Author: John Chambers

From New Dawn Special Issue 11 (Mar 2010)

Caodaism was always the favourite chapter of my briefing to visitors. Caodaism, the invention of a Cochin civil servant, was a synthesis of the three religions. The Holy See was at Tanyin. A Pope and female cardinals. Prophecy by planchette. Saint Victor Hugo. Christ and Buddha looking down from the roof of the Cathedral on a Walt Disney fantasia of the East, dragons and snakes in technicolour. How could one explain the dreariness of the whole business: the private army of twenty-five thousand men, armed with mortars made out of the exhaust pipes of old cars, allies of the French who turned neutral at the moment of danger?

So writes Thomas Fowler, the disillusioned narrator of The Quiet American, Graham Greene’s 1955 novel set in Vietnam in the final months of France’s doomed struggle to hold onto its Far Eastern possession. Fowler, a British journalist covering the war, has taken the day off from his desk in Saigon to go northwest to Tanyin (actually, Tay Nim) province, where he watches a Caodaist religious ceremony.

His cynical description of Caodaism makes it sound as if this esoteric religion, founded in Vietnam in the 1920s, is nothing more than a cover for one of the many private and/or secret armies running wild in Indochina during its rebellion against France. But Caodaism is seen here only through the narrow, atheistic eyes of the embittered Fowler, and is accordingly twisted.

The real Caodaism, however bizarre its trappings, is a vibrantly spiritual faith. It is practiced today by more than five million people in Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan, Australia, Canada, and parts of the US, particularly California. It announces the Tam Ky Pho Do, or Third Period of Salvation, when heaven will reveal itself directly to earth and all religions will unite in mutual understanding.

And, though it’s not even a century old, it sprang largely from the convergence of two rich and ancient cultural traditions in Vietnam: the Chinese and Indian spiritual and religious practices – i.e., Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism – that were brought to Vietnam over two thousand years ago, and the indigenous belief systems of Vietnam – i.e., the land as a place of benign, malignant, and mystical spirits; Hau Bong, or spirit mediumship in the shamanic mode – that stretch back before recorded history.

Channelling and “Saint Victor Hugo”

Two odd phrases stick out in Fowler’s description of a Caodaist ceremony that tell us unequivocally this new religion also has a jarringly modern, esoteric – even beguilingly mysterious – side. The first phrase is, “Prophecy by planchette;” the second is, “Saint Victor Hugo.”

What exactly is “prophecy by planchette?”

A planchette is the tiny, heart-shaped, three-legged marker that scurries across the letters of the alphabet written on an Ouija board and spells out words and phrases said to be communicated by disembodied spirits. It’s the descendant of the three-legged table that, placed on a larger table, with the hands of the medium and one other person lying on its surface, tapped out spirit messages by raising and lowering one leg. Such “table-tapping” was the mode of otherworldly communication preferred by the aristocrats and literati of France when, in the mid-nineteenth century, a tidal wave of enthusiasm for this occult pastime swept across the country.

And “Saint Victor Hugo?”

In 1853–1855, while in exile on the Channel island of Jersey from the dictatorship of Napoleon III, the great French author of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables participated in over 100 table-tapping séances. While other political exiles and members of his family looked on, Hugo chatted with the illustrious dead such as Shakespeare, Molière, Galileo and Luther; legendary animals like Balaam’s Ass and the Lion of Androcles; abstractions like The Novel and India; spirits that had never been alive, like the Shadow of the Sepulcher and Death; extra-terrestrials from Mercury and Jupiter; and the occasional errant Jersey island ghost.

On five occasions – February 11 and 18 and March 8, 15 and 22, 1855 – the spirit of Jesus Christ (or so the transcripts tell us) held forth through the tables to the assembled guests. His subject was the coming of a “third” religion that would supersede Christianity just as Christianity had superseded Druidism (the ancient religion of Britain). Victor Hugo was to be the prophet of this new religion, which held that (1), not only do men and women have individual conscious souls, but animals, plants and stones do as well, and (2), God is in the process of bringing a “universal pardon” to our world, and in fact to every soul in the universe; even Satan will be granted amnesty.

This all sounds strangely familiar to devotees of Caodaism. Some seventy years after Hugo spoke to the spirits on Jersey, 8,000 miles away in Vietnam, the newly-aborning religion would announce itself through spirit guides as, “The Third Great Universal Religious Amnesty.” According to its tenets, God would grant a pardon to all the religions of the world and in so doing bring peace to the universe. At an historic “summit” séance in Saigon on Christmas Eve 1925, attended by members of the Pho Loan group, the powerful spirit having overall responsibility for communicating Caodaism to our world would reveal his true name and declare that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.

All this would happen seventy years after the Jersey séances. Back on that windswept island in the early 1850s, the mysterious process that would somehow transmit the spirit of Jesus Christ’s channelled pronouncements to Saigon in the 1920s and elevate Victor Hugo to the status of Caodaist saint, was putting forth its roots in another direction. The séance transcripts tell us that on September 12, 1853, the “living phantasm” of Napoleon III came to Victor Hugo while the dictator was asleep. A three-hour “trial” of the channelled Emperor ensued, at the end of which Napoleon III humbled himself abjectly before the writer and apologised for the wrongs he had inflicted on Hugo and the world.

