The Secret History of the World

8. THE SPHINX AND THE TIMELOCK Orpheus • Daedalus, the First Scientist • Job • Solving the Riddle of the Sphinx

WHEN JASON SET OFF ON THE ARGOS ON what proved to be the last hurrah of the demi-gods and heroes, his boat contained many of the great figures of the age, including Hercules and Theseus. But among these muscle-bound super-heroes, there was one with very different powers, a transitional figure who looked forward to life after the demi-gods and heroes had left, when humans would have to fend for themselves.

Orpheus had travelled down from the north, bringing with him the gift of music. His music was so beautiful that it could not only charm humans and animals, it could make trees, even rocks move.

On the voyage with Jason he helped the heroes when brute force could not. Singing and accompanying himself on his lyre, he charmed the great clashing rocks that threatened to crush the Argos and he sent the dragon that guarded the GoldenFleece to sleep.

On his return he fell in love with Eurydice, but on the day of their wedding she was bitten on the ankle by a snake and died. Half-blinded by grief, Orpheus descended into the Underworld. He was determined not to accept the new order of life and death, determined to win her back.

Death was now a terrible thing, no longer a welcome rest when the spirit recuperated and refreshed itself in preparation for its next incarnation. It was a painful separation from those you love.

Descending deeper and deeper, Orpheus encountered the grim old ferryman Charon, who at first refused to row him across the River Styx to the land of the dead. But Charon was charmed by the lyre, as was Cerberus, the three-headed dog whose job was to guard the way to the Underworld. Orpheus charmed, too, the terrible demons whose task was to tear from the spirits of the dead the unregenerate animal lusts and savage desires that still clung to them.

Finally, he reached the place where the King of the Underworld held his love captive. The King was not unequivocally charmed by Orpheus, because the release he granted was not unconditional. There was just one, small condition. Eurydice could return to the world of the living if Orpheus could lead her up there without ever once turning round to make sure she was following.

But of course Orpheus, at the last moment, as the sunlight hit his face, perhaps worried he was being tricked by the King, did turn round. He saw the love of his life suddenly pulled back down away from him, down the stone passageways, out of sight, fading into the Underworld like a wisp of smoke. The other, more muscle-bound heroes had succeeded in their quests by fighting the good fight to the limits of their strength and endurance, by being brave and never giving up. But times were changing. The great initiates who preserved this story for us wanted us to understand that Orpheus failed because he tried to do what every good hero had done — he tried to make sure.

It may also be that his music lost some of its charm, because it did not stop a band of maenads, the female followers of Dionysus, throwing themselves upon him and tearing him limb from bloody limb. They threw his head into the river, and it floated downstream, still singing. As it floated by, the weeping willows crowded the banks. Finally the head of Orpheus was rescued and set on an altar in a cave, where crowds came to consult it as an oracle.

IF CADMUS/ENOCH NAMED THE PLANETS and the stars, it was Orpheus who measured them, and by measuring them, invented numbers. There are eight notes in an octave, but in a sense really only seven, as the eighth always represents elevation to the next octave. The octaves, then, refer to ascent through the seven spheres of the solar system, which in antiquity were central to all thought and experience. By giving a system of notation, Orpheus was originating mathematics. Concepts could be manipulated, paving the way for the scientific understanding of the physical universe.

Orpheus is a transitional figure because on the one hand he is a magician with the power to move stones with music, but on the other he is a forerunner of science. Later we will see a similar ambiguity in many great scientists, even in modern times, but the other representative of the transition taking place at the time of Orpheus was Daedalus. (We know he was a contemporary because he was the keeper of the Minotaur, killed by Theseus, who joined in the quest for the Golden Fleece.)

Daedalus is famous for making wings out of wax and feathers to help him and his son, Icarus, to escape from Crete. He also designed the labyrinth and is credited with inventing the saw and the sail. So he was an inventor, an engineer, an architect in ways we would recognize today. He did not use magic.

If science was an innovation of the age, so too was magic. Magic was the application of a scientific way of thinking to the supernatural. In this age we no longer see the seemingly effortless shape shiftings of earlier ages or the turning of those who have offended into spiders, stags or plants. Instead we see Jason’s wife Medea and Circe, to whom Medea went for help, advice and magical protection. Circe and Medea had to work in order to achieve their supernatural effects, using potions, spells, incantations. If the invention of words and numbers enabled humans to begin to manipulate the natural world, it also gave them the idea of being able to manipulate the spirit world. Medea offered Jason a blood-red potion, made from the juice of the crocus, to soothe the dragon that guarded the Fleece. She used chants and sprigs of juniper to spray the dragon’s eyelids. She dealt in magic elixirs and knew the secrets of the snake-charmer.

As the material world continued to become denser and as the beings of the spirit worlds were increasingly squeezed out, even the lowest level of spirits, the nature spirits, the sylphs, dryads, naiads and gnomes, became elusive. They seemed to disappear into the streams, trees and rocks, fleeing the first light of dawn. But they still seemed tantalizingly close, and it was these spirits — then as now — that magicians found easier to manipulate.

