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Copyright Victoria LePage 2007

Christianity today is a bastion of the egalitarianism inseparable from a democratic institution. The Christian baptism is for all, the Christian body of doctrine is for all, laity and priesthood alike. The lowliest member can be assured that no arcana exist in the Christian faith, no occult secrets to which he is forbidden, no hidden cabal to which he is denied access; all is open to the light of day. Comfortingly, his religion is a perfect expression of Western democracy – to which indeed it is the time-honoured parent. But is time incubating a revolution in this ideological Eden?

In a rural area of England a group of charismatic Anglican communicants have for the past thirty or so years been quietly effecting a revival of the three-tiered power structure of the first Gnostic Christian communities. It was a ranking system consisting of laity, priests and prophets, three categories once known as hylics (the laity), psychics and pneumatics.[1] Today the members of this very private Anglican group have in effect constituted themselves, with ecclesiastical consent, the top rung of a distinctly elitist ladder of spiritual rank formed along ancient lines. They are prophets, or pneumatics.

 The members of this group are recruited only by invitation and initiation. Priests, be they archbishops or even higher, are not permitted entrance to their meetings; as healers, clairvoyants, exorcists and psychospiritual counsellors, women take leading parts equally with the men in their ritual proceedings and affairs. Services culminate in a social mingling devoted to spirited philosophic and metaphysical debate. There is no authority in charge; the members in turn officiate at the meetings, which are never made public and are held in separate premises from the church. Released from the shackles of ecclesiastical dogma, the climate is one of extraordinary zest, creativity and personal liberty – liberty of both spirit and intellect.

These people regard themselves as constituting a very undemocratic Christian brotherhood: an elite, a prophetic elite that stands above and apart from the priesthood, even though it practices a wholesale democracy in its internal affairs and relinquishes all governing status in service to those below it.

The basis of this radical return to the political structure of early Christianity, unfamiliar to most Christians today, is initiation, a process of transformation of consciousness whereby every Christian prepared to undergo the necessary study and purification could ascend by a number of stages the entire ranking system up to prophethood. Not until 1946 was the Gnostic Gospel of Philip, thought to have been written in the late first century, discovered among the Nag Hammadi codices and revealed to be a radical new source of insight into primitive Christianity and its triune hieratic structure. After nineteen centuries of suppression, the Gospel disclosed that originally there were five ascending degrees of Christian initiation. The Lord, said Philip,

has done everything in a Mystery, a baptism and an anointing [a chrism], and a Eucharist and a redemption and a marriage-chamber. (Saying 68).

The prophetic rank was associated with the sacrament of chrism. This was a preliminary anointing with oil on the forehead known as baptism by fire, but requiring the final sacrament of the bridechamber for a complete rebirth in Christ. The mysterious fire of the spirit associated with chrism and with spiritual light was prefigured in the Pentecostal visitation of the Paraclete after Christ’s resurrection, a theophany in which tongues of fire alighted on the heads of those present, bestowing on them the supernatural gifts of the spirit. The apocryphal Gospel of Philip says of chrism:

Soul and spirit are constituted of water and fire… Fire is chrism; light is fire – I do not mean worldly fire, which has no form, but another kind of fire, whose appearance is white, which is beautifully luminous, and which bestows beauty. (Gospel of Philip, 58)

And again this Gospel explains that both baptism by water and baptism by fire are necessary for redemption:

By water and fire the entire place is sanctified… The visible elements of it by the visible, the hidden by the hidden… There is water within water, there is fire within chrism. (22)

 Chrism is today a ritual that is, relatively speaking, little more than a formality. But when Gnosticism was suppressed around the third century CE so was the sacrament’s true meaning as an initiation that opens the third eye in the forehead, so bestowing the many psychospiritual gifts of the spirit; clairvoyance and clairaudience, telepathy and healing powers as well as wisdom, spiritual knowledge and preternatural sagacity. These gifts were once what distinguished the prophet from the priest, whose office was of a lower administrative order, concerned primarily with ecclesiastical law, liturgy and ritual. Chrism’s central importance in Gnosticism as an initiation of higher mind is revealed when we understand the Christological meaning the Qabalah gives to the quality of beauty, which stands at the central Christ station on the Qabalistic Tree of Life and is a primary attribute of the Christ. When the Gospel of Philip speaks of chrism bestowing beauty, he is therefore conveying “to those with ears to hear” its power to achieve a cognitive union with the Christ Spirit.

 The leading lights within the Anglican group of which I am now speaking have won such cognitive gifts in abundance. They can rightfully be called sages or prophets. Unlike their ancient forbears, these men and women have no governing function in the church, but work solely in conjunction with the ecclesiastical taskforce on the next lower rung, placing their formidable charismatic gifts at the service of the priests’ pastoral work.

