6
Live Music
We have seen how the modern scientific description of physical reality, in many ways echoing the voices of thinkers long passed, encompasses the idea that everything, even something as seemingly inert as a lump of rock, is in some inexpressible way alive. David Bohm summed up this latest view by describing the electron, the most substantial component of matter, as a mindlike entity. The “choreographed” movements of electrons in plasmas and metals reveal that there are hidden orders implicit in the greater quantum field, where everything appears to be interconnected and potentially “aware” of the presence of everything else. So, in the opinion of many modern physicists, nothing in this universe is truly dead: everything resonates, communicates, radiates, and absorbs. And, as we have seen, there is a clear musical pattern to it all.
Now, when we consider entities that are organic and alive in the sense in which we normally understand the term, we find once again that there are clear musical symmetries evident in their underlying structures. Specifically, the biomolecular world, as I explained in the Introduction of this book, is an endlessly unfolding symphony of “live” music, of genetic harmonies and interpenetrating organic scales. Remember that the Hermetic Code, which is in essence a musical system, describes in precise detail how the genetic code works.
It is interesting that this altogether remarkable fact has not yet been acknowledged by the scientific establishment, even though it was first made public back in 1994.1 This is, however, not just any old “fact” we are asking these scholars to consider. It is an all-pervading, fundamental truth, one that carries with it the unavoidable and, perhaps, unpalatable, conclusion: that the latest picture of the organic world being described by modern biologists, like the physicist’s description of the underlying structure of matter, is basically just a cover version of the original canon first revealed by the original hermeticists. What we are saying here, in effect, is that the historian’s mysterious “huntergatherers,” who populated the more temperate regions of the Earth at the dawn of recorded history, were apparently more in tune with life’s creative processes than any scientist alive today. We have proof of this. We have the Hermetic Code, the code of life itself, described by a simple formula that embodies an idea in circulation for untold millennia, an idea that is, in fact, so profoundly relevant to us all that it will never fade away.
By way of finding further proof in support of the above heresy, we must now make another “musical” journey through time. It’s a very long road indeed that you are about to travel, for we shall be going way back, beyond the eras of the Greeks and the Egyptians, back to the music of the Neanderthal race and further still, beyond even the time of the dinosaurs—right back, in fact, to point zero, to the very first evolutionary “note,” the first primordial spark of life on Earth. As we shall see, the Hermetic Code has been in evidence practically from the very beginning.
The present, most widely accepted account of our origins is of course the Darwinian theory of evolution, which asserts that you and I and the consciousness we are endowed with happened to have evolved here on Earth purely as a result of blind, accidental physical and biochemical processes. This basic concept, the random evolutionary development of life, has in the last few years become virtually a scientific dogma. When we compare ancient and modern ideas on evolution, however, we find that the latter is but a pale imitation of its predecessor. This is not to say, of course, that Darwinism is not a valid theory of evolution, only that it doesn’t go far enough. So let’s see in what respects this great theory falls short of the original described by the priests of Old Kingdom Egypt. We can begin with the experts.
In a recent book, River out of Eden, Professor Richard Dawkins, author of several influential books on evolutionary theory, attempts to explain the whole phenomenon of life in terms of Darwinian principles. This is a theory that he fully endorses and which, he says, displays “a sinewy elegance, a poetic beauty that outclasses even the most haunting of the world’s origin myths.”2
Already, it seems, I am inescapably and completely at odds with one of the world’s foremost proponents of current evolutionary theory, who clearly believes that the modern scientific interpretation of our creation is superior in every way to the ancients’ description of mankind’s origins. So let’s see.
Dawkins’s lucid account of how life evolved on this planet constitutes an impressive argument in favor of the theory of natural selection. According to this view, all living creatures are indirectly descended from a single, primitive ancestral species, which evolved and diverged into new species over billions of years through random copying errors in DNA replication. Many of these mutations of single genes will have had deleterious effects on the functions of the host organism and actually reduced its chances of survival in the world. Very occasionally, however, a gene-copying error resulted in a change in the organism’s functioning that happened to be beneficial in life, improving its performance in some way and so increasing both its chances of survival and its ability to produce equally successful descendants.
Clearly Dawkins has little time for the Creationists’ arguments against the apparently random, ungodlike nature of gene mutation and natural selection. To be fair, Creationism (as interpreted by modern theologians) is not a theory at all; it is simply a blind faith, whose advocates have haphazardly concocted a rather flimsy file of uninformed criticism of Darwinism, none of which provides convincing evidence for their ideas.
There is a paradox here. While Creationists have been busy nitpicking at scientific theory, they have all along been in possession of the complete evolutionary picture. The whole story is there, as we shall see, in their scriptures. And this account includes a detailed description of the newly discovered biomolecular world, albeit only as part of a much broader and more comprehensive theory of evolution.
The commonest criticism of Creationists relates to one of the main problems of Darwinian theory, the difficulty it has in explaining how such an intricate organ as, say, the human eye was formed. What, for example, did the intermediate, developmental forms of such a sophisticated organ look like? What kinds of beneficial evolutionary functions did these earlier, rudimentary conglomerates of cell tissue facilitate before they evolved into a state that actually bestowed upon the host organism the ability to even recognize the difference between light and darkness, let alone “see”? Darwin himself said that he could never imagine the eye, with all its structural complexities, as having evolved through random variation and selection alone. Dawkins disagrees. In fact, answering this rather difficult question is, he assures us, “a doddle.” Half an eye, he argues, is 100 percent better than no eye at all, 1 percent better than 49 percent of an eye, 1 percent worse than 51 percent—and so on, providing an evolutionary scenario that suggests a gradual, hit-and-miss process of development.
Now this might seem at first to be a fairly reasonable line of deduction. But then, what about a measly 1 percent of an eye? One percent, 2, even 3 percent would be so far removed from an organ that sees, or even one only half-formed, that it is difficult to envisage what kind of survival advantages these first crude mutations would have given to the evolving species. Would 2 percent of an eye, for example, give a creature even the slightest hint that one of its natural predators was about to pounce from a short distance away?
There are other complex evolutionary developments that are difficult to explain solely in terms of Darwinian theory—for example, the evolution of fins and wings. We are told that fins evolved into hands and that arms evolved into wings. But of what use were these different functional structures during the in-between stages of development? What advantages over others would a species existing through the proposed transitional stages have with an appendage that was neither arm nor wing, but a bit of both? If and when traces of the existence of such peculiar creatures are ever found in the fragmentary fossil record, then perhaps a little light might be shed on the problem. To date, none have been identified, and one can only speculate on the reason. The Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould has suggested that such transitions may have been discontinuous, rapid changes, invoked by single crucial genes that somehow managed to cross over concurring pathways of development and so affect the structure of the whole organism in a much more radical way.
