By Jonathan Black
Alternative History and Esoteric Philosophy
- two portals into the same world?
Something that often surprises me about the opponents of alternative history is how readily they stoop to intellectual dishonesty. Typically the 'scientifically correct,' as I like to think of them, present themselves as high-minded defenders of intellectual rigour. Then they go right ahead and attribute to others claims they have never made just so they can rubbish them!
The 1999 Horizon documentary about Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval was a shining example of this, cut, dried and well documented in the adjudication of the Broadcasting Standards Commission. Maybe it's a kind of tribute? If the scientifically correct were sure of their ground, perhaps they wouldn't feel the need to behave so shiftily?
But they do, more's the pity on several deep and important, levels. Because alternative history often touches on what the existentialist theologian Paul Tillich called 'the ultimate questions' - the questions of where we come from, who we are and what the meaning of life might be. Of course, ideally, these questions should inspire in us a whole-hearted desire to discover the truth. We should be passionately interested yet scrupulously disinterested, setting aside all partisan affiliations, even the desire to be right, because upon the answers we give to those ultimate questions depends the way we choose to live our lives.
Exactly how does alternative history bear on the ultimate questions? I think this is best explained using an example that is central to alternative history. If the Sphinx dates back deep into what's conventionally called the Stone Age, in other words if it is many thousands of years older than conventional, academic history allows, then it follows that we are not who we thought we were. Our history has different patterns to the accepted ones.
This question of the age of the Sphinx is also an example of a curious feature of the human condition as a whole, a feature which is quite remarkable when you come to consider it, but often overlooked:
when it comes to issues like these, we find ourselves dealing with minute fragments of evidence that admit of many different interpretations, sometimes even contradictory ones.
It seems to me to that when it comes both to the great questions of history, and to the great questions of life and death that are tied up with them, the evidence is often not so overwhelming that it imposes an answer on us. We often have great latitude when we choose what to believe.
Perhaps we then choose what we want to believe?
Important then to be aware of which part of ourselves is doing the choosing, that we do not choose unconsciously but bring our full intellect to bear. Is it the part that really wants to know the truth that is doing the choosing? Or is it the partisan, egotistical side that wants to be right or to be on the winning side?
* * *
As I try to show in my book, The Secret History of the World, that fact that we are in a position to consider the ultimate questions in a relaxed a tolerant way and without trying to tear each other's throats out, the fact that a wonderful forum like Graham Hancock's website exists, is in part at least due to the work of the secret societies. In particular the secret societies that lay behind the Royal Society, and therefore the great scientific and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, created protected spaces - sometimes called lodges - where free-thinking, disinterested intellectual enquiry could take place.
In these spaces people like Newton, Boyle, Hooke and Harvey were not only able to discover and define gravity, formulate the law of thermodynamics that paved the way for the internal combustion engine, invent the microscope and discover the circulation of the blood, they were also able to pursue their interest in alchemy and other arcane subjects. When an outsider questioned Newton about his interest in astrology, he is reported to have replied 'Sir, I have studied it, you have not.' Newton also believed that that we live in a world dense with secret codes - in the laws of nature, in books like the Bible and in ancient monuments like the ones on the Giza plateau. They were put there, he believed, to help draw our intelligence out of us.
The initiates of the secret societies had realized that you get two very different sets of results if you look at the world as objectively as possibly and then on other occasions as subjectively as possible. This realization brought great material benefits to the world, but it also opened up many strange realms of thought…
It was brooding on these sorts of things, especially the dates of the monuments on the Giza plateau, that led me to think I might have a contribution to make as a writer. In my day job I was editing and publishing at different times not only Graham and Robert, but also Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight, Robert Temple, David Rohl and Michael Baigent. In my spare time I had also developed an interest in esoteric philosophy, in theosophy with a big and small 't', in the Rosicrucians and their modern representatives, the Anthroposophists. I used to delight in finding obscure and weird old books about the esoteric and mystical in second hand bookshops - for example the works of magi like Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme.
And it struck me that, although, as far as I knew, none of these alternative historians were - at that stage at any rate - much interested in esoteric philosophy, many of their discoveries were confirming its tenets, regarding, for example, the claims that the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid are much older than conventional history allows or related claims regarding the historical reality of Atlantis and the Flood.
If new evidence was being unearthed that suggested that extremely important traditions like these have some basis in historical reality, the question naturally arises: what other esoteric traditions about history might also be true? So I planned to try to weave together into one narrative historical lore from different esoteric traditions from around the world. In order to achieve one narrative thread, I decided to focus on what they had in common - discarding what are sometimes called 'cultural accidentals' - and also to focus, where possible, on traditions that chime in with the latest discoveries of alternative history.
