by Mark Booth
These are great siddhis, or ‘excellencies’. It was surely excellencies that enabled the initiate priests of antiquity to perceive the third star in the Sirius system, to understand the evolution of the species and to understand, too, the form and function of the pineal gland.
BUT IS IT POSSIBLE FOR US TO BELIEVE in the efficacy of such altered states today? Aren’t we more likely to see them as diminishing intelligence, making us less conscious, more likely to be deluded?
I offer one counter-example to the common-sense view, which was first pointed out to me by Graham Hancock while he was working on his breakthrough book on shamanism, Supernatural.
Each human cell has coiled inside it double-stranded ribbon only ten molecules wide but some six feet long which contains all the genetic information necessary for the construction of that person. Every living cell on the planet has a version of this ribbon, but the ones in human cells are the most complex, carrying a coded message of some three billion characters. These characters contain inherited instructions which enable the cells to organize themselves in the patterns that create each individual human being.
Scientists noticed that these billions of characters seem to have very complex patterns of relationships, a deep structure suggestive of a human language. This hunch was confirmed by statistical analysis. But it was the brilliant Cambridge biologist Francis Crick who cracked the code, discovering the double helix structure that won him and his colleague James Watson the Nobel Prize and launched modern, genetic medicine.
What is pertinent to the secret history is that, although in so far as I know Crick had no connections with the secret societies, he achieved his moment of inspiration and unlocked the structure of DNA while in an altered state brought about by taking LSD. As we have seen, hallucinogens have been used as part of techniques for achieving higher states of consciousness and grasping higher realities since the Mystery schools.
What is even more intriguing still is that later in life Crick published a book called Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature, in which he argued that the complex structure of DNA could not have come about by chance. Like an earlier Cambridge man, Isaac Newton, he believed that the cosmos had encoded deep within it messages about our — and its — origins that had been put there, so that we would be able to decode them when we had evolved sufficient intelligence.
WHAT IS THE MORAL OF THIS? AS THE Duchess in Alice in Wonderland will always ask.
What lies outside the collective is the realm of the demonic — but this realm is also the realm of the innovative, the evolutionary and that which addresses our deep and unquenchable need for the infinite. History shows that the people who have worked on the very boundaries of human intelligence have reached this place in altered states.
24. THE AGE OF FREEMASONRY
Christopher Wren • John Evelyn and the Alphabet of Desire • The Triumph of Materialism • George Washington and the Secret Plan for the New Atlantis
IF ALCHEMY WAS THE CORE PRACTICE connecting the Rosicrucians and early Freemasons, the outward forms of these societies were quite different.
There were only eight Rosicrucian brothers in the original brotherhood, and their ‘House of the Holy Spirit’ was supposed by many to exist on another plane. Later generations were still elusive enough to suggest that there were only ever a few of them.
By contrast Freemasonry spread around the world quickly recruiting thousands, then hundreds of thousands. Today, even if it doesn’t advertise its existence, there is a substantial Freemasonic Lodge in most large towns. Outsiders know where it is, even if they don’t know what goes on inside.
Following the Rosicrucians’ catastrophic attempt at direct political action, ending in the Battle of White Mountain, Freemasons would now operate behind the scenes. Rather than seeking to impose reforms from above, they reverted to the original aims of the secret societies, influencing from below.
In the case of Freemasonry the aim was partly to help foster the social conditions which would bring people to a stage in their development when they would be ready for initiation. Freemasons worked to create a tolerant and prosperous society with a degree of social and economic freedom that would give people the chance to explore better both the outer and inner cosmos. The evolution of free will would bring about many of the great changes foreseen in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, his vision of the perfect Rosicrucian state.
Prompted by Francis Bacon, people had begun to see the inner cosmos and outer cosmos as distinct. There arose out of this an understanding of the material world and the way it worked which would not otherwise have been possible, and in a few short decades this understanding had thrown a metallic embrace around the world, as railways and machines of mass manufacture transformed the landscape.
St Paul’s Cathedral, London. The famous diarist John Evelyn helped his fellow Freemason Christopher Wren with plans for St Paul’s and the reconstruction of London after the Great Fire of 1666. Evelyn and Wren submitted to Charles II a new street plan for London, doing away with the old higgledy-piggledy streets. Instead the streets were to be mapped according to the pattern of the cabalistic Tree of Life. In this plan St Paul’s is situated at Tiferet, the ‘heart’ of the Tree, associated with Jesus Christ in Christianized Cabala.
The great thing about science was that it worked. It produced testable, reliable results and tangible, life-changing benefits.
The contrast with religion could not have been more pointed. The Church was no longer a reliable source of spiritual experience. The Scottish philosopher David Hume asked, sarcastically, why was it that miracles always happen only in remote times and places?
