Secret Societies & Occult Politics
Dream of the Sages
By Robert Richardson
To students of history, religion, or the occult, a pattern of individual names and esoteric movements appears on the canvas of time like a sudden flash of light, then just as quickly vanishes. A group of disparate people ? sometimes famous, sometimes obscure, sometimes solitary, sometimes united, but always engaged in some amorphous activity ? spontaneously surfaces. Just as suddenly their traces evaporate, their true purpose and the scope of their actions never comprehended. Understanding their reality seems to be beyond our grasp. Further study may grudgingly yield information ? but it is inconclusive, incomplete, perplexing. Their nature and purpose seems to forever remain a mystery. The search for a solution only leads to speculations, not genuine answers.
For us to intellectually apprehend how and why esoteric groups work and influence the world requires a different type of thinking, a thought process that sees these organisations and their activities as an ebb and flow of an ideal. Most of us have approached the inquiry into the nature of how esoteric groups actually work and influence history by studying the limited and grossly distorted documentation available about them, like an investment analyst abstractly examining from afar the sterile financial structure of a multi-national corporation. But for us to understand the nature of historical esoteric groups, we should first attempt to find their underlying purpose. If we approach their study through that avenue, we may be able to understand why and how they work to achieve their purposes.
All of the positive esoterically tinged movements that have influenced history share one common characteristic. They seek to positively impact and alter, in a transformational way, the entire structure and direction of society. Their impetus is to interject into day to day living a transcendent awareness and communion with the spiritual element of life, to give a spiritual orientation and focus to the material activities of day to day living ? to, in effect, spiritualise the material. The reason for this direction is to correctly align man with the necessary spiritual path to fulfill his spiritual destiny. Their motives are highly altruistic, despite the wildly imaginative suspicions and innuendoes of many writers and even some church leaders. The methods employed by many powerful Western spiritual movements are always entirely in keeping with these goals.
The best known of these movements have manifested at key transitional points in Western history. The Rosicrucian movement on continental Europe. The less obvious but equally influential hermetic academies in Renaissance Italy and England. The Cathars in southern France. The Essenes at the dawn of the Christian era. And the best known, and by far the most misunderstood, of these groups, the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and The Temple of Solomon ? The Knights Templar. Each of these groups formed, existed, and survived a certain duration to accomplish a particular mission, then vanished. Through their actions, each of them positively influenced society as we know it today.
Historians and spiritual writers have expended a great deal of ink unsuccessfully trying to explain what these groups were about and what they believed. Each of these groups encountered considerable opposition and conflict and, seemingly, was superseded by rival groups. History is invariably altered by the victors to suit their goals and needs. Most of the existing works about esoteric groups have been based on deliberately distorted records left by the supposed victors. For example, as has been very aptly stated, attempting to draw an accurate picture of the activities of the Knights Templar by studying the records of the Inquisition is like trying to get an accurate picture of the activities of the wartime French resistance solely by studying the records of the Gestapo.1
However, one unaltered stream runs through each of these groups. It is their operational procedure. Each group has several common yet contradictory characteristics. Their organisational structure is both hierarchical and independent. It is at once interdependent and self-sustaining. In other words, it is a cell-like structure, organised around a belief system, designed to be able to function without need for a central governing body, yet still maintaining dutiful fealty and responsibility to the doctrine which the overall body represents. To cite one case, most people, ignorant of the actual working nature of the Essenes, assume that the Qumram monastery was the only Essene entity. In fact, many Essenes lived in the day to day society. The Qumram community was a centralised training base. Essene headquarters were on Mt. Carmel. The Essenes, like the Cathars, the Templars, and the Hermetic academies, could function independently if cut off from their supposed core. The Rosicrucian groups are the best recognised model of this structure. This system later became the basis for intelligence organisations and underground resistance movements. They were consciously organised like the esoteric societies, designed to continue functioning without support or contact from the main body, yet incapable of revealing the heart or details of the structure of the entire organism if penetrated or compromised by opposing forces.
