WHEN HERODOTUS WAS PUZZLING OVER the strange wooden statues of the kings who had reigned before any human king, the Egyptian priests told him that no one could understand this history without knowing about ‘the three dynasties’.
If Herodotus had been an initiate of the Mystery schools, he would have understood that the three dynasties were, first, the oldest generation of creator gods — Saturn, Rhea, Uranos — the second generation made up of Zeus, his siblings and their children, such as Apollo and Athena — and lastly the generation of demi-gods and heroes. This last generation is the subject of this chapter.
ALL THE WHILE MATTER WAS GROWING denser, and because matter and spirit are inimical, the gods became less and less a constant presence. The higher, the more ineffable, the god, the harder it became to squeeze down into the tightening net of physical necessity that covered the earth. Great gods such as Zeus or Pallas Athena seemed to make their presence felt and intervene directly in human affairs only at times of crisis.
In the Mystery schools it was taught that a decisive change in this direction came about in 13,000 BC. From then on the higher gods would find it difficult to descend further than the moon. Their visits to the surface of the earth became infrequent and fleeting. It was believed that on these visits they accidentally left behind the strange and unearthly mistletoe, a plant which cannot grow in the soil of the earth, but which grew naturally on the moon.
Without the presence of the greater gods to keep them down, the crab-like progeny of Saturn that had been imprisoned in underground caves began to creep up into the daylight again, infesting the surface of the earth and preying on humankind. Sea monsters also leapt on to the shore to drag off members of the tribe who had strayed too close. Giants carried off cattle and sometimes preyed on human flesh, too.
Full-scale wars took place between humans and armies of other creatures, stragglers from the previous epoch. The war between the Lapiths — a tribe of Neolithic flint-knappers — and the Centaurs is recorded on the Parthenon frieze. The Centaurs had been invited to the wedding of the leader of the Lapiths, but were inflamed by the sight of the white, hairless bodies of the Lapith women. They dragged off the bride and raped her — and her bridesmaids and page boys, too. In the ensuing fight a Lapith king was killed, and so began a feud that lasted for generations.
As bones thickened, the animal world began to feel its weight. Creation grew tired and animals grew vicious, as they had to struggle to survive. As humanity continued to fall, so too did nature. It became red in tooth and claw. Lions and wolves began to attack humans. Plants grew thorns to scratch and make the gathering of fruit difficult, and poisonous plants evolved, like wolfsbane.
The Parthenon frieze also records battles against the Amazons, a race of warrior women, who were the first to ride horses into battle. An Amazon had to kill a man before she was allowed to marry. Wearing armour of fur and carrying shields in a half-moon shape, their cavalry scythed down row upon row of foot soldiers. They were magnificent, and they represented a new form of human behaviour, because hard on the heels of the possibility of death had come the possibility of killing and of murder. Cut us and we would bleed. Cut us hard or often enough and we would die. Some humans began to delight in this. The Book of Enoch describes how the surface of the earth became covered with warring armies, and says that ‘human flesh itself had become perverse’.
Because of the encasing, bony skull and the enmeshing of the organs of spiritual perception, humans were now shut off not only from the gods ranged above them, but also from each other. A shadow was falling over human relations. It became possible for one centre of consciousness to believe itself cut off from another. ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ asked Cain, who represents the evolution of the new form of consciousness. This question would have meant nothing to Adam and Eve, who were like branches on the same tree.
In the same way that we would be overwhelmed by the spirit worlds if they were not filtered out, if there were no filter on empathy we would feel everyone’s pain as our own and so be completely overwhelmed by the suffering of others. Without a degree of isolation no human could experience him or herself as an individual, no one could feel the burning fire in the forehead that drove Cain onwards. But of course there were pitfalls in this…
History shows that humans have a horror of humans with other forms of consciousness, which they often find hard to tolerate. Sometimes they feel the need to eradicate it from the face of the earth. We need only think of the treatment by Europeans of the Aztecs, the near genocide of the Aborigines of Australia or the attempt to wipe out gypsies by the Nazis. Later we will see that since the time of Moses, the Jews have often been at the forefront of forging new forms of consciousness.
