Magic in the Ancient Mystery Religions
(December 1934-March 1935)
Part 1. Magic, Myth, Mystery
[Summary. Magic has to do with the mind making contact with the unseen spiritual side of the world. It involves the subconscious mind, and everyone's subconscious mind has latent powers for magic. Work in a mystery school is about training these latent powers and accessing higher states of consciousness.]
There are few words in the English language that can raise such strange reactions in the human mind as the word 'magic'. It is used equally to denote excellence, or the reverse. Poets speak of the magic of a woman's eyes, or of love, and they are right. But some cannot distinguish between a magus and a charlatan, and associate magic with conjuring, white rabbits, and top hats — and they too are right.
The word 'magic' has a way of revealing the inmost thoughts of the soul. Tell me a man's reaction to the word, and I will tell you, approximately, the state of his soul's evolution.
There is living today a famous English preacher, a Bishop of the Church of England [Ernest Barnes, a liberal churchman]. Magic is for him the vilest and basest of superstitions because he cannot measure the magical workings of the Christian Sacrament of Communion in terms of chemical change. The same rite for Evelyn Underhill [a Christian mystical writer] is an example of ritualistic magic. But magic's standard of measurement is not to be laid down in terms of chemistry; you cannot test its purity as you would a patent medicine.
Evelyn Underhill and Bishop Barnes stand at opposite poles of the magnet of religious experience. Both are right in what they say. But you will be committing religious adultery if you mix in your mind the plan of Bishop Barnes' religious consciousness with Miss Evelyn Underhill's.
The Century Dictionary gives the following definition of magic: 'Magic is the pretended art of controlling the actions of spiritual or superhuman beings.' This is a 'Barnesian' type of definition, and in its own way and on its own plane it is right. But it is not the only way. There are other ways and planes of thought about this matter.
'Magic' says the Byzantine writer Psellus, 'explores the essence and power of everything.' This, put into terms of today's thought, means that magic is a technique of mental training that enables the mind to reach out beyond the visible surface of things, and by doing so, to get in touch with the mental side of Nature. To use a magical expression, magic is lifting the Veil of Isis.
It is a technique for training the body or soul of a man or woman and preparing them for initiation into a mystery cult. In the Mysteries one does not learn to control the actions of spiritual beings. Rather, by means of ritual and meditation the initiate learns to control his own soul, so that he is able to lift it temporarily out of physical consciousness. By doing so, the initiate becomes fully aware of the statement that 'The Kingdom of God is Within You'.
Thus the magic of the ancients enables a man to control his own soul, for good or evil, for magic has the power to make the magician either God-centered, and thus a power for good, or self-centered, and a more than common power for human evil.
Let us go into more detail and see what it is that the initiate of a Mystery school tries to do, whether he is an initiate of an Egyptian Mystery school in the year 2000 BC or of one operating in the twentieth century.
What is magic as it is taught today? Dion Fortune has given us this definition: 'Magic is the art of causing changes to take take place in consciousness in accordance with will.' (London Forum, September 1934, p. 174.) It is upon the subconscious mind that ceremonial magic works and upon nothing else. You have only to attend a Roman Catholic High Mass to realize this truth. The ceremony is unfamiliar, and in an unknown tongue, and as a Protestant one's conscious mind is often hostile. But if you are an initiate, you will have learned the technique for sensing the atmosphere of a place, and you will quickly realize that a definite and highly magical ceremony is taking place. What is more, this ceremony is being consciously worked by a priesthood which has, and which knows it has, magical powers.
The most common subconscious powers of the mind as used in magic are telepathy, conscious suggestion, auto-suggestion and sensitivity to atmosphere. Everyone has these powers to a certain extent. In some they come naturally, and usually unsought, and sometimes they are developed to a high degree with no conscious knowledge of the actual technique. But in the initiate and the trained priest these powers are developed by means of a very definite technique, always kept secret, and which works very slowly.
The Church of Rome spends approximately seven years training her young men to become priests. In the Mysteries it is generally reckoned that, with very few exceptions, it takes a minimum of seven years to make an initiate fit and ready to stand upon his own mental foundations.
In both the Church and those Mystery schools run on the lines of the Western Esoteric Tradition, these subconscious mental powers are set free, controlled, trained, and finally used as a means of ceremonial magic. Certain ceremonies are designed to work upon the imagination and to heighten the emotion, and it is by these ceremonies, frequently repeated, that the powers of the subconscious mind are trained and used.
Magic, therefore, is a psychological technique. Modern psychology teaches that the mind is made up of various levels of consciousness, with barriers between them, and that deep down at the root of consciousness is the level of elemental energy.
Ceremonial magic aims at opening up and controlling this elemental energy, and pouring it in a carefully regulated manner into channels that have been properly prepared to receive it. Magic takes place in the realms of the mind. It uses mind stuff to build its engines, and mental energy to drive them. I repeat, magic is of the mental world, not the physical.
Part 2. Religion
[Summary. For Seymour, religion is about communing with an ultimate reality. Myth is a way of encoding religious experiences. Seymour talks about ancient mystery religion and says that initiates of the cult of a god were "encompassed with [the god's] divine life and energy", and even in some sense became the god. As far as historical accuracy is concerned, his statements about ancient religion and philosophy may be taken with a pinch of salt.]
Now let us turn to the word 'religion' and try to decide just what we mean by this term. As far as we are concerned, religion has nothing to do with any creeds, dogmas, rites or churches; and there is no need to believe in a personal deity, or indeed in any God at all. You may believe in all these things if you wish to do so, or, like my Buddhist teacher, believe in none. And yet your worship will come within the limits of this term 'religion' as used in these pages. We will use the term simply as a recognition of, and a communion with, the soul of that in which this visible Universe lives, moves and has its being. Here the term 'soul' means the emotional, mental, and spiritual states of consciousness, both in man and nature - nature being considered as an intelligent force.
You will see that here the word 'religion' involves two things:
1. Knowledge in contradistinction to belief.
2. Action that is direct communion with the Unseen, be it called God, a god, or a natural force manifesting as Law and Order.