Similarly, each of the esoteric groups has other definite organisational characteristics: Some sort of unified command and reporting structure that always appears vague and mysterious to outsiders. A highly disciplined internal training system. A firm code of conduct. An adherence to a canon of basic beliefs not fully comprehended by outsiders. The unwavering concept of individual personal responsibility and personal accountability. And the invariable but gracefully unstated implication of leadership by example.
These traits do not define a belief system per se, but something far more important and exceptionally relevant to our society today. They define a principle-centred existence that is applied in day to day affairs. They define very clearly a specific way of living one?s life. This way of life is lived in accordance with the knowledge and principles that have been carefully and selectively handed down orally through generations of initiates, and have as their basis the essential principles of the universe and the knowledge of the origin and purpose of man. This orally transmitted information is referred to as ?The Tradition?, and sometimes, when collected in a preserved body of wisdom, ?The Temple.?
Before examining more closely how this system has impacted us, it will benefit us to review the Western model for the public visibility of this system. The model was long established in the West. It entered into a decline. Its adherents transferred the model to other bases, perpetrated it, and preserved it for transmission into the future. The model was the Egyptian Temple system.
All of Egyptian society was organised along an esoteric and an exoteric basis. The exoteric structure centred around the pharonic system of government, with which academic students of this civilisation have occupied themselves in an effort to comprehend why this society lasted so long and so successfully. Their studies have not seen much successful fruit, because they have failed to comprehend that it was the esoteric structure which sustained the entire basis of the Egyptian dynasties and the surrounding society for so many centuries.2
This esoteric structure has had little effective study in academic circles, like most of man?s genuine history. It was organised around the Temple system. The Temple system was based on the gradual instruction of an increasingly elite group. This study took many decades. It involved intensive personal discipline. It began with a period of self-purification. It entailed physical, mental, and spiritual training. It worked on all aspects of the being.
The successful candidate was gradually culled away from his peers. The less capable aspirants were weeded out. The more fortunate were advanced progressively and carefully through the system over many years. They studied the physical and spiritual aspects of man, his origin, purpose, and relationship with the divine, becoming true physicians who could heal not just the physical being. Through increasingly progressive steps, they ultimately advanced to a series of tests. Some of these tests proved fatal to the aspirant. One objective of the training was an induced out of body experience in the Great Pyramid. To return the aspirant to this plane required the efforts of a high priest with twelve disciples. The priests were not always able to return the aspirant, and the death of the aspirant was not uncommon. When the aspirant did return to this plane, he consciously saw the world differently, like one who has been reborn with new knowledge and a new perspective. This is the origin of the phrase now so popular with fundamentalist Christians, ?born again?. In the end, a handful of carefully trained and highly developed individuals were advanced into an elite priesthood which, through its adherence to spiritual principles, maintained a balance that facilitated the functioning of Egyptian society. Their point of view had by now changed. They no longer worked on spiritual progress for their own sake, but for the benefit of the upward evolution of mankind. And from their inner core, they were dispatched to different corners of the known world to indirectly help the lesser developed advance themselves, thereby assisting in the progress of humanity.
The Temple replicated the structure and spiritual principles of the universe. The outer society replicated the Temple and its spiritual principles, but in a form not articulated to the common people who were not sufficiently developed to consciously understand, honour, and fulfill its reality. Instead, by replicating the principles in society, the average person was able to live in rhythm with the principles and to become positively influenced by them, growing through this process without making the total dedication and sacrifice required of the elite core group.
The Egyptian pharonic concept represents the embodiment in the person of pharaoh the highest principles and aspirations of the society. The pharaoh was the outward representative of the Temple principles and of the life of the entire society. He was supposed to live life in the material world in compliance with the inner laws of which the populace remained only vaguely conversant. The pharaoh was supported and aided in this role by the inner and most highly developed elite of the Temple priesthood. His dictums were executed by a separate administrative arm.
