I have also made cavalier judgements as to which schools of thought and which secret societies draw on authentic tradition. So the Cabala, Hermeticism, Sufism, the Templars, the Rosicrucians, esoteric Freemasonry, Martinism, the theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and Anthroposophy are included, but Scientology, the Christian Science of Mary Baker Eddy, together with a whole slew of contemporary ‘channelled’ material, is not.
This is not to say that this book shies away from controversy. Previous attempts to identify a ‘perennial philosophy’ have tended to come up with collections of platitudes — ‘we are all the same under the skin’, ‘love is its own reward’ — which are difficult to disagree with. To anyone expecting something similarly agreeable, I must apologize in advance. The teaching I will be identifying as common to Mystery schools and secret societies from all over the world will outrage many people and fly in the face of common sense.
One day my mentor told me I was ready for initiation, that he would introduce me to some people.
I’d been looking forward to this moment, but to my surprise, I refused. No doubt fear played a part. I knew by then that many initiation rituals involved altered states of consciousness, even what are sometimes called ‘near-death’ experiences.
But it was partly also because I didn’t want to have all this knowledge given to me all of a piece. I wanted to continue enjoying trying to work it out for myself.
And neither did I want to take an oath that forbad me to write.
THIS HISTORY OF THE WORLD IS structured in the following way. The first four chapters will look at what happened ‘in the beginning’ as taught by the secret societies, including what is meant in the secret teaching by the expulsion from Eden and the Fall. These chapters will aim, too, to provide an account of the world-view of the secret societies, a pair of conceptual spectacles — so readers may the better appreciate what follows.
In the following seven chapters many figures from myth and legend are treated as historical figures. This is the history of what happened before written records began, as it was taught in the Mystery schools and is still taught in the secret societies today.
Chapter 8 includes the transition into what is conventionally thought of as the historical period, but the narrative continues to tell stories of monsters and fabulous beasts, of miracles and prophecies and historical figures who conspired with disembodied beings to direct the course of events.
I hope that throughout the reader’s mind will be pleasurably bent equally by the strange ideas presented and by the revealing of the names of the personalities who have entertained these ideas. I hope, too, that some of the strange claims will strike a chord, that many readers will think… yes, that explains why the names of the week run in the order they do… That’s why the image of the fish, the water-carrier and a serpent-tailed goat are everywhere ascribed constellations that don’t really resemble them… That’s what we’re really commemorating at Halloween… That explains the bizarre confessions of demon-worship by the Knights Templar… That is what gives Christopher Columbus the conviction to set out on his insanely perilous voyage… That is why an Egyptian obelisk was erected in New York’s Central Park in the late nineteenth century… That is why Lenin was embalmed…
Through all this the aim is to show that the basic facts of history can be interpreted in a way which is almost completely the opposite of the way we normally understand them. To prove this would, of course, require a whole library of books, something like the twenty miles of shelves of esoteric and occult literature said to be locked away in the Vatican. But in this single volume I will show that this alternative, this mirror image view, is a consistent and cogent one with its own logic that has the virtue of explaining areas of human experience that remain inexplicable to the conventional view. I will also cite authorities throughout, providing leads for interested readers to follow.
Some of these authorities have worked within the esoteric tradition. Others are experts in their own disciplines — science, history, anthropology, literary criticism — whose results in their specialist fields of research seem to me to confirm the esoteric world-view, even where I have no way of knowing whether their personal philosophy of life has any spiritual or esoteric dimension.
But above all — and this the point I want to emphasize — I am asking readers to approach this text in a new way — to see it as an imaginative exercise.
I want the reader to try to imagine what it would feel like to believe the opposite of what we have been brought up to believe. This inevitably involves an altered state of consciousness to some degree or other, which is just as it should be. Because at the very heart of all esoteric teaching in all parts of the world lies the belief that higher forms of intelligence can be accessed in altered states. The Western tradition in particular has always emphasized the value of imaginative exercises which involve cultivating and dwelling upon visual images. Allowed to sink deep into the mind, they there do their work.
So although this book can be read just as a record of the absurd things people have believed, an epic phantasmagoria, a cacophony of irrational experiences, I hope that by the end some readers will hear some harmonies and perhaps also sense a slight philosophical undertow, which is the suggestion that it may be true.
Of course, any good theory which seeks to explain why the world is as it is must also help predict what will happen next, and the last chapter reveals what that will be — always presuming, of course, that the great cosmic plan of the secret societies proves to be successful. This plan will encompass a belief that the great new impulse for the evolution will arise in Russia, that European civilization will collapse and that, finally, the flame of true spirituality will be kept burning in America.
TO HELP WITH THE ALL-IMPORTANT WORK of the imagination there are strange and uncanny illustrations integrated throughout, some of which have not previously been seen outside the secret societies.
There are also illustrations of some of the most familiar images from world history, the greatest icons of our culture — the Sphinx, Noah’s Ark, the Trojan Horse, the Mona Lisa, Hamlet and the skull — because all of these are shown to have strange and unexpected meanings according to the secret societies.
Lastly there are illustrations from modern European artists such as Ernst, Klee and Duchamp, as well as from American outlaws such as David Lynch. Their work is also shown to be steeped in the ancient and secret philosophy.
INDUCE IN YOURSELF A DIFFERENT STATE of mind and the most famous and familiar histories mean something very different.
In fact if anything in this history is true, then everything your teachers taught you is thrown into question.
I suspect this prospect doesn’t alarm you.
As one of the devotees of the ancient and secret philosophy so memorably put it:
You must be mad, or you wouldn’t have come here.
1. IN THE BEGINNING
God Peers at His Reflection • The Looking-Glass Universe
ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS NO TIME AT ALL.
Time is nothing but a measure of the changing positions of objects in space, and, as any scientist, mystic or madman knows, in the beginning there were no objects in space.