Brotherhood of the Snake
The Brotherhood of the Snake — also called the Brotherhood of the Serpent — is an alleged ancient secret society claimed by researcher William Bramley in The Gods of Eden to have been founded in prehistoric Mesopotamia by an extraterrestrial being named Ea (also known as Enki), with the original purpose of imparting spiritual knowledge and opposing the enslavement of humanity. According to Bramley's thesis, the Brotherhood was subsequently defeated and corrupted by its original enemies — the Custodians, his term for the extraterrestrial beings who created humanity as a slave labor force — and became the hidden organizational backbone behind warfare, plague, religious distortion, and modern secret societies including Freemasonry.
The Custodians and the slave race
Bramley's framework begins with the Sumerian creation accounts, which he reads as describing a literal extraterrestrial civilization — the Custodians — that colonized Earth and genetically engineered Homo sapiens as a work race to perform mining and labor. The chief architect of humanity in this account is the Custodial prince Ea (Enki), son of a Custodial king, whose title "EN.KI" meant "lord of Earth." Bramley argues that the Custodians' overriding goal was to maintain humanity in permanent spiritual ignorance and physical toil, blocking access to two categories of knowledge symbolized in the Garden of Eden story in the Bible as the "tree of knowledge of good and evil" (ethics and justice) and the "tree of life" (spiritual immortality). Mesopotamian tablets describe deliberate Custodial population-control measures including induced famine, disease, and the Great Flood, which Bramley links to the Biblical narrative of Noah and the Great Flood. The Anunnaki connection to this framework is also traced in Jim Marrs's Rule by Secrecy, which draws on Zecharia Sitchin's translations to describe Enki and Enlil as rival half-brothers running the Earth colony, with Enki covertly assisting humans against Enlil's genocidal directives.
Origins and founding
The snake symbol in ancient cultures, Bramley argues, carried two distinct meanings: it identified the Custodial god Ea, and it identified the Brotherhood organization with which Ea was associated. Pre-Biblical Mesopotamian art depicts a snake coiled around a tree — later replicated in the Eden story — with the half-moon symbol of Ea to one side and the planet symbol of his father Anu to the other, indicating both figures were linked to the Brotherhood's teachings. The Brotherhood's name may derive from Ea's first home on Earth being built near a "Snake Marsh," or alternatively from the Biblical Hebrew word for snake — nahash — which derives from the root NHSH, meaning "to decipher, to find out."
In its original form, the Brotherhood practiced a step-by-step program of spiritual education that was scientific rather than mystical, with students advancing through levels under oaths of secrecy and with access to genuine knowledge of spiritual nature and ethical principles.
Defeat, corruption, and the Mystery Schools
Ancient Egyptian and Biblical texts record the Brotherhood's defeat by the dominant Custodial faction. The Egyptian Book of the Dead celebrates the victory over the "Serpent," whose followers — called the "Sons of Revolt" — had been dedicated to overthrowing the ruling Custodial gods and restoring the uncorrupted Brotherhood's dominance. Following this defeat, the Brotherhood was reabsorbed under Custodial control and transformed from a liberatory organization into an instrument of spiritual suppression. Ea, its founder, was systematically villainized — his title changed from "Prince of Earth" to "Prince of Darkness," and he was relabeled Satan, the Devil, and Lord of Darkness — to ensure no widespread human following could ever again coalesce around him.
In ancient Egypt, the corrupted Brotherhood organized its teachings into the Mystery Schools, first institutionalized under Pharaoh Cheops (Khufu). The Schools admitted only pharaohs, priests, and selected initiates, forbidding physical recording of advanced teachings to ensure oral transmission would degrade them over time. Under Thutmose III around 1450 B.C., the Brotherhood was transformed into a completely closed order, with rules and regulations that Bramley claims are still used by some Brotherhood organizations today. His successor Akhnaton converted the remaining spiritual teachings into incomprehensible mystical symbols and promoted monotheism — a Brotherhood doctrine which, Bramley argues, hid the Custodians' own nature behind a fictional "one-only God."
Expansion and the masons' guilds
The Brotherhood survived the collapse of ancient Egypt by sending missionaries and conquerors throughout the civilized world, establishing branches and offshoots including early Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. Within Egypt, the Brotherhood sponsored elite guilds of engineers and masons — the forerunners of Freemasonry. Papyri discovered by archaeologist Flinders Petrie in 1888–1889 in the Libyan desert describe a guild holding secret meetings around 2000 B.C. with organizational duties — including "Warden" and "Master" roles — closely resembling those of modern Freemasonry. The Egyptian Book of the Dead refers to one Custodial god as "Grand Master of the craftsmen" — a title still used by Brotherhood organizations — and credits him with initiating people into the higher degrees of mystical Brotherhood teachings.
The ceremonial apron — worn by Freemasons and earlier by ancient Egyptian priests — is traced by Bramley to iconography depicting Custodial "gods" wearing identical aprons in Egyptian hieroglyphics, providing what he calls a "stunning visual link" between the extraterrestrial rulers and the Brotherhood network. White lambskin aprons — now the signature regalia of Freemasonry — were first introduced around 2200 B.C. by the Melchizedek Priesthood, itself an elite Brotherhood branch.
