The Secret History of the World

by Mark Booth

  The Old Testament contains only a few enigmatic words on Enoch. Genesis 5.21-24. ‘And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah, And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years and begat sons and daughters; And all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years; And Enoch walked with God and he was not: for God took him.’

  There is little to go on here but, as we have already seen, there is a literary tradition about Enoch in Hebrew literature, including, as we have seen, some books which are widely quoted in the New Testament. In one of these, the Book of Jubilees, Enoch is described as discovering the writings of the Watchers, but this is a clumsy translation. What is meant is that he discovered, which is to say invented, language itself.

  Hebrew tradition presents Enoch as a strange figure. His shining countenance was uncomfortable to look at and he was evidently an uncomfortable presence. In this he may remind us of the Jesus of the Gospels, captivating vast crowds but feeling that he wants to withdraw in order to be alone with the great spiritual beings who are showing themselves to him.

  In solitude Enoch was able to commune with the gods and angels with a clarity that humankind was fast losing.

  Initially Enoch would spend one day teaching the multitude, then spend three days alone. Then he spent only one day a week, then one day a month and finally one day a year. The crowds yearned for his return, but when he did so his face shone so brightly it was so uncomfortable for them to look at that they had to avert their eyes.

  What was Enoch doing on his solitary vigils? We will see repeatedly that great turning points in history are caused by two types of thought. First, turning points arise when great thinkers like Socrates, Jesus Christ and Dante think for the first time something that nobody has ever thought before. Second, turning points arise when thoughts are set down and inscribed indelibly, because they preserve some ancient wisdom that is in danger of being lost forever.

  The generation of Jared, Enoch’s father, had been the last to experience an uninterrupted vision of the successive waves or generations of gods, angels and spirits emanating from the mind of God. What Enoch was preserving in the first language and the first stone monuments, the oldest stone circles, was this vision of the hierarchies of spiritual beings ranged above. Enoch is one of the great figures in the secret history of the world because he gave a complete account of what we might call, in today’s terms, the ecosystem of the spirit worlds. For this, he is remembered not only as Cadmus in the Greek tradition, but as Idris in the Arabian tradition and Hermes Trismegistus in the esoteric Egyptian tradition. He knew that, just as thought processes weaken health, language weakens memory. He also looked forward to an approaching catastrophe which would destroy everything made by mankind, except what he carried in his head and the sturdiest stone monuments.

  He memorialized the heavenly hierarchies not only in stone monuments but in the invention of language itself. Because according to the secret doctrine all language originated with the giving of names to the heavenly bodies.

  Indeed, the earliest art, such as is found at the famous caves at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain is likewise really a depiction of these same heavenly bodies. These heavenly bodies are the thoughts of the great cosmic mind, weaving through everything in the cosmos. Language and art now enabled humans to appropriate these cosmic thoughts in some way and to make them their own.

  Enoch retreated further and further into the mountains, where the ground was inhospitable and the weather stormy. Fewer and fewer were able to follow him. He said: ‘And my eyes saw the secrets of the lightning and of thunder, and the secrets of clouds and the dew, and there I saw from whence they proceed and where they come from to soak the Earth. And there I saw closed chambers out of which the winds are divided, and the chamber out of which came the mist and the cloud that has hung over the earth from its beginning. And I saw the chambers out of which come the Sun and the Moon, where they go to.’

  The Book of Enoch relates that in his final, ecstatic vision he was given a tour of the heavens, of the different spheres of heaven and the different orders of angels who live there and the whole history of the cosmos.

  Finally, Enoch addressed the last ragged band of followers who had been able to keep up with him on his mountain trek. As he was speaking they looked up and saw a horse descend from the sky in a whirlwind. Enoch mounted the horse and rode into the sky.

  WHAT THIS STORY OF ENOCH’S ASCENSION into heaven tells us is that he did not die as humans do — because he was not properly human. Like the other demi-gods and heroes of Greek tradition, Enoch/Cadmus was an angel occupying the body of a human.

  The stories of Hercules, Theseus and Jason are too well known to need retelling here, but aspects of them have special significance for the secret history.

  In the stories of the man-god Hercules we see just how deeply into matter humankind had fallen. Hercules wanted to be left alone to get on with his material life, to enjoy worldly pleasures — getting drunk, feasting, brawling — but he was repeatedly interrupted by his duty to follow his spiritual destiny. A stumbling, bungling, sometimes laughable figure, Hercules was torn between opposing cosmic forces.

  Ovid also shows how, as the gods withdrew, Eros began to make mischief. Hercules was hag-ridden by desire as much as by the spirits who try to control him.

  Today if we fall in love with a beautiful person, we may well see beauty as a sign of great spiritual wisdom. When we look into beautiful eyes, we may perhaps hope to find there the very secret of life itself. The story of Hercules’s love for Deianira, Ariadne’s love for Theseus, or Jason’s love for Medea, show that the spiritual connection between people was already becoming clouded. It was now possible to gaze into the eyes of a beauty and be deceived about what you saw there. Sexuality had become tricky.

