by Mark Booth
The books of Albert Pike and A.E. Waite on Freemasonry fall into the baggy Victorian monster category. Together with Manly Hall these men are established as the great writers on the Freemasonic mysteries, and I have used their Morals and Dogma, History of Freemasonry and Secret Teachings of All Ages, as well as The Temple Legend by Rudolf Steiner. I’d like to mention in the same breath, The Secret Zodiacs of Washington DC by David Ovason and The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro by Ian McCalman. I’d also like to credit the independent-minded research of Robert Lomas, who has co-written with Christopher Knight several bestselling books on the origins of Freemasonry — including The Hiram Key, The Second Messiah and Uriel’s Machine. Like another bestselling writer in the alternative history field, Robert Bauval, Lomas is an engineer, and so able to see things that more theoretically-minded writers have missed. Something I’ve tried to insist on in my own book is that the fact that esoteric teachings have useful, practical application makes them much more likely to be true. A.E. Waite’s The Hidden Church of the Holy Grail is the best account of the various sources of the Grail legend.
The great figure in esoteric Egyptology is Schwaller de Lubicz. He represents a major impulse to understand the consciousness of the ancient world. I have taken insights from The Temple of Man, Sacred Science and The Egyptian Miracle. I have also had the pleasure of sailing up the Nile to visit the major Egyptian sites with many of the most popular modern writers in the field, including Robert Bauval, Graham Hancock, Robert Temple and Colin Wilson. On one occasion I found myself exploring a secret passageway behind the altar of one of the great temples of Egypt in the company of Michael Baigent. Of particular relevance to this work is Bauval’s latest book, The Egypt Code, referenced in the text. There, I believe, he finally cracks the numerical, astronomical code behind Egyptian architecture. Robert Temple is someone who can certainly access supernatural levels of intelligence. The Sirius Mystery, The Crytsal Sun and Netherworld are authoritative texts on astronomical symbolism in myth and initiation lore. See also The Mysteries by Ita Wegman, Mystery Knowldege and Mystery Centres by Rudolf Steiner, In the Dark Places of Wisdom by Peter Kingsley. I first read Colin Wilson’s The Outsider at the right age — 17 years old — and was introduced to Rilke and Sartre. Later my philosophy tutor — sometimes talked of as the cleverest don in Oxford — dismissed Sartre’s work as not being real philosophy, and I’ve no doubt he’s say the same of Wilson. But I see Wilson as an intellectual in the highest sense, in that he struggles to understand the great questions of life and death and what it means to be alive now with complete intellectual honesty and remarkable intellectual energy. His intellectual heirs in the next generation were Michael Baigent and Graham Hancock. Baigent co-wrote with Henry Lincoln and Richard Leigh The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail the book that created the cultural climate into which any book on the subject of the secret societies must emerge. I explain in my text where I believe it is wrong, giving a materialistic interpretation of a genuine but more spiritual tradition regarding the relationship between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. Like Baigent and Leigh, Hancock is adept at using the techniques of suspense fiction to pull readers through quite difficult ideas. His books, particularly Fingerprints of the Gods, have begun to shift the paradigm, to convince a mass readership that they should question the version of history handed down to them by their elders and betters. His latest book, Supernatural, takes extraordinary intellectual risks, but is written with all the rigour you would expect from a man who was formerly one of Britain’s top financial journalists.
The archeologist David Rohl would perhaps slightly distance himself from some of those I have just mentioned, as he is an academic as well as the bestselling writer of A Test of Time, Legend: the Genesis of Civilization and The Lost Testament. His arguments on dating, particularly as they relate to the area where Egyptian archeology matches biblical texts, will, I believe, come to be accepted by his elders in the academic establishment over the next ten years.
