The Secret History of the World

public performances, but in the early days of the Mystery schools at least, candidates would never have seen anything like this before.

We now come to the third act, the subject of this chapter. At the start of it, there is the momentous event we alluded to at the end of the last chapter. Earth and sun separate. From now on the sun’s life-giving rays, rather than illuminating it from inside, shine down upon the earth from the sky. As a result the earth cools and becomes denser. It becomes less gaseous and more liquid. It shrinks and the whole of its watery surface is covered by Adam and Eve and their flowery, gently fluttering progeny.

Suddenly, at the climax of the third act, the candidate for initiation into the Mystery school watching this drama would have caught a whiff of sulphur, maybe even been half-blinded by a flash like lightning, as the peaceful pastoral scene was invaded by a glistening alien life-form, horrifyingly livid and horned. The picture that was being presented to his imagination was of a snake seemingly endlessly long, millions of miles of it weaving its way into the cosmos, a snake with a perverse kind of beauty. ‘Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God,’ says Ezekiel 28:13, ‘every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald and carbuncle and gold.’

The candidate for initiation would have watched with horror as it coiled itself ever more tightly around Adam’s vegetable trunk. He would have understood that what he was watching was the series of events by which life on earth moved painfully to the next stage of evolution. Because the story of the serpent entwined around the tree contains the clearest possible image of the earth’s transition from vegetable to animal life.

Since the eighteenth century when a matter-before-mind world-view began to take over from the ancient, mind-before-matter world-view, the Church has tried to reconcile the Genesis account of creation with the findings of science. This has been a doomed enterprise because it is based on a modern, anachronistic reading of Genesis.

Genesis does not consider evolution objectively as a modern scientist does, piecing together bits of geological, anthropological and archaeological evidence impartially and objectively evaluated. The story of Genesis is a subjective account of the way humanity evolved, what it felt like. In other words the story of the entwining of snake and tree is a picture of the formation of the spine and central nervous system characteristic of animals as it has been retained in the human collective subconscious.

Again and again we will see that the esoteric account is not necessarily inconsistent with the scientific one. As we suggested by the perspected picture, it views the same facts from a very different point of view.

WE SAW IN THE LAST CHAPTER HOW MATTER had in a sense prepared the ground in which vegetable life could be born. Now vegetable life as it were formed a cradle into which animal life could be born. To put it another way, vegetable life formed a seed bed into which the seeds of animal life fell.

This is the beginning of the momentous episode in history called the Fall.

The candidate for initiation would be made to feel the terrible sense of crisis and danger involved in the Fall in a quite literal way. Suddenly and as if impelled by an earth tremor, he found himself falling down into a black hole, pitched into what he immediately discovered to be a snake pit. In the esoteric tradition the rough-hewn chamber that lies underneath the Great Pyramid at Gizah, known as the Chamber of Ordeal, performed just this function. Recent excavations at Baia in Italy, where a system of caves, part natural and part man-made were believed by the Romans to be the actual entrance to the Underworld, have actually revealed the site of a trap door which would have flung the candidate for initiation down into the snake pit below.

The candidate experienced for himself how Lucifer and his legions infested the whole earth with a plague of glistening serpents. He saw how, according to the secret history, the whole earth had once begun to seethe with primitive animal life. He saw, too, how desire tormented the very ground, making it heave, and he realized traces of this torment could be seen in expressive rock formations.

^{Adam, Eve and the serpent by Masaccio.}

^{Renaissance engraving of the tree in the Garden of Eden as a skeleton, after Sebald Beharne.}

But why should the translation from vegetable to animal life be marked by such torment? The account of the catastrophe in Genesis certainly emphasizes this tormented aspect in some of the most sonorous phrases on the Old Testament: ‘Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children… And unto Adam He said… cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.’ It seems that as a result of the Fall, humans have to suffer, to strive, and to die — but why?

Wrapped up in this ancient language are more truths modern science would recognize. Plants reproduce by a method called parthenogenesis. A part of the plant falls off and grows into a new plant. This new plant is in a sense a continuation of the old one, which therefore — in a sense — does not die. The evolution of animal life and its characteristic method of reproduction — sex — brought death with it. As soon as hunger and desire were felt so too were dissatisfaction, frustration, sorrow and fear.

^{Loki, the Norse equivalent to Lucifer, is usually portrayed as a beautiful and fiery god but also evil, quick-witted and cunning. Ninteenth-century illustration by R. Savage}

WHO IS IT WHO TEMPTS EVE? WHO IS the serpent who inflames the world with desire?

We probably all feel we know the answer to this question — but naively. The problem is that those in charge of our spiritual development have kept us at a nursery level of understanding.

We began to see in the last chapter how the Church has covered up its astronomical roots, how the beginning of Genesis contains hidden within it stories of the same gods of the planets we know from other, more ‘primitive’ religions — the god Saturn, the Earth goddess and the Sun god. As we now move further into the Genesis account of history we can see again how this covering up of astronomical roots, the radical monotheism of the modern Church, can stop us from understanding clearly what the ancient text is trying to tell us.

Most people would naturally assume that Christianity allows the existence of only one Devil — the Devil — in other words that Satan and Lucifer are the same entity.

In fact we need only a quick, fresh look at the texts to see that the authors of the Bible intended something quite different. Again, this is something biblical scholars accept, but which hasn’t filtered down to congregations.

We have seen that Satan, the Dark Lord, the agent of materialism, is to be identified with the god of the planet Saturn in Greek and Roman mythology. Is Lucifer, the snake, the tempter who inflames humanity with animal desire also to be identified with Saturn — or perhaps with a different planet?

There is a vast, erudite body of literature comparing biblical texts to older and contemporary texts from neighbouring cultures, which shows that the two main representatives of evil in the Bible, Satan and Lucifer, are not the same entity. Fortunately we do not need to immerse ourselves in this literature, because there is a quite explicit statement in the Bible itself: Isaiah 14.12, ‘How thou art fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning.’

The Morning Star is, of course, Venus. The Bible, therefore, identifies Lucifer with the planet Venus.

It might at first seem counter-intuitive to equate the goddess of Venus in Greece and Rome — Aphrodite to the Greeks — with Lucifer in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Venus/Aphrodite is female and seems more life- enhancing. But in reality there are key points of similarity.

Both Lucifer and Venus/Aphrodite are bound up with animal desire and sexuality.

^{The correlation between Lucifer and Venus can also be seen in the mythology of the Americas, where he appears in the figure of the horned and feathered snake god Quetzal Coatl.}

^{The snake sometimes found coiled round the body of the goddess was called ‘the minister of the goddess’ by the Greeks.}

The apple is the fruit associated with both. Lucifer tempts Eve with an apple and Paris hands Venus an apple