by Mark Booth
Magicians drawing down the moon. Greek drawing.
ORPHEUS MIGHT HAVE FAILED BY THE standards of the conventional hero, but his influence on history was greater and more long-lasting than that of Hercules, Theseus and Jason. The music Orpheus originated would be a balm for healing the sick and troubled spirit of humanity down the millennia.
If people were becoming isolated not only from the gods but from one another, if they were worn down by an always harsh and sometimes hostile environment, and if their imaginations were infected by the perverse and bestial impulses of magic, all of this would now be countered by the aesthetic influence on the imagination, not only through music but also literature, painting and sculpture. Inspiring images of beauty, truth and love worked on humanity at a level below that of the conscious mind. They were more powerful than any explicit, abstract moral teaching.
Orpheus was the mythical founder of the Greek mysteries that would light up and inspire ancient Greece.
PERHAPS THE MOST POWERFUL ARTISTIC expression of the spiritual crisis at the end of the age of the heroes comes in the Bible.
In the written form it has come down to us, the story of Job is one of the later texts of the Old Testament, but in its origins it is one of the oldest parts.
Job was a good man, yet he lost all his money. His sons and daughters died. Left all alone he was covered with a plague of boils. Meanwhile, the wicked prospered. The story of Job has come down to us, not because he was a great leader or doer of great deeds, but because he was the first human being ever to think a very important and deeply true thought: ‘life is unfair’. Hercules had been the sport of the gods, but it was Job who cried out to the heavens in defiance. Unlike Hercules, Job had the language to do this.
Today we take it for granted that we have enough mental manoeuvrability to choose what to think about. However, before the invention of language, which was the great achievement of this age, this manoeuvrability would not have been possible.
Language enables us to distance ourselves from the world. It helps us to withdraw from what is physically present, and can enable us to break down experience, whether present or not, into bits we can manipulate. To some degree we can put experience into order as we wish.
There is an alienating element to this process. As well as the advantages it brought, language made the world a colder, darker and trickier place. We saw earlier how thinking is itself a deadening process. Language, too, makes us unhealthy, less vividly alive and less sure-footed in our wanderings in the world.
So language brought with it a new form of consciousness. Before Job people fel that everything that happened to them was meant to happen to them, that there was a divine purpose behind everything. They did not — could not — question. Now language enabled Job to step back. He began to notice inconsistencies. Life is unfair.
Blake’s Job.
But God rebuked Job for understanding so little. ‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth? When the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy? Have you entered the springs of the sea or walked the depths of the deep? Have the gates of death been opened to you? Do you know where the Sun lives and where the darkness comes from? Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the belt of Orion?’
What saved Job was that he had that sense we all have when we awake from a wonderful dream, when we try to bring it back but cannot. He was aware that the range of human experience was in some way diminishing. ‘Oh that I was as in the times of old, when God watched over me, when his lamp shone on my head’ (Job 29:2-4).
Job refers, of course, to the ‘Lantern of Osiris’.
Today the word ‘apocryphal’ carries pejorative associations, but really it means hidden — or esoteric. In the apocryphal Testament of Job, he was rewarded for being conscious of what he did not know, conscious of what he had lost. Job’s sons and daughters were returned to him, his daughters wearing golden girdles. One belt gave Job the ability to understand the language of the angels, the second the secrets of creation and the third the language of the Cherubim.
MUSIC, MATHEMATICS AND LANGUAGE were invented in the age of the heroes and so too was astronomy — another achievement attributed to Enoch. The first stone circles not only marked out the dispositions of the hierarchies of the gods and angels, they marked out the positions of the stars and planets.
In the secret history, therefore, it also now becomes possible for the first time to begin to fix the dates of great events.
BETWEEN THE LION PAWS OF THE SPHINX at Giza, gazing eastwards, is a large stone that carries the inscription ‘This is the Splendid Place of the First Time’. The mysterious First Time, or Zep Tepi, was a phrase the Egyptians used to allude to the beginning of time. In their mythology Zep Tepi was marked by the rising of the primordial mound out of the waters and the alighting on it of the Phoenix.