The only creature remotely resembling an “intermediate” that has been identified in the fossil record is the archaeopteryx, a raven-sized creature with a reptilian skull and birdlike wings. Its wings were fully formed, however, a fact that has prompted many biologists to classify the archaeopteryx not as a true intermediate but as a completely developed bird. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how any true intermediate with a confusing complement of half-formed wings could have survived at all. Should it attempt to fly away from danger, or jump? In that almost comical split second of indecision it would probably have been summarily dispatched by some ravenous carnivore. This might account for the fact that no half-formed wings have ever been identified in the fossil record. Presumably such unfortunate creatures would have been hopelessly ill-equipped to survive long enough in a ruthless, lex talionis world to produce offspring in sufficiently large numbers.
Returning to the question of the eye for a moment, if Darwin’s theory isn’t quite the whole story, could there possibly be other factors involved in the formation of such a complex organ? That is, could there be other agencies involved in the evolutionary process that might be to some extent responsible for the eye’s amazingly intricate development?
I would suggest that there is at least one agency that might be worth considering here, a phenomenon that is intrinsically connected to the eye like no other. Furthermore, it is all-powerful and omnipresent, and occupied a uniquely important position in the belief system of the first true “Creationists.” This, of course, is light, the Holy Ghost, the “Rainbow Covenant,” the agent of all visual sensation. Obviously if there were no light in the first place, an organ built to perceive it would never have evolved. We know that primitive sea creatures living at the bottom of the deepest oceans, where no light ever reaches them, are devoid of normal photon receptors. So the mere presence of sufficient light is enough to induce the development of organs capable of assimilating it. Remember also that light itself, as well as being the agency by which objects are made visible, is also, as the ancient Egyptians were aware, a musical phenomenon. With its seven fundamental frequencies (the spectrum) and its three distinct “primary” frequencies, it is a perfect electromagnetic model of the “triple octave,” of the Hermetic Code, which describes the evolutionary development of all organic processes, including, of course, the process of the development of the eye.
The “river” in the title of Dawkins’s book refers to the stream of digital information flowing through time in the form of DNA, branching and forking on its way, and giving rise to new species in the process. When one species mutates off a daughter species, the river of genes forks into two, and if the two tributaries diverge for long enough, perhaps through the external influence of geographical variables, the two species then develop quite distinct and different characteristics. At one stage, apparently, in one of these branches, Mitochondrial Eve was born. This is the name given to the most recent common ancestor of all modern humans, a member of the species Homo sapien sapiens who probably lived in Africa between 100,000 and 250,000 years ago.3
The name of this “hybrid from Eden” is derived from the term mitochondria, which are vital, energy-producing “particles” existing by the thousands in all our cells. They help to convert energy from food molecules and then store it for distribution as and when required. The significant point about mitochondria is that they have their own DNA. Unlike the main DNA housed in the nucleus of the cell, which becomes almost totally scrambled in every new generation every time a sex cell is made, mitochondrial DNA is passed down relatively unchanged through the female line only. It is therefore a very useful tool for long-term genealogists, who can use it for dating common ancestors within species. This is how Mitochondrial Eve has been identified and dated.
Dawkins is particularly fond of Mitochondrial Eve, and he contrasts her, as a scientific hypothesis, with the Eve of Eden. He believes his “scientific truth” to be of greater interest and, I quote, “more poetically moving” than the original myth.4
Presumably, at the time of writing this, Dawkins was unaware of the existence of the Hermetic Code, of the fact that it is identical in every way to the genetic code, and also of the fact that all major creation myths are in effect variations of the same, original theme. This, as we have seen, is not simply the spurious product of primitive superstition and folklore, but a genuine scientific theory, presented symbolically in the clearest of terms: it states simply that all creative processes are the product of forces described by the two fundamental laws of nature embodied in the pi convention, the law of three and the law of octaves. Clearly, it is only in this context—that is, from the hermetic perspective—that the original story of the Eve of Eden can be truly understood. In fact, as I explained in The Infinite Harmony, much of the Hebrew Scriptures, from the creation of the world and the story of Eden, through to the charmed lives of Noah, Joshua, Moses, David, and Solomon, contains innumerable symbolic musical references to the Hermetic Code, to the theory of transcendental evolution. And, remember, the creation myth of Genesis is just one example, one old “fairy tale” from the Middle East. There are many more, of course—Chinese, Vedic, Zoroastrian, Christian, and so on—and they tell exactly the same tale, providing a truly accurate description of the natural processes of creation. Think of the I Ching, and how perfectly its overall format corresponds to the structure and symmetry of that remarkable biochemical code used by DNA. Are we to believe, then, that the emergence of these identical symmetries are both merely the product of “accidental mutations”? I really don’t think so. One of these symmetries—the genetic code—just might have originated by chance, though personally I doubt it, given the fact that the physical universe itself is structured along the very same musical symmetries. But then, when we see exactly the same symmetries being repeated yet again in a higher scale of evolution, that is, in the mind of man, it begins to look as if it might be people like Dawkins, and not the ancient mythmaker, who is unwittingly purveying the fairy tale.
This repetition of identical symmetries in scales both “above” and “below” is important, because it suggests that there is an underlying unity and sense of purpose in all life. This purpose, quite clearly, is to evolve, and to do so musically, transcendentally—just as DNA has done over the past four thousand million years. You see, the DNA symmetry is not only “resonating” in our blood and in our bones, the same symmetry is also active in our minds, enlivening them, vitalizing them, coaxing them ever upward. Possibly this is why I am sitting here now, writing all about this symmetry, because, deep down, somewhere inside me, DNA is telling me to.
This now leads on to an important question: who or what told DNA how to behave? Dawkins’s answer is unequivocal: no one, nothing; it found its way quite by accident, stumbling blindly through geological time, through endless cosmic and geophysical cataclysms, ice ages, or whatever.
It is true that much of DNA’s evolution on Earth has been erratic and at times very chancey, with many of nature’s experiments (like, say, dinosaurs) going drastically wrong. But remember, underlying all this apparent random, selective evolution is the symmetry of DNA and the genetic code, a symmetry that, as we have seen, is actually controlled by the forces described by nature’s two fundamental laws. So this is in no way simply the product of chance. DNA’s distinctive form and method of evolution is an inevitable consequence of these natural forces: it was preordained by nature itself.
It seems to me that the main problem with Dawkins’s position is that there is little or no music in it, no allowance made for the evident hermetic symmetry of the biomolecular world. This is where ideas old and new really diverge, because the mythmakers, the originators of the Hermetic Code, of pi and the “triple octave,” knew all about this music and about the laws and forces that conduct it.
