The deepest mystery of this individuality, though, concerns an even earlier incarnation from the time when human bodies were on the borderline of becoming solid flesh. Enoch was the earliest prophet of the Sun god, a man whose face shone with a sun-like radiance.
When St Germain took Cagliostro on a tour of the heavens they were going on the tour described in the Book of Enoch. In the phrase Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, St Germain looked forward to a time when humanity would reach out to the Sun god with freedom of thought and will, as they had failed to do the first time He came.
The secret history of the world from the late sixteenth century to the nineteenth century is dominated by the work behind the scenes of the great ascended masters of Western tradition, Enoch and Elijah, and by preparations for the descent from the skies of the Archangel of the Sun — and, beyond this, for the descent of an even greater being.
These men were preparing the way for the Second Coming.
AS THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY PROGRESSED, sightings of the mysterious count become rarer, but a mood of optimism and expectation filled the lodges of the secret societies. In France ‘the Unknown Philosopher’, St Martin, was teaching that ‘every man is a king’. Chevalier Ramsay, the Scottish laird who had founded a Grand Lodge in Paris in 1730, made a speech to new initiates in Paris in 1737: ‘The whole world is nothing but a great republic. We strive for the reunion of all people of an enlightened mind… not only through the love of the fine arts, but even more through the elevated principles of virtue, science and religion, in which the interests of the brotherhood and that of the entire family of humankind can meet each other… and from which the subjects of all kingdoms can learn to love each other.’
Freemasonry provided a protected space for the tolerant discussion of ideas, for free scientific enquiry and for investigation into the spirit worlds.
Following the establishment of mother lodges in Scotland, London and Paris, the great event of Freemasonry in the eighteenth century took place in the 1760s. This was the founding of the Order of Elus Coens (or ‘chosen priests’) by the Portuguese magus Martines de Pasqually. The rituals of the Elus Coens, devised by de Pasqually, were sometimes up to six hours long and involved an incense that blended hallucinogens and fly agaric mushroom spores. In the later rituals of Stanislas de Guaita, much influenced by de Pasqually, a blindfold was removed and the candidate might find himself facing men wearing Egyptian masks and headdresses who silently pointed swords at his chest.
In the way that Dr Dee had worked to bring back real spiritual experience into the Church by the practice of ceremonial magic, men like de Pasqually and Cagliostro did the same in Freemasonry. In 1782 Cagliostro founded Egyptian Right Freemasonry, which would be highly influential in both France and America.
De Pasqually’s pupil and successor, St Martin, placed less emphasis on ceremony and more on internal, esoteric disciplines. Influenced in this by his reading of Boehme, his version of Martinist philosophy has remained highly influential in French Freemasonry to this day. Living in Paris at the time of the Terror, St Martin allowed men and women to come to his apartment, initiating them by a mystical laying on of hands. They were in such peril that they continued to wear their masks even during their meetings in order to hide their identities even from one another.
Famous for his genially excoriating attacks on religion, Voltaire is often thought of as a God-hater. In reality, it was organized religion he was against. When he was initiated by Benjamin Franklin, he was given the apron belonging to Helvetius to kiss. Helvetius was the famous Swiss scientist whose account of alchemical transmutation remains the second most highly authenticated account after that of Leibniz.
The historian of Freemasonry and mystical experience A.E. Waite wrote of Masonry’s ‘dreams of antique science, proclaiming that the reality behind dreams must be sought in the spirit of dreams’. He talked of Voltaire as the man ‘who held the keys — who had forged the key — which opened up the door to this reality and unfolded amazing vistas of possibility… Condemned practices, forbidden arts might lead through some clouds of mystery into the light of knowledge.’ We will see more clearly what this means in the next chapter, but for the moment it is enough to say that the initiates of the secret societies were amazed by these new vistas.
Their breasts were full of such faith and optimism that they would undoubtedly have agreed with Wordsworth that bliss was it that dawn to be alive.
Among the artists, writers and composers of the secret societies this great wealth of enthusiasm and these expectations of the dawn of a new age gave rise to the Romantic movement. Whenever there is a great flowering of imaginative art and literature, as, for example, in the Renaissance and Romanticism, we should suspect the presence somewhere in the shadows of sacred idealism as a philosophy of life and of the secret societies which cultivate that philosophy.
THIS HAS BEEN A HISTORY OF THE WORLD according to idealism — if we take idealism in its philosophical sense of proposing that ideas are more real than objects. Idealism in the more common, colloquial sense — meaning living according to high ideals — was, as George Steiner has pointed out, an invention of the nineteenth century.
In the previous century the lodges of England, America and France had worked to create societies that were less cruel, superstitious and ignorant, less repressive and prejudiced and more tolerant. The world had become all of these things — and also more insincere and frivolous.
Even before the Terror there was disquiet, an anxiety that, although society might be made to run along straight lines, this enterprise was adequate neither to human nature nor to other, darker forces operating outside the laws of nature. Romanticism was partly an attempt to come to terms with a galvanic feeling of intensity rising up from below and what today we would call the unconscious. It would give rise to intense music and poetry. It would be impatient of convention, encouraging spontaneity and self-abandon.
In the land of Eckhart various writers saw France in particular as a land of ‘soulless little dancing masters who did not understand the inner life of man’. In Lessing, Schlegel and Schiller philosophical idealism became a philosophy of life once more. Above all, this idealism would exalt the imagination, holding the mystical and esoteric belief that the imagination is a higher mode of perception than that offered by the senses. Imagination can be trained to grasp higher realities than the materialism being peddled by the apostles of common sense.