A circular dance is described. The disciples first hold hands to form a circle, then whirl in a ring around Jesus Christ. In the liturgy that accompanies this dance, Jesus Christ is the initiator and his interlocutor a candidate for initiation.
Candidate: I would be saved
Christ: And I would save
Candidate: I would be loosed
Christ: And I would loosen
Candidate: I would be pierced
Christ: And I would pierce
Candidate: I would eat
Christ: And I would be eaten
The Acts of John use language in a paradoxical, even absurdist way. It will become easier to understand as we proceed.
Candidate: I have no house and I have houses
I have no place and I have places
I have no temple and I have temples.
Only fragments of the next bit have survived, but they seem to refer to some Osirian/Christian Mystery of death and resurrection. After which Christ says: ‘What I am now seen to be, that I am not, but what I am, thou shalt see when thou comest. If thou hadst known how to suffer, thou wouldst have had the power not to suffer. Know then suffering and thou shalt have the power not to suffer’.
A Hindu dance in honour of Krishna is described as ‘a circular sunwise dance’. The dancers twist and turn and wheel around the Sun god in imitation of the planets. This should alert us to the fact that the Acts of St John is inspired by a cosmic vision of Jesus Christ as the Sun god returned.
The Gospel of St Philip refers to five rituals, the last and greatest being the ritual of the bridal chamber. Is this a ritual-sexual practice like the ones that took place in the temples of Egypt, Greece and Babylon?
Later the Church would want to emphasize the uniqueness of Christian revelation and distance Jesus Christ and his teachings from what went before. But to the early Christians it was only natural to see Christianity as growing out of what had gone before and as a fulfilment of ancient prophecies. Many early Christians understood Christianity in terms of what they had been taught in the Mystery schools of Egypt, Greece and Rome.
The early Church father Clement of Alexandria may have known people who had known the Apostles. Clement and his pupil Origen believed in reincarnation, for example. They taught more advanced students what they called the disciplina arcani, devotional practices which today we would classify as magic.
Early Christian leaders like Origen and Clement were erudite men participating in the intellectual advances of their age. The most exciting of these found representative expression in Neoplatonism.
Plato had pretty comprehensively converted a mind-before-matter experience of the world into concepts. What happened in the second century AD was that what we now call Neoplatonists began to develop Plato’s ideas into a living philosophy, a philosophy of life, even a religion with its own spiritual practices. It is important to remember that while we consider Plato in a dryly academic way, for his followers in the centuries after his death his texts had the status of scripture. Neoplatonists saw themselves not as originating ideas but writing commentaries making clear what Plato really meant. Passages which are today considered merely as rather abstruse exercises in abstract logic were used by practising Neoplatonists in their devotions.
They were concerned with describing real spiritual experience. In On the Delay in Divine Justice, Plutarch, who was heavily influenced by Neoplatonism, describes what different spirits look like as they can be seen beginning their after-death journey. The deceased are said to be surrounded with a flame-like envelope, but ‘some were like the purest full-moon light, emitting one smooth, continuous and even colour. Others were quite mottled — extraordinary sights — dappled with livid spots like adders; and others had faint scratches.’
Plotinus, the greatest Neoplatonist in the Alexandrian school, was a practising mystic. His pupil Porphyry reported seeing his Master in ecstatic raptures, unified with ‘the One’ several times. Plotinus said of Porphyry, perhaps a bit dismissively, that he had not achieved this once! Neoplatonists who came after them, Iamblichus and Jamblichus, put great emphasis on the importance of theurgic, that is to say godly, magical practices, Iamblichus leaving detailed descriptions of his visions.
Plotinus elaborated an extremely complex metaphysic of emanations of the kind we touched on in chapter one. Neoplatonism influenced other traditions, especially by its systematic approach, particularly the Cabala and Hermeticism.
Hermeticism and the Cabala are viewed by some scholars as, respectively, Egyptian-and Hebrew-flavoured Neoplatonism. But in the secret history the hermetic and cabalistic writings that began to appear at this time are understood as the first written down, systematized expressions of ancient and largely oral traditions.
The Hermetica purported to have originated with Hermes Trismegistus, an ancient Egyptian sage, but were written down in Greek and collected at this time in forty two volumes. Yuri Stoyanov, a distinguished researcher at the Warburg Institute, recently confirmed to me that most scholars now accept their genuine, Egyptian origins. The Hermetica were genially tolerant of other traditions, no doubt partly because of an underlying assumption that all traditions addressed the same planetary gods and opened up the way to the same spirit worlds.
In fact it is possible to draw parallels between the numbered emanations of Plotinus, the gods of the Hermetica and the spheres of heaven as described in the Pistis Sophia.
In the Cabala the emanations from the cosmic mind — the sepiroth — are sometimes thought of as forming a sort of tree as they descend — the sepirothic tree. The allegorical interpretation of scripture that emerged with the Jewish scholar Philo of Alexandria opened up the shared structure of all religions. St Paul hinted at different orders of angels — not only Angels and Archangels, but also Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Mights, Powers, Principalities. He is alluding to a system he evidently expected his readers to understand. This system was set out explicitly by St Paul’s pupil Dionysius the Aeropagite. The nine orders he described can be equated with the branches on the sepirothic tree — and with the different orders of gods and spirits in the ancient polytheistic, astronomical religions. For example the ‘Powers’ of St Paul should be equated with the gods of the solar system of the Greeks and Romans, the Powers of Light being the spirits of the sun and the Powers of Darkness being the gods of the moon and the planets.
The Jewish scholar Rebecca Kenta has even compared the ascent through the gates of wisdom on the cabalistic Tree of Life with Sufi teachings, and made connections between the sepiroth and the chakras of Hindu tradition.
All idealism, the religious systems of all cultures, sees creation in terms of a descending series of emanations from the cosmic mind. But what is distinctly esoteric is this identifying of these emanations with the spirits of the stars and planets on the one hand and occult physiology on the other. It is this that leads to astrology, alchemy, magic and practical techniques for achieving altered states.
It is important to keep bearing in mind that we are not here talking about piled up abstractions, but lived experience. The nine angelic hierarchies were sometimes divided up into three parts, and when St Paul talked of being raised to the Third Heaven, he meant that he had been initiated to such a high level that he had had direct personal experience of the exalted spiritual beings, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.