As we have seen, the Hermetic Code is much more than a mathematical tool. It is a universal blueprint for all evolutionary or creative development, and its distinctive inner symmetry is to be found in the biomolecular and physical structures of all forms of life. We see this not only in the sixty-four-word/twenty-two-note amino acid “scale of resonance” but also, for example, in the overall physiology of human beings, with their three nerve complexes responsible for sensation, emotion, and perception, and their eight sets of endocrine transformers, the glands responsible for secreting into the bloodstream all the drugs and hormones necessary for enabling reaction to external stimuli. Thus, all human beings, and in fact all living things, are hermetically composed; they are all in their relative scales evolutionary “triple octaves” with the inherent potential to achieve a state of “optimum resonance.”
The living cell uses these hermetic symmetries to sustain itself and to develop. Ultimately it attains the necessary condition of “optimum resonance” and so acquires the supernatural power to self-replicate. Through a systematic sequence of exponential growth patterns it then combines with its fellow cells to create a whole new world for itself, a massive, complex, conscious organism. Such an organism constitutes a higher dimension for the cell, a higher “scale of being.”
The theory of transcendental evolution, the essence of which is contained in the now familiar phrase “As above, so below,” asserts that, at the human level of existence, it is possible for individuals to emulate the living cell and to achieve a similar condition of “optimum resonance.” Traditionally this unique condition of being has been most commonly acquired by following certain tried and tested “religious” codes of conduct—the idea being that such practices eventually endow the individual with special powers: to “self-replicate” in some way, to create whole new worlds, to penetrate up into an infinitely higher scale of existence, the scale which ultimately became known as heaven.
So pi itself, the blueprint for the evolution of all life, is also the blue-print for the evolution of consciousness. It represents an exact scientific description of the optimum metaphysical frequency, an “immaculate” psychological wavelength accessible to us all, through which mankind can ultimately break free from the ponderous mode of evolution characteristic of the “naked ape.”
Thus, the Hermetic Code describes the fundamental organic matrix upon which we have all been constructed. Whatever else we might care to think of ourselves, we are fundamentally walking “trinities,” triple octaves of resonance, comprising our sensations, emotions, and perceptions. And according to the originators of the theory of transcendental evolution, the three nerve complexes controlling these vital functions can be systematically developed up to a point where they all “resonate at optimum potential” and so acquire the power to transcend on to a higher scale of existence. Clearly such a condition of being is a far cry from our present evolutionary state. As Gurdjieff and Schwaller both said, somewhere along the line our ancestors lost the plot and slipped back into a rudimentary Darwinian mode. I believe the mythmakers and metaphysicians of ancient days foresaw this decline, and that this is why they went to such great lengths to project the Hermetic Code out into the greater sphere of humankind’s collective consciousness. They knew that this sacred concept would lie dormant, like a seed in the soil of the subconscious mind, but that sooner or later this seed would germinate, take root and grow, and ultimately flower and bear fruit. This description is not intended to be taken as a metaphor. The process outlined, as we shall see subsequently, is organic from beginning to end. And so it is that today, now that our level of comprehension has reached, as it were, the necessary “pitch,” we are witnessing a worldwide “Egyptian renaissance,” what we might call a new flowering of awareness and appreciation of the great wisdom and remarkable abilities of the metaphysicians of ancient times. Accordingly the Hermetic Code itself has surfaced once again, and its symmetries have been recognized, not only in all the major scriptures and in the dimensions of ancient pyramids all over the world, but also in our blood, in the white ray of physics, and in the underlying structure of the entire physical universe. In truth, now that we have eyes to see, we find that these symmetries are everywhere.
I stated above that I believe that the growth and development of consciousness is an organic process. Logically it has to be, because the Hermetic Code and the genetic code are fundamentally one and the same system. And, in fact, this organic correlation is further compounded in the ideas of Pythagoras, the main proponent of hermetic theory in ancient Greece.
The Pythagoreans themselves left no written records. The “Golden Verses,” whose authorship is generally attributed to their founder, may be authentic, but they are scanty and fragmented and contain no hermetic data as such. What the Pythagoreans did leave for posterity, however, was a comprehensive array of esoteric symbols: numerical, geometrical, and, of course, musical. The language of symbolism was their way of recording and transmitting their ideas, and when we examine the most “sacred” of these symbols, we often find that they possess a number of distinct but related facets. Of course, pi is the prime example: it conveys mathematical, geometrical, musical, mystical, and even scientific truths, all neatly condensed into a single, imperishable sign. Another significant symbol to which Pythagoras attached great importance was the sacred “Tetrad.” This was expressed by placing ten pebbles on the ground like so:
Like pi, this is in essence a musical symbol, another symbolic expression of the Hermetic Code and was referred to in Pythagorean schools as the model of the gods. Also described as the source of nature, the Tetrad was seen as the fundamental matrix upon which to create the perfect individual, a “model” of the gods.
When we look at the configuration of the ten pebbles, we see that they are laid out in a 4–3–2–1 format, the whole depicting an evolutionary process developing from bottom to top. It so happens that this distinctive pattern of development describes perfectly the four distinct stages in the synthesis of amino acids, the very building blocks of life.
It will help to remind readers here that the DNA molecule works with the four chemical components, or “bases,” of the genetic code. These are used to construct small molecules known as RNA triplet codons, comprising three bases each, which then serve as templates for the production of amino acids. The amino acids are then, in turn, assembled into the much more complex protein chains.
The Hermetic Code, as we know, is primarily an expression of the law of triple creation, which holds that everything is composed of trinities within trinities. This means that the three individual octaves embodied within pi are in themselves triple octaves, making nine octaves in total, or sixty-four “notes”—precisely the number of RNA codon combinations.
Look at the musical structure of the formula pi when set out in diagrammatic form:
As we see, the Hermetic Code, just like DNA and the genetic code, is constructed upon four fundamental “base notes.” These are represented in the base line of the Tetrad, which we have noted consists of four pebbles. If we now follow the successive stages in the synthesis of the amino acid, we see that the Tetrad describes this process exactly. Thus, from the four nitrogenous bases, DNA programs three of them at any given time (RNA triplet codons) to produce two distinct properties (amino acids are both acidic and alkaline) of one biochemical unit in a higher, more complex scale of existence, that is, one of the twenty-two evolutionary signals at the amino acid/protein scale of development.
There is one particularly detailed description of the Tetrad, written more than 1,500 years after the Pythagorean era, which is especially interesting, because it demonstrates even more convincingly how perfectly in tune these hermetic initiates were with the vital process of the creation of life, even to the extent of understanding the dual nature of what was being conceived in this way. The text in question, dealt with in some detail in The Infinite Harmony, is a tenth-century Egyptian commentary on the Koran, the Tafsir ol-Jalalayn, which gives an account of Muhammad’s famous night journey to heaven. It begins with him riding on the back of a quadruped, sees him prostrating himself three times in prayer, after which he is offered by the angel Gabriel two cups to drink from, one of wine and one of milk, and finally, after wisely choosing the milk, escorted in triumph to the first of the “seven heavens.”
