IF WE SEE IN THE ATHENIANS A GIFT FOR free, individual thought, we see in Sparta the development of individual will, competitive edge and admiration, to the point of hero-worship, of strong men. Heroes created the space for the flowering of Greek culture, which in the fifth century BC began to set standards in beauty of form and rigour of intellect that we have aspired to match ever since.
This was the Greece of the great initiates: the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, the poet Pindar and the dramatists Sophocles and Euripides.
The most famous of all the Greek Mystery schools was situated at Eleusis, a hamlet a few miles from Athens. The Roman statesman Cicero, himself an initiate, would say that the Eleusian Mysteries and what flowed from them formed the greatest benefit that Athens gave to the civilized world.
‘ELEUSIS’ COMES FROM ‘ELAUNO’, MEANING ‘I come’, which is to say ‘I come into being’. There is almost nothing left of the sanctuary — just a few scattered stones and a couple of panels from inside have survived — but a contemporary description of it talks of an unmarked exterior wall of grey-blue stone. Inside there were painted statues and friezes of goddesses, sheaves of grain and eight-petalled flowers. One account says there was an aperture in the ceiling of the inner sanctum that provided the only light source.
The Lesser Mysteries were celebrated in the spring. They involved rites of purification and also dramatizations of stories of the gods. A statue of a god crowned with myrtle and carrying a torch was led in procession with singing and dancing. The god was sacrificed and died for three days. When the sacrificed god was represented as being raised from the dead, the assembled hierophants and candidates shouted, ‘Iachos! Iachos! Iachos!’
There was also an overtly sexual element in these celebrations. Psellus, a Byzantine scholar, wrote that Venus was portrayed as rising out of the sea from in between moving representations of female genitalia, and that afterwards the marriage of Persephone and Hades took place. It was recorded by Clement of Alexandria that the rape of Persephone was enacted, and it was also said by Athenagoras that during this bizarre, violent, almost surreal drama, she was portrayed as having a horn on her forehead, perhaps symbolizing the Third Eye.
There were also accounts of ceremonial pouring of milk from a golden vessel in the shape of a breast. On one level this is obviously connected with the worship of the Mother Goddess, but it should alert us to the fact that on a deeper level these ceremonies were concerned with life after death. We know from Pythagoras that the Milky Way was conceived of as a vast river or troop of spirits. The star-like spirits of the dead ascended through the gate of Capricorn and up through the spheres, before descending back into the material world through the gate of Cancer. Pindar said, ‘Happy is he who has seen the Mysteries before being buried beneath the ground, because he knows what happens as life ends.’ Sophocles said, ‘Thrice happy are those who have seen the Mysteries before they die. They will have life after death. Everyone else will only experience suffering.’ Plutarch said that those who die experience for the first time what those who have been initiated have already experienced.
The Greater Mysteries, celebrated on or about the autumn equinox, were preceded by nine days of fasting, after which candidates for initiation were given a potent drink called the kykeon.
Of course extreme hunger can by itself lead to a visionary state, or at least a propensity for hallucinations. After fasting for so long, the candidate drank this mixture of roasted barley, water and poley oil, which can be narcotic if taken in sufficient quantities.
The Mysteries were known to involve people in the most intense experiences, the wildest fears, blackest horrors and raptures. Plutarch wrote of the terror of those about to be initiated, as if they were about to die, and, of course, in a sense they were.
Imagine if you had seen dramatic presentations of terrifying supernatural events in the Lesser Mysteries and now believed these things were going to happen for real, that you were going to take part in a drama in which you would be killed and in some sense really die! The accounts by Proclus suggest candidates were attacked by ‘the rushing forms of troops of earthly demons’. Though it was by this time very difficult for the higher spiritual beings, the gods, to squeeze down into a dense, material realm, it was relatively easy for lesser spirits, such as demons and spirits of the dead. The candidate was to be shamed and punished, tortured by demons. Pausanius in his Description of Greece describes a demon called Euronomos, with blue-black skin like a fly’s, who devoured the flesh of rotting corpses.
