The Secret History of the World

17. THE AGE OF ISLAM Mohammed and Gabriel • The Old Man of the Mountains • Haroun al Raschid and the Arabian Nights • Charlemagne and the Historic Parsifal • Chartres Cathedral

A GRIMLY FORBIDDING FIGURE LOOKED down from the spirit worlds on these developments.

In 570 a child called Mohammed was born in Mecca. When he was six he lost both his parents and was hired out as a shepherd’s boy. He grew broad shouldered, with curly black hair and a beard through which shone dazzling white teeth. He became a camel-driver, transporting the spices and perfumes that were the speciality of Mecca to Syria. Then, at the age of twenty-five, he married a wealthy widow of Mecca and became one of the richest and most respected citizens of that city.

Although he had in one way now won back all he had lost at the death of his parents, Mohammed was dissatisfied. The religious centre of Mecca was a large, black, granite stone called the Kaaba, which in some traditions is said to have fallen to earth from the Sirius star system. At that time Arabia was populated by shamanistic tribes, each worshipping their own gods and spirits and at the centre of this whirlwind, next to the Kaaba, stood a sacred tent which housed hundreds of their idols. Mecca had also become corrupted by the sale of holy water — taken from a spring which Ishmael had caused to spring from the sand. To Mohammed’s eyes all of this looked lax. He saw a people interested only in money-making, gambling, horsemanship and getting drunk.

While driving camel trains down to places like Syria and Egypt he heard about Judaism and also stories about Jesus Christ. Did the story of the cleansing of the temple strike a chord? Mohammed became convinced that Arabia needed a prophet, someone like Jesus Christ who could purge the people of superstitions and of corruption and could unite them in one cosmic purpose.

Mohammed was sitting in the hills surrounding Mecca, brooding darkly on how all this might be achieved, when an angel appeared before him, saying: ‘I am the angel Gabriel.’ The apparition then showed Mohammed a golden tablet and told him to read it. Mohammed protested that he was illiterate, but when Gabriel commanded him a second time, Mohammed found that he could indeed read. So began the series of angelic conversations that became the Koran. Later Mohammed went into town and preached what Gabriel had taught him with blazing sincerity and irresistible power. He would summarize his creed in these down-to-earth terms:

When challenged to perform a miracle to prove that his preaching was divinely inspired, he refused. He said that Allah had raised the heavens without recourse to pillars, had made the earth, the rivers, the fig, the date and the olive — and that these things were miraculous enough.

We may hear in this ecstatic materialism the first whisperings of the modern age.

DURING THEIR ANGELIC CONVERSATIONS, the Archangel Gabriel asked Mohammed to choose refreshment. Mohammed chose milk, which occultists call moon juice. Alcohol would be forbidden in Islam.

It is highly significant, from an esoteric point of view, that the angel who dictated the Koran to Mohammed was Gabriel, traditionally Archangel of the Moon. Allah is the Muslim name for Jehovah, great god of the moon and thought. Gabriel is here heralding the power of thought to control human passions and quell fantasy, and his god is the great god of thou-shalt-not, represented in Muslim iconography by the crescent moon.

Thought is a death process that feeds on life-giving energies. In the Middle Ages — the great Age of Islam — the sexual impulse would have to be suppressed in order for the human capacity for thought to grow. And in order to quell the outgrowths of Gnostic fantasy, religious leaders imposed their authority on the people.

From the point of view of conventional, Western history, Europe was besieged by the uncivilized Muslims during the latter part of the Dark Ages and on into the Middle Ages. From the point of view of esoteric history the truth is something pretty nearly the mirror image of this. The impulses seeded at this time that would grow and transform Europe, indeed the whole human race, came from Islam.

MOHAMMED’S PREACHING IN THE MARKETPLACE at Mecca prompted a plot to assassinate him. He escaped to the town of Medina with his disciple Abu Behr in order to marshal his supporters. In 629 he returned to Mecca and in the four years until his death he established control over the rest of Arabia. When Abu Behr became his successor — or ‘Caliph’ — the will to conquer continued at an astonishing rate.

