The Secret History of the World

in a gesture that precipitates the abduction of Helen and the Great War of the ancient world. The apple is universally the fruit of Venus because if you slice an apple in two, the path that Venus traces in the sky over a forty-year period is a five-pointed star, pinpointed by the position of the pips.

Lucifer and Venus are also ambiguous figures. Lucifer is evil, but he is a necessary evil. Without Lucifer’s intervention, proto-humanity would not have evolved beyond a vegetative form of life. As a result of Lucifer’s intervention in history we are animated, both in the sense that we can move about the surface of the planet and also in the sense that we are moved by desire. An animal has a conscious awareness of itself as a distinct entity that is denied to plants. To say that Adam and Eve ‘knew they were naked’ is to say that they became aware that they had bodies.

Many beautiful representations of Venus have come down to us from the ancient world, but there were terrifying representations too. Behind the image of a woman of matchless beauty lurked the terrifying serpent woman.

IN ORDER TO DELVE DEEPER INTO THIS ambiguity and to understand better the next great event in the secret history of the world, we now turn to an early German version of Venus/Lucifer tradition which appeared in medieval poetry and would enter the mainstream of world literature when it was taken up and adapted by Wolfram von Eschenbach in Parzifal.

See! Lucifer, there he is!
If there are still master-priests
Then you know well that I am saying the truth.
Saint Michael saw God’s anger…
He took Lucifer’s crown from his head
In such a way that the stone jumped out of it
Which on earth became Parsifal’s stone.

Tradition tells us that as Lucifer fell a great emerald dropped from his forehead. This signals that humanity would increasingly suffer a loss of vision in the Third Eye, the brow chakra.

^{These small Greek statues capture something of the joy the Greeks took in the pleasures of desire, their joy in the material world. In Greek creation stories the birth of Venus is brought about by an act of rebellion by Saturn, who takes his sickle and slices at the testicles of Uranos, the Sky god, castrating him. As the sperm of Uranos falls into the sea, the beautiful goddess Venus springs into being, fully formed, and floats ashore on a sea shell. The ancients believed that shells were precipitated out of water, just as matter is precipitated out of spirit, hence their symbolizing emanation from the cosmic mind, both here and in the iconography of St James of Compostela.}

While the result of the influence of Satan is that life is often hard to bear, it is as a result of the influence of Venus that life is often hard to understand. The influence of Venus brought a paradoxical, tricky quality to the heart of the universe.

In other words, delusion entered the world. Lucifer endowed matter with a glamour that would dazzle humankind, and blind people to higher truths.

Why is it that the way forward sometimes looks like the way backwards? Why is it that the thing we most ought not to do looks almost indistinguishable from the thing we ought to do? In my heart of hearts I know what I ought to do, but I have another, alien element entwined inside me that wants to lead me astray. The Luciferic element is infused into my very physiology. Desire and delusion combine in me dangerously. Because of Lucifer’s influence, ‘the good that I would do I not; but the evil which I would not, that I do’. (Romans 7.19.) St Paul, who as we shall see was an initiate of the Mystery tradition, is saying that part of me always knows what is right, but that it is often overruled by a part that is in thrall to Lucifer.

MODERN SCIENCE NEVER FRAMES THE questions, How did delusion come into the world? Or imagination? Or willpower? But to the ancients delusion, imagination and will were among the greatest forces in the universe, living out there in three-dimensional space as well as in our own minds. For them the history of creation was an account of how these things came to be.

Friedrich Nietzsche said, ‘Unless you have chaos inside you, you cannot give birth to a dancing star.’ Humans would never have been able to become freely creative, brave or loving if they had not been able to make mistakes, to see things as other than they are and to believe things to be other than they are. Because of Lucifer it is the case that we do not always believe in proportion to the evidence. We can often believe what we want to believe. For instance, the life of someone we know can appear a miserable failure or a heart-warming success depending on how we choose to look at it, whether good- heartedly or mean-spiritedly. And when the harsh fire, the primeval sulphur burns in the pit of our stomachs, it is difficult for us to choose to be good-hearted.

When in the very beginning the Earth goddess had been attacked by the god of Saturn, the young Sun god had arrived to protect her, and, fighting a great battle in heaven, had defeated Saturn. The candidate for initiation who was being shown the secret history of the world had therefore already watched one great battle. He now had to watch another one in which the enemy was the great snake that had slithered into Paradise in order to corrupt it.

Who was to be the new champion to fight this second battle?

As with the Church’s conflation of Satan and Lucifer in order to disguise its astronomical roots, we must now disentangle another deliberately created confusion.

In the early chapters of Genesis telling the story of creation, the word usually translated as ‘God’ is, as we have seen, ‘Elohim’. Later Genesis ceases to refer to Elohim and instead the word usually translated as ‘God’ is ‘Jehovah’. Biblical scholars working outside the esoteric tradition have tended to explain what appears to them as two different names for the same God as the result of two different literary strands, the Elohim strand and the Jehovah strand, probably dating from different periods and woven together by a later redactor.

However, scholars working within the esoteric tradition have a much simpler explanation. Elohim and Jehovah are not different names for the same entity but different entities. Elohim is, as we have seen, a collective name for the Seven Spirits working together as the god of the Sun, while Jehovah came into being when one of these seven broke away to defend the Earth from Venus.

In order to discover Jehovah’s true, astronomical identity, we must look again at the iconography of his opponent, Venus. We must also remember that for the ancients the history of the origins of the cosmos was as much about how human experience was put together, how experience gained its characteristic structure, as it was about how the physical universe was put together. In other words, it was as much about the principles of human nature as about the laws of the natural world.

Human nature is so formed that any power I may have to resist my animal desires — indeed what stops me from becoming a mere animal — derives from my capacity for thought and reflection. Venus was traditionally depicted holding a mirror, but not out of vanity as is nowadays supposed. The mirror was a symbol of the power of reflection to modify desire.

^{Depicted here on the back of a Greek mirror from the first century BC is the story of Semele, goddess of the Moon, and a beautiful youth called Endymion. In the story Semele falls in love with Endymion and casts a spell that leaves him in perpetual dreamy sleep. Here is an explicit depiction of the moon working on the pineal gland in the form of the wand of Dionysus.}

^{Medieval depiction of Jehovah as a war god.}

The god of reflection was the god of the great reflector in the sky — the moon. In all ancient cultures the moon regulated not only fertility but thought.

In fact the initiate priests believed that in order to create the conditions in which human thought would be