by Mark Booth
Osiris might equally have given this experience to someone who had walked into his throne room at Thebes. Jacob Boehme described the world of cut stone, carved wood, of royal robes and flesh and blood as ‘Outworld’. He intended to be a bit disparaging. He knew that the inner world, accessible to the Third Eye, is the real one, and in the midst of the bloody, painful, death-drenched world in which the followers of Osiris now found themselves, this is what they clung on to.
THE MYTH OF OSIRIS, THEREFORE, HAS many layers of meaning, but it is above all a myth about consciousness.
It informs us that we must all die — but in order to be reborn. The key point in this story is that Osiris is reborn not into ordinary life but into a higher state of consciousness. ‘I shall not decay,’ he proclaims in the Book of the Dead, ‘I shall not rot, I shall not putrefy, I shall not turn into worms, I shall have my being, I shall live, I shall live.’ Again we come across a phrasing, an idea of being born again that may seem strangely familiar to Christians. Osiris is here discovering that he has what Christians call ‘eternal life’.
IN THE STORY OF OSIRIS WE HAVE SEEN how the forces of sex, death and thought became ever more tightly entwined in order to create the unique thing that is human consciousness. The wise men and women of antiquity understood how death and sexuality are necessary for thought to arise, and because they understood how these forces had been woven together in a historical process, they also understood how conscious thought could be used to manipulate the sexual and the death forces in order to achieve higher states. Since ancient times these techniques have been among the best kept secrets of the Mystery schools and secret societies.
We will look into these techniques in some detail later, but all this is a difficult area for us because our understanding of sexuality tends to be on a very materialistic level.
For instance, it is very difficult for us today to look at paintings and carvings of the erect phallus adorning the walls of Hindu or Egyptian temples and to imagine how they would have been intended to be ‘read’, because in the modern world spirituality has for the most part been removed from sex.
In the ancient world sperm was understood to be an expression of the cosmic will, the hidden generative power in things, the ordering principle of all life. Each particle of sperm was held to contain a particle of the prima materia out of which everything was made, a particle which could explode with incredible burning heat to form a whole new macrocosm. Adolescents in our era may catch some reverberation of the ancient feeling, when the first stirrings of sexuality bring on feelings of keen, new intensity and an aching desire, felt in the breast, to embrace the whole world.
Desire is always open to corruption, though. What we desire, we possess in our imagination. Desire hardens. When we desire someone we ‘reify’ them to borrow Jean-Paul Sartre’s phrase. We want to bend them to our will, which is the influence of the Spirit of Opposition.
In the mind-before-matter view this diminishing of other people by the way we perceive them can be literally true. The way you look at people affects their internal physiological and chemical constitution.
Modern science has taught us to think of the sexual urge as something impersonal, something that has a will apart from our own, as an expression of the will to survive of the species. For the ancients, too, the sexual urge was an expression of a will beyond the individual. They saw sexuality impelling us towards the great moments of our lives, because they saw how sex controls who we are born to, as well as determining the people we are attracted to.
A man in the ancient world might see a woman he desired and be overcome by a quite frightening, overwhelming desire. He would know that the rest of life would be shaped by her response. He would also know that the roots of his desire lay very, very deep, having their origins long before his present lifetime. He would know that the sexual desire that drove him towards that woman was not merely biological — as in the modern account — but had other dimensions, spiritual and sacred. If the planet of love had been steering them towards this meeting, then so, too, had the other great gods of the sky been preparing this experience for them over many, many millennia and through many incarnations.
Melancholia I by Dürer and opposite The Death Posture by Austin Osman Spare. In the same way that in the secret societies techniques are taught to control sexual forces as a way of achieving higher forms of consciousness, so there are also teachings on channelling the closely intertwined death forces. Osman Spare developed a practice which involved closing off mouth, nostrils, ears and eyes. In India adepts including Bhagavan Shri Ramana and Thakur Haranath have achieved long, death-like trances which have even led to their being prepared for burial, then been reborn into a new, higher form of consciousness.
Today we know that when we look at a distant star we are seeing something that happened a very long time ago, because of the time it has taken for the light from that star to reach the earth. The ancients knew another truth, which is that when they contemplated their own will, they were also looking at something which they had formed long before they were born. The ancients knew that every time they felt themselves merging with another human being in the sexual act, the flight of whole constellations was involved. They knew, too, that how they made love would have an effect on the cosmos for millennia to come.
When we make love we are interreacting with great cosmic powers, and if we choose to do so consciously we may participate in this magical act. It was this magical element in the sexual act that Rilke was referring to when he wrote that ‘two people coming together in the night summon up the future’.
THERE IS ONE FURTHER TWIST TO THE STORY of Osiris, a dark shadow to an already dark story. We saw that Isis had a sister, Nepthys, and there was a suggestion of sexual impropriety with Osiris, some sexual fall from grace perhaps. But later Nepthys used her magic powers to help Isis in her search for the body parts of Osiris and helped, too, to bind them together again.
Nepthys, then, is a figure representing some dark form of wisdom, fallen but capable of redemption.
