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Category: Secret History

  • Chinese Triads, Japanese Black Dragons & Hidden Paths of Power

    Chinese Triads, Japanese Black Dragons & Hidden Paths of Power

    From New Dawn 92 (Sept-Oct 2005)

    The influence of secret societies on the history of the West is well documented in numerous books and articles. Freemasons figured prominently in the American Revolution and the birth of the American Republic. The French Revolution, with its notions of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” originated in the radical Masonic lodges. Secret societies have been connected to a range of movements that sprang up around Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to defend people’s rights against the abuses of royal and priestly power, and to promote freedom by any and every means.

    Secret societies are often viewed as a largely Western phenomenon, but their roots reach deep into the ancient civilisations of the East. While much is written about Europe’s hidden fraternities, little attention has been given to Asia’s secret societies and the important part they played in organising resistance to the violent onslaught of European colonialism. As one China specialist points out, the Chinese secret societies “were closely linked to the struggles which the Chinese people tirelessly waged… against their internal and external adversaries.”1

    Secret societies were deeply rooted in Chinese historical reality, and did not divide matters into the spiritual and the mundane. The source of their power lay in their total opposition to the established order: political and religious, social and ideological. The secret societies relied for support primarily upon the oppressed classes of China. They were the authentic expression of popular hostility to China’s harsh imperial authorities and to foreign encroachment. In the words of the Sorbonne professor Jean Chesneaux:

    the secret societies constantly threatened the imperial regime in the nineteenth century, formed a powerful part of the tidal wave which finally overwhelmed it in 1911, and reacted strongly to foreign penetration at the end of the nineteenth century as they did to the Japanese invasion in the twentieth.2

    Enter the Black Dragon

    Secret societies also emerged in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Southeast Asia. Like the societies in China, their mystico-political teachings combined elements of Buddhism, Taoism, and traditional beliefs. All refused to recognise the dominant system and resolutely opposed the humiliations inflicted by the Western powers.

    By the late nineteenth century secret society networks in Indochina were struggling against French occupation. Tracing their origins to China, these Vietnamese brotherhoods served economic and social purposes as well as religious ones. A sense of solidarity between members was strengthened by initiation rites drawn from Buddhism and Taoism, and directed by a spirit medium. Resembling Freemasonry in some ways, their elaborate ceremonies were held at night with the blessings of Buddhist monks. As in China these groups had clearly defined political objectives, in this case, the ending of French domination.

    In the 1890s members of the Japanese secret society Genyosha (the Black Ocean society) created the Tenyukyo (Society for the Celestial Salvation of the Oppressed) which gave covert support to the Tonghak, a Korean mystico-political group, espousing equality and the dignity of human beings, opposed to Korea’s imperial Yi dynasty.

    Founded in the mid 1800s, the Tonghak or Eastern Learning society sought to rally the Korean people against foreign intrusion. The movement’s leader Ch’oe Che-u, after a period of ‘aimless wandering’ reminiscent of a Taoist monk, derived the movement’s ideology from Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. The Tonghak greatly contributed to the development of Korean national consciousness, one of their leaflets proclaiming:

    The people are the root of the nation. If the root withers, the nation will be enfeebled… We cannot sit by and watch our nation perish. The whole nation is as one, its multitudes united in their determination to raise the righteous standard of revolt…

    At the dawn of the twentieth century secret societies were behind radical nationalist uprisings across Asia. From the Young Turks and Young Persians of the Muslim East to Japan’s Black Ocean society and Chinese Triads, the secret societies provided support networks for Asia’s young revolutionaries.

    With Japan’s military victory over Russia in 1905, Tokyo became the centre of a powerful Pan-Asian movement aimed at freeing all the people of Asia from Western domination. One notable founding member of the Black Ocean society was Toyama Mitsuru (1855–1944).

    According to historian Richard Storry, Mitsuru “appeared to be the opponent of all established governments in Asia, including that of his own country. Chinese, Indian and Filipino dissidents visiting Tokyo tended to gravitate to his home in Shibuya.” A complex, charismatic, and controversial figure known as the “Shadow Shogun” and “Spymaster Supreme,” Mitsuru became one of the most powerful men in Japan. A master of traditional Japanese brush work, he lived frugally and remained a private citizen all his life.

    Hiraya Amane, another prominent leader of the Black Ocean society and a pioneer of revolutionary Pan-Asian solidarity, compiled the first authentic history of the Triads and other Chinese secret societies. His book was the fruit of friendships he cultivated with Chinese secret society leaders and militant Chinese revolutionaries. Hiraya Amane’s writings were diligently studied by a new generation of Japanese secret society members in the 1920s.

    The Amur River Society (Kokuryukai), later to become notorious in the West as the Black Dragon society, took over the work and traditions of the Black Ocean society in the years leading up to the First World War. Established in 1901 by a Black Ocean society leader and Buddhist monk, Ryohei Uchida, the Black Dragons, with their Pan-Asian vision, had links with the Triads and supported China’s 1911 Republican Revolution. Their agents undertook intelligence gathering operations in China, Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia, Siberia, and established relations with anti-colonialist circles in the Muslim world.

    Forming alliances with revolutionaries in Indochina, India, Indonesia and the Philippines, the Black Dragons also had close contact with several Buddhist sects. Throughout the 1920s and 30s the Black Dragon society supported Indian independence activities, providing political and financial assistance to Indian nationalists who looked to Japan as the only Eastern power capable of liberating Asia from the stranglehold of European colonialism. One such Indian nationalist was Subhas Chandra Bose (founder of the anti-colonialist Indian National Army), a correspondent in the 1930s for the influential German journal Geo-political Review, published by Professor Karl Haushofer.

    Major General Karl Haushofer encountered the Pan-Asian geopolitics and Buddhist mysticism of Japan’s secret fraternities during his time in Tokyo as the German military attaché. After the First World War, Haushofer became Professor of Geopolitics at the University of Munich where Rudolf Hess (later to become Hitler’s deputy) was his student assistant. Haushofer wrote that, “the struggle of India and China for liberation from foreign domination and capitalist pressure agrees with the secret dreams of Central Europe.” He urged Japan to come to terms with China and the Soviet Union, and consistently advocated an alliance between Germany and the USSR. This would facilitate what Haushofer called the “Eurasian continental organisation from the Rhine to the Amur and the Yangtze [rivers].”

    Some researchers are convinced Haushofer, a lifelong admirer of Oriental wisdom, was the emissary of “Unknown Superiors” in Asia, effectively acting as a crucial link between the Eastern secret societies and their European counterparts in the German lodges. The French authors Pauwels and Bergier mention a rumour that Haushofer was initiated into a secret Buddhist society and to have sworn, if he failed in his ‘mission’, to commit suicide “in accordance with the time-honoured ceremonial.” Haushofer, who committed suicide in 1946, is still remembered today by Russia’s Eurasian thinkers because he never reconciled himself to Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. Had the Nazi leadership taken note of Haushofer’s views, the Second World War could have been avoided. No doubt conscious of Haushofer’s remarkable role in hidden history, Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan in the United States, dedicated his infamous Satanic Bible to the German general.

    By the start of the Second World War agents of Japanese secret societies, all lumped together by Western intelligence agencies under the name Black Dragons, were operating worldwide from North Africa to the United States. One successful Black Dragon agent in America was Satohata Takahashi. Sent to the US in 1929, Takahashi formed a mystico-political movement called the Society for the Development of Our Own, recruiting several thousand members to his Pan-Asian cause, most of them of African-American, Filipino, or East Asian descent. The “Five Guiding Principles” of the group were “Freedom, Justice, Equality, Liberty, and Honour.”

    Through Takahashi the Black Dragon society channelled financial aid to Black Muslim groups in the US. The Moorish Science Temple, founded by Noble Drew Ali in 1913, taught the true origin of Black Americans was “Asiatic.” Another Muslim teacher, Master Wallace D. Fard, the mysterious leader of the Allah Temple of Islam declared, “I’m an Asiatic black man. I have come to America to save my long lost uncle [the Black Americans].” Fard’s chief disciple the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, prophet of the Nation of Islam, told his followers, “It is Japan’s duty to save you; they have been given the power by the Asiatic nation to save you in the West.” Another organisation to enjoy Takahashi’s patronage was the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World, which campaigned for the US to stay out of the war and promoted the Pan-Asian agenda among non-white Americans.

    Based on intelligence reports from their agents around the globe, the Black Dragon leadership in Tokyo concluded in 1941 that the United States had secretly started preparing to enter the war against Germany, Italy and Japan. Fearing a surprise American attack on Japanese forces, the Black Dragons urged Japan’s military hierarchy to launch a pre-emptive strike on the US. “The signal for war in the Pacific was given on August 26, 1941, at a session of the Black Dragon Society in Tokyo,” an American author noted in 1944. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the espionage and sabotage operations carried out by the Black Dragons became legendary.

    However, the society’s original mystico-political vision of Pan-Asian solidarity and anti-colonialism had been subsumed in the pre-war years by Japanese ultra-nationalism and militarism. Many Black Dragon members were part of Japan’s industry and government, holding key diplomatic and military posts. With the Japanese surrender in 1945 some Black Dragons in government were charged as war criminals. But the Allied victory in Asia could not extinguish the dream of freedom. Japan had shattered the myth of the military invincibility of Western colonialism. The seeds sown by the secret societies flourished in a new wave of national liberation movements that led the peoples of Asia to independence in the years immediately following the end of the war.

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    Political Intrigues of Secret Societies in the Modern World

    A century and a half ago, the British politician Benjamin Disraeli commented that, “the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” In our twenty-first century most people, mesmerised by the electronic media, are conditioned to dismiss the notion that secret societies may be tied-up with political intrigue. Yet Western intelligence agencies frequently rely on clandestine conspiratorial networks in their subversion of foreign governments. British intelligence services have a long history of involvement with underground ‘Muslim’ brotherhood groups actively opposed to the Arab nationalist states of the Middle East. The roots of the recent bloody conflict in the Russian republic of Chechnya can be traced to British intelligence service support of secretive ‘Muslim’ sects in the Caucasus. Many believe the American CIA is currently using a range of quasi-religious cults in clandestine operations aimed at destabilising the People’s Republic of China.

    “The history of the world is the history of the warfare between secret societies,” said the African American poet Ishmael Reed. Has world history been shaped by conspiratorial groups employing secret knowledge? Are the Anglo-American secret societies engaged in a titanic struggle with Eastern adepts and their allies?

