The Secret History of the World

by Mark Booth

  Gem carvings of Silenus and Socrates.

  The death of Aeschylus carved on a gem. Aeschylus was the son of a priest at Eleusis. He was threatened with execution for having betrayed the secrets of the Mysteries by portraying them on stage. He escaped execution by claiming that he had never been initiated, but when an eagle dropped a rock from a great height on to his bald head, killing him, many interpreted this as divine retribution.

  Socrates sometimes spoke of his daemon, meaning a good spirit who guided him through life. Today this might seem an alien concept. But the following account of the daemon in modern times is perhaps instructive. It is an incident recalled by a pupil of the Russian esoteric philosopher P.D. Ouspensky, a formative influence on many of the great writers and artists of the twentieth century, including the poet and playwright T.S. Eliot, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the artists Kazimir Malevich and Georgia O’Keefe.

  This man, a lawyer, had been to hear a lecture by Ouspensky at a house in west London. He was walking away, puzzled by it and full of doubts. But as he did so, a voice inside him said: ‘If you lose touch with this, you will be doing something that you will regret for the rest of your life’. He wondered where this voice came from.

  Eventually he found an explanation in Ouspensky’s teachings. This voice was his higher self. One of the great aims of the process of initiation he found himself undertaking was to so alter his consciousness that he would be able to hear this voice all the time.

  Socrates was a man guided by his conscience in this way. He carried forward the great project of converting instinctive wisdom of the lower, animal self into concepts, and his philosophy like that of Pythagoras is not merely academic. It is also a philosophy of life. The aim of all philosophy, he said, is to teach one how to die.

  There is some dispute, even within the secret schools, as to whether or not Socrates was an initiate.

  When accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and of not believing in the gods, Socrates committed suicide by drinking hemlock. He died forgiving his executioners.

  The oath against suicide was one of the most terrible taken by initiates.

  IT’S BECOME COMMONPLACE TO SAY that religion has had a negative, even destructive effect on human history. Wars of religion, the Inquisition, the suppression of scientific thought and restrictive patriarchal attitudes are routinely cited. It is worth remembering that some of the greater glories of human culture had their origins in the Mystery schools that were a central part of organized religion in the ancient world. Not only sculpture and drama but also philosophy, mathematics and astronomy as well as political and medical ideas arose out of this religious institution.

  Above all the Mystery schools influenced the evolution of consciousness.

  Conventional history puts little emphasis on the evolution of consciousness, but we can see it in action again if we look at changes in Greek drama. In the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the first dramatists to have their work performed outside the Mystery schools, wrongdoing results in persecution by the winged demons called Erinyes or Furies — for example in the Oresteia of Aeschylus of 458 BC. By Euripides’s play of 428 BC, Hippolytus, this chiding has been internalized and given a name. ‘There is only one thing that can survive all life’s trials — a quiet conscience.’

  In conventional history it is assumed that people have always been pricked by conscience. On this view Euripides was simply the first person to put a name to it. In the upside-down, other-way-round thinking of esoteric tradition the reason that there is no suggestion of conscience in any of the annals of human experience up to that point, is that the Eleusian Mysteries forged this new dimension of human experience.

  Startling statue of an actor in a mask. Aristophanes satirized the Mysteries in The Frogs. If tragedy dramatized the machinations of Satan in the world, comedy dramatized the machinations of Lucifer.

  Great dramatic art shows we often don’t feel exactly what convention tells us we should feel. It shows us new ways of being — feeling, thinking, willing, perceiving. To borrow a phrase of Saul Bellow’s, it opens the human condition a little wider.

  When we experience Greek drama we are purged by catharsis. The Greek dramatists give their audiences an experience which is an echo of the experience of initiation, and their way of working is based on an understanding of human nature that is essentially initiatic. Our animal body has been corrupted. It has become hardened and carries something like a protective carapace. We become comfortable with this carapace, though. We even grow to rely on it. But our easy, basking lives have been made possible by blood spilled, torture, theft, injustice — and deep down we know it. So deep inside us there is a self-loathing that prevents us from living wholly in the moment, from living life to the full. We cannot truly love or be loved until the insect-like carapace is cut open by the agonizing process of initiation. Until we reach that point we don’t know what life is meant to be like.

  When we see a great production of one of the tragedies inspired by the experience of initiation — Oedipus Rex, for example, or King Lear — we may catch an echo of this process.

  IF SOME OF THE IDEAS OF THE GREEKS ARE hard to understand, hard to accept, others may at first glance look rather obvious, even bland, to the extent you might even think they are hardly worth saying at all. The handful of sayings attributed to Pythagoras that have survived include:

  Above all things respect yourself

  and

  Do not yield to temptation except when you agree to be untrue to yourself.

  In order to understand why these were challenging, even astounding things to say, things that shook the world and, as a result have been remembered down the ages, we have to see them in the context of a newly burgeoning sense of self.

  Similarly when Socrates said:

  An unconsidered life is not worth living, he was addressing people who up that point had had no faculty for abstract thought with which to contemplate their lives. This was the great gift of Socrates to the world.

  WHEN SOCRATES DIED, HIS PUPIL PLATO became the leading figure in Greek philosophy.

