The Secret History of the World

spirit of the universe, the guiding force that makes plants seek nourishment in the earth, gives animals sense, motion and an instinct to go after what is good for them that is almost akin to reason. This same moving spirit of the cosmos gives people ‘reason itself and a higher intelligence to the gods themselves’. These gods should not really be imagined as having bodies like our own ‘but are clothed in the most ethereal and beautiful forms’. He writes, too, that ‘we can see their higher, inward purpose in the movements of the stars and planets’.

When Rome’s political machinations finally caught up with Cicero, he stoically bared his neck to the centurion’s sword.

Seneca also believed in this cosmic sympathy of the Stoics — and the ability of adepts to manipulate this sympathy for their own ends. His play Medea probably quotes real magical formulae used by the black magicians of the day. Medea is portrayed as being able to direct her power of concentrated hatred so strongly that she can change the positions of the stars.

In this Age of Disenchantment it first became possible to consider that the gods might not exist. Among the intellectual elite, the Epicureans were formulating the first materialistic and atheist philosophies. What remained was belief in the lowest levels of spirits, the spirits of the dead and demons. If you read literature of the time, such as the Gospels of the New Testament, you see they record that the world was experiencing an epidemic of demons.

While the intellectual elite toyed with atheism, the people dabbled in atavistic forms of occultism that made use of the fact that demons and other low forms of spirit life are attracted by the fumes from blood sacrifices.

The high priest of the Jerusalem Temple wore little bells attached to his robes so that the goblins that lived in the shadows could hear him coming and hide their hideous shapes. The Temple needed a vast, complex drainage system to cope with the thousands of gallons of sacrificial blood that flowed through it every day.

All around the world increasingly desperate measures were taken. Plutarch wrote against human sacrifice in a way that implies it was common.

In South America, in a bizarre parody, a black magician was being nailed to a cross.

15. THE SUN GOD RETURNS The Two Jesus Children • The Cosmic Mission • Crucifixion in South America • The Mystic Marriage of Mary Magdalene

IN PALESTINE A GREAT TURNING POINT IN the history of the world had been reached. Because the gods were no longer experienced as ‘out there’ in the material world, it was necessary for the Sun god, the Word, to descend to earth. As we are about to see, his mission was to plant in the human skull the seeds of an interior life that would become the new arena for spiritual experience. This planting would give rise to the sense we all have today that we each have inside an ‘inner space’.

The cosmic plan had been that human spirits should attain individuality, should be able to think freely, to exercise free will and to choose who to love. To create the conditions for this, matter became denser until each individual spirit was finally isolated inside its own skull. Human thought and will was then no longer wholly controlled by gods, angels and spirits, as it had been a thousand years earlier at the siege of Troy.

However there were dangers in this development. Not only might humanity become altogether cut off from the spirit world, there was a danger, too, that humans would become completely cut off from one another.

This was the great crisis. People no longer felt like spiritual beings, because the human spirit was in danger of being snuffed out altogether. The love that bound tribes and families, an instinctive, psychic blood-love like the one which binds packs of wolves, was weakened in the newly hardened skulls, in the new towns and cities.

Tracing the development towards a sense of individual identity, we have touched on Mosaic law, a rule for communal living strictly enforced, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. We have touched, too, on the obligation to feel compassion for all living things taught by the Buddha. We saw in both traditions the beginnings of moral obligation as a path of individual discipline and development. Now the Stoics of Rome gave the individual legal and political status in the form of rights and duties.

The irony, then, was that just as individual human identity was formed, the sense that life was worth living was largely lost. The blood baths in the Colosseum showed no notion of the value, let alone the sanctity of individual human life.

Jesus ben Pandira, the leader of the Essenes, might preach purity and universal compassion, but from a point of view of a movement to withdraw from the world altogether. Stoics might teach responsibility, but to them this was a duty without joy. ‘Never let the future disturb you’, the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius would offer as a philosophy of life — ‘you will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which arm you today against the present’. These words are full of weariness.

Humanity felt itself dragged along by a tide of suffering. We may imagine how people longed to hear someone say, ‘Come with me, ye that are heavy-laden, I will give you rest.’

We saw the candidate for initiation being shown the green wheat ear in the inner sanctum at Eleusis and taught to look forward to the ‘seed time’. In the inner sanctum of great Egyptian temples, candidates for initiation had been shown Isis suckling the infant Horus. This second Horus, this Horus-to-come, would be a new king of the gods bringing a new dispensation. He was called the Good Shepherd, the Lamb of God, the Book of Life and the Truth and the Life. Isaiah had told his people to make straight the ways of the Lord. He promised their sins would be washed away as he envisioned the coming of the Messiah. In the Fourth Eclogue the Roman initiate-poet Virgil predicted the coming of the man-god, the Saviour. ‘The Golden Age will return as its first-born descends from on high,’ he wrote, ‘… all the stains of our past wickedness will be washed away.’

In fact the life of Christ Jesus as it has come down to us might look like a patchwork of events in the lives of those who came before him: born to a carpenter and a Virgin, like Krishna: born on December 25, like Mithras; heralded by a star in the East, like Horus; walking on water and feeding the five thousand from a small basket, like Buddha; performing healing miracles, like Pythagoras; raising from the dead, like Elisha; executed on a tree, like Adonis: ascending to heaven, like Hercules, Enoch and Elijah.

It is hard to find any act or saying ascribed to the Jesus of the Gospels that had not been foreshadowed in some way. Anyone minded to think corrosively will decide to see this as evidence that his life was a fiction. But in the secret history this is a universal movement of convergence as the whole cosmos strained to give birth to the new Sun god.

Looking at the great imaginative image of the Nativity as it has been depicted in history’s greatest art, and decoding it according to the secret doctrine, we can see how the whole secret history of the world had been leading up to this point.

In Mary we should sense the presence of Isis; when the sun arose in the constellation of Pisces, the sign of Jesus, the constellation on the opposite horizon was Virgo. In Joseph, the patriarch carrying a crooked staff, we see Osiris — his staff symbolizing the Third Eye. The cave in which Jesus Christ is often represented as being born is the bony skull in which a new miracle of consciousness is about to be ignited. The baby in the manger has the luminous vegetative body of Krishna. The ox and the ass represent the two ages that have led to the new Age of Pisces — the Ages of Taurus and Aries. The star that guides the Magi is the spirit of Zarathustra (‘the golden star’). One of the Magi is Pythagoras reincarnated, and the Magi have been initiated by the prophet Daniel. The angel who announces the birth to the shepherds is the spirit of the Buddha.

THE SECRET TRADITION SOMETIMES HAS a propensity to see how things are with a, child-like simplicity.

The two Gospels with infancy narratives, Luke and Matthew, give very different, indeed inconsistent, accounts, starting with the different genealogies ascribed to Jesus, the time and place of the births, and the visit by the shepherds in Luke and by the Magi in Matthew. This is a distinction rigidly maintained in the art of the Middle Ages that has since been lost. While it may be glossed over in church, academic theologians accept that where these accounts conflict at least one must be false — perhaps an uncomfortable conclusion for anyone believing that scripture is divinely inspired.

In the secret tradition, on the other hand, there is no problem, because these two narratives describe the infancies of two Jesus children. These boys had a mysterious kinship. They were not