by Mark Booth
The Trojan horse is depicted in the bottom panel. The story of the siege of Troy has come down to us, for the most part, in the account by ‘blind Homer’. In the language of the secret societies ‘blind’ is not necessarily meant literally. In the case of Homer it may mean he was an initiate, whose gaze was directed at the spiritual rather than the material world. Florence and Kenneth Wood have shown that the Iliad can be read as an astronomical allegory. But, as we have seen, this does not imply that it is not also a real historical event. As an initiate Homer would have been conscious of the great gods of stars and planets guiding the life below.
From now on, though, we will see that many legendary figures, presumed by most people to be entirely non-historical, have in fact been shown by recent archaeology to have left physical remains.
The discovery of the ruins of Troy by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s has always been controversial. The archaeological layer he excavated probably dates to 3000 BC, and so is far too old to be Homer’s, but today the majority of scholars agree that the layer relating to 1200 BC, in the late Bronze Age, is consistent with Homer’s account.
In the ancient world wars were fought for the possession of sacred, initiatic knowledge, partly because of the supernatural powers this conferred. The Greeks fought because they wanted to carry off the statue made by the hand of Athena, called the Palladium. We should see their struggle to possess Helen in the same way.
Today we may see in the face of a beauty ‘the promise of happiness’, to use Stendhal’s phrase. Yes, we may cherish that promise in a crude or trivial sense, but we may also do so in a deeper sense. Great beauty can seem mystical to us, as if it holds the very secret of life. If I could be with that beautiful person, we think, my life would be fulfilled. The presence of exceptional beauty can induce an altered state of consciousness, and male initiates have often been associated with very beautiful women, perhaps partly because their participation intensifies the secret sexual techniques of the schools.
Possession of Helen would enable the Greeks to move forward to the next stage of civilization.
We see the change consciousness that the story of the siege of Troy is all about in the famous saying of Achilles: ‘Better to be a slave in the land of the living than the king of the shades.’ The heroes of Greece and Troy loved to live in the sun and it was a terrible thing when it was suddenly shut out, and their spirits were sent off to the land of the shades, the Western gloom. This was the ‘death-dread’ of Gilgamesh intensified to a level that seems almost modern.
Odysseus blinding the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, shows the progenitor of the new way of thinking destroying the old Third-Eyed one. The parallel story of David and Goliath, of some two hundred years later, when David slays the giant with a pebble aimed at the middle of the forehead, shows that such stragglers from earlier dispensations were still then a historical reality.
Note that Achilles was not doubting the reality of life after death, but his conception of it evidently did not go beyond the dreary, half-life of the sub-lunar sphere. A vision of the heavenly spheres above had been lost to him.
We can see this turning point in consciousness from another angle if we ask ourselves who out of the heroes really won the battle of Troy for the Greeks? It was not the brave, strong hero Achilles, the almost-invincible last of the demi-gods. It was Odysseus ‘of the nimble wits’, who defeated the Trojans by tricking them into accepting the gift of a wooden horse, which had soldiers hidden inside.
To today’s sensibility the story of the Trojan Horse seems almost completely implausible. From the point of view of modern psychology it just seems unrealistic to suppose that anyone could be so gullible.
But at the time of the Trojan war, people were only just beginning to emerge from the collective mind we followed earlier walking through the ancient wood and have just seen Jaynes define. Before the Trojan war everyone shared the same world of thoughts. Others could see what you were thinking. No such lie would have been possible. People interacted with a terrible sincerity. They had a sense that we have lost that in everything they did they were taking part in cosmic events.
…the date of the siege of Troy is also the date of the first trick in history.
12. THE DESCENT INTO DARKNESS
Moses and the Cabala • Akhenaten and Satan • Solomon, Sheba and Hiram • King Arthur and the Crown Chakra
EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION IS PERHAPS THE most successful in recorded history, lasting over three thousand years. Compare this with European-American, Christian civilization, which has so far lasted only about two thousand years. Another notable thing is Egypt’s extraordinarily well preserved historical records, which have survived on temple walls, on tablets and in papyri. These have been vital in placing neighbouring civilizations that have left less complete records and remains, in a chronological context.
The Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt has traditionally been placed in the reign of the pharaoh Ramasees II, one of the greatest and most expansive rulers of Egypt. A great builder at Luxor and Abu Simbel, his monuments also include the gigantic obelisk currently standing in La Place de la Concorde in Paris. In the Romantic poet Shelley’s Ozymandias , he became the archetype of the earthly ruler who comes to believe his achievements will last forever — ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
A worthy opponent for Moses, you might think. Cecil B. De Mille certainly thought so. But a problem has arisen. Archaeologists discovered that if you look for traces of the Hebrews in the reign of Ramasees II, or if you look, for example, for traces of the fall of Jericho or the Temple of Solomon in the corresponding archaeological layers, you find absolutely nothing.
This led to a consensus among academics that the epic myths of the origins of the Jews were ‘just myths’, in the sense that they had no basis in historical reality.
Is it worth pausing for a moment to wonder how much these people wanted the stories to be untrue, how much their convictions were informed by a sort of adolescent glee at the nursery certainties being overturned?
