A thoughtful item well worth tackling. He puts the idea of a so called secret society in its proper place and certainly cautions us over taking any of it too seriously. All societies per se are social gatherings useful to share ideas and intentions. Critically they socialize ideas and intentions.
We too have learned that a good idea shared with one person lacks life. Share it with many and you get a little buzz. Share it in company with a dozen or so and you may have ignition..
Knowing that it is still a miracle when something gets done.
.
Freemasons, Secret Societies, Conspiracies, Consciousness & the Hidden Masters:
An Interview with Gary Lachman
By Richard
Smoley
http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.ca/2016/05/freemasons-secret-societies.html
An
overlooked but powerful current is flowing in our time. It’s found in a
small group of writers and thinkers who are trying to overcome the materialism
and rationalism of the present age and rediscover the perennial truths that lie
behind all religion. These writers are grappling with the occult and esoteric
paths of the past and present[…]
In this small but distinguished company is Gary Lachman. He started out in the 1970s in the New York rock scene as one of the original members of the groundbreaking New Wave band Blondie. In 1996 he moved to London, where he established himself as a full-time writer, contributing to publications such as Fortean Times, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement.
In this small but distinguished company is Gary Lachman. He started out in the 1970s in the New York rock scene as one of the original members of the groundbreaking New Wave band Blondie. In 1996 he moved to London, where he established himself as a full-time writer, contributing to publications such as Fortean Times, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement.
Since 2001 Gary has produced a steady stream of books, including Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius; The Secret History of Consciousness; A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult; and Politics and the Occult: The Right, the Left, and the Radically Unseen.
In recent years he has published biographies of major esoteric figures including P.D. Ouspensky, Emanuel Swedenborg, Rudolf Steiner, Carl Jung, and H.P. Blavatsky (see his interview in New Dawn 137).
Gary’s latest work, published in December 2015 by Tarcher/Penguin, is The Secret Teachers of the Western World, a monumental work that unveils the esoteric masters who have shaped the intellectual development of the West, from Pythagoras and Zoroaster to little-known twentieth-century figures such as Jean Gebser and René Schwaller de Lubicz.
In June 2015
I conducted an e-mail interview with Gary about secret currents in the Western
tradition.
RICHARD
SMOLEY (RS): Many people have a sense, however dim, that what is going
on in the news is only the thinnest skin upon a sea of struggles and forces
that we can barely conceive of. Would you agree with this assessment?
GARY
LACHMAN (GL): I suspect that at most times what we are aware of is
only a selection of what is actually taking place. I mean this in the broadest
sense possible. In terms of the media, it’s reasonable to assume there are a
variety of filters in place that result in an edited version of things getting
to us. But then there are people who devote their energies to ‘uncovering’ the
truth and ‘revealing’ the facts about this or that event. It does strike me
that one could get lost in attempting to track down the ‘truth’ about things,
in terms of the political, economic, social situation. I mean conspiracy
theorists who pursue an elusive solution to the mystery of who ‘really’ is in
power and what ‘really’ happened in this or that situation.
I think it
is important to be discriminating about what we accept from our sources and to
be aware that every source has its bias. Personally, I am more interested in
the kind of things that are outside this kind of ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’,
in the philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s phrase. I mean philosophy, thought, etc. I
think it’s always a good time to pursue the good, the true, and the beautiful,
whoever is running the show. I also think there is less covert control than
some people believe, but it seems de
rigueur nowadays to feel that everything we see on the news is
false. The show itself is ultimately unimportant. It is an unavoidable nuisance
that we nevertheless need to be aware of in order to pursue our aims.
RS: Novelist Ishmael Reed
wrote, “Beneath or behind all political and cultural warfare lies a struggle
between secret societies.” How much truth do you think there is in this
statement?
GL: Well, I don’t know.
I first came across it, as many people did, in Robert Anton Wilson and Bob
Shea’s conspiracy fantasy Illuminatus.
Are there really secret societies at work, manipulating events and controlling
the world? If there are, they don’t seem to be doing a particular good job of
it.
I think that
at different times there have been societies or groups of people who have
worked together to effect some change or introduce some idea into the societies
of their time. I talk about some of them in my new book, The Secret Teachers of the Western
World. But these were relatively small groups who were active at a
certain time, and when you look at what they were doing, the aura of mystery
and sensation around them being ‘secret’ dissolves. That isn’t what is
important about them.
