Mark Booth - The Secret History of the World

The boy is enlightened because from the point of view of this other form of consciousness the monk’s finger belongs to him as much as it does the monk. The normal categories of human head-thought are inadequate to cover this.

Laughter erupts when you suddenly see the cosmos upside down, inside out and the other way round. At the beginning of the second half of the fifth century a new sense of absurdity entered the world and from then on the great initiates of the secret societies, in the West as well as in the East, would always have a touch of Zen.

UNDER A STRONG RULER, JUSTINIAN, the Byzantine Empire expanded, even regaining territories from the barbarians. Justinian closed down the remaining schools of Greek philosophy, causing teachers to flee, taking with them texts like the writings of Aristotle, including his now lost alchemical treatise.

Many arrived in Persia where King Khusraw dreamed of founding a great academy like the one that had inspired Greek civilization. In an intellectual ferment that took in elements of Neoplatonism, Gnosticism and Hermeticism, the methodology of Aristotle was applied jointly to the material world and the spirit worlds . So began the golden age of Arabian magic.

All our childhoods are lit up by a vision of magic — of genies, magic lamps and abracadabra. These stories began to weave their magical influence on the history of the world in the sixth century. There were rumours of automata and flying machines and caches of self-generating gold, of powerful magic spells that would become collected in forbidden books.

Soon the whole world would be under the spell of Arabia, as books of its spells were published far and wide, books containing the whispers of demons.

A GRIMLY FORBIDDING FIGURE LOOKED down from the spirit worlds on these developments .

In 570 a child called Mohammed was born in Mecca. When he was six he lost both his parents and was hired out as a shepherd’s boy. He grew broad shouldered, with curly black hair and a beard through which shone dazzling white teeth. He became a camel-driver, transporting the spices and perfumes that were the speciality of Mecca to Syria. Then, at the age of twenty-five, he married a wealthy widow of Mecca and became one of the richest and most respected citizens of that city.

Although he had in one way now won back all he had lost at the death of his parents, Mohammed was dissatisfied. The religious centre of Mecca was a large, black, granite stone called the Kaaba, which in some traditions is said to have fallen to earth from the Sirius star system. At that time Arabia was populated by shamanistic tribes, each worshipping their own gods and spirits and at the centre of this whirlwind, next to the Kaaba, stood a sacred tent which housed hundreds of their idols. Mecca had also become corrupted by the sale of holy water — taken from a spring which Ishmael had caused to spring from the sand. To Mohammed’s eyes all of this looked lax. He saw a people interested only in money-making, gambling, horsemanship and getting drunk.

While driving camel trains down to places like Syria and Egypt he heard about Judaism and also stories about Jesus Christ. Did the story of the cleansing of the temple strike a chord? Mohammed became convinced that Arabia needed a prophet, someone like Jesus Christ who could purge the people of superstitions and of corruption and could unite them in one cosmic purpose.

Mohammed was sitting in the hills surrounding Mecca, brooding darkly on how all this might be achieved, when an angel appeared before him, saying: ‘I am the angel Gabriel.’ The apparition then showed Mohammed a golden tablet and told him to read it. Mohammed protested that he was illiterate, but when Gabriel commanded him a second time, Mohammed found that he could indeed read. So began the series of angelic conversations that became the Koran. Later Mohammed went into town and preached what Gabriel had taught him with blazing sincerity and irresistible power. He would summarize his creed in these down-to-earth terms:

When challenged to perform a miracle to prove that his preaching was divinely inspired, he refused. He said that Allah had raised the heavens without recourse to pillars, had made the earth, the rivers, the fig, the date and the olive — and that these things were miraculous enough.

We may hear in this ecstatic materialism the first whisperings of the modern age.

DURING THEIR ANGELIC CONVERSATIONS, the Archangel Gabriel asked Mohammed to choose refreshment. Mohammed chose milk, which occultists call moon juice. Alcohol would be forbidden in Islam.

It is highly significant, from an esoteric point of view, that the angel who dictated the Koran to Mohammed was Gabriel, traditionally Archangel of the Moon. Allah is the Muslim name for Jehovah, great god of the moon and thought. Gabriel is here heralding the power of thought to control human passions and quell fantasy, and his god is the great god of thou-shalt-not, represented in Muslim iconography by the crescent moon.

Thought is a death process that feeds on life-giving energies. In the Middle Ages — the great Age of Islam — the sexual impulse would have to be suppressed in order for the human capacity for thought to grow. And in order to quell the outgrowths of Gnostic fantasy, religious leaders imposed their authority on the people.

From the point of view of conventional, Western history, Europe was besieged by the uncivilized Muslims during the latter part of the Dark Ages and on into the Middle Ages. From the point of view of esoteric history the truth is something pretty nearly the mirror image of this. The impulses seeded at this time that would grow and transform Europe, indeed the whole human race, came from Islam.

MOHAMMED’S PREACHING IN THE MARKETPLACE at Mecca prompted a plot to assassinate him. He escaped to the town of Medina with his disciple Abu Behr in order to marshal his supporters. In 629 he returned to Mecca and in the four years until his death he established control over the rest of Arabia. When Abu Behr became his successor — or ‘Caliph’ — the will to conquer continued at an astonishing rate.

One of the things that makes a religion successful is if it works in the world , that is to say if it brings material benefits. The combination of Mohammed’s radical monotheism with the scientific methodology of Aristotle that had earlier pervaded Arabian thought would quickly encircle the globe from Spain to the boundaries of China.