The Secret History of the World

very spirit of the world and with the rays of the stars through which the world-spirit acts.’ What Ficino is saying is that if you imagine as fully and vividly as you can the spirits of the planets and the stellar gods, then, as a result of this act of imagination, the power of the spirit may flow through you.

^{Raphael: Madonna and Child.}

We saw in the last chapter that the Middle Ages was the great age of magic. Then esoteric thinkers and occultists began to construct images in their minds which gods and spirits could inhabit and make come alive, as once the makers of the temples and Mystery centres of the ancient world had manufactured objects such a statues for disembodied beings to use as bodies. In Italy in the Renaissance artists with esoteric beliefs began to recreate the magical images in their minds with paint and stone.

In the Middle Ages, the dissemination of grimoires had been a wholly underground, sub-cultural activity. Now the more widely published hermetic literature of the Renaissance gave instructions on how to construct talismans designed to draw down influences from the spirit worlds which were taken up by the artists of the day. Hermetic literature explained how occult influences could be more effective if they were constructed of metals appropriate to the spirit being invoked — gold for the god of the sun, for example, silver for the god of the moon. Particular colours, shapes, hieroglyphs and other sigils were revealed afresh as sympathetic to particular disembodied beings.

An art critic has talked of Sandro Botticelli’s ‘predilection for minor tones’ and for lighter colours, which suggests an ethereal quality, as if he is depicting beings from another realm not yet fully materialized. We can see Ficino’s influence on Botticelli’s painting popularly known as the Primavera, which illustrates the process of the creation of matter in terms of the successive emanations of the planetary spheres from the cosmic mind. The Primavera herself has shown a remarkable propensity to live and breathe in the minds of those who have seen the painting ever since.

The neoplatonic artists of the Renaissance believed they were rediscovering ancient secrets. Following Plato they believed that all learning is a process of remembering. Our minds are protrusions of the great central cosmic mind into the material world. Everything that has been experienced or thought in history is held in the memory banks of the cosmic mind — or perhaps, more accurately, lives in a sort of eternal now.

If Plato is right, this book is already inside you!

IT IS WITH THE ITALIAN HIGH RENAISSANCE that we come to the idea of the towering genius — not just Botticelli but Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo. The genius is someone set totally apart from the rest of us by the magnificence and clarity of his or her visions, and it is perhaps appropriate that this flowering took place in Italy because it was a continuation of the tradition of the ecstatic visions of Joachim and St Francis.

Like the saints, the great artists were sometimes mouthpieces for great spiritual beings. According to esoteric tradition the painter Raphael was directly inspired by the Archangel Raphael. The hand that painted the masterpieces was divinely guided.

But there is a stranger and more mysterious tradition — that the individuality who incarnated as Raphael had previously incarnated as John the Baptist. According to Steiner, this explains why there are no major paintings by Raphael of events that took place after the death of John the Baptist. His great masterpieces depicting the Madonna and child with a strange and uniquely compelling quality were in effect painted from memory.

MANY MAGI LIVED IN ITALY IN THE HIGH Renaissance in the time of Leonardo. They often worked within the closed brotherhood of an artist’s studio, where artistic and spiritual progress could be guided together and go hand in hand. For example, the mathematician and Hermeticist Luca Pacioli, who was the first to write openly about the secret formulae behind the Venusian pentangle, was one of Leonardo’s teachers regarding ‘divine proportion’.

Another magus we know had an influence on Leonardo (because Leonardo owned some of his books and mentioned him in his own notebooks) was an architect of an older generation. Leon Battista Alberti was the architect of the Rucellai Palace in Florence, one of the earliest classical buildings in Renaissance Italy, and of the facade of Santa Maria Novella, also in Florence. He was also the author of one of the strangest books in the Italian language: Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the proto-surreal story of Poliphilo (the title may roughly be translated as ‘the lover of many things in his struggle for love in a dream’).

The hero awakes on the day he is to go on an adventure, but falls into a dream. He pursues his beloved through a strange landscape inhabited by dragons and other monsters, through a labyrinthine course that takes him into many marvellous buildings which are half-stone, half-living organism. The inside of a temple, for example, appears as its viscera. Alberti was obsessed by nature and natural forms and incorporates them in his work in a most unusual way. When we look at, for example, the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks, this same obsession appears in the spiritually epressive forms of the landscape a clear example of Alberti’s influence on Leonardo.

^{Illustration from the Hypnerotomachia. Here we may catch an echo of the translation from vegetable to animal life, as taught in the secret history.}

The story unfolds with the logic of a dream. On one level the Hypnerotomachia is an architectural manifesto. Alberti is proposing that the new architecture of the Renaissance that he was instrumental in creating should have the logic of a dream. Instead of a slavish and inhibited following of precedent, architects should operate in a new, free state of mind where nothing is forbidden, where architects should let themselves be inspired by the combinations of forms that altered states of consciousness may suggest. Alberti is recommending, then, a kind of controlled thought-experiment as a way of facilitating a new way of thinking — and not just in architecture.

That the channelling of sexual energies is involved becomes clear at the end of the story when the hero is finally united with his beloved in a series of mystic rites in the Temple of Venus. His beloved is asked by the priestess to stir a cistern with a flaming torch. This causes Poliphilo to fall into a trance state. Then a shell-shaped basin full of whale sperm, musk, camphor oil, almond oil and other substances is set alight, doves are sacrificed, and nymphs dance around an altar. When the beautiful beloved is asked to rub the ground around the base of the altar, the whole building convulses as if in an earthquake and a tree bursts out of the top of the altar. Poliphilo and his beloved taste the fruit of this tree. They are transported into an even higher state of consciousness. The volcanic power of libido has been channelled by the priestess-adept so that all prohibitive rules of behaviour, of morality and creativity, even the laws of nature, have been turned upside down.

Perhaps the most mysterious of all the great masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance is the Mona Lisa. Who can explain its power? The great nineteenth-century art critic and esotericist Walter Pater wrote of it: ‘Hers is the head upon which all “the ends of the world are come” and the eye lids are a little weary. It is beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions… She is older than the rocks among whom she sits… she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave and has been a diver in deep seas and keeps their fallen day about her…’

Pater is perhaps hinting at what he knows. The Mona Lisa is indeed older than the gods.

We saw earlier how the moon separated from the earth in order to reflect sunlight down to the earth and make human reflection possible. We saw, too, how in 13,000 BC Isis withdrew from the earth to the moon to become mistress of this process of reflection. Now at the beginning of the fifteenth century, after the cosmos had spent aeons working to create the conditions to make possible reflection in the sense that we understand it today, it happened at last. Leonardo’s masterpiece is an icon in human history because it captured the moment this step in the evolution in consciousness took place. In the face of the Mona Lisa we see for the first time the deep joy of someone exploring her inner life. She is free to detach herself from the world of the senses pressing in on her and roam within. She has what J.R.R. Tolkien in another context called ‘an unencumbered, mobile, detached inner eye’.

^{The Mona Lisa is perhaps the most reproduced image in the history of painting, here in a nineteenth-century engraving. In his Treatise on Painting Leonardo recommends working oneself into a state of receptivity to imaginative imagery in which cracks and stains on old walls can evoke — or invoke — gods and monsters.}