The Lucifer Spore

Prologue

The biologic structure of the sentient brain dictates perceptual interpretation. As a biped with a bifid brain, humans think in terms of dualities, right and wrong, left and right, yin and yang. However, it is important to remember that this is a limitation of consciousness. Our own biosphere has produced animals such as mollusks and segmented arthropods not based on the dualistic model. It is a safe assumption that the universe has produced sentient beings with a wide variety of perceptual interpretations of matter and energy. It remains to be determined if, like humans, sentient aliens will have developed the capacity for trans-egocentric imaginative thought, allowing for interspecies communication and mutual understanding. If not, first contact could be very ugly. We can hope that humanity will be pleasantly surprised.

—Ravi Lakshmi: First Contact: Astrobiological Considerations

Chapter 1

"The relationship is probably no more than a million years old, for the era of human nomadic hunters dates from that time. . . . Whatever we call the human interaction with the mushroom, Stropharia cubensis, it has not been a static relationship, but rather a dynamic one through which we have been bootstrapped to higher and higher cultural levels, and levels of individual self-awareness."

—Terence K. McKenna, Food of the Gods

Circa One Million BCE

The forest was as hungry as the women who disturbed its ancient peace, devouring all but the errant ray of light fortunate enough to escape its ravenous canopy. The women moved through its misted gloom, gleaning the forest floor for sustenance as they chanted in unison. Some worked with infants suckling on downy breasts while others minded bone-thin children stripping the underbrush of berries and shoots. Survival depended on their meager gatherings and each day hunger drove them deeper into the trees farther from the safety of open land. Only when Moon Woman’s belly grew full could they sit upon the grassy hills and watch for the men to return with meat that would ease their hunger pangs.

Root scratched at the earth some distance from her clanswomen, taking care to remain within earshot of the chant. She worked warily. Her eyes darted repeatedly overhead to the tangled branches where dappled shadow cats waited to pounce on the distracted or dawdling. She had no infant to carry and the soil was moist after a night of heavy rain, allowing her to work quickly. She turned over a clod of earth with her sharpened stick, snatched a white grub and slipped it into her mouth, savoring its earthy sweetness.

She resumed her chant and wound her way through the trees, prodding the earth until she came upon a dense stand of trunks cloaked in tangled undergrowth. She squeezed through and emerged in a sunlit clearing of toppled trees in various stages of decay. She squinted and raised a palm to shade her eyes from the blinding sunlight. When her eyes adjusted, she saw the Tree God. It hovered in the midst of the glade with spindly branches covered in smooth, dark bark and bearing twig-like fingers that stretched to the ground. A slit-like mouth hissed breath like a snake and shining moon-eyes bulged from the end of vines that swayed to and fro.

Without warning, the swaying stopped. A moon eye lifted and locked its gaze on Root.

Terrified, she dropped her prodding stick and fell to her knees, pressing her forehead to the ground as women and children did to avoid beatings. She waited, shaking with fear, but nothing happened. She chanced another look, peeking through cords of her matted hair. To her surprise, the Tree God had turned away to resume its strange dance, its branched arms swaying and releasing a white mist from the tips of its twig fingers. She looked to the place where the god worked and saw a patch of sprouting mushrooms

When her breath slowed and her heart stopped drumming, curiosity seized her. She approached the Tree God cautiously, crawling on hands and knees until she was almost beneath its swaying branches. She could see tiny fires flashing under the god’s skin and hear its humming heart as its arms moved over the plot of fresh mushrooms poking from the earth like pale penises. Her people were wary of eating the soft shoots that grew from rot because they sometimes hurt the belly and brought death, but she was starving and these were offered by a god.

She touched the soft shoots. She smelled their musky scent. She picked one and touched it to her tongue and it was earth-sweet like the forest grubs. She bit, chewed, and swallowed as the Tree God hovered nearby with its moon eyes now fixed on her. Her belly cramped and she doubled over, writhing on the ground and moaning as fear of death came over her, but the pain soon subsided and the forest melted into a blur of muddy green like the color of the clan’s drinking pond.