Something that has struck me during the writing of this book is just how many academics working in their separate fields are coming up with results which are anomalous as regards the ruling paradigm, both in terms of the materialistic hegemony and the conventional view of history. One of the things I’ve tried to do in this book is to bring together many different groups of anomalies to create a complete, anomalous world-view. Some of the senior academics mentioned in this book I know personally, but most I do not, and I have no way of knowing if they have, or had any private interest in the esoteric. The important point is this: no esoteric allegiances are evident in their texts, but their books bolster the esoteric world-view: The Origin of Consciousness in the breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, The Wandering Scholars by Helen Waddell, Les Troubadors et le Sentiment Romanesque by Robert Briffault, The Art of Memory, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances Yates, Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human and Where Shall Wisdom be Found? by Harold Bloom, Why Mrs Blake Cried by Marsha Keith Suchard, Isaac Newton, the Man by John Maynard Keynes, Name in the Window by Margaret Demorest (on John Donne), The School of Night by M.C. Cranbrook, Hamlet’s Mill by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin, Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas, Church And Gnosis by F.C. Burkitt, Emperor of the Earth by Czeslaw Milosz, The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism by Octavio Paz, John Amos Comenius by S.S. Laurie, Meditations on Hunting by Jose Ortega y Gasset.
Other key sources include:
The Book of the Master by W. Marsham Adams
The Golde Asse of Lucius Apuleius translated by William Adlington
Love and Sexuality by Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov
Francis of Assissi: Canticle of the Creatures by Paul M Allen and Joan de Ris Allen
Through the Eyes of the Masters by David Anrias
The Apocryphal New Testament edited by Wake and Lardner
SSOTBME an Essay on Magic by Anon
Myth, Nature and Individual by Frank Baker
Les Diaboliques by Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly
History in English Words by Owen Barfield
Dark Knights of the Solar Cross by Geoffrey Basil Smith
The Esoteric Path by Luc Benoist
A Rumour of Angels by Peter L Berger *
A Pictorial History of Magic and the Supernatural by Maurice Bessy
The Undergrowth of History by Robert Birley
Radiant Matter Decay and Consecration by Georg Blattmann
The Inner Group Teachings by H.P. Blavatsky
Studies in Occultism by H.P. Blavatsky
A Universal History of Infamy by Jorge Luis Borges
Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair by John Bossy
Letters from an Occultist by Marcus Bottomley
The Occult History of the World Vol 1 by J. H. Brennan
Nadja by André Breton
Egypt Under the Pharaohs by Heinrich Brugsch-Bey
Hermit in the Himalayas by Paul Brunton
A Search for Secret India by Paul Brunton
Egyptian Magic and Oriris and the Egyptian Resurrection by E.A. Wallis Budge
Legends of Charlemagne by Thomas Bulfinch
Studies in Comparative Religion by Titus Burckhardt
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino*
Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
Rediscovering Gandhi by Yogesh Chadha
Life Before Birth, Life on Earth, Life After Death by Paul E. Chu
The True Story of the Rosicrucians by Tobias Churton
The Dream of Scipio by Cicero, translated by Percy Bullock
On the Nature of the Gods by Cicero, translated by C.M. Ross
The New Gods by E.M. Cioran
Europe’s Inner Demons by Norman Cohn
The Theory of the Celestial Influence by Rodney Collin
Ka by Roberto Calasso
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
by Roberto Colasso*
A Road to the Spirit by Paul Coroze
The Mysteries of Mithras by Franz Cumont
The Afterlife in Roman Paganism by Franz Cumont
Valis by Philip K. Dick
The Revelation of Evolutionary Events by Evelynn B. Debusschere
Mystical Theology and Celestial Hierarchy by Dionysius the Aropagite, translated by the editors of the Shrine of Wisdom
Atlantis: the Antediluvian World by Ignatius Donnelly
The Erotic world of Faery by Maureen Duffy
Les Magiciens de Dieu by François Ribadeau Dumas
