The Secret History of the World

by Mark Booth

  By descending into Hell, Jesus Christ was following in the footsteps of Osiris. He was lighting up a way through the Underworld that the dead could follow. The living and dead would have to walk together if the great cosmic mission, the Work, was to be completed.

  ACCORDING TO ESOTERIC DOCTRINE, the whole history of the world can be summed up as follows:

  There was a Golden Age when earth and sun were united and the sun gave the earth form.

  The sun then separated from the earth, causing it to materialize and become colder.

  The god of the sun returned to infuse his spirit in the earth, so that the whole cosmos will eventually dematerialize and again become spiritualized.

  This is the cosmic vision of the mission of Jesus Christ which inspired the early Christians, the Work which helped shape the great churches of the Middle Ages and the art of the Renaissance. It has been lost to modern, exoteric Christianity.

  The Harrowing of Hell by Andrea Mantegna. I Peter 6: 18-9: ‘He also went to the spirits in prison… the gospel was also preached to those that are dead.’ Following what St Paul termed Jesus Christ’s ‘descent into the lower parts of the Earth’, spirits had Him as their guide to light the way.

  IF THE DEATH OF JESUS CHRIST WAS meant to happen on a cosmological level, we should still ask ourselves, what made it happen on a historical level? What were the immediate causes of the crucifixion?

  Although Jesus Christ instructed Lazarus in private, his rebirth, and his being called forth to a new life, was a public event. It did not happen, like all previous initiations, within the closely guarded confines of a Mystery school and neither was Jesus Christ a hierophant of one of the state-sponsored Mystery schools. As a result Jesus Christ made deadly enemies of the Sadducees, who controlled the dissemination of initiatic knowledge on behalf of the ruling elite. The act of initiating Lazarus in public was a revolutionary one, signalling that the tie that bound initiates to the ruling elite was being broken. It was the beginning of the end of the Mystery schools and it prepared the way for the secret societies.

  Jesus Christ also posed a threat to the Roman elite. The soldiers who draped him in a purple cloak and placed a crown of thorns on his head had no other king, no other god than Caesar. They mocked Jesus Christ by draping on him the purple cloak that was worn as a sign of initiation in the Adonis mysteries. The crown of thorns was a satire on the wreath bestowed when a candidate achieved initiation in the mysteries of Eleusis. The Caesars were the great occult enemy of Jesus Christ.

  WHAT IS LESS WELL KNOWN IS THAT ANOTHER enemy was at work on the other side of the world. There an initiate wielded a blacker, more powerful magic than that wrought by the Caesars.

  This magician had, according to Rudolf Steiner, worked to build up his supernatural powers over several incarnations, and he now threatened to pervert the whole course of history.

  He had achieved this power on the back of multiple human sacrifices. José Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, talks of the release of spirits that the spilling of blood brings. Blood is a frightening mystery, he says. It carries life, and when it is spilled and the ground stained, the whole landscape is maddened and excited. Occulists know that humans can be killed in a particular way so that the human spirit is harnessed. We saw how great initiates like Elijah fashion their own vegetable and animal selves in such a way that they can become chariots with which to travel through the spiritual worlds. In occult circles it is also known that black magicians can use the souls and spirits of others, their sacrificial victims, as chariots.

  The great enemy, a magician, was therefore able to control people beyond the grave. By sacrificing great numbers of victims, he created an army for himself in the spirit worlds.

  At the turn of the millennium a Sun hero was sent to earth to oppose him. He was called Uitzilopotchtli, as we know from the Codex Florentin of Sahagun, one of the few scraps to survive the Conquistadors. Like earlier Sun heroes, his birth was prophesied. He was born to a virgin mother and after his birth the forces of evil conspired to kill him.

