by Mark Booth
THE MOST IMPORTANT INITIATION TEACHINGS concerned the way the spirit worlds are experienced after death. This was not because a candidate would have doubted there was life after death — such a thought would have been unthinkable then — but because they feared what their experience would turn out to be. In the first instance they feared that demons they had evaded in their lifetime were lying in wait. Initiation showed candidates how to navigate the after-death journey safely.
Iconography of the spirit leaving the body in Egyptian and Christian art (Didron’s Christian Iconocraphy ). In the Egyptian depiction, the spirit is showing separating from the discarded soul-matter.
In sleep the animal spirit leaves the vegetable and mineral parts of the body behind. In death, on the other hand, the vegetable part, which orders the basic life functions, leaves with the animal spirit.
The vegetable part of human nature has many functions, including storing memory. As the vegetable part detaches from the material body, both begin to disintegrate. This disintegration of the vegetable part causes the spirit to experience a review of the life just completed.
The vegetable part dissipates and detaches itself from the animal spirit in a matter of days. Then the spirit passes into the sub-lunar sphere. There it is attacked by demons who tear from it all impure, corrupt and bestial desires, all evil impulses of will. This region, where the spirit has to endure this painful process of purification for a period lasting approximately a third of the time spent on earth, is called Purgatory in Christian tradition. It is the same place as the Underworld of the Egyptians and Greeks. It is the Kamaloca (literally ‘region of desire’) of the Hindus.
Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century German mystic, said ‘If you fight your death, you’ll feel the demons tearing away at your life, but if you have the right attitude to death, you will be able to see that the devils are really angels setting your spirit free.’ An initiate has the right attitude to death. He sees behind appearances and knows that demons in their proper place perform an invaluable role in what we might call the ‘ecology’ of the spirit world. Unless the spirit is purged in this way, it cannot ascend through the higher spheres and hear their music. Following its prodigal journey on earth, the spirit cannot be reunited with the Father until it has been purified.
It is important to continue to bear in mind that the knowledge gained in initiation is not dry or abstract, but existential. The initiate has an out-of-body experience which is shattering.
Illustration to Le Petit Prince showing the ascent through the spheres.
From the lunar sphere the disembodied spirit flies upwards to the realm of Mercury, from there to Venus and then on to the sun. Then the spirit experiences, as the Greek orator Aristides put it, ‘a lightness which nobody who has not been initiated could either describe or understand’. It is important to continue to bear in mind that this teaching was common to Mystery schools of all cultures in the ancient world and has been perpetuated in the modern world by the secret societies. From the Egyptian Book of the Dead, through the Christian Cabala of the Pistis Sophia through Dante’s Commedia, forward to modern works such as Le Petit Prince by the twentieth-century French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the secret doctrine is maintained, sometimes in books only initiates may read — and sometimes hidden in plain view.
In the ancient texts the initiate is told the secret names of the spirits who guard the entrance to every sphere and the sometimes secret handshakes and other signs and formulae needed to negotiate entry. In the Pistis Sophia these spheres are envisaged as made of crystal and the entrance keepers of these spheres as archons or demons.
In all the ancient religions, the being who guides the human spirit through the underworld and helps negotiate the way past the guardian demons is the god of the planet Mercury.
But the initiates of the Mystery schools kept a secret. Halfway on the journey through the spheres, there is a swap. The task of guiding the human spirit upwards is taken over by a great being whose identity may perhaps be a surprise. In the latter part of the spirit’s ascent through the heavenly spheres the guide who lights the way is Lucifer.
In the spiritual ecology of the cosmos Lucifer is a necessary evil, both in this life — because without Lucifer humans could feel no desire — and in the afterlife. Without Lucifer the spirit would be plunged into total darkness and fail to understand the ascent. The second-century Roman writer Apuleius wrote that in the process of initiation the spirit confronts the gods of heaven in all their unveiled splendour — and with all their ambiguities removed.
The spirit ascends through the spheres of Jupiter and Saturn, passes through the sphere of the constellations and is finally reunited with the great Cosmic Mind. It has been a painful, confusing and tiring journey. Plutarch writes: ‘But finally a wondrous light shines to greet us, beautiful meadows full of singing and dancing, the solemnity of sacred realms and holy appearances.’
Then the spirit must begin again the descent through the spheres, preparatory to the next incarnation. As it descends each sphere grants the spirit a gift which it will need when re-entering the material plane.
The following account has been compiled from fragments of ancient tablets, dating perhaps as far back as the third millennium BC, excavated in Iraq in the late nineteenth century:
The first gate he passed her out of, and he restored to her the covering cloak of her body.
The second gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the bracelets of her hands and feet.
The third gate he passed her out of, and he restored to her the binding girdle of her waist.
The fourth gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the ornaments of her breast.
The fifth gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the necklace of her neck.
The sixth gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the earrings of her ears.
The seventh gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the great crown of her head.
Even today every child is reminded of these gifts in the fairy story Sleeping Beauty. The human spirit still responds strongly and warmly to this story, experiencing it as true in a deep sense.
