Mark Booth - The Secret History of the World

As Pythagoras and his followers began to describe the rational element in life, they started to formulate a parallel concept. It was a concept which had perhaps never been articulated before, because up till that point it had been a part of everyone’s everyday experience. The concept went like this: life can be explained in rational terms only up to a point. There is a vast irrational element in life , too.

The teachings of the Mystery schools relating to the rational side would help build cities, develop science and technology, structure and regulate the Outworld. The irrational teaching in its explicit form would be confined to the schools. To talk about it outside was dangerous and might well attract hostility. As Plutarch would put it, ‘One who knows the higher truths, finds the “serious” values of society difficult to take seriously. Eternity is a child at play.’

Here, at the birth of rational thought, the Mystery schools nurtured its opposite. It is no accident that individuals like Pythagoras, Newton and Leibniz, those who have done most to help humanity get to grips with the reality of the physical universe, have also been deeply immersed in esoteric thought. This is because it is undoubtedly true, as these great minds have seen, that if you look at life as subjectively as possible, rather than objectively, as you must do in science, some very different patterns emerge. Life viewed objectively may be rational and subject to natural law, but experienced subjectively it is irrational.

By consciously splitting experience in this way, Pythagoras made it possible to think more clearly about both dimensions.

The pupils of Pythagoras were taught to live apart from society, alternating between mystical ecstasy and intellectual analysis. Pythagoras was the first to call himself a lover of wisdom, that is to say ‘a philosopher’, but like Socrates and Plato who followed him, he was closer to a magus than a modern-day university professor. His pupils were in awe of him. They believed he had the power to make them dream what he willed, and that he could reorient their waking consciousness in an instant, too.

Pythagoras attracted murderous rage from those excluded from his inner circle. He refused to admit a man called Cyron into his Mystery school because of his reckless, imperious behaviour. Cyron stirred up a mob against Pythagoras. They broke into the building where Pythagoras and his followers were meeting and set fire to it. Everyone inside died.

IN THE ERA OF PYTHAGORAS TWO OTHER philosophers on different sides of the world, Heraclitus in Greece and Lao-Tzu in China, briefly come to the surface of history, trying to define rationally, the irrational dimension of life.

We cannot step in the same stream twice, said Heraclitus.

There is a story that Confucius went to see Lao-Tzu and asked to be initiated. Lao-Tzu turned him away, mocking him for his mixture of ingratiating manners and vaulting ambition. It is probably apocryphal, but it points to an important truth which is that Confucianism and Taoism represent exoteric and esoteric thought in China.

Confucius spent years collecting traditional Chinese wisdom and these collections would be adopted as manuals for government by later Chinese leaders.

The sayings of Confucius are eminently reasonable. A thousand mile journey begins with a single step. Value the task more than the prize. If you can’t meet your goals, adjust your goals. And so on.

We can compare Confucius with Rudyard Kipling. They were both servants of empire. If scientific materialism described everything there is in life, Kipling’s poem ‘If’ would be the last word on the conduct of life and esoteric philosophy would have nothing to teach us.

The problem is that, though there may be times when the best thing to do is to try with all our might and not give up, there are other times, as Orpheus had found to his cost, when it is prudent to give up and go with the flow. Sometimes when you grab at what you want, you just push it further away. Sometimes the only way to keep something is by letting it go. As Lao Tzu says:

THIRTY YEARS AFTER THE DEATH OF PYTHAGORAS, an enormous Persian army under Xerxes swept over Greece. Then, in the early years of the fifth century BC, Persian forces were defeated and driven back by the Athenians at Marathon and then by an Athenian-Spartan alliance at Mycale.

Pythagoras had institutionalized the open discussion of options and the making of collective decisions on matters which concerned the whole community — what we today call politics. From this — and in the space created by the Athenian-Spartan alliance — would emerge the unique character of the Greek city-state of Athens.

IF WE SEE IN THE ATHENIANS A GIFT FOR free, individual thought, we see in Sparta the development of individual will, competitive edge and admiration, to the point of hero-worship, of strong men. Heroes created the space for the flowering of Greek culture, which in the fifth century BC began to set standards in beauty of form and rigour of intellect that we have aspired to match ever since.

This was the Greece of the great initiates: the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, the poet Pindar and the dramatists Sophocles and Euripides.

The most famous of all the Greek Mystery schools was situated at Eleusis, a hamlet a few miles from Athens. The Roman statesman Cicero, himself an initiate, would say that the Eleusian Mysteries and what flowed from them formed the greatest benefit that Athens gave to the civilized world.

‘ELEUSIS’ COMES FROM ‘ELAUNO’, MEANING ‘I come’, which is to say ‘I come into being’. There is almost nothing left of the sanctuary — just a few scattered stones and a couple of panels from inside have survived — but a contemporary description of it talks of an unmarked exterior wall of grey-blue stone. Inside there were painted statues and friezes of goddesses, sheaves of grain and eight-petalled flowers. One account says there was an aperture in the ceiling of the inner sanctum that provided the only light source.

The Lesser Mysteries were celebrated in the spring. They involved rites of purification and also dramatizations of stories of the gods. A statue of a god crowned with myrtle and carrying a torch was led in procession with singing and dancing. The god was sacrificed and died for three days. When the sacrificed god was represented as being raised from the dead, the assembled hierophants and candidates shouted, ‘Iachos! Iachos! Iachos!’

There was also an overtly sexual element in these celebrations. Psellus, a Byzantine scholar, wrote that Venus was portrayed as rising out of the sea from in between moving representations of female genitalia, and that afterwards the marriage of Persephone and Hades took place. It was recorded by Clement of Alexandria that the rape of Persephone was enacted, and it was also said by Athenagoras that during this bizarre, violent, almost surreal drama, she was portrayed as having a horn on her forehead, perhaps symbolizing the Third Eye.