  Mary Magdalene. Esoteric thought is essentially reincarnational. It is not primarily concerned with spirits passed on through genes. Jesus Christ came to do away with bloodlines as a way of transmitting clairvoyance and wisdom. Love was to be freely chosen rather than instinctual and tribal. The notion of Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene and having children is therefore irrelevant to his mission. Esoteric literature and the teachings of the schools refer rather to a ‘Mystic Marriage’ of the sun and the moon, the hieros gamos, which we will return to in a later chapter.

  But Uitzilopotchli survived the early attempts on his life and after many trials he waged a three-year magical war against the black magician. Finally, he succeeded in crucifying him.

  When Jesus Christ was crucified, a huge power to spiritualize the earth was unleashed. When, simultaneously, the great black magician of the South Americas was crucified, a vortex opened up that would draw into itself the great currents of world history, the extremes of both good and evil.

  THE GOSPEL OF PHILIP CONTAINS intriguing hints about Jesus Christ’s relationship with Mary Magdalene. ‘Jesus loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on…’ Then intrigingly the script fragments. But this seems to be a reference to the Song of Songs, ‘Let him kiss me with kisses of the mouth’ and so, too, to the ‘love that is stronger than death’.

  The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voraigne, the most popular collection of saints’ stories in the Middle Ages, describes how a particular group of Christians began to be persecuted in Jerusalem. Seven of them were set adrift in the Mediterranean in a small boat. Eventually they were washed ashore in a place east of the town known today as Marseilles.

  In the centre of a great cliff rising above the shore it is still possible to see the cave where Mary Magdalene, who stepped out of that boat, spent the last thirty years of her life.

  She is usually depicted penitent, naked apart from her long red hair. A painting of her by Fra Bartolomeo in a small garden chapel near Florence shows her with her jar of oil, used to anoint the feet of Jesus Christ. It is resting on a stone inscribed with the following words:

  I HAVE FOUND HIM WHOM MY SOUL LOVES

  16. THE TYRANNY OF THE FATHERS

  The Gnostics and the Neoplatonists • The Murder of Hypatia • Attila and Shamanism • A Touch of Zen

  IN THE SECRET TEACHINGS OF THE SCHOOLS the life and death of the Sun god marked the halfway point of the secret history.

  Although it was unnoticed by the official chroniclers of the day, at the end of time this event will come to be seen as the great hinge on which history has turned.

  To many people living at the time, the magnitude of this event undoubtedly made it hard to get into perspective. After a long period of spiritual aridity many now began to enjoy vivid, if atavistic, experience of the spirit worlds. Maybe some had an inkling of what the great revolution that had taken place in the spirit worlds actually was, but in the absence of the sort of unified, institutional authority that the hierophants of the Mystery schools had commanded, these new experiences were interpreted in a variety of ways. We see this in a proliferation of sects in the decades following the death of Jesus Christ.

  Many of the Gnostic texts are as old as the books of the New Testament, some with clear claims to validity. We have already touched on the Gospel of St Thomas with its more authentic versions of the sayings of Jesus and the Pistis Sophia’s account of the two Jesus children. The somewhat fragmentary text of the Acts of St John offers a fascinating glimpse of the inner group practices of Jesus Christ.

  A circular dance is described. The disciples first hold hands to form a circle, then whirl in a ring around Jesus Christ. In the liturgy that accompanies this dance, Jesus Christ is the initiator and his interlocutor a candidate for initiation.

  Candidate: I would be saved

  Christ: And I would save

  Candidate: I would be loosed

  Christ: And
I would loosen

  Candidate: I would be pierced

  Christ: And I would pierce

  Candidate: I would eat

  Christ: And I would be eaten

  The Acts of John use language in a paradoxical, even absurdist way. It will become easier to understand as we proceed.

  Candidate: I have no house and I have houses

  I have no place and I have places

  I have no temple and I have temples.

  Only fragments of the next bit have survived, but they seem to refer to some Osirian/Christian Mystery of death and resurrection. After which Christ says: ‘What I am now seen to be, that I am not, but what I am, thou shalt see when thou comest. If thou hadst known how to suffer, thou wouldst have had the power not to suffer. Know then suffering and thou shalt have the power not to suffer’.

