The Secret History of the World

the states kept returning she used the manuals of medieval mystics and texts by Ramon Lull as guides to achieving a working knowledge of mystical experience.

Teresa’s mystical ecstasy upon encountering a Seraph was, of course, sculpted by Bernini, the great initiate- artist of the Counter-Reformation. ‘He was not tall but short, marvellously beautiful. In his hands was a long golden spear and at the point of the iron there seemed to be a little fire… that he thrust several times into my heart… he drew out the spear, leaving me all on fire with a wondering love of God… so exciting sweet is this greatest of pains.’ There is an irrepressible suggestion of sexual ecstasy about this that invites comparison with the sex-magical practices of mystical societies of the same period. These practices are among the most closely guarded secrets of esoteric lore, and we will examine them in Chapter 25.

Teresa’s spiritual journals also describe an ascent of the soul that ties in with cabalistic accounts of the ascent of the sephirothic Tree. She describes, too, out-of-body experiences and the soul’s organs of spiritual vision — the chakras, which she calls ‘the eyes of the soul’. But though her writing might be informed by a knowledge of the Cabala, what comes through most strongly is an immediate account of direct personal experience, an understanding of the way the spirit worlds work which is rare outside of India. There is no element of inauthenticity or literary artifice.

^{Ecstasy of St Teresa in the Cornaro Chapel in Rome.}

^{Other levitating saints include Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, Francis of Assisi, Joseph of Cupertino and, in the twentieth century, Padre Pio and Gemma Galgani.}

St Teresa’s extreme spiritual states sometimes induced supernatural phenomena, including frequent levitations. These were witnessed by many. Nuns would struggle to hold her down.

It would be a mistake to assume that the experience of bodily levitation is necessarily a blissful one. Teresa talks of being ‘suspended between heaven and earth and receiving no comfort from either’. There is in this some of the sense of loneliness, of spiritual aridity, which had been predicted by Eckhart, and which would be given its finest, defining expression by Teresa’s pupil, St John of the Cross.

Because we live in an age when experiences of the spirit worlds are rare, there is a danger that we read St Teresa or her pupil, St John of the Cross, as mere allegory, an idealized account of finer feelings or even as a description of relatively trivial mood changes described in an aspirational or wishful-thinking way. But St John of the Cross’s account of his dark night of the soul, written after a period in prison in solitary confinement is an account, not of altered moods, but of an altered state of consciousness, an alteration of mental faculties as radical as that achieved by taking hallucinogenic drugs.

The Spanish throw themselves at death. The work of their mystics, writers and artists shows they keep the immanence of death in mind, not in a theoretical way, but a pressing existential way. They see it weaving around them and through them. They are ready to wrestle with it. They risk defeat by it in order to snatch what is most valuable in life from its jaws. This Spanish spirit finds electrifying expression in The Dark Night of the Soul. We have touched on the Mystic Death, the stage in the process of initiation the candidate must pass through. After the first comforting, illumining manifestations of the spirit, the candidate is pitched into a state of profound misery. Not only does he have no doubt that he is about to die, he has no doubt God has abandoned him, that the whole cosmos finds him despicable. He does not now even want anything more than the shady half- existence he is being shown.

^{Bernini’s famous Obelisk of Santa Maria sopra Minerva is derived from Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia — as we have seen, also a key occult influence on Leonardo.}

If John is describing this experience in terms which are recognizable to us today, this is partly because he helped formulate the very language we use to describe the beginnings of the spirit’s journey through Purgatory, the sphere of the moon.

In John’s account there is also a prophetic level of meaning. He was anticipating an era of history in which incarnated humanity as a whole would have to go through its own Dark Night of the Soul.

But perhaps the most characteristic form of occultism in what would become known as the Counter- Reformation was the Jesuits.

Ignatius Loyola was a professional soldier. When his right leg was shattered during a siege at Pamplona, he was invalided out of the Spanish army. During a period of convalescence he was reading a book on the lives of the saints when he realized his religious vocation. So in 1534, while studying in Paris, he gathered around him seven fellow students to form a brotherhood. They were to be the highly disciplined soldiers of the Church. In 1540 the Pope recognized this order as the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits were to be the Church’s intellectual elite, its military intelligence, servants unto death, searching out heresy and unlawful entry into the spirit worlds. The Jesuits also became the Pope’s educators and missionaries, instituting a rigorous system that would orient the young towards Rome and instil obedience. They also had remarkable successes as missionaries in Central and South America and in India.

Ignatius Loyola devised trials and techniques for achieving altered states that included breathing exercises, sleep deprivation, meditation on skulls, training in lucid dreaming and in active imagination. This latter involved constructing an elaborate, sensual mental image which a disembodied spirit might inhabit, a process known to the Rosicrucians as ‘building a hut by the palace of wisdom’.

However, in Loyola’s exercises there is a subtle but important difference. While the Rosicrucian techniques were designed to help achieve a free-willed, free-thinking exchange with beings from higher hierarchies, the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola are intended to still the will and induce a state of unquestioning obedience like a soldier’s. ‘Take, Lord, and receive all my memory, my understanding and my whole will, everything I have.’

In the West esoteric bookshops are dominated by Hindu, Buddhist and other oriental esoteric literature, but the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola remain the most readily available and widely published esoteric techniques from the Western tradition.

^{El Greco’s stretched figures have eyes that are half-closed as they contemplate some inner mystery. They stand in convulsive landscapes and stormy skyscapes. Not only does El Greco portray people in altered and mystical states, but he conveys a sense of what it is like to be in that state. Rene Huyghe, the French art critic, analysed the light in El Greco’s panoramic view of Toledo. In reality Toledo is bathed in a fierce, clear Mediterranean light, whilst in El Greco’s vision the ordinary light of day has been swallowed up by a fantastic, supernatural light. As an initiate, El Greco painted what St John of the Cross described when he wrote of ‘the dark night of the fire of love… without a guiding light other than that which was burning in my heart’.}

^{Mary as Isis the Moon goddess by Murillo.}

IN 1985 A BOOK WAS PUBLISHED anonymously called Meditations on the Tarot. It created a big stir in esoteric circles because it shows in an extremely erudite fashion that the symbolism in the tarot cards points to a unified set of beliefs underlying Hermeticism, the Cabala, oriental philosophies and Catholic Christianity. This book is a wonderful treasure chest of esoteric lore and wisdom.

It later emerged that the author was Valentine Tomberg, who had been initiated by Rudolf Steiner, but then left Steiner’s Anthroposophy to become a Catholic convert. The underlying purpose of Meditations on the Tarot — to try to draw those interested in esoterica back into the Church — becomes apparent when you know this. Was there any intellectual dishonesty involved? Tomberg, like Loyola before him, was working to ensure that the initiative in esoteric matters should not entirely be taken away from Rome.

WE LOOKED AT THE LIVES OF SOME individuals working in Northern Europe, it seems, more or less in isolation — Eckhart, Paracelsus, Dee, Boehme.

What is the evidence of a network, of anything like the rumoured secret society of Rosicrucians? Is there any documentary evidence to support the rumours about secret brotherhoods?

In 1596 a man called Beaumont was convicted of magical practices by a court at Angouleme in France. As the famous French historian de Thou recorded, Beaumont confessed that he ‘held commerce with Aerial and