Humans were now free to make mistakes, to choose the bad and to enjoy it. It was no longer the case that humans received all their spiritual nourishment from the milky sap-filled breasts of Mother Earth. The natural law and the moral law were no longer the same thing.
The earth grew colder, harder and more dangerous in many different ways. People struggled to survive and would sometimes find themselves stretched to the limits of endurance. They discovered that the road ahead would always be fraught with the danger of death, but unless they took that road they would die anyway. From now on they would have to put at risk what they valued most or they would lose it. Beyond a certain point, there is no return. That point, they discovered, must be reached.
They discovered uncomfortable things about themselves, too — that they had become brutalized by this new world, and had grown a hard, protective carapace of habit. To break open this carapace and expose the sensitive part of themselves, the better part that brought them fully alive again, was a bloody and painful process that few could face.
The world became darker, a place of paradox where opposites meet and where it is painful to be human, a world calling out for heroism.
THE LARGEST AND MOST TERRIFYING OF the monstrous, progeny of Saturn came last. Typhon emerged out of the sea, heading straight for Olympus, spitting fire from his mouth and blocking out the sun with his bat-like wings. He had the head of an ass, and when he emerged from the sea, the gods saw that below the waist he was nothing but a coiling mass of thousands of snakes. Zeus tried to fell him with thunderbolts, but Typhon only shrugged them aside. As Typhon bore down upon him, Zeus then snatched the flint scythe that Cronos had used to castrate Uranos. But the monster’s snake-like limbs wrapped themselves around the limbs of Zeus, holding them fast and snatching the scythe from him. Then keeping the king of the gods pinned down, Typhon cut out all his sinews. Zeus is immortal and could not be killed, but without his sinews he was completely helpless.
Typhon took the sinews away with him and retired to a cave to recuperate from his own wounds. Apollo and Pan then emerged from the shadows and hatched a plan. They went to find Cadmus, the dragon-slaying hero, who was wandering the earth looking for his sister Europa. She had been carried away by Zeus, disguised as a white bull. Now Apollo and Pan promised Cadmus that if he helped them, his quest would be over.
Pan gave Cadmus his pipes, and, disguised as a shepherd, the hero went to play for the wounded Typhon. Never having heard music before, Typhon was entranced by this strange new sound. Cadmus told him that it was nothing compared to the music he could make with a lyre, but sadly the sinews on his lyre were broken. Typhon handed over the sinews of Zeus, and Cadmus told him he needed to go back to his shepherd’s hut to string his lyre. So it was that Zeus regained his sinews and was able to surprise the monster, overpower him and bury him under Mount Etna.
The important point to note here is that Zeus was only saved with the help of a hero. The gods now needed humans.
THE MYTHS OF THE GREEK HEROES — Cadmus, Hercules, Theseus and Jason — are some of the most famous stories in human history. It might seem as if they are entirely missing from the biblical account, but according to the ancient tradition preserved in the secret societies Cadmus is to be identified with Enoch, the first human in Hebrew tradition to whom the gods turn for help.
The Old Testament contains only a few enigmatic words on Enoch. Genesis 5.21-24. ‘And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah, And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years and begat sons and daughters; And all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years; And Enoch walked with God and he was not: for God took him.’
There is little to go on here but, as we have already seen, there is a literary tradition about Enoch in Hebrew literature, including, as we have seen, some books which are widely quoted in the New Testament. In one of these, the Book of Jubilees, Enoch is described as discovering the writings of the Watchers, but this is a clumsy translation. What is meant is that he discovered, which is to say invented, language itself.
Hebrew tradition presents Enoch as a strange figure. His shining countenance was uncomfortable to look at and he was evidently an uncomfortable presence. In this he may remind us of the Jesus of the Gospels, captivating vast crowds but feeling that he wants to withdraw in order to be alone with the great spiritual beings who are showing themselves to him.
