The Secret History of the World

twins, though they looked almost identical.

In the Gnostic text the Pistis Sophia, contemporary with the canonical books of the New Testament — and considered by some scholars to have equal claim to authenticity — there is a strange story concerning these two children.

Mary sees a boy who looks so exactly like him that she naturally takes him to be her son. But then this boy disconcerts her by asking to see her son, Jesus. Fearing that this must be some sort of demon, she ties the boy to the bed, then goes out into the fields looking for Joseph and Jesus. She finds them erecting vine poles. The three of them go back to the house. The boys gaze at each other, amazed, and embrace.

The secret tradition that traces the subtle, complex process by which human form and human consciousness was put together has a parallel in its tracing of the extremely complex process by which the incarnation of the Word was brought about. In this account it was necessary for one of the two Jesus children, who carried the spirit of Krishna, to sacrifice his individual identity in some mysterious way for the sake of the other. The spiritual economy of the cosmos required him to do this so that the boy who survived would in time be ready to receive the Christ- spirit at the Baptism. As the Pistis Sophia says, ‘ye became one and the same being’.

This tradition of the two Jesus children was maintained by the secret societies and can be seen on the north portal at Chartres, in the apse mosaic of San Miniato outside Florence and in the paintings of many initiates, including Borgonone, Raphael, Leonardo and Veronese.

^{The Leonardo Cartoon in the National Gallery, London. The esoteric dimension to this work is conveyed by the swirling, star-spangled light that suggests the world between the worlds. It depicts the two Jesus children. Similarly in the London version of the Virgin of the Rocks nearby, a later hand than Leonardo’s has added the elongated form of the cross that in Christian art is John the Baptist’s distinctive insignia.}

‘IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD, and the Word was with God and the Word was God… All things were made by him… And the light shineth in darkness and darkness comprehended it not… He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.’

The author of the Gospel of St John is here comparing the creation of the cosmos by the Word with the mission of Jesus Christ, the incarnated Word. John presents this second mission as a sort of second creation.

At a time when the material universe had become so dense that it was all but impossible for the gods to manifest themselves on the earth’s surface, the Sun god descended.

His mission was to plant a seed. This spiritualizing seed would grow to provide the space that would be the new arena in which the gods could manifest themselves…

The crucial point here, usually overlooked outside the secret tradition, is this: Jesus Christ created the interior life.

We have seen an intimation of the interior life in the still, small voice heard by Elijah. Similarly in Jeremiah the Lord says, ‘I will put my hand in the inward parts and in their heart I will write it.’ But the planting of the sun seed just over two thousand years ago was the decisive event in the process which has led to each of us experiencing inside of ourselves a cosmos of infinite size and variety.

^{Romulus and Remus. The story of the two Jesus boys is, in effect, a sanctified version of the story of Romulus and Remus, in which one brother murders the other in order for him to serve as the foundation sacrifice of the Eternal City. Great buildings and cities were founded on sacrifices in ancient times, and this is undoubtedly what the myth of Remus killed and buried in a ditch refers to. In the case of the two Jesus boys, one could be said to sacrifice himself for the sake of the New Jerusalem.}

We also have a sense that others have infinity inside them. Over many hundreds of years, the conditions had been coming together which would make possible a sense of individual identity, what we today sometimes call the Ego. But without the intervention of the Sun god, the Ego would have been a small, hard, self-centred point, operating in isolation, intent only on its own immediate gratification, open to no outside interests other than the very lowest. Every human being would have been at war with every other human being. No individual would have any sense at all of any other as an independent centre of consciousness.

When his parents took Jesus to the Temple, at the time of the disappearance of his kindred spirit, he showed himself very wise. What passed into him from the other Jesus was the ability to read minds, to see deep into other people’s souls, to see how they related to the spirit worlds and to know what to do or say to make things right for them. He felt other people’s pain as his own. He was experiencing something — the gift of empathy — which no one had ever felt before.

Once an individual or small group develops a new faculty, a new mode of consciousness, it often spreads around the world with remarkable speed. Jesus Christ introduced a new kind of love, a gracious love based on the gift of empathy. An individual would be free to transcend the bonds of his or her isolated existence to share in what was taking place in another person’s innermost nature.

Love BC had been tribal or familial. Now individuals were able to rise above blood ties and to choose freely who to love. It is this that Jesus meant when, in Mark 3:32 he appeared to deny the importance of his own mother to him and when, in Matthew 10:37-8 he said: ‘He that loveth father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.’

Esoteric teaching is above all about loving in the right way. It says that when you cooperate with the gracious forces that form the cosmos, the force flows through you in such a way that you may become conscious of it. This process is called thaumaturgy, or divine magic.

Whether at this level or at the level of ‘little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love’ or the ‘little way’ of St Therese of Lisieux, the way of self-denial and acts of charity in small things, the new Christian perspective was focused on the inner life. If we compare earlier moral codes, such as the law of Moses or the even older Code of Hammurabi, with the Sermon on the Mount, it is clear that they were only rules to regulate behaviour in the Outworld — do not worship idols, steal, murder, commit adultery etc. The moral teaching in the Gospels, on the other hand, is directed towards inner states. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit… they that mourn… the meek… the pure in heart…’

When Jesus Christ said, ‘But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart’, he was saying something no one had ever said before, that our innermost thoughts are as real as physical objects. What I think ‘privately’ has a direct effect on the history of the cosmos.

In an idealist universe, intention is of course much more important than in a materialist universe. In an idealist universe if two people perform exactly the same action in exactly the same circumstances, but one in a good-hearted way and the other not, the consequences are very different. In some mysterious way the state of our soul informs the results of our deeds, just as the elevated state of the soul of a great painter informs his paintings.

In esoteric interpretation of Greek myths, ambrosia, the food of the gods, is human love. Without it, gods fade away and their power to help us is diminished. In esoteric and mystic Christianity angels are attracted to us if we ask for their help, but if we fail to do so they fall into a twilit, vegetative state, and the phantoms and demons that insinuate themselves around our lower beings work on us instead.

We can of course resist the demons and train our baser animal selves in the same way that we train a dog — by a process of repetition. In esoteric teaching it is said that daily repetition of a meditative exercise for twenty-one days is needed to effect a deep-seated change in our habits.

But there is a yet deeper part of our animal selves which lies completely below the threshold of consciousness and is inaccessible to it. We cannot transform this part by the exercise of free will, no matter how persistent, because the corruption of our animal selves has seeped down into our vegetable and mineral selves.

In order to purify and transform these parts of ourselves we need supernatural help.

The mission of the Sun god, then, was to sink right down into deepest matter, introducing his transforming spiritual influence. The Sun god has the ability to reach right down into the most material part of humanity, which is why it was written ‘None of his bones shall be broken’.