The Secret History of the World

A similar choice confronts us when we contemplate the cosmos as a whole. Cervantes was writing at a turning point in history when people no longer knew for sure that the world is a spiritual place with goodness and meaning at its heart. What Cervantes is saying is that if, like Don Quixote, we good-heartedly decide to believe in the essential goodness of the world, despite the brickbats of fortune, despite the slapstick tendency in things that seems to contradict such spiritual beliefs and make them look foolish and absurd, then that decision to believe will help transform the world — and in a supernatural way, too.

Don Quixote is reckless in his good-heartedness. He takes an extreme and painful path. He has been called the Spanish Christ, and the effect of his journey on world history has been quite as great as if he had really lived.

CERVANTES DIED ON 23 APRIL 1616, the same date as Shakespeare.

The sparse traces left by William Shakespeare in the written records yield few definite facts. We know he was born in the village of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, that he was educated at the village school, became a butcher’s apprentice and was caught poaching. He left Stratford for London where he became a bit-part player in a company at one time under the patronage of Francis Bacon, and many successful plays were performed, the published versions of which bear his name. He died leaving his second best bed to his wife in his will.

His contemporary, the playwright Ben Jonson, said sneeringly of William Shakespeare that he knew ‘small Latin and less Greek’. How could such a man have created a body of work, saturated in all the erudition of the age?

Many great contemporaries have been pushed forward as the true author of Shakespeare’s plays, including his patron, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe (working on the theory that he wasn’t really murdered in 1593, just as the plays of Shakespeare began to appear), and latterly the poet John Donne. An American scholar, Margaret Demorest, has noted the strange links between Donne and Shakespeare, the likeness of their portraits, the similarity in nicknames, ‘Johannes factotum’ for Shakespeare and ‘Johannes Factus’ for Donne, odd idiosyncrasies in spelling — both use cherubin for cherubim, for example — and the fact that Donne’s publications begin when Shakespeare’s cease.

But the most popular candidate is, of course, Francis Bacon.

An infant prodigy, Francis Bacon was born into a family of courtiers in 1561. At the age of twelve a masque he had written, The Birth of Merlin, was performed before Queen Elizabeth I, who knew him affectionately as her little Lord Keeper. He was a small, weak, sickly child and his schoolfellows teased him by calling him by a pun on his name, Hamlet, or ‘little ham’. He was educated at Oxford and when, despite the Queen’s earlier fondness for him, he was blocked again and again in his political ambitions, he conceived an ambition to build himself an ‘Empire of learning’, conquering every branch of erudition known to man. His intellectual brilliance was such that he became known as the ‘wonder of the ages’. He wrote books that dominated the intellectual life of his day, including The Advancement of Learning, the Novum Organon, in which he proposed a radical new approach to scientific thinking, and The New Atlantis, a vision of a new world order. Part inspired by Plato’s vision of Atlantis, this would prove very influential on esoteric groups in the modern world. When James I came to the throne Bacon quickly achieved his long-held ambition and became Lord Chancellor, the second most powerful post in the land. One of Bacon’s responsibilities was the distribution of land grants in the New World.

Bacon’s brilliance was such that it seemed to cover the whole world, and, all other things being equal, he might seem to be a better candidate for the author of the plays of Shakespeare than Shakespeare himself.

Bacon was a member of a secret society called the Order of the Helmet. In The Advancement of Learning, he wrote of a tradition of handing down parables in a chain of succession and with them hidden meanings on the ‘secrets of the sciences’. He admitted he was fascinated by secret codes and numerological ciphers. In the 1623 edition of The Advancement of Learning he explained what he calls the Bilateral Cipher — which would later become the basis of the Morse Code.

It is interesting to note that his favourite code was the ancient ‘cabalistic cipher’ in terms of which the name ‘Bacon’ has the numerical value thirty-three. Using this same cipher, the phrase ‘Fra Rosi Crosse’ can be founded encoded on the frontispiece, dedication page and other significant pages in The Advancement of Learning.

And using the same cipher, the same Rosicrucian phrase can also be found in the dedication in the Shakespeare Folio, on the first page of The Tempest and on the Shakespeare monument in Stratford-upon-Avon. The rolled scroll on the Shakespeare Memorial in Westminster Abbey also has it, together with the number thirty-three, which we have just seen is the number for Bacon.

IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THE SOLUTION to this mystery given in the secret history, it is necessary first to take a look at the work.

The plays of Shakespeare play with altered states, with the madness of love. Hamlet and Ophelia are descended from the Troubadours. There are wise fools — like Feste in Twelfth Night. In Lear’s Fool, the Christ-like jester who tells the truth when no one else dares, the fool of the Troubadors achieves apotheosis.

The characters of Gargantua, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza inhabit the collective imagination. They help form our attitudes to life. But as Harold Bloom, Professor of Humanities at Yale University and author of the key book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, has shown, no single writer has populated our imagination with archetypes like Shakespeare: Falstaff, Hamlet, Ophelia, Lear, Prospero, Caliban, Bottom, Othello, Iago, Malvolio, Macbeth and his Lady, Romeo and Juliet. In fact, after Jesus Christ no other individual has done so much to develop and expand the human sense of an interior life. If Jesus Christ planted the seed of interior life, Shakespeare helped it to grow, populated it and gave us the sense we all have today that we each contain inside us an inner cosmos as expansive as the outer cosmos.

Great writers are the architects of our consciousness, in Rabelais, Cervantes and Shakespeare, above all in the soliloquies of Hamlet, we also see the seeds of the sense we have today of personal turning points, vital decisions to be made. Before the great writers of the Renaissance, any inkling of such things could only have come from sermons.

^{RIGHT The History of the World, 1614. Sir Walter Raleigh, the famous adventurer, was a member of a secret society called the School of Night. So shadowy was this society that some recent critics have even doubted its existence, but Raleigh undoubtedly shared esoteric ideas with Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman, author of The Shadow of Night. One of the secrets they kept was ‘atheism’. Raleigh feared the prolonged torture, disembowelling and slow death that had overtaken another friend, Thomas Kyd, for professing atheistic views. But none of them was an atheist in the modern sense of denying the reality of spirit worlds or denying that disembodied beings intervened in the material world in a supernatural way. In Faust Marlowe wrote one of the most learned, esoteric works of world literature dealing with the dangers of commerce with the spirit worlds.}

^{There was a brilliant analysis of this frontispiece of his literary masterpiece by David Fideler in the much-missed Gnosis magazine. On one level, says Fideler, it was meant to illustrate Raleigh’s view of history as the unfolding of Divine Providence according to Cicero’s definition: ‘History bears witness to the passing of the ages, sheds light upon reality, gives life to recollection and guidance to human existence, and brings tidings of ancient days.’ On another level, he points out, this design embodies the cabalistic Tree of Life with planetary correspondences at the nodes. The figure on the left is Bon Fama, the Fama of the Rosicrucian Manifestoes.}

There is a shadowy side to this new interior richness, which, again, we see most clearly in the soliloquies of Hamlet. The new sense of detachment that allows someone to withdraw from the senses and roam around his interior world is double-edged, carrying with it the danger of feeling alienated from the world. Hamlet languishes in just such a state of alienation when he is not sure whether it is better ‘to be or not to be’. This is a long way from the cry of Achilles, who wanted to live in the light of the sun at all costs.

As an initiate Shakespeare was helping to forge the new form of consciousness. But how do we know Shakespeare was an initiate?

In the Anglo-Saxon countries at least Shakespeare has done more than any other writer to form our idea of