Are we to take this as literally true? As mentioned earlier, these initiation ceremonies were part ritual and drama — and part séance. That drugs played a part in conjuring up these demons does not necessarily — from an idealist point of view — mean they were illusory. We should also remember that in rural India perfectly respectable religious ceremonies still take place, the worship of lesser spirits, the Pretas and Bhuts and Pisachas and Gandharvas, ceremonies which we in the West would classify as séances.
The Mystery schools were concerned with granting the candidate an authentic spiritual experience, which in the context of idealistic philosophy means a genuine experience of spirits — first demons and the spirits of the dead, then later the gods.
By the fifth century BC it was, of course, difficult for a god without a material body to affect matter directly, to move a heavy object for example. But the initiate priests could mouth magic words into a cloud of smoke emanating from a sacrificial fire and the face of a god would sometimes appear. Karl von Eckartshausen, the late eighteenth-century theosophist, recorded the most effective fumigations for causing apparitions: hemlock, henbane, saffron, aloe, opium, mandrake, salorum, poppy seed, asafoetida and parsley.
The miraculously lifelike statues for which Greece is famous emerged from the Mystery schools. Their original function was to help bring the gods to earth.
We know from the earlier use of statues in Egypt and Sumeria that it was intended that the gods occupy them, live in them as their physical bodies and make them come alive. If you stood in front of the statue of Artemis in Ephesus, the Mother Earth loomed over you like a great tree. You had a sensation of being absorbed into the vegetable matrix of the cosmos, the great ocean of weaving waves of light, and of being at one with it.
The statues would breath, seem to move. It was said that sometimes they would speak to you.
After various trials the successful candidate was allowed to ascend to the Empyrean realm, a place flooded with light, music and dancing. Dionysus — Bacchus or Iacchos — appeared in a beautiful, radiant vision of light. Aristedes, the orator, recalled: ‘I thought I felt the god draw near and I touched him, I was somewhere between waking and sleeping. My spirit was so light — in a way someone who hasn’t been initiated wouldn’t understand. ’ By this lightness of spirit, he is referring to an out-of-body experience. It also seems clear that the gods sometimes occupied ethereal, vegetable bodies in the Mysteries and so appeared like luminous spectres or phantoms.
So the process of initiation gave direct, existential, undeniable first-hand knowledge that the spirit could live outside the body, and while in this state the candidate became a spirit among spirits, a god among gods. When the new initiate was ‘born again’ into the everyday material world, when he was crowned as an initiate he retained many god-like powers of perception and abilities to influence events.
The experience of initiation was, therefore, a mystical one. However, as we have seen in the case of Pythagoras, practical and even scientific knowledge was shown to be implicit in this experience, too. After initiation the hierophant would elucidate what the new initiate had just experienced, drawing arcane disclosures from a book made of two stone tablets, called the Book of Interpretation. They taught the way the material world and the material, human body had been formed and the way both were directed by the spirit worlds. To help them in their teaching they also used symbols. These included the thyrsus made of a reed, sometimes with seven knots and topped with a pine cone. There were also the ‘toys of Dionysus’ — a golden serpent, a phallus, an egg and a spinning top that made the sound ‘Om’. Cicero would write that when you come to understand them, the occult mysteries have more to do with natural science than with religion.
There was a prophetic element in this teaching, too. The final initiation at Eleusis involved the candidate being shown a plucked green wheat ear, held up in silence.
Of course on one level the Mysteries were agricultural and looked forward to a good harvest. But there was another level to do with the harvesting of souls.
This wheat was the star Spica, the divine seed held in the left hand of the virgin goddess of the constellation of Virgo. I’m talking, of course, about the goddess the Egyptians called Isis. The grain she holds looks forward to the great cosmic ‘seed time’. It will be made into the bread of the Last Supper, symbolizing the vegetable body in Jesus Christ and also the vegetative dimension, or altered state of consciousness, we all must work ourselves into, according to esoteric Christianity, if we are to meet him there.
Again we see that the vegetative dimension of the cosmos is the focus of esoteric thought. In Plato’s philosophy it is the soul, the mediator between the material body and the animal spirit. If we are to leave behind the material world and enter the spirit worlds, this vegetative dimension must be the subject of our Work.
THERE ARE OTHER WAYS THAT SPIRITS could influence events.