In Christian mythology this same figure, this same spiritual impulse, reappears as Mary Magdalene. We have been following the history of the Fall. We have seen that the Fall was not the fall of human spirits into a pre-existing material world — it is a very easy and common mistake to imagine it like this — but a Fall in which human bodies became denser as the material world became denser.
We live in a Fallen world. Just as myriad spirits help us to grow and evolve, so too others, just as numerous, work to destroy both us and the very fabric of our world. In Christian mythology — and in the secret doctrine of the Church — the earth suffered and was punished for having fallen by having her own spirit imprisoned deep in the underworld inside her. Sometimes called Sophia, notably in the Christian tradition, this wisdom is only reached when we travel down through the dark and demonic places of the earth and also of ourselves. It is because of Nepthys — because of Sophia — that we all have need to touch rock bottom, to experience the worst that life has to offer, to wrestle with our demons, to test our intellect to its limits and journey to the other side of madness.
We know from Plutarch that in antiquity Isis was identified with Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. Athena had a half-sister, a dark-skinned girl called Pallas, whom she loved more than anyone. Carefree, they used to play on the plains of Anatolia, running games, wrestling and mock fights with spears and shields. But one day Athena was distracted. She slipped and accidentally speared Pallas to death.
From then on she called herself Pallas Athena, to acknowledge the dark side of herself, just as in a sense Nepthys represents the dark side of Isis. She also carved a statue of Pallas out of black wood to memorialize her.
This statue, called the Palladium, carved by the hand of a goddess and washed by her tears was revered as an object of world-changing power in antiquity. When the people of Anatolia kept it in their capital, Troy was the greatest city in the world. The Greeks wanted to know what th
e Trojans knew. When they carried it off triumphantly, the leadership of world civilization passed to them. It was later buried beneath Rome in all its glory, until the Emperor Constantine moved it to Constantinople, when it became the centre of world spirituality. Today it is said to be hidden somewhere in Eastern Europe, which is why in recent times, the great powers, the Freemasonic ones, have sought to control this region.
The cult of Nepthys together with its Greek and Christian equivalents, forms one of the darkest and most powerful streams in occultism. Great forces like these shape the history of the world even now.
7. THE AGE OF DEMI-GODS AND HEROES
The Ancient Ones • The Amazons • Enoch • Hercules, Theseus and Jason
WHEN HERODOTUS WAS PUZZLING OVER the strange wooden statues of the kings who had reigned before any human king, the Egyptian priests told him that no one could understand this history without knowing about ‘the three dynasties’.
If Herodotus had been an initiate of the Mystery schools, he would have understood that the three dynasties were, first, the oldest generation of creator gods — Saturn, Rhea, Uranos — the second generation made up of Zeus, his siblings and their children, such as Apollo and Athena — and lastly the generation of demi-gods and heroes. This last generation is the subject of this chapter.
ALL THE WHILE MATTER WAS GROWING denser, and because matter and spirit are inimical, the gods became less and less a constant presence. The higher, the more ineffable, the god, the harder it became to squeeze down into the tightening net of physical necessity that covered the earth. Great gods such as Zeus or Pallas Athena seemed to make their presence felt and intervene directly in human affairs only at times of crisis.
In the Mystery schools it was taught that a decisive change in this direction came about in 13,000 BC. From then on the higher gods would find it difficult to descend further than the moon. Their visits to the surface of the earth became infrequent and fleeting. It was believed that on these visits they accidentally left behind the strange and unearthly mistletoe, a plant which cannot grow in the soil of the earth, but which grew naturally on the moon.
Medallion showing Isis on the moon. In The Golden Asse by Apuleius, Isis is described in the following terms: ‘Just above her brow was a disk in the form of a mirror, or resembling the light of the Moon, in one of her hands she bore serpents, in the other, blades of corn.’
Without the presence of the greater gods to keep them down, the crab-like progeny of Saturn that had been imprisoned in underground caves began to creep up into the daylight again, infesting the surface of the earth and preying on humankind. Sea monsters also leapt on to the shore to drag off members of the tribe who had strayed too close. Giants carried off cattle and sometimes preyed on human flesh, too.
Full-scale wars took place between humans and armies of other creatures, stragglers from the previous epoch. The war between the Lapiths — a tribe of Neolithic flint-knappers — and the Centaurs is recorded on the Parthenon frieze. The Centaurs had been invited to the wedding of the leader of the Lapiths, but were inflamed by the sight of the white, hairless bodies of the Lapith women. They dragged off the bride and raped her — and her bridesmaids and page boys, too. In the ensuing fight a Lapith king was killed, and so began a feud that lasted for generations.
Drawing by the nineteenth-century Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli of a demon sometimes called the Hanon-Tramp. Moon demons inhabit the ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, where they play a legitimate role in the spiritual economy of the cosmos, helping to tear corruption from human spirits after death. However, if they break through into the earthly realm, they appear as malevolent dwarves. The height of a six- or seven-year old child with large, hypnotic eyes, they sometimes emit an ear-splitting yell that can freeze a human with fear. More powerful when the moon is waning, these demons may account for some modern encounters with ‘aliens’, which in a physical form at any rate play no part in esoteric cosmology.