By a remarkable feat of reconstruction, which he made while standing between the paws of the Sphinx, Robert Bauval has managed to determine the date of Zep Tepi. In Egyptian mythology the Phoenix arrived to mark the beginning of a new age. In Egyptian mythology the Phoenix, or Bennu bird, is the symbol of the Sothic cycle of 1,460 years, (which is the time it took the Egyptians’ 365-day calendar to resynchronize with the beginning of the yearly cycle, marked by the heliacal rising of Sirius). The synchronization of these two cycles, the yearly and the Sothic, took place in 11,451, 10,081, 7160, 4241, and 2781 BC. Bauval noticed immediately that these dates coincided with the commencement of some of the great building projects up and down the Nile. Clearly the starting of this cycle was very important to the ancient Egyptians…
Trying to figure out which cycle might have been the ‘first’ one, he was initially attracted by the idea that it might be 10,081 BC, because of an esoteric tradition that the Sphinx had been built at this time or even earlier.
Then Bauval worked out that on the earlier date of 11,451 BC the Milky Way, which had immense significance in ancient cultures around the world as the ‘river of souls’, was lying directly over the course of the Nile, so that they mirrored each other. Moreover, it also struck him that on this very early date of 11,451 the Sothic and yearly cycles coincided with a third cycle, the Great Year — the 25,920-year-long complete cycle of the zodiac — in a most meaningful way. Because on that date the Lion-bodied Sphinx’s eastwards gaze would have taken in the dawning of the Age of Leo.
The Sphinx embodies the four cardinal constellations of the zodiac, the four corners of the cosmos — Leo, Taurus, Scorpio and Aquarius, the Four Elements that work together to make the material world. The Sphinx, according to the secret history, is a monument to the first time the Four Elements locked into place and matter finally became solid.
When in the Timaeus Plato famously wrote of the World Soul being crucified on the World Body, he was not prophesying the crucifixion of Christ, as some Christian apologists have supposed. He was recalling this crucial moment in world history as idealism conceives it, when consciousness was finally fixed in solid matter.
The Sphinx, therefore, has a very special place in history as idealism tells it. It marks that point when, after wave upon wave of emanations from the cosmic mind, solid matter as we know it today was finally formed. That is why it is perhaps the greatest icon of the ancient world. The laws of physics as we know them today were only then set in motion, and from that point on the dates can be firmly fixed, because the great clock of the cosmos was finally set in its complex pattern of orbits.
If this late solidification of matter were what actually happened, it would, of course, invalidate dating methods, such as Carbon-14, conventionally used to try to establish early chronologies. Modern science makes an assumption in its calculations that the ancients did not, namely that the natural laws have held true in all places and at all times.
THE SPHINX ASKS OEDIPUS A RIDDLE: ‘What walks on four legs, then two legs, then three legs?’ If he cannot answer it, the Sphinx will kill him, but he correctly interprets it as a riddle concerning t
he ages of man. A baby walks on four legs, grows up to walk on two legs, until so old that a third leg, or walking stick, is needed. But ‘ages’ here is also another way of evoking the evolution of humanity. The form of the Sphinx is a monument to this evolution.
The Sphinx is defeated by the acumen of Oedipus, and casts itself into the precipice or abyss. The Sphinx’s dying is a way of showing that the gods of the elements, these organizing principles of the universe, became successfully absorbed inside the human body at this time.
Central to the Oedipal legend is the terrible fate he hoped — but failed — to avoid. He duly kills his father and becomes his mother’s lover. As the laws of nature become fixed and mechanical, humans are trapped in them.
So the Sphinx also marks the end of the Age of Metamorphosis, the fixing of the biological forms we know today. It also bars the way back. In Genesis it is one of the Cherubim who bars the way back into Eden, and the Egyptians called the Sphinx, made up of four Cherubim, ‘Hu’, meaning protector. By this they meant that he guarded against any slide back into the old ways of procreation.