Clearly this commentary on the Prophet’s spiritual awakening is describing a hermetic process, the organic “flowering” of Muhammad’s consciousness. It is a clear description of the pattern of evolutionary development of the Tetrad, which, as we have noted, depicts with absolute precision the way in which Watson and Crick’s famous double helix is evolving through time. The two symbols of wine and milk are especially significant, because they describe perfectly the dual, acid/ alkali properties of the amino acid.
We have now established that hermetic is genetic. This means, in effect, that certain fundamental aspects of consciousness—ideas, concepts, revelations, and so forth—are metaphysical genes and are produced in exactly the same way as are amino-acid chains.
Interestingly, this particular idea (or “gene”) was first tentatively put forward by Richard Dawkins himself in his highly acclaimed first book, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins defines this new kind of replicator as a “unit of cultural transmission,” or of “imitation,” one still in its infancy but which “already is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.”5 His chosen name for this metaphysical phenomenon—meme, from the Greek root mimeme (hence, mime, mimic, copy)—has since been incorporated into the main corpus of our language and has spawned a whole new embryonic science: memetics.
Examples of memes are numerous. Dawkins cites things like tunes, ideas, catch phrases, fashions in clothing, ways of making pots and of building arches. In fact, the list could be endless, because it would encompass anything invented by any given individual, good or bad, positive or negative, that is subsequently copied by another or others. This would include concepts as diverse and far removed from one another as fascism, belief in god, a scientific theory, the wheel, a literary genre, computer hacking, praying, killing, or whatever. Memes are likened to viruses, willy-nilly infecting or contaminating brains as they hop from one to another like subquantum fleas, apparently going nowhere in particular. This means that they are not seen as conscious agents but, like genes, as agents of “blind natural selection.” So memes, or ideas, another form of replicator, are everywhere, floating awkwardly around in the primeval soup—the soup of human culture—endlessly parasitising our brains at every twist and turn. Even the great religions, philosophical movements, and the concepts of the most influential figures in human history can be classed simply as parasitic “meme complexes,” all swimming around in a chaotic meme pool.
Memes are seen as agents of blind natural selection, but the evident longevity of the most enduring creations and inventions of man have to be admitted. As Dawkins explains, an individual’s genetic input to the ancestral line is halved as each generation comes forth, so it doesn’t take long for it to reach negligible proportions. The memetic influences of the more notable figures in history—like Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus, and Marconi—are still going strong.6
Although he makes an oblique reference to the power of the organized church, whose architecture, rituals, music, art, and written tradition he describes as “a co-adapted stable set of mutually-assisting memes,”7 Dawkins sees nothing special in religion per se. Indeed, he is well known for being particularly vociferous, and perhaps with good reason, in his condemnation of the Christian fundamentalist elements in certain southern states of America, where attempts have been made to keep Darwin’s theory off the educational curriculum. In some states it is still obligatory for schools to teach the naïve literal interpretation of the Biblical creation story alongside Darwin. Of course millions will agree that studying scripture of any religious persuasion can enrich and stimulate the mind, if only by freeing it to speculate on dimensions beyond the restrictive confines of mere survival. Possibly Dawkins himself would agree that written traditions are not all bad. But the Biblical version, along with all the other major doctrines referred to in this book, is a hermetic work, an all-encompassing treatise on universal symmetries, and to present it simply as a factual account of the origin of the world and of mankind not only misses the point entirely, but alienates virtually everyone of a scientific or rational bent, and in so doing actually hinders the flow of a vital stream of important knowledge. If such a state of affairs were to continue, the “soup of human culture” would simply stagnate.
Understandably, therefore, Dawkins tends to focus on peripherals, on the negative or contradictory aspects of formalized religion, such as the Christian idea of hellfire or the meme for religious blind faith, loosely referred to as the god meme. This, in my opinion, is where he misses out on the most important line of enquiry, one that must logically take us right back to the creators of these long-lived religious movements. In the case of the Christian phenomenon we need of course to focus primarily on the deeds and words of Jesus Christ, and to do this we have to strip away practically all of the subsequent trappings and subjective embellishments of the formalized hierarchy. If we do this we end up with the kernel of all Christian preaching—the original “meme complex”—expressed by Jesus himself through the unchanging symbolism of what is known today as the Passion. And what immediately becomes apparent when we look at the symbolism involved is that the eight days of Easter week, from Palm Sunday to the Sunday of the Resurrection, describe a musical event, an octave of activity, beginning on the note Do and ending, after seven intervals, on the very same note. So clearly the message encoded here is hermetic, a scientific description of the organic evolution of Christ’s consciousness, which, like Muhammad’s, successfully transcended on to the greater scale above.
Given that the Hermetic Code is the blueprint of all religious symbolism, we might say that it is one of the oldest memes floating around. More than that, like RNA or DNA in the gene pool, it is ubiquitous, and so deeply immersed in the human psyche that it looks to be unstoppable.
We now know that the Hermetic Code has many facets, expressing mathematical, musical, geometrical, scientific, and even cosmic truths, all ingeniously condensed into a single, imperishable sign: 22/7. One might say, then, that this code is a meme complex in its own right. But is it, as Dawkins assumes it must be, an unconscious entity, merely an agent of “blind natural selection”? The answer, it seems to me, is far from decided. In fact, it is difficult to see how the Hermetic Code could be defined as a blindly evolving, unconscious replicator. It was intentionally created and subsequently disseminated by the mind of some unknown genius for a specific and entirely selfless purpose—to enlighten lesser mortals on the ways of Nature and so facilitate the ongoing evolution of man’s collective consciousness. And it is still with us today, this code, as vital and resilient as the day it was conceived, an undiminishing beacon of metaphysical light shining into every nook and cranny of human endeavor. Even in the modern Western world, where secular influences predominate and the so-called god meme is in recessive mode in the majority of human brains, the fundamental components of the Hermetic Code are everywhere, in the symmetries of the material world of elementary particles and biomolecules, in music, legend, folklore, fairy tales, customs, and so on, stretching right back to the dawn of civilization. Just think of the number 7, every other person’s lucky number. So evidently appealing is this particular meme, if you won the national lottery with the number 7 and multiples thereof, you would almost certainly be sharing your diminished prize money with thousands of others. Of all numbers, this symbol, which is of course a symbol of the octave, is without doubt one of the most efficient “replicators” in the entire development of human thought.8
The point is, the Hermetic Code is not just any old brainchild. It is not a fashion, a craze, a catch-phrase, a political ideology, or a computer virus. It is an all-embracing concept, which not only describes the process of evolution but actually facilitates its ongoing development. In view of its uniqueness, it would be inappropriate to classify it along with the common meme. For this reason I choose to differentiate between memes and evolutionary concepts by referring to the latter simply as metaphysical genes. This would apply to all significant concepts, such as, for example, the highly potent symbolism of the Passion of Christ, the eightfold ways of the Buddha, Zoroaster, and Confucius, the structures of the I Ching and of the tarot pack, or the symmetries of creation described in Genesis, in the Koran, or in the cosmogeny of the builders of the Giza necropolis. These ancient concepts have survived for millennia and look set to last for many more to come. There are modern concepts, too, which might fall into the same category. For instance, Gurdjieff’s system is likely to prevail because it is essentially a hermetic phenomenon, a faithful “copy” of the original. Arguably Darwin’s rudimentary “conception” is in there too—along with the revelations of such as Watson and Crick or Einstein. Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity is a particularly potent “metaphysical gene” and has changed our view of the world forever. Not only does it focus on the constant properties of light, the Covenant of the Ages, but also, with its implications for the elasticity of space and time, it provides us with an intuitive glimpse into another dimension, the timeless, spaceless world of the great Egyptian sun-god, the plane of light.
