Secrets from the Dark Horizon: A Reader's Companion Guide (The Dark Horizon Trilogy Book 0)

by Duncan Simpson

  In the following years, Constantine gradually consolidated his military superiority over his rivals and finally defeated Licinius to become the sole ruler of both Western and Eastern empires in AD 324.

  A series of events in AD 326 would haunt Constantine for the rest of his life. In May or June, he had his eldest son, Crispus, put to death by ‘cold poison’ at Pula in Croatia. In July, at the behest of his mother, it was his wife’s turn. The Empress Fausta was left to die in an over-heated bath (some say boiled to death). Constantine ordered their names to be erased from many literary records and inscriptions. It was commonly believed that the Empress Fausta was engaged in an illicit relationship with Crispus.

  Constantine is recognised as the first emperor to stop Christian persecutions and to legitimise the practice of Christianity and other religions and cults in the Roman Empire. This was ratified in the Edict of Milan of AD 313, which protected believers of all religions, not only Christians, from persecution. In an attempt to placate warring Christian factions in his empire, Constantine instructed the early Church councils to settle on a consensus over the hotly argued issue concerning the true nature of God. In AD 325, the historic Council of Nicaea was called, and its conclusions continue to shape the history of world events up to this day.

  The council’s achievements were many and profound: a common interpretation of the nature of Christ and his relationship to God the Father, the development of the Nicene Creed, the establishment of the date of Easter, and the formulation of early canon law. Through this council, Constantine’s influence on the consolidation of the early Christian Church is recognised as a significant turning point in Western civilisation.

  Secret Fact

  During the Renaissance, Constantine’s reputation as a paragon of Christian virtue started to be re-examined in light of the rediscovery of anti-Christian sources. During the following centuries, even Constantine’s alleged conversion to Christianity was called into question.

  Before his conversion, Constantine had been a follower of Mithraism, the mysterious religion practised in the Roman Empire between the 1st and 4th centuries. The sect worshipped the undying sun god and enacted bloody rituals in which initiates stood in a pit as a bull was sacrificed above their heads. In AD 321, Constantine instructed that Christians and non-Christians should observe the venerable day of the sun, or Sunday. Across his empire, he introduced a new gold coin, the solidus, which carried the symbol of the sun (not Christ) on its face. The solidus would become the standard for Byzantine and European currencies for more than a thousand years. Even when Constantine dedicated his new capital of Constantinople, he did so wearing a sun-rayed crown, his garments displaying a complete absence of Christian imagery. Right up until his death, Constantine retained the honour ‘Pontifex Maximus’, a rank emperors held as the head of the pagan priesthood.

  St Helena

  Born: c. AD 246–50, Possibly at Helenopolis Bithynia, Asia Minor

  Died: c. AD 327–30, Rome

  St Helena was the mother of the emperor Constantine the Great. Through her rediscovery and endorsement of early Christian historical sites and her pervasive influence on her son, Helena had a profound effect on the early evolution of the Christian church.

  Few facts exist about her early life. She was thought to be of humble origin and to have worked as a stabularia (a position that could be translated today as a ‘barmaid’ or ‘inn-keeper’). Tradition has it that when she met her future husband, Flavius Constantius, a soldier from the Balkans, they were wearing matching silver bracelets. This was taken as a sign that their meeting was ordained by God. It is uncertain whether Helena became Constantius’s wife or his concubine, but their son Constantine was born on AD 27 February 272, at Naissus in modern-day Serbia.

  Constantius’s status as a military commander was soon in the ascendency. He first served as Governor of Dalmatia, and then Praetorian Prefect before being raised to the rank of Caesar, essentially the deputy emperor, on AD 1 March 293. As a high-ranking Roman official, Constantius was obliged to secure a wife more in keeping with his official status and so ‘divorced’ Helena and married Theodora. Helena and her son were sent to the court of the emperor Diocletian I in Nicomedia, where Constantine was educated and grew to be a member of the inner court. Constantine held his mother in deep regard and displayed great affection for her throughout his life.

  In AD 306, following the death of his father, Constantine was proclaimed Augustus of the Roman Empire by his father’s troops in Britannia. Soon after, he brought his mother back to public life. She became his constant companion at the imperial court and when Constantine gained control of the whole empire in AD 324, Helena was raised to the rank of Augusta.

  In AD 326, scandal ripped through the palace. Crispus, Constantine’s eldest son by his first wife, Minervina, was suddenly sentenced to death. A short time later, Constantine’s stepmother Faustus was found suffocated in the steam room of the palace baths. Though the real reasons for these sudden deaths will probably never be known, one version of the story claims that Fausta had fallen in love with Crispus and when he refused her advances, she accused him of attempted rape. Helena was reportedly influential in having Fausta put to death. With no rival in the imperial court, Helena was appointed as Augusta Imperatrix.

  It is thought that Helena’s conversion to Christianity came after her son’s spiritual experience at the battle of Milvian Bridge in AD 312. In the following years, she was given access to the resources of the treasury to locate relics of the Judeo-Christian religion. Shortly after the deaths of Crispus and Fausta, Helena set out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, no mean feat for a woman in her late seventies.

