The Secret History of the World

by Mark Booth

  The publication of these manifestoes at the beginning of the seventeenth century also marked the founding of another secret society that would dominate world affairs up until the present day.

  The institution of the Holy Roman Emperor, founded by Charlemagne in 800, was built on the ideal of a world leader who with the Pope’s blessing held Christendom together and defended the faith. This ideal was shining less brightly by the beginning of the seventeenth century. No Holy Roman Emperor had been crowned between 1530 and Rudolf II’s coronation in 1576, and many of the small kingdoms and princedoms of Germany had become Protestant, which naturally undermined any notion of a Europe united under a Roman Emperor.

  Following the death of Rudolf, the tolerant, intellectually curious and occult-minded Emperor whom Dr Dee had failed to impress, a dispute over his succession drew the Rosicrucian brotherhood into a plot. If Frederick V, a Rhineland prince and Rosicrucian fellow traveller, could be placed on the Bohemian throne, then Europe might be seized for Protestantism.

  The Rosicrucians had been cultivating James I of England. Michael Maier, whose alchemical prints are among the most explicit ever printed, sent him a Rosicrucian greeting card. In 1617 Robert Fludd dedicated his work of esoteric cosmology Utriusque cosmi historia to James, saluting him with an epithet sacred to Hermes Trismegistus. In 1612 James’s daughter, Elizabeth, married Frederick. The Tempest was given a special performance at court to celebrate the wedding day, with the masque scene newly inserted. We may say with a small degree of literary artifice that Dee was there in spirit.

  The plan was that when in 1619 Frederick travelled from Heidelberg to Prague to be crowned, James would move to defend his romantic teenage son-in-law and his young bride from Catholic attack.

  In the event James did nothing when Frederick’s forces were decisively defeated at the Battle of White Mountain. Frederick and Elizabeth had to flee Prague, and because they had reigned for such a laughably short time, they were known forever after as the Winter King and Queen.

  The Thirty Years War was waged by Ferdinand of the great Catholic dynasty of the Hapsburgs, whose intellectual outriders were the Jesuits. The aim of the Hapsburgs was to re-establish Catholic supremacy in Europe. During this time five out of six German towns and villages were destroyed and the population reduced from some nine million to four million. The Rosicrucian dream was destroyed in a carnival of bigotry, torture and mass slaughter. Central Europe was a desert.

  Yet the Church’s victory was a phyrric one. If the Church really saw itself as engaged in warfare with the secret societies, fighting black magic, then perhaps it was making the mistake of believing its own propaganda.

  The real enemy was the oldest enemy of all in a new disguise.

  23. THE OCCULT ROOTS OF SCIENCE

  Isaac Newton • The Secret Mission of Freemasonry • Elias Ashmole and the Chain of Transmission • What Really Happens in Alchemy

  IN 1543 NICHOLAS COPERNICUS published On the Revolution of the Celestial Bodies. His thesis was that the earth goes round the sun.

  In 1590 Galileo Galilei performed experiments to show that the speed of falling objects is proportional to their density not their weight.

  In 1609 Johannes Kepler, using the star maps of Tycho Brahe, calculated the three laws of the motions of planets.

  In the 1670s Isaac Newton devised a unifying theory which tied all these discoveries together to describe the behaviour of the mechanical universe in three simple formulae.

  Of course, it is too easy to see this as humanity’s triumphant rush into the modern world, emerging out of millennia of dark superstition and ignorance into the clear light of reason. But the initiate-priests of the Egyptian temples who knew that Sirius was a three-star system were well aware, thousands of years earlier, that the earth rotates around the Sun.

  Moreover, as we are about to see, there is evidence to show that the heroes of modern science — the people of whom we would least expect it — were deeply immersed in the ancient wisdom.

