They discovered uncomfortable things about themselves, too — that they had become brutalized by this new world, and had grown a hard, protective carapace of habit. To break open this carapace and expose the sensitive part of themselves, the better part that brought them fully alive again, was a bloody and painful process that few could face.
The world became darker, a place of paradox where opposites meet and where it is painful to be human, a world calling out for heroism.
THE LARGEST AND MOST TERRIFYING OF the monstrous, progeny of Saturn came last. Typhon emerged out of the sea, heading straight for Olympus, spitting fire from his mouth and blocking out the sun with his bat-like wings. He had the head of an ass, and when he emerged from the sea, the gods saw that below the waist he was nothing but a coiling mass of thousands of snakes. Zeus tried to fell him with thunderbolts, but Typhon only shrugged them aside. As Typhon bore down upon him, Zeus then snatched the flint scythe that Cronos had used to castrate Uranos. But the monster’s snake-like limbs wrapped themselves around the limbs of Zeus, holding them fast and snatching the scythe from him. Then keeping the king of the gods pinned down, Typhon cut out all his sinews. Zeus is immortal and could not be killed, but without his sinews he was completely helpless.
Typhon took the sinews away with him and retired to a cave to recuperate from his own wounds. Apollo and Pan then emerged from the shadows and hatched a plan. They went to find Cadmus, the dragon-slaying hero, who was wandering the earth looking for his sister Europa. She had been carried away by Zeus, disguised as a white bull. Now Apollo and Pan promised Cadmus that if he helped them, his quest would be over.
Pan gave Cadmus his pipes, and, disguised as a shepherd, the hero went to play for the wounded Typhon. Never having heard music before, Typhon was entranced by this strange new sound. Cadmus told him that it was nothing compared to the music he could make with a lyre, but sadly the sinews on his lyre were broken. Typhon handed over the sinews of Zeus, and Cadmus told him he needed to go back to his shepherd’s hut to string his lyre. So it was that Zeus regained his sinews and was able to surprise the monster, overpower him and bury him under Mount Etna.
The important point to note here is that Zeus was only saved with the help of a hero. The gods now needed humans.
THE MYTHS OF THE GREEK HEROES — Cadmus, Hercules, Theseus and Jason — are some of the most famous stories in human history. It might seem as if they are entirely missing from the biblical account, but according to the ancient tradition preserved in the secret societies Cadmus is to be identified with Enoch, the first human in Hebrew tradition to whom the gods turn for help.
The Old Testament contains only a few enigmatic words on Enoch. Genesis 5.21-24. ‘And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah, And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years and begat sons and daughters; And all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years; And Enoch walked with God and he was not: for God took him.’
There is little to go on here but, as we have already seen, there is a literary tradition about Enoch in Hebrew literature, including, as we have seen, some books which are widely quoted in the New Testament. In one of these, the Book of Jubilees, Enoch is described as discovering the writings of the Watchers, but this is a clumsy translation. What is meant is that he discovered, which is to say invented, language itself.
Hebrew tradition presents Enoch as a strange figure. His shining countenance was uncomfortable to look at and he was evidently an uncomfortable presence. In this he may remind us of the Jesus of the Gospels, captivating vast crowds but feeling that he wants to withdraw in order to be alone with the great spiritual beings who are showing themselves to him.
In solitude Enoch was able to commune with the gods and angels with a clarity that humankind was fast losing.
Initially Enoch would spend one day teaching the multitude, then spend three days alone. Then he spent only one day a week, then one day a month and finally one day a year. The crowds yearned for his return, but when he did so his face shone so brightly it was so uncomfortable for them to look at that they had to avert their eyes.
What was Enoch doing on his solitary vigils? We will see repeatedly that great turning points in history are caused by two types of thought. First, turning points arise when great thinkers like Socrates, Jesus Christ and Dante think for the first time something that nobody has ever thought before. Second, turning points arise when thoughts are set down and inscribed indelibly, because they preserve some ancient wisdom that is in danger of being lost forever.
The generation of Jared, Enoch’s father, had been the last to experience an uninterrupted vision of the successive waves or generations of gods, angels and spirits emanating from the mind of God. What Enoch was preserving in the first language and the first stone monuments, the oldest stone circles, was this vision of the hierarchies of spiritual beings ranged above. Enoch is one of the great figures in the secret history of the world because he gave a complete account of what we might call, in today’s terms, the ecosystem of the spirit worlds. For this, he is remembered not only as Cadmus in the Greek tradition, but as Idris in the Arabian tradition and Hermes Trismegistus in the esoteric Egyptian tradition. He knew that, just as thought processes weaken health, language weakens memory. He also looked forward to an approaching catastrophe which would destroy everything made by mankind, except what he carried in his head and the sturdiest stone monuments.
He memorialized the heavenly hierarchies not only in stone monuments but in the invention of language itself. Because according to the secret doctrine all language originated with the giving of names to the heavenly bodies.
Indeed, the earliest art, such as is found at the famous caves at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain is likewise really a depiction of these same heavenly bodies. These heavenly bodies are the thoughts of the great cosmic mind, weaving through everything in the cosmos. Language and art now enabled humans to appropriate these cosmic thoughts in some way and to make them their own.
Enoch retreated further and further into the mountains, where the ground was inhospitable and the weather stormy. Fewer and fewer were able to follow him. He said: ‘And my eyes saw the secrets of the lightning and of thunder, and the secrets of clouds and the dew, and there I saw from whence they proceed and where they come from to soak the Earth. And there I saw closed chambers out of which the winds are divided, and the chamber out of which came the mist and the cloud that has hung over the earth from its beginning. And I saw the chambers out of which come the Sun and the Moon, where they go to.’
The Book of Enoch relates that in his final, ecstatic vision he was given a tour of the heavens, of the different spheres of heaven and the different orders of angels who live there and the whole history of the cosmos.
Finally, Enoch addressed the last ragged band of followers who had been able to keep up with him on his mountain trek. As he was speaking they looked up and saw a horse descend from the sky in a whirlwind. Enoch mounted the horse and rode into the sky.
WHAT THIS STORY OF ENOCH’S ASCENSION into heaven tells us is that he did not die as humans do — because he was not properly human. Like the other demi-gods and heroes of Greek tradition, Enoch/Cadmus was an angel occupying the body of a human.