Some magicians tried to bend the great gods to their will, too, to draw them down from the moon. The myths of the original werewolf, Lycaon, who prompted the flood of Deucalion, of Poseidon’s flooding of the Thracian plain, causing Athena to move her city to the present site of Athens, and of the terrible storms that pursued Medea wherever she went are depictions of the environmental catastrophes that were resulting from the practice of black magic.

At the end of this period humanity is sick and so, too, is nature.

Magicians drawing down the moon. Greek drawing.

ORPHEUS MIGHT HAVE FAILED BY THE standards of the conventional hero, but his influence on history was greater and more long-lasting than that of Hercules, Theseus and Jason. The music Orpheus originated would be a balm for healing the sick and troubled spirit of humanity down the millennia.

If people were becoming isolated not only from the gods but from one another, if they were worn down by an always harsh and sometimes hostile environment, and if their imaginations were infected by the perverse and bestial impulses of magic, all of this would now be countered by the aesthetic influence on the imagination, not only through music but also literature, painting and sculpture. Inspiring images of beauty, truth and love worked on humanity at a level below that of the conscious mind. They were more powerful than any explicit, abstract moral teaching.

Orpheus was the mythical founder of the Greek mysteries that would light up and inspire ancient Greece.

PERHAPS THE MOST POWERFUL ARTISTIC expression of the spiritual crisis at the end of the age of the heroes comes in the Bible.

In the written form it has come down to us, the story of Job is one of the later texts of the Old Testament, but in its origins it is one of the oldest parts.

Job was a good man, yet he lost all his money. His sons and daughters died. Left all alone he was covered with a plague of boils. Meanwhile, the wicked prospered. The story of Job has come down to us, not because he was a great leader or doer of great deeds, but because he was the first human being ever to think a very important and deeply true thought: ‘life is unfair’. Hercules had been the sport of the gods, but it was Job who cried out to the heavens in defiance. Unlike Hercules, Job had the language to do this.

Today we take it for granted that we have enough mental manoeuvrability to choose what to think about. However, before the invention of language, which was the great achievement of this age, this manoeuvrability would not have been possible.

Language enables us to distance ourselves from the world. It helps us to withdraw from what is physically present, and can enable us to break down experience, whether present or not, into bits we can manipulate. To some degree we can put experience into order as we wish.

There is an alienating element to this process. As well as the advantages it brought, language made the world a colder, darker and trickier place. We saw earlier how thinking is itself a deadening process. Language, too, makes us unhealthy, less vividly alive and less sure-footed in our wanderings in the world.

So language brought with it a new form of consciousness. Before Job people fel that everything that happened to them was meant to happen to them, that there was a divine purpose behind everything. They did not — could not — question. Now language enabled Job to step back. He began to notice inconsistencies. Life is unfair.

Blake’s Job.

But God rebuked Job for understanding so little. ‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth? When the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy? Have you entered the springs of the sea or walked the depths of the deep? Have the gates of death been opened to you? Do you know where the Sun lives and where the darkness comes from? Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the belt of Orion?’

What saved Job was that he had that sense we all have when we awake from a wonderful dream, when we try to bring it back but cannot. He was aware that the range of human experience was in some way diminishing. ‘Oh that I was as in the times of old, when God watched over me, when his lamp shone on my head’ (Job 29:2-4).

Job refers, of course, to the ‘Lantern of Osiris’.

Today the word ‘apocryphal’ carries pejorative associations, but really it means hidden — or esoteric. In the apocryphal Testament of Job, he was rewarded for being conscious of what he did not know, conscious of what he had lost. Job’s sons and daughters were returned to him, his daughters wearing golden girdles. One belt gave Job the ability to understand the language of the angels, the second the secrets of creation and the third the language of the Cherubim.

MUSIC, MATHEMATICS AND LANGUAGE were invented in the age of the heroes and so too was astronomy — another achievement attributed to Enoch. The first stone circles not only marked out the dispositions of the hierarchies of the gods and angels, they marked out the positions of the stars and planets.

In the secret history, therefore, it also now becomes possible for the first time to begin to fix the dates of great events.

BETWEEN THE LION PAWS OF THE SPHINX at Giza, gazing eastwards, is a large stone that carries the inscription ‘This is the Splendid Place of the First Time’. The mysterious First Time, or Zep Tepi, was a phrase the Egyptians used to allude to the beginning of time. In their mythology Zep Tepi was marked by the rising of the primordial mound out of the waters and the alighting on it of the Phoenix.