So what is their attraction? What makes significant concepts such good replicators? The answer, in my view, is their hermetic content, their evolutionary bias. It is this kind of impetus that ordinary people like you and me somehow find irresistible, even if only on a subconscious level. But of course anything, any invention that serves to promote the evolution of consciousness, must by its very nature be based on “sound” principles and therefore be psychologically harmonious. Possibly, therefore, it is this integral harmony, or the quality of resonance intrinsic to the concept, that explains the secret of its longevity. This is to say that concepts possessing a high degree of resonance seem to be endowed with a special kind of metaphysical power, the power continually to “self-replicate,” by harmonizing, blending in, with billions of human brains.
So the significant concept, the metaphysical gene, is an evolutionary impulse; it has an inherent tendency to rise above the surface level of the “soup of human culture” and, in musical or hermetic terms, is much more psychologically resonant than a mindless catchphrase or the latest gizmo.
In Dawkins’s view, memes, or metaphysical genes, have nothing equivalent to chromosomes: “In general memes resemble the early self-replicating molecules, floating chaotically free in the primeval soup, rather than modern genes in their neatly paired, chromosomal regiments.”9
Evolution is considered to have kicked in when the early replicators in the primeval soup began not merely to exist but to construct for themselves containers as vehicles for their continued existence. The replicators that won through were those that built “survival machines” for themselves to live in. So genes came first and the machines— chromosomes, cells, plants, animals, people—came afterward. We might say, then, that the first true survival machine was the DNA molecule, the chromosome. This would imply that, at the next scale of development, the scale of human consciousness, ideas and concepts will eventually build “survival machines” for themselves, possibly beginning with the metaphysical equivalent of the chromosome. Dawkins assumes that this hasn’t happened yet, that memes, or metaphysical genes, whether in isolation or in loosely affiliated complexes, are still drifting clumsily through space and time like spores in the wind.
There is, however, an alternative way of looking at metaphysical genes, one that sees the “chromosomes” housing them—their “vehicles”—as already existing. To understand this we need first to look at DNA itself, the original chromosome. One of the chromosome’s functions is to create proteins, which it does by sending out copies of parts of its internal structure in the form of triplet codons. These are ejected into the chemically rich liquid membrane of the cell to do their work, to code either for one of the twenty amino acids or for one of the start–stop signals. The amino acids are then assembled by other genetic components into molecular chains. A chain of amino acids makes a peptide, a chain of peptides makes a protein, and the protein codes for one or another of a multitude of chemical processes in the evolutionary development of the entire organic body, the whole “machine.”
If we subsequently apply this model to the world of memes, we might say that the metaphysical chromosome is the brain itself, so that a momentary thought or idea would function as some kind of metaphysical amino acid, or a cluster of them, and a full-blown concept, with all its cognitive applications, would be the equivalent of a metaphysical gene. The product of such a “gene,” continuing to evolve and self-replicate in millions of other human brains, we might regard as the metaphysical equivalent of the biologists’ greater protein macromolecule.
If this is really how it is, and the evolutionary processes “above” are in essence the same as the processes “below,” it would require an explanation as to how a three-dimensional organ like the brain could possibly be regarded as a scaled-up replica of the DNA double helix. This will be the subject of the next chapter.
Earlier I suggested that this “organic” process of transcendental evolution, of “journeying to heaven,” involved attaining what I call an optimum degree of psychological resonance, one that would ultimately be “in tune” with the constant frequencies of light quanta. The implication of this is that light and consciousness are, in effect, opposite sides of the same metaphysical coin—the “coin” itself being the metaphysical equivalent of the amino acid, the transcendental product of an enlightened mind. Now this product—this impulse, idea, or concept—like the amino acid, is derived primarily from three basic components or “bases,” namely sensation, emotion, and perception. The concept that arises from the harmonious interaction of these three metaphysical “bases,” just like the acid/alkali structure of the amino acid, must also have a dual nature, which means that these products of consciousness should have a complementary opposite. This must be light itself. Light is, after all, the primary agent of all visual sensation. It is also the most resonant “octave” in existence. Most importantly, however, it is a perfect electromagnetic blueprint of the Hermetic Code.
The unraveling of the digital molecular structure of the DNA double helix has been hailed by Dawkins as the most revolutionary scientific discovery in history, an achievement that, he believes, should be honored as much as the works of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Whether or not this will, in the event, turn out to be the case remains to be seen, but it seems to me to be a tall order. The Athenian adepts almost certainly achieved their present status primarily because they were all fully “in tune” with the tenets of hermetic theory. Socrates, for example, the first of the great trio and Plato’s mentor, is known to have received personal instruction from the Pythagorean School on the island of Samos. In addition, all three were known to have respected and familiarized themselves with the “musical” traditions of the legendary Persian Magi.
The Greeks, of course, believed the original source of all this hermetic wisdom to have been the ibis-headed Egyptian god Thoth. Known to the Greeks as Hermes Trismegistus (“Thrice-greatest Hermes”), he later became associated with the Roman god Mercury, the messenger of the gods. Most of the extant literature relating to Hermes belongs to the post-Christian era, and scholars in general doubt his historical authenticity. But of course, someone, somewhere, revealed the Hermetic Code to the human race, so by whatever name this individual was then known, we can be reasonably sure that the originator of Revelation certainly did, at some remote period in prehistory, walk upon this earth.
We have already established that this remarkably astute observer understood fully how life is created. The symmetry of the Hermetic Code and the symmetry of the genetic code match too precisely for us to think otherwise. But in case there is still some doubt in the reader’s mind, it is perhaps worth noting here another intriguing detail in the legends of Hermes/Thoth, one that, to me at least, is so fitting as to be more “poetic” even than Dawkins’s Mitochondrial Eve. The rod or wand of Hermes/Mercury was known as the caduceus. He is depicted holding it in Botticelli’s painting La Primavera. The wand itself, said to have had awesome magical properties, was surmounted with two wings and entwined by two serpents. It is a perfect double helix.
