The Secret History of the World

11. GETTING TO GRIPS WITH MATTER Imhotep and the Age of the Pyramids • Gilgamesh and Enkidu • Abraham and Melchizedek

AS LONG AS SOCIETY HAS EXISTED THERE have been small groups within it which have practised secret techniques to work themselves into alternative states of consciousness. They have done this in the belief that this alternative state of consciousness lends the power to perceive things inaccessible to ordinary, everyday consciousness.

The problem is that from the point of view of today’s everyday consciousness, which is commonsensical and down to earth in a quite unprecedented way, everything seen in the alternative state is, almost by definition, delusional. If initiates of secret societies work themselves into hallucinatory states in which they communicate with disembodied beings, see the future and influence the course of history, then these things are just that — hallucinations.

But what if they can be shown to yield results?

We have begun to see how these states have inspired some of history’s greatest art, literature and music, but all of that might be dismissed by someone minded to do so as merely a matter of the life of the imagination, something without any relevance to life’s practical aspects. A lot of art, even great art, has an element of fantasy, after all.

Our modern mind-set prefers to see more concrete results. What about great feats of engineering or great scientific discoveries? In this chapter we will be following the development of an age when great initiates of the Mystery schools led humanity to some unequalled feats of engineering, from the temple of Baalbeck in Lebanon, which includes in its construction a block of carved granite weighing about a thousand tons that even today’s strongest crane could not lift, to the Great Pyramid at Giza and other lesser known pyramids in China.

At the start of this age the first great civilizations seemed suddenly to spring from nowhere — in the Sumerian civilization dominated by the bull hero Gilgamesh, in the Egypt of the bull cult of Osiris and in bull-running Crete. The age of these civilizations is the Age of Taurus, beginning early in the third millennium BC. For no very good reason conventional history can determine, vast numbers of people now began to live together in highly organized cities of extraordinary size, technical brilliance and complexity.

A SHADOWY BUT MOMENTOUS EVENT took place in China. It is shrouded in mystery. Even great initiates are unable to see it with anything approaching total clarity.

In the third millennium BC the people of China lived a tribal, nomadic existence and, according to Rudolf Steiner, it was into one of their encampments that an extraordinary individual was born. Just as thousands of years later another exalted heavenly being would descend to earth in order to incarnate as Jesus Christ, so now Lucifer incarnated too.

The birth of Lucifer was the beginning of wisdom.

Of course I’m using ‘wisdom’ in a particular sense — in fact the same sense academic, biblical scholars use it when they talk about ‘the wisdom books of the Bible’. The wisdom contained, for example, in the Book of Proverbs or Ecclesiastes, is a collection of rules for a happy and successful life, but unlike the teachings contained in other biblical books there is no moral or religious dimension here. This wisdom is entirely prudential and practical, advising you what you must do to look after your own best interests. There is no suggestion, for example, that good behaviour is likely to be rewarded or bad behaviour punished, except by human agency. There is no notion either of a providential order.

These books, compiled in the form we now have them in about 300 BC, were the fruits of a way of thinking which had developed approximately two and a half thousand years earlier. The secret history proposes that this form of wisdom became possible as a result of the incarnation and ministry of Lucifer.

For the most part initiations into spiritual disciplines have taken place between childhood and adulthood and after many years of preparation. For example, initiation into the Cabala has traditionally only been permitted at the age of forty, and candidates for initiation into the school of Pythagoras had to live in isolation and without speaking for years before their education could begin. But from birth Lucifer was raised entirely within the confines of a Mystery school. A circle of magi worked intensively on his education, allowing him to take part in the most secret ceremonies, moulding his soul, until at the age of forty he finally had a revelation. He became the first person ever to be able to think about life on earth in an entirely rational way.

WE SAW IN CHAPTER 8 HOW ORPHEUS invented numbers. But in the age of Orpheus it had been impossible to think of numbers without also thinking of their spiritual meaning. Now, because of Lucifer, it became possible to think of numbers without any symbolic connotations, to think of numbers purely as measures of quantity unencumbered by any notions of quality. People were now free to measure, to calculate and to make and build.