    At a time when a shadowy global “war on terror” is used to justify increased government control and the serious erosion of personal freedom, we’d do well to recall the admonition of the Roman poet Ovid: “It is one’s duty to learn from the enemy.” The counterculture novelist William S. Burroughs once suggested the form of the Chinese secret society served as the perfect mode of organisation for marginal groups. Indeed, when the State becomes the oppressor of its own citizens, the only alternative is to disconnect and seek autonomy by any means necessary. The hidden history of secret societies may still have a lot to teach us.

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    Footnotes

    1. Jean Chesneaux, Secret Societies in China in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 
    2. Ibid.

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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  • The Rosicrucian Vision

    The Rosicrucian Vision

    The word “Rosicrucian” is one that most readers will have heard many times. Yet if I were to ask for a definition of the word I would probably be given a wide variety of different answers. I might be told that it was something to do with esoteric Christianity, with alchemy, or with Cabala. All of these things are part of the answer, but not the whole answer.

    So what is Rosicrucianism? For the time being let us call it a current of thought and ideas which has been flowing through history for at least three and a half centuries and probably quite a bit longer, sometimes underground, sometimes coming to the surface, but always pushing human beings towards certain goals. I say that we can trace the current back three and a half centuries because that was when it first came to the surface. So let us go back to that moment in history.

    The opening scene is Germany at the beginning of the 17th century. The Reformation had taken place just over a hundred years earlier. Now part of Germany was Protestant, part was still Catholic. The two sides had not yet reached any proper modus vivendi, and the tension between them was soon to erupt into the Thirty Years War, which was to prove one of the most disastrous wars in European history. So there was an expectation of coming calamity. And there was a feeling that European civilisation in general had somehow gone wrong. Now it was at this time that strange things began to happen in a certain part of Germany.

    We now focus on the town of Kassel. It was here, in 1614 and 1615, that there appeared two mysterious manifestos of unknown authorship. The first was in German, but its title was a mixture of German and Latin. It was called Fama Fraternitatis dess Löblichen Ordens des Rosenkreutzes, which means: The Fame (or Proclamation) of the Praiseworthy Order of the Rosy Cross. The second was called the Confession Fraternitatis, the Confession of the Fraternity.

    These documents told a curious story. They told of somebody called Christian Rosenkreutz who was born in the year 1378. As a boy of 16 he travelled to the Middle East and spent some time at Damcar in Arabia where there evidently existed some kind of utopian community. As the Confessio puts it: “those who dwell in the City of Damcar in Arabia… have a far different political order from the other Arabians. For there do govern only wise and understanding men, who by the King’s permission make particular laws.”

    At Damcar Rosenkreutz learned Arabic and received scientific and occult teaching and came into contact with a mysterious book, referred to simply as “the Book M”, which he translated into Latin.

    After three years at Damcar he was directed to go, via Egypt, to Fez in Morocco, which was, and still is, one of the holy cities of Islam and the site of one of the oldest universities in the world. So at the time Rosenkreutz is said to have gone there it would already have been a great centre of learning for many centuries. This is how the Fama describes his experience at Fez:

    “At Fez he did get acquaintance with those which are commonly called the Elementary Inhabitants, who revealed to him many of their secrets…” (Possibly what is meant by Elementary Inhabitants are the “Elemental Spirits” of magic).

    After two years at Fez he went to Spain hoping to impart his new-found knowledge but met only with hostility and mockery. And this experience was evidently repeated in other countries. So he returned to Germany and eventually gathered about him a small group of men who shared his ideals, and this was the beginning of the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross. The Fraternity had, as its headquarters, a building called the House of the Holy Spirit. The brothers dedicated themselves to studying and spreading the ancient wisdom and also travelled around doing good work such as healing the sick. One of them, it is said, went to England where he cured the young Earl of Norfolk of leprosy. Christian Rosenkreutz himself lived for 106 years, dying in 1484.

    After his death the brotherhood was continued by his successors. Then in 1604 the brethren were carrying out some rebuilding in their headquarters when they came across a hidden door on which was written in Latin: “after 120 years I shall open.” Behind the door they found a seven-sided vault illuminated by an artificial Sun placed in the middle of the ceiling. The floor, walls and ceiling of the vault were covered in symbolic figures, and there were also chests containing books and ritual objects. In the middle of the vault was an altar, and beneath the altar was a coffin containing the perfectly preserved body of Christian Rosenkreutz.

    This description of the vault was to capture many people’s imaginations. Two and a half centuries later the English occult society, the Golden Dawn, actually made a vault corresponding to the description in the Fama. One of the key rituals of the order, the Adeptus Minor initiation ritual, was a re-enactment of the discovery of Rosenkreutz’ body.

    The discovery of the vault was taken by the brethren as a sign that the time was ripe for the society to declare its existence publicly and to invite people of learning and goodwill to participate in the society’s aims and ideals. What were those aims and ideals? We don’t get a very clear idea from the manifestos, but it appears that the brethren believed in a system of universal knowledge incorporating theology, philosophy, mathematics, astrology, and so on. They were firm believers in Christ and the Scriptures. Furthermore, they claimed to have access to an ancient and secret body of wisdom which enabled them to interpret the scriptures correctly. What they appear to be referring to here is Cabala, which is, among other things, a means of decoding the Bible. They talk about being able to understand certain characters and letters which form the basis of all creation. Again, this seems to refer to the cabalistic notion that the universe is actually made up of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet in different combinations.

    Their beliefs can perhaps best be summed up in the word Gnosticism. By Gnosticism I mean the ancient belief that man’s spirit is imprisoned in matter by a mischievous creator. Man is, as it were, living underwater, not realising that up above is light and air and that if only he could swim to the surface he could get back to his true element. In the Gnostic view this predicament is not entirely hopeless because there are some people who possess Gnosis, that is, knowledge or wisdom which enables them to swim up and to teach this to others. (This Gnosis, this lifebelt of wisdom, is very often represented by a female figure. The Greeks called her Sophia.) This is the essence of Gnosticism, and this is, I believe, what lies behind Rosicrucianism.

    The Rosicrucians also knew about alchemy, in the sense of a dual process, physical and spiritual, in which the spiritual part was the more important. The early Rosicrucians clearly belonged to the Protestant rather than the Catholic camp. (There are some very contemptuous references to the Pope in the manifestos.) But, they felt that all of Christendom was in need of a new impulse. They believed that Europe was on the threshold of a new age in which spiritual, intellectual and political enlightenment and brotherly love would flourish, and they saw their role as being able to help usher in this new age.

    That essentially was the message of the first two manifestos, but, of course, what is not clear is whether the brotherhood existed at all or whether it was a deliberately created myth.

    In 1616 appeared a third Rosicrucian document published at Strassbourg, in German, under the title of Die Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosenkreutz (The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz). The title is slightly misleading because it is not about the wedding of Rosenkreutz himself but purports to be an account by him of his experiences as a guest at the wedding of a King and Queen. The wedding takes place in a castle which Rosenkreutz reaches after an arduous journey.

    The story is full of occult imagery. For example, on the fifth day of the celebrations, the guests are taken to an island in seven ships flying flags bearing the symbols of the planets. On the island an alchemical operation is conducted in a seven-storied tower, in which two homunculi are created from the bodies of six people who have been killed. In the roof of the Tower is a hole through which two souls descend and enter the homunculi. Finally, the company returns to the castle, this time in twelve ships flying flags of the zodiacal signs.

    The author of this document was a 19-year old man, Johann Valentin Andreae. Andreae was in fact a very important figure. He was a Protestant pastor and theologian, immensely influential in the German Protestant movement – in fact almost a kind of Luther of his day. And the strange thing about him is that in some of his later writings he referred very contemptuously to the Rosicrucian movement. In his autobiography, for example, he called it a “jest” – and this had led some people to say that the Chemical Wedding was in fact an attempt to debunk Rosicrucianism. I don’t believe this myself. I believe Andreae was – at least when he wrote the Chemical Wedding – very deeply involved with the whole Rosicrucian movement. So these three manifestos are the basis of the Rosicrucian movement as we know it.

    The effect of the three manifestos was astonishing. They stirred up a tremendous controversy in Europe. Many people wrote to the brotherhood hoping to be admitted. If any received replies they remain unrecorded. Other people attacked the brotherhood. Others claimed to be members of it. And in due course many societies were set up imitating the one that is described in the original manifestos – which, as I say, may or may not have existed. So what you ended up with was a core of mystery with huge ramifications, emanating out from these publications.

    Part of the appeal of the Rosicrucian movement lies in the richness of the Rose Cross symbol. It is possible to interpret this in all sorts of different ways. Both the cross and the rose are very ancient motifs. The cross appears in many religions and mythologies and seems to indicate a universal tendency for man’s inner consciousness to seek fourfold patterns: you have four points of the compass, four seasons, four elements, four worlds in the Cabala, and so on. The cross also suggests masculinity, and – in the Christian tradition – suffering, sacrifice and death.

    As for the rose, this can also be seen in many different ways. One of the things that the rose stands for is secrecy. The sign over Roman taverns signified that anything said in drunkenness would not be repeated – hence the expression sub rosa, meaning confidential. On another level the rose can be seen as the Western form of the lotus. Now the lotus, in Hindu mythology, represents the female life principle and is the symbol of the yoni or female sexual organs. So we have lotus/rose as female, cross as male.

    And if we look at ancient Egyptian mythology we find that Osiris, the god of the underworld who died and came to life again, is often shown wearing a crown of lotus flowers. So here we have another possible interpretation: lotus/rose = resurrection, cross = death. In other words, the Rose Cross represents the balance between a series of polarities: death and resurrection, male and female, sacrifice and the reward of sacrifice.

    It is an elusive symbol, but a very suggestive and powerful one. And it is typical of the great inner wisdom tradition of which Rosicrucianism is part, to use these shorthand emblems which carry deep layers of meaning. Many examples can be found in the emblem books of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries – for example the famous image of the dolphin curled around an anchor, with the motto festina lente (“hasten slowly”). These emblems serve as a secret code through which those in touch with the inner traditions can communicate their ideas, but they also work at a deeper level than a message which is framed in straightforward words.

    So did the Rosicrucian plan misfire? I think not, because this is an interesting example of what happens when you plant a mystery in the collective mind of society. It’s like dropping a stone into a pond: the ripples go on and on. And, in this case, the initial impact was so strong that the ripples are still going today.

    And this, I believe, is exactly what the authors of the manifestos intended. They took the view that if you wanted to bring about a new age, the way to do it was to frame your ideals in the form of a legend, to cloak the legend in mystery and then to launch it in such a way that it was bound to create endless debate and controversy.