It’s a common misconception that in 1650, when Bishop Usher famously calculated the date of the creation as humankind as 4004 BC, this was some last vestige of an ancient superstition. In fact Usher’s calculation was the product of a time when materialism was gaining ground — and so, too, was a narrow, literal interpretation of the Bible that would have seemed absurd to the ancients. They believed that human souls had existed for vast, immeasurable eras before 11,451 BC, and only then did the human body as we know it today fully materialize around the human spirit.
It is interesting to note that, according to the calculations of Manetho in the third century BC, this is almost exactly the time when the reign of the demi-gods came to an end.
WE WILL SEE LATER THAT, ACCORDING TO esoteric doctrine, not only was matter only precipitated out of mind a short while ago, but that it exists only for a brief interval. It will dissolve again in just over nine thousand years, when the sun rises again to meet the gaze of the Sphinx in the constellation of Leo.
In the teachings of the secret societies we live on a small island of matter in a vast ocean of ideas and imagination.
The Sphinx, which showed the Four Elements locked into place at the four cardinal points. In modern times the eminent Egyptologist R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz — protégé of Henri Matisse — was the first to reveal to a wider public that the Sphinx might have been carved before 10,000 BC. He pointed to the fact that the walls surrounding the monument show signs of water erosion that could not have been made after that time. The Sphinx, according to the secret history, is a monument to the first time the Four Elements locked into place and matter finally became solid. In 11,451 BC east, west, north and south were then locked with the Four Elements that make up the physical world.
9. THE NEOLITHIC ALEXANDER THE GREAT
Noah and the Myth of Atlantis • Tibet • Rama’s Conquest of India • The Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali
IF YOU HAVE A PASSING ACQUAINTANCE with the myth of Atlantis, you may well have been left with the impression that there is only one ancient source for this legend — Plato.
The Platonic account goes like this. Egyptian priests told Solon, a statesman and lawyer of the generation of Plato’s great grandfather, about a great island in the Atlantic that had been destroyed some nine thousand years earlier — in about 9600 BC.
The civilization on this island had been founded by the god Poseidon, and peopled by the descendants of his coupling with a beautiful woman called Cleito. (As we saw in Chapter 5, this intervention by a fish god is a coded account of evolution, common to mythologies all around the world.)
As well as the main island, this Atlantean civilization also ruled over several lesser islands in the region.
The largest island was dominated by a beautiful and fertile plain and a large hill. Here Cleito lived, and the people enjoyed food which grew abundantly on the island. Two streams of water came up through the earth, one of hot water and one of cold.
To keep Cleito for himself, Poseidon had a series of circular canals dug around the hill. In time a sophisticated civilization grew up, taming wild animals, mining metals and building — temples, palaces, racecourses, gymnasiums, public baths, government buildings, harbours and bridges. Many walls were coated with metals — with brass, tin and a red metal, unknown to us, called orichalcum. The temples had roofs of ivory and pinnacles of silver and gold.
The islands of Atlantis were ruled over by ten kings each with his own kingdom, the nine others being subservient to the ruler of the largest island.
The central temple, dedicated to Poseidon, had statues of gold, including one of the god standing in a chariot pulled by six-winged horses and flanked by hundreds of Nereids riding dolphins. Live bulls roamed freely around the forest of columns in this temple, and every five or six years the ten kings who ruled the islands between them were left alone in the temple to hunt these bulls without weapons. They would capture one, lead it up to the great column of orichalcum, inscribed with laws of Atlantis, and there behead it.
Life on the islands of Atlantis was generally idyllic. In fact life was so good that eventually people could not bear it any longer and began to become restless, decadent and corrupt, searching after novelty and power. So Zeus decided to punish them. The islands were flooded until only small islets remained, like a skeleton sticking out of the sea. Then finally a great earthquake engulfed all that was left in the course of one day and one night.
