The Secret History of the World

5. THE GODS WHO LOVED WOMEN The Nephilim • The Genetic Engineering of Humankind • The Fish Gods • The Original History of the Origin of the Species

WE ARE NOW ABOUT TO LOOK INTO ONE of the murkier and more shameful episodes in the history of the world. Even within the secret societies a veil is sometimes drawn.

A priest in Babylon at the time of Alexander the Great was one of the first historians. It is clear from the few remaining fragments that Berosus, like Herodotus before him, had studied the king lists inscribed on temple walls and delved into the secret priestly archives.

The few fragments of Berosus that survive contain teachings on the history of the origins of the earth and the sky and of the race of hermaphrodites, the pre-sexual humans who reproduced by means of parthenogenesis.

Berosus goes on to describe how the land came to be inhabited by a primitive race. Then one day a monster emerged on the seashore, an animal called Oannes ‘… whose whole body was that of a fish; under the fish’s head he had another head with feet also below similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish’s tail. His voice and language were articulate and human; and representation of him is preserved even to this day…’

‘This monster was accustomed to pass the day among men, but took no food then; and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences and arts of every kind. He taught them to construct cities, to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge. He made them distinguish the seeds of the earth and showed them how to collect fruits; in short, he instructed them in everything which could soften manners and humanize their lives…’

‘And when the sun had set this being Oannes retired again into the sea, and passed the night in the sea, for he was amphibious… ’

‘After this appeared other animals like Oannes…’

Similar stories of fish gods who suddenly appear and become the teachers of mankind can be found in other traditions, for example the Indian stories about Matsya, the first avatar of Vishnu, and the stories of the ancient Phoenicians of the Dagon, who taught humankind the art of irrigation, and the ancient fish gods of the Dagon tribe in West Africa. We even know from Plutarch that the earliest representations of Zeus were of a man with a fish tail, an image which survived in Greek mythology in the form of his brother Poseidon.

Some modern writers outside the esoteric tradition have seen in this fish imagery evidence for an alien invasion in ancient times. It’s even been suggested that the human race was genetically engineered by alien invaders, which is a good illustration of the way that esoteric traditions are misinterpreted by people trying to impose a materialistic interpretation on them.

If our candidate for initiation had been initiated to a high enough level, he would have been taught the truth of the matter, something very like the following…

IN GENESIS THERE IS A PASSAGE WHICH may at first not seem to refer to exactly the same fishy events, though it is also about invasion by beings from another realm:

Genesis, 6:1-5. ‘And it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair: and they took wives which they chose… when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.’

What on earth are we to make of this passage? The phrase here translated as ‘sons of God’ is elsewhere in the Bible a phrase used to mean angels, messengers coming down from heaven. But in this context ‘coming down’ also seems to carry with it moral opprobrium. By saying that the angels had sex with women is Genesis perhaps saying that these angels lowered themselves to participate in the material world? And perhaps they had become too enamoured with it?

As I say, we are now trying to penetrate one of the murkier episodes in the secret history, and indeed these five verses in Genesis might well remain completely impenetrable were it not for the fact that this episode is treated rather more fully in ancient Hebrew traditions — particularly the Book of Enoch.

This book disappeared from mainstream, exoteric history in AD 300-400, but traditions regarding its existence, its contents and teachings were preserved in Freemasonry. Then in 1773 some very tattered scripts of it were tracked down in Ethiopian monasteries by the Scottish explorer James Bruce, and in this way the old Freemasonic traditions were vindicated.

Never part of the canon of Christian scripture as it was put together in the fourth century, the Book of Enoch was nevertheless sufficiently esteemed by writers of the New Testament for them to quote from it, evidently viewing it as an authority with a status something like sacred scripture. It is a measure of the status of this book that Jesus Christ evidently recognized its notions of a coming kingdom and the judgement of the world. Moreover the phrase used at his Transfiguration, ‘This is my Son, the Elect One’, is meant to show that Jesus Christ is the One promised by the Book of Enoch.

