by Mark Booth
Picasso often used esoteric themes in his work. Sometimes he painted himself as the Harlequin. This figure is associated with Hermes and the Underworld, particularly in his native Barcelona, where Harlequin’s victory over death is re-enacted annually in street carnivals. His friend Apollinaire sometimes referred to him as ‘Harlequin Trismegistus’. At other times he portrayed himself in terms of an image from the Tarot, suspended between the material world and the spirit worlds.
In an analysis of a 1934 drawing of a Spanish bullfight, a long-overlooked work, Mark Harris highlights the theme of Parsifal. His essay is an inspiring example of the way that esoteric thought can illuminate dimensions closed to conventional criticism. In his youth Picasso had been a founder member of a group called Valhalla, formed to study the mystical aspects of Wagner. The drawing depicts the scene in Wagner’s opera when the black magician hurls the spear of Longinus at Parsifal, but, because Parsifal is now initiated, it only hovers over his head.
Georges Bataille researched Mithraism, and in 1901 Picasso made a series of paintings depicting women wearing a Mithraic cap, a traditional symbol of initiation. The 1934 drawing, Harris convincingly shows, is a portrayal of an underworld initiation. Like Dante and Dostoyevsky before him, he shows that the hell that the candidate must traverse begins with the hell of his own desires. Hell lies the other side of the grave but this life is hellish, too — and hellish according to the temper of the times.
This drawing is a depiction of one of Picasso’s grand themes. Our world is being shattered, fragmented by an eruption of evil, subterranean forces. The initiatic artist, Picasso, can remake the world, can be a fertility god reborn, but he will do it not in terms of the conventional canons of beauty. He will recombine the discarded, the shattered, the ugly, in beautiful new ways.
The abstract and conceptual painter Yves Klein discovered esoteric thought when he chanced upon a book by the modern proponent of Rosicrucian philosophy Max Heindel, who had been initiated by Rudolf Steiner but broke away to set up his own Rosicrucian movement. Looking forward to the transfiguration of matter, Klein intended his art to inaugurate a new Age of Space, depicted in canvasses of ultramarine unbroken by line or form. In his new age human spirit free of the restrictions of matter and form would levitate and float.
THE GREAT WRITERS OF THE TWENTIETH century were deeply immersed in esoteric thought, too. Inspired by rumours about William Blake and his sexual religion, W.B. Yeats and his young wife, Georgie, explored first the direct link between sexual and spiritual union to be found in The Zohar, then Tantric yoga. Yeats even had a vasectomy in the hope that stemming the flow of semen would help build up the energies needed for a visionary trance. Not only did their experiments produce more than four thousand pages of spirit-inspired automatic writing, but Yeats remained sexually rejuvenated into old age and wrote some of his most magnificent poetry then. He described ‘the love that moves the Sun’. Yeats was also a member of both the Order of the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical society, studied the Hermetica, wrote openly about magic and an introduction to a popular edition of the Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali. Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake show his familiarity with Hindu and Hermetic doctrine, including direct quotes from Swedenborg, Madame Blavatsky and Eliphas Levi. The poetry of T.S. Eliot also uses occult references in an eclectic way. Eliot attended Theosophist meetings and the breakaway Quest group attended by Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Gershem Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism. But perhaps the formative influence on his poetic sensibility was the Sufi-inspired philosophy of Ouspensky, whose lectures he also attended. In fact the famous first three lines of perhaps the most influential poem in English in the twentieth century, Four Quartets — on time past and time future contained in time present — are a paraphrase of the philosophy of Ouspensky.
Perhaps the most occult writer of the twentieth century and the one who best lived up to Rimbaud’s dictum about becoming a medium was Fernando Pessoa. He wrote of holding inside himself all the dreams of the world and wanting to experience the whole of the universe — its reality — inside himself. He awaited the return of the Hidden One, who has himself been waiting since the beginning of time. Meanwhile Pessoa emptied himself like a medium, allowing himself to be taken over by a series of personae, under whose names he wrote different series of poems with very different voices. ‘I am the cleverness in the dice’, says an ancient Taoist text. ‘I am the active in the deeds’, says the Gnostic Hymn of the Pearl. Pessoa recognized these sentiments. To move things in space and time, to make the world better, it is not enough to push as hard as we can. We need the spirits to work through us. We need some of that spirit of cleverness.
In the literature of the late twentieth century Borges, Calvino, Salinger and Singer also deal openly with esoteric themes. It is as if they work in accord with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s assertion that all genuine creation makes conscious something from the esoteric realm that has not been made conscious before. Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy has been extremely influential, not only on Kandinsky, Marc and Beuys, but also on William Golding and Doris Lessing, both of whom lived in Anthroposophical communities.
It is a mark of the strange way that esoteric influences spread that two such different writers as C.S. Lewis and Saul Bellow were both instructed in esoteric philosophy by the same spiritual master, the Anthroposophist Owen Barfield.