I very quickly realized that this if this history was to be in one volume rather spreading across many, many volumes, it could not incorporate debate as to whether its claims - the arguments for and against the Sphinx being some twelve thousand years old, for example - are true. This would have to be a 'take it or leave it' history. If readers wanted to follow up these debates, the pros and cons, they'd have to turn to the works referenced at the back. (In the case of the Sphinx these would be books by Graham and Robert, John Anthony West, Robert Temple and Schwaller de Lubicz.)
After a while I began to formulate a theory as to what these esoteric traditions all had in common: they describe the ways that the supernatural works in the world. Gods, angels and spirits may have different names in different places and at different times, but, according to secret teachings everywhere, the patterns they help make, the shapes they give to our lives are the same. Therefore The Secret History of the World describes patterns that wouldn't be there if materialistic science accounted for everything.
Of course it is quite impossible to prove supernatural events on the page. I couldn't do that even if I wanted to. But I did entertain a very big - perhaps insanely big - ambition. I tried to weave all these different mystical traditions about our beginnings and endings and great turning points in between together into one epic imaginative vision. My aim was to see if this imaginative vision formed a coherent, cogent whole that might be set against the scientific materialist one. I couldn't think of anyone who had tried to do this since Milton, and he had done it in very different circumstances, when scientific materialism was beginning to roll back the idealism that had been the universal philosophy up to that point.
Madly, I asked myself if it were possible to create an imaginative vision that would be a sort of mirror image to Milton's - written at a time when scientific materialism seems to many to be beginning to fray and look a bit thin at the edges.
I wanted to write a book that would be an experience, not a collection of arguments. So the deep structure of the book is as follows. I try to show patterns in history that are perhaps deeper than the laws of economics, the effects of climate change and the conventional, materialistic view of politics that interest modern, academic historians. In other words I show history operating according to what I call - after the poet Rainer Maria Rilke - the Deeper Laws. Then at the end of the book I invite readers to look at their own lives to see if they can't find these same Deeper Laws operating there.
The Secret History of the World invites readers to trust their own personal experience in preference to the say-so of academic experts. I have known many academics as teachers, authors and friends. Naturally I would trust their judgment when it comes to their fields of research. I wouldn't always extend the same trust when it comes to questions of how I ought to live my life. (If you're hesitating on this point, just think of the average don's dress sense!)
* * *
The world is a much more mysterious place than we have been brought up to believe. There are other ways of knowing than the one we have been taught to see as the exemplar and paradigm of knowing..
The 1999 Horizon documentary about Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval was a shining example of this, cut, dried and well documented in the adjudication of the Broadcasting Standards Commission. Maybe it's a kind of tribute? If the scientifically correct were sure of their ground, perhaps they wouldn't feel the need to behave so shiftily?
But they do, more's the pity on several deep and important, levels. Because alternative history often touches on what the existentialist theologian Paul Tillich called 'the ultimate questions' - the questions of where we come from, who we are and what the meaning of life might be. Of course, ideally, these questions should inspire in us a whole-hearted desire to discover the truth. We should be passionately interested yet scrupulously disinterested, setting aside all partisan affiliations, even the desire to be right, because upon the answers we give to those ultimate questions depends the way we choose to live our lives.
Exactly how does alternative history bear on the ultimate questions? I think this is best explained using an example that is central to alternative history. If the Sphinx dates back deep into what's conventionally called the Stone Age, in other words if it is many thousands of years older than conventional, academic history allows, then it follows that we are not who we thought we were. Our history has different patterns to the accepted ones.
This question of the age of the Sphinx is also an example of a curious feature of the human condition as a whole, a feature which is quite remarkable when you come to consider it, but often overlooked:
when it comes to issues like these, we find ourselves dealing with minute fragments of evidence that admit of many different interpretations, sometimes even contradictory ones.
It seems to me to that when it comes both to the great questions of history, and to the great questions of life and death that are tied up with them, the evidence is often not so overwhelming that it imposes an answer on us. We often have great latitude when we choose what to believe.
Perhaps we then choose what we want to believe?
Important then to be aware of which part of ourselves is doing the choosing, that we do not choose unconsciously but bring our full intellect to bear. Is it the part that really wants to know the truth that is doing the choosing? Or is it the partisan, egotistical side that wants to be right or to be on the winning side?
* * *
As I try to show in my book, The Secret History of the World, that fact that we are in a position to consider the ultimate questions in a relaxed a tolerant way and without trying to tear each other's throats out, the fact that a wonderful forum like Graham Hancock's website exists, is in part at least due to the work of the secret societies. In particular the secret societies that lay behind the Royal Society, and therefore the great scientific and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, created protected spaces - sometimes called lodges - where free-thinking, disinterested intellectual enquiry could take place.