Battle of Lapiths and Centaurs in the Parthenon frieze.
As bones thickened, the animal world began to feel its weight. Creation grew tired and animals grew vicious, as they had to struggle to survive. As humanity continued to fall, so too did nature. It became red in tooth and claw. Lions and wolves began to attack humans. Plants grew thorns to scratch and make the gathering of fruit difficult, and poisonous plants evolved, like wolfsbane.
The Parthenon frieze also records battles against the Amazons, a race of warrior women, who were the first to ride horses into battle. An Amazon had to kill a man before she was allowed to marry. Wearing armour of fur and carrying shields in a half-moon shape, their cavalry scythed down row upon row of foot soldiers. They were magnificent, and they represented a new form of human behaviour, because hard on the heels of the possibility of death had come the possibility of killing and of murder. Cut us and we would bleed. Cut us hard or often enough and we would die. Some humans began to delight in this. The Book of Enoch describes how the surface of the earth became covered with warring armies, and says that ‘human flesh itself had become perverse’.
Because of the encasing, bony skull and the enmeshing of the organs of spiritual perception, humans were now shut off not only from the gods ranged above them, but also from each other. A shadow was falling over human relations. It became possible for one centre of consciousness to believe itself cut off from another. ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ asked Cain, who represents the evolution of the new form of consciousness. This question would have meant nothing to Adam and Eve, who were like branches on the same tree.
In the same way that we would be overwhelmed by the spirit worlds if they were not filtered out, if there were no filter on empathy we would feel everyone’s pain as our own and so be completely overwhelmed by the suffering of others. Without a degree of isolation no human could experience him or herself as an individual, no one could feel the burning fire in the forehead that drove Cain onwards. But of course there were pitfalls in this…
History shows that humans have a horror of humans with other forms of consciousness, which they often find hard to tolerate. Sometimes they feel the need to eradicate it from the face of the earth. We need only think of the treatment by Europeans of the Aztecs, the near genocide of the Aborigines of Australia or the attempt to wipe out gypsies by the Nazis. Later we will see that since the time of Moses, the Jews have often been at the forefront of forging new forms of consciousness.
Humans were now free to make mistakes, to choose the bad and to enjoy it. It was no longer the case that humans received all their spiritual nourishment from the milky sap-filled breasts of Mother Earth. The natural law and the moral law were no longer the same thing.
The earth grew colder, harder and more dangerous in many different ways. People struggled to survive and would sometimes find themselves stretched to the limits of endurance. They discovered that the road ahead would always be fraught with the danger of death, but unless they took that road they would die anyway. From now on they would have to put at risk what they valued most or they would lose it. Beyond a certain point, there is no return. That point, they discovered, must be reached.
They discovered uncomfortable things about themselves, too — that they had become brutalized by this new world, and had grown a hard, protective carapace of habit. To break open this carapace and expose the sensitive part of themselves, the better part that brought them fully alive again, was a bloody and painful process that few could face.
The world became darker, a place of paradox where opposites meet and where it is painful to be human, a world calling out for heroism.
THE LARGEST AND MOST TERRIFYING OF the monstrous, progeny of Saturn came last. Typhon emerged out of the sea, heading straight for Olympus, spitting fire from his mouth and blocking out the sun with his bat-like wings. He had the head of an ass, and when he emerged from the sea, the gods saw that below the waist he was nothing but a coiling mass of thousands of snakes. Zeus tried to fell him with thunderbolts, but Typhon only shrugged th
em aside. As Typhon bore down upon him, Zeus then snatched the flint scythe that Cronos had used to castrate Uranos. But the monster’s snake-like limbs wrapped themselves around the limbs of Zeus, holding them fast and snatching the scythe from him. Then keeping the king of the gods pinned down, Typhon cut out all his sinews. Zeus is immortal and could not be killed, but without his sinews he was completely helpless.
Typhon took the sinews away with him and retired to a cave to recuperate from his own wounds. Apollo and Pan then emerged from the shadows and hatched a plan. They went to find Cadmus, the dragon-slaying hero, who was wandering the earth looking for his sister Europa. She had been carried away by Zeus, disguised as a white bull. Now Apollo and Pan promised Cadmus that if he helped them, his quest would be over.
Pan gave Cadmus his pipes, and, disguised as a shepherd, the hero went to play for the wounded Typhon. Never having heard music before, Typhon was entranced by this strange new sound. Cadmus told him that it was nothing compared to the music he could make with a lyre, but sadly the sinews on his lyre were broken. Typhon handed over the sinews of Zeus, and Cadmus told him he needed to go back to his shepherd’s hut to string his lyre. So it was that Zeus regained his sinews and was able to surprise the monster, overpower him and bury him under Mount Etna.
The important point to note here is that Zeus was only saved with the help of a hero. The gods now needed humans.
THE MYTHS OF THE GREEK HEROES — Cadmus, Hercules, Theseus and Jason — are some of the most famous stories in human history. It might seem as if they are entirely missing from the biblical account, but according to the ancient tradition preserved in the secret societies Cadmus is to be identified with Enoch, the first human in Hebrew tradition to whom the gods turn for help.