This is an important piece and the only difference between my enquiries on this linage is that I at least would have beren looking for evidence in the literature because we are uncovering the original sacred understanding of the Atlantean world itself which acted as a melting pot for knowledge before it was handed on through the Greeks and the Indians.
That knowledge is disguised is no surprise either as this was common then. An associate has had wonderful success lopcating two thousand year old sciencevfrom China and let us not forget John Churchward's pronouncements on the nature of prehistory and Lemuria et al whose credibility improves with age.
As noted we now understand that the spirit operates our first tier bodies and we commincate through this. Yet the spirit is formed from dark matter and photons and is hugely more information dense.
This secret knowledge and it is not secret is underlying any spiritual aspects of all religions and related movements. It was well taught in Atlantean times and was derived from before 13,000 years ago or the time of the Pleistocene nonconformity. The problem we all face is ready access. After all the spirit world is right here among us and even working with us. Yet it is us who are blind..
..
The Religion With No Name
That knowledge is disguised is no surprise either as this was common then. An associate has had wonderful success lopcating two thousand year old sciencevfrom China and let us not forget John Churchward's pronouncements on the nature of prehistory and Lemuria et al whose credibility improves with age.
As noted we now understand that the spirit operates our first tier bodies and we commincate through this. Yet the spirit is formed from dark matter and photons and is hugely more information dense.
This secret knowledge and it is not secret is underlying any spiritual aspects of all religions and related movements. It was well taught in Atlantean times and was derived from before 13,000 years ago or the time of the Pleistocene nonconformity. The problem we all face is ready access. After all the spirit world is right here among us and even working with us. Yet it is us who are blind..
..
The Religion With No Name
By Brian C. Muraresku
http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/MurareskuB1.php
In this article, Brian C. Muraresku outlines his theory of the world's oldest surviving religion.
“The man of a traditional culture sees himself as real only to the extent that he ceases to be himself. Plato could be regarded as the outstanding philosopher of ‘primitive mentality’ – the thinker who succeeded in giving philosophic currency and validity to the modes of life and behavior of archaic humanity.”1
– Mircea Eliade
The Real Hippies
What’s
become of religion these days? Seriously. More than a billion
people across the planet are religiously
unaffiliated. That includes one
in every five Americans and Europeans, and – believe it or
not – almost
half of the British public. Impressive as those numbers are
today, just imagine the future of the Western world. Fueling the
growth of this segment, after all, is a younger generation that is
either uninterested in or entirely fed up with the organized
religions of their parents and grandparents. Despite being four
months older than the statistically oldest Millennial
(born in the distant past of 1980), I can still report the cohort’s
emerging preference: 32% of Americans aged 18 to 34 choose not to
identify with a particular faith. This is far more than any previous
generation, including those groovy Boomers, whose comparative figure
in the 1970s was an underwhelming 13%. The below graph gives due
credit to the real hippies.
At
the end of his brilliant career, mythologist Joseph Campbell
concluded that what we’re all seeking is not the meaning of
life, but an “experience
of being alive”. Across the 200,000-year history of our
species, the triggering of “powerful, pervasive, and
long-lasting” states of mind has been the essential function of
bona
fide
religion.2
Recently, our fields,
stages
and screens
– the altars of the 21st
century – have assumed that sacred responsibility, making
organized religion obsolete in a world where the full range of human
emotion is available at the tap of a thumb. A half century ago, this
is really all John Lennon was trying to say. When people are willing
to wait in line for days (yes, days!)
to get the latest iPhone or audition for American
Idol,
what the hell isn’t “more
popular than Jesus”? But fear not. There is nothing
particularly new or disturbing about that 72%
of my “spiritual
but not religious” generation intent on reclaiming
ownership of its heart and mind. Before the rise of Churchianity, in
the long-forgotten cradle of Western Civilization, our ancestors were
also drawn to a spiritually independent lifestyle – free from
any doctrine or dogma. What united them, however, was not just an
“experience of being alive”, but something they thought
was the single most important event a human being could ever
experience. Its participants, without fail, left permanently
transformed. Before religion goes the way of the fax machine, we owe
this phenomenon some serious consideration – for the sake of
our ancestors, and ourselves.
