga Khan court case in Bombay. | MB11 |
| 1883 | Cooper claims the Most Puissant Sovereign Grand Commander referenced in a letter of this year, described as an ex-Confederate general who led a brigade of Indians in battle, is Albert Pike. | MB27 |
| 1888 | Cooper claims Pike’s Legenda rejects creation from nothing as a monstrous absurdity, which he reads as confirmation that the deity of Freemasonry is not the God of the Bible. In the same year Helena Blavatsky publishes The Secret Doctrine, which the later Third Reich episodes treat as the root of Aryan race theory. | MB31, MB39 |
| July 14, 1889 | Cooper claims Albert Pike wrote to the 23 Supreme Councils of Freemasonry instructing top Masons to maintain the Luciferian doctrine and to deny publicly that Lucifer is their god. | MB18 |
1900 to 1945
| Date claimed | Claim as broadcast | Episode |
|---|---|---|
| 1905 | The documentary Cooper airs states that Jorg Lanz founded the journal Ostara, in which he proposed polygamy for pure Aryans, sterilisation of the racially impure, and deportation of inferior races. | MB40 |
| 1907 | The documentary states that Lanz’s Order of the New Templars anticipated the racial vetting and hierarchy of the later SS. | MB40 |
| Before 1914 | The documentary states that Guido von List’s writings described a future Aryan state with race-based citizenship, ancestry verification and a ruling elite of initiates. | MB39 |
| June 1916 | Cooper claims the Rose Cross Order held its 68th Convocation at Beverly Hall, Quakertown, Pennsylvania, conducting the Ancient Mysteries of Egypt in a prepared Grove of Osiris, and that attendees received a prophecy that America would be drawn into a war that was only the beginning of greater wars. | MB19, MB37 |
| October 1916 | Cooper claims a further Rose Cross College convocation was held on what the organisation treated as the four-hundredth anniversary of its 1516 founding, featuring three-degree initiations called the Ancient Mysteries of Osiris. | MB36 |
| 1916 | Cooper claims R. Swinburne Clymer wrote that the capstone of the pyramid on the reverse of the Great Seal will be set only when Mexico is again part of the United States, and that the 1916 Fundamental Laws report is a written admission that the Illuminati is the public-facing arm of the Rose Cross Order. | MB19 |
| January 1919 | The documentary states that the Thule Society, a Munich occultist lodge devoted to List’s teachings, helped found the German Workers Party, which became the NSDAP. | MB39 |
| November 11, 1924 | Cooper claims the Lucifer Publishing Company, founded by Alice A. Bailey, changed its name to the Lucis Publishing Company on this date. | MB30 |
| 1924 | Cooper claims the revised edition of Mackey’s Encyclopedia of Freemasonry traces the word Aryan to Blavatsky’s writings, linking Masonic scholarship to the same Theosophical lineage as Nazi racial ideology. | MB39, MB40 |
| By 1930 | The documentary states that twenty-eight American states had passed compulsory sterilisation laws and fifteen thousand people had been sterilised, rising to thirty thousand by 1939, and that German eugenicists studied the American programme. | MB41 |
| Before 1930 | Cooper claims senior LDS leaders who received their temple endowments before this year remained bound by an oath of vengeance against the United States government. | MB29 |
| 1933 | The documentary states that Himmler’s Race and Resettlement Bureau was reviewing nearly two thousand SS marriage applications a month. | MB40 |
| 1934 | The documentary states German genetic health courts ordered more than fifty-six thousand sterilisations in this year alone, and that the Night of the Long Knives of June 30, 1934 killed up to five hundred people including the SA leadership. | MB40, MB41 |
| December 1935 | The documentary states Himmler founded the Lebensborn programme, operating maternity homes in which SS men and racially approved women could produce children outside marriage. From the same year the Race and Resettlement Bureau was empowered to vet all civilian marriages in Germany. | MB40, MB41 |
| 1936 | The documentary states that after the reoccupation of the Rhineland the SS sterilised five hundred mixed-race children of black French soldiers, the first sterilisation campaign conducted explicitly on racial grounds. | MB41 |
| September 1939 | The documentary states that Reinhard Heydrich’s five Einsatzgruppen followed the invasion of Poland and shot tens of thousands of members of the Polish educated and leadership classes. | MB41 |
1945 to 1990
| Date claimed | Claim as broadcast | Episode |
|---|---|---|
| 1945 | Cooper claims Winston Churchill, Harry Truman and Joseph Stalin were all 33rd-degree Freemasons and that this explains the decisions taken at the Yalta Conference. | MB21 |
| April 18, 1949 | Cooper claims that pressure from bodies including the World Council of Churches led Secretary-General Trygve Lie to announce the creation of the United Nations Meditation Room. | MB30 |
| 1951 | Cooper claims Manly P. Hall was a 33rd-degree Freemason and a priest of the Order of Mystery Babylon, and that his book America’s Assignment with Destiny was a prediction of a planned convergence rather than retrospective history. | MB24 |
| 1952 | Cooper claims Clymer’s revised The Teachings of the Masters identifies him as Supreme Grand Master of a merged confederation including the O.T.O., the Golden Dawn, Freemasonry and the Knights of Malta. | MB37 |
| August 23, 1953 | Cooper relays the claim, drawn from Stelle Group chronology, that the Age of Aquarius began on this date. | MB31 |
| 1957 | Sweden donates the six-and-a-half-ton magnetite block installed as the altar of the UN Meditation Room, and Dag Hammarskjold directs the leaflet describing it as dedicated to the God whom man worships under many names. Cooper reads both as esoteric formulations. | MB30 |
