Mark Booth - The Secret History of the World

It requires a whole book — David’s book — to give a full account. What is important to this history, and helps us to begin to pull its main themes together, is that Washington, DC was laid out to welcome Isis, the goddess associated with Virgo.

Washington, then, built his city under the sign of Virgo, inviting the Mother Goddess to participate in the destiny of the United States.

We’ve seen that secret techniques for achieving altered states are taught inside secret societies. Different grades of initiation that lead to different levels of altered state. Higher levels may grant the gift of prophecy. Great initiates have such an all-embracing knowledge of the higher spirits and their plans for humanity that they are able to work consciously towards helping the fulfilment of those plans.

Initiates from different esoteric traditions and different parts of the world had been predicting the dawn of a new age. Joachim, Dee and Paracelsus prophesied the return of Elijah, working behind the scenes of history to help humankind become strong enough to face the trials that it would have to face. By inviting the Mother Goddess to participate in the destiny of the United States, Washington was also looking forward to a new age, a new dispensation. The United States would dominate the world — if Washington’s great prayers in stone were answered and the ancient prophecies came true.

Abbot Trithemius, influenced by Joachim and influencing in his turn both Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, had predicted that the epoch of Gabriel, the Archangel of the Moon, would be succeeded by the epoch of Michael, Archangel of the Sun. He predicted that this great event would take place in 1881.

We saw in Chapter 3 how St Michael had fought the good fight against the forces of evil, leading the hosts of the good angels. The Freemasons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries foresaw that St Michael, Archangel of the Sun, would come again.

Michael was coming to fight the forces of corrupted angels and demons that were predicted to assault the earth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Michael’s defeat of these forces — with human help — was to lead to the end of the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age of the Hindus, which had begun in 3102 BC with the murder of Krishna. The Yugas are astronomically determined, there being eight divisions of the Great Year.

In fact the initiate astrologers of the Freemasons realized that Trithemius had made a small mistake in his astronomical/astrological calculations and that the Michaelic age was due to begin in 1878. All around the world, as this year approached, Freemasons were planning to erect monuments. Above all they planned to erect obelisks.

The Egyptians saw the obelisk as a sacred structure on which the Phoenix would alight to mark the end of one civilization and the beginning of another. An obelisk is a symbol of the birth of a new age. Like a gigantic lightning conductor, it draws down the spiritual influence of the sun.

Constantine the Great had converted a temple in Alexandria into a church, reconsecrating the obelisks sacred to Thoth or Hermes that stood outside it to the Archangel Michael. In 1877 Freemasons on both sides of the Atlantic worked to transport these two obelisks by sea, one to London where it was to be raised on the Victoria Embankment overlooking the Thames — and popularly known as Cleopatra’s Needle. There it was to be raised on 13 September 1878 when the sun was at its zenith. Its twin obelisk was raised in New York’s Central Park, organized by a group of Freemasons led by members of the Vanderbilt family.

Michael was, as we have seen, the leader of the heavenly hosts, and the transition from one order to another is always marked by battles. And because what happens on earth is always an echo of what has happened earlier in the spirit worlds, a great war would be fought in the heavens before being fought down here on the earthly plane. As Freemasons erected an obelisk in Central Park, New York, they were invoking St Michael and all his angels, asking for their help as they sought to establish the leadership of the United States among the nations in the war-torn age that would soon be dawning.

IT MAY ALREADY HAVE OCCURRED TO some readers that obelisks are placed with similar prominence in ecclesiastical contexts, for example the obelisk erected by the initiate artist Gianlorenzo Bernini in the square in front of St Peter’s in Rome.

The upper echelons of the Church hierarchy wish to keep its flock from conscious knowledge of the astral roots of their religion.

But these monuments work on different levels. They attract the disembodied beings of spiritual hierarchies. They work on people at levels below the conscious one, levels where the great disembodied beings weave in and out of their mental space. Initiates inside and outside the Church create great works of art and architecture to help condition humanity for its future evolution.

They also carry enough clues for those who are so minded as to be able to decode them.

…HOWEVER, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE eighteenth century the rise to supremacy of the United States was only a mystical vision. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries France became the most powerful and influential nation. Extremes of good and evil, rapier and sharp tongue, decided the fate of the world in the corridors of the Louvre, then Versailles.

It is perhaps significant that, though Descartes spent many years researching the Rosicrucians, even journeying to Germany to try to track them down, he never succeeded. A prey to visions, he was evidently not, like Newton, adept at alchemical techniques that might give repeated, perhaps even controlled, access to the spirit worlds.

In collaboration with the mathematician and theologian Marin Mersenne, whose patron was Richelieu, Descartes developed a rationalist philosophy, a closed system of reasoning without the necessity of reference to the realm of the senses.