The Place Where Science Was Born
At
the tender age of 14, I began eight years of intensive training in
Latin and Greek. Accounting as they do for 60%
of the English language, I was told the mandatory Jesuit
curriculum would bump my SAT scores. An appeal was also made to the
Founding Fathers, who were themselves fairly obsessed with the
Classics. James Madison’s opinion
that Athens and Rome had “done more honor to our species
(humanity) than all the rest” was by no means unique in the
late 18th
century. The principal drafter of the Declaration of Independence,
Thomas Jefferson, looked to classical literature as “the
ultimate source of both delight and instruction”3
– admiration that hearkens back 700 years to the Renaissance,
when the key feature of the new humanism that came to shape our
Western world “was an educational and cultural program based on
the study of classical Greek and Latin authors”.4
It is no coincidence the National Mall near my home in Washington DC
is flanked on either end by rather explicit tributes to the Athenian
Parthenon (Lincoln Memorial) and the Roman Pantheon (Capitol
Building).5
Back
in the day, I was particularly attracted to Greek, at once so alien
and familiar. The process of learning an exotic alphabet was a little
weird, especially for a language credited with seeding not only
English, but so many of the institutions and disciplines we take for
granted today: democracy, law, medicine, architecture and economics;
not to mention philosophy, history, ethics or the very concept of a
university. Our love of entertainment, sports and music goes directly
back to the theaters and stadia of Ancient Greece. And it was from
scratch, let’s not forget, that a handful of enterprising minds
created the sciences we hold so dear: from cosmology and physics, to
biology and mathematics. No one articulates this more lyrically than
Carl
Sagan: “And so it was here [in the Greek isles of the
eastern Mediterranean between 600 and 400 BC] that the great idea
arose – that there might be principles, forces, laws of nature
through which the world might be understood without attributing the
fall of every sparrow to the direct intervention of Zeus. This is
the place where science was born!”
A rare edition of Plutarch's Lives from Thomas Jefferson's personal library, complete with a scrap of paper showing his handwritten notes.
From
the very beginning, therefore, I understood Greek as a kind of
initiation into ancient systems of thought that had somehow
influenced everything, then inexplicably went missing. But in a
country that was so unambiguously created as the extension of
classical insights and achievements, why did almost nobody learn this
stuff anymore? Why had this branch of knowledge become the eccentric
province of a privileged few? These questions hounded me into
college, where I was given a generous scholarship to exhaust my
curiosity as a full-time Classics geek.
Ancient
Greek Gurus and the “Secret Doctrine”
Having
already invested my high school years in two dead languages, the
exploration of yet another seemed in order. My budding interest in
religion was kind of leading in the same direction as other
disaffected youth before me – a path if not pioneered then
certainly popularized by the Beatles and my hero, George
Harrison, specifically.6
His celebrity peaking just as the first wave of Eastern wisdom hit
Western shores, George’s enormous impact on global spirituality
is nowhere better depicted than Martin Scorsese’s 2011
documentary: Living
in the Material World. My own linguistic and spiritual longings
therefore coincided in an obvious next step – Sanskrit –
which would open the door to millennia of Hindu and Buddhist
teachings. Freshmen mornings found me chanting the great Indian
epic, the Mahabharata.
My introduction to Theravada
meditation came over lunch. Afternoons were reserved for my old
pals, Homer and Plato. Most evenings carried me into the wee hours,
deciphering hundreds of lines of ancient text. It pretty much stayed
this way for four years – impossible almost anywhere else but
the rather liberal Brown University. For my senior
thesis, I translated a poem from an ascetic order called Jainism,
which likely predates both Hinduism and Buddhism. The only
appropriate way to bid farewell to these mystical, sitar-heavy
years – before selling out to a Wall Street law firm –
was to hike through India with my best buddy, who has since fled
Delhi to run a yoga
retreat in Goa. The point being, at a time when I really should
have been attending more naked
parties, something was urging me head first into a distant and
dusty past.
