The Secret History of the World

by Mark Booth

  But his pleasure at winning was cut short as Seth slammed down the lid. Seth hammered in nails and filled every crack with molten lead — the metal of Satan. Then Seth and his followers carried the chest down to the banks of the Nile and cast it on the waters.

  Osiris was an immortal, and Seth knew he couldn’t kill him, but he could, he believed, get rid of him for good.

  The chest floated down the Nile for several days and nights, eventually washing ashore on the coast of what we now call Syria. A tender young tamarisk tree growing there wrapped the chest in its branches, and eventually grew all around it, enclosing it lovingly and protectively in its trunk. In time this tree became famous for its splendour, and the king of Syria had it chopped down and fashioned into a pillar that stood in the centre of his palace.

  In the meantime Isis, separated from her man and deposed from her throne, cut her hair, blackened her face with cinders and wandered the surface of the earth, searching, tearfully, for her beloved husband. After a while she took a job as a servant girl at the court of a foreign king. (Readers will readily appreciate how this story, originally a sacred drama in the temples of Egypt, has come down to us in slightly garbled form as the pantomime Cinderella.)

  But Isis never gave up hoping to find her man, and one day her magic powers led her to see Osiris clairvoyantly in the chest inside the tree in the middle of the very palace where she was working, the palace of the Syrian king. Isis revealed her true identity as a queen and persuaded the king to chop down the pillar and let her take the chest away.

  She left by boat and landed on the island of Chemmis in the Nile delta. There she intended to use her magic arts to revive her husband.

  But Seth had magic powers too. He and his evil cohorts were hunting by moonlight, and in a vision Seth suddenly saw Isis cradling Osiris. While she lay sleeping, he swooped down upon the loving couple.

  Wall-carving from the temple at Philae.

  Determined to make sure this time, he attacked Osiris with savage glee, hacking him into fourteen different pieces that he then had hidden in secret in different corners of the land.

  So the widowed Isis had to set out on her travels again. (Freemasonic readers will perhaps be aware that they call themselves ‘Sons of the Widow’ partly as a mark of their participation in her quest.)

  Isis wore seven veils to disguise herself from Seth’s minions and was aided by Nepthys. She also loved Osiris and now turned herself into a dog to help find and dig up the parcels of Osiris’s corpse. They retrieved all of them except the penis, which had been eaten by fish in the Nile.

  They arrived at an island in Abydos in southern Egypt and there at night Isis and Nepthys bandaged all the remaining parts together using a long, winding piece of white linen.

  The first mummy.

  Finally, Isis fashioned a penis out of gold and attached it. She was not able to bring him wholly back to life, but she revived Osiris sexually so that she was able to hover, touching him gently and delicately as she enveloped his penis in the form of a bird until he ejaculated. In this way she impregnated herself on him, and in this same way Horus, the new Master of the Universe, was conceived.

  Horus grew up to avenge his father’s death by killing his Uncle Seth. Osiris meanwhile lived in the Underworld as its king and Lord of the Dead. It is in this role that he was most often depicted by the Egyptians, usually with a green face, heavily swathed and apparently immobile, but emanating a power that is symbolized in his royal regalia, and carrying the crook and flail.

  Isis suckling Horus. For idealists who believe in a mind-before-matter universe, that the universe has helped nurture mankind and helped it to evolve, the image of the mother goddess and child, perhaps even more than the cross, is their central and most important icon.

  WHAT THE HELL DOES ALL THIS MEAN? How can we decode it?

  On one level it seems to represent the succeeding of one constellation by another in the precession of the equinoxes. Horus deposes Seth and supplants him.

  On another level, perhaps the most obvious one, it is a fertility myth about the yearly cycle of the seasons. The appearance of the star Sirius on the horizon after months of being hidden was a sign to the ancient Egyptians that Osiris would arise again shortly afterwards and that the inundation of the Nile was due. Myths of the resurrected god-king were told all around the world from Tammuz and Marduk to the Fisher King stories associated with Parsifal and the King Arthur cycle. They follow this same pattern. The king is fatally wounded in the genitals and while he lies suffering the land stays barren. Then in the spring a magical operation is performed and he rises again, both sexually and in a way that fertilizes the whole world.

  This is why Osiris came to be worshipped in Egypt as a god of crops and summer fertility. The longed-for yearly appearance in the east of Orion and his consort Isis, known to us as Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens, heralded the inundation of the Nile that revived the vegetable and so also the animal and human world — literally a matter of life and death. The Egyptians made small mummies out of linen bags stuffed with corn — corn dollies. When it was watered the corn sprouted through the bag, showing that the great god was being reborn.

  I am the plant of life, says the Osiris of the pyramid texts.

  I WILL NOT DWELL ON THIS ASPECT OF OSIRIS because the level of meaning in myths that relates to fertility has become widely appreciated in the hundred or so years since Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

  The trouble is that it is has tended to be appreciated at the expense of everything else.

  If the Egyptian populace thronging the outer courtyards of the temples understood the story of Osiris on this level of the fertility myth, there was another, higher level known only to the priests of the inner sanctum, the Black Rite whose secrets Herodotus claimed to know.

