The Secret History of the World

Moreover, on closer inspection the Bible itself can be seen to contain many coded references to the chakras. The ‘horns’ with which Moses has traditionally been depicted are explained away by conventionally minded Christians as the result of a misunderstanding based on a mistranslation. But in the esoteric tradition these horns represent the two petals of the brow chakra, sometimes called the Third Eye. The flowering rod of Aaron refers to the activation of the chakras, the opening of the subtle flowers up and down the subtle tree. In the final chapter we will see how in Revelation the account of the opening of the seven seals is in fact a way of talking about the enlivening of the seven chakras, and predicting the great visions of the spiritual world that will result.

^{The almond shape that surrounds this vision of Jesus, called the vesica piscis, is derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph called the Ru, which symbolized the birth-portal and also the Third Eye, or brow chakra. What is intended by the masons who carved this device on a church at Alpirsbach, Germany, is that you can have direct experience of and communication with the great spiritual beings by activating the Third Eye. It is extraordinary to consider that Christian art and architecture all over the world commonly features a representation of the Third Eye, unrecognized by the great majority of Christians.}

THE PINEAL GLAND IS A SMALL GREY gland, the size of an almond, which is situated in the brain where the spinal chord reaches up into it. In esoteric physiology, when we have a hunch, our pineal gland begins to vibrate, and if spiritual disciplines are used to increase and prolong this vibration, this may lead to the opening of the Third Eye, situated, of course, in the middle of the brow.

^{The Third Eye as a uraeus snake in an Egyptian wall carving.}

^{Man meditating on the pineal gland, taken from a drawing by Paul Klee with Hindu depiction of the same for comparison.}

Modern anatomists only ‘discovered’ the pineal gland in 1866, when two monographs were published almost simultaneously by H.W. de Graaf and E. Baldwin Spencer. Later it was discovered that the pineal gland is large in children and when the crystallization of various body parts happens around puberty — that is to say when we naturally become less imaginative — the pineal gland begins a process of calcification and also shrinks. Scientists now know that melatonin is a hormone, most of which is produced by the pineal gland, mostly at night. Melatonin is essential for the rhythm of waking and sleeping and the maintenance of the immune system.

If modern science discovered the pineal gland relatively late, the ancients certainly knew of it very early on, and also believed they understood its function. They knew, too, how to manipulate it to achieve altered states. The Egyptians clearly depicted it as a uraeus snake and in Indian literature it is shown as the Third Eye of Enlightenment, or the Eye of Siva. It was depicted as the pine-cone-topped wand of the followers of Dionysius, and a fourth-century BC Greek anatomist described it as ‘the sphincter which regulates the flow of thought’.

They saw the pineal gland as an organ of perception of higher worlds, a window opening on to the brightness and wonder of the spiritual hierarchies. This window could be opened systematically by meditation and other secret practices which gave rise to visions. Recent research at the University of Toronto has shown that meditating on the pineal gland using methods recommended by Indian yogis causes it to release a rush of melatonin, the secretion that causes us to have dreams and, in sufficient dosages, can also cause waking hallucinations.

^{Artists such as Peter Breugel, Henri Met Des Bles and, here, Hieronymus Bosch often depicted proto-human creatures of pink, waxy-bone. Art critics have not until now discovered the source of these images.}

RETURNING TO THE CREATION NARRATIVE and the great imaginative images encoded within Genesis, we see that Adam’s body had at first been very soft and amorphous, his skin almost as delicate as the skin on a pond, but now it began to harden. As the great Christian mystic and Rosicrucian philosopher Jacob Boehme wrote in Mysterium Magnum, his commentary on Genesis, ‘what would in time become bone now hardened and became something closer to wax’. Warmed by the sun, his green limbs also began to become tinged with pink.

As Adam solidified he also began to divide into two, that is to say he was an hermaphrodite who reproduced in an asexual way. When pressed, any scholar of biblical Hebrew will have to admit that Genesis 1.27, the passage usually translated ‘Male and female He created them’, properly reads ‘Male and female they [i.e. the Elohim] created him [singular]’.

So, it was by this plant-like method of reproduction that Eve was born out of Adam’s body, moulded from the waxy cartilage which served Adam for bone.

The progeny of Adam and Eve also reproduced asexually, procreating by using sounds in a way that was analogous to the creative activity of the Word. This episode in history is related to Freemasonic lore pertaining to ‘the Word that has been lost’, the esoteric belief when in the far future this Word is rediscovered, it will be possible to impregnate using only the sound of the human voice.

^{The separation of the earth and sun in a seventeenth-century English print, illustrating the writings of Robert Fludd, an eminent Rosicrucian scholar traditionally believed to have been one of the board employed to translate the King James Bible.}

Adam, Eve and their progeny did not die, but now and then they merely went to sleep in order to refresh themselves. But the lotus-eating state of the Garden of Eden could not go on forever. If it had done, humanity would never have evolved beyond the vegetable stage.

It was always intended that the Sun god would separate from the earth… for a while.

OF COURSE NO ARTEFACTS HAVE SURVIVED from the time when gods and proto-humans lived in plant form, but there is at least a reliable record of such artefacts.

Herodotus, the Greek writer of the fifth century BC is sometimes called the father of history, because he was the first to try to research and piece together a coherent and objective account of history.

In approximately 485 BC Herodotus visited Memphis in Egypt. There in vast underground vaults, he was shown rows of statues of former kings stretching back as far as the eye could see into almost unimaginably distant times. Walking with the priests along the rows, he came to a series of 345 colossal wooden carvings of beings who had reigned before Menes, their first human king. These beings, said the priests, were ‘born one from the other’, that is to say without need of a sexual partner, by the plant-like method of parthenogenesis. Each carrying a plaque giving name, history and annals, the wooden monuments were a record of a long lost era of the vegetable life of humankind.

^{Mandrake men in nineteenth century engraving. Mandrake roots have always played a prominent part in esoteric lore because their shapes often seem to represent a vegetable striving towards the human form. Might the colossi Herodotus saw have looked something like this?}

4. LUCIFER, THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD The Apple of Desire • A War in Heaven • The Secrets of the Days of the Week

CREATION WAS RE-ENACTED IN THE Mystery schools, a drama in three acts.

The first act dramatized Saturn’s oppression of Mother Earth. This was called the Age of Saturn.

The second act dramatized the birth of the Sun and his protection of Mother Earth. This, the paradise time of the flower people, was remembered as the Age of the Sun.

During the re-enactment of these great events the candidate for initiation found himself in the middle of what was partly a play with special effects, and partly a seance. In an altered state, perhaps drugged and with little ability to distance himself from events, the candidate was guided by the priests on a shaman-like journey through the spirit worlds. Drama as we know it today would eventually move out of the Greek Mystery centres to become