Take the Fedeli d’Amore of Dante’s time and of whom Dante was a member. They weren’t secret in the way that we think of Skull and Bones or that kind of thing (and I should say here that my book isn’t about that kind of secret group). But they were a relatively private group of poets who wanted to introduce ideas about the divine feminine or Sophia into the consciousness of their time. They were more like what G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky mean when they talk about the ‘inner circle of humanity’ or ‘esoteric school’. I’m not saying the Fedeli d’Amore were agents of esoteric schools, but that their objectives and practice were like theirs, rather than some cabal of powerful individuals directing events from behind the scenes, which is how secret societies are popularly imagined to be.
Take the Fedeli d’Amore of Dante’s time and of whom Dante was a member. They weren’t secret in the way that we think of Skull and Bones or that kind of thing (and I should say here that my book isn’t about that kind of secret group). But they were a relatively private group of poets who wanted to introduce ideas about the divine feminine or Sophia into the consciousness of their time. They were more like what G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky mean when they talk about the ‘inner circle of humanity’ or ‘esoteric school’. I’m not saying the Fedeli d’Amore were agents of esoteric schools, but that their objectives and practice were like theirs, rather than some cabal of powerful individuals directing events from behind the scenes, which is how secret societies are popularly imagined to be.
In one sense
I think conspiracy consciousness is a good sign, in the way that Jung said
neuroses were, as an attempt by the psyche to deal with a problem. It shows
that we have a hunger for meaning. We prefer feeling that someone is in charge,
even if we don’t know who that is, to feeling that no one is and that
everything is chance and arbitrary. The hunger for meaning is good; it’s the
means of satisfying it that I find questionable. We are purposive beings who
seek out patterns and meanings. The mainstream narratives – religion, progress
– no longer satisfy our appetite for meaning, and so we seek it elsewhere. One
of the ideas of the book is that the meaning is there, but we won’t find it by
looking for it outside ourselves.
RS: One period in which
occult orders were especially influential was the eighteenth century, in which
lodges like the Freemasons played a crucial role in transforming the old feudal
and ecclesiastical order into the modern world. Do you have any thoughts or
insights about this development?
GL: Freemasonry was a
very important means for some fundamental ideas about modernity to be
disseminated. I mean ideas about tolerance, social justice, democracy,
individual worth regardless of social or economic rank. It was the spread of
these ideas through different lodges that helped prepare the eighteenth-century
zeitgeist for
the radical changes that happened with the American and French revolutions. It
is a mistake, though, to think, with Abbé Barruel and more recent writers on
the Masonic influence on these events, that Freemasonry arranged or
stage-managed them. There were Masons on both sides of the American Revolution,
and the Illuminati – the real society, not the popular romanticised idea of it
that’s present on the Internet – wasn’t ‘responsible’ for the French
Revolution. The ideas
that informed Adam Weishaupt’s short-lived and ineffective Masonic offshoot
certainly were active forces in the revolution, and they were spread through
Masonic lodges. But I think we have to credit the zeitgeist more than Weishaupt and Co. for the
storming of the Bastille. In fact in one sense we could say Freemasonry itself
was a product of the shift in consciousness that began around that time.
RS: Your new book is
entitled The Secret Teachers
of the Western World. If they were secret, how have they been able
to have such influence?
GL: Well, again, my
secret teachers aren’t necessarily secret in the sense that no one knows about
them. I mean, if they were that secret, how could I know about them? One can be a secret
teacher by teaching secrets, or one can be a secret teacher in the sense that
the influence and importance of your ideas haven’t been recognised or have been
misunderstood. Or you can be secret in another sense, as with several important
thinkers who have been marginalised or don’t fit into the standard model of
Western consciousness. It’s a broad term referring to a variable status rather
than specific group of people. Jesus Christ, for example, is one of my secret
teachers, and most people know about him. But there is a whole school of
thought that argues that what we have accepted as Christianity really has
little to do with the original teachings associated with Jesus. The Gnostics,
for example, are thought to be more in line with what Jesus actually taught
then the Petrine church of Rome.
Or take
Madame Blavatsky. If people know about her at all, she is chalked up to be an
entertaining but fraudulent nineteenth-century spiritualist with a lot of
chutzpah. But she was enormously influential on the modern world, in everything
from art, religion, and science to what became known as the ‘counterculture’. I
am not saying that everything she said about science or religion is ‘true’.
That’s not the point. True or not – and she is more often on the ball than you
might think – her ideas were tremendously influential, and I am amazed that
feminists haven’t appropriated her. I suspect the occult connotations put them
off. She isn’t secret, but her influence is not generally recognised.
