The Secret History of the World

and lovingly not only through the material world but also through the spirit worlds.

Drug-taking is, of course, a big part of modern shamanistic practice, but it is forbidden by most modern esoteric teachers as a means of reaching the spirit worlds. The aim of these teachers is to achieve experience of the spirit worlds with intelligence and critical faculties as unimpaired as possible, indeed heightened. To enter the spirit worlds on drugs, on the other hand, is to do so without proper preparation, and may open up a portal into a demonic dimension which then refuses to close.

WHEN IN 453 ATTILA PREPARED TO CELEBRATE MARRIAGE to a high-born, soft-skinned young woman — he already had hundreds of wives — he was a man in the prime of life and full of potency, about to oversee the end of the Roman Empire.

The delicate early growth of a new stage of human consciousness was about to be nipped in the bud.

In the morning Attila was found dead. He had suffered a massive nosebleed.

‘I BELIEVE BECAUSE IT IS ABSURD.’ This famous phrase by the first of the Latin-speaking Church fathers, Tertullian, influenced many thinkers in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century.

We may imagine how absurd life might have seemed to a citizen of the Roman Empire in the days of its decline. He lived in a disenchanted world, where the great spiritual certainties on which the civilizations of the ancient world had been founded seemed doubtful. They no longer corresponded to his experience. Pan was long dead and the oracles had fallen silent. God and the gods seemed little more than empty, abstract ideas, while the really vigorous thought-life was in the realm of science and technology, in the atomic theories of Lucretius, in amazing engineering projects — aqueducts, drainage systems and roads thousands of miles long — that were springing up all round. Spiritual certainties had been replaced by harsh political and economic realities.

Yet if this citizen had been minded to listen to the inner promptings of his spirit, he might have noticed that this harsh and mechanical grinding of the wheels of necessity, this new way of the world, threw into relief something very like its opposite, something elsewhere called ‘the nameless way’. If this citizen had chosen not to shut it out, he might have caught suggestions emanating from underground streams of thought.

At this critical juncture we move from the age of the Mystery schools to the age of the secret societies, from the directing of the course of history by the political elite to something much more subversive coming from below. A new mood was taking over the soul-life of initiates which may be traced in the life of God’s joker, Francis of Assisi, in Shakespeare’s fools and in the gently undermining work of Rabelais, in Gulliver’s Travels, Alice in Wonderland and in the cuttings and pastings of Kurt Schwitters.

IN ANSWER TO A QUESTION ABOUT THE meaning of Zen, a monk raised a finger. A boy in the class began to ape him, and then afterwards, whenever anyone discussed this monk’s teachings, this naughty boy would raise his finger in mockery.

But the next time the boy attended class, the monk grabbed him and cut off his finger. As he ran off crying, the monk called after him. The boy turned round to look at the monk, and the monk looked back at him and raised his own finger.

At that moment the boy was enlightened.

This conte cruel is not a historical episode but one of the classic fables of Zen, formulated at the time of Attila’s nosebleed.

The capacity for abstract thought had been developing for less than a thousand years, inspired by Pythagoras, Confucius and Socrates. Buddhism had spread from India to China with the visit of the twenty-eighth Buddhist patriarch Bodhidharma. Then in China over the next two hundred years Buddhism and Taoism fused to create a philosophy of spontaneous, intuitive enlightenment called tch’an — or Zen as it would later come to be called in Japan.

Tch’an brought a new cautionary sense of the limitations of abstract thought.

The boy and his fellow pupils had been struggling to understand what the monk was saying. We may imagine them frowning with the effort to grasp enlightenment cerebrally.

But the boy is suddenly enabled to see the world from the point of view of an altered state of consciousness. He is suddenly seeing the world from the point of view of the vegetable consciousness that is centred in the solar plexus rather than the skull. It is by means of this vegetable consciousness that we are connected individually to every other living thing in the cosmos. These connections can be visualized as tendrils of a great cosmic tree and every solar plexus as a flower on the tree. In another way of looking at it, this vegetable consciousness is another dimension, the world between the worlds and the gateway to the spirit worlds. It is consciousness, the ‘light beyond the light of the intellect’, to quote St Augustine, that anyone must slip into who wishes to become enlightened.

The boy is enlightened because from the point of view of this other form of consciousness the monk’s finger belongs to him as much as it does the monk. The normal categories of human head-thought are inadequate to cover this.

Laughter erupts when you suddenly see the cosmos upside down, inside out and the other way round. At the beginning of the second half of the fifth century a new sense of absurdity entered the world and from then on the great initiates of the secret societies, in the West as well as in the East, would always have a touch of Zen.

UNDER A STRONG RULER, JUSTINIAN, the Byzantine Empire expanded, even regaining territories from the barbarians. Justinian closed down the remaining schools of Greek philosophy, causing teachers to flee, taking with them texts like the writings of Aristotle, including his now lost alchemical treatise.

Many arrived in Persia where King Khusraw dreamed of founding a great academy like the one that had inspired Greek civilization. In an intellectual ferment that took in elements of Neoplatonism, Gnosticism and Hermeticism, the methodology of Aristotle was applied jointly to the material world and the spirit worlds. So began the golden age of Arabian magic.

All our childhoods are lit up by a vision of magic — of genies, magic lamps and abracadabra. These stories began to weave their magical influence on the history of the world in the sixth century. There were rumours of automata and flying machines and caches of self-generating gold, of powerful magic spells that would become collected in forbidden books.

Soon the whole world would be under the spell of Arabia, as books of its spells were published far and wide, books containing the whispers of demons.

17. THE AGE OF ISLAM Mohammed and Gabriel • The Old Man of the Mountains • Haroun al Raschid and the Arabian Nights • Charlemagne and the Historic Parsifal • Chartres Cathedral

A GRIMLY FORBIDDING FIGURE LOOKED down from the spirit worlds on these developments.

In 570 a child called Mohammed was born in Mecca. When he was six he lost both his parents and was hired out as a shepherd’s boy. He grew broad shouldered, with curly black hair and a beard through which shone dazzling white teeth. He became a camel-driver, transporting the spices and perfumes that were the speciality of Mecca to Syria. Then, at the age of twenty-five, he married a wealthy widow of Mecca and became one of the richest and most respected citizens of that city.

Although he had in one way now won back all he had lost at the death of his parents, Mohammed was dissatisfied. The religious centre of Mecca was a large, black, granite stone called the Kaaba, which in some traditions is said to have fallen to earth from the Sirius star system. At that time Arabia was populated by shamanistic tribes, each worshipping their own gods and spirits and at the centre of this whirlwind, next to the Kaaba, stood a sacred tent which housed hundreds of their idols. Mecca had also become corrupted by the sale of holy water — taken from a spring which Ishmael had caused to spring from the sand. To Mohammed’s eyes all of