This was the last “spirit communication” with the Emperor. But Victor Hugo would never cease to attack the real, living French dictator virulently and publicly. In 1860, Napoleon III, with the British, invaded China. His ostensible motive was to protect Roman Catholicism in that country. The allies inflicted a crushing defeat on a defending army of Tatars that greatly outnumbered them but was short on modern firearms; when the battle was over, 3,000 Chinese, two British, and three French lay dead. Once arrived in Peking (now Beijing), the French and British troops spent days looting, burning and ransacking China’s Imperial Summer Palace, one of the seven wonders of the modern world. The Chinese capitulated immediately.

This piece of imperialist vandalism redoubled Hugo’s hatred of Napoleon III. He wrote, “Imagine some inexpressible construction, something like a lunar building… suppose in a word a sort of dazzling cavern of human fantasy with the face of a temple and palace, such was this building…. One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the other burned. Victory can be a thieving woman [Queen Victoria], or so it seems… It contained not only masterpieces of art, but masses of jewelry… One of the two victors filled his pockets; when the other saw this he filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in arm, laughing away. Such is the story of the two bandits.”

The Chinese would gratefully remember Hugo’s rebuke to Napoleon III. The great writer spoke out just as vehemently when, in 1862, the French Emperor invaded Cochin China, again to “protect” Catholicism. By 1869, all of Indochina had been subdued. Vietnam was now a province of the French colonial empire.

When the Vietnamese began to foment rebellion against the French in the early 20th century, Napoleon III was bitterly remembered as the author of all their woes. The Vietnamese held the memory of Victor Hugo dear; he was their defender and their friend.

The Emergence of Caodaism

The séances ended in 1855. In 1870, Victor Hugo, now free to return to France (the Emperor had been deposed), packed the copious transcripts away in a trunk. He had kept all news of the séances away from his political enemies, fearing they might hold up the transcripts as proof that he was a lunatic. The great author died in Paris in 1885. Certain stipulations in his will governed when and if the transcripts could be published.

In 1900, the energies that would create Caodaism began to coalesce around the person of Ngo Minh Chieu (1878–1932), a young Confucian scholar who joined the French civil service in Saigon in 1899. Chieu combined learning in Chinese philosophy with a knowledge of ancient Vietnamese spiritistic-shamanic traditions and Taoist Shamanism, abetting this with wide reading in nineteenth-century European spiritists such as the astronomer/psychic researcher Camille Flammarion; the founder of Spiritism Allen Kardec; Leon Denis; and probably Theosophical Society leader Annie Besant.

Transferred to Phu Quo island, the shy, now isolated adept immersed himself in mediumistic phenomena, using the Cau Co or “spirit pen” to communicate with traditional Chinese deities like the red-faced demon slayer Guan di Gong. He encountered a powerful entity that revealed itself only through the mystical name of Cao Dai Tien Ong Dai Bo Tat Ma-Ha-Tat. He was vouchsafed a vision, probably in mid-1920, of a large eye encompassed by rays of light; this was to become the “Divine Eye,” or “Left Eye of God” (Thien Nhan) that, signifying universal and individual consciousness, is a key icon of Caodaism. Arrived back in Saigon in 1924, the humble modern-day shaman/administrator drew disciples to himself as he studied how to worship Duc Cao Dai.

Now a signal event took place. In 1923, the first collection of the transcripts of Hugo’s channelling experiences – Chez Victor Hugo: Les Tables Tournantes de Jersey – was published in Paris. The volume was highly incomplete, excluding many of the transcripts of the more tradition-challenging séances. It did include Hugo’s five sessions with the “spirit of Jesus Christ.”

Available in Vietnam, and reviewed in the Saigon newspaper L’écho Annamite, the book seized the attention of the many who were still grateful to Victor Hugo. It galvanised a group of young French-speaking Vietnamese civil servants into conducting their own table-tapping experiments. Soon, a spirit calling itself Thuong-De viet Cao-Dai giao-dao Nam-Phuong, or “Jade Emperor, Supreme Deity, alias Cao-Dai, religious teacher of the Southern Quarter,” manifested to announce that it had come to “teach the truth to the people of Annam.”

The group called itself Pho Loan. It was soon instructed to switch from table-tapping to the use of the corbeille à bec (“basket with beak”). Central to this procedure was a wicker basket shaped like an upside-down crow. Four ropes were attached to the basket, each held by a different medium so that no one personality could control the communication. The basket was suspended in such a way that its “beak” could make contact with a flat, fine surface of sand beneath; thus the spirit writings were written in the sand.