Invisible hands lifted her above the trees. The clearing shrank below her until she floated among the clouds with a view of the vast forest stretching from the hilly grasslands to the smoking mountains which birthed the sun each day. Still higher she rose until the valley vanished and she found herself bathed in a pool of light surrounded by singing spirits. They sang without mouths, without bodies, and yet she felt no fear, because the song filled her with contentment. A one-eyed bird with shining wings appeared over her and then alighted on her arm, pecking once with its sharp beak and leaving a tiny drop of blood. A moment later her eyes grew heavy and she drifted into a deep sleep.

Root awoke to the chattering of her clanswomen. They’d found her lying near the patch of pale mushrooms. The younger women looked at her with curious expressions and the older ones chastised her for laziness.

When she was helped to her feet she realized her visit with the god had lasted most of the day, for the clearing was now in shade. The Tree God was gone but she remembered the strange encounter and cried out, Aiee! The gods have taken me to their sky lodge and given me earth wisdom.

In the following days, Root’s clan huddled together at twilight listening as she retold her story and sang the song the Tree God had taught her. They watched with wonder as she scratched into the earth the strange symbols it had left in her dreams. And though she lacked words to express their meaning, her clan believed she was god-blessed because she had acquired great powers, leading them to the richest hunting grounds and finding plants to heal sickness. All of Root’s children were bright-eyed, quick learners, and made the finest tools. Because of Root’s gift, her clan prospered and grew strong.

They followed her instructions to collect the sacred mushrooms and spread them throughout the forests they roamed. Her clan named her God Speaker and her people worshipped the sacred mushroom, and passed on the story of the Tree of Earth Wisdom to their children. Others of her clan tasted the sacred mushroom, but only the children of Root were gifted with earth wisdom and saw visions of the Tree God’s message. They carved it into bones and painted it on cave walls where it waited for the time when it would be understood.

Chapter 2

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

—Niccolo Machiavelli

1581 CE

Duke Carlo d'Aragona looked with contempt at the half-naked woman whimpering in a nimbus of torchlight. His guards had staked and flogged her in the very cave where she and her followers had been trespassing. He would not tolerate peasants holding pagan rituals on his lands. Keeping the persistent game poachers at bay was difficult enough.

The cave was on the southern end of his vast estate, which gave him sovereign right to it and any secrets it held. Though whipped raw, the woman refused to reveal the meaning of the symbols written on the cave wall or explain why they were of such interest to her and her group of pagan worshippers.

Carlo raised a palm to halt the whipping and then brushed a mote of dust from the sleeve of his jacket embroidered with gold thread and made of the finest Chinese silk, dyed jet black to compliment the ruby-encrusted gold chain and amulet draped about his neck. It marked him as a Bearer of the Chain of the Golden Vine, a descendant of a group of legion officers appointed as governors or prefects throughout the Roman Empire, which had evolved into an oligarchy of wealth-laden families known as Aurum Orbis, the Golden Circle.

They had maintained power for centuries, surviving history’s vicissitudes, by recognizing nascent threats and nipping them in the bud. The key to their perpetual success was vigilance, eliminating threats or transforming them into sources of profit. The Brotherhood locked shields when a member was threatened, thwarting the enemy in the spirit of their legionnaire forefathers. Trouble was always popping up where least expected and to Carlo, these pagans and the mysterious symbols they worshipped had the feel of trouble. Christianity had started under similar circumstances, but they had successfully corrupted that cult with appropriate manipulations and now Aurum Orbis counted popes among its servants.

A guard stepped aside as Duke Carlo advanced to the cave wall to inspect the pagan symbols. He touched a finger to the markings as he scanned them with his dark eyes. One wall was covered in markings, arranged in multiple blocks of twenty-five symbols. He could see there had been repeated applications over a great span of time. The oldest were faintly scratched into the stone while later ones had been painted with pigments. The symbols reminded him of the characters brushed onto the scrolls that his spice traders had brought from China, but these were different and he wanted to know their meaning.

The woman moaned. At some point she had stopped screaming in response to the lashes; now it seemed the brief respite had restored her sense of pain.

Carlo turned to her and demanded, Woman, tell me what language this is.

Garbled moans came from her dust-encrusted lips.

Turn her over and give her water, Carlo commanded.

Two guards untied the woman’s bonds, lifted her by her arms, and leaned her against the cave wall. She screamed in agony when her bloodied back met the rough stone. When her screams subsided, another guard opened a water bladder and pressed it against her lips. She coughed and spluttered, swallowing a small portion while the greater part spilled from her chin to drip on her bared breasts. Her eyes, obscured by bedraggled strands of gray-streaked hair, rolled upward to meet the duke’s gaze.

