THIS IS A HISTORY OF THE WORLD that has been taught down the ages in certain secret societies. It may seem quite mad from today’s point of view, but an extraordinarily high proportion of the men and women who made history have been believers.
Historians of the ancient world tell us that from the beginnings of Egyptian civilization to the collapse of Rome, public temples in places like Thebes, Eleusis and Ephesus had priestly enclosures attached to them. Classical scholars refer to these enclosures as the Mystery schools.
Here meditation techniques were taught to the political and cultural elite. Following years of preparation, Plato, Aeschylus, Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Cicero and others were initiated into a secret philosophy. At different times the techniques used by these ‘schools’ involved sensory deprivation, breathing exercises, sacred dance, drama, hallucinogenic drugs and different ways of redirecting sexual energies. These techniques were intended to induce altered states of consciousness in the course of which initiates were able to see the world in new ways.
Anyone who revealed to outsiders what he had been taught inside the enclosures was executed. Iamblichus, the neoplatonist philosopher, recorded what happened to two boys who lived at Ephesus. One night, lit up by rumours of phantoms and magical practices, of a more intense, more blazingly real reality hidden inside the enclosures, they let their curiosity get the better of them. Under cover of darkness they scaled the walls and dropped down the other side. Pandemonium followed, audible all over the city, and in the morning the boys’ corpses were discovered in front of the enclosure gates.
In the ancient world the teachings of the Mystery schools were guarded as closely as nuclear secrets are guarded today.
Then in the third century the temples of the ancient world were closed down as Christianity became the ruling religion of the Roman Empire. The danger of ‘proliferation’ was addressed by declaring these secrets heretical, and trafficking in them continued to be a capital offence. But as we shall see, members of the new ruling elite, including Church leaders, now began to form secret societies. Behind closed doors they continued to teach the old secrets.
This book contains an accumulation of evidence to show that an ancient and secret philosophy that originated in the Mystery schools was preserved and nurtured down the ages through the medium of secret societies, including the Knights Templar and the Rosicrucians. Sometimes this philosophy has been hidden from the public and at other times it has been placed in plain view — though always in such a way as to remain unrecognized by outsiders.
To take one example, the frontispiece of The History of the World by Sir Walter Raleigh, published in 1614, is on display in the Tower of London. Thousands file past it every day, missing the goat’s head hidden in its design and other coded messages.
If you’ve ever wondered why the West has no equivalent to the tantric sex on open display on the walls of Hindu monuments such as the temples of Khajuraho in central India, you may be interested to learn that an analogous technique — the cabalistic art of karezza — is encoded in much of the West’s art and literature.
We will see, too, how secret teachings on the history of the world influence the foreign policy of the present US administration regarding Central Europe.
Is the Pope Catholic? Well, not in the straightforward way you might think. One morning in 1939 a young man aged twenty-one was walking down the street when a truck drove into him and knocked him down. While in a coma he had an overwhelming mystical experience. When he came round he recognized that, although it had come about in an unexpected way, this experience was what he had been led to expect as the fruit of techniques taught him by his mentor, Mieczlaw Kotlorezyk, a modern Rosicrucian master.
As a result of this mystical experience the young man joined a seminary, later became Bishop of Cracow, then later still Pope John Paul II.
These days the fact that the head of the Catholic Church was first initiated into the spirit realm under the aegis of a secret society is perhaps not as shocking as it once was, because science has taken over from religion as the main agent of social control. It is science that decides what it is acceptable for us to believe — and what is beyond the pale. In both the ancient world and the Christian era, the secret philosophy was kept secret by threatening those who trafficked in it with death. Now in the post-Christian era the secret philosophy is still surrounded by dread, but the threat is of ‘social death’ rather than execution. Belief in key tenets, such as prompting by disembodied beings or that the course of history is materially influenced by secret cabals, has been branded as at best crackpot, at worst the very definition of what it is to be mad.
In Mystery schools candidates wishing to join were made to fall down a well, undergo trial by water, squeeze through a very small door and hold logic-chopping discussions with anthropomorphic animals. Ring a bell? Lewis Carroll is one of the many children’s writers — others are the Brothers Grimm, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, C .S. Lewis and the creators of The Wizard of Oz and Mary Poppins — who have believed in the secret history and the secret philosophy. With a mixture of the topsy-turvy and child-like literalness these writers have sought to undermine the common sense, materialistic view of life. They want to teach children to think backwards, look at everything upside down and the other way round, and break free of established, fixed ways of thinking.