We know from Plutarch that Orpheus’s son Asclepius equated with Imhotep, who lived in about 2500 BC. By then this great wave of change, this revolutionary way of thinking had swept over from the Far East.

Vizier to the Egyptian King Djoser, Imhotep was known as the builder, the sculptor, the maker of stone vases. He was also called Chief of the Observers, which would become the title of the high priest of Heliopolis. Sometimes represented as wearing a mantle covered in stars, and sometimes, too, represented holding a rolled scroll, Imhotep was famous in antiquity as both as the great master builder and architect of the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. In the nineteenth century archaeologists excavating beneath the Step Pyramid discovered a store of secret treasures, sealed there since the founding of the building, that became known as the ‘impossible things of Imhotep’. Some of these are on display today in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Nineteenth-century commentators were amazed above all by the vases, which they suggested would be impossible for the craftsmen of the day to reproduce. Giraffe-necked and pot-bellied as they are, it’s still difficult today to see how the rock crystal of these vases was hollowed out.

Half an hour’s drive north from Saqqara is the Great Pyramid. Arguably the most magnificent building ever, it stands four-square at this crossroads in history, oriented to the cardinal points with remarkable accuracy. The world does not need another description of its magnificence. Suffice to say that although it would in principle be possible to rebuild it today, this would be crippling for all but the world’s richest economies. It would also stretch modern engineering to the limits of its abilities, particularly in the exactitude of its astronomical orientations.

But what makes the Great Pyramid even more extraordinary, almost miraculous according to the secret history, is that the fact that it was the first Egyptian building.

Conventional historians have assumed that the building ambitions of the Egyptians progressed from simple one-storey tombs called mastabas, through the relative complexity of the Step Pyramid and culminated in the massive complexity and sophistication of the Great Pyramid, conventionally dated to 2500 BC. In the absence of contemporary textual accounts, and because these buildings contain no organic material that can be carbon-dated, and because up till now there has been no method of dating cut stone, this has perhaps seemed an eminently commonsensical way of interpreting the evidence.

I suggested at the beginning of this book that this is an upside-down, other-way-round history, and in the secret doctrine the Great Pyramid was built in 3500 BC, before the founding of the great civilizations of Egypt and Sumeria, at a time when the only previously existing constructions were the stone circles and other ‘cyclopean’ monuments.

We must imagine Stone Age peoples wearing animal skins and carrying primitive stone tools gazing at the Great Pyramid in stupefaction.

According to the secret history, then, the Step Pyramid and the other lesser pyramids represent not an ascent but a decline.

The Great Pyramid has conventionally been seen as a tomb. As a variation on this theme, prompted by the narrow shafts which point from out of the so-called King’s and Queen’s Chambers towards particular stars, it has been seen as a sort of machine designed to aid the projection of the dead pharaoh’s spirit out of this tomb towards its heavenly resting place. On this view, then, the Great Pyramid is a sort of gigantic excarnation machine.

From the point of view of the secret history this interpretation is anachronistic. It was the universal belief at this time that all human spirits travelled up through the planetary spheres to the stars after death. In fact, as we have seen, the living still had such vivid experience of the spirit worlds that it would have been as hard for them to decide to disbelieve in the reality of the after-death journey as it would be hard for us to decide to disbelieve in the reality of the book or table in front of us.

We should look elsewhere for an explanation of the function of the Great Pyramid. The whole tenor of ancient Egyptian civilization is that it was trying to get to grips with matter. We see this in its innovatory drive to cut and carve stone.

We also see the new relation to matter in the practice of mummifying. We are never more ready to ascribe stupid beliefs to the ancients than when we link Egyptian mummification and elaborate grave goods to a supposed belief that the spirit might actually want to use these grave goods in the afterlife. The point of these burial practices, according to esoteric thought, is rather that they exerted a sort of magnetic attraction on the ascending spirit that would help it attain speedy reincarnation. It was believed that if the discarded body were preserved, it would remain a focus for the spirit that had left it, exerting an attraction that pulled it down to earth again.