  Copernicus acknowledged that his ideas came from reading texts from the ancient world, and, when Kepler formulated his theories, he was conscious of the ancient wisdom working through him. In the foreword to the fifth volume of Harmonices Mundi (1619) he wrote, ‘Yes, I have stolen the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a shrine to my God…’

  Kepler was a life-long friend of Richard Beshold, who worked closely with Valentine Andrae and is often thought to have been his collaborator on the Rosicrucian Manifestoes.

  Isaac Newton, born in Woolthorpe, Lincolnshire, never grew above five feet. He was strange, eccentric, sexually confused and lonely. Then in his schooldays he lodged with an apothecary who turned out to be an alchemical adept — and Newton’s path lay clear before him. Newton, no less than Cornelius Agrippa, tried to discover the complete system of the world.

  Newton came to believe that the secrets of life are encoded in numerical form in the fabric of nature. He believed, too, that the clues for deciphering these codes are hidden in both numerical and linguistic codes in ancient books of wisdom, and in ancient buildings like the Great Pyramid and the Temple of Solomon. It was as if God had set humanity a test. Only when humanity had developed sufficient intelligence would it be able to recognize the presence of these codes and decode them. That time, thought Newton, had arrived.

  In Newton’s view every part of the universe is intelligent. Even a stone is intelligent, and not just in the sense that it shows evidence of design. According to the ancient way of thinking that Newton subscribed to, it is not the case that animal, vegetable and mineral are totally distinct categories. They naturally overlap, intermingle and in special circumstances may morph one into the other. As Newton’s cabalistic contemporary Lady Conway put it, ‘There are transformations from one species to another, as from stone to earth, from earth to grass, from grass to sheep from sheep to human flesh, from human flesh to the lowest species of man, and from these to noblest spirits.’ In Newton’s view, then, everything in the universe strains towards intelligence. Inanimate matter strains towards vegetable life, which aspires to animal life by means of a rudimentary sensitivity. The higher animals have an instinct that is almost reasonable like the faculty in human beings, who wait to evolve into super-intelligent beings.

  Ptolemy’s map of the spheres is conventionally presented as having been superseded by the ideas of Copernicus, Galileo et al. but in fact it was and remains an accurate map of the spiritual dimension of the cosmos, a dimension which seemed more real to the ancients than the material cosmos.

  And this universal aspiration to the super-intelligent looks to the heavens as the stoics had intimated. Isaac Luria, the sixteenth-century Cabalist put it like this: ‘There is nothing in the world, not even among silent things such as dust and stones that does not possess a certain life, spiritual nature, a particular planet and its perfect form in the heavens.’ Luria was talking about the intelligence in a seed that responds to the intelligent intention in the sun’s light. The ancient esoteric tradition did not suppose that all the information needed for a seed’s growth into a plant is contained in the seed. Growth is a process resulting from the intelligence in the seed interacting with the intelligence in the greater cosmos surrounding it.

  We know from John Maynard Keynes’s investigation into the occult dimensions of Newton’s world-view that these schools of thought fascinated him. Newton asked himself whether it was possible to discern different intelligences, perhaps even distinct principles with distinct centres of consciousness behind the material surface of things. This is not to say that he ever saw these principles as angels sitting on clouds or visualized them in any naively anthropomorphic way — but neither did he see them as being completely impersonal, let alone as pure abstractions. He called them ‘Intelligencers’ to imply volition.

  AS WE HAVE SEEN, ALL ESOTERICISTS are especially interested in the interface between the animal and vegetable on the one hand and in the interface between the vegetable and th
e mineral on the other. In the esoteric view this is the key to understanding the secrets of nature and manipulating them. The vegetable is the intermediary between thought and matter. It may be called the gateway between the worlds.

  To help us understand why anyone might believe this, we should perhaps remind ourselves of the mind-before-matter account of the creation given in the early chapters of this book. If you believe that the world is formed by intelligence, by mind, you have to explain how the immaterial forms the material. This has traditionally — in all the world’s ancient cultures — been seen in terms of a series of emanations of mind, initially too ethereal for any form of sensory perception — finer even than light. It was from these ethereal emanations that matter was eventually precipitated.

