The Secret History of the World

the ground in front of this mysterious figure. ‘You must be the Green One, Master of Saints. Bless me, for I would attain.’ He was afraid to touch the robe, because now he was close enough to see it was made of green fire.

‘You have seen too much,’ replied the Green One. ‘You must understand that I am from another world. Without their knowing it, I protect those who have a service to perform.’

The man raised his eyes from the ground, but the Green One had disappeared, leaving only the sound of rushing wind.

A YOUNGER CONTEMPORARY OF Shakespeare’s, Robert Burton, wrote in The Anatomy of Melancholy ‘that omniscient, only wise fraternity of the Rosie Cross names their head Elias Artifex, their theophrastian master’. Burton then describes him as ‘the renewer of all arts and sciences, reformer of the world and now living’ (my italics).

We have already seen how in the esoteric tradition Elijah is believed to have reincarnated as John the Baptist. His return was prophesied not only in the last words of the Old Testament but by the initiate-prophet Joachim, who profoundly influenced the Rosicrucians’ understanding of history. Joachim said Elijah would come to prepare the way for the third age. Did the secret societies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries believe that he had reincarnated in their own time and that he was protecting and guiding those with a service to perform?

In Chapter 13 we looked at rather disturbing stories of Elijah and Elisha, his successor. The time has come to consider that in the secret history these passages in the Old Testament are not a description of two separate individuals. Rather, Elijah is such a highly evolved being that not only is he able to incarnate, discarnate and reincarnate at will, he is also able to parcel up bits of his spirit — or mantle — and distribute it among several different people.

Just as a flock of birds turn as one, moved by the same thought, so also several people may be moved simultaneously by the same spirit. Lurking in the darkness behind the surface glitter of Elizabethan England, speaking through the minds of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Bacon, Donne and Cervantes we should be able to make out the stern visage of the Green One, spiritual master of Sufis and architect of the modern age.

We shall look at the aim of Elijah’s mission in the last chapter, but for the moment it is as well to recall the role that Arabia played in inspiring not only literature but science. At the court of Haroun al Raschid and later among the Arab peoples, science had made great leaps forward, particularly in mathematics, physics and astronomy. There is a deep mystical connection between the Arab people and the English, because it was the great Arabian spirit of scientific research which lived again in Francis Bacon, the individual most closely associated with Shakespeare in the occult literature. And, as the history of the philosophy of science tell us, it was Bacon who inspired the great scientific revolution that has done so much to form the modern world.

As the inner cosmos was opened up and illumined, so, too, the material cosmos was opened up and illumined. As Shakespeare revealed a world not of character types, which is what had gone before, but a jostling crowd of fully realized individuals, seething with passion and fired by ideas, so Bacon revealed a world bursting with quiddity, a scintillating world of infinitely various, sharply defined objects.

These parallel worlds ballooned and became mirror images of one another. Inner and outer worlds that had previously been darkly and indistinctly intermingled were now clearly separated.

The world of Shakespeare is the world of human values, where, whatever happens, it is human happiness and the shape of human lives that are at stake. The world of Bacon is one where human values have been stripped out.

Human experience is the tricky, paradoxical, mysterious and ultimately unpredictable thing that Shakespeare dramatized. Bacon taught humankind to look at the physical objects that are the contents of experience and to note the predictable laws they obey.

He devised new ways of thinking about the contents of experience. He advised the discarding of as many preconceptions as possible while gathering as much data as possible, trying not to impose patterns on it, but waiting patiently for deeper, richer patterns to emerge. This is why in the history of the philosophy of science he is known as the Father of Induction.

In short, Bacon realized that if you can observe objects as objectively as possible very different patterns emerge from the ones that give subjective experience its structure.

This realization would change the face of the planet.

21. THE ROSICRUCIAN AGE The German Brotherhoods • Christian Rosenkreuz • Hieronymus Bosch • The Secret Mission of Dr Dee

LITTLE IS KNOWN ABOUT MEISTER ECKHART, the shadowy thirteenth-century German mystic, but, just as his contemporary Dante can be seen as the source of the Renaissance, Eckhart can be seen as the source of the broader but more slowly moving Reformation. In Eckhart we can also see the source of a new form of consciousness which would lead Northern Europe to world domination.

Born in near Gotha in Germany in 1260, he entered a Dominican friary, became a prior and eventually succeeded Thomas Aquinas teaching theology in Paris. His great Opus Tripartitum, as ambitious in scope as the Summa Theologica, was never finished. He died while on trial for his life, accused of heresy.

A few sermons have come down to us, some of them transcribed by people in Strasbourg. They had never heard anything like these notions before:

I pray to God to rid me of God.

If I myself were not, God would not be either.

If I were not, God would not be God.

God is within, we are without.

The eye through which I see God and the eye through which God sees me is the same eye.

He is He because He is not He. This cannot be understood by the outer man, only the inner man.

Find the one desire behind all desires.

God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk.

Through nothing I become what I am.

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.

These sound exceptionally modern. You would probably even be a bit surprised to hear them coming out of the mouth of your local clergyman today.

Like a Zen Master, Meister Eckhart tries to shock us out of fixed ways of thinking, sometimes with what at first sounds like nonsense.

He also teaches an oriental style of meditation that involves both sustained detachment from the material world and emptiness of the mind. He says that when the powers have all been withdrawn from their bodily form and functions, when man has absconded from the senses, then he ‘lapses into the oblivion of things and of himself’.

Like Buddhist ‘emptiness’ this oblivion is a void containing infinite and inexhaustible possibilities, and so a place of rebirth and creativity. It is also a difficult and dangerous place. Eckhart was showing the way not of consolation for a harsh, repressed life, not rewards deferred, but a strange and testing dimension you enter at your peril, ‘the desert of the Godhead where no one is at home’.

Like Mohammed, like Dante, Eckhart had direct personal experience of the spirit worlds. Again and again what he reported back is not what you’d expect:

‘When you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see demons tearing your life away. If you’ve made your peace, you’ll see that the demons are really angels freeing you from the earth. The only things that burn us is the part you won’t let go, your memories, your attachments.’

Eckhart is sometimes spoken of as one of ‘the twelve sublime Masters of Paris’, a phrase that reminds us of the ancient traditions of hidden masters and adepts, the Great White Brotherhood, the Thirty-Six Righteous of