It is difficult if not impossible for any group, no matter how dedicated, to indefinitely sustain itself in accordance with spiritual principles. Such organisations have a period of life in which they create an expression suited to the times, accomplish the mission and disappear to be succeeded in another time and place by a successor organisation suited to the expression of its times. During the existence of any group, as individuals successively replace each other from generation to generation, changes occur. Some are more able than others, some less able than those who precede or follow them. Human frailty sets in. Slight changes in even a highly disciplined Temple system can have vast implications over time. Alterations in the focus and dedication of those holding the pharonic throne could divert the course of events. Embodying the weathervane of a society or group is neither easy nor sustainable. Gradually, systems and principles can deteriorate.
But over that same time period, the seeds of the future can also be planted. Non-Egyptians were allowed to enter the Temple system. Some advanced through the full training. Some returned back to their own countries. This is the origin of the system called the Mysteries which arose in the Mediterranean pre-Christian era as Egyptian culture declined. The Mysteries appeared in a different form but followed the same lines as the Temple system. It was the same message, simply put into a different bottle, a bottle styled for the people of Greece and the Mediterranean world. Similarly, the Egyptian Temple system is undeniably the training ground for the great Pythagoras and the system of knowledge that he spread through ancient Greece and southern Europe.
The teachings of Pythagoras appeared differently as well. Styled in a more modern form, they followed the same line as the Temple, but less rigid. Still, they entailed an academy. A gradual system in which the candidate advanced degree by degree toward a higher level of mental and spiritual development. And an outward aspect as well, a concern with the nature and direction of humanity, just like the Temple system. Metaphorically, the superiority of the system of knowledge that he represented is expressed by the parable of his dying of starvation on the steps of the Temples of Muses.
While the Temple system was being disseminated to the north and east of Egypt by Pythagoras, another Temple trained initiate followed a similar path of preserving the initiatic knowledge. His name is known to history as Moses. He aligned with an obscure people and reconstituted their societal structure and belief system around the Temple principles. By restructuring an entire ethnic people, he insured that aspects of the Temple system would be preserved by this insular group for generations, until its next reconstitution was necessary in a form applicable to the requirements of that time.
Moses reconstituted the Temple system among the Jewish people in a manner stylised after the Egyptian model. A specific caste of priests was physically organised around a Temple. The entire twelve tribe system ? itself a mystical anagram ? focused on the Temple, and the life of the nation centred on it, on their faith, and on a specific identity as a people set apart, unique in God?s eyes, and held together under a pharaoh-like king. Even the mystical Tree of Life of the Kabbalah directly corresponds to the Egyptian Neters. The focus on their religion as the core of their existence gave the Jewish people their unique identity and enabled them to survive the cultural annihilation experienced by others. But it did not give rise to the powerful spiritual current Moses had hoped. This vacuum gave rise to the mission of the Essenes.
The Essenes, like the Templars, are a widely misunderstood spiritual group. Subdivided into different groups and having members active both in their monastic training ground at Qumram and throughout the Jewish community in day to day living, from the headquarters at Mt. Carmel they were directed toward one specific goal ? the preparation of an entity sufficiently advanced to bear the higher consciousness which would incarnate in the man known as Jesus. This particular mission extended far beyond the concept of the messiah, which may be loosely defined as the priest-king. In the concept of the messiah is the return of the pharaoh, the embodiment of the spiritual governing principle in the day to day affairs of the state, but in the Essene case it involves a particularly advanced consciousness carrying an impulse to revive the spiritual facets of mankind. The pharonic ideal also appeared throughout Europe, degenerating over time into the present concept of royalty. Interestingly, all prophetic Jewish literature except one book foretells and focuses on the coming of a messiah.
