The Secret History of the World

^{Frontispiece, designed by John Evelyn, to the official history of the Royal Society, published in 1667. Francis Bacon is depicted as the founding father. He sits under the wing of an angel in a way that echoes the closing phrase of the Fama Fraternitatis of the Rosicrucians.}

Blaise Pascal, one of the great mathematicians of his day and an eminent philosopher, was discovered after his death to have sewn into his cloak a piece of paper on which was written: ‘The year of grace 1654, Monday 23 November, day of St Clement, Pope and Martyr. From about half-past ten in the evening until about half-past twelve at night, FIRE.’ Pascal achieved the illumination that the monks of Mount Athos sought.

In 1726 Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels predicted the existence and orbital periods of the two moons of Mars, which were not discovered by astronomers using telescopes until 1877. The astronomer, who then saw how accurate Swift had been, named the moons Phobos and Deimos — fear and terror — so awestruck was he by Swift’s evident supernatural powers.

Emmanuel Swedenborg, the great eighteenth-century Swedish visionary, wrote detailed accounts of his journeys into the spirit worlds. His reports of what the disembodied beings he met there told him inspired the esoteric Freemasonry of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was also the first to discover the cerebral cortex and the ductless glands, and also engineered what is still the largest dry dock in the world.

As we have already seen, Charles Darwin attended séances. He may have had the opportunity to learn the esoteric doctrine of the evolution from fish to amphibian to land animal to human from his close association with Max Müller, early translator of sacred Sanskrit texts.

Nicholas Tesla, recently described by a historian of science as ‘the ultimate visionary crank’, was a Serbian Croat who became a naturalized American. There he patented some seven hundred inventions including fluorescent lights and the Tesla coil that generates an alternating current. Like Newton’s most important breakthroughs, this last arose out of his belief in an etheric dimension between the mental and physical planes.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many leading scientists thought it worthwhile to pursue a scientific approach to occult phenomena, believing that it would ultimately be possible to measure and predict occult forces such as etheric currents that seemed only a shade more elusive than electromagnetism, sound waves or x-rays. Thomas Edison, inventor of the phonograph and therefore the godfather of all recorded sound, and Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, both supposed that psychic phenomena were perfectly respectable areas of research for science, involving themselves in esoteric Freemasonry and theosophy. Edison tried to make a radio that would tune into the spirit worlds. Their great scientific discoveries arose out of this research into the supernatural. Even the television was invented as a result of trying to capture psychic influences on gases fluctuating in front of a cathode ray tube.

LOOKING FOR CLUES ON HOW BEST TO understand this strange vision of the occult and the scientific joined at the hip, we will return to the great genius behind the scientific revolution, Francis Bacon.

As we saw, Francis Bacon’s great discovery was that if you view the objects of sense experience as objectively as possible, stripping out all preconceptions and notions that all of it was meant to be, then new patterns emerge beyond the ones traced by priests and other spiritual leaders. You can use these new patterns to predict and manipulate events.

Historians of the philosophy of science see this as the great beginning, the moment when inductive reasoning became a part of humanity’s approach to the world. From this moment flowed the scientific revolution and the whole industrial and technological transformation of the world.

However, if you look more deeply into Bacon’s account of the process of scientific discovery, it appears less straightforward and, initially at least, rather mysterious.

‘Nature is a labyrinth,’ he said, ‘in which the very haste you move with will make you lose your way.’ Bacon was writing as if the scientist plays a game of chess with nature. In order to get answers, he must first put nature in check. It’s as if nature needs to be tricked into giving away her secrets, because nature is inherently tricky herself. As if she means to deceive.

Today’s historians of science try to present Bacon as a thorough-going materialist, but this is wishful thinking. Although he believed that interesting new results would emerge if you looked at sense data as if they were not infused with meaning, this is not what he believed to be the case. We know, for example, that he believed in what he called ‘astrologica sana’, which is to say receiving the magical celestial influences into the spirit in the way that the Renaissance magus Pico della Mirandola had recommended. Bacon also believed in the same ethereal intermediary between spirit and matter as Newton, and that this same intermediary existed in humans who are ‘inclosed in a thicker body, as Ayrein Snow or Froath’ — what he called the ‘Aetheric body’.

Bacon said: ‘It is no less true in this human kingdom of knowledge, than in God’s kingdom of heaven that no man shall enter into it “except he become first as a little child”.’ This seems to be saying that a different and child-like state of mind needs to be reached first in order for higher knowledge to be reached. Paracelsus had said something similar, writing of the process of experimentation also using biblical phrasing: ‘Only he who desires with his whole heart will find and to him only who knocks vehemently shall the door be opened.’

The implication is that higher knowledge of the world comes from altered states of consciousness. Working in the same circles as Bacon and Newton, Jan Baptiste van Helmont wrote: ‘There is a book inside us, written by the finger of God, through which we may read all things.’ Michael Maier, who wrote about the Rosicrucians as if from the inside and published some of the most beautiful alchemical literature, said: ‘To drink the interior life in a long draft is to see the higher life. He who discovers the interior, discovers what is in space.’ In all these sayings there is a clear implication that the key to scientific discovery somehow lies within.

^{Rosslyn Chapel, near Edinburgh. The Scottish roots of Freemasonry were deliberately covered up in the eighteenth century because they had become entangled with the Stuart dynasty, supporting its claims to the throne. Rosslyn Chapel, built in the fifteenth century by William Sinclair, the first Earl of Caithness, incorporated replicas of the twin pillars of Solomon’s Temple — Jakim and Boaz — in a way that anticipated every Masonic lodge in the world. A carving on the lower frame of the window in the south-west corner of the chapel seems to be of a Freemasonic First Degree. Scottish lodges of some description undoubtedly existed at least a hundred years before the recorded English ones.}

We’ve seen that throughout history small groups have worked themselves into altered states. Is the suggestion by Bacon and his followers that the scientist needs somehow to tune himself to the etheric or vegetable dimension? That if you can somehow work yourself into the dimension of interweaving forms, you are on your way to understanding the secrets of nature?