Mark Booth - The Secret History of the World

One afternoon in 414 when Hypatia was leaving a lecture hall, a gang of black-cowelled monks forced her from her chariot, stripped her naked and dragged her through the streets to a nearby church. There they pulled her through the cool, flitting shadows to the altar. In an atmosphere perfumed with incense they swarmed all over her body, her naked form now covered by black cloth, and they tore her limb from limb. Later they scraped the flesh from her bones using oyster shells and burned all her remains.

The church was trying to erase Hypatia from history just as the priests of Amun had tried to erase Akhenaten.

IT IS TOO EASY TO SEE THE CHURCH AS the evil repressor of free thought and to romanticize outlawed groups and antinomian schools like the Neoplatonists and the Gnostics. From its early history the Church has numbered among its leaders practitioners of black magic and other initiates who have abused their supernatural powers for selfish ends. But it is equally true — and perhaps more important — to say that from the time of St Paul and St Augustine the greatest Church leaders have been initiates of the highest order who have sought to guide humanity according to the divine plan outlined in this book. They knew that it was necessary for any understanding of reincarnation to be suppressed in the West. According to the cosmic plan, the West was to be the cradle for the developing sense of the value of an individual human life.

On the other hand the Neoplatonists, though they had continued the work of Pythagoras and Plato, converting into concepts the direct experiences of the spirit worlds, seemed altogether unaware of the great revolution that had taken place there. In their writings there is no trace of the gospel of universal love that Jesus Christ had introduced. Similarly the Gnostic emphasis on direct, personal experience of the spirit worlds, as distinct from passive acceptance of abstract dogma, was in line with the impulse introduced by Jesus Christ, but many of the Gnostics were also vehement world-haters in a way that ran contrary to the mission of Jesus Christ to transform the material world. Many of the beliefs that the Gnostic sects took from their adventures in the spirit worlds were also quite fantastical. Not only did some Gnostics believe that Jesus Christ had not sunk so low as to inhabit a physical body, that he had lived on the earth only as some kind of phantom, but they also practised bizarre extremes of mortification and debauchery as a way of disrupting their own, despised bodily senses and gaining access to the spirit worlds. Some encouraged snakes to crawl over their naked bodies, some drank menstrual blood, saying ‘Here is the blood of Christ’, and others believed that their sex magic would lead to the birth of god-like creatures. Others castrated themselves and boasted, ‘I am deader than you are.’

ROME WANTED TO STAMP OUT DOCTRINAL differences. Christian conviction and moral purpose were useful for Constantine and Theodosius, unifying the Empire and strengthening it from within at a time when barbarian hoards were threatening it from the East.

A steadily expanding empire in China had caused a domino effect across Central Asia and into Europe. Under pressure from the Far East Goths, Visigoths and Vandals invaded parts of Europe, even reaching as far as Rome before retreating again. Then, in the second quarter of the fifth century, the nomadic Mongolian tribes were united under a great leader, Attila the Hun. He swept through the territories previously invaded by Goths and Vandals and built an empire which stretched from the plains of Central Asia to northern Gaul. He pushed into northern Italy and raided Constantinople.

Attila, the ‘scourge of God’, has become a byword for barbarity, but an eyewitness account of a visit to Attila’s encampment by a Greek historian, Priscus, gives a very different picture. Priscus shows Attila living in a simple wooden house of polished boards, surrounded by a wooden enclosure. Woollen mats served as carpets, and Attila — literally ‘little father’ — received his visitors wearing simple linen clothes, unadorned by gems or gold. He drank — moderately — from a wooden bowl and ate from a wooden plate. He showed no emotion during the interview except when his youngest son arrived, whom he chucked under the chin and regarded with a look of satisfaction.

It is also said that when Attila conquered the Christian city of Corinth, he was outraged to find a prostitute on every street corner. He gave them the choice of marrying one of his men or exile.

If Attila was not the ravening monster of popular imagination, it is nevertheless true to say that if he had succeeded in overrunning the Roman Empire, this would have been disastrous for the evolution of human consciousness.

The Romans feared Attila more than any of their other enemies. Attila would not allow his people to live in Roman territory or buy Roman goods. When he invaded Roman territories he reversed Romanization, demolishing Roman buildings — and he also took thousands of pounds of gold from Rome in tribute money. When in 452 he finally had Rome itself in his grip, the Emperor sent out Leo, the Bishop of Rome, to meet him.

The future Pope Leo negotiated a deal with Attila by the terms of which Honoria, the daughter of the Emperor, would be his wife together with a dowry of thousands more pounds of gold.

At this point Attila believed he had achieved his ambition to take over the Roman Empire and rule the world.

Attila and his people practised shamanism. In all battles Attila was guided — wisely as it turned out — by his shaman-priests. The great terror-striking uproar of a Hun army going to battle was made up of the howling of dogs, the clanking of weapons, the sounds of horns and bells. All this was intended to summon the battalions of the dead, the ghosts of their ancestors, to fight alongside them. They were also shamanistically calling on the group souls of carnivores, the wolves and the bears, to enter into them and give them supernatural powers.

BECAUSE WE HAVE BEEN CONSIDERING the barbarian invasions from the East, this is perhaps a good place to pause to consider shamanism. The word shaman comes from the Tungus-Mongol noun meaning ‘one who knows’.

Shamans, from the time of the barbarian invasions to the present, have used a variety of techniques — Mircea Eliade has called them ‘archaic techniques of ecstasy’ — to work themselves into a trance state: rhythmic drumming and dancing, hyperventilation, frenzied self-mutilation, sensory deprivation, dehydration, sleep deprivation — and also psychoactive plants, including ayahuasca, peyote cactus, the ergot fungus. Recent studies by Wiliam Emboden, Professor of Biology at California State University, and others have also made it look likely that drugs were used to induce trance states in Mystery centres — for example, the kykeon at Eleusis and the blue water lily taken in conjunction with opium and mandrake roots in ancient Egypt.

Scientists have isolated an enzyme in the brain that induces these trance states. Research seems to suggest that 2 per cent of us have high enough levels of dimethyltryptamine naturally occurring in the brain to give us spontaneous and involuntary trance states. It also seems likely that we all have higher levels until adolescence, when a process of crystallization takes place, cladding the pineal gland and impeding its function. For the rest of us these ancient techniques or similar are necessary.