The mystery schools are the starting point for everything in the Mystery Babylon series. In the opening broadcasts William Cooper argued that a single initiatory religion, born in ancient Babylon and Egypt, survived through successive organizational forms up to the present day. Before the series turns to Templars, Freemasons, or Skull and Bones, it spends nine episodes establishing what Cooper claimed the original religion was, how it worked, what it taught, and who carried it. This hub documents that foundation: the episodes involved, the key claims, the sources Cooper read from, and where mainstream scholarship agrees or disagrees.

As on every page of this site, the framing is documentary. These are the claims the series made. The site does not endorse them. For the full picture, start with the complete episode guide.

The Series’ Central Claim About the Mystery Schools

Cooper’s thesis, stated in MB01 and repeated throughout, was that the mystery schools constituted not a collection of separate local cults but a single religion with a consistent inner doctrine concealed behind varying outer forms. In his telling, the religion taught that man’s first enemy was darkness and his first god the sun. From that origin, a priestly class developed astro-theology, the worship of celestial bodies as symbols of higher powers, and used its accumulated knowledge to govern populations from behind thrones rather than on them. Cooper called these priests the Guardians of the Secrets of the Ages.

The religion, he argued, never died. It adapted. The Osirian mystery of ancient Egypt, the Eleusinian mysteries of Greece, the Mithraic cult of Rome, and the initiatory degrees of Freemasonry were, in his account, the same body of doctrine in successive costumes. Cooper presented the Masonic lodge, the Skull and Bones, and related modern organizations as current carriers of this ancient inheritance.

The Mystery Schools Arc: Episodes and Air Dates

MB00: The Dawn of Man (February 11, 1993)

The series begins with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as an extended worked example of mystery school symbolism. Cooper argued that the film’s opening sequence, the obelisk, the bone, the transition from ape to space station, was a deliberate message to initiated viewers working through the standard symbols of the religion: the obelisk as the generative force, the sun’s arc as the cycle of ages, the murder of Abel as the first act of will powered by forbidden knowledge. Cooper identified that forbidden knowledge with what he said the mystery schools taught: that Lucifer, through Satan, gave mankind intellect, freeing it from a jealous god’s garden. This episode establishes the interpretive frame for everything that follows.

MB01: Intro to Mysteries (February 12, 1993)

Cooper introduced the full historical scope of what he called the mystery schools. He read the list that would become familiar across the series: the Order of the Quest, Freemasonry, the Ancient Order of the Rose and Cross, the Knights Templar, the Knights of Malta, the Prieure de Sion, the Thule Society, Skull and Bones, the Illuminati, and more. His claim was that all of these, whatever their surface differences, share a common origin and doctrine. The episode reads from Robert Klark Graham’s The Future of Man for its evolutionary framing and from Jordan Maxwell’s That Old-Time Religion for the sun-worship thesis, establishing that man’s first religion was astro-theology.

MB02: Antiquities (February 15, 1993)

Working through Manly P. Hall’s Freemasonry of the Ancient Egyptians and Jordan Maxwell’s That Old-Time Religion, Cooper argued that Egyptian religion was a codified form of sun worship and that its symbols, the obelisk, the eye, the pyramid, passed directly into later fraternal orders. This episode introduces the distinction Cooper maintained throughout: the exoteric religion visible to ordinary worshippers and the esoteric doctrine reserved for initiates, which in his account never changed.

MB03: Osiris and Isis (February 16, 1993)

The first of two episodes on the Osirian myth. Cooper read from Manly P. Hall and from Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma (mediated through Hall) to present Osiris as the sun god, Isis as the moon and mother goddess, and Horus their son as the rising sun: a trinitarian structure he argued repeated across mystery religions globally. The claim is that the Catholic mass, the Masonic degree, and the ancient Egyptian funerary rite are all versions of the same underlying drama, the death and resurrection of Osiris.

MB04: Osiris and Isis Pt 2 (February 17, 1993)

Continues the Osirian myth with Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris and the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Budge translation) as additional sources. Cooper traced the resurrection motif through Egyptian funerary practice into what he called the Hiramic legend of Freemasonry, the ritual death and raising of the master mason, which he presented as a direct inheritance from the Osirian rite.

