The Secret History of the World

by Mark Booth

  Michael’s defeat of these forces — with human help — was to lead to the end of the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age of the Hindus, which had begun in 3102 BC with the murder of Krishna. The Yugas are astronomically determined, there being eight divisions of the Great Year.

  In fact the initiate astrologers of the Freemasons realized that Trithemius had made a small mistake in his astronomical/astrological calculations and that the Michaelic age was due to begin in 1878. All around the world, as this year approached, Freemasons were planning to erect monuments. Above all they planned to erect obelisks.

  The Egyptians saw the obelisk as a sacred structure on which the Phoenix would alight to mark the end of one civilization and the beginning of another. An obelisk is a symbol of the birth of a new age. Like a gigantic lightning conductor, it draws down the spiritual influence of the sun.

  Constantine the Great had converted a temple in Alexandria into a church, reconsecrating the obelisks sacred to Thoth or Hermes that stood outside it to the Archangel Michael. In 1877 Freemasons on both sides of the Atlantic worked to transport these two obelisks by sea, one to London where it was to be raised on the Victoria Embankment overlooking the Thames — and popularly known as Cleopatra’s Needle. There it was to be raised on 13 September 1878 when the sun was at its zenith. Its twin obelisk was raised in New York’s Central Park, organized by a group of Freemasons led by members of the Vanderbilt family.

  Drawing of a bust of Albert Pike, Grand Master and initiate. The Masonic star with thirty-three rays is prominently displayed on public monuments at the centre of cities all round the world. We have found the number thirty-three encoded in the works of Bacon, Shakespeare and in the Rosicrucian Manifestoes. It is encoded on the tombs of Shakespeare and Fludd, translator of the Authorized Version of the Bible. Jesus Christ lived thirty-three years. The significance of this number is one of the oldest and most closely guarded secrets of esoteric philosophy. Thirty-three is the rhythm of the vegetative realm of the cosmos, the dimension that controls the interactions between the spirit worlds and the material world. The closest to an explicit reference to it perhaps comes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the murdered Caesar’s spirit is described exiting by his thirty-three wounds. The secret of thirty-three refers to the number of gateways by which the human spirit may travel between the material world and the spirit worlds. Practical knowledge of these pathways is known only to initiates of the highest level, because it enables them to slip unobtrusively in and out of the material realm.

  Michael was, as we have seen, the leader of the heavenly hosts, and the transition from one order to another is always marked by battles. And because what happens on earth is always an echo of what has happened earlier in the spirit worlds, a great war would be fought in the heavens before being fought down here on the earthly plane. As Freemasons erected an obelisk in Central Park, New York, they were invoking St Michael and all his angels, asking for their help as they sought to establish the leadership of the United States among the nations in the war-torn age that would soon be dawning.

  IT MAY ALREADY HAVE OCCURRED TO some readers that obelisks are placed with similar prominence in ecclesiastical contexts, for example the obelisk erected by the initiate artist Gianlorenzo Bernini in the square in front of St Peter’s in Rome.

  The upper echelons of the Church hierarchy wish to keep its flock from conscious knowledge of the astral roots of their religion.

  But these monuments work on different levels. They attract the disembodied beings of spiritual hierarchies. They work on people at levels below the conscious one, levels where the great disembodied beings weave in and out of their mental space. Initiates inside and outside the Church create great works of art and architecture to help condition humanity for its future evolution.

  They also carry enough clues for those who are so minded as to be able to decode them.

  25. THE MYSTICAL-SEXUAL REVOLUTION

  Cardinal Richelieu • Cagliostro • The Secret Identity of the Comte de St Germain • Swedenborg, Blake and the Sexual Roots of Romanticism

  …HOWEVER, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE eighteenth century the rise to supremacy of the United States was only a mystical vision. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries France became the most powerful and influential nation. Extremes of good and evil, rapier and sharp tongue, decided the fate of the world in the corridors of the Louvre, then Versailles.

  It is perhaps significant that, though Descartes spent many years researching the Rosicrucians, even journeying to Germany to try to track them down, he never succeeded. A prey to visions, he was evidently not, like Newton, adept at alchemical techniques that might give repeated, perhaps even controlled, access to the spirit worlds.