  The danger of delusion was made worse, by the love of delusion. What is best for me and what is worst for me, the thing I most ought to do and the thing I most ought not to do, look very much alike. In my heart of hearts I may know which is which — but then a spirit of perversity makes me want to choose wrongly. Great psychic perturbation always surrounds great beauty.

  The twelve labours of Hercules show him moving through a series of trials each set for him by the successive spirits who rule the constellations. It is a series of trials which all humans take, and by and large they take them unwittingly, like Hercules. The life of Hercules, then, illustrates the pain of being a man. He is Everyman, trapped in a cycle of pain.

  To modern sensibility the fact of a story’s being allegorical makes it less likely to be an accurate depiction of real events. Modern writers try to drain their texts of meaning, to flatten them out in order to make them more naturalistic.

  To the ancients, who believed that every single thing that happened on earth was guided by the motions of the stars and planets, the more a narrative brought out these ‘poetic’ patterns, the truer and more realistic the text.

  So, it may be tempting to view the journeys into the Underworld made by Hercules, Theseus and Orpheus as mere metaphor. It is true that on one level their adventures represent the beginning of humanity’s coming to terms with the reality of death. But as we try to imagine the adventures underground of Hercules, Theseus and the others, we must not imagine these to be purely internal or mental journeys such as we might contemplate today. When they battled with monsters and demons, they were confronting forces that infested their own beings, the corrupted human flesh, the dark labyrinth of the human brain. But they were also fighting real monsters of flesh and blood.

  IF WE COMPARE THE STORY OF THESEUS and the Minotaur with a much earlier myth such as Perseus and the Gorgon Medusa, we can see that by the time of Theseus the rate of metamorphosis seems to have slowed down. In the Perseus story every episode involves supernatural powers or magical transformation. On the other hand, the bull-man Minotaur is apparently a rare survivor or straggler from an earlier epoch.

  THE LAST ADVENTURE THAT THE d
emi-gods and heroes took together should also be interpreted as history. Wars were fought to try to steal the ‘inner sanctum’ knowledge of rival tribes, and on one level Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece was an example of just such a raid.

  Isaac Newton revealed some of the secret wisdom of his brotherhood when he showed that the quest for the Fleece, like the labours of Hercules, shows the progress of the sun though the signs of the zodiac. What he did not reveal, though he undoubtedly would have been aware of it, was that the Fleece represents animal spirit that has been totally purified by catharsis, so that it shines like gold.

  Curled round the tree is a snake that intends to prevent Jason from taking the Fleece. The snake is a descendant of the Luciferic serpent that originally worked this corruption into the physiology of humankind, coiled around the tree in the Garden of Eden.

  But if Jason can wrest the Fleece from him, he will win great powers for himself. He will be able to ask his spirit to leave his body at will, to communicate freely with gods and angels like the people of earlier epochs. He will be able to control his own physiology, influence the minds of others telepathically, even transform matter.

  So the text of Jason’s quest by Apollonius should be read as a manual of initiation as well as a true historical account. We will see later how alchemists of the Middle Ages and later Newton himself acted on this insight.

  IF YOU LOOK AT THIS PERIOD OF ENOCH, Hercules and Jason with the eye of science, you will see none of the great events that have been described in this chapter. You will not see heroes or monsters arising from the sea or phantasmal deities like Zeus or black magic causing the fall of empires. You will see only wind and rain on a dreary, natural landscape whose only human features are at best some fairly unimpressive dwellings and primitive stone tools.

  The Labours of Hercules. The neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry decoded these twelve labours to reveal the signs of the zodiac that lie behind them. According to modern thinking, if a narrative is allegorical in form, this is a good reason for believing it cannot be an accurate account of historical events. But if you believe, as the ancients did, that all events on earth are governed by the movements of the heavenly bodies, then the opposite is true. All accounts of real historical events must inevitably mirror astronomical events like the passage of the sun through the constellations. Hercules is here depicted on a sarcophagus relief journeying through the constellations of Leo, represented by the Nemean Lion, Scorpio represented by the Hydra and the Erymanthian Boar, representing Libra — by taming the Wild Boar Hercules is balancing animal spirits with a measured intelligence.

  But perhaps science only shows us what happened on the surface. Perhaps more important things were happening underneath? What the secret history preserves is a memory of subjective experience, of the great experiences that transformed the human psyche during this period. So which is more real? Which tells us more about the reality of being human in this period, the scientific one or the esoteric one encoded in the ancient myths?

  Might there be levels of truth or reality in today’s events that are missed by the science-oriented common-sense consciousness we use to navigate our way through traffic jams, supermarkets and e-mails?

  8. THE SPHINX AND THE TIMELOCK

  Orpheus • Daedalus, the First Scientist • Job • Solving the Riddle of the Sphinx

  WHEN JASON SET OFF ON THE ARGOS ON what proved to be the last hurrah of the demi-gods and heroes, his boat contained many of the great figures of the age, including Hercules and Theseus. But among these muscle-bound super-heroes, there was one with very different powers, a transitional figure who looked forward to life after the demi-gods and heroes had left, when humans would have to fend for themselves.