Significantly, this same design also appeared in ancient America, and in much the same context, that is, as a symbol adopted by a legendary man of high learning. In Fingerprints of the Gods, Graham Hancock describes a statue in Teotihuacán near Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, of the mythological civilizer of ancient South America, Viracocha. A bearded, Caucasian figure with features identical to the early depictions of the Egyptian god Osiris, Viracocha is wearing a ceremonial robe, on either side of which is engraved the image of a serpent, coiling from bottom to top. In another representation, Viracocha holds a thunderbolt in each hand. A thunderbolt, of course, is a stylized representation of a helix, and Viracocha is holding two of them. Further north, incidentally, Viracocha’s Mexican counterpart, Quetzalcoatl, had as his symbol a plumed serpent—again very reminiscent of the plumed caduceus of Hermes.
Possibly the most impressive ancient representation of the double helix I have yet encountered is the pyramid Temple of Kukulkan (the name for Quetzalcoatl in the Mayan dialect) at Chichén Itzá, in northern Yucatán, Mexico. This is what Graham Hancock has to say about this remarkable structure:
Its four stairways had 91 steps each. Taken together with the top platform, which counted as a further step, the total was 365. This gave the number of complete days in a solar year. In addition, the geometric design and orientation of the ancient structure had been calibrated with Swiss-watch precision to achieve an objective as dramatic as it was esoteric: on the spring and autumn equinoxes, regular as clockwork, triangular patterns of light and shadow combine to create the illusion of a giant serpent undulating on the northern staircase. On each occasion the illusion lasted for 3 hours and 22 minutes exactly.10
Two serpents coiling up to the sun, like starbound DNA. Esoteric, yes, but entirely comprehensible in the light of the theory of transcendental evolution.
Such remarkable similarities in ancient global symbolism may lead us reasonably to suppose, as Hancock, Bauval, West, Wilson, and others have suggested, that these legendary civilizers—Viracocha/ Quetzalcoatl/Kukulkan, Osiris/Thoth/Hermes—if not one and the same individual, were an elite group from a forgotten race of people. Possibly they were survivors of the cataclysms of the last ice-age melt-down, who successfully disseminated their profound understanding of the laws governing creation and evolution across the entire planet at an unknown period of the distant past. But how distant?
Dawkins says that Mitochondrial, or African, Eve, was the first member of our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens, to produce descendants successfully. She is thought to have appeared possibly as recently as a hundred thousand years ago. Before her there were more primitive hominids, such as the Neanderthals (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis), Homo erectus, and its even more remote ancestors, Homo habilis and Australopithicus, the earliest having been dated to around four million years ago.
So a great deal has happened in the evolution of the hominid over the last hundred thousand years; for Eve, the mother of the modern human race, is thought to have been little more than a cunning savage, a successful fighter and breeder, an unwitting, cutthroat product of DNA’s relentless bid for immortality.
This conventional picture of the primitive “savage” dominating the world stage around one hundred thousand years ago is by no means accepted by all scholars. We have noted already how Stan Gooch has shown that the predecessors of African Eve—the Neanderthals—were in their own way a highly evolved culture, people who were closely observing the heavens as long ago as 75,000 years ago and were capable of calculating cosmic events such as the long-term cycles of the moon and the periodicity of the planets. It also seems that not all of them were merely fighters and breeders, for they engaged in huge communal mining enterprises. Gooch cites as evidence for this large-scale redochre mines and quarries recently discovered in southern Africa. Some of the mines have true mining tunnels, and these immense hives of highly organized human activity have been accurately dated, with the earliest, around one hundred thousand years old, corresponding exactly with the long-term genealogist’s latest possible date for the appearance of African Eve. It should also be noted that red ochre had no material value and so would have been used for ritual purposes only, indicating that the Neanderthal’s world was not solely an arena of survival, but also had a strong spiritual side to it. This is further confirmed by the archaeological evidence mentioned previously, namely the stone altar discovered in a cave at Drachenloch in the Swiss Alps, in which had been enshrined seven bear skulls. Obviously seven is a crucial number here, not only because of its obvious association with the natural rhythms and harmonies of nature, but also because of its association with a celestial counterpart, the seven stars of the Great Bear. Even as early as 75,000 years ago, it seems, the Neanderthal consciousness was already nurturing the rudimentary elements of the theory of transcendental evolution, possibly little more than twenty or so thousand years after the appearance of African Eve. By about 35,000 BCE, Eve’s descendants had migrated across the habitable regions of the Earth and all but wiped out the Neanderthal. Today only a few bones and tools are left to testify to their existence. Indeed, according to the American geneticist Mark Stoneking of the University of Berkeley, who has done extensive research on mitochondrial DNA, there aren’t even any original Neanderthal genes left in mankind’s gene pool. The evidence suggests that the modern human—Cro-magnon, Homo sapiens sapiens—was an extremely vigilant and ruthless exterminator. As Stoneking says, there are no non-African mitochondria in the genetic makeup of any individual living: “It looks like there wasn’t any mating going on between the resident females and the migrating males—at least none that produced a lasting genetic legacy.”11
However, as Gooch’s research has shown, they certainly left a lasting symbolic, or metaphysical, legacy. We see this, in part, in the astronomical observations of both the Neanderthals and our forebears, the exterminators.
For example, the constellation of the Great Bear was called by the ancient Egyptians the Mother of Time and was later regarded in India as the heavenly home of the septarishi, an embodiment of the seven properties (rishi) of creation. We thus have a definite link between the mythological and astrological beliefs of the “primitive” hominid existing in the depths of the last ice age and those of the priest-astronomers of Old Kingdom Egypt and Vedic India. One would expect such links to exist, of course, because that’s exactly how evolution works. Successful ideas are like successful genes and are passed on in exactly the same way, with or without the cognizance and cooperation of the host “organism.” The symbolism of the number seven is one such “gene,” and it has been with us since the dawn of civilization. Gooch not only identifies this number in the findings at Drachenloch, but also in another symbolic configuration known as the Cretan Labyrinth, which took the form of a sevenfold spiral leading to a central point. This design appears in both the pre-Columbian Americas and in Minoan Crete—hence its name—which suggests that it originated from a common, extremely ancient source dating back, Gooch suggests, as much as 20,000 years. A simpler, less standardized design has been found on a Palaeolithic mammoth bone from Siberia, which again pushes its origins back at least as far as the time of the bear cult of the Swiss Alps, circa 75,000 years ago. This same “ritual labyrinth” is also found in the symbolic designs of Cornish, Rajastani, Hopi, Finnish, Welsh, and Etruscan art, all of which feature spirals with seven turns.
In Greek mythology, Theseus was told by Ariadne that the maze, or labyrinth, consisted of one left-handed, seven-coiled path spiraling in, and one right-handed path spiraling out—a kind of double-helix configuration through which the initiate “danced” his or her way to freedom—or to enlightenment.12
Now let’s return for a moment to the conventional view of the hominid’s recent development, that the archetypal caveman was superseded by the slightly smarter but equally cutthroat Cro-Magnon type around 35,000 years BCE. Some 25,000 years later, after enduring possibly the most treacherous and uninhabitable climatic conditions ever faced by mankind (the last ice-age meltdown), these people foregathered in and around the more temperate regions of the world.
