The Secret History of the World

People who learn how to dream consciously, that is to say with the ability to think and exercise willpower we normally only enjoy in waking life, may develop powers which are ‘supernatural’ by today’s definitions. If you can dream consciously, then you are on the way to being able to move about the spirit worlds at will, communicating freely with the spirits of the dead and other disembodied beings. You may perhaps learn about the future in ways which might otherwise be blocked. You may be able to travel to other parts of the material universe and view things where you are not bodily present — so-called astral travel. The great sixteenth- century initiate Paracelsus, who, as we shall see, has some claims to be the father of both modern experimental medicine and homeopathy, said he was able to visit other people in their dreams.

We will also see that many great scientific discoveries have been revealed to initiates while in this alternative state of consciousness.

Supernatural means of influencing minds is another of the gifts that initiation may confer. Initiates I have met have undoubted gifts of mind-reading way beyond the abilities of sceptical scientists to reproduce in ‘cold reading’ experiments.

Similarly science has only the flimsiest, question-begging explanations for hypnosis. This is because, though it may be abused by popular entertainers, hypnosis was originally — and at root remains — an occult practice. Ultimately explicable only in mind-before-matter terms, it originated with the Rishis of India and in techniques practised during the process of initiation by the temple priests of Egypt. In the Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali, this power of influencing others’ minds is one of the powers called vibhuti. Mind-influence was used for benevolent purposes, but as the world became a more dangerous place it would have to be used for both defence and attack.

We saw earlier how in a mind-before-matter philosophy the way you look at someone can affect them at a sub-atomic level. The coiled cobra representations of the Third Eye on the foreheads of Egyptian initiates shows that it can reach out and strike at what it perceives. In the seventeenth century the scientist and alchemist J.B. von Helmont said that ‘a man may kill an animal by staring at it for fifteen minutes’. From the eighteenth century onwards European travellers in India were amazed by the ability of adepts to throw anyone into an immediate state of catalepsy, just by looking at them. The story of one nineteenth-century traveller was recorded by George Eliot’s friend, the initiate Gerald Massey. This traveller had been mesmerized by the gaze of a serpent. He was sinking deeper and deeper into a ‘somnambulic’ sleep under its fascinating influence. Then someone else in the party shot the snake, breaking its power over him — and he felt a blow to the head as if he too had been struck by a bullet. Travellers in the twentieth century reported tales of wolves that were able to freeze their victims and prevent them from crying out, even when the victim was unaware that he was being watched. In living memory in a small town called Crowborough, less than six miles from where I write, lived a local wise man and healer called Pigtail Badger. The villagers were afraid of him, because it was said that this tall, heavy-set, fierce-looking man could stop others in their tracks just by looking at them. It was said that sometimes he would do this to farm labourers, then sit and eat their lunches in front of them.

THE MOST IMPORTANT INITIATION TEACHINGS concerned the way the spirit worlds are experienced after death. This was not because a candidate would have doubted there was life after death — such a thought would have been unthinkable then — but because they feared what their experience would turn out to be. In the first instance they feared that demons they had evaded in their lifetime were lying in wait. Initiation showed candidates how to navigate the after-death journey safely.

^{Iconography of the spirit leaving the body in Egyptian and Christian art (Didron’s Christian Iconocraphy ). In the Egyptian depiction, the spirit is showing separating from the discarded soul- matter.}

In sleep the animal spirit leaves the vegetable and mineral parts of the body behind. In death, on the other hand, the vegetable part, which orders the basic life functions, leaves with the animal spirit.

The vegetable part of human nature has many functions, including storing memory. As the vegetable part detaches from the material body, both begin to disintegrate. This disintegration of the vegetable part causes the spirit to experience a review of the life just completed.

The vegetable part dissipates and detaches itself from the animal spirit in a matter of days. Then the spirit passes into the sub-lunar sphere. There it is attacked by demons who tear from it all impure, corrupt and bestial desires, all evil impulses of will. This region, where the spirit has to endure this painful process of purification for a period lasting approximately a third of the time spent on earth, is called Purgatory in Christian tradition. It is the same place as the Underworld of the Egyptians and Greeks. It is the Kamaloca (literally ‘region of desire’) of the Hindus.

Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century German mystic, said ‘If you fight your death, you’ll feel the demons tearing away at your life, but if you have the right attitude to death, you will be able to see that the devils are really angels setting your spirit free.’ An initiate has the right attitude to death. He sees behind appearances and knows that demons in their proper place perform an invaluable role in what we might call the ‘ecology’ of the spirit world. Unless the spirit is purged in this way, it cannot ascend through the higher spheres and hear their music. Following its prodigal journey on earth, the spirit cannot be reunited with the Father until it has been purified.

It is important to continue to bear in mind that the knowledge gained in initiation is not dry or abstract, but existential. The initiate has an out-of-body experience which is shattering.

^{Illustration to Le Petit Prince showing the ascent through the spheres.}

From the lunar sphere the disembodied spirit flies upwards to the realm of Mercury, from there to Venus and then on to the sun. Then the spirit experiences, as the Greek orator Aristides put it, ‘a lightness which nobody who has not been initiated could either describe or understand’. It is important to continue to bear in mind that this teaching was common to Mystery schools of all cultures in the ancient world and has been perpetuated in the modern world by the secret societies. From the Egyptian Book of the Dead, through the Christian Cabala of the Pistis Sophia through Dante’s Commedia, forward to modern works such as Le Petit Prince by the twentieth-century French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the secret doctrine is maintained, sometimes in books only initiates may read — and sometimes hidden in plain view.

In the ancient texts the initiate is told the secret names of the spirits who guard the entrance to every sphere and the sometimes secret handshakes and other signs and formulae needed to negotiate entry. In the Pistis Sophia these spheres are envisaged as made of crystal and the entrance keepers of these spheres as archons or demons.

In all the ancient religions, the being who guides the human spirit through the underworld and helps negotiate the way past the guardian demons is the god of the planet Mercury.

But the initiates of the Mystery schools kept a secret. Halfway on the journey through the spheres, there is a swap. The task of guiding the human spirit upwards is taken over by a great being whose identity may perhaps be a surprise. In the latter part of the spirit’s ascent through the heavenly spheres the guide who lights the way is Lucifer.

In the spiritual ecology of the cosmos Lucifer is a necessary evil, both in this life — because without Lucifer humans could feel no desire — and in the afterlife. Without Lucifer the spirit would be plunged into total darkness and fail to understand the ascent. The second-century Roman writer Apuleius wrote that in the process of initiation the spirit confronts the gods of heaven in all their unveiled splendour — and with all their ambiguities removed.

The spirit ascends through the spheres of Jupiter and Saturn, passes through the sphere of the constellations and is finally reunited with the great Cosmic Mind. It has been a painful, confusing and tiring journey. Plutarch writes: ‘But finally a wondrous light shines to greet us, beautiful meadows full of singing and dancing, the solemnity of sacred realms and holy appearances.’

Then the spirit must begin again the descent through the spheres, preparatory to the next incarnation. As it descends each sphere grants the spirit a gift which it will need when re-entering the material plane.

The following account has been compiled from fragments of ancient tablets, dating perhaps as far back as the third millennium BC, excavated in Iraq in the late nineteenth century: