The Secret History of the World

Something that is clear from these accounts is that the great migrations eastwards were not moving into uninhabited territories. While the peoples of Atlantis had been all but eliminated, the emigrants travelled to new lands still occupied by aboriginal tribes. We see Dionysius’s reaction to what he found in these new lands in his forbidding of cannibalism and human sacrifice. Native priests would sometimes keep enormous snakes or pterodactyls, rare survivors from antediluvian times, which were worshipped as gods and fed the flesh of captives. The Ramayana describes how Rama and his followers suddenly invaded these temples with torches, driving out both priests and monsters. He would appear without warning among enemies, sometimes with bow drawn, sometimes defenceless except that he was able to petrify them with his pale lotus-blue gaze.

Rama was dispossessed, a nomad. His kingdom lay beneath the seas. He did not live the life of a king, but camped out in the wild with his beloved Sita.

Then Sita was abducted by the evil magician Ravana. The Ramayana tells of the completion of Rama’s journey with the conquest of India and the taking of Ceylon, the last refuge of Ravana. Rama formed a bridge over the sea between mainland India and Ceylon with the help of an army of monkeys, which is to say hominids, the descendants of human spirits who had rushed into incarnation too early and were doomed to die out. Finally, after a battle that lasted thirteen days, Rama killed Ravana by showering fire down on him.

We might see Rama as a Neolithic Alexander the Great. Following the conquest of India, he had the world at his feet. He also had a dream.

He was walking in the forests on a moonlit night, when a beautiful woman came towards him. Her skin was as white as snow and she was wearing a magnificent crown. He didn’t recognize her at first, but then she said, ‘I am Sita, take this crown and rule the world with me.’ She knelt humbly and offered him a glittering crown — the kingship which had been denied him. But just then his guardian angel whispered in his ear: ‘If you place that crown on your head, you will see me no more. And if you clasp that woman in your arms, she will experience such happiness that it will kill her instantly. But if you refuse to love her she will live out the rest of her life free and happy on earth, and your invisible spirit will rule over her.’ As Rama made up his mind, Sita disappeared amongst the trees. They would never see each other again, leading the remainder of their lives apart.

Stories about Sita’s later life suggest it was by no means obvious that she was as happy as the guardian angel had promised. In its ambiguity and uncertainty there is something very modern about this story.

We can also see in it a paradox that lies at the heart of the human condition. All love, if it is true love, involves a letting go.

With his prowess with the bow, his handsome face, blue eyes and lion chest, Rama is in many ways like the heroes that Greek myths describe, such as Hercules, but in the story of Rama there is, as I say, something new. Hercules was required to choose between virtue and happiness, and unsurprisingly chose the former. Rama’s story, on the other hand, contains an element of moral surprise. The reader of the story will probably agree with Sita as she argues with Rama that it is only right and fitting that he now accept the crown he has been cheated of since birth. But then Rama’s surprising choices — deciding not to take the crown that is rightfully his, not to marry the woman he loves — these dilate the moral imagination and quicken the moral intelligence. The story of Rama encourages us to see beyond the conventional, to imagine ourselves into the mind of others and also, ultimately, to think for ourselves. Esoteric thinking has always sought to undermine and subvert conventional, habitual, mechanical modes of thought. Later we will see how storytellers, dramatists and novelists steeped in esoteric thought, from Shakespeare and Cervantes to George Eliot and Tolstoy, would quicken the moral imagination, one of the distinguishing characteristics of the very greatest literature. If great art and literature give a sense of patterns, of laws operating beyond conventional thought, great esoteric art brings these laws near to the surface of consciousness.

The story of Rama also brings us back to the notion that according to the secret history the cosmos has been formed in order to create the conditions in which people could experience free thought and free will. Rama could have enforced what is good and right on his people by ruling them with a rod of iron, but he instead let them decide for themselves. Rama is thus the archetype of the exiled or ‘Secret King’ or ‘Secret Philosopher’ who influences the course of history not from the throne but by mingling incognito among the people. Rama tried to help humans to evolve freely.

