My new book, Signs in the Sky (to be published on March 6th) follows on directly from Magi: the quest for a secret tradition. That work was concernd with identifying and tracing the identity of the mysterious Magi or "Three Wise Men" who make such a dramatic entry at the start of St Matthew's Gospel and then, just as suddenly as they arrived, disappear from the scene never to mentioned again. In Magi I explored the possibility that these wise men were members of a secret brotherhood that throughout known history has been working in the background guiding mankind. This is not an entirely new idea and I quoted from another book called A New Model of the Universe that was written some seventy years ago by the Russian author P.D. Ouspensky. In New Model the author, who had spent most of his life studying the esoteric, presented the idea of two, parallel histories. One history was what he called "The history of crime", the other a secret undercurrent of creative action.
‘One history passes by in full view and, strictly speaking, is the history of crime, for if there were no crimes there would be no history. All the most important turning-points and stages of this history are marked by crimes: murders, acts of violence, robberies, wars, rebellions, massacres, tortures, executions. Fathers murdering children, children murdering fathers, brothers murdering one another, husbands murdering wives, wives murdering husbands, kings massacring subjects, subjects assassinating kings.
This is one history, the history which everybody knows, the history which is taught in schools.
The other history is the history which is known to very few. For the majority it is not seen at all behind the history of crime. But what is created by this hidden history exists long afterwards, sometimes for many centuries, as does Notre-Dame [Cathedral in Paris]. The visible history, the history proceeding on the surface, the history of crime, attributes to itself what the hidden history has created. But actually the visible history is always deceived by what the hidden history has created’[P. D. Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe, pp. 344-5, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London, 1967]
These words had a profound effect upon my thinking when I first read them in 1971. Ouspensky believed in the existence of hidden Masters of Wisdom with their own "schools" where neophytes could find instruction in the mysteries and attain initiation. During the period before the First World War, whilst he was still a young man, he searched diligently but without success for such masters in India and in Egypt. Returning to Russia he met up with G.I. Gurdjieff, a strange man then living in Moscow but originally from Armenia. He had a philosophical school of his own and claimed to be the sort of teacher for whom Ouspensky had been searching in the east. For a time at least Ouspensky concurred, believing that in Gurdjieff's school he had found what he was looking for. He kept meticulous notes of all the lectures he attended. The record of these early meetings he later wrote up in a subsequent book called In Search of the Miraculous: fragments of an unknown teaching. Certainly anyone reading this book today cannot help but be struck by the force and power of the ideas expressed, which though in some ways familiar in the context of esoteric philosophy, nevertheless carry an authority and coherence of expression that smacks of personal Gnosis.
Gurdjieff died in October 1949 almost exactly two years after Ouspensky. Whilst to some commentators he was an out and out fraud who exploited the weaknesses of others to further his own ends, to others he was a master playing a role. This role, they say, demanded that he act in a way that would attract blame in order that he should not be hero worshipped. According to them his high-handed manner, particularly when dealing with his senior pupils, was intentional. It was designed to drive them away so that they would find their own feet and not be forever dependent upon him. This may be true but it cannot be denied that a whiff of corruption hangs over his work. This has been made infinitely worse by the fact that in the 1960s and '70s a number of his former students and students students later exploited his legacy by setting up lucrative cults of their own. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that his work has fallen under suspicion and that few people today take seriously his assertion that he had met up with and been instructed by a secret brotherhood of initiates operating in the east. Yet is this necessarily the case? Certainly Ouspensky, who was under few illusions concerning his former master's frailties and who heartily disapproved of his at times unreasonable behaviour, continued to believe in the veracity of the corpus of ideas presented to him in Gurdjieff's earlier lectures. In his own mind he made a separation between these "ideas", which he believed to have emanated from a high source and the messenger (Gurdjieff) who had brought them to his attention. Towards the end of In Search of the Miraculous he writes:
"But my personal position in G.'s work began to change. For a whole year something had been accumulating and I gradually began to see that there were many things I could not understand and that I had to go.
This may appear strange and unexpected after all I have written so far, but it had accumulated gradually. I wrote that I had for some time begun to separate G. and the ideas. I had no doubt about the ideas. On the contrary, the more I thought of them, the deeper I entered into them, the more I began to value them and realize their significance...
I read this in 1971 at the time when my own quest for the Magi was only just beginning. Since then I have found clear evidence for Gurdjieff's secretive brotherhood (see my book Magifor details of this, an outline of the book is presented in the "Books" section of this website). It is clear that to Ouspensky the "ideas" as he calls them belonged to the "Hidden History" category and were as unrelated to G.'s personality as this was to the "History of crime". In this judgement I believe him to be correct. It is certainly a fact that the really major works of art which draw our attention (and one thinks here particularly of Stonehenge, the Pyramids of Giza and the Parthenon of Athens) are all creations motivated by a higher idealism. Whatever their mundane purpose (for example to act as a tomb or to be the repository for the statue of a goddess) the reason why they were built in the way they were was not run-of-the-mill. In every case it was to do with the recording of knowledge and the passing of it on to future generations in ways that could have some chance, despite the ravages of time and crime, of surviving uncorrupted.
