The Secret History of the World

bread and wine and he was the priest of the most high God. And he blessed him and said “Blessed be Abram of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth and blessed be the most high God, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand.” This sense of the numinous is reinforced by a mysterious passage in the New Testament, Hebrews 6.20-7.17: ‘Jesus was made an high priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek. For this Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the most high God, who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings, and blessed him; to whom Abraham also gave a tenth part of all, first being by interpretation King of righteousness and after that also King of Salem, which is, King of peace; without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually… Who is made, not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life. For he testifieth Thou art a priest forever under the order of Melchizedek.’

^{Melchizedek features in art and literature quite out of proportion to the brief mention of him in the Bible. For example, he features prominently in France’s most esoteric ecclesiastical statuary, for example, here in the North Porch of Chartres Cathedral. He is traditionally shown bearing the chalice or grail.}

Clearly something strange is going on. Clearly this mysterious individual, who has the ability to live forever, is no ordinary human being.

In cabalistic tradition Melchizedek’s secret identity is Noah, the great Atlantean leader who had taught humankind agriculture, the cultivation of corn and of the vine, who never really died but moved to another dimension. He now reappeared in order to be Abraham’s spiritual teacher, to initiate him to a higher level.

In order to understand Melchizedek’s initiatic teaching, we must examine a later episode when, according to the ancient tradition, Melchizedek was present, even though this is hidden in the biblical version.

Isaac was twenty two years old when his father took him up a mountain to sacrifice him on the altar of Melchizedek.

IT IS VERY IMPORTANT IN CERTAIN FORMS of initiation that at a particular point in the ceremony the candidate believes, perhaps briefly but with total conviction, that he or she is going to die.

He has perhaps understood that he is going to undergo a symbolic death, but it suddenly dawns upon him that there may have been a change of plan. Perhaps he has sworn the most solemn oaths on pain of death that he will mend his ways and live up to high ideals. Now with the blade held against him, he wonders if the initiates who have him in their power know that he has lied to them. He knows, now he comes to think about it, that he has done things he ought not to have done, not done the things he ought to have done, that there is no health in him. He knows in his heart of hearts he does not have enough willpower to keep the oaths he has sworn. He has just condemned himself to death out of his own mouth, and he is utterly unable to help himself.

At this point he realizes he needs supernatural help.

We may catch a faint echo of these emotions of fear and pity if we are moved by a great tragedy, by Oedipus Rex or King Lear. In initiation the candidate is made to feel the tragedy of his own life, an overwhelming need for catharsis. He begins to judge his own lives as the demons and angels will judge it after death.

AS ABRAHAM’S KNIFE BEGAN TO SLICE open Isaac’s throat, an angel substituted a ram whose horns had been caught in a nearby thicket.

What the thorns in the thicket represent is the two-petalled — or two horned — brow chakra, already entangled in matter. Abraham acts as he does because this mode of vision would have to be sacrificed. For the time being at least, perception of the spirit worlds must be put to sleep for the sake of the mission of the ancestors of Abraham — to develop the brain as an organ of thinking.

The Jews will be guided by Jehovah, the great spirit of the moon, the great god of thou-shalt-not who helps humanity evolve away from animal and ecstatic experience, away from the life of tribal or group soul towards the development of individual free will and free thinking.

In the secret history this sacrifice of the brow chakra takes place on the altar of Melchizedek, the great high priest of the Sun Mysteries. What this signifies is that Isaac was initiated to such a level that he understood the necessity for this next, lunar stage of human development. The evolution of individual free will and free thinking will eventually enable humans to play a conscious part in the transforming of the world.

Isaac stayed at the Mystery school of Melchizedek for three and a half years learning of these things.

Because Melchizedek is a priest of the Sun Mysteries, this school should be pictured as containing within its precincts a stone circle. We have reached the great age of these sun temples, examples of which still survive in Luneberg in Germany, Carnac in France and Stonehenge in England. In the fourth century BC the historian Diodorus of Sicily described a spherical sun temple in the north, dedicated to Apollo. Today scholars believe he was describing Stonehenge or, more likely, Callanish in the far north of Scotland, but in either case the association with Apollo should be understood as a looking forward to the rebirth of the Sun god from the womb of the Mother Goddess.

THE OTHER GREAT CONTRIBUTION TO THE development of thought came, of course, from the Greeks.

The siege of Troy marks the beginning of the rise to greatness of Greek civilization, when the Greeks seized the initiative from Chaldean-Egyptian civilization and forged their own ideals.

We have been tracing a history of the world in which — for the first time — the lives of great cultural heroes from around the world — Adam, Jupiter, Hercules, Osiris, Noah, Zarathustra, Krishna and Gilgamesh — have been woven together into one chronological narrative. For the most part they have left no physical traces, living on only in the collective imagination, preserved only in surviving scraps of story and scattered imagery.

^{The Trojan horse is depicted in the bottom panel. The story of the siege of Troy has come down to us, for the most part, in the account by ‘blind Homer’. In the language of the secret societies ‘blind’ is not necessarily meant literally. In the case of Homer it may mean he was an initiate, whose gaze was directed at the spiritual rather than the material world. Florence and Kenneth Wood have shown that the Iliad can be read as an astronomical allegory. But, as we have seen, this does not imply that it is not also a real historical event. As an initiate Homer would have been conscious of the great gods of stars and planets guiding the life below.}

From now on, though, we will see that many legendary figures, presumed by most people to be entirely non- historical, have in fact been shown by recent archaeology to have left physical remains.

The discovery of the ruins of Troy by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s has always been controversial. The archaeological layer he excavated probably dates to 3000 BC, and so is far too old to be Homer’s, but today the majority of scholars agree that the layer relating to 1200 BC, in the late Bronze Age, is consistent with Homer’s account.

In the ancient world wars were fought for the possession of sacred, initiatic knowledge, partly because of the supernatural powers this conferred. The Greeks fought because they wanted to carry off the statue made by the hand of Athena, called the Palladium. We should see their struggle to possess Helen in the same way.

Today we may see in the face of a beauty ‘the promise of happiness’, to use Stendhal’s phrase. Yes, we may cherish that promise in a crude or trivial sense, but we may also do so in a deeper sense. Great beauty can seem mystical to us, as if it holds the very secret of life. If I could be with that beautiful person, we think, my life would be fulfilled. The presence of exceptional beauty can induce an altered state of consciousness, and male initiates have often been associated with very beautiful women, perhaps partly because their participation intensifies the secret sexual techniques of the schools.

Possession of Helen would enable the Greeks to move forward to the next stage of civilization.

We see the change consciousness that the story of the siege of Troy is all about in the famous saying of Achilles: ‘Better to be a slave in the land of the living than the king of the shades.’ The heroes of Greece and Troy loved to live in the sun and it was a terrible thing when it was suddenly shut out, and their spirits were sent off to the land of the shades, the Western gloom. This was the ‘death-dread’ of Gilgamesh intensified to a level that seems almost modern.

^{Odysseus blinding the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, shows the progenitor of the new way of thinking destroying the old Third-Eyed one. The parallel story of David and Goliath, of some two hundred years}