by Mark Booth
So it was that followers of St Francis came to be hunted down and killed as heretics.
A famous fresco by Giotto shows St Francis propping up the Church. If Francis saved the Church from complete collapse, can he be said to have succeeded in reforming it as the voice from the crucifix had asked? In esoteric Christianity it is believed that the Seraph who gave Francis the stigmata told him that his new mission was to be fulfilled after death. Once a year, on the anniversary of his death — 3 October — he was to lead the spirits of the dead out of the lunar spheres into the higher hierarchies.
Initiation, as we continue to see, is as concerned with life after death as much as this life.
IN THE LIFETIMES OF RAMÓN AND Francis new, different impulses for reform and purification of religious practice were growing up in many parts of Europe, in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and above all in the south of France.
There the Cathars attacked the corruption of the Church. Their Gnostic-like central tenet was that they should keep themselves completely pure from an evil world. Like both the Templars and St Francis they renounced material possessions and kept strict vows of chastity.
The ministry to the dead, carved on a sixteenth-century sarcophagus.
The Cathars had no churches of wood or stone. They rejected a sacramental system that made the Church the only intermediary between God and the people. ‘We value virginity above everything,’ said one witness. ‘We do not sleep with our wives but love them as we would our sisters. We never eat meat. We hold our possessions in common.’ They had only one prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, and their initiation ritual, the consolamentum, was a saying goodbye to an evil world. They welcomed martyrdom.
The Church obliged. In 1208 Pope Innocent III ordered a Crusade against the Cathars. Arriving at the town of Béziers, the Crusaders demanded that it hand over the five hundred or so Cathars inside. When the townspeople refused, all of them, running into many thousands, were slaughtered. When one of the soldiers asked the papal legate Arnaud-Amaury how they might distinguish the Cathars from the others, he is said to have replied with a phrase that has echoed down history: ‘Kill them all, God will find his own.’ At Bram they stopped off to take a hundred hostages. They cut off their noses and upper lips, then blinded all except one who led a procession to the castle. At Lavaur they captured ninety knights, hanged them, then stabbed them when they took too long to die. An entire army of prisoners was burned alive at Minerve.
In 1244 the last few remaining heretics, who had survived a nine-month siege of the mountain-top castle of Montségur, gave themselves up. Two hundred Cathar monks descended the mountain and walked into the fires awaiting them.
According to legend four monks had escaped the mountain-top refuge a day earlier, taking with them the secret treasure of the Cathars. We do not know whether this treasure was gold, relics or secret doctrine, but perhaps it is too easy to romanticize the Cathars. They taught that the world was evil in a way that suggests that they, like the Gnostics before them, were under the sway of a world-hating, death-loving oriental philosophy. The Church at Rome suppressed the Cathars with maximum force — but the true esoteric thought of the day was closer to it than the jugular vein.
IN THE CLOSING YEARS OF THE THIRTEENTH century a weak and sickly child was born. Shortly after birth he was taken in and looked after by twelve wise men. In Rudolf Steiner’s account, they lived in a building that had belonged to the Templars at Monsalvat on the border between France and Spain.
Because the boy was kept completely shut away from the outside world, the locals were unable to see anything of his miraculous nature. He was filled with such a strong, shining spirit that his little body became transparent.
The twelve men initiated him in about 1254, and he died shortly afterwards — having shared his spiritual vision with those who had looked after him. The thirteen had helped prepare for his next incarnation in which he would change the face of Europe.
ALBERTUS WAS BORN IN 1193, APPARENTLY a dull and stupid boy until, inspired by a vision of the Virgin Mary, he began to pursue his studies so zealously that he quickly became the most famous philosopher in Europe. He studied Aristotle’s science, physics, medicine, architecture, astrology and alchemy. The short text The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, containing the central hermetic axiom ‘as above so below’, first surfaced into exoteric history as part of his library. He almost certainly explored methods of divining the presence of metals deep in the earth using occult means. It is said he built a strange automaton he called the Android, able to speak, perhaps even think and move about of its own free will. It was made of brass and other metals chosen because of their magical correspondences with heavenly bodies, and Albertus made it come alive by breathing magical incantations into it and with prayers.
The legend that Albertus Magnus was the architect of Cologne Cathedral probably derives from his authorship of Liber Constructionum Alberti, containing the secrets of Operative Freemasons, including the laying of the foundations of cathedrals along astronomical lines.
STORIES OF JOURNEYS UNDERGROUND, like those of Albertus Magnus, to discover metals, are often ways of alluding to underground initiations. We know that initiations of this type survived into the Middle Ages because of an account of one that took place in Ireland, which has come down to us from three sources.
A soldier called Owen, who served the English King Stephen, went to the Monastery of St Patrick in Donegal. Owen fasted for nine days, processing around the monastery and taking baths of ritual purification. On the ninth day he was admitted to the underground chamber ‘out of which all who enter do not return’. There he was laid down in a grave. The only light was from a single aperture. That night Owen was visited by fifteen men robed all in white, who warned him that he was about to undergo a trial. Then, all of a sudden, a troop of demons appeared. They held him over a fire, before showing him scenes of torment like those described by Virgil.