In solitude Enoch was able to commune with the gods and angels with a clarity that humankind was fast losing.
Initially Enoch would spend one day teaching the multitude, then spend three days alone. Then he spent only one day a week, then one day a month and finally one day a year. The crowds yearned for his return, but when he did so his face shone so brightly it was so uncomfortable for them to look at that they had to avert their eyes.
What was Enoch doing on his solitary vigils? We will see repeatedly that great turning points in history are caused by two types of thought. First, turning points arise when great thinkers like Socrates, Jesus Christ and Dante think for the first time something that nobody has ever thought before. Second, turning points arise when thoughts are set down and inscribed indelibly, because they preserve some ancient wisdom that is in danger of being lost forever.
The generation of Jared, Enoch’s father, had been the last to experience an uninterrupted vision of the successive waves or generations of gods, angels and spirits emanating from the mind of God. What Enoch was preserving in the first language and the first stone monuments, the oldest stone circles, was this vision of the hierarchies of spiritual beings ranged above. Enoch is one of the great figures in the secret history of the world because he gave a complete account of what we might call, in today’s terms, the ecosystem of the spirit worlds. For this, he is remembered not only as Cadmus in the Greek tradition, but as Idris in the Arabian tradition and Hermes Trismegistus in the esoteric Egyptian tradition. He knew that, just as thought processes weaken health, language weakens memory. He also looked forward to an approaching catastrophe which would destroy everything made by mankind, except what he carried in his head and the sturdiest stone monuments.
He memorialized the heavenly hierarchies not only in stone monuments but in the invention of language itself. Because according to the secret doctrine all language originated with the giving of names to the heavenly bodies.
Indeed, the earliest art, such as is found at the famous caves at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain is likewise really a depiction of these same heavenly bodies. These heavenly bodies are the thoughts of the great cosmic mind, weaving through everything in the cosmos. Language and art now enabled humans to appropriate these cosmic thoughts in some way and to make them their own.
Enoch retreated further and further into the mountains, where the ground was inhospitable and the weather stormy. Fewer and fewer were able to follow him. He said: ‘And my eyes saw the secrets of the lightning and of thunder, and the secrets of clouds and the dew, and there I saw from whence they proceed and where they come from to soak the Earth. And there I saw closed chambers out of which the winds are divided, and the chamber out of which came the mist and the cloud that has hung over the earth from its beginning. And I saw the chambers out of which come the Sun and the Moon, where they go to.’
The Book of Enoch relates that in his final, ecstatic vision he was given a tour of the heavens, of the different spheres of heaven and the different orders of angels who live there and the whole history of the cosmos.
Finally, Enoch addressed the last ragged band of followers who had been able to keep up with him on his mountain trek. As he was speaking they looked up and saw a horse descend from the sky in a whirlwind. Enoch mounted the horse and rode into the sky.
WHAT THIS STORY OF ENOCH’S ASCENSION into heaven tells us is that he did not die as humans do — because he was not properly human. Like the other demi-gods and heroes of Greek tradition, Enoch/Cadmus was an angel occupying the body of a human.
The stories of Hercules, Theseus and Jason are too well known to need retelling here, but aspects of them have special significance for the secret history.
In the stories of the man-god Hercules we see just how deeply into matter humankind had fallen. Hercules wanted to be left alone to get on with his material life, to enjoy worldly pleasures — getting drunk, feasting, brawling — but he was repeatedly interrupted by his duty to follow his spiritual destiny. A stumbling, bungling, sometimes laughable figure, Hercules was torn between opposing cosmic forces.
Ovid also shows how, as the gods withdrew, Eros began to make mischief. Hercules was hag-ridden by desire as much as by the spirits who try to control him.
Today if we fall in love with a beautiful person, we may well see beauty as a sign of great spiritual wisdom. When we look into beautiful eyes, we may perhaps hope to find there the very secret of life itself. The story of Hercules’s love for Deianira, Ariadne’s love for Theseus, or Jason’s love for Medea, show that the spiritual connection between people was already becoming clouded. It was now possible to gaze into the eyes of a beauty and be deceived about what you saw there. Sexuality had become tricky.
