The Roots of the Western Mystery Tradition
A survey

Introduction

It is essential in dealing with mysteries to recognise the importance of the statement, possibly made by Aristotle and adapted by many thereafter, that ‘a mystery is not something to be learned but a path to be trodden.’ Therefore don’t expect to learn any mysteries from this little piece of writing. Rather I hope it will share an insight that may be valuable. Those familiar with the idea of the medicine song know, that with each reiteration of the song, a deeper meaning attaches to it, hence ‘medicine song’. It is healing the rift between the spirit and the personality.

Before we begin, a short note on language. The term ‘man’ refers not only to the male gender but is also a neuter noun referring to the species. In the same way Master refers not to a male figure, but to one who has attained competency within a specific milieu. There are women Masters as well as men. The late Queen Elizabeth is such an example. Horse, Cat and Dog are other examples of nouns with a neuter context as well as, for some, a gender specification.

Reflection

Perhaps the first principle within the Western Mystery Tradition is that of Reflection. We are told ‘As Above, So Below’, supposedly inscribed on the Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus, Thrice Greatest Hermes, inspiration of the Gnostic school is also the measure of the Apollonian Tradition as shared by Bernhard Wosien.

This principle of Reflection is the basis for polarity, Light and Dark, Sameness and Difference, and others, that occupied the attention of the Ancient philosophers. Each polarity is joined by a mean, a middle term which unites the extremes.

Egypt

In Egypt when they spoke of Life they were referring to the life of Spirit. Never the personality. From the Heart of the Divine Self the Soul circulates into the realms of Amenti, the underworld, where the life of the personality takes place, and, on that shell dying, the Soul released, returns to the heart of the Divine Self to be restored to the fullness of its identity. At least some of the teachings Egypt inherited found their origins in Sumeria and India through the maritime trade with those nations.

Myths and Fairy Tales

Sir George Trevelyan refers to the descent of the Soul in his talk “The Allegorical Journey” (mp3), published in the book Awakening Consciousness. In this lecture, Sir George briefly outlines the descent of the Soul from the Eternal Realms of Light into the darkness and separation of the material world, the place of forgetfulness, on taking incarnation.

He says not only can we find this among the ancient teachings, but that it has been carried through various guises from Shakespeare to fairy tales. In fairy tales, the soul, the incarnating principle, is often figured as a princess, born into the world, and pressed into some lowly position – Cinderella, for example – where she forgets her royal birth and homeland, until some event awakens her to the truth of it, often represented by a Prince. Sir George explains this is the coming together of the two parts of the psyche, the Spirit and the Soul, to bring about wholeness in the individual. The same idea is carried in the esoteric teachings of Alchemy where the twin aspects may be figured as Sun and Moon.

 

Poems, Hymns and Songs

The world of the personality is limited and sometimes figured as a prison, as in the opening line of Martin Armstrong’s poem ‘The Cage’,

Man, afraid to be alive
Shuts his soul in senses five

On release the soul returns to the world of the Empyrean from whence it fell.

We find this idea presented to us in the 60s song ‘Spirit in the Sky’.

When I die and they lay me to rest
Gonna go to the place that’s the best When I lay me down to die
Goin’ up to the spirit in the sky

Goin’ up to the spirit in the sky (spirit in the sky)
That’s where I’m gonna go when I die (when I die)
When I die and they lay me to rest
I’m gonna go to the place that’s the best

Prepare yourself you know it’s a must
Gotta have a friend in Jesus
So you know that when you die
He’s gonna recommend you
To the spirit in the sky (spirit in the sky)

Songwriter: Norman Greenbaum
Spirit in the Sky lyrics © Concord Music Publishing LLC

Many Southern States gospel songs carry the idea, whether it is in the form of standing on the shore, or across the river, or simply seen as flight. For example ‘I’ll Fly Away’

Some glad morning when this life is over
I’ll fly away
To a home on God’s celestial shore
I’ll fly away

I’ll fly away, oh, Glory
I’ll fly away
When I die, Hallelujah, by and by
I’ll fly away

Songwriter: Albert Brumley
I’ll Fly Away lyrics © Albert E Brumley & Sons

The image of the soul as a bird is an ancient one. As Bernhard Wosien, the dance master, taught us using an image of a Greek bowl showing the figure of a person running with a bird flying overhead, in a gap between two trees, or the roots and branches of the same tree. This he said was the Soul in the gap of Time.

