FOUR
A Sense of Loss Pervades
We’ve now examined all the available evidence pertinent to the origin of the myth of “Enoch’s pillars.” What might that myth mean in today’s very different world?
The first thing to note is that Josephus’s little story represents history’s first appearance—albeit condensed—of what has become something of a global industry. I refer of course to that popular enthusiasm for extraordinary knowledge about ancient civilizations: often a heady blend of spiritually frustrated instincts entwined with scientific research, theory, extraterrestrial speculaion, and natural curiosity. Popular interest in ancient historical themes is reflected in myriad flashy, sensationalist TV shows and YouTube uploads ubiquitous to our multifarious screens on anything from “Ancient Aliens” to the “Secrets of Stonehenge” to the “Mayan Prophecies,” while the ideological pivot of so much of it—the Bible—is (allegedly) “decoded” by some means or other. Amid a frequently unscholarly and often misleading flood of televisual hyperbole may yet be espied the odd pinnacle poking up from a submerged range of serious documentaries investigating archaeological and ancient historical themes with responsible, forensic thoroughness, though even then, not infrequently chafing at the bit of academic caution in quest of the elusive scoop. Truth is inured to being an unwelcome stranger in human affairs.
One ambitious website, for example, serves as flagship to an attractive, glossy magazine designed to serve this burgeoning interest: ANCIENT ORIGINS—Reconstructing the Story of Humanity’s Past is regularly packed with a mix of archaeological reports and speculative articles on subjects as diverse as “high-tech” devices used to float the Sphinx up the Nile; a mysterious megalithic monument at Carrowmore (“Unlike Anything Seen in Ireland”); discovery of the oldest Buddhist scrolls; chemical reactions used by humans 5,000 years ago for pigments in the Altai Mountains (Siberia); 8,000-year-old petroglyphs found in a South African crater; sacred sites of the pre-Columbian Diaguita people in Argentina; the moon’s ancient origins; a giant Ice Age mammoth tusk found in Mexico; the gods of ancient Carthage; the Vestal Virgins of ancient Rome; ancient Chinese death rituals involving cannabis; Nicaragua’s Lost City emerging from the ashes; 5,500-year-old homes found in Scotland beneath a loch; ancient Japanese magical practices; the greatest Macedonian necropolis in Aigai; trophy skulls that help explain the Mayan Empire’s collapse; psychic archaeology uncovering lost structures at Glastonbury; a 40,000-year-old Pleistocene-era wolf unearthed in Yakutia, Russia; Mysteries of the ancient Phoenicians; Ma’at, Egyptian goddess of truth and justice; the “Enochian” language used by angels revealed to John Dee and Edward Kelley; “Malta, Shrouded in Megalithic Mystery”; the decomposing bodies of Skull Island, Indonesia; “Ancient Origins of North Americans Settled”; the “Antikythera Mechanism: who designed the world’s oldest Astronomical Computer?”; “How the Universe Came to Be: The Bible and Science Finally in Accord?”
It makes one wonder how civilization coped before our times on an archaeological diet of the book of Genesis, a few classics, and the odd chronicle of national history. Nevertheless, the fact is that data concerning ancient history gathers at an ever-accelerating rate, and as it does so, emerging questions expand commensurately, leading to a somewhat unreasonable demand for explanations and “answers” (especially when confronted by unexpected or mysterious objects), of which tentative efforts at “solutions” serve to fuel the aforementioned industry. One is reminded of one “explanation” for the Book of Enoch’s account of Sethites being corrupted by “angels,” a story naturally popular within the industry under discussion; that is, that to explain the overwhelming scale of evils done by men and sustained in the world that seemed insoluble to sensitive minds in late antiquity, it was found necessary to apportion ultimate responsibility to wayward “extraterrestrials” (as we might anachronistically call them)—angels—“descending” to earth for nefarious purposes involving transmission of technical or occult knowledge formerly unknown to a relatively ignorant humanity. Likewise, we find in the gospel that Jesus’s principal conflict is with “Satan,” for mere men “know not what they do.”*15
If it’s unknown, it must come from Above, seems to be the perennial human instinct, for a being poised twixt here and “there” who is often confused as to whence he comes and whither he goes. “Man,” according to Genesis, was made of “red earth” (the meaning of Adam) yet rendered a living soul by breath of “Elohim” (literally, “gods”) breathed into his nostrils; that is, although made of earth, his life, or spirit, came from “above.” While man is in Nature, according to the Genesis myth, he is not entirely of it, so long, that is, as he breathes and lives, which he may continue to do, as Genesis explains with respect to Enoch, as long as he “walks with God.” Man has “to do” with God and the world; his business is with imperishable creator and perishable world. “Get right with God,” as Aleister Crowley’s preacher father used to tell those whom he encountered on the road and had a mind to convert.