  This ethereal dimension, then, lay and continues to lie between mind — the animal dimension — and matter. Hence the traditional gradation: animal, vegetable, mineral.

  Mind could not — and cannot — create or order matter directly, but only through the medium of the vegetative dimension. The mineral dimension of the cosmos, as it were, grows out of this vegetative dimension. Something crucial for practical occultists flows out of this. What Paracelsus called the ens vegetalis is malleable by mind, and because the mineral dimension grows out of this vegetative dimension, it is possible to exercise a power of mind over matter via this medium.

  Newton’s name for this subtle medium, which may be used by mind to reorganize the cosmos, is the sal nitrum. In his accounts of his experiments he describes how he has conducted tests in order to see how the sal nitrum may be used to make metals come alive. These notes are an account of a real alchemist at work. Newton saw the sal nitrum circulating from the stars to the depths of the earth, investing it with life, routinely with plant life but in certain special circumstances giving life to metals. It is with growing excitement that he describes metal compounds coming to life in nitrate solutions and growing like plants. This ‘vegetation of metals’ confirmed him in his conviction that the universe is alive, and in his private papers he used the notion of the sal nitrum to help explain the effects of gravity.

  WHEN WE PEER INTO THE HIDDEN LIVES of the heroes of science, the people who forged the mechanical world-view and made the great leaps forward in technology that have made our lives so much safer, easier and more pleasant, we often find they are deeply immersed in esoteric thought — particularly alchemy.

  We might also consider the lesser but related paradox that many of the world’s most notorious occultists and outlandish visionaries were also in their own way practically minded men, often responsible for smaller but nevertheless significant inventions.

  Looking at both groups together, it is difficult to see a clear distinction between scientists and occultists, even as we move into modern times. Rather there is a spectrum in which the individual is a bit of both, albeit to varying degrees.

  Paracelsus, perhaps the most revered of occultists, revolutionized medicine by introducing the experimental method. He was also the first to isolate and name zinc, made great breakthroughs in the importance to medicine of hygiene and also was the first to formulate principles which would come to underlie homeopathy.

  Giordano Bruno is a great hero of science because he was burned at the stake in 1600 for insisting that the solar system is heliocentric. But as we have already seen, this was because he believed fervently in the ancient wisdom of the Egyptians. He believed that the earth goes round the sun because, in the first instance, so too did the initiate priests of the ancient world.

  Robert Fludd, the occult author and defender of the Rosicrucians, also invented the barometer.

  Jan Baptiste van Helmont, the Flemish alchemist, was important in the secret societies for reintroducing into Western esotericism ideas of reincarnation — which he called ‘the revolution of humane souls’. He also separated gases in the course of his alchemical experiments, coined the word ‘gas’, and in the course of experiments on the healing powers of magnets, coined the word ‘electricity’.

  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German mathematician, was Newton’s rival in the devising of the calculus. In Leibniz’s case his discoveries arose out of fascination with cabalistic number mysticism which he shared with his close friend, the Jesuit scholar of the occult Athanasius Kircher. In 1687 Kircher, an alchemical student of the properties of the vegetable dimension, resurrected a rose from its ashes in front of the Queen of Sweden. Leibniz himself has also provided us with the most detailed and credible account of the alchemical transformation of base metals into gold.

  The Royal Society was the great intellectual engine of modern science and technological invention. Among Newton’s contemporaries, Sir Robert Moray published the world’s first ever scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions — and was a fervent researcher into Rosicrucian teaching. The strange monk-like figure of Robert Boyle, whose law of thermodynamics paved the way for the internal combustion engine, was a practising alchemist. In his youth he wrote of having been initiated into an ‘invisible college’. Also practising alchemists were Robert Hooke, inventor of the microscope, and William Harvey, discoverer of the circulation of the blood.

