The Secret History of the World

But there is a yet deeper part of our animal selves which lies completely below the threshold of consciousness and is inaccessible to it. We cannot transform this part by the exercise of free will, no matter how persistent, because the corruption of our animal selves has seeped down into our vegetable and mineral selves.

In order to purify and transform these parts of ourselves we need supernatural help.

The mission of the Sun god, then, was to sink right down into deepest matter, introducing his transforming spiritual influence. The Sun god has the ability to reach right down into the most material part of humanity, which is why it was written ‘None of his bones shall be broken’.

THE TWELVE-PETALLED LOTUS RADIATES outwards from the region of the heart and envelops those we choose to love. It is also an organ of perception. What I truly love will open itself up to me and reveal its secrets.

Enveloping someone in love in this way is an exercise of the imagination. Of course imagination is not to be confused here with fantasy. It is a true perception of a higher reality — and the organ of this in both East and West is the heart chakra. This is what is being referred to on the road to Emmaus, where disciples who have just recognized who it was they have just encountered say to themselves, ‘Did our hearts not burn within us while he talked to us on the road?’

When the heart chakra blossoms and shines, we may perceive the Outworld in a supernatural way. A loving heart can give me conscious experience of the heart of the cosmos, of the loving intelligence that lives beyond the Outworld and controls it. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’

Love works on the will as well as powers of perception. When we really love someone, we are willing to do anything for them.

This is why the heart chakra blossoms when love moves me to act according to my conscience. I am not then acting wearily, like Marcus Aurelius. I am not acting in a cold, unenthusiastic or inauthentic way. I am not doing my duty while part of me resents it. I am acting out of love and devotion.

^{The phrase ‘Son of Man’ is problematic to exoteric theologians because it seems to refer to both a state of mind and to Jesus Christ himself. In esoteric thought this is resolved because the individual who has evolved to the stage of enlightenment that Jesus Christ made possible, will, as a result, become aware of his or her Higher Self, or divine self. In Christian iconography this evolution is commonly symbolized by a child carried on the shoulder, for example in the story of St Christopher who carried the Christ child on his shoulders. In the Cabala these two same dimensions of meaning are contained in the three-pronged letter shin.}

Initiation forges a new form of consciousness. It revives ways of being conscious of the spirit worlds that were common in the earlier stages of human evolution, but now with new elements. The initiations of Pythagoras that set the tone for the ages of the ascendancy of Greece and Rome, for example, had been concerned with achieving an alternative state of consciousness involving free communications with the spirit worlds that had been an everyday occurrence for, say, Gilgamesh or Achilles, but with a crucial difference. Initiates of the school of Pythagoras were able to think about their spiritual experiences in a considered, conceptual way that would have been impossible for Achilles or Gilgamesh.

Four hundred years later the initiations of Jesus Christ introduced a new element, opening up dizzying new dimensions in love.

IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THE MOMENTOUS events described in the Gospels better, we must now look at Jesus’s involvement with the Mystery schools.

We are trespassing on closely guarded academic territory here. Controversial findings now widely accepted by biblical scholars, but which have not yet filtered down to the wider congregation, show that there are some early Christian texts, rediscovered in Palestine in the 1950s, which contain versions of sayings of Jesus that are likely to be closer to the originals than the versions contained in the four Gospels.

And some of these texts contain sayings which don’t appear in the Gospels at all.

And the fact that texts like the Gospel of St Thomas contain ‘truer’ versions of the biblical sayings is a reason for believing that the entirely non-biblical sayings these texts contain may be authentic.

This is important for our history, because some of them relate to the secret teachings.

The Gospels hint that Jesus gives favoured followers teachings not for public dissemination. When Jesus warns against casting ‘pearls before swine’ he seems to be talking of holding some sacred truths back from the multitude. More explicitly, Mark 4.11 has Jesus say: ‘The secret of the kingdom of God is given to you, but to those who are outside everything comes in parables.’

A more striking and revealing account of Jesus’s involvement in secret teaching is to be found in a letter written in the second century by Clement, Bishop of Alexandria. This text was discovered in 1959 in the stacks of the library of the Mar Saba Monastery near Jerusalem by Dr Morton Smith, Professor of Ancient History at Columbia University:

… Mark, then, during Peter’s stay in Rome, wrote an account of the Lord’s doings, not however declaring all of them, nor yet hinting at the secret ones, but selecting those he thought most useful for increasing the faith of those who were being instructed. But when Peter died as a martyr, Mark came over to Alexandria, bringing his own notes and those of Peter, from which he transferred to his former book the things suitable to whatever makes for progress towards knowledge, and in this way he composed a more spiritual gospel for use of those who were being perfected… and dying he left his composition to the church in Alexandria, where it is still carefully guarded.

The Bishop of Alexandria then quotes from this ‘more spiritual’ version of Mark’s Gospeclass="underline"

And they came to Bethanay, and a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and said to him: ‘Son of David, have mercy on me.’ But the disciples rebuked her.

And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightaway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and, seizing his hand, raised him.

But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him.

And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth came to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. And then, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan…

^{The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. It has been suggested that this painting alludes to suppressed, secret doctrines regarding the feminine role in Christianity. We shall see shortly that this is true, though not in the way proposed by The Da Vinci Code.}

To modern sensibility this story — which appears to be a more detailed version of the story of the raising of Lazarus in John’s Gospel — might seem to describe a homosexual liaison, but, as we shall see as we come to examine the nature of initiation ceremonies more clearly, it is certainly a Mystery school initiation that Mark alludes to here.

The raising of Lazarus from the dead has traditionally been seen as an encoded account of initiation. The clues are there. Lazarus ‘dies’ for thee days and when Jesus Christ raises him, he uses the phrase ‘Lazarus, come forth’ that the hierophants had used in the Great Pyramid when, after three days, they stretched forth a hand to raise the candidate from the open tomb in the King’s Chamber.