One of the things that makes a religion successful is if it works in the world, that is to say if it brings material benefits. The combination of Mohammed’s radical monotheism with the scientific methodology of Aristotle that had earlier pervaded Arabian thought would quickly encircle the globe from Spain to the boundaries of China.

Absorbing new ideas as well as spreading them, the Arabs took in Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Chinese science, including the manufacture of paper. They made great advances in astronomy, medicine, physics and mathematics, replacing the clumsy Roman numerals with the system we use today.

BY ITS OWN ACCOUNT SUFISM HAD ANCIENT, even primordial roots. Some traditions date its origins to the Saramong Brotherhood — or Brotherhood of the Bee — founded in the Caucasus in Central Asia during the first great post-Atlantean migration. Later, Sufism was undoubtedly influenced by Gnosticism and Neoplatonism.

If there was a tendency in Islam in its triumphant period to become dogmatic and paternalistic, Sufism represented a contrary impulse, a fascination with the sometimes perverse and paradoxical twisting this way and that of the spirit. Esoteric Islam advocated immersing oneself in the gentler, more feminine and feeling side of the spiritual life which would find expression in the great outpouring of Sufi poetry.

The question of what constitutes ‘oneself ’ is also a big issue in Sufism. What we generally imagine to be our own self, it teaches, is really an entity that operates independently of us, made up for the most part of fears, false attachments, dislikes, prejudices, envy, pride, habits, preoccupations and compulsions. A lot of Sufi practice involves breaking down this false self, this false will.

‘God is nearer to a man than his jugular vein’ according to the verse from the Koran (50:16), yet for the most part, distracted by our false selves, we are not awake to this.

The great Sufi writer Ibn Arabi said that a Sufi master is someone who unveils one to oneself.

Practices under instruction from a Sufi master might involve breathing exercises and music used to attain an altered state. Sufism taught the sometimes painful process of ‘waking up’, of becoming aware of ourselves and of the cosmic, mystical current that runs through us and becoming more fully alive.

Because they opened themselves totally to this mystic current, Sufis could be wild, unpredictable and disconcerting. We will see later that Sufism has had a vast, though largely unacknowledged, influence on Western culture.

Mohammed’s brother-in-law, Ali, was to him as John to Jesus Christ, receiving and transmitting the secret teachings. Sufis obeyed Islamic law but believed it to be the outer shell of esoteric teaching.

Ali and Mohammed’s daughter, Fatima, established what became known as the Fatimid Empire, ruling a large part of North Africa and Cairo, where they established a school for esoteric philosophy called the House of Wisdom. There were seven initiatory grades taught within. Candidates would be initiated into timeless wisdom and gain secret powers. Sir John Woodruffe, the nineteenth-century translator of the key Tantric texts, also uncovered a Sufi tradition with a parallel understanding of occult physiology. In this Sufi tradition centres of power had beautiful and intriguing names such as Cedar Heart and Lily Heart.

One of the initiates to emerge from the House of Wisdom was Hassan-I Sabbah, the famous Old Man of the Mountains.

He founded a small sect which in 1090 captured the castle of Alamut in the mountains south of the Caspian Sea in modern-day Iran. From his mountain fastness he sent his secret agents all over the world to do his bidding, exerting a puppet master’s control on distant rulers. His Hashishim — Assassins — infiltrated courts and armies. Anyone who even thought of disobeying Hassan was found dead the next morning.

The Western view of Hassan is no doubt distorted by a passage in Marco Polo’s account of his travels. He claimed that the Old Man of the Mountains gave his young followers drugs which put them to sleep for three days. When they woke up they found themselves in a beautiful garden they were told was paradise. They were surrounded by beautiful girls who played them music and gave them anything they wanted. After three days the young men were sent back to sleep. When they awoke, they were brought again before Hassan, convinced that the Old Man had the power to send them back to Paradise on a whim. So when Hassan wanted someone killed, his assassins would do it willingly, knowing that Paradise would be their certain reward.

