The Secret History of the World

by Mark Booth

  When his parents took Jesus to the Temple, at the time of the disappearance of his kindred spirit, he showed himself very wise. What passed into him from the other Jesus was the ability to read minds, to see deep into other people’s souls, to see how they related to the spirit worlds and to know what to do or say to make things right for them. He felt other people’s pain as his own. He was experiencing something — the gift of empathy — which no one had ever felt before.

  Once an individual or small group develops a new faculty, a new mode of consciousness, it often spreads around the world with remarkable speed. Jesus Christ introduced a new kind of love, a gracious love based on the gift of empathy. An individual would be free to transcend the bonds of his or her isolated existence to share in what was taking place in another person’s innermost nature.

  Love BC had been tribal or familial. Now individuals were able to rise above blood ties and to choose freely who to love. It is this that Jesus meant when, in Mark 3:32 he appeared to deny the importance of his own mother to him and when, in Matthew 10:37-8 he said: ‘He that loveth father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.’

  Esoteric teaching is above all about loving in the right way. It says that when you cooperate with the gracious forces that form the cosmos, the force flows through you in such a way that you may become conscious of it. This process is called thaumaturgy, or divine magic.

  Whether at this level or at the level of ‘little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love’ or the ‘little way’ of St Thérèse of Lisieux, the way of self-denial and acts of charity in small things, the new Christian perspective was focused on the inner life. If we compare earlier moral codes, such as the law of Moses or the even older Code of Hammurabi, with the Sermon on the Mount, it is clear that they were only rules to regulate behaviour in the Outworld — do not worship idols, steal, murder, commit adultery etc. The moral teaching in the Gospels, on the other hand, is directed towards inner states. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit… they that mourn… the meek… the pure in heart…’

  When Jesus Christ said, ‘But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart’, he was saying something no one had ever said before, that our innermost thoughts are as real as physical objects. What I think ‘privately’ has a direct effect on the history of the cosmos.

  In an idealist universe, intention is of course much more important than in a materialist universe. In an idealist universe if two people perform exactly the same action in exactly the same circumstances, but one in a good-hearted way and the other not, the consequences are very different. In some mysterious way the state of our soul informs the results of our deeds, just as the elevated state of the soul of a great painter informs his paintings.

  In esoteric interpretation of Greek myths, ambrosia, the food of the gods, is human love. Without it, gods fade away and their power to help us is diminished. In esoteric and mystic Christianity angels are attracted to us if we ask for their help, but if we fail to do so they fall into a twilit, vegetative state, and the phantoms and demons that insinuate themselves around our lower beings work on us instead.

  We can of course resist the demons and train our baser animal selves in the same way that we train a dog — by a process of repetition. In esoteric teaching it is said that daily repetition of a meditative exercise for twenty-one days is needed to effect a deep-seated change in our habits.

  But there is a yet deeper part of our animal selves which lies completely below the threshold of consciousness and is inaccessible to it. We cannot transform this part by the exercise of free will, no matter how persistent, because the corruption of our animal selves has seeped down into our vegetable and mineral selves.

  In order to purify and transform these parts of ourselves we need supernatural help.

  The mission of the Sun god, then, was to sink right down into deepest matter, introducing his transforming spiritual influence. The Sun god has the ability to reach right down into the most material part of humanity, which is why it was written ‘None of his bones shall be broken’.

  THE TWELVE-PETALLED LOTUS RADIATES outwards from the region of the heart and envelops those we choose to love. It is also an organ of perception. What I truly love will open itself up to me and reveal its secrets.

  Enveloping someone in love in this way is an exercise of the imagination. Of course imagination is not to be confused here with fantasy. It is a true perception of a higher reality — and the organ of this in both East and West is the heart chakra. This is what is being referred to on the road to Emmaus, where disciples who have just recognized who it was they have just encountered say to themselves, ‘Did our hearts not burn within us while he talked to us on the road?’

  When the heart chakra blossoms and shines, we may perceive the Outworld in a supernatural way. A loving heart can give me conscious experience of the heart of the cosmos, of the loving intelligence that lives beyond the Outworld and controls it. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’

  Love works on the will as well as powers of perception. When we really love someone, we are willing to do anything for them.

  This is why the heart chakra blossoms when love moves me to act according to my conscience. I am not then acting wearily, like Marcus Aurelius. I am not acting in a cold, unenthusiastic or inauthentic way. I am not doing my duty while part of me resents it. I am acting out of love and devotion.

  The phrase ‘Son of Man’ is problematic to exoteric theologians because it seems to refer to both a state of mind and to Jesus Christ himself. In esoteric thought this is resolved because the individual who has evolved to the stage of enlightenment that Jesus Christ made possible, will, as a result, become aware of his or her Higher Self, or divine self. In Christian iconography this evolution is commonly symbolized by a child carried on the shoulder, for example in the story of St Christopher who carried the Christ child on his shoulders. In the Cabala these two same dimensions of meaning are contained in the three-pronged letter shin.

