The Secret History of the World

19. FOOLS FOR LOVE Dante, the Troubadors and Falling in Love for the First Time • Raphael, Leonardo and the Magi of Renaissance Italy • Joan of Arc • Rabelais and the Way of the Fool

IN 1274 IN FLORENCE A YOUTHFUL DANTE first saw the beautiful Beatrice.

It was love at first sight.

It was also the first time anyone fell in love at first sight.

In the annals of the secret societies this is a great and important historical truth. In conventional history people have been falling in love and been romantically in love since the dawn of time. It’s part of our biological make-up, they say. The odes of Pindar and Sappho are expressions of romantic love.

In the secret history, though, these odes from ancient Greece are read as being narrowly sexual. They do not exhibit the moon-calf pain of separation, the ecstatic delight in the beloved’s appearance and the interlocked gaze which characterize being in love today.

Dante wrote of his first sight: ‘She was wearing a beautiful, delicate crimson robe tied with a belt and the moment I saw her I say in all truth that the spirit that loves in the innermost depths of my heart began to tremble in such a way that it overtook my whole being… the beginning and end of my life’s happiness had been revealed to me.’ He said he became wholly absorbed in the love in her eyes. Later he wrote of her that when he first saw her he thought by some miracle an angel had materialized on earth. It would be wrong to read this in terms of poetic convention.

In the Commedia he described the sensation of being wholly absorbed in her eyes and says that the erotic charge he took from them led him to Paradise. Again, this is no mere poetic fancy. The erotic and the mystical intertwined in a way that was new in the West.

Dante and Beatrice would both marry other people, and she died young. What today we think of as romantic love with its mystical yearnings and sense of destiny — the feeling that this was meant to be — all derives from the mystic ferment of Islam. Just as the characteristically Christian understanding of love of your neighbour freely given can be seen to have grown out of the Hebrew prophets’ concept of grace, so now the modern world’s understanding of the sacred was illumined by the altered states of consciousness achieved by Sufi mystics such as Ibn Arabi. His revolutionary The Interpretation of Longing expressed sexual love in terms of divine love. The Sufis expressed a feeling never felt before and so creating the conditions for everyone else to feel it.

For over a thousand years the erotic instinct had been repressed. Sexual energies had been channelled into the development of the human intellect. By the time of Aquinas and Bacon this development was complete. Devised in overnight vigils kneeling at the altar, Aquinas’s Summa Theologica is more than two million words of densely packed syllogisms, testimony to a capacity for unrelenting intellectual focus that today’s greatest philosophers would find it hard to match.

Now, prompted by an impulse spreading up from Arabia, people began to take a new delight in the material world, a sensual pleasure in light, colour, space and the touch of things. The point of evolution of human consciousness moved out of monkish cells and into the pleasure garden. A scintillating sexual sheen was spreading over everything.

The Islamic occupation of Europe lasted longest in Spain. Then, as the brilliant civilization of Mauresque Spain spread northwards, this new way of being spread to the rest of the world, first to the south of France.

In the twelfth century Provence and the Languedoc became the most civilized region in Europe. Provençal poets called Troubadors adapted the Arabic-Andalusian poetic forms, inspired by their erotic éclat. Though she was not an esotericist, Helen Waddell’s The Wandering Scholars remains the classic account of this period of transition. She relates the story of an abbot riding out with a young monk who is being allowed outside the monastery for the first time, when they pass some women on the road.

‘They be demons,’ said the abbot.

‘I thought,’ said the boy monk, ‘that they were the fairest things I ever saw.’

The first Troubador to surface in the stream of exoteric history was Guillaume, Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitane, who began composing tender, yearning love songs when he returned from the Crusades. But although this early flowering was courtly, it spread through all classes. Among the Troubadors Bernart de Ventadorn was a baker’s son and Pierre Vidal was a furrier’s son. Perhaps as result of the influence of men like these, poetry now filled with vernacular objects — toads, rabbits, farm machinery, pubs, tumbling pigeons, crackling thorns and a cheek pillowed upon an arm.

