The Secret History of the World

to Thoth or Hermes that stood outside it to the Archangel Michael. In 1877 Freemasons on both sides of the Atlantic worked to transport these two obelisks by sea, one to London where it was to be raised on the Victoria Embankment overlooking the Thames — and popularly known as Cleopatra’s Needle. There it was to be raised on 13 September 1878 when the sun was at its zenith. Its twin obelisk was raised in New York’s Central Park, organized by a group of Freemasons led by members of the Vanderbilt family.

^{Drawing of a bust of Albert Pike, Grand Master and initiate. The Masonic star with thirty-three rays is prominently displayed on public monuments at the centre of cities all round the world. We have found the number thirty-three encoded in the works of Bacon, Shakespeare and in the Rosicrucian Manifestoes. It is encoded on the tombs of Shakespeare and Fludd, translator of the Authorized Version of the Bible. Jesus Christ lived thirty- three years. The significance of this number is one of the oldest and most closely guarded secrets of esoteric philosophy. Thirty-three is the rhythm of the vegetative realm of the cosmos, the dimension that controls the interactions between the spirit worlds and the material world. The closest to an explicit reference to it perhaps comes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the murdered Caesar’s spirit is described exiting by his thirty-three wounds. The secret of thirty-three refers to the number of gateways by which the human spirit may travel between the material world and the spirit worlds. Practical knowledge of these pathways is known only to initiates of the highest level, because it enables them to slip unobtrusively in and out of the material realm.}

Michael was, as we have seen, the leader of the heavenly hosts, and the transition from one order to another is always marked by battles. And because what happens on earth is always an echo of what has happened earlier in the spirit worlds, a great war would be fought in the heavens before being fought down here on the earthly plane. As Freemasons erected an obelisk in Central Park, New York, they were invoking St Michael and all his angels, asking for their help as they sought to establish the leadership of the United States among the nations in the war- torn age that would soon be dawning.

IT MAY ALREADY HAVE OCCURRED TO some readers that obelisks are placed with similar prominence in ecclesiastical contexts, for example the obelisk erected by the initiate artist Gianlorenzo Bernini in the square in front of St Peter’s in Rome.

The upper echelons of the Church hierarchy wish to keep its flock from conscious knowledge of the astral roots of their religion.

But these monuments work on different levels. They attract the disembodied beings of spiritual hierarchies. They work on people at levels below the conscious one, levels where the great disembodied beings weave in and out of their mental space. Initiates inside and outside the Church create great works of art and architecture to help condition humanity for its future evolution.

They also carry enough clues for those who are so minded as to be able to decode them.

25. THE MYSTICAL-SEXUAL REVOLUTION Cardinal Richelieu • Cagliostro • The Secret Identity of the Comte de St Germain • Swedenborg, Blake and the Sexual Roots of Romanticism

…HOWEVER, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE eighteenth century the rise to supremacy of the United States was only a mystical vision. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries France became the most powerful and influential nation. Extremes of good and evil, rapier and sharp tongue, decided the fate of the world in the corridors of the Louvre, then Versailles.

It is perhaps significant that, though Descartes spent many years researching the Rosicrucians, even journeying to Germany to try to track them down, he never succeeded. A prey to visions, he was evidently not, like Newton, adept at alchemical techniques that might give repeated, perhaps even controlled, access to the spirit worlds.

In collaboration with the mathematician and theologian Marin Mersenne, whose patron was Richelieu, Descartes developed a rationalist philosophy, a closed system of reasoning without the necessity of reference to the realm of the senses.

The philosophy of Descartes and Mersenne helped evolve a new form of cynicism. It enabled a succession of French diplomats and politicians to run rings round their opposite numbers. They might wear similar, though rather more fashionable clothes than the ones worn by their contemporaries in Germany, Italy, Holland, Spain or England, but the difference in consciousness was as drastic as that between the Conquistadors and the Aztecs.

The French court was the most magnificent in human history, not only in material terms, but in the sophistication of its culture. Beautiful and heartless, it wittily interpreted all human actions as motivated by vanity, according to the maxims of La Rochefoucauld. ‘When we dwell on the good qualities of others, we are expressing esteem for our own finer feelings’ is one of his sly, devastating critiques of human nature. ‘No matter how well we are spoken of,’ he said, ‘we learn nothing we do not already know.’ In the gap left by the departure of sincerity arose a tyranny of taste and style.

^{Et in Arcadia Ego by Nicholas Poussin. Poussin’s connection with the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery has led to much speculation on his esoteric interests. But to look for Rosicrucian interests, as some have done, is to bark up the wrong tree. Poussin’s spiritual mentor was the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, perhaps the greatest scholar of esoterica in the seventeenth century. As the most learned Egyptologist of the day, Kircher was concerned to verify the perennial philosophy and universal secret history encoded in Egyptian texts, the Bible and the classical tradition, represented here by an allusion to an episode in Virgil. What the crouching shepherd is pointing to — on a tomb which existed in Poussin’s time, though it has recently been destroyed — is an inscription that confirms the secret history in this book. Even I was in Arcadia refers to the turning point in history described in Chapter 5, when the idyllic vegetative life of humanity was invaded by animal desire and death. This was the Fall of the Mother Goddess. In esoteric Christianity Mary Magdalene was the incarnation of the goddess, redeemed by her Beloved. As we saw, Mary Magdalene spent the last years of her life in the south of France, according to Church tradition. What Poussin was literally pointing to here, therefore, was the tomb of Mary Magdalene.}

As spirituality was severed from sexuality, libertines like Choderlos de Laclos, author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, said to be a spider at the centre of a vast web of sexual and political intrigue, Crebillon fils, author of the best of the libertine novels, Les Egarements du Coeur et de l’Esprit, Casanova and de Sade became representative men, admired for the complexity and cleverness of their power plays.

In all sex there is an element of striving. Now this striving became an end itself. Even among the most sensitive and intelligent, sex could be reduced to an exercise of power.

Following Cardinal Richelieu’s unprincipled machinations to promote national interests in the reign of Louis XIII, Louis XIV aggregated to himself the title of Sun King — but of course there was a dark side. While haute cuisine was devised to keep nobles contented at court, peasants were taxed to the point of starvation and Richelieu massacred religious dissenters. Later Marie Antoinette would be shielded from sight of the sick, old or poor, and Louis XVI obsessively read and reread an account of the beheading of Charles I, drawing to himself the thing he feared most.

Rumours of powerful, esoteric secrets echoed round the court. Cardinal Richelieu carried a wand of gold and ivory and enemies feared its magic powers. His mentor Pere Joseph, the original eminence grise, taught him spiritual exercises that developed psychic powers. He employed a cabalist called Gaffarel to teach him the secrets of the occult. A man called Du-boy, or Duboys, rumoured to be a descendant of Nicholas Flamel, went to see him carrying an obscurely phrased magical primer. But Du-boy was unable to interpret it for the Cardinal and get him results, and so Du-boy was hanged. It seems Richelieu became desperate to achieve the breakthrough to the other side that he craved, because he employed increasingly extreme methods. Urban Grandier, an alleged devil-worshipper, was being slowly tortured to death at Richelieu’s behest, when he is reported to have warned: ‘You are an able man, do not destroy yourself.’