The idea of the distant shore is found in the hymn ‘In the Sweet By and By’

There’s a land that is fairer than day,
And by faith we can see it afar;
For the Father waits over the way
To prepare us a dwelling place there.

Refrain:
In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore;
In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

Songwriter: Ben Webster
In the Sweet By and By lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group

In Greek mythology the River Lethe is the river of forgetfulness that we cross to come into incarnation. In Christianity the River Jordan is the river where we are baptized to be born again.

These Christian songs refer to the release of the soul after death. They prompt the awakening to an Eternal vision. These ideas are immortal, they pertain to the soul, and hence are ever renewed, generation after generation amidst the turmoil that the passage of time brings.

In the song ‘I Shall Be Released’, Bob Dylan sings

Yet I swear I see my reflection
Some place so high above the wall

I see my light come shining
From the west down to the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released

Songwriter: Bob Dylan
I Shall Be Released lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner Chappell Music, Inc

He sees his spirit standing high in the place of the West, the place of Death and the SET-ting of the Sun. It is a shield, as well as a guide.

Platonic Theology

To look more closely at the origin of these ideas we can refer to the theology of Classical Greece. This was left to us in the writings of Plato and the Academy he founded. However the roots of his teaching can be traced to Pythagoras and Orpheus. Hesiod (c.700 BCE) left the fullest description of the Gods and the nature spirits that peopled his world, following the teachings of Orpheus. Platonic Theology is also called Pythagorean and Orphic Theology, acknowledging a single stream of teaching.

Here we are taught that nothing exists without a cause. Everything finds its source in The One. The One must have existence since nothing can be derived from nothing, The One must have presence for all else to possess presence.

The introduction of Zero in the Middle Ages as the ultimate ‘lowest value’, brought confusion, with the loss of a precious insight. This notion is the foundation for all nihilistic creeds. It is only valid in measuring material things, not in considering numbers as of themselves. In contrast to the idea of numbers referring only to size, measure and quantity, Pythagoras is reputed to have said ‘A figure and 3 steps, never a figure and three objects’.

The ciphers used for numbers were the letters of the Greek alphabet. The Greek language has its own Cabala, which is admirably explored in ‘The Canon’ by William Stirling, and in ‘The Apostolic Gnosis’ by Frederick Bligh Bond and Thomas Simcox Lea.

Three Great Spheres

From The One, the ancients taught us, three great Spheres extend into generation which are Eternal and unchanging. These three are Being, Life and Reason. All things have Being, even those things without form, such as Justice or Beauty, which adorn the forms of others and demonstrate their Being from their absence.

The Second Sphere is Life for, of all things which possess Being, some also possess Life. The Third Sphere is that of Reason or Intellect for, of those things which possess Life some, also, possess Reason. Of all those that possess Reason mankind is the lowest, since Souls and the Gods also possess Reason. Each of these Spheres contains a rank of Divine Presences.

From the Sphere of Intellect, home of the Olympian Gods, the Sphere of Soul is precipitated. This is not Eternal but Perpetual. Everything within the Perpetual Sphere moves in a circular fashion, returning to its place of origin. This is demonstrated, the Ancients declared, by the circling of the Heavens, for it is here that the Universe comes into expression.

From the Sphere of the Perpetual, the sphere of the mundane or Temporal world subtends. This is the world we inhabit. It is in this sublunary sphere that the elements of the Western Tradition, Fire, Air, Water and Earth, exist. Only in this realm does Time take a linear expression. Things have a beginning and an end.

These are the five Spheres of Creation. Above these five exists The One, an ever-constant generative source. The Eternal Spheres lie behind the Manifest Realm, which is contained within the Sphere of the Fixed Stars.