This is what the Book of Enoch has to say about the angels who loved women:

Enoch 6.1-4. ‘And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the Angels, the children of heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: “Come, let us choose ourselves wives from among the children of men and beget us children.”… And all the others together with them took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them, and they taught them charms and enchantments… and they became pregnant.’

Later Enoch is given a tour of the Heavens, where the rebel angels — or Watchers — ask Enoch to intercede with God on their behalf. But when Enoch tries to do so, God only repudiates them, sending Enoch back:

‘And go say to the Watchers, who have sent thee to intercede for them: You should intercede for men, and not men for you… ’

The story of the rebellious angels is then retold, as it were, in God’s own words with additional details:

Enoch 6. 15-16. ‘Wherefore have ye left the high, holy and eternal Heaven, and lain with women, and defiled yourselves with the daughters of men and taken to yourselves wives, and done like the children of the Earth, and begotten giants as your sons. And though you were spiritual beings living the eternal life, you have defiled yourselves with the blood of women, and have begotten children with the blood of flesh and blood as those also who die and perish… And now as to the Watchers who have sent thee to intercede for them, who have been aforetime in Heaven, say to them: “You have been in Heaven, but all the mysteries had not yet been revealed to you, and you knew worthless ones, and these in the hardness of your hearts you have made known to women, and through these mysteries women and men work much evil on earth.” Say to them therefore: “You have no peace.”’

The Epistle of Jude 6:6 describes the Watchers as having ‘not kept their own appointed habitations’. A third century Christian writer, Commodorius, wrote: ‘The women who seduced the angels were of such lewdness that their seducers could not now desire to return to heaven.’

But beyond these few, strange fragmentary hints lies a set of characters very familiar to us all.

When the Epistle to Jude describes the Watchers as not having kept to their appointed seasons, it seems to be referring to them in some way as timekeepers. But the final, telling clue to revealing the hidden identity of these ‘fallen angels’ lies in their number, given in one of the versions the Book of Enoch as seven.

In all traditions seven is the number of the great gods of the solar system. Again we see that the biblical narrative has encoded within it stories of the same astronomical gods as those of Greece and Rome.

The angels who became sexually attracted to human women are none other than the gods of Olympus.

WE HAVE SEEN THAT THE BIBLE CONTAINS encoded within it an account of creation in which key roles have been played by Saturn, earth, the sun, Venus and the moon. We have followed the story from the purely material to the vegetable to the first stirrings of animal life. The age that followed would be marked by the arrival of the gods of the solar system; Jupiter — or Zeus, as he was known to the Greeks — became the king of all the gods. The gods of Mars and Mercury would fly into view during this age too.

The infant Jupiter had to be hidden from his father, Saturn. Mother Earth kept Jupiter on the island of Crete in a cave deep underground. Isolated from the other gods, the boy Jupiter lived on the milk of a goat-nymph and ate the honey of sacred bees.

Mother Earth hid Jupiter in this cave because she was afraid that Saturn and the Titans, the elder sons and daughters of Saturn, would come to destroy him. She knew that the birth of Jupiter showed that the reign of Saturn was coming to an end, but the transition from one age to another is always a painful one. The old order always tries to stay on beyond its allotted time.

The Titans were Saturn’s enforcers. They were the consciousness eaters. They wanted to swallow up the new life and create what Milton, who knew all about the secret history, called ‘a universe of Death’.

The Titans would always be the enemies of Jupiter. They failed to kill him while he was still an infant, but they did not cease to wage war on him, sporadically and in great battles, until finally and decisively Jupiter defeated them and imprisoned them underground. There these great forces of materialism became part of the very structure of the earth, and whenever volcanoes rumbled and threatened to erupt the ancients heard their discontent.