The term 'Mystery religion' need not detain us long. In the past, mystery meant hidden, but not incomprehensible as it often does today. The Mystery religions were esoteric, selective and strictly limited brotherhoods. They had rigid laws and secret observances. In this way they were different from the State religions, which were free and public.
Having considered the meaning of the subjects given in the title, let us set out the object of these studies. Modern Christianity as understood by the extreme Protestant section of the Church of England and certain of the non-conformist sects, has been called (not altogether unjustly) a system of practical ethics slightly tinged by emotion and strongly obsessed by a fear of hellfire. It is claimed as a simple doctrine for simple people, and the simpler the people, the better the doctrine suits them. It has no esoteric teachings; all is given out. It is rational, above-board and practical, and its teachers declare that Christianity has no use for such things as magic, myth or mystery.
But when we turn to the past, we find that the three essential features of ancient religion were magic, myth and mystery. The first and last have been explained, but the term 'myth' is worthy of study. The word as it will be used does not mean a supposed historical story which may or may not be true. For us it means a sequence of symbols used as an aid to learning, memorizing and understanding a religious process, the true meaning of which is kept secret from the uninitiated. Man always tries to define and synthesize his religious experiences. He rationalizes them and they become myth, with characters as symbols of the myth.
For the outer world, a tale in historical form is built up. For the initiate, however, the myth is the key to a psychological and mental process which is carried out within the soul of the initiate. It is not historical fact. For the cult initiate, things are not what they seem to the uninitiated. It was the ignorance and superstition of the Middle Ages that turned myth into supposed history.
Today, some Christians continue to confuse myth with history. Others deny that it has meaning, and look upon myths as fairytales for children. Both are wrong. Myth is a method for recording psychological experiences.
Let us turn now to the background of religious thinking of the Ancient Mysteries, and examine that phase which came under the influence of Neo-Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism, especially the latter.
It should be pointed out that Neo-Platonism when formulated was not a new system of thought. Plotinus (AD 205-70), who is looked on as its founder, had only gathered into a clear and comprehensive system the knowledge of many centuries of practical occult research. (Dodd, Neoplatonism, p. 10.) In this system Plotinus endeavoured to do two things: first, to give a clear and rational account of the reality implied in experience; and second, when understanding was reached, to place the student in direct contact with this reality, which - as was said earlier - may be called the Soul of Nature.
For Plotinus and the great Initiates of that time the history of the world was the history of the involution of a spiritual force into matter. This idea had come down from the writings of Plato, and it is certain that it was already an ancient idea 400 years before Christ.
To explain this teaching, Plato used the term 'On' to denote the Absolute or Unmanifest. The next stage in the world process was 'Ho ontos On', which means 'Real Being', that which really is, or has being, as contrasted with 'Genesis' or objective existence. With Plato, this Real Being is defined as 'essence', and described as formless, colourless, intangible and visible only to the mind or higher reason. (Iamblichus, Egyptian Mysteries, p. 29)
From the Absolute there emanated the gods of the Ancient Mysteries. Iamblichus (op. cit., p. 31) taught that there are the many gods that are the emanations of this Absolute God, and as such they were not substances, that is: real beings complete in themselves. You get this idea expressed in the 95th Psalm:
For the Lord is a Great God,
And a Great King above all Gods.
All over the ancient world at that time you get this same idea. The Hindus have Brahman, who is the God who is beyond Essence, and who is Absolute, while Brahma is the creator and is identical with essence or 'Real Being'.
The Parsis worshipped Zeroana, the Unlimited, and Ahura Mazda, the divine creator. In like manner, the Egyptians at one period acknowledged Amoun the Hidden One as the Absolute, and Ptah was the Demiurgos or Architect of the Universe.
There is a point here which is unfamiliar to modern religious thought, and which should be explained for it is of vital importance if we are to understand the part that magic played in the Ancient Mysteries. These Gods were spiritual essences, and were formless in any sense that we can understand. They encompassed and permeated all things in the manner in which the Mediterranean encompasses and permeates the sponges that grow in its depths. Once a man became an initiate of the Mysteries belonging to a certain God, that man's soul lived and moved and had its being in the 'Real Being' of his particular God, in a special and peculiar manner.
The idea may be stated thus: the Ancient Mysteries taught that the god of a cult encompassed with his own divine life and energy the bodies and souls of the initiated members of that particular cult. St Paul was quoting the poet Aratus, and was using a Mystery teaching when he said to the Athenians: 'In him we live, move, and have our being ... for we are the offspring of God.' (Acts 17:28.)
Every initiate of a Mystery cult, by virtue of his initiation, became in a special manner the saving god of that cult. He was sealed and signed and often branded with the sign of the god. You will see this idea being kept up in the baptism of various sects in the Christian Church, where the baptism makes the infant, who is as yet unconscious of any religion, a member of Christ, a child of God, and the inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven.
The Christian child is supposed to get all these benefits by virtue of a rite; he does not have to work for them. But in the Ancient Mysteries, the neophyte had to undergo long and careful training to obtain such benefits. He had to reach a certain standard of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual training before he could undergo the magical ceremony of initiation into a mystery cult.
Having reached that standard, he became a child of that saving god, and a participator in its protective essence. The god of a cult gave his followers protection in this world, and safe passage through the dark realms of the Underworld at death.
Let us sum up the chief points so far. The first point was that the ancients had a different idea of religion from the purely ethical conception common in Protestant circles today. For the ancient, the three essential features of religion were myth, magic and mystery. The second point is that the ancients used these words in a very different way from our modern usage.
Myths for the initiated were a telepathic presentment of certain pictures in the form of a drama, which imparted an intuitional awareness of the Cosmic Truth thus dramatized. They were a set of conventional symbols with a definite but secret meaning.
Magic as the ancients saw it was a secret system of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual training which aimed at giving the neophyte control over certain inner states of consciousness. He went through ceremonies of initiation which brought about certain kinds of psychic experience, experience which was expected to produce effects in the subconscious mind.