    How successful was this ploy? Did those men who launched the manifestos succeed in bringing about any of the reforms that they desired? You may well say – looking at the state of Western civilisation – that they failed. But before we judge, let’s look a bit more closely at some of the repercussions of the manifestos.

    Although the Rosicrucian philosophy was presented as a total package of religion, science, etc., it tended to divide into three different streams: first, there was the scientific, philosophical stream; secondly, the social and political stream; thirdly, the Hermetic-Cabalistic-Alchemical stream.

    There is evidence the first of these two streams gave rise to a number of learned institutions in various parts of Europe, including the Royal Society in England, which of course was, and still is, one of the most important scientific bodies in the world. Many of the inventions and discoveries that have shaped our environment have come out of the Royal Society. I shall not go in detail into the connection between the Rosicrucian movement and the Royal Society, but one link, for example, is through an interesting man called Comenius: a Bohemian refugee, a member of the Andreae circle, interested in Utopian ideas, who envisaged an ideal state in which science and religion would flourish side by side and in which men of all creeds and races would be respected. Comenius came to England in about the 1640’s and he knew the leading scientists of the time. And furthermore, it is clear that scientists such as Robert Boyle and John Wilkins knew all about the Rosicrucian movement. When the Royal Society was founded in 1660 it is very likely that it was in some sense an attempt to realise the scientific and philosophical side of the Rosicrucian ideal.

    It is also possible that Rosicrucian influences were behind the creation of speculative masonry. For example, there is a Scottish poem of the year 1638, which contains the lines:

    “For we be brethren of the Rosie Cross

    We have the Mason’s word and second sight”1

    So clearly there is at least some connection between Rosicrucianism and the early history of masonry. And in masonry we see really a combination of all three of the streams that I mentioned: the philosophical, the social and the esoteric. Here again there may be a link with Comenius, as he also knew many of the men who were behind the formation of the Grand Lodge of London.

    Think for a moment of the multifarious ways in which Masonry has influenced the world: its role in promoting the ideas of the Enlightenment, its influence on the French Revolution, the fact that a large proportion of the signatories of the American Declaration of Independence were Masons, the way in which it has impacted on literature, art, architecture and music, the famous figures who have been Freemasons, from Voltaire to Goethe and from Mozart to Churchill. It can be argued that all of this is indirectly part of the Rosicrucian heritage.

    Let me give you another example of the influence of Rosicrucianism in history. I mentioned earlier that many societies and fraternities have adopted the Rosicrucian label. One of the most important was a German fringe masonic group called the Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross. This Golden and Rosy Cross was a remarkable phenomenon. It was a kind of Golden Dawn of its day, bringing together many different elements and fusing them together in the same sort of way that the Golden Dawn did. In fact the Golden Dawn adopted the grade system used by the Golden and Rosy Cross.

    The aim of the order was described as follows: “to make effective the hidden forces of nature, to release nature’s light which has become deeply buried beneath the dross resulting from the curse, and thereby to light within every brother a torch by whose light he will be able better to recognise the hidden God… and thereby become more closely united with the original source of light.”2

    That passage is pure Gnosticism, and it confirms what I was saying earlier about the Gnostic character of the whole Rosicrucian movement.

    The Golden and Rosy Cross was founded in about 1757, and it soon had lodges all over the German-speaking world. There was, for example, a very active lodge in the duchy of Sulzbach. And it is no coincidence that Sulzbach at the time was a tremendous centre of Hermetic and Cabalistic studies. There was even a Hebrew press there.

    But the real heyday of the order came when one of its members became King of Prussia in 1786. This was King Frederick William II, successor to Frederick the Great. During his reign the court and government were dominated by a Rosicrucian clique led by the King’s two Rosicrucian mentors, Wöllner and Bischoffswerder. Wöllner was something of a fanatic, and there is a story that on one occasion he wrote to a fellow member of the order telling him to stop doubting that adepts of the 8th degree had the ability to hatch chickens out of hard-boiled eggs.

    Under Frederick William II Prussia became for a time virtually a Rosicrucian state. Unfortunately it all collapsed because Wöllner and Bischoffswerder pursued thoroughly reactionary policies, made themselves very unpopular, and were eventually turfed out when the King died and his son came to the throne. So the Rosicrucians – like any other body of men – sometimes failed.

    There are many other examples I could give you of the practical influence of Rosicrucianism. I could point to the mystical community of German settlers in Pennsylvania that was influenced by Rosicrucian ideas. I could point to the Golden Dawn and the enormous ramifications which that has had. I could point to the vast amount of literature, art, even music, inspired by Rosicrucianism.

    So it begins to look as though those early Rosicrucians did achieve something after all.

    When we look at something like Rosicrucianism, or at the Templars or at Freemasonry or at the legends of the Holy Grail, we are looking at the tip of an iceberg. I believe that behind these phenomena lies a very ancient current. What precise form it takes I know not, but I believe that every so often in human history this current comes to the surface. It can emerge in the obvious form of an esoteric movement. It can also come out in more subtle ways. It can come out in the arts or in science; in architecture, in garden design, in craftwork, in typography. But one usually recognises it when one sees it because it has a certain stamp of yearning for eternal beauty and truth.

    And at this point I should like to mention a piece of fiction that struck me as being a remarkable allegory of the Rosicrucian movement. It comes in a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. The essence of the story is this: you are asked to imagine a group of people who come together and decide that they will invent a fictitious country. They then decide that they cannot invent a country in isolation so they must invent an entire planet. And this is what they do. Furthermore they produce an encyclopedia of 40 volumes all about this planet, which they call Tlön. The encyclopedia contains minutely detailed descriptions of every aspect of this imaginary world: its geography, history, folklore, its religions, its languages and their grammar, its literature, and so on. Then they surreptitiously leak out clues about the imaginary world – at first just little things such as religious objects. Then they plant a copy of the encyclopedia in a library, and gradually this mysterious world starts to capture people’s imaginations to such an extent that the real world starts to imitate it. And towards the end of the story Borges writes: “A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues.” That could equally well describe the men who launched the Rosicrucian movement.

    In conclusion let me address the question: what is the relevance of all this to us today? In the first place, it is possible to draw certain parallels between the age of the Rosicrucian manifestos and the present day. There was the same feeling then, as there is today, that the world was in chaos and needed a change of direction. And there was the same expectation of a coming New Age. The Rosicrucians linked it with certain astrological indications. Likewise we link it with the Age of Aquarius.

    The Rosicrucian vision of the New Age is one that makes a lot of sense today. I mentioned the Rosicrucian emphasis on universality. One aspect of this is the need to draw together religion and science, so that the scientist always works in a spirit of service to God, as the alchemists did. Today we are seeing a renewed striving to reconcile science and spirituality. Furthermore this holistic vision has begun to embrace not just religion and science but many other areas of our culture including art, architecture, technology, politics and ecology.

    I think perhaps the most important thing about the relevance of the Rosicrucian path for us today is that it involves not only personal enlightenment but also service in the widest sense. We are talking about a complete vision, a dream of what humankind and the world could be like. If you want to have a dream, the Rosicrucian one is still alive.

    The above article is reprinted with permission from The Inner West: An Introduction to the Hidden Wisdom of the West, edited by Jay Kinney (published by Jeremy Tarcher/Penguin USA). It originally appeared in Gnosis 6 (winter 1987-88) under the title “The Rosicrucian Dream”.

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    Footnotes

    1. Henry Adamson, Muse’s Threnodia, quoted in Knoop, Jones and Hamer, Early Masonic Pamphlets (Manchester, 1945); p.30; cited in Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (Boulder, Co: Shambhala, 1978), p. 211

    2. J.J. Bode, Starke Erweise (Leipzig: Goschen, 1788), p. 25.

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  • Rudolf Steiner, Secret Societies & ‘The Ahrimanic Deception’

    Rudolf Steiner, Secret Societies & ‘The Ahrimanic Deception’

    From New Dawn 136 (Jan-Feb 2013)

    Many believe there is an ‘occult’ or ‘spiritual war’ taking place between forces of ‘light’ and ‘darkness’, or ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and that this ‘war’ manifests on the material and mortal planes politically, culturally, spiritually, and economically.

    It is often surprisingly difficult to discern the affiliations in this ‘battle’, with the multitude of occult Orders, Schools and personalities. These often use similar or even identical terminologies and symbols, and draw on the same traditions and origins. In such a situation well-meaning people are easily duped into supporting long-range aims of which they do not understand.

    Occult War: Adepts ‘Black’ & ‘White’

    The definition of ‘good and evil’, or ‘light and dark’, metaphysically can – from an esoteric perspective – be regarded as a dichotomy between those who seek a higher spiritual path for mankind, and those who seek to enchain man to matter. This dichotomy is well portrayed in the standard depictions of ‘The Devil’ trump in the Tarot Major Arcana.1 Paul Foster Case, founder of the Builders of the Adytum, gave a particularly apt explanation:

    In its most general meanings, it signifies Mammon and thus big business, the conventions of society, the injustice and cruelty of a social order in which money takes the place of God, in which humanity is bestialised, in which war is engineered by greed masquerading as patriotism, in which fear is dominant. Students of astrology will have no difficulty in seeing how this corresponds to Capricorn, the sign of big business, and the sign of world fame.2

    One sees in this Trump a male and female human each starting to take on the appearance of wild beasts – with horns and tails – enchained to a solid block, representing matter, with the Devil enthroned. As Case states, it is symbolic of the reign of Mammon, which is ushered in by materialistic doctrines such as Capitalism and Marxism, keeping humanity focused on lower pursuits in the guise of ‘progress’ and ‘freedom’.

    Occultists such as René Guenon, Aleister Crowley and Julius Evola3 have sought to identify contending Schools as ‘White’ and ‘Black’ Brotherhoods, or as ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ Hand Paths.