 I have witnessed their participation in an exorcism and have been amazed at the quiet skill and assurance with which three of these people working together controlled the successful course of the healing. Here one finds none of the emotionalism that characterizes nearly all the Christian evangelical and charismatic sects: in the work of the spirit these Anglican initiates are true professionals, working at a level beyond that of the emotions. A similar but even more radical experiment is underway in the Reformed Lutheran church in Java, and there may well be other such cases of quiet revision to be found in the Christian world. In Indonesia, a Javanese bishop known for his ecumenical activities has been permitted to retain his initiate connection with a mystical Javanese school with a Hindu-Buddhist background. He has thus been enabled to bring to the Church the outstanding supernatural gifts proper to the prophet rather than to the priest. This is a throw-back to the Gnostic tolerance for tran-religious loyalties among the initiates, a tolerance based on the fact that long ago one prophetic brotherhood existed worldwide in the Solar temples that dotted every land.

Can this return to Christianity’s ancient initiatory system be a sign of things to come? Could it be one of the first harbingers of a philosophic/political revolution that will affect not merely the Christian church but the political world beyond it?

To appreciate the full significance of these remarkable developments in the modern Anglican and Lutheran churches it will be necessary to go back into the depths of religious history. It has often been remarked that beyond the sixth century BCE the religious past is almost a closed book, and the reason is not hard to find. Up until that fateful century, the masses, the ordinary people everywhere on earth, possessed no organized religion that we would recognize as such. They had only a simple moral code and an annual round of agricultural festivals mythically expressed in terms of gods and goddesses of the natural elements. Religion, wrapped in secrecy, was a spiritual privilege confined to the upper classes of temple and court, since its pursuit was understood to demand a high degree of educated intelligence as well as moral integrity. Secrecy was maintained because religion bestowed great powers on those who pursued it, and those powers were always in danger of being abused in the hands of the ignorant masses. To a very great degree that secrecy has never been broken.

Beyond the fact that privileged religion was basically a science of sacred knowledge and was constituted of three ascending ranks, that of priest, prophet and divine king – or four ranks if we include the ordinary people at the bottom - we still know very little about it before the end of the bronze age. Our religious history really begins after that with the advent of the new popular religions of the sixth century BCE., when Zoroastrianism in Persia, Reformed Judaism in Judaea, Brahminism and Hinayana Buddhism in India, Confucianism in China and probably Shinto in Japan opened up a new ceremonial religious world that belonged to the common people. Christianity and Islam, which appeared later, belonged of course to this popular category. The teachings and practices that evolved in this distinctively new and more open type of religion, which we can legitimately call moral religion, are really all we know with any clarity about our spiritual past.

Nevertheless, a pattern is emerging from the shadows that veil the bronze age and even earlier eras from the gaze of historians. It is a pattern throughout the world of a steady devolution of the religious hierarchy of dominance that once prevailed throughout human society. We have learned from the ancient Egyptian Pyramid texts, believed to be the oldest religious texts in the world, that in times long gone, when the legendary Horus-kings reigned over pre-dynastic Egypt, the divine initiate-king was the absolute centre of authority and power in the state; every rank bowed to his wisdom and his numinosity. And they did so because in the primordial beginnings of time he was literally a god or son of a god sent to earth to reign as the proxy of the Supreme Deity. He was literally Rex Mundi, King or God of this World.

 The rancorous distinctions between different religions and their different divine rulers – Christ for Christianity, Muhammad for Islam, and so on - belongs to our modern thought world; but in past epochs there was a far greater unity. Only one Solar religion operated across most of the earth, whatever temple celebrated it. The divine King might have different names and even promulgate different laws and doctrines in different localities, but in the unified imaginative consciousness of early peoples divinity was identified with the Sun, and was therefore always One, and His Sons were always One. Below the divine king were the prophets, high initiates who mediated his laws and teachings to the priestly class below them, while the priests administered these in more ritualistic ways to the fourth or lowest class. The prophets also applied the sacred knowledge they received from the holy Source above in the arts and sciences of civilization, and they too, as I have already suggested, constituted a more or less single brotherhood across the earth. No matter where a prophet operated, he could be in touch, telepathically or literally, with his brothers in other lands.