Plutarch (De Anima, p. 84) says: 'They who suffer death are as those initiated into the Great Mysteries, wherefore in deed as well as in name death is akin to initiation.' 'Telesthenai' is a Greek word meaning 'to be initated into the Mysteries', and in those Mysteries the dead were called 'Christoi'. Jesus, the Christ, uttered as his last cry at the point of death 'Tetelestai', a Mystery term meaning 'The Initiation is complete.'
Part 3. The Lore of Persephone
[Summary: Seymour believed that the initiates of ancient mystery cults were trained to use their psychic abilities to work with the unseen spiritual world. He associates this world with Hades, traditionally regarded as the realm of the dead, which was ruled over by the mystery goddess Persephone. He seeks to unite ancient beliefs with the system of the Qabbalah. Again, his statements about ancient systems should be taken with a pinch of salt.]
In Parts One and Two of these articles we considered the three aspects of the Ancient Mysteries: myth, magic and mystery, and finished up with the idea that 'They who suffer death are as those initiated into the Great Mysteries.'
In Apuleius is given a fairly full account of the initiation of Lucius into the Isis cult at Cenchreae. Lucius went through a long and arduous training for this event. He studied the ceremonial and contemplative devotion of the Egyptian liturgical tradition. Having undergone all this preparation, he was led into the innermost sanctuary to be given the culminating psychological experience. In The Golden Ass, he has this to say of that moment: 'I penetrated to the boundaries of death. I trod the threshold of Persephone, and after being borne through all the elements I returned to earth.' That is a definite statement by a man who lived 2,000 years ago, a Mystery initiate. [This is a reference to the ancient esotericist and writer Apuleius, who wrote a novel known as The Golden Ass or Metamorphoses.]
All through the ages there have been those who have trained themselves to grasp the World Soul and enter into it. They have sought, successfully, to take the Kingdom of Heaven by force, the force of the directed will. The whole scheme of the Mystery teaching was based upon an idea which has been put thus: 'Behind this world of appearance lies another and vaster world with a thronging population of its own, with many populations, each absorbed in uttering its own being according to its own laws. There is a chain of "Being" whose top and bottom know nothing of each other at all.' [The source of this quotation is Maurice Hewlett's novel Lore of Proserpine (1913).] And only rarely have we any intercourse with any but our own. We may, for convenience, call it the antechamber of this world. For the ancients, it was the world of Persephone. The old initiates believed there was a power and energy in this unseen side of nature which the trained adept was able to draw upon by means of special techniques. They based their scheme of training upon the beliefs that:
1. Man is the centre of concealed and potent forces; and
2. the unseen forces of nature are of the same kind as those that exist in the soul of man.
Thus man can draw from nature all the energy and power he needs. The greater his need, the more the adept can draw from this unfailing power source. 'Gnothi Se Auton' was the greatest maxim that both neophyte and adept had to comprehend and practise. The cultivation of a student's powers began with initiation and ended only with death. The first lesson in this lengthy process of self-knowledge that had to be mastered was the idea that 'nervous force is at the back of man's mental energy' while he is still in the body. It is this idea that lies at the root of the many strange and complicated rules of the Ancient Mysteries with regard to continence and chastity.
Demeter and Persephone were the two great goddesses of the Greater Mysteries at Eleusis. The realm of the dead was the kingdom of Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld, whose portress was triune Hecate. The statues of the latter were placed at the fork of roads looking each way. As a moon-goddess she was the patron of childbirth, of the sea and fishermen. She was also the goddess of night, darkness, ghosts and magic. Hermes, in his role of psychopomp, was the guide who presented souls to the rulers of Hades, Persephone and Pluto, her uncle/husband and King. Here are three great links which bind the Greater Mysteries to the 'Lore of Persephone'; i.e. Hermes the Guide or psychopomp, Hecate and Persephone herself.
'The dead are as those Initiated': in other words, the rite of initiation into the Greater Mysteries of Eleusis gave the initiate the Keys of Heaven and Hell — to use a popular phraseology. What it really means is that the initiate was made free of Hades, and Hades for them meant neither Heaven nor Hell. It meant that other and vaster world which lies beyond the veil of physical manifestation. The entry to this world was symbolized by the Veil of Isis, or the Helmet of Pluto, which is found as the Cap of Darkness in Norse mythology.
This system of thought was common to much of the ancient world. You get almost the same teaching in the Mysteries of Egypt where Anubis and/or Thoth takes the place of Hermes. A special note to make here is that these 'conductors of the dead' are also in many cases the instigators of the teachings of the Mysteries. Their role of 'Walker of Two Worlds' made them the guardian of neophyte and initiate alike, and both strove to become proficient in the ability to travel in worlds other than the physical.
Let us look at this 'Lore of Persephone' from the point of view of the Ancient Mysteries. To Iamblichus, it was the study of that astral knowledge pertaining to the creation of images from the generative energy. To the ancients, the term 'astral' meant the unseen world in general, and they believed that in this unseen world there were many classes of beings, as well as many different planes of consciousness (Iamblichus, Egyptian Mysteries, p. 81.)
First, let us deal with the inhabitants of the world of Persephone. Scutellius [Nicolaus Scutellius, a sixteenth-century scholar] gives us nine, a number that fits exactly with the Tree of Life, for he did not include in his system the Absolute or the Unmanifest:
1. the invisible gods;
2. the sky-gods;
3. archangels;
4. the angels;
5. the demons (remember that these were not devils);
6. leaders;
7. princes;
8. heroes and demigods; and
9. souls.
St Paul in the Epistle to the Ephesians gave the following classification:
1. princes;
2. authorities;
3. kosmokrators; and
4. the spiritual essences in the super-celestial spheres.
Damascius [an ancient Neoplatonist philosopher] says that the Chaldean Mysteries held to the following list of Beings of the Unseen World:
1. gods that are pure mind;
2. gods subsisting before all subordinate dominion;
3. rulers;
4. archangels;
5. divine beings confined to no special place or service; and
6. beings with a special place and/or service.
The geography, if I may use that word, of the Unseen World was carefully mapped out in both the Egyptian and the Greek Mysteries, and the initiate was expected to have a sound knowledge of this celestial geography and to have been made free of these inner worlds before he started any exploration of the realms of 'death'.