  Secret Fact

  In Jerusalem, the Emperor Hadrian had built a temple dedicated to Venus or Jupiter over the alleged site of Jesus’s tomb. Helena ordered the temple to be torn down and arranged for the foundations to be excavated. According to legend, the remains of three crosses were uncovered, and Helena devised an ingenious plan to authenticate their provenance. She had a prominent woman of the city who was near to death brought to the crosses. The dying woman was asked to touch the three wooden crosses in turn. When the woman touched the first and second crosses, her condition remained critical, but when she touched the final cross, she suddenly recovered. Helena declared this to be the True Cross. On the site of the discovery, Helena ordered the building of a magnificent basilica—the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Tradition also says that Helena found the nails used in Jesus’s crucifixion. In order to protect her son, she allegedly had one fixed inside Constantine’s helmet and another installed in the bridle of his horse.

  Helena left Jerusalem in AD 327, bringing parts of the True Cross and other holy relics back to Rome. She died in AD 330 with Constantine at her side. Her skull can be seen on display in the Cathedral of Trier in Germany.

  Isaac Newton

  Born: December 25, 1642, Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth

  Died: March 31, 1727, Kensington, London

  More than any other person, Isaac Newton’s extraordinary contribution to the field of science laid the foundations for the modern study of optics, mathematics, gravity and motion.

  Born prematurely on Christmas day in the sleepy hamlet of Woolsthorpe, Newton was a frail baby and given little chance of survival. Newton always felt rejected by his family. His father died before he was born, and his mother, so that she could remarry, left him with his grandmother when he was just three years old. Newton withdrew into his books and began to explore and to experiment.

  While his mother hoped he would take over the family farm, Newton’s headmaster at Grantham School encouraged his academic studies. In 1661, he enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge. In these early years, Newton came under the wing of Isaac Barrow, Cambridge's first professor of mathematics. Soon tiring of the undergraduate curriculum, Newton began to pursue answers to the big scientific questions of the day. When Cambridge University was temporarily closed due to the outbreak of the plague,
Newton was forced to return home in 1665. This was the beginning of Newton’s famous ‘annus mirabilis’, or year of miracles, in which he laid the groundwork for his theories of calculus, laws of motion, the chromatic composition of light, and the inverse-square law of universal gravitation.

  His insights into the field of optics led him to fundamentally redesign the telescope using mirrors instead of lenses. After presenting his new telescope to the Royal Society, he was encouraged to share his ideas. However, not all of Newton’s ideas were universally accepted. When Robert Hooke, the gifted creator of experiments at the Royal Society began to challenge his ideas on the nature of light, Newton began to withdraw from public life and dedicate himself to biblical study and alchemical work. His public feuds with Hooke and German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz over the invention of calculus were legendary and caustic.

  Newton’s masterwork, the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, took two years to write and was the culmination of more than 20 years of experimentation and research. First published 1687, it outlined his own theory of calculus, the three laws of motion and the first mathematical model of universal gravitation. It is regarded by many as the greatest scientific book ever written. In mid-1693, Newton suffered a nervous breakdown after working five nights without sleep.

  His appointment in 1696 as the warden of the Royal Mint re-energised Newton’s intellectual curiosity and helped bring Britain’s currency from the brink of collapse. At the time, one in every ten coins in Britain was forged and many more were clipped. Under Newton’s skilful management, all hammered silver coins in circulation were replaced. Newton organised a database of people involved in the counterfeit and hunted them with a puritanical zeal. He was appointed Master of the Mint in 1700 and President of the Royal Society in 1703, posts that he would hold until his death in 1727 at the age of 84.

  Newton laid the foundations for the industrial revolution and the modern scientific age. His theories underpin much of modern physics and engineering and yet there is a side to Newton that is rarely discussed but just as fascinating.

  Secret Fact

  Far from being the ultimate rationalist, Newton was obsessed with unlocking the secrets hidden within Holy Scripture. It has been estimated that out of Newton’s surviving writings, 700,000 words are concerned with scientific research, 600,000 words relate to alchemy and 1,700,000 relate to his biblical research. Certain of its accuracy, Newton described biblical prophecy as a ‘history of things to come’. According to John Maynard Keynes, Newton regarded ‘the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty’. Through his intellect and incredible ability to focus on a problem, Newton’s mission was to decode the scripture.

  Convinced that encoded in the design of Solomon’s first temple was some divine hidden knowledge, Newton became consumed with recreating the floor plan of the Temple from descriptions contained within the Book of Ezekiel. He even learned Hebrew so that he could read the original Old Testament books. In some ways, Newton perceived himself as the new Solomon and believed that it was his God-given purpose in life to unlock the secrets of Nature. He esteemed the biblical figure of Noah as the ultimate source of esoteric wisdom and ancient Judaism as the repository of a divine knowledge, which had later been contaminated and diluted. His search led him into an exploration of sacred geometry and numerology.

  A few weeks before his death, Newton systematically burned a great number of manuscripts and personal papers. On his death bed, and to the considerable surprise of his contemporaries, he refused his last rites.