In the 1990s a group of younger archaeologists, based in Austria and London and led by David Rohl, began to question the conventional chronology of Egypt. More particularly they came to realize that in the period of the Third Intermediate Dynasty, two king lists which had been understood to run one after the other should really be understood as running concurrently.
This had the effect of ‘shortening’ the chronology of ancient Egypt by approximately four hundred years. Known as the ‘New Chronology’, it is gradually gaining ground even among the older generation of Egyptologists.
An incidental side effect of the New Chronology — I say ‘incidental’ because these scholars have no religious axe to grind — was that when field archaeologists began to search for traces of the biblical stories some four hundred years earlier, they made sensational discoveries.
The human condition gives us extraordinary latitude for believing what we want to believe, but for anyone who does not have a strong ulterior motive for believing that the biblical stories are ‘just fairy tales’, this new evidence is quite compelling.
It shows that Moses did not live in about 1250 BC contemporary with Ramasees II. Instead he was born in about 1540 BC, and the Exodus took place in approximately 1447 BC. Using astronomical retro calculations, Venus observations recorded in Mesopotamian texts that cross-reference both the Bible and also surviving Egyptian records, David Rohl has provided strong evidence to show that Moses was brought up an Egyptian prince in the reign of Neferhotep I in the mid-sixteenth century BC. Rohl has found complementary evidence in an account by Artapanus, a Jewish historian of the third century BC who may well have had access to now lost records from the Egyptian temples. Artapanus related how ‘Prince Mousos’ became a popular administrator under Khenephres, Neferhotep I’s successor. Mousos was then was sent into exile when the pharaoh became jealous of him. Finally Rohl has shown that the pharaoh of the Exodus was Khenephres’s successor,
Dudimose. Excavations at the Dudimose level have revealed the remains of a foreign settlement of slaves or workers — such as are also referred to in the Brooklyn Papyrus, a royal decree authorizing transfer of just such a group at just this time. This settlement may have been built for and by the Hebrews. There are also death pits and evidence of hasty, mass burials which may be traces of the biblical plagues.
Unearthing stone remains may ground us in historical reality, but in order to understand what was really important in human terms, what it felt like to be there, the highest and deepest that human experience had to offer, we must turn again to the secret tradition.
AS AN EGYPTIAN PRINCE MOSES WAS initiated in the Egyptian Mysteries. This is recorded by the Egyptian historian Manetho, who identified Heliopolis as the Mystery school. It is confirmed in Acts 7.22, where the Apostle Stephen says, ‘And Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.’
The teachings of Moses are steeped in Egyptian wisdom. For example, Spell 125 in the Book of the Dead describes the judgement of the dead. The spirit is required to declare to Osiris that he has led a good life, then deny having committed a list of specific immoral acts to the forty-two judges of the dead: ‘I have not robbed, I have not killed, I have not born false witness’ and so on. Of course this predates the Ten Commandments.
It is no denigration of Moses to point this out. His teaching could not have done otherwise than grow out of the given historical milieu. What is historically significant about Moses is the way he reframed the ancient wisdom with the aim of leading humankind into the next stage of the evolution of consciousness.
When Moses fled into exile in the desert, he encountered a wise, old teacher. Jethro was an African — Ethiopian — high priest, keeper of a library of stone tablets. When Moses married his daughter, Jethro initiated him to a higher level. This is what is being alluded to in the story of the burning bush. When Moses saw the burning bush not being consumed by the fire, this was a vision of the self that is not destroyed by the purging fire that awaits on the other side of the grave.
A sense of mission arose out of Moses’s vision of the burning bush, an impulse to work for the greater good of humanity, to lead us all to a land flowing with milk and honey.
But then, as Moses hesitated before the magnitude of the task in front of him, God stiffened his resolve: ‘And thou shalt take this rod in thy hand, wherewith thou shalt do signs.’ As Moses journeyed back to Egypt, he intended to ask the pharaoh to ‘set my people free’.
As Moses and his brother Aaron stood in the throne room, Aaron suddenly threw his rod down to the ground. It changed, magically, into a snake. The pharaoh ordered his court magicians to match this feat, but as they did so Aaron’s snake swallowed theirs.
As the battle of wills between Moses and the pharaoh unfolded, Moses used his own rod — or wand — to direct the course of events: to bring fire and hail down from the sky, to bring on a plague of locusts, to part the Red Sea, to strike a rock to cause water to gush out of it.
What does this mean? I suspect many readers may be well ahead of me already, but the folk legend that this rod was carved out of wood that originally came from the tree in the Garden of Eden points to its deeper meaning. The rod is part of the vegetable dimension of the cosmos. By mastering it and manipulating it as it runs through his own body, Moses, now an adept, was also able to master and manipulate the cosmos around him.
Later, after Moses had given up trying to persuade the pharaoh to set his people free and had led them out into the Sinai desert, he came down from the mountain with the tablets of stone. Moses proved to be a hard taskmaster, in some ways harder than the pharaohs. Again and again his people failed to live up to his demands. At one point they were punished by a plague of fiery and deadly serpents (Numbers 7.19). To save them Moses nailed a bronze serpent across a raised horizontal pole.