Now let us examine the method by which the Ancient Mysteries taught their initiates to do their exploring. Mainly, it was a method of mind-control. There were numerous systems in vogue; but with a little effort, most can be brought within the scope of the following system which is based on the Qabalah.
First there was the condition of Unmanifestation called 'The God of Gods'. This condition was the All and the One, the Alone; and it was, and is, utterly beyond our comprehension. It could be given a name, but no attributes. It was the 'On' of the Neo-Platonists.
The next phase was 'Ho ontos On', or state of Real Being, It held all the various grades of being that lie between It completely unmanifest and the physical world which our senses reveal to us. This latter was called 'Becoming', or 'Genesis'. In the Ho ontos On there were four states of consciousness:
1. the spiritual;
2. the mental;
3. the emotional; and
4. the aetheric.
This last was a supra-physical condition. It was an inner world containing five elements; the fifth being usually called 'aether'. The physical world was held to be made up of earth, water, fire and air; and these four elements were held fast and bound to the form seen in this physical world by the fifth element of aether. The ancients taught that this fifth element acts upon the other four as isinglass acts upon jellies. It keeps them in their correct form.
You can put this information on the Tree of Life as follows:
10. Malkuth is the world of the four elements.
9. Yesod is the world of the fifth element, the matrix in which Malkuth is embedded.
8/7. Hod and Netzach form the emotional world - the form and force sides respectively.
6/5/4. Tipareth, Geburah and Chesed are the mental worlds.
3/2/1. Binah, Chokmah and Kether are the spiritual world.
Man is a child of the Absolute, the Unmanifest, and he belongs in the Cosmos which is his home. His Cosmic and as yet unmanifest self is called the Monad, the true Ego, and the Yechidah. It belongs to the On, or not being, condition of existence. When man comes into the realm of Ho ontos On, into the sphere of Real Being, he grows very gradually three dual-natured bodies: the spiritual, the mental and the emotional - that is, six inner plane bodies, and an aetheric body, which crystallize into the four elements of the physical body as we now know it.
So the soul of man has four states of consciousness which correspond to the four states of consciousness in the soul of the Great Earth Mother. (Soul here means all states of consciousness between the physical and the unmanifest cosmic monad.) Put another way, man has within him seven planes of Real Being corresponding to the seven planes of Real Being of the Earth Mother. 'As above, so below.'
Each of the seven subtle bodies of the soul of man belongs to and has a close link with the seven planes in the soul of the Great Mother. The relationship of each soul body to its plane is the same as the relationship of the physical body to the physical body of nature.
The nature and the real being of the soul of man is rooted in the nature and real being of the soul of nature, plane by plane. The Mysteries taught that if man could learn conscious control of his own soul, by his own subtler-than-matter bodies, then he could function consciously on the corresponding planes of the earth soul in exactly the same way as today he functions on the earth plane of nature. The ancient schools taught that an initiate could only hope to travel in safety on the other levels of being with the aid and protection of the god to whose cult he belonged. And he was given the protection of that deity after he had been initiated into the ritual of a particular plane of consciousness.
Part 4. The Inhabitants of the Realm of Persephone
Let us turn to the teachings of Iamblichus as given in his work The Egyptian Mysteries, concerning the inhabitants of the next world.
Iamblichus tells us that in the religious teachings given in the Egyptian Mysteries between 4,000 and 300 BC, and in the Graeco-Egyptian Mysteries between 300 BC and AD 300 - about the time that Iamblichus lived - it was a matter of faith that from the One Great God (Neter) there came the many, gods and men.
His teachings can be summarized thus. Behind all Being there is the causeless Cause of All. That Cause in itself is not Being; it is Amun, whose titles were the One, the Maker of All that have Being, the Hidden One. Proceeding from this One is the realm of Real Being. And in this realm are the gods and lesser divinities, who - with 'souls' - are the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Persephone. From this One, through the divinities in the realm of Real Being, come the human and animal kingdoms that exist in the realm of 'Becoming', i.e. the physical world.
So between the Cause of All in the Unmanifest, and mankind in this realm of 'Becoming', there are many kinds of divine being, some superior, some inferior, to man. These beings exist and evolve in this intermediate state of consciousness which Iamblichus calls the realm of 'Real Being'.
This realm of Real Being is also described as the Soul of Nature, the Supreme Genetrix, by Ab-Ammon, the Egyptian priestly initiate who was the teacher of Porphyry and Iamblichus. The ruler of the realm of Real Being was 'Mind', the leader and king of the things that actually are.
The Divine Races of this realm, which could be reached by means of the sacerdotal technique of the Mysteries (The Egyptian Mysteries, p. 55), were divided by Ab-Ammon into two classes: the Superior Races, and the Inferior Races. The Superior Races were the gods and half-gods. The gods were spiritual essences. They were not bound to form as man is; but they governed the forms for which they were responsible from outside. They were - speaking with regard to man (op. cit., p. 41) - superior and perfect, while man is inferior and imperfect. These spiritual essences (relative to man) can do all things at once, uniformly and now; in contradistinction to man, who is unable to do anything completely or immediately, either speedily or individually.
These gods were completely formless, whereas man is circumscribed by his physical body. Ab-Ammon lays down the principle that 'Mind, the leader and king of all things that actually are, the Demiurge of the Universe, is always present with the Gods in the same manner, completely and abundantly, being established in itself unalloyed according to one sole energy.' (Ibid.) He contrasts this Universal Mind with the mind of man, which is derived from it.
What this important passage means is this: mind is the magical creator of all things that exist. It is creative energy. There is the Great, All Perfect Creative Mind of the Universe. This is the Demiurgos. Man, in a limited, feeble fashion can draw upon the creative mind of nature because he forms part of it. The gods, however, are actually aspects of that creative mind of nature, and are not limited, as is man. They, the gods, have direct access to it.
