by this arrival Rabelais means to say that his heroes are entering the Matrix.
They are led to an initiation chamber in an underground temple. Stories of going underground should always alert us to the fact that occult physiology is being referred to. The journey underground is a journey inside the body.
In the centre and deepest part of the temple stands a sacred fountain of life. Fulcanelli pointed out that Rabelais allowed his esoteric, alchemical interests to come to the surface in this description of the fountain with its seven columns dedicated to the seven planets. Each planetary god carries the appropriate precious stones, metals and alchemical symbols. A figure of Saturn hangs over one column with a scythe and a crane at his feet. Most tellingly Mercury is described as ‘fixed, firm and malleable’ — which is to say semi-solidified in the process of alchemical transmutation.
What flows from this fountain and what our pilgrims — which is how we should think of them, we now realize — drink is wine. ‘Drinking is the distinguishing character of humanity,’ writes Rabelais, ‘I mean drinking cool, delicious wine, for you must know, my beloved, that by wine we become divine, for it is in its power to fill the spirit with truth, learning and philosophy.’ In some oriental occult physiology wine is used as a symbol of the secretions within the brain that stream into consciousness in ecstatic states. In the twentieth century some Indian scientists went so far as to suggest that ‘wine’ in Vedic texts referred to what we today call dimethyltryptamine, the enzyme that streams down from the higher regions of the cerebellum that we have already touched on in our discussion of shamanism. Swami Yogananda likewise talked of neuro-physiological secretions he called ‘blissful
‘Oh Lord,’ wrote the Sufi master Sheikh Abdullah Ansari, ‘intoxicate me with the wine of Thy love.’
20. THE GREEN ONE BEHIND THE WORLDS
WHEN IN 1492 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS reached the mouth of the Orinoco he believed he had found the Gihon, one of the four rivers that flow out of Eden. He wrote home: ‘There are great indications suggesting the proximity of the earthly Paradise, for not only does it correspond in mathematical position with the opinions of the holy and learned theologians, but all other sages concur to make it probable.’
The impulse to discover everything about the world that would inspire the scientific revolution was also inspiring men to voyages of exploration. Never had wonder at the material world been so strong.
Hopes of finding a New World were inextricably connected with expectations of a new Golden Age, but the gold found turned out to be the more earthly kind.
Much has been made of Columbus’s connections with the Knights Templar. He was married to a daughter of a former Grand Master of the Knights of Christ, a Portuguese order that had grown up after the Templars had been driven underground. It’s been noted as significant that Columbus navigated ships whose sails carried the distinctive red cross ‘patte’ of the Templars. But the reality is that the Knights of Christ did not pursue the same independent commerce with the spirit worlds that had pushed the Papacy to such desperate measures in the case of the Templars. As with other later crypto-Templar orders such as the Knights of Malta, Rome was here adopting the powerfully glamorous mystique of the original Knights Templar, and using it for its own purposes.
Columbus wrote to Queen Isabella expressing hope that he would find a ‘barrel of gold’ that would finance the reconquest of Jerusalem, just as she and her husband, Ferdinand, had recently managed the reconquest of Granada, bringing Spain back to the Church. Columbus did not know that that gold would be needed to fund a war against an enemy nearer home and fast growing in strength — an enemy with much greater claims to be called the spiritual heir of the Knights Templar.
The battle lines for control of the world were being drawn, not only geopolitically, but in the spirit worlds, too. It would be a battle for the whole spirit of humanity.
CERVANTES AND SHAKESPEARE WERE pretty nearly exact contemporaries.
Don Quixote, the elderly knight who tilts at windmills, believing them to be giants, and who sees a squat, garlic-chewing peasant girl as a beautiful, aristocratic maiden out of tales of chivalry, called Dulcinea, might at first seem like a character in a rather knock-about comedy. But as the story progresses its tone changes and the reader senses some strange magic at work.
On one level Don Quixote is trying to insist on the old chivalric ideals of the Middle Ages as they pass away. On another he is entering his ‘second childhood’, harking back to a time when imaginings seemed so much more real. The point is, of course, that in esoteric philosophy imaginings
At one point in the story Don Quixote and his down-to-earth servant Sancho Panza are tricked by Merlin into believing that the beautiful Dulcinea has been bewitched so that she looks like a squat peasant girl. Apparently the only way she can regain her beautiful form is if Sancho Panza submits to a beating of 3300 lashes. We shall return to examine the significance of the number thirty-three shortly.
An account of an initiation lies at the heart of the novel. It marks the point when simple-minded comedy gives way to something more troubling and ambiguous. This is the strange episode of the Don’s descent into the Cave of Montesinos…
Sancho Panza tied a rope a hundred fathoms long to his master’s doublet, then lowered him through the mouth of the cave, Don Quixote hacking his way through brambles, briars and fig trees, dislodging crows and rooks.
At the bottom of the cave the Don could not stop himself falling into a deep, deep sleep. He awoke to found himself in a beautiful meadow. But unlike in a dream he could think reasonably…
He approached a vast palace of crystal where he was met by a strange old man in a green satin hood, who introduced himself as Montesinos. This man, evidently the genius of the transparent palace, told him he had long been expected. He took the Don to a downstairs chamber and showed him a knight lying on a marble sepulchre. This knight had been bewitched by Merlin, Montesinos told him. Furthermore, he said, Merlin had prophesied that he, Don Quixote, would break the spell, and so would revive knight errantry…
Don Quixote returned to the surface and asked Sancho Panza how long he had been gone. Told not more than hour, Don Quixote said this could not be, that he had spent three days underground. He said he saw what he saw, touched what he touched.
You’re saying the most
The whole novel is a play on enchantment, illusion, disillusion — and a deeper level of enchantment. It reads like a series of parables in which the meaning is never explicitly stated and never quite clear. But the deepest level of meaning has to do with the role of imagination in forming the world. Don Quixote is not just a buffoon. He is somebody who has the strongest desire to have his innermost questions answered. He is being shown that material reality is just one of many layers of illusions, and that it is our deepest imaginings that form them. The implication is that if we can locate the secret source of our imaginings, we can control the flow of nature. By the end of the novel the Don has subtlely changed his surroundings.
We saw earlier that when we are in love we choose to see the good qualities in the one we love. We saw how our good-heartedness helps to bring out these qualities and make them stronger. The reverse is also true. Those we despise become despicable.