What language is this? he asked again.

The woman coughed, then answered, It is the language of the gods.

You speak heresy, woman. I should offer you and your followers to the Inquisitors. They are far less merciful than I.

The woman smiled derisively, flashing remnants of broken teeth from her grime-smeared face.

The gold brocade on Carlo’s jacket sleeves reflected the firelight as he turned and started to pace, his tall leather riding boots raising tiny clouds of glowing dust with each impatient step. He absently stroked his well-trimmed moustache which formed the pedestal of his aquiline nose. I am a man of mercy. Tell me what these symbols mean and I will permit you to live.

The woman wrapped her arms around her torso to cover her nakedness. I do not know.

Carlo stopped pacing, turned his dark eyes on her, and said, You insolent peasant. Do you think me a fool? Why would you and your pagan followers worship words that mean nothing to you?

They do have meaning.

Then tell me what they mean!

The woman winced in pain, her eyes widening with the wild intensity of a prophet. I will tell you this, My Duke. It is a sacred message from the gods. They gave us the gift of the holy mushroom, and when the gods return from the sky they will teach us the meaning of their message. When that day comes you and your kind will be swept from this world forever.

Confused and angered by the woman’s defiant words, the duke shook his head in disgust and turned to the captain of his guard. She’s yours. He stormed out of the cave.

Troubled by the woman’s words, Duke Carlo decided that prudence would be the best course. He ordered his guards to execute all pagans known to frequent the cave and then he recorded the encounter for the archives of the Golden Circle. His record included a detailed transcription of the cave symbols. He also confiscated the sack of dried mushrooms found on the woman when she was captured.

When he directed a tower guard to taste one of them, the man grew ill at first, then started to laugh and dance before leaping from the castle wall. His parting words were, You are more a fool than I, My Duke.

The episode added to the duke’s concern. He added a comment to the archive, Beware of mushroom worshippers and their gods from the sky.

Chapter 3

In the early 21st century, molecular biologists began to realize that the ninety percent of the human genome thought to be ‘junk’ DNA might in fact be functional. It was not until the discovery of Luma that all became clear.

—Dwinion El-Sim, The Luma Revolution

The Jewel of Mumbai

Ice needles attacked Ravi Lakshmi’s exposed cheeks like swarms of voracious insects. Hunkered against a makeshift windbreak, he tightened the hood of his parka and adjusted his goggles as his crew replaced yet another broken ice core drill head.

He and his crew worked on a wind-exposed hill overlooking what served as his summer residence, a distant cluster of snow-interred prefabricated huts dwarfed by an infinite expanse of frozen gray and white. Despite the cold, there was beauty here, the cruel, uninviting kind. In the months since arriving in Antarctica, the monotonous frozen landscape assailed him each day. In a desperate search for variety, he had come to discern a hundred shades of gray and white with as many hues of blue. These were best appreciated in morning and evening light, which framed the short summer nights; by midday the intense white was blinding and painful without eye protection.

But he was soon to escape this frozen incarceration. The ice-laden wind was a reminder that the Antarctic summer was ending and his team would soon have to pull up stakes and leave, or freeze to death.

Of the men and women that comprised his research team, Ravi was the most out of his element. There was no greater contrast to Antarctica than his native southern India. He longed for Mumbai’s stifling heat after months of ice and snow. He missed its steaming streets with their explosion of colors, cacophony of sound, myriad odors, and seething flow of humanity. Antarctica was sensory deprivation wrapped in sterile, frozen boredom.

He might have cracked without his work to distract him. As lead astrobiologist for Project Nahklite, he was tasked with finding and analyzing meteorite fragments for evidence of extraterrestrial life. He had named his project after the group of meteors, called Nahklites, discovered on Earth as far back as 1911 and shown to have arrived from Mars.

He would not have been in this frozen waste if it were not for a social engineering experiment instituted in the slums of blistering Mumbai. The central government had installed public computers with wireless Internet access as a means to improve the opportunities of slum children. Ravi was tucked among the crowd of rag-clad, bony children watching wide-eyed as government technicians installed the devices, each encased in a tamper-resistant kiosk covered by a colorful umbrella roof. The street urchins cheered with delight when the display monitor came to life. Most thought the devices were televisions and waited for a program to begin, but they were soon disappointed. Then, typical of ill-conceived government projects, there was little training as to how to use them.

