The Secret History of the World

^{Artists such as Peter Breugel, Henri Met Des Bles and, here, Hieronymus Bosch often depicted proto-human creatures of pink, waxy-bone. Art critics have not until now discovered the source of these images.}

RETURNING TO THE CREATION NARRATIVE and the great imaginative images encoded within Genesis, we see that Adam’s body had at first been very soft and amorphous, his skin almost as delicate as the skin on a pond, but now it began to harden. As the great Christian mystic and Rosicrucian philosopher Jacob Boehme wrote in Mysterium Magnum, his commentary on Genesis, ‘what would in time become bone now hardened and became something closer to wax’. Warmed by the sun, his green limbs also began to become tinged with pink.

As Adam solidified he also began to divide into two, that is to say he was an hermaphrodite who reproduced in an asexual way. When pressed, any scholar of biblical Hebrew will have to admit that Genesis 1.27, the passage usually translated ‘Male and female He created them’, properly reads ‘Male and female they [i.e. the Elohim] created him [singular]’.

So, it was by this plant-like method of reproduction that Eve was born out of Adam’s body, moulded from the waxy cartilage which served Adam for bone.

The progeny of Adam and Eve also reproduced asexually, procreating by using sounds in a way that was analogous to the creative activity of the Word. This episode in history is related to Freemasonic lore pertaining to ‘the Word that has been lost’, the esoteric belief when in the far future this Word is rediscovered, it will be possible to impregnate using only the sound of the human voice.

^{The separation of the earth and sun in a seventeenth-century English print, illustrating the writings of Robert Fludd, an eminent Rosicrucian scholar traditionally believed to have been one of the board employed to translate the King James Bible.}

Adam, Eve and their progeny did not die, but now and then they merely went to sleep in order to refresh themselves. But the lotus-eating state of the Garden of Eden could not go on forever. If it had done, humanity would never have evolved beyond the vegetable stage.

It was always intended that the Sun god would separate from the earth… for a while.

OF COURSE NO ARTEFACTS HAVE SURVIVED from the time when gods and proto-humans lived in plant form, but there is at least a reliable record of such artefacts.

Herodotus, the Greek writer of the fifth century BC is sometimes called the father of history, because he was the first to try to research and piece together a coherent and objective account of history.

In approximately 485 BC Herodotus visited Memphis in Egypt. There in vast underground vaults, he was shown rows of statues of former kings stretching back as far as the eye could see into almost unimaginably distant times. Walking with the priests along the rows, he came to a series of 345 colossal wooden carvings of beings who had reigned before Menes, their first human king. These beings, said the priests, were ‘born one from the other’, that is to say without need of a sexual partner, by the plant-like method of parthenogenesis. Each carrying a plaque giving name, history and annals, the wooden monuments were a record of a long lost era of the vegetable life of humankind.

^{Mandrake men in nineteenth century engraving. Mandrake roots have always played a prominent part in esoteric lore because their shapes often seem to represent a vegetable striving towards the human form. Might the colossi Herodotus saw have looked something like this?}

4. LUCIFER, THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD The Apple of Desire • A War in Heaven • The Secrets of the Days of the Week

CREATION WAS RE-ENACTED IN THE Mystery schools, a drama in three acts.

The first act dramatized Saturn’s oppression of Mother Earth. This was called the Age of Saturn.

The second act dramatized the birth of the Sun and his protection of Mother Earth. This, the paradise time of the flower people, was remembered as the Age of the Sun.

During the re-enactment of these great events the candidate for initiation found himself in the middle of what was partly a play with special effects, and partly a séance. In an altered state, perhaps drugged and with little ability to distance himself from events, the candidate was guided by the priests on a shaman-like journey through the spirit worlds. Drama as we know it today would eventually move out of the Greek Mystery centres to become public performances, but in the early days of the Mystery schools at least, candidates would never have seen anything like this before.

We now come to the third act, the subject of this chapter. At the start of it, there is the momentous event we alluded to at the end of the last chapter. Earth and sun separate. From now on the sun’s life-giving rays, rather than illuminating it from inside, shine down upon the earth from the sky. As a result the earth cools and becomes denser. It becomes less gaseous and more liquid. It shrinks and the whole of its watery surface is covered by Adam and Eve and their flowery, gently fluttering progeny.

Suddenly, at the climax of the third act, the candidate for initiation into the Mystery school watching this drama would have caught a whiff of sulphur, maybe even been half-blinded by a flash like lightning, as the peaceful pastoral scene was invaded by a glistening alien life-form, horrifyingly livid and horned. The picture that was being presented to his imagination was of a snake seemingly endlessly long, millions of miles of it weaving its way into the cosmos, a snake with a perverse kind of beauty. ‘Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God,’ says Ezekiel 28:13, ‘every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald and carbuncle and gold.’

The candidate for initiation would have watched with horror as it coiled itself ever more tightly around Adam’s vegetable trunk. He would have understood that what he was watching was the series of events by which life on earth moved painfully to the next stage of evolution. Because the story of the serpent entwined around the tree contains the clearest possible image of the earth’s transition from vegetable to animal life.

Since the eighteenth century when a matter-before-mind world-view began to take over from the ancient, mind-before-matter world-view, the Church has tried to reconcile the Genesis account of creation with the findings of science. This has been a doomed enterprise because it is based on a modern, anachronistic reading of Genesis.

Genesis does not consider evolution objectively as a modern scientist does, piecing together bits of geological, anthropological and archaeological evidence impartially and objectively evaluated. The story of Genesis is a subjective account of the way humanity evolved, what it felt like. In other words the story of the entwining of snake and tree is a picture of the formation of the spine and central nervous system characteristic of animals as it has been retained in the human collective subconscious.

Again and again we will see that the esoteric account is not necessarily inconsistent with the scientific one. As we suggested by the perspected picture, it views the same facts from a very different point of view.

WE SAW IN THE LAST CHAPTER HOW MATTER had in a sense prepared the ground in which vegetable life could be born. Now vegetable life as it were formed a cradle into which animal life could be born. To put it another way, vegetable life formed a seed bed into which the seeds of animal life fell.

This is the beginning of the momentous episode in history called the Fall.