Mark Booth - The Secret History of the World

Nimrod was the first man to seek power for its own sake. From this will to power came cruelty and decadence. In Hebrew tradition a prophecy of the imminent birth of Abraham prompted Nimrod to mass infanticide. We should understand by this that he practised infant sacrifice, burying the bodies in the foundations of his great buildings.

We join the secret story of Abraham in about 2000 BC wandering in between the sky scrapers of his native Ur (Uruk). He decided to go on a quest, to become a desert nomad to rediscover the sense of the divine that was in the process of being lost.

When he visited Egypt the pharaoh gave one of his daughters, Hagar, as a servant to Abraham’s wife Sarai. Hagar bore Abraham his first son, Ishmael, who was to become the father of the Arab nations. We should understand by this that Abraham learned great initiatic knowledge from the Egyptian priests. Marriages of this time were usually within a tribe or extended family. Supernatural powers were connected with blood, and marriage between people of the same blood strengthened powers, something which used to be a part of the tradition of the gypsies, for example. Marriage of individuals from different tribes could involve an exchange of powers and knowledge.

WHAT FORM OF INITIATION MIGHT ABRAHAM have received in Egypt?

We should picture the candidate for initiation laid out in a granite tomb. He is surrounded by initiates who have sent him into a very deep sleep-like trance. When he is in this trance state they are able to raise his vegetable body — and with it his spirit or animal body — up out of his physical body, so that it hovers like a phantom over the mouth of the tomb. A witness of an initiation ceremony practised on the Irish poet W.B. Yeats described how during the course of the ceremony a series of bells were rung to mark the stages. Yeats’s spirit could be seen shining with different degrees of brightness during the different stages, each marked by different patterns of colour.

Initiates who perform these sorts of ceremonies know how to mould the candidate’s vegetable body so that when it sinks back into the material body the candidate is able to work to use its organs of perception consciously. At the end of three days the candidate will be ‘born again’, or initiated, which is marked by the hierophant grasping him by the right hand and pulling him out of the coffin.

In esoteric philosophy the vegetable body is of utmost importance. Not only does it control vital bodily functions, but the chakras are, of course, the organs of the vegetable body. So this body in effect forms the portal between the physical world and the spirit world, and if the chakras are enlivened this may lead to powers of supernatural perception and influence, the ability to communicate with disembodied spirits and also healing powers.

In the temple sleep — which would still be practised by initiates of the Mystery schools two and half thousand years later, and is still practised in some secret societies today — someone who was ill would be allowed to sleep in the temple. This sleep would last for three days, during which time the initiates would work on their vegetative bodies in a way which was not dissimilar to the process of initiation.

Someone undergoing this healing process might have very realistic visions, directed by the initiates. First, he would be plunged in utter blackness. He would seem to himself to be losing all consciousness, to be dying. He would seem to himself to come round again, then be led by an animal-headed being travelling down long passages and through a series of chambers. At different stages he would be challenged and menaced by other animal-headed gods and demons, including monstrous crocodiles who would tear at him.

In the Egyptian Book of the Dead the candidate makes his way past these guardians of the thresholds by proclaiming, ‘I am the Gnostic, I am the one who knows.’ This is a magical formula he uses in the process of initiation and will be able to use again after death.

He approaches the inner sanctum. He sees an extraordinary, bright light shining through the cracks round the edge of the gates. He cries out, ‘Let me come! Let me spiritualize myself, let me become pure spirit! I have prepared myself by the writings of Thoth!’

Finally, out of the swirling waves of light a vision emerges of the Mother Goddess suckling her child. This is a healing vision because it takes us back to the paradisaical time we looked at in Chapter 3, before the earth and the sun became separated, when the earth was illumined from within by the Sun god, a time before there was any dissatisfaction, disease or death. And it looks forward, too, to another time when earth and sun will be reunited, when the earth will again be transfigured by the sun.

In all ages and in all places there have been people who have believed that meditating on this image of the Mother Goddess and child brings about miracles of healing.

AFTER HIS STAY IN EGYPT ABRAHAM moved westwards, towards the region we know today as Palestine. He had to arm and train his servants to rescue his brother who had been captured by local bandits. Following a fierce and bloody fight, he was walking through a valley (which today’s biblical scholars identify with the Kidron Valley), when he met a strange individual called Melchizedek.

As with Enoch, there is just a brief mention of Melchizedek in the Bible but an accompanying sense of the numinous and of something important left unsaid. Genesis 14: 18-20: ‘And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine and he was the priest of the most high God. And he blessed him and said “Blessed be Abram of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth and blessed be the most high God, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand.” This sense of the numinous is reinforced by a mysterious passage in the New Testament, Hebrews 6.20-7.17: ‘Jesus was made an high priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek. For this Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the most high God, who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings, and blessed him; to whom Abraham also gave a tenth part of all, first being by interpretation King of righteousness and after that also King of Salem, which is, King of peace; without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually… Who is made, not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life. For he testifieth Thou art a priest forever under the order of Melchizedek.’

Clearly something strange is going on. Clearly this mysterious individual, who has the ability to live forever, is no ordinary human being.

In cabalistic tradition Melchizedek’s secret identity is Noah, the great Atlantean leader who had taught humankind agriculture, the cultivation of corn and of the vine, who never really died but moved to another dimension. He now reappeared in order to be Abraham’s spiritual teacher, to initiate him to a higher level.