But in times beyond our direct recall – times we regard as mythic, possibly around 11,000 BCE, which the Egyptians called the First Time, the time of the Elder Gods, “thousands of years before the generally accepted genesis of civilization”[2]- this direct flow from the top downward began a process of devolution. The Horus kings were mortal, it is true; but hawk-headed Horus himself is credited with being one of the oldest gods of Egypt, older even than the Great Ennead, a neolithic prince, the Son of the great god Atum. Horus was identified with the Sun god Re and regarded as the Lord of this natural world even as his father Atum was the Lord of the divine realm.[3] Shamanic in nature, Horus’s divine rule was followed by that of the nine Great Ennead. This pantheon, composed of five gods and four goddesses, were also known as the mysterious Watchers from the stars who brought the arts and sciences of civilization to Egypt.[4] The Watchers were followed by a Lesser Ennead, and then a lesser lineage still of demi-gods, that of the Divine Souls, the Shemsu-hor, and finally by the fully mortal Horus-kings who reigned from Heliopolis from about 3,100 BCE. Thus the gradual decline in quality of rank began many millennia before Egyptian history officially began – Andrew Collins believes it can be traced back to the Neolithic era.[5]

 Later still, in the carved iconography of the Old Kingdom the serpent emergent from the king’s forehead tells us that baptism by the fire of Higher Mind was still alive and well and at one time authorized the crown to rule over the nation in absolute sovereignty. However, temple annals reveal that during the New Kingdom many centuries later the prophets of Thebes, centre of the worship of the god Amun, gained enormous power at the expense of the crown. They took over all state
affairs and the rituals of kingship, and the Heliopolitan king became little more than a figurehead.[6]

 The monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaton, who ascended to the throne around 1367 BCE, struggled to reverse this trend and win back the original divine puissance of the monarchy, but his failure to do so is a telling reminder of the steady downward thrust of religious power towards the end of the bronze age. Akhenaton’s reign in his new city of Armana as a genuinely divine priest-king, as once the Horus-kings had been, lasted only fourteen years, after which he was ruthlessly excised from history at the hands of the mighty prophets of Amun.[7] Thereafter, his royal successors were reduced to subservience again under the sages they had once ruled. And with the onset of the next epoch, the iron age, we see a further devaluation of religious authority – and of the serpent power that symbolized it.

With the opening of the sixth century BCE, a bitter power-struggle arises in the Solar temples everywhere between the prophets, now strongly entrenched in their acquired power, and the priestly rank below them. It is a time of enormous turmoil, with warring factions created in society by a newly emerging people’s power. With the rise of popular religion, moral issues become central for the first time. For the priests and their countless peasant charges spiritual knowledge is unimportant, the primordial Gnosis is sidelined; the conquest of good over evil isthe main religious criterion and the primary concern of the faithful.

 Thus in India the legalistic Brahmin priests succeed in supplanting the asmanas, the superior prophetic caste whose members flee into the Himalayas to become the Forest Sages of the Upanishads. In Persia the Zervanite prophets are likewise demoted and the moral struggle is defined by priests in terms of the Good God Ahura Mazdao as opposed to the evil Ahriman, the Spirit of the Lie; and in Judaea the Levitical priesthood also seizes power from the rank above, establishing a dualistic theology modelled on Zoroastrianism and its abiding moral warfare.[8] The Levites disavow the ancient Judaic mysteries based on the Egyptian religion and exile the Zadokite prophets to the Syrian and Damascene wildernesses, forbidding them under pain of death to teach under the name of any prophet later than Ezra.[9] At the same time the serpent, once the symbol of kundalini’s wisdom and sovereignty, becomes in the new dispensation in Jerusalem the outright enemy of God and is seen no more as the sacred symbol of Higher Mind.

Today, the last act in this great devolutionary drama is being played out as the secular Western world seeks to dethrone and emasculate the last vestiges of religious power, now concentrated in priesthood. The initiate-king has gone, the prophet has gone, and now the priest is the final target in a campaign against religion itself, led by a growing number of sceptical scientists and philosophers like the renowned atheist Professor Richard Dawkins.[10] The democracy of the masses has finally triumphed; like all our “elites”, priests are a threatened species. The Church, whose sole concern for many centuries has been to police the morals of its flock, is in steep decline, its authority eroded in the politics of secular majority rule.

 It might be objected that religious fundamentalism is actually on the rise, but fundamentalism is essentially a phenomenon of the people, heavily laden with home-made dogmas and frequently led by lay preachers rather than ordained priests. It is par excellence the ultimate symptom of democracy run riot, of rule by those on the last rung left on the hierarchical ladder. The overall picture, even in the more traditional countries, is one of deep religious malaise in a populace that is turning away from the faith institutions at a very decisive level indeed in favour of the autonomy of each individual for himself.