The Troubador poet Arnaud Daniel, whom Dante described as il miglio fabbro, boasts of ‘hunting hares with an ox, gathering the winds and swimming against the tide’. He is talking in the topsy-turvy way characteristic of esoteric thinkers about the powers initiation has given him.

As well as crossing class barriers, the Troubadors reversed the traditional subjection of women to men. In Troubador poetry men enslave themselves to women. Marriage had worked as an agent of social control, but now the Troubadors encouraged a new form of love that was not arranged but spontaneous, and could flow between individuals of different social status.

Love became subversive like the secret societies themselves.

Being in love in this new way made people feel more fully alive.

It was a new and intense form of consciousness. In the poetry of the Troubadors love, this new way of being, can be reached if you successfully negotiate your way through a number of trials — passing through hell and high water, finding a passage through the labyrinth, combat and the slaying of wild beasts. You must solve riddles and choose the right casket.

Already pale and tortured by doubt the lover is trembling when he is finally allowed into the presence of the beloved. In consummation he achieves an altered state of consciousness, one that confers supernatural powers. All true lovers know that when they gaze deeply into each others’ eyes they really are touching each other.

In other words not only was the experience of falling in love introduced into the stream of human consciousness by initiates, but the experience of being in love was given the deep structure of the process of initiation.

Troubador literature is full of the symbolism of initiation, too. The most popular symbol of the Troubadors, the rose, was probably derived from Sufism where it was a symbol, among other things, of the entrance to the spirit worlds — and an obvious allusion to the chakras. In the famous story of the Nightingale and the Rose, the bird represents the human spirit’s longing for the divine. There is also an undeniable sexual level of meaning here, connected with the sensual, fleshy qualities of the rose. The ubiquity of the rose in Troubador love poetry should alert us to the presence here of esoteric, perhaps — as Ezra Pound believed — alchemical techniques of sexual ecstasy. Guillaume of Poitiers wrote, ‘I want to retain my lady in order to refresh my heart so well that I cannot age. He will live a hundred years who succeeds in possessing the joy of his love.’

At root the impulse behind the birth of the Renaissance was a sexual one. Let us be clear about the outrageous thing we are saying here — that the whole of human consciousness was transformed and moved to another level of evolution just because a few people performed the sexual act in a new way.

They made love for the first time.

When we reach the altered state of consciousness that is orgasm, can we think, or is orgasm inimical to thought? We can — and should — ask the same question of a mystical ecstasy.

Secret societies and heretical groups such as the Cathars, Templars and the Troubadors were teaching techniques of mystical ecstasy. Would the hard-won faculty of human thought be strong enough to survive these ecstasies?

IN THE COMMEDIA DANTE TOOK THE erotic-spiritual impulse of the Troubadors to another level. He expanded his love for Beatrice to embrace the whole cosmos.

At the beginning of the Commedia Dante describes how in middle age Dante found himself lost in a gloomy wood, when he was met by Virgil, one of the great initiates of the ancient world.

Virgil takes Dante through a portal with the words Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here written over it. Virgil then leads him into an underworld like the one described in the Aeneid — and containing characters we have already met in our history. They cross the River Acheron and enter the realm of shades. They encounter the judge of the dead, Minos, and Cerberus, the three-headed dog. They enter the minareted city of Dis, encounter the three Furies and the Minotaur. They walk the banks of Lake of Blood in which the violent are immersed, including Attila the Hun. They traverse the Wood of the Harpies and the burning plain of sand. They meet a famous Scottish wizard Michael Scott, Nimrod and finally, in the deepest rung of Hell, Dante sees what he first takes to be a windmill. It is really Lucifer’s wings.

It would have been perfectly well understood by Dante’s contemporaries that this, the first part of his poem, described a real journey underground — in other words that Dante had undergone an underground initiation. He would perhaps have been led through a series of ordeals and ceremonies like the ones we saw the knight Owen undergo in Donegal.