While the old understanding of absolute biblical inerrancy used to make “walking with God” a relatively straightforward matter in principle (subdue lusts), it is difficult or impossible nowadays for scholarship to take, say, Josephus’s account of Sethite pillars as history. One thing we can assert with confidence today is that the dating of Noah’s Flood afforded by literal interpretation of Genesis takes us to a period astonishingly distant, not from us, but from any provisionally scientific date for planetary genesis. It is also the case that any ancient phenomenon that might correspond to a historical flood serving as a basis for the story of Noah’s survival would also have occurred at a vast distance in time from the first appearance of our species. Based on biblical accounts alone, Noah’s Flood has been dated to approximately 2348 BCE (Bishop Ussher’s famous chronology), with the Genesis creation dated by conscientious scholars of yesteryear between approximately 4004 and 3950 BCE. Whereas, the earliest skeletal remains identified as homo sapiens discovered so far derive from nearly 200,000 BCE (in present-day Africa), with other early skeletal specimens found dating from 100,000 to 40,000 BCE in Asia and Europe. Naturally, given the vast extension of time for human habitation that archaeology reveals, reaching far beyond the generations described in the Bible, the “pillars of Enoch” story is naturally open to dismissal as either historically superfluous or fanciful, or else, on the positive side, as being a valuable symbol of a culturally meaningful myth.
For the purposes of our investigation, Enoch’s pillars suggest several things of cultural value, for we have in them a vivid, even stark picture of a depositum of vital knowledge, a product of wisdom and painstaking practice, a body of knowledge so important that it is deemed vital that it survive, even if nothing else should, as a monument to what has been achieved and what is worth passing on, even to unknown hands at some unknown time: something true to outlive Nature’s (or the Creator’s) predations on established orders of things. It is a powerful, influential image.
Within it we find the idea of knowledge being given definite, lasting form in writing, our surest hope of memorable thought, a kind of artificial extension of life in mind. The birth of writing has always been associated with the gods. While the pillars are made at a point in time, their purpose is projected into an unknown future, a form of continuity of memory and experience. This stone-cold writing will keep warm a living knowledge affording the sole means available to rebuild something of what has been lost: to create anew so that past phoenix may rise from present ashes.
We also find within this composite myth the unmistakable note of loss. Conflagrations—whether of water or of fire—serve to sever definitively the future from a fast-receding past. The flood becomes the dividing line between two states of humanity, one we call antediluvian—before the cataclysm (the lost); the other, postdiluvian—that which is left afterward, a detritus where humankind has to pick up the pieces. Of course, we nowadays recognize (as did Plato in the Timaeus), that there have been many such breaks with the past, and doubtless more to come, and much has been correspondingly lost through deluges wrought on humankind by “outraged nature”: loss of knowledge, memory, insight, experience, monuments to vision, ancestral roots, and countless human lives lived well and ill. Pompeii, for example, has become a monument of its own: a collective “pillar,” or frozen moment, held immobile by fiercest fire, lava turned cold and dusty, intriguing us with its virtual life turned to death. Pompeii suggests both life and life’s absence, its future lost; that is to say, caught in an eternal past by Vesuvius’s indifferent ash. The theme of lost knowledge, and its corresponding emotion, nostalgia, will become one of the greatest motivators for learning, spiritual awakening, and cultural renaissance in our relatively brief history on this planet.