    Given the confusion that exists – because individuals and occult currents that are diametrically opposed often claim to represent the same traditions – the biblical injunction ‘by their fruits ye shall know them’ is the best formula for identifying motives, although this also is often obscure. For example, the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley, whose ‘evil’ antics played up to the tabloid press, could easily be regarded as a ‘Black Adept’. Although Crowley claimed to work in the tradition of, among others, and for unclear reasons, the 18th century Black Adept Adam Weishaupt and his crypto-Masonic Illuminati, Crowley sought to expose the spiritual war that was taking place between the ‘White’ and ‘Black’ Adepts,4 while his doctrine of Thelema is antithetical to the doctrine of the Illuminati.5 Also, while having been a Freemason, as was Eliphas Levi,6 Rene Guenon7 condemned the Black Adepts who had subverted and redirected Masonry.8

    Steiner and The Ahrimanic Deception

    Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), founder of Anthroposophy, whose influence has gone far beyond ‘occult’ circles for his prominence in alternative education, architecture, and organic agriculture, was one of those seminal personalities who believed in the existence of such an ‘occult war’. Again, as with Crowley, difficulties are encountered due to Steiner’s own affiliations with Freemasonry.9 However, Steiner, like Guenon, Evola, Levi and Crowley, forthrightly sought to expose a Dark current at work within the secret societies, and in particular within Freemasonry, whose influence was being directed in the world politically.

    In a 1919 lecture delivered in Zurich entitled ‘The Ahrimanic Deception’, Steiner stated that, “a great part of mankind today is already under the control, from one side or another, of Ahrimanic forces of a cosmic nature which are growing stronger and stronger.” Steiner had an unusual perception of what he called the “Luciferic Impulse,” which he stated manifested on Earth in 3000 BCE. The Luciferic Impulse prepared the way for the “Christ Impulse” in Steiner’s cosmology. Both ‘Impulses’ began to fade and mankind has therefore become increasingly materialistic. Steiner stated this Ahrimanic Deception emanates from an actual being:

    The Ahrimanic impulse proceeds from a supersensible Being different from the Being of Christ or of Lucifer.… The influence of this Being becomes especially powerful in the Fifth Post-Atlantean Epoch. If we look at the confused conditions of recent years we shall find that men have been brought to such chaotic conditions mainly through the Ahrimanic powers.10

    While the Luciferic Impulse pushed humanity into what Nietzsche might have called the Dionysian passion that gives birth to arts and brings humanity outside of itself, albeit, according to Steiner, with a “false spirituality,” “Ahriman is the power that makes man dry, prosaic, philistine – that ossifies him and brings him to the superstition of materialism.”11 Ahriman would seem to equate with the Christian perception of the Antichrist. The Christ Impulse balances the two poles, in what in some respects seems akin to a Hegelian dialectic.

    And the true nature and being of man is essentially the effort to hold the balance between the powers of Lucifer and Ahriman; the Christ Impulse helps present humanity to establish this equilibrium…. [T]he Ahrimanic influence has been at work since the middle of the fifteenth century and will increase in strength until an actual incarnation of Ahriman takes place among Western humanity.12

    Preparing the Way for Ahriman

    The relevance of this concept of the Ahrimanic Deception in regard to an ‘occult war’ for world rule, is that:

    Now it is characteristic of such things that they are prepared long in advance. Ahrimanic powers prepare the evolution of mankind in such a way that it can fall a prey to Ahriman when he appears in human form within Western civilisation… Ahriman will appear in human form and the only question is, how he will find humanity prepared. Will his preparations have secured for him as followers the whole of mankind that today calls itself civilised, or will he find a humanity that can offer resistance.13

    The way in which humanity looks at the cosmos under the Ahrimanic Deception is not with the spiritual awe and sense of place of those of past Civilisations, including, we could add, those of Gothic man in Western Civilisation’s cycle of youth, as the philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler pointed out,14 but as merely part of a mechanical and mathematical process. Steiner said of this:

    Today man gazes from his earth up to the star-world and to him it is filled with fixed stars, suns, planets, comets, and so on. But with what means does he examine all that looks down to him out of cosmic space? He examines it with mathematics, with the science of mechanics. What lies around the earth is robbed of spirit, robbed of soul, even of life. It is a great mechanism, in fact, only to be grasped by the aid of mathematical, mechanistic laws.…15

    We might state of this Ahrimanic Deception that it motivates Rationalism and Materialism, the dominant ideologies of the Late West.16 Steiner warned that the Ahrimanic Deception aims to imbue Man with “scientific superstition,” an “external illusion,” that while necessary (it was far from Steiner’s intent to repudiate the sciences) has made what we can identify as Rationalism and Materialism into a dogma.

    The second method of the Ahrimanic Deception is to split society into contending factions. Steiner aptly identified Marxism, a product of Scientism, as a primary method of the Ahrimanic Deception.

    Since the times of the Reformation and the Renaissance the economist has emerged as the new priest into the increasingly materialistic world, while Steiner also pointed out that Christian religion had also become desacralised.

    Since that time the economist has been in command. Rulers are in fact merely the handymen, the understrappers of the economists. One must not imagine that the rulers of modern times are anything but the understrappers of the economists.17

    Steiner next alludes to a very important matter, the power that the bankers have assumed:

    In the nineteenth century the ‘economical’ man is replaced for the first time by the man thinking in terms of banking, and in the nineteenth century there is created for the first time the organisation of finance which swamps every other relationship. One must only be able to look into these things and follow them up empirically and practically.18

    This statement provides the key to the history of the ‘modern world’ for the past several hundred years, and the human agency pushing for a world state – a ‘New World Order’ – enchained to the dead weight of matter.19 The power of the international banking cabals prepares the way for an Ahrimanic World Order by reorienting the spirit of Man:

    If men do not realise that the rights-state and the organism of the Spirit must be set against the economic order called up through the economists and the banks, then again, through this lack of awareness, Ahriman will find an important instrument for preparing his incarnation.20

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    Role of Secret Societies

    The ‘Ahrimanic Deception’ equates with what Guenon and Evola referred to as the ‘Counter-Tradition’. The secret societies it uses behind the façade of the Perennial Tradition are the ‘Anti-Tradition’. Steiner lectured on the role of these secret societies in the occult war.

    While referring to both the “humanitarian works” and the spiritual evolution that is supposedly at the foundation of Freemasonry,21 Steiner, like Levi, Crowley, Evola and Guenon, also spoke of the manner the ‘Ahrimanic Deception’ operates through Freemasonry. Steiner even went further than anti-Masonic ‘conspiracy theorists’ such as Nesta H Webster22 and the eminent Scottish scholar, Prof. John Robison,23 himself a Grand Lodge Freemason, both of whom accepted English Masonry’s innocence of intrigue. Steiner, however, made a particular point of discussing the origins of Continental Masonry in the English Lodges. Despite its repudiation of ‘irregular’ Grand Orient Masonry that predominates on Continental Europe and Latin America, English Grand Lodge Masonry, stated Steiner, was also involved in a struggle for world power. He said the British Government was subverted by the secret societies, and that in particular foreign affairs was taken over by “an inner committee.”24 Steiner, in tracing the origins of Grand Orient Masonry to the Grand Lodge, wrote that:

    But everywhere in a different way, in many places outside the actual British realm, Freemasonry pursues exclusively or mainly political interests. Such political interests in the most palpable sense are pursued by the ‘Grand-Orient de France’, but also by other ‘Grand Orients’. One might now say: what has that to do with the English?… But view this in conjunction with the fact that the first High-degree Lodge in Paris was founded from England, not France! Not French people but Britons founded it; they only wove the French into their Lodge…25

    After listing the Lodges that were founded under the impetus of the English Grand Lodge, from Spain to Russia, Steiner adds that, “these Lodges were founded as the external instruments for certain occult-political impulses.” These impulses included the “fury of the Jacobins,”26 (who launched a Reign of Terror over France in the name of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’); Weishaupt’s Illuminati and the Italian Carbonari. Although Steiner admits these began without “evil” intent (which I would dispute), they “continued their underground work in many different forms,” after being driven underground. Steiner alludes to the disingenuousness of Grand Lodge Masonry in being able to say:

    ‘[L]ook at our Lodges, they are very respectable – and we are not concerned with the others’. But if one can see through the historical connection and the driving forces in an interplay of mutual opposition to one another, then it is indeed high British politics that is concealed behind it.27

    Of the “occult-political” societies, Steiner observed they serve a materialistic aim behind the façade of spirituality: what Guenon and Evola called “Anti-Tradition,” and Levi called “profanity.” These “various Orders” are “not spiritual, because of their purposes and goals.” They are the secret societies that work in the name of “democracy” and a “universal republic” (as did the Jacobins and the Illuminati). Steiner warned:

    If one wants as a person of modern times to see clearly in order to meet the world openly and understand it, then one should not let oneself be blinded by democratic logic, which is justified only in its own sphere, or by phrases concerning democratic progress etc. One would have also to point to the interposing of something that reveals itself in the attempt to give rulership to the few through the means available within the Lodges – namely, ritual and its suggestive effect.28

    While genuine mystical lodges exist(ed) – even Guenon sought initiation in them, as did Steiner – both pointed out that one must be cognisant of those Orders with mystical trappings and claims to ancient pedigree as a mask for other motives, as they are “often nebulous, maybe even fraudulent”… “For power is of special importance for these secret societies, not insight.”29

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    Footnotes

    1. For example, the popular ‘Rider-Waite Tarot Deck’.

    2. Paul Foster Case, Oracle of The Tarot: A Course on Tarot Divination, Chapter 6, ‘The Major Trumps: 15. Le Diable’, http://tarotinstitute.com/free/Oracle2.pdf.

    3. Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins, Inner Traditions, 2002, 250-251.

    4. Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, Falcon Press, 1983, 66.

    5. K R Bolton, ‘Aleister Crowley as Political Theorist’, Crowley: Thoughts & Perspectives Vol. II, Troy Southgate, editor, Black Front Press, 2011, 5-27; Keith Preston, ‘The Whole of The Law: The Political Dimensions of Crowley’s Thought, ibid., 68-84.

    6. Eliphas Levi, The History of Magic, translated by A E Waite, 1913, Rider, 1982, 310. Levi in condemning the “profanity” of Freemasonry and its involvement in political subversion, including the French Revolution, was doing so as an initiate of the 18°, the Rosicrucian Degree. This is indicated in a footnote to his History of Magic, where he states: “Having attained by our efforts to a grade of knowledge which imposes silence, we regard ourselves as pledged by our convictions even more than by an oath.… and we shall in no wise fail to deserve the princely crown of the Rosy Cross….” (286). Levi here states that he was staying true to what he considered the genuine Tradition of Masonry, whilst condemning what he saw as the perversion of Masonry by the Counter-Tradition. His reference to the Masonic oath attached to the ‘Rosy Cross’ indicates he had reached as far as the 18° of Knight of the Pelican & Eagle & Sovereign Prince Rose Croix of Heredom.