Ravi watched the government technician demonstrate how to use the touch screen, but the man took no questions, just packed his gear and departed. The children jostled and fought to get an opportunity to play with the machines after the technician left. A pecking order quickly developed with the older, aggressive children taking hegemony. In time, the bullies became bored and turned their attention to more familiar pursuits, giving the opportunity for a hidden jewel in the slums of Mumbai to be revealed.

Ravi took to the computer like a duck to water. He had mastered the ability to access and search the Internet in the first hour. He managed to key in words that he knew and read the results of searches, though his education was limited. He soon became a fixture at the computer kiosk, drinking in knowledge with an insatiable thirst. Sometimes a local bully would drive him away, but he would return to his post, bruised but determined.

The next turning point came when he learned how to set up an electronic mail account. He had so many questions and now had a means to answer them. He found teachers among the faculty of schools and universities who addressed his questions about mathematics, physics, biology, and astronomy. One professor, Dr. Chandron, at the Mumbai University was obliging and the two of them carried on prolonged scientific and philosophical exchanges. When the professor discovered that Ravi was a ten-year-old boy living in the Bhandup slum, he was at first skeptical, but on the slim chance that he had discovered a genius, he sent a message requesting Ravi meet him and discuss the possibility of attending university.

Ravi read the message but hesitated to reply; he was street smart enough to know about child molesters yet he sensed this could be his chance to escape the slums. He considered the offer for two days before concluding that it would be safe to arrange a meeting in a public place and run away if there was trouble. When he returned to the computer kiosk to send his message, he found it smashed and stripped of its equipment. It was a miracle it had lasted as long as it had. He searched the slums looking for other kiosks, but they all had been vandalized or stolen. His one chance was to try another approach.

He begged a few rupees, put on his one pair of sandals and took a bus southwest to better parts of the city. He came to a business district that catered to the middle classes but most importantly, people with computers and smart phones. He spotted several young men at a café, sipping expensive drinks while they stared into the displays of their wireless devices. Most shooed him away as if he were mangy dog when he approached. One was amused enough to permit him to send a message. Ravi kept his message simple, knowing that he would not get another opportunity.

Dear Professor,

I would very much like to meet you. This may be my last opportunity to send a message. Meet me at the Tiger Café on Lal Bahadur Shastri Road next Tuesday at one o’clock. I hope that you can make this time.

Ravi Lakshmi

That Tuesday, Professor Chandron discovered a slum-born genius.

Twelve years later, Ravi huddled with his back against a windbreak fifty kilometers from the South Pole, the kind of place where anyone foolish enough to become an astrobiologist might be exiled. Ravi’s fellow students had often chided him, You’re supposed to be the genius on campus. Don’t you think it’s a bit stupid to study biology that’s light years beyond reach? You might as well study fairies.

Despite persistent collegial discouragement, Ravi obtained his doctorate degree by age eighteen and had written the sentinel treatise in the field of astrobiology entitled First Contact: Astrobiological Considerations; it was now considered standard reading among a small but devoted circle of astrobiologists. The book detailed the scientific and philosophic exploration of potential factors to be considered in the event of contact with extraterrestrial life forms. It also included the Lakshmi Evidentiary Encounter Scale, or LEES, which defined a progressive five-level system of extraterrestrial encounters based on physical evidence.

Ravi had dedicated his career to seeking evidence of extraterrestrial life. He would never travel to other worlds, but perhaps extraterrestrial life had come to Earth, carried across thousands of light years on fragments of rock from life-bearing worlds shattered by cosmic cataclysms. Ravi had done the math and it was possible; the probability factor was a small, but reasonable. Millions of meteorites had collided with the Earth over millions of years and many of them must have fallen in the planet’s deep freeze, Antarctica. There, hot rocks would have been rapidly cooled and locked in ice, waiting for Ravi to retrieve them.

There should be thousands of meteorite fragments for the picking is what he told NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, which had agreed to fund his expedition. He failed to tell them about his other calculation: The probability of finding one was infinitesimal.