  Descartes, who fathered rationalism in the mid-seventeenth century, spent a considerable amount of time trying to track down the Rosicrucians and in researching their philosophy. He rediscovered the ancient, esoteric idea of the pineal gland as the gateway to consciousness, the inner eye, and his philosophical breakthrough came to him all of a piece while in a visionary state. His most famous dictum may be seen as a recasting of the Rosicrucian teaching intended to help foster the evolution of an independent, intellectual faculty: I must think in order to be.

  Frontispiece, designed by John Evelyn, to the official history of the Royal Society, published in 1667. Francis Bacon is depicted as the founding father. He sits under the wing of an angel in a way that echoes the closing phrase of the Fama Fraternitatis of the Rosicrucians.

  Blaise Pascal, one of the great mathematicians of his day and an eminent philosopher, was discovered after his death to have sewn into his cloak a piece of paper on which was written: ‘The year of grace 1654, Monday 23 November, day of St Clement, Pope and Martyr. From about half-past ten in the evening until about half-past twelve at night, FIRE.’ Pascal achieved the illumination that the monks of Mount Athos sought.

  In 1726 Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels predicted the existence and orbital periods of the two moons of Mars, which were not discovered by astronomers using telescopes until 1877. The astronomer, who then saw how accurate Swift had been, named the moons Phobos and Deimos — fear and terror — so awestruck was he by Swift’s evident supernatural powers.

  Emmanuel Swedenborg, the great eighteenth-century Swedish visionary, wrote detailed accounts of his journeys into the spirit worlds. His reports of what the disembodied beings he met there told him inspired the esoteric Freemasonry of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was also the first to discover the cerebral cortex and the ductless glands, and also engineered what is still the largest dry dock in the world.

  As we have already seen, Charles Darwin attended séances. He may have had the opportunity to learn the esoteric doctrine of the evolution from fish to amphibian to land animal to human from his close association with Max Müller, early translator of sacred Sanskrit texts.

  Nicholas Tesla, recently described by a historian of science as ‘the ultimate visionary crank’, was a Serbian Croat who became a naturalized American. There he patented some seven hundred inventions including fluorescent lights and the Tesla coil that generates an alternating current. Like Newton’s most important breakthroughs, this last arose out of his belief in an etheric dimension between the mental and physical planes.

  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many leading scientists thought it worthwhile to pursue a scientific approach to occult phenomena, believing that it would ultimately be possible to measure and predict occult forces such as etheric currents that seemed
only a shade more elusive than electromagnetism, sound waves or x-rays. Thomas Edison, inventor of the phonograph and therefore the godfather of all recorded sound, and Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, both supposed that psychic phenomena were perfectly respectable areas of research for science, involving themselves in esoteric Freemasonry and theosophy. Edison tried to make a radio that would tune into the spirit worlds. Their great scientific discoveries arose out of this research into the supernatural. Even the television was invented as a result of trying to capture psychic influences on gases fluctuating in front of a cathode ray tube.

  LOOKING FOR CLUES ON HOW BEST TO understand this strange vision of the occult and the scientific joined at the hip, we will return to the great genius behind the scientific revolution, Francis Bacon.

  As we saw, Francis Bacon’s great discovery was that if you view the objects of sense experience as objectively as possible, stripping out all preconceptions and notions that all of it was meant to be, then new patterns emerge beyond the ones traced by priests and other spiritual leaders. You can use these new patterns to predict and manipulate events.

  Historians of the philosophy of science see this as the great beginning, the moment when inductive reasoning became a part of humanity’s approach to the world. From this moment flowed the scientific revolution and the whole industrial and technological transformation of the world.

  However, if you look more deeply into Bacon’s account of the process of scientific discovery, it appears less straightforward and, initially at least, rather mysterious.

  ‘Nature is a labyrinth,’ he said, ‘in which the very haste you move with will make you lose your way.’ Bacon was writing as if the scientist plays a game of chess with nature. In order to get answers, he must first put nature in check. It’s as if nature needs to be tricked into giving away her secrets, because nature is inherently tricky herself. As if she means to deceive.