Category: Articles

From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 18 No 5 (Oct 2024)

When we talk about the ancient wisdom, at least in Western cultures, what we’re discussing is a vast heap of wreckage left behind by three savage campaigns of destruction.

The first of these hit in the twilight years of the ancient world, carried out by religious fanatics after Christianity was hijacked by the Roman elite and turned into an instrument of social control. The second came in the late Middle Ages when the Church hierarchy panicked at the rising tide of independent thought and created the Inquisition to stop free inquiry in its tracks. The third and most recent arrived with the Scientific Revolution when the rising mercantile-capitalist class embraced scientific materialism as its ideology of choice and used its power and wealth to crush alternative viewpoints. It’s a long and bitter story.

There’s another side to the tale, however. During each of these orgies of violence and oppression, there were people who risked everything to preserve what they could for the future. Afterwards, in turn, small groups of independent thinkers rejected the orthodoxies of their time and set out to recover some of what was lost. In the teeth of outraged resistance from the established institutions of the day and blind hostility from the masses, these succeeded in preserving some of the core teachings and practices of the old mystery traditions and reassembling others from the surviving fragments.

Imagine for a moment that some immense machine of glass and bronze was battered to pieces by a furious mob and the fragments trampled underfoot so that all that remained were fragments scattered through the gutters of a great city. Imagine that every record of the machine’s structure and function had been destroyed to keep anyone from figuring out how to rebuild it. Now imagine that many years later, you learn of the machine. Inspired by the old stories, you prowl the streets of the city, and when you find something that might once have been a piece of it, you pick it up, take it back home with you, clean off the grime, and then try to figure out how it might fit together with the other pieces you’ve already gathered, and what the shape of the whole machine might have been. This metaphor, taken from John Crowley’s visionary novel Aegypt, may give you some sense of the labour involved.

That work is still ongoing. Some parts of the ancient wisdom – some pieces of the machine, in terms of the metaphor – have been restored to full working order. Astrology and ceremonial magic, for example, were brought back into use in the nineteenth century, the former pioneered by Alan Leo and the latter by Eliphas Lévi; both can now be learned from many books and teachers, and practised with good results. Other elements of the tradition, such as alchemy and sacred geometry, are still only half-understood. Then there are fragments of the ancient lore that were destroyed so completely and lost for so long that they survive only as hints and whispers or as gaps where something once existed.

The Lost Word

One of those gaps lies at the centre of modern Freemasonry. Down through the years, there has been a vast amount of chatter about the secrets of Freemasonry, but there’s a detail that generally gets left out, though it can be found in plenty of publicly available sources: the Freemasons don’t have their original secrets any more. When a member is raised to the sublime degree of a Master Mason, he is told that the words and signs he is given are substitute secrets because the real secrets have been lost. To this day, every Master Mason is, at least in theory, pledged to the quest for the Lost Word.

What is this Lost Word? Nobody knows – not even the Masons. Of course, there’s no shortage of speculation. Devil worship, political conspiracy, kinky sex, the relics of a prehistoric civilisation on Mars, you name it, no matter how lurid or absurd, somebody has identified it as the Lost Word. Some of the other Masonic degrees pass on words that are supposed to be the Lost Word, but none agree on what it is or why it is so important.

Let’s go deeper. The Master Mason degree ritual used in regular Masonic jurisdictions today derives from an original that appeared around 1720, three years after the founding of the first Grand Lodge in London. There is no record of who introduced it or where it came from; it simply shows up. It tells a story about the building of the Temple of Solomon, and that story includes – indeed, centres on – the disappearance of the Lost Word and the invention of the substitute secrets, which are to be kept until the real secrets are recovered.

Thus, it is clear that in 1720, three linked ideas were so important to the most influential Masons of the time that they put them into the Craft’s most important ritual. The first of these ideas was that Masons of some earlier period had known some important secret; the second was that the Masons of 1720 no longer knew what the secret was but thought they had some hope of recovering it; and the third is that it had something to do with the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, one of the most famous buildings of the ancient world.

Power of the Temple

There’s plenty of information about the Temple of Solomon in ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish sources, as well as a vast modern scholarly literature on the subject. Most of it is fairly straightforward, but one very odd detail runs through the old sources. This is the claim that while the Temple stood, it caused a remarkable increase in agricultural fertility in the land around it. The Jewish sources go into quite a bit of detail about this: from the time when Solomon built the Temple to its destruction by the Babylonians, the weather and the soil fertility of the region were different. After the destruction of the first Temple, that stopped, but when the second Temple was built by Jewish refugees returning from Babylonia, the effect returned and stayed in place until the Romans destroyed the second Temple in 70 CE.

