It is also said that when Attila conquered the Christian city of Corinth, he was outraged to find a prostitute on every street corner. He gave them the choice of marrying one of his men or exile.
If Attila was not the ravening monster of popular imagination, it is nevertheless true to say that if he had succeeded in overrunning the Roman Empire, this would have been disastrous for the evolution of human consciousness.
The Romans feared Attila more than any of their other enemies. Attila would not allow his people to live in Roman territory or buy Roman goods. When he invaded Roman territories he reversed Romanization, demolishing Roman buildings — and he also took thousands of pounds of gold from Rome in tribute money. When in 452 he finally had Rome itself in his grip, the Emperor sent out Leo, the Bishop of Rome, to meet him.
The future Pope Leo negotiated a deal with Attila by the terms of which Honoria, the daughter of the Emperor, would be his wife together with a dowry of thousands more pounds of gold.
At this point Attila believed he had achieved his ambition to take over the Roman Empire and rule the world.
Attila and his people practised shamanism. In all battles Attila was guided — wisely as it turned out — by his shaman-priests. The great terror-striking uproar of a Hun army going to battle was made up of the howling of dogs, the clanking of weapons, the sounds of horns and bells. All this was intended to summon the battalions of the dead, the ghosts of their ancestors, to fight alongside them. They were also shamanistically calling on the group souls of carnivores, the wolves and the bears, to enter into them and give them supernatural powers.
BECAUSE WE HAVE BEEN CONSIDERING the barbarian invasions from the East, this is perhaps a good place to pause to consider shamanism. The word shaman comes from the Tungus-Mongol noun meaning ‘one who knows’.
Shamans, from the time of the barbarian invasions to the present, have used a variety of techniques — Mircea Eliade has called them ‘archaic techniques of ecstasy’ — to work themselves into a trance state: rhythmic drumming and dancing, hyperventilation, frenzied self-mutilation, sensory deprivation, dehydration, sleep deprivation — and also psychoactive plants, including ayahuasca, peyote cactus, the ergot fungus. Recent studies by Wiliam Emboden, Professor of Biology at California State University, and others have also made it look likely that drugs were used to induce trance states in Mystery centres — for example, the kykeon at Eleusis and the blue water lily taken in conjunction with opium and mandrake roots in ancient Egypt.
Scientists have isolated an enzyme in the brain that induces these trance states. Research seems to suggest that 2 per cent of us have high enough levels of dimethyltryptamine naturally occurring in the brain to give us spontaneous and involuntary trance states. It also seems likely that we all have higher levels until adolescence, when a process of crystallization takes place, cladding the pineal gland and impeding its function. For the rest of us these ancient techniques or similar are necessary.
Anthropologists have noticed that accounts of shamanistic experience across many different cultures show a progression through the same stages.
First, a blacking out of the world of the senses, and a sense of a journey through the darkness. Great pain is often experienced as if the body is being dismembered.
Second, a sea of lights, often with a shifting net of geometric patterns — the matrix.
Third, these patterns morph into shapes, most commonly snakes and half-human, half-animal creatures often with pliable, semi-transparent bodies.
Lastly, when the trance fades the shaman has a sense of enjoying supernatural powers, the ability to heal, information about enemies, mind-to-mind influence on animals and the gift of prophecy.
This may all seem to fit nicely with the accounts of initiations in Mystery schools that we have looked at. Gregg Jacobs at Harvard Medical School has said that ‘by the use of shamanistic techniques we can work ourselves into powerful ancestral states of consciousness’.
But in the view of modern esotericists, the example of shamanism will only take us so far when trying to understand the Mystery schools and secret societies. Many of the paintings produced by shamanistic cultures as records of their trances are startlingly beautiful, but they do not give the same magnificent, comprehensive panorama of the spirit worlds found, for example, on the ceilings of the temples of Edfu or Philae. Moreover, the beings encountered by shamans seem to be from the lower levels, rather than the more elevated planetary gods with whom the temple priests communed.
In the view of modern esoteric teachers, then, all shamanism, whether that of the old Hunnic or Mongol hordes or that practised by the sangoma in South Africa today, represent a degeneration of a once magnificent primordial vision.
Again we see that in the secret history everything is upside down and the wrong way round. In conventional history religion’s early stages were marked by animism and totemism, then developed into the complicated cosmologies of the great ancient civilizations. In the secret history humankind’s primordial vision was complicated, sophisticated and magnificent, and only later degenerated into animism, totemism and shamanism.
Attila’s tribespeople practised a shamanism that gave them an access to the spirit worlds that many a churchman might envy, but it was access in an atavistic state. It ran contrary to the impulse of the evolution of human consciousness that had been developed by Pythagoras and Plato and had now been given new direction by Jesus Christ and Paul. The aim of this evolution was a beautiful one — that people would be able take joy in their individual intellectual strength and superiority, and that they should be able to choose to move freely, powerfully and lovingly not only through the material world but also through the spirit worlds.
Drug-taking is, of course, a big part of modern shamanistic practice, but it is forbidden by most modern esoteric teachers as a means of reaching the spirit worlds. The aim of these teachers is to achieve experience of the spirit worlds with intelligence and critical faculties as unimpaired as possible, indeed heightened. To enter the spirit worlds on drugs, on the other hand, is to do so without proper preparation, and may open up a portal into a demonic dimension which then refuses to close.
WHEN IN 453 ATTILA PREPARED TO CELEBRATE MARRIAGE to a high-born, soft-skinned young woman — he already had hundreds of wives — he was a man in the prime of life and full of potency, about to oversee the end of the Roman Empire.
The delicate early growth of a new stage of human consciousness was about to be nipped in the bud.
In the morning Attila was found dead. He had suffered a massive nosebleed.
‘I BELIEVE BECAUSE IT IS ABSURD.’ This famous phrase by the first of the Latin-speaking Church fathers, Tertullian, influenced many thinkers in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century.
We may imagine how absurd life might have seemed to a citizen of the Roman Empire in the days of its decline. He lived in a disenchanted world, where the great spiritual certainties on which the civilizations of the ancient world had been founded seemed doubtful. They no longer corresponded to his experience. Pan was long dead and the oracles had fallen silent. God and the gods seemed little more than empty, abstract ideas, while the really vigorous thought-life was in the realm of science and technology, in the atomic theories of Lucretius, in amazing engineering projects — aqueducts, drainage systems and roads thousands of miles long — that were springing up all round. Spiritual certainties had been replaced by harsh political and economic realities.