And then we have the key intrigue of Josephus’s story: manifestation. One of the pillars, he tells us, remains to this day, in a real place, which, though vaguely determined, stands to testify to the story’s truth. What has occurred may occur again: the monument’s apparent survival in “Seiriadic land” speaks to a world too pleased with itself. Your time, too, may come, it seems to say. Was Josephus saying this subtly to his Roman audience? Prophecies of doom were rife in the Rome he knew; astrologers had been banished from Rome, along with Jews and Egyptians, by emperors Tiberius and Claudius—prediction being too popular and, perhaps, too incendiary of public confidence. This all resonates with us in our very different world, especially given the “realized apocalypse” scenario presented by anxious climatologists, incautious news bulletins, single-issue zealots, and sundry pundits of a world gripped by natural deformations attributed to alleged contemporary “sins” of exploitation, profit seeking, willful ignorance, self-destructiveness, blindness, fanaticism, war—you name it. It’s the old judgment scenario, in new, secular form.
So we have in Enoch’s pillars a kind of epitome, or template, for a framework still preoccupying many today. And its message runs more or less like this:
Something has gone wrong.
We have, it is alleged, lost touch with something our species once knew and understood. There are keys to what this something was. They come from the past, and many still hide in the past: in history, written and unwritten, told and untold, revealed and suppressed, inscribed or mute, in myth and manuscript, magic and legend and mystery.
Evidence exists for forgotten civilizations that indicates ancient genius and the powers of destruction: from nature, from humanity, from ignorance, from overworking of fertile land (Easter Island), to failure to see what was coming—perhaps even from powers above and beyond the milky blue ball of Earth. Guilty men and women have a hand in causing deluges from, it has been alleged, failing to observe spiritual imperatives and ancestral wisdom: punishments for “sin”; that is, getting it wrong with a will, departing from divine knowledge.
And the visible remains of those lost civilizations, are they not taken to suggest superior knowledge and practical skill, ancient science whose precise mechanisms we can only guess at—the stones of Machu Picchu, the pyramids of Giza, the temple of Angkor Wat, the Nazca Lines, Stonehenge, and more to come, under land or sea, still beyond our ken—an as yet silent vista of revelation requiring only spades, bathyscaphes, and “geophiz” to unearth ’em? The world, you could say, is burgeoning with “Enoch’s pillars,” and anything resembling them is hastily pressed into service of a theosophically stimulated contemporary religion that I am inclined to call “Hancockism” (were it not for its antecedents) on account of that name’s ubiquity in the literature of an alleged primal spiritual “Tradition” obscured by time and an ever more remote antiquity. Probabilities may be scarce, but possibilities are endless. One would be as justified in calling this movement “Old Age” as the journalistic misnomer “New Age.”
And, having mentioned the seed of theosophical speculation, we are driven to recognize that other dimension. The aforementioned knowledge that in its fullness and glory belongs to an unreachable Other Side of a cataclysm, or series of cataclysms, in a lost world. Whence did this knowledge derive? What kind of knowledge is it? Is it to be explained as an inevitable product of evolution? What has stimulated such alleged evolution?
Our ancestors were in no doubt. Sciences came from above, ambiguous gifts of the gods, invisible powers behind perceptible forces. Now, we today may rationalize this ancient and globally widespread belief by saying, aye, indeed: the “above” doubtless denotes the higher mind, that sapiens of which mere Homo is said to be distinguished from hominid relatives. And who tells us this? Why, intellectuals, presumably distinguished by intellectual capacities for innovation and technical prowess like those of the mute ancestor whose works they purport to explain! Well, the modern intellectual undoubtedly finds use for his or her mind, but the Patent Office has not historically been a wing of the Ivy League. Perhaps there is confusion about the meaning of “higher mind.” To this question we must surely return in due course, but for now, let us simply make the point that the knowledge of which we speak, the one worth saving, worth recording, worth projecting into the future was, in the earliest known myths, the product of men working on earthly materials with insights gifted from worlds apparently higher than immediate natural environments. It has proved naturally logical in our fragmented “space age” to see such higher worlds in terms either of psychology or of distant galaxies, whence have come and whither return aliens (to us, that is) who have, it is said and been believed, descended, or condescended, to unload some superior intelligence into fit human receptacles. This idea was forcibly and memorably presented in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which one imagined hirsute hominid in remotest prehistory encounters a pillar (!) that by some inexplicable power, stimulates a leap of, well, imagination, in the hominid, who turns a bone into a tool, and, in course of time (identified with evolution), turns a weapon into a space station. Neither Arthur C. Clarke nor Kubrick dared define the nature of the intelligence behind the pillar, only that in quest of it, the new Odysseus—known as “Dave” to his overfamiliar computer—finally experiences something beyond time, space, and his reason, culminating, by visual sleight of lens, in an embryonic being who (in Clarke’s original story) will destroy the collective space armory (“star wars”) of the apelike mentalities of the world’s most violent be-suited protagonists who have used science to destroy, rather than to create. For, according to Genesis, it is a gift to exiled Man to create, and the privilege of God to destroy what he has created. So sayeth Genesis, at least.