The esoteric explanation of the Great Pyramid is similar. We saw in Chapter 7 that the great gods, finding it increasingly difficult to incarnate, had retreated as far as the moon, visiting the earth increasingly rarely.

The Great Pyramid is a gigantic incarnation machine.

EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION REPRESENTS A great new impulse in human evolution, very different from the oriental civilization which had taught that matter is maya, or illusion. The Egyptians initiated the great spiritual mission of the West, sometimes called in alchemy, Sufism Freemasonry, and elsewhere in the secret societies, the Work. The mission was to work on matter, to cut it, carve it, to imbue it with intention until every particle of matter in the universe has been worked on and spiritualized. The Great Pyramid was the first manifestation of this urge.

THIS HISTORY IS ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS in different ways.

First, this history has been told in various groups who have made it their aim to work themselves into altered states of consciousness.

Second, this history supposes that consciousness has changed over time in a far more radical way than conventional historians allow.

Third, it suggests that the mission of these groups is to lead the evolution of consciousness. In a mind-born universe the end and aim of creation is always mind.

I want to focus now on the second of these ways, to show that some academics have recently written in support of the esoteric view that consciousness used to be very different from what it is today.

Contemporary with the rise of Egyptian civilization in about 3250 BC Sumerian civilization arose in the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates. In the early cities of Sumeria statues to ancestors and lesser gods stood in family homes. A skull was sometimes kept as a ‘house’ that a minor spirit could inhabit. Meanwhile, the much greater spirit who protected the interests of the city was held to live in the ‘god house’, a building at the centre of the temple complex.

As these cities grew, so too did the god houses, until they became ziggurats, great rectangular, stepped pyramids, built out of mud bricks. In the centre of each ziggurat was a large chamber in which the statue of the god resided, inlaid with precious metals and jewels, and wrapped in dazzling clothes.

According to the cuneiform texts, the Sumerian gods liked eating, drinking, music and dancing. Food would be put on tables, then the god left alone to enjoy it. After a time the priests would come in and eat what was left. The gods also needed beds to sleep in and for enjoying sex with other gods. They had to be washed for this and dressed and anointed with perfumes.

As with the grave goods in Egypt, the aim of these practices was to try to tempt gods to inhabit the material plane, by reminding them of the sensual pleasures denied them in the spirit worlds.

The bee is one of the most important symbols in the secret tradition. Bees understand how to build their hives with a sort of pre-conscious genius. Bee-hives incorporate exceptionally difficult and precise data in their construction. For example, all hives have built into them the angle of the earth’s rotation. Sumerian cylinder seals of this time show figures with human bodies but bees’ nests for heads. This is because in this period an individual’s consciousness was experienced as made up of a collaboration of many different centres of consciousness, in the way we described in Chapter 2. These centres could be shared or even moved from one mind to another like a swarm of bees from one hive to another.

A brilliant analysis of Sumerian and other ancient texts by Princeton Professor of History Julian Jaynes was published in 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind argued that during this period humans had no concept of an interior life as we understand it today. They had no vocabulary for it, and their narratives show that features of mental life, such as willing, thinking and feeling which we experience as somehow generated ‘inside’ us, they experienced as the activity of spirits or gods in and around their bodies. These impulses happened to them at the bidding of disembodied beings that lived independently of them, rather than arising inside themselves at their own bidding.

It is interesting that the Jaynes analysis chimes with the esoteric account of ancient history given by Rudolf Steiner. Born in Austria in 1861, Steiner represents a genuine stream of Rosicrucian thinking, and he is the esoteric teacher of modern times who has given the most detailed account of the evolution of consciousness. Jaynes’s researches are, as far I know, independent of this tradition.