I
will never forget the moment in sophomore year when the line between
East and West began to blur, sparking a whole new appreciation for
those often-overlooked ancestors who birthed our civilization into
being. Up to that point, my afternoon seminar on Homer’s
Odyssey
seemed out of place for a day otherwise dedicated to obscure
breathing exercises and reading about karma, reincarnation and the
chakras. One fateful day, I had happened upon a passage
from the 5th-century
AD philosopher, Proclus,
where he makes reference to a “secret doctrine”
(αππορητον θεωρίαν) hidden away in the Iliad
and Odyssey.7
I was mesmerized! What a crazy idea to associate with the
foundation of all Western literature. Why, rather than speaking
plainly, would our very first attempt at the written word transmit a
covert agenda? And what on earth could that agenda possibly be?
Bizarre as it sounds, Proclus was not alone in thinking a surface
reading of Homer’s epics would completely miss the point. His
tradition, Neoplatonism,
arose in the 3rd
century AD as an effort to preserve the purest teachings of the
godfathers of Western thought, Pythagoras and Plato.8
One of the early stars of this school was Porphyry,
who wrote a long and complicated commentary
on just a few lines of Book 13 of the Odyssey
that, at first glance, are very pretty but easily forgettable.
Classicists
label this passage the “Cave
of the Nymphs”. The wily hero, Odysseus, after a 10-year
journey through a million obstacles in the wake of the Trojan War, is
finally homebound to his native Ithaca. Just before his ship touches
down on Greek soil, Homer pauses to describe the extraordinary harbor
that will, at long last, welcome back its native son. It houses a
sacred olive tree and a miraculous cavern populated by nymphs. The
hero’s patron goddess, Athena, selects this cave as a hiding
place for the gold and bronze valuables Odysseus has just inherited
from the friendly Phaeacians,
a mysterious but hospitable sea-faring people.9
In a blatant omission that has perplexed scholars for centuries,
however, Homer never fully resolves the ultimate fate of this
meticulously buried treasure. Mentioned just once more in passing, it
seems like a rather superfluous detail, as does the cave itself.
This head of Odysseus was discovered in 1957 on the west coast of Italy between Rome and Naples, on the grounds of the former villa of the Roman Emperor Tiberius at Sperlonga. The original sculpture likely dates to the 1st century BC.
Following
this strange episode, Athena magically transforms Odysseus into a
withered, old vagabond. It makes the ambush and graphic execution of
his wife’s suitors a little easier. Under the leaves of the
holy tree in that curious harbor, Odysseus assumes a new identity and
spends basically half the book in disguise. Reflecting on this scene
almost a thousand years after its creation, Porphyry says something
that should forever change how we think about the origin and purpose
of Western Civilization.
The translation from Robert Lamberton’s Homer
the Theologian is worth reproducing:
“Homer says that all outward possessions must be deposited in this cave and that one must be stripped naked and take on the persona of a beggar and, having withered the body away and cast aside all that is superficial and turned away from the senses, take counsel with Athena, sitting with her beneath the roots of the olive, how he might cut away all the destructive passions of his soul.”10
What
the hell? That sounded almost monastic, and much closer to the
Eastern religious tradition than anything I had heard about the
Ancient Greeks. In fact, the essence of the Buddha’s so-called
Four Noble
Truths were right there, staring me in the face. To summarize:
(1) nothing lasts forever in this disjointed life; (2) by clinging to
the ups and downs of such an existence – the good as well as
the bad – we suffer and are continuously reborn; (3) this cycle
of reincarnation can only be stopped by stripping away the unhealthy
attention we place on all things impermanent; and (4) it is through
right conduct and self-examination – in disciplines like
meditation – that we can train the mind to see beyond the
illusions of the phenomenal world and our physical body, thereby
achieving liberation.
In
the absence of any competing explanation for why Homer would waste
his time introducing a Phaeacian treasure that in no way affects the
plot, Porphyry’s metaphor of abandoning life’s pleasures
and comforts in exchange for true peace and happiness seems fair –
just as Odysseus must shed his riches, and play the beggar, prior to
his homecoming. But what the Neoplatonists are suggesting is
something altogether more radical. This is a philosophy in which the
senses are interpreted as obscuring, rather than revealing, the
truth. Porphyry’s warning to “turn away from the senses”
(τἀς αἰσθήσεις ἀποστραφέντα) is
pretty clear in the Greek. In fact, it could even be translated
“dissuade the senses”. The apparent authority of our
sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell – while great for
keeping us focused on “all that is superficial” so we
don’t walk into each other – should nonetheless be
challenged once in a while. Wonderful as they are, the senses don’t
deserve 100% control over how we perceive the world. Likewise, the
“passions” or “emotions” (πάθη)
that accompany everyday life are described as “destructive”
or, perhaps better, “plotting against” us (ἐπίβουλα).