MB08: Initiation (February 24, 1993)

The most psychologically detailed episode in the arc. Cooper read at length from Arkon Daraul’s A History of Secret Societies on the mechanics of initiation: fasting, sensory disruption, induced fear and tension, orgiastic drumming, the soporific draught, and the ceremonial sentence of death. He then connected these techniques to modern psychological research, citing William Sargant’s Battle for the Mind on how the same physiological collapse-and-conditioning pattern appears in religious conversion, political indoctrination, and mass psychotherapy. Cooper’s argument was that initiation is not symbolic instruction but a technology for making minds receptive to implanted ideas, and that this is the actual function of the mystery school degree system from ancient Egypt to the lodge room.

MB09: Gnosticism (February 25, 1993)

Cooper presented Gnosticism as one of the mystery school’s historical carriers, a tradition that preserved the inner doctrine, the identification of the creator god as a lesser or malevolent being and Lucifer as the liberator of mankind, during the early centuries of Christianity. He connected Gnostic texts and theology to the Cathar movement, arguing that the same doctrine reappears wherever the mystery religion has been suppressed but not destroyed.

MB16: Sun Worship (March 30, 1993) — page coming

MB16 returns to the astro-theology thesis after the Freemasonry and other episodes that intervene. Cooper argued that the solar symbolism visible in ancient mystery religions appears without interruption in the ceremonial calendars and architecture of modern orders: the solstice degrees of the Scottish Rite, the orientation of Masonic temples, the symbolism of the compass and square as celestial instruments. This episode closes the loop between the ancient origins described in MB00 to MB04 and the modern organizations the series spends its second half documenting. The episode page is in preparation; the audio is available at archive.org.

Key Concepts the Series Develops in This Arc

Astro-theology

Cooper’s term, drawn substantially from Jordan Maxwell, for the original religion: the worship of celestial bodies, above all the sun, as symbols of divine power. He argued this was not metaphor but the literal first religion, born from man’s terror of darkness and gratitude for the sun’s return each morning. The series claims every later mystery religion preserves this core.

The exoteric and the esoteric

A distinction Cooper returned to in almost every episode. The exoteric is the public face of a religion or fraternity: its official doctrine, available to any member. The esoteric is the inner teaching, reserved for those advanced through the initiation degrees. Cooper claimed, following Albert Pike’s own writing in Morals and Dogma, that the lower three Masonic degrees are deliberately kept ignorant of the order’s real theology.

The Osiris and Isis cycle

The death of Osiris by Set, the gathering of his dismembered body by Isis, and the resurrection that produces Horus: Cooper presented this myth as the template for every later mystery school’s central rite. He read from Plutarch’s account and from Hall’s Egyptian analysis to argue that the drama of the dying and rising god, the same structure appearing in the Mithraic mysteries, the Eleusinian grain rite, and the Hiramic legend of Freemasonry, was the mystery school’s mechanism for communicating its doctrine about death, resurrection, and the immortality available only to initiates.

Initiation as mind conditioning

MB08 is the most focused treatment of this concept. Drawing on Daraul’s survey and Sargant’s psychology, Cooper argued that ancient initiation ceremonies were not primarily about teaching symbolic content but about creating a psychologically receptive state through physiological stress. In his account, this is why initiates remained permanent devotees even after they understood the technique: the conditioning preceded the belief, not the other way around.

The lineage claim

The thread running through all nine episodes is the assertion of unbroken continuity: from the Babylonian and Egyptian priesthoods through the Gnostics and Neoplatonists, into the medieval orders (covered in the Templars and Assassins hub and the Rosicrucians hub), and finally to modern institutions. The secret society lineage map diagrams this full claimed descent, episode by episode.

Primary Sources Cooper Read From in This Arc

• Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma (1871) — Public domain. The central Masonic text throughout the series. Search scanned editions on archive.org.
• Plutarch, Isis and Osiris (1st century CE) — Public domain. The classical account of the Osirian myth, cited in MB03 and MB04. Search translations on archive.org.
• The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Budge translation (1895) — Public domain. Search scanned editions on archive.org.
• G.S. Faber, The Origin of Pagan Idolatry (1816) — Public domain. Search scanned editions on archive.org.
• Arkon Daraul, A History of Secret Societies (1961) — Under copyright; extensively read in MB08. Treated here as a quoted source only. Available in libraries and in print.
• Manly P. Hall, Freemasonry of the Ancient Egyptians (1937) — Under copyright; read in MB02, MB03, MB04. Treated here as a quoted source only.
• Jordan Maxwell, That Old-Time Religion — Under copyright; read in MB01 and MB02 for the astro-theology framing. Treated here as a quoted source only.
• William Sargant, Battle for the Mind (1957) — Under copyright; cited in MB08 for the psychology of initiation and conditioning. Available in libraries.