But in order to understand the esoteric content of Sleeping Beauty it is necessary to think in an upside down sort of way. The story relates that at the party to celebrate her birth, six fairies give the Princess gifts to help her have a happy and fulfilled life. The seventh fairy, who represents Saturn or Satan, the spirit of materialism, curses the child with death, which is commuted to a long period of sleep. These seven fairies are, of course, the seven gods of the planetary spheres.
What is upside down and the other way round about this story is that by the deathly, dreamless sleep which is the curse of the evil fairy is meant life on earth. In other words, because of the intervention by Satan, humans gradually lose any consciousness, and eventually any memory, of their time among the heavenly hierarchies: ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.’ In this story, then, the party at the beginning of the narrative must be understood as taking place in the spirit world, and it is only when Beauty falls asleep that she is alive on the material plane. When she awakes, she dies!
In fact we have already seen a similar paradox in the story of Osiris, most of which takes place in the spirit world. When Osiris is nailed in the coffin that fits him like skin, it is his skin. He is only dead to Isis when he is alive on the material plane.
THESE STORIES SHOW HOW BOTH THIS life and the afterlife are ruled by the planets and stars. They should alert us to another very important dimension in initiatic teachings. Initiation prepares the candidate for meetings with the guardians of the different spheres both on the way up and on the way down. If these teachings are imprinted well enough on the individual spirit, this will ultimately prepare the spirit for conscious participation with the higher spiritual beings in preparing for a new incarnation. The key word here is ‘conscious’.
Rosicrucian beliefs about reincarnation are encoded
in the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Snow White ‘dies’ and is laid in a glass coffin — a legendary custom of the Rosicrucians. The whole idea of reincarnation may seem alien to people brought up in a modern, Christian culture. As we shall see, though, the New Testament contains ideas of reincarnation, the early Christians believed in it, and senior Christians have believed in it in secret ever since. Secret beliefs about reincarnation are encoded in art, architecture and literature here in Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book.
Initiation involves forging a conscious, working relationship with disembodied spirits and an existential knowledge of the way they work in our lives and our afterlives. It reveals the way they operate when we are awake, when we dream and when we are dead. We have seen that the histories we have been examining, such as the trials of Hercules, are structured according to different astronomical cycles — the journey of the sun through the months of the year and in the precession of the equinoxes. The point is that the same patterns that structure life on earth also structure the spirit worlds. Hercules and Job suffered trials in their earthly lives that have been recorded in the history of the world, but they will also have to suffer the same trials in the afterlife — unless they can learn to become conscious of them. And if they can’t, they will also have to suffer them in their next incarnation.
This is the aim of initiation: to make more and more experience conscious, to roll back the boundaries of consciousness.
Initiation by Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna. Compare this with the ancient Roman depiction of the process of initiation on p.43. The hooded acolyte is threatened and suddenly made to feel he has been pushed into a fatal fall. This is part of the process of inducing an out-of-body experience that enables the acolyte to achieve personal, existential knowledge of what will happen when the spirit leaves the body after death. The continuity in this process can also be seen in the account by the great eighteenth-century magus Cagliostro of his initiation into a Masonic Lodge in London. In the Esperance Lodge above a pub in Soho, he was asked to repeat an oath of secrecy then blindfolded. A rope was then tied round his waist, and he heard pulleys creak as he was winched up to the ceiling. Suddenly he fell to the floor, his blindfold was removed, and he saw a pistol being loaded with powder and a bullet. The blindfold was replaced and he was handed the pistol and asked to prove his obedience by shooting himself in the head. When he hesitated, his initiators shouted at him, accusing him of being a coward. He pulled the trigger, heard an explosion, felt a blow to the side of the head and smelled gunpowder. He had believed he was going to die — and now he was an initiate.
In our individual lives — and collectively — we go round and round in the circles traced out for us by the planets and stars.
But if we can become conscious of these circles, if we can become conscious of the activity of the stars and planets in our lives in a most intimate way, then we are in a sense no longer trapped by them. We are no longer trapped by them, we rise above them, we are moving now not in a circle but in an upward spiral.
ZARATHUSTRA WORE A CLOAK COVERED with stars and planets as a mark of the knowledge that the great spirits of the sun had taught him. This was knowledge he passed on in initiation. When candidates re-entered the body, following their out-of-body experience, they were enabled by Zarathustra to explore the interior workings of their bodies in ways that thousands of years later people would only be able to rediscover though autopsies. Again the difference was that the ancients, according to their habit of seeing life as subjectively as possible, did not know human anatomy in an abstract, conceptual way, but rather they experienced it. This was how the ancients knew of the pineal gland long before it was ‘discovered’ by modern science.
At the transition from the sixth to the fifth millennium BC, humankind began to construct the great stone circles that survive to this day. In the same way that the withdrawal of the gods during the Indian period had forced humankind to think about ways of following them, now the obscuring of direct guidance from the gods made it necessary for humankind to discover new ways of seeking that guidance. Again humankind was being drawn out of itself.