It is perhaps easier to appreciate Jaynes’s analysis in relation to the more familiar Greek mythology. In the Iliad, for example, we never see anyone in any sense sit down and work out what to do, in the way we see ourselves doing. Jaynes shows that for the people of the Iliad there is no such thing as introspection. When Agamemnon robs Achilles of his mistress, Achilles does not decide to restrain himself. Rather, a god accosts him by the hair, warning him not to strike Agamemnon. Another god rises out of the sea to console him, and it is a god who whispers to Helen of homesick longing. Modern scholars tend to interpret these passages as ‘poetic’ descriptions of interior emotions, in which the gods were symbols of the sort a modern poet might create. Jaynes’s clear-sighted reading shows that this interpretation reads present-day consciousness back into texts written by people whose form of consciousness was very different. Neither is Jaynes alone in his view. The Cambridge philosopher John Wisdom has written: ‘The Greeks did not speak of the dangers of repressing instincts but they did think of thwarting Dionysius or of forgetting Poseidon for Athena.’

We shall see in the concluding chapters of this history how the ancient form of consciousness continued to thrive very much later than even Jaynes posits. For the moment, though, I want to touch on a significant difference between Jaynes’s analysis and the way the ancients themselves understood things. Jaynes describes the gods who control the actions of the humans as being ‘aural hallucinations’. The kings of Sumeria and heroes of Greece are depicted by him as being, in effect, beset by delusions. In the ancient view, by contrast, these were not, of course, mere delusions but independent, living beings.

Jaynes believes that everyone in the Homeric era and earlier lived in a world of delusion until, as he sees it, the right side of the brain gained supremacy over the left. In Jaynes’s view, then, each individual, although believing himself addressed by a god equally present to everyone else, was in fact trapped in a private delusion. The problem with this view is that, because hallucinations are, almost by definition, non-con-sensual, it would lead you to expect these people to live in a totally chaotic and barbaric state, characterized by complete mutual misunderstanding. Modern clinical psychiatrists define a schizophrenic as someone who cannot distinguish between externally and internally generated images and sounds. Clinical madness causes extreme, disabling distress together with impairment of domestic, social and occupational functioning. Instead the people of this era constructed the first post-Flood civilizations with separation between priestly, military, agricultural, trading and manufacturing orders. Organized labour forces engineered great public edifices, including canals, ditches and, of course, temples. There were complex economies and large, disciplined armies. In order for these peoples to have cooperated surely the hallucinations would have had to be group hallucinations? If the ancient world-view was a delusion, it had to have been a massive, almost infinitely complex and sophisticated delusion.

What I have tried to present so far is a history of the world as it was understood by ancient peoples who had a mind-before-matter world-view in which everyone collectively experienced gods, angels and spirits as interacting with them.

Thanks to Freud and Jung we are all familiar with the idea that our minds contain psychological complexes which are independent of our centres of consciousness and so to some degree may be thought of as autonomous. Jung described these major psychological complexes in terms of the seven major planetary deities of mythology, calling them the seven major archetypes of the collective unconscious.

Yet when Jung met Rudolf Steiner, who believed in disembodied spirits, including the planetary gods, Jung dismissed Steiner as a schizophrenic. We shall see in Chapter 27 how very late in life, shortly before he died, Jung went beyond the pale as far as the modern scientific consensus goes. He concluded that these psychological complexes were autonomous in the sense of being independent of the human brain altogether. In this way Jung took one step further than Jaynes. By no longer seeing the gods as hallucinations — whether individual or collective — but as higher intelligences, he embraced the ancient mind-before-matter philosophy.

The reader should beware of taking the same step. It is important you be on your guard against any impression that perhaps — to be fair — this version of history hangs together in some way, or that it feels true in some unspecific poetic or, worse, spiritual way. Important because a momentary lapse of concentration in this regard and you might, without at first noticing it and with a light heart and a spring in your step, begin to walk down the road that leads straight to the lunatic asylum.