‘Virgil’ may well have been the mask for Dante’s initiator in real life, a scholar called Brunetto Latini. Journeying as an ambassador to Spain, Latini had there met savants from both the Hebrew and Arab traditions. His great work The Book of Treasure included occult teachings on the planetary qualities of precious stones. The uninitiated often fail to appreciate the initiatic quality of Dante’s description of the cosmos, that the rungs of hell that spiral downward in the other direction are characterized by planetary qualities. Dante’s work is written to read on several different levels — the astrological, the cosmological, the moral, even, some say, the alchemical.

Like the Fotuhat and like an earlier model, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Commedia is, on one level, a guide to the afterlife, on another a manual of initiation and on a third level an account of the way that life in the material world — quite as much as the afterlife — is shaped by stars and planets.

The Commedia shows how when we behave badly in this life we are already constructing a Purgatory, a Hell, for ourselves in another dimension that intersects with our everyday lives. We are already suffering, tormented by demons. If we do not aspire to move up the spiral of the heavenly hierarchies, if we ‘make do’ with purely earthly successes and pleasures, we are already in Purgatory.

Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray has become a part of public consciousness. We all know that, beautiful and vain, Dorian keeps a painting in his attic, which decays and becomes monstrous as he plunges into a life of debauchery, while he himself remains perfect and unlined. At the end of the novel the decay in the painting suddenly afflicts Dorian all at once. According to Dante, we’re all Dorian Grays, creating monstrous selves and devising monstrous punishments for ourselves. What makes Dante’s vision incomparably grander than Wilde’s is that not only does he show that we each create a heaven and hell inside us, he also shows what our misdeeds do to the structure and very texture of the world. He turns the world inside out to reveal the hideous effects of our innermost thoughts and the deeds we most want kept secret. According to Dante, everything we do or think materially alters the universe. Umberto Eco has called his poem ‘the apotheosis of the virtual world’.

IN 1439 A MYSTERIOUS STRANGER CALLED Gemistos Plethon slipped into the court of Cosimo de Medici, ruler of Florence. Plethon was carrying with him the lost Greek texts of Plato. As fate would have it, he was also carrying various neoplatonic texts, some Orphic hymns and, most intriguingly, some esoteric material which purported to date back to the Egypt of the pyramids.

Plethon came from Byzantium where an esoteric, neoplatonic tradition still thrived dating back to early Church fathers such as Clement and Origen — a tradition that Rome had repressed. Plethon was able to fire Cosimo with the idea of a lineage of universal but secret lore that went back beyond these early Christians to Plato, Orpheus, Hermes and the Chaldean Oracles. He whispered in Cosimo’s ear of a perennial philosophy of reincarnation and personal encounters with the gods of the hierarchies which might be achieved by ceremony and the ritual singing of the Hymns of Orpheus.

It is this appeal to vivid, personal experience that inspired the Renaissance. Cosimo de Medici employed the scholar Marsilio Ficino to translate Plethon’s documents, starting with Plato, but when Cosimo learned about the Egyptian material, he told Ficino to put Plato aside and translate the Egyptian stuff instead.

The spirit that Plethon introduced into Italy by his translations of the hermetica spread quickly among the cultural elite. Appetite for new experience, together with a fresh and vital relationship with the spirit worlds, is captured on the page by the Italian magus Giordano Bruno. He writes of a love that brings ‘excessive sweat, shrieks which deafen the stars, laments which reverberate in the caves of Hell, tortures which afflict the living spirit with stupor, sighs which make the gods swoon with compassion, and all this for those eyes, for that whiteness, those lips, that hair, that reserve, that little smile, that wryness, that eclipsed Sun, that disgust, that injury and distortion of nature, a shadow, a phantasm, dream, a Circean enchantment put to the service of generation…’

This is a new note in literature.

