The Secret History of the World

by Mark Booth

  Medieval depiction of Jehovah as a war god.

  The god of reflection was the god of the great reflector in the sky — the moon. In all ancient cultures the moon regulated not only fertility but thought.

  In fact the initiate priests believed that in order to create the conditions in which human thought would be possible, the cosmos had had to arrange itself in a particular way. In order for human reflection to be possible, the sun and the moon had had to arrange themselves in the sky so that the moon reflected the light of the sun down to earth.

  They also believed that this arrangement in the sky had to be reproduced on a smaller scale inside the human head. There the pineal gland represented the sun, and the gland which could modify and reflect on the visions that the pineal gland received from the spirit worlds was the pituitary gland.

  This might seem one of the madder things that anyone has ever believed, but to the ancients it corresponded to their everyday, lived experience. They tracked small changes in their consciousness, which seemed to them to mutate with the changing positions of the sun and moon. Readers are invited to check their own experience to see whether their dreams are more vivid when the moon is big and full.

  If you observe oysters in a tray for a month, you will see that they wax and wane with the moon. Modern science has confirmed that the pituitary gland behaves like an oyster.

  THE GOD OF THE MOON WOULD BECOME known to the Hebrews as Jehovah and to the Muslims as Allah, the great god of thou-shalt-not.

  So at the climax of this great cosmic drama of creation, with the earth in danger of becoming a living Hell, a new force arose to meet Lucifer. Just as the seven Elohim had acted to hold Saturn/Satan in check, now one of these seven broke away to become the god of the Moon, and from there directed operations to hold Venus/Lucifer in check.

  Perseus, the wielder of the Moon-shield.

  This great cosmic battle against Venus was remembered in cultures around the world, for example in the story of Krishna’s battle with the snake-demon Kaliya, and the stories of Apollo’s battle with the Python and of Perseus combating the sexually ravenous dragon that threatened Andromeda by using his shield as a mirror.

  The Jehovah of the Old Testament is a jealous, angry and warlike god. In Hebrew tradition, Jehovah’s forces are led by Archangel Michael. As the Book of Revelation has it: ‘And there was a war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon fought against his angels… and the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent which deceiveth the whole world, he was cast out into the earth.’

  WE HAVE SEEN, THEN, THAT IN THE THIRD great act of the drama of creation, the god of the Moon won a great victory.

  So began the era of the moon. The first three epochs of the cosmos, the mineral, vegetable and animal eras — Saturn-day, Sun-day and Moon-day — are remembered in the names of the first three days of the week. These days of the week are named after these three heavenly bodies in this particular order for this reason alone.

  Here we see a sun god’s battle against a snake or dragon in an engraving taken from the painting by Raphael.

  5. THE GODS WHO LOVED WOMEN

  The Nephilim • The Genetic Engineering of Humankind • The Fish Gods • The Original History of the Origin of the Species

  WE ARE NOW ABOUT TO LOOK INTO ONE of the murkier and more shameful episodes in the history of the world. Even within the secret societies a veil is sometimes drawn.

  A priest in Babylon at the time of Alexander the Great was one of the first historians. It is clear from the few remaining fragments that Berosus, like Herodotus before him, had studied the king lists inscribed on temple walls and delved into the secret priestly archives.

  The few fragments of Berosus that survive contain teachings on the history of the origins of the earth and the sky and of the race of hermaphrodites, the pre-sexual humans who reproduced by means of parthenogenesis.

  Berosus goes on to describe how the land came to be inhabited by a primitive race. Then one day a monster emerged on the seashore, an animal called Oannes ‘… whose whole body was that of a fish; under the fish’s head he had another head with feet also below similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish’s tail. His voice and language were articulate and human; and representation of him is preserved even to this day…’

  ‘This monster was accustomed to pass the day among men, but took no food then; and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences and arts of every kind. He taught them to construct cities, to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge. He made them distinguish the seeds of the earth and showed them how to collect fruits; in short, he instructed them in everything which could soften manners and humanize their lives…’

  ‘And when the sun had set this being Oannes retired again into the sea, and passed the night in the sea, for he was amphibious… ’

  Oannes: nineteenth-century engraving taken from the walls of Nineveh — original now in the British Museum.

  ‘After this appeared other animals like Oannes…’

  Similar stories of fish gods who suddenly appear and become the teachers of mankind can be found in other traditions, for example the Indian stories about Matsya, the first avatar of Vishnu, and the stories of the ancient Phoenicians of the Dagon, who taught humankind the art of irrigation, and the ancient fish gods of the Dagon tribe in West Africa. We even know from Plutarch that the earliest representations of Zeus were of a man with a fish tail, an image which survived in Greek mythology in the form of his brother Poseidon.

  Some modern writers outside the esoteric tradition have seen in this fish imagery evidence for an alien invasion in ancient times. It’s even been suggested that the human race was genetically engineered by alien invaders, which is a good illustration of the way that esoteric traditions are misinterpreted by people trying to impose a materialistic interpretation on them.