With the Titans imprisoned, Jupiter became for a while the undisputed ruler of Mount Olympus, king of the gods and god of a new age. He shook his magnificent locks and the whole earth trembled. He was the only god strong enough to throw the thunderbolt.

In his masterpiece The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, the great Italian scholar and writer Roberto Calasso, who has done much to bring esoteric lore regarding the historical reality behind myths to a wider public, put it like this: ‘Olympus is a rebellion of lightness against precision.’ In other words the Olympic gods — Jupiter, Apollo, Mars, Mercury, Diana, Athena and the others — rebelled against the limitations imposed by Saturn. The Olympians flew through the air to perform magical deeds and defeat terrible monsters. It was a splendid, spectacular era that thrashes and writhes in the mind, inspiring some of history’s most imaginative art, sculpture and literature.

But it was also somewhat sinister, an age charged with moral ambiguity. The thunderbolt of Jupiter struck through a dense fug of testosterone, the feral reek of animal passion, the fell heartlessness of animal ferocity.

Jupiter raped Callisto and she was turned into a bear. He raped Io, turning her into a cow. He punished Lycaon for cannibalism by turning him into a wolf. Apollo’s lust for Hyacinth caused the beautiful youth to metamorphose into the flower and his rape of Daphne ended in her morphing into the laurel bush.

We should take note that all these myths are concerned with is the proliferation of natural forms, the cramming of every square inch of our planet with the almost infinite variety of plants and animals, the biodiversity that is its great natural glory. Zeus is not moral in a sense that Moses would have recognized, but he and his fellow Olympians direct the galvanizing fecundity, the myriad creativity of the biological world.

BUT WHAT OF THE STORY OF THE FISH GODS? How does that fit in?

We have seen that many mythologies around the world tell the strange story of the arrival of the fish gods, and we have touched on the fact that even Jupiter in his earliest representations was one of them. We have seen, too, that the myths of Jupiter and the other Olympian gods are an account of the proliferation of animal forms. Bringing these two things together gives rise to an astonishing possibility.

Could it be that the ancient myths anticipated the modern, scientific insight that the animal life that would eventually evolve into the human form began life as a fish?

If this were true, it would be an astonishing revelation

DARWIN’S DISCOVERY OF THE EVOLUTION of the species is one of history’s great scientific discoveries, ranked alongside Galileo’s, Newton’s and Einstein’s. Could it be that the priests of the Mystery schools knew of the evolution of species many thousand of years earlier? We shall now discover how evidence for this claim, which may, initially at least, sound implausible, is written across the sky in blazing lights for all to see.

We are cracking the code of the cosmos. We saw how the earliest episodes in history are to be understood in terms of the ordered creation of the solar system. One after the other Saturn, the Sun, Venus, the Moon and Jupiter joined in the work of weaving together the basic conditions that made possible the evolution of life on earth. Following this sequence has brought us to the dawn of animal life and of consciousness and the beginning of the proliferation of animal forms.

In order to understand the history of the development of these animal forms, we must turn again to astronomy, and following on from the sequence in which the ancients believed the planets were created we turn to an interlocking sequence — the constellations of the zodiac.

TO ANCIENTS THE FORCES OF NATURE WERE asleep during winter and then reawakened, exerting their influence anew in the spring. The constellation in which the sun rose in the spring was therefore very important to them. The sun vivified that constellation, energizing it and increasing its power to shape the world and its history.

Because of a slight wobble in the earth as it spins on its axis, the sun seems to us to fall slowly backwards against the backdrop of stars. Over a period of some 2160 years the sun rises in the same constellation. It then moves on to the next one. We are currently in the Age of Pisces and famously awaiting the dawn of the Age of Aquarius. As constellation follows constellation, and age follows age, the symphonic variations of the Music of the Spheres signal a new movement. The cycle of animating powers, of instinctual drives sweeping through the cosmos, moves on to a new plane.