The danger of delusion was made worse, by the love of delusion. What is best for me and what is worst for me, the thing I most ought to do and the thing I most ought not to do, look very much alike. In my heart of hearts I may know which is which — but then a spirit of perversity makes me want to choose wrongly. Great psychic perturbation always surrounds great beauty.
The twelve labours of Hercules show him moving through a series of trials each set for him by the successive spirits who rule the constellations. It is a series of trials which all humans take, and by and large they take them unwittingly, like Hercules. The life of Hercules, then, illustrates the pain of being a man. He is Everyman, trapped in a cycle of pain.
To modern sensibility the fact of a story’s being allegorical makes it less likely to be an accurate depiction of real events. Modern writers try to drain their texts of meaning, to flatten them out in order to make them more naturalistic.
To the ancients, who believed that every single thing that happened on earth was guided by the motions of the stars and planets, the more a narrative brought out these ‘poetic’ patterns, the truer and more realistic the text.
So, it may be tempting to view the journeys into the Underworld made by Hercules, Theseus and Orpheus as mere metaphor. It is true that on one level their adventures represent the beginning of humanity’s coming to terms with the reality of death. But as we try to imagine the adventures underground of Hercules, Theseus and the others, we must not imagine these to be purely internal or mental journeys such as we might contemplate today. When they battled with monsters and demons, they were confronting forces that infested their own beings, the corrupted human flesh, the dark labyrinth of the human brain. But they were also fighting real monsters of flesh and blood.
IF WE COMPARE THE STORY OF THESEUS and the Minotaur with a much earlier myth such as Perseus and the Gorgon Medusa, we can see that by the time of Theseus the rate of metamorphosis seems to have slowed down. In the Perseus story every episode involves supernatural powers or magical transformation. On the other hand, the bull-man Minotaur is apparently a rare survivor or straggler from an earlier epoch.
THE LAST ADVENTURE THAT THE demi-gods and heroes took together should also be interpreted as history. Wars were fought to try to steal the ‘inner sanctum’ knowledge of rival tribes, and on one level Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece was an example of just such a raid.
Isaac Newton revealed some of the secret wisdom of his brotherhood when he showed that the quest for the Fleece, like the labours of Hercules, shows the progress of the sun though the signs of the zodiac. What he did not reveal, though he undoubtedly would have been aware of it, was that the Fleece represents animal spirit that has been totally purified by catharsis, so that it shines like gold.
Curled round the tree is a snake that intends to prevent Jason from taking the Fleece. The snake is a descendant of the Luciferic serpent that originally worked this corruption into the physiology of humankind, coiled around the tree in the Garden of Eden.
But if Jason can wrest the Fleece from him, he will win great powers for himself. He will be able to ask his spirit to leave his body at will, to communicate freely with gods and angels like the people of earlier epochs. He will be able to control his own physiology, influence the minds of others telepathically, even transform matter.
So the text of Jason’s quest by Apollonius should be read as a manual of initiation as well as a true historical account. We will see later how alchemists of the Middle Ages and later Newton himself acted on this insight.
IF YOU LOOK AT THIS PERIOD OF ENOCH, Hercules and Jason with the eye of science, you will see none of the great events that have been described in this chapter. You will not see heroes or monsters arising from the sea or phantasmal deities like Zeus or black magic causing the fall of empires. You will see only wind and rain on a dreary, natural landscape whose only human features are at best some fairly unimpressive dwellings and primitive stone tools.
But perhaps science only shows us what happened on the surface. Perhaps more important things were happening underneath? What the secret history preserves is a memory of subjective experience, of the great experiences that transformed the human psyche during this period. So which is more real? Which tells us more about the reality of being human in this period, the scientific one or the esoteric one encoded in the ancient myths?
Might there be levels of truth or reality in today’s events that are missed by the science-oriented common-sense consciousness we use to navigate our way through traffic jams, supermarkets and e-mails?