I should say
the central idea of my book is that the whole Hermetic, esoteric tradition is
the victim of a war going on inside our heads. I mean the rivalry between our
two cerebral hemispheres. One of the inspirations for the book came from
reading Iain McGilchrist’s very important work The Master and His Emissary, which is about
the left and right brain and the differences between them. Briefly put,
McGilchrist revamps the left/right brain discussion by showing that the
difference between them is not in what
they do – as was originally believed – but in how they do it. They
respond to the world in very different ways, and the way they present the world
is also very different. In the simplest sense, the right brain presents a total
picture of the world. Its mode of consciousness is relational, connective,
holistic. It presents what McGilchrist calls the ‘big picture’, the overall
pattern, but its picture is fuzzy, vague. It works with metaphor, symbols, and
is focused on the living character of being. It is aware of implicit meanings,
meanings that we know and feel but cannot express explicitly. (Think of our
appreciation of music: we know a Beethoven string quartet means something, but we’d
be hard pressed to say exactly what.)
The left
brain is aimed at breaking up the big picture into smaller bits and pieces that
it can manipulate. Its main function, as Henri Bergson said long ago, is to
help us survive. It reduces the living, flowing whole presented by the right
brain to a kind of map that allows us to manoeuvre through the world
effectively. It’s interested in the trees; the right brain is interested in the
forest. One looks through a microscope, the other at a panorama.
Both are
necessary, and for the most part each gets along with the other in a system of
checks and balances, each inhibiting the other’s excesses. But McGilchrist
argues – convincingly, I believe – that in the last few centuries the left has
increasingly gained an upper hand against the right and has, in a sense, gone
on a smear campaign against it. One expression of right brain thinking that the
left brain targeted was the Hermetic, esoteric tradition, which was cast into
disrepute with the rise of mechanical science – itself an exemplar of left
brain thinking. With the dismissal of the esoteric tradition it was transformed
into what the historian James Webb called ‘rejected knowledge.’ What my secret
teachers teach is this rejected knowledge.
RS: Of the figures that
you would include among these secret teachers, which do you consider the most
influential?
GL: That’s difficult to
say, and I should point out that the book isn’t a ‘top ten’ or ‘ten best’ list
or something like that. Plato is certainly one of the most influential; in many
ways the esoteric, Hermetic roads all lead to him. He is believed to have ‘gone
to school’ in Egypt, and whatever he learned there is supposed to inform his
philosophy. But whether Plato studied in Egypt or not, his ideas about the
Forms, the ideal essences of which the physical realities of time and space are
merely shadows, is certainly at the heart of the esoteric tradition. And
Platonism informed Christianity, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and other esoteric
teachings. We can argue with and reject or accept different aspects or elements
of his philosophy, but I would say that for the West, Plato is certainly one
of, if not the most, significant source of esoteric thought, or thought in
general. Alfred North Whitehead said long ago that all Western philosophy is
but a series of footnotes to Plato.
In saying
this I’m not saying I think Plato is the ‘best’. My own philosophical
background is more in Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead, William James, and
existentialism. But Plato is still there too.
RS: Which of these figures
do you admire the most?
GL: I’m not quite sure
how to answer that. There are plenty of admirable figures in the book, as well
as more questionable ones, and also some martyrs, like Hypatia the
Neoplatonist, and the Persian theosopher Suhrawardi, both of whom fell victim
to religious persecution, as well as truly secret teachers like the so-called
Dionysius the Areopagite who welded Neoplatonism to Christianity. We do not
know who he really was, just as we have no names for the Hermeticists of ancient
Alexandria.
I can say
who has been an influence on me. One of first writers on esotericism that I
read was P.D. Ouspensky. His books Tertium
Organum and A
New Model of the Universe made a big impact on me, even before I
read In Search of the
Miraculous and became interested in Gurdjieff. I first read these
books forty years ago, and Ouspensky seemed a model of the kind of thinker I
wanted to be: he combined a romantic openness to ideas, and poetry and art with
a rigorous critical mind and he remains the best writer from what I call the
‘golden age of modern esotericism’, which took place during the 1920s, when
people like Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, Rudolf Steiner, Jung, Crowley, and others
were all active. Again, I’m not saying Ouspensky is the ‘best’ – that’s as
pointless as arguing about who’s the best guitarist. But reading his books
excited me and made me want to learn more. I tend to like figures that combine
imagination with critical thinking, which we can see as the right and left
brain working together, which is another theme running through the book.
RS: One theme that you
advance in your new book is that the cosmos is a living, conscious being, and
that we need to rediscover that fact. To what extent do you think this
rediscovery is actually happening in the world today?