The Temple of Solomon isn’t the only ancient temple about which that same claim was made. You can find it in legends surrounding temples over much of the ancient world. Where it occurs, you find certain other things reliably associated with it. The temples are built above underground water sources and their sites have to be chosen by special means. A flurry of odd taboos govern who can or cannot enter and under what conditions. Usually, though not always, they are surrounded by at least a narrow green belt of natural vegetation. Above all, certain rules of alignment and sacred geometry govern their placement and design.

Geographically, this is a weirdly selective tradition. It doesn’t appear in Africa outside of Egypt, except in a few northeastern African countries that absorbed a great deal of ancient Egyptian culture. It is found all over the ancient Mediterranean and extends east to India and some, but not all, of the island chains further east. Then, it appears in Japan, where it plays a central role in Shinto shrines but not Buddhist temples. Finally, it crops up in the Christian churches of medieval western Europe but is absent from Orthodox Christianity, Islam, and post-temple Judaism.

Knights Templar

Western Europe in the Middle Ages apparently knew nothing about it until the time of the Crusades, where the tradition shows up first in churches built by the Knights Templar and spread from there. That turned out to be a clue of immense importance. The Templars – the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, to give them their original name – were founded in 1118 by nine French knights who had gone to Jerusalem with the First Crusade. They were dissolved by Pope Clement V in 1311 amid a flurry of charges of heresy and sorcery.

The Templars got their name because the original nine knights were housed on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, atop the ruins of Solomon’s Temple; by the time of their abolition, they had landholdings in most of the countries of Europe. When the Order was destroyed, some of the members were burned at the stake and others were transferred to monasteries of less militant orders where they lived out their lives as ordinary monks.

There were two exceptions to this. In Portugal, King Dinis created a new order, the Knights of Christ, and had all the Templars in Portugal transfer into it; the Knights of Christ proceeded to play a remarkably active role in the great age of Portuguese navigation, sailing straight to islands in the Atlantic that (in theory) nobody in Europe knew about. Then there was Scotland, where the Pope’s rulings had no force because the whole country just then was under an interdict, and where Robert the Bruce was leading a war of independence against the English and needed every competent soldier he could get.

The Knights Templar had a significant presence in Scotland at that time; the village now called Temple, located next to the mysterious Roslyn Chapel, was their headquarters in the kingdom, but they also had many other properties and plenty of knights and officials to supervise them. Masonic tradition insists that the Scottish Templars promptly made a deal with Robert the Bruce. They fought for him at Bannockburn and elsewhere, and in return, he protected them from the Church and let them go quietly to ground.

The tradition proceeds to claim that since the Templars had their own master builders and stonemasons – they had to since they themselves built the castles, churches, and other structures on their landholdings – some of these Scottish Templars ended up supporting themselves as master masons in the original sense of that term, and from that source, certain Templar legacies found their way into Freemasonry. It’s a matter of historical record, finally, that Freemasonry as we now know it, was in existence in Scotland most of a century before it appeared anywhere else.

All of this is familiar ground to most people aware of alternative history. What deserves attention here are the charges levelled against the Templars when the order was dissolved. Much of it was the same sort of canned libels that would be used later in the witch trials; some of it had intriguing parallels to the actual practice of heretical Christian sects in ancient and medieval times, which deserve more attention than they’ve gotten in the historical literature to date; but then there was the claim that they worshipped a mysterious idol named Baphomet, which made the crops grow. There was the issue of agricultural fertility again.

Holy Grail

That issue pops up again in another place at precisely the same time. The oldest known version of the story of the Holy Grail was written around 1190 by Chretien de Troyes, who claimed he’d gotten the story from Count Philip of Flanders, a Crusader who had close connections with the Knights Templar and the royal house of Jerusalem. Between 1190 and 1250 – that is, during the golden age of the Templars – the Grail got massive play in popular literature. They were strange stories, these legends of the Grail; they spoke of a secret passed down through the centuries by hidden guardians, which could only be revealed to those who asked the right question.