 With a high standard of education up to the tertiary level now available to all, and with the physical sciences in the ascendancy, the Western mass-mind has in a sense come to maturity. It is its own priest. It prizes its independent judgment, its capacity to form its own value systems and standards of behaviour, its own version of spirituality. It has achieved a sense of selfhood. And this autonomous condition, which is true today of all the populations of earth to a greater or lesser degree, is precisely the condition that once distinguished the privileged few in the temples and royal courts from the peasantry in the fields. Thus we are probably seeing the end of a devolutionary process in which, for the first time in human history, the entire human species has become qualified, however untutored as yet, to enter the privileged stream once possible only to a small fraction of the population. Whether we are therefore at the turning point in a great cycle due to ascend once more to its beginning in another era of divine kingship is a possibility only, yet one that cannot be ignored.

 As the great Western democratic ideal inherited from ancient Greece finds itself increasingly embattled today by forces of erosion – the whittling away of civil liberties and rights by laws against terrorism, the rising political power of nations which are not and never have been democratic, the imperialistic ambitions of global corporations – the whole controversial issue of government either by democratic principles or by a ruling hierarchy is beginning to loom on the horizon. Perhaps as yet no bigger than a man’s hand, this cloud is nevertheless destined to darken the terminal struggles of Western civilization as we know it today and to overshadow for good or ill its shaping in the days to come.

In our two-tiered society the cult of democratic rule has attained the sanctity of a religion. Yet ever since Plato condemned it, the value of democracy as a political form of government has been questioned by some. The German philosopher Herbert Marcuse, writing soon after the Second World War, called our industrial civilization a “totalitarian democracy” that has hypnotized us into forfeiting our own best interests and robbed us of our freedom of thought.

The union of growing productivity and growing destruction; the brinkmanship of annihilation; the surrender of thought, hope, and fear to the decisions of the powers that be; the preservation of misery in the face of unprecedented wealth constitute the most impartial indictment…of this society.[11]

 And in 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, the journalist Daniel Pinchbeck rails against the unquestioning glorification of American democracy, the “sleep-inducing force of indoctrination” that seems to render the democratic concept the only possible one for sane people.[12] But hidden behind the scenes, the esoteric schools have always subscribed to a hierarchical structure of grades in their own case and recommended it sotto voce for society at large.[13] Indeed, in 530 BCE Pythagoras launched it as a great social experiment in the Italian city of Crotone, where he and his brotherhood of fellow initiates guided the prevailing government for some years. In this way they curtailed the unlimited bureaucratic powers that can tyrannize a society where no limiting office exists above that of the politicians. (However, it must be noted that as a consequence of this wise intervention, it is believed that Pythagoras and his fellow philosophers were eventually murdered by the exasperated rulers below them.)

Despite its unpopularity, the hierarchical or prophetic ideal has lived on in the underground occult schools, and today it shows many signs of a renaissance in the growing New Age movements constellating around the cult of the Nine Unknowns. Mysterious in outline, secretive in propagation, the hierarchical ideal proposed by the Nine has evolutionary law behind it, but is generally very little understood, even by its most ardent proponents.

The Platonic view has always been a subtle one. It contends that the freedoms of democracy are mythic, illusory, leading inevitably to a tyranny of the lowest common denominator and total corruption by the forces of greed. Government by an elite, however, is paradoxically based on a true philosophy of freedom. How can this be? From such a perspective, elitism is not a function of birth, wealth, learning, fame or military power; no one can bestow it and no one can take it away, for it is a function of the sanctified spirit alone, which has no external cause. It is given by God alone. Ideally, elitism governs as the pharaoh Akhenaton claimed to govern, by the spirit of Maat – an important Egyptian goddess personifying a principle whose primary role is to establish cosmic order by divine rule. Maat is the spirit of pure rectitude, pure justice realized as a state of the soul. By the purity of this inner state it establishes harmonious social conditions; by its spirit of equity it does justice to every soul in its mandate and blesses all.[14] By “living in Maat” the divine king mediates between Heaven and Earth, uniting all those levels below him in his cosmic amplitude. “The king performs the function of ‘centering the world,” says Daniel Pinchbeck, “maintaining order from his palace at the centre of the cosmic axis.”[15]

In other words, Plato regarded true freedom as flowing only from the summit rather than the base of a governing hierarchy, issuing from the apex alone where wisdom and right action are enthroned and greed has been conquered. Indeed, in remote times the legitimacy of divine kingship was ensured by divine means. In Persian myth the first Iranian god-kings were said to bear a facial countenance known as farr, or Divine Glory, a sign of divinity shared by many of the biblical patriarchs.

