The Secret History of the World

The miraculously lifelike statues for which Greece is famous emerged from the Mystery schools. Their original function was to help bring the gods to earth.

We know from the earlier use of statues in Egypt and Sumeria that it was intended that the gods occupy them, live in them as their physical bodies and make them come alive. If you stood in front of the statue of Artemis in Ephesus, the Mother Earth loomed over you like a great tree. You had a sensation of being absorbed into the vegetable matrix of the cosmos, the great ocean of weaving waves of light, and of being at one with it.

The statues would breath, seem to move. It was said that sometimes they would speak to you.

After various trials the successful candidate was allowed to ascend to the Empyrean realm, a place flooded with light, music and dancing. Dionysus — Bacchus or Iacchos — appeared in a beautiful, radiant vision of light. Aristedes, the orator, recalled: ‘I thought I felt the god draw near and I touched him, I was somewhere between waking and sleeping. My spirit was so light — in a way someone who hasn’t been initiated wouldn’t understand. ’ By this lightness of spirit, he is referring to an out-of-body experience. It also seems clear that the gods sometimes occupied ethereal, vegetable bodies in the Mysteries and so appeared like luminous spectres or phantoms.

So the process of initiation gave direct, existential, undeniable first-hand knowledge that the spirit could live outside the body, and while in this state the candidate became a spirit among spirits, a god among gods. When the new initiate was ‘born again’ into the everyday material world, when he was crowned as an initiate he retained many god-like powers of perception and abilities to influence events.

^{In the upside-down, other-way-round doctrine of the secret societies, the Greeks created the first statues of perfect human bodies because human bodies only became perfectly formed at this point in time. The Greek cult of the body arose from the fresh experience of the perfect form.}

^{Otherwise known as the Wand of Hermes, the Caduceus was a pole with two snakes entwined. The thyrsus was a representation of the Caduceus, probably made out of a hollow stalk like that of a fennel — in which Prometheus carried fire down to illumine humankind. The thyrsus in which the secret, sacred fire is hidden is the Sushumna Nadi of Indian occult physiology. On top of the stalk was a pine cone representing the pineal gland.}

The experience of initiation was, therefore, a mystical one. However, as we have seen in the case of Pythagoras, practical and even scientific knowledge was shown to be implicit in this experience, too. After initiation the hierophant would elucidate what the new initiate had just experienced, drawing arcane disclosures from a book made of two stone tablets, called the Book of Interpretation. They taught the way the material world and the material, human body had been formed and the way both were directed by the spirit worlds. To help them in their teaching they also used symbols. These included the thyrsus made of a reed, sometimes with seven knots and topped with a pine cone. There were also the ‘toys of Dionysus’ — a golden serpent, a phallus, an egg and a spinning top that made the sound ‘Om’. Cicero would write that when you come to understand them, the occult mysteries have more to do with natural science than with religion.

There was a prophetic element in this teaching, too. The final initiation at Eleusis involved the candidate being shown a plucked green wheat ear, held up in silence.

Of course on one level the Mysteries were agricultural and looked forward to a good harvest. But there was another level to do with the harvesting of souls.

This wheat was the star Spica, the divine seed held in the left hand of the virgin goddess of the constellation of Virgo. I’m talking, of course, about the goddess the Egyptians called Isis. The grain she holds looks forward to the great cosmic ‘seed time’. It will be made into the bread of the Last Supper, symbolizing the vegetable body in Jesus Christ and also the vegetative dimension, or altered state of consciousness, we all must work ourselves into, according to esoteric Christianity, if we are to meet him there.

^{The importance of Spica in the ancient world is shown by the fact that, apart from Sirius, it is the only star represented on the famous planisphere at Dendera, a section of which is produced here. The great cosmic wheel grinds all the stars except for this single one that is saved, just outside its rim.}

Again we see that the vegetative dimension of the cosmos is the focus of esoteric thought. In Plato’s philosophy it is the soul, the mediator between the material body and the animal spirit. If we are to leave behind the material world and enter the spirit worlds, this vegetative dimension must be the subject of our Work.

THERE ARE OTHER WAYS THAT SPIRITS could influence events.

Everyone who contemplates one of the busts of Socrates that have survived may be struck by the lively, satyr-like quality of his physiognomy.

In the secret tradition Socrates was a reincarnation of the great spirit who had previously lived in the body of Silenus.

^{Gem carvings of Silenus and Socrates.}

^{The death of Aeschylus carved on a gem. Aeschylus was the son of a priest at Eleusis. He was threatened with execution for having betrayed the secrets of the Mysteries by portraying them on stage. He escaped execution by claiming that he had never been initiated, but when an eagle dropped a rock from a great height on to his bald head, killing him, many interpreted this as divine retribution.}

Socrates sometimes spoke of his daemon, meaning a good spirit who guided him through life. Today this might seem an alien concept. But the following account of the daemon in modern times is perhaps instructive. It is an incident recalled by a pupil of the Russian esoteric philosopher P.D. Ouspensky, a formative influence on many of the great writers and artists of the twentieth century, including the poet and playwright T.S. Eliot, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the artists Kazimir Malevich and Georgia O’Keefe.

This man, a lawyer, had been to hear a lecture by Ouspensky at a house in west London. He was walking away, puzzled by it and full of doubts. But as he did so, a voice inside him said: ‘If you lose touch with this, you will be doing something that you will regret for the rest of your life’. He wondered where this voice came from.

Eventually he found an explanation in Ouspensky’s teachings. This voice was his higher self. One of the great aims of the process of initiation he found himself undertaking was to so alter his consciousness that he would be able to hear this voice all the time.

Socrates was a man guided by his conscience in this way. He carried forward the great project of converting instinctive wisdom of the lower, animal self into concepts, and his philosophy like that of Pythagoras is not merely academic. It is also a philosophy of life. The aim of all philosophy, he said, is to teach one how to die.

There is some dispute, even within the secret schools, as to whether or not Socrates was an initiate.

When accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and of not believing in the gods, Socrates committed suicide by drinking hemlock. He died forgiving his executioners.