| February 5, 1962 | Cooper claims Jeane Dixon’s vision of a pharaoh and Nefertiti presenting a child, reported alongside a planetary conjunction covered in three consecutive New York Times articles, was staged preparation for the birth of Maitreya. | MB06 |
| 1968 | Cooper claims 2001: A Space Odyssey is a coded message to initiates rather than entertainment, and that Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick are members of the Mystery Schools. | MB00, MB01 |
| 1973 | Cooper claims the Humanist Manifesto II explicitly denies divine purpose and states that ethics requires no theological sanction, aligning humanism with the doctrine of man becoming god. | MB32 |
| July 1977 | Cooper relays the New Age claim that Lord Maitreya arrived in the Asian community of East London from a Himalayan retreat, and notes that no such person was ever found there. | MB06 |
| 1978 to 1988 | Cooper opens the ecumenism episode with a 1989 news report that Baptist and Catholic theologians had found common ground after eighteen meetings across this decade, alongside Archbishop Robert Runcie’s call for Christians to accept the Pope as a common leader. | MB07 |
| 1982 | Cooper claims Alice Bailey’s channelled entity Djwhal Khul declared through Benjamin Creme that the plan includes a new world government and new world religion under Maitreya. | MB06 |
| 1986 | Cooper claims the Assisi interfaith gathering, at which John Paul II prayed alongside a Tibetan lama, a Hindu swami, a Native American medicine man, a rabbi and a Maori high priest, demonstrates the secret societies’ ecumenical project at work. | MB34 |
1990 to the End of the Series
| Date claimed | Claim as broadcast | Episode |
|---|---|---|
| 1989 | Cooper claims he predicted the World Trade Center bombing as early as this year. | MB11 |
| June 1991 | Cooper claims a CAJI member infiltrated a Masonic lodge and reached the 32nd degree of the Scottish Rite in under two years, and that members were placed in lodges across the country. | MB20 |
| February 1993 | Cooper points to the World Trade Center bombing as the fulfilment of his earlier prediction, made while the series was covering the Assassins. | MB11 |
| March 15, 1993 | Cooper announces a San Diego lecture at which he says he will prove that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. | MB05 |
| 1993 | Cooper claims the goal of seating one of their own on the throne of the Vatican had by this year been achieved, and that many leaders of the patriot movement are Freemasons sworn to one-world government. | MB07, MB27 |
| 1994 | Cooper frames the Third Reich documentaries as confirmation that the same system that produced Nazi Germany is operating in the United States as he broadcasts. | MB39, MB40 |
| By 1999 | Cooper claims the planners intend the full New World Order structure to be in place, possibly accelerated by famine, depression or war. | MB05 |
| By 2000 | Cooper claims the Global 2000 report set a goal of reducing world population by two billion; Anthony Hilder claims on air that AIDS was engineered to reduce global population by twenty-five percent by the same year; and Cooper places the end of the 6,000-year Mystery Babylon calendar in this year. | MB06, MB28, MB31 |
| After 2010 | Cooper claims the sun enters Aquarius sometime after this date, ending the Age of Pisces, and that this transition is the source of the term New Age. | MB01 |
Broadcast Chronology
The order in which listeners actually heard the argument being built is different again. The series aired on The Hour of the Time over shortwave station WWCR, beginning February 11, 1993. The numbering runs MB00 through MB42 with no episode 33; that gap is in the source numbering as the series circulates, not an omission on this site.
Historians’ Note on Using This Timeline
Reading the claims in date order makes one feature of the series unmistakable: the chronology is assembled backwards. The series begins with its conclusion, that a single religious tradition has been transmitted continuously from ancient Egypt and Babylon to the present day, and then arranges historical events along that line. Professional historians do not treat the Dionysian Artificers, the Gnostics, the Assassins, the Knights Templar, eighteenth-century Freemasonry, the Bavarian Illuminati and the twentieth-century New Age movement as a single institutional lineage. Each is studied as a distinct phenomenon with its own documented origins, and the connective tissue the series supplies between them comes largely from nineteenth- and twentieth-century speculative literature rather than from primary evidence. Individual dated events in this timeline are frequently accurate. The claim that they form one chain is the part mainstream scholarship does not support. The lineage chart sets out that claimed chain link by link, with the scholarly position on each.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is this timeline?
A chronological index of every dated historical claim made across all 42 episodes of William Cooper’s Mystery Babylon series, reordered by the date being claimed rather than by broadcast order, with a citation to the episode each claim comes from.
Does this site endorse these claims?
No. This is a documentary study companion. Claims are recorded as broadcast, and each episode page carries a Historians’ View section setting out where mainstream scholarship agrees, disagrees, or considers the question differently framed. See our editorial policy.
Why is there no episode 33?
The series as it circulates is numbered MB00 through MB42 with no episode 33. The gap is in the source numbering itself; 42 episodes exist across that numbering, and all 42 are summarised on this site.
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
- The claimed lineage chart — the chain of transmission the series argues for, link by link
- Source map — every book read on air, mapped to the episodes that use it
- All 42 episode summaries
- Sources and bibliography
- Who was William Cooper?
- Topic hubs
