CLOSE YOUR EYES AND IMAGINE A TABLE, a good table, the table you’d ideally like to work on. What size would it be? What wood would it be made of? How would the wood be joined? Would it be oiled or polished or planed bare? What other features would it have? Imagine it as vividly as you can.
Now look at a real table.
Which table can you be sure of knowing the truth about?
What can you be more sure of — the contents of our mind or the objects you perceive with your senses? Which is more real, mind or matter?
The debate springing from these simple questions has been at the heart of all philosophy.
Today most of us choose matter and objects over mind and ideas. We tend to take physical objects as the yardstick of reality. Contrariwise Plato called ideas ‘the things that really are’. In the ancient world the objects of the mind’s eye were taken as the eternal realities we can really be sure of, as opposed to the transitory, external surfaces out there. What I want to suggest now is that people did not formerly believe in a mind-before-matter universe because they had carefully weighed up the philosophical arguments on either side and come to a reasoned decision, but because they experienced the world in a mind-before-matter way.
While our thoughts are pale and shadowy in comparison with our sense impressions, in the case of ancient man it was the other way round. People then had less of a sense of physical objects. Objects were not as sharply defined and differentiated to them as they are to us.
If you look at depiction of a tree on the walls of an ancient temple, you will see that the artist has not really looked to see how branches are joined to the trunk.
In ancient times no one really looked at a tree in the way we do.
THESE DAYS WE TEND TO THINK VERY reductively about our thoughts. We tend to go along with the prevailing intellectual fashion that sees thoughts as nothing more than words — perhaps with a penumbra of other stuff, such as feelings, images and so on — but with only the words themselves having any real significance.
However, if we dwell on this fashionable view, even only briefly, we will find that it flies in the face of everyday experience. Take an apparently mundane and insignificant thought such as ‘I mustn’t forget to phone my mother this evening’. If we now try to examine a thought like this as it weaves through our field of consciousness, if we try to hold it back in order to throw a little light on it, we can perhaps see that it carries a loose cluster of word associations, such as might come to light in a psychoanalyst’s word association test. If we then concentrate harder, it may well become apparent that these associations are rooted in memories that bring with them feelings — and may even carry with them their own impulses of will. The guilt I feel at not having phoned my mother earlier, as we now know from psychoanalysis, has roots in a complex knot of feelings that go back to infancy — desire, anger, feelings of loss and betrayal, dependency and the desire for freedom. As I contemplate my feelings of failure, other impulses arise — nostalgia for when things were better perhaps, when my mother and I were one — and an old pattern of behaviour is reanimated.
As we continue to try to pin this thought down, it will twist this way and that. The very act of looking at it changes it, causes reactions, perhaps sometimes even contradictory reactions. A thought is never still. It is a living thing that can never be identified definitively with the dead letter of language. This is why Schopenhauer, another proponent of the mystical philosophy at the heart of this book, said that ‘as soon as you try to put a thought into words it ceases to be true’. Words can never convey or capture the complexity of an image or of the feelings.
Whole dimensions lie glistening on the dark side of even the most dull and commonplace thought.
The wise men and women of the ancient world knew how to work with these dimensions, and over many millennia they created and refined images which would perform just this function. As taught in the Mystery schools, the very early history of the world unfolds in a series of images of this type.
Before considering these powerful and evocative images I now want to ask the reader to begin to take part in an imaginative exercise: to try to imagine how someone in ancient times, a candidate who hoped for initiation into a Mystery school, would have experienced the world.
Of course it is a way of experiencing the world that is completely delusional from the point of view of modern science, but as this history progresses we will see more and more evidence that many of the great men and women of history have deliberately cultivated this ancient state of consciousness. We will see that they have believed that it gives them a view of the way the world really is, the way it works, that is in some ways superior to the modern way. They have brought back into ‘the real world’ insights that have changed the course of history, not only by inspiring works of art and literature of the greatest genius, but by prompting some of history’s greatest scientific discoveries.