Without this sign of divinity a king could not rule, and if he were to misappropriate this sacred power during his reign then the farr would leave him in the form of a bird, never to return.[16]

Leavened by the teachings of the forest yogis of India, the renewed hierarchical ideal of government was the gift that Alexander the Great brought to Egypt during his conquest of that land in the fourth century BCE, and was one taken up by many of the Jewish immigrants who came to live in the Delta city of Alexandria thereafter. It recalled to them the Solomonic ideal of government that they claimed had once made Israel great. The esoteric school of Therapeutae in Alexandria was based on its gender-equality[17], the dissident Jewish Essenes took it up for its freedom from ethnicity,[18] and it became the Gnostic ideal over which the earliest Christians wrestled, argued and broke heads over, leading to a major schism in their ranks from which we are still suffering.

In Mysteries of the Bridechamber, my forthcoming book on the beginnings of Christianity, I argue that for those prepared to look there is incontrovertible evidence that in the first century CE Jesus played a key role in this widespread movement of religious reform stirred up by the rise of Hellenism. Like the Pharaoh Akhenaton’s reformation in the Egyptian New Kingdom, Jesus’ new movement too aimed at reinstating the reign of the divine king, the Hebrews’ Davidic Messiah, and was similarly doomed to failure. The Hebrews had a proud tradition of divine kingship, and many strongly resented its vanishing and the outlawing of its prophets. Their resistance to the Levitical takeover, known as Reformed Judaism, led to the formation of sectarian groups right across the Mediterranean world pitted against the clergy in Jerusalem. By the time of Jesus’ birth many martyrs had already been sacrificed to this underground insurrection, which had spread from avant-garde Alexandria across the whole of the Jewish Diaspora. For more than two centuries the rebellion, no doubt fanned by descendants of the prophets, had been aiming at reviving the ancient Judaic power structure, and there is little question that the ministry of the Nazarean Jesus ben Joseph was deeply embroiled in this endeavour.

In the first century CE, the majority of Jews learned little of their religion in the synagogues beyond the purity laws and the rites of table fellowship, and their unrest and dissatisfaction was at a critical point. A copious Wisdom literature written mainly in Hellenistic Alexandria had been secretly infiltrating Judaea for a long time,[19] and there both Jesus and John the Baptist taught the people forbidden doctrines against a darkening background of clerical hostility. Although, as we know, Jesus left no written records, the canonical gospels make it clear that he was in the habit of conveying his teachings in three distinct modes of expression according to the level of understanding of his audience. In this way, he sowed the seeds of the three-tiered initiatory structure of Gnostic communities such as that of Valentinus, which were flourishing in Jesus’ name by the early part of the second century.[20] There has been much controversy over how and when these Gnostic schools came about which so incensed the heresiologists of the young Church; but a very good case exists for them having been modelled from the beginning on the constitution of the Mandaean sect, a Gnostic baptismal sect led by prophets, which was active before and during Jesus’ lifetime.

The Mandaeans, who still exist in the Middle East and have recently emigrated to America, were originally called Nazareans. They claim that both Jesus and John the Baptist were prophets initiated into their organization. Although this is strongly disputed in many scholastic circles, the renowned Scandinavian scholar Geo Widengren argues convincingly that the Mandaean records are probably a reliable index of the past.[21] The Mandaean system comprised the laity, then the priests and finally, at the apex of three grades, the prophets, the high rank to which both Jesus and John were reputed to belong.[22] (Dr. Kurt Rudolph, a noted German scholar, says that the Mandaeans on all occasions telescoped the first three sacraments into one, so that there were essentially but three sacraments corresponding to the three levels of rank. This arrangement may also have prevailed in early Christianity.) Although Jesus defected from the sect, John, say the Mandaeans, has remained the most revered prophet and spiritual teacher in their long history.

 Whether or not this recall of history is accurate or not, it does appear that the early Jesus movement adopted the Mandaean initiatory system of three ascending grades, with the prophets at the head; while above all of them the initiate king reigned – Jesus Christ himself, who after his transfiguration on Mt. Hermon became the divinely annointed one, the Son of God.

 This essentially four-runged caste ladder was only dismantled when the Christian bishops gained enough power towards the end of the second century to suppress the grade of prophets above them. Thereafter charismatic prophecy was once again forced into exile in the Syrian and Egyptian deserts, and it has remained an underground and unacknowledged force in our civilization to the present day. Indeed, considering that for nearly eighteen hundred years the freedom-loving independence, the wisdom of higher mind and the paranormal cognitive powers of the prophetic office have been excised from the mainstream Christian church, as also from official Judaism and Islam, to religion’s great loss, it is perhaps surprising that the atheistic movement to which Richard Dawkins belongs is not a great deal more vociferous than it is. It has much to rail against.

 Since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices, we are learning that the prophetic grade in Christianity seemed to have been a great force for personal freedom of thought and conscience, thus neutralizing to a degree the heavy legalism of the clergy, while giving implicit support to the laity in its age-old struggle to find the right accommodation to the forces of authority always pressing down on it.