In reality Hassan banned all intoxicants, even executing one of his own sons for being drunk. He banned music, too. Among his own people he was renowned as a holy man and alchemist, an adept who was able to control events all over the world by supernatural means. This was despite the fact that once he arrived and set up his court there, he only ever left his room at Alamut twice.

In the twentieth century the archetype of the man who appears mad, but really controls the whole world from his cell appeared as Dr Mabuse, in the deeply esoteric films of Fritz Lang.

HAROUN AL RASCHID WAS ANOTHER OF the extraordinary, compelling characters of this era. He became Caliph in his early twenties and quickly made Baghdad the most splendid city in the world, building a palace of unparalleled splendour served by hundreds of courtiers and slaves and a harem. It was a place of glittering materiality, where a man might experience every pleasure the world has to offer, grow bored with them all and long for novelty.

The turbaned oriental potentate of all our imaginations and Caliph of the Tales of the Arabian Nights, he drew to his court all the great writers, artists, thinkers and scientists of his day. It was rumoured that, as related in the Arabian Nights, he would sometimes slip out of a secret door in the palace in disguise in order to eavesdrop on his people and find out what they really thought.

In one of the most famous tales a fisherman on the Red Sea catches a large iron pot in his nets. When he has hauled it on board he sees that the metal cover is engraved with the interlocked triangles of Solomon’s Seal. Naturally curious, the fisherman opens the pot and at once a black vapour rises out of it and spreads itself all over the sky, so that all he can see is darkness. Then the vapour condenses again into the monstrous form of a Jinn, who tells the fisherman he was imprisoned in the pot by Solomon. He says that after two hundred years he swore he would make rich anyone who set him free. After five hundred years he swore he would reward his liberator with power. But after a thousand years of captivity he swore he would kill whoever set him free. So the Jinn tells the fisherman to prepare to die. But the fisherman says he can’t believe the Jinn was really inside the pot, and so the spirit, to prove it, turns himself back into vapour and sinks with a slow, spiralling motion back inside — at which point, of course, the fisherman claps the lid back on.

This might seem just a silly story for children, but for occultists it is packed with esoteric lore. But the word ‘Jinn’ means ‘to hide’, and a detailed theory and practice of dealing with these entities, said to live in ruined houses, in wells and under bridges, was actively cultivated among Arab peoples. Moreover, the imprisoning of spirits and demons in amulets, rings and stones using magical sigils such as the Seal of Solomon was well known. By the Middle Ages such lore, largely Arabic in origin and concerned particularly with the empowering of talismans by astrological means, would be collected in many famous grimoires. The greatest of these, called the Picatrix, would fascinate many of the more influential personalities in this history, including Trithemius, Ficino and Elias Ashmole.

RUMI GREW UP TO BECOME the great poet at court. He was a disconcerting presence even as a small child. At the age of six he began the habit of fasting, and began, too, to see visions. There is a story that one day he was playing with a group of children who were chasing a cat from rooftop to rooftop. Rumi protested that humans should be more ambitious than animals — and then vanished. When the others cried out in fright, he suddenly reappeared behind them. He had a strange look in his eyes, and said spirits in green cloaks had carried him away to other worlds. The green cloaks may have been shadows of El Khidir, the Green One, a powerful being able to materialize and dematerialize at will. The Green One is said by the Sufis to come to the aid of those on a special mission.

At thirty-seven years old, now a young university professor, Rumi was adored by his students. One day he was riding his horse, followed by his students, when he was accosted by a dervish. Shamsi Tabriz had made a name for himself, insulting sheiks and holy men, because he would be guided by nothing but God — which made him unpredictable and sometimes an overwhelming, even shattering presence.

The two men embraced and went to live in a cell together, where they meditated for three months. Each saw what he had been searching for in the eyes of the other.

But Rumi’s students grew so jealous that one day they ambushed Shamsi and stabbed him to death.

Devastated, Rumi wept and wailed and grew thin. He was desolate. Then one day he was walking down the street, past a goldsmith’s shop, where he heard the rhythmic beat of a hammer upon gold. Rumi began repeating the name of Allah and then suddenly began to whirl in ecstasy.

