by Mark Booth
Drug-taking is, of course, a big part of modern shamanistic practice, but it is forbidden by most modern esoteric teachers as a means of reaching the spirit worlds. The aim of these teachers is to achieve experience of the spirit worlds with intelligence and critical faculties as unimpaired as possible, indeed heightened. To enter the spirit worlds on drugs, on the other hand, is to do so without proper preparation, and may open up a portal into a demonic dimension which then refuses to close.
WHEN IN 453 ATTILA PREPARED TO CELEBRATE MARRIAGE to a high-born, soft-skinned young woman — he already had hundreds of wives — he was a man in the prime of life and full of potency, about to oversee the end of the Roman Empire.
The delicate early growth of a new stage of human consciousness was about to be nipped in the bud.
In the morning Attila was found dead. He had suffered a massive nosebleed.
‘I BELIEVE BECAUSE IT IS ABSURD.’ This famous phrase by the first of the Latin-speaking Church fathers, Tertullian, influenced many thinkers in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century.
We may imagine how absurd life might have seemed to a citizen of the Roman Empire in the days of its decline. He lived in a disenchanted world, where the great spiritual certainties on which the civilizations of the ancient world had been founded seemed doubtful. They no longer corresponded to his experience. Pan was long dead and the oracles had fallen silent. God and the gods seemed little more than empty, abstract ideas, while the really vigorous thought-life was in the realm of science and technology, in the atomic theories of Lucretius, in amazing engineering projects — aqueducts, drainage systems and roads thousands of miles long — that were springing up all round. Spiritual certainties had been replaced by harsh political and economic realities.
Yet if this citizen had been minded to listen to the inner promptings of his spirit, he might have noticed that this harsh and mechanical grinding of the wheels of necessity, this new way of the world, threw into relief something very like its opposite, something elsewhere called ‘the nameless way’. If this citizen had chosen not to shut it out, he might have caught suggestions emanating from underground streams of thought.
At this critical juncture we move from the age of the Mystery schools to the age of the secret societies, from the directing of the course of history by the political elite to something much more subversive coming from below. A new mood was taking over the soul-life of initiates which may be traced in the life of God’s joker, Francis of Assisi, in Shakespeare’s fools and in the gently undermining work of Rabelais, in Gulliver’s Travels, Alice in Wonderland and in the cuttings and pastings of Kurt Schwitters.
IN ANSWER TO A QUESTION ABOUT THE meaning of Zen, a monk raised a finger. A boy in the class began to ape him, and then afterwards, whenever anyone discussed this monk’s teachings, this naughty boy would raise his finger in mockery.
But the next time the boy attended class, the monk grabbed him and cut off his finger. As he ran off crying, the monk called after him. The boy turned round to look at the monk, and the monk looked back at him and raised his own finger.
At that moment the boy was enlightened.
This conte cruel is not a historical episode but one of the classic fables of Zen, formulated at the time of Attila’s nosebleed.
The capacity for abstract thought had been developing for less than a thousand years, inspired by Pythagoras, Confucius and Socrates. Buddhism had spread from India to China with the visit of the twenty-eighth Buddhist patriarch Bodhidharma. Then in China over the next two hundred years Buddhism and Taoism fused to create a philosophy of spontaneous, intuitive enlightenment called tch’an — or Zen as it would later come to be called in Japan.
Tch’an brought a new cautionary sense of the limitations of abstract thought.
The boy and his fellow pupils had been struggling to understand what the monk was saying. We may imagine them frowning with the effort to grasp enlightenment cerebrally.
But the boy is suddenly enabled to see the world from the point of view of an altered state of consciousness. He is suddenly seeing the world from the point of view of the vegetable consciousness that is centred in the solar plexus rather than the skull. It is by means of this vegetable consciousness that we are connected individually to every other living thing in the cosmos. These connections can be visualized as tendrils of a great cosmic tree and every solar plexus as a flower on the tree. In another way of looking at it, this vegetable consciousness is another dimension, the world between the worlds and the gateway to the spirit worlds. It is consciousness, the ‘light beyond the light of the intellect’, to quote St Augustine, that anyone must slip into who wishes to become enlightened.
