The Secret History of the World

completely impossible if science described everything there is.

For the meek will certainly not inherit the earth and prayers will not be answered by the forces that science describes. Neither virtue nor faith will be rewarded — unless some supernatural agency makes them so.

The New Testament is full of occult and esoteric teaching, some of it explicitly stated. The problem is that we have been educated to be blind to it. But the text quite clearly says that John the Baptist is Elijah come again — that is, reincarnated. There is magic too. The late Hugh Schonfield, Morton Smith and other academic experts have shown that Jesus’s miracles, particularly in the form of words he uses, are based on pre-existing magical papyri in Greek, Egyptian and Aramaic. When in John’s Gospel Jesus Christ is described as using spittle to make a paste to apply to the eyes of a blind man, this is not a purely godly action, in the sense of an unmediated influx of spirit, but a manipulation of matter in order to influence or control spirit.

^{Apollonius of Tyana. Of the many itinerant wonder workers and healers contemporary with Jesus Christ, the one who made the greatest impression on contemporary chroniclers was Apollonius. This Pythagorean from Cappadocia let his hair grow long, wore only linen clothes and shoes of bark. He cast out demons and performed many healing miracles. But perhaps the most interesting parallel to Jesus Christ is his insistence that the day of blood sacrifice was over. ‘We should approach God,’ he said, ‘only with the noblest faculty with which we are blessed — namely intelligence.’}

Again, it is no denigration of Jesus Christ to point this out. One must not view these things anachronistically. In terms of the philosophy and theology of the day, this sort of divine magic — or thaumaturgy — was not only respectable, it was the highest activity to which a human being could aspire.

IF YOU POLITELY TURN A BLIND EYE TO the supernatural content of the story of Jesus Christ and the rise of Christianity, you still have to accept that something extraordinary happened which needs explanation. Because whether or not anything miraculous happened in that obscure corner of the Near East in the early years of the first century, its effect on the history of the world is unparalleled in its breadth and depth. It gave rise to the civilization we now enjoy, a civilization of unprecedented freedom, prosperity for all, richness of culture, scientific advance. Before the time of Jesus Christ there was very little sense of the importance of the individual, of the sanctity of individual life, the transcendental power of one individual’s freely chosen love for another. Of course some of these ideas were foreshadowed by Krishna, Isaiah, the Buddha, Pythagoras, Lao-Tzu, but what was unique to Christianity, the ‘mustard seed’ planted by Jesus Christ, was the idea of the interior life. With Jesus Christ not only did the individual began to experience the sense we all have now that, parallel to the limitless, infinitely various cosmos out there, we each have inside us a cosmos which is equally rich and limitless, but Jesus Christ also introduced the sense that each of us now has of a personal narrative history that weaves in and out of the general history. Each of us may fall as humanity as a whole has fallen. Each of us experiences crises of doubt and finds individual, personal redemption — very different from the tribal consciousness of earlier generations of Jews or the city-state consciousness of the Greeks.

THE MINISTRY OF JESUS CHRIST LASTED just three years from the Baptism to Good Friday on 3 April AD 3 when at the place of the skulls, Golgotha, the Sun god was nailed on the cross of matter. Then at the Transfiguration the Sun god began to transform that matter, to spiritualize it.

We have seen how in the Mystery schools from Zarathustra to Lazarus, candidates had undergone a three day ‘mystical death’ and rebirth. The candidate was put into a deep, death-like trance for three days during which his spirit travelled the spirit worlds, bringing back knowledge and power to the material world. The ‘death’ then was a real event, but on the spiritual plane. What happened with the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ was that for the first time this process of initiation occurred as a historical event on the material plane.

^{The Resurrection, part of the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grunewald is a cosmic vision of Jesus Christ as the Sun god. Grunewald depicted what the Church father Tertullian, drawing from the Greek Mystery tradition, called the luminous seed, the ‘augoeides’. Planted in the earth, it now arose as a luminous, star-like body, a body of light rays. When the disciples on the road to Emmaus failed to recognize Christ it was because they were encountering his augoeidean body.}

^{The Cross in the middle of the Four Cherubim who symbolize the Four Elements. As we have seen, the Four Elements, working from the constellations at the four corners of the cosmos work together to hold the material world in place. Jesus Christ is here represented in his cosmic role as Fifth Element, the Sun god who comes to Earth to spiritualize the Four Elements and dissolve matter.}

THE SHADOW SIDE OF THIS GREAT EVENT is contained in the story of Christ’s journey into Hell. This happened immediately after his death on the cross. It is a story which has fallen into desuetude, part of the process by which we have lost a sense of the spiritual dimension of the cosmos. Initiation is always concerned as much with lighting the way of the journey after death as with this life’s journey. In the centuries before Jesus Christ, humanity’s sense of the afterlife had shrunk to an anticipation of a dreary half-life of shades in the sub-lunar realm, Sheol. And after death human spirits lost consciousness as they started their ascent through the higher, heavenly spheres. The result was that in their next reincarnation these spirits returned with no intimations of the journey.

By descending into Hell, Jesus Christ was following in the footsteps of Osiris. He was lighting up a way through the Underworld that the dead could follow. The living and dead would have to walk together if the great cosmic mission, the Work, was to be completed.

ACCORDING TO ESOTERIC DOCTRINE, the whole history of the world can be summed up as follows:

There was a Golden Age when earth and sun were united and the sun gave the earth form.

The sun then separated from the earth, causing it to materialize and become colder.

The god of the sun returned to infuse his spirit in the earth, so that the whole cosmos will eventually dematerialize and again become spiritualized.

This is the cosmic vision of the mission of Jesus Christ which inspired the early Christians, the Work which helped shape the great churches of the Middle Ages and the art of the Renaissance. It has been lost to modern, exoteric Christianity.

^{The Harrowing of Hell by Andrea Mantegna. I Peter 6: 18-9: ‘He also went to the spirits in prison… the gospel was also preached to those that are dead.’ Following what St Paul termed Jesus Christ’s ‘descent into the lower parts of the Earth’, spirits had Him as their guide to light the way.}

IF THE DEATH OF JESUS CHRIST WAS meant to happen on a cosmological level, we should still ask ourselves, what made it happen on a historical level? What were the immediate causes of the crucifixion?

Although Jesus Christ instructed Lazarus in private, his rebirth, and his being called forth to a new life, was a public event. It did not happen, like all previous initiations, within the closely guarded confines of a Mystery school and neither was Jesus Christ a hierophant of one of the state-sponsored Mystery schools. As a result Jesus Christ made deadly enemies of the Sadducees, who controlled the dissemination of initiatic knowledge on behalf of the ruling elite. The act of initiating Lazarus in public was a revolutionary one, signalling that the tie that bound initiates to the ruling elite was being broken. It was the beginning of the end of the Mystery schools and it prepared the way for the secret societies.

Jesus Christ also posed a threat to the Roman elite. The soldiers who draped him in a purple cloak and placed a crown of thorns on his head had no other king, no other god than Caesar. They mocked Jesus Christ by draping on him the purple cloak that was worn as a sign of initiation in the Adonis mysteries. The crown of thorns was a satire on the wreath bestowed when a candidate achieved initiation in the mysteries of Eleusis. The Caesars were the great occult enemy of Jesus Christ.