The Secret History of the World

Christianity in terms of what they had been taught in the Mystery schools of Egypt, Greece and Rome.

The early Church father Clement of Alexandria may have known people who had known the Apostles. Clement and his pupil Origen believed in reincarnation, for example. They taught more advanced students what they called the disciplina arcani, devotional practices which today we would classify as magic.

Early Christian leaders like Origen and Clement were erudite men participating in the intellectual advances of their age. The most exciting of these found representative expression in Neoplatonism.

Plato had pretty comprehensively converted a mind-before-matter experience of the world into concepts. What happened in the second century AD was that what we now call Neoplatonists began to develop Plato’s ideas into a living philosophy, a philosophy of life, even a religion with its own spiritual practices. It is important to remember that while we consider Plato in a dryly academic way, for his followers in the centuries after his death his texts had the status of scripture. Neoplatonists saw themselves not as originating ideas but writing commentaries making clear what Plato really meant. Passages which are today considered merely as rather abstruse exercises in abstract logic were used by practising Neoplatonists in their devotions.

They were concerned with describing real spiritual experience. In On the Delay in Divine Justice, Plutarch, who was heavily influenced by Neoplatonism, describes what different spirits look like as they can be seen beginning their after-death journey. The deceased are said to be surrounded with a flame- like envelope, but ‘some were like the purest full-moon light, emitting one smooth, continuous and even colour. Others were quite mottled — extraordinary sights — dappled with livid spots like adders; and others had faint scratches.’

Plotinus, the greatest Neoplatonist in the Alexandrian school, was a practising mystic. His pupil Porphyry reported seeing his Master in ecstatic raptures, unified with ‘the One’ several times. Plotinus said of Porphyry, perhaps a bit dismissively, that he had not achieved this once! Neoplatonists who came after them, Iamblichus and Jamblichus, put great emphasis on the importance of theurgic, that is to say godly, magical practices, Iamblichus leaving detailed descriptions of his visions.

Plotinus elaborated an extremely complex metaphysic of emanations of the kind we touched on in chapter one. Neoplatonism influenced other traditions, especially by its systematic approach, particularly the Cabala and Hermeticism.

Hermeticism and the Cabala are viewed by some scholars as, respectively, Egyptian-and Hebrew-flavoured Neoplatonism. But in the secret history the hermetic and cabalistic writings that began to appear at this time are understood as the first written down, systematized expressions of ancient and largely oral traditions.

The Hermetica purported to have originated with Hermes Trismegistus, an ancient Egyptian sage, but were written down in Greek and collected at this time in forty two volumes. Yuri Stoyanov, a distinguished researcher at the Warburg Institute, recently confirmed to me that most scholars now accept their genuine, Egyptian origins. The Hermetica were genially tolerant of other traditions, no doubt partly because of an underlying assumption that all traditions addressed the same planetary gods and opened up the way to the same spirit worlds.

In fact it is possible to draw parallels between the numbered emanations of Plotinus, the gods of the Hermetica and the spheres of heaven as described in the Pistis Sophia.

In the Cabala the emanations from the cosmic mind — the sepiroth — are sometimes thought of as forming a sort of tree as they descend — the sepirothic tree. The allegorical interpretation of scripture that emerged with the Jewish scholar Philo of Alexandria opened up the shared structure of all religions. St Paul hinted at different orders of angels — not only Angels and Archangels, but also Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Mights, Powers, Principalities. He is alluding to a system he evidently expected his readers to understand. This system was set out explicitly by St Paul’s pupil Dionysius the Aeropagite. The nine orders he described can be equated with the branches on the sepirothic tree — and with the different orders of gods and spirits in the ancient polytheistic, astronomical religions. For example the ‘Powers’ of St Paul should be equated with the gods of the solar system of the Greeks and Romans, the Powers of Light being the spirits of the sun and the Powers of Darkness being the gods of the moon and the planets.

The Jewish scholar Rebecca Kenta has even compared the ascent through the gates of wisdom on the cabalistic Tree of Life with Sufi teachings, and made connections between the sepiroth and the chakras of Hindu tradition.

All idealism, the religious systems of all cultures, sees creation in terms of a descending series of emanations from the cosmic mind. But what is distinctly esoteric is this identifying of these emanations with the spirits of the stars and planets on the one hand and occult physiology on the other. It is this that leads to astrology, alchemy, magic and practical techniques for achieving altered states.

It is important to keep bearing in mind that we are not here talking about piled up abstractions, but lived experience. The nine angelic hierarchies were sometimes divided up into three parts, and when St Paul talked of being raised to the Third Heaven, he meant that he had been initiated to such a high level that he had had direct personal experience of the exalted spiritual beings, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

^{The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even by Marcel Duchamp. Stripped bare, the bachelors reveal their planetary identities.}

CHRISTIANITY WAS FORGED OUT OF INITIATIC experiences and beliefs like these. The greatest of the Church fathers, St Augustine, was an initiate of a late-flowering Persian mystery school called Manichaeism.

Mani was born in 215 in the region that today we call Iraq. At the age of only twelve a being appeared to him. This mysterious being he came to call the Twin revealed to Mani a great hidden mystery — the role of evil in the history of humankind. He learned of the intertwining of the forces of darkness in the creation of the cosmos. He learned, too, that in the great cosmic battle between good and evil, the forces of evil virtually triumph.

The cosmic nature of Mani’s vision can also be seen in its syncretism, in his account of the great events of history and the exalted parts played by Zarathustra, the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets and Jesus Christ.

The universalism of initiates tends to worry local tyrants. The initiate’s heightened awareness of the forces of evil is also always open to misinterpretation. Mani was protected by two successive kings, but their successor persecuted him, torturing and eventually crucifying him.

‘I entered my innermost soul and beheld beyond my light and soul, the light.’ Augustine’s towering intellectual achievement was to give a comprehensive account of Church doctrine in terms of Platonism. What is usually glossed over in conventional Church history is that this account was based on the direct, personal experience of the initiate. Augustine has himself seen with ‘the mysterious eye of the soul’ a brighter light than the light of the intellect. He is not only concerned with eternal abstractions. His Confessions show him tortured by a sense of time passing, in his often quoted phrase ‘O Lord make me chaste — but not yet’ and also in his poignant cry in another moment of visionary experience: ‘O Beauty so old and so new, too late have I loved thee.’ St Augustine’s sense of time passing carries over into an esoteric sense of history. Later we will see the way in which he understood that the successive stages of the history of the world would unfold when we look at his prophecy of the founding of the City of God.

This was also the age of the great Christian missionaries. Having been captured and sold into slavery, St Patrick later went on a mission to spread the feeling for the sanctity of human life that Jesus Christ had introduced into the stream of world history. He fought to abolish slavery and human sacrifice. But he was also a wizard in the tradition of Zarathustra and Merlin, a terrifying figure casting all the snakes out of Ireland with his wand, casting out demons and raising the dead.

Christianity was readily accepted by the Celts. St Patrick overlaid with historical knowledge of the life and work of Jesus Christ the Celts’ cosmic prophecy of the return of the Sun god. Celtic Christianity would happily intertwine Christian and pagan elements. In Celtic art intertwining motifs would also stand for the interweaving waves of light that characterize the first stage of mystical experience in all traditions.

The fiercely independent Celts would continue to insist on the primacy of direct, personal experience of the spirit worlds, and would develop esoteric traditions independent of Rome. Some of the beliefs and practices of these and other early Christians would come to be dubbed heretical by the Roman Church.