Mark Booth - The Secret History of the World

But what if they can be shown to yield results?

We have begun to see how these states have inspired some of history’s greatest art, literature and music, but all of that might be dismissed by someone minded to do so as merely a matter of the life of the imagination, something without any relevance to life’s practical aspects. A lot of art, even great art, has an element of fantasy, after all.

Our modern mind-set prefers to see more concrete results. What about great feats of engineering or great scientific discoveries? In this chapter we will be following the development of an age when great initiates of the Mystery schools led humanity to some unequalled feats of engineering, from the temple of Baalbeck in Lebanon, which includes in its construction a block of carved granite weighing about a thousand tons that even today’s strongest crane could not lift, to the Great Pyramid at Giza and other lesser known pyramids in China.

At the start of this age the first great civilizations seemed suddenly to spring from nowhere — in the Sumerian civilization dominated by the bull hero Gilgamesh, in the Egypt of the bull cult of Osiris and in bull-running Crete. The age of these civilizations is the Age of Taurus, beginning early in the third millennium BC. For no very good reason conventional history can determine, vast numbers of people now began to live together in highly organized cities of extraordinary size, technical brilliance and complexity.

A SHADOWY BUT MOMENTOUS EVENT took place in China. It is shrouded in mystery. Even great initiates are unable to see it with anything approaching total clarity.

In the third millennium BC the people of China lived a tribal, nomadic existence and, according to Rudolf Steiner, it was into one of their encampments that an extraordinary individual was born. Just as thousands of years later another exalted heavenly being would descend to earth in order to incarnate as Jesus Christ, so now Lucifer incarnated too.

The birth of Lucifer was the beginning of wisdom.

Of course I’m using ‘wisdom’ in a particular sense — in fact the same sense academic, biblical scholars use it when they talk about ‘the wisdom books of the Bible’. The wisdom contained, for example, in the Book of Proverbs or Ecclesiastes, is a collection of rules for a happy and successful life, but unlike the teachings contained in other biblical books there is no moral or religious dimension here. This wisdom is entirely prudential and practical, advising you what you must do to look after your own best interests. There is no suggestion, for example, that good behaviour is likely to be rewarded or bad behaviour punished, except by human agency. There is no notion either of a providential order.

These books, compiled in the form we now have them in about 300 BC, were the fruits of a way of thinking which had developed approximately two and a half thousand years earlier. The secret history proposes that this form of wisdom became possible as a result of the incarnation and ministry of Lucifer.

For the most part initiations into spiritual disciplines have taken place between childhood and adulthood and after many years of preparation. For example, initiation into the Cabala has traditionally only been permitted at the age of forty, and candidates for initiation into the school of Pythagoras had to live in isolation and without speaking for years before their education could begin. But from birth Lucifer was raised entirely within the confines of a Mystery school. A circle of magi worked intensively on his education, allowing him to take part in the most secret ceremonies, moulding his soul, until at the age of forty he finally had a revelation. He became the first person ever to be able to think about life on earth in an entirely rational way.

WE SAW IN CHAPTER 8 HOW ORPHEUS invented numbers. But in the age of Orpheus it had been impossible to think of numbers without also thinking of their spiritual meaning. Now, because of Lucifer, it became possible to think of numbers without any symbolic connotations, to think of numbers purely as measures of quantity unencumbered by any notions of quality. People were now free to measure, to calculate and to make and build.

We know from Plutarch that Orpheus’s son Asclepius equated with Imhotep, who lived in about 2500 BC. By then this great wave of change, this revolutionary way of thinking had swept over from the Far East.

Vizier to the Egyptian King Djoser, Imhotep was known as the builder, the sculptor, the maker of stone vases. He was also called Chief of the Observers, which would become the title of the high priest of Heliopolis. Sometimes represented as wearing a mantle covered in stars, and sometimes, too, represented holding a rolled scroll, Imhotep was famous in antiquity as both as the great master builder and architect of the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. In the nineteenth century archaeologists excavating beneath the Step Pyramid discovered a store of secret treasures, sealed there since the founding of the building, that became known as the ‘impossible things of Imhotep’. Some of these are on display today in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Nineteenth-century commentators were amazed above all by the vases, which they suggested would be impossible for the craftsmen of the day to reproduce. Giraffe-necked and pot-bellied as they are, it’s still difficult today to see how the rock crystal of these vases was hollowed out.

Half an hour’s drive north from Saqqara is the Great Pyramid. Arguably the most magnificent building ever, it stands four-square at this crossroads in history, oriented to the cardinal points with remarkable accuracy. The world does not need another description of its magnificence. Suffice to say that although it would in principle be possible to rebuild it today, this would be crippling for all but the world’s richest economies. It would also stretch modern engineering to the limits of its abilities, particularly in the exactitude of its astronomical orientations.

But what makes the Great Pyramid even more extraordinary, almost miraculous according to the secret history, is that the fact that it was the first Egyptian building.

Conventional historians have assumed that the building ambitions of the Egyptians progressed from simple one-storey tombs called mastabas , through the relative complexity of the Step Pyramid and culminated in the massive complexity and sophistication of the Great Pyramid, conventionally dated to 2500 BC. In the absence of contemporary textual accounts, and because these buildings contain no organic material that can be carbon-dated, and because up till now there has been no method of dating cut stone, this has perhaps seemed an eminently commonsensical way of interpreting the evidence.

I suggested at the beginning of this book that this is an upside-down, other-way-round history, and in the secret doctrine the Great Pyramid was built in 3500 BC, before the founding of the great civilizations of Egypt and Sumeria, at a time when the only previously existing constructions were the stone circles and other ‘cyclopean’ monuments.

We must imagine Stone Age peoples wearing animal skins and carrying primitive stone tools gazing at the Great Pyramid in stupefaction.

According to the secret history, then, the Step Pyramid and the other lesser pyramids represent not an ascent but a decline.

The Great Pyramid has conventionally been seen as a tomb. As a variation on this theme, prompted by the narrow shafts which point from out of the so-called King’s and Queen’s Chambers towards particular stars, it has been seen as a sort of machine designed to aid the projection of the dead pharaoh’s spirit out of this tomb towards its heavenly resting place. On this view, then, the Great Pyramid is a sort of gigantic excarnation machine.