The result of all this was that physical objects became the yardstick of what is real. The inner world began to seem like just a shadowy reflection or shadow of the outer one. In philosophy’s central debate, the one between idealism and materialism, idealism had been dominant since philosophy’s beginnings. As we have suggested, this was perhaps not because the majority of people had weighed up the arguments on both sides and come down in favour of idealism, but because they had experienced the world with an idealistic form of consciousness.
Now a decisive shift took place in favour of materialism.
Blake’s pictures sometimes feature naked bodies in the forms of letters of the Hebrew alphabet. William Blake was a Freemason, like the more respectable Christopher Wren and John Evelyn. These respectable Freemasons, members of the Royal Society famous for their good and public works, knew to keep their esoteric interests secret. What John Evelyn kept out of diaries written with an eye to publication, however, was that he had a ‘seraphic’ or cabalistic girlfriend thirty years his junior whom he taught secret techniques of meditation. John Evelyn initiated Margaret Blagge into cabalistic exercises based on Abraham Abulafia’s imaginative manipulations of the Hebrew alphabet. The difference was that these exercises involved imagining naked bodies erotically contorted into the shapes of the Hebrew letters. Margaret began to experience ecstatic trance states. In a way Evelyn anticipated the twentieth-century artist Austin Osman Spare, whose ‘Alphabet of Desire’ was based on correspondences between inner movements of sexual impulses and their outer form, manifested in erotic, magically-charged sigils or fetishes.
We may see Dr Johnson, author of the first English dictionary, as a transitional figure. He was a church-going Christian who countenanced the existence of ghosts and on one occasion heard his mother crying out to him over a distance of more than a hundred miles, yet he was one of the apostles of the common-sense view of life that is the ruling philosophy today. Once, walking down a London street, he was challenged to refute the idealism of the philosopher Bishop Berkeley. He kicked a stone by the side of the road and said, ‘I refute it thus!’
This new way of looking at things was very bad for religion. If nature obeyed certain universal laws that ran along certain straight, predictable tracks, then it was indifferent to the fate of human beings. Life, as Thomas Hobbes put it, is a war of all against all.<
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A magus sees a cabalistic vision in his study. Rembrandt created few pictures with explicit esoteric content, but his greatest contribution to the evolution of consciousness was his series of self-portraits. These show more clearly than any other medium the human spirit conscious of its being trapped in an ageing body of flesh.
THE WASTELAND OF CENTRAL EUROPE following the Thirty Years War became the spiritual wasteland of the Western world. It’s possible, if you are so minded, to see the decline of religion with sardonic glee, but for most people the gradual withdrawal of the spirit worlds has been experienced with an increasing sense of alienation. Without the living presence of beings from the higher hierarchies of gods and angels to help them, people were left alone to confront, as we say, their own demons — and demons.
Humanity was entering a new Dark Age. Neo-Solomonic temples sprang up all around the world. The esoteric aim of Freemasonry would be precisely this: to help lead humanity through the age of materialism while keeping the flame of true spirituality alive.
Of course Freemasonry is often thought of as atheistic, particularly by its enemies in the Church, but a Freemason has traditionally sworn an oath to ‘study the hidden secrets of Nature and Science in Order the better to know his Maker’.
From the start Freemasons had wanted to discard unthinking religion, false piety and the accretions of centuries of Church practice and dogma, particularly the crude idea of a vindictive father figure. But the higher orders have always sought direct personal experience of the spirit worlds. As philosophers they have always been interested in attempting to define what we can reasonably say about life’s spiritual dimension.
As we are about to see, many famous Freemasons of the eighteenth century who are usually thought of as sceptical, if not downright atheistic, were practising alchemists — and some even participated in ceremonial magic. Moreover, some great Freemasons from this period were reincarnations of great personages from the distant past. They were returning to fight in the greatest battle with the forces of evil since the first War in Heaven.
IF SCOTTISH AND ENGLISH FREEMASONS supported a constitutional monarchy working with a democratic parliament, the situation was very different for the American colonies.
George Washington was initiated in 1752.
On 16 December 1773 a group of men, apparently native Indians, played a large part in inspiring the American Revolution. After they had dumped British tea into Boston harbour they hurried back inside St Andrews Masonic Lodge…
In 1774 Benjamin Franklin met Thomas Paine in a Lodge in London and urged him to emigrate to America. Fond of quoting the words of Isaiah, Paine became the great prophet of Revolution, proposing a federation of states, coining the phrase, ‘The United States of America’. He argued for the abolition of slavery and state funding for the education of the poor.
In 1775 members of the Colonial Congress were staying as guests in a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their aim was to design the American flag. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were present and so was an old professor, who seemed to be staying there by coincidence. Somewhat to the surprise of the others, Washington and Franklin deferred to the professor. They seemed to recognize him as their superior, immediately and unreservedly, and all of his suggestions for the design of the flag were promptly adopted. Then he vanished and was never seen or heard of again. Was this stranger one of the Hidden Masters who direct the history of the world?
