by Mark Booth
It was always intended that the Sun god would separate from the earth… for a while.
OF COURSE NO ARTEFACTS HAVE SURVIVED from the time when gods and proto-humans lived in plant form, but there is at least a reliable record of such artefacts.
Herodotus, the Greek writer of the fifth century BC is sometimes called the father of history, because he was the first to try to research and piece together a coherent and objective account of history.
In approximately 485 BC Herodotus visited Memphis in Egypt. There in vast underground vaults, he was shown rows of statues of former kings stretching back as far as the eye could see into almost unimaginably distant times. Walking with the priests along the rows, he came to a series of 345 colossal wooden carvings of beings who had reigned before Menes, their first human king. These beings, said the priests, were ‘born one from the other’, that is to say without need of a sexual partner, by the plant-like method of parthenogenesis. Each carrying a plaque giving name, history and annals, the wooden monuments were a record of a long lost era of the vegetable life of humankind.
Mandrake men in nineteenth century engraving. Mandrake roots have always played a prominent part in esoteric lore because their shapes often seem to represent a vegetable striving towards the human form. Might the colossi Herodotus saw have looked something like this?
4. LUCIFER, THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD
The Apple of Desire • A War in Heaven • The Secrets of the Days of the Week
CREATION WAS RE-ENACTED IN THE Mystery schools, a drama in three acts.
The first act dramatized Saturn’s oppression of Mother Earth. This was called the Age of Saturn.
The second act dramatized the birth of the Sun and his protection of Mother Earth. This, the paradise time of the flower people, was remembered as the Age of the Sun.
During the re-enactment of these great events the candidate for initiation found himself in the middle of what was partly a play with special effects, and partly a séance. In an altered state, perhaps drugged and with little ability to distance himself from events, the candidate was guided by the priests on a shaman-like journey through the spirit worlds. Drama as we know it today would eventually move out of the Greek Mystery centres to become public performances, but in the early days of the Mystery schools at least, candidates would never have seen anything like this before.
We now come to the third act, the subject of this chapter. At the start of it, there is the momentous event we alluded to at the end of the last chapter. Earth and sun separate. From now on the sun’s life-giving rays, rather than illuminating it from inside, shine down upon the earth from the sky. As a result the earth cools and becomes denser. It becomes less gaseous and more liquid. It shrinks and the whole of its watery surface is covered by Adam and Eve and their flowery, gently fluttering progeny.
Suddenly, at the climax of the third act, the candidate for initiation into the Mystery school watching this drama would have caught a whiff of sulphur, maybe even been half-blinded by a flash like lightning, as the peaceful pastoral scene was invaded by a glistening alien life-form, horrifyingly livid and horned. The picture that was being presented to his imagination was of a snake seemingly endlessly long, millions of miles of it weaving its way into the cosmos, a snake with a perverse kind of beauty. ‘Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God,’ says Ezekiel 28:13, ‘every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald and carbuncle and gold.’
The candidate for initiation would have watched with horror as it coiled itself ever more tightly around Adam’s vegetable trunk. He would have understood that what he was watching was the series of events by which life on earth moved painfully to the next stage of evolution. Because the story of the serpent entwined around the tree contains the clearest possible image of the earth’s transition from vegetable to animal life.
Since the eighteenth century when a matter-before-mind world-view began to take over from the ancient, mind-before-matter world-view, the Church has tried to reconcile the Genesis account of creation with the findings of science. This has been a doomed enterprise because it is based on a modern, anachronistic reading of Genesis.
Genesis does not consider evolution objectively as a modern scientist does, piecing together bits of geological, anthropological and archaeological evidence impartially and objectively evaluated. The story of Genesis is a subjective account of the way humanity evolved, what it felt like. In other words the story of the entwining of snake and tree is a picture of the formation of the spine and central nervous system characteristic of animals as it has been retained in the human collective subconscious.
Again and again we will see that the esoteric account is not necessarily inconsistent with the scientific one. As we suggested by the perspected picture, it views the same facts from a very different point of view.
WE SAW IN THE LAST CHAPTER HOW MATTER had in a sense prepared the ground in which vegetable life could be born. Now vegetable life as it were formed a cradle into which animal life could be born. To put it another way, vegetable life formed a seed bed into which the seeds of animal life fell.
This is the beginning of the momentous episode in history called the Fall.
The candidate for initiation would be made to feel the terrible sense of crisis and danger involved in the Fall in a quite literal way. Suddenly and as if impelled by an earth tremor, he found himself falling down into a black hole, pitched into what he immediately discovered to be a snake pit. In the esoteric tradition the rough-hewn chamber that lies underneath the Great Pyramid at Gizah, known as the Chamber of Ordeal, performed just this function. Recent excavations at Baia in Italy, where a system of caves, part natural and part man-made were believed by the Romans to be the actual entrance to the Underworld, have actually revealed the site of a trap door which would have flung the candidate for initiation down into the snake pit below.
The candidate experienced for himself how Lucifer and his legions infested the whole earth with a plague of glistening serpents. He saw how, according to the secret history, the whole earth had once begun to seethe with primitive animal life. He saw, too, how desire tormented the very ground, making it heave, and he realized traces of this torment could be seen in expressive rock formations.
Adam, Eve and the serpent by Masaccio.
Renaissance engraving of the tree in the Garden of Eden as a skeleton, after Sebald Beharne.
But why should the translation from vegetable to animal life be marked by such torment? The account of the catastrophe in Genesis certainly emphasizes this tormented aspect in some of the most sonorous phrases on the Old Testament: ‘Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children… And unto Adam He said… cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.’ It seems that as a result of the Fall, humans have to suffer, to strive, and to die — but why?
Wrapped up in this ancient language are more truths modern science would recognize. Plants reproduce by a method called parthenogenesis. A part of the plant falls off and grows into a new plant. This new plant is in a sense a continuation of the old one, which therefore — in a sense — does not die. The evolution of animal life and its characteristic method of reproduction — sex — brought death with it. As soon as hunger and desire were felt so too were dissatisfaction, frustration, sorrow and fear.
Loki, the Norse equivalent to Lucifer, is usually portrayed as a beautiful and fiery god but also evil, quick-witted and cunning. Ninteenth-century illustration by R. Savage
WHO IS IT WHO TEMPTS EVE? WHO IS the serpent who inflames the world with desire?
We probably all feel we know the answer to this question — but naively. The problem is that those in charge of our spiritual development have kept us at a nursery level of understanding.
We began to see in the last chap
ter how the Church has covered up its astronomical roots, how the beginning of Genesis contains hidden within it stories of the same gods of the planets we know from other, more ‘primitive’ religions — the god Saturn, the Earth goddess and the Sun god. As we now move further into the Genesis account of history we can see again how this covering up of astronomical roots, the radical monotheism of the modern Church, can stop us from understanding clearly what the ancient text is trying to tell us.
Most people would naturally assume that Christianity allows the existence of only one Devil — the Devil — in other words that Satan and Lucifer are the same entity.
In fact we need only a quick, fresh look at the texts to see that the authors of the Bible intended something quite different. Again, this is something biblical scholars accept, but which hasn’t filtered down to congregations.
We have seen that Satan, the Dark Lord, the agent of materialism, is to be identified with the god of the planet Saturn in Greek and Roman mythology. Is Lucifer, the snake, the tempter who inflames humanity with animal desire also to be identified with Saturn — or perhaps with a different planet?
There is a vast, erudite body of literature comparing biblical texts to older and contemporary texts from neighbouring cultures, which shows that the two main representatives of evil in the Bible, Satan and Lucifer, are not the same entity. Fortunately we do not need to immerse ourselves in this literature, because there is a quite explicit statement in the Bible itself: Isaiah 14.12, ‘How thou art fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning.’
The Morning Star is, of course, Venus. The Bible, therefore, identifies Lucifer with the planet Venus.
It might at first seem counter-intuitive to equate the goddess of Venus in Greece and Rome — Aphrodite to the Greeks — with Lucifer in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Venus/Aphrodite is female and seems more life-enhancing. But in reality there are key points of similarity.
Both Lucifer and Venus/Aphrodite are bound up with animal desire and sexuality.
The correlation between Lucifer and Venus can also be seen in the mythology of the Americas, where he appears in the figure of the horned and feathered snake god Quetzal Coatl.
The snake sometimes found coiled round the body of the goddess was called ‘the minister of the goddess’ by the Greeks.
The apple is the fruit associated with both. Lucifer tempts Eve with an apple and Paris hands Venus an apple in a gesture that precipitates the abduction of Helen and the Great War of the ancient world. The apple is universally the fruit of Venus because if you slice an apple in two, the path that Venus traces in the sky over a forty-year period is a five-pointed star, pinpointed by the position of the pips.
Lucifer and Venus are also ambiguous figures. Lucifer is evil, but he is a necessary evil. Without Lucifer’s intervention, proto-humanity would not have evolved beyond a vegetative form of life. As a result of Lucifer’s intervention in history we are animated, both in the sense that we can move about the surface of the planet and also in the sense that we are moved by desire. An animal has a conscious awareness of itself as a distinct entity that is denied to plants. To say that Adam and Eve ‘knew they were naked’ is to say that they became aware that they had bodies.
Many beautiful representations of Venus have come down to us from the ancient world, but there were terrifying representations too. Behind the image of a woman of matchless beauty lurked the terrifying serpent woman.
IN ORDER TO DELVE DEEPER INTO THIS ambiguity and to understand better the next great event in the secret history of the world, we now turn to an early German version of Venus/Lucifer tradition which appeared in medieval poetry and would enter the mainstream of world literature when it was taken up and adapted by Wolfram von Eschenbach in Parzifal.
See! Lucifer, there he is!
If there are still master-priests
Then you know well that I am saying the truth.