  Initiation forges a new form of consciousness. It revives ways of being conscious of the spirit worlds that were common in the earlier stages of human evolution, but now with new elements. The initiations of Pythagoras that set the tone for the ages of the ascendancy of Greece and Rome, for example, had been concerned with achieving an alternative state of consciousness involving free communications with the spirit worlds that had been an everyday occurrence for, say, Gilgamesh or Achilles, but with a crucial difference. Initiates of the school of Pythagoras were able to think about their spiritual experiences in a considered, conceptual way that would have been impossible for Achilles or Gilgamesh.

  Four hundred years later the initiations of Jesus Christ introduced a new element, opening up dizzying new dimensions in love.

  IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THE MOMENTOUS events described in the Gospels better, we must now look at Jesus’s involvement with the Mystery schools.

  We are trespassing on closely guarded academic territory here. Controversial findings now widely accepted by biblical scholars, but which have not yet filtered down to the wider congregation, show that there are some early Christian texts, rediscovered in Palestine in the 1950s, which contain versions of sayings of Jesus that are likely to be closer to the originals than the versions contained in the four Gospels.

  And some of these texts contain sayings which don’t appear in the Gospels at all.

  And the fact that texts like the Gospel of St Thomas contain ‘truer’ versions of the biblical sayings is a reason for believing that the entirely non-biblical sayings these texts contain may be authentic.

  This is important for our history, because some of them relate to the secret teachings.

  The Gospels hint that Jesus gives favoured followers teachings not for public dissemination. When Jesus warns against casting ‘pearls before swine’ he seems to be talking of holding some sacred truths back from the multitude. More explicitly,
Mark 4.11 has Jesus say: ‘The secret of the kingdom of God is given to you, but to those who are outside everything comes in parables.’

  A more striking and revealing account of Jesus’s involvement in secret teaching is to be found in a letter written in the second century by Clement, Bishop of Alexandria. This text was discovered in 1959 in the stacks of the library of the Mar Saba Monastery near Jerusalem by Dr Morton Smith, Professor of Ancient History at Columbia University:

  … Mark, then, during Peter’s stay in Rome, wrote an account of the Lord’s doings, not however declaring all of them, nor yet hinting at the secret ones, but selecting those he thought most useful for increasing the faith of those who were being instructed. But when Peter died as a martyr, Mark came over to Alexandria, bringing his own notes and those of Peter, from which he transferred to his former book the things suitable to whatever makes for progress towards knowledge, and in this way he composed a more spiritual gospel for use of those who were being perfected… and dying he left his composition to the church in Alexandria, where it is still carefully guarded.

  The Bishop of Alexandria then quotes from this ‘more spiritual’ version of Mark’s Gospel:

  And they came to Bethanay, and a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and said to him: ‘Son of David, have mercy on me.’ But the disciples rebuked her.

  And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightaway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and, seizing his hand, raised him.

  But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him.

  And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth came to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. And then, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan…

  The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. It has been suggested that this painting alludes to suppressed, secret doctrines regarding the feminine role in Christianity. We shall see shortly that this is true, though not in the way proposed by The Da Vinci Code.

  To modern sensibility this story — which appears to be a more detailed version of the story of the raising of Lazarus in John’s Gospel — might seem to describe a homosexual liaison, but, as we shall see as we come to examine the nature of initiation ceremonies more clearly, it is certainly a Mystery school initiation that Mark alludes to here.

  The raising of Lazarus from the dead has traditionally been seen as an encoded account of initiation. The clues are there. Lazarus ‘dies’ for thee days and when Jesus Christ raises him, he uses the phrase ‘Lazarus, come forth’ that the hierophants had used in the Great Pyramid when, after three days, they stretched forth a hand to raise the candidate from the open tomb in the King’s Chamber.

  What was the initiation of Lazarus like from Lazarus’s point of view? What was the alternative form of consciousness it conferred? Readers may be surprised to learn that we know the answer to these questions. Because in the secret history the man called Lazarus in the Gospel of John later wrote the Revelation of St John the Divine. According to the secret doctrine, the opening of the seven seals and the great visionary events that follow that are described in Revelation, refer to the revivifying of the seven chakras.

  Unpalatable though some may find it, the fact of the matter is that the teachings of Jesus Christ are steeped in the ancient and secret philosophy, and this is equally true of his sayings recorded in the Bible as it is of the newly discovered sayings.

  I have led up to this point gently. Those of us brought up as Christians may find it easier to recognize these things in alien cultures, partly, no doubt, because of the greater focus that distance brings, but also because we are less acutely aware of treading on sacred ground. Christianity’s most sacred texts are deeply occult:

  The meek shall inherit the earth

  Faith moves mountains

  Ask and it shall be given.

  There is deliberate obfuscation by Church leaders when it comes to these and other key tenets of the Christian faith. Modern liberal Christianity has tried to accommodate science by playing down its occult dimensions, but the sayings from the Sermon on the Mount listed above are descriptions of how the supernatural operates in the universe. Not only are they paradoxical and mysterious, not only are they irrational, not only do they describe what is highly unlikely according to the laws of probability, they describe the universe behaving in a way which would be completely impossible if science described everything there is.

