by Mark Booth
The long struggle to wake up to the material world that had begun with Noah is finally completed and the result is sheer delight. Love of light and laughter, food and drink, wrestling and love-making drives the densely packed, punchy prose. In the pages of Rabelais, the world is not the terrible place the Church has made it out to be. The Church’s world-denying philosophy is shown to be unhealthy. ‘Laugh and face it out boldly whatever it may be,’ said Rabelais. Laughter, jolliness and good humour were a cure for both mind and body. Both could be transformed.
Rabelais loves the world and in his writing love of objects and love of words go hand in hand. A profusion of things and the coining of new words come tumbling off the page. But there is a sly initiatic undercurrent for those who wish to look for it. Rabelais is a mystic but not in the otherworldly style of the Middle Ages.
Troubadors had written of the madness of being in love and some of them had written of themselves as fools and madmen. By this they meant that they had found new ways into the spirit worlds, and that when they returned they saw life upside down and inside out.
For the Troubadors, then, everyday reality had looked very different, and Rabelais now turned this new way of seeing into a narrative, creating a subversive style of humour that would become characteristic of initiatic writers such as Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Lewis Carroll and André Breton. Not only does Rabelais find that he is able to rampage around the spirit worlds with new-found freedom, but when he returns to the material world he is unable to take people’s assumptions about it, their conventions, their morality, seriously. In his story his heroes found the Abbey of Thelema, which has the instruction ‘Do what thou wilt’ inscribed above its gate. Rabelais envisioned a company of initiates whose consciousness is so transformed that they are beyond good and evil.
At the end of Gargantua and Pantagruel, after many voyages of exploration over many seas, during which they have seen many wonders, battled with cat-people, armies of sausages and windmill-eating giants, our heroes finally reach a mysterious island. The twentieth-century alchemist Fulcanelli explained that by this arrival Rabelais means to say that his heroes are entering the Matrix.
Initiatic humour enlivens this startlingly dark image of the Fool by Jacob Jordaens. Like his fellow Dutch artists Rubens and Rembrandt, Jordaens was deeply immersed in the Cabala. The fool’s cap mimics the Hebrew letter shin, which inserted in the Tetragrammaton, or sacred name of God, to yield the name of Jesus. It also symbolizes, in its three prongs, the spiritualizing of the three bodies of man — animinal, vegetable and mineral.
They are led to an initiation chamber in an underground temple. Stories of going underground should always alert us to the fact that occult physiology is being referred to. The journey underground is a journey inside the body.
In the centre and deepest part of the temple stands a sacred fountain of life. Fulcanelli pointed out that Rabelais allowed his esoteric, alchemical interests to come to the surface in this description of the fountain with its seven columns dedicated to the seven planets. Each planetary god carries the appropriate precious stones, metals and alchemical symbols. A figure of Saturn hangs over one column with a scythe and a crane at his feet. Most tellingly Mercury is described as ‘fixed, firm and malleable’ — which is to say semi-solidified in the process of alchemical transmutation.
What flows from this fountain and what our pilgrims — which is how we should think of them, we now realize — drink is wine. ‘Drinking is the distinguishing character of humanity,’ writes Rabelais, ‘I mean drinking cool, delicious wine, for you must know, my beloved, that by wine we become divine, for it is in its power to fill the spirit with truth, learning and philosophy.’ In some oriental occult physiology wine is used as a symbol of the secretions within the brain that stream into consciousness in ecstatic states. In the twentieth century some Indian scientists went so far as to suggest that ‘wine’ in Vedic texts referred to what we today call dimethyltryptamine, the enzyme that streams down from the higher regions of the cerebellum that we have already touched on in our discussion of shamanism. Swami Yogananda likewise talked of neuro-physiological secretions he called ‘blissful amrita’, the pulsating nectar of immortality that brings with it moments of heightened consciousness, and enables us to perceive directly the great ideas that weave together the material world.
‘Oh Lord,’ wrote the Sufi master Sheikh Abdullah Ansari, ‘intoxicate me with the wine of Thy love.’