Will it always be true to say that the greatest writers of the day are interested in esoteric ideas? We can certainly see the influence of esotericism on both Bellow and John Updike, the two leading novelists writing in English at the turn of the century. Some of Bellow’s correspondence with Barfield has been published. Updike has written an overtly occult novel in The Witches of Eastwick, but perhaps more telling is this passage from his latest novel, Villages: ‘Sex is a programmed delirium that rolls back death with death’s own substance; it is the black space between the stars given sweet substance in our veins and crevice. The parts of ourselves conventional decency calls shameful are exalted. We are told that we shine, that we are exalted…’
This passage reaches right to the heart of the issue that lies between the exoteric world view and its opposite. According to esoteric thinkers, life in a mechanized, industrialized, digitalized environment has a deadening effect on our mental processes. The concrete, the plastic, the metal, the electrical impulses bouncing off the screen become internalized, resulting in a sterile wasteland that does not regenerate itself.
A conscious shift in consciousness is needed to open ourselves up again to the free-flowing, revivifying influence of the spirit worlds.
IN 1789 THE ARMIES OF ANGELS LED BY St Michael won a victory in heaven. In order for this victory to be decisive, though, it would have to be fought again on earth.
On 28 June 1914 Rasputin was overtaken by the plot to kill him. On the very same day Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated.
All hell let loose.
Much has been written about the evil occult influences on Germany in the early twentieth century. Less well known is the story of the occult influences in Russia at the time of the Revolution. We have already touched on St Martin, Papus and Rasputin. What is very little known is the occult influence behind their enemies, the revolutionary communists.
As I have already suggested, Marxism can be seen as a materialistic reframing of the fraternal ideals of Freemasonry. The revolutionary cell structure instigated by Lenin and Trotsky was closely modelled on the working methods of Weishaupt. Marx, Engels and Trotsky were Freemasons. Lenin was a Freemason of the 31st degree, a member of several lodges including the lodge of the Nine Sisters, the most important lodge to have been infiltrated by the followers and nihilistic philosophy of the Illuminati. Lenin and Trotsky waged war on God.
Like Augustus, like James I, Hitler persecuted occultists because he believed in them, not because he didn’t. One of the most learned occultists of the day, Franz Bardon was arrested with one of his disciples by the SS. There is a st
ory that while they were being beaten, the disciple lost control and shouted out a cabalistic formula that froze his torturers. When the spell was broken, the disciple was shot. Bardon worked professionally as a stage magician. The idea of the stage magician who also turns out to be a real occultist was portrayed by Thomas Mann in his story Mario and the Magician and here in the film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.
But there is a deeper mystery here. How was a man like Lenin able to bend millions of people to his will? This seems to go beyond the sinister strategies of a Weishaupt.
The US military research into occult ways of gaining advantage over the Soviet Union has been well documented. Key personnel have given testimony which seems authentic, though the results seem to have been pretty limited.
What is only now beginning to emerge is the much more extreme — and successful — use of the occult by government agencies of the old Soviet Union. Some reluctant initiates have survived to speak of ‘the red initiation’, of the training to become secret agents which took place in former monasteries. It seems that occult techniques were employed to strengthen the will to a supernatural degree by exploiting the psychic energies of torture victims and sacrificial victims, too. Only someone who had killed in the cause could become a red initiate.
Of course we have seen this form of black magic before — in the pyramid culture of South America. In the secret history Lenin is a reincarnation of a high priest, born again in order to oppose the second coming of the Sun god, and when Trotsky was on the run from his old comrades, hiding in Mexico City, he was returning home.
The image of Lenin, the mummified incarnation of an initiate of the pyramids is both resonant and a little absurd to modern sensibility. Ironically, perhaps, this image seems to encapsulate the very spirit of Modernism, mixing the iconic with the offbeat, of the cheap, banal even tackily up to date with ancient, occult wisdom.
THERE HAS BEEN SOME DEBATE IN occult circles as to how much esoteric wisdom should be made public. How much is useful in the war against materialism — and how much is dangerous?
We return to India, where post-Atlantean history began.
As we approach the end of this history, we are in a good position to see how far humanity has evolved from the communally minded creature of earlier times who had little awareness of the world around him and little sense of an interior life. In Gandhi we see individual free thought, free will and free love. Here is someone who has so expanded his sense of self that he is able to make turning points in his own personal story, his own interior narrative, into turning points in world history.
Gandhi stands as a great embodiment of the new form of consciousness that the secret societies have been working throughout history to help evolve.
It is perhaps a small irony, as well as being a mark of the global reach of the secret societies, that coming from the land of the Rishis, Gandhi first learned esoteric ideas from the Russian/English/Egyptian/American hybrid Theosophy, as taught by Madame Blavatsky.
As a young man Gandhi described himself as ‘in love’ with the British Empire. Being naturally good-hearted he saw the best in the upright and fair-playing Britons who administered his native country as a colony.
But as he matured, he began to see a deeper reality. Beneath the much-vaunted fair play, he saw, for example, the unfairness of the tax burden from abroad and above all India’s lack of freedom to determine her own destiny.
Influenced in part by the philosophy of disobedience of the American Transcendentalist Henry Thoreau and by the art and social critic John Ruskin, Gandhi set about turning the world upside down and inside out.
