The Secret History of the World Page 2

  But it was partly also because I didn’t want to have all this knowledge given to me all of a piece. I wanted to continue enjoying trying to work it out for myself.

  And neither did I want to take an oath that forbad me to write.

  THIS HISTORY OF THE WORLD IS structured in the following way. The first four chapters will look at what happened ‘in the beginning’ as taught by the secret societies, including what is meant in the secret teaching by the expulsion from Eden and the Fall. These chapters will aim, too, to provide an account of the world-view of the secret societies, a pair of conceptual spectacles — so readers may the better appreciate what follows.

  In the following seven chapters many figures from myth and legend are treated as historical figures. This is the history of what happened before written records began, as it was taught in the Mystery schools and is still taught in the secret societies today.

  Chapter 8 includes the transition into what is conventionally thought of as the historical period, but the narrative continues to tell stories of monsters and fabulous beasts, of miracles and prophecies and historical figures who conspired with disembodied beings to direct the course of events.

  I hope that throughout the reader’s mind will be pleasurably bent equally by the strange ideas presented and by the revealing of the names of the personalities who have entertained these ideas. I hope, too, that some of the strange claims will strike a chord, that many readers will think… yes, that explains why the names of the week run in the order they do… That’s why the image of the fish, the water-carrier and a serpent-tailed goat are everywhere ascribed constellations that don’t really resemble them… That’s what we’re really commemorating at Halloween… That explains the bizarre confessions of demon-worship by the Knights Templar… That is what gives Christopher Columbus the conviction to set out on his insanely perilous voyage… That is why an Egyptian obelisk was erected in New York’s Central Park in the late nineteenth century… That is why Lenin was embalmed…

  Through all this the aim is to show that the basic facts of history can be interpreted in a way which is almost completely the opposite of the way we normally understand them. To prove this would, of course, require a whole library of books, something like the twenty miles of shelves of esoteric and occult literature said to be locked away in the Vatican. But in this single volume I will show that this alternative, this mirror image view, is a consistent and cogent one with its own logic that has the virtue of explaining areas of human experience that remain inexplicable to the conventional view. I will also cite authorities throughout, providing leads for interested readers to follow.

  Some of these authorities have worked within the esoteric tradition. Others are experts in their own disciplines — science, history, anthropology, literary criticism — whose results in their specialist fields of research seem to me to confirm the esoteric world-view, even where I have no way of knowing whether their personal philosophy of life has any spiritual or esoteric dimension.

  But above all — and this the point I want to emphasize — I am asking readers to approach this text in a new way — to see it as an imaginative exercise.

  I want the reader to try to imagine what it would feel like to believe the opposite of what we have been brought up to believe. This inevitably involves an altered state of consciousness to some degree or other, which is just as it should be. Because at the very heart of all esoteric teaching in all parts of the world lies the belief that higher forms of intelligence can be accessed in altered states. The Western tradition in particular has always emphasized the value of imaginative exercises which involve cultivating and dwelling upon visual images. Allowed to sink deep into the mind, they there do their work.

  So although this book can be read just as a record of the absurd things people have believed, an epic phantasmagoria, a cacophony of irrational experiences, I hope that by the end some readers will hear some harmonies and perhaps also sense a slight philosophical undertow, which is the suggestion that it may be true.

  Of course, any good theory which seeks to explain why the world is as it is must also help predict what will happen next, and the last chapter reveals what that will be — always presuming, of course, that the great cosmic plan of the secret societies proves to be successful. This plan will encompass a belief that the great new impulse for the evolution will arise in Russia, that European civilization will collapse and that, finally, the flame of true spirituality will be kept burning in America.

  TO HELP WITH THE ALL-IMPORTANT WORK of the imagination there are strange and uncanny illustrations integrated throughout, some of which have not previously been seen outside the secret societies.

  There are also illustrations of some of the most familiar images from world history, the greatest icons of our culture — the Sphinx, Noah’s Ark, the Trojan Horse, the Mona Lisa, Hamlet and the skull — because all of these are shown to have strange and unexpected meanings according to the secret societies.

  Lastly there are illustrations from modern European artists such as Ernst, Klee and Duchamp, as well as from American outlaws such as David Lynch. Their work is also shown to be steeped in the ancient and secret philosophy.

  INDUCE IN YOURSELF A DIFFERENT STATE of mind and the most famous and familiar histories mean something very different.

  In fact if anything in this history is true, then everything your teachers taught you is thrown into question.

  I suspect this prospect doesn’t alarm you.

  As one of the devotees of the ancient and secret philosophy so memorably put it:

  You must be mad, or you wouldn’t have come here.

  1. IN THE BEGINNING

  God Peers at His Reflection • The Looking-Glass Universe

  ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS NO TIME AT ALL.

  Time is nothing but a measure of the changing positions of objects in space, and, as any scientist, mystic or madman knows, in the beginning there were no objects in space.

