by Mark Booth
We think of the twelve constellations of the zodiac following in a sequence according to months of the year, Aries followed by Taurus, then Gemini and so on. In the larger cycle measured by the appearances of these constellations at the spring equinox, the constellations move ‘backwards’, Gemini is followed by Taurus, then Aries and so on.
This phenomenon is known as precession. There is some dispute among academics as to when the ancients first became aware of it. The breakthrough book on this subject was Hamlet’s Mill, written by MIT Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Professor of Science at Frankfurt University, and published in the late 1950s. Tremendously erudite, it began a process of rediscovering an astronomical dimension of myths that had long been forgotten outside the secret societies. Their thesis is that one of the stories central to all mythology, indeed all literature from Oedipus Rex to Hamlet, the story of the dispossessed son who defeats his uncle to regain his father’s throne, is a description of an astronomical event: of one precessional epoch succeeding another.
But Hamlet’s Mill provides an essentially static model. It shows that precession is encoded on one particular archetype, not how the succession of ruling constellations allows us to organize different layers of myth in their proper chronological sequence.
Let us now look at this sequence in terms of the historical reality that lies behind the myths of Jupiter and the other gods, according to esoteric tradition.
Because we have been looking at history as it has been remembered in myths, particularly the myths of the gods of Olympus, we have naturally been picturing for ourselves anatomically modern humans. However, we should continue to bear in mind that these myths represent what these things would have looked like to the eye of the imagination. But to a physical eye, if any such had existed, it would all have looked very different.
Because what these imaginative pictures represent is the beginning and development of primitive life-forms.
If the age of the first marine life was marked by the rulership of the planet Jupiter, then in terms of the precession of the constellations it was marked by Pisces. When the sun first began to rise in the constellation of Pisces, a new form condensed out of the semi-liquid substance on the earth’s surface. This was the earliest embryonic form of the fish — somewhat like a modern jellyfish.
The ancients conceived of this evolutionary impulse as a god. If primitive life on earth — the life that would eventually evolve into human life — took on a primitive fish form, that was because a god took on this form and, as it were, pulled life on earth with him.
In Egypt this miraculous event, the birth of animal life, was known as the birth of Horus, and the earliest representations of Horus, like those of Jupiter, were half-man, half-fish.
So we again see that the Greeks and Egyptians, like the Greeks and the Hebrews, worshipped the same god in different cultural clothing.
The next precessional age was the first Age of Aquarius. This was the era of the evolution of amphibians, giant floating creatures, somewhat like the modern dolphins but with webbed limbs and lantern-like foreheads. This lantern was the pineal gland; protruding from the top it still holds in some reptiles, such as the Tuatara species of lizard, from New Zealand.
The ‘Lantern of Osiris’ is an ancient record of this late vegetable protuberance from the animal form.
The ‘lantern’ was still these proto-human creatures’ main organ of perception. Sensitive to warmth and coolness in other living beings, both in the vicinity and in the distance, the lantern could intuit their inner nature. These proto-humans could intuit, too, the nature of plants, assessing their suitability as food or medicine — in the way that some animals can. And because the laws of natural growth were not yet completely fixed, humans could also speak to plants in a way which might, as the ancient sagas of the Jews have it, make ‘a tree yield fruit or ears of wheat grow as tall as the cedars of Lebanon’. We must imagine the speech made by these amphibian-humans as sounding something like the bellow of a stag.
Lantern-headed humans were later idealized as unicorns. The Earth goddess still told them what to do clairvoyantly, so that the natural law and the moral law were the same thing. This historical truth is beautifully portrayed in the famous tapestry in the Musée de Cluny in Paris, where the unicorn lays its head in the lap of a virgin.
Our collective memory of the unicorn is, of course, of a hunted creature. Humans might seek sanctuary in the lap of Mother Earth, but the world was becoming a dangerous place. We saw that desire had originally existed independently of humankind, and desires continued to exist independently, unintegrated into the proto-human form. These desires running wild were the dragons of mythology. They terrorized the rest of creation.
As the marshy surface of the earth began to harden into something like dry land, the next stage of the development of human form began. This was the beginning of the Age of Capricorn, when proto-humans developed calves and limbs to crawl on to land to pursue their burgeoning animal desires.
According to the ancient wisdom it was the arrival of Mars that led to the evolution of warm-blooded animals. Mars arrived at the time of the transition from the lizard-like amphibians of the Age of Capricorn to the land animals of the Age of four-footed Sagittarius.
The iron of Mars yielded red blood and provided the conditions that would make egotism possible — and not only in the sense of a healthy drive to survive. As the earth continued to harden and become denser and drier, it shrank further, with the result that one being could only prosper at another’s expense. It became part of the human condition that I can hardly move without harming, even killing, another living creature. Because of Mars there is also a cruel part of human nature that rejoices in this, exults in forcing a fellow human being to submit, and experiences euphoria when it is dominant over others, when it is able to exercise willpower without restraint.
