by Mark Booth
I myself have seen artefacts retrieved from the sea bed off the American Atlantic coast — the so-called Scott stones — which I am persuaded it would very difficult for technology to reproduce today, let alone eleven thousand years ago when the area in question went under the sea. In design terms the Scott stones show features which are remarkably similar to Egyptian artefacts. This is not my secret to reveal, but I hope that perhaps by the time this book is published Aaron du Val, President of the Miami Museum Egyptological Society, may have chosen to show the world what he has.
No detailed description of the events that put such artefacts under the sea has survived in the Greek myths that have come down to us, and the biblical account is characteristically brief, but these can be supplemented and illumined by accounts from other cultures, particularly the Sumerian and other Near Eastern accounts. No scholars dispute that some of these accounts from older cultures provided source material for the biblical story. Elements familiar to us from the biblical account, such as the ark, the doves and the olive branch, appeared in the earlier Sumerian account, where Noah is called Ziusudra. He appears, too, in the Mesopotamian account where he is called Atrahasis and in the Babylonian account which names him Upnapishtim. Weaving these different versions together creates an amplified version of the biblical story:
One day Noah was standing in a reed hut, when he heard a voice coming through the wall that warned him of a rainstorm that would wipe out mankind. Tear down your reed hut and build a boat, he was told. Noah and his family set about building a great vessel made out of reeds, finally daubing it with bitumen in order to make it watertight. Everything growing out of the ground, everything grazing on it, the birds of the sky, the cattle and the wild animals roaming open country, he put in. Then for six days and nights the storm blew and their boat was tossed about by the waves. The downpour, the storm and the flood overwhelmed the surface of the earth. On the seventh day, hearing the winds begin to fall, Noah opened a window and light fell on his face. The world was silent, because all humanity had been returned to clay…
The catastrophic deluge that nearly destroyed humankind is remembered every year by both the living and the dead on the Day of the Dead or Halloween. In England as late as the nineteenth century villagers would dress up as the dead, wear masks and make a mum-mumming sound with closed lips to imitate the sound made by the walking dead — hence the word ‘mummers’.
WHEN NOAH AND HIS FAMILY DISEMBARKED to set foot on dry land, something rather odd happened. ‘And Noah began to be a husbandman and he planted a vineyard, and he drank of the wine, and was drunken, and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham saw the nakedness of father and told his two brethren without.’ (Genesis 9.20-22)
It is entirely fitting that Noah should become a husbandman, because archaeology tells us that agriculture began during this period, the Neolithic. But what are we to make of the strange story of his drunken nakedness?
In order to make sense of it, we must turn to the tradition that identifies Noah with the legendary Greek figure Dionysus the Younger.
We need to disentangle two different strands of stories concerning two figures with the same name. Dionysus is the name of two distinct individuals, a god and later a demi-god. These two make very different contributions to human history in two different eras. The Dionysus who should be identified with Noah is very different from the earlier Dionysus Zagreus, the Elder Dionysus, the story of whose dismemberment we told in Chapter 6.
After the Flood, Dionysus the Younger, often depicted in a boat, travelled from Atlantis via Europe to India, with the aim of teaching the whole world the arts of agriculture, the sowing of crops, the cultivation of the vine and writing. This latter had of course been taught by Enoch, but was now in danger of being lost in the devastation brought by the Flood.
Dionysus and his followers carried the thyrsus, a pole wrapped with ivy-like snakes and topped with a pine cone like a pineal gland. This shows that Dionysus also taught the secret evolution of the human form, the development of the spine topped by the pineal gland we have just been considering.
The fauns and satyrs and the whole rout of Dionysus represent stragglers from Atlantis. They are the last remnant of a process of metamorphosis of forms. The curious story in Genesis of Noah’s sons uncovering his genitals while he was drunkenly sleeping also refers to the petering out of this process. We saw that the genitals were the last parts of human anatomy to evolve into their present form, and his sons were curious to find out about their origins. Were they the sons of a human or a demi-god, a man or an angel?