There are 8 inner spheres identified with the Fixed Stars and Planets and find their reflection in music, the song of the spheres, or music of the spheres. They represent pathways of ascent through which the soul progresses to the Eternal realms. Lucian (c.150-180), the Syrian writer from Roman times, writes of this journey in some of his dialogues. Porphyry (c.234 – c.305) in the Cave of the Nymphs (De Antro Nympharum) writes of escaping the cave, the Temporal realm, although Porphyry does not deal with the spheres as such.

The Hebrew Tree of Life as presented in western occultism, shows a similar ascent though it only reaches the edges of manifest Creation, frontier of the Eternal Spheres. The Eternal Spheres are encapsulated in that tradition as the three negations of Ain, Ain Soph and Ain Soph Aur, usually translated as Nothing, No limit, Limitless Light. It is said that this ‘Nothing’ is ‘No-thing’, suggesting that God is not to be found in objects and manifest forms. It is the basis of the Biblical tirade against statues of Divinities, misunderstanding the role of Divine images and effigies found in many traditions.

Where the Hebrews adopted the negative source of all pictured as Light, among the Greeks the source is unequivocally The One, a source possessed of conscious presence. In Egypt the image was of ‘Thrice Greatest Darkness’, which is reflected in the teachings of Hesiod in which Chaos, ‘the Yawning’, gives rise to Erebus and Night, both types of Darkness. Since that which is closest to its source is most like its source, we may conclude that Chaos itself is an undefined obscurity.

The Supernal Spheres, numbered 1, 2 and 3 on the Tree of Life, cannot represent the three Eternal spheres of the Greeks, since Binah is given to the planet Saturn, and Chokmah to Uranus, the place of the fixed stars.

Only Kether, the Crown, could relate to the three Eternal spheres of the Greeks, although it serves only as the gateway to those spheres.

It is said by the Ancient Greeks that the Gods do not create through desire, since that would imply they are lacking in something, and it is inconceivable that the Gods lack anything.

Neither do they Create through an act of Will. They Create, argue the ancient Greeks, because it is their Nature to be Generative. They are sources and Generate merely from their Essence. The Gods are seen as Generative causes in imitation of The One. Thus we find the Gods identified with such things as Peace, Justice and Love.

There are more personalities than there are Souls, and more Souls than there are Gods, and more Gods than there is of The One. In this way we understand the significance of the Pythagorean Tetractys.

While the name of Pythagoras is remembered for the theorem that declares the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides in any right-angled triangle, the excitement this raised is largely overlooked. The sum of the three numbers 3, 4, and 5, is 12.

Interested readers can find more delights in The Theoretic Arithmetic of the Pythagoreans, by Thomas Taylor. Here Taylor explains that, for the Ancient Greeks, Arithmetic was the highest Science giving rise to all the rest in a hierarchy of subjects. From Arithmetic we derive Geometry in one direction and Ratio (Harmony – the comparison of two or more values) in another. From Geometry comes Stereometry, the study of solid figures, for which the Greeks used the stars, and hence Astronomy with its related subject Mythology. In the other direction Ratio gives rise to Musical intervals, and this in turn creates the underlying laws of Harmony and Symmetry which bind Architecture. If the values of Arithmetic are changed the values of all the subjects dependent upon it will also be changed, hence it is the oldest and Mother to all those subjects.

The Rational Gods are the familiar Olympian Gods who dwell on Mount Olympus, the sphere of Reason. There are 12 of them, matched male and female. Of these Zeus, (Force or Power), is the summit and serves to guide the ascension of the awakening self into the sphere of Life, home of the Titans.

Like the Olympians there are 12 Titans, 6 male and 6 female. The Titans we may take to be the appetites, or desires, which are so strong as to overpower Reason. It is at this level that we find the presence of the Archetypes (devas) of the animals, represented for us by the Gods of Egypt.

The last Sphere, Being, in ascent, is home to the First Born, described by Hesiod as having 100 arms, 50 heads, a single eye and so on. They are monstrous figures who are the cause of Ge’s raising rebellion amongst her children against their father Uranos.