John 3:14 comments on his passage in the Old Testament: ‘And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.’
Clearly John is seeing the bronze serpent as foreshadowing the crucified Jesus Christ. ‘Lifted up’ carries with it a sense of being transformed or transfigured. The bronze serpent has been smelted, and so looks forward, John suggests, to the transfiguration of the material body of humanity.
The rod that Moses used to smite the Egyptians and to discipline his own people was an image of the Lucifer-serpent of animal consciousness that has been straightened and subdued by willpower and a moral discipline that is very hard to maintain.
The great gift Moses gave his people, then, was guilt. Morality emerges into history with Moses and with it a call to a change of heart.
If we look at the Ten Commandments from the perspective of the esoteric doctrine, what is most significant is the way that the first two commandments banned the use of images in religious practice and called upon the Jews to worship no other gods. Following Abraham, Moses was working towards a new kind of religion that did away with the practices of older religions with their elaborate, overwhelming ceremonies, the loud clashing cymbals, the blinding clouds of smoke and speaking idols. The old religion aimed to diminish consciousness. The worshippers would attain access to the spirit worlds but in an uncontrolled way, in the great, overwhelming and riotous visions of the followers of Osiris. It was this that Moses was concerned to roll back and replace with a thoughtful, more conscious communion with the divine.
By this ban on images, Moses was helping to create the conditions that would make abstract thought possible.
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS AND THE other laws of Exodus and Deuteronomy form Moses’s public teaching. They are for all the people. In esoteric tradition he also taught seventy elders the Cabala, the secret, mystical teachings of Judaism, at the same time.
The Cabala is as broad a church as a major world religion, and we will be returning to different aspects of it.
The udja eye as a series of fractions.
In sacred idealism the human form is a microcosm of the universe. The divine proportions can be found not just in ammonites and nebulae but also in the human body. The renegade Egyptologist R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz spent fifteen years on site tracing the divine-mathematical proportions of the Temple of Luxor. He showed how the ritual laying of the foundation and consecration of the temple was called the ceremony of Giving the House to its Master. Likewise in Hinduism, he wrote, the building of a temple in the form of a human body was a magical process. It was believed that if the overseer of the work of building a temple had made a mistake in the construction of a particular part of a temple, he would suffer an illness or injury in the corresponding part of his own body.
Again, it is no denigration of Moses or the Cabala to point out that it grew out of an older tradition, the mystical number system of the Egyptians.
Reams of mathematical calculations have not come down to us from ancient Egypt, but their understanding of higher mathematics has survived in Egyptian art. For example, the eye of Horus was often represented as the udja eye, which we now know was made up of a number of hieroglyphs representing fractions which add up to a total of 63/64. If you reverse this and divide 64 by 63, you come up with what has been called the greatest secret of the Egyptians, a number called the Comma of Pythagoras.
Highly complex numbers like the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and Phi (sometimes called the Golden Proportion), are known as irrational numbers. They lie deep in the structure of the physical universe, and were seen by the Egyptians as the principles controlling creation, the principles by which matter is precipitated from the cosmic mind.
Today scientists recognize that the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and the Golden Proportion as well as the closely related Fibonacci sequence are universal constants that describe complex patterns in astronomy, music and physics. For example, the Fibonacci sequence is a series in which each number is the sum of the two preceding it. Spirals are built up according to this sequence. It is rampant in nature in the spirals of galaxies, the shape of ammoni
tes and the arrangement of leaves on a stem.
To the Egyptians these numbers were also the secret harmonies of the cosmos, and they incorporated them as rhythms and proportions in the construction of their pyramids and temples. A building made in this way would be ideal. A hall, a doorway, a window which had the Golden Proportion built into it, would be ineffably pleasing to the human spirit.
The great temples of Egypt are, of course, bursting with vegetable forms, such as the bulrush-shaped pillars of the great hypostyle at Karnak. But it was the vegetable life that gives proportion to human limb, the vegetable life that turns ribs and makes them curve according to a pleasing mathematical formula that the temple-builders were particularly concerned to reproduce.
The point is that Egyptian temples were built in this way because the gods were no longer able to inhabit bodies of flesh and blood. A temple was built to be the body of a god, no less. The god’s spirit lived inside the vegetable and material bodies that the temple embodied, just as the human spirit lives inside its vegetable and material bodies.
Hypostyle hall at Karnak.
THE HEBREWS HAVE NOT LEFT A RICH architectural heritage like the Egyptians. Their number mysticism has come down to us encoded in the language of the books of Moses.
The great book of the Cabala is The Zohar, which is a vast commentary on the first five books of the Old Testament, traditionally ascribed to Moses. If the world is materialized thought then, according to the Cabala, words and letters were the means by which this process happened. God created the world by manipulating and making patterns out of the Hebrew letters of the alphabet. Hebrew letters, therefore, have magical properties and the patterns they make in scripture open up layers, indeed vistas, of hidden meaning.
Exodus chapter fourteen contains three verses — 19, 20 and 21 — which each consist of 72 letters. If you write these verses on top of one another so that the 72 letters appear in columns, then reading a column at a time, you will discover the secret 72 Names of God.