Other kindred spirits include Rabelais and Jonathan Swift. Their work has a disconcerting quality in which the supernatural is not made a big issue of — it is simply a given. Imaginary objects are seen as at least as real as the mundane objects of the physical world. Satirical and sceptical, these gently iconoclastic writers are undermining of readers’ assumptions and subversive of down-to-earth attitudes. Esoteric philosophy is nowhere explicitly stated in Gargantua and Pantagruel or Gulliver’s Travels, but a small amount of digging brings it into the light of day.
In fact this book will show that throughout history an astonishing number of famous people have secretly cultivated the esoteric philosophy and mystical states taught in the secret societies. It might be argued that, because they lived in times when even the best educated did not enjoy all the intellectual benefits that modern science brings, it is only natural that Charlemagne, Dante, Joan of Arc, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Milton, Bach, Mozart, Goethe, Beethoven and Napoleon all held beliefs that are discredited today. But then isn’t it rather surprising that many in modern times have held the same set of beliefs, not just madmen, lone mystics or writers of fantasies, but the founders of the modern scientific method, the humanists, the rationalists, the liberators, secularizers and scourges of superstition, the modernists, the sceptics and the mockers? Could the very people who have done most to form today’s scientifically oriented and materialistic world-view secretly have believed something else? Newton, Kepler, Voltaire, Paine, Washington, Franklin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Edison, Wilde, Gandhi, Duchamp: could it be true that they were initiated into a secret tradition, taught to believe in the power of mind over matter and that they were able to communicate with incorporeal spirits?
Recent biographies of some of these personalities hardly mention the evidence that exists to show that they were interested in these sorts of ideas at all. In the present intellectual climate where mention is made, they are usually dismissed in terms of a hobby, a temporary aberration, amusing ideas the personalities may have toyed with or used as metaphors for their work but never taken seriously.
However, as we shall see, Newton was undoubtedly a practising alchemist all his adult life and regarded it as his most important work. Voltaire participated in ceremonial magic through all the years he dominated the intellectual life of Europe. Washington invoked a great spirit in the sky when he founded the city that would bear his name. And when Napoleon said he was guided by his star, this was no mere figure of speech; he was talking about the great spirit who showed him his destiny and made him invulnerable and magnificent. One of the aims of this book is to show that, far from being passing fads or unaccountable eccentricities, far from being incidental or irrelevant, these strange ideas formed the core philosophy of many of the people who made history — and perhaps more significantly, to show that they shared a remarkable unanimity of purpose. If you weave together the stories of these great men and women into a continuous historical narrative, it becomes apparent again and again that at the great turning points in history, the ancient and secret philosophy was there, hiding in the shadows, making its influence felt.
In the iconography and statuary of the ancient world, starting from the time of Zarathustra, knowledge of the secret doctrine of the Mystery schools was denoted by the holding of a rolled scroll. As we shall see, this tradition has continued into modern times, and today the public statues of the world’s towns and cities show how widely its influence has spread. There’s no need to travel as far as sites like Rennes-le-Château, Rosslyn Chapel or the remote fastnesses of Tibet to find occult symbols of a secret cult. By the end of this book the reader will be able to see that these traces lie all around us in our most prominent public buildings and monuments, in churches, art, books, music, films, festivals, folklore, in the very stories we tell our children and even in the names of the days of the week.
TWO NOVELS, FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM and The Da Vinci Code, have popularized the notion of a conspiracy of secret societies that seeks to control the course of history. These novels concern people who hear intriguing rumours of the ancient and secret philosophy, set themselves on the trail of it and are drawn in.
Some academics, for example Frances Yates at the Warburg Institute, Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, and Marsha Keith Suchard, author of the recent groundbreaking Why Mrs Blake Cried: Swedenborg, Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision, have researched deeply and written wisely, but their job is to take a measured approach. If they have been initiated by men in masks, taken on journeys to other worlds and shown the power of mind over matter, they are not letting on.
The most secret teachings of the secret societies are transmitted only orally. Other parts are written in a deliberately obscure way that makes it impossible for outsiders to understand. For example, it might be possible to deduce the secret doctrine from Helena Blavatsky’s prodigiously long and obscure book of the same name, or from the twelve volumes of G.I. Gurdjieff’s allegory All and Everything: Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, or from the six hundred or so volumes of Rudolf Steiner’s writings and lectures. Similarly you might — in theory — be capable of decoding the great alchemical texts of the Middle Ages or the esoteric tracts of high-level initiates of later periods such as Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme or Emmanuel Swedenborg, but in all these cases the writing is aimed at people already in the know. These texts aim to conceal as much as they reveal.