We think of the twelve constellations of the zodiac following in a sequence according to months of the year, Aries followed by Taurus, then Gemini and so on. In the larger cycle measured by the appearances of these constellations at the spring equinox, the constellations move ‘backwards’, Gemini is followed by Taurus, then Aries and so on.

This phenomenon is known as precession. There is some dispute among academics as to when the ancients first became aware of it. The breakthrough book on this subject was Hamlet’s Mill, written by MIT Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Professor of Science at Frankfurt University, and published in the late 1950s. Tremendously erudite, it began a process of rediscovering an astronomical dimension of myths that had long been forgotten outside the secret societies. Their thesis is that one of the stories central to all mythology, indeed all literature from Oedipus Rex to Hamlet, the story of the dispossessed son who defeats his uncle to regain his father’s throne, is a description of an astronomical event: of one precessional epoch succeeding another.

But Hamlet’s Mill provides an essentially static model. It shows that precession is encoded on one particular archetype, not how the succession of ruling constellations allows us to organize different layers of myth in their proper chronological sequence.

Let us now look at this sequence in terms of the historical reality that lies behind the myths of Jupiter and the other gods, according to esoteric tradition.

Because we have been looking at history as it has been remembered in myths, particularly the myths of the gods of Olympus, we have naturally been picturing for ourselves anatomically modern humans. However, we should continue to bear in mind that these myths represent what these things would have looked like to the eye of the imagination. But to a physical eye, if any such had existed, it would all have looked very different.

Because what these imaginative pictures represent is the beginning and development of primitive life-forms.

If the age of the first marine life was marked by the rulership of the planet Jupiter, then in terms of the precession of the constellations it was marked by Pisces. When the sun first began to rise in the constellation of Pisces, a new form condensed out of the semi-liquid substance on the earth’s surface. This was the earliest embryonic form of the fish — somewhat like a modern jellyfish.

The ancients conceived of this evolutionary impulse as a god. If primitive life on earth — the life that would eventually evolve into human life — took on a primitive fish form, that was because a god took on this form and, as it were, pulled life on earth with him.

In Egypt this miraculous event, the birth of animal life, was known as the birth of Horus, and the earliest representations of Horus, like those of Jupiter, were half-man, half-fish.

So we again see that the Greeks and Egyptians, like the Greeks and the Hebrews, worshipped the same god in different cultural clothing.

The next precessional age was the first Age of Aquarius. This was the era of the evolution of amphibians, giant floating creatures, somewhat like the modern dolphins but with webbed limbs and lantern-like foreheads. This lantern was the pineal gland; protruding from the top it still holds in some reptiles, such as the Tuatara species of lizard, from New Zealand.

The ‘lantern’ was still these proto-human creatures’ main organ of perception. Sensitive to warmth and coolness in other living beings, both in the vicinity and in the distance, the lantern could intuit their inner nature. These proto-humans could intuit, too, the nature of plants, assessing their suitability as food or medicine — in the way that some animals can. And because the laws of natural growth were not yet completely fixed, humans could also speak to plants in a way which might, as the ancient sagas of the Jews have it, make ‘a tree yield fruit or ears of wheat grow as tall as the cedars of Lebanon’. We must imagine the speech made by these amphibian-humans as sounding something like the bellow of a stag.

Lantern-headed humans were later idealized as unicorns. The Earth goddess still told them what to do clairvoyantly, so that the natural law and the moral law were the same thing. This historical truth is beautifully portrayed in the famous tapestry in the Musée de Cluny in Paris, where the unicorn lays its head in the lap of a virgin.

Our collective memory of the unicorn is, of course, of a hunted creature. Humans might seek sanctuary in the lap of Mother Earth, but the world was becoming a dangerous place. We saw that desire had originally existed independently of humankind, and desires continued to exist independently, unintegrated into the proto-human form. These desires running wild were the dragons of mythology. They terrorized the rest of creation.

As the marshy surface of the earth began to harden into something like dry land, the next stage of the development of human form began. This was the beginning of the Age of Capricorn, when proto-humans developed calves and limbs to crawl on to land to pursue their burgeoning animal desires.