On Christmas Eve, 1925, at the previously mentioned landmark séance, the commanding spirit previously calling itself A.A.A. (the first three letters of the Romanised Vietnamese alphabet) now manifested to reveal that its true name was Ngoc Hoang Thuong De Viet Cao Dai Giao Dao Nam Phuong and to affirm its reincarnational identity with Jesus Christ.

It declared:

Be joyful tonight on this the anniversary of my appearance to teach the religion in the West. Your allegiance brings much happiness to me… Soon you must help me establish the religion. Have you seen my humility? Imitate me so that you may genuinely claim to be religious men.

Now Ngo Minh Chieu, whose lived experience of mediumship would be essential to the development of Caodaism, was invited to join the group. It became apparent that he and the Pho Loan members worshipped the same supreme being.

On October 7, 1926, a spirit-dictated petition, signed by 247 Caodaists, gave the French authorities notice that a new religion had been established. The religion held that the world’s misery was caused by the disunity existing between all religions, and that its aim was to perfect the Tam Giao (“three teachings,” that is, Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism) of Vietnam. The religions of the world would be brought into equilibrium.

Increasingly, spirit visitors of world stature manifested through the corbeille à bec. They included Lao-Tzu; Li Po, China’s great 8th century Taoist poet; the female Bodhisattva Quan Am; Joan of Arc; Louis Pasteur; René Descartes; Vladimir Lenin – and, very soon, Victor Hugo. Martin Ebon writes in the Introduction to Victor Hugo’s Conversations with the Spirit World: A Literary Genius’s Hidden Life:

Adherents have meticulously recorded that the first, momentous encounter with this spirit took place on April 20, 1930, at 1:00 a.m., the earthly interviewer being one Ho-Phap. A bit later, the entity said that one prominent Caodaist, Tran-Quang-Vinh, was, actually, a reincarnation of the French poet’s third son, François-Victor Hugo (1828–1873). Tran later became head of the Cao Dai Army, and eventually Minister of Defense (1948–1951) in the ill-fated government of Bao Dai. During a session of the Cao Dai’s legislative body, the deceased Victor Hugo was appointed titular head of the movement’s ‘foreign missions’, that is, its actual ambassadorial representation abroad.

In The Quiet American, Greene’s narrator Fowler fingers General Thé (the name is a pseudonym), the Caodaist Chief of Staff, as a savage and out-of-control ally of the Americans who, already in Vietnam, are attempting, through the “quiet American” Alden Pyle, to create a “Third Force” that will stand up to the French and Vietminh armies. Fowler (but perhaps not Greene) seems almost to assume that politics was the real raison d’être behind the creation of Caodaism, and that it is already badly compromised in what will become the Vietnam quagmire.

Others have wondered about this. In “Through God’s Left Eye” (Underground, Summer 2008), author Paul La Farge asks himself, perhaps with tongue partly in cheek, if some of the more obscure spirit messages might not be coded messages, detailing the movement of troops and supplies. He quotes a message from the spirit of Victor Hugo: “Yes, it’s this kind of gas, which they call hydrogen. More or less dense, which makes the healthiest part, When they say that the Spirit of God swam above the waters, It’s in that sense that the word must be understood…” Professor La Farge wonders if this bizarre message might not be “a Caodaist cipher behind which some violent activity lurked” [meaning, perhaps], “The mortar shells will arrive at midnight, by boat.”

In fact there may be elements of this in Caodaist communications. But the vast majority of Caodaist spirit messages are transparently of deep spiritual intent. In other messages, Hugo spoke eloquently of beauty, divine peace, harmony, science and wisdom. He revealed that “there are… other universes than ours in the infinite and that their creatures know not the word ‘war’.” Moreover, in these worlds “soul-power is master of human weakness.” The Hugo entity averred that “death will be vanquished by uplifted conscience. There is no difference between the living and the dead.”

Caodaism in Modern Times

Certainly, in welcoming the spirit of Victor Hugo – and of that great Resistance fighter Joan of Arc! – Caodaism had found a way of allying itself with a hidden Western tradition of anticolonialism. As the number of Caodaist adherents increased almost exponentially, multiplying the need for administrative entities, Caodaism shaped itself into three “powers.” The first – the Eight Sided Temple – consisted solely of spirits, with the 8th century Tang Dynasty poet Li Po serving at one point as “spiritual Pope” in this power. The second power, that of The Heavenly Union Temple, was comprised entirely of mediums, and served as the administrative branch. The third, The Nine-sphered Temple, inspired by the organisation of the Roman Catholic Church, was host to nine hierarchies, including adepts, student priests, priests, bishops, archbishops, principal archbishops, cardinals, legist cardinal, censor cardinals, along with the Pope; this became the executive branch. Women were early on accepted in all these roles. Caodaism’s expanding membership soon called for a church or temple. Spirit guides indicated appropriate land near the capital of Tay Ninh province. Over a twenty-year period, the Tay Ninh Great Divine Temple, with its multiple acres and numerous attendant structures, was built here, emerging as the “Vatican City” – the Holy See – of Caodaism.