THEREFORE LET US NOW TO TRY IMAGINE ourselves into the mind of someone about two and a half thousand years ago, walking through woodland to a sacred grove or a temple such as Newgrange in Ireland, or Eleusis in Greece…
To such a person the wood and everything in it was alive. Everything was watching him. Unseen spirits whispered in the movements of the trees. A breeze brushing against his cheek was the gesture of a god. If the buffeting of blocks of air in the sky created lightning, this was an outbreak of cosmic will — and maybe he walked a little faster. Perhaps he sheltered in a cave?
When ancient man ventured into a cave he had a strange sense of being inside his own skull, cut off in his own private mental space. If he climbed to the top of a hill, he felt his consciousness race to the horizon in every direction, out towards the edges of the cosmos — and he felt at one with it. At night he experienced the sky as the mind of the cosmos.
When he walked along a woodland pathway he would have had a strong sense of following his destiny. Today any of us may wonder, How did I end up in this life that seems to have little or nothing to do with me? Such a thought would have been inconceivable to someone in the ancient world, where everyone was conscious of his or her place in the cosmos.
Everything that happened to him — even the sight of a mote in a sunbeam, the sound of the flight of a bee or the sight of a falling sparrow — was meant to happen. Everything spoke to him. Everything was a punishment, a reward, a warning or a premonition. If he saw an owl, for example, this wasn’t just a symbol of the goddess, this was Athena. Part of her, a warning finger perhaps, was protruding into the physical world and into his own consciousness.
It’s important to understand the particular way in which human beings have affinities with the physical world according to the ancients. They believed in a quite literal way that nothing inside us is without a correspondence in nature. Worms, for example, are the shape of intestines and worms process matter as intestines do. The lungs that enable us to move freely through space with a bird-like freedom are the same shape as birds. The visible world is humanity turned inside out. Lung and bird are both expressions of the same cosmic spirit, but in different modes.
To the teachers of the Mystery schools it was significant that if you looked down on to the internal organs of the human body from the skies, their disposition reflected the solar system.
In the view of the ancients, then, all biology is astrobiology. Today we know full well how the sun gives life and power to living things, drawing the plant out of the seed, coaxing it to unravel upwards, but the ancients also believed that the forces of the moon, by contrast, tend to flatten and widen plants. Bulbous plants such as tubers were thought to be particularly affected by the moon.
More strikingly, perhaps, the complex, symmetric shapes of plants were believed to be caused by the patterns that the stars and planets make as they move across the sky. As a heavenly body takes a path that sees it curving back on itself like a shoelace, so that same shape is traced in the curling motion of a leaf as it grows, or a flower. For example, they saw Saturn, which traces a sharp pattern in the sky, forming the pine needles of conifers. Is it a coincidence that modern science shows that pine trees contain unusually large traces of lead, the metal believed by the ancients to be inwardly animated by the planet Saturn?
In the ancient view the shape of the human body was similarly affected by the patterns made in the sky by stars and planets. The movements of the planets, for example, were inscribed in the human body in the loop of the ribs and the lemniscate — bootlace shape — of the centripetal nerves.
Science has coined the word ‘biorhythms’ to describe the way the relationship of the earth with the moon and the sun, marked by the sequence of the seasons and day following night, is built biochemically deep into the function of every living being, for example in sleep patterns. But beyond these more obvious rhythms, the ancients recognized how other, more mathematically complex rhythms that involve the outer reaches of the cosmos work their way into human life. Humans breathe on average 25,920 times per day, which is the number of years in a great Platonic year (i.e. the number of years it takes the sun to complete a full cycle of the zodiac). The average or ‘ideal’ human life — seventy-two — also has the same number of days in it.
This sense of interconnectedness was not just a matter of bodily interconnectedness. It extended to consciousness too. When our man on a walk saw a flock of birds turn as one in the sky, it seemed to him as if the flock were one moved all together by one thought — and indeed he believed that this was the case. If the animals in the wood moved altogether in a sudden, violent way, if they panicked, they had been moved by Pan. Our man knew that this was exactly what was happening, because he commonly experienced great spirits thinking through himself and through other people at the same time. He knew that when he reached the Mystery school and his spiritual master introduced astonishing new thoughts to him and his fellow pupils, they would all be experiencing the very same thoughts, just as if the Master were holding up physical objects for them all to see. In fact he felt closer to people when sharing their thoughts than he ever did through mere physical proximity.
