Uwe Nolte: Auferstehung
"Thou hast made me the authorised interpreter of profound mysteries. Thou hast given me understanding of thy faith and the knowledge of thy wonderful secrets."
- Essene Hymn, Dead Sea ScrollsIs there a rejected knowledge? That is, a body of arcane wisdom handed down from ancient times, which is either actively rejected by the world, or voluntarily exiles itself because of its recognized incompatibility with the prevailing popular culture.
A Secret Tradition, suppressed or discarded in our modern materialistic age, that holds within itself the answers to the individual seeker's deepest needs and inner longings? A Secret Wisdom hidden because of its sublime and immense value, or reverently concealed from the prying eyes of the profane?
Natalie Banks points out in her book The Golden Thread:
"The constant reappearance of the Ancient or Ageless Wisdom, that body of inner or esoteric teaching handed down from remote times in a form suitable to that period, has always attracted the minds of thoughtful people. Through its remarkable preservation and continuity it has been compared in symbol to a golden thread: a spiritual lifeline waxing or waning in clarity and intensity from century to century..."
In fact, secret knowledge has been called the basis of all power and the doorway to truth and liberation from spiritual and mental bondage. The key to Man's past and the vision of Man's future.
Did Jesus the Christ teach a secret doctrine? The Gospels plainly state that he told His disciples: "Unto you it is given to know the Mystery of the Kingdom of God; but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables" (Mark 4:11).
Commenting on these words of Jesus, the Renaissance philosopher Pico de Mirandola urged his students to: "Think on how Origen the theologian [third century] asserts that Jesus Christ, the Teacher of Life, made many revelations to his disciples, which they were unwilling to write down lest they should become commonplace to the rabble."
Examining the Bible, particularly the New Testament, we find confirmation of secret teachings. These Mysteries of the Kingdom, imparted by Jesus to His inner circle of disciples, as we will show, were only suppressed or radically reinterpreted after the Council of Nicaea in 325. Since the time of the ecumenical councils of the fourth century, the Christian Church has sought both to distort and brand as 'heretical' surviving fragments of this Ancient Secret Tradition.
The Church and other Establishment religious and political institutions viciously attack the Secret Tradition because it directly challenges the prevailing consensus reality. In the words of James Webb:
"The occult is rejected knowledge. It may be knowledge which is actively rejected by an Establishment culture, or knowledge which voluntarily exiles itself from the courts of favor because of its recognized incompatibility with the prevailing wisdom. The occult is rejected knowledge: that is, an Underground whose basic unity is that of Opposition to an Establishment of Powers That Are." (The Occult Underground)
All the great spiritual teachers clearly distinguished between open proclamations and secret or inner teachings. "I received from the messenger of God two kinds of knowledge," said the Prophet Mohammed, a direct descendant of the Patriarch Abraham through his son Ishmael. "One of these I taught...(but) if I had taught them the other it would have broken their throats." Gautama "Buddha", a prince of the Sakya clan, said: "O disciples, the things which I have discovered and have not told you are more numerous than those which I have told you."
Esoteric and Exoteric
Dr. Buck explains in Mystic Masonry that "in the Ancient Mysteries, and in all the great Religions, there was always an Exoteric portion given out to the world, to the uninitiated, and an Esoteric portion reserved for the Initiates, and revealed (only) in the degrees, according as the candidate demonstrated his fitness to receive, conceal, and rightly use the knowledge so imparted. Few professed Christians are, perhaps, aware that such was the case with Christianity during the first two or three centuries."
If we are sincerely desirous of seeking truth above all we must first appreciate the difference between the esoteric and the exoteric. The scholar of religion Huston Smith, in his introduction to the revised edition of Frithjof Schuon's The Transcendent Unity of Religions, says: "The esoteric minority consists of men and women who realize that they have their roots in the Absolute....The exoteric majority is composed of the remainder of mankind for whom this way of talking about religion is sterile if not unintelligible."
This well established pattern of esoteric (inner or hidden) and exoteric (open or apparent) teachings confuses some people. A confusion that stems from an inability to discern truth from falsehood. Every honest student of the Scriptures and history must agree that the forces of evil always seek to invert the truth. To manufacture a counterfeit to the Divine Will.