Everyone who contemplates one of the busts of Socrates that have survived may be struck by the lively, satyr-like quality of his physiognomy.
In the secret tradition Socrates was a reincarnation of the great spirit who had previously lived in the body of Silenus.
Socrates sometimes spoke of his daemon, meaning a good spirit who guided him through life. Today this might seem an alien concept. But the following account of the daemon in modern times is perhaps instructive. It is an incident recalled by a pupil of the Russian esoteric philosopher P.D. Ouspensky, a formative influence on many of the great writers and artists of the twentieth century, including the poet and playwright T.S. Eliot, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the artists Kazimir Malevich and Georgia O’Keefe.
This man, a lawyer, had been to hear a lecture by Ouspensky at a house in west London. He was walking away, puzzled by it and full of doubts. But as he did so, a voice inside him said: ‘If you lose touch with this, you will be doing something that you will regret for the rest of your life’. He wondered where this voice came from.
Eventually he found an explanation in Ouspensky’s teachings. This voice was his higher self. One of the great aims of the process of initiation he found himself undertaking was to so alter his consciousness that he would be able to hear this voice all the time.
Socrates was a man guided by his conscience in this way. He carried forward the great project of converting instinctive wisdom of the lower, animal self into concepts, and his philosophy like that of Pythagoras is not merely academic. It is also a philosophy of life. The aim of all philosophy, he said, is to teach one how to die.
There is some dispute, even within the secret schools, as to whether or not Socrates was an initiate.
When accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and of not believing in the gods, Socrates committed suicide by drinking hemlock. He died forgiving his executioners.
The oath against suicide was one of the most terrible taken by initiates.
IT’S BECOME COMMONPLACE TO SAY that religion has had a negative, even destructive effect on human history. Wars of religion, the Inquisition, the suppression of scientific thought and restrictive patriarchal attitudes are routinely cited. It is worth remembering that some of the greater glories of human culture had their origins in the Mystery schools that were a central part of organized religion in the ancient world. Not only sculpture and drama but also philosophy, mathematics and astronomy as well as political and medical ideas arose out of this religious institution.
Above all the Mystery schools influenced the evolution of consciousness.
Conventional history puts little emphasis on the evolution of consciousness, but we can see it in action again if we look at changes in Greek drama. In the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the first dramatists to have their work performed outside the Mystery schools, wrongdoing results in persecution by the winged demons called Erinyes or Furies — for example in the Oresteia of Aeschylus of 458 BC. By Euripides’s play of 428 BC, Hippolytus, this chiding has been internalized and given a name. ‘There is only one thing that can survive all life’s trials — a quiet conscience.’
In conventional history it is assumed that people have always been pricked by conscience. On this view Euripides was simply the first person to put a name to it. In the upside-down, other-way-round thinking of esoteric tradition the reason that there is no suggestion of conscience in any of the annals of human experience up to that point, is that the Eleusian Mysteries forged this new dimension of human experience.
Great dramatic art shows we often don’t feel exactly what convention tells us we should feel. It shows us new ways of being — feeling, thinking, willing, perceiving. To borrow a phrase of Saul Bellow’s, it opens the human condition a little wider.
When we experience Greek drama we are purged by catharsis. The Greek dramatists give their audiences an experience which is an echo of the experience of initiation, and their way of working is based on an understanding of human nature that is essentially initiatic. Our animal body has been corrupted. It has become hardened and carries something like a protective carapace. We become comfortable with this carapace, though. We even grow to rely on it. But our easy, basking lives have been made possible by blood spilled, torture, theft, injustice — and deep down we know it. So deep inside us there is a self-loathing that prevents us from living wholly in the moment, from living life to the full. We cannot truly love or be loved until the insect-like carapace is cut open by the agonizing process of initiation. Until we reach that point we don’t know what life is meant to be like.
When we see a great production of one of the tragedies inspired by the experience of initiation — Oedipus Rex, for example, or King Lear — we may catch an echo of this process.
