Yet if this citizen had been minded to listen to the inner promptings of his spirit, he might have noticed that this harsh and mechanical grinding of the wheels of necessity, this new way of the world, threw into relief something very like its opposite, something elsewhere called ‘the nameless way’. If this citizen had chosen not to shut it out, he might have caught suggestions emanating from underground streams of thought.
At this critical juncture we move from the age of the Mystery schools to the age of the secret societies, from the directing of the course of history by the political elite to something much more subversive coming from below. A new mood was taking over the soul-life of initiates which may be traced in the life of God’s joker, Francis of Assisi, in Shakespeare’s fools and in the gently undermining work of Rabelais, in Gulliver’s Travels, Alice in Wonderland and in the cuttings and pastings of Kurt Schwitters.
IN ANSWER TO A QUESTION ABOUT THE meaning of Zen, a monk raised a finger. A boy in the class began to ape him, and then afterwards, whenever anyone discussed this monk’s teachings, this naughty boy would raise his finger in mockery.
But the next time the boy attended class, the monk grabbed him and cut off his finger. As he ran off crying, the monk called after him. The boy turned round to look at the monk, and the monk looked back at him and raised his own finger.
At that moment the boy was enlightened.
This conte cruel is not a historical episode but one of the classic fables of Zen, formulated at the time of Attila’s nosebleed.
The capacity for abstract thought had been developing for less than a thousand years, inspired by Pythagoras, Confucius and Socrates. Buddhism had spread from India to China with the visit of the twenty-eighth Buddhist patriarch Bodhidharma. Then in China over the next two hundred years Buddhism and Taoism fused to create a philosophy of spontaneous, intuitive enlightenment called tch’an — or Zen as it would later come to be called in Japan.
Tch’an brought a new cautionary sense of the limitations of abstract thought.
The boy and his fellow pupils had been struggling to understand what the monk was saying. We may imagine them frowning with the effort to grasp enlightenment cerebrally.
But the boy is suddenly enabled to see the world from the point of view of an altered state of consciousness. He is suddenly seeing the world from the point of view of the vegetable consciousness that is centred in the solar plexus rather than the skull. It is by means of this vegetable consciousness that we are connected individually to every other living thing in the cosmos. These connections can be visualized as tendrils of a great cosmic tree and every solar plexus as a flower on the tree. In another way of looking at it, this vegetable consciousness is another dimension, the world between the worlds and the gateway to the spirit worlds. It is consciousness, the ‘light beyond the light of the intellect’, to quote St Augustine, that anyone must slip into who wishes to become enlightened.
The boy is enlightened because from the point of view of this other form of consciousness the monk’s finger belongs to him as much as it does the monk. The normal categories of human head-thought are inadequate to cover this.
Laughter erupts when you suddenly see the cosmos upside down, inside out and the other way round. At the beginning of the second half of the fifth century a new sense of absurdity entered the world and from then on the great initiates of the secret societies, in the West as well as in the East, would always have a touch of Zen.
UNDER A STRONG RULER, JUSTINIAN, the Byzantine Empire expanded, even regaining territories from the barbarians. Justinian closed down the remaining schools of Greek philosophy, causing teachers to flee, taking with them texts like the writings of Aristotle, including his now lost alchemical treatise.
Many arrived in Persia where King Khusraw dreamed of founding a great academy like the one that had inspired Greek civilization. In an intellectual ferment that took in elements of Neoplatonism, Gnosticism and Hermeticism, the methodology of Aristotle was applied jointly to the material world and the spirit worlds. So began the golden age of Arabian magic.
All our childhoods are lit up by a vision of magic — of genies, magic lamps and abracadabra. These stories began to weave their magical influence on the history of the world in the sixth century. There were rumours of automata and flying machines and caches of self-generating gold, of powerful magic spells that would become collected in forbidden books.
Soon the whole world would be under the spell of Arabia, as books of its spells were published far and wide, books containing the whispers of demons.
17. THE AGE OF ISLAM
Mohammed and Gabriel • The Old Man of the Mountains • Haroun al Raschid and the Arabian Nights • Charlemagne and the Historic Parsifal • Chartres Cathedral
A GRIMLY FORBIDDING FIGURE LOOKED down from the spirit worlds on these developments.
In 570 a child called Mohammed was born in Mecca. When he was six he lost both his parents and was hired out as a shepherd’s boy. He grew broad shouldered, with curly black hair and a beard through which shone dazzling white teeth. He became a camel-driver, transporting the spices and perfumes that were the speciality of Mecca to Syria. Then, at the age of twenty-five, he married a wealthy widow of Mecca and became one of the richest and most respected citizens of that city.
Although he had in one way now won back all he had lost at the death of his parents, Mohammed was dissatisfied. The religious centre of Mecca was a large, black, granite stone called the Kaaba, which in some traditions is said to have fallen to earth from the Sirius star system. At that time Arabia was populated by shamanistic tribes, each worshipping their own gods and spirits and at the centre of this whirlwind, next to the Kaaba, stood a sacred tent which housed hundreds of their idols. Mecca had also become corrupted by the sale of holy water — taken from a spring which Ishmael had caused to spring from the sand. To Mohammed’s eyes all of this looked lax. He saw a people interested only in money-making, gambling, horsemanship and getting drunk.
While driving camel trains down to places like Syria and Egypt he heard about Judaism and also stories about Jesus Christ. Did the story of the cleansing of the temple strike a chord? Mohammed became convinced that Arabia needed a prophet, someone like Jesus Christ who could purge the people of superstitions and of corruption and could unite them in one cosmic purpose.
Mohammed was sitting in the hills surrounding Mecca, brooding darkly on how all this might be achieved, when an angel appeared before him, saying: ‘I am the angel Gabriel.’ The apparition then showed Mohammed a golden tablet and told him to read it. Mohammed protested that he was illiterate, but when Gabriel commanded him a second time, Mohammed found that he could indeed read. So began the series of angelic conversations that became the Koran. Later Mohammed went into town and preached what Gabriel had taught him with blazing sincerity and irresistible power. He would summarize his creed in these down-to-earth terms:
When challenged to perform a miracle to prove that his preaching was divinely inspired, he refused. He said that Allah had raised the heavens without recourse to pillars, had made the earth, the rivers, the fig, the date and the olive — and that these things were miraculous enough.