Consider just one example. As the economic, political and social systems of the nations of earth face upheaval and collapse, there is a frantic attempt by the dominant power elites to fashion a 'New World Order'. To forcefully integrate all nations into a one world superstate under the iron rule of a parasitic few. This nefarious plan is an abhorrent inversion, a barbarous counterfeit of the inevitable divine New Age of Light and Righteousness proclaimed by all the Prophets. Satan, the god of this world, always throws up a twisted parody of the truth so as to deceive humanity and keep them trapped in the bondage of ignorance.
Unfortunately, much of what the world identifies as occult wisdom, esotericism, the Mysteries, etc., is absolutely foreign, subversive and contrary to the authentic Ancient Secret Tradition and all genuine metaphysics.
The French esotericist Luc Benoist rightly cautions:
"The conditions which prevail in the world today favour such subversive anti-traditional activity. The confusion between the spiritual and the psychic and the identification of religion with magic, totemism, and even sorcery, the popular dissemination of pseudo or counter-initiatic rituals are all irrefutable examples of a degraded perversion of the truth. The growing materialism of our modern world, its increasing mechanization, and the current vogue for extreme artificiality, the virtual brain-washing or standardization of thought by the media, all reveal a mounting tide of uncontrolled and uncontrollable influences working on those who have practically no idea of their existence" (The Esoteric Path).
Ancient Wisdom
If such an Ancient Secret Tradition exists it certainly is suppressed within contemporary Western culture. Though this was not always the case. Down through the centuries writers and thinkers referred to this Ancient Wisdom, linking it to humanity's pioneering advances in medicine, art, literature, mathematics, natural history, geometry and astronomy, to name just a few. While documenting this spiritual heritage, these same writers warned of a counterfeit, corrupt doctrine and viewed it as the product of the forces of degeneration and bondage. Robert Macoy provides us with a good overview of this process. He writes:
"It appears that all the perfection of civilisation and all advancement made in philosophy, science and art among the ancients are due to those institutions which, under the veil of mystery, sought to illustrate the sublimest truths of religion, morality and virtue, and to impress them on the hearts of their disciples...their chief object was to teach the doctrine of the One God, the resurrection of man to eternal life, the dignity of the human soul; and to lead people to see the shadow of Deity in the beauty, magnificence and splendour of the Universe.
"With the decline of virtue which has preceded the destruction of every nation of history, the mysteries became perverted, and sorcery took the place of the Divine Magic. Indescribable practices were introduced and perversion ruled supreme; for no instruction can be any better than the members of which it is composed. In despair, the few who were true sought to preserve the secret doctrines from oblivion, in some cases they succeeded, but more often the mysteries were lost, until only the empty shell remained."
Modern Freemasonry is an example of this process of degeneration and the distortion of spiritual knowledge. Today, Freemasonry is a corruption of the original Arcane School of Masonry. There can be no doubt that ancient Masonry was a keeper of the Ancient Wisdom, and before its corruption it was one of the great Mystery Schools. The first Mystery Schools and secret societies arose from the highest aspirations of the human mind - the desire for a knowledge of eternal verities. The evil arising from such systems is usually due to the perversion of principles that once were pure and holy.
Mysteries and Civilisation
In many ancient civilisations, Egypt and Greece for example, there existed side by side two forms of religious observance, one dogmatic and ceremonial, the other mystical and esoteric. Popular cults represented one form of observance, while the other was the religion of the Mysteries. The latter religion went far beyond popular cults, explaining the symbolic meaning of arcane myths and uniting those who were striving toward the hidden higher truths.
Symbolism is the language of the Ancient Secret Tradition. By symbolism Man has ever sought to communicate his thoughts that transcend the limitations of language. The Mystery Schools and secret societies chose symbolism as the ideal method of preserving their transcendental knowledge. A symbol may both reveal and conceal, to the truly wise the subject of the symbol is obvious, while to the ignorant the figure remains inscrutable. Thus he who seeks to unveil the Ancient Secret Tradition of antiquity must search for that wisdom not upon the open pages of books that might fall into the hands of the unworthy, but in the place where it was originally concealed.
