In the temple sleep — which would still be practised by initiates of the Mystery schools two and half thousand years later, and is still practised in some secret societies today — someone who was ill would be allowed to sleep in the temple. This sleep would last for three days, during which time the initiates would work on their vegetative bodies in a way which was not dissimilar to the process of initiation.
Someone undergoing this healing process might have very realistic visions, directed by the initiates. First, he would be plunged in utter blackness. He would seem to himself to be losing all consciousness, to be dying. He would seem to himself to come round again, then be led by an animal-headed being travelling down long passages and through a series of chambers. At different stages he would be challenged and menaced by other animal-headed gods and demons, including monstrous crocodiles who would tear at him.
In the Egyptian Book of the Dead the candidate makes his way past these guardians of the thresholds by proclaiming, ‘I am the Gnostic, I am the one who knows.’ This is a magical formula he uses in the process of initiation and will be able to use again after death.
He approaches the inner sanctum. He sees an extraordinary, bright light shining through the cracks round the edge of the gates. He cries out, ‘Let me come! Let me spiritualize myself, let me become pure spirit! I have prepared myself by the writings of Thoth!’
Finally, out of the swirling waves of light a vision emerges of the Mother Goddess suckling her child. This is a healing vision because it takes us back to the paradisaical time we looked at in Chapter 3, before the earth and the sun became separated, when the earth was illumined from within by the Sun god, a time before there was any dissatisfaction, disease or death. And it looks forward, too, to another time when earth and sun will be reunited, when the earth will again be transfigured by the sun.
In all ages and in all places there have been people who have believed that meditating on this image of the Mother Goddess and child brings about miracles of healing.
AFTER HIS STAY IN EGYPT ABRAHAM moved westwards, towards the region we know today as Palestine. He had to arm and train his servants to rescue his brother who had been captured by local bandits. Following a fierce and bloody fight, he was walking through a valley (which today’s biblical scholars identify with the Kidron Valley), when he met a strange individual called Melchizedek.
As with Enoch, there is just a brief mention of Melchizedek in the Bible but an accompanying sense of the numinous and of something important left unsaid. Genesis 14: 18-20: ‘And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine and he was the priest of the most high God. And he blessed him and said “Blessed be Abram of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth and blessed be the most high God, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand.” This sense of the numinous is reinforced by a mysterious passage in the New Testament, Hebrews 6.20-7.17: ‘Jesus was made an high priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek. For this Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the most high God, who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings, and blessed him; to whom Abraham also gave a tenth part of all, first being by interpretation King of righteousness and after that also King of Salem, which is, King of peace; without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually… Who is made, not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life. For he testifieth Thou art a priest forever under the order of Melchizedek.’
Clearly something strange is going on. Clearly this mysterious individual, who has the ability to live forever, is no ordinary human being.
In cabalistic tradition Melchizedek’s secret identity is Noah, the great Atlantean leader who had taught humankind agriculture, the cultivation of corn and of the vine, who never really died but moved to another dimension. He now reappeared in order to be Abraham’s spiritual teacher, to initiate him to a higher level.
In order to understand Melchizedek’s initiatic teaching, we must examine a later episode when, according to the ancient tradition, Melchizedek was present, even though this is hidden in the biblical version.
Isaac was twenty two years old when his father took him up a mountain to sacrifice him on the altar of Melchizedek.
IT IS VERY IMPORTANT IN CERTAIN FORMS of initiation that at a particular point in the ceremony the candidate believes, perhaps briefly but with total conviction, that he or she is going to die.
He has perhaps understood that he is going to undergo a symbolic death, but it suddenly dawns upon him that there may have been a change of plan. Perhaps he has sworn the most solemn oaths on pain of death that he will mend his ways and live up to high ideals. Now with the blade held against him, he wonders if the initiates who have him in their power know that he has lied to them. He knows, now he comes to think about it, that he has done things he ought not to have done, not done the things he ought to have done, that there is no health in him. He knows in his heart of hearts he does not have enough willpower to keep the oaths he has sworn. He has just condemned himself to death out of his own mouth, and he is utterly unable to help himself.
At this point he realizes he needs supernatural help.
We may catch a faint echo of these emotions of fear and pity if we are moved by a great tragedy, by Oedipus Rex or King Lear. In initiation the candidate is made to feel the tragedy of his own life, an overwhelming need for catharsis. He begins to judge his own lives as the demons and angels will judge it after death.
AS ABRAHAM’S KNIFE BEGAN TO SLICE open Isaac’s throat, an angel substituted a ram whose horns had been caught in a nearby thicket.
What the thorns in the thicket represent is the two-petalled — or two horned — brow chakra, already entangled in matter. Abraham acts as he does because this mode of vision would have to be sacrificed. For the time being at least, perception of the spirit worlds must be put to sleep for the sake of the mission of the ancestors of Abraham — to develop the brain as an organ of thinking.
The Jews will be guided by Jehovah, the great spirit of the moon, the great god of thou-shalt-not who helps humanity evolve away from animal and ecstatic experience, away from the life of tribal or group soul towards the development of individual free will and free thinking.
In the secret history this sacrifice of the brow chakra takes place on the altar of Melchizedek, the great high priest of the Sun Mysteries. What this signifies is that Isaac was initiated to such a level that he understood the necessity for this next, lunar stage of human development. The evolution of individual free will and free thinking will eventually enable humans to play a conscious part in the transforming of the world.
Isaac stayed at the Mystery school of Melchizedek for three and a half years learning of these things.
Because Melchizedek is a priest of the Sun Mysteries, this school should be pictured as containing within its precincts a stone circle. We have reached the great age of these sun temples, examples of which still survive in Lüneberg in Germany, Carnac in France and Stonehenge in England. In the fourth century BC the historian Diodorus of Sicily described a spherical sun temple in the north, dedicated to Apollo. Today scholars believe he was describing Stonehenge or, more likely, Callanish in the far north of Scotland, but in either case the association with Apollo should be understood as a looking forward to the rebirth of the Sun god from the womb of the Mother Goddess.