by Mark Booth
Pythagoras was able to grant his pupils a great vision of the spirit worlds, which he would then interpret for them. Out of this, the first discursive teaching, would emerge mathematics, geometry, astronomy and music.
In his day Pythagoras was said to be the only human being able to hear the Music of the Spheres, conceived as a scale of different notes each made by the seven planets as they moved through space. This is easy to dismiss as mystical hogwash, but the story of how he measured the first musical scale has an authentic sounding ring to it.
One day Pythagoras was walking through town when he heard metal being pounded on an anvil. He noticed that different sized hammers made different sounds. Returning home, he fixed a plank of wood across a room and hung a series of weights according to the weights of the different hammers in an ascending scale. By a process of trial and error he determined that the musical notes that sound beautiful to the human ear correspond to different weights. He then calculated that they were proportionate to one another in a mathematically precise way. It is from these calculations by Pythagoras that we derive the musical octave we understand and enjoy today.
As Pythagoras and his followers began to describe the rational element in life, they started to formulate a parallel concept. It was a concept which had perhaps never been articulated before, because up till that point it had been a part of everyone’s everyday experience. The concept went like this: life can be explained in rational terms only up to a point. There is a vast irrational element in life, too.
The teachings of the Mystery schools relating to the rational side would help build cities, develop science and technology, structure and regulate the Outworld. The irrational teaching in its explicit form would be confined to the schools. To talk about it outside was dangerous and might well attract hostility. As Plutarch would put it, ‘One who knows the higher truths, finds the “serious” values of society difficult to take seriously. Eternity is a child at play.’
Here, at the birth of rational thought, the Mystery schools nurtured its opposite. It is no accident that individuals like Pythagoras, Newton and Leibniz, those who have done most to help humanity get to grips with the reality of the physical universe, have also been deeply immersed in esoteric thought. This is because it is undoubtedly true, as these great minds have seen, that if you look at life as subjectively as possible, rather than objectively, as you must do in science, some very different patterns emerge. Life viewed objectively may be rational and subject to natural law, but experienced subjectively it is irrational.
By consciously splitting experience in this way, Pythagoras made it possible to think more clearly about both dimensions.
The pupils of Pythagoras were taught to live apart from society, alternating between mystical ecstasy and intellectual analysis. Pythagoras was the first to call himself a lover of wisdom, that is to say ‘a philosopher’, but like Socrates and Plato who followed him, he was closer to a magus than a modern-day university professor. His pupils were in awe of him. They believed he had the power to make them dream what he willed, and that he could reorient their waking consciousness in an instant, too.
Pythagoras attracted murderous rage from those excluded from his inner circle. He refused to admit a man called Cyron into his Mystery school because of his reckless, imperious behaviour. Cyron stirred up a mob against Pythagoras. They broke into the building where Pythagoras and his followers were meeting and set fire to it. Everyone inside died.
IN THE ERA OF PYTHAGORAS TWO OTHER philosophers on different sides of the world, Heraclitus in Greece and Lao-Tzu in China, briefly come to the surface of history, trying to define rationally, the irrational dimension of life.
We cannot step in the same stream twice, said Heraclitus.
There is a story that Confucius went to see Lao-Tzu and asked to be initiated. Lao-Tzu turned him away, mocking him for his mixture of ingratiating manners and vaulting ambition. It is probably apocryphal, but it points to an important truth which is that Confucianism and Taoism represent exoteric and esoteric thought in China.
Confucius spent years collecting traditional Chinese wisdom and these collections would be adopted as manuals for government by later Chinese leaders.
The sayings of Confucius are eminently reasonable. A thousand mile journey begins with a single step. Value the task more than the prize. If you can’t meet your goals, adjust your goals. And so on.
We can compare Confucius with Rudyard Kipling. They were both servants of empire. If scientific materialism described everything there is in life, Kipling’s poem ‘If’ would be the last word on the conduct of life and esoteric philosophy would have nothing to teach us.
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them ‘Hold on!’…
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the earth and everything that is in it
And which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!
The problem is that, though there may be times when the best thing to do is to try with all our might and not give up, there are other times, as Orpheus had found to his cost, when it is prudent to give up and go with the flow. Sometimes when you grab at what you want, you just push it further away. Sometimes the only way to keep something is by letting it go. As Lao Tzu says:
Because the awakened one puts himself behind, he steps ahead.
Because he gives way, he gains
Because he is selfless, he fulfils himself
The still is the lord of the restless.
THIRTY YEARS AFTER THE DEATH OF PYTHAGORAS, an enormous Persian army under Xerxes swept over Greece. Then, in the early years of the fifth century BC, Persian forces were defeated and driven back by the Athenians at Marathon and then by an Athenian-Spartan alliance at Mycale.
Pythagoras had institutionalized the open discussion of options and the making of collective decisions on matters which concerned the whole community — what we today call politics. From this — and in the space created by the Athenian-Spartan alliance — would emerge the unique character of the Greek city-state of Athens.