This explains why historians know comparatively very little about the Mysteries. Yet it is precisely these Mysteries that shed light on many historical enigmas, including the sudden appearance of Greek culture in the 7th century B.C., following upon the completely dark 8th and 9th centuries. Also, the earlier sudden appearance of high civilisation in the land of Egypt is connected with the Mysteries.
In Greece, philosophers and mystics in Ancient Mystery Schools preserved the Mysteries, patterned after a very old design first established in Egypt.
Moses, who the Bible declares was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians (Exodus 2:10; Acts 7:22), obtained knowledge of the Mysteries in the land of his birth. Later at divine command, he initiated the Seventy Elders into the Mysteries (Numbers 11:24) and they transmitted them orally to the Levites and Elders. After Moses, David and Solomon are regarded as possessing extensive knowledge of the Secret Tradition.
Those initiated into this Israelite Secret Tradition distinguished between the esoteric and exoteric expressions of the Mosaic law. This is plain from the words of Philo, who said that: "The law of Moses is like a living creature whose body is the literal sense, but the soul is the more inward and hidden meaning, covered under the sense of the letter."
The Book of Esdras informs us that the Old Testament scribe Ezra dictated to five men, during a period of forty days, books that were to be hidden and confined to the "wise amongst the people."
G.R.S Mead informs us in Fragments of a Faith Forgotten:
"The institution of the Mysteries is the most interesting phenomenon in the study of religion. The idea of antiquity was that there was something to be known in religion, secrets or mysteries into which it was possible to be initiated; that there was a gradual process of unfolding in things religious; in fine, that there was a science of the soul, a knowledge of things unseen.
"A persistent tradition in connection with all the great Mystery-institutions was that their several founders were the introducers of all the arts of civilisation; that they were either themselves gods or were instructed in them by the gods - in brief, that they were men of far greater knowledge than any who had come after; they were the teachers of infant races. And not only did they teach them the arts, but they instructed them in the nature of the gods of the human soul, and the unseen world, and set forth how the world came into existence and much else."
Enoch and the Secret Tradition
The idea of the existence of an enlightened people who lived at a remote era, and came from the East, is a prevalent notion in many ancient legends. Ezekiel in verse 2, chapter 43, says: "The glory of the God of Israel came from the way of the East." The Bible commentator Adam Clark notes: "All knowledge, all religion, and all arts and science have travelled according to the course of the sun from east to west." The veneration of the East is a reference to the Ancient Secret Tradition that is symbolised by the sun.
According to Epiphanius, Enoch was the founder of the Mysteries having been instructed by Adam. The Egyptians knew him as Thoth, to the Greeks he was Hermes, and to the Latins Mercury. The Sumerians and Phoenicians represented him as the Phoenix, and regarded him the father or patriarch of their race. `Phoenix' being the Greek form of Pa Hanok, of the house or family of Enoch. From the research of Dr. E. Wallis Budge we know that the ancient Egyptians associated Thoth/Enoch with the construction of the Great Pyramid.
The German ethnologist, Dr. Goldziher, says in his work Mythology Among the Hebrews:
"The solar character of Enoch admits of no doubt. He is brought into connection with the building of towns - a solar feature. He lives exactly three hundred and sixty-five years, the number of days of the solar year; which can not be accidental. And even then he did not die, but 'Enoch walked with Elohim, and was no more (to be seen), for Elohim took him away.' In the old times when the figure of Enoch was imagined, this was doubtless called Enoch's Ascension to heaven, as in the late traditional legends Ascensions to heaven are generally acknowledged to be solar features."
The Hebrew name Enoch means initiated or consecrated, suggesting his connection with a system of initiation. The Hebrew sages also held that Enoch appointed festivals and sacrifices at periods when the sun entered each of the zodiacal signs. A system of sacred ritual taught to him by Adam.