    7. Robin Waterfield, René Guenon & the Future of The West, Sophia Perennis, 2002, 21.

    8. René Guenon, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, New York, Sophia Perennis, 2001, 260-261.

    9. ‘Was Rudolf Steiner a Freemason?’, www.fourhares.com/freemasonry/Steiner_and_masonry.html

    10. Rudolf Steiner, ‘The Ahrimanic Deception’, Zurich, 27 October 1919, http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/AhrDec_index.html

    11. Ibid.

    12. Ibid.

    13. Ibid.

    14. Oswald Spengler , The Decline of The West, George Allen & Unwin, 1971. Spengler, writing in the early 20th century, contended that history is not lineal-progressive, but that each Civilisation is self-contained and goes through its own analogous organic cycles of birth, youth, maturity, old age and death. During the latter epochs of a Civilisation, culture becomes ossified and materialistic and money-thinking dominates. This is the cycle of present Western Civilisation. Broadly, the historical-cyclic theories of both Steiner and Spengler can be used in tandem.

    15. Rudolf Steiner, ‘The Ahrimanic Deception’, op. cit.

    16. Vide, Spengler, op. cit.

    17. Ibid.

    18. Ibid.

    19. For the political agendas of the International Bankers, including the connections with Marxism, see: K R Bolton, Revolution from Above, Arktos Media Ltd, 2011.

    20. Rudolf Steiner, ‘The Ahrimanic Deception’, op. cit.

    21. Rudolf Steiner, ‘The Work of the Secret Societies in the World’, Berlin, 23 December 1904, http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19041223p02.html

    22. Nesta H Webster, Secret Societies & Subversive Movements, Britons Publishing Co., 1964, Chapter 6, ‘The Grand Lodge Era’, 128-129.

    23. John Robison, 1798, Proofs of a Conspiracy, Western Islands, 1967, ‘Introduction’, 6.

    24. Rudolf Steiner, ‘The Karma of Untruthfulness’, ‘Rudolf Steiner Archive, GA 173’, 18 December 1916, www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA/index.php?ga=GA0173

    25. Rudolf Steiner, ‘Karma of Untruthfulness, Part II’, GA 174, 8 January 1917, www.rsarchive.org/GA/index.php?ga=GA0174

    26 Ibid.

    27. Ibid.

    28. Ibid.

    29. Rudolf Steiner, ‘The History & Actuality of Imperialism’, Dornach, Switzerland, 21 February 1920.

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  • The Chinese Nostradamus

    The Chinese Nostradamus

    From New Dawn 129 (Nov-Dec 2011)

    This year [2011] is the 700th anniversary of the birth of Liu Ji (1311-1375), military commander of Chinese forces both on land and on sea and long-time advisor to the first Ming emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, whom he helped bring to power.

    Liu Ji, who eventually became grand chancellor at the imperial court, was a man of protean interests and the author or co-author of books on warfare including comprehensive treatises on the use of gunpowder in firearms (Huolongjing), and, in particular, on the use of the medieval Chinese firearm known as the fire lance. Liu Ji (who is at least as well-known by his honorific or “courtesy” name of Liu Bowen) also wrote works on astronomy, the calendar, magnetism, geomancy, feng-shui, and other subjects skirting the supernatural.

    In this latter category, he wrote one book that holds the same fascination for us today as it did for Liu Ji’s contemporaries. This is the Shaobing ge (The Baked Cake Ballad), a collection of prophecies of future events. The predictions are cloaked in a welter of abstract, allusive and arcane language. They seem to be stunningly accurate in their prediction of future events (such as the coming of Sun Yat Sen, founder of the Chinese Republic, in 1911). They bid fair to being compared to the prophetic Centuries of Michel de Nostradamus, the French prognosticator who wrote 200 years in Liu Ji’s future.

    Basing his calculations on knowledge of cycles covering 50-year periods, this Chinese Nostradamus prophesied that the 50-year period from 1860-1910 would unfold as follows:

    Strong nations will seek to subdue weak ones while oppressed nations and people will rise in strife to throw off their unvirtuous rulers. The people in China, likewise, will agitate and revolt against their foreign rulers from the North. The country will be weak and divided as it will be suffering from all these conflicts and other calamities.1

    In a discussion of Liu Ji and his prophecies, in Occult magazine, Sybil Leek writes that,

    In more specific terms, Liu Ji pointed out that his people would see great floods in the years of the swine (1873), the snake (1887) and the goat (1893) and 1911, another year of the swine. He indicated that within twenty-four years after the greatest flood, the existing rulership of the country would meet with great difficulties and dangers of an overwhelming nature, and the Wise Man in the name of the Moon would arise as the new sage and statesman to act for the cause and destiny of the country. The ‘Wise Man in the Name of the Moon’ is the birth name of Sun Yat Sen, the founder of the Chinese Republic.

    Leek goes on to explain:

    China was weakened by the Taiping Rebellion and the actions of the revolutionaries from 1860 onwards. The great flood took place in 1877, the year of the swine. There were wars with France, England and Japan in 1865, 1884 and 1895, each of which brought humiliation and losses of territory to the Manchu dynasty. The final crisis took place in 1911 when the Chinese revolution broke out to overthrow the once great and long Manchu regime, exactly 24 years after the great flood of the Yellow River. Other important historic events in this 50-year era were: the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905; the Japanese conquest of Korea in 1911; the Spanish-American War of 1898-1899; and the French annexation of Indochina in 1883.2

    Does the warrior, politician, prognosticator of the future and explorer of ancient “New Age” lore known as Liu Ji or Liu Bowen have the right to be called “the Chinese Nostradamus?”

    There are those who think so. Others contend that, while Liu Ji genuinely was a figure of great power and importance amidst the clashing ideologies, peoples, and life styles of fourteenth-century China, much of Shaobing ge was composed hundreds of years later, after many of the events it “predicts” had taken place, and was fraudulently credited with Liu Ji’s name in order to bestow divine legitimacy on those events. This school of thought traces the inception of the Shaobing ge not to the Ming or even the Qing era, but to the work of fiction writers and the propagandists of anti-Manchu sectarian organisations and secret societies that flourished in the early eighteenth century.3 

    Some hold there really was a Shaobing ge, composed by Liu Ji and consisting of prophetic messages – but it was greatly adumbrated, added to, and revised in later centuries, becoming the centrepiece of a number of Chinese messianic documents built on, in the words of Barend J. ter Haar, “the concrete expectation that one or more saviours will descend to earth to rescue a select group of human beings from imminent or currently raging apocalyptic disasters.”4

    What really happened may be a complex mixture of all the above – including the exciting if uncomfortable fact that Liu Ji may really have produced predictions for the future, some of which have come true in stunning fashion.

    The Chinese World of the 14th-15th Centuries

    A brief look at the tumultuous times in which Liu Ji lived and left his mark may provide the beginnings of an answer.

    Late fourteenth-century and early fifteenth-century China under the Ming dynasty saw the last great flowering of Chinese culture before a lengthy period of stagnation that ended only at the beginning of the twentieth century. Paper (100 BCE), the seismograph (132 CE), gunpowder (220 CE), and printing (movable wooden blocks by the sixth century CE, movable type by the eleventh) – all these were only a few of the inventions that China had developed centuries before the West, and it had pioneered such devices as the compass, the stirrup, suspension bridges, canal locks, iron chains, and water-powered mills and looms as well.

    Under the Ming, China brought these advanced technologies to the height of efficiency. Art (particularly pottery), printed texts of every sort (a preponderance of them being scholarly), and architecture (both sacred and profane), flourished as never before. Defences, paved highways, bridges, temples and shrines, stupas, tombs, memorial arches and rock gardens were built in profusion. The walls of some five hundred cities were reconstructed. According to a legend that has followed him up to modern times along with that of his prowess as a prognosticator, Liu Ji himself was “an ingenious builder of imperial cities.”5 

    From 1405 to 1433, the eunuch admiral Zheng He, born four years before Liu Ji died, would lead at least one expedition of 200 (perhaps even 371) ships, some of them the tallest in the world, on a diplomatic and exploratory mission to South-east Asia, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, the Persian Gulf, the Arab states and the Red Sea. Gavin Menzies speculates, in 1421: The Year China Discovered America, that this fleet, captained by its Chinese Vasco da Gama and carrying a crew of 28,000, even penetrated as far as the west coast of North America.6 To cap the achievements of this era in a literary mode: in 1403-1408 three thousand scholars laboured to compile and copy what is still the longest encyclopaedia ever produced, the Yung-Lo Ta Tien (Grand Encyclopedia of the Yung-Lo Ta Tien Reign-Period) – an astonishing 11,095 volumes, containing 50 million Chinese characters. (Only 370 volumes have survived, scattered in libraries around the world.)7

    Who Was Liu Ji (Liu Bowen)?

    Liu Bowen was an exemplar of, and helped to mould, this world of vibrant and many-faceted activity. He was born in Qingtian County (modern-day Wencheng County, Zhejiang Province) in 1311. Tall, wiry, eager and precocious, he rose swiftly in the imperial civil service, acquiring the skills of engineer, writer, soldier and administrator, and others. When one of the leaders of the Red Turban secret society, a former travelling monk, grotesque in appearance but highly capable, Zhu Yuanzhang (1328-1398), seized Nanking from the Mongols in 1356, Liu Ji was at his side. Twelve years later, Zhu drove the descendants of the Great Khan out of Beijing and became the first Ming emperor.8 Liu served in many administrative posts under Zhu Yuanzhang. He was a commanding officer in sea and land battles. He studied and wrote on a wider range of topics than any other man of his time, particularly in the fields of warfare and divination.

    Joseph Needham writes of him, in Science and Civilization in China (Volume Five, Part Seven), that, “Liu Chi [Ji]… was a striking personality, of remarkable qualities both civil and military. In philosophy he was a skeptical naturalist, interested in all kinds of science and proto-science – astronomy, the calendar, magnetism and geomancy – and a friend of the eminent mathematician and alchemist Chao Yu-Chin. But he was also concerned with administration, and for long an advisor to the first Ming emperor. In war he commanded at battles both on land and afloat, having in one instance (+1363) his flagship destroyed by a ‘flying shot’ (fei phao) just after he had transferred to another vessel.” Needham sums up Liu’s unique abilities: “Liu Chi was the sort of man who could successfully conjure a change in the wind just when the commander-in-chief needed it.”9

    Needham’s vivid description of Liu Ji brings out the adventurous side of his life, as no account of this remarkable man can fail to do. This action-oriented dimension of the prognosticator-warrior was exploited in full by Taiwanese TV in a 404-episode mega-series, Shen Ji Miao Suan Liu Bo Wen (The Amazing Strategist Liu Bowen), that aired five nights a week from August 23, 2006, to March 12, 2008. This TV spectacular tells how Liu Bowen’s amazing ability to predict the future helped Zhu Yuanzhang overthrow the Yuan emperor and establish the Ming empire. In actual fact, Liu Bowen’s death in 1375 is shrouded in mystery: his multifarious talents may have incurred the jealousy of Zhu, who, increasingly perceiving his lieutenant as a threat, harassed Liu Bowen so much that he died of sorrow and indignation; the emperor then erased much evidence of the warrior-seer’s accomplishments. The TV mega-series takes advantage of these blank spaces, writing in a passionate love affair between Bowen and Princess Nanfeng, daughter of the deposed Mongol emperor. (Did this high-powered liaison really take place? The best that can be said is that there is no strong reason to suppose that it did not.)

