When Constantine’s nephew Julian came to power in 361, he reversed the tide of religious intolerance. Having been brought up a pupil of the Neoplatonist philosopher Iamblichus, he well understood the mission of the being he called the ‘Seven-rayed god’. He gave equal rights to all subjects regardless of their religious beliefs and gave permission for pagan temples to reopen.
Julian wrote a famous polemic against the narrow, dogmatic Christianity that had grown up during the time of Constantine, which is why later Christian writers came to call him the Apostate, meaning someone who discarded the faith. He believed that Christianity had been seeking to deny the reality of the gods he had encountered through initiation.
Julian led a military campaign into Persia. Just as the Greeks had besieged Troy to control the initiation knowledge hidden within, Julian wished to understand the secret knowledge of the Manichaean Mystery school based in Persia. He knew enough to know that the mission of the Sun god was under threat, and that the inner mysteries of Manichaeism concerned the secrets of the war between the Sun god and Ahriman — or Satan — the spirit of materialism.
But before he could accomplish his mission, Julian was murdered by a follower of Constantine, and a new Saturnine era began, when knowledge of true, initiatic spirituality would finally be driven underground. The Emperor Theodosius began a ruthless policy of suppressing all disagreement with the imperial line on Christian doctrine. He confiscated the property of ‘heretics’ and took over their temples. Statues of Isis were rededicated to Mary. The Pantheon in Rome has a sublime and cosmic beauty unlike any purpose-built church. This temple to all the gods was converted by Theodosius into a temple of monotheism.
Theodosius closed down the Mystery schools and in 391 besieged the Serapeum in Alexandria. This sacred compound with a vast cloud-capped temple to Serapis was one of the wonders of the ancient world. Inside a statue of the god was suspended from the ceiling by a magnet. There were also libraries that housed the world’s greatest collection of books. Fortunately many books were smuggled out before the Serapeum was burned to the ground and its sacred statues dragged through the streets.
Finally Theodosius turned his attention to the Neoplatonic school of philosophy based in Alexandria, foremost preserver of the intellectual legacy of the Mystery schools. The great personality of Neoplatonism at that time was a young woman called Hypatia. Daughter of a leading philosopher and mathematician, she was educated in philosophy, maths, geometry and astronomy. Her father had also developed a series of exercises to make her body a fitting vessel for a brilliant mind. She loved swimming, horse riding and mountain climbing. So she was beautiful as well as clever, and she soon won fame as an inventor of scientific instruments, including one to measure the specific gravity of liquids. Only a few fragments of her writing have survived, but she was known far and wide as one of the most brilliant minds of the time.
She attracted large crowds as a lecturer. Well versed in the wisdom of Plotinus and Iamblichus she explained in her lectures how Christianity had evolved out of the teachings of the Mystery schools, and she argued, like her father, that no single tradition or doctrine could have exclusive claim to the truth.
One afternoon in 414 when Hypatia was leaving a lecture hall, a gang of black-cowelled monks forced her from her chariot, stripped her naked and dragged her through the streets to a nearby church. There they pulled her through the cool, flitting shadows to the altar. In an atmosphere perfumed with incense they swarmed all over her body, her naked form now covered by black cloth, and they tore her limb from limb. Later they scraped the flesh from her bones using oyster shells and burned all her remains.
The church was trying to erase Hypatia from history just as the priests of Amun had tried to erase Akhenaten.
IT IS TOO EASY TO SEE THE CHURCH AS the evil repressor of free thought and to romanticize outlawed groups and antinomian schools like the Neoplatonists and the Gnostics. From its early history the Church has numbered among its leaders practitioners of black magic and other initiates who have abused their supernatural powers for selfish ends. But it is equally true — and perhaps more important — to say that from the time of St Paul and St Augustine the greatest Church leaders have been initiates of the highest order who have sought to guide humanity according to the divine plan outlined in this book. They knew that it was necessary for any understanding of reincarnation to be suppressed in the West. According to the cosmic plan, the West was to be the cradle for the developing sense of the value of an individual human life.
On the other hand the Neoplatonists, though they had continued the work of Pythagoras and Plato, converting into concepts the direct experiences of the spirit worlds, seemed altogether unaware of the great revolution that had taken place there. In their writings there is no trace of the gospel of universal love that Jesus Christ had introduced. Similarly the Gnostic emphasis on direct, personal experience of the spirit worlds, as distinct from passive acceptance of abstract dogma, was in line with the impulse introduced by Jesus Christ, but many of the Gnostics were also vehement world-haters in a way that ran contrary to the mission of Jesus Christ to transform the material world. Many of the beliefs that the Gnostic sects took from their adventures in the spirit worlds were also quite fantastical. Not only did some Gnostics believe that Jesus Christ had not sunk so low as to inhabit a physical body, that he had lived on the earth only as some kind of phantom, but they also practised bizarre extremes of mortification and debauchery as a way of disrupting their own, despised bodily senses and gaining access to the spirit worlds. Some encouraged snakes to crawl over their naked bodies, some drank menstrual blood, saying ‘Here is the blood of Christ’, and others believed that their sex magic would lead to the birth of god-like creatures. Others castrated themselves and boasted, ‘I am deader than you are.’
ROME WANTED TO STAMP OUT DOCTRINAL differences. Christian conviction and moral purpose were useful for Constantine and Theodosius, unifying the Empire and strengthening it from within at a time when barbarian hoards were threatening it from the East.
A steadily expanding empire in China had caused a domino effect across Central Asia and into Europe. Under pressure from the Far East Goths, Visigoths and Vandals invaded parts of Europe, even reaching as far as Rome before retreating again. Then, in the second quarter of the fifth century, the nomadic Mongolian tribes were united under a great leader, Attila the Hun. He swept through the territories previously invaded by Goths and Vandals and built an empire which stretched from the plains of Central Asia to northern Gaul. He pushed into northern Italy and raided Constantinople.
Attila, the ‘scourge of God’, has become a byword for barbarity, but an eyewitness account of a visit to Attila’s encampment by a Greek historian, Priscus, gives a very different picture. Priscus shows Attila living in a simple wooden house of polished boards, surrounded by a wooden enclosure. Woollen mats served as carpets, and Attila — literally ‘little father’ — received his visitors wearing simple linen clothes, unadorned by gems or gold. He drank — moderately — from a wooden bowl and ate from a wooden plate. He showed no emotion during the interview except when his youngest son arrived, whom he chucked under the chin and regarded with a look of satisfaction.