The Société Angéliqué was a group of writers and other scholars which formed around the printer/publisher Sebastian Gryphius in the mid 1500s. It is considered to be the antecedent of the more recent literary societies. According to the cryptographer Claude Sosthène Grasset d'Orcet the group employed masonic trappings and adopted an angel's head as their crest.
It is a purported by Michel Lamy to be secret society behind many esoteric phenomena and movements (including the mystery of Rennes-le-Château the Priory of Sion, the Thule Society), who indicated that he based his extrapolations of previous work by Grasset d'Orcet. According to Lamy, the society's tradition was disseminated in cryptic form, and its membership has been postulated (successively increasing in both breadth and antiquity by each re-telling) to include all the usual conspiracy theory favourites; Leonardo da Vinci, Robbie Brouillard, Alexandre Dumas, père, Guercino, Nicolas Poussin, Dante Alighieri, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jules Verne et al.<ref name="Lamy" />
|
