The Secret History of the World

^{that he had to remain behind a curtain during audiences with his subjects. A crown was a symbol that a certain grade of initiation had been achieved and that the initiate was crowned with buddhic fire.}

13. REASON — AND HOW TO RISE ABOVE IT Elijah and Elisha • Isaiah • Esoteric Buddhism • Pythagoras • Lao Tzu

AFTER SOLOMON THE KINGDOM OF ISRAEL began to fall apart again.

An institution grew up called the prophets. Their role was to advise the kings — except that, unlike the relationship between Melchizedek and Abraham or Merlin and Arthur, theirs was adversarial, even subversive. They said uncomfortable and unpopular things no one wanted to hear. They ranted and raved. Sometimes they were thought of as mad.

Elijah was a wild man, strange and solitary, almost like a tramp, with a leather belt and a long cloak. Like Zarathustra he fought fire with fire.

Told by God to hide in the wilderness and to drink from a brook, he was fed by ravens. ‘Raven’ indicates that Elijah was being initiated in the ways of the wisdom of Zarathustra. ‘Raven’ was one of the grades of initiation in his mysteries.

The king of Israel, Ahab, married Jezebel and began to erect altars to Baal (the Canaanite name for Saturn/Satan). Elijah fought and won a battle with the prophets of Baal, calling fire down from heaven. On later occasions he called fire down from heaven to kill squads of soldiers sent by Jezebel to capture him.

Elijah was a man of blood and thunder, the prophet who lived closest to the borders of madness. There are stories of repeated, astonishing proofs of his charisma — his clairvoyance, his ability to turn a poisoned well wholesome, to make iron float, to heal a leper. There is a strange story of his bringing a young boy back to life by lying on top of him and infusing him with his spirit. When he had to flee into the wilderness again, he was fleeing for his life — and towards God. He found himself standing on a mountain in the middle of a terrible, raging storm. We may imagine him railing against the storm, a combination of Lear and the Fool.

Eventually he sank down, exhausted, and slept under a juniper tree, where he had a dream of an angel.

Then, while it was still dark, he set off to climb Mount Horeb in search of God as the angel had told him. But a great wind came, shaking the very mountain and sending enormous boulders bouncing down in his direction. Elijah knew that God was not in this wind and he managed to reach the safety of a cave.

Suddenly a sheet of lightning struck the ground right in front of the cave, causing a roaring blaze in the vegetation outside, which trapped him inside. He also knew God was not in this fire.

After a while the storm and the fire died down and as morning approached all was calm. The morning star arose and it was then, in the gentle morning air, that Elijah heard the still small voice of God.

An exuberant, even outrageous figure, he was nevertheless the prophet of a new interiority. This is a development of Moses hearing of the voice in the burning bush, but quieter, subliminal almost. Where people had once had an overwhelming sense of the divine, now they would have to listen very intently, to practise mental discipline and directed attention in order to discern it.

But in order to understand the true meaning of Elijah’s mission, it is necessary to understand his death, and in order to do that we will turn first to India.

There are testimonies about Indian adepts able to dematerialize and materialize at will. In Paramahansa Yogananda’s marvellous Autobiography of a Yogi, first published in 1946, he describes how he was due to meet his spiritual master, Sri Yukteswar, at the local train station, but received a telepathic message not to go there. His master had been delayed. The pupil waited in the hotel. Suddenly a window overlooking the street became brilliant with sunlight and his master clearly materialized in front of him. His master explained that he was not an apparition but flesh and blood, that he had been divinely commanded to give his pupil this very rare experience. Paramahansa Yogananda touched the familiar sandals made of orange canvas and rolled with rope. He also felt the ochre cloth of his master’s robe brush against him.

Elijah developed this gift to the next stage. He learned how to excarnate and incarnate at will.

You can’t take it with you, goes the popular saying, but according to the secret doctrine you can. The great twentieth-century initiate G.I. Gurdjieff said that exactly what is needed truly to become master of oneself in this life is what is needed to survive as a conscious being in the afterlife. Initiation is concerned at least as much with life after death as this life. In the seventh book of The Republic Plato said, ‘Those who are unable in the present life to apprehend the idea of the good, will descend to Hades after death and fall asleep in its dark abode.’

At the end of his life Elijah was carried up into the heavens in a fiery chariot. So like Enoch and Noah before him, he did not die in the ordinary way. He joined the college of ascended masters, who are for the most part invisible but return to earth at times of great change and crisis.

In cabalistic thought the chariot by means of which Elijah ascends is called the Merkabah. Great initiates are able to work on the vegetable body so that it does not dissolve after death, enabling the ascending spirit to keep aspects of consciousness only usually possible during life on earth. Initiates know of secret techniques by means of which very fine energies may be crystallized in such a way that they are not dispersed.

We will see later that Christian thinkers would call this chariot the Resurrection body. As Elijah ascended his mantle slipped from him to be taken up by Elisha, whom Elijah had chosen as his successor. By some mysterious process the confering of the mantle gives Elisha an increased portion of Elijah’s power. (We will return to look at the way this works when we come to consider the life and work of Shakespeare.)

The succession of Elijah by Elisha was not without ambiguity, though. Once Elijah seemed as if he might want to repudiate Elisha. He hurried off and, when Elisha caught up with him, said, ‘Go back. What have I done to you?’ Does he see something in Elisha he is not sure of? Later Elisha is mocked for being bald by a large gang of boys and uses his power to call two bears from the woods which attack and kill them. It is as if the prophet is still engaged in a deadly battle with Baal.

Two hundred years later, by the time of the later prophets, a new, transcendent understanding of the way the universe works had developed. The concept of Grace put prophets on a much less warlike footing. In 550 BC Isaiah proclaimed, ‘The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light… For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be on his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.’

^{Elijah ascends. Print from a nineteenth-century Bible.}

The concept of Grace grew out of this prophetic sense of history. The kings of the two kingdoms and their peoples failed to do what was asked of them. They degenerated and the land was laid waste. But then, because of the Grace of God, a living root emerged from the wasteland. The prophets saw Grace operating in this way in their own lifetimes on a military and political level, in the rise and fall and rise again of their own little kingdoms. They also prophesied its repetition in the greater cosmic cycles of history.

For the followers of Baal, on the other hand, life was about the exercise of power. They believed that if they performed the correct religious practices — sacrifices and magical ceremonies — they could compel their gods to do their bidding.

Isaiah repudiated this view. He told his people that Yahweh had shown them Grace by choosing them, by empowering them to obey, by purging them of their sins, by saving them when they had been stiff-necked and disobeyed, and by the promise of restoring them to former glory even though they did not deserve it. Yahweh’s gracious love could never be demanded, bought or earned, he said. It is a love given in complete freedom.

Once this kind of divine love had been understood, it would only be a matter of time before this understanding opened a new dimension in the love of one human for another.

Isaiah had a great sense of both the history and the future fortunes of Israel — ‘there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse’. He also has a great vision of the end of history which we will return to later — ‘the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid’.

The prophetic tradition would die out by about 450 BC. As the Cabalist Rabbi Hayyim Vital would write, at the