14. THE MYSTERIES OF GREECE AND ROME
The Eleusian Mysteries • Socrates and his Daemon • Plato as a Magus • The Divine Identity of Alexander the Great • The Caesars and Cicero • The Rise of the Magi
IF WE SEE IN THE ATHENIANS A GIFT FOR free, individual thought, we see in Sparta the development of individual will, competitive edge and admiration, to the point of hero-worship, of strong men. Heroes created the space for the flowering of Greek culture, which in the fifth century BC began to set standards in beauty of form and rigour of intellect that we have aspired to match ever since.
This was the Greece of the great initiates: the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, the poet Pindar and the dramatists Sophocles and Euripides.
The most famous of all the Greek Mystery schools was situated at Eleusis, a hamlet a few miles from Athens. The Roman statesman Cicero, himself an initiate, would say that the Eleusian Mysteries and what flowed from them formed the greatest benefit that Athens gave to the civilized world.
‘ELEUSIS’ COMES FROM ‘ELAUNO’, MEANING ‘I come’, which is to say ‘I come into being’. There is almost nothing left of the sanctuary — just a few scattered stones and a couple of panels from inside have survived — but a contemporary description of it talks of an unmarked exterior wall of grey-blue stone. Inside there were painted statues and friezes of goddesses, sheaves of grain and eight-petalled flowers. One account says there was an aperture in the ceiling of the inner sanctum that provided the only light source.
The Lesser Mysteries were celebrated in the spring. They involved rites of purification and also dramatizations of stories of the gods. A statue of a god crowned with myrtle and carrying a torch was led in procession with singing and d
ancing. The god was sacrificed and died for three days. When the sacrificed god was represented as being raised from the dead, the assembled hierophants and candidates shouted, ‘Iachos! Iachos! Iachos!’
There was also an overtly sexual element in these celebrations. Psellus, a Byzantine scholar, wrote that Venus was portrayed as rising out of the sea from in between moving representations of female genitalia, and that afterwards the marriage of Persephone and Hades took place. It was recorded by Clement of Alexandria that the rape of Persephone was enacted, and it was also said by Athenagoras that during this bizarre, violent, almost surreal drama, she was portrayed as having a horn on her forehead, perhaps symbolizing the Third Eye.
There were also accounts of ceremonial pouring of milk from a golden vessel in the shape of a breast. On one level this is obviously connected with the worship of the Mother Goddess, but it should alert us to the fact that on a deeper level these ceremonies were concerned with life after death. We know from Pythagoras that the Milky Way was conceived of as a vast river or troop of spirits. The star-like spirits of the dead ascended through the gate of Capricorn and up through the spheres, before descending back into the material world through the gate of Cancer. Pindar said, ‘Happy is he who has seen the Mysteries before being buried beneath the ground, because he knows what happens as life ends.’ Sophocles said, ‘Thrice happy are those who have seen the Mysteries before they die. They will have life after death. Everyone else will only experience suffering.’ Plutarch said that those who die experience for the first time what those who have been initiated have already experienced.
The Greater Mysteries, celebrated on or about the autumn equinox, were preceded by nine days of fasting, after which candidates for initiation were given a potent drink called the kykeon.
Surviving panel from Eleusis, showing Demeter and a candidate for initiation.
Of course extreme hunger can by itself lead to a visionary state, or at least a propensity for hallucinations. After fasting for so long, the candidate drank this mixture of roasted barley, water and poley oil, which can be narcotic if taken in sufficient quantities.
The Mysteries were known to involve people in the most intense experiences, the wildest fears, blackest horrors and raptures. Plutarch wrote of the terror of those about to be initiated, as if they were about to die, and, of course, in a sense they were.
Imagine if you had seen dramatic presentations of terrifying supernatural events in the Lesser Mysteries and now believed these things were going to happen for real, that you were going to take part in a drama in which you would be killed and in some sense really die! The accounts by Proclus suggest candidates were attacked by ‘the rushing forms of troops of earthly demons’. Though it was by this time very difficult for the higher spiritual beings, the gods, to squeeze down into a dense, material realm, it was relatively easy for lesser spirits, such as demons and spirits of the dead. The candidate was to be shamed and punished, tortured by demons. Pausanius in his Description of Greece describes a demon called Euronomos, with blue-black skin like a fly’s, who devoured the flesh of rotting corpses.
Are we to take this as literally true? As mentioned earlier, these initiation ceremonies were part ritual and drama — and part séance. That drugs played a part in conjuring up these demons does not necessarily — from an idealist point of view — mean they were illusory. We should also remember that in rural India perfectly respectable religious ceremonies still take place, the worship of lesser spirits, the Pretas and Bhuts and Pisachas and Gandharvas, ceremonies which we in the West would classify as séances.