That much smaller number did not concern Ravi too much at the time of grant submission, because he felt he had something more valuable than an imposing intellect: luck and good instincts. Both had lifted him from the slums of Mumbai. At the moment, the latter told him that perhaps he had run out of the former. The Antarctic summer was ending and the hundreds of ice cores retrieved so far had yielded nothing but broken drills.

I think we got it fixed! someone yelled. Concealed by thick parkas and dark goggles it was impossible to tell who it was.

Ravi walked over to the drill hole. Any idea what happened to it?

Seth Williams, the lead geologist who had been reluctantly conscripted to be drilling engineer, answered sarcastically, Perhaps it hit something too hard to cut. Bits of ice shed from his beard like a miniature blizzard as he spoke.

Ravi had learned to be judicious with his optimism after several previous encounters with hard objects. Do you think we hit bedrock?

Well, after doing this for three months, I doubt it’s a giant meteorite, Seth answered. What do you want to do? Shall we move to another site? That would be my professional recommendation.

Ravi looked at the ruined cutting drill head, friction hot and still steaming in the snow where it had been cast off while its replacement was being fitted. He hated thinking of the thousands of dollars each of those broken drills had cost. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have taken Seth’s advice and moved the rig to a safer spot, but Ravi was feeling defiant this morning. No, just move a couple of meters over and try again.

Okay, it’s your grant money. Don’t blame me when we break our last drill head. Seth flashed a toothy smile wreathed in his frosted beard.

Seth’s abuse, though in jest, was testing Ravi’s patience and he was tired of standing in the weather. He ignored the mocking commentary. I’m going back to camp to look over yesterday’s core data. Give me a progress report at the lunch break.

As he walked away the icy wind intensified and the drill motor started up with a hideous screech; it sounded more animal than mechanical. Ravi shivered, reminded of a scream he had once heard in a Mumbai alley.

Chapter 4

. . . [t]he last thing humanity needs is paradise. Trouble and travail have always been the engines of human progress.

—The Tenets, by Anonymous

Cassandra’s Child

Manisha Roy finished the Salute to the Sun as the last chords of a Hindu raga faded into silence. It was a morning ritual she had performed every day since her truce with the beast. Yoga and music were not just hobbies, they were vital to lulling the beast asleep, allowing her temporary respite from the incessant hunger gnawing at the roots of her sanity.

The beast gorged on information, sights, sounds, and smells. It wolfed down details of people and events, past and present, great and insignificant, all converging into a flood of data which the beast assembled into conclusions, judgments, extrapolations, and predictions. At times, the shear mass of information accreted into an experiential black hole, distorting her sense of time and causing the world to move in slow motion. It was a cursed gift paid for with loneliness and migraine headaches.

It had revealed itself at Christmas when she was six years old. She had been taken to a department store filled with a wondrous array of holiday displays and dioramas, delighting in the experience as any child, but as they left the building, she commented, Too bad this will all burn down soon. A week later the devastating blaze was reported on every news network.

More disturbing were her predictions of death. A pretty, green-eyed girl with dark wavy hair would inform complete strangers that they were going to die. Most responded with nervous laughter, glaring at her parents and awaiting some disciplinary action. Her embarrassed Indian immigrant parents complied. She was chastised and made to feel she was a freak, so she caged her beast. That was when the migraines began. She was prescribed a virtual pharmacopoeia of medications with no effect.

She came to terms with her beast in college, permitting it to feed each day if it allowed her temporary refuge in yoga and music. Despite the truce, the college environment proved too strenuous, not academically, but psychologically. She was an attractive woman and hormone-oozing studs were often coming on to her. She had natural human urges and longed for human contact or even a single friend with whom she could share her feelings, but her attempts at socialization were failures. She couldn’t be with another person without the beast clawing out ulterior motives, deceptions, and weaknesses. She dropped out of college after a year and moved to the opposite coast, adopting a reclusive lifestyle with cynicism and loneliness as her companions.

She lived in a self-made hermitage with minimal sensory stimulation. Her modest seaside bungalow could be best described as Spartan neo-utilitarian. Her yoga practice room doubled as her bedroom, consisting of a simple futon on a clear white oak floor, enclosed by unadorned walls. The bedroom entrance in the west wall was covered by a plain muslin cloth. The north and south walls were covered with mirrors which concealed doors to a bathroom and walk-in closet; the east wall was a full-length window with a view of the Atlantic Ocean. She had chosen a beach home after discovering the ocean horizon calmed her beast. Natural scenery lacked the hidden human intent that it hunted.