THE FALLEN
It is right at this point that we call into our investigation the idea of the Fall. I refer in principle to the idea of a catastrophic breach twixt man and God, one outflow of which Genesis delineates as the phenomenon of consciousness, or rather, consciousness of being separated, or as we may say, “self-consciousness,” as disturbing to the adolescent today as it was to Adam and Eve in Eden: “They knew that they were naked,” as the stark biblical phrase has it. They knew, and the knowledge was unwelcome. One could easily assert that the entire history of higher religion consists in attempting to overcome this self-consciousness, that is, consciousness of being separate, with inherent, tragic sense of loss: an overwhelming sense of separateness that comes when, for example, one truly realizes a loved one is dead. I well remember the first time this occurred to me, when, aged three, I saw a line written by my late grandfather in a book he had given to my brother, and connecting his handwritten name and message of love to the memory of the man I knew had just died, a mystery darkened my vision. That, I think, was the first time I experienced true loss, and it made me reflective, opening a chamber of melancholy in my soul I never imagined could exist, where love and loss would mingle. Perhaps, in time, it made me an artist—or thinker—wielding the primitive bone of thought.
In Genesis, having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve are stung to the core by realization that they are no longer automatically at home in the paradise, or garden, or even at home in their own skins, with their own existence. And, further, they have now come under the “other side,” as it were, of their once familiar, friendly creator. They are separated from the living essence of nature, and from God.
This myth of Fallen Man is a deep and mysterious symbol that has exercised the profoundest thoughts of some of the finest human minds for several millennia at least, and it is as valid a subject today for profound rumination as it has ever been.
According to Genesis, before the descendants of Noah were removed from the world that preexisted the Flood, their originators, Adam and Eve, were already exiled from the place of their creation. In terms of visionary artist William Blake, a “flood of time and space” had transformed their vision. A double loss of primal knowledge: but the first fall was not a loss of practical or technical knowledge (as suggested in Josephus’s telling of the Sethite pillars story) but rather a loss of a state of being, of essence: of being “Man” as he was created to be, with unbroken, reflective intercourse with God, with no tragic self-consciousness, and therefore no fear, untrammeled by knowledge at all, for knowledge is the key to embarrassment.
Now, I am sure I am not the first who has espied here a link between “fallen” humanity and the word in Genesis 6 (nephilim) for those born as a result of the sons of God quitting their proper path. In the Book of Enoch, whose “Book of the Watchers” is a kind of “midrash” or explicatory extension of Genesis’s account of the nephilim, the idea is eagerly taken up that wicked angels “fell” from their heavenly home, having been entranced by the allure of human females. Desirous of “knowledge” of them—something presumably out of bounds for an angel, however exalted—they “fell to earth,” with tragic and miserable results for all who would suffer the appalling consequences of this breach in the divine order.
In the Book of Enoch, these Watchers beget giants who start eating human beings and oppressing the good, while teaching every kind of destructive enchantment: selfish sciences of cosmetics, poisons, weaponry, metallurgy, and according to Zosimos of Panopolis, alchemy, or chemistry, and all that goes with lust for power over others in rebellion against the good. Again, we see a kind of knowledge that comes from a dramatic fall. And, in the Book of Enoch, God instigates the Flood specifically to wipe out the wicked offspring and fatal arts of the nephilim, the fallen ones, and restore a seed willing and able to find the way back to God: of which state, the figure of Enoch is paragon, earning him in the Book of Enoch the liberty of heaven, whence, according to the book, he will come to deliver final judgment upon the wicked Watchers who have contaminated the world with their disobedience and cunning.
