The Secret History of the World

by Mark Booth

  Christianity was readily accepted by the Celts. St Patrick overlaid with historical knowledge of the life and work of Jesus Christ the Celts’ cosmic prophecy of the return of the Sun god. Celtic Christianity would happily intertwine Christian and pagan elements. In Celtic art intertwining motifs would also stand for the interweaving waves of light that characterize the first stage of mystical experience in all traditions.

  The fiercely independent Celts would continue to insist on the primacy of direct, personal experience of the spirit worlds, and would develop esoteric traditions independent of Rome. Some of the beliefs and practices of these and other early Christians would come to be dubbed heretical by the Roman Church.

  When people care deeply about the same things, when they share what the existentialist theologian Paul Tillich called ‘ultimate concerns’, they are sometimes incredibly sensitive to different shades of opinion. Differences of opinion may lead to murderous hatred, so that my greatest enemy is not the alien conqueror coming over the horizon with bloody tears carved into his cheeks but a brother or sister I rub shoulders with in the congregation.

  Sometimes, too, members of a congregation will try to ban beliefs — as had the Emperor Augustus — not because they believe them to be false, but because they believe them to be true.

  THE HISTORY OF THE FOUNDING OF THE Roman Church and its dissemination through the good offices of the dying Roman Empire has been written both by the Church and by its enemies. The Emperor Constantine claimed that in the middle of the night, before he went into battle against rebels, he had a dream in which Jesus Christ appeared to him and told him to put the sign of the cross on his battle flag, with the inscription ‘In this sign thou shalt conquer’. Constantine obeyed and the rebels were duly defeated.

  He declared Christianity the official religion of the Empire, donating the Lateran Palace to the Bishops of Rome. There were undoubted political benefits to this. The new form of consciousness that had been initiated in Jerusalem was spreading with great vigour through the Empire, and Constantine capitalized on this by offering freedom to any slave who converted and twenty pieces of gold to any who were already free.

  As we have seen, the Romans made a cult of cruelty. The imposition of power by one man on another, taken to its furthest extremes, was exalted. The Romans were ruthless and ruthlessness was a manly virtue. So the Christian exaltation of meekness and humility turned everything upside down and inside out. The Christians clearly knew of new joys and satisfactions, new ways of being in the world.

  Consider how strange meeting a Christian initiate must have seemed to a Roman. Here was a new form of consciousness. Here were people able to live inside their heads. They were lit up inside by an enthusiasm and a certainty about spiritual experience. It must have been as baffling and intriguing as it was, hundreds of years later, for a pygmy in Papua New Guinea to meet for the first time a European explorer. There were whole new worlds behind those eyes.

  CONSTANTINE MAY HAVE HOPED THE RIGOROUS new religion would help slow down the decline of the Roman Empire, but he remained anxious about a prophecy in the Sibylline Oracles that Rome would again become the haunt of wolves and foxes.

  Exsternsteine in Germany. This ancient carving is a few paces away from an older carving of a Norse god hung on a tree, in a happy acceptance of the fact that Christianity grew out of pagan traditions. Note that esoteric understanding of the different bodies of the individual is alluded to in the fact that while the material body of Jesus Christ is being taken down from the cross, his spirit already rests in the arms of his Father.

  He decided to try to thwart this prophecy by transferring the spirit of Rome to another location and founding an alternative capital. So from under a porphyry pillar he dug up the Palladium, the ancient god-carved statue that, as we saw, had been carried from Troy for the founding of Rome. Then he reburied it at the site of the city that would be called Constantinople. It was buried under the same pillar but now topped by a statue of the Sun god, crowned with the nails from the true cross in the form of a sort of nimbus.

  This symbolism, incorporating initiatic teaching regarding the Sun god, would have been understood by initiates of all religions, so it is perhaps slightly ironic that under the aegis of Constantine, the Church began to suppress initiatic teachings and to reduce its exoteric teachings to dogma. In 325 the Council of Nicea decided which gospels among the many in circulation were the real thing. Imperial edicts also forbad pagan practices. On the orders of Constantine’s sons, women and children were force-fed, their mouths held open by a wooden engine while consecrated bread was stuffed down their throats.

