by Mark Booth
There is a shadowy side to this new interior richness, which, again, we see most clearly in the soliloquies of Hamlet. The new sense of detachment that allows someone to withdraw from the senses and roam around his interior world is double-edged, carrying with it the danger of feeling alienated from the world. Hamlet languishes in just such a state of alienation when he is not sure whether it is better ‘to be or not to be’. This is a long way from the cry of Achilles, who wanted to live in the light of the sun at all costs.
As an initiate Shakespeare was helping to forge the new form of consciousness. But how do we know Shakespeare was an initiate?
In the Anglo-Saxon countries at least Shakespeare has done more than any other writer to form our idea of beings from the spirit worlds and the way they may sometimes break into the material world. We need only think of Ariel, Caliban, Puck, Oberon and Titania. Many thespians still believe that Macbeth contains dangerous occult formulae that give it the force of a magical ceremony when performed. Prospero in The Tempest is the archetype of the Magus, based on Elizabeth’s court astrologer Dr Dee. A spirit spoke to Dee on 24 March 1583, talking about the future course of nature and reason, saying, ‘New Worlds shall spring of these. New manners; strange Men.’ Compare this with ‘O wonder! How beauteous mankind is. O brave new world, that has such people in it.’
Initiatic images of meditating on a skull, often found in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from Hamlet through the brooding monks of Zurbarán to the posing of Byron. These are not mere reminders that one day we must die. The skull meditation alludes to arcane techniques of invoking the spirits of dead ancestors — techniques inherited and nurtured by secret societies such as the Rosicrucians and the Jesuits.
When we enter the Green Wood of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the other comedies we are re-entering the ancient wood we walked through in Chapter 2. We are returning to an archaic form of consciousness in which all nature is animated by spirits. In all art and literature twisted vegetation usually signals we are entering the realm of the esoteric, the etheric dimension. Shakespeare’s writing is, of course, dense with flower imagery. Critics have often commented on the use of the rose as an occult, Rosicrucian symbol in The Faerie Queene, written by Edmund Spenser in 1589, but no writer in English has used the symbol of the rose more often — or more occultly — than Shakespeare. There are seven roses on the memorial to Shakespeare in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, and, as we shall see shortly, the seven roses are the Rosicrucian symbol of the chakras.
It is here that one of the distinctions created by modern, positivist philosophy may prove useful. According to logical positivism an apparent assertion is really asserting nothing if no evidence would disprove it. This argument is sometimes used to try to disprove the existence of God. If no conceivable turn of events would ever count against the existence of God, it is argued, then by asserting that God exists we are not really asserting anything.
In some religious orders, the novitiate lies in a coffin between four candles, the Miserere is sung and he then rises to be given a new name as a sign of rebirth. Painting by Francisco Zurbarán.
Looked at in this way the assertion ‘the historical personage Shakespeare wrote the plays that bear his name’ actually asserts very little. We know so little about the man that it has no bearing at all on our understanding of the plays. Shakespeare is an enigma. Like Jesus Christ he revolutionized human consciousness yet left almost invisible traces on the contemporary historical record.
In order finally to get to grips with this mystery and to understand better the literary Renaissance that overtook England at this time, we must examine the largely overlooked Sufi content in the plays of Shakespeare. Sufism, we saw, was the great source of the rose as a mystical symbol.
The basic plot of The Taming of the Shrew comes from the A Thousand and One Nights. The Arab title of A Thousand And One Nights, ALF LAYLA WA LAYLA, is a coded phrase meaning Mother of Records. This is an allusion to the tradition that there lies hidden underneath the paws of the Sphinx, or in a parallel dimension, a secret library or ‘Hall of Records’, a storehouse of ancient wisdom from before the Flood. The title A Thousand and One Nights means to tell us, therefore, that the secrets of human evolution are encoded within.
Illustration to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The word ‘fairy’ entered the English language in the thirteenth century from the old English word to marvel and originally referred to a state of mind — feyrie or fayrie meaning the state of being enchanted. J.R.R. Tolkein defined faerie as ‘beauty that is an enchantment’.
The main story of The Taming of the Shrew comes from The Sleeper and the Watcher, a story in which Haroun al Raschid puts a gullible young man into a deep sleep, dresses him in royal clothes and tells his servants to treat him as if he really is the Caliph when he awakes.
This, then, is a story about altered states of consciousness — and both story and play contain descriptions of how a higher state of consciousness may be achieved.
The outer, framing plot of The Taming of the Shrew centres on Christopher Sly. In Sufi lore a sly man is an initiate, or member, of a secret brotherhood. Christopher Sly is described in the first folio as a beggar, another Sufi code word, a Sufi being ‘a beggar at the door of love’.
Early in the play Sly says: ‘the Slys are no rogues. Look at the Chronicles. We came in with Richard the Conqueror.’ This is a reference to the Sufi influence that Crusaders brought back from the Crusades.
Sly is also shown as a drunkard. As noted earlier, drunkenness is a common Sufi symbol for a visionary state of consciousness.