  If our candidate for initiation had been initiated to a high enough level, he would have been taught the truth of the matter, something very like the following…

  IN GENESIS THERE IS A PASSAGE WHICH may at first not seem to refer to exactly the same fishy events, though it is also about invasion by beings from another realm:

  Genesis, 6:1-5. ‘And it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair: and they took wives which they chose… when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.’

  What on earth are we to make of this passage? The phrase here translated as ‘sons of God’ is elsewhere in the Bible a phrase used to mean angels, messengers coming down from heaven. But in this context ‘coming down’ also seems to carry with it moral opprobrium. By saying that the angels had sex with women is Genesis perhaps saying that these angels lowered themselves to participate in the material world? And perhaps they had become too enamoured with it?

  As I say, we are now trying to penetrate one of the murkier episodes in the secret history, and indeed these five verses in Genesis might well remain completely impenetrable were it not for the fact that this episode is treated rather more fully in ancient Hebrew traditions — particularly the Book of Enoch.

  This book disappeared from mainstream, exoteric history in AD 300-400, but traditions regarding its existence, its contents and teachings were preserved in Freemasonry. Then in 1773 some very tattered scripts of it were tracked down in Ethiopian monasteries by the Scottish explorer James Bruce, and in this way the old Freemasonic traditions were vindicated.

  Never part of the canon of Christian scripture as it was put together in the fourth century, the Book of Enoch was nevertheless sufficiently esteemed by writers of the New Testament for them to quote from it,
evidently viewing it as an authority with a status something like sacred scripture. It is a measure of the status of this book that Jesus Christ evidently recognized its notions of a coming kingdom and the judgement of the world. Moreover the phrase used at his Transfiguration, ‘This is my Son, the Elect One’, is meant to show that Jesus Christ is the One promised by the Book of Enoch.

  This is what the Book of Enoch has to say about the angels who loved women:

  Enoch 6.1-4. ‘And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the Angels, the children of heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: “Come, let us choose ourselves wives from among the children of men and beget us children.”… And all the others together with them took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them, and they taught them charms and enchantments… and they became pregnant.’

  Later Enoch is given a tour of the Heavens, where the rebel angels — or Watchers — ask Enoch to intercede with God on their behalf. But when Enoch tries to do so, God only repudiates them, sending Enoch back:

  ‘And go say to the Watchers, who have sent thee to intercede for them: You should intercede for men, and not men for you… ’

  The story of the rebellious angels is then retold, as it were, in God’s own words with additional details:

  Enoch 6. 15-16. ‘Wherefore have ye left the high, holy and eternal Heaven, and lain with women, and defiled yourselves with the daughters of men and taken to yourselves wives, and done like the children of the Earth, and begotten giants as your sons. And though you were spiritual beings living the eternal life, you have defiled yourselves with the blood of women, and have begotten children with the blood of flesh and blood as those also who die and perish… And now as to the Watchers who have sent thee to intercede for them, who have been aforetime in Heaven, say to them: “You have been in Heaven, but all the mysteries had not yet been revealed to you, and you knew worthless ones, and these in the hardness of your hearts you have made known to women, and through these mysteries women and men work much evil on earth.” Say to them therefore: “You have no peace.”’

  The Epistle of Jude 6:6 describes the Watchers as having ‘not kept their own appointed habitations’. A third century Christian writer, Commodorius, wrote: ‘The women who seduced the angels were of such lewdness that their seducers could not now desire to return to heaven.’

  But beyond these few, strange fragmentary hints lies a set of characters very familiar to us all.

  When the Epistle to Jude describes the Watchers as not having kept to their appointed seasons, it seems to be referring to them in some way as timekeepers. But the final, telling clue to revealing the hidden identity of these ‘fallen angels’ lies in their number, given in one of the versions the Book of Enoch as seven.

  In all traditions seven is the number of the great gods of the solar system. Again we see that the biblical narrative has encoded within it stories of the same astronomical gods as those of Greece and Rome.

  The angels who became sexually attracted to human women are none other than the gods of Olympus.

  WE HAVE SEEN THAT THE BIBLE CONTAINS encoded within it an account of creation in which key roles have been played by Saturn, earth, the sun, Venus and the moon. We have followed the story from the purely material to the vegetable to the first stirrings of animal life. The age that followed would be marked by the arrival of the gods of the solar system; Jupiter — or Zeus, as he was known to the Greeks — became the king of all the gods. The gods of Mars and Mercury would fly into view during this age too.

  The infant Jupiter had to be hidden from his father, Saturn. Mother Earth kept Jupiter on the island of Crete in a cave deep underground. Isolated from the other gods, the boy Jupiter lived on the milk of a goat-nymph and ate the honey of sacred bees.

  Mother Earth hid Jupiter in this cave because she was afraid that Saturn and the Titans, the elder sons and daughters of Saturn, would come to destroy him. She knew that the birth of Jupiter showed that the reign of Saturn was coming to an end, but the transition from one age to another is always a painful one. The old order always tries to stay on beyond its allotted time.