In 1906, at the age of thirty-six, Gandhi renounced sex with his wife. His spiritual discipline involved daily work on a hand-spun spinning wheel, partly to encourage a method of weaving cloth that would provide employment for the poor, but also because he believed that as he worked on the cloth he was also working on his own vegetable body. If he could master his body in its different dimensions, he could develop what he called soul force.
He believed that the cosmos is governed by truth and by the laws of truth and that, by acting in accordance with these laws, an individual would gain Satyagraha, the force of truth and love.
For example, if you trust your opponent without fail, you will eventually influence him to act in a trustworthy way — both by means of a psychological influence, but also, crucially, by means of a supernatural one. Similarly, if attacked, you should try to be free from all thoughts of anger and hatred against your assailant. Follow this philosophy, Gandhi taught, and ‘you will be free of fear of kings, people, robbers, tigers, even death’.
In the upside down thinking typical of the secret societies, Gandhi blamed Indians not Britons for the occupation of India, pointing out that 100,000 Britons would not be able to control three hundred million Indians unless they went along with it. Indian cotton was being exported to Britain, to the textile mills of Lancashire, then sold back to India at a profit to Britain and a loss to India. Seated at his spinning wheel, he said, ‘It’s my certain conviction that with every thread I draw, I am spinning the destiny of India.’
On 26 January 1929 he asked people to observe Independence Day in towns and villages throughout India. He asked for the boycotting of law courts, elections and schools. He also chose to challenge the British government’s monopoly on salt manufacture, which meant that Indians had to pay the British for salt, even though it lay in open abundance around their own coast. In March 1930 the sixty-year-old Gandhi set off, staff in hand, on a twenty-four-day walk to the sea. Thousands joined him. Finally he waded into the sea for ritual purification, then leaned down and scooped up a small handful of salt. The crowd acclaimed him ‘Deliverer!’
Gandhi’s soul power was such that when he met armed soldiers, they would lower their weapons. Hindus and Muslims forgave each other in his presence.
The imprisonment of Gandhi and his hunger strikes sapped the moral will of the British government, leading to independence for India in 1947. The largest empire the world had ever seen melted away with an unprecedented lack of bloodshed.
In this history we have followed the lives of great leaders such as Alexander the Great and Napoleon. In a sense Gandhi was greater than any of them. Soul force, he believed, could deflect the greatest military power, because the intention behind an action could have greater and more widespread effects than the action itself.
Gandhi was a devout Hindu but he lived according to the deeper laws as laid out in the Sermon on the Mount. Talking to hostile Hindu and Muslim factions, he argued that someone whose spirit of self-sacrifice did not go beyond his own community eventually became selfish and made his community selfish. The spirit of self-sacrifice, he said, should embrace the whole world.
Like St Francis, he loved the whole world.
28. WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY, FRIDAY
The Anti-Christ • Re-entering the Ancient Wood • The Maitreya Buddha • The Opening of the Seven Seals • The New Jerusalem
IT IS ONLY IN THIS OBSCURE SUBURB of history, where nothing miraculous ever seems to happen and no great geniuses live, this age when the standards of education of the educated classes is in steep decline — it is only in this time and place that people have held matter-before-mind beliefs. In all other places, at all other times, people believed the contrary. They would have found it just about impossible to imagine how anyone could believe what we do.
According to the secret history this change has been caused by a change in consciousness. In the esoteric account consciousness changes much more quickly and in a much more radical way than in the conventional account. I hope this book has gone some way to showing that if people believed in a mind-before-matter philosophy a few generations ago, it was not because they’d weighed up the arguments on both sides and plumped for idealism. It was because they experienced the world in an idealistic way.
Consider, finally, how your consciousness is different from your parents’ consciousness. Yours is probably more lib
eral, more sympathetic, more able to appreciate the point of view of other races, classes, gender, sexual tastes and so on. In some ways you are probably more aware of yourself. Because Freud’s ideas have percolated down so thoroughly, you are less likely to remain unaware of underlying sexual motivations for your impulses. Or of commercial motivations — because of Marx. You are probably less repressed, less fearful of authority, more questioning and have less strong family ties. You probably tell lies more readily, have weaker powers of concentration and less determination to stick at boring tasks for the sake of a long-term goal. Although popular culture pays much lip service to romantic love, you, along with most people, probably don’t believe in it wholeheartedly any more. Few would want or expect to stay with the same sexual partner for a lifetime. In fact, as Rilke suggested in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, part of you wants to run from the responsibility that being loved brings.
The Antichrist by Luca Signorelli, a detail from the San Brizio Chapel in Orvieto Cathedral. Signorelli worked with Botticelli on the Sistine Chapel and was also, like Leonardo, a member of the studio of Verrocchio, whose own work is replete with esoteric references. Mayan astronomer-priests pinpointed the incarnation of Lucifer to 13 August 3114 BC, tying in closely with Hindu traditions of the dawn of the Dark Age. These same priests predicted a similar turning point in history, the closing of one great cycle and the start of another, on 22 December AD 2012.