What is the Grail? That was one of the questions those who sought the Grail had to ask. A later generation of authors, heavily invested in mainstream Christianity, insisted that the Grail was the cup Jesus of Nazareth used at the Last Supper and redefined the secrets of the Grail as those of ordinary Christian theology. Go back to the earliest surviving Grail stories, those by Chretien de Troyes or Wolfram von Eschenbach, and you land in a far stranger world where the Grail could take many forms, and its ultimate secret was the power to make the fields flourish. That was why King Arthur’s knights went out in search of the Grail: it alone could restore the barren wasteland to fertility.

All this happened as sacred geometries and other traditions that were part of the temple tradition elsewhere in the world found their way into medieval European religious architecture. In its wake, monasteries were founded all over western Europe in desolate areas, which promptly became burgeoning agricultural regions capable of supporting not only monks but thriving villages. To this day, all across Europe, you can visit the ruins of long-abandoned settlements from the Middle Ages in barren upland regions that nowadays barely produce enough grass for sheep; old records and archaeological remains alike show that these villages once had thriving fields of grain and other crops – and in the centre of each is a church laid out according to the sacred geometries of the temple tradition.

Temple technology

Up out of the darkness of the centuries, like a shape in the mist, rises the dim shape of a forgotten technology – the temple technology, as I came to call it – that was once used by priests and priestesses across much of the Old World to make the fields flourish. Long before the beginning of recorded history, perhaps by sheer chance, perhaps through other means, people in certain parts of the world noticed that buildings of specific shapes built and aligned in particular ways affected the crops grown in nearby fields. Over millennia of trial and error, that original insight gave rise to two kinds of structures.

One of them uses structures shaped more or less like a stair-step pyramid: large ones, like the ziggurats of Babylon or the pyramids of the Mayas, or small ones, like the earth-deity altars that used to be found in every village in China before the 1949 revolution. The other uses square or rectangular buildings, usually oriented to the rising sun, which seems to have functioned as a resonance chamber. Both kinds of structures were built over certain specific geological features that create electrical discontinuities in the ground.

This matters because there are currents of electricity and lines of magnetic force, closely associated with one another, moving through the body of the Earth. Back in the 1920s, before the chemical industry got a stranglehold on corporate agriculture with their toxic fertilisers and pesticides, experimenters working with these earth currents developed a system called “electroculture” which sent a slight electrical charge through the soil; this resulted in sharply improved harvests. A building properly sited atop an electrical discontinuity in the earth, as it turns out, can build up a substantial charge of telluric electricity, which then streams outward through conductive areas in the soil.

This was one of the secrets of the Templars, one of the reasons that their landholdings in Europe produced bumper crops year after year to help pay for the Order’s castles in the Holy Land. In past ages, it had been a secret kept by many priesthoods and played a role in many ancient mystery initiations. (The Eleusinian mysteries, to cite only one example, centred on the fertility goddesses Demeter and Persephone, and at the climactic moment of the initiation ceremony, the new initiates were shown a newly reaped ear of grain.) It is one of the secrets of the Grail, and it – or more precisely, a word or phrase passed down from the Templars, probably in garbled form, that once communicated it – is the original Lost Word of the Freemasons. That, at least, is the most likely explanation for the tangled web of evidence that surrounds the old temple technology.

Like so many of the legacies of the ancient wisdom, the temple technology has been lost. The monasteries that once preserved it in Europe were destroyed in Protestant countries and subjected to the rigid ideological discipline of the Counter-Reformation in Catholic countries, breaking the links by which the knowledge was once transmitted from generation to generation. Elsewhere in the world, three centuries of colonialism, breakneck modernisation, and global warfare have left little intact, though it’s possible that even today, oral traditions at some isolated Indian temple or documents in a remote Shinto shrine might record some of the secrets of the lost temple technology.

One way or another, however, it is still possible for the Lost Word to be restored and the Holy Grail found. There are plenty of reasons why the global corporate monoculture might want to hide every surviving trace of a simple and scalable technology that uses natural energies and practices linked to traditional spirituality to make gardens thrive and fields bear bumper crops. Every one of those is also a reason why independent thinkers and researchers in today’s rising alternative culture might be interested in finding those traces and following them.

In terms of the metaphor introduced earlier, this is an important part of the lost machine and one that might be rebuilt and put to work. I can only hope that others will hear the call and join the quest for the Word that once made the fields flourish. 

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 18 No 5.[/alert]

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From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 19 No 4 (Aug 2025)

Best known to the wider world through the Hollywood interpretations of his works Blade Runner (from the book Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report and others, Philip K. Dick was certainly not a typical ‘science-fiction’ writer.

