The Secret History of the World

The first gate he passed her out of, and he restored to her the covering cloak of her body.

The second gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the bracelets of her hands and feet.

The third gate he passed her out of, and he restored to her the binding girdle of her waist.

The fourth gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the ornaments of her breast.

The fifth gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the necklace of her neck.

The sixth gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the earrings of her ears.

The seventh gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the great crown of her head.

Even today every child is reminded of these gifts in the fairy story Sleeping Beauty. The human spirit still responds strongly and warmly to this story, experiencing it as true in a deep sense.

But in order to understand the esoteric content of Sleeping Beauty it is necessary to think in an upside down sort of way. The story relates that at the party to celebrate her birth, six fairies give the Princess gifts to help her have a happy and fulfilled life. The seventh fairy, who represents Saturn or Satan, the spirit of materialism, curses the child with death, which is commuted to a long period of sleep. These seven fairies are, of course, the seven gods of the planetary spheres.

What is upside down and the other way round about this story is that by the deathly, dreamless sleep which is the curse of the evil fairy is meant life on earth. In other words, because of the intervention by Satan, humans gradually lose any consciousness, and eventually any memory, of their time among the heavenly hierarchies: ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.’ In this story, then, the party at the beginning of the narrative must be understood as taking place in the spirit world, and it is only when Beauty falls asleep that she is alive on the material plane. When she awakes, she dies!

In fact we have already seen a similar paradox in the story of Osiris, most of which takes place in the spirit world. When Osiris is nailed in the coffin that fits him like skin, it is his skin. He is only dead to Isis when he is alive on the material plane.

THESE STORIES SHOW HOW BOTH THIS life and the afterlife are ruled by the planets and stars. They should alert us to another very important dimension in initiatic teachings. Initiation prepares the candidate for meetings with the guardians of the different spheres both on the way up and on the way down. If these teachings are imprinted well enough on the individual spirit, this will ultimately prepare the spirit for conscious participation with the higher spiritual beings in preparing for a new incarnation. The key word here is ‘conscious’.

^{Rosicrucian beliefs about reincarnation are encoded in the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Snow White ‘dies’ and is laid in a glass coffin — a legendary custom of the Rosicrucians. The whole idea of reincarnation may seem alien to people brought up in a modern, Christian culture. As we shall see, though, the New Testament contains ideas of reincarnation, the early Christians believed in it, and senior Christians have believed in it in secret ever since. Secret beliefs about reincarnation are encoded in art, architecture and literature here in Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book.}

Initiation involves forging a conscious, working relationship with disembodied spirits and an existential knowledge of the way they work in our lives and our afterlives. It reveals the way they operate when we are awake, when we dream and when we are dead. We have seen that the histories we have been examining, such as the trials of Hercules, are structured according to different astronomical cycles — the journey of the sun through the months of the year and in the precession of the equinoxes. The point is that the same patterns that structure life on earth also structure the spirit worlds. Hercules and Job suffered trials in their earthly lives that have been recorded in the history of the world, but they will also have to suffer the same trials in the afterlife — unless they can learn to become conscious of them. And if they can’t, they will also have to suffer them in their next incarnation.

This is the aim of initiation: to make more and more experience conscious, to roll back the boundaries of consciousness.

^{Initiation by Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna. Compare this with the ancient Roman depiction of the process of initiation on p.43. The hooded acolyte is threatened and suddenly made to feel he has been pushed into a fatal fall. This is part of the process of inducing an out-of-body experience that enables the acolyte to achieve personal, existential knowledge of what will happen when the spirit leaves the body after death. The continuity in this process can also be seen in the account by the great eighteenth- century magus Cagliostro of his initiation into a Masonic Lodge in London. In the Esperance Lodge above a pub in Soho, he was asked to repeat an oath of secrecy then blindfolded. A rope was then tied round his waist, and he heard pulleys creak as he was winched up to the ceiling. Suddenly he fell to the floor, his blindfold was removed, and he saw a pistol being loaded with powder and a bullet. The blindfold was replaced and he was handed the pistol and asked to prove his obedience by shooting himself in the head. When he hesitated, his initiators shouted at him, accusing him of being a coward. He pulled the trigger, heard an explosion, felt a blow to the side of the head and smelled gunpowder. He had believed he was going to die — and now he was an initiate.}

In our individual lives — and collectively — we go round and round in the circles traced out for us by the planets and stars.

But if we can become conscious of these circles, if we can become conscious of the activity of the stars and planets in our lives in a most intimate way, then we are in a sense no longer trapped by them. We are no longer trapped by them, we rise above them, we are moving now not in a circle but in an upward spiral.

ZARATHUSTRA WORE A CLOAK COVERED with stars and planets as a mark of the knowledge that the great spirits of the sun had taught him. This was knowledge he passed on in initiation. When candidates re-entered the body, following their out-of-body experience, they were enabled by Zarathustra to explore the interior workings of their bodies in ways that thousands of years later people would only be able to rediscover though autopsies. Again the difference was that the ancients, according to their habit of seeing life as subjectively as possible, did not know human anatomy in an abstract, conceptual way, but rather they experienced it. This was how the ancients knew of the pineal gland long before it was ‘discovered’ by modern science.

At the transition from the sixth to the fifth millennium BC, humankind began to construct the great stone circles that survive to this day. In the same way that the withdrawal of the gods during the Indian period had forced humankind to think about ways of following them, now the obscuring of direct guidance from the gods made it necessary for humankind to discover new ways of seeking that guidance. Again humankind was being drawn out of itself.

As the initiator of these stone monuments, Zarathustra can be seen as a sort of post-Flood mirror image of Enoch.

The megalithic stone circles which began to spread throughout the Near East, Northern Europe and Northern Africa are intended to measure the movements of the heavenly bodies. In the 1950s Professor Alexander Thom of Cambridge University first realized that megalithic stone monuments across the world are constructed according to a common unit of measurement, which he called the ‘megalithic yard’. This has since been verified by wide-ranging statistical analyses of monuments. Recently Dr Robert Lomas of Sheffield University has shown how it was that this unit of measurement was derived to such astonishing unanimity and accuracy in different parts of the world; a pendulum swinging 360 times during the time it takes for a star to move through one of the 360 degrees into which the sky’s dome divides will be exactly 16.32 inches long, which is exactly one half a ‘megalithic yard’.

Because the ancients looked to the stars and planets as the controllers of life on earth, they naturally defined their original mathematical measures of the physical world by reference to these heavenly — which is to say spiritual — bodies. Therefore mathematics in its origins was not only holistic, in the sense that it took into account the size, shape and movement of the earth and its relation to the heavenly bodies, but it was also the expression of a spiritual impulse.

EVIL POWERS ALWAYS THREATENED TO DESTROY Zarathustra. There are poignant reminders in the small mountainside shrines of Zoroastrianism today, where a flame is kept alight, but in permanent danger of being snuffed out. At the age of seventy-seven Zarathustra was murdered on his own altar.