  This secret was a historical secret.

  To get at the truth of it, we now need to look at a similarly bizarre and disturbing story from the Greek myths. We know from Plutarch that in antiquity Osiris, the last god-king to rule the earth, was equated with Dionysus, the last of the Olympic gods.

  The sources disagree on the subject of Dionysus’s parentage. Some say his father was Hermes, others Zeus. All agree that the little god’s mother was Mother Earth and that, as with Zeus, she hid the infant Dionysus in a cave.

  Dionysus, like Zeus, represents the evolution of a new form of consciousness, and again the Titans were determined to nip it in the bud. Again we see that the Titans are the consciousness eaters.

  They smeared their faces white with gypsum to conceal their identity as the black-faced sons of the crow god. They didn’t want to frighten him as they lured Dionysus from a cradle hidden in a niche in the back of the cave.

  Suddenly the Titans fell on Dionysus, tearing him into pieces. They flung these pieces into a boiling cauldron of milk, then tore the meat from his bones with their teeth.

  Meanwhile, Athena had stolen into the cave unnoticed and she snatched away the goat-boy’s heart before it was cooked and eaten. She took this to Zeus, who cut open a hole in his thigh, inserted the body part and sewed it up again. After a while, just as Athena had sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus, the reborn Dionysus sprang fully grown from Zeus’s thigh.

  IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THE HISTORICAL reality behind this mysterious story and the parallel story of Osiris, it is necessary to remind ourselves that in this account of the history of the universe matter was only precipitated out of the cosmic mind over very long periods and was only very gradually developing towards the sort of solidity we are familiar with today.

  It is also as well to remind ourselves again that although we may view many of the great figures of myths, both gods and human, as having an anatomy like our own, this is only how they appear in the eye of imagination.

  The world looked very different to the physical eyes that were evolving at this time. This was still the world recorded in the Metamorphoses of the initiate-poet Ovid, when the anatomical forms of
humans and animals were not fixed as they are now, a world of giants, hybrids and monsters. The most anatomically advanced humans were evolving the two eyes we have today, but the Lantern of Osiris still protruded from the middle of the forehead, where the bone of the skull had not yet hardened.

  Gradually, though, matter became denser. And the important point to bear in mind here is that, despite the fact that matter was precipitated from mind, it was alien to mind. To the extent that matter hardened, it became a greater barrier to the free flow of the cosmic mind. What gradually happened, then, was that as matter hardened to something approaching the solid objects we know today, two parallel dimensions evolved, the spirit world and the material world, the former viewed by the Lantern of Osiris and the latter by the two eyes.

  The story of Osiris/Dionysius is the next and perhaps the most decisive stage in this process, when parts of the great cosmic mind, the universal consciousness, became parcelled off and absorbed into individual bodies. The bony roof of the skull hardened, closing over the Lantern of Osiris, so filtering out the great cosmic mind above.

  According to the ancient wisdom, so long as there had been no barrier to the spirits, gods and angels ranged up above them, there had been no possibility of humans enjoying the individual free thought or will that distinguishes human consciousness. If we were not cut off from the spirit worlds and from the great cosmic mind, if our bodily make-up did not filter it out, our minds would be completely dazzled and overwhelmed.

  Humans would now have some space for themselves in which to think.

  The archetypal image of this model of the human condition is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Prisoners are chained in cave so that they face a wall and cannot look round. Events taking place outside the mouth of the cave throw shadows on to the wall that the prisoners take for reality.

  This is an exposition of the philosophy academics call idealism, which holds that the cosmic mind and the thoughts or Thought-Beings emanating from it (ideas) are the higher reality. Physical objects, on the other hand, are mere shadows or reflections of this higher reality.

  Because we are remote from the time when people believed in idealism, it is difficult for us to appreciate it as a living philosophy of life, rather than just as a dry as dust theory. But people who believed in idealism experienced the world in an idealistic way and also understood idealism as a historical process.

  Academics tend to miss the surprisingly literal layer of meaning in Plato’s Allegory. The cave here is the bony roof of the skull. The skull is a dark, bony room covered in flesh.

  Plato was an initiate and would have been well aware of the delicate mechanism of shadowing and reflecting that takes place inside the human skull, the occult physiology and psychology of the secret doctrine.

  The defining characteristic of human life, its crowning achievement, and also the crowning achievement of the cosmos, is the capacity for thought. The brain is the most complex, the most subtle, altogether the most mysterious and miraculous physical object in the known universe.

  According to the secret doctrine the cosmos created the human brain in order to be able to think about itself.

  IT IS VITAL, IF WE ARE TO UNDERSTAND WHAT is happening here, to snap out of a materialistic way of thinking, to look at things, as it were, through the other end of the telescope. If you are an idealist, you believe that the universe was created by Mind for minds.

  More particularly, you believe that the cosmic Mind created the material universe in order to give human minds the form they have.

  The idealist history of creation is the history of this process, and the great events in this history have been the putting into place of the sun, moon, the planets and the stars. Our consciousness now has the structure it has because the heavenly bodies are ranged above us in the way they are.