20. THE GREEN ONE BEHIND THE WORLDS
Columbus • Don Quixote • William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and the Green One
WHEN IN 1492 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS reached the mouth of the Orinoco he believed he had found the Gihon, one of the four rivers that flow out of Eden. He wrote home: ‘There are great indications suggesting the proximity of the earthly Paradise, for not only does it correspond in mathematical position with the opinions of the holy and learned theologians, but all other sages concur to make it probable.’
The impulse to discover everything about the world that would inspire the scientific revolution was also inspiring men to voyages of exploration. Never had wonder at the material world been so strong.
Hopes of finding a New World were inextricably connected with expectations of a new Golden Age, but the gold found turned out to be the more earthly kind.
Much has been made of Columbus’s connections with the Knights Templar. He was married to a daughter of a former Grand Master of the Knights of Christ, a Portuguese order that had grown up after the Templars had been driven underground. It’s been noted as significant that Columbus navigated ships whose sails carried the distinctive red cross ‘patte’ of the Templars. But the reality is that the Knights of Christ did not pursue the same independent commerce with the spirit worlds that had pushed the Papacy to such desperate measures in the case of the Templars. As with other later crypto-Templar orders such as the Knights of Malta, Rome was here adopting the powerfully glamorous mystique of the original Knights Templar, and using it for its own purposes.
Columbus wrote to Queen Isabella expressing hope that he would find a ‘barrel of gold’ that would finance the reconquest of Jerusalem, just as she and her husband, Ferdinand, had recently managed the reconquest of Granada, bringing Spain back to the Church. Columbus did not know that that gold would be needed to fund a war against an enemy nearer home and fast growing in strength — an enemy with much greater claims to be called the spiritual heir of the Knights Templar.
The battle lines for control of the world were being drawn, not only geopolitically, but in the spirit worlds, too. It would be a battle for the whole spirit of humanity.
CERVANTES AND SHAKESPEARE WERE pretty nearly exact contemporaries.
Don Quixote, the elderly knight who tilts at windmills, believing them to be giants, and who sees a squat, garlic-chewing peasant girl as a beautiful, aristocratic maiden out of tales of chivalry, called Dulcinea, might at first seem like a character in a rather knock-about comedy. But as the story progresses its tone changes and the reader senses some strange magic at work.
On one level Don Quixote is trying to insist on the old chivalric ideals of the Middle Ages as they pass away. On another he is entering his ‘second childhood’, harking back to a time when imaginings seemed so much more real. The point is, of course, that in esoteric philosophy imaginings are more real. Some Spanish scholars have argued on the basis of a close textual analysis that Don Quixote is an allegorical commentary on the cabalistic Zohar (or Book of Splendour).
At one point in the story Don Quixote and his down-to-earth servant Sancho Panza are tricked by Merlin into believing that the beautiful Dulcinea has been bewitched so that she looks like a squat peasant girl. Apparently the only way she can regain her beautiful form is if Sancho Panza submits to a beating of 3300 lashes. We shall return to examine the significance of the number thirty-three shortly.
An account of an initiation lies at the heart of the novel. It marks the point when simple-minded comedy gives way to
something more troubling and ambiguous. This is the strange episode of the Don’s descent into the Cave of Montesinos…
Sancho Panza tied a rope a hundred fathoms long to his master’s doublet, then lowered him through the mouth of the cave, Don Quixote hacking his way through brambles, briars and fig trees, dislodging crows and rooks.
At the bottom of the cave the Don could not stop himself falling into a deep, deep sleep. He awoke to found himself in a beautiful meadow. But unlike in a dream he could think reasonably…
He approached a vast palace of crystal where he was met by a strange old man in a green satin hood, who introduced himself as Montesinos. This man, evidently the genius of the transparent palace, told him he had long been expected. He took the Don to a downstairs chamber and showed him a knight lying on a marble sepulchre. This knight had been bewitched by Merlin, Montesinos told him. Furthermore, he said, Merlin had prophesied that he, Don Quixote, would break the spell, and so would revive knight errantry…
Don Quixote returned to the surface and asked Sancho Panza how long he had been gone. Told not more than hour, Don Quixote said this could not be, that he had spent three days underground. He said he saw what he saw, touched what he touched.