  The Titans were Saturn’s enforcers. They were the consciousness eaters. They wanted to swallow up the new life and create what Milton, who knew all about the secret history, called ‘a universe of Death’.

  The Titans would always be the enemies of Jupiter. They failed to kill him while he was still an infant, but they did not cease to wage war on him, sporadically and in great battles, until finally and decisively Jupiter defeated them and imprisoned them underground. There these great forces of materialism became part of the very structure of the earth, and whenever volcanoes rumbled and threatened to erupt the ancients heard their discontent.

  With the Titans imprisoned, Jupiter became for a while the undisputed ruler of Mount Olympus, king of the gods and god of a new age. He shook his magnificent locks and the whole earth trembled. He was the only god strong enough to throw the thunderbolt.

  In his masterpiece The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, the great Italian scholar and writer Roberto Calasso, who has done much to bring esoteric lore regarding the historical reality behind myths to a wider public, put it like this: ‘Olympus is a rebellion of lightness against precision.’ In other words the Olympic gods — Jupiter, Apollo, Mars, Mercury, Diana, Athena and the others — rebelled against the limitations imposed by Saturn. The Olympians flew through the air to perform magical deeds and defeat terrible monsters. It was a splendid, spectacular era that thrashes and writhes in the mind, inspiring some of history’s most imaginative art, sculpture and literature.

  But it was also somewhat sinister, an age charged with moral ambiguity. The thunderbolt of Jupiter struck through a dense fug of testosterone, the feral reek of animal passion, the fell heartlessness of animal ferocity.

  Jupiter raped Callisto and she was turned into a bear. He raped Io, turning her into a cow. He punished Lycaon for cannibalism by turning him into a wolf. Apollo’s lust for Hyacinth caused the beautiful youth to metamorphose into the flower and his rape of Daphne ended in her morphing into the laurel bush.

  We should take note that all these myths are concerned with is the proliferation of natural forms, the cramming of every square inch of our planet with the almost infinite variety of plants and animals, the biodiversity that is its great natural glory. Zeus is not moral in a sense that Moses would have recognized, but he and his fellow Olympians direct the galvanizing fecundity, the myriad creativity of the biological world.

  Telamones depicted being forced to hold up the earth in a nineteenth-century engraving of recent discoveries at Pompeii. The Telamones were Titans forced to become a part of the earth’s structure. Their progeny were earth-demons, or goblins. As late as the nineteenth century they were still feared in some remote rural regions in southern Europe. These red-eyed creatures with skin made of scales like dead grey fingernails were said to pursue you in spirit even after you had died.

  BUT WHAT OF THE STORY OF THE FISH GODS? How does that fit in?

  We have seen that many mythologies around the world tell the strange story of the arrival of the fish gods, and we have touched on the fact that even Jupiter in his earliest representations was one of them. We have seen, too, that the myths of Jupiter and the other Olympian gods are an account of the proliferation of animal forms. Bringing these two things together gives rise to an astonishing possibility.

  Could it be that the ancient myths anticipated the modern, scientific insight that the animal life that would eventually evolve into the human form began life as a fish?

  If this were true, it would be an astonishing revelation

  DARWIN’S DISCOVERY OF THE EVOLUTION of the species is one of history’s great scientific discoveries, ranked alongside Galileo’s, Newton’s and Einstein’s. Could it be that the priests of the
Mystery schools knew of the evolution of species many thousand of years earlier? We shall now discover how evidence for this claim, which may, initially at least, sound implausible, is written across the sky in blazing lights for all to see.

  We are cracking the code of the cosmos. We saw how the earliest episodes in history are to be understood in terms of the ordered creation of the solar system. One after the other Saturn, the Sun, Venus, the Moon and Jupiter joined in the work of weaving together the basic conditions that made possible the evolution of life on earth. Following this sequence has brought us to the dawn of animal life and of consciousness and the beginning of the proliferation of animal forms.

  In order to understand the history of the development of these animal forms, we must turn again to astronomy, and following on from the sequence in which the ancients believed the planets were created we turn to an interlocking sequence — the constellations of the zodiac.

  TO ANCIENTS THE FORCES OF NATURE WERE asleep during winter and then reawakened, exerting their influence anew in the spring. The constellation in which the sun rose in the spring was therefore very important to them. The sun vivified that constellation, energizing it and increasing its power to shape the world and its history.

  Because of a slight wobble in the earth as it spins on its axis, the sun seems to us to fall slowly backwards against the backdrop of stars. Over a period of some 2160 years the sun rises in the same constellation. It then moves on to the next one. We are currently in the Age of Pisces and famously awaiting the dawn of the Age of Aquarius. As constellation follows constellation, and age follows age, the symphonic variations of the Music of the Spheres signal a new movement. The cycle of animating powers, of instinctual drives sweeping through the cosmos, moves on to a new plane.