Mark Booth - The Secret History of the World

The great enemy, a magician, was therefore able to control people beyond the grave. By sacrificing great numbers of victims, he created an army for himself in the spirit worlds.

At the turn of the millennium a Sun hero was sent to earth to oppose him. He was called Uitzilopotchtli, as we know from the Codex Florentin of Sahagun , one of the few scraps to survive the Conquistadors. Like earlier Sun heroes, his birth was prophesied. He was born to a virgin mother and after his birth the forces of evil conspired to kill him.

But Uitzilopotchli survived the early attempts on his life and after many trials he waged a three-year magical war against the black magician. Finally, he succeeded in crucifying him.

When Jesus Christ was crucified, a huge power to spiritualize the earth was unleashed. When, simultaneously, the great black magician of the South Americas was crucified, a vortex opened up that would draw into itself the great currents of world history, the extremes of both good and evil.

THE GOSPEL OF PHILIP CONTAINS intriguing hints about Jesus Christ’s relationship with Mary Magdalene. ‘Jesus loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on…’ Then intrigingly the script fragments. But this seems to be a reference to the Song of Songs, ‘Let him kiss me with kisses of the mouth’ and so, too, to the ‘love that is stronger than death’.

The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voraigne, the most popular collection of saints’ stories in the Middle Ages, describes how a particular group of Christians began to be persecuted in Jerusalem. Seven of them were set adrift in the Mediterranean in a small boat. Eventually they were washed ashore in a place east of the town known today as Marseilles.

In the centre of a great cliff rising above the shore it is still possible to see the cave where Mary Magdalene, who stepped out of that boat, spent the last thirty years of her life.

She is usually depicted penitent, naked apart from her long red hair. A painting of her by Fra Bartolomeo in a small garden chapel near Florence shows her with her jar of oil, used to anoint the feet of Jesus Christ. It is resting on a stone inscribed with the following words:

IN THE SECRET TEACHINGS OF THE SCHOOLS the life and death of the Sun god marked the halfway point of the secret history.

Although it was unnoticed by the official chroniclers of the day, at the end of time this event will come to be seen as the great hinge on which history has turned.

To many people living at the time, the magnitude of this event undoubtedly made it hard to get into perspective. After a long period of spiritual aridity many now began to enjoy vivid, if atavistic, experience of the spirit worlds. Maybe some had an inkling of what the great revolution that had taken place in the spirit worlds actually was, but in the absence of the sort of unified, institutional authority that the hierophants of the Mystery schools had commanded, these new experiences were interpreted in a variety of ways. We see this in a proliferation of sects in the decades following the death of Jesus Christ.

Many of the Gnostic texts are as old as the books of the New Testament, some with clear claims to validity. We have already touched on the Gospel of St Thomas with its more authentic versions of the sayings of Jesus and the Pistis Sophia ’s account of the two Jesus children. The somewhat fragmentary text of the Acts of St John offers a fascinating glimpse of the inner group practices of Jesus Christ.

A circular dance is described. The disciples first hold hands to form a circle, then whirl in a ring around Jesus Christ. In the liturgy that accompanies this dance, Jesus Christ is the initiator and his interlocutor a candidate for initiation.

Candidate: I would be saved

Christ: And I would save

Candidate: I would be loosed

Christ: And I would loosen

Candidate: I would be pierced

Christ: And I would pierce

Candidate: I would eat

Christ: And I would be eaten

The Acts of John use language in a paradoxical, even absurdist way. It will become easier to understand as we proceed.

Candidate: I have no house and I have houses

I have no place and I have places

I have no temple and I have temples.

Only fragments of the next bit have survived, but they seem to refer to some Osirian/Christian Mystery of death and resurrection. After which Christ says: ‘What I am now seen to be, that I am not, but what I am, thou shalt see when thou comest. If thou hadst known how to suffer, thou wouldst have had the power not to suffer. Know then suffering and thou shalt have the power not to suffer’.

A Hindu dance in honour of Krishna is described as ‘a circular sunwise dance’. The dancers twist and turn and wheel around the Sun god in imitation of the planets. This should alert us to the fact that the Acts of St John is inspired by a cosmic vision of Jesus Christ as the Sun god returned.

The Gospel of St Philip refers to five rituals, the last and greatest being the ritual of the bridal chamber. Is this a ritual-sexual practice like the ones that took place in the temples of Egypt, Greece and Babylon?

Later the Church would want to emphasize the uniqueness of Christian revelation and distance Jesus Christ and his teachings from what went before. But to the early Christians it was only natural to see Christianity as growing out of what had gone before and as a fulfilment of ancient prophecies. Many early Christians understood Christianity in terms of what they had been taught in the Mystery schools of Egypt, Greece and Rome.

The early Church father Clement of Alexandria may have known people who had known the Apostles. Clement and his pupil Origen believed in reincarnation, for example. They taught more advanced students what they called the disciplina arcani , devotional practices which today we would classify as magic.

Early Christian leaders like Origen and Clement were erudite men participating in the intellectual advances of their age. The most exciting of these found representative expression in Neoplatonism.

Plato had pretty comprehensively converted a mind-before-matter experience of the world into concepts. What happened in the second century AD was that what we now call Neoplatonists began to develop Plato’s ideas into a living philosophy, a philosophy of life, even a religion with its own spiritual practices. It is important to remember that while we consider Plato in a dryly academic way, for his followers in the centuries after his death his texts had the status of scripture. Neoplatonists saw themselves not as originating ideas but writing commentaries making clear what Plato really meant. Passages which are today considered merely as rather abstruse exercises in abstract logic were used by practising Neoplatonists in their devotions.