The Secret History of the World

The Serpent in the Sky by John Anthony West

The Secret of the Golden Flower by Richard Wilhelm

Witchcraft by Charles Williams

The Laughing Philosopher: a life of Rabelais by M.P. Willocks

Are These the Words of Jesus? by Ian Wilson

Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda*

Mysticism sacred and profane by R.C. Zaehner

This book is the result of some twenty years of reading. Often I’ve read a book which has yielded only a sentence in my own. So the above is a selective biography. I should perhaps declare a small interest here. In the case of some of these books, I have not only read them, I have commissioned and published them too. I had originally intended that the notes would be almost as long as the text, but then the text is twice as long as intended. Perhaps it’s for the best. One more tiny, wafer-thin bit of information and this book might have exploded like Mr Creosote in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life.

It’s a peril of writing a book so wide-ranging that even as you’re going to press, new books are published which you need to read and take into account. I’d just like to mention Philip Ball’s brilliant The Devil’s Doctor, a biography of Paracelsus and The Occult Tradition by David S. Katz. Both these books show great ‘negative capability’ when it comes to the question of whether or not occult phenomena are real. Barry Strauss’s recent book on The Trojan War bolsters the idea that it was a real historical event.

I’ve put an asterisk by the books — not the obvious ones, not The Brothers Karamazov, for example — that I recommend as giving the reader a vertiginous sense of plunging into whole new worlds of thought. I’ve chosen books that are easy to read — and also, I imagine, relatively easy to find.

Discography: De Occulta Philosophia, J.S. Bach is performed by Emma Kirkby and Carlos Mena.

Beethoven spoke of the Appassionata as his most esoteric work, but for me it is his last piano sonata, no. 31 in A flat major opus 110, in the course of which, suddenly he jumps forward to the music of a hundred years later the prophesied jazz.

Esoteric pop music is made by the pataphysicist Robert Wyatt, and the deftest of Donovan. Mountain. No Mountain.

Index

Aaron

Abraham

Abulafia, Abraham

Achilles

Adam and Eve

Adepts (Indian)

Aeschylus

Agamemnon

Agrippa, Cornelius

Ahab

Ahriman

Akhenaten

Alberti, Leon Battista

Albertus Magnus

alchemy

Alexander the Great

Amazons

Andrae, Valentine

Angels

Aphrodite

Apollo

Apuleius

Archangel Gabriel,

Archangel Michael

Aristedes

Aristotle

Arjuna

Ark of the Covenant

Artapanus

Arthur, King

Asclepius

Ashmole, Elias

Asoka, Emperor

Astarte

Asuras

Aten

Athena

Atlantis

Attila the Hun

Augustine

Aurelius, Marcus

Baal

Bach, J.S.

Backhouse, William

Bacon, Francis

Bacon, Roger

Bartolomeo, Fra

Bauval, Robert

Beatrice

Beethoven, Ludwig van

Bell, Alexander Graham

Berkeley, Bishop

Bernini, Gianlorenzo

Berosus

Blake, William

Boehme, Jacob

Book of Enoch

Bosch, Hieronymus

Botticelli, Sandro

Breton, Andre

Brockmer, John Paul

Bronte, Emily