For the Essenes, the mission was consuming. In an occult sense, the entire organisation focused on the incarnation of a spiritual being who would alter humanity through the implantation of a spiritual impulse. The documents of their training base at Qumram denote the discipline that was expected to be extended in daily life. There is little in the aspects of daily training in these documents that is not in other spiritual schools. Their nature has assumed a special character given that those men and women in the modern world primarily responsible for studying these documents do not understand the rudiments of the way in which individuals are trained to live in society and reflect spiritual values, nor can they apprehend a methodology so broad that it intends through deliberately indirect actions the reformation of the entire society.
The name Essene has many interpretations. One of the most interesting is ?trowel?, the tool with which a mason works with stone and mortar to create a building. The Essenes were masons, building the house of God in themselves. By doing this, they were working to help advance mankind. Ultimately, the mission of creating the vessels adequate to sustain the spiritual capacity necessary for the reformation of society was successful. The Essenes, their mission completed, disappeared from history, most traces of their existence obliterated by the different Jewish sects that opposed them.
The start of the Christian era marked a singular turning point. Prior to this time, many conflicting religious expressions of the same ideals existed side by side. The Greek Mysteries are allegorical representations of the Egyptian system. The rise of various cults such as Sol Invictus, Mithras, and the Roman system of gods are all representations of the same group of principles. This mass confusion was consolidated in the early years of the Christian era as the Roman church proclaimed itself supreme and systematically absorbed or annihilated its opposition, driving these movements into extinction. But by these actions, the church created a widespread common vocabulary and belief structure.
During this time, Pythagorean thought assumed an academic and philosophical character and resurfaced later in Neo-Platonic ideals. Plato?s ideals, often seen as observations derived from Athenian society or a philosophical treatise, are really esoteric principles expressed as the restoration of a balanced and spiritual order. As opposed to blind obedience, man functions in an intellectual manner driven by principles. But the outcome is still the same dream the sages have held for centuries.
Continue to read:
newdawnmagazine.com/Article/Se…es_&_Occult_Politics.html
Dream of the Sages
By Robert Richardson
To students of history, religion, or the occult, a pattern of individual names and esoteric movements appears on the canvas of time like a sudden flash of light, then just as quickly vanishes. A group of disparate people ? sometimes famous, sometimes obscure, sometimes solitary, sometimes united, but always engaged in some amorphous activity ? spontaneously surfaces. Just as suddenly their traces evaporate, their true purpose and the scope of their actions never comprehended. Understanding their reality seems to be beyond our grasp. Further study may grudgingly yield information ? but it is inconclusive, incomplete, perplexing. Their nature and purpose seems to forever remain a mystery. The search for a solution only leads to speculations, not genuine answers.
For us to intellectually apprehend how and why esoteric groups work and influence the world requires a different type of thinking, a thought process that sees these organisations and their activities as an ebb and flow of an ideal. Most of us have approached the inquiry into the nature of how esoteric groups actually work and influence history by studying the limited and grossly distorted documentation available about them, like an investment analyst abstractly examining from afar the sterile financial structure of a multi-national corporation. But for us to understand the nature of historical esoteric groups, we should first attempt to find their underlying purpose. If we approach their study through that avenue, we may be able to understand why and how they work to achieve their purposes.
All of the positive esoterically tinged movements that have influenced history share one common characteristic. They seek to positively impact and alter, in a transformational way, the entire structure and direction of society. Their impetus is to interject into day to day living a transcendent awareness and communion with the spiritual element of life, to give a spiritual orientation and focus to the material activities of day to day living ? to, in effect, spiritualise the material. The reason for this direction is to correctly align man with the necessary spiritual path to fulfill his spiritual destiny. Their motives are highly altruistic, despite the wildly imaginative suspicions and innuendoes of many writers and even some church leaders. The methods employed by many powerful Western spiritual movements are always entirely in keeping with these goals.
