The Secret History of the World

by Mark Booth

  We see Comenius’s influence in, for example, Jane Eyre or David Copperfield — and we should be aware that it was very new then.

  But the area of esoteric thought which would have the biggest effect on the novel would be that of the deeper laws. The novel provided an arena for novelists steeped in esoteric philosophy to show the working out of these laws in individual human lives.

  Illustration from Comenius’s school book.

  THE TIME HAS COME TO GET TO GRIPS with this elusive concept which lies right at the heart of the esoteric view of the cosmos and its history.

  We saw how Elijah, working behind the scenes of history, had helped bring about a split in consciousness between the objective Baconian consciousness and the subjective Shakespearean consciousness. We saw, too, how viewing the world as objectively as possible made the laws of physics snap into focus.

  But what about subjective experience? What about the structure of experience itself?

  In time the science of psychology would arise. But psychology would make the materialistic assumption that matter influences the mind, never the other way around. Psychology, then, turned a blind eye to a universal part of human experience — the experience of meaning.

  We have already touched on the way that Rosicrucians had begun to formulate laws in line with oriental esoteric thought on ‘the nameless’ way, inextricably bound up with notions of human wellbeing. In the East there is an august tradition of tracing the operation of yang and its opposite ying, but in the West this remained an elusive element that slipped between the emerging sciences of physics and psychology.

  If the laws that govern these elusive elements are difficult to think about in abstract terms, it is much easier to see them in action. Some of the great novelists of the nineteenth century wrote explicitly occult novels. In addition to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights shows a spirit pursue its beloved from beyond the grave. George Eliot’s Lifting the Veil, the fruit of her passionate investigation of the occult, was suppressed by her publisher. Then, as we shall see shortly, there was Dostoyevsky.

  But as well as this explicit occultism, a more widespread influence is implicit in much more fiction. A great vision of the working out of the deeper laws in individual lives, the complex, irrational patterns that could not occur if science explained everything there is in the universe, can be found in the very greatest novels.

  Jane Eyre, Bleak House, Moby Dick, Middlemarch, War and Peace hold up a mirror to our lives and point up the significant patterns of order and meaning that are our universal experience, even when science tells us not to believe the evidence of our eyes, hearts and minds.

  ON ONE LEVEL NOVELS ARE ALL ABOUT egotism. A novel always involves seeing the world from other people’s points of view. Reading a novel, therefore, lessens egotism. Also the failings of characters in novels are very often to do with egotism, either in terms of self-interest or, more particularly, the failure to empathize.

  But the greater contribution of the novel to the human sense of self is, as we have just suggested, the formation of the sense of an inner narrative, the sense that an individual life seen from the inside has a meaningful shape, a story.

  Mother Goose in an eighteenth-century engraving. Mother Goose here reveals her secret identity as Isis, the Moon goddess and priestess of the secret philosophy, not only by her name — in ancient Egypt the goose was one of the traditional attributes of Isis — but also by the crescent shape of her profile. The fairy stories of folk tradition are saturated with the numinous and paradoxical qualities of the ancient and secret philosophy.

  Underlying these notions of shape and meaning are beliefs about the ways people’s lives are formed by their being tested — the labyrinth that keeps morphing.

  What shapes lives in novels is life’s paradoxical quality, the fact that it does not run in a straight, predictable line, the fact that appearances are deceptive and that fortunes are reversed. The notions of the meaning of life and the deeper laws here come together.

  IF THESE DEEPER LAWS REALLY EXIST AND are universal and so important and powerful, if history really does turn on them, isn’t it perhaps surprising that we are not more aware of them? In fact, isn’t it odd if we in the West don’t even seem to have a name for them?

  It is surprising, not least because if these laws come into play when human happiness is at stake it should follow that they could be very useful when it comes to our hopes of living a happy life.

  Of course the most common sets of rules for achieving a happy life are the down-to-earth wisdom contained in proverbs and the common-sense cautionary advice traditionally given to children.

  But one difference is that both proverbs and the cautionary advice given to children only address the basics — how to avoid physical harm and obtain the bare necessities — while the deeper laws deal in grand notions of destiny, good and evil. As we shall see, they advise us on satisfying our craving for the highest, most ineffable levels of happiness, our deepest needs for fulfilment and meaning.

  Compare the proverbial advice to ‘look before you leap’ with the recommendation contained in this perverse little parable by the proto-Surrealist Guillaume Apollinaire:

  Come to the edge, he said.

  They said, We are afraid.

  Come to the edge, he said.

  They came. He pushed them.

  They flew.

  Like Paracelsus, the Brothers Grimm collected esoteric folklore before it died out. Dopey, Happy, Bashful, Sleepy, Grumpy, Sneezy and Doc might seem humorous, child-friendly, made-up names, but in fact they are all literal translations of seven earth demons from Scandinavian esoteric lore: Toki, Skavaerr, Varr, Dun, Orinn, Grerr and Radsvid. Even in the cosy world of Disney the esoteric lies closer to the surface than you might think.