GILGAMESH, THE GREAT HERO OF SUMERIAN civilization, was king of Uruk in approximately 2100 BC. His story is full of madness, extreme emotion, anxiety and alienation. The great poet Rainer Maria Rilke called it ‘the epic of death-dread’.

The story as laid out here has largely been pieced together from clay tablets excavated in the nineteenth century, but it seems nearly complete.

At the start of his story the young king is called the ‘butting bull’. He is bursting with energy, opening mountain passes, digging wells, exploring, going into battle. He is stronger than any other man, beautiful, courageous, a great lover from whom no virgin is safe — but lonely. He longs for a friend, someone who is his equal.

So the gods created Enkidu. He was as strong as Gilgamesh but was wild, with matted hair all over his body. He lived among wild beasts, ate as they did and drank from streams. One day a hunter came face to face with this strange creature in the woods and reported back to Gilgamesh.

When he heard the hunter’s story, Gilgamesh knew in his heart that this was the friend he had been waiting for. He devised a brilliant plan. He instructed the most beautiful of the temple prostitutes to go naked into the woods, to find the wild man and tame him. When she made love to him he forgot, as Gilgamesh had known he would, about his home in the hills. Now when Enkidu came across wild animals they sensed the difference and no longer ran with him — they ran away from him.

When Gilgamesh and Enkidu met in the marketplace at Uruk there was a wrestling match of champions. The whole population crowded round to watch. Gilgamesh finally won, flinging Enkidu on to his back while still keeping his own foot on the ground.

So a famous friendship started a series of adventures. They hunted panthers and tracked down the monstrous Hawawa who guarded the way though the cedar forest. When they later slew the bull of heaven, Gilgamesh had the horns mounted on the walls of his bed chamber.

But then Enkidu fell dangerously sick. Gilgamesh sat by his bed six days and seven nights. Finally a worm fell out of Enkidu’s nose. At the end Gilgamesh drew a veil across his old friend’s face and roared like a lioness that has lost her cubs. Later he roamed the steppe, weeping, fear of his own death beginning to gnaw at his entrails.

Gilgamesh ended up at the tavern at the end of the world. He wanted to get out of his head. He asked the beautiful barmaid the way to Ziusudra, whom, we have seen, is another name for Noah or Dionysus. Ziusudra was a demi-god who had never really died.

Gilgamesh made a boat with punting poles topped with bitumen, such as are still used by marsh Arabs to this day, and went to meet the seer. Ziusudra said, ‘I will reveal to you a secret thing, a secret of the gods. There is at the bottom of the sea a plant that pricks like the rose. If you can bring it back up to the surface, you can become young again. It is the plant of eternal youth.’

Ziusudra was telling him how to dive beneath the seas that covered Atlantis, how to find the esoteric lore that had been lost at the time of the Flood. Gilgamesh tied stones to his feet like the local pearl-divers, descended, plucked the plant, cut himself free of the stones and rose to the surface in triumph.

But while he was resting on the shore from his exertions, a snake smelled the plant and stole it.

Gilgamesh was as good as dead.

WHEN WE READ THE STORY OF GILGAMESH we may be intrigued to see how he fails the test that humanity’s great leader has set him. There is a note of anxiety here that can then be heard spreading ever more widely in the Babylonian and Mesopotamian civilizations that grew up to dominate this region.

With the death of Gilgamesh we are in the time of the greatest ziggurats. The story of the Tower of Babel, the attempt to build a tower up to heaven and the resulting loss of a single language uniting all humanity, represents the fact that as nations and tribes began to become attached to their own tutelary spirits and guiding angels, they lost sight of the higher gods and the great cosmic mind beyond that gives all the different parts of the universe one destiny. The ziggurats represent a misguided attempt to scale the heavens by material means.

The Tower of Babel was built by Nimrod the Hunter. Genesis calls Nimrod ‘the first potentate on earth’. The archaeologist David Rohl has convincingly identified Nimrod with the historical Enmer-kar (‘Enmer the Hunter’), the first king of Uruk who wrote to the neighbouring king of Aratta, demanding tribute money in what is believed to be the earliest surviving letter.

