Garibaldi — there was more than one Freemason deeply versed in occult science and Rosicrucianism. Garibaldi himself was a 33rd degree Freemason and Grand Master of Italian Freemasonry.
In Hungary Louis Kossuth, and in South America Simon Bolivar, Francisco de Miranda, Venustiano Carranza, Benito Juarez and Fidel Castro, all fought for freedom.
Today in the USA there are some 13,000 lodges, and in 2001 it was estimated that there were some seven million Freemasons worldwide.
WE HAVE SEEN HOW JESUS CHRIST planted the seed of the interior life, how this interior life was expanded and populated by Shakespeare and Cervantes. In the eighteenth century and, particularly, the nineteenth century the great initiate-novelists forged the sense we all enjoy today that this interior world has its own history, a
The great novelists of the age — we think of the Brontes, of Dickens — were also full of a sense that, just as human consciousness was understood in esoteric thought to have evolved through history, so consciousness also evolves in individual human lives.
John Comenius grew up in the Prague of Rudolf II where he attended the coronation of the Winter King. He knew John Valentine Andrae in Heidelberg, and was then invited by his friend, the occultist Samuel Hartlib, to join him in London ‘to help complete the Work’. By his educational reforms Comenius would introduce into the mainstream of history the idea that in childhood we experience a very different state of mind from the one we develop in adulthood.
We see Comenius’s influence in, for example,
But the area of esoteric thought which would have the biggest effect on the novel would be that of the deeper laws. The novel provided an arena for novelists steeped in esoteric philosophy to show the working out of these laws in individual human lives.
THE TIME HAS COME TO GET TO GRIPS with this elusive concept which lies right at the heart of the esoteric view of the cosmos and its history.
We saw how Elijah, working behind the scenes of history, had helped bring about a split in consciousness between the objective Baconian consciousness and the subjective Shakespearean consciousness. We saw, too, how viewing the world as objectively as possible made the laws of physics snap into focus.
But what about subjective experience? What about the structure of experience itself?
In time the science of psychology would arise. But psychology would make the materialistic assumption that matter influences the mind, never the other way around. Psychology, then, turned a blind eye to a universal part of human experience — the experience of meaning.
We have already touched on the way that Rosicrucians had begun to formulate laws in line with oriental esoteric thought on ‘the nameless’ way, inextricably bound up with notions of human wellbeing. In the East there is an august tradition of tracing the operation of yang and its opposite ying, but in the West this remained an elusive element that slipped between the emerging sciences of physics and psychology.
If the laws that govern these elusive elements are difficult to think about in abstract terms, it is much easier to see them in action. Some of the great novelists of the nineteenth century wrote explicitly occult novels. In addition to Dickens’s
But as well as this explicit occultism, a more widespread influence is implicit in much more fiction.
ON ONE LEVEL NOVELS ARE ALL ABOUT egotism. A novel always involves seeing the world from other people’s points of view. Reading a novel, therefore, lessens egotism. Also the failings of characters in novels are very often to do with egotism, either in terms of self-interest or, more particularly, the failure to empathize.
But the greater contribution of the novel to the human sense of self is, as we have just suggested, the formation of the sense of an inner narrative, the sense that an individual life seen from the inside has a meaningful shape, a story.
Underlying these notions of shape and meaning are beliefs about the ways people’s lives are formed by their being tested — the labyrinth that keeps morphing.
What shapes lives in novels is life’s paradoxical quality, the fact that it does not run in a straight, predictable line, the fact that appearances are deceptive and that fortunes are reversed. The notions of the meaning of life and the deeper laws here come together.
IF THESE DEEPER LAWS REALLY EXIST AND are universal and so important and powerful, if history really does turn on them, isn’t it perhaps surprising that we are not more aware of them? In fact, isn’t it odd if we in the West don’t even seem to have a name for them?
It is surprising, not least because if these laws come into play when human happiness is at stake it should follow that they could be very useful when it comes to our hopes of living a happy life.
Of course the most common sets of rules for achieving a happy life are the down-to-earth wisdom contained in proverbs and the common-sense cautionary advice traditionally given to children.
But one difference is that both proverbs and the cautionary advice given to children only address the basics — how to avoid physical harm and obtain the bare necessities — while the deeper laws deal in grand notions of destiny, good and evil. As we shall see, they advise us on satisfying our craving for the highest, most ineffable levels of happiness, our deepest needs for fulfilment and meaning.
Compare the proverbial advice to ‘look before you leap’ with the recommendation contained in this perverse little parable by the proto-Surrealist Guillaume Apollinaire:
