We have met these shining spirits before. They are the spirits of the sun called in Genesis the Elohim. They now prepared Zarathustra for his mission.
First, they told him he must pass through fire without being burned.
Second, they poured molten lead — the metal of Ahriman — on to his chest, which he suffered in silence. Zarathustra then took the lead from his chest and calmly gave it back to them.
Third, they opened up his torso and showed him the secrets of his inner organs, before closing him up again.
Zarathustra returned to court and preached what the great spirits had revealed. He told the king that the sun spirits who created the world were working to transform it, and that one day the world would be a vast body of light.
The king he was addressing was a new one, but, like his predecessor he was in thrall to evil ministers. He did not want to hear this good news and let his ministers persuade him to have Zarathustra thrown in prison.
But Zarathustra escaped from prison and also from attempts to murder him. He lived to fight many battles against the forces of evil, battles where he pitched his magic powers against the powers of evil sorcerers. Later he became the archetype of the wizard, with a tall hat, cloak of stars and an eagle on his shoulder. Zarathustra was a dangerous, somewhat disconcerting figure, prepared to fight fire with fire.
He led his followers to secluded grottoes, hidden in the forests. There in underground caverns he initiated them. He wanted to provide them with the supernatural powers needed to fight the good fight. We know about this early Mystery school, because it survived five millennia underground in Persia before resurfacing as Mithraism, an initiatory cult popular among Roman soldiers, and then again in Manichaeism, a late Mystery religion which included St Augustine among its initiates.
Zarathustra prepared his followers to face Ahriman’s demons or Asuras by terrifying initiation ordeals. He who fears death, he said, is already dead.
It was recorded by Menippus, the Greek philosopher of the third century BC, who had been initiated by the Mithraic successors of Zarathustra, that, after a period of fasting, mortification and mental exercises performed in solitude, the candidate would be forced to swim across water, pass through fire and ice. He would be cast into a snake pit, and cut across the chest by a sword so that blood would flow.
By experiencing the outer limits of fear, the initiate was prepared for the worst that could happen, both in life and after death.
An important part of this preparation was inducing in the candidate conscious experience of the separation of the animal part of his make-up from the vegetable and material parts, as happens in sleep. Equally important was to experience the separation of the animal from the vegetable part, as happens after death. In other words initiation involved what we today sometimes call an ‘after-death experience’.
By the act of leaving the body the candidate knew beyond any possibility of doubt that death was not the end.
People who learn how to dream consciously, that is to say with the ability to think and exercise willpower we normally only enjoy in waking life, may develop powers which are ‘supernatural’ by today’s definitions. If you can dream consciously, then you are on the way to being able to move about the spirit worlds at will, communicating freely with the spirits of the dead and other disembodied beings. You may perhaps learn about the future in ways which might otherwise be blocked. You may be able to travel to other parts of the material universe and view things where you are not bodily present — so-called astral travel. The great sixteenth-century initiate Paracelsus, who, as we shall see, has some claims to be the father of both modern experimental medicine and homeopathy, said he was able to visit other people in their dreams.
We will also see that many great scientific discoveries have been revealed to initiates while in this alternative state of consciousness.
Supernatural means of influencing minds is another of the gifts that initiation may confer. Initiates I have met have undoubted gifts of mind-reading way beyond the abilities of sceptical scientists to reproduce in ‘cold reading’ experiments.
Similarly science has only the flimsiest, question-begging explanations for hypnosis. This is because, though it may be abused by popular entertainers, hypnosis was originally — and at root remains — an occult practice. Ultimately explicable only in mind-before-matter terms, it originated with the Rishis of India and in techniques practised during the process of initiation by the temple priests of Egypt. In the Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali, this power of influencing others’ minds is one of the powers called vibhuti. Mind-influence was used for benevolent purposes, but as the world became a more dangerous place it would have to be used for both defence and attack.
We saw earlier how in a mind-before-matter philosophy the way you look at someone can affect them at a sub-atomic level. The coiled cobra representations of the Third Eye on the foreheads of Egyptian initiates shows that it can reach out and strike at what it perceives. In the seventeenth century the scientist and alchemist J.B. von Helmont said that ‘a man may kill an animal by staring at it for fifteen minutes’. From the eighteenth century onwards European travellers in India were amazed by the ability of adepts to throw anyone into an immediate state of catalepsy, just by looking at them. The story of one nineteenth-century traveller was recorded by George Eliot’s friend, the initiate Gerald Massey. This traveller had been mesmerized by the gaze of a serpent. He was sinking deeper and deeper into a ‘somnambulic’ sleep under its fascinating influence. Then someone else in the party shot the snake, breaking its power over him — and he felt a blow to the head as if he too had been struck by a bullet. Travellers in the twentieth century reported tales of wolves that were able to freeze their victims and prevent them from crying out, even when the victim was unaware that he was being watched. In living memory in a small town called Crowborough, less than six miles from where I write, lived a local wise man and healer called Pigtail Badger. The villagers were afraid of him, because it was said that this tall, heavy-set, fierce-looking man could stop others in their tracks just by looking at them. It was said that sometimes he would do this to farm labourers, then sit and eat their lunches in front of them.
THE MOST IMPORTANT INITIATION TEACHINGS concerned the way the spirit worlds are experienced after death. This was not because a candidate would have doubted there was life after death — such a thought would have been unthinkable then — but because they feared what their experience would turn out to be. In the first instance they feared that demons they had evaded in their lifetime were lying in wait. Initiation showed candidates how to navigate the after-death journey safely.