The Tay Ninh temple, although neutered by Vietnam’s post-1975 communist regime and today a quasi-Caodaist theme/amusement part, remains the holiest of the Caodaist places of worship. In The Quiet American, narrator Thomas Fowler lays out for us, if sardonically, its most striking attributes. Entering the temple, he notes a famous mural on the wall:

Saint Victor Hugo in the uniform of the French Academy with the halo round his tricorn hat point at some noble sentiment Sun Yat Sen [the founder of modern China] was inscribing on a tablet, and then I was in the nave. There was nowhere to sit except in the Papal chair, round which a plaster cobra coiled, the marble floor glittered like water and there was no glass in the windows… The dragons with lion-like heads climbed the pulpit: on the roof Christ exposed his bleeding heart, Buddha sat, as Buddha always sits, with his lap empty. Confucius’s beard hung meagerly down like a waterfall in the dry season.

Unremarked by Fowler is best-known feature of the temple: the picture of the “Divine Eye,” or “Left Eye of God” that signifies universal and individual consciousness. This was the eye first seen in a vision by Ngo Minh Chieu.

In the fifth year of its existence, Caodaism boasted 500,000 members. By the 1950s, an estimated one in eight South Vietnamese was a Caodaist. The religion treated Tay Ninh province as if it were a feudal theocracy, collecting taxes for itself and maintaining a standing militia of tens of thousands of men. At the same time, the movement was beginning to splinter into a number of factions, some with marked ideological differences.

The Phnom Penh Post reporter Sebastian Strangio offers a succinct summary of the history of Caodaism from the fall of the French garrison in Dien Bien Phu in 1954 (bringing with it the French surrender) to the present:

But when South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, a staunch Catholic, came to power in 1955, the domestic political calculus began to turn against the Caodaists. In 1956, Diem forcibly disbanded the Caodaist militias and other nationalist rivals. Following the fall of Saigon in 1975, the communists took their revenge, confiscating Caodaist property and arresting or exiling many of its leaders. Relations between the Cambodian Caodaist and the Vietnamese government were difficult during the occupation of the 1980s, but have since improved.

But despite some positive changes, rights groups and exiles say the Vietnamese government continues to ban participation in independent Caodaist factions and oversees all internal Caodaist affairs. “Undercover government agents have infiltrated the administration of Caodaism, and the religion has to function according to the government’s [rules] without respecting the current religious constitution,” said Hum Dac Bui [a spokesman for www.Caodai.org, a California-based non-profit organisation]. “The Tay Ninh Holy See has become more or less a place of tourist interest for the profit of the government and is totally paralysed from a religious point of view.”

“Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch, said that only the government-approved Caodaist sect is legally recognised and that those who belong to splinter groups are subject to ‘harassment, arbitrary detention, and imprisonment’.”

The persecution of Caodaists by the post-1975 Communist regime saw a steady exodus of adherents out of Vietnam. Approximately 50,000 have settled in the United States, half of them in California. There are twenty temples in California, most of them small; a temple is under construction in Garden City that will be a miniaturised version of the Great Divine Temple in Tay Ninh.

There are approximately 2,000 Caodaists in Australia today. A large temple was constructed over a period of nine years in Wiley Park, New South Wales. Like the semi-completed temple in Garden City, California, it is modelled after the Great Divine Temple in Tay Ninh.

There are currently over 1,300 Caodaist temples in Vietnam; these serve the great majority of the five million adherents to Caodaism that are spread around the world today.

All that is required in the practice of Caodaism is a vegetarian diet ten days a month and biweekly attendance at services. Doctrinal loyalty is not required. During services Caodaists bow before the Divine Eye, chant, and meditate; sometimes there are addresses. In California, as in other Western places of worship of Caodaism, séances are no longer carried out. If the spirit of Victor Hugo still hovers over this faith, no doubt he has moved on to California, where the dark-blue Pacific can remind him of the dark-blue Atlantic pounding on the shores of Jersey island, where so much of it, so mysteriously, began.

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From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 7 No 3 (June 2013)

The sixth-century BCE Greek philosopher-mystic Pythagoras was a man of spectacular achievement. Plutarch says that he taught an eagle to come at his command and stoop down to him in flight.¹ He taught the doctrine of reincarnation and was thought to remember twenty-two of his past lives. He founded an order whose adherents strove to free themselves from the cycle of earthly incarnations through vegetarianism, silence, and contemplation of the ultimate reality of the universe.²

Up through the seventeenth century CE, scholars believed Pythagoras journeyed to Sidon, in Phoenicia, where he met the descendants of a man named Moschus (or Mochus) who had lived five hundred years before. Moschus was the Phoenician name for Moses, and his descendants gave Pythagoras esoteric doctrines passed down to them from their illustrious ancestor.³

Pythagoras returned to his home in the Greek colony of Crote in southern Italy to further develop his mystical philosophy which stated that the numerical relationships reflected in the relationships between musical chords are the bedrock of reality. Adding to this the secret doctrines of Moses, he discovered that the planets revolved around the sun. He also discovered the law of universal gravitation (including the inverse-square law of attraction), which he expressed allegorically as the divine music of the spheres holding the planets in thrall to the sun.