To my mind this, if anything, is the evidence for the unseen hands of the "Masters" driving the hidden history. They made use of the opportunities presented before them as "public works" and used these for the fulfilment of their own agenda. Thus it is that the Pyramids of Giza, on the surface merely tombs for the pharaohs of the IVth Dynasty, had a second function of recording ideas connected with sacred geometry and astronomy. These ideas were clearly considered to be so important to the builders of the pyramids that no effort was spared in making sure that the record of them would last. Thus it is that the pyramids were built on a scale unmatched to recent times and are still with us, beckoning and urging us to unravel their secrets.
Whilst searching for the Magi I found clear evidence that at the time of Jesus and shortly before there was indeed a secret brotherhood active in Commagene, a small kingdom in what is now eastern Turkey. At that time and for at least a century before, the Kingdom of Commagene was independent of political control from either the Seleucid (Syrian) Empire to the South-West or the Parthian (Persian) Empire to the east. Its enlightened monarchs were therefore free to devise a religious culture of their own: one free from the orthodoxies of their time. The monuments that the Commagene Magi left behind them, at Nemrut Dag (Mount Nimrod) and at Arsameia indicate their great knowledge and interest in astronomy. Close examination of these reveals that the builders of these monuments were, like the ancient Egyptians of the Pyramid Age, chiefly interested in the two constellations of Leo and Orion.
The interest in Leo is hardly surprising as further exploration of ancient texts and traditions reveals that it was considered important not only to the Egyptians (whose sphinxes were distinctly leonine) but to religious initiates throughout Mesopotamia, Persia and Northern India as well. Indeed the name "Aryan" which is applied to Caucasian Europeans as well the race of people who invaded Persia and India in prehistoric times, is probably derived from the root word "Ari" or "Arya" meaning "Lion" in many Semitic languages including Hebrew. The origins of this name and how these peoples came by it is immaterial for the present discussion as is any notion of an Aryan "master race". All we need take note of is that from time immemorial the association of the lion symbol with royalty has been all pervasive. It would also seem that the astrology of the Sign of Leo was very important to the religions of the east. At Commagene we see clear evidence for the continuity of leonine symbolism in the many carvings of lions, lion heads and above all the famous lion relief, the oldest known horoscope in the world. This relief, which must have been carved around 62 BC or soon after, has been identified by archaeo-astronomers (Neugebauer and Hoesen) as a represention of the constellation of Leo along with the planets Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and the Moon, all of which were resident in the constellation on 6th July 62 BC. [For further details on the subject of the Lion of Commagene and a picture of it, see the text on Magi contained in the Books section of this website]
Whilst researching Magi I found evidence that the wise-men of the time (1st century BC) were not confined to Commagene but were also active in the next-door kingdom of Osrhoene, whose capital city was Edessa (now called Urfa). This was very close and linked historically with another ancient city called Nisibis (Nusaybin) which is where I believe that Gurdjieff hit upon a major clue in his own quest for secret traditions. This was an ancient map, drawn on vellum or animal-skin which depicted what he called "Pre-Sand Egypt". Following its discovery (probably around 1885 or thereabouts) he himself transferred his attentions to Egypt and in particular to the pyramids and sphinx. It is my belief that the map he found, of which alas we have no known trace, related to the connection between the pyramids and the constellation of Orion. This much I have explained in Magi. There is, however, much more to it than this and for the past three years I have been busy unravelling a further layer of this ongoing mystery. I am now able to say with assurance that the pyramids embody a solar as well as a stellar code and that amongst other things they are a cosmic clock pointing towards the year 2000 as the time when a symbolic "star-gate" will be opened.
There are many facets to this, not least the connection between the wise-men of the east and the birth of the then new religion of Christianity (All this I cover in Signs in the Sky). I believe I now have enough pieces of this most exciting jig-saw puzzle in place to be able to see the overall picture. What that picture is is both inspiring and awful in the true meaning of the word "awe-full". Decoding the pyramids of Giza as well as certain monuments in Jerusalem, in the light of clues left in Commagene shows, to me at least, that the Masters of Wisdom were real, Hermetic initiates in that they were the willing tools of the "Higher Mind" [to understand what is meant here, see my articles on The Hermetic Tradition]. In an age before computers and computer programs only God could know what they appear to have known. Only God could have planned what they appear to have prophecied. The implications of this are clearly of importance for all of us, for it would appear that the "Hidden History" still has some wild cards to play.
Copyright © 2000 Adrian G Gilbert