The Secret History of the World

and anointed with perfumes.

As with the grave goods in Egypt, the aim of these practices was to try to tempt gods to inhabit the material plane, by reminding them of the sensual pleasures denied them in the spirit worlds.

The bee is one of the most important symbols in the secret tradition. Bees understand how to build their hives with a sort of pre-conscious genius. Bee-hives incorporate exceptionally difficult and precise data in their construction. For example, all hives have built into them the angle of the earth’s rotation. Sumerian cylinder seals of this time show figures with human bodies but bees’ nests for heads. This is because in this period an individual’s consciousness was experienced as made up of a collaboration of many different centres of consciousness, in the way we described in Chapter 2. These centres could be shared or even moved from one mind to another like a swarm of bees from one hive to another.

^{Bee-hive headed Sumerian goddesses.}

A brilliant analysis of Sumerian and other ancient texts by Princeton Professor of History Julian Jaynes was published in 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi- Cameral Mind argued that during this period humans had no concept of an interior life as we understand it today. They had no vocabulary for it, and their narratives show that features of mental life, such as willing, thinking and feeling which we experience as somehow generated ‘inside’ us, they experienced as the activity of spirits or gods in and around their bodies. These impulses happened to them at the bidding of disembodied beings that lived independently of them, rather than arising inside themselves at their own bidding.

It is interesting that the Jaynes analysis chimes with the esoteric account of ancient history given by Rudolf Steiner. Born in Austria in 1861, Steiner represents a genuine stream of Rosicrucian thinking, and he is the esoteric teacher of modern times who has given the most detailed account of the evolution of consciousness. Jaynes’s researches are, as far I know, independent of this tradition.

It is perhaps easier to appreciate Jaynes’s analysis in relation to the more familiar Greek mythology. In the Iliad, for example, we never see anyone in any sense sit down and work out what to do, in the way we see ourselves doing. Jaynes shows that for the people of the Iliad there is no such thing as introspection. When Agamemnon robs Achilles of his mistress, Achilles does not decide to restrain himself. Rather, a god accosts him by the hair, warning him not to strike Agamemnon. Another god rises out of the sea to console him, and it is a god who whispers to Helen of homesick longing. Modern scholars tend to interpret these passages as ‘poetic’ descriptions of interior emotions, in which the gods were symbols of the sort a modern poet might create. Jaynes’s clear-sighted reading shows that this interpretation reads present-day consciousness back into texts written by people whose form of consciousness was very different. Neither is Jaynes alone in his view. The Cambridge philosopher John Wisdom has written: ‘The Greeks did not speak of the dangers of repressing instincts but they did think of thwarting Dionysius or of forgetting Poseidon for Athena.’

^{The most famous depiction of other worldly suggestion is the statue in the Cairo Museum which shows Horus whispering in the ear of the pharaoh Kefren.}

^{Here Athena restrains Achilies from striking Agamemnon, in a drawing by Flaxman, who was an initiate of the secret societies, and a demon sits on the shoulder of a saint.}

We shall see in the concluding chapters of this history how the ancient form of consciousness continued to thrive very much later than even Jaynes posits. For the moment, though, I want to touch on a significant difference between Jaynes’s analysis and the way the ancients themselves understood things. Jaynes describes the gods who control the actions of the humans as being ‘aural hallucinations’. The kings of Sumeria and heroes of Greece are depicted by him as being, in effect, beset by delusions. In the ancient view, by contrast, these were not, of course, mere delusions but independent, living beings.

Jaynes believes that everyone in the Homeric era and earlier lived in a world of delusion until, as he sees it, the right side of the brain gained supremacy over the left. In Jaynes’s view, then, each individual, although believing himself addressed by a god equally present to everyone else, was in fact trapped in a private delusion. The problem with this view is that, because hallucinations are, almost by definition, non-con-sensual, it would lead you to expect these people to live in a totally chaotic and barbaric state, characterized by complete mutual misunderstanding. Modern clinical psychiatrists define a schizophrenic as someone who cannot distinguish between externally and internally generated images and sounds. Clinical madness causes extreme, disabling distress together with impairment of domestic, social and occupational functioning. Instead the people of this era constructed the first post-Flood civilizations with separation between priestly, military, agricultural, trading and manufacturing orders. Organized labour forces engineered great public edifices, including canals, ditches and, of course, temples. There were complex economies and large, disciplined armies. In order for these peoples to have cooperated surely the hallucinations would have had to be group hallucinations? If the ancient world-view was a delusion, it had to have been a massive, almost infinitely complex and sophisticated delusion.

What I have tried to present so far is a history of the world as it was understood by ancient peoples who had a mind-before-matter world-view in which everyone collectively experienced gods, angels and spirits as interacting with them.

Thanks to Freud and Jung we are all familiar with the idea that our minds contain psychological complexes which are independent of our centres of consciousness and so to some degree may be thought of as autonomous. Jung described these major psychological complexes in terms of the seven major planetary deities of mythology, calling them the seven major archetypes of the collective unconscious.

Yet when Jung met Rudolf Steiner, who believed in disembodied spirits, including the planetary gods, Jung dismissed Steiner as a schizophrenic. We shall see in Chapter 27 how very late in life, shortly before he died, Jung went beyond the pale as far as the modern scientific consensus goes. He concluded that these psychological complexes were autonomous in the sense of being independent of the human brain altogether. In this way Jung took one step further than Jaynes. By no longer seeing the gods as hallucinations — whether individual or collective — but as higher intelligences, he embraced the ancient mind- before-matter philosophy.

The reader should beware of taking the same step. It is important you be on your guard against any impression that perhaps — to be fair — this version of history hangs together in some way, or that it feels true in some unspecific poetic or, worse, spiritual way. Important because a momentary lapse of concentration in this regard and you might, without at first noticing it and with a light heart and a spring in your step, begin to walk down the road that leads straight to the lunatic asylum.

^{A representation on a cylinder seal of two heroes hunting, said to be Gilgamesh and Enkidu.}

GILGAMESH, THE GREAT HERO OF SUMERIAN civilization, was king of Uruk in approximately 2100 BC. His story is full of madness, extreme emotion, anxiety and alienation. The great poet Rainer Maria Rilke called it ‘the epic of death-dread’.

The story as laid out here has largely been pieced together from clay tablets excavated in the nineteenth century, but it seems nearly complete.

At the start of his story the young king is called the ‘butting bull’. He is bursting with energy, opening mountain passes, digging wells, exploring, going into battle. He is stronger than any other man, beautiful, courageous, a great lover from whom no virgin is safe — but lonely. He longs for a friend, someone who is his equal.

So the gods created Enkidu. He was as strong as Gilgamesh but was wild, with matted hair all over his body. He lived among wild beasts, ate as they did and drank from streams. One day a hunter came face to face with this strange creature in the woods and reported back to Gilgamesh.

When he heard the hunter’s story, Gilgamesh knew in his heart that this was the friend he had been waiting for. He devised a brilliant plan. He instructed the most beautiful of the temple prostitutes to go naked into the woods, to find the wild man and tame him. When she made love to him he forgot, as Gilgamesh had known he would, about his home in the hills. Now when Enkidu came across wild animals they sensed the difference and no longer ran with him — they ran away from him.