Chronicles volume One by Bob Dylan*
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The Book of Enoch edited by R.H. Charles
The Sacred Magician by Georges Chevalier
Life’s Hidden Secrets by Edward G. Collinge
Conversations with Goethe by Eckermann*
A New Chronology of the Gospels by Ormond Edwards
Zodiacs Old and New by Cyril Fagan
On Life after Death by Gustav Theodor Fechner
Ecstasies by Carlo Ginzburg
Once upon a fairy tale by Norbert Glas
Snow-White put right by Norbert Glas
Magic and Divination by Rupert Gleadow
Maxims and Reflections by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Hara: the vital centre of man by Karlfried Graf Dürckheim
The Greek Myths by Robert Graves
M.R. James’ Book of the Supernatural by Peter Haining
Cabalistic keys to the Lord’s Prayer by Manly P. Hall
Sages and Seers by Manly P. Hall
The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall
The Roots of Witchcraft by Michael Harrison
The Communion Service and the Ancient Mysteries by Alfred Heidenreich The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception by Max Heindel
The Hermetica in the edition edited and translated by Walter Scott
The Kingdom of Faerie by Geoffrey Hodson
The Kingdom of the Gods by Geoffrey Hodson
Myth and Ritual by Samuel H. Hooke
Vicious circles and infinity by Patrick Hughes and George Brecht
The Way of the Sacred by Frances Huxley
La Bas by J.K. Huymans
Vernal Blooms by W.Q. Judge
Eshtetes et Magiciens by Philippe Jullian
The Teachings of Zoroaster by S.A. Kapadia
The Rebirth of Magic by Francis King and Isabel Sutherland
Egyptian Mysteries New Light on Ancient Knowledge by Lucy Lamy
Transcendental Magic by Eliphas Levi
The Invisible College by Robert Lomas
The Book of the Lover and the Beloved by Ramon Lull
Lynch on Lynch, edited by Chris Rodley
An Astrological Key to Biblical Symbolism by Ellen Conroy McCaffrey
Reincarnation in Christianity by Geddes MacGregor
The Great Secret by Maurice Maeterlinck
Experiment in Depth by P.W. Martin
The Western Way by Caitlin and John Matthews
Simon Magus by G.R.S. Mead
The Secret of the West by Dimitri Merezhkovsky
The Ascent of Man by Eleanor Merry
Studies in Symbolism by Marguerite Mertens-Stienon
Ancient Christian Magic by Meyer and Smith
Outline of Metaphysics by L. Furze Morrish
Rudolf Steiner’s Vision of Love by Bernard Nesfield-Cookson
The Mark by Maurice Nicoll
The New Man by Maurice Nicoll
Simple explanation of work ideas by Maurice Nicoll
The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto
The Secrets of Nostradamus by David Ovason*
Metamorphoses by Ovid translated by David Raeburn
Gurdjieff by Louis Pauwels
Les Sociétés Secretes by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier
Select works of Plotinus edited by G.R.S Mead
The Double Flame: Essays on Love and Eroticism by Octavio Paz
The Cycle of the Seasons and Seven Liberal Arts by Sergei O. Prokofieff
Prophecy of the Russian Epic by Sergei O. Prokofieff
The Golden Verses of Pythagoras and Other Pythagoran Fragments translated by Florence M. Firth
The Tarot of the Bohemians by Papus
King Arthur: the true story by Graham Philips and Martin Keatman
Freemasonry by Alexander Piatigorsky
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais, translated by J.M. Cohen
Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Paul Reps
Letters to a young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke*
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke
The Followers of Horus by David Rohl
Dionysius the Areopagite by C.E.Rolt
Pan and the Nightmare by Heinrich Roscher and James Hillman*
Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age by Richard Rudgley
The Philosophy of Magic by Eusebe Salverte
The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria by W. Scott-Elliot
Studies in comparative religion by Frithjof Schuon
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
Annotations of the sacred writings of the Hindus by Edward Sellon
Lights Out For The Territory by Iain Sinclair
The Sufis by Idries Shah
Esoteric Buddhism by A.P. Sinnett
Man, creator of forms by V. Wallace Slater
Jesus the Magician by Morton Smith
The Occult Causes of the Present War by Lewis Spence
Egypt, myths and legends by Lewis Spence
Epiphany by Owen St. Victor
The Present Age by W.J. Stein