  In collaboration with the mathematician and theologian Marin Mersenne, whose patron was Richelieu, Descartes developed a rationalist philosophy, a closed system of reasoning without the necessity of reference to the realm of the senses.

  The philosophy of Descartes and Mersenne helped evolve a new form of cynicism. It enabled a succession of French diplomats and politicians to run rings round their opposite numbers. They might wear similar, though rather more fashionable clothes than the ones worn by their contemporaries in Germany, Italy, Holland, Spain or England, but the difference in consciousness was as drastic as that between the Conquistadors and the Aztecs.

  The French court was the most magnificent in human history, not only in material terms, but in the sophistication of its culture. Beautiful and heartless, it wittily interpreted all human actions as motivated by vanity, according to the maxims of La Rochefoucauld. ‘When we dwell on the good qualities of others, we are expressing esteem for our own finer feelings’ is one of his sly, devastating critiques of human nature. ‘No matter how well we are spoken of,’ he said, ‘we learn nothing we do not already know.’ In the gap left by the departure of sincerity arose a tyranny of taste and style.

  Et in Arcadia Ego by Nicholas Poussin. Poussin’s connection with the Rennes-le-Château mystery has led to much speculation on his esoteric interests. But to look for Rosicrucian interests, as some have done, is to bark up the wrong tree. Poussin’s spiritual mentor was the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, perhaps the greatest scholar of esoterica in the seventeenth century. As the most learned Egyptologist of the day, Kircher was concerned to verify the perennial philosophy and universal secret history encoded in Egyptian texts, the Bible and the classical tradition, represented here by an allusion to an episode in Virgil. What the crouching shepherd is pointing to — on a tomb which existed in Poussin’s time, though it has recently been destroyed — is an inscription that confirms the secret history in this book. Even I was in Arcadia refers to the turning point in history described in Chapter 5, when the idyllic vegetative life of humanity was invaded by animal desire and death. This was the Fall of the Mother Goddess. In esoteric Christianity Mary Magdalene was the incarnation of the goddess, redeemed by her Beloved. As we saw, Mary Magdalene spent the last years of her life in the south of France, according to Church tradition. What Poussin was literally pointing to here, therefore, was the tomb of Mary Magdalene.

  As spirituality was severed from sexuality, libertines like Choderlos de Laclos, author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, said to be a spider at the centre of a vast web of sexual and political intrigue, Crebillon fils, author of the best of the libertine novels, Les Egarements du Coeur et de l’Esprit, Casanova and de Sade became representative men, admired for the complexity and cleverness of their power plays.

  In all sex there is an element of striving. Now this striving became an end itself. Even among the most sensitive and intelligent, sex could be reduced to an exercise of power.

  Following Cardinal Richelieu’s unprincipled machinations to promote national interests in the reign of Louis XIII, Louis XIV aggregated to himself the title of Sun King — but of course there was a dark side. While haute cuisine was devised to keep nobles contented at court, peasants were taxed to the point of starvation and Richelieu massacred
religious dissenters. Later Marie Antoinette would be shielded from sight of the sick, old or poor, and Louis XVI obsessively read and reread an account of the beheading of Charles I, drawing to himself the thing he feared most.

  Rumours of powerful, esoteric secrets echoed round the court. Cardinal Richelieu carried a wand of gold and ivory and enemies feared its magic powers. His mentor Père Joseph, the original eminence grise, taught him spiritual exercises that developed psychic powers. He employed a cabalist called Gaffarel to teach him the secrets of the occult. A man called Du-boy, or Duboys, rumoured to be a descendant of Nicholas Flamel, went to see him carrying an obscurely phrased magical primer. But Du-boy was unable to interpret it for the Cardinal and get him results, and so Du-boy was hanged. It seems Richelieu became desperate to achieve the breakthrough to the other side that he craved, because he employed increasingly extreme methods. Urban Grandier, an alleged devil-worshipper, was being slowly tortured to death at Richelieu’s behest, when he is reported to have warned: ‘You are an able man, do not destroy yourself.’

  Louis XIV’s mistress, Madame de Montespan, caused her young rival to die by means of a Black Mass.