This is how the Mellevi, or whirling dervish order of Sufis, was born.

The magnificent civilization of the Arabs both fascinated and horrified medieval Europe. Travellers returned with tales of life at court, of hundreds of lions on leashes, of a lake of mercury on which lay a leather bed, inflated with air and fastened by silk bands to four silver columns at the corners. The most common report was of a miraculous mechanical garden made out of precious metals and containing mechanical birds that flew and sang. In the middle of it stood a great golden tree bearing fruit made out of astonishingly large precious stones and representing the planets.

To many these prodigies seemed necromantic. They existed on the border between magic and science. A partial explanation at least may lie in the discovery made in Baghdad in 1936. A German archaeologist called William Koenig was excavating palace drains when he discovered what he identified immediately as a primitive electric battery. It dated back as least as far as the early Middle Ages. When a colleague created a replica, she found she was able to generate an electric current with it that coated a silver figurine with gold in under half an hour.

IN 802 HAROUN AL RASCHID SENT THE Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, a gift of silks, brass candelabras, perfume and ivory chessmen. He sent, too, an elephant and a water clock that marked the hours by dropping bronze balls into a bowl and little mechanical knights that emerged from little doors. It was a gift intended to impress upon Charlemagne the superiority of Arabian science — and the reach of its empire.

If it hadn’t been for three generations of Frankish kings, Charles Martel, Pepin and Charlemagne, Islam might have wiped Christianity off the face of the earth.

Born in 742, Charlemagne inherited the spear of Longinus, used to pierce the side of Jesus Christ on the cross. Charlemagne lived and slept with the spear, believing it gave him powers to foresee the future and forge his own destiny. In the first decade of the ninth century he won victories against the Muslims. He wielded his sacred sword Joyeuse to keep them from invading northern Spain and to protect, too, the route of the pilgrimage to St James of Compostela.

Charlemagne had an imposing physical presence. Some seven foot tall with blazing blue eyes, he was a man of simple, moderate habits, yet he managed to impose his will on the course of history. Not only did his vision of Fortress Europe maintain a Christian sense of identity in the face of Islamic invasion, but he also moved to protect his people against corrupt and tyrannical nobles.

It is from the writings of one of the great magi of the Renaissance, Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, that we learn the strange story of the Holy Vehm, or Secret Tribunal of Free Judges, founded by Charlemagne in 770 with secret ciphers and signs to exclude the uninitiated. Sometimes known as the Secret Soldiers of Light, masked men would nail a summons to the gates of a castle whose owner thought he could live above the law. Some nobles disobeyed the summons. They would try to protect themselves with bodyguards, but inevitably they would be found stabbed to death with the characteristic cruciform dagger of the Holy Vehm.

A noble who chose to obey the summons would arrive late at night alone at the designated place, sometimes a lonely crossroads. Masked men would appear and place a hood on his head, before leading him off to be interrogated. At midnight the hood would be removed and the nobleman would find himself perhaps in a vast underground vault, facing the Free Judges, masked and dressed in black. Sentence would be passed.

This secret society is not obviously esoteric or arcane in its philosophy, but the vault motif points to legends of Charlemagne’s underground initiation.

The Enchiridion of Pope Leo was a book of spells, including protection against poison, fire, storm and wild beasts, which emerged into exoteric history in the early sixteenth century, but was said to have been worn at all times by Charlemagne, who carried it tied to his person in a little leather bag. One note of authenticity in this story is that the first chapter of St John’s Gospel was included in the Enchiridion as its most powerful spell. These verses are still used in this way by practising esotericists.

More solid evidence of Charlemagne’s initiatic way of thinking can be seen today in the Aachen chapel. Added to Charlemagne’s palace, it was the largest building in the world north of the Alps. Its octagonal shape looks forward to the walls that will surround the New Jerusalem, according to the esoteric numerology of the Revelation of St John. Entry is by the Wolf Door — named after the legendary wolf who tricked the Devil out of possession of the chapel. The visitor looks up to the first-floor gallery to see the imposing throne of the Holy Roman Emperor, made from simple slabs of white marble. In the centre of the chapel a solid gold casket contains Charlemagne’s bones. Above it ‘the Crown of Lights’, a gigantic wheel-shaped chandelier, hangs like a crown chakra ablaze.