The Book of Jubilees is one of the non-canonical books of the Bible, preserved by the Essenes and the early followers of the Christ, but later rejected by the established Christian Church. In its fourth chapter we read of Enoch:
"He was the first one among the children of Adam that are born on the earth to learn writing and knowledge and wisdom. And he wrote the signs of heaven according to the order of their months in a book, that the sons of Adam might know the time of year according to their separate months. He was the first to write a testimony, and he testified to the children of Adam concerning the generations of the earth, and explained the weeks of the jubilees, and made known to them the days of the years, and arranged the months and explained the sabbaths of the year as we [the Almighty] made them known to him. And what was and what will be he saw in a vision of the night in a dream, and as it will happen to the children of Adam in their generations until the day of judgement; he saw and learned everything and wrote it as a testimony and laid that testimony on the earth over all the children of Adam and for their generations."
The Hebrews had a tradition that Adam wrote books of Arcane Wisdom that were passed to Enoch. The Druids, who were said to "give themselves wholly to the contemplation of divine and hidden things", also believed in books of secret knowledge that originated at the dawn of Adamic civilisation. An old Arabic tradition maintains that Abraham had in his possession certain sacred writings of Adam, Seth and Enoch containing laws and promises from the Almighty as well as predictions of many events. Arab writers say Abraham taught that astronomy and other sciences came down from Enoch. Thus Enoch, the righteous Priest-King and Great Teacher, passed into history as a personification of the Ancient Secret Tradition.
The Book of Enoch, a sacred text highly esteemed by the Essenes, details how, in the company of Heavenly Messengers, Enoch travelled out beyond our solar system.
Within the existing copies of the Book of Enoch, the Secrets of Enoch and the Pillars of Enoch we find the presentation of arcane esoteric concepts in symbolic form and language. We read how transported to the heavenly realms in his physical body, Enoch had a realisation of the days when he walked in the Realm of Light. How he had volunteered to come to earth when told in the Great Councils of the Divine Plan for the establishment of the Kingdom of God and the bringing back of this area of the universe into a proper relationship with the Most High. Thus, in the Secrets of Enoch, Enoch is instructed to "write all about the souls of men, those of them which are not born, and the places prepared for them for ever. For every soul was created for eternity before the foundation of the world."
We also discover that the Patriarch Enoch, born of the pure seed of Adam's race, prophesied of the coming of the Anointed One and of the last days of our present cycle. The writings attributed to Enoch outline the star prophecies foretelling the manner and time of the coming of the Messiah. How a major conjunction at the birth of the Messiah would be the sign of this mighty event. This Mystery of the Christ and of His Sign in the heavens was a central theme of the pre-Christian Ancient Mystery Schools. The eminent scholar Prof. Breasted in his History of Egypt says that the old Priests of Egypt anticipated the coming Saviour in their Book of the Dead and in their Pyramid Texts fully one thousand years before the Hebrew Prophets.
The New Testament writer Jude quoted Enoch when he declared:
"And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, Yahweh cometh with ten thousands of his saints; To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him."
The writers of the New Testament drew heavily from the works attributed to Enoch. Dr. R.H. Charles, the translator of the Book of Enoch notes that "It is impossible to see Matthew, Mark and Luke in true perspective unless we place them against the background of the Book of Enoch." The early Church Fathers considered the Book of Enoch divinely inspired. Being acclaimed by St. Barnabas as scripture and widely read throughout Western Christendom. Only after the notorious Council of Nicaea did the Book of Enoch fall into discredit.
Over time, people lacking in the capacity to understand and correctly interpret the arcane symbolism gained control of some of the Mystery Schools and totally distorted their message. Wicked and corrupt individuals twisted the sacred rituals, introducing alien notions and cruel practices derived from primitive nature worship. Unfortunately, many contemporary secret societies that claim to trace their origin back to the Ancient Mystery Schools, possess only a modern humanistic explanation of the sacred symbolism.
Christ and the Mysteries
The poet William Blake penned the following words aptly contrasting the historical Jesus the Christ with the Jesus Christ of established Christianity:
"The Vision of Christ that thou dost see,
Is my vision's greatest enemy.
Thine is the Friend of all Mankind,
Mine speaks in Parables to the blind.
Thine loves the same world that mine hates,
Thy heaven-doors are my hell gates."
