IN 1274 IN FLORENCE A YOUTHFUL DANTE first saw the beautiful Beatrice.
It was love at first sight.
It was also the first time anyone fell in love at first sight.
In the annals of the secret societies this is a great and important historical truth. In conventional history people have been falling in love and been romantically in love since the dawn of time. It’s part of our biological make-up, they say. The odes of Pindar and Sappho are expressions of romantic love.
In the secret history, though, these odes from ancient Greece are read as being narrowly sexual. They do not exhibit the moon-calf pain of separation, the ecstatic delight in the beloved’s appearance and the interlocked gaze which characterize being in love today.
Dante wrote of his first sight: ‘She was wearing a beautiful, delicate crimson robe tied with a belt and the moment I saw her I say in all truth that the spirit that loves in the innermost depths of my heart began to tremble in such a way that it overtook my whole being… the beginning and end of my life’s happiness had been revealed to me.’ He said he became wholly absorbed in the love in her eyes. Later he wrote of her that when he first saw her he thought by some miracle an angel had materialized on earth. It would be wrong to read this in terms of poetic convention.
In the Commedia he described the sensation of being wholly absorbed in her eyes and says that the erotic charge he took from them led him to Paradise. Again, this is no mere poetic fancy. The erotic and the mystical intertwined in a way that was new in the West.
Dante and Beatrice would both marry other people, and she died young. What today we think of as romantic love with its mystical yearnings and sense of destiny — the feeling that this was meant to be — all derives from the mystic ferment of Islam. Just as the characteristically Christian understanding of love of your neighbour freely given can be seen to have grown out of the Hebrew prophets’ concept of grace, so now the modern world’s understanding of the sacred was illumined by the altered states of consciousness achieved by Sufi mystics such as Ibn Arabi. His revolutionary The Interpretation of Longing expressed sexual love in terms of divine love. The Sufis expressed a feeling never felt before and so creating the conditions for everyone else to feel it.
For over a thousand years the erotic instinct had been repressed. Sexual energies had been channelled into the development of the human intellect. By the time of Aquinas and Bacon this development was complete. Devised in overnight vigils kneeling at the altar, Aquinas’s Summa Theologica is more than two million words of densely packed syllogisms, testimony to a capacity for unrelenting intellectual focus that today’s greatest philosophers would find it hard to match.
Now, prompted by an impulse spreading up from Arabia, people began to take a new delight in the material world, a sensual pleasure in light, colour, space and the touch of things. The point of evolution of human consciousness moved out of monkish cells and into the pleasure garden. A scintillating sexual sheen was spreading over everything.
The Islamic occupation of Europe lasted longest in Spain. Then, as the brilliant civilization of Mauresque Spain spread northwards, this new way of being spread to the rest of the world, first to the south of France.
In the twelfth century Provence and the Languedoc became the most civilized region in Europe. Provençal poets called Troubadors adapted the Arabic-Andalusian poetic forms, inspired by their erotic éclat. Though she was not an esotericist, Helen Waddell’s The Wandering Scholars remains the classic account of this period of transition. She relates the story of an abbot riding out with a young monk who is being allowed outside the monastery for the first time, when they pass some women on the road.
‘They be demons,’ said the abbot.
‘I thought,’ said the boy monk, ‘that they were the fairest things I ever saw.’
The first Troubador to surface in the stream of exoteric history was Guillaume, Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitane, who began composing tender, yearning love songs when he returned from the Crusades. But although this early flowering was courtly, it spread through all classes. Among the Troubadors Bernart de Ventadorn was a baker’s son and Pierre Vidal was a furrier’s son. Perhaps as result of the influence of men like these, poetry now filled with vernacular objects — toads, rabbits, farm machinery, pubs, tumbling pigeons, crackling thorns and a cheek pillowed upon an arm.
The Troubador poet Arnaud Daniel, whom Dante described as il miglio fabbro, boasts of ‘hunting hares with an ox, gathering the winds and swimming against the tide’. He is talking in the topsy-turvy way characteristic of esoteric thinkers about the powers initiation has given him.
As well as crossing class barriers, the Troubadors reversed the traditional subjection of women to men. In Troubador poetry men enslave themselves to women. Marriage had worked as an agent of social control, but now the Troubadors encouraged a new form of love that was not arranged but spontaneous, and could flow between individuals of different social status.
Love became subversive like the secret societies themselves.
Being in love in this new way made people feel more fully alive.
It was a new and intense form of consciousness. In the poetry of the Troubadors love, this new way of being, can be reached if you successfully negotiate your way through a number of trials — passing through hell and high water, finding a passage through the labyrinth, combat and the slaying of wild beasts. You must solve riddles and choose the right casket.
Already pale and tortured by doubt the lover is trembling when he is finally allowed into the presence of the beloved. In consummation he achieves an altered state of consciousness, one that confers supernatural powers. All true lovers know that when they gaze deeply into each others’ eyes they really are touching each other.
In other words not only was the experience of falling in love introduced into the stream of human consciousness by initiates, but the experience of being in love was given the deep structure of the process of initiation.
Troubador literature is full of the symbolism of initiation, too. The most popular symbol of the Troubadors, the rose, was probably derived from Sufism where it was a symbol, among other things, of the entrance to the spirit worlds — and an obvious allusion to the chakras. In the famous story of the Nightingale and the Rose, the bird represents the human spirit’s longing for the divine. There is also an undeniable sexual level of meaning here, connected with the sensual, fleshy qualities of the rose. The ubiquity of the rose in Troubador love poetry should alert us to the presence here of esoteric, perhaps — as Ezra Pound believed — alchemical techniques of sexual ecstasy. Guillaume of Poitiers wrote, ‘I want to retain my lady in order to refresh my heart so well that I cannot age. He will live a hundred years who succeeds in possessing the joy of his love.’
At root the impulse behind the birth of the Renaissance was a sexual one. Let us be clear about the outrageous thing we are saying here — that the whole of human consciousness was transformed and moved to another level of evolution just because a few people performed the sexual act in a new way.
They made love for the first time.