In 1884 Joseph Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre (1842-1909) published Mission des Juifs, the third and largest of his Missions. He explained its title in a single sentence: since the Jews are "the witnesses of the centuries," it was before them that he wished to verify the law of human society. The book that followed is a philosophy of history on the grandest scale, and the foundational statement of the doctrine he named Synarchy.

Synarchy, as Saint-Yves described it, is government by three Councils, for teaching, for justice and for the economy, beneath a spiritual Authority that is "absolutely disarmed." It is built upward from local liberties, and in France it was to rest on universal suffrage. Against it stands Nimrodism: power without authority, force acting in its own name, whether crowned in a monarchy or uncrowned in a republic.

The history he tells is that of a broken constitution. It begins with a prehistoric world order he calls the Cycle of Ram and the schism that shattered it, a schism over the priesthood of women. It continues through the rise of military empire, the constitution of Moses and the Councils of Israel, the Captivity, Greece and Rome, and the dispersion, and arrives at the Europe of the Peace of Westphalia. The Conclusions turn that history into a program: a reform of France, and a constitution of European peace in three Orders, with Freemasonry seated among the teaching bodies.

Readers in the Gnostic, Martinist and Masonic traditions will find here:

• an extended argument against dualism, in which evil has no substance and the descent of Spirit into matter is no fall;
• the Gnostics of Alexandria counted among the martyred guardians of the Tradition;
• the bread and wine of Melchizedek presented as older than Moses;
• the symbols of the Craft read as the vestiges of a lost science;
• the Unknown Superiors given a new and precise meaning;
• the hidden pontificate that would later become Agarttha, in its earliest form;
• the first diagram of what would become the Archeometer.

Published in 1884, the book answers the antisemitic literature of its decade by name. It holds governments, not peoples, responsible for persecution, and speaks of a restoration in Palestine on a condition entirely its own. At its theological center stands a chapter on Jesus that Saint-Yves wrote and then destroyed, leaving the task of filling the gap to a Jewish writer.

This edition presents the complete and unabridged text, every passage rendered as Saint-Yves wrote it, in standard American English. The Translator's Introduction sets the book in its time. It treats Saint-Yves's sources and his debt to Fabre d'Olivet, his use of the race theories of his century and his explicit rejection of them, his refusal of every secret society, and the later history of the word "Synarchy." More than four thousand notes identify his sources, record his errors, and mark the many places where he proves right. His figures are reproduced in facsimile.