  A Hindu dance in honour of Krishna is described as ‘a circular sunwise dance’. The dancers twist and turn and wheel around the Sun god in imitation of the planets. This should alert us to the fact that the Acts of St John is inspired by a cosmic vision of Jesus Christ as the Sun god returned.

  The Gospel of St Philip refers to five rituals, the last and greatest being the ritual of the bridal chamber. Is this a ritual-sexual practice like the ones that took place in the temples of Egypt, Greece and Babylon?

  Later the Church would want to emphasize the uniqueness of Christian revelation and distance Jesus Christ and his teachings from what went before. But to the early Christians it was only natural to see Christianity as growing out of what had gone before and as a fulfilment of ancient prophecies. Many early Christians understood Christianity in terms of what they had been taught in the Mystery schools of Egypt, Greece and Rome.

  The early Church father Clement of Alexandria may have known people who had known the Apostles. Clement and his pupil Origen believed in reincarnation, for example. They taught more advanced students what they called the disciplina arcani, devotional practices which today we would classify as magic.

  Early Christian leaders like Origen and Clement were erudite men participating in the intellectual advances of their age. The most exciting of these found representative expression in Neoplatonism.

  Plato had pretty comprehensively converted a mind-before-matter experience of the world into concepts. What happened in the second century AD was that what we now call Neoplatonists began to develop Plato’s ideas into a living philosophy, a philosophy of life, even a religion with its own spiritual practices. It is important to remember that while we consider Plato in a dryly academic way, for his followers in the centuries after his death his texts had the status of scripture. Neoplatonists saw themselves not as originating ideas but writing commentaries making clear what Plato really meant. Passages which are today considered merely as rather abstruse exercises in abstract logic were used by practising Neoplatonists in their devotions.

  They were concerned with describing real spiritual experience. In On the Delay in Divine Justice, Plutarch, who was heavily influenced by Neoplatonism, describes what different spirits look like as they can be seen beginning their after-death journey. The deceased are said to be surrounded with a flame-like envelope, but ‘some were like the purest full-moon light, emitting one smooth, continuous and even colour. Others were quite mottled — extraordinary sights — dappled with livid spots like adders; and others had faint scratches.’

  Plotinus, the greatest Neoplatonist in the Alexandrian school, was a practising mystic. His pupil Porphyry reported seeing his Master in ecstatic raptures, unified with ‘the One’ several times. Plotinus said of Porphyry, perhaps a bit dismissively, that he had not achieved this once! Neoplatonists who came after them, Iamblichus and Jamblichus, put great emphasis on the importance of theurgic, that is to say godly, magical practices, Iamblichus leaving detailed descriptions of his visions.

  Plotinus elaborated an extremely complex metaphysic of emanations of the kind we touched on in chapter one. Neoplatonism influenced other traditions, especially by its systematic approach, particularly the Cabala and Hermeticism.

  Hermeticism and the Cabala are viewed by some scholars as, respectively, Egyptian-and Hebrew-flavoured Neoplatonism. But in the secret history the hermetic and cabalistic writings that began to appear at this time are understood as the first written down, systematized expressions of ancient and largely oral traditions.

  The Hermetica purported to have originated with Hermes Trismegistus, an ancient Egyptian sage, but were written down in Greek and collected at this time in forty two volumes. Yuri Stoyanov, a distinguished researcher at the Warburg Institute, recently confirmed to me that most scholars now accept their genuine, Egyptian origins. The Hermetica were genially tolerant of other traditions, no doubt partly because of an underlying assumption that all traditions addressed the same planetary gods and opened up the way to the same spirit worlds.

  In fact it is possible to draw parallels between the numbered emanations of Plotinus, the gods of the Hermetica and the spheres of heaven as described in the Pistis Sophia.