Intent on distracting us from what is essential, Porphyry gives the
okay to “cut down” or “trim” (επικοψη)that
annoying mental chatter.
For
these quasi-Buddhists who could spot Homer’s “secret
doctrine”, the Odyssey
is an 8th
century BC invitation to a worldview in which things are not always
what they seem – where the reality of everything around us must
be questioned.11
Like the hero, Odysseus, we are called to reassess the mere surface
of things – both the outer, sensory world and our innermost
being. Underneath the illusion (what the Hindu or Buddhist literature
would term “maya”),
the real world – our true home – waits to be discovered.
For
explicit instructions on how to “dissuade” those
overbearing senses and “trim” the unruly passions, we
need look no further than Porphyry’s guru, Plotinus.
Born in Egypt in 205 AD, this virtually unknown genius is where all
Neoplatonism begins. Over the last 17 years of his life, Plotinus
wrote a massive, six-part treatise in Greek entitled the Enneads
(available here for free). In a
passage
that acknowledges the entire Odyssey
as a parable of spiritual liberation, Plotinus is quick to
distinguish our journey home as an inner, rather than outer,
adventure: “We must not look, but must, as it were, close our
eyes and exchange our faculty of vision for another. We must awaken
this faculty which everyone possesses, but few people ever use.”12
This seems like a recipe for Western meditation, in very plain and
unmistakable language. And much like the Hindus or Buddhists who
believe such exercises can penetrate the illusions that surround us,
both inside and out, Plotinus taught his students to “awaken”
(ἀνεγεῖραι)this
underused “other sight” (ὄψιν ἄλλην) in
order to reach “that other world”, where “everything
is color and beauty” not on the surface but “right from
its very depths”.13
This might resemble the world more likely encountered in dreams,
where everything is experienced – keep in mind – without
the aid of those alert, problem-solving senses. But Plotinus’
realm is different. His gives shape and meaning to the universe as we
know it – the magical source, in fact, of reality across all
times and dimensions.
In
a final surprise twist, Plotinus cautions that access to this elusive
kingdom cannot be “acquired by calculations” or
“constructed out of theorems”.14
Logic, reason or conscious reflection will have zero impact on our
ability to explore it, which can only occur through what Classicist
Pierre Hadot
referred to as “privileged experience”15
– “eyes closed” (μύσαντα ὄψιν)in
contemplation. The covert agenda attributed to Homer had now made
itself known. What Proclus had only hinted at became crystal clear
with Plotinus, as the barrier between East and West crumbled away.
It occurred to me, of course, that these guys were getting carried
away with their Homer – inventing a “secret doctrine”
where none existed in the nostalgia for a bygone era. Was it really
possible for “the place where science was born”, as Carl
Sagan pointed out, to have also birthed a completely contradictory
worldview? Where matter is just a byproduct of something much more
fundamental. Where the senses – and everything we think we know
about the world – are not to be trusted. And where each of us
possesses a latent ability, which “few people ever use”,
to explore the ultimate nature of reality.
Imagine the implications
if, for the entire history of Western Civilization, we’ve had
it all upside down.
Ten
Thousand Eyes
As
it turns out, the Neoplatonists weren’t just making this stuff
up. The idea of a non-physical world that creates and sustains the
one we inhabit – accessible only by some kind of extrasensory
power, some non-ordinary state of consciousness – was
introduced to Western philosophy over 600 years before Plotinus’
Enneads
by the godfather himself: Plato. My chance run-in with Neoplatonism
had me totally reevaluating how it all began. Sure enough, scattered
across a number of Plato’s 4th
century BC masterpieces, the “secret doctrine” shines
apparent for all to see.
