The oath against suicide was one of the most terrible taken by initiates.
IT’S BECOME COMMONPLACE TO SAY that religion has had a negative, even destructive effect on human history. Wars of religion, the Inquisition, the suppression of scientific thought and restrictive patriarchal attitudes are routinely cited. It is worth remembering that some of the greater glories of human culture had their origins in the Mystery schools that were a central part of organized religion in the ancient world. Not only sculpture and drama but also philosophy, mathematics and astronomy as well as political and medical ideas arose out of this religious institution.
Above all the Mystery schools influenced the evolution of consciousness.
Conventional history puts little emphasis on the evolution of consciousness, but we can see it in action again if we look at changes in Greek drama. In the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the first dramatists to have their work performed outside the Mystery schools, wrongdoing results in persecution by the winged demons called Erinyes or Furies — for example in the Oresteia of Aeschylus of 458 BC. By Euripides’s play of 428 BC, Hippolytus, this chiding has been internalized and given a name. ‘There is only one thing that can survive all life’s trials — a quiet conscience.’
In conventional history it is assumed that people have always been pricked by conscience. On this view Euripides was simply the first person to put a name to it. In the upside-down, other-way-round thinking of esoteric tradition the reason that there is no suggestion of conscience in any of the annals of human experience up to that point, is that the Eleusian Mysteries forged this new dimension of human experience.
Great dramatic art shows we often don’t feel exactly what convention tells us we should feel. It shows us new ways of being — feeling, thinking, willing, perceiving. To borrow a phrase of Saul Bellow’s, it opens the human condition a little wider.
When we experience Greek drama we are purged by catharsis. The Greek dramatists give their audiences an experience which is an echo of the experience of initiation, and their way of working is based on an understanding of human nature that is essentially initiatic. Our animal body has been corrupted. It has become hardened and carries something like a protective carapace. We become comfortable with this carapace, though. We even grow to rely on it. But our easy, basking lives have been made possible by blood spilled, torture, theft, injustice — and deep down we know it. So deep inside us there is a self-loathing that prevents us from living wholly in the moment, from living life to the full. We cannot truly love or be loved until the insect-like carapace is cut open by the agonizing process of initiation. Until we reach that point we don’t know what life is meant to be like.
When we see a great production of one of the tragedies inspired by the experience of initiation — Oedipus Rex, for example, or King Lear — we may catch an echo of this process.
IF SOME OF THE IDEAS OF THE GREEKS ARE hard to understand, hard to accept, others may at first glance look rather obvious, even bland, to the extent you might even think they are hardly worth saying at all. The handful of sayings attributed to Pythagoras that have survived include:
Above all things respect yourself
and
Do not yield to temptation except when you agree to be untrue to yourself.
In order to understand why these were challenging, even astounding things to say, things that shook the world and, as a result have been remembered down the ages, we have to see them in the context of a newly burgeoning sense of self.
Similarly when Socrates said:
An unconsidered life is not worth living, he was addressing people who up that point had had no faculty for abstract thought with which to contemplate their lives. This was the great gift of Socrates to the world.
WHEN SOCRATES DIED, HIS PUPIL PLATO became the leading figure in Greek philosophy.
Plato was born in 428 into one of the first generations systematically taught to read. He founded the Academy in the garden of the tomb of Academus in Athens.
His Dialogues are the greatest expression of the mind-before-matter philosophy called idealism that is at the heart of this book.
In the secret history everyone had experienced the world in an idealistic way up to this time. Everyone’s form of consciousness was such that he would not have questioned that ideas are a higher form of reality than objects. Everyone believed this unthinkingly, instinctively. It only became necessary for a great initiate to conceptualize the idealistic world-view and write it down in systematic terms at the point when consciousness had evolved to a stage that people could conceive of the opposing point of view. Plato’s pupil Aristotle made the philosophical leaps forward that would lead to the materialism that is the dominant philosophy today.
PLATO’S IDEALISM IS EASY FOR US TO misinterpret. It naturally seems to us to follow that if the material world is a precipitate of our mental processes, we should be able to manipulate the world in a very obvious and direct way just by thinking about it. In fact, if the world is nothing more than a sort of giant hologram, then couldn’t it just be switched off? In The Principles of Human Knowledge Bishop Berkeley, the most influential philosopher of idealism in English, advocated a version of idealism according to which matter has no existence independent of perception — and this is the version of idealism most familiar to students of philosophy in Anglo-American universities.
But as a matter of historical fact it is not the position held by the great majority of people throughout history who have believed in idealism. As I have already suggested, these people experienced the world in an idealistic way. The faculty of imagination was much stronger than the faculty for thinking, which was then only beginning to develop. They believed that the objects of the imagination were more real than the objects of the senses — but this does not necessarily mean that the latter are totally unreal.
Most people in history who have believed in idealism as a philosophy of life, have believed in matter being precipitated out of mind as a historical process that took place gradually and over vast periods of time. They have also believed — and still believe — that the hologram will, as it were, be switched off, but again gradually and over equally vast stretches of time.
Today’s university students debating the pros and cons of idealism probably find it difficult to equate Platonic ideas with gods and angels, as we have been doing. This association risks seeming crudely anthropomorphic to modern sensibility.
But again, as a matter of historical fact, people who believed in idealism as a philosophy of life have always tended to believe in spirits, gods and angels.
When considering the great world-weaving cosmic thoughts, the active principles behind the appearances of things, many idealists have asked themselves how far it is appropriate to consider them as being conscious beings like ourselves. Idealists like Cicero and Newton have considered these ‘Intelligencers’, to use Newton’s name for them, neither as crudely impersonal nor crudely personal. Cicero and Newton were neither crudely polytheistic nor crudely monotheistic. They experienced life as meaningful and the cosmos as meant. They believed, then, that something like human qualities, indeed something like human consciousness, is built into the structure of the cosmos.