You’re saying the most foolish things imaginable, said Sancho Panza.
The whole novel is a play on enchantment, illusion, disillusion — and a deeper level of enchantment. It reads like a series of parables in which the meaning is never explicitly stated and never quite clear. But the deepest level of meaning has to do with the role of imagination in forming the world. Don Quixote is not just a buffoon. He is somebody who has the strongest desire to have his innermost questions answered. He is being shown that material reality is just one of many layers of illusions, and that it is our deepest imaginings that form them. The implication is that if we can locate the secret source of our imaginings, we can control the flow of nature. By the end of the novel the Don has subtlely changed his surroundings.
We saw earlier that when we are in love we choose to see the good qualities in the one we love. We saw how our good-heartedness helps to bring out these qualities and make them stronger. The reverse is also true. Those we despise become despicable.
A similar choice confronts us when we contemplate the cosmos as a whole. Cervantes was writing at a turning point in history when people no longer knew for sure that the world is a spiritual place with goodness and meaning at its heart. What Cervantes is saying is that if, like Don Quixote, we good-heartedly decide to believe in the essential goodness of the world, despite the brickbats of fortune, despite the slapstick tendency in things that seems to contradict such spiritual beliefs and make them look foolish and absurd, then that decision to believe will help transform the world — and in a supernatural way, too.
Don Quixote is reckless in his good-heartedness. He takes an extreme and painful path. He has been called the Spanish Christ, and the effect of his journey on world history has been quite as great as if he had really lived.
CERVANTES DIED ON 23 APRIL 1616, the same date as Shakespeare.
The sparse traces left by William Shakespeare in the written records yield few definite facts. We know he was born in the village of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, that he was educated at the village school, became a butcher’s apprentice and was caught poaching. He left Stratford for London where he became a bit-part player in a company at one time under the patronage of Francis Bacon, and many successful plays were performed, the published versions of which bear his name. He died leaving his second best bed to his wife in his will.
His contemporary, the playwright Ben Jonson, said sneeringly of William Shakespeare that he knew ‘small Latin and less Greek’. How could such a man have created a body of work, saturated in all the erudition of the age?
Many great contemporaries have been pushed forward as the true author of Shakespeare’s plays, including his patron, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe (working on the theory that he wasn’t really murdered in 1593, just as the plays of Shakespeare began to appear), and latterly the poet John Donne. An American scholar, Margaret Demorest, has noted the strange links between Donne and Shakespeare, the likeness of their portraits, the similarity in nicknames, ‘Johannes factotum’ for Shakespeare and ‘Johannes Factus’ for Donne, odd idiosyncrasies in spelling — both use cherubin for cherubim, for example — and the fact that Donne’s publications begin when Shakespeare’s cease.
But the most popular candidate is, of course, Francis Bacon.
An infant prodigy, Francis Bacon was born into a family of courtiers in 1561. At the age of twelve a masque he had written, The Birth of Merlin, was performed before Queen Elizabeth I, who knew him affectionately as her little Lord Keeper. He was a small, weak, sickly child and his schoolfellows teased him by calling him by a pun on his name, Hamlet, or ‘little ham’. He was educated at Oxford and when, despite the Queen’s earlier fondness for him, he was blocked again and again in his political ambitions, he conceived an ambition to build himself an ‘Empire of learning’, conquering every branch of erudition known to man. His intellectual brilliance was such that he became known as the ‘wonder of the ages’. He wrote books that dominated the intellectual life of his day, including The Advancement of Learning, the Novum Organon, in which he proposed a radical new approach to scientific thinking, and The New Atlantis, a vision of a new world order. Part inspired by Plato’s vision of Atlantis, this would prove very influential on esoteric groups in the modern world. When James I came to the throne Bacon quickly achieved his long-held ambition and became Lord Chancellor, the second most powerful post in the land. One of Bacon’s responsibilities was the distribution of land grants in the New World.