  When Constantine’s nephew Julian came to power in 361, he reversed the tide of religious intolerance. Having been brought up a pupil of the Neoplatonist philosopher Iamblichus, he well understood the mission of the being he called the ‘Seven-rayed god’. He gave equal rights to all subjects regardless of their religious beliefs and gave permission for pagan temples to reopen.

  Julian wrote a famous polemic against the narrow, dogmatic Christianity that had grown up during the time of Constantine, which is why later Christian writers came to call him the Apostate, meaning someone who discarded the faith. He believed that Christianity had been seeking to deny the reality of the gods he had encountered through initiation.

  Julian led a military campaign into Persia. Just as the Greeks had besieged Troy to control the initiation knowledge hidden within, Julian wished to understand the secret knowledge of the Manichaean Mystery school based in Persia. He knew enough to know that the mission of the Sun god was under threat, and that the inner mysteries of Manichaeism concerned the secrets of the war between the Sun god and Ahriman — or Satan — the spirit of materialism.

  But before he could accomplish his mission, Julian was murdered by a follower of Constantine, and a new Saturnine era began, when knowledge of true, initiatic spirituality would finally be driven underground. The Emperor Theodosius began a ruthless policy of suppressing all disagreement with the imperial line on Christian doctrine. He confiscated the property of ‘heretics’ and took over their temples. Statues of Isis were rededicated to Mary. The Pantheon in Rome has a sublime and cosmic beauty unlike any purpose-built church. This temple to all the gods was converted by Theodosius into a temple of monotheism.

  Theodosius closed down the Mystery schools and in 391 besieged the Serapeum in Alexandria. This sacred compound with a vast cloud-capped temple to Serapis was one of the wonders of the ancient world. Inside a statue of the god was suspended from the ceiling by a magnet. There were also libraries that housed the world’s greatest collection of books. Fortunately many books were smuggled out before the Serapeum was burned to the ground and its sacred statues dragged through the streets.

  Finally Theodosius turned his attention to the Neoplatonic school of philosophy based in Alexandria, foremost preserver of the intellectual legacy of the Mystery schools. The great personality of Neoplatonism at that time was a young woman called Hypatia. Daughter of a leading philosopher and mathematician, she was educated in philosophy, maths, geometry and astronomy. Her father had also developed a series of exercises to make her body a fitting vessel for a brilliant mind. She loved swimming, horse riding and mountain climbing. So she was beautiful as well as clever, and she soon won fame as an inventor of scientific instruments, including one to measure the specific gravity of liquids. Only a few fragments of her writing have survived, but she was known far and wide as one of the most brilliant minds of the time.

  She attracted large crowds as a lecturer. Well versed in the wisdom of Plotinus and Iamblichus she explained in her lectures how Christianity had evolved out of the teachings of the Mystery schools, and she argued, like her father, that no single tradition or doctrine could have exclusive claim to the truth.

  One afternoon in 414 when Hypatia was leaving a lecture hall, a gang of black-cowelled monks forced her from her chariot, stripped her naked and dragged her through the streets to a nearby church. There
they pulled her through the cool, flitting shadows to the altar. In an atmosphere perfumed with incense they swarmed all over her body, her naked form now covered by black cloth, and they tore her limb from limb. Later they scraped the flesh from her bones using oyster shells and burned all her remains.

  The church was trying to erase Hypatia from history just as the priests of Amun had tried to erase Akhenaten.

  The Pantheon in Rome. Ovid explains that temples represent the whole cosmos in the form of a sphere. The great rotunda of the Pantheon is 143 feet in diameter with an aperture in the roof to admit the sun. The height from the floor to the top, where this hole is, is equal to the diameter, so that it contains a vast sphere of air. The niches around the floor originally held images of the planetary gods.