  Inspired by the teachings of the secret societies, the Surrealists wanted to destroy entrenched ways of thought, to smash scientific materialism. One of the ways they did this was by promoting irrational acts. Here Apollinaire is saying that if you act irrationally, you will be rewarded by the irrational forces of the universe.

  If what Apollinaire is saying is true, this is one of the deeper laws of the universe, a law of cause and effect lying outside the laws of probability.

  Surrealists were unusually open about their irrational philosophy and its roots in the secret societies, but this same irrational philosophy is also implicit in much more mainstream culture. Take It’s a Wonderful Life, an old film that on the surface seems homely and comforting, together with its literary forebear A Christmas Carol, which Charles Dickens imbued with the philosophy of the secret society of which he was an initiate.

  Scrooge is confronted by ghosts that present him with visions showing how his behaviour has caused great misery, together with a vision of what will result if he continues in the same vein. George Bailey, the character played by James Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life, believes his life has been a complete failure and he is about to commit suicide when an angel shows him how much unhappier his family, friends, the whole town, would have been were it not for him and his self-sacrificing nature.

  So both George Bailey and Scrooge are invited to ask themselves how the world would have been different if they had chosen to live differently. At the end of this process of questioning both characters are asked to go through the same door they were about to go through at the beginning of the story — but this time do the right thing. George Bailey decides not to commit suicide and to face his creditors. Scrooge redeems himself by coming to the aid of Bob Cratchit and his family.

  So in a way both It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol depict life as having a kind of circular quality and of being a test. They show how life directs us towards crucial decisions and how we may be made to loop round and come back to confront these crucial decisions again if we get it wrong.

  I imagine that most of us feel that both It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol are in some way true. It’s difficult
to see how anything in science or nature could account for life’s being patterned in this insistently testing way, but most of us probably feel that both these very popular works are more than just entertainments, that they say something deep about life.

  A few moments consideration may now be enough to convince us that the same sorts of mysterious and irrational patterns also inform the structure of some of the greatest works of literature in the canon: Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Doctor Faustus and War and Peace.

  Oedipus somehow draws to himself the thing he fears most, and ends up killing his father and marrying his mother.

  Hamlet repeatedly ducks out of his life’s challenge — avenging his father’s murder — but this challenge returns to confront him in increasingly dire forms.

  Don Quixote holds a good-hearted vision of the world as a noble place, and so strong is this vision that by the end of the novel it has in some mysterious way transformed his material surroundings.

  In his heart of hearts Faust knows what he ought to do, but because he does not do it, a providential order in the universe punishes him.

  Tolstoy’s hero, Pierre, is tortured by his love for Natasha. It is only when he lets go of his feelings for her that he wins her.

  Imagine if you fed all these great works of literature — in fact all literature — into a giant computer and asked it the question: What are the laws that determine whether or not a life is ultimately happy and fulfilled? I suggest the result would be a body of laws that included the following:

  If you duck out of a challenge, then that challenge will come round again in a different form.

  We always draw towards us what we fear most.

  If you choose the immoral path, ultimately you will pay for it.

  A good-hearted belief will eventually transform what is believed in.

  In order to hold on to what you love, you must let it go.

  This, then, is the type of law that gives great narrative literature its structure, and if we read Oedipus Rex or King Lear or Doctor Faustus or Middlemarch and feel that in a deep and important sense they are true, it is surely because the working out of the laws they portray resonates with our experience. They accurately depict the shape of our lives.

  Now imagine what would happen if you fed all the scientific data in the world into another gigantic computer and asked it the same question. The results, I suggest, would be very different:

  The best way to keep something is to try your hardest to do so and never give up.

  You cannot transform the world by wishful thinking — you must do something about it.

  If you can avoid being found out and punished by your fellow man, there is no reason to suppose a providential order will punish you.

  And so on. The implication is clear and confirms what we suggested earlier. We get very different results, two very different sets of laws, if we try to determine the structure of the world than we do if we try to determine the structure of experience.

  This is a distinction that Tolstoy wrote about in his essay On Life. Though the same laws operate in the outer world of external phenomena and in our inner life with its concern for meaning and fulfilment, they seem very different when we consider them separately. As Abraham Isaac Kook, one of the great Cabalists of the twentieth century and the first Chief Rabbi of Palestine, put it: ‘God is revealed in the deep feelings of sensitive souls.’

  The deeper laws can be discerned only if we view events in the external world with the deepest subjectivity, as an artist or a mystic might. Is it the subjectivity of these laws, the fact that they work so near to the centre of consciousness, that makes it difficult for us to keep them in focus?

  Rainer Maria Rilke, the Central European poet, seems to come close to writing explicitly about these laws in a letter to an aspiring young poet. ‘Only the individual who is truly solitary is brought under the deep laws, and when a man steps out into the morning that is just beginning, or looks into the evening that is full of happenings, and when he feels what is coming to pass there, then all rank drops from him as from a dead man, although he is standing in the midst of sheer life.’ Rilke is using heightened, poetic language but he seems to be confirming that these deeper laws can only be discerned if we shut out everything else and concentrate on them over a long time with our subtlest and most intense powers of discernment.