Today we tend to be very proprietorial about our thoughts. We want to take credit for originating them, and we like to think that our private mental space is inviolate, that no other consciousness can intrude on it.
However, we don’t need to dwell on these assumptions long to see they don’t always fit experience. If we are honest we must admit we do not invariably construct our thoughts. It’s not just that geniuses like Newton, Kepler, Leonardo, Edison and Tesla talk of inspiration coming to them, as if in a dream and sometimes literally in a dream. For all of us it is the case that everyday thoughts naturally just come to us too. In common parlance we say ‘It strikes me that…’ and ‘It occurs to me that…’ If you’re lucky it may happen now and then that a perfectly phrased quip comes to you that sets the table aroar. Then of course you’re happy to bask in the glory — but the unvarnished truth is that the quip probably just jumped up and out of your mouth before you had any time consciously to phrase it.
The reality of everyday experience is that thoughts are quite routinely introduced into what we like to think of as our private mental space from somewhere else. The ancients understood this ‘somewhere else’ as being some-one else, the someone being a god, an angel or a spirit.
And an individual is not always prompted by the same god, angel or spirit. While today we like to think of ourselves as each having one individual centre of consciousness located inside the head, in the ancient world each person experienced him or herself as having several different centres of consciousness originating outside the head.
We saw earlier that gods, angels and spirits were believed to be emanations from the great cosmic mind — Thought-Beings in other words. What I am asking you to consider now is that these great Thought-Beings expressed themselves through people. If today we naturally think of people thinking, in ancient times they thought of Thoughts peopling.
As we shall see later on, gods, angels and spirits can bring about great changes in a nation’s fortunes. The focus of these changes will often be an individual. For example, Alexander the Great or Napoleon were vehicles for a great spirit, and for a while carried all before them in a remarkable way. No one could oppose them and they succeeded in everything they did — until the spirit left them. Then quite suddenly everything began to go wrong.
We see the same process in the case of artists who become vehicles for the expression of a god or spirit for a certain period of their lives. Then they seem to ‘find their voice’ and create masterpiece after masterpiece with a sure hand, sometimes transforming the consciousness of a whole generation, even changing the whole direction of a culture in history. But when the spirit leaves, an artist never again creates with the same genius.
Similarly if a spirit weaves through an individual to create a work of art, the same great spirit may once again be present whenever that work of art is contemplated by others. One of his contemporaries said: ‘When Bach plays the organ, even God comes to Mass.’
Today many Christians believe that God is present in the blood and wine at the climax of the Mass, albeit in a rather elusive way which centuries of theological debate have never quite managed to pin down. On the other hand if you read liturgies that have survived from ancient Egypt, notably The Book of the Opening of the Mouth, or consider chronicles kept in the temple of the Vestal Virgins in Rome that record the regular ‘epiphanies’, or appearances of the gods, it is quite clear that in those days the gods’ presence was expected at the climax of religious ceremonies — and in a far more imposing way than in Christian services today. The people of the ancient world experienced the gods’ presence as awe-inspiring.
When a thought came to the man walking through the woods, he felt as if he had been brushed by the wing of an angel or by the robe of a god. He sensed a presence even if he could not always perceive it directly and in detail. But once inside the holy precinct, he could perceive not just the wing, not just the swirling waves of light and energy that made up the robe. In the midst of the light he saw the angel or god itself. On these occasions he would have believed that he really was perceiving a being from the spiritual realm.
Today we experience moments of illumination as interior events, while the ancients experienced them as impinging on them from outside. The man we have been following expected the Thought-Being he saw to be visible to others — what today we would call a collective hallucination.
We don’t know how to go about having such an experience. We don’t know how to go about meeting a disembodied spirit. We don’t know who they are. Today it often seems that we search and search for a genuine spiritual experience but are seldom sure we’ve had one that genuinely deserves the name. In the ancient world experience of spirits was so strong that to deny the existence of the spirit world would not have occurred to them. In fact it would have been almost as difficult for people in the ancient world to deny the existence of spirit as it would for us to decide not to believe in the table, the book, in front of us.