Saint Michael saw God’s anger…
He took Lucifer’s crown from his head
In such a way that the stone jumped out of it
Which on earth became Parsifal’s stone.
Tradition tells us that as Lucifer fell a great emerald dropped from his forehead. This signals that humanity would increasingly suffer a loss of vision in the Third Eye, the brow chakra.
These small Greek statues capture something of the joy the Greeks took in the pleasures of desire, their joy in the material world. In Greek creation stories the birth of Venus is brought about by an act of rebellion by Saturn, who takes his sickle and slices at the testicles of Uranos, the Sky god, castrating him. As the sperm of Uranos falls into the sea, the beautiful goddess Venus springs into being, fully formed, and floats ashore on a sea shell. The ancients believed that shells were precipitated out of water, just as matter is precipitated out of spirit, hence their symbolizing emanation from the cosmic mind, both here and in the iconography of St James of Compostela.
While the result of the influence of Satan is that life is often hard to bear, it is as a result of the influence of Venus that life is often hard to understand. The influence of Venus brought a paradoxical, tricky quality to the heart of the universe.
In other words, delusion entered the world. Lucifer endowed matter with a glamour that would dazzle humankind, and blind people to higher truths.
Why is it that the way forward sometimes looks like the way backwards? Why is it that the thing we most ought not to do looks almost indistinguishable from the thing we ought to do? In my heart of hearts I know what I ought to do, but I have another, alien element entwined inside me that wants to lead me astray. The Luciferic element is infused into my very physiology. Desire and delusion combine in me dangerously. Because of Lucifer’s influence, ‘the good that I would do I not; but the evil which I would not, that I do’. (Romans 7.19.) St Paul, who as we shall see was an initiate of the Mystery tradition, is saying that part of me always knows what is right, but that it is often overruled by a part that is in thrall to Lucifer.
MODERN SCIENCE NEVER FRAMES THE questions, How did delusion come into the world? Or imagination? Or willpower? But to the ancients delusion, imagination and will were among the greatest forces in the universe, living out there in three-dimensional space as well as in our own minds. For them the history of creation was an account of how these things came to be.
Friedrich Nietzsche said, ‘Unless you have chaos inside you, you cannot give birth to a dancing star.’ Humans would never have been able to become freely creative, brave or loving if they had not been able to make mistakes, to see things as other than they are and to believe things to be other than they are. Because of Lucifer it is the case that we do not always believe in proportion to the evidence. We can often believe what we want to believe. For instance, the life of someone we know can appear a miserable failure or a heart-warming success depending on how we choose to look at it, whether good-heartedly or mean-spiritedly. And when the harsh fire, the primeval sulphur burns in the pit of our stomachs, it is difficult for us to choose to be good-hearted.
When in the very beginning the Earth goddess had been attacked by the god of Saturn, the young Sun god had arrived to protect her, and, fighting a great battle in heaven, had defeated Saturn. The candidate for initiation who was being shown the secret history of the world had therefore already watched one great battle. He now had to watch another one in which the enemy was the great snake that had slithered into Paradise in order to corrupt it.
Who was to be the new champion to fight this second battle?
As with the Church’s conflation of Satan and Lucifer in order to disguise its astronomical roots, we must now disentangle another deliberately created confusion.
In the early chapters of Genesis telling the story of creation, the word usually translated as ‘God’ is, as we have seen, ‘Elohim’. Later Genesis ceases to refer to Elohim and instead the word usually translated as ‘God’ is ‘Jehovah’. Biblical scholars working outside the esoteric tradition have tended to explai
n what appears to them as two different names for the same God as the result of two different literary strands, the Elohim strand and the Jehovah strand, probably dating from different periods and woven together by a later redactor.
However, scholars working within the esoteric tradition have a much simpler explanation. Elohim and Jehovah are not different names for the same entity but different entities. Elohim is, as we have seen, a collective name for the Seven Spirits working together as the god of the Sun, while Jehovah came into being when one of these seven broke away to defend the Earth from Venus.
In order to discover Jehovah’s true, astronomical identity, we must look again at the iconography of his opponent, Venus. We must also remember that for the ancients the history of the origins of the cosmos was as much about how human experience was put together, how experience gained its characteristic structure, as it was about how the physical universe was put together. In other words, it was as much about the principles of human nature as about the laws of the natural world.
Human nature is so formed that any power I may have to resist my animal desires — indeed what stops me from becoming a mere animal — derives from my capacity for thought and reflection. Venus was traditionally depicted holding a mirror, but not out of vanity as is nowadays supposed. The mirror was a symbol of the power of reflection to modify desire.
Depicted here on the back of a Greek mirror from the first century BC is the story of Semele, goddess of the Moon, and a beautiful youth called Endymion. In the story Semele falls in love with Endymion and casts a spell that leaves him in perpetual dreamy sleep. Here is an explicit depiction of the moon working on the pineal gland in the form of the wand of Dionysus.