[ i can go one step further. we now understand that this non physical world means just non first tier physical. It is second tier and it is profoundly physical and information dense as well - arclein ]
[ i can go one step further. we now understand that this non physical world means just non first tier physical. It is second tier and it is profoundly physical and information dense as well - arclein ]
“That
other world” mentioned by Plotinus is trademark Plato, familiar
to many as the Theory
of Forms. In perhaps his most famous passage from the Republic,
the so-called Allegory
of the Cave, Plato establishes our physical world as the mere
shadow of a more genuine reality lying just beyond our conventional
awareness. This retro, three-minute Claymation
video is an excellent refresher. Later in his Timaeus,
Plato again refers to the sensory universe as a “copy”
(εἰκόνος) or
“model” (παραδείγματος) of
something much more permanent and absolute.16
This perspective is not necessarily the most intuitive. It flies in
the face of our everyday experience, where things seem real enough
just the way they are. Plato calls “uninitiated”
(ἀμυήτων) however,
those who would object to his theory of everything. In the
Theaetetus,
he scorns those poor folks “who believe that nothing is real
save what they can grasp with hands and do not admit …
anything invisible can count as real”. Funnily enough, there
is a term to describe this “uninitiated” philosophy,
which seems to have conquered much of the Western world today: naïve
realism. It is important to remember that this worldview is a
choice and not a fact. It puts a lot of faith in the images formed
by the brain – a gullibility that keeps
magicians in business. But this kind of blind acceptance is
certainly not how our civilization hit the ground running.
Anticipating
his Neoplatonic disciples by hundreds of years, Plato likewise doubts
the reliability of our senses. The entire body, as a matter of fact,
is suspect. A memorable line from the Phaedrus
compares our condition in this world to “an oyster imprisoned
in its shell”.17
It is only by avoiding the “follies of the body” that we
can “gain direct knowledge of all that is pure and
uncontaminated,” declares the Phaedo.18
Not surprisingly, Plato insists that the same untapped ability
identified by Plotinus is our sole means of achieving spiritual
release from this confused, temporary moment we call life. Just like
Plotinus’ “other sight” (ὄψιν ἄλλην),
Plato testifies in the Republic
that “there is in every soul an organ or instrument of
knowledge” which is “blinded by ordinary pursuits”.
Though relatively few of us seem to take advantage of this amazing
faculty, once activated, it can perceive more than “ten
thousand [ordinary] eyes”. Translated by some as the “eye
of the soul”,19
Plato with no hesitation declares that it is our “exclusive
means of beholding the ultimate truth”
(μόνῳ γὰρ αὐτῷ ἀλήθεια ὁρᾶται)20
– an
obvious allusion to the so-called “third
eye” or ajna
chakra of Hindu mysticism, considered the visionary portal to
domains unseen.
"Oversoul" (1997) by visionary artist, Alex Grey
To
dispel any doubt that Plato was the George Harrison of the 4th
century BC, deftly packaging Eastern spirituality for a Western
audience, note the concept of karma embedded in the Phaedrus.
Plato makes “some ancient guilt” or “wrath”
(παλαιῶν ἐκ μηνιμάτων) responsible for families passing misfortune from one generation to
another. Not exactly what you’d expect from the people who gave
us logic and rationality! Finally, no guru would be complete without
a shameless advertisement for reincarnation. Plato’s other
well-known episode from the Republic,
the Myth of Er,
features a fallen solider who comes back from the dead to share his
incredibly vivid account of the afterlife. The resurrected Er speaks
about the process of reincarnation at length, for which there are no
less than three ludicrous words in Greek: metempsychosis,
metensomatosis
and palingenesis.
As Plato concludes in the Timaeus,
the only escape from this wheel of death and rebirth is to conquer
the same “destructive passions” that Porphyry warned
against – the ups and downs, the “pleasure and pain”
(ἡδονῇ
καὶ λύπῃ),
inherent in all “desire” (ἔρωτα).21
Ancient
Cultural Internet
If
Plato had written in Sanskrit instead of Greek, first off – the
“secret doctrine” would be indistinguishable from
esoteric Hindu or Buddhist scripture. And second, you would never
guess this was the father of all Western thought talking. We live in
a make-believe world, imprisoned by the body, and the only way out is
a hidden power we all have but never learn about? The ultimate
reality – the stuff that really counts – is invisible?
Karma, reincarnation and the chakras are all credible? By the time I
finished college, that old line between East and West made absolutely
no sense whatsoever. What made even less sense was the fact that
mainstream, Western academia never addressed what I thought was a
mind-blowing realization. I was never taught to read Homer in the
manner of Proclus, Porphyry or Plotinus. And while the Allegory of
the Cave and the Myth of Er certainly came up in my Plato seminars,
the focus was always honing our grammar and vocabulary skills, and
never the totally neglected but amusing fact that Western
Civilization was evidently founded by a bunch of hippies.