GNOSTICS: RETURN OF THE SETHITES
Within a century of Josephus’s writing down the Sethite pillars story, we find individuals in Syria, in Alexandria, in Lyon (France), and in Rome promoting various forms of spiritual philosophy and practice traditionally called “Gnostic,” referring to “one with knowledge.” What this knowledge, or gnosis, consisted of derived in part, I am convinced, from a process of dwelling imaginatively on the text of Genesis, in conjunction with the Book of Enoch and other apocryphal works, combined with forms of “Christianity” or messianic salvationism that contrasted a condemned world with an eternal Father in heaven.
In gnosis, broadly speaking, we can discern the idea of a “double fall,” in which the fallen angel is now, as it were, twofold. First, wicked angels are in radical Gnostic mythology responsible for fabricating, not just perverting, the universe, in league with their master, the “demiurge” or creator of the material structure of the cosmos (a notion derived from Platonism), copied deficiently from divine, living ideas beyond it. There is a “ruler of this world” (John 12:31) and a Lord beyond it (John 18:36). This explains the corruption of the world, its fatal and sorrowful character for those who become conscious of it, and their existence within it, or under its sway.
Second, “Adam”—or rather the divine idea of Man—is now given an original heavenly home. Stationed there as the Gnostic Anthrōpos (the eternal idea of Man), he is a reflection of God, the Father’s son, whose original being is Light. And all would have been perfect but for a breach in the harmony of heavenly being: the sensible universe results from the downpouring effects of a primal catastrophe. The image of a spiritually infertile abortion is strong in radical Gnostic texts.
Genesis’s account of Eve’s sin of surrendering to temptation—that is, eating “fruit of the tree”—is pre-mirrored in some gnostic texts in a drama, or arguably parable, of God’s Wisdom, the feminine Greek “Sophia” or “heavenly Eve,” wanting to “know” God. Desiring to conjoin herself with the transcendent originator of all that exists, she is constrained, for her wisdom is essentially reflective. What she can do, however, due to spiritual fecundity stimulated by reflecting the Father’s image, is to generate “seeds” (spermata). In several Gnostic myths, the weight of these seeds of pneuma (spirit) and her orgasmic state of being (yearning for knowledge of the Father) unbalance her, for in her turmoil, she acts without the Father’s will, and being unbalanced, her seeds fall glittering downward into a material dimension ruled by a demiurge’s jealous eye.*16 Seeing the seeds of pneuma (spirit), the demiurge enters a frenzy of sexual excitement. Being a “jealous God,” he is dimly aware of a dimension higher than himself but denies it, nor can he understand, or “know” it, his powers restricted to crude, mortal copies of divine ideas; so in some Gnostic schools, the demiurge fashions an animal man out of stuff, the earth, whereupon Sophia pities the poor creature and imparts pneuma—with memory of spiritual origins—into at least some of these creatures. The pneuma, alien to earth, becomes terrified of what spirit is now sunk in: death, decay, and a vengeful “God of the Law” delighting in imprisonment of men, who desires that men stay ignorant, serving wicked angels who manipulate all powers in the material universe. The seed longs to be reunited with the generative home of being, for translation back to a divine marriage in heaven and joy everlasting with the “aeons.”†17
And what do we find amid these strange developments in the spiritual life of the late Roman Empire? Sometime before 265 CE, a book appears among Gnostics called The Three Steles of Seth in which appear three steles, or pillars, because, according to Frederik Wisse, translator of the book’s extant Coptic version, the text was composed with the Neoplatonic triad of Existence-Life-Mind as a framework,‡18 for the knowledge on these steles of Seth vouchsafed to posterity is about awakening to the true seed, the seed of Seth, of eternal life, “another race” whose home is beyond this world, who look to the progenitor, the spiritual being of Seth, identified in some Gnostic systems with “Jesus,” called “the Great Seth”—and all true emissaries of Sethian seed.1
The revelation of Dositheos [“gift of God”] about the three steles of Seth, the Father of the living and unshakeable race, which he [Dositheos] saw and understood. And after he had read them, he remembered them. And he gave them to the elect, just as they were inscribed there.2
An extraordinary transformation has taken place. Knowledge that predates the Flood, a supposed original knowledge derived from familiarity with God, is no longer astronomical or scientific knowledge, as Josephus related. No, this knowledge is key to Man’s secret spiritual identity, accessed within the imagination of the “Knower.”