The literature of the Renaissance is lit up by the stars and planets. The great writers of Renaissance Italy invoked this energy by the active and intelligent use of the imagination. Like Helen Waddell, Frances Yates was not an esotericist — or, if she was, left no hint in her writings — but thanks to her meticulous research and brilliant analysis, and that of the scholars at the Warburg Institute who have followed in her footsteps, we have a detailed understanding of the esoteric discoveries of the Renaissance and of the ways they inspired art and literature. The translations of the hermetic texts by Marsilio Ficino talked of the fashioning of images in esoteric terms: ‘Our spirit, if it has been intent upon the work and upon the stars through imagination and emotion, is joined together with the very spirit of the world and with the rays of the stars through which the world-spirit acts.’ What Ficino is saying is that if you imagine as fully and vividly as you can the spirits of the planets and the stellar gods, then, as a result of this act of imagination, the power of the spirit may flow through you.

We saw in the last chapter that the Middle Ages was the great age of magic. Then esoteric thinkers and occultists began to construct images in their minds which gods and spirits could inhabit and make come alive, as once the makers of the temples and Mystery centres of the ancient world had manufactured objects such a statues for disembodied beings to use as bodies. In Italy in the Renaissance artists with esoteric beliefs began to recreate the magical images in their minds with paint and stone.

In the Middle Ages, the dissemination of grimoires had been a wholly underground, sub-cultural activity. Now the more widely published hermetic literature of the Renaissance gave instructions on how to construct talismans designed to draw down influences from the spirit worlds which were taken up by the artists of the day. Hermetic literature explained how occult influences could be more effective if they were constructed of metals appropriate to the spirit being invoked — gold for the god of the sun, for example, silver for the god of the moon. Particular colours, shapes, hieroglyphs and other sigils were revealed afresh as sympathetic to particular disembodied beings.

An art critic has talked of Sandro Botticelli’s ‘predilection for minor tones’ and for lighter colours, which suggests an ethereal quality, as if he is depicting beings from another realm not yet fully materialized. We can see Ficino’s influence on Botticelli’s painting popularly known as the Primavera, which illustrates the process of the creation of matter in terms of the successive emanations of the planetary spheres from the cosmic mind. The Primavera herself has shown a remarkable propensity to live and breathe in the minds of those who have seen the painting ever since.

The neoplatonic artists of the Renaissance believed they were rediscovering ancient secrets. Following Plato they believed that all learning is a process of remembering. Our minds are protrusions of the great central cosmic mind into the material world. Everything that has been experienced or thought in history is held in the memory banks of the cosmic mind — or perhaps, more accurately, lives in a sort of eternal now.

If Plato is right, this book is already inside you!

IT IS WITH THE ITALIAN HIGH RENAISSANCE that we come to the idea of the towering genius — not just Botticelli but Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo. The genius is someone set totally apart from the rest of us by the magnificence and clarity of his or her visions, and it is perhaps appropriate that this flowering took place in Italy because it was a continuation of the tradition of the ecstatic visions of Joachim and St Francis.

Like the saints, the great artists were sometimes mouthpieces for great spiritual beings. According to esoteric tradition the painter Raphael was directly inspired by the Archangel Raphael. The hand that painted the masterpieces was divinely guided.

But there is a stranger and more mysterious tradition — that the individuality who incarnated as Raphael had previously incarnated as John the Baptist. According to Steiner, this explains why there are no major paintings by Raphael of events that took place after the death of John the Baptist. His great masterpieces depicting the Madonna and child with a strange and uniquely compelling quality were in effect painted from memory.

MANY MAGI LIVED IN ITALY IN THE HIGH Renaissance in the time of Leonardo. They often worked within the closed brotherhood of an artist’s studio, where artistic and spiritual progress could be guided together and go hand in hand. For example, the mathematician and Hermeticist Luca Pacioli, who was the first to write openly about the secret formulae behind the Venusian pentangle, was one of Leonardo’s teachers regarding ‘divine proportion’.

Another magus we know had an influence on Leonardo (because Leonardo owned some of his books and mentioned him in his own notebooks) was an architect of an older generation. Leon Battista Alberti was the architect of the Rucellai Palace in Florence, one of the earliest classical buildings in Renaissance Italy, and of the façade of Santa Maria Novella, also in Florence. He was also the author of one of the strangest books in the Italian language: Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the proto-surreal story of Poliphilo (the title may roughly be translated as ‘the lover of many things in his struggle for love in a dream’).