But, wait a minute! Didn’t Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) discover the law of universal gravitation?

Yes, he did. But Sir Isaac didn’t think his discoveries were original. He thought he was recovering parts of a body of primordial knowledge called the prisca sapientia (the “pristine wisdom”). Bits of this ancient knowledge had been transported through the Flood by Noah. It had caught the interest of the Egyptians, then the Jews, then the Phoenicians, until it emerged almost fully-blown in the philosophy of Pythagoras. It spread throughout the ancient world, meeting with resistance only when Aristotle insisted that the sun revolved around the earth and that many of the Pythagorean beliefs were irrational.

Almost all this knowledge disappeared in the third and fourth centuries CE with the collapse of the Roman Empire. So complete was the loss that mathematician Alfred North Whitehead could say in 1970: “By the year 1500 Europe knew less than Archimedes, who died in 212 BCE.”⁴ The “sacred philosophy” did not re-emerge until after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when it was rediscovered in ancient texts, many thought lost forever, many never known, by the seers of the Italian Renaissance.

The French philosopher/mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650) believed in the existence of the prisca sapientia, declaring that when God created mankind, “certain primary seeds of truth [were] implanted by nature in our human minds.” By Descartes’s time the seeds had been “stifled [in us] owing to our reading and hearing, day by day, so many diverse errors.” Descartes regretted that the ancients had concealed these truths in symbols. He suspected their motives: “They have perhaps feared,” he remarked scornfully, “that their method being so very easy and simple, would if made public, diminish, not increase public esteem.”⁵

Isaac Newton and his contemporaries believed that, in the pre-Flood world where truth and the bounty of God walked hand-in-hand, the places of worship resembled a combination of planetarium and cathedral. Astronomy flourished in this land of the perfect fusion of science and spirituality, especially since the antediluvian peoples lived for centuries (this was the time of Methuselah, who died at the age of 969). Richard Hinckley Allen writes:

Following the opinion of [the first-century CE Jewish historian] Josephus, [the second-century CE Christian theologian] Origen said that the constellations were known long before the days of the patriarchs by Noah, Enoch, Seth, and Adam – indeed were mentioned in the Book of Enoch as ‘already named and divided;’ and he claimed that ancient longevity was a blessing specially bestowed to give opportunity for a long-continued period of observation and comparison of the heavenly bodies.⁶

Josephus consulted the historical records of Tyre (which were lost not long after his death) and wrote enigmatically that this knowledge survived the Flood thanks to the preservation of one of the pillars upon which all knowledge had been inscribed.⁷

William Stukeley, Newton’s contemporary, and the first archaeologist to truly understand Stonehenge, read multiple ancient sources and declared that the pre-Flood sages got along without a telescope because “in the beginning of the world… [people] lived 7, 8, or 900 years, [and] they had time in one man’s life to perfect the art of astronomy.” Both William Whiston and Newton believed the people of the land of the prisca sapientia understood the circulation of the blood and that white light contains within itself the spectrum of seven colours⁸ (William Harvey would “rediscover” the first, and Newton would rediscover the second).

These ideas (which we will shortly examine at length, especially as regards Isaac Newton) began to fade in the mid-seventeenth century. They succumbed in the face of man’s widening exploration of the world, which contradicted the idea of a universal Flood; to the dawning of the Age of Reason, which brought with it a process of demythologising; and to Darwin’s discoveries of the age of the earth and the origin and evolution of species.

The Sources of the “Pristine Wisdom”

These ideas would fade – but they never quite faded away. In the early twentieth century, certain maverick artists and thinkers revived the notion of a pure science and a high civilisation that existed before our own. British novelist D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), author of Sons and Lovers and Women in Love, wrote in Fantasia of the Unconscious in 1922:

I honestly think that the great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece were the last living terms, the great pagan world which preceded our era, once had a vast and perhaps perfect science of its own, a science in terms of life. In our era this science crumbled into magic and charlatanry. But even wisdom crumbles.

I believe that this great science previous to ours and quite different in constitution and nature from our science once was universal, established all over the existing globe. I believe it was esoteric, invested in a large priesthood. Just as mathematics and mechanics and physics are defined and expounded in the same way in the universities of China or Bolivia or London or Moscow today, so, it seems to me, in the great world previous to ours a great science and cosmology were taught esoterically in all countries of the globe, Asia, Polynesia, Atlantis, and Europe.

…In that world men lived and taught and knew, and were in one complete correspondence over all the earth. Men wandered back and forth from Atlantis to the Polynesian Continent as men now sail from Europe to America. The interchange was complete, and knowledge, science was universal over the earth, cosmopolitan as it is today.