In their individual shape and in the pattern of their arrangement, the five pointed stars on the flag echo the symbols on the ceiling of a chamber in the Egyptian pyramid of Unas. In Egypt they were a symbol of the spirit powers raying down their sustaining and guiding influence on human history.
If we insist, against all the evidence, on seeing Freemasonry as an atheistic organization, spiritual only in an empty, modern sense, we will fail to understand how its leaders felt themselves both prompted by mysterious powers, some incarnated like the old professor, others the disembodied spirits of the stars.
The architecture of Freemasonry grows out of an occult, magical tradition of invoking disembodied spirits that goes back to ancient Egypt. ‘When the materials are all prepared and ready,’ it is said, ‘the architect shall appear.’
On the doors of the Capitol building in Washington, DC, there is a depiction of a Masonic ceremony that took place in 1793, when George Washington laid its cornerstone. If we contemplate Washington’s designs for the capital that would bear his name, with this building at its heart, we can begin to understand Freemasonry’s secret plans for the age. The key to this understanding — perhaps shockingly for those who would like to see Washington as a model of Christian piety — is astrology.
Freemasonry’s interest in astrology had good strong roots in the Royal Society. When Newton was challenged on the subject, he said, ‘Sir, I have studied the subject. You have not.’ Elias Ashmole had cast a horoscope for the founding of the Royal Exchange in London, soon to become the centre of world finance, as well as for St Paul’s Cathedral. When George Washington had a horoscope cast for the founding of the Capitol building he was acting in accordance with a solemn Freemasonic tradition which charted the history of humankind according to the movements of the stars and planets.
For esoteric Freemasons like Wren and Washington, the act of consecrating a cornerstone at an astrologically propitious moment meant inviting the hierarchies of heavenly beings to participate in the ceremony.
It is significant that at the very moment George Washington laid the foundation stone of the Capitol building, Jupiter was rising in the East. The phrase ‘Annuit Coeptis’ which hovers above the pyramid on the dollar bill is adapted from a line in Virgil’s Aeneid — ‘Jupiter, favour us in our undertaking.’
The phrase ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum’, also to be found on the dollar bill and which worries conspiracy theorists so much, is also adapted from Virgil. In the Eclogues he looks forward to a new age, when the people will be reunited with the gods so there will be no need for religion. The dollar bill, therefore, looks forward to the end of the Catholic Church’s world domination and the beginning of a new spiritual era. Replete with esoteric symbolism, it was designed under the aegis of President Roosevelt, a 33rd degree Freemason, who was advised on occult symbolism by his Vice President, Henry Wallace, a fellow Freemason and disciple of the theosophist and artist Nicholas Roerich.
After years of research and having been granted access to the Masonic archives, my old friend David Ovason wrote a magisterial book revealing in all but completely plain terms the esoteric plans that have motivated America’s leaders.
David Ovason has shown how the astrological orientation of Washington, DC, marks a complex pattern involving Jupiter, the sun, the moon, Sirius and the constellation of Virgo. He shows that a great triangle of streets with Pennsylvania Avenue as the hypotenuse was intended by Washington and Latrobe to mirror the constellation of Virgo. He shows, further, that in a spectacular light display to rival the greatest achievements of the Egyptians, Washington, DC, is laid out so that on 3 August every year the sun streams down Pennsylvania Avenue and strikes the pyramidion on the top of the Post Office tower.
It requires a whole book — David’s book — to give a full account. What is important to this history, and helps us to begin to pull its main themes together, is that Washington, DC was laid out to welcome Isis, the goddess associated with Virgo.
Washington, then, built his city under the sign of Virgo, inviting the Mother Goddess to participate in the destiny of the United States.
We’ve seen that secret techniques for achieving altered states are taught inside secret societies. Different grades of initiation that lead to different levels of altered state. Higher levels may grant the gift of prophecy. Great initiates have such an all-embracing knowledge of the higher spirits and their plans for humanity that they are able to work consciously towards helping the fulfilment of those plans.
Initiates from different esoteric traditions and d
ifferent parts of the world had been predicting the dawn of a new age. Joachim, Dee and Paracelsus prophesied the return of Elijah, working behind the scenes of history to help humankind become strong enough to face the trials that it would have to face. By inviting the Mother Goddess to participate in the destiny of the United States, Washington was also looking forward to a new age, a new dispensation. The United States would dominate the world — if Washington’s great prayers in stone were answered and the ancient prophecies came true.
Abbot Trithemius, influenced by Joachim and influencing in his turn both Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, had predicted that the epoch of Gabriel, the Archangel of the Moon, would be succeeded by the epoch of Michael, Archangel of the Sun. He predicted that this great event would take place in 1881.
Cleopatra’s Needle shortly before its transportation to London.
We saw in Chapter 3 how St Michael had fought the good fight against the forces of evil, leading the hosts of the good angels. The Freemasons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries foresaw that St Michael, Archangel of the Sun, would come again.
Michael was coming to fight the forces of corrupted angels and demons that were predicted to assault the earth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.