Noah’s ark. Legend has it that the only animal that missed the ark was the unicorn, which therefore became extinct. This is an obvious depiction of the diminishing of the powers of the Third Eye. As the waters of the deluge closed over Atlantis, the era of Imagination ended. The subconscious was formed.
Dionysus the Younger was educated by the satyr Silenus.
Stories about this individual in the Greek and Hebrew traditions — Dionysus the Younger and Noah — are both connected with the grape and intoxication. We have already met followers of Dionysus. The wild and savage maenads tore Orpheus limb from limb with tooth and nail. In a state of ecstatic drunkenness the maenads were possessed by a god.
PRIMITIVE PEOPLES HAVE ALWAYS LIVED in tune with the vegetable part of their natures. One of the results of this is that they have understood how different plants have different effects on human biology, physiology and consciousness.
What we see in these Greek and Hebrew traditions of the beginnings of agriculture is a depiction of a new, more thoughtful form of consciousness. What greater outward symbol of the impact of orderly human thought on nature could there be than fields of wheat?
The task of the leaders of humanity would now be to forge the new thought-directed consciousness.
In the Zend-Avesta, the sacred literature of Zoroastrianism, the Noah/Dionysius figure is called Yima. He tells the people how to build a settlement — a ‘var’- a fenced-in place, a kind of stronghold ‘taking in men, cattle, dogs, birds and blazing fires’. He instructs people that when they arrive at the place where they are to settle, they must ‘drain off water, put up boundary posts, then make houses from posts, clay walls, matting and fences’. He urges his people to ‘expand the earth by tilling it’. There was to be ‘neither suppression nor baseness, neither dullness nor violence, neither poverty nor defeat, no cripples, no long teeth, no giants, neither any of the characteristics of the evil spirit’.
The invasion of Ceylon by Rama, the ‘shepherd of the peoples’.
Again, we see an anxiety about a reversion to anomalous forms of the previous epoch such a giants.
The Greek epic poet Nonnus described Dionysus’s migration to India, and the same journey is also described in the Zend-Avesta as ‘the march of the Ram on India’. But the fullest description comes in the great Indian epic, the Ramayana.
Something that is clear from these accounts is that the great migrations eastwards were not moving into uninhabited territories. While the peoples of Atlantis had been all but eliminated, the emigrants travelled to new lands still occupied by aboriginal tribes. We see Dionysius’s reaction to what he found in these new lands in his forbidding of cannibalism and human sacrifice. Native priests would sometimes keep enormous snakes or pterodactyls, rare survivors from antediluvian times, which were worshipped as gods and fed the flesh of captives. The Ramayana describes how Rama and his followers suddenly invaded these temples with torches, driving out both priests and monsters. He would appear without warning among enemies, sometimes with bow drawn, sometimes defenceless except that he was able to petrify them with his pale lotus-blue gaze.
Rama was dispossessed, a nomad. His kingdom lay beneath the seas. He did not live the life of a king, but camped out in the wild with his beloved Sita.
Then Sita was abducted by the evil magician Ravana. The Ramayana tells of the completion of Rama’s journey with the conquest of India and the taking of Cey
lon, the last refuge of Ravana. Rama formed a bridge over the sea between mainland India and Ceylon with the help of an army of monkeys, which is to say hominids, the descendants of human spirits who had rushed into incarnation too early and were doomed to die out. Finally, after a battle that lasted thirteen days, Rama killed Ravana by showering fire down on him.
We might see Rama as a Neolithic Alexander the Great. Following the conquest of India, he had the world at his feet. He also had a dream.