In these spaces people like Newton, Boyle, Hooke and Harvey were not only able to discover and define gravity, formulate the law of thermodynamics that paved the way for the internal combustion engine, invent the microscope and discover the circulation of the blood, they were also able to pursue their interest in alchemy and other arcane subjects. When an outsider questioned Newton about his interest in astrology, he is reported to have replied 'Sir, I have studied it, you have not.' Newton also believed that that we live in a world dense with secret codes - in the laws of nature, in books like the Bible and in ancient monuments like the ones on the Giza plateau. They were put there, he believed, to help draw our intelligence out of us.
The initiates of the secret societies had realized that you get two very different sets of results if you look at the world as objectively as possibly and then on other occasions as subjectively as possible. This realization brought great material benefits to the world, but it also opened up many strange realms of thought…
It was brooding on these sorts of things, especially the dates of the monuments on the Giza plateau, that led me to think I might have a contribution to make as a writer. In my day job I was editing and publishing at different times not only Graham and Robert, but also Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight, Robert Temple, David Rohl and Michael Baigent. In my spare time I had also developed an interest in esoteric philosophy, in theosophy with a big and small 't', in the Rosicrucians and their modern representatives, the Anthroposophists. I used to delight in finding obscure and weird old books about the esoteric and mystical in second hand bookshops - for example the works of magi like Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme.
And it struck me that, although, as far as I knew, none of these alternative historians were - at that stage at any rate - much interested in esoteric philosophy, many of their discoveries were confirming its tenets, regarding, for example, the claims that the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid are much older than conventional history allows or related claims regarding the historical reality of Atlantis and the Flood.
If new evidence was being unearthed that suggested that extremely important traditions like these have some basis in historical reality, the question naturally arises: what other esoteric traditions about history might also be true? So I planned to try to weave together into one narrative historical lore from different esoteric traditions from around the world. In order to achieve one narrative thread, I decided to focus on what they had in common - discarding what are sometimes called 'cultural accidentals' - and also to focus, where possible, on traditions that chime in with the latest discoveries of alternative history.
I very quickly realized that this if this history was to be in one volume rather spreading across many, many volumes, it could not incorporate debate as to whether its claims - the arguments for and against the Sphinx being some twelve thousand years old, for example - are true. This would have to be a 'take it or leave it' history. If readers wanted to follow up these debates, the pros and cons, they'd have to turn to the works referenced at the back. (In the case of the Sphinx these would be books by Graham and Robert, John Anthony West, Robert Temple and Schwaller de Lubicz.)
After a while I began to formulate a theory as to what these esoteric traditions all had in common: they describe the ways that the supernatural works in the world. Gods, angels and spirits may have different names in different places and at different times, but, according to secret teachings everywhere, the patterns they help make, the shapes they give to our lives are the same. Therefore The Secret History of the World describes patterns that wouldn't be there if materialistic science accounted for everything.
Of course it is quite impossible to prove supernatural events on the page. I couldn't do that even if I wanted to. But I did entertain a very big - perhaps insanely big - ambition. I tried to weave all these different mystical traditions about our beginnings and endings and great turning points in between together into one epic imaginative vision. My aim was to see if this imaginative vision formed a coherent, cogent whole that might be set against the scientific materialist one. I couldn't think of anyone who had tried to do this since Milton, and he had done it in very different circumstances, when scientific materialism was beginning to roll back the idealism that had been the universal philosophy up to that point.
Madly, I asked myself if it were possible to create an imaginative vision that would be a sort of mirror image to Milton's - written at a time when scientific materialism seems to many to be beginning to fray and look a bit thin at the edges.
I wanted to write a book that would be an experience, not a collection of arguments. So the deep structure of the book is as follows. I try to show patterns in history that are perhaps deeper than the laws of economics, the effects of climate change and the conventional, materialistic view of politics that interest modern, academic historians. In other words I show history operating according to what I call - after the poet Rainer Maria Rilke - the Deeper Laws. Then at the end of the book I invite readers to look at their own lives to see if they can't find these same Deeper Laws operating there.
The Secret History of the World invites readers to trust their own personal experience in preference to the say-so of academic experts. I have known many academics as teachers, authors and friends. Naturally I would trust their judgment when it comes to their fields of research. I wouldn't always extend the same trust when it comes to questions of how I ought to live my life. (If you're hesitating on this point, just think of the average don's dress sense!)
* * *
The world is a much more mysterious place than we have been brought up to believe. There are other ways of knowing than the one we have been taught to see as the exemplar and paradigm of knowing..
Read More ...
Jonathan Black's new book, The Secret History of the World, reveals extraordinary and thought-provoking insights into the esoteric teachings of secret societies down the ages and offers a radical new (or perhaps very ancient) perspective on human history.
The Secret History of the World, by Jonathan Black, published in paperback by Quercus Books, London, 2008, is available from all good bookshops and from Amazon.co.uk.