For the awakening self it is necessary to follow this ascending flow to restore the awareness through union with the Higher Self of each preceding realm, finally to make the leap into The One.

Bernhard Wosien assured us that to make that leap, it was necessary to have a master since the self alone cannot conquer the doubt it contains. The Master stands as an exemplar to the individual.

Apollo, as the last of the Rational (Olympian) Gods is the paradigm of the Soul, the ideal towards which one aims, and ushers Souls into existence serving also to return them to their home among the Gods.

Zeus, serves this role for those progressing from the Rational sphere into the realm of the Titans (Sphere of Life). It is here that Zeus is throned as the Demiurgos, God the Creator, God the Father of the Christians, and the Supreme Architect.

The Sphere of Life is ruled by Chronos, (Time) and Rhea (Flow), his sister wife. Together this pair govern and direct the flow of Life into the separate expressions that find their descent into material incarnation. The Titans, as appetites, evolve into the animal species reflected in the human emotional body. It is via Chronos ad Rhea that the awakening one may enter the realm of Being, of the First Born, to discover there the monstrous aspects of himself or herself. Finally it is through Uranos, (the Mountain, Eternity), that one transcends Being to enter into True Union with The One.

This important teaching, along with many others including the precedence of the Soul, was suppressed in Europe. Sir George Trevelyan spoke of the precedence of the Soul as the Soul existing before we take incarnation, and moving into situations prior to our arrival there.

The Canon

In his work The Canon, William Stirling explores the mysteries of Gematria in which any word sharing the same numerical value with another is supposed to throw light on each definition. Aleister Crowley discusses this in his book 777, where he explores the Hebrew Cabala more deeply than I am able to here.

Writing in the 1890s Stirling explores the Cabbala in conjunction with the dimensions of symbols in the Jewish religion, relating some of these to the relative positions of the planets. He declares that the symbol of Noah’s Ark is of particular importance, and mentions the ‘the roof beam’ of that ship for the animals.

As a simple example of celestial symmetries the relationship between the diameter of the Earth and that of the Moon stands at 11:3. It underlines the principle that the Universe is indeed a pattern of Harmony as claimed by the Ancients, and not a chaos of accidental occurrences as modern science seeks to affirm.

Stirling tells us that the Egyptian ideas have been passed through the Greeks to the hellenized parts of the world, to which we also belong.

 

Sublime Concord

He explores the Vesica Piscis, which he calls the ‘evil eye’, that specific geometric construction formed from two circles of equal radius, the centre of each being on the circumference of the other. (Crowley identifies it as the feminine symbol.) A significant symbol in Sacred Geometry. Probably the best introduction to this is ‘View over Atlantis’ by John Michell, published in 1969, later revised as ‘The New View Over Atlantis’.

 

It is perhaps typical of the West that the principle idea is seen as uniting with the Mind of God as represented by the Vesica. The eastern emphasis is to unite with God directly. Our Origin is in God, not as creations of a Willing – and wilful – Deity, but as an emanation from that Source into the world. Thus Hermes (Mercury) is described as the messenger of the Gods. It is Mercury who stands as the fully awakened one in our Greek traditions, just as Jesus does for the Christian.

Stirling declares that we have lost the rituals and teachings of Egypt, and have only partial insights from Classical sources. He continues

‘There is also the Jewish cabala, containing an explanation of the priestly secrets and mysteries of the Hebrews, but no-one at the present day can fully understand it. There are the works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus preserved by the Neo-platonists … and there are references to the doctrine of the heretical Christians called Gnostics, preserved in the controversial works of the early fathers.’

In this statement he outlines the bones of the Western Mystery tradition as it has been revived repeatedly over many centuries. Modern scholarship recognises the Gnostics as a movement prior to Christianity.