As proto-humans became wholly land creatures, it also became necessary to create new ways for humans to communicate. It was as the result of the influence of Mercury that the thorax evolved. Mercury also fashioned leaner and fitter limbs, the better for humans to move towards each other and live and work together. He was, of course, the messenger and scribe of the gods, known as Hermes to the Greeks and Thoth to the Egyptians.
He was also the god of tricks and thieving.
Zodiacs from Egypt, India and Greece showing an extraordinary similarity of imagery.
THIS CHAPTER HAS BEEN A COMMENTARY on Genesis, taking into account parallel traditions, such as the Egyptian and the Greek. This way of interpreting or decoding the Bible surfaced among the Neoplatonists and early Cabalists and was exposed by groups like the Rosicrucians. Much of what we have been considering can be found, for example, in the seventeenth-century writings of Robert Fludd (highly influential on Milton’s Paradise Lost) and, slightly later, Jacob Boehme’s commentary on Genesis, already mentioned, Mysterium Magnum. The work of elucidating these commentaries and reframing the wisdom of the Rosicricians in modern times was carried out by the great Austrian scholar and initiate Rudolf Steiner, whose Anthroposophical Society perhaps has the best claim to be a genuine survivor of the true Rosicrucian stream.
However, even outside the esoteric tradition, it is acknowledged that the ancient civilizations around the world showed remarkable agreement when it came to the images associated with the sequence of the constellations of the zodiac. This agreement is all the more remarkable, you might think, when you consider how little the arrangements of the stars as seen from the surface of the earth suggest these images.
The reality is that the ancients saw in this sequence of the constellations the history of the evolution of humanity and the world, as it was collectively remembered and understood. For them the history of the world was written in the stars.
The head of the Medusa, on a Greek gem. The night sky was a living history, because the heavenly bodies were seen as the material bodies of spiritual being
s or gods. The ancients believed they had the ability to communicate with these beings and felt their influence. For instance, it is no coincidence that the star Algol — associated with the head of the Gorgon Medusa in Greek tradition — was felt to be a malignant influence in all the cultures of the ancient world. The Hebrew astrologers named it after the dark spectre Lilith, and even before this Hebrews of the desert had called it the Head of Satan, while the Chinese named it by a phrase meaning ‘piled up corpses’. Diverse cultures were experiencing the same spiritual reality when they looked up at the same area of the sky.
THEREFORE, WHAT IS GENERALLY REGARDED as a modern idea that put paid to ancient superstition is in fact itself an ancient idea. An understanding of the ordered evolution of the species originated thousands of years before Darwin set sail in HMS Beagle.
This secret history was encoded in the zodiac, written down by initiates such as Jacob Boehme and Robert Fludd, and preserved into modern times by esoteric groups such as the Freemasons and various Rosicrucian groups, but always and very deliberately in a way that was hard for outsiders to understand.
Then in the nineteenth century, when the sacred texts of Hinduism were first translated into European languages and openly published, much esoteric knowledge which had previously been carefully managed and controlled, now leaked into the public consciousness. Fascination with these ideas also led to a renewed interest in the Cabala and other Western traditions and helped fire the craze for spiritualism. Many of the great intellectuals of the period became interested in trying to apply scientific methodology to spiritual and spiritualist phenomena. In 1874 Charles Darwin attended séances with the novelist George Eliot. Darwin’s rival A.E. Wallace took part in several controlled experiments into spiritualism, believing its phenomena could be measured and verified just as well as other types of phenomena were measured and verified by the other sciences. As we shall see later, many leading intellectuals, including scientists, believed that there was something in esoteric philosophy, and that science and the supernatural would eventually come together.
Friedrich Max Müller was a young German scholar, employed by the East India Company in the 1840s to translate the Rig Veda, before being awarded a professorial chair at Oxford. He went on to translate the sacred books of the East in fifty volumes, making oriental esoteric doctrines widely available for the first time. He was also very friendly with Darwin with whom he kept up a regular correspondence. The Origin of Species was published in 1859.
IN THE SECRET HISTORY THE EVOLUTION of the species was not the even progress that science supposes. There were twists and turns that have important implications for the way we understand our own physiology and mental make-up. There were dead ends, false starts and even deliberate attempts at sabotage.
Snakes, spiders, beetles and parasitic creatures, on the other hand, were formed under the malignant influence of Dark Side of the Moon.
According to the secret doctrine the animals we know today evolved into the forms we are familiar with today, influenced by the stars and planets, lions by the constellation of Leo, for instance, bulls by the constellation of Taurus. Centaurs, mermaids, sirens, fauns and satyrs were predecessors of anatomically modern humans, representing the impulse to create anatomically modern humans in various transitional stages.
The cosmic plan was that all the world’s biological forms would gradually be incorporated into humankind, which was intended to be the crown of all creation. As the gods led humanity closer and closer to human anatomy as we know it, they assumed the part-animal, part-human forms remembered by the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Persians and the Babylonians, until they finally assumed anatomically perfect forms remembered by the last great civilizations of the ancient world, the Greeks and Romans. For example, the goddess of the planet Venus was cow-headed Hathor and the god of the planet Mercury was dog-headed Anubis on the walls of Egyptian temples. According to the secret tradition, these same gods, the same living beings, were remembered by the classical Greeks in a later, more evolved form.