Then came the melting of the glaciers, and the world flood. The refugees from the drowned continent fled to the high places of America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Isles. And some degenerated naturally into cave men, neolithic and palaeolithic creatures, and some retained their marvellous innate beauty and self-perfection, as the South Sea Islanders, and some wandered savage in Africa, and some, like Druids or Etruscans or Chaldeans or Amerindians or Chinese, refused to forget, but taught the old wisdom, only in its half-forgotten symbolic forms. More or less forgotten, as knowledge: remembered as ritual, gesture, and myth-story.⁹

Maverick Armenian-Greek mystic/spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff (1877?–1949) believed the Sufis were the spiritual heirs of “the old master magicians of Altai” who lived in an advanced civilisation in Central Asia that began 40,000 years ago. Gurdjieff’s disciple J.G. Bennett wrote that, according to his teacher:

In that palaeolithic age art and religion were still one; secular and religious consciousness had not yet separated out, and spirit and matter were not yet in opposition; nor was evil an absolute force seeking the overthrow of good. All things and all attitudes to things were filled with the magnetic, synthesizing radiance of hypercosmic energy, which Gurdjieff called conscious energy. In such a unified world the great Initiates developed the unique type of spirituality that still distinguishes Sufism today, wherein the polarising activity of mind is submissive to the over-riding Spirit that ever seeks a return to the One. Only in the later more alienated religious systems, Gurdjieff believed, do we find the divisive seeds of philosophical dualism.¹⁰

Newton’s Primordial Cathedral-Planetariums

Sir Isaac Newton wouldn’t have accepted Gurdjieff’s idea of the antediluvian world, but he would have agreed with him that spirituality was on a par with science in that era. Newton never ceased striving to find out the nature of the prisca sapientia in its purest form. He had deduced the existence of the primordial cathedral-planetariums from the temples, which he called prytanea after the later Greek model, that had been erected not long after the Flood and whose structures contained echoes of the prisca sapientia. Historian Robert Markley contends that these prytanea embodied a timeless mathematical form; that they were “a kind of computational code by which true knowledge [of the prisca] could be demonstrated and transmitted without interruption, interference, or corruption.”¹¹ Newton speculated that the shape of the prytaneum had been transported through the Flood in the shape of the Ark itself; he thought the “divine dimensions” of the prytanea and the Ark were later embedded in Solomon’s temple. The ancient prytaneum “framed,” or mirrored, the shape of the Solar System; this shape had been embodied in later temples. Noah’s Ark had transported sacred fires that had burned in the prytanea; Noah used this to prepare a burnt offering to the Lord once the Ark had made landfall. And, in these temples, Newton further deduced, the priests and priestesses had circled around the ever-burning flame in the central hearth in emulation and worship of the celestial bodies that revolved around the sun.

A great deal of apocryphal literature surrounds the Noahic Flood story. From its mention in the Koran and the New Testament, Newton may have known the story of the ever-burning light that illuminated the inside of the Ark. Journalist Rene Noorbergen tells us that references in the Bible support the contention that

…Electricity may have played a vital role in the operation of the ark. One reference is found in Genesis 8:6, where the Hebrew word challon or ‘opening’ is used, referring to the window through which Noah released the birds. The other reference, however, utilises a different word – tsohar – which is translated as ‘window‘ but does not mean window or opening at all! Where it is used (twenty-two times in the Old Testament), its meaning is given as ‘brightness, a brilliance, the light of the noonday sun’. Its cognates refer to something that ‘glistens, glitters or shines’. Many Jewish scholars of the traditional school identify tsohar as ‘a light which has its origins in a shining crystal’. For centuries Jewish tradition has described the tsohar as an enormous gem or pearl that Noah hung from the rafters of the ark, and which, by some power contained within itself, illuminated the entire vessel for the duration of the Flood voyage.¹²

Newton may also have known the story, told by John Cassianus in about 428 CE, that Noah’s son Cham (or Ham) was “expert in all the arts and sciences of the antediluvian generations, and wished to save this accumulated natural knowledge of man.” His father forbade him to bring the “unholy” knowledge on board the Ark. Cham inscribed the knowledge on metal plates which he buried. After the Flood, Cham succeeded in finding these plates; thus, writes Cassianus, he “transmitted to his descendants a seedbed of profanity and perpetual sin.”¹³

Did the descendants of Moses really pass knowledge to Pythagoras? Could Moses possibly have known anything about the philosophy of the pre-Flood world?

Newton thought that the biblical description of Creation was written by the prophet Samuel, who had gotten his information from Moses. The description hardly sounds scientific to us today; but Newton insisted the Genesis account was accurate but couched in simplistic terms because the author wanted the common man to understand it. To the objection that the entire Creation could scarcely have happened in seven twenty-four-hour periods, Newton replied that God had started the world rotating on its axis only on the fourth or fifth day, and then slowly the Deity simply made the days long enough to accomplish all He had to accomplish.

(We know now that the historians of the late Renaissance wanted to prove that Mosaic doctrines influenced Pythagoras because they could not bear to believe that some of the greatest ideas in the Western world had originated in pagan Greece. If these ideas didn’t originate in the Christian New Testament, then they were determined to prove that the ideas came from the Hebrew scriptures which formed the background to Christianity.)

