The Secret History of the World

We have seen that great scientific geniuses, the founders of the modern age, have tended to be fascinated by ideas of ancient wisdom and altered states. Could it be that it is not so much that genius is next to madness but that genius is next to the altered states brought on by esoteric training?

IF THE HEROES OF THE ROSICRUCIANS — Dee and Paracelsus — were wild and strange, the magi of the next epoch came on like respectable businessmen.

Freemasonry has always presented a straight face to the world. The Anglo-Saxon lodges in particular have been coy about their esoteric origins. The notion that Freemasons at sufficiently high levels of initiation are taught the secret doctrine and history of the world outlined in this book might seem implausible, even to many Freemasons.

In Freemasonic lore the society’s roots may be traced back to the building of Solomon’s Temple by Hiram Abiff, the suppression of the Knights Templar, and to secretive guilds of craftsmen such as the Compagnons Du Devoir, the Children of Father Soubise and the Children of Father Jacques.

An often overlooked influence on the formation of secret societies, especially Freemasonry, is the Co-fraternities. Founded in the fifteenth century, they were originally lay brotherhoods affiliated to monasteries. The brothers pursued the spiritual life while also working in the community, organizing charities, commissioning art and leading processions on holy days. Their secrecy was originally designed to ensure that charitable works remained anonymous, but it gave rise to rumours of robes, secret rituals and initiates. In France in the fifteenth century these Co-fraternities, which had been absorbing ideas from Joachim and the Cathars, were eventually driven underground.

But modern ‘speculative’ Freemasonry is dated by its official historians to the seventeenth century.

It’s sometimes claimed that the first recorded case of initiation into Freemasonry was that in 1646 of the celebrated antiquary and collector, and founder member of the Royal Society, Elias Ashmole. He was certainly one of the earlier English Freemasons and very influential.

Born in 1617, the son of a sadler, Elias Ashmole qualified as a lawyer, and became a soldier and a civil servant. He was restless collector of curios. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, built around his collection, was the first public museum. He was also a man of boundless intellectual curiosity. In 1651 he met an older man, William Backhouse, owner of a manor house called Swallowfield. This turned out to have an extraordinary long gallery, a treasure house of ‘Inventions and Rarities’, including rare alchemical manuscripts. Backhouse was evidently a man much after Ashmole’s heart, and Ashmole’s diaries reveal how Backhouse invited him to become his son.

By this, we learn, Backhouse meant that he intended to adopt him as his successor and heir. Before he died, he promised, he would pass on to Ashmole the ultimate secret of alchemy, the true matter of the Philosopher’s Stone, so that Ashmole could carry forward a secret tradition that dated back to the time of Hermes Trismegistus. Over the next two years Backhouse’s teaching of the eager Ashmole was slow and apparently hesitant. But then in May 1653 the younger man recorded ‘my father Backhouse lying sick in Fleet streete over against St Dunstans Church, and not knowing whether he should live or dye, about eleven o clock, told me in S.lables the true Matter of the Philosophers Stone which he bequeathed to me as a Legacy’.

^{Illustration to Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, an anthology collected by Elias Ashmole.}

Ashmole’s is an unusually clear and unambiguous account of the passing down of secret knowledge, but there is other evidence, too, hints and allusions of occult activity among the intellectual elite. The second grand master of the London Lodge was John Théophile Desaguliers, a follower of Isaac Newton who likewise spent many years poring over alchemical manuscripts.

The symbolism of Freemasonry as it was formulated in this period is shot through with alchemical motifs from the central notion of the Work to the ubiquitous cornerstone and philosopher’s stone — ASHLAR — to the compasses and l’equerre.

^{Depiction of the English king, Charles I in 1649 awaiting execution. This event was predicted with astonishing accuracy by the French prophet and astrologer Michel de Nostradamus in 1555. As David Ovason, the most learned of the Nostradamus scholars, has pointed out, his line ‘CHera pAR LorS, Le ROY’ is cabalistic code for ‘Charls Le Roy’, so that the apparently bland line ‘It will come about that the King’ actually contains a prediction of the name of the man who, as parts of the quatrain make clear, was to be ‘kept in a fortress by the Thames’ and be ‘seen in his shirt’. Charles made a point of wearing two shirts, as he stepped outside on to the executioner’s platform, so that he would not shiver from the cold and appear fearful.}

THE TIME HAS FINALLY COME TO ASK

What exactly is alchemy?

Alchemy is very old. Ancient Egyptian texts talk of techniques of distillation and metallurgy as mystical processes. Greek myths such as the quest for the Golden Fleece can be seen to have an alchemical layer of meaning, and Fludd, Boehme and others have interpreted Genesis in the same alchemical terms.

A quick survey of alchemical texts ancient and modern shows that alchemy, like the Cabala, is a very broad church. If there is one great mysterious ‘Work’, it is approached via a remarkable variety of codes and symbols. In some cases the Work involves Sulphur, Mercury and Salt, in others roses, stars, the philosopher’s stone, salamanders, toads, crows, nets, the marriage bed, and astrological symbols such as the fish and the lion.

There are obvious geographical variations. Chinese alchemy seems less about the quest for gold and more about a quest for the elixir of life, for longevity, even immortality. Alchemy also seems to change through the ages. In the third century the alchemist Zozimos wrote that ‘the symbol of the chymic art — gold — comes forth from creation for those who rescue and purify the divine soul chained in the elements’. In early Arab texts the Work involves manipulations of these same Four Elements, but in European alchemy, rooted in the Middle Ages and flowering in the seventeenth century, a mysterious fifth element, the Quintessence, comes to the fore.

^{Illustration to Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton often wrote about the way his muse dictated poetry to him. It is tempting to modern sensibility to see this as mere metaphor. But Milton’s journals also show how much he was influenced by Boehme in his descriptions of Paradise and by Fludd in his cosmology. Milton’s writings also make it clear that he was used to encounters with disembodied beings: ‘If answerable style I can obtain Of my Celestial Patroness, who deigns Her nightly visitation unexplored; or inspires Easy my unpremeditated verse’.}

If we begin to look for unifying principles, we can see immediately that there are prescribed lengths of time or numbers of repetitions for the various operations, the distilling, the applying of gentle heat and so on.

There are obvious parallels, then, with meditative practice and this suggests immediately that these alchemical terms may be descriptions of subjective states of consciousness rather than the sort of chemical operations that might be performed in a laboratory.

Tying in with this we have also seen repeated suggestions, particularly from Rosicrucian sources, that these operations are often intended to have an effect during sleep and on the border between sleeping and waking. Could they be to do with visionary dreams or lucid dreaming? Or are they to do with the carrying over of elements of dream consciousness in waking consciousness?