Mark Booth: The Secret History of the World

The four Cherubim are among the most powerful symbols in the Bible, appearing in key passages in Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Revelation. Popular in Hebrew and Christian iconography, prominent in Church art and architecture everywhere, they are symbolized by the Ox, the Lion, the Eagle and the Angel. In esoteric teaching these four Cherubim are the great spiritual beings behind four of the twelve constellations that make up the zodiac. The proof of their astronomical identities lies in the imagery associated with them: Ox = Taurus, Lion = Leo, Eagle = Scorpio, and Angel = Aquarius.

This fourfold pattern of symbolism regarding the constellations is repeated in all the world’s great religions. But for the most important and telling example of polytheism in Christianity we must return to the story of the creation as it is told in Genesis and the Gospel of St John.

Genesis 1:26 is usually translated as ‘In the beginning God made heaven and earth’, but in fact any biblical scholar will admit, even if only when pressed, that the word ‘Elohim’ here translated as ‘God’ is plural. The passage properly reads ‘In the beginning the gods made heaven and earth’. This is a rather puzzling anomaly that clergymen outside the esoteric tradition tend to turn a blind eye to, but inside this tradition it is well known that what is being referred to here are astronomical deities

We can discover their identity, as I have suggested, by matching the passage in Genesis with the parallel passage in the Gospel of St John. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God… All things were made by him… And the light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehended it not.’

This parallel is helpful because John did not newly mint the phrase [the Word]. He was referring to a tradition already ancient in his lifetime, and which he evidently expected his readers to understand. Some four hundred years earlier Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, had written ‘the Logos [i.e. the Word] was before the Earth could be’. The important point here is that according to ancient tradition the Word that shone in the darkness in John’s gospel — and so we now see, the gods who ‘let there be light’ in Genesis — are the seven great spirits who work together as the great spiritual influence emanating from the sun.

THE SECOND GREAT ACT IN THE DRAMA of creation comes about when the seven-fold Sun god arrives in order to rescue Mother Earth from Saturn.

In the eye of imagination the Sun is a beautiful and radiant young man with a leonine mane. He rides a chariot and he is a musician. He has many names — Krishna in India, Apollo in Greece. Arising in splendour in the midst of the storm, he pushes back the darkness of Saturn until Saturn becomes like a giant dragon or serpent encircling the cosmos.

The Sun then warms Mother Earth into new life, and as he does so, he gives vent to a great, triumphal roar that reverberates to the outer limits of the cosmos. The roar causes matter in the cosmic womb to vibrate, to dance and form patterns. In inner group esoteric circles this process is sometimes known as ‘the dance of the substances’. After a while it causes matter to coagulate into a variety of strange shapes.

What we are seeing here, then, is the sun singing the world into existence.

The Sun-Lion is a common image in ancient art. Whenever it appears it refers to this early stage in the mind-before-matter account of creation. A magnificent re-telling of the history of the Sun-Lion in the act of creation was written as late as the 1950s. It comes in the prequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , called The Magician’s Nephew. Something that non-esoteric schools of literary criticism have missed is that the work of C.S. Lewis is steeped in Rosicrucian lore. In his story the Sun-Lion is called Aslan:

In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory — the first child to explore Narnia — found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful voice he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it… The eastern sky changed from white to pink and from pink to gold. The Voice rose and rose, till the air was shaking with it… The Lion was pacing to and fro about that empty land and singing his new song. And as he walked and sang the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the Lion like a pool. It ran up the sides of the hills like a wave.

What the teachers of the Mystery schools meant to indicate by the victory of the Sun god was the momentous transition from a purely mineral cosmos to a cosmos burgeoning with plant life.

In the earliest and most primitive form of plant life according to the Mystery tradition, single germs were joined together in vast floating structures like webs that filled the whole universe. In the Vedas , the sacred books of India, this stage of creation is described as ‘the net of Indra’, an infinite net of luminous, living threads, perpetually interweaving, coming together like waves of light then dissolving again.

Time passed and some of these threads began to weave together more permanently, the light streams dividing into tree-like forms. An imaginative impression of what this was like can perhaps be got by remembering what it was like, as a small child, to visit a great hothouse like the ones that Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired Alice in Wonderland , liked to visit at Kew Gardens. Great tendrils stretch everywhere. Here are humid mists and a sunny, luminous greenness.

If you were able to land in the midst of all of this and if you sat on one of the great green branches stretching out of sight, and if this great branch on which you were sitting suddenly stirred, you would have an experience like a hero in a fairy story sitting on a rock that moves and reveals itself to be a giant. Because the vast vegetable being at the heart of the cosmos, whose soft and luminous limbs stretched to all four corners of it, was Adam.

This was Paradise.

Because there was as yet no animal element to the cosmos, Adam was without desire and so without care or dissatisfaction. Needs were satisfied before they could even be felt. Adam lived in a world of endless springtime. Nature yielded an unending supply of food in the form of a milky sap, similar to that which we find in dandelions today. Memorials to this blissful satiation have come down to us in statues of the many-breasted Mother Goddess.

As time went on the plant forms became more complex, more like the plants of today. Again, if you had been able to see this time in the history of the cosmos with the physical eye, you would have been struck by the myriad fluttering, palpitating flowers.