Nimrod was the first man to seek power for its own sake. From this will to power came cruelty and decadence. In Hebrew tradition a prophecy of the imminent birth of Abraham prompted Nimrod to mass infanticide. We should understand by this that he practised infant sacrifice, burying the bodies in the foundations of his great buildings.

We join the secret story of Abraham in about 2000 BC wandering in between the sky scrapers of his native Ur (Uruk). He decided to go on a quest, to become a desert nomad to rediscover the sense of the divine that was in the process of being lost.

When he visited Egypt the pharaoh gave one of his daughters, Hagar, as a servant to Abraham’s wife Sarai. Hagar bore Abraham his first son, Ishmael, who was to become the father of the Arab nations. We should understand by this that Abraham learned great initiatic knowledge from the Egyptian priests. Marriages of this time were usually within a tribe or extended family. Supernatural powers were connected with blood, and marriage between people of the same blood strengthened powers, something which used to be a part of the tradition of the gypsies, for example. Marriage of individuals from different tribes could involve an exchange of powers and knowledge.

WHAT FORM OF INITIATION MIGHT ABRAHAM have received in Egypt?

We should picture the candidate for initiation laid out in a granite tomb. He is surrounded by initiates who have sent him into a very deep sleep-like trance. When he is in this trance state they are able to raise his vegetable body — and with it his spirit or animal body — up out of his physical body, so that it hovers like a phantom over the mouth of the tomb. A witness of an initiation ceremony practised on the Irish poet W.B. Yeats described how during the course of the ceremony a series of bells were rung to mark the stages. Yeats’s spirit could be seen shining with different degrees of brightness during the different stages, each marked by different patterns of colour.

Initiates who perform these sorts of ceremonies know how to mould the candidate’s vegetable body so that when it sinks back into the material body the candidate is able to work to use its organs of perception consciously. At the end of three days the candidate will be ‘born again’, or initiated, which is marked by the hierophant grasping him by the right hand and pulling him out of the coffin.

In esoteric philosophy the vegetable body is of utmost importance. Not only does it control vital bodily functions, but the chakras are, of course, the organs of the vegetable body. So this body in effect forms the portal between the physical world and the spirit world, and if the chakras are enlivened this may lead to powers of supernatural perception and influence, the ability to communicate with disembodied spirits and also healing powers.

In the temple sleep — which would still be practised by initiates of the Mystery schools two and half thousand years later, and is still practised in some secret societies today — someone who was ill would be allowed to sleep in the temple. This sleep would last for three days, during which time the initiates would work on their vegetative bodies in a way which was not dissimilar to the process of initiation.

Someone undergoing this healing process might have very realistic visions, directed by the initiates. First, he would be plunged in utter blackness. He would seem to himself to be losing all consciousness, to be dying. He would seem to himself to come round again, then be led by an animal-headed being travelling down long passages and through a series of chambers. At different stages he would be challenged and menaced by other animal-headed gods and demons, including monstrous crocodiles who would tear at him.

In the Egyptian Book of the Dead the candidate makes his way past these guardians of the thresholds by proclaiming, ‘I am the Gnostic, I am the one who knows.’ This is a magical formula he uses in the process of initiation and will be able to use again after death.

He approaches the inner sanctum. He sees an extraordinary, bright light shining through the cracks round the edge of the gates. He cries out, ‘Let me come! Let me spiritualize myself, let me become pure spirit! I have prepared myself by the writings of Thoth!’

Finally, out of the swirling waves of light a vision emerges of the Mother Goddess suckling her child. This is a healing vision because it takes us back to the paradisaical time we looked at in Chapter 3, before the earth and the sun became separated, when the earth was illumined from within by the Sun god, a time before there was any dissatisfaction, disease or death. And it looks forward, too, to another time when earth and sun will be reunited, when the earth will again be transfigured by the sun.