  In the Cabala the emanations from the cosmic mind — the sepiroth — are sometimes thought of as forming a sort of tree as they descend — the sepirothic tree. The allegorical interpretation of scripture that emerged with the Jewish scholar Philo of Alexandria opened up the shared structure of all religions. St Paul hinted at different orders of angels — not only Angels and Archangels, but also Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Mights, Powers, Principalities. He is alluding to a system he evidently expected his readers to understand. This system was set out explicitly by St Paul’s pupil Dionysius the Aeropagite. The nine orders he described can be equated with the branches on the sepirothic tree — and with the different orders of gods and spirits in the ancient polytheistic, astronomical religions. For example the ‘Powers’ of St Paul should be equated with the gods of the solar system of the Greeks and Romans, the Powers of Light being the spirits of the sun and the Powers of Darkness being the gods of the moon and the planets.

  The Jewish scholar Rebecca Kenta has even compared the ascent through the gates of wisdom on the cabalistic Tree of Life with Sufi teachings, and made connections between the sepiroth and the chakras of Hindu tradition.

  All idealism, the religious systems of all cultures, sees creation in terms of a descending series of emanations from the cosmic mind. But what is distinctly esoteric is this identifying of these emanations with the spirits of the stars and planets on the one hand and occult physiology on the other. It is this that leads to astrology, alchemy, magic and practical techniques for achieving altered states.

  It is important to keep bearing in mind that we are not here talking about piled up abstractions, but lived experience. The nine angelic hierarchies were sometimes divided up into three parts, and when St Paul talked of being raised to the Third Heaven, he meant that he had been initiated to such a high level that he had had direct personal experience of the exalted spiritual beings, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

  The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even by Marcel Duchamp. Stripped bare, the bachelors reveal their planetary identities.

  CHRISTIANITY WAS FORGED OUT OF INITIATIC experiences and beliefs like these. The greatest of the Church fathers, St Augustine, was an initiate of a late-flowering Persian mystery school called Manichaeism.

  Mani was born in 215 in the region that today we call Iraq. At the age of only twelve a being appeared to him. This mysterious being he came to call the Twin revealed to Mani a great hidden mystery — the role of evil in the history of humankind. He learned of the intertwining of the forces of darkness in the creation of the cosmos. He learned, too, that in the great cosmic battle between good and evil, the forces of evil virtually triumph.

  The cosmic nature of Mani’s vision can also be seen in its syncretism, in his account of the great events of history and the exalted parts played by Zarathustra, the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets and Jesus Christ.

  The universalism of initiates tends to worry local tyra
nts. The initiate’s heightened awareness of the forces of evil is also always open to misinterpretation. Mani was protected by two successive kings, but their successor persecuted him, torturing and eventually crucifying him.

  ‘I entered my innermost soul and beheld beyond my light and soul, the light.’ Augustine’s towering intellectual achievement was to give a comprehensive account of Church doctrine in terms of Platonism. What is usually glossed over in conventional Church history is that this account was based on the direct, personal experience of the initiate. Augustine has himself seen with ‘the mysterious eye of the soul’ a brighter light than the light of the intellect. He is not only concerned with eternal abstractions. His Confessions show him tortured by a sense of time passing, in his often quoted phrase ‘O Lord make me chaste — but not yet’ and also in his poignant cry in another moment of visionary experience: ‘O Beauty so old and so new, too late have I loved thee.’ St Augustine’s sense of time passing carries over into an esoteric sense of history. Later we will see the way in which he understood that the successive stages of the history of the world would unfold when we look at his prophecy of the founding of the City of God.

  This was also the age of the great Christian missionaries. Having been captured and sold into slavery, St Patrick later went on a mission to spread the feeling for the sanctity of human life that Jesus Christ had introduced into the stream of world history. He fought to abolish slavery and human sacrifice. But he was also a wizard in the tradition of Zarathustra and Merlin, a terrifying figure casting all the snakes out of Ireland with his wand, casting out demons and raising the dead.