Then Sly is woken up by a Lord, which is to say that he is instructed by his spiritual master on how to awaken to higher states of consciousness.
The story that follows, the taming of the shrewish Katharina by Petruchio, is on one level an allegory of the Lord’s ‘awakening’ of his pupil. Petruchio employs sly methods to tame Katharina. She represents what in Buddhist terminology is sometimes called ‘monkey mind’, the never quiet, never still, always gibbering part of the mind that distracts us from spiritual realities. Petruchio tries to teach her to abandon all preconceptions, all her old habits of thinking. Katherina must learn to think upside down and inside out:
I’ll attend her here —
And woo her with some spirit when she comes!
Say that she rail, why then I’ll tell her plain
She sings as sweetly as a nightingale.
Say that she frown, I’ll say she looks as clear
As morning roses newly washed with dew.
Say she be mute and will not speak a word,
Then I’ll commend her volubility
And say she uttered piercing eloquence…
As we saw in Chapter 17, Sufis trace the origins of their brotherhood further back than Mohammed. Some trace its chain of transmission back to the prophet Elijah or ‘the Green One’. The mystical, edgy spirit of the Green One pervades both A Thousand and One Nights and The Taming of the Shrew.
THERE IS A STORY ABOUT THE GREEN ONE which conveys something of these qualities.
The witness to this strange series of events was standing by the banks of the River Oxus when he saw someone fall in. He then saw a dervish run down to help the drowning man, only to be dragged in himself. All of a sudden, as if from nowhere, another man dressed in a shimmering, luminous green robe appeared, and he too flung himself into the water.
It was at this point that things began to turn really strange. When the green man resurfaced, he had magically transformed into a log. The other two managed to cling on to this log and float to the river bank. The two of them climbed out safely.
But the witness was more interested in what happened to the log, and he followed it as it floated further downstream.
Eventually it bumped up against the river bank. Watching from behind a bush, the witness was astonished to see it change back into the green-robed man, who crawled out, bedraggled, but then — in an inst
ant — dry again.
Coming out from behind the bush, the man who had been watching all this felt compelled to throw himself on the ground in front of this mysterious figure. ‘You must be the Green One, Master of Saints. Bless me, for I would attain.’ He was afraid to touch the robe, because now he was close enough to see it was made of green fire.
‘You have seen too much,’ replied the Green One. ‘You must understand that I am from another world. Without their knowing it, I protect those who have a service to perform.’
The man raised his eyes from the ground, but the Green One had disappeared, leaving only the sound of rushing wind.
A YOUNGER CONTEMPORARY OF Shakespeare’s, Robert Burton, wrote in The Anatomy of Melancholy ‘that omniscient, only wise fraternity of the Rosie Cross names their head Elias Artifex, their theophrastian master’. Burton then describes him as ‘the renewer of all arts and sciences, reformer of the world and now living’ (my italics).
We have already seen how in the esoteric tradition Elijah is believed to have reincarnated as John the Baptist. His return was prophesied not only in the last words of the Old Testament but by the initiate-prophet Joachim, who profoundly influenced the Rosicrucians’ understanding of history. Joachim said Elijah would come to prepare the way for the third age. Did the secret societies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries believe that he had reincarnated in their own time and that he was protecting and guiding those with a service to perform?
In Chapter 13 we looked at rather disturbing stories of Elijah and Elisha, his successor. The time has come to consider that in the secret history these passages in the Old Testament are not a description of two separate individuals. Rather, Elijah is such a highly evolved being that not only is he able to incarnate, discarnate and reincarnate at will, he is also able to parcel up bits of his spirit — or mantle — and distribute it among several different people.
Just as a flock of birds turn as one, moved by the same thought, so also several people may be moved simultaneously by the same spirit. Lurking in the darkness behind the surface glitter of Elizabethan England, speaking through the minds of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Bacon, Donne and Cervantes we should be able to make out the stern visage of the Green One, spiritual master of Sufis and architect of the modern age.
We shall look at the aim of Elijah’s mission in the last chapter, but for the moment it is as well to recall the role that Arabia played in inspiring not only literature but science. At the court of Haroun al Raschid and later among the Arab peoples, science had made great leaps forward, particularly in mathematics, physics and astronomy. There is a deep mystical connection between the Arab people and the English, because it was the great Arabian spirit of scientific research which lived again in Francis Bacon, the individual most closely associated with Shakespeare in the occult literature. And, as the history of the philosophy of science tell us, it was Bacon who inspired the great scientific revolution that has done so much to form the modern world.
As the inner cosmos was opened up and illumined, so, too, the material cosmos was opened up and illumined. As Shakespeare revealed a world not of character types, which is what had gone before, but a jostling crowd of fully realized individuals, seething with passion and fired by ideas, so Bacon revealed a world bursting with quiddity, a scintillating world of infinitely various, sharply defined objects.
These parallel worlds ballooned and became mirror images of one another. Inner and outer worlds that had previously been darkly and indistinctly intermingled were now clearly separated.