The best known of these movements have manifested at key transitional points in Western history. The Rosicrucian movement on continental Europe. The less obvious but equally influential hermetic academies in Renaissance Italy and England. The Cathars in southern France. The Essenes at the dawn of the Christian era. And the best known, and by far the most misunderstood, of these groups, the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and The Temple of Solomon ? The Knights Templar. Each of these groups formed, existed, and survived a certain duration to accomplish a particular mission, then vanished. Through their actions, each of them positively influenced society as we know it today.
Historians and spiritual writers have expended a great deal of ink unsuccessfully trying to explain what these groups were about and what they believed. Each of these groups encountered considerable opposition and conflict and, seemingly, was superseded by rival groups. History is invariably altered by the victors to suit their goals and needs. Most of the existing works about esoteric groups have been based on deliberately distorted records left by the supposed victors. For example, as has been very aptly stated, attempting to draw an accurate picture of the activities of the Knights Templar by studying the records of the Inquisition is like trying to get an accurate picture of the activities of the wartime French resistance solely by studying the records of the Gestapo.1
However, one unaltered stream runs through each of these groups. It is their operational procedure. Each group has several common yet contradictory characteristics. Their organisational structure is both hierarchical and independent. It is at once interdependent and self-sustaining. In other words, it is a cell-like structure, organised around a belief system, designed to be able to function without need for a central governing body, yet still maintaining dutiful fealty and responsibility to the doctrine which the overall body represents. To cite one case, most people, ignorant of the actual working nature of the Essenes, assume that the Qumram monastery was the only Essene entity. In fact, many Essenes lived in the day to day society. The Qumram community was a centralised training base. Essene headquarters were on Mt. Carmel. The Essenes, like the Cathars, the Templars, and the Hermetic academies, could function independently if cut off from their supposed core. The Rosicrucian groups are the best recognised model of this structure. This system later became the basis for intelligence organisations and underground resistance movements. They were consciously organised like the esoteric societies, designed to continue functioning without support or contact from the main body, yet incapable of revealing the heart or details of the structure of the entire organism if penetrated or compromised by opposing forces.
Similarly, each of the esoteric groups has other definite organisational characteristics: Some sort of unified command and reporting structure that always appears vague and mysterious to outsiders. A highly disciplined internal training system. A firm code of conduct. An adherence to a canon of basic beliefs not fully comprehended by outsiders. The unwavering concept of individual personal responsibility and personal accountability. And the invariable but gracefully unstated implication of leadership by example.
These traits do not define a belief system per se, but something far more important and exceptionally relevant to our society today. They define a principle-centred existence that is applied in day to day affairs. They define very clearly a specific way of living one?s life. This way of life is lived in accordance with the knowledge and principles that have been carefully and selectively handed down orally through generations of initiates, and have as their basis the essential principles of the universe and the knowledge of the origin and purpose of man. This orally transmitted information is referred to as ?The Tradition?, and sometimes, when collected in a preserved body of wisdom, ?The Temple.?
Before examining more closely how this system has impacted us, it will benefit us to review the Western model for the public visibility of this system. The model was long established in the West. It entered into a decline. Its adherents transferred the model to other bases, perpetrated it, and preserved it for transmission into the future. The model was the Egyptian Temple system.
All of Egyptian society was organised along an esoteric and an exoteric basis. The exoteric structure centred around the pharonic system of government, with which academic students of this civilisation have occupied themselves in an effort to comprehend why this society lasted so long and so successfully. Their studies have not seen much successful fruit, because they have failed to comprehend that it was the esoteric structure which sustained the entire basis of the Egyptian dynasties and the surrounding society for so many centuries.2
This esoteric structure has had little effective study in academic circles, like most of man?s genuine history. It was organised around the Temple system. The Temple system was based on the gradual instruction of an increasingly elite group. This study took many decades. It involved intensive personal discipline. It began with a period of self-purification. It entailed physical, mental, and spiritual training. It worked on all aspects of the being.