YES, IT WOULD MAKE THIS ACCOUNT OF the destruction of Atlantis unlikely to be true, if Plato were the only classical writer on the subject. Aristotle said of it, ‘Plato alone made Atlantis rise out of the sea, and then he submerged it again’, which has been taken to mean that Plato simply made the whole thing up. However, a little research shows that classical literature is packed with references to Atlantis, for example in the works of Proclus, Diodorus, Pliny, Strabo, Plutarch and Posidinus, and they include many elements which are not in Plato and seem to come from earlier sources — assuming, that is, that they haven’t been made up too.
Proclus says that three hundred years after Solon, Crantor was shown columns by the priest of Sais covered with a history of Atlantis in hieroglyphic characters. A near-contemporary of Plato’s, now known as pseudo-Aristotle, wrote about a similar island paradise in his book On Marvellous Things Heard.
The Greek historian Marcellus, also a near contemporary of Plato’s, is clearly relying on ancient sources when he writes that ‘in the Outer Ocean [the Atlantic] there are seven small islands and three larger ones, one of which was dedicated to Poseidon’. This ties in with Plato’s account in terms of the number of kingdoms. A Greek historian of the fourth century BC, Theopompus of Chios, retells a story told two hundred years before Plato by Midas of Phrygia, that ‘besides the well-known portions of the world — Europe, Asia, Libya (Africa) — there is another which is unknown, of incredible immensity where vast blooming meadows and pastures feed herds of various huge and mighty beasts and where the men are twice the height and live to twice the age of men’. As we have already seen, Enoch and the myths and legends of many cultures around the world recorded the prevalence of giants before the Great Flood.
Then, of course, there is the Greek myth of the Great Flood. The story of Deucalion is much older than Plato. As in both Plato’s account and the biblical one there is an implication here that the Great Flood was intended to destroy the greater part of humankind, because the development of humankind had gone wrong. Rudolf Steiner has pointed out that the stories of the demi-gods and heroes, Cadmus, Theseus, Jason — all involve journeys eastwards. We should read them, he says, as stories of migrations which took place as conditions on the Atlantean islands deteriorated and before the final catastrophe.
When Plato writes about Poseidon, the first god-king of Atlantis, this should remind us of what we saw in Chapter 5 — that Poseidon was the original half-fish form of Zeus/Jupiter. Poseid
on was also god of the raging sea, god of subterranean, volcanic depths, whose bull-bellowing roar signalled climatic catastrophe. Poseidon was at work at both the beginning and end of Atlantis’s history.
Other ancient cultures cross-reference Plato’s account. The South American Aztecs recorded that they came from ‘Aztlan’, ‘the land in the middle of the water’. Sometimes this land was called ‘Aztlan of the Seven Caves’. It was depicted as a central, large step pyramid surrounded by six smaller pyramids. According to traditions collected by the invading Spaniards, humanity had nearly been wiped out by a vast flood, and would have been but for a priest and his wife who constructed a boat made out of a hollow log, in which they also rescued seeds and animals. The complex and sophisticated astronomy of these South American tribes has allowed one modern researcher to deduce that they dated this flood to about 11,600 BC.
This might seem a long way from Plato’s date of around 9600 BC, but the crucial point here is that both dates agree in setting the Flood at the end of the Ice Age. Modern geology tells us that as the ice caps melted, a series of floods swept down from the north. We have already noted the suggestion that the islands of Atlantis suffered several catastrophic floods over a long period before the last island was finally, completely, submerged.
Underwater archaeologists are today discovering in many parts of the world the remains of civilizations which were covered by floods caused by the melting of ice at the end of the Ice Age. In April 2002 divers stories told by local fishermen were used to help locate the lost city of the Seven Pagodas off the coast of Mahabalipuram in India. The temple-like structures that have been found are much grander and more complex than we would expect for the end of the Ice Age — the Neolithic, or New Stone Age. Author and investigator Graham Hancock, who has done so much to question our academic assumptions about ancient history, was quoted at the time as saying, ‘I have argued for many years that the world’s flood myths deserve to be taken seriously, a view that most Western academics reject. But here in Mahabalipuram, we have proved the myths right and the academics wrong.’