The principle of reincarnation by W.J. Stein
Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky by George Steiner
Atlantis and Lemuria by Rudolf Steiner
The Book with Fourteen Seals by Rudolf Steiner
The Concepts of Original Sin and Grace by Rudolf Steiner
The Dead Are With Us by Rudolf Steiner
Deeper Secrets of Human History in the Light of the Gospel of St Matthew by Rudolf Steiner
Egyptian myths and mysteries by Rudolf Steiner
The Evolution of Consciousness, and The Sun Initiation of the Druid Priest and his Moon-Science by Rudolf Steiner
From Symptom to Reality in Modern History by Rudolf Steiner
Inner Impulses of Evolution by Rudolf Steiner
The Karma of Untruthfulness vols I and II by Rudolf Steiner
Karmic relationships Vols I and II by Rudolf Steiner
Life Between Death and Rebirth by Rudolf Steiner
Manifestations of Karma by Rudolph Steiner
Occult History by Rudolf Steiner
The occult movement in the nineteenth century by Rudolf Steiner*
The Occult Significance of Blood by Rudolf Steiner
The Origins of Natural Science by Rudolf Steiner
Reincarnation and Karma by Rudolf Steiner
Results of spiritual investigation by Rudolf Steiner
The Temple Legend by Rudolf Steiner
Three Streams in Human Evolution by Rudolf Steiner
Verses and Meditations by Rudolph Steiner
Wonders of the World by Rudolf Steiner
The World of the Desert Fathers by Columba Stewart
Witchcraft and Black Magic by Montague Summers
Conjugal Love by Emanuel Swedenborg
Heaven and Hell by Emanuel Swedenborg
Conversations with Eternity by Robert Temple*
He Who Saw Everything — a translation of the Gilgamesh epic by Robert Temple
Mysteries and secrets of magic by C.J.S. Thompson
The Elizabethan World Picture by E.M.W Tillyard
Tracks in the Snow — studies in English science and art by Ruthven Todd
The Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno
Primitive Man by Cesar de Vesme
Re
incarnation by Guenther Wachsmuth
Raymund Lully, Illuminated Doctor, Alchemist and Christian Mystic by A.E. Waite
Gnosticism by Benjamin Walker
Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon by Peter Washington
Tao, the Watercourse Way by Alan Watts
Secret Societies and Subversive Movements by Nesta Webster
The Serpent in the Sky by John Anthony West
The Secret of the Golden Flower by Richard Wilhelm
Witchcraft by Charles Williams
The Laughing Philosopher: a life of Rabelais by M.P. Willocks
Are These the Words of Jesus? by Ian Wilson
Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda*
Mysticism sacred and profane by R.C. Zaehner
This book is the result of some twenty years of reading. Often I’ve read a book which has yielded only a sentence in my own. So the above is a selective biography. I should perhaps declare a small interest here. In the case of some of these books, I have not only read them, I have commissioned and published them too. I had originally intended that the notes would be almost as long as the text, but then the text is twice as long as intended. Perhaps it’s for the best. One more tiny, wafer-thin bit of information and this book might have exploded like Mr Creosote in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life.
It’s a peril of writing a book so wide-ranging that even as you’re going to press, new books are published which you need to read and take into account. I’d just like to mention Philip Ball’s brilliant The Devil’s Doctor, a biography of Paracelsus and The Occult Tradition by David S. Katz. Both these books show great ‘negative capability’ when it comes to the question of whether or not occult phenomena are real. Barry Strauss’s recent book on The Trojan War bolsters the idea that it was a real historical event.
I’ve put an asterisk by the books — not the obvious ones, not The Brothers Karamazov, for example — that I recommend as giving the reader a vertiginous sense of plunging into whole new worlds of thought. I’ve chosen books that are easy to read — and also, I imagine, relatively easy to find.
Discography: De Occulta Philosophia, J.S. Bach is performed by Emma Kirkby and Carlos Mena.
Beethoven spoke of the Appassionata as his most esoteric work, but for me it is his last piano sonata, no. 31 in A flat major opus 110, in the course of which, suddenly he jumps forward to the music of a hundred years later the prophesied jazz.