It
was in the years following, while I was supposed to be practicing
law, that I realized Plato wasn’t just making this stuff up
either. By the 4th
century BC, in fact, he was simply the latest in a long line of
mystical philosophers alluded to in a 2nd-century
AD fragment
by Numenius,
who informs us that the “initiations
[emphasis mine] and doctrines and cults … established by the
Brahmins, the Jews, the Magi, and the Egyptians” were indeed
“harmonious with Plato”.22
Given all the above similarities, the case for an Indian influence
on Ancient Greek thought seems beyond dispute.23
For our connection to North Africa and the Near East, groundbreaking
scholarship by just a few Classicists has amassed the evidence for
what a recent article in The
Guardian
dubbed an “ancient
cultural internet” connecting “a series of networked
cultures in multi-voiced conversation”. A quick glance at the
titles alone offers a great snapshot of this exciting line of
research: Martin Bernal’s Black
Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization;
M.L. West’s The
East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth;
Walter Burkert’s Bablyon,
Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture and The
Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in
the Early Archaic Age;
and
most recently, Tim Whitmarsh’s The
Romance Between Greece and the East.
Rather
than a “Greek Miracle” where Western Civilization springs
fully-formed out of nowhere, Burkert sets the prevailing view: “we
can agree that it was there [Asia Minor, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Palestine
and Egypt] that the first high cultures developed and spread their
achievements to neighboring regions.”24
While it might seem obvious for younger nations to have learned from
those who came before, like any good offspring, this is actually a
long-overdue concession in the study of Classics. Either way, a much
more accurate picture of our classical past is finally emerging from
all these “tangled
roots”. And it’s a picture that sets the stage (with
all due respect to Dan Brown) for solving the greatest riddle of our
civilization: where the hell do we come from?
"Phryne in Eleusis" (1889) by Polish painter, Henryk Siemiradzki
The Psychedelic Sacrament
We
can rest assured that the our Ancient Greek ancestors – the
very same ones who laid the foundations for almost every critical
aspect of our society today – were not entirely off the mark
when it came to tackling life’s biggest questions. They were a
diligent and practical people in all respects, whether physical or
metaphysical. They faithfully preserved an enormous wealth of ancient
wisdom it was their unique position, in the Mediterranean of the
first millennium BC, to inherit and then pass along to Western
Civilization. The “secret doctrine” traced from the
Neoplatonists to Plato himself, back further through Pythagoras and a
number of other pre-Socratic philosophers to Homer in the 8th
century BC, brings us face to face with those “high cultures”
in the Fertile
Crescent and India whose pivotal role in our story is only now
gaining appreciation. This was a world with far less distinction
between East and West, or religion and science, than exists today.
Way before any of our modern religions – including Hinduism and
Buddhism, or Judaism, Christianity and Islam – a common
initiation rite culminating in an ecstatic visionary experience
linked many of the Bronze
Age cultures that flourished after 3,000 BC: from Ancient Egypt
to Sumeria, from Crete to the Indus Valley Civilization. Over the
succeeding two thousand years, these were the civilizations that
eventually gave rise to the “ancient cultural internet”
from which Homer and Plato were able to download, in the words of
Graham Hancock, “a ‘science of the soul’ developed
through thousands of years of inquiry and experimentation and applied
with high precision to the fundamental questions of life and death.”25
In
the end, this explains Plato’s preferred definition for his
trade: “true philosophers make dying their profession.”26
What could be more fundamental? It was not was from piles of books
or heated debates that Plato came to his conclusion about the need to
awaken the “eye of the soul” in order to see clearly
through this, our carnival world of smoke and mirrors.27
It was from an experience! As a matter of fact, it was a highly
ritualized and carefully programmed experience which brought the
initiate to death’s door and back, complete with unshakeable
knowledge of exactly
what happens when we die and renewed appetite for making the most of
our precious, fleeting moment under the sun. They saw something! And
whatever it was, it changed them forever and made naïve realism
a complete joke.
