Historians of the ancient world tell us that from the beginnings of Egyptian civilisation to the collapse of Rome, public temples in places like Thebes, Eleusis and Ephesus had priestly enclosures attached to them. Classical scholars refer to these enclosures as the Mystery schools.
Here meditation techniques were taught to the political and cultural elite. Following years of preparation, Plato, Aeschylus, Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Cicero and others were initiated into a secret philosophy. At different times the techniques used by these ‘schools’ involved sensory deprivation, breathing exercises, sacred dance, drama, hallucinogenic drugs and different ways of redirecting sexual energies. These techniques were intended to induce altered states of consciousness in the course of which initiates were able to see the world in new ways.
Anyone who revealed to outsiders what he had been taught inside the enclosures was executed. Iamblichus, the neoplatonist philosopher, recorded what happened to two boys who lived at Ephesus. One night, lit up by rumours of phantoms and magical practices, of a more intense, more blazingly real reality hidden inside the enclosures, they let their curiosity get the better of them. Under cover of darkness they scaled the walls and dropped down the other side. Pandemonium followed, audible all over the city, and in the morning the boys’ corpses were discovered in front of the enclosure gates.
Formation of the Secret Societies
In the ancient world the teachings of the Mystery schools were guarded as closely as nuclear secrets are guarded today.
Then in the third century the temples of the ancient world were closed down, as Christianity became the ruling religion of the Roman Empire. The danger of ‘proliferation’ was addressed by declaring these secrets heretical, and trafficking in them continued to be a capital offence. But members of the new ruling elite, including Church leaders, now began to form secret societies. Behind closed doors they continued to teach the old secrets.
The Secret History of the World contains an accumulation of evidence to show that an ancient and secret philosophy that originated in the Mystery schools was preserved and nurtured down the ages through the medium of secret societies, including the Knights Templar and the Rosicrucians. Sometimes this philosophy has been hidden from the public and at other times it has been placed in plain view – though always in such a way as to remain unrecognised by outsiders.
A mystical experience
Is the Pope Catholic? Well, not in the straightforward way you might think. One morning in 1939 a young man aged twenty one was walking down the street when a truck drove into him and knocked him down. While in a coma he had an overwhelming mystical experience. When he came round he recognised that, although it had come about in an unexpected way, this experience was what he had been led to expect as the fruit of techniques taught to him by his mentor, Miefzyslaw Kotlarczyk, a modern Rosicrucian master.
As a result of this mystical experience the young man joined a seminary, later became Bishop of Cracow, then later still Pope John Paul II.
These days the fact that the head of the Catholic Church was first initiated into the spirit realm under the aegis of a secret society is perhaps not as shocking as it once was, because science has taken over from religion as the main agent of social control. It is science that decides what it is acceptable for us to believe – and what is beyond the pale. In both the ancient world and the Christian era, the secret philosophy was kept secret by threatening those who trafficked in it with death. Now in the post-Christian era the secret philosophy is still surrounded by dread, but the threat is of ‘social death’ rather then execution. Belief in key tenets, such as prompting by disembodied beings or that the course of history is materially influenced by secret cabals, has been branded as at best crackpot, at worst the very definition of what it is to be mad.
Common purpose
However, one of the aims of this book is to show that, far from being passing fads or unaccountable eccentricities, far from being incidental or irrelevant, these strange ideas formed the core philosophy of many of the people who made history – and perhaps more significantly, to show that they shared a remarkable unanimity of purpose. If you weave together the stories of these great men and women into a continuous historical narrative, it becomes apparent again and again that at the great turning points in history, the ancient and secret philosophy was there, hiding in the shadows, making its influence felt.
I have been looking for a concise, reliable and completely clear guide to the secret teachings for more than twenty years. The results of my researches have convinced me that the basic facts of history can be interpreted in a way which is almost completely the reverse of the way we normally understand them. To prove this would, of course, require a whole library of books, something like the twenty miles of shelves of esoteric and occult literature said to be locked away in the Vatican. But in The Secret History of the World I can only show that this alternative, this mirror image view, is a consistent and cogent one with its own logic, and that is has the virtue of explaining areas of human experience that remain inexplicable to the conventional view.
An imaginative exercise
Above all – and this point I want to emphasise – I ask readers to approach this text in a new way – to see it as an imaginative exercise.
I want the reader to try to imagine what it would feel like to believe the opposite of what we have been brought up to believe. This inevitably involves an altered state of consciousness to some degree or other, which is just as it should be. Because at the very heart of all esoteric teaching in all parts of the world lies the belief that higher forms of intelligence can be accessed in altered states. The Western tradition in particular has always emphasised the value of imaginative exercises which involve cultivating and dwelling upon visual images. Allowed to sink deep into the mind, they there do their work.
Induce in yourself a different state of mind and the most famous and familiar histories mean something very different.
In fact if anything in this history is true, then everything your teachers taught you is thrown into question.
I suspect this prospect doesn’t alarm you.
As one of the devotees of the ancient and secret philosophy so memorably put it: You must be mad, or you wouldn’t have come here.
From The Secret History of the World © 2008 by Jonathan Black, published by Quercus.
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