The successful candidate was gradually culled away from his peers. The less capable aspirants were weeded out. The more fortunate were advanced progressively and carefully through the system over many years. They studied the physical and spiritual aspects of man, his origin, purpose, and relationship with the divine, becoming true physicians who could heal not just the physical being. Through increasingly progressive steps, they ultimately advanced to a series of tests. Some of these tests proved fatal to the aspirant. One objective of the training was an induced out of body experience in the Great Pyramid. To return the aspirant to this plane required the efforts of a high priest with twelve disciples. The priests were not always able to return the aspirant, and the death of the aspirant was not uncommon. When the aspirant did return to this plane, he consciously saw the world differently, like one who has been reborn with new knowledge and a new perspective. This is the origin of the phrase now so popular with fundamentalist Christians, ?born again?. In the end, a handful of carefully trained and highly developed individuals were advanced into an elite priesthood which, through its adherence to spiritual principles, maintained a balance that facilitated the functioning of Egyptian society. Their point of view had by now changed. They no longer worked on spiritual progress for their own sake, but for the benefit of the upward evolution of mankind. And from their inner core, they were dispatched to different corners of the known world to indirectly help the lesser developed advance themselves, thereby assisting in the progress of humanity.
The Temple replicated the structure and spiritual principles of the universe. The outer society replicated the Temple and its spiritual principles, but in a form not articulated to the common people who were not sufficiently developed to consciously understand, honour, and fulfill its reality. Instead, by replicating the principles in society, the average person was able to live in rhythm with the principles and to become positively influenced by them, growing through this process without making the total dedication and sacrifice required of the elite core group.
The Egyptian pharonic concept represents the embodiment in the person of pharaoh the highest principles and aspirations of the society. The pharaoh was the outward representative of the Temple principles and of the life of the entire society. He was supposed to live life in the material world in compliance with the inner laws of which the populace remained only vaguely conversant. The pharaoh was supported and aided in this role by the inner and most highly developed elite of the Temple priesthood. His dictums were executed by a separate administrative arm.
It is difficult if not impossible for any group, no matter how dedicated, to indefinitely sustain itself in accordance with spiritual principles. Such organisations have a period of life in which they create an expression suited to the times, accomplish the mission and disappear to be succeeded in another time and place by a successor organisation suited to the expression of its times. During the existence of any group, as individuals successively replace each other from generation to generation, changes occur. Some are more able than others, some less able than those who precede or follow them. Human frailty sets in. Slight changes in even a highly disciplined Temple system can have vast implications over time. Alterations in the focus and dedication of those holding the pharonic throne could divert the course of events. Embodying the weathervane of a society or group is neither easy nor sustainable. Gradually, systems and principles can deteriorate.
But over that same time period, the seeds of the future can also be planted. Non-Egyptians were allowed to enter the Temple system. Some advanced through the full training. Some returned back to their own countries. This is the origin of the system called the Mysteries which arose in the Mediterranean pre-Christian era as Egyptian culture declined. The Mysteries appeared in a different form but followed the same lines as the Temple system. It was the same message, simply put into a different bottle, a bottle styled for the people of Greece and the Mediterranean world. Similarly, the Egyptian Temple system is undeniably the training ground for the great Pythagoras and the system of knowledge that he spread through ancient Greece and southern Europe.
The teachings of Pythagoras appeared differently as well. Styled in a more modern form, they followed the same line as the Temple, but less rigid. Still, they entailed an academy. A gradual system in which the candidate advanced degree by degree toward a higher level of mental and spiritual development. And an outward aspect as well, a concern with the nature and direction of humanity, just like the Temple system. Metaphorically, the superiority of the system of knowledge that he represented is expressed by the parable of his dying of starvation on the steps of the Temples of Muses.