(The Everlasting Gospel)The popular image of Jesus Christ as portrayed by the Christian Churches is of a 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild', a suffering saviour engaged in a titanic struggle with Lucifer the Devil for the souls of men. This leaves the modern Christian with the task of being good and winning his neighbours to the 'Lord', so that they may spend eternity in heaven and not in hell fire. Students of the Ancient Secret Tradition know that this 'Jesus' is truly man-made and is a far cry from the historical Galilean Master.
By studying the New Testament, particularly the Gospels, we see a very definite delineation between the general exoteric message and what the Jesus of the Gospels called the esoteric Mysteries of the Kingdom. A body of teachings deliberately concealed, as we have shown, and only taught to a select few. This is in keeping with the initiatic practice of the Ancient Mystery Schools of Israel. "It is undeniable that, already at the time of Jesus Christ," explains the historian Edersheim, "there existed an assemblage of doctrines and speculations that were carefully concealed from the multitude."
That Jesus and His disciples taught and amplified this Ancient Wisdom can be easily shown. A full study of this would be the subject of many pages, so we will confine ourselves to a few elementary points.
The American mystic Dr. R.S. Clymer observed that:
"The Bible is a part of ancient religion which was both exoteric and esoteric. Theologians fail to recognize that they have but the outer shell, although Jesus made the existence of an inner teaching very clear. Anciently, religion was divided into three degrees and man spent his life mastering them. These comprised purification, initiation and mastership (of himself). Today man refuses the first, purification, hence he cannot determine the fundamentals of religious mysticism concerning himself as God's image."
In the thirteenth chapter of Matthew, verse 10 we read: "And the disciples came and said unto him [Jesus], why speakest thou unto them [the assembled multitude] in parables?
"He answered and said unto them (the disciples), Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given."
By determining the exact meaning of the word Mysteries as used in the New Testament, which according to Young's Analytical Concordance is "that which is known only to the initiated", it is evident that Jesus was referring to the Ancient Secret Tradition.
Such statements as: 'It is given unto you to know the mysteries'; 'we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery'; and 'we are stewards of the mysteries of God and understand all mysteries', and numerous other similar passages throughout the New Testament show that Jesus and the Apostles were a part of the Ancient Secret Tradition coming down from Adam through the first Patriarches.
The Gospel accounts of Jesus' ministry provide a number of cases where he taught an open exoteric message to the people and then privately instructed the disciples in the deeper esoteric meaning. This enables us to grasp the idea behind the words of Jesus in the Matthew's Gospel: "Give not that which is holy unto dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you." The Mysteries were not to be revealed to the uninitiated.
Modern scholarship now confirms that in the time of Jesus, the Essene Order possessed a deep understanding of the Ancient Secret Tradition. Their Manual of Discipline alludes to "the Revelation of the Mysteries, which has been kept in silence through all times eternal, but now is manifested."
The Dead Sea Scrolls reveal the similarities in ritual practices, teachings, and terms between the Essenes and the first followers of the Christ. The Essenes called themselves the 'Keepers Of The Covenant', 'Followers of the Way' and 'Nazarenes'. The original disciples of Jesus were also known as Nazarenes and only later called Christians. The name derives from the Hebrew word Nazar, signifying one separated or consecrated. To this day the Arabic word for 'Christians' is Nasrani and the Quran refers to the first Christians as Nasara.
The respected British authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls, John Allegro, was convinced that the Essenes were a secret society with highly developed grades of initiation and rituals in which they swore never to divulge the Mysteries to the profane. Of the Essene connection to the Gnostic Nazarenes, he says:
"The gnostic ('knowing') Essenes reappear on the literary scene as 'gnostic Christians,' but...there is really no justification for the heavy black dividing line that is customarily drawn across the page of history between them. There is a continuous development of religious thought, influenced by the turn of political events, which is perfectly comprehensible chronologically and doctrinally without the artificial separation of 'Christian' from 'pre-Christian'" (The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth).