In all ages and in all places there have been people who have believed that meditating on this image of the Mother Goddess and child brings about miracles of healing.

AFTER HIS STAY IN EGYPT ABRAHAM moved westwards, towards the region we know today as Palestine. He had to arm and train his servants to rescue his brother who had been captured by local bandits. Following a fierce and bloody fight, he was walking through a valley (which today’s biblical scholars identify with the Kidron Valley), when he met a strange individual called Melchizedek.

As with Enoch, there is just a brief mention of Melchizedek in the Bible but an accompanying sense of the numinous and of something important left unsaid. Genesis 14: 18-20: ‘And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine and he was the priest of the most high God. And he blessed him and said “Blessed be Abram of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth and blessed be the most high God, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand.” This sense of the numinous is reinforced by a mysterious passage in the New Testament, Hebrews 6.20-7.17: ‘Jesus was made an high priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek. For this Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the most high God, who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings, and blessed him; to whom Abraham also gave a tenth part of all, first being by interpretation King of righteousness and after that also King of Salem, which is, King of peace; without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually… Who is made, not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life. For he testifieth Thou art a priest forever under the order of Melchizedek.’

Clearly something strange is going on. Clearly this mysterious individual, who has the ability to live forever, is no ordinary human being.

In cabalistic tradition Melchizedek’s secret identity is Noah, the great Atlantean leader who had taught humankind agriculture, the cultivation of corn and of the vine, who never really died but moved to another dimension. He now reappeared in order to be Abraham’s spiritual teacher, to initiate him to a higher level.

In order to understand Melchizedek’s initiatic teaching, we must examine a later episode when, according to the ancient tradition, Melchizedek was present, even though this is hidden in the biblical version.

Isaac was twenty two years old when his father took him up a mountain to sacrifice him on the altar of Melchizedek.

IT IS VERY IMPORTANT IN CERTAIN FORMS of initiation that at a particular point in the ceremony the candidate believes, perhaps briefly but with total conviction, that he or she is going to die.

He has perhaps understood that he is going to undergo a symbolic death, but it suddenly dawns upon him that there may have been a change of plan. Perhaps he has sworn the most solemn oaths on pain of death that he will mend his ways and live up to high ideals. Now with the blade held against him, he wonders if the initiates who have him in their power know that he has lied to them. He knows, now he comes to think about it, that he has done things he ought not to have done, not done the things he ought to have done, that there is no health in him. He knows in his heart of hearts he does not have enough willpower to keep the oaths he has sworn. He has just condemned himself to death out of his own mouth, and he is utterly unable to help himself.

At this point he realizes he needs supernatural help.

We may catch a faint echo of these emotions of fear and pity if we are moved by a great tragedy, by Oedipus Rex or King Lear. In initiation the candidate is made to feel the tragedy of his own life, an overwhelming need for catharsis. He begins to judge his own lives as the demons and angels will judge it after death.

AS ABRAHAM’S KNIFE BEGAN TO SLICE open Isaac’s throat, an angel substituted a ram whose horns had been caught in a nearby thicket.

What the thorns in the thicket represent is the two-petalled — or two horned — brow chakra, already entangled in matter. Abraham acts as he does because this mode of vision would have to be sacrificed. For the time being at least, perception of the spirit worlds must be put to sleep for the sake of the mission of the ancestors of Abraham — to develop the brain as an organ of thinking.

The Jews will be guided by Jehovah, the great spirit of the moon, the great god of thou-shalt-not who helps humanity evolve away from animal and ecstatic experience, away from the life of tribal or group soul towards the development of individual free will and free thinking.

In the secret history this sacrifice of the brow chakra takes place on the altar of Melchizedek, the great high priest of the Sun Mysteries. What this signifies is that Isaac was initiated to such a level that he understood the necessity for this next, lunar stage of human development. The evolution of individual free will and free thinking will eventually enable humans to play a conscious part in the transforming of the world.

Isaac stayed at the Mystery school of Melchizedek for three and a half years learning of these things.