The Mystery schools were concerned with granting the candidate an authentic spiritual experience, which in the context of idealistic philosophy means a genuine experience of spirits — first demons and the spirits of the dead, then later the gods.
By the fifth century BC it was, of course, difficult for a god without a material body to affect matter directly, to move a heavy object for example. But the initiate priests could mouth magic words into a cloud of smoke emanating from a sacrificial fire and the face of a god would sometimes appear. Karl von Eckartshausen, the late eighteenth-century theosophist, recorded the most effective fumigations for causing apparitions: hemlock, henbane, saffron, aloe, opium, mandrake, salorum, poppy seed, asafoetida and parsley.
The miraculously lifelike statues for which Greece is famous emerged from the Mystery schools. Their original function was to help bring the gods to earth.
We know from the earlier use of statues in Egypt and Sumeria that it was intended that the gods occupy them, live in them as their physical bodies and make them come alive. If you stood in front of the statue of Artemis in Ephesus, the Mother Earth loomed over you like a great tree. You had a sensation of being absorbed into the vegetable matrix of the cosmos, the great ocean of weaving waves of light, and of being at one with it.
The statues would breath, seem to move. It was said that sometimes they would speak to you.
After various trials the successful candidate was allowed to ascend to the Empyrean realm, a place flooded with light, music and dancing. Dionysus — Bacchus or Iacchos — appeared in a beautiful, radiant vision of light. Aristedes, the orator, recalled: ‘I thought I felt the god draw near and I touched him, I was somewhere between waking and sleeping. My spirit was so light — in a way someone who hasn’t been initiated wouldn’t understand. ’ By this lightness of spirit, he is referring to an out-of-body experience. It also seems clear that the gods sometimes occupied ethereal, vegetable bodies in the Mysteries and so appeared like luminous spectres or phantoms.
So the process of initiation gave direct, existential, undeniable first-hand knowledge that the spirit could live outside the body, and while in this state the candidate became a spirit among spirits, a god among gods. When the new initiate was ‘born again’ into the everyday material world, when he was crowned as an initiate he retained many god-like powers of perception and abilities to influence events.
In the upside-down, other-way-round doctrine of the secret societies, the Greeks created the first statues of perfect human bodies because human bodies only became perfectly formed at this point in time. The Greek cult of the body arose from the fresh experience of the perfect form.
Otherwise known as the Wand of Hermes, the Caduceus was a pole with two snakes entwined. The thyrsus was a representation of the Caduceus, probably made out of a hollow stalk like that of a fennel — in which Prometheus carried fire down to illumine humankind. The thyrsus in which the secret, sacred fire is hidden is the Sushumna Nadi of Indian occult physiology. On top of the stalk was a pine cone representing the pineal gland.
The experience of initiation was, therefore, a mystical one. However, as we have seen in the case of Pythagoras, practical and even scientific knowledge was shown to be implicit in this experience, too. After initiation the hierophant would elucidate what the new initiate had just experienced, drawing arcane disclosures from a book made of two stone tablets, called the Book of Interpretation. They taught the way the material world and the material, human body had been formed and the way both were directed by the spirit worlds. To help them in their teaching they also used symbols. These included the thyrsus made of a reed, sometimes with seven knots and topped with a pine cone. There were also the ‘toys of Dionysus’ — a golden serpent, a phallus, an egg and a spinning top that made the sound ‘Om’. Cicero would write that when you come to understand them, the occult mysteries have more to do with natural science than with religion.
There was a prophetic element in this teaching, too. The final initiation at Eleusis involved the candidate being shown a plucked green wheat ear, held up in silence.
Of course on one level the Mysteries were agricultural and looked forward to a good harvest. But there was another level to do with the harvesting of souls.
This wheat was the star Spica, the divine seed held in the left hand of the virgin goddess of the constellation of Virgo. I’m talking, of course, about the goddess the E
gyptians called Isis. The grain she holds looks forward to the great cosmic ‘seed time’. It will be made into the bread of the Last Supper, symbolizing the vegetable body in Jesus Christ and also the vegetative dimension, or altered state of consciousness, we all must work ourselves into, according to esoteric Christianity, if we are to meet him there.
The importance of Spica in the ancient world is shown by the fact that, apart from Sirius, it is the only star represented on the famous planisphere at Dendera, a section of which is produced here. The great cosmic wheel grinds all the stars except for this single one that is saved, just outside its rim.
Again we see that the vegetative dimension of the cosmos is the focus of esoteric thought. In Plato’s philosophy it is the soul, the mediator between the material body and the animal spirit. If we are to leave behind the material world and enter the spirit worlds, this vegetative dimension must be the subject of our Work.
THERE ARE OTHER WAYS THAT SPIRITS could influence events.
Everyone who contemplates one of the busts of Socrates that have survived may be struck by the lively, satyr-like quality of his physiognomy.
In the secret tradition Socrates was a reincarnation of the great spirit who had previously lived in the body of Silenus.