IF SOME OF THE IDEAS OF THE GREEKS ARE hard to understand, hard to accept, others may at first glance look rather obvious, even bland, to the extent you might even think they are hardly worth saying at all. The handful of sayings attributed to Pythagoras that have survived include:
Above all things respect yourself
and
Do not yield to temptation except when you agree to be untrue to yourself.
In order to understand why these were challenging, even astounding things to say, things that shook the world and, as a result have been remembered down the ages, we have to see them in the context of a newly burgeoning sense of self.
Similarly when Socrates said:
An unconsidered life is not worth living, he was addressing people who up that point had had no faculty for abstract thought with which to contemplate their lives. This was the great gift of Socrates to the world.
WHEN SOCRATES DIED, HIS PUPIL PLATO became the leading figure in Greek philosophy.
Plato was born in 428 into one of the first generations systematically taught to read. He founded the Academy in the garden of the tomb of Academus in Athens.
His Dialogues are the greatest expression of the mind-before-matter philosophy called idealism that is at the heart of this book.
In the secret history everyone had experienced the world in an idealistic way up to this time. Everyone’s form of consciousness was such that he would not have questioned that ideas are a higher form of reality than objects. Everyone believed this unthinkingly, instinctively. It only became necessary for a great initiate to conceptualize the idealistic world-view and write it down in systematic terms at the point when consciousness had evolved to a stage that people could conceive of the opposing point of view. Plato’s pupil Aristotle made the philosophical leaps forward that would lead to the materialism that is the dominant philosophy today.
PLATO’S IDEALISM IS EASY FOR US TO misinterpret. It naturally seems to us to follow that if the material world is a precipitate of our mental processes, we should be able to manipulate the world in a very obvious and direct way just by thinking about it. In fact, if the world is nothing more than a sort of giant hologram, then couldn’t it just be switched off? In The Principles of Human Knowledge Bishop Berkeley, the most influential philosopher of idealism in English, advocated a version of idealism according to which matter has no existence independent of perception — and this is the version of idealism most familiar to students of philosophy in Anglo-American universities.
But as a matter of historical fact it is not the position held by the great majority of people throughout history who have believed in idealism. As I have already suggested, these people experienced the world in an idealistic way. The faculty of imagination was much stronger than the faculty for thinking, which was then only beginning to develop. They believed that the objects of the imagination were more real than the objects of the senses — but this does not necessarily mean that the latter are totally unreal.
Most people in history who have believed in idealism as a philosophy of life, have believed in matter being precipitated out of mind as a historical process that took place gradually and over vast periods of time. They have also believed — and still believe — that the hologram will, as it were, be switched off, but again gradually and over equally vast stretches of time.
Today’s university students debating the pros and cons of idealism probably find it difficult to equate Platonic ideas with gods and angels, as we have been doing. This association risks seeming crudely anthropomorphic to modern sensibility.
But again, as a matter of historical fact, people who believed in idealism as a philosophy of life have always tended to believe in spirits, gods and angels.
When considering the great world-weaving cosmic thoughts, the active principles behind the appearances of things, many idealists have asked themselves how far it is appropriate to consider them as being conscious beings like ourselves. Idealists like Cicero and Newton have considered these ‘Intelligencers’, to use Newton’s name for them, neither as crudely impersonal nor crudely personal. Cicero and Newton were neither crudely polytheistic nor crudely monotheistic. They experienced life as meaningful and the cosmos as meant. They believed, then, that something like human qualities, indeed something like human consciousness, is built into the structure of the cosmos.
And, crucially, initiates of the secret societies, like initiates of the Mystery schools, encountered these disembodied Intelligencers in altered states of consciousness. It is Goethe perhaps who writes best about what it feels like to be an idealist in modern times. He writes about feeling the real presence of living interconnections with the natural world and living connections with other people, even though such connections may not be measurable or visible. And crucially he writes about the great universal spirits that hold everything together. What Newton called ‘the Intelligencers’, Goethe calls ‘the Mothers’:
‘We all walk in the mysteries. We do not know what is stirring in the atmosphere that surrounds us, nor how it is connected with our own spirit. So much is certain — that we can at times put out the feelers of our soul beyond its bodily limits… one soul may have a decided influence upon another, merely by means of its silent presence, of which I could relate many instances. It has often happened to me that, when I have been walking with an acquaintance, and have had a living image of something in my mind, he has at once begun to speak of that very thing. I have also known a man who, without saying a word, could suddenly silence a party engaged in conversation by the mere power of his mind.. We all have some electrical and magnetic forces within us; and we put forth, like the magnet itself, some, attractive or repulsive power… With lovers this magnetic power is particularly strong and acts even at a distance. In my younger days I have experienced cases enough, when, during my solitary walks, I have felt a great desire for the company of a beloved girl, and have thought of her till she has really come to meet me. ‘I was so restless in my room,’ she has said, ‘that I could not help coming here.’