Below these superior gods, there come the half-gods, who were the teachers and directors of souls. Today, we would call them the 'Creations of the Created', for they were the results of the creating minds of those great spiritual essences, the gods. These half-gods are to be distinguished from the Archons or rulers over matter (op. cit., p. 79), whose characteristic seems to have been the force and disorder of creative energy when functioning in matter (op. cit., p. 83).
Of the same rank as the half-gods but of a different nature were the archangels and angels. 'To the Gods there pertain order and tranquillity, and with the figures of the archangels there exists a representation of order and quietude. With the angels there is the disposition of order and peacefulness, but they are not free from motion.'
Proclus says (op. cit., p. 83n) that in many Mystery rituals 'the Gods project many shapes of themselves, many changing figures; there will be a formless luminance radiating from them, now represented by a human shape, and now different'. Now these things were seen only by the Epoptae, the initiates of high grade who were being or had been fully initiated.
It must be understood that in the Mystery initiations the ritual did not aim at materializing an immaterial spirit. It aimed at raising the consciousness of the initiate above that of the physical level, and enabling him to function on a level that was in tune with that of the Gods, or selected Entities.
If a certain note is repeatedly struck on a piano then it will tend to set in vibration the strings of other pianos nearby which are tuned to the same pitch. In a Mystery ritual a certain spiritual note was struck, a note tuned to the vibrations of the spiritual essence which was the god of that cult. Those partaking in the ritual, if they had been trained to pick up this note and tune their consciousness to it, could pick up and receive the spiritual vibrations of the deity of that cult.
Those who entered the Mysteries were, and still are, given a long and very careful training in the art of 'tuning in'. To speak in terms of the wireless, you were taught which wavelength to use, which stations you might expect to pick up, and even the kind of programme you should be able to hear ... or see, for they had a spiritual television of a sort. You had only to watch yourself for error.
The advantage of this Mystery method is that it can be checked quite easily. Suppose you were a member of the Mystery school whose god was Thrice Greatest Hermes. You would expect to get the god Hermes in his symbolic form, perhaps as the Ibis-headed Thoth, or the winged Mercury with the caduceus, etc. You would pick up the appropriate symbols and attendants, and so on. But if you picked up a dog-faced demon with blood and thunder, or saw one of the Chthonian deities bearing down on you with a menacing air, you knew full well that someone had blundered. And it had to be you. You would have to explain to your justly annoyed superiors how it was you had called up the myrmidons of Pluto instead of the bright figures of the Elysian Fields.
Let us now sum up the points that have been considered. The Mystery gods were not immaterial ghosts in human guise, nor were they material idols. They were spiritual essences. They were part of the One God as a wave is part of the ocean. The forms in which they were contacted were the result of man's image-making faculty, for the gods are formless energies. They expressed an aspect of the 'Real Being' of the Unmanifest. They are real in their own way and on their own plane. Archangels, angels, half-gods and archons are realities of the same kind.
The initiate was trained to tune in by means of a ritual to the spiritual vibrations of the deity of the cult to which he belonged. When in this condition a more subtle set of senses opened up and the initiate could see and hear with the eyes and ears of the spirit. He did not see materializations with his physical eyes and ears; he was on a higher level of consciousness. Paul said: 'I know a man of Christ ... who was caught up into the third heaven. In body or out of it, that I do not know, God knows. I simply know that this man was caught up to Paradise and heard sacred secrets which no human lips can repeat.' (1 Cor. 12:1-4.)
Here you have in the words of St Paul an accurate description of the results of a Mystery initiation. This experience is exactly the same as that which the pagan Mysteries sought to give their initiates when taking their grade initiations in the saving cult of their particular deity, be it Hermes, Serapis or Isis.
Part 5. The Bridal Song
The Bridal Song of the Ancient Mysteries should start one's soul upon a journey that is not often taken today. Those who studied the 'Sacred Marriage of the Qabalah' as taught in Israel about the time of the crucifixion will know this ancient road well (Mead, Echoes from the Gnosis, Vol. XI, p. 32.) In the 'Wedding Song of Wisdom', taken from the Greek version, we find sung of the 'Maiden', the Bride-to-Be, the Secret Wisdom:
Her fingers are secretly setting
The Gates of the City ajar.
In the terminology of the time, this 'Maiden' is the Light's daughter, the higher self, the one that sits in the bridal chamber of the heart, an ancient term for the subconscious mind. She is the one whose invisible fingers will open the gate of that inner city, lying beyond the stairway of effort.
'The Religion of the Mind' was a term used to describe the religion of the disciples of Thrice Greatest Hermes; men who lived in an inner world of great beauty of thought and purity of feeling. Here was a world created by the human mind, human devotion and human intelligence of those who had been taught in the ancient fraternities how to use the secret wisdom of Hermes.
Religion for them meant a combination of myth, magic and ritual. But these words did not have the meaning they have for us today. Myth was not fairytales, but the collective symbolism of a psychological process. Magic was a process for training the mind and making the will work upon consciousness, and ritual was a method of using the five senses to aid the soul to lift itself above the four elements of the physical world on to the spiritual stairway whose lowest step is that of the 'Aether of the Wise'. One step on that stairway leads first into the purple darkness of the path of Saturn; then on, to the silver radiance of those moonlit regions that stand before the orange-hued Temple of the Religion of the Mind which Qabalists call 'Hod'.
Just as you have a higher and a lower self in your spiritual make-up, so the priesthood of ancient Egypt - considered as a class - had a higher and a lower self. The functioning priesthood of the day formed the lower self, while Thoth was the personification of the Group Oversoul. He was the higher self of the Egyptian priesthood.
Within the Group Oversoul were stored all the experiences, the knowledge, the memories of past and gone priests, priesthoods and colleges, and Mystery cults of ancient Egypt. The essence of four, five or maybe more, thousands of years of religious thought, meditation and magical working had gone to build up the essence of that mighty Oversoul.
Out of the Oversoul of the Egyptian priesthood came much of the Hebrew bible. The basic stories of the Old Testament have come to us via Joseph, Moses and Solomon. Joseph married the daughter of Potipherah, the Priest of On (Heliopolis), whose ruins are near modern Cairo. On is probably one of the most sacred, and certainly the most famous, university towns of ancient Egypt. Moses was said to have been educated there - his Egyptian name was Osarseph, a derivative of Osiris. Manetho says that Moses served as a priest of Osiris. Not only did the Twelve Patriarchs settle in Egypt, but all through the history of the Hebrews there is a strong tradition of close relationship with Egypt and Egyptian thought.