Bacon’s brilliance was such that it seemed to cover the whole world, and, all other things being equal, he might seem to be a better candidate for the author of the plays of Shakespeare than Shakespeare himself.
Bacon was a member of a secret society called the Order of the Helmet. In The Advancement of Learning, he wrote of a tradition of handing down parables in a chain of succession and with them hidden meanings on the ‘secrets of the sciences’. He admitted he was fascinated by secret codes and numerological ciphers. In the 1623 edition of The Advancement of Learning he explained what he calls the Bilateral Cipher — which would later become the basis of the Morse Code.
It is interesting to note that his favourite code was the ancient ‘cabalistic cipher’ in terms of which the name ‘Bacon’ has the numerical value thirty-three. Using this same cipher, the phrase ‘Fra Rosi Crosse’ can be founded encoded on the frontispiece, dedication page and other significant pages in The Advancement of Learning.
And using the same cipher, the same Rosicrucian phrase can also be found in the dedication in the Shakespeare Folio, on the first page of The Tempest and on the Shakespeare monument in Stratford-upon-Avon. The rolled scroll on the Shakespeare Memorial in Westminster Abbey also has it, together with the number thirty-three, which we have just seen is the number for Bacon.
IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THE SOLUTION to this mystery given in the secret history, it is necessary first to take a look at the work.
The plays of Shakespeare play with altered states, with the madness of love. Hamlet and Ophelia are descended from the Troubadours. There are wise fools — like Feste in Twelfth Night. In Lear’s Fool, the Christ-like jester who tells the truth when no one else dares, the fool of the Troubadors achieves apotheosis.
The characters of Gargantua, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza inhabit the collective imagination. They help form our attitudes to life. But as Harold Bloom, Professor of Humanities at Yale University and author of the key book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, has shown, no single writer has populated our imagination with archetypes like Shakespeare: Falstaff, Hamlet, Ophelia, Lear, Prospero, Caliban, Bottom, Othello, Iago, Malvolio, Macbeth and his Lady, Romeo and Juliet. In fact, after Jesus Christ no other individual has done so much to develop and expand the human sense of a
n interior life. If Jesus Christ planted the seed of interior life, Shakespeare helped it to grow, populated it and gave us the sense we all have today that we each contain inside us an inner cosmos as expansive as the outer cosmos.
Great writers are the architects of our consciousness, in Rabelais, Cervantes and Shakespeare, above all in the soliloquies of Hamlet, we also see the seeds of the sense we have today of personal turning points, vital decisions to be made. Before the great writers of the Renaissance, any inkling of such things could only have come from sermons.
RIGHT The History of the World, 1614. Sir Walter Raleigh, the famous adventurer, was a member of a secret society called the School of Night. So shadowy was this society that some recent critics have even doubted its existence, but Raleigh undoubtedly shared esoteric ideas with Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman, author of The Shadow of Night. One of the secrets they kept was ‘atheism’. Raleigh feared the prolonged torture, disembowelling and slow death that had overtaken another friend, Thomas Kyd, for professing atheistic views. But none of them was an atheist in the modern sense of denying the reality of spirit worlds or denying that disembodied beings intervened in the material world in a supernatural way. In Faust Marlowe wrote one of the most learned, esoteric works of world literature dealing with the dangers of commerce with the spirit worlds.
There was a brilliant analysis of this frontispiece of his literary masterpiece by David Fideler in the much-missed Gnosis magazine. On one level, says Fideler, it was meant to illustrate Raleigh’s view of history as the unfolding of Divine Providence according to Cicero’s definition: ‘History bears witness to the passing of the ages, sheds light upon reality, gives life to recollection and guidance to human existence, and brings tidings of ancient days.’ On another level, he points out, this design embodies the cabalistic Tree of Life with planetary correspondences at the nodes. The figure on the left is Bon Fama, the Fama of the Rosicrucian Manifestoes.