According to the ancient wisdom it was the arrival of Mars that led to the evolution of warm-blooded animals. Mars arrived at the time of the transition from the lizard-like amphibians of the Age of Capricorn to the land animals of the Age of four-footed Sagittarius.

The iron of Mars yielded red blood and provided the conditions that would make egotism possible — and not only in the sense of a healthy drive to survive. As the earth continued to harden and become denser and drier, it shrank further, with the result that one being could only prosper at another’s expense. It became part of the human condition that I can hardly move without harming, even killing, another living creature. Because of Mars there is also a cruel part of human nature that rejoices in this, exults in forcing a fellow human being to submit, and experiences euphoria when it is dominant over others, when it is able to exercise willpower without restraint.

As proto-humans became wholly land creatures, it also became necessary to create new ways for humans to communicate. It was as the result of the influence of Mercury that the thorax evolved. Mercury also fashioned leaner and fitter limbs, the better for humans to move towards each other and live and work together. He was, of course, the messenger and scribe of the gods, known as Hermes to the Greeks and Thoth to the Egyptians.

He was also the god of tricks and thieving.

THIS CHAPTER HAS BEEN A COMMENTARY on Genesis, taking into account parallel traditions, such as the Egyptian and the Greek. This way of interpreting or decoding the Bible surfaced among the Neoplatonists and early Cabalists and was exposed by groups like the Rosicrucians. Much of what we have been considering can be found, for example, in the seventeenth-century writings of Robert Fludd (highly influential on Milton’s Paradise Lost) and, slightly later, Jacob Boehme’s commentary on Genesis, already mentioned, Mysterium Magnum. The work of elucidating these commentaries and reframing the wisdom of the Rosicricians in modern times was carried out by the great Austrian scholar and initiate Rudolf Steiner, whose Anthroposophical Society perhaps has the best claim to be a genuine survivor of the true Rosicrucian stream.

However, even outside the esoteric tradition, it is acknowledged that the ancient civilizations around the world showed remarkable agreement when it came to the images associated with the sequence of the constellations of the zodiac. This agreement is all the more remarkable, you might think, when you consider how little the arrangements of the stars as seen from the surface of the earth suggest these images.

The reality is that the ancients saw in this sequence of the constellations the history of the evolution of humanity and the world, as it was collectively remembered and understood. For them the history of the world was written in the stars.

THEREFORE, WHAT IS GENERALLY REGARDED as a modern idea that put paid to ancient superstition is in fact itself an ancient idea. An understanding of the ordered evolution of the species originated thousands of years before Darwin set sail in HMS Beagle.

This secret history was encoded in the zodiac, written down by initiates such as Jacob Boehme and Robert Fludd, and preserved into modern times by esoteric groups such as the Freemasons and various Rosicrucian groups, but always and very deliberately in a way that was hard for outsiders to understand.

Then in the nineteenth century, when the sacred texts of Hinduism were first translated into European languages and openly published, much esoteric knowledge which had previously been carefully managed and controlled, now leaked into the public consciousness. Fascination with these ideas also led to a renewed interest in the Cabala and other Western traditions and helped fire the craze for spiritualism. Many of the great intellectuals of the period became interested in trying to apply scientific methodology to spiritual and spiritualist phenomena. In 1874 Charles Darwin attended séances with the novelist George Eliot. Darwin’s rival A.E. Wallace took part in several controlled experiments into spiritualism, believing its phenomena could be measured and verified just as well as other types of phenomena were measured and verified by the other sciences. As we shall see later, many leading intellectuals, including scientists, believed that there was something in esoteric philosophy, and that science and the supernatural would eventually come together.

Friedrich Max Müller was a young German scholar, employed by the East India Company in the 1840s to translate the Rig Veda, before being awarded a professorial chair at Oxford. He went on to translate the sacred books of the East in fifty volumes, making oriental esoteric doctrines widely available for the first time. He was also very friendly with Darwin with whom he kept up a regular correspondence. The Origin of Species was published in 1859.