  Christopher Wren

  Born: October 20, 1632 – East Knoyle

  Died: February 25, 1723 – London

  Sir Christopher Wren was arguably the greatest architect of his time and played a significant role in rebuilding the city after the Great Fire of London in 1666. He was responsible for building 52 churches, including his masterpiece, St Paul's Cathedral. Wren read Latin and Aristotelian physics at the University of Oxford, but his fields of interest extended into astronomy, anatomy, mathematics, as well as architecture. He was a founder of the Royal Society and held the presidency from 1680 to 1682.

  Wren was born in East Knoyle, Wiltshire, in 1632. (Wren’s father was the rector there before becoming the rector of Windsor.) From an early age, the young Wren showed a great aptitude for mathematics, and at fourteen he was sent to Wadham College, Oxford. At Wadham, Wren became closely associated with the warden of the college, John Wilkins, who ran an unofficial club of mathematicians and experimenters, which became a prototype for the future Royal Society. During this time, Wren invented several astronomical and mathematical devices, which made him known to some of Europe’s most learned men. In 1653, Wren was elected a Fellow of All Souls College.

  Perhaps surprisingly, Wren had no formal architectural education, but in 1665 he took a seminal architectural tour of Paris with the sole intention of studying the great public buildings of the city. Soon after his return, the Great Fire of London laid waste to much of the ancient city and devastated some 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches and the great St Paul's Cathedral.

  In 1667, Wren was appointed as the King’s Surveyor General and Chief Architect. In the following years, Wren completed a spectacular number of building projects, including the rebuilding of 52 city churches, the Royal Observatory Greenwich, the Royal Naval College, Trinity College Library in Cambridge and the façade of Hampton Court Palace among others. Wren’s masterwork was the rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral, which started in 1675 and was completed in Wren’s lifetime in 1710.

  On February 25, 1723, Wren was found dead in his chair after dinner. He was ninety-one. Wren’s tomb in the crypt of the Cathedral bears the Latin inscription Si monumentum requiris, circumspice (If you seek his monument, look around).

  Interestingly, Sir Christopher Wren left another architectural mark in his lifetime, but this time on the prehistoric monument of Stonehenge. His name is expertly chiselled into one of the 40-tonne sarsen stones that make up the stone circle.

  Secret Fact

  Wren’s connection with Freemasonry has long been debated. Reports of Wren’s alleged membership of the Fraternity have been strengthened by a handwritten note from John Aubery (1626-1627) found on the manuscript of his book ‘Natural History of Wiltshire’. The note reads:

  ‘1691 … this day, May the 18th, being Monday after Rogation Sunday is a great convention at St Paul’s Church of the Fraternity of the adopted masons, where Christopher Wren is to be adopted a brother …’

  There is also a long tradition that Wren was the Master of the Lodge of Antiquity No. 2, one of the four founding lodges of the first Grand Lodge created on 24 June 1717. The Lodge of Antiquity No. 2 would meet at the Goose and Gridiron pub in St Paul's Churchyard, just yards away from Wren’s Cathedral masterpiece. The Minutes of the lodge meeting dated 18 March 1722 state:

  ‘Several vestiges of the Old time were laid before the lodge, particularly the Old Mallet used at laying the foundation stone of St Paul’s Cathedral … the Mallet ordered to be preserved in the Lodge as a Curiosity’.

  The minutes from 23 June 1723 record: ‘The Three Mahogany Candlesticks presented to this Lodge by its Worthy old Master Sir Christopher Wren ordered to be carefully deposited in a Wooden case lin'd with Cloth’.

  Nicholas Hawksmoor

  Born: 1661 – Nottinghamshire

  Died: 25 March 1736 – Millbank, London

  Nicholas Hawksmoor was an English architect of extraordinary vision. He worked alongside the principal architects of the day, Christopher Wren and John Vanbrugh, and yet his legacy is like no other. His London churches are mysterious and strange places and often use pagan rather than Christian references for their inspiration.

  The enigma surrounding Hawksmoor the man is only intensified by the flimsy historical record we have concerning his background. He was born in East Drayton, a small village by the River Trent in Nottinghamshire, around 1661. From an early age, Nicholas Hawksmoor became fascinated by archit
ecture. At the age of eighteen, and with a reputation as a competent draftsman, Hawksmoor travelled to London and entered the service of Christopher Wren. Hawksmoor was a brilliant student and absorbed much from his master.

  Effectively working as Wren’s apprentice, he became involved in the reconstruction of St Paul’s Cathedral, Wren’s London churches during the 1680’s, the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich, and (with Vanbrugh) the building of Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace.

  In 1710, the Fifty New Churches Act was passed by Parliament to serve the growing population on the fringes of the growing city. With Wren now 79 years of age, the commission appointed Hawksmoor as one of its surveyors. Due to mounting costs, only 12 churches were completed. Hawksmoor was solely responsible for the architecture of six of them and collaborated on a further two with fellow commissioner John James. Miraculously, all six of Hawksmoor’s unique city churches have survived to this day. They are arguably the crowning achievement of his career.