I have been looking for a concise, reliable and completely clear guide to the secret teachings for more than twenty years. I have decided to write one myself because I am convinced that no such book exists. It is possible to find self-published books and web sites that claim to do it, but, like collectors in any field, those who browse in bookshops on a spiritual quest soon develop a nose for ‘the real thing’, and you only have to dip into these books and sites to see there is no guiding intelligence at work, no very great philosophical training and very little hard information.
This history, then, is the result of nearly twenty years’ research. Books such as Mysterium Magnum, a commentary on Genesis by the mystic and Rosicrucian philosopher Jacob Boehme, together with books by his fellow Rosicrucians Robert Fludd, Paracelsus and Thomas Vaughan have been key sources, as well as modern commentaries on their work by Rudolf Steiner and others. These are referenced in the notes at the back, rather than considered in the main body of the text, for reasons of conciseness and clarity.
But, crucially, I have been helped to understand these sources by a member of more than one of the secret societies, someone who, in the case of one secret society at least, has been initiated to the highest level.
I had been working for years as an editor for one London’s largest publishers, commissioning books on a wide range of more or less commercial subjects and sometimes also indulging in my interest in the esoteric. In this way I have met many leading authors working in the field. One day a man walked into my office who was clearly of a different order of being. He had a business proposition, that we should reissue a series of esoteric classics — alchemical texts and the like — to which he would write new introductions. We quickly became firm friends and spent a lot of time together. I found I could ask him questions about more or less anything and he would tell me what he knew — amazing things. In retrospect I think he was educating me, preparing me for initiation.
On several occasions I tried to persuade him to write these things down, to write an esoteric theory of everything. He repeatedly refused, saying that if he did ‘the men in white coats would come and take me away’, but I also suspected that for him to publish these things would be to break solemn and terrifying oaths.
So in a sense I have written the book I wanted him to write, based in part on the Rosicrucian texts he helped me to understand. He guided me, too, to sources to be found in other cultures. So as well as the cabalistic, hermetic and neoplatonic streams that lie relatively close to the surface of Western culture, there are also Sufi elements in this book and ideas flowing from esoteric Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as a few Celtic sources.
I have no wish to exaggerate the similarities between these various streams, nor is it within the scope of this book to trace all the ways that these myriad streams have merged, separated then merged again down the ages. But I will focus on what lies beneath the cultural differences and suggest that these streams carry a unified view of a cosmos that contains hidden dimensions and a view of life as obeying certain mysterious and paradoxical laws.
By and large the different traditions from around the world illumine one another. It is rather wonderful to see how the experiences of a hermit on Mount Sinai in the second century or of a medieval German mystic fit with those of a twentieth-century Indian swami. Because esoteric teachings are more deeply hidden in the West, I often use oriental examples to help understand the secret history of the West.
I do not intend to discuss potential conflicts between different traditions. Indian tradition places far more emphasis on reincarnation than the Sufi tradition, which speaks of only a few. So for the sake of the narrative I have compromised by including only a small number of reincarnations of famous historical personalities.
I have also made cavalier judgements as to which schools of thought and which secret societies draw on authentic tradition. So the Cabala, Hermeticism, Sufism, the Templars, the Rosicrucians, esoteric Freemasonry, Martinism, the theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and Anthroposophy are included, but Scientology, the Christian Science of Mary Baker Eddy, together with a whole slew of contemporary ‘channelled’ material, is not.
This is not to say that this book shies away from controversy. Previous attempts to identify a ‘perennial philosophy’ have tended to come up with collections of platitudes — ‘we are all the same under the skin’, ‘love is its own reward’ — which are difficult to disagree with. To anyone expecting something similarly agreeable, I must apologize in advance. The teaching I will be identifying as common to Mystery schools and secret societies from all over the world will outrage many people and fly in the face of common sense.
One day my mentor told me I was ready for initiation, that he would introduce me to some people.
I’d been looking forward to this moment, but to my surprise, I refused. No doubt fear played a part. I knew by then that many initiation rituals involved altered states of consciousness, even what are sometimes called ‘near-death’ experiences.
But it was partly also because I didn’t want to have all this knowledge given to me all of a piece. I wanted to continue enjoying trying to work it out for myself.
