The Secret History of the World

were astonished to see how similar the ceremonies were to their own.

There is a story that Alexander sent a Greek philosopher to summon a Brahmin teacher into his presence, offering great rewards and threatening decapitation if he refused. The philosopher finally tracked down the Brahmin in the depths of the forest and received the following rather dusty response: ‘The Brahmins neither fear death nor desire gold. We sleep deeply and peacefully on forest leaves. Were we to have any material possessions, this would only disturb our slumber. We move freely over the surface of the earth without conflict and all our needs met as by a mother who feeds her baby her milk.’

This was a rare knockback for Alexander. Until the near the end of his life it seemed no one could stand in his way. As has happened only a few times in history, an individual seemed able to bend the whole world to his will.

As I’ve suggested, Alexander’s entire life can be seen as a quest to understand the origins of this divine power. At different times both Perseus and Hercules were claimed as his ancestors, according to variant traditions. Aristotle had given Alexander a copy of Homer’s Iliad, which he learned off by heart, and he sometimes saw himself as a demi-god like Achilles. In 332 BC he went on an expedition to the temple of Amun at the desert oasis of Siwa, some five hundred miles west of Memphis in Egypt. It was said he nearly died on this expedition, though this may be a reference to a ‘mystical death’. What is certain is that he was ‘recognized’ by the priests and initiated there.

It is sometimes speculated that the priests might have told Alexander he was a son of Amun-Zeus. It is supposed that the ceremonial horns he took to wearing afterwards were a mark of this. In some countries he conquered he was remembered as a horned man. In the Koran he appeared as Dhul-Qarnayn, which means ‘the two-horned one’. But according to the secret history, these horns are the horns of a hunter we have already met, and the two fiercely loving friends Gilgamesh and Enkidu, separated by the untimely death of Enkidu, were reunited when they reincarnated as Alexander and Aristotle.

At the age of only thirty-three Alexander ignored warnings by the astrologers of Babylon not to enter their city gates. Two weeks later he died of a fever. It would soon become apparent that Alexander’s empire had been held together only by his personal magnetism.

BUDDHISM EMERGED AS THE FIRST PROSELYTIZING, missionary religion in about 200 BC. Before then the religion you believed in was determined by your race or tribe. Now the human condition was changing. For the uninitiated the spirit worlds were a fading vision, leaving faint traces hard to be certain of, difficult to discern. Inspired by Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, people were developing a capacity for deductive and inductive thought. They were able to weigh up arguments on either side.

By 140 BC Rome was the capital of the world and a vortex of ideas. A citizen might have very different belief systems to choose from: the official cult of the planetary gods, the neo-Egyptian worship of Serapis, Epicurianism, Stoicism, the philosophy of the Peripatetics and the Persian cult of Mithraism. Buddhist monks and Indian Brahmins had certainly reached Alexandria.

^{Virgil from a painting by the Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli. Virgil was the great initiate poet of the founding and destiny of Rome. Aeneid vi 748-51 gives expression to the doctrine of reincarnation, of the spirit’s ‘desire to return to the body’ when a thousand years comes round.}

For the first time in history choosing one of these belief systems could be a matter of personal choice.

Individuals might choose in proportion to the evidence or they might choose what they wanted to believe. With the rise to dominance of the Roman Empire, therefore, we reach the age of inauthentic faith, with a cynicism and conscious cultivation of sensibility that was entirely new.

When we think of Rome we picture sophistication and grandeur but also paranoia. If we compare the Greece of Pericles with the Rome of the Caesars, we see in the latter the same kind of overbearing pomp, elaborate, awesome rituals of smoke, incense and clashing cymbals that had earlier been used to hypnotize the peoples into obedience to Baal. Now it was used to hypnotize people into believing that various strange and egomaniacal members of the ruling elite were in fact gods.

The Caesars forced the Mystery schools to initiate them. In the process they discovered the ancient initiatic teachings regarding the Sun god.

Julius Caesar eradicated the Druids because of their teaching of the Sun Mysteries — that the Sun god was soon to return to earth. Similarly Augustus banned astrology not because he disbelieved in it, but because he was anxious about what astrologers could see written in the sky. If the people could not read the signs of the time, he could perhaps get away with representing himself as the Sun god. Because he had been initiated, Caligula knew how to communicate with the spirits of the moon in his dreams. But because he had gained initiation by force and without proper preparation, he could not properly identify them. Caligula would refer to Jupiter, Hercules, Dionysus and Apollo as his brother gods, sometimes appearing in fancy dress to look like them. Nero’s reign of madness reached a climax when he realized he was not after all the Sun god. He would rather burn the whole world to the ground than let another, greater, individual live.

THE GOLDEN ASSE OF APULEIUS IS ONE of the great initiatic works of the Roman period. It contains a wonderful story concerning the life of the spirit. Cupid and Psyche carries familiar and fairly conventional warnings about the dangers of curiosity, but it also has an esoteric and historical level of meaning.

Psyche is a beautiful, innocent young girl. Cupid falls in love with her and sends messengers asking her to come to him in his hill-top palace at night. She is to make love to a god! But there is one condition. Their love making must take place in total darkness. Psyche must take it on trust that she is enjoying the love of a god.

Her elder sister is envious, though. She taunts her and tells her that it is not a beautiful boy-god she is making love to, but a hideous, giant serpent. One night Psyche can resist no longer, and while Cupid is in a post- coital slumber, she holds an oil lamp over him. She is delighted to discover the gloriously beautiful young god, but at that moment a drop of burning oil falls on him and wakes him. Psyche is banished from his presence forever.

The double meaning in this story is this: the god really is a hideous serpent. This is the history of the Nephilim, of the entry into the human condition of the serpent of animal desire — but told from the human point of view!

THE MYSTERY SCHOOLS WERE FALLING into decay. As we have seen, excavations of the entrance to the Underworld at Baia in southern Italy revealed secret passageways and trap doors used to help convince the candidates that they were having supernatural experiences. In the smoky, druggy darkness priests dressed up as gods would loom out of the darkness over candidates heavily drugged with hallucinogens. Robert Temple has reconstructed the initiation ceremonies of this late, decadent phase. They were largely a matter of scary special effects, even including puppets, like a ghost train today. The difference was that at the end of your initiation, when you re-emerged into daylight, the priests quizzed you, and unless you believed in their illusions without the slightest sliver of doubt, they killed you.

^{The Golden Asse which contains the story of Cupid and Psyche is a beautiful book, written by an initiate in a larky way that anticipates Rabelais. But it is also a consciously literary production. The colossal and monolithic sincerity of the ancient Mystery schools is no more.}

The sincere men of Rome, the true initiates, withdrew into yet more shadowy schools that operated independently of the official cult. Stoicism became the outward expression of the initiatic impulse of the age, the growing point of intellectual and spiritual evolution. Cicero and Seneca, both deeply involved with Stoicism, tried to temper the egomania of their political masters. They tried to argue that all men were born brothers and that the slaves should be set free.

Cicero was an urbane and sophisticated man and one of the great forces for reform in the Roman Empire. He looked upon his initiation at Eleusis as the great formative experience of his life. It had taught him, he said ‘to live joyfully and to die hopefully’.

If Cicero looked askance at the plebs’ vain and superstitious beliefs in venal gods, he was also tolerant of them. He held that even the most ridiculous of the myths could be interpreted in an allegorical way. In The Nature of the Gods he gives a passionate exposition of the Stoic idea of the moving