  Plato was born in 428 into one of the first generations systematically taught to read. He founded the Academy in the garden of the tomb of Academus in Athens.

  His Dialogues are the greatest expression of the mind-before-matter philosophy called idealism that is at the heart of this book.

  In the secret history everyone had experienced the world in an idealistic way up to this time. Everyone’s form of consciousness was such that he would not have questioned that ideas are a higher form of reality than objects. Everyone believed this unthinkingly, instinctively. It only became necessary for a great initiate to conceptualize the idealistic world-view and write it down in systematic terms at the point when consciousness had evolved to a stage that people could conceive of the opposing point of view. Plato’s pupil Aristotle made the philosophical leaps forward that would lead to the materialism that is the dominant philosophy today.

  PLATO’S IDEALISM IS EASY FOR US TO misinterpret. It naturally seems to us to follow that if the material world is a precipitate of our mental processes, we should be able to manipulate the world in a very obvious and direct way just by thinking about it. In fact, if the world is nothing more than a sort of giant hologram, then couldn’t it just be switched off? In The Principles of Human Knowledge Bishop Berkeley, the most influential philosopher of idealism in English, advocated a version of idealism according to which matter has no existence independent of perception — and this is the version of idealism most familiar to students of philosophy in Anglo-American universities.

  But as a matter of historical fact it is not the position held by the great majority of people throughout history who have believed in idealism. As I have already suggested, these people experienced the world in an idealistic way. The faculty of imagination was much stronger than the faculty for thinking, which was then only beginning to develop. They believed that the objects of the imagination were more
real than the objects of the senses — but this does not necessarily mean that the latter are totally unreal.

  Most people in history who have believed in idealism as a philosophy of life, have believed in matter being precipitated out of mind as a historical process that took place gradually and over vast periods of time. They have also believed — and still believe — that the hologram will, as it were, be switched off, but again gradually and over equally vast stretches of time.

  Today’s university students debating the pros and cons of idealism probably find it difficult to equate Platonic ideas with gods and angels, as we have been doing. This association risks seeming crudely anthropomorphic to modern sensibility.

  But again, as a matter of historical fact, people who believed in idealism as a philosophy of life have always tended to believe in spirits, gods and angels.

  When considering the great world-weaving cosmic thoughts, the active principles behind the appearances of things, many idealists have asked themselves how far it is appropriate to consider them as being conscious beings like ourselves. Idealists like Cicero and Newton have considered these ‘Intelligencers’, to use Newton’s name for them, neither as crudely impersonal nor crudely personal. Cicero and Newton were neither crudely polytheistic nor crudely monotheistic. They experienced life as meaningful and the cosmos as meant. They believed, then, that something like human qualities, indeed something like human consciousness, is built into the structure of the cosmos.

  And, crucially, initiates of the secret societies, like initiates of the Mystery schools, encountered these disembodied Intelligencers in altered states of consciousness. It is Goethe perhaps who writes best about what it feels like to be an idealist in modern times. He writes about feeling the real presence of living interconnections with the natural world and living connections with other people, even though such connections may not be measurable or visible. And crucially he writes about the great universal spirits that hold everything together. What Newton called ‘the Intelligencers’, Goethe calls ‘the Mothers’:

  ‘We all walk in the mysteries. We do not know what is stirring in the atmosphere that surrounds us, nor how it is connected with our own spirit. So much is certain — that we can at times put out the feelers of our soul beyond its bodily limits… one soul may have a decided influence upon another, merely by means of its silent presence, of which I could relate many instances. It has often happened to me that, when I have been walking with an acquaintance, and have had a living image of something in my mind, he has at once begun to speak of that very thing. I have also known a man who, without saying a word, could suddenly silence a party engaged in conversation by the mere power of his mind.. We all have some electrical and magnetic forces within us; and we put forth, like the magnet itself, some, attractive or repulsive power… With lovers this magnetic power is particularly strong and acts even at a distance. In my younger days I have experienced cases enough, when, during my solitary walks, I have felt a great desire for the company of a beloved girl, and have thought of her till she has really come to meet me. ‘I was so restless in my room,’ she has said, ‘that I could not help coming here.’

  Goethe went on to speak about the living connections that underlie such phenomena…

  Dwelling in eternal obscurity and loneliness, these Mothers are creative beings; they are the creative and sustaining principle from which proceeds everything that has life and form on the surface of the earth. Whatever ceases to breathe returns to them as a spiritual nature, and they preserve it until there arises occasion for its renewed existence. All souls and forms of what has been, or will be, hover about like cloud in the vast space of their abode… the magician must enter their dominion, if he would obtain power over the form of a being…

  IN THE FIFTH CENTURY BC ATHENS AND SPARTA had fought for dominance. In the fourth century they were both overtaken by Macedonia, ruled by the robust Philip II. Plutarch noted that Philip’s son, Alexander, was born on the very day in 356 BC that the Temple at Ephesus was torched by a lunatic.