 The prophets delivered men and women from the inflexibility of the caste system, encouraging them to rise through the ranks by study, penitence and initiation; they gave gender equality to women and political equality to peasants and slaves. Above all, they encouraged the development of the higher mind by the exercise of creative, independent thought, thus liberating a sense of selfhood among Christians unknown to the general mill of the Roman proletariat. In the Valentinian Gospel of Truth, 32, 31 – 33, the teacher advises his students, whom he addresses as “sons of interior knowledge,” “Be concerned with yourselves, do not be concerned with other things which you have rejected from yourselves.” This emphasis on the autonomy of the self which, when won, delivers us from the oppression of external authority, is possibly one of the most surprising and enriching things to have come out of the Nag Hammadi discoveries. Advises the teacher Sylvanus:

 “Knock on yourself as upon a door and walk upon yourself as upon a straight road. For if you walk on the road, it is impossible for you to go astray… Open the door for yourself that you may know what is… Whatever you will open for yourself, you will open. (Teachings of Silvanus, 106. 30 – 117).

And the same redoubtable teacher, who no doubt infuriated the bishops and severely threatened their power base, has this to say:

Have a great number of friends, but not counsellors… But if you do acquire [a friend] do not entrust yourself to him. Entrust yourself to God alone as father and as friend. (Teachings of Silvanus, 97. 18 – 98)

It was through such men that a tradition of self-knowledge and internalising of moral authority – the birth, one might say, of our psychological sciences - was seeded in the young Christian movement. For the first time, the prophets declared, an initiation existed that was independent of any outer authority, enabling a direct personal connection to be made with the divine throne, one that was energetically potent enough to tap the psychospiritual resources of love and wisdom that poured forth from the reigning Christ Spirit. Thus would new prophets be continually created.

The late Dr. Morton Smith, a professor of Ancient History at the Columbia University, relates the pneumatic rite of initiation to a hidden Mystery tradition taught by Jesus himself to his inner circle of disciples. As is now well known, Dr. Smith found evidence for his view in an eighteenth-century copy of a fragment of a letter that he found in the library of the Greek Orthodox Mar Saba monastery founded in the Palestinian desert about 1500 years ago. The letter, which has subsequently been authenticated by numerous experts, was addressed to one Theodore and purported to have been written by Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 – 240), one of the earliest, most erudite and gnostic of the early Church Fathers. In his letter Clement claimed knowledge of a secret Gospel written by the apostle Mark in Alexandria some years after he wrote the canonical version we find in the New Testament.[23]The material used in the secret text was drawn, at least in part, from an older Aramaic Gospel, a source used also by the writer of the John Gospel.

Smith quotes Clement as saying that after Mark wrote his canonical gospel in Rome soon after 70 CE he had written an account of the Lord’s deeds in this secret gospel, about “whatever makes for progress towards knowledge (gnosis).” Clement continues:

Thus he (Mark) composed a more spiritual gospel for the use of those who were being initiated… When he died, he left his composition to the church in Alexandria, where it is even yet most carefully guarded, read only to those ‘who are being initiated into the great Mysteries.’[24] (Author’s italics)

According to Dr. Cyril Richardson, the late professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary, the secret Markan Gospel tells us that for the lowest grade in primitive Christianity, the catechumens or hylics, mere faith was appropriate. For them the baptismal rite by immersion in water was conducted in conjunction with a reading from the ordinary Markan Gospel. The second initiation, that for psychics, took place at the Paschal Vigil, an all-night baptismal service preceding Easter Day, at which ordinary Mark was read with secret insertions, suggesting that faith was now being augmented with spiritual knowledge. But the third initiation for pneumatics, the true Gnostics, was conducted privately and its nature was never divulged. Many of these initiates met in private homes, away from the general community, and maintained a strict secrecy concerning their beliefs.

 On this latter score, Clement quotes the work of a Gnostic called Theodotus, who wrote in Egypt during the 160’s. Theodotus reported that Jesus taught the disciples “at first by examples and by stories with hidden meanings, then by parables and enigmas, but in the third stage, clearly and nakedly, in private.”[25]

Dr. Smith cites Paul’s letters, which connect the secret initiation with a visionary ascent of consciousness into the heavens culminating in union with Christ, conferring freedom from the law and giving the initiate entrance into the highest spiritual state, that of the Kingdom of God. Smith believes that in the third grade, that of the pneumatics, initiation was transmitted by a secret form of nocturnal baptism by Jesus himself, probably in the stream that ran through the Garden of Gethsemene. But although baptism by water may well have been the initial stage of Jesus’ initiation, there is much internal evidence suggesting that the final baptism of which we have any cognisance was by the spiritual fire of the Higher Mind - and that this prophetic initiation was the burden of Mark’s secret tradition.