Now contrast this hungry, flint-wielding creature with the kind of human being that lived in the Fertile Crescent about five thousand years ago. From Egypt to Mesopotamia there occurred, quite suddenly, an unprecedented bout of civilized activity. Great cities and highly refined cultures, the likes of which had supposedly never been seen before on Earth, grew and blossomed in the space of a few centuries. Suddenly man had learned to build on an unbelievable scale—not just any-old-how, but with an expertise and precision that even today’s architects and engineers, using the same kinds of tools as the ancient builders are supposed to have used, would find very difficult to match, let alone surpass.
As is usual when trying to assess the incredible achievements of these “children of the hunter-gatherers,” we shall take the classic example of the Great Pyramid, undoubtedly the largest and most complex building ever to have been constructed in stone. Each of its two and a half million or so blocks of limestone averages 2.5 tons in weight, and some of the larger granite blocks incorporated hundreds of feet up in its interior structure weigh as much as 70 tons. On top of all that, this monument, towering almost 150 meters above the Giza plateau, was originally sheathed in a two-and-a-half-meter-thick, exterior limestone casing of blocks weighing around fifteen tons apiece. These blocks were irregular in shape underneath and had to be made to fit the cruder contours of the core masonry, but, quite remarkably, their exposed surfaces were perfectly flat and polished so that they shone like glass. Further, each of these blocks, equivalent in weight to about thirty family-sized cars, was set with cemented joints only a fraction of a millimeter wide. Archaeologists and astro-archaeologists alike tell us that this remarkable building was erected around 2500 BCE, and all of the available evidence supports this dating.
So what was our primitive forebear doing for a living in the Fertile Crescent a millennium before this era? According to the current historical scenario, the natives had barely learned to tame grass, let alone their restless minds; they were merely surviving. But then, quite suddenly by evolutionary standards, the natives not only learned to build on an unprecedented scale, to write and to administer vast social enterprises, they also conjured up the remarkable Hermetic Code, pulling it out of nowhere, like a rabbit out of a hat, and then mankind suddenly came of age.
Now this, I would suggest, is a massive developmental leap. According to Darwinian theory, macromutations seldom occur in nature, and if they do they usually result in some kind of chronic deformity of the organism, which generally results in extinction. Yet here we have an example in nature of a genuine macromutation—in this case in the mind of man—despite the fact that it seems to break the fundamental Darwinian rule of natural, selective evolution.
So, what exactly happened? Is the Hermetic Code really the chance product of a random macromutation in the brain of a fortunate member of the species Homo sapiens sapiens, or was it purposely introduced by some kind of external force?
Possibly we shall never know. Some of the authors mentioned earlier have suggested that there existed, toward the end of the last ice age, around 15,000–11,000 BCE, a high civilization that was almost completely destroyed in a massive global catastrophe. Dozens of myths and legends from all over the world describe such an event, which apparently culminated in the Great Flood. An unprecedented rise in sea levels would have been a natural result of emergence from the last ice age, when there was a rapid deglaciation of vast regions of the Earth’s surface.
The legends from America and Egypt all say that there was only a handful of survivors of this great cataclysm, seven or eight in number. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition these survivors are known as the Noahs, a seafaring people with extreme foresight who knew how to build and sail ships across oceans. They had also been initiated into the secrets of the Hermetic Code, as the biblical records clearly show.13
Elsewhere Noah and his companions (or similar survivors) were known by various other names: Osiris or Thoth in Egypt, Viracocha in Peru and Bolivia, Quetzalcoatl in Mexico, Yu the Great in China, Manu in Vedic India, Deukalion in Greece, Utnapishtin in Babylon— the list goes on, through more than seventy flood legends from cultures worldwide.
If these myths are in fact describing an actual event, then it is entirely possible that some of the survivors of an earlier civilization passed on the main tenets of their knowledge to the early settlers of the Fertile Crescent. So when ancient scriptures speak of “divine intervention” on the part of the “gods” from heaven above or whatever, possibly they are merely referring to the dissemination of a superior knowledge to a less advanced race, a perfectly logical transference of consciousness from spheres “above” to spheres “below.”
Of course, the Darwinist theory of gradual change through chance mutations actually lends support to this idea that civilization is much older than historians would have us believe. Even so, the question of whether or not the concept of the Hermetic Code, however old it may be, originally evolved gradually or appeared quite suddenly in the fertile mind of a single inspirational genius remains unanswered. Perhaps the experiences of some modern “geniuses” can provide us with a clue here, for it is a well-known and accepted fact that scientists themselves very often experience moments of inspirational perception, intuitive insights that transcend logic.
A typical example is the strange experience of the German chemist August Kekulé, who, after spending several hours laboriously working through a mundane textbook, fell into a dispirited half-sleep, in which he saw long rows of atoms dancing before him, wriggling like snakes. When one of the snakes suddenly seized its own tail with his mouth, Kekulé awoke to the realization that he had just “seen” what he had been long seeking—the precise chemical structure of the benzene ring.
Similarly, Henri Poincaré, the French mathematician, said that the solution to a particularly difficult non-Euclidean geometry problem he had been grappling with came to him quite suddenly, at a time when he was idly thinking about something far removed from mathematics. Another great pioneering scientist, the astronomer Johannes Kepler, said that the discovery of his famous third law came to him as “a glimpse of light”; and Einstein, whose own “glimpses” into the mysteries of space and time are the stuff of modern legend, had this to say of scientific investigation: “There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition.”14
Perhaps, then, it was something like this flash of intuition (a macromutation of the mind) that was responsible for the conception of the Hermetic Code by Thoth/Osiris/Viracocha or whoever. Or it may be that the idea evolved gradually from the earlier instinctive impulses of the Neanderthals. We shall possibly never know exactly how this change came about, but in any event we can see that successful macromutations do, in fact, occur frequently in nature. A flash of intuition is precisely that.
As I said, Darwinists exclude macromutations from the evolutionary process on the grounds that gross physical changes are invariably detrimental to living organisms. And yet, regarding the origin of the very first intelligent entity to appear on this planet, the DNA–RNA complex, evolutionists’ arguments for a gradual appearance are not entirely convincing.
Scientists now believe that the first biomolecular self-replicators were free-falling, bacterial RNA strands. Exactly what form their self-replicating predecessors took no one knows. Dawkins cites a proposal made by the biologist A. G. Cairns-Smith that the precursors to organic self-replicators might have been something like inorganic crystals, growing, say, in different sorts of clays, constantly transported every-which-way by ever-changing waterflows.
