The Secret History of the World

generations.

^{Drawing by the nineteenth-century Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli of a demon sometimes called the Hanon-Tramp. Moon demons inhabit the ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, where they play a legitimate role in the spiritual economy of the cosmos, helping to tear corruption from human spirits after death. However, if they break through into the earthly realm, they appear as malevolent dwarves. The height of a six- or seven-year old child with large, hypnotic eyes, they sometimes emit an ear-splitting yell that can freeze a human with fear. More powerful when the moon is waning, these demons may account for some modern encounters with ‘aliens’, which in a physical form at any rate play no part in esoteric cosmology.}

^{Battle of Lapiths and Centaurs in the Parthenon frieze.}

As bones thickened, the animal world began to feel its weight. Creation grew tired and animals grew vicious, as they had to struggle to survive. As humanity continued to fall, so too did nature. It became red in tooth and claw. Lions and wolves began to attack humans. Plants grew thorns to scratch and make the gathering of fruit difficult, and poisonous plants evolved, like wolfsbane.

The Parthenon frieze also records battles against the Amazons, a race of warrior women, who were the first to ride horses into battle. An Amazon had to kill a man before she was allowed to marry. Wearing armour of fur and carrying shields in a half-moon shape, their cavalry scythed down row upon row of foot soldiers. They were magnificent, and they represented a new form of human behaviour, because hard on the heels of the possibility of death had come the possibility of killing and of murder. Cut us and we would bleed. Cut us hard or often enough and we would die. Some humans began to delight in this. The Book of Enoch describes how the surface of the earth became covered with warring armies, and says that ‘human flesh itself had become perverse’.

Because of the encasing, bony skull and the enmeshing of the organs of spiritual perception, humans were now shut off not only from the gods ranged above them, but also from each other. A shadow was falling over human relations. It became possible for one centre of consciousness to believe itself cut off from another. ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ asked Cain, who represents the evolution of the new form of consciousness. This question would have meant nothing to Adam and Eve, who were like branches on the same tree.

In the same way that we would be overwhelmed by the spirit worlds if they were not filtered out, if there were no filter on empathy we would feel everyone’s pain as our own and so be completely overwhelmed by the suffering of others. Without a degree of isolation no human could experience him or herself as an individual, no one could feel the burning fire in the forehead that drove Cain onwards. But of course there were pitfalls in this…

History shows that humans have a horror of humans with other forms of consciousness, which they often find hard to tolerate. Sometimes they feel the need to eradicate it from the face of the earth. We need only think of the treatment by Europeans of the Aztecs, the near genocide of the Aborigines of Australia or the attempt to wipe out gypsies by the Nazis. Later we will see that since the time of Moses, the Jews have often been at the forefront of forging new forms of consciousness.

Humans were now free to make mistakes, to choose the bad and to enjoy it. It was no longer the case that humans received all their spiritual nourishment from the milky sap-filled breasts of Mother Earth. The natural law and the moral law were no longer the same thing.

The earth grew colder, harder and more dangerous in many different ways. People struggled to survive and would sometimes find themselves stretched to the limits of endurance. They discovered that the road ahead would always be fraught with the danger of death, but unless they took that road they would die anyway. From now on they would have to put at risk what they valued most or they would lose it. Beyond a certain point, there is no return. That point, they discovered, must be reached.

They discovered uncomfortable things about themselves, too — that they had become brutalized by this new world, and had grown a hard, protective carapace of habit. To break open this carapace and expose the sensitive part of themselves, the better part that brought them fully alive again, was a bloody and painful process that few could face.

The world became darker, a place of paradox where opposites meet and where it is painful to be human, a world calling out for heroism.

THE LARGEST AND MOST TERRIFYING OF the monstrous, progeny of Saturn came last. Typhon emerged out of the sea, heading straight for Olympus, spitting fire from his mouth and blocking out the sun with his bat-like wings. He had the head of an ass, and when he emerged from the sea, the gods saw that below the waist he was nothing but a coiling mass of thousands of snakes. Zeus tried to fell him with thunderbolts, but Typhon only shrugged them aside. As Typhon bore down upon him, Zeus then snatched the flint scythe that Cronos had used to castrate Uranos. But the monster’s snake-like limbs wrapped themselves around the limbs of Zeus, holding them fast and snatching the scythe from him. Then keeping the king of the gods pinned down, Typhon cut out all his sinews. Zeus is immortal and could not be killed, but without his sinews he was completely helpless.

Typhon took the sinews away with him and retired to a cave to recuperate from his own wounds. Apollo and Pan then emerged from the shadows and hatched a plan. They went to find Cadmus, the dragon-slaying hero, who was wandering the earth looking for his sister Europa. She had been carried away by Zeus, disguised as a white bull. Now Apollo and Pan promised Cadmus that if he helped them, his quest would be over.

Pan gave Cadmus his pipes, and, disguised as a shepherd, the hero went to play for the wounded Typhon. Never having heard music before, Typhon was entranced by this strange new sound. Cadmus told him that it was nothing compared to the music he could make with a lyre, but sadly the sinews on his lyre were broken. Typhon handed over the sinews of Zeus, and Cadmus told him he needed to go back to his shepherd’s hut to string his lyre. So it was that Zeus regained his sinews and was able to surprise the monster, overpower him and bury him under Mount Etna.

The important point to note here is that Zeus was only saved with the help of a hero. The gods now needed humans.

THE MYTHS OF THE GREEK HEROES — Cadmus, Hercules, Theseus and Jason — are some of the most famous stories in human history. It might seem as if they are entirely missing from the biblical account, but according to the ancient tradition preserved in the secret societies Cadmus is to be identified with Enoch, the first human in Hebrew tradition to whom the gods turn for help.

The Old Testament contains only a few enigmatic words on Enoch. Genesis 5.21-24. ‘And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah, And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years and begat sons and daughters; And all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years; And Enoch walked with God and he was not: for God took him.’

There is little to go on here but, as we have already seen, there is a literary tradition about Enoch in Hebrew literature, including, as we have seen, some books which are widely quoted in the New Testament. In one of these, the Book of Jubilees, Enoch is described as discovering the writings of the Watchers, but this is a clumsy translation. What is meant is that he discovered, which is to say invented, language itself.

Hebrew tradition presents Enoch as a strange figure. His shining countenance was uncomfortable to look at and he was evidently an uncomfortable presence. In this he may remind us of the Jesus of the Gospels, captivating vast crowds but feeling that he wants to withdraw in order to be alone with the great spiritual beings who are showing themselves to him.

In solitude Enoch was able to commune with the gods and angels with a clarity that humankind was fast losing.

Initially Enoch would spend one day teaching the multitude, then spend three days alone. Then he spent only one day a week, then one day a month and finally one day a year. The crowds yearned for his return, but when he did so his face shone so brightly it was so uncomfortable for them to look at that they had to avert their eyes.

What was Enoch doing on his solitary vigils? We will see repeatedly that great turning points in history are caused by two types of thought. First, turning points arise when great thinkers like Socrates, Jesus Christ and Dante think for the first time something that nobody has ever thought before. Second, turning points arise when thoughts are set down and inscribed indelibly, because they preserve some ancient wisdom that is in danger of being lost forever.