He was walking in the forests on a moonlit night, when a beautiful woman came towards him. Her skin was as white as snow and she was wearing a magnificent crown. He didn’t recognize her at first, but then she said, ‘I am Sita, take this crown and rule the world with me.’ She knelt humbly and offered him a glittering crown — the kingship which had been denied him. But just then his guardian angel whispered in his ear: ‘If you place that crown on your head, you will see me no more. And if you clasp that woman in your arms, she will experience such happiness that it will kill her instantly. But if you refuse to love her she will live out the rest of her life free and happy on earth, and your invisible spirit will rule over her.’ As Rama made up his mind, Sita disappeared amongst the trees. They would never see each other again, leading the remainder of their lives apart.
Stories about Sita’s later life suggest it was by no means obvious that she was as happy as the guardian angel had promised. In its ambiguity and uncertainty there is something very modern about this story.
We can also see in it a paradox that lies at the heart of the human condition. All love, if it is true love, involves a letting go.
With his prowess with the bow, his handsome face, blue eyes and lion chest, Rama is in many ways like the heroes that Greek myths describe, such as Hercules, but in the story of Rama there is, as I say, something new. Hercules was required to choose between virtue and happiness, and unsurprisingly chose the former. Rama’s story, on the other hand, contains an element of moral surprise. The reader of the story will probably agree with Sita as she argues with Rama that it is only right and fitting that he now accept the crown he has been cheated of since birth. But then Rama’s surprising choices — deciding not to take the crown that is rightfully his, not to marry the woman he loves — these dilate the moral imagination and quicken the moral intelligence. The story of Rama encourages us to see beyond the conventional, to imagine ourselves into the mind of others and also, ultimately, to think for ourselves. Esoteric thinking has always sought to undermine and subvert conventional, habitual, mechanical modes of thought. Later we will see how storytellers, dramatists and novelists steeped in esoteric thought, from Shakespeare and Cervantes to George Eliot and Tolstoy, would quicken the moral imagination, one of the distinguishing characteristics of the very greatest literature. If great art and literature give a sense of patterns, of laws operating beyond conventional thought, great esoteric art brings these laws near to the surface of consciousness.
The story of Rama also brings us back to the notion that according to the secret history the cosmos has been formed in order to create the conditions in which people could experience free thought and free will. Rama could have enforced what is good and right on his people by ruling them with a rod of iron, but he instead let them decide for themselves. Rama is thus the archetype of the exiled or ‘Secret King’ or ‘Secret Philosopher’ who influences the course of history not from the throne but by mingling incognito among the people. Rama tried to help humans to evolve freely.
Rama is a demi-god, but declines to be ruler of the world. No longer will gods or even demi-gods sit on thrones in bodies of flesh and bone.
AT JOURNEY’S END THE EMIGRANTS FOUNDED Shambala, a great spiritual fortress in the mountainous region of Tibet. The roof of the world, Tibet is the world’s biggest, highest plateau surrounded by high mountain ranges. Some traditions say the Tibetan population is directly descended from the people of Atlantis.
Some say that Shambala can only be reached via an underground tunnel, others that it exists in another dimension into which a secret portal opens somewhere in the region. St Augustine was the greatest Christian theologian after St Paul and, like St Paul, was an initiate of a Mystery school. He wrote about the place where Enoch and the saints lived, a terrestrial paradise so high up that the Flood could not reach it. Emmanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish theologian, diplomat and inventor — and also the leading esoteric Freemason of the age — wrote that ‘the “Lost Word” must be sought among the sages of Tibet and Tartary’. Anne-Catherine Emmerich, the nineteenth-century German Catholic mystic wrote similarly of a Mount of Prophets where live Enoch, Elijah and others who did not die in the ordinary way but ‘ascended’, and where unicorns which survived the Flood may also be found.
From the mountain fastnesses of Tibet flowed streams of living spirituality which joined together, gathered force, depth and width and became a mighty river like the Ganges, feeding the whole of India.
IN THIS HISTORY OF THE WORLD WRITTEN in the stars, the next era began as the sun began to rise in the constellation of Cancer in 7227 BC and the first great Indian civilization, the earliest and most deeply spiritual of post-Flood civilizations, was founded. The founders felt little for the newly created material world, which they saw as ‘maya’, an illusion threatening to obscure the higher realities of the spirit worlds. They looked back with nostalgia to the time before this veil of matter had been drawn between humankind and the spiritual hierarchies.