  For example, a year is a measure of the movement of the earth round the sun. A day is the revolving of the earth on its axis. Since by its own account neither earth nor sun existed in the beginning, the authors of the Bible never meant to say that everything was created in seven days in the usual sense of ‘day’.

  Despite this initial absence of matter, space and time, something must have happened to get everything started. In other words, something must have happened before there was anything.

  Since there was noTHING when something first happened, it is safe to say this first happening must have been quite different from the sorts of events we regularly account for in terms of the laws of physics.

  Might it make sense to say this first happening could have been in some ways more like a mental event than a physical event?

  The idea of mental events generating physical effects may at first seem counter-intuitive, but in fact it’s something we experience all the time. For example, what happens when I’m struck by an idea — such as ‘I just have to reach out and stroke her cheek’ — is that a pulse jumps a synapse in my brain, something like an electrical current burns down a nerve in my arm and my hand moves.

  Can this everyday example tell us anything about the origins of the cosmos?

  In the beginning an impulse must have come from somewhere — but where? As children didn’t we all feel wonder when we first saw crystals precipitating in the bottom of a solution, as if an impulse were squeezing out of one dimension into the next? In this history we shall see how for many of the world’s most brilliant individuals the birth of the universe, the mysterious transition from no-matter to matter has been explained in just such a way. They have envisaged an impulse squeezing out of another dimension into this one — and they have conceived of this other dimension as the mind of God.

  WHILE YOU ARE STILL ON THE THRESHOLD — and before you risk wasting any more time on this history — I must make it plain that I am going to try to persuade you to consider something which may be all right by a mystic or
a madman, but which a scientist will not like. A scientist will not like it at all.

  To today’s most advanced thinkers, academics like Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simony Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and other militant materialists who regulate and maintain the scientific world-view, the ‘mind of God’ is no better than the idea of a white-haired old man up above the clouds. It is the same mistake, they say, that children and primitive tribes make when they assume God must be like them — the anthropomorphic fallacy. Even if we allowed that God might conceivably exist, they say, why on earth should ‘He’ be like us? Why should ‘His’ mind be in any way like ours?

  The fact is that they’re right. Of course there is no reason at all… unless it’s the other way round. In other words, the only reason why God’s mind might be like ours is if ours was made to be like His — that is, if God made us in His image.

  And this is what happens in this book, because in this history everything is the other way round.

  Alice enters the other-way-round universe.

  Everything here is upside down and inside out. In the pages that follow you will be invited to think the last things that the people who guard and maintain the consensus want you to think. You will be tempted to think forbidden thoughts and taste philosophies that the intellectual leaders of our age believe to be heretical, stupid and mad.

  Let me quickly reassure you that I’m not going to try to embroil you in academic debate, to try to persuade you by philosophical argument that any of these forbidden ideas are right. The formal arguments for and against can be found in the standard academic works referenced in the notes. But what I am going to do, is ask you to stretch your imagination. I want you to imagine what it would feel like to see the world and its history from a point of view that is about as far away from the one you’ve been taught as it is possible to get.

  Our most advanced thinkers would be horrified, and would certainly advise you against toying with these ideas in any way at all, let alone dwelling on them for the time it will take to read this book.

  There has been a concerted attempt to erase from the universe all memory, every last trace of these ideas. Today’s intellectual elite believes that if we let these ideas slip back into the imagination, even briefly, we risk being dragged back into an aboriginal or atavistic form of consciousness, a mental slime from which we have had to struggle over many millennia to evolve.

  SO IN THIS STORY, WHAT DID HAPPEN before time? What was the primal mental event?

  In this story God reflected on Himself. He looked, as it were, into an imaginary mirror and saw the future. He imagined beings very like Himself. He imagined free, creative beings capable of loving so intelligently and thinking so lovingly that they could transform themselves and others of their kind in their innermost being. They could expand their minds to embrace the totality of the cosmos, and in the depths of their hearts they could discern, too, the secrets of its subtlest workings. Sometimes the love in them was almost snuffed out, but at other times they found deeper happiness the other side of despair, and sometimes, too, they found meaning the other side of madness.

  Putting yourself into God’s position involves imagining that you are staring at your reflection in a mirror. You are willing the image of yourself you see there to come alive and take on its own independent life.

  As we shall see in the following chapters, in the looking-glass history taught by the secret societies this is exactly what God did, his reflections — humans — gradually and in stages, forming and achieving independent life, nurtured by Him, guided and prompted by Him over very long periods.

  TODAY’S SCIENTISTS WILL TELL YOU THAT in the hour of your greatest anguish there is no point in crying out to the heavens with any expression of your deepest, most heartfelt feelings, because you will find no answering resonance there. The stars can show you only indifference. The human task is to grow up, to mature, to learn to come to terms with this indifference.

  A nineteenth-century depiction of the cabalistic image of God reflecting on himself.

