The Secret History of the World

In John’s account there is also a prophetic level of meaning. He was anticipating an era of history in which incarnated humanity as a whole would have to go through its own Dark Night of the Soul.

But perhaps the most characteristic form of occultism in what would become known as the Counter-Reformation was the Jesuits.

Ignatius Loyola was a professional soldier. When his right leg was shattered during a siege at Pamplona, he was invalided out of the Spanish army. During a period of convalescence he was reading a book on the lives of the saints when he realized his religious vocation. So in 1534, while studying in Paris, he gathered around him seven fellow students to form a brotherhood. They were to be the highly disciplined soldiers of the Church. In 1540 the Pope recognized this order as the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits were to be the Church’s intellectual elite, its military intelligence, servants unto death, searching out heresy and unlawful entry into the spirit worlds. The Jesuits also became the Pope’s educators and missionaries, instituting a rigorous system that would orient the young towards Rome and instil obedience. They also had remarkable successes as missionaries in Central and South America and in India.

Ignatius Loyola devised trials and techniques for achieving altered states that included breathing exercises, sleep deprivation, meditation on skulls, training in lucid dreaming and in active imagination. This latter involved constructing an elaborate, sensual mental image which a disembodied spirit might inhabit, a process known to the Rosicrucians as ‘building a hut by the palace of wisdom’.

However, in Loyola’s exercises there is a subtle but important difference. While the Rosicrucian techniques were designed to help achieve a free-willed, free-thinking exchange with beings from higher hierarchies, the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola are intended to still the will and induce a state of unquestioning obedience like a soldier’s. ‘Take, Lord, and receive all my memory, my understanding and my whole will, everything I have.’

In the West esoteric bookshops are dominated by Hindu, Buddhist and other oriental esoteric literature, but the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola remain the most readily available and widely published esoteric techniques from the Western tradition.

^{El Greco’s stretched figures have eyes that are half-closed as they contemplate some inner mystery. They stand in convulsive landscapes and stormy skyscapes. Not only does El Greco portray people in altered and mystical states, but he conveys a sense of what it is like to be in that state. René Huyghe, the French art critic, analysed the light in El Greco’s panoramic view of Toledo. In reality Toledo is bathed in a fierce, clear Mediterranean light, whilst in El Greco’s vision the ordinary light of day has been swallowed up by a fantastic, supernatural light. As an initiate, El Greco painted what St John of the Cross described when he wrote of ‘the dark night of the fire of love… without a guiding light other than that which was burning in my heart’.}

^{Mary as Isis the Moon goddess by Murillo.}

IN 1985 A BOOK WAS PUBLISHED anonymously called Meditations on the Tarot. It created a big stir in esoteric circles because it shows in an extremely erudite fashion that the symbolism in the tarot cards points to a unified set of beliefs underlying Hermeticism, the Cabala, oriental philosophies and Catholic Christianity. This book is a wonderful treasure chest of esoteric lore and wisdom.

It later emerged that the author was Valentine Tomberg, who had been initiated by Rudolf Steiner, but then left Steiner’s Anthroposophy to become a Catholic convert. The underlying purpose of Meditations on the Tarot — to try to draw those interested in esoterica back into the Church — becomes apparent when you know this. Was there any intellectual dishonesty involved? Tomberg, like Loyola before him, was working to ensure that the initiative in esoteric matters should not entirely be taken away from Rome.

WE LOOKED AT THE LIVES OF SOME individuals working in Northern Europe, it seems, more or less in isolation — Eckhart, Paracelsus, Dee, Boehme.

What is the evidence of a network, of anything like the rumoured secret society of Rosicrucians? Is there any documentary evidence to support the rumours about secret brotherhoods?

In 1596 a man called Beaumont was convicted of magical practices by a court at Angoulême in France. As the famous French historian de Thou recorded, Beaumont confessed that he ‘held commerce with Aerial and Heavenly Spirites — that Schools and Professors of this noble Art had been frequent in all Parts of the World, and still were so in Spain at Toledo, Cordova, Grenada and other Places that they had also been formerly celebrated in Germany, but for the most part had failed since Luther had sown the seeds of his Heresy, and began to have so many Followers: that in France and in England it was still secretly preserved, as it were by Tradition, in the families of certain Gentlemen; but that only the initiated were admitted into the Sacred Rites; to the exclusion of profane Persons.’

Then, less than thirty years later, a series of short pamphlets began to appear which purported to give the inside story.

Published anonymously in Kessel in Germany in between 1614 and 1616, the first was called the Fama Fraternitatis (or ‘Rumour of the Brotherhood’) and it called for a spiritual revolution.

The second, the Confessio Fraternitatis, told the story of CRC (Christian Rosenkreuz), the founder of the brotherhood, gave an account of the rules he instituted and also revealed that his tomb had been discovered in 1604.

A door had been uncovered underneath an altar leading down to a crypt. The door carried an inscription: After one hundred and twenty years I shall be opened. Down below was a seven-sided mausoleum, each side being eight feet high with an artificial sun suspended in the middle above a circular table. Underneath this table lay the uncorrupted body of CRC, surrounded by books, including the Bible and a text by Paracelsus, and the body was clutching a rolled scroll, which bore the words: ‘Out of God we are born, We die in Jesus, We will be reborn through the Holy Spirit.’

An observant literary detective might have noticed that the title page of the first folio of this second pamphlet featured the unique and unmistakable shape of Dr Dee’s occult emblem of evolved consciousness, the Monas Hieroglyphica.

The third pamphlet, The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, was an allegorical account of initiation, a sex-magical Chemical Marriage in the tradition of the Hypnerotomachia .

These publications caused a sensation across Europe.

Who were the Rosicrucian brothers and who was the author?

Then it gradually emerged that the author was a young Lutheran pastor called John Valentine Andrae. His spiritual mentor had been a famous mystic, Jean Arndt, the disciple of John Tauler, disciple in his turn of Meister Eckhart.

ANYONE WHO CONSIDERS THE CLAIMS of esoteric history is frustrated by the sparse nature of the evidence. Almost by definition the operations of secret societies leave scant traces. If they are successful, they leave little to go on. Yet the claims are very grand indeed: that these societies are representatives of an ancient and universal philosophy, that this is a coherent, consistent philosophy that explains the universe more adequately than any other, and that many if not most of the great men and women of history are guided by it.

Anyone considering this dichotomy naturally asks, Can these societies really involve a secret coalition of the greatest geniuses — or it is really just the fantasy of a few, isolated and marginal people who are really a bit dim?