The Jewish scholar Isaac Myer believed that the original 'Christians' or Nazarenes incorporated the Ancient Wisdom of the Israelites that stretched back to Moses, Abraham, Enoch and Adam. He declared:
"With the appearance of Jesus, the Jewish thought-world became divided. The Secret Doctrines were mostly under the guidance of a spiritual faith of a high intellectual order; the Pharisees had made the Jewish religious life, one of form and ritual, and had destroyed most of the inward spiritual life of the Hebrew religion. Many of the higher spiritual teachings of the Secret Doctrine were at this time, absorbed into the formulations which resulted in the firm establishment of Christianity."
The Gnostic Nazarenes, the true disciples of Jesus, claimed to possess a Secret Tradition, coming to them directly from the Christ, different from that of the Gospels and New Testament Epistles, and superior to these texts, which in their eyes, were merely exoteric.
To avoid persecution, the Nazarenes were compelled to use concealment (occultatio) of certain tenets and ceremonies. They held their meetings in private places, under cover of darkness. They assembled at night, and they guarded against the intrusion of false brethren who might cause their arrest.
The early Church Fathers, many of whom were initiates, writing in the first centuries of the Christian era, fully appreciated the delineation between the exoteric and the esoteric. Some of their works allude to "a truth which is not permitted that the catechumens should contemplate." St Basil wrote: "They [the Fathers] were well instructed to preserve the veneration of the Mysteries in silence. For how could it be proper, publicly to proclaim in writing the doctrine of those things which no baptised person may so much as look upon?"
Tertullian, who died about 216, says in his Apology: "None are admitted to the religious Mysteries without an oath of secrecy." While St. Gregory, Bishop of Constantinople, says: "You have heard as much of the Mystery as we are allowed to speak openly in the ears of all; the rest will be communicated to you in private; and that you must retain within yourself....Our Mysteries are not to be made known to strangers."
In a letter to a certain Theodore, Clement of Alexandria (150-215) admitted that the Apostle Mark recorded "an account of the Lord's doings" for catechumens, in which he selected what he thought was most suitable for beginners in the faith; that Mark also wrote another, "more spiritual Gospel", to be used by those who were being perfected in the faith; and that Mark knew of additional arcane secrets.
Counterfeit Church
In time the Gnostic Nazarenes were scattered, persecuted and martyred by a counterfeit 'Church' that affixed to itself the title of Christ and claimed to be His priests. Many of the Scriptures containing the deeper or esoteric teachings of Jesus and His disciples were deliberately excluded from the New Testament, and in several instances destroyed with the rise of the Christian Church.
With the convening of the Council of Nicaea in 325 and subsequent ecumenical gatherings, the original Mysteries of the Kingdom were, under threats of violence and exile, abandoned, and a centralised power-based institution constructed. Early Church Fathers such as Origen were classified as heretics for upholding a mystical interpretation of the Scriptures and their followers threatened with exile unless they recanted and accepted the 'true faith'. In fact, this violence was so great that one pagan historian was moved to write that "the atrocities of the Christians against each other surpass the fury of wild beasts against man".
The reign of terror inflicted on the scattered Gnostic communities did not destroy the followers of the Way, nor did it extinguish the flame of truth. Through many underground local groups and even within recognised religious Orders the Mysteries of the Kingdom were preserved.
Kenneth Rexroth wrote of these underground communities that existed throughout Europe:
"In every city there were little groups of people meeting together in one another's homes, or in large rooms barren of decorations and images, living together in communes in town houses or in seclusion in the country. Most of them still went to Mass on Sundays and to confession at Easter. But their religious life was centred on their own meetings, where they sat quietly listening to the readings of the Scriptures and their exposition, praying together spontaneously or sitting quietly waiting for the Inner Light, the movement of the Spirit. Behind all the conflicts and controversies, persecutions, trials, burnings, and wars, this way of life would go on. The apocalyptic men and the apocalyptic events would rise up, flourish in the melodramas of history, and then pass away, to be absorbed in the quiet life of the apostolic communities." (Communalism: from its Origins to the Twentieth Century).