Rama is a demi-god, but declines to be ruler of the world. No longer will gods or even demi-gods sit on thrones in bodies of flesh and bone.

AT JOURNEY’S END THE EMIGRANTS FOUNDED Shambala, a great spiritual fortress in the mountainous region of Tibet. The roof of the world, Tibet is the world’s biggest, highest plateau surrounded by high mountain ranges. Some traditions say the Tibetan population is directly descended from the people of Atlantis.

Some say that Shambala can only be reached via an underground tunnel, others that it exists in another dimension into which a secret portal opens somewhere in the region. St Augustine was the greatest Christian theologian after St Paul and, like St Paul, was an initiate of a Mystery school. He wrote about the place where Enoch and the saints lived, a terrestrial paradise so high up that the Flood could not reach it. Emmanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish theologian, diplomat and inventor — and also the leading esoteric Freemason of the age — wrote that ‘the “Lost Word” must be sought among the sages of Tibet and Tartary’. Anne-Catherine Emmerich, the nineteenth-century German Catholic mystic wrote similarly of a Mount of Prophets where live Enoch, Elijah and others who did not die in the ordinary way but ‘ascended’, and where unicorns which survived the Flood may also be found.

From the mountain fastnesses of Tibet flowed streams of living spirituality which joined together, gathered force, depth and width and became a mighty river like the Ganges, feeding the whole of India.

IN THIS HISTORY OF THE WORLD WRITTEN in the stars, the next era began as the sun began to rise in the constellation of Cancer in 7227 BC and the first great Indian civilization, the earliest and most deeply spiritual of post-Flood civilizations, was founded. The founders felt little for the newly created material world, which they saw as ‘maya’, an illusion threatening to obscure the higher realities of the spirit worlds. They looked back with nostalgia to the time before this veil of matter had been drawn between humankind and the spiritual hierarchies.

The icy baths and other forms of self-torture of the ascetics can be looked on as part of the effort to stay awake to the spirit worlds. A conscious effort was made by them, while the veil was still relatively translucent, to remember the lineaments of the spirit world, and to impress them indelibly on human consciousness.

The success of this enterprise has meant that India is still the world’s greatest storehouse of spiritual knowledge, particularly as regards occult physiology. As a high level initiate recently said to me, ‘If you visit India today, you cannot help feeling how the air still just crackles with astrality.’

Great Western teachers such as Pythagoras, Apollonius of Tyana and St Germain have travelled to India in search of this astrality. The Gospels contain quotes from older, Indian sources and more ideas that originated there.

Sir John Woodruffe, the Sanskrit scholar who first translated the tantric texts in the nineteenth century, has written how even the venerable Sufi tradition leant on Hindu wisdom for teachings on the chakras, for example.

In the 1960s onwards, Indian religion was felt by many people in the West to offer a working spiritual knowledge, including practical spiritual disciplines and guides through the spirit worlds, which they could not find in church. A bookshop in the West is still likely to stock more books on mysticism derived from the Eastern than from the Western tradition.

FOLLOWING RAMA’S REFUSAL TO TAKE THE crown, no great single personality dominates this period. If Rama was an all-action hero who fought monsters, went on long, dangerous adventures and founded cities, his successors, sometimes called the Seven Wise Ones, or the Rishis, had a stillness, an inactivity about them. They built no stone buildings. They lived in buildings of mud or simple shelters twisted into shape from roots and tendrils. Nothing of the Rishis has lasted except what they knew.

There is a simple saying in the Cabala: ‘Everything you have seen, every flower, every bird, every rock will pass away and turn to dust, but that you have seen them will not pass away.’ This is a saying that would have seemed sympathetic to the Rishis. Seated with legs folded so that the soles of their feet turned upwards, they had no desire to feel gravity, the downward, reductive pull of the material world, but headed instead for the spirit worlds. They were able to see spiritual beings at work on the earth, how they help seeds to germinate in spring, flowers to blossom in summer, trees to bear fruit in autumn — and how seeds are preserved through winter by