28
They were reborn into a new vision of who we are and what life is all
about. This should come as no surprise. The Greek word for “doctrine”
in the “secret doctrine” (αππορητον θεωρίαν)
has nothing to do with an actual, written teaching. Derived from a Greek
root meaning to “see” or “behold” (θεωρίαν)
Lamberton
clarifies: “rather than a fixed and unchanging ‘doctrine’,
[the secret doctrine] seems to refer to a mystical and privileged
‘contemplation’ or mode of seeing”.
To
awaken Plotinus’ “other sight” or Plato’s
“eye of the soul” – our “exclusive means of
beholding the ultimate truth” – all signs point to our
hippy ancestors engaging the unrivaled technology of the natural
kingdom. The psychoactive properties of the many plants and fungi at
the Greeks’ disposal did not escape the obsession of these
early scientists.29
While Hadot’s “privileged experience” can be
cultivated in any number of ways, including meditation, the most
reliably fast-acting across the ages has been through psychedelics (a
beautiful Greek word meaning “that which makes visible the
contents of the psyche”), the significance of which will have
to be explored in future discussion.30
Prior to the celebration of the Eleusinian Mysteries in the Fall, the enigmatic Lenaia festival took place in January. Rosemarie Taylor-Perry theorizes that the purpose of this ceremony was to add herbs and psychotropic plants to fermenting wine which would later be imbibed during various rituals in the Greek religious calendar. Likely additives are thought to have included: "absinthe, belladonna berries, cannabis, datura flowers, mandrake root, [or] poppy sap or straw". The above shows an artist's rendering of a vase currently housed in the Louvre Museum in Paris, where women are clearly depicted adding some kind of herb, plant and/or fungus to the pithoi (storage containers) of sacred wine. source: "Lenäenvasen" by August Frickenhaus, Zum Winckelmannsfeste der Archäeologischen Gesellschaft Zu Berlin (1912), p. 12, available here
But
by the time they made their way to our Greek ancestors from lands
south and east, the sacred rites consisted of seven months of
detailed instruction, followed by nine days of elaborate procession
and fasting. A recreational activity this was not. Only then were
Plato and the rest of Athens’ greatest minds like Sophocles and
Aristotle “initiated into that which is rightly named the
holiest of mysteries” and allowed “the blessed sight and
vision” as a grand finale to all their effort (as attested in
the Phaedrus).31
For nearly two millennia, these so-called Eleusinian
Mysteries were the most popular initiation rites in Ancient
Greece. They welcomed not just the elite but any Greek-speaking
pilgrim, male or female, to participate in its secret rites. The
great initiation hall at Eleusis, 11 miles northwest of Athens, was
officially administered by the state for a time, testifying to the
centrality of this experience in the society we have come to idolize
and imitate in so many other ways. This was not a fringe movement by
any means.
An
Unknown Upper Paleolithic Ancestor
But
how far back does this confrontation with death reach? With the
authenticity of my feminism in deservedly serious jeopardy, I am
relieved to finally highlight the scholarship of the first woman to
appear here, Mary
Settegast. It is frankly embarrassing how men, both ancient and
modern, have cornered the market on these topics. It seems only
appropriate that as we examine our pre-literate roots (before writing
came on the scene in Egypt and Mesopotamia around 3200 BC), Settegast
should lead the way with her phenomenal Plato
Prehistorian: 10,000 to 5,000 BC Myth, Religion, Archaeology. In
a remote and nearly forgotten episode of our archaic past, just as
the Paleolithic was giving way to the Neolithic, something
extraordinary has been tucked away, awaiting inspection. An “Upper
Paleolithic culture, probably Anatolian, of which hardly anything is
known”32
seems to have been in possession of the “secret doctrine”.
Exclusively by word of mouth, they managed against all odds to convey
the sacred rites by which it was communicated past the boundary of
the last
Ice Age – 11,500 years ago – where they suddenly show
up at the Catalhoyuk
site in modern-day Turkey in 7,500 BC.
Map taken from Karageorghis, V. 2000. Ancient Art from Cyprus. The Cesnola Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, p xiv.
Source: http://www.brynmawr.edu/collections/nehinterns/cypriote/cyprusmap.html
For the obvious reason that there are no records of this event, where
linguists must concede their specialty to archaeologists, the
unbelievable antiquity of the spiritual roots of Western Civilization
has never been properly considered part of the Classics curriculum
(nor part of our history in general). This is prehistory, after all.