Paucity of experience makes belief in disembodied spirits difficult today. In fact the Church teaches that belief is admirable because it is difficult. The more your belief is out of proportion to the evidence the better, it seems. This teaching would have seemed absurd to people in the ancient world.
IF YOU BELIEVE IN A MIND-BEFORE-MATTER universe, if you believe that ideas are more real than objects as the ancients did, collective hallucinations are, of course, much easier to accept than if you believe in a matter-before-mind universe — in which case they are almost impossible to explain.
In this history gods and spirits control the material world and exercise power over it. We will see, too, how sometimes disembodied beings break through, unbidden. Sometimes whole communities are possessed by a convulsion of uncontrollable sexual savagery.
This is why commerce with the spirits was always considered highly dangerous. In the ancient world controlled communion with the gods and spirits was the preserve of the Mystery schools.
ROBERT TEMPLE, WHOSE CURRENT affiliations include Visiting Professor of Humanities, History and Philosophy of Science, University of Louisville, USA, and Visiting Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, has demonstrated that ancient cultures such as the Chinese and the Egyptians had an understanding of the universe that was in some ways in advance of our own. For example, he has shown that the Egyptians, far from being primitive or backward in these matters, knew that Sirius is a three-star system — something which modern science only ‘discovered’ in 1995 when French astronomers, using powerful radio telescopes, detected the red dwarf, subsequently named Sirius C. The point is that the ancient Egyptians were neither ignorant nor childlike, even though we may be tempted to consider them so.
One of the stupid beliefs we are fond of attributing to the ancients is that they worshipped the sun, as if they believed the physical object were a sentient being. Robert Temple’s commentary on key texts by Aristotle, Strabo and others shows they saw the sun as a sort of lens through which the spiritual influence of a god rayed from the spiritual into the earthly realm. Other gods rayed their influences through the other planets and constellations. As the positions of the heavenly bodies changed, so the various patterns of influence give history direction and shape.
Returning to the man walking through the ancient wood, we see now that he experienced the spirits behind the sun, the moon and the other heavenly bodies as working on different parts of his mind and body. He felt his limbs move like flowing Mercury and he felt the spirit of Mars raging inside him in the fierce river of molten iron that was his blood.
The state of his kidney was affected by the movement of Venus. Modern science is only just starting to understand the role the kidney plays in sexuality. At the beginning of the twentieth century it discovered the kidney’s role in the storing of testosterone. Then in the 1980s the Swiss pharmaceuticals giant Weleda began to conduct tests which showed that the movements of the planets affect chemical changes in metal salt solutions that are dramatic enough to be seen with the naked eye, even when these influences are too subtle to be measured by any scientific procedure so far devised. What is even more remarkable is that these dramatic changes come about when a solution of metal salt is examined in relation to the movement of the planet with which it has traditionally been associated. Thus copper salts contained in the kidney are affected by Venus, copper being the metal traditionally associated with Venus. Modern science may be on the verge of confirming what the ancients knew well. It really is true to say that Venus is the planet of desire.
The Mystery schools taught that as well as head-consciousness we each have, for example, a heart-consciousness which emanates from the sun then enters our mental space via the heart. Or to put it another way, the heart is the portal through which Sun god enters our lives. Likewise a kind of kidney-consciousness beams into us from Venus, spreading out into our mind and body via the portal of our own kidneys. The working together of these different centres of consciousness makes us variously loving, angry, melancholy, restless, brave, thoughtful and so on, forming the unique thing that is human experience.
Working through our different centres of consciousness in this way, the gods of the planets and constellations prepare us for the great experiences, the great tests that the cosmos means us to have. The deep structure of our lives is described by the movements of the heavenly bodies.
I am moved to desire by Venus and, when Saturn returns, I am sorely tested.
IN THIS CHAPTER WE HAVE ALREADY BEGUN to use some of the imaginative exercises used in the esoteric teaching. In the next chapter we will cross the threshold of the Mystery school and begin to follow the ancient history of the cosmos.