TWENTY

Return of the Lost Pillar

We may now ask: “Has esoteric knowledge really come from antediluvian civilization?”

Recall, if you will, our anthropological model for a “brief history of religion.” We traced a development from “primitive” conditions of absorption in animistic nature, toward more organized social and agricultural life, and subsequently to city building and temple religion. This model is mirrored somewhat in the first six chapters of Genesis, in which Man moves from unconsciousness (no distinction between self and creation) in Eden’s garden (Paradise) to self-consciousness (“they knew they were naked”), and on to the horror of death, with “wild” Cain versus pious Abel with knowledge of agriculture and sacrifice. Cain’s son Enoch initiates city life, while divine knowledge is passed from Adam to Seth’s descendants, with “God consciousness” exemplified in the Sethite Enoch, whom God “took.” According to Josephus, the Sethites’ cosmic knowledge was, during a period of corruption, inscribed on pillars to outlast cataclysms.

Consistent with this model we traced a siting of religious consciousness first in nature, then in religion, and subsequently, from about the sixth century BCE onward, sited within the individual soul, leading to esoteric philosophies and practices where the object of religious life moved beyond creation altogether. We then observed, in the late Roman Empire, authoritarian religion commandeering the inner soul relationship, whereafter Western esoteric spirituality was frequently condemned.

On this model, it seems unlikely that esoteric understanding existed in any remote antediluvian or prehistoric civilization, for written evidence points to esoteric systems occurring within late antiquity, building on movements visible from the late sixth and fifth centuries BCE in India, China, Persia, Israel, Egypt, and Greece.

It is arguable, however, that late antiquity’s esoteric interpretations of human nature and destiny may represent something of a startling rediscovery of spiritual perception lost in remotest times. That loss, mythology associates with Man’s Fall from unity with God, or unbroken God-consciousness, to a condition wherein his sole hope lay in redemption by higher being through temporal, revelatory interventions. This “Fall” involved further descents into spiritual corruption that, over millennia, severed human beings from knowledge of essential being, and from knowledge of all kinds, such that seeing a ruin, or hearing a legend, might evoke wonder and nostalgia. Such a pattern of fall followed by revival of hope only served to disquieten sensitive observers further, for a pattern of imminent or future calamity was well established (as we found in Plato’s Timaeus). Intellectual melancholy and ruminations on the futility of existence would fuel a knowledge-search for transcendence of fundamental conditions from about the sixth to fifth centuries BCE across the historically attestable world. Any spiritual “evolution,” then, would represent a struggle against devolution. We have been warned.

Perhaps we attain better understanding of this idea of antediluvian knowledge if we look to William Blake’s symbolic reading of the human predicament. Blake speaks of “Poetry, Painting, and Music” as “three powers in Man for conversing with Paradise that the Flood did not sweep away,” where the Flood meant a fall into materially sensual existence—a flood of time and space. Time and space all but truncate the essentially human from limitlessness imagination, door to infinite and eternal being. Powers of imagination invoked by painting, poetry, and music could restore humanity to true being—what Blake calls the Poetic Genius, the Hermetic Mind (nous) that creates and perceives simultaneously: the crowning faculty of the human system.

“Conversing with Paradise” goes back to the gospel assertion that the kingdom of heaven is within you. The Fall may be reversed through sacrifice of “old self ” and resurrection to eternal worlds, knowledge of which was formerly canceled out by contraction to sense data.

Now, if this kind of thinking is, as the great psychologist Carl Jung frequently asserted with respect to gnosis, Man’s truest knowledge of himself, then it can hardly be something that only emerged in late antiquity! For human nature did not change in that period, though thoughts may have, of course; rather, we may be seeing in late antiquity and subsequent periods a reawakening of ancient knowledge once enjoyed by remote members of our species. The flood, then, may symbolize a break—or indeed many breaks—that have divided us from source, a consciousness that men and women throughout the ages have been convinced we have lost touch with, to our detriment, and that our sense of ourselves, and the scope of our knowledge, is painfully deficient so long as we persist in exile from this knowledge of Self beyond ego.

If such be the case, while we may believe in a period of “evolution” leading to our species’ appearance (a scenario somewhat difficult to imagine in reality), we may be disposed to consider our species’ subsequent history as one characterized as much by devolution of consciousness—with occasional interruptions of reawakening—as by some unbroken or progressive ascent. Ascent may turn out to have been the option taken by the few whose efforts have in fact saved the many from themselves—and we may yet fall again. The pillars of Enoch serve to remind us of the stakes involved. We stand on the edge of catastrophe.

Here in the twenty-first century, we may look again to the legend of the lost pillars of Enoch as quintessential symbol for reattaining ancient heritage, a heritage in which it is fully understood how what we consider antithetical worlds of spirit and matter are but perceptions of one system of which we are a part, if only potentially. But insofar as that potential is real, as our myths remind us, it may be elevated as a fact, albeit largely hidden, of our eternal being, and that at some time in the not too distant future, human science may yet regain its wholeness and our religion its true taste.