As a result, few aside from Settegast have ever explored the
possibility that the initiations of Ancient Greece trace back in an
unbroken, continuous line to the hunters and gatherers of the
Paleolithic eastern Mediterranean. The evidence is certainly there,
however, for “a thriving center of cult life, one whose shrines
were enriched by decorations and statuary which recall the later
mystery religions of Iran and Egypt, as well as the Aegean and
Anatolia”. Indeed, the findings at Catalhoyuk are seen by
Settegast to “suggest that the freeing of the soul in life, the
rebirth of the living individual onto a higher plane of being, was
the goal toward which the Catal[hoyuk] rites were aimed”.33
We seem to have a match!
Rather
than scrapping together a miserable existence, our uncivilized
forebears in Asia Minor may have been busy perfecting a ritual that
would somehow survive 7,000 years, to be assimilated by a huge swathe
of the Ancient Greek world. Only slightly east of the place where
democracy and the sciences first came to light, Catalhoyuk –
the land of Homer and the Trojan War – couldn’t be better
situated. But if a smoking gun is going to emerge anywhere to prove
the merits of this theory, my bet is the on-going dig at another site
due east named Gobekli
Tepe (90% of which remains unexcavated). First opened in 1995,
the presence of a ritual complex in the 10th
millennium BC has already been confirmed – making this, per the
Smithsonian, “the
world’s first temple”. Topographic scans have
indicated that additional structures waiting to be unearthed could
date even further back to 13,000 BC! Was Gobekli Tepe the brainchild
of the same unknown “Upper Paleolithic culture” behind
Catalhoyuk? Are these the true spiritual ancestors of Western
Civilization?
If
a Stone Age people really did manage to transmit those secret rites
in the absence of written language for thousands of years, then the
visionary experience that was their core can properly be termed the
longest-surviving religion the world has ever known. Ironically, no
one’s ever heard of it. It does not have a name, and perhaps
it never did. But if any religion is going to recapture the hearts
and minds of a spiritually thirsty generation, this is the one! When
the mysteries finally showed up in Ancient Greece – across the
most improbable expanse of time – Plato and his disciples were
keen to seek admission and initiation. Amazed and transformed by
their glimpse of immortality, the creators of Western thought ensured
that the tireless efforts of our Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic
ancestors did not go to waste. Under penalty of death for exposing
the big secret, they nonetheless committed their visions to a
language which almost nobody understands today. It was worth the
risk for our species to retain memory of the single most unique event
a human being could ever experience. This was a serious and
cherished experience that worked for their world, and no doubt works
for ours – the spitting image as we are of so many Ancient
Greek institutions and disciplines. Our society can no longer afford
its unexplained ignorance of the “secret doctrine”,
something so integral to our founders’ worldview. To dismiss
this religion is to deny our birthright, and to totally misinterpret
the whole point of Western Civilization. Unlike any other in the
history of our planet, this religion has stood the test of time. It
is our collective responsibility to acknowledge its influence in our
past, to reincorporate it into the 21st
century and – in continuing imitation of our ancestors –
to carry it forward to those new worlds being birthed in
this solar system and beyond.
Endnotes
6
Their 1967 meeting with Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the Transcendental
Meditation movement, marks a turning point in Eastern
philosophies becoming more widely available to a Western audience.
27
Algis Uzdavinys, The
Golden Chain: Anthology of Pythagorean and Platonic Philosophy,
at p. xi: “The task of the ancient philosophers was in fact to
contemplate the cosmic order and its beauty; to live in harmony with
it and to transcend the limitations imposed by sense experience and
discursive reasoning … and it was through this noetic vision
(noesis) that the ancient philosophers tried to awaken the divine
light within, and to touch the divine Intellect in the cosmos. For
them, to reach apotheosis
was the ultimate human end.”
Brian C. Muraresku graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University in 2002, with a concentration in Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. He obtained a law degree from Georgetown University and was admitted to the New York Bar in 2005. Muraresku has been practicing international law for 10 years, while maintaining an obsession with the mysterious spiritual foundations of Western Civilization. He lives in Washington D.C. with his lovely wife, Pilar, and enjoys dancing to Bob Marle
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