    In the early stages of the story, Princess Nanfeng tries to assassinate Emperor Yuanzhang, is blinded for her failed attempt, and seeks refuge in the shop of A Tian, who turns out to be Bowen’s best friend. There she meets Liu and his sister, A Xiu, who is training in the martial arts. When Liu discovers who this refugee is, he tries to restore her sight and keep her from trying to assassinate Emperor Yuanzhang again; Bowen wants to promote good relations between the present Ming emperor and the former Mongol emperor.

    A treacherous Ming official, Hu Weiyong, tries, for personal gain, to persuade the Ming emperor to have Nanfeng killed. A battle of wits ensues that pits the noble Liu Bowen against the evil Hu Weiyong. It’s this battle, filled with bloody combat, sizzling romance, and the wrenching encounters of Bowen with the gods from whom he channels searing images of the future, that kept millions of Taiwanese glued to their TV sets for more than eighteen months. At the end of 404 episodes, when the contest is decided in favour of the Ming dynasty, the aid of Liu and his paranormal powers has been indispensable.10 

    How much truth is there in this TV production, and the depiction of Liu Ji as a man of magical clairvoyant power? Did he really “channel” future-event predictions that, gathered into a volume called Shaobing ge, rival those of Nostradamus in their beguiling obscurity and – when they can be interpreted – their occasional striking accuracy?

    Liu Bowen’s Specially Encoded “Moon Cakes”

    Many modern scholars, as we’ve seen, tend to think not. Ter Haar writes that in the nineteenth century,

    One of the first paragraphs of the 1811 initiation manual [put together by secret societies plotting the downfall of the Manchu dynasty and the resurrection of the Ming in a series of divinely-ordained, messiah-led, apocalyptic battles] states that in 1643 an ‘Inscription by Liu Bowen’ was spit out by the (Yellow) River in Kaifeng… It predicted the return of the Ming under the Zhu family, bringing peace.11

    Perhaps not conscious fraud as much as powerful, self-deluding, emotional need – it must have seemed to the members of the society as if they were channelling the document! – wafted Liu Ji’s imprimatur into the ritualised agendas of these anti-Manchu secret societies. Nevertheless, there is a story, with some claim to historical truth, that suggests just how cryptic messages in baked cakes, prophesying China’s future, might have come to be associated with Liu Ji.

    The Chinese have a custom, said to date from the end of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) of eating baked “moon cakes” at yearly mid-autumn festivals. The custom had its origins in the revolutionary times preceding the fall of the Yuan, when the general populace, lashed into fury by the oppressive regime, rose up again and again against their Yuan masters. The messages had to be transmitted in secret so that the insurrectionists could meet at the right time and the right place. Zhu Yuanzhang and Liu Bowen had the idea – or so the story goes – of spreading the rumour among the peasants that a deadly plague was afoot in the land and the only way to prevent it was by eating specially-prepared mooncakes. These special cakes were to be quickly distributed – each containing an encoded message coordinating the Han Chinese revolt for the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month.

    The messages were in the form of a simple puzzle or mosaic printed on the surface of the cake. To read it, you had to cut the four mooncakes per package into four pieces each. The sixteen parts would then be put together in the right order to reveal the message. The evidence would be destroyed by eating.

    But Yuan government officials were everywhere, and it was almost impossible to send the messages without their being detected.

    Liu Bowen devised a new plan: the messages, particularly the critical one of “Uprising on August 15,” would be baked inside the mooncakes. This was done, and the buried-message cakes were successfully distributed. The insurrectionary armies converged on Beijing on August 15, and soon the city fell to Zhu Yuanzhang.

    The memory of this conspirators’ device, enhanced by legend and the life story of the charismatic Liu Bowen, could have been transformed into a legend of cryptic prophetic messages from the gods “hidden” inside a book called The Baked Cake Ballad.12

    According to legend, the Shaobing Song, as it is also known, predicted the future of China including the 1449 Mongol invasion, the 1911 founding of the Republic of China and much, much more.

    To further quote Sybil Leek:

    The next era of Liu Ji’s visions was the 50-year period from 1911 to 1960. Liu Ji predicted the Chinese-Japanese war which would come in the year of the ox (1937) and would last for 1,085 days. He did not see the end of the war as a lasting peace. But he foresaw that around 1947 a great statesman would arise to lead the Chinese into an era of peace.

    Among other major predictions he made were that a world war would involve every country and that 1917, the year of the snake, would be one of the most ominous dates in the period. He predicted an earthquake in Japan in 1923, the year of the swine; the great world depression in 1931, the year of the snake; and the European war in 1939, the year of the rabbit.

    Other interpreters believe that the Shaobing ge contains cryptic allusions to the rise of the great eunuch admiral of Ming times, Zheng He, the establishment of the Quin dynasty, the Opium Wars, and the first Sino-Japanese War, along with the founding of the Republic of China in 1911.13

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    Another Text Accurately Forecasted China’s Future

    Liu Ji was not the first Chinese prognosticator of the future to be spoken of in the same breath as Nostradamus. In the reign of Emperor Tang Taizong (599-649 CE), Li Chun-feng and Yuan Tian-gang wrote a book that seems to contain a startlingly accurate forecast of China’s struggle against Japan in World War Two.

    This strange and ancient text, called Tui bei tu (“Back-Pushing Sketch,” apparently an allusion to the sixtieth, final, and farthest-in-the-future prophecy in the book), has never been translated into English. Dr. Yow Yit Seng writes in Chinese Dimensions: Their Roots, Mindset and Psyche that this prophetic work consists of

    sixty illustrated diagrams [called ‘surreal drawings’ by other commentators], each with lyrics and descriptions in a cryptic style. Each scenario uses a ‘Celestial Stem and Terrestrial Branch’ used in [the] Chinese calendar, as well as a scenario from the I Ching. Each scenario seems to have accurately predicted events in Chinese history from the Táng dynasty onwards. It accurately predicted that there would be twenty-one emperors in the [Tang] dynasty from the [Li] family, with one of them from outside the family. It also foretold the rise of Empress Wu Zetian, the only ruling empress in the history of China.

    To illustrate the difficulty of translating the Tui bei tu into English – or any language – in intelligible fashion, Dr. Yow provides a rough translation of Scenario 39, which depicts a bird standing on top of a mountain, with the rising sun at the bottom of the picture.

    The lyrics run somewhat as follows:

    Bird without leg, moon in the mountain.

    The sun rises, everyone cries.

    Disharmony in mid-December.

    Sparrows to the south of the mountain, traps to the north.

    One morning cries from metal rooster is heard.

    The sea is lifeless, the day is over.

    Dr. Yow writes that,

    the Chinese character of a legless bird with a mountain is the character ‘Island’. Hence the event refers to an island nation. The island nation is linked to the rising sun; hence, Japan. When a million soldiers invade China with unprecedented cruelty and inhumanity, everyone cries.

    In December of 1941, the Japanese talked peace in the United States, while secretly attacking Pearl Harbour. [This] fits the description ‘Disharmony in December’.

    There are sparrows (small birds) south of the mountain, referring to small nations in South East Asia being captured. In the picture there is certainly an eagle that could trap it, coming from in the North, symbolising the United States. (Incidentally, the word luo is also the first word of the Chinese name for President Roosevelt, the US president who subdued Japan.)

    Japan surrendered in August 1945. This corresponds to the Chinese calendar year of [the] rooster. The month of surrender was August, a ‘metal’ month.

    The sea is lifeless when Japanese troops surrender unconditionally. Ri refers either to the day, or in this case to Japan (riben).

    Dr. Yow concludes: “While the earlier scenarios depict events from the various dynasties, the later scenarios could probably describe events outside China.”14 

    The Tui bei tu, like the Shaobing ge (though in its vastly expanded form as the youthful adventures of Liu Bowen), had its moment in the television sun. From April 16, 2007, to May 11, 2007, Chinese TV aired in twenty instalments a serial called A Change of Destiny about two young men who hope to change their destiny by making use of the scenario-diagrams of the Tui bei tu. One tricks the other into buying a fake set of diagrams. This is straightened out; but the hopes of the two for an extraordinary future are dashed when they see that, every which way they interpret the scenarios, courting the future with the help of the Tui bei tu is always to court disaster. The future is our own responsibility, and not that of sixty predictive drawings. The 20-episode Change of Destiny series was extremely popular all across China, and shows the hold that divinatory practices still have on this country now embracing cut-throat capitalism.15 

    So odd and cryptic are the predictions of Shaobing ge that there are no translations, into any language, that are not to some extent creations of the translator almost as much as they are creations of Liu Ji and whatever gods, if any, communicated his predictions to him.

    Below are a few lines of text from the Baked Cake Ballad, in a translation so rough, so raw, and obscure, that it is virtually impenetrable. To try to interpret it is to be left fending for yourself in a forbidding if provocative jungle of words that are seemingly stand-alone because they seem to be completely unconnected.

    Yet a translation like this is so rough that it can never really mislead, even while it illuminates only with the greatest difficulty. Perhaps these words are worth trying to interpret, though, if only to catch a mention of what’s going to happen in 2012, in China and in the world.

    World hunger and cold are strange, the pillars of Germany by the baby dragon.

    10,000 Sun sub-stack layer, (Wanli descendants) ancestral mountain shell clothing line.

    Wu Zi Ji-Chou tangled everywhere, people are not at home, occasional famine bandits hair, safe guarding the good sweet-scented osmanthus.

    Chaos to the former pro-Western thief, no one dared to Zhongliang admonition, glad to see descendants of shame see the day, recession gas transported back to heaven, lack of ears on Kyrgyzstan in the middle and a Machine made to go West, East.

