The Secret History of the World

THE SECOND GREAT ACT IN THE DRAMA of creation comes about when the seven-fold Sun god arrives in order to rescue Mother Earth from Saturn.

In the eye of imagination the Sun is a beautiful and radiant young man with a leonine mane. He rides a chariot and he is a musician. He has many names — Krishna in India, Apollo in Greece. Arising in splendour in the midst of the storm, he pushes back the darkness of Saturn until Saturn becomes like a giant dragon or serpent encircling the cosmos.

The Sun then warms Mother Earth into new life, and as he does so, he gives vent to a great, triumphal roar that reverberates to the outer limits of the cosmos. The roar causes matter in the cosmic womb to vibrate, to dance and form patterns. In inner group esoteric circles this process is sometimes known as ‘the dance of the substances’. After a while it causes matter to coagulate into a variety of strange shapes.

What we are seeing here, then, is the sun singing the world into existence.

The Sun-Lion is a common image in ancient art. Whenever it appears it refers to this early stage in the mind-before-matter account of creation. A magnificent re-telling of the history of the Sun-Lion in the act of creation was written as late as the 1950s. It comes in the prequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, called The Magician’s Nephew. Something that non-esoteric schools of literary criticism have missed is that the work of C.S. Lewis is steeped in Rosicrucian lore. In his story the Sun-Lion is called Aslan:

In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory — the first child to explore Narnia — found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful voice he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it… The eastern sky changed from white to pink and from pink to gold. The Voice rose and rose, till the air was shaking with it… The Lion was pacing to and fro about that empty land and singing his new song. And as he walked and sang the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the Lion like a pool. It ran up the sides of the hills like a wave.

What the teachers of the Mystery schools meant to indicate by the victory of the Sun god was the momentous transition from a purely mineral cosmos to a cosmos burgeoning with plant life.

In the earliest and most primitive form of plant life according to the Mystery tradition, single germs were joined together in vast floating structures like webs that filled the whole universe. In the Vedas, the sacred books of India, this stage of creation is described as ‘the net of Indra’, an infinite net of luminous, living threads, perpetually interweaving, coming together like waves of light then dissolving again.

Time passed and some of these threads began to weave together more permanently, the light streams dividing into tree-like forms. An imaginative impression of what this was like can perhaps be got by remembering what it was like, as a small child, to visit a great hothouse like the ones that Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired Alice in Wonderland, liked to visit at Kew Gardens. Great tendrils stretch everywhere. Here are humid mists and a sunny, luminous greenness.

If you were able to land in the midst of all of this and if you sat on one of the great green branches stretching out of sight, and if this great branch on which you were sitting suddenly stirred, you would have an experience like a hero in a fairy story sitting on a rock that moves and reveals itself to be a giant. Because the vast vegetable being at the heart of the cosmos, whose soft and luminous limbs stretched to all four corners of it, was Adam.

This was Paradise.

Because there was as yet no animal element to the cosmos, Adam was without desire and so without care or dissatisfaction. Needs were satisfied before they could even be felt. Adam lived in a world of endless springtime. Nature yielded an unending supply of food in the form of a milky sap, similar to that which we find in dandelions today. Memorials to this blissful satiation have come down to us in statues of the many-breasted Mother Goddess.

^{From a thirteenth-century manuscript. Adam stretched to the corners of the cosmos.}

^{A comparison of this with the famous drawing by Leonardo reveals a layer of meaning often missed. Adam literally occupied the whole cosmos.}

As time went on the plant forms became more complex, more like the plants of today. Again, if you had been able to see this time in the history of the cosmos with the physical eye, you would have been struck by the myriad fluttering, palpitating flowers.

We have suggested that the secret history of the creation shadows the scientific history of creation in intriguing ways. We have just seen, for example, how a purely mineral stage of existence has been followed by a primitive plant stage, followed by an era of more complex plants. But there is a vital difference I must draw to your attention. In the secret history not only is it true to say that what eventually evolved into human life passed through a vegetable stage, but the vegetable element remains an essential part of the human being today.

If you removed the sympathetic nervous system from the body and stood it up on its own, it would look like a tree. As one of Britain’s leading homeopathic healers put it to me, in a rather beautiful phrase: ‘The sympathetic nervous system is the gift of the vegetable kingdom to the physical body of man.’

Esoteric thought all over the world is concerned with the subtle energies that flow round this vegetable part of the body and also with the ‘flowers’ on this tree, the chakras which operate, as we shall see, as its organs of perception. The great centre of the vegetable component of the human body, feeding on the waves of light and warmth radiating from the sun, is the chakra of the solar plexus — called ‘solar’ because it was formed in this, the era controlled by the sun.

Awareness of this vegetable element in the human body has remained greatest among the peoples of China and Japan. In Chinese medicine the energetic flow of this vegetable life force, called chi, is understood to animate the body, and disease arises when the delicate network of energies becomes blocked. The fact that the flow of this energy is undetectable by modern, materialistic science, the fact that it seems to operate in some elusive realm between the human spirit and the meat of the animal body, does not make the medicine any the less effective, as generation upon generation of patients attest.

^{Germanic sun-idol. Engraving of 1596. J. B. van Helmont, an important alchemist and scientist who will feature later in this history, called the stomach ‘the seat of the soul’.}

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^{Hindu illustration of the seven major chakras and, for comparison, illustration by Johann Gichtel to the writings on chakras by the seventeenth-century Christian mystic Jacob Boehme.}

As well as in medicine, the Chinese and Japanese tend to lay great emphasis on the role of the solar plexus in spiritual practice. If you contemplate a statue of a meditating Buddha, you will see someone who has gathered himself inward, and that the centre of this meditation, his centre of mental and spiritual gravity, is his lower belly. This is because he has withdrawn from the rigid, deadly mentality of the brain and sunk down into the centre within himself — sometimes called the hara — that is connected with all life. He is concentrating on becoming more aware of being alive, of his unity with all living things. ALTHOUGH THE IDEA OF CHAKRAS HAS become popular in the West because of an influx of oriental esoteric thought, the chakras are also central to the Western esoteric tradition and can be seen in both Egyptian and Hebrew thought. And just as Christianity contains a hidden tradition of gods of the stars and planets, so it also contains a hidden tradition of the chakras.

The organs of the vegetable body are situated in nodes up and down its trunk. They are made up of different numbers of petals — the solar plexus chakra, for example, having ten petals and the brow chakra having two petals. The seven major chakras — situated at the groin, solar plexus, kidneys, heart, throat, brow and crown — feature in the seventeenth-century writings of Jacob Boehme and, as we will see later, in those of his near-contemporary, the Catholic Saint, Teresa of Avila, where they are called ‘the eyes of the soul’.