Frank Manuel explains in The Religion of Isaac Newton that: “Moses knew the whole of the scientific truth – of this Newton was certain – but he was speaking to ordinary Israelites, not delivering a paper to the Royal Society, and he popularised the narrative without falsifying it.”¹⁴ Rob Iliffe similarly explains that in the early post-Flood world the priesthood “concealed these [scientific] truths from the vulgar. At this time there was a ‘sacred’ philosophy – communicated only to the cognoscenti – and a ‘vulgar‘ version, promulgated openly to the common people.”¹⁵ Newton himself sounds almost as critical as Descartes when he remarks sardonically that, “The [ancient] philosophers loved so to mitigate their mystical beliefs that in the presence of the vulgar they foolishly propounded vulgar matters for the sake of ridicule, and hid the truth beneath discourses of this kind.”¹⁶

Pythagoras & Newton: Same Theories, Different Time Period

Can it possibly be that Newton’s scientific discoveries, which revolutionised the world, were known in every detail to Pythagoras and his followers in the sixth century BCE?

Sometime in the 1690s, Newton confided to a disciple, the Scottish mathematician David Gregory, that he intended, in the forthcoming revised edition of the Principia, to, in Gregory’s words,

spread himself in proving the agreement of his own findings with those of the ancients and ‘principally of Thales’, the legendary founder of Greek philosophy. He would demonstrate that what Epicurus and Lucretius had affirmed was true and valid, and that the charge of atheism laid on them was unjust. [Newton would assert that] Thoth, the Egyptian Hermes or Mercury, had been ‘a believer in the Copernican system’, while Pythagoras and Plato had ‘observed the gravitation of all bodies towards all’.¹⁷

In 1692, at the instigation of Newton, his close friend the brilliant young Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier told the eminent Dutch mathematician/astronomer Christiaan Huyghens in a letter that Newton had discovered that all the chief propositions of the Principia [Mathematica] had been known to ancients like Pythagoras and Plato, although those worthies had turned them into a “great mystery.” A startled Huyghens wrote back that the ancients may have known the solar system was heliocentric, but they could not possibly have known that the orbits of the planets were elliptical.¹⁸

Newton begun very early to disseminate these ideas to those who were closest to him. In Book Two of the 1685 De Mundi, he describes the ancient philosophy and astronomy behind the work of Plato, Pythagoras, and the Roman King Numa Pompilius. Newton argued, as Newton Project Director Rob Iliffe explains, that

the Ancients had believed in a heliocentric cosmos but that this had been perverted by misinterpretation. Whereas Pythagoras and others had correctly understood the true meaning of symbolic representations of a heliocentric cosmos, with a central Sun encircled by the concentric orbits of the planets, Greeks such as Aristotle assumed that the central object in such a scheme was the Earth…. Via Orpheus and Pythagoras, the Greeks had originally received their understanding of the natural world from the Egyptians.

Not only did Thoth (the Egyptian Mercury) know that the planets went around the sun, but Moses had promulgated the theory that atoms are the fundamental building blocks of the universe.¹⁹

David Gregory summarised the ancient beliefs that Newton believed anticipated the Principia:

The moon was like another Earth, and itself like other celestial bodies; therefore, the planets and their satellites were heavy masses of the same substance as the Earth;

Bodies in the solar system exercised a mutual gravitation that extended to all other systems (each fixed star being the centre of a gravitational system of planets), that force itself extending indefinitely in all directions;

All matter was made of atoms, and they were hard, solid, and immutable; gravity accrued to both atoms and to the bodies they composed; gravity was proportional to the quantity of matter in every body;

The proportion in which gravitational power decreased with distance was analogous to the law governing tension and pitch in a string instrument, and was concealed in the ancient concept of the “harmony of the spheres;”

The cause of gravity was explained in the “mystical philosophy” of the ancients by their supreme divinity, Pan, playing on his pipe – that is, by the direct exercise of God’s divine power in all bodies whatsoever.²⁰

But what does it mean to say that “the harmony of the spheres” is the same as the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction? One of the clearest explanations comes from Newton’s time, from the hand of arguably Newton’s most brilliant disciple, the mathematician Colin MacLaurin. He wrote in 1750:

A musical chord gives the same notes as one double in length, while the tension or force with which the latter is stretched is quadruple: and the gravity of a planet is quadruple of the gravity of a planet at a double distance. In general, that any musical chord may become unison to a lesser chord of the same kind, its tension must be increased in the same proportion as the square of its length is greater; and that the gravity of a planet may become equal to the gravity of another planet nearer to the sun, it must be increased in proportion as the square of its distance from the sun is greater. If therefore we should suppose musical chords extended from the sun to each planet, that all these chords might become unison, it would be requisite to increase or diminish their tensions in the same proportions as would be sufficient to render the gravities of the planets equal. And from the similitude of these proportions the celebrated doctrine of the harmony of the spheres is supposed to have been derived.²¹

For some commentators, the question of the supposed similarity of Newton’s doctrines with those of Pythagoras takes second place to an even more beguiling question: If Newton hadn’t totally immersed himself in the philosophy of Pythagoras, would he ever have come up with the universal law of gravitation? Did Pythagoras’ tantalising notions of the music of the spheres and the pipes of Pan, insofar as they represented a true portrait of the dynamics of the universe – to push, prod, stretch, open up, redirect, inspire and bedevil Sir Isaac – that had it not been for them, he would never have conceived the idea of an all-controlling gravitation? (A secondary question, occasionally asked, is: Did the prolonged meditation of Pythagoras on the mystical number of seven provide Newton with an indispensable impetus pushing him to the discovery that light is composed of seven colours?)