Out of the Egyptian Therapeutic system, as described by Philo, grew up the monastic system of the Christian churches of Rome and Constantinople, of Alexandria and Antioch. And it is as well to remember that at Alexandria was born the group soul of the Christian priesthood.
Hermes was the personification of the priestly oversoul of the wisdom religion that grew up under the influence of the worship of Serapis. This Hellenized religion was the child of the older priestly religion of Egypt and had its centre of power in Alexandria, and it held sway over the minds of men for some 700 years. Its powerful group soul expressed itself through the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus. Out of this priestly group soul of the Graeco-Egyptian religion, the group soul of Christianity as a priestly religion developed. It gave us many of the ideas found in the New Testament and in the traditions of the Roman Church. It made the world of Jesus of Nazareth possible. 'Out of Egypt have I called my Son' is a saying that is true in more ways than one. The wisdom of Moses came out of the numerous priestly colleges of Thebes, the city of No-Amon, destroyed by the Assyrians; and of On at Heliopolis. The New Testament wisdom came, in its turn, out of the priestly colleges of Alexandria. Thoth and Hermes both stand behind Christianity's sacred book, the bible.
No one is talking here of popular Christianity, either ancient or modern. There is and was a wide gulf between the Christianity of the priesthood of the Inner Christian cults and the Christianity of the laity.
The group soul of the priesthood of any vital religion is a specialized group soul within the greater group soul of the followers of that religion. The group soul of the priesthood is always more strongly knit, far stronger and more potent as a magical instrument than is the less clearly defined, more malleable, group soul of any religion as a whole. In a Church such as that of Rome, you have today an example of a group soul within a group soul. The priesthood are a class apart from the laity. They have their own special interests, their own religious knowledge, their own methods of teaching, learning and acting. They have their own ethical code, and in all these things the inner priestly code may be something which is quite different from that of the laity.
This point has been laboured to make the next point clear. Just as Jesus Christ is the personification of the male aspect of the group soul of the Church of Rome, and the Virgin Mary is the personification of the female aspect of the same group soul, so Hermes and the Sacred Wisdom form the male and female aspects of the Hermes Trismegistus Religion of the Mind.
Hermes is the male type, the great Teacher who saves. Isis is the Lady of all Wisdom and the Teacher of all Magic. (Thrice Greatest Hermes, Vol. I, p. 481.)
The New Testament tells us that the Virgin treasured the sayings of Jesus in her heart. And the Roman Church teaches openly that she taught the disciples in the upper room before the coming of the magical fire of Pentecost.
So too in the literature of the Trismegistic cults. Even the Lady of All Wisdom and the Teacher of All Magic gets her wisdom and her power from face-to-face instruction by the most ancient Hermes, with whom she gets into contact through spiritual vision.
For the celibate clergy of the Church of Rome, and especially for the monks in their cells, it is the Virgin Mary, the female force, that is attracted to them in their need for help and guidance. Nature will out, even in psychology. 'Mary Worship' is the natural result of the celibacy of the Roman Priesthood.
One can listen to the Catholic priests in their pulpits describing how Mary the 'Maiden Mother', comes to the tortured soul, inflamed by fasting and the sins of the imagination. She it is who gives to the fasting monk in his solitary hours the visions he longs for. Mary is the monk's 'Bride-to-Be'. It is she whose fingers are 'secretly setting the Gates of the City ajar'. It is she who sits in the Bridal Chamber of the celibate priest's heart.
Now let us return to the religion of the mind, and consider the methods of the 'Maiden' setting the gates ajar. As already pointed out, the Maiden is the secret wisdom of the higher self, and the common factor in the pre-Christian gnosis, the Pythagorean and Neo-Platonic gnosis, as well as the Christianized offshoot of the gnosis of Alexandria. All attempt to set ajar the gates of the inner world of the human soul, and to admit the influence of the higher self.
The methods used are a combination of myth, magic and ritual. You get the myth-making tendencies in the speculations with regard to the fall and the sufferings of Sophia. You get the same thing in the Trismegistic lectures; in the story of the World Soul, of the Nous, and the creative aspect of the Logos.
Hermes is simply the Graeco-Egyptian name for Thoth. He is the creative word - not only of the Cosmic Absolute, but also, on a lower arc, of Amoun, the Absolute of the Universe. As such he assists both Ptah, the male creative aspect of the universe, and Isis, the feminine creative power of the universe.
Isis passes out of the realm of myth and into the realm of magic and ritual. The Lesser Mysteries of Alexandria were the Mysteries of Isis in her aspect of the Lady of Magic, the Teacher of Wisdom. In the three degrees of the Lesser Mysteries of Isis through which the neophyte had to pass before he could claim the right of admission to the Greater Mysteries of Osiris, the neophyte had to specialize in the magical use of the divine names and attributes, and he had to be summoned to the Temple by the Goddess herself.
This summons was given in the form of a theophany, the Goddess appearing to the neophyte when he was exalted by fasting and self-discipline in the Temple Sleep. The candidate was tested for fitness by a trained priest who would read his mind and thus determine whether or not he had reached the required standard. It was a sort of psychoanalysis. Fifty years ago, the idea of an examination of this type would have been considered foolish. Today, thanks to the researches of Freud, Jung and others, we know that trained psychiatrists - which the ancient Egyptian priests certainly were - can probe the soul and weigh it in the balance against the feather of truth in a manner that might well seem to our forebears to be miraculous.
Magic and ritual were, and still are, methods of soul training; and myth, magic and ritual were the fingers that set the gate of the inner city ajar. A ritual of Isis, which was performed regularly throughout the Graeco-Roman world to about AD 400, aimed at raising the impressions received by the senses of sight and hearing and inflaming them with emotion until the soul was swept out and beyond the limitations of the physical body into a state of consciousness that enabled the neophyte to feel the influx of the power of the All-Mother and to see her in the traditional form of Isis, Queen of Heaven.