 The physicist Amit Goswani offers an effective definition of higher mind when he speaks of a “supramental intellect” or “theme body”, a body of archetypal themes that shape and unify the movements of the physical, vital and mental bodies below it[26] – in other words, it is the “causal body” of the classical spiritual lexicon. This supramental or archetypal intellect was the distinguishing feature of the Gnostic prophets, conferring on them the power to illumine consciousness in such a way as to manifest the love, wisdom and paranormal “gifts of the spirit” that are now so signally absent from mainstrean Christianity. By virtue of the creative energies drawn down from the divine level above, the prophets were able to articulate the structural verities of the new faith in living lineaments of light

As a consequence, for two to three centuries the Christian religion, clad in its ancient hieratic vestments, shed a wonderful radiance over the Roman world. The wisdom, poetry and spiritual idealism of “pneumatics” like Marcion, Basilides, Valentinus, Bardesanes of Edessa and many others, leading intellectuals of their time, illumined the infancy of a grand New Age that was set to revolutionize society. And even much later the lingering afterglow from this divine birthing lit in a kind of glory the Desert Fathers of Egypt and Cappadocia and the brilliant Celtic Church of Ireland. But essentially the Christian prophets had been banished – excommunicated, murdered in the Roman circuses or exiled - by the third century.

Were the Church Fathers aware that history was repeating itself? – that again and again throughout the story of civilization this defeat of the higher creative energies, the banishment of the higher mind, had been accomplished by lower orders like themselves? Did they understand that Christ had given them participation in an ancient, archetypal, irreducible organ of divine transmission no part of which could be amputated without destroying the whole? Indeed, were the Church Fathers ever aware at all that however much they gathered priestly titles like archbishop, cardinal and pope, they could not fill the amputated prophetic role because they had not been empowered to do so – had not been initiated into that transcendental office?

Prophecy briefly re-emerged in eighteenth-century Jewry in the guise of the Tzaddik, the righteous one of Jewish Qabalah – Qabalah being at that time an ecstatic school that “stressed the experience of the divine through a kind of mystical, prophetic communion.”[27]A composite of divine king and prophet, the Tzaddick’s legendary forbear was the Biblical high priest Zadok, whom King Solomon favoured above the Levitical priests. The Book of Kings recounts how Solomon bestowed on Zadok and his descendants the hereditary honour of crowning the kings of Judaea evermore. Quoting the Jewish philosopher Gershom Scholem, Pinchbeck says:

 When God created the Earth – our ‘abysmal world of shards’ – he shattered the vessel of higher mind, sprinkling fragments of lost wisdom across the globe... The Tzaddik performs the ‘gathering up of the shards, finding the hidden keys to spiritual knowledge to establish shalom, peace and harmony on earth.’[28]

 But the Tzaddik and his mystical status was not officially accepted by the rabbis and was soon swept back into the shadows of speculative Qabalism, discredited by a tide of Jewish rationalism known as the Heskaloth or Enlightenment. Yet, as I have already suggested, there are many subterranean signs today that the hieratic archetype is once again pressing to manifest itself, to take over and audaciously remodel on a planetary scale democratic government as we know it.

 One such sign, though minor of course, is the curious eruption of Gnostic procedures in an Anglican See in rural England and another in the Javanese Reformed Lutheran Church - a duplication that may hint at many other such hidden hierarchic revivals in the official Christian scene. But the most important and thought-provoking sign by far is that of the cult of the Nine Unknowns, which has been gaining ground within New Age communities from as far back as the early twentieth century and is now well-established in the Western counter-culture. It is here that we find incontrovertible evidence of a well-organized programme to bring about what amounts to a new World Order and a new global religion to underpin it.

As early as 1932, Reuben Swindburne Clymer, the head of American Rosicrucianism, claimed that his society, the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, was directed from a secret order in France called the Council of Nine, whose doctrines Clymer taught. A letter from this secret body proclaimed:

This is the New Dispensation, and the work of the Spiritual and Mystical Fraternities must be re-established throughout the world, so that all peoples may be taught the Law and thereby enabled to apply it towards universal improvement as the only means of saving mankind… We, the Council of Nine, have selected your organization…to help in this work.[29]

Clymer’s group professed to “embrace the esoteric side of all religions.”[30] This unification of the religions of the world by absorbing their main underlying tenets in one grand esoteric system has been at all times the basis of the Nine’s teachings. In the beginning, God, they declare, had given out one primordial Gnosis for this planet, which over time has differentiated into a variety of religions; but the time has come for these different local versions again to coalesce as one under the control of the Great White Brotherhood -or the Hierarchy or Hidden Directorate, as it is also known. Such a unification of our fragmented race would transform the collective consciousness, releasing its full genetic potential to a degree barely imaginable today. This crossing of a great transformational threshhold may be imminent, stresses the Nine. It will usher us in to a new galactic universe wherein other human races are pursuing their transcendental destinies. Empowered to co-create a new vision of planetary harmony, which has long been the ideal of esoteric schools around the globe, we will flower gloriously into what has been called “a bodhisattvic race.”