The full cross-reference of every source to every episode is in the sources and bibliography hub.

The Historians’ View

Mainstream historians of religion acknowledge the existence of mystery cults in the ancient world, their initiatory structures, and their use of theatrical staging to create powerful experiences. They do not accept the claim of doctrinal continuity across millennia. The standard scholarly explanation for the recurring pattern of dying-and-rising gods, initiatory degrees, and solar symbolism is convergent cultural development: similar ecological and social conditions produce similar religious forms. Cooper’s thesis requires institutional or deliberate transmission; no documentary evidence establishes that chain.

Specific factual components the series draws on are solid history. The Eleusinian mysteries existed and practiced the roughly described procedures. The Osirian myth appears in Plutarch essentially as Cooper described it. The Masonic degree system does have a ritual death and raising at its center, and Pike’s Morals and Dogma does describe Sun worship as a symbolic layer of the Scottish Rite. What does not survive scrutiny is the assertion that these things are the same religion rather than separate traditions that borrowed common symbols. The series presents this as established fact; it is an interpretation, and this site marks it as such.

Where the Mystery Schools Arc Connects to the Rest of the Series

After MB09 and MB16, the series moves outward through successive organizational forms. The Knights Templar and the Assassins hub covers MB10 through MB12, where Cooper argued the medieval orders transmitted the mystery school lineage from East to West. The Freemasonry hub covers MB05, MB15, and the William Morgan trilogy, where the modern carrier of the doctrine is examined at length. The secret societies hub covers the umbrella argument: all of these are the same organization under different names. The lineage map shows the complete claimed descent, and the series timeline dates every claim from ancient Babylon to the 1990s.

Listen to the Mystery Schools Episodes

All surviving audio is preserved at the Internet Archive: Mystery Babylon audio collection on archive.org. This site embeds archive.org players on each episode page and never hosts, re-uploads, or distributes the recordings. For Cooper’s biography and the history of the Hour of the Time program, see Who Was William Cooper.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Bill Cooper say about the mystery schools?

Cooper argued that the mystery schools were not a collection of separate ancient cults but a single religion, originating in Babylon and Egypt, that survived by concealing its doctrine inside successive fraternal organizations. He claimed the religion’s core was sun worship, that its priesthood used initiation techniques to condition members psychologically, and that it persists today inside Freemasonry, Skull and Bones, and related orders. The series documents these claims across nine opening episodes; this site records them without endorsing them.

Which Mystery Babylon episodes cover the mystery schools?

The core arc runs from MB00 through MB09, with MB16 returning to the sun worship theme. MB00 (The Dawn of Man, February 11, 1993) introduces the symbology through Kubrick’s film. MB01 (Intro to Mysteries) names the organizations in the claimed lineage. MB02 through MB04 cover Egyptian religion, the Osiris and Isis myth, and the Book of the Dead. MB08 (Initiation, February 24, 1993) is the detailed treatment of initiation psychology. MB09 covers Gnosticism as a historical carrier. MB16 closes the arc on sun worship.

What is astro-theology in the Mystery Babylon series?

Cooper used the term, drawing on Jordan Maxwell’s writing, to describe what he called man’s first religion: the worship of the sun as a symbol of the creator, born from humanity’s fear of darkness and dependence on sunlight for survival. The series claims this original astro-theology is the hidden inner doctrine of every mystery school and fraternal order from ancient Babylon to the present lodge room.

What is the Osiris and Isis cycle and why does it matter in the series?

The myth of Osiris’s murder by Set, Isis’s recovery of his dismembered body, and the birth of Horus is treated in MB03 and MB04 as the central rite of the ancient mystery schools: a symbolic drama of death, resurrection, and the immortality available to the initiated. Cooper argued this same pattern, the dying and rising god, appears in Mithraism, Eleusis, and the Masonic Hiramic legend, making all three expressions of the same inherited religion.

What did Bill Cooper say about initiation?

MB08 is Cooper’s most sustained treatment. Reading from Arkon Daraul and William Sargant, he argued that ancient initiation was a psychological conditioning program: sensory stress, fear, induced physical debilitation, and then the implantation of new beliefs into a receptive mind. He claimed this technique, not symbolic instruction, was the actual secret of the mystery schools, and that it explains why initiated members remained committed even when they were told how the process worked.