As the initiator of these stone monuments, Zarathustra can be seen as a sort of post-Flood mirror image of Enoch.
The megalithic stone circles which began to spread throughout the Near East, Northern Europe and Northern Africa are intended to measure the movements of the heavenly bodies. In the 1950s Professor Alexander Thom of Cambridge University first realized that megalithic stone monuments across the world are constructed according to a common unit of measurement, which he called the ‘megalithic yard’. This has since been verified by wide-ranging statistical analyses of monuments. Recently Dr Robert Lomas of Sheffield University has shown how it was that this unit of measurement was derived to such astonishing unanimity and accuracy in different parts of the world; a pendulum swinging 360 times during the time it takes for a star to move through one of the 360 degrees into which the sky’s dome divides will be exactly 16.32 inches long, which is exactly one half a ‘megalithic yard’.
Because the ancients looked to the stars and planets as the controllers of life on earth, they naturally defined their original mathematical measures of the physical world by reference to these heavenly — which is to say spiritual — bodies. Therefore mathematics in its origins was not only holistic, in the sense that it took into account the size, shape and movement of the earth and its relation to the heavenly bodies, but it was also the expression of a spiritual impulse.
EVIL POWERS ALWAYS THREATENED TO DESTROY Zarathustra. There are poignant reminders in the small mountainside shrines of Zoroastrianism today, where a flame is kept alight, but in permanent danger of being snuffed out. At the age of seventy-seven Zarathustra was murdered on his own altar.
SHORTLY BEFORE THE END OF THE FOURTH millennium Krishna was born. The year was 3228 BC. This shepherd and prophet was in some ways a forerunner of Jesus Christ. (We shall see shortly how Krishna, Osiris and Zarathustra are depicted attending the Nativity, albeit in disguise, in famous Renaissance paintings.)
He is not, of course, to be confused with the war god Krishna, the earlier Atlantean Krishna who fought in an epic battle to defeat the Luciferic forces of desire and delusion. Now these forces had sunk deeper into human nature, and degenerated into a desire for gold and for the spilling of blood.
His mother-to-be, the virgin Devaki, had been increasingly beset by strange visions. One day she fell into a deep ecstasy. She heard a heavenly music of harps and voices, and in the midst of a bright flashing of myriad lights saw the Sun god appear to her in human form. Overshadowed by him, she lost consciousness altogether.
In time Krishna was born. Devaki was later warned by an angel that her brother, Kansa, would try to murder the boy, so she fled the court to live among shepherds at the foot of Mount Meru.
Kansa was a child-killer, hunting down the children of the poor. He’d even done it while still a child himself. Now he sent a giant red-crested snake to kill his nephew, but Krishna was able to kill the snake by stamping on it. A female demon called Putana, whose breasts were full of poison, pulled him to her, but Krishna sucked on her breast with such force that she crumpled and fell down dead.
Kansa continued to persecute his nephew, trying to hunt him down like a wild animal, but as Krishna grew to manhood he was protected by shepherds and hid in the hills and the forests, where he preached a gospel of non-violence and love for all humanity: ‘Return good for evil, forget your own suffering for another’s’, and ‘Renounce the fruit of your works — let your work be its own reward’. Krishna was saying things no one had ever said before.
When these teachings reached Kansa, they enraged him further, tortured him in the very depths of his spirit.
Among Krishna’s many titles are ‘The Cowherd’ and ‘The Lord of the Milkmaids’. He enjoyed a simple country life, preaching but avoiding direct confrontation with Kansa. The local milkmaids were all madly in love with the slender youth. He
liked to play the flute and dance the dance of love with them. On one occasion he watched them as they went to bathe in the Yumana River, then stole their clothes and climbed up a tree where they could not reach him. On another he was dancing with many milkmaids who all wanted to hold his hand, so he multiplied himself into many forms so that each could believe she held the hand of the true Krishna.
Krishna is a god of transgression, whose numer — or sacred potency — takes him beyond conventional morality.
One day he and his brother entered Kansa’s city of Mathura, disguised as poor country people, in order to take part in an athletics festival. They met a deformed girl called Kubja, carrying ointments and perfumes to the palace. When asked by Krishna she readily gave him some, though she could by no means afford it, and he cured her of her deformity and made her beautiful.
But Kansa had not been fooled by the brothers’ disguise, and when they entered the wrestling competition he had primed two giants to kill them. If they failed, an enormous elephant was set to trample them to death. In the event Krishna and his brother turned the tables on all of them and escaped.
Finally Krishna decided to discard all disguise, to come out of hiding to confront Kansa. When he re-entered Mathura, Krishna was acclaimed as its saviour by a populace that showered him with flowers and garlands. Kansa was waiting with his retinue in the main square. ‘You have stolen my kingdom,’ said Kansa, ‘Kill me!’ When Krishna refused, Kansa had his soldiers seize him and tie him to a cedar tree. He was martyred by Kansa’s archers.
With the death of Krishna in the year 3102 BC, the Kali Yuga — the Dark Age — began. A yuga is a division of a great year, there being eight yugas in a complete processional cycle.