Modern religious psychology provides us with numerous examples of this not-uncommon phenomenon. The Church of Rome recognizes this phenomenon and gives many instances in the lives of her saints. If we see its genuineness in this case, we cannot in fairness withhold the admission of its genuineness in the case of the Ancient Mysteries. That is not to say there has been no fraud, no simony, in those Mysteries. There was - and there has been such in the Christian Church. But no matter how many cases of fraud there may have been, the fact of its existence does not affect the authenticity of that Mystery phenomenon which the Ancients called 'setting the Gates of the City ajar'.
Part 6. Les Ténèbres de l'Ignorance
Before considering that period of history which has been well-named 'the Night of Ignorance', let us study the basic reasons that make the Mysteries - ancient or modern - so obnoxious to the organized priesthoods of Christianity.
In the first place, the ancient Mystery cults were secret societies. In the past, the attitude of the orthodox Church to the Mysteries was exactly the same as is the attitude of the Roman Church today towards the Freemasons. Then they had the power to slay and torture; today - thank God! - they do not.
The Mysteries taught that everyman can be his own priest. That makes organized priesthoods an unnecessary class. Naturally, the ancient priesthoods - both pagan and Christian - disliked having their privileges taken away from them, to say nothing of their tithes. You cannot blame a man for turning nasty when you interfere with his pocket.
Again, the adepti claimed to have the keys of heaven and hell in their possession. So did the Christians - but they claimed the power of admitting you to heaven or sending you to hell as the Church wished.
The true adepti claimed only to have each his personal key which unlocked for him alone the doors of the heaven worlds. He did not use his key to keep his neighbours out. Neither did he sell special 'through tickets' for purgatory. The Church of Rome said then as she says now: I alone hold the true teaching; belong to me or go to another place.
The initiate of the Ancient Mysteries said: Seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you. Anyone could seek and find. There was only one method by which one could be successful - hard work. It is still so in the Mysteries of today.
The Church of Rome said then, as now: Believe and support, then God's grace which is in the Church's Bank of Spiritual Grace, will see you safely into heaven.
The real key to the matter is this. The Mysteries taught, and still teach, that each individual is his own saviour. The churches teach that man is a miserable sinner, and only the Church can keep him out of hell. Only the Church can save a suffering humanity that is born and lives its whole life in sin.
Now let us turn to that 'Night of Ignorance' which the Church ushered in when she destroyed the ancient pagan civilizations. The story of the treatment of the Mystery tradition by the Church is, on the whole, sorry reading. In the third and fourth centuries AD the conquering Christian religion destroyed the gnosis, which had its chief centre in Alexandria. In the fifth and sixth centuries - having become a political instrument for imperial policy - it destroyed the pagan universities and schools in Greece and elsewhere, schools which had in some cases been teaching for over a thousand years.
Used as a political instrument, the Church proved fatal to a civilization tottering from age and corruption. Its teaching poisoned humanity instead of healing nations that were very sick. It is not unfair to say that the ethics and sociology of Christianity destroyed the fighting spirit of the Roman Empire just as effectively as the Roman free trade system in foodstuffs destroyed the livelihood of the Roman peasant - once the backbone of the Roman Army. While the food dole destroyed the independence and sapped the morale of the artisans of the Roman cities, Rome fell in the end because the Roman armies were largely officered by and recruited from barbarians, who placed Greeks and Syrians, as well as Romans, upon the throne of the Caesars.
By the seventh century, Orthodox Christianity as a religious power was rotten to the core. The Western Roman Empire in Britain, Spain, France and North Africa had perished. In the Eastern Mediterranean, Mahommedanism had shattered the Eastern Roman Empire. Most of Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt became Mahommedan; and the Byzantine Empire as a Christian State sank to the lowerst depths of vice and misery. Even in Italy, by the eighth century, the old Roman Empire had ceased to exist, and there the Christian Church ruled only by virtue of the protection of the Franco-German Holy Roman Empire from their headquarters north of the Alps.
By the ninth century, the Saracens had conquered Spain, while England, most of France, as well as Switzerland and Germany, had long before lapsed into barbarism. Learning had perished, and so had freedom. There was a single exception. North of the Pyrenees from the Bay of Biscay to the River Rhone, was a prosperous belt of country about 200 miles in width. This portion of south-western France owed its prosperity to the fact that the Visigoths, who conquered the country in the fourth and fifth centuries took special care to absorb without destroying the splendid civilization they found there. The rulers of Toulouse were the sovereigns of the only Christian state which remained happy and prosperous in the wreck of the western Empire of Rome. The rulers and upper classes of this little state were Arians, not Catholics. But in the course of time Arianism and Catholicism merged, and the country became - nominally at least - Catholic, and acknowledged the supremacy of the Pope.
The Mystery religions of the Graeco-Egyptian city of Alexandria had, in about the fourth century AD, taken refuge outside the Christian Roman Empire in Babylonia and Persia. Speaking very generally, it may be said that the Mystery religions of the Western Tradition reappeared in the fourth and fifth centuries as Manicheism. Like the conquests of Alexander nearly a thousand years before, the Mahommedans in the seventh century had broken up and scattered the Mystery centres in these countries. Some of the adepti passed into Bulgaria, Dalmatia and Hungary. In time these teachers worked up the valley of the Danube, the Rhine and the Po, then along the Italian and French trade routes to Toulouse, Orleans and Paris.
They were referred to by many names, of which 'Cathari' and 'Patarini' are probably the best-known. Their teaching was synthetic and built up from a Christianized form of Buddhism and Manicheism. It taught reincarnation, the avoidance of taking animal life, and the priesthood of the laity. It made mock of Churches, of priests, and of salvation by priestly officiousness. It recognized no priest as an intermediary between God and man. It taught that release from suffering and reincarnation could only be obtained through loss of desire for wealth and comfort, and it insisted on simplicity of life and service to one's fellow men as the way to happiness and release from rebirth and worry.