It is extremely difficult to pinpoint the phenomenon of the Nine Unknowns, since they have been channelled in a number of different guises by a wide variety of high-profile people, some of whom, confusingly, appear to bear no relationship to each other. Sometimes the Nine are referred to as extraterrestrial intelligences, sometimes rather as indigenous deities or discarnate Masters. They act as a hierarchy of intelligences that rule the universe, intervening in human evolution at critical times throughout the Earth’s history. The Nine speak of themselves in deific terms in their channelled communications– “God is nobody else than we together, the Nine Principles of God. There is no God other than what we are together.”[31] But this statement need not be taken too literally: the convention of spokespersons speaking in the name of a higher power is commonplace. Elsewhere, the Nine are evoked in an invitation by one of their followers to another well-known psychic researcher “to join a new psychic group designed to change the destinies of the world by occult means.”[32] Here the Nine are rendered by implication in far more human terms and placed explicitly at the hub of an occult world-revolution to come.

Various prominent esoteric organizations have been named as possible messengers of the Nine – among them the worldwide Sons of Light of the Order of Melchizedek and Alice Bailey’s equally worldwide offshoot school of Theosophy, featuring the Master Koot Hoomi and the Tibetan – but the identity of the messenger group that psychics are channelling remains obscure. What is, however, evident is that its character is prophetic: the advanced telepathic skills and the authority of its teachings distinguish the group as something genuinely new and mystical to enter the public arena. We must assume therefore that what is being proposed - yet again - is a global return to the kind of theocratic system that once included the prophets in a leading role. It is in many ways the Gnostic system in another guise.

 For a great many people subconsciously attuned to this covert event alarm bells are already ringing. Intimations of an organized resistance to the perceived threat are already with us; the enormous popularity of Richard Dawkins’ latest work to target religion is only one instance of a spreading unease. There are many others. Alerted, science is beginning to marshal laboratory research programmes in neurotheology, a branch of neuroscience devoted to uncovering the brain processes that happen during religious, spiritual and mystical experiences, which suggest that these activities may engender a form of illness called psychic dissociation in their practitioners.[33] Fundamentalist groups of every stripe are also ratcheting up their war on elites; politicians as well as church leaders are stressing their populist, democratic credentials. Sufis in Islam and Qabalists in Judaism are confronting greater opposition than ever as a spontaneous polarization develops in the religious field, mirroring that of geopolitics. It seems to declare that the people’s freedoms have been won at great cost; they will not be lightly forfeited.

Yet it should be born in mind that almost all we know of the theocratic system is from the rule of priests and that of kings divine only in name, many of them autocratic and cruel. A true, full-flowering theocracy has hardly been known for something like three thousand years, perhaps longer. Since the sixth century BCE the prophets have not moved among us except briefly or without office: the mahatmas and Jains of India; the Gnostic initiates of early Christianity; the Sufi initiates of early Islam; the Taoist Mountain-men of China. All these have passed enigmatically through the portals of history and have been seen no more, though they wait still in the shadows. How they would govern remains something of a mystery, although historians tells us that in ancient Egypt during the bronze age, when prophecy was at its height, there is evidence that the society was a peaceful and highly creative one and the people enjoyed many freedoms.

The Council of Nine is not likely to be more than a long-range preparatory programme, perhaps destined to undergo numerous changes as it continues to develop its primary theme: that of the imminent reign of superior Intelligences or Ascended Masters over human affairs. The most immediate obstacle to the Council’s success is its difficulty in presenting a picture of global integration while so many of the races and religions of the world are locked in intractable enmities, loyal to so many different deities, worldviews and value systems. The Nine also have internal flaws that have not gone unnoticed: racist and overbearing attitudes that militate against their success in gaining disciples. Does their greatest value, then, lie in simply being a marketing ploy, a wakeup call alerting us all to the need for another evolutionary step - a preparation, in other words, for the return of a divine king whose self-evident powers of wisdom and calm majesty will bring unity to all the peoples of the Earth?

 It is noteworthy that today millions of people worldwide and of many races are awaiting the imminent coming of the fifth Buddha, Maitreya.