  Orpheus had travelled down from the north, bringing with him the gift of music. His music was so beautiful that it could not only charm humans and animals, it could make trees, even rocks move.

  On the voyage with Jason he helped the heroes when brute force could not. Singing and accompanying himself on his lyre, he charmed the great clashing rocks that threatened to crush the Argos and he sent the dragon that guarded the GoldenFleece to sleep.

  On his return he fell in love with Eurydice, but on the day of their wedding she was bitten on the ankle by a snake and died. Half-blinded by grief, Orpheus descended into the Underworld. He was determined not to accept the new order of life and death, determined to win her back.

  Death was now a terrible thing, no longer a welcome rest when the spirit recuperated and refreshed itself in preparation for its next incarnation. It was a painful separation from those you love.

  Descending deeper and deeper, Orpheus encountered the grim old ferryman Charon, who at first refused to row him across the River Styx to the land of the dead. But Charon was charmed by the lyre, as was Cerberus, the three-headed dog whose job was to guard the way to the Underworld. Orpheus charmed, too, the terrible demons whose task was to tear from the spirits of the dead the unregenerate animal lusts and savage desires that still clung to them.

  Finally, he reached the place where the King of the Underworld held his love captive. The King was not unequivocally charmed by Orpheus, because the release he granted was not unconditional. There was just one, small condition. Eurydice could return to the world of the living if Orpheus could lead her up there without ever once turning round to make sure she was following.

  But of course Orpheus, at the last moment, as the sunlight hit his face, perhaps worried he was being tricked by the King, did turn round. He saw the love of his life suddenly pulled back down away from him, down the stone passageways, out of sight, fading into the Underworld like a wisp of smoke. The other, more muscle-bound heroes had succeeded in their quests by fighting the good fight to the limits of their strength and endurance, by being brave and never giving up. But times were changing. The great initiates who preserved this story for us wanted us to understand that Orpheus failed because he tried to do what every good hero had done — he tried to make sure.

  It may also be that his music lost some of its charm, because it did not stop a band of maenads, the female followers of Dionysus, throwing themselves upon him and tearing him limb from bloody limb. They threw his head into the river, and it floated downstream, still singing. As it floated by, the weeping willows crowded the banks. Finally the head of Orpheus was rescued and set on an altar in a cave, where crowds came to consult it as an oracle.

  IF CADMUS/ENOCH NAMED THE PLANETS and the stars, it was Orpheus who measured them, and by measuring them, invented numbers. There are eight notes in an octave, but in a sense really only seven, as the eighth always represents elevation to the next octave. The octaves, then, refer to ascent through the seven spheres of the solar system, which in antiquity were central to all thought and experience. By giving a system of notation, Orpheus was originating mathematics. Concepts could be manipulated, paving the way for the scientific understanding of the physical universe.

  Orpheus is a transitional figure because on the one hand he is a magician with the power to move stones with music, but on the other he is a forerunner of science. Later we will see a similar ambiguity in many great scientists, even in modern times, but the other representative of the transition taking place at the time of Orpheus was Daedalus. (We know he was a contemporary because he was the keeper of the Minotaur, killed by Theseus, who joined in the quest for the Golden Fleece.)

  Daedalus is famous for making wings out of wax and feathers to help him and his son, Icarus, to escape from Crete. He also designed the labyrinth and is credited with inventing the saw and the sail. So he was an inventor, an engineer, an architect in ways we would recognize today. He did not use magic.

  If science was an innovation of the age, so too was magic. Magic was the application of a scientific way of thinking to the supernatural. In this age we no longer see the seemingly effortless shape shiftings of earlier ages or the turning of those who have offended into spiders, stags or plants. Instead we see Jason’s wife Medea and
Circe, to whom Medea went for help, advice and magical protection. Circe and Medea had to work in order to achieve their supernatural effects, using potions, spells, incantations. If the invention of words and numbers enabled humans to begin to manipulate the natural world, it also gave them the idea of being able to manipulate the spirit world. Medea offered Jason a blood-red potion, made from the juice of the crocus, to soothe the dragon that guarded the Fleece. She used chants and sprigs of juniper to spray the dragon’s eyelids. She dealt in magic elixirs and knew the secrets of the snake-charmer.

  As the material world continued to become denser and as the beings of the spirit worlds were increasingly squeezed out, even the lowest level of spirits, the nature spirits, the sylphs, dryads, naiads and gnomes, became elusive. They seemed to disappear into the streams, trees and rocks, fleeing the first light of dawn. But they still seemed tantalizingly close, and it was these spirits — then as now — that magicians found easier to manipulate.

  Some magicians tried to bend the great gods to their will, too, to draw them down from the moon. The myths of the original werewolf, Lycaon, who prompted the flood of Deucalion, of Poseidon’s flooding of the Thracian plain, causing Athena to move her city to the present site of Athens, and of the terrible storms that pursued Medea wherever she went are depictions of the environmental catastrophes that were resulting from the practice of black magic.

  At the end of this period humanity is sick and so, too, is nature.