The hero awakes on the day he is to go on an adventure, but falls into a dream. He pursues his beloved through a strange landscape inhabited by dragons and other monsters, through a labyrinthine course that takes him into many marvellous buildings which are half-stone, half-living organism. The inside of a temple, for example, appears as its viscera. Alberti was obsessed by nature and natural forms and incorporates them in his work in a most unusual way. When we look at, for example, the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks, this same obsession appears in the spiritually epressive forms of the landscape a clear example of Alberti’s influence on Leonardo.

The story unfolds with the logic of a dream. On one level the Hypnerotomachia is an architectural manifesto. Alberti is proposing that the new architecture of the Renaissance that he was instrumental in creating should have the logic of a dream. Instead of a slavish and inhibited following of precedent, architects should operate in a new, free state of mind where nothing is forbidden, where architects should let themselves be inspired by the combinations of forms that altered states of consciousness may suggest. Alberti is recommending, then, a kind of controlled thought-experiment as a way of facilitating a new way of thinking — and not just in architecture.

That the channelling of sexual energies is involved becomes clear at the end of the story when the hero is finally united with his beloved in a series of mystic rites in the Temple of Venus. His beloved is asked by the priestess to stir a cistern with a flaming torch. This causes Poliphilo to fall into a trance state. Then a shell-shaped basin full of whale sperm, musk, camphor oil, almond oil and other substances is set alight, doves are sacrificed, and nymphs dance around an altar. When the beautiful beloved is asked to rub the ground around the base of the altar, the whole building convulses as if in an earthquake and a tree bursts out of the top of the altar. Poliphilo and his beloved taste the fruit of this tree. They are transported into an even higher state of consciousness. The volcanic power of libido has been channelled by the priestess-adept so that all prohibitive rules of behaviour, of morality and creativity, even the laws of nature, have been turned upside down.

Perhaps the most mysterious of all the great masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance is the Mona Lisa. Who can explain its power? The great nineteenth-century art critic and esotericist Walter Pater wrote of it: ‘Hers is the head upon which all “the ends of the world are come” and the eye lids are a little weary. It is beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions… She is older than the rocks among whom she sits… she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave and has been a diver in deep seas and keeps their fallen day about her…’

Pater is perhaps hinting at what he knows. The Mona Lisa is indeed older than the gods.

We saw earlier how the moon separated from the earth in order to reflect sunlight down to the earth and make human reflection possible. We saw, too, how in 13,000 BC Isis withdrew from the earth to the moon to become mistress of this process of reflection. Now at the beginning of the fifteenth century, after the cosmos had spent aeons working to create the conditions to make possible reflection in the sense that we understand it today, it happened at last. Leonardo’s masterpiece is an icon in human history because it captured the moment this step in the evolution in consciousness took place. In the face of the Mona Lisa we see for the first time the deep joy of someone exploring her inner life. She is free to detach herself from the world of the senses pressing in on her and roam within. She has what J.R.R. Tolkien in another context called ‘an unencumbered, mobile, detached inner eye’.

The Mona Lisa, then, creates a magical space which the spirit of Isis may inhabit. Of course it almost impossible these days to be alone in the Louvre with the Mona Lisa, but like The Lohan in the British Museum, it was created so that if you commune with it, it will speak to you.

FAR AWAY FROM THE GLITTER AND GRANDEUR of the courts of the Italian Renaissance, in the unsophisticated north of Europe another spirit was making itself felt. At the age of twelve or thirteen a young girl, living in a simple, rustic cottage in France in the heavily wooded Loire Valley, began to hear voices and see visions. The Archangel Michael appeared to Joan and told her she would have spirit guides. She was reluctant to go along with this, saying she would rather spin by her mother’s side. But the voices became increasingly insistent. They told her of her mission. When an invading English army seemed about to take the city of Orleans, they told her to go to the nearby town of Chinon to find the Dauphin, the heir to the throne of France, and from there lead him to be crowned at Rheims Cathedral.