The icy baths and other forms of self-torture of the ascetics can be looked on as part of the effort to stay awake to the spirit worlds. A conscious effort was made by them, while the veil was still relatively translucent, to remember the lineaments of the spirit world, and to impress them indelibly on human consciousness.
The success of this enterprise has meant that India is still the world’s greatest storehouse of spiritual knowledge, particularly as regards occult physiology. As a high level initiate recently said to me, ‘If you visit India today, you cannot help feeling how the air still just crackles with astrality.’
Great Western teachers such as Pythagoras, Apollonius of Tyana and St Germain have travelled to India in search of this astrality. The Gospels contain quotes from older, Indian sources and more ideas that originated there.
Sir John Woodruffe, the Sanskrit scholar who first translated the tantric texts in the nineteenth century, has written how even the venerable Sufi tradition leant on Hindu wisdom for teachings on the chakras, for example.
In the 1960s onwards, Indian religion was felt by many people in the West to offer a working spiritual knowledge, including practical spiritual disciplines and guides through the spirit worlds, which they could not find in church. A bookshop in the West is still likely to stock more books on mysticism derived from the Eastern than from the Western tradition.
FOLLOWING RAMA’S REFUSAL TO TAKE THE crown, no great single personality dominates this period. If Rama was an all-action hero who fought monsters, went on long, dangerous adventures and founded cities, his successors, sometimes called the Seven Wise Ones, or the Rishis, had a stillness, an inactivity about them. They built no stone buildings. They lived in buildings of mud or simple shelters twisted into shape from roots and tendrils. Nothing of the Rishis has lasted except what they knew.
There is a simple saying in the Cabala: ‘Everything you have seen, every flower, every bird, every rock will pass away and turn to dust, but that you have seen them will not pass away.’ This is a saying that would have seemed sympathetic to the Rishis. Seated with legs folded so that the soles of their feet turned upwards, they had no desire to feel gravity, the downward, reductive pull of the material world, but headed instead for the spirit worlds. They were able to see spiritual beings at work on the earth, how they help seeds to germinate in spring, flowers to blossom in summer, trees to bear fruit in autumn — and how seeds are preserved through winter by these same spiritual beings. The Rishis experienced the ebb and flow of spiritual influence li
ke a giant breath. Ancient Indian civilization was like the lowest realm of Heaven.
Earlier we talked about the way materialists misappropriate words and phrases such as ‘the meaning of life’, using them in a secondary and slightly dishonest sense. The same is true of ‘spiritual’, often used by people to puff themselves as good-hearted or moral in a warm, fuzzy, perhaps pseudo-mystical way. What it really means is the ability to see, hear and communicate with the spirits like the Indian adepts.
They were also able to communicate in occult ways. Other people were felt by them to be sympathetic or not by their breathing. By breathing in someone else’s air, they could sense that person’s inner life.
Adepts were able to pour their knowledge into the souls of others in an unceasing flow of pictures. Much later this knowledge would be put into words and passed from generation to generation orally until it was finally written down as the Vedas.
Their gaze could drive away serpents and calm lions and tigers. Nothing could deflect the adepts from their contemplation. They wandered freely, building only the flimsiest shelters, eating fruit and drinking the milk of their flocks. They would eat only vegetable matter, never any meat. To do so, they believed, was to absorb the animal’s death agony.
They immersed themselves in vegetable consciousness, in the physical processes — waking, sleeping, breathing, digesting — which we have seen are the gift of the vegetable kingdom to the human body. By learning to control the ens vegetalis, or etheric body, they could control, too, breathing, the rate of digestion, even heart rate and the flow of blood, leading to the amazing feats for which Indian adepts are famous — the ability to stop the heart altogether just by thinking about it, for example.