Charlemagne’s achievements include his bringing together of the great scholars of Christendom in an attempt to rival the court of Haroun al Raschid. The greatest scholar was perhaps Alcuin of York.

This British connection is significant in the secret history. The spirit of King Arthur lives and breathes in the history of Charlemagne. He is a defender of the faith who keeps pagans at bay with the help of a weapon that confers invincibility and of a circle of faithful knights, or paladins as they are known in the case of Charlemagne.

We have seen that the original King Arthur lived in the Iron Age, a champion of the Sun god at a time of encroaching darkness. The stories of the Grail which were added to the canon at the time of Charlemagne are based on historical events.

You might assume that the story of Parsifal is an allegory, but in the secret history he was a man of flesh and blood, a reincarnation of Mani, the third-century founder of Manichaeism. Though he did not know it, he was the nephew of one of Charlemagne’s paladins, William of Orange, who fought in a battle against the Saracens at Carcassonne in 783. This battle cost the Muslims so dearly that they withdrew from France to Spain.

Raised to be a forester, Parsifal lived with his mother deep in the woods, far away from the glamour of court life and the dangers of chivalry. He did not know his father or his uncle. He was never to be a knight like Roland, famous in his own day, a knight whose deeds were blazed across the sky and celebrated in the official records, but his local deeds, his private battles, would change the course of history.

One day Parsifal was playing by himself in the woods when a troop of knights rode by. The episode is described in a passage by Chrétien de Troyes that lights up the imagination:

Trees were bursting into leaf, the iris blooming and birds singing when the son of the widow went out into the wild and lonely forest. He was practising hurling spears when he heard a clashing, jangling, thumping sound. Then suddenly he saw five knights ride out from among the trees in full armour, their helmets shining in the sun. The gold, silver, white and blue of their liveries danced before his eyes. He had never seen anything like this before and thought he was being granted a vision of angels.

Parsifal’s own imagination was fired. He left his mother, heartbroken, and set off in search of adventure.

For all his ideals Parsifal was a foolish knight and his missions were often fraught with misunderstanding and accident. His was a journey of loneliness and failure.

Then one day, as dusk approached, he was riding by a river and asked two fishermen if they knew where he could find shelter. They directed him to a great castle, set high on a hill. This turned out to be the castle of the Fisher King, Amfortas, who had been wounded and was bleeding from his thighs. It seemed that an evil king, Klingsor, had laid a trap for Amfortas, involving some kind of sexual temptation, and had succeeded in inflicting this wound on him.

While Parsifal was sitting at dinner a wonderful procession appeared, page boys carrying a bleeding spear and a shining bowl. After dinner Parsifal fell into a deep sleep. In some versions of the legend he also faced a series of trials. He was menaced by wild beasts — lions — and was tempted by a beautiful demon. He also had to cross the Bridge Perilous, a giant sword that spanned the moat. As we shall see these variations can be reconciled.

When he awoke he found that the castle was deserted. He rode out to find that the crops had failed and the country become a wasteland.

Parsifal was later accepted at court and received his spurs. But one day an ugly crone, the Loathly Lady, accosted him. She explained that the country was suffering because, when presented with a vision of the Grail, he had failed to ask the question which would have healed the Fisher King and restored his kingdom’s fortunes.

On his second visit to the Grail Castle, Parsifal asked Amfortas what ailed him, and he succeeded in the quest for the Grail where all other knights had been denied. Sir Launcelot had failed, for instance, because of his love for Guinevere. He did not have a pure heart.

At the climax of his quest, Parsifal sees first the spear of Longinus — a reminder of the connection with Charlemagne — and then, finally, the Grail itself.

What are we to make of this as history? The visionary element should certainly be understood as an account of an initiation ceremony. Parsifal’s trials and visions took place in a deep trance.