In a seminal article, “Newton and the Pipes of Pan,” J.E. McGuire and J.B. Rattansi tackle this question. They explain that Newton’s textual analyses of ancient natural philosophy

…provide a pedigree for his own doctrines, to legitimate them for an audience which still widely accepted the idea of a prisca sapientia. He could use them as a direct defense for his own doctrines, as he does in the Opticks, and, on one occasion, during the controversy with Leibniz. Furthermore, the documents dealt with in this paper do not tell us whether his own adoption of the doctrines he ascribes to the ancients preceded his textual studies. Such basic problems as the existence of the void, the properties of matter, and the character of the divine agency lay beyond the experimental procedures they could deploy. Newton’s solutions to some of these problems are explained and defended by the analogical reasoning whose patterns he defined in the Regulae. But the possibility that the ancient texts might have provided clues, and guided his thoughts in one direction or another, can by no means be excluded.²² (author’s underlining)

Beyond the question of whether Newton’s intense meditation on the philosophy of Pythagoras was indispensable to his discovery of the principle of universal gravitation, there lies an equally beguiling question (and one that could never have been raised in Newton’s time):

After years of collaboration with analytical psychologist Carl Jung, Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958) came to the conclusion that the collective unconscious posited by Jung certainly existed. Pauli further decided that the archetypes theorised by Jung (and which he thought had a greater reality than physical reality) certainly existed, and that the fundamental components of science, the “background physics” of the universe, so to speak, derived their being without a doubt from those archetypes.²³

Did Sir Isaac Newton and Pythagoras, across the gulf of 2,300 years, tap into the very same cluster of archetypes of the collective unconscious – that same single cluster that gave its essential shape to both the principle of gravitation and the allegory of the music of the spheres?

If this is so, perhaps René Descartes, with his notion of the prisca sapientia as comprised of seeds of truth planted in the mind of man, is closer to the truth than Sir Isaac Newton, who saw in the prisca sapientia the spiritual and scientific force that defined a pristine primordial land that still couldn’t save itself from God’s wrath in the form of the Flood.

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Footnotes

1. Plutarch, The Lives of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Translation by John Dryden, The Modern Library, 1992, 80
2. Eduard Zeller, Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy, Meridian Books, 1955, 47-48
3. J.E. McGuire & P.M. Rattansi, “Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan’,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Dec., 1966), 130
4. Marcelo Gleiser, The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang, Dutton/Penguin Group, 1997, 70
5. Quoted in Prisca Sapientia, MathPages, www.mathpages.com/home/kmath066/kmath066.htm
6. Richard Hinckley Allen, Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning, Dover, 1963 (1899), 27-28
7. Quoted in Jed Z. Buchwald & Mordecai Feingold, Newton and the Origin of Civilization, Princeton University Press, 2013. (Yahuda MS 16.2 fols. 47^V, 52; Josephus, 1841)
8. David Boyd Haycock, William Stukeley: Science, Religion and Archeology in Eighteenth-Century England, Boydell Press, 2002, 95 (The Newton Project) www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/OTHE00021
9. D.H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, Mineola, 2005, 54-55
10. Victoria LePage, “G.I. Gurdjieff & the Hidden History of the Sufis,” New Dawn 107 (March-April 2008), 67-72
11. Robert Markley, “Newton, Corruption, and the Tradition of Universal History,” In Newton and Religion: Context, Nature, & Influence, James E. Force & Richard H. Popkin, eds. Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999, 136
12. Rene Noorbergen, Secrets of the Lost Races: New Discoveries of Advanced Technology in Ancient Civilizations, Bobbs-Merrill, 1977, 45-46
13. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part IV, Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Apparatus, Theories and Gifts, Cambridge University Press, 1980, 346
14. Frank E. Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton, The Fremantle Lectures 1973, Clarendon Press, 1974, 364-365
15. Rob Iliffe, Newton: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2007, 96
16. Sir Isaac Newton, The Original of Religions, (The Newton Project) www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk
17. McGuire & Rattansi, 109-110
18. Ibid., 110
19. Iliffe, 96
20. Rattansi, 187-188
21. Quoted in McGuire & Rattansi, 117
22. Ibid., 137
23. John Chambers, “Physics and the Unconscious: The Discoveries of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung,” Atlantis Rising 98 (March-April 2013), 39

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