  Each Mystery school taught a wisdom unique to it, which is why Moses and Pythagoras were initiated into more than one. The hierophants at the Mystery school attached to the temple at Ephesus taught the mysteries of Mother Earth, the powers that shape the natural world. In a sense the spirit of this school entered Alexander at birth. Alexander would spend his whole life trying to identify this divine element within.

  One day the handsome, fearless boy with the burning eyes and leonine mane tamed a magnificent but fiery horse called Bucephalus that none of Philip’s generals could even mount.

  Philip cast about for the greatest mind of the day to be his son’s tutor, and chose Plato’s greatest pupil, Aristotle. Alexander and the older man recognized each other as kindred spirits.

  As soon as Plato gave formal, conceptual expression to idealism, it was inevitable that its opposite would quickly be formulated. Instead of deducing the truth about the world from immaterial, universal principles, Aristotle collected and classified the data of the material world. He worked out physical laws by a process of abstraction. Aristotle was therefore able to invent an entirely new and modern way of describing the hidden powers that shape nature. It is often said that the Roman Empire provided a vehicle for the spread of Christianity, and in the same way Alexander created the largest empire the world had yet seen. This, then, became the vehicle for Aristotle’s philosophy.

  Philip was assassinated when his son was only twenty, but immediately Alexander established himself as a ruler of genius and an unbeatable military commander. In 334 BC he led an army into Asia, defeating the Persians at the Battle of Issus, even though they were outnumbered by as many as ten to one. Then he swept south through Syria and Phoenicia, before conquering Egypt, where he founded the city of Alexandria. Wherever he went he founded city-states on the Greek model, spreading Greek politics as well as Greek philosophy.

  It was part of Alexander’s mission to save the newly evolved consciousness, forged by initiates such as Plato and Euripides, from being swamped by the greater wealth, grandeur and military might of Asia. More particularly, he was to save the new rationality from being swept away by ancient ritualistic clairvoyance and picture-consciousness.

  In 331 BC Alexander defeated the Persians again, destroying their ancient capital of Persepolis, before pushing further into Afghanistan and finally into India. There he debated with Brahmin philosophers, the descendants of the Rishis. Admitted to watch the sacred, initiatory rites of the Brahmins, Alexander’s own priests were astonished to see how similar the ceremonies were to their own.

  There is a story that Alexander sent a Greek philosopher to summon a Brahmin teacher into his presence, offering great rewards and threatening decapitation if he refused. The philosopher finally tracked down the Brahmin in the depths of the forest and received the following rather dusty response: ‘The Brahmins neither fear death nor desire gold. We sleep deeply and peacefully on forest leaves. Were we to have any material possessions, this would only disturb our slumber. We move freely over the surface of the earth without conflict and all our needs met as by a mother who feeds her baby her milk.’

  This was a rare knockback for Alexander. Until the near the end of his life it seemed no one could stand in his way. As has happened only a few times in history, an individual seemed able to bend the whole world to his will.

  As I’ve suggested, Alexander’s entire life can be seen as a quest to understand the origins of this divine power. At different times both Perseus and Hercules were claimed as his ancestors, according to variant traditions. Aristotle had given Alexander a copy of Homer’s Iliad, which he learned off by heart, and he sometimes saw himself as a demi-god like Achilles. In 332 BC he went on an expedition to the temple of Amun at the desert oasis of Siwa, some five hundred miles west of Memphis in Egypt. It was said he nearly died on this expedition, though this may be a reference to a ‘mystical death’. What is certain is that he was ‘recognized’ by the priests and init
iated there.

  It is sometimes speculated that the priests might have told Alexander he was a son of Amun-Zeus. It is supposed that the ceremonial horns he took to wearing afterwards were a mark of this. In some countries he conquered he was remembered as a horned man. In the Koran he appeared as Dhul-Qarnayn, which means ‘the two-horned one’. But according to the secret history, these horns are the horns of a hunter we have already met, and the two fiercely loving friends Gilgamesh and Enkidu, separated by the untimely death of Enkidu, were reunited when they reincarnated as Alexander and Aristotle.

  At the age of only thirty-three Alexander ignored warnings by the astrologers of Babylon not to enter their city gates. Two weeks later he died of a fever. It would soon become apparent that Alexander’s empire had been held together only by his personal magnetism.

  BUDDHISM EMERGED AS THE FIRST PROSELYTIZING, missionary religion in about 200 BC. Before then the religion you believed in was determined by your race or tribe. Now the human condition was changing. For the uninitiated the spirit worlds were a fading vision, leaving faint traces hard to be certain of, difficult to discern. Inspired by Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, people were developing a capacity for deductive and inductive thought. They were able to weigh up arguments on either side.

  By 140 BC Rome was the capital of the world and a vortex of ideas. A citizen might have very different belief systems to choose from: the official cult of the planetary gods, the neo-Egyptian worship of Serapis, Epicurianism, Stoicism, the philosophy of the Peripatetics and the Persian cult of Mithraism. Buddhist monks and Indian Brahmins had certainly reached Alexandria.

  Virgil from a painting by the Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli. Virgil was the great initiate poet of the founding and destiny of Rome. Aeneid vi 748-51 gives expression to the doctrine of reincarnation, of the spirit’s ‘desire to return to the body’ when a thousand years comes round.