But, of course, the fact that events are symbolic or allegorical does not mean that they are not to be understood as literally true, too.

What, then, is the Grail?

We saw that in the early German version of the story the Grail is a stone. In this version the Grail also seems to have the properties of the philosopher’s stone of the alchemists. It shines, it regenerates, makes flesh and bones young again and, in the words of von Eschenbach, ‘offers so much of the world’s sweetness and delight that it seems like the kingdom of heaven’. Of course, if this stone that fell out of the forehead of Lucifer had been shaped into a bowl, it would also be a stone that had been worked on.

In order to understand what the Grail really is, we should recall what its function is, listen carefully to what the well-known story is telling us. It is a chalice or receptacle to hold bodily fluids. More particularly, it was to hold the blood of Christ, used to catch it as it spurted from his body on the cross and then later, symbolically, at the Last Supper.

As we have seen, blood is the distinguishing feature of animal consciousness, and in occult physiology the animal part of our nature nestles in or is carried by — as if by a chalice — the vegetable part of our nature.

The secret of the Holy Grail, then, is not that it represents a bloodline. This, I have already suggested, would go against the esoteric doctrine of reincarnation. Rather it alludes to the role of the vegetable part of our nature as a living receptacle for our spirit or consciousness. The quest for the Grail is the quest for a purified receptacle fit to carry a higher form of spirit, and the trials in the course of the quest involve certain esoteric techniques of purification of the vegetable body. Rudolf Steiner, perhaps the greatest teacher of the twentieth century, said that all serious esoteric work begins with work on the etheric, that is to say the vegetable body.

Because of the Fall our animal selves have become so corrupted and we are in thrall to our sexual selves. In fact our animal selves are so corrupt that this has seeped down into our vegetable and material bodies, and it is beyond our power to purify them. We need supernatural help, and esoteric techniques are intended to enlist this help.

If the plant-like dimension of humanity is purified, we will naturally become more plant-like. Saintly individuals can sometimes live on almost nothing but sunlight, after the manner of plants. The twentieth-century German mystic and miracle-worker Therese Neumann lived for some forty years on nothing more than the daily consumption of a consecrated wafer.

But if techniques to transform our vegetable bodies have existed since ancient times, what was new and distinctive about the techniques involved in the Grail initiation?

In his deeply meaningful second encounter with the wounded Fisher King, Parsifal asks the question, What ails thee, brother?

This shows a combination of selfless compassion and — most significantly — shows a free, enquiring spirit which was new in the eighth century. Here, then, is the beginning of a new impulse towards freedom of thought that marked the beginning of the end of the age of Church authority.

When Parsifal achieves a vision of the Holy Grail, this is a vision of the vegetable body or soul which has been so transformed by moral feeling and intellectual questioning that it is fit to carry a higher form of spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

The historical dimension of the story is contained in the way that Amfortas’s wound causes the country to become a wasteland. The private devotions of initiates affect the destinies of nations.

The form of the story is significant, too. The story of Parsifal’s attainment of the Grail is presented in terms of Parsifal’s inner imaginative vision.

In the temples and Mystery schools of earlier ages wonderful statues were fashioned and gods were called down to inhabit them. In the Middle Ages the great initiates would inspire wonderful imaginative pictures, and it was into these mental images that the gods would descend and breathe life.

On the death of Charlemagne in 814, his empire quickly fell apart, but what has survived to this day is the living idea of a united Europe. Like King Arthur, Charlemagne has never really died but waits to return in time of need.

THE CHURCH GREW IN POWER AND WEALTH. It wanted to be the sole keeper of the keys to the Kingdom. The Church had earlier emphasized that an individual has but one life by suppressing teachings on reincarnation and had emphasized one god by suppressing knowledge of its astronomical roots. Now it emphasized the unity of the disembodied parts of the human being. In 869 at the Eighth Ecumenical Council, the Church effectively closed the door to the spirit worlds by abolishing the ancient distinction between the vegetable dimension of the soul and the animal dimension of the spirit. Soul and spirit were declared to be the same thing, and the result of this was that the spirit worlds, formerly encountered in the Mass, would come to seem an empty abstraction.