Joan was still little more than a child when she arrived at the court of the Dauphin. He played a trick on her, letting a courtier sit on the throne and pretend to be him, but Joan saw through it and addressed the Dauphin directly. Convinced by Joan, he equipped her with a white horse and a suit of white armour. She wore it in the saddle for six days and nights without respite.

Joan saw a vision of a sword hidden in a church. The sword she described — with three distinctive crosses on it — was discovered hidden behind the altar of the nearby Church of St Catherine de Fierbois.

As sometimes happens in history, when great beings from the spirit worlds bring their powers to bear on a particular individual, she could not be denied. Nothing could stop her even though the odds against her looked overwhelming.

When on 28 April 1429 Joan arrived outside Orleans, now occupied by the enemy, the English troops retreated before the young girl and her small band of supporters. Only five hundred of them defeated an English army of thousands in a way which even her captains described as miraculous.

At Joan’s urging the Dauphin was crowned King of France at Rheims. Her mission had been accomplished in less than three months.

It is difficult to think of a clearer example of the influence of the spirit worlds on the course of world history. George Bernard Shaw, who was deeply interested in esoteric philosophy, would write that ‘behind events there are evolutionary forces which transcend our ordinary needs and which use individuals for purposes far transcending that of keeping those individuals alive and prosperous and respectable and safe and happy’.

Betrayed by her own people, Joan was sold to the English. She was questioned closely on her voices. She said they were sometimes accompanied by visions and bright lights, that they advised her, warned her and even gave her detailed instructions, often several times a day. Joan was also able to ask their advice and would receive detailed answers to her questions.

Such easy familiarity, such deep and detailed communications with the spirit worlds outside the aegis of the Church was characterized as witchcraft and on 30 May 1430 Joan was burned at the stake in the marketplace in Rouen in northern France. An English soldier turned to another and said, ‘We have burnt a saint.’

It was as if the great spiritual powers that had made her inviolable had now deserted her and all of a sudden the forces of opposition rushed on her together in order to overwhelm her.

The English thought of her as the enemy, but according to the perspectives of the secret history it would be England that most benefited from the divinely inspired actions of Joan of Arc. France and England had been locked in conflict for hundreds of years and, though at the time of Joan England had the upper hand militarily, it was dominated culturally, in its language and literature, by the French. Without Joan’s severing of France and England, the particularly English contribution to world history — the psychological realism of Shakespeare and the detached and tolerant philosophy of Francis Bacon — would not have been possible.

THE PAINTER ALBRECHT DÜRER WAS returning to Germany following a trip to Italy, where he had been initiated into the esoteric lore of the painter’s guilds. Weird visions of the Apocalypse would begin to inspire his woodcuts. He would also paint a portrait of himself as an initiate, holding a flowering thistle, sparkling with dew, the sweat of the stars, as a sign that his organs of spiritual vision were opening up on a new dawn.

On the way he stopped by the wayside to paint a clump of turf. This watercolour was the first still life ever painted. There is nothing leading up to it in the history of art. Before Dürer no one had really looked at a rock and a clump of grass in the way we take for granted today.

Dürer’s journey should also be taken as a sign that the impulse for the evolution of human consciousness was moving to the north of Europe. Northerners would find themselves at odds with the more narrowly Catholic countries of the south. New political developments saw the rise of newly powerful northern states which would become vehicles for new forms of consciousness.