By a remarkable feat of reconstruction, which he made while standing between the paws of the Sphinx, Robert Bauval has managed to determine the date of Zep Tepi. In Egyptian mythology the Phoenix arrived to mark the beginning of a new age. In Egyptian mythology the Phoenix, or Bennu bird, is the symbol of the Sothic cycle of 1,460 years, (which is the time it took the Egyptians’ 365-day calendar to resynchronize with the beginning of the yearly cycle, marked by the heliacal rising of Sirius). The synchronization of these two cycles, the yearly and the Sothic, took place in 11,451, 10,081, 7160, 4241, and 2781 BC. Bauval noticed immediately that these dates coincided with the commencement of some of the great building projects up and down the Nile. Clearly the starting of this cycle was very important to the ancient Egyptians…

Trying to figure out which cycle might have been the ‘first’ one, he was initially attracted by the idea that it might be 10,081 BC, because of an esoteric tradition that the Sphinx had been built at this time or even earlier.

Then Bauval worked out that on the earlier date of 11,451 BC the Milky Way, which had immense significance in ancient cultures around the world as the ‘river of souls’, was lying directly over the course of the Nile, so that they mirrored each other. Moreover, it also struck him that on this very early date of 11,451 the Sothic and yearly cycles coincided with a third cycle, the Great Year — the 25,920-year-long complete cycle of the zodiac — in a most meaningful way. Because on that date the Lion-bodied Sphinx’s eastwards gaze would have taken in the dawning of the Age of Leo.

The Sphinx embodies the four cardinal constellations of the zodiac, the four corners of the cosmos — Leo, Taurus, Scorpio and Aquarius, the Four Elements that work together to make the material world. The Sphinx, according to the secret history, is a monument to the first time the Four Elements locked into place and matter finally became solid.

When in the Timaeus Plato famously wrote of the World Soul being crucified on the World Body, he was not prophesying the crucifixion of Christ, as some Christian apologists have supposed. He was recalling this crucial moment in world history as idealism conceives it, when consciousness was finally fixed in solid matter.

The Sphinx, therefore, has a very special place in history as idealism tells it. It marks that point when, after wave upon wave of emanations from the cosmic mind, solid matter as we know it today was finally formed. That is why it is perhaps the greatest icon of the ancient world. The laws of physics as we know them today were only then set in motion, and from that point on the dates can be firmly fixed, because the great clock of the cosmos was finally set in its complex pattern of orbits.

If this late solidification of matter were what actually happened, it would, of course, invalidate dating methods, such as Carbon-14, conventionally used to try to establish early chronologies. Modern science makes an assumption in its calculations that the ancients did not, namely that the natural laws have held true in all places and at all times.

THE SPHINX ASKS OEDIPUS A RIDDLE: ‘What walks on four legs, then two legs, then three legs?’ If he cannot answer it, the Sphinx will kill him, but he correctly interprets it as a riddle concerning the ages of man. A baby walks on four legs, grows up to walk on two legs, until so old that a third leg, or walking stick, is needed. But ‘ages’ here is also another way of evoking the evolution of humanity. The form of the Sphinx is a monument to this evolution.

The Sphinx is defeated by the acumen of Oedipus, and casts itself into the precipice or abyss. The Sphinx’s dying is a way of showing that the gods of the elements, these organizing principles of the universe, became successfully absorbed inside the human body at this time.

Central to the Oedipal legend is the terrible fate he hoped — but failed — to avoid. He duly kills his father and becomes his mother’s lover. As the laws of nature become fixed and mechanical, humans are trapped in them.

So the Sphinx also marks the end of the Age of Metamorphosis, the fixing of the biological forms we know today. It also bars the way back. In Genesis it is one of the Cherubim who bars the way back into Eden, and the Egyptians called the Sphinx, made up of four Cherubim, ‘Hu’, meaning protector. By this they meant that he guarded against any slide back into the old ways of procreation.

It’s a common misconception that in 1650, when Bishop Usher famously calculated the date of the creation as humankind as 4004 BC, this was some last vestige of an ancient superstition. In fact Usher’s calculation was the product of a time when materialism was gaining ground — and so, too, was a narrow, literal interpretation of the Bible that would have seemed absurd to the ancients. They believed that human souls had existed for vast, immeasurable eras before 11,451 BC, and only then did the human body as we know it today fully materialize around the human spirit.

It is interesting to note that, according to the calculations of Manetho in the third century BC, this is almost exactly the time when the reign of the demi-gods came to an end.

WE WILL SEE LATER THAT, ACCORDING TO esoteric doctrine, not only was matter only precipitated out of mind a short while ago, but that it exists only for a brief interval. It will dissolve again in just over nine thousand years, when the sun rises again to meet the gaze of the Sphinx in the constellation of Leo.

In the teachings of the secret societies we live on a small island of matter in a vast ocean of ideas and imagination.

The Sphinx, which showed the Four Elements locked into place at the four cardinal points. In modern times the eminent Egyptologist R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz — protégé of Henri Matisse — was the first to reveal to a wider public that the Sphinx might have been carved before 10,000 BC. He pointed to the fact that the walls surrounding the monument show signs of water erosion that could not have been made after that time. The Sphinx, according to the secret history, is a monument to the first time the Four Elements locked into place and matter finally became solid. In 11,451 BC east, west, north and south were then locked with the Four Elements that make up the physical world.