In fact, crystals do, in a sense, “grow,” one into another, the first array of geometrically aligned atoms and molecules acting as a template for the next. As they grow, crystals also produce, on occasions, flaws (mutations) in their molecular structure, which are then “copied” by the subsequent developing layers. Crystals also possess right- and left-handed properties, that is, two varieties—two or more kinds being the necessary prerequisite for the phenomenon of heredity, where “like begets like.” However, as Dawkins himself points out, crystal molecules only act as templates for the formation of molecules in their mirror image. So, in this particular instance, like does not beget like. Chemists have been trying for many years to “trick” inorganic molecules into breeding other molecules of the same handedness, but the natural forces at work in the inorganic molecular world are seemingly indifferent to such deception. If you start cultivation with a left-hander crystal, you end up with an equal number of left-and right-handed molecules. Thus, says Dawkins, “although the function of an earlier, non-organic self-replicator didn’t involve ‘handedness,’ a version of this trick was pulled off naturally and spontaneously four thousand million years ago.”15
It seems to me that this statement is somewhat lacking in scientific clarity. In fact, the suggestion that some kind of evolutionary “trick” was spontaneously “pulled off” all those years ago has a distinct air of the magician about it, a familiar, sleight-of-hand, “Hey, presto” quality, which suggests to me that its author is really a Creationist at heart, one who does believe in some form of “immaculate conception” taking place here on Earth way back at the dawn of geological time.
The analogy Dawkins uses in his book The Blind Watchmaker is that inorganic crystal growth, producing mutational flaws over billions of years, happened, quite accidentally, to act as a kind of crude “scaf-folding” for the building of a sophisticated biochemical “arch.” Once the final “center-stone” of the arch fell into place (one of the four bases, perhaps?), then the previously formed crystal “scaffolding,” greatly superseded by its biomolecular successor, involved, or collapsed, into extinction. The now animated “arch,” the biomolecular descendent of this extremely primitive inorganic ancestor, eventually evolved blindly into entities like Jesus or Einstein, Hermes, Dawkins, and ourselves.
According to Dawkins, “the digital revolution at the very core of life has dealt the final, killing blow to “vitalism”—vitalism being the apparently mistaken notion that living material is deeply distinct from nonliving material. This is certainly true in respect of the individual electrons and atoms of which living matter is composed, but when considering the overall symmetrical structure of entire biomolecules, and the harmonious distribution of the electrons and atoms within these beautiful, dynamic, musically structured life forms, then the fundamental difference between, for example, a molecule of the protein hemoglobin and a molecule of water is surely glaringly obvious. Ergo, vitalism—my kind at least—is very much alive and kicking.
We thus have two extremely advantageous macromutations in the otherwise uneventful story of the evolution of life on Earth: the quantum transition from salt crystals or whatever, via something or other, to living, writhing, hermetically composed bacteria; and the incredibly rapid metamorphosis, over a period of time which by Darwinian standards is infinitesimally small, of African Eve into Marie Curie or Rosalind Franklin.
But are successful macromutations really so very rare? Have they only ever happened at the beginning and at the end of this current evolutionary episode on planet Earth? Perhaps not. For example, the transition from the single chemical base to the amino acid is a huge developmental leap. Again, the transition from amino acid to protein molecule is also a massive step. And what about the transition from bacterial RNA to the first self-contained cell, or the first cell to a multicellular structure and so on, to the fish, the reptile, and the bird, the mammal, the hominid, and ultimately the civilization-builder?
Evolutionists will argue that these marked changes in development only look like macromutations, that they are in reality composed of untold billions of small, gradual, mutational steps. This may be so, but at some point in each of these evolutionary lines there must have come a point during the transition from one stage of development to another when a clear distinction between the two was finally cast. A bird is only a bird when it is a bird, not before. And we know that, at some point, birds definitely did come into being. When this happened, when the first feathered creature finally took flight, a greater macromutation occurred.
Perhaps the evolution of the Hermetic Code proceeded along similar lines, where a rudimentary instinctive awareness of the natural rhythms and harmonies of nature took root in the primitive consciousness and then gradually began to develop into a coherent belief system. One can envisage a scenario whereby this process of recognition might have continued to evolve to the point where all the fundamental components of the Hermetic Code were instinctively incorporated into ritual practices, possibly without any conscious intervention on the part of any single individual. At a certain stage, however, someone, or a group of people, must have realized that the separate components of this instinctively adopted number symbolism could be incorporated into an overall cohesive theory of evolution. Even if we don’t know exactly how and when, we know this happened, because the Hermetic Code “happened.” Gradualists, if they were to accept that the Hermetic Code is everything I say it is, or even that it exists, would probably argue for a slow dawning of this cosmic awareness, a step-by-step method of advancement.
But, as we have seen, there is plenty of room for any number of successful macromutations in the long, fragmented story of our evolution, and one cannot doubt that the “eureka” moment has been experienced untold times by millions of human minds for tens of thousands of years. And this process, as we have noted, eventually culminated in the emergence of the Hermetic Code.
If, as I believe, the Hermetic Code was a genuine macromutation, introduced by an extremely powerful external force into the receptive consciousness of the Fertile Crescent, then perhaps the first, hermetically composed biomolecular self-replicators, which evolved along exactly the same hermetic principles, also received, right at the very beginning of the evolutionary chain, an external “leg-up,” to get them started.
What I am suggesting is that there may be very real, unseen forces in this universe that dictate that the evolution of DNA-based, or musically structured, life forms must inevitably, as and when conditions permit, occur everywhere in what is, after all, a musically structured arena. This is to say that the evolution of life on Earth, or anywhere else, far from being a chance, random event, is in fact an irresistible, natural process, dictated from start to finish by the natural forces of the universe itself. And these are forces that, as we have seen, are described in meticulous detail by the two fundamental laws of nature embodied in the Hermetic Code.
It is now generally believed that life, in some form or another, very probably exists elsewhere in the universe, though to what extent scientists can only speculate. The astronomer Frank Drake, in his book Intelligent Life in Space, formulated an equation designed to give some idea of the likelihood of life existing in other star-systems in our galaxy. The equation contains seven approximate factors, including the rate at which new stars form in our galaxy each year, the proportion of planetary systems that might harbor planets with a suitable physical environment, the smaller fraction of such planets on which life might actually get started, the number of years life is expected to survive on each planet—and so on. To get to the point, his answer, for our galaxy, is five-to-one against just one other planet in the Milky Way harboring any form of life whatsoever.
In the next chapter we shall be exploring this question of “alien” life in more detail. Being neither an astronomer nor mathematician, I will not be using long equations or intergalactic telephone numbers to explain why I believe that Drake has got his sums drastically wrong. In fact, all the reader needs to follow the line of thought to my own conclusions is some ordinary common sense, an essential pinch of intuition and, of course, a basic understanding of the Hermetic Code, the “theory of everything.”