Cabalistic tradition, the Brotherhood on the Roof of the World, the Inner Circle of Adepts or the Nine Unknown. According to ancient traditions knowledge, the way to gain experience of the spirit words is passed on by an initiatic chain of transmission from master to pupil. In the East this is sometimes called
An initiate I knew told me how, when he was a young man living in New York, his Master had reached over to him, drawn a circle on a table and asked him what he saw.
‘A table top,’ he replied.
‘That is good,’ said the Master. ‘The eyes of a young man
Immediately the world faded and he was dazzled by a vision of what seemed to him a cold, white goddess of the moon, carrying a skull and a rosary. She had six faces each with three eyes.
The goddess danced and my friend lost track of time. Then, after a while, the vision faded and shrank until it became a dot and disappeared.
My friend knew, though, it was still living inside him somewhere like a burning seed and would do so forever.
His Master said, ‘You saw it?’
I was thrilled when I heard this story, because I knew I was very close to the chain of mystic transmission.
THE DIRECT SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE THAT Meister Eckhart talked about with such conviction in his sermons was experience of a kind organized religion no longer seemed able to provide. The Church seemed pedantically tied to the dead letter of the law both in theology and ritual.
So it was in a climate of spiritual dissatisfaction and restlessness that loose and shadowy associations arose among like-minded people. Groups of lay people questing for spiritual experience, ‘wandering stars’ as they were sometimes known, were said to meet in secret: the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit, the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life, the Family of Love and the Friends of God. Stories were rife among all levels of society in Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, even among the underprivileged and alienated poor, of people being approached by mysterious strangers who took them to secret meetings or even on journeys into strange, otherworldly dimensions.
One of the more intriguing notions associated with the secret societies is that you can never track them down. Instead they operate some form of occult but benevolent surveillance. When the time is right, when you are ready, a member of the secret schools will come to you and offer himself as your spiritual guide or master.
The same initiate told me how at a gathering of top academics who all shared an interest in the esoteric — he himself was an art historian — it eventually emerged that the great teacher in their presence was none of the doctors or professors but the cleaning lady with mop and pail at the back of the lecture theatre. Such stories may have an apocryphal air about them, but they also have a universal resonance. The spiritual master of the greatest esoteric teacher of the twentieth century, Rudolf Steiner, was a woodcutter and herb-gatherer.
Karl von Eckartshausen, the early theosophist, wrote: ‘These sages whose number is small are children of light. Their business is to do as much good to humanity as is in their power and to drink wisdom from the eternal fountain of truth. Some live in Europe, others in Africa, but they are bound together by the harmony of their souls, and they are therefore one. They are joined even though they may be thousands of miles apart from each other. They understand each other, although they speak in different tongues, because the language of the sages is spiritual perception. No evil person could possibly live among them, because he would be recognized immediately.’
People today freely and openly describe meetings with Indian mystics such as Mother Meera, who confer life-changing mystical experiences. On the other hand we tend to be shy of ascribing supernatural powers to remarkable Christians these days. But you really do not need to look very far into the lives of the great Christian mystics to find evidence of psychic powers. Reading von Eckartshausen you might suspect that he had been influenced by ideas about Hindu holy men. That may be true, but this should not stop us from recognizing that the great Christian mystics and Hindu adepts have much in common.
The mystic John Tauler, for example, was a pupil of Meister Eckhart. The older man does not seem to have been Tauler’s spiritual master in the sense in which we have just been using that phrase. Tauler was preaching in 1339 when he was approached by a mysterious layman from the Oberland, who told him his teaching lacked true spirituality. Tauler gave up his life and followed this man, who is supposed in some Rosicrucian traditions to have been a reincarnation of Zarathustra.
Tauler disappeared for two years. When he reappeared, he tried to preach again, but could only stand there and cry. On his second attempt he was inspired, and it was said of him that the Holy Spirit played upon him as upon a lute. Tauler himself said of his experience of initiation, ‘My prayer is answered. God sent me the man long sought to teach me wisdom the schoolmen never knew.’
Tauler’s is the mysticism of everyday life. When a poor man asked if he should stop working to go to church, Tauler replied: ‘One can spin, another make shoes and these are the gifts of the Holy Spirit.’ In Tauler we may recognize the great sincerity and practical probity of the German people. Martin Luther would say of him, ‘Nowhere in either Latin or German have I found more wholesome, powerful teaching, nor any that more fully agrees with the Gospels.’
OF COURSE NOT ALL INITIATES ARE MYSTICS, and neither is everyone who has genuine communication with the spirit worlds. Certain great individuals, such as Melchizedek, have been avatars, embodiments of great spiritual beings who are able to live in constant communication with the spirit worlds. Others, such as Isaiah, were initiates in previous incarnations, carrying the powers of an initiate into their new incarnation. The cosmos prepares people in different ways. Mozart is believed to have undergone a series of short incarnations which had the purpose of interrupting his experience of the spirit worlds only briefly, so that in his incarnation as Mozart he could still hear the Music of the Spheres. Others, such as Joan of Arc, inhabit bodies that have been prepared to be so sensitive, so finely tuned, that spirits of a very high level are able to work through them, even though they are not in any sense incarnations of these spirits. Modern mediums are sometimes people who have suffered a trauma in childhood which has caused a rent in the membrane between the material and spirit worlds.
Anyone who has spent time with mediums or psychics accepts that they often, even routinely, receive information by supernatural means — anyone, that is, whose cast of mind is not such that they are absolutely determined to disbelieve. However, it is equally apparent that most mediums cannot control spirits with whom they converse. Often they cannot even recognize them. These spirits are sometimes mischievous, giving them a lot of reliable information on trivial matters, but then tripping them up on important things.
Unlike mediums, initiates are concerned to communicate their altered states of consciousness, either directly, as happened to my friend in New York, or by teaching techniques to achieve altered states.
THE LIFE OF CHRISTIAN ROSENKREUZ is usually thought of as an allegory — or a fantasy. In the secret tradition the great being who had incarnated briefly in the thirteenth century, as the boy with the luminous skin, was incarnated again in 1378. He was born into a poor German family living on the border of Hesse and Thuringia. Orphaned at the age of five, he was sent to live in a convent, where he learned Greek and Latin not very well.
At the age of sixteen he set out on a pilgrimage. He longed to visit the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. He travelled to Egypt, Libya and Fez. He went, too, to Cyrpus, where a friend who was accompanying him died. Then on to Damascus and Jerusalem and finally to somewhere called Damcar, where he studied for three years and was initiated by a Sufi brotherhood known as the Ikhwan al-Safa, or Brethren of Purity. During this time he translated into Latin
When he returned to Europe, he was determined to pass on what he had learned. He landed first in Spain,