  IT IS TOO EASY TO SEE THE CHURCH AS the evil repressor of free thought and to romanticize outlawed groups and antinomian schools like the Neoplatonists and the Gnostics. From its early history the Church has numbered among its leaders practitioners of black magic and other initiates who have abused their supernatural powers for selfish ends. But it is equally true — and perhaps more important — to say that from the time of St Paul and St Augustine the greatest Church leaders have been initiates of the highest order who have sought to guide humanity according to the divine plan outlined in this book. They knew that it was necessary for any understanding of reincarnation to be suppressed in the West. According to the cosmic plan, the West was to be the cradle for the developing sense of the value of an individual human life.

  On the other hand the Neoplatonists, though they had continued the work of Pythagoras and Plato, converting into concepts the direct experiences of the spirit worlds, seemed altogether unaware of the great revolution that had taken place there. In their writings there is no trace of the gospel of universal love that Jesus Christ had introduced. Similarly the Gnostic emphasis on direct, personal experience of the spirit worlds, as distinct from passive acceptance of abstract dogma, was in line with the impulse introduced by Jesus Christ, but many of the Gnostics were also vehement world-haters in a way that ran contrary to the mission of Jesus Christ to transform the material world. Many of the beliefs that the Gnostic sects took from their adventures in the spirit worlds were also quite fantastical. Not only did some Gnostics believe that Jesus Christ had not sunk so low as to inhabit a physical body, that he had lived on the earth only as some kind of phantom, but they also practised bizarre extremes of mortification and debauchery as a way of disrupting their own, despised bodily senses and gaining access to the spirit worlds. Some encouraged snakes to crawl over their naked bodies, some drank menstrual blood, saying ‘Here is the blood of Christ’, and others believed that their sex magic would lead to the birth of god-like creatures. Others castrated themselves and boasted, ‘I am deader than you are.’

  ROME WANTED TO STAMP OUT DOCTRINAL differences. Christian conviction and moral purpose were useful for Constantine and Theodosius, unifying the Empire and strengthening it from within at a time when barbarian hoards were threatening it from the East.

  A steadily expanding empire in China had caused a domino effect across Central Asia and into Europe. Under pressure from the Far East Goths, Visigoths and Vandals invaded parts of Europe, even reaching as far as Rome before retreating again. Then, in the second quarter of the fifth century, the nomadic Mongolian tribes were united under a great leader, Attila the Hun. He swept through the territories previously invaded by Goths and Vandals and built an empire which stretched from the plains of Central Asia to northern Gaul. He pushed into northern Italy and raided Constantinople.

  Attila, the ‘scourge of God’, has become a byword for barbarity, but an eyewitness account of a visit to Attila’s encampment by a Greek historian, Priscus, gives a very different picture. Priscus shows Attila living in a simple wooden house of polished boards, surrounded by a wooden enclosure. Woollen mats served as carpets, and Attila — literally ‘little father’ — received his visitors wearing simple linen clothes, unadorned by gems or gold. He drank — moderately — from a wooden bowl and ate from a wooden plate. He showed no emotion during the interview except when his youngest son arrived, whom he chucked under the chin and regarded with a look of satisfaction.

  It is also said that when Attila conquered the Christian city of Corinth, he was outraged to find a prostitute on every street corner. He gave them the choice of marrying one of his men or exile.

  If Attila was not the ravening monster of popular imagination, it is nevertheless true to say that if he had succeeded in overrunning the Roman Empire, this would have been disastrous for the evolution of human consciousness.

  The Romans feared Attila more than any of their other enemies. Attila would not allow his people to live in Roman territory or buy Roman goods. When he invaded Roman territories he reversed Romanization, demolishing Roman buildings — and he also took thousands of pounds of gold from Rome in tribute money. When in 452 he finally had Rome itself in his grip, the Emperor sent out Leo, the Bishop of Rome, to meet him.

  The future Pope Leo negotiated a deal with Attila by the terms of which Honoria, the daughter of the Emperor, would be his wife together with a dowry of thousands more pounds of gold.

  At this point Attila believed he had achieved his ambition to take over the Roman Empire and rule the world.