  One of Louis XIV’s doctors, called Lesebren, gave a strange account of what happened to a friend of his who had concocted what he believed to be the elixir of life. He had started to take a few drops every morning at sunrise with a glass of wine. After fourteen days his hair and nails began to fall out, and he lost his nerve. He started giving the potion to an elderly female servant, but she too became frightened and refused to continue. So finally he started an old hen on a course of this medicine, by soaking corn with it. After six days its feathers began to fall out until it became completely naked. Then two weeks later new feathers began to grow brighter and more beautifully coloured than the feathers she had had in her youth, and she began to lay eggs again.

  Amid extremes of cynicism and gullibility, where quacks and frauds were common, genuine initiates developed ways of presenting themselves to the outside world. Esoteric teachers had always known their wisdom looked foolish to the uninitiated. They had always focused on the tricky paradoxical nature of the cosmos. Now initiates began to present themselves in the guise of tricksters and scoundrels.

  A poor boy from the backstreets of Sicily reinvented himself as Count Cagliostro. By a mixture of mesmeric charm, his habit of using as bait Seraphita, his beautiful young wife, and above all his rumoured possession of the philosopher’s stone, he rose to the top of European society.

  To those at the bottom of society he seemed some kind of saint. Healing miracles performed among the poor of Paris, unable to afford a doctor, made him a popular hero, and when, after a short imprisonment, he was released from the Bastille, some eight thousand people came to cheer. When Cagliostro was challenged to a debate in front of his intellectual peers, his opponent Court de Gébelin, a friend of Benjamin Franklin’s and a renowned expert on esoteric philosophy, soon admitted he was up against a man whose erudition far surpassed his own.

  Cagliostro also seems to have had remarkable powers of prophecy. In a famous letter of 20 June 1786 he prophesied that the Bastille would be completely destroyed, and it is said that he even predicted the exact date of this event — 14 July — in graffiti found inscribed on the wall of the prison cell in which he died.

  Anyone with supernatural power is bound to suffer temptation. Perhaps the most charismatic and disconcerting initiate of the twentieth century was G.I. Gurdjieff. He deliberately presented his ideas in an absurd way. He wrote of an organ at the base of the spine that could enable everyone to see everything upside down and inside out, calling it the ‘Kunderbuffer’. In this way he deliberately gave the power of the kundalini serpent, the reserve of unredeemed energy that lies coiled at the base of the spine, and which is central to Tantric practice, a laughable name. Similarly he wrote of gods in giant spaceships and that the surface of the sun is cool. Anyone who dismissed it showed himself unworthy. Anyone who persisted and was able to tune in found that Gurdjieff’s spiritual disciplines worked.

  Since his death it has emerged that he sometimes used his undoubted powers of mind control to prey on vulnerable young women.

  A friend of mine journeyed to India, to visit the renowned teacher, adept and miracle-worker Sai Baba. My friend was travelling with his beautiful young girlfriend. After an exquisite dinner the servants withdrew and Sai Baba took his guests into the library. My friend was perusing a book while his girlfriend talked to Sai Baba. He noticed that he was standing unusually close to her and became anxious when Sai Baba turned the conversation to the subject of the sexual dimension in Hindu myths. Suddenly Sai Baba reached to ring a copper bell engraved with sigils and simultaneously seemed to grab something out of mid-air. He turned his hand palm up to reveal a golden chain with a crucifix on it. He told the girl that this was real magic and held his palm out to her, offering her the object, which seemed to my friend to glow with a dark aura.

  He also noticed that the sigils on the bell were Tantric, and realized that the intention was probably to bewitch his girlfriend with a view to seducing her. He asked where the chain came from.

  ‘It appeared before your very eyes,’ said Sai Baba.

  My friend took the chain from him, to prevent his girlfriend from touching it. Holding it over his palm, he used the art of psychometry to determine its origins. He had a disturbing vision of grave robbers, and realized that this crucifix and chain had been dug up from the grave of a Jesuit missionary.

  He confronted Sai Baba with this and so, by demonstrating his own magical powers, he was able to make him back down.