Although his early books might indeed have featured ‘zap guns’ and ‘androids’, they generally did so only as ironic props in stories of bewildered human protagonists displaced by emergent technological absurdities and hostile bureaucracies.

Often plagued by relationship breakdowns (he had four wives) and an adventurous attitude to drug use, Dick wrote an extraordinary series of novels across the 1970s (and early 1980s) that have come to be known as his metaphysical or theological canon.

Inspired by a chain of otherworldly and mystical events in February and March of 1974 – Dick had often previously written of the fragile nature of what we perceive to be ‘reality’ – he now manifested a cogent and strikingly timeless alternate cosmology.

In essence, beginning with his novel Valis (originally written in 1978 but not published until 1981), Dick argued that the Roman Empire had never truly ended but instead transformed and adapted, continuing to dominate human civilisation through different masks and institutions.

In his view, what we perceive as historical progression – the fall of Rome, the rise of Christianity, the development of modern nations – was largely illusory. Beneath these surface changes, the same imperial power structure or spirit remained intact, continuously subjugating humanity.

That concept was deeply rooted in Gnostic philosophy, which Dick encountered (largely through the Nag Hammadi scriptures) during the intense metaphysical period following his transformative 1974 experiences. In Gnostic thought, the material world is ruled by a false god (or Demiurge) which keeps humans trapped in ignorance. Dick mapped this onto his understanding of the Roman Empire, seeing it as the earthly manifestation of this malign cosmic force.

Described as “The Empire That Never Ended,” it was one of Philip K. Dick’s most profound and complex philosophical concepts, central to these theological works and his sci-fi-tinged personal spiritual perspective.

The “Empire,” in Dick’s view, had constructed a “Black Iron Prison” – another key concept in his work – a metaphysical cage that traps human consciousness. This prison operates through multiple vectors, often hidden in plain sight:

• Deception and illusion: Making people believe they are free while actually being controlled.
• Information control: Manipulating what people know and believe.
• Psychological oppression: Creating systems that make resistance seem impossible or pointless.
• Spiritual blindness: Preventing people from recognising their true divine nature.

Dick argued that the Empire’s continuation could be traced through various historical periods:

• Early Christianity: Rather than defeating the Empire, Christianity was co-opted and became another tool of imperial control. The institutional church became a new form of Roman authority.
• Medieval Period: Feudalism and the Holy Roman Empire represented direct continuations of Roman imperial structure.
• Modern Era: Contemporary governments, corporations, and institutions all serve as manifestations of the same underlying malevolent imperial power.

The methods may have become more sophisticated – psychological manipulation rather than direct, brute force – but the essential structure remained unchanged.

In Dick’s universe, the Empire is opposed by a divine force he sometimes called “VALIS” (“Vast Active Living Intelligence System”), represented, in the book of the same name, by a self-aware satellite that orbits Earth, shooting Gnosis (divine knowledge) through a blinding pink laser beam. This plot device presented authentic divine consciousness attempting to break the illusion and liberate humanity.

Dick believed that around 70 CE, with the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, time itself became corrupted or trapped. This wasn’t simply a historical event but a cosmic catastrophe that fundamentally altered the nature of reality. In his cosmology, we are all living in a kind of temporal loop or stasis, where the same imperial patterns repeat endlessly under different disguises.

This temporal imprisonment means that what we perceive as progress – technological advancement, social evolution, political change – is largely illusory. The essential power structures remain unchanged because time itself has been hijacked by the imperial force. We experience the sensation of moving forward while actually trapped in the same historical moment.

While couched across the novels Valis (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981), The Transmigration Of Timothy Archer (1982) and the astounding Radio Free Albemuth (originally written in 1976 but published posthumously in 1985) as a kind of quasi-hallucinogenic science-fiction mysticism, it should not be difficult to see Dick’s vision as hauntingly prescient and direly accurate of our historical and current circumstances.

According to Dick, the Empire now maintains its power through increasingly sophisticated methods:

• Information Warfare: Rather than crude physical oppression, the Empire now operates primarily through the manipulation of information and perception. People are controlled not by chains but by false beliefs about reality itself.
• Psychological Programming: The Empire creates mental patterns that make resistance seem impossible or pointless. People become complicit in their own oppression by accepting the Empire’s version of reality as natural and inevitable.
• Institutional Capture: Every institution that might oppose the Empire – religion, education, media, government – is eventually captured and turned into another tool of control. Revolutionary movements are co-opted before they can pose any real threat.
• Temporal Confusion: By keeping people trapped in the false timeline, the Empire prevents them from recognising the true nature of their situation. People cannot resist what they cannot perceive.

