Mark Booth - The Secret History of the World

The spirit ascends through the spheres of Jupiter and Saturn, passes through the sphere of the constellations and is finally reunited with the great Cosmic Mind. It has been a painful, confusing and tiring journey. Plutarch writes: ‘But finally a wondrous light shines to greet us, beautiful meadows full of singing and dancing, the solemnity of sacred realms and holy appearances.’

Then the spirit must begin again the descent through the spheres, preparatory to the next incarnation. As it descends each sphere grants the spirit a gift which it will need when re-entering the material plane.

The following account has been compiled from fragments of ancient tablets, dating perhaps as far back as the third millennium BC, excavated in Iraq in the late nineteenth century:

The first gate he passed her out of, and he restored to her the covering cloak of her body.

The second gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the bracelets of her hands and feet.

The third gate he passed her out of, and he restored to her the binding girdle of her waist.

The fourth gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the ornaments of her breast.

The fifth gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the necklace of her neck.

The sixth gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the earrings of her ears.

The seventh gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the great crown of her head.

Even today every child is reminded of these gifts in the fairy story Sleeping Beauty. The human spirit still responds strongly and warmly to this story, experiencing it as true in a deep sense.

But in order to understand the esoteric content of Sleeping Beauty it is necessary to think in an upside down sort of way. The story relates that at the party to celebrate her birth, six fairies give the Princess gifts to help her have a happy and fulfilled life. The seventh fairy, who represents Saturn or Satan, the spirit of materialism, curses the child with death, which is commuted to a long period of sleep. These seven fairies are, of course, the seven gods of the planetary spheres.

What is upside down and the other way round about this story is that by the deathly, dreamless sleep which is the curse of the evil fairy is meant life on earth. In other words, because of the intervention by Satan, humans gradually lose any consciousness, and eventually any memory, of their time among the heavenly hierarchies: ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.’ In this story, then, the party at the beginning of the narrative must be understood as taking place in the spirit world, and it is only when Beauty falls asleep that she is alive on the material plane. When she awakes, she dies!

In fact we have already seen a similar paradox in the story of Osiris, most of which takes place in the spirit world. When Osiris is nailed in the coffin that fits him like skin, it is his skin. He is only dead to Isis when he is alive on the material plane.

THESE STORIES SHOW HOW BOTH THIS life and the afterlife are ruled by the planets and stars. They should alert us to another very important dimension in initiatic teachings. Initiation prepares the candidate for meetings with the guardians of the different spheres both on the way up and on the way down. If these teachings are imprinted well enough on the individual spirit, this will ultimately prepare the spirit for conscious participation with the higher spiritual beings in preparing for a new incarnation. The key word here is ‘conscious’.

Initiation involves forging a conscious, working relationship with disembodied spirits and an existential knowledge of the way they work in our lives and our afterlives. It reveals the way they operate when we are awake, when we dream and when we are dead . We have seen that the histories we have been examining, such as the trials of Hercules, are structured according to different astronomical cycles — the journey of the sun through the months of the year and in the precession of the equinoxes. The point is that the same patterns that structure life on earth also structure the spirit worlds. Hercules and Job suffered trials in their earthly lives that have been recorded in the history of the world, but they will also have to suffer the same trials in the afterlife — unless they can learn to become conscious of them. And if they can’t, they will also have to suffer them in their next incarnation.

This is the aim of initiation: to make more and more experience conscious, to roll back the boundaries of consciousness.

In our individual lives — and collectively — we go round and round in the circles traced out for us by the planets and stars.

But if we can become conscious of these circles, if we can become conscious of the activity of the stars and planets in our lives in a most intimate way, then we are in a sense no longer trapped by them. We are no longer trapped by them, we rise above them, we are moving now not in a circle but in an upward spiral.

ZARATHUSTRA WORE A CLOAK COVERED with stars and planets as a mark of the knowledge that the great spirits of the sun had taught him. This was knowledge he passed on in initiation. When candidates re-entered the body, following their out-of-body experience, they were enabled by Zarathustra to explore the interior workings of their bodies in ways that thousands of years later people would only be able to rediscover though autopsies. Again the difference was that the ancients, according to their habit of seeing life as subjectively as possible, did not know human anatomy in an abstract, conceptual way, but rather they experienced it. This was how the ancients knew of the pineal gland long before it was ‘discovered’ by modern science.