    Red Head Boy and Girl are bleeding, upside-down triple the total before I go, shall be synthesized Sichuan pages, (predicted emperor) eighteen wins between the fire and water.

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    Footnotes

    1. Leek, 42; 2. Ibid; 3. ter Haar, 154; 4. Ibid, 163; 5. Needham, Vol. 1, 144; 6. Seng, 100; 7. Needham, Vol. 1, 145; 8. Roberts, 444; 9. Needham et al, Vol. 5, Part 7, 25, 232; 10. Wikipedia: Addicts, http://wiki.d-addicts.com/Shen_Ji_Miao_Suan_Liu_Bo_Wen; 11. ter Haar, 158; 12. Liu Bowen and the Moon Cakes, http://history.cultural-china.com/en/47H2345H11800.html; 13. Leek, 43; 14. Seng, 252-254; 15. Wikipedia: Change of Destiny, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Change_of_Destiny

    Works Consulted

    Sybil Leek, “Sybil Leek’s Psychic Notebook,” Occult: New Dimensions of Life in the Field of Psychic Phenomena 5 (3) (October 1974): 42-45+.

    Liu Bowen and the Moon Cakes on Mid-Autumn Festival, http://history.cultural-china.com/en/47H2345H11800.html

    Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered America, New York: HarperCollins/Harper Perennial, 2008.

    Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, Vol. 1, Introductory Orientations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954.

    Joseph Needham, Gwei-Djen, Lu; Ping-Yi, Ho; and Ling, Wang. Science and Civilization in China. Vol. 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 7, Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

    J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World, London: Penguin Books, 1980.

    Yow Yit Seng, Chinese Dimensions: Their Roots, Mindset and Psyche, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia: Pelanduk, 2006.

    Barend J. Ter Haar, “Messianism and the Heaven and Earth Society: Approaches to Heaven and Earth Society Texts,” David Ownby en Mary Somers Heidhues, Eds., “Secret Societies” Reconsidered, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1993, 153-176.

    Wikipedia: Addicts, http://wiki.d-addicts.com/Shen_Ji_Miao_Suan_Liu_Bo_Wen

    Wikipedia: Change of Destiny, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Change_of_Destiny

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  • From Ancient Egypt to Modern Science: The Forgotten Link

    From Ancient Egypt to Modern Science: The Forgotten Link

    From New Dawn 129 (Nov-Dec 2011)

    The ‘Scientific Revolution’ describes the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century watershed in the basic attitude to the scientific method, laying the foundations for the modern technological age. Starting when Copernicus went public with his heliocentric theory in 1543, and ending when Isaac Newton published Principia Mathematica in 1687, textbooks say there was a window of just 150 years when European thinking was transformed from superstition to science.

    But that’s not the way it was. In reality, science owes its origins to beliefs that the high priests of modern science such as Richard Dawkins would regard as even more irrational than Christianity. Far, far worse to them would be the fact that the particular ‘superstitions’ in question were unprecedentedly influential.

    In fact, the Scientific Revolution was driven by a very specific magical philosophy and cosmology, set out in a set of texts that inspired all the pioneers of science, directly or indirectly.

    The Books that Really Changed the World

    Bluntly, these texts have had a greater influence on Western civilisation than any other set of texts apart from the Bible – and the greatest effect on modern Western civilisation than any texts including the Bible. The scandal is that so few people today have even heard of them.

    They are a collection known as the Hermetica, setting out an uncompromisingly magical and mystical philosophy and cosmology. Their name comes from their attribution to the legendary Egyptian teacher, Hermes Trismegistus (‘Thrice-Great Hermes’). According to the Hermetica, he was a descendant of the god of that name – Hermes in Greek, identified with the Egyptian god of learning, Thoth, scribe to the gods.

    In medieval Europe, with the exception of the one treatise Asclepius, they had been lost, thanks to the fourth-century crackdown on pagan learning by Christian zealots. However, the books survived in the Middle East, becoming the foundation for the famously advanced medieval Arab science. All knowledge-hungry Europeans could do was hope – and pray? – that they might be rediscovered.

    Eventually they were. In 1463 an agent of the great patron of the early Renaissance, Cosimo de Medici, returned to Florence with a set of 14 Hermetic treatises, written in Greek, which he had acquired in Macedonia. Famously, Cosimo’s top scholar, Marsilio Ficino, was working on the first translation of the complete works of Plato into Latin – but Cosimo, beside himself with excitement at the new discovery, ordered him to drop it in favour of the Hermetic books.

    Through his translation – the Corpus Hermeticum – and allied esoteric writings, Ficino is a major figure in the restoration of Hermeticism, setting it at the heart of the Italian Renaissance. And thanks to the sensational new technology of the printing press, the Hermetic books fomented the greatest furore among European intelligentsia. It is impossible to overstate their impact, both then and much, much later. Hermeticism influenced everyone from Leonardo da Vinci to Shakespeare, and can be said without exaggeration to have kick-started the Renaissance. But the Hermetic books’ significance has always been downplayed by academics, particularly historians of science and philosophy.

    The Hermetic works were so enthralling largely because they were believed to preserve the wisdom of the most ancient period of the Egyptian civilisation, that of the pyramid builders, predating even the Old Testament. But the most important reason for their huge impact was the image of humankind they presented – diametrically opposite to Man-the-doomed-worm so beloved of the Vatican.

    According to the Corpus Hermeticum human beings are brilliant, amazing creatures of unlimited potential. Treatise X even declares that “the human is a godlike living thing,”1 reinforced by the Hermetic adage ‘Magnum miraculum est homo’ (‘Man is a great miracle’). This also applies to women: the Hermetic tradition had great respect for the feminine – a reason by itself for the Catholic Church’s horrified reaction to this audacious philosophy.

    Although to the Church it was bad enough to promote ideas of a divine-spirited Man, to include women as inherently god-like was considerably worse. Some clerics were still debating whether they had souls, and here come these vile pagans with outrageous beliefs that women were dazzling beings of ultimate light…

    Many authors have written at length about the Hermetica’s influence in generating the surge of self-confidence that inspired the great flowering of art and literature that is the Renaissance. We, however, take it further and link this Hermetic epiphany with the history of science.

    Copernicus’ ‘Visible God’

    The Scientific Revolution famously began with Nicolas Copernicus’ On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres (1543), which set out the sensational theory that the Earth circles the Sun and not the other way round. But where did he get the idea?

    A rather large clue is there on the very page showing his celebrated diagram of the Earth and other planets orbiting the Sun. Just four lines below, he explicitly references the Hermetica in relation to the metaphysical implications of the diagram, quoting a passage where Hermes Trismegistus describes the Sun as the ‘visible god’.

    This is no coincidence. All Copernicus’ radical notions can be found in the Hermetica.

    Copernicus’ famous proposition is found several times in the Corpus Hermeticum, for example, in Treatise XVI: “For the Sun is situated at the centre of the cosmos, wearing it like a crown.”2 And “Around the Sun are the six spheres that depend from it: the sphere of the fixed stars, the six of the planets, and the one that surrounds the Earth.”3 ‘Spheres’ correspond to our ‘orbits’…

    Essentially, Copernicus was claiming to have found mathematical and physical proof for principles that are set out – without proof – in the Hermetic books. Contemporary Hermeticists certainly regarded him as a hero for vindicating their sacred texts.

    The Hermetic influence spread and spread. There isn’t a major character in the Scientific Revolution who wasn’t steeped in the tradition: Kepler, Tycho Brahe, William Gilbert, William Harvey, Leibniz. The list even includes the likes of Galileo and Francis Bacon, generally considered proto-reductionists.

    The list of the discoveries either taken directly from the Hermetica or discovered indirectly by applying its basic principles to particular problems is truly impressive. Apart from the world-changing theory of heliocentricity, they include:

    The circulation of the blood

    The Earth as a magnet

    The concepts of an infinite universe and that the stars are in fact distant suns

    The idea of other inhabited worlds, some with more advanced inhabitants

    The basic principles of computer science and information theory

    Most of these were actually developed by the great Hermetic genius Giordano Bruno, as we will explain in our next article.

    Perhaps the Hermetica’s greatest – but most deliberately downplayed – impact was on the work of Isaac Newton who first put forward the theory of gravity and the other laws of motion in his Principia Mathematica in 1687: the apotheosis of the Scientific Revolution and the real start of the modern world. However, although his admirers today tend to humour his obsession with alchemy – usually very condescendingly – the extent to which he was influenced by Hermeticism is still rarely mentioned.

    Briefly, by Newton’s day the new reductionist, mechanistic thinking developed by René Descartes in the mid-seventeenth century was all the rage in scientific circles. Undoubtedly Newton began his own academic career as a mechanist but in the mid-1670s he became heavily influenced by a group of philosophers at Cambridge University known as the Cambridge Platonists.

    In fact these ‘Platonists’ were the spiritual heirs of Ficino’s Academy in Florence, founded on Hermetic principles at the very beginning of the Renaissance, the initiators of a magical brotherhood that transmitted the Hermetic tradition from Florence to Cambridge, and to Newton… And they changed his thinking – but in the opposite way to what is usually claimed. American historian of science and Newton biographer Richard S. Westfall, wrote that, as a result of his contact with the Cambridge group “the Hermetic influence bade fair to dominate his picture of nature at the expense of the mechanical.”4 Instead of moving from magic to mechanics, he moved from mechanics to magic.

    A few, such as Westfall, now acknowledge that Newton’s breakthroughs came from applying the Hermetic principles – to understand the mystery of gravity, for example.

    Newton didn’t make his great discoveries despite his occult beliefs, but because of them.

    The same is true of all the great figures of the Scientific Revolution – really the Hermetic Revolution – a very different picture from steady march of rationalism painted by the likes of Dawkins. Science’s real origins were occult and therefore, according to the modern misunderstanding, irredeemably irrational. And deeply embarrassing.

    It was only after Newton that science as we know it emerged, through the gradual separation of Hermeticism from the scientific method. History was then rewritten to pretend the magic had never been there in the first place, or that it was only ever a derisory novelty.

    However, it was the magic that did the trick. It’s often stated that if Newton had never written the Principia the modern technological world would not exist – but the fact is if he had never read the Hermetica he would never have written the Principia. For that alone we owe the ancient texts a huge debt. But did these momentously influential books really come from ancient Egypt?

    Out of Egypt

    As we saw above, when they were rediscovered everybody believed the Hermetic books originated at the most venerable period of the Egyptian civilisation, the pyramid age. Depending on one’s viewpoint, they were either humanity’s purest wisdom or devil-inspired pagan occultism, but either way their immense antiquity was accepted.