The Sethian Gnostic steles are a call to awakening.
The author of the Three Steles of Seth was not the only teacher on the pillars trail. A more traditional-style working of the spiritual awakening theme expressed in terms of the now familiar revelatory stelae—and possibly produced in competition with, and during the same period as, the Three Steles (and to whose readers the work would nonetheless have appealed)—is the Korē Kosmou, whose survival we owe to John of Stobi, a fifth-century collector of Greek texts in Macedonia. Familiar to scholars as “Stobaeus,” John collected many rare extracts from works attributed to Hermes Trismegistos. Without him, these logia would have been lost. Among them is a remarkable work that puts the god Hermes in an unspoiled, blessed setting as teacher to the goddess Isis and to her son, the sun god Horus (Stobaeus, excerpts 23–26).
Its title, Korē Kosmou, has been translated as “Virgin of the Cosmos,” though a Korē is more specifically a Greek statue of a young woman, so a title like “the Cosmic Virgin” (or “Maiden”) or even the “Virgin Cosmos” might be closer to the author’s intention, for the idea seems to be that the universe, or Nature, is, properly speaking, an object of worship, once her divinely spiritual and essentially pure nature is perceived. For the majority of Hermetic philosophical tracts, gnosis usually involves perceiving an ineffable, incorporeal energy that sustains the grandeur of the universe; not alleged evil in the world, on the otherhand, comes from not recognizing such eternal beneficence. Appreciating such a distinction would turn Egyptian Neoplatonist Plotinus (204–270 CE) “against the Gnostics” in his student philosophy classes for the academic year 264–265. Neither the cosmos nor its creator was evil in Plotinus’s philosophy. Deficiencies in the material or sensible world should be traced to distance from the source of the One and not to ill intention in the universe’s fashioner. The image Plotinus entertains is one whereby gathering density of matter, on account of remoteness, naturally obscures or inhibits the fullness of the “light” of pure spirit projected from the source. Put another way, light diminishes in effulgence as it becomes distant from its source: a natural phenomenon visible universally. Matter to Plotinus is, in a sense, “dark light,”*19 in that to Plotinus, light is substantial, if highly rarefied and spiritual. Matter is not something evil, just relatively deficient qualitatively, compared to source. The true or enlightened philosopher, however, enjoyed pure mind, in keeping with the true philosopher’s aim of reuniting with the One, through raising mind to its source. The whole looks different once the “One” is envisioned, its wisdom appropriated through higher, receptive mentation (Plotinus’s nous, or “king,” faculty).
Hear how Isis opens Korē Kosmou:
Give heed, my son Horus; for you shall hear secret doctrine, of which our forefather Kamephis was the first teacher. It so befell that Hermes heard this teaching from Kamephis, the oldest of all our race; I heard it from Hermes the writer of records.3
Fig. 4.1. The Korēstatue made of Parian marble by Ariston of Paros (550–540 BCE)
Notice how the dialogue of Isis to Horus refers to a “craftsman” (Greek: technitēs) who made the universe, but not negatively like radical, cosmoclastic Gnostics.
And as long as the craftsman who made the universe willed not to be known, all was wrapped in ignorance. But when he determined to reveal himself, he breathed into certain godlike men a passionate desire to know him, and bestowed on their minds a radiance ampler than that which they already had in their breasts, that so they might first will to seek the yet unknown God, and then have the power to find him.4
This, Isis explains, would never have happened among mortals, but for one special man whose soul was responsive to the holy powers of heaven; namely, Hermes: “he who won knowledge of all.”