Few people realise that these communities planted the seeds of the reformation that later swept all of Europe, challenging the stranglehold of the Roman Church. These heirs of the Mysteries of the Kingdom became known to history by a variety of names. The Albigensians, Brethren of the Free Spirit, Beghards and Beguines, Waldenses, and Taborites are just a few. They survived despite terrible persecution. The Albigensians of Western Europe, for example, were zealous, hardworking, skilful in many crafts and prospered exceedingly. Soon they attracted the envious attention of the Roman Church, which after failing to convert them, subjected them to violent persecution. Their rich lands were laid waste, their beautiful towns destroyed, and the Albigensians themselves very nearly exterminated.
The work of Count Nicholas Zinzendorf during the mid-1700s was an effort to revive the Secret Tradition. In Saxony in 1722 Count Zinzendorf gave sanctuary to a group of dissident Christians known as 'Moravian Brethren'. Under his leadership they founded the village of Herrnhut ('Protection of the Lord') and restored many of the original Nazarene teachings. Patterning their lives after the followers of Jesus the Christ, the Brethren lived communally and devoted much of their time to prayer and song, in a spirit of union and charity. Moravian missionaries had a decisive impact on John Wesley, the great evangelical preacher.
Following the example of the first Nazarenes, Count Zinzendorf taught the esoteric Mysteries of the Kingdom in a secret society known as the 'Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed' and the 'Confraternity of Moravian Brothers of the Order of Religious Freemasons'. Zinzendorf's Order proclaimed its mysticopolitical purpose to be the extension of the Kingdom of God all over the world.
The birth of the American Republic was the work of Freemasons schooled in esoteric principles. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton were all initiates. They actively opposed those elements of European Freemasonry responsible for perverting much of the Secret Tradition. The historian Dr. Bernard Fay documented the commanding role Masonry played in the genesis of the United States of America. He says:
"Masonry alone undertook to lay the foundation for national unity in America, because, through the very nature of its organization, it could spread throughout all the colonies and work steadily and silently. It created in a limited but very prominent class of people a feeling of American unity without which the American liberty could not have developed - without which there would have been no United States." (Revolution and Freemasonry 1680-1800)
Benjamin Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in an effort to preserve elements of the Secret Tradition and resist the encroachment of corrupt European Freemasonry. The society served as a beacon of light in the New World and virtually all of America's pioneering advances in the arts and sciences can be traced back to it. Not long after Benjamin Franklin's death, European Freemasonry, through Rothschild agents, gained control of the remaining outposts of authentic Masonry in North America.
Today, in this time of transition and upheaval, the Mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven are open to all who have 'the eyes to see and ears to hear'. Though sometimes covered with numerous modern accretions, misrepresented and distorted by those for whom it was not intended, the Ancient Secret Tradition survives as the nucleus of supreme truth in whole, in part, or in many varied combinations. After years researching esoteric teachings the Russian writer P.D. Ouspensky concluded: "Esotericism is remote and inaccessible, but every man who learns of or guesses at the existence of esotericism has the chance of approaching a school or may hope to meet people who will help him and show him the way..." (A New Model of the Universe)
If we are sincerely seeking these secret teachings then we must prepare to search and find that which is 'lost' and 'rejected' by the world. In its purity the Ancient Secret Tradition is an eternal heritage, a source of vibrant inspiration in a time overrun with materialism and the senseless glorification of base thinking. In conclusion, the reader is asked to consider the following words from Manly P. Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages:
"Though the modern world may know a million secrets, the ancient world knew one - and that one was greater than the million; for the million secrets breed death, disaster, sorrow, selfishness, lust, and avarice, but the one secret confers life, light, and truth. The time will come when the secret wisdom shall again be the dominating religious and philosophical urge of the world. The day is at hand when the doom of dogma shall be sounded. The great theological Tower of Babel, with its confusion of tongues, was built of bricks of mud and the mortar of slime. Out of the cold ashes of lifeless creeds, however, shall rise phoenixlike the ancient Mysteries...The unfolding of man's spiritual nature is as much an exact science as astronomy, medicine or jurisprudence. To accomplish this end religions were primarily established; and out of religion have come science, philosophy, and logic as methods whereby this divine purpose might be realised.
The above article appeared in
New Dawn No. 40 (January-February 1997)
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