Mark Booth: The Secret History of the World

The great masterpieces of alchemy in twentieth century writing are, of course, Le Mystère des Cathédrales and Les Demeures Philosophales . Not only do they offer clues to understanding, but they are also brilliant guides to tracking down esoteric sites in France. I recommend Paul Sedir’s History of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood , which contains an excellent, illuminating account of the greatest flowering of Christianized alchemy. The Zelator by David Ovason is good on this subject, as is Steiner’s The Mysteries of the Rosicrucians. To anyone wishing to research alchemy further, I recommend the writing website of Adam Maclean, a fascinating archive of historical documents.

Steiner’s predecessor, Madame Blavatsky, is a bit of a problem, if only because her anti-Christian animus seems in retrospect a bit impish and perverse. I prefer to see Blavatsky as an exemplar of a splendid Victorian tradition — the writing of monstrously large rag bags of books packed with strange ideas and obscure but often fascinating erudition. With the possible exception of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough — which is at least permanently in print — these books are hardly read at all now. In fact I sometimes wondered whether I was the first person to read some of these pages for perhaps over a hundred years. Their wisdom has become discarded wisdom, but there is wisdom to be found, and I have had a lot of fun rummaging around in the following: The Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled by Madame Blavatsky , Theosophy and Psychological Religion by F. Max Muller . Fragments of a Faith Forgotten and Orpheus by G.R.S. Meade, The Egyptian Book of the Dead and Gnostic and Historic Christianity by George Eliot’s friend, Gerald Massey, Ancient Theories of Revelation and Inspiration by Edwyn Bevan, Oedipus Judaicus by William Drummond, The Lost Language of Symbolism, and Archaic England by Harold Bayley, The Canon by William Stirling, Architecture: Mysticism and Myth by William Lethaby, Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter, Introduction to Tantra Sastra and The Serpent Power by Sir John Woodroffe, The History of Magic by Eliphas Levi, The Kabbalah Unveiled by S.L. Macgregor Mathers, Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill, Studies in Mysticism and Certain Aspects of the Secret Tradition by A.E. Waite, Cosmic Consciousness by Richard Bucke, The Initiates by Eduard Schure, The Eleusian and Bacchic Mysteries by Thomas Taylor, The Veil of Isis by W. Winwood Reade.

Occult physiology is a key part of this book. I have used The Occult Causes of Disease by E. Wolfram, The Encyclopedia of Esoteric Man by Benjamin Walker, Occult Principles of Health and Healing by Max Heindel, Occult Anatomy and the Bible by Corinne Heline and An Occult Physiology, Initiation and its Results , Occult Science and Occult Development by Steiner. The Parable of the Beast by John Bleibtreu, while not framed in esoteric philosophy, has fascinating information, especially on the Third Eye.

Occult art is also key. I have used Symbolists and Symbolism by Robert L Delevoy, Legendary and Mythological Art by Clara Erskine Clement, Hieronymus Bosch by Wilhelm Fraenger, Symbols in Christian Art by Edward Hulme, Three Lectues on Art by René Huyghe — particularly good on El Greco — The Occult in Art by Fred Gettings, The Two Children by David Ovason, Marcel Duchamp by Octavio Paz on Marcel Duchamp, John Richardson’s three volume biography, A Life of Picasso and Mark Harris’s insightful essay on Picasso’s Lost Masterpiece , The Foundations of Modern Art by Ozenfant, Sacred and Legendary Art by Mrs Jameson, Surrealism and Painting by André Breton, Surrealism and the Occult by Nadia Choucha.

The books of Albert Pike and A.E. Waite on Freemasonry fall into the baggy Victorian monster category. Together with Manly Hall these men are established as the great writers on the Freemasonic mysteries, and I have used their Morals and Dogma, History of Freemasonry and Secret Teachings of All Ages , as well as The Temple Legend by Rudolf Steiner. I’d like to mention in the same breath, The Secret Zodiacs of Washington DC by David Ovason and The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro by Ian McCalman. I’d also like to credit the independent-minded research of Robert Lomas, who has co-written with Christopher Knight several bestselling books on the origins of Freemasonry — including The Hiram Key, The Second Messiah and Uriel’s Machine . Like another bestselling writer in the alternative history field, Robert Bauval, Lomas is an engineer, and so able to see things that more theoretically-minded writers have missed. Something I’ve tried to insist on in my own book is that the fact that esoteric teachings have useful, practical application makes them much more likely to be true. A.E. Waite’s The Hidden Church of the Holy Grail is the best account of the various sources of the Grail legend.

The great figure in esoteric Egyptology is Schwaller de Lubicz. He represents a major impulse to understand the consciousness of the ancient world. I have taken insights from The Temple of Man, Sacred Science and The Egyptian Miracle . I have also had the pleasure of sailing up the Nile to visit the major Egyptian sites with many of the most popular modern writers in the field, including Robert Bauval, Graham Hancock, Robert Temple and Colin Wilson. On one occasion I found myself exploring a secret passageway behind the altar of one of the great temples of Egypt in the company of Michael Baigent. Of particular relevance to this work is Bauval’s latest book, The Egypt Code , referenced in the text. There, I believe, he finally cracks the numerical, astronomical code behind Egyptian architecture. Robert Temple is someone who can certainly access supernatural levels of intelligence. The Sirius Mystery, The Crytsal Sun and Netherworld are authoritative texts on astronomical symbolism in myth and initiation lore. See also The Mysteries by Ita Wegman, Mystery Knowldege and Mystery Centres by Rudolf Steiner, In the Dark Places of Wisdom by Peter Kingsley. I first read Colin Wilson’s The Outsider at the right age — 17 years old — and was introduced to Rilke and Sartre. Later my philosophy tutor — sometimes talked of as the cleverest don in Oxford — dismissed Sartre’s work as not being real philosophy, and I’ve no doubt he’s say the same of Wilson. But I see Wilson as an intellectual in the highest sense, in that he struggles to understand the great questions of life and death and what it means to be alive now with complete intellectual honesty and remarkable intellectual energy. His intellectual heirs in the next generation were Michael Baigent and Graham Hancock. Baigent co-wrote with Henry Lincoln and Richard Leigh The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail the book that created the cultural climate into which any book on the subject of the secret societies must emerge. I explain in my text where I believe it is wrong, giving a materialistic interpretation of a genuine but more spiritual tradition regarding the relationship between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. Like Baigent and Leigh, Hancock is adept at using the techniques of suspense fiction to pull readers through quite difficult ideas. His books, particularly Fingerprints of the Gods, have begun to shift the paradigm, to convince a mass readership that they should question the version of history handed down to them by their elders and betters. His latest book, Supernatural, takes extraordinary intellectual risks, but is written with all the rigour you would expect from a man who was formerly one of Britain’s top financial journalists.