The boy is enlightened because from the point of view of this other form of consciousness the monk’s finger belongs to him as much as it does the monk. The normal categories of human head-thought are inadequate to cover this.
Laughter erupts when you suddenly see the cosmos upside down, inside out and the other way round. At the beginning of the second half of the fifth century a new sense of absurdity entered the world and from then on the great initiates of the secret societies, in the West as well as in the East, would always have a touch of Zen.
UNDER A STRONG RULER, JUSTINIAN, the Byzantine Empire expanded, even regaining territories from the barbarians. Justinian closed down the remaining schools of Greek philosophy, causing teachers to flee, taking with them texts like the writings of Aristotle, including his now lost alchemical treatise.
Many arrived in Persia where King Khusraw dreamed of founding a great academy like the one that had inspired Greek civilization. In an intellectual ferment that took in elements of Neoplatonism, Gnosticism and Hermeticism, the methodology of Aristotle was applied jointly to the material world and the spirit worlds. So began the golden age of Arabian magic.
All our childhoods are lit up by a vision of magic — of genies, magic lamps and abracadabra. These stories began to weave their magical influence on the history of the world in the sixth century. There were rumours of automata and flying machines and caches of self-generating gold, of powerful magic spells that would become collected in forbidden books.
Soon the whole world would be under the spell of Arabia, as books of its spells were published far and wide, books containing the whispers of demons.
17. THE AGE OF ISLAM
Mohammed and Gabriel • The Old Man of the Mountains • Haroun al Raschid and the Arabian Nights • Charlemagne and the Historic Parsifal • Chartres Cathedral
A GRIMLY FORBIDDING FIGURE LOOKED down from the spirit worlds on these developments.
In 570 a child called Mohammed was born in Mecca. When he was six he lost both his parents and was hired out as a shepherd’s boy. He grew broad shouldered, with curly black hair and a beard through which shone dazzling white teeth. He became a camel-driver, transporting the spices and perfumes that were the speciality of Mecca to Syria. Then, at the age of twenty-five, he married a wealthy widow of Mecca and became one of the richest and most respected citizens of that city.
Although he had in one way now won back all he had lost at the death of his parents, Mohammed was dissatisfied. The religious centre of Mecca was a large, black, granite stone called the Kaaba, which in some traditions is said to have fallen to earth from the Sirius star system. At that time Arabia was populated by shamanistic tribes, each worshipping their own gods and spirits and at the centre of this whirlwind, next to the Kaaba, stood a sacred tent which housed hundreds of their idols. Mecca had also become corrupted by the sale of holy water — taken from a spring which Ishmael had caused to spring from the sand. To Mohammed’s eyes all of this looked lax. He saw a people interested only in money-making, gambling, horsemanship and getting drunk.
While driving camel trains down to places like Syria and Egypt he heard about Judaism and also stories about Jesus Christ. Did the story of the cleansing of the temple strike a chord? Mohammed became convinced that Arabia needed a prophet
, someone like Jesus Christ who could purge the people of superstitions and of corruption and could unite them in one cosmic purpose.
Mohammed was sitting in the hills surrounding Mecca, brooding darkly on how all this might be achieved, when an angel appeared before him, saying: ‘I am the angel Gabriel.’ The apparition then showed Mohammed a golden tablet and told him to read it. Mohammed protested that he was illiterate, but when Gabriel commanded him a second time, Mohammed found that he could indeed read. So began the series of angelic conversations that became the Koran. Later Mohammed went into town and preached what Gabriel had taught him with blazing sincerity and irresistible power. He would summarize his creed in these down-to-earth terms:
My teachings are simple.