Finally, two elders came to guide him, and showed Owen a vision of Paradise.
ALBERTUS WAS SPIRITUAL GUIDE TO Thomas Aquinas, nearly thirty-three years his junior. It seems that Thomas smashed his master’s Android to pieces, in some accounts because he believed it diabolical — in others because it would never stop talking.
Aquinas had come to the University of Paris to study Aristotle at the feet of the master, but he was to discover that the greatest Aristotelean was in fact a Muslim. Averroës argued that Aristotelean logic showed Christianity to be absurd.
Would logic eat up religion, all true spirituality?
Aquinas’s life’s work culminated in his massive Summa Theologica, perhaps the most influential work of theology ever written. Its aim was to try to show that philosophy and Christianity are not only compatible — they illumine each other. Aquinas applied the sharpest analytical scalpel to thought about the spirit worlds. He was able to categorize the beings of the heavenly hierarchies, the great cosmic forces that create natural forms as well as creating our subjective experiences. The Summa contains, for example, the Church’s definitive teachings on the Four Elements and this is achieved with a living, penetrating intellect rather than a stultifying reshuffling of dead dogma.
Aquinas is a key figure in the secret history, then, because his great intellectual triumph over Averroës prevented Europe’s being overcome by scientific materialism several hundreds years too early.
Again it is important to bear in mind that this triumph was achieved from the standpoint of direct, personal experience of the spirit worlds. There is not a shadow of a doubt that Thomas Aquinas, like Albertus Magnus, was an alchemist, who believed it was possible to harness the power of disembodied spirits to effect changes in the material world. Of the many alchemical texts attributed to him, scholars accept at least one as undoubtedly genuine. In order to understand this better, it’s useful to compare him with his contemporary Roger Bacon.
Today alchemy can seem a strange, hole-in-the-wall activity. In fact it is quite
familiar to all church-going Christians because it is what is said to take place at the climax of the Mass. Aquinas first formulated the doctrine of the transubstantiation of the bread and wine. What he described is essentially an alchemical process in which the substance of the bread and wine changes and a parallel transubstantiation takes place in the human body. The Mass brings about not just a new frame of mind, a new determination to do better, but a vital physiological change.
Title page of Testamentum Cremeri, showing Thomas Aquinas as a practising alchemist.
It is no accident that Aquinas formulated his doctrine at the same time that the stories of the Grail began to circulate. They describe the same process albeit using different methods.
Though they were enemies — Bacon mocked Aquinas for only being able to read Aristotle in translation — both Aquinas and Bacon were representatives of the impulse of the age: to strengthen and refine the faculty of intelligence. They found magic in thinking. The capacity for prolonged, abstract thought, for juggling with concepts, had existed once before but only briefly and locally in the Athens of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, before being snuffed out again. A new, living and more long-lasting tradition arose with Aquinas and Bacon. Both put experience before the dead old categories of tradition, and both were deeply religious men who sought to refine their religious beliefs on the basis of experience. ‘Without experience,’ said Bacon, ‘it is impossible to know anything.’
Bacon was the more practical, but when he explored the mind’s supernatural capacities, he invoked entities from the same spiritual hierarchies that Aquinas categorized. Both applied rigorous analysis and logic, and their mysticism was quite unlike the unthinking, ecstatic mysticism of the Cathars.
A young scholar at Oxford in the 1250s, Roger Bacon resolved, like Pythagoras before him, to know everything there is to know. He wanted to gather together into his own mind all that the scholars at the court of Haroun al Raschid had known.
Roger Bacon became the image of a wizard. Known as Doctor Mirabilis, he sometimes appeared on the streets of Oxford in Islamic robes. At other times he worked without rest day and night in his rooms in college which would be rocked by explosions from time to time.
Bacon busied himself conducting practical experiments, for example with metals and magnetism, discovering gunpowder independently of the Chinese or scaring his students by shining a light on to a crystal in order to produce a rainbow — something which up until that time people had believed only God could do. He also had a magic looking-glass that enabled him to see fifty miles in any direction, because he, unlike anyone else alive at the time, understood the properties of lenses.
But it is undoubtedly true that Bacon had powers beyond the ability of science to explain today. He sent his complete works to Pope Clement IV in the mind of a twelve-year-old boy called John, whom he had taught to know all his many books off by heart in a few days. Bacon used a method that involved prayers and magic symbols. Similarly, he was able to teach students Hebrew so well that they could read all of scripture in a matter of weeks.
All magic is a power of mind over matter. As we are beginning to see, esoteric philosophy is concerned with methods for developing the faculties of the mind so that natural laws can be manipulated.
In Roger Bacon the faculties of intelligence and imagination were highly developed and each worked one on the other. In 1270 he wrote: ‘It is possible to make engines of navigation which have no need of men to navigate them, so that very large sea-going ships may go along with one man to steer and at greater speed than if they were full of men working them. And cars could be made that would move at inestimable speed without animals to draw them. Flying machines can be built so that a man sitting in the middle of the machine may turn an instrument by which wings artificially made will beat there…’ In the Middle Ages this remarkable man had a complete vision of the modern technological world created by experimental science. Bacon was a Franciscan who, like the founder of his order, longed for a better, cleaner, kinder world for the poor and the dispossessed.
