The Secret History of the World

^{all literal translations of seven earth demons from Scandinavian esoteric lore: Toki, Skavaerr, Varr, Dun, Orinn, Grerr and Radsvid. Even in the cosy world of Disney the esoteric lies closer to the surface than you might think.}

Inspired by the teachings of the secret societies, the Surrealists wanted to destroy entrenched ways of thought, to smash scientific materialism. One of the ways they did this was by promoting irrational acts. Here Apollinaire is saying that if you act irrationally, you will be rewarded by the irrational forces of the universe.

If what Apollinaire is saying is true, this is one of the deeper laws of the universe, a law of cause and effect lying outside the laws of probability.

Surrealists were unusually open about their irrational philosophy and its roots in the secret societies, but this same irrational philosophy is also implicit in much more mainstream culture. Take It’s a Wonderful Life, an old film that on the surface seems homely and comforting, together with its literary forebear A Christmas Carol, which Charles Dickens imbued with the philosophy of the secret society of which he was an initiate.

Scrooge is confronted by ghosts that present him with visions showing how his behaviour has caused great misery, together with a vision of what will result if he continues in the same vein. George Bailey, the character played by James Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life, believes his life has been a complete failure and he is about to commit suicide when an angel shows him how much unhappier his family, friends, the whole town, would have been were it not for him and his self-sacrificing nature.

So both George Bailey and Scrooge are invited to ask themselves how the world would have been different if they had chosen to live differently. At the end of this process of questioning both characters are asked to go through the same door they were about to go through at the beginning of the story — but this time do the right thing. George Bailey decides not to commit suicide and to face his creditors. Scrooge redeems himself by coming to the aid of Bob Cratchit and his family.

So in a way both It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol depict life as having a kind of circular quality and of being a test. They show how life directs us towards crucial decisions and how we may be made to loop round and come back to confront these crucial decisions again if we get it wrong.

I imagine that most of us feel that both It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol are in some way true. It’s difficult to see how anything in science or nature could account for life’s being patterned in this insistently testing way, but most of us probably feel that both these very popular works are more than just entertainments, that they say something deep about life.

A few moments consideration may now be enough to convince us that the same sorts of mysterious and irrational patterns also inform the structure of some of the greatest works of literature in the canon: Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Doctor Faustus and War and Peace.

Oedipus somehow draws to himself the thing he fears most, and ends up killing his father and marrying his mother.

Hamlet repeatedly ducks out of his life’s challenge — avenging his father’s murder — but this challenge returns to confront him in increasingly dire forms.

Don Quixote holds a good-hearted vision of the world as a noble place, and so strong is this vision that by the end of the novel it has in some mysterious way transformed his material surroundings.

In his heart of hearts Faust knows what he ought to do, but because he does not do it, a providential order in the universe punishes him.

Tolstoy’s hero, Pierre, is tortured by his love for Natasha. It is only when he lets go of his feelings for her that he wins her.

Imagine if you fed all these great works of literature — in fact all literature — into a giant computer and asked it the question: What are the laws that determine whether or not a life is ultimately happy and fulfilled? I suggest the result would be a body of laws that included the following:

If you duck out of a challenge, then that challenge will come round again in a different form.

We always draw towards us what we fear most.

If you choose the immoral path, ultimately you will pay for it.

A good-hearted belief will eventually transform what is believed in.

In order to hold on to what you love, you must let it go.

This, then, is the type of law that gives great narrative literature its structure, and if we read Oedipus Rex or King Lear or Doctor Faustus or Middlemarch and feel that in a deep and important sense they are true, it is surely because the working out of the laws they portray resonates with our experience. They accurately depict the shape of our lives.

Now imagine what would happen if you fed all the scientific data in the world into another gigantic computer and asked it the same question. The results, I suggest, would be very different:

The best way to keep something is to try your hardest to do so and never give up.

You cannot transform the world by wishful thinking — you must do something about it.

If you can avoid being found out and punished by your fellow man, there is no reason to suppose a providential order will punish you.

And so on. The implication is clear and confirms what we suggested earlier. We get very different results, two very different sets of laws, if we try to determine the structure of the world than we do if we try to determine the structure of experience.

This is a distinction that Tolstoy wrote about in his essay On Life. Though the same laws operate in the outer world of external phenomena and in our inner life with its concern for meaning and fulfilment, they seem very different when we consider them separately. As Abraham Isaac Kook, one of the great Cabalists of the twentieth century and the first Chief Rabbi of Palestine, put it: ‘God is revealed in the deep feelings of sensitive souls.’

The deeper laws can be discerned only if we view events in the external world with the deepest subjectivity, as an artist or a mystic might. Is it the subjectivity of these laws, the fact that they work so near to the centre of consciousness, that makes it difficult for us to keep them in focus?

Rainer Maria Rilke, the Central European poet, seems to come close to writing explicitly about these laws in a letter to an aspiring young poet. ‘Only the individual who is truly solitary is brought under the deep laws, and when a man steps out into the morning that is just beginning, or looks into the evening that is full of happenings, and when he feels what is coming to pass there, then all rank drops from him as from a dead man, although he is standing in the midst of sheer life.’ Rilke is using heightened, poetic language but he seems to be confirming that these deeper laws can only be discerned if we shut out everything else and concentrate on them over a long time with our subtlest and most intense powers of discernment.

IN THE COURSE OF WRITING this book I have met the young Irish mystic Lorna Byrne. She hasn’t read any of the literature that lies behind this book, nor even previously met anyone who might have passed its ideas on. Her extraordinary knowledge of the spirit words has come from direct personal experience. She meets Michael, Archangel of the Sun, and has encountered the Archangel Gabriel in the form of the Moon, divided in half yet pressed together and moving, she says, like the turning of pages in a book. She has described to me seeing in the fields near her home the group-spirit of the fox in the form of the fox but with human-like elements. She meets Elijah, who was once a human with the spirit of an angel, and she has seen him walk on water like the Green One of the Sufi tradition. Hers is an alternative method of perception, a parallel dimension that moves things around in our own.

IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY ANCIENT creatures began to stir in the depths of the earth, to slouch towards the appointed place.

Imprisoned since the first War in Heaven, the consciousness-eaters were on the move again.