GL: It seems some form
of that idea has been revived and presented in a variety of different ways
throughout the last century and into our own. Bergson argued a form of it as
did Whitehead. In the nineteenth century we have Gustav Fechner, who wrote
about the Earth as a living being well in advance of James Lovelock. The
philosopher David Chalmers has argued for a kind of panpsychism, meaning that
in some sense, the entire universe is conscious. What headway this idea has
made in altering our ‘standard model’ of the cosmos is unclear. We’d have to
interview lots of scientists, I guess, and go through the numbers.
I think more
people today have some sense of it than, say, in the nineteenth century – at
least the kind of mechanistic picture of the world popular then is less so now.
Of course, any scientist who takes the idea literally and talks about it is
subject to the scorn of his peers. But that too is an expression of the rivalry
between the two modes of thinking. The ‘hard’ left brain makes fun of the
‘soft’ right brain’s ‘need’ to see a nice, cozy universe that cares about him,
while he shows how ‘tough’ he is by saying that he doesn’t need that and
prefers the ‘truth’ about the cold, indifferent cosmos. I write about this in
an earlier book, The
Caretakers of the Cosmos, where the idea of a living cosmos is a
central theme.
RS: Thirty or forty years
ago, it seemed possible to believe that we were on the verge of a new age of
rising consciousness and compassion. It’s a little harder to believe this now.
How do you personally respond to hopes and dreams of a coming new age (however
imagined)?
GL: I’m not that keen on
predicting a new age. Western history is littered with them. I think the
current pessimism, or, more accurately, nihilism is a kind of ‘sound barrier’
that our culture, our civilisation, has to break through. Nietzsche predicted
it at the end of the nineteenth century. I think we have somewhat naïve ideas
about a new age. I believe there are shifts in consciousness. One of the
thinkers I refer to in the book and in others is the little-known German
philosopher Jean Gebser, who talks about different ‘mutations’ of consciousness
happening throughout history. But these come about through our own participation
in them; I mean we are active players, not passive recipients of something
happening in the stars or according to some ancient teachings.
The real new
age will come round when we learn how to master our own consciousness. This
means coming to understand it. This takes hard, determined work. I don’t think
the new age will come about because of nice thoughts or fun raves or because of
a conference or a festival. It will start to appear in individuals who have an
obscure hunger for some purpose higher or more demanding than what our ordinary
life can provide. These types embody in embryonic form a new consciousness that
demands a new kind of inner freedom.
We tend to
think of freedom as liberation, as being free from something. The new types want a more
significant freedom, the freedom for
some purpose greater than just fulfilling their individual needs.
In The Caretakers of the
Cosmos I borrow a term from the Russian existential philosopher
Nikolai Berdyaev and talk of a ‘creative minority’. These are the individuals
who quietly and solitarily confront the demands of the new consciousness
emerging within them. We tend to think that a new form of consciousness will be
lots of fun and full of ecstasy. But more often people experiencing a different
kind of consciousness, with different needs and appetites, tend to feel like
misfits and have to go through a long struggle to actualise their
possibilities. I have a very evolutionary way of thinking. I feel that any
important development at first makes life more
difficult for those in whom it occurs. Those who can get through
the initial difficulties develop a strength that will help them impose the new
vision on the world around them.
RS: Which living people
do you consider to be most important and impressive in fostering this higher
awareness?
GL: The most important
one for me has been Colin Wilson, who sadly died at the end of 2013 at the age
of eighty-two. I have been a dedicated Wilson reader since 1975, when I first
read The Occult.
After that I tracked down and read as many of his books as I could find. I am
in fact preparing to write a book about his work and ideas, which more or less
form the basis for much of my own writing. Wilson spent a lifetime in a
determined analysis of consciousness and developed what I find to be a very
convincing argument for why our consciousness is how it is and what we can do
to intensify it. It isn’t for everyone, but I personally have got the most out
of following his leads.
Gary
Lachman’s The Secret
Teachers of the Western World (Tarcher/Penguin) is available from
all good bookstores and online retailers.
RICHARD
SMOLEY’s
latest book, The Deal: A
Guide to Radical and Complete Forgiveness, was reviewed in the
May-June 2015 issue of New
Dawn. He is the author of Inner
Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition; The Dice Game of Shiva: How
Consciousness Creates the Universe; Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical
Christianity; The Essential Nostradamus; Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of
Gnosticism; Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History, and Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western
Inner Traditions (with Jay Kinney). A frequent contributor to New Dawn, he is editor of
Quest: Journal of the
Theosophical Society in America.
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