    Then in 1614 the French scholar Isaac Casaubon compared the Hermetica’s language and style to other Greek texts, arguing that they were of relatively late composition. He also believed that the Hermetic writers had borrowed from Greek philosophy and sections of the New Testament, concluding they were a second- or third-century hoax, although – to him, laudably – one that was intended to bring Egyptian pagans to Christianity.

    Hermeticism’s enemies, particularly among French Catholics (then fiercely combating its academic influence) seized on Casaubon’s work as ammunition. Meanwhile, Hermeticists, naturally, were slower to acknowledge his reasoning. Although accepting his linguistic arguments, many – particularly the Cambridge Platonists – argued that, while the books may have been written during the Greek period, their ideas were much older.

    While most historians still agree that the Hermetica came from Egypt during the period of Graeco-Roman domination, they now only accept the part of Casaubon’s case based on the style, considering his conclusion that the Hermetic writers borrowed from the New Testament a particular howler. In fact, it is now known that the gnostic theology in question pre-dated Christianity (although Casaubon couldn’t have known that). The consensus now is that the texts were written a few centuries earlier than Causabon thought. But when were their ideas first developed?

    The Hermetic books are clearly an Egyptian and Greek mix. As western academia has always been biased in favour of classical Greece, regarding it as the fount of all things worthwhile in philosophy and science, the Greek parts have been traditionally considered more important than the Egyptian. However, during the twentieth century it became increasingly obvious that native Egyptian ideas played a larger part than previously thought. Today it’s not a question of if there’s an Egyptian influence, but of how much. One faction even argues that the books are mostly Egyptian, with ideas from Plato and other Greek thinkers being crowbarred in only to help explain the underlying concepts to that particular audience.5

    The evidence is considerable: the books fit the Egyptian model of wisdom literature more obviously than the Greek tradition; the authors remain anonymous and attribute their works to Hermes – typically Egyptian – whereas Greek writers sought personal celebrity; the texts use the Egyptian, rather than Greek, system of astrology.

    Perhaps most compelling, though, is the fact that the Hermetica are not only populated with Egyptian gods and goddesses – either ‘straight’ Egyptian deities such as Isis, Thoth and Horus or Greek gods that were specially venerated in Egypt such as Asclepius and Hermes himself – but also rely on Egyptian concepts of divinity. Although Greek Hermes is customarily identified with the Egyptian wisdom-god Thoth, scribe of the gods, the two did not share identical characteristics – and Hermes Trismegistus’ are those of Thoth, not Hermes.

    The honorific ‘Trismegistus’ also makes sense as a Greek rendering of a characteristically Egyptian custom. In Egypt a person or deity was venerated simply by repeating the glyph for ‘great’, either twice or, for exceptional greatness, three times. It would be natural for a Greek translator to render a text literally reading ‘great great great’ as ‘three times great’ – or ‘Trismegistus’.

    Indeed, the practice seems to have been reserved for Thoth himself (left). An inscription from Saqqara in 160 BCE calls him “the three times great” – repeating the Demotic character for ‘great’ three times.6 Not only is this the earliest known inscription using the ‘three times great’ form, but it comes from the period of Greek domination when the Hermetic books were being composed, making the link to Thrice-great Hermes even more compelling.

    The case for a native Egyptian influence on the Hermetica is now so persuasive that many specialists believe the books originated with a specific Egyptian wisdom-cult – which obviously honoured Thoth. Borrowing ideas from Greeks such as Plato would have helped make alien Egyptian concepts seem more familiar, and ensuring Egyptian traditions were inveigled into the Greek conquerors’ own literature would have effectively preserved them for posterity. But who created the Hermetica?

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    From the City of the Sun

    A clue comes from another movement that emerged in Greek-dominated Egypt and which is closely entwined with Hermeticism – and may be regarded as Hermeticism’s esoteric twin.

    Academics may have called this school, off-puttingly, ‘Neoplatonism’ – because it borrowed some concepts from Plato’s more mystical writings – but the movement is entrancingly profound and very Egyptian: a magical system intended to reconnect directly with God during life – rather than after death – and empower the practitioner.

    It is known that the school was founded on the works of the Egyptian philosopher Plotinus (c.205-270 CE), pupil of the mysterious Egyptian sage Ammonius Saccas. And although originally it was thought to be entirely Greek-based, the presence of other influences, including native Egyptian, was acknowledged. And now some argue that the core ideas are wholly Egyptian and the Greek parts just a veneer.

    One of the main proponents of the latter is the German-born American professor of religious history Karl W. Luckert, who argues in Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire (1991) that rather than Neoplatonic the philosophy should be called ‘neo-Egyptian’. He declares: “Plotinus has given us Egyptian religion [and] theology in the linguistic garb of Hellenic philosophy.”7 The most obvious example is Plotinus’ account of a two-part soul, corresponding exactly with the well-known Egyptian ka and ba, but failing to match any Greek beliefs.

    And now there’s a huge amount of evidence that Neoplatonism preserves spiritual traditions that go right back to the very foundations of the Egyptian civilisation. Luckert has found compelling parallels between the Neoplatonic writings and the beliefs expressed in the famous Pyramid Texts. The oldest known religious writings in the world, these are inscribed on the walls of pyramids constructed between 2500 and 2200 BCE, but are unquestionably just examples of writings that originated many centuries earlier. In fact, they encapsulate the beliefs of the religion whose cult centre was at Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, close to Giza – which inspired the building of the great pyramids.

    The similarities between Neoplatonism and Hermeticism have been obvious since Ficino’s day, and clearly they are simply alternative expressions of the same worldview. For example, Iamblichus of Syria (c.245-c.325 CE), labelled a Neoplatonist philosopher by contemporary historians, opens his masterwork On the Egyptian Mysteries with an appeal to Hermes “who presides over true knowledge of the gods,”8 showing the close connection with Hermeticism. Significantly, too, Iamblichus emphasises the custom of Egyptian writers of attributing their books to Hermes while remaining anonymous.

    Given the close association of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism they obviously share a common source. And if Neoplatonism derives from ancient Heliopolis – then so must the Hermetica. Indeed, a comparison of the latter’s core spiritual and cosmological ideas does reveal them to be very similar, if not identical, to the Pyramid Texts.

    To the Heliopolitans, the universe was not merely an emanation from the creator-god Atum but also as an emanation of Atum. This fits both the Hermetic concept of the cosmos as God’s thought and the part-divinity of humanity. It also parallels the Hermetic belief in an evolving, expanding and growing universe, becoming ever more complex and multidimensional as it develops from the spiritual to the material.

    And in the Heliopolitan system, as the cosmos evolves Atum generates eight other deities, representing new forces and levels of complexity, which make up the Great Ennead – nine gods – the most famous of which are Isis and Osiris, and of which Atum is the chief. But a second ‘octave’, repeating the pattern on the level of physical matter, is generated through Isis and Osiris’ child Horus, who has the same relationship with the material universe as Atum does to all creation, and is therefore god of the material world. Not only does this seem to be the origin of Gnostic (and Platonic) ideas of the Demiurge or lesser god of this world, but also, through Horus’ association with the Sun, of two important ideas that Copernicus picked up on. The first is the Sun as the ‘visible god’ (as opposed to the invisible one, Atum). The second is that, since Atum is the centre of the entire universe, the Sun must be at the centre of our solar system.

    Although Egypt’s most ancient religion, the Heliopolitan tradition survived throughout the civilisation’s three-millennia history. In early Egypt mystical and religious wisdom were not separate from practical, technical and scientific knowledge. Both were the preserves of priests, a practice that continued through to classical times, as witnessed by the association of the great libraries, such as that of Alexandria, with temples. Even by the time the Greek traveller Herodotus visited Heliopolis in the fifth century BCE it was still considered to be “where the most learned of the Egyptians are to be found.”9 The famed third-century BCE priest and sage Manetho (‘Beloved of Thoth’) was a priest of Heliopolis – who worked to preserve his land’s religious beliefs by making them more accessible to the new Greek rulers, the very same motive ascribed to the writers of the Hermetica. But there is another important clue to the origins of the Hermetica at the very beginning of the civilisation’s history, in the person of the earliest recorded priest of Heliopolis.

    This was Imhotep, priest of Heliopolis and the genius who conceived and oversaw the building of the first great pyramid, the Step Pyramid of Saqqara, in 2650 BCE. He was so endowed with genius and divine gifts that he was worshipped by later generations – making him the perfect role model for the Hermetic belief that humans can achieve godhood through their endeavours.

    Imhotep’s cult survived through the ages. The second-century-BCE inscription to ‘three times great Thoth’ discussed above was written by a priest named Hor (Horus) who belonged to the ‘chapel of Imhotep’ in the city of Heliopolis.

    Imhotep also lives on, thinly disguised, in the pages of the Hermetica. The major character of the treatises is Hermes’ pupil, Asclepius – a descendant of Asclepius, Greek god of healing. The Greeks identified Asclepius with Imhotep – and in the Hermetic work that bears his name, the identification with Imhotep is heavily reinforced.

    So the latest scholarship vindicates the belief of the Renaissance Hermeticists such as Ficino and Bruno that their revered texts contained the wisdom of Egypt’s pyramid age. But this also means that the Scientific Revolution – and therefore the whole basis of modern science – was also inspired by the authentic wisdom of the ancient Egyptians. Where they might have got it from is quite another question, sadly beyond the scope of this article…

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    Footnotes

    1. Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, Cambridge University Press, 2003, 36.

    2. Ibid., 59.

    3. Ibid., 61.

    4. Richard S. Westfall, ‘Newton and the Hermetic Tradition’, in Allen G. Debus, Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance, Science History Publications, 1972, vol. II, 194-5.

    5. A major figure in this development was the French orientalist Jean-Pierre Mahé, in his Hermès en Haute-Egypt, published in two volumes in 1978 and 1982. Another important study is British professor of antiquity Garth Fowden’s The Egyptian Hermes (1986).

    6. See J.D. Ray, The Archive of Hor, Egypt Exploration Society, 1976.

    7. Karl W. Luckert, Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire: Theological and Philosophical Roots of Christendom in Evolutionary Perspective, State University of New York Press, 1991, 257.

    8. Iamblichus (trans. Clarke, Dillon and Hershbell), De mysteriis, Brill, 2004, 5.

    9. Herodotus (trans. de Sélincourt and Burn), The Histories, Penguin, 1972, 130.

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