Goethe went on to speak about the living connections that underlie such phenomena…
Dwelling in eternal obscurity and loneliness, these Mothers are creative beings; they are the creative and sustaining principle from which proceeds everything that has life and form on the surface of the earth. Whatever ceases to breathe returns to them as a spiritual nature, and they preserve it until there arises occasion for its renewed existence. All souls and forms of what has been, or will be, hover about like cloud in the vast space of their abode… the magician must enter their dominion, if he would obtain power over the form of a being…
IN THE FIFTH CENTURY BC ATHENS AND SPARTA had fought for dominance. In the fourth century they were both overtaken by Macedonia, ruled by the robust Philip II. Plutarch noted that Philip’s son, Alexander, was born on the very day in 356 BC that the Temple at Ephesus was torched by a lunatic.
Each Mystery school taught a wisdom unique to it, which is why Moses and Pythagoras were initiated into more than one. The hierophants at the Mystery school attached to the temple at Ephesus taught the mysteries of Mother Earth, the powers that shape the natural world. In a sense the spirit of this school entered Alexander at birth. Alexander would spend his whole life trying to identify this divine element within.
One day the handsome, fearless boy with the burning eyes and leonine mane tamed a magnificent but fiery horse called Bucephalus that none of Philip’s generals could even mount.
Philip cast about for the greatest mind of the day to be his son’s tutor, and chose Plato’s greatest pupil, Aristotle. Alexander and the older man recognized each other as kindred spirits.
As soon as Plato gave formal, conceptual expression to idealism, it was inevitable that its opposite would quickly be formulated. Instead of deducing the truth about the world from immaterial, universal principles, Aristotle collected and classified the data of the material world. He worked out physical laws by a process of abstraction. Aristotle was therefore able to invent an entirely new and modern way of describing the hidden powers that shape nature. It is often said that the Roman Empire provided a vehicle for the spread of Christianity, and in the same way Alexander created the largest empire the world had yet seen. This, then, became the vehicle for Aristotle’s philosophy.
Philip was assassinated when his son was only twenty, but immediately Alexander established himself as a ruler of genius and an unbeatable military commander. In 334 BC he led an army into Asia, defeating the Persians at the Battle of Issus, even though they were outnumbered by as many as ten to one. Then he swept south through Syria and Phoenicia, before conquering Egypt, where he founded the city of Alexandria. Wherever he went he founded city-states on the Greek model, spreading Greek politics as well as Greek philosophy.
It was part of Alexander’s mission to save the newly evolved consciousness, forged by initiates such as Plato and Euripides, from being swamped by the greater wealth, grandeur and military might of Asia. More particularly, he was to save the new rationality from being swept away by ancient ritualistic clairvoyance and picture-consciousness.
In 331 BC Alexander defeated the Persians again, destroying their ancient capital of Persepolis, before pushing further into Afghanistan and finally into India. There he debated with Brahmin philosophers, the descendants of the Rishis. Admitted to watch the sacred, initiatory rites of the Brahmins, Alexander’s own priests were astonished to see how similar the ceremonies were to their own.
There is a story that Alexander sent a Greek philosopher to summon a Brahmin teacher into his presence, offering great rewards and threatening decapitation if he refused. The philosopher finally tracked down the Brahmin in the depths of the forest and received the following rather dusty response: ‘The Brahmins neither fear death nor desire gold. We sleep deeply and peacefully on forest leaves. Were we to have any material possessions, this would only disturb our slumber. We move freely over the surface of the earth without conflict and all our needs met as by a mother who feeds her baby her milk.’
