The Secret History of the World

secret societies, he achieved his moment of inspiration and unlocked the structure of DNA while in an altered state brought about by taking LSD. As we have seen, hallucinogens have been used as part of techniques for achieving higher states of consciousness and grasping higher realities since the Mystery schools.

What is even more intriguing still is that later in life Crick published a book called Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature, in which he argued that the complex structure of DNA could not have come about by chance. Like an earlier Cambridge man, Isaac Newton, he believed that the cosmos had encoded deep within it messages about our — and its — origins that had been put there, so that we would be able to decode them when we had evolved sufficient intelligence.

WHAT IS THE MORAL OF THIS? AS THE Duchess in Alice in Wonderland will always ask.

What lies outside the collective is the realm of the demonic — but this realm is also the realm of the innovative, the evolutionary and that which addresses our deep and unquenchable need for the infinite. History shows that the people who have worked on the very boundaries of human intelligence have reached this place in altered states.

24. THE AGE OF FREEMASONRY Christopher Wren • John Evelyn and the Alphabet of Desire • The Triumph of Materialism • George Washington and the Secret Plan for the New Atlantis

IF ALCHEMY WAS THE CORE PRACTICE connecting the Rosicrucians and early Freemasons, the outward forms of these societies were quite different.

There were only eight Rosicrucian brothers in the original brotherhood, and their ‘House of the Holy Spirit’ was supposed by many to exist on another plane. Later generations were still elusive enough to suggest that there were only ever a few of them.

By contrast Freemasonry spread around the world quickly recruiting thousands, then hundreds of thousands. Today, even if it doesn’t advertise its existence, there is a substantial Freemasonic Lodge in most large towns. Outsiders know where it is, even if they don’t know what goes on inside.

Following the Rosicrucians’ catastrophic attempt at direct political action, ending in the Battle of White Mountain, Freemasons would now operate behind the scenes. Rather than seeking to impose reforms from above, they reverted to the original aims of the secret societies, influencing from below.

In the case of Freemasonry the aim was partly to help foster the social conditions which would bring people to a stage in their development when they would be ready for initiation. Freemasons worked to create a tolerant and prosperous society with a degree of social and economic freedom that would give people the chance to explore better both the outer and inner cosmos. The evolution of free will would bring about many of the great changes foreseen in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, his vision of the perfect Rosicrucian state.

Prompted by Francis Bacon, people had begun to see the inner cosmos and outer cosmos as distinct. There arose out of this an understanding of the material world and the way it worked which would not otherwise have been possible, and in a few short decades this understanding had thrown a metallic embrace around the world, as railways and machines of mass manufacture transformed the landscape.

^{St Paul’s Cathedral, London. The famous diarist John Evelyn helped his fellow Freemason Christopher Wren with plans for St Paul’s and the reconstruction of London after the Great Fire of 1666. Evelyn and Wren submitted to Charles II a new street plan for London, doing away with the old higgledy-piggledy streets. Instead the streets were to be mapped according to the pattern of the cabalistic Tree of Life. In this plan St Paul’s is situated at Tiferet, the ‘heart’ of the Tree, associated with Jesus Christ in Christianized Cabala.}

The great thing about science was that it worked. It produced testable, reliable results and tangible, life-changing benefits.

The contrast with religion could not have been more pointed. The Church was no longer a reliable source of spiritual experience. The Scottish philosopher David Hume asked, sarcastically, why was it that miracles always happen only in remote times and places?

The result of all this was that physical objects became the yardstick of what is real. The inner world began to seem like just a shadowy reflection or shadow of the outer one. In philosophy’s central debate, the one between idealism and materialism, idealism had been dominant since philosophy’s beginnings. As we have suggested, this was perhaps not because the majority of people had weighed up the arguments on both sides and come down in favour of idealism, but because they had experienced the world with an idealistic form of consciousness.

Now a decisive shift took place in favour of materialism.

^{Blake’s pictures sometimes feature naked bodies in the forms of letters of the Hebrew alphabet. William Blake was a Freemason, like the more respectable Christopher Wren and John Evelyn. These respectable Freemasons, members of the Royal Society famous for their good and public works, knew to keep their esoteric interests secret. What John Evelyn kept out of diaries written with an eye to publication, however, was that he had a ‘seraphic’ or cabalistic girlfriend thirty years his junior whom he taught secret techniques of meditation. John Evelyn initiated Margaret Blagge into cabalistic exercises based on Abraham Abulafia’s imaginative manipulations of the Hebrew alphabet. The difference was that these exercises involved imagining naked bodies erotically contorted into the shapes of the Hebrew letters. Margaret began to experience ecstatic trance states. In a way Evelyn anticipated the twentieth-century artist Austin Osman Spare, whose ‘Alphabet of Desire’ was based on correspondences between inner movements of sexual impulses and their outer form, manifested in erotic, magically-charged sigils or fetishes.}

We may see Dr Johnson, author of the first English dictionary, as a transitional figure. He was a church-going Christian who countenanced the existence of ghosts and on one occasion heard his mother crying out to him over a distance of more than a hundred miles, yet he was one of the apostles of the common-sense view of life that is the ruling philosophy today. Once, walking down a London street, he was challenged to refute the idealism of the philosopher Bishop Berkeley. He kicked a stone by the side of the road and said, ‘I refute it thus!’

This new way of looking at things was very bad for religion. If nature obeyed certain universal laws that ran along certain straight, predictable tracks, then it was indifferent to the fate of human beings. Life, as Thomas Hobbes put it, is a war of all against all.

^{A magus sees a cabalistic vision in his study. Rembrandt created few pictures with explicit esoteric content, but his greatest contribution to the evolution of consciousness was his series of self-portraits. These show more clearly than any other medium the human spirit conscious of its being trapped in an ageing body of flesh.}

THE WASTELAND OF CENTRAL EUROPE following the Thirty Years War became the spiritual wasteland of the Western world. It’s possible, if you are so minded, to see the decline of religion with sardonic glee, but for most people the gradual withdrawal of the spirit worlds has been experienced with an increasing sense of alienation. Without the living presence of beings from the higher hierarchies of gods and angels to help them, people were left alone to confront, as we say, their own demons — and demons.

Humanity was entering a new Dark Age. Neo-Solomonic temples sprang up all around the world. The esoteric aim of Freemasonry would be precisely this: to help lead humanity through the age of materialism while keeping the flame of true spirituality alive.

Of course Freemasonry is often thought of as atheistic, particularly by its enemies in the Church, but a Freemason has traditionally sworn an oath to ‘study the hidden secrets of Nature and Science in Order the better to know his Maker’.

From the start Freemasons had wanted to discard unthinking religion, false piety and the accretions of centuries of Church practice and dogma, particularly the crude idea of a vindictive father figure. But the higher orders have always sought direct personal experience of the spirit worlds. As philosophers they have always been