Experience of the spirit worlds was replaced by dogma to be accepted on authority.

Meanwhile, a vital Islamic influence, part intellectual, part spiritual, continued to flow into Europe through centres of scholarship like Toledo and Sicily. The study of mathematics, geometry and natural science, inspired in part by the Arabs’ translation and preservation of the works of Aristotle, as well as astronomy and astrology, spread northwards, leading to the formation of the first universities in Europe, based on the Islamic model. It led, too, to the arabesques of Gothic architecture, influenced by the intricate vegetal forms of mosque architecture.

IN THE NORTH PORCH OF THE CATHEDRAL at Chartres, founded in 1028, stands Melchizedek bearing the Grail. The astrology that Islam was bringing back to Europe, after it had been driven out several hundred years earlier by Rome, can be seen in the symbolism of the west porch — the fish of Pisces and the twin Templar Knights of Gemini. The pediment also has a fine example of a vesica piscis, a Third Eye that sees the spirit worlds coming through into the material world.

Chartres is a fusion in stone of Islamic mysticism, ancient Celtic spirituality and Neoplatonic Christianity. Atop a hill honeycombed with ancient tunnels and caves, it is believed to have been built on a site sacred to the Mother Goddess. A black virgin, resonant of the kinship between Isis, mother of the Sun god, and Mary, mother of Jesus Christ, can still be seen in the crypt.

Set into the floor of the nave is the most famous labyrinth in Europe. Built in 1200 it is some forty feet in diameter. Before it was taken up to help make canons in the French Revolution, a bronze plaque in the centre depicted Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur.

Of course labyrinths and mazes are ancient pagan artefacts, remains of which are found not only at Knossos but at Hawara in Egypt and in the many open-air labyrinths and mazes found cut in the turf in Ireland, Britain and Scandinavia. Many other Christian churches had labyrinths before the eighteenth century, but these were destroyed because of their pagan associations.

One of the burial mounds at Newgrange in Ireland was still called ‘the spiral castle’ by the locals in the 1950s, because of a spiral carved by the entry portal. The expression ‘our king has gone to the spiral castle’ was an idiomatic way of saying that he had died.

This is the key to understanding the secret symbolism of the labyrinth and of Chartres Cathedral itself. If you enter the labyrinth and follow its track on foot you find yourself moving in a spiral motion, first to the left then curving back to the right as you move towards the centre. Pilgrims following its route are engaged in a dance like the dance of Jesus described in the Acts of St John. The aim, as in all initiatory activity, is to enter an altered state in which the spirit journeys up through the spirit worlds, experiencing the after-death journey while still alive.

Ariadne, who intercedes to help save Theseus, is, in the Chartrean context, Mary who gave birth to the Sun king and through whose intercession we may give birth to our own higher selves.

The labyrinth at Chartres can therefore be seen as a sort of mandala or aid to meditation and to achieving an altered state. In the sacred geometry of the cathedral the labyrinth is mirrored by another mandala, the great rose window.

The stained glass of the Middle Ages appeared first in Iran/Iraq in the eleventh century. The extraordinary, luminescent glass of Chartres was manufactured by medieval alchemical adepts who had learned the secrets of the Arabs and whose techniques we cannot now reproduce. Schwaller de Lubicz, the great Egyptologist, explained to his biographer André Vanden Broeck that the brilliant reds and blues of the stained glass at Chartres used no chemical pigmentation but a separation of the volatile spirit of metals that he tested with the famous alchemist Fulcanelli and also found in shards of glass he unearthed in Egypt.

The rose window, which in its outer circle displays the signs of the zodiac, represents the chakra ablaze as it should be when we reach the centre of life’s labyrinth, dancing finally to the Music of the Spheres. Not for nothing has Chartres Cathedral been described as an alchemical crucible for the transformation of humanity.

Islam was weaving its way into the fabric of the whole world both esoterically and exoterically. Then, in 1076, Turkish Muslims took control of Jerusalem.