Hermes saw all things, and understood what he saw, and had power to explain to others what he understood . . . for what he had discovered he had inscribed on tablets, and hid securely what he had inscribed, leaving the larger part untold, that all later ages of the world might seek it.5
Isis reports Hermes’s speech when depositing his books. The “holy books” would be placed in a place absolutely secure from vicissitudes of time and wantonness of men, until an era when heaven made organisms worthy to receive them. After this, Hermes—like Enoch after giving his message to Methuselah—ascended to the stars and was “received into the sanctuary of the everlasting zones.”
It should not surprise us then, when we imbibe this message and read it as many men read it before the seventeenth century, that the Hermetic writings, along with the elevated spiritual philosophy of the Neoplatonists, and works such as the similarly late antique “Chaldaean Oracles,” would come to be regarded as constituting a prisca theologia, “ancient theology,” its purity held to derive from the earliest, golden period of human civilization, when gods and men, so to speak, mingled in mind.*20
Fig. 4.2. Ficino’s translation of the Pimander, Treviso, 1471
Such pure “ancient theology” only existed untarnished in an antediluvian, creamy-fresh, unspoiled civilization, successively corrupted over time. The dynamic here is one of return. One desires to return to the remotest past for the key to returning spiritually to the ultimate source. Any progress is in reverse. Ficino, for example, would have disliked the title to Professor Jacob Bronowski’s book (and BBC TV series) The Ascent of Man (1974), referring to the idea of human history as being one of gradual, if often painfully interrupted, forward progress, commensurate with some kind of intellectual and spiritual evolution and sophistication, reflected chiefly in the development of scientific knowledge, biology, and humane ethics. This optimistic, rather late-Victorian view was an almost impossible view in Ficino’s day, when most “science” came in translations from the ancients, along with the laws of righteousness that had sustained a better world.
Fig. 4.3. Hermes Trismegistus, “contemporary” of Moses; floor inlay in Siena Cathedral
The wisdom of the ancients, according to prisca theologia understanding, was that Man was fallen at the start but that a time of grace had revealed truth to godly patriarchs. Any subsequent ascent must be born of the deepest desire to re-ascend, to return to lost source through inwardly appropriating, by contemplation, the lost knowledge (involving the notion of a restored state of mind) prevalent in the earliest period, which, through human ignorance or demonic or angelic interference, had fallen from the hands of even the pious, so that the true spiritual teaching was taught amid shadows of the real, with the light source beyond the human cave. Such was the esoteric—that is, inner or initiated—spiritual meaning of the doctrine of repentance: to turn again, to travel inward, which is almost to say to turn back again, like the prodigal son of Jesus’s famous parable coming back home to his loving father after worldly misadventures and willful, wasteful wanderings inspired by rebellious vanity. Salvation, according to this scheme, is an apocatastasis; that is, a return to, or restoration of primal knowledge, involving an ascent to a higher level of being, awareness, and life. That is what has been lost: the point of return and a true means of ascent.
Our contemporary idea of progress, fostered out of the so-called Age of Enlightenment, is dismissed from the prisca theologia point of view as being mere forward movement into the unknown: a void. Such movement constitutes no deep drive, is weak as motive, and represents no true, ardent spiritual desire. We gain nothing by rushing forward into nature. Rather, according to the testimony of the prisci theologi, we make genuine progression toward our deepest goal by looking backward, to where the spring of being is most pure: its source.
In point of fact, there could have been no modern scientific revolution or “progress” had the Renaissance period not glorified ancient knowledge and begged their and subsequent generations to look to past achievements, exoteric and esoteric. The return of Hermes in translations by Ficino and other men of the time kick-started a movement that encouraged a Leonardo, along with an era whose magian ambitions brought forth remarkable men in almost every field of endeavor, people fascinated by what had been inscribed on “the ancient tablets” in purer times, men with the vision to take up the tablets again, to absorb their supposed contents, and then, in due humility, with a deep thirst or desire for experimental or experiential knowledge of the truth, add to them, secure that at last a sure foundation had been recovered from the debris of time. It would lead back to the future.
Science, for such men, was nothing without antiquity. And the essential wisdom of antiquity had been inscribed on the Sethite pillars, where it awaited rediscovery.