  The universe that this book describes is different, because it was made with humankind in mind.

  In this history the universe is anthropocentric, every single particle of it straining, directed towards humankind. This universe has nurtured us through the millennia, cradled us, helped the unique thing that is human consciousness to evolve and guided each of us as individuals towards the great moments in our lives. When you cry out, the universe turns towards you in sympathy. When you approach one of life’s great crossroads, the whole universe holds its breath to see which way you will choose.

  Scientists may talk of the mystery and wonder of the universe, of every single particle in it being connected to every other particle by the pull of gravity. They may point out amazing facts, such as that each and every one of us contains millions of atoms that were once in the body of Julius Caesar. They may say we are stardust — but only in the slightly disappointing sense that the atoms we are made of were forged from hydrogen in stars that exploded long before our solar system was formed. Because the important point is this: however they deck it out with the rhetoric of mystery and wonder, theirs is a universe of blind force.

  LHOOQ — Manifeste DADA by Marcel Duchamp, reproduced in the book Surrealism and Painting by André Breton. The notion that the physical world responds to our inner desires and fears is a difficult and perhaps somewhat troubling one that we will keep returning to in order to try to understand it better. In 1933 André Breton, a devotee of the philosophy of the secret societies, said something very wonderful that has illumined art and sculpture ever since — and never more so than in the case of the ready-mades of Duchamp: ‘Any piece of flotsam or jetsam within our grasp should be considered as a precipitate of our desire.’

  In the scientific universe matter came before mind. Mind is an accident of matter, inessential and extraneous to matter — as one scientist went so far as to describe it, ‘a disease of matter’.

  On the other hand in the mind-before-matter universe that this book describes, the connection between mind and matter is much more intimate. It is a living, dynamic connection. Everything in this universe is alive and conscious to some degree, responding sensitively and intelligently to our deepest, subtlest needs.

  In this mind-before-matter universe, not only did matter emerge from the mind of God, but it was created in order to provide the conditions in which the human mind would be possible. The human mind is still the focus of the cosmos, nuturing it and responding to its needs. Matter is moved by human minds perhaps not to the same extent but in the same kind of way that it is moved by the mind of God.

  In 1935 the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger formulated his famous theoretical experiment, Schrödinger’s Cat, to describe how events change when they are observed. In effect he was taking the secret societies’ teachings about everyday experience and applying them to the sub-atomic realm.

  At some point in childhood we all wonder whether a tree falling really makes any sound if it takes place in a remote forest where no one is there to hear it. Surely, we say, a sound not heard by anyone can’t properly be described as a sound? The secret societies teach that something like this speculation is true. According to them, a tree only falls over in a forest, however remote, so that someone, somewhere at some time is affected by it. Nothing happens anywhere in the cosmos except in interaction with the human mind.

  In Schrödinger’s experiment a cat sits in a box with radioactive material that has a 50 per cent chance of killing the cat. Both the cat’s being dead and its being alive remain 50 per cent probabilities suspended in time, as it were, until we open the box to see what’s inside, and only then does the actual event — the death or survival of the cat — happen. By looking at the cat we kill or save it. The secret societies have always held that the everyday world behaves in a similar way.

  In the universe of the secret societies a coin flipped in strict laboratory conditions will s
till land heads up in 50 per cent of cases and tails up in 50 per cent of cases according to the laws of probability. However, these laws will remain invariable only in laboratory conditions. In other words, the laws of probability only apply when all human subjectivity has been deliberately excluded. In the normal run of things when human happiness and hopes for self fulfilment depend on the outcome of the roll of the dice, then the laws of probability are bent. Then deeper laws come into play.

  These days we are all comfortable with the fact that our emotional states affect our bodies and, further, that deep-seated emotions can cause long-term, deep-seated changes, either to heal or to harm — psychosomatic effects. But in the universe that this book describes, our emotional states directly affect matter outside our bodies too. In this psychosomatic universe the behaviour of physical objects in space is directly affected by mental states without our having to do anything about it. We can move matter by the way we look at it.

  In Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan’s recently published memoirs, he writes about what has to happen if an individual is to change the times in which he or she lives. To do this ‘you’ve got to have power and dominion over the spirits. I had done it once…’ He writes that such individuals are able to ‘…see into the heart of things, the truth of things — not metaphorically either — but really see, like seeing into metal and making it melt, see it for what it is with hard words and vicious insight’.

  Note that he emphasizes he is not talking metaphorically. He is talking directly and quite literally about a powerful, ancient wisdom, preserved in the secret societies, a wisdom in which the great artists, writers and thinkers who have forged our culture are steeped. At the heart of this wisdom is the belief that the deepest springs of our mental life are also the deepest springs of the physical world, because in the universe of the secret societies all chemistry is psycho-chemistry, and the ways in which the physical content of the universe responds to the human psyche are described by deeper and more powerful laws than the laws of material science.