Plagues and UFO activity
A central and controversial element of Bramley's thesis is that the Brotherhood's Custodial controllers have periodically deployed biological weapons against the human population. Mesopotamian tablets describe Custodial directives to release "disease, sickness, plague and pestilence" against humanity when its numbers grew too large. Bramley extends this argument to the Black Death of the 14th century, arguing that the bubonic plague was spread by Custodial aircraft releasing germ-laden aerosols — described in contemporary European sources as foul-smelling "mists" that appeared after bright lights in the sky. He cites the historian Johannes Nohl's 1926 compilation of plague accounts, which documented that "moist pestilential fogs" preceded the epidemic "throughout its whole course," and individual accounts of strange figures with "scythe-like" instruments spraying aerosols over fields immediately before outbreaks. A similar pattern is identified in the Plague of Justinian (540–592 A.D.), where witnesses described unusual aerial phenomena preceding outbreaks.
Connection to Freemasonry and modern secret societies
Bramley traces the organizational lineage from the ancient Brotherhood through the medieval craft guilds to Freemasonry, which he describes as "a major Brotherhood offshoot that would take on great political importance." He further identifies the Rosicrucians, Knights Templar, the Illuminati (which he distinguishes from Adam Weishaupt's 18th-century Bavarian organization), Hinduism, and the major monotheistic religions as all being Brotherhood network branches or offshoots. The Brotherhood's cross-shaped temple at El Amarna is offered as an origin point for the Christian cross symbol, while the priestly vestments of the Egyptian Brotherhood temple — broad-sleeved gowns, cord-at-loin outfits, and the clerical tonsure — were adopted by Christian monks and friars.
Marrs, drawing on Bramley's work, identifies the same underlying Brotherhood network — variously called the New World Order, the Illuminati, or the "Secret Brotherhood" — as the force still directing international political and financial affairs, and notes that multiple researchers describe its ultimate controllers as non-human "prison wardens" or "Custodians." Marrs also cites Bramley specifically in connection with Saint-Germain's role as a link between European wars, the Brotherhood's deeper levels, and the German princes of Hesse — a primary center of Brotherhood activity in medieval and early modern Europe.
Warfare as a Custodial instrument
Bramley argues that once the corrupted Brotherhood became the Custodians' primary organizational instrument on Earth, its network of religious and fraternal institutions became the channel through which large-scale wars could be "secretly and continuously generated" by the Custodial society — fulfilling the Tower of Babel directive of keeping humanity divided and absorbed in physical survival rather than spiritual development. Wars, in this model, also serve the Custodial purpose established in the Adam and Eve story: by absorbing large-scale resources while offering nothing to enhance life, they ensure that physical survival remains an all-consuming preoccupation that leaves no capacity for spiritual recovery.
The reform faction
Throughout his account Bramley acknowledges that sincere reformers periodically attempted to restore the Brotherhood to its original liberatory purpose. The original "Sons of Revolt" first rebelled against the corrupted Brotherhood when it began sending conquerors out of Egypt, before eventually being reabsorbed. By the early 17th century, Bramley identifies a "maverick influence" in the Rosicrucian organization that promoted individual spiritual recovery and attempted a more scientific approach to spiritual phenomena, though he concludes that modern Rosicrucianism still contains sufficient Custodial elements to prevent adherents from achieving full spiritual rehabilitation.
Modern researchers
William Cooper, in his classic recorded lectures, directly cited the Brotherhood of the Snake as the central organizational thread running through Freemasonry and its predecessor Mystery Schools, arguing that the network's goal of global domination had been continuously pursued for millennia under changing institutional names. David Icke has linked the Brotherhood's Mesopotamian origins to the Rothschild banking dynasty and the creation of the Bavarian Illuminati in 1776, arguing that Jacob Frank, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, and Adam Weishaupt (see also Illuminati) were coordinated agents of the same ancient network operating under a Sabbatean-Luciferian framework.
Jorjani on Bramley
Jason Jorjani, in a 2025 American Alchemy interview, described Bramley's Gods of Eden as "absolutely indispensable," noting that Bramley "started out as a very conventional researcher trying to understand war profiteering" and "wanted to understand who was behind engineering all these wars throughout history" — only to discover a pattern of UFO sightings and alien intervention underlying the events he was investigating. Jorjani highlighted Bramley's description of Black Plague-era entities — hooded figures carrying spray devices that became the basis for the Grim Reaper iconography — who emerged from luminous aerial objects and delivered biological agents door to door, with plague outbreaks following their visits; Jorjani argued the plague's consequence was "a mass retreat back into religious fundamentalism" that set back European scientific development by centuries. In a separate interview with Danny Jones, Jorjani reiterated Bramley's conclusion that "the elites in various societies that are engineering wars and pursuing a policy of divide and conquer for control over large populations on this planet seem to all be involved with these entities" — linking Sumerian Anunnaki, Greek Olympian gods, and the Biblical Elohim as different cultural names for the same non-human controllers.