Writing at the same time as Stirling, E. A. Wallis Budge, curator of the Egyptian section of the British Museum, in ‘The Egyptian Book of the Dead’ refers to a condition called ‘coming forth by Day’ which is the restoration of the awareness to the Divine Self. The journey of the soul is identical in Life as after Death. The various landscapes described for the Soul after Death, whether Tartarus, Hell or Purgatory, are all dimensions (Tibetan Bardo) in which the soul can wander as it confronts some of its earthly experiences.

Stirling explores the mysteries of the Cube which is so fundamental to Masonic teaching and is referred to in the Bible as the cornerstone of the temple. The image shown here is adapted from Bligh Bond’s Apostolic Gnosis.

While Stirling claims ‘the Pythagoreans concealed their doctrines in a numerical and geometrical system’.

Taylor tells us that the Ancient Greeks did not consider 1 or 2 as belonging to numbers. He explains that to belong to a set it is necessary to share the properties of that set. The only properties that Numbers share in common is that the sum of adding a number to itself is less than the result of multiplying that number by itself. This is not the case with either 1 or 2. They stand beyond the realm of Number which only begins with 3.

Stirling tells us

‘[the Egyptians] numerical system formed a part of the dogma in those laws, referred to by Plato as having been ten thousand years old, as one of the bases of religion and art by all subsequent peoples.’

No doubt Plato received this from the Egyptian priests themselves.

Re-emergence of the Perennial Wisdom

To speak briefly of the re-emergence of the perennial wisdom through the ages. It is not surprising that the same masters incarnating into a later setting will bring with them the same understanding they earlier shared.

The Medieval Period saw the flourishing of Christian Mysticism. Writers expressed their oneness with God through such works as ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) through her singing. St Julian of Norwich (c.1343-c.1416) recorded her visions in ‘Revelations of Divine Love’. Thomas a Kempis published The Imitation of Christ in 1418.

During the whole of this period Freemasons were building churches and temples according to a science thought lost in 20th Century. The Pagan nature of their teachings, and the antiquity of their order is demonstrated by the prevalence of ‘Green man’ figures on the roof beam bosses and pews of the churches. The Masons had their own spiritual tradition which was more ancient, and too powerful, for the churches to dismiss. This was the time of the raising of the great cathedrals in Europe.

It was difficult to express spirituality openly. The Troubadours and minnesingers carried the message of the Cathars to audiences across Europe. When the troubadours sang a song with a deeper meaning they would carry a rose to signify inner content.

Knights from the Holy Land, including the Knights Templar, brought back to Europe inspiration from the Middle East. Among these was the symbol of the Pearl.

In Northern and Western Europe Celtic Christianity had been subverted during the first Millennium and those, coming later, seeing the wealth of their traditions in danger of being lost turned to literature. The poem ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ holds images of a very pagan nature in the form of the hunt and its various prizes. It carries a superficial overlay of Christian imagery upon a pagan background.

This poem was found with another called ‘The Pearl’, both written in 101 verses, on the same manuscript apparently written by the same poet. The Pearl is entirely Christian in its symbolism speaking of a journey to the New Jerusalem and the Pearl that the bride wears containing the secret name known only to her and to the Bridegroom, the Christ.

When the Catholic church took no heed of the example of St Francis in his attempt to reform it (1209), Luther nailed his protests to the door of a church in Germany (95 theses, 1517). This signalled the beginning of the Reformation which saw various flavours of Christianity arise.

With the collapse of Byzantium and the fall of Constantinople (1453) to the Ottomans many scholars fled to Italy, bringing with them sacred texts including the dialogues of Plato which had been lost to the West for about 1000 years. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain by Isabella and Ferdinand (1492) saw Italy gain an influx of mystical teachings, initiating the Renaissance.

The next great revival of the Western Mysteries and the re-establishment of a spiritual life in Europe, took place in the 19th Century which we shall look at elsewhere. Again and again the three sources for these revivals of a mystical and spiritual outlook take the form of Platonic Theology, Gnosticism and a Christianised Hebrew Cabala. Each system posits a threefold structure, even as did the Druids. The 19th century however saw the introduction of Eastern teachings into Europe looking back to the very origins of Egyptian teaching.