  Attila and his people practised shamanism. In all battles Attila was guided — wisely as it turned out — by his shaman-priests. The great terror-striking uproar of a Hun army going to battle was made up of the howling of dogs, the clanking of weapons, the sounds of horns and bells. All this was intended to summon the battalions of the dead, the ghosts of their ancestors, to fight alongside them. They were also shamanistically calling on the group souls of carnivores, the wolves and the bears, to enter into them and give them supernatural powers.

  BECAUSE WE HAVE BEEN CONSIDERING the barbarian invasions from the East, this is perhaps a good place to pause to consider shamanism. The word shaman comes from the Tungus-Mongol noun meaning ‘one who knows’.

  Shamans, from the time of the barbarian invasions to the present, have used a variety of techniques — Mircea Eliade has called them ‘archaic techniques of ecstasy’ — to work themselves into a trance state: rhythmic drumming and dancing, hyperventilation, frenzied self-mutilation, sensory deprivation, dehydration, sleep deprivation — and also psychoactive plants, including ayahuasca, peyote cactus, the ergot fungus. Recent studies by Wiliam Emboden, Professor of Biology at California State University, and others have also made it look likely that drugs were used to induce trance states in Mystery centres — for example, the kykeon at Eleusis and the blue water lily taken in conjunction with opium and mandrake roots in ancient Egypt.

  Scientists have isolated an enzyme in the brain that induces these trance states. Research seems to suggest that 2 per cent of us have high enough levels of dimethyltryptamine naturally occurring in the brain to give us spontaneous and involuntary trance states. It also seems likely that we all have higher levels until adolescence, when a process of crystallization takes place, cladding the pineal gland and impeding its function. For the rest of us these ancient techniques or similar are necessary.

  Anthropologists have noticed that accounts of shamanistic experience across many different cultures show a progression through the same stages.

  First, a blacking out of the world of the senses, and a sense of a journey through the darkness. Great pain is often experienced as if the body is being dismembered.

  Second, a sea of lights, often with a shifting net of geometric patterns — the matrix.

  Third, these patterns morph into shapes, most commonly snakes and half-human, half-animal creatures often with pliable, semi-transparent bodies.

  Lastly, when the trance fades the shaman has a sense of enjoying supernatural powers, the ability to heal, information about enemies, mind-to-mind influence on animals and the gift of prophecy.

  This may all seem to fit nicely with the accounts of initiati
ons in Mystery schools that we have looked at. Gregg Jacobs at Harvard Medical School has said that ‘by the use of shamanistic techniques we can work ourselves into powerful ancestral states of consciousness’.

  But in the view of modern esotericists, the example of shamanism will only take us so far when trying to understand the Mystery schools and secret societies. Many of the paintings produced by shamanistic cultures as records of their trances are startlingly beautiful, but they do not give the same magnificent, comprehensive panorama of the spirit worlds found, for example, on the ceilings of the temples of Edfu or Philae. Moreover, the beings encountered by shamans seem to be from the lower levels, rather than the more elevated planetary gods with whom the temple priests communed.

  In the view of modern esoteric teachers, then, all shamanism, whether that of the old Hunnic or Mongol hordes or that practised by the sangoma in South Africa today, represent a degeneration of a once magnificent primordial vision.

  Again we see that in the secret history everything is upside down and the wrong way round. In conventional history religion’s early stages were marked by animism and totemism, then developed into the complicated cosmologies of the great ancient civilizations. In the secret history humankind’s primordial vision was complicated, sophisticated and magnificent, and only later degenerated into animism, totemism and shamanism.

  Attila’s tribespeople practised a shamanism that gave them an access to the spirit worlds that many a churchman might envy, but it was access in an atavistic state. It ran contrary to the impulse of the evolution of human consciousness that had been developed by Pythagoras and Plato and had now been given new direction by Jesus Christ and Paul. The aim of this evolution was a beautiful one — that people would be able take joy in their individual intellectual strength and superiority, and that they should be able to choose to move freely, powerfully and lovingly not only through the material world but also through the spirit worlds.