Mark Booth: The Secret History of the World

Returning to the man walking through the ancient wood, we see now that he experienced the spirits behind the sun, the moon and the other heavenly bodies as working on different parts of his mind and body. He felt his limbs move like flowing Mercury and he felt the spirit of Mars raging inside him in the fierce river of molten iron that was his blood.

The state of his kidney was affected by the movement of Venus. Modern science is only just starting to understand the role the kidney plays in sexuality. At the beginning of the twentieth century it discovered the kidney’s role in the storing of testosterone. Then in the 1980s the Swiss pharmaceuticals giant Weleda began to conduct tests which showed that the movements of the planets affect chemical changes in metal salt solutions that are dramatic enough to be seen with the naked eye, even when these influences are too subtle to be measured by any scientific procedure so far devised. What is even more remarkable is that these dramatic changes come about when a solution of metal salt is examined in relation to the movement of the planet with which it has traditionally been associated . Thus copper salts contained in the kidney are affected by Venus, copper being the metal traditionally associated with Venus. Modern science may be on the verge of confirming what the ancients knew well. It really is true to say that Venus is the planet of desire.

The Mystery schools taught that as well as head-consciousness we each have, for example, a heart-consciousness which emanates from the sun then enters our mental space via the heart. Or to put it another way, the heart is the portal through which Sun god enters our lives. Likewise a kind of kidney-consciousness beams into us from Venus, spreading out into our mind and body via the portal of our own kidneys. The working together of these different centres of consciousness makes us variously loving, angry, melancholy, restless, brave, thoughtful and so on, forming the unique thing that is human experience.

Working through our different centres of consciousness in this way, the gods of the planets and constellations prepare us for the great experiences, the great tests that the cosmos means us to have. The deep structure of our lives is described by the movements of the heavenly bodies.

I am moved to desire by Venus and, when Saturn returns, I am sorely tested.

IN THIS CHAPTER WE HAVE ALREADY BEGUN to use some of the imaginative exercises used in the esoteric teaching. In the next chapter we will cross the threshold of the Mystery school and begin to follow the ancient history of the cosmos.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION AGREE THAT IN the beginning the cosmos moved from a state of nothingness to the existence of matter. But science has very little to say about this mysterious transition, all of it highly speculative. Scientists are even divided on whether matter was created all at once or whether it continues to be created.

By contrast, there was remarkable unanimity among the initiate priests of the ancient world. Their secret teachings are encoded in the sacred texts of the world’s great religions. In what follows we will see how a secret history of creation is encoded in Genesis, that a few overfamiliar phrases can be opened up to reveal extraordinary new worlds of thought, mighty vistas of the imagination. And we shall see, too, that this secret history chimes with the secret teachings of other religions.

IN THE BEGINNING THERE PRECIPITATED out of the void nothing but a matter that was finer and more subtle than light, then an exceptionally fine gas. If a human eye had been looking at the dawn of history it would have seen a vast cosmic mist.

This gas or mist was the Mother of All Living, carrying everything needed for the creation of life. The Mother Goddess, as she was sometimes also called, will metamorphose in the course of this history and assume many different forms, many different names, but for now ‘the earth was without form and void’.

Now for history’s first great reversal of fortune. The Bible narrative continues: ‘Darkness was upon the face of the earth.’ According to biblical commentators working within the esoteric tradition, this is the Bible’s way of saying that the Mother Goddess was attacked by a searing dry wind that almost extinguished the potential for life altogether.

Again, to a human eye it would have looked as if the gently interweaving mists that had first emanated from the mind of God were suddenly overtaken by a second emanation. There was a violent storm like some rare and spectacular phenomenon observed by astronomers — the death of a massive star, perhaps — except that here ‘in the beginning’ it would have been on a completely overwhelming scale that filled the entire universe.

So this it what it would have looked like to a physical eye, but to the eye of the imagination this great cloud of mist and the terrible storm that attacked it can be seen to cloak two gigantic phantoms.

BEFORE WE TRY TO MAKE SENSE OF THIS ancient history of the cosmos, or to understand why so many brilliant people have believed in it, it is important to try to absorb it in the form it would have been presented in ancient times — as a series of imaginative images. It is important to let these images work on our imaginations in the same way that initiate priests intended them to work on the imagination of the candidate for initiation.

A few years ago I found myself falling into conversation with one of the legendary figures of London’s gangland, a man who had helped spring a villain called Frank ‘the Mad Axeman’ Mitchell from a psychiatric prison and then, according to the stories, gone a bit mad himself. He killed the Mad Axeman in the back of a van with a sawn-off shotgun, then bathed in his blood, laughing. But his most vivid memory, the one he personally found the most chilling, was also his earliest. He remembered a fight he must have seen when he was perhaps just two or three years old.

His grandmother was bare-knuckle fighting on the cobbles outside her home among the Victorian terraces of the old East End. He remembered the gaslight on the wet cobbles and flying spittle, and how his grandmother resembled a giantess, lumbering but supernatural in strength. He remembered, too, that her massive forearms, built up and rubbed raw by the washing she took in to help feed him, thudded again and again into the other woman, even as she lay on the ground unable able to defend herself.

We must try to imagine something similar as we contemplate the two titanic forces locked in combat at the beginning of time. The Mother Goddess would often be remembered as a loving, life-giving and nurturing figure, comfortingly round and soft looking, but she also had a terrifying aspect. She was warlike when needs be. Among the people of ancient Phrygia, for instance, she was remembered as Cybele, a merciless goddess who rode on a chariot pulled by lions and who required devotees to work themselves into such a wild and savage delirium that they would castrate themselves.

Her opponent was, if anything, more frightening. Long, bony, his skin was a scaly white and he had glowing, red eyes. Swooping low over Mother Earth, the Dark Lord was armed with a deadly scythe — giving away his identity to anyone who hasn’t already guessed it. For if the first emanation from the mind of God would metamorphose into the goddess of the earth, the second emanation would become the god of Saturn.

Saturn would trace the limits of the solar system. In fact he was the very principle of limitation. What Saturn’s intervention introduced into creation was the potential for individual objects to exist and therefore the transition from formlessness to form. In other words because of Saturn there is a law of identity in the universe by which something exists and is nothing else and neither is anything else it. Because of Saturn an object occupies a certain space at a certain time and no other object can occupy that space, and neither can that object be in more than one place at one time. In Egyptian mythology Saturn was Ptah who moulds the earth on a potter’s wheel, and in many mythologies Saturn’s title is Rex Mundi , King of the World or ‘Prince of this world’, because of his control of our material lives.