  IN THE COURSE OF WRITING this book I have met the young Irish mystic Lorna Byrne. She hasn’t read any of the literature that lies behind this book, nor even previously met anyone who might have passed its ideas on. Her extraordinary knowledge of the spirit words has come from direct personal experience. She meets Michael, Archangel of the Sun, and has encountered the Archangel Gabriel in the form of the Moon, divided in half yet pressed together and moving, she says, like the turning of pages in a book. She has described to me seeing in the fields near her home the group-spirit of the fox in the form of the fox but with human-like elements. She meets Elijah, who was once a human with the spirit of an angel, and she has seen him walk on water like the Green One of the Sufi tradition. Hers is an alternative method of perception, a parallel dimension that moves things around in our own.

  IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY ANCIENT creatures began to stir in the depths of the earth, to slouch towards the appointed place.

  Imprisoned since the first War in Heaven, the consciousness-eaters were on the move again.

  27. THE MYSTIC DEATH OF HUMANITY

  Swedenborg and Dostoyevsky • Wagner • Freud, Jung and the Materializing of Esoteric Thought • The Occult Roots of Modernism • Occult Bolshevism • Gandhi

  EARLY ROMANTICISM’S JOY IN self-expression, in animal joy at being alive in the natural world, gave way to disquiet. The greatest of the German philosophers of idealism, Hegel, recognized this force in history: ‘The spirit cheats us, the spirit intrigues, the spirit lies, the spirit triumphs.’

  Taken as an account of humanity’s interior life, the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century reveals a terrible darkening, a spiritual crisis. If materialist history explains this crisis as ‘alienation’, esoteric history sees a spiritual crisis. In other words it sees a crisis caused by spirits — or more particularly by demons.

  The great exponent of this view was not someone revered in academia like Hegel or even the more frankly occultist Schopenhauer, but a man who rolled around the mud. Swedenborg saw demonic forces rising up from the depths. He prophesied that humanity would have to come to terms with the demonic in the world and inside himself.

  Today the Swedenborg Church is the only esoteric movement admitted to Sweden’s National Council of Churches, and Swedenborg’s teachings remain influential on exponents of communal living, particularly on American groups such as the Shakers. In his own day, however, he was a rather more dangerous figure. Swedenborg’s exceptionally detailed and accurate clairvoyance made him world-famous. The spiritualists tried to claim him as one of their own. Swedenborg repudiated them, saying that his supernatural gifts were unique to him and heralded the dawn of a new age.

  It was from his reading of Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell that Goethe had derived his sense of the intrusion of evil, supernatural forces that afflicted Faust. It was from Swedenborg that Baudelaire derived his notion of correspondences, and that Balzac took his notions of the supernatural in Seraphita. But perhaps Swedenborg’s most important and far-reaching influence was on Dostoyevsky, an influence that would darken the mood of an entire era.

  DOSTOYEVSKY’S HEROES ARE POISED over an abyss. There is always a heightened awareness of how much our choices matter — and also that our choices come to us in different disguises.

  In Dostoyevsky we encounter the paradoxical notion that those who confront this evil, supernatural dimension, even if they are thieves, prostitute and murderers, are closer to heaven than those whose cosy world-view deliberately shuts evil out and denies it is there.

  Eastern, Orthodox Christianity had been less dogmatic than its Western counterpart
and it had valued individual spiritual experience more. Raised in this Church, Dostoyevsky felt free to explore the outer limits of spiritual experience, to describe battles between the forces of darkness and the forces of light that were taking place in realms of which most people were barely conscious. Dostoyevsky’s journey through Hell, like Dante’s, is partly a spiritual journey but it is also a journey through the Hell on Earth that humanity has created. There is in Dostoyevsky a new impulse which would come to characterize the arts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the desire to know the worst that can happen.

  On Dostoyevsky’s death his library was discovered to be well stocked with Swedenborg, including his accounts of the many different hells that people with different capacities for evil fashion for themselves. Swedenborg’s accounts of the hells he visited are not fictional. They elude our conventional ontologies, our everyday working assumptions of what is real and what is not. Hell may at first appear no different from the world we live in, but then gradually anomalies show themselves. We might meet a group of genial and amusing men, libertines who love to deflower virgins, but they turn to greet us and we see they are ‘like apes with a fierce face… a horrible countenance’. Non-esoteric schools of literary criticism have missed the way that passages like the following, from Crime and Punishment, come straight from Swedenborg:

  ‘I don’t believe in a future life,’ said Raskolnikov.

  Svidrigailov sat lost in thought.

  ‘And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that sort?’ he said suddenly.

  He is a madman, thought Raskolnikov.

  ‘We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of that, what if it’s one little room, like a bathhouse in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.’