The ancient texts describing this era also lay great emphasis on its giants. The author of the Book of Enoch writing in the Hebrew tradition and Plato writing in the Greek tradition agree that in these early pre-Flood times there arose a race of giants. In fact, traditions of an antediluvian race of giants can be found all over the world from the Danavas and Daityas of India to the Miaotse of China. In a Dialogue between Midas the Phrygian and Silenus that has survived in fragmentary form from the time of Alexander the Great, Silenus says that ‘men grew to double the size of the tallest men in his time, and they lived to twice the age’. In the secret tradition, the gigantic Bamyan statues recently destroyed in Afghanistan were not three giant statues of buddhas but three life-sized statues of giants of 173, 120 and 30 feet high. The drapery that made them look like buddhas was made of plaster, said to have been added to the stone later. In the nineteenth century it was recorded that the locals believed them to be statues of the Miaotse, the giants of Chinese tradition. The famous statues of Easter Island are also supposed to record the real heights of historical giants.
Then there were the dead-end freaks — the one-legged men, the bat-men, the insect-men and the men with tails. Manetho, an Egyptian historian of the third century BC, also recorded traditions of the progency of the Watchers, writing ‘they… brought double-winged human beings, also others with four wings and two faces, human beings with one body and two heads, still other human beings had thighs of goats and horns upon their heads; others had the feet of horses behind and men in front; there were also others said to have been man-headed bulls and four-headed dogs, whose tails emerged like fish-tails from their backs… and other monsters, such as all kinds of dragon-like beings.’
This, then, is the era remembered in the great myths and finds echoes in great fantasy literature, such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis. This fantasy literature represents a welling up into the present of a collective memory of this period when humans lived on the earth with giants, dragons, mermaids, centaurs, unicorns, fauns, satyrs. Legions of dwarves, sylphs, nymphs, dryads and other lesser spiritual beings served the gods and humans rubbed shoulders with them, fought battles with them and sometimes fell in love with them.
IN THE SECRET HISTORY, THE LAST CREATURES to incarnate before humans were the apes. They came about because some human spirits rushed into incarnation too early, before human anatomy had been perfected.
In the secret history, therefore, it is not right to say that humans are descended from apes, rather that apes represent a degeneration of humankind.
Of course none of the fabulous creatures have left any trace in the fossil record. So why have the great men and women of history who were initiates of the secret societies believed in them? Why should any intelligent person even begin to toy with the idea?
6. THE ASSASSINATION OF THE GREEN KING
Isis and Osiris • The Cave of the Skull • The Palladium
IN THE PERIOD DESCRIBED BY THE MYTHS of Olympus, gods walked among humans. But the history of the last god to rule as king of the earth is recorded in its fullest version in Egyptian rather than Greek tradition. The Egyptians unquestioningly believed that their most important god had once walked among them, led them into battle and ruled them wisely and well.
Herodotus described a visit to the shrine where Osiris was said to be buried. ‘Gigantic stone obelisks stand in the courtyard and there is a circular artificial lake next to it. It is on this lake at night that the Egyptians act out the Mysteries, the Black Rite that celebrates the death and resurrection of a being whose name I dare not speak. I know what goes on but… say no more.’
Fortunately we can supplement this teasing account with the history of Osiris as told by Herodotus’s near-contemporary Plutarch, an initiate priest of the Oracle at Delphi. In the following I have used Plutarch’s account as a basis, weaving in additional material from other sources…
We have to start b
y imagining a world at war, ravaged by roaming monsters and wild animals. Osiris was a great hunter, a ‘Beast Master’ — remembered as Orion the Hunter in Greek mythology and Herne the Hunter in Norse mythology — and a great warrior. He cleared the land of predatory beasts and defeated invading armies.
But this great warrior’s downfall came not in combat with monsters or on the battlefield, but because of the enemy within.
Returning from another military campaign, Osiris was welcomed back by cheering crowds, by the populace who loved him. The reign of Osiris, though constantly under attack from outside the country, would be remembered as a golden age. And it was an age of domestic as well as civil bliss. His name is connected with insemination, ‘ourien’ meaning semen, and what we today call the belt of Orion is a euphemism. In ancient times it was a penis that became erect as the new year progressed. These things should alert us to the fact that there is a strong sexual current in the history that follows.
Osiris accepted an invitation from his brother Seth to a gala dinner to celebrate victory.
Some said Osiris had been sleeping with beautiful dark-skinned Nepthys, wife of Seth and sister of his own wife, Isis. Did this provide Seth with a motive for murder? He may not have needed one. The clue to Seth’s animosity is contained in his name. He was an envoy of Satan.
After dinner Seth announced a game. He had made a beautiful chest, something like a coffin but fashioned out of cedar and inlaid with gold, silver, ivory and lapis lazuli. Whoever fitted most neatly into this chest, he said, could take it away.
One by one the guests tried but they were too fat, to thin, too tall, too short. Finally Osiris stepped in and lay down. ‘It fits!’ he cried. ‘Fits me like the skin I was born in!’