FRANÇOIS RABELAIS, BORN TOWARDS THE end of the fifteenth century, walked the narrow streets of Chinon some fifty or sixty years after Joan’s footfalls had died away. His life and work is animated by the spirit of the Troubadors. While Dante, the southerner, had written with a yearning for the spiritual heights, all Rabelais’s delight seems, at first glance at least, to be in the material world. His great novel Gargantua and Pantagruel tells stories of giants rampaging around the world causing havoc because of their gigantic appetites. The joy in everyday objects that had been characteristic of the Troubadors was given a humorous new twist by Rabelais. Gargantua contains a long list of objects you might want to use to wipe your bottom that includes a lady’s velvet mask, a page’s bonnet, feathered in the Swiss style, a cat, sage, fennel, spinach leaves, sheets, curtains, a chicken, a cormorant and an otter.

The long struggle to wake up to the material world that had begun with Noah is finally completed and the result is sheer delight. Love of light and laughter, food and drink, wrestling and love-making drives the densely packed, punchy prose. In the pages of Rabelais, the world is not the terrible place the Church has made it out to be. The Church’s world-denying philosophy is shown to be unhealthy. ‘Laugh and face it out boldly whatever it may be,’ said Rabelais. Laughter, jolliness and good humour were a cure for both mind and body. Both could be transformed.

Rabelais loves the world and in his writing love of objects and love of words go hand in hand. A profusion of things and the coining of new words come tumbling off the page. But there is a sly initiatic undercurrent for those who wish to look for it. Rabelais is a mystic but not in the otherworldly style of the Middle Ages.

Troubadors had written of the madness of being in love and some of them had written of themselves as fools and madmen. By this they meant that they had found new ways into the spirit worlds, and that when they returned they saw life upside down and inside out.

For the Troubadors, then, everyday reality had looked very different, and Rabelais now turned this new way of seeing into a narrative, creating a subversive style of humour that would become characteristic of initiatic writers such as Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Lewis Carroll and André Breton. Not only does Rabelais find that he is able to rampage around the spirit worlds with new-found freedom, but when he returns to the material world he is unable to take people’s assumptions about it, their conventions, their morality, seriously. In his story his heroes found the Abbey of Thelema, which has the instruction ‘Do what thou wilt’ inscribed above its gate. Rabelais envisioned a company of initiates whose consciousness is so transformed that they are beyond good and evil.

At the end of Gargantua and Pantagruel, after many voyages of exploration over many seas, during which they have seen many wonders, battled with cat-people, armies of sausages and windmill-eating giants, our heroes finally reach a mysterious island. The twentieth-century alchemist Fulcanelli explained that by this arrival Rabelais means to say that his heroes are entering the Matrix.

They are led to an initiation chamber in an underground temple. Stories of going underground should always alert us to the fact that occult physiology is being referred to. The journey underground is a journey inside the body.

In the centre and deepest part of the temple stands a sacred fountain of life. Fulcanelli pointed out that Rabelais allowed his esoteric, alchemical interests to come to the surface in this description of the fountain with its seven columns dedicated to the seven planets. Each planetary god carries the appropriate precious stones, metals and alchemical symbols. A figure of Saturn hangs over one column with a scythe and a crane at his feet. Most tellingly Mercury is described as ‘fixed, firm and malleable’ — which is to say semi-solidified in the process of alchemical transmutation.

What flows from this fountain and what our pilgrims — which is how we should think of them, we now realize — drink is wine. ‘Drinking is the distinguishing character of humanity,’ writes Rabelais, ‘I mean drinking cool, delicious wine, for you must know, my beloved, that by wine we become divine, for it is in its power to fill the spirit with truth, learning and philosophy.’ In some oriental occult physiology wine is used as a symbol of the secretions within the brain that stream into consciousness in ecstatic states. In the twentieth century some Indian scientists went so far as to suggest that ‘wine’ in Vedic texts referred to what we today call dimethyltryptamine, the enzyme that streams down from the higher regions of the cerebellum that we have already touched on in our discussion of shamanism. Swami Yogananda likewise talked of neuro-physiological secretions he called ‘blissful amrita’, the pulsating nectar of immortality that brings with it moments of heightened consciousness, and enables us to perceive directly the great ideas that weave together the material world.

‘Oh Lord,’ wrote the Sufi master Sheikh Abdullah Ansari, ‘intoxicate me with the wine of Thy love.’