This was a rare knockback for Alexander. Until the near the end of his life it seemed no one could stand in his way. As has happened only a few times in history, an individual seemed able to bend the whole world to his will.
As I’ve suggested, Alexander’s entire life can be seen as a quest to understand the origins of this divine power. At different times both Perseus and Hercules were claimed as his ancestors, according to variant traditions. Aristotle had given Alexander a copy of Homer’s Iliad, which he learned off by heart, and he sometimes saw himself as a demi-god like Achilles. In 332 BC he went on an expedition to the temple of Amun at the desert oasis of Siwa, some five hundred miles west of Memphis in Egypt. It was said he nearly died on this expedition, though this may be a reference to a ‘mystical death’. What is certain is that he was ‘recognized’ by the priests and initiated there.
It is sometimes speculated that the priests might have told Alexander he was a son of Amun-Zeus. It is supposed that the ceremonial horns he took to wearing afterwards were a mark of this. In some countries he conquered he was remembered as a horned man. In the Koran he appeared as Dhul-Qarnayn, which means ‘the two-horned one’. But according to the secret history, these horns are the horns of a hunter we have already met, and the two fiercely loving friends Gilgamesh and Enkidu, separated by the untimely death of Enkidu, were reunited when they reincarnated as Alexander and Aristotle.
At the age of only thirty-three Alexander ignored warnings by the astrologers of Babylon not to enter their city gates. Two weeks later he died of a fever. It would soon become apparent that Alexander’s empire had been held together only by his personal magnetism.
BUDDHISM EMERGED AS THE FIRST PROSELYTIZING, missionary religion in about 200 BC. Before then the religion you believed in was determined by your race or tribe. Now the human condition was changing. For the uninitiated the spirit worlds were a fading vision, leaving faint traces hard to be certain of, difficult to discern. Inspired by Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, people were developing a capacity for deductive and inductive thought. They were able to weigh up arguments on either side.
By 140 BC Rome was the capital of the world and a vortex of ideas. A citizen might have very different belief systems to choose from: the official cult of the planetary gods, the neo-Egyptian worship of Serapis, Epicurianism, Stoicism, the philosophy of the Peripatetics and the Persian cult of Mithraism. Buddhist monks and Indian Brahmins had certainly reached Alexandria.
For the first time in history choosing one of these belief systems could be a matter of personal choice.
Individuals might choose in proportion to the evidence or they might choose what they wanted to believe. With the rise to dominance of the Roman Empire, therefore, we reach the age of inauthentic faith, with a cynicism and conscious cultivation of sensibility that was entirely new.
When we think of Rome we picture sophistication and grandeur but also paranoia. If we compare the Greece of Pericles with the Rome of the Caesars, we see in the latter the same kind of overbearing pomp, elaborate, awesome rituals of smoke, incense and clashing cymbals that had earlier been used to hypnotize the peoples into obedience to Baal. Now it was used to hypnotize people into believing that various strange and egomaniacal members of the ruling elite were in fact gods.
The Caesars forced the Mystery schools to initiate them. In the process they discovered the ancient initiatic teachings regarding the Sun god.
Julius Caesar eradicated the Druids because of their teaching of the Sun Mysteries — that the Sun god was soon to return to earth. Similarly Augustus banned astrology not because he disbelieved in it, but because he was anxious about what astrologers could see written in the sky. If the people could not read the signs of the time, he could perhaps get away with representing himself as the Sun god. Because he had been initiated, Caligula knew how to communicate with the spirits of the moon in his dreams. But because he had gained initiation by force and without proper preparation, he could not properly identify them. Caligula would refer to Jupiter, Hercules, Dionysus and Apollo as his brother gods, sometimes appearing in fancy dress to look like them. Nero’s reign of madness reached a climax when he realized he was not after all the Sun god. He would rather burn the whole world to the ground than let another, greater, individual live.
THE GOLDEN ASSE OF APULEIUS IS ONE of the great initiatic works of the Roman period. It contains a wonderful story concerning the life of the spirit. Cupid and Psyche carries familiar and fairly conventional warnings about the dangers of curiosity, but it also has an esoteric and historical level of meaning.
