The Secret History of the World

THE OTHER GREAT CONTRIBUTION TO THE development of thought came, of course, from the Greeks.

The siege of Troy marks the beginning of the rise to greatness of Greek civilization, when the Greeks seized the initiative from Chaldean-Egyptian civilization and forged their own ideals.

We have been tracing a history of the world in which — for the first time — the lives of great cultural heroes from around the world — Adam, Jupiter, Hercules, Osiris, Noah, Zarathustra, Krishna and Gilgamesh — have been woven together into one chronological narrative. For the most part they have left no physical traces, living on only in the collective imagination, preserved only in surviving scraps of story and scattered imagery.

^{The Trojan horse is depicted in the bottom panel. The story of the siege of Troy has come down to us, for the most part, in the account by ‘blind Homer’. In the language of the secret societies ‘blind’ is not necessarily meant literally. In the case of Homer it may mean he was an initiate, whose gaze was directed at the spiritual rather than the material world. Florence and Kenneth Wood have shown that the Iliad can be read as an astronomical allegory. But, as we have seen, this does not imply that it is not also a real historical event. As an initiate Homer would have been conscious of the great gods of stars and planets guiding the life below.}

From now on, though, we will see that many legendary figures, presumed by most people to be entirely non-historical, have in fact been shown by recent archaeology to have left physical remains.

The discovery of the ruins of Troy by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s has always been controversial. The archaeological layer he excavated probably dates to 3000 BC, and so is far too old to be Homer’s, but today the majority of scholars agree that the layer relating to 1200 BC, in the late Bronze Age, is consistent with Homer’s account.

In the ancient world wars were fought for the possession of sacred, initiatic knowledge, partly because of the supernatural powers this conferred. The Greeks fought because they wanted to carry off the statue made by the hand of Athena, called the Palladium. We should see their struggle to possess Helen in the same way.

Today we may see in the face of a beauty ‘the promise of happiness’, to use Stendhal’s phrase. Yes, we may cherish that promise in a crude or trivial sense, but we may also do so in a deeper sense. Great beauty can seem mystical to us, as if it holds the very secret of life. If I could be with that beautiful person, we think, my life would be fulfilled. The presence of exceptional beauty can induce an altered state of consciousness, and male initiates have often been associated with very beautiful women, perhaps partly because their participation intensifies the secret sexual techniques of the schools.

Possession of Helen would enable the Greeks to move forward to the next stage of civilization.

We see the change consciousness that the story of the siege of Troy is all about in the famous saying of Achilles: ‘Better to be a slave in the land of the living than the king of the shades.’ The heroes of Greece and Troy loved to live in the sun and it was a terrible thing when it was suddenly shut out, and their spirits were sent off to the land of the shades, the Western gloom. This was the ‘death-dread’ of Gilgamesh intensified to a level that seems almost modern.

^{Odysseus blinding the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, shows the progenitor of the new way of thinking destroying the old Third-Eyed one. The parallel story of David and Goliath, of some two hundred years later, when David slays the giant with a pebble aimed at the middle of the forehead, shows that such stragglers from earlier dispensations were still then a historical reality.}

Note that Achilles was not doubting the reality of life after death, but his conception of it evidently did not go beyond the dreary, half-life of the sub-lunar sphere. A vision of the heavenly spheres above had been lost to him.

We can see this turning point in consciousness from another angle if we ask ourselves who out of the heroes really won the battle of Troy for the Greeks? It was not the brave, strong hero Achilles, the almost-invincible last of the demi-gods. It was Odysseus ‘of the nimble wits’, who defeated the Trojans by tricking them into accepting the gift of a wooden horse, which had soldiers hidden inside.

To today’s sensibility the story of the Trojan Horse seems almost completely implausible. From the point of view of modern psychology it just seems unrealistic to suppose that anyone could be so gullible.

But at the time of the Trojan war, people were only just beginning to emerge from the collective mind we followed earlier walking through the ancient wood and have just seen Jaynes define. Before the Trojan war everyone shared the same world of thoughts. Others could see what you were thinking. No such lie would have been possible. People interacted with a terrible sincerity. They had a sense that we have lost that in everything they did they were taking part in cosmic events.

…the date of the siege of Troy is also the date of the first trick in history.

12. THE DESCENT INTO DARKNESS Moses and the Cabala • Akhenaten and Satan • Solomon, Sheba and Hiram • King Arthur and the Crown Chakra

EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION IS PERHAPS THE most successful in recorded history, lasting over three thousand years. Compare this with European-American, Christian civilization, which has so far lasted only about two thousand years. Another notable thing is Egypt’s extraordinarily well preserved historical records, which have survived on temple walls, on tablets and in papyri. These have been vital in placing neighbouring civilizations that have left less complete records and remains, in a chronological context.

The Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt has traditionally been placed in the reign of the pharaoh Ramasees II, one of the greatest and most expansive rulers of Egypt. A great builder at Luxor and Abu Simbel, his monuments also include the gigantic obelisk currently standing in La Place de la Concorde in Paris. In the Romantic poet Shelley’s Ozymandias , he became the archetype of the earthly ruler who comes to believe his achievements will last forever — ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

A worthy opponent for Moses, you might think. Cecil B. De Mille certainly thought so. But a problem has arisen. Archaeologists discovered that if you look for traces of the Hebrews in the reign of Ramasees II, or if you look, for example, for traces of the fall of Jericho or the Temple of Solomon in the corresponding archaeological layers, you find absolutely nothing.

This led to a consensus among academics that the epic myths of the origins of the Jews were ‘just myths’, in the sense that they had no basis in historical reality.

Is it worth pausing for a moment to wonder how much these people wanted the stories to be untrue, how much their convictions were informed by a sort of adolescent glee at the nursery certainties being overturned?

In the 1990s a group of younger archaeologists, based in Austria and London and led by David Rohl, began to question the conventional chronology of Egypt. More particularly they came to realize that in the period of the Third Intermediate Dynasty, two king lists which had been understood to run one after the other should really be understood as running concurrently.