And neither did I want to take an oath that forbad me to write.
THIS HISTORY OF THE WORLD IS structured in the following way. The first four chapters will look at what happened ‘in the beginning’ as taught by the secret societies, including what is meant in the secret teaching by the expulsion from Eden and the Fall. These chapters will aim, too, to provide an account of the world-view of the secret societies, a pair of conceptual spectacles — so readers may the better appreciate what follows.
In the following seven chapters many figures from myth and legend are treated as historical figures. This is the history of what happened before written records began, as it was taught in the Mystery schools and is still taught in the secret societies today.
Chapter 8 includes the transition into what is conventionally thought of as the historical period, but the narrative continues to tell stories of monsters and fabulous beasts, of miracles and prophecies and historical figures who conspired with disembodied beings to direct the course of events.
I hope that throughout the reader’s mind will be pleasurably bent equally by the strange ideas presented and by the revealing of the names of the personalities who have entertained these ideas. I hope, too, that some of the strange claims will strike a chord, that many readers will think… yes, that explains why the names of the week run in the order they do… That’s why the image of the fish, the water-carrier and a serpent-tailed goat are everywhere ascribed constellations that don’t really resemble them… That’s what we’re really commemorating at Halloween… That explains the bizarre confessions of demon-worship by the Knights Templar… That is what gives Christopher Columbus the conviction to set out on his insanely perilous voyage… That is why an Egyptian obelisk was erected in New York’s Central Park in the late nineteenth century… That is why Lenin was embalmed…
Through all this the aim is to show that the basic facts of history can be interpreted in a way which is almost completely the opposite of the way we normally understand them. To prove this would, of course, require a whole library of books, something like the twenty miles of shelves of esoteric and occult literature said to be locked away in the Vatican. But in this single volume I will show that this alternative, this mirror image view, is a consistent and cogent one with its own logic that has the virtue of explaining areas of human experience that remain inexplicable to the conventional view. I will also cite authorities throughout, providing leads for interested readers to follow.
Some of these authorities have worked within the esoteric tradition. Others are experts in their own disciplines — science, history, anthropology, literary criticism — whose results in their specialist fields of research seem to me to confirm the esoteric world-view, even where I have no way of knowing whether their personal philosophy of life has any spiritual or esoteric dimension.
But above all — and this the point I want to emphasize — I am asking readers to approach this text in a new way — to see it as an imaginative exercise.
I want the reader to try to imagine what it would feel like to believe the opposite of what we have been brought up to believe. This inevitably involves an altered state of consciousness to some degree or other, which is just as it should be. Because at the very heart of all esoteric teaching in all parts of the world lies the belief that higher forms of intelligence can be accessed in altered states. The Western tradition in particular has always emphasized the value of imaginative exercises which involve cultivating and dwelling upon visual images. Allowed to sink deep into the mind, they there do their work.
So although this book can be read just as a record of the absurd things people have believed, an epic phantasmagoria, a cacophony of irrational experiences, I hope that by the end some readers will hear some harmonies and perhaps also sense a slight philosophical undertow, which is the suggestion that it may be true.
Of course, any good theory which seeks to explain why the world is as it is must also help predict what will happen next, and the last chapter reveals what that will be — always presuming, of course, that the great cosmic plan of the secret societies proves to be successful. This plan will encompass a belief that the great new impulse for the evolution will arise in Russia, that European civilization will collapse and that, finally, the flame of true spirituality will be kept burning in America.
TO HELP WITH THE ALL-IMPORTANT WORK of the imagination there are strange and uncanny illustrations integrated throughout, some of which have not previously been seen outside the secret societies.
There are also illustrations of some of the most familiar images from world history, the greatest icons of our culture — the Sphinx, Noah’s Ark, the Trojan Horse, the Mona Lisa, Hamlet and the skull — because all of these are shown to have strange and unexpected meanings according to the secret societies.
Lastly there are illustrations from modern European artists such as Ernst, Klee and Duchamp, as well as from American outlaws such as David Lynch. Their work is also shown to be steeped in the ancient and secret philosophy.
INDUCE IN YOURSELF A DIFFERENT STATE of mind and the most famous and familiar histories mean something very different.
In fact if anything in this history is true, then everything your teachers taught you is thrown into question.
I suspect this prospect doesn’t alarm you.
As one of the devotees of the ancient and secret philosophy so memorably put it:
You must be mad, or you wouldn’t have come here.