Allah is the One God
Mohammed is his prophet
Give up idolatry
Do not steal
Do not lie
Do not slander
And never become intoxicated
If you follow my teachings, then you follow Islam.
When challenged to perform a miracle to prove that his preaching was divinely inspired, he refused. He said that Allah had raised the heavens without recourse to pillars, had made the earth, the rivers, the fig, the date and the olive — and that these things were miraculous enough.
We may hear in this ecstatic materialism the first whisperings of the modern age.
DURING THEIR ANGELIC CONVERSATIONS, the Archangel Gabriel asked Mohammed to choose refreshment. Mohammed chose milk, which occultists call moon juice. Alcohol would be forbidden in Islam.
It is highly significant, from an esoteric point of view, that the angel who dictated the Koran to Mohammed was Gabriel, traditionally Archangel of the Moon. Allah is the Muslim name for Jehovah, great god of the moon and thought. Gabriel is here heralding the power of thought to control human passions and quell fantasy, and his god is the great god of thou-shalt-not, represented in Muslim iconography by the crescent moon.
Thought is a death process that feeds on life-giving energies. In the Middle Ages — the great Age of Islam — the sexual impulse would have to be suppressed in order for the human capacity for thought to grow. And in order to quell the outgrowths of Gnostic fantasy, religious leaders imposed their authority on the people.
From the point of view of conventional, Western history, Europe was besieged by the uncivilized Muslims during the latter part of the Dark Ages and on into the Middle Ages. From the point of view of esoteric history the truth is something pretty nearly the mirror image of this. The impulses seeded at this time that would grow and transform Europe, indeed the whole human race, came from Islam.
The caves of the desert fathers in an early nineteenth-century print. The desert fathers, living in isolation, devoted their lives to practising extreme techniques that would gain them access to the spirit worlds, a way of life that would develop into the monastic movement. St Antony the Great, the greatest of the desert fathers, would stay for long periods in tombs in a trance-like state. On one occasion Antony advised a man to cover himself with meat. When this man was shredded by wild dogs, he learned something of what it would be like to be attacked by demons on the other side of the grave. In the episode known as the temptation of St Antony, he himself entered the sphere of the moon, otherwise known as kamaloca, or purgatory, and was granted a vision of the Devil, a tall black man with his head in the clouds. He also saw angels who were able to guide some human spirits up beyond the devil’s reach.
MOHAMMED’S PREACHING IN THE MARKETPLACE at Mecca prompted a plot to assassinate him. He escaped to the town of Medina with his disciple Abu Behr in order to marshal his supporters. In 629 he returned to Mecca and in the four years until his death he established control over the rest of Arabia. When Abu Behr became his successor — or ‘Caliph’ — the will to conquer continued at an astonishing rate.
One of the things that makes a religion successful is if it works in the world, that is to say if it brings material benefits. The combination of Mohammed’s radical monotheism with the scientific methodology of Aristotle that had earlier pervaded Arabian thought would quickly encircle the globe from Spain to the boundaries of China.
Absorbing new ideas as well as spreading them, the Arabs took in Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Chinese science, including the manufacture of paper. They made great advances in astronomy, medicine, physics and mathematics, replacing the clumsy Roman numerals with the system we use today.
BY ITS OWN ACCOUNT SUFISM HAD ANCIENT, even primordial roots. Some traditions date its origins to the Saramong Brotherhood — or Brotherhood of the Bee — founded in the Caucasus in Central Asia during the first great post-Atlantean migration. Later, Sufism was undoubtedly influenced by Gnosticism and Neoplatonism.
If there was a tendency in Islam in its triumphant period to become dogmatic and paternalistic, Sufism represented a contrary impulse, a fascination with the sometimes perverse and paradoxical twisting this way and that of the spirit. Esoteric Islam advocated immersing oneself in the gentler, more feminine and feeling side of the spiritual life which would find expression in the great outpouring of Sufi poetry.
