Napoleon employed a team of scholars to come to the conclusion that Isis was the ancient goddess of Paris, and then decreed that the goddess and her star should be included in Paris’s coat of arms. On the Arc de Triomphe Josephine is portrayed kneeling at his feet carrying the laurel of Isis.
We can infer from this that Napoleon did not identify himself with Sirius, he followed it, as Orion follows Sirius across the sky. In Freemasonic initiation ceremonies candidates are reborn — as Osiris was reborn — looking up at a five-pointed star that represents Isis. Osiris/Orion the Hunter is the masculine impulse towards power, action and impregnation, pursuing Isis, the gatekeeper to life’s mysteries.
This is how Napoleon thought of Josephine, born of a family deeply immersed in esoteric Freemasonry and already a Freemason herself when he met her. Napoleon could conquer mainland Europe, but he could never quite conquer the sublimely beautiful Josephine. He longed for her as Dante had longed for Beatrice and longing made him aspire higher.
Osiris and Isis are also, of course, associated with the sun and the moon and on one level, as we have seen, this is to do with the cosmos’s arranging of itself in order to make human thought possible. In ancient Egypt the heliacal rising of Sirius in the middle of June presaged the rising of the Nile. In some esoteric traditions Sirius is the central sun of the universe around which our sun rotates.
This complex nexus of esoteric thought, combined with his love for Josephine, informed Napoleon’s sense of destiny.
But in 1813 the powers guiding and empowering Napoleon left him, as they always leave everyone, quite suddenly, and, as Goethe had described, the powers of reaction rushed in from all sides to destroy him.
We see the same process in the lives of artists. They struggle to find their voice, reach an inspired period during which they cannot put a brushstroke wrong, perhaps leading art into a new era. Then the spirit suddenly leaves them and they are unable to recapture it, no matter how hard they try.
THROUGHOUT THIS HISTORY WE HAVE repeatedly referred to the series of experiences a candidate must go through to achieve initiation, including the experience of kama loca, or purgatory, where the soul and spirit, still united, are attacked by demons. Now it is time to touch on the idea taught in the esoteric schools that the whole of humanity was to undergo something like an initiation.
The secret societies were preparing for this event, helping humanity to develop the sense of self and other qualities that would be needed during the ordeal.
In the middle decades of the eighteenth century Freemasonry spread throughout the world — to Austria, Spain, India, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Russia, Denmark, Norway and China. Following in the footsteps of the American and French brethren, Freemasonry inspired republican revolutions all round the world.
Madame Blavatsky wrote that among the Carbonari — the revolutionary precursors and pioneers of Garibaldi — there was more than one Freemason deeply versed in occult science and Rosicrucianism. Garibaldi himself was a 33rd degree Freemason and Grand Master of Italian Freemasonry.
In Hungary Louis Kossuth, and in South America Simon Bolivar, Francisco de Miranda, Venustiano Carranza, Benito Juarez and Fidel Castro, all fought for freedom.
Today in the USA there are some 13,000 lodges, and in 2001 it was estimated that there were some seven million Freemasons worldwide.
WE HAVE SEEN HOW JESUS CHRIST planted the seed of the interior life, how this interior life was expanded and populated by Shakespeare and Cervantes. In the eighteenth century and, particularly, the nineteenth century the great initiate-novelists forged the sense we all enjoy today that this interior world has its own history, a narrative with meaning, highs and lows, reversals of fortune and dilemmas, turning points when life-changing decisions may be made.
The great novelists of the age — we think of the Brontës, of Dickens — were also full of a sense that, just as human consciousness was understood in esoteric thought to have evolved through history, so consciousness also evolves in individual human lives.
John Comenius grew up in the Prague of Rudolf II where he attended the coronation of the Winter King. He knew John Valentine Andrae in Heidelberg, and was then invited by his friend, the occultist Samuel Hartlib, to join him in London ‘to help complete the Work’. By his educational reforms Comenius would introduce into the mainstream of history the idea that in childhood we experience a very different state of mind from the one we develop in adulthood.
We see Comenius’s influence in, for example, Jane Eyre or David Copperfield — and we should be aware that it was very new then.
But the area of esoteric thought which would have the biggest effect on the novel would be that of the deeper laws. The novel provided an arena for novelists steeped in esoteric philosophy to show the working out of these laws in individual human lives.
THE TIME HAS COME TO GET TO GRIPS with this elusive concept which lies right at the heart of the esoteric view of the cosmos and its history.
We saw how Elijah, working behind the scenes of history, had helped bring about a split in consciousness between the objective Baconian consciousness and the subjective Shakespearean consciousness. We saw, too, how viewing the world as objectively as possible made the laws of physics snap into focus.
But what about subjective experience? What about the structure of experience itself?
In time the science of psychology would arise. But psychology would make the materialistic assumption that matter influences the mind, never the other way around. Psychology, then, turned a blind eye to a universal part of human experience — the experience of meaning.
We have already touched on the way that Rosicrucians had begun to formulate laws in line with oriental esoteric thought on ‘the nameless’ way, inextricably bound up with notions of human wellbeing. In the East there is an august tradition of tracing the operation of yang and its opposite ying, but in the West this remained an elusive element that slipped between the emerging sciences of physics and psychology.
If the laws that govern these elusive elements are difficult to think about in abstract terms, it is much easier to see them in action. Some of the great novelists of the nineteenth century wrote explicitly occult novels. In addition to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights shows a spirit pursue its beloved from beyond the grave. George Eliot’s Lifting the Veil, the fruit of her passionate investigation of the occult, was suppressed by her publisher. Then, as we shall see shortly, there was Dostoyevsky.
But as well as this explicit occultism, a more widespread influence is implicit in much more fiction. A great vision of the working out of the deeper laws in individual lives, the complex, irrational patterns that could not occur if science explained everything there is in the universe, can be found in the very greatest novels.
Jane Eyre, Bleak House, Moby Dick, Middlemarch, War and Peace hold up a mirror to our lives and point up the significant patterns of order and meaning that are our universal experience, even when science tells us not to believe the evidence of our eyes, hearts and minds.
ON ONE LEVEL NOVELS ARE ALL ABOUT egotism. A novel always involves seeing the world from other people’s points of view. Reading a novel, therefore, lessens egotism. Also the failings of characters in novels are very often to do with egotism, either in terms of self-interest or, more particularly, the failure to empathize.