The world of Shakespeare is the world of human values, where, whatever happens, it is human happiness and the shape of human lives that are at stake. The world of Bacon is one where human values have been stripped out.
Human experience is the tricky, paradoxical, mysterious and ultimately unpredictable thing that Shakespeare dramatized. Bacon taught humankind to look at the physical objects that are the contents of experience and to note the predictable laws they obey.
He devised new ways of thinking about the contents of experience. He advised the discarding of as many preconceptions as possible while gathering as much data as possible, trying not to impose patterns on it, but waiting patiently for deeper, richer patterns to emerge. This is why in the history of the philosophy of science he is known as the Father of Induction.
In short, Bacon realized that if you can observe objects as objectively as possible very different patterns emerge from the ones that give subjective experience its structure.
This realization would change the face of the planet.
21. THE ROSICRUCIAN AGE
The German Brotherhoods • Christian Rosenkreuz • Hieronymus Bosch • The Secret Mission of Dr Dee
LITTLE IS KNOWN ABOUT MEISTER ECKHART, the shadowy thirteenth-century German mystic, but, just as his contemporary Dante can be seen as the source of the Renaissance, Eckhart can be seen as the source of the broader but more slowly moving Reformation. In Eckhart we can also see the source of a new form of consciousness which would lead Northern Europe to world domination.
Born in near Gotha in Germany in 1260, he entered a Dominican friary, became a prior and eventually succeeded Thomas Aquinas teaching theology in Paris. His great Opus Tripartitum, as ambitious in scope as the Summa Theologica, was never finished. He died while on trial for his life, accused of heresy.
A few sermons have come down to us, some of them transcribed by people in Strasbourg. They had never heard anything like these notions before:
I pray to God to rid me of God.
If I myself were not, God would not be either.
If I were not, God would not be God.
God is within, we are without.
The eye through which I see God and the eye through which God sees me is the same eye.
He is He because He is not He. This cannot be understood by the outer man, only the inner man.
Find the one desire behind all desires.
God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk.
Through nothing I become what I am.
Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.
These sound exceptionally modern. You would probably even be a bit surprised to hear them coming out of the mouth of your local clergyman today.
Like a Zen Master, Meister Eckhart tries to shock us out of fixed ways of thinking, sometimes with what at first sounds like nonsense.
He also teaches an oriental style of meditation that involves both sustained detachment from the material world and emptiness of the mind. He says that when the powers have all been withdrawn from their bodily form and functions, when man has absconded from the senses, then he ‘lapses into the oblivion of things and of himself’.
Like Buddhist ‘emptiness’ this oblivion is a void containing infinite and inexhaustible possibilities, and so a place of rebirth and creativity. It is also a difficult and dangerous place. Eckhart was showing the way not of consolation for a harsh, repressed life, not rewards deferred, but a strange and testing dimension you enter at your peril, ‘the desert of the Godhead where no one is at home’.
Like Mohammed, like Dante, Eckhart had direct personal experience of the spirit worlds. Again and again what he reported back is not what you’d expect:
‘When you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see demons tearing your life away. If you’ve made your peace, you’ll see that the demons are really angels freeing you from the earth. The only things that burn us is the part you won’t let go, your memories, your attachments.’
Eckhart is sometimes spoken of as one of ‘the twelve sublime Masters of Paris’, a phrase that reminds us of the ancient traditions of hidden masters and adepts, the Great White Brotherhood, the Thirty-Six Righteous of Cabalistic tradition, the Brotherhood on the Roof of the World, the Inner Circle of Adepts or the Nine Unknown. According to ancient traditions knowledge, the way to gain experience of the spirit words is passed on by an initiatic chain of transmission from master to p
upil. In the East this is sometimes called satsong. It is not just a matter of information passed on by word, but a sort of magical mind-to-mind process. Plato may be read as referring to something similar when he talks of mimesis. In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato is inviting his pupil to create an imaginative image which will work on his mind in a way that operates beyond the narrowly rational. In Plato’s opinion, the best writing — he is talking of Hesiod’s poetry — casts a hypnotic spell that carries with it the transmission of knowledge.
An initiate I knew told me how, when he was a young man living in New York, his Master had reached over to him, drawn a circle on a table and asked him what he saw.
‘A table top,’ he replied.
‘That is good,’ said the Master. ‘The eyes of a young man should look outward.’ Then, without saying any more, he leaned forward and touched my friend on the forehead between the eyes with his outstretched finger.
Immediately the world faded and he was dazzled by a vision of what seemed to him a cold, white goddess of the moon, carrying a skull and a rosary. She had six faces each with three eyes.
The goddess danced and my friend lost track of time. Then, after a while, the vision faded and shrank until it became a dot and disappeared.
My friend knew, though, it was still living inside him somewhere like a burning seed and would do so forever.
His Master said, ‘You saw it?’
I was thrilled when I heard this story, because I knew I was very close to the chain of mystic transmission.
