In the last decades of the nineteenth century Paris filled with occult orders, Martinists, Rose-Croix Kabbalists, revived Egyptian rites, with a founder-organizer named Papus at the center. This dossier lays out the revival from the record: who the orders were, the schism that split them, and the one thread that reached history that matters, a French mesmeric healer named Philippe of Lyon who held the trust of the last Tsar of Russia. Confirmed facts stated plainly; the legend that ties the revival to the Protocols kept bounded to what the record holds.
Primary-source examination of the evidentiary basis for attributing the Protocols' authorship to Pyotr Rachkovsky, what the record establishes, what it cannot, and what further archival research could resolve.