Because Melchizedek is a priest of the Sun Mysteries, this school should be pictured as containing within its precincts a stone circle. We have reached the great age of these sun temples, examples of which still survive in Lüneberg in Germany, Carnac in France and Stonehenge in England. In the fourth century BC the historian Diodorus of Sicily described a spherical sun temple in the north, dedicated to Apollo. Today scholars believe he was describing Stonehenge or, more likely, Callanish in the far north of Scotland, but in either case the association with Apollo should be understood as a looking forward to the rebirth of the Sun god from the womb of the Mother Goddess.

THE OTHER GREAT CONTRIBUTION TO THE development of thought came, of course, from the Greeks.

The siege of Troy marks the beginning of the rise to greatness of Greek civilization, when the Greeks seized the initiative from Chaldean-Egyptian civilization and forged their own ideals.

We have been tracing a history of the world in which — for the first time — the lives of great cultural heroes from around the world — Adam, Jupiter, Hercules, Osiris, Noah, Zarathustra, Krishna and Gilgamesh — have been woven together into one chronological narrative. For the most part they have left no physical traces, living on only in the collective imagination, preserved only in surviving scraps of story and scattered imagery.

From now on, though, we will see that many legendary figures, presumed by most people to be entirely non-historical, have in fact been shown by recent archaeology to have left physical remains.

The discovery of the ruins of Troy by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s has always been controversial. The archaeological layer he excavated probably dates to 3000 BC, and so is far too old to be Homer’s, but today the majority of scholars agree that the layer relating to 1200 BC, in the late Bronze Age, is consistent with Homer’s account.

In the ancient world wars were fought for the possession of sacred, initiatic knowledge, partly because of the supernatural powers this conferred. The Greeks fought because they wanted to carry off the statue made by the hand of Athena, called the Palladium. We should see their struggle to possess Helen in the same way.

Today we may see in the face of a beauty ‘the promise of happiness’, to use Stendhal’s phrase. Yes, we may cherish that promise in a crude or trivial sense, but we may also do so in a deeper sense. Great beauty can seem mystical to us, as if it holds the very secret of life. If I could be with that beautiful person, we think, my life would be fulfilled. The presence of exceptional beauty can induce an altered state of consciousness, and male initiates have often been associated with very beautiful women, perhaps partly because their participation intensifies the secret sexual techniques of the schools.

Possession of Helen would enable the Greeks to move forward to the next stage of civilization.

We see the change consciousness that the story of the siege of Troy is all about in the famous saying of Achilles: ‘Better to be a slave in the land of the living than the king of the shades.’ The heroes of Greece and Troy loved to live in the sun and it was a terrible thing when it was suddenly shut out, and their spirits were sent off to the land of the shades, the Western gloom. This was the ‘death-dread’ of Gilgamesh intensified to a level that seems almost modern.

Note that Achilles was not doubting the reality of life after death, but his conception of it evidently did not go beyond the dreary, half-life of the sub-lunar sphere. A vision of the heavenly spheres above had been lost to him.

We can see this turning point in consciousness from another angle if we ask ourselves who out of the heroes really won the battle of Troy for the Greeks? It was not the brave, strong hero Achilles, the almost-invincible last of the demi-gods. It was Odysseus ‘of the nimble wits’, who defeated the Trojans by tricking them into accepting the gift of a wooden horse, which had soldiers hidden inside.

To today’s sensibility the story of the Trojan Horse seems almost completely implausible. From the point of view of modern psychology it just seems unrealistic to suppose that anyone could be so gullible.

But at the time of the Trojan war, people were only just beginning to emerge from the collective mind we followed earlier walking through the ancient wood and have just seen Jaynes define. Before the Trojan war everyone shared the same world of thoughts. Others could see what you were thinking. No such lie would have been possible. People interacted with a terrible sincerity. They had a sense that we have lost that in everything they did they were taking part in cosmic events.

…the date of the siege of Troy is also the date of the first trick in history.