  Telling me about this many years later, my friend said that since Prospero had broken his wand at the end of The Tempest, initiates had been forbidden to exercise their magical powers, unless in exceptional circumstances like these. There is a law that if a white magician uses his occult power, an equal amount of power is made available to a black magician.

  Is there any other evidence to suggest that magic is still practised today? In a secondhand bookshop in Tunbridge Wells I recently came across a small cache of letters in which an occultist gave out advice on how to use magic spells to achieve their goals. One included introducing menstrual blood secretly into food as a way of awakening a man’s sexual desires. This might seem outlandish, but in 2006 the British government announced its plans to give large grants for the development of ‘biodynamic’ farming. This method, devised by Rudolf Steiner, depends on the correspondences between plants and the spirits of the stars described by Paracelsus and Boehme. Steiner recommends that an infestation of field mice should be dealt with by burying in the field the ashes of a field mouse prepared when Venus is in the sign of Scorpio.

  IF CAGLIOSTRO REMAINS AN ENIGMA, the man he looked up to is an even greater mystery.

  Cagliostro’s own account of meeting the Comte de St Germain at a castle in Germany in 1785 records that he and his wife arrived at 2 a.m, the appointed time. The drawbridge lowered and they crossed to find themselves in a small, darkened room. Suddenly, as if by magic, great doors opened to reveal a vast temple made dazzling by the lights of thousands of candles. In the middle of the temple sat the Comte de St Germain. He was wearing many fabulous diamond rings and on his chest there rested a bejewelled device that seemed to reflect the light of all the candles and beam it on Cagliostro and Seraphita. Sitting either side of St Germain two acolytes held up bowls from which incense arose, and, as Cagliostro entered, a disembodied voice he took to be count’s — though his lips did not seem to move — resonated around the temple.

  ‘Who are you? Where did you come from? What do you want?’

  Of course in at least one sense St Germain knew exactly who Cagliostro was — the visit had been pre-arranged, after all — but here he was asking about his previous incarnations, his daemon, his deeper motives.

  Cagliostro threw himself on the ground in front of St Germain, and after a while said, ‘I come to invoke the God of the Faithful, the
Son of Nature, the Father of Truth. I come to ask one of the fourteen thousand and seven secrets he bears in his bosom. I come to give myself up as his slave, his apostle, his martyr.’

  Clearly Cagliostro thought he recognized St Germain, but who was he?

  There was a clue in the fact that St Germain then initiated Cagliostro into Templar mysteries, taking him on an out of body journey, flying him above a molten sea of bronze to explore the heavenly hierarchies.

  St Germain had appeared in European society quite suddenly in 1710, apparently from Hungary and seemingly about fifty years old. Small and dark skinned, he always wore black clothes and extraordinary diamonds. His most arresting features were his hypnotic eyes. By all accounts he quickly commanded attention in society because of his accomplishments, speaking many languages, playing the violin and painting. And he also seemed to have an extraordinary ability to read minds.

  He was believed to practise secret breathing techniques taught by the Hindu fakirs and, in order to meditate better, he adopted yoga positions unknown in the West at that time. Though he attended banquets, he was never seen eating in front of others and drank only a strange herbal tea he concocted himself.

  But the greatest mystery surrounding the Comte de St Germain was his longevity. Having appeared in public life in 1710, apparently in late middle age, when he met the composer Rameau in Venice, he remained in public life at least as late as 1782 without appearing to age at all. Sightings of him by the great and the good continued as late as 1822.

  It would be tempting to dismiss all this as a romance in the style of Alexander Dumas were it not for the fact that witnesses who left accounts of meeting him over such a long period were of such high standing. As well as Rameau, they included Voltaire, Horace Walpole, Clive of India and Casanova. He was a prominent figure at the court of Louis XV, an intimate of both Madame de Pompadour and the king himself, for whom he took diplomatic missions in Moscow, Constantinople and London. There in 1761 he negotiated an agreement called the Family Compact, which paved the way for the Treaty of Paris, putting an end to the colonial wars between France and Britain. St Germain’s efforts always seemed to be in the cause of peace, and, though he is often lumped in with Cagliostro, he was never caught out in any act of dishonesty. Although nobody knew where his money came from — some said alchemy — he was evidently independently wealthy and by no means a desperate adventurer.