While the Temple system was being disseminated to the north and east of Egypt by Pythagoras, another Temple trained initiate followed a similar path of preserving the initiatic knowledge. His name is known to history as Moses. He aligned with an obscure people and reconstituted their societal structure and belief system around the Temple principles. By restructuring an entire ethnic people, he insured that aspects of the Temple system would be preserved by this insular group for generations, until its next reconstitution was necessary in a form applicable to the requirements of that time.
Moses reconstituted the Temple system among the Jewish people in a manner stylised after the Egyptian model. A specific caste of priests was physically organised around a Temple. The entire twelve tribe system ? itself a mystical anagram ? focused on the Temple, and the life of the nation centred on it, on their faith, and on a specific identity as a people set apart, unique in God?s eyes, and held together under a pharaoh-like king. Even the mystical Tree of Life of the Kabbalah directly corresponds to the Egyptian Neters. The focus on their religion as the core of their existence gave the Jewish people their unique identity and enabled them to survive the cultural annihilation experienced by others. But it did not give rise to the powerful spiritual current Moses had hoped. This vacuum gave rise to the mission of the Essenes.
The Essenes, like the Templars, are a widely misunderstood spiritual group. Subdivided into different groups and having members active both in their monastic training ground at Qumram and throughout the Jewish community in day to day living, from the headquarters at Mt. Carmel they were directed toward one specific goal ? the preparation of an entity sufficiently advanced to bear the higher consciousness which would incarnate in the man known as Jesus. This particular mission extended far beyond the concept of the messiah, which may be loosely defined as the priest-king. In the concept of the messiah is the return of the pharaoh, the embodiment of the spiritual governing principle in the day to day affairs of the state, but in the Essene case it involves a particularly advanced consciousness carrying an impulse to revive the spiritual facets of mankind. The pharonic ideal also appeared throughout Europe, degenerating over time into the present concept of royalty. Interestingly, all prophetic Jewish literature except one book foretells and focuses on the coming of a messiah.
For the Essenes, the mission was consuming. In an occult sense, the entire organisation focused on the incarnation of a spiritual being who would alter humanity through the implantation of a spiritual impulse. The documents of their training base at Qumram denote the discipline that was expected to be extended in daily life. There is little in the aspects of daily training in these documents that is not in other spiritual schools. Their nature has assumed a special character given that those men and women in the modern world primarily responsible for studying these documents do not understand the rudiments of the way in which individuals are trained to live in society and reflect spiritual values, nor can they apprehend a methodology so broad that it intends through deliberately indirect actions the reformation of the entire society.
The name Essene has many interpretations. One of the most interesting is ?trowel?, the tool with which a mason works with stone and mortar to create a building. The Essenes were masons, building the house of God in themselves. By doing this, they were working to help advance mankind. Ultimately, the mission of creating the vessels adequate to sustain the spiritual capacity necessary for the reformation of society was successful. The Essenes, their mission completed, disappeared from history, most traces of their existence obliterated by the different Jewish sects that opposed them.
The start of the Christian era marked a singular turning point. Prior to this time, many conflicting religious expressions of the same ideals existed side by side. The Greek Mysteries are allegorical representations of the Egyptian system. The rise of various cults such as Sol Invictus, Mithras, and the Roman system of gods are all representations of the same group of principles. This mass confusion was consolidated in the early years of the Christian era as the Roman church proclaimed itself supreme and systematically absorbed or annihilated its opposition, driving these movements into extinction. But by these actions, the church created a widespread common vocabulary and belief structure.
During this time, Pythagorean thought assumed an academic and philosophical character and resurfaced later in Neo-Platonic ideals. Plato?s ideals, often seen as observations derived from Athenian society or a philosophical treatise, are really esoteric principles expressed as the restoration of a balanced and spiritual order. As opposed to blind obedience, man functions in an intellectual manner driven by principles. But the outcome is still the same dream the sages have held for centuries.
Continue to read:
newdawnmagazine.com/Article/Se…es_&_Occult_Politics.html
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