The religious and social conditions of the Christian Church at this time, between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, were deplorable. Bishops and priests vied with the nobility in vice and scandalous living. Both classes combined to grind the last farthing out of the merchant, the artisan and the peasant. It was hard to say which was worse - the feudal baron with his men-at-arms, or the Christian prelate with his monks, friars and nuns.
The Catharist heresy spread like wildfire in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Priests, abbots, monks, nuns and whole congregations deserted the orthodox Church. The revenues of the papacy were seriously affected - and so the order was given to stamp out the Catharist heresy.
In 1125 St Bernard was sent to Toulouse, where a crowd hooted at him. In 1175 a council was held in the same city to stamp out the heresy; but as the courts of Toulouse and the feudal nobility had become open to secret heretics, the papal legate left in despair. The little town of Albi gave its name to a new heresy in that part of France. And so, in 1195 when Innocent III mounted the throne of St Peter, the word went out to all Christendom to start the Albigensian Crusade.
As Innocent III promised the German and French barons the lands and wealth of southern France as a reward for success in this crusade, plenty of 'good' Christian men swarmed to his banner. The military leader and representative of the Pope was Simon de Montfort a man now infamous in history as one of the most brutal and bestial military leaders the world has ever known. Behind him, casting a halo of spirituality over this grim engine of destruction, stands St Dominic, founder of the Dominican Order, a man who in cold, calculating cruelty was in no way inferior to his military leader.
The troops of de Montfort swept over the rich provinces of France. Their first exploit was the capture of the small town of Beziers, in which 60,000 men, women and children - mostly fleeing peasants and even orthodox Catholics - had taken refuge. By order of the Abbot of Citaux, the papal legate, all were slain. The town was set on fire, and the entire population perished in the flames.
There followed ten years of ferocious warfare in which 500 towns and castles were destroyed. Open warfare and slaughter by soldiers were replaced - when peace (!) was made - by the activities of the Inquisition. In the end, the remains of the Albigensian heretics, reduced to a few hundred, took refuge in the vast natural cave of Ornolhac. The Catholic Governor of Toulouse walled up and guarded the only entrances - and that was the end of the Albigensian heresy in south-western France. Considering the methods employed by the Christians of that time, it was a merciful act. A once prosperous and highly civilized country had been brought back to the fold of the orthodox Christian Church. It came back as a desert with half of its population slaughtered in cold blood.
Before that time, the south of France was the only Christian country in Europe where the Jews had absolute religious and civil freedom. With the triumph of the orthodox party the Jews lost that freedom, and the once highly efficient educational organization of the State completely vanished.
As had happened some 800 years before, the Christian Church as a temporal power had seen its pockets threatened by the Mysteries and its professional clergy shamed by the purer life and teachings of the adepti. Once again, the sword and the flame destroyed the schools and the temples of the Mysteries, and restored its revenues to the papal college. But another attempt was soon made to bring the Mysteries back to Western Europe - this time by the Knights Templar.
The story of the Knights Templar is a curious one. In about AD 1120, Hugo de Payens and eight French Knights founded this Order in the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem. Hugo de Payens and his comrade Geoffrey de Saint-Adhemar were not only fighting men, but were also mystically inclined. Saint-Adhemar, who came from Toulouse, was an Albigensian. Their protector was Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem, who for a year had been the prisoner of Emir Balak the Saracen.
The East at that time had a number of secret societies which were philosophical in their teachings and military in their actions. Then, the Mahommedan world was famous for its mind culture and learning. It was the age of Omar Khayyam and other great men.
In Palestine, Hugo de Payens found Theocletes, who was said to be the last Patriarch of the Gnostic sect of Johannites, and from him the Templars obtained their right to initiate. These three men, Hugo de Payens, Geoffrey de Saint-Adhemar and Theocletes are said by Maurice Magre (The Return of the Magi, p. 145) to have founded the Order of the Temple. It lasted for 184 years; for St Bernard approved the rule of the new Order in 1128, and Jaques de Molay was burnt, by order of Phillipe le Bel, in March 1313 after trials and torture that had lasted for seven years.
The Templars were a secret society with various grades of initiation. There was an Inner Order, which remained unknown and which governed the society under the nominal orders of the Grand Master. There appears to be little doubt that they were in close touch, and often on friendly terms, with the Saracens. They grew rich and powerful. They had an immense army of highly trained men. They were exempt from military service, and could only be tried by the Pope. They had about 9,000 castles scattered in every country at the time of their destruction - all well-placed strategically.
It would seem that Phillipe le Bel suddenly realized that a great military power had grown up in France and outside his authority. On 13 October 1306 he arrested the Templars, confiscated their immense wealth and destroyed the Order in France. Thus finished, so far as is known, the last great attempt to win back for the Ancient Mysteries the material power and prestige they had enjoyed when Mithras was the cult deity of the Roman fighting man.
Once again the Religion of Love had triumphed. With the rack and the faggot the Christian teachers of the gospel of mercy and justice had crushed the Ancient Mysteries and stamped out their deadly teaching of the freedom of man's soul from sacerdotal bondage. Yet those Mysteries were not dead, only driven underground; and within the last hundred years they have once more come into the open. What is the power that lies behind them? What enables them to live on even when the outer form has been destroyed?
The power is the power of the divine pressing into manifestation. The ancient schools knew how to build channels for this divine power to use - and the power did the rest. The schools and their initiates are but the instruments of a mighty, conscious and intelligent will that is ultra-human.
The initiates of such schools know that reincarnation is a fact - though the doctrine they teach is not the popular one that today goes by that name. The temples of the Order in the physical world may be broken down, and their initiates killed; but the Temple of the Mysteries on the Inner Planes cannot be destroyed. Nothing can prevent the initiates from reincarnating or from recovering what they have learned of the ancient wisdom in past lives.
From time to time, a leader comes back and commences the work of rebuilding the outer manifestation of the Inner Temple. When that work begins, the initiates of that Temple who are in incarnation return to their Order and take up their work once more. Life after life, they who are of the ancient schools hear the call loud and clear. They feel the pull, and return to the Order to which they rightly belong.
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