  With the moon in place to reflect the light of the sun down to earth and with this process reproduced in microcosm within the human skull, with matter having at last become sufficiently dense that the human mind is ‘closed off’, we have reached the point where human anatomy and human consciousness have achieved a form we would recognize today. The basic conditions making it possible for humans to reflect, that is to say, to think, were now in place.

  There is, however, one more issue to consider.

  IN THE SECRET HISTORY THERE IS ALSO A specifically sexual dimension to this development.

  The Mystery priests believed that as the Lantern of Osiris withdrew underneath the bony covering of the skull and begun to occupy the position where we know it today as the pineal gland, the fleshly penis protruded. According to the ancient wisdom, the penis was the last part of the human body to assume its present, fleshly form, which is why artists in the secret societies, such as Michelangelo and, Signorelli, Leonardo’s brother initiate, often depicted the penis of the men of mythology as plant-like.

  At this great turning point in history, then, just as the penis became flesh, humans could no longer propagate themselves by the old plant-like method of parthenogenesis. Humanity gave itself entirely over to animal sexuality.

  And from this opens up a third and terrible dimension.

  The Companions of Pan by Luca Signorelli. This engraving is a rare record of a painting destroyed during World War Two.

  Human bones were hardening and becoming material. A human skull became something half-living and half-dead.

  This is why it is an axiom of the secret doctrine that the beginning of death was the birth of thought.

  According to the secret doctrine, there is a fundamental opposition between life and thought. The life processes in humans — digestion, respiration and the processes of growing, for example — are largely unconscious. The conscious, thoughtful dimension in humans is only made possible by a partial suppression of these life processes. The human organism ‘steals’ forces which in animals are used for growth and biological structuring, and channels them to create the conditions necessary for thought. It is said that this is one of the reasons why humans are, comparatively, sickly animals.

  Human thought is a deadly process, restricting both growth and longevity.

  When proto-humans were vegetable creatures, they did not experience death. When they began to take on animal characteristics, they began to experience a foretaste of death. This was an experience like dream-filled sleep. After a while they would ‘awake’ again into the material world. This sleep, even when it was very deep sleep, no longer gave humans the refreshment they craved. As human bones and the body of the earth hardened and rigidified to something near to what they are today, humans moved less freely, indeed painfully. The call of death grew louder and louder until it became almost overwhelming.

  Sleep deepened until it became like death, and then it became death.

  Now humans were finally entangled in the savage cycles of life, death and rebirth, cycles in which creatures must die in order to make way for a new generation. They now lived in a place where fathers must die to make way for sons, where the king must die to give way to a younger, more vigorous successor. Scholars have managed to piece together textual references with carvings at the Step Pyramid complex at Saqqara near Cairo in order to understand something of what must have happened at the ‘Heb-Sed’ rituals that took place there. Having undergone a Mystery school ceremony of death and rebirth in an underground chamber, the newly regenerated pharaoh would emerge into a more public courtyard. There he had to undergo a series of trials of strength and potency, including running with a bull, to try to prove that, as he would ritually cry, ‘I am free to run through the land’. If the pharaoh failed these tests he would suffer the same bloody death as the bull. The following eyewitness account, of a bull god sacrifice in India, comes from a nineteenth-century British traveller: ‘When the stroke is given which severs the head of the victim from his body, the cymbals strike up, the tom-toms beat, the horn is blown and the whole assembly, shouting, smear their bodies with blood, they roll themselves in it, and, dancing like demons, accompany t
heir dances with obscene songs, allusions and gestures.’

  Herodotus must have witnessed something very like this if he was allowed see the Black Rite of the Egyptians. At the climax of the initiation ceremony we have been following, the candidate would also have seen something similar — the death of a great god.

  In Northern Europe the god who became entangled in the cycles of nature was portrayed as the Green Man. A leaf-clad god, fierce like nature but also a victim of it, Osiris stares down at the congregation from the walls of countless Christian churches.

  THE HUMAN CONDITION WAS CHANGING on many different levels. We have reached a pivotal time in the secret history of the world when matter had precipitated out of mind and hardened to such a degree that the human skull was finally formed into a shape very like it is today. But the Third Eye was still much more active than it is today and had not become vestigial. Perceptions of the material world were equally as vivid as perceptions of the spiritual world.

  A human being ushered into a throne room might look at another human being sitting in front of him, or at least what appeared to be very like a human being. Although humans no longer had unlimited access to the spirit worlds, the man might then be permitted to look at the king again with his Third Eye, and, if he did, he might see a god sitting there.

  The greatest historical record of humanity’s lost ability to exercise this double mode of perception comes in the Hindu sacred text the Bhagavad Gita. A charioteer called Arjuna has been full of doubts on the eve of battle. So Krishna, the leader he is about to drive into the fray, allows Arjuna to see him as he looks to the eye of vision, in his supreme, divine form. Trembling with awe and wonder he sees Krishna’s eyes as the sun and moon, sees that Krishna fills all of heaven and earth with radiance as if with the light of a thousand suns, that he is worshipped by countless other gods and that he contains within himself all the wonders of the cosmos. Afterwards Krishna shrinks into his human form again, and shows his gentle human face to reassure terrified Arjuna.