  For the meek will certainly not inherit the earth and prayers will not be answered by the forces that science describes. Neither virtue nor faith will be rewarded — unless some supernatural agency makes them so.

  The New Testament is full of occult and esoteric teaching, some of it explicitly stated. The problem is that we have been educated to be blind to it. But the text quite clearly says that John the Baptist is Elijah come again — that is, reincarnated. There is magic too. The late Hugh Schonfield, Morton Smith and other academic experts have shown that Jesus’s miracles, particularly in the form of words he uses, are based on pre-existing magical papyri in Greek, Egyptian and Aramaic. When in John’s Gospel Jesus Christ is described as using spittle to make a paste to apply to the eyes of a blind man, this is not a purely godly action, in the sense of an unmediated influx of spirit, but a manipulation of matter in order to influence or control spirit.

  Apollonius of Tyana. Of the many itinerant wonder workers and healers contemporary with Jesus Christ, the one who made the greatest impression on contemporary chroniclers was Apollonius. This Pythagorean from Cappadocia let his hair grow long, wore only linen clothes and shoes of bark. He cast out demons and performed many healing miracles. But perhaps the most interesting parallel to Jesus Christ is his insistence that the day of blood sacrifice was over. ‘We should approach God,’ he said, ‘only with the noblest faculty with which we are blessed — namely intelligence.’

  Again, it is no denigration of Jesus Christ to point this out. One must not view these things anachronistically. In terms of the philosophy and theology of the day, this sort of divine magic — or thaumaturgy — was not only respectable, it was the highest activity to which a human being could aspire.

  IF YOU POLITELY TURN A BLIND EYE TO the supernatural content of the story of Jesus Christ and the rise of Christianity, you still have to accept that something extraordinary happened which needs explanation. Because whether or not anything miraculous happened in that obscure corner of the Near East in the early years of the first century, its effect on the history of the world is unparalleled in its breadth and depth. It gave rise to the civilization we now enjoy, a civilization of unprecedented freedom, prosperity for all, richness of culture, scientific advance. Before the time of Jesus Christ there was very little sense of the importance of the individual, of the sanctity of individual life, the transcendental power of one individual’s freely chosen love for another. Of course some of these ideas were foreshadowed by Krishna, Isaiah, the Buddha, Pythagoras, Lao-Tzu, but what was unique to Christianity, the ‘mustard seed’ planted by Jesus Christ, was the idea of the interior life. With Jesus Christ not only did the individual began to experience the sense we all have now that, parallel to the limitless, infinitely various cosmos out there, we each have inside us a cosmos which is equally rich and limitless, but Jesus Christ also introduced the sense that each of us now has of a personal narrative history that weaves in and out of the general history. Each of us may fall as humanity as a whole has fallen. Each of us experiences crises of doubt and finds individual, personal redemption — very different from the tribal consciousness of earlier generations of Jews or the city-state consciousness of the Greeks.

  THE MINISTRY OF JESUS CHRIST LASTED just three years from the Baptism to Good Friday on 3 April AD 3 when at the place of the skulls, Golgotha, the Sun god
was nailed on the cross of matter. Then at the Transfiguration the Sun god began to transform that matter, to spiritualize it.

  We have seen how in the Mystery schools from Zarathustra to Lazarus, candidates had undergone a three day ‘mystical death’ and rebirth. The candidate was put into a deep, death-like trance for three days during which his spirit travelled the spirit worlds, bringing back knowledge and power to the material world. The ‘death’ then was a real event, but on the spiritual plane. What happened with the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ was that for the first time this process of initiation occurred as a historical event on the material plane.

  The Resurrection, part of the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald is a cosmic vision of Jesus Christ as the Sun god. Grünewald depicted what the Church father Tertullian, drawing from the Greek Mystery tradition, called the luminous seed, the ‘augoeides’. Planted in the earth, it now arose as a luminous, star-like body, a body of light rays. When the disciples on the road to Emmaus failed to recognize Christ it was because they were encountering his augoeidean body.

  The Cross in the middle of the Four Cherubim who symbolize the Four Elements. As we have seen, the Four Elements, working from the constellations at the four corners of the cosmos work together to hold the material world in place. Jesus Christ is here represented in his cosmic role as Fifth Element, the Sun god who comes to Earth to spiritualize the Four Elements and dissolve matter.

  THE SHADOW SIDE OF THIS GREAT EVENT is contained in the story of Christ’s journey into Hell. This happened immediately after his death on the cross. It is a story which has fallen into desuetude, part of the process by which we have lost a sense of the spiritual dimension of the cosmos. Initiation is always concerned as much with lighting the way of the journey after death as with this life’s journey. In the centuries before Jesus Christ, humanity’s sense of the afterlife had shrunk to an anticipation of a dreary half-life of shades in the sub-lunar realm, Sheol. And after death human spirits lost consciousness as they started their ascent through the higher, heavenly spheres. The result was that in their next reincarnation these spirits returned with no intimations of the journey.