There is a telling point in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose when William of Baskerville, Eco’s Sherlock Holmes-like hero, explains that there are two forms of magic, a Devil’s magic that seeks to harm others by illicit means, and a holy magic which rediscovers the secrets of nature, a lost science known to the ancients. Like the Arab alchemists who influenced him, Bacon worked on the borderline of magic and science — and this borderline, we will see, is what alchemy essentially is.
Bacon wrote a treatise called The Mirror of Alchemy and liked to recall a saying of a great scholar of the Cabala, St Jerome: ‘You will find many things quite incredible and beyond the bounds of probability that are true for all that.’
In 1273 Thomas Aquinas, nearing the completion of his massive Summa Theologica, was taking Mass at a church in Naples when he had an overwhelming mystical experience. He wrote ‘What has been revealed to me now, makes all I’ve written worth no more to me than a stack of straw.’
WE’VE HAD HINTS OF THE TRAINING OF THE imagination in Lull and Bacon. Of course idealists have a more exalted view of imagination than materialists. For idealists imagination is a faculty for grasping a higher reality.
The discipline of training the imagination is central to esoteric practice, the initiations of the secret societies and, indeed, of magic.
For esotericists and occultists imagination is also important, because imagination is the great creative force in the universe. The universe is the creation of God’s imagination — imagination, as we saw in Chapter 1, was the first emanation — and it is our imaginations that allow us to interpret the creation and sometimes to manipulate it.
Human creativity, whether magical or non-magical, is the result of a particular channelling of the powers of the imagination. In alchemical tracts, for example, sperm is described as created by the imagination. This is a way of saying that imagination not only informs desire, it also has the power to transform our very material natures.
Powerful magical transformations in the material world outside their bodies can be made by initiates who know how to work on these creative powers of the imagination. An Indian adept is taught from an early age to practise seeing a snake in front of him with such concentrated power, with such a highly trained imagination, that he can eventually make others see it, too.
Of course there is a danger in all this emphasis on the imagination that is perilously close to fantasy. There is always a danger that these workings on the imagination will only end up in delusion. Magic can seem a self-deluder’s charter.
The systematic approach of the secret societies was intended to militate against this.
St Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote the rule book of the Templars, recommended a systematic training of the imagination. By summoning up images of the birth, infancy, ministry and death of Jesus Christ, you could invoke his spirit. If you imagined, say, a domestic scene involving Jesus Christ, imagining the pots and pans, the clothes, his likeness, the lines on his face, the expression in his features, your feelings when he turned to look at you, then if you all of a sudden banished the visual images, what might be left is the very real spirit of Christ.
In thirteenth-century Spain a Cabalist called Abraham Abulafia wrote amplifying the idea of God’s creative word. In earlier cabalistic texts the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet had been described as creative powers. ‘In the beginning’, then, God had combined these letters in patterns, changed them round and made words out of them, and out of this process unfolded all the different shapes of the universe. Abraham Abulafia proposed that the initiate could participate in the creative process by combining and recombining Hebrew letters in the same way. He recommended retiring to a quiet room, dressing in white robes, adopting ritual poses, pronouncing the divine names of God. In this way a state of ecstatic, visionary trance could be achieved — and with this state, secret powers.
The notion of ‘words of power’ which give the initiate do
minion over the spirit worlds — and so over the material world — is a very ancient one. Solomon was said to have this dominion, and in his Temple the Tetragammaton — the most sacred and powerful name of God — might only be pronounced once a year on the day of the Atonement by the High Priest alone in the Holy of Holies. Outside trumpets and cymbals prevented others from hearing. It was said that someone who knew how to pronounce it could inspire terror in angels. Even earlier, among the Egyptians, it was said that the Sun god, Ra, had created the cosmos using words of power, and it was said that knowledge of these words gave the initiate power not only in this life but in the afterlife.
Abraham Abulafia also recommended using the names of God in diagrammatic form. The practice of working with magical signs and sigils again features largely in Hebrew tradition, but with an admixture of Egyptian and Arab elements it became widespread in the Middle Ages. This was largely because of the spread of grimoires — grammars — of spells such as The Testament of Solomon and The Key of Solomon. Most of the spells promised the fulfilment of selfish desires, whether sexual, avenging or the finding of treasure. Preparation of materials such as beeswax, the blood of an animal, powdered lodestone, sulphur and perhaps the brain of a raven, might be followed by an act of purification. Then the ceremony itself, perhaps involving sickles, wands, swords, performed at propitious times. The result might be that a ring or perhaps just a scrap of paper was inscribed with the sigil — or signature — so that the carrier of it, wittingly or unwittingly, would be duly affected by the disembodied being for good or for ill. In the mid-fourteenth century, The Sacred Magic of Abraham the Jew taught how to excite tempests, raise the dead, walk on water and be beloved of a woman. All of this was to be achieved by using sigils and squares of cabalistic letters.