The question of what constitutes ‘oneself ’ is also a big issue in Sufism. What we generally imagine to be our own self, it teaches, is really an entity that operates independently of us, made up for the most part of fears, false attachments, dislikes, prejudices, envy, pride, habits, preoccupations and compulsions. A lot of Sufi practice involves breaking down this false self, this false will.
‘God is nearer to a man than his jugular vein’ according to the verse from the Koran (50:16), yet for the most part, distracted by our false selves, we are not awake to this.
The great Sufi writer Ibn Arabi said that a Sufi master is someone who unveils one to oneself.
Practices under instruction from a Sufi master might involve breathing exercises and music used to attain an altered state. Sufism taught the sometimes painful process of ‘waking up’, of becoming aware of ourselves and of the cosmic, mystical current that runs through us and becoming more fully alive.
Because they opened themselves totally to this mystic current, Sufis could be wild, unpredictable and disconcerting. We will see later that Sufism has had a vast, though largely unacknowledged, influence on Western culture.
Mohammed’s brother-in-law, Ali, was to him as John to Jesus Christ, receiving and transmitting the secret teachings. Sufis obeyed Islamic law but believed it to be the outer shell of esoteric teaching.
Ali and Mohammed’s daughter, Fatima, established what became known as the Fatimid Empire, ruling a large part of North Africa and Cairo, where they established a school for esoteric philosophy called the House of Wisdom. There were seven initiatory grades taught within. Candidates would be initiated into timeless wisdom and gain secret powers. Sir John Woodruffe, the nineteenth-century translator of the key Tantric texts, also uncovered a Sufi tradition with a parallel understanding of occult physiology. In this Sufi tradition centres of power had beautiful and intriguing names such as Cedar Heart and Lily Heart.
One of the initiates to emerge from the House of Wisdom was Hassan-I Sabbah, the famous Old Man of the Mountains.
He founded a small sect which in 1090 captured the castle of Alamut in the mountains south of the Caspian Sea in modern-day Iran. From his mountain fastness he sent his secret agents all over the world to do his bidding, exerting a puppet master’s control on distant rulers. His Hashishim — Assassins — infiltrated courts and armies. Anyone who even thought of disobeying Hassan was found dead the next morning.
The Western view of Hassan is no doubt distorted by a passage in Marco Polo’s account of his travels. He claimed that the Old Man of the Mountains gave his young followers drugs which put them to sleep for three days. When they woke up they found themselves in a beautiful garden they were told was paradise. They were surrounded by beautiful girls who played them music and gave them anything they wanted. After three days the young men were sent back
to sleep. When they awoke, they were brought again before Hassan, convinced that the Old Man had the power to send them back to Paradise on a whim. So when Hassan wanted someone killed, his assassins would do it willingly, knowing that Paradise would be their certain reward.
In reality Hassan banned all intoxicants, even executing one of his own sons for being drunk. He banned music, too. Among his own people he was renowned as a holy man and alchemist, an adept who was able to control events all over the world by supernatural means. This was despite the fact that once he arrived and set up his court there, he only ever left his room at Alamut twice.
In the twentieth century the archetype of the man who appears mad, but really controls the whole world from his cell appeared as Dr Mabuse, in the deeply esoteric films of Fritz Lang.
HAROUN AL RASCHID WAS ANOTHER OF the extraordinary, compelling characters of this era. He became Caliph in his early twenties and quickly made Baghdad the most splendid city in the world, building a palace of unparalleled splendour served by hundreds of courtiers and slaves and a harem. It was a place of glittering materiality, where a man might experience every pleasure the world has to offer, grow bored with them all and long for novelty.
The turbaned oriental potentate of all our imaginations and Caliph of the Tales of the Arabian Nights, he drew to his court all the great writers, artists, thinkers and scientists of his day. It was rumoured that, as related in the Arabian Nights, he would sometimes slip out of a secret door in the palace in disguise in order to eavesdrop on his people and find out what they really thought.