His “Black Iron Prison” also represents the metaphysical structure that enforces the Empire’s control. It was Dick’s most powerful metaphor for the nature of oppression itself. Indeed, the Black Iron Prison is not a physical location but a state of consciousness – or rather, unconsciousness. The Prison functions through:

• Perceptual Limitation: The prison limits what people perceive and understand. Reality appears solid and unchangeable because the prison prevents people from seeing its constructed nature.
• Ideological Constraint: The prison functions through belief systems that make alternatives seem impossible. People remain trapped not because they cannot leave, but because they cannot imagine freedom.
• Temporal Imprisonment: Like the Empire, the prison operates through time distortion. People experience the illusion of temporal progression while actually being held in stasis.
• Collective Delusion: The prison is maintained through shared false beliefs. It’s a consensus reality that people collectively create and maintain, even as it oppresses them.

Directly intersecting with contemporary descriptions such as Matthias Desmet’s concept of “Mass Formation Psychosis” and the heaving totalitarianism that surfaced during the COVID Operation, there seems little doubt that Philip K. Dick’s ‘paranoid’ cosmology presents a vital roadmap for attempting to understand what passes for the spiritual, political, philosophical and informational landscape of the 21st century.

In classical Gnostic thought, the Demiurge is a false creator god who has trapped divine sparks (human souls) in the material world. Dick identified this figure with the “Empire That Never Ended,” seeing the Demiurge as the cosmic principle behind all earthly oppression.

While traditional Gnosticism often portrays the Demiurge as a cosmic principle, Dick historicised it, seeing it as actively manifesting through specific human institutions and historical periods. The Roman Empire wasn’t just influenced by the Demiurge – it was the Demiurge’s most successful Earthly incarnation.

The Archons, in Gnostic cosmology, are the Demiurge’s agents who maintain control over the material world. Dick saw these as manifesting in various forms such as political leaders, religious authorities, and institutional powers, who serve the Empire’s interests, often without realising their true role.

Furthermore, Dick identified Psychological Archons, internal forces that keep people trapped – fear, despair, conformity, the desire for security over truth. These are the ‘guards’ of the Black Iron Prison. And in Dick’s more modern interpretation, Information Archons are the forces that control information flow – media, education, propaganda systems that shape perception and belief.

Dick’s Gnostic perspective led him to a radical critique of institutional Christianity. He believed that Christianity had been co-opted by the Empire almost from its beginning, turning the revolutionary message into a tool of control. Orthodox Christianity promises salvation in another world, which Dick saw as a way of preventing people from recognising their potential for liberation in this world. And, Dick suggested, much of institutional Christianity actually worships the Demiurge while believing it worships the true God. Indeed, orthodox Christianity emphasises faith over direct knowledge, which Dick saw as keeping people dependent on external authority rather than developing their own direct divine consciousness.

In earlier Dick novels (such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from 1968), he subtly presents questions about consciousness and the true nature of what it means to be human, blurring and shifting the lines between the ‘androids’ of the title and their ostensible human creators.

John Carpenter’s 1988 film They Live shared many settings and themes with Dick’s sublime novel Radio Free Albemuth. In the book, a scattered resistance battles the treacherous Archonic infection represented by President ‘Ferris F. Freemont’ (obviously, FFF is numerologically 666), as underground culture furtively keeps hope alive – situations loosely mirrored in the film. Similarly, the iconic 1999 film The Matrix presents ‘Dickian’ and Gnostic concepts wrapped in an action/sci-fi garb.

From 1974 until his untimely death in 1982, Dick produced a multitude of research, journals and letters that dealt with the events of “2-3-74” and his place in the great cosmic mystery. Condensed from over 8,000 pages of material, The Exegesis Of Philip K. Dick runs to more than 900 published pages and explores, in depth, Gnostic and unmistakeably Lovecraftian perspectives – indeed, “the Demiurge is still under the waters, dead but dreaming.”

While Philip K. Dick clearly and knowingly presented timeless Gnostic themes in a modern form, it is hard to imagine a time and place more necessary (than here and now) to examine concepts such as the constructed and manipulated nature of ‘reality’, the cancerous, imprisoning scourge of materialism, and the industrially designed death of the soul.

Indeed, it really is Philip K. Dick’s world… and we live in it.

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 19 No 4.[/alert]

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© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.