There, she lived in seclusion, maintaining her tenuous pact with the beast. Sometimes it provided immediate flashes of insight, but more often after lying for hours in the dark, battling insomnia, thousands of pieces of disparate information would assemble into a prediction. She was not a psychic. Her beast collected details and processed data, seeing relationships and sensing the flow of events, like an eagle soaring above a field of causality.

Her abilities allowed for a substantial source of income, the stock market being her primary cash fountain. But in order to avoid drawing attention, she always sold before a stock’s value peaked and orchestrated losses to maximize tax benefits. She also created a consulting firm under the name Roy Analytics: Outcome and Risk Assessment. The work was steady and she was independent enough to be choosy about her jobs. When there were no acceptable clients, she used the beast to research subjects of her personal interest.

Manisha stored her yoga mat, showered, dressed, and then broke her fast in her kitchen-dining room with its white-on-white décor. She ate a simple meal of yogurt, fruit, and granola, chased by a glass of juice. She cleaned her dishes and then went to her home office, crossing her living room on route. On rare occasion she was forced to entertain a relative so she fitted her living room with basic concessions of normalcy, a couch, tables, easy chair, the odd knickknack, and a few photographs of family members. She spent very little time in her living room and passed through it, ignoring the photos of her parents who had disowned her. Those memories were too painful.

Like her bedroom, her office was sparsely furnished, but in contrast, it was kept dark, bathed in dim illumination from a glowing display monitor. Her computer was still on after her previous day’s work while nearby her mobile pad computer gathered dust since she was not mobile.

Manisha sat on an ergonomic chair, constructed by a company she had invested in after perusing government data regarding the absenteeism of office workers due to back pain. A year later, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration required use of ergonomic chairs in government offices and Manisha’s stock increased ten-fold in value. She sold when it peaked, knowing it would collapse in another year due to a Chinese competitor.

She started her day by deleting email, reading just a fraction of her messages. Subject and sender lines were all the information she could tolerate. There were invitations to lecture or requests to provide consultant services. She accepted consulting jobs on her terms and never traveled to lecture. At times, she prepared prepackaged audio presentations using voice-altering software to conceal her identity. Traveling was too painful and it was better that clients were ignorant of her identity. Most imagined Roy Analytics was a company operated by a retired socioeconomics professor rather than a twenty-three-year-old college drop out. Her most recent project was a treatise that projected government collapses over the next fifty years entitled Nations with Untenable Societal Gaps. It was not a page-turner.

Okay, let’s do this, she whispered as she started marking messages for death. The slaughter had become rhythmic until she reached a subject line that caused her to stop.

Subject: You’ve got our attention

Sender: Luxoria Inc.

The subject line intrigued her. She opened the message and read, expecting another consultation request.

Congratulations on your latest treatise. Your projections are almost perfect. We think you would be a great addition to our little group of Cassandras. If interested, respond with a simple yes. Otherwise, no response is self-explanatory.

There was no signatory, but more disturbing to her were the words, almost perfect. She felt a mix of anger and curiosity as well as surprise that anyone had the patience to read, let alone critique her treatise. Who could possibly be in a position to judge her analysis? The message mentioned Cassandras, referring to the Trojan prophetess whose warning to beware of Greeks bearing gifts was ignored, resulting in the fall of Troy. It was obvious that Luxoria Inc. was attempting to pass itself off as a group of self-appointed futurists or intuitives, but why so enigmatic? A quick Internet search revealed no such organization.

Manisha opened her mind, letting her beast feed on every aspect of the brief message and process the implications. No signatory indicated a desire for secrecy. Little group meant a limited assemblage of individuals, a club, or private society. Concern with social projections suggested political or financial motivation. The name Luxoria Inc. was unclear. Manisha ticked off possibilities. Luxor was an ancient Egyptian city. Lux was Latin word for light. The lux was a unit for luminance. Manisha closed her eyes for moment and then said aloud, Illuminati, and laughed.

The Illuminati were a putative secret society founded by Enlightenment