Psyche is a beautiful, innocent young girl. Cupid falls in love with her and sends messengers asking her to come to him in his hill-top palace at night. She is to make love to a god! But there is one condition. Their love making must take place in total darkness. Psyche must take it on trust that she is enjoying the love of a god.
Her elder sister is envious, though. She taunts her and tells her that it is not a beautiful boy-god she is making love to, but a hideous, giant serpent. One night Psyche can resist no longer, and while Cupid is in a post-coital slumber, she holds an oil lamp over him. She is delighted to discover the gloriously beautiful young god, but at that moment a drop of burning oil falls on him and wakes him. Psyche is banished from his presence forever.
The double meaning in this story is this: the god really is a hideous serpent. This is the history of the Nephilim, of the entry into the human condition of the serpent of animal desire — but told from the human point of view!
THE MYSTERY SCHOOLS WERE FALLING into decay. As we have seen, excavations of the entrance to the Underworld at Baia in southern Italy revealed secret passageways and trap doors used to help convince the candidates that they were having supernatural experiences. In the smoky, druggy darkness priests dressed up as gods would loom out of the darkness over candidates heavily drugged with hallucinogens. Robert Temple has reconstructed the initiation ceremonies of this late, decadent phase. They were largely a matter of scary special effects, even including puppets, like a ghost train today. The difference was that at the end of your initiation, when you re-emerged into daylight, the priests quizzed you, and unless you believed in their illusions without the slightest sliver of doubt, they killed you.
The sincere men of Rome, the true initiates, withdrew into yet more shadowy schools that operated independently of the official cult. Stoicism became the outward expression of the initiatic impulse of the age, the growing point of intellectual and spiritual evolution. Cicero and Seneca, both deeply involved with Stoicism, tried to temper the egomania of their political masters. They tried to argue that all men were born brothers and that the slaves should be set free.
Cicero was an urbane and sophisticated man and one of the great forces for reform in the Roman Empire. He looked upon his initiation at Eleusis as the great formative experience of his life. It had taught him, he said ‘to live joyfully and to die hopefully’.
If Cicero looked askance at the plebs’ vain and superstitious beliefs in venal gods, he was also tolerant of them. He held that even the most ridiculous of the myths could be interpreted in an allegorical way. In The Nature of the Gods he gives a passionate exposition of the Stoic idea of the moving spirit of the universe, the guiding force that makes plants seek nourishment in the earth, gives animals sense, motion and an instinct to go after what is good for them that is almost akin to reason. This same moving spirit of the cosmos gives people ‘reason itself and a higher intelligence to the gods themselves’. These gods should not really be imagined as having bodies like our own ‘but are clothed in the most ethereal and beautiful forms’. He writes, too, that ‘we can see their higher, inward purpose in the movements of the stars and planets’.
When Rome’s political machinations finally caught up with Cicero, he stoically bared his neck to the centurion’s sword.
Seneca also believed in this cosmic sympathy of the Stoics — and the ability of adepts to manipulate this sympathy for their own ends. His play Medea probably quotes real magical formulae used by the black magicians of the day. Medea is portrayed as being able to direct her power of concentrated hatred so strongly that she can change the positions of the stars.
In this Age of Disenchantment it first became possible to consider that the gods might not exist. Among the intellectual elite, the Epicureans were formulating the first materialistic and atheist philosophies. What remained was belief in the lowest levels of spirits, the spirits of the dead and demons. If you read literature of the time, such as the Gospels of the New Testament, you see they record that the world was experiencing an epidemic of demons.
While the intellectual elite toyed with atheism, the people dabbled in atavistic forms of occultism that made use of the fact that demons and other low forms of spirit life are attracted by the fumes from blood sacrifices.
The high priest of the Jerusalem Temple wore little bells attached to his robes so that the goblins that lived in the shadows could hear him coming and hide their hideous shapes. The Temple needed a vast, complex drainage system to cope with the thousands of gallons of sacrificial blood that flowed through it every day.
All around the world increasingly desperate measures were taken. Plutarch wrote against human sacrifice in a way that implies it was common.
In South America, in a bizarre parody, a black magician was being nailed to a cross.