IN THE SECRET HISTORY THE EVOLUTION of the species was not the even progress that science supposes. There were twists and turns that have important implications for the way we understand our own physiology and mental make-up. There were dead ends, false starts and even deliberate attempts at sabotage.

Snakes, spiders, beetles and parasitic creatures, on the other hand, were formed under the malignant influence of Dark Side of the Moon.

According to the secret doctrine the animals we know today evolved into the forms we are familiar with today, influenced by the stars and planets, lions by the constellation of Leo, for instance, bulls by the constellation of Taurus. Centaurs, mermaids, sirens, fauns and satyrs were predecessors of anatomically modern humans, representing the impulse to create anatomically modern humans in various transitional stages.

The cosmic plan was that all the world’s biological forms would gradually be incorporated into humankind, which was intended to be the crown of all creation. As the gods led humanity closer and closer to human anatomy as we know it, they assumed the part-animal, part-human forms remembered by the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Persians and the Babylonians, until they finally assumed anatomically perfect forms remembered by the last great civilizations of the ancient world, the Greeks and Romans. For example, the goddess of the planet Venus was cow-headed Hathor and the god of the planet Mercury was dog-headed Anubis on the walls of Egyptian temples. According to the secret tradition, these same gods, the same living beings, were remembered by the classical Greeks in a later, more evolved form.

The ancient texts describing this era also lay great emphasis on its giants. The author of the Book of Enoch writing in the Hebrew tradition and Plato writing in the Greek tradition agree that in these early pre-Flood times there arose a race of giants. In fact, traditions of an antediluvian race of giants can be found all over the world from the Danavas and Daityas of India to the Miaotse of China. In a Dialogue between Midas the Phrygian and Silenus that has survived in fragmentary form from the time of Alexander the Great, Silenus says that ‘men grew to double the size of the tallest men in his time, and they lived to twice the age’. In the secret tradition, the gigantic Bamyan statues recently destroyed in Afghanistan were not three giant statues of buddhas but three life-sized statues of giants of 173, 120 and 30 feet high. The drapery that made them look like buddhas was made of plaster, said to have been added to the stone later. In the nineteenth century it was recorded that the locals believed them to be statues of the Miaotse, the giants of Chinese tradition. The famous statues of Easter Island are also supposed to record the real heights of historical giants.

Then there were the dead-end freaks — the one-legged men, the bat-men, the insect-men and the men with tails. Manetho, an Egyptian historian of the third century BC, also recorded traditions of the progency of the Watchers, writing ‘they… brought double-winged human beings, also others with four wings and two faces, human beings with one body and two heads, still other human beings had thighs of goats and horns upon their heads; others had the feet of horses behind and men in front; there were also others said to have been man-headed bulls and four-headed dogs, whose tails emerged like fish-tails from their backs… and other monsters, such as all kinds of dragon-like beings.’

This, then, is the era remembered in the great myths and finds echoes in great fantasy literature, such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis. This fantasy literature represents a welling up into the present of a collective memory of this period when humans lived on the earth with giants, dragons, mermaids, centaurs, unicorns, fauns, satyrs. Legions of dwarves, sylphs, nymphs, dryads and other lesser spiritual beings served the gods and humans rubbed shoulders with them, fought battles with them and sometimes fell in love with them.

IN THE SECRET HISTORY, THE LAST CREATURES to incarnate before humans were the apes. They came about because some human spirits rushed into incarnation too early, before human anatomy had been perfected.

In the secret history, therefore, it is not right to say that humans are descended from apes, rather that apes represent a degeneration of humankind.

Of course none of the fabulous creatures have left any trace in the fossil record. So why have the great men and women of history who were initiates of the secret societies believed in them? Why should any intelligent person even begin to toy with the idea?